Elizabeth Bishop
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“Lizzie and Louise”: REB 71.
65 “perfectly beautiful”: OA 74.
“coffee concerts”: REB 84.
“I can scarcely”: BPR 18.
“Many years ago”: BPR 24.
“attract to myself”: BPR 24; “inscriptions”: BPR 23.
“twelve or fifteen”: BPR 20; “a short, but immortal”: BPR 23.
66 “We hadn’t meant”: EAP 41.
it had been Billie Holiday: REB 328. EB had known Billie Holiday through Louise Crane, and was proud to have introduced her to the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick at one of their parties. REB 104. Her set of four poems, “Songs for a Colored Singer,” were written with Billie Holiday in mind.
infidelity was unforgivable: See EB to AM, March 31, 1971, VC 114.40: “I was only jealous in this awful way once, when I was 28 years old—for about two weeks—and in that case, since I was sensible, and was being treated dishonestly, I simply broke the thing off. . . . It’s the worst feeling in the world, & the most disgusting, and I wish I could be all for promiscuity and free love and menages à trois and not give a damn whom you sleep with. But I can’t.”
“huge blue eyes”: REB 41.
“See, here, my distant”: EB, “Valentine,” EAP 40.
“scaled, metallic”: EB notebook quoted in EBL 117.
67 “submarine / toadstools”: MM, “The Fish,” Observations, 42.
“I caught a tremendous”: EB, “The Fish,” BP 43–44.
68 “nothing”: EB notebook entry, February 8, 1941, quoted in EBL 164.
69 “Sex Appeal”: OA 86.
“militarism”: OA 96.
“more and more Navy ships”: OA 91.
“almost every boy”: EB to Anne Stevenson, “Answers to your questions of March 6 [1964],” BPR 426. A more accurate census is provided by Sandra Barry, “Lifting Yesterday,” chapter 1, 45: “seventy men . . . enlisted between 1914–1918. Many of them were wounded, twenty-one died.”
“command and terrorize”: EB, “Roosters,” BP 36, 37.
“purified”: EBL 159.
“The Cock”: OA 96.
“water-closet door”: EB, “Roosters,” BP 36.
70 “cranky”: OA 97.
“perhaps some early”: EB to Anne Stevenson, March 18, 1963, BPR 393.
“I took Marjorie”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
“drunkenness is an excuse”: OA 76.
71 “would drip on the screens”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
“It is marvellous”: EAP 44.
“just starting to get light”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
population rapidly doubled: Stephen Nichols, A Chronological History of Key West: A Tropical Island City (Key West: Key West Images of the Past, Inc., 2000), 1941–1945 entry.
72 Blackouts curtailed: See Abraham H. Gibson, “American Gibraltar: Key West During World War II,” Florida Historical Quarterly 90, no. 4 (Spring 2012), 393–425.
“translucent-looking”: EB notebook quoted in EBL 169.
becoming her lover: EB to RF, February 1947, and Sunday Morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
73 “seem to comb”: OA 115–16.
74 “stupider and stupider”: OA 116.
“six bedraggled old poems”: OA 113.
she no longer found: EBL 179.
“lovely brand-new”: OA 122.
75 “scenery”: EB, “Chemin de Fer,” BP 10. For an account of the influence of EB’s Camp Chequesset years on her mature writing, especially “Chemin de Fer,” see William Logan, “Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp,” Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 299.
“with birds, with bells”: EB, “Anaphora,” BP 52.
“trying to make”: Marjorie Stevens letter quoted in EBL 179.
“Miss Bishop’s”: Barbara Gibbs review in Poetry quoted in EBL 184.
“honest in its wit”: Randall Jarrell, “On North & South,” EBHA 181.
“this small-large book”: MM, “A Modest Expert,” EBHA 178–79.
76 25 percent premium: EBL 188, BNY xviii.
“one of the best”: RL, “Thomas, Bishop, and Williams,” EBHA, 186–88.
77 “her most important”: RL, “Thomas, Bishop, and Williams,” EBHA 187.
“rumpled”: EB notebook quoted in EBL 186–87.
“certain things”: OA 54.
“Every magazine or paper”: OA 163.
“makes one write”: EB letter quoted in EBL 126–27.
78 Karen Horney: OA 108.
“the quiet heroisms”: MM, Selected Letters, ed. Bonnie Costello, with Celeste Goodridge and Cristanne Miller (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 405.
“I really do”: EB to RF, Saturday [February 1947], VC 118.33.
estranged from her: author’s interviews and correspondence with Foster family members.
That education: “Dr. Ruth Foster,” Biographical Directory of Fellows and Members of the American Psychiatric Association (New York: American Psychiatric Association, 1950), 253.
79 “Dear Dr. Foster”: EAP 77. Editor Alice Quinn chose not to give Dr. Foster’s name, and published the draft with the title “Dear Dr. ——”; cf. EBL 180.
“in my cups”: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
account of her sexual history: In a letter to RF dated “February 1947,” VC 118.33, EB confides her worry, amounting to a conviction, that “I have no clitoris at all.” Two women “I have lived with,” Loren MacIver and Marjorie Stevens, had “commented” on this. In an article titled “Approaching Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters to Ruth Foster,” scholar Lorrie Goldensohn writes, “There seems to be no good reason to dismiss Bishop’s description of her anatomical abnormality.” Yale Review 10, no. 1 (January 2015), 15. Yet there is no record of RF’s reaction to EB’s stated worry, which she admits “may be all nonsense,” or the conversation that followed from this confession; EB’s later relationships with women, documented in private correspondence and unpublished poems, show her taking a great deal of pleasure in sexual relations. When asked about the “February 1947” letter, EB’s former lover Roxanne Cumming, with whom EB lived from 1968 to 1970, laughed and said, “She must have been having a bad day.” Interview with the author, December 13, 2015.
“it was all”: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
80 “a few weeks old”: EB to RF, chronology [February 1947], VC 118.33.
“Heavens do you”: EB to RF, February 1947, VC 118.33.
three quarts: EB to RF, Saturday [February 1947], VC 118.33.
premenstrual symptom: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
the year her mother died: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
“hours of hangover”: EB to RF, “Saturday” [February 1947], VC 118.33.
“that dreadful thing”: EB to RF, Sunday morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“more or less drunk”: EB to RF, February 1947, VC 118.33.
81 Department of Health, “I had the feeling”: REB 100.
strange behavior, “seldom speaks”: Barry, “Lifting Yesterday,” chapter 4, 34, 36, 38.
And delusions: Barry, “Lifting Yesterday,” chapter 4, 21, 20.
delivered by forceps: Barry, “Lifting Yesterday,” chapter 4, 12.
“so nice”: OA 206.
“tight”: EB to RF, Feburary 1947, VC 118.33.
82 “excitement”: RL, “Thomas, Bishop, and Williams,” EBHA 188.
free-flowing iambs: I am grateful to Lloyd Schwartz for a discussion of the meter of “At the Fishhouses,” in which he described the poem’s “loose iambs.”
“The day I saw”: EB to RF, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“big old seal”: EB to RF, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“curious about me”: EB, “At the Fishhouses,” BP 62.
“started feeling”: EB to RF, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“regarded me / steadily”: EB, “At the Fi
shhouses,” BP 63.
“seal,” “double meaning”: EB to RF, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“Cold dark deep”: EB, “At the Fishhouses,” BP 64.
83 “Knowledge is historical”: EB to RF, February 1947, VC 118.33.
“she hardly knew”: REB 339–40.
addressed her as “Elizabeth”: WIA 7.
“a psychiatrist friend”: WIA 16.
84 “your poetry is as different”: WIA 273.
“There’s a side”: WIA 380. RL was referring to EB’s poem “First Death in Nova Scotia.”
85 “shake so I can’t”: OA 211.
86 “literary”: EBC 95.
draining all the bottles: Published accounts of this episode vary slightly. Compare REB 109–10 and David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 146–47.
“constant menace,” “morality and decency”: quoted in David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 57, 2; Six thousand workers: Jill Lepore, “The Last Amazon: Wonder Woman Returns,” New Yorker, September 22, 2014, 72.
“all those piles”: OA 194.
unsteady foundation of her appointment: For an extensive discussion of EB’s year in Washington, see Camille Roman, Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II—Cold War View (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
“purge of the perverts”: quoted in Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 2.
87 “terrible flop”: OA 199.
helpless to draw them out: REB 119.
“all this recording”: OA 202.
“hopeless”: OA 199.
“the high point”: WIA 99.
88 locked themselves in the butler’s pantry: REB 120.
“go back on the parish?”: WIA 99.
three simple pieces: OA 207.
blowing bubbles: OA 190; Pearl K. Bell, “Dona Elizabetchy: A Memoir of Elizabeth Bishop,” Partisan Review, Winter 1991, 29.
“so fast I expect”: OA 207.
“sort of ‘Pub’”: OA 206.
survived by her mother: “Dr. Ruth Foster,” obituary, New York Times, September 30, 1950.
pancreatic cancer: coroner’s report, Case No. 7247, City of New York, Office of Chief Medical Examiner.
variety of . . . medications: OA 198–99.
an inhaler that made: OA 204.
89 “for about a week”: OA 198.
“this side of going”: OA 199.
“helped me more than”: OA 206.
five-day hospitalization: REB 119.
“Well, go ahead”: OA 210.
“She had been promiscuous”: EB, “Homesickness” (unfinished short story), EAP 190.
90 “worst year”: EB notebook quoted in Roman, Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II—Cold War View, 139.
“not even realizing”: EB, “Homesickness” (unfinished poem), EAP 86.
OCTOBER 5, 1976: ROBINSON HALL, HARVARD YARD
96 “The Colder the Air”: BP 8.
97 “Please try your hands”: EB, “Assignments for English Sar Fall Term, 1976,” Mildred Nash papers, private collection.
“PLEASE USE”: EB, “Assignments for English Sar Fall Term, 1976.”
CHAPTER 3: COFFEE
98 “large apartment”: WIA 109.
99 “a smallish sand”: WIA 116.
“tax tangle”: WIA 119.
“85% at Houghton Mifflin”: WIA 122.
“crazy trip”: WIA 129.
“But no!”: EB, “I introduce Penelope Gwin . . .,” EAP 4, 3.
100 “harrowing,” “a girl can bear”: WIA 112, 113.
New York rental: BNY 65.
“mostly fairies”: WIA 116.
“a very nice tall bony”: OA 278.
101 “frank conversational”: EB to RF, Sunday Morning, February 1947, VC 118.33.
hadn’t caught on: EB to RF, February 24, 1947, VC 118.33.
“a lot to me”: EB notebook quoted in EBL 238–39.
journal letters: See M. Eleanor Prentiss, “Leaves from an Oxford Notebook,” Blue Pencil, March 1927, 14–16.
“day-dreams”: WIA 130.
102 “all very luxurious”: OA 226.
“driving to the interior”: EB, “Arrival at Santos,” BP 88.
“very sour”: OA 231.
“large red-hot mushrooms”: OA 232.
103 “A love letter”: EAP 296.
“fearful and wonderful”: OA 236.
“I call to you”: EAP 296.
leaving Lota: EB to Maria (Maya) Osser, January 4, 1968: “I lived with Lota all that time—much longer than Mary did, and I never left Lota (she did, and rather decisively, you know, even if she continued to live nearby).” OA 490. Mary Morse, quoted in REB 132: “we were staying at a friend’s when Elizabeth came to stay with us at Christmas time [in 1951]. I had begun building my house because I had decided to adopt children. [When] Elizabeth went to live with Lota in the new house, I was living down [the hill from Lota’s new house] in the house that I was finishing.”
“I believe”: EB notebook quoted in EBL 244.
“made that kind”: EB quoted by James Merrill in REB 266.
“died and gone to heaven”: OA 246.
104 “alive forever,” “those pure blue”: EB, “In the Village,” BPR 62.
“leaning willows”: EB, “In the Village,” BPR 77.
“unbelievably impractical”: OA 234.
“brilliant, brilliant”: OA 243.
“I am a little”: BNY 85. EB wrote similarly to Yaddo friends Kit and Ilse Barker two days later, on October 12, 1952: “It is funny to come to Brazil to experience total recall about Nova Scotia—geography must be more mysterious than we realize, even.” OA 249.
“You have an ally”: BNY 142.
“20-12-51”: OA 551.
“or my perpendicular”: BNY 165.
“my hostess”: BNY 74.
“coming in my bedroom”: OA 237.
“like waterfalls”: OA 243.
“much too attached”: OA 240.
105 “rarely without”: OA 358.
samba competitions: OA 292.
“getting used to be”: OA 264.
“wonderful you are”: LS to EB, Morning Sunday [June 21, 1964], VC 114.20.
106 “real,” “very tame”: OA 236.
“lifelong dream”: OA 234.
“in a chauvinistic outburst”: WIA 136.
“For Lota”: BPPL 911.
“Lota likes luxury”: OA 259.
“the last six or seven”: OA 238.
107 “is really interested”: OA 245.
“the friend with whom”: BNY 85.
“sociopathic personality”: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1952), 7, 38–39.
“functional references”: OA 251.
“definitely out as humor”: BNY xxiv.
“fundamentally”: WIA 140.
“a masochist, a Lesbian”: Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Subjection of Women,” A View of My Own: Essays on Literature & Society (New York: Ecco Press, 1962), 170.
“a fine job”: WIA 140.
“she wanted me to stay”: WIA 143.
108 “fantastic”: OA 289.
how happy: EB to RL: “Here I am extremely happy, for the first time in my life.” WIA 143.
“happier than I have felt in ten years”: OA 232.
or twenty: OA 280.
or ever: OA 143.
“It is so much easier”: OA 247.
“the really lofty”: OA 237.
“seasons, fruits”: OA 243.
“nice & relaxing”: OA 232.
“complete confusion”: OA 243.
“extremely affectionate”: WIA 143.
“wonderful . . . likes to read”: OA 257.
“mens”: OA 359.
“superb”: OA 250.
109 “once or
twice a month”: OA 246.
“wander around the world”: WIA 143.
“so beautiful”: OA 243.
“rather elderly”: OA 273.
“enormous”: OA 241.
“way up in the air”: OA 252.
110 “stupendous mountain scenery”: OA 256.
“neck-deep”: WIA 191.
“delicious”: OA 293.
“black with white feet”: OA 256.
“Wishes seem to come true”: OA 244.
“super-bathroom”: OA 267.
“running, rushing water”: OA 272.
“The still explosions”: EB, “The Shampoo,” BP 82.
111 “Giving you what”: Luís de Camões quoted in translation in George Monteiro, Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland & Company, 2012), 15.
“This sort of small,” “It won’t make”: BNY xxv.
“I never thought”: Karl Shapiro quoted in BNY xvi.
“winter . . . when I thought”: WIA 143.
112 “something indecent”: BNY xxvi. In responding to MS’s approving letter, EB writes a rare explanation of her poem: “I am awfully pleased with what you say about the little Shampoo & you understood exactly what I meant and even a little bit more—it’s a nice thought that perhaps the shampoo will arrest Time. . . . The Shampoo is very simple:—Lota has straight long black hair.—I hadn’t seen her for six years or so when I came here and when we looked at each other she was horrified to see I had gone very gray, and I that she had two silver streaks on each side, quite wide. Once I got used to it I liked it—she looks exactly like a chickadee—remember them at Yaddo? & it’s quite chic. Shiny tin basins, all sizes, are very much a feature of Brazilian life—you see them hanging in graduated sizes outside the little hovels people live in—various degrees of shininess—we used an enormous one before we got our now more-or-less-hot-running-water in the bathroom—And I am surrounded with rocks and lichens—they have the sinister coloration of rings around the moon exactly, sometimes—and seem to be undertaking to spread to infinity, like the moon’s, as well —.” EB to MS, September 19, 1953, WU.
sanctified by rings: Paul Swenson, “A Figure in the Tapestry,” Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Gantt, eds. (Logan: Utah State University, 2006), 33.