Oh well, dearest Adrienne, it’s lovely you are writing. I hope to be briefly in New York around the first of May. I’ll spare you a lecture on repetition and change based on a trip to Norway and reading the Burnt Njal Saga. What could be less like our lives than theirs of honor and hacking, yet at every point a responsive cord is struck. In sad moments it seems that man and woman advance from one black bog to another. A To/ look at the worst, as Hardy says.50 And the joy is incredible too. Please forgive my chaffing, my heart is with you.
Love,
Cal
133. Harriet Lowell to Mr. Robert Lowell
[Postcard: Land’s End. Looking out from Hilton Head Island onto the Intercoastal Waterway.]
[Hilton Head, S.C., but postmarked Savannah, GA]
[March 29, 1971]
Dear Daddy,
Hi. I am having a great time. We are very sunburnt. The water is warm. I hope you are having a good time. There is not enough room on this card to say anything interesting.
Love, Harriet
134. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell
80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10
April 2, 1971
Dearest Harriet:
I have gone and come back from Norway, very “scenic” like Maine or Aspen, snow-topped/ mountains near large cities, pretty wooden houses on cliffs, an amber-colored drink that tastes of caraway seeds and is called the “water of life.” In Oslo, the capital, I went to a famous park where a man named Vigeland got a contract in the ’twenties to put up naked statues, then no one could legally stop him and he put up four hundred before he died. Everyone in Norway speaks English as well as we do, but they aren’t as bright, at least some of the people teaching American literature weren’t.
I started a story: “Aside from an occasional egg on the head and bacon behind my fins and cornpudding on my tail, life was very calm and nice. It rapidly grew much less nice, when a small chocolate-brown cat without foreclaws, but with terrible hindclaws and the bark of a police man began to haunt my sink, sniffing for fishblood. “You pig,” I screamed, flipping my tail, and hitting the beast on the head with a wet lump of cornpudding. “Your round,” replied Charles Sumner Lowell in a surly voice, “but wait till Old Missus has to wash dishes, then you’ll be left high and dry.” “I hope you croak on catfood,” said the sinkfish. “Why don’t you just stop breathing,” said Sumner. (You finish[.])
I’ll be in New York on the first or second of May, and will fly on to Indiana, then spend a few days on my way back.
Love,
Daddy (what a pretty signature)/
135. Robert Lowell to Robert Silvers, New York Review of Books
[Telegram]
LONDON
[received April 2, 1971, 2:45 PM]
ROBERT SILVERS
NEWYORK REVIEW
250 WEST57THSTREET
NEWYORK
I CANT TAG THIS TO A REVIEW COMMA BUT IT SEEMS MEANT FOR THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS PERIOD
POISENED BY MY FRESH IMPRESSIONS COMMA I FUMBLE FOR MY FIRST WORDS—NO ONE HAS A GOOD CASE AGAINST LIEUTENANT CALLEY51 PERIOD WHY SHOULD THE BAIT BE EATEN WHEN THE SHARKS SWIM FREE QUESTION MARK52 OUR PUBLIC UNDER THE HEAD OF STATE HAVE EXPRESSED SYMPATHY FOR CALLEY COMMA MORE THAN HUMANIZED HIM COMMA MORE THAN CONDONED HIS ATROCITIES—A SMALL STUMBLE COMMA PERHAPS FATAL COMMA [ON] OUR HURRIED ROAD FROM HIROSHIMA TO NOW PERIOD WE ACT IN DAYLIGHT SEMICOLON NO GROPING CIVILIAN CAN CLAIM TO SEE NOTHING PERIOD WEVE NO NEED TO WORRY ABOUT RETRIBUTION COMMA IT IS NEVER AN EYE FOR AN EYE COMMA ETC SEMICOLON IT NORMALLY FALLS ON SOMEONE ELSE PERIOD WE PLANT THESE TREES FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN SEMICOLON WE DARE NOT HYPOCRITICALLY OSTRICIZE PRESIDENT NIXON COMMA OUR OWN HUCKLEBERRY FINN WHO HAD TO SHOOT EVERYONE ELSE ON THE RAFT53
ROBERT LOWELL
136. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 9, 1971
Cal, dearest: I am not bringing Harriet to England. It more and more doesn’t seem the right thing to do to her. You are our only real concern in this and I am looking forward to your visit to us.
S. Carolina was a disaster. Rootless, village-less, condominium (whatever that is) country-club development on a lovely old island that was given to the Negroes after the Civil War—forty acres and a mule.54 The wind blew, many retired couples, many hot biscuits. Went to Savannah and Charleston for quick visits, each a long drive and the drives, flat, empty and not even a cabin with its wisp of smoke along the road.
There is a lot happening here, but all too complicated to go into. H. and I went to S. Carolina on the plane with Isaiah B. and Aline, who were enroute to Columbia Dickey-land.55 Had lunch with Stephen Spender yesterday. Bob S. and I went to Stravinsky funeral,56 but didn’t actually get into the chapel, all the seats having been taken.
Did I tell you Flavio committed suicide.57 Poor Elizabeth[.] She and Ted Hughes hear the tolling of the bell over and over.58
I must get to my work. Harriet is fine, but she doesn’t like to talk about what is happening to you, even though she does talk about you, as you were, with much pleasure and pride.
It is nice of you to come over to see us, no matter for how brief a time. Until then I am thinking about you with love and a good deal of worry. I have just written something about myself that says, “All I know I have learned from books and worry.”59 So, just think of my “worry” as the pursuit of knowledge.
Again, dearest love, to you always/
Lizzie
137. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell60
80 Redcliffe Sq., London Sw. 10
April 9, 1971
Dearest Lizzie:
You must be just returned from your southern trip, tanned and weary. These trips rather get one down, I’m still aching back into form from mild Norway. Tomorrow we go to the Hebrides. I think I may steal out of going to Purdue, since I’ll be seeing you and Harriet about a month later here. I really wish to see you both in New York, in expectation/, but the trips are hard, require weeks to sink back to one’s true self. So, I think not, but will wait ten days or so to make sure. Why take a lot of money just to break even talking about something I’m incompetent on?
Don’t you think everything is moral chaos now? Liked and immensely admired your Ibsen, maybe rawly near home. Or is it? So many phrases come back to me from letters in other foreign/ contexts, yet seem to stick glue/ to Ibsen.61 I think you should be vain of having put so much of yourself into the classic plots; I’m envious. Pardon this letter, I’m coming out of mild flu and irritatedly intuitive, or stupid./
Love to you and Harriet,
Cal
138. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
[33 Pont Street, London SW 1]
April 13, 1971
Dearest Lizzie—
Our letters seem doomed to cross. I woke up this morning silently saying Flavio, and for the first time in the twenty-four hours since I’d read your letter—realized how deeply terrifying his death must be for Elizabeth. Where is she? I’ve sent a cable to [her] Brazil address, saying “Dearest Elizabeth, can I help?” I do hope she is in this country. How almost like something in Hardy would it have been if the little group in Rio could have looked eight years ahead.62 Even Keith63 has had vicissitudes.
Think carefully about not bringing Harriet to London. Are you coming yourself? Of course it is all delicate and uncertain, and the success of her trip would have to depend on the moods of so many persons, so many swayed persons. Maybe you have been getting the wrong advice, from yourself among others. Anyway, it’s [a] great blow to me. I suppose I’ll make the early May flight, though the flying is like six hours of giving blood. For you and Harriet too!/ And isn’t really a serious and honorable assignment.
You seem to have found a curious new stylistic trick, the phrase, uncertain between two meanings, id est, [“]Harriet’s not interested in what has happened to you.”64 Happened has two meanings, but I don’t suppose you knew that you couldn’t have both. Poor Carolina Sout
h! It is nature wearing the mask of city slum. Sorry you didn’t have a better trip. Love to you both. I’ll be seeing you.
Love,
Cal
139. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 19, 1971
Dearest Cal: I despair of letters. Apparently mine do not say what I mean or feel and I’m sure I read yours wrongly also. No matter. If you say I wrote “Harriet isn’t interested in what is happening to you,” I suppose I did, but it is a fantastic untruth, misprint, something. I do know that sometime not so long ago I said you were the main concern, not London, the scene or anything else. I want more than my life to do what is best for everyone. Harriet is absolutely wonderful, beautiful, gay, doing well in every way. I have a horror of upsetting this before she goes off to Mexico, alone, brave, all that. Children her age, Cal, just don’t sit around talking about things about their parents that upset them. Adrienne says her children never mention Alf. But I do talk to Harriet about you, gaily, friendly, never denying that I miss you, but no longer bitter. I have been absolutely candid about everything, clear, sure, and she knows you are not coming home, everything. But after some longer thought I do feel that a short trip to England, back to the same for months, years, whatever, is rather bad just now. No, I will not be coming. I got the invitation after I had decided to bring Harriet—rather a strange coincidence. But, another thing, I couldn’t possibly pay for our trip, couldn’t begin to. The income tax is a nightmare; tomorrow 1969 will be audited and they always charge.… I feel the trip is much too expensive right now.
I very much agree about the exhaustion of your coming here, the general uselessness of the astronaut conference. It seems for such a short time, so dislocating, tiring. Do what you like and we will certainly understand. Harriet is fine, busy. All is well here. So it is up to you, but please believe that I see every reason for you not to come and I am being absolutely honest, honestly.
I guess we will go to Washington this weekend.65 It is a dedication and like dedications, repetitious, gratuitous often, not specially interesting or fresh—merely necessary.
I hope there is nothing askew in this letter!66 May God keep you[.]
E.
“‘I despair of letters…’” [The Burden 6], from “The Dolphin” manuscript, here, composed and revised between 1971 and January 1972.
140. Robert Lowell to Stanley Kunitz
[London]
April 25, 1971
Dearest Stanley—
I wrote the review knowing that many of the poems were written when death was near enough to you to put out your hand and touch it, and that you might be in that position when you read it. How lovely to know you feel tough again, back to your lifelong state.67 Once or twice, I felt I was likely to die. Can’t say I enjoyed the realization much, yet what a relief to have been there. Have we though? Someone said death isn’t an event in life, it isn’t lived.68 Thank God. You must be sick of people bothering you about my review. I wanted to put you dramatically, and think (without exactly admitting it to myself) I/ was angling for a good place in the Review.
Several of my books, especially Notebook, I assumed might be my last. Now with this one (No doubt it will be) I don’t. It’s about done, many taken out, many put in, total a little under 120, title Dolphin (a very different title than Crow69—which by the way I don’t like at all, tho I like him personally better than any other poet here)[.] I’m playing with/ the idea of bringing out the book in a limited edition, in a sort of Cummington Press run by Ted Hughes’ sister,70 about 500 copies, printed any way I want, expensive. That might be the most tactful thing I could do for Elizabeth short of burning the Ms. Then in a year or so I’d bring out commercial editions. I’d hate to leave the book in type if I were run over or something. Lawsuits between Lizzie and Caroline etc. Lizzie is the heroine, the eel I try to ensnare and release from the eelnet,71 but she will feel bruised by the intimacy. She should win all hearts but what is that when you are left, and left again in print?
Everyone in America seems to think this is too dire a time to breed. I had an impertinent lecture from Adrienne, but for us it’s a calming joy. We already have three rather lovely little girls, so the coming of another child is not alarming—tho always there is a frightening mystery and uncertainty. Caroline is comparatively physical, healthy, we breathe now as the cattle breathe. Caroline sleeping and eating double, looking as though she’d deliver tomorrow, tho it’s not till October 9[.] We mustn’t talk as if we were living in East Pakistan.
We live in the same house now, next week Caroline will take my name—this isn’t marriage yet, I don’t want to jostle Lizzie at all. Will the hailstones of the gods fall on me,72 if I say I’ve never been so happy, nor knew I could be?
Don’t know when I’ll reach America. Maybe in September. It seemed too jolting to come this spring. The plane trips in themselves are murder,—and so much else added! Oh my Dear, who to talk to? I love it here, but the English are generically horrible, just like New York Jews and New Englanders. Alas, I’ve been all three.73 But the countryside, and the eccentric changeful/ slowed pace of life here are lovely, not that feeling one sometimes gets in New York of screaming, metallic, poisoned ice.
all my love to you and Elise.
Cal
* * *
PS. We can’t make it to the Cape, either. It seems best to spend a quiet summer in Kent, where patterns can be repeated in a house Caroline has lived in/, broken in. The guy in the Tribune was as you say.74 Two errors. I really said that Shakespeare was such a success that he couldn’t [be] regarded as a model or typical of other writers.75 Also at the end, I meant to say that my living in England was not a/ symbolic gesture.76
141. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 26, 1971
Dearest Mary: I keep expecting copies of your novel, but haven’t received any yet. Bob of course had one but it went off to Pritchett immediately.77 Anyway I hope it is coming soon. I had put off writing you in the thought that the book was just around the corner. The Review people tell me that [they] have a splendidly interesting piece from you, the introduction to Neither Christ nor Marxism.78 I haven’t seen that either since I haven’t been on the premises for a few weeks.
Harriet, Barbara, Francine Gray, Rose Styron and a few others of us went to the demo. The church service, with the veterans, the night before was very nice, the march itself tiring but, well, at least there. There was no way to look upon it except as a personal dedication—repetitive, not especially interesting, merely necessary. It was a nice day, the numbers were pleasing. Then late Sunday night some idiots, Rennie Davis group, did the one thing that would drive the harassed American wild, held up traffic for four hours on the Pennsylvania turnpike. Counter-productive indeed. The march had been a wild success and I don’t think this last foolishness, over a day later, made any sense. Not that one couldn’t think of times when such actions would be proper, but not just now. The veterans were the main thing. And one young man, John Kerry, sane, intelligent, attractive really emerged with all his wounds and decorations from the crowd, suddenly providing that mysterious thing: leadership. He spoke before Congress and Senate, brought tears to old elected eyes. Otherwise, the slaughter goes on. It is, isn’t it, just like The Iliad, as S. Weil sees it.79 The fighting just can’t stop.
Long to see you. I have the feeling that from abroad poor old Babylon seems truly lost. And the Nixon people of course surpass anything we could have imagined. But still, the country is perhaps turning around in slow, hesitant steps. I feel hopeless about government but not about the people. Even the prospects for summer of 1972, for the Democrats, seem backward, but I guess we will need just to continue. It is interesting here, in any case, and doesn’t feel the way I imagine people living abroad think it feels. I ponder the whirling changes that seem to take place here over night, those quick, unaccountable shifts of attitud
e and feeling. Perhaps being attuned to such things is in itself a distorting talent, but it does seem to me that every six months is different from the six before. Some people think the students are apathetic from despair, but I believe, or try to believe, that they are radical, genuinely troubled but no longer foolishly destructive. There seem to be less fewer drug scenes, among the sensible at least. The March was much more calm, gloriously less stoned. The Panthers, the guns, the bravado seem wiped out, by the trials, the hopelessness of the whole strange gesture. It is horrible in its end, just as the beginning was horrible—like a peculiar dream in some awful African-Congo village.
Maine—when will you be coming? I guess Harriet and I will go up on June 14th, then I will fly back down for the weekend of the 4th of July to put her on her way to Mexico. She is very well, dieting with great courage and tenacity, has had a good year in school, and announced to me last night with a frown that we really had to start building a Socialist Party in this country. And I felt how sad it was that the Socialist Party didn’t exist, after its very brief—not so brief—blossoming around World War I. It is a strange lack; I guess the dear old New Deal really is the answer … About Non-Socialist Maine. It is about as far from what I need in my life now as anything could be. We have no place for vacations, holidays, Harriet doesn’t like it at this point. If it weren’t for you I think I would pull the cover over my head, after calling out an order for sale. But I can’t face it now. Instead, writing Link Sawyer to repay the inevitable damage of the foul winter.
I spoke to Cal this morning. He seemed quite together and so I hope he is well. Time is gradually liberating me from the pains of the past, by giving me new ones I guess. The only thing I worry about now is Harriet, but she seems so extraordinarily well that I accept that with trembling gratitude. I have been/ candid with her, have taken a positive attitude about the baby and Cal’s future and for the rest we talk about him only in joking and friendly memories of his odd ways. Children her age don’t seem to/ like to talk about their parents’ troubles—all that will come soon enough. So for the moment all is very well. I want her to get through Mexico happily without too much concentration on what has happened this year. We have a good time together, she has friends. I think everything is going to be perfectly all right for her.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 19