249. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” Saturday Evening Post, April 5, 1924; Thomas Caldecott Chubb: “In a short career, even now amounting to only five years, Scott Fitzgerald has already found time to do a great many things […] He has told,—and presumably based the telling on his own experience,—how it is possible to live on $30,000 a year” (“Bagdad-on-Subway,” Forum 74, no. 2 [August 1925]). Fitzgerald’s 1924 figure of $36,000 is approximately $532,160 in 2019 dollars; Lowell’s 1972 figure of $30,000 is approximately $184,508 in 2019 dollars (CPI).
250. Mary McCarthy: “But to speak of my doubts about the radicalism of the Thirties, what did we accomplish? Almost nothing that I can see […] Some of us (you and me included) were OK on [Senator Joseph] McCarthy, but again history took care of that, and I would not like to claim that our disputes with [Sidney] Hook and others had any influence on events. Meanwhile, like most American writers, professors and editors, we were getting richer. And less revolutionary. Not just because we had more money, but because we were getting older, and because, according to our analysis, it was not ‘a revolutionary situation’” (Philip Rahv, “The Editor Interviews Mary McCarthy,” Modern Occasions 1, no. 1 [Fall 1970], p. 22).
251. Lowell: “‘My mother really learned to loathe babies,|she loved to lick the palate of her Peke,|as if her tongue were trying a liqueur…|What I am saying say/ should go into your Notebook:|I’d rather have my children on morphine than religion’” (Artist’s Model [3] 1–5, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “‘My cousin really learned to loathe babies,|she loved to lick the palate of her Peke|as if her tongue were trying a liqueur— what I say should go into your Notebook.…|I’d rather dose children on morphine than the churches’” (Artist’s Model [2] 1-5, The Dolphin).
252. OED: “Palate 1. The roof of the mouth (in man and vertebrates)” (“palate, n. and adj.” Oxford English Dictionary Vol. VII).
253. Lowell: “I sit with my fresh wife, children, house and sky—” (“Later Week at Milgate” [Burden 7] 12, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “I sit with my staring wife, children … the dour Kent sky” (“Late Summer at Milgate” [Marriage 10] 12, The Dolphin). Cf. Lowell’s use of “unfresh” in “‘I despair of letters…’” [The Burden 6] 13 in “The Dolphin” manuscript, and in “Letter” [Marriage 8] 13, The Dolphin).
254. From “Christmas 1970” [Flight to New York 10] 14, “The Dolphin” manuscript; cf. “Christmas” [Flight to New York 12] 14, The Dolphin.
255. Lowell: “A thick heavy/ book, sunrise-red from Lizzie,|with, ‘Why don’t you try to lose yourself|and write a play about the fall of Japan?’” (“Christmas 1970” [Flight to New York 10] 5–7, “The Dolphin” manuscript); cf. “Christmas” [Flight to New York 12] 5–7, The Dolphin.
256. Lowell: “Have we got a child…|Our bastard, easily fathered, hard to name?” (“Knowing” [Burden 1] 6–7, “The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised to read “We have our child,|our bastard, easily fathered, hard to name…” (“Knowing” [Marriage 5] 6–7, The Dolphin).
257. In “The Dolphin” manuscript, the protagonist learns that the Caroline character is expecting a child after his return from New York, and after his decision to leave the Lizzie character for Caroline. For the published version of The Dolphin, Lowell revised the order of the poems away from the actual chronology of events, fictionalizing them. He moved poems about Sheridan’s conception and birth to a sequence titled Marriage, which occurs before Flight to New York. The visit to New York takes place a full year after his birth, and after the protagonist and the Caroline character have married.
258. For Lowell’s substitution of “slave” for “woman” in “From my Wife” [The Farther Shore 1], cf. Hardwick: “We are as good and useful as men. Equality is self-evident. We do not want to be slaves or married to slaves—but this is the condition of so much of the suffering world. When that happens, human beings can only cling together, huddling under the blanket” (“The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” Vogue, June 1, 1971, p. 87).
259. Lowell: “She is normal and good because she had normal and good|parents” (“In the Mail,” 6–7, The Dolphin); see footnote 2 on page 293. Cf. also Frank Bidart to Lowell, June 4, 1970; Hardwick to Lowell, OCT 16 PM 5.13 [1970]; and Hardwick to Lowell [no date summer 1972].
260. Taylor.
261. The poems in Burden [1-10] (the penultimate sequence in “The Dolphin” manuscript) were revised and added to a sequence newly titled Marriage [1-16] (The Dolphin); “Sickday” [Sickday Leaving America for England 3] was retitled “Sick” [Leaving America for England 5]. The idea to change the title of Flight to New York [1-10] in “The Dolphin” manuscript to To New York did not last; Lowell went back to Flight to New York [1-12] for the sequence title when he published The Dolphin.
262. “From My Wife” [The Farther Shore 1] in “The Dolphin” manuscript was rewritten as “Voices” [Hospital II 1] in The Dolphin.
263. See John Thompson to Robert Lowell, May 24 [1972], Robert Lowell Papers, HRC.
264. Hardwick to Ian Hamilton, that before the publication of The Dolphin in 1973: “All I knew, and this from everyone visiting at Milgate, was that he was using my letters” (Elizabeth Hardwick Papers, HRC); see also Hardwick’s remarks in footnote 1 on page 366 (Lowell to Giroux, July 26, 1973).
265. In Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833).
266. Cf. Hardwick: “There is some dispute about Rousseau. Perhaps he did not abandon his children to the foundling hospital. What a base lie. Not to have abandoned the children, all five of them. But of course he sent the children to the foundling hospital. Everything we know about him and Thérèse Levasseur makes it ‘work.’ That is if there actually were children born. There’s always that” (“Cross-Town” [1980] in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick [2010], p. 159).
267. For the American edition of Alvarez’s The Savage God (1972) (published in the U.K. in 1971). Hardwick: “A. Alvarez does make her alive and real to us and his chapter on Sylvia Plath in his book about suicide is very moving. Alvarez is restrained, but he manages to suggest many of the private sufferings that were there at the moment of suicide” (“On Sylvia Plath,” New York Review of Books, August 12, 1971).
268. Carol Brightman: “When the Wests returned to Paris from [Nicola] Chiaromonte’s funeral in Rome, Mary had noticed a black speck in her right eye […] A torn retina was diagnosed, and McCarthy had checked into the American Hospital at Neuilly for laser surgery. Recovering at home, her eyes bandaged, [she was] unable to move her head for weeks” (Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World [1992], p. 566).
269. Robert Bland.
270. Hans Jonas.
271. McCarthy: “About the ms. he gave to Faber he knows I don’t commend him for it. I think he might have made the sacrifice, for the time being, of those poems. But Cal is not a sacrificing man, least of all, I suppose, where his poetry is concerned, which means more to him than any people. People in fact are sacrificed to it, to keep the flame burning. It is a Jamesian subject, I guess—the Moloch-artist. I just had a note from Gaia, saying, among other things, that Roger Straus told her that Cal had given him two manuscripts, and that he and Giroux didn’t know what to do. I suppose that means publish or don’t publish; Gaia is always elliptic. Perhaps the poems aren’t so bad; I mean, from your point of view as, so to speak, co-author. I don’t know. I saw only one or two, long ago, when he had the place on Pont Street. It wasn’t hard to recognize your voice, certainly. Have you seen them and what do you feel?” (to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 5, 1972).
272. McCarthy: “Incidentally, I thought his Berryman piece was quite good. Patronizing, but he did not try to hide that. To my mind, Berryman, though, has been overrated; I don’t feel he does compare to Cal, which people were tending to do more and more” (to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 5, 1972).
&nbs
p; 273. Figurative (OED: “happy dust n. slang [orig. U.S.] = cocaine n.” [“happy, adj. and n.],” OED Online. March 2019. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/84074?redirectedFrom=happy+dust [accessed March 29, 2016]).
274. An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil (1972).
275. R. K. Meiners, Everything to Be Endured: An Essay on Robert Lowell and Modern Poetry (1970).
276. John Berryman, Delusions, Etc. of John Berryman (1972).
277. “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore” in Bishop’s Collected Prose (1984).
278. Probably “Poem,” which Bishop enclosed with “In the Waiting Room” (see Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, April 24, 1972, below).
279. For Golden State (1973).
280. “Golden State,” Golden State (1973).
281. Letter from Bidart now missing. Lowell had written an earlier draft of a blurb for Bidart’s Golden State in a letter to Bidart on March 25, 1972.
282. Among Lowell’s papers, typed by Lowell: “A Cursory list of|Errors with Harriet:|1. Staying too long at Maidstone and bringing C. to London|2. Dinner with Grey and Neiti|3. Gold ring|4. House of Lords?|5. Waterloo and Original?|6. Late hours, Blue Nun and Irish Coffee?|7. C. and H. wildly arguing women and socialism against Harriet’s father.|8. Swanly College, Duckworth|9. Having Ivana and Jenia around too much; not having Ivana and Jenia around enough.|10. Failure to buy clothes|11. Uninventive present to Harriet of a check|12. Failure to pick up two registered letters|13. Failure to take H. to call on New York Book Review elders|14. Paltry stop-gap presents from Cal to H. and E.|15. English weather|16. Meeting with Lady Dufferin|17. Introducing of Israel, the norm, humorously into talk.|18. Lady Caroline Lowell” (HRC). (“Israel” is a reference to Israel Citkowitz.)
283. About Robert Craft’s chronicle of Igor Stravinsky in the New York Review of Books; see “Pages from a Chronicle” (February 25, 1971); “Stravinsky: End of a Chronicle” (July 1, 1971); and “Venice: Paragraphs from a Diary” (October 5, 1972). If Hardwick ever did write about Craft and Stravinsky, she did not publish it.
284. Elizabeth Bishop, “Poem” and “In the Waiting Room” (Geography III [1976]).
285. Bishop: “Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George,|he’d be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother|when he went back to England.|You know, he was quite famous, an R.A.…” (“Poem” 40–43, Geography III [1976].) R. A.: Royal Academician.
286. Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Village,” New Yorker (December 19, 1953); reprinted in Questions of Travel (1965). See also Lowell, “The Scream,” For the Union Dead.
287. Stanley Kunitz, The Testing-Tree (1971). Cf. Robert Frost’s title A Witness Tree (1942); and his lines “One tree, by being deeply wounded,|Has been impressed as Witness Tree|And made commit to memory|My proof of being not unbounded” (“Beech,” 6–9).
288. Kunitz: “As for Dolphin, I should be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that it both fascinates and repels me. There are details that seem to me monstrously heartless. I will grant that parts of it are marvelous—wild, erotic, shattering. (Who else has the nerve for such a document of enchantment and folly?) But some passages I can scarcely bear to read: they are too ugly, for being too cruel, too intimately cruel. You must know that after its hour has passed, even tenderness can cut the heart. What else need I say to you, dear Cal, not as your judge—God save me!—but as your friend. In any event, these are matters that I have not discussed with another soul” (Stanley Kunitz to Lowell, April 19, 1972; quoted in Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 422).
289. “Morning Away from You” (The Burden 9) 8–12 (“The Dolphin” manuscript). Revised: “Goodmorning.|My nose runs, I feel for my blood,|happy you save mine and hand it one,|now death becomes an ingredient of my being— my Mother and Father dying young and sixty” (“Morning Away from You” [Marriage 16] 7–11, The Dolphin).
290. “Plane-Ticket” (Flight to New York 3) 13–14, in “The Dolphin” manuscript; cf. “Plane-Ticket” (Flight to New York 1) 13–14, The Dolphin.
291. “Departure at the Air-Terminal” (Flight to New York 4) 13–14, “The Dolphin” manuscript. Revised: “Surely it’s a strange joy|blaming ourselves and willing what we will” (“With Caroline at the Air-Terminal” [Flight to New York 2] 12–13, The Dolphin).
292. “Green Sore” (The Burden 5) 11, “The Dolphin” manuscript; see poem on page 154. Cf. “Green Sore” (Marriage 7) 11, The Dolphin.
293. Third page of letter now missing.
294. Hardwick, “Working Girls: The Brontës,” New York Review of Books, May 4, 1972.
295. See Lowell to Hardwick, September 2, 1971, footnote 2 on page 216.
296. Talent agency that handled Lowell’s plays.
297. Private boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut.
298. Brooks.
299. Devie Meade, daughter of Lowell’s cousin Alice Winslow Meade.
300. The University of East Anglia awarded Lowell an honorary Doctor of Letters (Litt.D.).
301. Thus, for “devolved” or “developed.”
302. Bishop marked this word with an asterisk and the rest of the paragraph with a line. At the bottom of the page, she wrote to Alice Methfessel, to whom she gave the letter: “Coitado! one can see what comes first! SAVE, please—”
303. That is, Sheridan, Ivana, and Evgenia, as well as Natalya when she was home from boarding school.
304. “Night City (from a Plane),” New Yorker (September 16, 1972). See Bishop to Lowell, July 12, 1972, Words in Air, p. 719.
305. “The Moose,” New Yorker (July 14, 1972).
306. “12 O’Clock News,” New Yorker (March 24, 1972).
307. “Poem (About the size of an old-style dollar bill),” New Yorker (November 11, 1972).
308. Thus, hand-corrected by Lowell to read graceful. Milton: “And now lastly will be the time to read with them those organic arts which inable men to discourse and write perspicuously, elegantly, and according to the fitted stile of lofty, mean, or lowly. Logic therefore so much as is useful, is to be referr’d to this due place withall her well coucht Heads and Topics, untill it be time to open her contracted palm into a gracefull and ornate Rhetorick taught out of the rule of Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus. To which Poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate.” (Milton, Of Education [1644].) Cf. The Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 25.
309. An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, ed. Bishop and Brasil.
310. To visit Lowell’s aunt and uncle, Sarah and Charles Cotting, who had a house in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts.
311. See “Terminal Days in Beverly Farms” (Life Studies).
312. Lowell: “‘Rock was my name for Grandfather Winslow’s country place at Rock, Massachusetts” (Collected Prose, p. 359). See also “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” “Dunbarton,” and “Grandparents” (Life Studies).
313. Cf. “Old Snapshot and Carpaccio” (The Farther Shore 2), “The Dolphin” manuscript; and “Old Snapshot from Venice, 1952” (Hospital II 3), The Dolphin.
314. Twenty years ago.
315. Lowell and Hardwick were married on July 28, 1949, the day after Hardwick’s thirty-third birthday.
316. See Hardwick to Lowell, June 26, 1970, footnote 4 on page 69.
317. Postmarked August 4, 1972.
318. Katherine Meredith Keast (sister of William Meredith) and her daughter, Susan Meredith Keast, who was a childhood friend of Harriet Lowell’s.
319. Enclosure now missing.
320. Both the 1972 Republican and Democratic Primaries were held in Miami Beach, Florida, the Republican from August 21–23, the Democrati
c from July 10–13.
321. In 1972, Hardwick contributed to the unsigned article “The New Woman, 1972” and perhaps others in “The American Woman: A Time Special Issue,” Time Magazine (March 20, 1972); wrote seven articles for Vogue, including “Is the ‘Equal’ Woman More Vulnerable?” (July 1, 1972); and “Election Countdown ’72: One Woman’s Vote,” a six-part series published between August 15 and November 1, 1972; wrote four articles for the New York Review of Books, “Working Girls: The Brontës” (May 4, 1972); “On the Election” (November 2, 1972); “Amateurs: Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle” (November 30, 1972); and “Amateurs: Jane Carlyle” (December 15, 1972); and published “Scenes from an Autobiography” (Prose 4, 1972).
322. Lowell: “Your student wrote me, if he took a plane|past Harvard, at any angle, at any height,|he’d see a person missing, Mr. Robert Lowell.|You insist on treating Harriet as if she|were thirty or a wrestler—she is only thirteen.|She is normal and good because she had normal and good|parents. She is threatened of necessity.…|I love you, Darling, there’s a black black void,|as black as night without you. I long to see|your face and hear your voice, and take your hand— I’m watching a scruffy, seal-colored woodchuck graze|on weeds, then lift his greedy snout and listen;|then back to speedy feeding. He weighs a ton,|and has your familiar human aspect munching” (“In the Mail,” The Dolphin). Cf.: Frank Bidart to Robert Lowell, June 4, 1970; Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell, OCT 16 PM 5.13 [1970]; and Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell [April 2, 1972]. Cf. also lines 8–10 with “The Messiah” [Flight to New York 2] 1–4, “The Dolphin” manuscript, on page 249.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 56