There’s no laundry dirtier than laundry dumped at the end of a marriage—when a literary couple comes to blows, the air is full of pummeling haymakers. He weighs a ton and alas has the human aspect in certain munching profiles. . “Last March, I knew you’d manage by yourself. Hardcover. Ad Choices. Arriving at Kennedy Airport, he took a taxi to his old apartment. I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again. 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. 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. 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. I have that feeling whenever I read her letters after The Dolphin was published…. What did you notice about the voice that came across in her letters? At the time Lowell was writing these poems, a great storm was going on in his personal life, as he had left his wife Elizabeth Hardwick and their teenager daughter Harriet behind in New York and gone to London to live with Lady Caroline Blackwood. Very, very beautiful. If the main purpose of the paired versions is to exhibit a remarkable artist at work, a great deal more might have done. 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The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle, along with a new, previously unpublished manuscript version of The Dolphin. 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. The words, on the other hand, remain the property of the writer. Lowell trawled through his present in The Dolphin—sometimes day by day and hour by hour. In the book, you draw on parallel conversations both Hardwick and Lowell were having with friends and colleagues during this difficult time. But instead it’s the kind of extraordinary act of composure that we see in the creation of their work. Get the latest chatter, from Kensington Palace and beyond, straight to your inbox. I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, … (Theirs in New York consisted of the family apartment and two studio apartments in the same building, used as studies.) The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle: Lowell, Robert, Hardwick, Elizabeth, Hamilton, Saskia: Amazon.sg: Books 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. Dolphin Lowell. It’s such a moving passage. And her sense of the balance of the letter, the balance of its composition, is gorgeous. interlined, corrected! A necessary picture of Lowell in this period would have required printing the remains of all his letters to her, certainly the twenty-one Saskia Hamilton included in The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005). That would have been cold comfort to Hardwick. Lowell was born to United States Navy Cmdr. 560 pages. The younger poet was later guilty of bad behavior. Lamb said of these draft pages that he wished the librarians “had thrown them in the Cam.”. 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. The major offenders are Christopher Smart (Jubilate Agno) and Walt Whitman, good company and bad models. The situation itself forces you into certain positions. Hamilton spoke with Vanity Fair by phone from her office in Barnard Hall—the same building where Hardwick herself used to have an office. He studied at Harvard University and Kenyon College. 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. . That Saskia Hamilton, who has thorough gifts as an editor, might easily have done more is shown by her long footnote to “In the Mail” in The Dolphin Letters. What Hardwick didn’t know was that, at a party a few days after his arrival in England, before he’d even made his way to Oxford, Lowell had renewed his acquaintance with the younger woman who became his Dolphin, and who until then had been seeing the editor of The New York Review of Books. By long-established copyright law, the recipient of a letter owns no more than the piece of paper, which he may crumple up, use to light a cigar, or sell at auction. Robert Traill Spence Lowell III and Charlotte Winslow in Boston, Massachusetts. Lowell completed the trifecta. 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 Lowells were apparently supported in large part by his trust fund, unmentioned here, which according to Lowell’s biographer Paul Mariani provided $20,000 a year, double a young professor’s salary in the seventies. The letters before the revelation are made more wounded, more scouring, by the familiar touches: “I miss you, old man. The rupture of a stable literary marriage, however, cuts into the moral matter of our culture, confounding the rumor that poets and novelists are too high-minded to fall for the come-hither smile or smoky glance. etc. 4.8 out of 5 stars 4. Thereafter, the messy lives lurking beneath the surface of poems were splashed across the page in Technicolor. Hollywood bust-ups are so common that, no matter how lurid the details, they’re hard to recall a week or two later. 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. The phrase “life studies” should be taken seriously—sketches from life, art achieved through deep inspection and practice, but “studies,” not finished work. . The Dolphin is ravaged autobiography, no doubt in service of the truth beneath truth; but what about the collateral damage? . There are so many beautiful letters there. Having pulled up to the building, the cabbie found Lowell slumped in the back seat, holding a flat parcel wrapped in brown paper. She died three decades later, never learning that he’d handed the packet to Harvard with a note restricting access until her death. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The best of them died before they became grandfathers, but most had already written themselves out. And she knows that. She sorted the massive accumulation but also slyly wrote to Harvard. You tease the sick as if theirthey were your friends; your suit laziesis lazied to grease. I recently came upon a little letter she wrote to me on some small matter, I can’t remember what it was. Paperback, 9780374511951, 0374511950 And she’s trying to say, Look, you left this here. 4.2 out of 5 stars 67. Watching Lowell watch Lowell is as much a parlor game as the appearance of Velázquez in Las Meninas. She stays true to both things. Since Robert Lowell’s sudden death in 1977 his critical reputation has suffered from the usual post-mortem slump. 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. Lowell loved too well the frenzy of revision. The letters of those years of turmoil take four times the space of those in the four years remaining before Lowell’s death in 1977. . “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. . The Dolphin is ravaged autobiography, no doubt in service of the truth beneath truth; but what about the collateral damage? Poets ever since have labored under the delusion that art is life and life, art—and that poetry begins and ends, in our mealy-mouthed language, in the poet’s truth. 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. I truly dislike him deeply, do not trust him and think he is boring in that special way that only those without any depth or real character can be. 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. Free shipping for many products! He next married the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, better known as a waspish critic. (“In Memory of Arthur Winslow,” “The Death of the Sheriff,” “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” “Her Dead Brother,” and “Thanksgiving’s Over” were all butchered.) 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. 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. It comes back to this question of composure, of self-composure, and the refusal to really be a cliché. And yet. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. T he 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. Click here for the lowest price! 2The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973, by Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 195 pages, $18 (paper). Click here for the lowest price! The poet continued on to Oxford, where he had accepted a fellowship at All Souls College, which admits no undergraduates—“a club,” the poet called it, “dressed up as a college.” His letters home were slow in coming. Lowell could fairly be represented by no fewer than a dozen or two poems. Although it’s very easy to feel, reading it. Lowell was lucky his wife didn’t hire someone to break his legs. Your trousers are worn to a mirror. A collection of sonnets that describe hospitalization for mental illness and the aftermath of … 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.” . He had the right to do with them as he wished.” Not quite. Most variants, fixing typos and making small adjustments to wording, seem just housekeeper’s taskwork. $16.64. Hardwick had every right to be furious, even so. He might have come down with a touch of the syndrome, too. at the best online prices at eBay! How did you decide what to include from these outside conversations? That she’s seeing through it all. She wrote Elizabeth Bishop that the poems “hurt me as much as anything in my life” and was scathing to his publishers. The spring after this long year of illnesses, he visited Ireland, where Blackwood had moved to reduce her taxes; but the marriage was over. With the loss of her teaching, Hardwick had been reduced to writing short reviews for Vogue, a magazine she despised. “The Dolphin Letters,” which collects the correspondence of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell from the period surrounding their divorce, turns out to be a better and a more important read than Lowell’s poetry from the time. Even as far back as Lord Weary’s Castle, he changed lines between printings. 1 Response to “Dolphin” by Robert Lowell. William Logan’s new collection of criticism, Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History, will be published this spring by Columbia University Press. Read "The Dolphin Two Versions, 1972-1973" by Robert Lowell available from Rakuten Kobo. So it’s quite a moment. We have gone from shying away from the dark side of life to offering little else, and from confession we have fattened ourselves on identity politics. Looking for more? She talks about what the day is like, the weather, what she’s reading. 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’s new marriage was soon on the rocks. Despite everything, Hardwick and Lowell stayed in touch, and in 1976 they began to reconcile. Bidart’s role was difficult, less lion tamer than lion whisperer. . Major revisions are relatively rare and not always convincing. The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle Elizabeth Hardwick. The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle edited by Saskia Hamilton. Through May and half of June, the poet kept shilly-shallying about his return to New York; his wife grew anxious, having been through so many of his manic episodes before. His royalties were not negligible, and he was teaching at Harvard, she at Barnard. Hardcover, 9780374141400, 0374141401 That’s what I find so interesting and surprising. The purpose of this double volume is, alas, never entirely clear. $32.99. One of the most fascinating passages of the book happens just before The Dolphin is published. And the same is true, of course, for Lowell. 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