93. Mermaid 1:1-2, The Dolphin. Cf. Milton: “Th’ old Dragon under ground, […] Swindges the scaly Horrour of his foulded tail” (“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” 168, 172; the poem echoes elsewhere in The Dolphin, too). Cf also T. S. Eliot: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 124). Ricks and McCue’s edition of Eliot also points to Donne: “Teach me to heare Mermaides singing” (“Song: Goe, and catche a falling starre,” 5); and A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1: “I […] heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back|Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath|That the rude sea grew civil at her song” (The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, Collected and Uncollected Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue [2015], p. 398).
94. Virgil: “Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore” (Aeneid VI, 314). William Empson writes that the line “is beautiful because ulterioris, the word of their banishment, is long, and so shows that they have been waiting a long time; and because the repeated vowel-sound (itself the moan of hopeless sorrow) in oris amore connects the two words as if of their own natures, and makes desire belong necessarily to the unattainable” (Seven Types of Ambiguity; reprinted in a New Directions edition [1966], pp. 10–11).
95. “Letter” [Hospital II 2], The Dolphin.
96. Cf. Lowell: “Now twelve years later, you turn your back” (“Man and Wife” 23, Life Studies); “Dear Figure curving like a questionmark,|how will you hear my answer in the dark?” (“The Flaw” 31–32, For the Union Dead [1964]).
97. Lowell to Hardwick, August 27, 1970.
98. Lowell, “On the End of the Phone,” The Dolphin.
99. Ricks also talks about Lowell’s Life Studies poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” in this context; in John Woolford and Daniel Karlin, “A Conversation with Christopher Ricks, Part Two,” Browning Society Notes 10, no. 3 (1980): pp. 4, 7.
100. Reproduced in Jamison, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire, p. 380.
101. Hardwick to Lowell, September 19, 1975.
102. As Hardwick reported to Darryl Pinckney at the time.
103. “I feel you ended things during my Irish visit, ended them wisely and we can’t go back” (Lowell to Blackwood, May 3, 1977); the letter is now missing but quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, pp. 460–72. Frank Bidart recalls Lowell telling him the marriage was over as early as November/December 1976 (interview with editor, January 29, 2017).
104. Lowell to Caroline Blackwood, July 17, 1977; the letter is now missing, but is quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 465.
105. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with Ian Hamilton, October 26, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
106. “On Robert Lowell,” Oral History Initiative, Harvard University (September 29, 2016).
107. Hardwick to Robert Craft, August 4, 1977.
108. Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 472.
Location of Manuscripts
1. Rodney G. Dennis, introduction to The Robert Lowell Papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University: A Guide to the Collection, comp. Patrick K. Miehe (1990), p. ix.
2. Dennis, The Robert Lowell Papers at the Houghton Library, p. x.
3. Frank Bidart, July 1, 1988 cover letter to MS Storage 244, Houghton Library.
A Note on the Text and Annotation
1. On a few occasions, further scrutiny of manuscripts and other sources led to the correction of a transcription in previous editions of Lowell’s letters.
Table of Dates, 1970–1977
1. Quotations from June 14 through August 9 are from Blair Clark’s diary and notes of conversations with Hardwick, Lowell, Mary McCarthy, Robert Silvers, and Jonathan Miller (Blair Clark Papers, HRC).
2. Ivana Lowell, Why Not Say What Happened? (2010), p. 36.
3. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008), p. 219.
4. Harriet Lowell Interview, “On Robert Lowell,” Harvard Oral History Initiative, August 2016.
Part I: 1970
1. Gomez, the Lowells’ housekeeper.
2. Letter now missing, but from P. W. Edwards, chairman of the Department of Literature, University of Essex, inviting Lowell to teach there; see Lowell to Hardwick, [April 26, 1970], below.
3. The cat, named for the abolitionist Charles Sumner. See Lowell: “Left Out of Vacation” [February and March 12] 8–11, Notebook70; and Hardwick: “Her skinny brown cat stared at her, hardly blinking. His yellowish-gray gaze was very like her own. They looked at each other, unseeing, into a mirror of eyes, before the cat fell asleep, his lids suddenly closing, tightly, quickly, strangely” (“Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973; see also page 461).
4. Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, editors of the New York Review of Books, which Hardwick, Lowell, Epstein, and her husband, Jason, had the idea to found at a dinner in 1963, during the New York newspaper strike. Jason Epstein: “the four of us that evening saw the opportunity wordlessly presented by the strike: either create the kind of review that Lizzie demanded [in her 1959 Harper’s article “The Decline of Book Reviewing”] or forever stop complaining. […] Bob was born to edit the review that Lizzie’s Harper’s article demanded. I called him the following day and, to our delight, he immediately accepted. He then called Barbara and asked her to be his co-editor. That morning Lowell and I visited my bank to open an account, to which he contributed four thousand dollars from his trust fund” (“A Strike and a Start: Founding the New York Review,” NYRDaily, New York Review of Books, March 16, 2013, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2013/03/16/strike-start-founding-new-york-review/). See also Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, January 23, [1963], and March 10, 1963, in both The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (2005) and Words in Air, ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton (2008).
5. Enclosure now missing, but probably “Long-Studied Drug Is Licensed for Treatment of Mental Illness,” New York Times, April 7, 1970.
6. Enclosure now missing.
7. William Alfred, friend to both Lowell and Hardwick since the late 1950s, also Lowell’s colleague at Harvard.
8. Cry for Us All, a musical adaptation of Alfred’s play Hogan’s Goat, opened on April 8, 1970, and ran for nine performances. Clive Barnes, “Theater: Musicalizing ‘Hogan’s Goat,’” New York Times, April 9, 1970; Richard Watts, “Politics in Old Brooklyn,” New York Post, April 9, 1970.
9. Isaiah and Aline Berlin.
10. “In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth” (Psalm 90:6).
11. See footnote 2 on page 146 (Lowell to Harriet Lowell, January 6, 1970 [1971]).
12. Private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
13. Brooks.
14. John S. Toll. John (“Jack”) Thompson, Lowell’s college friend who was also close to Hardwick, was at the time an English professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
15. The Poetry Collection of the State University of New York at Buffalo Library.
16. See Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1913–1922, ed. John Middleton Murry (1951). Hardwick: “Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter to Middleton Murry: ‘Did you read in The Times that Shelley left on his table a bit of paper with a blot on it and a flung down quill? Mary S. had a glass case put over same and carried it all the way to London on her knees. Did you ever hear such rubbish!’” (“Wives and Mistresses,” New York Review of Books, May 18, 1978).
17. Enclosure now missing.
18. Cf. Lowell, “Those Before Us,” For the Union Dead [1964].
19. Thus, for “module.” On April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank exploded during the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, forcing the astronauts to evacuate the command ship for the Lunar Module Aquarius. See “Power Failure Imperils Astronauts,” New York Times, April 13, 1970; and “Astronauts Face 2 Critical Problems: Keeping Spacecraft Cool and Its Air Clean,” New York Times, April 14, 1970.
20. Alfred’s father, Thomas Allfrey Alfred.
21. Nabokov.
22. Abandoned woman. Marian and Arthur Schlesinger were divorced in 1970 after thirty years of marriage.
23. Clark, Lowell’s friend since St. Mark’s School.
24. Cornwall Summer Workshop in Cornwall, Connecticut.
25. Progressive boarding school in Putney, Vermont.
26. Handwritten.
27. Lowell and Hardwick lived in Amsterdam from September 1951 until June 1952.
28. Hinks had worked for the British Council in Amsterdam from 1949–54 and knew the Lowells when they lived there.
29. Handwritten.
30. Hardwick: “And the long time in Holland, time to take trains, one to Haarlem to see the old almshouse governors painted in their unforgiving black-and-white misery by Frans Hals in his last days. The laughing cavaliers perhaps had eaten too many oysters, drunk too much beer and died a replete, unwilling death, leaving the poor, freed by a bitter life from killing pleasures, to shrivel on charity, live on with their strong, blackening faces” (Sleepless Nights [1979], p. 103).
31. Anarchist group founded by Roel van Duijn and named after the Dutch word “kabouter” (“gnome, pixie, […] little people […] fairies,” Van Dale Woordenboek Nederlands-Engels, s.v. “kabouter”).
32. Now missing.
33. Elisabeth du Perron-de Roos.
34. The family apartment and two studio apartments (which Lowell and Hardwick used for writing) at 15 West Sixty-Seventh Street.
35. See Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), both generally and the preface: “There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century, and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs.”
36. Wager.
37. Thus, for Albergo di Londra, hotel in Venice.
38. Enclosure now missing.
39. Monteith was Lowell’s editor at Faber & Faber, and a fellow of All Souls College. A. L. Rowse first met Lowell in 1960 in New York: “22 November [1960] […] at one met Robert Lowell at Cerutti’s, where I was giving him lunch. I had been rather apprehensive from the tone of his voice over the telephone—‘Yah-Yah-Yah’, just like Wystan Auden, off-putting. But he turned out to be most sympathetic, and we got on easily, without any trouble. We had no reserves with each other and came out with everything we thought. He, too, had a cold, a rather runny one, for which he stuffed menthol up his nose, rather unprepossessing, and recommended it to me. He was less bulky and shambling than I had been given to suppose, and less mad. In fact, he was sane, sensitive, perceptive and responsive, full of original thoughts, rather a dear, and obviously a man of genius. No-one in the United States came up to expectations as he did” (The Diaries of A. L. Rowse, ed. Richard Ollard [2003], p. 336).
40. Bishop; probably her letter of April 8th, 1970 (see Words in Air, pp. 671–72).
41. Peter Farb.
42. Lowell’s teaching at Harvard began in 1963. His job was “two classes, two days a week […] I’ll commute from here [New York] and have the rest of the year to burn” (quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography [1983], pp. 303–304).
43. W. F. (“Huyck”) van Leeuwen and Judith Herzberg.
44. Lowell had promised to edit and introduce a Festschrift for Allen Tate, but in March 1970 he feared he had lost the essays that were to be included in it. “Somehow all the Tate material has been lost. I brought it back from Maine in a special carton, then placed it on a shelf in my study bookcase, then back in a carton. When I was away recently, my study was cleaned all too thoroughly by the maid and she threw out the carton”; Lowell to Allen Tate, March 19, 1970. See The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 530–31 and 778–79. See also William Doreski, The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allen Tate (1990), pp. 193–94. The Festschrift, Allen Tate and His Work: Critical Evaluations, was edited by Radcliffe Squires and published in 1972.
45. Letter written on the verso of an April 2, 1970 letter from P. W. Edwards, chairman of the Department of Literature, University of Essex.
46. Comparative literature department founded by Davie at the University of Essex in 1964. Essex “had been the scene of some of the most fiery student riots of the 1960s” (Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 395). “Essex was, along with the London School of Economics, the place in England where ‘revolutionary theatre’ was most often played before the delightedly acquiescent television cameras” (Donald Davie, “The Responsibility of the English Department,” ADE Bulletin 60 [February 1979]: p. 15). After Donald Davie’s departure, “The morale of the department went right down, and tempers were very short. Our well-publicized student riots of May, 1968 made things worse, since Davie found himself on one side of the fence and most of his colleagues on the other” (P. W. Edwards to Robert Lowell, April 2, 1970). See also Lowell to Donald Davie, April 27, 1970, The Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 533.
47. Lowell: “our old Burgundy Ford station-wagon summer-car,|our fourth, and first not prone to accident” (“Cars, Walking, etc., an Unmailed Letter” 13–14, The Dolphin).
48. Thus, for “xeroxes.”
49. Crossed with Lowell’s letter of the same day.
50. Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963); “Donna, Donna,” Yiddish song recorded on Joan Baez (1960).
51. Nine members of the Black Panthers, including Bobby Seale, were on trial in New Haven for the murder of Alex Rackley. Hardwick refers to Seale in prison in “Militant Nudes,” New York Review of Books, January 7, 1971.
52. Joseph B. Treaster, “Brewster Doubts Fair Black Trials; Yale President is ‘Skeptical’ That Revolutionaries Can Obtain Justice in U.S.,” New York Times, April 25, 1970.
53. Donald Janson, “Damage Estimated at $100,000 After Harvard Riot,” New York Times, April 17, 1970.
54. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (opening sentence of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities [1859]).
55. Olga and Henry Carlisle’s house near Roxbury, Connecticut.
56. Thus, for “make.”
57. Thus, for “out.”
58. Hardwick: “Was that written for the archives? Who is speaking?” (“Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973). See also McCarthy to Hardwick, October 12, 1973 (below).
59. Tate acknowledged the return to Lowell on May 12, 1970: “As you must know, Elizabeth found the ‘material’ and sent it to me. My feelings are, of course, assuaged. What disturbed me was not so much the delay and cancellation of the book (one can live without that), as what seemed to me your indifference about the possible duplication of the articles. But now—never mind” (quoted in William Doreski, The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allen Tate [1990], p. 195).
60. Tate and his third wife, Helen Heinz Tate, had three children: the twins John Allen Tate (b. 1967) and Michael Paul Tate (1967–1968), and Benjamin Tate (b. 1969). Lowell wrote of the death of Michael Tate in Father and Sons, Notebook69-1 and -2.
61. Agnes Meyer.
62. The boarding school in Sou
thborough, Massachusetts, that Lowell attended from 1931–35.
63. At the van Leeuwens’ in Amsterdam.
64. Ovid: “The stones (who would beleve the thing, but that the time of olde|Reportes it for a stedfast truth?) of nature tough and harde,|Began to warre both soft and smothe: and shortly afterwarde|To winne therwith a better shape: and as they did encrease,|A mylder nature in them grew, and rudenesse gan to cease” (Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (1567), I: 476–80). See Lowell, “Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Collected Prose (1987).
65. For a party hosted by Faber & Faber, Lowell’s London publisher. Ian Hamilton: “On April 30 there was to be a party at Faber and Faber in Lowell’s honor” (Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 396). Among the guests was Caroline Blackwood.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 48
