172. Omar Pound, son of Dorothy and Ezra Pound.
173. Dorothy Pound.
174. Lowell: “if we see a light at the end of the tunnel,|it’s the light of an oncoming train” (“Since 1939” 45–46, Day by Day [1973]).
175. William Empson: “A steady iron-hard jet of absolutely total nonsense, as if under great pressure from a hose, and recalling among human utterances only the speech of Lucky in Waiting For Godot” (“Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” British Journal of Aesthetics 2, no. 1 [January 1962], reprinted in William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture [1987], p. 148).
176. See, for example, Tate’s letter of May 12, 1970, quoted above in footnote 5 on page 18.
177. Ian Hamilton: Lowell’s lithium treatment “seems to have begun shortly after his discharge from McLean’s in the spring of 1967” (Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 359).
178. Ecclesiasticus: “The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise” (38:24); Samuel Johnson: “Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes,|And pause awhile from Letters to be wise” (“The Vanity of Human Wishes,” 158–59). See also Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann,’” 71–76, quoted in footnote 1 on page 37 (Lowell to Hardwick, May 17, 1970).
179. Near Blackwood’s country house, Milgate Park.
180. In Hardwick’s hand.
181. Kathleen Spivack, “In the Midst of Life: Notebook 1967–68 by Robert Lowell,” Poetry, June 1970.
182. Allen Tate, The Hovering Fly and Other Essays (1949); “Dear Elizabeth, Thank you for sending The Hovering Fly. I believe that completes the list of items, and I am most grateful” (Tate to Hardwick, July 17, 1970, HRC).
183. Bishop to Dr. Anny Baumann: “I think I’m taking on the job of poetry reviewing for The New Yorker—something I’d really like to do. It is just 4 or 6 times a year—and one can write about what one wants to, I gather, so I think I could do it all right, and it would be a small source of ‘security’ (much needed)” (Bishop to Anny Baumann, March 7, 1970, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux [1994], pp. 519–20). Bishop abandoned the idea; see Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, ed. Joelle Biele (2011), pp. xl–xli, 306, and 314.
184. Isaiah Berlin: “I think the cleverest woman I ever met is […] Elizabeth Hardwick. Elizabeth Hardwick has a feminine mind. Much more bitchy than Mary [McCarthy]’s, but sharper and more original” (Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy [2000], p. 269).
185. Linda Charlton, “Penn Central Is Granted Authority to Reorganize under Bankruptcy Laws; No Cut in Service; Step Blocks Collection of $75 Million in Debt Due by End of Month,” New York Times, June 22, 1970.
186. Lowell: “We can’t swing New York on less than thirty thousand” (“Transatlantic Call” 1, “The Dolphin” manuscript); “We can’t swing New York on Harry Truman incomes—” (“During a Transatlantic Call” 1, The Dolphin).
187. Engraved cards that read: “EDMUND WILSON REGRETS THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM TO: READ MANUSCRIPTS, WRITE ARTICLES OR BOOKS TO ORDER, WRITE FOREWORDS OR INTRODUCTIONS, MAKE STATEMENTS FOR PUBLICITY PURPOSES, DO ANY KIND OF EDITORIAL WORK, JUDGE LITERARY CONTESTS, GIVE INTERVIEWS, CONDUCT EDUCATIONAL COURSES, DELIVER LECTURES, GIVE TALKS OR MAKE SPEECHES, BROADCAST OR APPEAR ON TELEVISION, TAKE PART IN WRITERS’ CONGRESSES, ANSWER QUESTIONNAIRES, CONTRIBUTE TO OR TAKE PART IN SYMPOSIUMS OR ‘PANELS’ OF ANY KIND, CONTRIBUTE MANUSCRIPTS FOR SALES, DONATE COPIES OF HIS BOOKS TO LIBRARIES, AUTOGRAPH BOOKS FOR STRANGERS, ALLOW HIS NAME TO BE USED ON LETTERHEADS, SUPPLY PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT HIMSELF, SUPPLY PHOTOGRAPHS OF HIMSELF, SUPPLY OPINIONS ON LITERARY OR OTHER SUBJECTS.” See Jeffrey Meyers, Edmund Wilson: A Biography (2003), pp. 248–49; Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (2005), p. 448.
188. Lowell, Prometheus Bound (1969).
189. (1970).
190. Nancy Schoenberger: “Blair Clark is a tall Boston aristocrat” (Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood [2001], p. 211).
191. Silvers.
192. Lowell: “And that new woman— when I hear her name, I have to laugh” (“From my Wife” [The Farther Shore 1] 8–9, “The Dolphin” manuscript; see poem on page 260); “… That new creature,|when I hear her name, I have to laugh” (“Voices” [Hospital II 1] 8–9, The Dolphin).
193. Lowell: “She tells/ me to stop, we mustn’t lose your money” (“Transatlantic Call” 14, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Cf. “During a Transatlantic Call” 14, The Dolphin.
194. Robert Silvers objected “on factual grounds” to this and other statements in this paragraph (Silvers, email message to editor, December 22, 2016).
195. Nancy Schoenberger: “With her inherited share of the Iveagh Trust, Caroline […] bought a brownstone at 250 West Twelfth Street” in 1959; “in 1964, Caroline gave birth to another girl […] named Evgenia and called Genia. Soon, the beautiful townhouse […] with its good furniture and paintings by Francis Bacon, began to look more like a bohemian household with young children—which is exactly what it was. It was chaos”; “Caroline first met the poet [Lowell] in 1966, the year of Ivana’s birth […] Silvers had brought Caroline to a number of dinner parties at the Lowells’ as his guest” (Schoenberger, Dangerous Muse, pp. 139, 145, and 154). Caroline Blackwood to Ian Hamilton: “when I was with Bob [Silvers], he used to take me to dinner at West 67th Street. And I couldn’t speak. I’d been told—which was nonsense—that Cal couldn’t speak about anything except poetry. That was the legend about him: everything else bored him. If you know that about anyone, it’s terrifying. So there were these ghastly silences. I thought it was better, if he only wanted to talk about poetry, not to talk at all—better than to say, ‘Do you like Housman?’ or that kind of thing. So I just used to sit absolutely silent. I was always put next to him. And it used to be my dread. To break the silence once, I said I admired the soup. And he said, ‘I think it’s perfectly disgusting.’ And then we had a silence” (Robert Lowell: A Biography, pp. 397–98).
196. Freud, whom Blackwood married in 1953; they were divorced in 1959, when she married her second husband, Israel Citkowitz (see Schoenberger, Dangerous Muse, pp. 138–39). In 1970, Blackwood was still married to Citkowitz.
197. James West, Mary McCarthy’s husband.
198. Israel Citkowitz and their daughters Natalya, Evgenia, and Ivana.
199. Blackwood’s house, Milgate Park.
200. Robert Silvers objected to statements in this paragraph (Silvers, email message to editor, December 22, 2016).
201. Alice Winslow Meade, Lowell’s maternal first cousin, who was married to Everard K. Meade, Jr. until their divorce in 1969.
202. Centro Intercultural de Documentación in Cuernavaca, Mexico; see Lowell, Mexico 1-12 in Notebook69-1, -2, and Notebook70; and Mexico 1-10, For Lizzie and Harriet (1973).
203. Hardwick, “The Driver’s Seat: ‘Purest Confidence,’” Vogue, October 1, 1970.
204. A writing project that emerged from Hardwick’s “Going Home in America: Lexington, Kentucky” (Harper’s, July 1969) and eventually became Sleepless Nights.
205. Hardwick: “Re. my ‘Notebook,’ I told Cal I was writing a sort of memoir, putting it in a handsome leather book with fine paper which had been given to me as a present by John Thompson. Cal had certain grandiose ideas about this ‘Notebook,’ also known as, my title, a joking one, ‘Smiling Through.’ I did very little of it, came upon it later and threw it away. Cal, I think, hoped it would be deliciously acerb and ‘interesting.’ Instead the little I wrote was sentimental and I tore it up like many another false start” (interview with Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 503). Cf. the title “Smiling Through” with “Those two eyes o’ blue|kept smilin’ through|At me!” (Arthur A. Penn, “Smilin’ Through
” [1918]); and with Jane Cowl’s play Smilin’ Through (1919).
206. The Life of Ezra Pound (1970).
207. Unpublished. Hardwick had written about Dreiser in “Fiction Chronicle,” Partisan Review 15: 1 (January 1948); and would later write about him in both “Mrs. Wharton in New York,” New York Review of Books, January 21, 1988, and “Wind from the Prairie,” New York Review of Books, September 26, 1991. She wrote about Crane in “Anderson, Millay and Crane in Their Letters,” Partisan Review 20, no. 6 (November–December 1953).
208. Hardwick to Darryl Pinckney, who had asked whether Lowell commented on the “intellectual content” of her essays: “I must say he often looked discomfited on that score. Sometimes he thought I was too snippy […] I remember in one of the first issues of The New York Review I wrote a piece about a biographical book on Robert Frost. It was more or less mild, but Cal was quite annoyed—annoyed for a short time. I noticed in Randall Jarrell’s letters that he gave a bit of approval to my Frost essay and so I said to myself, Okay, Cal? On the whole, Cal was encouraging” (Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Art of Fiction No. 87,” interview by Darryl Pinckney, Paris Review, no. 96 [Summer 1985]).
209. Cf. Henry James, The American Scene (1907); and Hardwick, “On Washington Square,” New York Review of Books, November 22, 1990.
210. Quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 399 (ellipses are Ian Hamilton’s); original letter is now missing.
211. See Hardwick to McCarthy, June 25, 1970, footnote 1 on page 64.
212. Peter du Sautoy, vice-chairman of Faber in 1970.
213. Matthew Evans.
214. Saul Bellow: “He had fallen under a spell and was writing letters to everyone under the sun. He was so stirred by these letters that from the end of June he moved from place to place with a valise full of papers” (Herzog [1964], p. 1).
215. McCarthy: “I saw Cal just now in London […] and spent an evening with him. He talked a lot about you, with a good deal of rue and tenderness. […] My impression as a veteran of all these wars, including Cal’s bouts of psychosis, is that he isn’t manic. Excited but rational and in some part of him calm. So far as I can judge, he is serious and Caroline too. The summer will doubtless show. The news was very shaking when I first heard it (by telephone). […] I am so eager to talk to you. What wasn’t clear from Cal’s conversation was your state of mind. Maybe it is Panglossian to think so, but this could be looked on as a blessing. I hated to see you so unhappy last summer. But this is nothing to be talked about in a letter. I feel too much in the dark” (to Elizabeth Hardwick, June 25, 1970).
216. I.e., for Harriet to visit Lowell in England (see Hardwick to Lowell, Saturday, June 27, 1970, above).
217. Jean Stafford (Lowell’s first wife) lived in Springs, East Hampton. McCarthy: “We’re so pleased you’re coming to Castine. Selfishly and unselfishly. Long Island would have been awful. I suppose you had thought of the presence of Jean, which for me in itself would have been a deterrent” (to Elizabeth Hardwick, June 27, 1970).
218. Daniel, Alison, and Jonathan West.
219. All Souls College.
220. Ian Hamilton: “On July 9 [thus—but compare date of Hardwick’s letter, July 8] Lowell was admitted to Greenways Nursing Home in London’s St. John’s Wood. Hardwick was telephoned by Mary McCarthy (from Paris; McCarthy had heard the news from Sonia Orwell)” (Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 400).
221. “Thou’lt come no more,|Never, never, never, never, never” (King Lear 5.3). Hardwick, reviewing a 1964 Peter Brook production: “The opening scenes of this play, with the three sisters, the questions and answers, are, as Coleridge said, a sort of fairy tale; at the end it is a devastating drama of power, old age, and death. […] when you have seen this remarkable production, the accent given to the text seems, if certainly not the only one, a brilliantly possible one. All the existential ‘nothings’ and ‘nevers’ of the play take on a special meaning” (“King Lear, ‘Brilliantly Possible,’” Vogue, August 1, 1964).
222. Arthur Miller and Inge Morath.
223. Harriet Gibney Coffin.
224. Jean Stein, American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy, ed. George Plimpton (1970), pp. 36, 192–93, 268–70, 304, 309–10, 318, and 340–41.
225. In Notebook69-1 and -2.
226. New poems forthcoming in the third edition of Notebook, published in the fall of 1970. “This text differs from the first edition in May 1969 and the second in July. About a hundred of the old poems have been changed, some noticeably. More than ninety new poems have been added” (“Note to the New Edition,” p. 264).
227. Olga Rudge.
228. Wordsworth: “Many hearts deplored|The fate of those old trees” (“Composed at Neidpath Castle, the Property of Lord Queensberry, 1803” 8–9, in The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, ed. Francis Turner Palgrave). Quoted as “Many a noble heart mourned the fall of those great oaks” in Hardwick’s “In Maine,” New York Review of Books, October 7, 1971.
229. Ian Angus: “On 13 October 1949 [Sonia] married [George] Orwell, seriously ill with tuberculosis, who died on 21 January 1950; subsequently she mostly used the surname Orwell. On 12 August 1958 she married Michael Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1917–1999), a wealthy farmer, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1965” (“Brownell, Sonia Mary [Sonia Orwell] [1918–1980],” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Oxford University Press, 2004]).
230. Probably Dr. Viola Bernard, one of Lowell’s psychiatrists (Lowell and Hardwick were also patients of Elizabeth Bishop’s doctor Anny Baumann, but for general not mental health).
231. Trans. Michael Roloff (1972).
232. Trans. Michael Roloff (1969).
233. Lowell: “Moonshine to say we can relive our lives,|beggging nature’s clean-edge Roman roads|turn back full circle … from the byways of night,|day, seeing nothing, missing nothing, God.…|The paintings blow over the floor, crachk/ and are free,|blown with the artist who gave them a color.|Your wall-mirror in a mat of plateglass sapphire,|mirror-scroll and claspleaves, holds our faces,|the style and the sitters dead like their portrait, unlearning.|Summer already looks further along than it is,|leaf blighted by streetdyes and the discard girl.|We are on the astigmatic crossroads. One summer, another— and this one that. You. One life for our/ two lives— we stop uncomfortable, we are humanly low” (“Wall-Mirror,” dedicated “To Caroline,” typewritten insertion of [Summer 17] into Notebook page proofs, “to go after THE BOND and before STALIN [Summer 16 and 18].” Cf. with Fall Weekend at Milgate [1] in “The Dolphin” manuscript and in The Dolphin).
234. Mary and Harris (“Tommy”) Thomas.
235. Now missing.
236. James: “How can places that speak in general so to the imagination not give it, at the moment, the particular thing it wants? I recollect again and again, in beautiful places, dropping into that wonderment. The real truth is, I think, that they express, under this appeal, only too much—more than, in the given case, one has use for; so that one finds one’s self working less congruously, after all, so far as the surrounding picture is concerned, than in presence of the moderate and the neutral, to which we may lend something of the light of our vision. Such a place as Venice is too proud for such charities; Venice does n’t borrow, she but all magnificently gives” (Preface, The Portrait of a Lady [1908], p. vi).
237. Stanley Kunitz and Elise Asher, who summered in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
238. Rich; enclosure now missing.
239. Bishop.
240. Robert Fitzgerald.
241. Attributed to Leo Durocher (manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers), but possibly an editorial compression of his remarks as reported by Frank Graham: “The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place” (New York Journal-American, July 7, 1946; quoted in the Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapi
ro [2006], p. 221). First appearance of the phrase in print is in Leo Durocher, “Nice Guys Finish Last,” Cosmopolitan (April 1948).
242. V. S. Naipaul: “Recently the Emperor visited Jamaica. The Ras Tafarians were expecting a black lion of a man; they saw someone like a Hindu, mild-featured, brown, and small. The disappointment was great; but somehow the sect survives” (“Power to the Caribbean People,” New York Review of Books, September 3, 1970).
243. Records and biographers differ as to where Blackwood was in mid- to late July 1970. Blackwood sent a telegram about Lowell to Blair Clark from Ballyconneely, Ireland (no date, Blair Clark Papers, HRC), and Ian Hamilton states: “‘Caroline in Ireland’” (Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 400). Nancy Schoenberger: “She packed up her children and left for the country, to an eighteenth-century house she had recently bought in Maidstone, Kent” (Dangerous Muse, p. 168). But cf. also Lowell: “Diagnosis: To Caroline in Scotland” (The Dolphin).
244. Blackwood, some days earlier: “I am going away. If I see you when you are so sick I know everything between us will become distorted and destroyed. Your sickness is so distressing to me and I am so bound up with you that I can’t help you and will break down again myself—and that does not help. I love you just as much as ever—you may think this is hypocrisy but it is not as Grey tried to tell you. As to the future—God knows—or does he? Please get better Cal. I love you so much[.] Love Godstow Marsh” (Blackwood to Lowell, no date, but summer 1970, Robert Lowell Papers, HRC).
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 50