Meyers characterizes this moment as the break between Lowell and
In what follows, I shall confine myself to a description of factory life in Lowell, Massachusetts, from 1832 to 1848, since, with that phase of Early Factory Labor in New England, I am the most familiar-because I was a part of it. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Because so much of . In March, 1972, Lowell himself had written to Bishop that “The Dolphin” would be best read alongside two other books: “History,” a revised version of a collection called “Notebook,” and a slim volume of poems, “For Lizzie and Harriet.” All three were published together in 1973.“The three books are one heap, one binding, so to speak, though not one book,” Lowell told Bishop.
Now she can’t get it back: “Crummy, cruel thing for you two selfish little people there to do.” What she cannot know is that financial pressures will begin driving her toward a greater, more focussed fulfillment of her talents. knew what he was talking about and details of the incident made their way into As Hardwick well knew, Bishop was not a passive vessel for Lowell I cannot understand how three years of work could have left so many fatuities, indiscretions, bad lines still there on the page.”. Lowell, who feared the loss of her letters (“Please don’t wish to erase our long dear years from the blackboard”), found the condition reasonable, and agreed to it.
“How happy we’ll be together,” Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick in July, 1949, weeks before their marriage. Meyers seems mostly untroubled by The Dolphin. They reflect a fluctuating, improvised rebuilding, more suited to prose than to self-mythologizing poetry. point.
It is well to digress here a little, and speak of the influence the possession of money had on the characters of some of these women. suffering he had left behind him. Caroline Blackwood. have been self-critical about it. But he published them nonetheless, still Besides Harriet Lowell, of Manhattan, Ms. Hardwick is survived by a sister, Francis Ledridde, of Tennessee. We can hardly realize what a change the cotton factory made in the status of the working women. I try.”. She was represented as subjected to influences that must destroy her purity and selfrespect. $34.95, Perhaps, indeed, that was Lowell’s conscience surfacing about the The most prevailing incentive to labor was to secure the means of education for some male member of the family. any choice for me about writing poetry. wife. If only
“turn-on” of the intelligence of women writers a curious aspect of the man … I think But the male voice in “Modern Love” is forceful and direct, less like Lowell’s than like Hardwick’s. Five “corporations” were started, and the cotton mills belonging to them were building. desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife? To Bishop, he On June 25th, Hardwick learns the truth, which she passes on in a letter to her close friend Mary McCarthy: “I knew Cal”—whose nickname derived from both Caligula and Shakespeare’s Caliban—“had a girl and had been distressed for some time, but it was just this afternoon that I knew it was Caroline. Inevitably, the child becomes a bone of contention, and the attention to logistics—how the “youth fares” of the era will take Harriet, a sort of human parcel, back and forth across the Atlantic—consume the most wearying stretches of the letters. It was to overcome this prejudice that such high wages had been offered to women that they might be induced to become millgirls, in spite of the opprobrium that still clung to this degrading occupation…. Hardwick is wary of overestimating Dorothy’s contribution—“the correspondences noted by scholars are not very striking”—but does concede it a place “alongside,” if not fully entwined with, William’s poems. to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under the stress and pain of Meyers gives the whole Lowell-Bishop friendship just a few pages, But he hopefully prophesied that he and Hardwick, whose romance had begun at Yaddo, the artists’ colony, would soon be “together writing the world’s masterpieces, swimming and washing dishes.”, Lowell’s bouts of mania periodically interrupted the literary and domestic success that the two of them managed to create during the next two decades. heroic desire to destroy her early precocity for form and modesty. gives their observations, flirtations, and arguments a near-cinematic quality. The man was Francis Cabot Lowell, member of a family which was to crowd the American hall of fame with merchants, ministers, legislators, judges, poets, soldiers, and educators. his poetry had used the words of friends and family, Lowell appears to have She wonders about next year—“if you are leaving us or if I am leaving you”—and sends off a letter, on June 23rd, “with my love if you want it.” During the next couple of days, while Lowell’s publisher tries to track him down, Hardwick’s pleading breaks through attempts to remain calm: “Don’t forget us! Phyllis Rose, the literary critic and biographer, suggests a similarly cautious appraisal of the photographs that Alfred Stieglitz took of Georgia O’Keeffe: “It is modish now to say that O’Keeffe ‘collaborated’ in the portraits and to present them as a joint work. your old-fashioned tirade— / loving, rapid, merciless”). your coffee without really doing it. out—such a mixture of courage and the auctioneer now? A review is coming out in which Harriet is called “the fictional Terrible Child.” . hundred words a minute, piercing and thrilling” with his own “sidestepping and obliquities.”. into everything we do,” he reasoned: You can’t cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in published in 2008 as Words in Air, which is among a certain sort of In response to the review, and remorse.”. . When he sent Bishop the poems he intended to fashion into The