106. Kenneth Harvey.
107. Clive Barnes: “In Mr. Lowell’s writing empty wisps of poetry are flaking off the prose like rust. He can write things such as ‘the iron of the Lord is more precious than gold.’ He can coin phrases such as ‘a raped Versailles’ or ‘You are dishonoring our nation, Perkins!’ He has horrid fustian passages, such as, ‘Only the unfortunate can understand misfortune,’ or ‘I have only one life, sir.’ And the tone throughout all three plays seems faintly maudlin” (“The Stage: Lowell’s ‘The Old Glory,’” New York Times, April 19, 1976).
108. From July 12 to July 15, 1976. Hardwick wrote about the 1976 presidential campaign in “Elections: Renewal or Just Replacement?” Vogue, July 1, 1976; and “The Carter Question II: Piety and Politics,” New York Review of Books, August 5, 1976.
109. Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (1976); for an account of Raymond Chandler and Natasha Spender’s romance, see Matthew Spender, A House in St. John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents (2015), pp. 145–48, 155–61, 189–92, 208–11, 224–25, 319, 395.
110. I. A. Richards.
111. Phaedra, Op. 93, first performed at the Aldeburgh Festival on June 16, 1976.
112. Thus, for Peter Pears.
113. Cf. Lowell: “Your old-fashioned tirade— loving, rapid, merciless— breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head” (“Man and Wife” 26–28, Life Studies). OED: etymology “[mod. Fr. tirade (16th cent.) a draught, pull, shot; a long speech, declamation; passage of prose or verse, stanza, paragraph] … 2. spec. A passage or selection of verse, of varying length, treating of a single theme or idea” (“Tirade, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Vol. XI).
114. Donald Mitchell: “it was not until the very last years of his life that he [Britten] succumbed to a serious illness of the heart that had its origins in early childhood. […] Among the works created against the odds in this final phase were […] the dramatic cantata Phaedra (for Janet Baker)” (“Britten, [Edward] Benjamin, Baron Britten [1913–1976], composer” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 28 Mar. 2016. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-30853).
115. Philip Booth, Available Light (1976).
116. Hardwick was invited to speak at the P.E.N. International Congress, held August 23–28, 1976, in London.
117. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 26–28, 1968. See “The Races” (Notebook69-1; -2; and Notebook70); and “Dream, the Republican Convention,” “Flaw (Flying to Chicago),” and “After the Democratic Convention” (History). For a description of Lowell’s experience in Chicago, see Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, September 5, 1968, Words in Air, p. 650.
118. In the summer of 1976, Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov performed in The Sleeping Beauty for the American Ballet Theatre (production opened on June 15).
119. Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Threepenny Opera, dir. Richard Forman for the New York Shakespeare Festival revival (production opened on May 1, 1976).
120. Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct: An Autobiography and Other Writings, trans. Beatrice Scott (1958), p. 127. See Hardwick to Lowell, September 19, 1975, above.
121. Selected Poems (1976).
122. 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). See also Lowell to Harriet Lowell: “I love you for liking both your father and mother […] that’s/ why they are such extraordinarily normal, healthy and modest people” (April 2, 1972).
123. A floor stone commemorating Henry James was installed in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey on June 17, 1976. “Among the 200 guests were C. P. Snow, the novelist, Dame Rebecca West, the writer and critic and James scholar, and Robert Lowell, the American poet” (“Henry James, at Last, Admitted to the Abbey,” New York Times, June 18, 1976).
124. Probably in the edition Short Novels of Henry James: Daisy Miller; Washington Square; The Aspern Papers; The Pupil; The Turn of the Screw, introduction by E. Hudson Long (1962).
125. Anzilotti.
126. Thus; Anne Armstrong, first female United States ambassador to the United Kingdom.
127. In conjunction with the exhibition “Young Writers of the Thirties” at the National Portrait Gallery, June 25–November 7, 1976.
128. See Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (1976).
129. Jill Balcon.
130. Enclosure now missing, but Hardwick probably sent Lowell a clipping of “In Martian Orbit”: “United States space scientists have scored a perfect interplanetary bull’s-eye again with the punctual arrival of Viking 1 in the neighborhood of Mars […] Percival Lowell […] devoted much of his life to propagating the idea that the network of canals indicated a highly complex civilization. The canals which Schiaparelli and Lowell wrote about are now known to have been illusions; yet the actual Martian topography is in some ways even more remarkable than were the dreams of these pioneers” (New York Times, June 24, 1976).
131. Associated Press: “Pluto has been selected by scientists of Lowell Observatory here as the name for the recently discovered transneptunian body which they believe is the long-sought Planet X. […] The announcement was made by Roger Lowell Putnam, trustee of the observatory and nephew of the late Dr. Percival Lowell, founder of the observatory, who predicted the existence of Planet X sixteen years ago. […] Mr. Putnam added that Pluto lent itself easily to the monogram ‘P.L.,’ the initials of Percival Lowell, and ‘would be a fitting memorial to him’” (“Pluto Picked as the Name for New Planet X Because He Was God of Dark, Distant Regions,” New York Times, May 26, 1930).
132. 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.
133. “The Carter Question II: Piety and Politics,” New York Review of Books, August 5, 1976.
134. “George III” first appeared in Newsweek as the voice of “The Great American Poet” in “Our America” (“nearly fifty American voices—speaking with Newsweek reporters across the nation”), on July 4, 1976.
135. Michael Feingold, “It’s Older but Still Glorious” (review of The American Place Theatre’s Bicentennial revival of The Old Glory), Village Voice, April 26, 1976.
136. Philip Booth, “Summers in Castine: Contact Prints: 1955–1965,” Salmagundi 37 (“For Robert Lowell, on His 60th Birthday”), Spring 1977.
137. P.E.N. 41st International Congress, held August 23–28, 1976 in London, entitled “The Truth of Imagination.” Spender was President of English P.E.N. from 1975–1977 (see John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography [2004], p. 485).
138. At the 21st Annual Writers Forum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (where Jarrell was on the faculty), March 17–19, 1964; Hardwick lectured on “Plot in Fiction” on March 17 and Lowell gave a “Poetry Reading and Commentary” on March 19 (Corradi: The Fine Arts Magazine of the University at Greensboro [March|Arts Forum 1964], p. 30).
139. Lowell’s maternal ancestor John Stark (1728–1822), a major general in the Continental Army during the American Revolution; “the iconoclastic, mulish Dunbarton New Hampshire Starks” (“91 Revere Street,” Life Studies, p. 16).
140. In Newsweek’s “Our America” (July 4, 1976), among the fifty American voices was “Jimmy Carter’s Mother” (Lillian Carter), who said, “I never have had an intimate friend. I don’t get intimate with anybody except my children.”
141. 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 footnote 5 on page 56 (Lowell to Hardwick, June 14, 1970).
142. Lowell: “I hear the noise of my own voice” (“Epilogue” 5, Day by Day).
143. With Iris Murdoc
h and John Bayley.
144. Sontag: “It is this demand for an unremitting rhetoric, with every argument arriving triumphantly at a militant conclusion, which has prevented some feminists from properly appreciating that most remarkable of recent contributions to the feminist imagination of history, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal. A more specific reproach leveled against Hardwick’s complex book is that it implicitly defends ‘elitist’ values (like talent, genius), which are incompatible with the egalitarian ethics of feminism. I hear an echo of this self-righteous view when Rich characterizes the feminist movement as ‘passionately anti-hierarchal and anti-authoritarian’” (Adrienne Rich, reply by Susan Sontag, “Feminism and Fascism: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, March 20, 1975). Sontag would later say, “Her sentences are burned in my brain […] I think she writes the most beautiful sentences, more beautiful sentences than any living American writer” (Hilton Als, “A Singular Woman,” New Yorker, July 13, 1998).
145. Hardwick, “Billie Holiday,” New York Review of Books, March 4, 1976.
146. Cf. Lowell: “I give you simply what you have already” (“The Vanity of Human Wishes,” 384).
147. Blackwood, “A Big House in Ireland” (review of Woodbrook by David Thomson), Listener, December 12, 1974.
148. For Great Granny Webster (1977).
149. (1877).
150. Grad.
151. The final part of the letter is typed on the verso of the aerogram.
152. “In the Mail” from The Dolphin, for inclusion in Lowell’s Selected Poems; see footnote 2 on page 293.
153. Probably Herbie Rides Again (1974), dir. Robert Stevenson, sequel to The Love Bug (1968); Le Ballon rouge (1956), dir. Albert Lamorisse.
154. In Hardwick’s hand on verso: “Reply to cable Harriet sent Cal in hospital October? 1976.” Lowell was discharged from Greenways on October 27, 1976.
155. Ian Hamilton: “In Cambridge the confusion was exacerbated: Blackwood was convinced that Lowell was still sick, and he was convinced that she needed help far more than he did. On November 25 Lowell called Blair Clark, as Clark records: ‘Cal Lowell called, I having called him. He was at Frank Bidart’s in Cambridge. He said, in effect, that he’d left the house and Caroline for a while to get some peace […] .’ Lowell stayed at Bidart’s apartment for ten days. ([Bidart said that] ‘he was just unbelievably grateful and relieved to be in an atmosphere that was not this terrific turmoil, anger, drama, tension’)” (Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 457).
156. Frank Bidart: “Lowell hoped his version of the Oresteia could be performed in one evening. Agamemnon and Orestes were written in the early 1960’s; The Furies was added in the last year of his life, for a projected production of the entire trilogy at Lincoln Center. (The Furies, begun during December 1976, was finished by the end of the following January.) It wasn’t produced. Lincoln Center decided to do Agamemnon alone, in the uncut translation of Edith Hamilton […] When he returned from Harvard at the end of January 1977, with the manuscript of The Furies, he was ill—and eager to finish his new book of poems, Day by Day” (“A Note on the Text,” The Oresteia of Aeschylus, trans. Robert Lowell [1978]).
157. W. B. Yeats, Sophocles’ King Oedipus: A Version for the Modern Stage (1928); Sophokles, Women of Trachis: A Version by Ezra Pound (1957).
158. Jacqueline Winslow, Lowell’s first cousin.
159. OED: “ordinary level n. Educ. (now hist.) the lowest of the three levels of examination in the General Certificate of Education in England […] usually taken by pupils at the age of 16, and replaced in 1988 by the General Certificate of Secondary Education; abbreviation O level” (“O level, n.,” March 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/261576?redirectedFrom=o+level, accessed March 28, 2016).
160. For The New York Review of Books. Bishop’s Geography III was published in December 1976.
161. Ian Hamilton: “Lowell’s sixtieth birthday coincided with news from Blackwood that Milgate had been sold, and that she had taken an apartment in a huge Georgian stately home at Castletown, near Dublin. The house was the headquarters of the Irish Georgian Society, and most parts of it were open to the public. Desmond Guinness, Lady Caroline’s cousin and the Society’s president, had suggested that she rent one of the house’s small private apartments; for tax purposes, it was sensible for her (and perhaps for Lowell also) to establish residence in Ireland—and for Blackwood, certainly Castletown offered a convenient interim arrangement. According to friends, Lowell complained that the sale of Milgate had gone through without any consultation […] To Blackwood, though, he wrote: ‘What strikes me in this order is the teenager flat, the likeness to the Louvre (a vague feeling that we will live there as old royal Louvre pensioners, and the nearness of the Liffey)…” (Robert Lowell: A Biography, pp. 460–61).
162. Frank Bidart.
163. Blair Clark: “Last Monday I had dinner at the Café des Artistes with Eliz. She seemed ready, if not ecstatic, about resuming some sort of life that was close, if not exactly with, to Cal. In passing, she said it would mean the interruption of some aspect of her personal life that had not quite worked out but was there” (“The Lowells … notes for a never-to-be-written memoir,” May 8, 1977, Blair Clark Papers, HRC).
164. Lowell: “‘You know|you were an unwanted child?’|[…] Is the one unpardonable sin|our fear of not being wanted?|For this, will mother go on cleaning house|for eternity, making it unlivable?|Is getting well ever an art,|or art a way to get well?” (“Unwanted,” 48–56, 112–17, Day by Day).
165. (1977).
166. (1976).
167. Robert Craft: “Yes, I believe it has passed I mean my marriage [to Rita Christiansen Craft]/, but I am grateful to you for even putting your mind on it” (Robert Craft to Elizabeth Hardwick, “Annotation of Elizabeth Hardwick’s letter, dated August 4—” Elizabeth Hardwick Papers, HRC). “Alfreda” is a joke about Alfredo in Verdi’s La Traviata (1853).
168. Katherine Anne Porter, “The Never-Ending Wrong,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1977.
169. That is, her journey to and from New York to the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where Hardwick would be teaching for the fall semester; but see also Franz Schubert, Winterreise (D. 911, Op. 89, 1828).
170. Lowell: “A savage servility|slides by on grease” (“For the Union Dead,” 67–68, For the Union Dead).
171. Aleksander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, vols. 1–4, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (1964). The Metropolitan Opera mounted a production of Tchaikovsky’s opera of Eugene Onegin with a Russian libretto on October 15, 1977.
172. First quoted in Jamison (2017), p. 365.
173. Associated Press. September 12, 1977, AM cycle. https://advance.lexis.com/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:3SJ4-DD60-0011-353T-00000-00&context=1516831.
174. “North Haven (In Memoriam: Robert Lowell),” which was later published in the New Yorker (December 11, 1978).
175. Sleepless Nights (1979).
176. For Cannibals and Missionaries (1979).
177. Hardwick: “Mother, the reading glasses and the assignation near the clammy faces, so gray, of the intense church ladies. And then a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off. The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs” (Sleepless Nights, p. 151).
178. Hardwick: “How is the Mister this morning? Josette would say. The Mister? Shall I turn his devastated brown hair to red, which few have? Appalling disarray of trouser and jacket and feet stuffed into stretched socks. Kindly smile, showing short teeth like his mother’s” (Sleepless Nights, p. 121).
179. Hannah Arendt, writing of Duns Scotus: “Contemplation of the summum bonum, of the ‘highest thing,’ ergo God, would be
the ideal of the intellect, which is always grounded in intuition, the grasping of a thing in its ‘thisness,’ haecceitas, which in this life is imperfect not only because here the highest remains unknown but also because intuition of thisness is imperfect: ‘the intellect … has recourse to intellectual concepts, precisely because it is incapable of grasping the haecceity’” (The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy [1978], p. 144).
180. Ida, Alex, and Louisa are characters in Sleepless Nights.
181. Caroline Blackwood and Natasha Spender.
182. DuVivier.
183. Diane Johnson, “Beyond the Evidence,” New York Review of Books, June 14, 1979.
184. Unsigned.
“Cal working, etc.” by Elizabeth Hardwick
1. Excerpt from a letter and pages of notes addressed to Ian Hamilton, Lowell’s biographer [n.d., 1981 or 1982].
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 61