PART I

1970

1. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Tuesday, April 7, 1970

Darling: Safely home, but quite tired and still not back on a schedule Americana, having waked up at 4:A.M.… However, the trip was heaven, every moment full of pleasure and interest and relief and food and good companionship, love, art, walk.… I never had a better time and thank you for it and miss you already. The apartment was beautiful and serene, clean and bright and filled with stupid mail and worthless books and bills and some good books, some communications necessary if not exhilarating. I will send off tomorrow a large envelope airmail to Oxford, all of it needing answers I fear. Also Nicole¹ found some old travelers checks which I will send, hoping you will use these first since they may have been around for quite some time.

A letter from the Sussex people, or person rather.² I don’t know. I found I was so pleased to see our sinfully comfortable, heavily equipped apartment, our library, records, Harriet immediately settled in spite of the trip for three hours with her guitar.… then I thought of some cold, rented place, with no books or records, few rays of heat, gas logs, the works and then I wondered. But still see how you feel about it. We needn’t go next year, but might wait a bit until H. is in boarding school and would actually be nearly 15, quite old enough to come for Christmas in London. Then we’d be free, without all the cares of a real family “situation.” I don’t know … perhaps this is the fatigue of the trip home, the pleasure of Nicole and Sumner³!

Bob is fine and Mrs. Barbara⁴ likewise. That is all I’ve had time for. Will write again in a few days, to Oxford, sending along the mail as I said. It is bright and sunny here today.… Be happy, be somewhat wise, and a little prudent. Enclose article on lithium.⁵ Much love always to you and the fondest greetings to our Dutch friends.

Elizabeth

2. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 10, 1970

Dearest Cal: I will send off the mail in a few days. Please answer this enclosed request immediately.⁶ … How, I miss you! I came home with a terrible cold and have been feeling rotten and unreal, going to sleep at 8 P.M., waking up at five. It seems to be almost gone today and so perhaps things will seem more cheerful, instead of lonely, dark, broken up.

Poor Bill.⁷ The play, as he thought, did not please. Clive Barnes and the N.Y. Post were all I have seen thus far, and they thought it was boring. Bill himself came out all right, with the reviewers wondering why they ever thought of reworking a good play in this manner.⁸ It does seem such an ungodly waste. I sent him a telegram for all three of us and will call him today. I assume the thing will not run.

Isaiah B. popped over for a moment last night to tell me goodbye. They⁹ are off today and looking forward to seeing you.

The mail groweth ever worse, even though I have cut down a lot of it.¹⁰ I’m sorry to say I was too sick to go to Orestes. And I haven’t seen anyone, except Isaiah for a moment.

I still look back with joy on the Italian trip—with you, especially. Dearest one, happiness and peace go with you and return—to turmoil and domestic rasp, which is kinda nice too.

Harriet is fine, full and fresh.

Elizabeth

3. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Saturday, April 12, 1970

Dearest: I’m so sorry about the trouble you had at the Rome airport. I know you’ve forgotten it by now, but still the picture of the old bear … struggling …¹¹ It’s too much. I’m at last, for the first time today, over that damned cold I got on the way home. All forgotten.

My first letter to you may have seemed lukewarm about England. I was under the spell of the clean, quiet apartment. But that is gone, once more. Cal I can’t cope. I have gotten so that I simply cannot bear it. Each day’s mail and effort grows greater and greater: we have left a little bit of ourselves in too many places. Writing, students, politics, friends, automobile, Maine, taxes, bills, house, Harriet, books arriving at the rate of ten or so a day. I give all my time to this and yet everything is in disorder, files mounting up like those of some monstrous institution, old checks, records, things in four or five places, since four or five “homes” are needed, and hours spent looking for a single bill, wondering if it was paid.… I feel the getting away for a year would push us backward to some more possible step along the way. Also I know the awful anxiety here. Harriet doesn’t really like Dalton¹² anymore and it seems to me needlessly complicated and anxious-making in its organization, without truly giving very sound instruction. Also I have some concern about her deep-seated notions that such and such aren’t “important”—grades, school, traditions, work. I feel as Esther¹³ does that one can’t do much, but must try to offer some variation on this dismaying theme.

Now, wait until you hear what I have gotten involved in. Jack Thompson happened to speak to the President of Stony Brook¹⁴ about your papers. They are wildly interested: hoping to compete with Buffalo maybe.¹⁵ In any case, he, the President, is arranging for an appraiser to come next week or so. I was rather taken aback by this, since you aren’t here, etc. However, I will try to stir myself to get the things in some sort of shape and with a list, general outline. I don’t see why you shouldn’t have the appraisal. You needn’t act on it, and you needn’t sell the stuff to Stony Brook, but could then compare offers with other places. I feel that the papers should be sent somewhere because the whole thing would be an unbearable headache for Harriet. The money would be parcelled out in yearly installments. And perhaps we should have this “foundation” and really change our lives for awhile or forever. I, myself, feel that it would be a relief to dispose of as much back-log as we can, in the concern for simpling a life that has become too weighty, detailed, heavy—for me. If we don’t do this I will have to have a secretary next year, or else simply give up on any hope of writing or reading. I don’t want a secretary. Another person to deal with, face, worry about, pay … But.

I’m also ready, as you are, to be d-mobilized! Darling, think of a cottage, as they call it, near Oxford or Cambridge, or near London. A garden, a library, a few friends. (What nonsense! Sounds like Katherine Mansfield and J. Middleton Murry.)¹⁶

Much love, my only one. I miss you amazingly! “Amazingly” only in that I thought it would be possible to use this time to catch up. But it is not you I need to be separated from but from all this nonsense here.

Sweetheart, I’m not planning to sell anything of yours or even to be very snoopy. There is not the time nor the inclination. The few letters I glanced at seemed to belong to another life, lived by two other fools. (These are letters in my own desk. I won’t go through anything in your study. Just give a general idea.)

Answer this Harvard thing.¹⁷ I am sending a packet of mail today. Nothing “important” as H. would say.

Elizabeth

Horrors! The papers, the manuscript, the letters. I took one look at your studio. Really we must make an effort to get this vaguely organized and taken away. How do you open the filing case! Of course the appraiser can’t come until something is done to organize all of this. I really think it would be worthwhile and I will do what I can.

4. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 14, 1970

Darling: How I miss you! I wrote the Brookses that if you stay married long enough you are bound to fall in love, and so I pass that on to you. It is so lonely without you. Everything since I’ve been back has been a little disturbing. Poor Harriet is so far behind in Spanish and Latin she will never catch up, and that fills her and me with despair. Don’t know quite how it happened. The Dalton system is unnecessarily complicated and nervous-making. Otherwise I think she’s doing fairly well. There will be a report on Thursday. Also the poor dear has eczema on her face, around her eyes, even on the eyelids. I am sure we will be able to cope with it, but at the moment I suffer for her. She misses you also, dearest. We owed a lot of money to the income tax! I am absolutely bogged down in your “papers,” and tempted to give up, but still if I can persist it will be valuable to you, to us, to those who come after us.¹⁸ It is important to try to make some order at this point. I haven’t heard from the appraisal man, and of course am not planning anything without your wishes.

I wonder if you are in Oxford yet. Do let me know several things. One, roughly when you will be returning. We have to make plans here for June appointments, going to Maine, preparing for camp, etc. Also give me some ideas about next year as soon as possible.

No mail of any interest. The political scene is very dark and mysterious here. It will just be luck if we come out of it without too much damage to the country. Both the left and administration are so profoundly threatening. Of course all our friends say the left has not enough power to be threatening, but I don’t agree. I do believe that, powerless as they are, they have profoundly shaped the course of the country by their hysterical “revolutionary” games … The poor astronauts in the lunar nodule with failing oxygen¹⁹—aren’t they the symbol? How I wish I liked nature and simplicity and isolation better than I do. That would be an escape from the low-oxygen nodule, but I love the hard pavements, the killing noise. There’s so much I want to talk to you about.

Bill Alfred is trying to be brave, but the loss of so many years is great. He says he has another play almost ready and I hope he can have the courage to continue. The sadness of it all oppresses me. I’m sure he needed money for the excesses of Old Mr. A.²⁰ He sends his love to you.

Write us when you have time. Find, somewhere in your pocket with a hole in it, a little prudence. May God keep you.

5. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Saturday, April 19, 1970

Darling: I hope to hear from you today. Really, I do miss you so and wish we hadn’t embarked on this long separation. However, there is nothing to be done about it now. The morning is beautiful today and last night was warm and misty. Went to Jean van der Heuvel’s party for Nicolas and Dominique.²¹ It was rather dull, as these large cocktail parties spanning the human possibilities will be: from black to white, rich to poor, important to handsome, young to old, left to right. Can’t quite remember who was “poor” but he must have been there. Greetings and love and expressions of wish for your presence were heard.

Marian Schlesinger there like a spectre, but quite a heavy one in purple satin. Arthur must have been out of town and so this moment was seized to include the poor abbandonata.²² Misfortune and neglect have not improved Marian.

Blair²³ called, plans to be in London some time in May.

Harriet’s report was very bad, except for English. I was quite unhappy about it and she seems very sullen and careless and although one knows that this is adolescence and sees it without alarm in other people’s children, still it does worry.… She is trying to grow up and there is so much charming and lovable about it. I think it is the negativism that causes me concern and a lack of even normal ambition. They say at school that she could do as well as anyone, and I believe that is meant seriously. But she is sloppy. On the other hand, I have the idea that this year she just wants to have fun in school, whenever one can sneak that in … and so she is busy sending notes, drawing pictures of the teacher … and that is nice. I wish I knew what would [be] best for her. The camp this summer could make a big difference.²⁴ We will go up to Putney.²⁵ In general I would like a less long-haired school, but I am not sure where she can get i[n], what she would like. This is such a critical year for her record, since it is the one that will decide. On the other hand, I hate to have her leave. If I could find any way to make New York really good for her I would like it best of all because then the dear one could be with us.

Sumner is pawing the typewriter.

I don’t even know where you are. No doubt in London, going about every minute. No mail except worrisome requests from students for recommendations, or more recommendations. I write them and say that you are away and that it will be sometime before you can be settled and able to do that sort of desk work …

Do send us a line. I’ll write again next month week, on Monday. Much love, darling.

6. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell²⁶

[Postcard: Frans Hals—Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse of Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem]

[Amsterdam]
[April 21, 1970]

Dearest Liz—

After a beautiful sunlit day in Haarlem—something we never saw 20 years gone. How the old numbers turn up on the wheel! I’ve seen every friend and acquaintance of 1952,²⁷ except Roger Hinks, who is gone.²⁸ I’ve had such a good visit, I am dull. Oxford in a couple of days.

Luv, Cal

7. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell²⁹

[Postcard: Frans Hals—detail of Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse of Haarlem,³⁰ Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem]

[Amsterdam]
[April 21, 1970]

Dearest Harriet—

This picture is not a photograph of me, but of a fine man 300 years ago. I’ve seen many things you might like, but most a group of nonviolent radicals, called Kabouter,³¹ elves \(this is true)/, the youngest your age, the oldest mine, break into an empty house. The police made them leave, but no one was hurt. Miss you terribly.

Daddy

8. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 24, 1970

Dearest Cal: Very distressed that I hadn’t heard from you, but I suppose I couldn’t expect it. One letter from Holland³² and now today, at last, a post-card. I had the idea you were going to Oxford sooner, but don’t see any reason why you should have. Last Sunday I had a call from Bep Du Perron.³³ I could hardly hear her and couldn’t really think of anything to say. She was thanking me for a present I didn’t know anything about, but I am happy if you gave her one and I only regret that the telephone was so useless and somehow we never really got together on it—you know how it happens sometimes.

Darling: now I must have some idea about next year immediately. I would never have imagined how many things are waiting upon it, but it is quite serious. First of all, the car. I want to give it to Jack for a nominal fee (it is 1964) especially if we are going away next year and maybe anyway because of my worry about it, the terrible anxiety I have every year with insurance, registration, etc. I must know because I have to pay insurance next week or lose it … Ugh. Also, various things about Harriet’s schooling depend seriously on our plans for next year. Also how on earth am I going to rent three apartments³⁴ when I am away in the summer and would want to come back only for a quick leaving for England. I don’t know whether you should take the Sussex or not. One is naturally mixed—inertia, the problems of settling, \Sumner,/ no place to live and work that would be right for us. Yet—the idea of being out of the US is attractive, perhaps. I understand from Bob that Sussex U (sounds like a cheerleader) is in Brighton … I also understand that Quentin Anderson and family were there last year and hated it!

But do make some inquiries and give us an idea. Harriet is trapped in some sort of escalating warfare with the Spanish teacher and cannot get “signed off” on her work card of two months ago—like a suit in Chancery.³⁵ She has to go back to school on Sat. (her third); she is willing to do anything and yet somehow nothing advances her suit.… I am furious.… Will go over this afternoon trying to get some sort of way out for H. I can understand those parents (I know so many) after long years in a school, have a row and take their children out. I have no place to take her and so I’ll try to be cool. She is fine, except for this; having a nice time with Lisa³⁶ on many occasions and is still your lovely little, big girl.

The mails bring nothing except tedious requests for letters to be sent in answer to something or other. I am trying to keep up, also still on your “papers.” It will be a help to have them in some order, but what a chore. The man is coming to see them on next Wednesday. I miss you, old man. I wish I were there to hang up your clothes, talk to you, think about things. How I loved Italy—dear Albergo di Londres.³⁷

Take a little care, darling. I’m going out to have lunch with Bob before descending on Dalton. Bob has been in Zurich to a fantastic conference with bankers, etc., industrialists, prime ministers. I am curious to hear his report. Darling, I enclose this,³⁸ just in case. I’ve told him and various others that you are away … but.…

Please write!

Elizabeth

9. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

All Souls College, Oxford
April 25, 1970

Dearest, here I am not quite a day yet, a half lost soul in All Souls about to have lunch with the Berlins. The first two people I met here were Charles Monteith and A. L. Rowse.³⁹ It’s a bachelor world, but very beautiful. Oxford is rather like Bath—Bath and Yale, quite Italian. I have eaten in gown, handled a 14th century psalm book, not much else.

Thanks for your lovely letters (I had lovely \good/ ones from Elizabeth,⁴⁰ Farb⁴¹ and Donald Davie, who is at Stanford and suggested that I might like getting out of my country, just as he wished to leave England[)]. I’ll go to Essex next week and phone or write you immediately, when I know a little more. I think we could live in London and I could do the sort of thing I did at Harvard.⁴² London is fifty minutes by train. I think the change of air might be refreshing and clear the mind. In fact, if I like Essex and hear good things about it, I am inclined (if you and Harriet are willing). We could begin this October or next.

Holland. I stayed 16 days with Huyck and Judith⁴³ and loved it all. I think I saw literally everyone we saw before, except that strange couple with the lovely father who read Finnegans Wake. All sent their love, and Henk van Galen Last, three times. I suppose they are all what we would call Old Left, but without the unpleasant features of many of ours. They are all still friends but with many rifts.

Waiting me of course was a blistering letter from Allen, a rather paranoid reading of my motives. I wrote him a gentle, I hope, rather appeasing letter back.⁴⁴ I don’t want to excuse my failure with his festschrift. Give H. my love. I miss you both so. This must go now.

Cal

P. S. We are now enjoying a hail storm, crystal peas bouncing off mouldy parapets. Winter is long. Huyck’s Mother, old and sick, said “It’s nice to have a nice guest since summer is late.”

10. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[All Souls College, Oxford]
[April 26, 1970]

Dearest Liz—I enclose Professor Edwards’s letter⁴⁵ so you can see once and for all the college is Essex not Sussex—not much difference maybe, except that Essex has Donald Davie’s rather special literature department; and demonstrations.⁴⁶ However, no one thinks I’ll be bothered much. The question is whether you’d like to live in London or somewhere in Essex or Sussex. Cambridge is no farther from London, but apparently long by car, the only way of getting there while London is under an hour by train. The only reason to take the job is to be in England, which I am for.

Oh sell the car. I superstitiously feel no rented car will \roll/ without hitch as our dear old burgundy.⁴⁷ You mustn’t sell any papers, tho I would be glad of an appraisal. I loathe the idea of their lying forever in the wastes of Stonybrook. Have you been there? Do papers include letters, or just my ms.? In any case I would have to have zeroxes.⁴⁸ But I don’t want them to go to Stonybrook. Maybe, God help us, you’ll come on Allen’s material when you rummage. His letter was the worst I’ve ever had from him.

I know how vexing the decisions are, and how toilsome carrying them out. I think I can decide by ten days; then you must decide. Sorry not to have written more, but I had great trouble working Huyck’s typewriter, the only vexation in a lovely visit. Nothing much to report. All Souls is a club dressed up as a college. Delightful, but \I/ am both too old and too young for it.

Give H. my love and yours,

Cal

P. S. Edwards (the author of the enclosed) just called; we meet at the National Liberal Club on the 29th. Maybe I’ll know then.

11. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell⁴⁹

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Tuesday, April 26 [1970]

Darling: I loved having a little talk with you and can’t wait to get your letters, to hear from you by phone on Sunday. The call relieved me, because it had been such a long time and one does mind, does feel cut off and strange.

I see that I have been mixing up Sussex and Essex. Quentin Anderson was in Sussex and although Jack had had the idea it wasn’t too successful, Quentin told me he had liked it very much.

I think we should go, if you feel after you’ve been around awhile anxious to return to England. I worry about details, such as renting our place and getting everything in order here. I’m sure we can find a London place. And I think we should take Nicole, who would I assume want to go. What a help that would be, for all of us, for Harriet. Cal, I feel the best thing about making a change would be the release from Dalton for Harriet. She is \“socially”/ happier this year, but the system is truly not suited to her nature. It is pressured and anxious-making in a peculiar way. Those month-long assignments are grotesque. I have watched Harriet these last years and I find that so far as getting the work done she is much happier with things like math that have daily assignment. She may not always do them well, but they are done the minute she gets home, and then one is free at least from the spectre of undone work. Then you don’t learn anything at Dalton, unless you teach yourself. You, otherwise, simply flounder about in work for which you haven’t the background, you fake, you blink in confusion.… She will mind going away a little, but I feel certain in my heart that she will improve as a student. The camp this summer will help in making a new adjustment.

Otherwise, she is beautiful, practicing for the modern dance recital tomorrow night, playing “Blowing in the Wind” and “Donna, Donna” on the guitar,⁵⁰ using bad language, washing her hair, lightly dieting.

I have been so occupied with Harriet, making appointments with teachers to see what the trouble [is], trying to get her caught up so that she doesn’t have Saturday school—but this last week I did see Bob, the Epsteins, some movies …

A grotesque thing is planned for Friday at Yale. Up to 30,000 people descending on New Haven to demonstrate about the Black Panther trial. (This one is Bobby Seale and the murder of a black informer.⁵¹) Yale hasn’t had classes all week, accommodations are being set up. Brewster made a statement last week, saying that he didn’t think the Panthers could get a fair trial and seeming to go along with the shut-down of Yale.⁵² This seemed to me really suicidal. I agree the Panthers can’t get a fair trial, but I can’t see that Yale, as a school, can involve itself in this. What are the judges, the lawyers, the jurors to do. Watch the demonstrators and turn off the trial, acquit them? (There is a death and nearly everyone thinks some Panther is responsible—who else?) What is Yale to do if there is violence? I feel the demonstration is o.k., but I don’t think the university should be seeming to promote it. I really do feel that if we want the university out of the CIA, the Defense Department, we can’t have it involving itself in left-wing things, although individual teachers may do so and students will naturally want to do so. (I’ve made a mess of expressing what is on my mind. Sounds like a New York Post editorial. Much more complicated in fact.) Horrible rampaging at Harvard recently.⁵³ God knows over what issue. Still if it weren’t for the students there would be no protest anywhere. Worst of times and the best of times.⁵⁴

Otherwise a sense of let-down here, generally. Spring … We’ll go up to Olga’s⁵⁵ toward the end of the month.

Darling, I must finish up the papers today. The man is coming tomorrow. I am happy that they will be in some disorderly order, at least. It is important. If anything happened to us this would at least makes⁵⁶ things easier. I haven’t the time to read letters—thousands and thousands … And what a lot of papers, but I will write a list of interesting things. I am not throwing about⁵⁷ anything, “girls” or otherwise! As I told you, this is just a getting together. The selling would be very complicated, a long-drawn out thing—so don’t worry!

I’ll write soon. Sorry for this bureaucratic letter. I have to write some good ones for the “files”!⁵⁸

Love, my heart, always,

If we go to England we can go during the year to France, Scotland, Ireland! Portugal!

P.S. I found some things of Allen’s—articles, reviews, etc., telephoned him immediately and will send them.⁵⁹ I hadn’t had your news then of his letter. Poor A. a little baby, in fever, crying in the background.⁶⁰ How the years came back! A. and H. are going to England in May.

12. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

All Souls, Oxford
April 27, 1970

Dearest—

I haven’t really noticed the calendar for weeks; now three days roll by in the space of one. In ways you might guess All Souls is too good to be true: windows on the Warden’s garden close, roused by the knock of a maid, my gown taken from my back at Commons and rushed up two flights of stairs by my scout to my lodgings, food about as good as Mrs. Meyers’s,⁶¹ letters stamped and mailed for me. And anomalies: about twenty fellows occupy buildings as large as Quincy House, down my hall is a cell marked Q. Hogg (the former Conservative Prime Minister). And of course there are people who knew Churchill, Gaitskell and Attlee. And anomalies; I used to think there couldn’t be too many, but it’s like living on only old frosting. The second sex doesn’t exist at All Souls, I feel fourteen again, vacationing at St. Mark’s.⁶²

I won’t hear from Professor Edwards of Essex till tomorrow, but I’ve talked at length with Isaiah and John Wain. The main trouble seems to be rather disturbing student demonstrations, like Berkeley. On the other hand not living in the town would probably keep me disengaged and untroubled. Davie thinks the department one [of] the best he has ever seen (he chose it). Almost everyone understands how one would want to leave America temporarily. If it looks like we will accept, I think you should fly over for a week or so, when H’s school is out and we will decide on where to live. Dear Harriet’s school. I am unhappy \about her/ school troubles; they are so like mine at 13, 14 and 15, that I brush them off a little. I had the same record, but almost no one thought me humanly bright. Harriet is very stubbornly and humorously deep—God help her.

Living in a family⁶³ made it easier to be away from you, but \here/ I miss you both every minute. I may telephone for you to come and get me. But there’s so much I like here; it’s an education. For what?

All my love,

Cal

P.S. I’ve answered almost all my mail on this delightful rented typewriter.

\Cat for Harriet. This drawing is deficient because I have no live model in All Souls’./

13. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Postcard: Caravaggio—David with Goliath’s Head, Borghese Gallery, Rome]

[Oxford]
[Postmarked 30 April 1970 but written on April 29]

Dearest—

I am sorry I was so mute on the phone. At the start two others seemed competing with you[.] The stones here are beginning to soften.⁶⁴ Everyone is very kind and casual. All love to you both, I’m off to London.⁶⁵

Cal

14. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell⁶⁶

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 29, 1970

Darling: I got your first letter today and happy was I to receive it. It is now boiling hot here, incredibly noisy outside with drills, dirty … and upstairs Mr. Metzdorf, a very nice, very professional man has arrived and will be here several days! Some points I have “unearthed”—literally, since I am filled with dirt and dust and sneezing—which I’ll just tumble out lest I forget them later. The papers! (Mr. M. goes to do Eberhart’s in June.) As I told you he is paid by Stony Brook.… Now, he said, although I am not allowed to quote him, naturally, that speaking from the point of view of the papers, the only place “it fits” is Harvard!⁶⁷ He said they wouldn’t have as much money possibly as other newer places, but perhaps they could get a donor. Mr. Metzdorf, a truly good man, believes collections don’t make sense unless they “fit.” He said poor Marianne Moore, who recently was reported to have sold her papers to the Rosenbach Foundation, got very little, was talked into the thing by a young man, and worst of all her papers don’t “fit” since the Rosenbach is very weak on literature.⁶⁸

I am very happy to have done the work I have these last three weeks since H. and I got back. (I am not quite through yet, of course, and I have done what you would call merely primary or beginning sorting.) We have an astonishing collection here—or rather you have an astonishing collection. Actually, everything has been saved. Early notebooks, a whole box on Lord Weary’s Castle,⁶⁹ worksheets, etc. Extensive worksheets on every book, not to speak of the unspeakable tons of Notebook. Each one in its place. Plays, autobiographical things that became Life Studies.⁷⁰ The letters are of course unbelievable. Far more than you realize, more Allen, more Williams, Eliot, Mary McC, Pound, Powers, Delmore, five from Claude-Edmonde Magny, strange long one from Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke (I’m reading from my list), a room full of Peter.⁷¹

Mr. Metzdorf just called from your studio, saying “Did you know you had two copies of Land of Unlikeness!⁷² Last one sold at Gotham⁷³ went for $1,000!” I said yes, I had actually put the two aside, listed them, one belonging to [the] library of Elizabeth Hardwick, one addressed to grandmother (Gaga)⁷⁴ by R.L.

I’m just writing all this nonsense for the fun of it, just so it won’t go by without your knowing of the funny thing this excursion has been.

The most interesting things—outside of the really alarming number of E. Bishop, which are fantastic—are the Santayana and Randall.⁷⁵ You have the long letter Randall wrote about L. W. Castle,⁷⁶ very detailed, also a carbon of the manuscript with his handwritten notes, very extensive. (Mr. Metzdorf says that in the trade anything more than one is called “extensive!”) Also those notes you and Randall made for an anthology, which are most interesting.⁷⁷ I haven’t read the letters of all these people; there wasn’t time to do anything except search for the signatures. Your letters to me,⁷⁸ mine to you, yours and mine to Cousin Harriet.⁷⁹ All your girl friends. Extensive!

I don’t even know whether Mr. M will tell me what evaluation he puts on these things. I’ll have to find out today how his work proceeds.

I hope you will decide to dispose of all of this and that we can gradually strip down our belongings a little and be a bit freer and less tied.

Harriet is fine, very tired from “modern dance” rehearsals, and looking forward to the performance tonight. Tomorrow she visits the eye doctor for the second time (once last week) to decide about reading glasses. She is not really in striking need of them, that we know already, but may get some for reading. Friday night we go to Boston and then up to Putney early Saturday morning, and, I hope, back to Boston and home Saturday night. I hope to talk to you on Sunday.

I’m sure your Faber party was exciting and how I wish I could have been there with you. Look around for a living place. Nicole, of course, wild to go with us if it should all work out. We’d have to go in September for Harriet’s school. I want to find out the name of some schools, but will just settle for the American School in London⁸⁰ probably.

Dearest forgive all foolishness. Love, peace, good health to you,

Elizabeth

15. Harriet Lowell to Robert Lowell⁸¹

[New York, N.Y.]
[n.d. April? 1970]

Hi Dad,

How is England? Do you want to teach there next year. I miss you very much. So does Sumner. Sumner is biting my pencil.

Love,

Harriet

16. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N. Y.]
May 3, 1970

Dearest: I loved talking to you today. England sounds delightful and I am completely happy about your decision. Harriet seems very agreeable to it, by which I mean there have been no tears or real resentment although she will say she is not sure she wants to go away. But how could she be sure? I think she is relieved. She was very good at Putney over the weekend and had I think a quite successful interview. She wants to go up to Abbot-Andover⁸² and I will try it before school is out. So I incline to the belief that this shows a willingness to explore the world. She will miss Lisa the most I think, for they have become good friends. I also think the American School will be more what she has been used to at Dalton. The comprehensive schools are for those who on the 11 plus exams don’t get into grammar schools.⁸³ I don’t think the kind of education, the kind of pupil would be right. And also she has done well in recent years on the various standardized tests given at the end of each period. We will have the results of her SSAT’s in June⁸⁴—the standard prep school test, which private schools take, and which is required by the American School. She will do well, I imagine … I feel sure she only needs to begin to care deeply about a subject to be a very good student. I hope she will make friends and expect she will.

I would so like to be in a nice neighborhood, not a good place in a dreary neighborhood, or something out of the way. I don’t want, if possible, to have too much trouble getting about—I hate transportation and being stuck somewhere. I will not live in the equivalent of Eric’s place on Riverside Drive.⁸⁵ It was so dreary I nearly died. We have the money and so please, please don’t be hasty. I can come over around June 10th or so. Harriet goes to camp on the 28th of June. I think we should take her and then go on to Maine, not go up to Maine and then come back to Connecticut.

.… I am so pleased you liked Essex.

I am telling them tomorrow at Barnard⁸⁶ and will tell Dalton also. You should write to Harvard. Otherwise I will take care of everything.

Your “papers” are in the most incredible \fine/ order and they are most interesting. Mr. Metzdorf gave me to understand Stony Brook was thinking of between $50,000 and $100,000. The very inflated prices one hears of aren’t true, he says. For instance Susan Thompson said a letter of yours, nothing special, to a poet, she thought maybe Louise Bogan or something someone, was listed by a dealer in the Library Journal for $800. Mr. M. thought that was ridiculous, and said who would buy a letter for that? Anyway we will know his evaluation in a few weeks. I am writing to Harvard just to start that going, since the minute the evaluation (and it includes a complete inventory) comes, Stony Brook will want a reply.… All of this is so boring to write you about, even though the papers are most interesting.…

I hate going into all these book-keeping and housekeeping and child-raising details, because they leave out the real news of the day. But I have been absolutely overwhelmed with all this and just to be able to [g]o away, to get the taxes, insurances, houses, studies, papers, schools organized, mail answered, things turned down, will take every minute until we go to Maine. It is simply horrendous. The drive back to the airport from Vermont was very tiring and I have been all morning on the State Insurance Fund⁸⁷ (Nicole) which is required by law.… so it goes, and I can’t wait to get away from some of it for a while.

I don’t seem to have any mail saved for you. Some books of interest.

Darling, I’m so happy you’re having such a nice time. I have to stop to send off some things today and I will write again, more interestingly, very soon. We’re both fine and miss you sorely. And we miss you more and more and send our dearest love to you,

17. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N. Y.]
May 4, 1970

Darling: Can you answer the enclosed?⁸⁸ I suppose you could go, if you liked. We will be going by boat, H & I & Nicole & I hope Sumner! Of course there is a lot to do.

Mary McCarthy here for a day from Japan—coming to dinner tonight.

Elated over England! More happy by the minute!

We’re going up to Abbot-Andover next Wednesday.

Cal it is very sad and disturbing here. It’s a matter of fundamental indifference to human destruction—and everything follows from that. Nixon & Mitchell like to think of thousands of N. Vietnamese killed in a single day, of “sanctuaries” bombed.⁸⁹ Every moral distortion seems natural, even good when you have crossed the field⁹⁰ and reached the other side without revulsion. What can we hope for?

Bill Alfred just called, they want you to name a winner of The S A Prize⁹¹ for poetry immediately. Send to Warren House⁹² immediately.

I love you, miss you. Will write soon.

18. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[All Souls College, Oxford. OX1 4AL]
May 5, 1970

Dearest—

What delightful letters you write! Your little jokes and Mr. Menzies (whatever the papers man is). I’ve seen the Carolyn McCullough movie,⁹³ and found it surprisingly good, tho I can follow myself always in print or picture with a certain suspension of disbelief and even of boredom. Everyone feels a strange feminine person, at first unseen and merely a Southern voice, crowns the show, or is the darling of the show. Mary is very good and I think about half the movie is that long wine dinner at Castine. \It’s like life, only I’m allowed to talk enormously more./

I have accepted Essex and will receive confirmation in a day or so from the Vice-provost, or what ever the queer anomalous title of the head of the university is.⁹⁴ I get 4000 pounds about 8000 dollars, but \much/ more in buying power. A minimum this, but it will be more and go up. Appointment for two years, but I can make it one, or permanent—but then the taxes would be much higher. Apparently for two years it does \not/ have to be taxed (?)

Not [much] news since calling. I gave my first student reading last night, of me and others. In a little while I have dinner with Sir Maurice Bowra, very affectionate, loud and deaf. The Berlins have him for a guest each summer, and have two plans: to persuade him that the Hunta, Junta, is becoming liberal so he can go back to Greece⁹⁵ or marry him to Sonia⁹⁶ (my idea)[.] But he is very nice and distinguished. People shower me with offprints, nevertheless I’ve found time to walk under Arnold’s Cumner Hills.⁹⁷ Everyone is keeping an ear open for a house or flat for us, if possible on one of the parks.

All love,

Cal

\Dear Harriet, this is me at the end of a dinner. Hope your eyes are forever O.K. Dad (DAD)/

19. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Friday, May 8, 1970

Darling: It has been a week like no \(none?)/ other here. I am sorry you missed it because of the intensity, the peculiarities, the national shifts which one could almost feel like a violent rain storm, letting up, then crashing down again. Tears, radio on all night, new alliances, suddenness of reversals. They did not get by with it … The killing of those Kent State Students⁹⁸ (that’s the place I went for the Arts Conference, where Ed McGehee teaches and all the students are in home ec or business or elem. educ.) and the escalation of the war was too much. What a monstrous error, all built on the ugly, selfish vanity of stupid men. Nixon, as you read in the paper, had to call in students, college Presidents, and it ended up with a crazy promise not to speak ill of students any more, to tone down Agnew, to get out of Cambodia in a matter of weeks, to have a volunteer army!⁹⁹ Secretary Wally Hickel wrote a letter denouncing the tone of the Administration, people are quitting in various posts …¹⁰⁰ Now, if the students don’t blow it tomorrow in Washington.¹⁰¹ I am going, as of now, with Harriet, who insists, Barbara and Francine and Cleve Gray. I stood out in the street on Broadway for the funeral of one of the people killed in Ohio and thousands stood in utter silence crying. It was very beautiful. Spock spoke inside; Lindsay and his wife were there and Sen. Goodell.¹⁰² I was wrong about Kingman Brewster … Everything worked there, the students seem to understand that they can only lose by being “revolutionary” and one of the interesting things is that the faculties, administration, and students are all united at last. Stephen S.¹⁰³ says it is like what happened in Czechoslovakia … Now, we will see. But what a strange, strange week it has been.

A few practical details: Carlos Fuentes, wife,¹⁰⁴ baby¹⁰⁵ and Mexican maid will take our apt. from Sept. to June. He is teaching at NYU and doesn’t have much money. I thought it would [be] better to let him pay just what we pay $350 a month and of course all their expenses than to try to make another one hundred by renting to someone we don’t know. Jack Ludwig’s house was destroyed by “nice” tenants he let it to … J. Thompson has taken over the car and all the expenses of that. I have told Barnard, Dalton … Harriet is delighted and is a “heroine” at school. She has, like the national scene, taken a sudden turn in another direction and is going well in school, is suddenly quite astonishingly more confident, out-going, sure of herself, interested. She’s looking forward to camp, serious about the boarding school possibility.

Darling, please, please right now look in the London Phone book for the address of the American School in London.

Loved your letter which just came. I must run for more agitation! I’m longing to see the McCullough film … All our love, my darling one … We’ll write soon. I’m so happy to be going to England! Nicole is going, and that makes four.

Love, love, and oh you are so missed,

Elizabeth

20. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
May 8, 1970

Darling: International telephone is not very satisfactory. My own voice kept echoing back in my ear and I kept screaming louder as a result. I had the feeling you were in a crowded hall, talking to two people at once. Anyway, I loved talking to you, even if the sense of it was muffled.

I can’t believe I heard correctly about 75,000 pounds, which would be about $150,000–200,000. But I assume I misheard you. Maybe you said $75,000. Can you imagine what the mortgage rates would be on that? It would be way out of our range. Also the buying and selling of an expensive house for a 9 months stay is crazy. How would I sell it, except through very expensive brokers. Furnishing even Azuma style¹⁰⁶ would be $5,000 and we would be very uncomfortable and also it takes months to get curtains and things and minimal furnishings. Beds, lamps, tables, desks, rugs, chairs, curtains, dishes, pots and pans, knives and forks, equipment, sheets, towels, sofas, chairs, dining room … all very homely and uncomfortable would cost a fortune and take months to assemble. I am sure we can find some kind of furnished house or large flat for the winter.

True we may decide to stay on and we may not. That I can imagine, but we are much too deeply in here to make a decision like that after a few lovely spring-time weeks in England. You may want to come back after the long winter, or you may not … Anyway it is a big decision and why make it before we have to?

I thought of coming over for a week or so around June 12th at the latest. That is “Arch Day,”¹⁰⁷ and since it may be Harriet’s last at Dalton I might want to be here with her. She can visit Lisa until we come back about the 20th. I don’t particularly want to come to London unless I have to, to find a place for the fall.…

This is just to say that I don’t myself think it would be a good idea to buy anything. We will really be a bit hard up for ordinary expenses as I see it since neither of us will earn as much, but I think we will manage.… Anyway, darling, I will sign off.… Much love

Elizabeth

21. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mr. Robert Lowell¹⁰⁸

[Postcard: Bernini—The Rape of Proserpina, Borghese Gallery, Rome]

[New York, N.Y.]
[Postmarked May 9 AM 1970 but written on May 8]

My third letter today

The American School is in Regents Park, very near Jonathan.¹⁰⁹ Remember our dream of H. being near school to make friends, to bring them home! The Spenders are far away—no?

Love, E.

22. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
May 14, 1970¹¹⁰

Dearest Cal: Everything has been in turmoil here—indeed since we got back over a month ago. The last few weeks have of course been whirling with “crisis”—that paradoxically permanent state. We went to Washington, Harriet, Barbara and I—and heat was paralyzing and brought me nearly to a heat stroke. It was also boring and yet necessary. We rushed home as soon as we could. There are more student deaths this morning, these in a black college in Mississippi, where again the National Guard simply opened fire on them.¹¹¹ All strange, student (white) riots in University of S. Carolina¹¹² and such places for weeks! I do feel Nixon is breaking up. He is so clearly incompetent, fumbling, and now genuinely bewildered by the overwhelming devastation in front of him—stock market going lower and lower, unemployment rising, Congress balking, petitions, complaints. I think the country became conscious just in the nick of time. You could actually see someone like Nixon fumbling in his wooden, empty way to nuclear weapons against “the enemy” in Hanoi. Too bad Gene McCarthy quit, because the Senate and perhaps the leadership might have been his just now. Of course the war people will put up a terrible fight again, but I do feel Nixon, weak and empty to begin with, will never feel secure again.

But here at home, the sense of crisis never leaves me. I haven’t been able to sleep since I got back and don’t know why—terrific neurotic anxiety about everything. It just looms up as unmanageable. I think a lot of it is a sort of climacteric¹¹³ at last reached, or hoping to be reached, in my violent love affair with Harriet. We are both anxious to get her settled in some way that will free both of us to be happy with each other again. She’s really now—and rightly—only happy with people her own age. (Washington with me was just not it, for her.) We talk late at night, but going in the park together or trying to find something to do on the weekends is awful. She’s outgrown that and yet hasn’t too many friends and is too often alone and still too young to manage on her own. Also the mounting work and confusion at Dalton really threw me and that was bad for both of us.

She is absolutely thrilled about England, but I am determined not to let her down if possible … We can’t! This is our last year with her¹¹⁴ and it must be made good for her. I want to be in the center, near her school, or reasonably near so that she won’t go off alone, friendless, every day and to endless empty weekends. She will still be too young to go about London alone and to really manage her own life, but she will manage school so much better, naturally, than before. She is much more out-going and less shy suddenly.… Now for something really interesting. We went up to Abbot Academy this week. It is right next to Andover, at Andover, Mass. and they have more and more classes and meeting[s] together. I had written for the catalogue and when I got it I sensed something new and exciting. How right I was! It is the most impressive, beautiful and serious school I’ve ever been near. A new headmaster has transformed it. The girls first of all were in jeans, ponchos, afros, sandals, wearing red armbands (the present student strike insignia). The admissions officer was a young woman of thirty at the most. The place is alive, fewer rules than Putney, grown-up, serious, free and absolutely tingling with excitement. Bushy-haired boys roaming the incredibly beautiful old New England grounds, tall maples everywhere, great flowering bushes … Harriet fell in love with it. She made that step toward utter desire and longing and acceptance. I saw it in the enchanted way she looked around, her glowing eyes. I think her interview was very good, but I worry that her falling grades this year, her generally wilted record, her lack of activities will prevent her from getting in. I am going to try to speak to Mr. Casey¹¹⁵ about being as optimistic as possible, but they aren’t really smart. I have just filled out six or so different applications for my students this year saying that any kind of checking in the categories listed on the applications would be meaningless.… Well, you can imagine where H. would be on Leadership, Motivation, Participation.… And yet there is something so valuable and promising in her, I know it, something that really only needed to fall in love with a place, to get there on her own and find her way. She can pull up next year—up to December—in England and that will help. She means to do so I can tell you!

The “evaluation”…! Mr. Metzdorf turned in his inventory, a complete listing and pricing. Conservative estimate, without Maine material, is $89,000. I have since telephoned Mr. Bond, Director of the Houghton Library and told him of the matter this far. I sent a copy of the inventory and he will perhaps send someone down next week. Also I will be hearing from Stony Brook immediately and feel very uncertain because they have gone to all this trouble and yet you probably will not want to sell to them. The inventory fee, $420.00, can always be repaid. Oh, dear. I don’t regret at all having all this behind us, but I do wish you were here to take over. Under no circumstances should it be left here now in case of fire, etc … Needless to say I am not making any decisions. You will do that when you come back and after Harvard has made a proposal. Maybe even Stony Brook won’t have the money under present circumstances.…

Disappointing never to hear from you, but …

I am going up to Olga’s next weekend, the 23rd, thank heavens, and probably to Castine, for Memorial Day … I wonder if you have any ideas about my coming to London. I can come and you needn’t be there if it is inconvenient. I don’t quite see that we can arrive in the fall, with a great deal of luggage, cat, all of that and no place to stay … On the other hand I am most reluctant to come, expense, etc. but suppose I must unless there is something practical before. Harriet has arranged to go to Lisa’s if I do come to London. I might leave here the night of June 12th and come back the 20th or earlier. The 20th the latest. Everything is so unsettled and so many trips to be made, Maine, back to clean out the sanctuaries of accumulation here (horrid taste in that reference!)¹¹⁶ and then off.

I will enclose a few things. Hope you are having a good time. We do miss you—it is all quite strange and unreal somehow, so hard to imagine what it is like to have you with us … And you must be going to Manchester just now, or Leeds or whatever.

Much love,

23. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
May 16, 1970

I guess we’ll never hear from you. I’m not even sure that you are still planning for us to come to England next year. Thinking that was the case I have been working day and night on these tedious school things for Harriet. Dalton has been cancelled, the apt. rented. Now I got an application from the American School in London today. It will be moving in Sept. to the same street Natasha lives on.…¹¹⁷ That still does not mean, if you are planning to bring Harriet to England, that I feel at all interested in buying a house. I just wanted you to know and thought you might tell Natasha, so that she could keep looking in her neighborhood.

Of course, I don’t even know H. will be accepted. So much to be done on all this. School sounds O.K. and she will not find it too hard scholastically, but it sounds also rather unimaginative.

24. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mr. Robert Lowell¹¹⁸

[Postcard: Raffaello—Portrait of a Young Woman with the Unicorn, Borghese Gallery, Rome]

[New York 23, N. Y.]
[May 1{6/17?}, 1970]

It has been suggested to me that Harriet must have a relationship with her father. She is not a baby & needs the respect [of] a serious letter about you, what you are doing, what next year could mean to her. If you don’t want \to write/ me, O.K, but some communication with her would be decent.

25. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell¹¹⁹

All Souls College, Oxford
May 17, 1970

Dearest—

I am sorry to write in long hand but my typewriter only runs one way.—Week of galleys:¹²⁰ I’ve been in London getting Grey¹²¹ to help me, then a student, then tomorrow Burton Feldman (the guy who wrote the Dissent review accusing me of being New Left).¹²² Next week, Manchester, Leeds & Bristol. All Souls—I can’t describe it—not my life, but interesting. Old Boston customs, beautiful countryside, villages. I love it here—England.

The house 3500 pounds. Write the American School care of Natasha. It is near there. I do think we’ll want to stay here 2 years.

If you’ll trust me and specify I’ll get a American house or flat. I’m enamored with the idea of something on a park, but you might rather be more central, whatever that is. I guess I can choose, guided by various experienced hands. here.

Oh dear the last week. One boiled with it—then it boiled off. The very name of America disappeared from half the papers. Even at the height, people changed the subject to Oxford gossip. I suppose our hopes for change were heartless because callous with fact. Yet even I thought for a high moment that things might change, and just possibly for the better. How did dear Harriet take Washington? How did you, even staying out of politics is dangerous.

Dear—I miss you so. I’ve haven’t been here or I would have tried to write. I’ve formally accepted Essex. I’ve written Harvard.

Soon, we [will] all be together, and find, God willing, more leisure to breathe.¹²³

Love,

Cal

\Harriet ma[r]ching/

26. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell¹²⁴

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
May 19, 1970

Dearest one: I’m sorry I was so upset in my latest letters and notes, but it just seemed that you didn’t care anything for us, and each day that would go by was so distressing. Do write a real letter to Harriet when you get time. She is, as I said, quite grown-up and quite critical of both of us, as I know from some notes she left on the floor[,] \notes/ that she and Lisa had exchanged. I don’t entirely take the psychiatric view that they want you to find these things, but of course I did. She said I nagged her too much and she couldn’t wait to be 18 and free forever! She said she never felt she was even your child and if you ever paid any attention to her it was just to pretend she was a baby! Please don’t say, ever, that I saw this! Lisa—amazingly—said that she had just lied when she said she was happy at camp last summer, that everyone hated her, but it was better than being at home at least! I know these are passing things, but I have been nagging Harriet all spring and I mean to quit. It had to do with that damned school work, because I felt so much was riding on these last months. Imagine making such a dumb mistake—interfering, worrying, all of that. I am trying to be better. I do think she adored Abbot and I hope that will come about, because she does want to be away from home. I went over to Dalton and Mr. Casey was wonderful. He says he will really do his best on filling out the recommendation. So, I will simmer down on all this. Our darling girl is really nice, honest, beautiful and brave. She has endured terrible loneliness here in New York with great stoicism, grown up in an essentially dreary household (for a child) with none of that young person’s bustle and excitement that brothers and sisters and their life and their friends and their interests can mean, been given a barren summer life, desolate week-ends, often alone friendless. I do want to leave her alone, give her the support and love I can and try to find a better life for her.…

I miss you, we both do so terribly. It has been a very hard time for me. But I am eager for England. I don’t know what to do about a house. You know there will [be] four of us¹²⁵—it would be nice to have it well-heated and to have books and records, and for it to be near school and more or less central. Now, about the house near Natasha, don’t know whether you mean what you wrote—3,500 pounds or 35,000 pounds. Of course 3,500 pounds would be another matter, something to consider. As for anything else I am sure Natasha or whoever would be a good guide and you could trust them and your own feeling if you found something.

Darling I didn’t know you were in London working on the galleys of your wonderful book. I send you my love about it, and all of that. Sorry I complained about your not writing.

I have to go.… want to get this off. Love, darling

27. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

All Souls College, Oxford. OX1 4AL
[May 25, 1970]

Dearest Harriet—

I don’t know how to describe the England I am hoping you will see and love next fall. Think of a much larger New York State, thousands of green fields everywhere, stone house villages, taxis you can almost stand up in, people having tea sometimes for breakfast and sometimes small fish—a climate neither as cold or as hot as ours, too much rain. At every moment, I feel I am in some part of America, and at every moment some often small detail of accent or architecture tells I am in England. I think you’ll find it lovely here, and less rushed. You can run about much more—more parks, fewer, almost no, thugs. The traffic in London is lousy, but nothing like Rome.

Glad you went on the march. I miss you. There are many beautiful walks we could take at Oxford when you ha[ve] the wish. I haven’t been inside a single cathedral, except yesterday in Bristol when Mary McCarthy turned up beautifully and turned my mind to higher things. All Souls, where I live at Oxford, is like a boarding school without any students¹²⁶—that is it’s filled with a group of about twenty men, ages twenty-five to ninety, doing queer things like writing a four volume history of Sicily, or bookbinding—I mean, they write, of course, about bookbind[ing], they don’t bind books.

I miss you. You have a deep look and a clear head at times, clearer than any of us, except Sumner—the most beautiful girl, soon to be more than a girl.

Love to Mother

Cal (Dad)

P.S. I want to hear about Abbot.

28. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

All Souls College, Oxford. OX1 4AL
May 26, 1970

Dearest Lizzie—

What’s up? Such boiling messages, all as public as possible on cables and uninclosed postcards.¹²⁷ It’s chafing to have the wicked, doddering, genial old All Souls’ porter take down your stinging cable.¹²⁸ It matters not; everything must be pressing you this moment in New York.

Grey and Bingo,¹²⁹ but mostly Bingo, are flat or house hunting. She is in touch with three or four agencies. I think something near Regent Park or Hampstead would be best for Harriet. Not too far from the center of the city, yet parkish. I crave not to look out on traffic, even here at Oxford, it goes on like the ocean.

I’ve just given a reading at Bristol for Christopher Ricks; Grey drove me over and Mary McCarthy took a train from London to arrive with a guide book of Gloucestershire. Lovely day of Bristol strolling and supper in the country.¹³⁰

I’ve written Harriet a letter without funny pictures and animal jokes.

What else? Bingo thinks it will be perfectly possible \for us/ to find a place without forcing you to come over. They have three. Things can be found, nice places, tho probably their main heat will have to be supplemented with plug-in heaters.

About letters—I can’t pour them out, Dear. Every mail alas brings in a new tide, and some must be answered. Today, a nice one from Desmond Harmsworth with a translation of Valéry’s Cimetière.¹³¹ Also letters from All Souls seem to arrive four or five days after mailing.

Miss you both—Luv,

Cal

29. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
May 27, 1970

Dear Cal: There are so many things I don’t know what to do about, but I hesitate to go on with so much to be done. The bare minimum facts I need:

Your return date.
Your studio. The rent is $160 per month and it is not actually so easy to find someone. Several people I knew thought they might use it, as you have, for writing, but the money is just too much. I am arranging to rent mine to two Juilliard girls, nieces of a friend of Chuck Turner’s.¹³² I’m not anxious to have the little places used full time, for cooking, etc., but the money is very important—I mean the fact that we won’t have to pay the rent. I need to know about your studio because of the difficulty of renting anything in August when we come back, with no one around.
Money is very low here at home, home being America and here with us.
Facts on Stony Brook: they would want you to decide when you come back. Offer of $100,000 (not payable all at once). They also want to give me if I want it a good, high-paying one day a week job as curator of these papers and also as a person to suggest others to go with them … Many more details. You can be pondering it. No word from Harvard, not even an answer to my sending the inventory they asked for. If you don’t want to sell them, we’ll have to find some sort of storage or vault.
I wonder if you can call the American School in London. Ask if Harriet will be able to be placed in the 8th grade. Might speed up her admission. Mrs. Murdoch Admissions dept. The telephone in London is 01-486-4901[.] Also you might ask when school starts. The catalogue says middle of Sept. That would mean leaving here about the 1st of Sept., leaving Maine no later than the 20th. Or at least I would have to leave the 20th of August to get things ready for tenants. Carlos Fuentes wants me to write him in Paris telling him when the apt. will be free.
Harriet goes to camp on June 28th. We’ll leave her off there, Cornwall, Connecticut and spend the night with Olga. Of course, if you wish.

This is a boring letter. I don’t have much gossip. Stanley¹³³ is well. B. Meredith¹³⁴ called with the news that he had heard you were going into exile. Not so much “repression” as to follow in the steps of the Master, TSE.¹³⁵ I said the reason was much simpler—you were having a good time in England.

Sorry to have “crowded” you about letters. I have been frantic since we got home from Italy—flying to Boston, renting cars, visiting schools, driving back to airport at the rush hour. Visits to Dalton, letters of recommendation, mail, bills, shopping for camp, dentist appointments (braces off!).… Just now I am feeling better. I’ve been with Harriet almost every night trying to see her through at least some of the ridiculously hard school work, so that the end will not be catastrophic for her future. We’ve had rather a good time. Now on “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”¹³⁶ She’s been reading it aloud to me at night. I’ve been sneaking into Jack Bate¹³⁷ by day in order to write—ugh—or help her to write a “precis”.

Man coming now to look at my studio. We are going to Castine for the long memorial day weekend, with Lisa. Called Mrs. Wardwell,¹³⁸ who is opening up for us now, and she said all was “luuvelly”.

Sorry about the questions.

We miss you, love mucho

Harriet isn’t home from school yet, but will have your letter waiting for her.

P.S. Leave dress clothes, shoes, etc. with someone in London.

P.S. Apparently the two girls will take my studio, you suddenly realize there are no dressers, no curtains & you loathe the idea of two people there day & night. But—it’s done!

30. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
May 29, 1970

Dear Cal: Just a few words, nothing to be answered. Harvard is interested in your papers and will send someone to look at them soon. When you get here you can then talk to both libraries. This, just so you can be thinking about it. Don’t know what their offer will be.

After I wrote I got a letter from [the] American School and they will hold up Harriet’s admission until the Dalton grades and SSAT scores arrive. I have written Dalton to hurry up on the grades and to be joyful about Harriet.

In an hour or so going to Dalton to pick up Harriet and Lisa and then off to Castine for a long Memorial Day weekend. Even New York is unbelievably beautiful today, clear, lovely deep green park, rustling in a gentle wind—and Connecticut last weekend was truly as beautiful as England, green, quiet, beautiful white frame houses in the little villages, and feels fields with a mist in the distance. Can’t wait to see if the flowering crab we put in last August will have taken hold in the yard at School Street. Hope to have time to unpack your barn and get it more or less in order. Darling Nicole has to have another hernia operation. It opened up! She’s all right, but it must be done, and so she will stay here. A friend will nurse her. With Harriet away and Mrs. Wardwell to open and close it won’t be too bad for us. Also we will save Nicole’s salary for two months and that is a help. She will get unemployment insurance.

It is expensive to go up to Maine, but Harriet is so gay about it, so eager with desire—and Lisa too is ecstatic, both of them making plans to dye T-shirts and all sorts of nonsense. I wouldn’t go of course without Lisa or some friend since it would not be so much fun for H. otherwise. Must say I am eager, also, and remember the great joy we had in the deserted little place last year. I sent three huge bags up air freight, to cut down on our problems when we go. But what a chore that was and what a bother if they aren’t in Bangor tonight.

There isn’t too much news here. Wonderful about your book. I certainly hope something \an apt/ can be found without my coming over. I am disappointed that we weren’t lucky enough to find a writer’s place with books, records, pictures, etc., and dread the thought of the usual wasteland that most people call home.

Don’t bother to write, except a card, with the answers to my last letter: when you’re coming back, your studio, etc.

Love from here. Everything very worrying. I think Nixon is going to get by with it all. More and more talk of “tactical” nuclear weapons. Don’t see how the N. Vietnamese can hold out in the South short of a World War … It is very distressing.

I think I’ll go back to Coleridge. Feel “Mariner” breaks down in the end. Harriet visibly disappointed in final stanzas, but I explained they really didn’t mean that! And so you can see literary studies are still going on! What a relief to grow up and learn that things mean what you want them to.

Off to Bangor.… love, again

Elizabeth

31. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

All Souls College, Oxford. OX1 4AL
May 31, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

Very Oxford day: in the crowds watching the bumping \(8)/ boat races on the Isis,¹³⁹ lunch with Iris Murdoch and her husband,¹⁴⁰ Aline,¹⁴¹ Lord David Cecil, Father Peter Levi; funeral of Enid Starkie at St. Mary the Virgin; afternoon of reading Warden Sparrow’s Shakespeare books¹⁴²—and yesterday an immense walk from Godstow¹⁴³ to Oxford over a three mile meadow covered with buttercups, peacocks,¹⁴⁴ cattle and skylarks. Blithe spirit¹⁴⁵—but no, the skylark’s nagging wearied twitter like stars in the sky above us. This I did with Sidney.¹⁴⁶ Brisk telephone conversation with Al Alvarez.

Bingo and I (if that’s the right way to phrase it) are putting an ad in the Times for a house or less. We should hear next week. I’m steeling myself to do something about my teeth. There are now five holes I can stick my tongue in; none yet painful.

Not much happens. I read to the Oxford poetry society and answered questions. Much like home, only I was asked to read Marianne Moore. Oxford incredibly beautiful with all the flowers, I think, I’ve read about in English poetry—a bit too like a college. What’s happening? I read as much as I could of the last exhaustive review¹⁴⁷—Saturday I must do something with Ronnie Dworkin¹⁴⁸ \on the unreal world./¹⁴⁹ I must stop, my ribbon is screwy, high table dinner. I feel when I’m through here I’ll receive my sixth form degree.

Love to both,

Cal

32. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

All Souls College, Oxford
June 1, 1970

Dearest—

A cool gray day. I sit with a big light on to see my type and wait for Charles Monteith to come for midmorning coffee. The weather here is between a good Castine summer and a bad Castine summer. All Souls is elderly and stiff, yet a pleasant seat on the sidelines to watch the storm, house of space and repetition.

To answer your questions. 1. I plan to leave here on the 25th. We have some kind of final round-up here on the 24th, then I want to be here in London to go over my pageproofs with a copy editor. As you can imagine my manuscript invites misreading. Then there’s the dentist, which I’d like to put off … O forever, but shouldn’t. 2. I guess we must rent my studio, tho it would be handy to have for a transAtlantic descent; I guess that would be above our means. 4. 100,000 dollars is unbelievable. How much would go into taxes? I feel numb about storing so much that is mine in the empty and remote Stonington. Like being buried in the Long Island Vets’ Cemetery where Bill’s mother¹⁵⁰ is. Will they zerox¹⁵¹ everything for me? Will the public be kept out till long after my death—I mean will everyone be kept out? Certain personal letters will have to be subtracted—many? 5. Today is Sunday, but I’ll call the American School early tomorrow. 6. You are right, I like it here. I’m not following in the wake of Ezra Pound.¹⁵² 7. I’ll store everything possible in London. Do you plan to come by air or boat? I feel sure we’ll stay two years, long enough to let the wonder dull. Did I tell you Mary will be in Maine by midJuly. Poor dear, her essays have three slams out of four.¹⁵³ I know how these things hurt. I’ll write Harriet this afternoon; she seems happy to move, thank God. Tell Bob, that I could spend months here never entering a room unilluminated by one of the Mag’s contributors or admirers. One in Bristol was waiting for the next issue to know what to think of Cambodia week, breathlessly withholding his own thoughts. Miss \you/, Love,

Cal

33. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

All Souls College, Oxford
June 1, 1970

Dear Heart—

I am thinking of you without braces; it’s like a graduation—blinding white teeth, and you can talk more rapidly because your jaws will be lighter, but never say as much in quantity as your mother and father.

Today is cool and gray—I hope your trip to Castine on Memorial weekend was brighter, but what does it matter, it is all weather, all giving us something different to do. I am having lunch with someone really named Sir Isaiah Berlin, whom you have met and probably forgotten. The college where I am living is called All Souls, and they are very old souls, like Grace Stone you met in Rome, only all are men. A large maid gets them up for breakfast.

I don’t know all about the American School. It’s in the suburbs, half-country and much more green and airy than Dalton. I expect it is easier. Tomorrow I’ll talk to the admission dean, and learn more. If we are lucky, we’ll live somewhere nearby—this typewriter ribbon is the worst I’ve ever used, just good enough not to change! Then you wouldn’t need a bus and could visit your friends at will. It’s much safer here for little girls and for everyone.

I don’t know how to tell you about England—the countryside is somewhat like Connecticut and what you drove through going to Putney and Abbot. Only everything is farmed—hedges, streams, trees, gardens. London is a little like a big Boston, but not very and greener. Love, Dear—I must leave space for a picture but of what? In our corridor is a Quintin Hogg, ex-member of the Conservative cabinet. When he comes in he snortles like a seal, and slams his door so that the house shakes. When he was out, another man, Lord Lever, took a hammer, tacks, strips of felt and fixed Hogg’s \door/ so that it slammed without making a sound.¹⁵⁴

\tack/ Dad

\hammer/ \felt/

34. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

All Souls College, Oxford
June 2, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

I am off to London to do a translation reading at something called ICA.¹⁵⁵ Fairly intelligent audiences I’m told. Then I go for a few days with Grey to the Lake Country, mostly to see the Wordsworth scene but also to call on one of Grey’s idols, Basil Bunting. Ford¹⁵⁶ used to suggest that Pound must have made up such a name, but he is actually quite good, and it helps to know someone in a region.

I’ll be in London in a few hours and will check on Harriet’s school. Also will keep in touch with Bingo about the flat. There’[ll] be no trouble I’m sure.

I’ve been through “eights” week here, and am glad to be off.

Love to you both,

Cal

\Hope Maine was lovely./

35. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Telegram]

[London]
[n.d. May 1970]

MRS ROBERT LOWELL 15 WEST67THSTREET

NEWYORKCITY

SEND SCHOOL RECORDS WHN YOU CAN HARRIET ALMOST CERTAINLY ACCEPTED

CAL

36. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell¹⁵⁷

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 3, 1970

Dearest Cal: I am crushed by the news that you won’t be coming back until nearly the end of June. I somehow thought you would [be] coming home any day now.

Thanks for the cable about the school. Yes, I know they are waiting for the grades, but Dalton has been late getting out this year.

The manuscript expert is coming from Harvard today. I guess he will go back and report and they will make you an offer, I hope. Yes, the thought of Stony Brook is grey. But, I suppose all this will have to be put aside. As I see it the negotiations, the study, by you, of the material, the final statement by you of what is to be done with various things, will take a good while. Then lawyers conferences, tax accountant conferences \the money not all at once/. It is quite an undertaking. I will ask about copying at Harvard, but of course everything can’t be copied, nor would you wish it. I will have to see about how the files can be put—where—while we are gone? In any case, I know that I am relieved the manuscript and letters have at last been ordered. Only you or I could have done it, identified, pointed out significance, etc. So, that is behind us at least.

We are broke. The income tax this year was enormous. The withholding first quarter is now due and paid, rent and maintenance goes on, Harriet’s camp, expenses. I wonder if how you are holding out. Perhaps you have some royalties at Faber you can use to get your ticket back.

Very disappointing that an ad will have to go in The Times. Incredible running down of answers, etc. I had hoped a writer or painter or someone would turn up, leaving. You see, we are very well set up here with the work of 12 years in our arrangements. It will be hard without books, records, pictures, studios, dishes, space. I want you to stay as long as you like, but please don’t make the arrangement for more than one year now. There is all this damned space here to rent again, all the things to be looked after.

I will see about the studio, yours I mean, right away. First an ad in the review,¹⁵⁸ but I fear it will be out too late to help. Don’t know just what H. and I will do between now and the time you get back. Maine was glorious. I have your studio ready, all is ready, and it was exhausting but fun. The political situation changes so frequently, slightly this way, slightly that—not much point going into it.

I worry about your teeth.

Much love. I don’t know where we will be when you finally get back, but I’ll let you know. I’ll write Stony Brook and Harvard and say you will be later than I thought. I had planned to go over by boat around Sept. 1st. People will be wanting the apartments and, as I wrote you, that will mean coming back from Maine on August 20th at the latest. Just now I am trying to get together the tax things I have to take with us.…

All of this is very tedious, I realize, and it is boring to write about, worse to read. So I’ll just carry on as best I can. Love again

37. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 3, 1970

2nd letter today

Darling: Harvard is going to make an offer of $90,000! Can be paid in 10,000 and 15,000 lumps! Or however you like it. This is just for what you have to sell now. Later work will be bought as you collect it! Isn’t this wonderful? They have just finished buying Cummings.

I’m so happy. I haven’t done a lick of work since I got back to N.Y., but I have made $90,000 for you. That will help us next year over the hump of nothingness described in my letter!

Must stop immediately. Love.… You will be very interested to look over all of this when you get back and to make your decision.

In haste, with love,

They will copy things as you need them, all very nice. Librarian ecstatic, thinks the material is so interesting and important. It is interesting and alas there is never anyone to write well about anyone. Sending off in haste, after calling Oxford to learn you are gone until Sunday! Have a good time wherever you are. Italian tv just called to ask for a statement about Ungaretti, on his death.¹⁵⁹

If you felt you could make a basic decision now before your return, at least I could get Stony Brook off the fire. Harvard doesn’t seem to care about restrictions, and even though the offer is less it is so much more in tune with the other work writers they have, and you can go there yourself to use any of your papers.

\Shall we keep your studio? The rent for the 9 months Sept–June would be

If you do decide to stay longer, you can rent it then, or if someone comes up really suitable, or a truly reliable visitor, could be done now. I could leave the key and terms with Barbara and if some writer needed it, and could pay, something like Naipaul did …¹⁶⁰ we would come out a little better.

Love,

Elizabeth

38. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell¹⁶¹

[Card: Wm. J. Bennett—South Street from Maiden Lane, New York, ca. 1828, Aquatint]¹⁶²

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
[June 3, 1970]

I misread your letter this morning to say you weren’t coming home until June 25th. I was distressed & surprised. Now I have read it over & I learn you are only going to London on the 25th!

I feel I have to write this, after my two other letters today, to say I am very much hurt & deeply upset. I will just have to think about it for a while.

Elizabeth

39. Frank Bidart to Robert Lowell

383 Harvard St., Apt. 508, Cambridge, Mass.
June 4, 1970

Dear Cal,

I just heard you won’t be back this fall. Cambridge will be a forlorn place without you, but I’m glad England has worked out so well. Perhaps this forms the only natural conclusion to writing Notebook. Even if sections do keep coming, their character will change … Perhaps this will provide the new subject, new departure, you mentioned this spring. But you’ll be missed!—

I have some news. Several weeks ago I sent my poems¹⁶³ to Richard Howard at “New American Review,” and I just got a letter saying that he wants to publish them as a book. He’s directing a new poetry series for Braziller, and wants me to be third on his list. I said in the original covering letter that there was a possibility Farrar, Straus may do them, and he understands this. In any case, it was incredibly encouraging to find someone so enthusiastic about the volume (which is still not quite finished)—he’s the first person not a friend who has reacted so decisively, unequivocally. Of course, I’d rather have it published by Giroux.

Perhaps we’ll see each other or talk this summer (are you going to Maine?), we can discuss what I should do about the offer. I don’t think Howard has to know right away.

I’m anxious to see anything new you’ve written, and the final revisions of Notebook.

Give my best to the Gowries.

Bill Alfred says that Elizabeth Bishop may come next fall, which is fantastic, but won’t make up for … Well, if you see an aerial photograph of Cambridge, and it has a great big hole in the center, know that it’s because Mr. Robert Lowell is no longer at Quincy House.¹⁶⁴

Best,

Frank

40. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Thursday, June 5, 1970

Cal, dearest: Hate to load you down with all this mail from me, but there is no other way with so many things to be discussed, changes of plans and feelings from the last letter. Actually a complete exchange of one letter, one answer, wait for an answer is almost ten days. I called, as I told you in letter two, but they said you were away for a week.

I am coming to London on June 29th, BOAC flight 594 arriving there at 9:50.P.M. I will somehow get Harriet up to her camp on the 28th and drive back and then take off the next morning. I have nothing else to do; it is very hot and dreary here and lonely. I will not under any circumstances, pack up, drive all the way to Maine, unload and settle, drive Harriet way back to Connecticut, and then drive back to Maine again. It is not possible and I never considered Castine a happy and possible way of life for me alone. I’ve had nightmare trips all spring, driving, managing alone. Actually, my one worry is what on earth Harriet and I will do for the more than two weeks she has here before camp. I hope she’s invited somewhere, but otherwise it will be unbearable. It is full summer here. She also does not want a great trek to Maine and back with just us alone and feels it is too hard on me. If you were here and we all went together, stopping to see Aunt Sarah,¹⁶⁵ it would be different.

Can you borrow a flat for us, so that we can save money while I’m there. Then I can apt. hunt, visit the School, even bring over a few things. When we will be coming back? I want Harriet to know at camp and also to know where we are \will be, for emergencies/. Also, I really do, honey, need some ideas about the papers. We are flat broke and I will hope to write something for Vogue, whom I am calling this morning, to pay for the air trip.

Much love, dearest.… Also, shouldn’t I try to get a prescription from Dr. Platman [f]or pills.¹⁶⁶ Also, here is the name of a dentist, from Harriet’s dentist. (Can’t find it right now, but will send it in an envelope when I do.)

Dear heart, so sorry to bother you. Can’t wait to see you. It has been very lonely for both of us and we miss you sorely. I’m still sorry you aren’t coming back before Harriet goes to camp, but I know you would if you could. Anyway I am so happy that I’ll be seeing you just after she has gone because there wouldn’t be any point in being here after that.

I won’t write so much again. Just if something you need to know comes up.

Love, always

Elizabeth

P.S. I’m doing a 600 word review of Francine’s book¹⁶⁷ which was slaughtered by a rat Jesuit in the NYTimes,¹⁶⁸ and a 600 word of Mary’s.¹⁶⁹ This will more than pay for my trip. For Vogue. Of no importance, but still they do have a lot of short critical things in the mag. and it will be a chance to say a few good words on both—and give me the means to come to see you! Must get to work. Much love, darling.

41. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

All Souls College, Oxford
June 14, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

Lovely to hear your voice, clear as tho it were across the yard \quad/. I’ll reserve passage on the 24th or possibly the 23rd. This is a day or two later than I said on the phone. The reason is I plan \hope/ to go to Poland with Blair next Tuesday, or Wednesday. He is going to see his friend,¹⁷⁰ now separated from her husband. This is a stand-in trip for our age-old “ancestral” tour of Scotland.

I am going this morning to see Huyck and Judith at the Wains’.¹⁷¹ Everyone I know knows someone else I know fortunately. Then on to Cambridge driven by Omar¹⁷² to see D. P.¹⁷³ Not too much fun really, but something decided more than a month ago, and a debt to old times.

Wonderful drive through Cumberland, Lancashire and Northumberland and a visit to Basil Bunting. A Wordsworth fan and a Pound disciple. (This trip to Europe seems to circle around Pound[.]) I told you about Empson, “I now find the glare at the end of the tunnel to the afterlife (his retirement) oppressive.”¹⁷⁴ And “the afterlife is now assuming almost Egyptian proportions.” About art critics writing catalogues, “a steady iron-hard jet of absolutely total nonsense.”¹⁷⁵

I think my study better be rented. We can’t pay over a thousand dollars for storage. I trust Harvard will make out a catalogue so I can get hold of (know) what I have or want. I wonder if there are old lost poems, salvageable? Perhaps not.

You’ve had a terribly chafing stint of schools, Lowell “material.” Inavertently \Tastelessly/ I used this word in my first letter to Allen, and each letter of his sends it back to me in quotes.¹⁷⁶ I wonder if colleges will have to buy this kind of stuff by weight rather than interest. It seems horrible to think of warehouses stuffed with papers and papers. When machines do all, pedants can spend lifetimes listing and living variants. Or will computers do this too?

I guess I’ve taken it easy. This is almost the first time since lithium¹⁷⁷ that I’ve \am/ mostly unemployed—take leisure to be wise.¹⁷⁸ I’m not quite what I was when one groping and reaching summer I began Notebook.

Give all my love to Harriet, tell her I am bringing you both nice but modest presents.

Love from your soul among the “Souls,”

Cal

42. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Telegram]

[Maidstone, Kent]¹⁷⁹
[Received 1970|June 20—Sat|10:40-P.M.]¹⁸⁰

MRS ROBERT LOWELL 15 WEST67STREET

NEWYORKCITY

PERSONAL DIFFICULTIES MAKE TRIP TO NEWYORK IMPOSSIBLE RIGHT AWAY LOVE CAL

43. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 23, 1970

Dear Cal: I have no idea where you are, but I will just send this off to Faber and if it doesn’t reach you it doesn’t matter too much. I got your cable when I came home after a week-end. When I saw it lying there on the floor I knew what it would say.

I will take Harriet to camp this Sunday. She has had periods of saying she didn’t want to go and I hate to have her away because I can hardly bear it but I know it is best for her and I will just count the days until she comes back to me. I will spend the night with Olga after taking Harriet and then back here and face the decision of what to do with myself.

I must say I feel rather like a widow. Your things, you, your life, your family, your clothes, your work, your old shoes, ties, winter coats, books, everything seems sitting about at every turn. Thinking you were coming back I had your typewriter over-hauled and took it up to your study for you and it was just as if you were there[,] all your little objects, papers, books, your desk just as you left it, your bed. I suppose just as you left it isn’t accurate since it is a lot cleaner waiting to be dirtied “creatively.” And I was spraying mothballs on your clothes, and looking about our living room, your family, your past everywhere. I feel you have totally forgotten us as with an amnesia, but we have not forgotten you.

I am sending this review by Cathy Spivack¹⁸¹—very sweet, if not interesting.

I sit here answering your mail, saying “my husband is away and will be so indefinitely. I do not think he would like to write on his concept of style, since this isn’t exactly what he likes to do, but I will send along your kind letter.” And so it goes. Anthologies pile up, telephones ring.

I don’t know why I am writing this. There are so many absolutely pressing practical problems with Harriet and me. I have written them all to you I think and have no answer or even mention of them and so I suppose it would just be vexing to go into it all. And these are of course worrying but not my real grief and anxiety. Soon after the man was here from Harvard I wrote that I thought their offer would be agreeable to you, but you would get in touch with them when you came back. I haven’t written Stony Brook, but I guess I will. I cannot proceed on my own with Harvard and they would not like it, nor can it be done in a casual way. The restrictions would need to be quite specific and thought out, for your own ease I think. Also the material—(ugh!) is very interesting and you will want to see it to know what you want to have copied and so you will certainly need to come back here one of these days. \Strange old manuscripts you will be interested in./

Did I tell you I sent Allen a second batch and I think now I have found one of his books he sent you.¹⁸² I will send that to Allen—it is not a poetry book, exactly. I saw it a week or so ago and forgot about it and will wait yet I felt it was his not yours.

The end of Dalton was somehow just a catastrophe for our beautiful girl. She was so happy to say goodbye to it and to feel something new and hopeful ahead of her. If it is ahead of her. I have had to raise her and so I couldn’t come to England with you as I so wanted to and to share all of that. And perhaps you would have kept your love for us if we hadn’t been separated.

I will do the best I can. This is just to send undying love to you, a great sense of loss—from me and from your daughter.

Elizabeth

P.S. Dr. Annie tells me Elizabeth has signed a contract to do poetry reviews for a year for the New Yorker.¹⁸³ Isn’t that marvelous? For poetry, if not for her,—a dog’s life it is. But there is no one saying anything about poetry here and so I feel good about it. I hope she can review your new Notebook and will write give it the attention it truly deserves. One wants serious criticism, not just vague praise. When I was organizing your life’s accumulation I read very few things except Randall and I feel more and more what a great man he was. Curiously, with his death something in the culture came to an end, something I can’t define beyond just the obvious rare conjunction of great powers of mind and utter devotion to literature. But that isn’t good enough. I feel, reading the English press, that they are even worse off than we are, since they have a longer tradition. No, they are not worse, but reviews, the weekly and monthly cultural scene is just as mediocre. Of course the old people are beautiful, here and there too. But I feel as if they were all dead, and also came out of a world never to be had again, like that world of housemaids downstairs. (It is not the maids I mean but the lost cultural depth.) Did it come from some bustling downstairs?

There are only two people in England I care to have my relationship with preserved: Sidney and Isaiah.¹⁸⁴ Please tell them how much I love them. I would grieve to lose their friendship and their company when they come here. Jonathan of course, but that’s a little different.

We have a Demo primary today. Rather tedious examples of an uninspired political paralysis. But it will [be] fun to listen to some of the returns with friends tonight.

The recession here (depression) is truly frightening. The stock market is very low, gains a bit, goes back down. Penn Central railroad went into bankruptcy, leaving a lot of banks who had loaned the road millions in a very shaky condition.¹⁸⁵ I have no money at all and am going today to Harriet’s savings account so that she can pay for her camp. I got 3,000 a week or so [ago] from Bob Giroux for the June 15th income tax installment, which just for the federal came to 2,800. The State and city together were over 2,000—so we have just paid out $5,000. I really need another 3,000 more immediately for back bills, like the going to Boston for schools, Maine, renting cars, the quarterly maintenance of over 1,000 that comes due this month. Bills in Maine. After I pay my 3,000 I need 3,000 more for from now to September. Then next year if you are leaving us or if I am leaving you I will have to have $20,000. I can’t get by on less that first year and cannot even pay the taxes on that.¹⁸⁶ Later it would be of course be less.

I hate like anything to write these degrading money things to you. It seems to cancel out all of the love I want to send. But it isn’t really true and so read it in the spirit simply of what we have built together, that we have had to leave, live, had to pay rent, had to spend money for Harriet, for phones, for getting places. I will of course try to economize and actually have spent almost nothing except for real household expenses. But they are awful. Nicole is in the hospital today after her second hernia. The insurance will pay her salary this summer, thank heavens. Everything is so damned expensive.

I am trying to write some little things and then hopefully this summer and next fall something more substantial.

As I said I really do not expect this letter to reach you and if it does God knows what will have happened by then. But here it is, with my love if you want it.

Another postscript … a letter just came from Sister B. Quinn which I will answer, saying My husband is away, etc. I feel like Edmund’s card.¹⁸⁷ It, the letter, wasn’t anything, except about some young man’s interest in Prometheus.¹⁸⁸ Peter Farb’s novel, Yankee Doodle,¹⁸⁹ … oh, dear. A bill for $350.00 from last year’s income tax firm, very reasonable actually, and $125 for three months social security for Nicole or something. And insurance.… There are many good things, too, many days that are fun and even pretty and I am feeling pretty good. So … I send this off, wanting to wait a little, but for what?

I did say something funny the other day, which I knew you would never repeat because it was just that the opportunity came and I couldn’t resist. I spoke of Blair Clark as a “tower of weakness.”¹⁹⁰

Dearest, dearest love,

Elizabeth

44. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 23, 1970

Darling: I sent off a letter in the blue to Faber to be forwarded. I want to add this touching conversation I had with Harriet, who has been in Stockbridge with the Wagers since Friday and will now even not be coming home until tomorrow. She said she missed me, then sweet little voice:

“What is the news of Daddy?”

“Well, he sent a cable saying he couldn’t come this week because of work. But I think he will be here next week at the latest.”

“The minute he comes, after he is rested, drive up here to Connecticut to get me.”

“Yes, darling. We’ll go out for a picnic.”

“No. I have to be with you, with Daddy, a couple of days.”

So my darling, I am expecting you soon. Next week. There are just too many things to be settled. I don’t know where you are. This isn’t like you or anyone, really. I long to see you and will wait here in New York for the word. There is so much to be done.

Don’t forget us! There was a life here and there still is, and love and we need you and need some relief from our troubling uncertainties.

Dearest love,

Elizabeth

Harriet needs you. \She is deeply worried as am I./

45. Robert Giroux to Charles Monteith

[Telegram]

[New York, N.Y.]
June 23, 1970

MONTEITH

FABBAF

LONDON W1

ELIZABETH HARRIET DISTURBED CALS NONARRIVAL NEW YORK. COULD YOU DISCREETLY INQUIRE AND CABLE ME WHEN HE WILL BE BRINGING BACK THE PAGE PROOFS. GRATEFULLY

Giroux
Farrarcomp

46. Charles Monteith to Robert Giroux

[Telegram]

[London]
[n.d. June 1970]

ROBERT GIROUX

FARRARCOMP

NEWYORK

HAVE JUST SPOKEN CAL STOP PROMISED HE WOULD RING ELIZABETH STRAIGHT AWAY STOP SAYS HE’S STAYING HERE FOR THE SUMMER

CHARLES MONTEITH

47. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 25, 1970

Mary, dear: I was talking, if you can call it that, to Cal this afternoon and he said you were going to Maine on the 12th and that you were going to write me. Then Bob¹⁹¹ said you were coming here on the 8th. I want to send this off, even if you have written me, to give you my plans.

I am taking Harriet to camp on this Sunday, the 28th, and spending the night with Olga—then back here for a week to clear up things, find a new school \in N.Y./ for Harriet[.] I will be here if you are coming on the 8th and we can drive up in a big station wagon I have rented for the summer, going whenever you want, and taking things. So, I just wanted to let you know.… At first I thought I didn’t want to go to Maine, but I spent last weekend on Long Island. I had thought I might rent something out there. However, I came back longing for my own place and looking forward to Castine. I will miss Harriet terribly, but I want her to go to camp because there is so little to do up in C. Nicole, blessed one, had a very bad hernia operation last summer and it all literally came apart this summer. I have had her sent to a proper hospital with a top doctor and she will be home tomorrow. She has to rest at least a month and I really don’t need her. She is such a joy and comfort to me here that I want to get her well.

I knew Cal had a girl and had been distressed for some time, but it was just this afternoon that I knew it was Carolyn Caroline. I felt such relief and burst out laughing!¹⁹² I called him immediately at her house and he talked as if he were talking to me from his studio, for an hour, laughing and joking and saying you are spending all your alimony on this call.¹⁹³ Harriet had cried pitifully on the phone when he had told her he wasn’t coming home. He said he wasn’t worried about her, but about me, even though I had told him I was pretty good, which is true. And I told him I was better after I heard it was Caroline.

I cannot take her seriously for Cal. There is a comic element to me in it. Anyway I don’t care … But, Mary, Bob Silvers is in complete misery. The day Cal called me, saying he had “somebody”, apparently Caroline called Bob saying she couldn’t go on a trip they had planned because she had Cal.¹⁹⁴ I hadn’t spoken to Bob for a long time because I didn’t want to bore him with my suffering. I chose one friend and called day and night, changing my mind every minute, and I felt one was enough. What I want to tell you is that Bob is crushed and cannot see anything funny in this. He doesn’t want anyone to know it, poor dear. He thinks Caroline is the most intelligent, fascinating person in the whole world. He believes that the life she has organized in England is so beguiling that no one could ever leave it, that she and Cal will last forever.… I haven’t seen Caroline since she was here and she was very silent and withdrawn, diapers on the floor, really frightening.¹⁹⁵ I do believe Bob that she is better organized in England, and he says “all that is taken care of.”

I didn’t think Cal was in good shape, not at all. He got very angry, not with me, but with other people; he seemed very casual and filled with that amnesia about the past I know so well. However, I think he is more or less under control with the pills, but he should be taking more. I don’t particularly want him back and had made up my mind to quit until I heard it was Caroline. I called him and told him I thought it was worse really a sort of joke and he said, “Oh, you think you are so smart!” I can’t do anything and he doesn’t want me to, he says over and over. Caroline isn’t even divorced from Lucian.¹⁹⁶ What I am concerned about is her passion for having babies she can’t take care of.… Oh, dear.

What I really want to say is that I am fine. I will not take Cal back unless this is over in a month or so. I have gotten my apartment back here in New York, done everything on the assumption that I won’t be going to England. The person who is absolutely crushed is Bob and so I want you to know that, when you see him. What Caroline can do is break up my marriage—or what Cal can do, I mean—and then their thing will not last. It can’t, I feel. But that will then be too far along …

I am writing tomorrow and the next day a little 600 word review of your book for Vogue. You can’t say anything and even if you could that magazine isn’t right. But everyone rights writes these things, because they pay well, and when I needed the money I called and asked to write something about you. They gave me four reviews and so I will have a little money. I am planning a lot of writing this summer, most of which is under way.

I am looking at the news, drinking bourbon, as I write this and so it is mixed up. Dearest love to you and Jim.¹⁹⁷ And let me know whether I should wait—no, I couldn’t possibl[y] leave before the 8th anyway and if you are coming then I can well and profitably wait until you want to go \to Castine/.

Love,

Elizabeth

48. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 26, 1970

Dearest Cal: You must give up Essex and come back in September. Harriet is destroyed, deeply depressed. She needs you to start a new year in school, to help her, to be a part of her life. I do not think she can survive otherwise.

You cannot treat people as you wish to, you and Caroline. Caroline is deeply destructive and neurotic. You are leading a parasitic life, just like her other lovers. Poor Israel, coming around to see the girls.¹⁹⁸ All the rich squalor, covering up for inability to feel and function. I was horrified that you asked Harriet to visit you in “your great country house.”¹⁹⁹ It is not yours and I would never allow her to go into that kind of spoiled, negligent indifference. I do not like parasites. I feel astonished that you have become like a queen infatuated with England and as you said all the things \“easiness”/ a rich girl can give you. She will destroy you, just as without even thinking about it—or if thinking about it, not being able to feel—she would destroy Harriet. This kind of anarchy and nihilism will certainly ruin you.

You are a great American writer. You have told us what we are, like Melville, you have brought all the culture of England, and of course even America and other countries have something, to bear on us, on our land, on your past, your people, your family. You are not an English writer, but the most American of souls, the most gifted in finding the symbolic meaning of this strange place. You are a loss to our culture, hanging about after squalid spoiled, selfish life.

You must, absolutely must, come back in September, help Harriet in school, give her love and a feeling of being wanted by a father, a man, get her possibly into what she wants more than anything—Abbot. A mother alone cannot do it. You must do this. And if you don’t, not only will she be destroyed, but your own dignity will. You may feel very arrogant and combative now, but you are [a] person too and you cannot lead that life. When it breaks up as it will, you will have destroyed everything here you have built up. You cannot go on living with Caroline in that unreal world, year after year vaguely noticing her children, going about with people like Sonia, living vicariously, leaving what means a lot to you. I mean a lot to you and you know it. I not only saved your life but I gave you freedom and love and humor. I want you to come home, in September, start new work of which there is plenty among your papers, prose projects[,] everything. I have contempt for your situation. I am not jealous of it, but horrified. How could I be jealous of Caroline? She is charming and pathetic and unreal.

Poor Bob. I don’t know whether their relationship was real, but he cared terribly and is suffering pitifully. I hadn’t spoken to him for a long time and that is why I hadn’t known it was Caroline. I had been talking to another friend a bit about my distress and troubling thoughts and I felt boring one friend was enough. He spoke very little, too pained and betrayed—no matter what illusion his love may have been based on. I love Bob with all my heart and I trembled for him. He, unlike you, couldn’t pursue Caroline in London because in spite of his rather inexplicable and somewhat comic love of rich English girls, he felt he had work to do in America, that this was his. I don’t mean to imply that he could have won her—although those are hardly proper conceptions with her, since the basic anarchic removal is so great. But he is working on, trying to do what is right, committed to what he knows, America, horrid place, but all that those of us who were born here and have minds can really make ours.²⁰⁰

I was astonished that you said you were worried about doing something for me instead of Harriet, that you \knew you/ could do something for her. What do I need, if I don’t have your love? But she does need much. Were you thinking of a trip to your country house as doing something … a fantastic idea, in which she would be neglected and hardly fed if the servants were away.

I had thought of going to Long Island but a weekend there made me think I want for part of the summer my own house and my barn. At least now I can put up the pictures I like. I don’t know that I will go on in Maine if you tell me you are not returning in September. There is much I don’t like about it and I will have to discuss it with Harriet … I will miss her sorely … After speaking to you she didn’t want to go to camp but she must. Both Olga and Francine are near and are going to visit her to make her feel wanted and not rejected. I will come down once from Maine, at least, and call and write her. The school is a hideous problem. To me everything depends on it. I know how late it is and wonder if she can find a place in any school. We had utterly uprooted ourselves. I miss Barnard, which would have meant a lot to me, but they have filled my post for the year. Crummy, cruel thing for you two selfish little people there to do.

I will do as I please about your studio. I have rented my own to two girls and I would rather have it because it is nearer to my apt. but there is so much more stuff in yours and somehow I think of you there and can’t face two dreary girls in it. I have the idea of renting it off and on to people I know for a few weeks and using it for guests because I love having people but not in my apartment here.

I have, or will, write Harvard and Stony Brook that you are going to be away and will make a decision later since there is no rush. I would not consider having you sell the papers without having a week to delight in the study of them, but I cannot exactly agree that prices will go up. Your value will always go up, because you are a tremendous man. But the colleges are broke, libraries are broke, everyone is broke here.

Let’s see. Alice Meade was around the other day.²⁰¹ Heroic, Women’s Lib character she oddly turned out to be without wishing it, brave life in a 72nd Street hotel. However, she wants Everard to give one of their houses and he won’t even speak to the lawyer and she wants some more money. But she is nice, odd, very like Aunt Sarah I thought in a kind of gay femininity and curious discipline.

I am going to try to get in touch with Marietta Tree, who has pull at the UN school, and I have talked with Bobbie Handman, whose daughter was a top student there. She says it is very hard even to get an interview—and the year is over. But I have to try. If you never come back Harriet and I are going to Ivan Illich’s place²⁰² next summer because she wants, she says, to learn Spanish really well quickly and then study the culture.

H. sat with Helen Epstein last night and it was a good thing perhaps for her to get out of the house. Barbara called me and said what a beautiful, really deep and special creature she thought Harriet was. I have a good daughter, although good is not the word, an original, beautiful, reserved, suffering girl of great moral beauty. I tremble when I think of the summer without her. She is the joy of my day and night, and the pain too because she is \hurt/. I have known real love and I am, I suppose, blessed in that.

I am writing my few things, doing the dumb Vogue thing for Mary’s book today, having done Muriel Spark²⁰³ and Francine. That is all of that. Bob has many projects for me and I am writing my book about home again.²⁰⁴ Also, when I can’t sleep I am writing about you, a journal,²⁰⁵—but rather hard to know what “role” to play.

You must leave that parasitic life and come home in September. I know you can work at Harvard. You cannot stay away from me and Harriet for a year and half, almost two and return, love\, I am not Caroline, unreal./ You know that. The choice you have made is ludicrous and destructive and unreal. You will be destroyed by the unreality, the spoiled richness, the alien ground. I believe this and say it without regret, since I am not trying to impress anyone but tell the truth as I see it. You cannot live on Caroline, step into the sheets of Israel Citkowitz and all those weak people without diminishment. You cannot leave your responsibilities to your daughter without moral decay. You cannot continue your career as a fashionable London person,—that is all over \uninteresting/—and your talent is otherwise. I feel you are a loss to American literature and to the country, as well as to us.

Be made mad if you like, arrogant and above-it-all if you like, but this is the truth, or my truth.

No gossip or mail. I wish you everything with your book, old Zeus. I wish you health and dignity and serenity and moral beauty. I wish you a long creative life and a long life just for itself. I have contempt for your present situation, but love for you.

E. Elizabeth

The mail just came. A few “My husband is away, but…” bits. Nothing from Mary. She didn’t know I gather when you saw her that I knew “it” was Lady Caroline. But I have written her, hoping to drive up with her from here … I got an unexpected $500 for something I wrote and I am so happy. I want to earn money as a writer, as a woman. Harriet does too and in all her sorrow yesterday went to the Epsteins until 12:30! I received Noel Stock’s book about Pound in the mail.²⁰⁶ I am starting to do the Dreiser, Crane thing.²⁰⁷ Can I add Pound who would fit, or do you not want me to.²⁰⁸ If you are not returning in September we won’t be connected except legally, but not personally, and so I can do as I would. I’m not planning an assault, but a study of what the American scene²⁰⁹ does to writers, what it is like. If you would rather I didn’t, I won’t, but I’m sure you don’t really care. Anyway I won’t get to him for some weeks.

Your loving wife,

I have written the bank. Hope they could understand what I meant. I did it without regret & in our great need & in my relief that [you] have no need of money.

49. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.?]
[June 26, 1970]

I want to add my absolute horror that you two people have taken away something I loved and needed. My job at Barnard, which I tried to get back, but it is filled for this year and the budget is filled.

[…]My utter contempt for both of you for the misery you have brought to two people who had never hurt you knows no bounds.²¹⁰

50. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Saturday, June 27, 1970

Cal, dearest: I want to apologize for the terrible things I wrote in my last letters. My life this week has been a night-mare of inability to reclaim what I had given up, \& a suffering/ of Harriet’s distress. And when I talked to you on the phone today I had just driven a rented car across town. Even there they made me write a check of $400 for the summer rental which probably isn’t good. Originally I had said we would pay with Diner’s, etc … The UN School seemed so delightful a possibility and I will still try, but everything seemed closed and ruined and I just became furious.

I am all right, Harriet is all right. It took her a few days. We just bought her an adorable, long sort of granny, old-fashioned dress, she is excited about camp, more adults are looking after her, Barbara thinks she is the loveliest thing imaginable … everyone is going to visit her at camp from Connecticut[,] Olga, Francine … Of course she can visit you. We think of say, after Christmas day with me, a visit up until school,—if there is one—convenes again. It would be about 7 or 8 days. If that isn’t good because you’ll be too busy partying, as everyone is, another time can be worked out. Camp isn’t a possible time. Not over until Aug. 15th and we are going to spend a few days with Aunt Sarah then, which Harriet very much wants, and maybe back here on the school matter, etc.

Forgive me. I am glad you don’t need money. It would be a nightmare otherwise of poverty for all of us. I do hope the bank will act soon for me. I am very puritanical and I just haven’t anything in the bank and worry when I write a check.… Then I’ll be fine. I am looking forward to Maine. I don’t feel embarrassed. I may have a friend to drive me up, if I don’t go with Mary, but if not I’ll stop in Boston. I hope the economy picks up because I would like to sell School street and using your barn as a kind of substitute for the School street barn build a small, cozy house attaching to it. But this is a bad year for selling and building costs are astronomical … Francis Goodwin’s house on the beach is a masterpiece … I have a lot of writing to do. I am going to be content. My main love and anxiety is Harriet. She didn’t have such a good year, but the odd thing is that she has suddenly really come alive and will be a superb girl and a really interesting person. You’ll know what I mean when you see her.

This is just to ask for forgiveness. Love, don’t worry, all is well here and I think you are well and I give you my hope for your happiness in England. Don’t hate New York and the USA seriously—it is hateful but we don’t really hate it. Can’t afford to I guess[.]

Elizabeth

51. Robert Giroux to Mr. Charles Monteith

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 19 Union Square West, New York, N.Y.
June 29, 1970
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

Dear Charles:

Many thanks for your great help in the Lowell matter, and for your cable. Cal phoned Elizabeth some hours after your call here, obviously as a result of your calling him. Elizabeth learned the worst, but at least she knew where she stood. It was the uncertainty and the worry about Harriet that was the hardest for her to take. The next day she learned (from friends of theirs in London) the name of the person with whom he is staying. “I had to burst out laughing,” she said.²¹¹ She thinks from this and other evidence that Cal is probably ill, and she is consulting his doctor. She called him next day and described his telephone manner as low-keyed, “not vindictive and even solicitous.” The previous day she was planning a divorce, but I would gather that this is not now her plan. At any rate, as you cabled, Cal is not returning this summer. I’m glad you persuaded him to phone, and Elizabeth is grateful to have escaped from the unreality and frustration of last week’s limbo.

As I told you on the phone, I’ve just completed plans to visit London in August. I’ll arrive from Paris on Wednesday, August 12th. Would it be possible to see you and Peter²¹² and Matthew²¹³ on Thursday the 13th or Friday the 14th? I’m not sure at this moment whether I’ll be staying at the Connaught or with a friend on Mount Street. But I’ll have nine days in London, my first visit in five years, and I very much look forward to seeing all my friends at Faber.

With best wishes,

Yours ever,

[Bob]

Robert Giroux

52. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 30, 1970

Mary, dear: I just got your letter and it was sweet. I don’t know what I wrote you before because I was writing so many letters that day, like Herzog.²¹⁴ But I am well, resigned, and working day and night to pick up the pieces, which are terribly complicated. Harriet is very upset, because Cal spoke with all that detachment and gaiety you know so well, not meaning to, about \Harriet/ flying over, etc. She has gone off to camp without a school, having given up Dalton, hating it last year, saying goodbye. No place will even interview you, all filled, long waiting list, closed to September. However, I feel I will work something out and have decided not to worry and H. seems better, since I just talked to her on the phone at camp.

I will stay here—or so I think—until the 18th of [July] because then the first visiting day for camp comes,—it’s in Connecticut—and I can stop there on my way to Castine and then not have to drive all the way back to camp until August 15th, when I’ll be bringing H. up to Maine. I am going to visit Connecticut this weekend, visited the Carlisles last weekend and so I am not alone in the hot city too much. I will have all my affairs in shape here, getting at least one of the studios rented, and ready—getting things back.

I look forward to Castine very much and am so glad I spent a weekend in the Hamptons. That told me that I didn’t want to go there—like a retired couple leaving their little town and taking a trailer to Florida for life—and really want my own place.

I thought Cal seemed well when I last spoke to him.²¹⁵ Everything is cooling down. It will be all right. Will see you in Maine or you can call me here in New York if I am not there when you arrive. If there is anything you want to know. Much love to you both,

Elizabeth

Beautiful Darby Betts house on [Route] 166 was for sale when I was in Maine on May 30—with the beautiful meadow, the pillars on the lawn. Let’s get someone to buy it. We’ll make a new community. Or Commune.

53. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Telegram]

[London]
[July 1, 1970]

MRS ROBERT LOWELL 15 WEST67THSTREET

NEWYORK CITY

THANKS FOR YOUR SWEET LETTER AFTER CHRISTMAS OUR BEST TIME²¹⁶

LOVE

CAL

54. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
July 1st, 1970

Mary, dearest: Foreign communication … What a confusion it is. I wrote you yesterday and then I got your letter today and learned your plans had changed or might change. Now mine are a bit changed.

I think I will also be driving up about the 10th or 11th or 12th. I don’t at all need anyone to drive up with me and I plan to take some bits of furniture if I can. I have been in a nightmare of driving recently and ought not to be a road-menace by then. I am going tomorrow to spend the 4th with Francine Gray and I will pick up Harriet from her camp and bring her back to New York on Sunday, the 5th. After the most exhausting time I have gotten an interview at the United Nations School for Harriet on Tuesday, July 7th, then I drive her back to camp three hours up in Connecticut, then back here to fix my studio to be rented, pack up and go to Castine as soon as possible. It will be such a relief to have these unending practical problems over for a while. I won’t know about the UN School until late August, because it is entirely filled and they have to wait for a cancellation, if it should come. Poor Harriet. It will be a difficult adjustment, but she is rather excited and hopes it comes off. I can’t have her going back to Dalton, upset, not liking it, having said goodbye. They are also filled up. The UN School is much better and I think she will feel glamorous and proud of herself if she gets in.

She’s fine, I think, and I was of course furious with Cal for all our problems and for what seemed to be brutal ways of handling things. But I have cooled down and pain can’t be avoided and there is no way to do these separations without disruption and exhausting efforts to re-establish yourself. Naturally all of this fell to me since Cal is still, in a certain sense, right here in the house, all his things, his books, his mail, his business, his taxes, his clothes. He made a plaintive remark: “I’d write you and Harriet but I can’t find any stamps since I left Oxford.”

Being resigned doesn’t turn you off immediately, but it is a state, a new one for me and I am very happy that it turned up, like a visitor at the right time. I saw Caroline last during what may have been just a low period for her … baby diapers in the living room, 40 bottles of milk and not a bit of food in the house, no maid. Bob says she is much better set up in England and I gather that is true. There is something missing, along with much there. And so who knows. And all that is not the point for me. Cal kept, as usual, the door open here, telegrams saying right up until two weeks ago, all my love and can’t come right now. But it is closed forever, now. I guess it is just that strange thing that happens to you when you know you don’t want it any longer. I am speaking of myself, and of course the same is true for him.

I look forward to Maine and know we will have a nice time. I am planning some guests too. I never thought about Jean on L. Island,²¹⁷ because I was in the other end, but I hated it. Just the drive, even with someone else at the wheel, on the Long Island Expressway, taking three creeping hours even though we left the city at 10 at night—it was horrid. I hated the 100,000 dollar shacks on the beach, the publishers, the people.

Am trying to get at least one term of my Barnard job back, because I love it. All will be well I’m sure.

I forgot in my haste to say how I grieve for Jim that his children²¹⁸ won’t be there. I’m going to let Harriet go to see Cal if she is ready for it next Easter—and if they will feed her and not miss the plane! It is an awful deprivation to be separated from young children and I will be counting the days until my beloved is back up in Maine with me.

I’ll see you soon, dearest one. Maybe it will be the 13th, but no later.

55. Charles Monteith to Robert Giroux, Esq.

Faber and Faber LTD Publishers, 24 Russell Square,
London WC1B 5ED
3rd July 1970
Private and Confidential

Dear Bob,

Very many thanks for your letter of June 29th. I’m very glad that Cal telephoned Elizabeth—as he promised me he would when I talked to him after talking to you. I’ve met the lady in question myself a number of times and I can understand Elizabeth’s reaction! She may well be right in thinking that Cal is ill; and if there’s any way in which I can help don’t hesitate, please, to let me know. Is he, I wonder, in touch with a doctor over here with whom his own New York doctor has been in contact?

It’s most excellent news that you’re going to be in London in August; Peter, Matthew and I all look forward very much indeed to seeing you. If it’s convenient for you, could you call in here about 12.15 on Friday August 14th? We can talk about books in the office for half an hour or so and then go on to have lunch afterwards. Alas, I can’t—as I’d much looked forward to doing—suggest you come down to stay with me at Oxford for the weekend since the College²¹⁹ is closed for the whole month of August. Try to plan your next visit for some other month!

Yours ever,

Charles.

56. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
July 8, 1970

My dearest one: Life being what it is in the fast set of London, I have heard that you are in the hospital.²²⁰ Sweetheart, I just want to send you my love and Harriet’s and Sumner’s, et alia. All of us here, all of your friends, who love you and treasure you. Don’t worry, baby, you’ll be all right.

If you need money, tell them to write me and I will write the bank, or whatever you want. I only want to help you, not to hurt you. I value you so much and so does your daughter. Sometimes we can’t believe you’ll never be coming down from upstairs again, never, never, never.²²¹ Or going with pimento cheese to your studio on Water Street. But if that is your wish, never to have all of that, we will support you in any way we can.

I’ve driven back and forth along the west side highway four times over the 4th of July. I went up on that Thursday and had a lovely weekend at Francine’s, with the Millers²²² for swimming, playing tennis with Bill Coffin’s wife,²²³ driving Jean Van den Heuvel back. (I hear your remarks in the Bobby Kennedy book are lovely.)²²⁴ Then Harriet got an interview at the UN School, but I worry so about her. She is very upset and yet, after crying the first time she spoke to you, says nothing, which is worrying. I love her so. She is so, so smart, but so, so unlike other people—dear little creature. I won’t go into the school problems. It is a sort of nightmare.

Have the apt. back o.k. Lovely note from Fuentes, saying, “I love and respect you” and I barely know him. I’m o.k., honey. Guess what I’m doing? You had it the first time. Having a bourbon and looking at the news! I have written all those little things I planned and will start on my book. I have such good ideas for it and it will save my life.… There are, if I can do it, so many things in my past: commie stuff, women’s lib, all those horrid men I slept with, and the wonder what I have really made of myself as a woman. I think if it hadn’t been for feeling that as a woman you owe it to yourself to preserve dignity and honesty and integrity I couldn’t have stood what has happened to me. But I am really well I think and I will just write my book, started in the “going home piece,” and hope for the best, for a little prestige at least.

Thank you for the lovely poems to me and Harriet in Notebook.²²⁵ I read all of the book last night and it is really a strange, wonderful work. It would be stupid to speak of “loving it”—I don’t “love” really good books in that easy way. But I know your book is everything. And with the new ones, the additions²²⁶—Oh, God. I can’t agree with you when you said to me on the phone that you had 12 admirers in England to one here. The students at Harvard, I know, worship your book—and which twelve do you mean? It just depends on who it is … You have great love and the deepest belief in your genius here, from all of us who know what you are writing about.

Goodbye, my love.… I will always treasure you and do what you wish. Horrible book on Pound by Noel Stock, so, so boring. It just can’t be. You would never know if you didn’t look at the pictures that he was interesting.… It goes,

“Then Miss Rudge,²²⁷ … Then Mrs. Pound…” As if they were secretaries.

Well, “many a noble heart mourned the loss of those old trees…” remember I got that from Palgrave, up in Castine.²²⁸ Can’t wait to get there. Going I think on Sunday to Maine … Just heard from Vinny McGee, a new friend, going to jail as a draft resister … Some people think Columbia won’t even open, no money … I don’t believe it … I really want to get a job at Yale, year after this, because I think it would be fun. Also Harriet and I have Francine’s Connecticut house until New Year’s, after New Year’s really, and we plan to go up for weekends. She says she doesn’t want to come to England at Christmas. Not ready. Maybe Easter. But she will come some day, when she can face it.… Dearest love, always,

Elizabeth

57. Robert Giroux to Mr. Charles Monteith

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 19 Union Square West, New York, N.Y.
July 9, 1970
PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL

Dear Charles:

Shortly after your letter arrived this week, Elizabeth phoned to tell me that Cal was in a nursing home. The whole continental literary set is now in the act. It was Mary McCarthy who phoned Elizabeth from Paris; she had spoken to Cal the day before and thought he was “high” (it is not always so easy to tell). Then Sonia Orwell (I don’t know her present married name)²²⁹ phoned Elizabeth and wanted her to come over and take Cal home; it’s not that simple, however. Elizabeth knows she could not persuade him and that he might even react badly. His being in the nursing home is the best news of all. From my experience I would judge that the longer he stays, the better. It takes a little time for him to get down from the heights, and then the depression follows. If he agreed to go into the nursing home (this was not made clear), he’s headed for recovery through insight about his own need for quiet and rest. It’s when he’s footloose, over-drinking and over-talking, encouraged by people who have no suspicion of the boiling volcano beneath the apparently controlled and sometimes even sweet exterior, that the fireworks begin.

Elizabeth said she phoned Mrs. Nolan, who refused to pass a message to Sidney. He of course works wonders with Cal, as indeed I saw with my own eyes that night at the opera some years ago. The doctors really don’t seem to know what to do for Cal. Elizabeth is getting the name of the London doctor and will put Dr. Baum²³⁰ (I believe that’s her name) in touch with him. When Sidney and I delivered Cal to her on the memorable night at the opera, Dr. Baum said, “Cal, how can you act like this? Think what people will say about me.”

I don’t know of anything you can do, Charles, beyond what you’ve already done. Elizabeth is taking Harriet to Castine in Maine for the remainder of the summer. She feels she has to go on as best as she can for the girl’s sake, and I know she’ll do whatever is required. I’m writing Cal, in your care, by this mail merely to tell him I’m vacationing in France and will be in England. I’ll see him (I’m giving Faber as my address) only if he wants it and there’s something I can do.

Friday, August 14th, is fine for me, and I’ll come by at 12:15 to see you and Peter and Matthew. As for Oxford, I’ll make certain to plan for a better time than August on my next trip. Incidentally, I’m delighted that you are taking on the Peter Handke novel, THE GOALIE’S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK.²³¹ I’m sending Matthew the book of his we have already published, KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS.²³²

Yours ever,

[Bob] Robert Giroux

p.s. Thanks for corrected proofs—what a lot of work! It may well be his best book. Even that latest (and saddest) poem, “Wall Mirror,” is very moving.²³³

58. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
July 11, 1970

Darling Cal: How strange it is, making calls from here at 6 in the morning. But that is the time I wake up, and I love the mornings. I am very anxious to go up to Maine. There were just so darned many things to be done here that I couldn’t get away before. Mary tells me it is beautiful up there. The Thomases²³⁴ called to wonder where I was … tennis doubles waiting. I played once as I told you in Connecticut, in a humid indoor place, like having a heat stroke, but it was fun. I must say I am no better.…

I found yesterday, in going over my papers, a portrait I had done of Dorothea and Ivor Richards.²³⁵ It is quite good—oddly enough I have tried these posterity efforts before and they were quite always dull. It occurred to me that it had to do with the fact that I really was writing about people I knew too well, and somehow there was too little and too much, as Henry James said of writing about places.²³⁶ Certain limits on the knowledge of the place are a genuine help … I may try a few more, although I am not especially in line for posthumous acclaim since I feel I need so much right this minute … not acclaim, but good work to be published to keep me going.

Saw Stanley on the bus a little while ago. He looked fairly well and then I spoke to them before they went away,²³⁷ but that was some time ago. I enclose a card from Adrienne.²³⁸ Just the usual dumb mail, anthologies—all being saved here somewhere or another, requests for interviews by absurd sociologists on insane projects, two poems sent for your criticism, as if God himself could say anything about a few lines.…

Dearest, don’t feel that the lithium has let you down because of this set back. I guess you have put it to the ultimate test. It will work, it does work.… Bill Alfred said that if by any chance you should want to come back here this year, the second term at Harvard would be free since Elizabeth²³⁹ and Fitzgerald²⁴⁰ are both teaching the first term … I have no reason to think you would want that, but just wanted to pass the word along. You know how I am! I just found in an old notebook, also (all of these things are going with me to help with my Kentucky life of myself) the old baseball phrase: “Nice guys finish last!”²⁴¹ and that would seem to fit me, at least at the moment and in certain respects. If I knew, right now, how not to be nice I would not be, but can’t seem to find the occasions. (Naturally I am joking. My own awareness of the limits of my “niceness” is alive.)

Things have settled down here in the US, in a way at least, an odd way. There isn’t anything to be done. Nixon is so empty and has so appallingly failed at everything. One just sits back. The economic difficulties everywhere are the most absorbing I guess, since we have made the world numb to destruction and death. Incredible story someone was telling me yesterday about all the rich people selling out in the Caribbean, leaving vast beach houses at Jamaica, etc. Bob tells me there is a charming piece coming in the next issue by Naipaul on Black Power in Trinidad. I read a line or two, which told of their the black people waiting for the great African chieftain, Hailie Selassie, the Lion of Judah, on his visit, only to find that he looked like a little East Indian!²⁴²

Dearest, warmest greetings to you from me and everyone, if there were any one here to send his greetings. Much love, my dear old fellow. Will write or call you again soon.

Elizabeth Castine, Maine 207-326-8786

59. Caroline Blackwood to Robert Lowell

[Unknown Address²⁴³]
[n.d. summer 1970]

Darling Cal—I think about you every minute of the day, and I love you every minute of the day. Have just got your letter. You are right to object to me calling it “your” sickness.²⁴⁴ It is mine. Or ours. That is the trouble. I know it is better if I don’t see you or speak to you until your attack is over even though I really long to and without you everything seems hollow, boring, unbearable. I still feel as if I am under some kind of emotional anaesthetic and can’t plan or think. But that will change. I feel in an odd way and against obvious appearances that everything is going to be alright. But not immediately[.] As you say we got across the Godstow Marsh and manipulated that endless Military Road, and we reached Hadrian’s wall.

“Marriage?” [*Marriage* 9 5], from “The Dolphin” manuscript, composed and revised between 1970 and January 1972 (cf. “Marriage?” [Caroline 4], *The Dolphin*).

Are you working? Have you got enough books etc? I will get any letters that you send to Redcliffe Square. I enclose a copy of Wall Mirror that you said you wanted. At the moment I feel really sub-humanly low.²⁴⁵

Love Caroline.

60. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Castine, Maine]
July 14, 1970

Dear Cal: Just a word from Maine. Very hot and beautiful, clear and shining. Played tennis yesterday with the old group. The drive up was hard, but I went first to Boston to spend the night and dined at the Athens²⁴⁶ with Bill Alfred and with Peter Brooks, who was back fixing up their house for rental a second year. That was wonderful and we almost walked back to Cambridge. But how strange Harvard Square is, so over-populated with dirty, naked kids this summer, with a glazed look about them. Filth in the entrance to The Coop, around the plaza at the Holyoke Center. I began to see what Esther meant, how because it is so small one could see it as menacing to the sanity of young children somehow[.] New York, Central Park, the village—it’s all too big, people don’t mix with strangers and so that seems different. Boston fascinated me.

Here, Mary is settled in gaily, the Dupees are arriving tonight, Rahv is coming in August. On the Vineyard, he sold Theo’s beautiful house with a splendid garden, something she had always owned and which was a magnificent, expensive property right on the water, very much Theo. The day or two after the lease was signed, it burned to the ground. Chilling, isn’t it? Not a thing of Theo is left was the thought of everyone.²⁴⁷ She’s gone, utterly.

Well, you are certainly not gone from here. Your red wool shirt, your black and white checked wool, your sneakers, your dungarees, your bed in the barn and up here, your field glasses, your old muddy boots …²⁴⁸ It’s all like a Hardy poem.²⁴⁹ Birds are nesting in the house down there and up here. The trellis with the dutchman’s pipe vine absolutely collapsed, something before I came, and I am just staring at it, thinking about the next step.

I wonder how you are. The telephone calls to England became rather upsetting to me and they are unbelievably expensive and so I won’t make them unless I’m asked to.²⁵⁰ I write to support you, if you are feeling upset, and to say that Harriet and I feel millions of miles away, almost as if we had never known you. I am sure you feel the same about us.… I hope you get the Salmagundi I sent you, with the very good article by Robert Boyers.²⁵¹ I haven’t much else to say. My mail hasn’t started coming from New York, but I am busy and happy here, having a very good time, making the house cozy for that cold day that will surely come soon. I am working at writing and that is what I want to do. The weather is lovely. Can’t wait until August 15th and Harriet comes back. Mr. Soper²⁵² wanders about, the Thomases have re-done their house, and it is very pretty. Your barn is beautiful. I’ll have the Dupees for a drink in the sun there so that they can see it. Grass growing on the lawn, bulkhead standing after terrible storms, Sally’s house lovely, Pat all over Water Street, with bikes and so forth. Bob’s large boat in the harbor. Booths present and heavy somehow.²⁵³

Well, I would like some word from you, about you, if you care to send it.

With much love,

Lizzie

61. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Castine, Maine]
July 16, 1970

Darling: It was good to hear your voice. It is a rainy, or misty day, here and I can’t say I mind altogether. Tremendous activity, as you can imagine, with Mary here. Cocktail party for the Dupees and then I have them all back here for dinner. I had everyone, and the Dupees, after tennis at the barn yesterday, with the fire going, a great wind outside. Very nice. In addition now to the dubious liberation of feeling I can drive the freeways of the US at any hour, I now feel no worry at all about staying here alone at night. I just want a night at home, mostly, to read and go to bed early.

There isn’t much to say today. If you ever need to telephone me do at 11 to 12 in the morning your time! that will be six or seven in the a.m. here and I will certainly be at home.… But we won’t telephone unless there is something to say. I feel a bit strange sending off letters in the blue and I called you just to be sure they weren’t a bother. I just want to give you any support, or whatever would be better to call it, that you might need right now.

Be sure to tell the hospital to send the bills here, and the doctor. You have a new man at the State Street.²⁵⁴ I have his name written down someplace. Mr. Loring retired, and Mr. Nichols hasn’t really been on your “account” for a while, some years. Darling, I’ll have more to say in a day or two. Forgive this dull letter. But I send greetings and love and good wishes to you. Bear up and all will be well. I have faith in that and want you to have faith. Not cant, either, but based on my own knowledge and observation and rather large experience.

Dearest love,

Elizabeth

62. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Castine, Maine]
July 20, 1970

Dear Cal: I enclose this review, in case you haven’t seen it.²⁵⁵ I hope you are well. Castine is lovely, very warm and clear and I have had a lovely time so far. Senator McCarthy’s secretary called today but I said you were in England and not expected back here. Didn’t speak to him. Perhaps he is coming up. Mary and I would have loved to see him, but I didn’t feel I could ask to speak to him personally.

You seem so far away, letters are becoming difficult. Harriet is having a good time at camp I think.

Love,

Lizzie

63. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell²⁵⁶

[Castine, Maine]
Tuesday, July 21, 1971 [1970]

Darling: My typewriter is locked completely, carriage won’t budge. I want to send this off early. Cal, dear, would you like me to come over to help you get back on your feet & do what you want? Honey, telephones are ringing day & night here, with calls for help (not ringing at my house, at others).²⁵⁷ It is felt dearest that you are not well enough to come out of the hospital, that you are still very high & not the deep, serious Robert Lowell we all love. You will be all right, love—no one knows that better than I. If you want me—with so many people out of London—to sit with you, talk to you, make some order in your practical affairs there, and it must be made, I will, for a short time because I really haven’t long before I get Harriet from camp. Cable or call me Friday or Saturday. I would do this as a friend, as help if possible for my child’s father. Naturally I don’t want to come, am happy here. But I know I can help, Dearest love & just forget this offer if you don’t want it. Do call—your time—between 11 or 12 in the morning or send a cable. I could only stay ten days at the most but I could try to help & talk to you about your general business arrangements—And bring you news of here, maybe talk about interesting things, your work, etc,

Dearest love,

This is good faith, not wife-maneuver. If I had wanted to do that I could have months ago—at least tried.

64. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Castine, Maine]
July 28, 1970

Dear old heart: I liked talking to you.²⁵⁸ My tears welled up when Phil²⁵⁹ brought a great bouquet of flower-weeds, straight from the dump, as he said. Mary has been a devoted, imaginative friend, so sweet and good to me and I will love her always. It has been a perfect summer here, boiling hot, lively, gay tennis games, friends for drinks. Bob and Barbara calling me with kindness and love from New York. Harriet, too, has had the really astonishing devotion of her friends. Lisa went to the camp the first visiting weekend and last weekend, Melissa and her parents, who were visiting Melissa not far away went to see Harriet. Both people described her as looking very beautiful, with her face lighting up with gratitude for the visits, the efforts made, the loyalty. It is an 8 or 9 hour trip from here and of course I couldn’t go. I dread going down and coming back on the 16th, when I go to pick up her to return to Castine for the rest of August, but I will go a day early and spend one or two nights with Olga or Francine. She \H./ is very distressed to live without a father, day in and day out, especially painful is to be deprived for ever of an extraordinary father, an unforgettable, strange man. Daddy is so funny, she says, with his silent laughter!

There is a black bear in town!²⁶⁰ Hanging about the manor!²⁶¹ Rev. Ed Miller is puzzling over things, but I notice he withheld his perfect enthusiasm from a discussion of Bill Coffin and the wonderful Bishop Moore. Asking one saint about another is like asking George Ortman about Robert Motherwell. All my love, my dearest Cal.

Elizabeth

65. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy²⁶²

[London]
Sunday, Aug. 2, 1970

Mary, dearest: I’ll just send off this note instead of a cable, since you have all the other addresses.

Clive Hotel

Primrose Hill Road

London, NW 3, England²⁶³

It is very depressing here somehow & I realize again how happy it was for me in Castine. Cal has several more corners to turn before the realization that he has had a bad time really comes to him, but I think the next two or three weeks will do that. He is in awful shape physically, can only go about for an hour at the most & then just collapses. I will see the Dr. tomorrow. I am sure the thyroid is a problem.²⁶⁴ I was unable to hold back tears watching him creep along, exhausted. Sonia is unbearable. She met us²⁶⁵ at the town air terminal & between there & the hotel—quite nice, next to Cal’s hospital—did not let me say one word. At hotel coffee ordered & I said I don’t want coffee I want to see Cal for God’s sake & went off next door where he was waiting. I just hope she will keep away while Bill & I are here, but I doubt it. Had the feeling she was rushing back to town in two days!

What is so dreadful is the whole world of mental collapse—in different degrees, I hope. Caroline, Israel, Bingo (Grey’s lovely young wife, who had one previous breakdown). A world in which literally only Sonia is able to function. I find that very sad for Cal’s future, no one ever really hits the point of anything.

Cal is quiet, much too tired to drink more than a pint of beer; trying to write. He still can only speak in terms of jokes & has no real notion of the efforts people have made, etc., but sometimes a look of unutterable depression flashes across his face for a moment & I want to weep—then he pushes it back with a careless joke.²⁶⁶ But he has turned many corners, even if he has some left. That homely image is really the way getting over this seems to me. The “stealing” was all wrong—part of the telephone horror. Books from Sonia, a map of London she “thought” was in her handbag, later found on his bed!²⁶⁷ I said, “Books! they don’t count.” There is a nightmare quality here I hate & Bill feels it too, less in Cal now than in the hapless, helpless, unhelpful circle about him. God help him, I can’t stay long enough—as I estimate it—to see him through this period & of course I haven’t spoken to him anything about C. or “coming home.” I don’t even know what all the “telling him about Caroline” fear means, neither Bill nor I got the idea from Sonia’s ravings of just what there was to tell Cal about Caroline or not to tell. I feel she will be an awful disaster for him with her own deep unbalance. Cal seemed so helpless, so needing love & openness & wifely care (indeed). But that is all for now. Will wire you when I am coming back.

Dearest love to you both

66. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy²⁶⁸

Clive Hotel, Primrose Hill Road, Hampstead, London, N W 3
Aug 4, 1970

Dear Mary: I miss Castine. It is depressing here with so much illness & neurasthenia. I will not see Sonia, who is returning tomorrow. I think her hysterical reporting has done damage to Cal & I have no wish to hear her ideas. Cal is not well, but is certainly on the way. He is quiet, sober, honest. The hospital is charming & right for him, the doctor is good. I do not know what his future is, but I do know that by some odd good fortune I realized when I got here that I had no wish to start over again. One thing—not to do with Caroline, whom we have not mentioned—has quite released me. My only desire is to come home to my house & friends but the doctor wants me to stay as long as I can. I have said 14th at the latest. Have cut Cal’s shoulder length hair, had his shirts washed, his trousers cleaned.²⁶⁹ He is very weak & trembling & rather frail & needs help even to get around & is quite exhausted after an hour or so—even though we had a good time at Patton,²⁷⁰ an extraordinarily interesting 3 hour oddity.

Love “Thanksgiving”²⁷¹—not unlike “Patton” in a way. I hope to feel free to come \home/ earlier, but have a seat on the 14th. I may have to go to Harriet’s camp from Boston, but may not if she has remained firm in her interest in the Canada trip.²⁷²

London is nice. Hampstead enchants me. I will not call anyone—too tired & also do not want to talk about Cal. I hope to stop all that by my own silence. Bill Alfred is dear, patient & infinitely helpful. We are like two old nuns running errands, doing washing, taking the air for a pint of beer with Cal. He accepts our efforts like an invalid Archbishop, seeing nothing extraordinary in the service.

But we will both be glad to get home.

dearest love,

67. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell²⁷³

Clive Hotel, Primrose Hill Road, Hampstead, London, N W 3
Aug. 5, 1970

Dearest Cal: Here with a rubber band are some stamped post-cards & envelopes for airmail.²⁷⁴ Please don’t erase Harriet! A child can destroy herself over that, I get the feeling that with you she is like a cottage that once was near but has been lost to memory when a new building went up.

Are you prepared, happy to give us up for the rest of your life? Do you remember, actually, our apt, your studio, with its bed, its books, your phone. Do you remember Maine, the fire in School Street, friends, wine, music? Do you remember your barn & your seals & your long, lazy days.

Do you want to kiss Harriet’s cheeks again, hear her laugh, hear the guitar in her room?

You are going, irrevocably, to an emotionally crippled life, chaos, withdrawal, no support, no loving help, none of the effort made by a wife to create a life, everything for the man she loves. You are leaving private jokes, your \own/ life, to lead someone else’s life, you need the reality, the energy I brought to you, the care, the humor.²⁷⁵

What are your values? Do they include loyalty, responsibility to those you love, since you have love for me. Sickness & shame will overcome you as your whole life sinks into that created by someone else, ruled by a new country & the English aristocracy & its helpless ways, by surrender of something beautifully old-fashioned & New England & pure in you.

Your writing will flourish I hope, but what will renew it without the sense of fresh life always there, sometimes irritating I know, \me, the family/, the news? English gossip, old subjects?

Do you want to know of deaths and sicknesses at home? Do you feel no need for continuity or are you expatriated, occasionally informed by random visitors?

You could go home with us, to us, if you wished now. Essex will not buoy like Harvard. I understand it is dreary, like Stony Brook with a few good faculty.

My heart is broken, but I must make a clean break. I am strong & still get joy out of life. I do not believe in destruction, though I am \often/ wild.²⁷⁶

Love, hope for you

Elizabeth

P.S.²⁷⁷

Cal: Inside is a letter from me, some envelopes & cards stamped, some cards from the \National/ Gallery, I am going shopping, Bill is trying to get our tickets to leave Friday morning, day after tomorrow. Perhaps you can call me this afternoon & we could meet at 5 before I go to Valerie’s.²⁷⁸ I will see you as much as you like tomorrow, my last day.

Love,

Elizabeth (Lizzie)

Bill \in 320/ [will?] see you for lunch, if you like[.]

68. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell²⁷⁹

Clive Hotel, Primrose Hill Road, Hampstead, London N W 3
[n.d. August 1970]

Cal, darling: If you need me I’ll always be there, and if you don’t need me I’ll always not be there.

Salud & happiness, I wish you.

Lizzie

Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick, August 6, 1970

69. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell²⁸⁰

[Greenways Nursing Home, 11 Fellows Road, London]
August 6, [1970]

August 6

Dearest Lizzie—

You have always been a gentl

courageous, couteous, witty, generous.

how I can’

August 6, the day of your departure

Dearest Lizzie—

You[r] last note and much else that you said \and/ an have \said/ through the years go to my heart. you couldn’t have more loyal and witty. I can’t give you anything of equal value. Still much happened that we both loved in the long marriage. I feel we had much joy and many oth\er/ the thinkgs we had to learn. . there is nothing that wasn!t a joy and told ous something. Great jy \joy/.

Love,

Cal

70. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell²⁸¹

[Greenways Nursing Home, 11 Fellows Road, London]
October \August/ 9, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

Daily I send off those curious London sights photographs to Harriet.²⁸² I wonder what her fellow campers make of them. O O, the camp is running out, the yellow leaves are coming, even \here/ where I think of the climate as Norwegian. I bubble on,²⁸³ saying nothing because I am thinking more contentedly tha[n] ever of your long and yet rushed visit. A heart here thinks of you always. I expect to leave here about a week from now (nothing since the rainbow of Noah’s flood is certain) and already feel better in a way than I have for months.

All my love to you and all,

Cal

\P.S. All love to you./

71. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell²⁸⁴

[Greenways Nursing Home, 11 Fellows Road, London]
August 11, 1970

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,

Cal

“Notes for an unwritten Letter” [*The Farther Shore* 3], from “The Dolphin” manuscript,²⁸⁵ composed and revised between 1970 and January 1972.

72. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Castine, Maine]
Aug. 12, 1970

Dearest Cal: I don’t know that you will even get this, but I do want to write to say that your kind note to me meant a lot, more than a lot, more than I can say … Beloved Mary \Incarnatus!/ was waiting at the boiling Bangor airport, even though it was not certain I would be there. All is serene and beautiful here, tennis, friends. I leave in a few days for a couple of nights with Francine and Olga and then back with Harriet on the 15th. That will be a joy.

All my good wishes go with you always.

Lizzie

73. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Castine, Maine]
August 13, 1970

Dearest One: Letters, letters, letters. Now the bank calls that your signature is needed to get the money for the trip B. and I made. I dread the arrival of the bills from Faber²⁸⁶ and the long passage, with many regurgitations for new information, through the intestines of the Blue Cross, but will try as hard as I can. Those \bills/ not taken by B.C. will be paid by the bank.

It is so much fun here. Up this morning writing a parody for the yacht club poetry contest (judges Mary McCarthy, Philip Booth, Frank Hatch). It is called Reminiscences of the Bay Poets and is a jumble of lines and moods from Lowell, Booth, Eberhart, Daniel Hoffman. Since I don’t have Booth, Eberhart and Hoffman exactly at my finger tips a little digging was necessary. Tennis games are marvelous, lasting until seven. Somehow Castine is a lot livelier and gayer than it used to be; perhaps it’s the hot summer.

Daniel Berrigan arrested last night.²⁸⁷ He had been underground, hiding out. Barbara called me at ten. I had just come from the dock with Mary and Jim and their nice friend, Leonard Tennyson. I cried, even though of course he would be caught. It took four months. Dreadfully worrying story in the Times recently, saying many of the gentlest Catholic C.o.’s²⁸⁸ and resisters have been put in maximum security prisons, where they are at the mercy of assaults, sexual and otherwise, by the most incorrigible criminals. If you complain you may be killed. Philip Berrigan has been in one such, being held there as a hostage because of Dan we think …²⁸⁹ It is all so sad. Old Spock²⁹⁰ was around the harbor the other day, sent (over) greetings to you. Ann and Alfred Kazin have spent the summer near Blue Hill, which seems odd, and are coming over this afternoon. Alfred has been unkind about M.McC.²⁹¹ and so nothing communal can be planned, but I hear he is in good shape and she is predatory as ever.

Off at dawn for Connecticut. I am hoping Harriet will have a good time here and am planning reading and music evenings \for the two of us/ that may just go, people are having us both to dinner and I somehow think she will enjoy that in part. The Halls²⁹² will tune her guitar and a little solitude will be nice for her after the urban, teen-age torpor of the camp. Francine Gray visited Harriet in camp and wrote “what a stupendous beauty she is!” In a strange sense her suffering and loss have made everyone love her more and that comes at a time when she can receive it because she is older. I feel so guilty at times, because somehow I never made enough effort with the children of our friends, for her to take part in various families that she might have. But she is surrounded by love and sincere wishes for her happiness, and effort to provide pleasures and re-assurance. I am hopeful.

Olga just called with arrangements for my visit. I’m staying with Francine, because her house is bigger. I told Olga I was in the midst of writing you and she sent love.

Dearest Cal, I miss you sorely. You are loved here by me and Harriet and many others, by all of us, who have known you and who will always miss your presence. Please, honey man, sign this \Sheet enclosed inside envelope. But needs stamp, Baby!/ and mail immediately.

Dearest love again,

Elizabeth

74. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

80 Redcliffe Square, Kensington, London²⁹³
August 27, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

Nothing worthy to answer your beautiful letters. I’ve been rambling about getting a studio,²⁹⁴ toying with revisions, feeling the deadest poet as so often, and getting my textbooks ordered for Essex. Very cordial department \head/ who found an actually much better anthology for the one I’d ordered, also one much worse. No pressure. Also my students are already picked for me in very small numbers, so I avoid that agony. Not much else a lunch with Karl Miller, stay in Kent.²⁹⁵ I don’t feel very boastful, but I don’t think I’m a bastard. I rather look forward to Essex; teaching is so much easier and more dependable than writing, tho so much less.

I’ve thought much and wonderingly about Harriet’s picture. Since Venice she’s turned into a woman, or is that only the photographer’s angle? Then the profound in the second line and rather sad camp note.²⁹⁶ I wish I could be with her and let her let fly her random thoughts. We were good at deep jokes. When can I see you both? I thought of a trip leaving here around the 10th of December, or a little later. Would that confuse? Well, God bless you, all the sorrow in joy. Thanks for liking my revolutionary sonnet group.²⁹⁷ They’ll have a different arrangement in NOTEBOOK but this pleased me.

All my love,

Cal

75. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

80 Redcliffe Square, London
August 27, 1970

Dearest Harriet:

I don’t \know/ what a father so far away can say to you. My life except for you and mother is naturally much as it always was. Writing teaching enjoying myself as much as I dare. This country is like a combination of country Connecticut and Boston, perhaps. Not much like New York maybe. I’m like myself, just as you are like yourself. But I know you are older. A girl your age must grow older and wiser, which isn’t always true of the old. I want very much for you to talk and feel at ease with me. All is as was, tho never quite. I may come to New York sometime before Christmas, if you and mother ask me.

All my love,²⁹⁸

76. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mr. Robert Lowell

[Postcard: Charles Osgood—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1840), Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts]

[Castine, Maine]
[September 3, 1970]

Sorry about that stupid phone call. Please don’t call us. I’ll write when I get time & hope all this will be better by then. I realize there is nothing on earth you can do or feel about our problems, small or grave. The call was a desperate reflex I guess. I’m looking after Harriet & time will help. I believe (this a.m.) the return to Dalton & seeing her friends was the trouble.

Lizzie

77. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[London]
[September 1970]

Dearest Lizzie—

I have been thinking about you most of the time and am very stirred up about Harriet, the vagueness about what happened of course making things almost ominous, though I think I know what happened, an extreme explosion of anger and tears, and sad thoughts about herself. I suppose it will pass, part of her age’s whirlpool,²⁹⁹ but one must never say this and rely more or less on nature, though there’s little else.

Glad to have the checks and have added a thousand dollars to my small account. Saw Gertrude³⁰⁰ two days ago, who was temporarily in the house of the man I rent from.³⁰¹ Somehow fated. We had a pleasant evening. She has a little job with a little publisher, which she complains of, though bravely. Yet, miracle, she is as she was twenty years ago to my dim eye.

School begins in two or three weeks. I’ve been assembling my texts, and Essex had been helpful, a good American anthology, which costs ten pounds, more than any student can buy, and something made up of Ginsberg and the Black Mountain for the moderns. Am I a wolf in black fleece offering myself to the very advanced classes of Essex?

Not much more money will be needed; soon my salary will be rolling in. I would like what I get from royalties. Is that too much? When I come in Christmas time I’ll clean up the papers business, which should set us up better. All love to you and Harriet.

Love,³⁰²

78. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont St., London SW 1
September 12, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

Suddenly after mailing my letter I realized I hadn’t thanked you properly for the checkbook and making the whole business of cashing so easy. Even if we think of ourselves (not practical) as still on the old basis of a joint account, still nothing could be done without your help.

No news here. This is one of those rainy dark European city days, pleasing at times, but at others they almost make one see \touch/ eternity as Baudelaire wrote. I am reading the Shakespeare I will teach, mostly the Roman plays. I rather need a library, but I’ve always more or less gotten on without using one, except for the random, accidental offering of Quincy House. But now instead of Hazlitt’s characters, I have Professor Dorsch’s defense of the character of Julius Caesar.³⁰³ Professor Dorsch is the editor of my edition, and is too off even to effectively disagree with. Love to Dear Harriet.

Love,

Cal

79. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Sept. 17, 1970

Dearest Mary: Just a note to say I meant the quotation about Ivy Compton Burnett as an example of good writing.…³⁰⁴ And as another example, your wonderful letter was such a joy to receive this morning and I read it over twice for the pleasure of it. Ah, Philip. I would much rather have your delicious account than meet that creature in the flesh.³⁰⁵ He makes me so nervous somehow and leaves me with the feeling of my own insignificance that takes some time to cast off.

Here in New York it is actually very nice, cool, often bright, with something suspended, waiting … and not the revolution, as those inane young persons see it … but perhaps some return to sanity, or perhaps not. Seeing Nixon making a boring law and order speech, you realize that they are desperate and these vague banalities are all they have.³⁰⁶ But thirty or forty boring hecklers keep it alive when obviously we should ignore, at least in so far as public attendance is concerned, both Nixon and Agnew, let them go on talking and then do your own talking, at your own time. I can’t quite explain what I feel is different this fall. It may be fatigue with the peculiarity of our politics and it may not. Anyway it is very nice somehow, and all of a sudden different. One feels like trying to write well, trying to read again, trying to be happy and calm. All of this sounds foolish, but it is just a way of saying that the “crisis” existence of the last few years seems to have died down even though the very conditions remain and may even be worse. I am hoping to write my book that will be about Kentucky, myself in college, a little, and coming to New York, etc. I will try to be as removed from myself as possible and try to get the feeling of the thing. I have been talking it over with Jason³⁰⁷ or rather he called me to talk about my doing just this and what he thought were the possible themes that might make it a book of interest right now. Jason is a wonderful publisher in the sense of “exploiting” with great energy the things he likes and so I am somewhat buoyed up by the thought that, when I get the book done, he might “put me over.”³⁰⁸

I’ve had some letters from Cal and talked to him on the phone the day we got back. He has his own flat, or maybe it is just a studio. I can’t tell what mood or period, if that is the right word, he may be in and I try not to think about him. Every day brings new things of interest and painful as it is still I believe one cannot win with Cal. He will spare you nothing, least of all that terrible breeziness and casualness about the deepest feelings of your own life and, also, of his own.

Harriet is fine, I think. She’s back in school and very busy and talks on the phone from five to six without stopping and all of that is nice. The summer was beautiful in Castine. I like it more and more there, because you are there I’m sure, and Jim. But all the others are dear to me too, and the town, all of it.

Well, dearest love, Mary[,] and take up your book with a happy heart—if one can ever take up the hard, hard task in quite that way.³⁰⁹ What would be better is: take it up with confidence and pride.

Lizzie

80. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont Street, London SW 1
September 18, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

In a postcard you said you realized that there was nothing I could do about your problems.³¹⁰ I was sad of course when I read this, and knew in a way you were partly true. The distance is fa\r/ther than a hand can reach or mind can perhaps attend.³¹¹ Nothing for me to do, and as for my feeling it’s an acute, useless undifferentiated ache. I can’t imagine the inside of your lives, yet I am not free at all of what I’ve done to you.

Very soon I’ll begin my teaching and am pointing toward it—getting classbooks even reading them. It’s all very shadowy but I guess my feet are on earth. I do miss you both and would ask to be forgiven, if that had active meaning. All’s well. Do let us keep in touch, closely in touch till I come at Christmas.

Love to you both,

Cal

The last few days, after finishing Shakespeare’s Roman plays, I’ve \had/ the London sights with a guidebook. The Tower is more Roman than Fellini’s Satyricon³¹² which I also saw.

81. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont Street, London SW 1
September 25, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

I see we are using the same ornate letter-paper.³¹³ And if you were to \use/ my old typewriter, it would be the same type or at least the same machine. So much for continuity. I would have written sooner, but I’ve been spending a few days in Amsterdam with Huyck and Judith.³¹⁴

Adrienne came up naturally often in our talk but no one knew of the separation.³¹⁵ I am sorry, knowing nothing about it. Mostly because Adrienne seems so \such a/ matchstick, tho gloriously, to live by herself. Again, knowing nothing about the facts, I don’t think the separation will last long and because Adrienne will need Alf if she goes to the hospital again,³¹⁶ and because after all they shared and agreed on many things. I don’t quite know how to write into her confusion and don’t know the address, but give \her/ all my love. What are Street Schools?³¹⁷

When I first came to England, people gave me quite a few \old/ long pieces, so that naturally there seemed to be the world’s abundance and enthusiasm. I suppose I’m liked in one country about as much as another. These buildings can fall in a minute.

I do want to hear all your communication and gossip. It could never be too much. I too can’t state my feelings even to myself. The past is almost more with me than today. I look on it with all pride and joy, but it is piercing to look back, especially when I have no reproaches. Shall I say that I, or rather we, are alright? There’s much to be said at length at Christmas. Love to yourself and to my Harriet. She has gone into a void, but I can’t imagine she would find writing to me pleasant. In your next letter, quote something she has said.

Love,

Cal

82. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont Street, London
September 28, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

The enclosed is ambiguous.³¹⁸ I don’t know whether I have \a/ rough five thousand minus three thousand or the whole $4,700. I’ve written Bob³¹⁹ to give you three in the probable second case, and one thousand in the first. Confusion infects; I am almost as muddled as Bob. I don’t remember signing any check in June, but seem to remember that you drew the royalties, as was right. We can make this a little clearer at Christmas.

I have been sightseeing in the strangely oppressive heat, saw a very hard small baby elephant and now recognize most of the London place names in Vile Bodies.³²⁰ Saw Poirier³²¹ with Karl Miller, smart enough but the evening was enlivened by a frank argument on homosexuals. Poirier backed your halfattack on Hemingway,³²² then went on at length to defend \glorify/ him in general. Tomorrow I go trembling to school for the first time,³²³ and I hope \for a library with/ more than the weekly literary reviews which I have been gorging. If there weren’t a paper strike, I fear I’d be reading the news down t[o] the sporting pages and movie ads. I want to get the money news off to you.

Love to you both,

Cal

83. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop

33 Pont Street
[October 5, 1970]

Dearest Elizabeth:

Didn’t I write about your beautiful poem?³²⁴ It’s the nearest thing you’ve written to a short story in verse—an I,³²⁵ you or not you, telling a naturalistic narrative, more heightened than prose fiction would accept, very personal, the way a short story can sometimes be, without too much stress, because you always, till well on in writing, seem to be just quietly talking. One of your poems that most stays with me. \My dentist, I feel!/

I’ve written thirty more poems in the meter of Notebook, but somehow unlike Notebook in tone—more strained, the Romantic romance of a married man in a hospital. Mostly I’m not very very forthright. A few may be good, but I am disheartened by the whole, and keep trying to comb out the unnecessarily grand obscurities I somehow began with.

Like you I depended on Bill for everything all my years at Harvard. Once I was a year behind on my health certificate. Perhaps much more, I depended on him for companionship. I could always drop in and have drinks or a dinner or meet students. Often they, not I, came to his house at four in the afternoon and left at four in the morning. Give him my love; today I am going to Essex to teach for the first time and dreading the undefined errors I am bound to make without Bill. Give him my love.

By now you will probably have fifty poet-appliers, manuscripts double at first meeting. I tried to cut them down to 12 but usually couldn’t. Then I made the mistake of letting in auditors, usually wives of physics professors, who wrote better often than most of the students in worn styles that couldn’t be digested by the students. Other classes were comfortably small but insultingly so. I had three for the Bible. Some were too large to talk, others too small. Yet the students mostly in the end were ideal, or at least in class they were. I don’t think you’ll \have/ troubles. I almost always left a class happiery.

Natasha Spender speaking of her husband teaching English students for the first \time/, says he is like a boy going off from home to school for the first time.

My “someone” is Caroline Citkowitz. She \is 39/, has published stories in the London Magazine, has three very pretty daughters, oldest ten, and was once years ago married to Freud’s grandson, Lucian. You might have meant met; Caroline lived some time in San Francisco and later in New York, but you haven’t or she would remember. However she reads you with great admiration and thinks you much brighter than Mary whom she knows. What a bare list, but how can I make the introduction? She is very beautiful and saw me through the chafes and embarrassments of my sickness with wonderful kindness. I suppose I shouldn’t forget Harriet and Lizzie, anyway I can’t. Guilt clouds the morning, and though things are not embattled, nothing is settled. I’ll be back in New York for Christmas, then there will perhaps be more decision. I could be happy either way, if things could be settled. But nothing is. I am happy to be in presentable spirits.

This is somewhat in the mood of waiting [to] take a train to my new work later this afternoon. If only life \could/ be as manageable as teaching. Didn’t Faust say this? England, I speak from the wisdom of a six months stay, is wonderfully unstirred after New York.

All my love,

Cal

84. Robert Lowell to Blair Clark

33 Pont St., London SW 1
October 9, 1970

Dear Blair:

When I first read your postcard, through some macabre mistake I read that Peter White had raised the list of class suicides to four—I only know of two excluding Al Clark.³²⁶ What a grim way of holding the suspense then suddenly springing it. Glad he’s alive.

I expect to come over to New York during the Christmas holidays. There’s a problem whether to come with Lizzie \Caroline/. The only time she can come is before Christmas, while Lizzie wants me to come later when Harriet like Caroline’s children will be out of school. However, it seems callous humanly for me to arrive in New York, in Lizzie’s home city, with Caroline. Or am I being meaninglessly scrupulous? Until the divorce is made, and it looks as though it will, and that I will marry Caroline—it still remains uncertain in my mind. When friends of mine have been in this dilemma, I’ve always thought they should stop torturing themselves and everyone else, and make a quick clean severance. But it’s not easy, unless one becomes some sort of doll only capable of fast straightforward action.

I am beginning to teach and enjoy it, also getting away to London. Sometimes the change is small, tonight Caroline and I are having dinner with an angry young Hindu novelist whom I met in a pub near my sanitarium. Sunday, a higher life, the Spenders. Just talked to Mary finishing her novel and depressed; we’ll see her here in a few weeks. Hope you’ll \see/ Joanna and all moves toward, not heaven, but paradise. I miss you. Could I or we stay with you in midDecember? Love,

Cal

85. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont Street, London, SW 1
October 11, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

This has been a gray warm Sunday until now at twilight it is cool and clear. For the last three or four hours, I have been home and on bed reading forty or fifty pages of Emerson’s poems for class \teaching/. The unease of distance and severance are on me. He says of his child that his lips could pronounce “words that were persuasions.”³²⁷

Why don’t you write and tell me what is happening? I know it’s hard in this uncertain, changing time. You wrote something—like so \many/ phrases and feelings in your letters, it stays with me—like it was hard to state your thoughts accurately, even in your thoughts.³²⁸ I feel that too, and so find it hard to write, though not-writing I’m afraid was always one of my gifts. Let me hear of you and Harriet, and at length, if you can.

Essex, my part of it, is enough like Harvard to sometimes seem [a] mirage. The same students, tho half audible from their good manners and foreign idiom, the same old classes, the \same/ with fresh textbooks, a taxi drive along the Thames that is like the East River and even the Charles. I suppose my low-toned, conversational teaching is safe from the falls of ambition, but I feel wobbling in talking. You can seldom tell what students think, or what is perhaps more important, what good you’ve said. It’s all fairly pleasant. “The gentle lifesaver of routine,” as Emerson might have said, if he had had less soaring comforts.

Did you get the three thousand dollars? It deserves a note, even if it has already melted into the flow of costs. I really haven’t very much. I have enough, but wish I could hear.

Love,

Cal

86. William Alfred to Robert Lowell

31 Athens Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138
15 October 1970

Dear Cal,

Please write Elizabeth something clearest about what you mean to do. Your letters, written in kindness though they are, only serve to deepen her conviction that you are of two minds about the years ahead. That makes her miss you more, and understandably resent the pain your absence is causing her. And please be careful with Harriet. Send her little things from time to time. London has wonderful shoplets where you can pick up pretty bits of jewelry reasonably (the alleys off the Charing Cross Road, near the train station). She is at the age now where she could lose faith in everything for good, if it isn’t made clear to her why you won’t be with her. They say the fear of death is at bottom only our childhood fear of desertion come of age.³²⁹ I know you can bring her through that fear with your gift of \for/ love and words.

Frank Bidart tells me he has an advance copy of the book, and he thinks it is a towering achievement.

I miss you, and pray for your happiness and well being.

Love,

Bill

87. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
October 16, 1970

Darling: This is the last of the letters. Please telegraph Harriet and me about when you are coming home for good. That is the only question, the only reality … All the rest is just foolishness on my part. We are utterly miserable, unbelievably wounded. I do feel as I say again that this is like a death. We can’t bear your photographs, anything …³³⁰ What you have done is very, very serious. All we need to know is when you are coming back. If you aren’t coming soon, then we absolutely must know. Please, please—tell us the answer right now. We cannot go on this way, and we will not.

I’m working and getting things in shape when I’m not writing. I feel as if I were preparing for my own death somehow. I can’t, if anything should happen, leave Harriet with all this confusing junk about, all the mixed up drawers stuffed with old things.

How horrible this is.

I have told her that I am asking you to let us know once and for all. I know you understand, as anyone alive would, that you cannot stay away until the end of the school year. That is out of the question … But you realize that … Anyone who can leave his family and never return can certainly get out of a teaching job by explaining how dearly, painfully he is needed back across the ocean … We love you my dear … You’ll be exhausted from these letters. But there will not be more unless you are planning to return to us. I cannot bear it otherwise, it is degrading, unnecessary and quite destructive for me to keep writing to someone who doesn’t care for me or for his daughter.

We long to have you open the door, to laugh, play music, have you call from your phone upstairs, have a bourbon, fuss, kiss you, have grape-nuts, clean up your studio, kiss Harriet in the morning, look at Sumner on the blue chair, have dinner with in our dark orange dining room, see your little white seal in its window, the crushed tin from the explosion on 11th Street,³³¹ your books, your poems, your writing, your oldest jokes and your newest,—and to look after you forever, and to have you look after us. WE NEED YOU. We really need you.

Lizzie

When are you coming home?

88. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Telegram]

[New York]
OCT 16 PM 5.13 [1970]

ROBERT LOWELL

33 PONT STREET

LONDONSW1

MANY LETTERS ON THEIR WAY³³² STOP THANKS FOR THE MONEY STOP

HARRIET AND I ARE GRIEVING PITIFULLY STOP SHE IS ONLY 13³³³

STOP PLEASE COME HOME LOVE

LIZZIE

89. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont Street, London, SW 1
October 18
(Shortly after our phone-talk)

Dearest Lizzie:

I don’t know whether I’ve said or written that I feel like a man walking on two ever more widely splitting roads at once, as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist,³³⁴ or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision. Is there any decision still for me to make? After all I have done, and all that seven months have done, can I go back to you and Harriet? Too many cuts.

Time has changed things somewhat since we met at Greenways, I am soberer, cooler. More displeasing to myself in many little ways, but mostly about you. A copy of my new book came the other day, and I read through all the new and more heavily revised poems. A sense of the meaning of the whole came to me, and it seemed to be about us and our family, its endurance being the spine which despite many bendings and blows finally held. Just held. Many reviewers saw this; though it was something I thought pretentious and offensive if claimed \to push/ in my preface, I saw it too. I have felt as if a governing part of my organism were gone, and as if the familiar grass and air were gone.

I don’t think I can go back to you. Thought does no good. I cannot weigh the dear, troubled past, so many illnesses, which weren’t due to you, in which you saved everything, our wondering, changing, growing years with Harriet, so many places, such rivers of talk and staring—I can’t compare this memory with the future, unseen and beyond recollection with Caroline. I love her very much, but I can’t see that. I am sure many people have looked back on a less marvelous marriage than ours on the point of breaking, and felt this pain and indecision—at first insoluble, then when the decision has been made, incurable.

I don’t think I can come back to you, but allow me this short space before I arrive in New York to wobble in my mind. I will be turning from the longest realest and most loved fragment of my life.

I’ll arrive mid-day or so on Thursday. I’ll probably stay with Blair. We won’t feel tied together at all hours, but all my time will be yours. I don’t expect to see anyone except Blair and probably Stanley.

I don’t want to scrap over details.

My love to you both,

Cal

90. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Telegram]

[New York]
1970 OCT 19 03:45

ROBERT LOWELL

33 PONT STREET LONDONSW1ENGLAND

CALL ME IMMEDIATELY SERIOUS³³⁵

ELIZABETH

91. Elizabeth Hardwick and Harriet Lowell to Mr. Robert Lowell³³⁶

[Postcard: Vittore Carpaccio—St. Augustine in His Study (detail)³³⁷—Venice]

[New York, N.Y.]
[Postmarked Oct 20 AM, 1970, but written Oct. 19?, 1970]

Be lovely to see you. I am not tense about it or expecting anything. Don’t worry. Just want a pleasant visit. Lizzie.

I can’t wait to see you. Love,

Harriet

92. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mr. Robert Lowell

[Postcard: Greenwich Village, New York City: “One of the most colorful districts in New York, a Bohemian atmosphere pervades this part of the city where artists, writers, sculptors, composers, actors and beatniks make their homes. Here will be found off-Broadway shows, nite-clubs, a great variety of restaurants, exciting Espresso shops and friendly people.”]

[New York, N.Y.]
[Oct 20 PM, 1970]

H. just fine today. Her conversation with you cheered her up … and I don’t think any of these crises will come again. The Conrad thing was horrible and everyone was in agony.³³⁸ Dearest love & hope this didn’t upset you. We are O.K.

93. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[33 Pont Street, London SW 1]
[October 21, 1970]
Wednesday

Dearest Lizzie—

I phoned you just before leaving for Essex, and now am writing just after returning and reading your letters. Alf’s face was with me most of the time, large in the foreground, and what was nearer, you and Harriet and of course thoughts of Adrienne were peeping out behind, as if behind a poster. He always seemed in such full health and discipline, that nothing pointed this way. It’s as abrupt as Randall’s death, and these last days hits me with the same force, though we weren’t close and my real friend was always Adrienne.

You have written so much and so many things, the same repeating contradictory things since last summer. Poor thing, what else could you do under the circumstances? The last letter is relaxed, more relaxed, and ends with more of an up-note. And the last sentence is “hell and damnation … Life is so terrible.”³³⁹ Even if I returned for good, if that has meaning, almost all would be unsolved. I realize all three of us (crushing realization) have lived a depression, lived through our darks, at more or less the same time. Mine, waking up pricked through with my guilt and hollowness; the same ache you have felt has hurt me, but with time the feeling lifts. It’s the usual, once annual depression, lighter than most, but enough to make me peculiarly indecisive and useless to you now. I suppose I’ve made my choice, I and my seven months absence have have chosen, and you are right to say you wouldn’t have me back. I feel whatever choice I might make, I am walking off the third story of an unfinished building to the ground. I don’t offer this as good description, it’s too vague and grand, but to show you why my useless, depressed will, does nothing well. Just the usual somberness after mania, jaundice of the spirit, and yet it has so many absolutely actual objects to pick up—a marriage that was both rib and spine for us these many years.

Caroline isn’t (if you really want me to be free to talk to you about her) one of my many manic crushes, rather \this/ and everything more, just as you were at Yaddo and after.³⁴⁰ She is airy and very steady and sturdy in an odd way. She has been very kind to me. I think we can make out.³⁴¹ I love her, we have been together rather a long time—often and intensely. I have fears \doubts/ that I by myself, or anyway, can make \out/, that dear you and Harriet can make out. I think somehow that Christmas will help us all, great troubles but \no/ longer everyone unreal to everyone, and Christmas is the season to lighten the heart.

All my love to both—

Cal

Hold on my Dears. Making out is so much stiffer than making it.

94. Robert Lowell to Adrienne Rich

[33 Pont Street, London S. W. 1]
Wednesday, October 21, 1970

Dearest Adrienne:

I heard about Alf’s death last Monday from Lizzie on the telephone and then went off to my teaching at Essex carrying the wound and a sort of composite picture of him, now short-haired now long and a gay green or blue turtle-necked sweater—accurate thoughts and figures and an ardent moonlight glow. His death seems to me the most tragic I have known since Randall’s. In both, the end seems so unproportioned to the previous lives, full of health and promising its renewal. We knew him less well than you, but Lizzie and I have felt we lost part of ourselves, a part of our old lives of the last fifteen years.

You’ve heard of course from Lizzie about our situation. I am with another girl, Caroline Citkowitz. I love her and we’ve \been/ together a long stretch by now. Still, it’s all somber and unreal. Both Lizzie and Harriet are disturbed, and so am I. Hard to tell what is right or even possible. There’s an old picture somewhere, mostly as frontispieces, where Dante stands against an elaborate tapering tower with galleries³⁴²—it is Purgatory, and it seems to lean. That’s how the last twenty-one years seem to me now. This week especially with its many letters. I’ll be home for two or three weeks at Christmas. Perhaps things will [be] better and flatter then. Meanwhile the useless inescapable time of the two mutually exclusive choices. I imagine I’ll get divorced, and all may be well, but the loss will never go.

I am talking for you in a way in your much greater trouble. I have thought of you much when I heard of your separation, and felt my ignorance was too great to express itself in a letter. Terrible things happen, that have causes of course, but which can’t be answered. Maybe you’ll try not to, as is best, and your marvelous courage will carry through these new obstacles as it has through so many of the old. At Christmas, I pray that we may have more of our vodka or saki luncheons. My love to the children and all to you.

Love,

Cal

95. Robert Lowell to William Alfred

[33 Pont Street, London S. W. 1]
October 21, 1970

Dear Bill:

I’ve just gotten back from Leicester and read your caring letter. Telling Elizabeth plainly and without ambiguity in a letter what I am going to do is hard. It’s hard for me to be that certain even in my quietest thoughts. I am coming to New York over Christmas and stay two weeks or so. Then we can talk at leisure, then we can talk it out, which can’t be done by letter or long distance phone. This helps no one I have said, and you more or less say. Still such an old and passionate love cannot be ended like slicing pie. The time hasn’t been very long after all considering how much is still hanging. I have written Lizzie several times that I felt we would get a divorce, but that we should decide when w[e] met.

Oh yes, you are right about Harriet, I lie awake about her. Jewelry is a good idea. We talked the other day on the phone and things seem less frantic.

Love,

Cal

96. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Friday, October 23, 1970

Dear Blair: I felt after I talked to you yesterday that I wasn’t sure you understood what I meant.³⁴³ I really do not want this unreal Christmas visit from Cal, but I have asked all my friends, thought about it day and night, and I don’t see how he can possibly get in touch with Harriet or she with him unless he sees her. I can’t send her there, where she would be on unfamiliar ground—and I haven’t the confidence in Cal at this point that would make me able to let a 13 year old go to him. But in re-establishing things I hope and expect to work out something \for them/ and even had in mind something about the spring vacation, if we can afford it. For my business with Cal a visit is not necessary. I do not expect that any of us, even Harriet, will get anything out of it really and I will be glad when it’s over … Caroline would never come. That is his fantasy and his need to keep a sense of our competing over him going. She has never competed for anyone in her life and I do not want Cal back under any circumstances. But I don’t see his coming here, supposing Caroline would, and having a honeymoon visit when the whole purpose of the trip was to spend a bit of the Christmas with Harriet, to make arrangements for the future. This is the last time he will see me—something I don’t think he realizes, since he is reluctant just to face the lack of drama that the end of this would mean. Also I have the idea that he is afraid to budge one inch from Caroline—she might not be there when he got back. I don’t think he is really well, and he is kept going on this false sense of people competing for him.

I could not put Harriet and me through the giddy unreality I know Cal would be sunk in if he came over with Caroline. I feel it would be the end of her \Caroline’s/ feeling for him too, because she would see how he has to exploit and boast or else things aren’t real. In a way I doubt he will come. In all the months he has been gone I’ve heard from him a lot and he has never answered one question that I have put to him, or discussed really anything, me or Harriet or practical things or Caroline—except himself.

I am not withholding Harriet from Cal. My aim is to get him to acknowledge her. He has to come home in a manly way, for \only/ a few days, settle up things, make arrangements and then leave forever. That is the only decent thing to do. Any other path of celebration would be disastrous for his own reputation with those of his friends I know, and I think immoral for his daughter.

I don’t want you to be my emissary. I have no position. I just wanted you to understand what I mean. If Caroline should come with him I am sure Harriet would still want to see him and they would have a few afternoons I guess, but that would be something. I think it is very cruel as a method and quite unnecessary, but there is absolutely no chance, I believe, that Caroline would consider such a thing. As I told you they can move in next door for all I care after this is settled. Cal should have come in June before Harriet went to camp, talked to her, arranged things with me. Then it would have been done and over with.

Love,

97. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

[33 Pont Street, London SW 1]
[October 26, 1970]

Dearest Harriet:

I am mailing you a small arrow covered with diamonds[.] At first I was going to send you a gold love-knot which would have meant I love you forever, but the knot was only a copy and not as pretty as the \really/ old arrow. I don’t know quite what it means; both arrows and diamonds are something that goes to the heart like truth. Let it be our love.

I’ll be back Christmas. Whatever happens between Mother and me, you must never think of me as gone. Wherever I am you must come and stay as long as you wish. I haven’t made the last months happy for you or Mother. I did the best I could and promise better.

Love from your forgetful, not forgetting

Father.

Love,

Dad

98. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[London]
[October 26, 1970]

Dear Lizzie:

I have had letters from Blair and Bill, rather different letters. Bill’s was about Harriet and making my intentions absolutely clear.³⁴⁴ Blair was about Caroline’s coming to New York.³⁴⁵ From \both/ I see I must be more open and certain. This was hard for me to do and seemed rough. I merely wrote out of my feelings, which was probably unkind and without purpose. I must say now that I definitely want a divorce whenever arrangements can be made. I don’t see why you should veto Caroline’s coming to New York. There wouldn’t be much sense in my coming if you and Harriet were in the Caribbean. Harriet should meet Caroline sometime then, though this would have to be awkward, she would feel less bewildered by the possibility of visiting us.

Oh dear, these sentences seem stiff and unreal to type out.

I’ve sent you a charming little present along with one to H.

Love,

Cal

99. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
October 29, 1970

Dear Mary: No advertisement for Senator Goodell and I don’t suppose there will be one. One ad alone cost 8,000 and the Goodell people just don’t have it. We had, the Arts and Letters Committee had, a party ten days ago at someone’s town house to raise money but it didn’t do much good. Now the polls have Goodell trailing badly—and Buckley ahead by seven points two weeks in a row and the election almost here. I gave money for G., everyone did, and I suppose I will still vote for him although the Ottinger-Buckley business is very perturbing.³⁴⁶ An unusually miserable thought to think of New York with the first Conservative Party senator, and old Bill Buckley half out of his mind with “wit” and hysterical crowing. However, perhaps one should do when he can what he would like or think right for everyone to do. In that case I think it would be Goodell who has quite literally been purged by Nixon and Agnew. I’m having some people in for dinner on Nov. 3rd to watch the returns—one couldn’t go through it alone I guess … This is just a note since I have your contribution on my mind.… I have just written a short story of normal length, my first in over ten years. Golly, they are hard! as Randall J. would say in a high whine.³⁴⁷ Worst was to break the junkie habit of rushing through, sending it off to Bob and having it in print the next morning … Indeed I can’t see where this will find print since the possible places are so few. A gratuitous act, or so it will probably turn out to be although I hope not. Saw Edmund last night at the Epsteins. He has just finished a book on “Upstate”³⁴⁸ and was worried. Shawn was reading it over the weekend but E. thought the N. Yorker most likely wouldn’t take it. He says he fears they are trying to change their “image.” Actually they have been advertising all over the place, even TV. And such peculiar unbeckoning ads they are.

I remember that I wrote very testily, or actually sadly, about Cal and Harriet. Someone got to him I suppose because he has been corresponding with her and will come Christmas—with Caroline—as a sort of honeymoon, I suppose \reckon/, coupled with his visit to his daughter, the first it will be then in 9 months. I was annoyed when I heard Caroline was coming from Blair and wondered why Cal who has been writing very weirdly about this trip for weeks to me (“much trouble, but Christmas is the time of joy”) \didn’t tell me/ and said I would vanish, but I changed my mind the next day and I don’t care at all. Cal is a terrible show-off and just couldn’t come home, see Harriet quietly, settle up with me in a few days and then go away. (I am assuming Caroline wants to do this unlikely middle-class thing of coming here with him, meeting his “child” bit…)[.] He is such a childish torturer—that little side look of malice he gives you—and so spooky, more and more. I feel glad to be out of the torment and I am not at all frightened or upset about his visit and look upon it as a step along the way to the ending of my business with him as soon as possible. Harriet is all right, too, really marvelous, not expecting too much, saying quite sensibly they will get on better when she is older. I think maybe that is true and if Caroline is really going to marry Cal, as his idea goes, I think the sooner Harriet can add the Citkowitzes to her life the better. The only trouble is that I don’t have any real confidence in Caroline—that isn’t what one has “in” her—as a step-mother!

I am very well. Spoke to Philip R. on the phone and I found him almost unintelligible. He is unbelievably eccentric, isn’t he? I told him Commentary was running in the next issue an entire article against the N. Y. Review,³⁴⁹ the culmination of their obsessions, or Podhoretz’s obsession. Philip grunted: Norman is Captain Ahab and Bob is Moby Dick!

Not a very interesting letter, but I just wanted to write to explain about the ad. I have done a bit of work for the Goodell campaign and Republicans are astonishing, just the office staff, the regular people. They are strangely ignorant, unimaginative, square. I must say I found it interesting, but—as we New Lefters say—“frustrating.”

All my love to you both

Lizzie

100. Robert Lowell to Mary McCarthy

[33 Pont Street, London SW 1]
November 2, 1970

Dearest Mary—

I’ve put off writing because I draw back from seeing what I am going to say in type\d/. It’s a kind of decision which I haven’t yet talked about to anyone. It looks as \I think/ I’ll end up by returning to Lizzie and Harriet. I’ve done great harm to everyone and bemused myself. To go on seriously toward marriage with Caroline against the grain, the circumstances, our characters etc. \is more/ than can be got away with. We don’t think we can, and are in accord. Still—

I won’t go on much. I do find though that even for such a careless person as me one is cemented in habits beyond belief. I had to come to England and live with practically a new wife \to learn/ my whole being is repetition of things once done. I don’t mean quite that. With time we build up an organism, an artifact, that is mysteriously complex, quite beyond our intelligence. You most³⁵⁰ have found that. Still, it seems nothing merely to know what one can do. As if that were ever enough, as if one ever did.

Well, I’ll see you on the sixth. Maybe we’ll see you. I love the idea of your naturalistic check-up in Rome. I’ve been writing furiously too. It’s too far from publication for me to be \pierced/ with acute discontent, and good enough to engage \grip/ the day. Dying to see you, and love to Jim and you. I’ve talked on the phone to Lizzie and I suppose \know/ we can make up. I feel a little someone \like a Russian/ who has lost his own fortune and his uncle’s at Baden Baden. Other OK, pardon all this.

Love,

Cal

P.S. Excuse the pencilling.

101. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

[Postcard: Joshua Reynolds—The Strawberry Girl, Wallace Collection]

[London]
[n.d. November? 1970]

Darling Harriet—

Here is a small girl who might take the little dog³⁵¹ you sent me out for walks. I’ll do that with you or something as delightful. Sometimes life isn’t life without you and Mother. I’ll be back about two weeks before Christmas with an offensive British accent.

Love

Dad

102. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick

33 Pont St., London SW 1
November 7, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

I wonder if we couldn’t make it up? It’s hard to put this in a letter, and no doubt will be far harder in fact. I have thought this might be for about ten days now, and people have noticed, and thought I was more like my once self, what I must have been.

A cold way of putting it is that long burned-in and accepted habits never leave us. One can make out with the family he has long endured, which has a long time suffered him and his ways. Maybe you could take me back, though I have done great harm. Maybe now that the possibility is really possible, you will quite rightly draw back, happily rid of your weary burden.

I don’t know. I’ll be back around the fourteenth of December, so soon we can almost reach out hand[s] and touch it. If we should come together, there’s one hard problem, among many I would like you to consider. I don’t think I can very honorably drop my Essex appointment which lasts into March—more self-inflicted messiness and alteration than I can face in myself. That would mean I would have to return etc. Things have reached a kind of tolerable balance for me here, that will continue, I think, but not conceivably forever.

My book is out and has had gratifying, and more than that, reviews from Alvarez and Connolly in the Sunday papers, not like Benito.³⁵²

Dying to see you and Harriet,

Love,

Cal

103. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop

33 Pont Street [London]
November 7, 1970

Dearest Elizabeth:

You are cheerfully grumpy about Harvard. You should see Essex. Queues for the only cafeterias, often no sitting space, long tan, narrow, uniform corridors, only manageable by eccentric numbers that go up to six figures—my room 603,113. It was built in the late thirties, the time of some sensational failure in architectural design, all asbestos-white without a red brick in sight.³⁵³ My students, minute classes, small to the point of insult, are polite and inaudible. They would make yours seem like roughs from Seattle. Still, I like it at [that], wake up to thank myself for being in England.

I know Atlas³⁵⁴ and Rizzi;³⁵⁵ Miss Rizzi wrote quite sensitive, low-keyed poems for me, then met Robert Bly and wrote a flaming, eloquent lead-article in the Crimson, rather decently denouncing \me/. I lacked a feeling for large spaces—like your eastern seaboard students.³⁵⁶ I think your students will brighten up, at least you will find two or three people you like to talk to—maybe out of class, I found my best were older and not even enrolled often.

I think Lizzie and I may come back together. It’s impossible to give up my child and some \one/ I’ve loved most of my life, in my life that gave me most of habits and limits. Now that I am far away and detached here, they all come back, a creature of habit, as if my body were only spine and ribwork. Still, I can’t think of America without shuddering. Have I grown allergic?

My book is just out with good reviews from Alvarez and Connolly, particularly from Alvarez. Too good maybe. I’ll see you I hope when I come back in December, around the 14th through Christmas, a trial trip.

All my love,

Cal

104. Mary McCarthy to Robert Lowell

141 rue de Rennes, Paris
November 8, 1970

Dearest Cal:

I can’t write much. I’m just back from New York. Heinrich is dead.³⁵⁷ He died a week ago yesterday—suddenly, of a heart attack; Hannah will be writing you. Having gone over, when we got the news, to be with her, I still feel somewhat dazed and numb. The funeral was Wednesday, very affecting and in a not altogether somber way; his students and colleagues talked about him so as to almost make you believe in immortality.

I don’t know what to say about your news. I saw Lizzie briefly while I was at Hannah’s. She seemed agitated by letters and calls she’d had from you. I don’t think she understood what they portended but feared more grief and torment at a time when she was finally in balance. Whether she will want you to come back now, I don’t know. She had so firmly closed her mind against entertaining this possibility as a hope that it may not be easy for her to open it again. The coincidence of Women’s Liberation with what she’s been through, over Caroline, has played, I’d guess, quite a role. But probably you sense more of her feelings than I can.

As for Caroline, I’d already come to the conclusion that it couldn’t work between you. I mean marriage. In fact, looking back, I’m astounded that I thought it could. Too much romantic faith in the power of the will for transcendence. Maybe what I think of as love can only transcend death and is not much good about life.

Anyway, however it comes out, I wish you will.³⁵⁸ And I count on seeing you the weekend that ends the 6th.

Much love,

Mary

P.S. I can’t make up my mind whether to tell Lizzie that I’ve heard from you or not. Jim too finds this a hard question to decide. Perhaps for the moment I won’t write her anything, though I feel she ought to know soon what is in your mind.

105. Robert Lowell to Mary McCarthy

[33 Pont Street, London]
November 15, 1970

Dearest Mary:

Heinrich’s death seemed on the horizon so long that one forgot. At least I did being out of touch. Poor Hannah! I suppose crossing bridges beforehand may make the final thing a little less jolting, less jolting anyway than the suicide of our friend \though mostly his wife Adrienne/, Conrad. Friends dying comes now like increasing raindrops.

Thanks for your remarkably clear letter. You rather sharpen the horns of my dilemma. Everyone has vacillated, though I the worst.³⁵⁹ I hope you will write Lizzie. There’s nothing you can tell her that she doesn’t already know from me, but your sympathies and views would help. I think the jag that hit Caroline and me was whether to get married, she not wanting to and I not wanting to go on in perpetuum unmarried. Or maybe this was just the surface manifestation of some deeper unsurmountable gap. Pray God it all washes out.

My number here is 235-2270. Please let me know your plans. I hope we can do more or less as we intended to on your ghost visit last month. My love to you, hope your book is off. I almost have a new one, a small scale sequel to Notebook. It will probably be ages before it goes off to the publisher.

Love again to you both,

Cal

P.S. I have [been] puzzling \on/ your mysterious sentence about Lizzie and Woman’s Lib. What’s that? Do you mean it’s in the air or something closer?

106. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont St.
November 16, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

I didn’t write sooner because I didn’t want to go \fly/ off into crossed letters.³⁶⁰ I will do all I can to make things work; I think \we/ can,—we have after all for more years than I have the wits to count, tho all remains remembered. Perhaps everyone involved will get in the end what was most deeply and secretly desired. I’m no better than I was, unless it’s better to discover the hardness of old habits. I won’t put you through more.

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.

I still don’t get what happened with Alf and Adrienne, there must be some crude fact. You don’t go off and leave all your children with someone going mad. Poor Adrienne!

I have a vague idea I knew what about “groupies,” it’s like some Greek or archaic English word, I once knew and forgot.³⁶¹ I guess the new idiom is here to stay; it keeps seeping in in tiny trickles when I try to write. You and Harriet seem to have been having a week of pre-Thanksgivings. Give my derelict love to Sarah and Cot.³⁶²

My classes are small and quiet, the Poetry Writing rather retarded after Harvard, a good one in Shakespeare, where I have twice spent two hours reading one act of Antony and Cleopatra aloud. The college looks like Brandeis, if Brandeis had been built on a fiftieth the money, and with no Jews. The people are young and lively, most of my colleagues being just beyond graduate student age.

I think about you and Harriet. I am jealous. Let me into your circle again, but not to see the groupies.

Love,

Cal

107. Robert Lowell to Blair Clark

[33 Pont Street, London SW1]
November 21 [1970]

Dear Blair—

It must be like migraine getting stuck with all my affairs, from all sides. Here’s what’s going on in me. I am haunted by my family, and the letters I get. There seems to be such delicate misery. Lizzie’s letters veer from frantic affection to frantic abuse. Then somehow she and Harriet are fused as one in her mind. It’s not possible, but I get the impression they really are in Lizzie’s mind. It’s crazy, yet I can’t from a distance do anything about it, perhaps less on the spot.

The thing is I am really much \perfectly/ happiery with Caroline. At first I was frightened of not being married—old feelings of being outlawed. But I see it doesn’t matter much. We can go on permanently as we are. We are permanent no matter what our status. Caroline has always been afraid of legal marriage. Not being married, somehow loosens the bond, man and woman’s mutual, self-killing desire to master the other. Then we might get married anyway when we knew we didn’t have to. I don’t yet know what will happen, but I increasingly fear the blood I’ll have to pay for what I have done, for being me. Anyway, I’ll be coming to you around the 14th alone.

I want to hear all about you, and your heart if you wish. Long deep talks.³⁶³

Love,

Cal

108. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont St.
November 28, 1970

Dearest Lizzie:

I’m back from reading at Cambridge, and tomorrow it’s a reading at the Mermaid, scene of Benito’s triumph.³⁶⁴ All went well enough at Cambridge and I was told I had a record small audience. Somehow it leaves one with a feeling of tarnish and fraudulence. Two lunches a breakfast and a dinner at various faculty tables and high tables—too much like St. Mark’s, too much like college. Still good conversation, warmth of a kind. Essex on the other hand is in great disgrace, a protest with bonfires, then the next \day/ by accident, a long-prepared Daily Telegram³⁶⁵ attack on our leniency. The protest was what is talked of a[s] pitifully non-political: pot. Not much to arouse the demons, or amuse them.

I may have been short about Jack’s well-meant cable³⁶⁶—I was worried, unknown troubles for you in New York, and then I hate having friends tilt my hand. I have enough tangles now to occupy me for years, on top of my pills, a delicate matter to keep one from scumming up another. Nothing new though. Only new thing is I notice spreads in my teeth, rather like Mary’s before her patching.

Not much that might interest you. Most [of] the people I see wouldn’t even be names to you, my colleagues. Once [a] week I have lunch with Sidney, and come away with lines for poems. Poems at a great rate, even scribbling lines down during a dinner. I suppose I may have a book, a little notebook, ready by next fall. Then a new tune, a new meter, a new me. The last never, I guess[.] The surroundings here are not disappointing, I mean for the eye, but perhaps mostly humanly, the famous more mumbled and muffled pace.³⁶⁷ Well, it will be very soon. All my love to you and Harriet.

Love,

Cal

109. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont St., London, SW 1
November 30, [1970]

Dearest Lizzie:

A line before I set off for Essex. The Mermaid reading was as good as I could make it and went over. Somehow, it’s a show I can stage too easily. But why shouldn’t it give the satisfaction of a well-played tennis game? I don’t [know] what that would be, just a very occasional ace serve. I guess, reading gives more satisfaction than tennis. But who could face it daily, or weekly. I’m through for this year.

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. If I’m not hung up in red tape. The Home Office still has my passport, and my bank account is an impenetrable mist. No, I’ll be there.

I thought you were better informed than I on my reviews, but later in the day, clippings came from Faber, the one new to me Elizabeth Jennings.³⁶⁸ She is a sad, touching person, rather like Claude-Edmonde in appearance and habits—but shy, poor and poetic.

I dread the Review circuit and the buzz of American politics. An American isn’t expected to \follow/ issues. He can miss the papers for days without being pulled up and informed. But even for Englishmen, all’s mumbled and distant. Can’t see us as Mary and Bowden,³⁶⁹ even with my lack of engagement.

Love to both dear ones,

Cal

110. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont St., London SW 1
December 3, 1970

Dearest Lizzie—

My pay seems to be mostly old-age deductions, something that demands more optimism in me than in the government. I think I had 333 pounds a month, that is 666 pounds in all with another 333 pounds at the end of December, or more likely early in January. From this so far 191 pounds has been deducted with half as much again when I next receive my monthly pay. The whole salary is spread out over 12 months. I feel the government owes me money. Readings bring amounts like sixty dollars or unexpectedly nothing. In addition the Home Office still has my passport, necessary for acquiring a work certificate. A Mrs. McGlashan at Essex is trying to retrieve it for me[.]

I went to a great Vanderbilt game with Ben³⁷⁰; Caroline’s³⁷¹ dachshund was lost; I think permanently, a tragedy Ben didn’t rise to, nor did Caroline rise to the dangers she had put Ben in by letting me drive him back to Clarksville. I remember Allen and Ben yelling when the girl band came on, “Get those women off the field.” O blessed old days before Woman’s Lib. I liked some of John’s poems in some British or Irish magazine; he had gotten rid of Henry, and good and tender things made up for show-off obscenities.³⁷² Can’t believe it’s all bad; it isn’t. Folly to answer, even in a single sentence. I got a rather sour review from Denis Donoghue, who seems to think the book is about the breaking and final break up of our marriage.³⁷³ That’s not in the text. I wouldn’t trust Carruth too much, tho he has a gnarled integrity.³⁷⁴

I’ll be seeing people this weekend, Mary, Gaia,³⁷⁵ Francis Bacon and Sidney.

I’ll be with you both soon, if I can leave England.

Love to you both,

Cal

P.S. I was a little testy about politics last letter. I feel like someone naked under his raincoat—though I guess that’s always a girl³⁷⁶—coming back to be inspected.³⁷⁷ I think Bob Silvers and I have become too entangled to meet with shared joy.

111. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33 Pont Street, London
[n.d. December 1970]

Dearest Lizzie—

I’m just off to lunch with Sidney, but yes it’s a date for the Messiah on the 17th.³⁷⁸ Hope you feel much better by the time this reaches you. Here in London, we’ve reached weather like one of the worst Maine summers. Less disturbing maybe because it’s the usual thing. You a see³⁷⁹ a streak of indirect sunlight some day at three and everyone hymns the weather.

Love to my two messianics,³⁸⁰

Cal

112. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop

London
[December 1970]

Dearest Elizabeth—

I fear I may owe you an apology for versing one of your letters into my poems on you in Notebook.³⁸¹ When Lamb blew up at Coleridge for calling him “Frolicsome Lamb,” Coleridge said it was necessary for the balance of his composition. I won’t say that, but what could be as real as your own words, and then there’s only a picture that does you honor. Still, too intimate maybe, and if so I humbly ask pardon.

The other night, part of a weekend alone, I was in a Knightsbridge Portuguese restaurant Offado, more people worked on the tables, half in the kitchen etc. than there were guests; even the guitarist and singer helped, then sang things like Girls from Mallorca, while I ate and consumed a carafe of rosé, their table wine.³⁸² After a while I expected you to come in the door any moment, even began nervously looking at my watch. So much I wanted to see you.

So much I do. 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.

I must see you. I can easily come to Cambridge, or it could be New York if you’d like—you must be ripe to leave Cambridge by now, but I’d rather like to see it \Harvard/. Give my love to Bill. All my love to you,

Cal

113. Caroline Blackwood to Robert Lowell

[80 Redcliffe Square, London]
[December 14?, 1970]

Darling Cal—I’ve just got back to Redcliffe. Eliza³⁸³ is sobbing about her dead mother and her hoover is wailing against the wall. Genia³⁸⁴ is crying about you. Ivana is rather corruptly copying. London seems to be Chinese grey—oyster grey—every appalling shade of pitch, pitch grey. I miss you so much already and your plane probably hasn’t even taken off yet. If I have had drunken hysterical seizures it’s because I love you so much that I’m afraid sometimes it makes me rather deranged.

I have no news. Nothing has happened since I saw you go with those two bearded and yammering Rabbis.

“\Departure for Departure/ At the Air-Terminal” [*Flight to New York* 2. \3 4./], from “The Dolphin” manuscript, here, composed and revised between late 1970 and January 1972.

I will get your books sent out and the other little chores etc and fix the downstairs flat. I feel very unsafe. I don’t know if you will really ever come back—if I will ever see you again—if you should come back. I just know that I have been happier with you than I have ever been—ever. So even if the whole thing ends up for me with sadness, I will always think that it was worth it.³⁸⁵

Love

114. Robert Lowell to CAROLINE CITKOWITZ

[Telegram]

BLAIR CLARK’S
229 EAST 48 STREET
NEW YORK NY DE2170
[December 21, 1970]

CAROLINE CITKOWITZ 80 REDCLIFFE SQUARE LONDON SW1

THANK[S] FOR LETTER I’M NOT A CRIPPLE ALL MY LOVE

CAL

115. Robert Lowell to CAROLINE CITKOWITZ

[Telegram]

BLAIR CLARK
229
EAST 48 ST

NEW YORK NY 10017
DE 24 70
[December 24, 1970]

CAROLINE CITKOWITZ KIRRIEMUIR ANGUS SCOTLAND ALL WELL MERRY CHRISTMAS LONG FOR YOU

CAL

116. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
[n.d. December 1970]

Dearest: I came up to get some envelopes. I had the most pleasant evening, with several exciting things coming up about work. I took one of the Libriums³⁸⁶ beloved Dr. B.³⁸⁷ gave me and it helped enormously—took it about five, just before I saw you. So I think my trouble is “chemical,” if not in origin in devastating effect. I don’t want you to worry about me—if such a thing is possible!?—because I do feel on the mend, very much so. And suddenly having this good evening, free of care and memory, was almost unbelievable. See you tomorrow.

1. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

2. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

3. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

4. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

5. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

6. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell26

[Postcard: Frans Hals—Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse of Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem]

7. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell29

[Postcard: Frans Hals—detail of Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse of Haarlem,30 Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem]

8. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

9. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

10. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

11. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell49

12. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

13. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Postcard: Caravaggio—David with Goliath’s Head, Borghese Gallery, Rome]

14. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell66

15. Harriet Lowell to Robert Lowell81

16. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

17. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

18. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

19. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

20. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

21. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mr. Robert Lowell108

[Postcard: Bernini—The Rape of Proserpina, Borghese Gallery, Rome]

22. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

23. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

24. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mr. Robert Lowell118

[Postcard: Raffaello—Portrait of a Young Woman with the Unicorn, Borghese Gallery, Rome]

25. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell119

26. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell124

27. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

28. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

29. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

30. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

31. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

32. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

33. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

34. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

35. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Telegram]

36. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell157

37. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

38. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell161

[Card: Wm. J. Bennett—South Street from Maiden Lane, New York, ca. 1828, Aquatint]162

39. Frank Bidart to Robert Lowell

40. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

41. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

42. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Telegram]

43. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

44. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

45. Robert Giroux to Charles Monteith

[Telegram]

46. Charles Monteith to Robert Giroux

[Telegram]

47. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

48. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

49. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

50. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

51. Robert Giroux to Mr. Charles Monteith

52. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

53. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Telegram]

54. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

55. Charles Monteith to Robert Giroux, Esq.

56. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

57. Robert Giroux to Mr. Charles Monteith

58. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

59. Caroline Blackwood to Robert Lowell

60. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

61. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

62. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

63. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell256

64. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

65. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy262

66. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy268

67. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell273

68. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell279

69. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell280

6. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell²⁶

7. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell²⁹

[Postcard: Frans Hals—detail of Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse of Haarlem,³⁰ Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem]

11. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell⁴⁹

14. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell⁶⁶

15. Harriet Lowell to Robert Lowell⁸¹

21. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mr. Robert Lowell¹⁰⁸

24. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mr. Robert Lowell¹¹⁸

25. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell¹¹⁹

26. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell¹²⁴

36. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell¹⁵⁷

38. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell¹⁶¹

[Card: Wm. J. Bennett—South Street from Maiden Lane, New York, ca. 1828, Aquatint]¹⁶²

63. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell²⁵⁶

65. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy²⁶²

66. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy²⁶⁸

67. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell²⁷³

68. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell²⁷⁹

69. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell²⁸⁰

70. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell²⁸¹

71. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell²⁸⁴

91. Elizabeth Hardwick and Harriet Lowell to Mr. Robert Lowell³³⁶

[Postcard: Vittore Carpaccio—St. Augustine in His Study (detail)³³⁷—Venice]