Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Marianne Moore, photograph by George Platt Lynes, 1935

  In the years ahead, Elizabeth would send drafts of her poems to Marianne Moore, waiting to receive her inevitable criticism and praise before sending them out for publication. But in the early days of their acquaintance, Moore’s sense of vocation was the prime lesson she took, even if only some aspects of it stuck, chiefly in matters of craft. Elizabeth would never imitate, but her range of subjects grew to include singular objects and animals, even a fish, perhaps in answer to Moore’s famous “The Fish,” which opened as a school of fish “wade / through black jade.” She would always share with Moore a near obsession with accuracy of detail and precision of language. Form intrigued both poets, though Elizabeth’s poems more often adopted traditional figures, while Moore, as a pioneering modernist, invented shapes on the page. Above all she learned from Moore “never to try to publish anything until I thought I’d done my best with it, no matter how many years it took—or never to publish at all.”

  Marianne Moore led a highly disciplined life with her mother in Brooklyn, ascetic and abstemious, unaltered by such fame as she earned by publication. On her own, Elizabeth tried to follow suit, “pulling her mind up to the surface” each morning, as she wrote in her journal at Charles Street, “like a bucketful of water out of [a] well.” Often she came up empty. She jotted observations and ideas in notebooks she carried with her, so that she seemed to others always to be writing. But the process was never efficient and could be “painful,” she once explained to a friend: “she first wrote a poem in her head, but the act of writing, putting it down, was usually a letdown, so then she either put it away, destroyed it, or rewrote it.” Drafts were covered with cross-outs, often emphatic ones, and severe judgments like “TERRIBLE.” Days passed with little to show for her efforts. “I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it,” she would one day reflect. Occasionally poems came to her fully or partially formed in dreams, or at odd hours of the night or early morning. These were gifts.

  One of these arrived on New Year’s Eve after five months in New York, after a combination of flu and asthma had kept her mostly in bed for two weeks at the end of December 1934; she’d fled Christmas dinner with Margaret Miller and her mother, wheezing from an asthma attack. Elizabeth had amused—or distracted—herself on this solitary night, when she might have been at a party with her old Con Spirito friends Eleanor Clark and Mary McCarthy, by dialing MEridian 7-1212, the number New Yorkers called to find out the time, to listen for any change of tone in the recorded voice when the New Year came. There was none. But she spent much of the evening poring over a framed map of the North Atlantic, studying Canada’s easternmost coastline, the boundaries of Newfoundland and Labrador, where she’d taken a walking tour one college summer. She puzzled over the colors and markings, and constructed a poem, “The Map,” that would be the strongest she had written so far, one that was itself framed by two stanzas of eight lines each, arranged in a mesmerizing pattern of rhymes and repeated end words:

  Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.

  Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges

  showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges

  where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.

  Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,

  drawing it unperturbed around itself?

  Along the fine tan sandy shelf

  is the land tugging at the sea from under?

  While at Vassar, Elizabeth had written to Donald Stanford that she believed a poem ought to convey the effect of being “in action, within itself.” Here she had found a way to do it. Statements, refined and expanded by questions that follow, would become a characteristic means of drawing the reader into her process of thought. As Marianne Moore wrote some years later in an admiring review of Elizabeth’s work, “tentativeness can be more positive than positiveness.”

  Had Elizabeth asked herself “The Map” ’s questions as long ago as the days in Great Village School, when she’d gazed at Canada’s meandering outline and envied the older children their study of geography: Are those shadows or shallows? Is the land tugging at the sea? An imaginative girl who could not ask what was most on her mind—will my mother come back?—might have let her mind wander this way. In the poem’s interior stanza of eleven unrhymed lines, the yellow of Labrador appears “oiled,” like the glossy pull-down maps of childhood. And what of the map Aunt Grace had traced in the nap of a white bathroom carpet? The aunts, who’d taken Elizabeth along on their daily errands, are here too: “These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.”

  Elizabeth’s poems of the decade after graduation from Vassar were rarely autobiographical, but they drew on personal experience and asked questions, sometimes obliquely, that were her own: “Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?” Shouldn’t their hues be determined by “what suits the character or the native waters best”? The search for belonging, for home, could hardly find a better metaphor than a map. She considers the map’s printer, who has allowed the names of seaside towns to “run out to sea,” the names of cities to “cross the neighboring mountains / . . . experiencing the same excitement / as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.” Knowing how, and how much, she ought to feel had so often troubled Elizabeth. “The Map” gathered force from her own “tugging” from under, and the poem earned her prominent publication in an anthology, Trial Balances, in which established poets introduced younger ones. Marianne Moore served as her sponsor, describing Elizabeth’s work as “archaically new” and praising its “rational considering quality” as well as her “flicker of impudence.”

  A second gift of inspiration came ten days later—“A Little Miracle,” as Elizabeth titled her account of the incident in her Charles Street journal. She’d woken to find she’d forgotten to buy bread and had only a “dry crust” for breakfast. Resigning herself to orange juice and coffee and “no more,” she was startled by a ring of the doorbell and the subsequent appearance on the stairs of a “weary-looking woman,” a representative of Wonder Bread bakeries, which had begun marketing sliced bread nationally in the 1930s. “I don’t want to sell you anything—I want to give you something,” Elizabeth heard the woman call up the stairs, and she was soon the recipient of “a small box containing three slices . . . all fresh, a rye, a white, and whole-wheat,” as well as a “miniature” loaf unsliced. Instead of the dry crust, “I breakfasted on manna.”

  Elizabeth’s composition of “A Miracle for Breakfast,” the sestina that had its origins in that morning’s surprise, was more characteristic of her halting progress than the swiftly composed “The Map.” Two summers would pass before she found the form and voice with which to realize the incident’s potential and enclosed the finished poem in a letter to Marianne Moore. During that time she’d given up her apartment on Charles Street for a year in Europe, spent mostly with Louise Crane.

  Elizabeth’s passport photo, 1936

  On the voyage over, begun in late July 1935, before Louise joined her in the French countryside and then in a luxurious Parisian apartment rented for the two younger women by Louise’s mother, Elizabeth had been overcome by the sharpest sadness she had felt in years—a condition she could only describe as profound “homesickness,” she wrote in her notebook: “It is as if one were whirled off from all the world & the interests of the world in a sort of cloud-dark sulphurous grey of melancholia.” At dinners on board ship, despite the companionship of a college friend, Hallie Tompkins, she found herself unable to “speak, swallow, scarcely breathe” under pressure of this “awful, awful feeling of deathly physical, and mental illness,—something that seems ‘after’ me.” She tried to talk herself out of her depression; at age twenty-four, she felt, “I really have no right to homesickness at all.” And what home could she be missing? Her Bulmer grandparents had died in their eighties, one after another, in 1930 an
d 1931, and she had not been back to Great Village since. But the feeling dogged her through a period of sightseeing in Antwerp and Brussels, where paintings in the exhibition rooms at the world’s fair “wouldn’t stay still—the colors moved inside the frames, the objects moved up closer & then further back.”

  She found her bearings in a small hotel in Douarnenez, a fishing village in Brittany whose “picturesqueness is just like the water in Salt Lake, you simply can’t sink in it,” she wrote to Marianne Moore. The seaside town and its inhabitants were both quaint and familiar, reminiscent of Nova Scotia. She stayed for over a month, reading and writing in bed most mornings, until Louise joined her and the two traveled on to Paris. Just when their romance began is uncertain, but there was a quality of child’s play, of boarding school hijinks, to the affair at first. They bought a pair of doves from a street vendor to enliven their seven-room apartment on the Rue de Vaugirard, furnished with antiques and staffed by a cook and maid. They joked about having flowers sent to themselves to prevent the maid from pitying their lack of male suitors. Elizabeth began a poem in her notebook that she left unfinished:

  I looked for the kiss all night

  It shone all night through the forest . . .

  Like the white crumbs or pebbles the foresters’ children

  followed home from the heart of the forest.

  This morning I found it in my mouth.

  Yet Louise, like nearly all the women Elizabeth fell for, was more grown-up than she: a worldly sophisticate who, unlike Margaret Miller, could match Elizabeth drink for drink and was ready to answer her desire. With Louise, Elizabeth felt cared for—and she was. At Christmastime she caught a cold that brought on acute mastoiditis, requiring surgery and a three-week hospital stay; the Cranes covered much of the cost and supplied a Russian nurse during Elizabeth’s convalescence. Elizabeth happily fell in with Louise’s high style, though she prided herself on traveling inexpensively—her Atlantic crossing and return on a German freighter had cost only $155. Economizing had permitted her to purchase the clavichord she had wanted using the bulk of a small bequest she’d received when Uncle Jack Bishop, the guardian she’d feared as a child, died the previous spring. The small keyboard instrument, shipped in its convenient carrying case from the Dolmetsch workshop in England, arrived in Paris in time for her to take a half-dozen lessons at the Schola Cantorum with Ralph Kirkpatrick’s teacher. She’d acquired a typewriter as well, so she could send off finished drafts to Marianne Moore, who now played her agent, providing introductions to magazine editors; passing along a compliment from another of the eminent Dial poets, William Carlos Williams; even sparking interest in an editor at Harper & Brothers, who asked if Elizabeth had enough material for a book. Yet with scarcely more than a handful of polished poems so far, the project could not go forward.

  Louise Craine and Elizabeth

  In Douarnenez Elizabeth had been reading and translating Rimbaud, continuing a fascination with the origins of French surrealism, spurred by her library studies and French lessons in New York. She was naturally drawn to surrealism, a movement in literature and the arts roughly contemporaneous with American modernism. She could sympathize with its practitioners’ efforts to render in their works “the actual functioning of thought . . . in the absence of any control exercised by reason,” as the founding poet and critic André Breton wrote in his “Surrealist Manifesto” of 1924. Elizabeth visited Breton’s gallery in Paris and had sightings of the artists Max Ernst and Alberto Giaco­metti. She made notes for a trio of poems about sleep and the inversion of waking and dream states: “thoughts that were recumbent in the day / rise as the others fall, / stand up and make a forest of thick-set trees.”

  But Elizabeth’s wide-ranging curiosity (she had been reading Isaac Newton’s Optics as well as Rimbaud) and her disorienting bout of “homesickness” held her back from full commitment to a particular style, especially one marked by skewed or hallucinatory perception. “Some surrealist poetry terrifies me,” she wrote in her journal, “because of the sense of irresponsibility & danger it gives of the mind being ‘broken down’—I want to produce the opposite effect.” Poetry—read, recited, written—had long served Elizabeth as a safeguard against such danger. What she preferred, she later wrote, was the “surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy” when it is possible to “catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important.” In Douarnenez she had tacked to her wall several pages from Ernst’s Natural History, images made from pencil rubbings done on strongly grained floorboards so as to reveal strange birds, trees, and forests. Elizabeth saw the series of plates as a comic homage to Darwin; the images were more playful than threatening, and Ernst had used simple, “everyday” materials to glimpse—and capture—the fabulous, to suggest the large and scarcely visible truths of nature.

  Only when she was back in the United States, staying in another inexpensive rental, on Cape Cod, for the summer of 1936, did fragments of the past two post-Vassar years of study and experience coalesce in the sestina. And even then, “A Miracle for Breakfast” came close to being cast aside, along with Elizabeth’s hopes for becoming a poet. In late August, after a lonely and mostly unproductive two months punctuated by visits from Frani Blough and Margaret Miller, who worked intently on several impressive canvases in a style that united early Picasso and the Pre-Raphaelites, Elizabeth confessed to Marianne Moore that she had sent away for applications to medical school: “I cannot, cannot decide what to do. . . . I feel that I have given myself more than a fair trial, and the accomplishment has been nothing at all.” She would rather work hard at “Science . . . or even something quite uncongenial” than devote herself to “POETRY” if she could produce nothing better than “my contemporaries.” She apologized for the “great imposition,” but asked Moore for a “severe” assessment of her capabilities. She signed herself for the first time simply “Elizabeth.”

  After all Marianne Moore had already done for her, Elizabeth may have felt she could expect an encouraging reply—and she received one. Moore assured Elizabeth that her work so far was “enviable” and appealed to her sense of calling: “interesting as medicine is, I feel that you would not be able to give up writing.” She recognized in Elizabeth, because she knew it in herself, an undeniable and lifesaving need for expression in verse. In the future Elizabeth often despaired of her slow progress and slight output, but she never again considered abandoning her vocation. By return mail she now offered her mentor “A Miracle for Breakfast,” the poem that, perhaps more than any other she’d written so far, confirmed Moore’s judgment of her protégé’s work as “archaically new,” while establishing a key element of Elizabeth’s own aesthetic: “something needn’t be large to be good.”

  Elizabeth had discovered the sestina form in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century masterwork of poetry and prose, and likely knew of more recent attempts by Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden. Sidney’s remarkable double sestina in alternating voices employed ordinary—or “colorless,” as Elizabeth described them—end words: mountains, valleys, forests, music, morning, evening. The six words could slip easily into the poem’s dialogue, their repetition evident but not distracting. Elizabeth chose instead a mix of both “colorless” and “unusual” end words—coffee, crumb, balcony, miracle, sun, river—heightening the challenge of achieving fluidity in the rigidly structured form. Years later she identified “A Miracle for Breakfast” as “my Depression poem,” with its opening image of breadlines that began to form early each morning in New York City: “At six o’clock we were waiting for coffee, / waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb.” When Elizabeth returned from Europe in 1936, almost 20 percent of the city’s residents were still receiving public assistance. Yet the river that reappears in each stanza more clearly resembles the Seine than the Hudson; there is little of the newsreel to the scene and more Old World noblesse oblige or communion rite. The p
oem’s supplicants await the appearance of an official on a balcony above them to provide “charitable” sustenance—“like kings of old, or like a miracle.”

  Disappointed when a man finally arrives with only a cup of coffee and a roll, which he proceeds to crumble and dispense to the hungry crowd as “one rather hard crumb” each, the narrating “we” turns into an assertive “I” who performs—or envisions—her own miracle. With “one eye close to the crumb,” the poet’s perspective expands in a surrealism of beneficence rather than breakdown; the crumb becomes a “mansion” glowing in the sun, with “galleries and marble chambers” giving off the alluring “smell of hot coffee.” The poem nearly ends with this deliverance:

  . . . Every day, in the sun,

  at breakfast time I sit on my balcony

  with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

  But it is not to be. In the sestina’s concluding three-line envoy, the world returns to its proper dimensions, “I” shrinks back into anonymity, and the poem finishes on a note of longing:

  We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.

  A window across the river caught the sun

  as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

  Although “A Miracle for Breakfast” had its genesis in the free sample of Wonder Bread that had brightened a bleak winter morning in Greenwich Village, it had taken the “homesickness” of a first Atlantic crossing, the grandeur of Europe, the luxury of Louise Crane’s embrace, and Elizabeth’s return to the empty Cape Cod house that was not a home to complete the sestina. If everyday surrealism was at work, what had been glimpsed in that dizzying close inspection of a crumb that was so “enormously important”? Not only home and nourishment and confident autonomy, but beauty—the transforming miracle of art. One night in Paris the winter before, Elizabeth and Louise had entertained Vassar classmate Hallie Tompkins and her fiancé, and the quartet had fallen into a debate about beauty—was it subjective or absolute? Hallie’s fiancé had argued forcefully that beauty “is in the eye of the beholder.” Elizabeth turned emotional, defending the opposite position as best she could until she abruptly left the room. Hallie and Louise found her in the kitchen, “weeping in frustration over a glass of gin.” For Elizabeth, her friends learned, “beauty was one of the eternal absolutes.”