Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
He had these separately typed, as I remember, and as we started going through them he started putting more
Notebook
poems into it and as it grew the title “Heroes” just seemed too narrow, and that became
His
tory
.
Essentially, almost everything that was not family poems from
Notebook
could go into
History
,
and also the poems that didn’t fit very well in
Dolphin
.
35
The “family poems” would themselves make a book, and this
Lowell
decided to call
For
Lizzie
and
Harriet
,
even though it was to include, for example, the “Mexico” poems and other nonhistorical items which Lizzie and Harriet might reasonably feel were not addressed to their best interests. For example, Martha Ritter is the “dolphin” in the poem “Morning” (called “Dawn” in
Notebook
):
In this ever more enlightened bedroom,
I wake under the early rising sun,
sex indelible flowers on the air—
shouldn’t I ask to hold to you forever,
body of a dolphin, breast of cloud?
You rival the renewal of the day,
clearing the puddles with your green sack of books.
36
Really, these are poems that “cover” the period of Lowell’s personal life in which, whatever his vagaries, he continued to feel unshakably committed to his wife and daughter; in narrative terms, they prepare the ground for the anguished indecisions of the
Dolphin
tale. For
most of the six weeks that Bidart stayed at Milgate the chief task was to turn
Notebook
into two polished, separate books. For the moment, the matter of the new
Dolphin
poems was postponed:
The working pattern we developed was that I would cut sonnets out of a copy of
Notebook
—he would tell me which ones he wanted, in which order—and paper-clip them on to big legal-size sheets…. He would lie on his work-bed with his marked copy of
Notebook
and dictate across the room revisions which I would write in in the margin across from where the poem cut out from
Notebook
was paper-clipped. Usually he would dictate about four, one sheet, and then I would read them and we’d talk about them and argue about them. And sometimes he would change the order, or he would make more revisions, or sometimes he would go back to what he had before. There were some that we
continued
to argue about and that I never liked but most of them I liked a lot. I was always able to say just what I thought. I would be no use to him if I weren’t. By this time he knew I adored his work, and I loved him, and he was just never insulted by that sort of thing. And Caroline would wander in and read something and she was always full of
criticisms
and suggestions. She never had the slightest hesitation in saying she didn’t like something.
37
When Bidart left, in February, “there was the text of
History
and
For
Lizzie
and
Harriet
and
The
Dolphin
.
The
Dolphin
ended with the birth of Sheridan and essentially followed the real chronology of what happened—but I had much less to do with that than with the others.” Bidart and Lowell did, however, discuss the problem of how, if ever,
The
Dolphin
might be published: “it had to give Lizzie pain, he was very aware of that,” to have these intensely private torments paraded in a poem, to see herself portrayed as the ousted, vengeful wife, to have snatches of her letters, telegrams, phone conversations used as the all too raw material for Lowell’s lightly fictionalized drama of
his
indecision. And yet, as Bidart saw it, these were poems: “the only thing posterity will not forgive you for is a bad book.” The idea was floated of a very limited edition—perhaps as few as one hundred copies—and some moves had indeed been made in this direction. Olwyn Hughes, sister of the poet Ted Hughes, had proposed publishing such an edition, and Lowell was for a time convinced that this was the best compromise.
During the spring of 1972 Lowell continued to fret about
The
Dolphin
,
but the worry was no longer about
if
the book should be
published: what he was looking for was the least painful (for
Hardwick
) way to get the poems out. Letters from friends in America who had seen the version of
Dolphin
which Bidart had taken home with him were almost unanimously shocked that he should even think of releasing such material. In April, Stanley Kunitz wrote to him:
As for
Dolphin
. I should be less than honest if I didn’t tell you it both fascinates and repels me. There are details which seem to me
monstrously
heartless. I will grant that parts of it are marvelous—wild, erotic, shattering. (Who else had the nerve for such a document of enchantment and folly?) But some passages I can scarcely bear to read: they are too ugly, for being too cruel, too intimately cruel. You must know that after its hour has passed, even tenderness can cut the heart. What else need I say to you, dear Cal, not as your judge—God Save me!—but as your friend. In any event, these are matters that I have not discussed with another soul.
38
(Lowell responded to these strictures with what Norman Mailer would certainly have seen as an example of “neutralsmanship”—he offered to dedicate the book
History
to Kunitz, who was moved to reply: “What could I cherish more…. if you were here, I would embrace you.”
39
The dedication in the end was to both Kunitz and Bidart, in spite of a plea from Elizabeth Bishop that Lowell dedicate it solely “to Frank … he has worked so damn hard. When he came back here last winter I don’t think he thought of anything else for months—he used to call me up and recite sonnets and sonnets from memory, re-arranging lines and commas and so on—it’s
fantastic
.”)
40
Bishop herself had strong views on
The
Dolphin
, in its first
version
, and on March 21, 1972, wrote:
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 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…. 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 [Alfred] 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.”
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, page 10, is so shocking—well, I don’t know what to say. And page 47 … and a few after that. One can use one’s life a [
sic
]
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’ marvellous letter to Bridges 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, tragic, anguished letters that way—it’s cruel.
41
In England, Lowell was also soliciting advice: he wanted to see how the poems appeared to people for whom Hardwick’s feelings would not be of personal concern. In March he wrote to
Christopher
Ricks, the British critic and scholar; Lowell and Ricks had become friends since their first meeting in May 1970:
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, 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 clogged by the possibility of not. This awkward exposition shows my painful
embarrassment
.
42
In April, Lowell invited the British poet Alan Brownjohn to
Milgate
for a weekend; Brownjohn had written admiringly of
Notebook
in the
New
Statesman
. At this first—and, for Brownjohn, uneasy—weekend (“It was like being invited down to visit Milton or Chaucer or someone”) the
Dolphin
issue wasn’t raised, but in May Lowell wrote to him that “My ms. problem is this: a book of a little over 60 poems about the last two years, the end of my old marriage and then the beginning. I suppose what you are so expert on (truth of tone) is all-important.”
43
Brownjohn then called at Redcliffe Square:
After I’d been I had the impression that he was enormously determined to get a number of views on the decorum of publishing some of these personal poems about Elizabeth. I gather he’d taken that dilemma around to several people. When I got to Redcliffe Square on that
particular
day [June 6, 1972] I realized it wasn’t just a question of making a few comments on the new poems he’d been writing. There was the question of the propriety of publishing these kinds of transcribed telephone
conversations
or letters. He asked that question fairly outright and said, “These are poems written straight out of verbatim letters, and I’ve talked to one or two people and some people say they shouldn’t be published in that form. What do you think?” And I think in sheer nerves, reading the photocopied drafts as he set them in front of me, I said, “I think it’s all right.” I suppose if pressed I would have defended this by saying there is a kind of entitlement of poets to transmute, to use any kind of material that life, personal and public, offers them. And if Lowell isn’t entitled to do this, who is? … It seemed to me he clearly wanted to do
it and one didn’t feel like saying no on behalf of someone one had never met.
44
Jonathan Raban was another “detached” English figure whose
advice
Lowell solicited. Raban remembers “egging him on to do it. … I was really out of what the effect in New York would be”: he suggested to Lowell that perhaps he could “test” the American reaction by letting Faber put the book out first in England:
I was very much on the side of publishing, because it seemed to me that
Dolphin
wouldn’t really be a book at all if it didn’t have that suggestion of documentary, and fragments of other people’s conversations and letters. I thought they were some of the best poems in the book. So, for literature’s sake, the book ought to be published in exactly the way he’d written it and not edited out of fear of what Lizzie was going to say.
45
Raban, like Brownjohn, felt that Lowell had made up his mind; “he loved the feeling of being vulnerable to everybody else’s advice and criticism.” As early as April 1972 he had begun revising and
rearranging
the
Dolphin
poems with a view to publication. He had been stung by Elizabeth Bishop’s letter, and also by Bill Alfred’s view that certain of the poems “will tear Elizabeth [Hardwick] apart, important though I agree they are to the wholeness of the book. I have to say that.” Alfred also reported in this letter (March 12, 1972) that he had just met W. H. Auden for the first time: “He spoke of not speaking to you because of the book. When I said he sounded like God the Father, he gave me a tight smile. I write to warn you.”
46
Lowell was indignant about this—“How could he stop speaking to me about a book he hadn’t seen”—and cabled Auden:
DEAR WYSTAN ASTOUNDED BY YOUR INSULT TO ME WITH
WILLIAM ALFRED.
47