137. Hardwick to Ian Hamilton, referring to a draft of his biography of Lowell: “p. 388—last line quoted from Cal’s letter to Bill A. ‘She had roughly seen the contents…’ Completely untrue. I had no idea at all until the printed book came into my hand at publication. All I knew, and this from everyone visiting at Milgate, was that he was using my letters. I was genuinely shocked and appalled when I saw the book, the use he made, the distortion of the letters, the writing of some for me, putting lines unwritten by me, in my voice” (Elizabeth Hardwick Papers, HRC).
138. “In the Mail,” 11–14, The Dolphin; see footnote 2 on page 293.
139. Probably “Lies,” New York Review of Books, August 9, 1973. “Exit Mutt, Enter Jeff”: Bud Fisher, Mutt and Jeff (comic strip).
140. “Watergate Notes,” New York Review of Books, July 19, 1973; “Lies,” New York Review of Books, August 9, 1973.
141. Angleton, a friend of McCarthy’s.
142. Vidal.
143. Cf. Hardwick to Lowell [summer 1972?]; and Lowell, “In the Mail,” 11–14, The Dolphin; see footnote 2 on page 293.
144. George Santayana, The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1935).
145. Sophocles, Vol. 1, Oedipus the King|Oedipus at Colonus|Antigone, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, trans. F. Storr (1912).
146. Anton Chekhov, The Seagull (trans. Elisaveta Fen), dir. Jonathan Miller, Chichester Festival Theatre, opened on May 23, 1973.
147. In Amsterdam.
148. Peter Walcott; the photograph was taken on a visit to Trinidad in 1962. Derek Walcott: “I’ve described the sundering that put me off Lowell for a long time—during which he went into a hospital and I cursed and told everyone, yes, I too was tired of his turmoil. But I want to record, tears edging my eyes when he invited me years later to his apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street, the dissolving sweetness of reconciliation. He opened the door, hunched, gentle, soft voiced, while he muttered his apology, I gave him a hard hug, and the old love deepened. The eyes were still restless, haunted. A phantom paced behind the fanlight of the irises. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. I knew why. For a snapshot of his daughter and my son, who are the same age, that had been taken at a beach house in Trinidad” (“On Robert Lowell,” New York Review of Books, March 1, 1984).
149. See Rich, “Caryatid: A Column,” which includes a review of History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin: “Finally, what does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names, and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife? If this kind of question has nothing to do with art, we have come far from the best of the tradition Lowell would like to vindicate—or perhaps it cannot be vindicated.” She comments on lines 8–15 of “Dolphin”: “I have to say that I think this is bullshit eloquence, a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book, that it is presumptuous to balance injury done to others with injury done to oneself—and that the question remains—to what purpose? The inclusion of the letter-poems stands as one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry, one for which I can think of no precedent; and the same unproportioned ego that was capable of this act is damagingly at work in all three of Lowell’s books” (American Poetry Review, September/October 1973, pp. 42–43). Lowell to Stephen Berg, editor of the American Poetry Review: “I started a letter a year or so ago saying I couldn’t honestly blame you for Adrienne’s slash. I don’t see how you could have turned it down, particularly for your magazine whose lifelines were are opposing prejudices and judgments. However, Adrienne in her pre-prophetic days and for more than ten years was one of my closest friends. I could say she has become a famous person by becoming cheap and enflamed; but that isn’t it. Her whole career has been a rage for disorder, a heroic desire to destroy her early precocity for form and modesty. And wasn’t she right? And wasn’t she unrecognized mostly when she first became a better poet and before the time of her fevers? And who knows how the thing will turn out—such a mixture of courage and the auctioneer now?” ([1976?], published in The Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 647).
150. Henrik Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken (1899); see Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34, no. 1 (October 1972).
151. Nancy Milford, “Women’s Estate by Juliet Mitchell,” Partisan Review 40, no. 1 (Winter 1973). Diving into the Wreck was reviewed by Rosemary Tonks in “Cutting the Marble,” New York Review of Books, October 4, 1973.
152. West End Avenue in Manhattan.
153. Hardwick: “Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973; “(This is the opening of a novel in progress to be called The Cost of Living.)” Revised for Sleepless Nights. See page 471.
154. The (Diblos) Notebook (1965).
155. Hardwick: “Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she” (final sentence of “Writing a Novel”).
156. Fourrier.
157. Hardwick: “The troubles in a memoir are both large and small. Those still living do not create the longest hesitations. I am sure no one makes an enemy without wishing to do so. The need is sometimes very pressing; the relief rather disappointing. No, the troubles are not with relatives, lovers, famous persons seen at a deforming angle. The troubles are all with yourself seen at an angle, yourself defamed and libeled” (“Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973).
158. McCarthy.
159. Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974).
160. Hardwick: “Sylvia Plath has extraordinary descriptive powers; it is a correctness and accuracy that combine the look of things with their fearsome powers of menace. It is not close to the magnifying-glass descriptions in Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, that sense these two writers have of undertaking a sort of decoding, startling in the newness of what is seen. When Elizabeth Bishop writes that the ‘donkey brays like a pump gone dry,’ this is a perfectly recognizable and immensely gratifying gift of the sort we often get also in Sylvia Plath. But the detail in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish’ is of another kind: “I looked into his eyes|which were far larger than mine|but shallower, and yellowed,|the irises backed and packed|with tarnished tinfoil|seen through the lenses|of old scratched isinglass.” […] In Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop we are never far away from the comic spirit, from tolerance and wisdom—qualities alien to the angry illuminations of Ariel […]” (Seduction and Betrayal, pp. 122–23).
161. Hardwick: “Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she” (“Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973).
162. Hardwick: “Dearest M: Here I am in New York, on 67th Street in a high, steep place with long, dirty windows. In the late afternoon, in the gloom of the winter lights, I sometimes imagine it is Edinburgh in the Nineties. I have never been to Edinburgh, but I like cities of reasonable size, provincial capitals” (“Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973).
163. “In Maine,” New York Review of Books, October 7, 1971.
164. Hardwick: “A fantastic love of difficult, awkward islands gripped the heart of rich people at the turn of the century. Grandeur and privation, costliness and discomfort. Some years ago we took a friend from South America to an island quite a distance off Machias, Maine. The launch pulled up to a long, wooden pier to which the owner’s sloop was moored. The house was a large yellow frame with two graceful wings and inside there were beautiful dishes, old maps on the wall, fine painted chests, and handsome beds. We lived there in silence and candlelight for a few days, stumbling about with our guttering tapers, coming upon steep back stairways where we had been expecting a closet with our nightgowns in it. ‘This is madness
! No, it is not one bit amusing!’ the Brazilian lisped in fury” (“In Maine,” New York Review of Books, October 7, 1971).
165. David Shapiro: “The night I decided to paradoxically intend|I had the wished-for bad dreams.|Elizabeth Bishop, whose “2000|Illustrations” this shows I had been reading|was whistling in a nightgown and playing and|singing to her family,|‘I am the death tree,|I grow spontaneously,|I grow in the round,|Plant death in the ground’|after which duet|was played on the $59 Sony cassette|she became lugubrious, dramatic,|or conversely lubricated, and mellow,|and sighingly said,|Now I am going to bed, like a good girl!” (“On Becoming a Person,” 1–16, The Page-Turner [1973]).
166. In 1957.
167. Warhol: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” (Andy Warhol: this book was published on the occasion of the Andy Warhol Exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm February to March 1968, ed. Andy Warhol, Kaspar König, Pontus Hulten, and Olle Granath, Olle. [1968]).
168. Documents agreeing to the $5,000 Lowell wished to give to Bishop for the portion of her letters that were included in the sale of his papers to Harvard. (Hardwick was overseeing the completion of the sale.) Hardwick: “Dear Elizabeth: You are to sign all three of these and return all three to Mr. Iseman, whose address is in the letter I enclose” (Hardwick to Elizabeth Bishop, October 16, 1973, Vassar College Special Collections Library).
169. Hardwick: “When I think of deafness, heart disease and languages I cannot speak, I think of you, Angela” (Sleepless Nights, p. 119).
170. See James Reston, “Provocative President: Control Vanishes, Emotion Underneath,” New York Times, October 27, 1973.
171. Referring to the sudden death of Mary Thomas on September 2, 1973.
172. Julian Thomas, son of Harris and Mary Thomas.
173. Auden had died on September 29, 1973.
174. Nigel Nicolson: “The story is told in five parts, two by her, three by myself. Parts I and III are her autobiography verbatim […] Parts II and IV are my commentaries on it, to which I add essential new facts and quotations from letters and diaries” (Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson [1973], p. xi).
175. Nicolson: “She [Sackville-West] fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything. Yes, she may have been mad, as she later said, but it was a magnificent folly. She may have been cruel, but it was cruelty on a heroic scale. How can I despise the violence of such passion?” (Portrait of a Marriage, p. 194).
176. Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time (1973).
Part IV: 1974–1979
1. Philip Rahv died on December 22, 1973. Hardwick: “Philip Rahv (1908–1973),” New York Review of Books, January 24, 1974.
2. Modern Occasions, edited by Philip Rahv. Lowell’s prose was tentatively entitled “A Moment in American Poetry” in his American publisher’s files (see Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc. records, Archives and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library); it would become the Collected Prose (1987).
3. Paul Mariani: “Mostly it was a low-keyed autumn [in 1973]. In early November he gave a reading at the Pierpont Morgan Library [in New York] […] Harriet came up to Boston for a visit, and at term’s end he went back down to New York for a short visit. By then Lizzie had relented enough that Cal could talk to her before flying back to England” (Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell [1994], p. 424).
4. Hardwick: “Thinking over the life and the nature of this extraordinary person, I remember that he had a large number of friends and maintained an intimacy with many of them. And yet we must respect the fact that Philip was not especially autobiographical. Of course this was something of a puzzle because his curiosity about the biography of his acquaintances was relentless, just as his refusal to accept their version of their actions and their motives was complete” (“Philip Rahv [1908–1973],” New York Review of Books, January 24, 1974).
5. Hardwick: “The outstanding theme of Rahv’s efforts was, I think, a contempt for provincialism, for the tendency to inflate local and fleeting cultural accomplishments. This slashing away at low levels of taste and at small achievements passing as masterly, permanent monuments was a crusade some more bending souls might have grown weary of. But he was not ashamed of his extensive ‘negativism’ and instead went on right up to the end scolding vanity and unworthy accommodation” (“Philip Rahv [1908–1973]”).
6. For the New York Review of Books. Hardwick: “I had been here for some months in 1962 and now in 1974 I returned—to see what? It was a time of celebration for the military regime. They had ruled for ten years […] Prosperity flows to the chosen and to those who have more shall be given. For the rest, the huge remainder, their time has not yet come” (“Sad Brazil,” New York Review of Books, June 27, 1974).
7. Hardwick: “Largeness, magnitude, quantity: it is commonplace to speak of Brazil as a ‘giant,’ a phenomenon spectacular, propitiously born, outrageously favored, and yet marked by the sluggishness of the greatly outsized” (“Sad Brazil,” New York Review of Books, June 27, 1974).
8. Carlos Lacerda (friend of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedos Soares), whom Hardwick and Lowell met in 1962.
9. Hardwick: “it is not uncommon to hear that torture has become ‘boring.’ One brave old lady predicted that it would be replaced by murder, disappearance, gun shots in the streets. So it has proved to be. The idea of human sacrifice—a profane and secular purification rite, practiced in the name of progress, investment, and the holy ‘Growth’—has left the country a ruin. The land is rich in heroes created by the military Will. A small card sent out by the family of a young student killed by the police: […] (Having lived little [1946–1973] he accomplished the task of a long existence)” (“Sad Brazil,” New York Review of Books, June 27, 1974).
10. See Lowell to Hardwick, May 1, 1974 and Hardwick to Lowell, May 6, 1974.
11. Power shortages were still in effect after the end of the strike by the National Union of Mineworkers on March 6, 1974.
12. Paul Mariani: “In April 1974 […] he returned to the States for three weeks of readings, an itinerary which included Vanderbilt, the universities of Virginia and South Carolina (where he visited with James Dickey), then north to Washington, Skidmore, and Harvard” (Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell, p. 425).
13. Clive James, “Big Medicine,” the Review 27 [Autumn–Winter 1971–2]; reprinted in The Metropolitan Critic [1974]. For Lowell’s response, see The Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 631.
14. For a Bicentennial revival of The Old Glory (1965) that opened at the American Place Theatre on April 9, 1976.
15. With whom Lowell had an affair during a major manic episode in 1954. See The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 211–39.
16. One of the twelve letters, postcards, and telegrams written by Hardwick that were included in the Lowell Estate’s sale of papers to the HRC in 1982.
17. Possibly a reference to Clive James’s The Metropolitan Critic, among others; see Lowell to Hardwick, May 1, 1974, footnote 3 on page 389.
18. Robert Hardwick died on May 1, 1974.
19. The University of Kentucky awarded Hardwick an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in May 1974.
20. Israel Citkowitz died on May 4, 1974. Lowell: “he was nearer to us than ex-husbands usually are—close to the children like an uncle, and made the best of me even to the extent of being a partisan. He wasn’t mentally or physically well at the end, but he died rather gaily with oysters and champaigne (R months were just about over) and visits from Lord Gowrie’s beautiful German nobility girlfriend” (to S
tanley Kunitz, [May 14, 1974]).
21. Seduction and Betrayal (1974); Barbara Probst Solomon, “Of Women Writers and Writing about Women,” New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1974.
22. “Sad Brazil,” New York Review of Books, June 27, 1974.
23. Thompson.
24. Robie Macauley’s wife, Anne, died in 1973 (see The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 620–21). Peter Taylor had a heart attack in late May–early June 1974, and “as soon as Peter left the intensive care unit, he went into a deep depression that lasted for a month […] ‘I never before had such dark thoughts or such terrible nightmares,’ he confided to Cal” (Hubert H. McAlexander, Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life [2001], pp. 222–23).
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 59