Part Two: Art just isn’t worth that much

They age somehow.

SUBTITLE: 1970

LOWELL

Dearest Elizabeth,

Lizzie and I have more or less separated, though as good-naturedly as such things can be. I have someone else. And the future looks cheerful, but who at our age can ever tell?

My “someone” is Caroline Citkowitz. She is 39, has published stories in the London Magazine, has three very pretty daughters, and was once married to Freud’s grandson, Lucian. What a bare list, but how can I make the introduction? She is very beautiful and saw me through my sickness with wonderful kindness. I suppose I shouldn’t forget Harriet and Lizzie, anyway I can’t.

BISHOP

I am glad the lady is beautiful; that really cheers one a lot.

LOWELL

The child will be born in October. We have three little girls, and this strangely makes the arrival of another much less disturbing …

BISHOP

I think it is nice that it is a little boy—the possibilities were limited, of course, but a change is interesting …

He walks over and hands her a manuscript.

LOWELL

Read Dolphin when you have leisure. I am going to publish, and don’t want advice, except for yours. Lizzie won’t like it.

Bishop reads The Dolphin.

She looks disapproving.

She puts the book down, hard.

BISHOP

I’ve re-read The Dolphin a good many times now … Please believe that I think it is wonderful poetry. It is also honest poetry—almost. 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), and I love you a lot—I feel I must tell you what I really think.

Don’t be alarmed. Here is a quotation from dear little Hardy: “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.”

I’m sure my point is only too plain … Lizzie is not dead—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction,” and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief,” I think. 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 … But art just isn’t worth that much. I keep remembering Hopkins’ marvelous letter about the idea of a “gentleman” being the highest thing ever conceived—higher than a “Christian” even, certainly than a poet. It is not being “gentle” to use personal letters that way—it’s cruel.

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.

I can’t bear to have anything you write tell what we’re really like in 1972 … perhaps it’s as simple as that. DOLPHIN is marvelous—no doubt about that—I’ll write you all the things I like sometime!

LOWELL

Let me write you right away … my first scattered impressions—my thanks. Most of your reservations seem likely to be right and useful. I am talking about your brief line to line objections—

BISHOP

I was so relieved to get your letter—I was awfully afraid I’d been crude, rude … However, I think you’ve misunderstood me a little.

LOWELL

I did not see Lizzie’s letters as slander, but as sympathetic, though necessarily awful for her to read. I took out the worst things written against me, so as not to seem self-pitying. I could say the letters are cut, doctored, part fiction …

BISHOP

My 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. I do see how when you have written an absolutely wonderful, or satisfactory, poem—it’s hard to think of changing anything …

LOWELL

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? It’s the revelation 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. No one would object if I said Lizzie was wearing a purple and red dress, when it was yellow.

BISHOP

I feel I’ve annoyed you more than enough, but I can’t resist this from Kierkegaard:

LOWELL

The trouble is the letters make the book; they make Lizzie real beyond my invention …

BISHOP

“The law of delicacy, according to which an author has a right to use what he himself has experienced—

She has an asthma attack.

BISHOP	LOWELL
is that he is never to utter verity	How can I want to hurt?
	Hurt Lizzie and Harriet?
but is to keep verity
for himself & only let it be refracted—”

LOWELL

How can the story be told without the letters?

BISHOP

I don’t give a damn what someone like Mailer writes about his wives—but I DO give a damn what you write!

A silence.

She tries to catch her breath, wheezing.

He calls her on the telephone.

She wheezes, trying to speak, and can’t.

BISHOP

You talk—I can’t—

They hang up.

A silence.

LOWELL

I’m afraid the unexpected sadness of speaking to you, made me speechless. When you said “You talk, I can’t,” I could only think of questions and became speechless. But we are never speechless together.

I must write more softly to you. Forgive me.

They age somehow.

BISHOP

I am NOT going to hear Stanley Kunitz in Madison Square. What are we coming to? You can’t read poems without a drum & guitar and a bit of chanting …

Why all this change? My favorite eye shadow—for years—suddenly comes in 3 cakes in a row and one has to use all one’s skill to avoid iridescence …

LOWELL

I see us still when we first met, at Randall’s. I see you as rather tall, long brown-haired, shy but full of description and anecdote as now. I was brown haired and thirty I guess. I was largely invisible to myself, and nothing I knew how to look at. But the fact is we were swimming in our young age, with the water coming down on us, and we were gulping.

BISHOP

Cal dear, maybe your memory is failing!— Never, never was I “tall”— And I never had “long brown hair” either!— It started turning gray when I was 23—and probably was already somewhat grizzled when I first met you. I think you must be seeing someone else! What I remember about that meeting is your dishevelment, your lovely curly hair, and how we talked about a Picasso show—and how much I liked you, after having been almost too scared to go. You were also rather dirty, which I rather liked, too.

Well I must stop and slice some green beans— See you later, alligator, as they say in Florida.

So please don’t put me in a beautiful poem tall with long brown hair!

She sits and looks out a window.

She grips the chair as though it is a wheelchair.

LOWELL

Frank told me you arrived back in Boston in a wheelchair, a sad surprise because you seemed in such good health here and safe with your new English drug. Hope you are now recovered and moving to North Haven. I think on clear days you can see Castine from the northern shore. I miss it all.

My book is done. It’s the opposite of yours, bulky, rearranged, added-to—as though the unsatiated appetite were demanding a solid extra course when dinner was meant to be over. I spent a week or more on three lines which finally ended in changing the position of two words. I think a lot about getting things right—and often there is sprawl that cannot be arranged. We seem to be near our finish, so near the final, the perfect, is forbidden us, not even in the game.

I have no more to say … of course.

He hails a taxi.

BISHOP

I’m writing to you this morning to say that I hope you’ll understand if I say I’d rather you don’t come to North Haven on the 10th …

He looks over as though he sees her.

Just for a moment, while crossing the street.

Then Robert Lowell has a heart attack and lies down.

Day before yesterday and the day before that, seven, in all, guests left & although I love them all and we’d had a very nice time—it was just a bit too much. I hope you’ll understand when I say I must work and not break off for a while.

He closes his eyes.

SUBTITLE: Robert Lowell has a heart attack in a taxi.

He dies.

BISHOP

I’ve been reading your DOMESDAY BOOK—it’s just about perfect, I think—I’d only question “splash flowers” … (Forgive my being so picky.) There are many, many good—no, gorgeous lines—I’ll show you my underlinings sometime—

Well, I’ll see you in Cambridge or New York—and maybe in North Haven next summer—

She looks up sharply.

She breathes in.

Then she stands up and reads the following poem.

While she reads, Robert Lowell casually rises from the dead.

He leans against a wall and listens to the poem.

BISHOP

North Haven

In memoriam: Robert Lowell

The goldfinches are back, or others like them,

and the white-throated sparrow’s five-note song,

pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.

Nature repeats herself, or almost does:

repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

Years ago, you told me it was here

(in 1932?) you first “discovered girls”

and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.

You had “such fun,” you said, that classic summer.

(“Fun”—it always seemed to leave you at a loss…)

He smiles.

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,

afloat in mystic blue … And now—you’ve left

for good. You can’t derange, or rearrange,

your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)

The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

Lowell quietly applauds.

She turns to him.

She walks toward him.

During the following exchange, thousands of letters pour down on them,

slowly, as they took some time getting over various oceans.

They un-age somehow.

LOWELL

Dear Miss Bishop

BISHOP

Dear Mr. Lowell

LOWELL

Dear Elizabeth

BISHOP

Dear Cal

LOWELL

Dearest Elizabeth

BISHOP

Dearest Cal

LOWELL

Affectionately, Cal

BISHOP

Recessively yours, Elizabeth

LOWELL

My darling receding Elizabeth …

They reach each other.

BISHOP

I don’t know why I’ve been so slow about writing to you, since I think of you every day of my life I’m sure—

LOWELL

Dearest friend, I miss you so—

He takes her hands.

BISHOP

I’ll write soon—

He shakes his head, as in: You can’t write to dead people.

She nods, as in: I will write to you.

They look at the letters.

And it is as though they have become their own words.

And so can remain in the same place.

They exit, together.

The end.