The dolphin, p.6
The Dolphin, page 6
at the will and second of the end-all—
I am still a young man not done running around.…
The great circuit of the stars lies on jewellers’ velvet;
be close enough to tell me when I will die—
what will love do not knowing it will die?
No telling, no telling … not even a last choice.
5. SICK
I wake now to find myself this long alone,
the sun struggling to renounce ascendency—
two elephants are hauling at my head.
It might have been redemptive not to have lived—
in sickness, mind and body might make a marriage
if by depression I might find perspective—
a patient almost earns the beautiful,
a castle, two cars, old polished heirloom servants,
Alka Seltzer on his breakfast tray—
the fish for the table bunching in the fishpond.
None of us can or wants to tell the truth,
pay fees for the over-limit we caught, while floating
the lonely river to senility
to the open ending. Sometimes in sickness,
we are weak enough to enter heaven.
6. FACING ONESELF
After a day indoors I sometimes see
my face in the shaving mirror looks as old,
frail and distinguished as my photographs—
as established. But it doesn’t make one feel
the temptation to try to be a Christian.
Foxfur
“I met Ivan in a marvelous foxfur coat,
his luxurious squalor, and wished you one … your grizzled
knob rising from the grizzled foxfur collar.
I long to laugh with you, gossip, catch up … or down;
and you will be pleased with Harriet,
in the last six months she’s stopped being a child,
she says God is just another great man,
an ape with grizzled sideburns in a cage.
Will you go with us to The Messiah,
on December 17th, a Thursday,
and eat at the Russian Tearoom afterward?
You’re not under inspection, just missed.…
I wait for your letters, tremble when I get none,
more when I do. Nothing new to say.”
On the End of the Phone
My sidestepping and obliquities, unable
to take the obvious truth on any subject—
why do I do what I do not want to say?
When nothing matters, I ask—I never know.
Your rapier voice—I have had so much—
hundred words a minute, piercing and thrilling …
the invincible lifedrive of everything alive,
ringing down silver dollars with each word.…
Love wasn’t what went wrong, we kept our daughter;
what a good father is is no man’s boast—
to be still friends when we’re no longer children.…
Why am I talking from the top of my mouth?
I am talking to you transatlantic,
we’re almost talking in one another’s arms.
Cars, Walking, etc., an Unmailed Letter
“In the last three days Sheridan learned to walk,
and left the quadruped behind—for some reason
small pets avoid him.…” Who shakes hands with a dead friend?
I see a huge, old rattling brown paper bag,
a picture, no fact; when I try to unwrap it,
it slips in my hands. It is our old car
resurrected from the must of negligence,
warning like Hector’s Ghost from the underground—
the car graveyard … now no longer obsolete.
I do not drive in England, yet in my thought,
our past years, especially the summers, are places
I could drive back to if I drove a car,
our old Burgundy Ford station-wagon summer-car,
our fourth, and first not prone to accident.
Flight to New York
1. PLANE-TICKET
A virus and its hash of knobby aches—
more than ever flying seems too lofty,
the season unlucky for visiting New York,
for telephoning kisses transatlantic.…
The London damp comes in, its smell so fertile
trees grow in my room. I read Ford’s Saddest Story,
his triangle I read as his student in Nashville.
Things that change us only change a fraction,
twenty-five years of marriage, a book of life—
a choice of endings? I have my round-trip ticket.…
After fifty so much joy has come,
I hardly want to hide my nakedness—
the shine and stiffness of a new suit, a feeling,
not wholly happy, of having been reborn.
2. WITH CAROLINE AT THE AIR-TERMINAL
“London Chinese gray or oyster gray,
every appalling shade of pitch-pitch gray—
no need to cook up far-fetched imagery
to establish a climate for my mood.…
If I have had hysterical drunken seizures,
it’s from loving you too much. It makes me wild,
I fear.… We’ve made the dining-room his bedroom—
I feel unsafe, uncertain you’ll get back.
I know I am happier with you than before.
Safer…” The go-sign blazes and my plane’s
great white umbilical ingress bangs in place.
The flight is certain.… Surely it’s a strange joy
blaming ourselves and willing what we will.
Everything is real until it’s published.
3. PURGATORY
In his portrait, mostly known from frontispiece,
Dante’s too identifiable—
behind him, more or less his height, though less,
a tower tapering to a fingerend,
a snakewalk of receding galleries:
Purgatory and a slice of Europe,
less like the fact, more like the builder’s hope
It leans and begs the architect for support,
insurance never offered this side of heaven.
The last fifty years stand up like that;
people crowd the galleries to flee
the second death, they cry out manfully,
for many are women and children, but the maker
can’t lift his painted hand to stop the crash.
4. FLIGHT
If I cannot love myself, can you?
I am better company depressed …
I bring myself here, almost my best friend,
a writer still free to work at home all week,
reading revisions to his gulping wife.
Born twenty years later, I might have been prepared
to alternate with cooking, and wash the baby—
I am a vacation-father … no plum—
flown in to New York.… I see the rising prospect,
the scaffold glitters, the concrete walls are white,
flying like Feininger’s skyscraper yachts,
geometrical romance in the river mouth,
conical foolscap dancing in the sky …
the runway growing wintry and distinct.
5. NEW YORK AGAIN
After London, the wind, the eye, my thoughts
race through New York with gaping coarse-comb teeth,
the simple-minded streets are one-way straight,
no queues for buses and every angle right,
a cowering London with twenty times the soaring;
it is fish-shaped, it is modern, it is metal,
austerity assuaged with melodrama,
an irritable reaching after fact and reason,
a love of features fame puts up for sale—
love is all here, and the house desolate.
What shall I do with my stormy life blown towards evening?
No fervor helps without the favor of heaven,
no permissive law of nature picks up the bill—
survival is talking on the phone.
6. NO MESSIAH
Sometime I must try to write the truth,
but almost everything has fallen awry
lost in passage when we said goodbye in Rome.
Even the licence of my mind rebels,
and can find no lodging for my two lives.
Some things like death are meant to have no outcome.
I come like someone naked in my raincoat,
but only a girl is naked in a raincoat.
Planesick on New York food, I feel the old
Subway reverberate through our apartment floor,
I stop in our Christmas-papered bedroom, hearing
my Nolo, the non-Messianic man—
drop, drop in silence, then a louder drop
echoed elsewhere by a louder drop.
7. DEATH AND THE MAIDEN
Did the girl in Death and the Maiden fear marriage?
No end to the adolescence we attained
by overworking, then struggled to release—
my bleak habit of counting off minutes on my fingers,
like pages of an unrequested manuscript.
that brilliant onetime moment we alone shared,
the leftovers from God’s picnic and old times.
Why do I weep for joy when others weep?
One morning we saw something, half weed, half wildflower,
rise from the only thruhole in the barn floor—
it had this chance in a hundred to survive.
We knew that it was someone in disguise,
a silly good person … thin, pealnosed, intruding,
the green girl who doesn’t know how to leave a room.
8. NEW YORK
A sharper air and sharper architecture—
the old fashioned fishingtackle-box skyscrapers,
flesh of glass and ribs of tin … derisively
called modern in 1950, and now called modern.
As if one had tried to make polar bears
live in Africa—some actually survived,
curious, strong meat permutations of polar bear.…
It wasn’t so once, O it wasn’t so,
when I came here ten or twenty years ago.…
Now I look on it all with a yellow eye;
but the language of New Yorkers, unlike English,
doesn’t make me fear I am going deaf.…
Last night at four or five, whenever I woke up,
I found myself crying—not too heavily.
9. SLEEPLESS
Home for the night on my ten years’ workbed,
where I asked the facing brick for words, and woke
to my conscious smile of self-incrimination,
hearing then as now the distant, panting siren,
small as a harbor boat patrolling the Hudson,
persistent cry without diminishment
or crescendo through the sleepless hours.
I hear its bland monotony, the voice
that holds, and never shortcircuits the transcendence
I fiddled for imperiously and too long.
All my friends are writers. Do I deserve
to sleep, because I gave myself the breaks,
self-seeking with persistent tenderness
rivals seldom lavish on a brother?
10. NEW YORK
I can move around more … through the thirty years
to the New York of Jean Stafford, Pearl Harbor, the Church?
Most of my old friends are mostly dead,
entitled to grow infirm and lap the cream—
if time that hurt so much improved a little?
Our onslaught, not wholly Pyrrhic, to launch Harriet
on the heart-turning, now savage, megapolis.…
A friendly soft depression browns the air,
it’s not my glasses needing a handkerchief …
it’s as if I stood tiptoe on a chair
so that I couldn’t help but touch the ceiling—
almost obscenely, complaisantly on the phone with
my three wives, as if three-dimensional space were my breath—
three writers, none New Yorkers, had their great years there.
11. CHRISTMAS
All too often now your voice is too bright;
I always hear you … commonsense, though verbal …
waking me to myself: truth, the truth, until
things are just as if they had never been.
I can’t tell the things we planned for you this Christmas.
I’ve written my family not to phone today,
we had to put away your photographs.
We had to. We have no choice—we, I, they?…
Our Christmas tree seems fallen out with nature,
shedding to a naked cone of triggered wiring.
This worst time is not unhappy, green sap
still floods the arid rind, the thorny needles
catch the drafts, as if alive—I too,
because I waver, am counted with the living.
12. CHRISTMAS
The tedium and déjà-vu of home
make me love it; bluer days will come
and acclimatize the Christmas gifts:
redwood bear, lemon-egg shampoo, home-movie-
projector, a fat book, sunrise-red, inscribed
to me by Lizzie, “Why don’t you lose yourself
and write a play about the fall of Japan?”
Slight spirits of birds, light burdens, no grave duty
to seem universally sociable
and polite.… We are at home and warm,
as if we had escaped the gaping jaws—
underneath us like a submarine,
nuclear and protective like a mother,
swims the true shark, the shadow of departure.
Dolphin
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
forgetful as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will.…
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself—
to ask compassion … this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting—
my eyes have seen what my hand did.
THE DOLPHIN MANUSCRIPT
(1972)
In this edition of The Dolphin, the 1972 and 1973 variants are presented from latest to earliest. This arrangement honors Lowell’s decision to publish the book in and with its 1973 shape and plot.1 In looking back over his art and the experiences from which it emerged, he revised away from the actual sequence of events toward the fictional.
Both versions frame and devise his experience. He asks compassion, classically, for “this book, half fiction,” in his final poem, “Dolphin.” Half fiction: the real and the fictional are pendant to each other. The characters bear the names of actual persons but the words they write or speak come through Lowell’s hand or mouth. Their words are half Lowell’s, inasmuch as he changed and transformed the sources he was working from, in document or memory. Of the poems featuring other voices, however much he sought to “blunt and angle” them in revision, this essential ventriloquy exists, in both the 1973 and the 1972 versions.
As noted in this book’s introduction, the major difference between the two states of the book is structural. The 1972 manuscript version closely follows the actual events as they unfolded in Lowell’s life—the protagonist falls in love with Caroline, suffers a manic attack, recovers, vacillates, then, seven months later, flies to New York to end his marriage to Lizzie. The conception of Robert Sheridan,2 his child with Caroline, comes in the dénouement. In the 1973 version, Lowell reorders the sequence of events and lengthens the stretch of time, making the protagonist’s final decision to leave Lizzie for Caroline take place a year after the birth of the child, and marking a passage of time of more than two years. Lowell described his reasoning about the change in a letter:
I had meant to end with the Flight to New York sequence, even after R. S.’s birth conception, but feared I would be lying. Now The “departure” is the real, though not chronological ending; it will of course seem to be both the real and chronological ending because I place it at the end—not from anything I say. Sophistry? No, not entirely. It’s This/ is the real truth of the story and is in a way happening again now. The letters are not really changed to improve—the most I can hope is to lose nothing … to both lose and gain.3
For Lowell, the “real truth of the story,” retrospectively revealed, would admit these variations in plot, the gains and losses still in balance in the half fiction he was creating.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Lowell completed a draft of The Dolphin in January 1972. As he worked toward the final version, he enlisted help from Caroline Blackwood and Frank Bidart. As Bidart recalls, they would review each page and Lowell, while “lying on his daybed, would dictate changes” for Blackwood or Bidart to write on the page. The manuscript was finalized and copyedited by Bidart, who was preparing it for Lowell’s friends to read, and possibly also “for a typist or printer.”4 If any change on a manuscript page was unclear, Bidart would rewrite it in the margins—but all changes are presumed to be Lowell’s own.
This text, which Lowell never sanctioned for publication, is a facsimile of that early 1972 manuscript, intended to be experienced as Lowell’s friends did when it was circulated to them. Its typescript is clear and legible, while the writings in the margins offer a visual impression of Lowell’s work on the page. Lowell’s rewordings are transcribed for clarity and given inside the whole line, to allow readers to hear the line’s full rhythm and pattern of sounds. Handwritten changes and corrections are inserted in the place indicated in the line. Those in Lowell’s hand are transcribed in roman type; those he dictated to Frank Bidart, Caroline Blackwood, and in one instance perhaps an unknown other, are transcribed in italic type, with the initials of the scribe given in italicized brackets ([FB] for Frank Bidart, [CB] for Caroline Blackwood). Any hand-corrected typographical errors, as well as changes to punctuation, are recorded. Changes of mind (erased pencilings, revisions reconsidered) are given twice, in canceled and uncanceled versions. The typist’s overstrikes are transcribed only if they seem to indicate a suggestive revision or change of mind. In two instances, marginal changes (made in the last seven pages of the manuscript, from Frank Bidart’s photocopy; see below) are illegible.
