Should revelation be sealed like private letters,
till all the beneficiaries are dead,
and our proper names become improper Lives?
—Robert Lowell, “Draw” [Doubt 1], The Dolphin
Was that written for the archives? Who is speaking?
—Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights
Until the end of her life, Elizabeth Hardwick wondered what had happened to the letters she wrote to Robert Lowell during the 1970s. They “are lost or gone,” she said to Lowell’s biographer and, referring to the use Lowell had made of her letters in his book The Dolphin, she added, “I suppose he was so busy cutting them up!” (laughter).1
The Dolphin Letters collects the correspondence between Hardwick and Lowell during the last seven years of Lowell’s life—Hardwick’s side of which surfaced only after her death more than thirty years later—and offers a portrait of two writers at a time of intense personal crisis and creative innovation. Both relied on intelligent and telegraphic communications with each other while going through their separation and divorce; and afterward, through the years during which Lowell published four books of poetry, including The Dolphin, Hardwick wrote Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature and Sleepless Nights, and their daughter, Harriet, grew from thirteen to twenty years old. A written record cannot but be incomplete— “your whole self and your writing self are different,” as Hardwick once remarked2—and this portrait is necessarily partial, framed as it is by a period of distress that alters the proportions of the lives represented. Lowell’s romance with and marriage to Caroline Blackwood happen offstage, as does the family life they made with their son, Sheridan, Blackwood’s three daughters, and Harriet. Hardwick’s romantic involvements during this period are not mentioned. Nevertheless, the correspondence gives us their written character and temperament both within and outside of the marriage during this period (included in the book are significant exchanges with friends in their circle), in their distinct qualities of mind and sentence.
The book opens with Hardwick’s return to New York with Harriet after a family trip to Italy in the spring of 1970. Lowell and Hardwick were both fifty-three years old and had been married since 1949. Harriet was due back at school to finish the seventh grade, and Hardwick to finish the semester’s teaching at Barnard College. Lowell, who was on his way to take up an eight-week fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, extended his travels from Rome to Amsterdam to visit old friends, and then on to England. He was at the time considering a separate teaching offer from the University of Essex, which would have involved moving the family to England for two years, not least to seek respite from the stresses of his recent American life. These included his commitments to teaching (he commuted every week from New York to Harvard) and to activism—a “dedication,” as Hardwick called it,3 that both she and Lowell observed their entire adult lives. The claims of political engagement on both writers during the years of anti-war protests and the civil rights movement were serious, and yet the “scene” by 1970, during the first Nixon administration, struck Hardwick as “an utter, odd shambles, a nothing,” she wrote to Mary McCarthy before the family trip. “The phone rings all day with meetings one could attend, plays one is urged to go to in the freezing night, an occasional unwanted invitation, malignant growths of mail, bills […] And the depressing quiet in the midst of so much rush and anxiousness. You feel as if you’d been in a play running for years and then it closed and you went uptown and no one called.”4 “Almost everyone understands how one would want to leave America temporarily,” Lowell wrote to Hardwick that April.5
Lowell arrived at All Souls on April 24. Six days later, he attended a party in his honor given by his British publisher, Faber & Faber. Caroline Blackwood, whom he had met some years previously, was there, and they were reintroduced.6 Blackwood was thirty-eight years old. She later recalled that “after the Faber party, he moved into Redcliffe Square [Blackwood’s London house]—I mean instantly, that night.”7 Traveling from All Souls to London and back over the next six weeks, Lowell returned often in his thoughts to Matthew Arnold’s Scholar-Gipsy,8 a man of “pregnant parts and quick inventive brain” who tires of modern life and seeks shelter in the pastoral of Oxford. Though Lowell was far from idle during this period—his work included preparing Notebook for publication, adding new poems, revising old ones, engaging Blackwood as critic and scribe9—he writes to Hardwick that “this is almost the first time since lithium”10 that he had not been ceaselessly working. But a longing for rest had been a sign of impending turmoil in his past.11 “Take leisure to be wise,” he writes in the last of the letters to Hardwick that float on the fiction of all being well12—just six days before announcing by telegram that “PERSONAL DIFFICULTIES MAKE TRIP TO NEWYORK IMPOSSIBLE RIGHT AWAY.”13
During Lowell and Hardwick’s previous twenty-one years together, Lowell had suffered at least ten major manic episodes and at least fifteen hospitalizations, and was administered the therapies available at the time (seclusion and shock treatment in 1949; chlorpromazine, hydrotherapy, and psychoanalysis from the 1950s until the mid-1960s; lithium, newly available in the United States, in his fiftieth year). Manic-depressive illness is an episodic but also a progressive disease; and by 1961 Lowell’s cycle of acute mania, hospitalization, and depression began to recur yearly.14 Part of the tremendous activity and spectacle of the manic phases—“people loved to take part in them,” Hardwick wrote; “they were very like The Idiot,15 not at all like a mad killer”—involved falling in love, often implausibly. Hardwick said that during his breakdowns she was “deeply distressed, frantic, and all the rest” when “faced with these humiliating, recurring situations.” They were humiliating for him, too, later, after he “‘came to,’” when he was “sad, worried, always ashamed and fearful,” she wrote. “And when he was well, it seemed so miraculous that the old gifts of person and art were still there, as if they had been stored in some serene, safe box somewhere.” At home again after the hospital, “he returned to his days, which were regular,” reading, writing, studying. “And yet there he was, this unique soul for whom one felt great pity. His fate was like a strange, almost mythical two-engined machine, one running to doom and the other to salvation.”16
“Fortunately, Cal17 was ‘well’ much more of his life than he was not,” Hardwick added. “Otherwise his large and difficult, for him, production would not exist.”18 A. L. Rowse described him as “most sympathetic. […] He was sane, sensitive, perceptive and responsive, full of original thoughts, rather a dear, and obviously a man of genius.”19 Derek Walcott wondered “what biographer could catch the heartbreaking smile, his wit, his solicitude, his shyness? […] Clouds covered him, but when they went, he was extraordinarily gentle.”20
When Lowell was first prescribed lithium, it granted him release from both the yearly attacks and his anxiety about when the next would strike. One should not “understate how powerful it might have been for him to be freed of such a severe and painful illness,” Harriet Lowell writes. “If a salt could stop the attacks, that meant the illness was not caused by some terrible character flaw.”21 On lithium, Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, “even my well life is much changed, as tho I’d once been in danger of falling with every step I took.”22 He began to write a “notebook” of sonnet-like poems (fourteen lines, rhyming internally but to no set scheme), notations of “fleeting feelings, insights, perceptions, marginal half-thoughts and how these bear down on one’s life,” as Frank Bidart described them.23
But to some old friends there seemed another, subtle change, as if the difference in his character and temperament when well and when sick was a little less distinct, even if his gentleness and intelligence were undiminished. From 1967 to 1970 Lowell worked on the “unstopping composition” of the Notebook poems (numbering 377 by the publication of the third edition), which was connected, Lowell wrote to Hardwick in apology, to the “stirring and blurring” of drinking. “I’ve been hard going the last couple of years, though when haven’t I been?”24 Harriet Lowell remembers her mother saying that he was “simmering” during those years. As Kay Redfield Jamison writes, “Although Lowell fit the clinical profile of someone likely to respond to lithium […] he was put on lithium late in his illness, and stability is harder to achieve after repeated episodes of mania. Lowell also drank heavily at times, most notably when he was manic, which almost certainly affected his response” to the drug. “It is possible that the lithium capped his mania well enough to allow him to write with some of the productive advantage of mild mania.”25 Esther Brooks recalled that during the years of lithium treatment, “the well person and the unwell person seemed to rub together in a strange kind of muted euphoria. One no longer feared that he would go mad but one kept waiting for the delicate and exquisite side of his mind to assert itself once again.”26
In May 1970, Hardwick sensed very quickly from Lowell’s silences and evasions that he was again in love, and that he was “not at all well.” By mid-May, her letters appear to be keeping up a pretense of daily conversation—about Harriet and the household, plans for moving to England, the social scene, the extraordinary political events unfolding, the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the New Haven Black Panther trials, the killings of students at Kent State and Jackson State—because she knew something was wrong but couldn’t ask. “PERSONAL DIFFICULTIES”: as she feared, his affair (with whom, she had yet to learn) and his weeks at All Souls were prelude to a severe manic episode—his first since his lithium treatment had begun three years earlier. During the summer of 1970, it was not clear to anyone, Lowell included, whether his feelings for Blackwood were symptomatic of his illness. After nearly two months, when Hardwick finally learned with whom Lowell had taken up, she was doubtful about Blackwood as a partner for him. Part of her distress was not knowing whether Blackwood could “cope with his mental illness if it returned full force,” Harriet Lowell writes.27
Though none of Lowell’s previous affairs had lasted, this alliance proved different. “I am not mad and hold to you with reason,” he later wrote in a poem to Blackwood.28 Thanks to the efficacy of the lithium treatment, from his recovery in the fall of 1970 until 1975,29 the passionate and productive years he spent with Blackwood and their family marked the longest period his mania was stabilized since the first serious occurrence of the disease.30 And once Hardwick was relieved of her fears for his safety and sanity, and for Harriet’s well-being, the “certain euphoria (60%)”31 she felt at being on her own led to a richly generative time spent on her own writing. In some ways, “my mother was never freer or more lively” than during the period that followed, Harriet recalls.32
Lowell and Hardwick’s separation was conducted mostly through letters in the summer and fall of 1970. A practical reason for writing instead of telephoning was the expense of transatlantic calls and the uneven quality of reception (crossed lines, echoes) impeding the flow of conversation. “I am sorry I was so mute on the phone. At the start two others seemed competing with you,” Lowell writes after one such call.33 But they were also lifelong writers of letters, and were critically and artistically interested in the form.34 Contrary to a reader’s expectations that we might find in letters the writer “at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances,” Hardwick wrote about literary correspondence in 1953, “letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope.”35 She would later write, in an essay about fictional correspondence in Richardson’s Clarissa, that a letter is partly “one’s own evidence, […] the writer holds all the cards, controls everything about himself and about those assertions he wishes to make concerning events or the worth of others.”36 A letter is also of the moment, and quickly posted. Harder to control in a genuine correspondence (not one written for the art of fiction) is the vacillation of feeling from one letter to the next.
Letters both real and fictional are a formal device in Lowell’s poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in Hardwick’s prose. Experimenting with autobiography and immediacy in the Notebook poems, Lowell had versed a letter from Allen Tate into a poem for the 1969 first edition. In the spring of 1970, he did the same with a letter from Elizabeth Bishop for the third edition. That autumn, as he began to write in his adapted sonnet form about a “suffering hero?”37 being drawn into what precipitates the end of a long marriage, he turned to Hardwick’s letters to help tell the tale of “one man, two women, the common novel plot.”38 In The Dolphin, the wife and daughter left behind are given voice in Lowell’s “cut” and “doctored” versions of Hardwick’s letters. From Lowell’s point of view, they are thereby made real “beyond my invention.”39
During those years, Hardwick was immersed in letters from their past as she ordered Lowell’s papers for their eventual sale to archives. (“About the ‘papers,’—‘Aspern’—which I have not looked at since I first and last went through them. Have I the strength?” Hardwick wrote to Lowell after their separation. “I hate them and hate to let them go; the damned things are my life also.”40) Sleepless Nights, which took shape following the publication of The Dolphin, is not a “short-wave autobiography,” as her narrator first had in mind to write, but a novel that “fades in and out, local voices mixing with the mysterious static of the cadences of strangers” thousands of miles apart.41 Although Hardwick’s sources were many, what she had learned in her years of absorption in literary correspondence, in poems, and in the prose of poets (“one of my passions”42), shows in the novel’s lyric brevity and pacing. Its narrator, whose name is Elizabeth, writes to a “Dearest M.,” and is “always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.”43 These interlocutors may share initials with Mary (McCarthy), Barbara (Epstein), Devie (Meade), and Cal (Lowell), though they are not they exactly, either.
Central to Lowell and Hardwick’s exchange of letters in the 1970s, and to the work they made during this period, is a debate about the limits of art—what occasions a work of art; what moral and artistic license artists have to make use of their lives as material; what formal innovations such debates give rise to. “The whole question of the rights and duties, the decencies and discretions of the insurmountable desire to know,” as Henry James calls it,44 is given form in the decisions Lowell and Hardwick made in The Dolphin and Sleepless Nights. The illustrations and annotations in the present edition point especially to those works, and to significant earlier drafts, since both were much revised before final publication. Included herein are illustrations of individual poems from “The Dolphin” manuscript that draw from letters Lowell received and wrote. (The complete draft of Lowell’s manuscript that was circulated to friends in 1972 is now published in The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973.) Also included is “Writing a Novel,” Hardwick’s story as published in The New York Review of Books, which she transformed into Sleepless Nights.
Hardwick carefully saved Lowell’s letters, many of which were subsequently published in The Letters of Robert Lowell. But as for Hardwick’s side of the correspondence, “they’re all gone,” as she repeated to Ian Hamilton. Lowell had written to Hardwick in 1976, “I regret the Letters in Dolphin.”45 Still, he was unwilling to return them to her. “This is real Aspern Papers,” she told Hamilton:
At one time I said to him, “Well I would like, for history, to see those letters you say are mine. And that you put in my voice. Because I can’t remember and just want to see how they went.” I said “you’ve got to bring those to me.” Well, very sheepishly […] he gave me, well, it was three worthless little letters,46 and I said [reproachful] “Oh, Cal.” He said “I can’t find them,” and without making a big issue out of it I said, “I really want to see them.” It was of interest to me.47
Lowell died without resolving this with Hardwick, and for the subsequent thirty years she was given no opportunity to reread the letters she had written to him—never able (to borrow from T. S. Eliot) to “unravel the web of memory and invention and discover how far and in what ways” her letters had been transformed.48 Lowell feared that Hardwick might destroy them (though “zeroxes”49 could have been made).50 It is more likely that Hardwick would have preserved them, however regretfully,51 if they had been returned to her. “I know that she believed in archives,” Harriet Lowell recalls, “and had great qualms about any meddling with them. I don’t know of her ever wavering on this point.”52
Caroline Blackwood did not return the letters to Hardwick after Lowell’s death in 1977. Nor were they included in the estate’s 1982 sale of his papers. Hardwick reported that Frank Bidart had “found only a few perfunctory letters”53 from her to Lowell when Bidart organized the papers for the estate, and had told her “there is nothing there for you.” Hardwick thought that Blackwood “tore them up, there’s no other explanation.”54
What actually happened was that in April 1978, seven months after Lowell’s death, Blackwood had put 102 letters and postcards written by Hardwick in a large envelope and mailed them to Bidart for safekeeping. “There was nothing passive about Caroline,” her daughter Evgenia Citkowitz remembers. “The fact that she did send them to Frank, [Lowell’s] editor and friend, is noteworthy, otherwise they would have surely disappeared or have been left to be uncovered some other way. […] In the end, despite the bitterness, Caroline understood how important these letters were; how they documented the period for them all.”55 By agreeing to receive the envelope, Bidart believed himself to be acting not only as Blackwood wished but as Lowell did, too. He put the envelope under his bed, and later transferred it to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, with a cover note stating that “This packet of letters belongs to the Estate of Robert Lowell, not to me,” and that “they are to be kept here at the Houghton Library until the death of Elizabeth Hardwick.”56
Elizabeth Hardwick died on December 2, 2007. Bidart informed Evgenia Citkowitz about the envelope in May 2010, and she suggested that he and I catalogue its contents for the Lowell estate. When we did, it appeared to be an incomplete but substantial gathering, covering the time between April 1970, when Lowell and Hardwick parted in Europe, to Lowell’s final year. There is a significant gap in the fall of 1970, a period that Lowell dramatizes in The Dolphin. In The Dolphin, fifteen poems contain lines spoken or written by the “Lizzie” and “Harriet” characters. At least six of these invite us to think that Lowell drew on letters, but there is no source for them in the envelope.57 If letters are missing, it is unknown whether Lowell misplaced them during the composing of the poems or if they were later set aside, lost, or destroyed.
Of the letters that did survive, what to do with them—whether to publish and what to publish—raises “the quarrel beside which all others are mild and arrangeable, the eternal dispute between the public and the private, between curiosity and delicacy.”58 The decision was left to Harriet Lowell as legatee of her mother’s estate, and to Harriet and Sheridan Lowell as heirs of their father. Harriet regrets not being given a chance to ask Hardwick about her wishes for these letters. But despite Harriet’s personal misgivings,59 she recognized that her mother’s letters “were preserved to be placed in an archive.” However, leaving the letters open to quotation, paraphrase, or sensation without context concerned her. As the literary executor to both estates, she judged it best to publish the correspondence, despite the exposure of their parents’ lives and their own childhoods that publication represents. The estates were reluctant to ask the same of some others, still living, whose family and private lives are taken up intimately in the correspondence. Hence the omission in this edition of some brief passages.60
The Dolphin, Hardwick wrote, “hurt me as much as anything in my life.” She objected to what she saw as the distortions in Lowell’s portrait of her, the distortions of chronology (“I have found in the book letters from the very early period of my distress, attached to a sestet written long after”61), and especially the attribution to her of words that were not hers (“of course I mind the lines seeming to have issued from me”62). “In general, she did not object to him writing about his life (which meant her),” Harriet Lowell recalls. “This was different. […] She felt he misrepresented her. […] It wasn’t so much that it was revealing and embarrassing, but it was ungenerous.”63 “I have since the publication been analyzed under my own name in print, given some good marks as a wife and person by some readings, general disparagement and rebuke by other readings,” Hardwick wrote to Lowell’s publishers. “The facts are not in the nature of facts because of the disguise as poetry and so cannot be answered.”64
Nor did Hardwick think the poems themselves were very good, as she told Elizabeth Bishop: “It seemed so sad that the work was, certainly in that part that relies upon me and Harriet, so inane, empty, unnecessary. I cannot understand how three years of work could have left so many fatuities, indiscretions, bad lines still there on the page.”65 She never changed her opinion of the poems, and their publication affected the candor with which she wrote subsequent letters. After The Dolphin was published, one has the sense that Hardwick is looking right back at one while writing to her correspondent; knowing whatever she writes may be overheard, become part of someone’s record; knowing how inexorably she would be drawn into the surf of literary history. “It is one of the most peculiar and terrifying sensations to have yourself or someone you have really loved and deeply known suddenly lighted up in a way that seems so far from the real, the true,” Hardwick wrote to Bishop.66
Elizabeth Bishop’s objections to Lowell’s use of Hardwick’s letters in “The Dolphin” manuscript—“art just isn’t worth that much”67—are often cited, the terms of her objection less so. Clive James wrote in The Times Literary Supplement in May 2014, for instance: “Lowell wanted [Bishop’s] endorsement for his bizarre temerity in stealing his wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters to use unchanged in his poetry.”68 Rather than “use unchanged,” it was the “mixture of fact & fiction” to which Bishop particularly objected. She quoted Thomas Hardy, that “if any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact” because “the power of getting lies believed about people […] by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate.”69 Bishop wrote, “you have changed her letters”:
One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them … etc. But art just isn’t worth that much […] The letters, as you have used them, present fearful problems: what’s true, what isn’t; how one can bear to witness such suffering and yet not know how much of it one needn’t suffer with, how much has been “made up,” and so on.70
In defense of his practice, Lowell saw the changes he made to the letters and conversations he used as mild, even protective, in “the dress of fiction”:
Let me \re/phrase for myself your moral objections. It’s the revelation (with documents?) of a wife wanting her husband not to leave her, and who \does/ leave her. That’s the trouble, not the mixture of truth and fiction. Fiction—no one would object if \I/ said Lizzie was wearing a purple and red dress, when it was yellow. Actually my versions of her letters are true enough, only softer and drastically cut. The original is heartbreaking, but interminable.71
He adds that the poems in “Lizzie’s” voice “are made up of a mixture of quotes, improvisation, paraphrase.”72
Readers can now compare lines in “The Dolphin” manuscript and The Dolphin with some of the original letters to see the kinds of artistic choice, formal and semantic, that Lowell made. The springtime poem “Green Sore” awakens to an ache of new life, new beginnings; the Caroline character is pregnant, “the new spring fields extend like a green sore.” He quotes from a letter in “the morning mail” that “brings the familiar voice to Kent”73: “not that I wish you entirely well, far from it.” The words Hardwick actually wrote were, “I don’t entirely wish you well, far from it, of course.”74 Lowell plucks from Hardwick’s letter not what she writes of her own conflicting and simultaneous feelings and wishes (“I don’t entirely wish you well”), but what her words mean to him internally (“not that I wish you entirely well”). Musically, Lowell undoes Hardwick’s cadence for a rearrangement more fitting to the sense of jarred, anxious waking he wants for his poem. The rearrangement forecloses on her meanings, and makes possible a picture of a Lizzie character who, it is implied, does not wish him “entirely well,” or entirely healed. They become “words of a moment’s menace” that “stay for life,” he writes in the published version.75 Lowell’s rewriting of Hardwick’s words does not affect the “common novel plot” but captures a variation in his own feeling that he judged to be true to his experience, or true to the characters he was writing for his “half fiction.”76 And so his words are “true enough” for his poem, his source transformed in accordance with an artistic practice Lowell observed (with his own words and the words of others) throughout his life.77
But Bishop wasn’t convinced by Lowell’s rephrasing of her objections in terms of the disclosures of his plot. Changing Hardwick’s written words and changing the color of her dress are not quite apposite. Bishop wrote again to say: “I quoted Hardy exactly, & the point was that one can’t mix fact & fiction.”78 The documentary or collage element in American modernist writing had long been a point of interest and disagreement between Bishop and Lowell. William Carlos Williams’s use of Marcia Nardi’s letters for the “Cress” character in Paterson came up early in their friendship, in terms very similar to their discussion twenty-four years later. Lowell’s artistic interest in the practice and Bishop’s unease with its encroachments on trust had shadowed their exchange in the early 1960s about Lowell’s poem “The Scream,” based on Bishop’s short story “In the Village,”79 and Bishop’s silence upon Lowell’s apology for “versing one of your letters into my poems” in 1970.80
Hardwick’s own reflections on these issues, formal and moral, can be found in Sleepless Nights. Darryl Pinckney suggests that when Hardwick returned after many years to first-person fiction, her “lack of interest in herself” was a “formal problem and her determination not to write about Robert Lowell a principle. She wrote instead about what a life with him had allowed her to think about: beautiful writing and great literature and human weirdness.”81 Hardwick’s misgivings and demurrals about personal exposure, her tonal brilliance, her feeling for interiority and the interplay between what’s recalled and what’s archived, came together in a novel that behaves like a work of memory and a work of invention at once, driven not by narrative but by what Henry James first called “the life of the mind.” Her glance turns to Lowell at several moments in Sleepless Nights, such as when the speaker considers changing the hair color of “the Mister”:
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.82
But “shall I?” marks a distance, perhaps measured of “compassion and constraint,”83 between her fiction and Lowell’s. (“Why not say what happened?”—the interrogative permission given to Lowell by Hardwick herself when he was writing the Life Studies poems84—is a line from his late poem “Epilogue.”85) However much Sleepless Nights employs real addresses (239 Marlborough Street, 67th Street) and apparently real addressees (M., B., D., and C.), it is not documentary art but invention.86 Mary McCarthy returns to the question in her 1979 letter to Hardwick about Sleepless Nights:
I wonder what Cal would think. He’d be put out somewhat in his vanity to find himself figuring mainly as an absence and absence that the reader doesn’t miss. Even during the years when he was evidently on the scene, e.g. in Amsterdam. I like your idea of wondering whether you might not change his hair color to red—very funny, and it demonstrates how little his thisness (haecceitas), rather than \mere/ thatness, matters.87
What do a writer’s letters tell us that is different from biography or the plot of a life? It is a search for something elusive, the genesis of a work of art, “that internal history,” T. S. Eliot writes, “which may have much or may have little relation to the external facts, that internal crisis over which our imagination is tempted to brood too long.”88 Working with the same raw materials as poetry and fiction—noticings, moments of attention and inattention, formal concerns—letters process their material differently, and may store it in anticipation of poems or fictions for years. The habits of mind, association, and phrasemaking are as much prospective as retrospective. Conversely, the poem-as-letter trades on the intimacy and immediacy of a letter but is not looking forward (to a conversation or a meeting). It is looking back, as literature does. And it assumes a different formal and essential nature when it takes its place not in an envelope, nor in a volume issued for private circulation among friends, but in that public thing offered for sale, a book.
In July 1970, Lowell was hospitalized for mania at London’s Greenways Nursing Home, where he was alone and stranded, Blackwood having departed. Hardwick flew to London in early August for a brief visit89—she found him “in awful shape physically,” only able to “go about for an hour at the most & then just collapses”—and then returned to their summer house in Castine, Maine. Although he was still in the hospital, Lowell had recovered enough by August 11th to write his thanks. He had not yet decided what to do, whether to return to his family in America or make a new life with Blackwood.
Dearest Lizzie:
There’s cold in the the air, enough to make me rub my feet for warmth. And th\en/ a colder, perhaps truer air in Maine. Illusions, surely! The true Maine is always at [a] distance. You are there. And this morning I can reach to you. O I hope I have reached Harriet Lowell, To whom I have sent many postcards, terrible things like the horseguards which you were so gracious as to buy, stamp and leave me.
Goodbye, My Love,
Cal90
Lowell rewrote his letter as a poem for The Farther Shore sequence in “The Dolphin” manuscript, entitled “Notes for an unwritten Letter”:
Ice of first autumn \in the air/, enough to make me hold
my feet \socks/ for warmth. A purer cold in Maine—
all things are truer there, truth’s \is a/ foreign language.
The terrible postcards you bought and stamped for me
are mailed \have gone/ to Harriet: the horseguards, the lifeguards,
the golden Lord Mayor’s Chariot, Queen Bess—
true as anything else to fling a child …
In Maine, my country as I loved to boast, \where I hoped wished to die,/
each empty sweater and vacant \idle/ bookshelf hurts,
the \all the/ pretexes for their service gone.
I shout into the air, my voice comes back,
it doesn’t carry to the farther shore,
rashly removed, still ringing in my ears.
Is a sound sleeper one you \who/ will not wake?91
In the letter there is hope that communion is still possible. The poem is far lonelier, with a sense of loss too big for the letter’s containment and decorum. He repeats and varies the words he had addressed to her, as if his emotion could not be discharged in a single saying. In the sequence of poems, the speaker’s pursuit of the dolphin will lead him to abandon his family, his country, his former life. Is it a pursuit of the beloved, of his sanity, of his own art (the dolphin a figure for one of its gods92), doubting yet hoping for its powers of divination? “I have learned what I wanted from the mermaid,” Lowell writes in another poem, “and her singeing conjunction of tail and grace.”93 But in “Notes for an unwritten Letter” he has not yet crossed over, and feels unhoused and restless. The “farther shore” and the cancelled word “autumn” allude to the vast crowd of unburied souls in The Aeneid stretching their hands in longing for Hades, where they might finally rest, but which they cannot reach.94 The poem resembles a familiar letter but breaks with those conventions by listening more to itself than to its addressee. It is, after all, an “unwritten” letter, a conversation in his own mind. Hardwick will never receive it in an envelope, only as a poem in a book—and not even that, since it did not appear in this form in The Dolphin.
In the final version, published in 1973, the poem is entitled “Letter.”95 It begins with the Lizzie character talking or writing to the speaker who then turns to his own thoughts. Does the title “Letter” refer to the lines spoken by Hardwick or himself, or to their mutually solitary communications? Does the ambiguity change our sense of his engagement with the addressee? Or does “Letter” lay claim to being a freestanding poetic form?
“In London last month I encountered only
exhausted traffic and exhausting men—
the taxi driver might kill us, but at least he cared.”
Cold summer London, your purer cold is Maine,
where each empty sweater and hollow bookcase hurts,
every pretext for their service gone.
We wanted to be buried together in Maine …
You didn’t, “impractical, cold, out of touch.”
The terrible postcards you bought and stamped for me
go off to Harriet, the Horseguards, the Lifeguards,
the Lord Mayor’s Chariot, Queen Bess who could not bear—
true as anything else to fling to a child …
I shout into the air, my voice comes back—
nothing reaches your black silhouette.
Lowell has dispensed by now with the allusion to Virgil, and the sonnet-like form is a narrow room in which he frets in solitude. The suspension and vacillation in the poem’s first states of feeling have given way to a more clearly defined anger and sense of isolation. Gone is the hope that his old love will turn her face to him—he can only see her outline.96 What Lowell brings to the final version, which the good manners and hopefulness of his letter could not express, is the dissolution feared, and indeed realized (by the time of publication), in the real plot of their lives.
“Nothing worthy to answer your beautiful letters,” Lowell had written to Hardwick upon his release from the hospital.97 The poems in Lizzie’s “rapier voice” in The Dolphin are “piercing and thrilling” to the poet. They arrive between Lowell’s “sidestepping and obliquities,”98 between poems that turn over the courage of his desires, his snail horn perception of feeling, his study of Caroline and the children, his tangle of loyalties and wit. They are unanswerable. Christopher Ricks compares Lowell’s artistic achievement in The Dolphin to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. He suggests that Lowell had newly imagined “kinds of silence” that are “terrible challenges to the possibility of consolatory utterance.” “You don’t get the same feeling in Browning of contours of thought and feeling being shaped by the recipient in the way in which these tragically personal letters in Lowell are,” Ricks remarks. There is a “dramatic tautness in the letter” by virtue of its being so hard to reply to, such as when the Lizzie character writes, “I hope nothing is mis-said in this letter”:
Of course it’s imagining the receiving of the letter that’s the great stretch, not the writing. The good ones in Lowell are not ones emanating from him, they’re in letters arriving, so that the onus is on you to come up with something to say, and all you can come up with, say, is the re-working of the letter into poetry.99
Hardwick was at home in her apartment on West Sixty-Seventh Street on the afternoon of September 12, 1977, awaiting Lowell’s taxi from Kennedy Airport. “The elevator man called me and I went down,” she told a journalist from the Associated Press, where she found Lowell apparently asleep and unresponsive in the cab. She got in beside him and drove eight blocks south to Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at six o’clock. As the informant on his death certificate,100 Hardwick named his “surviving spouse” as Caroline Blackwood and described herself as a “friend.” She identified herself as “Elizabeth Lowell.” (“I go back and forth” between the two names, she had once written to Lowell, “as a commuter. Lowell to all the old trades, elevators, Castine, Harriet’s friends as her mother, some of mine—and then the Hardwick train of profession, women, students, readers. Neither seems quite to belong to me and alas they both have a deceptively rooted and solid sound for one so much a mutation in all stocks, all ‘roles’ to use the unmentionable word.”101) She tried to call Harriet with the news but had no change, and no one at the hospital would lend her a coin for the pay phone. She paid somebody ten dollars for a dime.102
When he died, Lowell was returning to Hardwick but was carrying in his arms a parcel wrapped in brown paper—“Girl in Bed,” a 1952 portrait of Blackwood painted by her former husband Lucian Freud. Lowell’s marriage to Blackwood was over, he had told friends the previous spring. Its end was initiated by Blackwood but accepted by Lowell, who saw the wisdom of the separation even after Blackwood changed her mind.103 His illness terrified her, and exacerbated her depression and her drinking. “It’s the effect my troubles have on you,” he had written to Blackwood that summer. “It’s like a nightmare we all have in which each motion of foot or hand troubles the turmoil it tries to calm.”104
Those times were “a great sadness” for him, Hardwick told Ian Hamilton.105 After Easter, he had “started coming down to New York” from Harvard, and with Hardwick’s measured acceptance eventually moved back into 15 West Sixty-Seventh Street, going between their old apartment and Hardwick’s studio. “She felt he was worthy of care,” Harriet Lowell recalls.106 In the summer, they went to Castine and spent the season there, also traveling to Russia together. Letters at the close of the present edition give Hardwick’s account to friends of what was going on. In one, she writes:
About my “situation”—the whole thing is astonishing and I have no idea exactly what the shape of it all will turn out to be. Cal is going to Ireland on the 1st of Sept. for two weeks, returning the 15th to teach at Harvard. They appear to be friendly from calls and letters and I think Caroline will make an effort again to mend her too hasty surgery on the marriage. Who knows? As for me, I spoke of the astonishment, by which I mean as clearly as I can say that I don’t feel vulnerable, don’t feel sent out on approval, as it were, don’t talk or care about contracts and commitments, whatever those are. It is very odd—we are just going along, having a very agreeable time. […] I know this sounds strange, but as the thing has gone along day by day it seems real just as it is. Cal and I burst out laughing on July 28th—had it not been for the “gap” we would have been married that day for 28 years.107
Lowell’s visit to Blackwood in Ireland was an unhappy one—he telephoned Hardwick on September 11 to say it was “sheer torture”108—and he flew back to New York on the twelfth, three days earlier than expected.