Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Although Lilli was reserved in temperament and different from Lota in appearance, she was an immensely capable woman too. Elizabeth had been in awe of Lota’s ability to “do all kinds of things to cars, install telephones and repair electrical gadgets.” Now Elizabeth loved Lilli’s “hard hands,” strong from gardening and innkeeping and refinishing the antique furniture she collected and planned to sell in a shop in town. She was four years older, but Lilli was “my dearest blue eyed fair-headed child with muscles and carrapatas & everything with a soft soft name,” Elizabeth wrote to her after a second visit, alone, in May 1965. This time Lilli had come to Rio on business, then driven Elizabeth back with her to Ouro Prêto—Lota could hardly mind. They were all friends.

  Carrapatas—or garrapatas—were the ticks that Lilli’s dog, Danny, brought in, or that Elizabeth may have plucked from her lover’s body in the evening after a ramble in the hills above Lilli’s house. Elizabeth was in the grips of a passion that made almost anything associated with Lilli—ticks, hard hands, a torn nightgown, her Danish accent—lovable. “Tell me,” she urged Lilli, “something beginning with ‘w’”—“You are a weak and wanton woman but I want you. . . . Could you say that?”

  It was on this second weeklong stay that Elizabeth set down the impressions that led to “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto.” To May Swenson she wrote of the “small water-fall right under my bedroom window” at Lilli’s house—“and it is good water, so every passerby, every car and truck almost, stops for a drink of water.” From her second-story window Elizabeth loved to “lean out and eavesdrop” on conversations—“mostly talk of sicknesses, funerals, babies, and the cost of living.” In the poem, and in fact, the small waterfall is diverted into “a single iron pipe,” from which “a strong and ropy stream” of cold water runs, attracting pedestrians and motorists: “they veer toward the water as a matter / of course,” where once there was an ornate soapstone fountain, “here where all the world still stops.”

  The poem records the “simple” talk of women in red dresses and plastic sandals who pause to give their babies drinks, “lovingly / from dirty hands”; of old men and younger ones, some driving trucks. A shiny new Mercedes-Benz “arrives / to overawe them all” with its body “painted / with throbbing rosebuds” and its bumper sticker, “HERE AM I FOR WHOM YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING.” Had Elizabeth tinkered with a bumper sticker she’d seen in Petrópolis several years before and passed along to May as a specimen of Brazilian machismo, “Women! Here I am!,” turning its slogan into a message of gratitude to Lilli? If so, no one could ever guess. Elizabeth had tinkered with the scene itself until it became, with donkeys and swaddled babies, a parable like “Filling Station,” with its final hymn-style blessing: “Somebody loves us all.” “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto” ends with another vision of redemptive beauty in an apparently godforsaken place, recalling, too, the rainbow in the oil slick at the close of “The Fish.” If Time Inc. would not allow an iridescent morpho into the pages of Brazil, Elizabeth could pin one to a poem in the New Yorker:

  The seven ages of man are talkative

  and soiled and thirsty.

  Oil has seeped into

  the margins of the ditch of standing water

  and flashes or looks upward brokenly,

  like bits of mirror—no, more blue than that:

  like tatters of the Morpho butterfly.

  “I feel human and slightly giddy and silly again,” Elizabeth wrote to Lilli, thanking her for the weeklong tryst in May, using a post office box she’d rented in Ouro Prêto. Elizabeth addressed the envelopes to herself, but Lilli had the key and knew to open the letters and read them. Since their affair began, Elizabeth had been “full of poetry”—“all kinds of bits of things that may turn into something—the first time in three or four years I’ve felt normally bright.” Could she help it that “I need love”? “It is the way I am made.” Some people, she wrote to Lilli, “seem to function all right without it—or else they ‘sublimate’—a chemical process I’ve never believed in for a moment.” Lilli would have known Elizabeth had too-busy, irritable, ailing Lota in mind. Elizabeth asked Lilli to burn her letters: “I wake up frightened at the damage they might do but seem to keep right on writing you.” There had been no one to talk to for so long, and she would not stop now.

  Elizabeth confided in Lilli the eerie feeling that Lota had developed a “split personality.” She was impossible to live with in Rio, but her agitation, the frenetic orders to Elizabeth to compose and type letters to Lota’s supporters, to dress rapidly for dinner, to take her pills, subsided as they drove out of the city for infrequent weekends at Samambaia. Elizabeth mourned the early days in Brazil, “after NY,” when “I used to wake up every morning so happy just because I was away from that constant pressure—phone-calls interruptions things that have to be done,—and because that feeling of a lump of lead in the stomach had finally disappeared after years of it.” Now, living with Lota in Rio, dread overtook her again, and “it only disappears on the rare occasions I get back to S[amambaia], or—when I am with you.” Lilli—“my lovely hot and cold snowdrift”—“my appletree still blossoming as prettily as ever”—“who gives everything away and feeds the cats and the hens and anyone who comes along.” Lilli—the “dear danish pastry” Elizabeth wished she could eat for breakfast.

  At her desk in Rio, trying to resist the ever-present temptation to daydream about Lilli, Elizabeth often felt “hideously guilty,” but she refused to admit the feeling for long. She silenced her qualms by “studying” John Crowe Ransom’s poem of illicit love, “The Equilibrists”: “Full of her long white arms and milky skin / He had a thousand times remembered sin.” And “so have I,” she told Lilli, yet her memories were all happy ones. How could finding love again when she needed it be a sin? In the months preceding her first visit to Lilli, Elizabeth had been reading the letters of Jane Carlyle, whose marriage to the nineteenth-century British writer Thomas Carlyle was famously unhappy. Making notes toward a poem she planned to call “The Carlyles,” Elizabeth had written, “We speak of shipwrecks—why not housewrecks?” In a later draft she wrote, “Oh white seething marriage!” Elizabeth saw herself as the long-suffering, subservient Jane; Lota with her park—which finally promised to do as Carlos Lacerda had hoped, rejuvenate the city—was the caustic, vituperative, bullying genius. Elizabeth could not tell even Lilli, who after all was Lota’s friend, just how bad it was—that Lota was “abrupt and rude” with almost everyone now, that her “violent . . . manner” frightened Elizabeth. She had let Lota be “bossy” until “I can’t stand it anymore.” She had to “get away.”

  And yet, even if she’d been wronged and neglected, Elizabeth knew her pleasure was taken selfishly, at Lota’s expense. Along with Ransom’s poem, she studied Thomas Hardy’s “The Self-Unseeing” and considered writing her own version; the mysterious scene of revelry rising out of barrenness now resonated with her own willful, unbidden behavior:

  Here is the ancient floor,

  Footworn and hollowed and thin,

  Here was the former door

  Where the dead feet walked in.

  She sat here in her chair,

  Smiling into the fire;

  He who played stood there,

  Bowing it higher and higher.

  Childlike, I danced in a dream;

  Blessings emblazoned that day;

  Everything glowed with a gleam;

  Yet we were looking away!

  Elizabeth had to be a “self un-seeing,” had to look away, in order to carry on as she was, choosing rebirth in Lilli’s arms.

  Lota suspected nothing, not even when Elizabeth ran off to Ouro Prêto again in September 1965 and stayed through October and into November, until Lota “finally came and got me,” making a nine-hour drive—“so I felt she really wanted me back!” Elizabeth wrote to May Swenson. She was hinting at the rift, the pain that had prompted her wandering and that she might inflict on Lota if she wasn’t careful. Elizabeth did n
ot tell May that she’d bought a rundown house, among the oldest in Ouro Prêto, across the road from Lilli’s, formulating a secret plan to spend several months each year in the town. Perhaps she could have both Lota and Lilli. As if by a miracle, Lota, who “is always very happy when there is some construction going on,” entered into the renovation project and stayed on for several days, taking measurements for blueprints.

  Elizabeth offered Lilli a 15 percent contractor’s fee for overseeing roof repairs and the installation of modern plumbing and electricity; Lili had ably restored both the inn, Pouso do Chico Rey, and her own house, with its “big old-fashioned Brazilian courtyard” of black and white brook stones laid out in daisy patterns. And Elizabeth implored Howard Moss to waive a new ban on dedications at the New Yorker and retain her inscription, “for Lilli Correia de Araújo,” when the magazine published “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto”: “it is almost the only re-turn my friend Lilli will let me make for endless hospitality and kindness. . . . I can’t bear to disappoint her.” Moss complied.

  But there had been scenes at Lilli’s house in Ouro Prêto too. Elizabeth drank too much some nights—“and it makes me feel especially bad that I was such a fool with you.” Perhaps Elizabeth needed to test Lilli’s loyalty as well; or, as likely, her thirst for alcohol under the stress of leading a double life, no matter how pleasurable, was beyond her control. Would Lilli forgive her bad behavior? “At least I do know it and admit it and feel awful remorse for it. . . . I’ll try hard never to be that way with you again.” Elizabeth wanted to believe their love was “not just a fling; it’s real.” Before leaving Ouro Prêto with Lota, she promised to find a ring, one with a lapis lazuli stone to match Lilli’s blue eyes, a gift to mark their first anniversary in January. Would Lilli join her on the river trip on the São Francisco Elizabeth still dreamed of?

  Lota, Elizabeth, and Lilli inspecting Elizabeth’s recently purchased house, Ouro Prêto, 1965

  Back in Rio, Lota resumed her nagging. Elizabeth and Lilli had looked like “fat round pigs” when Lota arrived in Ouro Prêto, she ridiculed them. Elizabeth had gained weight after two months of dining in Lilli’s “lavishly run kitchen.” She had also enjoyed making love with “nice and big and warm and blonde and heavy” Lilli. Now, under Lota’s watchful eye, she resumed taking Antabuse, and added diet pills and Metrecal (Danish Coffee flavor) on her own. She could not squeeze into her best dress when Time sent a photographer to take her picture for the magazine’s review of Questions of Travel. She had to conceal the gap with a sash. Elizabeth worried, she told Cal, that she looked like “both my grandmothers put together” in the resulting portrait. The book itself, she apologized to Howard Moss, was “pretty thin.”

  Yet Questions of Travel received positive reviews from the start, even in Time, which had never reviewed a book of Elizabeth’s before and had dismissed her poems as “cool, eely” and “sometimes repellent” in a 1962 roundup on contemporary poets. Now Time’s reviewer allowed that she had written “some of the finest descriptive poetry” since World War II; six of the twenty poems in the volume were “egregiously good,” rendering images that “blazon the retina long after the book is closed.” In the New York Review of Books Elizabeth was “one of the shining, central talents of our day,” and the poet Richard Howard, writing in Poetry, considered her sequence of Brazil poems “perfect.” In the new year, 1966, the book was nominated for the National Book Award.

  With her affections vacillating wildly—Lota, who “loves it when I am famous, a ‘celebrity,’” Elizabeth reported to Lilli, was paying attention to her again—the praise scarcely registered. She had been “feeling too many things at the same time” for so long she’d become “stuck,” Elizabeth had written to Cal as her domestic situation grew fraught, not naming the feelings. Frightened and wary and seeking release, Elizabeth still had not stopped caring for Lota, whose stewardship of Flamengo Park, now fully open to the public, was threatened under President Castelo Branco’s rule. Lota was suffering from ailments small and large—“gumboils” and ulcers and bronchitis and dizzy spells—but she refused to rest: “now she’s had a taste of public life, she’ll never be able to retire from it.” Elizabeth loved Lilli, her “soothing presence,” and the “great comfort and idleness” of Ouro Prêto that made writing possible again.

  And she worried for herself. In late October Elizabeth learned that Randall Jarrell, the poet-critic and friend who’d been among her first champions, had walked into oncoming traffic on a highway near campus at the University of North Carolina, where he taught in the Women’s College. Elizabeth considered Jarrell’s death an “accident of an unconscious-suicide kind, a sudden impulse when he was really quite out of his head.” As she gave in to her own impulses, life-affirming ones she believed, Elizabeth remained “determined,” she wrote to Lilli, “that I am one poet who’s going to stay sane till the bitter end.” She had written to Randall just six months before, complimenting him on his new book of poems, The Lost World, and telling him of her reviving love for Brazil’s inland towns where “some of the Lost World hasn’t quite been lost”—“I gather up every bit of evidence with joy, and wish I could put it into my poems, too.” She had, in “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto.”

  Just as the completion of Poems in 1955 had released a torrent of new verse, so Questions of Travel freed Elizabeth from years of feeling “stuck,” this time to face daunting questions that the book itself, its contents divided in two under the headings “Brazil” and “Elsewhere,” seemed to pose. Where (and with whom) should she live? Would she remain “passive forever,” the submissive wife in her marriage to Lota, or would she find some way to prove “I am not a helpless child anymore and can’t be treated like one”? The issue that pressed Lota and Elizabeth toward “housewreck” in November and December 1965 wasn’t jealousy—not yet. It was Elizabeth’s decision to accept a job as poet-in-residence at the University of Washington in Seattle for five months during the winter and spring of 1966. She had already turned down a similar offer from Rutgers the year before when Lota would not come along. This time Lota refused even to visit, and she argued—often at the top of her lungs—that Elizabeth would fail in the position. She would drink, she would be too shy to teach, she would “make a fool” of herself.

  Lota issued one warning after another and “keeps telling me how sorry I’m going to be,” Elizabeth complained to Lilli. There had been a “sad scene” between the two of them, lasting most of one night. It was up to Elizabeth to summon “the courage to make this step,” and to think of the benefits—“it will be good for me to be surrounded by lots of strangers for a change,” she told Lilli, “also be admired, and allowed to talk all I want to, in English, about my own narrow interests!” The alternative, staying in Rio with Lota, would only make Elizabeth “more & more of a recluse”: “If I allow this life to go on any longer I’ll be totally lost.” She could take driving lessons in Seattle and courses in Portuguese to increase her fluency in conversation; both would give her greater independence when she returned. She could “get some of my own work done” too. Although Elizabeth had always said teaching was “not my line at all,” everything else about the plan seemed designed to bring the liberation she sought, the respect and adulation she’d forfeited for so long by living in Brazil.

  Elizabeth purchased a plane ticket for December 30, and Lota and Elizabeth called a Christmas truce. Lota made “lists and lists” of furnishings for Elizabeth to buy, while Elizabeth wrote repeatedly to Lilli, assuring her “I don’t want anyone else.” On arrival in Seattle, knowing she had crossed Lota by leaving, Elizabeth thought almost exclusively of Lilli, to whom no one she’d seen on the journey or met at the English department’s New Year’s Eve party could compare: “How wonderful to know that I really know the most beautiful blonde in the hemisphere and that I feel she is my own property—maybe you aren’t, but I pretend you are—you and the house together.” Elizabeth could hardly wait to “get back there and overlook that enchantin
g dead town and write a poem, very very slowly, and be with you without having to make conversation at all.” She envisioned a blue-painted balcony where the two of them would sit, drinking tea and taking in the view.

  The secret satisfaction carried Elizabeth through her first days on campus. “I go around so sedate and neat and sober (yes—absolutely),” she wrote to Lilli, “everyone treats me with such respect and calls me Miss B—and every once in a while I feel a terrible laugh starting down in my chest—also a feeling of great pride because nobody knows,—And how different I am from what they think, I’m sure—and how wonderful and contradictory life is, and how little appearances tell.” In a neighborhood shop she found the lapis lazuli stone—a “wonderful rich just-before-dawn blue” recalling their hours of lovemaking—and had it set “in plain gold, rather heavy, like a man’s signet ring,” telling the elderly jeweler it was “for a small man (like him).” She thought of having it engraved for Lilli, then decided that wasn’t safe.

  But soon she was overcome by a “strange” hollow feeling, she told Lilli, “sick to my stomach—I think it must be homesickness—I never had it before.” Elizabeth had forgotten, or did not want to remember, the lost feeling she’d had just after college on her first Atlantic crossing, the feeling she’d called “homesickness” then, and associated with her mother’s early bouts of insanity.