Dear Elizabeth
Page 3
The poem is moving again.
I get stuck and in the dumps every so often; but what the hell, that’s writing.
Well, lonely girl: good luck & love,
Cal
He begins putting on a tuxedo.
BISHOP
I am mailing you a SAFE if not particularly esthetic ashtray …
I was sort of hoping to hear from you … I was afraid that, 1. you are sick. 2. you are MAD. 3.—well, various wild fancies.
SUBTITLE: Baldpate Mental Hospital, Georgetown, MA, April 10, 1949, Palm Sunday
LOWELL
I don’t know whether you got my last letter or not. I’m in grand shape. The world is full of wonders.
Wedding music.
Robert Lowell stands in a tuxedo.
He waits for an invisible Elizabeth Hardwick to come down the aisle.
During the following, he marches down the aisle beaming.
Rice is thrown at him.
Bishop looks at him getting married.
She is bewildered, then disapproving, then resigned.
And then moved by his happiness.
BISHOP
I wish you great happiness in your marriage and I do hope your troubles are over now for good—you have had too many lately for one person. I’ve been having quite a few of my own but things seem to have straightened out pretty much now. I was quite at loose ends for this month so finally decided to come here, to Yaddo. There is something a little sinister about the place though, don’t you think? I keep getting bats in my room, and then all those awful scummy ponds. But I think what is really the source of the trouble is the smell—old lunch boxes I guess …
I haven’t been able to “work” at all, so spend most of my time very pleasantly sitting on my balcony blowing bubbles.
Give my kindest regards to Elizabeth …
She gets out a bubble wand and starts to blow bubbles.
He suddenly lies down, inert.
She suddenly looks concerned, stops blowing bubbles.
Dear Cal:
I was up to New York briefly last week-end and tried to get hold of you but you were out … I do hope you’re feeling better …
With love,
Elizabeth
LOWELL
Things are much better with me. Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.
We sail now for Europe on the 28th, and plan to go to New York before. Now, I think there’s no escaping us for you. In any case don’t slip away.
She blows bubbles.
Thanks for your goodbye wire. How did you know the ship’s address?
She blows bubbles.
A large apartment and maid in Florence all waiting for you. Write me some American gossip, and for heavens’ sake hurry over here.
She blows bubbles.
I think I’ve almost given up expecting you—you’ll only come suddenly after swearing you’re on your way to Alaska—
She stops blowing bubbles.
I find that every day I less like writing letters and more like getting them; it’s the same with poems.
She packs a suitcase.
In May we are going to Rome. Can’t you be persuaded to join us? Wine with every meal. Short run-ins with every slight acquaintance of every slight acquaintance you’ve ever met. But best of all, lots of talk with me. Somehow I haven’t made this too attractive.
She snaps her suitcase shut.
Elizabeth and I spent the winter a few feet away from each other, reading. We both enjoy reading aloud to each other and detest listening. Sometimes, I suspect we see too much of one another. Accordingly, I have borrowed a houseboat for four days.
She stands with her suitcase.
Elizabeth has just said the only advantage of marriage is that you can be as gross, slovenly, mean and brutally verbose as you want.
She stands with her suitcase.
You absolutely must leave Yaddo and your horrible archeologist lover and join us in Florence.
She exits.
He looks puzzled, and slightly wounded, watching her exit.
Dear Elizabeth,
Write soon and tell us about Brazil. Why Brazil?
Brazilian music.
Part Three: Brazil
They age somehow.
Bishop enters.
SUBTITLE: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 21, 1952
BISHOP
Dear Cal,
I wanted to go around the world ending up about now visiting you, only they had made some mistake about my reservations on that freighter, so I haphazardly settled on South America.
Here I am extremely happy for the first time in my life. I can’t quite get used to being “happy,” but one remnant of my old morbidity is that I keep fearing that the few people I’m fond of may be in automobile accidents, or suffer some sort of catastrophe … The word for even a small accident here is “desastre,” so I often have false alarms.
I find the people here frank, startlingly so, and affectionate, an atmosphere that I just lap up after that dismal winter in Yaddo when I thought my days were numbered. I visited my friend Lota. She wanted me to stay; she offered to build me a studio. I certainly didn’t really want to wander around the world in a drunken daze for the rest of my life. So it’s all fine & dandy.
For heaven sakes—please keep me informed about your addresses so I can write to you, and I hope you’ll write to me. I’m probably going to need it much more than you are.
I have a TOUCAN—named Uncle Sam in a chauvinistic outburst. He’s wonderful, gulps down jewelry or pretends to, can play catch with grapes, and has brilliant blue eyes like neon lights.
With love,
Elizabeth
LOWELL
I hear that you are moving to Brazil forever. Hear you’re in wonderful tanned, talkative shape with a finished book. I’m talkative but untanned.
Last night I had a dream. I was in France. Paris was again falling to the Germans, but it had become a habit. I went to a party, where I was surrounded by acquaintances. They became distant and shadowy when I approached. Suddenly I saw you and gave you a tremendous hug. You moved to another table. I said: “I know where there are a couple of good French restaurants.” You said:
BISHOP
“They’re all French here.”
LOWELL
You see. You must come back.
BISHOP
I think it was extremely sweet of you to give me a witticism in a dream—it shows real, subconscious generosity.
LOWELL
I think about you continually—you and your studio and your Brazilian world. I’m sure you are as happy as you sound. But I don’t approve at all. Like a rheumatic old aunt, I would gladly spoil all your fun just to have you back.
You must come and we’ll build a replica of your Brazilian house, and you can swing through the years back and forth from one to the other like a pendulum.
BISHOP
We are coming to New York in the spring! Lota is looking forward to breakfast foods. I think we will give a corn-flake party immediately upon arrival …
INTERLUDE
Music.
They see each other.
They embrace, friends.
He tries to embrace her more fully.
She looks at him, astonished.
He looks wildly confused.
They go to their separate spaces.
A silence.
LOWELL
Dearest Elizabeth:
I see clearly now that for the last few days I have been living in a state of increasing mania—almost off the rails at the end. It almost seems as if I couldn’t be with you any length of time without acting with abysmal myopia and lack of consideration. My disease gives one (during its seizures) a headless heart.
Also I want you to know that you need never again fear my overstepping myself and stirring up confusion with you. There’s one bit of
the past that I would like to get off my chest and then I think all will be easy with us.
The lights become lights of a swimming and sunning day.
The stage fills with water and a rock.
He goes to her and speaks this letter directly to her.
They sit on a rock, or the idea of a rock.
Do you remember how at the end of that long swimming and sunning day we went up to, I think, the relatively removed upper Gross house and had one of those real fried New England dinners, probably awful. And we were talking about this and that about ourselves and you said rather humorously yet it was truly meant,
BISHOP
“When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
LOWELL
Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed since you found Lota. But at the time, I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed it would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then. And of course it wasn’t the right stage-setting, and then there was that poetry conference at Bard and I remember one evening presided over by Mary McCarthy and my Elizabeth was there, and going home to the Bard poets’ dormitory, I was so drunk that my hands turned cold and I felt half-dying and held your hand.
And nothing was said, and like a loon that needs sixty feet, I believe, to take off from the water, I wanted time and space, and went on assuming, and when I was to have joined you at Key West I was determined to ask you. Really for so callous (I fear) a man, I was fearfully shy and scared of spoiling things and distrustful of being steady enough to be the least good. Then of course the Yaddo explosion came and all was over.
The water recedes.
Yet there were a few months. And of course our friendship really wasn’t a courting, was really disinterested (bad phrase) really led to no encroachments. So it is.
Let me say this though and then leave the matter forever; I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can’t cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. I’ve never thought there was any choice for me about writing poetry. No doubt if I used my head better, ordered my life better, worked harder, the poetry would be improved, and there must be many lost poems, innumerable accidents and ill-done actions.
But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.
It was that way for these nine years or so that intervened. It was deeply buried, and this spring and summer it boiled to the surface. Now it won’t happen again. It won’t happen, I’m really underneath utterly in love and sold on my Elizabeth, and it’s a great solace to me that you are with Lota, and I am sure it is the will of the heavens that all is as it is.
He hands her a record.
P.S. The last part is too heatedly written with too many ands and so forth. The record is French Renaissance Vocal Music.
She takes the record. She closes her eyes.
Music.
She opens her eyes.
Love,
Cal
She looks out, not knowing what to say.
Blackout.
Intermission.
ACT TWO
Part One: Skunk
LOWELL
P.S. The last part is too heatedly written with too many ands and so forth. The record is French Renaissance Vocal Music.
She takes the record.
Love,
Cal
She puts the record on.
She picks up a pen.
She tries to write.
She stops and crumples the paper.
She tries again.
SUBTITLE: 115 East 67th Street, New York, August 28, 1957
BISHOP
Dearest Cal:
I wanted to answer your wonderful letter right away … but …
She stops.
Meanwhile he climbs a ladder.
But we’ve been so busy … And I’m apt to be interrupted at any moment by my Brazilian friends returning from Bloomingdale’s.
LOWELL
Asking you is the might have been—
BISHOP
I don’t know how Lota does it, really; I hate to shop so.
A moon appears.
LOWELL
—the other life that might have been had—
He reaches the top of the ladder and tries to grab the moon.
The moon won’t budge.
BISHOP
New York is awful I think.
LOWELL
I am sure it is the will of the heavens—
BISHOP
After racking my brains I just this minute decided it is like a battered-up old alarm clock that insists on gaining five or six hours a day & has to be kept lying on its side.
LOWELL
So it is …
BISHOP
I do hope you’re feeling much, much better, Cal, and realize now that I may not have written a very cheering letter.
She is not cheerful.
With lots of love as always—
Elizabeth
She puts her head in her hands.
He jumps off the ladder.
Or appears to jump off a ladder.
But maybe he just disappears into thin air.
The record ends.
He reappears.
She looks up.
LOWELL
I want you and Lota to know that I am at last in reverse. I am taking my anti-manic pills—75 mgs. of sparine, no more than what my doctor prescribed on the bottle but too much to drive or even see people much. The effect is something like the slowing and ache of a medium fever.
I want you to know … Oh, dear, I wanted you to know so many things …
Yesterday was mostly bed and letting my beard grow. Today I feel certain that I am not going off the deep end.
One is left strangely dumb, and talking about the past is like a cat’s trying to explain climbing down a ladder. Gracelessly, like a standing child trying to sit down, like a cat or a coon coming down a tree, I’m getting down my ladder to the moon. Ask Lota to forgive me. And forgive me yourself, dear old friend. I’ll make no solo descents on you either in New York or Brazil.
He walks to her and gives her a book.
A rare volume of George Herbert that was in his family for many years.
P.S. The George Herbert! I’ve really always wanted you to have it. I’ll be mortally hurt if you don’t keep it.
BISHOP
Thank you for the book. This is the first time I’d ever gone traveling without George Herbert so it is nice to have him again—even if I feel you really really shouldn’t have given it away. I’ve been reading him a lot—
LOWELL
Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing—
BISHOP
I think we should read his “Treatise of Temperance & Sobriety” out loud to each other. It begins “Having observed in my time many of my friends, of excellent wit & noble disposition, overthrown & undone by Intemperance; who, if they had lived, could have been an ornament to the world and a comfort to their friends…”
Dear Cal, do please please take care of yourself and be an ornament to the world (you’re already that) and a comfort to your friends … There are many hopeful things, too, you know. Sobriety & gayety & patience & toughness will do the trick. Or so I hope for myself & pray for you too.
You weren’t “inconsiderate,” Cal! You were a wonderful host, and we had such a nice time with you, really. Even if Lota does think all fir trees are deliberately planted, she liked Maine very much.
I’ll write soon—
LOWELL
Dearest Elizabeth,
We are going to have a child.
She looks surprised.
Then melancholy.
Her greatest regret in the world is not having a child.
LOWELL
It will come sometime in January, and already we are exhausted. We lie about on sofas all day eating cornflakes, no-calorie ginger-ale and yogurt. Elizabeth never moves except to turn the page of an English newspaper or buy a dress. I never move except to turn on my high-fi radio or to go on expeditions for second-hand books … We hear of women who ski all through pregnancy, give birth in bomb shelters, but we don’t approve, and are timid, delicate, and ante-bellum. We are so much older than other beginning parents.
How we boast! People whom I had utterly felt cut off from: my barber, my dentist, the head of the Boston University English department, wives of friends, children … to all of them I can’t stop talking and bragging.
Elizabeth Bishop feeds her toucan.
LOWELL
Do you stop in the States on your way to Europe? I wish with all my heart that you could somehow stretch things and see us. We seem attached to each other by some stiff piece of wire, so that each time one moves, the other moves in another direction. We should call a halt to that.
A horizontal wire comes down from the ceiling, connecting them.
It is something of a pulley, or an old-fashioned thing children used to make to connect one attic with another, and attach items in between, or pretend to use the telephone on either end.
A baby cries.
Bishop hears. She smiles.
She attaches a postcard to the stiff piece of wire.
It travels across the stage to him.
LOWELL
Our little girl, Harriet Winslow Lowell was just born last Friday, weight 6 pounds and 14 ounces, and already more with both feet on the ground than her fatuous and boasting parents.
He receives her postcard.
BISHOP
Just a note of congratulation on the arrival of Harriet Winslow Lowell. What should I bring her from Brazil, I wonder? Lota is magnificent with child-problems. I suspect it’s because she’s had so much practice with me.
LOWELL
Upstairs, Harriet Winslow Lowell is crying as rhythmically as breathing. Lizzie and our beaverlike professional baby nurse, Miss Elsemore, are not in theoretic or emotional agreement. Poor Lizzie isn’t allowed to play with Harriet except for thirty minutes between six and six-thirty when she would like to be relaxing over an Old Fashioned.