336. One of the twelve letters, postcards, and telegrams written by Hardwick that were included in the Lowell Estate’s sale of papers to the HRC in 1982.
337. Detail of a dog looking in St. Augustine’s direction.
338. Alfred H. Conrad, Adrienne Rich’s husband, had committed suicide on October 18, 1970.
339. Letter now missing.
340. Lowell and Hardwick fell in love at Yaddo in January 1949. He began to suffer his first major manic episode that winter and was hospitalized for acute mania in March 1949. After his recovery and release from hospital, he and Hardwick were married on July 28, 1949 (the day after Hardwick’s thirty-third birthday).
341. Lowell: “‘Ourselves,’ you wrote, ‘are all we know of heaven.|With the intellect, I always can|and always shall make out […] ’” (“To Margaret Fuller Drowned,” 11–13, Notebook70). OED: “to make out (b) To manage, make shift, to do something. Also absol. to make shift, get along; to succeed, thrive; to get on (well, badly). Also to make it out. Chiefly U.S.… 1776 ABIGAIL ADAMS in Fam. Lett. (1876) 180, I would not have you anxious about me. I make out better than I did” (“Make, v.1” 91, Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. VI).
342. La Divina Commedia di Dante by Domenico di Michelino (1465), in the nave of the Duomo (Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore) in Florence; used as a frontispiece for the Temple edition of The Purgatorio of Dante Alighieri (1901).
343. Blair Clark to Lowell, October 22, 1970: “I phoned [Elizabeth] this morning […] in the course of the conversation I found it natural to say that you had written to ask if you could stay with me when you came in December and that I had said of course, yes. To this I added that there was some possibility that Caroline might come too. I should have anticipated the reaction, which was very strong. She said that there were many practical things that had to be settled between you but that if Caroline came when you were here, she would leave town, taking Harriet with her, perhaps to the Caribbean. She would leave all the papers in order and a list of questions for you to answer and deal with, but she wouldn’t be here” (Robert Lowell Papers, HRC).
344. William Alfred to Lowell, 15 October 1970, above.
345. Blair Clark to Lowell, October 22, 1970, quoted in footnote 1 on page 121 (see also Hardwick to Blair Clark, Friday, October 23, 1970).
346. On the death of Robert Kennedy in 1968, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed Charles Goodell, a Republican, to fill Kennedy’s senatorial seat. Goodell’s increasingly liberal and anti-war positions as senator provoked conservatives and the Nixon administration. In his 1970 reelection campaign, he faced not only a Democratic Party opponent, Richard Ottinger, but a Conservative Party opponent, James L. Buckley (older brother of William F. Buckley, Jr.). See Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Malcolm Boyd, Robert McAfee Brown, and Noam Chomsky, et al.: “[Goodell] is one of only two national Republicans who deny Nixon the party unity behind his war policies that he seeks. Senator Goodell is rare also, in that he raises questions not only about the war, but about the kind of country that would allow such a war to continue. […] [We] believe that it is in the interest of peace and the antiwar movement to keep Charles Goodell in the Senate” (“Senator Goodell,” New York Review of Books, October 22, 1970). On election day, November 3, 1970, Ottinger and Goodell split the liberal vote, handing Buckley a victory.
347. A habitual exclamation of Jarrell’s, but given that Hardwick had recently reread Jarrell’s letters to Lowell and to her, see Jarrell to Lowell, [November 1951]: “Jesus, have you seen Paterson IV? Golly, golly” (Randall Jarrell’s Letters, p. 284).
348. Wilson, Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971); two excerpts, “An Upstate Diary I: 1950–1959” and “An Upstate Diary II: 1960–1970,” appeared in the New Yorker on June 5 and June 12, 1971.
349. Dennis H. Wrong, “The Case of the ‘New York Review,’” Commentary, November 1970.
350. Thus, for a probable “must.”
351. By Vittore Carpaccio; postcard from Elizabeth Hardwick and Harriet Lowell to Robert Lowell, October 19?, 1970. Cf. “Old Snapshot from Venice 1952” [Hospital II 3], The Dolphin.
352. A. Alvarez, “A Change in the Weather,” Observer (November 8, 1970); Cyril Connolly, “The Private and the Public,” Sunday Times (November 8, 1970). The March 1967 production of Lowell’s Benito Cereno, directed by Jonathan Miller at the Mermaid Theatre in London, was poorly reviewed.
353. OED: “redbrick university n. […] a British university founded in the late 19th or early 20th cent. in a major provincial city, typically having buildings of red brick (as opposed to stone); […] any recently founded or created university; freq., esp. in early use, in contrast with Oxbridge” (“red brick, n. and adj.,” OED Online. March 2016. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/160174?redirectedFrom=red+brick [accessed March 25, 2016]).
354. James Atlas.
355. Thus, for Margaret Rizza.
356. Margaret Rizza, “Poetry for Galway Kinnell: Confessions, a Blessing,” Harvard Crimson (December 1, 1969).
357. Heinrich Blücher, Hannah Arendt’s husband, died on October 30, 1970.
358. Thus, for a probable “well.”
359. Lowell: “From the dismay of my old world to the blank|new—water-torture of vacillation!” (“Pointing the Horns of the Dilemma” [Doubt 2] 1–2, The Dolphin).
360. The Hardwick letter Lowell refers to is now missing.
361. Groupies, dir. Ron Dorfman and Peter Nevard (1970). See Hardwick, “Militant Nudes,” New York Review of Books, January 7, 1971.
362. Lowell’s aunt Sarah Winslow Cotting and uncle Charles E. (“Cot”) Cotting.
363. Blair Clark replied: “All this makes me think of one thing you might set yourself to thinking on until we meet—The one big agenda item: do you really want to live ‘in the same room’ with anyone? I think in the past you have never questioned much that this was the best and most natural arrangement for you. But is it, at our age? I, of course, have had a longer training period than you in the business of living apart while never being un-connected (sometimes with too many at the same time!). But I was very much married for quite a while, as you know, and mostly exclusively. Now—I don’t know […] Well, dear Cal, we’ll stew about all this when you come, at length” (Blair Clark to Lowell, November 29, 1970). Cf. Lowell, “The Friend,” The Dolphin.
364. See Lowell to Hardwick, November 7, 1970, footnote 1 on page 129.
365. Thus, for Daily Telegraph. See R. Barry O’Brien, “Campus Freedom Plan Crashes in a Wave of Violence,” Daily Telegraph, November 26, 1970.
366. Now missing.
367. William Empson: “the delicious social hints and evasive claims-by-mumble of spoken English are a positive intoxicant though externally drab. One may agree that a poet should be enough in contact with the spoken English of his time, and also believe he has always needed to be free enough from it to sing. Taking for granted that mumbling is the only honest mode of speech is I suppose a fog which has thickened steadily for the last fifty years” (“Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” British Journal of Aesthetics 2, no. 1 [January 1962], reprinted in Empson, Argufying, p. 156). Lowell had been reading Empson’s essay in June 1970; see Lowell to Hardwick, June 14, 1970.
368. “Poet’s Chronicle,” Daily Telegraph, November 12, 1970.
369. Broadwater, to whom Mary McCarthy was married from 1946–60.
370. Tate, Allen Tate’s brother.
371. Gordon, Allen Tate’s wife from 1925–45 and from 1946–59.
372. John Berryman, “To B—E—” and “The Search,” Stand, XI (Fall 1970).
373. “The events which he does not list as public are domestic misfortunes, notably a marriage breaking, then broken” (Denis Donoghue, “Lowell’s Seasons,” Guardian, November
19, 1970).
374. Direct reference not known, but see Hayden Carruth, “A Meaning of Robert Lowell,” Hudson Review 20, no. 3 (Autumn 1967): pp. 429–47.
375. Servadio Mostyn-Owen.
376. “I come like someone naked in my raincoat,|but only a girl is naked in a raincoat” (“No Messiah” [Flight to New York 6] 7–8, in “The Dolphin” manuscript, and in The Dolphin).
377. “‘You’re not under inspection, just missed;’” (“Fox-Fur” [Flight to New York 1] 8, “The Dolphin” manuscript); cf. with “Foxfur,” The Dolphin.
378. Lowell: “‘Will you go with me to The Messiah,|on December 17th, a Thursday,|and drink eat/ at the Russian Tearoom afterward?’” (“The Messiah” [Flight to New York 2] 5–7, “The Dolphin” manuscript); cf. with “Foxfur” 9–12, The Dolphin.
379. Thus.
380. Lowell: “I stop in our Christmas-papered bedroom, hearing|my Nolo, the non-Messianic man—” (“No Messiah” [Flight to New York 6] 11–12, in both “The Dolphin” manuscript and The Dolphin).
381. Lowell: “‘You’re right to worry about me, only please DON’T,|though I’m pretty worried myself. I’ve somehow got|into the worst situation I’ve ever|had to cope with. I can’t see the way out.|Cal … have you ever gone through caves?|I did once … Mexico, and hated it— I’ve never done the famous ones near here.|Finally after hours of stumbling along,|one sees daylight ahead, a faint blue glimmer.|Air never looked so beautiful before.|That’s what I feel I’m waiting for now:|a faintest glimmer I am going to get out|somehow alive from this. Your last letter helped,|like being handed a lantern or a spiked stick’” (“Letter with Poems for a Letter with Poems” [For Elizabeth Bishop 3], Notebook70). Cf. Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, February 27, 1970 (Words in Air, pp. 663–67).
382. Cf. Lowell: “At Offado’s” [Winter and London 2], The Dolphin. O Fado was the name of a restaurant at 50 Beauchamp Place, London.
383. Blackwood’s housekeeper.
384. Nickname for Evgenia.
385. Cf. Lowell, “Departure At the Air-Terminal” [Flight to New York 4] 1–11, “The Dolphin” manuscript; and “With Caroline at the Air-Terminal” [Flight to New York 2], The Dolphin.
386. Antianxiety medication. Cf. “The room is filled with double-shadows,|librium sedation/ doublinges/ everything I see…” (“Double Vision” [Hospital 4] 8–9, “The Dolphin” manuscript).
Part II: 1971–1972
1. A Christmas present from Harriet. Lowell: “The tedium and deja-vu of home|make me love it; bluer days will come|and acclimatize the Christmas gifts:|redwood bear, rubber-egg shampoo, home-movie-|projector” (“Christmas 1970” [Flight to New York 10] 1–5, “The Dolphin” manuscript; cf. “Christmas” [Flight to New York 12] 1–5, The Dolphin).
2. Lowell: “I was learning to print. I wrote in ugly legible letters: ‘Arms-of-the-Law, A Horrid Spoof. Arms-of-the-Law was a horrid spoof most of the time, but an all-right guy on the 29th of February. He was also a Bostonian, an Irish policeman, and a bear’” (“My Crime Wave” typescript, “Autobiographical prose,” Robert Lowell Papers, *73M-90 bMS Am 1905, folder 2223, Houghton Library), quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (1983), p. 15. While a student at Kenyon College in 1938, “Lowell had dreamed up a world peopled by ‘bear-characters’—or ‘berts’ [French pronunciation], as he called them—and his favorite off-duty sport was to invent bear-dramas or bear-parables, which incorporated caricatures of friends and relatives. Each friend would be given a bear-name and an appropriate bear-voice. Lowell himself seems to have been the chief bear, known as Arms of the Law (the hero of his ‘horrid’ childhood ‘spoof’)” (Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 55).
3. Lowell: “I feel how Hamlet, stuck with the Revenge Play|his father wrote him, went scatological|under this clotted London sky” (“Plotted” 7–9, The Dolphin); “‘If it were done, twere well it were done quickly— to quote a bromide, your vacillation|is acne” (Artist’s Model [3] 1–3, The Dolphin).
4. In The Education of Henry Adams (1907); see among other passages Adams’s account of meeting Swinburne (pp. 139–44), given Lowell’s allusion to Swinburne’s “tears of time” below (Lowell to Hardwick, January 9, 1971).
5. Crossed with Lowell’s letter of January 7, 1971.
6. Possibly a reference to a second January 8 letter from Hardwick that is now missing.
7. Crossed with Hardwick’s letter of January 8, 1971.
8. Lowell: “Behind their cage,|yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting|as they cropped up tons of mush and grass|to gouge their underworld garage” (“For the Union Dead” 13–16, For the Union Dead).
9. In Connecticut.
10. Cf. Ezra Pound: “Then from my sight as now from memory|The courier aquiline, so swiftly gone!” (“Canzone: Of Angels” 29–30); and Swinburne: “Us too, when all the tears of time are dry,|The night shall lighten from her tearless eye” (“Tristram of Lyonesse” 231–32).
11. Lowell: Sidney Nolan “and I are very close friends and have frequent lunches, but his wife, described by Kenneth Clark as a German abstract expressionist painting of the angel of death done without passion, refuses to see us. An embarrassment” (Lowell to Frank Parker, [March 20, 1973], in The Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 605).
12. Limited edition of “Winter Visitors” (the first chapter of Birds of America), with pictorial boards, “published as a New Year’s greeting to friends of the author and the publisher” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).
13. Mary McCarthy, “Birds of America,” Southern Review (Summer 1965).
14. Playwright of Having Wonderful Time (1937) about a camp in the Catskills.
15. “Militant Nudes,” New York Review of Books, January 7, 1971; Mary Thomas.
16. “A Doll’s House,” New York Review of Books, March 11, 1971; “Ibsen and Women II: Hedda Gabler,” New York Review of Books, March 25, 1971.
17. Mary McCarthy to Hardwick: “All I’ve heard from England … was an hysterical letter from Sonia, accusing you, me, and everyone of having put false stories in circulation about her: typical denials of charges never made, such as that she had talked to you against Caroline, her dearest friend, and how could one be so wicked as to think she would…? I answered this with a quite sharp letter that’s never been mailed, since the day after I wrote it, the [postal] strike started, and the p.o. here wasn’t accepting anything for England” (February 15, 1971, Elizabeth Hardwick Papers, HRC).
18. Hardwick’s letter of January 8 and Lowell’s letter of January 9, 1971.
19. State Street Trust Company.
20. March 2, 1971, the day after Lowell’s fifty-fourth birthday.
21. Lowell: “Sometimes the little muddler|can’t stand itself!” (“Child’s Song” 17–20, For the Union Dead).
22. Cf. “Green Sore” [The Burden 5] 11–14, “The Dolphin” manuscript (see poem on page 154) and “Green Sore” [Marriage 7] 10–13, The Dolphin.
23. Corrections in Lowell’s and Frank Bidart’s hand.
24. Crossed with Hardwick’s March 12, 1971, letter to Blackwood.
25. Seyersted, whom the Lowells had met when he was a student at Harvard in 1956. They were introduced by Huyck van Leeuwen.
26. Central Park West.
27. Taylor.
28. The Winters Tale 1.2: “We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ the sun,|And bleat the one at the other”; Milton: “For we were nurst upon the self-same hill,|Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill” (“Lycidas,” 23–24).
29. Rich: “your eyes are stars of a different magnitude|they reflect ligh
ts that spell out: EXIT|when you get up and pace the floor|talking of the danger|as if it were not ourselves|as if we were testing anything else” (“On Trying to Talk with a Man,” 35–40 [1973]).
30. Review of Stanley Kunitz’s The Testing-Tree (1971) in the New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1971.
31. Lowell: “Now that obscure poetry is perhaps out of fashion, one must pay homage to its supreme invention and exploration. I remember Empson years ago with a group discussing one of his poems, ‘To an Old Lady.’ Was it about the moon described as an old lady, or an old lady as the moon? Was it physics or metaphysics? Empson said, ‘It’s my grandmother. The old girl would have been furious if she had known I was writing about her.’ Wasn’t he right? Think of the simple, heartfelt, offensive poems that have been written about friends, wives, children. What hope for the half-poet? The frank, open and vulnerable, the voice of a generation, fades as soon as the elitist incantations of the hermeticist” (New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1971). But compare Empson’s own account of “To an Old Lady,” in which he says that it was about his mother. She had said to him, “‘I will say, that poem about your Granny, William, now that showed decent feeling.’ And I was greatly relieved by her saying this; I thought the situation was very embarrassing. She thought it was about her own mother […] and I meant it about her” (The Ambiguity of William Empson, BBC Radio 3 [22 October 1977]; quoted in William Empson, The Complete Poems [2000], p. 193).
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 52
