SOURCE: Shetley, Vernon. “On Elizabeth Bishop.” Raritan 14, no. 3 (winter 1995): 151-63.

[In the following essay, Shetley examines One Art: Letters against the surge of interest in Bishop's life and work.]

Elizabeth Bishop apparently urged most of her correspondents to hold on to her letters, though more out of a desire that they get a good price when they sold them, than out of a sense of writerly pride. Part of the charm of her letters is their unselfconsciousness; vividly and memorably written as they are, they seem throughout offhand, spontaneous, the writing of a woman who had no sense of posterity looking over her shoulder. Poetry, for Bishop, was different; though her poems, too, often give an impression of casualness and spontaneity, we know that she was a perfectionist, often working on a poem for years before considering it finished. She promised, in 1956, to send her Aunt Grace a copy of “The Moose” when it was completed, a promise fulfilled only sixteen years later. Bishop, then, might have demurred a little at the title editor Robert Giroux has given this selection of her letters. One Art stands, Giroux explains in his introduction, for both the art of poetry and the art of letter writing, Bishop's productions in the latter of which arts “constitute her autobiography.” For Giroux, Bishop's poetry and her letters (and so, by implication, her life) form a seamless unity. That unity is implied as well by the subtitle of Brett Millier's biography (drawn from Bishop's “Poem”), Life and the Memory of It, and assumed by many of the critics who have contributed to the extraordinary recent surge of interest in Bishop's life and work.

Indeed, perhaps the most surprising aspect of the canonizing activity now in progress is the way that Bishop's life has come to seem, to readers of very different persuasions, the key to her poetry, or even to have displaced the poetry as the chief focus of interest. Part of this heightened attention to biography has to do with the academic demand for archival novelty; partly it's to be attributed to the enlightened and efficient stewardship of Alice Methfessel, Bishop's literary executor, which has made Bishop's papers easily available for study and quotation. Still, the intensity of the interest in Bishop the woman seems to exceed those explanations. More than one devotee has undertaken a pilgrimage to Brazil, visiting the houses where Bishop lived, speaking to the people whom she knew there, finally coming away with a piece of the true cross: an unpublished poem, a notebook, an untold anecdote. One of the forthcoming books is an oral biography, co-compiled by Peter Brazeau, whose previous subject was Wallace Stevens. Alongside the steady stream of critical articles that marks the arrival of Bishop studies as an academic industry, numerous memoirs of the poet, by friends and former students, have appeared. And the revaluation of the poetry currently under way, a revaluation from which Bishop seems destined to emerge as perhaps the major poet of the postwar America, seems closely tied to a reformulation of critical views, away from a view of description as the central project of her writing, and toward a view of her as an autobiographer.

Bishop's life then, has somehow become exemplary, a development that would surely have astonished the poet, prone as she was to expressions of dissatisfaction with what she'd made of that life, and eccentric as she seemed, to herself and others, in the literary world of her times. In an interview with George Starbuck a few years before her death she remarks “I wish I had written a great deal more. … I've wasted a great deal of time.” Early and late, her letters frequently break out into self-reproaches and vows of reform; she pledges to work harder, complain less, stop drinking. Her residence in Brazil, her maintenance of certain forms of poetic decorum at a time when they were being energetically abandoned by most of her contemporaries, and her avoidance of both the political and the confessional made her stand apart from what was then the poetic mainstream. In his study of American poetry since the 1950s, The Psycho-Political Muse, Paul Breslin remarked that “when the smoke clears, some poet like Elizabeth Bishop who simply resisted the whole pull of the age may seem the best of our time.” The smoke is beginning to lift, and Breslin's prophecy, which he didn't quite believe himself, is apparently coming true. A misfit in her own time, Bishop seems to belong to ours.

If Bishop's life is exemplary, what does it exemplify? A sentence from Millier's preface may begin to suggest an answer: “Her whole life demonstrates [the] task … of trying to discover how to get along spiritually and morally in a world where everything seems compromised.” One of those things that seems compromised is the vocation of poetry, and so those elements of her life and work that made her unplaceable on the maps of postwar poetic practice have become exactly those that certify her uncompromised status. Bishop's life seems to combine a thorough and conscientious dedication to poetry with an almost complete absence of professionalism; though she won almost every award and grant available to an American poet of her generation, she maintained a healthy distance from the network of self-promotion and exchanged favors that increasingly came to define the poetry world, and she took up teaching only late in life. But Bishop's life has become exemplary, too, insofar as it can be privileged over her poetry, in ways that the poetry seems to invite. The apparent casualness of her work, the modesty of its claims, its seeming transparency to the world it describes, have led a number of her recent critics to describe Bishop's as an art of the intimate and everyday, scaled to the diminished world we inhabit, a natural and continuous extension of the life.

This is surely part of the impression Randall Jarrell meant to communicate by comparing her to Vuillard and Vermeer, comparisons that delighted Bishop. But we should perhaps keep in mind, as Jarrell no doubt did, that in Vuillard's interiors people are constantly threatened with being absorbed into the wallpaper, and that Vermeer was not only an artist of the small-scale and quotidian, but also a profound thinker about the nature and possibility of representation, and an artist who had a disturbing way of painting the human figure as if it were nature morte. For Millier, the phrase “life and the memory of it” provides Bishop's endorsement of a direct and seamless linkage between the two. In its context, however, that endorsement may begin to seem less than complete. The phrase occurs twice, in the final section of “Poem,” a poem that describes a small painting by the poet's uncle:

life and the memory of it so compressed
they've turned into each other. Which is which?
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board. …

The first appearance of the phrase reads straightforwardly enough, but the second is heavily qualified, and reminds us of the material ground within which life and memory meet, the board on which the painting is painted. Throughout the poem, the poet's attention has shuttled back and forth between represented objects and brush strokes; for the speaker, the painter's art both enables and obstructs access to the remembered scene. And the poem closes with a mention of the “yet-to-be-dismantled elms,” a reminder that the painting's permanence, the impression it gives of encapsulating life, is won by its belonging to the changeless order of death, as opposed to the living landscape, whose life is paradoxically signaled by its vulnerability to death, the blight that has destroyed the elms in the gap of time between the painting's creation and the poem's. Many of Bishop's current readers are attracted to the notion of a poetry that is like life, more specifically like Bishop's life; Bishop's poems about art constantly remind us of the uncanny, deathlike nature of the art object.

.....

Brett Millier's biography presents a Bishop abstracted from the compromised world by a canny skepticism, and by the several kinds of distance, social, sexual, geographic, that characterized her life. At some points Millier tries perhaps too hard to remove Bishop from the pressures of her times. Traveling in Spain in April 1936, she was shocked and saddened by the wanton destruction of churches in the areas under Popular Front control; she expressed her outrage in a letter to a friend, Hallie Tompkins Thomas: “If you really want to see what the Communists are up to, what beautiful things they have ruined, you should come here. The prettiest Baroque chapel in Seville has just been saved from burning up.” Asked to write a poem about the Rosenbergs in 1956, Bishop expressed herself even more strongly: “I believe that the Rosenbergs were a wretched pair of dupes and traitors, and that the hysterical and hypocritical excitement whipped up by the Communist party about their trial and deaths was just one more example, a particularly unsavoury one, of the aims and methods of that party.” Strong words, rather too strong for Millier's picture of the poet's wise detachment, and she hastens to brush them aside: “[Bishop's] dislike of ‘Communists’ stemmed from her naive experience of the likes of burned churches, and that was all.” Millier rescues Bishop for our approbation by painting her as a political innocent, but the rescue may be worse than the peril. Whether one shares Bishop's politics or not, dismissing them as “naive” does little to help us understand a set of subjects about which Bishop cared deeply, regardless of how little politics as such obtruded into her poetry.

Neither of the letters from which I've quoted above, bearing on her attitude toward Communism, appear in One Art. Giroux's selection emphasizes the domestic Bishop, intimate and everyday. Indeed, the edition encourages, or rather assumes, intimacy between its readers and Bishop in ways that ultimately become annoying. Giroux provides headnotes identifying the recipients of the letters, but no annotations, so the reader several times encounters a peculiar situation in which Bishop mentions someone who becomes a recipient of her letters, and so rates an identification, only several pages later. The absence of annotations produces little frustrations all along the way. Who was the actress friend who, after a year of understudying Jessica Tandy, suddenly has her moment center stage? Who is the “Andy” whose book Bishop so enjoyed at Cabo Frio in the Christmas season of 1962? Giroux describes an item addressed to Robie Macauley in 1978 as “this famous letter,” but I have to confess that its fame had entirely escaped me, and it seems rather curious to term a text that is being published for the first time “famous.” Macauley had recently moved to Bishop's neighborhood, the North End of Boston; the letter consists of a referral for a cleaning woman, and a lengthy set of shopping recommendations:

(3) Guiffre's Fish Market—on the end of Salem Street, or corner, before the expressway. They're very nice there, too. (4) Halfway down Parmenter St., on the left—between Hanover & Salem, is a nice vegetable store. On that corner of Salem St. is Polcari's Coffee Shop (not a café)—where you can get all kinds of things—teas, coffees, spices, etc.—jars of a wonderful Italian mixture of chocolate & hazelnuts, for desserts for friends with a sweet tooth, etc.—(5) Also on Salem St.—one of the Martignetti's—booze and groceries—their soda, Coke, etc., is the cheapest. (6) Drago's Bakery—1st left off Fleet St.—North St.—the round breads aren't so good, but the long ones, flutes, etc., are the best—but they're apt to be all sold out by four o'clock.

And so on. If you know the neighborhood, all this has a certain interest, but singling out this letter for special attention indicates a peculiar attitude toward its author. It's hard to imagine why anyone should think it extraordinary that Bishop shopped, preferred good things to bad, and liked to buy cheaply when she could. Almost anyone who still lives in a real neighborhood could probably write a similar letter.

Fewer and fewer of us, though, live in real neighborhoods, and it seems that part of what Bishop represents, for many of her readers, is some vital link to a past imagined as richer than a diminished present. Bishop belongs to the last generation of poets to have grown up with a sufficiently close relation to the natural world as to have absorbed without study the names of the trees, birds, and flowers; when a contemporary poet, like Robert Hass, has all the names at hand, the effect, while often marvelous, feels like something of a stunt. Bishop was aware of her anachronism in this regard; she once remarked that “I'm really a minor female Wordsworth—at least, I don't know anyone else who seems to be such a Nature Lover.” In “manners” too (a term she uses as the title of one of her poems), taken in the broad sense, the poet felt herself to belong to an earlier generation. Though she grew up in many places, Bishop's memories of childhood focused on the time she spent with her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a place that seemed alarmingly backward to her American grandparents, of Worcester, Massachusetts. The poem “Manners” presents a loving portrait of her Canadian grandfather, whose humane precepts the child imbibes as she rides with him on a horse-drawn wagon:

My grandfather said to me,
as we sat on the wagon seat,
“Be sure to remember to always
speak to everyone you meet.”

But within the poem we encounter a warning that the child will grow up in a world where the manners of her grandfather's age are threatened with obsolescence:

When automobiles went by,
the dust hid the people's faces,
but we shouted “Good day! Good day!
Fine day!” at the top of our voices.

The pair “faces/voices” is the first, and only, half-rhyme in the poem; it provides an auditory emblem of the breaking of human relation precipitated by the technologies of modern life, and it reminds us that the poetic world which this child would inhabit as an adult would be as fully transformed as the material world.

Bishop's long residence in Brazil, from 1952 through 1967, spanned a time of enormous transformation in American society. Brazil gave her a new and exotic realm on which to exercise her famous powers of observation, at the same time that her rustication in Petrópolis, and later Ouro Prêto, recalled her Great Village youth in its isolation and technological simplicity. Bishop wrote to Kit and Ilse Barker from Petrópolis in 1952 that “the social life up here where I am is very limited … we go to bed to read at 9:30, surrounded by oil lamps, dogs, moths, mice, bloodsucking bats, etc.” Some of the most amusing letters in the collection are those written shortly after Bishop's return to the United States, when she was living with a younger woman in San Francisco. Having left America when postwar prosperity and the baby boom were both in their earliest stages, she found her simultaneous encounter with the consumer revolution and youth culture both fascinating and disturbing. She mentions the “wonderful machines, new to me, where for a dime you can copy anything in a split second,” and reports that “at first when I went to the Supermarket I spent hours because I wanted to read what it said on all the packages.” But though she liked some rock and roll, and even attended a Janis Joplin concert, the fragmentary draft of an essay on rock music from which Millier quotes shows the poet in a mood of Adornoesque gloom:

All gone—the sexual quality of the human voice and all its infinite … appeals caresses even gratitudes, and so on—none of that. … It is hard to imagine any delicate sex-play—flirtation. … All has been transferred to a machine—so it is so that amplification … has become the emotional or non-emotional part of music—it is a fucking machine.

I'm not aware of any other moment in Bishop's writing, published or unpublished, in which appears the obscenity she employs here—her encounter with the sixties seems to have momentarily defeated even Bishop's powerful sense of decorum.

If, both to herself and to readers, Bishop at times seemed to belong to the past, she also, from our vantage, appears to have belonged to the future, the one we now inhabit. Robert Lowell's “breakthrough” to the new style of Life Studies was famously facilitated by Bishop's work. Some time in 1957, Lowell reported, his poems began to seem to him “like prehistoric monsters”; rereading Bishop “suggested a way of breaking through the shell of my old manner.” By “old” here Lowell surely meant both “earlier” and “old-fashioned”; for him Bishop's poetry represented a colloquial lightness and apparent casualness that made for a greater contemporaneity. Lowell, however, never adopted the attitude that informed Bishop's style, which had to do, fundamentally, with her response to the steady diminishment of poetry's stature in the culture at large. Poets like Lowell and Berryman on the one hand, and Ginsberg on the other, responded to that diminishment with a kind of bardic overkill, furiously asserting, through explicit or implicit means, the importance of poetic vision and poetic vocation to a world that was less and less willing to grant their claims. “Art just isn't worth that much” Bishop admonished Lowell, dismayed by his use, in The Dolphin (1972), of personal letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick. Bishop's placing the claims of humanity and decency above those of art was of a piece with her acceptance of the contracted cultural space poetry had come to occupy, and within her own writing she shied away from the assertive stances that characterized Lowell's work even after the transformation of his style marked by Life Studies.

The modesty of the claims it puts forward, the absence in it of the egotism that is taken to characterize, in different ways, the chief products of romanticism and modernism, is a trait that today seems to be almost universally admired in Bishop's work. Eavan Boland's description of Bishop as “un-Romantic,” by which she contrasts Bishop's perception of a universe that stands apart from, detached from human consciousness, to the romantic notion of the intimate relation between mind and world, is frequently cited in recent criticism of the poet. This characterization in fact derives from David Kalstone's distinction between Bishop's “The Armadillo” and Lowell's “Skunk Hour,” which was stimulated by Bishop's poem and dedicated to her. In Kalstone's view “[Bishop] documents a prior creation, in contrast to Lowell's stubborn and impressive refusal to believe in a world prior to his own.” Recent academic critics seem to have preferred Boland's formulation because they are less willing to grant the impressiveness of Lowell's refusals. Indeed, Bishop's work has become for academic critics a prime weapon to wield against the egotistical Sublime, and the baggage of phallocracy, hierarchy, and colonialism that is now assumed to come with it.

The best recent work on Bishop, such as Lee Edelman's essay on “In the Waiting Room,” honors the fluidity and evasiveness that characterize her poetry through close attention to the texture of the writing. Less patient critics have tended to produce visions of Bishop significantly less murky, troubled, and conflicted than the figure revealed by Edelman's sensitive explorations. Marilyn May Lombardi, in the introduction to the collection of essays she has edited, Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, approvingly summarizes the argument of one of her contributors: “Bishop wins a distance from her precursor poets by interrogating the sexual dialectic at the heart of the Sublime.” But that summary if anything understates the claims staked by the essay itself: “Bishop's poems aim at nothing short of freedom from the inherently dualistic tradition that lies not only at the foundations of the American Sublime but at the very heart of the Western literary tradition.”

Through many of the essays in Lombardi's volume, the bizarre sentimentality that now governs much of academic literary study resounds: Bishop “refused … to be contained within any culturally prescribed notion of gender or sexual orientation”; Bishop's work exhibits “a fluidity of gender that does away with rigid, heterosexist categories”; Bishop “questions not only the dominant phallic perspective of our culture but its corollary political categories, hierarchies, and prejudices.” At times all this recalls Paul Breslin's explanation of why stones became the heroes of American poetry in the 1970s: “They have never discriminated against blacks or destroyed Vietnamese villages, never deceived themselves with a clever argument or capitulated to social convention.” Stones, that is, are outside of culture, and the poet that these critics describe would be too. Bishop was a lucid and skeptical observer, who constantly sought out new and unsettling perspectives. But it's hard to know which is more bizarre, the idea that Bishop succeeded in stepping outside of all known categories and traditions, or the idea the she would have wanted to, or that such a thing is possible, or desirable in the first place.

For one sort of reader, then, Bishop is valued because she embodies the past, through her craftsmanship and decorum; for another sort of reader she embodies the present, an era in which we have less faith in poetry and more in certain quasi-ideological criteria which Bishop's poems can be made to fit. For both kinds of reader, Bishop has become a peculiar kind of secular saint: an autobiographer without ego. Perhaps the best antidote to such a view is simply to read the letters, however much Giroux's selection has smoothed off Bishop's rough edges. The person that emerges from the letters, and indeed from the poems, is enormously sympathetic—witty, humane, sly, generous—but the principle of self is hardly inactive in her. She enjoyed praise and was upset by criticism; she never pretended to be above reading the reviews of her books. I think particularly of Bishop's first letter to Lowell, in which she interrupts her complaint about a bad review (“that silly piece”) for one of the many marvelous, vivid pieces of reporting that fill her correspondence:

Heavens, it is an hour later—I was called out to see a calf being born in the pasture beside the house. In five minutes after several falls on its nose, it was standing up shaking its head & tail & trying to nurse. They took it away from its mother almost immediately & carried it struggling in a wheelbarrow to the barn—we've just been watching it trying to lie down. Once up, it didn't know how to get down again & finally fell in a heap. Now it seems to be trying not to go to sleep.

But after this paragraph she returned to finish her sentence about the bad notice. She could be cutting at times; recounting a reading at a rally for striking teachers in 1969, she mentioned that “Muriel Rukeyser, whom I hadn't seen for many years, was there and really (to be bitchy) looked just like my idea of a Mexican opera star of about 1922.” And perhaps the need to conserve her strength so as to weather the losses in her own life may explain the sometimes chilly emotional temperature that registers in her letters; she responded to the news of the suicide of Calvin Kentfield, a friend whom she had met during her stay at Yaddo, by remarking “I do wish people I know would stop committing suicide.”

Reports indicate that Bishop, on first acquaintance, tended to produce an impression of great reserve, and these letters do remind us that she once termed herself “the loneliest person who ever lived.” Bishop's reserve, though, was accompanied throughout her life by dependency; she always needed other people to handle the business of living, to protect her from the world, and from herself. For a while, a dozen years or so, her relationship with her Brazilian lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, provided the poet with the paradoxical combination she needed of isolation and nurture. Indeed, though Bishop's love with Lota ended in tragedy, the tragedy was really of neither's making, and the story holds out the hope, to those who inhabit a truly great loneliness, that there might be someone out there who can remedy that isolation, even if to find her you may have to move to another country, and come close to death. The love between Lota and Elizabeth flowered while Lota took care of the poet after she experienced a severe allergic reaction to eating cashew fruit. After Lota's death Bishop found a phrase in her will that she took to indicate that Lota had come to New York in 1967 with the intention of committing suicide, but perhaps Lota, at some level, wanted no more than to recreate the situation of their first falling in love, as a way of restoring their relationship: one woman arriving in the other's country, immediately becoming seriously ill, and being nursed back to health, and love, by the other.

One definition of a major poet, perhaps the only workable definition we have, is one whose most ambitious poems are also her best, and Bishop fits that definition as well as any poet of her generation. Though these letters are marvelous reading, they tell us little, in the end, about how Bishop came to experience that good fortune. For reasons that aren't explained in the volume, One Art fails to include Bishop's letters to Anne Stevenson, author of the only book on Bishop to appear in her lifetime. Bishop wrote Stevenson a number of letters about poetry, her own work, and her development as a writer; the one extended quotation from these letters Stevenson provides in her book is fascinating, and culminates in a sentence that illuminates Bishop's work as much as anything that's been written about it: “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” Even if those letters had been included, however, they might not take us much closer to understanding this complex and enigmatic figure. Perhaps all of us who read Bishop should keep in mind a passage from a letter to Lilli Correia de Araújo quoted by Millier, recounting a New Year's Eve party shortly after she arrived in Seattle for her first teaching job in 1966:

It's so funny—I go around so sedate and neat and sober (yes—absolutely), all in black last night, my new Esmerelda dress—everyone treats me with such respect and calls me Miss B—and every once in a while I feel a terrible laugh starting down in my chest—also a feeling of great pride because nobody knows.—And how different I am from what they think.

Bishop concealed herself because of the various pains and shames in her life, but also, as this passage indicates, because it gave her pleasure, a terrible pleasure, marked by a “terrible laugh,” but pleasure nevertheless. We should be careful of supposing that we know Bishop—as either woman or poet—better than we can.