#TheDolphinLetters25 part 2
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979:
#ElizabethHardwick, #RobertLowell
and Their Circle #readinganactofsharedsolitude
#paperpills💊 #beedoubleokayess📚🐦 #reemreel #athingofbeauty www.instagram.com/reel/DNVi0YT...
#TheDolphinLetters25 part 1
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979:
#ElizabethHardwick, #RobertLowell
and Their Circle #readinganactofsharedsolitude
#paperpills💊 #beedoubleokayess📚🐦 #reemreel #athingofbeauty
www.instagram.com/reel/DNViI7D...
Beginnings are always delightful; the threshold is the place to pause.
Goethe said.
#TheDolphinLetters25
Everything about him was outsized:his learning,his patience with
his work... the pattern of his troubled life. He knew a lot of happiness in each of his decades, happiness that is when he was fortunately for such long creative and
private periods "himself." #TheDolphinLetters25
Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel--and yet I cannot
decide whether to call myself I or she.
#TheDolphinLetters25
Dearest M. Here I am in Boston, on Marlborough Street, number 239. am looking out on a snow storm. It fell like a great armistice, bringing all struggles to an end.
#TheDolphinLetters25
Photos: Robert Lowell’s Boston commemorated on his 100th birthday
www.loa.org/news-and-vie...
When you travel your great discovery is that you do not exist.
#TheDolphinLetters25
"Unsavory egotism? No-mere hope of self-definition, the heroism of description, the martyrdom of documentation. The chart
of life must be brought up to date every morning.
#TheDolphinLetters25
Immaculate drugs, hazy drifts of
dreams, passivity pure and rich as cream.
#TheDolphinLetters25
Then she took a cigarette from the pocket of the smock she was
wearing. She drew on it, as if it were opium; adding to the opium that
was within her, the narcotic of her boredom, as we are told we carry
our own heaven and hell within us.
#TheDolphinLetters25
"Lizzie is so literary."
He meant it as half a
compliment,in wonderment,shaking his head. You've proved him
right,more than he knew; you've brought about a triumph of the "literary over life's materials & you could only do that by being incurably "bookish."
#TheDolphinLetters25
"For Lizzie,
who snatched me out of
chaos,
with all my love
in Castine Aug. 1977
Cal"
September 12, 1977 New York: Pulitzer
Prize-winning poet Robert Lowell, 60, died here Monday of a heart
attack while on a taxi ride from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan
#TheDolphinLetters25
Sontag would later say, Her sentences are burned in my brain [...] I think she writes the most beautiful sentences, more beautiful sentences than any living American writer*
#TheDolphinLetters25
I miss having you to talk to. I feel deeply all you had to put up
with me for so many years.
Love,
Cal
#TheDolphinLetters25
Re: Susan Sontag
it seemed that she
realIy had only us and maybe Roger [Straus] to depend upon. In the long run, though, I think I would rather have my literary friends than anything, any family; they are what count, and Ifeel
they know about love"
#TheDolphinLetters25
Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
West 67th Street, New York, NY.
September 19, 1975
Robert Lowell to Mrs. Elizabeth Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
October 1, 1975
PS. I give you back the name Lowell. I thought you might take um-
brage
#TheDolphinLetters25
Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell'
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
October 13, 1974
It's an indescribable consolation for me to be near to you so happily.
Love,
#TheDolphinLetters25
Unsigned? Why?🤔
I especially liked the very last sentence!'
#TheDolphinLetters25
Hardwick: "Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel -and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she" ("Writing a Novel," New York Review of Books, October 18,1973).
they seem to have lived inworld without mirrors. Needless to say the only two
women one can talk to at all, and also the only two given to any "dressing" have Ph.D's in their own right. It is a perturbation-the laziness of wives.
#TheDolphinLetters25
the wives, of all sizes,yet
somehow one size in their heads! They mutter about typing His manuscripts & they have not made 1single demand upon themselves,whether of mind or body& go forth without any effort asif they were dogs adopted by their professore.
#TheDolphinLetters25
I am very eager to go on record with you as saddened and deeply resentful of not only one, the use of my letters without permission but many many ill-effects upon me of your consent to publication without any consultation with me.
Yours truly,
Eliz Hardwick
#TheDolphinLetters25
I.U have rights at my death as my husband. (Descent meansdescending from wife to husband. Nothing to do with descendants.)
2.If Caroline is yr wife U are not my husband.
3.If U are not [my] husband U have no rights at my death & Caroline has no rights either
#TheDolphinLetters25
DO U FEEL WE ARE MARRIED? DO U & CAROLINE CONSIDER SHERIDAN MY SON?IF NOT YR TREATMENT OF ME IS STUPID NOT EVEN HARRIET HAD LEGAL RIGHT TO THEHOUSE U HAVE RIGHTS ONLY AS MY HUSBAND BUT WE
ARE NOT MARRIED THE SIGNATURES ARE A TECHNICALITY
PLS SEND SIGNED DEED
#TheDolphinLetters25
It seems so natural writing to you, like breathing, an organic part of
my life. May it ever be. \Last week,/ I
went fishing up north in Westmoreland ...
After a while one is older - stifness, cold fingers and toes.
Love to you and Harriet
Cal
#TheDolphinLetters25
Oof! I’ve fallen off of #TheDolphinLetters25 bus. Busy with family and a slew of library holds have just come in. I will dip my toe in every once in a while.
EH: first husbands and first wives are al ways at the same dinner parties and birthday celebrations with their second husbands and wives. Divorces and fractured loves mingled together as if
the past were a sort of vinegar blending with the oil of the present.
#TheDolphinLetters25
Hardwick: worst of all to suffer in Holland where there is never any room between you and your "betrayer"--an incestuous
country, narrow, over-crowded, small intellectual class
#TheDolphinLetters25
I have been corresponding with Merwin- hysterical chapter in Alone in America about him, with a vocabulary of some mad talking machine. Merwin the
Preterist--then faineance, aporia, fewmets(!) and lagniappe.
#TheDolphinLetters25
Lowell: "Dear Elizabeth, (You must be called that; I'm called Cal, but won't
explain why. None of the prototypes are flattering: Calvin, Caligula, Caliban, Calvin Coolidge,
Calligraphy- with merciless irony)" (to Elizabeth Bishop, [August 21, 1947),
#TheDolphinLetters25
Lowell: "My namesake, Little Boots, Caligula, I you disappoint me. Tell me what I saw I to
make me like you when we met at school?` I took your name-"
("Caligula" I-4, For the Union
Dead)
#TheDolphinLetters25
