Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  The mood in the founder’s suite must have lightened; Eliot asked if he could loosen his tie. Something emboldened the shy but puckish Elizabeth to gently tease the poet: had Mr. Eliot “ever done a girl in”—murdered a woman? She was referring to Sweeney’s sinister lines, “Any man has to, needs to, wants to / Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.” No, the forty-five-year-old author of The Waste Land replied—was he amused?—“I am not the type.”

  A year later Elizabeth was once again seated on a bench, the left-hand one in the grand hallway outside the New York Public Library’s second-floor reading room, and “scared out of my wits.” She’d taken the train into the city to meet another poet, one she admired more deeply than Eliot, Marianne Moore. Moore was Eliot’s contemporary, but she was not well known on the Vassar campus, or much at all beyond the circle of writers she’d edited at the modernist Dial in the late 1920s: Ezra Pound, Eliot, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams. Elizabeth had been forced to make a determined effort to find Moore’s poetry in small magazines. The college library didn’t yet own a copy of her first book published in the United States, Observations, though Vassar’s librarian, who by lucky chance knew Moore’s family, had arranged this meeting.

  Perhaps it was Moore’s densely worded commentary on Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes in Poetry, quoted in the Miscellany News the same week Elizabeth’s interview was published, that caught her attention: “Mortal and sardonic victims though we are in the conflict called experience, we may regard our victimage with calmness.” Elizabeth would soon strive to emulate Marianne Moore’s equanimity, her “impersonal” approach to literary reputation: she “goes right on producing perhaps one poem a year and a couple of reviews that are perfect in their way,” despite being “practically unread.” But for now what mattered was Moore’s thrilling originality. “I hadn’t known poetry could be like that,” Elizabeth marveled at the “miracles of language and construction” in the copy of Observations the college librarian loaned her. “Why had no one ever written about things in this clear and dazzling way before?” Moore wrote odes “To a Snail,” “To a Steam Roller,” and on “Those Various Scalpels.” Her terse disquisition in verse, “Poetry,” began as irreverent conversation: “I, too, dislike it.” In “An Octopus,” about a mountain range not the sea animal, Moore argued for “relentless accuracy” and the “capacity for fact.” Moore had gone beyond Hopkins to practice a metrics based on syllable counts alone, and her rhymes were often so well hidden as to be undetectable on a first or even second reading. Here was a woman writing poetry with a complete absence of sentimentality, who could win praise in the pages of the Dial for creating “the self-portrait of a mind . . . not as a model, and not as beauty, but as experience.”

  On this April day in 1934, Elizabeth was dressed impeccably in a black jacket trimmed with sealskin, pearl earrings, and white gloves. The forty-six-year-old Moore wore a blue tweed suit with a black bow tied at the broad collar of her white blouse, her fading red hair wound around her head in one long braid—“quaint . . . but stylish.” If Elizabeth had known that Moore had chosen the public library as a meeting place so she could escape easily if she found Elizabeth dull, the college senior would have been even more terrified. But to the surprise of both skittish women, “it went very well.” Elizabeth’s “ability and technical interest,” her “concentrated and selective” taste, Moore said later, were already evident in the list of questions she carried with her in a small notebook and that the older poet happily answered: “It is almost scary . . . to find a college student with so much sense.” The year before, at his request, Elizabeth had sent Mr. Eliot copies of Con Spirito, and he’d written back a note conveying favorable impressions. At this first meeting with Marianne Moore, Elizabeth didn’t mention her own writing, and she would not show her a poem for more than a year. They spoke instead of their mutual fondness for Hopkins, and for the circus. Elizabeth didn’t yet know where she would live after graduation from Vassar, or what she would do. But she would take Miss Moore to the circus when it next came to town.

  Vassar had not been like Walnut Hill School, but Elizabeth found a home there despite her initial failures in music, despite the disturbing reappearance of Mike from Camp Chequesset as a gym teacher at the college. Elizabeth learned that Mike was “having affairs” with students. Mike wasn’t “a bad woman just very unfortunate,” it seemed to Elizabeth, now that she was no longer a “tomboy” and safely identified as a poet and an “intellectual.” Elizabeth herself may have begun a flirtation with Louise Crane while at Vassar; the woman she loved was Margaret Miller, but she did not tell her so. She had dated several men, but no one attracted her as Walnut Hill’s Judy Flynn had, as Margaret did now.

  By senior year Elizabeth had become an editor of the college yearbook and a minor campus celebrity, thanks to publication in The Magazine. She’d even resumed music study with a yearlong course, Music as a Literature. She lived in a coveted tower room in a suite she shared with Margaret Miller. “A ladder goes up out of our living room,” Elizabeth wrote with satisfaction to a new friend, Donald Stanford, a Harvard graduate student and aspiring poet introduced to her through the mail by Ivor Winters, an editor of the avant-garde journal Hound & Horn, which had recently awarded Elizabeth honorable mention for poems she’d entered in a young writers’ competition. “Once up among the elaborate Victorian iron railings,” she continued, “it’s a very nice spot to smoke a dishonest cigarette.” With Stanford, Elizabeth established her first serious correspondence about poetry and the writing life, which, like all such later correspondences, would be more about life—observing life—than about poetry. “The chimney pots here (my exclusive view from one window) are shaped rather like a merry-go-round,” she wrote as her last year in school drew to a close, “and all winter long the birds have come and sat in them to warm themselves. First they sit with their tails inside, then they switch around and warm their heads. It’s a very amusing sight. I’ll even draw you a picture of it.”

  April 29, 1975

  NINTH-FLOOR CONFERENCE ROOM, HOLYOKE CENTER

  I was the worst kind of student poet, nearly illiterate in contemporary poetry and writing to relieve an immobilizing sadness that had overtaken me the year before as a junior at Bennington College. And I wasn’t a student. My depression had led me to drop out of college—schoolwork, even at Bennington, which gave no grades, felt like too much pressure—and move to Cambridge, taking a room in a communal apartment at $27 a month (heat not included) and a secretarial job at Harvard, working in the college registrar’s office in Holyoke Center, just one floor below the conference room where I was now sitting. Getting a position in one of Harvard’s many administrative offices, I’d heard, was an easy matter if you could pass the typing test.

  That was the winter of the energy crisis, 1973–74, a particularly cold one, and the cost of heating oil had skyrocketed, making the low rent a doubtful bargain. From my room on the top floor of a River Street tenement, which swayed in the wind blowing up off the Charles, I checked the temperature on the electrified Coca-Cola sign across the river each morning before venturing outside and passing a long row of cars puffing steam as their drivers waited in line for the cheapest gas in town, at the Arco station up the street. The first glimmer that my depression was lifting arrived as a fleeting sense of joy that I wasn’t living in Southern California, where I’d grown up, dependent on a car to get anywhere, or Bennington, where it was so much colder. Still, I walked the mile to work at Harvard’s new ten-story concrete-and-glass administration building at the center of Harvard Square, saving bus fare so I could afford the steeply discounted therapy sessions that anchored my days.

  My job required me to type information gleaned from the application folders of the incoming freshman class onto permanent record cards, on which student grades would be entered over the next four years. Into my humming IBM Selectric typewriter I rolled a stiff 8½-by-11-inch white card printed horizontally, with blanks for name, birth date, home add
ress, high school, and SAT scores along the top, and spaces for eight semesters of grades below. Next I opened an application folder and soon became lost in the drama of an accepted student’s personal essay, letters of recommendation, and the admissions committee’s notes. “GOOD HARVARD SON” appeared with predictable frequency, scrawled across an application’s first page. Although women (a new self-appellation for college girls in the 1970s) were granted admission in those years to a combined Harvard-Radcliffe, the enrollment ratio stood at 3 to 1 in favor of men, and the legacy preference went unquestioned.

  It pained me to read the heartfelt words of those academically well-fed young men and women so close to my own age, the praise that poured forth from their teachers. I typed out unfamiliar names—The Pingree School, The Groton School, New Trier High School, Milton Academy—many times over. No one from my high school in Pasadena, a relatively new one built to accommodate baby-boom teenagers, had ever attended Harvard; I’d been turned down when I applied. But I couldn’t stop reading, even when my supervisor chided me for taking so long with what should have been a simple task.

  Occasionally I was asked to go to the “vault,” where the record cards were stored, and retrieve a card to make a grade change (accomplished by my supervisor with careful application of single-edged razor, fountain pen, and black ink). I was nearly fired the day I lingered too long in the windowless room lined with dark metal file cabinets after realizing I could look up my father’s card, class of ’42. I wasn’t surprised by the scramble of A’s and E’s (Harvard’s F’s), or the college-mandated leave of absence that just happened to coincide with my father’s wartime service in the merchant marine, but the stark confirmation of whispered family secrets shocked me all the same. I wondered if another story my mother had told me could also be verified. When my father succumbed to a second major depression shortly after their wedding and failed to complete his senior year, the college psychiatrist had ordered my mother, a panicked newlywed who hadn’t known about my father’s first collapse, “You have married a genius, stand by him!”

  I was thinking about my father, now fifty-four years old and a puffy yet still handsome version of the dark-haired, hollow-eyed youth in the black-and-white photo clipped to the card, wondering which of three typical moods he was in back home in Pasadena—comatose with depression, manically spouting urban-renewal schemes, passed-out drunk—when the registrar swooped down and pulled me into her office, threatening dismissal if she caught me looking at my father’s record card again. I cried and promised I would not. My father’s frightening example was why my sad feelings scared me, why I was in Cambridge and not California. Why I did not tell my long-suffering mother what was going on in my life. I needed to keep my job.

  Maybe it was then I started to become a shadow student, began to wish for college again. I learned which dorms I could enter by following a student closely and catching the door, which cafeterias I could access through an unguarded exit and help myself to yogurt and cereal at breakfast, or the salad bar at lunch or dinner. I wasn’t earning much, but that wasn’t the only reason I sometimes sat alone with my stolen meal in the company of Harvard students in the high-ceilinged Freshman Union or at the sleek modern tables in Quincy House; my roommates on River Street were all grad students in their late twenties, caught up in radical politics, and I felt even more a stranger there. One of them invited me to attend a session of her consciousness-raising group on a Saturday morning in our apartment, cautioning me that I would not be invited to join.

  So I auditioned for the new Harvard-Radcliffe choir for mixed voices, established two years before when the dorms had gone co-ed and open to faculty and staff as well as students, but I hid my secretary status from the other altos when I got in. I’d read the application file of one of them: Beaver Country Day School. A piano practice room at street level in Adams House caught my eye, and soon I was writing my name on the sign-up sheet and spending an hour at the Steinway grand whenever I could.

  Losing music had been part of my sadness. When I’d first arrived in Cambridge in January, I’d scheduled a visit to the converted warehouse near Lechmere Sales where Bill Dowd built harpsichords. That’s where I should have looked for work. I’d been playing the instrument for five years, after switching over from the piano in high school because I loved Bach; the early music revival was on, and Bach could no longer be played on the piano in good conscience. I learned to appreciate the quirkier styles of Couperin and Rameau, Scarlatti and Soler, and I excelled in the tricky ornaments—trills, mordents, turns—that embellish baroque keyboard music. I can’t say whether it was the heightened demands of preparing for a solo career on the harpsichord—the persistent terror of performing from memory, the requirement to master the irksome tasks of tuning and repairing so sensitive an instrument—or the teachers I’d traveled from Bennington to study with each week that put me off. I never auditioned at Yale for Ralph Kirkpatrick, the great Scarlatti cataloguer and Bach specialist, who sometimes accepted students from other colleges; I’d heard he hid behind a screen or in a closet when women came to play for him. Instead, I spent a semester with a Miss Havisham–like protégé of Wanda Landowska who lived in the defunct diva’s country house in Connecticut and taught me to play each piece precisely as la Maîtresse had. Next came lessons with a young Manhattan phenom, who greeted me in the hallway outside his Upper West Side apartment with open-mouthed kisses and massaged my back while I played, leaning in for more, reaching for my breasts. I could hear his opera-singer wife warming up with scales in an adjacent room. That’s when, if not why, I quit.

  But though I left the Dowd factory in Cambridge without speaking to the master builder, I bought a second-balcony ticket to one of Arthur Rubinstein’s last Boston concerts soon after. The gilt glory of Symphony Hall, the lush sounds that reached me from the distant piano, brought tears—the first not shed in my therapist’s office or before my boss that winter. When I sneaked into the Adams House practice room I was carrying Chopin and Schumann scores checked out of the music library with my staff ID card. The pieces I played felt as illicit as my use of the piano. The crashing chords, the swelling pedal, the singing melodies—I’d left them all behind in my years at the harpsichord, and mercifully they came back to me when I needed them to revive my capacity for emotions other than sadness. To give shape to my sadness.

  I began to write again too. My mother had taught me to love poetry, reading aloud at bedtime from children’s anthologies; her mother had sung to me settings from Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses while I lay on my parents’ bed after school and watched her iron my father’s shirts that my working mother didn’t have time to press. My grandmother’s songs blotted out the fact of my father’s disturbing presence in the house. He was often asleep in a faded wing chair downstairs in the spare room, once the family TV room, that passed as his office since he’d been fired from yet another city-planning job. I’d begun writing poetry at age eight, and my mother helped me mail one of my rhymes to the editor of the children’s page at the local paper, earning publication and a few dollars in prize money.

  The poems I submitted a dozen years later for admission to Robert Lowell’s workshop class in January 1975 were written out of ignorance, out of sorrow numbed by fear. I’d quit the job at Harvard to work as a research assistant and typist for a famous writer in Boston. He wrote at night and slept during the day, and our meetings took place at dinnertime in his townhouse apartment. He liked my work. He liked me. I’d come to expect this sort of thing; it had happened with music teachers, professors, a camp counselor. The attentions of a famous writer are flattering. I slept with him and told him I enjoyed it, half believing it was so; I needed to keep my job. Yet where could this lead?

  I’d saved enough money to pay for three courses as an unenrolled “special” student at Harvard, two literature seminars on English novels and the Romantics and Lowell’s workshop, if I could get in. I’d applied to the class not having read a line of his poetry. Still, in
an uncanny way, I’d written poems that aped his style, or appealed to Lowell’s sensibility. One, titled “November 9,” evoked my frozen mood by describing the few items in my sparsely decorated room on that day in 1974. Another, “Through-Composed,” employed the term for a piece of music without repeated themes or cadences as a metaphor signifying the challenge of living into an unknown future. When I read my name on the list of ten accepted students posted on the ninth-floor conference room door in early February, I quit working for the famous writer, who punched me in the shoulder and then stomped on my foot on the brick sidewalk in front of his apartment building as I left. I could get along for the next four months on my savings and food stamps, and look for a summer job after that.

  Professor Lowell, rumpled and wild-eyed, shuffling in his loafers as if they were bedroom slippers, was an irregular participant in his own class that semester. Sometimes his protégé Frank Bidart appeared in his place, explaining a mix-up in the poet’s medications. Family members sat in: the poet’s third wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, bright blond and thin in the way of chain smokers; his teenage daughter, Harriet, sullen, restless.

  I’d been studying Lowell’s poems assiduously since gaining admission to the class. I liked “Eye and Tooth” (“I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil”) and “Home After Three Months Away,” reading the melancholy stanzas as if they were my own father’s apologies for his illness. On his good days, Lowell read his favorite poems out loud—William Carlos Williams’s “The Yachts,” or Donne’s “The Relic” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”—marveling at excellent lines and turns of phrase, making us love them too. But none of this prepared me for the lure of a poem titled simply, “Poem.”