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Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) |
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One of the most important American poets of the twentieth century, hailed for her work which fuse together accurate perceptions of the visible world with the poet's experience and memory. Although Elizabeth Bishop received numerous awards during her lifetime, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature, she was also a somewhat lonely figure and her oeuvre was relatively small – less than a hundred poems apart from essays and stories. The art of losing isn't hard to master; Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Mass. In 1911, when
she was
only eight months old, her father died from Bright's disease; he was
vice-president of his father's contracting firm, which had built in
Boston the Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts. Until the age of
six, Bishop lived with her maternal grandparents, the Bulmer family, in
Great Village, Nova Scotia, and then returned to Massachusetts to live
with her father's family. Bishop great-grandfather sailed the North and
South American coasts, and went down with his ship in 1866. Bishop
loved the sea. In her late teens she mastered the skills to sail a
fifteen-foot sailboat from Plymouth to York Harbor, Maine. In her poems Bishop celebrated the rural and coastal Great Village, where the "old grandmother / sits in the kitchen with the child / beside the Little Matvel Stove, / reading the jokes from the almanac, / laughing and talking to hide her tears." (from 'Sestina,' in Questions of Travel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965, p. 80) Bishop's mother, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, who could not accept her husband's death, suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. Eventually she was confined in 1917 to a mental hospital. Bishop never saw her again. Since her childhood, Bishop's health was fragile. She was plagued by asthma and later she suffered from depression and occasional bouts of alcoholism. Uncle George Shepherdson bathed her; Bishop later recalled how his fingers probed her. On one of the lowest points of her life, Bishop drank a whole bottle of eau de toilette to get the alcohol. At sixteen, Bishop was sent to Walnut Hill boarding-school in
Natick. In 1929 she entered Vassar College, where she found "the
compass rose painted on the library floor / predicted all the ways she
would travel." (quoted in Elizabeth Bishop at Work by Eleanor Cook, Harvard University Press, 2016, p. 15) While at Vassar, Bishop co-founded a literary magazine,
the Con Spirito, with Mary McCarthy
and others. "She's always pretending to be something-or-other," Bishop
said of McCarthy in a letter, "and never quite convincing herself or other people."
(Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals by David Laskin, The University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 38) Encouraged by Marianne Moore, her first mentor and friend, Bishop began to pursue writing seriously. Her mother died in 1934, on the same year when Bishop graduated. Bishop's early poems and short stories were published in magazines and periodicals, including The Partisan Review, launched in 1934 as an organ for the Communist John Reed Club. The appearance of a number of prominent writers and intellectuals on the pages of PR strengthened the magazine's prestige, but Bishop was never a member of its inner circle. Nearly all of her best poems and rare short stories appeared in The New Yorker, beginning from 'Cirque d' Hiver' (1940). For this piece she was paid one dollar per line. After extensive travels with Louise Crane, a paper mill heiress, in Newfoundland, Europe and North Africa, Bishop settled with Crane in Key West, Florida. Bishop spent there much of the next decade; she became a good friend of Ernest Hemingway's ex-wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. One of her poems from this period, 'The Fish,' predated Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. When Bishop mailed a copy of the poem to Marianne Moore, she apologized, writing in a letter in February 1940: "I am sending you a real "trifle" ["The Fish"]. I'm afraid it is very bad and, if not like Robert Frost, perhaps like Ernest Hemingway! I left the last line on it so it wouldn't be, but I don't know . . . " (One Art, letters, selected and edited by Robert Giroux, 1994, p. 87) The poem opens with the lines, "I caught a tremendous fish / and held him beside the boat / half out of the water, with my hook / fast in a corner of its mouth." At the end the speaker says: "And I let the fish go." (The Complete Poems 1927-1979, pp. 42-44) North & South (1946),
Bishop's first book, contained some of her best-known poems, including
'The Map' (1935),
'The Man-Moth' (1936), based on a newspaper misprint for mammoth,
and 'The Unbeliever' (1938). "One is reminded of Kafka and certain
abstract paintings, and is left rather at sea about the actual subjects
of the poems," said Robert Lowell in his review. The majority of these
poems Bishop wrote in New York. When she congratulated Lowell on the
1947 Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary's Castle and fellowships
from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, he replied in May 23, 1947: "You are a marvelous writer,
and your note was about the only one that meant anything to me."
(Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p. 4) Bishop's friendship with Lowell lasted until his death. 'Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance' from her second book called A Cold Spring (1955) recalled Bishop's stay in Mexico, where she went with Marjorie Stevens. After meeting the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda on the summit of a pyramid in Chichén Itzá, she bought a volume of his poetry. "His chief interest in life (or did I tell you all this?) besides Communism seeems to be shells, and he has a beautiful collection, most of them laid in the top of a sort of large, heavy, specially built coffee table, with glass over them," Bishop wrote to Marianne Moore in May 1942. (One Art, p. 109) Neruda was more impressed of her work, calling her a "great North American poet". In 1949-50 Bishop worked at the Library of Congress as a poetry consultant – a duty for which she was not suited. However, she continued Robert Lowell's tradition of visiting Ezra Pound, who was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the insane in Washington, D.C. Bishop brought him books and magazines, but did not enjoy Pound's company, who was kind of mean. In 'Visits to St. Elizabeth's' from 1950 she wrote: "This is the man / that lies in the house of Bedlam. // The is the time / of the tragic man / that lies in the house of Bedlam." (The Complete Poems 1927-1979, p. 135) With the financial support of a Lucy Donnelly Fellowship,
which
Bishop received on Marianne Moore's recommendation, Bishop planned in
1951 to travel around the world. Since publishing North and South
she had not been able to write enough poems for a second collection and
she was in the habit of drinking. There were times in her life, when
she drank whatever was around, including eau de cologne. Once when she
stayed in her friend's apartment in Washington, D.C., she found under
the stairs a cupboard filled with an assortment of liquor. She took a
little of everything and vomited all over the house. While
convalescing in Rio from an allergic reaction to the
fruit of the cashew, Bishop met Maria Costellat (Lota) de Macedo
Soares, an architect and landscape designer, who was descended from old
aristocratic Brazilian families. She became her lover. "Here I am
extremely
happy, for the first time in my life", Bishop wrote in a letter in 1953
to
Lowell. "I live in a spectacularly beautiful place; we have between us
about 3,000 books now; I know, through
Lota, most of the Brazilian "intellectuals" already, and I find the
people frank, startlingly so, until you get used to Portuguese
vocabularies, extremely affectionate, an atmosphere that I just lap
up—no I guess I mean loll in—after that dismal year in Washington and
that dismaler winter at Yaddo when I thought my days were numbered and
there was nothing to be done about it." (Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, p. 143) With Lota, she shared a
modernist house called "Samambaia," in Petrópolis, fifty miles north of
Rio. In this very creative period Bishop wrote Poems: North &
South; A Cold Spring, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Brazilian rhythms
and way of life set a new undercurrent in her writing. From 1951 to 1966 she lived permanently in the country, and
then kept going back for extended stays until she sold her beautiful
eighteenth-century house in Ouro Prêto. In 1967 Bishop left for New
York City, where she stayed in the
apartment of Loren MacIver and Lloyd Frankenberg on Perry Street. At
that time Bishop's relationship with Lota had already begun to go
downhill. Depressed by the separation and exhausted by her job at the
Parque do Flamengo (Rio's Flamingo Park), Lota committed suicide with a
huge dose of Nembutal pills while visiting Bishop in Greenwich Village. First and foremost a poet, Bishop never considered herself a a
translator, but she translated from Ancient Greek, French, Portuguese,
and Spanish. With John Knox she translated Henrique
Ephim Mindlin's book Modern
Architecture in Brazil (1956,
Arquitetura Moderna no Brasil). "Have to do it to help out a friend and
because I live in one of the examples of it, so feel somehow involved,
but since my knowledge of architecture is probably a little less than
my knowledge of Portuguese, if that's possible, it is rather hard
going,"she complained in a letter to Randall Jarrell. (One Art, p. 311) Bishop referred to a passage on Fazenda Samambaia, where she lived. It was
published by Reinhold Publishing Corporation in 1956. Mindlin was a
friend of Macedo Soares. For the book on Brazil for the
Life World Library series she was paid $10,000 and travel expenses. After returning to the United States, Bishop began teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle, then Harvard University and later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, she was not very fond of her job, saying once that all the students wanted to write free verse, and she wanted them to do iambic pentameter. Bishop's third collection of poems, Questions of Travel
(1965) is considered by many her best. "These poems, so strikingly
untopical, are in a way really quite topical: add a headline or two as
an epigraph, reread them from the proper perspective, and they would be
current events, almost." ('A Poet of Landscape' by
Robert Mazzocco, The New York Review,
October 12, 1967)
The book consisted of two parts, eleven poems were grouped under the
general heading "Brazil"; the second section was entitled "Elsewhere".
In addition there is a story of a Nova Scotia childhood, 'In the
Village'. The Complete Poems (1969) won the National Book Award. It contained her three collections of poems, some uncollected poems, and a selection of translations from Portuguese. Bishop's final collection of poems, Geography III (1976), which received the National Book Critics' Circle Award, reflected again her concern with place and displacement. This book contains the masterpieces 'Crusoe in England' and 'The Moose,' based on a true incident that happened to her in 1946 on her on a bus trip in Nova Scotia. In both of these poems Bishop expressed feelings of strangeness and isolation, but her attitude is wryly ironic. Bishop was a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, she
held the post of chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and
collected several honorary degrees. The Brazilian Government awarded
her the Order of the Rio Branco in 1971 and in 1976 she won the Books
Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Elizabeth Bishop
died of a cerebral aneurysm on October 6, 1979, in Boston, Mass. Her
relationship with Macedo Soares inspired Carmen Oliveira's national bestseller Flores raras e banalíssimas (1995,
Rare and Commonplace Flowers). Bruno Barreto's 2014 film Reaching for the Moon (Flores
raras), starring Miranda Otto as Elizabet Bishop and Glória Pires as Lota de Macedo Soares,
was based on the book. "It's hard not to admire the intentions of a
movie that depicts two exceptional women living exactly the way they
wanted, together, outside the expected societal norms of the time. But
the tone of the film itself feels unfortunately conventional – the
opposite of the approach Elizabeth and Lota took in their personal and
professional lives." ('Reaching for the Moon' by Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com, November 14, 2013) For further reading: Elizabeth Bishop by Anne Stevenson (1966); Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, edited by Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (1983); Elizabeth Bishop:Her Artistic Development by Thomas J. Travisano (1988); The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop by Robert Dale Parker (1988); Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell by David Kalstone (1989); Elizabeth Bishop; Questions of Mastery by Bonnie Costello (1991); Elizabeth Bishop, Life and the Memory of It by Brett C. Miller (1993); Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of Poetry by Lorrie Goldensohn (1993); Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss by Susan McCake (1994); Remembering Elizabeth Bishop by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau (1994); 'Bishop, Elizabeth,' in World Authors 1900-1950, Volume One, edited by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); The Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota De Macedo Soares by Carmen L. Oliveira (2002); Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop by Jonathan Ellis (2005); God and Elizabeth Bishop: Meditations on Religion and Poetry by Cheryl Walker (2005); Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again by Sarah Ruhl (2014); On Elizabeth Bishop by Colm Tóibín (2015); Elizabeth Bishop at Work by Eleanor Cook (2016); Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil by Bethany Hicok (2016); Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall (2017); Elizabeth Bishop and Translation by Mariana Machova (2017); Elizabeth Bishop in Context, edited by Angus Cleghorn, Jonathan Ellis (2021); Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer's Life by Dana Gioia (2021); Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan F.S. Post (2022) Selected works:
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