Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  The City of Boston installed a historic marker on Cal’s boyhood home at 91 Revere Street even before he died. Robert Lowell was a celebrity. Time sent a reporter, Elizabeth’s and Cal’s former student James Atlas, to cover the funeral. Six hundred mourners and curiosity seekers filled Beacon Hill’s Church of the Advent. Elizabeth sat up front with the two wives, Lizzie and Caroline, and her godson Sheridan. The hymns were not hers, and she would not receive communion in the solemn high-church Episcopal requiem service; Caroline took Sheridan outside during the ritual. Elizabeth passed up a place in the caravan to the private graveside ceremony at the family burial ground in New Hampshire, and instead held a reception at Lewis Wharf, crowded with friends not invited to the interment, among them the critic Helen Vendler and the poet Alan Williamson. Elizabeth had once told Alice she never got drunk at her own parties, and she was true to her word. But at a second gathering late in the day, at the home of Cal’s old friend and distant cousin, the documentary film maker Bob Gardner, one of ten pallbearers along with Frank Bidart and Robert Fitzgerald, she gave in.

  Since their first meeting at Randall Jarrell’s New York apartment in 1947, there had been an unquenchable attraction. Cal was Elizabeth’s opposite, and her double. On that day Elizabeth, who’d been awarded rare A-pluses at Walnut Hill School for neatness, was charmed by slovenly, rakish, thirty-year-old Cal—“your dishevelment, your lovely curly hair.” Cal remembered Elizabeth, at thirty-six, as “shy but full of des[cription] and anecdote as now.” Three decades and more than four hundred letters later, writing Elizabeth to declare the manuscript of his Day by Day “done,” Cal told her his last book was “the opposite” of her Geography III, “bulky, rearranged, added-to, deleted two months after submission—as though the unsatiated appetite were demanding a solid extra course when dinner was meant to be over.” Even as Cal predictably feared he was “spoiling” his poems by reworking them, “I already miss their presence pressing on me to change, polish, do more.” By contrast, he wrote Elizabeth after reading “One Art,” “You command your words.” She always knew when a poem was “done.” Cal was rarely without a poem of Elizabeth’s folded in his wallet as talisman.

  Long ago when they were starting out, when “we were swimming in our young age, with the water coming down on us, and we were gulping,” Cal’s memoir, “91 Revere Street,” had seemed to him “thin and arty” compared with Elizabeth’s own autobiographical “In the Village.” But it was 91 Revere Street, not the Bulmer house on the corner of Cumberland and Old Post Roads in Great Village, that bore a plaque now. Cal’s brashness, his sloppiness when it came to others’ feelings, had won him an audience in the age of poetic self-revelation he’d ushered in with Life Studies. “One does use ‘painful experiences’—ALL experiences—how else could one write anything at all?” Elizabeth had consoled Cal in the depths of his regret over having hurt Lizzie with The Dolphin. But Cal envied a quality in Elizabeth’s verse, and perhaps in her life as a writer, that he could never achieve: “the pleasure of pure invention,” as if the poems had sprung entire from her imagination. Elizabeth had never published a poem “one would usually hesitate to read before an audience,” in the end Cal’s best definition of a “confessional poem.”

  The difference was in what Elizabeth hesitated to—could not—reveal. Elizabeth once boasted to Cal that she’d “never met a woman I couldn’t make.” Like Cal, she’d had numerous dalliances with “other” women and a late-life partnership with a younger woman. Cal could, and did, take the line and use it in a poem, “White Goddess,” in History. Elizabeth could not. Keeping secrets made her poems tell more than Cal’s outright confessions.

  Elizabeth labored over a valedictory, “North Haven,” during the summer of 1978, a year after Cal’s death. She celebrated the island she’d so quickly come to love, naming the wildflowers she catalogued each year from her front porch, those with “gay” colors she found in “Shakespearian” profusion every July:

  . . . Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch,

  Hawkweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright,

  the Fragrant Bedstraw’s incandescent stars,

  and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.

  But Cal was her subject. He’d told her he’d “discovered girls” on North Haven during one “classic summer” in boyhood when he “learned to sail, and learned to kiss.” She concluded her elegy—

  You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,

  afloat in mystic blue . . . And now—you’ve left

  for good. You can’t derange, or re-arrange,

  your poems again. (But the Sparrows can their song.)

  The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

  The two had been closest when apart. It was then they could “talk” in letters “with confidence and abandon and delicacy.” No longer was she “My Darling receding Elizabeth,” as Cal had once addressed her. Cal was gone.

  “Hadn’t two rivers sprung / from the Garden of Eden?” Elizabeth had asked in “Santarém,” then corrected herself: “No, that was four / and they’d diverged. Here only two / and coming together.” Elizabeth would soon follow Cal, and perhaps she sensed it. At the end of a grueling 1978 fall semester commuting to New York City to teach at NYU, she was back in the hospital, this time at Lenox Hill in Manhattan, where Dr. Baumann had admitting privileges, stricken once again with internal bleeding from the hernia that surgeons deemed too risky to repair. Suspecting more grim news, Elizabeth begged Anny Baumann to deliver the “truth.” But there was nothing more to be said. Rest and the prospect of a year off from teaching, subsidized by a Guggenheim fellowship she was awarded that spring, revived her.

  Sensibly, Elizabeth deepened friendships with young people with whom Alice felt at ease. Rosalind Wright, a novelist at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute, and Amram Shapiro, a poet who’d enrolled in Harvard Business School, were new to Cambridge during Elizabeth’s last years at the college and found their way to her literature class as auditors. The couple, who joined Elizabeth and Alice in games of Boggle after dinners at Lewis Wharf, lived in an apartment over a pharmacy in East Boston’s Maverick Square on the opposite side of the harbor. With binoculars, the friends could spot each other across the water and wave. “It had a bit of the feel of bon voyage,” Amram thought. “We were on the dock; they were on the ocean liner.” Sitting on her top-floor verandah in the late afternoon, looking toward her young friends’ apartment as the sun set behind her, Elizabeth might have felt she was living out the last lines of the first sestina she’d written forty years ago: “A window across the river caught the sun.” Did it still seem “as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony”? Four miles beyond Maverick Square was the house at 55 Cambridge Street in Revere where Uncle George had once dangled her by the hair over the second-floor back porch railing. Then it must have seemed a miracle would be required to transport that little girl to safety.

  In the winter of 1979, Elizabeth asked a student from her last Harvard verse-writing class, Mildred Nash, a young mother of two, to help winnow her vast library of books. Forty cases had arrived from Ouro Prêto in early 1975, after she’d moved into the condominium at Lewis Wharf, and the shelves in her bedroom had been crammed so full, two of them snapped off, scattering “books everywhere, and lots of broken objets d’art,” she’d written to Jimmy Merrill. Mercifully, Elizabeth had been out at the opera—Sarah Caldwell’s production of Così fan tutte—when it happened, and most of the broken bibelots were “things I should have got rid of anyway.” Her student John Peech had come to repair the faulty brackets.

  By February 1979, Elizabeth was ready to get rid of more things, and her mood as she and Millie Nash sorted through the books—twenty feet of art books, six of philosophy, and nearly a full wall of novels in the living room alone—was retrospective. They paused to look at photographs of Casa Mariana, the “house of my dreams” Elizabeth hadn’t seen for five years and was still trying to sell, and an album lab
eled “unknown relatives” shelved next to Elizabeth’s scarlet grosgrain baby book—“I was my loveliest at nine months.” Hunting among the volumes for a prized recording of South American birdsong, Elizabeth recalled Cal’s visit to Brazil and how “only the gaudy birds” had kept him from “going crazy with boredom.”

  A coffee break prompted a disquisition on the medical establishment’s contradictory recommendations on caffeine and hiatal hernias; she would not give up her daily cup of Medaglia d’Oro. Elizabeth, who’d met one of Millie’s daughters when she’d come along to class on a public school snow day, spoke of family life, remarking that marriage “just never worked out for me, but I don’t regret—all things considered—it’s not happening.” She’d come to believe, too, after observing her friends’ difficulties with their mothers, that she’d been better off without one.

  Elizabeth continued to dread a “decrepit” old age, or one dimmed by senile dementia such as her aunt Grace had suffered. She resented now being taken for “someone’s grandmother” or “a great aunt,” as she’d been described at two recent readings and in a New Jersey newspaper account—“It makes one very feminist.” “Robert Fitzgerald’s older,” she complained to Millie, “and no one tells him, ‘You look like anyone’s grandfather.’” Robert was one year older, to be precise, and as a tenured professor in an endowed chair at Harvard, he’d been allowed to keep his job until age seventy. Elizabeth still relied on him for favors, such as a recommendation for the Guggenheim fellowship, but she would rebuke him teasingly in a letter that spring for his immunity to being described as “a grandfather or great-uncle”—“Lady poets are supposed to die young, I think.” She closed the letter announcing her intention to walk up to Boston’s Government Center to have a passport photo taken for the trip to Greece she and Alice planned as the culmination of Elizabeth’s fellowship year.

  The Lewis Wharf apartment had begun to drag on her. Elizabeth had never liked living in city apartments, even ones with spectacular views; she craved whole houses in rural landscapes. What she appreciated most about Lewis Wharf was its proximity to Boston’s North End, the Italian neighborhood across Atlantic Avenue, with its narrow cobblestone streets lined with flat-front brick row houses and shops that sold olive oil, cured meats, and spumoni by the slice for takeout if you asked for it right. She walked to Giuffre’s Fish Market for the daily catch, Drago’s Bakery for long loaves of bread called flutes, Caffé Pompei for cappuccino, Martignetti’s for deals on “booze and groceries.” Elizabeth still drank herself into a stupor many nights. She was “that dreadful thing” she’d once told Ruth Foster she feared becoming, an alcoholic. Despite her promises to Alice, Elizabeth could not stop. Truth be told, Alice often drank with her.

  Of necessity, Elizabeth had agreed to teach at MIT in the fall of 1979, and the two women spent as much time as possible out of the city before then, staying at friends’ country homes for weekends, and longer stretches at John Brinnin’s in Duxbury—“stray dogs—pink sky, blue sea, red boat,” Elizabeth noted in her diary after another chilly walk on the beach. Again she rented Sabine Farm for two summer months on North Haven. Except for skipping the climb up Santorini’s steep stone “Steps to Heaven,” Elizabeth had kept up with Alice on the Swan cruise they joined in late May, paying close attention to the variety in size and color of wild poppies, from blood red to California orange, on the six Greek islands they toured. But she’d been “in a sort of daze” since their return, she wrote to Howard Moss from Sabine Farm in July. She could no longer manage the walk across the meadow past the line of fir trees and down the hill to “our beach.” Instead, in the late afternoon on an “intensely quiet, slightly hazy” day, they drove north on the island to “3rd Beach,” where Alice “went in naked—water very clear, lap-lapping. Drifts of mussel shells.” Elizabeth remained on shore, ready to offer Alice a towel when she emerged from the frigid water, beautiful as ever to Elizabeth at thirty-six. Elizabeth was sixty-eight.

  That summer, Elizabeth conducted her annual wildflower census, and made jam from the “millions of blueberries” growing near the house. On July 20, the tenth anniversary of Apollo 11’s landing on the moon, she produced a molded blancmange to please Alice, who’d asked to celebrate the day with a “Moon Pudding.” Searching Sabine Farm’s bookshelves, Elizabeth picked out Aldous Huxley’s last novel, Island, and skimmed through it—“badly written—very sad ending—he was discouraged.” She wasn’t impressed by Huxley’s “illumination by use of drugs” at the book’s conclusion: “one shd. be able to see that much by simple concentration, absorption, self-forgetting, etc.—without eating mushrooms or taking LSD.” Huxley, with whom Elizabeth had traveled to Brasília and the Xingú River in 1958, had died of laryngeal cancer in 1963, a year after the book was published. At age sixty-nine he’d been eased out of the world with an injection of LSD administered by his wife, Elizabeth’s old friend Laura Archera. Laura had written a book about it, This Timeless Moment, which, like You Are Not the Target, sold “in many editions, and in paperback,” a “rather embarrassing” fact for Elizabeth, since the women shared Farrar, Straus and Giroux as publisher.

  The next day, while picking raspberries along the road that ran in front of the house, Elizabeth found herself “eye to eye—about 18 inches apart—with a Lesser Fly-Catcher (I think)—2 of them.” Cedar waxwings and goldfinches arrived too, attracted by the ripe berries. Overhead, the barn swallows, whose nests she and Alice had knocked down from the eaves after the young were launched, could be seen “mating wildly in the air . . . eager to begin over again.”

  Day followed day, each as foggy as the last. Even Elizabeth’s typewriter began to feel damp. “Such fogginess seems to make one sleepy, lazy, and extra-remote,” she wrote to Frani, who’d visited Sabine Farm the year before in better weather. This was “The Foggy Summer,” as Elizabeth titled one journal entry. Her last letter to Howard Moss, written August 17, ended with a handwritten postscript: “The sun has come out!”

  Elizabeth never got to meet her verse-writing class at MIT. Illness kept her away from the first sessions, though she read through a sheaf of submissions to select students for English 582. On October 6, the night before she was due to give a reading, along with the short story writer Mary Lavin, to benefit the literary journal Ploughshares, Alice had driven to Lewis Wharf to pick up Elizabeth for a Saturday-night dinner party at Helen Vendler’s apartment with Frank Bidart, Harvard English professor Harry Levin, and his wife, Elena. Alice and Elizabeth still loved each other; Alice was not just being “‘nice’ to an old lady because she is fond of you,” as Elizabeth had so often feared. They were a couple with plans for a night out, though, as was their custom, they would not hold hands or display affection in the company of others, even close friends. The condominium at 437 Lewis Wharf was silent. Alice found Elizabeth on the floor of her bedroom, where she’d been dressing for dinner. There was no mistaking this collapse for a drunken fall. Elizabeth was dead of a cerebral aneurysm.

  In recent years Elizabeth had changed her mind about being buried in Worcester and asked to be interred in one of the rustic cemeteries on North Haven Island. But Alice soon learned that the right to burial on the island was reserved for those born there. On October 25, a handful of mourners, including Alice, Frank Bidart, Amram Shapiro, and Rosalind Wright, gathered in Worcester’s Hope Cemetery, a lush park of rolling hills covered with slate headstones, sculptured memorials, and granite family vaults, to bury Elizabeth beside the parents she hadn’t known. Within the year, an inscription was chiseled into the monument that marked Gertrude and William Bishop’s earlier deaths, the last line of the poem Elizabeth had written as a present to herself on a lonely birthday in 1948: “All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”

  Perhaps Elizabeth had been better off without her parents. There had been no one to admire her, no one to please, but also no one to disappoint by not marrying or raising a family, to shock by her decision to live with and love women. Elizabeth had s
taked her life on “the pleasure of pure invention,” and she could depart unencumbered—“Yesterday brought to today so lightly!”—leaving the choice fruits of her gift in the hands of her readers.

  Elizabeth left behind a puzzle in the form of one last poem, published in the New Yorker the week after her young friends buried her in Hope Cemetery. Elizabeth’s biographer of the 1990s, Brett Millier, speculated that Howard Moss, to whom Elizabeth sent “Sonnet” the year before, in the fall of 1978, delayed publication, worried about Elizabeth’s “veiled confession” of homosexuality in the poem. Was “Sonnet” Elizabeth’s declaration that she, like Howard Moss and Bob Giroux and so many in her literary circle who remained circumspect, was “gay”—her way of “coming out,” as many later critics and readers have interpreted the poem?

  Elizabeth had written numerous sonnets during her high school and college years when she was practicing her craft, but few since. This late sonnet, with its brief lines and unpredictable rhyme scheme, utterly defied convention:

  Caught—the bubble

  in the spirit-level,

  a creature divided;

  and the compass needle

  wobbling and wavering,

  undecided.

  Freed—the broken

  thermometer’s mercury

  running away;

  and the rainbow-bird

  from the narrow bevel

  of the empty mirror,