Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Elizabeth with Alice Methfessel

  Elizabeth sent Alice “love—housefulls, churchfulls, airportsfull,” slept with Alice’s letters, carried her photo buttoned into her shirt pocket. Alice lay in bed at night watching slides of Elizabeth she’d taken on late-fall excursions, projected on the white wall of her studio apartment. Still Elizabeth worried, dreamed they met by chance in a foreign airport, but had only three hours together before catching separate planes. She began taking a nightly Nembutal to sleep. Then, in Ouro Prêto, where bottles of cachaça and Old Crow were plentiful, and having the “best breakfast for hundreds of miles around” (her own cornbread toasted, plum jam she’d made from fruit in the garden) was “no fun at all, alone,” Elizabeth had “two collapses, one on top of the other”—binged twice in quick succession, she admitted after failing to write for more than two weeks, frightening Alice. Elizabeth could not stop envisioning a dreadful end to their pleasure and the saving grace of Alice’s love.

  It was now Elizabeth learned she could tell Alice anything—and Alice, “less neurotic than anyone else” Elizabeth knew, would remain unfazed, continue to love Elizabeth “unreservedly” and, unlike Elizabeth, who was “morbidly given to borrowing trouble & expecting the worst,” confine her own worries to “things I can actively do something about.” That was Alice: grateful to know the much older Elizabeth, or “I’d be really hung up on the generation gap”; literary enough to quote Wordsworth—“the child is father of the man”—but taking the adage to define the child’s responsibility for his parents, “the Ageds,” as she called hers. The senior Methfessels were Elizabeth’s age, but conservative Pennsylvania country-club Republicans with whom Alice had nothing in common but “our mutual past,” and declining, Alice thought, into a nattering senescence. Both Elizabeth and Alice agreed that, despite the “vast difference in our ages,” they shared a sense of humor, a yen for travel (Alice had already proposed a trip to Brazil for that August of 1971 to relieve Elizabeth’s exile), and a circumspection about romance that was increasingly rare as the 1970s gave birth to “women’s lib” and, before long, radical lesbian separatism. They had “the same way of looking at things.”

  So when Elizabeth confided that her two collapses had come as she sank once again into “just plain grief” after “so many sad deaths the past few years, so much insanity, so many god-awful experiences, & so much time lost forever,” fearing above all that her new “unsuitable” love was only likely to “bring more grief & loss,” she was testing Alice, even as Elizabeth insisted she didn’t mean to burden the younger woman. This “awful tail-spin” was “not your fault.” How would Alice respond when Elizabeth foretold the worst—a day, probably soon, when “I’ll have to see you going off with someone more suitable—and I’ll have somehow to turn into just being a ‘good friend’ etc.”? Elizabeth loathed the thought of “your coming to call on me in my ‘flat’ in Boston, & bringing me a bunch of flowers or something. Or your feeling you have to be ‘nice’ to an old lady because she is fond of you—& you’ll be dying to get away & go skiing or swimming or love-making with your young man—I really hope I die first.”

  Of course Alice aced the exam. When Elizabeth worried that she’d be left sitting on shore holding Alice’s terry-cloth beach wrap while her young lover swam in the Pacific on the tour of the Galápagos Islands they’d tacked onto the planned August visit, Alice brushed those worries aside and then made certain they both went swimming on Charles Island—“a nice beach, flamingos”—and mingled with the blue-footed boobies, sea lions, and albatrosses they’d flown all that way to see together. When Elizabeth returned to Cambridge in September, Alice had a one-bedroom apartment waiting for her in the Brattle Arms, a solid brick building at 60 Brattle Street, just past Design Research and next door to the Window Shop bakery, its walls freshly painted by Harvard boys Alice had hired, and with Alice’s new red-yellow-and-blue-striped terry-cloth bathrobe, purchased in the men’s department of Lord & Taylor, ready for lounging on Sunday mornings. Writing to Elizabeth that spring about her discovery of the Brattle Street apartment, Alice had crowed, “If Elizabeth lived here I’d be home now!,” mimicking the twin billboards aimed at harried commuters on Boston’s Storrow Drive advertising luxury rentals in the new Charles River Park complex: “If You Lived Here . . .” “ . . . You’d Be Home Now! ” Elizabeth’s surprise phone call from Brazil just days before had left Alice in a state of “blissful shock”—“Your wonderful laugh will ring through my dreams.”

  Elizabeth warned Alice there might be setbacks, future collapses when “the horrors set in.” She copied out a long passage from Melanie Klein’s Love, Guilt and Reparation on female friendship and sent it to Alice. Klein, whom Elizabeth described as Freud’s “best successor,” no longer seemed “grim” to her. Klein’s “books are wonderful—and she looks wonderful,” Elizabeth told Alice. The passage she excerpted, in which Klein observed that “a successful blending of a mother-attitude and a daughter-attitude seems to be one of the conditions for an emotionally rich feminine personality and for the capacity for friendship,” made the “Lib Ladies” and “their talk about actually liking their own sex” seem “pretty shallow,” Elizabeth thought, despite having been “written by a wonderful old woman, and quite some time ago.” But Klein also noted occasions when the past presses “strongly upon the present,” and “early situations of unsatisfied desires” for nurture break through, bringing up “feelings of dissatisfaction and loneliness,” and “we . . . expect the friend to make up for our early deprivations.” Such “excessive unconscious demands lead to disturbances in our friendships, exact repetitions,” Klein wrote. Few knew this better than Elizabeth, after her difficult last years with Lota.

  Alice might feel she had little in common with “the Ageds,” her parents, Elizabeth allowed, but they had not abandoned her, and “you seem to have come through your years so far pretty unscathed.” For Elizabeth—“well, so many things just happened to fail for me.” She did not enumerate: her father’s early death, her mother’s insanity, the orphan childhood spent shuttling between households, boarding school, and summer camp with no sure guardian. But if things had been different, “I’d undoubtedly be a different person, maybe happier and easier to love.” Still, “I’ll do my best,” Elizabeth promised Alice. “I am aware of all this, at least—& really trying, baby.” “Baby” was the way she addressed Alice in letters, and Alice, who called Elizabeth “Darling,” thought the name was sweet. Elizabeth had not typed out for Alice the footnote to the passage from Klein’s book, in which Klein remarked that “the subject of homosexual love relations is a wide and very complicated one,” beyond the scope of the study, and stated simply that “much love can be put into these relationships.” She didn’t have to.

  Elizabeth taught a second and then a third fall semester at Harvard, in 1972, without a serious collapse, living at the Brattle Arms, where she’d installed a ping-pong table for exercise that could double as a dining table for the occasional dinner party. Alice stayed with her many, if not most, nights. Bravely, Elizabeth accepted an offer to return to the University of Washington for one highly paid quarter in the spring of 1973, to raise money for future travels abroad with Alice. They’d cruised in Scandinavia on a Norwegian mail boat the summer before, after Elizabeth’s successful reading of “The Moose.” Now she booked a roomette on the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle.

  Elizabeth had always wanted to see the Rockies rise up from the Great Plains, and the new Amtrak’s Vista Dome car promised dramatic views. She was traveling alone, but Alice would meet her at the end of term to explore the Olympic Peninsula by rental car. As always when they were apart, Elizabeth jotted down her every move in letters to Alice, typing her first one on a portable machine she’d settled on the roomette’s closed toilet lid, an awkward stretch from her single seat by the window. In Chicago, the line for the Renoir show at the entrance to the Art Institute had been too long, so she’d skipped her planned museum visit a
nd ordered the taxi driver straight on to Union Station, where she sat on a bench in the glorious waiting room modeled after Rome’s Baths of Caracalla, reading the New York Times and a lurid tale of a sex-obsessed centenarian dowager by Tennessee Williams in the latest issue of Playboy—“SICK is the only word for it, or maybe DECADENT.” An article on Colorado River trips caught her eye, and she urged Alice to consider joining her on one with motorized rafts; a seventy-six-year-old woman had managed that. Or the twelve-day “rowed trip? I could make it, probably.” With Alice as guide, she’d recently learned to cross-country ski. Why not this?

  But what Elizabeth wanted to tell Alice most of all was about taking off on the first leg of her journey, the flight from Boston to O’Hare, the day before. “Yesterday as we whooshed up above the rain and gloom of Boston into the bright blue sunlight above it,” Elizabeth wrote, “I thought it was exactly what your coming into my life has done for me, Alice—not that fast, maybe, but pretty fast—and the wonderful difference is just the same.”

  As a result of taking Cal’s place at the head of English S—“Writing (Advanced Course) Primarily poetry. Note: For students actively engaged in creative writing”—Elizabeth became the first woman to teach an advanced writing class at Harvard and the first woman poet to have her name published in a course catalogue. It might not have happened without Cal’s intercession for Elizabeth, or any woman, for quite some time. Harvard’s English department simply was not welcoming to female faculty members. The poets May Sarton and John Ciardi had been hired for brief stints in the early 1950s, but only Ciardi was permitted to teach a poetry course or named in the catalogue; Sarton taught freshman composition. No woman had been appointed to the Briggs-Copeland Lectureship held by Ciardi and Sarton since. These were the years when Archibald MacLeish held sway as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, establishing a beachhead for creative writing at the college by claiming English S, initially offered to students “with a professional interest in writers’ problems,” and fostering introductory courses in fiction and poetry, such as Ciardi’s English G.

  When MacLeish retired in 1963, Cal had come on, but his erratic health and reluctance to settle again in Boston stood in the way of the named professorship, which went to poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, the faculty member who welcomed Elizabeth to Harvard in 1970. She had an early taste of the college’s stodgy ways when she learned from department chairman Morton Bloomfield that, although he’d altered the title of the graduate literature seminar she would also teach, from Cal’s Types of Modern Poetry to Subject Matter in Twentieth-Century Poetry, at her request (substance, what actually transpired in a poem, was what she aimed to teach), he would not be able to publish her name in the catalogue this first year. That would require a vote of the Harvard Corporation, which wouldn’t meet until the semester began in September. He resolved the matter by entering “Miss ________” under both her classes, perhaps a nod to the times. By now the Radcliffe students who had access to all of Harvard’s courses had begun to agitate for female professors.

  Not that Elizabeth wanted to be known as the first woman poet to teach creative writing at Harvard, or as a woman poet at all. She’d always been irked when described in reviews or introduced at readings as one of America’s best women poets or “the greatest feminine poet of the decade.” Men and women “do not write differently,” she insisted. But hers was a position increasingly under attack. First May Swenson wrote urging her to give permission for a poem, preferably “In the Waiting Room,” to appear in a new “scholarly and significant” anthology, The Women Poets in English. Hoping to overcome Elizabeth’s resistance, May described the volume, the first such collection to be published since 1825, as “not propagandist or ‘womans lib.’” Still Elizabeth refused, and on “Women’s Lib.” grounds: “Why not Men Poets in English? Don’t you see how silly it is?” She didn’t like to have “things compartmentalized like that”—“I like black & white, yellow & red, young & old, rich and poor, and male & female, all mixed up.” Segregation, whether social or artistic, could only work against women’s acceptance as equal to men. “Literature is literature, no matter who produces it.”

  Then a younger poet, Adrienne Rich, pressed her to contribute to an anthology devoted to American women poets. The occasion was a dinner party with writers in Harvard’s orbit. As a Radcliffe senior in 1951, Adrienne’s first book of poems had been selected by W. H. Auden for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and another book followed four years later. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that Adrienne, who’d married a Harvard economics professor and given birth to three sons in quick succession, turned prolific, finding freer expression in the language of the antiwar and women’s movements she joined after moving to New York City, then leaving her husband, and finally coming out as a lesbian in 1976. To Adrienne’s request, Elizabeth answered no again; she didn’t want to be classified as a “woman poet.”

  Adrienne Rich, photograph by Thomas Victor, 1974

  But privately Elizabeth expressed to Adrienne Rich an urge to follow her path, to write more openly about “the situation of woman.” Along with other vexations of her teaching job—coping with the fragile egos of students who, she noted in her journal, viewed C’s as failing grades, and deliberating over which student to select for the Harvard Monthly Prize (one year she chose a freshman, “an Irish boy who looks like the sun”; another an older married student not even enrolled in the college)—she particularly disliked being seen as a female role model. Speaking to a group of students at Dartmouth College following a reading in the fall of 1973, one year after the Ivy League school went co-ed, she’d been asked by a “militant young lady” whether she felt like a “woman—(of all things!), when I write poetry.” The question seemed to her absurd. But when it came to subject matter, the aspect of contemporary poetry Elizabeth was willing to teach in her graduate seminar, she thought she might “try” to be more “frank,” she wrote to Adrienne after reading Diving into the Wreck, the book that won its author a National Book Award a year later in 1974. (When her book was announced the winner at the awards ceremony, Adrienne read an acceptance speech written jointly with the two other women finalists, Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, “refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women.”)

  Elizabeth and Adrienne had met at parties in New York City and Cambridge as early as 1971, and shortly before Diving into the Wreck was published in 1973, Adrienne gave Elizabeth a ride from New York back to Boston, where Adrienne was living while teaching for a year at Brandeis. The conversation turned confiding. Adrienne had not known, during the 1950s when she’d struggled in her marriage, that Elizabeth, a poet she deeply admired, had a female lover in Brazil. In 1970, Adrienne’s husband had killed himself after she’d left him to explore her sexuality. Now in the whirring car, enveloped by darkness, “we found ourselves talking of the recent suicides in each of our lives,” Adrienne later recalled, “telling ‘how it happened’ as people speak who feel they will be understood.” Absorbed by the conversation, Adrienne missed the exit at Hartford and drove all the way to Springfield, thirty miles ahead, before realizing her mistake and turning east toward Boston.

  Elizabeth’s departure for Seattle soon after, and Adrienne’s move back to New York City at the end of her Brandeis appointment, prevented a friendship from developing. Or perhaps the women had too many differences to remain close. Elizabeth’s decades-long friendship with May Swenson would fade as May, like Adrienne, became more open about her lesbian identity and “militant” in her feminism. But Elizabeth’s instinct to confide continued by letter for several months. First Elizabeth sent Adrienne a postcard of de Chirico’s surreal pair,The Disquieting Muses, apologizing for “having TALKED so much on our drive back” and causing the younger poet to miss the turnoff. She invited Adrienne to a “Brazilian lunch”—feijoada—featuring a traditional stew Elizabeth would serve to a half-dozen friends on her
ping-pong table at 60 Brattle Street the following weekend.