The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979
Page 53
32. Lowell: “It’s strange having a child today, though common,|adding our further complication to|intense fragility” (“Overhanging Cloud” [Burden 3] 4–6, “The Dolphin” manuscript); cf. “Overhanging Cloud” [Marriage 14], The Dolphin.
33. Ted Hughes, Crow (1970).
34. Crossed with Lowell’s letters of March 14 to Harriet Lowell and March 20 to Hardwick.
35. Madame Olga Novikoff: “[Alexander] Kinglake interrupted me. ‘Pray, remember I am a heathen. I dislike churches and, had I my way […] I would write on every church, chapel, and cathedral only one line—“Important if true.”’” (The M. P. for Russia, Reminiscences and Correspondence, vol. 1, ed. W. T. Stead [1909], p. 151).
36. Satirical. Cf. Hardwick: “What a sad countryside it is, the home of the pain of the Confederacy, the birthplace of the White Citizens Council. […] [T]he whole region is fiction, art, dated, something out of a secondhand bookstore. And this, to be sure, is the ‘Southern way of life,’ these dated old photographs of a shack lying under a brilliant sky, the blackest of faces, the impacted dirt of the bus station, the little run-down churches, set in the mud, leaning a bit. […] Life arranges itself for you here in the most ‘conventional’ tableaux. Juxtapositions and paradoxes fit only for the most superficial art present themselves over and over. […] These Southerners have only the nothingness of racist ideas, the burning incoherence, and that is all” (“Selma,” New York Review of Books, April 22, 1965).
37. “Ibsen and Women III: The Rosmersholm Triangle,” New York Review of Books, April 8, 1971.
38. In Rich’s The Will to Change: Poems 1968–70 (1971).
39. Mstislav Rostropovich’s 1969 performance with the Berlin Philharmonic (cond. Herbert von Karajan) of Antonín Dvořák’s Concerto in B Minor for Cello and Orchestra (Op. 104, s), released by Deutsche Grammophon.
40. Prometheus Bound, dir. Jonathan Miller, opened at the Mermaid Theatre in London on June 24, 1971.
41. Irene Worth and Kenneth Haigh.
42. Hardwick: “there is a radical undercurrent to the realistic plays. If they have any moral it is that, in the end, nothing will turn out to have been worth the destruction of others and of oneself” (“Ibsen and Women III: The Rosmersholm Triangle,” New York Review of Books, April 8, 1971).
43. Lowell: “The postman The morning mail brings/ America the familiar voice to Kent/ to Kent:|‘not that I wish you entirely well, far from it’” (“Green Sore” [The Burden 5] 3–4, “The Dolphin” manuscript; see poem on page 154); “words of a moment’s menace stay for life:|not that I wish you entirely well, far from it” (“Green Sore” [Marriage 7] 3–4, The Dolphin).
44. Lowell to Hardwick, March 20, 1971.
45. Letter and Lowell’s reply now missing. But Lowell wrote to Blair Clark in 1973: “I have something of a grudge against Whittemore. A year or two ago he wrote a six page letter protesting against a review I’d written of Kunitz—log rolling, praising mediocrities etc. at the expense of Reed etc. Very hysterical, almost unhinged, but well-meant I suppose” (Lowell to Clark, July 31, 1973).
46. Mona Van Duyn won the 1971 National Book Award for To See, To Take, which “was hotly disputed by Allen Ginsberg, the poet [a judge for the award]. The book […] was on the long end of a 4-to-1 vote, with Mr. Ginsberg, the lone dissenter, supporting Gregory Corso’s ‘Elegiac Feelings American.’ Mr. Ginsberg called the choice of the other four jurors ‘ignominious, insensitive and mediocre’” (George Gent, “Bellow Wins 3d National Book Award,” New York Times, March 3, 1971).
47. Adrienne Rich.
48. By Alexander Pope (1712).
49. By Herman Melville (1851).
50. Thomas Hardy: “Let him in whose ears the low-voiced Best is killed by the clash of the First,|Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,|Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom and fear,|Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he disturbs the order here” (“In Tenebris II” 13–16).
51. First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., was convicted on March 29, 1971, for the premeditated murder of 22 South Vietnamese civilians during the 1968 My Lai massacre. On April 1, President Richard Nixon ordered him released from jail. For British coverage, see “Calley Guilty of My Lai Murders” (Guardian, March 30, 1971); Michael Leapman, “Lieut. Calley jailed for life amid wave of U.S. protest” (Times, 1 April 1971); Louis Heren, “Lieut Calley, a cog in a war machine” (Times, 1 April 1971); and Fred Emery, “Nixon order to free Lieut. Calley from prison pending review” (Times, 2 April 1971). Cf. Lowell, “Women, Children, Babies, Cows, Cats,” History (1973).
52. Lowell: “I hoped to gamble with unloaded dice…|like Racine, no enemy of craft,|drawn through his maze of iron composition|by the incomparable voice of Phedre.|As for this writing … flowers for the dead,|faulty things once written as best I might,|when I sat in service to the too many|words of the collaborating Muse,|and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,|not avoiding injury to persons,|not avoiding injury to myself— we ask compassion. Why should the bait be eaten|when the sharks swim free? This book is fiction,|an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting” (“Fishnet,” from “Excerpt from ‘The Dolphin,’” The Review 26 [Summer 1971]). Cf. “Dolphin,” The Dolphin.
53. Silvers replied on April 6, 1971 that “We certainly want to publish the message you sent me,” sending Lowell a fair copy of the “badly transmitted” text (silently corrected here; for the original, see Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library). Lowell replied by telegram on April 13, 1971, with corrections. The statement was published as “Judgment Deferred on Lieutenant Calley” (Lowell’s title), New York Review of Books (May 6, 1971):“A principle may kill more than an incident. I am sick with fresh impressions. Has no one the compassion to pass judgment on William Calley? His atrocity is cleared by the President, public, polls, rank and file of the right and left. He looks almost alive; like an old song, he stirs us with the gruff poignance of the professional young soldier. He too fought under television for our place in the sun. Why should the bait be eaten when the sharks swim free? I sense a coldness under the hysteria. Our nation looks up to heaven, and puts her armies above the law. No stumbling on the downward plunge from Hiroshima. Retribution is someone somewhere else and we are young. In a century perhaps no one will widen an eye at massacre, and only scattered corpses express a last histrionic concern for death. We are not hypocrites, we can learn to embrace people outside society—President Nixon, our own Huckleberry Finn who has to shoot everyone else on the raft.”
54. “The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea […] are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States […] each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground” (General W. T. Sherman, “Field Order No. 15,” January 16, 1865, from sections I and III). Eric Foner: “Sherman later provided that the army could assist them with the loan of mules. (Here, perhaps, lies the origin of the phrase ‘forty acres and a mule’ that would soon echo throughout the South)” (Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 [1988], pp. 70–71). The Field Order was overturned in the fall of 1865 by Andrew Johnson.
55. James Dickey was professor of English at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C.
56. On April 9, 1971, at Frank E. Campbell’s Funeral Home on Madison Avenue in Manhattan.
57. Flavio de Macedo Soares Regis, nephew of Bishop’s lover Lota de Macedo Soares.
58. Lota de Macedo Soares committed suicide in 1967. Ted Hughes’s first wife, Sylvia Plat
h, committed suicide in 1963, and his lover Assia Wevill committed suicide in 1969 (also killing their daughter, Shura, in the act).
59. Hardwick: “All my life I have carried about with me the chains of an exaggerated anxiety and tendency to worry, an overexcited imagination for disasters ahead, problems foreboding, errors whose consequences could stretch to the end of time. I feel some measure of admiration for women who are carefree, even for the careless; but we work with what we are given, and what I know I have learned from books and worry” (“The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” Vogue, June 1971, p. 86). Cf. Hardwick: “A lifetime of worrying and reading may bring you at last to free trips you are not sure you wish to take” (Sleepless Nights, p. 129).
60. Crossed with Hardwick’s letter of April 9, 1971.
61. See footnote 6 on page 160 (Hardwick to Lowell, March 21, 1971); cf. also Lowell to Silvers, April 2, 1971, with Lowell’s early draft of “Dolphin” (pages 166–67, footnote 2).
62. The Lowells visited Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares in Brazil in 1962. See Words in Air, pp. 415–25; and Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, pp. 405–13.
63. Botsford.
64. See Hardwick to Lowell, April 9, 1971 (above): “Harriet is fine, but she doesn’t like to talk about what is happening to you, even though she does talk about you, as you were, with much pleasure and pride.”
65. For the Vietnam War Out Now rally on April 24.
66. Cf. Lowell, “‘I despair of letters…’” [Burden 6], “The Dolphin” manuscript (see poem on page 172); and “Letter” [Marriage 8], The Dolphin.
67. Kunitz to Lowell: “A few months ago, at Lenox Hill [Hospital], I thought I was really through with my body. But in the springtime I seem as tough as ever” (April 23, 1971).
68. Wittgenstein: “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4311, trans. C. K. Ogden [1922]). Lowell: “Death’s not an event in life, it’s not lived through” (“Plotted” 14, The Dolphin).
69. Kunitz to Lowell: “When exactly is your revised Notebook coming out here? The books of verse that stand out for me this season are Ted Hughes’s nightmarish Crow, which has been extravagantly praised, and Jim Wright’s beautiful but unsung Collected. Adrienne’s The Will to Change has just arrived in the mail” (April 23, 1971). Ted Hughes, Crow (1970); James Wright, Collected Poems (1971); Adrienne Rich, The Will to Change (1971).
70. Olwyn Hughes, who managed the private Rainbow Press that she and Ted Hughes had founded together. Cummington Press was the publisher of Lowell’s first collection, Land of Unlikeness (1944).
71. Lowell: “this book is fiction,|an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting” (“Fishnet” 12–13, “An Excerpt from ‘The Dolphin,’” The Review 26 [Summer 1971]; see poem on pages 166–67, footnote 2.); “yet asking ask/ compassion for this book, half fiction,|an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting” (“Dolphin” 12–13, “The Dolphin” manuscript); “this book, half fiction|an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting— my eyes have seen what my hand did” (“Dolphin” 13–15, The Dolphin).
72. Lowell: “You have done too much. This hailstorm of gifts is poverty” (Prometheus Bound, page 24).
73. Lowell had Jewish ancestors on his paternal and maternal sides. They had similar names. His Lowell grandmother descended from Mordecai Myers (1776–1871), mayor of Kinderhook, New York, and Schenectady, New York. His Winslow great-grandmother, Margaret Devereux (née Mordecai) of Raleigh, North Carolina, was descended from Myer Myers (1723–1795), a New York silversmith. See Lowell to Ezra Pound, October 24, 1956: “I have no mind for your gospel, and don’t let us talk about the Jews. I have several on my family tree” (The Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 263). About his father’s side: “The account of him is platitudinous, worldly and fond, but he has no Christian name and is entitled merely Major M. Meyers in my Cousin Cassie Myers Julian-James’s privately printed Biographical Sketches: A Key to a Cabinet of Heirlooms in the Smithsonian Museum […] he was Mordecai Myers. […] a German Jew […] Mordecai Myers was my Grandmother Lowell’s great-grandfather. His life was tame and honorable” (“91 Revere Street,” Life Studies, p. 11). About his mother’s side, see Nicholas Jenkins, “Beyond Wikipedia: Notes on Robert Lowell’s Family,” http://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/beyond-wikipedia-notes-robert-lowells-family.
74. Kunitz to Lowell: “The interview with you in the NY Times a few weeks ago troubled me a bit. I had the impression that you were being pestered and badgered by an insensitive clod—no pal of yours, I hope” (April 23, 1971).
75. Lowell: “Shakespeare was an unusual playwright and not typical of his age. He was much less successful than Ben Jonson and I imagine people who saw his plays were a very small number, and the playhouse was very small, and the plays ran for a very short time; and I imagine the people who bought his first folio when it came out were a very small number. I don’t have the figures but I’m sure that his sales weren’t anything like the hundredth best seller this year” (Dudley Young, “Talk with Robert Lowell,” New York Times, April 4, 1971).
76. “Young: “What about the speculation that you are in flight from America? Is that a myth you want to endorse at all? No, I’ve been here the best part of a year and I’d quite like to stay another year and it is a vacation from America which has no sort of symbolics. I’ll go back to America and be American and I’m not comparing the countries. So we’re not to see you as a disenchanted pilgrim, returning to European sources. It’s an American theme … the discovery, the pioneer going into the wilderness. After a while the wilderness changes into the Europe of Henry James and Eliot—a freehold almost barbaric in its newness” (“Talk with Robert Lowell,” New York Times, April 4, 1971).
77. V. S. Pritchett, “Ironical Aviary,” New York Review of Books, June 3, 1971.
78. Mary McCarthy, “The American Revolution of Jean-François Revel,” New York Review of Books, September 2, 1971 (“The following will appear as an Afterword to Jean-François Revel’s Without Marx or Jesus, to be published by Doubleday”).
79. See Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” trans. Mary McCarthy, Politics (November 1945).
80. Aerogram.
81. Anzilotti.
82. Lowell to Theodore Roethke, June 6, 1958; September 18, 1958; and July 10, 1963 (copies, with notes and queries by a researcher, HRC). See also The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 427–28.
83. Possibly Jonathan Raban.
84. By Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850); Hardwick, “Seduction and Betrayal I,” New York Review of Books, May 31, 1973, and Seduction and Betrayal (1974), pp. 180–84.
85. The May Day protests in Washington (May 1–6, 1971). See Richard Halloran, “30,000 Anti-War Protesters Are Routed in Capital,” New York Times, May 3, 1970; Richard Halloran, “7,000 Arrested in Capitol War Protest; 150 Are Hurt as Clashes Disrupt Traffic,” New York Times, May 4, 1971; and James M. Naughton, “Protesters Fail to Stop Congress; Police Seize 1,146,” New York Times, May 5, 1971.
86. Panel discussion with Sonia Orwell, Edna O’Brien, Anne Sharpley, and Jill Tweedie following a production of Jane Arden’s A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets, and Witches (also known as Holocaust) by the Holocaust theatre group at the Open Space Theatre in London. Millett did not appear. Caroline Blackwood: “As though a Women’s Institute fete had been expecting a visit from the Queen and had only been informed after it opened that she was confined to her bed with a heavy cold, a feeling of let-down hung over the Women’s Lib rally … ‘Where’s Kate Millett?’” (Blackwo
od, “Women’s Theatre,” Listener, 3 June 1971).
87. Lowell revised his earlier translations of Homer, Sappho, Leopardi, Heine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Annesky from Imitations (1961), and of Juvenal and Góngora from Near the Ocean (1967), for History.
88. Jorge Luis Borges was awarded an honorary D.Litt by Oxford University on April 29 and then spoke for the ICA in London on four evenings from April 30 to May 13, 1971.
89. Theatrical agent at Ashley Famous Agency.