The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979

by Elizabeth Hardwick

    60.  Parnassus: Poetry in Review 1, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1973).

    61.  Thus, probably for The Colony Room.

    62.  Catharine Grad.

    63.  Ian Clark.

    64.  Dir. by Clifford Williams at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway (opened on March 28, 1973).

    65.  April 10, 1973.

    66.  Frank P. Grad, a law professor at Columbia University.

    67.  Judith Herzberg.

    68.  Hardwick: “In Holland the coziness of life is so complete it can not even be disturbed by the violent emotional ruptures that tear couples and friends forever apart in other places. Instead, there, first husbands and first wives are always at the same dinner parties and birthday celebrations with their second husbands and wives. Divorces and fractured loves mingled together as if the past were a sort of vinegar blending with the oil of the present. Where could one flee to? New alliances among this restless people were like the rearrangement of familiar furniture” (Sleepless Nights, p. 100).

    69.  Hardwick: “Dr. Z. met a mild New York winter day clothed in Siberian layers. He was wearing a heavy black overcoat, a woolen vest, a dark-gray sweater, and when he sat down in the waiting room off the lobby gray winter underwear appeared above his sock” (Sleepless Nights, p. 113).

    70.  Jane Dewey, daughter of John Dewey.

    71.  Cf. Bidart to Lowell, a year previous on March 15, 1972, in which Bidart described a telephone call with Hardwick on his return from England after helping Lowell with “The Dolphin” manuscript: “[I]t was one of the most unpleasant and painful conversations I’ve ever had. She seemed to feel I had betrayed her by going there, or staying so long, or helping you. My hand still shakes when I think about it. She had heard from Bob Silvers that Dolphin was going to be published in a year; perhaps she blames me for that. I said as far as I knew no decision about Dolphin had been made.… It’s terrible to be the object of her anger. Later Bill Alfred talked to her, and said she feels she had been wrong and went too far, and would write me an apology.… I haven’t gotten one. I really like Elizabeth, and find this unutterably depressing” (Robert Lowell Papers, HRC). Lowell replied, “Sorry about Lizzie, she’s been incredibly sweet to me lately, as we talk about Harriet’s coming” (Lowell to Bidart, March 25, 1972, Houghton Library).

    72.  “The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” Vogue, June 1, 1970.

    73.  Name of one of the Lowell trusts.

    74.  Trust manager.

    75.  By D. H. Lawrence (1913).

    76.  On April 19, 1973, Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst removed himself from the Watergate investigation owing to conflicts of interest. He resigned as attorney general on April 30, 1973.

    77.  By J. S. Bach (1727).

    78.  For asthma.

    79.  Lowell: “each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to pain” (“Soft Wood [for Harriet Winslow],” 42, Near the Ocean).

    80.  Keats: “Ah! Where|Are those swift moments? Whither are they fled?” (Endymion I, 970–71). Felicia Dorothea Hemans: “The boy stood on the burning deck|Whence all but he had fled” (“Casabianca,” 1–2); cf. with Elizabeth Bishop’s “Casabianca,” North & South (1946).

    81.  Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices (Senate Watergate Committee).

    82.  John Mitchell, who was attorney general from 1969 to 1972 and then chaired the Committee for the Re-election of the President, and his second wife, Martha Beall Mitchell.

    83.  Thea Crooks Bray, a friend of Dixey Brooks; see Roxy Freeman, Little Gypsy (2011), p. 15.

    84.  Harriet Winslow left her Castine properties to Hardwick (not to Lowell), but Hardwick felt it was “for reasons of practicality” and “was not meant as a rebuke to Cal.” See footnote 3 on pages 337–38 (Hardwick to Lowell, May 24, 1973, second letter) for a detailed explanation.

    85.  Leah and Clark Fitz-Gerald; Leah Fitz-Gerald was the stepdaughter of Bishop William Scarlett.

    86.  Wordsworth: “And this prayer I make,|Knowing that nature never did betray|The heart that loved her” (“Lines, written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798,” 122–24).

    87.  See Lowell to Hardwick, May 26, 1973 (below).

    88.  Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop: “My ms. sale to Harvard is coming to a conclusion, though there are still details. Your letters are the most valuable and large single group. I would like to have them pay you $5000. Of course they are yours, your writing, just as Miss Moore’s letters are hers, but convention gives letters to the recipient. […] I’ve seen a few of my own letters (to my mother, Roethke, incongruous couple) they aren’t too much, but have words and sentences written seriously and unlike what I print. Yours have the startling eye and kept-going brilliance of a work to print. I hope you do” (Words in Air, p. 740).

    89.  Value-added tax, introduced in the U.K. in 1973 after it joined the European Economic Community.

    90.  Signature not visible.

    91.  Letter crossed with Lowell’s letter of May 21, 1973 (which wasn’t posted until May 28).

    92.  “Digressions from Larkin’s 20th Century Verse,” Encounter 40 (May 1973).

    93.  Thomas Hardy: “Why did you give no hint that night|That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,|And calmly, as if indifferent quite,|You would close your term here, up and be gone|Where I could not follow|With wing of swallow|To gain one glimpse of you ever anon! […] O you could not know|That such swift fleeing|No soul foreseeing— Not even I—would undo me so!” (“The Going” 1–7 and 40–43; 40–43 are quoted in Hardwick’s “Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973, and in Sleepless Nights, p. 151.)

    94.  In a letter to Lowell dated January 25, 1956, Harriet Winslow wrote that she was going to leave the lifetime use of her Castine properties to the Lowells, together with a small income to cover taxes and upkeep. “I left the life income to Elizabeth instead of to you so that if she outlives you she can have it” (Houghton Library, Harvard). Lowell replied on January 31, 1956: “I feel an improper, but probably immemorially Bostonian squeamishness about acknowledging your kindness in your will. We are grateful for the life-hold on the brickyard house, and the generous yearly subsidy … and what touches me to the heart is that you have always seen Elizabeth as Elizabeth, and not just Elizabeth née Hardwick Lowell, a sort of Winslow in-law at one remove, though of course she is that too.” See The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 253 and 724. When Harriet Winslow died in 1964, both the houses and the income were left to Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick: “Maine property. Was left in its entirety to me by Miss Winslow. Cal had no claims at all on it, but I always felt it was left to me for reasons of practicality and was not meant as a rebuke to Cal. When we were together, he and I decided that I would sell part of it in order to improve the barn on the water where he worked. That was done. When we were divorced, I wanted to live in the barn as more suitable for me and Harriet. I had to sell the house on the Commons in order to make a house of the barn. Under Maine law, Cal, as my former husband, was required to sign. Only his signature was required, but he refused for a good while, seeming to think the signature indicated that the property had been left to both of us. I explained, the Maine lawyer explained, but he would not for a long time accommodate and I almost lost the sale of the other house. Behind this was, in my view, his sadness, not his greed, that Cousin Harriet, much loved by both of us, had done what she did” (Hardwick to Ian Hamilton [n.d.], Elizabeth Hardwick Papers, HRC).

    95.  For “acerb” see Hardwick to Ian Hamilton on an early draft of his biography: “Throughout I seem to be little more than a nurse, and an early ‘acerb’ critic”; and on her �
��Notebook”: “Cal, I think, hoped it would be deliciously acerb and ‘interesting’” (Hardwick to Ian Hamilton [n.d.], HRC).

    96.  Enclosure now missing, but possibly a passage from Hardwick’s “Writing a Novel”: “1972 Dearest M: I have sold the big house in Maine and will make a new place there, beginning with the old barn on the water. ‘Existing barn,’ the architect’s drawings say. But I fear the metamorphosis, the journey of species. The barn, or so I imagine of all barns, once existed for cows and hay. Then later it was—well, a place. (For what I do not like to say. Too much information spoils the effect on the page, like too many capitals within the line, or the odious exclamation point. Anyway, you have the information.) Will the barn consent to become what I have decided to make of it? I don’t know. Sometimes I am sure that I am building for a tire salesman from Bangor whose wife will not be kind to the sacred wounds of such a building—the claims, the cries of the original barn, the memories of the abandoned place. The claims and cries of Lightolier, Design Research, turkey carpets. As for the other, sluffed-off house, I mourn and regret much. The nights long ago with H. W. and her glorious 78 recording of Alice Raveau in Glück’s Orpheo. I hear the music, see H. W. very tall, old, with her stirring maidenly beauty. The smell of the leaves outside dripping rain, the fire alive, the bowls of nasturtiums everywhere, the orange Moroccan cloth hanging over the mantle. What a loss. Perhaps my memories, being kind, betray me and bleach the darkness of the scenes, the agitation of the evenings. I am as aware as anyone of the appeal, the drama of the negative. Well, we go from one graven image to the next and, say what you will, each house is a shrine” (“Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973; see pp. 461–71.). Revised and included in Sleepless Nights.

    97.  Letter crossed with Hardwick’s two letters of May 24, 1973.

    98.  Crossed with Lowell’s letters of May 21 and May 26, 1973.

    99.  William Arms Fisher (words), Antonín Dvořák (music), “Goin’ Home” (1922/1893); Franz Liszt, Liebesträume (1850).

  100.  Henry Vaughan: “They are all gone into the world of light!|And I alone sit lingering here” (Silex Scintillans II, 1–2).

  101.  Crossed with Hardwick’s letter of May 30, 1973.

  102.  Cf. Lowell, “The Literary Life, A Scrapbook” (Notebook69-1, -2, Notebook70) and “Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook,” History. Waugh’s diaries were published for eight weeks in the Observer Colour Magazine from March 25–May 13, 1973.

  103.  Frank Parker’s frontispieces for the American editions of the three books. Their official publication date became June 21, 1973.

  104.  In the U.S., the list price of both The Dolphin and For Lizzie and Harriet was $6.95 (approximately $39.66 in 2019 dollars [CPI]) and History was $7.95 (approximately $45.36 in 2019 [CPI]). In the U.K., the list price of The Dolphin was £1.75 (approximately £22 in 2018, according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator [BoE]), For Lizzie and Harriet £1.40 (approximately £17.50 in 2018 [BoE]), and History £2.95 (approximately £37 in 2018 [BoE]).

  105.  A reference to the Lord Lambton and Lord Jellicoe sex scandals of May 1973; see Our Political Staff, “Resignation of Lord Lambton as Minister,” Times, May 23, 1973; “‘I have no excuses … I behaved with credulous stupidity,’” Times, May 23, 1973; David Wood, “Mr Heath orders Security Commission inquiry after Lord Jellicoe resigns in call girl scandal,” Times, May 25, 1973; and Wilfrid Kerr, “My wife and family are standing by me, Lord Lambton declares,” Times, May 25, 1973.

  106.  Dixey Brooks married Dik Freeman, a gypsy (his brother was Bob Freeman); see their daughter Roxy Freeman’s memoir, Little Gypsy (London: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

  107.  Malcolm Bray.

  108.  W. B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli” 35–36 (1936).

  109.  Cf. Moorfield Storey: “Some of us remembered the crowded sullen streets of Boston, through which by military force Anthony Burns was carried back to slavery. We had heard the news of battle and outrage on the plains of Kansas, and we had burned with fierce indignation, when Sumner was beaten in the Senate for daring to denounce the crimes committed against that unhappy territory […] We had walked with tingling veins beside the Sixth Massachusetts as it marched through Boston on its way to the front, and had felt the sharp shock when the telegraph told us that the first blood of the war had been shed by those very men” (“Harvard in the Sixties” [1896]; reprinted in Harvard Graduates Magazine 5 [1897], p. 334).

  110.  Cf. Herman Melville: “Heavy the clouds, and thick and dun,|They slant from the sullen North” (“Admiral of the White” 15–16 [1885]).

  111.  Thus, for “your reply to my letter.”

  112.  “Seduction and Betrayal: I,” New York Review of Books, May 31, 1973; “Seduction and Betrayal II,” New York Review of Books, June 14, 1973.

  113.  Sir Thomas Wyatt: “They fle from me that sometyme did me seke” (1540).

  114.  William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (1969).

  115.  The first 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.

  116.  “S” written in Lowell’s hand.

  117.  From Lowell’s library in the West 67th Street apartment.

  118.  Hoek van Holland.

  119.  Ralph de Toledano, “A Text for Reaction, not a License for Revolution,” Times [London], 4 July 1973.

  120.  July 6.

  121.  Crossed with Lowell’s letter of July 4, 1973.

  122.  See Marjorie Perloff, “The Blank Now,” New Republic, July 7 and 14, 1973.

  123.  “In the Mail,” The Dolphin; see footnote 2 on page 293.

  124.  July 10.

  125.  Written on telegram in Hardwick’s hand: “Cal’s answer to Mrs. Perloff’s review in The New Republic.”

  126.  Walter Clemons, “Carving the Marble,” Newsweek, July 16, 1973; photograph by Thomas Victor.

  127.  Marjorie Perloff: “it is Lizzie who becomes the dominant figure in the sonnets, and she is depicted, perhaps unwittingly on Lowell’s part, as Dark Lady or Super-Bitch par excellence. In her letters and phone calls, she is forever patting herself on the back for running to Dalton to pick up Harriet’s grades or driving her to camp, and she dwells irritatingly on Harriet’s goodness […] Poor Harriet emerges from these passages as one of the most unpleasant child figures in poetry; only Hopkins’ Margaret, grieving over Goldengroves unleaving, can rival her cloying moral virtue. It is therefore difficult to participate in the poet’s vacillation, for Lizzie and Harriet seem to get no more than they deserve. And since these are, after all, real people, recently having lived through the crisis described, one begins to question Lowell’s taste” (“The Blank Now,” New Republic, July 7 and 14, 1973).

  128.  Lowell: “always inside me is the child who died” (“Night Sweat” 11, For the Union Dead).

  129.  Alice Methfessel’s apartment at 16 Chauncy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  130.  Robert Giroux to Lowell: “Enclosed is another batch of reviews […] I felt I should send you a copy of Elizabeth’s letter, in order to keep you advised of the position she has taken, and also because you may be hearing from Monteith. She has not taken a ‘legal position’ precisely, but she may be building up to it. We don’t propose to do anything precipitous; I will simply acknowledge my surprise at her letter […] p.s. I haven’t seen The Listener interview. Can you send me this?” (July 11, 1973, Robert Lowell Papers, HRC).

  131.  Ricks: “the recreation of Lizzie’s letters—which could be the most monstrous and is likely to be the most disliked part of Lowell’s undertaking—is unsentimental and movingly just. These letters, lucid and poignant, show her as not reducible to the wronged woman or a martyr, and show that though Lowell speaks of himself as ‘fi
red by my second alcohol, remorse,’ he is enabled, by speaking so of remorse, to break its addictive elation and to achieve instead some lovingkindness” (“The poet Robert Lowell—seen by Christopher Ricks,” Listener, 21 June 1973.)

  132.  Martha Duffy, “Survivor’s Manual,” Time, July 16, 1973; Walter Clemons, “Carving the Marble,” Newsweek, July 16, 1973; Anatole Broyard, “Naked in his Raincoat,” New York Times, June 18, 1973.

  133.  July 12.

  134.  July 18.

  135.  (1886).

  136.  Giroux to Lowell: “Elizabeth is still very much upset, and I don’t really know what to do or what in fact can be done. One point of fact you can help me with, if you will. Isn’t it true that letters have been used in your poems in previous books? In Life Studies is ‘To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage’—even though it is obviously a dramatic character speaking—making use of someone’s written phrases? Certainly in the two previous editions of Notebook poems like ‘Heidegger’ and ‘1968’ are based on letters, and ‘Letters from Allen Tate’ couldn’t be more explicit. It may be beside the point giving a rational explanation of your previous use of this device, but I can’t understand why it came to her as such a surprise” (July 23, 1973).