Delmore in an unpressed mustard gabardine, a little winded, husky voiced, unhealthy, but with a carton of varied vitamin bottles, the color of oil, quickening with Jewish humor, and in-the-knowness, and his own genius, every person, every book—motives for everything, Freud in his blood, great webs of causation, then suspicion, then rushes of rage. He was more reasonable than us, but obsessed, a much better mind, but one already chasing the dust—it was like living with a sluggish, sometimes angry spider—no hurry, no motion, Delmore’s voice, almost inaudible, dead, intuitive, pointing somewhere, then the strings tightening, the roar of rage—too much, too much for us!
This is hammer work, a hammer on the piano or a hammer on the drums; Bishop makes writing seem like breathing.
If one leaves the sheltered hunting grounds of literature—as to an extent we have already—then the differences grow still more apparent. Bishop likes strong Brazilian coffee, Lowell drinks American dishwater coffee (or tea, sometimes he’s not sure). Bishop is the one who brings in words—desmarcar, “when you want to get out of an engagement,” or “found a lovely word at Jane Dewey’s—you probably know it—ALLELOMIMETIC. (Don’t DARE use it!),” and she is the one, too, whose work requires a dictionary: “Dearest Elizabeth: It was fun looking up echolalia (again), chromograph, gesso, and roadstead—they all mean pretty much what I thought. Oh and taboret, an object I’ve known all my life, but not the name.” It’s as though these correspondents have separate vocabularies! And of course separate lives, or rather—to put it a little too brusquely—one life as well: hers. She is the one who travels on freighters, who likes bullfighting, whose “favorite eye-shadow—for years—suddenly comes in 3 cakes in a row and one has to work much harder at it and use all one’s skill to avoid iridescence…” (I belatedly realize what a strangely Hemingwayesque collocation this is). It’s not just that Lowell didn’t do these things, but that even if he had done them, it seems probable that they would have been wasted on him. He after all was at different times in three European cities—Florence, Amsterdam, and London—and was reminded in all three of them of Boston. Meantime, from Boston, his Boston, she wrote him in 1971: “It is nice autumn weather—the ivy turns bright colors but the trees just an unpleasant yellow. On the library steps I realized the whole place smelt exactly like a cold, opened, and slightly rotten watermelon—.” It is hard not to contrast this gift to him of his own place with his hard, raptorlike, plaid-golfing-slacks announcement: “We would like to come and see you and then rapidly a little more of South America.”
A great majority of the arresting and beautiful observations in this book are Bishop’s, and one’s sense of the book as a whole is largely conditioned by her part of it. From tiny sparkling details like the salutation “Dear Lowellzinhos” or the signing off “recessively yours,” to a charming haikulike sentence on a postcard from Italy, “Lovely weather—green wheat, wild-flowers, swallows, a ruin with a big fox,” that is like a fast-forward of the creation, it seems she is always good for a vivid and pell-mell and noticing transcription—if not, to use I think it was Derek Mahon’s Joycean neologism, “danscription”—of the natural world that is a match for anything in her poetry:
All the flowering trees are in blossom, delicate patches of color all up the mountains, and nearer to they glisten with little floating webs of mist, gold spider-webs, iridescent butterflies—this is the season for the big pale blue-silver floppy ones, hopelessly impractical, frequently frayed, in vague couples. They hover over our little pool, and pink blossoms fall into it, and there are so many dragonflies—some invisible except as dots of white or ruby red or bright blue plush or velvet—then they catch the light and you see the body and wings are really there, steely blue wire-work. We sat out in the evenings and the lightning twitched around us and the bigger variety of fireflies came floating along like people walking with very weak flashlights, on the hill—well, you missed this dazzlingness—and the summer storms. Lots of rainbows—a double one over the sea just now with three freighters going off under it in three different directions.
The Lowells had paid a more or less calamitous visit the previous year (“hopelessly impractical, frequently frayed”), and this magnificent paragraph is nothing less than a remaking of paradise (“steely blue wire-work”) and a sign of forgiveness (“a double one”) for them all. Even an occasional striking a pose of brisk, tweedy, maiden-auntish refusal is delightful in her: “A very cursory look at the Munch Museum—it was too beautiful a day and I was feeling too cheerful to be bothered with all that nordic nonsense.” For much of this book, Lowell makes really remarkably little showing compared to Bishop’s ironically proffered “superbly underdeveloped country and this backward friend!”
Why this matters I suppose is that—other things being equal—one likes a poet to have (ugly Tory word!) some hinterland—some hinterland basically of prose: to have experiences, to hold opinions, to store memories, to lead a rich and varied life of the senses. (The other type of poet is a unicorn who lives in an ivory tower: he’s frightening and different and real, and we don’t get him. When Lowell spends an evening reading poems aloud with I. A. Richards, that feels like unicorn behavior to me.) It’s the famous Louis MacNeice prescription: “I would have a poet…” and so forth. This, Elizabeth Bishop embodies triumphantly, to the extent that over the course of her life her poems—four short books—have a hard time emerging. She gets involved in the turbulent Brazilian politics of the ’50s and ’60s (and the characteristically ham-fisted American responses to them); Lowell writes: “Let’s not argue politics. I feel a fraud on the subject,” but that sort of retrenchment applies everywhere, and to some extent the feeling of fraudulence too. Bishop is so prodigal with sympathy, attention, interest; Lowell, by contrast, seems to endow even people quite close to him (even Elizabeth Bishop, as we will see) with very little reality. It comes down to something like focal length—his is about a foot. See him in his heavy, black-rimmed spectacles, recumbent on a leather sofa in the Fay Godwin photograph (“my tenth muse, Sloth”), in a study described (in the poem “The Restoration”) as “unopened letters, the thousand dead cigarettes, open books, yogurt cups in the unmade bed,” and writing things like:
Dear Heart’s-Ease,
we rest from all discussion, drinking, smoking,
pills for high blood, three pairs of glasses—soaking
in the sweat of our hard-earned supremacy,
offering a child our leathery love. We’re fifty,
and free! Young, tottering on the dizzying brink
of discretion once, you wanted nothing
but to be old, do nothing, type and think.
This is the poet as houseplant, as aspirin-munching studio beast, as day-for-night velvet hairband. Lowell is the linebacker-turned-pasha as poet, Bishop is the lifelong dervish.
Small wonder that Lowell (maybe) felt fraudulent. He knew the value of Bishop’s letters—when he sold his papers to Harvard, he made sure she was paid a decent sum for hers, but that’s not what I mean—even as he apologized (“your letters always fill me with shame for the meager illegible chaff that I send you back”) for the thinness of his own. “You & Peter Taylor both make me feel something of a fake—so I love you both dearly,” he remarks in 1949. It sounds flip, but of course it was deadly earnest. Lowell understood that there was an agility and a naturalness in Bishop that he would never have; he and most of the rest of his generation were manufactured. To my possibly anachronistic modern ear, he sentimentalizes and patronizes her all the time. His letters keep her in place, and almost invariably the wrong place; telling an audience that with her he “felt like a mastodon competing with tanks” is typically inept, but maybe no more than telling her, “Honor bright, I’m not a rowdy.” For decades he championed her prose, the story “In the Village” in particular ad nauseam—an obviously ambiguous accolade to any poet—and praises her poems—it’s a heretical thought, but it did cross my mind—without much sign of having read them. One succeeds the other
in his “billfold,” but maybe they didn’t do him much good there: “It’s like going on the pilgrimage of your Fish, or the poem ending awful and wonderful, yet the journey is as utterly new and surprising as a first discovery of what life is all about. And so it is. If I can’t stop what I’ve already done, I must stop. Maybe, if I carry your ‘[Under the] Window’ around long enough, I’ll learn. It’s a kind of patience and freshness.” The enthusiasm is vitiated by the confusion around the “what” and by the stale terms at the end. I’ve developed a thoroughgoing aversion to the (now routine) cult of Bishop as a perfectionist slow coach (Lowell was an early high priest): she was a fast and sure and instinctive writer, but when a vein or a jag broke off, it was much harder to patch or extend than with less sensitive matter. Beyond that, it’s mystifying how anyone could misremember “awful but cheerful.” But then, in a letter near the end, he manages to misremember the whole of her: “I see us still when we first met, both at Randall’s and then for a couple of years later. I see you as rather tall, long brown-haired, shy but full of des[cription] and anecdote as now. I was brown haired and thirty I guess and I don’t know what.” This elicits a characteristically accurate harrumph of friendly fire from her:
However, Cal dear, maybe your memory is failing!— Never, never was I “tall”—as you wrote remembering me. I was always 5 ft 4 and ¼ inches—now shrunk to 5 ft 4 inches— The only time I’ve ever felt tall was in Brazil. And I never had “long brown hair” either!— It started turning gray when I was 23 or 24—and probably was already somewhat grizzled when I first met you. I tried putting it up for a very brief period, because I like long hair—but it never got even to my shoulders and is always so intractable that I gave that up within a month or so. I think you must be seeing someone else!*
The asterisk is to her footnote: “so please don’t put me in a beautiful poem tall with long brown hair!” which of course, as she very well knew, is just what he would have done.
He knew she had everything he didn’t; she—in terms of his persistence, his confidence, his diligence—will have known the same. A kind of justice and a kind of vicariousness prompted each of them in hopes for the other, though in the end I don’t believe that either helped the other’s writing very much. (The title, “words in air”—the words are Lowell’s, incidentally—tells its own story.) She is afraid to read him while writing; it influences her too much. While her praise and minute criticism, droppered out over years (“‘ganging’ is just right”), would have made him think she was responding on an insignificant, immedicable scale, and beyond anything he could do. “I’m mailing you a copy and wish you’d point [out] any correctable flaws. Correctable—the big ones alas I’m stuck with,” Lowell wrote to accompany a typescript of Life Studies. But of course he was stuck with the little ones too, in the end not so little. With his swaggering inexactitude Lowell was absolutely wrong—a red rag for Bishop. In one dangerous letter, she wonders: “If I read it [“The Old Flame”] in Encounter under someone else’s name I wonder what I’d think?” He, too, had cause to wonder from time to time: “I see in a blurb you’ve written you object to confession and irony”—it doesn’t leave much of him, and he sounds accordingly bemused and hurt. They were contraries. Each enshrined the other. Short of enmity, it was all they could do.
ROBERT FROST AND EDWARD THOMAS
I thought all the mails had gone down in the Laconic, but evidently not.
—Helen Thomas to Robert Frost
Parnassian friendships—in particular friendships between poets—are rarer than one might imagine. A friendship late in life is unlikely, poets are so botanically specialized and overdetermined, each one stuck at the extremity of his or her personal development, craning and twisting apotropaically toward his or her personal light. Early friendships are subject to volatility, the vicissitudes of life, competitiveness, and the torque—or torc—of the Muse. When one has further taken away such things as alliances (Pound and Eliot), dalliances (Lowell and Bishop), rivalries (Goethe and Schiller), dependencies (Spender and Auden), romantic entanglements (Verlaine and Rimbaud), and mentor-pupil relationships (Akhmatova and Brodsky), one is left with really not very many.
Montaigne’s marvelously, irreducibly simple formulation for friendship, “Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi”—because it was him, because it was me—can have few juster claimants among poets than Robert Frost (1874–1963) and Edward Thomas (1878–1917). Friendship is such a mystery (and therefore such a provocation, a diaphanous rag to a bull) that it’s no surprise scholars have queued up to explain this instance of it, but it doesn’t come down to such things as more or less one-sided influencings, or the critic Linda Hart’s impressively foolish list of congruencies. For Frost, who outlived by the best part of half a century the friend he saw for one year, and wrote to for another two, the relationship was unrepeatable and irreplaceable. For Thomas, it was both an enabling agency—but for it, we might never have read him, or even heard of him—and an object of intensest focus. One could do worse, as one reads through the letters, poems, and reviews assembled in Elected Friends than murmur Montaigne’s words to oneself from time to time.
A starting point better than the second-guessing and computer-matchmaking of some of the critics, is to understand that the friendship between Frost and Thomas came about, in a strange way, out of time and out of place. This creates the space for some of its electiveness. Frost, evidently, was not in his own country but in the England he had bravely and arbitrarily plumped for a year earlier; nor did Thomas have home advantage either. Often, he was guesting in his hated London, touting for work (“I hate meeting people I want to get something out of, perhaps”), or else, in the Edwardian fashion, passing himself around like the port among various addresses (Eleanor Farjeon he met in the course of a “cricket week”). In fact, if one imagines, in one of P. G. Wodehouse’s “Psmith” novels, a meeting in a London chophouse or a country pile—say, Blandings in Shropshire—and a fast friendship being formed between Psmith’s likable friend Mike Jackson and—not Psmith but instead Ralston McTodd, “the powerful young singer of Saskatoon”—I don’t think the story of Frost and Thomas is altogether unlike a serious version of that. Even when they were living in adjacent cottages, in Ledington and Ryton, Thomas didn’t know that particular bit of country (not far from the imaginary Blandings); there was a local hill from which he could see Wales, but basically he was no more “at home” there than the American visitor.
Nor could either man draw on the authority of years, family, accomplishments. True, they both had families—Frost with his four children, Thomas his three—but to some extent, both were on the run from them. They were in settled, or serious years, mid- to late thirties—Frost the older by four years, and seeming older than that, I would guess, by virtue of being American and having traveled, of having grown up half-orphaned, of having come into money from his grandfather—but basically neither had very much to show for his time on earth, and both were well aware of the fact. If anything, Thomas, who was a hugely prolific and hardworking literary journalist with a string of books to his name, should have had the upper hand on an erstwhile farmer and occasional teacher, an idle and irascible man who had published hardly anything—only he saw in his own extensive production chiefly grounds for shame. (In fact, he was a wonderful writer of prose: the original texts have long since disappeared from sale, and even selections like Roland Gant’s Edward Thomas on the Countryside and Edna Longley’s A Language Not to Be Betrayed are not easy to find, but they are all worth the trouble: marvelously alert and rapturous prose.) Both Frost and Thomas had the discontents and aspirations of much younger men, though both, evidently, had seen and experienced far more of life. This strange mixing of ages characterized them, separately and together. On the one hand, the immoderateness and capacity and ebullience of youth, and youth’s faith in friendship’s great exchange, and on the other, the urgency and narrowing purpose of midlife, what the Germans call Torschlusspanik (fear of th
e gate closing). It was one of the conditions of their friendship, the inability of either man to “be his age.” They were unfinished, unappreciated, adrift, and thrown together.
Where Have You Been? Page 2
