Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  How was Elizabeth to sort out the heartfelt from the hypomanic in this rambling letter? With Cal’s mention of Strachey and Woolf, he strayed toward the question of sexual preference. Strachey had withdrawn his marriage proposal for a reason widely quoted in reviews of the correspondence—“the whole thing was repulsive to me.” Strachey loved men. And Virginia, Strachey had been relieved to learn, was “not in love” with him. Cal acknowledged, in an oblique reference to Elizabeth’s preference for women, that “of course there was always the other side, the fact that our friendship really wasn’t a courting . . . really led to no encroachments. So it is.”

  So it was. Only with Elizabeth traveling safely in the company of Lota, whose presence Cal seemed to welcome and may even have stirred his competitive amorousness, would Cal “sing.” He could make and unmake his proposal knowing that “all has come right since you found Lota,” and unburden himself of the “great block and question mark” that had disturbed everyone’s peace at Castine in August 1957. His message delivered and read—but never to be answered—Cal rested content that “everyone loves, admires and approves of everyone else and are happier than a month ago.”

  Elizabeth was not happier. She canceled readings she’d agreed to when she’d felt more sure of herself and returned early with Lota to Brazil, where, she had once written to Randall Jarrell, “distance makes the heart grow tougher.”

  Years later she wrote to Dr. Anny Baumann about Cal, “As you must know I love him, next best to Lota, I suppose—if one can measure love & affection or compare it.” She had not wanted the comparison forced on her. Elizabeth was not one for “might-have-beens.” Life, or its most significant events, had rarely seemed to her a matter of choice, they just happened—both tragedies and windfalls. Cal’s declaration was another blow, leveled blithely by the one man she did love, if not as a romantic partner, then as her soul mate. Had there really been “no encroachments”? This was one.

  Better to return to Brazil, where before long she received a sheaf of new poems from Cal, one of them, “Skunk Hour,” dedicated to her and set in the Castine of the past August. There was rugged Nautilus Island across the harbor, where Cal had pointed out grazing sheep, and the slopes of Blue Hill to the east covered with a “red fox stain” signaling a turn toward autumn: “The season’s ill.” There too, as Cal would later acknowledge, were the “short line stanzas,” “drifting description,” and culminating image of a single wild animal she’d originated with “The Armadillo.” Could Elizabeth ignore all that, along with the “fairy decorator” working late at his shop in town, who’d “rather marry” than rearrange the unsold baubles in his display window? Yes, she would. The poem, Elizabeth could see, was the “best” of the new group, a nocturne on the theme of Cal’s mental distress one late-summer night—“My mind’s not right”—relieved finally by the appearance of a line of skunks marching up Main Street past the white-spired Trinitarian church, kittens led by a mother who “will not scare.”

  The new poems, Elizabeth wrote to Cal, “all seem real as real—and getting more so.” By now, although she didn’t know it yet, he was in the hospital again, falling in love with a young Bennington graduate doing psychiatric fieldwork. Elizabeth was despairing too. “Oh heavens, when does one begin to write the real poems?” she asked Cal from her estudio in December 1957. “I certainly feel as if I never had.” She would not publish another poem for more than two years.

  January 12, 1977

  437 LEWIS WHARF, BOSTON

  We met under the clock in front of the Coop in Harvard Square, one junior boy from the class and three “older” women—my best friend, Linda Lord, a transfer from Bryn Mawr who’d also served time in Harvard’s secretary pool; Millie Nash, a grad student at the ed school who’d enrolled in a master’s program expressly to take Miss Bishop’s class; and me. Our teacher had invited us to a semester’s-end party at her new apartment in the North End, and none of us had been sure how to get there.

  Red Line to Park Street, Green Line to Haymarket. I’d done that plenty of times on Saturday mornings before I’d moved into the dorms, to take advantage of cheap produce at the market stalls where fruit sellers yelled and refused to do business if you tried picking up a peach or plum to test for ripeness. And I’d crossed under the elevated expressway into the North End for cannoli on Hanover Street at Mike’s Pastry, where the crisp curled shells were filled to order from white squeeze-bags of sweetened ricotta; Mike’s cannoli were never soggy. But none of us had been to the neighborhood’s waterfront, where dilapidated brick and granite warehouses were fast being transformed into office buildings and condominiums, a new term in the city. It was a cold night and we imagined dark alleys paved with broken cobblestones leading to Boston’s waterside urban frontier.

  But I was terrified of this trip for another reason. I was not certain I would be welcome. I thought I’d been doing well in Miss Bishop’s class, although it was hard to be sure. Two semesters of poetry workshops after Lowell’s had given me the confidence to drop out of the English department’s honors track, with its onerous requirements, to make room for two writing courses in the fall of my senior year. (I’d been troubled, as well, by my adviser’s critique of my junior qualifying paper on Emerson and Dickinson: “Again and again I look for confirming details or for necessary definitions—of ‘Transcendentalism,’ for instance—that do not appear.”) I’d passed a tricky entrance exam to gain admission to a graduate course on prosody taught by Robert Fitzgerald, the celebrated translator of the Odyssey and the Iliad, and I’d made the cut for Miss Bishop’s Advanced Verse Writing. Between the two classes I’d discovered a passion, maybe even a knack, for rhyme and meter.

  Fitzgerald and Bishop were both short, soft-spoken, gray-haired, almost elfin creatures, dwarfed by the immense black-oak seminar tables that dominated our classrooms, but there was a palpable difference in atmosphere. We leaned forward to catch Professor Fitzgerald’s wry jokes, esoteric explanations, and occasional praise of the exercises in Sapphic or Alcaic stanzas we turned in each week, receiving grades in a scoring system designed to induce humility: NAAB, or Not At All Bad, was tops in a gradual descent through Not Bad, Not Very Bad, Not Too Good, ending at PB, Pretty Bad. Professor Fitzgerald selected passages from among the NAABs to read out loud in class, never naming the student writer, but I’d been quietly proud to have had two of my samples chosen.

  Miss Bishop’s assignments, along with her own poetry, revealed an affection for verse forms too, and my rhymed couplets on the French baroque composer François Couperin came back with only one minor correction. She’d been absent, recovering from periodontal surgery, on the day we discussed our twenty lines of iambic pentameter, but Frank Bidart, the young friend who filled her place, took my poem seriously. I described the full-moon night in June when my family had gathered to celebrate my twenty-first birthday on a California beach; the grunion were running at high tide, and all of us, parents, uncle, cousins, raced through the waves to catch the slithery spawning fish in our bare hands. “What is this cruel feast you’ve made me, Father?” I’d asked in the poem. “I watch you slit each fish I’ve caught, scrape / the innards—vermilion eggs washed back to sea, / their scaly parents sputter buttery on the fire.” Reading that line was great fun, Frank had said, before referring me to Miss Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.”

  Frank (we called him that, though he was a professor at Wellesley), tall, lanky, and impassioned, appeared at the head of the seminar table several more times that fall. Perhaps it was ongoing dental work that gave our teacher a pained look more often than not when she arrived to lead discussion, although asthma brought later absences. Miss Bishop really did seem to wish she wasn’t there.

  On November 3, the day after Jimmy Carter took the presidency from Gerald Ford, she asked us to write election-inspired poems in class. Trying her own hand at the assignment, she gave up without reading her jottings to us, declaring our doggerel better than the serious idea she “couldn’t get start
ed.” Occasionally she forgot herself and told a story—once about the time Marianne Moore stole her line. Our teacher’s voice grew stronger, more musical, as she warmed to the tale, especially when recalling the line. “There goes the bell boy with the buoy balls,” she’d thought when checking into a bustling hotel on Cape Cod one summer in the 1930s, catching sight of a bellhop carrying another guest’s purchase of colored glass balls dangling in rope netting. Then she’d repeated the line for Marianne Moore’s approval when they met several days later in New York City. We could go read it for ourselves, now, in “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks,” she told us, seemingly still piqued at the theft forty years later. Miss Moore had dropped the plural s.

  At such times, despite an inflection combining a Vassar purr with Nova Scotia plain speech, Miss Bishop reminded me of my aunt Sally, a diminutive home ec major at the University of Oregon who’d left college at nineteen, during World War II, to marry. Aunt Sally wore the same smartly tailored suits when she dressed to attend meetings of the women’s Wednesday Club in La Jolla and, while raising five children, waged successful campaigns to stop high-rise development in the quiet beachside community and protect an ancient grove of Torrey pines on a two-thousand-acre reserve north of town. There was a power in these quiet, compact women, nearly always hidden, that one couldn’t name. Was it femininity? Surely neither of them would have raised a clenched fist at a Take Back the Night rally, but they did what had to be done. I’d always been a bit afraid of Aunt Sally, who sternly enforced a cleaned-plate rule at mealtimes and handed out what she called “sitting violations” to children, her own or visitors, who sat reading indoors when they might be outside playing.

  In mid-November I studied Miss Bishop’s assignment sheet carefully. We’d reached Assignment 6, a “free” week, “Anything you want to submit, but only one poem, please—no longer than one single-spaced page or two double-spaced pages.” I read over again the message typed in all-caps at the bottom of the page:139 “PLEASE DON’T HAND IN POEMS THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN HANDED IN AND DISCUSSED IN OTHER CLASSES.” I’d written an exercise in Catullan hendecasyllabics for Professor Fitzgerald that he’d never mentioned in class and had not yet been returned to me with his marks. It felt like more than an exercise to me, a poem. I wanted Miss Bishop’s opinion. I turned it in on a day she was out with asthma.

  Was it a good poem? I called it “The Change of Philomel,” and surely my version of the Greek myth had nothing on Eliot’s terse encapsulation in The Waste Land. But the strict eleven-syllable metrical scheme, devised two millennia before by Catullus, in which each line began and ended with double-stress spondees, had captured my imagination. First there was Professor Fitzgerald’s enchanting one-line mnemonic demonstrating the rhythm, recited to us in a vatic whisper: “Make strange all that you want someone to hear well.” And then he’d gone to the blackboard to show us how Robert Frost’s poem “For Once, Then, Something” followed, more or less faithfully, the prescribed meter:

  – – / – ͜ ͜ /– ͜ / – ͜ / – –

  Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs

  Always wrong to the light, so never seeing

  Deeper down in the well than where the water

  Gives me back in a shining surface picture

  Me myself in the summer heaven godlike

  Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.

  Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,

  I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,

  Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,

  Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.

  Water came to rebuke the too clear water.

  One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

  Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,

  Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?

  Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

  I’d never seen a well. I knew wells only as props in fairy tales or nursery rhymes. But Frost put me alongside him, kneeling to peer down into one, seeing himself reflected in the water “godlike” along with the sky, and then seeing beyond or beneath that reflection to—what? “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz?” In fifteen eleven-syllable lines he’d done what it took Herman Melville an epic novel to accomplish. This was a great poem, and my new knowledge of its internal structure gave me the faint hope that someday I might make something worthy too.

  My poem was not great, but because of the borrowed meter it pulsed with the rhythms of greatness, and I needed to know where and how it fell short. And I wanted to hear it from a woman. “Weave your tapestried message, Philomela,” my poem began. “Not with words nor by force will savage kings die.” I told the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses of the beautiful Philomela, kidnapped and raped by her sister Procne’s husband, King Tereus, and the bloody revenge the sisters took, in turn repaid by the transmutation of all three into birds:

  Weave and dream, wretched sisters, transformations:

  Blazoned scarlet with murder, marked for change, you

  Take flight, larks with a freedom earthbound creatures

  Can’t know. Spin till the nightmare king is banished—

  Rendered last, as a feathered warrior, helpless.

  A week later I read the poem in class. There was little to say, it seemed, aside from Miss Bishop’s observation that I’d written the piece in Catullan metrics, which she defined for the class: spondee, dactyl, trochee, trochee, spondee. And then we reached Thanksgiving break and the final classes in December. Miss Bishop held me back after the last session, stony-faced, her arms already full of satchel and pocketbook. I’d written well, she said, but she’d have to lower my grade for handing in an assignment from another class. She turned, a slight but determined figure, and walked out of the room.

  Now one of us was ringing the bell at a plain oak door down the hall from the fourth-floor elevators in the Lewis Wharf condominiums. It had been dark when we left Harvard Square on this winter evening, and darker still when we arrived at Haymarket station and made our way through a maze of narrow streets, finally crossing broad Atlantic Avenue to the hulking granite structure. Too dark to do more than sense, in the damp, brisk breeze, Boston Harbor lapping at the far end of the enormous pier that once sent coastal steamers to Nova Scotia.

  The door opened on a brilliantly lit room, or so it seemed compared with the dim hallway. A party was in full swing, people we didn’t know—dark-haired, bearded men in V-neck sweaters and corduroys—sipping at drinks. I’d never seen exposed-brick walls before, and there were two of them, hung with unfamiliar objects: a gleaming Venetian gilt mirror and a long, brightly painted paddle polished to a high sheen. Suspended from the ceiling was a horned beast, the figurehead of some Amazonian craft, I guessed, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, open-mawed. A third wall was given over to tightly stuffed bookshelves. Beyond sliding glass doors I glimpsed a deck and the flickering lights of East Boston across the water. Chairs had been set in a circle, and I slipped into one opposite a dark wooden rocker in which our teacher reclined, dressed in slacks, white blouse, thin cashmere sweater—smiling, girlish, pretty. Among friends.

  We all took seats. At Miss Bishop’s invitation, one of the dark-haired men, Ricardo Sternberg, Brazilian, pulled papers from a briefcase to read several new poems. I listened, unable to take in his words. I could see only Miss Bishop, seated next to Ricardo, with Frank Bidart on her right. So differently warm, yet indifferent to the students she’d invited to her home, perhaps regretting it now. Or had we come as an audience, one she could trust to be admiring?

  In the weeks since our last class meeting, we knew, her book Geography III had been published, and she’d been honored with a double session at the annual Modern Language Association meeting in New York City. She’d read a handful of her own poems and then, while scholars presented papers on her work, fled the conference center for a meal of corned beef hash with Frank Bidart and her old friends, the duo p
ianists Gold and Fizdale at the Stage Deli across the street. Fortified, she’d returned for the performance of Elliott Carter’s A Mirror on Which to Dwell, a setting of six of her poems for chamber ensemble with soprano soloist, which capped off the evening.

  Now Frank was urging Miss Bishop to read from the new book, and she was waving him away. “‘One Art,’” he persisted. At last she took up the slim taupe volume, the book those white pages in the black binder I’d seen two years before in Robert Lowell’s class had become, and put on her glasses, large plastic frames.

  “My god, Elizabeth, these lenses are almost opaque,” Frank exclaimed, taking the glasses from her to polish with a handkerchief. Our lore on Harvard’s celebrity poets extended to a long-ago reading at the Guggenheim in New York where Robert Lowell had introduced Elizabeth Bishop as “the famous eye.” Miss Bishop had risen to the podium and tweaked Cal: “The famous eye will now put on her glasses.”