Bishop is—this isn’t the same, but it may be related—a poet of “eye” and not “I,” or even of “eye and tears” and not “I,” and also of “we” and not “I.” Both the “eye” and the “we” are ways of not saying “I,” of getting around it or playing it down. (It’s not that Bishop never says “I,” but she seems almost to ration it, in a militant modesty, to no more than its statistically probable occurrence among the other pronouns.) She makes that very change, movingly, in the fragment “A Short, Slow Life”:
We lived in a pocket of Time.
It was close, it was warm.
Along the dark seam of the river
the houses, the barns, the two churches,
hid like white crumbs
in a fluff of gray willows & elms,
till Time made one of his gestures;
his nails scratched the shingled roof.
Roughly his hand reached in,
and tumbled us out.
Originally, that read “I lived in a pocket of Time” (and also “and tumbled me out”)—a little nightmare of scale and vulnerability and the end of coziness, alongside the pocket plays on “close” and “seam” and “fluff.” But no, that wouldn’t do, too much pathos, too much drama of self, too much contemplation of the ungainly blunt fingers (what is their rude gesture?), and so “I” is scratched out and becomes “we,” and the poem loses its identity and its urgency (perhaps neither of them especially Bishop-like qualities anyway), and the Robert Louis Stevenson or Hans Christian Andersen idea, now gone mousy and a little folksy, fails to survive.
A Bishop poem (its watchword, “Watch it closely”) goes on looking long after one thinks it should have looked away—from having seen enough, from having got or given the message, from irritation or boredom or pain. It is a type of looking, in part a quantity of looking, that sees—literally—sideshows where it looks, that specializes in distracting the reader (what is the main item here?), that disregards the conventional cut-to-the-chase grammar of looking that winnows as it sees, that is unafraid of outlandish qualifiers and similes, that continually proposes and interposes objects or scenes of probable symbolic worth (but are they?). The old man in “At the Fishhouses” sits there, “sequins on his vest and on his thumb. / He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, / the blade of which is almost worn away.” If he was in a nineteenth-century painting, he would surely have had some splendid allegorical or mythological label, but here he’s just a quiet and slightly sad man (the phrases seem to proceed, too, in short hacking motions), unheroic, but also (given that he is a destroyer of beauty) unvillainous. In “Cape Breton,” “A small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes, / packed with people, even to its step.” Like a sort of crowded pogo stick. Things in Bishop are not groomed and grooved and normed, but anarchically themselves. Her shoes clack in different keys. The noticing itself confers value, and is its own reward. It is worth paying attention; you will not be belabored. In “Under the Window: Ouro Preto”:
A big new truck, Mercedes-Benz, arrives
to overawe them all. The body’s painted
with throbbing rosebuds and the bumper says
HERE AM I FOR WHOM YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING.
The driver and assistant driver wash
their faces, necks, and chests. They wash their feet,
their shoes, and put them back together again.
The awe—technology overlaid with romance overlaid with religion—disappears the moment the clapped-out huaraches make their entrance. These are just men, men in magnificent machines. Plenty of poets would have given you the Mercedes, and most the ill-translated and vainglorious annunciation (what’s not to like about found poetry?); but few the rosebuds (and another truck is described as having “a syphilitic nose,” though Bishop doesn’t work in that designing or conniving way), and probably none the shoes. (As often in Bishop, there’s a persistent, slightly mocking tendresse toward men.) There is a motivelessness, a plenitude, a willingness to sweep and pan as well as seize and resolve, both a petillance and a panorama, a comprehensive refusal of hierarchy and abstraction. It’s a fabulous orchestra—and no conductor. The ground note is often humorous—the frantic little bus, bounding over the landscape—but never abjectly depends on being so. A passive, or latent humor.
It is not that Bishop’s life was short of disturbance, or even tragedy. Quite the contrary: her father died before she was one; her mother lost her mind and was committed, leaving her to be raised by grandparents and aunts; there were accidents and suicides, ill health and alcoholism, breakups and breakdowns—all those things that were fuel and grist for her generation of American poets, and one wouldn’t know it. “Although I think I have a prize ‘unhappy childhood,’ almost good enough for the text-books—please don’t think I dote on it,” she wrote to an early biographer; the “I think” there is already heroic. To use a somewhat banal but in its empirical way unusually dependable measure, she probably suffered as many broken bones in her life as John Berryman, but unlike his (the admittedly charming “An orange moon”), hers didn’t make it into her writing. The little girl narrator of “In the Village”—a story that reflects the last crack-up and committal of Bishop’s mother—is, in her dreamy, only-child way, endlessly plucky and resolute. She both knows and doesn’t know what is going on. The poems end either with a slightly unlikely exhortation—“Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!” (“Pink Dog”), “Somebody loves us all” (“Filling Station”), “from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, / please come flying” (“Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore”) or with reserve and ambivalence—“faithful as enemy, or friend” (“Roosters”), “‘half is enough’” (“The Gentleman of Shalott”), “again I promise to try” (“Manuelzinho”). The stereotypical form of words is “awful but cheerful” (“The Bight”).
It is in rare, late poems that Bishop permits herself not a long look as much as a brief glance at the worst: “(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift)” (“Five Flights Up”) or in “One Art” (a poem so rigid with the hieroglyphs of determination and so stifled in its compressed clamor I must admit I’ve never cared for it): “It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” Whether it was bravery, discretion, stoicism, writerly morality (a refusal to pass off despondency on the reader), or a life aesthetic of no fuss, Bishop was reluctant to make herself the subject, much less the object, of her poems. Either she clapped the telescope to her blind eye—a blind I, that would be—or else she swung the thing round and minimized the hurt in that oddly inclusive and luminous context produced by looking through a telescope the wrong way. The ending of a story called “Mercedes Hospital” makes the point: “The Mercedes Hospital seems so remote and far away now, like the bed of a dried-up lake. Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the salty glitter at its bottom, a slight mica-like residuum, the faintest trace of joyousness.”
The decades have worn against the writers of disaster. They set, as one might put it in the contemporary British idiom, a rubbish example. “I am tired,” Lowell wrote in For the Union Dead, “Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.” (That was in 1964; most of his moiling was still ahead of him.) Fifty years later, poetry is a card-carrying career; we are all, in Berryman’s sardonic words, “Henry House,” all “the steadiest man on the block,” and the stronger the reaction against the so-called confessional poets, the more prominence accrued to Bishop’s self-exemption, the more stark and heroic and solitary her small output, her refusal to (Berryman again) “get down in the arena,” the more remarkable her finicky pursuit of accuracy, beauty, detail. She seems to be continually revising for a closer approach to the truth—“not a thought, but a mind thinking,” as Bishop describes the characteristic posture of a poet perhaps unexpectedly dear to her, G. M. Hopkins—but even then it’s not possible to say whether it’s as a scientist twiddling a microscope, or a slight
ly tongue-tied trainee delivering a report to a roomful of middle managers. More and more, Bishop seems like a humble and prudent saint among self-destructive and swaggering deviltons. I was haunted, for instance, while writing this, by the notion that I had come across the plural form of the word “linoleum” somewhere, and I hadn’t been reading much of anything but Bishop. Sure enough, there it was—or there they were—a couple of days later, in “A Summer’s Dream”: “the floors glittered with / assorted linoleums.” Her grateful and somehow practical vocabulary—like a milliner’s or a cabinetmaker’s or a costume jeweler’s—full of exquisite and real color distinctions (a palette like Vuillard’s: “the smallest moths, like Chinese fans, / flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt / over pale yellow, orange, or gray”), and justified flights of fancy (“impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains”) seems increasingly immune to the ravages of time and literary inflation. There wasn’t a knack, and so it couldn’t be learned, you thought; whereas just possibly something like Lowell’s “a red fox stain covers Blue Hill” could. One is at an extreme end of loose-mindedness—almost Illustrious Corpses looseness—the other is done by a sort of eye-popping exertion of will and muscle. One is contrived and synthetic—you can imagine Lowell muttering, “I want to get some color clash going, and the whole thing is to sound doomy and monosyllabic and Gothic, and I need something to deepen the color and keep everything from just sounding superficial—I know, ‘fox’”—the other is beyond contrivance. Maybe there is something in those bell-curved Brazilian mountains that echoes the outline of Eeyore, but other than that I have no idea where “self-pitying” might come from. But it’s absolutely right, the inturned curl, the slump, the soft steepness of it.
Perhaps one more caveat. The umami of Bishop isn’t always the thing. You have to be in the mood for something that’s mostly middle. She doesn’t offer much to beginners and sophomores. She can seem touristic, evasive, wispy. She can seem small scale and unurgent (it’s her word, I’m a little embarrassed to recall: “the pulse, / rapid but unurgent, of a motorboat”). It’s a lasting puzzle that there aren’t more poems (why not?), and that it’s the letters that read more like a main of communication than the poems, however adorable and sinuous and unwilled these last are in their coming to being. In one letter to Lowell, she commends Anton Webern and writes about “that strange kind of modesty in almost everything contemporary one really likes—Kafka, say, or Marianne [Moore], or even Eliot and Klee and Kokoschka and Schwitters … Modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time.” Attractive though the idea of modesty is, especially modern modesty, sometimes you want something a little grander, more willed, less elliptical: Shostakovich or Beckmann or Sebastiao Salgado. I remember the time I first read Bishop’s “The Armadillo,” excited because Lowell was said to have partly modeled his “Skunk Hour” on it, and thinking “What’s this? Dystopic Beatrix Potter?” I still don’t really know, and it’s not a question that occurs to me with “Skunk Hour.”
ROBERT LOWELL
What can I tell you about Robert Lowell? “A shilling life will give you all the facts,” only the lives cost £20, and are most likely out of print. He was born Robert Traill Spence Lowell III (“Robert” and “Lowell” were the only words he could actually write—everything else he merely printed), in Boston in 1917, the son of a somewhat becalmed navy officer, who neither fought nor made it to admiral, Robert Lowell, and a high-strung mother, Charlotte Winslow. The dense-to-the-point-of-distracting prose memoir in Life Studies, “91 Revere Street,” has a visitor to the household leaving thoughtfully, saying: “I know why young Bob is an only child.”
Conventionality, privilege, and a slight Thomas Mann–ish sense of effeteness and foreboding, of being at the end of a declining line, characterize Lowell’s background and youth. Art comes at the culmination of generations of public service and stainlessness—an ambassador, a president of Harvard, fully the equal of the Consular Buddenbrooks. Off to one side were poets like the Victorian beardie James Russell Lowell (it is his Collected Poems one sees in used-book shops everywhere) and Ezra Pound’s Imagist acolyte, Amy Lowell. Family, upbringing are held down in the scales by an unequaled memory and vividness of presentation. I have a cassette of possibly Lowell’s last reading, where he mutters, off the cuff: “Memory is genius, really…” Whether in “91 Revere Street” or the groundbreaking childhood poems of Life Studies, this is what one takes away as a reader:
To be a boy at Brimmer [his mainly-for-girls prep school] was to be small, denied, and weak. […] In unison our big girls sang “America”; back and forth our amazons tramped—their brows were wooden, their dress was black and white, and their columns followed standard-bearers holding up an American flag, the white flag of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the green flag of Brimmer. At basketball games against Miss Lee’s or Miss Winsor’s, it was our upper-school champions who rushed onto the floor, as feline and fateful in their pace as lions. This was our own immediate and daily spectacle; in comparison such masculine displays as trips to battle cruisers commanded by comrades of my father seemed eyewash—the Navy moved in a realm as ghostlike and removed from my life as the elfin acrobatics of Douglas Fairbanks or Peter Pan. I wished I were an older girl. I wrote Santa Claus for a field hockey stick.
The enfeeblement and compromise so wittily recounted here are turned into something more biological in the poem “Dunbarton”:
I borrowed Grandfather’s cane
carved with the names and altitudes
of Norwegian mountains he had scaled—
more a weapon than a crutch.
I lanced it in the fauve ooze for newts.
In a tobacco tin after capture, the umber yellow mature newts
lost their leopard spots,
lay grounded as numb
as scrolls of candied grapefruit peel.
I saw myself as a young newt,
neurasthenic, scarlet
and wild in the wild coffee-colored water.
This is perhaps even more like García Márquez than Mann—the scene at the very end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, where the last of the inbred Buendías has sprouted a tail—the counter-evolutionary, lapsed, retro-Napoleonic Lowell, a far cry, a sad falling-off from his grandfather’s granite eminence.
Lowell was an unexceptional, even undistinguished schoolboy. At seventeen, he still wanted to be a footballer—he had the build for it, and the strength. Suddenly, massively, he switched his resources. The leader of a little group of three, he designated Frank Parker to be the painter, Blair Clark as the musician, and himself the poet. It’s strange to think of him beginning like that—almost randomly, out of will and imagination—because he became a poet of feel and instinct, characterized by a subtlety and inwardness with words that I wouldn’t have thought could be learned. The same expenditure of will characterizes him, for me, all through his twenties. He turned up to Robert Frost, with an English historical epic in couplets, and was told that it “lacked compression.” He left Harvard for Kenyon, a small college in Ohio, to sit at the feet of John Crowe Ransom. He drove down to Tennessee to be with Allen Tate; when he was told there was no room at the Tates’ house, and he’d have to camp on the lawn, he ignored or overrode the ironical turn of speech, bought a tent, and stayed for weeks.
The early poems, once they were publishable, have that shrillness and mastery. Contemporaries awoke to their thunderclap iambs, their menacing ambiguities (“The Lord survives the rainbow of His will,” “This is the Black Widow, death”), their cold fusion of Boston and Sodom, Hiroshima and Judgment Day, their chattering alliteration, their heavily rhyming run-on lines, their disregard for ease and fluency, the word “and” (as I once put it in a review) usually the meat in a zeugma, their desperate, unlocatable religion, anywhere between Catholicism and Calvinism, their knell of an autodidact drummer applauding the end of the world. I came to them later and less willingly than I did to other, later Lowell. To
appreciate them, one would have to be either powerfully religious, or else alive in the 1940s. I am moved and a little uncomprehending when I speak to my Australian poet friend Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who still seems to feel the impact of those first poems, and who can, for example, recite the very first poem of Lord Weary’s Castle, the first trade book, “The Exile’s Return”—which always struck me as a rather dusty piece—by heart. This is, by the way, a general truth in poetry: that even while you may not remember them, you are unlikely to move very far from your first impressions, and that your allegiance is probably determined by what you first read of someone.
I wish I could recover mine—my impressions. It would be like faith before fanaticism, or ritual; or the picture before many, many varnishings, because in some way reading is accretive, and you read the memory of your past readings, and nothing you reread is quite what it was when you first read it.
It was in the winter of 1976, after my first term as an undergraduate, that I borrowed a friend’s copy of the omnibus edition of Life Studies and For the Union Dead, Lowell’s two best-known books (1959 and 1964, respectively), and took it home with me to (then) Austria. Prose had attracted me as I think it attracts any aspiring writer—poetry in my view being a specialism, even a malformation—and then defeated me; the ability to write page after page in the same vein was beyond me, though I saw the need for it. I had begun to read quantities of poetry, rapidly, mostly at night, Yeats, Stevens, Pound. I don’t know how I came upon Lowell, if it was my idea or my friend’s, if I had read any before, in anthologies. Certainly, I knew nothing about him, said his name, Lowell, like vowel or towel, had no preconceptions, carried no baggage. As I say, I wish I knew what poems my reaction was based on, but whatever it was, it elicited the same response from me as Tony Harrison’s poems drew from the wonderfully generous and impulsive Stephen Spender: “it seems to me I have been waiting a lifetime for this style”—which I think is the only accolade for a poet. More particularly—and this is absolutely at variance with my own predilections, and with the times, because people who went around reading and quoting such things tended to wind up at the stake in the ruthless and schismatic Cambridge of the ’70s and ’80s—these poems, whichever they were, struck me as, in the words of whatever French sage said it, “scriptible” even more than “lisible”—demanding to be read but, even more, to be written.
Where Have You Been? Page 8
