The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979
Page 14
Love,
Cal
79. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Sept. 17, 1970
Dearest Mary: Just a note to say I meant the quotation about Ivy Compton Burnett as an example of good writing.…304 And as another example, your wonderful letter was such a joy to receive this morning and I read it over twice for the pleasure of it. Ah, Philip. I would much rather have your delicious account than meet that creature in the flesh.305 He makes me so nervous somehow and leaves me with the feeling of my own insignificance that takes some time to cast off.
Here in New York it is actually very nice, cool, often bright, with something suspended, waiting … and not the revolution, as those inane young persons see it … but perhaps some return to sanity, or perhaps not. Seeing Nixon making a boring law and order speech, you realize that they are desperate and these vague banalities are all they have.306 But thirty or forty boring hecklers keep it alive when obviously we should ignore, at least in so far as public attendance is concerned, both Nixon and Agnew, let them go on talking and then do your own talking, at your own time. I can’t quite explain what I feel is different this fall. It may be fatigue with the peculiarity of our politics and it may not. Anyway it is very nice somehow, and all of a sudden different. One feels like trying to write well, trying to read again, trying to be happy and calm. All of this sounds foolish, but it is just a way of saying that the “crisis” existence of the last few years seems to have died down even though the very conditions remain and may even be worse. I am hoping to write my book that will be about Kentucky, myself in college, a little, and coming to New York, etc. I will try to be as removed from myself as possible and try to get the feeling of the thing. I have been talking it over with Jason307 or rather he called me to talk about my doing just this and what he thought were the possible themes that might make it a book of interest right now. Jason is a wonderful publisher in the sense of “exploiting” with great energy the things he likes and so I am somewhat buoyed up by the thought that, when I get the book done, he might “put me over.”308
I’ve had some letters from Cal and talked to him on the phone the day we got back. He has his own flat, or maybe it is just a studio. I can’t tell what mood or period, if that is the right word, he may be in and I try not to think about him. Every day brings new things of interest and painful as it is still I believe one cannot win with Cal. He will spare you nothing, least of all that terrible breeziness and casualness about the deepest feelings of your own life and, also, of his own.
Harriet is fine, I think. She’s back in school and very busy and talks on the phone from five to six without stopping and all of that is nice. The summer was beautiful in Castine. I like it more and more there, because you are there I’m sure, and Jim. But all the others are dear to me too, and the town, all of it.
Well, dearest love, Mary[,] and take up your book with a happy heart—if one can ever take up the hard, hard task in quite that way.309 What would be better is: take it up with confidence and pride.
Lizzie
80. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
33 Pont Street, London SW 1
September 18, 1970
Dearest Lizzie:
In a postcard you said you realized that there was nothing I could do about your problems.310 I was sad of course when I read this, and knew in a way you were partly true. The distance is far/ther than a hand can reach or mind can perhaps attend.311 Nothing for me to do, and as for my feeling it’s an acute, useless undifferentiated ache. I can’t imagine the inside of your lives, yet I am not free at all of what I’ve done to you.
Very soon I’ll begin my teaching and am pointing toward it—getting classbooks even reading them. It’s all very shadowy but I guess my feet are on earth. I do miss you both and would ask to be forgiven, if that had active meaning. All’s well. Do let us keep in touch, closely in touch till I come at Christmas.
Love to you both,
Cal
* * *
The last few days, after finishing Shakespeare’s Roman plays, I’ve had/ the London sights with a guidebook. The Tower is more Roman than Fellini’s Satyricon312 which I also saw.
81. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
33 Pont Street, London SW 1
September 25, 1970
Dearest Lizzie:
I see we are using the same ornate letter-paper.313 And if you were to use/ my old typewriter, it would be the same type or at least the same machine. So much for continuity. I would have written sooner, but I’ve been spending a few days in Amsterdam with Huyck and Judith.314
Adrienne came up naturally often in our talk but no one knew of the separation.315 I am sorry, knowing nothing about it. Mostly because Adrienne seems so such a/ matchstick, tho gloriously, to live by herself. Again, knowing nothing about the facts, I don’t think the separation will last long and because Adrienne will need Alf if she goes to the hospital again,316 and because after all they shared and agreed on many things. I don’t quite know how to write into her confusion and don’t know the address, but give her/ all my love. What are Street Schools?317
When I first came to England, people gave me quite a few old/ long pieces, so that naturally there seemed to be the world’s abundance and enthusiasm. I suppose I’m liked in one country about as much as another. These buildings can fall in a minute.
I do want to hear all your communication and gossip. It could never be too much. I too can’t state my feelings even to myself. The past is almost more with me than today. I look on it with all pride and joy, but it is piercing to look back, especially when I have no reproaches. Shall I say that I, or rather we, are alright? There’s much to be said at length at Christmas. Love to yourself and to my Harriet. She has gone into a void, but I can’t imagine she would find writing to me pleasant. In your next letter, quote something she has said.
Love,
Cal
82. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
33 Pont Street, London
September 28, 1970
Dearest Lizzie:
The enclosed is ambiguous.318 I don’t know whether I have a/ rough five thousand minus three thousand or the whole $4,700. I’ve written Bob319 to give you three in the probable second case, and one thousand in the first. Confusion infects; I am almost as muddled as Bob. I don’t remember signing any check in June, but seem to remember that you drew the royalties, as was right. We can make this a little clearer at Christmas.
I have been sightseeing in the strangely oppressive heat, saw a very hard small baby elephant and now recognize most of the London place names in Vile Bodies.320 Saw Poirier321 with Karl Miller, smart enough but the evening was enlivened by a frank argument on homosexuals. Poirier backed your halfattack on Hemingway,322 then went on at length to defend glorify/ him in general. Tomorrow I go trembling to school for the first time,323 and I hope for a library with/ more than the weekly literary reviews which I have been gorging. If there weren’t a paper strike, I fear I’d be reading the news down t[o] the sporting pages and movie ads. I want to get the money news off to you.
Love to you both,
Cal
83. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop
33 Pont Street
[October 5, 1970]
Dearest Elizabeth:
Didn’t I write about your beautiful poem?324 It’s the nearest thing you’ve written to a short story in verse—an I,325 you or not you, telling a naturalistic narrative, more heightened than prose fiction would accept, very personal, the way a short story can sometimes be, without too much stress, because you always, till well on in writing, seem to be just quietly talking. One of your poems that most stays with me. My dentist, I feel!/
I’ve written thirty more poems in the meter of Notebook, but somehow unlike Notebook in tone—more strained, the Romantic romance of a married man in a hospital. Mostly I’m not very very forthright. A few may be good, but I am disheartened by
the whole, and keep trying to comb out the unnecessarily grand obscurities I somehow began with.
Like you I depended on Bill for everything all my years at Harvard. Once I was a year behind on my health certificate. Perhaps much more, I depended on him for companionship. I could always drop in and have drinks or a dinner or meet students. Often they, not I, came to his house at four in the afternoon and left at four in the morning. Give him my love; today I am going to Essex to teach for the first time and dreading the undefined errors I am bound to make without Bill. Give him my love.
By now you will probably have fifty poet-appliers, manuscripts double at first meeting. I tried to cut them down to 12 but usually couldn’t. Then I made the mistake of letting in auditors, usually wives of physics professors, who wrote better often than most of the students in worn styles that couldn’t be digested by the students. Other classes were comfortably small but insultingly so. I had three for the Bible. Some were too large to talk, others too small. Yet the students mostly in the end were ideal, or at least in class they were. I don’t think you’ll have/ troubles. I almost always left a class happiery.
Natasha Spender speaking of her husband teaching English students for the first time/, says he is like a boy going off from home to school for the first time.
My “someone” is Caroline Citkowitz. She is 39/, has published stories in the London Magazine, has three very pretty daughters, oldest ten, and was once years ago married to Freud’s grandson, Lucian. You might have meant met; Caroline lived some time in San Francisco and later in New York, but you haven’t or she would remember. However she reads you with great admiration and thinks you much brighter than Mary whom she knows. What a bare list, but how can I make the introduction? She is very beautiful and saw me through the chafes and embarrassments of my sickness with wonderful kindness. I suppose I shouldn’t forget Harriet and Lizzie, anyway I can’t. Guilt clouds the morning, and though things are not embattled, nothing is settled. I’ll be back in New York for Christmas, then there will perhaps be more decision. I could be happy either way, if things could be settled. But nothing is. I am happy to be in presentable spirits.
This is somewhat in the mood of waiting [to] take a train to my new work later this afternoon. If only life could/ be as manageable as teaching. Didn’t Faust say this? England, I speak from the wisdom of a six months stay, is wonderfully unstirred after New York.
All my love,
Cal
84. Robert Lowell to Blair Clark
33 Pont St., London SW 1
October 9, 1970
Dear Blair:
When I first read your postcard, through some macabre mistake I read that Peter White had raised the list of class suicides to four—I only know of two excluding Al Clark.326 What a grim way of holding the suspense then suddenly springing it. Glad he’s alive.
I expect to come over to New York during the Christmas holidays. There’s a problem whether to come with Lizzie Caroline/. The only time she can come is before Christmas, while Lizzie wants me to come later when Harriet like Caroline’s children will be out of school. However, it seems callous humanly for me to arrive in New York, in Lizzie’s home city, with Caroline. Or am I being meaninglessly scrupulous? Until the divorce is made, and it looks as though it will, and that I will marry Caroline—it still remains uncertain in my mind. When friends of mine have been in this dilemma, I’ve always thought they should stop torturing themselves and everyone else, and make a quick clean severance. But it’s not easy, unless one becomes some sort of doll only capable of fast straightforward action.
I am beginning to teach and enjoy it, also getting away to London. Sometimes the change is small, tonight Caroline and I are having dinner with an angry young Hindu novelist whom I met in a pub near my sanitarium. Sunday, a higher life, the Spenders. Just talked to Mary finishing her novel and depressed; we’ll see her here in a few weeks. Hope you’ll see/ Joanna and all moves toward, not heaven, but paradise. I miss you. Could I or we stay with you in midDecember? Love,
Cal
85. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
33 Pont Street, London, SW 1
October 11, 1970
Dearest Lizzie:
This has been a gray warm Sunday until now at twilight it is cool and clear. For the last three or four hours, I have been home and on bed reading forty or fifty pages of Emerson’s poems for class teaching/. The unease of distance and severance are on me. He says of his child that his lips could pronounce “words that were persuasions.”327
Why don’t you write and tell me what is happening? I know it’s hard in this uncertain, changing time. You wrote something—like so many/ phrases and feelings in your letters, it stays with me—like it was hard to state your thoughts accurately, even in your thoughts.328 I feel that too, and so find it hard to write, though not-writing I’m afraid was always one of my gifts. Let me hear of you and Harriet, and at length, if you can.
Essex, my part of it, is enough like Harvard to sometimes seem [a] mirage. The same students, tho half audible from their good manners and foreign idiom, the same old classes, the same/ with fresh textbooks, a taxi drive along the Thames that is like the East River and even the Charles. I suppose my low-toned, conversational teaching is safe from the falls of ambition, but I feel wobbling in talking. You can seldom tell what students think, or what is perhaps more important, what good you’ve said. It’s all fairly pleasant. “The gentle lifesaver of routine,” as Emerson might have said, if he had had less soaring comforts.
Did you get the three thousand dollars? It deserves a note, even if it has already melted into the flow of costs. I really haven’t very much. I have enough, but wish I could hear.
Love,
Cal
86. William Alfred to Robert Lowell
31 Athens Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138
15 October 1970
Dear Cal,
Please write Elizabeth something clearest about what you mean to do. Your letters, written in kindness though they are, only serve to deepen her conviction that you are of two minds about the years ahead. That makes her miss you more, and understandably resent the pain your absence is causing her. And please be careful with Harriet. Send her little things from time to time. London has wonderful shoplets where you can pick up pretty bits of jewelry reasonably (the alleys off the Charing Cross Road, near the train station). She is at the age now where she could lose faith in everything for good, if it isn’t made clear to her why you won’t be with her. They say the fear of death is at bottom only our childhood fear of desertion come of age.329 I know you can bring her through that fear with your gift of for/ love and words.
Frank Bidart tells me he has an advance copy of the book, and he thinks it is a towering achievement.
I miss you, and pray for your happiness and well being.
Love,
Bill
87. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
October 16, 1970
Darling: This is the last of the letters. Please telegraph Harriet and me about when you are coming home for good. That is the only question, the only reality … All the rest is just foolishness on my part. We are utterly miserable, unbelievably wounded. I do feel as I say again that this is like a death. We can’t bear your photographs, anything …330 What you have done is very, very serious. All we need to know is when you are coming back. If you aren’t coming soon, then we absolutely must know. Please, please—tell us the answer right now. We cannot go on this way, and we will not.
I’m working and getting things in shape when I’m not writing. I feel as if I were preparing for my own death somehow. I can’t, if anything should happen, leave Harriet with all this confusing junk about, all the mixed up drawers stuffed with old things.
How horrible this is.
I have told her that I am asking you to let us know once and for all. I know you understand, as anyone alive would, that you cannot stay away until t
he end of the school year. That is out of the question … But you realize that … Anyone who can leave his family and never return can certainly get out of a teaching job by explaining how dearly, painfully he is needed back across the ocean … We love you my dear … You’ll be exhausted from these letters. But there will not be more unless you are planning to return to us. I cannot bear it otherwise, it is degrading, unnecessary and quite destructive for me to keep writing to someone who doesn’t care for me or for his daughter.
We long to have you open the door, to laugh, play music, have you call from your phone upstairs, have a bourbon, fuss, kiss you, have grape-nuts, clean up your studio, kiss Harriet in the morning, look at Sumner on the blue chair, have dinner with in our dark orange dining room, see your little white seal in its window, the crushed tin from the explosion on 11th Street,331 your books, your poems, your writing, your oldest jokes and your newest,—and to look after you forever, and to have you look after us. WE NEED YOU. We really need you.
Lizzie
* * *
When are you coming home?
88. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[Telegram]
[New York]
OCT 16 PM 5.13 [1970]
ROBERT LOWELL
33 PONT STREET
LONDONSW1
MANY LETTERS ON THEIR WAY332 STOP THANKS FOR THE MONEY STOP
HARRIET AND I ARE GRIEVING PITIFULLY STOP SHE IS ONLY 13333
STOP PLEASE COME HOME LOVE