Dear Elizabeth
Page 1
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For Elizabeth B and Elizabeth C as in Charuvastra who covered her typewriter with bandages and typed out all the poetry she could remember when she was far from home
Sometimes it seems … as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.
—Elizabeth Bishop, from her notebook
Dream—
I see a postman everywhere
Vanishing in thin blue air,
A mammoth letter in his hand,
Postmarked from a foreign land.
The postman’s uniform is blue.
The letter is of course from you
And I’d be able to read, I hope,
My own name on the envelope
But he has trouble with this letter
Which constantly grows bigger & bigger
And over and over with a stare,
He vanishes in blue, blue air.
—Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments
Elizabeth told me about Robert Lowell. She said, “He’s my best friend.” When I met him a few years later, I mentioned that I knew her and he said, “Oh, she’s my best friend.” It was nice to think that she and Lowell both thought of each other in the same way.
—Thom Gunn, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop
I can remember Cal’s carrying Elizabeth’s “Armadillo” poem around in his wallet everywhere, not the way you’d carry the picture of a grandson, but as you’d carry something to brace you and make you sure of how a poem ought to be.
—Richard Wilbur, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop
While we were with her, she managed to finish “North Haven,” the poem [or elegy] for Lowell. She read it to us and walked about with it in her hand. I found it very moving that she felt she could hardly bear to put it down, that it was part of her. She put it beside her plate at dinner.
—Ilse Barker, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Preface
DEAR ELIZABETH
ACT ONE
Part One: Water
Part Two: Come to Yaddo
Part Three: Brazil
ACT TWO
Part One: Skunk
Part Two: Art just isn’t worth that much
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Also by Sarah Ruhl
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Preface
The great poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were great friends, and they wrote more than eight hundred pages of letters to each other. When I was on bed rest, pregnant with twins, a friend gave me the book of their collected letters, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I already had a long-standing obsession with Bishop; my obsession with Lowell and his friendship with Bishop now began. I could not put the letters down. I hungered to hear them read aloud; I particularly longed to hear letter number 161 read out loud. Number 161 is Lowell’s most confessional letter to Bishop, and I think, one of the most beautiful love letters ever written. In it, he says, about not asking Bishop to marry him: “But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.”
Reading these eight hundred pages—these strands of two lives intersecting, rarely meeting—I thought: Why do I find this narrative so compelling, even though theirs is not a story in the traditional sense? I was desperate to know how the “story” would come out—how each life would progress, how the relationship would end. But I also loved how the letters resisted a sense of the usual literary “story”—how instead they forced us to look at life as it is lived. Not neat. Not two glorious Greek arcs meeting in the center. Instead: a dialectic between the interior poetic life and the pear-shaped, particular, sudden, ordinary life-as-it-is-lived.
Life intrudes, without warning. Bishop’s great love and partner, Lota, commits suicide without warning. Bishop has multiple asthma attacks, and often needs to be hospitalized for alcoholism and depression. Lowell dies suddenly of a heart attack in a taxicab en route to see his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick. As he died in the taxi he held a painting of his third wife, painted by her ex-husband, Lucian Freud. Lowell had bipolar disorder and often found himself quite suddenly in a sanatorium. Bishop and Lowell’s carefully built, Platonic poetic worlds are intruded on constantly by the vagaries of life and the body. And through such sudden disturbances, their letters were like lanterns sent to each other across long distances. Bishop lived in Brazil most of her life, and Lowell lived in New York, Boston, and London. Their friendship was lived largely on paper, though they met up at crucial times in their lives.
Bishop was in New York when Lota committed suicide, and she stayed at Hardwick and Lowell’s apartment. They paid for her ambulance ride through Central Park, the result of a bad fall she took, perhaps induced by too much drink, after Lota’s suicide. Bishop was plagued her whole life by alcoholism; at one point a friend eliminated all the liquor in her house and Bishop was reduced to drinking rubbing alcohol and ended up in the hospital. Lowell visited Bishop in South America and was hospitalized in Argentina for a manic episode.
Their correspondence spans political epochs—coups in Brazil, the Vietnam War—personal epochs, and literary epochs. Bishop observes Lowell’s trajectory as he creates the confessional movement in poetry. There is, in the letters, an extraordinary dialectic between Lowell’s more confessional mode and Bishop’s formal restraint. Her skeptical attitude toward the confessional, however, didn’t keep her from loving Lowell’s poetry. They both carried each other’s poems in their minds and in their pockets. Lowell carried Bishop’s “The Armadillo” (a poem she dedicated to Lowell) in his wallet, a kind of talisman. Lowell wrote “Skunk Hour” for Bishop, as well as many sonnets and a poem called “Water,” about a seminal weekend the two of them spent in Maine.
After Lowell divorced Jean Stafford in July 1948, he visited Bishop in Maine. It’s a visit they would both return to again and again in their letters and in their poetry. It’s impossible to reconstruct exactly what happened; we know from letters and poems that they spent the weekend together, at one point standing waist high in water, and Bishop said to Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” Bishop wrote later that they were: “Swimming, or rather standing, numb to the waist in the freezing cold water, but continuing to talk. If I were to think of any Saint in his connection then it is St. Sebastian—he stood in a rocky basin of the freezing water sloshing it over his handsome youthful body and I could almost see the arrows sticking out of him.”
We know that shortly after that visit, Lowell told some friends he was going to marry Bishop. Soon after, they had a drunken weekend at Bard where many poets were gathered. Lowell was rumored to have proposed to Bishop that weekend. Bishop wrote to another friend, “Saturday night was worst—a really drunken party, I’m afraid, with everyone behaving very much the way poets are supposed to.” In another account, Bishop remembers that she and Hardwick had helped a drunken Lowell back to his room, taken off his shoes and tie, loosened his shirt, upon which Hardwick said, “Why, he’s an Adonis!” and Bishop said, “from then on I knew it was all over.”
We also know from their friend Josep
h Summers that at the end of the Bard weekend, “He and Elizabeth seemed to be very much in love … He was saying, ‘Now let me know when you are coming back.’ And she said, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Let me know where you are,’ and so on.” Another friend reports, “She told us at one point she loved Cal more than anybody she’d ever known, except for Lota, but that he would destroy her.” And from another friend: Lowell “was one of the few people Bishop addressed in her poems. She said that he had proposed to her, and she had turned him down.” Apparently her greatest regret was not having a child, and she considered having one with Lowell early on, but worried about the history of mental illness in both of their families.
The gaps between their letters, the mysterious interludes in which Lowell and Bishop actually saw each other, leaves much to the imagination. Their letters are so hyper-articulate that one almost has the impression that no bits of life were lived without having been written down. These silences between the letters fascinated me as much as the letters themselves. But rather than invent dialogue for these interludes in which they actually met, I felt it important to let Bishop and Lowell speak only in their own words. Bishop’s reserve, and her insistence on not mixing fact and fiction, was always with me as I arranged the letters. All the words from the play are taken from their letters and from their poetry.
There are many ways to do this play. One can imagine the full spectacle I have suggested in the stage directions, complete with planets appearing and water rushing onto the stage, as in its premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre. I wanted to see the images in their letters made three-dimensional, to somehow see the reach of their imagery. But I’m also interested in how much the language can do all by itself. One can imagine, for example, a simple book-club version. I saw pictures of one such event in Illinois and was very moved by the simplicity of nonactors who loved poetry reading the letters out loud to fellow travelers. One could also imagine doing the play in a library, at a poetry foundation, or even on the set for another play on a dark Monday night. You really need nothing more than a table and two chairs for two wonderful actors who could even read the letters straight from the page rather than memorizing them. A third actor could read stage directions in place of the projected subtitles.
Regardless of how the play is performed, in a theater or in a room, when I first read the letters, I felt that they demanded to be read out loud, whether by actors or by laypeople. Bishop and Lowell had unerring, consummate ears, and they wrote poetry for a time when Lowell could command massive crowds in Madison Square Garden, all gathered to hear him read his poems. I offer this arrangement, then, in the spirit of a contemporary hunger to hear poetry out loud. I think we are starved for the sound of poetry. I wonder if Bishop and Lowell are among the last great people of letters to write out their lives in letter form. Their letters become almost a medieval church constructed in praise of friendship. It’s difficult to write about friendship. Our culture is inundated with stories of romantic love. We understand how romantic love begins, how it ends. We don’t understand, in neat narrative fashion, how friendship begins, how it endures. And yet life would be unbearable without friendship.
—Sarah Ruhl
Dear Elizabeth was first commissioned by and produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre (James Bundy, artistic director; Victoria Nolan, managing director; Jennifer Kiger, associate artistic director). The first performance was on November 30, 2012.
Cast
ELIZABETH BISHOP Mary Beth Fisher
ROBERT LOWELL Jefferson Mays
Creative Team
DIRECTOR Les Waters
SCENIC DESIGNER Adam Rigg
COSTUME DESIGNER Maria Hooper
LIGHTING DESIGNER Russell H. Champa
SOUND DESIGNER Bray Poor
PROJECTION DESIGNER Hannah Wasileski
PRODUCTION DRAMATURG Amy Boratko
CASTING Tara Rubin
STAGE MANAGER Kirstin Hodges
Subsequently produced by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre (Tony Taccone, artistic director; Susan Medak, managing director; Liesl Tommy, associate director; Karen Racanelli, general manager). The first performance was on May 24, 2013, at the Roda Theatre.
Cast
ELIZABETH BISHOP Mary Beth Fisher
ROBERT LOWELL Tom Nelis
Creative Team
DIRECTOR Les Waters
SCENIC DESIGNER Annie Smart
COSTUME DESIGNER Maria Hooper
LIGHTING DESIGNER Russell H. Champa
SOUND DESIGNER Bray Poor
PROJECTION DESIGNER Hannah Wasileski
STAGE MANAGER Cynthia Cahill
Subsequently produced by People’s Light & Theatre Company (Abigail Adams, artistic director; Ellen Anderson, general manager; Zak Berkman, producing director). The first performance was on April 2, 2014.
Cast
ELIZABETH BISHOP Ellen McLaughlin
ROBERT LOWELL Rinde Eckert
Creative Team
DIRECTOR Lisa Rothe
SCENIC DESIGNER Jason Simms
COSTUME DESIGNER Theresa Squire
LIGHTING DESIGNER Mary Louise Geiger
COMPOSER / SOUND DESIGNER Rinde Eckert
ASSOCIATE SOUND DESIGNER Elizabeth Atkinson
PRODUCTION STAGE MANAGER Kelly O’Rourke
DRAMATURGS Zak Berkman and Gina Pisasale
LINE PRODUCER Zak Berkman
Personages
Elizabeth Bishop: a woman between the ages of forty and sixty.
Robert Lowell: a man between the ages of forty and sixty.
Set
One might use subtitles to indicate the place and date of some letters.
A spare set, with two chairs and a table.
One record player, one microphone.
The possibility of the stage becoming, for a moment, the sea and a giant rock, and then back to two private spaces for two writers.
Stagehands might be used to deliver props and glasses of wine to the actors.
Note
The following words are all Elizabeth Bishop’s and Robert Lowell’s. On occasion I repeated a phrase that they once used, and I often cut internally within their letters. A careful reader can go back to the original letters (Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell) to see the letters in their entirety. The numbering of the letters in the afterword corresponds with the numbers in Words in Air.
I don’t believe the actors should ever pretend to actually write the letters. They are speaking the letters to each other and to the audience as though they are in the act of composing them. They should feel in the moment of discovering the thought for the first time.
They might even read them from the page at times. My first impulse when creating this piece was mainly to hear these letters read out loud. So I can imagine full productions of the play, including water, ladders, and moons; and I can also imagine stripped-down versions in which the main event is hearing two actors, or two readers, simply read the thing out loud in a room.
ACT ONE
Part One: Water
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell enter and sit at a table.
A SUBTITLE FLASHES: May 12, 1947.
BISHOP
Dear Mr. Lowell,
I just wanted to say that I think it is wonderful you have received all the awards; the Guggenheim, the Pulitzer, and—I guess I’ll just call them 1, 2, & 3 …
Maybe if you’re still in town you would come to see me sometime, I should like to see you very much, or just write me a note if you’d rather …
Elizabeth Bishop
LOWELL
Dear Miss Bishop,
Sorry to have missed dining with you yesterday, and reading with you. You are a marvelous writer, and your note was about the only one that meant anything to me.
Last night at three we had a fire. The man who started it fell asleep drunk and smoking. He ran back and forth from his room to the bathroom carrying a waste-basket with a thimble-full of water shouting at the
top of his lungs, “Shush, shush, no fire. Stop shouting you’ll wake everyone up. An accident. Nobody injured,” until a policeman shouted: “Nobody injured? Look at all the people you’ve gotten up.” Today my room smells like burnt tar-paper.
I’m going to Boston on the 2nd and then to Yaddo. I hope that I will see more of you some day.
Robert Lowell
BISHOP
Dear Robert,
(I’ve never been able to catch that name they call you but Mr. Lowell doesn’t sound right, either.) I had meant to write to you quite a while ago, to answer the note you sent me in New York, and I certainly meant to do it before your review of my book appeared, but it’s too late now.
It is the first review I’ve had that attempted to find any general drift or consistency in the individual poems and I was beginning to feel there probably wasn’t any at all … I suppose for pride’s sake I should take some sort of stand about the adverse criticisms, but I agreed with some of them only too well—you spoke out my worst fears as well as some of my ambitions …
Elizabeth Bishop turns away from the audience for a moment.
Robert Lowell looks up, looking for her.
The vague sound of wind and an indeterminate cow sound.
Robert Lowell looks confused.
Elizabeth Bishop turns back toward the audience.
Heavens—it is an hour later—I was called out to see a calf being born in the pasture beside the house. In five minutes after several falls on its nose it was standing up shaking its head and trying to nurse. They took it away from its mother almost immediately. It seems that if they take the calf away immediately then they don’t have the trouble of weaning it—it will drink out of a dish.
The calf’s mother has started to moo, and the cow in the next pasture is mooing even louder, possibly in sympathy.
I hope you’re liking Yaddo—I almost went there once but changed my mind.
Sincerely yours,
Elizabeth Bishop