Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Elizabeth was writing her own poem now on the subject of shame and guilt, a “short, sad poem,” she called it in her accompanying letter to Howard Moss in December 1973. “Five Flights Up” was based on a dream of Alice’s treehouse apartment, as well as on a recollection of a neighbor, “the weird man who raises Corgies,” shouting at his dogs on a summer day when Elizabeth had been writing at the Chauncy Street apartment with the windows open—“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” “Still dark,” the poem begins, evoking the predawn hour she’d always loved:

  The unknown bird sits on his usual branch.

  The little dog next door barks in his sleep

  inquiringly, just once.

  Perhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquires

  once or twice, quavering.

  Questions—if that is what they are—

  answered directly, simply,

  by day itself.

  Later—

  The little black dog runs in his yard.

  His owner’s voice arises, stern,

  “You ought to be ashamed!”

  What has he done?

  He bounces cheerfully up and down;

  he rushes in circles in the fallen leaves.

  Obviously, he has no sense of shame.

  He and the bird know everything is answered,

  all taken care of,

  no need to ask again.

  —Yesterday brought to today so lightly!

  (A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift.)

  Cal had written five hundred confessional sonnets, baring his soul and others’. Everything Elizabeth wished to confess in a published poem was contained in a single parenthetical line. One day she would make it the final line in her last book of poems, Geography III.

  She mailed a copy of “Five Flights Up” to Loren MacIver on the first day of January 1974, thanking her for putting up with “my ridiculous gloom last night,” New Year’s Eve, when Elizabeth had made a lonely, perhaps drunken, phone call. Alice was away visiting family friends in Munich. Elizabeth asked Loren if she thought the new poem wasn’t “just too sad & awful.” Two days later Elizabeth was in Harvard’s Stillman Infirmary, recovering from a fall on the staircase leading down from the bar at Casablanca, a restaurant near her Brattle Street apartment. She’d broken her shoulder again.

  Sometimes a poem had to sneak up on her, emerging from a dream or an odd occurrence that sparked associations, or a combination of both, like “Five Flights Up,” presenting an unlooked-for opportunity to set down preoccupations: the persistent feelings of regret and shame she’d acknowledged in her letter to Cal and found “almost impossible” to bear. In the poem, as in her letter, the feelings are both personal (though undisclosed) and part of the human condition. Unlike the barking dog or chirping bird—“We all have” them.

  Snapshot of Cambridge backyards, from Elizabeth’s photo collection

  Other times Elizabeth had to fool herself into writing, as with “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto,” which began as a remembrance of her early stays with Lilli, a thank-you gift that took hold of her imagination and finished as a fully realized poem, the original impulse of gratitude left behind. Since returning to the United States, Elizabeth had revived old friendships with Frani Blough and Louise Crane, and deepened those with James Merrill and the poet John Malcolm Brinnin, whom she had first met at Yaddo in the 1940s. Frani had a husband and grown children. Jimmy, John, and Louise, who’d finally settled down with Victoria Kent, a Spanish Civil War exile with whom she’d founded the journal Iberica, all had longtime romantic partners of the same sex. All four had country homes that Elizabeth and Alice visited frequently, especially John Brinnin’s cottage on Duxbury Bay, an hour south of Boston. After the spring of 1974, when there had been weekend visits to Duxbury as Elizabeth nursed her painful shoulder, and a longer stay of nearly a month while John and his partner, Bill Read, were away, Elizabeth began writing a poem that “started out as a sort of joke thank-you-note” but turned serious.

  She called the poem “The End of March,” and she would dedicate it to the couple in the pages of the New Yorker, once again persuading Howard Moss to override the ban on dedications, especially “intramural” ones naming contributors to the magazine, like John Brinnin. The poem had much in common with “At the Fishhouses” and “The Bight,” Elizabeth’s shoreline poems of the 1940s, opening with description before turning to fanciful brooding and metaphysics—“thinking with one’s feelings,” as she’d described the poet’s task to May Swenson years ago. But in “The End of March” she is not alone, not lonely. “It was cold and windy,” she recalls of an afternoon walk on the beach at Duxbury, when the “rackety, icy, offshore wind / numbed our faces on one side.” The walkers—perhaps John, Bill, Alice, and Elizabeth—trek “along the wet sand, in rubber boots” at low tide, following a trail of dog-prints “so big / they were more like lion-prints.” They come across “lengths and lengths” of what appears to be kite string, wet and white, “looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,” finally ending in “a thick white snarl, man-size, awash, / rising on every wave, a sodden ghost.”

  Passing the tangled apparition, she hopes to reach a remembered house, one she’d seen on warmer days when walking the beach wasn’t so arduous: “my proto-dream-house / my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box / set up on pilings, shingled green.” Pressing on with her friends, but thinking her own thoughts, she imagines making the house hers:

  I’d like to retire there and do nothing,

  or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:

  look through binoculars, read boring books,

  old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,

  talk to myself, and, foggy days,

  watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.

  She’d make herself a “grog à l’américaine” and, to warm the drink, set the rum ablaze with a kitchen match and watch the “lovely diaphanous blue flame / . . . waver, doubled in the window.” A solitary existence contemplated while among friends held no threat, even permitted the old fantasy that drinking alone would bring revelation rather than ruin.

  Elizabeth had in fact just acquired a proto–dream house at the water’s edge—in Boston’s Lewis Wharf, a granite warehouse on a pier jutting out into the harbor, built at the height of the port’s prosperity in the nineteenth century and fallen into disrepair in the twentieth. “The whole Boston waterfront is being renovated,” she’d written to Anny Baumann, “and it is the one beautiful place to live.” The massive four-story structure had been gutted by a developer who was selling luxury condominiums, a fresh concept in 1970s Boston real estate, with eighteen-inch-thick walls of exposed brick, beamed ceilings, and rusted iron bolts protruding from ancient oak uprights as innovative decor. Elizabeth had selected a top-floor apartment with a view east across the harbor and north to the mouth of the Mystic River.

  When she’d signed the purchase agreement the year before, in March 1973, the apartment was still only a blueprint: bedroom, study, living room, galley kitchen, and six-by-twelve-foot “verandah.” She’d visited the wharf and taken snapshots of the building’s shell, learning that the granite blocks had been quarried in Quincy, Massachusetts, where her Bishop grandmother’s family first settled; her seafaring Nova Scotian great-grandfather might have unloaded his ship’s cargo at this very dock. Elizabeth knew she couldn’t retire to Lewis Wharf and “do nothing” yet. The cost of the apartment was almost beyond her means (she’d been irked, on “women’s lib” grounds, to find that banks were reluctant to grant mortgages to single women); she had not managed to sell Casa Mariana, though she’d made up her mind to let the Ouro Prêto house go. But Elizabeth would have her binoculars to observe passing ships, mostly tankers, and the smelt fishermen who worked at night under gasoline flares—“very pretty.” She would read long books and watch the tide rise and fall.

  View of East Boston from Elizabeth’s Lewis Wharf condominium, under construction, 1973

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nbsp; And Alice, who would take over Elizabeth’s Brattle Arms apartment in September when construction at Lewis Wharf was finished, would stay overnight and they’d have breakfasts in bed or on the verandah in warm weather. Alice, and all the new and old friends in her new American life, had made this possible. In their company she could walk past the floating “man-size” shroud—“falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost”—perhaps a reminder of the father she’d never known, and whose early death, possibly hastened by drink, had set in motion the cascade of events that “just happened to fail for me,” as she’d summarized for Alice. To Alice she could admit, as she rarely had before to herself or anyone, always denying the early feeling and claiming each new instance as the first, that she had suffered from “homesickness” as a child: “once, age 6—a constant heavy sensation in the pit of the stomach.” This was how she’d felt when carried off to Worcester, leaving behind the grandparents she loved and the weekly packages it was her sad duty to mail, which nevertheless enabled her to maintain a tie to her mother. She’d wanted to hide the address of the asylum on those packages; she’d felt ashamed. But she’d been protected from shame as a small child in Great Village—“all taken care of”—before she was sent to live alone among strange family members and homesickness brought on the precocious self-awareness of “In the Waiting Room” that marked her for a poet.

  In Duxbury at the end of March, the walkers turned back before reaching Elizabeth’s proto-crypto dream house; “our faces froze on the other side.” Surprising them all, the sun came out “for just a minute,” and—

  For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,

  the drab, damp, scattered stones

  were multi-colored,

  and all those high enough threw out long shadows,

  individual shadows, then pulled them in again.

  They could have been teasing the lion sun,

  except that now he was behind them

  —a sun who’d walked the beach the last low tide,

  making those big, majestic paw-prints,

  who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

  Elizabeth wrote Howard Moss that “The End of March” was “my version of The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” Yeats’s masterpiece inspired by Thoreau’s removal to Walden: “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree / And a small cabin build there,” and “live alone in the bee-loud glade.” Though Elizabeth considered herself much less the “hermit-type” than she once had been, like Thoreau and Yeats she heard the call to solitary creation “in the deep heart’s core,” and she could still respond, now and then, with a poem.

  “I’d be a wreck without you,” Elizabeth told Alice, and it seemed to be true. Collapses were nearly inevitable when Alice was away or when Elizabeth spent weeks or months alone in Ouro Prêto or Seattle. Alcohol wasn’t the only problem. Bouts of asthma and recurrent dysentery, contracted in Brazil, weakened her system and made her susceptible to colds and flu; her teeth bothered her and required extractions, root canals, and bridges; rheumatism made walking or typing painful at times. For allergies she endured a series of weekly cortisone injections, only to find they’d aggravated her tendency to anemia. And she’d grown reliant on a combination of Nembutal for sleep and Dexamyl—“pep-up cheer-up pills”—to lift her spirits and dull her appetite. Elizabeth didn’t want to risk losing Alice’s interest by putting on pounds—“my age and physical decay” were bad enough. Metrecal was a staple, cigarettes a habit, and when Dexamyl was withdrawn from the market as a diet drug, she persuaded Dr. Warren Wacker at Harvard’s University Health Services to continue prescribing the stimulant as an energy booster to ward off melancholy. Early in their love affair, by letter from Ouro Prêto, Elizabeth had warned Alice, too, not to get fat. She loved Alice’s slim body, scarcely minded that she had “no breasts.” Alice’s “build” seemed attractively American, and Alice herself reminded Elizabeth pleasurably of “the north and Massachusetts . . . and all those old things I used to know.”

  Though so much younger, Alice was the more practical of the two, “brave & sensible,” as Elizabeth readily acknowledged. From afar Alice did her best to organize Elizabeth’s daily life and manage her health problems: ordering her to take Antabuse pills regularly and go easy on the cigarettes and Nembutal; paying her bills (Elizabeth complained that “my mind closes up like a clam when business is discussed”); coaxing her to complete writing assignments, though Elizabeth never did turn in any reviews to the New Yorker after volunteering to serve as poetry critic when Louise Bogan died in 1970. Nor did Elizabeth finish her “long-procrastinated” book on Brazil, or complete the introduction to a volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters to her mother, due for publication in 1975. In the last case, Elizabeth had been startled to find that so talented a poet could write such “insipid” and “superficial” letters; Elizabeth had not had a mother to humor with chatty letters like Plath’s. She could find nothing kind to say about them, and she jotted down several pages on letter writing in general before scrawling on her draft, “Gave up on this!”

  But Elizabeth’s needs organized Alice’s days too, and Elizabeth had plans for Alice, who admitted to being in an Erik Erikson–style “identity crisis” over what to do with her life. Though she enjoyed the freedom of working on an academic calendar and having only genial “Uncle Arthur” Smithies to answer to, Alice was unsure whether to stay on as Kirkland House secretary. Should she go for an advanced degree in business or law? And there was the lure of family life, a direction her parents strongly favored. Alice wrote glowingly of time spent with friends who had children, and of touring Boston with a young godson.

  Elizabeth told Alice she was “much too good for the job you have,” even if she was “wonderful” at it, and she sympathized with Alice’s quandary. “Being extremely interested in any one thing,” as Elizabeth was in writing poetry, was a great advantage—“one of my really lucky breaks in this world”—but rare. Yet Elizabeth couldn’t “imagine that just ‘being married’ . . . would be what you’d want to do, or be, most.” Would Alice really like having “2 awful little American children who won’t let the grown-ups talk,” as in one family Alice had described? Alice was ambivalent about children herself. By the summer of 1974, four years into their alliance, Alice had quit her job at Harvard and enrolled in Boston University’s new School of Management for the fall. At a time when women were agitating for equal access to medical, law, and business schools, it was a bold “Woms. Lib.” move, yet one that could still satisfy Alice’s Republican parents.

  With Frank Bidart, who was teaching now at Wellesley College, Elizabeth split the cost of a summer rental on Maine’s North Haven Island for two weeks in July. She’d answered a classified ad in the newspaper and come up with a vacation spot that was “almost too good to be true.” The property was called Sabine Farm, and it offered “magnificent views” of Penobscot Bay and the Camden Hills from a capacious two-story gray-shingled house full of “high-brow books in 1st editions,” she wrote to Howard Moss, with access to a rocky beach, rowboat, and sailing dinghy. The island had “one general store—the rest is fields and woods, very much like Nova Scotia—and birds & wildflowers.” North Haven proved to be “a haven for the very rich,” but the island’s summer people were inclined toward a familiar New England–style shabby gentility, and “somehow we have infiltrated.”

  Elizabeth, Alice, and Frank, who had brought over “bags and bags” of groceries on the ferry, kept mostly to themselves anyway. Frank became absorbed in the drama of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon unfolding on Sabine Farm’s television set, while Elizabeth and Alice sampled the island’s pebbled beaches. Relieved that impeachment seemed “pretty certain,” Elizabeth nevertheless cursed the “god damn TV ” blaring all day and the “false rhetoric, bombast, self-righteousness, repetition” of the lawyers and politicians. “If this is ‘witnessing history’—I’d rather not,” she wrote in her journal, and ran a bath in t
he late afternoon, happy to soak “in a hot tub—the wind blowing the curtains—dazzling light—drinking a Bloody Mary at the same time!—oh!”

  Frank Bidart and Elizabeth on the ferry from Rockland to North Haven Island, Maine, 1974

  A new friend, Lloyd Schwartz, a poet in Frank’s graduate school class at Harvard, arrived to distract Frank with games of anagrams—“at least A’s are silent,” Elizabeth sighed in relief. The only one of her circle to have remained in Cambridge over the previous Christmas holiday, Lloyd had visited Elizabeth in Stillman Infirmary after her fall on the stairs at Casablanca, and their friendship deepened; soon he would ask Elizabeth’s permission to write his doctoral dissertation on her poetry, the first at Harvard. Elizabeth’s career still wasn’t what she’d hoped—she could still be “cast into gloom” by the thought of her more prolific peers, as she once confessed to Jimmy Merrill—but her reputation had gained luster since her return from Brazil. She’d received honorary degrees from Brown and Rutgers; a scholar was at work on a bibliography. She’d had her portrait taken by celebrity photographer Thomas Victor for a glossy coffee-table book called Preferences, edited by Richard Howard, in which “fifty-one American poets choose poems from their own work and from the past.” Elizabeth had selected “In the Waiting Room” and George Herbert’s “Love Unknown,” but she tore her photo out of the book when it arrived in the mail, believing she looked old and bloated from cortisone treatments.