Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Elizabeth’s physician, Dr. Baumann, had suggested that her craving for whiskey (she could drink three quarts in one days-long binge) might have been cyclical—a premenstrual symptom. But Elizabeth knew better. She’d long associated drinking with her mother’s absence—she began in earnest the year her mother died, she told Ruth Foster—and the love she sought in replacement. Getting drunk had allowed her to cry in Margaret Miller’s arms, to keep pace with hard-drinking Louise Crane, to win the affection of Marjorie Stevens when she collapsed under the street lamp in Key West. And she drank alone, too—to blot out painful feelings, but also for inspiration, for the vivid dreams that came after a boozy evening or morning, precious to her despite the inevitable “hours of hangover ahead” and the worry she confided to Ruth Foster: she’d become “that dreadful thing an ‘alcoholic.’”

  Elizabeth’s trip to Nova Scotia in the summer of 1946 had been more than a flight from the bad reviews of North & South that never came; it had been a voyage of discovery set in motion by her early sessions with Ruth Foster. She had summoned the courage to find out what she could of her mother’s history. The trip began inauspiciously, with a week’s stopover in Keene, New Hampshire, during which Elizabeth was “more or less drunk all the time.” When not “at the hotel unconscious or trying to read detective stories,” she had boarded buses at random, riding them for miles in various directions to the end of the line and back in a sodden haze. But one of the bus rides had yielded a dream “in which everything was very wild & dark & stormy,” she wrote to Dr. Foster, “and you were in it feeding me from your breast.” In the dream, Elizabeth had shrunk to the size of an infant and felt “very calm inside the raging storm,” drinking “not milk” but “some rather bitter dark gray liquid” from her analyst’s breast. Transference, both Elizabeth and Ruth Foster must certainly have concluded this time.

  Elizabeth made her way to Halifax and the Department of Health, where she sought out the records of her mother’s hospitalization and death two decades before. Her letters to Dr. Foster don’t say what she uncovered; a cousin Elizabeth visited while in Halifax later recalled that “I had the feeling that she didn’t learn a lot, but she didn’t say it had been a failure.” Perhaps all Elizabeth found was her mother’s death certificate, with its unsurprising verdict of “chronic psychosis,” disturbing nonetheless in its stark confirmation of the little she’d already been told. Or she may have read more: her mother’s case files, describing strange behavior—tossing her clothes and favorite possessions out the window, eating plaster from the hospital walls, singing through the night though she “seldom speaks.” And delusions: that she would be hanged as a witch, that she was the cause of the Great War. Elizabeth might have gleaned from her mother’s intake interview a startling fact: she, Elizabeth, had been delivered by forceps in a procedure that lacerated her mother’s cervix; both her parents had been unwell at the time of her birth. But Elizabeth may have learned little or none of this. Perhaps she had not been allowed to see her mother’s hospital records and returned to her room at the Nova Scotian Hotel disappointed. It was there she began to write the poem “Dear Dr. Foster,” summoning up her analyst’s reassuring presence, the colors of dreams.

  As often happened, an incomplete draft opened the way for a different finished poem, “At the Fishhouses,” one of Elizabeth’s best. It took time: Elizabeth’s return to New York City, more analytic sessions, the feeling that she loved Ruth Foster, who cared for her and was “so nice.” Elizabeth had given Ruth a copy of North & South. Dr. Foster read the book and offered an opinion: there was a way in which many of the poems, so finely crafted, some written in constricting verse forms, were “tight.” Elizabeth agreed. But with all the talk and all the letters, she was finding release. “I’ve lost the fear of repeating myself to you,” she wrote to Ruth. “And I feel that in poetry now there is no reason why I should make such an effort to make each poem an isolated event, that they go on into each other or over lap . . . and are really all one long poem anyway.” To “regard every single poem as something almost absolutely new” had become crippling. Elizabeth would never fully escape this demand of herself; the surprising variety in her relatively small oeuvre derived from her compulsion to make each poem somehow radically different from the last, to address a new problem or situation each time she wrote. In his review, Robert Lowell had registered his “excitement” in reading her poems: “Few books of lyrics are as little repetitious as North & South.”

  But for now there was release—and the new poem written in free-flowing iambs. She gave Ruth Foster a copy of “At the Fishhouses” to read in draft; she planned to dedicate it to Ruth. “The day I saw this poem I was in Lockeport,” Elizabeth wrote, a coastal town south of Halifax with a white crescent of beach facing the open ocean. She’d been drinking less since leaving the Nova Scotian Hotel, but she had given in the night before and woke up “feeling dreadful.” She’d ridden her bicycle a dozen miles, “sort of by way of punishment,” along a “very hilly gravelly road” to a small harbor, where she sat down on the rocks and “cried for a while.”

  A “big old seal” surfaced out on the water and, Elizabeth wrote later, in the poem, seemed “curious about me.” She rode farther on, reaching a row of fishhouses with “steeply peaked roofs / and narrow, cleated gangplanks . . . / for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on,” where fishermen scaled and gutted their catch; a forest of “dignified tall firs” rose up behind the shacks. By now, she wrote Ruth Foster, she had “started feeling very exhaltedly happy.” The seal that “regarded me / steadily, moving his head a little,” had reminded her of Ruth, the steady attention that invited Elizabeth’s confessions, that made her feel loved. (Unlike Elizabeth’s enormous fish, this sea creature looked back at Elizabeth and met her eyes.) The word “seal” has a “double meaning,” she wrote to Ruth. “I suppose a kiss is always considered a sort of seal.” And she “connected the appearance of the water” in which the seal swam “with my dream on the bus,” the dream of drinking a bitter gray liquid from Ruth’s breast. In the closing lines of the poem, “there is . . . a sort of interchange between kissing & feeding,” Elizabeth told Ruth, “or is this all too obvious to you and I don’t need to bother to pt. it out at all?”

  “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,” begins the magisterial final stanza of “At the Fishhouses,” describing the northern ocean, which the poet has stopped to contemplate after conversing with one of the fishermen: “element bearable to no mortal, / to fish and to seals. . . .” The speaker approaches the “gray icy” water, imagining what it would be like to taste it—“it would first taste bitter, / then briny, then surely burn your tongue.”

  It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

  drawn from the cold hard mouth

  of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

  forever, flowing and drawn, and since

  our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

  “Knowledge is historical” referred to the process of psychoanalysis, Elizabeth explained to Ruth, the self-understanding reached by examining one’s personal past, by making lonely voyages of discovery under the watch of a tall, blue-eyed analyst. As she set down the last lines, the words came so fast “she hardly knew what she was writing,” Elizabeth told a friend years later, though she “knew the words were right.” It was an exultant feeling, as if she were ten feet tall.

  When “At the Fishhouses” appeared in the New Yorker in August 1947, the first of Elizabeth’s poems to be published under the new contract, she heard from Robert Lowell right away. It was the second letter she’d received from him since the dinner at Randall Jarrell’s in January, the first in which he addressed her as “Elizabeth” rather than “Miss Bishop”—“you must be called that,” he insisted. “I’m called Cal, but I won’t explain why. None of the prototypes are flattering: Calvin, Caligula, Caliban. . . .” He’d been made “very envious” by the new po
em: “Perhaps, it’s your best.” Cal’s only “question” was “the word breast in the last four or five lines—a little too much in its context perhaps.”

  Elizabeth didn’t answer that question. There was much she wouldn’t tell him about her life or, as in this case, her work, the way the two intertwined. In her letters to Cal at the time, Ruth Foster was simply “a psychiatrist friend of mine” who is “writing an article on color in dreams.” But Cal Lowell soon became Elizabeth’s chief supporter, outdoing even Marianne Moore in his efforts to further her career and befriend her. And Elizabeth admired his work in return: “your poetry is as different from the rest of our contemporaries as, say, ice from slush.” She could play the ranking game too, or perhaps she let Cal draw her in. The two grew to be the most astute appreciators of each other’s work, using their letters to refine their own conceptions of poetry’s demands. “There’s a side to writing that’s like a little bird swooping in to snatch a piece of bread,” Cal once wrote to Elizabeth, “only there are so many birds bustling about, and I suppose the bread is always vanishing, so that only by miracle can the bird get it.” He was always aware of those other birds—the other poets. But perhaps because Elizabeth was a woman and not, in his view, a direct competitor, Cal could admit that she often got the crumb: “if one is very lucky and talented, there’s a way of writing that is actually believable, and beyond that, a way that is rich and interesting, and beyond that, a way that really gets the bread—then a bell rings and a poem is what we call immortal. That’s what you’ve done.”

  Elizabeth’s good fortune had continued with the receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship that spring of 1947. The funds allowed another summer trip to Nova Scotia and prompted her return to Key West for the winter and beyond. Marjorie had arranged the sale of the White Street house, so Elizabeth could afford an apartment on her own, while still maintaining the King Street rental in Greenwich Village if she wanted to spend time in New York. Her friends now were the Pfeif­fer sisters: Pauline, Marjorie’s onetime partner in the Caroline Shop, who’d retained the rambling house in Key West she’d shared with Ernest Hemingway before their separation in 1939, and Jinny, who had a lover in Rome, an Italian violinist turned documentary filmmaker, Laura Archera.

  Elizabeth stopped seeing Ruth Foster when she left the city in 1947. Perhaps she felt she’d gained enough to give up treatment, or she may have foreseen an itinerant life in the years ahead that simply couldn’t support regular sessions. Possibly, despite the breakthrough with “At the Fishhouses,” she’d given up in frustration: both asthma and alcoholism have since proven beyond the reach of psychoanalysis. And Elizabeth’s shyness—her extreme self-consciousness—may have been the “fault” her existence as a poet depended upon.

  Living on her own in the years after the breakup with Marjorie left her vulnerable to lapses from the sobriety she strove to maintain. There were sustaining benefactions from Cal, including an appointment from September 1949 through the summer of 1950 as Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress, the post Lowell had held two years before, now known as Poet Laureate. And on either side of Elizabeth’s year in Washington, there were stays at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. But Elizabeth often gave in to binge drinking, out of loneliness she sometimes said now, and there were drying-out stays as well: two months in Connecticut’s Blythewood Sanitarium, where a Freudian version of the Alcoholics Anonymous program was practiced, emphasizing surrender of the ego; and then at Saratoga Hospital near Yaddo, during her second residency, after her hands had begun to “shake so I can’t sign my name.” Each time she told herself she “had to stop”—“It can be done.” Yet her 1946 trip to Nova Scotia had reminded her how much drinking ran in the family. In Great Village, her mother’s only brother was a lifelong alcoholic, and the Bishop men, including her father, she’d heard, also drank to excess.

  Elizabeth at work as the Poetry Consultant, Library of Congress, ca. 1949–50

  Nearly everyone Elizabeth knew drank heavily. Social life, whether in summer communities on the Maine coast, where she’d stayed in Wiscasset and Stonington during 1948, at Key West, or in the “literary” scene in New York and Washington, was a matter of cocktail parties and well-lubricated lunches and dinners. Elizabeth frequently drank alone in advance of such events, perhaps initially to brace herself, ultimately to remove herself from the fray. The year before she took over as Poetry Consultant, she never made it to a dinner Cal organized in Washington for visiting poets T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden; instead, after draining all the bottles in her host’s liquor cabinet, she was rushed to the hospital. She’d been braver, and steadier, as a junior at Vassar, interviewing Eliot in the founder’s suite.

  The post at the Library of Congress, which she’d been hesitant to accept, brought worries Elizabeth didn’t mention in letters or perhaps even articulate to herself. Her term in office came at the midpoint of a postwar decade during which the federal government determined to rid itself of the “constant menace” posed by homosexual employees. Six thousand workers were fired between 1945 and 1956 in a crusade for “morality and decency” nearly as visible as the concurrent hunt for Communist Party members and sympathizers. From her office at the library, Elizabeth looked out on the capital’s buildings, “all those piles of granite and marble,” which failed to impress the granddaughter of John W. Bishop, contractor. The solidity of her surroundings masked the unsteady foundation of her appointment, and that of any homosexual employed by the federal government at the time. During the spring of her Washington year, in a campaign that became known as the “purge of the perverts,” security officials in the State Department boasted of firing one homosexual per day, twice the rate of firings for political disloyalty. Most of those who lost their jobs were men, but government work was one of few options for professionally ambitious women, who could fall under suspicion simply for dressing unconventionally, sharing an apartment with another woman, or socializing in bars known as meeting places for lesbians. Perhaps the loneliness Elizabeth suffered so acutely in Washington, where she lived for most of the year in a women’s boarding house in Georgetown, was due to the need for more than usual secrecy about her private life, a concealment that amounted to suppression.

  And yet the Poetry Consultant appointment, Elizabeth’s first job lasting more than a few weeks, was a highly visible position. Many of the requirements chaffed. She considered her lone public reading in Washington a “terrible flop,” and bitterly resented the obligatory visits to Ezra Pound, institutionalized at St. Elizabeths Hospital after suffering a breakdown while imprisoned in Italy on charges of treason. She had little sympathy for Pound, who had written and broadcast anti-Semitic propaganda in Mussolini’s Italy during the war; here was an actual traitor. But with the support of Eliot, E. E. Cummings, and others, he’d received the Library of Congress’s first Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949, just as Elizabeth took office—for the Cantos he’d begun writing in prison. Pound’s supporters had hoped the recognition would win his release from St. Elizabeths. Instead, it brought dishonor to the prize, which afterward was administered by Yale.

  Elizabeth’s duties also included scheduling public readings and setting up recording sessions for visiting poets, and she fought her shyness each time. She arranged a party honoring Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost, two poets she imagined would have much in common, but they sat at opposite ends of a couch receiving their admirers, not exchanging a word; Elizabeth had been helpless to draw them out. With the kowtowing to eminences, and “all this recording & reading,” she wrote to Randall Jarrell, who’d remained a supporter and held out the hope of taking the Library of Congress job himself next, she’d begun to feel “sick of Poetry as Big Business.” (In the end, the position went unfilled for six years after Elizabeth’s term expired. William Carlos Williams was selected, and first was too ill to move to Washington, then was rejected as a Communist sympathizer for his postwar poem “Russia.”)

  Asthma kept Elizabeth awa
y from work for weeks during the winter of 1949–50, and she refused invitations to read at the YMHA Poetry Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York during the spring. Even the help of a vocal coach couldn’t rid her of the sense that she was “hopeless” at the podium. Audiences, she imagined, could tell she was suffering stage fright, “and I don’t think people enjoy seeing someone miserable.” But she counted the public reading she organized for Dylan Thomas that spring, at the start of his triumphant American tour, “the high point of my incumbency,” she wrote to Cal. The two poets could not have been more different in their public personas. But they’d both had village childhoods, and Dylan’s ebullience and informality (they were instantly on a first-name basis) put Elizabeth at ease. At a gala party in Dylan’s honor, they locked themselves in the butler’s pantry to drink and talk. Dylan had asked how Elizabeth would manage after the Poetry Consultant’s pay ran out—would she “go back on the parish?” She figured on “going back on Yaddo.”