Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  “The Moose,” which she completed in time to deliver in her simple BA cap and gown, purchased at the Coop, from the stage of Harvard’s Sanders Theatre in June 1972, her first poem written to deadline, was Elizabeth’s bus ride home. Boston, she’d written to Cal after accepting the Harvard job, “still seems like home to me in a funny way.” Boston was where, despite all that had befallen her as a child growing up in its surrounding suburbs, Grandfather Bishop’s stonework still upheld the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts, the museum Elizabeth visited with her aunts Grace and Maud; where she’d passed through the cavernous South Station innumerable times to catch trains to summer camp and Walnut Hill School and Vassar College and finally to New York City.

  Elizabeth reading “The Moose” at Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises, Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, 1972

  That spring, the first northern spring she’d witnessed since 1952, Elizabeth settled in, marveling at the “sea of lilacs” outside her bedroom window and completing more poems in a season than she had in a decade. “I just wish I could keep on like this forever,” she’d written to Howard Moss after mailing him a third poem in late May. And she was in love again. Although Elizabeth would follow her vow to live alone through the coming years, this love would last. It had been celebrated early on with a blissful weekend sub rosa at the Hotel Elysée in New York. Was the choice deliberate? Did Elizabeth realize, her lover had asked when she read The Group afterward, this was where Lakey had taken the Baroness on her homecoming?

  June 14, 1977

  SANDERS THEATRE, MEMORIAL HALL

  Phi Beta Kappa was for my uncle, my mother’s genius older brother, a marine physicist who’d invented a seagoing research vessel that flipped 90 degrees and held its position vertically at the surface, half above and half below, in surging Pacific waters, and the “deep tow” system that revealed hydrothermal vents feeding giant tube worms on the ocean floor. Phi Beta Kappa was not for me, with my A’s in courses that asked only for reading and writing, my B in Miss Bishop’s class. But then it was—and there I was, seated among the hundred-plus newly elected Phi Beta Kappa scholars in the front pews of Sanders Theatre, my black gown, a rental from the Coop, thrown over white jeans and a navy-blue ribbed tank top. The June day was hot and steamy, and the gown’s polyester didn’t breathe.

  I might have attended the Phi Beta Kappa program on the Tuesday morning before Thursday’s graduation anyway, to hear the appointed poet, Robert Penn Warren. A friend had a crush on the red-haired daughter of “Red” Warren, as we knew to call him, and the poet’s wife, the writer Eleanor Clark, had been a Vassar classmate of Miss Bishop’s. We were curious. Maybe the whole family would come up from Connecticut. But I was separated from my friend and my boyfriend and my visiting parents, listening first to Edwin Land, the day’s orator, tell how his young daughter had asked, while walking the beach with him years ago, Why can’t we take a snapshot and have the photograph right away? He’d invented the Polaroid camera to answer her question. “The question is itself the answer,” he counseled us graduating seniors as we sat, groggy from the revelry of senior week, in our cushioned pews.

  If only my questions were as wide-eyed as Land’s little daughter’s, and I had a scientist’s mind to answer them. My mother had taken me aside the day before to tell me she had rented a one-bedroom apartment a few blocks from our family home and would be moving things into it over the summer in preparation for telling my father she wanted a divorce. After that, the house would be sold, and where my long-unemployed father might live next would be up to him. They were staying now in a Harvard dorm room. It was the thirty-fifth reunion of the Harvard class from which my father hadn’t graduated, and the college wasn’t picky when it came to welcoming potential donors back to campus, though my parents had nothing to spare for Harvard beyond the minimal cost of the lodgings.

  My mother had rarely spoken of her unhappiness with my father, and there was no time for elaboration during the fifteen minutes before he joined us for lunch at Piroschka’s on Dunster Street. How she would tell him she was moving out and how he might respond was beyond imagining for me. He could talk a blue streak about his favorite novels—Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Norman Douglas’s South Wind—or the ingenious Quincy Market renovation he’d visited the day before, but his grasp on the facts of his situation was weak, and when challenged or even simply interrupted he was quick to anger. He liked to say he believed in the “generation gap” that so many of my age-mates bemoaned. Keeping my mother’s secret over the several days they’d allotted to attend my graduation would not be difficult.

  But my mother’s decision—her decisiveness—surprised me. My parents had operated separately for so long while residing in the same house, I’d stopped wishing for the divorce I’d once thought would bring relief from the painful ambiguity of our lives together. When my father had taken the train back east in May to roam the New England states for several weeks before coming to Cambridge, staying in hostels, I’d thought it was to save the steeper airfare and because he had nothing else to do while my mother worked at her copyediting job and then flew to Boston on the redeye. She must have welcomed the time alone to make her plans. When my father arrived at the café and ordered a sandwich of pâté and lettuce on a baguette, the most expensive item on the menu, we listened to him reminisce about Harry Levin’s lectures on Proust, Joyce, and Mann until my mother picked up the check. I felt sorry for him; he hadn’t gone to any of the scheduled reunion events. He had only us to tell his stories to, and soon he wouldn’t have that either. I doubted there’d be room for me to stay wherever my father lived after our house was sold.

  My mother hadn’t asked, but she would have been right to believe I had no plans to return home to Pasadena after graduation. I hadn’t even visited the summer before when I lived in San Francisco for a work-study job at Laura X’s Women’s History Research Center in Berkeley. It wasn’t until I’d arrived on the West Coast that I learned the WHRC, located in a church basement several blocks from the university campus, was in the process of closing down. Rather than pursuing research projects using the center’s collections, I’d spend most of my days packing up files documenting the WHRC’s not-so-distant founding in the late sixties and shipping them off to be archived at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, a few blocks away from the dorm I’d just left. Laura X, a St. Louis heiress who’d traded in her last name following Malcolm X’s lead, had put much of her fortune into acquiring a library to prove a point to her Berkeley history professor, who’d declared there wasn’t enough material to support even a semester’s course in women’s history. But her enterprise had been overtaken by university-backed women’s history libraries like the Schlesinger, and the organization shifted focus around the time I arrived, in June 1976, toward contemporary women’s issues, developing an informational film strip on the prevalence of rape and sexual assault.

  Laura rarely visited the center, and my supervisor warned me to turn down any invitations to visit her at home. I should drop the names of current and former boyfriends when I met her, otherwise our boss might “come on” to me. My supervisor had already “come out” to me one day after work, first extracting my promise not to tell Laura or anyone else in our tiny office her secret: she and her partner were ready to have a child, looking into artificial insemination, maybe using a turkey baster. She didn’t want complications on the job either.

  It seemed safe enough, though, to accept Laura X’s offer to house­sit while she was out of town on vacation. Her sprawling home in the Berkeley Hills may have had views of the Bay and the Golden Gate, but it was stuffed so full of books—the WHRC’s library was kept there—I seldom looked out the windows. I pulled some of the slimmer volumes off the shelves, hoping to find samples of recent feminist poetry. One book’s author had posed seminude for her jacket photo, arms raised overhead in flamboyant rebellion. Another pamphlet wasn’t poetry at all, though its typewritten pages with ragged right margins seemed at first to be
some style of verse. It was Calamity Jane’s Letters to Her Daughter, published by the Shameless Hussy Press. Was Calamity Jane, the frontier heroine, a real person? I hadn’t known. Here was a record spanning nearly three decades, from 1877 to 1903, letters written from Coulson, Deadwood, Stringtown, and New York City to a girl who grew to become a woman, cared for by others while her mother was on the road. I felt no qualms about taking the little book with me, a totem of the greater knowledge I’d hoped to gain that summer, but I wouldn’t go back to California except to clear out my bedroom.

  When Red Warren stepped to the podium in Sanders Theatre, I had to wonder whether his nickname derived from his ruddy complexion as much as the hair that now fell in white wisps from a balding pate. Academic regalia hadn’t camouflaged Edwin Land’s straight edges, his businessman’s verve. But Warren’s flowing robes, along with his impressive height, beaklike nose, and regal bearing, set him on a plane with the toga-clad heroes that flanked him on the stage—the patriot orator James Otis and the antebellum Boston mayor and Harvard president Josiah Quincy—pale marble though they were.

  Then his voice split the air, a rasping Kentucky twang as startling as a Confederate saber rattling in the hall, paneled in honey-colored hardwoods and dedicated to the memory of Harvard’s Union dead. We knew Robert Penn Warren as the author of All the King’s Men, his novel of political demagoguery in the Depression-era South, and after that as coauthor of dusty English textbooks with his colleague Cleanth Brooks at Yale—reason enough to view him as an intruder in Crimson territory. What kind of poet was he? None of my teachers had ever mentioned him; his six books of verse were not on our reading lists.

  He was nearly spitting out the lines of a poem called “Red-Tail Hawk and Pyre of Youth,” but his stretched and battered words were at first unintelligible. I picked up the outlines of a reminiscence: he’d been out hunting as a boy, climbed a ridge where the red-tail flew at him, “a shadowy vortex of silver,” then closed in—

  I pressed the cool, snubbed

  Trigger. Saw

  The circle

  Break.

  The boy carries the bloodied corpse home, “cuddled / Like babe to heart, and my heart beating like love,” to stuff and mount his prey—

  I knew my business. And at last a red-tail—

  Oh, king of the air!

  And at that miraculous range.

  How my heart sang!

  I knew Miss Bishop had read at this ceremony five years before. Her poem, “The Moose,” one of my favorites in Geography III, told a vastly different story of a wild creature’s surprise appearance at close range. That “curious” beast had been cautiously admired, then allowed to go her own way. How I wished for an end to Warren’s savage bluster, to listen instead one last time to my teacher’s softly musical voice as she spoke her poems, as if in conversation with herself or just a few intimates. There had been the time in Robert Lowell’s class when, after reading “Poem,” she’d flipped back through her binder to find “Crusoe in England” and started in with a little laugh: “A new volcano has erupted, / the papers say, . . . / But my poor old island’s still / un-rediscovered, un-renamable. / None of the books has ever got it right.” She’d taken us on a journey of the imagination, her imagination.

  My island seemed to be

  a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere’s

  left-over clouds arrived and hung

  above the craters . . .

  The turtles lumbered by, high-domed,

  hissing like teakettles. . . .

  The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun

  rose from the sea,

  and there was one of it and one of me.

  And there had been the evening this past winter when, basking in the rosy glow her walls of exposed brick seemed to emit, she’d read from her rocking chair: “practice losing farther, losing faster.” I had disappointed Elizabeth Bishop, but she could never, I realized, disappoint me.

  Our poet continued. The stuffed bird took up residence “year after year, in my room, on the tallest of bookshelves,” presiding over prized volumes of Blake, Milton, Hardy, and Shakespeare, “unsleeping,” glass eyes staring into the night as the boy slept, until “I slept in that room no more.” I was listening now—

  Years pass like a dream, are a dream, and time came

  When my mother was dead, father bankrupt, and whiskey

  Hot in my throat while there for the last

  Time I lay, and my heart

  Throbbed slow in the

  Meaningless motion of life, and with

  My eyes closed I knew

  That yellow eyes somewhere, unblinking, in vengeance stared.

  Or was it vengeance? What could I know?

  The grown man hunts down his childhood trophy, relegated to the cellar along with his books, and douses the bird with gasoline. “Flames flared. Feathers first. . . . I / Did not wait”—

  What is left

  To do but walk in the dark, and no stars?

  My bid for the Rockefeller fellowship had failed, and little wonder. Writing poetry in Paris, exotic as it seemed to me, couldn’t compete with the winning students’ proposals for travel in Africa and Poland. I hadn’t won any of the big-money creative-writing prizes that might have permitted time off from the research assistant jobs I’d recently pushed to full time, or simply boosted my confidence, the jolt I most needed. As it was, the award I would receive at Thursday afternoon’s diploma-granting ceremony had me blushing with something like the opposite of pride: the Harvard Monthly Prize for “the student in the most advanced course in English composition who shows the greatest literary promise.” Miss Bishop ordinarily selected the winner from among her Advanced Verse Writing students, but this year she’d given up the task, unwilling to do anything more than teach her classes when the college hadn’t renewed her contract. Certainly the prize would not have been mine if Miss Bishop had kept her job. Professor Fitzgerald stepped into the breach and chose me.

  The purse, $140.44, belied the commendation’s windy grandeur. I’d already spent the money: $5 on an oak bookcase another graduating senior was selling on the street, and the rest for a sleek new silver ten-speed bicycle outfitted with red panniers. My boyfriend and I had planned a bike trip in Nova Scotia, stopping first to visit a friend of his on North Haven Island, a short ferry ride off the Maine coast. Then we’d be back in it.

  6

  Sun

  “THE POOR HEART doesn’t seem to grow old at all,” Elizabeth had written to Alice Methfessel from Ouro Prêto in March 1971, a month after her sixtieth birthday and two weeks past Alice’s twenty-eighth. But their age difference was nearly always on her mind, from the moment Alice first laid her head on Elizabeth’s shoulder when Alice had stopped in to see her after a “beery party” with the boys of Kirkland House, where Elizabeth was living in an apartment reserved for visiting scholars during the fall of 1970, and “stayed & stayed, like a child who couldn’t bear to go to bed.” Alice Methfessel was the otherwise entirely sensible, slim and athletic Kirkland House secretary, with “blue blue blue” eyes and a disposition as bright as the “Sunny-Side Up” formula she used to lighten her cropped hair, who had helped move Elizabeth into her second-floor rooms in I-Entry in early October, showed her how to use the basement washing machines, and soon was handling Elizabeth’s mail, meeting her at the airport after a late return from New York City, and bringing her home to the fifth-floor studio apartment on Chauncy Street where Alice lived just outside Harvard Square.

  Alice’s apartment was “the most electrified place” Elizabeth had ever seen: “hi-fi, radios (2), color TV, hair dryers (2), electric blanket, electric clock, electric ‘Water Pik’” for tooth-brushing, along with an electric stove and refrigerator, “just normal here,” in contrast to Brazil, Elizabeth supposed, as she watched Alice dress for work in the morning from the large blue bed that took up more space than anything else in the room. She’d loved the lock of hair that Alice allowed Elizabeth to smooth
back from her forehead, and “those nice satiny eyelids shut tight” as Alice slept. She loved the coffee Alice brought to her now in bed, and looking out the window to see nothing but bare branches when Alice drew back the curtains, and the sound of Alice’s voice, “nice & loud and cheerful,” as she spoke the words that became their waking-up ritual, “Good-morning I love you.” Elizabeth adored “the way you pull on your stockings in the morning—very American, careless and extravagant,” and she’d never forget the sight of Alice wrapping her beautiful neck with a bright red scarf against the cold. Later that fall and winter they would plan ahead for more indulgent breakfasts of croissants from C’est Si Bon and foamy cappuccinos that Elizabeth taught Alice to make with Medaglia d’Oro coffee.

  When they parted at the end of Elizabeth’s first Harvard semester in February 1971, following a magical weekend at New York’s posh Hotel Elysée—Elizabeth did not remember this was where “the ladies” stayed in The Group—both were in tears, neither sure that the other’s love could last through the seven months before Elizabeth returned to teach again in September. Alice, who was used to chatting up Harvard professors and assorted dignitaries passing through Kirkland House, had still been “taken aback at your loving little me”; Alice was tall, Elizabeth was the little one, but she was so much older, and a famous poet. For her part, Elizabeth knew “I’m wrong in every way, except as a ‘dear older friend,’” she wrote to Alice from Ouro Prêto, and that “you are much too young for me; have many many things you must do”; surely Alice’s admirable practicality would cause her to break things off, to “do what’s right for you, and I’ll know it’s right for you—but I dread it terribly at the same time.” Troubled by the “beaux” in Alice’s past, and having witnessed the attraction Alice held for Kirkland House boys and even the avuncular housemaster, Professor Arthur Smithies (he’d given Alice a book called Nymphos and Other Maniacs for her birthday), Elizabeth wooed Alice as best she could in letters she feared were “indiscreet” and asked her to please destroy “after a while.” She conjured a scene: Alice arriving home from work, where “all your electrical gadgets will be waiting for you and they will turn themselves on & begin throbbing and singing: ‘Alice, we love you . . . we love you . . . we love you—Please let us warm your little body and dry your hair and make ice for your bourbon.” But Elizabeth didn’t really have to try so hard. Her sensible lover would not be shaken off course, despite the occasional dinner out with “Bob the Boring” or the sighting of a former beau, Toby. She signed her letters, “For Always, Alice.”