SOURCE: Oktenberg, Adrian. “The Letter and the Spirit.” Women's Review of Books 11, nos. 10-11 (July 1994): 27–29.

[In the following essay, Oktenberg argues that the publication of Bishop's letters will lead to her poetry being taken more seriously.]

Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the major American poets of this century, and the publication of this first selection of her letters will remain a lasting gift to literature. It will also accelerate a change, which has been building for some time, in the way Bishop is read. During her lifetime, Bishop was seen as a writer of marginalia, as an acolyte of Marianne Moore's school of meticulous observation of the strangeness of things, as a painter of delicate watercolors (“The Map”) and what Oscar Williams called “charming little stained-glass bits.” Bishop's modesty, reticence and New England or Nova Scotian rectitude were advertised as models of a presumably “feminine” kind of poetry, in which not much was attempted and even less was said.

Now she is seen as something quite different. Her letters show her as a poet making something new, with great labor, determination and discipline, as a master completely at ease with her craft, as a seeker of change and a passionate lover of the world. Far from being cold, distant, or disengaged, Bishop was enamored of life and all its tumultuous contradictions.

She was also prolific, using letters as a way of “keeping warm,” and once wrote forty in one day. From more than 3,000 letters, Robert Giroux has chosen 541 for this first selection, and rightly says that Bishop's letters deserve to be published in a multivolume edition. Giroux's selection emphasizes Bishop's humor, wit and good sense, her love of people, places and things. He seeks most to include letters that illuminate the poetry and show the poet at work, “not a thought, but a mind thinking.” The really wonderful thing about reading them is hearing Bishop's voice expressing itself in that casual, relaxed, slightly amused or ironic tone so characteristic of her poetry; following her famous “eye” into the heart of the thing; revelling in her acute senses; and being heartbroken by her losses (she said in 1947, one of the worst periods in her life, that she wanted her epitaph to be “the loneliest person who ever lived”). The letters deserve to be read at leisure, they will be fascinating to general readers as well as scholars, and, like Bishop's poetry, they will reward again and again.

As in Bishop's poetry, the themes repeated in the letters are history, geography and “questions of travel”; acute, witty or painful, observations of people and things; love and its losses; and the question Bishop appears to have used her poetry to answer, “How to live?” The playful tone so often evident in the poems comes out in her letters as unrestrained brio. On her favorite relative, Grace Bulmer:

my darling Aunt Grace has gone to live … in a place called Wawa, Ontario, on Lake Wawa. … They have to fly in, landing on the lake “if it's frozen over”—otherwise she doesn't say how they get there. And she's going to start a Bakery. … Even her most ardent admirer, like me, could never say she was a good cook. However, they're probably all so ravenous up in Wawa they won't notice the difference.

(p. 214)

To that same Aunt Grace, on her poem “The Moose”: “—the one I said was to be dedicated to you when it is published in a book. It is called ‘The Moose.’ (You are not the moose.)” On being a poet: “one of the unhealthier jobs—no regular hours, so many temptations!” On a ship, describing “a small interdenominational service”: “The three tiny boys sang ‘Jesus loves me this I know’ in Spanish and a song, with gestures, about how the house built on sand went splash. I'd always wondered how it did go but I had never thought of it as splash somehow.”

The center of this book, and of Bishop's life, is her relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she fell in love when she first went to Brazil in 1951 and with whom she stayed for sixteen years. Before that, the letters are marked by unhappiness, uncertainty, restlessness and troubles with alcohol and illness. But after December 20, 1951, the date Lota asked Bishop to stay with her in Brazil and Bishop accepted, the letters open out and radiate with surprise, happiness and relief. “I feel fine and although it is tempting Providence to say so, I suppose, happier than I have felt in ten years.” “[Y]esterday was my birthday and I am fonder of Brazilians than ever” (Lota had given her a gold ring inscribed “Lota—20/12/51”). “Is everybody working?—more than I am, I hope, but I have been so happy that it takes a great deal of getting used to.” And “things just couldn't be better.” Soon Lota appears in nearly every letter, sending love, making witty remarks, or being her energetic self, building their house and a road of stone “that is going to compete with the Appian Way and the Amalfi Drive.”

Bishop's letters from her first years in Brazil express her unabashed enchantment with Lota's household, people and country. She wrote that she had had “no particular interest” in Brazil before going there (a letter not in this book), but suddenly nearly everything became fascinating to her. To Marianne Moore, 1952:

I hope you're having nice weather up in Maine—strange to say it's been rather like Maine weather, or Nova Scotian, here, too—heavy dew in the mornings, deep blue skies, fogs—only they're clouds here—that disappear. I think it is getting warmer now, and that “winter” is over. However my grasp on the seasons is pretty tentative. We have beautiful flowers, and a beautiful vegetable garden. This is the month for one particular small orchid to bloom—“Olhos di Boneca”—“Doll's Eyes”—very delicate, pale lavender, with dark round purple spots in the middle. My Portuguese is progressing slowly because I get so little chance to practice it, all the Brazilians I meet being so fluent in English. But I like it very much—packed with diminutives, augmentatives, endearments, etc. “Buttonholes” are “button-houses.”—Lota calls the workmen “my flower,” “my beauty,” “my son,” etc.—when she isn't calling them names equally preposterous in the other direction. Did I tell you that the janitor in Rio called me “Madame, my daughter”?

(p. 244)

Quoting Darwin's journal, to Pearl Kazin, 1953:

One wonderful bit about how a Brazilian complained that he couldn't understand English Law—the rich and respectable had absolutely no advantage over the poor! It reminds me of Lota's story about a relative, a judge, who used to say, “For my friends, cake! For my enemies, Justice!”

(p. 255)

On the news that she had won the Pulitzer Prize, 1956:

The nicest story is about how Lota went to buy vegetables in the market and our vegetable man asked if it wasn't my picture he'd seen in the papers. She said yes, and then he said it was amazing what good luck his customers had. Just the week before another lady had bought a lottery ticket in the Qui Bom lottery and had won a bicycle.

(p. 318)

Lota (who was always referred to familiarly) was from a patrician family, and lived at the center of Brazilian intellectual and political life. In 1961, she was appointed “Chief Coordinatress” of a massive amusement park, built on miles of landfill in Rio. The creation was exciting but exhausting, and led to Lota's increasing remoteness and intemperateness. Bishop's letters from the mid-1960s begin to break down, then become increasingly desperate. “The park is a tremendous success, really—but there have been times at which I thought it would kill us both.” In 1966 and 1967 Lota was in the midst of a full-blown nervous breakdown, which appears to have included an obsession with Bishop, accusations and blame. To her physician and confidante, Anny Baumann, Bishop wrote:

I'm afraid you thought I was drunk when I called you, but I really wasn't—just closer to hysteria or more hysterical than I have ever been in my life, and although I realized there wasn't much you could do or say all those thousands of miles away, it helped some just to hear you. …

(p. 456)

In September 1967, having flown to meet Bishop in New York, Lota took an overdose of drugs and died at the age of 58. She was the sixth, and most important, person in Bishop's life to have committed suicide.

Bishop never fully recovered from Lota's death. For several years after 1967, her letters are permeated by grief. To Maya Osser, a friend in Brazil, 1968:

I am brokenhearted—those last years were so awful, so exhausting; I didn't behave the way I wish I could have, often, but I didn't realize for a long time … how desperately sick Lota was. You must believe me when I say we loved each other. Other people do not have the right to judge that. She went to sleep in my arms the night of September 17th [their last night together]. There will never be anyone like her in this world or in my life, and I'll never stop missing her—but of course there is that business of “going on living”—one does it, almost unconsciously—something in the cells, I think. …

(p. 491)

Bishop alternated between the US and Brazil for the next five years, but she had lost Brazil when she lost Lota. After 1972, she lived in the US, teaching at Harvard and other places, until her death in 1979.

Even to those who know the Bishop literature well, there are several surprises in these letters. Contrary to popular conception, Bishop was not rich, and worried about money frequently. The sheer number and variety of her illnesses and accidents is staggering: she begins to rival Hemingway at times. Perhaps as a consequence, she appears to have taken quite a lot of drugs, including consciousness-altering ones. Because Giroux prints for the first time a number of letters to Anny Baumann, the details of Bishop's alcoholism and asthma are more clearly delineated than ever before. But most important, because Giroux always chooses letters that discuss what Bishop was reading or explain or relate to her poetry or prose, her thinking and work as a whole are brought into focus much more clearly than they have been before.

Not that I don't have some quibbles. As Margo Jefferson remarked in a review in the New York Times, Robert Giroux doesn't edit the letters, he “chaperones” them. His editing is in most cases beautifully sensitive and tactful—he gives the reader an informational note just when one is desired. But his selection is also slightly too gracious and chivalric. His is a deliberate presentation of Bishop as A Great Poet (which she was, to be sure); one can almost see Bishop being elevated higher in the canon by it.

Giroux's presentation is irritating for being largely ungendered and almost completely unsexed. Bishop is presented as a wonderfully charming, intelligent and sensitive lady, but she appears as a lady rather than as a woman. And (except for the relationship with Lota, which is unavoidable), nearly everything related to Bishop's Lesbianism is excised. She appears to be a woman almost without libido. Although Giroux identifies Louise Crane, Lota and others as Bishop's lovers, he avoids as much as possible including notes or letters that offer information about who she was involved with when, what these relationships were like, or what they meant to her work.

There are several points in the letters where Bishop's comments are simply inexplicable, or remain untextured, unless one reads with Brett C. Millier's recent biography firmly at one's elbow, reading that with a fine-toothed comb for events and dates. For example, one needs to know that Bishop wrote “One Art,” one of her greatest poems, in the fall of 1975, after her lover Alice Methfessel left her (temporarily, as it turned out). Giroux includes the letter to Anny Baumann in which Bishop talks about “my saddest problem,” and other letters in which Bishop sounds heartbroken, but it is impossible to know what is upsetting her without consulting Millier.

In another letter, Bishop says that she wants her purchase of a house in Ouro Prêto to be kept secret, which seems an odd request unless one reads Millier to find that she was having an affair with Lilli Correia de Araújo in Ouro Prêto, and that her purchase of a house there would instantly reveal the fact to Lota. (Lota apparently did find out about the affair, and of course the house, later.) At another point, Bishop appears to have had a falling out with Randall Jarrell, but neither Giroux nor Millier explains this. (In Becoming a Poet, David Kalstone suggests that it was due to the fact that Bishop's reaction to Jarrell's novel Pictures from an Institution was insufficiently positive.) Finally, at the time of Lota's breakdown, when she was accusing Bishop of lying about drinking and other things, and Bishop talks in her letters about being at fault, we have to go to Millier to find out that she was unfaithful to Lota with at least two women, that Lota knew about these affairs and that her accusations appear to have had at least some kernel of truth.

Finally, a question: is Elizabeth Bishop the only poet in the history of the world never to have written a love letter? It is true that many of the letters were destroyed, particularly her letters to Lota and to an early lover, Marjorie Stevens. But it is not clear that no love letters survive. It seems more likely that if there are any, Giroux or the estate chose not to print them. The exclusion of materials relating to Bishop's Lesbianism strikes me as deplorably homophobic. Bishop is out of the closet as to her asthma and alcoholism, and critics have explored these in order better to read her poems. It is appalling that doing the same thing with her Lesbianism is still made so difficult.

Bishop would have hated The Geography of Gender. She told her writing students “NOT to read criticism,” she appears to have felt that most criticism about her work (except for Jarrell's) was either too much or just wrong (see an interesting letter to Jerome Mazzaro, Letters, p. 621, and pp. 638-639) and she was clearly horrified when someone told her she was going to Brazil to “find out” about her.

Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender is a collection of criticism by various hands that displays both the vices and virtues of much contemporary criticism. It is full of theorizing and jargon; it is also sophisticated and smart. Bishop, together with other women writers, suffered through much of her career from the diminutizing intent of much phallocentric criticism—her modesty and delicacy were condescendingly praised, and so on. The Geography of Gender aims to challenge that approach, and collects in one place nearly all the most important recent work on Bishop by scholars—not poets—who see her as, simply, a major American writer.

Since most of the writers are explicitly feminist in their terms, I was surprised at how often I was disappointed by this collection. It seems that feminism in the heads of academics is somewhat different from feminism, shall we say, “on the ground.” In many cases, I expected, and hoped for, a more explicit political reading of Bishop than I got. Adrienne Rich is quoted over and over again, and is credited, in the introduction, with “mark[ing] the shift in thinking about Bishop's poetics and person that has led to this present collection.” Rich wrote, in 1983, that she was concerned with Bishop's “experience of outsiderhood … linked with the essential outsiderhood of a lesbian identity; and with how the outsider's eye enables Bishop to perceive other kinds of outsiders to identify, or try to identify, with them.” She called for us to read Bishop “as part of a female and lesbian tradition,” and as a poet “who was critically and consciously trying to explore marginality, power and powerlessness, often in poetry of great beauty.” But while nearly everyone in this collection quotes Rich, almost no one follows her suggestions.

For example, while there is a good deal of placing of Bishop within the female tradition, particularly in relation to her predecessor and mentor Marianne Moore (see the essays by Thomas Travisano and Barbara Page), Joanne Feit Diehl's essay reads Bishop against a background mostly of men—“Emerson and his heirs.” While Diehl talks about how Bishop “swerved away” from the American Romantic tradition, she doesn't get to what she swerved toward—which is what Rich suggested we look at. (Diehl has written about “the female tradition” elsewhere.)

Similarly disappointing is Lorrie Goldensohn's essay, “The Body's Roses: Race, Sex and Gender in Elizabeth Bishop's Representations of the Self.” Because Bishop lived in the American South and in Brazil, regions predominantly of color, and because the most important relationship of her life was with a Brazilian woman she often described as “brown” or “black”—although Lota Macedo de Soares was ostensibly Caucasian—and because race is often touched on in Bishop's work, the subject of race cries out for serious discussion. But in her essay Goldensohn doesn't get much beyond referring to people of color as “the other”—a trendy way of remaining mired in whiteness, in bafflement and fear.

Reading Bishop as a Lesbian poet is almost impossible for these critics. Jeredith Merrin's essay, “Elizabeth Bishop: Gaiety, Gayness, and Change,” which promises so much, again fails to deliver. Almost as soon as she mentions the word “lesbian,” she hastens to assure us that she is not interested in sensationalism or in segregating Bishop as a “lesbian poet.” Then she makes an even more distancing move, commenting that Bishop's poems “continue to appeal to a wide audience”—as if Lesbian poetry cannot—and instantly redefining “gaiety” as “play.” Although play is often marked as one element in a possible Gay or Lesbian tradition, it hardly sums it up—and I don't think this is what Rich means by one; she means a more pointedly political tradition of outsiderhood to heterosexual culture.

To my mind, the two best essays in this book are by Lee Edelman and Jacqueline Vaught Brogan. Perhaps significantly, Bishop has tended to receive her most cogent criticism from Gay men (except for Rich, Lesbians have not been visible on the scene), and Edelman's essay, from which the book takes its title, is both brilliant and defining. He charges most critics with reading Bishop too literally, “almost as if she were a novelist.” He argues that “even admirers of Bishop's work have tended to ignore the rigor of her intellect, the range of her allusiveness, the complexity of her tropes.” He proceeds to read Bishop not as a simple species of truth-teller but as a writer, and in the process makes a case for her greatness that is quite convincing. In Bishop's late poem “In the Waiting Room,” Bishop as a little girl sits in the dentist's waiting room, looking at pictures of African women in the National Geographic (“their breasts were horrifying”). This poem is often read nauseatingly in this book, until I wished that she had never written about those “awful hanging breasts.” Edelman reads it smartly and precisely, as follows:

The horror that “Elizabeth” feels betokens her perception of the monstrosity, the abnormality that informs the given or “norm” of sexuality. Sexuality itself, she has discovered, is always constituted as a system of signs that must operate through the substitution of figures; consequently, it is neither a “natural” system nor an inevitable one. Yet within the patriarchal order the “normal” figurations of female sexuality take the form of literal disfigurations. … And what most horrifies “Elizabeth” as she focuses on the breasts of these monstrous or disfigured women is her recognition of the fundamental affinity she shares with them. … It is finally this resemblance, which is to say, the relationship of metaphoric interchangeability, that horrifies “Elizabeth.” At last she must recognize fully what is at stake in the dismantling of binary oppositions, for the reader and what she reads collapse into one another as “Elizabeth” finds herself located by the text, inside the text, and as a text.

(pp. 103-104)

Edelman's essay recognizes Bishop as a deeply subversive writer, one who challenged imperatives of gender and sexuality, who “wages war against the reduction of woman to the status of literal figure,” who “makes a war cry to unleash the textuality that rips the fabric of the cultural text.” His language could use an infusion of humility, and his argument is as difficult as they come, but on rereading it resonates for me as right.

Jacqueline Vaught Brogan is almost the only writer in this book to take up Rich's charge directly and read Bishop politically, as a writer who challenges the status quo. Her essay, “Elizabeth Bishop: Perversity as Voice,” argues that

Bishop uses her own lyrics … to expose the lyric voice itself, with its implicit and traditional associations with authenticity, originality, and authority, as a manifestation of a traditionally dominant (and dominating) phallic poetics. That is, her lyrics undermine the essentially logocentric and equally phallocentric belief in that “constructive faculty” that “orders” chaos into meaning.

(pp. 176-177)

Bishop's short early poem “Quai d'Orléans” is a description of a barge on the river Seine and the leaves in its wake (“for life we'll not be rid / of the leaves' fossils”). Brogan reads this as a “highly subversive text that is engaged in re-marking, if not violating, the terms and intent of this male canon.” She is one of the few writers in this collection who reads Bishop consistently as a conscious resister of things as they are, and as a conscious maker of oppositional texts.

“We write and rewrite literary history. It becomes increasingly clear, the more we know about Elizabeth Bishop, that she makes us describe poetry in a different light,” David Kalstone wrote in Becoming a Poet. Years after his death, he remains one of the very best writers on Bishop. The publication of Bishop's letters will make many readers return to her poetry, or discover it anew, and many will wish again that she had lived longer, and written more. There remain many tantalizing fragments in her papers, particularly Elegy, the projected book-length poem about Lota that only existed in outline at Bishop's death. For this reason one may hope that the estate's next project will be the publication of Bishop's working notebooks. In the meantime and for a long time, we have the letters, which can take their place, along with those of Emily Dickinson and John Keats, as part of literature.