Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  What had she done, bringing Roxanne here, when she’d needed all along to mourn Lota? “I miss her more every day of my life,” she wrote to Cal from Ouro Prêto the week the prize was announced. “This is one of the reasons I want to leave Brazil.” In an eerie reprise of Elizabeth’s last year with Lota, Roxanne appeared to be having a breakdown, alternating rapidly between “adoration & rudeness,” spending recklessly from their joint bank account on expensive building supplies and tools she hoarded in her locked room, fighting with the construction crew and firing the maid and babysitter. Roxanne had gone on a “sort of gold & diamonds jag,” staying up half the night “hammering rocks,” convinced she would find precious ore in the stones of Ouro Prêto, the town that took its name from the “black gold” of its colonial mines. Desperate to rescue the “poor crazy girl” as she had not been able to save Lota, Elizabeth had Roxanne hospitalized, then flown back with Boogie to her family in Seattle. The scenario of an unstable mother and dependent child was “all too much like my own early days,” Elizabeth told Cal; she felt “sorriest of all” for “little Boogie, who is so beautiful and was so upset.” Elizabeth learned from Roxanne’s doctors that she’d been consuming large quantities of Elizabeth’s stimulant medication, Anorexyl. Friends in Seattle told Elizabeth that Roxanne had a “long, long history of these breakdowns.” Elizabeth paid Roxanne’s hospital bill and sent more money to cover psychotherapy back home, even as she removed Roxanne’s name from her bank accounts and will.

  Truly alone in the hillside casa she was suddenly reluctant to leave, Elizabeth turned to a project she’d been contemplating since Lota’s death, a “small book of poems for her, or about her,” although the prospect of writing it seemed even now, she wrote to Cal, “still too painful.” In early 1968, before she broke her wrist in San Francisco, Elizabeth had begun a sonnet sequence, inspired by a new collection of the Brazilian poet and bossa nova lyricist Vinicius de Moraes, a friend through Lilli. Cal too, steadied by a new drug, lithium, had been spinning out sonnets at the rate of four or five per day, quickly filling a volume he would call Notebook: 1967–68, capturing his experience of a turbulent year during which he’d joined a group of celebrity writers in Washington, D.C., to protest the draft, and stumped for antiwar Senator Eugene McCarthy in his quixotic bid for the presidency. The sonnet sequence Elizabeth had envisioned in January 1968, when her grief was still fresh, was meant to “remember all the good days only those,” she’d written to Lilli. Now she made notes for one long “ELEGY poem” to be composed of “sections, some anecdotal, some lyrical,” recounting incidents from Lota’s childhood; recalling her physical traits, “small hands, small feet,” the “beautiful colored skin—the gestures”; and summing up aspects of her personality, the “reticence—and pride,” the “innocent snobbery,” her “ability to tease,” and her “courage courage to the last, or almost to the last.”

  Lota with Sammy the toucan

  Yet when Elizabeth tried to write, grief again overwhelmed her: “For perhaps the tenth time the tenth time the tenth time today / and still early morning I go under the crashing wave / of your death / I go under the wave the black wave of your death.” Phrases repeated, collided, and went nowhere: “No coffee can wwake you no coffee can wakeyou no coffee / can wake you / No coffee.” She took solace from the great Spanish elegy by Miguel Hernández, written after the sudden death of his friend and mentor Ramón Sijé, from whom he’d grown estranged. Elizabeth copied the opening lines onto her own pages and began to translate them: Yo quiero ser llorando el hortelano / de la tierra que ocupas y estercolas. / compañero del alma, tan temprano . . . I want to be the grieving gardener / of the earth you fill and fertilize, / my dearest friend, so soon. Elizabeth’s translation strayed from the original: “I want the mint to be weeping / of the land you occupy . . . / companion of the soul.” The conceit of the gardener entered Elizabeth’s own poem in the person of Lota:

  Not there. And not there! ! I see only small hands in the dirt

  transplanting Sweet Williams, tamping them down

  dirt on the deft hands, the rings, . . .small

  Y siento más tu muerte que mi vida, she copied from Hernández’s poem onto her page, but did not translate:I feel your death more than my life. In a letter to Dr. Baumann, written while Roxanne was still living at Casa Mariana, Elizabeth had admitted, “Since she died, Anny—I just don’t seem to care whether I live or die.”

  Elizabeth may have known Hernández’s “Elegía” since its publication in 1936 or learned about it from Pablo Neruda, with whom she’d been staying in Mexico at the time of Hernández’s death in prison after the Spanish Civil War. Neruda’s influence on Hernández had caused the rift with the politically conservative Sijé, even as Neruda and Hernández drew together as comrades in the Loyalist cause. In 1970, there was still no English translation of the poem, but Elizabeth would not complete her translation or her own “Elegy.” The feelings of guilt she shared with the anguished Hernández, who imagined digging up his estranged friend’s grave, mining the earth “until I find you, / kiss your noble skull, ungag your mouth, / and bring you back to life,” also overwhelmed her. The list of topics she planned to cover in her “Elegy” included “regret and guilt, the nighttime horro[r]s.”

  What was Elizabeth’s responsibility in Lota’s death? The difficulty in bearing the silent accusations, in sensing she was blamed and even hated, was an intuition that her accusers were at least partly right. While living with Roxanne, Elizabeth had resumed work on a poem she called “Pink Dog,” about a pariah dog wandering the streets of Rio at Carnival, pink because the “poor bitch” was hairless, exposed; pink had been the color Lota thought most becoming to Elizabeth. She resisted self-indictment, put it down to being “just naturally born guilty” or playing the role of scapegoat for Lota’s friends and family members, all of whom felt “slightly guilty after a tragic death like that,” she wrote to Lilli. Perhaps it was best to give up Roxanne, the innocent flower child who nevertheless had come between Elizabeth and Lota. Elizabeth had quarreled and parted ways with Lilli these past months also. Elizabeth might not write out her love for Lota, her sadness and regret, but at last she was enduring the “great grief” on her own—to her surprise, she wrote Dr. Baumann, “enjoying being terribly lonely.”

  And she had Cal’s companionship by letter. He’d just sent Elizabeth three poems dedicated to her, two of them recalling moments they’d spent together in Maine and the third, “Calling,” an ode to Elizabeth’s “unerring muse”: “Do / you still hang words in the air, ten years imperfect, / joke-lettered, glued to cardboard posters, with gaps / and empties for the unimagined word . . . ?” She loved the poems, unrhymed sonnets he would include in his revised Notebook, was “dumbfounded.” But in this season of renewed mourning Elizabeth clung instead to the final lines of “Obit,” the last sonnet in Cal’s Notebook, in which he reflected on his marriage to Lizzie Hardwick, not yet over but strained to the breaking point by his erratic moods and misdeeds. Somehow, at the end of his rambling diary-in-verse, Cal had composed two lines that “say everything,” Elizabeth wrote to him, “and they say everything I wish I could somehow say about Lota”:

  After loving you so much, can I forget

  you for eternity, and have no other choice?

  Cal offered another means of rescue. He’d accepted a two-year teaching position at the University of Essex in England, leaving a vacancy at Harvard, where he’d been teaching one semester each year since the fall of 1963. Could Elizabeth fill in for the 1970 and ’71 fall semesters? Despite Elizabeth’s meager teaching experience, the college was happy to offer the job on the strength of Cal’s recommendation and her two major prizes. The invitation arrived just as she’d sent the New Yorker the two long poems, “In the Waiting Room” and “Crusoe in England,” she’d polished in New York during the summer of 1967 but hadn’t found the peace of mind or the will to finish. The first contained a coded acknowledgment of her grief: the “big black wave
” that threatened the young Elizabeth of “In the Waiting Room” recurred as the “black wave of your death” in the unpublished “Elegy.” The second bade an oblique farewell to Lota in its closing lines, as the repatriated Robinson Crusoe recalls his desert-island exile and the loss of “Friday, my dear Friday,” who “died of measles / seventeen years ago come March.” Had Lota lived to one more March birthday, the couple would have spent seventeen years together.

  Elizabeth accepted the Harvard job without hesitation, and the prospect of regular half-time employment for the next two years buoyed her spirits briefly. But she wasn’t writing well. Roxanne sent long letters from Seattle, sometimes daily, and Elizabeth considered urging her to come along to Cambridge where treatment might be better. Roxanne argued that she wasn’t sick at all, which seemed to Elizabeth further confirmation that she was. Based on Elizabeth’s descriptions of Roxanne’s condition, Dr. Baumann predicted that “a long hospitalization would be the only hope of curing R.”

  Elizabeth was still weepy and drinking to excess when James Merrill arrived at Ouro Prêto for a visit in July. Merrill was one of a growing band of younger gay male poets who admired Elizabeth’s poetry and sought to know her. He’d met her first over lunch in New York City twenty years before while he was still a college student, inviting her out to discuss a poem that had “bowled” him over, but he’d had to scramble to make conversation when she showed no interest in talking about her work. Jim, as Elizabeth learned to call him—later he was Jimmy—persisted by letter, sending her his books, five by now; he’d won the National Book Award for the fifth, Nights and Days, in 1967. Jim had lived abroad too, finding a sybaritic refuge in Greece. As the son of a Merrill Lynch founding partner, he had the money and time to travel. He could afford to accept Elizabeth’s invitation to visit in Brazil, as Howard Moss, who’d become a friend as well as her editor, could not.

  The rainy winter weather in Ouro Prêto prevented much sightseeing, and they stayed indoors most days, listening to samba records in the high-ceilinged whitewashed main room, where Jim admired the collection of artifacts and bibelots Elizabeth had assembled: the double-sided paddle, a brass tuba cast off by Ouro Prêto’s town band, a tiny crucifix enclosed in a lightbulb. At her urging, he’d brought a quantity of duty-free bourbon, not realizing Elizabeth’s susceptibility. She often drank alone, and Jim found her one evening settled in her rocking chair by the wood stove in a stupor, books by Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore piled beside her. Another night he’d had to prepare the meal and entertain dinner guests by himself when she failed to emerge from her room. Yet drinking made Elizabeth talkative when she wasn’t beyond reach, and she described for Jim the long arc of her romance with Lota, from the invitation to stay at Samambaia with her own studio—“it just meant everything”—to the catastrophic night of Lota’s arrival in New York City. She was “only crying in English,” Elizabeth apologized to a Brazilian friend who arrived as she wound up her story in tears. Elizabeth told Jim she disliked being “typed as a lesbian,” the term woman-loving American feminists now claimed with zeal. Through the 1950s and ’60s Brazil had provided for her, as Greece had for Jim, a more fluid and fanciful environment in which to act on her yearnings. One day between rain showers, they’d taken a taxi to the next town, winding through “sparkling red-and-green country, downhill, uphill, then, suddenly, under a rainbow,” Jim later recalled. Elizabeth spoke in Portuguese to the taxi driver, who burst into laughter. “In the North of Brazil,” she told Jim, letting him in on the joke, “they have this superstition, if you pass underneath a rainbow you change your sex.”

  When Jim left and as the date of her first class approached, Elizabeth sank further into an alcohol-fueled depression, finally checking herself into a hospital in the closest major city, Belo Horizonte. Yet she summoned the nerve to make the trip to Cambridge in September 1970, fighting her instinctive dread of teaching and suppressing memories of her worst students at the University of Washington, “their hatred for my sex, their LSD fantasies, their bluffing.” Many of the university’s students, most of whom were men whose student deferments kept them out of Vietnam, would have been better off at a trade school, she thought, than on the “big and impersonal” college campus where Elizabeth herself had felt “rather small and much too personal.” Harvard, she hoped, would be different. And, despite the boarded-up shop windows in Harvard Square, unrepaired since the previous spring’s antidraft riot, and her dreary two-room suite in Kirkland House, a men’s dorm favored by varsity athletes, it was.

  After a second fall semester of teaching, with a spring and summer in Ouro Prêto intervening, Elizabeth had been promised a full-time “term appointment,” two courses each semester, lasting another five years, until she reached sixty-six, retirement age for nontenured faculty. She would continue at Harvard alongside Cal, who was expected back in Cambridge in the fall of 1972. And she had been asked to compose a poem for the Phi Beta Kappa initiation ceremony at commencement in June, one of the most prestigious invitations a poet could receive. Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and W. H. Auden were among her predecessors. Elizabeth stayed in Cambridge through the spring of 1972 to work on “The Moose,” a poem that had been “hanging in air” for decades.

  For “The Moose,” Elizabeth drew on memories going back to 1946, recorded in letters to Marianne Moore, who had died in February 1972 at eighty-four after a series of strokes, and to Dr. Ruth Foster, long dead but not forgotten. Perhaps the poem was an homage to both women. If Dr. Foster had been the attentive seal of “At the Fishhouses,” then might not Marianne Moore have been, in phantom form, the inquisitive, “grand, otherworldly” creature who appears at the conclusion of “The Moose”? “It’s awful plain” and “Look! It’s a she!” gasp the passengers on a bus, halted late at night on a country road deep in the Nova Scotia woods to allow the animal to pass. It could not have escaped Elizabeth’s notice that switching just one letter in the last name of her former mentor, whose close family members called each other by the names of the woodland characters in The Wind in the Willows, would have made Marianne Moore a moose.

  Marianne Moore with elephants at the Bronx Zoo, photograph by Esther Bubley, ca. 1953–54

  Since their first outings to the circus in the 1930s, Elizabeth had known Marianne adored large animals. It was in the letter to Marianne that she described the 1946 bus ride home from Nova Scotia that supplied the poem’s title character; she’d quoted to Marianne, who always appreciated a good line of dialogue, the bus driver’s remark after the “big cow moose . . . walked away very slowly into the woods, looking at us over her shoulder”: “Very curious beasts.” In the poem the driver’s comment is compressed—“Curious creatures”—and the backward gaze is given to the narrating passenger as the bus moves on, leaving the animal behind in a final stanza with an alliterative M-M phrase at its center:

  by craning backward,

  the moose can be seen

  on the moonlit macadam;

  then there’s a dim

  smell of moose, an acrid

  smell of gasoline.

  A letter written to Ruth Foster describing the same bus trip omits the moose, but captures the drowsy passenger eavesdropping on gossip through the nightlong journey, the chief subject of the poem’s irregularly rhymed six-line stanzas before the animal arrives. In Elizabeth’s February 1947 letter to her psychoanalyst, however, she wasn’t simply dozing; she’d drunk a glass of rum with her favorite aunt Grace before boarding the bus, and then taken a sleeping pill. The voices she listens to are of “two women seated far back behind me,” and their murmuring stirs an aural hallucination. One woman’s voice “was a little louder than the other’s,” she wrote to Ruth Foster, “and had an intonation very much like my Aunt Grace’s . . . that same sort of commiserating tone.” The other voice, less distinct, was her analyst’s: “It kept up all night or so I felt, this endless conversation between you and aunt G—I never could quite catch the words but almost. . . . It w
asn’t about me.” For several weeks after she’d returned to New York City from Nova Scotia, Elizabeth continued to hear the voices as she fell asleep at night, until finally she made an appointment with Dr. Foster—“then I came to see you again & yr real voice took up the tale.”

  In the poem, the pair of women becomes an elderly married couple—“Grandparents’ voices / uninterruptedly / talking, in Eternity”—

  Talking the way they talked

  in the old featherbed,

  peacefully, on and on,

  dim lamplight in the hall,

  down in the kitchen, the dog

  tucked in her shawl.

  Elizabeth might have chosen to give the poem wider appeal by substituting the set of grandparents for the female couple, a heterosexual decoy. Or perhaps she simply wanted everyone—her Nova Scotia grandparents, Aunt Grace, Marianne Moore, Ruth Foster—with her “in the middle of the road” for that sublime moment when the she-moose enters the scene and the poem’s central, heartening question arises: “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?”