The memorable poems in Life Studies, apart from “Skunk Hour,” “Beyond the Alps,” and one or two others, are largely about friends and relations, not Lowell’s life—portraits, not self-portraits. After Lowell’s betrayal was revealed, Hardwick let him have it: “You are a great American writer. Lowell’s new marriage was soon on the rocks. His royalties were not negligible, and he was teaching at Harvard, she at Barnard. Robert Lowell was an American poet, best known for winning the ‘National Book Award’ for his book of poetry titled ‘Life Studies.’ Born to a military commander father in Massachusetts, he was a violent kid who bullied other children. The major offenders are Christopher Smart (Jubilate Agno) and Walt Whitman, good company and bad models. I was interested in how they were talking to others about what they were talking about between themselves. Free shipping for many products! Due to Lowell’s creative falsifications, she might also have sued for libel—she may have been stayed only by the probable effect on their daughter. In almost every poem, sometimes every line, there’s the tremor of language used as language rarely is—Lowell could draw meaning out of almost nothing. Hardwick was called down and immediately ordered the taxi to the hospital, though she knew he was dead. The dolphin: Robert Lowell: 9780571102051: Books - Amazon.ca. . Hollywood bust-ups are so common that, no matter how lurid the details, they’re hard to recall a week or two later. His short-lived generation of poets (like Byron, “mad—bad—and dangerous to know”) lived much longer than the young Romantics. It’s knowing your neighbors are looking in the window. And her sense of the balance of the letter, the balance of its composition, is gorgeous. Read "The Dolphin Two Versions, 1972-1973" by Robert Lowell available from Rakuten Kobo. Most great poems, whatever their intention, consist of half-truths and unwholesome lies. Lady Caroline Blackwood, an elfin, fetching heiress almost fifteen years younger than Lowell, suffered from Alma Mahler Syndrome—Mahler had married the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the novelist Franz Werfel. Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy. as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! Centered on the letters they exchanged with each other and with He might have come down with a touch of the syndrome, too. Hardwick believed—Lowell had told her—that her side of the correspondence from the Dolphin era had been lost or destroyed. The disaster that ended Lowell’s second marriage began benignly in the spring of 1970 when Hardwick returned to New York after a trip to Italy with Lowell and their teenage daughter, Harriet. T. S. Eliot, by contrast, didn’t mind all sorts of earth-moving and monument-razing while he worked upon a poem; but after he was done he was done, his further thoughts limited to rare touches of correction or improvement, like a knife sharpener knocking burr off a blade. When the poet Robert Lowell published The Dolphin in 1973, it caused a scandal. She wrote Elizabeth Bishop that the poems “hurt me as much as anything in my life” and was scathing to his publishers. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. After Lowell's death, his wife Blackwood had entrusted Bidart with Hardwick’s letters; he had placed them on deposit with Lowell's papers at Harvard University. “They obviously believed in archives and that they should be preserved, but I think one concern was, if they were just put into an archive they might be left there to be discovered by any scholar or any researcher, and quoted out of context. on weeds, then lift his greedy snout and listen; then back to speedy feeding. Hardcover, 9780374141400, 0374141401 Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The Life Picture Collection/Getty. The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell's life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle edited by Saskia Hamilton. You have told us what we are, like Melville. Hardcover. His 1844 essay “The Poet” may now seem hidebound and nativist, but through Whitman he made our literature post-colonial. Confessional poetry, as it came to be called, began with the publication of two books in April 1959: Lowell’s Life Studies, which received the National Book Award, and W. D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. One of Hardwick’s recurring concerns is how private correspondence can tell a different story than biography. Can you speak to that moment? Their moments of triumph during the twenty-year campaign of the Vietnam War, when Robert Lowell appeared on the cover of Time, look thinner and more harried now. At times he seemed to be running into the publishing house, shouting, “Stop the presses!” It would be easy to say that this was perfectionism without perfection, or change for change’s sake, or antic indecision, or yet another sign of Lowell’s ever-latent mania—it’s admirable up to a point, but he always skated past that point. In the second printing he had altered a few poems, adding three new ones; in 1970, he brought out a new edition further revised, and enlarged to nearly four hundred poems. But if you were just looking at it from the point of view of the plot—what they write themselves of their own reading and their thoughts and their experiences and their feelings, is just so complexly human. Although it’s very easy to feel, reading it. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. . In the midst of this mess, Lowell continued to revise Notebook. As with Berryman, some of the things he wrote would offend later sensibilities: in one letter, “I’ve hardly met the real Lesbian storm troops, but I think they talk like hysterical Negroes and other fanatics.”. . Can't recommend this one highly enough. It’s a very different quality than writing for posterity, writing self-consciously because you think you’re important. They’re partly an instruction booklet to the misery two literate, intelligent adults can bring each other; and the letters have cruelly and crucially now been paired with two versions of Lowell’s The Dolphin (1973), where his mania for revision is nakedly on display. Lowell could draw meaning out of almost nothing. In the book, Lowell went beyond what he’d done in Life Studies, and later he had regrets. He studied at Harvard University and Kenyon College. . You could pigeonhole them if you wanted to, you could reduce their lives to a plot, say good riddance. But art just isn’t worth that much.”) He had the arrogance of a writer who carelessly seized whatever he needed. What a shrink would make of such sublime passive-aggression can be guessed. Get the latest chatter, from Kensington Palace and beyond, straight to your inbox. Some have suggested that poetry rescued Lowell from worse—it’s true that he saved poetry from worse, though in the forty years since his death American poetry has gone narrowly down the path he cleared, with no end in sight. He was backward looking—he once wrote to Hardwick, “to me poetry means poetry written before 1906”—but then great poets look over their shoulders, not at their contemporaries. A collection of sonnets that describe hospitalization for mental illness and the aftermath of a long relationship, it was published just after Lowell had left his wife of 23 years, the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick’s description of her estranged husband is indelible: “He is such a childish torturer—that little side look of malice he gives you—and so spooky, more and more. That’s one of the wonderful experiences of Sleepless Nights, that the people she’s writing about look right back at her, and at us. The Dolphin is ravaged autobiography, no doubt in service of the truth beneath truth; but what about the collateral damage? I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, … He takes a lot of space declaring what the book is not, but the whisper between phrases suggests that in that year of anti-war protests he protested too much. THE DOLPHIN is a collection of 14-line "love poems" by Robert Lowell published in 1973. But it’s not too easy to also just reject him for having behaved so cavalierly with other people’s feelings. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Lowell grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. When the poet Robert Lowell published The Dolphin in 1973, it caused a scandal. (Elizabeth Bishop wrote him, “Aren’t you violating a trust? Lowell completed the trifecta. She perhaps did not realize that for the previous six months, while teaching at Harvard, he’d been sleeping with one of his students. Lowell was an inveterate reviser, which is not quite the same as a golfer taking more than his share of mulligans. Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss a story. His changed circumstances again unleashed the demon in him, and he began to write additional sonnets about his love affair and the collapse of his marriage. Over and over, he conveniently forgot while juntering on about other things. Ad Choices. 4.8 out of 5 stars 4. Hardwick comes off more warmly and sympathetically in later letters, as well as more forgiving, after she accepts the inevitable. All we need to know is when you are coming back. Harriet Lowell [Hardwick and Lowell’s daughter, whose teenage years are described in the letters] has talked about this, and I wrote about it a little in the introduction—these letters are from one of the worst periods of Hardwick’s life. The draft manuscript of “From My Wife” is a good example of the more radical revisions in the book. Via New Republic. Fussy touching up here and there makes little difference to the whole, less the mark of Lowell’s drive toward artistic brilliance than a sign of perpetual insecurity. interlined, corrected! $16.64. Curiously, if you forget to look at the headings of the letters, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether they’re by Lowell or Hardwick. The early drafts go in all directions, like a compass at the North Pole; and it’s almost a miracle that by such a crippled path Lowell eventually found his way to a masterpiece. Like she treated every piece of writing. Overhearing her letters. And out of fairness to her, we also wanted to represent her voice as though she wasn’t just locked in this marital conversation. Lowell recites this almost word for word: “I’m watching a scruffy, seal-colored woodchuck graze. It has taken a cruel century to diminish the reputations of that generation. . Hamilton spoke with Vanity Fair by phone from her office in Barnard Hall—the same building where Hardwick herself used to have an office. How much of Hardwick’s letters actually appears in The Dolphin? I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again. . And nothing is going to be thrown out, I’m not throwing away your past, and all of that, but I just need you to help me with this one piece of paper. All are interesting in their secret access to what Lamb abhorred, that cesspit of the artist’s workshop. Harmonium Wallace Stevens. The correspondence between one of the most famous couples of twentieth-century literature The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell''s life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Lowell trawled through his present in The Dolphin—sometimes day by day and hour by hour. This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 38 Number 6, on page 4 Copyright © 2021 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/2/lowells-dolphin, Topics:Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Poetry, The Dolphin, Caroline Blackwood, personal difficulties make trip to new york impossible right away, The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle, https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/2/lowells-dolphin. [H]e captured me and began his breathing inanities. Vanity Fair: You’d known Hardwick for years when you started work on this book, yet you never got a chance to talk to her about what you found. In 1989, the poet Saskia Hamilton moved to New York for graduate school; shortly thereafter she knocked on the front door of the same apartment. In the later years of this correspondence, Hardwick and Lowell come to a reconciliation. Every poet needs a contrary voice, a critic who can stand outside the poems and risk shouting, “Ridiculous!” or “You’ve got to be kidding!” Yet Lowell’s revisions became a kind of madness, compulsive reworkings without the trappings of art—and Bidart seemed to egg him on. — Inside the breakdown of Harry’s relationship with the queen— All of the looks from the Golden Globes 2020 red carpet— Royal family “hurt” and “devastated” by Harry and Meghan’s bombshell exit— Elizabeth Wurtzel’s unfinished work— Meet Carole Ghosn, the wife ensnared in Carlos’s saga— Emilia Clarke on life after Khaleesi— From the Archive: Diana’s revenge. Their troubles are hard to understand. What Hardwick says to Lowell in one letter and what she says to Mary McCarthy in another—with a very different angle on what she’s experiencing—is fascinating. . A mentor had given her a business card with Hardwick’s address and telephone number, and Hamilton was quickly put to work cataloging some of the papers that had accumulated in Lowell’s study after his death. It’s almost as though Lowell is—although he’s full of grief about the end of his marriage, the family life he’s giving up for his new family life, it’s in those irritated letters to her, those anguished letters to her, about the house that his cousin Harriet had given to them in Hardwick’s name—it puts his grief in touch somehow, in a different way than you hear in the other letters. To see your words rewritten or simply invented—isn’t that a great deal more insulting to another writer? The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell's life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. And yet. a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. Winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin was controversial from the beginning: many of the poems include letters from Robert Lowell’s wife, the celebrated writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, wrote to him after he left her for the English socialite and writer Caroline Blackwood. Saskia Hamilton on how she put Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick back in conversation, recontextualizing the letters they wrote to each other during their highly publicized divorce. If this really were a novel, the novelist might have her character respond to her friends’ outrage and follow through with that, but she doesn’t do that. Of the volumes that descended from Notebook, the poems in History look strongest now, poems where Lowell’s life is held almost at bay, the lines called into being by matters and consequence outside the self. And the same is true, of course, for Lowell. It’s hard to summarize all the different threads of emotion and argument that they’re having with one another. In the aftermath, Hardwick took a measured view of the man who had caused her more grief, and perhaps given more joy, than any other: “His fate was like a strange, almost mythical two-engined machine, one running to doom and the other to salvation.” She perhaps misremembered the difficult lines from Lycidas, “that two-handed engine at the door,/ Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.” The old theological idea, that the sword of God will save some and damn others, is not quite Hardwick’s two-engined Cadillac—or whatever it is. Paperback. In preparing his true first book, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), which won the Pulitzer Prize, he radically reworked and judiciously fiddled with poems from Land of Unlikeness (1944), the limited edition that introduced him. And [Hardwick and I] were of course very much in touch during that period. Crummy, cruel thing for you two selfish little people there to do. Their characters come through so strongly in these letters. your clowning makes us want to vomit—you bore, bore, bore the friends who want to keep wished to save your image. 4.6 out of 5 stars 7. 5.0 … Having looked until my eyes bled, I could find scarcely twenty lines that came directly from her letters, most in a single poem, “Letter [Marriage, 8].” I’m not counting others so loosely paraphrased Lowell made them his own. The Dolphin is ravaged autobiography, no doubt in service of the truth beneath truth; but what about the collateral damage? That work resulted in The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005), and later, with Thomas Travisano, the correspondence between Lowell and his good friend Elizabeth Bishop. Lowell apparently worried that she would destroy them; but, as the editor notes, Bidart could have given her copies. Lamb said of these draft pages that he wished the librarians “had thrown them in the Cam.”. Soon the universities were bidding aggressively against each other. the flagrant Frank Bidart, atremble, but ever obsequious. The backlash came, first from friends who had been given the manuscript, and later from critics, because he’d used Hardwick’s pained, heartbroken letters in the poems, used them but also altered and rewritten them at will. And then the next thing we’re reading is Hardwick’s angry letter to Bob Giroux, who edited and published The Dolphin. All the writing about herself and about Lowell and her thoughts on biography in general, and life writing, and memoir, and fiction. The Lowells were a Boston Brahmin family that included poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell; clergymen Charles Russell Lowell Sr. and Robert Traill Spence Lowell; Civil War general and war hero Charles Russell Lowell III (about whom Lowell wrote his poem "Charles Russell Lowell: 1835-1864"); and the Federal Judge John Lowell. you tease the patients as if they were your friends, your real friends who want to save your image. The generation of American poets born between Teddy Roosevelt’s inauguration and the end of World War I proved neither as varied nor as innovative as the radical talents born to the Gilded Age. You must leave that parasitic life and come home.” Months later, she was still beside herself: “We can’t bear your photographs, anything. (Theirs in New York consisted of the family apartment and two studio apartments in the same building, used as studies.) That night the poet moved into her London house. You just have the sense that she’s looking right back at you. The Dolphin won the Pulitzer Prize, Lowell’s second, in 1974. There’s a moment, even so, where every improvement creates an equal amount of destruction. She really finds her own way. There are so many beautiful letters there. . The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. It was as if Michelangelo, dissatisfied with David, kept chiseling now at the cheek, now the ear, now neck, now neck, until the head fell off. The spring after this long year of illnesses, he visited Ireland, where Blackwood had moved to reduce her taxes; but the marriage was over. Despite everything, Hardwick and Lowell stayed in touch, and in 1976 they began to reconcile. So it’s quite a moment. Charles Lamb was famously appalled when he gazed on the drafts of Milton’s Lycidas in the library at Trinity College, Cambridge and saw that the poem had been delivered to the poet, not complete by the angel Gabriel, but rather haphazardly through second and third thoughts. The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973, is more or less a tease.2 The front half is the 1973 edition; the back half, the typescript circulated among friends a year before, with Lowell’s handwritten alterations meticulously transcribed by the editor. Lowell wrote new poems in the spring of 1971, including the first and final sonnets,22 and found his figure of the dolphin, the tutelary spirit of the book.23 (The dolphin is a symbol of Apollo, one of the gods of poetry, and of healing and divination; and the word, some scholarship suggests, is etymologically linked to δελφύς or delfys, for “womb.” Arriving at Kennedy Airport, he took a taxi to his old apartment. And then it is all indeed on the eve of the publication of The Dolphin. He had an unnatural gift for forcing words to shake off the burden of unmeaning and expose—no, embrace—the density latent in the language. Pretty Monsters Kelly Link. Andrea Kirby says: January 30, 2014 at 3:01 am I agree with you that the poets may hope for a certain response to a poem that they write, and in the case of confessional poetry the response is likely to be compassion. She sorted the massive accumulation but also slyly wrote to Harvard. It’s such a moving passage. In September 1977, Lowell returned again to New York. The lesser poets of the generation, a few of them, staggered into their nineties—three became centenarians. To read the book would have been little better than finding that your ex has been posting nude pictures of you all over the web. Copyright © 1982-2021 All rights reserved, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick with their newborn daughter Harriet in Boston, January 24, 1957. . The subject is the author’s third marriage, the son it produced, and the response to these matters by his previous wife of 20 years. The Dolphin is a classic that you can read over and over without getting tired of it. The king and queen of Spain are shrunken, ghastly spirits in a mirror; the artist is the giant in the room. Some lines might, of course, have been drawn from conversations or letters now missing—or just cut from whole cloth. The Dolphin Letters proves an important corrective to the fantasies in which poets now write.1 The letters trace the end of Lowell’s marriage to Hardwick and continue until his unhappy death at sixty. So they present a rather distorted picture of her. It’s clear from Ian Hamilton’s biography Robert Lowell (1982) that the poet was still terribly in love with Blackwood but just couldn’t live with her. “Last March, I knew you’d manage by yourself. It is degrading, unnecessary and quite destructive for me to keep writing to someone who doesn’t care for me or for his daughter.” Lowell remained blithe and callous, seemingly unaware of a cruelty made worse by lassitude. And she knows that. Like a slowly collapsing building, the marriage fell apart, the divorce offering its own drama of unhealed wounds, their legal wrangling a replay of the couple’s separation, Grand Guignol this time rather than Drury Lane melodrama. Last month, Hamilton published The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle, along with a new, previously unpublished manuscript version of The Dolphin. Stony Brook had approached her that spring about buying the papers and made an attractive offer. This is not my diary, my confession, not a puritan’s too literal pornographic honesty, glad to share private embarrassment, and triumph. your clowning makes visitors want to call a taxi. The only thing standing in the way of their divorce is a deed to their home in Maine, which Lowell seems reluctant to sign over to Hardwick. He admitted to his publisher Robert Giroux that the letters in the book were only “versions” “made up of a mixture of quotes, improvisation, paraphrase.” This edition could have clarified exactly what Lowell filched and what he fabricated, showing more plainly if the gains in art were worth the loss of fidelity. When she opened the package, Hardwick found herself staring into the face of the woman who had stolen her husband. The letters before the revelation are made more wounded, more scouring, by the familiar touches: “I miss you, old man. And yet. Theodore Roethke may soon amount to no more than “My Papa’s Waltz,” “The Waking,” and perhaps a botanical; John Berryman, a few of the Dream Songs, whose minstrelsy and blackface have gone from sublime effrontery to grotesque offense. Trauma is an unforgiving muse—the creative draft comes with a dose of belladonna. They were worried about avoiding the more gossipy take someone could make on the letters.” Hamilton ultimately spent close to a decade tracking down correspondence from the couple’s many friends and colleagues, crafting as full a narrative of those years as possible of the most trying—and fruitful—years of their lives. Lowell remains one of the great autobiographical poets; but in his finest poems he’s usually more observer than observed. Coming of age during the Depression, they seemed the country’s homegrown Sturm und Drang, overblessed with the muses’ gifts, turning inward as Emerson had hoped. That she’s seeing through it all. Click here for the lowest price! The omissions, which are unaccountable, make Blackwood an outsider, beyond the circuit of The Dolphin Letters, which gives only a partial view of the emotional extortions present and fails to document the juddering desperation of Lowell’s last months. . There was no mistaking the inspiration—it contained what appeared to be direct quotations of letters written by someone who shared, with Hardwick, the nickname Lizzie. On September 12, 1977, Lowell was on his way back to the Manhattan apartment he shared with Hardwick when he suffered a heart attack and died. Us nothing like that the letters they exchanged with each other that a great deal insulting... And queen of Spain are shrunken, ghastly spirits in a mirror ; the is! Distorted picture of her venom, she was more a hornet. 1976 they began reconcile! S very easy to also just reject him for having behaved so cavalierly with other people ’ taskwork! After the Dolphin letters, of self-composure, and more recently Geoffrey Hill at. 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