Elizabeth Bishop
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“the little poem”: BNY xxv.
“a good spell”: OA 289.
“old bronchitis-asthma”: EB to Pearl Kazin Bell [writer and editor, EB’s friend since Yaddo], November? 1953, VC 24.3.
“ride”: WIA 146; “this euphoria is wonderful”: WIA 150.
“intimacy with clouds”: OA 237.
$1,200 for “Gwendolyn”: OA 259.
“stop being the passenger-type”: OA 273.
113 “I don’t like”: EB to Anne Stevenson, January 8, 1964, BPR 413.
“Well done, daughter!”: EB to MS, August 10, 1953, WU.
“the few people”: WIA 164.
“who just can’t ‘produce’”: OA 296.
“CANNOT PROMISE”: OA 288.
“getting used to”: OA 249.
“Elizabeth is the slowest”: OA 264.
“so at home”: OA 262.
“dead low tide”: OA 250.
“hesitated”: EB, “A Cold Spring,” BP 55.
“The Bight”: BP 59.
114 “world inverted”: EB, “Insomnia,” BP 68.
115 “collected poems”: Candace W. MacMahon, Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 1927–1979 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980), 12.
“misbegotten book”: OA 304.
yellow-green leaf: Loren MacIver told EB she’d chosen a violet leaf for the cover, EB to MS, September 6, 1955, BPPL 805.
“the best, or maybe first”: BNY 165.
“maybe gradually making up”: OA 327.
“almost a new book”: OA 312.
“theoretically and practically”: Randall Jarrell, Randall Jarrell’s Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection, ed. Mary Jarrell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 420.
“Exile seems to work”: OA 312.
116 grant of $2,700: OA 317.
“Never has so little”: OA 318.
117 “pointedly uninterested”: OA 275.
she was dating men: EB to Pearl Kazin Bell, November 28, 1953, VC 24.3.
disliking his poetry: EB to MS, September 6, 1955, BPPL 809.
“NO MIDDLE CLASS”: OA 271.
118 home address: At graduation from Vassar, EB had listed Great Village rather than Cliftondale as her hometown, although she hadn’t visited Great Village since age sixteen.
drafted a poem: EB, “Hannah A.,” EAP 53.
“Squatter’s Children”: BP 83.
119 “Squatter’s Children” published in Anhembi: See Monteiro, Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After, 58.
subscribing to the Sunday: EB also subscribed to these publications: New American Writing, Botteghe Oscure (a free subscription), Partisan Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Listener, and Farmer’s Digest. LS subscribed to House & Garden, Interiors, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. EB to MS, March 20, 1953, WU.
“bi-localization”: WIA 135.
“deep river of red mud”: OA 261.
“my hostess”: OA 244.
“secret beaches”: EB letter quoted in EBL 299.
120 “living poetry”: EB, “On the Railroad Named Delight,” BPPL 442.
“Rio de Janeiro”: EB translation, “On the Railroad Named Delight,” BPPL 443.
“Come, my mulatta”: EB translation, “On the Railroad Named Delight,” BPPL 444.
“beautiful colored skin”: EAP 219.
“Anglo-Saxon blood”: OA 243.
“underdeveloped-yet-decadent”: OA 271.
Elizabeth looked “wise”: OA 316.
121 “young Negro cook”: EB, “On the Railroad Named Delight,” BPPL 448.
“half squatter”: EB, “Manuelzinho,” BP 94.
“United we shall be happy”: BNY 167.
“Judy”: EB notebook, VC 73.2.
122 “no one knows”: EB to MS, December 26, 1953, WU. Aware of her confusing syntax, EB wrote: “You can arrange this to please yourself—it is beyond me right now.” MS responded (January 25, 1954, WU) with the following series of “arrangements. I can’t decide which I like best”:
No one knows a child, whether is a boy or a girl.
Or a girl—whether is a boy, a child—no one knows.
A child or a girl, no one knows whether is a boy.
A child, whether is a boy, no? One knows, or a girl . . .
A child is a boy or a girl? No one knows whether.
Is a boy or a girl a child whether no one knows?
A child? No. No one knows whether. Or a girl is a boy.
“Are you”: Gene Stratton-Porter, The Keeper of the Bees (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925), 90.
“on bended knee”: Stratton-Porter, The Keeper of the Bees, 69.
“particular bright”: EB to MS, November 20, 1953, WU.
kill a five-foot snake: OA 331.
“combined being asthmatic”: WIA 250.
“hydraulic cannon”: EB to MS, May 10, 1956, WU.
“wild Atlantic Ocean”: EB to MS, April 11, 1956, WU.
123 “on parade with such”: MS to EB, May 8, 1956, WU.
Poets Since 1945: MS to EB, May 22, 1958, WU.
repeated “crack”: OA 320.
“feminine”: EB to MS, November 14, 1954, WU.
“our best women poets”: MS to EB, May 8, 1956, WU.
124 “When the muse”: EB to MS, September 6, 1955, WU. The full letter also appears in BPPL 805–10.
Kylso: REB 131–32.
“Filling Station”: BP 125–26.
“Love’s the main thing”: EB letter quoted in EBL 266.
“magnificent with child-problems”: WIA 255.
125 “discovering her voice”: EB letter quoted in EBL 267, 266.
“best results”: EB to MS, February 18, 1956, WU.
“Early Sorrow”: MS to EB, October 28, 1955, WU.
“inscrutable”: EB, “Sestina,” BP 121.
“a way of thinking”: EB to MS, September 6, 1955, BPPL 809. MS did not initially recognize the poem, titled “Early Sorrow” when EB mailed it to her in manuscript, as a sestina: “It’s hypnotic. It’s wonderfully organized, and yet so casual in tone. What do you call it when a set of the same words are used to end the lines in each stanza? I never studied prosody.” MS to EB, October 28, 1955. EB replied: “I’m very pleased that you liked my sestina—which is what it is and what I think I’ll call it now instead of that hammy title. And I think I’ll send you [Clement] Wood’s Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Handbook of Poetry for Christmas!” EB to MS, November 4, 1955. Perhaps MS’s inability to recognize the sestina form played a role in EB’s decision to choose an informative generic title, setting a precedent for the later “Poem” and “Sonnet.”
“forever”: MS to EB, December 9, 1955; also RL to EB, November 6 [1955]: “don’t stay away for ever,” WIA 171.
“everybody is so intent”: OA 276.
126 “inter-communication”: WIA 143.
“start sounding”: EB to MS, July 27, 1953, WU.
“sometimes I get”: EB to MS, July 2, 1955, WU.
“I’d like to hear”: EB to MS, May 10, 1956, WU.
“the way I got around”: EB to MS, July 2, 1955, WU.
“Sorry I can’t”: EB to MS, October 28, 1956, WU.
nearly four-hundred-page:328 EB to MS, November 4, 1955, WU.
“finicky”: EB to MS, September 25, 1956, WU.
twenty-six pieces: EBL 293.
“bang-up party”: WIA 233.
“svelte and chic”: I am grateful to Joelle Biele for directing me to this letter from Katharine White to Mary McCarthy, August 19, 1957, in the New Yorker correspondence held by the Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library.
127 “almost off the rails”: WIA 213.
Linked in the popular imagination: see BNY 27n. Joelle Biele writes of a column by Lewis Gannett, “Books and Things,” New York Herald Tribune (December 13, 1946): “Gannett reported that Selden Rodman had writte
n him in response to his statement that 1946 ‘was the most arid year in American literature since our renaissance began thirty-odd years ago.’ Rodman believed Gannett would not have made the claim had he read Bishop’s North & South and Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle.”
“I think of you”: WIA 175.
“real”: WIA 243, 315.
“genuine”: WIA 137.
“firmly new”: WIA 262.
“to get things straight”: WIA 161.
“great ruminating”: WIA 151.
“as though you weren’t”: WIA 174.
“growing-up novel”: WIA 151.
128 “sat through”: WIA 188.
“purple panes,” “delicate bay”: RL, “91 Revere Street,” LPR 315.
“less than fifty yards”: RL, “91 Revere Street,” LPR 313.
“Weelawaugh”: RL, “91 Revere Street,” LPR 317.
“freedom to explode”: RL, “91 Revere Street,” LPR 326.
“keep it up”: WIA 188.
129 “in the upstairs”: EB, “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs,” EAP 197. See also other draft memoirs EB may have begun writing at this time, “Primer Class” and “The Country Mouse,” dated 1960 and 1961 in BPR.
“psycho-therapy”: RL to EB, November 18, 1949, WIA 92.
“what we imagine”: EB, “At the Fishhouses,” BP 63, 64.
“similar difficulties”: WIA 121.
130 “Thomas wanted to live”: WIA 152.
“really just love”: EB to Pearl Kazin Bell, November 28, 1953, VC 24.3.
“Oh what a gap”: WIA 182.
“We seem attached”: WIA 151.
“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”: John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 38–39.
“armored heavy”: RL quoted in David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, ed. Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 174.
“glistening”: EB, “The Armadillo,” BP 102. “The Armadillo” was not a poem that EB associated with RL initially. EB, who by May 1956 had let the correspondence with RL lapse for more than six months, describes the sighting of the animal to MS: “Well—last night I saw an armadillo in the car headlights—I hadn’t known we had them around here before, but there he was, crossing the road with his head down, quite glisteny and very lonely-looking.” EB to MS, May 10, 1956, WU. EB also wrote to MM in a letter of the same date: “After all this time, I’ve just found out we have armadillos here—I see one crossing the road in the headlights at night, with his head and tail down—very lonely and glisteny.” Quoted in EBL 275.
“breaking through”: LPR 227.
131 amorousness: Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, 174.
had a fling: Edmund Wilson, The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 452–53.
“Italian girl”: Jarrell, Randall Jarrell’s Letters, 414.
nearly broken up his marriage: See Jeffrey Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 129–35.
“more constructive”: WIA 217.
“with ALL his heart”: WIA 214n.
“scherzo,” “rich in undramatic mishaps”: WIA 219.
“second ex-”: WIA 220.
“anti-manic pills”: WIA 213.
132 “our relations”: WIA 225–26.
“Oh heavens”: WIA 211.
“one great might-have-been”: WIA 108.
“delighted”: WIA 180.
“I read you”: WIA 204.
“we might almost claim”: WIA 226.
133 “the whole thing”: Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, Letters, ed. Leonard Woolf and James Strachey (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956), 37; also, Lytton Strachey quoted in Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, December 29, 1956.
“of course there was”: WIA 226.
“all has come right”: WIA 225.
“great block”: WIA 226.
“distance makes the heart”: OA 325.
“As you must know”: OA 481.
“red fox stain”: RL, “Skunk Hour,” LP 191.
“short line stanzas”: RL, “On ‘Skunk Hour’: How the Poem Was Written,” LPR 227.
134 “best” of the new group: WIA 243.
“My mind’s not right”: RL, “Skunk Hour,” LP 191–92.
“all seem real”: WIA 243.
JANUARY 12, 1977: 437 LEWIS WHARF, BOSTON
137 “couldn’t get started”: Mildred Nash diary, November 3, 1976, private collection.
138 “For Once, Then, Something”: Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1923, 1969), 225.
141 fled the conference center: Lloyd Schwartz email to the author, August 25, 2016.
“My god, Elizabeth”: William Sorensen recollection, email to the author, January 6, 2014.
“the famous eye”: RL quoted in EBL 415.
“The art of losing”: EB, “One Art,” BP 198.
CHAPTER 4: RIVER
142 “I am NOT”: EB to MS, September 28, 1961, WU.
“Graveyard of the Grand Banks”: BNY 66.
“projected fact pieces”: BNY 172.
143 “up to me”: OA 288. EB repeated this 1954 statement in a 1960 letter to RL: “I think it is up to me to earn $$$$ somehow or other,” WIA 310.
“created from scratch”: OA 360.
“missionaries, land speculators”: EB to MS, August 25, 1958, WU.
“go ahead”: BNY 202.
“rather highbrow”: EB, “A New Capital, Aldous Huxley, and Some Indians,” BPR 310.
“the River of Souls”: EB to MS, August 25, 1958, WU.
144 “medicine, mysticism”: WIA 265.
“all quite naked”: EB to MS, August 25, 1958, WU.
“rounded behinds”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 317.
“small”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 300.
145 “tall,” “well-modeled”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 300.
“from his great height”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 316.
“manioc patch,” “only attempt”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 318.
“most primitive”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 310.
“do no work”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 318.
“they rarely miss”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 317.
“messed about with”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 316–17.
146 “they are gentle”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 318.
becoming one family: See Ruth A. Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012), 277. Aldous Huxley had also entered into a “tripartite relationship” in the early years of his first marriage to Maria Nys, whom he’d met as she was extracting herself from a love affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell. Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 141.
“swooping”: EB, “A New Capital,” BPR 301.
“everything ‘tails off badly’”: BNY 208.
147 “rather dumb”: OA 369.
“what a relief”: EB to MS, August 25, 1958, WU.
“dingy and dark”: OA 343.
place to retire: OA 379.
“I wonder”: WIA 275.
“inoffensive”: WIA 256.
“I killed you!”: EB, “Sammy,” EAP 179.
148 “up to our necks in babies”: WIA 255.
“stretch” of fluent composition: WIA 246.
“assurance,” “all you have to do”: WIA 247.
“I feel awful”: LP 176.
149 “It is hell to realize”: WIA 247.
“behave”: Behaving badly was EB’s euphemism for her drinking spells. See EBL 515; EB to LA, June 3 [1967], VC 112.6.
“seems to feel”: EB to MS, August 10,
1953, WU.
“um grande poeta”: LS to LA, July 28, 1966, included in letters from EB to LA, VC 112.5.
“my natural melancholia”: OA 367.
“a great letter-snoop”: EB to MS, June 1, 1956, WU.
150 Lota hated: “Lota hates it,” WIA 315; “Lota hates that poem and I don’t like it too much myself,” EB to MS, the day after Christmas [1960], WU.
“anthropological number”: BNY 209.
“just crumbs”: EB to MS, March 26, 1959, WU.
“The Riverman”: BP 103.
learned from Wagley’s book: Charles Wagley, Amazon Town: A Study of Human Life in the Tropics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 228–34.
151 “Why shouldn’t I”: EB, “The Riverman,” BP 105.
“green cheroots,” “tall, beautiful”: EB, “The Riverman,” BP 104.
“travelling fast”: EB, “The Riverman,” BP 110.
“for each of the diseases”: EB, “The Riverman,” BP 106; “it stands”: BP 105.
“behind her back”: EB, “The Riverman,” BP 104.
“You can peer”: EB, “The Riverman,” BP 106–7.
“magical poem that casts”: BNY 210.
“long arid stretch”: BNY 211.
152 dedicate the poem: In the end, EB did not dedicate the poem to Katharine White. The New Yorker would not print a dedication to one of its staff members, and when the poem appeared in Questions of Travel (1965), EB omitted the promised dedication. BNY 212.
“the best fairy story”: WIA 321.
“very powerful”: WIA 591.
she wasn’t interested: “Lota flatly refuses to travel in Brazil,” EB to MS, May 10, 1956, WU; “I can’t interest Lota in our scenery,” EB to MS, October 27, 1964, WU.
“roughing it”: EB to MS, the day after Christmas [1960], WU.
“refuses to have anything”: WIA 318.
sixteen-year-old nephew: In a letter dated March 22, 1960, from the time of the trip, EB says Manoel was sixteen years old. OA 380. In a retrospective account given nearly three decades later, Rosinha Leão stated that her nephew was “about twelve.” REB 164.
“like weak café”: EB to LS, February 21, [1960], VC 32.8.
“RIVER VERY BIG”: EB telegram to LS, VC 118.44.
153 “Pink ones are lucky”: WIA 313.