Often Elizabeth fought the feeling that it might be “too late,” as she wrote of her desire to master the Peterson Field Guides to birds and wildflowers, and another volume on beach pebbles she’d brought with her to Maine. “I want now—now that it’s too late—to learn the name of everything.” She satisfied herself that summer of 1974 with identifying every flower she could see growing in the meadow within several feet of her front porch: yellow goat’s-beard, lesser stitchwort, Queen Anne’s lace, white clover, ox-eye daisy, red clover, rabbit’s-foot clover, lobelia, blue-eyed grass, wild radish, creeping bellflower, wild lupine, mullein, purslane, chicory, common morning glory, beach pea, white rosa rugosa, rosa rugosa, fragrant bedstraw, cow or tufted vetch, common Saint John’s wort, eyebright, lesser pyrola.
Still suffering insomnia, Elizabeth found herself waking at dawn while her young lover, a heavy sleeper, and their two friends slept on. Frank often couldn’t be roused until past noon. Elizabeth made notes for a poem, “Late Sleepers”: “Dreams they’ll never need or use. . . . But they are busy, busy their eyelids move // They are at work, these dreamers—. . . sorting, discarding.”
The dreams are working, working—
discarding love
She’d had a premonition, or was it only her inclination to borrow trouble? Alice started graduate school; her mind was filled with numbers, tax laws—she said she liked the work. At Christmas, Elizabeth and Alice took their holiday together, visiting the once-gamine, now—appallingly, to Elizabeth—overweight Louise Crane at her seaside estate in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. There was no collapse. Instead, with Alice, there had been a “sailing trip—3 days, 2 nights—Saw the white pelicans,” Elizabeth recorded in her journal. They made plans to come back next year. Only Elizabeth returned.
Elizabeth had first brought up the subject of her will with Alice in the late spring of 1971, writing from São Lucas Hospital in Belo Horizonte where she was recuperating from dysentery that had been diagnosed, erroneously she would learn, as typhoid fever. Her love for Alice was new; they hadn’t yet made their first trip together, to the Galápagos. Nevertheless Elizabeth asked: would Alice agree to be “one of the trustees . . . (or whatever it is)”? Alice consented, “on the condition that you not die for a long, long time.” The prospect of going on without Elizabeth in her life was “so scary & awful I refuse to consider it further.” Even at a distance, Elizabeth was powerfully alive to Alice. A year later, when Elizabeth was in Ouro Prêto for what would be her last extended stay, Alice wrote with the direct but demure passion they both indulged in their letters, “Could I be suffering from a bad case of LUST? Likely . . . My body wants yours!”
Before leaving for Seattle in the spring of 1973, Elizabeth named Alice in her will as sole beneficiary of all but her library, which would go to Frank Bidart. The bequest, including future royalties on Elizabeth’s books, Casa Mariana and the Lewis Wharf condominium, and the Bishop trust that had provided Elizabeth a small but steady income for so long, took Alice by surprise. “Just knowing you is enough of a legacy for me,” she wrote to Elizabeth finally. “I love you and admire you and enjoy you and have learned from you—that is enough.” The night she wrote, Alice had been watching The Waltons, the “syrupy” family drama, on television and she’d had a good cry: “Goodness knows what the future will bring.” Having Elizabeth’s love meant so much more than real estate or money, which Alice, an idealistic thirty-year-old, promised to donate to a cause Elizabeth would approve if she didn’t “really” need it. And “you know I will always care and do what I think you will want done.” Elizabeth had appointed Alice literary executor along with Frank, giving Alice the final word in case of dispute. “So, thank you, Darling, for your confidence in me,” Alice wrote. “I will try with all my might to live up to it.”
But that was nearly two years ago. Turning thirty-two in the spring of 1975, after five years together, Alice still loved Elizabeth “best” and “For Always.” Yet Elizabeth was drinking to the point of collapse even with Alice nearby. Her apologies and vows to reform, passionately expressed, had become predictable and unconvincing, almost worse than not saying she was sorry: “Please forgive me for being such a mess sometimes, Alice,” “I wish I had as much self-discipline as you have,” “I am going to try to respect myself a little more, honestly,” “I am sorrry—terribly sorry.” The “excessive unconscious demands” Elizabeth had warned Alice against by quoting Melanie Klein were breaking through beyond Elizabeth’s control and overwhelming Alice.
In July 1975, Elizabeth returned for a second summer on North Haven, while Alice stayed behind in Cambridge to attend summer classes, visiting on weekends. An old friend from Walnut Hill School, Rhoda Wheeler, divorced and living with her children on family property in Rhode Island, drove Elizabeth to Maine, but after Rhoda left, Elizabeth felt helpless with no car or driver. When Alice arrived, she brought guests, and the two were rarely alone. Elizabeth rationed her remaining green pills, the Dexamyl that her doctors were increasingly reluctant to prescribe. She was tired and fell asleep in the evening. She attempted a poem:
—To have no personal moods at all, to have
only the same moods that the weather has
here on North Haven Island—that would be
the (perfect) temperament, for the rest of life the rest of life)
Her journal entries were sparse. She added to the list of wildflowers in the front meadow: common evening primrose, bladder campion, harebell. But when she sat on the front porch her eyes were fixed on the line of fir trees “between us & the water” that her landlady “hates so” for obstructing the view. Elizabeth studied them: “the last reality, looking out to the bay—which is quite unreal. Vaporous, dream-like—an unknown. Only the fir trees are real—& alive, too—in the strong winds we’ve been having—moving, rushing, sometimes trying to get away—next to, against the sudden change to an atmospheric, imaginary world —” What was fixed, permanent, real—and what was not? Even the trees, the last reality, seemed poised for escape.
Before she left for North Haven, Elizabeth had written down further instructions to Alice about her will. “Frank gets the books. . . . But you take out whatever you want first . . . & a book or two to Lloyd.” Alice was free to “sell all my papers—if you can!” Something impelled her to write out the half page in longhand of hardly necessary advice: “Keep Loren’s paintings if you want them”—Loren MacIver’s portrait of Elizabeth, and those Lota had collected—“Or sell,” signing her full name, Elizabeth Bishop.
Three months later, on October 8, Elizabeth typed two long pages, another addendum to her will, addressed to “Dearest Alice.” Now there was need. The two women had separated. Alice had someone else, a man named Peter.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Elizabeth told Alice. “I’m not expecting to die today or even tomorrow—right now I’m planning no drastic changes in my life at all.” Yet the letter must have weighed heavily on Alice as she attempted to make a break the only way she knew how, the only way Elizabeth would accept as final. “Forgive me,” Elizabeth wrote. “Love me if you can and remember me as kindly as you can.”
Elizabeth wanted Alice to know that she would remain her sole beneficiary. “This holds good no matter where you are or what you are doing, etc.—married or single, etc., at the time I die.” Did Alice hear in these words the echo of a poem Elizabeth had written long ago and dedicated to Louise Crane, “Letter to N.Y.,” after the first painful rejection Elizabeth had suffered, the one she sometimes said had inured her to all others?
In your next letter I wish you’d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you’re pursuing . . .
“I want you to be happy and good and loved,” she wrote to Alice now, feigning good cheer. Happiness was mostly “a matter of luck,” Elizabeth thought, “even with a happy disposition like yours.” Elizabeth herself had been prone to “bad luck
—but it couldn’t be helped, really.” And “until quite recently I think I’ve managed to cope with disasters, etc. fairly well.”
Elizabeth turned to Alice now as “the only ‘family’ I have and like these days.” She’d neglected to specify in her will the wish to be cremated, then buried with “no services at all, please” in the “cheapest kind of pine box” next to her parents in Worcester’s Hope Cemetery. It would fall to Alice, as well, to administer the twenty Nembutal that Elizabeth planned to store away in the event of an incapacitating accident, stroke, or terminal cancer. Elizabeth wasn’t feeling well, “at least I never seem to feel the way I know I shd. & used to.” Perhaps something was seriously wrong. She was sixty-four; neither of her parents and few of her aunts or uncles had lived so long. Alice must please “let me—or if necessary—help me, die.” Or let Dr. Baumann “pull the plug”—“I’m serious about this—practical, I hope, not morbid.” As for a good “cause,” if Alice wanted to give away some of her inheritance, Elizabeth asked her to consider the Charles Darwin Research Center in the Galápagos Islands, where Alice and Elizabeth had swum from a beach populated by flamingos and Elizabeth had been the first to spot a tiny, “ruby-like” vermilion flycatcher—“my one triumph”—on their trip four years earlier.
The will gave Elizabeth an excuse to write to Alice, who urged Elizabeth to become less “attached.” Perhaps Elizabeth also hoped the letter—a dignified, legalistic pleading—could change Alice’s mind. It didn’t.
The week before Elizabeth wrote her letter, perhaps before Alice delivered her awful news, Elizabeth had sketched a “self-portrait” for a collector who was gathering hand-drawn images from eminent poets, among them her friends—Jimmy Merrill, May Swenson, Howard Moss—and new acquaintances, Octavio Paz, Richard Howard, John Ashbery. Though she had skill as an artist, Elizabeth chose not to sketch her face but instead to trace the outline of her left hand. The fingers were crooked and swollen, and she’d signed the sketch, “With best wishes, rheumatically, Elizabeth Bishop.” But on her ring finger she’d whimsically drawn an enormous sparkling diamond, labeling it “imaginary”; on her fifth finger she’d outlined a heavy ring of woven metal.
Was the “real” ring the gold one Lota had given her to mark their commitment to each other in 1951, the one she still often wore? Or another, a gift from Alice? Elizabeth had selected a moss agate for Alice at a gem shop in Ouro Prêto during their second summer apart, to be set in a ring with small diamonds on either side. Alice might have reciprocated with a ring of her own. In Elizabeth’s self-portrait, the large diamond was fantastical, both in its size and in its presence, marking an engagement she’d never had or wanted. After October 8, the woven metal ring was no more real than the diamond—whether it marked a lost attachment to Lota or to Alice.
Elizabeth’s self-portrait, October 2, 1975, from the self-portrait collection of Burt Britton
“I wish I’d been able to write more and better poems these last few years,” Elizabeth mourned in her October 8 letter to Alice. “And poems for you. Well, who knows, something may come along. . . .” And something did. “One Art” began with a prosy first draft titled “How to Lose Things”: “One might begin by losing one’s reading glasses / oh 2 or 3 times a day—or one’s favorite pen.” The list lengthened and gathered mass with lost houses, an island and a peninsula, an entire continent, until reaching a plaintive coda—
One might think this would have prepared me
for losing one average-sized not exceptionally
beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person
(except for blue eyes)
But it doesn’t seem to have, at all . . .
Here was the poem for Alice, now that it was too late.
In the second of seventeen drafts Elizabeth turned out rapidly during the month of October, the poem took shape as a villanelle—Elizabeth’s “one and only,” she later said—with its first stanza nearly finished:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master:
so many things seem to be meant
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
The first line remained the same in each successive draft, and it was repeated almost exactly at regular intervals through six stanzas, following the villanelle form, in the final version she mailed to Howard Moss at the end of the month. It was the third line, also required by the form to repeat, that Elizabeth varied, just as the disasters in her life had varied. Some were insignificant, like the minor mishaps Brazilians called desastres. She listed lost door keys, misspent hours, forgotten travel plans: “None of these will bring disaster.” Then, as in her first draft, the stakes escalated, “losing farther, losing faster,” and the losses mounted: my mother’s watch, three loved houses, two cities, two rivers, a continent. “I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.”
As late as draft eleven, the loss of Alice still registered in the poem’s concluding stanza as the one misfortune Elizabeth could not withstand: “My losses haven’t been too hard to master / with this exception (Say it!) this disaster.” Or, in an alternate version of the same draft:
I wrote a lot of lies. It’s evident
the art of losing isn’t hard to master
with one exception. (Write it!) Write “disaster.”
But, though she later described “One Art” as “pure emotion,” Elizabeth guarded her feelings in the final version’s last stanza, pretending bravery. And she merged the two great disasters of her adult life, leaving out Alice’s blue eyes and selecting physical characteristics she’d loved in both Alice and Lota:
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
By draft fifteen, the poem had acquired its title, “One Art.” Elizabeth had been practicing the art of losing since infancy; art had become her one means of mastery. “One Art” was the elegy she had wanted for so long to write.
“Upsetting and sad” as the poem was, Howard Moss wrote in early November 1975 accepting “One Art” for publication, Elizabeth had established “just the right amount of distance.” Yet once it was finished, Elizabeth had nothing left to defend against her loss, no way of maintaining that distance. She sent the poem in typescript to friends, but their reactions—“it makes everyone weep, so I think it must be rather good,” she wrote to Katharine White—weren’t enough. And by December she’d received another “blow.” Alice planned to marry Peter.
Alice drove Elizabeth to the airport in a snowstorm on December 21, letting her go alone to Fort Myers Beach, where Louise Crane, who was vacationing elsewhere this year, had offered her guesthouse to Elizabeth as a warm-weather refuge. Alice may have offered to drive Elizabeth after receiving yet another “Postscript” to Elizabeth’s will, dated December 18. Or she might have returned to the Brattle Arms to find Elizabeth’s letter waiting for her there. Something caused Alice to initiate phone contact with Elizabeth, calling to check on her three times during the first week of Elizabeth’s planned monthlong vacation.
The brief letter was alarming. Elizabeth’s pretext was forwarding a packet of information on the Galápagos foundation, but she returned to the grim instructions of her longer letter of October 8: “Since I’ll be taking my ten or eleven sleeping pills with me—I can’t give you a supply for the emergencies referred to. However, I still count on you always to do the humane and sensible thing by me, somehow.” And: “One morbid afterthought—if I shd. happen to die in Florida—not that I expect to,” Alice should have her cremated there and the ashes sent to Worcester. Finally: “Please love me and try to forgive me. I have loved you—and love you now—more than anything in the world.”
At first it was easier to be “away from it all,” as she wrote Anny Baumann from Florida, and for ten days she had the company of Rhoda Wheeler, “a good sailor,” who’d flown down in hopes of a three-day cruise like las
t year’s with Alice. But the weather was “too cold and windy,” and they managed only an afternoon’s sail. Elizabeth mailed a Christmas card on December 24 to Robert Fitzgerald, who’d helped arrange a medical leave when Elizabeth realized she couldn’t face teaching in the spring: “It’s cold for here, but sunny. Best wishes & love to you and Penny & many thanks.” Two weeks later, she sent Robert a postcard; Elizabeth had been relieved to learn that Cal, too, had obtained a semester’s leave after suffering “another really bad breakdown.” The postcard, purchased at a wildlife sanctuary she’d visited with Rhoda, pictured a stuffed and mounted red-tailed hawk: the “handsome” birds were frequently killed as “chicken hawks,” the caption read. “Help conserve them.” The swamplands were “beautiful,” Elizabeth reported to Robert, “it’s been lonely since.”
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