The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979

by Elizabeth Hardwick

    90.  Hardwick: “I have never felt free. I do not speak of the constraints of society but of the peculiar developments of my own nature. All my life I have carried about with me the chains of an exaggerated anxiety and tendency to worry, an over-excited 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 (“The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” Vogue, June 1, 1971, p. 86).

    91.  Accountant.

    92.  Thus, for “xeroxes.”

    93.  For “mostly critical,” see Lowell to Theodore Roethke, July 10, 1963, in The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 427–28. About “breakdowns,” Lowell writes: “Getting out of the flats after a manic leap is like our old crew races at school. When the course is half-finished, you know and so does everyone else in the boat, that not another stroke can be taken. Yet everyone goes on, and the observer on the wharf notices nothing” (Lowell to Theodore Roethke, June 6, 1958, copy in Robert Lowell Papers, HRC); and “You sound yourself and clearly must be. For months (perhaps always) there are black twinges, the spirit aches, yet remarkably less as time passes. I fell almost in a thanksgiving mood—so much of life is bearable. I’ve quite stopped wanting to turn the clock back or look for a snug hole” (Lowell to Theodore Roethke, September 18, 1958, copy in Robert Lowell Papers, HRC).

    94.  Letter now missing.

    95.  Lowell and Hardwick traveled to Brazil in 1962 for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. A 1966 New York Times article reported secret, indirect C.I.A. support for academic and cultural organizations, including the C.C.F., explaining how the C.I.A “may channel research and propaganda money through foundations—legitimate ones or dummy fronts […] Through similar channels, the C.I.A. has supported […] anti-Communist but liberal organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and some of their newspapers and magazines. Encounter magazine, a well-known anti-Communist intellectual monthly with editions in Spanish and German as well as English was for a long time—though it is not now—one of the direct beneficiaries of C.I.A. funds” (T. Wicker, J. W. Finney, M. Frankel, E. W. Kenworthy, others, “Electronic Prying Grows: C.I.A. Is Spying from 100 Miles up; Satellites Probe Secrets of the Soviet Union” New York Times, April 27, 1966). See also Matthew Spender, A House in St. John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents (2015).

    96.  Aerogram.

    97.  V. S. Pritchett, “How They Talked” (a review of Robert Baldick’s Dinner at Magny’s [1971]), New Statesman, 21 May 1971. Hardwick had written about the dinners in “Memoirs, Conversations and Diaries,” Partisan Review 20, no. 5 (September 1953).

    98.  Peter S. Prescott, “Candide without Voltaire,” Newsweek, May 24, 1971.

    99.  Lowell: “the Aztecs knew these stars would fail to rise|if forbidden the putrifaction of our flesh,|the victims’ viscera laid out like tiles|on fishponds changed to yellow flowers” (“Oxford” [Redcliffe Square 4] 6–9, The Dolphin).

  100.  See Caroline Blackwood, “Women’s Theatre,” Listener, 3 June 1971.

  101.  Angela Thorne.

  102.  David Horovitch.

  103.  “You have done too much. This hailstorm of gifts is poverty” (Prometheus Bound, p. 24).

  104.  Nadezhda Mandelstam: “Dear Robert, Do come here. I want to see you so much. Soon you’ll be late—I am old and can’t last long. And it is not a novel (imagination!), it is life. It is far more difficult to live one’s life than to write about it. Do come … As to you, I think that the second marriage is always better than the first. I am greatly for divorces. I hope you soon will be through it. [p.s.] If you want to make a call - my number 126-67-42. But I am rather deaf. Do speak slowly” (to Robert Lowell, June 1, [19]71, HRC; quoted in Michael Watchtell and Craig Cravens, “Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandel’shtam: Letters to and about Robert Lowell,” The Russian Review 61, no. 4 [October 2002], p. 524). Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward (1970).

  105.  James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).

  106.  Postscript typed above the date and address to Hardwick. See Hardwick to Lowell, May 27, 1970, in which she writes that Stony Brook had offered “to give me if I want it a good, high-paying one day a week job as curator of these papers.”

  107.  Adrienne Rich.

  108.  Thus, for “advise.”

  109.  See footnote 2 on page 146 (Lowell to Harriet Lowell, January 6, 1970 [1971]).

  110.  Hochman, with whom Lowell had an affair during a manic episode in 1961.

  111.  Donald Newlove, “Dinner at the Lowells’,” Esquire, September 1969.

  112.  Hemingway: “It was only Zelda’s secret that she shared with me, as a hawk might share something with a man. But hawks do not share” (A Moveable Feast [1964], p. 185). Hardwick: “Hemingway is smug and patronizing to Fitzgerald and urges upon us forgiveness by laying Fitzgerald’s weaknesses and pains at the feet of his wife. Hemingway sees Zelda as a ‘hawk’” (“Caesar’s Things,” New York Review of Books, September 24, 1970; and Seduction and Betrayal, pp. 89–90).

  113.  The New York Times and The Washington Post began publishing the Pentagon Papers during the week of June 13, 1971 (The New York Times on June 13 and the Post on June 18). See Paul L. Montgomery, “Ellsberg: From Hawk to Dove: Ex-Pentagon Aide Now Outspoken Critic of the War,” New York Times, June 27, 1971; Robert Rheinholds, “Ellsberg Yields, Is Indicted; Says He Gave Data to Press,” New York Times, June 29, 1971.

  114.  In June 1968, when Lowell received an honorary degree from Yale; William Bundy (a distant Lowell cousin) was a Fellow of the Yale Corporation at the time.

  115.  Hardwick, “On Sylvia Plath,” New York Review of Books, August 12, 1971.

  116.  See Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, with a biographical note by Lois Ames (1971). Ames was under contract for a full biography with Harper & Row, but the book was not completed (see Doug Holder, “Lois Ames: Confidante to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Interview (2005),” November 13, 2009, http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2009/11/lois-ames-confidante-to-sylvia-plath.html).

  117.  “Whether [Plath] was anything like the creature her hasty biographer, Lois Ames, seems to be patching together we will never know. Mrs. Ames follows the Indian trail of the natural wherever a hint of a footprint can be found. Thus, we learn that ‘she played tennis, was on the girl’s basketball team, was co-editor of the school newspaper…’ and so on” (“On Sylvia Plath,” New York Review of Books, August 12, 1971).

  118.  Henry James, The Aspern Papers (1888; revised 1908).

  119.  Ferris Greenslet and Bruce Rogers: “In 1806 Charles Lowell [Robert Lowell’s great-great grandfather] married Harriet Traill Spence, an indirect cousin and a childhood’s sweetheart. Both her father, Keith Spence, and her maternal grandfather, Robert Traill, were born in the Orkney Islands, and the imaginative Mrs. Lowell and her more imaginative son [James Russell Lowell] liked to trace their descent to persons no less portentous than Minna Troil and Sir Patrick Spens. At any rate, Mrs. Lowell possessed much of the wild beauty of the people of those windy northern isles, and her mind showed an irresistible tendency toward their poetic occultism. This tendency became irretrievably fixed by a visit which she made to the Orkneys in company with her husband early in their married life. Thenceforward until 1842, when her tense brain became disordered, she was a faerie-seer, credited by some with second sight […] there was a certain dreamful languor in the blood that blent queerly with the characteristic Lowell effectiveness. Throughout his [James Russell Lowell’s] early life, whenever he failed to do any of the things which, for his academic or domestic health, he should have done, the Lowell connection was prompt to attribute it to this deep quality, which they mis-called ‘the Spence negligence’” (James Russell Lowell: His Life and Work [1905]
, pp. 9–10).

  120.  Satirical, as against “to jew down.” OED: “Phr. to jew down, to beat down in price […] These uses are now considered to be offensive.” Among the examples given by the dictionary of the phrase in print from 1825–1972 is “1970 R. Lowell Notebk. 69 This embankment, jewed— No, yankeed—by the highways down to a grassy lip” (“Jew|jew, v.,”OED Online. March 2016. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/101211?rskey=Br5XvE&result=2&isAdvanced=false [accessed March 27, 2016]; from the Second Edition [1989]). See Lowell, Charles River [7] 4–5, Notebook70.

  121.  Reviews as of July 3, 1971: Benedict Nightingale, “By Jove,” New Statesman, July 2, 1971; Kenneth Hurren, “God the Father,” Spectator, July 3, 1971.

  122.  Lowell: “Smiling on all|Father was once successful enough to be lost|in the mob of ruling-class Bostonians” (“Commander Lowell” 62–64, Life Studies); “He smiled his oval Lowell smile”; “After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,|his last words to Mother were:|‘I feel awful’” (“Terminal Days in Beverly Farms,” 9 and 44–46, Life Studies). For “smiling,” see also Hardwick to Lowell, June 26, 1970, footnote 4 on page 69.

  123.  Lowell: “Luck threw up the coin, and the plot swallowed|monster yawning for its mess of pottage” (“For John Berryman” 4–5, Notebook69-1).

  124.  Dupee.

  125.  “The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” Vogue, June 1971. Photograph of Hardwick by Cecil Beaton.

  126.  Vogue biographical note: “With her daughter Harriet Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick lives in a rambling two-story studio-apartment […] filled with the paintings and books she and the poet Robert Lowell collected during the twenty-one years of their marriage” (“The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” Vogue, June 1971, p. 87). Wordsworth: “Behold her, single in the field,|Yon solitary Highland Lass!” (“The Solitary Reaper,” 1–2).

  127.  Workin’ Together (1971).

  128.  Sam Shepard, La Turista, introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick (1968).

  129.  Jarrell’s editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  130.  Anne and Carl Cori.

  131.  Hardwick, “On Sylvia Plath,” New York Review of Books, August 12, 1971.

  132.  Harriet Lowell’s Spanish teacher at Dalton, who was politically conservative.

  133.  Lowell: “The merciless Racinian tirade|Breaks like the Atlantic on my head” (“Holy Matrimony” 39–41 [draft of “Man and Wife”]; Houghton Library, bMS Am 1905, folder 2204, p. 1); cf. “Your old-fashioned tirade,|Loving, rapid, merciless,|Breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head” (“Man and Wife” 26–28, Life Studies).

  134.  Lowell: “Once a week, we have our old French readings with our friend, who teaches French at Exeter. But we’ve been rather frighteningly improved by Mary, who always does her homework … and knows the language” (To Adrienne Rich [August 1967], The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 489–90).

  135.  By Gustave Flaubert (1869).

  136.  First published in 1883, but the edition that Lowell was reading is not known. See Hardwick, “Amateurs: Jane Carlyle,” New York Review of Books, December 14, 1972.

  137.  “Rhythm in the Voice: Lowell’s ‘Prometheus Bound,’” Times Literary Supplement, 9 July 1971.

  138.  Letter addressed to “Miss Harriet Lowell, c/0 Senorita Eda Gomez, Portofirio Diaz no-I-E, Ixtalahuaca, Mexico.”

  139.  (1853).

  140.  Charlotte Brontë, Villette, with an introduction by Q. D. Leavis (1971), pp. vi–xii. Reprinted in Q. D. Leavis, Collected Essays, vol. 1, The Englishness of the English Novel, ed. G. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  141.  Arendt was on the faculty of the Committee for Social Thought at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967.

  142.  Ian Hamilton, “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” the Review 25 (Summer 1971).

  143.  Robert Lowell, “The Art of Poetry No. 3,” interview by Frederick Seidel, Paris Review, no. 25 (Winter–Spring 1961).

  144.  Card now missing.

  145.  Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848).

  146.  Ariel (1965).

  147.  “new poems”: Winter Trees (1971); “intermediate”: Crossing the Water (1971).

  148.  See Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michaelangelo” (1914) and Moses and Monotheism (1939). Cf. Lowell, “Freud” [London and Winter and London 3 4/ 5/], “The Dolphin” manuscript, and “Freud” [Winter and London 5], The Dolphin.

  149.  “How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero’s glance … But why do I call this statue inscrutable? There is not the slightest doubt that it represents Moses, the law-giver of the Jews, holding the Tables of the Ten Commandments” (Freud, “The Moses of Michaelangelo,” trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13 [1955], p. 213).

  150.  Lowell, Life Studies; Plath, Ariel.

  151.  Franz Schubert, “An die Musik” (D 547) and “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (D 118/Op. 2); very likely the 1952 Schwarzkopf recording (Columbia 33CX 1040). Hardwick: “When I visited him in the hospital […] we were always ordered rather grandly to bring the Vergil, the Dante, the Homer, the Elisabeth Schwarzkopf record” (“Cal working, etc.,” from a letter to Ian Hamilton, n.d., 1981 or 1982; see pages 473–75). See also Lowell, “Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in New York” (Midwinter 5), Notebook69-1, -2; (Midwinter 7), Notebook70; and History.

  152.  Harris (“Tommy”) Thomas.

  153.  “In Maine,” New York Review of Books, October 7, 1971.

  154.  From Sarah Orne Jewett, “The Town Poor,” Stranger and Wayfarers (1891), pp. 43–44.

  155.  OED: “To put up with, bear with, endure, tolerate [a fig. sense of ‘to stomach’ in 2]. Now only in negative or preclusive constructions” (“Brook, v.” 3, Oxford English Dictionary Vol. I).

  156.  Phyllis Munro Seidel (née Ferguson) was married to Frederick Seidel from 1960 to 1969.

  157.  Grace Dudley.

  158.  Meade.

  159.  Hubert Humphrey; cf. Seidel: “I miss the dry-ice fire of Bobby Kennedy.|I met McGovern in your living room.|Hubert Humphrey simply lacked the lust” (“The Former Governor of California” 15–17, My Tokyo [1992]).

  160.  Possibly Hardwick’s biography of Emily Brontë in Atlantic Brief Lives: A Biographical Companion to the Arts, ed. Louise Kronenberger and Emily Morison Beck (1971). Hardwick would write further about her in “Working Girls: The Brontës,” New York Review of Books, May 4, 1972.

  161.  Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949). Hardwick: “The Subjection of Women,” Partisan Review 20, no. 3 (May/June 1953), reprinted in A View of My Own (1962). Hardwick would write further about de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age in The New York Times Book Review (May 14, 1972); see also remarks about de Beauvoir in “The Art of Fiction No. 87,” interview by Darryl Pinckney, Paris Review, no. 96 (Summer 1985).

  162.  Possibly Anne (née Clifford), Vicountess Norwich. John Julius Norwich: “V. odd. In 1971 Lady Norwich would have been my first wife Anne. (My mother never used the title.) But neither of them ever cranked a car in her life. Nor does that strangely defensive remark ring true. I think he got the name wrong!” (email message to editor, October 14, 2014).

  163.  Page torn.

  164.  Page torn.

  165.  Thus, for “through.”

  166.  Dir. Robert Feust (1970).

  167.  Typed on the verso of the aerogram.

  168.  “The Dolphin” manuscript.

  169.  See Hardwick to Lowell, June 26, 1970, footnote 4 on page 69.

  170.  Lowell: “Today I leaned through lunch on my elbows,|watching my nose bleed red lacquer on the grass; I see, smell and taste blood in everything” (“Ninth Month” [Marriage 11] 4�
��6, The Dolphin).

  171.  Castine physician.

  172.  Hardwick: “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” (“Cal working, etc.,” n.d., 1981 or 1982; p. 475).

  173.  “Opus Dei” (an eight-poem sequence) was published in Delusions, Etc. (1972).

  174.  Beethoven, Missa solemnis in D major, Op. 123 (1819–1823).

  175.  Now missing.

  176.  Lowell: “in less than thirty seconds swimming the blood-flood:|Little Gingersnap Man, homoform” (“Robert Sheridan Lowell” 7–8, The Dolphin).