Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  Even so, Lowell felt that he could not now publish a third Notebook and, by the time Bidart arrived in England, had already begun to break the book up into at least two possible “new” volumes. He had culled fifty or so “historical” subjects from the book, revised them heavily, and put them into chronological order: this, he thought, might make a book called Heroes:

  He had these separately typed, as I remember, and as we started going through them he started putting more Notebook poems into it and as it grew the title “Heroes” just seemed too narrow, and that became History. Essentially, almost everything that was not family poems from Notebook could go into History, and also the poems that didn’t fit very well in Dolphin.35

  The “family poems” would themselves make a book, and this Lowell decided to call For Lizzie and Harriet, even though it was to include, for example, the “Mexico” poems and other nonhistorical items which Lizzie and Harriet might reasonably feel were not addressed to their best interests. For example, Martha Ritter is the “dolphin” in the poem “Morning” (called “Dawn” in Notebook):

  In this ever more enlightened bedroom,

  I wake under the early rising sun,

  sex indelible flowers on the air—

  shouldn’t I ask to hold to you forever,

  body of a dolphin, breast of cloud?

  You rival the renewal of the day,

  clearing the puddles with your green sack of books.36

  Really, these are poems that “cover” the period of Lowell’s personal life in which, whatever his vagaries, he continued to feel unshakably committed to his wife and daughter; in narrative terms, they prepare the ground for the anguished indecisions of the Dolphin tale. For most of the six weeks that Bidart stayed at Milgate the chief task was to turn Notebook into two polished, separate books. For the moment, the matter of the new Dolphin poems was postponed:

  The working pattern we developed was that I would cut sonnets out of a copy of Notebook—he would tell me which ones he wanted, in which order—and paper-clip them on to big legal-size sheets…. He would lie on his work-bed with his marked copy of Notebook and dictate across the room revisions which I would write in in the margin across from where the poem cut out from Notebook was paper-clipped. Usually he would dictate about four, one sheet, and then I would read them and we’d talk about them and argue about them. And sometimes he would change the order, or he would make more revisions, or sometimes he would go back to what he had before. There were some that we continued to argue about and that I never liked but most of them I liked a lot. I was always able to say just what I thought. I would be no use to him if I weren’t. By this time he knew I adored his work, and I loved him, and he was just never insulted by that sort of thing. And Caroline would wander in and read something and she was always full of criticisms and suggestions. She never had the slightest hesitation in saying she didn’t like something.37

  When Bidart left, in February, “there was the text of History and For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin. The Dolphin ended with the birth of Sheridan and essentially followed the real chronology of what happened—but I had much less to do with that than with the others.” Bidart and Lowell did, however, discuss the problem of how, if ever, The Dolphin might be published: “it had to give Lizzie pain, he was very aware of that,” to have these intensely private torments paraded in a poem, to see herself portrayed as the ousted, vengeful wife, to have snatches of her letters, telegrams, phone conversations used as the all too raw material for Lowell’s lightly fictionalized drama of his indecision. And yet, as Bidart saw it, these were poems: “the only thing posterity will not forgive you for is a bad book.” The idea was floated of a very limited edition—perhaps as few as one hundred copies—and some moves had indeed been made in this direction. Olwyn Hughes, sister of the poet Ted Hughes, had proposed publishing such an edition, and Lowell was for a time convinced that this was the best compromise.

  During the spring of 1972 Lowell continued to fret about The Dolphin, but the worry was no longer about if the book should be published: what he was looking for was the least painful (for Hardwick) way to get the poems out. Letters from friends in America who had seen the version of Dolphin which Bidart had taken home with him were almost unanimously shocked that he should even think of releasing such material. In April, Stanley Kunitz wrote to him:

  As for Dolphin. I should be less than honest if I didn’t tell you it both fascinates and repels me. There are details which seem to me monstrously heartless. I will grant that parts of it are marvelous—wild, erotic, shattering. (Who else had the nerve for such a document of enchantment and folly?) But some passages I can scarcely bear to read: they are too ugly, for being too cruel, too intimately cruel. You must know that after its hour has passed, even tenderness can cut the heart. What else need I say to you, dear Cal, not as your judge—God Save me!—but as your friend. In any event, these are matters that I have not discussed with another soul.38

  (Lowell responded to these strictures with what Norman Mailer would certainly have seen as an example of “neutralsmanship”—he offered to dedicate the book History to Kunitz, who was moved to reply: “What could I cherish more…. if you were here, I would embrace you.”39 The dedication in the end was to both Kunitz and Bidart, in spite of a plea from Elizabeth Bishop that Lowell dedicate it solely “to Frank … he has worked so damn hard. When he came back here last winter I don’t think he thought of anything else for months—he used to call me up and recite sonnets and sonnets from memory, re-arranging lines and commas and so on—it’s fantastic.”)40

  Bishop herself had strong views on The Dolphin, in its first version, and on March 21, 1972, wrote:

  Dearest Cal:

  I’ve been trying to write you this letter for weeks now, ever since Frank & I spent an evening when he first got back, reading and discussing THE DOLPHIN. I’ve read it many times since then & we’ve discussed it some more. Please believe I think it is wonderful poetry. It seems to me far and away better than the NOTEBOOKS; every 14 lines have some marvels of image and expression, and also they are all much clearer. They affect me immediately and profoundly, and I’m pretty sure I understand them all perfectly…. It’s hell to write this, so please first do believe I think DOLPHIN is magnificent poetry. It is also honest poetry—almost. You probably know already what my reactions are. I have one tremendous and awful BUT.

  If you were any other poet I can think of I certainly wouldn’t attempt to say anything at all; I wouldn’t think it was worth it. But because it is you, and a great poem (I’ve never used the word “great” before, that I remember), and I love you a lot—I feel I must tell you what I really think. There are several reasons for this—some are worldly ones, and therefore secondary (& strange to say, they seem to be the ones Bill [Alfred] is most concerned about—we discussed it last night) but the primary reason is because I love you so much I can’t bear to have you publish something that I regret and that you might live to regret, too. The worldly part of it is that it—the poem—parts of it—may well be taken up and used against you by all the wrong people—who are just waiting in the wings to attack you.—One shouldn’t consider them, perhaps. But it seems wrong to play right into their hands, too.

  (Don’t be alarmed. I’m not talking about the whole poem—just one aspect of it.)

  Here is a quotation from dear little Hardy that I copied out years ago—long before DOLPHIN, or even the Notebooks, were thought of. It’s from a letter written in 1911, referring to “an abuse which was said to have occurred—that of publishing details of a lately deceased man’s life under the guise of a novel, with assurances of truth scattered in the newspapers.” (Not exactly the same situation as DOLPHIN, but fairly close.)

  “What should certainly be protested against, in cases where there is no authorization, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing e
lse but fact, for obvious reasons. The power of getting lies believed about people through that channel after they are dead, by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate.”

  I’m sure my point is only too plain … Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction,” and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief,” I think. The first one, page 10, is so shocking—well, I don’t know what to say. And page 47 … and a few after that. One can use one’s life a [sic] material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them … etc. But art just isn’t worth that much. I keep remembering Hopkins’ marvellous letter to Bridges about the idea of a “gentleman” being the highest thing ever conceived—higher than a “Christian” even, certainly than a poet. It is not being “gentle” to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way—it’s cruel.41

  In England, Lowell was also soliciting advice: he wanted to see how the poems appeared to people for whom Hardwick’s feelings would not be of personal concern. In March he wrote to Christopher Ricks, the British critic and scholar; Lowell and Ricks had become friends since their first meeting in May 1970:

  My book problems are complicated and I would like to ask your advice. My new book is a small one, some eighty poems in the meter of Notebook—the story of changing marriages, not a malice or sensation, far from it, but necessarily, according to my peculiar talent, very personal. Lizzie is naturally very much against it. I am considering publication in about a year; it needn’t be published, but I feel clogged by the possibility of not. This awkward exposition shows my painful embarrassment.42

  In April, Lowell invited the British poet Alan Brownjohn to Milgate for a weekend; Brownjohn had written admiringly of Notebook in the New Statesman. At this first—and, for Brownjohn, uneasy—weekend (“It was like being invited down to visit Milton or Chaucer or someone”) the Dolphin issue wasn’t raised, but in May Lowell wrote to him that “My ms. problem is this: a book of a little over 60 poems about the last two years, the end of my old marriage and then the beginning. I suppose what you are so expert on (truth of tone) is all-important.”43 Brownjohn then called at Redcliffe Square:

  After I’d been I had the impression that he was enormously determined to get a number of views on the decorum of publishing some of these personal poems about Elizabeth. I gather he’d taken that dilemma around to several people. When I got to Redcliffe Square on that particular day [June 6, 1972] I realized it wasn’t just a question of making a few comments on the new poems he’d been writing. There was the question of the propriety of publishing these kinds of transcribed telephone conversations or letters. He asked that question fairly outright and said, “These are poems written straight out of verbatim letters, and I’ve talked to one or two people and some people say they shouldn’t be published in that form. What do you think?” And I think in sheer nerves, reading the photocopied drafts as he set them in front of me, I said, “I think it’s all right.” I suppose if pressed I would have defended this by saying there is a kind of entitlement of poets to transmute, to use any kind of material that life, personal and public, offers them. And if Lowell isn’t entitled to do this, who is? … It seemed to me he clearly wanted to do it and one didn’t feel like saying no on behalf of someone one had never met.44

  Jonathan Raban was another “detached” English figure whose advice Lowell solicited. Raban remembers “egging him on to do it. … I was really out of what the effect in New York would be”: he suggested to Lowell that perhaps he could “test” the American reaction by letting Faber put the book out first in England:

  I was very much on the side of publishing, because it seemed to me that Dolphin wouldn’t really be a book at all if it didn’t have that suggestion of documentary, and fragments of other people’s conversations and letters. I thought they were some of the best poems in the book. So, for literature’s sake, the book ought to be published in exactly the way he’d written it and not edited out of fear of what Lizzie was going to say.45

  Raban, like Brownjohn, felt that Lowell had made up his mind; “he loved the feeling of being vulnerable to everybody else’s advice and criticism.” As early as April 1972 he had begun revising and rearranging the Dolphin poems with a view to publication. He had been stung by Elizabeth Bishop’s letter, and also by Bill Alfred’s view that certain of the poems “will tear Elizabeth [Hardwick] apart, important though I agree they are to the wholeness of the book. I have to say that.” Alfred also reported in this letter (March 12, 1972) that he had just met W. H. Auden for the first time: “He spoke of not speaking to you because of the book. When I said he sounded like God the Father, he gave me a tight smile. I write to warn you.”46 Lowell was indignant about this—“How could he stop speaking to me about a book he hadn’t seen”—and cabled Auden: DEAR WYSTAN ASTOUNDED BY YOUR INSULT TO ME WITH WILLIAM ALFRED.47

  On April 10 Lowell wrote to Frank Bidart that he intended to modify Dolphin; principally, he had decided to move Sheridan’s birth forward in the narrative, so that it would appear that the new child was a factor in his Christmas, 1970, dilemma. He had also made other, softening alterations:

  I’ve read and long thought on Elizabeth’s [Bishop’s] letter. It’s a kind of masterpiece of criticism, though her extreme paranoia (for God’s sake don’t repeat this) about revelations gives it a wildness. Most people will feel something of her doubts. The terrible thing isn’t the mixing of fact and fiction, but the wife pleading with her husband to return—this backed by ‘documents’. So far I’ve done this much: 1) most important—shift Burden before Leaving America and Flight to New York. This strangely makes Lizzie more restful and gracious about the “departure.” I haven’t changed a word to this effect, but one assumes she knows about the baby’s birth. Burden now begins with Sickday and I think gains much by the baby’s birth not being the climax. 2) Several of the early letters, From my Wife, are now cut up into Voices (often using such title) (changing mostly pronouns) as if I were speaking and paraphrasing or repeating Lizzie. Most of the later letters I haven’t been able to change much or at all. 3) Changes for my style, not to do with this business.

  Now the book must still be painful to Lizzie, and won’t satisfy Elizabeth. As Caroline says, it can’t be otherwise with the book’s donnee. However, even fairly small changes make Lizzie less a documented presence. A distinct, even idiosyncratic voice isn’t the same as someone, almost fixed as non-fictional evidence, that you could call on the phone. She dims slightly and Caroline and I somewhat lengthen. I know this doesn’t make much sense, but that’s the impression I get reading through the whole. Then Sheridan is somewhat a less forced and climactic triumph; as E’s problem of the getting back to England and into pregnancy is gone, and the very end of Flight, with the shark is less Websterian and Poeish.48

  Bidart was against the proposed change of structure, feeling that “it blurred the dramatic movement of the poem. You know, the Christmas thing does feel different if you imagine him coming back to America having already had a child with Caroline. There was much more sense in the original that it was a real crisis, a real question of whether he might stay.”49 Lowell, though, was firm on this point: “The thing is,” he wrote on May 15, “I must shift the structure and somehow blunt and angle the letters.”50 He had promised Faber, he said, that he would have the manuscripts of all three books (History, For Lizzie and Harriet and Dolphin) by August, and he again asked Bidart to help with the final revisions.

  when I got to England in June, he still wanted to make this structural change but also, he had done an enormous amount of rewriting. And I felt that the structural change, when I read it with all these revisions, was possible. It did change the book, but it didn’t wreck it. And in the earlier version, which ended with the birth of Sheridan, it had come out a little bit like a happy ending, and that was somewhat of a problem. On the other hand, it did make the book less a drama. The emotional movement is somew
hat murky.51

  In September, Lowell wrote to William Alfred that baby Sheridan had learned to walk and was destructive, “even to books, and even after Milton appeared to him in a vision saying: ‘If you kill a man you only kill a body, but if you destroy a book you destroy an immortal soul.’” The Dolphin, muted and “written much better—both for art and kindness,” was scheduled for publication in summer, 1973.52

  Notes

  1. R.L., The Dolphin (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), p. 72.

  2. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, November 28, 1970.

  3. R.L. to Frank Bidart, September 11, 1970 (Houghton Library).

  4. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, November 28, 1970.

  5. Ibid., November 30, 1970.

  6. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Blair Clark to R.L., March 17, 1971.

  10. R.L. to Blair Clark, April 1, 1971.

  11. R.L. to William Alfred, March 20, 1971.

  12. R.L. to Peter Taylor, May 13, 1971.

  13. R.L. to Blair Clark, May 15, 1971.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Jonathan Raban, interview with I.H. (1979).

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Ibid.

  19. R.L. to Blair Clark, July 25, 1971.

  20. R.L. to Philip Booth, August 19, 1971.