Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  “Love’s the main thing always” in child-rearing, Elizabeth was learning from her experience tending little “Elizabetchy,” the cook’s daughter, and Kylso’s toddler children, although Lota did the bulk of the work when Kylso left his “babies” at Samambaia for weeks on end. Lota was “magnificent with child-problems,” Elizabeth conceded. “I suspect it’s because she’s had so much practice with me.” She remembered the saving love of her Bulmer aunts and grandmother, and as she listened one day to Kylso’s youngest, Lotinha, “discovering her voice . . . amusing herself trilling away by the hour, all alone,” Elizabeth was grateful she had not missed this: “see[ing] so much more of children than I ever had before.” Perhaps she had not been ready to see this way, but now it occurred to her that the “best results” of psychoanalysis, her sessions with Ruth Foster in the 1940s, had “come with the years,” enabling explorations of her childhood and adolescence in poetry and prose.

  One of these arrived in the form of a sestina, originally titled “Early Sorrow,” in which Elizabeth turned again to the scene of her mother’s removal to the asylum. It is a too-quiet afternoon like many following the night of screams and the slammed door; mother is gone. Grandmother and child sit at the kitchen table, taking comfort in the familiar objects around them—the hot Marvel stove, the singing teakettle, the almanac dangling on its string within easy reach for reference or jokes. But sorrow can’t be hidden. The grandmother weeps into her teacup. The child—like Little Scout, neither girl nor boy in this poem—draws crayon pictures of “inscrutable” houses one after another. The child is too young to write, but already finds in art “a way of thinking with one’s feelings,” as Elizabeth defined poetry in a letter to May Swenson in September 1955, the month before she sent “Sestina” to the New Yorker.

  May Swenson wasn’t the only American friend who missed Elizabeth and wondered whether she was planning to stay in Brazil “forever.” After a spell of itinerant teaching on his return to the United States in 1953, Cal had taken a job at Boston University in 1955 and settled in the Back Bay with Lizzie, who would soon give birth to their daughter Harriet. Cal never stopped urging Elizabeth to visit—he’d make a trip to New York City to see her, put her up in Boston or near his elderly cousin Harriet Winslow’s house in Castine, Maine, where the Lowells spent the summer months in a converted barn on the property. Sometimes Elizabeth’s reasons for staying away seemed clear. In New York, “everybody is so intent on using everybody,” there was “no room or time for friendship any more.” She’d always been too shy for this sort of “inter-communication,” she wrote to Cal, “and I was miserably lonely there most of the time.”

  But when she heard about a spate of verse plays scheduled to open in the city, Elizabeth asked May Swenson to report on them, and guessed that before long she would “start sounding actually wistful” about all she was missing. Elizabeth admitted to May that “sometimes I get awfully homesick for cold salt-water,” and for spring: “I’d like to hear a robin on a rainy evening, and see some maple trees budding.” She missed bicycling, “the way I got around in Florida,” impossible now in both vertiginous Petrópolis and crowded Rio. Still, five years after her arrival in Brazil, in October 1956, Elizabeth told May she was sorry she couldn’t vote for Adlai Stevenson in his run against President Eisenhower in the coming election, because she had no residence in the United States. “Sorry I can’t vote,” she specified, “I don’t mind about not having a residence.”

  The impending publication of her translation, The Diary of “Helena Morley,” provided a reason to return to New York for six months during the spring and summer of 1957 to review the proofs of the nearly four-hundred-page manuscript, a product of several years of “finicky” work rendering the young teenage girl’s late-nineteenth-century Portuguese idioms into fluid English. She rented a sublet on East 67th Street, and Lota came along to shop for the now almost completed house at Samambaia. They would return to Brazil in the fall with twenty-six pieces of luggage, as well as three barrels, four large crates, and seven trunks, packed into the ocean liner’s hold. The pianists Gold and Fizdale hosted a “bang-up party” in their new apartment on Central Park West, with Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, and Elizabeth’s Vassar classmate Eleanor Clark and her husband, the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, on the guest list. There were several social calls on Katharine White in New York, where Elizabeth was observed to be “svelte and chic and free of asthma,” and Lota remained “Donna Lota” to Mrs. White. The two women saw more of Cal and his family—Harriet was born in January 1957—first in Boston and later in Maine for a troubling several days in August as their host began to show the excitability that warned of a breakdown. He’d gone “almost off the rails at the end,” he admitted afterward.

  Elizabeth and Cal’s intellectual affinity, and their affection for each other, had deepened through the mail during the years both lived out of the country and after Cal’s return to the United States. Linked in the popular imagination since Elizabeth’s first book, North & South, and Cal’s second, Lord Weary’s Castle, appeared during the same publishing season in 1946, the two had more in common than even they sometimes acknowledged. Both had trust funds inherited from New England forebears that allowed them to get along without teaching, although Cal began to take jobs in the 1950s, as much to exercise his critical powers in the classroom and “inter-communicate” with fellow writers on the circuit as to contribute to the support of his new family. Cal suffered no shyness; in sociability he was Elizabeth’s opposite. Yet Elizabeth and Cal shared an aesthetic—ranging across literature, art, and music, and strengthened by trading impressions in their correspondence—that made them each other’s best reader, and that ensured, as Elizabeth wrote to Cal in June 1956, “I think of you every day of my life.” Their key terms of approbation were “real,” “genuine,” and “new”—or “firmly new,” as Cal described a recording of Charles Ives—in a midcentury modernism that took the stripping away of artifice and sentiment on an inward course toward personal narrative of the sort Cal had toyed with in The Mills of the Kavanaghs, his oblique account of his failed first marriage.

  By the early 1950s, Elizabeth at Samambaia was leading the way with her autobiographical stories, a new means to accomplish what she’d always found easier in verse: “to get things straight and tell the truth.” Cal was entranced by “In the Village” when he read it in the New Yorker, by its “great ruminating Dutch landscape feel of goneness,” so powerfully convincing “I could weep for the cow,” he wrote to Elizabeth. He knew she’d worked hard over it, but the story read “as though you weren’t writing at all, but just talking in a full noisy room, talking until suddenly everyone is quiet.” Could she develop the piece into a Nova Scotia “growing-up novel,” Cal wondered, or, as he thought back over the half-dozen tales she’d published since her first residence in Florida, fill out a collection? Elizabeth pursued the idea of a book of stories long enough to get a rejection from Houghton Mifflin, which also turned down her translation of The Diary of “Helena Morley.” In early 1957 she finally broke with the publisher to take a chance on a new editor at Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, Robert Giroux, who offered contracts for both Helena Morley and Elizabeth’s next collection of poems. Her recent productivity suggested a third book of verse might not be far off.

  Perhaps discouraged by Houghton Mifflin’s rejection, Elizabeth finished no more stories through the 1950s, but her example set Cal in motion. The December before her 1957 trip to New York, Elizabeth read his childhood memoir, “91 Revere Street,” in Partisan Review, feeling afterward as if she’d just “sat through one of those Sunday dinners,” she wrote to Cal, and marveling at his account of being “thrown out of the [Boston Public] Garden, just like Adam.” She referred to the story’s tragicomic set pieces, but Cal had, like Elizabeth, rendered a devastating portrait of his originating family drama: the overbearing mother and emasculated father tearing at each other in arguments the boy thrilled to overhear late at night in
the not-fashionable-enough Beacon Hill townhouse, lacking “purple panes” and “delicate bay,” that could never satisfy his mother, though it stood “less than fifty yards from Louisburg Square . . . the Hub of the Hub of the Universe.” The high-pitched “Weelawaugh, we-ee-eelawaugh, weelawaugh” of his mother’s unending complaints and his father’s sputtering “But-and, but-and, but-and!” borrow from Elizabeth’s use of onomatopoeia to establish a child’s perspective and echo her mother’s hovering scream. The fraught situation for young Cal, an only child like Elizabeth, inspired his grade school bullying of other boys and, in the suffocating atmosphere of matriarchal oppression at home and at the Brimmer School, a desire for the “freedom to explode” that never really left him.

  In her turn, Elizabeth urged Cal to “keep it up,” extend the narrative beyond his early school years. She imagined it wouldn’t be difficult: “your life being more all of a piece than—well, mine.” Elizabeth was exercising her customary self-deprecation, but she could also have been daunted by the extensive genealogy that filled the story’s opening pages; the cameo appearance of his eminent relation the poet Amy Lowell; the casual reference to Henry James as possible family chronicler; or the simple fact of Cal’s two living if embittered parents. In Cal’s young life, clamorous as it was, there had been no severing from parents or beloved grandparents and first remembered home; Cal’s favorite, his autocratic grandfather Winslow, lived just blocks away. Elizabeth would work intermittently on a story to follow “In the Village” about her own oppressive childhood on a very different Revere street, “in the upstairs apartment of a two-family house on the outskirts of an old but hideously ugly city north of Boston.” But the story, “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs,” into which Elizabeth tried to inject some of the fond humor of her Nova Scotia memoir by depicting neighborhood characters, was never finished. The problem of how to “get things straight and tell the truth,” how to represent with honesty her surrogate parents, sadistic Uncle George and timid Aunt Maud, may have been too difficult to solve.

  Despite urging each other on, neither Cal nor Elizabeth continued their autobiographical projects in prose for publication. Still, the twin accounts broke ground for future poems and drew on the poets’ shared experience of psychoanalysis. Like Elizabeth, and for equally pressing reasons, Cal had begun “psycho-therapy” in the late 1940s, a process he found “rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.” Those chunks of remembered feeling and incident served as material for “91 Revere Street” and much to follow. His aquatic analogy recalled Elizabeth’s 1947 “At the Fishhouses,” the poem she’d written near the end of her treatment, in which the icy ocean water, a revelation of “what we imagine knowledge to be”—knowledge of the self gained through psychoanalysis, she’d explained to Ruth Foster—is “dark deep and absolutely clear,” qualities that could also describe the poem itself and Elizabeth’s aim as a poet.

  Although Elizabeth did not confide in Cal about her romantic life, each knew enough to worry about the other’s vulnerabilities, their “similar difficulties,” in Cal’s phrase: the binge drinking or periods of derangement that had sent them to hospitals more than once in the past. In late 1953, as each had reacted to the shocking news of their mutual friend Dylan Thomas’s early death, which no one could separate from his chronic heavy drinking, Cal had written to Elizabeth, “Thomas wanted to live burning, burning out.” He hoped neither of them would follow suit: “I want to live to be old, and want you to.” Elizabeth had been distressed, she told a friend, by the way so many in Cal’s inner circle, like Dylan’s, seemed to “really just love the spectacle of the poet destroying himself and they’re filled with rotten romanticism about it.” If Elizabeth hadn’t so dreaded proximity to mental illness, with its reminders of maternal neglect and abandonment, she might have drawn closer to Cal—visited him in Europe as she once planned, traveled sooner to the United States when he returned. It was Cal who bemoaned the distance between them—“Oh what a gap and blank and sorrow that you are so far away”—and put it into words. “We seem attached to each other by some stiff piece of wire,” he’d written in the same letter mourning Dylan Thomas, “so that each time one moves, the other moves in another direction. We should call a halt to that.” He’d adapted a lyric of Donne’s that both Cal and Elizabeth knew well, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” in which the poet conceives himself bound to his absent lover as the two legs of a compass: “Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show / To move, but doth, if the other do.”

  When they met again after nearly seven years, it was not for the consummating reunion Donne described in his “Valediction,” although Cal may have half wished for that. When Elizabeth and Lota visited Boston early in their sojourn en route to paying a duty call on Aunt Florence in Worcester, Cal heard Elizabeth read one of her new Brazilian poems, “The Armadillo,” scheduled to appear in a late-June issue of the New Yorker. As he had after reading her Nova Scotia tales, Cal felt challenged by the poem’s clarity of image and diction to find his own new way of writing, less “armored heavy and old-fashioned,” and saw in himself something of the armadillo that scuttles away at the end of the poem, “glistening” and “rose-flecked,” yet “head down, tail down.” Now he was set on “breaking through the shell of my old manner,” and “The Armadillo,” which he later carried in his billfold, seemed to point the way. By the time Elizabeth and Lota arrived at the Lowells’ summer home in Castine, to stay with the young family for several weeks in August, Cal was wound up with inspiration for new poems he began to write almost as soon as they left, and with what Elizabeth felt to be an amorousness that set the two women packing nearly as soon as they arrived.

  Precisely what transpired can’t be known. There was discussion, initiated by Cal, of a visit to Brazil—he hoped to travel alone and stay with Elizabeth and Lota. Elizabeth quashed the plan with Lizzie Hardwick’s support; if Cal were to come at all, he should bring his family and rent an apartment in Rio. Lizzie may not have told Elizabeth about the Renoiresque beauty in Cal’s class at Boston University with whom he’d had a fling the previous fall, when Lizzie was six months pregnant, but thanks to a chatty letter from Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth knew all about the “Italian girl,” Giovanna Madonia Erba, a producer of opera recordings Cal had met in Europe and for whom he’d nearly broken up his marriage the previous year. With imploring love letters that crossed the Atlantic, some written from hospital rooms, Cal had succeeded in persuading Giovanna to leave her husband, only to change his mind about the affair on his recovery. Cal’s amorousness toward women not his wife, Elizabeth understood, signaled his ascent into mania. She left Castine wishing, she wrote Cal later, they’d managed a “more constructive and hopeful” conversation, and bearing Cal’s gift of his grandfather’s handsomely bound two-volume set of George Herbert, Elizabeth’s favorite poet since summer camp, inscribed “with ALL his heart by Robert T. S. Lowell (4th)” followed by a line from Herbert’s famous elegy “Death”: “Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.” Cal had pressed the books on Elizabeth over her protests, and would not take them back.

  A nearly four-thousand-word apology, more alarming than the visit itself, reached Elizabeth days later, explaining Cal’s quotation from Herbert. Much of the letter was given over to a “scherzo” rendition of a sail, “rich in undramatic mishaps,” on Mount Desert Island’s Somes Sound with poets Richard Eberhart and Philip Booth and their wives, as well as the “second ex-” Mrs. Kenneth Rexroth, “red-haired, figury, black-sweatery.” Cal was still in a state of arousal, despite the “anti-manic pills”—Sparine—he claimed had put him “in reverse.” At last he came to the point. Elizabeth’s visit to Maine had cast him back to that summer day in Stonington ten years before when they’d exchanged confidences after sending away their unwanted paramours. Cal had felt then, he now revealed, that “our relations” had “reached a new place”: “I assumed
that [it] would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept.” His mouth had opened, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, sing: “I didn’t say anything then.” And soon after, he’d met “my Elizabeth”—Hardwick. The moment passed, leaving him to reflect over the intervening ten years ​—with regret? longing? Cal didn’t say—on “the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.”

  Could Elizabeth credit this seemingly earnest confession? Scarcely a week before she’d arrived in Castine, Cal had written that he’d quit drinking, as he had several times in the past without ever managing a clean break. “Oh heavens, all the lives one wants or has to lead,” he’d mourned. She knew Cal’s inclination to think of life in terms of roads not taken; he’d once described his father’s decision to quit the navy, under pressure from his wife, as the source of the senior Lowell’s “one great might-have-been—a first-rate Naval career.” A different choice could have prevented the “terrible dim, diffused pathos” that was his father’s lot. But this was Cal’s fantasy. Nothing indicated his father had been in line for martial glory.

  Then, too, Cal’s admiration of Elizabeth as a writer had escalated since he’d read “In the Village,” and he’d been “delighted” by the confirming Pulitzer Prize. “I read you with more interest than anyone now writing,” he told Elizabeth early in the summer of her visit, and her direct influence on his work proved the feeling genuine. What “might have been” more splendid to Cal, in his inflamed state of mind, than a marriage of two Pulitzer-winning poets? Or even a near miss of a marriage, documented in a letter? Along with the rest of the literary world, Cal had been titillated by the revelation of Lytton Strachey’s impulsive and immediately retracted proposal of marriage to Virginia Stephen, made public for the first time in a 1956 edition of the Strachey-Woolf correspondence. In light of his retrospective version of the day in Stonington, Cal suggested to Elizabeth, “we might almost claim something like apparently Strachey and Virginia Woolf.”