The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979
Page 32
So, addio once more. Harriet would send love if she were not out in the storms. From within, lamplight, Emily Brontë and E. Wilson on my crowded desk I send my own greetings.
Love,
Elizabeth
234. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick
[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent, England]
[February 13, 1973]
Dearest Lizzie;
I am in a stupefying muddle of mind from several weeks of work and now a touch of flu. This letter will show it. Then I’m in a snarl on how to get money out of England. Living in two countries almost doubles the forms and stops. The money thing will work out, but it’ll take two weeks or so to clear. As it stands, I can’t pay the lawyers’ bills. I don’t know if I can pay anymore than that./ I’m putting off Frank’s painting as a wild extravagance[.]15 My check to him made out at the gallery after a Parker lunch had three inconsistencies and errors in it. My accountant will be someone that Caroline’s lawyer Henry King (Denton, Hall etc.) 3 Grays Inn Place will find for me. Meanwhile I see Henshaw tomorrow, the only person who knows my ramifications. I left (?) my marriage license with Bill Alfred, and in any case it will have to be rewritten by Iseman16 in English. Harvard papers/ at a standstill. Debts, immigration—I expect to be deported from England, refused entry to America, jailed or fined in both countries. This sounds wild.
I see I have no Blake in my library, but isn’t Daughters of Albion one of those vague bombastic long-lined Ossianic things? His only long poem I find wonderful [i]s Marriage of Heaven and Hell,17 as good as Nietzsche or Rimbaud’s Saison.18 My library doesn’t have my preface to Sylvia Plath. As I remember, it was quick and tender. There was a similar ghastly Plath meeting here last spring, with Greer who could read poetry to illustrate her points. I’ve hardly met the real Lesbian storm troops, but I think they talk like hysterical Negroes and other fanatics—the meaning of words, the object they denote mean nothing. Glad you saved me, if you could bare. Your Woolf has something people will quote on her—rather Bloomsbury writing (university people with a style) on Bloomsbury.19 Can’t understand you on Carrington and Strachey (Have you read her letters?)20 Then Strachey’s best books are more inspired and readable than anything by the group21 except Passage to India.22 And then Leslie Stephens,23 admired by Leavis and J. [R.] Lowell? But more startling, what are your 100 pages? More of woman? It’s your most passionate writing and therefore best.
What about Harriet coming here in her vacation? I’d love so to have her. Our local antique dealer is looking for a beautiful old picture/ frame. If she comes I’ll have to know the dates as soon as possible. I wonder if she wouldn’t enjoy an early April trip to Italy, Brookses, Anzilotti, poets etc.
I so sympathize with your positive will-lessness. I’ve had none for anything practical for weeks.
Love,24
* * *
Let me know if I can sign anything to help with the Trust transfer. Do they think I am not in my right mind? Ever? But maybe that isn’t anything to do with it. It’s like a very cold end of April American day here—green with no leaves, a great shushing gale blowing outside that could move a sailboat if one were in my room.
235 . Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
February 16, 1973
Dearest old Caligula:25 Yes, the vacation is drawing near. And indeed Harriet will spend it with you. She is delighted at the possibility of Italy or whatever you decide. Just let me know by a soon mail.
Here we are: Leave here Thursday Morning, March 22, get to
London that night. (Ha!)
Return Saturday March 31st (that is the latest).
When you let me know your plans I will get the tickets.
No, the boring, expensive business with the trusts has nothing to do with you, but merely with the question of whether all that was decided at the divorce can really be carried out … I do need the name of your tax man in order to do your American tax, but I guess all I need from them are the Essex things, anything from Ashley-Famous, etc. I am very distressed for you that your F, S. and G. earnings were so low this year; however with the flooding of the market you are planning26 perhaps that will be altered! I am trying to get an extra teaching job for next year. My great worries are daily things, the enormous maintenance for the apartment, food, house-hold things, tuition … One thing we managed was for both of us to feel poor. However, I refuse to consider that for very long and find I am skidding along from day to day extraordinarily well.
… I don’t like Carrington’s letters as well as you do, I guess. I like her devotion, but the rest just seems too cut off from anything except the immediate. Also I have as I said not learned much from Leslie Stephen; he just isn’t quite right on C. Brontë or George Eliot, a little thick somehow.27 But I will look again, as I trust what you say more than any idea of my own. Lytton Strachey is a good writer, but Eminent Victorians28 is less so than I once thought—lighter. Yet it is one of those things that brings something new to you and makes you think you have always known it, even grown tired of it, later.
I had a wonderful long letter about my Woolf article/ from Mrs. L. C. Knights and a real masterpiece from Mary McC. about James’s punctuation.29 Gosh, I read something beautiful last night: Blackmur on Emma Bovary!30 Also I am reading W. S. Merwin’s new book,31 very bare, stripped, plain, and moving in a peculiar way. About Daughters of Albion there are the cumbersome Oothoon and Theotormon and other mighty personifications I can’t understand at all, but some of the passages are absolutely striking and were I not edging toward 6 P.M. I would copy out some for you.
My 100 pages are mostly adding, almost doubling each essay, and doing one long new one and then finished.32 I am fed up with Woman and Women and want to write something utterly different.… Violet Parker was here on Sunday, very lovely and dear.33 I am going to visit Dr. Arendt this evening. Mary McC. is coming again soon. She and Susan S.34 go back and forth very often and that is nice both ways I think. Mary has a number of lectures, one in S. Dakota—not a tour, just single things. You will be here in the fall, so that if the old countree35 brings forth any stab of longing36 I suppose it will be more than assuaged then. It will be nice for the old country, too, and so … let me see. Yes, I saw a reprint in an anthology of your essay on Randall:37 absolutely beautiful and I thought to put up my own pen in shame and take up sleep. Let me know immediately if you want H. in London, etc. and about who can send me the meagre tax information we will need. Much love,
Elizabeth
236. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Elizabeth Hardwick Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
February 23, 1972 [1973]
What a lovely letter!
Dearest Lizzie:
I think the Italy with Harriet is almost impossible because the Italian colleges have vacation at the same time as she, and then open again in April. Also all of our children (including Sheridan who is on perpetual vacation) come home or are off from the Convent then. I think we should do as we did last year, a few days here and a few days in London. Sightseeing, tho less rigorous. A few people under fifty for her to meet. Plays, movies, talk. I am coming to admire the depths of reality open to even the wooliest person past fifty and under sixty, but that’s an acquired taste not attainable at sixteen. How I will love having her. I thought she’d forgotten. Leslie Stephen certainly is not Arnold, as Housman points out somewhere38—nor is he Bagehot. His pieces seem all one material, which makes for monotony and, even now, a graceful encyclopedic usefulness. Blackmur, when you break the crust[,] has a wonderful love of what he is writing about[,] a strange grace of style forever troubled and cleared.
I’m reviewing Larkin’s Oxford Modern anthology, and have done a draft yesterday—at the moment and maybe in the end—my worst prose. The anthology is only the English, but my main throw is a comparison of English and American. I start finding no difference and end with the opposite, though I have no ingenious theory
or desire to prove. It’s more like knowing two people apart.
We see Mary tonight and Esther and Peter Tuesday. Mary thank heaven got rather a rave on her Medina from Roy Fuller in the Listener or New Statesman.39 She must have thought once with the Birds that any notice would be a knock. I expect this with my outpouring.40 If the[re] were two, not three, I could subtitle them Two Rights can’t make a Wrong. O talking of Ashbery, tho I can’t penetrate his expert verses to much substance enjoyment/, I like his reviewing. Whether he’s right—Wheelwright is eccentric, but Whitman and Stevens even aren’t particularly—he makes one determined to reread and reconsider.41 I’ve just been thru Derek’s long autobiographical42 and on the first blush of enthusiasm, wrote him a rave. I daren’t read a second time, there’s a lot of unsteady poetic soaring, still the book has dazzling local color, and perhaps more important gives the feeling of having arrived open red-eyed at middle-age.
You seem to be working at a white heat. While you can you should, as you are doing, pack all you can without making a very big book. Did you read Fiedler’s silly Shakespeare book, not big, not good, vulgarizing every current issue?43
Two things should show in this letter: my gratitude for yours, for Harriet, and that I’m in the middle, tied in knots in the middle of my review.
Love,
Cal
237. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent, England
February 23, 1973
Dearest Harriet:
I’m so happy you are coming! This trip won’t be so new or so strange. You’ll be able to picture what you are coming to and choose a little. You won’t have to resee Canterbury, that red brick school (Or was that with the Taylors?)[,] Waterloo, the flea-market. On the other hand, Sheridan is much faster, badder, heavier, noisier—he continuously makes a sound like a pot of boiling water filled and wheezing and thumping and china mugs. The expression everyone uses about him is He’s so tiring. A month ago he had five words, now he has none and puts the energy into forever running (he never walks) refusing to go where we want him, and bringing one untimely us the wrong/ objects. He just brought me a letter I’d finished to Mother and which he had started to crumble44 to make it smaller and more convenient.
I think we’ll split the time between here and London. There’s enough to do and a lot to see. Anything you can think up, I’ll try to fulfill.
When you came a year ago, I’m sure you had many clashing thoughts, and many questions that couldn’t be answered ahead of time or on the plane. I think I lay awake most of some of the nights before frightened and wondering if you would like what you found. It was something one was unaccustomed to[,] like riding a horse or climbing a tree for the first time—like going to a new country, but much more than that. We can’t have that year again. This visit will be more like the rest of our lives. It’s strange, after these three years of swimming the ocean to be walking on land.
All my love,
Daddy
238. Harriet Lowell to Robert Lowell
[Telegram]
[New York]
[Received] 1 March 1973
MR ROBERT LOWELL MILGATE PARK BEARSTEDMAIDSTONEKENT
= HAPPY BIRTHDAY FROM THE LITTLE MUDDLER + LOWELL45
239. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
March 2, 1973
Dearest Cal: Here, in haste, are the facts of Harriet’s visit[.] It will be only one week because that is all they have, with a day or two on either end. She will come on Friday, March 23rd and return Friday, March 30. I will write all this once more, but I just want you to have the exact dates so that you will be free. Again she won’t be getting in until nearly 11 your time.
Arrive, BOAC, Flight 213 at 10:40 P.M. London Time. Friday March 23rd. Since she is going youth fare, considerably cheaper than regular[,] she cannot have a definite confirmation back, but must absolutely confirm from London when she gets there.
Unconfirmed return: Leave, March 30, BOAC, Flight 501
at 11 a.m.
Can you please tell me who can give me information about your English earnings, immediately. Henshaw or who? I will be doing your tax for you this year; it is immensely complicated and I must start. Please send me the name and address by return mail. I have to have everything from there quite soon and haven’t even sent the request yet.
I have looked into the Larkin anthology. Where will your piece appear? I understand there is some disappointment in his selection. I have also received Derek’s book. Very moving isn’t it? He’s truly a lovely soul and he has brought all his possibilities together: the traditional poetry, West Indies, black, all of it … It has been a somehow strange winter here in New York: a sense of rush has so wormed itself into my being that I suppose a sense of leisure would come down upon me as unwanted, a sort of depression. And yet I feel I can’t experience anything as fully, purely as I would like. Perhaps it is just as well to fly about as lie about. And yet when you awaken to a blue, clear icy day, as this day is, it surrounds you like a soothing water and you wonder if it isn’t all a dream and what joy to sink silently into it.
So! Anyway heartless, grey March dawn for tomorrow, with the truck grinding the night’s paper from ABC.46
The accountant, and address. And you will be seeing Harriet just three weeks from today! Addio.
Love,
Elizabeth
240. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Elizabeth Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
March 5, 1973
Dearest Lizzie—
It’s still Henshaw, Michael, 22 Park Sq. East, London. I’m in the process of shifting to Caroline’s lawyer, but this takes time. Henshaw absolutely promises to get the figures to you as soon as he has them and quickly.
I’ve finished the Larkin in a way but see that I hardly mentioned either Larkin or the English. It’s a responsible carefully weighed rather thrilling anthology, more names than can be counted, too much justice rather than not/ too little.
Thrilled to have Harriet’s business settled. I had a sweet wire from her, “Happy birthday from the Muddler* Lowell.” Tell her her father is so muddled he can hardly put anything down—paper, cigarette-lighter and find it again.
Esther is here from visiting Dixey in Wales. I’ll get this off.
Love,
Cal
* * *
Saw Mary who finds your Jane C. as exciting as I do.47 Now that your book is near I’ve grown careless of saving your pieces—could you send me copies of your two women and also to Esther who has just arrived and whom I disappointed by having lost my Reviews.
241. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
March 16, 1973
Dearest Cal: Harriet will be there as planned, 10:40 BOAC/ your time, Friday night, at Heathrow. Here is the problem I want you to have in mind. She has no reservation back. Again it is the youth fare problem, but the saving is several hundred dollars. The night she arrives please go to the BOAC counter with her ticket and get the reservation back for the next Friday, March 30th. I hope she can get on the 1 o’clock plane: they seem to be rather crowded and it is very important to get space back that night, or call the next morning if something goes wrong. I’ll have to be cabled so that I can meet her, flight number and time. On Saturday, the day after she goes to you, I am going to Nassau for a few days with Grace, but I’ll be back in the middle of the week. It isn’t necessary to call me from England[—]just so that I know when H. will be arriving, by cable. Harriet seems very pleased to be going off, pleased to see you, and she says she loves London.
I hope Henshaw will answer me immediately. Our taxes are very difficult this year and I must have all the material by April 1st. Money is an incredible problem for me. I hope to have another teaching day next year—both terms—and I think it will be in Columbia College, where I will teach a real course in Modern British Literature.
I hope after this year to get something rather fancy lined up with a big salary. I have lots of offers but away from New York and I can’t take that. I never want more than two days anyway; this is the last period in my life in which I want to stop writing. Did you get a letter or a call from City College—the figure they were talking about for you was $37,000! I said there was some possibility you might be interested for year after next (it would be the whole year, I think) but anyway I gave them your address and phone.
Frank Parker and Judy are coming for dinner. I haven’t asked anyone else and I look forward somewhat to the meeting, but also with a feeling of oppression too. I haven’t anything to say to Frank. He hasn’t taken in anything new for so long and dear, eccentric as he is I can’t look forward with a whole heart to trying to catch murmurs of our common past. I do think he’s attractive in every way, of course, rare, but he’s troubling too—not that I feel vulnerable anymore. Just a bother to try to project to him what you are, through his haze of wine and nostalgia and something very fixed, like a wall, about his relations.
Mary was here. I didn’t have any real talks with her, always at parties and lunch toward the end, but never alone. She is grand as always. Stephen is coming, but I am going to be in Nassau most of the time he is here. Hope for the end of the week to have him for dinner. (Why I go into these small social notes I don’t know.[)] Let’s see for [“]something higher…?” Higher, nobler? Jan Hughes48 died and I felt sad indeed. I am still reading a lot of poetry. Perhaps I will write about it one of these days. Have even written three poems, but they aren’t “finished!” I am not sure how poems are put together and reading doesn’t really tell me what I wish to know. I hardly think I will flower and flourish on this. The trouble is how to make it new!49 I have been corresponding with Merwin—hysterical chapter in Alone in America about him, with a vocabulary of some mad talking machine. Merwin the Preterist—then faineance, aporia, fewmets(!) and lagniappe.50 Look those up in your pocket thesaurus. I must say, knowing how you feel otherwise, that I like Howard. Sat next to him at dinner the other night and we talked of what we had learned from Cal! Und So. Goodbye, do the reservation, send the cable, needle Henshaw, enjoy Harriet, have a lovely, lovely time.