Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Despite her recent appeal for guidance, Elizabeth was confident that she had “done my best” with the sestina; it would mark her debut in Poetry magazine the following year. Paradoxically, Marianne Moore’s swift endorsement seemed to give Elizabeth the courage to challenge her mentor on several points, to begin to move out from under the senior poet’s protective wing. “Gallons of coffee” was too colloquial for the fastidious Miss Moore, and “crumb” and “sun” were so nearly alike in sound they created a kind of dissonance. But Elizabeth resisted the criticism. She liked the “boisterousness” of “gallons,” she replied with that “flicker of impudence,” and as for the clash of “sun” and “crumb,” the poem could not have been written without them. There are “certain things,” Elizabeth wrote, that “without one particular fault they would be without the means of existence.”

  Three months after Elizabeth sent Marianne Moore “A Miracle for Breakfast,” Bob Seaver mailed Elizabeth his suicide note, then shot himself. Just two years after her mother died, Elizabeth felt the shock of a second distant death, now of a friend and former beau who wanted to blame her for it. Louise took Elizabeth away for the winter to the Keewaydin Club, a resort on the west coast of Florida, and then planned a second European tour for them both, leaving late in the spring of 1937.

  They crossed the Atlantic together on a luxury liner, with Louise’s car stowed in the hold. Elizabeth had persuaded Margaret Miller to join them for a midsummer excursion in the French countryside, brushing aside Margaret’s qualms about Louise’s driving. At least Margaret remembered telling Elizabeth she’d been afraid to ride with Louise at the wheel. Margaret’s fears were confirmed when Louise’s speeding car was forced off the road by a passing vehicle near the small town of Montargis. The car rolled; Elizabeth and Louise emerged unhurt, but Margaret’s right arm, which she’d been resting on an open window, was severed just below the elbow. A nearby field worker applied a tourniquet, saving Margaret’s life. The driver of the other car ferried Margaret and Louise into town; Elizabeth stayed at the roadside to answer questions from officials, alone with her fears for Margaret, reliving in her mind the “freakishly cruel” accident, the sight of the severed arm.

  At first it seemed Margaret might recover almost fully, that “what resides in the right hand is in the left too,” and she might paint again. Elizabeth tried to believe the three women could continue their travels after a period of healing. “To keep ‘going’ is the main thing,” she wrote to Frani Blough in New York, “not to let her feel that there has been the slightest interruption in her work, once she is out of the hospital.” But there were complications with skin grafts and ongoing pain from damaged nerves. Margaret’s mother arrived, knowing only there had been an accident; when Elizabeth told her about Margaret’s arm, Mrs. Miller fainted. “I know now what it feels like to be a murderer,” Elizabeth told Frani.

  If Elizabeth failed to recall Margaret’s initial reluctance to make the trip, she could not forget her friend’s first words when they met again in the hospital room. Margaret wished she had died in the accident, “it would have been better” that way, she said. Elizabeth blurted out her love for Margaret: “how could I possibly live without her.” For once, Margaret didn’t seem to mind. But several weeks later, when Margaret was well enough to walk the streets near the hospital, Elizabeth reached out a hand to steady her and Margaret pushed Elizabeth away, saying “don’t.” Elizabeth gave up any remaining hope of receiving the love of her adored friend.

  Louise Crane’s auto insurance provided Margaret with a substantial settlement, and the Cranes may have found Margaret the job as editor in the publications department at the Museum of Modern Art that she kept for many decades. But Margaret did not paint again. She stopped answering Elizabeth’s letters for a time, and the friendship was never the same. Elizabeth and Louise turned to each other for solace, traveling to Italy later in 1937 in hopes of alleviating the asthma that had overcome Elizabeth once again, landing her in the same hospital in Paris where Margaret had undergone her surgeries. Both were haunted by the accident. Elizabeth recorded a dream Louise confided: Louise had been released from a prison, dressed in red and “condemned to death . . . at a certain hour,” when she became a target for anyone to shoot. Elizabeth had less reason to feel responsible, but it was hard to shake her fear that the people close to her were somehow destined for tragedy, that her presence in their lives was a liability.

  Louise Crane and Elizabeth in Paris after the car crash

  Did a shared sense of culpability—deserved or not—keep Elizabeth and Louise together? Both possessed a powerful urge for distraction; they spent hours playing billiards during the weeks they’d waited for Margaret’s recovery. They traveled well together, whether touring museums and drinking at cafés in Europe or, the previous winter, fishing on Florida’s Gulf Coast; to friends at the Keewaydin Club they were “Lizzie and Louise,” or “L and L.” But in most ways they were a mismatched pair: Louise socially adept and spontaneous, Elizabeth painfully shy. Louise was free to go where she wished, live as she pleased; Elizabeth could keep pace only as long as Louise paid most of the bills.

  The winter after the accident, they returned to Florida, where the island community of Key West, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, enchanted them both. They bought a house together at 624 White Street, bankrolled by Louise, a simple two-story wooden “eyebrow” house standing alone on its block midway between the town’s two sheltered bights where fishing boats moored, and “perfectly beautiful to me, inside and out,” Elizabeth wrote to Marianne Moore. The interior was painted a stark white and sparsely furnished, although it was soon filled with books and records. A broad roof (the eyebrow) shaded the front porch, keeping the house cool. Lush gardens in front and back contained “1 banana tree, 2 avocados, 1 mango, 1 sour-sop, 1 grapevine . . . and 2 magnificent lime trees, one loaded with large limes.” But Elizabeth was more inclined to settle in than Louise, who traveled frequently between New York City and Key West, returning with new friends, provoking Elizabeth to rent rooms elsewhere so she could write. Louise was following her mother’s lead by turning arts patron, directing a series of “coffee concerts” at the Museum of Modern Art featuring jazz and Latin musicians who became her friends, some of them lovers, Elizabeth would later learn. In Key West that winter of 1938, Elizabeth wrote a story called “In Prison” that won a prize and publication in Partisan Review. “I can scarcely wait for the day of my imprisonment,” the story began. “It is then that my life, my real life, will begin.”

  The fanciful tale, reminiscent of Poe, another writer-orphan whose work she had been reading closely, was not about guilt or punishment, but rather expressed a longing for confinement, routine, and seclusion: “Many years ago I discovered that I could ‘succeed’ in one place, but not in all places, and never, never could I succeed ‘at large.’” The narrator expects to “attract to myself one intimate friend” from among the other prisoners “whom I shall influence deeply,” and to add “inscriptions” to the “Writing on the Wall” of the prison cell: “brief, suggestive, anguished, but full of the lights of revelation.” There is no hint of the dark side of incarceration, such as her mother had known or Louise’s nightmare had revealed, although her own missing mother may have been on Elizabeth’s mind as she watched Louise join forces with the indefatigable Mrs. Crane and ceded Margaret to her mother’s care. Elizabeth was again turning a crumb—the imagined whitewashed cell, “twelve or fifteen feet long, by six feet wide,” with one high window and an iron bed—into a mansion, where one day she might write “a short, but immortal, poem.”

  The two women parted ways in 1940. Louise left Elizabeth the White Street house to rent or sell; they’d lived in it together only sporadically during the two years of joint ownership. “We hadn’t meant to spend so much time / In the cool shadow of the lime,” Elizabeth began an unfinished poem; “I can’t stand your arrangements anymore.” She had tried living with Louise in Manhattan during the summ
er of 1939, but the city overwhelmed her nearly as much as her shock at walking in on Louise and one of her musician friends—Elizabeth sometimes told others it had been Billie Holiday—making love in their bedroom. They had not pledged themselves to each other, but for Elizabeth the outright infidelity was unforgivable. In another unpublished draft, she admitted hurt and the longing she still felt after the breakup for Louise, whose “huge blue eyes” she would always miss:

  See, here, my distant dear, I lie

  Upon my hard, hard bed and sigh

  For someone far away,

  Who never thinks of me at all

  Or thinking, does not care. . . .

  The major poem Elizabeth finished writing during the winter of 1939–40 and sent to Partisan Review, where it found easy acceptance, had its beginnings three years before, back when Louise had taken her to the Keewaydin Club as solace after Bob Seaver’s suicide. Elizabeth had pulled a sixty-pound amberjack out of the Gulf waters, then several nights later dreamed of swimming after a large fish, “scaled, metallic . . . a beautiful rose color.” “We met in water,” Elizabeth wrote of the dream-fish in her notebook, and “he led the way . . . glancing around at me every now and then with his big eyes to see if I was following.” But Elizabeth wrote “The Fish” at the end of her affair with Louise, whose big blue eyes she could no longer follow; after she’d lost Margaret’s friendship; and at the waning of a third significant relationship of the 1930s. “The Fish” would also mark the distance Elizabeth had come since she first sought Marianne Moore’s guidance as a college senior. Now both women had written poems of the same title. Only Elizabeth’s was really about a fish.

  Moore’s fish, a school of them, leave her poem after the opening lines, as the poet’s attention turns to a rocky cliff on the Maine coast, encrusted with barnacles, dashed by waves, pocked with tide pools where crabs, jellyfish, and “submarine / toadstools, slide each on the other”:

  All

  external

  marks of abuse are present on this

  defiant edifice—

  Elizabeth meant no criticism when she set out to write an entirely different sort of fish poem. She was simply writing her own, expressing wonder and then sympathy for the barnacled sea creature she never lets out of her gaze:

  I caught a tremendous fish

  and held him beside the boat

  half out of water, with my hook

  fast in a corner of his mouth. . . .

  He hung a grunting weight,

  battered and venerable

  and homely. . . .

  I looked into his eyes

  which were far larger than mine. . . .

  They shifted a little, but not

  to return my stare.

  Moore’s subject is the dynamic force of sea on land over time; for Elizabeth, time is experience, personal experience such as she recognizes in the “venerable” fish when she counts five big hooks remaining in its mouth, “Like medals with their ribbons / frayed and wavering, / a five-haired beard of wisdom / trailing from his aching jaw.” The fish’s jaw, bearing so many external “marks of abuse,” is the “defiant edifice” of Elizabeth’s poem—a living one.

  Elizabeth’s powers of description rival her mentor’s—

  I thought of the coarse white flesh

  packed in like feathers,

  the big bones and the little bones,

  the dramatic reds and blacks

  of his shiny entrails,

  and the pink swim-bladder

  like a big peony.

  But close inspection leads to an intimate encounter, an “unexpected moment of empathy”—Elizabeth’s everyday surrealism—in a revelatory meeting on the water:

  I stared and stared

  and victory filled up

  the little rented boat,

  from the pool of bilge

  where oil had spread a rainbow

  around the rusted engine

  to the bailer rusted orange,

  the sun-cracked thwarts,

  the oarlocks on their strings,

  the gunnels—until everything

  was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

  And I let the fish go.

  The release granted at the close of the poem, the rainbowed victory after long struggle, belong to both ancient fish and youthful poet-angler. “The Fish” was Elizabeth’s declaration of independence—from Marianne Moore’s direct influence on her poetry, from her own fresh wounds of experience, from guilt.

  Yet victory was fleeting. Turning thirty alone in Key West in February 1941, Elizabeth was convinced she’d accomplished “nothing.” Slowly she had accumulated more than two dozen publications in small journals and prominent magazines like Partisan Review and the New Yorker, where she’d placed her first poem, “Cirque d’Hiver,” about a horse-and-dancer windup toy, in January 1940, but she’d had no success in securing a major book publisher. Against Marianne’s advice she’d refused New Directions editor James Laughlin’s offer to turn her collection into a pamphlet in his “Poets of the Year” series, perhaps annoyed by another of Laughlin’s invitations: to contribute to an anthology of five young poets, providing needed “Sex Appeal” to the otherwise all-male group.

  Key West was changing too, as a rising “militarism” took hold of the once-sleepy town, still in recovery from the devastating effects of the Depression and the 1935 hurricane that wiped out a new railway line connecting the island to the mainland. Now an improved roadway brought automobile traffic to annoy Elizabeth on her daily circuit of the island on her bicycle, “more and more Navy ships” docked in the harbor, and a “tremendous airplane hangar” was under construction as the United States prepared to join the war in Europe. American intervention seemed inevitable, but Elizabeth, who’d thrilled as a little girl to the sight of Great Village’s kilted regiment on parade during the Great War, felt only dread at the prospect: she now knew that “almost every boy in that tiny place, from 18–22, was killed in one of the big battles.” Scarcely two decades later, another small town she’d come to love was threatened, and the Europe she’d traveled freely not long ago was under siege.

  During the fall of 1940, as Mussolini’s army invaded Greece and Hitler’s Nazis bombed London and claimed Paris, where Elizabeth had once lived happily with Louise and their two pet doves, she’d worked on a poem, “Roosters,” describing a typical Key West backyard cock fight, whose combatants “command and terrorize the rest,” aiming to “tell us how to live.” The allegorical antiwar poem also prompted Elizabeth’s decision to quit sending early drafts to Marianne Moore for approval. When Marianne returned a “purified” version of “Roosters,” bearing the marks of both the poet and her mother, with significant alterations in everything from the poem’s title—Marianne preferred “The Cock”—to its meter and rhyme scheme, Elizabeth knew she’d outgrown her teacher. She wrote back defending an “important ‘violence’ of tone” in her triple-rhymed three-line stanzas, and refusing to adjust the poem’s “rather rattletrap rhythm” or eliminate its “sordidities.” (Marianne had deleted Elizabeth’s reference to a “water-closet door.”) Her “cranky” letter closed the years of apprenticeship. The correspondence continued, and Marianne never stopped supporting Elizabeth with letters of recommendation and reviews when the opportunity arose, but when asked in later years about their longtime connection, Elizabeth always emphasized the friendship, and expressed annoyance at suggestions of the older poet’s influence beyond “perhaps some early preferences in subject matter.”

  Insistence that her art was self-originating came naturally to the orphan girl now grown. It was the same stubborn self-reliance her English professor at Vassar had recognized in the “enormously cagey” freshman. Yet in turning away from Marianne, Elizabeth had also set herself adrift. “Roosters,” which appeared in the New Republic in March 1941, would be the last poem she completed for publication in nearly four years.

  In the months after her grim thirtieth birthday self-assessment, Elizabet
h began an affair with Marjorie Stevens, a recovering tuberculosis patient who’d moved to Key West for her health, leaving behind a husband in Boston who preferred an open marriage. Alcohol brought the two women together. Elizabeth remembered the first night “I took Marjorie home with me” from the bar where they’d met: “I was so drunk I kept falling off my bicycle and once I didn’t want to get up again.” Marjorie had been only “a little drunk herself,” but told Elizabeth that night she’d “never seen anything so beautiful in my life as you lying there in the gutter with the street lamp shining on your face.” Key West was a hard-drinking town, and passing out after a night at a bar was no immediate cause for alarm. Early in her residence there, Elizabeth had noted appreciatively the erratic work schedules of the locals, for whom “drunkenness is an excuse just as correct as any other.” Marjorie could not yet have known how much Elizabeth welcomed the camouflage.