The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979
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Caroline Blackwood did not return the letters to Hardwick after Lowell’s death in 1977. Nor were they included in the estate’s 1982 sale of his papers. Hardwick reported that Frank Bidart had “found only a few perfunctory letters”53 from her to Lowell when Bidart organized the papers for the estate, and had told her “there is nothing there for you.” Hardwick thought that Blackwood “tore them up, there’s no other explanation.”54
What actually happened was that in April 1978, seven months after Lowell’s death, Blackwood had put 102 letters and postcards written by Hardwick in a large envelope and mailed them to Bidart for safekeeping. “There was nothing passive about Caroline,” her daughter Evgenia Citkowitz remembers. “The fact that she did send them to Frank, [Lowell’s] editor and friend, is noteworthy, otherwise they would have surely disappeared or have been left to be uncovered some other way. […] In the end, despite the bitterness, Caroline understood how important these letters were; how they documented the period for them all.”55 By agreeing to receive the envelope, Bidart believed himself to be acting not only as Blackwood wished but as Lowell did, too. He put the envelope under his bed, and later transferred it to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, with a cover note stating that “This packet of letters belongs to the Estate of Robert Lowell, not to me,” and that “they are to be kept here at the Houghton Library until the death of Elizabeth Hardwick.”56
Elizabeth Hardwick died on December 2, 2007. Bidart informed Evgenia Citkowitz about the envelope in May 2010, and she suggested that he and I catalogue its contents for the Lowell estate. When we did, it appeared to be an incomplete but substantial gathering, covering the time between April 1970, when Lowell and Hardwick parted in Europe, to Lowell’s final year. There is a significant gap in the fall of 1970, a period that Lowell dramatizes in The Dolphin. In The Dolphin, fifteen poems contain lines spoken or written by the “Lizzie” and “Harriet” characters. At least six of these invite us to think that Lowell drew on letters, but there is no source for them in the envelope.57 If letters are missing, it is unknown whether Lowell misplaced them during the composing of the poems or if they were later set aside, lost, or destroyed.
Of the letters that did survive, what to do with them—whether to publish and what to publish—raises “the quarrel beside which all others are mild and arrangeable, the eternal dispute between the public and the private, between curiosity and delicacy.”58 The decision was left to Harriet Lowell as legatee of her mother’s estate, and to Harriet and Sheridan Lowell as heirs of their father. Harriet regrets not being given a chance to ask Hardwick about her wishes for these letters. But despite Harriet’s personal misgivings,59 she recognized that her mother’s letters “were preserved to be placed in an archive.” However, leaving the letters open to quotation, paraphrase, or sensation without context concerned her. As the literary executor to both estates, she judged it best to publish the correspondence, despite the exposure of their parents’ lives and their own childhoods that publication represents. The estates were reluctant to ask the same of some others, still living, whose family and private lives are taken up intimately in the correspondence. Hence the omission in this edition of some brief passages.60
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The Dolphin, Hardwick wrote, “hurt me as much as anything in my life.” She objected to what she saw as the distortions in Lowell’s portrait of her, the distortions of chronology (“I have found in the book letters from the very early period of my distress, attached to a sestet written long after”61), and especially the attribution to her of words that were not hers (“of course I mind the lines seeming to have issued from me”62). “In general, she did not object to him writing about his life (which meant her),” Harriet Lowell recalls. “This was different. […] She felt he misrepresented her. […] It wasn’t so much that it was revealing and embarrassing, but it was ungenerous.”63 “I have since the publication been analyzed under my own name in print, given some good marks as a wife and person by some readings, general disparagement and rebuke by other readings,” Hardwick wrote to Lowell’s publishers. “The facts are not in the nature of facts because of the disguise as poetry and so cannot be answered.”64
Nor did Hardwick think the poems themselves were very good, as she told Elizabeth Bishop: “It seemed so sad that the work was, certainly in that part that relies upon me and Harriet, so inane, empty, unnecessary. I cannot understand how three years of work could have left so many fatuities, indiscretions, bad lines still there on the page.”65 She never changed her opinion of the poems, and their publication affected the candor with which she wrote subsequent letters. After The Dolphin was published, one has the sense that Hardwick is looking right back at one while writing to her correspondent; knowing whatever she writes may be overheard, become part of someone’s record; knowing how inexorably she would be drawn into the surf of literary history. “It is one of the most peculiar and terrifying sensations to have yourself or someone you have really loved and deeply known suddenly lighted up in a way that seems so far from the real, the true,” Hardwick wrote to Bishop.66
Elizabeth Bishop’s objections to Lowell’s use of Hardwick’s letters in “The Dolphin” manuscript—“art just isn’t worth that much”67—are often cited, the terms of her objection less so. Clive James wrote in The Times Literary Supplement in May 2014, for instance: “Lowell wanted [Bishop’s] endorsement for his bizarre temerity in stealing his wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters to use unchanged in his poetry.”68 Rather than “use unchanged,” it was the “mixture of fact & fiction” to which Bishop particularly objected. She quoted Thomas Hardy, that “if any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact” because “the power of getting lies believed about people […] by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate.”69 Bishop wrote, “you have changed her letters”:
One can use one’s life as 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 […] The letters, as you have used them, present fearful problems: what’s true, what isn’t; how one can bear to witness such suffering and yet not know how much of it one needn’t suffer with, how much has been “made up,” and so on.70
In defense of his practice, Lowell saw the changes he made to the letters and conversations he used as mild, even protective, in “the dress of fiction”:
Let me re/phrase for myself your moral objections. It’s the revelation (with documents?) of a wife wanting her husband not to leave her, and who does/ leave her. That’s the trouble, not the mixture of truth and fiction. Fiction—no one would object if I/ said Lizzie was wearing a purple and red dress, when it was yellow. Actually my versions of her letters are true enough, only softer and drastically cut. The original is heartbreaking, but interminable.71
He adds that the poems in “Lizzie’s” voice “are made up of a mixture of quotes, improvisation, paraphrase.”72
Readers can now compare lines in “The Dolphin” manuscript and The Dolphin with some of the original letters to see the kinds of artistic choice, formal and semantic, that Lowell made. The springtime poem “Green Sore” awakens to an ache of new life, new beginnings; the Caroline character is pregnant, “the new spring fields extend like a green sore.” He quotes from a letter in “the morning mail” that “brings the familiar voice to Kent”73: “not that I wish you entirely well, far from it.” The words Hardwick actually wrote were, “I don’t entirely wish you well, far from it, of course.”74 Lowell plucks from Hardwick’s letter not what she writes of her own conflicting and simultaneous feelings and wishes (“I don’t entirely wish you well”), but what her words mean to him internally (“not that I wish you entirely well”). Musically, Lowell undoes Hardwick’s cadence for a rearrangement more fitting to the sense of jarred, anxious waking he wants for his poem. The rearrangement forecloses on her meanings, and makes possible a picture
of a Lizzie character who, it is implied, does not wish him “entirely well,” or entirely healed. They become “words of a moment’s menace” that “stay for life,” he writes in the published version.75 Lowell’s rewriting of Hardwick’s words does not affect the “common novel plot” but captures a variation in his own feeling that he judged to be true to his experience, or true to the characters he was writing for his “half fiction.”76 And so his words are “true enough” for his poem, his source transformed in accordance with an artistic practice Lowell observed (with his own words and the words of others) throughout his life.77
But Bishop wasn’t convinced by Lowell’s rephrasing of her objections in terms of the disclosures of his plot. Changing Hardwick’s written words and changing the color of her dress are not quite apposite. Bishop wrote again to say: “I quoted Hardy exactly, & the point was that one can’t mix fact & fiction.”78 The documentary or collage element in American modernist writing had long been a point of interest and disagreement between Bishop and Lowell. William Carlos Williams’s use of Marcia Nardi’s letters for the “Cress” character in Paterson came up early in their friendship, in terms very similar to their discussion twenty-four years later. Lowell’s artistic interest in the practice and Bishop’s unease with its encroachments on trust had shadowed their exchange in the early 1960s about Lowell’s poem “The Scream,” based on Bishop’s short story “In the Village,”79 and Bishop’s silence upon Lowell’s apology for “versing one of your letters into my poems” in 1970.80
Hardwick’s own reflections on these issues, formal and moral, can be found in Sleepless Nights. Darryl Pinckney suggests that when Hardwick returned after many years to first-person fiction, her “lack of interest in herself” was a “formal problem and her determination not to write about Robert Lowell a principle. She wrote instead about what a life with him had allowed her to think about: beautiful writing and great literature and human weirdness.”81 Hardwick’s misgivings and demurrals about personal exposure, her tonal brilliance, her feeling for interiority and the interplay between what’s recalled and what’s archived, came together in a novel that behaves like a work of memory and a work of invention at once, driven not by narrative but by what Henry James first called “the life of the mind.” Her glance turns to Lowell at several moments in Sleepless Nights, such as when the speaker considers changing the hair color of “the Mister”:
How is the Mister this morning? Josette would say. The Mister? Shall I turn his devastated brown hair to red, which few have? Appalling disarray of trouser and jacket and feet stuffed into stretched socks. Kindly smile, showing short teeth like his mother’s.82
But “shall I?” marks a distance, perhaps measured of “compassion and constraint,”83 between her fiction and Lowell’s. (“Why not say what happened?”—the interrogative permission given to Lowell by Hardwick herself when he was writing the Life Studies poems84—is a line from his late poem “Epilogue.”85) However much Sleepless Nights employs real addresses (239 Marlborough Street, 67th Street) and apparently real addressees (M., B., D., and C.), it is not documentary art but invention.86 Mary McCarthy returns to the question in her 1979 letter to Hardwick about Sleepless Nights:
I wonder what Cal would think. He’d be put out somewhat in his vanity to find himself figuring mainly as an absence and absence that the reader doesn’t miss. Even during the years when he was evidently on the scene, e.g. in Amsterdam. I like your idea of wondering whether you might not change his hair color to red—very funny, and it demonstrates how little his thisness (haecceitas), rather than mere/ thatness, matters.87
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What do a writer’s letters tell us that is different from biography or the plot of a life? It is a search for something elusive, the genesis of a work of art, “that internal history,” T. S. Eliot writes, “which may have much or may have little relation to the external facts, that internal crisis over which our imagination is tempted to brood too long.”88 Working with the same raw materials as poetry and fiction—noticings, moments of attention and inattention, formal concerns—letters process their material differently, and may store it in anticipation of poems or fictions for years. The habits of mind, association, and phrasemaking are as much prospective as retrospective. Conversely, the poem-as-letter trades on the intimacy and immediacy of a letter but is not looking forward (to a conversation or a meeting). It is looking back, as literature does. And it assumes a different formal and essential nature when it takes its place not in an envelope, nor in a volume issued for private circulation among friends, but in that public thing offered for sale, a book.
In July 1970, Lowell was hospitalized for mania at London’s Greenways Nursing Home, where he was alone and stranded, Blackwood having departed. Hardwick flew to London in early August for a brief visit89—she found him “in awful shape physically,” only able to “go about for an hour at the most & then just collapses”—and then returned to their summer house in Castine, Maine. Although he was still in the hospital, Lowell had recovered enough by August 11th to write his thanks. He had not yet decided what to do, whether to return to his family in America or make a new life with Blackwood.
Dearest Lizzie:
There’s cold in the the air, enough to make me rub my feet for warmth. And then/ a colder, perhaps truer air in Maine. Illusions, surely! The true Maine is always at [a] distance. You are there. And this morning I can reach to you. O I hope I have reached Harriet Lowell, To whom I have sent many postcards, terrible things like the horseguards which you were so gracious as to buy, stamp and leave me.
Goodbye, My Love,
Cal90
Lowell rewrote his letter as a poem for The Farther Shore sequence in “The Dolphin” manuscript, entitled “Notes for an unwritten Letter”:
Ice of first autumn in the air/, enough to make me hold
my feet socks/ for warmth. A purer cold in Maine—
all things are truer there, truth’s is a/ foreign language.
The terrible postcards you bought and stamped for me
are mailed have gone/ to Harriet: the horseguards, the lifeguards,
the golden Lord Mayor’s Chariot, Queen Bess—
true as anything else to fling a child …
In Maine, my country as I loved to boast, where I hoped wished to die,/
each empty sweater and vacant idle/ bookshelf hurts,
the all the/ pretexes for their service gone.
I shout into the air, my voice comes back,
it doesn’t carry to the farther shore,
rashly removed, still ringing in my ears.
Is a sound sleeper one you who/ will not wake?91
In the letter there is hope that communion is still possible. The poem is far lonelier, with a sense of loss too big for the letter’s containment and decorum. He repeats and varies the words he had addressed to her, as if his emotion could not be discharged in a single saying. In the sequence of poems, the speaker’s pursuit of the dolphin will lead him to abandon his family, his country, his former life. Is it a pursuit of the beloved, of his sanity, of his own art (the dolphin a figure for one of its gods92), doubting yet hoping for its powers of divination? “I have learned what I wanted from the mermaid,” Lowell writes in another poem, “and her singeing conjunction of tail and grace.”93 But in “Notes for an unwritten Letter” he has not yet crossed over, and feels unhoused and restless. The “farther shore” and the cancelled word “autumn” allude to the vast crowd of unburied souls in The Aeneid stretching their hands in longing for Hades, where they might finally rest, but which they cannot reach.94 The poem resembles a familiar letter but breaks with those conventions by listening more to itself than to its addressee. It is, after all, an “unwritten” letter, a conversation in his own mind. Hardwick will never receive it in an envelope, only as a poem in a book—and not even that, since it did not appear in this form in The Dolphin.
In the final version, published in 1973, the poem is entitled “Letter.”95 It beg
ins with the Lizzie character talking or writing to the speaker who then turns to his own thoughts. Does the title “Letter” refer to the lines spoken by Hardwick or himself, or to their mutually solitary communications? Does the ambiguity change our sense of his engagement with the addressee? Or does “Letter” lay claim to being a freestanding poetic form?
“In London last month I encountered only
exhausted traffic and exhausting men—
the taxi driver might kill us, but at least he cared.”
Cold summer London, your purer cold is Maine,
where each empty sweater and hollow bookcase hurts,
every pretext for their service gone.
We wanted to be buried together in Maine …
You didn’t, “impractical, cold, out of touch.”
The terrible postcards you bought and stamped for me
go off to Harriet, the Horseguards, the Lifeguards,
the Lord Mayor’s Chariot, Queen Bess who could not bear—
true as anything else to fling to a child …
I shout into the air, my voice comes back—
nothing reaches your black silhouette.
Lowell has dispensed by now with the allusion to Virgil, and the sonnet-like form is a narrow room in which he frets in solitude. The suspension and vacillation in the poem’s first states of feeling have given way to a more clearly defined anger and sense of isolation. Gone is the hope that his old love will turn her face to him—he can only see her outline.96 What Lowell brings to the final version, which the good manners and hopefulness of his letter could not express, is the dissolution feared, and indeed realized (by the time of publication), in the real plot of their lives.