Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  But already Elizabeth could see that the mix of egotistical architects and conniving bureaucrats Lota would have to manage was a combustible one—“everyone involved is too crazy and there are too many cross-purposes,” she summarized for May. The “semi-revolutions” and even an “anti-revolution revolution”—none of them “very bloody”—that Elizabeth occasionally mentioned in letters had brought Lacerda into power for the moment, and given Lota a job at last. Yet Elizabeth foresaw a precarious future, in which Lota might either “find herself in politics . . . or else she will get too fed up with the fearful jealousies, maneuverings, etc.,” and retire again from public life.

  Lota’s new position, for which she had refused pay to show she was beyond influence, brought Brazil’s shifting political scene into sharper focus. In late August, Lota and Elizabeth huddled by the radio to follow news of the abrupt resignation of President Quadros, Lacerda’s ally. Quadros was replaced by his vice president, “a real old crook from the dictator gang,” loyalists to the Vargas regime that had once sent Lacerda into exile. Fear of civil war ran high for more than a week. “We might even leave Brazil—who knows?” Elizabeth wrote to Aunt Grace, the last of her mother’s sisters still living in Nova Scotia; she did not seem disturbed by the prospect. Yet before long, life “as usual” resumed: a “strange” new “up & down life,” with weekdays down in Rio, where the phone started ringing for Lota at 7 a.m. and evening conferences lasted until after midnight, and rushed weekends with Mary and baby Monica up at a scarcely more peaceful Samambaia.

  Elizabeth often had trouble gauging just how bad things were in Brazil, where, as she wrote Cal early in her stay, “the word for even a small accident . . . is ‘desastre’”—“I often have false alarms.” She tried to get used to Rio, a city of “beaches & mts. jumbled together, frequently connected by unexpected tunnels with cars whishing through them, or aqueducts with trolley cars swaying over them . . . all quite fantastic,” she’d written to May. Rio was a city that “changes every week or so.” Eventually water ran through the pipes again, but the blackouts continued. Elizabeth strove to maintain an “awful but cheerful” attitude, captured in the samba song she’d learned about Rio, “My joy and my delight!”—“By day I have no water, / By night I have no light.”

  The new schedule kept Elizabeth away from her estudio, but worse, she was forced to postpone indefinitely a car trip across Europe, starting in Lisbon and ending in Greece, that she’d planned in great detail with maps from Esso and consultations with May, who’d just returned to her Greenwich Village apartment from a rejuvenating six months abroad with Pearl. Heeding Elizabeth’s pleas for travel funds, Cal had performed his usual “amazing first aid” and wangled a $7,000 fellowship from the Chapelbrook Foundation. She would have to bank the check for later, because Lota was to have done the driving.

  Dependence ran in both directions. Lota “hates to be alone,” Elizabeth told May more than once. Lota had never learned to type and didn’t know how to cook: “Brazilian ‘ladies’ are not trained in the household arts.” She conscripted Elizabeth to compile an “anthology” of excerpts from urban design texts—“hunks of Lewis Mumford” and Edward Higbee’s The Squeeze: Cities Without Space—for use in persuading Governor Lacerda, who “doesn’t have time to read any book properly,” to augment the aterro’s public beaches and promenades with an amphitheater, a trenzinho (train ride) for children, and a small airfield for launching model planes. On those rare occasions when Lota stayed by herself in Rio, Elizabeth was sure to get a despairing phone call in the morning asking how to assemble the Italian coffeepot, after Lota had “made her coffee upside down again.”

  Elizabeth was “sick of cooking, or supervising other people’s cooking,” she’d written to May, and had been looking forward to a spell of hotel living during her European car trip, turning aside her friend’s advice on money-saving campgrounds. Making jam or baking brownies and English muffins, an apple pie on request for Lota’s birthday, or an ornate wedding cake when Lota’s oldest nephew got married, was a pleasure. But too often Elizabeth had to stop writing a letter or revising a poem to “go down and heat up the lasagna” or “get busy cooking a chicken” for dinner. May had remarked that Elizabeth “seemed to have one hand on the oven door while typing with the other.” Now, marooned in Rio, where Lota had begun skipping weekend trips to Sam­am­baia, Elizabeth was planning and preparing dinners for Lota’s brain trust of architects and landscape designers, and joining the effort to charm or mollify them at table, struggling to overcome her shyness for Lota’s sake.

  In June Elizabeth had boldly canceled her first-read contract with the New Yorker, still troubled by Katharine White’s rejection of a poem long in the works, “From Trollope’s Journal.” Elizabeth sometimes apologized for the poem, saying she’d borrowed most of the language from Anthony Trollope’s account of his stay in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. But she suspected that its implicit criticism of Eisenhower’s Cold War politics, as the 1960 election drew near, had prompted the New Yorker’s refusal—for “fear it could be badly misinterpreted,” as Katharine White explained. Cal had been struck by Elizabeth’s ingenious means of posing her critique when he read the poem in manuscript: “You are about the only poet now who calls her own tune.” The poem easily found publication in Partisan Review, whose editors didn’t have to worry about offending “their Republican readers,” as Elizabeth complained to May of the New Yorker. By then, however, Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, had already lost the election to John Kennedy, and the poem, Elizabeth’s means of casting an absentee ballot, lacked a target.

  The deeper reason for canceling the New Yorker contract was strategic. Despite so many domestic distractions, Elizabeth still had “several poems crowded on my one-burner stove.” If she wasn’t traveling, she could at least finish those poems to fill out a new book that, she told Cal, was “almost ready.” In advance of the book’s release, she hoped to expand her publications to the literary journals where Cal, who never published in the New Yorker, had made his reputation, and where poems too hot for Katharine White to touch would fare better. But in the end, Elizabeth finished only two poems in the next few months, not enough to make a book, and she sent them to the New Yorker anyway. They would be the last she completed for three years, as the “excitements” of 1961 accelerated and Elizabeth took on a “job” of her own.

  By the time “Sandpiper” appeared, in July 1962, almost a full year after she’d sent it to Katharine White, the poem must have seemed prophetic. Cal Lowell was visiting Lota and Elizabeth on a Congress for Cultural Freedom tour, giving lectures and readings in Brazil and Argentina, and weren’t they all “obsessed!”—“looking for something, something, something” along the shore, like the “poor” bird of the poem? Years later, Elizabeth would compare herself to the sandpiper, who “runs to the south . . . / in a state of controlled panic,” and, as “a student of Blake,” pays close attention to each grain of sand between his toes, “no detail too small.” But now it was Lota who had her “finical” (finicky) designer’s eye trained on a particular stretch of beach, engaging in “bitter telephone fights about the dimensions of the trees” to be planted in “her park” and debating countless other details, none of them too small to ignore.

  Cal and Elizabeth on Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, photograph by P. Muniz, 1962

  And Cal—he’d arrived in Rio with Lizzie, five-year-old Harriet, and a “Radcliffe girl” to tend the child, only to turn garrulous and caustically opinionated, gathering velocity for yet another “attack of pathological enthusiasm,” as he preferred to view his “violent manic seizures.” There had been five breakdowns in ten years, by Cal’s reckoning, and the pattern was predictable. Elizabeth, Cal, and Lota had spent a glorious afternoon together at Cabo Frio, perched on the “very dangerous” edge of a cliff above a crater formed by jagged rocks—“just like Inferno”—mesmerized by the sight of a pair of seabirds, possibly boobies, “diving right into the
wild seething foam” as the surf spilled over into the crater at high tide: “It didn’t seem possible they could fly against that wind, or see anything in that raging sea or dive so far from so high quick enough to catch anything.” When wife, daughter, and babysitter left on an ocean liner bound for New York at the end of August, Cal traveled on alone to Buenos Aires, where his mania became full blown. After tearing off his clothes and mounting equestrian statues in a city square, proclaiming himself Argentina’s Caesar, he was put in restraints and then on a plane back to the United States, heavily sedated, accompanied by a doctor and nurse and the friend, Blair Clark, who’d flown down from New York to bring him safely home.

  The bond that sustained the two poets as they worked had never been enough to pull Cal back from the brink of madness. No human bond, nothing, could do that for him, though he had once hoped that through psychoanalysis, “the knot inside me will be unsnarled.” Cal’s breakdowns continued, as did Elizabeth’s drinking, beyond the reach of “psych-a,” in Elizabeth’s new shorthand: “Before one gets bored with it there seems to be a very good stretch when anything seems possible.” Yet in the same letter in which she dismissed “psych-a,” Elizabeth praised Cal’s rare ability among poets of their generation to demonstrate that “poetry does have some connection with emotions.” Despite what Cal described as “the seemingly dispassionate coolness” of her poems, Elizabeth had, since childhood, regarded poetry—reading it, writing it—as a release for emotion, “the most natural way of saying what I feel.” Psychoanalysis had been a way station in a lifelong pursuit of insight and mastery of emotion. Writing was the only consistent means of achieving the elusive moments of illumination she sought, and Cal’s new work in Life Studies had spurred her to “think I may be able to write a few simple but gripping lines myself.”

  She had answered his poems of boyhood with “First Death in Nova Scotia,” the other poem published in 1962, which reached Cal before he’d left for Brazil. Calling it an “elegy,” he’d praised Elizabeth’s account of the wake she attended as a young girl for her little cousin Frank (named Arthur in the poem) as “lovely and pathetic, the best in the language of its kind . . . a piece on a real little child, memorialized from your own memories.” This was another poem dusted off from Elizabeth’s “attic” of drafts; she’d referred to “First Death” several years before in a letter to Cal as a poem “about snow in Nova Scotia.” Did Cal, or Elizabeth for that matter, consider its resemblance to an earlier Lowell’s poem memorializing a “real little child,” James Russell Lowell’s elegy on his infant daughter, “The First Snow-Fall”? In Elizabeth’s poem, she stood by the child-sized coffin, “a little frosted cake,” alongside her mother—the mother who had “laid out Arthur,” “all white, like a doll,” then lifted up tiny Elizabeth to place a lily in her dead cousin’s hands, to see “his eyes shut up so tight” on a winter day when roads were “deep in snow.” This mother had never protected her daughter, had shown her death up close and offered no words of comfort or explanation; Gertrude herself would soon be dead to Elizabeth. She was left alone, asking “how could Arthur go”? Though Elizabeth mocked it as sentimental when she rattled it off in a letter to a friend back in Key West days, the poem by James Russell Lowell that she had memorized so long ago must have lodged in her mind as an expression of parental love she could scarcely imagine: the poet, standing by the window with his surviving daughter, kept his grief from her as they watched the season’s first storm “heaping field and highway,” answered her questions, gave her the kiss he wished he could bestow on her dead sister, buried under “deepening” snow. Elizabeth had rewritten Lowell’s poem, making it “real” for her, earning Cal’s highest approbation. The poem, he told her, was “immortal.”

  Yet Cal, even at his sanest, could not help Elizabeth either, as she entered the most “distrait” and distressed period of her adult life. She would not confide in him, except to say, “I have been minding my loneliness here more lately, I’m afraid.” Although she wrote to Cal and others of her worry over Lota’s steadily intensifying obsession with the aterro, she always praised Lota’s hard work and emphasized her concern that Lota would be devastated if her efforts came to naught, or if she was pushed out of her role as coordinatress. Elizabeth was “lost in admiration” of Lota, and proud that she was rapidly becoming Rio’s most famous woman, featured in South American Time and news stories, interviewed on television. Elizabeth confided in no one her frightening sense that Lota was a different person, a stranger overtaken by a kind of mania, offending both opponents and supporters with her vehemence, breaking ties with her adopted son, “shrieking” at Elizabeth when she was slow in dressing for an important dinner engagement. Or was this the same Lota, but with a new, exclusive object, “her park”? Either way, Lota was unable to see that her obsession threatened the project she so dearly loved, and the love she counted on from Elizabeth. Nor did Lota notice, until too late, that Elizabeth had stopped taking Antabuse. When Lota was out all day on the aterro, Elizabeth did not need a driver to reach the corner bakery where cachaça was stocked along with bread and pastries. She told her friends nothing of this either.

  Flamengo Park, Rio de Janeiro, photograph by Marcel Gautherot, ca. 1966

  Once Elizabeth saw that Lota would not leave Rio for Europe, she accepted a job with Time Inc., writing a volume on Brazil in the LIFE World Library series. Time offered $9,000 and a month’s stay in New York to work with editors on revisions. The LIFE series books were lavishly illustrated, but 35,000 words of text were required, including a summary of the country’s history and a comprehensive overview of present-day Brazil with an emphasis, Elizabeth learned to her dismay, on politics and commerce. She’d imagined the book as an extended letter home from her adopted country, with commentary on birds, animals, and plants; the samba songs she loved; the remote villages she hoped to visit on Time’s travel allowance. But writing progressed so slowly she had no chance for travel. Elizabeth arrived in New York in the late fall of 1961 short on copy and accompanied by Lota, who hated to be left alone and could not resist the lure of shopping in Manhattan.

  While Lota indulged her passion for “material possessions,” spending money at an alarming rate on plates and towels and sugar bowls for the Rio apartment she planned to remodel as her base of operations, Elizabeth worked long hours in the Time offices, feeling “homesick,” she later wrote, for “the New York I didn’t see.” Her days were so rushed “I can’t see or hear or think.” There was scarcely a moment for old friends, but together with Lota she paid visits to Dr. Baumann, “so blue-eyed and balanced”; Marianne Moore, fragile at almost seventy-five; the Lowells; May Swenson; and, in a meeting she would have reason to regret, Mary McCarthy. Little could distract Elizabeth, though, from the seemingly endless “fight with LIFE” over the editors’ “ghastly ‘slanting’” of every aspect of the book, from chapter titles and text to photographs and captions, “to make it seem as if the be-all & end-all of life is ‘industrialization’—and happy, American-style homes.” Time Inc., she realized, had wanted her name but not her voice, had always planned to “present their own undisturbed pre-conceptions” of the country. The series’ editors were not interested in “sloths, boa constricters . . . ant-eaters, morfo butterflies, orchids—4,000 varieties of fish,” she fumed, even as she watched them gleefully select color photographs of lions and zebras for a volume on Africa, “because they already know lions live in Africa.”

  The wrangling continued by telex after Elizabeth’s return to Brazil. By the time it was published in the spring of 1962, Brazil had become for her “that blasted book.” There were no photographs of wildlife, few of Indians (Time Inc. was “afraid of nakedness”), and seven of her ten chapters had been altered beyond recognition. In a chapter called “Groups and Individuals,” which Time renamed “A Changing Social Scene,” she’d written of Brazilian women: “marriage at seventeen or eighteen and the grim race of procreation are the lot of even the rich and educated.” In the fi
nal “LIFE-slicked book” there was no “grim race,” only “customary” early marriage and motherhood. She had lost nearly every battle, and “I have no confidence left whatever,” Elizabeth wrote to May on Valentine’s Day, worried that “I can’t seem to stop haranguing” and that her black mood “carried over into private life.” She spent long days going through the stack of finished books Time sent her, making corrections in green ink before giving them to friends, as Lota resumed her frenetic pace of meetings on the aterro. “I’ve never seen the point of, or been able to endure, much argument,” Elizabeth had once written to Cal, remembering the bickering Bishops of her childhood and her yet more cruel Uncle George. But for more than a year, her life had been filled with contention. In the small apartment, where she couldn’t help overhearing Lota’s phone calls, carried on at such high volume Lota became hoarse, Elizabeth found herself longing for silence—“what I like best of all.” Or a river trip, on the less traveled Rio São Francisco, she thought now, “if I can leave Lota for a couple of weeks.”

  In the months after Cal’s July visit, Elizabeth spent so little time in Samambaia that a house wren, a cambaxirra, nested in the Mexican mask, a relic of her travels with Marjorie Stevens, that hung on the wall of her studio. At her desk in Rio she managed to give line-by-line criticism on manuscripts by Cal, who dedicated to her the almost too-loose translations in Imitations, his anthology of European verse from Sappho to Pasternak; and by May, who asked Elizabeth’s advice in paring down a collection of ninety poems to make her third book. She composed jacket blurbs for them both, lengthy prose poems in themselves. And she translated several stories by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, whose tales she considered better than Borges’s, finally placing them in the Kenyon Review after the New Yorker and Encounter turned them down. In contrast to “Practicing Poets” like Cal and May, Elizabeth had come to think of herself as a “Practical Poet”—answering her friends’ requests, looking after Monica while Mary Morse traveled to New York to see a rich aunt, typing and cooking for Lota, but writing scarcely a word of her own. By October 1963, Elizabeth confided in May, “I can’t write at all anymore.” She had not uttered those words before, only feared it could be so. It was a grim admission for a writer who had counseled others, and herself, in hard times: “Work’s the thing.”