There are only two people in England I care to have my relationship with preserved: Sidney and Isaiah.184 Please tell them how much I love them. I would grieve to lose their friendship and their company when they come here. Jonathan of course, but that’s a little different.
We have a Demo primary today. Rather tedious examples of an uninspired political paralysis. But it will [be] fun to listen to some of the returns with friends tonight.
The recession here (depression) is truly frightening. The stock market is very low, gains a bit, goes back down. Penn Central railroad went into bankruptcy, leaving a lot of banks who had loaned the road millions in a very shaky condition.185 I have no money at all and am going today to Harriet’s savings account so that she can pay for her camp. I got 3,000 a week or so [ago] from Bob Giroux for the June 15th income tax installment, which just for the federal came to 2,800. The State and city together were over 2,000—so we have just paid out $5,000. I really need another 3,000 more immediately for back bills, like the going to Boston for schools, Maine, renting cars, the quarterly maintenance of over 1,000 that comes due this month. Bills in Maine. After I pay my 3,000 I need 3,000 more for from now to September. Then next year if you are leaving us or if I am leaving you I will have to have $20,000. I can’t get by on less that first year and cannot even pay the taxes on that.186 Later it would be of course be less.
I hate like anything to write these degrading money things to you. It seems to cancel out all of the love I want to send. But it isn’t really true and so read it in the spirit simply of what we have built together, that we have had to leave, live, had to pay rent, had to spend money for Harriet, for phones, for getting places. I will of course try to economize and actually have spent almost nothing except for real household expenses. But they are awful. Nicole is in the hospital today after her second hernia. The insurance will pay her salary this summer, thank heavens. Everything is so damned expensive.
I am trying to write some little things and then hopefully this summer and next fall something more substantial.
As I said I really do not expect this letter to reach you and if it does God knows what will have happened by then. But here it is, with my love if you want it.
E.
* * *
Another postscript … a letter just came from Sister B. Quinn which I will answer, saying My husband is away, etc. I feel like Edmund’s card.187 It, the letter, wasn’t anything, except about some young man’s interest in Prometheus.188 Peter Farb’s novel, Yankee Doodle,189 … oh, dear. A bill for $350.00 from last year’s income tax firm, very reasonable actually, and $125 for three months social security for Nicole or something. And insurance.… There are many good things, too, many days that are fun and even pretty and I am feeling pretty good. So … I send this off, wanting to wait a little, but for what?
I did say something funny the other day, which I knew you would never repeat because it was just that the opportunity came and I couldn’t resist. I spoke of Blair Clark as a “tower of weakness.”190
Dearest, dearest love,
Elizabeth
44. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 23, 1970
Darling: I sent off a letter in the blue to Faber to be forwarded. I want to add this touching conversation I had with Harriet, who has been in Stockbridge with the Wagers since Friday and will now even not be coming home until tomorrow. She said she missed me, then sweet little voice:
“What is the news of Daddy?”
“Well, he sent a cable saying he couldn’t come this week because of work. But I think he will be here next week at the latest.”
“The minute he comes, after he is rested, drive up here to Connecticut to get me.”
“Yes, darling. We’ll go out for a picnic.”
“No. I have to be with you, with Daddy, a couple of days.”
So my darling, I am expecting you soon. Next week. There are just too many things to be settled. I don’t know where you are. This isn’t like you or anyone, really. I long to see you and will wait here in New York for the word. There is so much to be done.
Don’t forget us! There was a life here and there still is, and love and we need you and need some relief from our troubling uncertainties.
Dearest love,
Elizabeth
* * *
Harriet needs you. She is deeply worried as am I./
45. Robert Giroux to Charles Monteith
[Telegram]
[New York, N.Y.]
June 23, 1970
MONTEITH
FABBAF
LONDON W1
ELIZABETH HARRIET DISTURBED CALS NONARRIVAL NEW YORK. COULD YOU DISCREETLY INQUIRE AND CABLE ME WHEN HE WILL BE BRINGING BACK THE PAGE PROOFS. GRATEFULLY
Giroux
Farrarcomp
46. Charles Monteith to Robert Giroux
[Telegram]
[London]
[n.d. June 1970]
ROBERT GIROUX
FARRARCOMP
NEWYORK
HAVE JUST SPOKEN CAL STOP PROMISED HE WOULD RING ELIZABETH STRAIGHT AWAY STOP SAYS HE’S STAYING HERE FOR THE SUMMER
CHARLES MONTEITH
47. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 25, 1970
Mary, dear: I was talking, if you can call it that, to Cal this afternoon and he said you were going to Maine on the 12th and that you were going to write me. Then Bob191 said you were coming here on the 8th. I want to send this off, even if you have written me, to give you my plans.
I am taking Harriet to camp on this Sunday, the 28th, and spending the night with Olga—then back here for a week to clear up things, find a new school in N.Y./ for Harriet[.] I will be here if you are coming on the 8th and we can drive up in a big station wagon I have rented for the summer, going whenever you want, and taking things. So, I just wanted to let you know.… At first I thought I didn’t want to go to Maine, but I spent last weekend on Long Island. I had thought I might rent something out there. However, I came back longing for my own place and looking forward to Castine. I will miss Harriet terribly, but I want her to go to camp because there is so little to do up in C. Nicole, blessed one, had a very bad hernia operation last summer and it all literally came apart this summer. I have had her sent to a proper hospital with a top doctor and she will be home tomorrow. She has to rest at least a month and I really don’t need her. She is such a joy and comfort to me here that I want to get her well.
I knew Cal had a girl and had been distressed for some time, but it was just this afternoon that I knew it was Carolyn Caroline. I felt such relief and burst out laughing!192 I called him immediately at her house and he talked as if he were talking to me from his studio, for an hour, laughing and joking and saying you are spending all your alimony on this call.193 Harriet had cried pitifully on the phone when he had told her he wasn’t coming home. He said he wasn’t worried about her, but about me, even though I had told him I was pretty good, which is true. And I told him I was better after I heard it was Caroline.
I cannot take her seriously for Cal. There is a comic element to me in it. Anyway I don’t care … But, Mary, Bob Silvers is in complete misery. The day Cal called me, saying he had “somebody”, apparently Caroline called Bob saying she couldn’t go on a trip they had planned because she had Cal.194 I hadn’t spoken to Bob for a long time because I didn’t want to bore him with my suffering. I chose one friend and called day and night, changing my mind every minute, and I felt one was enough. What I want to tell you is that Bob is crushed and cannot see anything funny in this. He doesn’t want anyone to know it, poor dear. He thinks Caroline is the most intelligent, fascinating person in the whole world. He believes that the life she has organized in England is so beguiling that no one could ever leave it, that she and Cal will last forever.… I haven’t seen Caroline since she was here and she was very silent and withdrawn, diapers on the
floor, really frightening.195 I do believe Bob that she is better organized in England, and he says “all that is taken care of.”
I didn’t think Cal was in good shape, not at all. He got very angry, not with me, but with other people; he seemed very casual and filled with that amnesia about the past I know so well. However, I think he is more or less under control with the pills, but he should be taking more. I don’t particularly want him back and had made up my mind to quit until I heard it was Caroline. I called him and told him I thought it was worse really a sort of joke and he said, “Oh, you think you are so smart!” I can’t do anything and he doesn’t want me to, he says over and over. Caroline isn’t even divorced from Lucian.196 What I am concerned about is her passion for having babies she can’t take care of.… Oh, dear.
What I really want to say is that I am fine. I will not take Cal back unless this is over in a month or so. I have gotten my apartment back here in New York, done everything on the assumption that I won’t be going to England. The person who is absolutely crushed is Bob and so I want you to know that, when you see him. What Caroline can do is break up my marriage—or what Cal can do, I mean—and then their thing will not last. It can’t, I feel. But that will then be too far along …
I am writing tomorrow and the next day a little 600 word review of your book for Vogue. You can’t say anything and even if you could that magazine isn’t right. But everyone rights writes these things, because they pay well, and when I needed the money I called and asked to write something about you. They gave me four reviews and so I will have a little money. I am planning a lot of writing this summer, most of which is under way.
I am looking at the news, drinking bourbon, as I write this and so it is mixed up. Dearest love to you and Jim.197 And let me know whether I should wait—no, I couldn’t possibl[y] leave before the 8th anyway and if you are coming then I can well and profitably wait until you want to go to Castine/.
Love,
Elizabeth
48. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 26, 1970
Dearest Cal: You must give up Essex and come back in September. Harriet is destroyed, deeply depressed. She needs you to start a new year in school, to help her, to be a part of her life. I do not think she can survive otherwise.
You cannot treat people as you wish to, you and Caroline. Caroline is deeply destructive and neurotic. You are leading a parasitic life, just like her other lovers. Poor Israel, coming around to see the girls.198 All the rich squalor, covering up for inability to feel and function. I was horrified that you asked Harriet to visit you in “your great country house.”199 It is not yours and I would never allow her to go into that kind of spoiled, negligent indifference. I do not like parasites. I feel astonished that you have become like a queen infatuated with England and as you said all the things “easiness”/ a rich girl can give you. She will destroy you, just as without even thinking about it—or if thinking about it, not being able to feel—she would destroy Harriet. This kind of anarchy and nihilism will certainly ruin you.
You are a great American writer. You have told us what we are, like Melville, you have brought all the culture of England, and of course even America and other countries have something, to bear on us, on our land, on your past, your people, your family. You are not an English writer, but the most American of souls, the most gifted in finding the symbolic meaning of this strange place. You are a loss to our culture, hanging about after squalid spoiled, selfish life.
You must, absolutely must, come back in September, help Harriet in school, give her love and a feeling of being wanted by a father, a man, get her possibly into what she wants more than anything—Abbot. A mother alone cannot do it. You must do this. And if you don’t, not only will she be destroyed, but your own dignity will. You may feel very arrogant and combative now, but you are [a] person too and you cannot lead that life. When it breaks up as it will, you will have destroyed everything here you have built up. You cannot go on living with Caroline in that unreal world, year after year vaguely noticing her children, going about with people like Sonia, living vicariously, leaving what means a lot to you. I mean a lot to you and you know it. I not only saved your life but I gave you freedom and love and humor. I want you to come home, in September, start new work of which there is plenty among your papers, prose projects[,] everything. I have contempt for your situation. I am not jealous of it, but horrified. How could I be jealous of Caroline? She is charming and pathetic and unreal.
Poor Bob. I don’t know whether their relationship was real, but he cared terribly and is suffering pitifully. I hadn’t spoken to him for a long time and that is why I hadn’t known it was Caroline. I had been talking to another friend a bit about my distress and troubling thoughts and I felt boring one friend was enough. He spoke very little, too pained and betrayed—no matter what illusion his love may have been based on. I love Bob with all my heart and I trembled for him. He, unlike you, couldn’t pursue Caroline in London because in spite of his rather inexplicable and somewhat comic love of rich English girls, he felt he had work to do in America, that this was his. I don’t mean to imply that he could have won her—although those are hardly proper conceptions with her, since the basic anarchic removal is so great. But he is working on, trying to do what is right, committed to what he knows, America, horrid place, but all that those of us who were born here and have minds can really make ours.200
I was astonished that you said you were worried about doing something for me instead of Harriet, that you knew you/ could do something for her. What do I need, if I don’t have your love? But she does need much. Were you thinking of a trip to your country house as doing something … a fantastic idea, in which she would be neglected and hardly fed if the servants were away.
I had thought of going to Long Island but a weekend there made me think I want for part of the summer my own house and my barn. At least now I can put up the pictures I like. I don’t know that I will go on in Maine if you tell me you are not returning in September. There is much I don’t like about it and I will have to discuss it with Harriet … I will miss her sorely … After speaking to you she didn’t want to go to camp but she must. Both Olga and Francine are near and are going to visit her to make her feel wanted and not rejected. I will come down once from Maine, at least, and call and write her. The school is a hideous problem. To me everything depends on it. I know how late it is and wonder if she can find a place in any school. We had utterly uprooted ourselves. I miss Barnard, which would have meant a lot to me, but they have filled my post for the year. Crummy, cruel thing for you two selfish little people there to do.
I will do as I please about your studio. I have rented my own to two girls and I would rather have it because it is nearer to my apt. but there is so much more stuff in yours and somehow I think of you there and can’t face two dreary girls in it. I have the idea of renting it off and on to people I know for a few weeks and using it for guests because I love having people but not in my apartment here.
I have, or will, write Harvard and Stony Brook that you are going to be away and will make a decision later since there is no rush. I would not consider having you sell the papers without having a week to delight in the study of them, but I cannot exactly agree that prices will go up. Your value will always go up, because you are a tremendous man. But the colleges are broke, libraries are broke, everyone is broke here.
Let’s see. Alice Meade was around the other day.201 Heroic, Women’s Lib character she oddly turned out to be without wishing it, brave life in a 72nd Street hotel. However, she wants Everard to give one of their houses and he won’t even speak to the lawyer and she wants some more money. But she is nice, odd, very like Aunt Sarah I thought in a kind of gay femininity and curious discipline.
I am going to try to get in touch with Marietta Tree, who has pull at the UN school, and I have talked with Bobbie Handman, whose daughter was a top student there. She says it is
very hard even to get an interview—and the year is over. But I have to try. If you never come back Harriet and I are going to Ivan Illich’s place202 next summer because she wants, she says, to learn Spanish really well quickly and then study the culture.
H. sat with Helen Epstein last night and it was a good thing perhaps for her to get out of the house. Barbara called me and said what a beautiful, really deep and special creature she thought Harriet was. I have a good daughter, although good is not the word, an original, beautiful, reserved, suffering girl of great moral beauty. I tremble when I think of the summer without her. She is the joy of my day and night, and the pain too because she is hurt/. I have known real love and I am, I suppose, blessed in that.
I am writing my few things, doing the dumb Vogue thing for Mary’s book today, having done Muriel Spark203 and Francine. That is all of that. Bob has many projects for me and I am writing my book about home again.204 Also, when I can’t sleep I am writing about you, a journal,205—but rather hard to know what “role” to play.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 10