Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  On an April afternoon I entered the classroom to find a small older woman with short, stiff white hair, clad in an elegant light-wool suit and carrying a thin black binder, taking a seat across the conference table from mine. Professor Lowell introduced his friend Elizabeth Bishop—“Miss Bishop,” he purred in his southern-tinged Boston Brahmin drawl. Now it was our guest’s turn to read. She smiled obligingly, somehow both coy and businesslike, and took a sheaf of photocopies out of her binder, handing around “Poem,” as it had appeared in the New Yorker several years before.

  The scene “Poem” evoked contrasted strikingly with the cityscape captured in the picture windows behind the writer’s bowed head as she leaned over the page—Harvard’s brick dormitory rooftops, the campanile of St. Paul’s Church. “About the size of an old-style dollar bill”: she was introducing a tiny landscape painted in oils by her uncle—no, really her “great-uncle,” she corrected herself in the poem, taking us back a generation, and then one more, to a Nova Scotia pasture—a “water meadow”—populated by “minuscule” geese and cows, with the brown and white houses and green shade trees of a country town in the background, storm clouds overhead. She read in a low, hoarse smoker’s voice, smoothed out with the buttery r’s of New England’s upper crust, yet given to flat inflections, the plain language of country folk. Or was it plain?

  A specklike bird is flying to the left.

  Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?

  The painting was old—more than seventy years old—and hadn’t been cared for by the descendants of the great-uncle with dubious talent. Still, a white-and-yellow wild iris in the foreground appeared to be “fresh-squiggled from the tube.”

  Then—“Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!”—the speaker affirms. “Poem” was not about the miniature scene, but about a miraculous coincidence: “I never knew him”—the great-uncle—yet “We both knew this place . . . looked at it long enough to memorize it, / our years apart.” It was about the ways this small family heirloom, “useless and free,” collapsed “life and the memory of it” into each other. “Which is which?” the poet asked—

  Life and the memory of it cramped,

  dim, on a piece of Bristol board,

  dim, but how live, how touching in detail

  —the little that we get for free,

  the little of our earthly trust. Not much.

  About the size of our abidance

  along with theirs: the munching cows,

  the iris, crisp and shivering, the water

  still standing from spring freshets,

  the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

  2

  Crumb

  NOW CAME TRAGEDIES Elizabeth could have written about, but didn’t. Two weeks before commencement, in late May 1934, her mother died at age fifty-four in the sanatorium in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where she’d lived since 1916. In a letter to Frani Blough, one of the first friends in whom she had confided about Gertrude years ago at Walnut Hill, Elizabeth offered the news in a terse postscript at the end of several chatty pages about summer plans—“I guess I should tell you that Mother died a week ago today. After eighteen years, of course, it is the happiest thing that could have happened.”

  “Apoplexy,” the result of a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke, was the cause recorded on her mother’s death certificate, with “Chronic Psychosis” listed as the “contributory” factor. Elizabeth would not read these words for more than a decade, and she may not have been told anything at the time beyond the fact of Gertrude’s death. If she attended the burial at Hope Cemetery in Worcester, where Gertrude was interred next to William—her parents joined for the first time since Elizabeth was a baby—she told none of her friends. More likely she stayed at Vassar, where, she confided later to her psychoanalyst, she had been prone to crying jags that spring, often following a night of drinking in Poughkeepsie with Louise Crane, who’d abandoned her college studies but still took the train or drove up from New York City to visit friends. Elizabeth’s mother was on her mind “constantly” as she looked toward the months and years ahead that seemed frighteningly blank without the community and structure of school.

  Perhaps when she wrote to Frani that her mother’s death was “the happiest thing,” Elizabeth hoped she might be able to put an end to her persistent anxiety; there was no need any longer to imagine her mother’s daily life on a locked ward, in a walled garden. The death she had sometimes lied about, even wished for, was finally real. But could that make any difference now? Uncle Jack Bishop believed firmly that there was “no hereditary tendency to insanity” in the family, as he’d told Miss Farlow, but Frani understood that for Elizabeth the “fear of inheriting her mother’s illness was a horrible thing” she “consciously” willed herself to suppress. During the year after her mother’s death, she jotted down a rhyming poem in one of her notebooks that started out cheerfully enough but ended starkly:

  The past

  at least

  is polite:

  it keeps out of sight.

  The present

  is more recent.

  It makes a fuss

  but is unselfconscious.

  The future

  sinks through water

  fast as a stone,

  alone alone.

  Rhyme, Elizabeth wrote in her journal around the same time, is “mystical.” Such poems, perhaps all her poems, were charms against the loneliness they often expressed.

  When she wasn’t thinking about her mother that last spring at Vassar, she was thinking about Margaret Miller—slim, raven-haired, soigné, everything that plucky Elizabeth, still something of a tousled kid in appearance, despite her smartly tailored suits and pearl earrings, was not. And Margaret, a scholarship student, had a mother to whom she was close and with whom she could share a modest New York City flat after graduation. It wasn’t just Margaret’s inclination to shrink from Elizabeth’s few gestures of physical affection during the year they’d spent together as roommates at Vassar that told her a romance would not work out. Margaret’s emotions were even more contained than Elizabeth’s—Margaret never broke down in tears, never drank herself into a state of oblivion, although she was usually patient with Elizabeth when she did, sat beside her on the floor and patted her head when she was “howling away about my mother,” the only way Elizabeth could safely release in Margaret’s presence the dread she felt at their impending separation.

  Margaret Miller

  Elizabeth had tried to distract herself by dating Bob Seaver, who’d fallen in love with her soon after they met, the summer before she’d entered Vassar. Bob was an older friend of a girl in Elizabeth’s Walnut Hill School circle; he’d already graduated from Hamilton College and was attending business school at Harvard. A survivor of polio in his early teens, Bob walked with crutches and relied on wit and a wide literary reference to charm women; he rarely lacked for female companionship. His physical limitations may have made Bob seem safe; Bob may have sensed that Elizabeth’s extreme shyness made her more accepting of an unconventional male. They talked easily. When Bob left Harvard to take a teaching job in a school near his hometown in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, seventy miles north of Poughkeepsie, and later a position in a Pittsfield bank, there was nothing to stop Elizabeth from joining him for an occasional unchaperoned weekend. He gave her his fraternity pin. During the winter of her senior year, they spent a “wonderful, romantic” week on Nantucket at Christmas, Elizabeth would say later, and after graduation she rented a cottage for most of July on sparsely populated Cuttyhunk Island, on the edge of Buzzards Bay, and invited Bob to stay with her for several days.

  It was the last vacation Elizabeth spent with Bob. She was happier after he left, when she could indulge the “island feeling” of “making this do for that, and contriving and inventing.” More vivid to her in recollection was the weekend house party at Louise Crane’s summer home in Dalton, Massachusetts, just before Bob had joined Elizabeth at Cuttyhunk: sharing a room there wit
h Margaret Miller for what seemed like the last time, sobbing and finally telling her how much she’d miss living with her. This time, in the Cranes’ big house, Margaret shushed her.

  When Bob asked Elizabeth to marry him, she could not accept. She would never marry anyone, she told him, hoping the rejection would hurt less, and it must have seemed to her the truth. He turned fierce, berating her. Bob guessed, or somehow knew, although Elizabeth never spoke to him of her love for Margaret or any woman, that “I’d like him better if he were a girl”; she seemed to “have it in for” men. The accuracy of the first of his charges, which Elizabeth would not dare admit, was no comfort in close quarters with someone she cared about, although not in the way he’d hoped. She liked Bob—he was one of the few men she did like—and wasn’t afraid of him, and yet she felt trapped, chained to the bed listening to his accusations in the “cheap hotel” where they’d gone for a night to find a future that left each of them alone.

  A year later Bob shot himself. His suicide note was directed to the “girl” who had refused his marriage proposal, a postcard she received while staying at the Hotel Chelsea, one of several residences she adopted in the 1930s and ’40s in or near Greenwich Village, choosing to live close to Margaret in New York City rather than hide away in Boston as she had once planned: “Elizabeth, Go to hell.” The message struck at the helplessness and shame she’d often felt when imagining her mother’s fate, yet there could be nothing “happiest” about the way this failed romance reached a conclusion.

  Mary McCarthy found Elizabeth her first apartment, at 16 Charles Street, two small rooms that Elizabeth planned to fill slowly on her slim budget, acquiring one piece of furniture each month. Nobody except Louise in her grand Fifth Avenue apartment, where her mother lived at one end and Louise at the other, with a salon for concerts and parties in between, had much space or adequate furnishings. Mary, orphaned at age six and, like Elizabeth, raised by a succession of relatives, had graduated from Vassar a year ahead and quickly married Harold Jonsrud, a playwright. Elizabeth remembered a visit when she slept in a cot at Mary’s place, while Mary and Harold shared another.

  After “figuring up my standing at the bank, my debts, my prospects” in July 1934, Elizabeth was reassured that her funds, soon to be augmented by her mother’s portion of the Bishop estate, would cover rent and necessities. She would not need a job any time soon, and she could save toward travel if she lived economically. By September she’d purchased a desk, bookshelves, a table, and two chairs. For entertainment there were parks nearby—Washington Square and Union Square—and the pleasant distraction of “riding around aimlessly on trollies and buses” after a morning spent typing up poems and sending them off to their “ill-fated destinations” at magazines and quarterly journals. Elizabeth did not expect success right away, although she’d begun collecting names of poetry editors at publishing houses. To remind herself of the discipline she hoped to practice—to “get to work” promptly each day—she would ask Margaret to paint a beautifully lettered sign for the foot of her bed bearing John Donne’s lines: “But as for one which hath a long taske, ’tis good, / With the Sunne to beginne his business.”

  The city that fall was on the rebound from the bleakest years of the Depression, when one in four New Yorkers were unemployed and shantytowns sprouted up along the East River. There was hope for better times under the newly elected mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who energetically courted New Deal sponsorship of relief programs and ambitious public works projects. During Elizabeth’s Vassar years, the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center were completed, monuments to pre-Crash excess that nevertheless gave the Manhattan she moved to a sense of confident—if deferred—prosperity and enterprise. The George Washington Bridge now spanned the Hudson, breaching the city’s insularity.

  But Elizabeth’s Manhattan was Greenwich Village, with its three- and four-story row houses on narrow streets with names instead of numbers, where rent was cheap and artists and intellectuals could get by on freelance pay, where the New School offered classes like the seminar in Early Keyboard Music that Elizabeth attended in the winter of 1934–35, taught by a brilliant young harpsichordist just her age, Ralph Kirkpatrick. She took notes on composers and ornamentation—appoggiatura, slide, inverted mordent—and planned to buy a clavichord, the much smaller and more portable precursor to the modern piano, softer in tone than a harpsichord, when she could afford it.

  Elizabeth lived two blocks from Christopher Street, where Bonnie’s Stone Wall Inn advertised itself to those in the know as a bar welcoming lesbians, as female “inverts” were increasingly called, by taking the title of the autobiographical confessions of the pseudonymous Mary Casal for its name. Elizabeth may never have visited the place. She may not have read The Stone Wall, published in 1930. But she had probably heard of the melodramatic tale, one of the first such narratives published in the United States, in which Mary’s “sex desire for woman” leads her to propose marriage to her beloved Juno. After enacting a private wedding ceremony, the two women live happily together in what appears to others to be “an ideal friendship,” supporting themselves in the city as an artist and a schoolteacher: “No one knew of the real union, of our bodies.” Despite years of harmony, Juno strays; recriminations and recombinations with other lovers follow. “When at its best, as was ours for so many years,” Mary writes, “I still believe the love between two women to be the highest type now known. At the same time, I believe that it may lead to the most intense suffering known to woman.”

  Elizabeth may not have believed that love between women was of the “highest type”—that notion belonged to the era of the Walnut Hill School’s founders—but she understood the “intense suffering” that same-sex love could bring. Both passion and loss had to be concealed. To speak or write openly was impossible; to resist the implicit notion that her love for women was shameful took courage that Elizabeth didn’t always have, or that sometimes required alcohol to bolster. In later years she confided to her analyst that all her love affairs had begun while she was drunk. Elizabeth was never one to join the cause of sexual liberation or to identify herself publicly as a lesbian, but in the 1930s there was safety in an urban neighborhood like Greenwich Village, where an establishment like Bonnie’s Stone Wall could thrive, hidden in plain sight.

  For a while Elizabeth’s love for Margaret, still unattainable, and her refusal of marriage to a man she did not desire, left her free for New School classes and private French lessons, to work her way through an ambitious reading list she set for herself at the public library when she found it impossible to write at home every morning, to try out a job as a writing teacher with a correspondence school that she gave up after two weeks. And to establish a friendship with Marianne Moore, who may have drawn her to the city as much as Margaret Miller did.

  Although Moore had graduated from Bryn Mawr College twenty-five years before, she remained intriguingly girlish, with her slender figure, coiled braid, and undying passion for the amusements of childhood. Like Elizabeth, she had never known her father, who had been hospitalized for mental illness at the time of her birth and was committed to an asylum soon after. Moore’s closest attachment was to her mother, a retired English teacher who vetted all of the poet’s work and with whom she shared a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, the second bedroom given over to books and papers. At first Elizabeth felt an awed reluctance to impose on Miss Moore, as she addressed her in person and in letters for several years, until Marianne requested that she use her first name; but not so much that she didn’t follow through on her plan to escort the poet to the circus at Madison Square Garden just weeks after their first meeting, arriving early to feed the elephants. Elizabeth wrote often after that, suggesting books—The Animal Mind, by a Vassar professor of animal psychology, and English Handwriting by Roger Fry—and carefully planned outings: a viewing of the anthropologists Osa and Martin Johnson’s documentary on baboons, a drive to Coney Island with Louise Crane for supper and rides on the m
erry-go-round. Mrs. Moore could come along.

  Elizabeth soon learned the route by subway to the Moores’ apartment on Cumberland Street—a name that may have recalled her grandparents’ Cumberland Road house in Great Village—where her hostess kept a bowl of nickels on a bookcase by the front door to cover her guests’ return fare. Marianne Moore was close in age to Elizabeth’s favorite aunt, Grace, and watched over the fledgling poet with a similar attentiveness. Elizabeth watched closely too, as her mentor advanced in public reputation that year with the appearance of a second book, Selected Poems, introduced by T. S. Eliot, and a promotional portrait by the celebrity photographer George Platt Lynes printed in the New York papers. Elizabeth was enough of a Moore family insider by then to praise the type size in the new book and the “very nice” photograph when it was published in the Sunday Herald Tribune.