The focus of these poets on the performative moment emerges even in Lowell’s first letter to Bishop, dated May 23, 1947, and written from his New York apartment, in response to one of Bishop’s regretting a missed meeting due to illness. Opening “Dear Miss Bishop,” it begins in a friendly but comparatively formal way. Then the letter suddenly launches, without transition, into a paragraph of impromptu comic performance. From Lowell’s first letter onward, neither correspondent felt the need for transitions between paragraphs—either could expect the other to follow each successive leap of thought. While much in the correspondence is in some sense historic, impromptu bits of detailed comic or lyric observation would punctuate the letters from both sides for the next three decades, as ordinary folk and distinguished personages (ranging from the modernist sculptor Alexander Calder to the quaintly learned founder of Hires Root Beer) are vividly figured forth in all their eccentric particularity. Among many pen portraits of famous writers, their lively ongoing commentary on the doings and sayings of Randall Jarrell, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Dylan Thomas, and Mary McCarthy feature as highlights. In these pages, too, the austere creator of The Waste Land makes a surprising appearance as “Elbows Eliot,” so named in a Lowell postscript because he “danced so dashingly” with his new wife at a “Charles River boatclub brawl.” Since Bishop and Lowell were at once historic personages, ordinary people, and extraordinarily fresh and funny observers, it should not surprise us that everywhere in the letters one finds a conjunction of hilariously descriptive performance on the one hand and literary history in the making on the other. Often these elements are inextricably intertwined.
Yet their descriptions of obscure individuals observed in passing are perhaps even more compelling. Thus, in a letter from the summer of 1948 in which Bishop has just spoken of several lonely and depressing days enclosed in the fog of Wiscasset, Maine, she writes:
I think almost the last straw here though is the hairdresser, a nice big hearty Maine girl who asks me questions I don’t even know the answers to. She told me: 1, that my hair “don’t feel like hair at all.” 2, I was turning gray practically “under her eyes.” And when I’d said yes, I was an orphan, she said “Kind of awful, ain’t it, ploughing through life alone.” So now I can’t walk downstairs in the morning or upstairs at night without feeling I’m ploughing. There’s no place like New England.
Lowell responds perfectly with a single line in a postscript to his next letter: “There’s something haunting and nihilistic about your hair-dresser.” (...).
As Bishop acknowledged to her fellow New Englander in the letter about her Maine hairdresser, she had in fact been virtually orphaned in early youth, and since then she had been plowing through life very nearly alone. Bishop noted the importance of support from her fellow writers, citing in a 1963 letter from Brazil a remark by Virgil Thomson, who had said: “one of the strange things about poets is the way they keep warm by writing to one another all over the world.” Bishop was born half a world away from Brazil in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911. Her father was William Thomas Bishop, a prosperous building contractor, who died of the still-incurable Bright’s disease when she was eight months old. Her mother, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, never got over the shock of her husband’s death. In 1915, when Bishop was four, her mother returned with her to the Bulmer family home in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Within a year, Bishop’s mother suffered a severe mental breakdown from which she did not recover, and she was placed in a mental institution in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where she died in 1934. Bishop never saw her again, and she vividly portrays this decisive experience of loss in her poignant “In the Village” (1953), a story which evokes the lingering presence of “the scream”—a scream Bishop associates with her mother’s final breakdown:
The scream hangs there like that, unheard, in memory—in the past, in the present, and those years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live, forever—not loud, just alive forever. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village.
Lowell praised this story as “wonderful” when it first appeared in The New Yorker, and in 1962 he composed a poem in quatrains “derived from Elizabeth Bishop’s story” entitled “The Scream.” Lowell frequently mentioned “In the Village” in subsequent letters, and the story antedates his own memoir “91 Revere Street” by three years and the composition of his “Life Studies” sequence by four.
In 1917, the year after her mother’s breakdown, Bishop was claimed by her wealthy paternal grandparents and transported from her beloved Great Village back to Worcester. Bishop observed of this move, in her posthumously published memoir “The Country Mouse”: “I had been brought back unconsulted and against my wishes to the house my father had been born in, to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even from the inverted r’s of my mother’s family. With this surprising set of grandparents, until a few weeks ago no more than names, a new life was about to begin.” In her own mind, “I felt as if I were being kidnapped, even if I wasn’t.” In the months that followed her unwilling return to Worcester, Bishop suffered simultaneous and nearly fatal onsets of asthma and eczema. She would struggle with severe episodes of both disorders for the rest of her life. When her paternal grandparents realized they could not care for her adequately, Bishop was passed among various maternal and paternal relatives. She lived chiefly, until she reached high school age, with her maternal aunt Maud Bulmer Shepherdson in an ethnically diverse lower-middle-class neighborhood in Revere, Massachusetts.
Thus, with these early and involuntary travels and movements up and down the social ladder, Bishop developed a fascination with geography. This may also explain the rapid juxtaposition, in her letters and in her poems, of sharply different peoples, cultures, and perspectives. After years spent quietly observing her passing world or, when the asthma struck, lying in bed “wheezing and reading,” Bishop sufficiently recovered her health to attend boarding school and later Vassar College on funds provided by a trust established by her father. After graduating from Vassar in 1934, a year or two older than most of her classmates because of the time lost to illness, she embarked on an adventurous life of travel that would lead to extended sojourns in Europe, Key West, Mexico, and Brazil and briefer visits to Newfoundland and North Africa, topped near the end of her life by a journey to the Galápagos. As her letters to Lowell show, Bishop’s insecurities seemed to melt away when she was on the move, and it is a widely held tenet of Bishop studies that her famous travels may have been prompted by a search for a sustaining place to be. Although, as One Art: Letters makes clear, she maintained a remarkably extensive circle of friends and correspondents, to many of whom she wrote nearly as voluminously as she did to Lowell, she once told him: “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” Lowell, quoting this remark back to Bishop nearly a decade later, was recalling the “long swimming and sunning Stonington [Maine] day” in 1948 when Bishop disclosed to Lowell key aspects of her early history. It was at this moment, as Lowell would recall in that 1957 letter, that he came nearest to proposing marriage to her.
Like Bishop’s, Lowell’s early life was deeply troubled by childhood experiences of emotional uncertainty and loss, and his work, like hers, is haunted by painful recollections of his youth. The enthusiasm they display in their letters for each other’s self-exploratory writing about childhood shows that this shared experience was one source of their lasting affinity. Lowell’s memoir “91 Revere Street” (1956)—inspired, as he acknowledged, by Bishop’s earlier “In the Village”—focuses on the year 1927, when Lowell was ten years old and his father, Robert Traill Spence Lowell III, was making up his mind under strong pressure from his wife, born Charlotte Winslow, to resign from a promising career in the navy to take up her preferred mode of living, as an upper-crust Bostonian. This memoir, in combination with the family sequence from Life Studies, makes it clear that Lowell’s parents were ill-matched and played out their difficulties in front of their only son. As Lowell recalled in “91 Revere Street,” “I felt drenched in my parents’ passions.”These passions took the form of ongoing, nightly verbal warfare overheard by the young poet-in-the-making during “the two years my mother spent in trying to argue my father into resigning from the Navy.” Lowell’s memoir revisits the “arthritic spiritual pains” of this period, during which “Mother had violently set her heart on the resignation. She was hysterical in her calm.” The wrenching effect of this not-altogether-civil domestic combat went deep into Lowell’s psyche, and his father’s ultimate defenselessness, which led him to mumble, “Yes, yes, yes,” in nighttime conversations overheard by their eavesdropping son, made it clear that his father would not be able to defend his son from a mother whose threatening presence was a daily reality for Lowell: “I grew less willing to open my mouth. I bored my parents, they bored me.”
It was Lowell’s mother who held the reins of power within his family. Lowell’s father was a descendant of one of Boston’s most famous families, but his was a secondary branch that had cut its ties with Boston two generations before. Lowell’s great-grandfather, the first Robert Traill Spence Lowell, was an Anglican minister and the elder brother of the poet James Russell Lowell. This Lowell ancestor was a sometime missionary to Newfoundland, the pastor of a working class parish in Newark, New Jersey, a poet and novelist of minor reputation, and for three years the headmaster of St. Mark’s School near Boston, the boarding school which Lowell would one day attend. Despite these accomplishments “The clan as a whole was inclined to look at him just a little askance as déraciné,” or so observes Ferris Greenslet in his elegant family history The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds. Perhaps the principal reason for these sidelong looks of disapproval by the family’s principal worthies was because this forebear ultimately relocated from Boston to “live with his wife’s people in Duanesburg [New York].” The maternal Traill Spence line seems also, according to Greenslet, to have been the hereditary source of the bipolar disorder that infiltrated this branch of the family tree. Bishop may well have been aware of these bits of Lowelliana, since Greenslet was the editor of her first book at Houghton Mifflin and in October 1946, a few months before she met Lowell, Bishop congratulated Greenslet on the book’s recent publication and declared her eagerness to read it, “tonight, I hope.” Lowell was exaggerating, but not by much, when he said that he didn’t know he was “a Lowell” until Allen Tate made clear to him the significance—and usefulness for himself as a poet—of his family position.
Lowell’s mother, a descendant of the famous Winslow line, was the family’s acknowledged aristocrat and its dyed-in-the-wool Bostonian, whereas when his father served as third in command of the local navy yard, he was by comparison a mere transplant and also comparatively impecunious. Without the added support of Arthur Winslow, Charlotte’s wealthy father—who had made a fortune as a mining engineer before settling back into the embrace of his native city—the family would have been dependent on Commander Lowell’s modest navy pay. Just as Bishop had been passed along among various grandparents, uncles, and aunts, Lowell was raised more by nurses and schoolmistresses and -masters than by his own mother or father, and he felt himself a victim both of his parents’ neglect and of his mother’s narcissistic overcontrol. For despite the fact that—setting James Russell and Amy Lowell aside—even the judges and captains of industry and Harvard presidents in the main Lowell line had dabbled in verse, and that his Lowell great-grandfather had been a poet of a certain note, it was Lowell’s mother who declared poetry to be an impossible occupation for any son of hers. Lowell wrote to Bishop of his recently widowed mother in 1951, “Well, under the best conditions, of course, I can’t begin to make sense out of her or to her. Each year since I was eighteen, it’s gotten worse.” Three years later, the death of Charlotte Lowell and her son’s journey to Italy to recover his mother’s body would trigger yet another overwhelming bipolar episode.
Certainly, these poets enjoyed real social and cultural advantages. Given their painful early histories, however, and their often turbulent personal vicissitudes, it is not surprising that they frequently found themselves viewing the world, as Adrienne Rich noted of Bishop, through “the eye of the outsider.” Partly for that reason, friendship for them was a matter of the greatest possible importance. Lowell shared with Bishop a real talent for friendship. Each maintained many intense lifelong friendships, and, as Peter Taylor noted of Lowell, loyalty to friends was a crucial personal value. Lowell wrote to Bishop in 1959,
Oh we won’t ever fall out, God help us! Aren’t people difficult. I think, perhaps I have almost more warm intellectual friends than anyone, and have lost none except Delmore Schwartz. But it’s like walking on eggs. All of them have to be humored, flattered, drawn out, allowed to say very petulant things to you. I’m sure they have to bear the same things from me—however, I don’t feel the need to be diplomatic with you and Peter Taylor.
Although they did, on a few occasions, disagree—most strenuously over Lowell’s use of Hardwick’s letters in The Dolphin—and although theirs, like all friendships, contained certain areas of ambivalence, the longevity of their friendship, and its intensity, was never really in doubt.
Lowell, facing a void when it came to parental confirmation, often sought as friends elders who could also serve as mentors. Two of his earliest mentors were the poets and critics Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. Tate, living in his native Tennessee, provided shelter at his home, Monteagle, when Lowell, after a violent quarrel in 1938, left his family and his undergraduate career at Harvard behind. Lowell notes of his arrival at the Tates’ that “Like a torn cat, I was taken in when I needed help,” famously living in a tent because the house shared by Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon, already bulged with writers. Lowell would remain under that sheet of Sears, Roebuck canvas in the yard for most of the summer. The following year, Ransom invited Lowell to room in his faculty house at Kenyon College, where the elder poet was taking up an endowed chair and the editorship of the fledgling Kenyon Review. There, Lowell shared the house’s upper story with Jarrell, three years his senior, who had long been a disciple of Tate and Ransom and who was already serving as an English instructor and tennis coach at Kenyon. Jarrell’s readings of and comments on his early poems helped Lowell to distill the style for that Pulitzer Prize–winning second book, Lord Weary’s Castle. Bishop, six years Lowell’s senior, was, like Jarrell, old enough to be a mentor but young enough to be a peer. In the years that followed their initial meeting, Bishop gradually took over Jarrell’s role as the most important peer-mentor in the Lowell pantheon.
Yet if Bishop served a vital psychological and professional function for Lowell, he served a function for Bishop that may have been still more vital. While Bishop displayed a lively readiness for tackling certain practical details and was accustomed to roughing it when need be, she could seem helpless when facing major life decisions. Given her ongoing sense of diffidence about her abilities—performing at poetry readings, for example, made her deeply anxious—her approach to her career as a poet, despite her profound ambitions, sometimes threatened to be overwhelmed by passivity or shyness. Not surprisingly, she often chose as friends or as lovers people who had the skills and the interest to help her negotiate an overpowering world. Lowell, for his part, had quickly developed remarkable skills when it came to career management and, along with his brilliant reputation, maintained an extensive network of talented and influential friends. Thus, he was in a position to be of great help to Bishop with regard to her poetic career, and he put those skills entirely at Bishop’s service. While Bishop lived remote from urban centers in Key West or, for two decades, in Brazil, Lowell took it upon himself to be her advocate for awards and fellowships. Thus, when Bishop hinted in 1960 that inflation in Brazil was eating into her remaining income and that a grant would come in very handy, Lowell immediately brought this to the attention of the Chapelbrook Foundation, who promptly indicated their readiness to support Bishop’s writing plans. Bishop wrote back, “Heavens Cal! That was SERVICE. I feel as if I had just held out my hand to the skies.” When she was about to take her first teaching job, at the University of Washington in Seattle (a job not arranged by Lowell), he wrote with helpful pointers on how to enter upon a teaching career late in life, as Lowell himself had done in his mid-thirties. Twice, when she was chosen for major literary awards and was reluctant to travel from Brazil to America to receive them, Bishop tabbed Lowell to do the honors of formally collecting the prize. When in 1970, following the tragic death of Lota three years earlier, Bishop’s Brazilian life had changed, and she was feeling trapped there, with little cash and tied to a partially renovated house that she could not sell, Lowell arranged for Bishop to succeed him in his teaching job at Harvard as he sought a new life, with a new wife, Caroline Blackwood, in England. Lowell’s arrangement, three years later, to compensate Bishop for her letters as part of the sale of his papers was part of his effort to support and sustain Bishop in her endeavor to make a new life at Harvard.
The meeting of Bishop and Lowell in 1947 was fateful, both on a personal and on an artistic level. Bishop and Lowell were poets preoccupied with loss and with the curious, indistinct borderline between public and private, fiction and fact. In studying each other’s lives and art while following their own “so different natures and destinies,” each learned to expand his or her artistic reach across their common ground. Their poetry would very likely have been different, and their lives would certainly have been different, if they had not met. Moreover, their meeting led to the creation of an extraordinary body of correspondence whose claims to canonical status as literature must certainly be considered. What Paulin stresses in his impromptu “poetics of the familiar letter” is the quality of performative immediacy, and that is surely vital to these letters. Yet, as the letters accumulated over three decades, they took on further qualities that would have been difficult to foresee—in particular the characteristics of continuity, coherence, and development. Read from beginning to end, or even in sustained, yearlong stretches, the letters establish not just an ongoing dialogical interchange between peers and equals but a compelling narrative line. They tell a story that is immersed in the quotidian, yet one that constantly intersects with public and private history. And it emerges as a story with a surprising degree of integrity as art.
Any individual poet’s “Selected Letters,” however brilliant, must be of necessity partial and miscellaneous. A multivolume “Complete Letters,” however inclusive, must be of necessity both one-sided and diffuse. On the other hand, these letters between Bishop and Lowell, by combining spontaneous performance focused on the moment with narrative coherence and development, may be seen, perhaps, to take on characteristics that one commonly associates with more traditional canonical genres. While the literary scene may seem an arena of constant change, preconceptions about literary genres change very slowly. Yet Bishop and Lowell themselves shared a perception that letters could be literature—and letters like these might begin to challenge preconceptions of correspondence as a secondary literary genre. Moreover, these letters link the separate published canons of these two artists in remarkable ways as we watch their parallel development as poets, as people, and as epistolary stylists. Throughout their lives both Bishop and Lowell were constantly exploring and questioning traditional artistic boundaries, so it seems fitting that we find them pushing those boundaries, once again and posthumously, in these letters.
Thomas Travisano
Words In Air
the Complete Correspondence Between
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
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