Part III: 1973

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0.     Conrad, one of Rich’s sons.

0.     (1972); Stephen Donadio, “Poetry and Public Experience,” Commentary, February 1973.

0.     By T. S. Eliot (1943).

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

0.     By William Blake (1793).

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

0.     A lawyer.

0.     (1790/1794).

0.     Une Saison en enfer (1873).

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

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

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

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

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

0.     Unsigned.

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

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

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

0.     (1918).

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

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

0.     Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973).

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

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

0.     Sontag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0.     Derek Walcott, Another Life (1973).

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

0.     Thus, for “crumple.”

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

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

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

0.     A Maine friend.

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

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

0.     Catherine Grad.

0.     April 15 (American tax deadline).

0.     “12 O’Clock News,” New Yorker (March 24, 1973).

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

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

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

0.     By Christopher Hampton.

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

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

0.     Parnassus: Poetry in Review 1, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1973).

0.     Thus, probably for The Colony Room.

0.     Catharine Grad.

0.     Ian Clark.

0.     Dir. by Clifford Williams at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway (opened on March 28, 1973).

0.     April 10, 1973.

0.     Frank P. Grad, a law professor at Columbia University.

0.     Judith Herzberg.

0.     Hardwick: “In Holland the coziness of life is so complete it can not even be disturbed by the violent emotional ruptures that tear couples and friends forever apart in other places. Instead, there, first husbands and first wives are always at the same dinner parties and birthday celebrations with their second husbands and wives. Divorces and fractured loves mingled together as if the past were a sort of vinegar blending with the oil of the present. Where could one flee to? New alliances among this restless people were like the rearrangement of familiar furniture” (Sleepless Nights, p. 100).

0.     Hardwick: “Dr. Z. met a mild New York winter day clothed in Siberian layers. He was wearing a heavy black overcoat, a woolen vest, a dark-gray sweater, and when he sat down in the waiting room off the lobby gray winter underwear appeared above his sock” (Sleepless Nights, p. 113).

0.     Jane Dewey, daughter of John Dewey.

0.     Cf. Bidart to Lowell, a year previous on March 15, 1972, in which Bidart described a telephone call with Hardwick on his return from England after helping Lowell with “The Dolphin” manuscript: “[I]t was one of the most unpleasant and painful conversations I’ve ever had. She seemed to feel I had betrayed her by going there, or staying so long, or helping you. My hand still shakes when I think about it. She had heard from Bob Silvers that Dolphin was going to be published in a year; perhaps she blames me for that. I said as far as I knew no decision about Dolphin had been made.… It’s terrible to be the object of her anger. Later Bill Alfred talked to her, and said she feels she had been wrong and went too far, and would write me an apology.… I haven’t gotten one. I really like Elizabeth, and find this unutterably depressing” (Robert Lowell Papers, HRC). Lowell replied, “Sorry about Lizzie, she’s been incredibly sweet to me lately, as we talk about Harriet’s coming” (Lowell to Bidart, March 25, 1972, Houghton Library).

0.     “The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” Vogue, June 1, 1970.

0.     Name of one of the Lowell trusts.

0.     Trust manager.

0.     By D. H. Lawrence (1913).

0.     On April 19, 1973, Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst removed himself from the Watergate investigation owing to conflicts of interest. He resigned as attorney general on April 30, 1973.

0.     By J. S. Bach (1727).

0.     For asthma.

0.     Lowell: “each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to pain” (“Soft Wood [for Harriet Winslow],” 42, Near the Ocean).

0.     Keats: “Ah! Where|Are those swift moments? Whither are they fled?” (Endymion I, 970–71). Felicia Dorothea Hemans: “The boy stood on the burning deck|Whence all but he had fled” (“Casabianca,” 1–2); cf. with Elizabeth Bishop’s “Casabianca,” North & South (1946).

0.     Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices (Senate Watergate Committee).

0.     John Mitchell, who was attorney general from 1969 to 1972 and then chaired the Committee for the Re-election of the President, and his second wife, Martha Beall Mitchell.

0.     Thea Crooks Bray, a friend of Dixey Brooks; see Roxy Freeman, Little Gypsy (2011), p. 15.

0.     Harriet Winslow left her Castine properties to Hardwick (not to Lowell), but Hardwick felt it was “for reasons of practicality” and “was not meant as a rebuke to Cal.” See footnote 3 on pages 337–38 (Hardwick to Lowell, May 24, 1973, second letter) for a detailed explanation.

0.     Leah and Clark Fitz-Gerald; Leah Fitz-Gerald was the stepdaughter of Bishop William Scarlett.

0.     Wordsworth: “And this prayer I make,|Knowing that nature never did betray|The heart that loved her” (“Lines, written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798,” 122–24).

0.     See Lowell to Hardwick, May 26, 1973 (below).

0.     Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop: “My ms. sale to Harvard is coming to a conclusion, though there are still details. Your letters are the most valuable and large single group. I would like to have them pay you $5000. Of course they are yours, your writing, just as Miss Moore’s letters are hers, but convention gives letters to the recipient. […] I’ve seen a few of my own letters (to my mother, Roethke, incongruous couple) they aren’t too much, but have words and sentences written seriously and unlike what I print. Yours have the startling eye and kept-going brilliance of a work to print. I hope you do” (Words in Air, p. 740).

0.     Value-added tax, introduced in the U.K. in 1973 after it joined the European Economic Community.

0.     Signature not visible.

0.     Letter crossed with Lowell’s letter of May 21, 1973 (which wasn’t posted until May 28).

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

0.     Thomas Hardy: “Why did you give no hint that night|That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,|And calmly, as if indifferent quite,|You would close your term here, up and be gone|Where I could not follow|With wing of swallow|To gain one glimpse of you ever anon! […] O you could not know|That such swift fleeing|No soul foreseeing— Not even I—would undo me so!” (“The Going” 1–7 and 40–43; 40–43 are quoted in Hardwick’s “Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973, and in Sleepless Nights, p. 151.)

0.     In a letter to Lowell dated January 25, 1956, Harriet Winslow wrote that she was going to leave the lifetime use of her Castine properties to the Lowells, together with a small income to cover taxes and upkeep. “I left the life income to Elizabeth instead of to you so that if she outlives you she can have it” (Houghton Library, Harvard). Lowell replied on January 31, 1956: “I feel an improper, but probably immemorially Bostonian squeamishness about acknowledging your kindness in your will. We are grateful for the life-hold on the brickyard house, and the generous yearly subsidy … and what touches me to the heart is that you have always seen Elizabeth as Elizabeth, and not just Elizabeth née Hardwick Lowell, a sort of Winslow in-law at one remove, though of course she is that too.” See The Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 253 and 724. When Harriet Winslow died in 1964, both the houses and the income were left to Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick: “Maine property. Was left in its entirety to me by Miss Winslow. Cal had no claims at all on it, but I always felt it was left to me for reasons of practicality and was not meant as a rebuke to Cal. When we were together, he and I decided that I would sell part of it in order to improve the barn on the water where he worked. That was done. When we were divorced, I wanted to live in the barn as more suitable for me and Harriet. I had to sell the house on the Commons in order to make a house of the barn. Under Maine law, Cal, as my former husband, was required to sign. Only his signature was required, but he refused for a good while, seeming to think the signature indicated that the property had been left to both of us. I explained, the Maine lawyer explained, but he would not for a long time accommodate and I almost lost the sale of the other house. Behind this was, in my view, his sadness, not his greed, that Cousin Harriet, much loved by both of us, had done what she did” (Hardwick to Ian Hamilton [n.d.], Elizabeth Hardwick Papers, HRC).

0.     For “acerb” see Hardwick to Ian Hamilton on an early draft of his biography: “Throughout I seem to be little more than a nurse, and an early ‘acerb’ critic”; and on her “Notebook”: “Cal, I think, hoped it would be deliciously acerb and ‘interesting’” (Hardwick to Ian Hamilton [n.d.], HRC).

0.     Enclosure now missing, but possibly a passage from Hardwick’s “Writing a Novel”: “1972 Dearest M: I have sold the big house in Maine and will make a new place there, beginning with the old barn on the water. ‘Existing barn,’ the architect’s drawings say. But I fear the metamorphosis, the journey of species. The barn, or so I imagine of all barns, once existed for cows and hay. Then later it was—well, a place. (For what I do not like to say. Too much information spoils the effect on the page, like too many capitals within the line, or the odious exclamation point. Anyway, you have the information.) Will the barn consent to become what I have decided to make of it? I don’t know. Sometimes I am sure that I am building for a tire salesman from Bangor whose wife will not be kind to the sacred wounds of such a building—the claims, the cries of the original barn, the memories of the abandoned place. The claims and cries of Lightolier, Design Research, turkey carpets. As for the other, sluffed-off house, I mourn and regret much. The nights long ago with H. W. and her glorious 78 recording of Alice Raveau in Glück’s Orpheo. I hear the music, see H. W. very tall, old, with her stirring maidenly beauty. The smell of the leaves outside dripping rain, the fire alive, the bowls of nasturtiums everywhere, the orange Moroccan cloth hanging over the mantle. What a loss. Perhaps my memories, being kind, betray me and bleach the darkness of the scenes, the agitation of the evenings. I am as aware as anyone of the appeal, the drama of the negative. Well, we go from one graven image to the next and, say what you will, each house is a shrine” (“Writing a Novel,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973; see pp. 461–71.). Revised and included in Sleepless Nights.

0.     Letter crossed with Hardwick’s two letters of May 24, 1973.

0.     Crossed with Lowell’s letters of May 21 and May 26, 1973.

0.     William Arms Fisher (words), Antonín Dvořák (music), “Goin’ Home” (1922/1893); Franz Liszt, Liebesträume (1850).

0.   Henry Vaughan: “They are all gone into the world of light!|And I alone sit lingering here” (Silex Scintillans II, 1–2).

0.   Crossed with Hardwick’s letter of May 30, 1973.

0.   Cf. Lowell, “The Literary Life, A Scrapbook” (Notebook69-1, -2, Notebook70) and “Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook,” History. Waugh’s diaries were published for eight weeks in the Observer Colour Magazine from March 25–May 13, 1973.

0.   Frank Parker’s frontispieces for the American editions of the three books. Their official publication date became June 21, 1973.

0.   In the U.S., the list price of both The Dolphin and For Lizzie and Harriet was $6.95 (approximately $39.66 in 2019 dollars [CPI]) and History was $7.95 (approximately $45.36 in 2019 [CPI]). In the U.K., the list price of The Dolphin was £1.75 (approximately £22 in 2018, according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator [BoE]), For Lizzie and Harriet £1.40 (approximately £17.50 in 2018 [BoE]), and History £2.95 (approximately £37 in 2018 [BoE]).

0.   A reference to the Lord Lambton and Lord Jellicoe sex scandals of May 1973; see Our Political Staff, “Resignation of Lord Lambton as Minister,” Times, May 23, 1973; “‘I have no excuses … I behaved with credulous stupidity,’” Times, May 23, 1973; David Wood, “Mr Heath orders Security Commission inquiry after Lord Jellicoe resigns in call girl scandal,” Times, May 25, 1973; and Wilfrid Kerr, “My wife and family are standing by me, Lord Lambton declares,” Times, May 25, 1973.

0.   Dixey Brooks married Dik Freeman, a gypsy (his brother was Bob Freeman); see their daughter Roxy Freeman’s memoir, Little Gypsy (London: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

0.   Malcolm Bray.

0.   W. B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli” 35–36 (1936).

0.   Cf. Moorfield Storey: “Some of us remembered the crowded sullen streets of Boston, through which by military force Anthony Burns was carried back to slavery. We had heard the news of battle and outrage on the plains of Kansas, and we had burned with fierce indignation, when Sumner was beaten in the Senate for daring to denounce the crimes committed against that unhappy territory […] We had walked with tingling veins beside the Sixth Massachusetts as it marched through Boston on its way to the front, and had felt the sharp shock when the telegraph told us that the first blood of the war had been shed by those very men” (“Harvard in the Sixties” [1896]; reprinted in Harvard Graduates Magazine 5 [1897], p. 334).

0.   Cf. Herman Melville: “Heavy the clouds, and thick and dun,|They slant from the sullen North” (“Admiral of the White” 15–16 [1885]).

0.   Thus, for “your reply to my letter.”

0.   “Seduction and Betrayal: I,” New York Review of Books, May 31, 1973; “Seduction and Betrayal II,” New York Review of Books, June 14, 1973.

0.   Sir Thomas Wyatt: “They fle from me that sometyme did me seke” (1540).

0.   William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (1969).

0.   The first 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.

0.   “S” written in Lowell’s hand.

0.   From Lowell’s library in the West 67th Street apartment.

0.   Hoek van Holland.

0.   Ralph de Toledano, “A Text for Reaction, not a License for Revolution,” Times [London], 4 July 1973.

0.   July 6.

0.   Crossed with Lowell’s letter of July 4, 1973.

0.   See Marjorie Perloff, “The Blank Now,” New Republic, July 7 and 14, 1973.

0.   “In the Mail,” The Dolphin; see footnote 2 on page 293.

0.   July 10.

0.   Written on telegram in Hardwick’s hand: “Cal’s answer to Mrs. Perloff’s review in The New Republic.”

0.   Walter Clemons, “Carving the Marble,” Newsweek, July 16, 1973; photograph by Thomas Victor.

0.   Marjorie Perloff: “it is Lizzie who becomes the dominant figure in the sonnets, and she is depicted, perhaps unwittingly on Lowell’s part, as Dark Lady or Super-Bitch par excellence. In her letters and phone calls, she is forever patting herself on the back for running to Dalton to pick up Harriet’s grades or driving her to camp, and she dwells irritatingly on Harriet’s goodness […] Poor Harriet emerges from these passages as one of the most unpleasant child figures in poetry; only Hopkins’ Margaret, grieving over Goldengroves unleaving, can rival her cloying moral virtue. It is therefore difficult to participate in the poet’s vacillation, for Lizzie and Harriet seem to get no more than they deserve. And since these are, after all, real people, recently having lived through the crisis described, one begins to question Lowell’s taste” (“The Blank Now,” New Republic, July 7 and 14, 1973).

0.   Lowell: “always inside me is the child who died” (“Night Sweat” 11, For the Union Dead).

0.   Alice Methfessel’s apartment at 16 Chauncy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0.   Robert Giroux to Lowell: “Enclosed is another batch of reviews […] I felt I should send you a copy of Elizabeth’s letter, in order to keep you advised of the position she has taken, and also because you may be hearing from Monteith. She has not taken a ‘legal position’ precisely, but she may be building up to it. We don’t propose to do anything precipitous; I will simply acknowledge my surprise at her letter […] p.s. I haven’t seen The Listener interview. Can you send me this?” (July 11, 1973, Robert Lowell Papers, HRC).

0.   Ricks: “the recreation of Lizzie’s letters—which could be the most monstrous and is likely to be the most disliked part of Lowell’s undertaking—is unsentimental and movingly just. These letters, lucid and poignant, show her as not reducible to the wronged woman or a martyr, and show that though Lowell speaks of himself as ‘fired by my second alcohol, remorse,’ he is enabled, by speaking so of remorse, to break its addictive elation and to achieve instead some lovingkindness” (“The poet Robert Lowell—seen by Christopher Ricks,” Listener, 21 June 1973.)

0.   Martha Duffy, “Survivor’s Manual,” Time, July 16, 1973; Walter Clemons, “Carving the Marble,” Newsweek, July 16, 1973; Anatole Broyard, “Naked in his Raincoat,” New York Times, June 18, 1973.

0.   July 12.

0.   July 18.

0.   (1886).

0.   Giroux to Lowell: “Elizabeth is still very much upset, and I don’t really know what to do or what in fact can be done. One point of fact you can help me with, if you will. Isn’t it true that letters have been used in your poems in previous books? In Life Studies is ‘To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage’—even though it is obviously a dramatic character speaking—making use of someone’s written phrases? Certainly in the two previous editions of Notebook poems like ‘Heidegger’ and ‘1968’ are based on letters, and ‘Letters from Allen Tate’ couldn’t be more explicit. It may be beside the point giving a rational explanation of your previous use of this device, but I can’t understand why it came to her as such a surprise” (July 23, 1973).

0.   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).

0.   “In the Mail,” 11–14, The Dolphin; see footnote 2 on page 293.

0.   Probably “Lies,” New York Review of Books, August 9, 1973. “Exit Mutt, Enter Jeff”: Bud Fisher, Mutt and Jeff (comic strip).

0.   “Watergate Notes,” New York Review of Books, July 19, 1973; “Lies,” New York Review of Books, August 9, 1973.

0.   Angleton, a friend of McCarthy’s.

0.   Vidal.

0.   Cf. Hardwick to Lowell [summer 1972?]; and Lowell, “In the Mail,” 11–14, The Dolphin; see footnote 2 on page 293.

0.   George Santayana, The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1935).

0.   Sophocles, Vol. 1, Oedipus the King|Oedipus at Colonus|Antigone, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, trans. F. Storr (1912).

0.   Anton Chekhov, The Seagull (trans. Elisaveta Fen), dir. Jonathan Miller, Chichester Festival Theatre, opened on May 23, 1973.

0.   In Amsterdam.

0.   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).

0.   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).

0.   Henrik Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken (1899); see Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34, no. 1 (October 1972).

0.   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.

0.   West End Avenue in Manhattan.

0.   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.

0.   The (Diblos) Notebook (1965).

0.   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”).

0.   Fourrier.

0.   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).

0.   McCarthy.

0.   Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974).

0.   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).

0.   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).

0.   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).

0.   “In Maine,” New York Review of Books, October 7, 1971.

0.   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).

0.   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]).

0.   In 1957.

0.   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]).

0.   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).

0.   Hardwick: “When I think of deafness, heart disease and languages I cannot speak, I think of you, Angela” (Sleepless Nights, p. 119).

0.   See James Reston, “Provocative President: Control Vanishes, Emotion Underneath,” New York Times, October 27, 1973.

0.   Referring to the sudden death of Mary Thomas on September 2, 1973.

0.   Julian Thomas, son of Harris and Mary Thomas.

0.   Auden had died on September 29, 1973.

0.   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).

0.   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).

0.   Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time (1973).