Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Lilli would later say that Elizabeth “fell in love easily. She also fell out of love easily.” And Lilli may not have minded. She had other companions—“the French ladies,” as the villagers referred to Lilli and her cosmopolitan friends in nearby Mariana, Ninita and “GK,” women of whom Elizabeth had been intermittently jealous. Elizabeth had never been sure she could count Lilli as hers, or, after Seattle, whether she wanted to. So Lilli had chosen to shield Elizabeth, retrieving Roxanne’s letters, mailed from Seattle to the Ouro Prêto post office box, and forwarding them in her own envelopes or reading them aloud over the phone. And when Lota, who’d always been a “letter-snoop,” discovered one of Roxanne’s letters just weeks after Elizabeth’s return, Lilli had allowed Elizabeth to retreat to her house in Ouro Prêto after the blowup. Elizabeth’s own tumbledown seventeenth-century casa wasn’t yet habitable.

  Had Elizabeth meant to break with Lota over a twenty-three-year-old? Scandinavian by ancestry, Roxanne Cumming really was a “blue eyed fair-headed child,” as Elizabeth had once termed Lilli. She’d married at eighteen, leaving a large family in which she was the eldest and most responsible daughter, to keep house for a man in his mid-forties, already the father of four children by previous wives. She’d helped Carolyn Kizer throw the dinner party for Elizabeth, attended mostly by Seattle artists, a crowd that Elizabeth preferred to the scholars on the English department faculty. In the private dining room of a Japanese restaurant, she’d been drawn to Elizabeth’s shy, attentive demeanor, as if Elizabeth weren’t the guest of honor. Roxanne was good company, jaunty and clever beyond her years, and good at helping people: she’d found Elizabeth an apartment within walking distance of campus and moved her into it, with several of Elizabeth’s male students doing the heavy lifting, while Elizabeth spent the afternoon at the hairdresser’s. But with her baby due in August, Roxanne wouldn’t be leaving Bill Cumming yet, if ever. When Lota discovered Roxanne’s letter, Elizabeth was quick to insist, as she’d written to Lilli, that she had no intention of leaving Lota for anyone else. Lota was her life, the affair with Roxanne “just a trifle.”

  And yet, in the heat of the moment, Lota and Elizabeth had traded accusations that neither could forget. Elizabeth raged that she might have written “better poems” if she hadn’t “wasted fifteen years” with Lota. And Lota regretted the “dull, useless days” she’d given to Elizabeth before she’d gone to work in Rio, thinking she was “helping a great poet” overcome alcoholism. In their early years together, love had given Elizabeth the “strength and energy to try to quit drinking and to try to be happy,” Lota believed. But those years were in the past.

  For Elizabeth, poetry and alcohol had long been twin compulsions. Both brought release from immediate distress, although poetry was the less reliable salve. Elizabeth couldn’t count on poems to emerge, especially amid distraction, whereas cachaça was easily available at the bakery down the street. Both provided entry to an altered state, a welcome oblivion—unquestionably precious when she was writing well in a days-long daydream; endlessly regrettable when the effects of alcohol wore off after a day or more of binging, leaving her hung over and ashamed. In Brazil a hangover was called a ressaca, the term for a storm surge or tidal wave. Elizabeth had seen one of those race up the beach at Copacabana, forcing ocean water along the street below Lota’s apartment and leaving behind a thick layer of sand and debris to be cleared away by bulldozers, reminding her of New York City snowplows.

  By her fifties, poetry and alcohol had become organizing principles, imperatives more powerful even than love, at least when past the stage of infatuation. Love, too, was irresistible, but could it last? Love was more capricious than the other two, and Elizabeth had returned from Seattle in July 1966 determined to take greater control of both her daemon and her demon. She needed to secure the conditions in which to write, in her own house at Ouro Prêto, she imagined, if Lota would not return with her to Samambaia; and she wanted Lota to quit hounding her about her drinking. Before she’d left for Seattle, Lota had been “almost physically” forcing pills down her throat, in higher doses and with greater frequency than Elizabeth thought necessary. While away, she’d read a news article linking Antabuse with “despondency” and reporting that a feeling of “punishment” associated with taking the pills undercut their effectiveness. Elizabeth already suffered enough from her own “natural melancholia,” and she no longer wished to be treated by Lota as a dependent child penalized for bad behavior. She’d sent Lota a copy of the article, but it was lost in the mail, or so Lota said. Instead, when Elizabeth returned from Seattle claiming she’d achieved moderation without the pills, Lota accused her of simply wanting to “keep on drinking.” Elizabeth’s insistence, in the aftermath of the blowup over Roxanne’s offending letter, on her right to continue a friendly correspondence with Roxanne, whose baby was due in less than a month, was, to Lota, the final outrage.

  Within days of Elizabeth’s flight to Ouro Prêto, Lota wrote to Lilli asking her to tell Elizabeth it was over. She’d written in Portuguese, speaking her mind more eloquently than she could in English, and leaving Lilli to translate. Lota admitted she’d become, as Elizabeth had charged, “impatient and rude, negligent and mindless.” She was sorry for “my wrongdoings” and wanted Elizabeth to know “I always admired her and thought that the best thing that ever happened in my life was that I was once honored by being loved by her.” But Lota could not be convinced, as Elizabeth had protested, that the “ridiculous love affair” had no meaning; Elizabeth “had proved she can go along by herself, that she can love somebody else, that she doesn’t need me anymore.” Elizabeth should not come back—“I’d rather be lonely and unhappy than humiliated and desperate.” Begging forgiveness for “all this nuisance,” Lota asked Lilli to “please” tell Elizabeth: “Living together, when there is no love and respect, is not possible, is not decent, and there isn’t a ghost of a chance for happiness.”

  Could Lilli have remained impartial after Elizabeth appeared, bearing chocolates and the lapis lazuli ring from Seattle? Wherever her loyalties lay, Lilli seems to have managed the near-impossible task of guarding the secret of her own brief affair with Elizabeth while consoling both women through a prolonged crisis. For, despite Lota’s cool dismissal by letter, there would be no swift end to a relationship of such profound dependency. Neither Lota nor Elizabeth was yet ready to quench the embers of a grand passion that had once provided them both a reason for being.

  Soon Lota arrived in Ouro Prêto, driving the flashy blue Willys Interlagos she’d acquired while Elizabeth was in Seattle. Alarmed by Lota’s impulsive purchase and fearing for her safety as she inevitably drove the lightweight convertible too fast, Elizabeth nevertheless understood why she’d done it. The Interlagos had been one of Brazil’s manufacturing and design innovations under the now-lamented Goulart presidency, Brazil’s last whiff of democracy for what would be the next two decades. Production of the Interlagos in São Paulo halted that “dramatic” year of 1966, after 822 of the Italian-designed sports cars had reached the market, and just as Lota found herself on the outside of Flamengo Park’s administration for the first time since taking the job of coordinatress. When Elizabeth returned to Brazil that July, she’d been shocked by the extreme rightward turn of the new military government, its clampdown on dissent while she was away. “Everything seems worse, that’s all.” Carlos Lacerda, she learned, had helped bring off the 1964 coup she’d feared was a “real” revolution; now Lota believed he’d sabotaged her efforts to maintain control of the park by heading up a supervisory commission once the project was completed. Lota wanted to own a piece of the world she was losing, and she had it in her Willys.

  For years Lota had worked to the edge of collapse, and now, as she faced the prospect of giving up both her job and her customary life with Elizabeth, it was here. She’d come to Ouro Prêto to reconcile with Elizabeth, but she could not forget or forgive Elizabeth’s betrayal. She wasn’t eating, she was too agitated to sleep or
read, and, while driving one day with Lilli in the Interlagos, distracted by “a bunch of crazy boys in a Volkswagen,” she lost control of the car. The little two-seater rolled, throwing both women to the roadside, fortunately without injury. The shock of the accident sent Lota to bed and ultimately home to Samambaia with “what they used to call a ‘nervous breakdown,’” Elizabeth wrote to Cal Lowell from Petrópolis, citing Lota’s trials with the park in Rio—“blow after blow”—as the root cause. To Dr. Anny Baumann she wrote much the same, adding that Lota “blames an awful lot on me, if not everything, and this makes it very tough”—though not explaining, beyond her drinking, why.

  Elizabeth tried her best to calm Lota and contain the damage. She hoped no one beyond Lilli would find out what she’d done to undermine a relationship she still expected to last, perhaps even to improve, if only Lota could stop raving and accept that “I have changed” and “grown up a lot (!—about time) in the past 15 years.” What if gossip traveled all the way “back to N Y in a wild and wrong version,” Elizabeth worried in a letter to Lilli. Why wouldn’t Lota believe her when she swore she’d given up Roxanne, or see that Elizabeth had returned from the United States because “I WANTED to come back, damn it!”

  Yet Elizabeth understood it was harder for Lota, and she could hardly bear to see her this way, to feel as if she were “killing L inch by inch.” Elizabeth knew exactly what Lota was feeling: she was enduring for the first time in her life the kind of heartbreak “most of us went through . . . much younger,” Elizabeth wrote to Lilli, “at least I did, a couple of times—so we could get over it quicker.” Elizabeth sometimes told the story of walking in on Louise Crane and Billie Holiday in bed together in their shared New York City apartment. Elizabeth had been twenty-eight then. A decade later she suffered again over Jinny Pfeiffer, reconciling herself to Jinny’s preference for Laura Archera by telling herself, “Nobody’s heart is really good for much until it has been smashed to little bits.” Lota had never been wounded this way before, never lacked for a lover. When Mary Morse had decided to move out, Elizabeth was there to take her place.

  Now Mary had returned, not as Lota’s mate, but to take sides with Lota against Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s efforts at containment had not been successful among Lota’s intimate coterie—the friends who had been Elizabeth’s too. She would soon be reckoning with the power of the de Macedo Soares name, a force that had once also protected Elizabeth. She was feeling “more and more alone on this continent.”

  But Elizabeth also held fast to her own conditions for a reconciliation. The affair with Roxanne wasn’t all that had happened in Seattle to alter her vision of the future. Time and again, as she made her way through “the very worst stretch in my life so far,” Elizabeth remembered how much better she’d been treated there, the “friends and gaiety” and how she’d been able to “manage pretty well on my own, and stay sober about 98 percent of the time.” Returning from six months away, she could see more clearly that Lota really was—and had been—“very sick.” “I was so used to Lota and saw her so constantly that it didn’t hit me, really,” Elizabeth wrote to Dr. Baumann as she thought back over Lota’s “increasing violence and rudeness” of the past several years. “I suppose the person closest is the last one to realize how terribly sick someone is.” Now all of Lota’s obsessions had “fixed” on Elizabeth—“first love; then hate,” in a pattern of rapid mood swings that the psychiatrists Lota began to consult quickly saw required hospitalization.

  There was some comfort in learning from Lota’s doctors that “it wasn’t too wrong of me to suffer so and feel so abused—I really WAS being abused!” But finally, Elizabeth wrote to Dr. Baumann in late September 1966, “I never felt so helpless and ignorant in my life, and unfitted to cope with my life or hers.” Madness near at hand was what she hadn’t wanted to experience in a closer relationship with Cal, what she had feared long ago in her mother—and what she had counted on Lota’s steady good cheer to shelter her from in their mountain aerie at Samambaia, above and away from it all.

  Yet she wanted to help, and she was not giving up. Lota had done more for her than anyone in her life. Every day Elizabeth phoned Lota at the Clínica Botafogo in Rio where she had finally been hospitalized, but it was Mary Morse who spent the night on the floor of Lota’s room, who brought soft clean sheets and home-cooked food. Elizabeth offered to take her place, but Mary said no. When they were apart, all Lota wanted was to have Elizabeth back, but when Elizabeth entered the room, Lota became hysterical and ordered her out.

  Lota was given injections and put into an insulin-induced sleep; now it didn’t matter who was there, although Elizabeth still wanted to be. When Lota returned to the apartment in Rio with a nurse at the end of December, still heavily sedated, to be woken only every four hours for feeding, Dr. Decio de Sousa, the psychiatrist both Elizabeth and Lota trusted the most, told Elizabeth she’d have to leave. The last time the two women had been alone in the apartment at night, Lota had threatened to jump from the balcony. All Elizabeth wanted now was for Lota to survive. And to live herself. “I hate to leave Lota like this,” she wrote to Dr. Baumann, “but it seems almost as if it were a question of saving my own life or sanity, too, now.”

  Dr. de Sousa, always called Decio by Elizabeth and Lota, had trained in London with the analyst Melanie Klein, whose “grim little book,” Envy and Gratitude, Elizabeth had read some years before and considered “superb in its horrid way.” Klein made much of the “death instinct.” She also emphasized the primal importance of the maternal bond, the mother’s role in engendering a propensity for either envy or gratitude in her child by offering or withholding her breast. Elizabeth, whose mother had been absent for months during infancy and then vanished altogether, could only have read dire warnings in this philosophy. But Lota wasn’t yet ready to take advantage of the analytic theories or skills of Klein’s protégé. Insulin shock therapy—like electroconvulsive therapy, its more widely used counterpart in the United States in treating schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness—had left Lota “calmer,” Elizabeth wrote to Lilli, “but she just isn’t Lota, & it is too awful.”

  Decio instructed Elizabeth to leave the apartment without Lota knowing, while she was out meeting him for an evaluation. Elizabeth must keep her whereabouts secret and never call, perhaps for as long as six months. She left in a hurry with nothing but two suitcases and a box of papers, “all the wrong ones” for her work. It was terrible not to say goodbye, not to know if she’d ever see Lota again. If Lota got better, which Elizabeth sometimes doubted, would she “want me back”?

  Elizabeth spent several days in a hotel farther up the beach, and then checked herself into a clinic for exhaustion—it was so “hard to know what to do.” She had reached “life’s lowest moment,” she wrote to Lilli, cautioning her to tell no one where she was. Lota must not be able to find her. “The awful thing is not having any place in the world to go.” Lota’s nurse paid occasional visits, telling Elizabeth that Lota “talks of me constantly” when awake, “but has no idea where I am in the world.” The nurse, Katia, was sworn to secrecy too. Elizabeth put most of the scarcely edible clinic food out on her balcony for the birds, talking to them when they landed to feed, “since there’s no one else.” No one brought her soft sheets or delicious meals. She lost weight. Yet, free of daily involvement with Lota’s case, she began to write again. Among her drafts was a poem she called “Inventory,” never finished:

  Bed, birdcage, and a chest of drawers,

  the biggest shell, the flat and foot-shaped

  piece of granite I found myself,

  the paddle, and the portable ink-well;

  the baby-book, the/ coffe spoons the blue enamm the cloisonee

  coffe spoons with blue enamel,

  the living cat

  where —where can I take them next? and where

  do we go next?

  Where could Elizabeth go next? Before leaving Seattle, with Cal’s assistance, she had secured a $12
,000 fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to support her work on a book of prose about Brazil—the book she might have written if Time Inc. had let her. She had a title in mind, “Black Beans and Diamonds,” and she’d revise the unsold New Yorker piece on Brasília and the Uialapiti, and write up her travels on the Amazon along with other trips she still hoped to take. The Rockefeller funds were paid in monthly installments, and she’d been living on the stipend since her return from Seattle. After Decio’s orders, Elizabeth realized “the book has to come first now.” She made plans for her long-awaited journey on the Rio São Francisco, the continent’s fourth-longest river, obtaining free passage through a “powerful friend” of Decio’s. She hoped Lilli might come too. Perhaps Elizabeth could devise enough research trips to fill the six months, stretching to June 1967, she was meant to stay away from Lota. Or perhaps she would fly to New York and write the book based on library research. She’d begun to suspect Lota’s friends were behind the request that she leave, and to “think it will be a great relief to get back to a country where people are not afraid of the name de Macedo Soares.”