Elizabeth Bishop
Page 36
4 “A Miracle for Breakfast”: BP 20–21.
CHAPTER 1: BALCONY
7 recorded in a baby book: “The Biography of Our Baby” and other quotations on these pages from EB’s baby book: VC 113.1.
8 another cherished album: honeymoon album of William and Gertrude Bishop, VC 119.18.
“What it is”: Ellery Bicknell Crane, ed., Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of Worcester County, Massachusetts, Vol. I (New York and Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1907), 174.
9 “being brave”: EB to RF, Saturday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
10 “a homely old white house”: EB quoted in William Logan, “Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp,” Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 296. Logan’s chapter on EB’s friendship with Louise Bradley at Camp Chequesset has been enormously helpful to my understanding of EB’s adolescence.
rose-patterned carpet: EB, “Reminiscences of Great Village,” Part I, VC 54.13.
“blur of plants”: EBC 126.
view her mother: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33; EB, “A mother made of dress-goods . . .” EAP 156.
Her mother hit her: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
11 “held specks of fire”: EB, “The Drunkard,” BP 317.
12 she jumped out: REB 4.
holding a knife: REB 3.
“pure note”: EB, “In the Village,” BPR 63, 69. EB changed “Mate” to “Nate” in the story.
“gasoline . . . Vaseline”: EBC 71.
“Holy, Holy”: “Elizabeth Bishop: Influences,” American Poetry Review, January/February 1985, 14. This article is described as “an edited version of a talk Elizabeth Bishop gave on December 13, 1977 in a series of ‘Conversations’ sponsored by The Academy of American Poets,” 11.
13 “made a satisfying”: EB, “Primer Class,” BPR 80, 85.
she didn’t say: When enrolling EB at Walnut Hill School, EB’s uncle Jack Bishop told the assistant principal, Helen Farlow, “no one has ever spoken to her about her mother and she has never mentioned her.” REB 29.
14 “permanently insane”: EB to Anne Stevenson [EB’s first biographer], January 8, 1964, BPR 410.
“wet red mud”: EB, “In the Village,” BPR 71.
“kidnapped”: EB, “The Country Mouse,” BPR 87, 86.
“was another grandfather”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
“silver stubble”: EB, “For Grandfather,” EAP 154.
she was lucky: EBL 180, REB 314.
“didn’t know anything”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
15 “good manners”: EB, “Manners,” BP 119.
16 “bitterly unhappy and lonely”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
“hideous craving”: EB, “The Country Mouse,” BPR 98.
“someone needed a spanking”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
“foolish”: EB, “In the Waiting Room,” BP 180.
“others waiting”: EB, “The Country Mouse,” BPR 99.
latest National Geographic: See Jim Powell, “Bishop’s Arcadian Geographic,” TriQuarterly 81, Spring/Summer 1991, 170–74, on EB’s “poetic confabulation” of images from several issues of the magazine, published in February 1918 and preceding years, in “In the Waiting Room.”
“a feeling of absolute”: EB, “The Country Mouse,” BPR 99.
“sliding / beneath”: EB, “In the Waiting Room,” BP 181.
17 “myself”: EB, “The Country Mouse,” BPR 99.
“inside looking out”: EB, “The Country Mouse,” BPR 99, 96, 95.
“aging, even dying”: EB, “The Country Mouse,” BPR 98.
“in another two months”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
Gertrude’s sister Maud: EB always spelled her aunt Maude Bulmer Shepherdson’s name as “Maud,” and I have retained her spelling here and elsewhere.
18 “suddenly very uncomfortable”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33. In this letter to her psychoanalyst, EB describes the workings of her memory in regard to such painful incidents: “another thing that I’d remember and then forget for stretches of years sometimes I think.”
“very tall man”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
“Maybe lots of people”: EB to RF, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“I got to thinking”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
19 “wheezing and reading”: EBC 112.
“harder & harder”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33; “small, worried”: EB, “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs,” EAP 203.
“the most natural”: EBC 99.
“aliens, dreamers”: EB, “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs,” EAP 204.
20 “From the icy”: EB, “Autobiographical Sketch,” July 22, 1961, VC 53.6.
“The First Snow-Fall”: James Russell Lowell, The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., Riverside Press, 1890), 350.
easily rattle off: OA 83.
“say good-bye”: EB, “First Death in Nova Scotia,” BP 123–24.
21 “just temporarily”: EB, “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs,” EAP 202.
“by heart”: WIA 135.
“no apparatus”: EB mentions Soap Bubbles, EBC 121; quotations: C. V. Boys, Soap Bubbles and the Forces which Mould them (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York: E. & J. B. Young & Co., 1890), 7, 9.
“Observation is a great joy”: EBC 101.
“dreaming deliberately”: from EB draft poem recalling Aunt Maud—“when you talked so much / to my young deaf dreaming deliberately ears.” EAP 307.
22 “an idiot child”: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33. The girl Elizabeth met on the train may have been Louise Bradley, with whom she quickly formed a lasting friendship. See Logan, “Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp,” 264.
“tomboy”: EBC 43.
“other children”: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“the new poetry”: Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson, eds., The New Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1917), vi.
“simple dignity”: EB quoting Coleridge in “Elizabeth Bishop: Influences,” American Poetry Review, January/February 1985; “very deep emotion”: EB in “Elizabeth Bishop: Influences.”
23 “extremely popular”: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
turned physical: “all the little girls were falling in love with each other right and left,” EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“I haven’t any”: EB quoted in Logan, “Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp,” 254.
forty-seven-foot sloop: Logan, “Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp,” 253; Ark: EB to Maude Shepherdson, July 1, 1928, quoted in Sandra Barry, “Lifting Yesterday: Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia” (unpublished ms., copyright 2014), chapter 5, 24. I am grateful for Sandra Barry’s careful research into EB’s Nova Scotia roots in this book and other publications, including “Elizabeth Bishop and World War I,” WLA: War, Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 11, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1999), 93–110.
24 “should have known better”: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
she detested the book: “I’ve detested [Gibran] since my counselor at camp gave me The Prophet to read when I was 14 or 15,” EB to AM, July 1, 1972, VC 115.12.
“There was a white”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
25 “always trying to feel”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
26 “beautiful girl”: EB quoted in Logan, “Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp,” 287.
“liked to feel”: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“normal”: REB 23.
drives and picnics: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
dressed up in bedspreads: REB 28.
27 regulation that required hats: “
Student Government Regulations,” E. Farrington scrapbook, 1926–27, Walnut Hill School archive.
“dreadful little house”: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
burst into tears: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“on more or less”: EB to Anne Stevenson, “Answers to your questions of March 6 [1964],” BPR 429.
28 “Ridge,” visiting Judy Flynn: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
Elizabeth rated poorly: Walnut Hill School register of student grades, 1929–30, Walnut Hill School archive.
“social terrors”: EB to Anne Stevenson, “Answers to your questions of March 6 [1964],” BPR 430.
“worried . . . a lot”: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“Behind Stowe”: BPPL 184. The poem’s title has been adopted for the campus alumni magazine.
29 “On Being Alone”: BPR 451–52.
“Roof-Tops”: BPPL 321.
30 “handicapped by an unusual”: REB 39–40.
“good musician”: REB 39.
her information card: REB 59; “independent”: EB to Anne Stevenson, “Answers to your questions of March 6 [1964],” BPR 429.
“too self-conscious self”: REB 40.
31 “Two Noble Emancipists”: Matthew Vassar quoted in Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 48.
A next generation: see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 218–22.
Hallie Flanagan at Vassar: See Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times (New York: Walker, 2011), 3–5.
blue chip stocks: I am grateful to Sandy Barry for sharing the results of her study of Bishop family probate records held at the courthouse in Worcester, Massachusetts. Sandra Barry email to the author, May 6, 2016.
32 “really ‘red’”: EB to Anne Stevenson, “Answers to your questions of March 6 [1964],” BPR 432.
“Then Came the Poor”: BPR 465.
“wax-faced”: EB, “Hymn to the Virgin,” BP 219–20.
33 $26.18, a princely sum: EBL 58.
34 “looked exhausted”: EBC 107.
“spontaneous”: EB, “Eliot Favors Short-Lived Spontaneous Publications,” Vassar Miscellany News 17, no. 46 (May 10, 1933).
loosen his tie: EBC 108.
“Any man has to”: T. S. Eliot, “Sweeney Agonistes,” Complete Poems and Plays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 83.
“ever done,” “I am not”: EB, “Eliot Favors Short-Lived Spontaneous Publications.”
“scared out of my wits”: EBC 57.
35 “Mortal and sardonic”: MM quoted in “First Production of Sweeney Brings T. S. Eliot Here,” Vassar Miscellany News 17, no. 45 (May 6, 1933).
“impersonal,” “goes right on”: OA 21.
“I hadn’t known”: EB, “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore,” BPR 117, 118.
“I too, dislike it”: MM, “Poetry,” Observations, ed. Linda Leavell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 28.
“relentless accuracy”: MM, “An Octopus,” Observations, 91.
“the self-portrait”: Glenway Wescott quoted in Leavell’s introduction to MM, Observations, xi.
dressed impeccably: For details of EB’s dress on the day of their meeting as recalled by MM, see Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 278. EB’s recollection of what she wore that day is less explicit: “my new spring suit,” EB, “Efforts of Affection,” BPR 119.
“quaint . . . but stylish”: EB, “Efforts of Affection,” BPR 119.
36 “it went very well”: EBC 57.
“ability and technical,” “It is almost”: MM quoted in Leavell, Holding On Upside Down, 279, 278.
“having affairs”: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
Music as a Literature: EB, College Notes: Music 140, VC 69B.9.
“A ladder goes up”: OA 14.
37 “The chimney pots”: OA 22.
APRIL 29, 1975: NINTH-FLOOR CONFERENCE ROOM, HOLYOKE CENTER
42 in an uncanny way: One poem I brought to class that semester, about my father’s arrival at Harvard as a freshman, contained the lines “1938. / A train traveling east.” Professor Lowell was stunned when he read the poem aloud to open discussion, remarking, “I just wrote that line myself. It will be in the New York Review next week. I’ll have to change it.” His poem, about his first marriage, to Jean Stafford, then titled “1938–1975,” began: “1938, our honeymoon train west.” In revision the poem became “Since 1939,” with the opening lines altered: “We missed the declaration of war, / we were on our honeymoon train west.” RL, “Three Poems,” New York Review of Books, May 29, 1975; LP 740.
43 “About the size”: EB, “Poem,” BP 196–97.
CHAPTER 2: CRUMB
45 “I guess I should”: OA 24.
“Apoplexy”: Gertrude Boomer Bishop “Certificate of Registration of Death,” May 29, 1934, Nova Scotia Archives. In her unpublished ms., “Lifting Yesterday: Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia” (copyright 2014), chapter 4, 28, Sandra Barry offers evidence from Gertrude Bishop’s case file suggesting she may also have suffered from hypothyroidism, “undiagnosed and untreated for decades.”
“constantly”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
46 “no hereditary tendency”: REB 30.
“The past / at least”: EAP 23.
“mystical”: EAP 273.
47 “howling away”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
48 “wonderful, romantic”: EBC 127.
“island feeling”: EB journal, “Cuttyhunk, July 1934,” quoted in EBL 62.
sharing a room: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
berating: EB, “In a cheap hotel . . .,” EAP 83.
“I’d like him better”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
“cheap hotel”: EB, “In a cheap hotel . . .,” EAP 83. See also editor Alice Quinn’s note, 291.
49 “Elizabeth, Go to hell”: REB 68.
“figuring up”: EB to Frani Blough, July 29, 1934, quoted in Barry, “Lifting Yesterday,” chapter 6, 12.
“riding around aimlessly”: OA 26.
one in four: Edward Robb Ellis, The Epic of New York City (New York: Coward-McCann, 1966), 533.
50 Early Keyboard Music: EB College Notes, VC 71.3.
“sex desire”: Casal quoted in John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freeman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 228.
“an ideal friendship”: Mary Casal, The Stone Wall: An Autobiography (Chicago: Eyncourt Press, 1930), 165.
“When at its best”: Casal, The Stone Wall, 211.
51 while she was drunk: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
after two weeks: Concluding her story based on her experience teaching in the correspondence school, “The U.S.A. School of Writing,” EB writes: “I stood the school for as long as I could, which wasn’t very long.” BPR 108. In a chronology written for her psychoanalyst Ruth Foster, circa 1947, EB records that she’d spent “about two weeks” working for the school in 1935, VC 118.33.
52 “very nice”: OA 33. George Platt Lynes also photographed EB in the 1930s, VC 100.2.
53 “wade / through black jade”: MM, Observations, ed. Linda Leavell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 41.
“never try to publish”: EB, “Efforts of Affection,” BPR 128.
“like a bucketful”: EB New York City notebook, quoted in EBL 65.
“painful”: REB 111–12.
“TERRIBLE”: EAP 254.
“I’ve always felt”: WIA 81.
54 “The Map”: BP 5.
/> “in action, within itself”: OA 11.
“tentativeness can be”: EBHA 179.
“oiled”: EB, “The Map,” BP 5.
55 “These peninsulas,” “Are they assigned”: EB, “The Map,” BP 5.
“archaically new”: EBHA 175.
“A Little Miracle”: EB New York City notebook, quoted in EBL 79–80.
56 “homesickness”: EB travel journal, quoted in EBL 87, 88.
57 “picturesqueness is just”: OA 34.
“I looked for the kiss”: EAP 250.
cost only $155: REB 62.
58 half-dozen lessons: OA 478.
59 “thoughts that were”: EB, “Sleeping Standing Up,” BP 31.
“Some surrealist poetry”: EAP 272.
“surrealism of everyday life”: EB to Anne Stevenson, January 8, 1964, BPR 414.
“I cannot, cannot”: OA 45; She signed herself: EBL 106.
60 “enviable”: MM quoted in EBL 106.
By return mail: EBL 107.
“something needn’t be”: EBC 24.
more recent attempts: Pound, “Sestina Altaforte,” 1909; Auden, “Paysage Moralisé,” 1934.
“colorless”: OA 54.
“my Depression poem”: EBC 25.
almost 20 percent: Ellis, The Epic of New York City, 533.
61 communion rite: Thirty years after “A Miracle for Breakfast” was published, EB wrote to a friend, “I didn’t even mind, because I suppose it is obvious, although I’d never thought of it consciously, when two different critics pointed out that ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’ referred to the Mass.” OA 477.
“A Miracle for Breakfast”: BP 20–21.
62 “is in the eye”: Hallie Tompkins Thomas quoted in EBL 97.
“boisterousness”: OA 54.
Margaret remembered: EAP 260.
63 “freakishly cruel”: OA 61. EB seemed to believe that Louise Crane really was “an awfully good driver” with “a very large safe car,” as she wrote to MM when proposing the outing to Coney Island. OA 33.
“what resides in the right”: OA 62.
“To keep ‘going’”: OA 61.
“I know now”: EB to Frani Blough, August 9, 1937, quoted in EBL 124.
“it would have been better”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
64 “condemned to death”: EAP 35. Although EAP editor Alice Quinn gives this passage the title “Villanelle,” it is possible that EB’s notes on the villanelle’s rhyme scheme that appear on the same notebook page may not apply to the journal entry recounting the dream.