Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  But Lota saw dark signs too. A close friend had nearly boarded the same airplane that crashed and killed Humberto Castelo Branco in mid-July. (Castelo Branco had resigned the presidency under pressure six months before, to be replaced by a still more repressive army general, Artur da Costa e Silva.) Lota began to update her will and pressed Elizabeth to do the same. Lota wanted to be certain that her sister would not contest her decision to divide her estate between Elizabeth and Mary Morse, who had made substantial loans to Lota and whose adopted daughters—three little girls now—were family to Lota. She knew Marietta was capable of hiring a lawyer to challenge the will; her friend Rachel’s “almost death” in the plane crash had given Lota an “urgency.” She was filled with “bad ideas about dying . . . and Marietta grabing it all . . . all! all!” But the issue of their wills was also one of “Faith and Trust.” Lota knew that, after Seattle, Elizabeth had revised her will, leaving a small bequest to help support Roxanne and her son, born in August the year before; Roxanne had decided to leave Bill Cumming, and Elizabeth felt at least partly responsible. Elizabeth also named Catharine Carver, the editor of the British edition of her poems, as her literary executor. Lota had asked Elizabeth to remove both of these provisions before flying to the United States and to put Lota in charge of her literary affairs, but, snooping in Elizabeth’s study, she’d found a tightly sealed envelope in a volume of Blake’s poetry: a will that Elizabeth hadn’t wanted her to read. Its unknown contents tormented Lota.

  Lota’s tirades about Elizabeth’s will, her pleading—“Lets not have any more secrets”—filled many pages of her letters. Lota recognized this as another obsession and swore off the subject of wills, then returned to it in the next sentence. She reported fights with Decio, who advised her to let Elizabeth alone. He was right to do so. Leaving her literary legacy in Lota’s hands when she was still so unstable could not have seemed wise, and Elizabeth’s sense of obligation to Roxanne continued, even though the affair did not. There had been secrets before, but now Elizabeth was reluctant to cede her privacy and independence. Evading Lota’s direct pressure, Elizabeth let slip that the recurring topic of their wills was depressing her, only to receive Lota’s most abject reply so far. “I cannot bear myself anymore,” Lota wrote, bewailing the long separation. “Everything is so against my own temperament, that waiting, and waiting. I spend my morning crying in bed, I only find some consolation talking with Decio—I cannot bear that you feel persecuted by me, that is bad, I only think about dying quickly ​—”

  The letter ended abruptly, to be followed by another written the next day, praising “Hen” once more, worrying over Elizabeth’s breathing troubles and loss of appetite—“I love you round not like A Dama Das Camelias”—and telling Elizabeth that a friend, hearing how lonely Lota was, had suggested she disregard Decio’s advice and “go immediately to see you.” The prospect must have been nearly as frightening to Elizabeth as Lota’s preoccupation with death, both her own and Elizabeth’s. “I hope you think like me,” Lota had written, “that if one of us loose the other, that no amount of money, jewells or literary rights can compensated that loss.” Remembering other close friends, a historian and his wife, who had died in a plane crash several years earlier, Lota continued, “The only thing I wish for us is to die together like Otavio and Lucia and be happy to the end like they were.”

  Could Elizabeth be happy with Lota again? Even as she wrote faithfully to her “darling,” her “honeybunch,” and helped plan the visit in December, suggesting they rent fur coats to withstand the unaccustomed cold, she must have had doubts. Elizabeth and Lota had changed in the past fifteen years, and so had their once-passionate romance. “If sexual love is gone between us,” Lota had written to Elizabeth after a session with Decio, “we want it substituted by the feeling that we belong only to each other, that nobody can stand between us, that every thing we have should be shared, that sleeping peacefully in each other arms is the reward of the labours of the day.” This was what Decio called “tender love.” Could Elizabeth be faulted for wanting more?

  “I was telling Decio today that he seems to me like a heavy closed door,” Lota wrote to Elizabeth in early August, “and I am like a little mouse trying to find a hole in that door, to escape and go to N.Y.” Decio continued to urge “dar tempo ao tempo,” to give it time, telling Lota this “is our last chance to be able to stand each other.” Though December seemed “far away than the moon,” Lota pretended to agree. But in her letters to Elizabeth she insisted she would be well soon, as early as November, or even October. “Don’t clean any thing any more on that bowl of dust,” Lota told Elizabeth, “let me do it when I come—and imagine what a wonderful T.V. dinner I am going to cook for you!! And lots of café espresso.” In a postscript she prodded, “Why don’t you ask Decio to let me go and spend a month with you in September or you don’t want it??” Lota would be strong again, she promised, “solid like the Sugar Loaf” that towered above Rio’s Guanabara Bay, “fit like a Stradivarius.”

  Lota’s performance began to convince. Decio didn’t change his mind about December, but he canceled several appointments with her, busy with the purchase of a new apartment, and Lota didn’t object; she canceled once herself. On August 25, Lota brought Elizabeth’s sealed will to Decio’s office, along with the incendiary letter she’d saved for more than a year, and ripped them to shreds in front of him. “The past is gone and finish,” she told Elizabeth. She mailed Elizabeth instructions for the injections she still received and phoned to say she was coming in September after all. She purchased a plane ticket for arrival on Sunday the seventeenth.

  How could Lota be well enough to travel? Could Decio really approve, as Lota insisted? Lota had said it would be up to Elizabeth to decide when she was ready for Lota’s visit, when Elizabeth had gotten enough work done, rested enough from “our Tempest here.” But “do you really like to be ‘boss’?” Lota had asked. “I thought it was only me.” No wonder Elizabeth sounded scared, wary, on the phone when Lota called to announce her plans. Elizabeth sent a cable the next day, reassuring Lota that she wanted her to come—how could she not? That was what Elizabeth knew she must do, prove to Lota that her love was unwavering. She waited for the letter Lota said Decio was writing, but it never came, and when Elizabeth phoned him, the connection was poor.

  It was Lota who arrived in New York confused, unable to read the signs. Or perhaps she’d come with the intent to end her life there. Elizabeth could tell right away, when she greeted Lota at the airport after the long flight, that she was “very sick indeed and that Decio had been a damned fool to let her come,” she later wrote to Rosinha Leão, her companion years before on the Amazon. Lota was “in a state of extreme depression, and nothing I could say or do seemed to help.” Elizabeth made coffee at the apartment; they went out to eat “in a place she hated.” Back at Loren’s studio, they each had a small glass of Dutch beer and then one Nembutal to sleep. Lota “started in talking about her troubles a bit, the same old cycle,” her bitterness over Flamengo Park, “but we had no quarrel.” First Lota drifted off, complaining of the early bedtime—9:30 p.m.—on her first night in the city, then Elizabeth. “Everything was very peaceful.” But this drugged sleep was not what either Lota or Elizabeth had wished for.

  At 6:30 a.m., Elizabeth woke to noises in the upstairs kitchen. Lota was “staggering down those steps” semiconscious, carrying a box of Nembutal, Elizabeth thought, though later the handful of pills Lota had taken turned out to be Valium. Elizabeth “half-carried” Lota to the bedroom and reached for the phone to call Dr. Baumann. Lota tried to grab it from her as Elizabeth begged her to say “how many” pills she’d swallowed. “Ten or twelve.”

  Lota did not wake up again on Perry Street or in St. Vincent’s Hospital, where she lay in a coma. Elizabeth did not see Lota again until she was summoned to the hospital a week later to identify her body. Going through Lota’s suitcases during those awful days of waiting, Elizabeth found twelve kilo bags of c
offee and her own recent poems, “In the Waiting Room” and “Trouvée,” which Lota had read so often “en cachette,” in secret, “to console me, and to made me understand you better,” Lota had written that summer. “Perhaps she felt some miracle would take place and she’d feel better the minute she got to New York,” Elizabeth could only guess. She was always impatient, “my darling Lota—and finally, too impatient to live.”

  Elizabeth’s telegram to Rosinha Leão, September 26, 1967

  Lota’s death, the tragic manner of it—whether accidental overdose or suicide, planned or “sudden impulse,” as Elizabeth had conjectured of Randall Jarrell’s death two years before—made Elizabeth’s very private life excruciatingly public. There were explanations to give to her American friends, some of whom may not have understood or fully sympathized with her love for a woman. It was as if The Group had come to life, only this time the Baroness was sacrificed at the end rather than Kay, the novel’s central character based loosely on Mary McCarthy. The gossip Elizabeth had feared ran wild, though mostly beyond her awareness. She would not have known of letters exchanged by Mary McCarthy and Cal, chums since the 1940s as members of the Partisan Review crowd, in which Mary offered her dark opinions—Elizabeth was a “poet of terror”—and Cal retailed the story of Elizabeth’s drunken fall in his house not long after Lota died. Elizabeth had broken her shoulder badly, forcing her to postpone her flight to Rio, which may have been her preference anyway. “I think it cooled her down,” Cal wrote to Mary of the injury and several weeks of convalescence, “so that finally she was in very good shape to go back to Brazil, and handled all the very vexing duties and encounters.” Elizabeth felt only grateful to Cal, who’d hosted her in his West Side apartment during these loneliest days when “I have no idea what to do with my life any more,” and who had called the ambulance; and to May Swenson’s Pearl, who visited Elizabeth from the nearby Village apartment the couple once shared. May had moved to suburban Sea Cliff with her newly beloved “Zan.” How had May and Pearl managed an amicable breakup after nineteen years?

  Back in Brazil, it was worse. Elizabeth felt the coldness right away from nearly everyone but Lilli, to whom she’d keened, “It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault,” in her first letter after Lota died. Mary Morse, who wouldn’t speak to her, had snatched up all of Elizabeth’s favorite photographs of Lota and burned Elizabeth’s letters. As Lota had anticipated, Marietta hired a lawyer to contest her sister’s will. Just months before, Elizabeth had been finalizing plans for renovations on the Ouro Prêto house, drawing a sketch for Lilli of the balcony she wanted widened so that three people—Elizabeth, Lilli, and Lota—could sit comfortably to admire the view of the town and its hillside churches. She knew that Lota had left her the Rio apartment, while Mary would inherit Samambaia; once the estate was settled, if Lota’s wishes prevailed, Elizabeth planned to sell the eleventh-floor rooms she had never enjoyed in order to keep the house she’d chosen herself. Lines Elizabeth had written five years earlier while translating Clarice Lispector’s story “The Smallest Woman in the World” captured her predicament. Lispector’s tiny woman is an African Pygmy, a tree dweller in the satiric fable, whose eyes darken with pleasure at the thought of possessing her own tree. “It is good to own, good to own, good to own,” becomes Little Flower’s mantra, second only to “Not to be devoured is the secret goal of a whole life.” Survival was all Elizabeth could contemplate. “There are times at which one doesn’t want to have feelings,” she had written in the translation, and this was one of them.

  Nearly three years would pass before Elizabeth completed “In the Waiting Room” or any other poem, three years during which she often slid under the waves of oblivion that alcohol provided, and tried but failed to access the reverie that had enabled her as a young girl to know, and then as a mature poet to write, “you are an I, you are an Elizabeth.” She filled the time with moves, first running away. “I just have to keep going somehow,” she wrote Lilli in January 1968, four months after Lota’s death. Cal’s letter of “gossip” to Mary McCarthy had included news—“I . . . know you won’t spread it”—of “a girl, about thirty, in Seattle, divorced, perhaps because of Elizabeth, with a child of two”: Roxanne Cumming, just twenty-five. Lizzie Hardwick had been deputized by Dr. Baumann, after Elizabeth’s fall in October, to phone Roxanne—“a very decent and good sort”—and let her know that Elizabeth was in need. Someone had to take care of Elizabeth, and it would not be the Lowells. There had been few Decembers in recent years when Cal had not suffered a breakdown.

  After considering New York City and Puerto Rico, Elizabeth, Roxanne, and her eighteen-month-old son, nicknamed “Boogie,” set up housekeeping in San Francisco early in the new year, renting the second-floor apartment in a “pea green” double-bayed triple-decker at the edge of Russian Hill from a landlord named Mr. Pang. The building at 1559 Pacific Avenue was a “nowhere address,” in Roxanne’s argot, with a steam laundry on one side and an Italian family’s kitchen garden on the other. Across the street was a body painting shop—“CAR, that is,” Elizabeth specified in a letter to Cal; this was the winter after 1967’s “Summer of Love” brought 100,000 hippies to Haight-Ashbury for a months-long orgy of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.

  Elizabeth and Roxanne might have been drawn to the city because of its place at the center of the burgeoning gay rights movement. San Francisco was where, in the mid-1950s, a small group of “homophile” women founded the Daughters of Bilitis, adopting the deliberately obscure name from a nineteenth-century French poet’s odes to a fictional lover of Sappho. The organization had gone national, and in 1966, the DOB’s publication, The Ladder, added a more assertive subtitle, A Lesbian Review, in tune with the restive times. But while Roxanne steered Elizabeth toward certain Bay Area radical causes, arranging for her to interview the Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, Eldridge’s twenty-three-year-old wife, for a New York Review of Books article that never came to fruition, gay liberation was not one of them. To everyone they met, Roxanne was introduced as Elizabeth’s secretary.

  Roxanne was more than that. Elizabeth both relied and doted on the tiny dynamo that was Roxanne Cumming. “Not very beautiful, but nice-looking” was how Elizabeth described the blue-eyed Roxanne to Lilli, and she may have called Elizabeth back to her younger, more spirited self. Elizabeth made notes for a poem, “S F,” that featured their neighborhood—“the wooden turning fire escapes / such queer clapboarded faces, ladders - pipes, / and crooked porches”—and trailed off, “it was the moon & not the laundromat / that woke us love.” Roxanne’s youth and difference in sensibility from Lota’s International-style elitism had been attractions from the start; now they were crucial distractions. Elizabeth found they agreed on most things—“music, food, furniture”—but she ceded control of the FM dial to Roxanne, who, while sharing Elizabeth’s love of opera, preferred rock to Elizabeth’s favored jazz station. Elizabeth let Roxanne shorten her skirt hems above the knee and construct a large writing table for her from a freighter’s abandoned hatch cover. Leaving Boogie with a babysitter, Roxanne drove the two of them on a tour of San Francisco’s derelict Hunters Point housing projects, in the “Lotus White” Volkswagen Beetle Elizabeth purchased, to prepare for the meeting with Kathleen Cleaver, then transcribed the taped interview and corresponded with Cleaver about the “short prose piece” or “poem” that might result but never did. Roxanne ferried Elizabeth to sessions with a psychotherapist who suggested she join AA. Imagining a basement room crowded with reeking winos, Elizabeth refused. Roxanne drove Elizabeth to the hospital when once again she fell, this time breaking her wrist. She had been “cold SOBER,” Elizabeth insisted in a letter to Lilli, had only slipped in her high heels on a wet sidewalk.

  Roxanne handled most of Elizabeth’s business correspondence, and when Farrar, Straus and Giroux sent a cover design for Complete Poems that Elizabeth didn’t like, Roxanne drove off to Design Research in Ghirardelli Square and returned with swatche
s of yellow, blue, and white fabric that she arranged in a simple collage. Elizabeth had not been able to write any new poems or anything more in prose on Brazil since the summer of 1967, but she was reading proof of the collection that brought together the poems from her first three books. Roxanne’s tricolor jacket design seemed just right. Still, far from home and responsible for her son as well as Elizabeth, Roxanne had her own periods of despond—“unhappy flower child,” Elizabeth wrote in “S F.” After more than a year at 1559 Pacific Avenue, both women began to imagine an easier, more picturesque life in Brazil, where Lilli had continued to supervise renovations on Casa Mariana, the name Elizabeth had chosen for her Ouro Prêto house, honoring Marianne Moore and acknowledging the neighboring town reached by the mountain road that separated Lilli’s and Elizabeth’s houses. They might have moved there sooner if Elizabeth hadn’t worried that Lota’s friends would look askance at her new housemate. “I keep reminding myself that I am really free to cheer up, free to feel happy, even, if I can,” Elizabeth wrote to Cal, but the “very black cloud” of all that had happened when she’d returned to Brazil after Lota’s death “hangs over me.” Her letters to Lilli were filled with hand-wringing over slights and silences, and messages to the lawyer who was managing her case and finances during the months before Marietta’s suit was resolved, finally, in Elizabeth’s and Mary Morse’s favor.

  Elizabeth, Roxanne, and Boogie, now almost three years old, were all living in Ouro Prêto in late February 1970 when word came that Complete Poems had won the National Book Award. “It’s about time,” Elizabeth groused to Roxanne and others, still smarting over her defeat four years earlier. Then she’d been in Seattle gaining self-confidence and hoping to make a victorious appearance in New York City to accept the prize. Now she refused her editor Robert Giroux’s offer of a plane ticket for the March 2 ceremony, dreading the prospect of making a speech, unable to retrieve her winter clothes and fur coat from storage in San Francisco. She asked Cal to attend the gala in her place. “You are always doing things for me that I should somehow be able to do for myself, and I am really profoundly grateful,” she wrote. The truth was, relations with Roxanne had turned tumultuous in recent months, and Elizabeth couldn’t think of traveling with her, or leaving her behind. Elizabeth hinted at problems when she told Cal she’d prefer to move back to San Francisco, where she’d take a separate apartment from Roxanne and “live alone, dismal as it is.”