I have learned what I wanted from the mermaid
and her singeing conjunction of tail and grace.1
“One man, two women” is what Robert Lowell called “the common novel plot” of The Dolphin. It is a book of love poems, and therefore a book of being driven off course, of doubt and vacillation. The protagonist is a poet (a “suffering hero?”2 as Lowell ventured in an interview), who, while in England and away from his wife and daughter in New York, falls in love with a woman named Caroline, both a figure in the plot and the actual person, Caroline Blackwood, to whom the book is dedicated. He thinks of his pursuit of Caroline and of his own art as continuous. A sense of impending mortality haunts him, as well as responsibility to and anxiety about children; Caroline’s, with whom he now lives; and his daughter, Harriet, in America. But more cutting and urgent is another “rapier voice,”3 that of his wife, Lizzie (Elizabeth Hardwick), speaking in letters and through the telephone cables. In the course of the story, he falls in love, has a recurrence of mania, suffers hallucinations and hospitalization, recovers, vacillates in an agony of indecision, goes back home to find no true answer, then makes his choice. In the manuscript version, the choice, made at Christmas, is followed the next year by the birth of a son (Robert Sheridan) and “a happiness so slow burning, it is lasting.”4 In the published version, the coming of the child precedes, and helps him to find, his resolution.
The riddles that all poems make and solve helped Lowell survive those days—“it seems our insoluble lives sometimes come clearer in writing.”5 While “pursuing my ear that knows not what it says,”6 Lowell created a series of poems that recount an experience of recovery, survival, guilt, and grief coincident with “beguilement and the storm” of erotic forces. To borrow from Coleridge, it is the choice of sensations7—the poet alert to his own feeling and thought alongside the look of London crowds at night, or the sounds of “the crude and homeless wet” of rain against the glass, or the memory of Lizzie’s intonations, or the experience of Caroline’s “humor and fragility”—that the poems sift. More than writing per se, the writing of this book, the shaping of the drama, is part of the narrative—for Lowell found in the writing of it a form of equipoise, balancing in his mind his exhilaration and desires, his conflicting responsibilities, and his artistic judgment.
As with all of Lowell’s deeply allusive work, he invites us to think of his art against the background of tradition. The verse form is an adapted sonnet, consisting mainly of fourteen lines, rhyming internally to no set scheme, with something of a sonnet’s thought structure. Among the ideals he invokes is accuracy, which was already on his mind when he was revising poems for Notebook, the collection that immediately preceded The Dolphin. He wrote to Marianne Moore in January 1970 about a recent poem of hers:
What startled was your generosity of thought, and the accuracy in carrying it out. I mean that when most people might feel they’ve\d/ found a good enough figure, you go on to accuracy.8
Accuracy meant more than exact description, but figures and represented forms quick with life and various of feeling or thought. He had said of his most celebrated book, Life Studies,9 that his ambition was for each poem to “seem as open and single-surfaced as a photograph,” what Michael Hofmann has described as “an Imagism enriched with psychological notes, with hardheadedness, with implication.”10 But Lowell subsequently came to see the ambition as a limitation, finding it “severe to be confined to rendering appearances.” The material of the Life Studies poems was largely “recollection,” of his childhood and family life. In the Notebook sonnets, which led to The Dolphin, the mix of the immediate present moment with memory, “the day-to-day with the history”—“always the instant, sometimes changing to the lost”—resulted in poems that are “more jagged and imagined.” This is the accuracy he was after, “things I felt or saw, or read” becoming “drift in the whirlpool.”11 He would later “pray,” in his poem “Epilogue,” “for the grace of accuracy.”12
Perhaps his decision to be “frank, open and vulnerable”13—or “simple, sensuous and passionate,” from Milton’s definition of poetry14—while in the grip of writing his poems creates the special style of The Dolphin. In the spring of 1971 Lowell was thinking about “the difficult poetry I grew wise and confused on in the thirties”15—William Empson and Hart Crane, he offered as examples, and others inspired not only by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry but by the critics who wrote so discerningly about it. “Now that obscure poetry is perhaps out of fashion, one must pay homage to its supreme invention and exploration.”16 In the summer of 1971, he spoke of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos as the work of “a hard, angular, in some ways shrill and artificial man” who “by courage let the heart break through his glass ribs.”17 The first sonnets, with their “unnecessarily grand obscurities” that he later tried to “comb out,”18 arose conditionally from the strange explosive mix of his experience while his old models contended behind the scenes. The result is poetry that is emotionally and tonally various, at times oblique in its leaps of thought and address, in its switching between British and American idioms, humorous and suffering and self-humoring, truth-telling and “sidestepping.”19
Lowell began writing sonnets about his new love shortly after his affair with Caroline Blackwood began in May 1970. In late June, he telegraphed Hardwick that he would not be returning to New York, and two weeks later he was hospitalized in London for mania. Blackwood departed, and Hardwick, moved by his distress, visited him at the London hospital in early August. She found him in a very weakened state and reported that he could “hardly write, writing a few poems (they’re all right).”20 He was released from the hospital in late August, and by October, he had thirty poems, “the Romantic romance of a married man in a hospital,” as he wrote to his friend Elizabeth Bishop.
By the end of November Lowell had “about ninety,” composing “at a great rate, even scribbling lines down during a dinner”21—more than a poem a day for two months. Among these were several written in the voices of the “two women,” based on transposed letters and conversations. (The story of Lowell’s use of Hardwick’s original letters—their wide-angle portrayal of her feelings, what he wanted from them for his poetry—is told in The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle.) He went home to New York for the Christmas holiday and broke with Hardwick, then returned to England in the new year. Later that winter came the news that Blackwood was pregnant.
Lowell wrote new poems in the spring of 1971, including the first and final sonnets,22 and found his figure of the dolphin, the tutelary spirit of the book.23 (The dolphin is a symbol of Apollo, one of the gods of poetry, and of healing and divination; and the word, some scholarship suggests, is etymologically linked to δελφύς or delfys, for “womb.” As a classicist in college, Lowell would also have known the tale, from Herodotus and Ovid, of the poet Arion, who was rescued from captivity by dolphins.) Even as he continued to add new sonnets written during Caroline’s pregnancy, the arc of the plot had been shaped. All the while, Lowell hesitated to plan the publication of the work, sensing that Hardwick “will feel bruised by the intimacy. She should win all hearts but what is that when you are left, and left again in print?”24 He nevertheless chose to publish a selection of fourteen poems in the Review that summer, and wrote what he thought would be the last of the poems at the birth of Sheridan in September.25
By the end of 1971 Lowell had assembled a fully shaped manuscript of “about eighty poems.”26 He invited Frank Bidart to England to help finalize this draft, going over the poems, sometimes dictating lines for Bidart or Blackwood to add to the typescript. They finished a version in early 1972, and Bidart brought a photocopy back to America. Copies were given or sent to Bishop, William Alfred, and Stanley Kunitz, among others. Their strong reactions—admiration and shock—caused Lowell to rethink the book.
All three objected to Lowell’s use of Hardwick’s letters and conversation. Bishop was particularly uneasy with Lowell’s revisions of Hardwick’s written words (“art just isn’t worth that much,” she wrote).27 She was also critical of the plot sequence at the end. She found the shift from his final New York visit (in the Flight to New York sequence) to the “change, decision, or whatever happens” afterward (his return to Caroline, the news of her pregnancy28) “too sudden—after the prolongation of all the first sections, the agonies of indecision, etc.—(wonderful atmosphere of life’s stalling ways…).” After the end of Flight to New York, with its “shadow of departure”29 from Lizzie and their life together, “there is no actual return to England—and the word BURDEN and then the question ‘Have we got a child?’30 sounds almost a bit Victorian-melodramatic.” She thought his character had to get himself “back to England before the baby appears like that.”
Lowell did not want to lose the voice of the Lizzie character, but he decided to change what he came to see as a “rather callous happy ending”31 and to “somehow blunt and angle the letters”32 so that they seemed not so much documentary as the recording of arguments in his memory and mind. He described to Bidart the changes he was making:
Several of the early letters, From my Wife[,] are now cut up into Voices (often using such title) \changing mostly pronouns/ as if I were speaking and paraphrasing or repeating Lizzie.33
To Kunitz, he wrote:
The long birth sequence will come before the Flight to New York, a stronger conclusion, and one oddly softening the effect by giving a reason other than \new/ love for my departure. Most of the letter poems—E. B.’s objection they were part fiction offered as truth—can go back to your old plan, a mixture of my voice, and another voice in my head, part me, part Lizzie, \italicized,/ paraphrased, imperfectly, obsessively heard.34
The alternative plots—one closely aligned with the true unfolding of events, the other fictive—did not alter the truth of what Lowell saw (by the spring of 1972) as a consequence somehow fated.35 He felt that the sequence of poems about going home to face his wife and daughter (Flight to New York) “is the real, though not chronological ending” and “the real truth of the story.”36
Even so, the change alters the key in which we hear those poems, written in the uncertainty of the moment, revised and narratively placed after Lowell had lived with the outcome of his decision. He had composed Flight to New York in November and December 1970, before and during the Christmas visit to his wife and daughter. In November, he was still wavering, but believed that he would be returning to them for good. He had asked Hardwick to take him back, and wrote to her on November 16:
I have been pouring out poems, and almost have a little book, in the same form as Notebook, but much smaller. I’ve even anticipated my landing in New York. You see I am back home.37
On November 30, he wrote to her again:
I still do nothing much but bury my indecisions in many many poems. I think I have ninety now and a tall house of draft and discard. I am very bad company because I am so removed. You won’t enjoy me. However I am coming to see you and dear Harriet, not Blair. So you’ll hear from me at once.38
But by mid-December, he had changed his mind again. He wrote to Kunitz on December 12:
Nothing is settled forever, but I imagine Lizzie and I are breaking. I pray it may be no more cruel than it has to be, and a little less. It’s all been rather killing, for months now not manic but cold, sober, & anxious sober.39
Lowell wrote to Bishop too of his change of heart as his trip neared:
I’ll be in New York staying with Blair Clark about the time you get this. I think Lizzie and I are going to break. I should have done it much more cleanly some time ago. But I can’t. I wonder if anyone in his right mind could. I am back to see Lizzie and Harriet, things are not even now quite settled, but they must be.40
Bishop later wondered if “flight” in the title Flight to New York “is the right word here? (even if you do fly).”41 A reader of The Dolphin might feel invited to think of another kind of flight, but is then disinvited by the very outcome of the story.42
There is no comfortable category for Lowell’s sonnets—the work of six years that resulted in the publication of five volumes of poetry,43 which he revised again in subsequent reprintings44—nor can a “stable text” be presented. While there is nothing remarkable about a writer amending his or her work, Lowell’s practice of it was unusually public. As he reported, “I couldn’t stop writing, and have handled my published book as if it were manuscript.”45 “Endless days revising our revisions” were spent, from handwritten first drafts to typed manuscripts, magazine publications, and typeset book galleys, and going past these to paperback editions and further changes in Jonathan Raban’s Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection (1974), Lowell’s own Selected Poems (1976), and his revised Selected Poems (1977), as well as lists of further corrections that he left with his friends46 or may have written in their copies of his books. The printed page allowed him to notice things he had overlooked in manuscript and wanted to put right.
The closest metaphor for Lowell’s freedom with the printed record, one critic suggests, is to the fluidity of song in performance47—a freedom tolerated by his publishers in America and Great Britain, who bore the cost of producing books that had simultaneously circulating versions of the same poems, and that as stock and backlist did not have the same temporally brief life as a song played for an audience.48 Like Erasmus before him, who had hoped that the reader of new editions of the Adagia will “have gained twice, not lost twice,”49 Lowell also hoped that “there has been increase of beauty, wisdom, tragedy, and all the blessings of this consuming chance.”50 But what it asks of a reader did trouble him, and in some moods he thought despairingly of those who might “spend lifetimes listing and living variants”;51 or of the “still target” he held up “for the critic who knows that most second thoughts, when visible, are worse thoughts.”52 (Tennyson asked in his poem “Sea Dreams,” “Is it so true that second thoughts are best?|Not first, and third, which are a riper first?”) Any further thoughts after the first, second, and third that Lowell left behind are final in authority only because of his death.
This edition offers some hours of the pleasures of “living” different versions of the poems, not only the large changes Lowell made to the plot but delicate and distinct musical ones as well. Many of the poems wonder if his new life is an arrival or a departure, his doubts extending overtly outward in meaning, or inward in internal rhymes, as in the following lines from “Morning Blue” about facing the day:
I am exposed, keeping53 guessing if I can make
the chill of the morning and put on my clothes.54
On the same manuscript page, he revised the rhyme:
I am exposed, keep guessing if I can make
the chill of the morning and its dressing.
Is the locution to “make|the chill of the morning” nautical—like making harbor, or making sail?55 In the first version, the softening rhyme of “exposed” with “clothes” comes to a kind of arrival, at least in sound. The revised rhyme pairs “guessing” (by way of “morning”) with “dressing,” a feminine ending. Perhaps the change, both rhythmic and tonal, implies that covering himself for the day will not give him a morning’s respite, nor put an end to his quandary.
In the final version, “make” is replaced with the perhaps more medicinal and bracing “take”:
I am exposed, keep guessing if I can take
the chill of the morning and its dressing.56
It is in some of his smallest musical decisions that Lowell exposes and makes larger his meanings. “What is it that Eliot says, Fare forward? So we must.”57 The publication of The Dolphin in 1973 was controversial. Many reviewers were uneasy with its claims of being “half fiction,” and critiques, whether vehement or more equable, echoed the lines of argument made by those who had seen the prepublication version. “A lampooning!” Lowell wrote to Bishop. “\The/ distortion of the ‘fictional’ characters becomes a kind of slander on the people themselves […] Your old letter of warning—I never solved the problem of the letters, and there and elsewhere of fact and fiction.”58 It is a coincidence of literary history that the reception of The Dolphin echoed arguments made against George Meredith’s 1862 volume Modern Love, which was one of Lowell’s models—a book of fifty adapted sonnets about the breakup of a marriage, in which “the actors are, it seems, the usual three:|Husband, and wife, and lover.” Modern Love was excoriated in its time for being “graphic,” a mere “common-place which is illustrated with a freedom that mistakes itself for courage, and is simply bad and prurient taste,”59 for resembling “scattered leaves from the diary of a stranger” in an “obscure style”60—though also defended against “rash or partial attack,” by a fellow poet, Swinburne.61
Alongside the controversy and gossip, The Dolphin had good reviews—one called it a “votive sculpture”62—and it won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. Anthony Hecht, who served on the jury, praised it for having “a range of reference, dramatic leaps of movement and tone, an imaginative amplitude, that few could match. The poem on Freud, for example, and his family, is connected to Lowell and his own family in dense, complex and mortifying ways. The language is strong and plain, full of the resonance of heart-break; and alive with the capacity to reveal what the spirit has scarcely the courage to utter.” William Alfred, another juror, confessed, “In all frankness, I was put off first reading the book by a certain callousness in the name of candor. I know the people involved. But on comparison with the other works nominated, I had no other choice but to cast my vote for it. It embodies an experience of our time, none the less tragic for being common; and it does so in a language worthy of the seriousness of that experience and supple enough to convey its desperately puzzling contradictions.”63
A reader who pauses over this sequence of Lowell’s poems to take in the arc of the whole book, or a set of lines, or an arresting image, or the “hundreds of aphorisms that stud and spice his poems,”64 or the double meanings of his words (“common,” “novel,” and “plot”),65 or the double meanings and several possible tones of his statements (“I have learned what I wanted”), will experience “the resonance of heart-break,” the masterful capturing, in single gestures, of compounds and conjunctions of feeling and experience. Lowell wrote to Bishop in 1972, in the summer of further revising, and with his own poised rearrangement of Milton’s words, “I’m trying to be simple sensuous and graceful.”66
Saskia Hamilton