BOOKS

The great letters of a great poet

James Buchan

ELIZABETH BISHOP ONE ART: THE SELECTED LEFIERS edited and introduced by Robert Giroux Chatto & Windus, f25, pp. 668 Ihave often wondered what lyric poets do with the time they're not writing lyric poetry. The answer, in the case of the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop, was drink, wander the world and write letters and in that order; it added up to a life that, though painful to Miss Bishop and some- times damaging to her friends, makes exemplary study.

Drink enters the pages of this vast book quite early, soon after Vassar, in gay references to cocktails, and runs on in panic, sickness and the most winning self- deception. During a spell of teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1966, Miss Bishop wrote to her New York doctor, Anny Baumann:

In fact I did not miss a single class because of drinking — and that's much better than any one can say of the other poets who have had the job before me.

Miss Bishop's double sonnet, 'The Prodi- gal', is the best poem ever written about alcohol, and is much better, I now see, than Robert Lowell's 'The Drinker', which copies it — though Elizabeth's pints have become Cal's fifths, a very masculine touch.

As for travel, Elizabeth Bishop was rest- less even by the standards of American artists of her generation. She never had a job, except briefly at a US navy optics laboratory at Key West in the war and, much later, at universities, but wandered the world on America's great public bounty to artists: to Key West, Mexico, Haiti, many times to Europe, Brazil for 18 years, the West Coast, Boston harbour and finally the beautiful island of North Haven, Maine, which she loved best of all, though her poem about the place is no good. If these journeys had some of the character of flight, from sexual orthodoxy and a hellish childhood and her neurasthenic ill- nesses, they also shielded her from a trivial and conformist modernity and left her free to serve her tyrant art.

Letters were the counterpoint of these travels. They were the narrative she made of her life for the perusal of her family and generation — for the United States itself — societies she could not tolerate at closer hand. They were also a sort of preliminary going over of her adventures which issued, sometimes only years later, into her verse. `I am sorry for people who can't write letters . . . It's kind of like working without really doing it,' she wrote in 1953.

On 29 August, 1946, she wrote from Manhattan to Marianne Moore in far-away Brooklyn about a visit she'd just made to her mother's family in Nova Scotia:

... and in the US, for some legal reason, so I had to leave. I came back by bus — a dreadful trip, but it seemed most convenient at the time — we hailed it with a flashlight and a lantern as it went by the farm late at night. Early the next morning, just as it was getting light, the driver had to stop suddenly for a big cow moose who was wandering down the road. She walked away very slowly into the woods, looking at us over her shoulder. The driver said that one foggy night he had to stop while a huge bull moose came right up and smelled the engine. 'Very curious beasts,' he said.

After a mere 26 years of gestation, this event was born as the famous poem 'The Moose', which will be anthologised as long as there are anthologies and even people in Nova Scotia know. This is the chief, though not the only interest of this immense collection of letters: to show the stages through which great verse is made. As far as I can see, it's quite simple. You read every poet you can find in four or five languages, and his or her letters, and work till you drop.

Like all great American artists, Elizabeth Bishop, who died in 1979, is grossly over- rated. Her output, except of letters, was small. You can read all her published verse in a morning: perhaps 100 poems, includ- ing translations and teenaged work. Her prose fiction, but for some poetical memoirs of childhood, would not survive on its own two feet. Yet, in the past ten years, United States literature in verse has been distilled to three names: Whitman (man, but OK because gay); Emily Dickin- son (woman); Elizabeth Bishop (woman and gay, bingo!) Miss Bishop would have hated her fashionable fame, not just because she despised campus feminism but because she also valued the now forgotten poets of her generation and the one before — poor Cal with his posh relations and breakdowns, the Wallace Stevens of 'The Emperor of Ice Cream', Randall Jarrell and James Merrill and Marianne Moore and was an excellent if sometimes flustered

critic of others, as well as of herself. Her sure judgment shines out of almost every letter here. Don't see Quo Vadis. Do you know Robert Johnson? Have you read Morgenstern?

For myself, I have loved her since I was 20, when a poet I knew in Oxford (now famous as a mystic) gestured, swooning, in

the direction of the latest New Yorker. He raved about her prosody. Not understand-

ing such things, I saw only a fidelity to experience, which sometimes suffices and sometimes opens on abysses of the unfamiliar. Also something attractive in her nature, which I can't quite define but which Henry James, in talking about the general superiority of American over European women, called their greater moral spontaneity.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father, a building contractor, died in her first year of life; she lost her mother, who was from Great Village, Nova Scotia, four years later to the first of a series of mental institutions and never saw her again. Not surprisingly, Elizabeth suffered as a child from bad asth- ma and eczema, which plagued her all her life.

She was well educated from a legacy of her father's, attended Vassar College up the Hudson from New York where, in 1934 — the year of her mother's death — she was given an introduction to Marianne Moore. It is a delight to follow this friend-

ship through these letters, from a first wild- ly successful visit to the Ringling Brothers'

circus right up to Miss Moore's death in 1972. From Miss Moore, I suspect, she learned her extreme dedication to her craft, a caution in dealing with words (especially in verse) and an interest in animals. Elizabeth's girlishness blows away, she gains confidence in her own work and

the restless apprentice takes her Meister- brief Their literary break came with Eliza-

beth's Key West poem 'Roosters', not just

because Miss Moore was alarmed by the water closet in it, but because it rejects

rather obviously a certain kind of masculin- ity, and I imagine Miss Moore, alone with her mother in her unfashionable neigh- bourhood, found this a little threatening. Certainly, pupil is never eccentric in the way of her mistress; and in Miss Bishop's later letters of critical admiration, one won- ders if she is quite serious:

I'm grateful for the word wendletrap and shall

do my best to see that it passes into common usage.

Her poem to Miss Moore is rather insolent, though it has ravishing lines: Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan is all awash with morals this fine morning, so please come flying.

There are also a couple of passages in her prose memoir of her mistress, Efforts of Affection, which are coarse (and evident only because of her all but perfect taste.) In 1938, Elizabeth Bishop bought a house in Key West, Florida with a room- mate from college, Louise Crane, where she fished (and wrote the best fishing poem ever, 'The Fish'). The war entered her con- sciousness only through the vandalism of the navy in Key West. In 1946, neither too early nor too late but just at the right time, she published her first verse collection, North & South, which was well received; but back on the US mainland, she fell prey to attacks of anxiety and hopelessness and had to have treatment in hospital. She was rescued by a travel bursary from Bryn Mawr. Planning to sail round South Ameri- ca, she stopped at Rio de Janeiro in November, 1951 and stayed in Brazil for 18 years. She lived at Petropolis, in the hills above Rio, on an estate belonging to Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares, usual- ly known as Lota, though later, when their affair was disintegrating, she bought a house for herself in the baroque town of Ouro Preto. At least a dozen of the years with Lota were happy, and she always recognised that Lota, a remarkable lady who rather baffles the editor of this vol- ume, had saved her life. Elizabeth's letters to Lota were destroyed by a jealous family, and it is hard to see what precisely went wrong. It appears that the relationship broke down under the weight of Elizabeth's drinking and Lota's exhaustion from her project to build a corniche and park in Rio, or rather these were symptoms of warring Pathologies. Elizabeth evidently began an affair with another woman, whom Mr Giroux calls XY. In the summer of 1967, she fled to New York and Lota followed her, only to commit suicide her first night at the apartment Elizabeth had borrowed on Perry Street. Elizabeth tried to return to Brazil, but was shunned by her old circle, while XY herself had a breakdown in Ouro Preto and had to be shipped home. Elizabeth spent her last decade at various campus sinecures in the US. That she survived this Brazilian crack-up shows that, for all her fragility and disorderliness, she Possessed a hard kernel of self- possession,and this I suspect, was the cer- tainty of her gift:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

Quite soon, no doubt, some campus bore will make a multi-volume edition of Eliza-

beth Bishop's letters, the pages invaded by prurient footnotes. But for me, this selection — a mere 3-400,000 words — will suffice as both the record of her life and as sufficient commentary on her verse. Mr Giroux is discreet, affectionate, pious and worldly: in a brief introduction, one hears the authentic accents of Farrar Straus & Giroux (`The only occasion on which I met Lota was at the small dinner party Robert and Elizabeth Lowell gave for the recently married T.S. and Valerie Eliot in New York'). He has done a monumental service, for these letters are not only great, they are probably the last great letters of our language. The art died with her.