Strange, what I have written about the working habits, the coming out of the hospital is not new. It is what I wrote in the “notebook” I tore up, which did not seem to have a proper context for such reflections. It turns out that one has very few ideas finally and I have written more or less these same things to friends over the years in letters that also contained my distress over Cal’s actions. […]
NOTES
Introduction
1. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with Ian Hamilton, October 26, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library. Robert Lowell, The Dolphin (1973).
2. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with David Farrell, October 9, 1977, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries.
3. Hardwick to Lowell, April 19, 1971.
4. Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, February 9, 1970.
5. Lowell to Hardwick, April 27, 1970.
6. Robert Silvers, whom Blackwood was dating, had written to Lowell in advance of his trip to put him in touch with her: “Would you like to see Caroline in London. I know she’d be very glad to see you” (Silvers to Lowell [March 1970?]).
7. Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (1983), p. 398.
8. Of whom Lowell had written in an earlier poem “Soft Wood,” set in Castine, Maine: “Sometimes I have supposed seals|must live as long as the Scholar Gypsy” (Lowell’s spelling of Arnold’s “Gipsy”; “Soft Wood” 1–2, For the Union Dead).
9. See corrections to Notebook proofs in Blackwood’s hand; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
10. Lowell to Hardwick, June 14, 1970. Lowell was prescribed lithium in 1967, relatively early in its introduction in the United States, and before its approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
11. See, for example, his manic letters in 1954 in The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (2005), pp. 212, 214–16, 221, 229–30, and 234–37.
12. Lowell to Hardwick, June 14, 1970. Arnold: “What leisure to grow wise” (“Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’” 69–76); see also footnote 1 on page 37 (Lowell to Hardwick, May 17, 1970).
13. Lowell to Hardwick, June 20, 1970.
14. Before 1961, Lowell’s major manic episodes had occurred every two to three years—in 1949, 1952, 1954, 1957, and 1959.
15. By Dostoevsky (1869).
16. “Cal Working, etc.,” excerpt of a letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Ian Hamilton [1981 or 1982]; see pages 473–75. Cf. John Milton: “But that two-handed engine at the door|Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more” (“Lycidas” 130–31).
17. Lowell’s nickname: “I’m called Cal, but I won’t explain why. None of the prototypes are flattering: Calvin, Caligula, Caliban, Calvin Coolidge, Calligraphy—with merciless irony” (to Elizabeth Bishop [August 21, 1947], Words in Air, ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton [2008], p. 7).
18. Elizabeth Hardwick to Ian Hamilton [1981 or 1982].
19. The Diaries of A. L. Rowse, ed. Richard Ollard (2003), p. 336.
20. Walcott, “On Robert Lowell,” New York Review of Books, March 1, 1984.
21. Harriet Lowell, email message to editor, January 28, 2017.
22. Lowell to Bishop, January 12, 1968, in Words in Air, p. 639; quoted also in Kay Redfield Jamison, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire; A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character (2017), p. 179.
23. Quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 420.
24. Lowell to Hardwick, January 9, 1969, in The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 509–10. Harriet remembers that during those years there was a “subtle” change in him, something a little “blunt” about his feelings sometimes, that “he smoked a little more, drank a little more—not alcoholic drinking, but—a little edgier, more irritable,” “perhaps out of an occasional excess of energy” (“On Robert Lowell,” Oral History Project, Harvard University [September 29, 2016]; interview with the editor, January 28, 2017). See also Elizabeth Bishop to Anny Baumann, November 14 and 15, 1967, in which Bishop shares a concern with Hardwick about the effect on Lowell of the “constant excitement, marches, demonstrations, drinking, and so on.” One evening Lowell, having just returned from a “very strenuous” trip, was “off to ‘Poets for Peace’ or something about VIETNAM & stayed up till 5 a.m., etc.—confessed to a hangover, had lunch with me down here & caught the plane to Harvard for three days of hard work, more & more people, parties & so on.” She adds that “he has so much better things to give the world (as his wife said) than hasty reactions to all the pressures here in N.Y.” See One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (1994), pp. 480–81.
25. Jamison, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire, pp. 180, 182.
26. Esther Brooks, “Remembering Cal,” in Robert Lowell: A Tribute, ed. Rolando Anzilotti (1979), pp. 42–43; quoted in Jamison, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire, p. 181.
27. Email message to editor, January 28, 2017.
28. “Knowing” [Marriage 5] 11, The Dolphin.
29. In 1975, his lithium levels became unstable, and he once again began to experience manic episodes.
30. Ivana Lowell writes of her memories of Lowell when he was well that he “was the gentlest, coziest man possible. A tall teddy-bearish presence, he instantly nicknamed me Mischief because I teased him so much” (Why Not Say What Happened? [2010], p. 27).
31. According to Mary McCarthy (Blair Clark notes from a conversation with McCarthy, July 23, 1970, Blair Clark Papers, HRC).
32. Email message to editor, April 4, 2019.
33. Lowell to Hardwick [postmarked 30 April 1970 but written on April 29], 1970.
34. See, for example, The Selected Letters of William James, edited and with an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick (1961).
35. Hardwick, A View of My Own (1962), p. 3.
36. Hardwick, “Seduction and Betrayal” II, New York Review of Books (June 14, 1970); written and published before Hardwick had read The Dolphin. Reprinted in Seduction and Betrayal (1974), p. 195.
37. As Lowell described his speaker in “The Poet Robert Lowell—Seen by Christopher Ricks,” Listener (June 21, 1973), p. 831.
38. Lowell, Exorcism [2] 10–11, The Dolphin. Compare lines from George Meredith’s 1862 sonnet sequence, Modern Love: “Let us see.|The actors are, it seems, the usual three:|Husband, and wife, and lover.” Lowell thought of Modern Love, a collection of adapted sonnets (sixteen lines long) about marital unhappiness, as a model for The Dolphin. See “The Poet Robert Lowell—Seen by Christopher Ricks,” p. 832.
39. Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 28, 1972.
40. Hardwick to Lowell, June 28, 1971; Hardwick refers to Henry James’s tale The Aspern Papers (1888, revised 1908).
41. Hardwick, “Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973. Cf. Boris Pasternak: “I am not writing my autobiography. […] Together with its principal character I think that only heroes deserve a real biography, but that the history of a poet is not to be presented in such a form. One would have to collect such a biography from unessentials, which would bear witness to concessions for compassion and constraint” (Safe Conduct, trans. Babette Deutsch [1958], p. 26).
42. Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Art of Fiction No. 87,” interview by Darryl Pinckney, Paris Review, no. 96 (Summer 1985).
43. Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (1979), p. 151.
44. In an 1893 review of Gustave Flaubert’s letters in Literary Criticism, vol. 2 (1984), p. 297.
45. Lowell to Hardwick, July 2, 1976.
&
nbsp; 46. Hardwick told Ian Hamilton that she put the three returned letters in an envelope and subsequently lost it.
47. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with Ian Hamilton, October 26, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
48. As T. S. Eliot writes about James Joyce in the preface to Stanislaus Joyce’s My Brother’s Keeper (1958); quoted in Philip Horne, “Revealers and Concealers,” Essays in Criticism 43, no. 4 (October 1993): p. 278.
49. As Lowell spelled “xeroxes.”
50. Lowell prevaricated with Hardwick, but Frank Bidart says Lowell told him he did not want to return the letters to Hardwick because he believed she might destroy them. Bidart says that Lowell cared about the survival of Hardwick’s letters. He wanted the evidence of what he had done to them, his “aesthetic act of transformation,” to be preserved (interview with editor, January 29, 2017).
51. Hardwick, referring to the time she found out about Lowell’s affair with Caroline Blackwood: “I wrote some terrible letters about Caroline, ten pages long, horrible worthless schizophrenia” (Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with Ian Hamilton, October 26, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library).
52. Email message to editor, April 4, 2019.
53. The twelve letters that were included by the Lowell Estate in the sale of his papers to the HRC in 1982.
54. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with Ian Hamilton, October 26, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
55. Email message to editor, December 31, 2016.
56. Frank Bidart, July 1, 1988, cover letter to MS Storage 244, Houghton Library.
57. Including, from The Dolphin, “Voices” and “Letter” [Hospital 1 and 2]; “Records”; “Communication”; “Foxfur”; and, from “The Dolphin” manuscript, “The Messiah” [Flight to New York 2] (which was removed from the published book, but three lines of which were incorporated into “In the Mail”).
58. Henry James, “She and He: Recent Documents” (1897), reprinted as “George Sand,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 2 (1984), p. 740.
59. Harriet has expressed regret that her mother’s “remarkable recovery is not more visible in these letters,” to give a truer and more balanced picture of her parents’ lives, of their civility and lack of bitterness toward one another. “Most of these letters were written at the height of my mother’s distress and it seems unfair that the record is so distorting—this is not my mother.” Once it was clear the marriage was over, Hardwick “got back to the business of writing and rebuilding her life in New York” (email message to editor, April 4, 2019). Evgenia Citkowitz, who was the first person in the family to learn of the survival of Hardwick’s letters, also supported their publication, despite her own apprehensions about characterizations of Caroline Blackwood to be found in them.
60. Detailed on page xxxvii.
61. Hardwick to Robert Giroux, July 5, 1973.
62. Hardwick to Lowell, June 20, 1976.
63. Quoted in Jamison, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire, p. 348.
64. Hardwick to Robert Giroux, July 5, 1973.
65. Hardwick to Elizabeth Bishop, July 27, 1973.
66. Hardwick to Elizabeth Bishop, October 18, 1973.
67. Elizabeth Bishop to Lowell, March 21, 1972.
68. Clive James, “Love in a Life: Lessons in the ‘Shutting up’ of Poetry,” Times Literary Supplement, May 16, 2014, p. 14.
69. Thomas Hardy to James Douglas, November 10, 1912; quoted in Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928 (1962), pp. 358–59.
70. Elizabeth Bishop to Lowell, March 21, 1972.
71. Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, Easter Tuesday, [April 4], 1972.
72. Hardwick’s (and Blackwood’s) were not the only letters that Lowell drew upon for The Dolphin in this way. Letters to and from friends that are included in the present edition also inspired lines—letters from William Alfred, Frank Bidart, Blair Clark, and Adrienne Rich in particular (though these sources and figures are not named in the poems as Hardwick and Blackwood are).
73. “Green Sore” [Burden 5] 4–6, with line 6 cancelled, the “Dolphin” manuscript.
74. Hardwick to Lowell, March 21, 1971.
75. “Green Sore” [Marriage 7] 3, The Dolphin.
76. Lowell: “to ask compassion … this book, half fiction” (“Dolphin” 13, The Dolphin).
77. Lowell: “‘You didn’t write, you rewrote.…’” (Randall Jarrell [3]13, History [1973]).
78. Elizabeth Bishop to Lowell, April 10 (Monday?) [1972].
79. Elizabeth Bishop to Lowell: “I still felt he shouldn’t have used the letters from that woman—to me it seems mean, & they’re much too overpowering emotionally for the rest of it so that the whole poem suffers […] I think Williams has always had a streak of insensitivity” (June 30 [1948]). Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, on the Nardi letters: “1) so terrifyingly and typically real, and yet I don’t think I’d want to read many of them straight—too monotonous, pathological. Yet in the poem they are placed and not pathological, the agony is absorbed. 2) Aren’t they really hardest on Williams himself (Paterson), a damning of his insensitivity. She’s mad, but he, like Aeneas[,] can’t handle her and shows up badly. I think that’s their purpose in the poem” (July 2 [1948]). See Words in Air, pp. 38–40. See also Lowell’s poem “Publication Day” [May 18], Notebook70, and “Publication Day,” History, based on a letter from Marcia Nardi; and David Kalstone’s analysis of Bishop and Lowell’s exchanges through the years about collage in Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (1989], pp. 137–38, 199–202, and 234–43.
80. “Letter with Poems for a Letter with Poems” [For Elizabeth Bishop 3], Notebook70, which he wrote after receiving Bishop’s letter of February 27, 1970. See Words in Air, pp. 663–67.
81. Darryl Pinckney, “The Ethics of Admiration: Arendt, McCarthy, Hardwick, Sontag,” Threepenny Review 135 (Fall 2013). Hardwick: “My interest falls upon the routinely outcast, the safely unwanted, the self-destructive, the self-deluding and, especially, the irregular” (“Scene from an Autobiography,” Prose 4 [Spring 1972], p. 51).
82. Hardwick, Sleepless Nights, p. 121. For “the Mister?” compare “the Master” (Henry James).
83. Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct, p. 26.
84. About the writing of Life Studies (1959), Lowell said in an interview, “I started one of these poems in Marvell’s four-foot couplet and showed it to my wife. And she said, ‘Why not say what really happened?’ (It wasn’t the one about her.) The metre just seemed to prevent any honesty on the subject” (A. Alvarez, “Robert Lowell in Conversation,” Observer, July 21, 1963, p. 19; reprinted in Jeffrey Meyers, ed., Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (1988), p. 75; quoted in Collected Poems [2003], p. 1149).
85. Robert Lowell, “Epilogue” 15, Day by Day (1977).
86. Hazel Rowley observes that the letters in Sleepless Nights “are from the author, not to the author; there is no breach of copyright involved, no breach of ethics; they are fictional and do not need to be in quotation marks” (“Poetic Justice: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 39, no. 4 [Winter 1997], p. 412).
87. Mary McCarthy to Hardwick, June 4, 1979. Cf. Hannah Arendt, writing of Duns Scotus: “Contemplation of the summum bonum, of the ‘highest thing,’ ergo, God, would be the ideal of the intellect, which is always grounded in intuition, the grasping of a thing in its ‘thisness,’ haecceitas, which in this life is imperfect not only because here the highest remains unknown but also because intuition of thisness is imperfect” (The Life of the Mind, ed.
Mary McCarthy [1978], p. 144).
88. “Shakespeare and Montaigne,” Times Literary Supplement, December 24, 1925, p. 895; unsigned, following the practice of the TLS at the time.
89. See Table of Dates, 1970–1977, on pages xxxix–xlix for details. There was great concern in Lowell’s circle that the system of support he had relied on during past manic episodes was unavailable to him in England.
90. Lowell to Hardwick, August 11, 1970.
91. “Notes for an unwritten Letter” [The Farther Shore 3], “The Dolphin” manuscript.
92. Apollo, god of poetry, healing, and divination. For more about the symbol of the dolphin in the history of poetry, see Peter M. Sacks, “You Only Guide Me by Surprise”: Poetry and the Dolphin’s Turn (2010).
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 47
