PART II

1971–1972

 

 

 

117. Robert Lowell to CAROLINE CITKOWITZ

[Telegram]

BLAIR CLARK|229 EAST 48TH STREET NYC
JAN 2 1200PM ’71

CAROLINE CITKOWITZ 80 REDCLIFFE SQUARE LONDON SW1

PANAM FLIGHT 2 730AM TUESDAY ALL LOVE

CAL

118. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

33 Pont St., London
January 6 1970 [1971]

Dearest Harriet:

I can’t really recommend my trip back to you. Forty-five minutes waiting for Jack Thompson to come to lunch; a line of cars that moved like snails for almost fifteen miles to the airport; a long line to weigh my baggage; a slow line to pay fifty-six dollars excess weight; a line to get into the lounge to wait for the plane; a wait in the lounge to be searched for dope and bombs; a long wait for the plane to take off; people lined seated up for seven hours eight abreast; a two mile trip by the airplane on the ground across the airport at a slow walking speed; a walk of a mile inside the airport; a mile trip on a very slow escalator; a wait while three hundred bags came out of the plane before mine. Then no more waiting, but snow was on the ground and I could see my breath like smoke from a dragon streaming before my face \in my cold apartment./ Now I am at rest and very tired, too tired to write you a longer letter. Your redwood bear,¹ Arms of the Law,² sits in my bookcase and reminds me of you. I loved talking to you over Christmas. All my love, take care of mother. Don’t boss her.

love,

Dad

119. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[33 Pont St., London SW 1]
January 7, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

In my thoughts I planned a much more ample personal and bread and butter letter, but still feel the jar, loss of sleep etc. of the flight. If I’d taken a later or earlier plane I would probably have been diverted to Birmingham.

I thought of a lot of kind charming things you did[.] Above all you stand out at the airport with your curled hair and beautiful smile that survived the long dull wait. Then the blue wash cloths, the buttermilk, the calm Christmas day, and the wonderful wit and good spirits of Harriet, surely rather owing to you—I mean your old undeviating loyalty.

I haven’t done much, rested, read Hamlet for class,³ Henry Adams on the English,⁴ a mountain of mail asking \me/ to read various places without fee. I worry about your blood-pressure. Mine went back to 180, due to the journey no doubt. I’m sure both our pressures will go down. Would that all pressures might. And thankyou \for breasting/ the problems and trials of my visit, so often turning trial into joy.

Love to you both,

Cal

120. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell⁵

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Jan. 8, 1971

Dear Cal: My financial situation is desperate and is going to be for the rest of my life. But I will manage that; the taxes for the coming year obsess me. I have paid $15,000 since we parted in April of last year. Now I obviously can’t have $21,000 and pay $15,000. You \(one)/ are forced to pay quarterly.… All of this leads me to say that the \tax/ check of $5,290 which Mr. Brooks mentioned must not be turned into pounds, but put into our account here, which I pay the tax with, or else they can hold it at the State Street Trust for you. Then, you must ask F. and Straus to hold, since they can’t withhold and send to the government, in a tax account for you 25 % \of your earnings/ and then at the end of the year they can put it on our final \tax/ accounting. I will send you a receipt for the $5,290 check.

I won’t go on about this, since the two letters⁶ are all anyone can take in I guess … I haven’t done anything about the papers. Exhaustion, trying to get my own affairs in shape. But I will. I am looking for a spring teaching job because I just haven’t enough money to pay the rent which, just went up over 100 per month … bringing the apartment maintenance to $500 per month.

Harriet is fine. I am fine. We miss you and hope, dearest, all is well and happy with you. I thought when I finally knew you would never be with us that I would have that empty space gradually to fill up with something new, but it is filled up with nothing but money worries. Still they are different, better, a challenge rather [than] a grief. I hate to send off a \business/ letter but it is just to say that you should keep the tax on your earnings in dollars and to try to suggest how to do it.

Love from here, as always,

Elizabeth

121. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell⁷

33 Pont St., [London]
January 9, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

I trust you have Mr. Brooks’s statement. The Agency Fund gives us both a little over 13,000 when some $5000 is deducted for capital gains. I’ve suggested that this sum be sent to you to pay with all the other taxes. I hadn’t thought we had gained so much, but I guess we at one time reduced the fund to about $15000. The government scoops us like a steamshovel.⁸

Looking for an address this morning, I came on Lowell, Harriet, Summer Workshop, West Cornwall.⁹ How swiftly gone; the tears of time!¹⁰ Called the Nolans and was greeted by Cynthia, a mirthless laugh.¹¹ I’ve recovered from flight, but have spent three days reading Hamlet and am rusty for next week’s teaching.

Love and miss talking with you,

Cal

122. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Wednesday, Feb. 10, 1971

Dear Cal: The Listener check, changed into dollars (100.00) came here. I felt if I sent it to you—it was drawn on an American bank—and it had to be sent back to the BBC to be redigested and finally months from now passed through the computer intestines.… well, it would never show up again. I had it changed into pounds and also added another pounds worth of 100, making it 200 dollars in pounds. I am sure you have no money and am sure you should have. I haven’t received the money from the Agency Account yet, and of course you haven’t.… But, not more book-keeping.

Love,

Lizzie

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Enclosed 81 pounds—$200.00

123. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Feb. 19, 1971

Mary, dearest: I wrote you a letter a few days ago which was returned for insufficient postage—and just as well, because now I have had the joy of a letter from you today. I was writing to say that the Literary Guild publicity magazine—a little hard-sell advertising for members—asked me to do a “personality” piece on you—400–600 words. I asked for a copy of [the] novel, which they said was not available yet, but in any case not necessary—they want just a “friendly” picture. We’ll both be deeply embarrassed I guess but I have agreed, even though I am bewildered by the sample of past work they sent me: Budd Shulberg on Irving Stone. I was writing to say how delighted I am that Birds has been chosen and to send my love and congratulations that the book is soon to come out, and my hope, nay, belief, it will be read, loved, admired and bought and that everything good will come to you … As for the horned owl present,¹² I stared off into the distance at your mention of it in your letter. Yes, it came, Cal was here on the red sofa, we looked at it and I said I remembered some version from the Southern Review¹³ and then—blankness. I looked and looked yesterday and did not find it until this morning, still in a box, a sort of Christmas box of things not put away, a leather belt of Harriet’s, a drawing pad, a sheep bell from Greece and underneath, lo, the lovely owl cover, the paper around it, the beautiful print. I have just been on my couch, reading, and it is a beautiful moment in \our vanished/ life, bringing back so much that seems gone forever—when people took houses in Rocky Port, the feel of things. When the mother leaves the house, there is more than simply taking up her work again; you feel everyone has left \forever/ that kind of house, and a possibility of a year in New England—and neither the house nor New England really quite exists any more. Very moving. The “psychology” is very true, especially at the end between the mother and the boy.

I hope you are coming soon for your book. Do let me know. If you would like to stay in Cal’s studio—just vacated by Florence Malraux and Alain Resnais—it would be splendid. It is very comfortable, you can fix your own breakfast, there is a phone; you would miss telephone messages but nothing else. For awhile it was more than a little triste because dear old Cal seemed to be in the very woodwork writing poems, the air still alive with his cigarettes—but I have changed it about a bit. I haven’t given it up because of some intricate problems, or advantages I hope, coming about when our house goes cooperative, as we plan in the next six months … But that is too tangled to go into.…

My Harriet has been accepted for a first-class Spanish language camp in Mexico for July and August. Quite a bit better than that Arthur Kober camp¹⁴ I found for her last year. At the moment she and I plan to go to Castine around June 12; then I’ll come to N.Y. to see her off early in July and then back. I think of your chimneys standing nobly in the snowy, wintery sky, and the staircase and the wall paper will soon be longing for you and Jim, and so will I. I rather like being alone up in Castine, although I expect to have more visitors this year.

I’m doing pretty well, feeling a great deal better in every way. The article Mary T. mentioned¹⁵ was a sort of “popular culture” reflection and I don’t know that it is anything special. I’m writing on Ibsen now. One piece will be in the next Review and it will be followed by a second.¹⁶ I have my Barnard job for the second term and I find it terribly pleasant and easy, and while it doesn’t pay much small sums are the only way to big, or bigger, sums. Next year I have been asked to give the Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton, just three, and that made me happy; and I may have another teaching job, since of course the Princeton is just an \a temporary/ addition, of a day a week. I don’t mind teaching at the most three days, preferably two, and I feel one can do just as much work if the soul is determined. All in all, this “getting on my feet,” has been the “cure.”

I have talked a number of times on the telephone to Cal, but I don’t have much of a picture of him or anything that is really “news.” To me he seems neither sick nor well and I feel a great sadness about him, but what can one do? I will sometime tell you about the three-week Christmas visit. Nothing dramatic, but more \often/ foolish. I was shocked when I saw him because the person I had been missing so painfully was the rare, glorious person of at least a decade ago and when I saw him at the airport, disheveled, that darting wild look in his eye, heard the eternal jokes, it was just so pitiful. I’m afraid I feel Caroline is a sort of wicked goblin and my poor old dear giant has been turned cross-eyed and is running backward. Cal told me she slept most of the day and fell into long periods of apathy and depression.… As for Sonia, I haven’t a clue as she would say.¹⁷ I don’t think Cal and I mentioned her; I haven’t spoken to her ever about Caroline since I didn’t talk to her in England and had only one conversation up in Maine about the doctor. I think Caroline may have wanted to drop her or something and she thinks we have done her in. On the other hand, Cal has become a rather active liar! I know when he is lying but not everyone does. He will, if questioned, pass it off as a joke—or as his “joking”—and so there is no telling what he may have said …

No matter, dears, just love to both of you and longing to see you both.

Lizzie

124. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[33 Pont Street, London SW 1]
[March 8, 1971]

Dearest Lizzie—

I think our letters on the agency tax-money must have crossed.¹⁸ I wrote as soon as the States Street¹⁹ letter arrived.

Through long hours of revising, a leisurely bath and a quick dressing, I have been thinking about our long past. What shall I say? That I miss your old guiding and even chiding hand. Not having you is like learning to walk. I suppose though one thing is worse than stumbling and vacillating, is to depend on someone who does these things. I do think achingly and bewilderingly about you and Harriet.

Tell Harriet that last Tuesday²⁰ my taxi was twenty minutes late. I missed my train, got another taxi at Essex that took someone in the opposite direction, reached my class half an hour late, just as it had been dismissed. However, I made it up in the afternoon. Even muddlers survive, though shaggily.²¹

Do miss you both. All my love,

Cal

125. Elizabeth Hardwick to Caroline Blackwood

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
March 12, 1971

Dear Caroline: I have told Harriet that you are having a baby by her father. It seems to me that she will have to meet her new family, to be with you and Cal and your children before the baby comes in order to make real everything that seems unimaginable to her—England, a new family for her father. She knows that she will have very little of him from now on and that he belongs to you and all of your children, since his physical presence there and absence here is the most real thing.²² I am bringing Harriet to England on June 14th, to stay maybe a week or ten days, or at least enough days to visit you and Cal. I cannot have her continue to be entirely cut off from her father and to receive a letter when the baby comes, because of course the new child and all of the new situation are a part of her life. She does not want to go alone and as I imagine it, she and I will stay in a hotel in London and I will see my friends while she is seeing you and Cal and your family in the evenings, as it suits you; and perhaps spending a weekend in the country with all of you if you invite her. But she would be with me in London. Also, I hope she will be able to spend the week between Christmas and New Years visiting her father and you and your new child, this time without me since she would have made some acquaintance with it all previously.

As I said, she does not imagine very much of Cal but I feel that I must make definite arrangements for at least a few days with him each year and I hope you won’t mind these brief and rare occasions. The June visit seems the only sensible time. She will be out of school then and waiting to go to Mexico, where she is going to spend the summer in a Spanish language camp. The only other time would be a week in late August, but she will just have come home from a very special summer, will be getting ready for school early in September; the pregnancy will [be] very advanced by then and it might be a little tiring for all of you. So, I will take for granted that June is agreeable. If necessary only a very few and brief meetings are required. We will just see how it works when she gets there, but I feel I must arrange the meeting. I frankly don’t know what else to do and this seemed the only way to manage.

Yours truly,

Elizabeth

“Green Sore” [The Burden 6. \5./], from “The Dolphin” manuscript, here, composed and revised between 1971 and January 1972.²³

126. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell²⁴

80 Redcliffe Square, London SW 1[0]
March 14, 1971

Dearest Harriet—

It’s hell trying to talk easily on the transAtlantic phone, and we’re not the talkative types at best. Or maybe we are.

I don’t know whether Mother has told you what I am going to write. I want anyway to tell you myself and try and keep you from feeling lonely and hurt. Caroline and I are going to have a baby. It is already visible and will be born according to the doctor (God willing) on the ninth of October. There can’t ever be a second you in my heart, not even a second little girl, to say nothing of a boy.

You are always with me, you and mother. I want you to visit us whenever you wish and can. We’re not ogres or bears. I think you may find that you will love Caroline. She has never been harsh to her own girls. You may even take delight in having a step brother or sister; one so much younger she is almost of another generation. Talking British and having my face or something of me, of you.

I’ll see you around the sixth of May, when I’ll be returning from giving a talk against technocracy in Purdue Indiana. I know nothing about technocracy, but suspect it’s bad, and would not give the talk but for wanting to come to you both.

Dear Heart, give all my love to mother and to your self—alas, we can never give all. I try.

Love,

Dad

127. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

80 Redcliffe Square, London SW 10
March 20, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

Overjoyed that you intend to bring Harriet here in early June. I think coming alone would be hard and perhaps impossible for her. She will be long looked forward-to and embraced with warmth. So very much by me. There are many things, good weather, sights, countryside, my play etc. to make her stay happy. And I hope yours.

I am flying to Norway in a few hours. Meticulous letter from Per,²⁵ all numbers: every plane schedule down to the minute, how many cronin I’ll be paid 20 minutes after arrival, how many after two days, how many students in each meeting, the seven poems of mine that have been read in Bergen, and a somewhat different seven in Oslo. Norway as I approach embarkation hour seems like Newfoundland, but I liked Newfoundland, they had never seen an American poet and came with tastes uncloyed.

I think it bold and generous of you to undertake the trip. I have a feeling that you will actually enjoy yourself. So will Harriet after we both get over the first stiff, shy minutes. I mean we all will. It’s good, I think, that I will see you on the fifth or sixth of May for a few days. I think we have all gotten through the narrows of the worst. I think this, and am not saying it in a mood of callous and shallow euphoria.

Love,

Cal

128. Adrienne Rich to Robert Lowell

333 CPW,²⁶ NYC 10025, NY, USA
New York, 21 March 1971

Cal dear: I had thought of writing you for your birthday, but here it is almost three weeks later. In the meantime I’ve been to Ohio and seen Kenyon College at last and imagined, or tried to imagine, you and Peter²⁷ and Randall frisking like young lambs on those green and unpolluted hills.²⁸ They have girls there now, very attractive and intelligent-looking ones, who would have done you & Peter & Randall a lot of good.

I think of you often, with a sense of loss. Even when we didn’t see much of each other, you were part of New York for me, as you were part of Boston back in those distant days when you marveled at being forty and I was swamped with infants and wearing Lizzie’s cast-off maternity clothes and you and Elizabeth were the strongest link I had with the reality of poetry, of my world, as against the domesticities and professorialities of Cambridge. I often think of you, and her, as having flung me a lifeline in those days. Well, they were simpler times; now it feels that we all have to be lifelines to each other, if we’re to be anything.

I see a lot of Elizabeth, and love and admire her very much. Women are more interesting now than they’ve ever been, and even women like E. who were always interesting have become more subtle, more searching. So many of us through one thing or another—choice, divorce, suicide or death, chance of some kind—are living more autonomous lives, and it’s like a second youth, only with far more sense of direction, of one’s real needs and longings, as opposed to the heady confusion of first youth.—I have cycles of feeling swamped, still, with grief over Alf—not just over the manner of his death but the manner of his life recently—and with a kind of anger at him for walking out on a conversation which had grown difficult.²⁹ But on the other hand I’m enjoying my life; there’s a kind of zest in it, even the difficulties, with concerns about money, the children, etc. My book will be out in April and I’ll send you a copy. I’m writing again, after a nearly six-months’ total silence. No, longer.

Your piece on Stanley³⁰ was out today and by all accounts has made him very happy. I thought it was lovely on Stanley but strange on poetry. I don’t know what you really mean by obscure poetry;³¹ you talk as if obscurity were a trick one could pick up and lay down, a matter of choice. I think it goes to the core of where one is, what one is able to say and what one is only able to dream. Some poems are closer to letters and others to dreams. A letter is intended for someone else primarily, a dream is first of all for the dreamer, but both kinds of poem have their place, and I love best the mixture of the two.

I know from Elizabeth that you are going to be a father again, and I wonder why—having children must be a profound thing if it’s anything, and right now in history it is a strange thing to do, even though very common. Men & women are having such a hard time with the intense fragility of their own relationship that adding a complication seems foolhardy, except perhaps for the very young, who don’t know what it is like.³²

Ted Hughes is here, being hailed as a kind of second Shakespeare. I haven’t read CROW,³³ as Ah don’t know. I’m interested in a poetry of the future, that will be ahead of where my sensibility can take me unaided. This poetry would have to concern itself with the breakdown of language and the breakdown of sex, with politics in its most extreme sense, now & then I read a poem that seems to be doing it, but not many. Of course, I’m trying to write a few.

I realize that I don’t have an address for you, so I’ll send this to Essex. I’d love to hear from you. I think of you with a warring affection—but the affection is true.

Adrienne.

129. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell³⁴

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
March 21, 1971

Dear Cal: Just a note to say Harriet and I are going off at noon on Saturday the 27th and will not be back until April 7th. The Adventure Inn, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina … a place Walker Percy told me about, when I happened to meet him. We fly to Savannah and during our time will go to Charlestown, S.C. I am very tired. I have been doing all this writing day and night to make a living and I begin to feel like Dwight McDonald, except that he doesn’t do it anymore and has sort of disappeared into various colleges. I made money last week for the trip, but our finances here are acute—so, man, be prepared in May for some shocks from the tax man and from the lawyer I am seeing on Wednesday, who goes by the name of Mrs. Gentleman! Tuition, rent, clothes, dentist, everything has gone up.

Your review of Stanley appeared today and I will say as someone said about Christianity: “Important, if true.”³⁵.… Very Calish, nice, delicious writing, but I have read Stanley’s book twice and thought it very, very thin and disappointing. Your part of the review is lovely, very good and special.

Hope you sent Harriet some cards from Norway \Per-Laand!/ She will send you some poor nigger scenes …³⁶ She is planning to take movies, with the famous camera. Harriet is in great form, looks wonderful, and is very happy about Mexico. I’m very happy with her; she is very gay, alive and busy … I hope you get the NY Review. I think my piece on Rosmersholm is the best of the three.³⁷ Had a letter from Esther Brooks and get news of you from various people who have seen you, also from newspapers who list you along with movie stars as having abandoned the ship here. Well, perhaps you are all wise. I don’t know. It still seems to me just as it always was and the passing scene, as you know to your sorrow, means a lot to me.… Adrienne’s book is out, very good I think, especially “Shooting Script.”³⁸ I had dinner the other night with, of all people, Richard Howard. He gave a brilliant lecture at Barnard that I attended, and I don’t think it was my lack of knowledge that made it seem better than it might have been had it been about English matters. (French criticism was the subject.)

I am playing the Dvořák Cello Concerto with Rostropovich³⁹ and finding, such is the tyranny of taste, that I love for the moment rather second string romantic things. It’s like the revival of old forties show tunes, I guess.

I hope Prometheus is the great, splendid success it deserves to be.⁴⁰ It’s a wonderful, wonderful play—with some of your greatest speeches in it. I understand Irene and Kenneth⁴¹ are both in [the] cast and so I can’t imagine you won’t be filled with glory. I hope so. This is our wish of hope, since we don’t know exactly when it is coming on … Also Harriet has a March 1st birthday present for you, held back by the strike and saved for your visit here.

Dearest, do take care. Nothing is worth destroying yourself.⁴² You have worked hard, led a good life and you have the right to nothing I’m afraid. But it is always nice when there is not justice but good luck and you have happiness and what you want. I don’t entirely wish you well, far from it, of course.⁴³ But I still feel less angry with you than with those who have used you for their own childish, destructive purposes. Write to Harriet. That is very easy, just nothing, and God will curse you if you do wrong when it is easy to do right. \He may just curse you anyway if He feels like it!/

Love, \darling,/

Elizabeth

---

Heredity! Harriet’s story for school is a mad thing about a fish named Gabino (name of Spanish teacher) who likes to live in the sink. “Aside from an occasional egg on the head and bacon behind my fin and corn-pudding on my tail, life was very calm and nice.” Who does that remind you of?

130. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
March 22, 1971

Dear Cal: Don’t you hate it when letters cross? I had written you last night because Harriet and I had been talking about you and I just wanted you to know we were thinking of you. It was H. who read out that fantastic bit about the sink-fish and said, “Isn’t it just like Daddy?” Now today your sweet letter to her arrived. \It took a week!/ By now you know that I had told her even before we spoke on the phone over a week ago. And I had made, with her, the plans I wrote Caroline about. We don’t talk about the baby, but we do say, “I’ll need the raincoat for England,” and that sort of thing. I will be on a program about reviewing at the American Embassy. It doesn’t pay my way, but it will give me something of an honorarium and a few days[’] room and board. We won’t stay long, but I think it must be.

What a year this has been. We will be taking off now as we took off with you last year for Italy, but this time alone and to S. Carolina. Harriet seems quite well and I think she will be all right if she doesn’t feel that you don’t care about her. I have tried to take the most optimistic attitude possible with her and while it is awful not to have a father, one who is around a little at least, I think we will all manage. When I told her you would be coming to Harvard a year and a half from now, she said, “Oh, good, then I’ll get to see him!”

Much love, dearest. We will work things out. Did you get the money from Blair, the bank, the NYTimes? May God keep you, now and for a long time. Forever is only for the world or for Him, isn’t it.

Lizzie

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\We look forward to May 6th. Dine here with us that night. How eager we are to see the dearest soul in the world./

131. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10
March 29, [1971]

Dearest Lizzie***

Letters are very slow, but this and an earlier one⁴⁴ (if you haven’t got it) will be waiting when you return. I almost wept over yours. Ah we must keep it so. Our time on this earth is so poignantly short. Two additional lives would be too little to cleanse my character, to go the rounds of amends.

In Norway, someone came up to me and said that your Hedda piece had solved the problem they had been debating for a hundred years. It was at a party, and I never could discover what problem. Hedda’s soul nature, good and evil? I guess there was more.

Reed Whittemore’s letter seemed strained, pushed by something unexpressed. A nasty instance, or whatever he said my review was. I answered cordially, I think.⁴⁵ Miss van Duyn writes witty and intelligent \reviews/, I guess her verse is witty and intelligent. She must be better than Corso, but I haven’t read him for years.⁴⁶

A haunting letter from Adrienne. Woman seems to have ousted the blacks. I thought of a made-up folk saying, A man whose profession is finding needles in haystacks will soon see them everywhere except in pin-cushions. I don’t know who this applies to.

Can I say that Caroline’s children are already planning things for Harriet? Ones a little below her age perhaps like the Hyde Park maze. She is warmly awaited.

Oh dear, Scandinavia. Per is improved by [h]is homeground, warmth under the ice. Norway is a country country, a bit of Oregon, Colorado and Vermont. Bergen partly made of wood and cliff-hung is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen. Oslo is one of ours, Boston in the setting of Portland. Then Copenhagen, and Amsterdam, but I was tired and knew no one, and had recommendations to people withdrawn by flu. My hotel was like a Volkswagen, efficient, uncomfortable, cheap and uncomfortable\small/. My shower was a hole in the ceiling separated by a movable board from the basin but not from the toilet. At breakfast, a cheerful middleclass man in spectacles chanted Danish hymns.

I think you are heroic to make the trip to London. It’s you who is the dearest soul that ever breathed. Or is it Harriet. Again my eyes water. All must be for the best.

Love,

Cal

132. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Adrienne Conrad⁴⁷

80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10
March 29, 1971

Dearest Adrienne:

How lovely to hear from you at the beginning of my 54th year of grace and pardon. I haven’t read my Stanley piece in print and forget exactly what I wrote about obscurity. I think I was putting in [a] plug for the difficult poetry I grew wise and confused on in the thirties. I don’t think obscurity can be put on like an overcoat, any more than the style of the Rape of the Lock⁴⁸ can be. Still there’s always an effort of will \whose other name is choice/. I’m uncertain what you mean by dream, but I am sure you don’t mean sleep walking. The poetry of the future? I’m not sure I have read any, then again I think I’ve read a lot—Rimbaud, Othello, wherever poetry is straining to its uttermost. Most art, even the best hardens to a convention, yet the very best can’t be imitated by the future, no second Moby Dick,⁴⁹ and hundreds more.

Women? Randall and Peter and I found them even in our Kenyon exile, we were all more or less engaged. I know too much about women to be entangled into an argument. We are having a child because we stumbled into it and then found we dearly wanted one, and had a moral horror of abortion—I mean for ourselves, not for others. We feel a calm and awe. I don’t think you know what you are talking about. Why shouldn’t our having a child be profound? The times are difficult, almost impossible today, yesterday, always. If one lived in East Pakistan, Biaffra either[,] Vietnam. Character and private conditions may make having children fearful, but I don’t \believe/ the times make it very hard\er/ for anyone we know.

Oh well, dearest Adrienne, it’s lovely you are writing. I hope to be briefly in New York around the first of May. I’ll spare you a lecture on repetition and change based on a trip to Norway and reading the Burnt Njal Saga. What could be less like our lives than theirs of honor and hacking, yet at every point a responsive cord is struck. In sad moments it seems that man and woman advance from one black bog to another. A \To/ look at the worst, as Hardy says.⁵⁰ And the joy is incredible too. Please forgive my chaffing, my heart is with you.

Love,

Cal

133. Harriet Lowell to Mr. Robert Lowell

[Postcard: Land’s End. Looking out from Hilton Head Island onto the Intercoastal Waterway.]

[Hilton Head, S.C., but postmarked Savannah, GA]
[March 29, 1971]

Dear Daddy,

Hi. I am having a great time. We are very sunburnt. The water is warm. I hope you are having a good time. There is not enough room on this card to say anything interesting.

Love, Harriet

134. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10
April 2, 1971

Dearest Harriet:

I have gone and come back from Norway, very “scenic” like Maine or Aspen, \snow-topped/ mountains near large cities, pretty wooden houses on cliffs, an amber-colored drink that tastes of caraway seeds and is called the “water of life.” In Oslo, the capital, I went to a famous park where a man named Vigeland got a contract in the ’twenties to put up naked statues, then no one could legally stop him and he put up four hundred before he died. Everyone in Norway speaks English as well as we do, but they aren’t as bright, at least some of the people teaching American literature weren’t.

I started a story: “Aside from an occasional egg on the head and bacon behind my fins and cornpudding on my tail, life was very calm and nice. It rapidly grew much less nice, when a small chocolate-brown cat without foreclaws, but with terrible hindclaws and the bark of a police man began to haunt my sink, sniffing for fishblood. “You pig,” I screamed, flipping my tail, and hitting the beast on the head with a wet lump of cornpudding. “Your round,” replied Charles Sumner Lowell in a surly voice, “but wait till Old Missus has to wash dishes, then you’ll be left high and dry.” “I hope you croak on catfood,” said the sinkfish. “Why don’t you just stop breathing,” said Sumner. (You finish[.])

I’ll be in New York on the first or second of May, and will fly on to Indiana, then spend a few days on my way back.

Love,

Daddy \(what a pretty signature)/

135. Robert Lowell to Robert Silvers, New York Review of Books

[Telegram]

LONDON
[received April 2, 1971, 2:45 PM]

ROBERT SILVERS

NEWYORK REVIEW

250 WEST57THSTREET

NEWYORK

I CANT TAG THIS TO A REVIEW COMMA BUT IT SEEMS MEANT FOR THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS PERIOD

POISENED BY MY FRESH IMPRESSIONS COMMA I FUMBLE FOR MY FIRST WORDS—NO ONE HAS A GOOD CASE AGAINST LIEUTENANT CALLEY⁵¹ PERIOD WHY SHOULD THE BAIT BE EATEN WHEN THE SHARKS SWIM FREE QUESTION MARK⁵² OUR PUBLIC UNDER THE HEAD OF STATE HAVE EXPRESSED SYMPATHY FOR CALLEY COMMA MORE THAN HUMANIZED HIM COMMA MORE THAN CONDONED HIS ATROCITIES—A SMALL STUMBLE COMMA PERHAPS FATAL COMMA [ON] OUR HURRIED ROAD FROM HIROSHIMA TO NOW PERIOD WE ACT IN DAYLIGHT SEMICOLON NO GROPING CIVILIAN CAN CLAIM TO SEE NOTHING PERIOD WEVE NO NEED TO WORRY ABOUT RETRIBUTION COMMA IT IS NEVER AN EYE FOR AN EYE COMMA ETC SEMICOLON IT NORMALLY FALLS ON SOMEONE ELSE PERIOD WE PLANT THESE TREES FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN SEMICOLON WE DARE NOT HYPOCRITICALLY OSTRICIZE PRESIDENT NIXON COMMA OUR OWN HUCKLEBERRY FINN WHO HAD TO SHOOT EVERYONE ELSE ON THE RAFT⁵³

ROBERT LOWELL

136. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 9, 1971

Cal, dearest: I am not bringing Harriet to England. It more and more doesn’t seem the right thing to do to her. You are our only real concern in this and I am looking forward to your visit to us.

S. Carolina was a disaster. Rootless, village-less, condominium (whatever that is) country-club development on a lovely old island that was given to the Negroes after the Civil War—forty acres and a mule.⁵⁴ The wind blew, many retired couples, many hot biscuits. Went to Savannah and Charleston for quick visits, each a long drive and the drives, flat, empty and not even a cabin with its wisp of smoke along the road.

There is a lot happening here, but all too complicated to go into. H. and I went to S. Carolina on the plane with Isaiah B. and Aline, who were enroute to Columbia Dickey-land.⁵⁵ Had lunch with Stephen Spender yesterday. Bob S. and I went to Stravinsky funeral,⁵⁶ but didn’t actually get into the chapel, all the seats having been taken.

Did I tell you Flavio committed suicide.⁵⁷ Poor Elizabeth[.] She and Ted Hughes hear the tolling of the bell over and over.⁵⁸

I must get to my work. Harriet is fine, but she doesn’t like to talk about what is happening to you, even though she does talk about you, as you were, with much pleasure and pride.

It is nice of you to come over to see us, no matter for how brief a time. Until then I am thinking about you with love and a good deal of worry. I have just written something about myself that says, “All I know I have learned from books and worry.”⁵⁹ So, just think of my “worry” as the pursuit of knowledge.

Again, dearest love, \to you always/

Lizzie

137. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell⁶⁰

80 Redcliffe Sq., London Sw. 10
April 9, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

You must be just returned from your southern trip, tanned and weary. These trips rather get one down, I’m still aching back into form from mild Norway. Tomorrow we go to the Hebrides. I think I may steal out of going to Purdue, since I’ll be seeing you and Harriet about a month later here. I really wish to see you both in New York, in \expectation/, but the trips are hard, require weeks to sink back to one’s true self. So, I think not, but will wait ten days or so to make sure. Why take a lot of money just to break even talking about something I’m incompetent on?

Don’t you think everything is moral chaos now? Liked and immensely admired your Ibsen, maybe rawly near home. Or is it? So many phrases come back to me from letters in other \foreign/ contexts, yet seem to stick \glue/ to Ibsen.⁶¹ I think you should be vain of having put so much of yourself into the classic plots; I’m envious. Pardon this letter, I’m coming out of mild flu and irritatedly intuitive\, or stupid./

Love to you and Harriet,

Cal

138. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[33 Pont Street, London SW 1]
April 13, 1971

Dearest Lizzie—

Our letters seem doomed to cross. I woke up this morning silently saying Flavio, and for the first time in the twenty-four hours since I’d read your letter—realized how deeply terrifying his death must be for Elizabeth. Where is she? I’ve sent a cable to [her] Brazil address, saying “Dearest Elizabeth, can I help?” I do hope she is in this country. How almost like something in Hardy would it have been if the little group in Rio could have looked eight years ahead.⁶² Even Keith⁶³ has had vicissitudes.

Think carefully about not bringing Harriet to London. Are you coming yourself? Of course it is all delicate and uncertain, and the success of her trip would have to depend on the moods of so many persons, so many swayed persons. Maybe you have been getting the wrong advice, from yourself among others. Anyway, it’s [a] great blow to me. I suppose I’ll make the early May flight, though the flying is like six hours of giving blood. \For you and Harriet too!/ And isn’t really a serious and honorable assignment.

You seem to have found a curious new stylistic trick, the phrase, uncertain between two meanings, id est, [“]Harriet’s not interested in what has happened to you.”⁶⁴ Happened has two meanings, but I don’t suppose you knew that you couldn’t have both. Poor Carolina South! It is nature wearing the mask of city slum. Sorry you didn’t have a better trip. Love to you both. I’ll be seeing you.

Love,

Cal

139. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 19, 1971

Dearest Cal: I despair of letters. Apparently mine do not say what I mean or feel and I’m sure I read yours wrongly also. No matter. If you say I wrote “Harriet isn’t interested in what is happening to you,” I suppose I did, but it is a fantastic untruth, misprint, something. I do know that sometime not so long ago I said you were the main concern, not London, the scene or anything else. I want more than my life to do what is best for everyone. Harriet is absolutely wonderful, beautiful, gay, doing well in every way. I have a horror of upsetting this before she goes off to Mexico, alone, brave, all that. Children her age, Cal, just don’t sit around talking about things about their parents that upset them. Adrienne says her children never mention Alf. But I do talk to Harriet about you, gaily, friendly, never denying that I miss you, but no longer bitter. I have been absolutely candid about everything, clear, sure, and she knows you are not coming home, everything. But after some longer thought I do feel that a short trip to England, back to the same for months, years, whatever, is rather bad just now. No, I will not be coming. I got the invitation after I had decided to bring Harriet—rather a strange coincidence. But, another thing, I couldn’t possibly pay for our trip, couldn’t begin to. The income tax is a nightmare; tomorrow 1969 will be audited and they always charge.… I feel the trip is much too expensive right now.

I very much agree about the exhaustion of your coming here, the general uselessness of the astronaut conference. It seems for such a short time, so dislocating, tiring. Do what you like and we will certainly understand. Harriet is fine, busy. All is well here. So it is up to you, but please believe that I see every reason for you not to come and I am being absolutely honest, honestly.

I guess we will go to Washington this weekend.⁶⁵ It is a dedication and like dedications, repetitious, gratuitous often, not specially interesting or fresh—merely necessary.

I hope there is nothing askew in this letter!⁶⁶ May God keep you[.]

E.

“‘I despair of letters…’” [The Burden 6], from “The Dolphin” manuscript, here, composed and revised between 1971 and January 1972.

140. Robert Lowell to Stanley Kunitz

[London]
April 25, 1971

Dearest Stanley—

I wrote the review knowing that many of the poems were written when death was near enough to you to put out your hand and touch it, and that you might be in that position when you read it. How lovely to know you feel tough again, back to your lifelong state.⁶⁷ Once or twice, I felt I was likely to die. Can’t say I enjoyed the realization much, yet what a relief to have been there. Have we though? Someone said death isn’t an event in life, it isn’t lived.⁶⁸ Thank God. You must be sick of people bothering you about my review. I wanted to put you dramatically, and think (without exactly admitting it to myself) \I/ was angling for a good place in the Review.

Several of my books, especially Notebook, I assumed might be my last. Now with this one (No doubt it will be) I don’t. It’s about done, many taken out, many put in, total a little under 120, title Dolphin (a very different title than Crow⁶⁹—which by the way I don’t like at all, tho I like him personally better than any other poet here)[.] I’m playing \with/ the idea of bringing out the book in a limited edition, in a sort of Cummington Press run by Ted Hughes’ sister,⁷⁰ about 500 copies, printed any way I want, expensive. That might be the most tactful thing I could do for Elizabeth short of burning the Ms. Then in a year or so I’d bring out commercial editions. I’d hate to leave the book in type if I were run over or something. Lawsuits between Lizzie and Caroline etc. Lizzie is the heroine, the eel I try to ensnare and release from the eelnet,⁷¹ but she will feel bruised by the intimacy. She should win all hearts but what is that when you are left, and left again in print?

Everyone in America seems to think this is too dire a time to breed. I had an impertinent lecture from Adrienne, but for us it’s a calming joy. We already have three rather lovely little girls, so the coming of another child is not alarming—tho always there is a frightening mystery and uncertainty. Caroline is comparatively physical, healthy, we breathe now as the cattle breathe. Caroline sleeping and eating double, looking as though she’d deliver tomorrow, tho it’s not till October 9[.] We mustn’t talk as if we were living in East Pakistan.

We live in the same house now, next week Caroline will take my name—this isn’t marriage yet, I don’t want to jostle Lizzie at all. Will the hailstones of the gods fall on me,⁷² if I say I’ve never been so happy, nor knew I could be?

Don’t know when I’ll reach America. Maybe in September. It seemed too jolting to come this spring. The plane trips in themselves are murder,—and so much else added! Oh my Dear, who to talk to? I love it here, but the English are generically horrible, just like New York Jews and New Englanders. Alas, I’ve been all three.⁷³ But the countryside, and the eccentric \changeful/ slowed pace of life here are lovely, not that feeling one sometimes gets in New York of screaming, metallic, poisoned ice.

all my love to you and Elise.

Cal

---

PS. We can’t make it to the Cape, either. It seems best to spend a quiet summer in Kent, where patterns can be repeated in a house Caroline has lived \in/, broken in. The guy in the Tribune was as you say.⁷⁴ Two errors. I really said that Shakespeare was such a success that he couldn’t [be] regarded as a model or typical of other writers.⁷⁵ Also at the end, I meant to say that my living in England was not \a/ symbolic gesture.⁷⁶

141. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 26, 1971

Dearest Mary: I keep expecting copies of your novel, but haven’t received any yet. Bob of course had one but it went off to Pritchett immediately.⁷⁷ Anyway I hope it is coming soon. I had put off writing you in the thought that the book was just around the corner. The Review people tell me that [they] have a splendidly interesting piece from you, the introduction to Neither Christ nor Marxism.⁷⁸ I haven’t seen that either since I haven’t been on the premises for a few weeks.

Harriet, Barbara, Francine Gray, Rose Styron and a few others of us went to the demo. The church service, with the veterans, the night before was very nice, the march itself tiring but, well, at least there. There was no way to look upon it except as a personal dedication—repetitive, not especially interesting, merely necessary. It was a nice day, the numbers were pleasing. Then late Sunday night some idiots, Rennie Davis group, did the one thing that would drive the harassed American wild, held up traffic for four hours on the Pennsylvania turnpike. Counter-productive indeed. The march had been a wild success and I don’t think this last foolishness, over a day later, made any sense. Not that one couldn’t think of times when such actions would be proper, but not just now. The veterans were the main thing. And one young man, John Kerry, sane, intelligent, attractive really emerged with all his wounds and decorations from the crowd, suddenly providing that mysterious thing: leadership. He spoke before Congress and Senate, brought tears to old elected eyes. Otherwise, the slaughter goes on. It is, isn’t it, just like The Iliad, as S. Weil sees it.⁷⁹ The fighting just can’t stop.

Long to see you. I have the feeling that from abroad poor old Babylon seems truly lost. And the Nixon people of course surpass anything we could have imagined. But still, the country is perhaps turning around in slow, hesitant steps. I feel hopeless about government but not about the people. Even the prospects for summer of 1972, for the Democrats, seem backward, but I guess we will need just to continue. It is interesting here, in any case, and doesn’t feel the way I imagine people living abroad think it feels. I ponder the whirling changes that seem to take place here over night, those quick, unaccountable shifts of attitude and feeling. Perhaps being attuned to such things is in itself a distorting talent, but it does seem to me that every six months is different from the six before. Some people think the students are apathetic from despair, but I believe, or try to believe, that they are radical, genuinely troubled but no longer foolishly destructive. There seem to be less fewer drug scenes, among the sensible at least. The March was much more calm, gloriously less stoned. The Panthers, the guns, the bravado seem wiped out, by the trials, the hopelessness of the whole strange gesture. It is horrible in its end, just as the beginning was horrible—like a peculiar dream in some awful African-Congo village.

Maine—when will you be coming? I guess Harriet and I will go up on June 14th, then I will fly back down for the weekend of the 4th of July to put her on her way to Mexico. She is very well, dieting with great courage and tenacity, has had a good year in school, and announced to me last night with a frown that we really had to start building a Socialist Party in this country. And I felt how sad it was that the Socialist Party didn’t exist, after its very brief—not so brief—blossoming around World War I. It is a strange lack; I guess the dear old New Deal really is the answer … About Non-Socialist Maine. It is about as far from what I need in my life now as anything could be. We have no place for vacations, holidays, Harriet doesn’t like it at this point. If it weren’t for you I think I would pull the cover over my head, after calling out an order for sale. But I can’t face it now. Instead, writing Link Sawyer to repay the inevitable damage of the foul winter.

I spoke to Cal this morning. He seemed quite together and so I hope he is well. Time is gradually liberating me from the pains of the past, by giving me new ones I guess. The only thing I worry about now is Harriet, but she seems so extraordinarily well that I accept that with trembling gratitude. I have \been/ candid with her, have taken a positive attitude about the baby and Cal’s future and for the rest we talk about him only in joking and friendly memories of his odd ways. Children her age don’t \seem to/ like to talk about their parents’ troubles—all that will come soon enough. So for the moment all is very well. I want her to get through Mexico happily without too much concentration on what has happened this year. We have a good time together, she has friends. I think everything is going to be perfectly all right for her.

Can’t wait to get Birds and to see, whole and plain, you and Jim. I look forward to the summer because of you two enormously—and of course I like Castine itself, and wish it were nearer. Much, much love

Lizzie

142. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

80 Redcliffe Sq., [London SW 1]
May 4, 1971

Dear Little Harriet—

Little, for so I think of you through all the years since the day when I carried you a limp almost boneless lump from the maternity hospital to Aunt Sarah’s car and the long times when I could carry you a squat-nosed snubbles refusing to walk home from our walks in Central Park. Now you are not small at all, though I think I can call you young. It breaks my heart that you are so far away so hard to get to. Sometimes when I am thinking a little absentmindedly and sadly, it seems almost as though I were a clay statue and part of my side had dropped at my feet \like a lump/. My dearest joy is picturing how you might someday, sooner or later, spend a long time with us. You wouldn’t be sorry. You could remind me that I am a great American moral leader, and not a reactionary sybarite.

How was the Washington Demo? Will the War ever end? It’s now dragging toward the end of its second ten years. How will things be when you enter college, if you so choose? Quieter? Unhappier? Or maybe better? I can’t see ahead.

Happier things. I’ve been to see two performing dolphins, Baby and Brandy, in a tank on Oxford St. They can jump twenty feet, bat a ball back to their trainer, pretend to cry for a fish. Smart as Sumner, bigger-brained than man and much more peaceful and humorous. It’s like summer outside today. Glorious, though for some time I’ve been troubled with a low virus. Little shivers. I am taking antibiotics, and it will go. It’s mainly why I decided not to fly to America. We have many pets. A hideous large white rabbit, Snowdrop, a beautiful small black rabbit, Flopsy, a tiny gerbil named Gertrude Buckman, two kittens. So, a zoo. Wish I had you with me to talk to and laugh with. Give Nicole my love, and most of all Mother.

Love,

Dad

143. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

[80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10]
May 5, 1971

Dearest Harriet:

I have been thinking all day about writing you since getting your wonderful postcard. I could perhaps zip over to New York before you fly to Mexico, but it is difficult. My play is coming out on the twenty-fourth of June, and Jonathan Miller who is directing it has come down with chickenpox (!) and won’t \be/ able to go to the first four or five rehearsals. I can hardly skip the opening night. The last days in June mightn’t be a very good time \for me/ to drop on your excited household, marshalled for your trip. This isn’t the best time to leave Caroline who is five months pregnant but looks nine. Still? Another time is September, when you would have more leisure, but this is even closer to the birth of our child.

Could you come here at any time, now or September before school? We would so love having you, and could promise an unrushed varied stay for you—unplagued with churches and heavy sights. The children aged ten, seven and five await your coming like Elvis Presley. The oldest, Natalya, particularly, who treats her youngest sister with the same stern smiles that you gave Angela, the marvelous fat little Spanish girl who stayed with us in Castine. How I would love to see you!

Our two cats, Tabby and Tiger, sisters, have nervous troubles when either is in the room with the other, but each sends her love to Charles, so sure she would be his favorite.

(If you came here in June, I am sure you’d enjoy seeing my Prometheus, a play in which a man is tied to a rock \and talks/ for two hours.)

You know I am a very unresponsive, humorless, conventional man, seldom giving voice to my emotions, so you can guess what it costs me to tell you I more or less wept with joy reading your card. It was at the end of a long day’s journey home from Italy—\to/ your letter the one letter in a pile of complimentary books, bills, requests to do things I didn’t want to do—to Tabby and Tiger too stupid even \to/ talk like Sumner at his most unwilling. Dear Heart, my Love,

Dad

---

P.S. This is the longest letter I’ve written on this kind of paper.⁸⁰

144. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10]
May 6, [1971]

Dearest Lizzie:

Radiant report from Stephen on you and Harriet. Or rather he found you both radiant. Nothing could be more consoling to me. The air is full of returning Englishmen and American visitors. Yesterday I heard Poirier in a labored perverse lecture blast Saul Bellow at the embassy. I don’t think going to the embassy would have made your trip, a small familiar audience of the local critics. I’m doing something in Rome at the end of the month, some sort of Fulbright symposium. I’ll speak on American poetry of the sixties. I won’t try to cover it and will just read people I like, such as Wallace Stevens, Randall etc. It pays planefare and lodging, nothing—but the trip will be fun and I’ll take my long planned trip with Rolando⁸¹ to Ravenna and Urbino.

I had a letter from Bob Giroux about my royalties etc. I think I will for the moment put them in a savings account but in my name alone. If you are desperate I can give you something. We aren’t flush and the child brings on all kinds of expenses. By the way, is there some way of getting the trust fund to pay for the hospital. I seem to still owe Faber over a thousand pounds, which means I won’t get a cent of royalties from them during my lifetime. The Blue Cross payed, I think, less than a third. And then what can we do about the manuscript? I delay because I hate the idea of people pawing through it. The other day I got a letter from a guy at Harvard writing a doctors on Ted Roethke. He enclosed three of my letters to Ted that I forgot having written⁸²—also requested that I return them in the next mail.

Not much news. I’m glad to be done with teaching for a spell. Also am throwing off a low virus. Also have a young man who trout fishes eagerly and badly.⁸³

One grows lazy with deep spring. I read the Scarlet Letter trying to anticipate your comment, but failed[.]⁸⁴ Loved the book as much as ever. He invented New England.

Hope you and Harriet weren’t on the second and rougher demo.⁸⁵ I am going to my first woman’s Lib on Sunday. Kate Millett and Sonia co-chairmen!⁸⁶

Love,

Cal

145. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[80 Redcliffe Square, London SW 10]
[May 12, 1971]

Dearest Lizzie—

Such good reports of you and Harriet. Both Jonathan and Stephen used the word radiant of Harriet, and reported you were in fine confident spirits, electric. I’m sorry to have sent you that fussy letter about money. I really can’t make out on my Essex salary. At our age it’s hard to live on nothing, taxis etc. I think the only article of clothing I’ve bought in a year is an overcoat. If you need money at any time from the Farrar royalties I’ll give it [to] you. I am keeping the fourteen thousand as a reserve. I admit this sounds like an anticlimax to my money groans, but I think you can understand the mental relief just having it gives me.

Rather homesick for America now in the heavy summer weather, Americans arriving like summer birds, returning Englishmen. I had some sort of virus without fever that made my head and bones ache. The antibiotic cure of course brought a slight nausea and depression. Otherwise all is well. I’ll go to Rome at the end of May. Then my play comes out on the 24th of June. I’ve been through it three times, brisking it up, making Zeus a little more like God or nature and less like a gestapo boss. Elizabeth Bishop is coming here I think in the second week of June. I don’t know how she has taken the boy’s suicide and dread knowing. I think I’ll spend the summer revising my imitations.⁸⁷ I made two or three much better I thought by being more quiet and accurate. I am tired by so much original writing, almost four years without stop.

I think of you constantly and long in a way for America, but not just a hurried glimpse. Maybe next Christmas would be best. Or I could dash over in September. I am beginning to get habituated to being here, really quite a job but it brings peace. I think a writer never for long feels he has done well. One of the most exciting things here has been Borges’ visit. I’ve had two nights more or less alone with him, talking about Tennyson, James and Kipling, and almost wept when he talked “without pity” to an audience about his blindness.⁸⁸

I started this letter meaning to talk only about missing you, but that though true would be boring. I guess all is well as far as mortality and one’s large failings allow. Jealous of you and everyone else seeing Harriet.

Love,

Cal

146. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

[Postcard of two dolphins]

[London]
[May 17, 1971]

Dearest Harriet—

Here are two friends, Baby and Brandy. They can jump 20 feet and laugh at things humans don’t even know are funny. I miss you too much!

Love,

Dad

147. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
May 19, 1971

Dearest Cal: Hot summer, lovely day. I’m back from a long period with the tax man, eating a pineapple yogurt (Mary McC. could hardly forgive me) and still trembling because these tax things make me very, very nervous. Now: here is the situation. Please write immediately to Bob Giroux asking them to send me $3,750.00

With that you will be paid up on Federal, State and New York City taxes for 1971. You can then ask them to send you the rest of what they are holding and that will give you some thousands. My heart bleeds that you haven’t any clothes, and I worry foolishly. Then you should have another 7,000 \from F, S & G,/ or so in the fall, around Sept. which is all yours and all the money from Janet Roberts’ office⁸⁹ is yours and all the tax will have been paid. (Did I tell you before that the money from the State Street Trust, the $5400 was to pay only the capital gains on what we got from it, not the other taxes.) Our taxes are less this year because I overpaid last year, driving myself almost out of my mind. I hope you understand, dear. I mean what I am saying about the taxes. You are only paying on American money that is yours for your private, single use. I know it is hard to realize, but at the tax man’s this morning it turned out that with your English earnings you have exactly the same amount of money—in total—that I have. Our American bracket is 50% and so I pay just as much tax here as you pay to Essex. I just want you to know that and I am paying all the rent, all the tuition, clothes, doctors, vacations, everything, for your child. I don’t want any more money, but I feel you don’t realize this. Actually you will now be much better off than you have been … I am glad for you, really. The reason you are paying \tax/ now is that we have to pay in advance, quarterly, or be penalized. I thought it best just to get the whole thing now instead of nagging you for it again in Sept. and next Jan.… This is for a 1971 joint return, which is cheaper I assure you by far, and seems the best thing at the moment. Please send the letter to Bob immediately. I have to finish off everything soon.

Dear Mary has been getting bad reviews. I read the book with enough pleasure. There is nothing cheap or commercial or strained about it and if it isn’t a “good novel” that doesn’t seem altogether unusual since few write good novels. She is coming to Maine in July and Hannah will be there in August. I will be there off and on.

I am so relieved to have the tax thing clear in my mind. I have written something for Vogue saying everything I know I have learned from books and from worry.⁹⁰ But what a price the latter is. I would like to sail the Greek islands today or do something daring. Oh, to be young and free as we once were. But still I like being what I am, at least today, unwillingly liberated, going to a concert this evening, thinking of you, still with pain, but believing it will grow less some day. Goodbye, my dear one.

Lizzie

---

\Did Janet Roberts reach you?/

---

\If you sell your papers, get it all cleared up this year, but start payment in 72 because of Capital gains (agency account) this year already having sent us soaring. That is a suggestion. Nat Hoffman⁹¹ said he thought Véra Nabokov was the world’s greatest tax expert, but he saw that I was second only because of having far less money to deal with!/

148. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[80 Redcliffe Square, London SW 10]
May 20, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

Thanks for writing Harvard. I’ll wait till I hear from Stonybrook before deciding. The protection given such collections seems rather vague. A few weeks ago I got a letter from a young man writing a PHD on Roethke. He enclosed zerox’s⁹² of three of my letters to Ted, and asked me to mail them back to him at once, with an OK for quoting them. The letters mostly critical, had things about breakdowns.⁹³ I had so forgotten them, they seemed like someone else’s. I don’t want mine open during my lifetime.

Your letter to Harvard made me very sad,⁹⁴ more than your letters to me. An air of aristocratic poignance and distance. I can understand your not wanting your letters mingled with the pile, but if you’d like to, & take that part of the money, or more, do. I don’t think my early notebooks are more interesting. Please don’t wish to erase our long dear years from the blackboard.

I go to Italy Sunday for my Fulbright conference. It feels like our old “CIA” days.⁹⁵ Americans come. I had an evening with Hannah and another tonight at the Spenders. It will be pleasant for you to have her in Maine. Quite a different presence than Sonia.

Please tell me about Harriet, if you are in the mood. I am. Everyone says she is radiant, and that you are writing like Dreiser.

Love to you both,

Dad

149. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10]
May 22, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

I am falling in love with these one page stamped air mail letters.⁹⁶ Now that I’ve almost mastered the mechanics, they are so easy.

I’ve written Bob about the 3750 dollars. You describe my finances of course accurately, more than I could. Whenever you think I can afford it, have some of my money. I have a man here named Henshaw supposed to be even better than Vera Stravinsky. He manages William Burroughs, and can deduct money for shoes and penknives.

O to be young! I was reading a review by Pritchett of the Magny dinners.⁹⁷ The people were young when they began, and ten years later dead or very old. I’ve been seeing the old lately. Two delightful almost alone evenings with Borges. A long afternoon in the hospital with David Jones. Hannah has been here and seems on the verge of old and frail. Oh dear. Life is much too short.

I yearn for your letters, and hope you won’t give up the habit. I have always prayed I were two people (one soul) one here, one with you.

I rather dread Mary’s book. Hannah feels it’s a new sympathetic Mary. She is a lovely person, or a “corker” as David Jones said about Shakespeare. Some of the reviews of her Essays were venomous. I’ve only seen one of birds, in Newsweek, I think, not venomous, but disheartening.⁹⁸

Something that will half-amuse you—Allen wrote me volunteering as a godfather. I miss you always to joke with, reason with, unreason with. Do you think you could dictate a postcard to me from Harriet? I’ve a notice to wire her in my datebook.

Love,

Dad

---

You’re writing like the wind. Lovely. I’m written dry, after about four non-stop years. Or is it ten? Now nothing, except maybe translation.

150. Adrienne Rich to Robert Lowell

W. Barnet. Vt.
June 17 [1971]

Dear Cal, I feel we are losing touch with each other, which I don’t want. Perhaps part of the trouble is that the events of my own life in the past 4 or 5 years have made me very anti-romantic, and I feel a kind of romanticism in your recent decisions, a kind of sexual romanticism with which it is very hard for me to feel sympathy. I guess I could have written nothing or written only about “ideas” etc but I feel we would then be completely out of touch. Also my affection and admiration for Elizabeth make it difficult to be debonair about something which—however good for her it may ultimately be—has made her suffer.

Still, I really do care about you—we have had a long friendship with many problematical & mysterious aspects but one which I would not surrender easily to indifference or misunderstanding. There is a certain depth in simply having cared about someone’s existence for a number of years.

I’m in Vermont now, with the kids & 2 of their friends & a former Columbia student of mine who has become a kind of brother to us all. It’s very beautiful here, lush & green & still. It was painful coming back the 1st time but the pain has drained away & we are all terribly glad to have this house. Last winter, thinking I wouldn’t want to be here all summer, I rented it for July & August, now I am almost sorry. But we are going to the West Coast for July and part of August. I’ve rented an apt. in San Francisco for July & in August we’ll drive or bus down the coast to L.A. where I have old friends.

My life is coming back together again. In many ways I feel my marriage to Alf was still unfinished when he died & there \are/ all kinds of pain connected with that. But I like being a separate woman—though I wish it had come about differently. Alone, one allows oneself to see clearly many things one dared not look at when one was tied to another life. And it’s a different relationship, altogether, one has with the world. I don’t think I could ever live with a man, in the old way, again.

How are you? What are you doing? Whom do you see? Your Norwegian friend Per-?—wrote me he was coming to NY but I leave for California the same day.

I’ve been cleaning the house & swimming & lying in the sun and feel an almost sensual tiredness such as one doesn’t get in New York. Goodnight—and love—

Adrienne.

151. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

[80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10]
June 23, 1970 [1971]

Dearest Baby—

I am thinking of \a/ moment six or seven or eight years ago, when you were having some sort of difference with Mother, and she threatened to let you do the cooking, order the groceries and answer the school report, and you suddenly collapsed and said, “I’m just a bay-bee.” You are not; but I don’t know how to order suitable presents for you. If I send you jewelry, it arrives with import duties for you to pay, duties higher than what I originally paid here. Then there are clothes, but the mistakes I might make terrify me, something small enough for a doll, or big enough for an elephant, or worse something tacky. So I have cabled you twenty-five pounds, about sixty dollars. Not very much, but something to stretch your pocket-money, and to be spent on something delightful and colorful and absolutely useless.

I worry a little about Mexican diseases, though I’m sure the camp takes all precautions. When I was in Mexico, I was never sick to my stomach, and only suffered two or three rather purifying, stunning days of fever. I think about Mexico, the volcanoes, the old Aztec temples (better than European churches)[,] the flowers,⁹⁹ the awful, wonderful Spanish \language/ and Indian faces. You’ll lose Nicole’s Castilian accent. Will you see our friend, Ivan Illich? And will you give him my love?

Tomorrow, my play opens, the one you saw four years ago at Yale—Jonathan Miller directing as before, the same lead actor, all the same almost, only it’s being done in a former warehouse called the Mermaid theater on the muddy Thames River, and we are doing without scenery, except for a bucket and a rag. It’s about the half-god Prometheus chained to a rock. I saw a God-awful woman’s Lib avant garde, all woman cast play last month which you might have enjoyed more. Do you remember Mrs. George Orwell from three years ago in Castine? She presided, and couldn’t keep the women in the after-play discussion from talking all at once and shouting obscenities at each other.¹⁰⁰ Aren’t you glad you are a lady?

Dearest, bless you through the Mexican summer and always. I die to see you. I am writing Mother, but please give her my love personally.

Love,

Dad

152. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10]
June 23, 1970 [1971]

Dearest Lizzie:

I’ve just cabled Harriet a small sum of money, an unadventurous, impersonal gift, but I couldn’t face the disaster of import duties, delays, choosing the wrong thing. At least this can’t wholly miss fire.

Tomorrow Prometheus opens at the Mermaid, once more beautifully directed by Jonathan. The Wernicks (!) went last night to the preview and liked it. I’ve only seen the dress rehearsal, very finished, except Ocean improvised his lines—maybe he should, but we hope he won’t. Io very good, but less than Irene, and young.¹⁰¹ Hermes better.¹⁰² Gulls better. Kenneth the same. Reading the text and speeding it with little changes, I kept coming on suggestions of yours like a hailstorm of gifts.¹⁰³ This happened many times because I was following with the lines to see that the actors got my emendations. Feelings of tender and lonely gratitude to you. I can’t judge the play. How did I get into so much Greek? And I may finish up the Oresteia. Jonathan says Sir Bernard Miles who runs the Mermaid Theater is like old Cronus. Quite a change from Bob Brustein.

I think strangely about Harriet’s summer, and the sublime, probably arid, Cuernavaca scenery. Hope she gets none of the Mexican diseases. I imagine the camp is extremely careful. Will she be at sea and alone? I think she’ll love it. The new Harriet. Still this moment of departure must make her shiver a little.

I may go to Russia to see Madam Mandelstam who wrote me a touching letter in reply to mine on her book.¹⁰⁴ But O the filthy Russian regime and the maddening precautions one must take, such as not writing her before I arrive. I’ve conferred with such Russian authorities as Gaia, Weidenfeld and Mary. They all agree, but of course no one knows what the government intends to do with Madam M.

I keep looking for your Scarlet Letter. I like almost all of it, tho perhaps the non-fictional historical shadowing most. I see I learned all I know about the Puritans from Hawthorne. I’m reading Hogg’s Justified sinner,¹⁰⁵ a similar very Scotch book, only the women are in the background, Chillingworth is the hero-fiend. No use to say how much I think of you. My blood-pressure is down.

Love,

Cal

---

Could you mail me Ivan’s address and Harriet’s. I expect to give my stuff to Stonybrook by the end of the month[.] They offer more and show more interest, a man is coming here next week. Do you want to be secretary?¹⁰⁶

153. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Alfred Conrad¹⁰⁷

80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10
June 23, 1970 [1971]

Dearest Adrienne:

I wonder if this will reach you before you leave for California? I trust it will trail you there. O I think you might want to live somewhere else this summer, and then return to Vermont in the cool of another year.

I mustn’t advize¹⁰⁸ or judge you, but I feel an air of relief in your letter, as if you had emerged from a very long fever. As indeed you have. The loneliness and freedom of a new life. We are never born again I think, nor would want to be. Yet there are new starts. A marriage ends, and nothing stays unchanged. We face the freshness and fears and release of looking at what we really are. \(What is THAT?)/ And the awful pains of improvisation and invention.

It wouldn’t be correct for me to defend myself to you, but you \may/ be able to see that we are in somewhat the same position, by different paths. You know a lot about me but nothing about my situation. You hold half the broken eggshell and see things thru Lizzie, not exactly through Lizzie’s eyes. The only important thing wrong with marriage with Lizzie was our unending nervous strife, as tho a bear had married a greyhound.¹⁰⁹ We were always deeply together and constantly fascinated and happy together, and constantly sadly vexed. When you talk about romantic sexual love, Dear, you are surely talking through your hat. I doubt if you are through with it. And anyway, it is only very partially true of me. No one sees a woman steadily for over a year and remains only romantically in love. I think you are thinking of people like Sandra.¹¹⁰ This has nothing in common with that. It’s not for nothing that in the old days I always came back to Lizzie. Sometimes I think you\r sense of justice/ want\s/ Lizzie to be happier and me to be unhappier. But you can’t wish that—and I do think she will be happier, tho to say so sounds like cant. I think you will be happier, and now are. These are hard sayings and life is hard, but only fatal in the end.

I see the people you can imagine and a few you can’t. Our weekends are much like yours—sun, grass[,] children. Sometimes I go trout fishing and fail to land them. God go with you on your summer. I wish you weren’t so far.

Love,

Cal

154. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 28, 1971

Dear Cal: I am enclosing Harriet’s addresses, as you asked, and will sometime, when I get it, send Ivan’s. Yes, I do worry about dysentery, but the camp, the group (Experiment in International Living) are very experienced and first-class. Harriet has never seemed to waver in her wish to go. The idea gives her a feeling of self-esteem and adventure; I have heard nothing but good things from children who have done the thing. I pray it will be well and feel no worries beyond the same awful Mexican sicknesses you mention. She was pleased with your 60 dollars, very unexpected and nice. I hope she will write you this week, but don’t be disappointed if she doesn’t. She finds writing letters very difficult and puts them off and I have resigned \myself/ to not hearing from her in Mexico even though I have made both stern demands and tearful pleas. How I will miss her! She is an enchanting companion, witty, brave, very firm about how she feels, sulky in the morning, quiet in the afternoon, and talkative, gay, fascinating by dinner-time. At the moment she wants to go to law school! (But I wouldn’t mention it because it might embarrass her to have her parents talking about her. And no doubt that will change.[)] She isn’t a child at all any longer—going into high school, 9th grade, in September. I think her grades will be quite good for the past year—we don’t seem to get them until mid-summer … We’ve been up to Castine—Lisa Wager with us—and it was warm and beautiful. I will be on my way back up there soon after this reaches you. However, when Harriet comes back on August 24th I’ll meet her and we are going to have Francine Gray’s house in Conn. until Sept. 7th—with swimming pool, Olga, the lovely countryside. I rather think we won’t go to Castine next summer and I am planning to rent my house in advance … When we got back from Castine yesterday the usual “surf” of mail, a lot of it stuff for you—waves from every old shore still quietly lapping tiding in and out. The Newman Press (Catholic), Peace Groups, Common Cause (McCarthy)[,] Boston College (Father Sweeney), a strange, repentant, religious note from the guy who wrote that fatuous piece in Esquire …¹¹¹

I felt something on the day Prometheus opened, but ruthlessly kept down too much memory and nostalgia; it is \for me/ so pointless and hurting. I thought of a telegram which would have said: “Zeus is the best we have.” … Mary due any moment. We are all very much concerned about Dan Ellsberg, a strange, sweet young man (a former Hawk), married to (do you remember?) Patricia Marx who used to be John Simon’s girl friend—a “hawk” in the sense that Hemingway spoke of Zelda F. as a hawk.¹¹² Poor Dan gave himself up this morning, admitted that he revealed the Pentagon Papers.¹¹³ He is now arrested, but he had made the decision and now I believe acts on it with a whole heart and as much courage as [he] can muster. The awful thing is that these court cases go on and on, draining body and soul. The papers are fascinating, immoral, arrogant, treacherous, full of betrayals of trust. Power does corrupt absolutely, of course, and the false courtesy that allows men in power to accept the most outrageous situations without exploding. I think you were right to cut Billy Bundy at Yale¹¹⁴ … I am interested in your travels. Esther wrote me that you and Caroline had visited her; and now you are going to Russia. I was on the PEN Club translation prize committee and we gave it to M. Hayward for the Mandelstam book—really to her, or at least that was my idea. I can see that with all of this a short trip here in May, just before Italy, would have been too much. Fortunately I had not at all stressed the coming visit to Harriet because I thought you might change your mind and so she didn’t notice it. She would like you to come, but the circumstances of your break from us are so drastic \and/ complete it leaves one numb after a while. In any case, we are both very fit, very busy. I am totally absorbed by the life here, dismaying as it is,—America I mean … I haven’t written Hawthorne yet, but am saving it for the Princeton lectures which terrify me. I am writing about Sylvia Plath.¹¹⁵ What an awful girl! What rage and hatred—out of sheer hate so much of that intense burst of genius came. But investigation turns me against the Hughes family too. The Bell Jar is a best seller; they are dribbling out her work, cleaning up. She would have slit Ted’s throat instead of her own! What a horrible irony it all is. I said to my informant, “But they are surely just putting all the mon[ey] in trust for the children?” Mmm … came the reply. And Lois Ames¹¹⁶ given a contract by Faber and Harper’s to write a biography for which she has no gifts, nothing.¹¹⁷ Sylvia will slit her, also. But I feel bewildered by her violence, even though vengeful feelings can unleash powerful expression. What a brilliant writer she is! What a strange “career” this was.

I hope the play was well received.… About the “papers,”—“Aspern”¹¹⁸—which I have not looked at since I first and last went through them. Have I the strength? I hate them and hate to let them go; the damned things are my life also. Did you write Harvard about Stonybrook’s offer? They know nothing about Stonybrook, except that they are interested. Perhaps they will meet it \the offer/. I don’t know, dearest. There are your Harvard students—especially if you plan to return occasionally, who are writing about you all the time. Harriet and I had a good evening with Frank Bidart on our way to Maine. You would be teaching at Harvard—although you will probably want to can that when the time comes—but you might be teaching at Harvard and all your papers, all the things that will go into “work” on you will be at Stonybrook. I don’t want to interfere and Mr. Lusardi is desperate. Please don’t mention that I have said anything. I would feel bad and out of order. It is just that I think you could write Harvard, if you did not do so, telling them of Stonybrook’s offer. Then see what happens. Please do not arrange for any payments this year, because of our tax! Then sometime we will have to get together to talk things over at length, make our final decisions and arrangements.

Meanwhile, all is well with us, your lovely daughter is blooming and thinning and I at least am deeply blessed by her being and thank God for her and for my love of her which is the greatest thing in my life.… Off to Castine on the 5th.

With love,

Lizzie

---

P.S. Thinking perhaps you hadn’t written Harvard saying you had had a better offer I called Mr. Dennis. He was horrified at the thought that they wouldn’t get the papers and had assumed that if you had a better offer you would have let him know. I did this only to clear the way for you to make the choice that would really suit your heart. It is of some importance—I glanced fearfully into the pulsing grey tin drawers and felt sick. Ugh, our Lois Ames is out there waiting to say, “meanwhile Elizabeth was writing to Harriet Winslow in Washington saying that ‘Bobby’—”—Oh, F—! Please I’ll kill you if you let Lusardi know I alerted Harvard. But I \knew Harvard cared very much!/

155. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

[Telegram]

[n.d. but July 1, 1971]

HARRIET LOWELL 15 WEST67STREET

NEWYORKCITY

GOOD LUCK FOR MEXICO DEAR HEART

DADDY

156. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[80 Redcliffe Sq., London SW 10]
July 1, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

Very rushed letter; I am off in a couple of hours for a six day trip to Edinburgh and the Orkneys (Home of the Spence negligence).¹¹⁹ A quick trip but it gives me a chance to meet McDiarmid, see my ancestral islands, and Edinburgh.

Spence negligence! I don’t need it. Somehow I mislaid the Harvard man’s name and wrote Bill Alfred a couple of weeks ago for it, and hadn’t heard. Harvard rang up just after I had had dinner with Lusardi, clumsy very touching type. In half a minute Harvard had upped their price to 130 thousand from 90. Then two days later Lusardi went up to 150. I’m not keen on the auction, at least I don’t admit I am. My lawyer here thinks nothing should be decided till after the divorce and birth of the baby. I suppose the bidding might have come out the same way anyway, but my heart-felt thanks for your timely intervention. I don’t \think/ the colleges should be jewed up¹²⁰ too much; what I want is an annual income that could replace if need be my part-time teaching, say from 8 to 12 thousand, an independence, my retirement fund. I will go on teaching, but hope not to do it steadily till sixty-five. I seem to be in excellent health for blood-pressure etc. but Oh me we well-in-our-fifties have lived so \too/ much of our lives already. Peter Taylor and I humorously mourn about this. Most writers if they don’t survive into hopeless ill-health and senility die at fifty-seven.

Thrilled about Harriet’s law vocation. Do you think law and the Supreme Court will replace Eldridge Cleaver, the Beatles, and even Jesus with the young? I’ve just wired my little cable to H. God bless you in Maine this summer. I think Conn. is a good idea for you and H. Will Mary be stranded?

Love,

Cal

157. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
July 3, 1971

Dear Cal: I am still here in New York until Harriet leaves in the morning. I got a copy of the letter Mr. Dennis of the Houghton Library sent to your agent or lawyer, with his offer, etc. Now that I have managed to do all of this for you I find, as I want to say quite frankly, that I am very disturbed. I have from the first acted as a very efficient agent and of course as someone who knows the value and meaning of all that is concerned. A lot of the stuff in the inventory is mine—not just your letters to me which I don’t want to sell, but letters to me from everyone, your parents, hundreds from Cousin Harriet, from our mutual friends. I only plan, I guess, to take out, your letters to me. Also I do not think I can make you a present of the copy of Land of Unlikeness, with my maiden name in it, which I bought before I met you. I plan to give that to Harriet instead. I really don’t know how to put into words all the strange feelings I suddenly have. It was I who set the Stonybrook price at $125,000 and who called Harvard and told them to bid on their own, etc. That and for so many other things I have never even been thanked. It worries me that I should have at this late date taken on so much for you. You and Caroline have treated Harriet and me with unremitting meanness. But then, what else has she to do with herself? She drifts about, has babies, destroys lives of both men and women who are really serious and deep by her carelessness and spoiled indifference to consequence and the feelings of others. However, with you—it is a different matter. You have been a person of the deepest moral yearnings and it was that person I loved. I hate your life and what you have done to those who cared so deeply for you. But that I feel is just the beginning of your suffering and decline. You will not be allowed to survive but will be sacrificed to the emptiness of Caroline, her shallow, narrow existence.

Nothing can be done about the papers until at least Sept. 15th. Then the list will be gone over. Whatever is mine that will stay in I have to ask you to pay me for from what you get. I am in no position to give you anything. I cannot live on the $20,000 you have set aside for us. I pay $6,000 rent for the apartment, Harriet’s school is 3,000, this summer alone 2,000. That almost takes up what you have given us after taxes.

I do not know what caused me to take action when you carelessly wrote, “What have we done about the papers.” I noted “we” but somehow was seized (“I” as always) with the desire to do what you wanted. The papers are yours, but they were here and you would probably have waited to accomplish all this if I had not answered and done it for you, and I must say so well. Why? For Caroline? For my memory. I don’t know. But I feel stupid and upset. I have not done well by Harriet or myself. We are both You risked, without a thought, the sanity and stability of a young creature on the brink of life. I am not impressed by Caroline’s “maternal” qualities; they do not extend to my child or to her responsibilities to me as another woman. These things are part of being a decent person.

I hated the reviews of the play¹²¹ I saw; just as I hated the English reviews of Notebook. I say that as a critic, as someone who knows how beautiful and rare Prometheus is.

I am very angry with myself, with the incredibly stupid way I behave almost without thinking toward you, writing letters, getting better arrangements. I loathe Caroline and silly little Tories like Grey Gowrie and their destruction of the dear Yankee genius they will never understand. Anyway, I hope you begin to understand Daddy Lowell better and his empty smiling and “happiness.”¹²² Sometimes it is the only way one can bear a ruined life. And I think you have ruined your life for a mess of potage—a mess.¹²³

Harriet is all packed and very calm about her trip. The other night, sharing a rather feeble fan, we talked until 1:30 in the morning. She is tougher than anyone knows in a way—at least at the moment—but the shocks of her life that have made her tough have also turned all her thoughts in a noble and serious direction, not toward selfishness as sometimes happens. Her direction in life is much firmer—she actually used more or less that phrase. She wants to be independent, she told me, and to have worthwhile work to do. Her grades were all B’s, very good I think. Next year it really counts since it is the beginning of high school and she seems determined suddenly to work hard because of her interest in her future. I think my really feeling confident about her instead of just “praising” her is one of the main things. She has lost 12 pounds and now, of course, I want her to give up her newly found powers of resistance to pleasure for a goal. She is just right and looks wonderful. I took her to lunch with Mary, who has come and gone back for a week. M was wonderful, incredibly simple and pure suddenly, with dinners for all her old friends every night—Fred,¹²⁴ Wm Phillips, Hannah and me almost every night of her stay, lunch with Harriet. We didn’t mention you and that was a relief. Mary has written me many times how much better off I am. Everyone insists that I am. But can it be true? I know they mean it but I am not sure. I enclose the Vogue picture and article.¹²⁵ I told them we were separated and am only sorry they mentioned you at all, but I guess I haven’t been “solitary in the field” all these years.¹²⁶ I suppose this letter will enrage you, but I am enraged today—by what strange little or great events—my getting all this arrangement for your papers to be profitably concluded—can one suddenly be stabbed by emotion. Well, be enraged in your turn. I don’t care. I believe what I say and know it to be true. You will never be free of the dreadful thing you have killed in yourself and of your ingratitude and lack of loyalty and love. And no child you produce can be more splendid than the one you abandoned

Lizzie

158. Elizabeth Hardwick to Harriet Lowell

Castine, Maine
July 11, 1971

Dearest: You have now been away only one week and it seems months. How I miss you. Nothing new up here, except incredibly wonderful weather, very very hot. Apparently New York has been in a terrible heat wave and so I am happy to be in sunny, clear, but not unbearable Castine. They have had a theatrical group playing here, quite young, not very inspiring but o.k. They seemed very forlorn and so I had them all down at the barn last night. There was a wonderful moon, the high tide rose, we played records and they danced until 3!—nearly breaking the place up. Then the lady in charge said, that’s enough, and they scurried about like little soldiers, cleaned up the whole place, put back together the bed that had broken down and went home. The thing they danced to—there were several blacks—was that awful Ike and Tina Turner record which I brought down for want of anything else to do with it.¹²⁷

I do so much want to hear how you like the Experiment. I hope it is fun and that you have found some friends here and there. And I hope you are well. I just can’t let myself think about the Mexican diseases—like la turista,¹²⁸ which is intestinal. I think Sumner is alright. I was out by the barn door this morning and heard a little cry and there he was, looking very frightened. He had been out for about a minute and wanted back in! I find him wanting to sleep on my stomach but I have to say no.

Nicole must be taking off today. No news my dearest except that you are in my heart. And so send your old mother word of you.

All my love

Mommy

159. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Castine, Maine]
July 13, 1971

Dearest Cal: I’m sorry I wrote you in such an angry manner. I feel all that, from time to time, and often I just don’t feel anyway now. However, I do want to say a few things. I won’t be able to do anything about your papers until the fall, maybe October. There is so much still that I want to go through, and there is a question of just which things are actually addressed to me, etc., and are actually my property. It was all thrown together. I am up here; I go back; school starts, my lectures start and so I personally feel I will need a little time—perhaps October. Whichever University you honor will then come over and we will get the whole thing accomplished.

A second thing: last spring Mary Jarrell called wanting to be able to make copies of Randall’s letters to you for a volume she wants to edit. I said I didn’t think she should edit the volume—speaking as a critic—and that I don’t particularly believe in one little volume of letters, then another. These things tend to preempt the field for quite sometime to come. She would make casual statements about, “Oh, I’ll take out anything personal,” and I informed her that the question of taking out was the great question—it is more than a matter of not hurting people’s feelings, etc. I looked over a few of Randall’s letters. The ones I saw are fairly impersonal but they do say Randally things like: “Wouldn’t you hate to be Eberhardt or Nemerov.” Anyway, I talked to the Taylors who do not want to give their letters and who are very much opposed to what Mary may try to do. They—way back there—simply didn’t answer. Now, Michael di Capua¹²⁹ has called again. Last Spring when I demurred—also saying to Mary you hadn’t really had a chance to see the correspondence—he became very rude and said “The letters aren’t yours,” etc. I said, well they are in my apartment.

But when he called the other night I did feel the justice of his remark that none of this was really mine and I said to write to you. I don’t know what you will want to do, but I think you could stall, not answer, or whatever until you’ve had time to think about it.

No word from Harriet. Mail is very slow there, I hear. Sumner was out all last night with a white cat. I nearly died, but he came back this morning. I fear he will never be the same.… Castine is heaven, very warm and clear. We are all up at the tennis court, drinking cocktails in the evening. I go two days from now to meet Mary at Bangor. The Coris¹³⁰ are here, planning a big musical party for Alexander Schneider on Sunday. It is very, very pleasant. I have a friend visiting.

I just write this so you will have some picture of the situation with me here about the papers and to make those remarks about the request that will be coming from Mary Jarrell.

Much love,

Lizzie

---

Fond memories of the old grey head going down Water Street! The swallows miss you.

160. Elizabeth Hardwick to Miss Harriet Lowell

Castine, Maine 04421 USA
July 19, 1971

Dearest, dear Harriet: What a joy to go [to] the p.o. this morning and to see there a beautiful airmail letter. But the best was still to come. It was such a gay, witty, real letter, which actually told me about everything there and about you. I was completely delighted to get it and enjoyed it immensely. It seems to be fun and that made me happy. I hope to go to Mexico with you sometime because I’ve never been there.

Beautiful Maine weather, perfect; but I’ve been busy writing and had to work all weekend and then yesterday race up to Bangor to put my piece on the plane for New York.¹³¹ Still getting it done made me happy. I have no human news but amazing cat news—if that doesn’t sound too childish. It turned out to be impossible to keep Sumner in the house; he found ways to get out and so I gave up. It is perfect. He is friendly with a big white cat, goes and comes, nicely cautious. At night now because of rain I usually keep him in. But oddest of all is how he has changed in his character. He will eat any kind of food—all sorts of different cans, and he purrs like a steam machine and wants to be in your lap all the time. So, you can see!

The summer is racing by. Nixon made headlines by saying he will be going to China to visit Mao! Bet Señor Roche is furious!¹³² Nixon a Maoist! Mary McCarthy is here. My routine is fairly much the same as always—and I think you would have been especially miserable here this summer. It is nice in many ways and perhaps you will like it later, perhaps not.

I am cut off from New York except for New York Review and so have nothing interesting to send you except my dearest love. Tell me more if you have time. I truly adored hearing from you. Relieved you got through the first days at least without beings sill \sick/. Many greetings, darling,

Mother

161. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
July 25, 1971

Dearest Lizzie—

I don’t want to say anything about your “angry” letter, even if you hadn’t followed it with a kind one. But your Vogue piece is a tirade in the best sense,¹³³ every feeling, every cadence alive—all too alive for me, beautiful, and shakes my being. Too good for Vogue. Rather sorry Cecil Beaton did the picture, still it gets the old room in all its manifold objects and shine.

We are moving permanently to Maidstone, but keeping some of Redcliffe Square to visit. A big country house used only for weekends and the short English summer \vacation/ was backbreaking for commuting and upkeep. I think this is the way I want to live—mostly in the country. Anyway the strain is immediately much less.

I miss so many people in America. Give my love to the Thomases, the Booths, Bishop Scarlett, Sally and Helen Austin, and of course Mary and Jim. We have, probably fortunately, no neighbors here. But I miss the old country community. Do you still have the French readings?¹³⁴ (I’ve just read the Education Sentimentale,¹³⁵ shamefully in English[.]) Does the tennis still have its shaggy excellence? Do you have drinks and gossip in the barns?

I’ve mislaid your letters (not lost) and don’t know how we agree on the correspondence, ms. etc. I don’t think any thing should be finished till January. Probably Stonybrook. They seem willing to offer a lot more, and to have more interest in figuring out the best financial dole. Still what a meaningless place to leave the stuff, if place matters? It’s not like one’s grave. OH talking about letters, I’ve just read [the] best novel in English, Jane Welsh’s letters.¹³⁶ Dickens said she was of another order than all the great literary women he knew. The best Victorian marriage, in a way the only one, and miserable.

All my love,

Cal

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Prometheus got the worst and most superficial and most reviews of anything I’ve written. Only one good one, in the TLS.¹³⁷ However, it filled much of the theater for its six weeks, unlike Benito. What’s any good in the play is Io and the bit right after. I might cut it to that for my collected poems or something.

162. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
July 25, 1967 [1971]

Dearest Harriet:

I am shocked to see how many days are gone since I wrote you (how many are gone since you wrote me?) and now it’s too late to address a letter to your camp. I hope you will find this one waiting for you when you open Senorita Gomez’s door¹³⁸ (porta?) \puerta?/ Is she a cousin of Nicole’s?

Since I last wrote you, we have been up to our eyes moving from London to the country. And now we are moved in in a raggedy way. You know how I used to blow off about wanting to spend a winter in Castine. Now that has come true, only it’s not such a severe step—we are only fifty miles from London, and can reach it in less than two hours. This house—let me boast—is bigger and older and much shaggier and messier than Mary McCarthy’s. We have a trout stream about five inches deep at its deepest, a lake? about as big as my Castine barn area and solid reeds right now, herds of cattle and sheep can be seen from my study window (a neighboring farmer’s—I’m not trying to rival Uncle Cot)[,] hundreds of birds with harsh, horrid early morning voices—pigeons, rooks, sparrows. Things repeat. I have a bed to write on, about half the books I need, the same time commuting to where I teach as it was from London or New York. Our first two visitors come this week (not together) Bob Silvers! and Senator McCarthy.

I think of you away from me with deep sorrow. Maybe (I hope so much) you’ll come to us on Christmas vacation. You can split your time between here and London. I wonder how the summer has gone for you. Can you still speak English, or only English, or are you bilingual. Still more I hope you’ve had good friends, and intelligent happy things to do. I’ve been writing hard for a long time, and now I’m just reading, rereading old things I loved. A time to cool off before I dry up. I hear such wonderful things about you. I weep that I cannot see the new Harriet, or just the old.

All my love,

Daddy

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PS. What do you think of my living in a place called Bearsted? AH, BUT MY BEARS have all hibernated since I last saw you. My last sentence looks so haywire because I’ve just untangled a typewriter ribbon that’s been tangled for two months. It may be worse.

163. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Castine, Maine]
July 29, 1971

Dear Cal: I was much blessed this morning at the p.o. A letter from you and one from Harriet, my second from her. She is having a very, very good time and her letters are quite detailed and interesting. The mail is very slow there and she doesn’t seem to have heard much from me. But I am beginning to miss her terribly and she seems to feel the same way, although the summer is a wild success even with 6 hours a day of study! When she comes back on August 24th we will go immediately to Francine’s and stay there until about September 7th. Your letter—I hadn’t really expected to hear from you again and so that was nice … Castine has been green and blue and luminous all summer, utterly breath-taking. It is all exactly the same, tennis, drinks, dinners, fires, records. One night last week was heavenly. Chuck Turner was visiting and I had Mary and Sally; a wonderful clashing storm came up, thunder, lightning, and we had the fire and played Elisabeth Rethberg and Fischer-Dieskau and then all got out Cousin Harriet’s old umbrella and finally got Madame Mary to Sally’s car. The group is studying Montaigne this year, but I have asked off. I am studying Charlotte Brontë for my Princeton lectures. Villette¹³⁹ is a wonderful novel—I have two young girls who work at Harper’s (Pub.) and they want me to write a preface to go along with an incredible 38 page essay by Queenie Leavis, not the kind that makes me tremble, but quite good.¹⁴⁰ [(]Her letter to the editor says: “I have left Miss H. the biography, but let me know if she feels I have taken up too much space and too much content otherwise. I am a very agreeable person!”) Actually, her ideas and mine never once cross—a bit disconcerting … The Review has my Sylvia Plath piece in it this issue—don’t know what you will think of it.… Hannah is here, all set up in Mary’s garage apartment, and seems very grateful and happy to be here. She hadn’t, I think, realized how much she would miss Heinrich. She was gone a great deal—Chicago,¹⁴¹ etc.,—but still there was a whole great space he was in the center of. Phil Booth is largely, brownly present, with some new yearnings I cannot name stirring inside him. Well, though. I had a marvelous letter from Adrienne in San Francisco. She speaks of herself as a “manic” free-way driver and is contemptuous of S.F. for “charm,” saying that “charm is the canker at the heart of civilization.” Also she is horrified by the healthy, sun-tanned profs at Berkeley, etc. Dear frail creature of such baffling strength—Adrienne. I always feel a bit back-sliding and unreliable with her and yet she makes me filled with love because I know that one of the things among the thousands she has on her mind is “helping” me to be strong and sure. Sometimes her brown eyes brighten with danger and I see she has sensed my unconquerable ambivalence, my imperishable weaknesses.… I feel I ought to have more news. Everyone we know is as he or she was. I will give your greetings to everyone. I miss you terribly and always will until I die.

With love,

Lizzie

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Quotations from H.’s letters. In Oaxtepec they are in a huge government resort, worker’s vacations, national sports events and so on are held there. The Experiment has a floor.

“I arrived in Oaxtepec today. The hotel is beautiful but very touristy. There are 13 swimming pools. All that kind of garbage … Getting here was awful. We had a 5 hr. bus ride to Nuevo Laredo, a border town. 5 hour wait in the heat, then a 27 hr. train ride. I am having a great time. I went swimming instead of eating breakfast. We sleep in a big dormitory with about 20 girls. Mexico is beautiful and very poor. My hands are very sore from carrying our bags. As they say we are not here to be pampered.”

---

2nd letter:

“We have 6 hours of classes a day. My first teacher was very strict. He is nice out of class. The teacher I have now is really nice. I don’t really like my group leader, nice but a little stupid. She looks like a Salvation Army woman. She wants me to read some chapters in a book and make a report. Don’t think I will. Too nice a day. The kids are nice, but a little conventional. Oaxtepec is really gross! So touristy. We had a group of athletes here and now a religious group. I am having a wonderful time and hopefully learning some Spanish … Mexico is nice, but I like the USA. More freedom. You can wear what you want. In our families we will have to wear dresses, probably shoes and nylons. I prefer my way of life. Why shouldn’t I. I haven’t been able to get too many American newspapers and so you kind of forget all the bad things. Adios.”

(By the time this reaches you, she will be at her homestay. I hope they aren’t too “conventional.”)

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Did I tell you H. had lost 12 pounds before she left home and looked beautiful? I’ll take some photos in Connecticut and send them to you.

Again, much love and good wishes to you,

E.

164. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
August 3, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

It’s hard to believe letters cross the Atlantic in less than the months of the old ships at sea in the nineteenth century. It does something to smother expression maybe. Or is it that I feel you would \not/ much welcome details of my daily life? Not that we have drama. I’ve been mostly settling in, and am now fairly at ease and glad to \be/ out of the press and smother of London. It’s easy to go there, but the call isn’t strong this summer. And summer so queer and cool and short. The children’s school ends the sixth of July and begins the sixth of September. Another reason to be here instead of a[n] interrupted almost ten months in London.

Events—this morning two swallows flew in my window and out … those old friends who used to scare me into my old barn. I have a rabbit who dogs me around the house, and can’t be housebroken. I’ve just corrected a thirty-five page interview for a little magazine called The Review.¹⁴² It’s mostly shop, though we took care not to repeat Seidel’s old one.¹⁴³ It seems double its ten years or so ago, I’m very valetudinarian, free with the \my/ wisdom of age. Last weekend, separately Bob Silvers and McCarthy were here, Gene rather pricking up his ears toward campaigning, or backing someone. Bob told me about your letters from Harriet. I rub my eyes—suddenly from cats and pigs to full adolescence. Liked particularly the garbage and newspaper bits. I had one lovely \card/ from her before she left—tender and gracefully humorous.¹⁴⁴ We hardly bring out the most severe and ideological in one another, tho I write her like another grown-up—almost. Funny, just yesterday, I took Villette out of the bookcase—and put it her back. I’m deep in Dombey¹⁴⁵—almost to where I left off in Maine four summers ago. I am terribly proud of Harriet—the flower has come to her, about five years earlier than anything came to me. Whatever else, she won’t be a wooden lady.

Bob brought your Sylvia—dazzling, as usual. In a way I want to see it in contrast with your book’s other heroines—you feel strong attraction, strong repulsion \disgust/. Daddy¹⁴⁶ is too much for me, and I think it [is] weakened by being too much Sylvia—Oh stridently! Some \of her/ new poems (not the intermediate book) but more Ariel¹⁴⁷ are terrific—one on unfaith. Remember how Dr. Eissler said Freud shifted \transferred/ from the benign Joseph to the far more dangerous Moses?¹⁴⁸ Don’t.

Love,

Cal

165. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Castine, Maine]
August 12, 1971

Dearest Cal: Yes, letters are strange. There is no answering in the true sense in our correspondence, since no answer or information is called for. There is just writing a letter. Yes, I did mind hearing about your daily life, but I don’t much any longer. Actually I am at last glad that you are so happy, have found exactly how and where you want to live. Kent sounds lovely and the fantastic, extraordinary life one has with a new baby, all the dream-like, peculiar new rhythms—that should be much easier for you and Caroline in the country.

I have had a really fine summer, strange in many ways, in others exactly the same. In the afternoons the light drops suddenly, the day waits and you feel a melancholy repetition, as though you were living moments lived before, maybe long ago by someone else. I will be going to get Harriet in about a week and so if you want to write one or both send it to 67th Street. I will write you all about her just as soon as I see the beloved girl. Only going to the airport to meet you could compare with the emotion I feel about re-uniting with our daughter. But, honey, we don’t talk “ideology!” as you sometimes seem to think; we laugh and gossip about people and experiences not at all about politics! There are no “politics” around anyway; nothing much is happening. I forgot to tell you Harriet wanted the 25 pounds you sent her used for the East Bengalis. She had just read something about them in the paper and her eyes were tearing. I said, “It will just go down the drain.” Later in the day she came to me and said, “Yes it will go down the drain. But spending it at Bloomingdale’s is down the drain, too.” And so I sent the money.

I am not a law-giver (your little admonition about shifting from the “benign Joseph” to the “dangerous Moses.” I agree with that.)¹⁴⁹ It’s funny about my piece on Sylvia Plath. Most of the letters I have had speak of \my/ “compassion” and actually I don’t quite feel that for her. I find her very unattractive as a woman, so hard and cruel, with herself and with others. I dislike “Daddy” intensely (I compare it with “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms”) and also “Lady Lazarus.”¹⁵⁰ But so much else is fantastically beautiful, isn’t it.… I have a sort of trembling, sick feeling when I think of the fall coming up. I have been asked to speak at various places, to write things and of course I want to do so, but I feel so inadequate and so pressed for time. “Little” essays take me such a bloody long span to write.

Ah, well, darling Hannah was over for a drink yesterday and I was playing lieder, this time your old Schwarzkopf record, which has been through many a scene of your life, and she became very happy in a strange agitated way, listening to An die Musik, Gretchen, etc.¹⁵¹ I suppose it was the German. Suddenly I felt close to her for the first time in my life. She is happy here, Mary and Jim are well. I have given Tommy¹⁵² your address and he will be writing you. Bill Alfred is going to Ireland in Sept., paid for by PEN club and I will also give him Kent, with phone number, etc. Gene McCarthy—I don’t think he can rally any forces. It will be interesting to see … You know, Sarah Orne Jewett is wonderful. I am doing a sort of Maine thing¹⁵³—“creative”—using my old notes. I began to look at her stories and they are stunning.

“A man ought to provide for his folks he’s got to leave behind him. ‘Be just before you are generous:’ that’s what was always set for the B’s in the copy-books.”

---

“‘As for man, his days are as grass’ that was for A—the two go well together … My good gracious, ain’t this a starved-looking place? It makes me ache to think \them/ nice Bray girls has to brook it here.”¹⁵⁴

For some reason I am immensely moved by that use of “brook.”¹⁵⁵

I had been hoping for a letter from Harriet today, but I probably will have to be satisfied with the two I quoted you. In Mexico I think they sort of throw away the mail, South American fashion. I did have a card from Jean Valentine and so I hope that means she’s all right. As I got to know her better last winter I saw how unbearably hard life is for her at times and how she won’t or can’t accept help. There are weeks when you call, no answer even though you know she’s there; or at 6 p.m. the children say she is sleeping. Then it passes, but one worries and yet there is nothing you can do except let her know you’re there, not so many blocks away, if needed. We made a wonderful friend, both of us, in a student Jean had at Barnard when she had my course last fall and I had in the spring. I know how one treasures these students when they are right, witty, smart, nice. This one, Mary Gordon was also much liked by Harriet and now the girl is going off to Syracuse to study with Snodgrass. She told me she and her boy friend used to walk up 67th Street, sighing, “He lives there!” You, of course … Barbara told me Phyllis Seidel had been disturbed this summer. Strange, she called me often and would ask me to dinner parties; when Jonathan was here I had her at a little dinner I gave. All these last years she has seemed beautiful, busy, very much on top of things, quite dismissing about Fred, indifferent.¹⁵⁶ And then, or so I gather, everything sort of flooded over her and broke and it turned out she had very complex and hurting feelings still. She’s all right now, and I will call her when I get to New York. I feel like the voracious Lillian Hellman with my “young” friends; but these aren’t things I pursue. They just happen. The only thing I can see that has come from Women’s Lib is that women seem more able to lean on each other, be free to. The rest is bad writing, bald simplicity and simple-mindedness, or usually. I look forward to New York, shameless urbanite that I continue to be, even edging the grave. I will see Bob on the 23rd for dinner. He gave a nice account of you and Caroline. He had or has—don’t know—a new “Lady”¹⁵⁷ someone to while away the hours, or are they minutes, that he can spare from the never sleeping Review. \Goodbye Lizzie/

166. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Robert Lowell|15 West 67 St|Milgate Park, Bearsted,
Maidstone, Kent]
August 18, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

May I say it? The last is the sweetest of your letters—only one crack. How could you compare my gentle Flaubertian elegy on my father to Daddy? Oh how I too wish that in some turning of time and doubling of matter you might be meeting my plane in New York this late summer. I don’t see how I will get to America sooner than Christmas or Easter. The date of the child’s (Lowell-Guinness, I’ve been holding this back from you) [birth] is little more than six weeks off. Yes, the country is already much better \for/ the children, and will be for the next one’s entrance. They have so much more at their age to do \distract them—much/ most of it will last through winter: indoor swimming (at an awful country hotel, The Great Dane)[,] various horse things, and even ballet, and mostly running about the house, indoors and out. Pets go on snowballing, Bosun, a miniature, long-haired dachshund, liable to be eaten by the cats, Tigger and Kitty—and Goldie and Carpie, liable to be eaten by everyone. Oh this is like one of Harriet’s old letters.

Guests pile in—the Empsons, Sonia, and now perhaps Alice.¹⁵⁸ I don’t think McCarthy is doing much—that makes him refreshing after the other polls. Sorry about Phyllis. Fred was here last fall—much better than the Humphrey evening,¹⁵⁹ but rather too torpedoeing around town. Could he be called a snob, but then an intelligence\?/ Everyone knows the name and frame of Bob’s Lady romance, but no one has seen them together. When he came, I’m sure all three of us felt scared and embarrassed, it went off with kindness, awe, and even much humor. He’s been a friend. Sorry too about Jean V. It was the same last year. It seems rapid to say \think/ she must be tough in her weakness. Give her my Love. Your book seems a big thing: a more passionate, personal style, Woman, a subject hardly \un/touched in our time by anyone of critical and literary vocation. Are [you] going to use any of your old women pieces, particularly Emily Brontë,¹⁶⁰ and maybe La Deuxieme?¹⁶¹ You’ve given that \this/ out of the way subject quite a little time. The one advantage I find in Woman’s Lib is that I can start off humorous or angry argument with any woman. Last winter, a Lady Norwich stopped speaking to me with the furious remark, “I have as much right as a man to crank a car.” I said I had always prayed for such a woman.¹⁶² I’m very low. I¹⁶³

\How co/¹⁶⁴

167. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
August 18, 1971

Dearest Harriet:

If you’d write me oftener, I’d write you oftener. However, mother told me about two of your letters, the “thirteen swimming pool hotel” and “such garbage” and about your preferring America to Mexico because you hadn’t “read many American papers lately.” Well, now you are home to \and with/ the papers. Three come to us at breakfast (over my dead body) one, even flatter than the New York Times, \the/ London Times, one easier to read but irritatingly conservative, and one much more violently conservative, and constantly smoking into editorials calling for reform of the young \and Irish Catholics/—each issue of this paper is gayed up with photos of four new half naked girls with considerable figures.

I hope you have a lot of Spanish. And it gives me pride to hear that you have serious \thoughts/ about life and education. Does it spoil it all for me to say so? None of us do what we might; that’s almost a definition of life. How many though thicken their minds and tear the nerves to tatters when they might \not/ have? Have you met met more silly grown-ups or more silly persons roughly your own age. I’ve met \find/ more grown-up\s/, but then I see more.

I intended to write you about our pets. They increase at the rate of one a week. Last one, a wooly miniature dachshund. It made our most terrifying cat, Tigger the killer of voles, almost jump threw¹⁶⁵ a window. Now Tigger and Kitty and an Irish terrorist cat, Kelly, have drawn the outline of a dog on the flint of the driveway, and then jump for its throat.

I am glad you gave the twenty-five pounds to East Pakistan—one of the few issues like Biaffra, where there’s only one right side.

Goodbye and love,

Daddy

168. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
September 2, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

We’ve had two weeks much like the famous Brooks’ summer in Castine. And hanging over the clouds, the birth, now little less than a month off? No troubles, but frightening at best. The other day we went to a vulgar new movie of Wuthering Heights.¹⁶⁶ I had forgotten the plot.

Alice has just left from a swift over-night visit. She had rhapsodic pictures of you and H. You seemed to be growing more than Harriet. Indeed Harriet had lost weight. Do you think Harriet would like to come here for Easter vacation. Things could be split between here and London, maybe more of London, she is young to retire. I’d like her to see the other children—the oldest thinks of her as a model, but is more involved with pets than politics. And the new child\, involved too./

Maybe because Alice left rather early in the morning for her plane, the moment was melancholy. I’ve known her since four, but somehow it’s the more recent years that flash and trouble my immediate vision of her—drives with Everard etc. to Mount Desert lakes, the Boston Hospital. We don’t get younger, tho you may. She is over the excited stage about her divorce, can’t regret Everard, but a little sad with her outlook. Very sweet.

You see, I have nothing to write, but wished you to know I was thinking of both of you this Maine morning. I think Bill Alfred is coming in [a] few days.

Love,

Cal

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(I do hope your hip has healed—what I meant to say, but the letter was sealed.)¹⁶⁷

169. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
September 21, 1971

Dear Cal: I have seen my lawyer, Mrs. Barbara Zinsser, and she will be writing you about my intention to start divorce proceedings.

I have never tried to deny my grief and pain and my love for you. For me at least the amputation will probably always hurt, but I am resigned to that. The recent shocks have added something new. I don’t know what to call it—the intolerable, I guess. All the more sad in that there is in what you plan to do no element of necessity.

About Harriet. She finds it hard to write you, anyone. I got only two letters this summer and she said she wrote one to you. However, so many people speak of letters returned, months later, from all your old London addresses. Harriet is definitely not up to handling her feelings about all of this. She just turns off, naturally. I hope you will set up some sort of regularity and your own relationship, writing at set intervals, cards, even a monthly telephone call. She is a child and the relationship cannot be on a reciprocal basis with you any more than it can with me. We talk of you occasionally, but only in friendly, smiling terms. We were remembering the other night those freezing mornings in Spain and your inevitable cry of disappointment when, instead of orange juice and a freshly boiled egg, you got a tepid bottled orange soda with a raw egg floating in it. Actually my own memory of you is \of/ about 15 years ago. You and Harriet are on your own now, with your own arrangements and relationships to make.

For the rest, I believe getting my own life into order, protecting myself from further sorrows is the best I can do for myself and for Harriet and even for you.

Love,

Elizabeth

170 . Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
[September 24, 1971]

Dearest Lizzie—

I only partly understand your second paragraph about “recent shocks.” One of course is my book,¹⁶⁸ but it doesn’t have a publication date, need not come out ever. It’s not defamatory, \it’s/ like your Notebook,¹⁶⁹ probably less astringent. My story \is/ both a composition and alas, a rather grinding autobiography, what I lived, though of course one neither does or should tell the literal or ultimate truth. \Poetry lies./ I’ll send it to you if you wish (when it’s in neater shape), you won’t feel betrayed or exploited but I can’t imagine you’ll want to scrape through the sadness and breakage now.

I can’t write much. Everything has fallen on us this week—false labor pains, rushed midnight trip to hospital, discovery that the child is upsidedown, feet-first\, and must be turned./ For over a week I had continual nosebleeds (high blood pressure?) now stopped and cured by an expert stuffing \wicking/ my nose.¹⁷⁰ No more worry? Our whole household seems to be catching \scabies/ from Bosun the pet \toy/ dachshund.[*] What a moment! I guess all will be well.

Mail is queer. Some reaches me. I guess more doesn’t. Harriet’s didn’t. I’ll write her soon. Mary and Jim were here, sad over your illness and gloating over the reactionary Dr. Russell’s¹⁷¹ misdiagnosis. Poor Mary! She got some of the worst reviews I’ve ever read—worse than my Prometheus, \more/ all inconsequential entertainment journalists. She seemed shaken; but \a/ brave soul never shows it except involuntarily.

I can’t write more; all my love to you and Harriet.

\*All must be washed \boiled/, all us, and the \clothes,/ rabbits and hedge. Could you give Blair some proof, like a library card, that I can exist and recover my/

Cal

171. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Sept. 27, 1971

Dearest Cal: I am sorry, actually much distressed, by your ill health. I pray it is all gone and will not return. Caroline seems to have had a rough time, but that will inevitably be temporary and I hope all will go well. You will have the letter from Mrs. Zinsser by now. It will be a tedious, difficult and expensive thing, infinitely complicated—money paid to me taken off your income tax, some that can’t be \etc./ I don’t know all the details. I can’t speak about the book. I know only the shocked reaction of our mutual friends. As for my journal—something I haven’t written in since last Feb.—I looked at it recently and it is nothing, alas, except a rather masochistic eulogy, explaining your tremendous efforts at survival, your heroic working life, your humor, etc.¹⁷² Also it is entirely in my own hand, first draft, just a diary really. I may tear it up; it doesn’t seem very much to the point any more. There is a good portrait of Merrill Moore and a not bad one of your parents and Dr. Bernard, Dr. Eissler … But nothing much.

This is just to say that I \am/ frightfully worried about you, although I do believe you will be all right. I hope someone will let us know if anything goes wrong with you. I would bring Harriet right over.

I have to go now. But to cheer you up—a fantastic little exchange I had with Bill A. on the phone.

E: Did you know J. Berryman has called his new book Agnus Dei?¹⁷³

B: I don’t know her.

E: She’s terribly nice.

A. Well, that’s good because we all know what a long suffering person Berryman has been!

E Yes, Agnus will be his fifth wife just as soon as she gets divorced from Mischa Solemnis.*

B Good, that will be a happy marriage.

I gather you need some sort of paper for some reason—whatever you scratched out of your last letter. I will send it. What is it? And when you get time let me know, or Mrs. Zinsser, about the lawyer. Whenever you get time to think about it.

Dearest love, & salud, always

Elizabeth

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*I must confess to that terrible pun!¹⁷⁴

172. Robert Lowell to Blair Clark

[Telegram]

[London]
[Received Sept 28 1971, 707 AM]

MR BLAIR CLARK 229 EAST48TH STREET

NEWYORKCITY

BOY ROBERT SHERIDAN BORN LAST NIGHT LOVE

CAL

173. Harriet Lowell to Mr. Robert Lowell

[Telegram]

[New York]
[Received Sept. 29, 1971]

MR ROBERT LOWELL MILGATE PARK BEARSTEDMAIDSTONEKENT

DEAR DADDY I TRIED TO CALL TO SAY THE NEWS IS GREAT STOP LOVE HARRIET +

174. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent, England
October 1, 1971

Darling Harriet:

I feel … I mean to say that your lovely cable was like having another new child born. I remember Mother writing me last spring just telling you of our child’s existence, \appearance,/ its coming existence—that she didn’t want you to hear the news in a telegram, she meant first hear of it existence that way of course; but I trembled a little at sending my cable to you.¹⁷⁵ Forgive me, if this is clumsily said, but I am so tired I’ve half-forgotten English.

The last twenty days before Robert Sheridan Lowell’s birth were rough. Twice labor pains that stopped but were real and forced us to hurry in the middle of the night in an ambulance [to the] local hospital, then a last minute shift from the Maidstone Hospital to London, because here it took 12 hours to see a doctor—medicare not at its best. Just before all this, I had continual nosebleeds for 8 days, and had to suddenly go to London because of mistakes at Maidstone. It was as though we (Caroline and I) were in a basket of \our/ blood. But all’s well.

After 12 hours of labor pains, Robert was born in thirty-seconds, no time to go to the delivery room. He looked like a lobster-red \stiff/ gingersnap man, in a crimson stream \mud/.¹⁷⁶ His first sentence was (I had been praising you) “Isn’t Harriet a girl?”

We have two other babies: a taffy-colored Burmese kitten and a very floppy childish miniature long-haired dachshund: Moonlight and Bosun. Both are childish, Bosun incredibly so; Moonlight has his Uncle Sumner’s lovely voice, but unlike Sumner, an undignified fawning needling way of using it. The boy is much more dignified, despite looking like a bar tender, one who imbibes as well as sells.

What I want is for you to come to us as soon as you can. Christmas wouldn’t be too soon. There’s a famous progressive, casual country school in Devon that my oldest step-daughter goes to—Dartington. You might like it for a year or two before college, much less clamping than Dalton, and a change of scene. Ask Mother[.] It’s the one school in England almost that everyone \anyone/ likes. My loveliest daughter, please come and stay.

Love,

Daddy X

(some John Hancock)

175. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
October 1, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

We had to dash from Maidstone to London \on the next to last day/ in order to get proper medical attendance; then after inducement, twelve hours of labor. Even fathers get tired, but all is well. Not enough to write much. \letters./

Whatever you do, don’t burn your Notebook! I hope to live in it long after I’m dirt. What you showed me was some of your tenderest, and easiest writing. I wrote you that mine need not be published ever. It won’t be published, but kept. I won’t burn all but a few \blue/ parts so you mustn’t. Maybe in calmer times we can publish the two books in one volume. I think in time to come, if \we/ are still here, my poems will seem less disturbing to you. It’s my best \last/ work maybe—isn’t an author always his own best critic? Particularly of a lately finished book.

My blood survives the tense last two weeks, two midnight ambulances etc. \Not for me!/ It’s my old high wavery bloodpressure. Now I’m back on aldomet,¹⁷⁷ have had and will, all sorts of tests. All’s well, heart, liver etc. Only the blood goes high then drops—not with inner anguish, but mysteriously. I guess it’s not too serious. Like me.

Oh the will—I mean the settlement—can’t your friendly lawyer draw up what seems right, and then I without a lawyer will object to what I wish to. I’d like to avoid lawyer costs. Though I pay less than my share, my expenses for the baby are heavy, will be. Also my royalties for this half (?) were only a little over $4000—with $7000 last spring this give[s] me only 11 or 12 thousand. \A drop?/ Or is there some catch? On the other hand, I’ll have 140 thousand \in trust/ from Harvard. Oh I’m well enough off. Of the common possessions, I’d like [a] few family possessions \tokens/ for Robert; I’d naturally like to leave him something—maybe royalties. For myself, a few of the books. I have much of what I want in paperbacks. Thankyou for your dear concern.

Love,

Cal

Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell, November 20, 1971

176. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent, England
November towards Thanksgiving
[November 20, 1971]

Dearest Harriet:

I miss you very much, and really can’t bare \bear/ not to see you much longer. I \h/ave been looking over old New York and Maine poems. You and Mother are of course much in them. You both come back as I read, but \where/ are the realities, the \you/ living and breathing people? It’s hard to imagine you not around. And today, when there was actually ow on the ground, I thought I was back in Massachusetts’ untriside. You see my words are slipping off the margin: snow, countriside.

I think nothing takes one down more than trying to write a letter. Good after I’ve been teaching, and ready almost to improve the lines of the poets I am teaching.

We are all well and enjoying life \alive/, though it takes forever for a Father (yours) to \get up/ from his new birth. Love to mother, love to you. (I am making this letter short and, so you won’t have have \to/ sweating much in replying. Hint.

Love,

Daddy \(my best signature)/

177. Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
[December 6 or 8?, 1971]

Dear Frank:

We’ve been having problem[s] of someone working for us suddenly going violent, somewhat insane, with many unpleasant side-effects. We were left with two little girls, a baby still at the breast and a large somewhat remote country house—all rather spooky for a week or so, but now over, I think.

I am writing to take you up on a favor. Could you come here after Christmas or early January? Here’s the agenda, as Pound would say. My new book, The Dolphin, about eighty poems, shorter than when you saw it, but with many new poems (it now ends in a long pregnancy and birth (one poem) sequence) everything endlessly rewritten, and about 40 poems about English statuary, demos etc. taken \out/, not because they are bad, but because they clog the romance 2) \To find/ something to do with the rejected poems; they can’t be a narrative, but could have a mounting \drive/ of similarity. 3) Here’s where I need you most: I’ve tried to reduce Notebook to personal narrative. Mostly the Historic, the metaphysical and the political go, tho it keeps bits of each, then \go the/ personal poems that fit well enough but are inflated, uninspired or redundant. I’ve done this in a sort of jerry-built first draft, and am not sure whether it works (half my new revision will go? etc.) You can see how your advice and care would be unique and invaluable. This all began by trying to get around the mounting pressure on me not to publish The Dolphin (For moral reasons). And indeed, it must wait.

Now my confession, I haven’t yet gotten around to your book¹⁷⁸ and will in a few days and will write you. I’ve done nothing but schoolwork and my own work for a month—uneasy to have so much unfinished on my hands unfinished\ing./

Anyway Caroline and I would love to have you here. I of course want to pay your passage. Do see if you can come. Miserable about Elizabeth B.¹⁷⁹ I think With asthma you think you cannot breathe at all. I’m writing her but give her my love.

Affectionately as ever,

Cal

178. Mary McCarthy to Elizabeth Hardwick

141 rue de Rennes, Paris 6
December 9, 1971

Dearest Lizzie:

News: we are going to spend Christmas Eve and night with Cal and Caroline in Kent. I’ll write about this, them, and the baby on our return. This will be a stage on a Christmas trip to visit English cathedrals, going up as far north as Durham, southwest to Wells and Winchester and south-east, probably to Canterbury. Cal says all these are “only a stone’s throw” from Maidstone, but look at the map. This pilgrimage is a strange notion in the cold season, especially since some of these cathedrals are supposed to be dank and chilling even in full summer. But it strikes a common romantic chord in us, and practically we’ll take sweaters, wool socks, and above all fleece-lined boots.

The trip, I hope, is a prelude to my finally getting started on the book on the Gothic I’ve been planning for so many years. Meanwhile I’m still slogging away on Medina and doubt whether I shall get out of those trenches for Christmas.¹⁸⁰ It’s my first experience with something like writer’s block, and God knows what exactly is the reason.

We had a letter from Elmer Wardwell saying that Tommy had been operated on twice but that he had seen the Missus¹⁸¹ downtown after the second operation and all was going well. Do you know anything about this? I shall write her.

Bob says you’re in splendid form, very much in demand, collecting your essays. This must mean the Gauss lectures finished well. How is Harriet? Here it’s been a rather gloomy late fall (I mean morally), perhaps partly connected with the Medina syndrome and partly with Jim’s troubles in Alabama, which are too long and complicated to detail now. But beyond these specific causes I feel wrapped in a dark heavy cloud, which may be just the world. I keep thinking about Dante. But we’re past the middle of life’s journey.¹⁸²

Dear Lizzie I wish you, Harriet, and all friends a Merry Christmas and hope our attendance at Cal’s crib and fireside won’t give you pain.

Much love,¹⁸³

179. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

[“Season’s Greetings” card, Albrecht Dürer, “Mouse (detail from ADAM AND EVE),” Cleveland Museum of Art]

[New York, N.Y.]
[December 1971]

This doesn’t seem altogether suitable as a Christmas greeting. It was personally bought at the Cleveland Museum. Bob, Grace Dudley and I flew out here on Saturday to see the Caravaggio show.¹⁸⁴ It is quite an astonishing museum, large, important, and all down there in the middle of the tracks, smokestacks, waste—we almost went on to the sights of Toledo and Kansas City, both actually supposed to be excellent museums also. It was rather a fantastic day, starting at 8 a.m. when Bob and Grace emerged from their suite at the Pierre!¹⁸⁵ I don’t suppose I’ll forget the details and so they can be saved for a meeting sometime. There is one thing I finally get very nervous about with rich people—they like themselves far too much. Otherwise, fantasy land drifts about them like a dream I guess. I must say Bob is having real fun; she likes him, she takes care of him—he blinks with the newness of such attention, goes on talking, putting out the essays, telephoning, dining. Incredible.… New York is not bad right now, but I haven’t been feeling well, very, very tired. How awful that is. I have always had the habit of saying I was tired, but it meant something else. It will pass—I have pills and I am sure there is nothing at all wrong. Harriet seems fairly well. I had been wanting her to go away to school, thinking it would enrich her life, and I spent a lot of time on it—but she doesn’t want to. I would have missed her terribly of course and it is great fun having her in and out. I suppose my Princeton lectures went well. I enjoyed dashing over there; I’m going to Chicago and Univ. of Wisconsin in the spring—not for anything important, but just profitable enough to make it possible. I do wish you and Jim a good Christmas in Kent; it will be nice for Cal and so that pleases me. Much love, dear ones.

Lizzie

180. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
December 14, 1971

Dearest Harriet—

Almost an abstract Christmas present, but solid and the exchange value of the pound is rising. If you kept this till you were 100, who knows what it would be worth? Would to heaven I were with you in its place.

Love to you and mother,

daddy

181. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

[Card from the Scotch House, Knightsbridge, London S.W.1 X 41PB]

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
Christmas 1971

Dearest Lizzie—I tried to choose something modest and sharp[.]¹⁸⁶

With my love

Cal

182. Robert Lowell to MRS. AND MISS ROBERT LOWELL

[Telegram]

[Maidstone, Kent, England]
[Received] Dec 23 3 51 PM ’71

MRS AND MISS ROBERT LOWELL15 WEST67ST NEWYORKCITY

LOVE AND MERRY CHRISTMAS COULDNT PHONE LOVE AGAIN

DADDY

183. Harriet Lowell to Robert Lowell

[Card: Peyote Chief (ca. 1930) by Jack Hokeah, Kiowa, Museum of the American Indian: “A beautifully costumed ceremonial leader kneels on a colorful blanket, holding his gourd rattle, beaded staff and feather fan as he prays in Peyote rites. Hokeah was one of the original ‘Five Kiowa’ painters.”]

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
[January 2?, 1972]

Dear Daddy,

Thank-you for the check. I just got it cashed. I still haven’t decided what to spend it on. Christmas was very nice. I went to the country with the Browns. School starts tomorrow, back to the old grind. My Robespierre paper is due tomorrow and I am typing it on an electric typewriter. Some girls who lived in mommy’s studio left it, instead of the rent. Well, I must be getting back to work! Dalton won’t leave me in peace on my last day of vacation. Thanks again.

Love,

Harriet

184. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
[January 10, 1972]

Darling Harriet:

If you had consulted me on Robespierre, Dalton would have left you in peace on the last day of vacation. I transcribe my 14 line masterpiece on this subject.

Robespierre and Mozart as Stage¹⁸⁷

Robespierre could live say\ing/, “The Republic

of Virtue without la terreur is a disaster;

loot the chateaux, have mercy on Saint Antoine;”

or promise Danton, “I’ll love you till I die—”

both discovered the guillotine is painless.

La Revolution, old Jacobin, kept repeating,

“This theater must remain and remain theater,

play her \my/ traditional, barren audience-drama,

play back the revolution.” Ask the voyeur

what blue movie is worth a seat at the keyhole.

Even the prompted Louis Seize was living theater,

sternly and lovingly judged by his critics, who knew

Mozart’s operatic slash could never

cut the gold thread of the suffocating curtain.

There it is in my usual uneccentric and clear style, every word in need of a “footmark” except for you a recent scholar on Robespierre. Oddly enough everyone writes well on odious Robespierre (and even with sympathy)[,] Carlyle, Michelet, Büchner.¹⁸⁸ He only killed two or three thousand, while Napoléon must have killed a million, still Robespierre knew the people he killed, he killed most of the people he knew and respected in parliament, the French Convention.

My last day of vacation is getting too near. My students are gentle but many couldn’t get into a good American high school. In the past our college has had rather pitiful little demos (for pot) and as a result, the County gives them \us/ as little money as is legal; and so new teachers can’t be hired, secretaries, etc. Going back to work is a slightly wet experience.

What about Easter? I would like to fly over and get you, if you’ll come. When is your Easter vacation. I think it’s early with us, but probably Dalton doesn’t acknowledge Easter. A former principal, Dr. Abram Straus[,] asked why Dalton should celebrate the resurrection of a renegade Arab mystogogue. Seriously, I am dying to see you. You’ll meet few people of all ages here, and I’ll dictate all your history papers. Give my love to mother; I think she was gypped on the apartment.

All my love,

Daddy

185. Harriet Lowell to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
[n.d. but January 1972]

Dear Daddy,

I sent you a card earlier, but addressed it wrong. Anyway, I want to thank you for the check. I am trying to find something extravagant to spend it on. I am now fifteen, whatever that means.¹⁸⁹ At school we are reading Donne & Johnson Jonson. Tonight I have to write a paper on anything. I am not sure I enjoy all the freedom. I saw the movie of Macbeth.¹⁹⁰ The witch scene was done in the nude, which didn’t seem much like Shakespeare. At Christmas time I went with the Browns to a hotel on the Hudson. We had a New Year’s party here, which wasn’t very exciting. Well, bye.

Love, Harriet

186. Robert Lowell to HARRIET LOWELL

[Telegram]

[Maidstone, Kent]
[Received] 1972 Jan 18 PM 2:18

HARRIET LOWELL 15 WEST67STR

NEWYORKCITY

APPALLED I LOST YOUR BIRTHDAY I BOAST YOU ARE 15 TO EVERYONE IT MEANS THE EDGE OF WHAT IS TO COME AND GO IN LIFE GLORIOUS FOR YOU I TEACH DONNE PLEASE COME HERE LOVE

DADDY

187. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
January 23, 1972

Dearest Cal: A morning of amazement! I came in and saw on the chair a package and I looked at it and thought, quite truly, “Who in England would be sending me a gift?” Dorothy Richards? I opened it to find the astonishing surprise. A beautiful dark green cashmere which I love, which fits perfectly, and is grand and elegant and something I could never afford for myself. How happy I am with it and I thank you very much, very much.

The morning mail, also there alone¹⁹¹ with the sweater, brought sounds from another long silent voice. Fred Seidel, a long poem, dedicated to me and Norman Mailer! I think it is very, very brilliant except for the part within that mentions me and Norman Mailer—not “together” but just as names.¹⁹² How strange. I will write him and ask to have my name out of the poem because I think it sort of ruins it for Fred, as a poem I mean. I haven’t seen him for ages.

Ah, ages. Well, I have been \reading/ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in bed and I love it and Renaissance poetry this a.m. to help Harriet study for an examination Harry Levin couldn’t pass. But I mutter to myself, “Gosh, that’s good!” as if it were all sprung new from a Village pen and going off to Poetry.¹⁹³

Harriet is marvelously well. I sort of gave up writing before and after Christmas and find it hard to start again and instead do housekeeping. However, I am back, of various necessities. “The Wife of Bath”—isn’t that the very best ever? I am using it in a lecture I have to give this week-end on men and women, a subject like the air if I ever heard of one.¹⁹⁴

All is well here, rather busy. I went to a party at William Phillips’ this past Saturday,—depressing and distressing. I never saw so many looking so awful. Dwight¹⁹⁵—the first time in over a year—simply fallen apart, or so I felt, terrible color, vague; faces, blown up, of Will Barrett and his wife Julie—remember—also blown-up and silent. Years of suffering and calories and spirits seem to have taken their toll. Judy Feiffer, shrunken, but all right. Adrienne and Hannah the only joys intact.

Blair is married,¹⁹⁶ but I haven’t seen him. N. Chiaromonte died. And John Berryman’s death was simply awful.¹⁹⁷ I just couldn’t try to find out details, if there are any. The desperation stands for itself, without any footnotes being needed. And where did it come from and why did it stay forever? We never know much I guess. I met him in 1945 and knew him a little better than I ever told anyone. He was beautiful and dear and brilliant and afraid.

Again my thanks for the staggering gift, coming truly from the blue.

With dearest love,

Lizzie

---

\I shall go out in my new green sweater & my winter dunce cap to mail this and—guess what?—buy the New York Post. So doth habit keep us happy./

E

188. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
January 31, 1972

Dear Cal: I am sorry we got cut off on the phone, but I think most of the information from both sides got through. However, I do want to write a few new ideas. There is no necessity for you to come \to/ get Harriet. She has no hesitation about going off alone. I’ve just talked with her at length about it. And in addition just to get the picture a little bit clarified I called BOAC. Things are very crowded at that time. I am assuming that you understand that you will have to pay Harriet’s fare because I cannot in the most literal sense. Well, youth fare round trip, which she is eligible for is $190 and the other fare is $452—almost $260 \more/! But each flight only allots a few for youth fare and so I went on and made a reservation; it had to be Qantas, BOAC filled. She feels that a week, actually about 8 days it is, would be about right. I made her reservation for March 25, returning April 2. Her actual vacation starts as yours does on March 20 and ends April 4th. We don’t need to go into the details; this is just a quick note to say that it is not necessary for you to make a trip here in order to have Harriet go to England. The reservation is very tentative, but at least I have it.

I feel very sorry for Ivana; the first blow of pain never leaves you as long as you live.¹⁹⁸ However I am encouraged from what you said and what I have read about the new methods of treatment.

This is in haste, and I will probably hear from you about how all of this appears to you and then we can correspond further about the plans.

Love from both of us,

Lizzie

189. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
Feb. 5, 1972

Dearest Lizzie:

Just a note of delight about Harriet’s trip. I enclose the check \(in another envelope)/. Of course I would be glad to come and escort her here, but plane trips kill me—two in about two days! Also this isn’t a moment when I feel like a swift, a rapid motion \glimpse/ of all my dear New York friends. So I sigh with relief. I’ll be at Heathcliff¹⁹⁹ airport with a car at the exact hour.

I can’t write much. This week was hell, just ending. Ivana’s case was and is very grave; doctors’ reports conflicted; no point was reached when we could feel she was out of danger. Then difficult drives through one of England’s worst snow storms (nothing to ours, but looking like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow to the English eye). Then the skin-stripping operation; then next the plastic surgery. I think she [is] out of danger (but for the unforeseen) but will be two more months in the hospital—one of the best in England and with manners like Miss Elsemore.²⁰⁰

I will write Harriet either today or tomorrow. Tell \her/ the thought of her coming has been to me the happiest of all happy thoughts. (Do I sound like Wordsworth?[)]²⁰¹ I am Thrilled and half-marveling that you and Harriet are reading poetry. To me poetry means poetry written before 1906.

I appreciate your accommodation.

All my love,

Cal

190. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
February 6, 1972

Darling Harriet:

The best news on earth you are coming. I would have loved the Gallantry of flying over to escort you here, but I find in my green old age such trips are murder; especially one within days of another. Last time I sat between a Canadian \insurance man/ and a woman from Newark. For about fifteen minutes, I found each more interesting than the other. Then they were both death. I waited in a line for an hour to get to the toilet and then gave up. Something had gone wrong with the lighting, so that at times when things were meant to be dimmed for sleep, the lights were so brightly blazing they gave me a sunburn. All the while I heard the voices of the electricians by some error amplified like rock and roll, while they conferred on repairs. I won’t comment on the TV movie. Dearest, don’t come on a super-jet and if you do sit by a window or the aisle. What a handsome sacrifice you are making to see us.

I’ll be waiting at the \London/ airport and won’t let you dawdle about there lost for 8 days. I plan to make your visit unplanned. Six country days here with children and animals (not more than one church a day—or at all)[.] Then a couple of days in London. The children want you to bring your guitar even more than Caroline does. Bring it. Bring your poetry book; your lessons were the first poetry written before 1900, except for mine, that Mother has read. I’m sure I can add to her very expert teaching.

Ivana, our six year old, has made a wonderful turn for the better in the last day or so, though she still must have plastic surgery and may well be in the hospital when you arrive. The plasma-intravenous feeding has ended. She is free from the plastic tubes that Caroline called her rosaries. Her life is no longer in danger. We had eight days without a sky but now it’s just gruelling.

Dear Heart, I can’t wait. Give my love to Mother, and thank her.

Love,

Daddy

191. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
Feb 6(?), 1972

Dearest Elizabeth:

You seem to have been here during Frank’s visit, both by voice and reference (if Caroline had met you, you would have been as here as we are). (Change in type caused by my disastrous stopgap of putting an Olympia ribbon on a Hermes, meaning rolls stop rolling every five minutes and have to be exhaustingly switched.[)]

You are so here that I started to phone you about Marianne.²⁰² The end of her life already ended by infirmity—she was a star in my sky 35 years ago when I first read Dick Blackmur’s essay.²⁰³ Last week I was teaching her to my poor dim students, along with Cummings whom they of course liked and got much better. For you, tho, it’s losing the person. What can I say? Maybe you’ll write a little book of memory and thoughts. I have never heard anyone describe her so well—or anyone else. Her death has made little stir, unlike Berryman’s—on whom each English week or arts page has a bad elegy. This is right, tho I thought him doomed too ever since I ate with him last year but then it was drink, later he must have died from not drinking. She was much more inspired—his heroism was in leaping into himself in the last years, amazingly \bravely/.

I think Frank and I revised 405 poems in a month. That’s no way to write, but it was made more sensible by Frank’s amazing filing code and total memory for my lines. Even for rejected versions. The three books are my magnum opus, are the best or rather they’ll do. Are they much? Read Dolphin when you have leisure. I’ll send the other two fairly soon. I am going to publish, and don’t want advice except for yours. Lizzie won’t like the last. What else can I offer her? There’s something creepy about deliberately writing something posthumous. \(Love, Cal)/

I have no heart to write about Ivana’s accident. We have been a lost ship.

192. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
Feb. 22, 1972

Dearest Harriet:

We’ve just come out of the dark tunnel of the miners’ strike.²⁰⁴ You probably didn’t hear much of it in New York, but here it held the whole stage. You’d be cooking an egg or reading Shakespeare or absorbing an interesting news reel about the strike on television, when all would fold into darkness. As this continued into the second hour, a chill settled down, you went to look for your overcoat. Other resources were tried, coal fires, wood fires, oil lamps, very dangerous, but which \made/ the night like day with their luminous, glowing “mantels.” Doom snowballed in the daily news, 2 Million unemployed, armed pickets, polluted water, deaths in stopped elevators, dentist drills stopping mid-tooth. Worst for me, threats of a total milk cut-off. We were nearing the dark ages, when it all suddenly stopped.²⁰⁵ In two days, it disappeared even from the back pages of the newspapers.

I’ll be meeting you at the London airport at ten p.m. on the March 25. We may spend the night in London, since the trip here is twice as long. I think Mother wants to prepare a guide for me, step by step with Harriet—turn left for the baggage counter with her suitcase, bring money for extra charges, see that she brushes her teeth,²⁰⁶ help her two hours a day with the new math, read Milton aloud, don’t make up facts \imaginary/ facts about Milton’s life, that he adored buttermilk.²⁰⁷

Dear it’s rather a long dark journey into a blaze of new faces. I know you’ll find my Heart is warm. The little girl is better, having her last operation today and will be home in 3 weeks. She can even be funny about it now, but it wasn’t funny. Love to you and Mother,

Daddy

193. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
February 28, 1972

Dear Cal: A beautiful, warm day here. Sumner snoozing on the window sill among the begonias brought from Maine years ago and still bravely enduring … I have finished my essay on the Brontë girls²⁰⁸ and am writing something for Time Magazine for a lot of money which I hope they won’t print since they will pay me most of the money anyway.²⁰⁹ After Christmas I had a too long bout of not getting down to work, but that has passed and I seem to have a number of things going. There are always parties and people coming and going and Nixon and Chou²¹⁰ on the telly. I am trying to think of some gossip for you, but all the good things are rather long and take too long to tell. Not that I have such a bit of news or speculation on hand just now.

Some new plans for Harriet and some “advice”—since you have already credited me with it I might as well produce it! She is coming on Thursday the 23rd of March and returning the following Friday, March 31. The change to the first Thursday is to give me a free week-end and I will be away from Friday until Sunday night. The second Thursday is to give Harriet a weekend before she goes to school; she has some plan with a friend. I will put all of the information on a card enclosed here.

I was talking to Harriet recently. Here are her wishes; you can honor them or not as you wish \like/. The trip—for her—is to spend time with you after this long stretch of a year and a half. Also she is very keen to see London, go to the galleries, to restaurants. She said rather wistfully that she hoped the trip would be like her last one to Venice. She would like to stay in Kent from Friday until Monday and then come up to London and be alone with you until she leaves for home on Friday morning. You will let me know about this, will you? Is Redcliffe Square open, possible?

You and Harriet and I aren’t the same people we were last year. What kind of life one lives, who you live with, what you value—that is everything. Harriet will be a strange surprise—if you recognize her at the airport. But she is still vulnerable and shy and full of deep feelings and some hurts I imagine. Very proud, though, and sure of just who she is. I think you will have a wonderful time getting to know her, being with her alone and I want it to work well so that sometime she can go on a beautiful, far-away trip with you and learn from you and have the delight and honor of all the old experiences I still value. I know it will be a deep, lasting love for you both if you can give yourself to her. I have had a marvelous time this year with her, her wit, her sympathy and loveliness and humor give me joy every day. I truly want the same for you and, of course, for her on her part.

I go out all the time and seem to be on everyone’s list²¹¹ like the man in Dickens who is folded in and out like a leaf in a table.²¹² Dinners are dull often, but then again fantastic, peculiar things happen to you … I am glad life has taken a turn for the better there. Let me know your thoughts.

Love,

Elizabeth

---

Can you send me some information about where you will meet H. and what to do if you somehow miss each other for some minutes. The London airport is awful!

[Card enclosed]

These are youth fares and her flight back has to be reconfirmed from there or else she won’t be on it; state that it is a youth fare when you call Qantas on Friday, after her arrival.

Very important, Dad:

Arriving London 10:25 P.M. Qantas flight 530 … Thursday, March 23

Leaving London, Friday March 31 at 12:15 P.M.… Get to airport early. Flight 531

Qantas

194. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
March 1, 1972

Dearest Harriet:

I am fifty-five today. I thought I would be yesterday, I had forgotten leapyear. A day has been added to my life. What’s wrong with that addition? Or that if you take a fast plane you arrive here before you left? You can’t come soon enough. I’ve decided all Americans are terrific, that a dull or limp American is by definition impossible. But I’ve only seen four since Sheridan was born. He gets more and more distressingly extravert, lifts up heavy steel standing lamps, races past speed-limits on down corridors in his walker, and talks an unintelligible mash and gulp which he considers great conversation. He only smiles at me, though, because I never hold him over my head, and say, “You’re so manly, manly.” He has so many bigger women to survive.²¹³

I hear through Blair, through some Dalton mother you’ve written a good poem—and I am in it. If this is so, we write the same way; I’ve put you in \mine/—and you said every poem would need a footmark to be intelligible. Don’t sadden over the uncertainties of the trip and our meeting. Nothing will be quite the same, but you will find a second home, a second family. Everyone will love you, though you may find many of us childish.

The climate is getting colorful and warm for you—crocus and snowdrop, more birds, noisier birds, invisible leaves like the hair on Sheridan’s head.

All my love, and to Mother,

Daddy

195. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
March 4, 1972

Dearest Lizzie:

Sweet of you to remember old times, even my now rather rusty sight-seeing: the “horrors of the Vatican,”²¹⁴ the mosque at Cordoba that didn’t look like a church, the Carpaccio with the dragon Harriet pitied,²¹⁵ the poets’ feast, Grace Stone, and the many walks when we didn’t arrive quite where we intended, or when. Don’t worry, I have many things to go, romero,²¹⁶ with Harriet. More than the pitifully short time will allow. I’ll make out a loose schedule when she comes. I had no intention of marching her in a caravan of small children.

Huyck van Leeuwen read of a theory in an Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, that Napoleon’s mobile Italian Campaign was controlled by fast dispatches from The Directoire in Paris.²¹⁷ But they must have left something to Napoleon who was there. I’m here. The plans will be alright. But is anything alright? We make so many mistakes and age rubs them in, almost indelibly. God rest us all, and Tiny Tim.²¹⁸

You must change the departure date. I teach till very late on Thursday afternoon, and then again \on/ Friday morning. Friday night will be alright, tho the earlier plan would have been better. I know how hard and dark Harriet’s trip is for you. I mustn’t go into this. When she comes back you will wonder at some of your fears. When things loosen up, I’ll try and get to America—North America as my Essex Literature classes call it.

Love to you both,

Cal

196. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
March 9, 1972

Dearest Lizzie:

Sorry to scuffle with you on the phone. I have plans made out roughly that are much like what you and Harriet suggested. I don’t want things set much more than that—a London of a play, museums, the Tower, Regent’s Park, the City, nothing maybe a must, lots of solitary me, as much as … I know all the dark thickets of feelings; the visit must be a happy one. It will.

I thought maybe, and almost certainly I’d try to make a New York trip in late May or early June, before the colleges close and people scatter, so as before I could combine seeing you all, and look up old friends and cronies. I really haven’t been able to travel at all for a long time; except for my weekly drive to Essex. I don’t think I’ve been to London more than four times since Sheridan’s birth. All’s easier. Ivana comes home today, after two months I think—hard to tell because she lived in the hospital under constantly changing release-dates. Now she is learning to walk again, and should be back in school in a month.

By the way, I got a furious illiterate letter from a Johnny Milford, who had offered to become my assistant and apprentice, and who had been firmly declined by “my New York Secretary.” She only gave her title and typed signature, but I recognized the hand of the old rejector.²¹⁹ The postcard was enclosed and an insulting dollar bill—“hey Cal.” I’ll spend the money in New York—to live off one’s parasites!

Want to read your Brontës. I do nothing but read books on subjects I’ve just taught without sufficient preparation, and won’t teach again. Only three more weeks teaching thank God—the load is light but the nervous burden heavy. Principally because when I ask an Essex student, if he doesn’t think act 2 scene 4 in Lear has most of the play’s struggles, the students start mutely thumbing their text. How do you teach, if the students don’t do your work? So, in life, in all things.

I lie awake, think of Harriet (and fear I’ll prove unworthy) in hope.

All love to you both,

Cal

197. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell²²⁰

[Barnard Hall, 3009 Broadway, New York, N.Y.]
Thursday, March 9 1972

Dear Cal: I am sitting here in my Barnard office waiting for Carolyn Kizer who has been on campus for a week or so & is coming to my class. She is just as memory will bring her back to you—large, exhausting, energetic, predatory, blonde, inclined to recitation of her “firsts”—first feminist, first n’west woman, etc. So … I haven’t seen your Berryman.²²¹ Bob was to have brought it over last night when he came to dinner. Harriet sits on the floor barefoot at all my parties now, listening & talking. She sat through Marshall Cohen saying what John Rawls’ theory of a just society was & how Stuart Hampshire hadn’t understood it!²²²

---

Later

Sunk after lunch with C. K. who was drunk on vodka & then ordered a huge Chinese meal & so she is even more expansive & expanded than an hour ago!

Harriet will be on her way and I am sure all will go well. I am absolutely worn down with work, people, so many large & small deadlines.

Home, very tired, have cystitis (kidney infection) which Dr. Anny’s pills will have fixed up before this reaches you. Your Berryman epitaph here. I like it; it honors both of you. John was—I think—not a “character” that goes right down on the page; there aren’t too many details actually. He wrote; he drank. It was good to read it.

I am pleased about H’s chance to be with you. I have always kept that alive with her. You are her dear father. You say it is “hard and dark” for me. Something is “hard and dark” but not her trip to England. I do hope things will go well with your life there and that there will be some rest & peace accrued from Essex being behind you for another year. With love, Elizabeth P.S. Don’t forget to reconfirm Qantas home flight.

198. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
March 17, 1972

Dear Cal: I got the tickets today. The return is left open—the rules about the youth fare—but they will paste it on when you get to the airport for her return. Please be sure to call Qantas to confirm the flight back. Harriet will have the return flight number in her case and you have it. I am sorry she gets there so late for you in the evening, but I’d hate for her to be up all night also. Either way has some distress. She seems pleased to be going and will meet you at the door as they come through the customs. Bob says there is only one door. She’s very grown-up and will surprise you since she suddenly looks about twenty-one.

We are going to “Le Chagrin et la Piti锲²³ tomorrow, four and one-half hours of documentary about Occupied France. Everyone says it is fascinating. I’ve been explaining to Harriet who Mendès France and Pétain are. On the night she leaves I am going to Othello at the Metropolitan.²²⁴ Englishmen are in town suddenly—Stuart again, Richard Wollheim. The elections, the primaries are very dispiriting.

I always feel I have a lot of gossip to tell you, but things never seem quite worth the “creative” effort, the typing. Gossip has to be awfully good to stand up to the page and I like it when it isn’t so ravishing, just faintly interesting.

I seem to be absolutely snowed under by mails, bills, phone calls, duties of all kinds and so I can truthfully say that I’m glad you’re not here! How did I ever do it? Right now I am getting ready to answer a courteous letter from the Polish Ambassador about rights to the Old Glory. I throw lots of Robert Lowell envelopes into the basket, and feel I’ve made a goal on the basket-ball court²²⁵ and am full of self-satisfaction; however, I do answer those that absolutely need it and the ambassador is writing because I didn’t answer so many times before. When one begins to have a little pleasure from his work then the duties pile up, mocking you. Remember Marianne Moore saying, “Not one has compassion!” Much love, dear, and have a good visit with Harriet. Send her back, even though I know you won’t want to.

Lizzie

---

\So she will see you Sat. night at 10:30!/

199. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent Sunday
March 19, [1972]

Dearest Lizzie—

This probably won’t arrive before Harriet, but I have put in for a call to you this afternoon. Thanks for your lovely letter. Poor old Caroline Kizer, sharp as a thistle when we first met, now wallow, Seattle’s Sonia who is appearing today, quite gay if sober?

Sorry about your kidney. I live on mutually antagonistic pills. Nothing much wrong though but teeth. I feel my mouth is falling to chalk but the dentist will find only one urgent hole.

Ivana to the doctors’ surprise is already climbing the stairs. Because most of the water boiled on her middle it’s hard for [her] to stand straight like a ramrod, or rather walk upright. She’s to go back to school next month. In six years, she’ll have to have another plastic operation (less bad than this one) because she will outgrow her surgery. All done in half a second!

I wait for Harriet like a bridegroom, or a sinner waiting the priest. The weather has been heavenly for nearly a week, so warm it’s a relief to go in the windowless hall and cool from the heat. I know we’ll have a happy time. She comes with in the awe of full spring.

I can’t judge my Berryman. It looks denser in proofs. It’s fiction in a way, but may not be far from the truth. Anecdotes about John could be made up for miles by his cronies and students, monotonous, wearying, like Dylan Thomas’s, because the escapades even when they happened, lived on the imagination. I was on a program for him in London. It centered on a movie interview with Alvarez—John, close-up, just off drunkenness, mannered, booming, like an old fashioned star professor. His worst. I think of the young, beardless man, simple, brilliant, the enthusiast … buried somewhere with the older man.

Goodbye, my love. One seems to have no age in this season—I don’t mean I feel twenty.

Love,

Cal

200 . Robert Lowell to Mr. William Alfred

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
[March 20, 1972]

Dear Bill:

Many thanks for your letter bringing home the loneliness of being here without you. I wonder if you got the poems on here right.²²⁶ They are meant to be about Caroline and me, in a sort of pastoral analogue.²²⁷ If you took them [to] be about Elizabeth, they might be better … sadder and about more.—Food for thought, when I get a little more time.

On the Auden, I have been indiscreet. How could he stop speaking to me about a book he hadn’t seen.²²⁸ I think he’s not a snubber and has never stopped talking to anyone, except Rudolf Bing even then I think it was the Met he stopped talking to. Pretty rough to me, unpleasant too to wait for his appearance in England … to be cut. So, about ten-thirty at night, a too ardent hour, I sent him this cable: “Dear Wystan—astounded by your insult to me with William Alfred.” I didn’t mean to get you involved, but without naming you it seemed impossible to rescue my charge from complete vagueness. Well, now it seems Auden has been behaving this way lately when drunk and then doesn’t remember. I probably should have done nothing, but sending the cable made my life sweeter. I apologize to you. Poor Wystan, still marvelous and calm in things he writes. I think it’s desertion not marriage that cuts him. For some reason, though once warm, not intimate, friends, we have cooled more and more for the last four or five years. He has cooled, I haven’t and would be glad to stop it.

I am going to do everything not to make my book offensive to Lizzie; the poems you name could go with\out/ too much loss, but others couldn’t.

Love as ever,

Cal

---

Sonia Orwell is a few feet away waiting for a picnic; Harriet arrives Saturday.

“Fox Fur” and “The Messiah” [Flight to New York 1 and 2], “The Dolphin” manuscript, here, composed and revised between late 1970 and January 1972.²²⁹

201. Robert Lowell to Christopher Ricks

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent—phone Maid. 38028
March 21, 1972

Dear Christopher:

My book problems are complicated and I would like to ask your advice. My new book is a small one, some eighty poems in the meter of Notebook—the story of changing marriages, not a malice or sensation book, far from it, but necessarily, according to my peculiar talent, \very/ personal. Lizzie is naturally very much against it. I am considering publication in about a year; it needn’t be published, but I feel fully clogged by the possibility \of not/. My \This/ awkward exposition shows my painful embarrassment.

I have two other books that are re-arrangement and rewriting 1) Notebook, now about 300 poems, and is called History, going through the ages from the reptiles to 1970. It takes me a hundred poems or so to get to Verdun, so the bulk of History is in my lifetime, often \sometimes/ heavily autobiographical—The Twenties are mostly seen as my adolescence. 2) \A/ short book, 60 poems, called For Lizzie and Harriet, which also comes from Notebook and is about my marriage. The \My/ three books are related, though not in sequence exactly. The new one, The Dolphin, would come out by itself; the other two would come out as separate books under one cover. All would \to/ be published at the same time.

I know so much published revision is silly, but the confusions of my composition, looking for my form etc. made it necessary. I am still making small changes on a fairly clear manuscript, and almost feel that I have made the improvements with \in/ my powers and gifts. Afterwards, something new, but not before I get this \my/ great load published.

I wonder if we could confer sometime toward the end of April? \We’d love to have you stay here. / You see how all this involves your article.²³⁰

Affectionately,

Cal

202. Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell

[60 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Mass.]
March 21st, 1972

Dearest Cal:

I’ve been trying to write you this letter for weeks now, ever since Frank & I spent an evening when he first got back, reading and discussing THE DOLPHIN. I’ve read it many times since then & we’ve discussed it some more. Please believe that I think it is wonderful poetry. It seems to me far and away better than the NOTEBOOKS; every 14 lines have some marvels of image and expression, and also they are all much clearer. They affect me immediately and profoundly, and I’m pretty sure I understand them all perfectly. (Except for a few lines I may ask you about.) I’ve just decided to write this letter in 2 parts—the one big technical problem that bothers me I’ll put on another sheet—it and some unimportant details have nothing to do with what I’m going to try to say here. It’s hell to write this, so please first do believe I think DOLPHIN is magnificent poetry. It is also honest poetry—almost. You probably know already what my reactions are. I have one tremendous and awful BUT.

If you were any other poet I can think of I certainly wouldn’t attempt to say anything at all; I wouldn’t think it was worth it. But because it is you, and a great poem (I’ve never used the word “great” before, that I remember), and I love you a lot—I feel I must tell you what I really think. There are several reasons for this—some are worldly ones, and therefore secondary (& strange to say, they seem to be the ones Bill is most concerned about—we discussed it last night) but the primary reason is because I love you so much I can’t bear to have you publish something that I regret and that you might live to regret, too. The worldly part of it is that it—the poem—parts of it—may well be taken up and used against you by all the wrong people—who are just waiting in the wings to attack you. One shouldn’t consider them, perhaps. But it seems wrong to play right into their hands, too.

(Don’t be alarmed. I’m not talking about the whole poem—just one aspect of it.)

Here is a quotation from dear little Hardy that I copied out years ago—long before DOLPHIN, or even the Notebooks, were thought of. It’s from a letter written in 1911, referring to “an abuse which was said to have occurred—that of publishing details of a lately deceased man’s life under the guise of a novel, with assurances of truth scattered in the newspapers.” (Not exactly the same situation as DOLPHIN, but fairly close.)

“What should certainly be protested against, in cases where there is no authorization, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons. The power of getting lies believed about people through that channel after they are dead, by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate.”²³¹

I’m sure my point is only too plain … Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction,” and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief,” I think. The first one, here, is so shocking—well, I don’t know what to say.²³² And here²³³ … and a few after that. One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them … etc. But art just isn’t worth that much. I keep remembering Hopkins’ marvelous letter to Bridges about the idea of a “gentleman” being the highest thing ever conceived—higher than a “Christian” even, certainly than a poet.²³⁴ It is not being “gentle” to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way—it’s cruel.

I feel fairly sure that what I’m saying (so badly) won’t influence you very much; you’ll feel sad that I feel this way, but go on with your work & publication just the same. I also think that the thing could be done, somehow—the letters used and the conflict presented as forcefully, or almost, without changing them, or loading the dice so against E. \but you’re a good enough poet to write anything—get around anything—after all—/ It would mean a great deal of work, of course—and perhaps you feel it is impossible, that they must stay as written. It makes me feel perfectly awful, to tell the truth—I feel sick for you. I don’t want you to appear in that light, to anyone—E, C,—me—your public! And most of all, not to yourself.

I wish I had here another quotation—James wrote a marvelous letter to someone about a roman à clef by Vernon Lee—but I can’t find it without going to the bowels of Widener, I suppose … His feelings on the subject were much stronger than mine, even.²³⁵ In general, I deplore the “confessional”—however, when you wrote LIFE STUDIES perhaps it was a necessary movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh and immediate. But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & fathers and sex-lives and so on. All that can be done—but at the same time one surely should have a feeling that one can trust the writer—not to distort, tell lies, etc.

The letters, as you have used them, present fearful problems: what’s true, what isn’t; how one can bear to witness such suffering and yet not know how much of it one needn’t suffer with, how much has been “made up,” and so on.

I don’t give a damn what someone like Mailer writes about his wives & marriages [—] I just hate the level we seem to live and think and feel on at present—but I DO give a damn what you write! (Or Dickey or Mary…!) They don’t count, in the long run. This counts and I can’t bear to have anything you write tell—perhaps—what we’re really like in 1972 … perhaps it’s as simple as that. But are we? Well—I mustn’t ramble on any more. I’ve thought about it all I can and can’t reach any more lucid conclusions, I’m afraid.

Now the absurd. Will you do me a great favor and tell me how much you earned for a half-term, or one term I guess it is, when you left Harvard? They have asked me to come back—when I was so sick I didn’t think it through very well—for the $10,000. I got last year, & last fall, and a “slight raise.” (This may be $500. I learned from Mr. Blumfield.²³⁶) Of course I shd. have insisted on some sort of definite contract then and there but I didn’t even think of it until later. I have rented this place for a year and another year—but I must plan ahead and I am getting fearfully old and have to think of what I’m going to do in the future years, where I’m going to live, etc. At present I’m afraid even to get a cold because I have no hospital protection—thank god I did have when I was sick. The Woman’s outfit—whatever it is here—has been after me, too—asking me if I am getting the same salary that you got—and I don’t know. This sounds very crass—but it’s true I could earn more at other places—but prefer to stay here if I can … but must have some sort of definite contract, obviously. Forgive my sordidness (as Marianne wd. call it).

I had a St. Patrick’s Day dinner for Bill—a few days late—and Octavio Paz, etc—very nice. We dine off the ping-pong table … Now I have to go to the dentist and I’ll send this without thinking. Otherwise I’ll never send it.

DOLPHIN is marvelous—no doubt about that—I’ll write you all the things I like sometime!—I hope all goes well with you, and Caroline, and the little daughters, and the infant son—

With much love,

Elizabeth

[Enclosed:]

(Later—this is all pretty silly. The only good point is on page 2.)

1.  These will be very petty comments—but things that held me up a bit when reading or possibly one or two small mistakes—Frank & I have argued a lot about most of them!

p.6. “machismo” is accurate for the peacock,²³⁷ of course—but it is such an over-worked word at present … a fad-word, here, at least. I thought it useful when I 1st learned it, in Brazil, about 20 yrs ago; right now I can’t bear it.

p.10. 2. I find the lion (Torcello. I remember it, too) confusing, with C’s poodle (that little white dog?) in the Carpaccio, in Venice.—and can’t make out which one is in the snapshot (possibly). I don’t think you can mean “tealeaf” color which would be almost black after all²³⁸—or is just “strongtea color” implied? I’m fiddling & quibbling—but I am so fond of the images in this one I want to get them right—

p.12. 1. “count”—must mean realize? or “are worth”?—no, “realize”? or both (as F wd. say, because he loves ambiguities)²³⁹?

p.13. 3. “no friend to write to…”²⁴⁰ Oh dear, Cal! The poem being remarkable for its carefulness about the emotions, and its courage, etc.—I can’t quite see this—

4. “thump”—I wonder if C likes this … but because of carpeted maybe the thumps are all right …²⁴¹

p[.]14—“vibrance”? I think you made it up—but suppose it works all right—²⁴²

15. 1. I’d like a comma, after cows I think—because I tend to see the “huddle” of cows & leaves all together—one lump—but maybe I’m supposed to?²⁴³ Not just the cows under the autumn-leaved tree or trees?

17. the “his” in the last line … one has to think & think & think—and then the genders don’t seem to come out right …²⁴⁴

23. 5. (Mermaid) I can’t bear “grapple in the aspic of your flesh”²⁴⁵—Frank & I have argued at length about this … It’s supposed to be violent and jealousy is a hideous emotion, etc.—but aspic is a cold jelly—all right—but “grapple in” well, it is supposed to be horrible, too, perhaps. Frank is so totally bewitched that he even argued for an ambiguity—“aspic” suggesting also Cleopatra’s colloquial word for “asp.” Well, I pointed out to him that this isn’t possible—an “ambiguity” has to work equally well, or at least work, both ways … and you can’t “grapple in” a tiny black snake, but I couldn’t convince him.²⁴⁶ Perhaps I’m just prejudiced from the feminine point of view, having made eggs in aspic, etc etc.—I feel sure you’ll never change this, but it does make me feel sick.

31. I am pretty sure it’s Ernest Thompson Seton—he used to be my favorite author. (I saw “Rolf in the Woods” at the Coop—so I’ll check on it.)²⁴⁷

33. “thirty thousand”—(Frank says it was originally forty…)²⁴⁸ This is the sum Fitzgerald needed annually, I remember.²⁴⁹ But oh dear, it reminds me of that unfortunate remark of Mary’s in an interview a few years back “Of course we’re all much richer now.”²⁵⁰ Well, many of us aren’t and I feel such sums not only tell against the writer of the letter but wd. be held against you.— Of course in time they’ll probably seem absurdly small, too, but they don’t now— But perhaps it is meant just to tell against the correspondent … it certainly does, to me, anyway. But it gives the sonnet—so moving otherwise—a sort of Elizabeth-Taylor-whine air …

39. Really palate?²⁵¹ I always thought that meant the small piece of flesh that hangs downaway at the back of the throat—the OED says it can be the “roof = etc of the mouth” so maybe it’s all right—²⁵²

Somewhere—I can’t find it right now—you wrote “with my fresh wife”—and that seemed just too much, somehow—the word “fresh,” again, had a sort of Hollywood or Keith Botsford feeling that I’m sure you didn’t intend—you’ve avoided it almost completely.²⁵³

2.  Well, I could go on, of course. Most of these are trivialities & some I forgot to mark as I read through the book—many times, now. You know I am quite fiendish about trivialities, however … But right now they don’t seem worth it. I am having trouble trying to decide how to divide this letter, but I think I’ll put all my technical remarks on these pages. This is the one big criticism I’d make:

As far as the story goes—of course you haven’t stuck exactly to the facts, & didn’t have to. But starting about here, I find things a little confusing. here is titled LEAVING AMERICA FOR ENGLAND—obviously, about the idea of that. Then 47, FLIGHT TO NEW YORK. (I wonder if “Flight” is the right word here? (even if you do fly.) Then New York, and Christmas. “swims the true shark, the shadow of departure.”²⁵⁴ That’s all about that. (The N Y poems in themselves are wonderful…) (Can the line about the “play about the fall of Japan” possibly be true.?!)²⁵⁵ But after the “shadow of departure” comes BURDEN—and the baby is on the way. This seems to me a bit too sudden—there is no actual return to England—and the word BURDEN and then the question “Have we got a child?” sounds almost a bit Victorian—melodramatic.²⁵⁶ This is the only place where the “plot” seems awkward to me, and I can fill it in of course—I think it might baffle most readers—

The change, decision, or whatever happens between here & here seems too sudden—after the prolongation of all the first sections, the agonies of indecision, etc.—(wonderful atmosphere of life’s stalling ways…)²⁵⁷

You’ve left out E’s trip to London?—that’s not needed perhaps for the plot—but it might help soften your telling of it?—but I somehow think you need to get yourself back to England before the baby appears like that. (Frank took violent exception to the word bastard, I don’t know why—I think it’s a good old word and even find it appealing & touching. He must have worse associations with it than I have.)

“From my Wife” and “Old Snapshot and Carpaccio” [The Farther Shore 1 and 2], “The Dolphin” manuscript, here; composed and revised between 1970 and January 1972.²⁵⁸

203. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
March 28, 1972

Dearest Elizabeth—

Let me write you right away … thoughtlessly, casually, my first scattered impressions—my thanks. The smaller things. Most of your questions \reservations/ seem likely to [be] right and useful. I can’t tell from a quick reading and haven’t checked your remarks with my lines. I think they will help; please give me more. I am talking about your brief line to line objections. 2) The transition back to London is a hard problem maybe. I’d like to do [it] in two or preferably one sonnet. The pregnancy isn’t meant to come on \New York/, tho it was only a month later, i.e. \when/ we knew or suspected. It’s [a] problem of finding inspiration for a link, I think I can.

Now Lizzie’s letters? I did \not/ see them as slander, but as sympathetic, tho necessarily awful for her to read. She is the poignance of the book, tho that hardly makes it kinder to her. I could say the letters are cut, doctored part fiction; \I/ thought of it (I attribute things to Lizzie I made up, or that were said by someone else. I combed out abuse, hysteria, repetition.[)] The trouble is the letters make the book, I think, at least they make Lizzie real beyond my invention. I took out the worst things written against me, so as not to give myself a case and seem self-pitying. Or maybe I didn’t want to author them. I promise I’ll do what I can to answer your piercing objections \thoughts/. I’ve been thinking of course these things for years almost. It’s oddly enough a technical problem as well as a gentleman’s problem. How can the story be told at all without the letters? I’ll put my heart to it. I can’t bear not to publish Dolphin in good form. I am in no hurry for time, and would love to spend the summer working if the muse lets me.

Salary is complicated. I got $9500, I think eventually at my highest. After three years, I was given rooms at Quincy House free for two or three days a week[,] the expense of commuting. I think all salaries must be higher now. Every two or three years I got a little $500 raise. I may have started at $8500. Also I wasn’t around when I was teaching. I’m sure you will get more. Maybe the best thing is to have someone practical and forceful to handle it for you, but even lambs like us can kick \the bucket over/.

Harriet is with us now, and tho the weather is now suddenly wintry, think it is May with us.

I feel like Bridges getting one of Hopkins’s letters, as disturbed as I am grateful.

Oh, I forgot. If you can get the revised Notebook from Frank, particularly the section For Lizzie and Harriet, but also the latter part of History, you might get a slightly different slant on the meaning of Dolphin. The three books are one heap, one binding, so to speak, though not one book.

All my love,

Cal

204. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
[April 2, 1972]
Easter, 5 P.M.

Darling Harriet:

I meant to write you as soon as I got home, but my hand moves slowly, and my mind slower. It’s gray at Milgate, though the pastures are green, and more things have leafed out since you left four days ago. Two fields have even mysteriously managed to mow themselves.

If you’ve slept as much as I today, you hardly need [to] go to bed at all tonight.

I can’t write how much we, I, loved your visit. I think maybe you are all you ever were only grown up (almost). You are all I asked. Do fathers and even the most brainy mothers have blind eyes? You mustn’t trust them. I am beginning to ramble.… (The four dots are Frank Bidart punctuation)[.] When you hunt chocolate Easter eggs, you can find them by putting your ear to the ground and listening for them to cackle like chickens.

I love you for liking both your father and mother—(another Bidart punctuation) that\’s/ why they are such extraordinarily normal, healthy and modest people²⁵⁹—(B. punctuation) and for never talking too much except on women and politics, particularly your theories on socialism.

Loved your being with me.

Daddy

205. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
Easter Monday, [April 3, 1972]

Dearest Lizzie:

The trip, the visit, is sadly over. I am more happy than I can say to have seen Harriet in bloom, all that has been indicated for many years, all I hoped. Oddly, though now almost grown-up, she reminds me more of how she looked four or more years ago. Thinness? Or something in the character? Joy, amusement, awe and pride.

I’d like to come over for a week near the end of May. Isn’t June tropical? I’d like to avoid that. Each year I grow less tolerant to heat. Talking about weather, we had England’s worst weather during the whole of Harriet’s stay. Today it’s beautiful, as it was the day before she arrived. People are pouring in, Peter and Eleanor²⁶⁰ tomorrow; the Brookses next week.

Thank you for so \lovingly/ sending Harriet.

Love,

Cal

206. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
Easter Tuesday, [April 4], 1972

Dearest Elizabeth:

Harriet has come and gone, and I’m left in a mood of wonder, so well she carried off what had to be difficult, impossible I almost thought. We talked more freely than we ever have (this is age only partly\)/ yet not too much, and no sides had to be taken except humorously. And things went well with Caroline, Harriet’s brother and the other children. \A m/oment not to come again, for there never can be such a moment again, but it is a promise of future happiness.

Let me \re/phrase for myself your moral objections. It’s the revelation (with documents?) of a wife wanting her husband not to leave her, and who \does/ leave her. That’s the trouble, not the mixture of truth and fiction. Fiction—no one would object if \I/ said Lizzie was wearing a purple and red dress, when it was yellow. Actually my versions of her letters are true enough, only softer and drastically cut. The original is heartbreaking, but interminable.

I thought of doing this. It’s just a sketch, because I’ve really only had yesterday to read through The Dolphin, and scribble and sketch. First, the entire “Burden” section should come after “Sickday,” after “Burden” come “Leaving America,” and “Lost Fish,” then all the “To New York” (new title).²⁶¹ This leaves rough edges, and falsifies the actual time sequence, but gets rid of the rather callous happy ending, and softens E’s role in the New York group—she seems rather serenely gracious (I overstate) about my visit after the birth. I can go this far, but won’t bring any post facto business about the baby into the New York section. Two, I take your moral objections are confined to the letters, and not to all of them. Several can be handled and perhaps improved by using some of the lines in italics, and giving the rest, somewhat changed, to me. From my Wife would be called “Voice.”²⁶² Other poems do not need change maybe. “Fox Fur” and “The Messiah” become gentler when the reader assumes the child is born.

This is a sketch and not exactly what I’ll do. The problem of making the poem unwounding is impossible, still I think it can be made noticeably milder without losing its life. It might be much better, for who can want to savage a thing. How can I want to hurt? Hurt Lizzie and Harriet, their loving memory? Working my poem out is a must somehow, not avoidable even though \I/ fail—as I must partially.

What are your plans? I hope to come to New York for a week at the end of May. I wish I could talk to you face to face about this and everything. The cloud of winter seems to have lifted.

Love,

Cal

207. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 9, 1972

Dear Cal: Harriet had a nice visit and came home in good shape, slept for a couple of days almost and now is back at school. New York is alive, sunny chill today, rainy warmth tomorrow. Last week was under the unbearable cloud of the death of Jack’s son, Peter, in an automobile accident.²⁶³ Jack’s life has been built upon catastrophic losses in childhood, and now this. I believe he is all right, but I worry about him. He hadn’t been doing the distressing drinking for sometime and so that is a help—or I hope it is.

One thing I wanted to say to you—rather difficult, but I will try. It seems that agitation about your book has come up again among your friends. I haven’t seen any of the poems based on my letters and I know nothing about the book,²⁶⁴ but I feel a little sad by the vigor of the defense of me and even somewhat bewildered by the terms of it as I understand it. I don’t know what you should or should not do, but it seems to me that you have been writing for thirty years and publishing for nearly the same number. The matter of your work is yours entirely and I don’t think you have it in your power to “hurt” me. I suppose that is something I control since the feelings are mine and perhaps my feelings are not as simple as my friends think. I mean that I cannot see what harm can come to me from a poem by you. Why should I care? The credit or discredit is entirely yours. I don’t see any of this as having anything to do with me in the long run. I just wanted to “go on record” in this. It is certainly a wearisome business by now and I feel strongly that you should do what you wish. I went to Princeton last week with Hannah to hear Nathalie Sarraute. She, N.S., made a deep impression of the most exhilarating kind on me. Very handsome, elegant English, utterly strange and intense ideas of the novel. “You see, I do not believe in zese characters. Zee miser?²⁶⁵ He ees impossible! No?” Last night I had dinner at a friend’s house with Elliott Carter and Charles Rosen—most fantastic conversation about Rousseau’s Confessions and someone’s ideas—a French scholar—that he fabricated the whole thing about sending his children to an orphanage, and even about the existence of the children.²⁶⁶ I got up this morning looking for the Confessions and have found an old copy.

Englishmen are coming here as we are going to you in England. Alvarez is coming or may already be here. I think I will go to the publishing party for him,²⁶⁷ the strange little shark. I have always liked him, but somehow one must be prepared not to like him I suppose.

Another thing—May is looming up as a very busy and inconvenient time for me. In June it will be hot, as you feared, and I think you’d do well to stay at home then. I don’t know how much importance you give to the visit, or how much difference it makes about my own plans—I mean I know you are coming to see friends, publishers, etc. But I am not sure I can spare my studio at the end of May. We can talk further about it, sometime. It isn’t all that near.

I must sign off. Love, from here

Lizzie

208. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 9, 1972

Dearest Mary: To have your own typed letter made me very happy because it meant you were well again.²⁶⁸ Thank heaven it is over. Your courage through it all shouldn’t surprise but yet it always does.

New York is lovely today, cool and sunny. But what will tomorrow bring? I had the most exhilarating visit to Princeton with Hannah to hear Nathalie Sarraute. We were driven by a young pansy named, wrongly, Mr. Bland,²⁶⁹ who is Hannah’s secretary at [the] New School. “I share him with Jonas!”²⁷⁰ I feel in love with N.S.—first her presence, the little wing of grey-black hair falling over the right spectacles, her beautiful English, and the elegant intensity, turning page after page of her lecture, looking up slyly. I was gasping with the pleasure of it. Question period: Hannah: “But when you take the invisible and put it into words then it is in the realm of ‘appearances,’ no?” N.S. “Not precisely.” Hannah closed in, circling, narrowing … finally, N.S. “Ah, as always you are too clever for me,”—sly little smile … We are going back next Thursday, motored by the wild Bland. Even though I teach all day and will have left home at nine to return at midnight the chance, the pleasure are too great to miss.

I hate the idea too of not being in Castine. Mostly because of you, but also I love the whole place. It is very inconvenient, expensive, difficult for me alone. I go up late May to finish the opening—terrible \costly/ airplane, rental car expense—and Harriet gets nothing from it during vacations or in the summer. I have no plans about it. Just as soon as my tenants leave in August I will abandon Olga’s house and come up until school starts. I don’t know how long they will stay, but perhaps they won’t stay all of August. I hope not. And I do plan on Jim touring you to Washington, Conn., to visit me. (When I said I had no plans about it, I meant about selling it. The chance to see you and Jim can hardly be weighed against anything else, alas.)

Oh, Cal’s book.²⁷¹ Yes, I guess that is agitating friends again. I haven’t read any of the letter-poems, but I don’t care at all. The whole thing, Mary, seems to me to have that awful silliness about it—and to think it has been well over a year that Cal has held forth with his friends on the matter, everyone has read the “poems” and Olwyn Hughes even had the whole foolishness in page proof. I cannot imagine anyone else of Cal’s gift and thirty years of writing and publishing being sent telegrams, letters of plea about his work. (Lots of agitation from Bill Alfred, Esther Brooks.) I truly think Cal is in a half-mad state, one I know well, and which I think is his permanent condition. You can function quite well (yes, I like his Berryman piece very well²⁷²) and then again you do very foolish, self-loving things, marked by that hypo-manic inappropriateness of feeling. This whole thing is a sort of half-manic caper and always has been. He hasn’t the intention of “hurting” and hasn’t the intention of the reverse—that doesn’t enter in. He has some idea that there may be one person, reader, who needs to be informed of the background to the Caroline poems; without me he feels—foolishly I think—that it is “incomplete.” I feel very strongly that he has to take his own chances. I can’t see that I can be hurt. He will publish the whole thing someday. The one Bill Alfred read me over the phone was grotesquely bad, as a poem, and I confess I felt I was having some strange, unasked for revenge, instead of the other way around. I truly feel indifferent to it all. Credit or discredit is entirely his. I have written him that I don’t care a fig. I agree with what you said many months ago that his sanctimoniousness were he to refrain is worse than any “betrayal,” if that is what it is. I have the idea the second book Gaia mentioned … hold on … is a re-writing of Notebook, a re-arrangement, now called History! Do you see what I mean about his state of mind, poor old boor. I feel sad about that sort of happy dust²⁷³ he seems to get up and inject himself with every day, because he was once the most beautiful and interesting man. I can’t tell from letters and the phone perhaps but he seems repetitive, rather lacking in any kind of true moral concerns, rather a fallen angel.

Harriet paid \Cal/ a week’s visit. It went perfectly well. I haven’t questioned her too much, as I understand you aren’t “supposed to.”

Much love. I can’t wait until some way of getting together in the summer. I am certainly coming to Paris the next time I go anywhere. Things look a little possible here politically and I guess we are all prepared to find that McGovern has “charisma” and whatever. I would do anything to get Nixon out. What can we do. All of us are full of hope however.

Dearest greetings to you both,

Lizzie

209. Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell

[Cambridge, Mass.]
April 10th (Monday)? [1972]

Dearest Cal:

I have two letters from you here now—& I was so relieved to get the first one, especially—I was awfully afraid I’d been crude, rude, etc … Look—I do see how when you have written—one has written—an absolutely wonderful, or satisfactory, poem—it’s hard to think of changing anything … However, I think you’ve misunderstood me a little.

I quoted Hardy exactly, & the point was that one can’t mix fact & fiction—What I have objected to in your use of the letters is that I think you’ve changed them—& you had no right to do that (?)

---

April 12th—

Well, I was interrupted there and have stayed interrupted for two days, apparently … It was—is—as I was saying—the mixture of truth & fiction that bothers me. Of course, I don’t know anything about your possible agreements with E. about this, etc … and so I may be exaggerating terribly—

To drop this painful subject and go on to the rest—I think the re-arrangements you are thinking of making will improve the last part of the poem enormously—and I see what a lot of hard work they entail, too. The idea of the italics and your saying some lines—sounds fine.

I am so glad Harriet’s visit apparently went off so very well. After all, she has two very bright parents and so must have inherited a good deal of intelligence!

I am getting read[y] to go to New York; the Brazilian anthology,²⁷⁴ or vol. I of it, is to be launched tomorrow at a huge, I gather, party, and I must be there. I don’t want to be especially, but must. This is no real answer to your letters—and thank you for being so frank about the poems—

Just rec’d an ad for a book about you called “Everything to be Endured” …²⁷⁵

I just wanted to get some reply to you in the mail before I left. I’ll be back the 17th or 18th and then I’ll write again. I even have some more of my niggling line-comments, too, if you can bear them. I read your Berryman piece with sadness—also wonder that you could do it all so fast and spontaneously. I have the new book here but haven’t had time really to study the poems yet.²⁷⁶ It is awful, but in general his religiosity doesn’t quite convince me—perhaps it couldn’t quite convince him, either … He says wonderful little things, in flashes—the glitter of broken glasses, smashed museum cases,—something like that.

I am still struggling to put down all my Marianne Moore recollections.²⁷⁷ I’ve also done a couple of poems—one a pretty long one, still being furbished a bit—the first of this batch maybe I’ll enclose.²⁷⁸ It is very old-fashioned and umpty-umpty I’m afraid—but I’m grateful to get anything done these days and one usually starts me off on 2 or 3 more, with luck. Frank has also asked me for a blurb²⁷⁹ and I struggle with the phrases for that in between everything else. It is terribly hard. His poem²⁸⁰ is so personal, so conclusive—so definitive, almost (for Frank)—I don’t see where he can go after that, really. I wish he’d try something easier. He has such amazing taste and sensitivity about other people’s poetry … I wish he were a happier young man. I do think we’ve become very good friends, however. The Paz-es have also been very friendly and we had—I had—an Easter breakfast party—a great success, I think, with Frank doing [his] best at egg-dy[e]ing, and Octavio madly searching my bedroom and bathroom for eggs—all brand new to him. \–these Easter rites–/

It’s spring—first one I’ve seen in many years. I had one wonderful last skiing week-end in Stowe—unbroken fields & mountainsides of snow—and then back here where everything looks very bare and still brown—and the brick walks are still bleached white by all that salt they use in the winter.

I’ll really write again as soon as I return. Elizabeth Cadwalader is arriving to vacuum my house, thank goodness—I hope you’re all well and that Robert Sheridan sits up & takes notice …

With much love,

Elizabeth

210. Robert Lowell to Mr. Frank Bidart

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
April 10 [1972]

Dear Frank:

In the confusion of Harriet[’s] visit and the arrival of the Taylors, I have mislaid your letter—left it in London. So I start again from scratch.²⁸¹ It’s import\ant/, since I am your friend, to state the thing soberly. Blurbs tend to stiffen into honorary degree citations, a form, unlistenable, unbelievable, even when true. I think they exist to make reviewers seems intelligent and, natural and brilliant.

Here goes:

\“/For three or four years, I haven’t forgotten the story and atmosphere of Frank Bidart’s California sequence; it is very painful, and moves in a \dry,/ gruesome glare, heightened—perhaps this is my anti-Californian bias—by flashes of a modern “western”, when the gunslingers are fossils. Bidart’s poetry, unlike most, doesn’t distort or glaze or stand between the reader and the subject.\”/

I’ve read and long thought on Elizabeth’s letter. It’s a kind of masterpiece of criticism, though her extreme paranoia (For God’s sake don’t repeat this) about revelations gives it a wildness. Yet Most people will feel something of her doubts. The terrible thing isn’t the mixing of fact and fiction, but the wife pleading to her husband to return—this backed by “documents.” So far I’ve done this much: I) Most important—Shift Burden before Leaving America and Flight to New York. This strangely makes Lizzie more restful and gracious about the “departure.” I haven’t changed a word to this effect, but one assumes she knows about the baby’s birth. Burden now begins with Sickday, and I think gains much by the baby’s birth not being the climax. 2) Several of the early letters, From my Wife, are now cut up into “Voices” (often using such title) \changing mostly pronouns/ as if I were speaking and paraphrasing or repeating Lizzie. Most of the later letters I haven’t been able to change much or all. 3) Changes for my wish and style, not to do with this business.

Now the book must still be painful to Lizzie and won’t satisfy Elizabeth. As Caroline says, it can’t be otherwise with the book’s donnée. However, even fairly small changes make Lizzie much less a documented presence. A distinct, even idiosyncratic voice isn’t the same as some one, almost fixed as \non-fictional/ evidence, that you could call on the phone. She dims slightly and Caroline and I somewhat lengthen. I know this doesn’t make much sense, but that’s the impression I get reading through the whole. Then Sheridan is somewhat a less forced and climactic triumph; as Ed.’s \wrote/ problem of \the/ getting back to England and into pregnancy is gone; and the very end of Flight, with the shark is less Websterian and Poeish.

Harriet’s visit scared me to death naturally beforehand. But never have we been able to talk so easily. One age. Surprisingly, she both knew about and liked Blue Nun, Irish coffee and champagne. Then she and Caroline would argue with me about socialism and women, both pitifully incoherent \to a man/, especially Caroline, but to my delight agreeing.²⁸² I want to get this off in the car, so will stop. Trust you’ll come sometime in June.

Affectionately,

Cal

---

Give my love to Elizabeth and Bill[.]

211. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
April 21, 1972

Dear Cal: My last letter probably sounded like a mood or a pose of some sort. The crazy thing is that it wasn’t. I have gone over my calendar for May. The only part of the month that I am free of deadlines, visitors, engagements is the week starting Sunday, May 21st. At that time I believe you could stay in your own old studio, the last week before it goes. That would be better for me because I work in my studio, the telephone there is connected with the main one in my apartment, and the whole thing is the only privacy I have. Also, last mention of your book. I was being quite genuine, not angry or ironical. Everyone has seen the poems, a manuscript or two must be floating around. I really don’t see, as I said, that it matters to me one way or another. We always think we are writing our autobiography, but life is not willing to tell \assure/ us which part of ourselves is the main one, which action is telling and what it tells. In that way I guess it is folly to see your life as a book—and such a clue for clever people who come after us to try to pierce our defenses and let out the pus. I am writing something on this—in June!, such is the way I have to plan out everything—in connection with Robert Craft and Stravinsky.²⁸³

Naturally, I am a little fearful of seeing you, of reawakening the great hurt that has at last subsided, thank God! I think you will find me more than a little ahead of where I was—I hope so. I started to say that if the week of the 21st didn’t suit Himself, then September. But I looked at the calendar, both of us start school the first week. And speaking of heat!

With Love,

Elizabeth

212. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
April 24, 1972

Dearest Elizabeth:

I seem to have left your last letter and poem (much turned to) in London, (I almost wrote New York) in a coat left there for another taken. I can’t be as accurate as I’d like. The picture poem and the dentist one are in the clearest of narrative styles, of the best short stories … if quite a long one could be written on a page.²⁸⁴ The picture is more mysterious—when the R.A. turns up I still jump—your relative seemed more of a failure than that—then you see the painting is good enough, that the poem is a life, yours, his, going to age.²⁸⁵ I want to see more of these poems. I’m sure they roll up, a huge story maybe like “In the Village,” gaining in what can be held on to, in graspableness by being poetry.²⁸⁶

Kunitz has similar reservations about Dolphin. But don’t say this; everything seems to get back to Lizzie. There must be heavy changes. But Peter Taylor, a kind soul, has seen my revised Dolphin and saw nothing wrong, except that it needed to be read with the earlier poems about Lizzie and Harriet. I think I’ve at last turned the thing, though there’s still file-work.

I’ll be in New York the week beginning the 21st of May. Will you still be in North America?

From the shattering strength of your letters and your skiing, you are in huge health. Never more force! I hope to get back to tennis, but skiing—the last time I tried about eighty years ago during the war, I failed to stop on a low mound when my skis stopped and fell on my head with my thumb under a ski—broken. Do you believe in Woman Power? I do, the shadow at the end of history. However my son feels the opposite, has broken a kitchen chair, shovels everything (rugs, blankets, silver toys, the little dachshund, Caroline and my fingers) into his two tooth mouth. Our family of women braces itself.

Dear, how I hope you’ll still [be] in Cambridge!

Love,

Cal

213. Robert Lowell to Stanley Kunitz

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
April 24, 1972

Dear Stanley:

I have meant to do something about your book, but had the impression that Witness (bad slip) Testing Tree²⁸⁷ had been to Faber. However my editor Charles Monteith knows about you and is unaware of having been sent Tree. I’m mailing both book and my review this morning. I should have acted ages ago, but the winter has been outwardly troubled and somber for us. Now full spring weather, Ivana back at school, Sheridan eating everything in sight: blanket, rug, small dog, our fingers—a microcosm of James Dickey but on the wagon. Lovely.

About your criticism.²⁸⁸ I expect to be back in New York for a week beginning the 21st of May, and hope to unwind over drinks with you. Dolphin is somewhat changed with the help of Elizabeth Bishop. The long birth sequence will come before the “Flight to New York,” a stronger conclusion, and one oddly softening the effect by giving a reason other than \new/ love for my departure. Most of the letter poems—E. B’s objection they were part fiction offered as truth—can go back to your old plan, a mixture of my voice, and another voice in my head, part me, part Lizzie, \italicized,/ paraphrased, imperfectly, obsessively heard. I take it, it is these parts that repel \you/. I tried the new version out on Peter Taylor, and \he/ couldn’t imagine any moral objection to Dolphin. Not that the poem, \alas,/ from its donnée, can fail to wound. For Harriet and Lizzie doesn’t go with History, it goes before Dolphin, but I thought it was too sensational, confessing, to bring the two books out together. I think you are right, \tho,/ and I’ll do something. History somehow relates \echoes/ and stands aside from the other books. Do you think I could comb out enough excrescencies from History to do much good? The metal too often reforged wears out. Maybe you could put your finger on a few of the worst. It must be as good almost as I can \will/ make it.

How are you and Elise? I have sort of a feeling from your letters that this has been a much healthier winter. You can’t picture our complicated ménage. One thing we’ve discovered, Never employ men, they are forever trying to surpass themselves and everyone else.

Love to you and Elise,

Cal

---

Thankyou as ever for giving so much time and kindness.

214. Frank Bidart to Robert Lowell

[2 Ware Street, Apt. 508, Cambridge, Mass.]
April 30, 1972

Dear Cal,

I’ve just re-read Dolphin in the new order. Let me re-state this new order, in case I have misunderstood: “Sickday,” then all the sections of “Burden” (from “Knowing” through “Robert Sheridan”), then “Leaving America for England,” “Before Womean,” “Flight to New York” (from “Fox-Fur” through “Christmas 1970”), then “Dolphin.”

To my immense depression, I don’t think it works. On the level of “plot,” of course, it does—but it drastically changes the meaning and resonance of a great many of the sections, and ultimately of the whole book.

Lizzie, for example, simply would not write a letter like “The Messiah” after Sheridan’s birth. Knowing about Sheridan, it seems far more pathetic of her to say “I long to see|your face and hear your voice and take your hand.” She doesn’t seem “restful and gracious,” but far more desperate than in the original order. Similarly, she can’t later say “I cannot tell you|the things we planned for you this Christmas season” (plans she had to abandon) if she had known from the beginning you would probably return to England.

But far more important, one’s sense of where you are in the drama, and thus of the emotional meaning and resonance of so many of the lines, is thrown out of whack. It’s hard to pinpoint this in specific lines (though I’ll try). The whole “Burden” section breathes a kind of emotional resolution that seems to say you have been through all the alternatives; the lines have a resonance and rhetorical weight which feel like the end of a poem:

It’s happy to find love with you at last,

now death has become an ingredient of my being:

bloodclot and hemorrhage, today, tomorrow,

like Mother and Father, their youth struck dead at sixty;

I have saved their blood, and hand it on.…²⁸⁹

Without “Flight to New York” preceding this, the sense of resolution comes too abruptly; in the original, there is the sense that you have fought through much more to get here. Even more frustratingly, in the new order, after “Burden” one goes back to the relative bewilderment and emotional thinness (with respect to the relationship with Caroline) of “Flight to New York”:

a feeling,

not wholly happy, of having been reborn.²⁹⁰

Surely, it was a great joy

blaming ourselves and wanting to do wrong.²⁹¹

There’s nothing wrong with these lines, except that they seem inadequate, even a little unfelt, after the intensity and complexity of “Burden”. I don’t feel you would have written them in this order.

For me, the whole ending of the book went out of focus. After the birth of Sheridan, it’s hard to know what the flight to New York means to you; in the original, because the relationship with Caroline at this point is so much less resolved, there is the sense that you have to go back to New York to see if anything is left. (And Caroline feels the threat—e.g., “Departure at the Air Terminal”.) This seems largely gone in the new version—even Lizzie has acknowledged it (she has already told Caroline that Harriet “knows she will seldom see him”²⁹²). The whole process of going back, implicitly searching for something and not finding it (especially in “No Messiah” and “Sleepless”), now has much less force, much less pathos.

It’s true, as you say in your letter, that in the original order the birth of Sheridan comes to have a tremendous symbolic weight—one wonders if any child can mean the “death-fight” fought throughout the book is over. But for all the reasons I’ve been trying to give—especially in sections like “Morning Away From You,” where the sense of resolution and happiness is bound up with feeling the “ingredient” of your own death—Sheridan’s birth doesn’t have to do all the work. If there is a problem here (and it doesn’t bother me) I don’t see that the new order satisfyingly solves it.

Also, the seasons get terribly confused. After the “summer” sections early in the book, Sheridan is born; can “Christmas” then be the first Christmas after you have gone to England? Somehow, in the new version, one still feels it is the first Christmas; but then all the emotions, turmoil and sense of emotional resolution in “Burden” happen in the nfew months of fall after the “summer” poems. They then seem too abrupt—it trivializes them. If “Christmas” is a full year and a half after the “summer” sections, it seems too far away. I’m not saying at all that one consciously counts the months when reading the poem—just that something seems disjointed about the passage of the seasons. I miss the suffocating uncertainty and intensity of Christmas after the vacillation, the pain of the fall, followed by nine months of pregnancy, where a kind of order and peace is slowly found again.

The abruptness of “Burden” after “Flight to New York” (Elizabeth’s worry) just doesn’t bother me. Perhaps in the title of this section you could make it clear you’re back in England (though the poem is clearly addressed to “Caroline”). In fact, I like this abruptness—the poem isn’t a chronicle, and after the departure from New York the next crucial event, through which all of your conflicting emotions begin to be worked out, is the fact of²⁹³

215. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
May 6, 1972

Dearest Lizzie:

I don’t think I am going to be able to make the trip this spring. Ivana sometime soon is going to have another operation. One of her grafts has grown tight and woodlike, so that she has to bend when she walks, and has pains. We hoped to put this off for a year, but it now seems unlikely. It’s not a major operation, but a tense and painful one.

Also the other day when we were driving to Maidstone in a taxi, a car about twenty feet in front and going in the opposite direction turned without looking into a filling station on our side of the road—that awful few slow seconds when you know you’ll—and we hit. No injuries except I soon had a huge lump on my shin. It will last far into summer, but is not dangerous or painful. I still feel shaken.

I’ve talked to Stephen Spender who brought me good news of you and Harriet’s visit. Has her French tour come off? She might, as I so wish, stop off here, either going or coming. I dearly wish I could come to New York very soon. I trust my nerves though \saying “don’t.”/ My teaching schedule will be improved (less work for less pay) and I will teach four days a month all at once \in sequence./ So I will be free to fly almost any time in the fall, avoiding the steam and rush of September.

Michael Henshaw who manages my taxes etc. will shortly be in New York and will call on you about the Harvard papers. Anything reasonable will suit me. I do want to end life financially independent. I suppose Henshaw is too “rough diamond.”

Good times with the Brookses and Taylors. Talk sightseeing etc. The Taylors have seen so much, they are ready to drop from fatigue \over-knowledge/, yet no one can discover which of the family drives them on and on. I was nearly killed by both Peters independently, looking to the left when they should look right. I don’t think I’d last a day driving in England.

Good remarks of yours about “autobiography[.]” In the best art, as in life, all the blood-veins go to the heart.

All my love,

Cal

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P.S. The Brontës is one of your best portraits.²⁹⁴ Very superior to the New Wuthering Heights I saw In Maidstone.²⁹⁵ Excited to read your whole book.

216. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
May 6, 1972

Darling Harriet:

As I have just written Mother, I don’t think I can make New York this spring. Ivana will soon have to have another operation, not dangerous but tense and grueling. She has already outgrown one of her important grafts, and walks stooped.

I will write you in slightly more detail than I wrote Mother about our car accident. We had slipped off a mid-Sunday afternoon to an adults only \Maidstone/ crime movie, after twice narrowly missing death with Peter Taylor and Peter Brooks, neither of whom understood English left side driving. A taxi man was driving us, one of the safest. Suddenly about the length of the big parlor in your apartment, a car (not American!) and going in the opposite direction, turned fully across the road ahead. For a forever of fifteen (?) seconds I saw us in slow motion about to hit. Not a thing I could do. My whole life didn’t pass before my imagination, no brilliant deep thoughts, no blood-gush of new compassion—I did stretch my arms in front of Caroline to break her fall. The cars hit and stopped with wrinkled fenders, I felt a small pain in my shin, and saw a slight scratch. Threequarters through the crimefilm (full of accidents much like ours) I felt a stretching tight of my leg-skin and some pain. I touched my leg, and found a bump like a second knee on the side of my leg. The bump will bulge for a long time, but doesn’t hurt much and isn’t dangerous. It’s handy to persuade people to fetch my things like a cigarette lighter.

Now I will certainly be home in the fall. I wonder—we beg you—to consider stopping off here a few days on your European circuit. Sheridan has just had a terrible half-hour of taking a bath with Genia and her friend Kay, both saying “you are so manly.” A few days ago, he mistook (?) Bosun’s ear for a blanket, and might have eaten him—so Bosun says. I think he needs your mature touch. So do I.

All my love,

Daddy

217. Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
May 15, 1972

Dear Frank:

I’ve neglected answering because I was waiting for your History notes, and also because I imagined it I would soon be in America. But Ivana will have to have another operation in the next few weeks, and the time doesn’t seem very fortunate with Lizzie before the divorce gets planned.

Your remarks on Dolphin are too profound and detailed for me to handle them in a letter. Besides you would have to see the new text before we would have our feet on the earth. The thing is I must shift the structure and somehow blunt and angle the letters. The new structure, with the alteration of a few lines here and there, seems a big improvement to me. I had meant to end with The Flight to New York sequence, even after R.S.’s birth conception, but feared I would be lying. Now The “departure” is the real, though not chronological ending; it will of course seem to be both the real and chronological ending because I place it at the end—not from anything I say. Sophistry? No, not entirely. this \This/ is the real truth of the story and is in a way happening again now. The letters are not really changed to improve—the most I can hope is to lose nothing … to both lose and gain. I do think Elizabeth is mostly right, though is peculiarly (almost unintelligibly) sensitive to private exposure. Her letter to me was as powerful criticism as I’ve ever gotten—usually she writes me about this phrase or that.

Affectionately,

Cal

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P.S. What can we say of the War! Sorry you’ve been ill. We’ve had a rather hard winter; it’s better now.

218. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 1, 1972

Dear Cal: I tried to phone you on this urgent, perplexing matter. Here it is. Starting in Feb. I wrote Michael Henshaw that we needed simple material for the 1971 income tax, the year ending Dec. 31, 1971. He never answered and then I wrote again and he said that he was coming in May, early. I wrote back that we had to file on April 15th; he wrote back saying we should get an extension until June 15th. I wrote back saying that was a bit risky—pay interest on months beyond April 15, have more and more meetings, quite expensive, with my accountant, make an audit more likely and I am not really in good shape for an audit since I’ve had to “improvise” expenses, etc., these last years. But we asked for the extension. No Henshaw; two cables, no answer. Here it is now June 1, weekend will pass; I will be going away the 15th. All of this is very, very distressing and quite frightening to me.

I told Henshaw I did not need any money because I have it from what you gave me the year before. All I really must have are the earnings, deductions, English taxes paid on Essex Jan. 1971–Dec. 31, 1971 and a listing of miscellaneous earnings, a few readings, Ashley Famous.²⁹⁶ \Very simple./

As for this year, that is another matter. I hope we will be legally separated by the end of Dec. and in that case you will do your own American earnings taxes—royalties, I think \also/ you list what you give Harriet and me but I pay the taxes. However until then I have been paying or will, when I get the information, the estimated 1972 tax for both, which we will adjust later. You would have to pay it to three sources quarterly otherwise. Actually you’ll have to get a tax man for here.

But all I need now are the records for the year well gone by. Cal, if you can’t get Henshaw you must ask Essex to mail the day—airmail—you get this letter the records for the year 1971, starting Jan. ending Dec. And send a few other statistics, like a few readings. I can get in terrible trouble here, fines, months of investigation, trouble for signing your name, etc. I must get this before June 12th and so it must be acted on immediately.

Harriet is marvelous, taking exams now and next week. She will go to Washington, Connecticut[,] with me and in July go to Choate School²⁹⁷ for a summer program—boys and girls in dorms, studying things they are interested in. She’s taking “Choate Film Institute”—and maybe something else, history. This is just for fun. We couldn’t begin to afford the Europe trip and both of us have the electoral frenzy and wouldn’t want to be away this summer in any case. I am having a good time, feel wonderful. Will give a lecture at Harvard Summer School (that does not contribute to my “wonderful,” but I guess I’ll get through it). Esther and Dixey²⁹⁸ were here and will be coming back. Everyone is very well that I know about. Your studio has at last been dismantled; the books go out today as soon as I get up to the dust infested upper reaches here and move everything to make room for your books. Was up in Maine last week to open up my house for tenants. The town was shining and blue-sparkling, house and barn lovely, grassy, sunny. The Thomases very well. I don’t mind not goin[g] up, though. It is too far and Connecticut, going back and forth a good deal from the city, sunning, writing, having friends visit is just what I want. Love,

Lizzie

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After June 15th—Washington, Connecticut 06793 Phone 203 UN 8-2545

219. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
June 28, 1972

Darling Harriet:

I am up early this morning to write you. I have been working like a steamshovel, if a steamshovel works, for the last month and have been too slothful, unversatile or self-indulgent to do anything else, I mean to write letters, I mean to write you. Devie²⁹⁹ was here yesterday for the night. [She] reminded me of you, too much so that it was painful to me, and I knew how terribly I miss you. I could have given the money for your trip to Europe.

How are politics? It’s hard for old Eugene McCarthyites to rave about McGovern—it’s the sentimental Irish lost cause passion that’s somewhere in all of us. I suppose, I know McGovern is all we’ll get, and maybe that even isn’t likely. I wonder what Miami will be like. In the last Democratic Convention, I never left my Chicago hotel, but police and demonstrators were all about us. This won’t be that way.

Today we set off for Norwich to get, for me to get a doctor’s degree.³⁰⁰ It’s a lot of trouble getting \training/ there and the degree has no money value, of course, and not much honor—but here in this far country, away from so much, I am rather touched.

Devie thinks you have your head screwed on—I wonder where you inherited that, not from Cousin Natalie or the Winslows. But what has Sheridan inherited? He is now so overnordic looking that he makes Willi Brandt look like Jason Epstein. And he has devoled³⁰¹ alarmingly, can crawl wide rooms and long halls in seconds, and also loves to destroy—the more irreplaceable the object destroyed, the better it pleases him—a dear unanswered letter on a window seat. He is very beautiful. Yesterday he stuck his tongue out all day, with a meditative profound, or stupid expression. H[e] has redgold hair now and dark questioning eyebrows, like Devie’s. I am at the end of the page, I think. Goodbye. Caroline sends all her love, give mine to Mother.

All my love,

Daddy

220. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
July 8, 1972

Dearest Elizabeth:

We’ve been working like steam-engines; no, very hard \but/ like human beings. Pardon me for not answering. I think of you every day, and of course Frank is a constant reminder of you.

The work is rather peculiar and sounds³⁰² almost insane. We’ve gone over almost 400 old Notebook poems, with an average I suppose of 4 changes a poem, tho often the whole poem torn up trying to get rid of muddy lines, dead lines etc. I dictate the changes to Frank. Often there are many alternates, and more come to me as I talk. He remembers everything, and keeps me from throwing \out/ silver spoons. Notebook was such a wilderness, now I think you’ll [like] it better. Kunitz thinks it’s transformed. Why boast? But I do think Frank will stay here a little longer. We just can’t get through by the 15th. That’s why I’ve given you this formidable account of my methods. I do feel guilty about his not going to Brazil, but think he wants badly to finish what’s so largely done.

Not much news. Caroline is off to an all-day school picnic and circus with Ivana, the little girl who was burned. I think we’ll \go/ to Ireland for two weeks or so in August. When are you coming to Europe? I gather it will be early August. We do so wish you’d stop off here with \us/ on your way. I could time the Ireland so as to be here. You and Kunitz are the only close American friends we haven’t had. I want you to meet Caroline. She has gotten as bad as I about revising and sits on her bed all day with long foolscaps in front of her. She almost finished a book of short stories this winter—along with looking after, with help, three children, and in vacations four.³⁰³ The nicest more or less new person I’ve met is Angus Wilson. Met when I got a degree at Norwich, as beautiful in its way as Ouro Preto, at least when we came on it from a distance, and saw it during the long English twilight.

I like all your poems—most the Night Flight,³⁰⁴ another of your best and one I might just not have known was by you. Very directly grim. Moose³⁰⁵ has lovely moments, but others maybe too close to light verse. The midnight prose poem³⁰⁶ is eerie, hard to compare with the others, because it couldn’t have been written in verse. Then the marvelous RA painting poem.³⁰⁷ You’re sailing! I can’t send you anything quite finished. I’m trying to be simple sensuous and garceful³⁰⁸ \bad word for a typo/. My new poems, about four are additions to the long poems. I’m sure you’ll \find/ Dolphin less excruciating; it can’t I’m afraid entirely come clear of that. The new order, due to you, helps everything.

All my love,

Cal

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Ps. I haven’t read your anthology really,³⁰⁹ but have gone over the Drummond religiously and find him one of the best living poets—a quieter Montale.

221. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Washington, Conn.]
July 25, 1972

Dearest Cal: Did you receive a copy of the letter I wrote to Mr. Henshaw soon after he left? I have a great many business matters, some very pressing, that I wish to write to whatever person is representing you. Is it Mr. Henshaw? Do you have a lawyer there in England who knows your affairs. You will probably need an American accountant and perhaps your representative could write the one we have been using, who does know your business pretty well. As I told Henshaw I have not paid any of your \quarterly/ 1972 American taxes, only my own.

I want to get our divorce \over/ as quickly as possible. I will start the minute I get back to New York and hope it will go through \smoothly/. It will not be what it has been in the way of money. The only reason I can say now that I am glad I waited before filing is that I have had two years in which to straighten things out, two years in which I have worked constantly. I haven’t enough to live on and can’t pay Harriet’s tuition this fall. But I do not wish to go into all of this with you, by mail. It just isn’t a good idea. Also there are many things about the Harvard papers that disturb me. The papers themselves, some very damaging to both of us, my own work on them, the fact that I included everything of my own except your letters to me—my correspondence with Mary McCarthy is a good example—and a great deal of other material. I should have had my own arrangement with Harvard, but the actual selling, the removal from the house came about so quickly—and in some funny way I just wasn’t able to take a stand on my rights and was a bit too sentimental I fear.… But, as I said, I just can’t deal with you personally about this in letters. Please let me know with whom I can communicate, and it must be someone who will answer promptly and efficiently. I need $1600 right away for the FIRST HALF of Harriet’s \yearly/ tuition. All of this will be written into the separation of course. Also I think I should remind you that you will have to pay the lawyer’s fee in total—that is usual—and this is not a simple case. Thank heaven, your situation is so extraordinarily good financially that you won’t have to suffer at all. I would hate it otherwise—and indeed I see no reason why you should be bothered about any of this. The only thing that I want to be sure of is that you know what is ahead. I will ask for $10,000 as my part of the Harvard papers, my work on them, selling them, looking after them, all of that goes in. Actually I am still in correspondence with the library and I imagine they will \confirm/ my idea of what my contribution has been in this.

Sorry to have to write this, but I am very eager to go ahead and I know that makes you and Caroline happy. I do not want any disagreement or resentment. It would be bad for Harriet and I feel nothing at all right now except that Harriet and I must be dealt with fairly because we are very vulnerable. Otherwise I’d say we had survived very well and no one need feel guilty.

I have had a nice summer, but very busy. I don’t like Connecticut much and I am glad to know that. Actually I haven’t been here all the time, far from it. In late August I will go up to Maine for ten days or so. I love the community there, but I plan, as a part of my reorganization to keep from going broke, to sell the house and keep the barn for renovating into a small, easy place for whatever part of the summers I will spend there. It probably won’t be all summer any longer. I long, though, for the tennis, the Thomases, Mary, Ken’s Market, Phil Booth.

Harriet is fine. She has been in Choate Summer Program for three weeks and will be back with me in about four days. I was at Harvard last week, saw Bill Alfred, Bob Gardner, went to Manchester³¹⁰ for a few days, past the gray “terminal days” in Beverly Farms house,³¹¹ talk of Rock, Dunbarton, Grandpa.³¹² It seems like a century ago, doesn’t it. In a way it was a little bit like going back to Kentucky for me; I mourn the loss \sudden diminishment/ of nostalgia and sentiment for the loss of the place. What is sad is that finally things are just as if they had never been. Of course if it were otherwise we couldn’t live I suppose. Much love, dear, and good health.

Lizzie

222. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Elizabeth Hardwick Lowell

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
[July 28, 1972]

CARPACCIO’S CREATURES: Separation³¹³

To Elizabeth

From the salt age\s/, aye from the salt age,

courtesans, Christians, they filled the barnyard close.

The tree with a skull for a cap is a silly swelled tree;

Carpaccio’s Venice is broader by, the world, \soured saint/

than the life Jerome w\c/ould taste and pass.

\And honeyed lion mutter to work unfeared./

In Torcello, venti anni fa,³¹⁴

the lion, snapped behind you, has poodled hair,

whernever you move, no sooner he has moved.

Lion marblewhiskers. Priest and beast

leap in Carpaccio’s tea-leaf color. Was he

the one in the trade who wished to tell tales?…

You are making Boston alone in the early A.M.,

having left Harriet

having left Harriet at camp.… Old Love,

Eternity, Thou, mothbitten time!

Dearest Lizzie—I really was going to write, and thinking of some enclosure to fill out the letter because I am \too/ groggy with mental \health/ pills to write much. Will you like it? This is an awful new Czech machine that bites my fingertips each [time] I touch it. The poem? As I \descend/ deeper in reality and age I seem to write with Mallarmean simplicity. I really did\n’t/ know what [day] or month it was. Happy birthday, happy anniversary.³¹⁵ What I feel most is your writing about \me/ etc.³¹⁶ I’ve thought \always known/ it was one [of] the things you do best. Why not publish, then I could read a copy? Or can I any way. All my [love] to les deux

Love,

Cal

223. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
August 2, 1972 (?)³¹⁷
It’s the day, not the year I’m
Unsure of.

Darling Harriet:

I guess you’re just beginning your vacation at last. I hope you love it. I can’t pity you too much, a writer works like a woman, not just from sun to sun, his work is never done. Just last night when half asleep two inspired lines came to me:

“The monologuist tries to think something out

while talking, maybe thinks fine things, yet fails.”

Oddly enough I was writing about myself.

We have a noisy disturbed life. Sheridan managed to do something to a light connection that instantly short-circuited a third of the house. Frank Bidart is here and a great comfort to me, but the other day he came quite shaken into my study holding up a thick black sock, one of mine that had mistakenly been put in his drawer—and one of his was missing. To my nearsighted eyes there was no difference, but to his it was a tragedy. Also he has gained 12 pounds from drinking four thermos bottles of bitter black coffee and eating two icecream and cake cobblers a day. We had our car stolen again, now recovered. Genia and Natalya have just gone off to camp, much missed but leaving with the feeling of an army evacuating. We have two minute childish dogs named Sonnet, and Nerva. I went to a party in London and met a man who knew Kay Meredith, but not Susie Keast, or Bill Meredith.³¹⁸

Gosh I miss you. Though somehow after your visit you seem so closer, I can almost talk out loud to you—even when you don’t answer. O, trivia again, last week I got a manly bluejean suit and four leather slippers, the first unsleazy man’s clothes I’ve found in England.

What happened to Devie Meade, she was supposed to come back here? Sheridan has her eyebrows. He can crawl about as well as a small puppy now, and follows better, and has one intelligible word: Dada. I’m the only man he has ever seen except for Peter Taylor and Frank Bidart, Caroline handles him like a fish-puppy.

My dearest love to mother and

You.

Daddy

224. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Elizabeth Hardwick Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent, England
[August 11, 1972]

Dear Lizzie—

Here’s the check. It was lovely talking to you the other day. Will write more later.

Love,

Cal

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I’ve cancelled the Harvard till [I] can talk with you in October. It’s like willing one’s gristly bones to posterity.

225. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[Card: “Warrior in the Costume of the Dog Dance,” from Wied-Neuwied’s Travels in … North America. London, 1843–44. Rare Book Division. The New York Public Library.]

[Washington, Conn.]
[n.d. summer 1972]

Am leaving Connecticut. Will be off and on in New York until August 24, then up to Maine until Sept. 4. I wish we could stay longer in Castine—can hardly wait for Mary who is offering dinner when [we] arrive, the courts at four, cocktails and music. Harriet is off visiting a friend in L. Island; I enclose Choate “Film Institute” report as a nice joke.³¹⁹ She is going to [the] Republican Convention with me—just for the Miami Beach fun, if such it can be called.³²⁰ The Democratic was rather gay because every writer you knew in the world almost was in the Doral Bar all day, where waitresses in black leather hot pants and plastic boots look about twenty years from the back and prove to be their authentic seventy when they turn a sun-tanned, dentured, fantastic taste face toward you with the bloody Mary. The Fountain Blue (Fontaine-bleu Hotel) is a Jewish brothel fantasy, beefy Cubans, for Wallace, drive all the cabs. I hope the “kids”—Dave Dellinger!—do not insist on some sort of confrontation with Nixon, but I fear they will. I have been working hard all summer at sundry “free lance” unnecessary articles,³²¹ but I have made enough money to turn down everything I don’t want to write for a while … Am watching a scruffy, seal colored woodchuck graze on weeds, then lift a greedy snout, listening, then back to the speedy feeding. He weighs a ton and alas has the human aspect in certain munching profiles.³²² Am reading Clive Bell’s Virginia Woolf;³²³ gets fairly good toward the middle, but why must they recreate the nursery, the early scenes, when they never seem the least bit like what a rare person could be as child. I find contemporary biographies really trapped in a bad tradition. It is so hard to take this when you’ve been reading Rousseau all summer. The only thing contemporary I like in this vein is my beloved Bob Craft’s work. This intense, rare gift of his, the daring of it—that is what is necessary to bring a life into being on the page. Then the egotism of Bloomsbury weighs a little. Somehow it makes you think back with pride on the frontier intransigence, the eccentric provinciality that made Randall’s aesthetic snobbishness so passionate and valuable.

No more! I’ve had a good summer; the best part of it going in and out of New York where, as usual, you find everyone you thought was away. And what a relief to know that I do not want to live in Connecticut. Can’t see the point of it for me, nothing to do, although there have been many friends about. I like Castine, at the moment, but want to simplify it and not feel so much committed, to use it when I feel like it. Goodbye fer now, as Mrs. Farley used to say.

see note below.³²⁴ Love,

Elizabeth

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\Please write asking him to give material to me, my lawyer or your lawyer. Otherwise they won’t.

Creighton Gatchell

State St. Bank & Trust

Boston, Mass. 02101/

226. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
September 16, 1972

Dear Cal: I tried to get Blair in Princeton, where he lives now, so that he could pass on my progress to you about legal matters, but he has been in Washington working for McGovern and I guess has muchas problemas on that score. I have my lawyer, Mr. Ben O’Sullivan, and have had a long talk with him and am getting all the material together. Next step—you and I will talk, then you will talk about what you have talked to me about with your lawyer, then they will talk, then B.O’S. will draw up a separation divorce agreement, then it will go back and forth from there. These are not easy matters, the lawyers are busy, but I will do everything possible to keep them at it. I hope Blair will find someone for you not too high-powered and bitchy because that will hold things up. I plan to present not outrageous demands but exactly what I will not budge from. Anyway, when you all get here call me and we will talk over all of it, which I will have clearly in my mind by then.

I am swamped with work of all kinds, but I am trying to fit in first some tedious stuff the lawyer wanted me to draw up for him. I fear if I wait a week it will not set the tone of speed I wish to impress upon him. Otherwise, let’s see. Harriet starts school at last next week, but has a really horrifying schedule of six full academic courses, also required art and dance (exercise). On Fridays she doesn’t even have lunch. This is not the school’s fault. In the high school there everyone is taking his own schedule just as if it were college. But she is getting off her requirements in science, math, and what with two languages, English (now also an elective and for her “Greek Tragedy and Comedy[”]) and History—ach! Poor little creature.

Esther Brooks’ brother died in a drowning accident and she has been back in America—stayed with me³²⁵

227. Charles Monteith to Mr. Robert Giroux

Faber and Faber Ltd Publishers, 3 Queen Square,
London WC1N 3AU
September 21st, 1972

Dear Bob,

ROBERT LOWELL

Last week I went down to Maidstone to see Cal and Caroline and to stay the night with them. Cal handed over what he optimistically describes as the “final” version of his three new books: HISTORY, FOR LIZZIE AND HARRIET, and THE DOLPHIN.

As you’ll see from this, NOTEBOOK has now been split into two: 1) HISTORY—which in its present form consists of 155 pages of typescript. It includes 80 new poems which didn’t appear in any of the \previous/ versions of NOTEBOOK, and in addition, of course, he’s reworked quite a number of the poems that have already been published.

2) FOR LIZZIE AND HARRIET. The title is self-explanatory. It’s a short book—34 pages of typescript; and all the poems have already appeared in NOTEBOOK.

THE DOLPHIN. 61 pages of typescript—a sequence of love poems written to Caroline. None of these have yet appeared in book form anywhere.

All three have now been handed over to our production department, and our very approximate production schedule is as follows:

Galleys: early December

Page proofs: early February

Shee[t]s (and repro pulls): early April

Publication date: it looks as if the very earliest we could publish would be mid or late June. We fully appreciate of course that you must publish before we do; so when we get nearer the time, perhaps you could fix your publication date and let me know what it is to be. We’ll then fix ours.

I do stress that this timetable is extremely approximate. Mr Peter Moldon—who’ll be looking after all three books in our production department—will keep in touch with you when dates become more definite.

Format. As agreed with Cal, we’ll be following the format of the earliest Farrar Straus edition of NOTEBOOK for all three volumes.

Proofs. We’ll be sending you galleys and page proofs when they’re ready—but these of course will simply be for your information. Cal warned me that he would probably rewrite quite a bit in galley—I’ll be very surprised indeed if he doesn’t—but he promised to be a good boy about page proofs. Let’s see what happens! We’ll arrange of course for Cal to read proofs here and they’ll also be read by our own proof-reader.

I expect you’ll be seeing Cal very shortly—if you haven’t done so already. He’s going over to the States for six weeks or so, mainly I think to see to the divorce proceedings.

Robert Sheridan Lowell, whom I met for the first time, was in fine form. He’s walking already—and walking very expertly too—though he’s still not quite a year old.

With all best wishes,

Yours ever

Charles Charles Monteith

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P.S. I suppose we shall have a separate contract for LIZZIE AND HARRIET. Would the same terms as those we agreed on for THE DOLPHIN be all right? They were: a royalty of 12½% to 2500, 15% thereafter, and an advance of £200 on publication.

If these are agreeable to you, perhaps you could ask Gerald Pollinger to send me a contract.

228. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
Sept. 28, 1972

Dearest Harriet:

I’ll be seeing you very soon, on the 9th of October. Never has time moved so fast. I’ve been writing rather steadily all summer, and now when I look up the tops of trees are yellow, and it is cold to get up sometimes in the morning. Sheridan is now one. He surpassed himself at his party. The birthday cake with its one candle was unwisely put on the floor, soon he had rammed into it with his musical lawnmower. Almost every inch of the mawner³²⁶ was sticky with cake and its music had stopped. Then he was given a large ball and sent to a far corner of the room. Suddenly through three large women, he dropped the ball on the middle of the cake. But there is worse. Last he met his first girlfriend-guest, Olivia Pearson, age eight months. He was gently patting her hair (his own is tangly now and rather better) then suddenly she was blushing red and alas crying. There’s such a thing as being too healthy, as you will see when you see him.

Ah me, it seems unimaginable to be back again in New York, but it always did from Maine, and I guess in a few hours I’ll feel I never left. Or will I?

Caroline sends her love. Mine to Mother. Rather an awful visit, but it must be.

all my love,

Cal

229. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop

[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
[October 31, 1972]

Dearest Elizabeth—

I’m so glad you wrote because I didn’t think we parted on the right note—so much so I didn’t quite know how to write. The trip has left us bone-tired, not in spirit so much as physically—I could use one of Mailer’s irritating metaphors, a boxer who has been punished for ten rounds.

I am sore about my alimony, though it’s quite bearable and more or less what I outlined in my mind two and a half years ago. I keep what I make: salary, manuscript sale, royalties, I lose everything inherited, all trust interest, NY apartment,³²⁷ Maine house and barn—I thought they were Lizzie’s in Cousin Harriet’s will, but as I had forgotten, they were half mine by Maine law—all this is OK, but it’s the small things, the difficulty of getting personal or family things, my books, silver spoons etc. I have no need of furniture, but all of ours I paid for, and some pieces were in my parents’ house when I was five, or seven or eight. Well, I want little, not even many books; there’s a clause in the alimony agreement saying we should agree on what should be mine—and doubtless when emotions are less keen we will agree, since not more than a couple of thousand dollars at most is in question. What really bothers me though is that Harriet will receive nothing of consequence from me—the alimony provides for her tuition through graduate school and further, but to be handled by Lizzie. I feel Harriet has been stolen from me like the dozen silver spoons. Of course, there are provisions for mutual consultation on her life and education—unenforcible if we are in a temper, as we are now, and mustn’t be later when our blood cools—for everyone’s good. So it will be, God willing—today I am enjoying the luxury of steaming.

Frank’s dedication³²⁸—here’s what happened (but no one concerned can tell the same story about something even as simple as this). I think I said to Frank last winter that I ought to dedicate History to him, but that this seemed odd because he was really a collaborator. Anyway I totally forgot and dedicated it to Kunitz, who had written me a powerful letter about it,³²⁹ had recently nearly died, to whom for ages I had wanted to dedicate a book, etc. Frank was so upset, I made a double dedication, a solution like splitting a Bollingen, that no one quite relishes, but the only possible way out for me. I haven’t dared tell Kunitz and meant to if I had had a chance to see him, not just talk to. Now I will. It’s hard to express how much Frank’s work with me was worth, and is—without giving an immodest evaluation to my poem. There’s no other book to dedicate—the For Lizzie and Harriet is itself a dedication, and the Dolphin must be to Caroline. I’m so glad you really like her—I assumed so somehow—perhaps Frank has copies of some of her things.³³⁰ He must have. We’re so bad about parcelling and mailing, and only have one copy of most things.

Oh God, Dear one, I do feel you must have security. I don’t think I’ve undermined you, cannot remember not being open about my return—somehow Bloomfield assumed I had resigned when I hadn’t.³³¹

If I weren’t still tired I’d tell you humors of our San Domingo days—I’d say with my whole heart, we (you & I) are together till life’s end,

All my love,

Cal

230. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent, England
November 3 \6/, 1972

Dearest Harriet:

This letter is dated wrong because somehow I got an idée fixe that the election day was November 4 instead of 7. The last days are an agony to read about, it will be merciful when it’s all over.³³² McGovern must feel that he is living a waking nightmare that he can’t stop. It’s strange to be writing you such things. I remember when my letters were all jokes. Better that way.

Yesterday a herd of twenty very handsome and very stupid cows got into our grounds. I think they are dumber, more harmless and stupider than guinea pigs.³³³ I would chase them away from the garbage cans, then they’d slowly shuffle away and attack what was left of the roses. The worst was when they leapt a barb wire fence, putting one hoof on the top wire and bending it down. After a while, and slow as glue, I got them all uninjured back to their pasture. Cows are the same as little animals, only less bright. Size doesn’t mean anything unless it sits on you.

We went through our divorce and marriage on schedule—a few errors such as not having any passports or identification when we stood before the divorcing judge. Santo Domingo where it all happened is much like Porto Rico, only the Spanish speaking people are at least half negro, and the blessing and disadvantages of America are hidden. Also hidden is the body of Christopher Columbus buried there. Miles of beaches but unswimmable because of barracudas and sharks pursuing sewage.³³⁴ I quite enjoyed the swimming pool; actually cooler than the air.

Somehow I miss you even more than ever, and brood about it, and even wake up brooding. You must (I mean we invite you) to come here Easter. Maybe bring a friend and see more movies in London. Or all kinds of things that aren’t movies. We plan to be at Harvard beginning in September, in the country if possible. I’ll only be an hour or so away from you.

A miracle happened with Sheridan at Bill Alfred’s. You know how every inch of his house is covered with reachable breakables. This was doubled by the Brooks’s using his house as storage for part of the furniture [from] the Cambridge house they just sold. Sheridan somehow got interested in doing vaudeville with Bill’s hat, a carrot-grater and a milk bottle. Just as we were leaving, the last hour, he realized what a chance he had missed and rushed for the dishes on low shelves. We stopped him. So much stronger are years than youth.

But what is strong? I miss you so. All my best to mother.

Love,

Daddy

231. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent, Eng.
November 21, 1972

Dearest Harriet:

I sharpened the brown pencil for about five minutes in order to do my first Sumner, though you may not recognize him. Then confident with failure, I tried my second in blue ink. I see that though I hate non-representation in all the arts, I will never be a lifelike painter. However, the purpose of my drawings is to make it easy for you to write me a letter. It’s hard to write; it’s harder for your father not to have an answer, not ever to hear.

For some crazy reason, we have had five sunny days out of six here, a record for southern England. On the sixth, a heavy rain fell blown by winds that bent large trees double. It left a lake on the flat roof over my study, and for twenty hours a steady heavy drip, caught by six dishpans and a rubber wastebasket. Then a man who knew came and the leaks stopped.

The Academy of American Poets is putting on a small memorial for Ezra Pound on January 4, and will pay my passage.³³⁵ I plan to come (if I can get my passport back from the Home Office). I particularly promise myself that I will see you.

My teaching has turned out to be rather fun this year. The sun is setting now at four, and soon I’ll be setting off on my longish dark drive to Essex. I dare not tell you or even myself how short my teaching hours are. Nothing like your daily homework, but think of the great mind, the courageous modesty etc. I put into it.

Caroline is still losing things right and left, and writing reams, and sends her love. I send mine to you and Mother.

Love,

Daddy