Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  It wasn’t the first award that had come to the women at Samambaia. Six months after she’d settled in Brazil, Elizabeth had received the Poetry Society of America’s$800 Shelley Memorial Award. The year before Poems was published, the design for Lota’s house, which had already been featured in several international magazines, took first place in a competition judged by Walter Gropius for architects under age forty; Sergio Bernardes, who’d drawn up the plans in collaboration with Lota, was the named winner. And the Pulitzer wasn’t the only award Poems would bring. During the year following the announcement, Elizabeth received a Ford Foundation grant of $2,700 from Partisan Review and an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. “Never has so little work dragged in so many prizes,” she quipped. But the Pulitzer Prize, which she had won out of a field including Jarrell and Auden, put Elizabeth on film in Brazil’s weekly newsreel and in a photo in O Globo, where she was recognized by the vegetable man in Petrópolis, who congratulated her at the market. Most important, Elizabeth would say, the prize certified her worth as a poet to Lota’s circle of friends.

  Elizabeth on the patio at Samambaia

  Elizabeth’s sense of being “so at home” could vanish when the artists and writers and politicians who were Lota’s lifelong companions arrived for weekend stays or dinner parties at Samambaia. Some seemed “pointedly uninterested” in or attacked American culture; others grew tired of the effort to communicate with Elizabeth in English or French, or were jealous that Lota’s affection had been won by an American. Elizabeth’s shyness returned, forcing questions: “what am I doing here?—who am I, anyway—did I ever have a personality?” Mary Morse had drifted off to Rio, where she was dating men; she wanted a child. And although Elizabeth enjoyed Rosinha Leão and the poet Manuel Bandeira (despite disliking his poetry), she felt most comfortable practicing her limited Portuguese with the cook, who named her new daughter after Elizabeth.

  In Elizabeth’s view, Brazil suffered as a country with “NO MIDDLE CLASS,” she wrote to a friend, in which the “ruling” and “intellectual” elites were drawn from a small group of people who “all know each other and are usually all related.” There was no competition from below to challenge the few anointed writers and artists, and press them to do better. Political power was both entrenched and vacillating, and all too closely allied with the military. When Elizabeth arrived, the country was under the rule of a former dictator, Getulio Vargas, elected as president after six years out of power. Lota’s close friend the publisher Carlos Lacerda had waged a relentless campaign against Vargas in his newspaper and narrowly escaped assassination. The failed plot to kill Lacerda gave the military a pretext for demanding Vargas’s resignation; Vargas stepped down and then committed suicide, setting off a period of instability that enabled Lacerda to enter the political arena himself, putting Lota and her friends close to the center of power. La­cerda had bought one of the lots on Lota’s estate and was a near neighbor on weekends and holidays; he loved to drop by to talk politics, art, and literature with Lota and Elizabeth.

  The severe imbalance of rich and poor, obvious to any visitor in the 1950s at a first glimpse of Rio’s luxury apartment buildings lining the beach and slum neighborhoods, favelas, climbing the mountainside behind, both disturbed Elizabeth and fired her imagination. Elizabeth herself was born of such an imbalance, an unusual hybrid of the extreme ends of the social spectrum: an orphan heiress who’d spent her happiest childhood years among tradespeople, a Vassar girl whose home address was a dingy working-class suburb. Traveling in luxury in Europe with Louise Crane, Elizabeth had formed a close bond with the Russian nurse who cared for her after a surgery. In Key West, she’d grown attached to the matronly housekeeper at White Street, Hannah Almyda, and drafted a poem about her that she revised many times but never finished. She’d completed poems about two other domestic workers, black women she’d met in Key West, honoring their complicated lives in “Faustina” and “Cootchie,” both published in her prize-winning Poems.

  Now in Brazil, Elizabeth lived among the wealthy, but as an outsider, a dependent whose trust fund met only basic expenses, and she sometimes chose as subjects people and situations that must have seemed commonplace to Lota, her benefactor and mate. “Squatter’s Children,” the first poem she sent to the New Yorker in 1955, grew out of Elizabeth’s sympathetic identification with neglected children, and recalled the imagery of “A Miracle for Breakfast.” Viewed from a great distance, a “specklike girl and boy” play alone near a “specklike house,” dark crumbs scattered on the “unbreathing sides of hills”—the favela. The sun hangs in the sky, a “suspended eye,” and while there is no river, the children “wade” in “gigantic waves of light and shade.” The image magnifies to reveal the children playing with their father’s tools in the hard dirt, dropping the heavy mattock with a clang. Their laughter blooms, joining their mother’s sharp cries to come inside as thunderheads rise and rain begins to fall on the “unwarrantable ark,” the squatter’s shack that is their tenuous home. The storm, like the Oz-bound tornado that swept up an orphan Dorothy Gale and her flimsy Kansas homestead and deposited them in a vibrant new world, provides a “threshold” beneath the children’s “muddy shoes” over which they can step into a wider world, free to enter “mansions” (another image drawn from “A Miracle for Breakfast”) of their own choosing, “rooms of falling rain.” This new realm is neither miracle nor fantasy, however, but the natural world where the “rights” of children are guaranteed and their “lawfulness endures,” even if in “soggy documents.” It is the new world of 1955, where a handful of Negro schoolchildren in Topeka, Kansas, had just won, at least in court documents, the right to cross thresholds into classrooms previously closed to them. Would Brazil act to secure the natural rights of its dispossessed children too?

  Cold War politics had played into the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision: how could the United States present itself as an exemplary democracy if it denied racial minorities equal treatment? Elizabeth may have heard such accusations in dinner party conversation at Samambaia or in Rio as the landmark case worked its way to the Supreme Court from 1951 to 1953, and might have wished to turn them back on her host country. She published “Squatter’s Children” first (in English) in the progressive Brazilian monthly Anhembi, where it followed the serialization of Vinicius de Moraes’s “verse tragedy” of favela life, Orfeu da Conceição, from which the movie Black Orpheus was later derived.

  Elizabeth followed the American scene as closely as she could—subscribing to the Sunday New York Times and the Nation as well as Partisan Review and the New Yorker—even as she pressed Lota, who frankly preferred traveling in Europe or the United States, to explore Brazil with her. Lota thought her beloved Cookie was suffering from “bi-localization.” One weekend in April 1953 they made a journey in the old Jaguar, carrying spare cans of gasoline and Lota’s revolver, along mountain roads transformed into a “deep river of red mud” by equinoctial rains to the nearly deserted former gold-mining town of Ouro Prêto. Lota’s expertise in changing a flat tire “in a jiffy” impressed Elizabeth almost as much as the baroque Basílica do Bom Jesus in neighboring Congonhas, with its Twelve Prophets by the mulatto sculptor Aleijadinho, the “little cripple.” Aleijadinho, a leper, had completed the works with hammer and chisel strapped to his fingerless hands. Lota had changed the tire while clad in a wraparound skirt that fell open as she bent over to jack up the car, oblivious to the stares of passing truck drivers. Elizabeth could not have been surprised by Lota’s “precipitate” practicality; she’d also seen “my hostess” direct the early-morning dynamiting of an enormous boulder in her bathrobe.

  Lota resisted the exotic river trips Elizabeth longed for, but starting in 1957 they spent Christmas and New Year’s in the quiet seaside village of Cabo Frio, with its high white dunes and “secret beaches,” two hours from Rio by car, where they fished, swam, ate the local lobster, shrimp, and pineapples, read and napped in string hammocks. Every year, Elizabeth and L
ota attended Carnival, usually in Rio. Elizabeth, who struggled with conversational Portuguese, nonetheless picked up the new samba songs—“living poetry,” she called the lyrics composed by rival samba schools to sing as they danced in elaborate costumes through the streets at night. She treasured the ironic humor of some:

  Rio de Janeiro,

  My joy and my delight!

  By day I have no water,

  By night I have no light.

  A favorite love song echoed her own “Shampoo”:

  Come, my mulatta,

  Take me back.

  You’re the joker

  In my pack,

  The prune in my pudding,

  Pepper in my pie,

  My package of peanuts,

  The moon in my sky.

  The song’s mulatta lover could have been Lota, with her “beautiful colored skin”; Lota turned darker in the sun while Elizabeth remained pale, even as her “Anglo-Saxon blood” was “gradually relinquishing its seasonal cycle.” Carnival was the epitome of the “underdeveloped-yet-decadent” Brazil that Elizabeth settled into contentedly at age forty-five, writing May Swenson, who thought Elizabeth looked “wise” in her recent author photo, that in fact she had “never felt foolisher.” Elizabeth “loved” this photo, in which she had posed against “my rocks” at Samambaia wearing “an old shirt,” and she wished May—who’d become one of Elizabeth’s most reliable correspondents since her move to Brazil, providing literary news along with the occasional pair of Lee jeans, high-powered binoculars for bird watching, or a pink skirted bathing suit from Saks—could slide down the waterfall into the pool with her and Lota, join them for an outdoor lunch of fresh figs and prosciutto. Elizabeth didn’t much like Rio except at Carnival time, but where else, she wondered, could you find a billboard advertising a new gas stove showing a “young Negro cook, overcome by her pleasure . . . leaning across it toward her white mistress . . . as they kissed each other on the cheek.”

  In “Manuelzinho,” another poem of 1955, the same year she produced “Squatter’s Children,” Elizabeth captured the effort at connection across class lines she found so remarkable in Brazil and reminiscent of her village childhood. She recorded Lota’s frustrated dealings with the inept gardener, “half squatter, half tenant (no rent),” whose right to live at Samambaia with his family on land farmed by his ancestors Lota never questioned. “You helpless, foolish man, / I love you all I can,” she finished in Lota’s voice. “Or do I? / . . . Again I promise to try.” When Howard Moss, the New Yorker’s new poetry editor, wrote to Elizabeth praising the poem, she rolled a special sheet of paper, a memento of Carnival season, into her typewriter to answer him. Hand-lettered across the top of the page in bright pink, green, and silver glitter, the colors of Rio’s popular Mangueira samba school, were the words UNIDOS SEREMOS FELIZES. “United we shall be happy,” she translated her “motto” for Moss; “so true, don’t you think?”

  Although many of the new poems of the mid-1950s featured Brazilian subjects, Elizabeth was still imaginatively engaged in her Nova Scotia and New England youth, seeking the roots of her present happiness in several unfinished works about her early erotic life. A poem, called simply “Judy,” revived her passion for Judy Flynn at Walnut Hill School: “I still am proud / that then I stared so hard / upon this best of Beauty. . . .” She remembered the high school classroom where pupils “sat in rows” and “we were all / helpless before it even / our old martinet principal.” Another story, incomplete or perhaps never begun, but mentioned in a letter to May Swenson, derived from a favorite book by Gene Stratton-Porter. Aunt Maud had read Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost aloud to Elizabeth when she was sick with the measles, and the two had cried over the tale of the fatherless teenager who earned enough money to stay in school by selling rare moths she collected in the wilderness. But it was The Keeper of the Bees that inspired Elizabeth now, with its child hero, Little Scout, who “no one knows whether is a boy or a girl,” she explained to May, apologizing for her awkward syntax in describing such an unusual character. May would understand her fascination with a tomboy far more insistent on her androgyny than Elizabeth had dared to be. When asked outright, “Are you a girl or a boy?” the child replies, “If you can’t tell, it doesn’t make a darn bit of difference, does it?” Little Scout dresses as a boy and belongs to a Boy Scout troop, but is still capable of planting “the hardest, hottest, sweetest little kiss” on the lips of the novel’s protagonist, a shell-shocked World War I veteran recuperating on a seaside ranch in California. There he observes the impish child in a moment of abandon: “on bended knee . . . with eyes rolled heavenward, ecstatically sucking” honey from the pistils of Madonna lilies.

  Perched amid a flowering wilderness, Elizabeth and Lota could have been taken for “little scouts”—almost child-sized women, dressed all day in slacks and work shirts, still rare feminine attire in the 1950s. In fun, Lota had gone shopping in a local priests’ clothing store and come back with a pair of bishop’s socks of a “particular bright magenta,” Elizabeth told May, “just the thing with blue jeans.” Which was the greater breach of convention, wearing men’s clothes or a bishop’s socks? Elizabeth was proud that Lota could give orders to carpenters and bricklayers, drive the jeep or Jaguar as expertly as a man, kill a five-foot snake with one shot of her .22. Elizabeth herself, who’d “combined being asthmatic with also being athletic” since childhood, had taken hold of a “hydraulic cannon” at a mine in Diamantina, where she’d gone to research her translation of the young Helena Morley’s diary, and “brought down a few tons of landscape.” When Elizabeth had flown out of the small town—a desolate place, a “wild Atlantic Ocean of rocks” that felt as far off as the moon—she’d been one of only two women on the small plane, the other an expectant mother of twins on transport to a city hospital for the delivery.

  In the poetry world, it was the same. While she had learned from and leaned on Marianne Moore, and, in recent years, encouraged May Swenson with letters of recommendation and line-by-line critiques, she was pleased to have been “on parade with such a slew of men,” as May described the photo gallery of Pulitzer Prize winners published in the newspapers, and to learn that she’d been featured, along with Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Richard Wilbur, on a WNYC radio program, Poets Since 1945. Elizabeth seemed amused rather than daunted by her despised aunt Florence Bishop’s repeated “crack,” remembered now, at a safe distance in Brazil, that “being a writer makes a woman coarse, or masculine.” Although she wrote love poems on occasion, Elizabeth was nettled by what she perceived as the New Yorker poetry critic Louise Bogan’s expectation that women poets should confine themselves to “feminine” or sentimental subjects. Elizabeth could not have been happy to hear from May that she’d been acknowledged, along with Bogan, at a reading at the Museum of Modern Art, as among “our best women poets,” despite the moderator’s clumsy effort to clarify he’d meant “women poets,” not “women poets.”

  May Swenson, photograph by Erich Hartmann

  But at Samambaia, Elizabeth could indulge in the conventionally feminine when she wanted to. Elizabeth and Lota were not just building but also decorating and furnishing a house together, and there were trips to tile makers and decisions to make about upholstery and linens. In the kitchen, Elizabeth supervised the cook or made her own lasagna, chicken tetrazzini, and stuffing for the Christmas turkey. She perfected recipes for jams and marmalades using local fruits, and taught herself to work with yeast so she could offer guests English muffins made from scratch. “When the muse gives up the ghost,” she joked to May, “I can set myself up with a little shop in Rio, an impoverished gentlewoman, selling doughnuts and brownies.” There were children to look after too—the cook’s baby and, in the hot summer months, Lota’s young grandchildren escaping the heat in Rio. Long before Elizabeth arrived in Brazil, Lota had adopted the son of a garage mechanic who’d been repairing her car. She’d noticed the boy, Kylso, nearly hidden behind the service
station’s high counter, his legs crippled by polio, and asked his father’s permission to take him to a hospital. Several operations enabled the boy to walk with the aid of a cane, and then Lota supported his education at a boarding school. Now Kylso was grown, working as an architect’s draftsman, and married with children of his own.

  Perhaps Lota’s benefaction was in the back of Elizabeth’s mind as she wrote “Filling Station,” another poem of 1955, set in a gas station on one of Brazil’s highways, although she later placed it in the “Elsewhere” section of her 1965 volume, Questions of Travel, implicitly transposing the scene to Canada. “Oh, but it is dirty!” the poem begins. “Father wears a dirty, / oil-soaked monkey suit / . . . and greasy sons assist him / (it’s a family filling station).” Yet the grimy roadside establishment is furnished with a “comfy” if battered wicker sofa, and an “extraneous” begonia plant sits atop a side table draped with a large handmade doily. These humble decorative touches, hints of femininity and craft or art, yield a closing benediction: “Somebody embroidered the doily. / Somebody waters the plant, / . . . Somebody loves us all.”