If Molière is right, and everything that isn't verse is prose, and everything that isn't prose is verse, then, with The Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop (companion-volume to The Complete Poems, out last year, from the same publisher), we shall have seen all we shall ever get to see of this wonderful author's work…. If the excellence of the Prose is quite unsurprising, then it should only be observed that it is not a separate excellence from that of the poems.

The virtues of the prose are the virtues of the poems: observation, wit, decorum, a sinuous intelligence and above all what Randall Jarrell called her 'moral attractiveness'—no abuse, no indiscretion, no protests. If this sounds prim, it isn't: it's only an indication of how far things have gone the other way…. The prose is odd and pleasant and sympathetic…. The subjects are largely those familiar from the poems: her family, her native Nova Scotia, life by the shores of the Atlantic, in Massachusetts and Brazil, paintings, human portraits and 'questions of travel'. The aller-et-retour form of many of the poems is discernible in some of the prose, in 'To the Botequim and Back' and 'A Trip to Vigia'. Sometimes, there are detailed correspondences between the poems and the prose: it is the same scene from childhood in 'The Country Mouse' and 'In the Waiting Room'. Or correspondences of genre: the realistically elaborated story 'The Sea and Its Shore' is charmed from its hypothetical premise in just the same way as 'The Man-Moth' from its newspaper misprint. Both are abstract fantasies indebted, it seems to me, to Kafka. Or again, one might identify two distinct styles in Bishop, in her prose as in her poems: a loose, probing, 'spoken' style and a stately 'high style', literary, fixed, almost artificial, hinting at Victorian prose and at Defoe. These similarities and others make the division of Bishop's prose into the two categories 'Memory' and 'Stories' rather factitious: after all, no such division is made among her poems.

If one imagined a square with admiration and sympathy, amusement and dignity as its four corners, the whole of Elizabeth Bishop's work would be situated inside it. Take for instance the account of only her second meeting with Marianne Moore, an outing to the circus at Madison Square Garden. Miss Moore was carrying.

two huge brown paper bags, full of something I was given one of these. They contained, she told me, stale brown bread for the elephants, because stale brown bread was one of the things they liked best to eat. (I later suspected that they might like stale white bread just as much but that Marianne had been thinking of their health.)

In a way, the scene is 'a gift', just as the remarkable Miss Moore and her mother are 'a gift', but how easy it would have been to collapse it into sentimental farce. Instead, all the parties involved, and not least the elephants, whose wishes are solicitously though never intrusively guessed at, are treated with the utmost respect—a smiling respect, though, not stiffness or stuffiness. Elizabeth Bishop marries generosity of spirit with generosity of style ('one of the things', 'just as much'): how well her memoir earns its title—itself an acknowledged and admired borrowing from Miss Moore—'Efforts of Affection'.

It is this kind of tact and attention—one should perhaps call it grace—that is maintained throughout this collection, and makes it so delightful and rewarding. Whenever it really matters to her, Elizabeth Bishop has the ability to procure for herself the reader's utter, unreserved belief, most obviously when she is writing, as a child, about her childhood. This, just as fraught with difficulties as the type of scene with Miss Moore, is managed with equal assurance. It is, I think, because Bishop is always so committed to the moment and the scene she is describing, and free from any ulterior purpose, that she is both so engaging and so trustworthy. (pp. 33-4)

There is so much more I would like to say about her: her ingenuity, her freakishness, her tendency to personify objects and places (another sign of generosity, for she doesn't do the opposite and reify people in the way, say, Dickens does), the wonderfully candid way she allows herself to be scrutinised and laughed at, just as she, in her writing, laughs and scrutinises. The freedom of her manner: 'he gave me his name and asked me to print it; here it is: Manoel Benicio de Loyola, "diamond-hunter of Curralinho".' The way virtue and virtuosity seem to be inextricably bound up in her work: Miss Mamie in 'Mercedes Hospital' who 'has the local reputation of a saint'…. I have helplessly and purposely left out of my account all mention of Elizabeth Bishop's masterpiece 'In the Village' that concludes [The Complete Prose], which, even without it, would be wholly admirable. If only there were another to come. (p. 34)