One Art: Letters

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Introduction

Chronology

[ONE] 1928–1936

SCHOOL, VASSAR, NEW YORK, EUROPE

[TWO] 1937–1945

KEY WEST, EUROPE, NEW YORK

[THREE] 1946–1951

North & South, MAINE, HAITI, YADDO, WASHINGTON

[FOUR] 1952–1967

BRAZIL, A Cold Spring, SEATTLE, Questions of Travel, NEW YORK

[FIVE] 1968–1979

SAN FRANCISCO, OURO PRÊTO, CAMBRIDGE, Geography III, NORTH HAVEN, LEWIS WHARF

Notes and Acknowledgments

Index

Books by Elizabeth Bishop

Copyright

Introduction

BY ROBERT GIROUX

I

In a tribute to Elizabeth Bishop after her death, poet James Merrill cited her instinctive, modest, lifelong impersonations of an ordinary woman, an acute and witty observation about an extraordinary woman who is regarded as one of the major poets of our century. Richard Wilbur called her poems inexhaustibly fresh. Harold Bloom said her poetry stands at the edge where what is most worth saying is all but impossible to say. Octavio Paz wrote: The enormous power of reticence—that is the great lesson of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop … To hear it is not to hear a lesson; it is a pleasure, verbal and mental, as great as a spiritual experience. Frank Bidart—a close friend of Elizabeth in her last years (to whom she left her library)—has shown that her poetry also has a dark side since too often she has been considered ‘cool’ and ‘perfect,’ and not the profound, even tragic artist she is.

She once described her younger self as painfully—no, excruciatingly—shy. Only at the urging of her friend Robert Lowell, who recognized her genius early on, did she reluctantly agree to accept the post of Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress, succeeding him and Léonie Adams in this office, known today as that of the Poet Laureate. Her sad and humorous letters around this period show that it was a lonely and difficult time for her.

During her life she wrote several thousand letters, from which the selection in this book has been made. The letters here cover fifty years—from 1928, when she was seventeen (and already a poet), to her death in 1979—and they represent only a fraction of her output. When Elizabeth Bishop’s letters are published (as they will be), Lowell predicted, she will be recognized as not only one of the best, but also one of the most prolific writers of our century. In a sense the letters constitute her autobiography, though they were not intended as such: she was not recording her life but was simply keeping in touch with her friends and correspondents. Inevitably, the details of her little known private life emerge in these pages. As one would have expected from so honest a nature as hers (the phrase is Richard Wilbur’s), she was explicit about the great love of her life, which lasted fifteen years and ended in tragedy. When accepting the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976, she revealed in her biographical notes that for some fifteen years … [I] shared a house in the mountains near Petrópolis and an apartment in Rio de Janeiro with a Brazilian friend, Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares. Part Four of this book covers their life in Brazil, beginning late in 1951 and ending with Lota’s suicide in New York in 1967. Elizabeth describes her years in Brazil, before Lota’s illness, as the happiest of her life.

*   *   *

One Art, the title of this book (taken from her villanelle), stands for the art of poetry, to which she devoted her life. William Butler Yeats believed that The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work, and Elizabeth chose the latter. Her meticulous striving for perfection in her verse is legendary, immortalized by Robert Lowell in his poem For Elizabeth Bishop 4: Do / you still hang your words in air, ten years / unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps / or empties for the unimaginable phrase— / unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect? She started to write one of her most famous poems, The Moose, in 1956, promising her Aunt Grace she would dedicate it to her when it was ready; she mailed her the finished poem sixteen years later. The natural, unstrained language of this long, subtle, and marvelous poem, describing an interrupted bus trip from Nova Scotia, reads as if it had been written in one sitting. (Elizabeth was asked to read The Moose at the Harvard commencement in 1972 as the Phi Beta Kappa poem, and considered it a great compliment when a student who was asked what he thought of it said: Well, as far as poems go, it wasn’t bad.)

One Art also stands for the art of letter writing, which she practiced more casually and with more prolific results than composing poems. She was not only a good letter writer herself, she enjoyed reading other people’s letters. Her library contained scores of books of letters—the Elizabethans, George Herbert, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Austen, Sydney Smith, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, etc. Not many people know that she gave a seminar at Harvard on letter writing as an art. Limited to fifteen students, the course was listed in 1971–72 as English 2902. Conference Group: Letters—Readings in Personal Correspondence, Famous and Infamous, from the 16th to 20th Centuries. She told a friend that the kind of letters and letter writers she had in mind for her class were Mrs. Carlyle, Chekhov, my Aunt Grace, Keats, a letter found in the street, etc.—not only literary or formal letters, that is, but human and eloquent (even perhaps illiterate) ones, like those sent to her by Jimmy O’Shea of Fall River, aged seventy, when she briefly worked at a correspondence school after leaving Vassar (see her memoir The U.S.A. School of Writing).

She said that once, while staying with her friend the atomic physicist Jane Dewey, she wrote forty letters in a single day. This was the exception, of course; she usually complained of being behind in her correspondence. She wrote her close friend Mrs. Kit Barker: I am sorry for people who can’t write letters. But I suspect also that you and I, Ilse, love to write them because it’s kind of like working without really doing it. Some letters are more carefully composed than others, like those to Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell—especially the one written in response to his recollected near-proposal of marriage. Her most spontaneous letters always display her famous eye for interesting or unexpected details—of birds (like her beloved toucan, Uncle Sammy), animals (her cats’ antics), flora and fauna, and the behavior of children. There are a few cris de coeur, whose recipients were asked to burn or destroy them, but since the letters have remained extant, they are here. Letters like the one she wrote Robie Macauley (who had just moved into her Boston neighborhood and asked her about local stores), and the letter she wrote John Frederick Nims on the day she died (objecting to too many footnotes explaining words in her poems for students who could look them up and learn their meaning for themselves) are Elizabeth at her most characteristic as a letter writer.

I first met her in 1957 at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York, when we were drawing up a contract for her translation of The Diary of Helena Morley; I published this book and all her subsequent books of poetry. She was reserved and formal at the beginning, and also attractive and intelligent. Our mutual interests in poetry and music (especially opera; occasionally she was my guest at the Met), and the fact that for years I had known Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, two of her closest friends, helped our publishing relationship deepen into a friendship that lasted until her death twenty-two years later. Her delightful poem Manners tells a great deal about Elizabeth: she always cherished, as well as practiced, good manners. Though highly sophisticated, she possessed at the same time a down-to-earth quality which perhaps came from her early upbringing in Nova Scotia. She not only had common sense and a superlative sense of humor, but enjoyed calling herself a country mouse, which made it easy to impersonate an ordinary woman. Among her many domestic gifts was that of being a superb and inventive cook (Lota’s nickname for her was Cookie). She knew a great deal about painting, and excelled at watercolors, as the exhibit of thirty-seven of her drawings and sketches at the Key West Literary Seminar in January 1993 proved. When depressed she had trouble with drinking, but in all our years I never once saw her drunk. There are degrees of alcoholism, as any editor or publisher quickly learns. Despite books by writers (who never knew her) labeling her an addicted alcoholic, the letters show she was at times a heavy drinker, with a serious but not an all-consuming problem. After she took on her first teaching job (at age fifty-five), a professor wrote her, You are the soberest poet we’ve had here yet. Only an understanding of the whole cycle of her life provides the key to her character and genius.

II

When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived, she told Robert Lowell in 1948, on an occasion he never forgot. The most significant fact of her biography seems to be that early in life she became an orphan. She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1911; her father, William Thomas Bishop, died when she was eight months old. He had been an executive of Bishop Contractors, a New England construction firm founded by his father at the turn of the century. Her mother, Gertrude Bulmer of Great Village, Nova Scotia, never recovered from the shock of her husband’s sudden death; it seriously affected her mental health. After 1916 Elizabeth, a child of five, never saw her mother again; Mrs. Bishop died in an asylum in 1934. Elizabeth was raised in Great Village by her Bulmer grandmother and went to primary school there. I used to ask Grandmother, when I said goodbye [for school], to promise me not to die before I came home. She had an unhappy interlude of nine months living with her well-to-do paternal grandparents in Worcester (see her memoir The Country Mouse), and felt she was on the same terms in the house as their Boston bull terrier, Beppo, and she became asthmatic and developed eczema. Her health improved when she went to live near Boston with Aunt Maude, her mother’s sister.

Her excellent education was financed by a legacy from her father, which dwindled over the years through inflation, so that she was more and more dependent on grants, fellowships, awards, magazine and book royalties, and finally teaching. After attending the Walnut Hill boarding school, where she met Frani Blough and published her first poems in the student magazine, she followed Frani a year later to Vassar College. Among her other college friends were Mary McCarthy, Louise Crane, Margaret Miller, and Eleanor and Eunice Clark. She graduated in 1934, the year in which she met Marianne Moore and the year in which her mother died. Worried about the choice of a career, she first thought of becoming a composer (she studied music at college and later was a pupil of Ralph Kirkpatrick, the noted harpsichordist and musicologist), and then a doctor (I got myself enrolled at the Cornell Medical School … Marianne Moore discouraged me from going on with that). In 1935 her poems were published for the first time in a book, Trial Balances, an anthology introducing new poets, in which she was presented by Marianne Moore.

Not until four years after they started corresponding did she address Dear Miss Moore as Dear Marianne, and only at the latter’s invitation. She genuinely admired, deferred to, and delighted in the friendship of the older poet. I never left Cumberland Street [Moore’s Brooklyn address], her memoir Efforts of Affection reveals, without feeling happier: uplifted, even inspired, determined to be good, to work harder, not to worry about what other people thought, never to try to publish anything until I thought I’d done my best with it, no matter how many years it took—or never to publish at all. David Kalstone’s brilliant posthumous book, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (1989), has analyzed Miss Moore’s role as her early mentor. He also noted their inevitable point of artistic departure—that moment of liberation which came on October 17, 1940, over Elizabeth’s ambitious war poem Roosters. Miss Moore and her mother had rewritten it, changing the language, the triplet rhyme scheme, and even the title (their choice was The Cock). Elizabeth firmly rejected their revisions; in capital letters she humorously proclaimed ELIZABETH KNOWS BEST and published Roosters in The New Republic as she had originally written it. Fortunately, despite this literary disagreement, their friendship lasted until the older poet’s death in 1972.

After leaving Vassar, Elizabeth in July 1934 rented an apartment in Greenwich Village at 16 Charles Street, where her classmate Margaret Miller was briefly her roommate. But it was another classmate, Louise Crane, who became her closest friend and lover in these years. Louise was not an intellectual and had flunked her freshman year, despite tutoring by Elizabeth and Margaret Miller; she attended classes for three years but never graduated. She came from a distinguished family, her father, Winthrop Murray Crane, having been governor of Massachusetts and a U.S. senator. Her mother, who moved to New York after her husband’s death, was a founder of and a leading spirit at the new Museum of Modern Art, as well as founder of the Dalton School (also in New York) named after their hometown in Massachusetts. The family fortune came from Crane Paper, a company which produced not only superior notepaper but the silk-threaded paper (invented by Mr. Crane) on which U.S. currency is printed.

Though Mary McCarthy claimed that Louise was a comic butt at Vassar, with big blue eyes and a tendency to be overweight, other classmates admired her generosity, her sense of humor and adventure, and her intuitive good taste in modern art. She loved jazz and made friends of the best Harlem musicians; that’s how Elizabeth met Billie Holiday, for whom she wrote her poem Songs for a Colored Singer. At college Louise drove a Dusenberg and was known as a fast driver; when Margaret Miller was injured in a car accident in France (see the letter of August 9, 1937), Louise was at the wheel and escaped injury, as did Elizabeth. Some of these early trips abroad were partly financed by Louise. On one occasion she and Elizabeth stayed in Paris at the commodious apartment of Mrs. Crane’s friend, the Comtesse de Chambrun (born Clara Longworth and a sister-in-law of the famous Alice), where Elizabeth wrote Cirque d’Hiver, her first poem to appear in The New Yorker, as well as Paris, 7 A.M. Louise was generous to artists of all kinds, including Marianne Moore, who gave readings at Mrs. Crane’s salons at 820 Fifth Avenue. It was through Louise Crane and Monroe Wheeler of MoMA that Elizabeth first met Lota, during the latter’s New York visit in 1942. Elizabeth’s discovery of Key West can be attributed to Louise, who loved fishing; they jointly bought a house there at 624 White Street in 1938. Elizabeth lived in Key West for nine years, with frequent trips to New York. Though their affair ended before the war, Louise and Elizabeth always remained good friends.

After the war in June 1945 Elizabeth submitted her first book, North & South, for the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Her sponsors were Edmund Wilson, Marianne Moore, and Dr. John Dewey, and her manuscript was chosen from 800 entrants for the prize of $1,000. Published in August 1946, the book was greeted with an extraordinary review by the best (and toughest) poetry critic in America, poet Randall Jarrell:

The best poems in Elizabeth Bishop’s North & South are so good that it takes a geological event like Paterson to overshadow them. The Fish and Roosters are two of the most calmly beautiful, deeply sympathetic poems of our time; The Monument, The Man-Moth, The Weed, the first Song for a Colored Singer, and one or two others are almost or quite as good, and there are charming poems on a smaller scale, or beautiful fragments—for instance, the end of Love Lies Sleeping…

The poet of North & South … is as attractively and unassumingly good as the poet of Observations and What Are Years—but simpler and milder, less driven into desperate straits or dens of innocence, and taking the Century of Polycarp more for granted. (When you read Miss Bishop’s Florida, a poem whose first sentence begins, The state with the prettiest name, and whose last sentence begins, The alligator, who has five distinct calls: / friendliness, love, mating, war, and a warning, you don’t need to be told that the poetry of Marianne Moore was, in the beginning, an appropriately selected foundation for Miss Bishop’s work.)… Her work is unusually personal and honest in its wit, perception, and sensitivity—and in its restrictions too; all her poems have written underneath, I have seen it.

In 1947 Jarrell introduced Elizabeth to Robert Lowell, who, for the remainder of their lives, was her most important literary friend and colleague. During the summer of 1948 she vacationed in Maine with Lowell and Mrs. Carley Dawson, a widowed Washington socialite who thought Lowell was going to marry her. It was Elizabeth he wanted to propose to, he later confessed in a letter (see page 344). I suppose we might almost claim something like apparently Strachey and Virginia Woolf, he wrote Elizabeth, and her reply of December 11, 1957, is a poker-faced masterpiece.

After she accepted the Library of Congress appointment at Lowell’s insistence, in 1949, her letters to her good friend the painter Loren MacIver, during the summer preceding her stint in Washington, record the anxiety attacks and near-hysteria she suffered as the starting date approached. Even after completing her term at the Library, she was uneasy and plagued with doubts. She wrote Dr. Anny Baumann, her physician in New York, who became her close friend and confidante:

I get myself into a fine state of discouragement and panic, sleeplessness, nightmares, etc.—and why, I don’t really know … When I went to the hospital for five days I had not been drinking so much, but I was afraid I was going to … I am exactly the age now at which my father died, which also might have something to do with it.

At this juncture Bryn Mawr awarded her their Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellowship of $2,500. It changed her life. She was allowed to travel and decided on a crazy trip, circumnavigating the continent of South America. Her ship Bowplate took seventeen days to reach the Brazilian port of Santos, where she arrived in late November 1951. At Rio, her train was met by her friend Pearl Kazin, as well as by Mary Stearns Morse, a former dancer and lover of Lota’s. Elizabeth expected to resume her voyage after two weeks or so, but she stayed in Brazil fifteen years.

Soon after her arrival, while living in Lota’s penthouse apartment on Copacabana Beach, Elizabeth took two bites of the fruit of the cashew and had a violent reaction. That night my eyes started stinging, she wrote Dr. Baumann, "and the next day I started to swell—and swell and swell … I couldn’t see anything for over a week. The doctor diagnosed her affliction as the Quincke Edema." Elizabeth believed that this illness endeared her to Brazilians, because Lota’s relatives and friends brought her their pills and smothered her with the kind of affectionate attention she was not used to but loved. When she moved to the modern and elegant house Lota was building on her estate in the mountains above Petrópolis—the old imperial summer residence, more than one hour’s drive from Rio—she learned that Lota had fallen in love with her. On December 20, 1951, Lota not only asked Elizabeth to stay and live with her but said she would take care of her and build a studio next to the house in which the poet could concentrate on her work. Later Elizabeth, through tears, told friends: It was the first time anyone ever offered me a home, or so much. Lota’s gesture meant—just everything. In her notebook Elizabeth wrote: Sometimes it seems … as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people [meaning herself] are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved. She dedicated her next book of poems, Questions of Travel, to Lota with the words of Luis de Camões, the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet: O to give you as much as I have and as much as I can, / since the more I give you the more I owe you. As she wrote Lowell in the second year of her stay, I am extremely happy, for the first time in my life.

What was Lota like? Her full name was Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares, the daughter of an aristocratic and wealthy family that had come to Brazil with the Portuguese settlers. Convent-educated, Lota had been born in Paris and spoke fluent French as well as Portuguese, with English as a weaker third language. Her father, owner and editor of one of the largest newspapers in Rio, the Diario Carioca, had long opposed the dictator Getúlio Vargas, who had taken over in 1930. (Even when he left office in 1945, Vargas maintained control through his strong political machine and returned to public power as President in 1950; he died by his own hand in 1954.) Lota’s father—exiled several times, imprisoned, and also shot at (the family treasured his straw hat with a bullet hole)—was honored at a tremendous banquet on Freedom of the Press Day in 1953. Lota and her father had been estranged for years; unlike her attractive sister, Marietta, who married and had a family, Lota was the ugly duckling, the intellectual, unconventional and lesbian. On their mother’s death she and her sister had inherited the large and ancient fazenda or plantation of Samambaia, officially designated a national monument; they divided the land, Lota choosing the higher mountainous part. Elizabeth said that Lota kept a couple of square miles here at the top where we live, so it will always be protected from neighbors. For income Lota depended on the sale of parts of her estate; several relatives and friends, including the young up-and-coming politician Carlos Lacerda, had houses on her land.

Elizabeth Hardwick, who had been a guest at Samambaia, described Lota as not tall. She had a lot of lustrous black hair which she wore in a bun. She was witty indeed, civilized—and yet different from the women I had known. She had wonderful, glistening dark eyes and glistening dark-rimmed glasses. You felt, or I felt, in her the legacy or curse of the Spanish-Portuguese women of the upper classes … Her English was fluent, fractured and utterly compelling. Lota was talkative, amusing and very sophisticated, and yet somehow melancholy too, the Iberian strain … [She] was very intense indeed, emotional, also a bit insecure as we say, and loyal, devoted and smart and lesbian and Brazilian and shy, masterful in some ways, but helpless also. She adored Elizabeth in the most attractive way, in this case somewhat fearfully, possessively, and yet modestly and without any tendency to oppress.

Another friend of Lota’s, Robert Fizdale of the duo-piano team Gold & Fizdale, who in the 1940s had met her in New York through Louise Crane and harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe, described Lota as "one of the most charming, original, remarkable women I’ve ever known. She was small, volatile, outgoing and thoroughly artistic. Do not underestimate Lota." Whenever Elizabeth wrote to the pianists, Lota usually added her own comments; see their jointly written letter of May 5, 1953, for an example of Lota’s writing style. The only occasion on which I met Lota was at the small dinner party Robert and Elizabeth Lowell gave for the recently married T. S. and Valerie Eliot in New York. The occasion was congenial and Eliot’s marital happiness and good humor were noticeable, but I failed in efforts to get Lota to talk. She had intelligent eyes and mannish looks and smiled pleasantly and seemed at ease, but owing either to shyness or faulty English, she hardly opened her mouth.

Elizabeth’s friend Pearl Kazin, who in this period was living in Brazil, called Lota shrewd and generous and wise, full of strong and irrepressible opinions about everything, fully convinced that what Elizabeth needed for her health and her sanity and her writing was … the affectionate protection of a home, a sense of belonging, the orderly consolations of habit and dailiness, the will to stay put. They became lovers, even if Lota more often acted the mother to Elizabeth the child.

Before Elizabeth’s arrival, Lota had adopted a son named Kylso. He was a poor and bright young man she had discovered in the garage where her car was being repaired. A neglected victim of polio, Kylso could scarcely walk. She sent him to the hospital for treatment, purchased a motorscooter for him, and got him a job in an architect’s office; by the time Elizabeth met him, Kylso was married and had a family. Mary Stearns Morse, whom they called Morsey, moved to her own house nearby, after Elizabeth’s arrival, and also adopted several children. Later Elizabeth wanted to adopt a twelve-year-old boy, a painter, but his parents would not consent. Elizabeth paid so much attention to the cook’s baby girl that one of the workers on the estate complained that something was wrong with the child because it laughed too much. (Lota agreed with Elizabeth’s theories of child-raising; they talked about translating Dr. Spock’s books into Portuguese, until they realized that the parents most in need of advice would never read his books. They referred to themselves as maternal old maids and Elizabeth wrote her Aunt Grace: Now I know why poor children cry more than rich ones: their parents are so dumb.)

After she moved in with Lota, they were known to their Brazilian neighbors and servants as Dona Elizabetchy and Dona Lota. The house they occupied at the top of Samambaia, designed by Sergio W. Bernardes, was a prize-winning (with Gropius one of the judges) architectural marvel. Elizabeth in 1952 drew a pen-and-ink sketch of the unfinished split-level, horizontal building, with ramps, sliding glass walls, and what was to be an aluminum roof. Her one-room estudio was high up and apart from the house, situated to the left above a boulder, with a stream falling down beside it, one section of which they dammed up as a swimming pool. The grounds were spacious, very steep, dotted with granite, and had a fine view of the mountain peaks across the valley. In Elizabeth’s new studio a solid wall blocked out this view, to prevent any distraction from her creative work. The main house had two maid’s rooms with baths, and there was a separate house for the cook and gardener and their families, a tool shed, and sheds for Mimosa the horse and Mimoso the donkey.

The security of a real home, combined perhaps with the liberating foreignness of Brazil, seemed to free Elizabeth to write about her earliest years. Her long story from this period, In the Village, about her mother’s insanity and her childhood in Great Village, is one of her finest prose creations. When The New Yorker published it in 1953, paying her the then large sum of $1,200, she bought a black MG with red leather seats, though she had no driver’s license (she later sold the car for a large profit). Gwendolyn was another Nova Scotia childhood story written during her first years at Samambaia. Poems with Brazilian themes soon followed, including Arrival at Santos, The Mountain, and The Shampoo, her love poem addressed to Lota, with the lines you’ve been, dear friend, / precipitate and pragmatical; / and look what happens.

In 1954, nine years after North & South, Elizabeth had her second book ready, A Cold Spring, whose final poem was The Shampoo. When Houghton Mifflin, concerned that the book’s twenty poems were too few, suggested that she combine North & South, long out of print, with the new poems, she wisely agreed. Poems, as the combined volume was called, came out in July 1955 and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry the following spring. This brought overnight fame to Dona Elizabetchy throughout Brazil, where poets are honored figures. This book found her an English publisher, Chatto & Windus; she was also awarded a Partisan Review Fellowship of several thousand dollars.

Two demanding prose works now occupied her time. The first was a translation, The Diary of Helena Morley, the journal of a twelve-year-old girl in a mining town in the 1890s. It was a Brazilian classic, but Elizabeth’s expectations for it in English, inspired by her enthusiasm and perhaps her self-identification with the young heroine, were unrealistic. On its publication in 1957 it sold well and received good reviews, but it was not a best-seller. She was soon disenchanted with the complaints of the elderly Helena Morley (now the wife of a banker) about the small royalties. Another prose work was later commissioned by Life magazine, which offered her ten thousand dollars, more than she had ever earned in a single year, for a book about Brazil, half text and half photos. She would doubtless have done much better on her own, but her co-authors by contract were "the Editors of Life, a powerful and impersonal corporation. When the book came out in 1962 she wrote Pearl Kazin: I am horribly and idiotically distressed by the book—absolutely everything seems wrong." The photos chosen by Life had not a single bird, beast or flower—in Brazil! As for the text, she claimed it had "not a trace of what I tried to say." However, the income enabled her to treat Lota and herself to a trip to Italy, and also helped her to buy the run-down eighteenth-century house in Ouro Prêto, later named the Casa Mariana, that she wanted to restore.

In 1960 Carlos Lacerda, Lota’s friend, ran for governor of the state of Guanabara, whose capital is Rio—and won. Lota had fought hard for his election, rounding up voters and driving them to the polls. Now she and Elizabeth were not only invited to dinners at the Governor’s Palace but Lota persuaded Lacerda to convert an undeveloped stretch of landfill along the Rio coast on Guanabara Bay into a People’s Park. She offered to work out the park’s design and supervise the enterprise, without salary. Lacerda not only agreed to her proposal but gave her control of the project and an important title, Chief Coordinatress of Flamingo Park (Parque do Flamengo)—the colorful name he decided to give the new area. In publicity releases Lota was given an engineer’s title of Doctor, though she had never been to university. It was the opportunity of a lifetime for her; she could now put into practice the progressive city-planning concepts of architects like Le Corbusier, whose work she had admired for years.

Elizabeth estimated that the area in question was as big as Central Park. In a country where men never took orders from women, Lota proposed to transform the reclaimed area into a landscaped network of cafés and restaurants, playgrounds with carousels, a children’s railroad, museums, libraries and reading rooms for kids, a dance pavilion, gardens, a boat pond, and, of course, beaches. She would use the newest lighting methods to illuminate the park at night. Elizabeth was impressed by Lota’s courage and praised her for using her brains and helping poor dirty dying Rio at the same time. They moved to the apartment in Rio, nearer to Lota’s work, with only an occasional weekend at Samambaia. Lota has been admirable, Elizabeth wrote Pearl Kazin, clear, succinct, quiet—directives like Napoleon’s! Lota expected and experienced resistance from entrenched male bureaucrats, and the work progressed slowly but unrelentingly under the firm direction of the Coordinatress. As Elizabeth wrote Dr. Baumann, Lota comes home from work every evening looking so pale and exhausted that I get very worried about her. By February 1961 she was writing Pearl Kazin: The job is enormous—I went ‘on location’ with her and about a dozen engineers last week—and so far I think she’s doing marvelously—just the right tone—but I don’t trust these gentlemen … they are all so jealous of each other, and of a woman, naturally.

Three years later, writing to Loren MacIver, Elizabeth confessed to ambivalent feelings: Lota is getting so famous and powerful it is frightening. If our friend [Lacerda] gets elected President (he’s running, but a lot can happen here in the next few months), I’m afraid she’ll be an ambassador or something—an awful prospect. But she’s thriving on it and is too energetic, almost, for my taste—a combination of Lewis Mumford and Fiorello La Guardia. Yet early in 1965 Elizabeth reported real success on the day the trains for children began operating: [The park] is looking really lovely—the first Sunday of the ‘trains for children’ there were over 3,500 passengers, and that first week 17,000. There is so little for the poor and the ‘middle class’ to do in Rio. On another occasion Elizabeth wrote: Perfect strangers passing us on the road lean out of their cars and shout, ‘Bravo for the new park, Dona Lota!’ Really, it is very nice.

Later in 1965—Lacerda’s term as governor ended in December—things began to go sour. Oddly enough, it was Lacerda himself who was causing Lota’s problems. Elizabeth wrote Dr. Baumann: "Lota is more or less ‘on strike’—I don’t know how it will turn out. She is fighting with Carlos. For some reason or other he will not sign the papers necessary … for the libraries for children, in the playgrounds … The park is by far his most popular project and the one that will last longest, too—and yet he seems to enjoy making things complicated … It is hopeless. She predicted that if Carlos gets elected [President], I think I’ll leave rather than live any longer in the hysterical atmosphere he creates around him. She wrote Lowell: It has been a hideous stretch. I am utterly sick of Brazilian politics, big and little. [Lota] is a fighter, after all, and in some ways enjoys all the bloodshed, I think. A while ago I was afraid it would really kill us both before the thing got finished." A few of Lota’s colleagues now began to attack her, including the landscape expert, Roberto Burle-Marx, one of her closest friends; Elizabeth called his attacks indecent. Perhaps to escape the pressures of Lota’s problems and her constant scolding of Elizabeth, the latter found herself going more often to Ouro Prêto, to work on restoring the old house.

When the new governor set up a Foundation to supervise the completion of Flamingo Park, naming Lota as its head, they saw through this political ploy. The project had such a low financial priority in the new administration that Lota knew the park and her role in it were doomed. Meantime the University of Washington, in Seattle, had renewed an offer to Elizabeth to serve two terms as writer-in-residence (she followed Theodore Roethke). The offer was so attractive financially that she decided to embark on her first teaching experience. I wish Lota would go along with me for part of the time, Elizabeth wrote Dr. Baumann, but Lota would not leave Brazil. Yet it was a relief to get away from the hectic political turmoil as well as from Lota’s complaints to Elizabeth about drinking and laziness. (When visiting American friends stayed up late with Elizabeth, Lota embarrassed and annoyed her by pounding on the wall, ordering them to go home.) Elizabeth was also worried about Lota’s health, informing Dr. Baumann that she was having dizzy spells and even falls down. During the first term at Seattle, Elizabeth assured her doctor: "Of course I am going back [to Brazil], and of course I mean to live there, and with Lota, forever and ever. She did go back, and when a small legacy from an aunt enabled her to travel, she took Lota abroad that summer to Holland and England. Unfortunately they had to cut the trip short, because Lota was not up to it."

The medical truth emerged in January 1967—Lota had arteriosclerosis. After resigning in despair from the Flamingo Park foundation, she suffered a nervous breakdown and went into hospital. In a shaking hand, she added a short and sad postscript to Elizabeth’s letter of March 18, 1967, to Gold and Fizdale, and seemed to blame Elizabeth for all their troubles: "E.B. is undertaking a cure for all the nonsences [sic] and alcoholism she had this horrible year of ’66. Lota’s doctor, a psychiatrist, advised Elizabeth to get away temporarily (He thought he could treat Lota better without me"), so she left for New York and stayed at Loren MacIver’s home at 61 Perry Street, while the painter and her husband (the poet Lloyd Frankenberg) were in Paris.

Elizabeth and Lota had both agreed to make new wills. Elizabeth left everything to Lota; outside the will, she arranged through Dr. Baumann for $15,000 to be paid in case of her death to X.Y. (as I will refer to her), a young divorced woman she had met in the West who served as her secretary. Lota’s will left Elizabeth the apartment in Rio, as well as several offices she owned. The house at Samambaia went to Mary Stearns Morse, to whom Lota owed a long-standing debt. Much later Elizabeth learned that Lota had clearly indicated she was planning suicide—by inserting into her will a quotation from Voltaire: Si le bon Dieu existe, il me pardonnera, c’est son métier. (If God exists, he will forgive me, that’s his business.)

More than once that summer Lota cabled Elizabeth that she wanted to come to New York, and Elizabeth sought the doctor’s approval by cable or phone; he never replied. Finally in September Lota cabled that she was flying to New York and asked Elizabeth to meet her plane. When Lota disembarked at Kennedy Airport on Saturday, September 16—the plane was three hours late—Elizabeth said she looked very sick and depressed. They arrived at Perry Street extremely tired and went to bed early. Around 6 a.m. on Sunday Elizabeth phoned Dr. Baumann that Lota was in a coma, having swallowed a bottle of pills. The doctor immediately called nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital for an emergency rescue crew and then called architect Harold Leeds, Elizabeth’s friend who lived across the street, for help. He and filmmaker Wheaton Galentine rushed there at once and helped the paramedics and policemen to carry the comatose figure of Lota down the narrow curving staircase on a kitchen chair, since the rigid stretcher could not round the curves. Leeds urged Elizabeth to get into the ambulance with Lota and later walked over to the hospital to join her. When Dr. Baumann arrived, they learned that the pills Lota had taken were Valium. Lota remained in a coma for a week, and Elizabeth delayed informing the family in the hope that Lota would recover and the attempt at suicide would never be known. On Monday, September 25, Lota’s heart stopped beating. Elizabeth cabled the news to Brazil.

Lota’s body was shipped to Rio, where it was met by a military guard of honor. Several officials, including Carlos Lacerda and the former head of the Supreme Court, as well as a crowd of two hundred, were on hand for the plane’s arrival. Elizabeth, who remained in New York, asked that Lota be buried in the Macedo Soares tomb with her father, because she loved him in spite of everything, I know.

III

Elizabeth’s return to Brazil in late November—to settle her share of Lota’s estate and reclaim her books, manuscripts, and other personal possessions—was, she wrote Dr. Baumann, one of the most disturbing experiences of my life, and it will take a long long time to get over it. Not only was she treated badly, and even shunned, by many of Lota’s relatives and friends, who blamed her for Lota’s suicide, but some of her possessions had disappeared. Hurt and depressed, she moved to her house at Ouro Prêto. I just couldn’t seem to start living alone right away, she wrote Frani, and couldn’t bear New York just now, and certainly not Brazil. She decided to start a new life in California with her young friend X.Y., the divorcée from the West who now had a baby boy; they would try keeping house together for a while.

At her publisher’s suggestion, Elizabeth’s next book was a collected edition of her poems, published in April 1969, with typography by Cynthia Krupat, Frani’s daughter. A year later, when the news broke that The Complete Poems had won the National Book Award for poetry, Elizabeth was living in the Casa Mariana at Ouro Prêto with X.Y. and the child. In the spring of 1970 life there began to become unpleasant. Local hoodlums threw stones at the Americans and tossed garbage into the gardens of the Casa Mariana. Elizabeth realized she would soon have to put the house up for sale. She then reported a new medical crisis to Dr. Baumann: X.Y. had fallen ill. After being treated at the Belo Horizonte hospital, her friend was flown home to the United States and her son was returned to his mother’s family. As Elizabeth admitted, I should have realized much, much sooner that [X.Y.] was really extremely sick.

That summer Harvard asked Elizabeth to take over Robert Lowell’s courses for the 1970 fall term, during his absence in England, and she accepted. She moved into Kirkland House on the campus, where she met the young house secretary, Alice Methfessel, a very friendly woman, who became her close friend and companion. After another visit alone to Ouro Prêto that summer, to arrange for the sale of the house, Elizabeth came down with severe amoebic dysentery and had to return to Cambridge for medical treatment. Fully recovered by August 1971, she was ready to take a trip to the Galápagos Islands with Alice before classes resumed. (It was a trip she had long wanted to make: the Galápagos were the site of important discoveries by Charles Darwin, her favorite hero.) That fall at Harvard she conducted her new seminar in Personal Correspondence, Famous and Infamous. Marianne Moore died in February 1972. Joining Elizabeth at the memorial service in Brooklyn were Dr. Baumann, Louise Crane, Margaret Miller, Harold Leeds, and many others including myself; we all intoned the sonorous hymns whose familiar words Elizabeth relished. The opportunity arose for her to acquire an apartment at 437 Lewis Wharf in 1974; it had a fine view of Boston harbor, whose maritime activities she loved to watch.

The last book issued in her lifetime was Geography III, dedicated to Alice. The format designed by Cynthia Krupat was one that Elizabeth preferred over all her books. Its publication in 1976 was not only a literary event; it brought her work to a wider circle of readers than she had previously known and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Poet Anthony Hecht wrote in The Times Literary Supplement that "In Geography III all the virtues of ear and eye, of speech and reticence, and of lonely courage are superbly, beautifully in evidence … [It] contains only ten poems, none unusually long. But ten new poems by Elizabeth Bishop are enough to make a good-sized readership in the United States rejoice in gratitude and pride. Hers is about the finest product our country can offer the world … It beats our cars and films and soft drinks hollow."

Robert Lowell’s sudden death in September 1977 came as a shock to Elizabeth, inspiring her memorial poem, North Haven. After the funeral for Lowell in Boston, she invited many guests—poets, writers, publishers—to her apartment at Lewis Wharf. When they crowded onto her balcony for a view of the harbor, she was heard to murmur, If the balcony breaks, a big part of literary New York will disappear. After completing a teaching assignment at New York University in 1978, she wrote a friend, My one desire is to retire, but her financial situation would not allow this.

She accepted a teaching job at M.I.T., scheduled to start late in September 1979. Because she was ill and in hospital (see her letter to her students, here), she was unable to meet her first class, but she recovered sufficiently to be discharged from the hospital before the next class. There never was a class. At home that weekend, after writing what was to be her last letter, she suffered a cerebral aneurysm. Alice found her body on the floor of the Lewis Wharf apartment early in the evening of Saturday, October 6, 1979.

*   *   *

In addition to her genius, Elizabeth had two gifts—wit and good manners—that typified her life. James Merrill has recorded one occasion (when he visited the Casa Mariana) on which both qualities were displayed with brilliance. Elizabeth was particularly glad to see Merrill because she had not been able to speak English with anyone for weeks. Late one evening, he wrote, over Old Fashioneds by the stove, a too recent sorrow had come to the surface; Elizabeth, uninsistent and articulate, was in tears. At that moment a young Brazilian painter entered the room and, seeing her weeping, stopped dead in his tracks. His hostess almost blithely made him at home, Merrill wrote. Switching to Portuguese, ‘Don’t be upset, José Alberto,’ I understood her to say, ‘I’m only crying in English.’

Addendum to page 13

EB wrote a letter on December 1, 1933, to Donald Stanford, which was deleted after the book was in proofs. It contained some of her own ideas on the proper things for me to write about. The omitted text follows.

December 1, 1933

… I think what I was saying about subject matter [for poetry] was something like this: All the primary poetic sources have been made use of and we’re in possession of a world made up of poetry, the natural world. Now for people like myself the things to write poems about are in a way second-degree things—removed once more from this natural world. It’s like Holland being built up out of the sea—and I think I am attempting to put some further small structures on top of Holland. But from the poems of yours I’ve read so far, I’d say that you are rather making use of the primary sources. If you have any idea what it is I’m talking about I wish you’d tell me what you think, because I find it very interesting to speculate on such things.

Chronology

[ONE]

1928–1936

SCHOOL, VASSAR, NEW YORK, EUROPE

Elizabeth Bishop in Vassarion 1934, her senior yearbook. Courtesy Vassar College Library

To Frani Blough

Frani Blough (later Mrs. Curt Muser) first met EB in 1927 at the Walnut Hill boarding school in Massachusetts, where she was one year ahead of EB. Frani went on to Vassar in 1929 and EB followed a year later. They remained lifelong friends. EB mailed this letter from Nova Scotia, enclosing a Christmas note from one of her teachers (see footnote), as well as her early poem Imber Nocturnus [Night Rain], published in the school magazine The Blue Pencil, December 1928, and in The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (1983).

Great Village, Nova Scotia

December 31, 1928

Thank you for the helpful little card. Of course I realize that you could never quite realize the full significance of all this [the love letter from their teacher*] but isn’t it too sweet for words, anyway? Auntie [Grace] read it and said our friend had an aching void. Alas, all she needed was a little snow. And what do you suppose she didn’t dare say? Oh, Miss Talbot told me a mystery that will appeal to your romantic soul. I’ll tell you when I get back, if I ever do—

and my love†

BISHOP

Having become an expert swimmer and sailor during summers at Camp Chequesset on Cape Cod, EB successfully copes with a tipped-over sailboat.

[Harwich Port, Massachusetts

August 30, 1929]

I arrived at the [summer] home of my fathers scarce three hours ago with a suitcase, a coat, a hat, a bathing suit, a paper hatbox and three books—oh yes, and a can of powder. Such a nice drive—and after our Chesterfields my aunt’s Camels are very tame animals indeed. I think I’m being here until Tuesday … Lord! There were letters here from you and Judy—thank you. Besides being my warmest welcome, they rather impressed the two females [EB’s paternal Aunts Florence and Ruby].

I have news of greatest importance: I’ve tipped over in a sailboat! Tuesday afternoon there was a violent wind—a good one—and Louise [Crane?] and I wanted to have a good long sail so we started out as soon as the boats were afloat—bearing heavy sweaters and cigarettes and wearing bathing suits. The tide and the wind were both against us—we should have had a reef and the boat bounced like a bottle. We got out past shirttail all right and kept being pushed into shore. I was heading for that little white house down in the cove. All of a sudden a saltwater apple tree appeared right behind the stern and caught the main sheet. The boat swung right around—away from the wind. I couldn’t reach the rope and I was scared stiff for fear we would jibe or Louise would drown or something. I yelled Pull down the sail! But she couldn’t get there quickly enough. It went so slowly—the water was a long, bright line all around the combing—then it poured over and the sail settled on the water. I thought Louise might get caught underneath—she was sort of on the centerboard box and I told her to jump out from the boat. She gave a big jump and landed right in the middle of the sail in the most graceful sitting posture. She might have been a Turk taking a siesta, if you can combine such things. I climbed up on the side and pulled her up—then dove in and captured the floorboards and oars that were floating away. Then I swam into the dock with the boat—very simple, because the wind and waves were so strong they fairly pushed us along. Louise lay on the top and waved our sweaters—it was so silly. I laughed so hard that I kept sinking and I quite surprised Barb and Betty, who came frantically splashing in a rowboat to rescue us. They thought my sailing reputation was ruined, I guess. It took us about two hours to fix the boat up—and I didn’t have a chance to go out again. The poor Kut Up is still tied to the dock—her sail all muddy …

Perhaps I shall omit reunion. Reunions are exactly like eating spaghetti and finding the ends left outside, anyway. I cannot seem to rake up the yeast and breathe the spirit of life into it—even yesterday’s … I’m inhabiting a comfy place called the pink room [at her aunt’s]. I feel about as much at home as an elephant in negligée. Ah me! I’m going to begin to pine—feature me as pale green lolling between my pink sheets. I do wish my dear Aunt Ruby made the various shades harmonize at least.

I am enjoying very much your essay on Comus. Perhaps if I study it hard, and you send me a few pointers on my handwriting, I’ll get into Vassar. Tell me when your address changes so I can get going with the night letters. Don’t you think double-barreled idiot is a nice term? I miss you greatly.

[Boston, Massachusetts

September 5, 1929]

Wednesday afternoon

… Harwich Port is not my future summer home, I’m afraid. I got the asthma so badly from poor Major [a dog] that I had to leave Saturday morning. Of course my uncle [Jack] and aunt [Ruby] couldn’t bear to give me up—and Kay, it broke her heart! She kissed me as I crudely counted the change left from buying my ticket. But it all began poorly, anyway. You see, Aunt Ruby had to sit on my suitcase, and