Elizabeth was on her own now and intending to “WORK,” she wrote to Anny Baumann, but she was “desperately unhappy; can’t work, can’t sleep—& can’t eat.” Dr. Baumann’s “idea of being cheerful, ignoring everything, and pretending that nothing is wrong,” typical of the firm-handed physician, wasn’t helping at all—“much too optimistic!” Without Alice, there was no one in whom she could confide. Elizabeth still kept the facts of her private life secret. Though her friends in Boston were anxious about her, “they don’t know the story,” she told Dr. Baumann, “or perhaps do intuitively, I don’t know.” Even in letters to Anny, Elizabeth would not refer to Alice by name, only as “the friend I am so concerned about.” Of course Elizabeth drank. Of course she consumed too many pills in one nearly lethal dose.
Since Lota’s death, thoughts of suicide had rarely been far from Elizabeth’s mind, though her concern was nearly always for the bereaved. Even with an ambiguous death brought on by an “accident of an unconscious-suicide kind, a sudden impulse,” as she’d judged Randall Jarrell’s fatal walk on the highway and possibly Lota’s overdose, Elizabeth knew how feelings of responsibility and guilt inevitably spread to survivors. After John Berryman leapt from a bridge in 1972 and Anne Sexton succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning in her garage in 1974, she’d moaned to Howard Moss, “Oh dear, oh dear—I wish people would stop doing this.” Yet Elizabeth harbored a recurrent desire, she’d once confided in Alice, “to pass quite out of the picture from time to time,” to perform a vanishing act without serious consequences. During the season of her double collapse in Ouro Prêto, she’d welcomed a “stupendous thunderstorm” that descended with biblical force on the town, she’d written to Alice, hoping “I might get struck by lightning—a dramatic demise, don’t you think—& so good for book-sales.” Alice had easily read the desperation in Elizabeth’s fantasy and scolded her: wishing to be struck by lightning was “not ok. . . . Cut that out!”
In the past year, Elizabeth’s attitude toward suicide had shifted as she looked ahead to old age and increasing “decrepitude.” Her longtime friend Lloyd Frankenberg, Loren McIver’s husband, who had been in and out of hospitals for years with a seemingly uncontrollable mania, had died that spring after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. “I think this was a wise decision for him, really,” she’d written to Jimmy Merrill, who knew the couple too. There were times when suicide was the rational, even honorable choice. Elizabeth had translated a poem by her Brazilian friend Manuel Bandeira called “My Last Poem,” in which he envisioned his final opus: it would have “the purity of the flame in which the most limpid diamonds are consumed,” and “the passion of suicides who kill themselves without explanation.” Was Elizabeth ready to leave “One Art” as her last work?
Elizabeth’s brush with death in Florida in mid-January 1976 was not the result of a “decision,” or she would have succeeded. That month, Elizabeth called Frank Bidart to say she was fighting an impulse to throw herself under a passing car. She did not do it. “One Art” was no suicide note. The poem’s concluding lines underscored Elizabeth’s fortitude. On January 13, neighbors discovered Elizabeth passed out on the floor in Louise Crane’s beach house and rushed her to the hospital. Soon Elizabeth was apologizing again for “having behaved so stupidly,” for being “an awful fool,” as she had after so many drunken collapses. She returned to Boston earlier than planned, and pled with Robert Fitzgerald and Dr. Wacker, who’d approved her medical leave, for the chance to teach in the spring after all, though it was too late.
In the months after Lota’s death, Cal had written to Mary McCarthy of Elizabeth’s “ox-like power of character and imagination which nothing can break”; Elizabeth herself had told Alice in the early months of their love affair that she need never worry about her, she was “made of iron.” Elizabeth wasn’t that strong anymore; her recurrent dysentery or some unnamed ailment lingered. But she had plans—to write a “more cheerful poem,” as she told Anny Baumann. Elizabeth’s bleak December “Postscript” to her will mentioned her “modest” expectations for a new book, Geography III. She’d like to see it in print.
And Elizabeth didn’t want to lose Alice. Although it had once seemed an unbearable prospect, they could still be friends. Elizabeth would manage as long as “you’ll talk to me,” she wrote to Alice from Florida while recovering from her collapse. “I DO want you to be free, darling—that wouldn’t ever make me stop loving you.” And: “You can always have me back if ever you should want me . . . truly.”
No one could say what changed Alice’s mind. It wasn’t Elizabeth’s near suicide. As late as the end of February, Elizabeth was still weepy, writing to Robert Fitzgerald that she’d cried over his memoir in the New Yorker. Robert’s fond recollection of his father, a sometime alcoholic who’d died in Robert’s adolescence, struck a chord. Elizabeth’s own father’s terminal illness might have been aggravated by drink. Now here she was, ruining her life the same way, and with no child—no “Baby”—to forgive her.
Lloyd Schwartz heard later that Elizabeth “promised everything” to Alice—no more drinking. Perhaps Alice never really wanted to marry, only to escape the wearying cycle of Elizabeth’s binge drinking, and to please the “Ancients,” her parents. In early March, at the end of a week’s stay in New York for the premiere of Elliott Carter’s song cycle A Mirror on Which to Dwell, with six of her poems as lyrics, and to see an infectious disease specialist, Elizabeth sprained her ankle badly on the sidewalk. Alice met her at the airport in Boston, drove her to Stillman Infirmary for x-rays, and brought her home. Alice would not marry. They were together again.
By late spring they’d made a plan to travel to Europe that summer—Alice with her parents on a family vacation, Elizabeth to visit Cal in England—and then meet in Lisbon afterward to tour Portugal by rental car. Elizabeth had won a $10,000 prize—the Neustadt International Prize for Literature—a first for a woman or an American, and she could afford the trip. “I like being with you more than anyone else in the whole world,” Alice wrote Elizabeth in early June from a Norwegian cruise ship packed with senior citizens. She wondered if she liked being with her parents “least—it’s close.”
Elizabeth’s reunion with Alice and other boons of 1976—the Neustadt Prize, her European trip, the upcoming publication of Geography III, and a “very smart” Advanced Verse Writing class in the fall, the last she was scheduled to teach—almost compensated for the imminent termination of her Harvard contract at the end of the spring 1977 semester. After six years in the job, Elizabeth no longer thought of herself as “a scared elderly amateur ‘professor,’” as she had during her first term in Cambridge. No longer did she wake in the night with dreams like the one she’d reported to Alice, in which she’d ordered her students to go spend an hour in the Harvard Square Woolworth’s, then come back to write about the items they’d seen. Their poems “lacked ‘reality,’” she’d railed at them.
In the classroom during waking hours, Elizabeth addressed her students by surname—Miss Agoos, Mr. Sorensen—and tried to be tactful, believing that “the more polite the teacher, the more polite the students.” Teaching writing, a phrase she placed in quotation marks, still seemed a dubious enterprise. “Group reading, group discussion, all this going over and over and over, usually strikes me as a wasteful form of time-passing or therapy, with little or no connection to writing,” she’d groused in a teaching evaluation for a faculty member under review at MIT in December 1976. But she admitted that “some students do learn a lot in writing classes and . . . their writing does improve.” The class she observed met her standards for decorum: “no one seemed aggressive or rude and no one’s feelings seemed to get hurt.” She hoped the MIT students, all male, might in the end “produce better-written scientific papers, or letters to their wives, or read a few good books a year, or at least feel respect for people who chose to spend their lives writing prose or poetry rather than working at more ‘practical’ things.”
This year in Eliza
beth’s Harvard class there were “two really witty boys” for whom she held out hope, and she’d maintained friendships with other promising students, mostly young men—Jonathan Galassi; the angelic Irish boy, Mark O’Donnell; and her favorite, John Peech, a graduate student in physics whose poems she pressed on Howard Moss at the New Yorker with some success. Why, Elizabeth wondered in a letter to Alice, had she been “scared to death of ‘boys’ when I was at the age I should have been wild about them—was afraid to talk to them, etc—and suffered hells,” and now, “forty years too late,” she found herself perfectly at ease. In January she invited the class to Lewis Wharf for a first-ever semester’s end party, along with the older young men who were her close friends—Frank Bidart, Lloyd Schwartz, and the Brazilian poet Ricardo Sternberg, a junior member of Harvard’s elite Society of Fellows.
The day after the party, she flew to New York on the 3 p.m. shuttle for the National Book Critics Circle Awards reception in the Time-Life Building’s auditorium, then caught an 8 p.m. flight home. Elizabeth had won the prize in poetry for Geography III. It was the first time she’d accepted a book award in person. The slender volume was made up of the nine extraordinary poems of the past decade, among them “In the Waiting Room,” “Poem,” “The Moose,” “Crusoe in England,” “Five Flights Up,” “The End of March,” and “One Art.” As May Swenson had written after reading “Questions of Travel” in the New Yorker, “Those are bulls’ eyes only E.B. can hit.” Maybe now she’d have a chance at an extension on her Harvard contract.
But it was not to be. Not even Robert Fitzgerald could successfully appeal Dean Henry Rosovsky’s decree that, since “Miss Elizabeth Bishop will pass her 66th birthday during the academic year 1976–77 . . . no further appointment should be recommended.” Elizabeth had been a diffident teacher of “creative writing,” another phrase she despised, along with the trendy term “creativity,” and her literature seminars attracted only a handful of students each year. Many were scared off by her requirement to memorize poetry each week and unimpressed by her attention to the surface action—the “subject matter”—of the poems discussed in class. She refused to teach the poetry of John Ashbery, whose Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976, saying she couldn’t understand him. This was the “age of poet-teachers,” Cal had once said, but Elizabeth wasn’t one of them. Her poetic gift had come to her early in a time of need, and she had nurtured it, as it had nurtured her, not in the classroom but in solitude—in libraries and apartments in New York City, in rented rooms and a white house in Key West, in an estudio in Brazil, and now in a “new home, alone, and on the ocean,” as Cal described her Lewis Wharf apartment. How could she advise students to do otherwise?
Elizabeth’s portrait by Thomas Victor, in Preferences, 1974
Cal was younger—just sixty that spring of 1977. Retirement wouldn’t catch up to him for another six years, and he’d “looked awfully well—younger even,” when she visited him at Milgate House outside London the past summer, although it was his breakdown two months later that had given Elizabeth her verse-writing class. She never taught a workshop the same semester as Cal, not wishing to compete for the top students or spread thin the ranks of the talented. But they compared rosters, and inevitably “a lot of your ex-es” found their way into her courses, Elizabeth told Cal. The creative writing students at Harvard were a self-selecting and sometimes cliquish bunch, accustomed to anointing each other with membership in the college’s literary societies—the Signet and the Advocate’s staff. It paid to follow Cal’s lead, she’d learned at the start of her first semester in 1970 when James Atlas came to see her at Kirkland House with his girlfriend, Peggy Rizza, pleading her case after Elizabeth failed to admit her to the class when she’d been accepted to Cal’s twice before. Peggy “looked tragic,” Elizabeth relented, and the girl held her own with what Cal had judged “quite sensitive, low-keyed poems” in a group that included Atlas, R. D. Rosen, Jonathan Galassi, and Ezra Pound’s grandson, Siegfried Walter “Sizzo” de Rachewiltz. Still, Elizabeth had been annoyed to discover, when students moved from her class to Cal’s, that “my best pupils are now handing in their poems—the ones I know by heart, almost—all over again, to him.” She didn’t fault Cal for this, rather the students, who seemed to “think if they can only manage to take the course enough times, some poet is going to like the poems.”
Cal’s health had deteriorated by the time he reached Cambridge to teach in the spring, making up for the fall semester he’d forfeited because of a late-summer breakdown. He’d arrived without Caroline, who’d proved nearly as psychologically unstable and prone to drink as he. Alcohol combined with mania to make Cal delusional; Caroline turned hostile, vituperative. In the fall they’d attempted to live and write together in the Cambridge house they’d rented for what was meant to be Cal’s teaching semester, bringing five-year-old Sheridan and Caroline’s daughters along, but tensions ran so high Cal soon moved out to Frank Bidart’s apartment. Caroline had taken the children back to England in December. Cal still loved his “dolphin,” he told Lizzie, with whom he was back on speaking terms, and wanted the marriage to work, but the strain had been enormous. He missed his first classes of the semester, hospitalized for congestive heart failure.
Cal recovered, after doctors drained the fluid from his lungs that his heart, weakened by a mild heart attack the previous fall, could no longer pump efficiently. Elizabeth cooked him a birthday dinner—“LAMB,” she recorded in her datebook—on March 1, and they shared other meals through the spring as Elizabeth finished out her year, teaching a prose-writing class as well as her customary seminar, Subject Matter in Twentieth-Century Poetry. Often when they met, “it seemed as if almost thirty years had rolled back,” as Cal had written after the summer’s visit at Milgate House. The two poets, shy about “talking emotionally,” experienced a “lonely warmth,” Cal thought, as on the day in Stonington so many years ago: “no need to stop talking, and always when the talk stops it starts.” But Elizabeth’s own failing health kept her from visiting Cal’s class that spring to give a reading, as she had two years before when an imbalance of lithium made Cal’s attendance erratic, bringing both Frank Bidart and Elizabeth to his aid. Five days after the lamb dinner, Elizabeth had vomited in a way that “hurt,” and by the end of term in May, she was under observation in Phillips House, the private-care wing at Massachusetts General Hospital where Cal had been treated in February. She remembered convalescing there after her appendectomy at age twelve, sponsored by her wealthy Bishop grandfather and under the watchful care of Aunt Grace Bulmer, who’d risen to become superintendent of the Phillips House nursing staff before returning to Nova Scotia to marry.
The previous summer Elizabeth had spent twelve days in Cambridge Hospital after an attack of asthma on the flight home from Lisbon left her gasping for breath and unable to walk. Frank, who’d met Elizabeth and Alice at Logan Airport, was sure she was dying in her wheelchair. But Elizabeth, who knew that particular menace intimately, had been certain she’d survive. This was different. Doctors discovered a hiatal hernia, the cause of the ongoing discomfort she’d taken for dysentery or some lingering tropical disease. The disturbance in her lower esophagus had gone undiagnosed for so long that she’d become severely anemic; the hernia had begun to bleed. Transfusions helped restore the balance of red blood cells, and iron pills were prescribed in high doses.
On Mother’s Day, Alice, Lloyd, and Frank (for whom she’d once confessed “motherly” feelings to Cal) visited her room overlooking the Charles. The next day a freak snowstorm blanketed New England, but the following Sunday she’d been permitted an afternoon with Alice at Mount Auburn Cemetery—“trees & lilacs wonderful.” They’d hunted unsuccessfully for the graves of Henry, William, and Alice James in the family plot at Cambridge Cemetery across the road. Two days later she was “allowed OUT!” and by June Elizabeth was taking in a screening of Star Wars and preparing for the annual North Haven vacation, expanded to two
months this year.
Cal was in Maine that summer too, staying with Lizzie and Harriet, taking refuge from the new life he’d chosen. “I think on clear days you can see Castine from the northern shore” of North Haven, he’d written to Elizabeth, though they did not visit each other. She’d been working on a poem called “Santarém,” after the village where the Amazon and the Tapajós Rivers flow together, “grandly, silently.” She remembered the place vividly from her first Brazilian river trip almost twenty years before: “That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther.” Lingering in the town of “stubby palms, flamboyants like pans of embers,” and one-story “blue or yellow” stucco houses, and wading through streets “deep in dark-gold river sand / damp from the ritual afternoon rain,” she’d heard about a thunderstorm the week before. Lightning struck the cathedral tower, leaving “a widening zig zag crack all the way down.” The priest’s house next door had been hit too, his brass bed “galvanized black.” By a “miracle”—“Graças a deus—he’d been in Belém.”
As Elizabeth worked over the poem in early September and prepared for a verse-writing course she’d agreed to teach that fall at New York University, she learned the dreadful news. Cal had flown to Ireland, where Caroline had bought an apartment in a grand country house outside Dublin, for a ten-day visit during which he’d hoped to settle matters between them, only to have Caroline depart in a rage. Returning to the United States, Cal succumbed to a heart attack in the back seat of the cab carrying him to Lizzie’s Manhattan apartment. “When you are dying, and your faith is sick,” Cal had quoted one of Lizzie’s accusatory letters in The Dolphin, “you will look for the love you fumbled.”
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