Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Decio wavered in the face of Lota’s pleading. He permitted a meeting of the two women in February. Elizabeth had been apprehensive, but the reunion went well, and Decio relented—they could live together again. They were at Samambaia for Lota’s birthday in March, and Elizabeth baked Lota a rocambole, a jelly roll cake. In Rio, both of them tried sound therapy, a revival of an ancient healing practice, sonoterapia, in which metal bowls of varying sizes were placed on the patient’s torso and then sounded with mallets by the practitioner, releasing sympathetic tones to resonate through the chest cavity and the rest of the body. The sessions seemed to have “worked miracles” with Lota, Elizabeth wrote to Dr. Baumann—“I haven’t seen her so much like her old self in years.” But Elizabeth developed a “spectacular” case of asthma, “useful in getting me LOTS of attention” from the attendants. She planned to devote a chapter in her book to sonoterapia—“a chic touch,” she thought.

  “All I want to do is WORK WORK WORK,” Elizabeth wrote to Lilli in mid-March. With Lota taking a fresh interest in the renovations on the Ouro Prêto house, and the Interlagos at last in good repair after the accident—Lota had taken practice spins along the beachfront roads below their apartment at Copacabana—Elizabeth could foresee a time when she would be able to work steadily again, either in the estudio at Samambaia or in her own “real study” at Ouro Prêto, which she planned to line with built-in shelves, painted white, for books and “objects.” She counted eighteen months since she’d last settled down at a desk to write.

  Casa Mariana, Elizabeth’s house at Ouro Prêto, under renovation

  In April, Lilli visited Lota and Elizabeth in Rio, bringing guava preserves and wearing the lapis lazuli ring, but she would not accompany Elizabeth on her river trip. Before Elizabeth flew to Bahia, and then boarded a seventy-year-old stern-wheeler at Pirapora on the banks of the São Francisco, she made time for two interviews on contemporary poetry with Time’s Rio correspondent. She hadn’t known, she would write to everyone afterward, that the interview would be used for a cover story on Cal. The trip, during which she tossed all of Roxanne’s letters overboard in a private show of renewed commitment to Lota, acted like “a sort of eraser,” she wrote to May Swenson. “I lost all track of time and distance—feel as if I’d had amnesia.”

  To Lilli she confided a grimmer truth: she dreaded the return to Rio. Although Elizabeth had repeatedly promised “everything else is All off, forever, really & truly,” that there would be no romantic attachments to anyone but Lota, relations between the two were strained at best, and Lota was “still very sick.” Lota was seeing Decio twice a week for analytic sessions and had become reliant on an array of pills that left her groggy and forgetful and unable to concentrate. Elizabeth wanted to “live with her again and try try to be happy with her—but after every stretch of a few fairly good days comes another explosion—and then I can’t be patient enough.” To her shame and sorrow, Elizabeth was losing the battle to control her drinking. She would “try and try” again to stay sober, but she had lost confidence in her ability to withstand the “feeling of disintegration and guilt” provoked by each stormy scene, so many of them, stretching back over eleven intolerable months. She had no idea “what I’ll find” back in Rio—“if only L will forgive me and BELIEVE me”—“I want only her.”

  In the villages along the São Francisco there was “ghastly poverty,” and she was just as glad Lilli hadn’t come along, or Lota, who “wouldn’t have liked it a bit.” Elizabeth lost her appetite when she learned that the animals brought on board at the start of the journey, including “a big, gentle ram with curling horns,” were being slaughtered on the deck below her cabin to feed the ship’s fifteen tourist passengers. Nevertheless she took copious notes for her book and dozens of photographs in her Cartier-Bresson style, candid yet composed, bearing witness to scenes of grace amid the squalor.

  She remained fearful about her return. Back in Bahia, before boarding the plane to Rio, she picked up the latest issue of Time to find Cal’s picture on the cover, a cartoonish crayon-and-watercolor portrait of a downcast Caligula, crowned with a laurel wreath.

  Riverboat passengers, Rio São Francisco, 1966, photograph by Elizabeth Bishop

  She hadn’t meant to sound stingy, and “maybe I said what they said I said,” she wrote to May Swenson. The topic on which Elizabeth had been quoted was “confessional poetry,” the new phrase for the autobiographical turn that both she and Cal had taken in their writing, Cal more explicitly with Life Studies, followed by the outpouring of personal and increasingly political lyrics in For the Union Dead and Near the Ocean that had landed him on Time’s cover. He’d spawned a race of imitators—his cohorts John Berryman and Theodore Roethke, and the younger poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Frederick Seidel—whose verses read more like diary entries, Elizabeth often thought. Confessional poetry “is really something new in the world,” she’d told the Time reporter, offering an apt definition: “the idea is that we live in a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world.” But, she quipped, “the tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves.” In recent years, writing to Randall Jarrell and others, she’d gone further, dubbing confessional poetry “The School of Anguish,” made up of the “self-pitiers” that Cal seemed “innocently to have inspired.”

  Elizabeth would not resort to naked retellings of the anguish she now suffered, though what she experienced was as “horrible and terrifying” as any private drama the confessionals might claim. She would not complete and publish “Inventory.” Yet Elizabeth had been working on a longer poem, her most openly autobiographical so far, derived from her distressing epiphany as a seven-year-old in an overwarm dentist’s waiting room, reading National Geographic and studying the adults seated in the room with her: “I, I, I . . . was one of them too. . . . Why was I a human being?” Six years before, in 1961, she’d used the episode to conclude “The Country Mouse,” a story about her childhood that she never sent out for publication. The poem would tell it better.

  Elizabeth came close to finishing “In the Waiting Room” during the summer of 1967, after another of Lota’s explosions prompted Decio to banish Elizabeth once more. This time she packed her bags, gathered up the right papers, and flew to New York City, where she moved into the vacant studio of her old friend Loren MacIver at 61 Perry Street in Greenwich Village. Loren, whose paintings Lota had collected in New York in the 1940s, and her poet husband Lloyd Frankenberg had been living in Paris for most of a decade. Elizabeth was determined to work, and—despite the heat, and a thick layer of dust coating the room making it difficult to breathe, and the aftereffects of a concussion that might have been the result of a drunken fall—she was managing at last. In a first draft, remarkably similar to the final version, the poem began:

  In Worcester, Massachusetts,

  I went with Aunt Consuelo

  to keep her dentist’s appointment

  and sat and waited for her

  in the dentist’s waiting room.

  It was winter. It was already

  dark. The waiting room

  was full of grown-up people,

  arctics and overcoats,

  lamps and magazines.

  My aunt was inside

  what seemed like a long, long time,

  and while I waited I read

  THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

  (I could read.) and looked at

  all the photographs.

  She’d changed Aunt Florence’s name to something more fanciful, but little else was altered in the remembered scene. When she checked the appropriate issue of National Geographic in the public library that summer, she confirmed a photo essay on the “Valley of 10,000 Smokes” that “has been haunting me all my life, apparently,” she wrote to Cal, and triggering other recollected images: a volcano “spilling over / in rivulets of fire”—

  Babies with pointed head
s

  wound round and round with string,

  naked black women with necks

  wound round and round with wire

  (like the necks of light bulbs).

  Their breasts filled me with awe.

  In later drafts, she would work over that line: “Their breasts terrified me” or “frightened me” or, finally, “were horrifying.” Had Elizabeth felt awe or terror forty years later when she held a camera to photograph Laura Archera Huxley among the bare-breasted Uialapiti women? That photograph, artfully composed and whimsical, suggests she didn’t. By then, in August 1958 at age forty-seven, she was fully “one of them,” a phrase she borrowed from her unpublished story and inserted, with different emphasis, in the poem; she was a woman with breasts, who loved women with breasts, particularly blonds like Laura. Perhaps the moment on the Xingú brought the memory back, set the story and then the poem in motion.

  Now, at fifty-six, evicted from the home she’d known longer than any other, she remembered the earlier forced removal from Great Village to Worcester, the feeling of radical displacement in the months before this “unlikely” waiting room revelation of her unique existence—“you are an I,/ you are an Elizabeth”—which arrived in tandem with a shocking sense of likeness, of being “one of them.” Hearing her “foolish aunt” cry out from the dentist’s chair, the child Elizabeth felt the “oh! of pain” as if it rose from her own mouth. She wrote in the finished poem:

  Without thinking at all

  I was my foolish aunt,

  I—we—were falling, falling,

  our eyes glued to the cover

  of the National Geographic,

  February, 1918. . . .

  Questions followed:

  Why should I be my aunt,

  or me, or anyone?

  What similarities—

  boots, hands, the family voice

  I felt in my throat, or even

  the National Geographic

  and those awful hanging breasts—

  held us all together

  or made us all just one?

  This fall into self-consciousness was almost more than the child could bear. The “bright / and too hot” waiting room carried her “sliding / beneath a big black wave, / another, and another.” Yet it was not too much. Thinking saved her; poetry—“a way of thinking with one’s feelings”—saved her. She could think then and, decades later, define and contain the unsettling moment in verse:

  I knew that nothing stranger

  had ever happened, that nothing

  stranger could ever happen.

  “In the Waiting Room” concludes as the child snaps out of her trance to find herself “back in it,” in Worcester, Massachusetts, in February 1918. For Elizabeth as she worked on the poem, “back in it” meant Greenwich Village in 1967, now simply “the Village,” and both “wilder” and “hippier” than the shabby-chic neighborhood she’d known in the 1930s and ’40s. Perhaps a summer here would “rejuvenate me,” she wrote to Cal when she arrived in early July, joking that “I never appear without earrings down to my bosom, skirts almost up to it, and a guitar over my shoulder. I am afraid I am going to start writing FREE VERSE next.” “Back in it” meant writing to Lota nearly every day and receiving Lota’s daily letters in return. Elizabeth sent her a draft of “In the Waiting Room,” and Lota was enchanted. “The poem is a beauty,” she wrote in English now, “the kind I like best, that funny sensation between the real and the unreal. Like a sail in the wind but attached by some facts, the National Geographic, Worcester Mass, like nails to the mast.” Lota wished she had known Elizabeth at age seven; instead, “we knew each other so late, but lets hope to have more many years to enjoy each others company, so help us God.” How Elizabeth must have wanted to believe, in turn, that “nothing / stranger could ever happen” than a rude self-awakening in a dentist’s waiting room.

  Lota’s letters followed the pattern of the days she and Elizabeth had spent together in the months after Decio had permitted their reunion. Desperately loving and apologetic paragraphs dissolved into recrimination and ultimatums, only to end in ardent expressions of longing: “Oh! my darling, my darling what a dreadful waste of time, what a horrible and irrecuperable waste of time this separation is! We are too old to suffer this way.” Decio held out the possibility of a visit to New York in September, but in early August he changed his mind; Lota wouldn’t be ready to travel until December. Elizabeth could not have been surprised. The doctor, who had met her at the airport in Rio after the river trip to explain that Lota was still in the early stages of convalescence, was communicating separately with Elizabeth that summer. Playing the role of couples therapist, he’d encouraged Elizabeth to take her work to New York; he was well aware of her obligations—not just the book of prose, but a new volume of collected poems that Farrar, Straus and Giroux proposed to follow Questions of Travel—and understood her need to complete the projects for her own well-being. Even if Elizabeth hadn’t been receiving letters from Decio describing Lota’s erratic progress, signs of illness were everywhere in her letters—pills and injections, insomnia and exhaustion, agitation in a crowded movie theater, memory slips about dinner plans or where she’d parked her car, recurrent “very bad mornings” when she woke in a panic that lasted until late afternoon. Most alarming of all, the “terrible depression” Lota referred to in a letter of August 3, “that Decio thinks is increasing.”

  From afar, Elizabeth often succeeded in providing the affectionate reassurance Lota needed, indeed demanded—“Please write, all the time,” Lota urged, and “Tell me again my dearest that you miss me like I miss you,” and “I would like to know more about your feelings, how are you feeling, what you have been thinking about you and me—It is important.” Elizabeth signed herself, in a phrase Lota cherished, “your dearest dearest friend and companion and every thing else, family, home and pet.” She promised to dedicate her book of prose, now retitled Brazil, Brasil, to Lota. “Nothing could give me more pleasure in the world,” Lota answered, “not even a Rolls Royce.” Elizabeth sent her “In the Waiting Room” and another poem, “Hen,” in the draft that Lota received. Elizabeth had written “Hen,” or “Trouvée,” as she altered the title for publication in the New Yorker, almost as soon as she arrived in the city, mailing the “very, very light poem” to Howard Moss in mid-July. Just before leaving for the United States, she’d asked to revive her first-read contract, and he’d happily answered yes.

  Despite its title, “Trouvée” wasn’t precisely a found poem, with text adapted from signage or news headlines, although Elizabeth had found her subject in the street:

  Oh, why should a hen

  have been run over

  on West 4th Street

  in the middle of summer?

  She was a white hen

  —red-and-white now, of course.

  How did she get there?

  Where was she going?

  The poem continued with four more quatrains playing out the unfortunate chicken’s ill-timed enactment of the “old country saying.” But how “light” was the poem? “How did she get there? / Where was she going?” These were questions Elizabeth had asked of herself in the unfinished “Inventory.” Lota found the poem “adorable,” perfectly balanced, “like a small Calder.” The “poor creature,” Lota thought, must have been a “country hen,” ignorant of “os sinaes de trafego,” traffic signals. Lota showed the poem to Decio and reported his interpretation for Elizabeth: “for him you are the ‘hen’ . . . white, lovely and crushed by the big city and by the last evenements”—the tumultuous events of the past year. She implored Elizabeth to be careful crossing streets.

  Lota knew she was “still turning around the same problems and having nothing to distract me,” liable to seek omens everywhere. When she was feeling sturdy, the signs seemed favorable. Elizabeth wrote that May Swenson had broken up with Pearl Schwartz, leaving her for “a new girl called Rosanne,” and Lota had “a big laugh.” “What a pity for poor Pear
l,” after nineteen years, but Lota was relieved that Elizabeth had been able to write the name “Rosanne” without comment. Elizabeth must truly have forgotten her own Roxanne. At such times, “I think how lucky we are malgré that dramatic year of 66,” Lota wrote, “after all would have been too miraculous if we had spend all our lives without any trouble.” Decio had counseled Lota that “we are two different people than we were 15 years ago, that we have to recognise that, and act accordingly.” When Lota wasn’t in the grips of a morning panic, “I even think that our ‘crisis’ was good to us, because we can from now on see how much we like each other, and how much better we can get along, and how much more thankful we are going to be with the good things we have.”