Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Elizabeth found Marjorie beautiful too. Her long dark hair, when she let it down at night, reminded Elizabeth of her young mother bathing in the bedroom they’d shared in Nova Scotia, and so did the vulnerability of her pale white body, though Marjorie was taller and thinner than Gertrude as Elizabeth preferred to remember her, before mental illness ravaged her mother’s body and mind. Marjorie soon took on a caretaking role with Elizabeth; fragile as she was in health, Marjorie had a practical side. It was Elizabeth who prized the hot early mornings during their first summer together, when she woke to find the whole yard white with a heavy dew that “would drip on the screens and the palm branches just outside the window,” and embraced Marjorie, whose “back was wet with perspiration and it all seemed part of the dew.” Elizabeth wrote a love poem, never published, beginning: “It is marvellous to wake up together / At the same minute. . . .” The hour before dawn, when it is “just starting to get light,” Elizabeth would confide to the psychoanalyst she sought out for help later in the decade, is “about the time I usually start drinking, or writing a poem, or come to think of it . . . when I liked best to make love to someone.”

  Marjorie Stevens (standing) and Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, Key West, 1940s

  Elizabeth rented out the White Street house for the income and moved into Marjorie’s apartment on Margaret Street behind the Caroline Shop, a fabric store Marjorie ran with Ernest Hemingway’s second ex-wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. But their idyll ended abruptly in December 1941 when the United States finally entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, another remote port city with a navy base. Key West’s population rapidly doubled with the arrival of fifteen thousand servicemen and their families; the vacant lots surrounding Elizabeth’s house on White Street were taken for military housing. A favorite bar was torn down to make room for a naval air station and submarine base to defend against torpedo-bearing German submarines in the Florida Straits. Blackouts curtailed nightlife. Key West was no longer a place where two drunken women could fall in love on a street corner without anyone taking notice. The Caroline Shop closed its doors.

  While Marjorie found work as an accountant for the navy, the tense atmosphere pushed Elizabeth toward leaving the country. She wanted to study Spanish and brought Marjorie along with her on a tour of Mexico that stretched to six months as they traveled first to the Yucatán, where a chance meeting with Pablo Neruda at a hotel near the pyramids at Chichén Itzá led to a stay with the Chilean poet-diplomat and his second wife in Cuernavaca. The thirty-seven-year-old Neruda, initially a poet of private emotions, had become politicized while posted to Madrid in the 1930s, joining the Loyalists in defense of the Republic at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. After the capture and execution of his friend the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, he’d written España en el corazón (Spain in Our Hearts), a sequence of defiant war poems printed and distributed in 1937 to soldiers at the front. Neruda’s partisan role ended his diplomatic service in Spain. Elizabeth and Marjorie visited Cuernavaca in the spring of 1942, just after their host received the news of the death of a second close friend, Miguel Hernández, another poet turned Loyalist soldier, in a Spanish prison. That spring, too, Mexico declared war on the Axis powers after German submarines sank Mexican oil tankers in the Gulf. The two women traveled on to Mexico City, Puebla, and the “translucent-looking” mountains and “quilted” hillsides of Oaxaca, but they found no peace there. Elizabeth could write no better in Mexico than in Key West.

  Returning to the United States, Elizabeth braved New York City alone in October 1942, staying in a room at the Murray Hill Hotel near Grand Central Terminal and hoping the city’s vitality, even when dampened by wartime, would transfer to her work. She met Marianne for an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum and revived a friendship with Loren MacIver, the artist wife of the poet Lloyd Frankenberg. Loren had taken a long working vacation in Key West three years before, staying with Elizabeth in an effort to console her after the breakup with Louise, briefly becoming her lover. Now Loren painted Elizabeth’s portrait, filling more of the hours that Elizabeth found herself unable to use for writing. Within two months of her arrival in Manhattan, Elizabeth gave up and returned to Margaret Street, where she followed Marjorie’s lead and looked for work at the navy yard.

  Elizabeth’s portrait by Loren MacIver, 1942

  Elizabeth landed a job as trainee in the navy’s optical shop, taking apart binoculars and reassembling them after their working parts had been repaired. She’d resisted placement as an office worker among women who “seem to comb their hair and file their nails most of the time,” preferring the company of the optical shop’s tattooed sailors, who worked in their undershirts in the steamy Florida heat grinding lenses for “magnificent optical instruments”—sextants and periscopes as well as binoculars. But eyestrain and an eczema flare-up brought on by the chemicals used for cleaning prisms caused her to quit after five days. She’d enjoyed drinking “very strong Navy coffee all day long” and practicing her French with two Swiss watchmakers in the crew. The view of the busy harbor from the navy yard had been magnificent. “The water is jade green, the gray ships looked bright blue against it,” Elizabeth wrote to Marianne Moore. But she doubted she’d have lasted long in the shop even if she hadn’t gotten sick. No one else seemed to care about “the theory of the thing, why the prisms go this way or that way.” The “lack of imagination” of the navy men, who seemed content “fiddling” endlessly with their “delicate, maddening” little tools, would only have gotten “more and more depressing.”

  At the same time, Elizabeth felt herself growing “stupider and stupider and more like a hermit every day”—the reason, along with her dwindling funds, she’d taken the job in the first place. She had almost given up on completing the “six bedraggled old poems and a couple of short stories” she’d carried with her from Key West to Mexico to New York City and back. On too many days, Elizabeth started drinking long before Marjorie returned home from work. Whether Elizabeth’s drinking was the root cause of the breakup that now loomed is impossible to determine, but Marjorie’s letters from the time show she no longer found an inebriated Elizabeth attractive. Marjorie didn’t mind being the household wage earner, but she expected Elizabeth to write every day and have something to show for it. Like many of Elizabeth’s lovers, and Elizabeth herself in her early years as a poet, Marjorie didn’t understand that inspiration could not be summoned through regular application. In the fall of 1944, with the help of Loren MacIver, Elizabeth rented a small apartment on King Street in Greenwich Village and tried once again to live on her own.

  In the final months of the war, Elizabeth responded to a surprise invitation from an editor at Houghton Mifflin, the venerable Boston publishing firm, to enter its first annual Poetry Prize Fellowship competition. She sent off a “lovely brand-new set of mss.,” she wrote to Marianne, who readily served as one of her recommenders, under the title North & South, reflecting the diverse settings of a collection that opened with “The Map.” In May 1945 she received a telegram with the news that her “mss.” had been chosen for the prize out of a field of 833 submissions. In June a check for $1,000 arrived.

  Yet what should have been cause for celebration soon turned to a source of tension as Elizabeth worked under pressure of deadline to expand the manuscript by a half-dozen poems in order to satisfy her editor, Ferris Greenslet, and herself that she had a complete volume. The several new poems worried the question of love, as her romance with Marjorie finally unraveled. “Wading at Wellfleet” and “Chemin de Fer” recalled girlhood summers at Camp Chequesset: the “scenery” of “scrub-pine and oak,” a walk down the tracks of an abandoned railway line, the ritual visit to the local hermit’s shack. “Love should be put into action!” the hermit screams at the close of “Chemin de Fer,” and across the pond “an echo”—perhaps from the young Elizabeth, newly awakened to her body’s yearnings—“tried and tried to confirm it.”

  Elizabeth wrote “Anaphor
a,” the final poem in North & South, for Marjorie. The setting is the Mexican city of Puebla they’d visited in 1942, where morning begins “with birds, with bells, / with whistles from a factory.” In the first of two opposed stanzas, the sunrise that had once awakened their pleasure instead summons “intrigue” and “mortal / mortal fatigue”; in the second, sunset—“the fiery event” of closure—ends “every day in endless / endless assent,” the final word’s ironic pun underscoring the sense of defeat. By the spring of 1946, with the book’s publication a few months off, Marjorie was writing to Elizabeth that there was no point in returning to Florida or “trying to make something work that doesn’t.”

  North & South appeared in print in August 1946, while Elizabeth was traveling in Nova Scotia for the first time since her Bulmer grandparents died. If she had fled to Canada now, spurred by anxiety about the book’s reception, she soon had little to worry about. A first review in the Atlantic Monthly was stingy, but Poetry, the Saturday Review, the New York Times, and others followed swiftly with unequivocal admiration for “Miss Bishop’s almost perfect artistic acumen.” Prominent voices weighed in: Louise Bogan in the New Yorker, and a poet-critic of the rising generation, Randall Jarrell, who praised her work as “honest in its wit, perception, and sensitivity” in Partisan Review—“all her poems have written underneath, I have seen it.” Writing in the Nation, Marianne Moore concluded her glowing review of “this small-large book of beautifully formulated aesthetic-moral mathematics”: “At last we have someone who knows, who is not didactic.” Marianne had even singled out the unrevised “Roosters” for compliment, and she wrote, with qualified admiration, of “The Fish”: despite its too-graphic description of the fish’s entrails (“one is not glad of the creature’s every perquisite”), “the poem dominates recollection.” “The Fish” was the book’s strongest offering, critics agreed, and for many years it was Elizabeth’s most anthologized poem.

  Good news kept coming. The New Yorker granted Elizabeth a coveted first-read contract with a 25 percent premium for poems accepted for publication. Randall Jarrell’s review led to a dinner party in January 1947 at his New York apartment, where Elizabeth found the courage to stay and meet Jarrell’s friend and fellow Kenyon College alumnus Robert Lowell, whose Pulitzer Prize later that year for his second book, Lord Weary’s Castle, would confirm the thirty-year-old’s status as American poetry’s enfant terrible. The dinner, in turn, led to Lowell’s review of North & South, along with new books by Dylan Thomas and William Carlos Williams, in the summer issue of Sewanee Review. Lowell deemed Bishop “one of the best craftsmen alive” and “about equal” to Thomas in achievement so far. He analyzed the “simple and effective” structure of “a Bishop poem”: “It will usually start as description or descriptive narrative, then either the poet or one of her characters or objects reflects. The tone of these reflections is pathetic, witty, fantastic, or shrewd. Frequently, it is all these things at once.” The technique worked to “unify and universalize,” and in this she resembled Robert Frost. Lowell counted ten of Elizabeth’s poems “failures” and ten more “either unsatisfactory as wholes, or very slight,” but he pronounced “Roosters” and “The Fish” “large and perfect”: the “best poems,” aside from Marianne Moore’s, “that I know of written by a woman in this century.”

  Fiercely competitive, Lowell had a compulsion to rate and rank, yet while she disliked the qualifier—“by a woman”—and preferred not to be linked with Marianne Moore, “her most important model” Lowell surmised, his frank assessment of Elizabeth’s successes and failures won her trust. This was praise she could learn from. She had liked him too. Elizabeth would always remember the younger poet’s endearingly “rumpled” dark blue suit and the “sad state of his shoes” on the night of their first meeting, how handsome he was despite needing a haircut, and, most of all, “that it was the first time I had ever actually talked with some one about how one writes poetry.” Elizabeth forgot her shyness; trading thoughts about their craft became “strangely easy”—“like exchanging recipes for making a cake.”

  Robert Lowell, 1940s

  For a time, however, the acquaintance with Robert Lowell seemed to hold less promise than the psychoanalysis with Dr. Ruth Foster that Elizabeth finally committed to during the winter of 1946–47. There are “certain things,” she had written to Marianne Moore over a decade before, defending her choice of end words in “A Miracle for Breakfast,” that “without one particular fault they would be without the means of existence.” By age thirty-six, Elizabeth’s own existence was painfully linked to a number of faults—shyness, dependence on alcohol, chronic asthma—that, along with her deepest concern, the faltering pace of her poetic output, seemed possible to ease, perhaps even cure, through psychoanalysis.

  “Every magazine or paper I pick up has an article proving that asthma is psychosomatic,” Elizabeth observed to Dr. Anny Baumann, the German émigré physician she’d begun to see in New York for her breathing troubles after settling into the King Street apartment, and who may have provided the referral to Dr. Foster. As long ago as her second trip to Europe, she’d been advised by Marianne Moore’s friend the avant-garde novelist Bryher, whom she’d met in Paris following her hospitalization for asthma, that psychoanalysis could help. More tantalizing, Bryher had promised that a Freudian analysis “makes one write better and more easily.” But Marianne had shared Elizabeth’s initial skepticism, her worry that psychoanalysts viewed the poet “as a neurotic working off his complexes,” as Elizabeth had written to Marianne back then, quoting the literary critic Christopher Caudwell, and in the course of analysis tampered with “symbols that are peculiarly private,” impeding the poet’s work. When Elizabeth met several times with the renegade German analyst Karen Horney in the fall of 1940, as she’d despaired of her future in the wake of Louise Crane’s betrayal, Marianne, a staunch Presbyterian, had counseled instead “the quiet heroisms of faith.” Elizabeth quit the analysis and moved back to Key West.

  In stepping away from Marianne’s influence, Elizabeth opened herself to the possible benefits of the talking cure. She made her first appointments with Dr. Ruth Foster in the spring of 1946, and by February 1947 was firmly attached to the tall, blue-eyed analyst who saw patients in the apartment where she lived alone at 110 East 87th Street. Elizabeth called Dr. Foster “Ruth,” and, in the first of a remarkable series of letters written between analytic sessions that February, told her “I really do love you very much . . . all transferences aside.” Elizabeth was sure she would have loved Ruth regardless of the process by which a patient was expected to “transfer” the powerful emotions of childhood into the analytic relationship. And she might have.

  Almost twenty years older, Ruth Foster was a native New Englander with a girls’ private school background like Elizabeth’s. Her choice to take up a profession had left Ruth Foster estranged from her proper Bostonian family even as she’d become one of the earliest American women to train and practice as an analyst. That education had been hard to come by; she’d specialized in neurology at the University of Maryland’s medical school, graduating in 1931, before the founding of any American psychoanalytic training institutes, and she’d coauthored a paper on one-sided paralysis to establish her credentials as a neurologist. But in Baltimore, and later in London and New York, she’d interned and practiced in clinics founded by Freud’s acolytes, then established her own private practice in 1937, preferring to treat patients who lived on the margins: creative people, and the poor children of Harlem served by the newly founded Northside Center for Child Development. Elizabeth may have known little of Ruth Foster’s background beyond the upper-crust lineage she could easily intuit, but she did know, because Ruth told her, that her analyst was writing a paper now on color in dreams. Elizabeth found that fascinating. She began a poem, “Dear Dr. Foster”: “Yes, dreams come in colors / and memories come in colors / but those in dreams are more remarkable.”

  Elizabeth’s letters to Ruth Foster were fill
ed with dreams. In one of them she relived the car crash in Montargis. Ruth rather than Louise was with her and Margaret on the roadside afterward—“you didn’t seem responsible in any way,” Elizabeth assured Ruth in her letter. She woke from the nightmare bewildered and frightened, and with the “not very good” first line of a sonnet on her lips, expressing relief that Ruth had survived—“Alive alive and with blue eyes.” The letter also supplied details of Elizabeth’s desperation that winter, despite the critical success of North & South. Elizabeth had wanted to tell Ruth her dream right away, recite the line to her while it was fresh in memory, and she’d been too drunk that night to stop herself from picking up the phone and dialing the number Ruth had given her in case of emergency. But it was after midnight; there was no emergency; she shouldn’t have called. Elizabeth apologized to Ruth by letter that morning: she’d been “in my cups—kegs” for five days straight, starting to drink on a Thursday and making the drunken phone call late Sunday night.

  Dr. Foster seems to have asked Elizabeth for a written account of her sexual history. Elizabeth wasn’t seeking help in shifting the direction of her attraction away from women; she’d selected the two unmarried female analysts she consulted in the 1940s, pioneers in a predominantly male profession, knowing they would not find her love for women a perversion demanding a cure. Horney was already famous for rejecting Freud’s theory of penis envy as demeaning to women. But such intimate confessions lay at the heart of psychoanalytic work, and Elizabeth was troubled by loneliness. She told Ruth Foster about Mike at summer camp, about her passion for Judy Flynn, about sadistic Uncle George; about her unrequited love for Margaret Miller, Bob Seaver’s accusation that she “had it in” for men, and Marjorie’s more recent one, that she didn’t really love women—“it was all some sort of revenge on my mother.” Elizabeth described for Ruth her early childhood: her parents’ departure when she was “a few weeks old,” her father’s illness and death, her mother’s hospitalization. Elizabeth guessed she must have been bottle-fed as a baby: “Heavens do you suppose I’ve been thinking of alcohol as mother’s milk all this time and that’s why I pour it down my throat at regular intervals? Or bottle feedings, or what?”