Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Katharine White had been out of the city during Elizabeth’s New York stay and did not meet “the friend with whom I am living here,” the most Elizabeth would venture to say in letters about her connection to Lota. Perhaps missing the opportunity to introduce Lota this time was fine with Elizabeth. She was leaving a country where same-sex love was more than ever taboo, where the American Psychiatric Association’s first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, newly released in 1952, was to categorize homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” Had she consulted a psychoanalyst now, confided as she had in Ruth Foster five years before, Elizabeth might not have found acceptance. Elizabeth was well aware that the New Yorker’s editorial department insisted on strictly verifiable facts and refused to print certain curse words or “functional references,” even in poetry and fiction. She may not have known that the magazine maintained an equally strict code of suitable topics, which Katharine White, wife of the magazine’s longtime contributor E. B. White, upheld: homosexuality was “definitely out as humor, and dubious in any case.”

  Within a year of her return to Brazil with Lota, Elizabeth would read Lizzie Hardwick’s dismissive review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (which Elizabeth had read earlier in French and “fundamentally” agreed with) and take in Hardwick’s approving surmise that the French feminist at least was not “a masochist, a Lesbian, a termagant, or a man-hater.” Lizzie had done “a fine job” with the review, Elizabeth wrote to Cal, who’d stayed on with Lizzie in Amsterdam, in the same letter in which she informed him, tersely, that she’d settled down with Lota—“she wanted me to stay; she offered to build me a studio.” A year later, the first chapters of Mary McCarthy’s The Group began to appear in Partisan Review, leaving Elizabeth aghast at her old schoolmate’s ability to write such “fantastic” prose, yet “without one shred of imagination”—and most of all worried that Mary might expose Elizabeth as one of the sex-obsessed grown-up Vassar girls she caricatured in the novel.

  Elizabeth would not tell Cal outright that she loved Lota. But that first Brazilian summer of 1952 she did tell him, and everyone else she wrote to, how happy she was, “happier than I have felt in ten years,” or twenty, or ever. “It is so much easier to live exactly as one wants to here.” Brazilians in general may have been no more overtly welcoming to homosexuals in the 1950s than Americans, but the country had a long history of tolerance. In 1830, a few years after gaining independence from Portugal, following the lead of Napoleonic France and its colonies, Brazil was the first nation in the New World to repeal anti-sodomy laws. As in Key West, a mix of races and ancestries contributed to what Elizabeth called “the really lofty vagueness of Brazil,” which extended to mail delivery, “seasons, fruits, languages, geography, everything.” It was “nice & relaxing” to live in such “complete confusion.” Her choice of housemate hardly seemed to matter, and the Brazilian people, she told Cal, are “extremely affectionate, an atmosphere that I just lap up—no I guess I mean loll in.” For Elizabeth, who struggled with the Portuguese language and was just as happy that Samambaia’s remote location meant visitors arrived only on weekends, those “people” were Lota.

  They were rarely apart. Days in Samambaia were framed by an hour or more of reading each morning and evening; it was “wonderful” that Lota “likes to read as much as I do and begins at 6:30 a.m. usually,” Elizabeth wrote to Marianne. Once her books were unpacked, Elizabeth estimated that between them they owned three thousand volumes. The hours of work—Elizabeth writing, Lota supervising the “mens” who arrived to lay flooring or pave the driveway—were punctuated by cafezhinos and meals prepared by a cook or by Elizabeth herself, whom Lota promptly nicknamed “Cookie.” The coffee was always “superb,” and Elizabeth was well aware “how good it is for me to live in a country where one scarcely ever dreams of drinking anything else.” She told her doctor, Anny Baumann, who increasingly served as Elizabeth’s confidant and confessor as well as clinician, that she was shedding the thirty pounds she’d gained in recent years and had reduced her nights of drunkenness to “once or twice a month, and I stop before it gets really bad.” Both drinking and working had “improved miraculously,” thanks to Lota’s “good sense and kindness.” Elizabeth simply didn’t “think about it any more”—whether or not to drink—“or go through all that remorse” on the few occasions when she succumbed. She no longer feared, as she wrote to Cal, that she’d “wander around the world in a drunken daze for the rest of my life.”

  Elizabeth in the pool at Samambaia

  Some days the landscape and weather were “so beautiful” it was hard to stay indoors and work. Some days Lota’s workmen were noisy and distracting, or the two women drove down the mountainside in Lota’s “rather elderly” Jaguar to shop at the village market. One weekend Lota’s friend Rosinha Leão, another of Candido Portinari’s former students, arrived from Rio with buckets of paint, and the women covered one wall of the “enormous” new bathroom with multicolored diamonds, “harlequin-tights style.” When Elizabeth’s studio, “way up in the air behind the house,” was finished at the end of December, in Brazilian midsummer, she spent hours gazing in disbelieving gratitude at the gray-blue mica-flecked rock that Lota had found for the small building’s exterior, the whitewashed walls and herringbone-patterned brick floor, the tiny bathroom and kitchenette with stove for making tea, the view of “stupendous mountain scenery” in the distance, the vegetable garden up close. Although she’d had no formal training in architecture or landscape design—few women did—Lota had a genius for everything from siting a building to sculpting its outdoor spaces and outfitting its interiors, which her projects at Samambaia, where she was at liberty to experiment on her own remote mountainside, abundantly displayed.

  Lota also had a way of knowing what mattered most to Elizabeth. Next she dammed a natural pool at the base of a small waterfall that ran beside the house to make Elizabeth a “neck-deep” swimming pool that filled right away with “delicious,” ice-cold, pale green water “straight down off the top of the mountain.” A cat, Tobias, “black with white feet and vest,” joined the household soon after Elizabeth spoke of wanting one to curb the mouse population. “Wishes seem to come true here at such a rate one is almost afraid to make them any more,” Elizabeth wrote to Dr. Baumann.

  Before the pool was finished and a “super-bathroom” installed in the big house, the two women relied on tin basins for bathing, as in the long-ago days when Elizabeth had watched her mother wash herself in the bedroom at her grandparents’ house in Great Village. But now Elizabeth and Lota reveled in Samambaia’s unending supply of “running, rushing water” outdoors, using the garden hose. Elizabeth offered to wash Lota’s long, straight hair, black with wide silver streaks on either side; the shampooing of Lota’s hair became a ritual they couldn’t give up. The ritual became a poem, the second Elizabeth wrote in the early months of her stay in Brazil; its interlocking pairs of rhymes spoke her love for Lota, her gratitude for Lota’s impulsive invitation to stay on at Samambaia:

  The still explosions on the rocks,

  the lichens, grow

  by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.

  They have arranged

  to meet the rings around the moon, although

  within our memories they have not changed.

  And since the heavens will attend

  as long on us,

  you’ve been, dear friend,

  precipitate and pragmatical;

  and look what happens. For Time is

  nothing if not amenable.

  The shooting stars in your black hair

  in bright formation

  are flocking where,

  so straight, so soon?

  —Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,

  battered and shiny like the moon.

  Lota and Elizabeth were an interlocking pair—in love, in their lives together. A decade later, when Elizabeth had collected a volume of poems all written i
n Brazil, Questions of Travel, she would dedicate the book to Lota with an epigraph in Portuguese, the final couplet of a sonnet by the sixteenth-century poet Luís de Camões: “Giving you what I have and what I may / The more I give you, the more I owe you.” Elizabeth gave Lota what she had and what she made—this new poem and others to come.

  She sent “The Shampoo” to the New Yorker, but unlike “Arrival at Santos” and the stories “In the Village” and “Gwendolyn,” it came back. “This sort of small personal poem perhaps doesn’t quite fit into the New Yorker,” wrote Katharine White apologetically. “It won’t make literary history,” Elizabeth complained to a friend, “but I did think it was easy enough to understand.” Too easy, perhaps. She sent “The Shampoo” to Poetry, and it was returned as well. “I never thought I’d see the day when we would reject a poem of yours,” wrote Poetry’s editor, Karl Shapiro, “but we do so daringly today.” Marianne Moore, to whom Elizabeth had mailed the earliest finished draft in August 1952, never mentioned “The Shampoo” in return letters. Elizabeth confided to the poet May Swenson, with whom she’d formed a fast bond at Yaddo that “winter . . . when I thought my days were numbered,” her worry that there was “something indecent about it I’d overlooked.” May also lived with a woman, Pearl Schwartz, in a relationship sanctified by rings engraved with the date of their commitment; she knew what Elizabeth was asking. Finally, three years later in 1955, the New Republic published “the little poem Mrs. White couldn’t understand.”

  Elizabeth struggled, even in Lota’s paradise, to complete what she’d once estimated as the remaining 15 percent of the manuscript expected by Houghton Mifflin and meant to become her second book since North & South appeared in 1946. There had been “a good spell of work and then a long bad one,” during which the “old bronchitis-asthma cycle” recurred, along with circling thoughts: was asthma the reason she couldn’t write, or did her fear that “poetry is all over forever” provoke the asthma? The two stories she’d written early on at Samambaia, “In the Village” and “Gwendolyn,” had been accomplished while under the influence of cortisone, a new medication that cleared her lungs but also left her feeling hopped up, and afterward worn out. She quit using the drug, triggering the letdown in mood, and returned to it only intermittently in later years, always pleased with the energy she gained on the “ride”—“this euphoria is wonderful,” she once wrote Cal—but disliking the frenetic state cortisone put her in, the surges of emotion the steroid caused.

  Disrupted sleep was no help. She woke several times a night gasping for breath, lit the oil lamp so she could see to administer a shot of adrenaline, then waited for the effects to take hold. She guessed that “intimacy with clouds” might affect her lungs adversely, she wrote to Marianne Moore, but she would not consider moving from Samambaia—“I like it so much.” To her delight, Elizabeth had earned more than $1,200 for “Gwendolyn” and more for “In the Village,” far exceeding any sums she’d received for poems from the New Yorker, with its per-line rates. Expecting to sell more stories, she bought a car, a year-old MG two-seater, black with red leather upholstery, and began learning to drive, eager to “stop being the passenger-type I’ve been all my life” and take over the shopping in Petrópolis for Lota, who disliked the chore. Here was a way she could help save “emotional wear & tear” in the household. “I don’t like arguments,” Elizabeth would always say, and she strove to avoid them in even small matters with Lota, a Brazilian for whom “argument . . . is the favorite occupation.” Dependence on Lota, in a country where Elizabeth couldn’t speak the language and had no friends of her own, felt risky at times. But learning to operate the car’s finicky gearshift proved too difficult on mountain roads in Brazil, where female drivers were a rarity and the sight of a woman at the wheel could provoke shouts of “Well done, daughter!” or “Go back to the kitchen!” Perhaps, with a traumatic car crash in memory, Elizabeth was destined to remain a passenger, and she admitted to Cal a residual fear that any of “the few people I’m fond of may be in automobile accidents.” The disappointment added to her sense, as she wrote in a letter of apology to a second editor at Houghton Mifflin, Paul Brooks, that she was someone “who just can’t ‘produce.’” Finally she resorted to telegram: “CANNOT PROMISE ANYTHING IMMEDIATELY. . . . HOPE YOU WILL CONSIDER PUBLISHING BOOK AS IT IS NOW.”

  Elizabeth was “getting used to be[ing] happy.” She wondered, could happiness itself cause her to “never write a line” again? And Lota was getting used to Elizabeth’s pace, her yen for distraction. “Elizabeth is the slowest personne in the world,” Lota informed their friends Gold and Fizdale, after a year together. “You should see the mail she gets asking, begging, etc. and nope, she is cooking a cake!” The new life, the feeling of being “so at home” for the first time since early childhood, may have made it hard for Elizabeth to look back at the poems she’d written before, when she’d been at “dead low tide.” In the new book, which she planned to title A Cold Spring after a poem describing a season that “hesitated” into being, there would be “At the Fishhouses,” with its bitter draught of knowledge, and “The Bight,” written to mark a birthday at Key West when she’d despaired of both the year past and the one ahead. The poem began with a bleak description of Garrison Bight, a sheltered harbor for small craft:

  At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

  White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare

  and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.

  At low tide, the water “doesn’t wet anything.” In the sky—

  Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar

  on impalpable drafts

  and open their tails like scissors on the curves

  or tense them like wishbones till they tremble.

  The soaring man-of-war birds with their scissoring tails threaten, yet they too are wishing, trembling, in tension. On shore, shark tails for the “Chinese-restaurant trade” hang out to dry on chicken wire; a dredge thrums a steady beat, bringing up more marl from the bay’s sandy bottom; and small white boats, damaged by a recent storm, lie on their sides, “stove in” or “piled up / against each other . . . / like torn-open unanswered letters.” The whole “untidy” scene reflected her state of mind, “awful but cheerful,” as she had faced down a lonely birthday in February 1948.

  “The Prodigal,” a double sonnet, was inspired by an encounter with one of her aunt Grace’s stepsons, who’d offered her a drink early one morning during her 1946 trip to Nova Scotia. He’d been standing in the pigsty when he held out the bottle of rum, and if Elizabeth wasn’t drunk or hung over herself, there had been many mornings that summer when she was. He’d recognized that in her, and she felt it; he was her double. “O Breath” captured her battle with asthma. Even “Insomnia,” a small, personal love poem the New Yorker published happily in 1951, just before Elizabeth left for South America, must have brought confused feelings as she read it over in her newfound Eden. Although “Insomnia” told of abandoned constraint, of staying awake all night for the sake of love in a “world inverted / where left is always right,” Elizabeth understood, in the wake of “The Shampoo” ’s rejection, that the first poem’s lovers had been suitably ambiguous, need not have been, to most readers, two women. Had the subterfuge been intentional? Most likely. But Elizabeth knew now, if she hadn’t before, how closely her words were scrutinized for hints of the secret life she managed to live by hiding in plain sight.

  In the end, Houghton Mifflin took her suggestion; there would be no more unmet promises for new poems. But rather than publish a slim volume, the editors proposed a “collected poems,” combining North & South, now out of print, with A Cold Spring. “The Shampoo” provided the conclusion for what Elizabeth described sheepishly to Marianne Moore as this “misbegotten book.” Proofs left Elizabeth’s desk in July 1955. The book’s simple cover was designed by Loren MacIver: a brilliant yellow-green leaf ascending on a field of white and blue; the title, Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring, displa
yed modestly in typewriter type. Elizabeth would not presume to use the word “Collected” in her title; she was not yet forty-five, twenty years younger than Marianne had been when she issued her prize-winning Collected Poems.

  Yet now, with the pressure to produce lifted, Elizabeth pushed a dozen new poems through to completion in 1955 and ’56. “Squatter’s Children,” “Manners,” “Filling Station,” “Questions of Travel,” “Sestina,” “Manuelzinho,” “The Armadillo,” and “Sunday, 4 A.M.” all went to the New Yorker and found swift acceptance. More poems filled her notebooks in draft. She’d begun translating the diary of a Brazilian girl—Helena Morley, she would be called in the finished book—a vivid portrayal of life in a remote diamond-mining town in the mid-1890s. So far the project seemed to help rather than hinder her progress with poetry, and allowed her to reckon with her newly adopted country’s language without the strain of rapid conversation. Finally, as Elizabeth wrote to Katharine White, she could state truthfully that Samambaia was “the best, or maybe first, place I’ve found to work in steadily.” Her health rebounded, Elizabeth told Dr. Baumann, and she was “maybe gradually making up for some of my misspent youth-and-early-middle-age.” She had “almost a new book of poems,” she wrote to Randall Jarrell, with whom she’d carried on an occasional correspondence since he’d introduced her to Cal back in 1947. Randall, who could be a vicious critic of his contemporaries, had told her she was doing something both “theoretically and practically impossible”: writing nothing but good poems. “Exile seems to work for me,” she concluded. In the midst of this unprecedented burst of productivity, a reporter from O Globo in Rio called in early May 1956 to tell Elizabeth that Poems had won the Pulitzer Prize.