Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  Then there was the way I went about writing when I found the time for it. The book was as far from a poem as one could imagine—a six-hundred-page biography of three nineteenth-century sisters tracing their involvement with Transcendentalism, the intellectual movement my junior honors adviser had told me I didn’t know how to define. When people asked about my preparation for the work, I told them I’d learned to write in poetry workshops in college. But of course, I joked, you can’t write a six-hundred-page book with the same attention to every word and sentence that I’d been taught to give to each line of a poem. Or maybe that’s what I had done, and why it took so long.

  Newly divorced, I found myself looking for a teaching job in my mid-fifties, as Elizabeth Bishop had after her marriage ended. I didn’t think of myself as elderly, but I was a scared amateur professor counting myself lucky to find work when I did. A second biography, written faster than the first or I’d have lost my job, brought tenure and the Pulitzer Prize the year I turned sixty. My children were grown. My marriage was over. My parents were dead: seventeen years apart, both suffered falls resulting in fatal head injuries, my mother at sixty-eight on a freshly waxed concrete floor in the lobby of her apartment building, my father at eighty-eight, stumbling over the threshold of his favorite bar. Assuming my own fatal fall was in the distant future, I was free to write what I wanted. I had time to follow up on an email from Mildred Nash, a student I hazily remembered from the class I’d taken with Elizabeth Bishop in 1976.

  I’d been thinking of writing about our professor, but Millie Nash couldn’t have known that when she wrote to me, curious about whether the author of two biographies she’d read was the same Megan Marshall she’d known in Miss Bishop’s class. I was eager to meet, and Millie was too. I hoped she might have saved her notes from our class, maybe even some of the poems I’d passed around in photocopies for discussion.

  A retired public school teacher of the gifted and talented, and an active poet, Millie Nash arrived for lunch at Patou Thai in Belmont Center bearing several folders stuffed with papers and wrapped in a plastic shopping bag. She had all my poems, including the one that had earned me my B, along with pages of notes covering both poetry classes I’d taken that fall; Millie had audited Professor Fitzgerald’s versification class too, paying closer attention than I had to his lectures. She’d kept a diary describing encounters with Miss Bishop over three years: our first class session, coffee and hot chocolate at Piroschka’s in Harvard Square when her daughter came to class on a snow day, the party at Lewis Wharf, precious hours spent culling Elizabeth Bishop’s library during the spring before her death.

  From Millie’s notes and diary entries I was able to reconstruct a chronology, and I found more of my poems in a file at Yale’s Beinecke Library, part of the Robert Fitzgerald collection. But my story quickly took a back seat to what I was discovering about Miss Bishop. There was so much I hadn’t known, that almost no one else knew. In Elizabeth Bishop’s archive at Vassar, a trove of letters had appeared, locked away in a file box until Alice Methfessel’s death in 2009. What I read brought tears: in letters written to her psychoanalyst, Elizabeth described in alarming detail her harrowing childhood and the car wreck that severed Margaret Miller’s arm; letters to and from Lota de Macedo Soares recorded the crises of the last years in Brazil. Hundreds of pages of letters exchanged with Alice Methfessel showed what the couple had never revealed in public or even to close friends: a passionate and abiding love.

  I was falling in love, too, with the Elizabeth Bishop I began to know in her letters and manuscript drafts and in snapshots: the little girl sitting in wet sand on a beach in Nova Scotia, the grown woman swimming nude in a private pool at Samambaia, each offering up the same pleased grin; the unseen photographer capturing Cartier-Bresson–style images on the Xingú, along the Amazon, and down the Rio São Francisco. I admired what Elizabeth Bishop called her “geographic curiosity,” so deep it pervaded her dreams. She’d described one such dream to Howard Moss: “There was a narrow road that began at Tierra del Fuego and went straight north, and I had started to walk it, quite cheerfully. A large primitive stone coffin was being carried on mule-back alongside of me, ready for me when I gave out.”

  If Miss Bishop had been snappish with me, she had been equally severe with others. I took a perverse pleasure in her cracks, always in private letters, at Robert Frost (“something slightly unpleasant under that lichen-covered stone”), E. E. Cummings (“you have to pretend you’ve never seen a Cummings poem before, and that’s difficult”), and J. D. Salinger (“Henry James did it much better in one or two long sentences”). Robert Bly and Octavio Paz were “all too vague,” and Allen Ginsberg “just can’t write.”

  What would she have said of herself? Elizabeth knew the worth of her own poems. She never sought advice as Cal had, as “dear Frankie” Bidart did so sweetly in repeated phone calls—“Have you a few minutes? Could I read you something?”—as I had, in fishing for compliments on my Catullan hendecasyllabics. Elizabeth sent her poems to editors and friends when she considered them finished. But she also knew she should have written more and simply could not, despite vowing to “grit my teeth and write another poem, that’s all.” And she knew when she’d “behaved badly.” She begged forgiveness of those she’d hurt or offended so often they grew impatient with her. I sometimes tired of reading her apologies and excuses too. And then I felt sad about the futility of her always broken promises—to write more, drink less.

  But could it have been otherwise? I thought of the poems she did write, almost improbably—how the writing of them was what she’d lived for, and how they’d made her reputation after her death. Would Elizabeth have been happy to know how famous she’d become, that movies were made about her, and scholarly societies established in her name? Disturbed to find that Cal, her dear friend, was comparatively neglected? Cal had seen that Elizabeth could write the “immortal” poem, as she had yearned to do from her earliest days as a writer: one “short, but immortal, poem,” she’d imagined in her 1938 story “In Prison.” With “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop had done that. Could any other American poet of her generation claim as much? And I had been there, by lucky chance, to sport among these gods of verse on an ivied Mount Olympus.

  Millie Nash had a message for me that day in Patou Thai. She put it delicately, not naming names. When Millie and Elizabeth had taken a coffee break on one of those long mornings of book-sorting in 1979, Elizabeth spoke of something that had troubled her since the time of Millie’s class three years before. There had been a student who turned in a poem written for another professor, and Miss Bishop had to lower her grade. She felt sorry about it to this day. Millie eyed me as she told the story. Millie knew the student was me.

  Forty years late, this unsought apology felt like an invitation, a call. It carried me back to autumn hours spent in a hushed classroom, when I’d wanted more than a teacher could give.

  In the weeks and months ahead, as I pored over manuscripts, letters, and journals, as I read and reread one hundred perfect poems, I sometimes paused and let myself imagine Elizabeth Bishop: sitting on her balcony with Millie or Alice—or possibly even me—brushing crumbs from a tablecloth on which coffee cups sat half full next to a plate of croissants or homemade corn bread, taking in the view of brick and stone dormitories at the Charlestown Navy Yard where Cal’s commander father had once been quartered, gazing farther north in the bright morning sun toward the conflux of two great rivers, the Mystic and the Charles, and witnessing the daily miracle. “If you squint a little,” Elizabeth would turn and say, “it looks almost like the Grand Canal in Venice—really.”

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  This book could not have been written without the foundational work of previous scholars, editors, and biographers of Elizabeth Bishop and her circle, including Sandra Barry, Frank Bidart, Joelle Biele, Peter Brazeau, Bonnie Costello, Gary Fountain, Robert Giroux, Langdon Hammer, Saskia Hamilton, David Hoak, Jill Jano
ws, David Kalstone, Linda Leavell, Candace MacMahon, Brett Millier, George Monteiro, Carmen L. Oliveira, Barbara Page, Alice Quinn, Camille Roman, Lloyd Schwartz, Thomas Travisano, and Helen Vendler. I am grateful to those who welcomed my questions and offered guidance. Important conversations with friends and acquaintances of Elizabeth Bishop in her last years—Frank Bidart, Roxanne Cumming, Jonathan Galassi, Rachel Jacoff, Alexandra Johnson, Gail Mazur, Pamela Painter, Grace Schulman, Amram Shapiro, Jane Shore, Deborah Weisgall, Rosalind Wright, and Ross Terrill–helped immeasurably. I am indebted to Lloyd Schwartz for his patience with my queries by email and over lunches at Changsho, and his careful reading of an early draft of this book; and to James Atlas, whose guest appearance in Jane Shore’s poetry workshop at Harvard inspired me to follow the biographer’s path. Four decades later, Jim set my work on Elizabeth Bishop in motion.

  My memories of English Sar, Fall 1976, have been tested and augmented by classmates Julie Agoos, Mildred Nash, David Owen, and William Sorensen. Other students who worked with or encountered Elizabeth Bishop memorably at Harvard—April Bernard, Paula Bonnell, Steven Fenichel, and Elise Partridge—generously shared recollections and notes, and Isabel Swift recalled a North Haven summer. Elizabeth Bishop’s own school communities welcomed and supported my research: at Walnut Hill School for the Arts, Sarah Banse, Jennifer TumSuden, Bruce Smith, and Charlotte Hall; at Vassar College’s Archives and Special Collections Library, Dean Rogers and Ronald Patkus.

  An extraordinary year as a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library under the directorship of Jean Strouse pushed the book toward completion. Several NYPL librarians provided important research leads: Elizabeth Denlinger, Karen Gisonny, Denise Hibay, and Carmen Nigra. The companionship of writers at the Cullman Center as well as members of the New England Biography Seminar of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the 40 Concord Group of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the faculty of Emerson College’s Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing, and my longstanding biographers group—Joyce Antler, Frances Malino, Susan Quinn, Lois Rudnick, Judith Tick, and Roberta Wollons—made lonely work less so. Emerson College supported my research and writing on Elizabeth Bishop with a grant from the Faculty Advancement Fund and in many other ways.

  For help with Brazilian lore and translation from Portuguese and Spanish, I relied on the expert advice of Carlos Dada, Stefanie Kremser, Jordi Punti, Larry Rohter, Katherine Vaz, and Andrew Zingg. Dr. Carol Zuckerman advised on the treatment of asthma in the mid-twentieth century; Deborah Cramer on the shore birds of South America; Gary Wolf on architectural details; Kenneth Gross on the history of lyric poetry; David Hopkins on North Haven nomenclature. Anne Gray Fischer offered research assistance on short notice when my tech capabilities failed. For information on Elizabeth Bishop’s psychoanalyst, Dr. Ruth Foster, I consulted Lucy Claire Curran, Maxwell Foster Jr., Nancy Foster, Joyce A. Lerner, Susan McGrath, Susan Twarog, Roger Warner, Brenda Lawson of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Nellie Thompson of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and Margaret Warren, archivist of The Winsor School. At other archives and for grants of permission I was aided by Marylène Altieri and Sarah Hutcheon of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, William Minor of Washington University Libraries’ Department of Special Collections, Bernard Schwartz of the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, Christina Davis of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University, Catherine Fancy of the Elizabeth Clark Wright Archives of Acadia University, Victoria Fox of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Rosanna Warren, and Carole Berglie, representative of the May Swenson estate. In my travels for research and writing, I was fortunate to experience the generous hospitality of Lithgow Osborne and Chuck Burleigh, Emily and Jay McKeage, and the North Haven Library and Symposium.

  My longtime editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Deanne Urmy, along with Larry Cooper, Jenny Xu, and Jackie Shepherd, helped make this book beautiful and true. Neil Giordano’s expertise with rights and permissions made it all possible. My literary agent, Katinka Matson of Brockman Inc., has enabled me to write books over nearly four decades. Friends and family, not all named here, tolerated and even encouraged the past several years of intense effort, bordering on obsession: Carol Bundy, Natalie Dykstra, Mark Edmundson, Rebecca Goldstein, Anne C. Heller, Carla Kaplan, Louise Knight, Diane McWhorter, Patricia O’Toole, Stacy Schiff, Lorraine Shanley, Amanda Vaill, Susan Ware, Mary Liz and George DeJong, Amy Marshall and Tim Zenker, Scott Harney, Josephine Sedgwick, and Sara Sedgwick Brown. Their gifts of attention and love are the miracle I had not looked for, but receive with intense gratitude and the will to respond in kind.

  Notes

  * * *

  In quotations from primary sources I have retained the original spelling and punctuation, except in some instances where I have altered capitalization at the start of sentences for ease of reading. I have also used, both in quotations and in my text, Elizabeth Bishop’s preferred spelling of her maternal family name—Bulmer, rather than Boomer—and of her aunt Maude Bulmer Shepherdson’s first name—Maud.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Names

  AB: Dr. Anny Baumann

  AM: Alice Methfessel

  EB: Elizabeth Bishop

  LA: Lilli Correia de Araújo

  LS: Lota de Macedo Soares

  MM: Marianne Moore

  MS: May Swenson

  RF: Dr. Ruth Foster

  RL: Robert Lowell

  Books and Manuscript Collections

  BNHJ:

  The North Haven Journal, 1974–1979, Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Eleanor M. McPeck (North Haven, ME: North Haven Library, Inc., 2015)

  BNY:

  Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, ed. Joelle Biele (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

  BP:

  Poems, Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

  BPPL:

  Poems, Prose, and Letters, Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008)

  BPR:

  Prose, Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

  EAP:

  Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Alice Quinn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

  EBC:

  Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, ed. George Monteiro (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996)

  EBHA:

  Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983)

  EBL:

  Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, Brett Millier (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1993)

  LL:

  The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

  LP:

  Collected Poems, Robert Lowell, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003)

  LPR:

  Collected Prose, Robert Lowell, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987)

  OA:

  One Art: Letters, Selected and Edited, Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994)

  REB:

  Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography, Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994)

  SL:

  Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University

  VC:

  Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College; access codes refer to box and file numbers

  WIA:

  Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

&nbs
p; WU:

  May Swenson Papers, Special Collections, Washington University, St. Louis

  YCAL:

  Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven

  OCTOBER 21, 1979: AGASSIZ HOUSE, RADCLIFFE YARD

  1 Waiting to sing: The recording of Elizabeth Bishop’s memorial service can be heard at Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room “Listening Booth” website: http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/listeningbooth/poets/bishop.cfm.

  “Unbeliever”: BP 24.

  2 “I ordered the book”: OA 256.