Walnut Hill School, a college preparatory school for girls on the outskirts of Natick, Massachusetts, was like camp, only better. It lasted longer, September to June. Except for a bout with asthma that compromised her freshman year, Elizabeth stayed on until she graduated at nineteen. School was school, drudgery at times—especially algebra and geometry—but there were plays every semester to act in (she loved dressing up as the male villain), concerts to attend at nearby Wellesley College and in Boston (she saved the program for Prokofiev’s Wellesley recital after shaking the composer’s hand), hymns to sing every morning at chapel, a Glee Club to join, and a literary magazine, the Blue Pencil, to write for and finally to serve as its editor in chief. There were teachers who loved her, maybe too much, but they didn’t paw her or climb into her bed. And there were friends—to confide in, to write skits for, to play four-hand piano with, and a few to kiss and hold in her arms, to be kissed by and held. She truly loved one girl—the deep-voiced Judy Flynn, tall with red hair so dark it was almost black, cut in a bob that drew attention to her graceful swanlike neck. Elizabeth attended Catholic Mass with Judy for the chance to gaze at the “beautiful girl . . . on her knees with a rosary.” With the others, Elizabeth simply “liked to feel rather naughty and mischievous.”
Blue Pencil staff, Walnut Hill School, 1929. Frani Blough and Elizabeth are seated in second row, center and right. Judy Flynn is standing, wearing the dark blouse.
Walnut Hill School had been founded in 1893 by two Wellesley College graduates, Florence Bigelow and Charlotte Conant, who shared a house near the campus, living in what was sometimes called a Boston marriage until Conant died in 1925, the year before Elizabeth entered the school. This had been the way of many girls’ schools and women’s colleges in their founding years, as a few bold women asserted the right to higher education for all and forged long-lasting affectionate partnerships in reform. While questions were raised at times now by faculty members about whether intense student friendships were “normal,” Miss Bigelow still presided over Walnut Hill in the late 1920s with her younger assistant principal, Miss Helen Farlow, who took a lenient, possibly uncomprehending, view of girls who paired off. Miss Farlow sometimes took Elizabeth and Judy on drives and picnics, encouraging the friendship.
The fifty-acre campus was wooded and hilly, with playing fields and tennis courts and a long, sloping, grassy bank as its central green, where students skied in the wintertime. To her Walnut Hill friends, Elizabeth was “Bishop,” and when she was mischievous or joking—such as the time she and a friend dressed up in bedspreads, put baskets on their heads, and walked down the main road toward Wellesley, perhaps mocking a school regulation that required hats on outings to town—the nickname was ironic; when she was solemn, judgmental, or enigmatic in her continued bouts of shyness, it suited her perfectly.
In 1926 the Shepherdsons had moved a short distance to a “dreadful little house” in the Cliftondale neighborhood of Saugus, leaving behind the carnival atmosphere at Revere, where the mighty Cyclone, the longest and fastest roller coaster in the world, had been installed a year before, attracting thrill seekers from miles around. But neither town was on the typical itinerary of Elizabeth’s new friends from camp or Walnut Hill School, mostly daughters of professionals and businessmen, several of whom owned summer homes on New England’s more secluded shorelines. Elizabeth confided the fact of her mother’s hospitalization to a new friend, Frani Blough—a live wire, small, thin, and bold, who shared Elizabeth’s birthday though a year older. But that painful truth seemed more remote, less immediately distressing, than her “dreadful” residence with timid, tender-hearted Aunt Maud and brutish Uncle George in Saugus. When Judy Flynn stopped in without advance warning at Cliftondale during a school vacation, Elizabeth burst into tears at the kitchen table, uncertain how to introduce her beautiful friend to her unrefined aunt and uncle. Yet she had no wish to move into Uncle Jack Bishop’s plush household north of Worcester; and on one visit to her aunt Florence’s new home in Stockbridge, she’d run away, with a few dollars and two books of poetry stuffed in her pocket—hitching a ride to the station, boarding a train to Framingham, then walking back to school—rather than stay for a dance party organized by foolish Aunt Florence. With her Bishop relations she always felt “on more or less visiting terms,” longing to be elsewhere.
Elizabeth clung to Walnut Hill and to her friends there, cadging invitations to their homes whenever possible for vacations and holidays. More than most of her classmates, Elizabeth found a safe haven in the insular world of girls and women, interdependent and mingling easily despite the regimentation of morning room inspections and dressing for dinner, where silver napkin rings engraved with each girl’s name waited at round tables covered in starched white linen. Teachers donned period costumes to join students in theatricals, enjoying the lark of playing male roles as much as “Bishop” did. It was the actual boys Aunt Florence had wanted her to meet that caused Elizabeth to panic and run away back to school; she’d spent a rainy night huddled in the woods up on the “Ridge,” a favorite retreat, until daylight when she found her way to her English teacher Miss Mulligan’s house across the road, to be cosseted with warm blankets and a breakfast of scrambled eggs. Visiting Judy Flynn at her home in New Hampshire was heavenly, except for the older brother who picked them up by car from school.
Much supervision came in the form of rules or grades for posture and neatness. (Elizabeth rated poorly at times in the former, a consistent A-plus in the latter.) Yet Miss Farlow also took note of the childish pranks and of what Elizabeth would later call her “social terrors,” and arranged for her to see a psychiatrist in Boston, expecting Elizabeth to confide about her mother’s mental illness. Jack Bishop had informed Miss Farlow of Gertrude’s “insanity” when registering Elizabeth for school, assuring the assistant principal there was “no hereditary tendency” to fear in Elizabeth’s case, and asserting that “no one” had ever spoken to his niece about her mother. He requested the Walnut Hill staff to follow suit. Elizabeth could not bring herself to speak at the sessions, and they soon ended. But she remembered Miss Farlow’s concern with gratitude, especially one ride back to school from the psychiatrist’s office during which Miss Farlow had defied Uncle Jack and asked Elizabeth whether she “worried” about her mother “a lot.” Elizabeth was “so overcome,” startled that Miss Farlow knew about Gertrude, that she could only cry—and then wonder afterward if she’d used her tears to elicit Miss Farlow’s sympathy. She didn’t know her mother well enough to worry about her. She didn’t know how she ought to feel.
Elizabeth would not speak to a psychiatrist, but she wrote unstoppably at Walnut Hill School—stories, book reviews, essays, poetry, and plays that were published in the rigorously edited Blue Pencil as early as her sophomore year and performed on the school’s improvised stages. The Christmas pageant she wrote with Frani Blough served as the school’s holiday program for decades, and a fanciful twelve-line lyric, “Behind Stowe,” referring to one of the school’s two principal dormitories, remained popular with students as well. “I heard an elf go whistling by” and “heard a cricket sing,” the poem began:
His singing echoed through and through
The dark under a windy tree
Where glinted little insects’ wings.
His singing split the sky in two.
The halves fell either side of me,
And I stood straight, bright with moon-rings.
At Walnut Hill, the remembered sound of her mother’s screams hovering in the air over Great Village diminished, and music “echoed through and through” her new world. The sky might split in two around her, but Elizabeth stood straight and bright, crafting her own song in words, playing with rhyme and meter.
At Walnut Hill she grew strong enough to write an essay, “On Being Alone,” admitting to a “fear of all those innumerable quiet hours alone that are ahead of all of us,” but proposing that in solitude “the mind can do what it wants to”: “find the i
slands of the Imagination” and befriend “the companion in ourselves who is with us all our lives . . . the rare person whose heart quickens when a bird climbs high and alone in the clear air.” The self “inside looking out” that she’d discovered since that dizzying day in the dentist’s waiting room in Worcester could experience joy as well as suffering. The girl who had once dangled by her hair at the mercy of her brutish uncle could write now about “Roof-Tops,” as Elizabeth titled another Blue Pencil essay—the “many-slanted, many-shingled planes” we have “longed to rise up” and “heave” off, leaving “open every building to the blue sky and the wind.”
Elizabeth planned to major in music at Vassar, following the lead of Frani Blough, who’d gone to college a year ahead. Piano study at Walnut Hill, where her teacher had trained with the English pianist Myra Hess, had been more rigorous and rewarding than childhood lessons with Mrs. Darling. As a senior she’d taken a yearlong course in harmony and was secretary of the Glee Club. Most of all, she’d loved the hours spent improvising on favorite hymns at the piano with Frani, singing at the top of their lungs, when rainy days kept them indoors. If she could write poetry and plays, perhaps she could compose music as well.
But Vassar College wasn’t Walnut Hill School. While she joined the choir and sang happily again with Frani, the advanced music theory class she signed up for as an overconfident freshman was beyond her capabilities, and piano instruction proved equally daunting. In an early group recital she suffered a memory slip and couldn’t finish her piece; she left the room and never performed in public again. At lessons her teacher found her “handicapped by an unusual degree of muscular tension,” and Elizabeth mastered only one of the four pieces assigned during her first semester, a Bach three-part invention. She complained “feelingly” of limited time and noisy practice rooms. Her teacher worried that Elizabeth didn’t have the stamina for Vassar, noting her difficulty in “adapting her quick and imaginative, but too self-conscious self to college conditions.” In Frani’s view, Elizabeth was a “good musician,” but “very particular, as she was with writing poetry.” She lacked the “carefree abandon” necessary to perform with confidence, or to keep pace in her piano studies.
For Elizabeth, who had no place to go but school, the stakes were high. Elite private women’s colleges took pride in enforcing rigorous academic standards, and many first-year students did not return. One of Elizabeth’s new friends, the paper-company heiress Louise Crane, struggled academically for three years and never graduated. Unlike Louise, who could return home to a Fifth Avenue apartment shared with her widowed mother, a founder of the Museum of Modern Art and the progressive Dalton School, Elizabeth resorted to renting cheap hotel rooms in Boston or inexpensive beach houses for vacation and holiday stays when she couldn’t wangle invitations from friends, avoiding both her Cliftondale and Worcester relatives as much as possible. Perhaps hoping to dodge hard-to-answer questions about her mother, she’d listed both parents as deceased on her information card when she enrolled at Vassar. She considered herself “independent” now.
Fortunately, Elizabeth’s freshman English teacher responded differently to her pupil’s “too self-conscious self.” She saw Elizabeth as “enormously cagey,” but admired the quietly willful nineteen-year-old “who looked at authorities with a suspicious eye.” Elizabeth seemed “quite capable of attending to her own education,” and, with her penchant for metaphor even in term papers, was evidently “doomed to be a poet.” While Vassar offered no classes in verse writing—no colleges did—Elizabeth took every opportunity to prepare herself to become a writer.
The college had been founded in 1865 by a devout Baptist philanthropist and brewer, Matthew Vassar, who considered himself, along with Abraham Lincoln, one of the country’s “Two Noble Emancipists—one of Woman—[the other] of the Negro.” With a cloistered campus eighty-five miles up the Hudson Valley from New York City in Poughkeepsie, Vassar was the second of what eventually became the “Seven Sisters,” the first to make its start as a full-fledged college. (Mount Holyoke began as a seminary in 1837.) A next generation of wealthy Baptists, the Rockefellers and Pratts of Standard Oil, funded the massive neo-Gothic stone library, chapel, art building, and crenellated gatehouse that gave Vassar its fortresslike air of secluded—and exclusive—privilege.
But the 1930s brought a restless mood to campus. During Elizabeth’s freshman year in the spring of 1931, Vassar’s experimental student theater director, Hallie Flanagan, soon to lead the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, staged Can You Hear Their Voices?, a social realist drama contrasting the plight of impoverished southern farm families with the frivolous world of debutante balls so familiar to Vassar students. Yet many students were hurting financially as family fortunes shrank or disappeared in the Depression. Talk in dormitory smoking rooms turned to socialism and Communist Party politics, and Elizabeth found herself caught between an instinctive populism, derived from her childhood in Nova Scotia and among the working poor north of Boston, and a yearning for the stability and comfort she’d glimpsed in the fine homes of her Walnut Hill School friends. She might turn her back on Bishop hospitality, but she relied on her trust fund, conservatively invested in blue chip stocks that withstood the ’29 Crash, as on little else but her way with words.
At Vassar Elizabeth called herself a socialist, wore a pea coat rather than stylish camel hair or furs in winter, and adopted a vegetarian diet. But she hung back in smoking room conversation, and not just out of shyness. When she joined the leftist staff of the twice-weekly Vassar Miscellany News her junior year, she found her niche as editor of “Campus Chat,” the humor column, poking fun at the campus scene, often in verse. Elizabeth valued wit in friends like Louise Crane and serious intellectual engagement—Frani Blough’s dedication to music, a new friend Margaret Miller’s devotion to art as a painter and critic for the Miscellany News—over what she saw as political posing. The “really ‘red’” students on campus were “too silly”; covering their activities as a reporter for the college paper held no interest.
The battle Elizabeth was prepared to wage was over literature. Her circle had grown to include the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark and brassy, brilliant Mary McCarthy, a true orphan whose parents had died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Along with Elizabeth, Frani Blough, and the gifted Margaret Miller, most had suffered rejection by the stodgy campus literary magazine, the Vassar Review, and they joined forces to found a rival journal, Con Spirito—the title devised by Elizabeth as a pun on the musical term, suggesting the conspiracy among the six. The idea was born in a speakeasy off campus in the waning months of Prohibition, and the first issue celebrated with a legal bottle of wine in February 1933. Con Spirito’s stories and poems were published anonymously to conceal the conspirators’ identities, but the publication won praise from the Miscellany News. After three issues, Elizabeth was welcomed on board at the Vassar Review for her senior year.
Elizabeth’s senior photo, Vassar College yearbook, 1934
In Con Spirito Elizabeth voiced her ambivalence about Depression-era politics with an ironic tale, “Then Came the Poor,” about a wealthy family hastily packing up its valuables to escape a rampaging “red” mob. At the last minute, the narrator stays behind to mingle with the marauding crowd, ultimately taking up residence with the squatters in his own house, agreeing with a wink to his new roommate’s summation: “Seems like home already, don’t it.” But Elizabeth took the people’s side emphatically in a mocking “Hymn to the Virgin,” one of four poems she contributed to the fledgling journal. The speaker addresses a statue of the Madonna—“wax-faced, wooden-bodied,” stored away for years among “sacramenting moths”—and demands more than “smell-stale incense” and “dusty grandeur” from the “petulant and cranky princess”: “Turn not aside Thy pretty-painted face, parade and meet our audience-eyes you must.” Elizabeth was imitating Gerard Manley Hopkins in alliterative lines packed with stressed syllables; she would later dismiss her collegiate experiments
with sprung rhythm as failures. But in evoking a female deity, she’d adapted Father Hopkins’s spiritual questioning to her own circumstances. In place of his Jesuit community, she’d had a girls’ camp and boarding school, now a women’s college, where unbelievers and “reds” debated issues of faith and justice. The poem was personal too. On arrival at Vassar, Elizabeth had banished her own mother, listing her as deceased, yet she still must have wished for the impossible, a miracle: Gertrude’s return to meet Elizabeth’s eyes after so many years locked away.
During her senior year, Elizabeth sold “Then Came the Poor” and “Hymn to the Virgin” to a new literary monthly, The Magazine, for $26.18, a princely sum in those dark times. But the greater reward for her Con Spirito efforts had come in the spring of her junior year, with T. S. Eliot’s visit to campus for Hallie Flanagan’s premiere of his first verse play, Sweeney Agonistes, in May 1933. Elizabeth’s reputation as poet and upstart literary editor earned her an assignment from the Miscellany News to interview Eliot, who was in the United States for the year to deliver the prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard.
Despite her jittery nerves and the formal setting in the founder’s suite on a hot spring day—Eliot, who “looked exhausted and sat mopping his brow” after giving a lecture, was seated in one of Matthew Vassar’s plush velvet armchairs, and Elizabeth, dressed in a light summer suit and spectator pumps, settled as best she could on an immense horsehair sofa, her short legs dangling, trying hard not to slide off—she pursued the questions most on her mind. What did Mr. Eliot think of “spontaneous” campus publications like Con Spirito? Elizabeth, who had been considering soliciting manuscripts for the journal, was reassured by the poet’s pronouncement, based on “his experience at Oxford and Cambridge,” that such magazines were “more interesting and had more character the fewer the editors and the fewer the contributors.” Eliot, who praised Flanagan’s production of Sweeney, a one-room one-act play featuring prostitutes and the burly Sweeney as its lead characters, explained his theory that the “rhythmic forms, and rhymed verses” he’d employed, picking up on jazz syncopations, had a more promising future on the modern stage than blank verse, the province of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Elizabeth Bishop Page 4