66. Crossed with Lowell’s postcard of the same day.
67. Harvard’s Houghton Library for rare books and manuscripts.
68. Moore sold her papers to the Rosenbach Museum & Library in December 1968 for $100,000. She was introduced to Clive Driver, its director, by the bookseller Robert Wilson. See Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (2013), pp. 383–84.
69. (1946).
70. (1959). For autobiographical prose in addition to “91 Revere Street,” see Collected Prose.
71. For the catalogue of letters to Lowell from Allen Tate, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Mary McCarthy, Ezra Pound, J. F. Powers, Delmore Schwartz, Claude-Edmonde Magny, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, and Peter Taylor, among other correspondents, as well as the list of papers and manuscripts, see Patrick K. Miehe, comp., The Robert Lowell Papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University: A Guide to the Collection (1990).
72. (1944).
73. Gotham Book Mart on West Forty-Seventh Street in Manhattan.
74. Mary Devereux Winslow.
75. George Santayana and Randall Jarrell.
76. Jarrell to Lowell, [January 1946], Randall Jarrell’s Letters, ed. Mary Jarrell (1985), pp. 144–48. See also Jarrell to Lowell [November 1945], Randall Jarrell’s Letters, pp. 136–40.
77. “Randall and I are doing an anthology of modern poetry—we want things like fifty Yeats, fifty Hardy etc. that cost like hell”; Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, Nov. 29th, 1953, The Letters of Robert Lowell and Words in Air. (The idea for the anthology was abandoned, but the papers are part of the Robert Lowell collection at the Houghton Library.)
78. Hardwick’s letters to Lowell from 1949 to 1969 are part of the Houghton’s collection. Lowell’s letters to Hardwick were kept out of the sale to the Houghton, but Hardwick later sold them to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (HRC) in 1991. Most are published in The Letters of Robert Lowell.
79. For Lowell’s letters to Harriet Patterson Winslow, see The Letters of Robert Lowell.
80. Housed in Mayfair and Regent’s Park until 1971.
81. Handwritten.
82. Abbot Academy and Phillips Academy, private boarding schools for girls and boys in Andover, Massachusetts; they merged as Phillips Academy in 1973.
83. “Students completing primary school at age 11 were required to take a series of examinations called the eleven-plus. Results of these tests determined a student’s placement in a three-track secondary system. The highest scoring students were admitted to grammar schools and were likely to go on to university studies. The other students attended either modern schools […] or technical schools […] After World War II many ‘comprehensive’ schools, which combined elements of grammar, modern, and technical schools, were established” (Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Grammar school,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, July 20, 1998, rev. November 27, 2014; https://www.britannica.com/topic/grammar-school-British-education).
84. Secondary School Admission Test.
85. The Lowells lived in Eric Bentley’s apartment at 194 Riverside Drive in 1960–61.
86. Where Hardwick had been teaching an “Experiments in Writing” course since 1965.
87. New York State Insurance Fund, for workers’ compensation insurance coverage.
88. Enclosure now missing.
89. On April 30, 1970, the New York Times reported on a “Big Allied Sweep Aimed at Enemy’s Sanctuaries,” and in a televised address that evening, Nixon announced the incursion of American troops into Cambodia, explaining that “North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam” (“Transcript of President’s Address to the Nation on Military Action in Cambodia,” New York Times, May 1, 1970).
90. Lowell (translating Pasternak): “To live a life is not to cross a field” (“Hamlet in Russia, A Soliloquy,” 35, Imitations); quoted in Hardwick, “Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973, and in Sleepless Nights, p. 11.
91. Possibly the Signet Society Medal for Achievement in the Arts (also known as the Signet Associates medal).
92. Location of the Harvard English Department in 1970.
93. Robert Lowell (1970), a twenty-five-minute film, dir. Carolyn McCullough, was screened at the National Film Theatre in London.
94. Albert Sloman, Vice-Chancellor of Essex from 1962 to 1987.
95. L. G. Mitchell on Bowra: “The military coup in Greece in 1967 deeply distressed him, and he was happy to allow Wadham [College, Oxford University] to become a base for those trying to restore democracy” (L. G. Mitchell, “Bowra, Sir [Cecil] Maurice [1898–1971],” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., May 2005]).
96. Orwell.
97. Cf. Matthew Arnold: “And air-swept lindens yield|Their scent, and rustle down their perfum’d showers|Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid” (The Scholar-Gipsy, 27–30); “the warm green-muffled Cumner hills” (69); “some lone homestead in the Cumner hills” (101); “And thou hast climb’d the hill|And gain’d the white brow of the Cumner range” (126–27). Cf. Lowell: “We have climbed above the wind to breathe” (“America from Oxford” 14 [Notebook70]).
98. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Four were killed and nine were wounded.
99. See Robert B. Semple, Jr., “Nixon Will Bar Hostile Comments on Students by Agnew and Others; Summons 50 Governors to Meeting,” New York Times, May 8, 1970.
100. See Max Frankel, “Hickel, in Note to Nixon, Charges Administration Is Failing Youth; Protests Close over 80 Colleges; Agnew Criticized; Discontent Is Believed Spreading in Ranks of Government,” New York Times, May 7, 1970.
101. To mark a nationwide student strike, over 100,000 people marched on Washington on May 9, 1970. See Robert D. McFadden, “Students Step up Protests on War; Marches and Strikes Held Amid Some Violence—200 Colleges Closed,” New York Times, May 9, 1970.
102. Funeral service for Jeffrey Glenn Miller, one of the four students killed at Kent State University, was held in the Riverside Memorial Chapel on Amsterdam Avenue and West Seventy-Sixth Street in Manhattan on May 7, 1970. See Linda Charlton, “Spock Delivers Eulogy: City Closing Its Schools to Honor 4 Slain at Kent,” New York Times, May 8, 1970.
103. Spender.
104. Rita Macedo.
105. Cecilia Fuentes Macedo (b. 1962).
106. Inexpensive imports store in New York.
107. Annual school occasion at Dalton when students walk under an arch to mark passage to the next grade.
108. Handwritten.
109. Miller.
110. But probably written on May 15, 1970 (see reference to the Jackson State College killings below).
111. Two students were killed and twelve injured at Jackson State College when Jackson city and Mississippi state police opened fire on demonstrators on the night of May 14/15, 1970. See Special to The New York Times, “Jackson Police Fire on Students,” New York Times, May 15, 1970.
112. On May 7 and May 11.
113. Lowell: “gored by the climacteric of his want” (“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” 13, Life Studies [1959]).
114. That is, if Harriet was to go to a boarding school on the family’s return from England.
115. Michael Casey, director of the Dalton Middle School.
116. See Hardwick to Lowell, May 4, 1970, and footnote 2 on page 26.
117. Natasha Spender; the Spenders lived on Loudoun Road in St. John’s
Wood. The American School in London moved to Loudoun Road and Waverley Place in 1971.
118. Handwritten.
119. Crossed with Hardwick’s letters of May 14 and 16, and Hardwick’s postcard of May 1[6/7/8].
120. For Notebook70; corrections to the galleys in the Farrar, Straus and Giroux files (New York Public Library) are mostly in Lowell’s hand and Caroline Blackwood’s hand. Lowell was meant to have finished Notebook70 in January 1970. Ian Hamilton: “[Frank] Bidart stayed in the studio at West 67th Street for a week in January 1970 and ‘we worked all day for about a week … These pages of revisions were very complicated and Farrar Straus wanted cleaner copy, so he asked me to help him put it together’” (Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 392). Lowell added poems between January and June, including “Letter with Poems for a Letter with Poems” [For Elizabeth Bishop 3]; “In the Family” [February and March 11]; and “Left Out of Vacation” [February and March 12]. At least two new poems were written in May–June 1970: “Wall-Mirror” [Summer 17], which is dedicated “To Caroline,” and “America from Oxford,” which is dated May 5, 1970.
121. Gowrie.
122. Review of Notebook 1967–68 in Dissent (November–December 1969).
123. Lowell: “We have climbed above the wind to breathe” (“America from Oxford” 14, Notebook70). Matthew Arnold: “What leisure to grow wise?|Like children bathing on the shore,|Buried a wave beneath,|The second wave succeeds, before|We have had time to breathe” (“Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’” 72–76).
124.
125. Lowell, Hardwick, Harriet, and Nicole Gomez.
126. All Souls, a research college for advanced study, has had no undergraduate students since receiving its founding charter in 1438.
127. See postcard of May 1[6/17/18?], but Lowell may be referring to other postcards that are now missing.
128. Now missing.
129. Xandra Bingley, Grey Gowrie’s first wife.
130. At Ricks’s house in Lasborough, Gloucestershire.
131. Paul Valéry, “Le Cimetière marin,” trans. Desmond Harmsworth, ADAM International Review 35, nos. 334–36 (1969).
132. Charles Turner.
133. Kunitz.
134. William Meredith.
135. Two expatriates to Britain: Henry James (the Master) and T. S. Eliot (TSE).
136. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798; revised 1817).
137. W. Jackson Bate, Coleridge (1968).
138. Washerwoman.
139. Annual Eights Week regatta at Oxford.
140. John Bayley.
141. Berlin.
142. From John Sparrow’s library of rare editions.
143. Matthew Arnold: “And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time’s here|In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames” (The Scholar-Gipsy, 91–92). See also Caroline Blackwood to Lowell, no date but summer 1970 (below): “As to the future—God knows—or does he? Please get better Cal. I love you so much[.] Love Godstow Marsh.”
144. Lowell: “The cattle has stopped in the Godstow meadow,|a peacock wheels his tail to move the heat,|then pivots, changing to a wicker chair,|tiara of thistle on his shitty bobtail.|It’s the feathery May and England, but the heat|is American summer. Two weeks use up three months;|at home, the colleges are closed for summer,|the students march … Brassman lances Cambodia,|he has lost his pen, the sword folds in his hand like felt— Is truth here not there here with you/, if I sleep well,|Bystander? The peacock spins, the Revolution hasn’t evolved to us involved us/ … a heat that moves|air so estranged and hot I might be home…|We have climbed above the wind to breathe (“America from Oxford [May 5, 1970], Notebook70). Corrections “here with you” and “involved us” are written in Caroline Blackwood’s hand. Cf. “America from Oxford, May 1970” and “Oxford” [Redcliffe Square 3 and 4], The Dolphin.
145. Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!” (“Ode to a Skylark,” 1). Cf. also Matthew Arnold: “Thee, at the ferry, Oxford riders blithe,|Returning home on summer nights, have met|[…] And leaning backwards in a pensive dream,|And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers” (The Scholar-Gipsy, 71–72 and 76–77).
146. Nolan.
147. The June 4, 1970 issue of The New York Review of Books, with articles about Cambodia, Nixon, the Black Panthers’ trial in New Haven, and student protests.
148. Dworkin and Lowell discussed Vietnam, civil disobedience, Nixon, and “a host of other matters” at the request of Oxford students. “It was just the two of us together with a large room full of students. I don’t remember many details of our conversations, alas, but I do remember being impressed both with Lowell’s outrage and his knowledge of politics and events” (Ronald Dworkin, email message to editor, January 25, 2004). Their conversation was published as “Mud in the Blue Stream: Robert Lowell and Ronald Dworkin on America after Cambodia,” Isis (June 8, 1970).
149. Lowell: “I lean heavily on the rational, but am devoted to unrealism” (“Afterthought,” Notebook70).
150. Mary Bunyan Alfred; Long Island National Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York.
151. Thus, for “xerox.”
152. See Hardwick to Lowell, May 27, 1970.
153. Bad or mixed reviews of the English edition of The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (1970), including Francis Hope, “Unfinished Arguments,” New Statesman, 28 May 1970; Julian Mitchell, “What’s Going On,” Guardian, 28 May 1970; “Making It New,” Times Literary Supplement, 4 June 1970; and Christopher Ricks, “Mary and Martha,” Listener, 11 June 1970.
154. Sir Jeremy Lever: “I think that I must indeed be the ‘Lord Lever’ to whom Robert Lowell referred despite my lack then, as now, of the title. Perhaps the confusion arose because there was at the time a Labour Party Life Peer who was a Lord Lever. Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham as he became, had the bedroom next to mine in the attic of the Warden’s Lodgings […] When he retired for the night, he would come into his bedroom in the attic and I would then hear a loud thump when he would throw across the room one of the two heavy boots that he wore; the worst outcome was then waiting for the second thump which sometimes inexplicably did not materialize. Because he had held the Ministerial office of Lord Privy Seal in 1959–1960, I sometimes joked about my neighbouring seal (an animal that barks loudly). However, I was sufficiently in awe of the great man that I would never have taken countermeasures of any description. I guess that Robert Lowell must have heard me joking about my seal neighbour and embroidered the tale” (email message to editor, October 7, 2014).
155. On June 3, 1970, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
156. Ford Madox Ford.
157. Crossed with Lowell’s letter of June 2, 1970.
158. New York Review of Books.
159. Ungaretti died on June 1, 1970. See Lowell’s translations of Ungaretti, including “You Knocked Yourself Out,” Imitations, and “Returning,” For the Union Dead.
160. Patrick French: “Keen to save dollars, he [Naipaul] jumped at the opportunity when the manic poet Robert Lowell (‘the only American who has read my work’) and his wife the critic Elizabeth Hardwick offered to lend him their book-lined studio apartment on West 67th Street while they were away on a trip to Israel and Europe [in 1969]” (The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul [2008], p. 274).
161. Handwritten.
162. On verso, in Lowell’s hand, “[Isaiah] Berlin 6511[.]”
163. Golden State (1973).
164. Lowell: “‘Your student wrote me, if he took a plane|past Harvard, at any angle, at any height,|he’d see a person missing, Mr. Robert Lowell’” (“In the Mail” 1–3, The Dolphin); see footnote 2 on page 293. Cf. Hardwick to Lowell, OCT 16 PM 5.13 [1970]; Lowell to Harriet Lowell [April 2, 1972]; and Hardwick to Lowell
[no date summer 1972].
165. Sarah Winslow Cotting, Lowell’s maternal aunt.
166. Lithium.
167. Hardwick, “Divine Disobedience, ‘Important Record’” (review of Francine du Plessix Gray’s Divine Disobedience), Vogue, August 1, 1970.
168. Andrew M. Greeley, “The Newest Heroes in Catholicism-as-entertainment,” New York Times Book Review, May 31, 1970.
169. Hardwick, “Books: The Writing on the Wall,” Vogue, September 1, 1970.
170. Joanna Rostropowicz.
171. John Wain and Eirian Mary James.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 49
