25. “In the Ward (for Israel Citkowitz)”; see also “Burial (for—)”; both in Day by Day (1977).
26. 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.
27. Frances FitzGerald; Nixon resigned the presidency at noon on Friday, August 9, 1974.
28. Nixon: “You are here to say good-by to us. And we don’t have a good word for it in English. The best is au revoir. We’ll see you again. […] I remember my old man. […] He was a streetcar motorman first and then he was a farmer and then he had a lemon ranch—it was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I assure you—he sold it before they found oil on it. […] Nobody will ever write a book probably about my mother. Well, I guess all of you would say this about your mother. My mother was a saint” (“Transcription of Nixon’s Farewell Speech to Cabinet and Staff Members in the Capital,” New York Times, August 10, 1974).
29. For Day by Day (1977).
30. John Crowe Ransom died on July 3, 1974. Lowell: “John Crowe Ransom, 1888–1974,” New Review 1, no. 5 (August 1974).
31. “John Crowe Ransom: Four Tributes” by Lowell, Denis Donoghue, Richard Ellmann, and Roy Fuller, New Review 1:5 (August 1974).
32. Irvin Ehrenpreis, “The Arts in America”; Jonathan Raban, “One American City”; New Review 1, no. 4 (July 1974).
33. By Miguel de Cervantes (1605).
34. William Alfred’s father.
35. Donald Bourasa, William Alfred’s foster son.
36. 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.
37. See Lowell to Harriet Lowell, October 9, 1974, below. Ian Hamilton: “In October 1974 Lowell was at a party given by the London publisher George Weidenfeld. He was not drinking; indeed, to aid in this latest of several efforts to renounce alcohol, he was taking the drug Antabuse. On October 9 he writes again to [Peter] Taylor: ‘The other night at a large party I suddenly felt an acute nausea as if I had been drinking heavily, then a rather comforting feeling of changing inside to ice, then I was being rolled about by six merry people on a low table, like a gentle practical joke. I had fainted. It may have been from accidentally drinking something like vodka and orange juice, or it may not. The doctors can’t tell. […] ’” (Robert Lowell: A Biography, pp. 441–42).
38. Envelope stamped “DIVERTED TO SURFACE NO POSTAGE.”
39. On September 12, 1974, the start of court-ordered busing to achieve racial integration in Boston’s public schools was marred by violence in South Boston, where students were attacked and school buses were stoned. Riots continued into October; on October 8 the mayor of Boston requested the help of Federal Marshals to control the violence and protect the schoolchildren. The events were widely covered in the press in both the United States and the United Kingdom, but for an example of the kind of story appearing in the British papers that Lowell read, see Joyce Eggiton, “The battle of Boston,” Observer, October 13, 1974.
40. State Street Trust Company.
41. Unsigned.
42. Crossed with Lowell’s letter of October 13, 1974.
43. 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.
44. Harriet Lowell: “My mother had a very unusual [Christmas] tree. She had these flowers made out of crepe, in fuchsia and other bright colors, and birds, some of which flapped. She might have picked some of these decorations up in Brazil [in 1962]” (interview with the editor, July 5, 2016).
45. Claire Tomalin, “Anger and Accommodation,” Listener, November 28, 1974; Rosemary Dinnage, “Men, Women, and Books: The Rule of Heroism,” Times Literary Supplement, November 29, 1974; A. Alvarez, “Heroines and Victims,” Observer, December 1, 1974; Margaret Drabble, “Women’s Literature,” Guardian, December 5, 1974; Philippa Toomey, “When Heroines Were Heroines and Not Just Decorations,” Times (London), December 9, 1974; A. Alvarez and Mary McCarthy, “Books of the Year,” Observer, December 15, 1974.
46. Patricia Beer, Reader, I Married Him: A Study of the Women Characters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot (1974). See also her memoir Mrs. Beer’s House (1968).
47. Christopher Ricks, “The Ruling Passion,” Sunday Times (London), 15 December 1974; John Carey, “The Subjugation of Women,” New Statesman, 29 November 1974.
48. 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.
49. Hardwick: “A few years ago I spent the New Year season in Maine, on the sea. A heavy, thick snow fell during the night. The scene along the country roads was transformed, as by an unearthly, visionary stroke. […] The land lay in a blind, lunar dream and all the forms of nature appeared fixed in a frozen, metallic perfection. The beauty, absolute as a frieze, made one gasp at the satanic glimpse of an unknown world. The dead, thrilling, moon-like architecture of the scene was like the region itself—unpredictable, gorgeous, never quite to be brought into scale, never entirely yours or anyone’s” (“Accepting the Dare: Maine,” Vogue, September 1976).
50. Thus, although the letter is dated January 2, 1975.
51. Helen Keeler (“Dilly”) Burke, John Thompson’s first wife.
52. 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.
53. Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography (1929).
54. Castine grocer.
55. 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.
56. Kay Redfield Jamison: “In May 1975, during a trip to New York, Lowell suffered severe lithium toxicity and had to be hospitalized. During lunch with his editor, Robert Giroux, Lowell’s head fell forward onto the table and he appeared heavily sedated. Robert Silvers, a friend and the editor of the New York Review of Books, described what happened some time later that evening: ‘We’d all been to the opera, and at the restaurant afterwards Cal seemed in terrible shape—exhausted, excited, incoherent. He slumped at the table drinking glass after glass of orange juice.’ […] Lowell was treated for lithium intoxication and possible delirium at Mount Sinai Hospital; the experience left him and his friends shaken” (Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire; A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character, p. 188).
57. Hardwick, “Reflections on Simone Weil,” Signs: Journal of Woman and Culture in Society 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1975); edited by Catharine R. Stimpson.
58. Pinckney.
59. 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.
60. Enclosure now missing, but possibly relating to Lowell’s contribution to “A Special Supplement: The Meaning of Vietnam,” New York Review of Books, June 12, 1975.
61. “Notes on Baudelaire” and “A Study of Corbière,” Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue, ed. and trans. William Jay Smith (1956).
62. Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Hardwick: “Rilke imagined that a tin lid had no other desire than to rest evenly and firmly upon its proper can” (Sleepless Nights, p. 121); Hardwick could have been reading a translation either by M. D. Herter Norton (W. W. Norton, 1949) or by John Linton (Hogarth Press, 1950).
63. One of the twelve letters, postcards, and telegrams wri
tten by Hardwick that were included in the Lowell Estate’s sale of papers to the HRC in 1982.
64. Heinrich Heine, Selected Verse, with an introduction and prose translation by Peter Branscombe (1967).
65. Clark Fitz-Gerald’s marriage to his second wife, Elizabeth.
66. Daughter of Philip and Margaret Booth.
67. The page ends here; second page of letter now missing.
68. Dennis O’Driscoll: “1975 […] [Heaney] organizes and introduces poetry reading series at Kilkenny Arts week, hosting Robert Lowell, Norman MacCaig, Richard Murphy, Derek Mahon” (Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney [2008], p. xxvi; see also pp. 215–20). Lowell to Heaney: “Put us down for the Kilkenny last week in August festival” (April 29, 1975; see The Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 639).
69. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952).
70. (1965).
71. By William Makepeace Thackeray (1847–48).
72. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (1955).
73. Dir. John Davies (1972–73).
74. Albert Maysles and David Young were the cameramen for Carolyn McCullough’s film Robert Lowell (1970).
75. Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold.
76. “The Concept of Death” taught by Mary Mothersill (Barnard Bulletin, February 28, 1974, p. 6).
77. Gillian Walker, a close friend of Alfred’s, had also once been engaged to him (Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with the editor, 2002).
78. Harmonium (1923); “Sailing after Lunch,” Ideas of Order (1935), Esthétique du Mal (1945); “The Rock,” Collected Poems (1954).
79. Unsigned.
80. Hermann Cohen, whom Boris Pasternak studied with in Marburg and wrote about in the first half of Safe Conduct: An Autobiography and Other Writings, trans. Beatrice Scott (1958).
81. Safe Conduct (1958), p. 127; quoted in Hardwick to Lowell, June 20, 1976, below.
82. Thus, for “youngest.”
83. “Montale, a Poet, Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature,” New York Times, October 24, 1975.
84. Montale: “Non so come stremata tu resisti|in quel lago|d’indifferenza ch’è il tuo cuore” (Eugenio Montale, “Dora Markus,” 22–24); Lowell: “I don’t know how, so pressed, you’ve stood up|to that puddle of diffidence, your heart” (“Dora Marcus,” I: 22–23, Imitations).
85. Nickname of Drusilla Tanzi, Montale’s lover (later, his wife) when Hardwick and Lowell met them ca. 1950–1951 in Florence. “In Questa Tomba Oscura” by Ludwig van Beethoven, WoO 133 (1807). Hardwick: for Dr. Z, “there was still happiness to be found in reassuring the weeping nurse at the end of the day, in bringing home a pâté and cheese to his wife, in going down a dark canal on the arm of Simone and singing ‘In questa tomba oscura’” (Sleepless Nights, p. 111).
86. Thus, for “letting.”
87. Lowell was receiving acupuncture as an alternative treatment for his mania. Hardwick to Mary McCarthy: “I have had several talks with Cal by phone. No doubt you know that he has given up lithium, of his own will, and is ‘into’ acupuncture. I have doubts, in my provinciality, about anything Asian, but I can’t help but hope that some relief from the long, long lithium years might give Cal a period of at least physical lightness. It has always seemed improper to me that he should appear so old, walk so slowly, when lithium is not supposed to be a downer in that sense. Also he seemed to take pleasure in doing all these things on his own time so to speak and it might just be that he will have some sort of change. And, poor thing, he can always go back to the old routine and so I feel nothing but a groundless hope for him at the moment. In any case all of his case and the treatment is groundless. The new world, a sort of Lourdes, might just help” (Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, December 30, 1975). Seamus Heaney: “I went with him in January 1976 to two acupuncturists in Harley Street. He was at that time confined to a small private hospital […] he carried me away in a taxi […] [to visit] slightly quackish acupuncturists […] He took off his shirt. He bowed a little and accepted the needles, one by one, in a delicate gleaming line, from the point of his shoulder to the back of his ear” (“Gulliver in Lilliput” [1987], quoted in Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell, p. 436). Elizabeth Bishop: “I tried and tried to find a good Saint Sebastian to send you by Mary Morse (the friend). He’s the Saint I want to get because once we went swimming in that Maine ice-water near Stonington […] you inadvertently posed against a tree trunk, and looked just like Saint S for a moment!” (Bishop to Lowell, June 25, 1961—Sunday Morning, Words in Air, p. 365).
88. Thus, for Parmigianino, who has a drawing depicting St. Sebastian; but given “needle-arrows,” perhaps Hardwick was thinking of one of Andrea Mantegna’s three versions, particularly the 1490 Venice St. Sebastian.
89. Eleanor DuVivier.
90. Henry James: The Spoils of Poynton (1897), serialized as The Old Thing in the Atlantic Monthly (1896); cf. also: “Poor Miss Tina’s sense of her failure had produced a rare alteration in her, but I had been too full of stratagems and spoils to think of that” (The Aspern Papers [1908]; alluding to The Merchant of Venice: “The man that hath no music in himself,|Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,|Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils” [5.1.83-8]).
91. D. H. Lawrence: “Things” (1928 publication in Bookman; collected in The Lovely Lady [1933]).
92. McCarthy was a judge for the 1976 National Book Awards.
93. Awarded to Richard Howard in 1976 for his translation of E. M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay (1975).
94. In the summer of 1974, Jane Kramer and her husband Vincent Crapanzano rented a “derelict (literally falling down over our heads) abandoned old house, near the water, which for some reason couldn’t be sold or restored and was referred to humorously in Castine as ‘the Manor.’ […] We celebrated the Nixon resignation together at the Manor, in front of a rented tv set on a crate in what had once been the living room” (email message to editor, February 1, 2016).
95. Dr. Stanley R. Platman; see Hardwick to Lowell, June 5, 1970.
96. Enclosures now missing.
97. Hardwick: “This week has been a great sorrow. Susan Sontag went on Monday to the hospital for a lump that was, according to the best x-ray reader in New York, almost certain to be nothing. But it is not nothing. She is facing the terrible operation […] She has in the last year become very close to Bob, Barbara and me and I must say that I love her very much. Her ideas are a good deal less chic and narrow than they used to be and the beautiful energy is very special. There is a sort of orphan quality about her and when this doom came crashing down on her it seemed that she really had only us and maybe Roger [Straus] to depend upon. In the long run, though, I think I would rather have my literary friends than anything, any family; they are what count, and I feel they know about love” (Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, October 21, 1975).
98. Lowell’s fifty-ninth birthday.
99. March 5th.
100. Martin Gottfried, “A Classic in ‘The Old Glory,’” New York Post (April 19, 1976).
101. Clive Barnes: “Robert Lowell’s trilogy ‘The Old Glory’ has become part of the younger glories of the American intellectual establishment. Seeing it reproduced by the American Place Theater [thus] as part of its Bicentennial celebrations, one idly wonders why. Mr. Lowell is a major American poet, but his sense of the theater is meager, and in these plays even his prosody is fundamentally prosaic. Looking at them one feels today slightly like a nervous witness at a dress show of the emperor’s new clothes” (“The Stage: Lowell’s ‘The Old Glory,’” New York Times, April 19, 1976).
102. Ian Hamilton: “In April
[1976], Lowell and Lady Caroline flew to New York for a performance of The Old Glory at the American Place Theatre” (Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 454).
103. Symbionese Liberation Army.
104. Martin Gottfried: “[Benito] Cereno is so beautifully composed, so intelligent, so tragically and ironically powerful that somehow, despite its several faults, it is nearly perfect […] Austin Pendleton has staged the new production immaculately, as aware of the play’s language as of its theater. He lets its references to racist and imperialist America speak for itself […] Once again, Roscoe Lee Browne takes Babu from feline mockery to lionine explosion” (“A Classic in ‘The Old Glory,’” New York Post, April 19, 1976).
105. Jonathan Miller directed two parts of The Old Glory (My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Benito Cereno) at the American Place Theatre in 1964.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 60
