The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979
Page 26
I go out all the time and seem to be on everyone’s list211 like the man in Dickens who is folded in and out like a leaf in a table.212 Dinners are dull often, but then again fantastic, peculiar things happen to you … I am glad life has taken a turn for the better there. Let me know your thoughts.
Love,
Elizabeth
* * *
Can you send me some information about where you will meet H. and what to do if you somehow miss each other for some minutes. The London airport is awful!
[Card enclosed]
These are youth fares and her flight back has to be reconfirmed from there or else she won’t be on it; state that it is a youth fare when you call Qantas on Friday, after her arrival.
Very important, Dad:
Arriving London 10:25 P.M. Qantas flight 530 … Thursday, March 23
Leaving London, Friday March 31 at 12:15 P.M.… Get to airport early. Flight 531
Qantas
194. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
March 1, 1972
Dearest Harriet:
I am fifty-five today. I thought I would be yesterday, I had forgotten leapyear. A day has been added to my life. What’s wrong with that addition? Or that if you take a fast plane you arrive here before you left? You can’t come soon enough. I’ve decided all Americans are terrific, that a dull or limp American is by definition impossible. But I’ve only seen four since Sheridan was born. He gets more and more distressingly extravert, lifts up heavy steel standing lamps, races past speed-limits on down corridors in his walker, and talks an unintelligible mash and gulp which he considers great conversation. He only smiles at me, though, because I never hold him over my head, and say, “You’re so manly, manly.” He has so many bigger women to survive.213
I hear through Blair, through some Dalton mother you’ve written a good poem—and I am in it. If this is so, we write the same way; I’ve put you in mine/—and you said every poem would need a footmark to be intelligible. Don’t sadden over the uncertainties of the trip and our meeting. Nothing will be quite the same, but you will find a second home, a second family. Everyone will love you, though you may find many of us childish.
The climate is getting colorful and warm for you—crocus and snowdrop, more birds, noisier birds, invisible leaves like the hair on Sheridan’s head.
All my love, and to Mother,
Daddy
195. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
March 4, 1972
Dearest Lizzie:
Sweet of you to remember old times, even my now rather rusty sight-seeing: the “horrors of the Vatican,”214 the mosque at Cordoba that didn’t look like a church, the Carpaccio with the dragon Harriet pitied,215 the poets’ feast, Grace Stone, and the many walks when we didn’t arrive quite where we intended, or when. Don’t worry, I have many things to go, romero,216 with Harriet. More than the pitifully short time will allow. I’ll make out a loose schedule when she comes. I had no intention of marching her in a caravan of small children.
Huyck van Leeuwen read of a theory in an Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, that Napoleon’s mobile Italian Campaign was controlled by fast dispatches from The Directoire in Paris.217 But they must have left something to Napoleon who was there. I’m here. The plans will be alright. But is anything alright? We make so many mistakes and age rubs them in, almost indelibly. God rest us all, and Tiny Tim.218
You must change the departure date. I teach till very late on Thursday afternoon, and then again on/ Friday morning. Friday night will be alright, tho the earlier plan would have been better. I know how hard and dark Harriet’s trip is for you. I mustn’t go into this. When she comes back you will wonder at some of your fears. When things loosen up, I’ll try and get to America—North America as my Essex Literature classes call it.
Love to you both,
Cal
196. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
March 9, 1972
Dearest Lizzie:
Sorry to scuffle with you on the phone. I have plans made out roughly that are much like what you and Harriet suggested. I don’t want things set much more than that—a London of a play, museums, the Tower, Regent’s Park, the City, nothing maybe a must, lots of solitary me, as much as … I know all the dark thickets of feelings; the visit must be a happy one. It will.
I thought maybe, and almost certainly I’d try to make a New York trip in late May or early June, before the colleges close and people scatter, so as before I could combine seeing you all, and look up old friends and cronies. I really haven’t been able to travel at all for a long time; except for my weekly drive to Essex. I don’t think I’ve been to London more than four times since Sheridan’s birth. All’s easier. Ivana comes home today, after two months I think—hard to tell because she lived in the hospital under constantly changing release-dates. Now she is learning to walk again, and should be back in school in a month.
By the way, I got a furious illiterate letter from a Johnny Milford, who had offered to become my assistant and apprentice, and who had been firmly declined by “my New York Secretary.” She only gave her title and typed signature, but I recognized the hand of the old rejector.219 The postcard was enclosed and an insulting dollar bill—“hey Cal.” I’ll spend the money in New York—to live off one’s parasites!
Want to read your Brontës. I do nothing but read books on subjects I’ve just taught without sufficient preparation, and won’t teach again. Only three more weeks teaching thank God—the load is light but the nervous burden heavy. Principally because when I ask an Essex student, if he doesn’t think act 2 scene 4 in Lear has most of the play’s struggles, the students start mutely thumbing their text. How do you teach, if the students don’t do your work? So, in life, in all things.
I lie awake, think of Harriet (and fear I’ll prove unworthy) in hope.
All love to you both,
Cal
197. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell220
[Barnard Hall, 3009 Broadway, New York, N.Y.]
Thursday, March 9 1972
Dear Cal: I am sitting here in my Barnard office waiting for Carolyn Kizer who has been on campus for a week or so & is coming to my class. She is just as memory will bring her back to you—large, exhausting, energetic, predatory, blonde, inclined to recitation of her “firsts”—first feminist, first n’west woman, etc. So … I haven’t seen your Berryman.221 Bob was to have brought it over last night when he came to dinner. Harriet sits on the floor barefoot at all my parties now, listening & talking. She sat through Marshall Cohen saying what John Rawls’ theory of a just society was & how Stuart Hampshire hadn’t understood it!222
* * *
Later
Sunk after lunch with C. K. who was drunk on vodka & then ordered a huge Chinese meal & so she is even more expansive & expanded than an hour ago!
Harriet will be on her way and I am sure all will go well. I am absolutely worn down with work, people, so many large & small deadlines.
Home, very tired, have cystitis (kidney infection) which Dr. Anny’s pills will have fixed up before this reaches you. Your Berryman epitaph here. I like it; it honors both of you. John was—I think—not a “character” that goes right down on the page; there aren’t too many details actually. He wrote; he drank. It was good to read it.
I am pleased about H’s chance to be with you. I have always kept that alive with her. You are her dear father. You say it is “hard and dark” for me. Something is “hard and dark” but not her trip to England. I do hope things will go well with your life there and that there will be some rest & peace accrued from Essex being behind you for another year. With love, Elizabeth P.S. Don’t forget to reconfirm Qantas home flight.
198. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
March 17,
1972
Dear Cal: I got the tickets today. The return is left open—the rules about the youth fare—but they will paste it on when you get to the airport for her return. Please be sure to call Qantas to confirm the flight back. Harriet will have the return flight number in her case and you have it. I am sorry she gets there so late for you in the evening, but I’d hate for her to be up all night also. Either way has some distress. She seems pleased to be going and will meet you at the door as they come through the customs. Bob says there is only one door. She’s very grown-up and will surprise you since she suddenly looks about twenty-one.
We are going to “Le Chagrin et la Pitié”223 tomorrow, four and one-half hours of documentary about Occupied France. Everyone says it is fascinating. I’ve been explaining to Harriet who Mendès France and Pétain are. On the night she leaves I am going to Othello at the Metropolitan.224 Englishmen are in town suddenly—Stuart again, Richard Wollheim. The elections, the primaries are very dispiriting.
I always feel I have a lot of gossip to tell you, but things never seem quite worth the “creative” effort, the typing. Gossip has to be awfully good to stand up to the page and I like it when it isn’t so ravishing, just faintly interesting.
I seem to be absolutely snowed under by mails, bills, phone calls, duties of all kinds and so I can truthfully say that I’m glad you’re not here! How did I ever do it? Right now I am getting ready to answer a courteous letter from the Polish Ambassador about rights to the Old Glory. I throw lots of Robert Lowell envelopes into the basket, and feel I’ve made a goal on the basket-ball court225 and am full of self-satisfaction; however, I do answer those that absolutely need it and the ambassador is writing because I didn’t answer so many times before. When one begins to have a little pleasure from his work then the duties pile up, mocking you. Remember Marianne Moore saying, “Not one has compassion!” Much love, dear, and have a good visit with Harriet. Send her back, even though I know you won’t want to.
Lizzie
* * *
So she will see you Sat. night at 10:30!/
199. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent Sunday
March 19, [1972]
Dearest Lizzie—
This probably won’t arrive before Harriet, but I have put in for a call to you this afternoon. Thanks for your lovely letter. Poor old Caroline Kizer, sharp as a thistle when we first met, now wallow, Seattle’s Sonia who is appearing today, quite gay if sober?
Sorry about your kidney. I live on mutually antagonistic pills. Nothing much wrong though but teeth. I feel my mouth is falling to chalk but the dentist will find only one urgent hole.
Ivana to the doctors’ surprise is already climbing the stairs. Because most of the water boiled on her middle it’s hard for [her] to stand straight like a ramrod, or rather walk upright. She’s to go back to school next month. In six years, she’ll have to have another plastic operation (less bad than this one) because she will outgrow her surgery. All done in half a second!
I wait for Harriet like a bridegroom, or a sinner waiting the priest. The weather has been heavenly for nearly a week, so warm it’s a relief to go in the windowless hall and cool from the heat. I know we’ll have a happy time. She comes with in the awe of full spring.
I can’t judge my Berryman. It looks denser in proofs. It’s fiction in a way, but may not be far from the truth. Anecdotes about John could be made up for miles by his cronies and students, monotonous, wearying, like Dylan Thomas’s, because the escapades even when they happened, lived on the imagination. I was on a program for him in London. It centered on a movie interview with Alvarez—John, close-up, just off drunkenness, mannered, booming, like an old fashioned star professor. His worst. I think of the young, beardless man, simple, brilliant, the enthusiast … buried somewhere with the older man.
Goodbye, my love. One seems to have no age in this season—I don’t mean I feel twenty.
Love,
Cal
200 . Robert Lowell to Mr. William Alfred
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
[March 20, 1972]
Dear Bill:
Many thanks for your letter bringing home the loneliness of being here without you. I wonder if you got the poems on here right.226 They are meant to be about Caroline and me, in a sort of pastoral analogue.227 If you took them [to] be about Elizabeth, they might be better … sadder and about more.—Food for thought, when I get a little more time.
On the Auden, I have been indiscreet. How could he stop speaking to me about a book he hadn’t seen.228 I think he’s not a snubber and has never stopped talking to anyone, except Rudolf Bing even then I think it was the Met he stopped talking to. Pretty rough to me, unpleasant too to wait for his appearance in England … to be cut. So, about ten-thirty at night, a too ardent hour, I sent him this cable: “Dear Wystan—astounded by your insult to me with William Alfred.” I didn’t mean to get you involved, but without naming you it seemed impossible to rescue my charge from complete vagueness. Well, now it seems Auden has been behaving this way lately when drunk and then doesn’t remember. I probably should have done nothing, but sending the cable made my life sweeter. I apologize to you. Poor Wystan, still marvelous and calm in things he writes. I think it’s desertion not marriage that cuts him. For some reason, though once warm, not intimate, friends, we have cooled more and more for the last four or five years. He has cooled, I haven’t and would be glad to stop it.
I am going to do everything not to make my book offensive to Lizzie; the poems you name could go without/ too much loss, but others couldn’t.
Love as ever,
Cal
* * *
Sonia Orwell is a few feet away waiting for a picnic; Harriet arrives Saturday.
“Fox Fur” and “The Messiah” [Flight to New York 1 and 2], “The Dolphin” manuscript, here, composed and revised between late 1970 and January 1972.229
201. Robert Lowell to Christopher Ricks
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent—phone Maid. 38028
March 21, 1972
Dear Christopher:
My book problems are complicated and I would like to ask your advice. My new book is a small one, some eighty poems in the meter of Notebook—the story of changing marriages, not a malice or sensation book, far from it, but necessarily, according to my peculiar talent, very/ personal. Lizzie is naturally very much against it. I am considering publication in about a year; it needn’t be published, but I feel fully clogged by the possibility of not/. My This/ awkward exposition shows my painful embarrassment.
I have two other books that are re-arrangement and rewriting 1) Notebook, now about 300 poems, and is called History, going through the ages from the reptiles to 1970. It takes me a hundred poems or so to get to Verdun, so the bulk of History is in my lifetime, often sometimes/ heavily autobiographical—The Twenties are mostly seen as my adolescence. 2) A/ short book, 60 poems, called For Lizzie and Harriet, which also comes from Notebook and is about my marriage. The My/ three books are related, though not in sequence exactly. The new one, The Dolphin, would come out by itself; the other two would come out as separate books under one cover. All would to/ be published at the same time.
I know so much published revision is silly, but the confusions of my composition, looking for my form etc. made it necessary. I am still making small changes on a fairly clear manuscript, and almost feel that I have made the improvements with in/ my powers and gifts. Afterwards, something new, but not before I get this my/ great load published.
I wonder if we could confer sometime toward the end of April? We’d love to have you stay here. / You see how all this involves your article.230
Affectionately,
Cal
202. Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell
[60 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Mass.]
March 21st, 1972
Dearest Cal:
I’ve been trying to write you this letter fo
r weeks now, ever since Frank & I spent an evening when he first got back, reading and discussing THE DOLPHIN. I’ve read it many times since then & we’ve discussed it some more. Please believe that I think it is wonderful poetry. It seems to me far and away better than the NOTEBOOKS; every 14 lines have some marvels of image and expression, and also they are all much clearer. They affect me immediately and profoundly, and I’m pretty sure I understand them all perfectly. (Except for a few lines I may ask you about.) I’ve just decided to write this letter in 2 parts—the one big technical problem that bothers me I’ll put on another sheet—it and some unimportant details have nothing to do with what I’m going to try to say here. It’s hell to write this, so please first do believe I think DOLPHIN is magnificent poetry. It is also honest poetry—almost. You probably know already what my reactions are. I have one tremendous and awful BUT.
If you were any other poet I can think of I certainly wouldn’t attempt to say anything at all; I wouldn’t think it was worth it. But because it is you, and a great poem (I’ve never used the word “great” before, that I remember), and I love you a lot—I feel I must tell you what I really think. There are several reasons for this—some are worldly ones, and therefore secondary (& strange to say, they seem to be the ones Bill is most concerned about—we discussed it last night) but the primary reason is because I love you so much I can’t bear to have you publish something that I regret and that you might live to regret, too. The worldly part of it is that it—the poem—parts of it—may well be taken up and used against you by all the wrong people—who are just waiting in the wings to attack you. One shouldn’t consider them, perhaps. But it seems wrong to play right into their hands, too.