Love between the lines

Sam Leith

WORDS IN AIR: THE COMPLETE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ELIZABETH BISHOP AND ROBERT LOWELL edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton Faber, £40, pp. 875, ISBN 9780571243082 Why does this ook need to exist? It’s a legitimate question — the correspondence of both these poets has been published in generous selected editions — but an easy one to answer. Quite apart from the fact you’d need prehensile thumbs to follow their exchanges properly through those two fat volumes, the unexpurgated version gives you not only ease but texture: their ‘helter-skelter shop-talk’; gossip about Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell; Lowell ‘exhaustingly’ changing his typewriter ribbons; Bishop getting ‘some of a very old & liquefied jelly bean’ stuck to her letter.

This was one of the great epistolary friendships of the 20th or any other century, and a hopeless love story to boot: manic-depressive toff seeks orphaned lesbian alcoholic for poetry, self-torment and perhaps more. In one celebrated letter, Lowell writes that asking Bishop to marry him was ‘the might have been for me’. Bishop — with her characteristic Nova Scotian reserve — blanked the subject in her letter back. It wasn’t mentioned again. Their love always belonged between the lines rather than between the sheets. ‘One of the strange things about poets,’ Bishop quotes a friend remarking, ‘is the way they keep warm by writing to one another all over the world.’ The first letter here is from Bishop, concisely courteous and dated 12 May 1947. It is addressed to ‘Mr Lowell’ and sent care of his publisher. The last is from August 1977, a month or so before Lowell’s unexpected death. It was a poets’ friendship, and not always a high-minded one. The log-rolling was relentless: each of them hitting the other up for blurbs, conspiring to fix grants and fellowships and prizes and teaching jobs at universities. ‘One more boring request — do you think you could write a short new sentence about me for Bob Giroux?’ Bishop asked in one postscript, adding, in the certain knowledge she’d be extravagantly disobeyed, ‘But short — and please don’t exaggerate, Cal dear’.

These pages are scattered, too, with feline dismissals of the competition. The Beat poets, thinks Bishop, are

hopeless — and yet I sympathise with them . . . the trouble is mostly ignorance, don’t you think — and lack of education, as well as talent. (I guess that takes care of them!)

Spender is ‘pleasant — no poet, though’. Ben Belitt ‘so egotistical one just doesn’t know what to say to him’. Richard Eberhart produces an ‘endless ubi sunt poem’. An unadmired critic is ‘a Clive James, or James Clive . . . who is he?’ At one point, Bishop exclaims: ‘WHO wrote those idiotic movie reviews? I think she must be somebody’s mistress?’ A footnote soberly informs us. Jeepers. It was Pauline Kael.

Neither of them found being in the world easy, and they understood that about each other. ‘Sometimes I wish we could have a more sensible conversation about this suffering business,’ she wrote to him in 1948. ‘I imagine we agree pretty well.’ They did and did not. After another of Lowell’s breakdowns — he suffered manic attacks and was hospitalised every year or two throughout his adult life — she wrote: ‘Sobriety & gaiety & patience & toughness will do the trick.’ She was talking to herself, too.

I once heard Seamus Heaney describe her as having had a ‘dry, merry quality’, and that’s there in the letters. Lowell wears his suffering more heavily. His characteristic tone of voice is mournful, bewildered. His jokes are skewed, his best anecdotes sawn-off and left hanging: the letter-writer, as the poet, of ‘unlikeness’, ‘misalliance’, ‘lost connections’.

Recovering from a manic episode, a breakdown, he writes:

As I dully drove back over the Bangor toll bridge in my gray and blue Ford, the nut still rattling in the hub cap as though we were dragging a battered tin can at our heels, I looked up and a sign said, ‘When money talks it says, “Chevrolet.” ’

Only in correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop, I think, would Lowell look like the weaker writer. Bishop is pragmatic: ‘awful but cheerful’. Lowell you sometimes catch showing off. She, seldom if ever. Were it not for the footnotes and biographical time-line that the editors (whose scholarship is to be applauded: at one point they manage to put a name to a character identified in the text only as ‘a nice deaf old man’) have helpfully included, you’d scarcely know what she was going through from some of the letters. Hospitalisation for her asthma, hospitalisation for her breakdowns, Antabuse treatment for drinking, her companion Lota’s breakdowns and death, injuries in drunken falls. ‘I, too, have “spells”,’ she admits.

There are amazing, higgledy-piggledy riches throughout this volume, from glints of description (Harvard’s oak trees ‘shedding old inner-soles at a great rate’) and comic curios — comparing notes on learning to drive; Bishop being electro cuted; Lowell setting fire to his trousers — to marvellous set-pieces like Lowell’s disastrous boating expedition, or Bishop’s close-up dispatches from the Brazilian revolution.

Cadences from the poetry intrude — Lowell’s ‘gun-metal-gray and meekly utilitarian ranch wagon’ echoes ‘gray, sorry and ancestral house’ in ‘The Exile’s Return’. And when he exclaims, ‘Oh, to break away’, you can’t but hear ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’.

This is, among other things, a threedecade dialogue at the highest level on the ethics and pragmatics of making poems; Bishop was an astonishing technician, and Lowell no slouch. Their conversation is filled with line-fragments and quotations and early versions. (Other things came second: they’d been corresponding for 20 years before Lowell even knew the date of Bishop’s birthday.) But it’s the poets in their affectionate, messy, private selves that make this book sing.

The last letter from Bishop ends with a promise: ‘I’ll see you in Cambridge or New York — and Elizabeth, too, in New York — and maybe in North Haven next summer if I can get back here again.’ It is followed in the book by her elegy to him, ‘North Haven’. If after reading 800 pages of their letters you can get through it without a tear you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

After Dylan Thomas’s death, Lowell signed off a letter to Bishop: ‘Thomas wanted to live burning, burning out. So we. I want to live to be old, and want you to.’ They did, just. q