Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  flying wherever

  it feels like, gay!

  Certainly defiance in form supported defiance in “subject matter.” But what convention was Elizabeth defying?

  In 1973 Elizabeth had told Adrienne Rich that she hoped to write something more “frank” about the situation of women, but she had hardly done so. Feminist as she was, marking advances toward the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in her journal, wearing her “Woms. Lib.” button to a “Sapphic” tea at Lilli’s in Ouro Prêto, railing against Norman Mailer’s misogynist American Dream as “really a sick book” in a letter to Alice, Elizabeth had not joined any crusade. As in her response to May Swenson’s plea to contribute a poem to the women’s verse anthology—“I like black & white, yellow & red, young & old, rich and poor, and male & female, all mixed up”—Elizabeth was an integrationist, a position falling out of fashion in the 1970s with the emergence of Black Power, Gay Pride, and lesbian separatism. The sentiment found its way into the opening stanza of “Santarém,” the poem on “the conflux of two great rivers”:

  . . . Even if one were tempted

  to literary interpretations

  such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female

  —such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off

  in that watery, dazzling dialectic.

  “Sonnet,” too, aimed to “resolve, dissolve” arbitrary and constricting divisions. The creature “caught” in the opening line—divided, wobbling, wavering—is later “freed” to fly wherever it pleases: a “rainbow-bird” of all colors, perhaps all genders—“gay.” But was that what Elizabeth meant by “gay”?

  In the previous decade, following the bloody Stonewall riots of 1969 on the streets outside a bar that had been a meeting place for lesbians when Elizabeth first lived in Greenwich Village, there had been a rapid shift toward public acceptance of homosexuality, along with the rise to prominence of the term “gay,” embraced as a positive identity label by both male and female homosexuals. Through the early 1970s, half of American states acted to repeal anti-sodomy laws; the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its manual of mental disorders. In 1975, the U.S. Civil Service ended its ban on employing homosexuals. In 1978, the rainbow flag was designed and flown by San Francisco Gay Pride activists. Would Elizabeth have known, as she wrote “Sonnet” that same year?

  On October 11, 1978, the day before Howard Moss wrote a “delighted” letter accepting “Sonnet” for publication, Elizabeth recorded a frightening incident in her daily diary. She and Alice had been eating dinner at Francesca’s, a favorite North End restaurant, when their meal was disturbed by “a gay drunken party behind me—2 men, 1 woman.” The noisy trio got up to leave, but “one man (tall, good-looking) rushed—well, 2 or 3 ft.—toward A[lice] (facing me) & shouted: ‘You’re a good-looking son of a bitch! ’” This man—not “gay” in the new sense of the word—had caught on to Alice’s boyish charm, what others sometimes referred to in Alice as “butch,” and he was making just the sort of public scene Elizabeth had always hoped to avoid.

  When the couple first visited New York City together, they’d stayed at the elegant Hotel Elysée, whose rooms were stocked with stationery and blue pens bearing the motto “Where Courtesy Prevails.” After that, they’d visited only friendly households, and they’d established separate residences. In Brazil, Elizabeth had lived openly with Lota, but her life in America had to be different. Elizabeth believed her job and reputation were on the line. There were closeted gay men on Harvard’s English department faculty, but there had been scandals as nearby as Smith College and as recent as 1960, when a popular English professor, Newton Arvin, was forced into retirement after police raided his Northampton apartment and arrested him for possession of homosexual pornography. “Closets, closets, and more closets” was what she told the openly gay poet Richard Howard she wanted in her new Lewis Wharf apartment, knowing he’d get the double meaning. Ironically, increased public awareness of the gay “life-style” (a coinage Elizabeth despised) meant an increased likelihood of confrontations such as the one at Francesca’s. In years past, Alice and Elizabeth would have been just two women out to dinner. Now, much as Elizabeth wished otherwise, they appeared to be a gay couple asserting their rights in public.

  Elizabeth told Lloyd Schwartz, whose questions about her poetry she’d come to welcome during the writing of his dissertation, that with “Sonnet” she had wanted to “restore” the word “gay” to its “original” meaning. The lighthearted little monosyllable had been unfairly pressed into service for a cause. The word itself could have been the “rainbow-bird” Elizabeth wished to set free. Gay liberation was developing its own orthodoxy, appropriating words like “gay” and “rainbow,” the very tools of her trade. “Rainbow” had been a favorite image of Elizabeth’s since “The Fish,” carried forward in a vision of refracted brilliance in “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto,” in the “multi-colored” stones illuminated by the “lion sun” in “The End of March,” and still evident in her writing notebook during her last summer on North Haven. As Alice swam naked at “3rd Beach,” Elizabeth was dazzled by the heaps of broken mussel shells shimmering “just under water showing iridescent streaks, green & blue.” That summer, too, she’d felt “a bit sad” on an August day, recollecting how “much more gay—‘youthful’” the colors of Sabine Farm’s wildflowers had been in late June and July than the “almost autumnal” hues of Queen Anne’s lace, loosestrife, fireweed, and steeplebush then in bloom.

  Another phrase Elizabeth defended, this time in a letter to Lloyd Schwartz, was “making love.” Elizabeth scolded him for the use of the trendy “to have sex” in one of his own poems: “it may be what everyone says at present, but it always offends me. . . . If it isn’t ‘making love’—what other way can it be put?” The newly popular phrase, which she remembered hearing decades before from the fan dancer Sally Rand, in reference to her pet snake’s mating habits, “seems like such an ugly, generalized sort of expression for something—love, lust, or what have you—always unique, and so much more complex than ‘having sex.’” Elizabeth’s closeted romantic life had never prevented her from full experience of that “much more complex” passion. She’d written about it too, though privately, as in this untitled poem, shared with close friends in Brazil, one of whom read the verses aloud to a young documentary filmmaker in Ouro Prêto in 1987:

  Close close all night

  the lovers keep.

  They turn together

  in their sleep,

  close as two pages

  in a book

  that read each other

  in the dark.

  Each knows all

  the other knows,

  learned by heart

  from head to toes.

  Elizabeth had kept back the most explicit quatrain, which survived, nevertheless, in a notebook:

  Once in the night

  the lovers turned over

  tightly, together,

  under the cover,

  Elizabeth Bishop wrote love poems, and poems about lovemaking, and one of the best poems ever written in English about the loss of love, but she had made her way through life as an orphan, a solitary. Reticence wasn’t the reason she’d become a poet of the self—of a singular “mind in action,” as she’d once described the effect she hoped to achieve in her poems. She had discovered early on, perhaps too early, that she was “an I . . . an Elizabeth”—and she’d treasured that painful, “unlikely” self-awareness ever since, knowing it was the same thing as her imagination.

  As an ambitious but still fanciful sixteen-year-old at Walnut Hill School, Elizabeth had written a poem in which she imagined she heard an elf “go whistling by,” whose “singing echoed through and through” and “split the sky in two”—

  The halves fell either side of me,

  And I stood straight, bright with moon-rings.

  As she wrote “Sonnet” a half century later, Elizabeth could no longe
r look ahead to a vibrant future, standing tall, with songs echoing through her, splitting the sky. The writer’s life—her life—had turned out to be so much more difficult. Often she had felt “caught,” like the spirit-level’s bubble, or internally “divided”—painfully “undecided.” At the end of a long letter she’d written to her first biographer, one of a dozen letters summarizing her family history, education, and development as a poet, Elizabeth had apologized: “This is just the sketchiest of armatures, really, leaving out so many friends, people, places, events—false beginnings, retreats, mistakes, and so on.” She knew how important the “left out” could be—the townspeople gathered by the fountain in Ouro Prêto, the aspiring shaman on the Amazon, the squatter’s children in Rio, the proprietors of a roadside filling station, the moose or armadillo that crossed her path and caught her attention. These made her poems, which would not have come into being without her own false starts, retreats, and mistakes.

  Even if her writing had not shaken the world, or so far claimed a wide readership, writing had always saved her. “What one seems to want in art,” she’d also told her biographer, “is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (In this sense it is always ‘escape,’ don’t you think?)” Characteristically, she had rendered her most important statement as a parenthetical aside, followed by a question. But she knew the answer. Poetry had been her refuge, her escape—had “freed” her. Elizabeth was the rainbow-bird, as she had been the sandpiper, only now it was time to stop “looking for something, something, something” and run away to wherever she felt like. She too was gone.

  Envoy

  January 23, 2014

  PATOU THAI, BELMONT CENTER

  I didn’t see Elizabeth Bishop on North Haven in the summer of 1977, although our host’s boyfriend, who’d taken one of Miss Bishop’s classes several years before me, had heard she was renting on the island and fantasized about running into her at the general store, picnicking at Mullin’s Beach, or in line at the ferry. I hoped we wouldn’t. I’d tossed out my notes for the poetry classes I’d taken my last year at Harvard, and nearly all the poems as well. I was still ashamed of what I’d done, or what Miss Bishop thought I’d done. I was twenty-three years old, and it was hard to know the difference between what others thought of me and what I knew to be true.

  I saved the poem I now called “Birthdays,” the one with the line Frank Bidart had praised, about capturing the spawning grunion at high tide on the night of my twenty-first birthday, and sent it to the New Yorker, receiving an answer by return mail. The magazine’s “poetry department” was closed for the summer. I fared better with the Atlantic Monthly. “The manuscript we are returning to you is one in which we have taken a special interest,” the editors’ form letter told me; “we are grateful for the chance to consider your work, and hope you will try us again.”

  Soon after, I found myself in the position of issuing those same form letters, which I learned to code as R, signifying “rather enjoyed reading,” instead of the more usual D, meaning simply “dump.” That fall, the Atlantic had a sudden need for a “first reader” of short fiction and poetry submissions, and Robert Fitzgerald put in a good word for me with the poetry editor, Peter Davison, who may have read my “Birthdays” poem. Once a week I borrowed my boyfriend’s car and drove to the magazine’s offices in a lofty brownstone on Arlington Street facing Boston’s Public Garden, picked up a cardboard carton filled with envelopes of all sizes, and returned with them a week later, having made my decisions. Poems that I rated R were read by Peter Davison for serious consideration, the others were returned with the D form letter, which I never got to read.

  The short fiction submissions were all considered “over the transom,” or “slush”—unsolicited manuscripts by unknown authors without literary agents. But poets didn’t have literary agents, and I read every poem that came to the magazine. It was an important job, and it turned out I did it badly. I hadn’t recognized the work of my boss’s friends. Writers with three names and what I considered fussy poems, like John Frederick Nims and John Hall Wheelock, had been receiving D form letters. Peter Davison was outraged, and I was fired. I might write good poems someday, the burly blustering poet informed me in an exit interview in his book-lined corner office, but I’d never be an editor. There would be no second chance: I learned afterward from the fiction editor that Mary Updike, John Updike’s ex-wife, who had given up the job earlier that fall, wanted it back. Who could say no to a recently divorced mother of four? Mary Updike was another of Peter Davison’s friends.

  I never wrote another poem after that, and scarcely read one. I didn’t want to be one of them. Or maybe, as I read in an interview Elizabeth Bishop had done with the London Times, I was one of those female poets who quit because they “get discouraged very young.” When I came across the line years later, I appreciated its double meaning. Both could have applied to me back then.

  I did send “Birthdays” to a friend of a friend who worked as a bookstore clerk in Manhattan and was starting a poetry journal called Other Islands. He’d borrowed the phrase from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England,” a poem he loved even more than I did. “Dreams were the worst,” the stanza began, as Crusoe recalled his long nights in exile:

  . . . I’d have

  nightmares of other islands

  stretching away from mine, infinities

  of islands, islands spawning islands,

  like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs

  of islands, knowing that I had to live

  on each and every one, eventually,

  for ages, registering their flora,

  their fauna, their geography.

  My poem appeared in the first issue of Other Islands. By letter, the young editor praised my poem’s “wonderfully sculptural lines” and technique “subsumed by the intention.” Neither the journal nor my career nor my friend’s took off. That wasn’t the way our story went. I saved the small pamphlet, tucked away with the rhyming dictionary my mother had given me in grade school and the versification texts from Professor Fitzgerald’s class, its title an unwelcome reminder of the way ambitions tease and proliferate.

  I was even a tiny bit glad I’d been dismissed from the Atlantic Monthly when I learned that another first reader, Mary Jo Salter, an earlier student of Elizabeth Bishop’s who took over the slush pile from Mary Updike, had plucked out work by the little-known poet Amy Clampitt and helped make her career. Would I have seen the promise in lines like these, at the opening of Clampitt’s “Fog”?

  A vagueness comes over everything,

  as though proving color and contour

  alike dispensable: the lighthouse

  extinct, the islands’ spruce-tips

  drunk up like milk in the

  universal emulsion; houses

  reverting into the lost

  and forgotten; granite

  subsumed, a rumor

  in a mumble of ocean.

  Miss Bishop would have liked them, I felt sure. The poem reminded me of my stay on North Haven. It could have described her “Foggy Summer.”

  Peter Davison thought I was a poor judge of poetry, and I’d come to doubt my opinions. As if to compensate, I began writing book reviews, nearly always finding fault with the writers whose books I’d been assigned—historians, biographers, novelists, but never poets. I stayed away from them. I wrote, but not poetry. I meant to get back to it. And then I lost the knack for knowing what makes a poem. “I really don’t know how poetry gets to be written,” Elizabeth Bishop told an inquiring reader at about the time I first met her in Robert Lowell’s class. “There is a mystery & a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work.”

  The last time I felt that mystery and surprise was when I was well into my thirties. My boyfriend and I had married. We had a four-year-old daughter, and I’d taken her for a walk in a nearby nature preserve. The ranger handed us a slip of pale blue paper headed “Scavenger Hu
nt,” with a list of items for preschoolers to identify along the trail:

  Find:

  Something green

  Something blue

  Something that moves in the water

  Something that flies in the air

  Something that makes a sound

  Something that crawls on the ground

  Something that reminds you of you

  The list was almost a poem, and maybe at some future time I could make it into one. I kept the list on the windowsill above the kitchen sink in our suburban home until it was too watermarked to read.

  My marriage ended badly at the same time I finished writing a book I’d been working on for twenty years. Maybe there was a connection between the two culminations, or maybe not. I do know that I’d struggled with what Adrienne Rich identified in a famous essay as the “discontinuity of female life with its attention to small chores, errands, work that others constantly undo, small children’s constant needs.” I’d wanted to do all that for my family, had not wanted my two daughters to come home from school to an empty house, or one with a parent inside but too far off to hear them knocking on our front door’s glass windowpane with key in hand. I’d have agreed with Rich, if I’d picked up the essay again during that time and read: “For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape . . . a certain freedom of the mind is needed—freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyance of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away.” I closed my ears to freedom’s siren song, and opened my heart to my husband and daughters. I was not willing to conclude, as Elizabeth Bishop had, “I am just not made for ‘family life.’”