by Ian Hamilton
I don’t think I can go back to you. Thought does no good. I cannot weigh the dear, troubled past, so many illnesses, which weren’t due to you, in which you saved everything, our wondering, changing, growing years with Harriet, so many places, such rivers, of talk and staring—I can’t compare this memory with the future, unseen and beyond recollection with Caroline. I love her very much, but I can’t see that. I am sure many people have looked back on a less marvelous marriage than ours on the point of breaking, and felt this pain and indecision—at first insoluable [sic], then when the decision had been made, incurable.
I don’t think I can come back to you, but allow me this short space before I arrive in New York to wobble in my mind. I will be turning from the longest realest and most loved fragment of my life.33
And again, on October 22, he writes that he is going through “the usual, once annual depression” and that “whatever choice I might make, I am walking off the third story of an unfinished building to the ground”:
I don’t offer this as a good description, it’s too vague and grand, but to show you why my useless, depressed will does nothing well. Just the usual somberness after mania, jaundice of the spirit, and yet it has so many absolutely actual objects to pick up—a marriage that was both rib and spine for us these many years.
Caroline isn’t (if you really want me to be free to talk about her) one of my many manic crushes, rather this and everything more, just as you were at Yaddo and after. She is airy and very steady and sturdy in an odd way. She has been very kind to me. I think we can make out. I love her, we have been together rather a long time—often and intensely. I have doubts that I by myself, or anyway, can make out, that dear you and Harriet can make out. I think somehow that Christmas will help us all. Great troubles but no longer everyone unreal to everyone, and Christmas is the season to lighten the heart.34
Three weeks later, on November 7, he seems to have made up his mind; he asks Hardwick, “I wonder if we couldn’t make it up? … Maybe you could take me back, though I have done great harm.” Of course, she may not want him back; she may feel “happily rid of [her] weary burden.” A week later he is still pressing: “I will do all I can to make things work: I think we can—we have after all for more years than I have the wits to count, tho all remains remembered.” And to friends, throughout November, he writes, though warily, of a reconciliation. To Peter Taylor, he summarizes the year’s events as follows:
I fell in love, part manic, was sick in hospital a good part of the summer, got well, stayed in love. There was great joy in it all, great harm to everyone. I have been vacillating. I think Lizzie and I will come back together, if that can be done. Anyway, I’ll be home in New York during Christmas.35
And to Blair Clark: “I think now, but it is hard to be very confident, that Lizzie and I will come together again…. When we are depressed, our only support seems to be old habits—mine for a quarter of a century.36
Lowell speaks in this same letter of his “baffling vacillation,” the “jerky graph of the heart,” but he does not seem seriously to have entertained the thought that Hardwick might finally have had enough, that it wasn’t merely a question of his vacillation. On October 23 Hardwick wrote to Blair Clark about Lowell’s proposed visit to New York:
For my business with Cal a visit is not necessary. I do not expect that any of us, even Harriet, will get anything out of it really and I will be glad when it’s over…. Caroline would never come. That is his fantasy and his need to keep a sense of our competing over him going. She has never competed for anyone in her life and I do not want Cal back under any circumstances. But I don’t see him coming here, supposing Caroline would, and having a honeymoon visit when the whole purpose of the trip was to spend a bit of the Christmas with Harriet, to make arrangements for the future. This is the last time he will see me—something I don’t think he realizes, since he is reluctant just to face the lack of drama that the end of this would mean. Also I have the idea that he is afraid to budge one inch from Caroline—she might not be there when he got back. I don’t think he is really well, and he is kept going on this false sense of people competing for him.
I could not put Harriet and me through the giddy unreality I know Cal would be sunk in if he came over with Caroline. I feel it would be the end of Caroline’s feeling for him too, because she would see how he has to exploit or boast or else things aren’t real. In a way I doubt he will come. In all the months he has been gone I’ve heard from him a lot and he has never answered one question that I have put to him, or discussed really anything, me or Harriet or practical things or Caroline—except himself.37
By the end of November, Lowell seems to have grasped that his “choices” might indeed be illusory: on the one hand, “it comes to me that I can’t pull this new marriage off,” that Blackwood might not wish to marry him; and on the other, that Hardwick’s response to his latest escapade was puzzlingly volatile.38 On November 21 he wrote to Clark:
It must be like migraine getting stuck with all my affairs, from all sides. … Here’s what’s going on in me. I am haunted by my family, and the letters I get. There seems to be such a delicate misery. Lizzie’s letters veer from frantic affection to frantic abuse. Then somehow she and Harriet are fused as one in her mind. It’s not possible, but I get the impression they really are in Lizzie’s mind. It’s crazy, but I can’t from a distance do anything about it, perhaps less on the spot.
The thing is I am perfectly happy with Caroline. At first I was afraid of not being married—old feelings of being outlawed. But I see it doesn’t matter much. We can go on permanently as we are. We are permanent no matter what our status. Caroline has always been afraid of legal marriage. Not being married, somehow loosens the bond, man and woman’s mutual, self-killing desire to master the other. Then we might get married anyway when we knew we didn’t have to. I don’t know yet what will happen, but I increasingly fear for the blood I’ll have to pay for what I have done, for being me. Anyway, I’ll be coming to you around the 14th alone.39
Lowell carried on living in Pont Street until his departure for New York; since October he had been teaching two days a week at Essex and finding his poetry classes there “rather retarded after Harvard. The college looks like Brandeis, if Brandeis had been built on a fiftieth the money, and with no Jews.”40 Otherwise, he had been leading “a mole’s life,” with occasional readings—in Bristol and Cambridge and in London at the Mermaid Theatre and the Institute for Contemporary Arts—and a weekly lunch with Sidney Nolan. At his readings he would be told by the organizers that he had attracted “a record small audience,” and all in all he was enjoying England’s “famous more mumbled and muffled pace.”41 As to America, he wrote to Hardwick that he dreaded “the Review circuit and the buzz of American politics.” One of the nice things about England was that “an American isn’t expected to follow issues.”42 But in mid-December he set off “home”—with nothing resolved, and no clear idea of what would happen next. After he left, Caroline Blackwood wrote him a letter, which, again, he was later to put into a poem (“With Caroline at the Air Terminal”): “If I have had hysterical drunken seizures, / it’s from loving you too much….” This is, almost word for word, the opening of Blackwood’s letter. She went on to say that she was uncertain whether they would ever meet again; unsure, even, that they should. Whatever happened, though, she wanted Lowell to know that the happiness he had given her was unique, that if there was misery ahead, she would never regret having known him, and so on. Lowell responded to all this with a terse cable from New York: I AM NOT A CRIPPLE LOVE CAL.
Notes
1. David Caute, “Crisis in All Souls,” Encounter 26, 3 (March 1966).
2. Philip Edwards to R.L., April 2, 1970 (Houghton Library).
3. Donald Davie to R.L., April 4, 1970 (Houghton Library).
4. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 25, 1970.
5. Ibid., April 27, 1970.
6. Ibid., June 1, 1970.
7. The eldest
child of Maureen Guinness, marchioness of Dufferin and Ava; her father, whose full name was Basil Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, fourth marquess of Dufferin and Ava, had been killed in Burma in 1945.
8. R.L. to J. F. Powers, February 18, 1973.
9. Caroline Freud, “The Beatnik,” Encounter 12, no. 6 (June 1959).
10. Ibid.
11. R.L. to Charles Monteith, October 1, 1959.
12. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. R.L. to Blair Clark, May 17, 1970.
16. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, May 26, 1970.
17. Robert Giroux to Charles Monteith, June 29, 1970.
18. Elizabeth Hardwick to R.L., June 26, 1970.
19. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
20. Blair Clark’s notes, July 17, 1970.
21. “Marriage?” The Dolphin (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), P. 26.
22. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, n.d.
23. Blair Clark’s notes, July 21–26, 1970.
24. Ibid., July 29, 1970.
25. Ibid., August 9, 1970.
26. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, August 6, 1970.
27. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, n.d.
28. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
29. R.L. to Peter Taylor, November 1, 1970.
30. R.L. to Blair Clark, September 11, 1970.
31. Ibid., October 9, 1970.
32. William Alfred to R.L., October 15, 1970 (Houghton Library).
33. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, October 18, 1970.
34. Ibid., October 22, 1970.
35. R.L. to Peter Taylor, November 1, 1970.
36. R.L. to Blair Clark, November 7, 1970.
37. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, October 23, 1970.
38. R.L. to Blair Clark, November 7, 1970.
39. Ibid., November 21, 1970.
40. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, November 16, 1970.
41. Ibid., November 28, 1970.
42. Ibid., November 30, 1970.
23
“If I have had hysterical drunken seizures,
it’s from loving you too much. It makes me wild,
I fear … We’ve made the dining room his bedroom—
I feel unsafe, uncertain you’ll get back.
I know I am happier with you than before.
Safer….” The go-sign blazes and my plane’s
great white umbilical ingress bangs in place.
The flight is certain … Surely it’s a strange joy
blaming ourselves and willing what we will.
Everything is real until it’s published.1
Since July in Greenways, Lowell had again been “turning out poems at a great rate,”2 and like this one, they were transcriptions of the day-to-day shifts and swells of his dilemma. When he wrote to Blair Clark that he had been “through baffling vacillation, and letters would have been like a jerky graph of the heart,” he might easily have said the same of this new spate of fourteen-liners, or “belles lettres,” as—with some irony—he called them. In September he had “thirty or so new poems in the old meter”;3 by the end of November he had ninety: “Poems at a great rate, even scribbling lines down during a dinner. I suppose I may have a book, a little notebook, ready by next fall. Then a new tune, a new meter, a new me. The last never I suppose.”4 Throughout October and November, he said, he had done “nothing but bury my indecisions in many many poems.”5
Before flying to New York, he had asked Frank Bidart to meet him there: he wanted Bidart to help him sort out the “tall house of draft and discard” which, along with the ninety or so “finished” poems, he had accumulated since July.
In mid-December I got a letter or telegram asking if I could meet him in New York. He was going to be in New York for Christmas. That’s the Christmas that’s in The Dolphin [the book title Lowell was to give to these 1970 sonnets]. It’s certainly the case that before he came, there was a sense that the thing with Caroline might be over. But Lizzie, when she met him at the airport, was terribly upset because she knew right away—I think he announced immediately that he was going back. So the whole trip, which he had been very much looking forward to, was right away poisoned for her. He was staying at Blair Clark’s apartment, not with her.6
Lowell’s New York visit, in Bidart’s view, was not just “to see Harriet” or to sort out his affairs: “I think he wanted to see what it felt like, and to talk to old friends—just to touch base…. I don’t think he really knew exactly what was going to happen”:
I think I went to see him around December 28—though it may have been before Christmas. I flew to New York, and it seems to me it was early in the day…. Maybe I stayed over at Blair Clark’s that night, I’m not sure. Anyway, we talked a little bit about his personal situation, but he had the beginning of The Dolphin. At that time there was no image of the dolphin in it, so the whole controlling symbolic scheme was not there. It was more nakedly a ninety-odd-sonnet narrative, but very much without an ending. He’d already begun writing the Christmas stuff—he was absolutely writing it as he was living through it. I was there long enough to read some ninety-odd sonnets. Then I went back to Cambridge and after a few days he went back to England. I didn’t hear from him for a long time and didn’t know what was happening.7
Lowell returned to London in January with matters still unsettled. He was committed, he felt, to at least one more term at Essex and he had rented the Pont Street apartment until spring: these, he pleaded, were two concrete reasons for not lingering in New York. Shortly after his return, though, he was still vacillating. He wrote to Hardwick (in a letter from Pont Street dated simply 1971):
What shall I say? That I miss your old guiding and even chiding hand. Not having you is like learning to walk. I suppose though one thing is worse than stumbling and vacillating, is to depend on someone who does these things. I do think achingly about you and Harriet.
In February 1971 Caroline Blackwood learned that she was pregnant. As Frank Bidart recalls:
He told me later that it was when he got back that Caroline said she was pregnant. I guess the point of this is that at this time [December 1970] he was intending to stay with Caroline regardless of the pregnancy. It wasn’t the pregnancy that precipitated that. It may have sealed it, that spring, I don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t any simple cause and effect. He said to me, later, that he would not have been upset if girlfriends he had had earlier had got pregnant, but there was no sense he would have left Lizzie for them.8
Certainly, Lowell welcomed the pregnancy; from March 1971 his “vacillating” stops. On March 14 he wrote to Harriet telling her that he and Caroline were going to have a child:
There can’t ever be a second you in my heart, not even a second little girl, to say nothing of a boy.
You are always with me, you and your mother. I want you to visit us whenever you wish and can. We’re not ogres and bears. I think you may find that you will love Caroline. She has never been harsh to her own girls.
Hardwick’s first response to the news was angry and self-protective, or rather protective of her own and Harriet’s future, although Lowell had offered her the whole of his “unearned income.” Blair Clark, who saw Lowell in London in March 1971, wrote to him on returning to New York:
your relations with Harriet depend almost entirely on what you do about them. You absolutely cannot count on any help from Eliz. That well is poisoned, whatever the formal position of Eliz. is. As we agreed, no campaign for Harriet can now be undertaken, but I think you must gently keep in touch with her, not expecting much response…. you can count on no good will from Eliz. in any of this. I would say that any chance of that disappeared when you got off the plane in Dec. wearing that ring, and now, with the child in prospect, it has receded into unimaginable distance. I think she is and will remain extremely bitter, Cal, and I repeat that the most foolish thing I ever heard said was Lady Jean Mailer’s “I always l
ove everyone I’ve ever loved.” In any case, Eliz. not being an upper-class swinger, such friendliness is inconceivable. So, in my strong view, you’re on your own in an uphill battle for the affections of Harriet.9
Lowell wrote back to Clark that he thought Hardwick “a little puts on her demonic … mask with you,” that he had just had “the most friendly [letter] I’ve ever gotten from Lizzie speaking of my lovely letter to H.” and that “I’m very hopeful, with forebodings of course.”10 Indeed, hopefulness surges through every letter Lowell writes throughout this spring and summer. In March, to Bill Alfred, he announces:
Caroline and I are having a child. It will be born early in October, and most people we’ve met know by now. Many problems, but somehow a calm has come for the last month and a half that is quite surprising. Like walking through some gauze screen that allowed one to see real things without touching them, but what we see is different. Anyway, for me and Caroline a peace we haven’t known, perhaps ever. Ah well who knows … what’s around the corner? It’s easier to face.11
And in May he writes to Peter Taylor:
Caroline’s almost five months pregnant and looks nine. Fearful dread of twins and indeed Allen [Tate] who behaved very badly about us to Lizzie, has already offered himself as a godfather. Even so, if there is only one child we might call him, until after the divorce, Lowell Guinness. It’s a great comfort, soothes us, and somehow takes away from the wilfulness of my action. I feel that I have more than half lost Harriet, not through anyone’s fault but through distance. It’s more than I can bear sometimes, but this will make up. We have three other children, lovely little girls, so “Lowell” will have a nest waiting. One child is already knitting him mittens. Everything in our house is a girl except me—two rabbits, two kittens, a small guineapig named Gertrude Buckman etc.