The past
at least
is polite:
it keeps out of sight.
The present
is more recent.
It makes a fuss
but is unselfconscious.
The future
sinks through water
fast as a stone,
alone alone.
After she had rejected a boyfriend who had twice proposed, he shot and killed himself, having first sent her a postcard that read, “Elizabeth, Go to hell.” Her lovers thereafter were not always women, though in her late thirties, as far as her biographer can tell, Bishop accepted what was probably always her inclination (she had fallen in love with her Vassar roommate). The small legacy her father left could never support her in New York; through her thirties she moved around restlessly, looking further and further away for a home. In 1951, during a stop in Brazil on a cruise around South America (she arrived on the pleasantly named S. S. Bowplate), she suffered an allergic reaction to cashew fruit. While recovering, she fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares, the aristocratic Brazilian with whom she shared a long domestic contentment but who in the end also committed suicide.
A reader searches the poems in vain for this romantic life—there are gestures or countergestures of affection, but rarely do you feel the disruptions of passion. (Bishop wasn’t careful or even faithful in love—the beautiful villanelle “One Art” is almost an apology for all the unwritten love poems.) A few poems in the archives live on the remembered edge of sex; but they seem oddly uncomfortable with physical desire, the poems suppressed, not perhaps because of what they revealed (homosexual poets of Bishop’s generation sometimes still couched love for one sex in terms of the other), but because of the sentiment lurking there. Bishop’s reticence had little room for sentiment, and less for immodesty.
Poets with a perfectionist streak are often depressives. (This is not to say that misery loves poetry, though it does.) When you read Bishop’s letters, you wonder how—alcoholic, asthmatic, living in clouds of unhappiness—she finished anything at all. The poems are a triumph over what the false starts and dead ends succumbed to. The perceiving squint that attracted Bishop in Marianne Moore’s descriptions, where its origins lay in an eccentricity squeezed into whalebone-bodiced propriety, alters the ordinariness that surrounds and imposes upon depression, the commonplace touched with Ovidian metamorphosis.
Off to the left, those islands, named and renamed
so many times now everyone’s forgotten
their names, are sleeping.
Pale rods of light, the morning’s implements,
lie in among them tarnishing already,
just like our knives and forks.
Because we live at your open mouth, O Sea,
with your cold breath blowing warm, your warm breath cold,
like in the fairy tale.
Not only do you tarnish our knives and forks
—regularly the silver coffee-pot goes into
dark, rainbow-edged eclipse;
the windows blur and mirrors are wet to touch.
(“Apartment in Leme”)
How often Bishop liked to observe sleepers—you cannot quarrel with a sleeper. These islands off Rio become part of a domestic scene estranged from its usual identities—the islands renamed into erasure, the coffeepot eclipsed by its own tarnish. In her poems, no identity is safe.
Her childhoods, imagined or real, are flecked with sadness, sometimes even besieged by it. (She once said that families were like “concentration camps.”) There’s a childlike naivete to her poems—Bishop is the best American poet on childhood and the least sentimental about it; yet the comforts taken there, comforts she enjoyed too rarely, can be touched with the morbid:
For M.B.S., Buried in Nova Scotia
Yes, you are dead now and live
only there, in a little, slightly tip-tilted graveyard
where all of your childhood’s Christmas trees are forgathered with the presents they meant to give,
and your childhood’s river quietly curls at your side
and breathes deep with each tide.
The matter-of-fact opening, the comical “tip-tilted graveyard,” like one a child might draw, lure us into a poem where death is childhood lived over, more happily; the poem might be callous without the last lines, which make death, too, a consolation—the river curls against the dead woman like a dog at the feet of a knight on a medieval tomb. (I have changed “present” to “presents” on the authority of another draft.)
These poems brought so near perfection (a dozen are as good as all but her best) make us lament Bishop’s too critical eye; but others exist only as fragments or pipe dreams, without the will to become poems. The failures explain more about Bishop’s talents than the successes—she worked by accretion, stumbling through early drafts by phrase or fancy (often you see her characteristic gestures without their magic), trying to get at the resistant matter of the poem. Sometimes it’s important that a writer find out what she can’t do, as well as what she can. She must have asked herself if these really were poems (she worried about her “cuteness” and her “exotic or picturesque” details)—we love them now because they’re like no one else’s. It was that irregularity, that off-balance tilt, that made her poems poems. Jarrell and Lowell, among others, saw how much moral brooding and unsettling vision lay beneath their glittering surfaces. No wonder she found it impossible to write criticism—the critical restrictions of period taste were what she was trying to escape. Self-doubt is not the least attractive of her vulnerabilities.
Certain memories haunted her, cast and recast over the years as she tried to find the form nascent there. When most subservient to memory, she fell into the rambling narrative of poems like “The Moose” and “In the Waiting Room.” The crucial moment of self-awareness in the latter (“you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth”), an epiphany on its way to becoming a joint-stock company, has given critics a field day, though it’s one of her few false moments. Her troubled memories are less affecting than ones where despair, as in “Sestina,” is half suppressed beneath her playful manner. A poet, over time, discovers different ways to write a poem, ways, once discovered, often hard to change—most poets never learn more than three or four. What we see in her drafts is how often Bishop tested her routines; if there were failures, they were the price of her successes.
Reading through her collected poems, you marvel at how often she succeeded (great poets commit their share of mediocre sins; but some with a peculiar limitation of means—like Eliot and Auden—write, at least for a while, almost nothing but masterpieces). If she knew intuitively what made her poems work, should these drafts and fragments have been left unpublished? At their deaths, Shelley, Housman, and many another left lovely poems in rough draft. (The entire works of Wyatt, Traherne, and Dickinson, which remained in manuscript, might have vanished into a kitchen fire.) It would be criminal, by whatever statutes apply, to leave in dusty archives poems so touched with mournful knowledge, with the sense of a life sometimes wrongly spent.
A great and early sunset,
a classic of its kind, went unobserved,
although today the sun himself swerved
as far out of his course as he could get,
taking the opportunity
to see things that he might not see again;
letting the shadows poke their fingers in
and satisfy their curiosity.
Now, down below,
the darkness-level rises in the valley.
In the small tip-tilted town already
those gold cats’ whiskers show
where six streets lie.
(“St. John’s Day”)
Bishop’s calm powers conspire here toward a majesty of observation (think of Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge, but with her nervous comic touches)—and then, as if she didn’t know how to go on, the poem staggers forward a couple of stanzas and loses its way. The volume has many gorgeous beg
innings that come to nothing in the end. (That shyly absurd adjective “tip-tilted” tries again, and in vain, to sneak into a poem she could publish.)
Alice Quinn’s thoughtful editing has returned these poems to the density of their histories. Full of quotations from Bishop’s memoirs, notebooks, and letters, the notes set the poems into the life surrounding these interrupted and abandoned works. The fragmentary memoirs included in the appendix form a major autobiographical supplement to Bishop’s childhood, which they treat with more depth and less critical posturing than Brett Millier’s workmanlike biography Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (1993). Unfortunately, it takes only Bishop’s stray mention of stars or lime trees or graveyards for the editor to throw in everything the poet said on the subject—some notes are so long you feel you’re being punished for bothering to look them up.
Despite long immersion in Bishop’s work, the editor has found it difficult to order or date these drafts (the fonts of the poet’s apostolic succession of typewriters have proved of some help); but Quinn’s editorial decisions are never doctrinaire—her affectionate tone is among the pleasures of this edition. Like most editors, she misses a trick or two—she doesn’t mention, for example, the relation between some draft lines and Bishop’s lovely “Cirque d’Hiver” or between others and “Sleeping Standing Up” and “Filling Station” (and surely it’s odd to say that a poem is “terribly prescient” about the death, twenty years later, of a lover Bishop hadn’t even met yet). Some of the editor’s judgments bewilder me—I don’t see why the prose and poetry in the appendix lack notes (or why the villanelle “Verdigris” is placed there rather than in the body of the book). Some drafts have been printed in photographic facsimile, which lets us see how the pages looked to the poet; yet these often lack transcriptions. These are minor flaws in a book that will be indispensable to readers of Bishop.
Readers who bother to read acknowledgments may notice my name. In 1992, while spending an afternoon in the archives at Vassar, I first saw many of these poems. I approached Bishop’s publisher with the idea of an edition of unfinished poems. Though initially encouraging, after seeing a draft manuscript he decided not to pursue the idea, which by then conflicted with other plans. Some years later, the project was revived. Alice Quinn started from scratch, though she saw the draft of my labors, and pursued a very different and far more inclusive idea for the collection.
Having scoured the archives, Quinn has perhaps included too many drafts that barely escape their fragmentary phrases—that’s the risk when a poet’s editor loves the poet’s work (lovers want to see every scrap, even the laundry lists). If it is a flaw, it’s better than the vices to which editing is sometimes prey. Is there anything left after so thorough a trawl? At least two poems, perhaps.
Newsreel
Pompeii and Herculaneum,
smuts floating from an unsnuffed lamp,
two cinders; we got used to them.
We rubbed them in our eyes to weep
for man drawn up in igneous cramp,
the posture of those burnt asleep,
a man burnt up alive asleep.
In the country movie hall
many of the hard seats go
down too far or not at all.
An unremarking hierarch
steers us to a middle row.
In draughty interrupted dark
we sit and wish for darker dark.
The oddly emphasized opening is similar to the italicized close of “The Armadillo,” which has often puzzled readers. (Is there a change in emphasis or a change in speaker?) The horrors of Pompeii, the igneous cramp of the dead, are those of the photographs of bodies piled at Dachau. The wistfulness in the last line contains something like hope, but something like horror, too—as if the only moral response were not to see at all. Oedipus reacted to horror in that way.
Bishop’s poems were so modestly disposed, so full of delightful and startling images, like a tray of weird candies, it’s hard to say just where their fragility, so similar to Dickinson’s, sinks into something darker, more frantic, less in control:
Bicycles
The bicycle riders
work like insects,
each bicycle
a pair of spiders,
each wheel filled
solid silver,
buckets of water
swing unspilled.
Each gray wing
held by webs
slips to and fro,
kept from flying
by the wheels:
a pair of spiders;
they’ve caught the wings,
they’ve caught the riders,
bent on tiny seats,
spinning two webs
at the same time spinning
long threads in the streets.
Something about Bishop makes readers feel proprietary—Shakespeare and Milton are everyone’s property, but Hardy and Larkin and Bishop each reader’s alone. Her vulnerability, her charming chaos (even when complete, the poems feel fragmentary, like her personality) were not overcome but succumbed to—she lacks that seriousness, that pretentiousness in the poet’s lingua franca, that in Lowell, Jarrell, and Berryman now seems leaden, done by union rule for union wages. Bishop emerges from this book a more personal poet, the made surfaces of her poems concealing the disorder from which they were made. In “‘The past …,’” “City Stars,” “‘From the shallow, night-long graves …,’” “The Street by the Cemetery,” “The Salesman’s Evening,” “Key West,” “‘Don’t you call me that word, honey …,’” “For M.B.S., Buried in Nova Scotia,” “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator,” “St. John’s Day,” “Foreign-Domestic,” “All Afternoon the Freighters—Rio,” “Mimosas in Bloom,” “Apartment in Leme,” “Salem Willows,” “Just North of Boston,” “Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle,” and in dozens of fragments, there is a Bishop we recognize and a Bishop we do not quite know. Readers will remember some of these poems as long as they read her.
Bishop’s life was a series of frustrations, tragedies, accidents—the extraordinary was her only means of disabling the terrors of the ordinary. This makes more affecting the transfigurations in “A Miracle for Breakfast” and “Filling Station,” the metamorphosis of her desk in “12 O’Clock News” and of the view out her window in “The Bight.” That our age remains in love with a poet of such reticence and tact, one often frustrated by her gifts, is as much a mark of the age’s intelligence as of its mawkishness. (There there, there there, readers seem to say over her wounds.) Her make-believe world, so like Joseph Cornell’s boxes, can be too perfectly self-contained; perhaps the childlike awe was put on, after a while—yet Bishop was so afflicted by self-doubt, it’s hard to believe the awe became merely a mannerism. And, if it did, there are worse forms of insincerity.
Elizabeth Bishop’s Sullen Art
Michelangelo was the last poet to show much talent as a painter. In our narrow century poets have with few exceptions confined themselves to the art of words: Pound plunked away at opera (with dismal results), Cummings was a rough-and-ready dabbler in oils; but we have been spared the sculpture of Robert Lowell and the ballets of T. S. Eliot. It is charming to find that a poet secretly practices another art and consoling to know he’s no good at it. This is partly Schadenfreude and partly relief that talent is not a gift completely selfish in its distribution.
After her death, Elizabeth Bishop’s cheery watercolors appeared on her Complete Poems, her Collected Prose, and her selected letters, One Art. Modest, sweetly colorful, and full of quiet exuberance, the paintings transposed to the visual world the deceptive innocence of her poems. Indeed, they seemed to have been drawn by children—no set of parallel lines ever parallel, no circle ever circular, perspective lost in some twelfth-century muddle of vanishing points, everything thumbed onto the page with the spirit not of art but of need. “Her method,” writes her editor William Benton, “for the most part consisted of making a simple drawing and, unceremoniously, coloring it in.”
Exchanging Hats gathers the surviving three dozen or so fragile watercolors and drawings (as well as two box constructions indebted to Joseph Cornell), some of them now mysteriously missing and available only as reproductions from slides.
Poetry and painting are not antagonistic arts: artists can live without writing a coherent word, and poets can be color-blind. Proudly diffident though she was about her verse, Bishop knew the difference between primitive poetry and primitive painting. Of her own paintings she said, “They are Not Art—NOT AT ALL”; yet some of what we admire in her verse lies in just its amateurish, old maidish, slightly fussy and unexpected graces—hers is the verse of an amateur who believes in the professional (Hardy’s verse was the other way around). It is the primitive in her poems to which we respond.
Bishop lived at leisure until late in life, when she was forced into teaching (she didn’t think she was much good at it, and by most accounts neither did her students). As a young woman she had a little money, a very little, and spent months in France and nearly a decade in Key West. Earlier she had tried a job or two in New York, but in the early fifties she escaped on a cruise and ended up in Brazil, more or less by accident. She lived there for nearly two decades. When you don’t work, there’s a great deal of life to be gotten through. Despite various projects (a book on Brazil, an anthology of Brazilian poetry, a translation of The Diary of “Helena Morley”), despite squabbles with her lover and visits with her friends, despite depression and alcohol and the two poems or so she managed to finish each year, there must have been long vacant hours. We can never get close enough to some writers—their love letters and even their laundry lists promise the human side of what is the mystery of art, but it is failure (in love or laundry) that finally makes the artist human again.
Bishop made a few botanical illustrations, one or two landscapes, and a couple of portraits, but mostly she painted buildings and interiors. Buildings offered the least resistance to her lack of skill. The earliest watercolor is of a small brick townhouse in Greenwich Village, its windows festooned with long vines of ivy, like wreaths of mildew. She tended to paint what was in front of her and often positioned herself so a building stood four-square opposite, eliminating any need for the confusions of perspective. The battlements of a school in Key West make it a castle, or a prison. A deformed bicycle has been abandoned outside, near a pair of trees whose whitewashed trunks look like tight skirts. Her other buildings can be slightly terrifying. The one painting of Paris is touchingly labeled, in her clumsy printing, “PALAIS DU SENAT PARIS FRANCE,” the monumental stonework and balustrades outlined in Chinese white, as if it were a Ferris wheel. Two statues on the parapet appear to be hailing a cab.
Our Savage Art Page 15