Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  In the same letter, Elizabeth told May that she’d finished reading Mary McCarthy’s The Group, her new novel retailing the private lives of a thinly disguised “group” of Vassar classmates after graduation in the 1930s. It was Mary’s tenth book and, with its “set-fire-works-sex-pieces,” an instant bestseller. Reading the early portions of the novel in Partisan Review and the New Yorker, Elizabeth could not have predicted the explosive ending, in which Lakey, the elegant and supercilious class intellectual, returns to New York after several years in Europe to attend the funeral of Kay, the novel’s protagonist, accompanied by a “foreign woman,” her lover. Lakey’s shocked friends slowly realize, as the pair settles in at the Elysée Hotel, “This woman was her man.” The next sentences must have jolted Elizabeth: “This was why Lakey had stayed abroad so long. Abroad people were more tolerant of Lesbians.” Mary had even poked fun at “the convention by which the Baroness was ‘my friend,’ like a self-evident axiom.” Trying their best “not to think” of what the female couple “did in bed together,” the Vassar women were uniformly of the opinion that “what had happened to Lakey was a tragedy.”

  Most readers assumed the book was a roman à clef. Elizabeth readily identified Helena—a “short sandy-haired girl with an appealing snub nose” and a “habit of walking around nude”—as her friend Frani Blough. “Mary lets her off lightly!” she told May. Elizabeth had been a year behind Mary and Frani at school, and it was easy enough to make a blanket denial: “I was not in her ‘group’ (thank heavens),” and more firmly, “I’m thankful not to be in ‘The Group.’! My poor friends. . . .” Lakey bore a closer physical resemblance to the willowy Margaret Miller, as Mary would later admit, than to Elizabeth. But, except for the fact that she was “stocky,” Lakey’s lover, the short, mannish Baroness Maria d’Estienne, dressed in tweed suit and Cuban-heeled pumps, was a carbon copy of Dona Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares when she and Elizabeth had visited Mary in Manhattan. Lota—who worked eighteen-hour days and was hardly ever at home, except to sleep and shout into the phone.

  Elizabeth did not criticize Mary—that would have revealed too much. “I admire her gall,” she wrote to May, but “I dislike the age we live in that makes that kind of writing seem necessary. . . . We’re all brutes.” Nearly as much as she despised having Lota and herself caricatured, Elizabeth envied Mary’s “commercial success,” although, as she noted slyly in a letter to Cal, “it entails that bitterness that it’s not for what she deserves it for.” Compared to Mary’s Venice Observed and The Stones of Florence, both critically acclaimed, The Group was tacky.

  The same month Elizabeth learned of The Group’s publication, Laura Archera Huxley’s You Are Not the Target: A Practical Manual of How to Cope with a World of Bewildering Change and Uncertainty arrived in the mail as a gift to Lota and Elizabeth. “What DOES California do to people’s brains?” Elizabeth asked Cal, marveling over Aldous Huxley’s unctuous preface, and Laura’s advice, presented in the form of “recipes for living and loving” with titles like “Dance Naked with Music,” “Bubble Freedom,” and “Be an Animal.” Laura’s book, too, became a bestseller.

  Elizabeth traveled north to Ouro Prêto in January 1965, for the quiet and for the company of Lota’s friend Lilli Correia de Araújo, and soon she was writing again. Not poems she would publish. This writing didn’t feel like work. Work was no longer “the thing.” In late 1964, she’d confessed to May Swenson her desperate “craving for a good long 3 or 4-day day-dream,” the kind of uninterrupted reverie “that enables one to stay with something and get it done.” She had become, at best, a “Sunday poet,” and not a productive one: “after a week of doing other things strenuously and talking Portugese and worrying about politics here—I get very uneasy.” Would there be “no escape”? She had to make a change: “self-preservation’s the thing.” Without writing, she was scarcely living.

  And so she turned her back on it all. She’d already tried taking refuge at Samambaia by herself for a week at a time—Lota hardly seemed to notice, now, “whether I’m there or not.” But Elizabeth’s loneliness in what had been their shared dream house, falling into disrepair without Lota’s vigilant presence, was overwhelming: “I don’t mind being alone when I’m happy—when I’m not, then it is unbearable.” She was lonely even in Rio with Lota, whom “I scarcely seem to see . . . any more.” There had been no time, or goodwill, for lovemaking in—how long? Instead of spending early mornings in bed together, Lota was out the door, leaving Elizabeth to a solitary 7:30 a.m. swim on the beach, the only bodily indulgence of her Rio days. To cheer herself up, Elizabeth had acquired a pair of canaries, both female, but without mates they wouldn’t sing. “We’re all silent together,” she wrote to May. “This isn’t my world,” she asked Cal, puzzling over her confinement to a high-rise apartment in a city she despised, “or is it?”

  The world she’d left behind more than a decade ago—Cal’s world—had become nearly as foreign. Not only Cal, but also the once-timid Marianne Moore, had read their poetry to audiences numbered in the thousands on the Boston Common. Cal and his family had moved to New York City, buying an apartment near the new Lincoln Center, a mid-Manhattan Brasília for the performing arts. Soon after, he and Lizzie Hardwick had joined a group of 170 writers and artists invited to the White House for President Kennedy’s inauguration. “I feel like a patriot for the first time in my life,” Cal confessed. (He’d served a jail term as a conscientious objector during World War II rather than join the military.) The most Elizabeth could do to indulge the newly vigorous American spirit was stand in line for a glimpse of the “capsula” in which John Glenn had splashed down near the Bahamas after orbiting the earth, on exhibition in a park in Rio. And then Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 left her weeping with sympathetic taxi drivers and shopkeepers for weeks, even as a “golpe,” or coup, threatened in Brazil.

  That same season of mourning, Lota had been hospitalized with an intestinal occlusion requiring surgery, then she’d contracted typhoid fever. Elizabeth had spent every night with Lota in the hospital, helping to drain an “awful brown slime” out of her stomach into an enamel pan after the surgery and “scared to death” over her high fever, only to have Lota emerge too weak to drive and “FURIOUS!” at having been sick in the first place. Shaken by the experience and likely drinking to excess, Elizabeth checked into a hospital for a week, a “rest home” run by hymn-singing Seventh-day Adventists, teetotalers who skipped coffee but served good meals—she sent May one of the menus. The view from the Hospital Silvestre, situated near Rio’s “awful” Cristo Redentor on Corcovado, the “hunchback” peak overlooking the harbor, was “magnificent.” A precedent had been set: Elizabeth would seek her own cures from now on.

  In a journey that would provide memories of their last peaceful hours together, Elizabeth and Lota managed an abbreviated version of the old plan to travel in Europe, spending three weeks driving through northern Italy in May 1964, lingering in Venice before Lota felt she must fly back to the aterro, recently named Flamengo Park after one of the beaches on its shoreline.

  There were no more flamingos in Rio, Elizabeth explained to May, though they could be seen by airplane over the islands at the mouth of the Amazon, “great low pink clouds of them flapping below you.” Lota had good reason to be preoccupied with the fate of the park: one month before the women left the country, the feared golpe had taken place. Lota had spent a frightening night barricaded in Rio’s Guanabara Palace with Carlos Lacerda and his loyal troops and staff, one of two women on the premises. But the forty-eight-hour siege, a “real” revolution that unseated the leftist President Goulart, did Lota no immediate political damage and permitted her a month’s vacation following the regime change. Both Lota and Elizabeth tried not to worry about the imprisonment of a group of intellectuals, not of Lota’s protected social class, who’d protested the installation of a military leader as president, Humberto Castelo Branco, who’d made quick use of emergency powers enabl
ing the suppression of dissent. Brazil had survived dictators before; in the unstable nation, another might soon be gone.

  Elizabeth pressed on alone that summer for an intended two months in England and Scotland, only to cut short her stay after five weeks. She was lonely and “acutely anxious,” despite visits to old friends from Yaddo days. She forced herself to attend several parties—“YE GODS the gentility” and “Oh so many poets”—but turned down all offers to give readings. “I wish you were here so much,” she wrote to Lota in one of her frequent typewritten aerograms, filled to the margins. “Oh, I’d like to bring you here and just give you $1,000 to spend all by your little self!” She shopped for Lota anyway, searching out the right “GORGEOUS” tweed for a new suit and a monogrammed silver cigarette lighter at Dunhill’s that was “light as a feather.” Would she like a gun, a Webley revolver, “excellent for ladies’ use,” about $48? Lota wrote too, shorter handwritten letters, sending “a thousand little kisses” and reminding Elizabeth to “take your pills” (Antabuse twice a week)—“my love, come back soon.” But crossing the Atlantic by “slow boat,” Elizabeth dreaded the return. To Cal she wrote, “I am dying to see Lota ​—” And then it was “back to the Brazilian madhouse.” Nothing had changed. Lota was as irritable and distracted as ever, lashing out at Elizabeth on her return from work—irrational, possessed, Elizabeth sometimes thought. What had become of the dear friend, “minha querida,” who had once shooed away Elizabeth’s “inferiorities” and assured her she was “wonderful” and loved?

  In Rio, Elizabeth would have received from her clipping service a copy of the interview she’d done for the London Times shortly before her departure. The reporter, Edward Lucie-Smith, dwelled on her connections to Mary McCarthy and The Group by way of Vassar, and to Robert Lowell, who’d been enjoying “near-canonisation” in England; and he queried Elizabeth on her least favorite subject, women poets. She answered only that women “get discouraged very young.” In the accompanying photograph Elizabeth herself appeared defeated—ashen, sad, an old woman at fifty-three.

  In the New Year, Elizabeth hadn’t hesitated. Traveling with a young male Fulbright scholar, Ashley Brown, whose yen for sightseeing provided cover, Elizabeth left Lota for two weeks in Ouro Prêto. How soon after her arrival, in January 1965, did she write a poem for long-limbed, Scandinavian Lilli?

  Dear, my compass

  still points north

  to wooden houses

  and blue eyes,

  fairy-tales where

  flaxen-headed

  younger sons

  bring home the goose,

  love in hay-lofts,

  Protestants, and

  heavy drinkers . . .

  Springs are backward,

  but crab-apples

  ripen to rubies,

  cranberries

  to drops of blood,

  and swans can paddle

  icy water,

  so hot the blood

  in those webbed feet.

  —Cold as it is, we’d

  go to bed, dear,

  early, but never

  to keep warm.

  She marked a star in her calendar on January 21, 1965—the night Lilli, mercifully, had not been “reluctant” when Elizabeth turned to her, so full of need, and Lilli took Elizabeth to bed.

  In the back pages of a small notebook dated December 1961 to May 1965, the years that saw the unraveling of Elizabeth and Lota’s marriage, Elizabeth kept a list of books she meant to buy (prices were sometimes noted) or had read. She entered stars alongside some of the titles: Selected Letters of Rilke, Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, Guy Domville, The Life of Mary Wortley Montague—and The Problem of Homosexuality. The last, published in 1958, may be the only informational book on homosexuality Elizabeth ever mentioned in writing, aside from a reference to having read Havelock Ellis as a teenager in a letter to Ruth Foster. (Fiction was different: she’d read Djuna Barnes’s “good old” Nightwood soon after its publication in 1938, and told May Swenson she regretted having lost the book in her move to Brazil; she would not have been startled by The Group’s conclusion if it were not for the possibility that readers might take Lota for the Baroness.) Although she’d lived primarily in Rio during the years 1961–1965, Elizabeth eventually labeled the notebook “Ouro Prêto,” and ideas she could have gleaned from The Problem of Homosexuality may have supported the choices she began to make in 1965 that led her away from Lota. Perhaps she sought out the book for help in justifying behavior that felt natural to her—as natural as her homosexuality—even as her actions were almost certain to hurt Lota if discovered.

  The Problem of Homosexuality had two authors, both psychiatrists, and only the first of them thought homosexuality was a problem. Clifford Allen threw down the gauntlet: “If happiness is of any value . . . then homosexuality should be eliminated by every means in our power.” Allen argued the premise, enshrined in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual since 1952, that homosexuality was a “psychological deviation” to be cured by psychotherapy. But Charles Berg, the second author, made a different case altogether. If there was a “problem” with homosexuality, it was in the minds of those who thought so. Why, he wondered, do “we make such a fuss about it”? The answer, he believed, “is to be found in the precarious balance of forces in our own repressed unconscious.” Railing against the “psychopathology of our often stupid and morbid and injurious reactions against” homosexuality, Berg proposed that “‘bi-sexual’ potentialities within the psyche,” so often repudiated when same-sex attraction emerged, actually form “the basis of inter-personal relationships”: the “holding together of our social structure” depends on attraction to and identification with both one’s own and the opposite sex. Drawing on anthropological studies to demonstrate tolerance of homosexuality in other cultures, Berg quoted a passage from Wilhelm Reich’s writings on the Trobriand Islanders that may have meant more to Elizabeth in her loneliness than Berg’s defense of her chosen way of loving. “The socially accepted form of sexual life,” Reich wrote, “is spontaneous monogamy without compulsion, a relationship which can be dissolved without difficulties; thus, there is no promiscuity.” Elizabeth, of course, was not really married to Lota, although the two women mingled their incomes and had written each other into their wills. Whatever rules they made for themselves were extralegal, spontaneous. Could the rules be broken—dissolved—without difficulty?

  Elizabeth’s love poem “Dear, my compass” was a sub-rosa gift to Lilli. Elizabeth wrote out the lines by hand while visiting Ouro Prêto, and decorated the page with watercolor sketches of a goose, a swan, a hayloft, and an antique four-poster with two pillows at the headboard. By late September she’d written another poem for “My dear Aurora Borealis,” “Darling Lilli”—one that was safe to offer to the New Yorker, though too late to include in Questions of Travel, the book Elizabeth had finally sent to press in the early months of 1965, energized by her stay with Lilli. The book reached a plausible length with the addition of her story “In the Village,” following Cal’s lead with Life Studies, in which he had included his memoir, “91 Revere Street”; and it was still inscribed to Lota (“The more I give you, the more I owe you”). Lota—who was “killing herself with work,” Elizabeth wrote to her New Yorker editor Howard Moss when she mailed the new poem she planned to dedicate to Lilli, “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto.” Questions of Travel would be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October, during Elizabeth’s third and longest stay with Lilli.

  She had felt “mean abandoning Lota” for two weeks in January, Elizabeth told May, not letting on just how far she had strayed. Elizabeth wrote only that she’d gotten a lot of work done, and felt “much better—a better altitude.” Ouro Prêto—with its ten exquisite eighteenth-century churches scattered across the hillsides, “THE Baroque town,” in Elizabeth’s description—was a thousand meters higher than Petrópolis and considerably more remote, hundreds of miles north in the landl
ocked state of Minas Gerais. Elizabeth wasn’t staying at Pouso do Chico Rey, where Ashley Brown, her Fulbright-scholar friend who’d done the driving, spent his nights, but at Lilli’s own house high above the village on the road east to Mariana, the region’s oldest city, whose name brought pleasant associations with Marianne Moore. Up on the hillside Lilli kept a flower garden and a “strange assortment of poultry”: chickens, geese, guinea hens, white fan-tailed doves, and a pinkish, snake-eating, heronlike bird to protect them all, which Lilli had tamed by leaving bits of meat in a dish on her kitchen floor each morning.