Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  This time Elizabeth brought her clavichord along to the artists’ retreat for a five-month stay beginning in October 1950, and set herself three simple pieces to practice each day in the studio at East House, one of the smaller outbuildings on the estate’s grounds. For her first Yaddo residency, a year earlier at midsummer, she’d been assigned a tower room where, often too nervous in the proximity of more prolific authors or too drunk to write, she’d passed idle hours on her balcony, blowing bubbles from a clay pipe dipped in a cup of soapy water and watching the translucent spheres drift away on the breeze. She planned to spend her days more wisely now, and was writing a story about her mother, working “so fast I expect to be rich before long.” The New Yorker’s per-line rates meant prose was a vastly more profitable enterprise than poetry. She quickly made friends with another poet in residence, May Swenson, two years younger and with one book already in print. But there was a “sort of ‘Pub’ down the road,” with a half-grown colt out back, near Saratoga’s racetrack. And on a stopover in New York City on her way to Yaddo, she’d learned that Ruth Foster had died, alone in her 87th Street apartment. Ruth was fifty-six, the New York Times obituary stated, survived by her mother and three brothers in Boston. The cause was pancreatic cancer. Elizabeth had not seen her since the spring of 1947.

  Perhaps Elizabeth no longer loved Ruth Foster. Her New York physician, Dr. Anny Baumann, who had also tended to Ruth Foster through her illness, had become Elizabeth’s confidant instead. Dr. Baumann dispensed a variety of anti-anxiety and asthma medications long-distance—Theoglycinate and Bellargel pills, adrenaline shots, sulfate cartridges for an inhaler that made her feel like the caterpillar smoking a hookah in Alice in Wonderland—and treated Elizabeth like a friend when she appeared in the city. Elizabeth wrote Dr. Baumann letters too, addressing her as “Anny”—not recitals of dreams or childhood memories, just simple statements: “for about a week I’ve been feeling very depressed”; “having a terrible fight to keep from drinking”; “I did drink for two awful days—no damage done”; “I feel some sort of cycle settling in & I want to stop it.” By early 1950, Elizabeth was begging Dr. Baumann for any remedy “this side of going to a psychiatrist, which I never want to do again,” for the asthma that left her choking and gasping for breath most nights, unable to lie down to sleep. Had she told Ruth Foster too much? Much of what Elizabeth confided to Dr. Foster would never be uttered again.

  Yet Ruth’s death, so young—scarcely older than Elizabeth’s mother had been when she died—stunned her. Dr. Foster had “helped me more than anyone in the world,” Elizabeth wrote to Marianne Moore now. “It was so sad, she was so nice—I wish you had met her.” Dr. Baumann reassured Elizabeth that her intense grief was normal, and the loss could feel worse for a patient who had terminated treatment. Still, Elizabeth drank herself into a five-day hospitalization, remembering afterward, she wrote to Dr. Baumann, how Ruth had once told her, “Well, go ahead, then—ruin your life.” And “I almost have,” she admitted.

  Through the fall and winter months at Yaddo in late 1950, Elizabeth worked fitfully on the story about her mother, now called “Homesickness,” and a poem of the same title. There was a nugget of family history at the heart of both. At sixteen, Gertrude had taken a job as schoolteacher a day’s ride from Great Village. Gertrude had been overcome by loneliness—a homesickness so acute it may have been the first indication of her later illness. She could not afford to give up the job and return home, but her father drove up by wagon to leave the family dog with her for comfort. In the story, Elizabeth named the large brown dog Juno: “She had been promiscuous,” running off after squirrels or other small prey, “and yet there was something very settled and domestic in her manner . . . a character to turn to with confidence in life’s darker moments.”

  Had Elizabeth’s own “homesickness,” the frightening sensation she’d had of being “whirled off from all the world” on her first transatlantic voyage, recurred as, more lonely than she’d been since leaving college, she mourned her confessor, Ruth Foster? Elizabeth labeled her journal for 1950 “worst year.” She would not finish the story in which Juno was meant to accomplish a rescue. Could she have longed, without being able to say so, for a Juno, the promiscuous but passionate lover in The Stone Wall ? The poem trailed off, an unfinished fragment—

  . . . not even realizing she was weeping

  her face nightgown drenched—

  It was too late—for what, she did not know.—

  already ​—, remote,

  irrepairable . . . irreparable.

  Beneath the bed the big dog thumped her tail.

  October 5, 1976

  ROBINSON HALL, HARVARD YARD

  I had known homesickness—unjustified, unwarranted. How could I miss a home where I could not bring friends, where I felt lonely or fearful except at the piano or behind the pages of a book? But still, when I left California for Vermont, as the unfamiliar trees turned red and yellow and dropped their leaves, when a foot of snow fell on Thanksgiving Day and I woke alone in the white clapboard dormitory, I felt something like homesickness—though I was glad to be far away on the holiday and did not miss my home, I told myself, trying to explain away the otherwise unexplainable feeling that I was lost, misplaced.

  I latched on to my roommate, a millionairess eight times over, with a desperate admiring love. She was nineteen, I was seventeen; she’d skipped from boarding school to boarding school, I’d skipped a grade. She was generous, laughing at my cheap white Orlon gloves and buying me soft leather mittens with wool liners like the ones she wore skiing at Killington and Stowe. She offered to buy me a winter coat, and a harpsichord better than the clunker in the basement practice room in Jennings, the gray stone mansion that was Bennington’s music building.

  She owned a car, her third Saab 99E; two others had been totaled in accidents not her fault, and she had not been hurt. Before classes started, she drove into town to buy stereo components—amplifier, turntable, Bose speakers—and returned with furniture as well. We cast out the battered student desks that had made me feel like I was in college, where I wanted to be, in favor of a single weathered drop-leaf table that could be opened out for entertaining. We balanced our typewriters precariously at either end, her Smith-Corona electric, my Olivetti manual, to write our class papers on smudgy Corrasable Bond.

  On fall weekends we drove to the vacant country houses her family owned, one on Cape Ann, north of Boston, and another on an island off the coast of Maine. She was driving fast. A childhood friend richer than she rode up front beside her. I was in back, peering out between their heads, watching the pickup truck approach slowly from a distance, at the speed of a country road at dusk and a driver not expecting to meet a whizzing carload of college students shaving hours off a full-day’s ride. Slowly, the pickup turned across our path, and we were upon him, then swerving to avoid the collision, off the road, rolling, miraculously landing upright on dry grass. A roll bar–style headrest from one of the front seats had come off in my grasping hands.

  My roommate’s quick reflexes and her Saab 99E had saved us, she said over and over. Except that her friend’s neck and shoulder ached. An ambulance arrived, the friend was flown to a hospital, then home. She would be fine, she might miss a semester at Vassar, but she would be fine. This Saab 99E wasn’t totaled. It stayed in the shop until the end of term, though, and by spring my roommate had a boyfriend who drove the car, and things were different.

  Maybe the homesickness I shouldn’t have felt grew into the sadness that made me want to leave Bennington. But I was making a home in Cambridge, first in a new apartment on leafy Ellsworth Avenue shared with just one roommate, another music student from Bennington, enrolled in a piano tuning and repair course at Boston’s North Bennet Street School. On campus he’d made a point of going barefoot through the winter and wearing a white chorister’s surplice instead of a shirt. But he’d turned practical the year we roomed together, and he left the apartment each morning in work boot
s, work shirt, and jeans like everyone else.

  During the spring of Robert Lowell’s class, I applied to transfer to Radcliffe and was accepted, joining the class of students whose application folders I’d read as a secretary. By now they were college juniors, no longer recognizable as the fresh-faced preppies and high school valedictorians whose photos I’d studied enviously more than a year before. Could the famous writer’s letter of recommendation have made the difference for me this time? He’d been sorry about hitting me and wanted to help. He asked me to marry him and hoped, at least, I’d come back. I didn’t trust myself to let him know I’d gotten in and would not be leaving Cambridge for Vermont.

  My acceptance at Radcliffe was conditional, though. I’d have to live off campus. There was a shortage of dorm rooms, and since I would turn twenty-one that summer, the college wasn’t obliged to house me. I would be one of ten “older women students,” the other nine much older than me, in an admissions experiment intended to bring women whose educations had been stalled by marriage and child-rearing back to school. The financial aid was the same Bennington offered, and I said yes, eager for even this partial resumption of student life. All summer long, as I worked a new job as cashier in a secondhand bookstore on Mass. Ave., I looked forward to choosing my courses in the fall, finding my way to classrooms where I would belong, drafting poems in spiral-bound notebooks with the Radcliffe shield on the cover. I bought a used paperback copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems with my employee discount, not minding the acid-burned pages or inked underlines of the previous owner, and looked for “Poem.” It wasn’t there. I understood, as I hadn’t before, that I’d heard something brand-new that day in Professor Lowell’s class, from the small woman who’d bowed her head and read to us from the pages of a slim black binder.

  Maybe I fit the description “older woman student” well enough. I’d been on the outside supporting myself, cooking plain meals with the worn cast-iron pan, battered aluminum colander, and tarnished but still-whirling eggbeater I’d picked up at Goodwill for a few dollars. I felt more than one year older than my classmates—or most of them. When, after a semester, I pressed for admission to a newly co-ed dorm in the Radcliffe Quad and met the two Vietnam vets who lived in one of the top-floor suites at Cabot Hall, I felt ashamed of my sense of superiority. They never spoke of what they’d seen or done as soldiers, or of the indignity of living now among relative children who had never had to worry their draft numbers might be called. Like me, they seemed grateful for the regression to coddled dormitory life, for the chance to make Friday-afternoon booze runs to the New Hampshire state liquor store an hour’s drive north, returning with tax-free cases of Rolling Rock and Marlboro Reds to drink and smoke through endless bridge games played with the two senior women who shared the dorm’s fifth-floor aerie. Their smoke and occasional laughter wafted down the staircase to the fourth floor where I sometimes sat on the hall carpet just outside my room, notebook propped on my knees, working on a poem for class, happy to be in the midst of other students’ comings and goings, to forget myself as I remembered.

  I was following what seemed the direction of poetry then, which also suited my need for retrospection. Robert Lowell had given me an A-minus (I tried not to feel the nick) for poems about my father, about my season of depression. One of them, he wrote on the strip of paper clipped to my sheaf of final pages, “has all the litheness and control of good prose.” I did not understand this then as praise for a poem, but I kept on each semester in writing classes for which I applied and was accepted out of a few dozen aspirants, relieved each time I saw my name among the ten posted on the classroom door—uncertain what I’d have done if I had not. Jane Shore, a poet just a half-dozen years older than me, beloved by students, gave assignments: write a poem based on a fairy tale, write a poem inspired by a work of art, write a sestina. I chose “The Ugly Duckling” (my anxious childhood) and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures (a one-night stand that fizzled). Only my sestina, with the names of players on the winning 1975 World Series Cincinnati Reds—Gullett, Bench, Rose, Morgan, Concepcion, Geronimo—threaded through the stanzas, brought unqualified praise from classmates and professor. But I knew the poem was merely clever. I hadn’t really cared about the widely mourned Red Sox loss in Game Seven. If I had, I wouldn’t have written about the Reds.

  Still, one or more of these poems earned me admission to Elizabeth Bishop’s class in the fall of 1976, my senior year. Like Robert Lowell’s workshop, into which I’d stumbled as a lucky beginner, this was a graduate-level course, and the competition for admission had to have been stiff. In early September, Lowell had suffered a breakdown, his third in little over a year, causing him to withdraw from teaching that semester and thrusting Bishop into his spot on three days’ notice. She never taught workshops—“verse-writing classes,” she called them—the same semester as Lowell, not wishing to compete for students. I didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure either, that this would be her last verse-writing class at Harvard. She was hoping for an extension to her contract, and her colleague and friend Robert Fitzgerald, a tenured professor with a named chair and considerable clout, had made inquiries on her behalf.

  Would more students have applied, knowing this was a last chance? Probably not. Lowell was Harvard’s headliner, and he would teach again in the spring; Octavio Paz and Seamus Heaney were waiting in the wings. Elizabeth Bishop was not a big name like those men, and not an outspoken feminist like Adrienne Rich or May Swenson—icons on campus, revered by students beyond the English department. Nor was she a histrionic beauty like Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton. Some of us had heard Anne Sexton read at Harvard in 1974, the year of her suicide. Perched on a stool like a nightclub performer in an A-line shift and knee-high boots, she’d recited her poem “The Fury of Cocks,” first warning her electrified audience in Sanders Theatre, “And I don’t mean roosters.”

  About thirty students crowded the seminar room on the first floor of Robinson Hall, the history department building at the far northeast corner of Harvard Yard, on a Wednesday afternoon at the end of September. Why we were meeting here no one, least of all our professor, knew. It didn’t matter that most of us had to stand through the brief advisory issued by Miss Bishop, a grimmer, grayer, possibly even smaller woman than I’d remembered from her guest appearance in Robert Lowell’s class eighteen months earlier, dressed smartly but uncomfortably, it now seemed, in another tailored suit—a delicate tweed. She dismissed us soon enough, after giving instructions to hand in our sample poems at the English department office, then return to Robinson Hall next Tuesday, the day before the next class meeting, to check the roster posted on the classroom door. For homework we should complete three stanzas of a ballad rhyming abcb or abab, our choice.

  Did some give up then, put off by the somber, sallow Miss Bishop or by her assignment to write verses in rhyme? If there was one thing never encouraged by any of our workshop professors and uniformly derided by my classmates, it was rhyme. And a ballad? I could think only of poems in the children’s anthology from which my mother read aloud at bedtime, or the French folk tunes my father sometimes picked out on the piano. As a little girl I’d begged him to play over and over a favorite song, “Ragotin,” about this clownish fellow’s “pots de vin,” whose title my father translated for me as “Tipsy.” I hadn’t known what any of those words meant, just liked their sounds and the playful ditty that accompanied them. I’d almost forgotten this was where my love of poetry began, with rhythmic melodies and pulsing story-poems whose rhymes pinned their plot lines in memory like messages tacked to a bulletin board: “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “O Captain! My Captain!” “Barbara Allen,” “Barbara Frietchie.” Hadn’t I memorized Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in fifth grade, enchanted by the hushed midnight scene, the hint of wisdom at the poem’s close, and aided by subtly recurring sounds at each line’s end?

  That night in my room at Cabot Hall, I paged through the yellowed leaves of my Complete Poem
s. How could I not have noticed the elegant rhyme schemes of “The Map” and “The Colder the Air,” whose message seemed to mock my inattention—

  We must admire her perfect aim,

  this huntress of the winter air

  whose level weapon needs no sight,

  if it were not that everywhere

  her game is sure, her shot is right.

  The least of us could do the same. . . .

  —or “Chemin de Fer” (abcb), “Sleeping Standing Up” (abcacb), “Cirque d’Hiver” (abcbb), and “Roosters,” with its emphatic aaa triplets? But this was “her game,” her magic that my not noticing certified. On Tuesday I was back in Robinson Hall checking the roster, finding my name, and then the next day in the room with the lucky ten—eleven, with one auditor—for the start of class.

  Miss Bishop seemed no happier. “I don’t believe poetry can be taught,” she started in, looking straight out at us, yet somehow managing not to meet anyone’s gaze. Her level weapon needs no sight. “But we’ll do what we can with the time we’ve got.” A tentative smile. Should we have laughed?

  She passed around a photocopied sheet with each week’s assignment listed: ballads to be finished by next class, at least twenty lines of iambic pentameter, the same of rhymed couplets, and “Please try your hands at a Christmas poem” for December. These alternated with “free” dates: “Anything you want to submit, but only one poem, please—no longer than one single-spaced page or two double-spaced pages.”