The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  323.  Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972); Quentin was the son of Clive Bell and Vanessa Stephen.

  324.  Postscript written by hand.

  325.  Second page of letter now missing.

  326.  Thus.

  327.  Hardwick: “My lawyer drew up the settlement in consultation with Cal’s lawyer. It was complicated by provisions for Harriet and so on and it is wrong to say the money was ‘given’ to me, since she was 13. It was for both of us. It was the income from the trusts, amounting to about $20,000 dollars, on which I paid the taxes and sent Harriet to school, maintained the house and so on. This at the time was about the same amount Cal had from his royalties, plays and so on. There were provisions for death, illness, and the usual legal requirements. […] I think the fact that Caroline had a good deal of money made Cal wish to pose as a man who would have been rich had he not been ‘wiped out.’ He wasn’t rich at all and the divorce was financially hard on him and on me, according to our previous income when we were together” (Hardwick to Ian Hamilton, copy in the Elizabeth Hardwick Papers, HRC).

  328.  History is dedicated to Stanley Kunitz and Frank Bidart.

  329.  Kunitz: “I could enumerate for pages the things that are wrong with History—its rhetorical excesses, its hints of vainglory, its clutter, its trivia, etc.—but it would be a silly enterprise, for this is a monumental poem, your monument, a generation’s book of days, and great enough to make its flaws inconsequential. You have made vast improvements with your rearrangements and revisions of Notebook, and some of the new sonnets are among your best. But if you intend to complete the book with For Harriet and Lizzie [thus], I wish you would think twice about it. They are separate structures and don’t belong together. The main work is diminished in its grandeur by the juxtaposition: the whole dwindles to pathos, domesticities, and anti-climax” (to Robert Lowell, April 19, 1972).

  330.  That is, Blackwood’s writing.

  331.  Morton Bloomfield was the chair of the Harvard English Department from 1968 to 1972. Bishop was anxious that Lowell’s return to teaching at Harvard would displace her. See Lowell and Bishop’s exchange of letters in Words in Air, pp. 728–33.

  332.  Among many articles covering the 1972 U.S. presidential elections in the British newspapers, see Adam Raphael: “President Nixon, riding the crest of a 23-point gallup poll lead, came here [Chicago] to consolidate what his aides are now predicting will be one of the greatest landslides in American political history” (“Nixon sets out on triumphal progress—in advance,” Guardian, November 4, 1972). See also “The meeting of St George and the Godfather: How President Nixon swung the tide of unpopularity,” Times (London), November 6, 1972.

  333.  See Lowell, “Words for a Guinea-Pig” (Eloges to the Spirits 4), all three editions of Notebook; and “Words for Muffin, a Guinea-Pig” (Circles 7), For Lizzie and Harriet.

  334.  Lowell: “a barracuda settlement. (Santo Domingo,|quick divorces, solid alimony,|its dictator’s marina unsafe because of sharks|checking in twice daily like grinning, fawning puppies|for our sewage” (“Alimony” [Another Summer 4] 7–11, The Dolphin).

  335.  Ezra Pound died on November 1, 1972. “A Quiet Requiem for E.P” at the Donnell Library Center (20 West 53rd Street), with Lowell, Leon Edel, Robert Fitzgerald, James Laughlin, and Robert MacGregor.

  Part III: 1973

      1.  The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, ed. Philip Larkin (1973).

      2.  “Digressions from Larkin’s 20th Century Verse,” Encounter 40 (May 1973).

      3.  During Lowell’s visit to New York for the Pound memorial (on January 4, 1973).

      4.  McCarthy: “Where the G.I. in Vietnam out on patrol felt he was really a civilian that nobody had the right to snipe at, the counter-culture is convinced that all Americans except themselves are war-makers, i.e. indistinguishable from war criminals. Such virtuous ‘indictments’ of a whole culture in its ordinary pursuits are politically sterile. The VC and the North Vietnamese are always careful to distinguish ‘the American people’ from ‘the U.S. imperialist aggressors.’ By the American people they mean not the proletariat (whose general support of the war they are aware of) but some larger, vaguer entity—America’s better self, still found throughout the whole spectrum of classes. The assumption that everybody has a better self is indispensible to those working for change. The opposite assumption, of equating individuals with social categories, most of which are treated as criminal per se, when it does not lead to Stalinist-style mass liquidations or assassination commandos, conduces to despair and is anyway patently false” (Mary McCarthy, Medina [1972], p. 83).

      5.  Leon Edel had appeared with Lowell at the Pound memorial. Lowell: “This morning I’ve lost my only English checkbook, my only legible pen, my silver ballpoint stolen from Leon Edel” (Lowell to Peter Taylor, no date but early April? 1973, Vanderbilt University Library Special Collections).

      6.  Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965), with an introduction by Robert Lowell. Hardwick appeared with Erica Jong and Robert Bagg on “The Works of Sylvia Plath” panel at the 92nd Street Y on January 22, 1973.

      7.  Matthew: “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (22:30). Lowell: “We might have married as Christ says man must not|in heaven where marriage is not, and giving|in marriage has the curse of God and Blake” (“Gruff” [Marriage 3] 9–11, The Dolphin).

      8.  By Euripides. Cf. Lowell: “All night I’ve held your hand,|As if we had|A fourth time crossed the kingdom of the mad— Its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye— Alcestis!… Oh my Petite” (draft of “Man and Wife” 8–12, Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library).

      9.  Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972 (1973).

    10.  Conrad, one of Rich’s sons.

    11.  (1972); Stephen Donadio, “Poetry and Public Experience,” Commentary, February 1973.

    12.  By T. S. Eliot (1943).

    13.  Edward FitzGerald: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,|Moves on” (The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, lxxi, 1–2).

    14.  By William Blake (1793).

    15.  Francis S. Parker, “The Wave,” which Lowell bought for $1,500; “The Great Wave has been on the wall above the bed where I work for five days now, rain and shine etc. it changes with the weather and glows most on dull days. It’s somehow much like the pasture outside, stern before the leaves come. It has lost nothing of the glow my drunkenness gave it that afternoon at the Athenaeum” (Lowell to Frank Parker [early April 1973?], collection of Judith Parker; see also The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 604–605).

    16.  A lawyer.

    17.  (1790/1794).

    18.  Une Saison en enfer (1873).

    19.  “Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf,” New York Review of Books, February 8, 1973.

    20.  Hardwick: “The worst thing before the present exhaustion of Virginia Woolf was the draining of Lytton Strachey. This is a very overblown affair, right down to his friend Carrington, who committed suicide forty years ago—an unreclaimable figure, fluid, arrested, charming, very much a girl of the period, with the typical Bloomsbury orderly profligacy and passionate coldness. Her marriage and her love affairs are held in the mind for a day or so after hard study, but they soon drift away to the Carrington haunt” (“Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf,” New York Review of Books, February 8, 1973). See also Carrington: Letters and Extracts from Her Diary, ed. David Garnett (1970).

    21.  Hardwick: “Back to the far too well known Lytton Strachey. The latest issuance holds out some hope of a pause with its advice that ‘the most important of Lytton Strachey’s literary remains are now in print.’ But the sentence before mentioned ‘the mammoth exception of his corresponde
nce.’ Surely that can wait for our children, who can then gather their brows once more over Ottoline, Ham Spray, Ralph, Pippa” (“Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf,” New York Review of Books, February 8, 1973).

    22.  E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924).

    23.  Hardwick: “One of the things that make To the Lighthouse interesting for the reader who is also a writer is that, in this case, one can bring things in from the outside. If Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are in some way Virginia Woolf’s mother and father, then you have Leslie Stephen as a character. And upstairs you have his Hours in a Library, Studies of a Biographer, the thin, green George Eliot. These are books I have used, but I have not learned greatly from them. Still when Mr. Ramsay appears in his being as a writer we are watching something real, immensely affecting—the poignancy of a long, hard literary life” (“Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf,” New York Review of Books, February 8, 1973).

    24.  Unsigned.

    25.  Lowell: “My namesake, Little Boots, Caligula,|you disappoint me. Tell me what I saw|to make me like you when we met at school?|I took your name—” (“Caligula” 1–4, For the Union Dead). Cf. also Lowell: “Dear Elizabeth, (You must be called that; I’m called Cal, but won’t explain why. None of the prototypes are flattering: Calvin, Caligula, Caliban, Calvin Coolidge, Calligraphy—with merciless irony)” (to Elizabeth Bishop, [August 21, 1947], Words in Air, p. 7).

    26.  The simultaneous publication of History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin on June 21, 1973.

    27.  Leslie Stephen, “Charlotte Brontë,” Cornhill, nos. 108–109 (December 1877); George Eliot (1902).

    28.  (1918).

    29.  Hardwick: “I wonder about the ‘morality’ of certain marks of punctuation used by James in ‘In the Cage.’ […] In the midst of her upward longings, her rising misconnections, the girl pauses unexpectedly, in a clause, at the end of the most externally conceived, impudent Jamesian depiction of her—she pauses and ‘made up even for the most haunting of her worries, the rage at moments of not knowing how her mother did “get it.”’ ‘Get it’ is alcohol, gin probably. The down, down mother (‘never rebounded any more at the bottom than on the way down’) drinks. […] To put ‘get it’ in quotations is a moral failing; it pretends it is a mere colloquialism identified, or asks that we in our minds put some peculiar stress on it that will equal the accentual patterns in the author’s mind, or wants to indicate an affectation on the girl’s part—any of those things the mimicry of quotation marks may suggest. But this is wrong. […] Even a second of an impoverished mother’s pursuit of gin cannot be put on the page in that way. It accomplishes only a stylistic diminishment of the possibility of pain, of real feeling” (“Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf,” New York Review of Books, February 8, 1973). McCarthy: “I agree with you nearly 100% in what you find to condemn or rather blame or regret in Virginia Woolf, Forster, James […] And yet I wonder about In the Cage. Most of my 10% disagreement is located there. In my memory, In the Cage is rather an exception—as though, in that instance, he was trying to peek out of his cage. […] To me, he felt sympathy for the girl and for the awful expressions she used, which themselves expressed her deprivation and imprisonment. She was caged up in her narrow vocabulary. And I don’t see how that could be rendered without showing it. […] As for ‘get it,’ no, there, I really jib; he had to put it in quotes to flag the reader’s attention; what was behind those two neutral little words would have slipped by otherwise. And in a certain way it’s in quotes in the girl’s mind, being her euphemism for her mother’s habit, which she can’t bear to name” (to Elizabeth Hardwick, January 22, 1973).

    30.  R. P. Blackmur, “Madame Bovary: Beauty Out of Place,” Kenyon Review 13, no. 3 (Summer 1951).

    31.  Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973).

    32.  For Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974).

    33.  Frank Parker’s mother; see The Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 35.

    34.  Sontag.

    35.  Alfred Comyn Lyall: “Never a story and never a stone|Tells of the martyrs who die like me,|Just for the pride of the old countree” (“Theology in Extremis,” 124–26).

    36.  Given the discussion of Visions of the Daughters of Albion, see Blake: “Enslav’d, the Daughters of Albion weep; a trembling lamentation|Upon their mountains; in their valleys, sighs toward America.|For the soft soul of America Oothoon wandered in woe” (1–3).

    37.  In Randall Jarrell: 1914–1965, ed. by Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren (1967).

    38.  A. E. Housman: “I will not compare Arnold with the mob of gentlemen who produce criticism (‘quales ego vel Chorinus’), such woful stuff as I or Lord Coleridge write: I will compare him with the best. […] I go to Mr Leslie Stephen, and I am always instructed, though I may not be charmed. I go to Mr Walter Pater, and I am always charmed, though I may not be instructed. But Arnold was not merely instructive or charming nor both together: he was what it seems to me no one else is: he was illuminating” (from a typescript of “a paper of the 1890’s on Matthew Arnold,” Selected Prose, ed. John Carter [1961], p. 198).

    39.  Roy Fuller, “Deeds and Words,” Listener (February 22, 1973).

    40.  History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin.

    41.  Ashbery: “The pure products of America don’t always go crazy: Dr. Williams himself is a demonstration of this. But the effort of remaining both pure and American can make them look odd and harassed—a lopsided appearance characteristic of much major American poetry, whose fructifying mainstream sometimes seems to be peopled mostly by cranks (Emerson, Whitman, Pound, Stevens), while certified major poets (Frost, Eliot) somehow end up on the sidelines […] Both John Wheelwright and A. R. Ammons are full of tics and quirks […] Both are American originals (in the French sense of un original as someone who is also quite eccentric)” (“In the American Grain,” New York Review of Books, February 22, 1973).

    42.  Derek Walcott, Another Life (1973).

    43.  Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972).

    44.  Thus, for “crumple.”

    45.  Cf. Lowell to Hardwick, [March 8, 1971], footnote 4 on page 152.

    46.  From the ABC News studio in the Hotel Des Artistes at 1 West 67th Street.

    47.  “Amateurs: Jane Carlyle,” New York Review of Books, December 14, 1972.

    48.  A Maine friend.

    49.  Ezra Pound, Make It New: Essays (1934).

    50.  Richard Howard, “W. S. Merwin: We Survived the Selves That We Remembered,” Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 (1969), pp. 349–81; for the words Hardwick quotes, see pp. 357, 360, 366, 373, and 375.

    51.  Catherine Grad.

    52.  April 15 (American tax deadline).

    53.  “12 O’Clock News,” New Yorker (March 24, 1973).

    54.  Postmarked, but probably written on April 1, 1973; this letter crossed with Hardwick’s of March 31, 1973.

    55.  A Doll’s House (film), dir. Patrick Garland (1973).

    56.  Hardwick: “The change from the girlish, charming wife to the radical, courageous heroine setting out alone has always been a perturbation. Part of the trouble is that we do not think, and actresses and directors do not think, the Nora of the first acts, the gay woman, with her children, her presents, her nicknames, her extravagance, her pleasure in the thought of ‘heaps of money,’ can be a suitable candidate for liberation … Claire Bloom in the present New York production plays the early Nora with a great deal of charm and elegance. But neither she nor the director, Patrick Garland, has any new ideas about the play. They struggle on in the traditional fashion with the early Nora and the late Nora, linking the two by an undercurre
nt of hysteria in the first part. This is not sufficient and will not really connect the two women” (“A Doll’s House,” New York Review of Books, March 11, 1971).

    57.  By Christopher Hampton.

    58.  Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, trans. William Archer (1889).

    59.  Michael Wood, “Ezra Pound,” New York Review of Books, February 8, 1973; Alfred Kazin, “Melville the New Yorker,” New York Review of Books, April 5, 1973; W. H. Auden and George L. Kline, “The Poems of Joseph Brodsky,” New York Review of Books, April 5, 1973.