I have just finished
reading The Dolphin Letters, 1970—1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell,
and Their Circle (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2019), edited by Saskia
Hamilton. The correspondence presents the story of the breakdown of Hardwick
and Lowell’s marriage and Lowell’s use of some of Hardwick’s letters to him in
his collection The Dolphin, a still controversial book. The crux of the
issue, as I read it, was, in part, that Lowell used passages from Hardwick’s
letters without her knowledge (initially) and permission. As Lowell was writing
The Dolphin poems, he was living with Caroline Blackwood in England.
They had a son together and eventually married, after Lowell and Hardwick,
who had a daughter, divorced.
This story is
complex and riveting as it unfolds in these letters, not only between Hardwick
and Lowell, but also among various friends (e.g., Mary McCarthy, Stanley Kunitz,
Blair Clark, Frank Bidart and Elizabeth Bishop). One of the most
famous letters in this saga was written by Bishop to Lowell on 21 March 1972,
after she read the manuscript of The Dolphin and discussed it with
Bidart. Bishop was deeply troubled and upset by what Lowell had done and her
admonition to him has become almost legendary. It has been quoted in a number
of scholarly books and essays. The kernel that usually appears is thus: “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.” (252) She then
paraphrased a passage from a Hopkins’s letter “about the idea of a ‘gentleman’
being the highest thing ever conceived – higher than a ‘Christian’ even.” (252)
Bishop thought that what Lowell had done was “cruel.” Lowell was unsettled by
Bishop’s sharp critique, but he declared to Bidart, in a letter of 10 April
1972, that “her extreme paranoia (For God’s sake don’t repeat this)” was “a
wildness.” (272) For a long time, Lowell remained, more or less, unrepentant.
I was mesmerized
by this trans-Atlantic back and forth between Hardwick and Lowell, and among
“their circle,” in this well edited book. A fascinating story made all the more
riveting because we the readers know what happened, while they, living in their
moment in time, did not. They can’t fully see the ironies, the surprises, the
consequences of their actions and words. The “untidy activity” of life, as
Bishop concluded in “The Bight,” was “awful but cheerful,” and sometimes not so
cheerful.
I have my own
views about Lowell’s actions, which closely mirror Bishop’s and probably I
would go even further because I do not have the decades-long friendship with
Lowell that tempered Bishop’s objections, at least somewhat. In my opinion,
Lowell betrayed Hardwick because, as Bishop pointedly and emphatically
observed, “Lizzie is not dead, etc.” and “there is a ‘mixture of fact &
fiction’, and you have changed her letters.” (252) Lowell’s actions seem
irrefutable and inexcusable.
What struck me
most, however, about Bishop’s letter is what this post is really about. As I
mentioned, only specific, short passages from this letter, which is actually
quite long (running from page 251 to 259 in the book), are quoted, which means
they are out of context, considerably. Bishop clearly thought about her
response for some time and felt strongly enough to write at length and in
detail. What delighted me most about this detail was not the larger “moral”
objections (as well-presented and important as they are); but after going
through these serious concerns (which Lowell by and large dismissed and
ignored), Bishop offered Lowell a list of what she called “very petty comments”
about “small mistakes” (255), or “trivialities.” (258) What followed was a
dozen or so issues that go on for well over a page, some complex enough to
warrant a paragraph of explanation. I won’t repeat all of these issues, but
will offer one example, my favourite:
“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.)” (257)
Hamilton’s footnote
for this item reads, in part: “2. Lowell: ‘What were was the lessons of
the wolverine, / the Canada of Earnest [sic] Seton Thompson’ …. The poem
was removed The Dolphin and added to History as ‘Wolverine,
1927’.” (257)
I do not recall
ever seeing this list of issues mentioned in any reference to or discussion of Bishop’s
letter/response to Lowell’s poetic actions. Lowell received her list much more
positively than her moral objections (he acted on them), which reinforced, it
seems, the certainty of his prerogative, about which he wouldn’t budge, much:
Hardwick’s letters to him were for him to use.
On a number of
occasions on this blog, I have offered my own lists of “comments,” “mistakes,”
“trivialities” for various books about Bishop (by Alice Quinn, Megan Marshall
and Thomas Travisano, etc.). When I read Bishop’s list about nothing less than
Robert Lowell’s poems, I felt reassured by my own practice. Here was my
precedent from no less than Bishop herself. Somehow, I didn’t register the
significance of this letter when I first read it in Words in Air: The
Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (NY:
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2008). But that book presented a very different context
for it and in 2008 there was no blog and I had not written much by way of
reviews of the voluminous literary criticism and biography about Bishop being
churned out in the first decade of the new millennium. Since that time, I have
written more critique, mostly located on this blog. Perhaps somewhere at the
back of my mind, I remembered the letter and felt my own modus operandi
justified, though occasionally I felt petty, pointing out things like Bishop’s
“Ernest Thompson Seton.” Reading the letter again, over a decade later, in an
entirely different context, was a reassuring surprise.
As for Hardwick
and Lowell: The passage of time blunted the sharpest edges of the hurt for
Hardwick. One can’t tell from the letters if she actually forgave him, but with
the immediate bond of their daughter, Hardwick’s determination to move on with
her life, and Lowell’s increasingly poor health, Hardwick seemed to let bygones
be bygones, and Lowell himself eventually managed a qualm. In a letter of 2
July 1976, he wrote to Hardwick, “I regret the Letters in Dolphin.” (435)
Hardwick had the last word though, in her autobiographical novel Sleepless
Nights, begun while Lowell was still living but published in 1979, two
years after his death. Her achievement is best described by Mary McCarthy in a
letter to Hardwick on 4 June 1979:
“When I read the
first bits in the New York Review, I couldn’t see how you were going to
cope with the huge fact of Cal [Lowell]; it didn’t occur to me that you could
do it by simply leaving him out. That’s a brilliant technical stroke but proves
to be much more than that. He becomes a sort of black hole in outer space, to
be filled in ad lib, which is poetic justice: he’s condemned by the form
to non-existence – you couldn’t do that in a conventional autobiography. In any
case, he couldn’t patronize your book by appearing to be generous about it,
though I suppose he might try.” (456-7)
Was E.B.'s friend Gwendolyn Applebee in the story a real person and if so,was that her real name, can't find surname in sensus. .Dick Akerman
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