The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979
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A Note About the Authors and Editor
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INTRODUCTION
Should revelation be sealed like private letters,
till all the beneficiaries are dead,
and our proper names become improper Lives?
—Robert Lowell, “Draw” [Doubt 1], The Dolphin
Was that written for the archives? Who is speaking?
—Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights
Until the end of her life, Elizabeth Hardwick wondered what had happened to the letters she wrote to Robert Lowell during the 1970s. They “are lost or gone,” she said to Lowell’s biographer and, referring to the use Lowell had made of her letters in his book The Dolphin, she added, “I suppose he was so busy cutting them up!” (laughter).1
The Dolphin Letters collects the correspondence between Hardwick and Lowell during the last seven years of Lowell’s life—Hardwick’s side of which surfaced only after her death more than thirty years later—and offers a portrait of two writers at a time of intense personal crisis and creative innovation. Both relied on intelligent and telegraphic communications with each other while going through their separation and divorce; and afterward, through the years during which Lowell published four books of poetry, including The Dolphin, Hardwick wrote Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature and Sleepless Nights, and their daughter, Harriet, grew from thirteen to twenty years old. A written record cannot but be incomplete— “your whole self and your writing self are different,” as Hardwick once remarked2—and this portrait is necessarily partial, framed as it is by a period of distress that alters the proportions of the lives represented. Lowell’s romance with and marriage to Caroline Blackwood happen offstage, as does the family life they made with their son, Sheridan, Blackwood’s three daughters, and Harriet. Hardwick’s romantic involvements during this period are not mentioned. Nevertheless, the correspondence gives us their written character and temperament both within and outside of the marriage during this period (included in the book are significant exchanges with friends in their circle), in their distinct qualities of mind and sentence.
The book opens with Hardwick’s return to New York with Harriet after a family trip to Italy in the spring of 1970. Lowell and Hardwick were both fifty-three years old and had been married since 1949. Harriet was due back at school to finish the seventh grade, and Hardwick to finish the semester’s teaching at Barnard College. Lowell, who was on his way to take up an eight-week fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, extended his travels from Rome to Amsterdam to visit old friends, and then on to England. He was at the time considering a separate teaching offer from the University of Essex, which would have involved moving the family to England for two years, not least to seek respite from the stresses of his recent American life. These included his commitments to teaching (he commuted every week from New York to Harvard) and to activism—a “dedication,” as Hardwick called it,3 that both she and Lowell observed their entire adult lives. The claims of political engagement on both writers during the years of anti-war protests and the civil rights movement were serious, and yet the “scene” by 1970, during the first Nixon administration, struck Hardwick as “an utter, odd shambles, a nothing,” she wrote to Mary McCarthy before the family trip. “The phone rings all day with meetings one could attend, plays one is urged to go to in the freezing night, an occasional unwanted invitation, malignant growths of mail, bills […] And the depressing quiet in the midst of so much rush and anxiousness. You feel as if you’d been in a play running for years and then it closed and you went uptown and no one called.”4 “Almost everyone understands how one would want to leave America temporarily,” Lowell wrote to Hardwick that April.5
Lowell arrived at All Souls on April 24. Six days later, he attended a party in his honor given by his British publisher, Faber & Faber. Caroline Blackwood, whom he had met some years previously, was there, and they were reintroduced.6 Blackwood was thirty-eight years old. She later recalled that “after the Faber party, he moved into Redcliffe Square [Blackwood’s London house]—I mean instantly, that night.”7 Traveling from All Souls to London and back over the next six weeks, Lowell returned often in his thoughts to Matthew Arnold’s Scholar-Gipsy,8 a man of “pregnant parts and quick inventive brain” who tires of modern life and seeks shelter in the pastoral of Oxford. Though Lowell was far from idle during this period—his work included preparing Notebook for publication, adding new poems, revising old ones, engaging Blackwood as critic and scribe9—he writes to Hardwick that “this is almost the first time since lithium”10 that he had not been ceaselessly working. But a longing for rest had been a sign of impending turmoil in his past.11 “Take leisure to be wise,” he writes in the last of the letters to Hardwick that float on the fiction of all being well12—just six days before announcing by telegram that “PERSONAL DIFFICULTIES MAKE TRIP TO NEWYORK IMPOSSIBLE RIGHT AWAY.”13
During Lowell and Hardwick’s previous twenty-one years together, Lowell had suffered at least ten major manic episodes and at least fifteen hospitalizations, and was administered the therapies available at the time (seclusion and shock treatment in 1949; chlorpromazine, hydrotherapy, and psychoanalysis from the 1950s until the mid-1960s; lithium, newly available in the United States, in his fiftieth year). Manic-depressive illness is an episodic but also a progressive disease; and by 1961 Lowell’s cycle of acute mania, hospitalization, and depression began to recur yearly.14 Part of the tremendous activity and spectacle of the manic phases—“people loved to take part in them,” Hardwick wrote; “they were very like The Idiot,15 not at all like a mad killer”—involved falling in love, often implausibly. Hardwick said that during his breakdowns she was “deeply distressed, frantic, and all the rest” when “faced with these humiliating, recurring situations.” They were humiliating for him, too, later, after he “‘came to,’” when he was “sad, worried, always ashamed and fearful,” she wrote. “And when he was well, it seemed so miraculous that the old gifts of person and art were still there, as if they had been stored in some serene, safe box somewhere.” At home again after the hospital, “he returned to his days, which were regular,” reading, writing, studying. “And yet there he was, this unique soul for whom one felt great pity. His fate was like a strange, almost mythical two-engined machine, one running to doom and the other to salvation.”16
“Fortunately, Cal17 was ‘well’ much more of his life than he was not,” Hardwick added. “Otherwise his large and difficult, for him, production would not exist.”18 A. L. Rowse described him as “most sympathetic. […] He was sane, sensitive, perceptive and responsive, full of original thoughts, rather a dear, and obviously a man of genius.”19 Derek Walcott wondered “what biographer could catch the heartbreaking smile, his wit, his solicitude, his shyness? […] Clouds covered
him, but when they went, he was extraordinarily gentle.”20
When Lowell was first prescribed lithium, it granted him release from both the yearly attacks and his anxiety about when the next would strike. One should not “understate how powerful it might have been for him to be freed of such a severe and painful illness,” Harriet Lowell writes. “If a salt could stop the attacks, that meant the illness was not caused by some terrible character flaw.”21 On lithium, Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, “even my well life is much changed, as tho I’d once been in danger of falling with every step I took.”22 He began to write a “notebook” of sonnet-like poems (fourteen lines, rhyming internally but to no set scheme), notations of “fleeting feelings, insights, perceptions, marginal half-thoughts and how these bear down on one’s life,” as Frank Bidart described them.23
But to some old friends there seemed another, subtle change, as if the difference in his character and temperament when well and when sick was a little less distinct, even if his gentleness and intelligence were undiminished. From 1967 to 1970 Lowell worked on the “unstopping composition” of the Notebook poems (numbering 377 by the publication of the third edition), which was connected, Lowell wrote to Hardwick in apology, to the “stirring and blurring” of drinking. “I’ve been hard going the last couple of years, though when haven’t I been?”24 Harriet Lowell remembers her mother saying that he was “simmering” during those years. As Kay Redfield Jamison writes, “Although Lowell fit the clinical profile of someone likely to respond to lithium […] he was put on lithium late in his illness, and stability is harder to achieve after repeated episodes of mania. Lowell also drank heavily at times, most notably when he was manic, which almost certainly affected his response” to the drug. “It is possible that the lithium capped his mania well enough to allow him to write with some of the productive advantage of mild mania.”25 Esther Brooks recalled that during the years of lithium treatment, “the well person and the unwell person seemed to rub together in a strange kind of muted euphoria. One no longer feared that he would go mad but one kept waiting for the delicate and exquisite side of his mind to assert itself once again.”26
In May 1970, Hardwick sensed very quickly from Lowell’s silences and evasions that he was again in love, and that he was “not at all well.” By mid-May, her letters appear to be keeping up a pretense of daily conversation—about Harriet and the household, plans for moving to England, the social scene, the extraordinary political events unfolding, the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the New Haven Black Panther trials, the killings of students at Kent State and Jackson State—because she knew something was wrong but couldn’t ask. “PERSONAL DIFFICULTIES”: as she feared, his affair (with whom, she had yet to learn) and his weeks at All Souls were prelude to a severe manic episode—his first since his lithium treatment had begun three years earlier. During the summer of 1970, it was not clear to anyone, Lowell included, whether his feelings for Blackwood were symptomatic of his illness. After nearly two months, when Hardwick finally learned with whom Lowell had taken up, she was doubtful about Blackwood as a partner for him. Part of her distress was not knowing whether Blackwood could “cope with his mental illness if it returned full force,” Harriet Lowell writes.27
Though none of Lowell’s previous affairs had lasted, this alliance proved different. “I am not mad and hold to you with reason,” he later wrote in a poem to Blackwood.28 Thanks to the efficacy of the lithium treatment, from his recovery in the fall of 1970 until 1975,29 the passionate and productive years he spent with Blackwood and their family marked the longest period his mania was stabilized since the first serious occurrence of the disease.30 And once Hardwick was relieved of her fears for his safety and sanity, and for Harriet’s well-being, the “certain euphoria (60%)”31 she felt at being on her own led to a richly generative time spent on her own writing. In some ways, “my mother was never freer or more lively” than during the period that followed, Harriet recalls.32
* * *
Lowell and Hardwick’s separation was conducted mostly through letters in the summer and fall of 1970. A practical reason for writing instead of telephoning was the expense of transatlantic calls and the uneven quality of reception (crossed lines, echoes) impeding the flow of conversation. “I am sorry I was so mute on the phone. At the start two others seemed competing with you,” Lowell writes after one such call.33 But they were also lifelong writers of letters, and were critically and artistically interested in the form.34 Contrary to a reader’s expectations that we might find in letters the writer “at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances,” Hardwick wrote about literary correspondence in 1953, “letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope.”35 She would later write, in an essay about fictional correspondence in Richardson’s Clarissa, that a letter is partly “one’s own evidence, […] the writer holds all the cards, controls everything about himself and about those assertions he wishes to make concerning events or the worth of others.”36 A letter is also of the moment, and quickly posted. Harder to control in a genuine correspondence (not one written for the art of fiction) is the vacillation of feeling from one letter to the next.
Letters both real and fictional are a formal device in Lowell’s poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in Hardwick’s prose. Experimenting with autobiography and immediacy in the Notebook poems, Lowell had versed a letter from Allen Tate into a poem for the 1969 first edition. In the spring of 1970, he did the same with a letter from Elizabeth Bishop for the third edition. That autumn, as he began to write in his adapted sonnet form about a “suffering hero?”37 being drawn into what precipitates the end of a long marriage, he turned to Hardwick’s letters to help tell the tale of “one man, two women, the common novel plot.”38 In The Dolphin, the wife and daughter left behind are given voice in Lowell’s “cut” and “doctored” versions of Hardwick’s letters. From Lowell’s point of view, they are thereby made real “beyond my invention.”39
During those years, Hardwick was immersed in letters from their past as she ordered Lowell’s papers for their eventual sale to archives. (“About the ‘papers,’—‘Aspern’—which I have not looked at since I first and last went through them. Have I the strength?” Hardwick wrote to Lowell after their separation. “I hate them and hate to let them go; the damned things are my life also.”40) Sleepless Nights, which took shape following the publication of The Dolphin, is not a “short-wave autobiography,” as her narrator first had in mind to write, but a novel that “fades in and out, local voices mixing with the mysterious static of the cadences of strangers” thousands of miles apart.41 Although Hardwick’s sources were many, what she had learned in her years of absorption in literary correspondence, in poems, and in the prose of poets (“one of my passions”42), shows in the novel’s lyric brevity and pacing. Its narrator, whose name is Elizabeth, writes to a “Dearest M.,” and is “always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.”43 These interlocutors may share initials with Mary (McCarthy), Barbara (Epstein), Devie (Meade), and Cal (Lowell), though they are not they exactly, either.
Central to Lowell and Hardwick’s exchange of letters in the 1970s, and to the work they made during this period, is a debate about the limits of art—what occasions a work of art; what moral and artistic license artists have to make use of their lives as material; what formal innovations such debates give rise to. “The whole question of the rights and duties, the decencies and discretions of the insurmountable desire to know,” as Henry James calls it,44 is given form in the decisions Lowell and Hardwick made in The Dolphin and Sleepless Nights. The illustrations and annotations in the present edition point especially to those works, and to significa
nt earlier drafts, since both were much revised before final publication. Included herein are illustrations of individual poems from “The Dolphin” manuscript that draw from letters Lowell received and wrote. (The complete draft of Lowell’s manuscript that was circulated to friends in 1972 is now published in The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973.) Also included is “Writing a Novel,” Hardwick’s story as published in The New York Review of Books, which she transformed into Sleepless Nights.
Hardwick carefully saved Lowell’s letters, many of which were subsequently published in The Letters of Robert Lowell. But as for Hardwick’s side of the correspondence, “they’re all gone,” as she repeated to Ian Hamilton. Lowell had written to Hardwick in 1976, “I regret the Letters in Dolphin.”45 Still, he was unwilling to return them to her. “This is real Aspern Papers,” she told Hamilton:
At one time I said to him, “Well I would like, for history, to see those letters you say are mine. And that you put in my voice. Because I can’t remember and just want to see how they went.” I said “you’ve got to bring those to me.” Well, very sheepishly […] he gave me, well, it was three worthless little letters,46 and I said [reproachful] “Oh, Cal.” He said “I can’t find them,” and without making a big issue out of it I said, “I really want to see them.” It was of interest to me.47
Lowell died without resolving this with Hardwick, and for the subsequent thirty years she was given no opportunity to reread the letters she had written to him—never able (to borrow from T. S. Eliot) to “unravel the web of memory and invention and discover how far and in what ways” her letters had been transformed.48 Lowell feared that Hardwick might destroy them (though “zeroxes”49 could have been made).50 It is more likely that Hardwick would have preserved them, however regretfully,51 if they had been returned to her. “I know that she believed in archives,” Harriet Lowell recalls, “and had great qualms about any meddling with them. I don’t know of her ever wavering on this point.”52