Recorded Books Inc. - The dolphin two versions, 1972-1973

I have learned what I wanted from the mermaid and her singeing conjunction of tail and grace. One man, two women is what Robert Lowell called the common novel plot of The Dolphin. It is a book of love poems, and therefore a book of being driven off course, of doubt and vacillation.

The protagonist is a poet (a suffering hero? In the published version, the coming of the child precedes, and helps him to find, his resolution. The riddles that all poems make and solve helped Lowell survive those daysit seems our insoluble lives sometimes come clearer in writing.the poet alert to his own feeling and thought alongside the look of London crowds at night, or the sounds of the crude and homeless wet of rain against the glass, or the memory of Lizzies intonations, or the experience of Carolines humor and fragilitythat the poems sift. More than writing per se, the writing of this book, the shaping of the drama, is part of the narrativefor Lowell found in the writing of it a form of equipoise, balancing in his mind his exhilaration and desires, his conflicting responsibilities, and his artistic judgment. As with all of Lowells deeply allusive work, he invites us to think of his art against the background of tradition. The verse form is an adapted sonnet, consisting mainly of fourteen lines, rhyming internally to no set scheme, with something of a sonnets thought structure. Among the ideals he invokes is accuracy, which was already on his mind when he was revising poems for Notebook, the collection that immediately preceded The Dolphin.

He wrote to Marianne Moore in January 1970 about a recent poem of hers: What startled was your generosity of thought, and the accuracy in carrying it out. I mean that when most people might feel they ve \d/ found a good enough figure, you go on to accuracy. Accuracy meant more than exact description, but figures and represented forms quick with life and various of feeling or thought. He had said of his most celebrated book, Life Studies, Perhaps his decision to be frank, open and vulnerable

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Lowell began writing sonnets about his new love shortly after his affair with Caroline Blackwood began in May 1970. In late June, he telegraphed Hardwick that he would not be returning to New York, and two weeks later he was hospitalized in London for mania. Blackwood departed, and Hardwick, moved by his distress, visited him at the London hospital in early August.

She found him in a very weakened state and reported that he could hardly write, writing a few poems (theyre all right). He was released from the hospital in late August, and by October, he had thirty poems, the Romantic romance of a married man in a hospital, as he wrote to his friend Elizabeth Bishop. By the end of November Lowell had about ninety, composing at a great rate, even scribbling lines down during a dinnermore than a poem a day for two months. Among these were several written in the voices of the two women, based on transposed letters and conversations. (The story of Lowells use of Hardwicks original letterstheir wide-angle portrayal of her feelings, what he wanted from them for his poetryis told in The Dolphin Letters, 19701979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle.) He went home to New York for the Christmas holiday and broke with Hardwick, then returned to England in the new year. Later that winter came the news that Blackwood was pregnant.

Lowell wrote new poems in the spring of 1971, including the first and final sonnets, By the end of 1971 Lowell had assembled a fully shaped manuscript of about eighty poems. He invited Frank Bidart to England to help finalize this draft, going over the poems, sometimes dictating lines for Bidart or Blackwood to add to the typescript. They finished a version in early 1972, and Bidart brought a photocopy back to America. Copies were given or sent to Bishop, William Alfred, and Stanley Kunitz, among others. Their strong reactionsadmiration and shockcaused Lowell to rethink the book. All three objected to Lowells use of Hardwicks letters and conversation.

Bishop was particularly uneasy with Lowells revisions of Hardwicks written words (art just isnt worth that much, she wrote). sounds almost a bit Victorian-melodramatic. She thought his character had to get himself back to England before the baby appears like that. Lowell did not want to lose the voice of the Lizzie character, but he decided to change what he came to see as a rather callous happy ending so that they seemed not so much documentary as the recording of arguments in his memory and mind. He described to Bidart the changes he was making: Several of the early letters, From my Wife[,] are now cut up into Voices (often using such title) \changing mostly pronouns/ as if I were speaking and paraphrasing or repeating Lizzie. To Kunitz, he wrote: The long birth sequence will come before the Flight to New York, a stronger conclusion, and one oddly softening the effect by giving a reason other than \new/ love for my departure.

Most of the letter poemsE. B.s objection they were part fiction offered as truthcan go back to your old plan, a mixture of my voice, and another voice in my head, part me, part Lizzie, \italicized,/ paraphrased, imperfectly, obsessively heard. The alternative plotsone closely aligned with the true unfolding of events, the other fictivedid not alter the truth of what Lowell saw (by the spring of 1972) as a consequence somehow fated. Even so, the change alters the key in which we hear those poems, written in the uncertainty of the moment, revised and narratively placed after Lowell had lived with the outcome of his decision. He had composed Flight to New York in November and December 1970, before and during the Christmas visit to his wife and daughter. In November, he was still wavering, but believed that he would be returning to them for good.

He had asked Hardwick to take him back, and wrote to her on November 16: I have been pouring out poems, and almost have a little book, in the same form as Notebook, but much smaller. Ive even anticipated my landing in New York. You see I am back home. On November 30, he wrote to her again: I still do nothing much but bury my indecisions in many many poems. I think I have ninety now and a tall house of draft and discard. I am very bad company because I am so removed.

You wont enjoy me. However I am coming to see you and dear Harriet, not Blair. So youll hear from me at once. But by mid-December, he had changed his mind again. He wrote to Kunitz on December 12: Nothing is settled forever, but I imagine Lizzie and I are breaking. I pray it may be no more cruel than it has to be, and a little less.

Its all been rather killing, for months now not manic but cold, sober, & anxious sober. Lowell wrote to Bishop too of his change of heart as his trip neared: Ill be in New York staying with Blair Clark about the time you get this. I think Lizzie and I are going to break. I should have done it much more cleanly some time ago. But I cant. I wonder if anyone in his right mind could.