The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  177.  Antihypertensive drug.

  178.  The manuscript of Bidart’s Golden State (1973).

  179.  Bishop had an asthma attack in late October 1971, and “on November 9 she collapsed and was taken by the university police to the Harvard infirmary. Transferred immediately to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, she remained in an oxygen-deficit fog for eight days.” She was then “back at Stillman Infirmary at Harvard, where she remained for three more weeks, until December 6” (Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It [1993], pp. 454–55).

  180.  McCarthy covered Captain Ernest Medina’s trial for his role in the 1968 My Lai Massacre. See her study, Medina (1972).

  181.  Mary Thomas.

  182.  Dante: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita|mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,|ché la diritta via era smarrita” (“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost” [Temple translation, 1900]; Inferno, I:1–3).

  183.  Unsigned.

  184.  Caravaggio and His Followers, The Cleveland Museum of Art, October 22, 1971–January 2, 1972.

  185.  Hotel in Manhattan.

  186.  See Hardwick’s thank-you letter of January 23, 1972.

  187.  Lowell: “Robespierre and Mozart as Stage” (The Powerful 14) Notebook70; and “Robespierre and Mozart as Stage,” History.

  188.  See Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (1837); Jules Michelet, Histoire de la révolution française (1847–53); Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod (1835).

  189.  Harriet Lowell’s fifteenth birthday was on January 4, 1972.

  190.  Macbeth, dir. Roman Polanski (1971).

  191.  Thus, for “along.”

  192.  Seidel: “He took an office just like Norman Mailer.|He married a writer just like Lizzie Lowell.|He shaved his beard off just like. Yes. Exactly” (manuscript draft of “What One Must Contend With,” 24–26, dedicated to Elizabeth Hardwick; Elizabeth Hardwick Papers, HRC). In the version published in Sunrise (1979), the dedication was removed and the lines read: “He took an office just like Norman Mailer.|He married a writer just like—yes exactly.|He shaved his beard off just like—et cetera.”

  193.  An allusion to Randall Jarrell. Peter Taylor: “I remember once at Kenyon there was a student who had done a painting, a landscape, and had it proudly displayed in his room. When Randall came in and saw it there, he exclaimed, ‘Gosh, that’s good!’ He pointed out all the fine qualities. The painter sat soaking up the praise. They talked of other things for a while, and when Randall got up to leave he said, putting his fist on his hip and frowning, ‘You know, I’ve changed my mind about that picture. There’s something wrong, awfully wrong, about the light in it. You ought to work on it some more, or maybe you really ought to just throw this one away and do another’” (“Randall Jarrell,” in Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965, ed. Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren [1967], pp. 246–47).

  194.  Hardwick: “Women, wronged in one way or another, are given the overwhelming beauty of endurance, the capacity for high or lowly suffering, for violent feeling absorbed, finally tranquilized, for the radiance of humility, for silence, secrecy, impressive acceptance. Heroines are, then, heroic; but the heroism may turn into an accusation and is in some way feared as the strength of the weak. The Wife of Bath, coarse, brilliant, greedy, and lecherous as any man, tells a tale of infinite psychological resonance” (“Seduction and Betrayal: I,” New York Review of Books, May 31, 1973). The essay “was read at Vassar College in 1972” (Seduction and Betrayal, p. vii). See also Lowell’s “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” (Life Studies).

  195.  Macdonald.

  196.  To Joanna Rostropowicz.

  197.  Berryman committed suicide on January 7, 1972.

  198.  Ian Hamilton: “In January 1972 Lowell’s stepdaughter Ivana (now aged six) overturned a kettle of boiling water and was badly burned; she spent three months in the hospital” (Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 428). See Lowell’s “Dolphins” and “Ivana” [Another Summer 2 and 3], The Dolphin, and Caroline Blackwood’s “Burns Unit” (For All That I Found There [1973]). For her own account of the accident, see also Ivana Lowell, Why Not Say What Happened? (2010), pp. 34–40.

  199.  Thus, for Heathrow.

  200.  The babynurse hired by the Lowells after the birth of Harriet in 1957. See “Home After Three Months Away” (Life Studies) and The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 270, 278, 281.

  201.  Wordsworth: “a voice|That seemed the very sound of happy thoughts” (“The Wanderer” 734–45, The Excursion).

  202.  Marianne Moore died on February 5, 1972.

  203.  R. P. Blackmur, “The Method of Marianne Moore,” in The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation (1935).

  204.  In Britain, coal miners downed tools on January 9, 1972. On February 16, the BBC reported that the Central Generating Electricity Board had announced “many homes and businesses will be without electricity for up to nine hours from today.”

  205.  The miners ended their strike on February 19, 1972.

  206.  Lowell: “She’s/ a friend to Mom now, not an enemy,|except for my yelling, Dammit, brush your teeth!” (“Fox Fur,” 11–12, “The Dolphin” manuscript, p. 47; see poem on page 249).

  207.  Harriet Lowell: “One time [my mom] was drilling me—I had a spelling bee and I guess I misspelled ‘strange’ and [my father] would say, ‘Well, Ben Jonson spells it that way, so she can,’ and she was furious because, [as she said,] ‘We don’t need this now, we want her to pass the test!’” (Harriet Lowell Interview, “On Robert Lowell,” Harvard Oral History Initiative, August 2016).

  208.  “Working Girls: The Brontës,” New York Review of Books, May 4, 1972.

  209.  For “The American Woman: A Time Special Issue,” Time Magazine 99, no. 12, March 20, 1972, which is unsigned, as was Time Magazine’s practice. See especially “The New Woman, 1972.”

  210.  Zhou Enlai; Nixon visited China from February 21–28, 1972.

  211.  Among the chronicles of New York literary social life in 1972 is Robert Craft’s: “On February 21, I shared a table with Lincoln and Fidelma Kirstein […] for the Random House-New York Review Auden testimonial dinner, a combination birthday party and Last Supper […] I saw Elizabeth Hardwick home afterward” (An Improbable Life [2002], pp. 306–307).

  212.  Twemlow in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865).

  213.  Lowell: “a mother, unlike most fathers, must be manly” (“Dolphins” [Another Summer 2] 12, The Dolphin).

  214.  Harriet Lowell: “I remember my mother saying […] [that] he asked for an art book called Horrors of the Vatican [for Christmas] and my mother went all over looking for it but it was just a joke” (interview with the editor, July 5, 2016).

  215.  “Old Snapshot from Venice 1952” (Hospital II 3), The Dolphin.

  216.  Pilgrims; both “Pilgrims” and “Romero” were draft titles for “Marriage?” (Caroline 4), The Dolphin.

  217.  Guglielmo Ferrero, Aventure. Bonaparte en Italie. 1796–1797 (1936).

  218.  Dickens: “And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!” (final sentence in A Christmas Carol [1843]).

  219.  That is, Hardwick herself.

  220.  Handwritten.

  221.  “For John Berryman,” New York Review of Books, April 6, 1972.

  222.  John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971); Stuart Hampshire, “A Special Supplement: A New Philosophy of the Just Society,” New York Review of Books, February 24, 1972. See also Marshall Cohen, “A Theory of Justice by John Rawls: The Social Contract Explained and Defended,” New York Times Book Review, July 16, 1972.

  223.  Dir. Marcel Ophüls (1969).

  224.  Giuseppe Verdi, Otello (1887), dir. Franco Zeffirelli, Metropolitan Opera, March 25, 1972.

  225.  Lowell (speak
ing in Hardwick’s voice): “‘My sister, Margaret, a one-bounce basketball|player and all-Southern Center, came home|crying each night because of “Happy” Chandler,|the coach, and later Governor of Kentucky.|Our great big tall hillbilly idiots keep|Kentucky pre-eminent in basketball’” (“The Graduate” [Summer 12] 5–11, Notebook69-1, -2; [Summer 20], Notebook70; and [Late Summer 7], For Lizzie and Harriet).

  226.  “Frank has given me The Dolphin to read. It is beautifully made, every line won hard, and it is sad and comforting at one and the same time. But 1 and 2 on page 47 will tear Elizabeth apart, important though I agree they are to the wholeness of the book. I have to say that” (William Alfred to Lowell, March 12, 1972, Texas). In “The Dolphin” manuscript, the poems on page 47 are “Fox Fur” and “The Messiah” (Flight to New York 1 and 2). (See poems on page 249.)

  227.  Lowell mistook the page number (see footnote immediately above), but he may have been thinking of the poems on page 46 of “The Dolphin” manuscript, “Before the Dawn of Woman” and “Dawn” (Before Woman 1 and 2). Cf. The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973.

  228.  William Alfred: “I met Auden for the first time at Kronenbergers. He looked a dirty snowman with a boys’ wig on. He spoke of not speaking to you because of the book [The Dolphin]. When I said he sounded like God the Father, he gave me a tight smile. I write to warn you” (Alfred to Lowell, March 12, 1972, Texas; quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography p. 425). Robert Craft: “On January 11 [1972], Wystan Auden, rumpled face now resembling that of a shar-pei, and Chester Kallman came for dinner. Conversation was like old times […] W.H.A. was indignant about ‘Cal’ Lowell’s treatment of Elizabeth and Harriet in his last poems” (Craft, An Improbable Life, p. 306).

  229.  Compare “The Messiah” 1-4 with “In the Mail” 8-10, The Dolphin; see footnote 2 on page 293.

  230.  “The Poet Robert Lowell—Seen by Christopher Ricks,” Listener (21 June 1973).

  231.  Thomas Hardy to James Douglas, November 10, 1912, published in the Daily News (November 15, 1912); quoted in Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928 (1962), pp. 358–59.

  232.  “From My Wife” [The Farther Shore 1], “The Dolphin” manuscript; see poem on page 260. Cf. “Voices” [Hospital II], The Dolphin.

  233.  “Fox Fur” and “The Messiah” [Flight to New York 1 and 2], “The Dolphin” manuscript, the same poems that William Alfred objected to in his letter of March 12, 1972, to Lowell; see poems on page 249.

  234.  Hopkins: “This is the chastity of mind which seems to lie at the very heart and be the parent of all other good, the seeing at once what is best, the holding to that, and the not allowing anything else whatever to be even heard playing the contrary. Christ’s life and character are such an appeal to all the world’s imagination, but there is one insight St. Paul gives us of it which is very secret and seems to me more touching and constraining than everything else […] It is this holding of himself back, and not snatching at the truest and highest good, the good that was his right, nay his possession from a past eternity in his other nature, his own being and self, which seems to me the root of all his holiness and the imitation of this the root of all moral good in other men. I agree then, and vehemently, that a gentleman, if there is such a thing on earth, is in the position to despise the poet, were he Dante or Shakespeare, and the painter, were he Angelo or Apelles, for anything in him that shewed him not to be a gentleman […] The quality of a gentleman is so very fine a thing that it seems to me one should not be at all hasty in concluding that one possesses it. […] By and by if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind. As a fact poets and men of art are, I am sorry to say, by no means necessarily or commonly gentlemen” (Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, February 3, 1883, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (1935), pp. 175–76). Quoted in Bishop’s posthumously published “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore,” Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (1984).

  235.  Henry James: “Receive from me (apropos of extraordinary women) a word of warning about Vernon Lee. I hope you won’t throw yourselves into her arms—and I am sorry you offered to go and see her (after she wrote to you) first. My reasons are several, and too complicated, some of them, to go into; but one of them is that she has lately, as I am told (in a volume of tales called Vanitas, which I haven’t read), directed a kind of satire of a flagrant and markedly ‘saucy’ kind at me (!!)—exactly the sort of thing she has repeatedly done to others (her books—fiction—are a tissue of personalities of the hideous roman-à-clef kind), and particularly impudent and blackguardedly sort of thing to do to a friend and one who has treated her with such particular consideration as I have” (Henry James to William James, January 20 [1893]; Henry James, Letters, vol. 3, 1883–1895, ed. Leon Edel [1980], p. 402). See Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (1962), pp. 332–35, which quotes from the letter and is likely the source of Bishop’s knowledge of the incident.

  236.  Thus, for Bloomfield.

  237.  Lowell: “Nothing but dung of the marsh, the moan of cows,|the machismo of the peacock” (“Oxford” [Redcliffe Square 3] 3–4, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “nothing but the soft of the marsh, the moan of cows,|the rooster-peacock” (“Oxford” [Redcliffe Square 4] 3–4, The Dolphin).

  238.  Lowell: “The saint and animal|swim Carpaccio’s tealeaf color” (“Old Snapshot and Carpaccio” [The Farther Shore 2] 9–10, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “The courtesans and lions|swim in Carpaccio’s brewing tealeaf color” (“Old Snapshot from Venice 1952” [Hospital II 3] 9–10, The Dolphin).

  239.  Lowell: “But surely it cuts the toll more than men count—” (“Flashback to Washington Square 1966” [Caroline 1] 12, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “though we earn less credit than we burn” (“Flashback to Washington Square 1966” [Caroline 1] 12, The Dolphin).

  240.  Lowell: “I have no friend to write to … I love you” (“July-August” [Caroline 3] 13, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “I have no one to stamp my letters … I love you” (“July-August” [Caroline 3] 13, The Dolphin). Cf. Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, July 1, 1970: “He made a plaintive remark: ‘I’d write you and Harriet but I can’t find any stamps since I left Oxford.’”

  241.  Lowell: “Up the carpeted stairway, your shoes thump,” (“Morning Blue” [Caroline 4] 9, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “Up the carpeted stairway, your shoes clack” (“Morning Blue” [Caroline 5] 9, The Dolphin).

  242.  Lowell: “a vibrance in the news and fat of my legs” (“Summer Between Terms” 7, “The Dolphin” manuscript). The line was deleted; cf. Summer Between Terms 2, The Dolphin. OED: No entry for vibrance in the 1933 edition but an entry from the 1993 supplement “vibrance n. = vibrancy n.” gives two examples in print before 1972, including “1934 in Webster Dict.” (“vibrance, n.” OED Online. March 2016. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/243291?redirectedFrom=vibrance (accessed March 28, 2016).

  243.  Lowell: “Here/ a huddle of shivering cows and feverish leaves|burying old lumber without truce./” (Fall Weekend at Milgate [1] 11–12, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “I watch a feverish huddle of shivering cows;|you sit making a fishspine from a chestnut leaf” (Fall Weekend at Milgate [1] 11–12, The Dolphin).

  244.  Lowell: “love vanquished by his mysterious carelessness.” (“‘I Was Playing Records,’” 14, “The Dolphin” manuscript; cf. “Records,” 14, The Dolphin.)

  245.  Lowell: “I’ve wondered who would see and date you next,|and grapple in the aspic of your flesh” (Mermaid [5] 1–2, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “One wondered who would see and date you next,|and grapple for the danger of your hand” (Mermaid [5] 1–2, The Dolphin).

  246.  Cf. Lowell:
“Rough Slitherer in the your grotto of haphazard” (Mermaid [5] 10, “The Dolphin” manuscript). “Rough Slitherer” may have suggested the “asp” in “aspic” to Bidart’s ear.

  247.  Lowell: “What were was the lessons of the wolverine,|the Canada of Earnest Seton Thompson” (“Wolverine” [More London Winter 1] 1–2, “The Dolphin” manuscript). The poem was removed from The Dolphin and added to History as “Wolverine, 1927.” See also Ernest Thompson Seton, Rolf in the Woods (1911).

  248.  Lowell: “‘We can’t swing New York on less than thirty thousand,’” (“Transatlantic Call” 1, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “We can’t swing New York on Harry Truman incomes—” (“During a Transatlantic Call” 1, The Dolphin). Hardwick to Lowell, June 23, 1970: “next year if you are leaving us or if I am leaving you I will have to have $20,000. I can’t get by on less that first year and cannot even pay the taxes on that.” ($20,000 in June 1970 is approximately $130,296 in 2019 dollars [CPI].)