Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  At the end came more rules, in all-caps: “PLEASE USE PAPER CLIPS OR STAPLES!” and “PLEASE DON’T HAND IN POEMS THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN HANDED IN AND DISCUSSED IN OTHER CLASSES. THIS IS A WASTE OF EVERYONE’S TIME.” It seemed that wasting time—one’s own, one’s classmates’, one’s professor’s—was a cardinal sin for Miss Bishop. Perhaps the class itself was a waste of everyone’s time. But here we were. We would make the best use we could of the hours we had.

  3

  Coffee

  SHE COULD SMELL coffee beans even before the SS Bowplate, the Norwegian freighter she’d boarded in New York in November 1951, landed at the Brazilian port of Santos. There had been open-air coffee stands on street corners in Key West, releasing the pungent aroma of brewed coffee to drift on warm sea breezes. But this was different, the acrid scent of roasting beans that greeted her as she descended from the Bowplate’s upper deck amid dozens of cargo ships loaded for export with the odorless fresh beans, still green. She would later say you could smell coffee everywhere in Brazil, either roasting in factories outside cities and towns, or the subtler fragrance of coffee plants in flower on the mountainsides she grew to love, as she did the rich dark liquid that ushered in each day—not in gallons but in tiny cupfuls, cafezinhos.

  Elizabeth hadn’t meant to stay. She hadn’t meant, at first, to travel to South America at all. When she’d pocketed a $2,500 writer’s fellowship from Bryn Mawr College, bestowed on her the previous spring at the urging of Marianne Moore and her editor at the New Yorker, Katharine White, both graduates, she’d planned on spending a year in Europe before returning to deliver the requisite lecture on campus. Cal Lowell was traveling in Italy with his new bride, the acerbic critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, and he’d invited her to visit each time the couple settled in for a stretch. In Florence he promised a “large apartment and maid . . . waiting for you,” and he painted the scene of “a smallish sand and wind-swept cottage” on the island of Ischia that all three would share. But an unexpected “tax tangle” and a finally unmet desire to complete the manuscript of a second book that was “85% at Houghton Mifflin” stalled her departure until the fall when, she wrote to Cal from the Bowplate, there had been no cheap tickets to Europe. The prospect of a “crazy trip” around the South American continent, stopping at various ports until the next passage of the freighter line, began to appeal to her.

  She had hardly seen Cal since a summer day in Maine in 1948 when the two had been stranded awkwardly together at the guesthouse in Stonington, on Deer Isle, where she’d rented a room for several weeks, inviting friends to join her. Still not officially divorced from his first wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, Cal had arrived to meet his girlfriend, Carley Dawson, only to rudely dismiss her, leaving Elizabeth to offer comfort to his rejected lover on the morning of her departure. Later that day, swimming, lounging on the beach, and trading stories with Cal, Elizabeth couldn’t be certain he understood she loved women. It wasn’t something she made clear to most people, least of all to men, and Cal, who hadn’t known her when she’d been involved with Louise Crane or Marjorie Stevens, might have had the wrong impression. She’d been dallying with a mutual friend, Tom Wanning, inviting him along on vacations like this one. Marriage was something she’d always instinctively resisted—“But no! I would be no man’s wife,” she’d written as a girl in a string of humorous couplets, “family life is not for me. / I find it leads to deep depression / And I was born for self expression.” Still, she was nearing forty, and other women she knew had married simply to have children, or to provide cover for a romantic life they felt constrained to hide. But Tom’s drinking was as bad as hers, and when the opportunity arose to send him off to the train station with Carley, Elizabeth pushed him away too.

  While later Elizabeth would say she might have wished to have a child with Cal, it wasn’t hard to see that the habitually disheveled Adonis of American poetry needed more nurture than she could give. A thoroughbred Boston Brahmin, six feet tall and with a mass of dark ringleted hair, Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV had long cultivated nicks in the Yankee veneer, leaving Harvard for Kenyon College in Ohio, adopting a southern drawl in imitation of his mentors Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. Elizabeth knew at least some of Cal’s romantic history—the car wreck in Boston before his wedding to Jean Stafford that had put her in a coma and left her beautiful face scarred, her nose misshapen; the house on the Maine coast in Damariscotta Mills purchased with the proceeds of Jean’s first novel, a bestseller; the night near the end of the marriage when he’d nearly strangled his young wife in a jealous rage. The episode figured dramatically in Cal’s third book, The Mills of the Kavanaughs. Elizabeth had delayed responding to the manuscript when he’d sent it to her for critique during her second stay at Yaddo, and she struggled still to find ways to praise the book when it came out in the spring of 1951. In manuscript she’d found the collection “harrowing,” and she objected, she finally told its author, to a line near the end: “a girl can bear just about anything.” She was dismayed by Cal’s attempt to capture—appropriate—Jean’s angry, injured voice in dramatic monologue. Jean wasn’t a close friend, but they shared an editor in Katharine White, and, for several months before leaving for South America, Elizabeth had stayed in the same New York rental where Jean had written her most recent novel.

  Then there were Cal’s breakdowns and hospitalizations, which had begun less than a year after the 1948 Maine holiday and which hadn’t kept Lizzie Hardwick from marrying him. Elizabeth had felt the heat that drew women to Cal despite his erratic behavior, felt it that day alone with him in Maine. But such a man could never have consented to a sham marriage. She read it in his letters from Florence, where he wrote derisively of the tourists who crowded the city: “mostly fairies, people of taste and students from Chicago,” producing a “certain blank.” He needed to be aroused.

  And so did she. The “crazy trip” was not so crazy, not at all. Her first stop would be in Rio, visiting Mary Morse and Lota de Macedo Soares. When she’d met the couple in New York four years earlier, she’d been drawn to Mary Morse, a former dancer, and confided as much in Dr. Foster. She’d made a drunken phone call to Mary—“a very nice tall bony Boston type”—confessing her love, and instantly regretted it; she didn’t want to risk Lota’s fury by acting on her attraction. Lota—small, olive-skinned, and quiet, perhaps because she was amid English-speakers; something in Lota’s manner warned of fierceness, or passion. Backing off, Elizabeth told Ruth Foster it was only Mary’s looks and startlingly “frank conversational style” she cared for; she hardly knew her. She hoped Mary and Lota hadn’t caught on to her drinking problem.

  Now she would be seeing them both for the first time on their home turf—Lota’s, really. Mary Morse had fallen for Lota when the two met on a steamer from Rio to New York a decade before. Lota was traveling with her teacher and friend the muralist Candido Portinari, who’d been commissioned to paint wall frescoes in the Hispanic Reading Room at the Library of Congress. Mary had just completed her last tour as a dancer. Once the murals were finished, she followed Lota back to Brazil and, except for an extended visit the couple made to New York at the end of the war, never left—living with Lota in a penthouse apartment in Rio overlooking Copacabana beach and on the Soares family estate fifty miles outside the city, in the mountain village of Petrópolis, the summer retreat of Rio’s elite.

  It had been a year since the shock of Ruth Foster’s death. Aboard the Bowplate Elizabeth took heart from a new acquaintance, Miss Breen, a retired police officer who’d presided over Detroit’s women’s prison for twenty-six years; she spoke “a lot to me” of her “roommate,” a lawyer named Ida, Elizabeth recorded in her journal. Miss Breen was tall with bright blue eyes, like Dr. Foster, and “extremely kind,” but at almost seventy, a survivor. Elizabeth wrote of Miss Breen to Cal as “very gentle and polite,” modest about her crime-solving capabilities; she’d been featured in True Detective. She may also have reminded Elizabeth of the intrepi
d women who founded and ran Walnut Hill School and occasionally traveled to England on holiday, writing back enthusiastic journal letters for publication in the Blue Pencil. Miss Breen entertained “day-dreams” like her own, Elizabeth wrote to Cal, then wintering with Lizzie in Amsterdam, of “going down through the Straits & up the West coast” of South America.

  She wrote about Miss Breen once more, three months later in her first poem from Brazil. Elizabeth had traveled with the older woman to São Paulo for two days, touring the massive, Versailles-inspired National Museum before taking the night train alone to Rio. There Lota’s apartment, hers for the month while Mary and Lota withdrew to Petrópolis, was “all very luxurious.” She was surrounded by “Calders”—Lota was a collector—“Copacabana, Cariocans, Coffee, etc.” But the city seemed a “mess,” like Miami and Mexico City combined, and with “men in bathing trunks kicking footballs all over the place” beginning at sunrise. She made plans to move on to Buenos Aires, taking the next freighter. Elizabeth’s feelings about Brazil would change, however, when, to her surprise, as she concluded the poem “Arrival at Santos,” she found herself “driving to the interior”—with Lota.

  All it took was two “very sour” bites of a cashew fruit, the bulbous, persimmon-colored stem that bears the nut, rarely eaten anywhere but in Brazil. Elizabeth’s face blew up until she could no longer see. Her hands ballooned; she couldn’t type or even hold a pencil. Her ears were two “large red-hot mushrooms.” Up in the mountains at Samambaia, the property in the village of Petrópolis named for a giant fern on which Lota was building a glass-walled house in the shape of a butterfly, its wings spread open to the sun, she lay in bed, except when Lota drove her to the hospital each day for injections of calcium.

  Lota’s Samambaia house, Petrópolis

  When did they first touch? Perhaps Lota stroked the suffering Elizabeth’s stiff wild hair with its ripples of gray. On the back of a draft of her unfinished story “Homesickness,” Elizabeth scribbled “A love letter,” written at five a.m.: “Lota!—(if I may call you so . . .) Come scratch me again! I am madly in love with you.” She could not have written this while stricken with the “fearful and wonderful allergy,” but soon, when she took out her manuscripts and began to work again. “I call to you every morning. Don’t you hear me? It is from the heart.”

  She’d come to Samambaia to watch the workmen raise the roof of Lota’s new house; she’d learned that Mary Morse was leaving Lota to build her own separate residence farther down the mountain. Perhaps there was an opening to fulfill one or more of the aims Elizabeth had listed in her travel journal in a fervent litany, headed “I believe”—

  that the steamship will support me on the water,

  & that the aeroplane will conduct me over the mountain,

  that perhaps I shall not die of cancer,

  or in the poorhouse,

  that eventually I shall see things in a “better light,”

  that I shall continue to read and continue to write,

  that I shall continue to laugh until I cry with a certain few friends.

  that love will unexpectedly appear over & over again,

  that people will continue to do kind deeds that astound me.

  It wasn’t long-limbed Mary, but small, impulsive, and imperious Lota—not at all quiet in her mix of convent-school French, native Portuguese, and improvised English—whose love appeared unexpectedly. Whose kind deeds astounded Elizabeth, not just in nursing her back to health—when Elizabeth fainted one morning, Lota collapsed too, in sympathy—but in offering to build an estudio where Elizabeth could write if she would stay on at Samambaia. Never in her life had anyone “made that kind of gesture toward me.” Elizabeth felt as if she’d “died and gone to heaven without deserving to.” She stayed.

  Even before the studio was completed, while the two women lived in Lota’s unfinished house open to the elements, amid heaps of construction materials, lighting their way at night with oil lamps, Elizabeth was writing as she never had before—stories, not poems, of her childhood in Nova Scotia. Although she would never finish the story “Homesickness,” about her mother, she found she could write about her own early terror at her mother’s screams echoing over Great Village—“alive forever” in memory—because she could also recall “those pure blue skies,” the “leaning willows” along the riverbank that were her comfort, and the villagers—seamstress, blacksmith, postmaster—who knew her so well, as she settled into another country village in a differently vivid, “unbelievably impractical” landscape of black granite cliffs, waterfalls, purple-flowered Lent trees, and “brilliant, brilliant blue” skies. “I am a little embarrassed about having to go to Brazil to experience total recall about Nova Scotia,” she wrote to Katharine White, who gratefully accepted “In the Village,” Elizabeth’s tale of childhood in Great Village, for the New Yorker: “geography must be more mysterious than we think.” She could write a story called “Gwendolyn,” about the death of her frail girlhood playmate; Elizabeth herself was safe and cared for. “You have an ally here in the friend I am staying with,” she would tell Katharine White. Lota had given her a gold ring with the date of their impetuous pledge to live together—“20-12-51,” less than a month after Elizabeth’s arrival in Rio—inscribed in it. Elizabeth would be “no man’s wife,” but she and Lota had started a marriage.

  At Walnut Hill School Elizabeth had written of her longing to “open every building to the blue sky and the wind.” Now in Brazil—“or my perpendicular stretch of it,” as she wrote to Katharine White in letters carefully introducing her decision to extend her stay in Petrópolis with “my hostess”—at the very top of a thickly forested property that Lota was selling off in parcels to support her construction project, Elizabeth lived in a house where a cloud might be “coming in my bedroom window right this minute,” or a large yellow and black hummingbird had to be shooed out of the pantry with an umbrella. Her view was of a steep green valley rimmed by mountains with thick mists spilling over them “like waterfalls in slow motion.”

  And she lived with Lota, a woman “much too attached to material possessions . . . in a careless country like Brazil”—the Calders and other works of art she collected, the Saarinen and Aalto furniture with which she filled her homes, the expensive fabrics she had made up into suits and shifts she wore in the city—but who, at Samambaia, was “rarely without a measuring stick, a trowel or a screwdriver” and nearly always, like Elizabeth these days, dressed in blue jeans and an old, man-tailored shirt. Lota, who had once triumphed in samba competitions partnered by men of her newspaper-editor father’s ruling class, but who used her inherited property and prestige to live as she pleased—always with women. Lota, who instinctively knew that Elizabeth needed “getting used to be happy and sleeping well, and less scared,” as she added in a postscript to one of Elizabeth’s letters back to America; who would repeatedly assure Elizabeth how “wonderful you are” and how “amusing” and “likeable,” and never tire of shooing away Elizabeth’s “inferiorities,” like so many hummingbirds from the pantry.

  Lota de Macedo Soares at Cabo Frio, Brazil

  Elizabeth was slow to admit to her American friends that she wasn’t coming back. Her letters mentioned plans to continue her circuit of South America by steamer at the end of February, and then early March. But Lota had given her the ring on her birthday, February 8, and a party the night before with cake and champagne and gifts from neighbors—a “real” banana-eating, “very tame and mischievous” toucan was Elizabeth’s favorite. It had been her “lifelong dream” to own one. She told no one of the ring, but could Marianne Moore or Dr. Anny Baumann or Cal Lowell or anyone to whom she described Uncle Sam, with his “electric-blue eyes,” red-feathered stomach, “bright gold bib,” and sleek black body, think she could leave the bird behind? The name she chose “in a chauvinistic outburst,” she told Cal, both recalled her old home and celebrated the new one: in everyday speech the bird was “Sam,” the shorthand Lota used in referrin
g to her Petrópolis estate, or “Sammy.”

  For Lota’s birthday, March 16, when Lota turned forty-two to Elizabeth’s forty-one, Elizabeth painted a watercolor of the Aladdin kerosene lamp they read by at night, inscribed “For Lota”:

  Longer than Alladin’s burns,

  Love, & many Happy Returns.

  In late April they traveled to New York, staying for more than a month at the Hotel Grosvenor, on Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village—“Lota likes luxury,” Elizabeth already knew—to gather books, clothes, and the clavichord, and pack them for shipment to Brazil. Elizabeth gave her talk at Bryn Mawr. Few students appeared, but she assured the college president, Katherine McBride, by letter that “the last six or seven weeks have been very good ones for me and I am feeling very grateful.”

  In Manhattan they visited mutual friends—the painter Loren MacIver and her husband, the poet Lloyd Frankenberg. Loren had painted Elizabeth’s portrait; Lota collected Loren’s paintings. They saw the duo pianists Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale in their two-story studio apartment at Carnegie Hall. Elizabeth introduced Lota to Marianne Moore, who at almost sixty-five had received both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems and was on the brink of late-life celebrity. Moore had picked out the black tricorne hat that became, with flowing cape to match, her signature garment and wore it atop her pinned-up white braids to the National Book Award ceremony that spring of 1952; her lovably eccentric appearance in the news photo ushered in her era of fame. At the New Yorker, which had previously rejected any poems she submitted, Katharine White begged Elizabeth to use her influence to press Marianne to send new manuscripts. Shortly after her return to Brazil with Lota in July, Elizabeth complied, finessing the awkward fact that she’d been first to join the New Yorker’s stable of writers by telling Marianne that William Shawn, the new editor, “is really interested in trying to get good, better, best poems, for a change.”