My Famous Evening

by Howard Norman

  Sandra had a key to the house. Stepping into the kitchen was like stepping into one’s own reading, let alone an earlier time. The owner, a friend of Sandra’s, was not at home. The house felt very much lived in, not museum-like in the least, though it is dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop’s memory and work and more or less open to the public by appointment. We signed the guest book, perused the literature on a small table: scholarly articles (including Sandra’s), Elizabeth Bishop’s books, several photographs of the house at various times in the twentieth century. On the wall of the sitting room was a particularly haunting photograph of a baptism, in an icy lake or stream. Standers-by are wearing thick coats, scarves, boots, gloves. “Talk about coming awake to the Lord!” Sandra quipped. “More like startling awake to the Lord!”

  Sandra is the best possible tour guide. She provided us with the house’s architectural history, pointed out objects referenced in Bishop’s writings, all delivered in an informal yet respectful manner. On the second floor, which somehow felt crowded with rooms, we stood in front of Elizabeth’s room.

  It is startlingly small. Emma was drawn to a pair of scissors locking closed the slant window, and took several photographs of it. She then took still lifes in other rooms, the tops of bureaus, mirrors, other compositions and tableaux.

  As we stood in the largest bedroom, Sandra sighed deeply. “This, of course, is where the scream took place,” she said. “This is where Elizabeth’s mother cried out. She was having her nervous breakdown, and some time after was sent to hospital. And Elizabeth never saw her again.”

  This statement, for all its biographical compression, seemed largely for Millan’s and Emma’s benefit, as if to say, Things were difficult in this house and it’s best to say it directly.

  “You might remember, Emma,” Sandra said, “Elizabeth’s story ‘In The Village’ begins, ‘A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotia village.’”

  Sandra Barry on the front porch of Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home

  “Amazing story,” Emma said, “—and it could freak you out if you let it. But it’s very cool being in this house. But kind of sad, too.”

  “Well,” Sandra said, “the room we’re standing in is where that sentence is derived from.”

  The actual, physical location from which a sentence is “derived” makes an impression. Besides which, I happened to be holding a copy of Collected Prose and read the second paragraph of “In The Village:”

  She stood in the large front bedroom with sloping walls on either side, papered in wide white and dim-gold stripes. Later it was she who gave the scream.

  “Sometimes—and it’s simply my inclination, I suppose,” Sandra said, “I associate the story of Elizabeth’s mother with a kind of Victorian tale, of family, of madness, silence, absence, things spoken of and not spoken of. But one shouldn’t romanticize it. It was all so painful. It always strikes me as so, I don’t know, generous, just how much actual detail Elizabeth gives us in her stories.”

  We visit the first-floor rooms again. In the sitting room, I tell Sandra that when Jane and I had stopped by this house in 1984, we had seen a copy of the New Yorker containing “In The Village” on a table. “Do you recall first reading it?” I had asked Hazel, Elizabeth’s distant cousin by marriage, then living in the house. Her answer struck me then, and later to an even greater extent, as epitomizing rural Nova Scotian social restraint, all the while acknowledging the fundamental unpredictability of life.

  “Well, you see,” Hazel had said, “it’s all true, everything Elizabeth wrote. It’s beautifully written, of course.” She paused to stare at the magazine, then out the window. “I’ve never understood, though, how Elizabeth could tell so many strangers what happened here.”

  Later, Jane and I speculated on whether Hazel had even an inkling of just how many “strangers” had, over the years, read “In The Village.”

  “Oh, but I suppose that’s what great writers do,” Hazel continued.

  On the walk to the Blakie House, we didn’t speak for a while, then I asked Sandra how, to her mind, she was perceived in Great Village.

  “I trust I’m perceived as someone who cares deeply about the village,” she said. “I’ve always advocated that the work of the Elizabeth Bishop Society needs to remain centered here, that the village is the nexus, in a way, in our efforts to honor her life and work. I suppose those in the village who know me regard me favorably because I’m not really from away. I don’t think people view me as any sort of professional; that is, I’m viewed differently from academics.

  “I would hope that Great Village folks view me kindly. I would be grateful for that. The people who know me always seem glad to see me when I visit. Probably some view me as a kind of caretaker of Elizabeth Bishop’s legacy, in a local sort of way. And that suits me just fine.”

  Later the same day I walked to the small post office and mailed two letters, one placed inside a tin candy box I’d purchased in the general store. Standing in the post office, I thought about what Chekhov, master chronicler of village life, wrote of one of his characters: “The beautiful and uneasy privilege of visiting the house of such a sullen and joyful childhood, both usual and unusual for the times, where certain inhabitants, the ones that should be in someone’s diary, seemed to have the deepest heart, the deepest soul, the deepest observance of time simply by their natural inclinations.” Through Sandra’s portrait of her, I felt this about Elizabeth Bishop in her childhood.

  In a certain, selfish regard, I had wanted to sit all night in the kitchen of Elizabeth Bishop’s house, candles lit, conversation between Jane and Sandra a kind of séance, bringing Miss Bishop into the present. Millan and Emma and I would observe from a corner, or sitting on the stairs. On the other hand, I had experienced a disquieting sense of trespass in the house, much more difficult, at least for me, to articulate. Partly it had to do with the fact that Sandra’s and Jane’s knowledge of Bishop’s life seemed more appropriately well-met with the privilege of setting foot in the house itself, a house I could best relate to only impressionistically. Partly, too, it had to do with the haunting power of Bishop’s own writing, especially the story “In The Village.” We had read the story aloud in the car, and then, later, had stood in the room in which the scream had sounded; all of this reminded me of Bishop’s own thought: “Life and memory of it so compressed they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?”

  I suddenly did not wish to know more “facts” about Bishop’s life. No more anecdotes. Not for a while, at least. I simply wanted to time-travel, to have lived in Great Village at the beginning of the century, to erase all vicariousness and replace it with quotidian life. It was a feeling (as so often happens in my life) of nostalgia for a time and place I never experienced. No doubt, too, given our age of terrorism, the agitated density of daily existence, resident in that nostalgia was a precise longing for peace-of-mind, early twentieth-century sea air to breathe, the ability to breathe it calmly and collect one’s thoughts.

  Yet the life of Elizabeth Bishop insistently disallows sentimentality. Because, in the very least, we know her childhood in Great Village contained its severities, along with what Emma called, “just normal kid stuff, like long walks to go swimming.”

  “Yes,” Hazel had said on our visit in 1984 (I had written it down and kept it all of these years), “Elizabeth wrote beautifully about such painful things, didn’t she. If you don’t feel things deeply as a child, and see things clearly, you could never write like that later on. Oh, I’m sure of that.”

  The next day we drove to Parrsboro and bought sandwiches at a bakery. We had a picnic in the shade of a gazebo near the wooden statue of the giant Mi’kmaq culture hero, Glooskap, in a small park at the intersection of two roads. Jane and Sandra spoke about Elizabeth Bishop’s letters; an eavesdropper might be convinced that they’d indeed memorized all five hundred letters in One Art. These dozens of epistolary relationships, working in concert between the covers of a book, provide as pow
erful an autobiography as could be expected; an astonishing collection, really.

  After lunch we drove the winding coastal road to Advocate Harbour. I was hoping to find the house I’d lived in in the late 1970s, when it was loaned to me by playwright Sam Shepard. I hadn’t been back to Advocate Harbour in many years. One does not necessarily expect any landscape in Nova Scotia to change much at all. “The upkeep is a bit more impressive,” is all I could come up with when we entered the vicinity of the house. The area had been turned into a well-kept park, with a railinged path down to the beach, and it took a while to recognize the big house on the hill.

  “That’s got to be it,” Emma said. “There’s no other house around. Dad, just walk up and if somebody’s home, tell them you used to live there.”

  Sound advice, neither too presumptuous nor allowing the regret of not having tried. I walked up the long dirt driveway. When I reached the house, I saw that it was being wonderfully renovated. There were stacks of plywood in the yard. Three men, each holding a hammer, stopped to look over. I waved. Two of the carpenters went directly back to work. The third, however, walked across the yard. “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I used to live here.”

  The carpenter, a handsome fellow in what I took to be his late thirties, or very early forties, turned out to be co-owner, with his wife, of the house. “I’m Stuart,” he said. We shook hands. “Howard Norman,” I said. “I lived here in the late seventies.”

  “A friend of Sam’s, then—did you ever own the place?”

  “No, stayed here is all.”

  “Well, come on up. My wife Megan’s inside. She’ll want to meet you.”

  “I’ve got a bunch of people with me. My family and two friends. Is it okay if I get them? I’ve been telling them about this house for years.”

  “We’ll get you something to eat.”

  I walked back to the car, gathered everyone, and we all walked back to the house. By this time Megan had come out onto the lawn. Introductions were made. When Stuart and Megan turned and started back to the house, I noticed a somewhat strange expression cross Sandra’s face. She whispered something to Emma, who in turn whispered something to Millan. I could not for the life of me figure this out.

  We toured the house. I showed everyone my “old” room on the second floor, which was being painted.

  Emma took photographs of the piano downstairs, the same piano that had been in the house when I lived there. Megan and Stuart were splendid hosts, on an obviously busy day. They took us through each room, saying what had been done to shore it up, what personal touches they’d added, and so on. Clearly, it was going to be a beautiful, dignified house; even amid the disarray it already felt like a family lived a rich, full life in it.

  “I heard some pretty famous people came out to visit here, back in the seventies,” Stuart said.

  “I think so,” I said. “Sam was already pretty famous. But he kept a low profile up here. That’s my understanding, at least. It was one of the great gifts of my life, this house, no matter how brief a time I stayed in it. It’s like that Neil Young song, ‘All my changes were there.’”

  “I know what you mean,” Stuart said. “It’s a good place to think things through.”

  Addresses and telephone numbers were exchanged. Stuart said, “I’ve put our Los Angeles address on that piece of paper, too. I stay here through lobster season. That’s one of my jobs. In the winter we’re in Los Angeles, mostly.” Mention of Los Angeles seemed at best enigmatic, but I had long ago ceased having any presumptions about how, where, and why people lived where they did. Anyway, there had been, in just that hour’s time, a flood of memories. It was a very pleasant visit.

  In the car, on the road back to Great Village, Sandra looked at Emma and said, “Can you believe it?”

  Jane and I still were clueless. “Believe what?” I said.

  “Dad,” said Emma, with dramatic exasperation, clearly shared by Millan and, more mercifully, by Sandra, “that was Megan Follows. She was Anne of Green Gables! God, you’re really out of it!”

  “The most famous actress in all of Canada, I should imagine,” Sandra said. “Anne of Green Gables is how she’s first and even best known, but she’s had many remarkable roles since. Many. She’s quite brilliant.”

  “Do you think Elizabeth Bishop ever read Anne of Green Gables?” Millan said.

  After four days on Cape Breton Island, we returned to Halifax. On our last evening together this time around, I still had some questions for Sandra Barry, both pertaining specifically to her reading of Elizabeth Bishop and herself, as well.

  In the library/sitting room, tape recorder on the table, I said, “What was your earliest reading of Elizabeth Bishop? For that matter, Sandra, what was the progress of your thinking that led to such a dedicated project, your book, Lifting Yesterday?”

  “It begins, really, in 1988,” Sandra said. “But there’s a preamble. My love of historical fiction and nonfiction led me to two degrees in Canadian history, a B.A. and M.A. at Acadian University and the University of New Brunswick. When I completed these degrees, I was at sixes and sevens about what to do with my life. I wanted to be a scholar and writer, but just didn’t know how to do that. Rather than grab the bull by the horns, I retreated back to university. In the fall of 1987, I returned to the University of New Brunswick to do a qualifying year for a creative writing M.A. One of the courses during the winter term was ‘American Poets Between the Wars,’ a seminar taught by Robert Cockburn.

  “The assignment in class was to give a presentation on one of four poets, Robert Lowell, James Dickey, James Wright, or Elizabeth Bishop. I went to the bookstore and bought the texts, which included Bishop’s Collected Poems 1927-79. But before I cracked the cover, I went to the library and took out Collected Prose. The very first thing I read was ‘Primer Class.’ And as I read the memoir of her early life, I felt as though I was reading my own experience, or at least something very akin to it. I know we’ve spoken of this, Howard, but there it is again. I thought, ‘Oh, Elizabeth Bishop is not really an American. She’s a Maritimer.’ I say Maritimer instead of Nova Scotian, because it speaks more to geography and landscape, rather than a geopolitical entity. What happened to me in that little academic setting, that literature course, was, for the first time in my life, where I connected art and artist at the most profound level I could manage.

  “Now, I realize that there’s nothing especially unusual about any of this—in the wide world, I mean. Many people have such moments. However, it was unusual in my life. Elizabeth Bishop’s work, reading it, studying it, writing about it, all of it has marked a profound change for me.”

  At breakfast, tea and sweet breads, slices of melon, coffee, I said to Sandra, “I hate to leave, really. I always hate to leave Nova Scotia. I really hate it.”

  “I’m sad to see all of you go,” she said.

  “It’s been fun, hasn’t it?”

  “Great fun.”

  “How’s your life here in Halifax, your working life and so on? Do you mind me asking? It’s just so I can think about it on the ferry back to the States.”

  “Well, I have a pretty simple life here in Halifax,” Sandra said. “Partly, it’s because of financial restraints, my meager resources, you know. But also it’s because it’s my nature to keep things low-key, I think. Organized and uncluttered. I do my work. I do a lot of reading and writing. I spend a lot of time in solitude. Sometimes I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s question in one of her letters, something like, ‘Do you think the Great Village house would be a good place to retire in my old age?’ I apply the question to myself, only substituting the Annapolis Valley.”

  “So, then, Sandra,” I said, “the real question of travel would be where you wish to retire, to live out your days?”

  “Yes. I enjoy life here in Halifax. But somehow I expect that I shouldn’t end up in the city. My old age should take place in a village.”

  EPILOGUE

  Robert Frank

  Eq
uals Late Autumn

  Late October. 6:00 a.m. In my hostel

  room near Mabou,

  when the pre-set radio “wake up”

  came on (a Chopin nocturne).

  I had been dreaming of Robert Frank’s photograph

  “The Mail Box at the Road to Findlay Point, Mabou,

  Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Fall 1976.”

  (In the dream the photograph was a billboard,

  the sea behind it.)

  This photograph fairly defines

  what Picasso called

  “the reality of dreams in art,”

  that is, a perfectly composed visual duet

  between the unconscious and conscious mind.

  It looks like a “painted” photograph;

  in fact it is signed by both Robert Frank and his wife,

  painter June Leaf,

  who added brushstrokes.

  The photograph evokes a dawn or dusk-lit

  fog besotted smoky ocher hue.

  A road gently curves left to right along a headland.

  Except for an unbroken stretch

  of sky across the top, the photograph

  consists of seven adjacent panels,

  each slightly aslant, and was taken

  with a Polaroid Instamatic camera.

  The road moves us through time

  left to right. However, the panel

  at the far right, the seventh panel,

  abruptly alters the perspective,

  because it squares a view straight on out,

  which depicts a car (or is it a small truck?)

  trundling along toward a different headland.

  One way to interpret this is that the car