Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  She put them on and began to read. A slim younger woman appeared in the hall that led to the kitchen. Blue eyes, dirty-blond hair cropped short. Was that Alice, the woman we’d heard was Miss Bishop’s lover?

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

  so many things seem filled with the intent

  to be lost that their loss is no disaster. . . .

  4

  River

  ELIZABETH HAD FAILED so far at every attempt to write the kind of literary travel piece that was a staple at the New Yorker. Finally she would be forced to admit, “I am NOT a journalist.” But in the meantime there was serious money to be made in prose, in contrast to the few dollars per line she earned for poetry, and Elizabeth knew how to capture Katharine White’s interest with a proposal letter.

  She’d spent months that stretched to years drafting and redrafting an account of a 1951 voyage to Sable Island, a desolate twenty-five-mile crescent of sand dunes and beach grass lodged in the Atlantic between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland known as the “Graveyard of the Grand Banks”—a place that “has haunted my imagination most of my life,” with its race of wild ponies, its unique Sable Island sparrow (“the ornithologists’ delight”), and “wonderful ghost stories” of shipwrecked sailors. Elizabeth’s own great-grandfather had gone down with all hands on a West Indies schooner off Sable Island’s shores. Her idea to “combine personal reminiscences” with the “best parts” of the island’s history, “plus a first-hand account of it now,” seemed a sure-fire plan, and as late as 1956 Katharine White still hoped to receive the article, along with several other “projected fact pieces” Elizabeth had suggested on locations in Brazil. Eventually Mrs. White stopped asking about Sable Island.

  Yet now, in August 1958, Elizabeth was flying off in a Brazilian air force DC-3 with the celebrated British novelist Aldous Huxley, a denizen of Hollywood since the 1930s, and his younger Italian wife, Laura Archera, to explore a remote Indian post on the Xingú River, after several days spent touring the new capital city of Brasília, with the aim of writing up the trip for the New Yorker as a combination travel piece and profile. Lota’s fortune was tied to her Samambaia properties, and Elizabeth believed it was “up to me to earn a lot of $$$$$$ somehow,” as inflation, fueled by government instability, drove the price of necessities in Brazil ever higher. Lota and Elizabeth deplored the relocation of the nation’s capital from nearby Rio to Brasília, a modernist City of Oz “created from scratch” out of previously uninhabited jungle lands in the country’s interior, not least for its diversion of enormous sums to the quixotic scheme. Still, when invited to join the Huxleys on a tour sponsored by the Brazilian government, Elizabeth had accepted. Trailing the aging author of Brave New World through the spare beginnings of the planned city, the green-tinted Ray-Ban glass panels scarcely in place on the first of Oscar Niemeyer’s sleek public buildings, followed by a meeting with the Uialapiti, a tribe under government protection from “missionaries, land speculators, etc.,” as Elizabeth wrote May Swenson on her return, would surely yield marketable copy. Huxley was enjoying a new wave of fame since the 1954 publication of Doors of Perception, his record of a refulgent California afternoon on mescaline, a hallucinogenic compound found in the peyote cactus used in religious rituals by certain tribes in the American Southwest. William Maxwell, taking over as Elizabeth’s prose editor from Katharine White, who had recently retired to full-time residence in Maine, telegraphed his boss William Shawn’s instructions to “go ahead” with the Brasília piece, with the caveat that “we can’t be sure it will work.”

  The air force transport, retrofitted with blue plush seats, bore its “rather highbrow” passengers northwest over “the River of Souls, and the River of the Dead, to a branch of the Xingú—if you have a map!” Elizabeth wrote to May Swenson, describing “my best trip in Brasil, so far.” There, a village of thatched huts “rushed to meet us” as the plane landed on a small strip of asphalt in the jungle, not “the green Amazonian jungle—just immense waste lands, with palms and small rivers” where, Elizabeth soon observed, the Uialapiti swim and fish “off and on all day—they are very clean.”

  Huxley had been a frustrating companion and interview subject, Elizabeth later complained to Bill Maxwell, speaking only of mescaline at any length; “medicine, mysticism, and God are his present themes,” she wrote to Cal. But she knew Laura Archera, a documentary filmmaker and lay psychotherapist, from Key West days. Laura had been the lover of Pauline Hemingway’s sister Jinny Pfeiffer before marrying the widowed Huxley in 1956. Elizabeth herself had been attracted to Jinny, with whom she’d spent a ten-day vacation in Haiti in 1949, easing her loneliness after the breakup with Marjorie Stevens. Lota and Elizabeth entertained the Huxleys at Samambaia in the Brazilian winter of 1958 when they first arrived, and now Elizabeth and Laura, two friends who had once loved the same woman, mingled with the Indians—“all quite naked” except for strings of beads and, for the women, a palm-leaf cache-sexe, “cache-ing nothing.” The “rounded behinds and childishly smooth legs, in both sexes, are remarkably pretty,” Elizabeth wrote in her draft for the New Yorker.

  Aldous and Laura Archera Huxley with Elizabeth in front of her estudio, Samambaia, 1958

  Laura had brought along a Polaroid camera, perhaps the same one Jinny, Laura’s partner in filmmaking, had purchased for the Haiti trip, and it proved an immediate attraction. Elizabeth took her own photos of Laura as she worked, a “small, trim” northern Italian blond in stylishly draped slacks among the dark-haired indigenous Brazilians. Later, on the riverbank, while some in the tour group swam, the “tall, pale, and thin” Aldous Huxley, strikingly handsome with “well-modeled” features, pulled a magnifying glass from his pocket and leaned over “from his great height” to examine “a mass of pale yellow Sulphur butterflies . . . quivering, in the wet mud at the river’s edge, like the start of a yacht race,” Elizabeth wrote in her New Yorker draft.

  Laura Archera Huxley (with Polaroid camera) touring a Uialapiti village, photograph by Elizabeth Bishop

  The party toured a “manioc patch” a half mile from the village, the tribe’s “only attempt at agriculture,” they were informed by the Cambridge University graduate student who served as guide to this “most primitive people left in the world,” except for Africa’s Pygmies. The Uialapiti “do no work at all, as we consider work,” he told them, though fishing, done with bow and arrow in the flowing, waist-deep Xingú, was a refined art: “they rarely miss.” Inside a longhouse, where men swayed in hammocks and women “messed about with manioc and clay pots” on the dirt floor, the tourists were besieged with requests for cigarettes. Elizabeth obliged by giving each man a cigarette from her own pack and lighting it. At the far end of the shelter, hidden by a fence of “twigs and palm leaves,” a young girl was held in isolation, required to remain “silent and invisible” for a months-long puberty ritual. Elizabeth was invited to peer through the fence: “this isn’t the really secret part,” the guide explained.

  After a siesta, followed by a wrestling match with no declared winners or losers—“they are gentle with each other”—the travelers departed for the airstrip, but not before a Uialapiti widower, fascinated by Elizabeth’s earrings and watch, inquired whether she was unmarried. Would she stay behind to wed him? “This produced a great deal of tribal merriment,” Elizabeth wrote in her New Yorker draft, wryly working in a quotation from Othello: “although I was vain of having been singled out, I was afraid he merely did not want to be the Indian who threw away the pearl, richer than all his tribe.” Laura Archera may have taken this moment to confide in Elizabeth the fact that her own marriage to a widower had been nearly as precipitate, the ceremony performed on a whim at a roadside chapel in Yuma, Arizona. The newlywed Huxleys took up residence in the Hollywood Hills, in a house a few hundred yards up the road from the one Laura had shared for years with Jinny, the two households becoming one family, including two young children Jinny adopted in the early 1950s. Certainly both Lota
and Elizabeth took note of the Huxleys’ arrangement; it was a model they would soon follow when Mary Morse gave up on men and determined to adopt the babies she longed to raise.

  What killed the piece for the New Yorker were the passages on Brasília. This time Elizabeth composed and delivered her travelogue within two months of the journey, but she had trouble rendering the ingenious “swooping” pillars of Niemeyer’s futuristic Palace of the Dawn: like “a chain of huge white kites, poised upside down, then grasped by giant hands and squeezed on the four sides until they are elegantly attenuated.” The labored architectural descriptions stalled the narrative; after that, “everything ‘tails off badly,’” Bill Maxwell wrote, reporting the “factual department” editors’ verdict. And, as Elizabeth had feared, “Huxley doesn’t come through.” She had been no more able to penetrate this famous writer’s reserve than she had Frost’s or Sandburg’s in her days as reluctant Library of Congress doyenne. But in the end, Elizabeth scarcely minded the loss of money and time, and felt only “rather dumb” to have worked so hard again on something outside “my natural bent.” As she wrote to May, she’d gotten a poem out of the experience, a long one, “The Riverman,” her first in two years—“what a relief to begin again.”

  The months after her return from New York City, before the Brasília trip, had been difficult. Brazil seemed “dingy and dark and grease-stained” that November of 1957, in contrast to the “rich, gleaming, deodorized U.S.A.” She missed the “bright cleanness,” and Lota’s retrospective complaints about Maine’s diminutive rocky beaches and the fir trees she insisted must have been artificially planted dampened Elizabeth’s customary enthusiasm for “Nature . . . so bright & fresh” in Brazil. She wanted to travel abroad again, but there was no money for it. Without telling Lota, she began to consider the old Bulmer house in Great Village as a place to retire someday. “I wonder if that’s where I shouldn’t be, after all,” she wrote to Cal of her sometimes acute long­ing for Nova Scotia.

  In late March 1958, Elizabeth’s cherished toucan died, the result of a tragic mistake. She’d applied an insecticide to control the ant swarms in the courtyard where Sammy’s cage hung, having been assured by the sales clerk that the poison was “inoffensive” to animals, only to find Sammy supine on the floor of his cage a few hours later, claws—or “feet,” as Elizabeth referred to them in recounting the disaster—raised to the offending air. The ode to Sammy she began writing that day joined a cache of others already devoted to the bird and never completed, though she quoted a fond first line to Cal when she sent him the news: “Most comical of all in death. . . .” The lines she kept to herself and added in later drafts were more self-recriminating and anguished: “I killed you! I didn’t mean to, / of course; I cried & cried ​—.” She mourned Sammy’s “neon-bright blue eyes, / looking at me, sidewise” and his love of “shiny things, bright things.” She’d feared his life was “boring,” but “You cheered me up. . . . I loved you, and I caged you.” The New Yorker’s 1962 serialization of Rachel Carson’s indictment of commonly used pesticides, Silent Spring, would come too late for Sammy.

  Lota refused to consider acquiring another toucan, and in any case the two women were “up to our necks in babies,” caring for Kylso’s expanding brood during the hot summer months of February and March. At Easter, Elizabeth staged an egg hunt for the older children and her three-year-old namesake, the cook’s daughter, hiding dozens of tiny eggs (quail eggs most likely) wrapped in colored foil all around the terrace, in the MG she’d never learned to drive, among the spines of a ceiba tree. But she wasn’t writing. Her asthma returned, the result of anxiety over her meager output, she was convinced. Cal’s recent productivity, despite hospitalizations, put her to shame. The breakthrough inspired for both of them by “In the Village” had yielded a book’s worth of poems first for Cal. Elizabeth envied him this “stretch” of fluent composition, a time, she imagined, such as she had only rarely experienced, “when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise.” That “rare feeling of control, illumination”—that was “the whole purpose of art, to the artist.” She craved it for herself.

  Was it Cal’s “assurance” that made the difference? As she paged through the manuscript he’d sent, the sheaf of poems that would be published a year later as Life Studies, she marveled: “all you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American, etc., gives you, I think, the confidence you display about tackling any idea or theme, seriously, in both writing and conversation.” There were poems titled “Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” and “Commander Lowell,” or situated in the Winslow-Stark family burial ground in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, and the Beverly Farms “cottage”—Brahmin code for rambling summer house—that was Cal’s father’s last residence. These weren’t reverential elegies or patriotic odes. “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms” concluded with his father’s prosaic last words: “I feel awful.” But Cal’s family background put him in a league with T. S. Eliot and Henry James, to whom Elizabeth compared him in a blurb for the book, not to mention his own Lowell relations, Amy and James Russell, whose poem “The First Snow-Fall” she had memorized in grade school and could still recite.

  Elizabeth knew Cal’s illness was hardly enviable, but his breakdowns, too, had found their way into his writing, with “Waking in the Blue,” “Home After Three Months Away,” and “Skunk Hour.” It was not just that Elizabeth’s family seemed inconsequential by comparison to Cal’s. She had so much to hide that was central to her experience. “It is hell to realize one has wasted half one’s talent through timidity” was how she phrased her dilemma for Cal. Her intractable and deeply painful shyness stood for it all, indeed served as a protective screen she could never give up, shielding her from public scrutiny even as it limited her professionally. Elizabeth could not chat up Huxley or Frost. She could never write an autobiographical poem called “Man and Wife,” as Cal had. She had ventured to write about her mother’s madness, obliquely, in “In the Village,” but she would never make poetry or prose of her own hospitalizations for the drinking binges that continued sporadically even in paradisal Brazil. These last, though originating decades earlier in panicky shyness and feelings of difference—her orphan state, her attraction to women—merited only silence, evasion, shame, now that they’d become habitual, and produced only unmet promises to Lota to “behave” better in future.

  At such times, Lota was forced to act as more than Elizabeth’s caring spouse. She became her keeper, checking Elizabeth into the hospital, insisting she take the Antabuse pills newly prescribed by Dr. Baumann, who “seems to feel my pulse all the way across the Equator,” Elizabeth thought. This was aversion therapy; the pills made Elizabeth violently ill if she drank while under their influence. Lota told herself she was helping “um grande poeta.” She loved Elizabeth and nothing else mattered. But Elizabeth was increasingly aware, as she wrote to their friends Gold and Fizdale shortly after the New Yorker turned down her Brasília piece, that “my natural melancholia taxes her severely.” The admission served as a veiled apology to Lota, who read Elizabeth’s contribution to this shared letter before it was mailed.

  Lota read most of the letters Elizabeth sent and received; she was “a great letter-snoop,” Elizabeth explained early on to May Swenson, reporting Lota’s fondness for May’s letters. At first Elizabeth had enjoyed sharing her epistolary friendships with Lota. Cal, May, Marianne Moore, all seemed closer if Lota knew them too. But as Elizabeth struggled, with herself most of all, to make room in her life for poetry, she began to regret the loss of privacy. She looked for opportunities to post outgoing mail on her own, and asked her correspondents not to refer to comments she occasionally made about her “dear friend” in their return letters, knowing Lota might read them. She felt hemmed in, at times, by Lota’s intense devotion, impatien
t of the dependence she’d once reveled in, even as her reliance on Lota for everything from daily companionship to rides to the market and a house to live in was nearly complete.

  Lota hated “The Riverman,” Elizabeth told Cal and May and everyone to whom she mentioned her “anthropological number.” Elizabeth wasn’t sure she liked it herself, though she was grateful for a poem that reached the page in nearly finished form. The year preceding her 1958 trip to the Xingú had produced nothing but jottings, “just crumbs that always fail to shape themselves back into the loaf again,” she complained to May. In “Manuelzinho,” another poem with which she’d broken through a creative logjam, Elizabeth had adopted Lota’s voice to tell the story of her gardener, a tenant farmer on the mountainside where his family had lived for generations. Now she wrote as an Amazonian Indian, a shaman-in-training, conjured up with the help of the anthropologist Charles Wagley’s 1953 study Amazon Town, which she’d read in advance of her meeting with the Uialapiti.

  “The Riverman” begins in the middle of the night, when a river god in the form of a dolphin calls the riverman to the shore:

  I waded into the river

  and suddenly a door

  in the water opened inward, . . .

  I looked back at my house,

  white as a piece of washing

  forgotten on the bank,