The first of Elizabeth Bishop’s losses was her father, who died when she was eight months old. The second loss was more protracted: Bishop’s mother, shattered by her husband’s death, suffered a series of breakdowns. Sometimes loving in her behavior, sometimes violent, she went in and out of mental hospitals and was finally committed permanently, when Elizabeth was five. At the time, in the spring of 1916, the little girl was living with her mother’s family in a tiny town in Nova Scotia, a comforting place where she had often stayed before. Like many uprooted children, she had vivid memories: the pictures on the pages of the family’s Bible, the rhyme that her grandmother made when shining her shoes (using imaginary “gasoline” and “Vaseline”), and, when she was six, being taken away—“kidnapped,” she felt—by her father’s far more prosperous family, to live in their large and loveless house in Worcester, Massachusetts. It seemed then that she had lost a country, too. Although she was born in Worcester and had spent her earliest life there, and although her father had grown up in the same house, she did not feel at home, or even American: when she sang the required songs at school, the words “land where my fathers died” seemed aimed directly at her.
In later years, a psychiatrist told Bishop that she was lucky to have survived her childhood. In fact, soon after arriving in Worcester she developed both asthma and eczema sores, which became so severe that she was confined to bed. It was only when the family feared that she might truly be dying that she was bundled off again, this time to live with her aunt Maud—one of her mother’s sisters—and Maud’s husband, Uncle George, in a run-down harborside town outside Boston. The sea air was meant to do her good, and it did. Far more helpful, however, were the kind ministrations of Aunt Maud and another of her mother’s sisters, Aunt Grace, a trained nurse who came to help coax her back to health. And when the asthma returned, causing her to miss weeks of school, her aunts read her the enthralling stories in verse of Tennyson, Longfellow, and the Brownings, which she absorbed so deeply that she believed they entered her unconscious. She started writing poetry when she was eight. At twelve, patriotically reconciled, she won her first authorial prize, for an essay on the subject of “Americanism.”
This second chance at childhood made her so grateful to her aunts (or so afraid of further losses) that she never told them, or anyone, about how Uncle George touched her when he insisted on washing her in the bath, or how he tried to feel her breasts once she began to have breasts, or even about the time he grabbed her by the hair and dangled her from the second-story balcony. These wretched facts, revealed in Megan Marshall’s new biography, “Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), derive from a trove of letters, unknown to previous biographers, that Bishop wrote to her psychiatrist, in 1947. (Marshall explains that she discovered the letters in plain sight, in the Bishop archives at Vassar, where they were made available, after being locked away for decades, in 2009.) Bishop’s bluntly objective chronicle of abuse—“Maybe lots of people have never known real sadists at first hand”—adds far more evidence than was needed to convince us that she was indeed lucky to survive.
Despite the book’s often harrowing content, and Bishop’s lifelong drive toward alcoholic self-obliteration, Marshall’s account is lively and engaging, charged with vindicating energy. Another newly disclosed group of letters, from the same source, documents a passionate love affair that Bishop began when she was nearing sixty, with a much younger woman, a relationship that lasted until the poet’s death, at sixty-eight, in 1979. (Bishop’s homosexuality was a carefully kept secret in her lifetime.) Marshall, an aspiring poet in her youth, writes from a deep sense of identity with her subject: she studied with Bishop at Harvard, in 1976, and her biographical chapters are interspersed with pages of her own memoir, also centered on family, poetry, and loss. It’s an odd but compelling structure, as the reader watches the two women’s lives converge, and it allows for some closeup glimpses of Bishop as a teacher. Marshall seems still sensitive to having given up poetry, the one great thing that Bishop, for all her losses, never let go. There’s an emotional undertow even in Marshall’s treatment of poetic forms (the sestina, for example, of Bishop’s early poem “A Miracle for Breakfast,” or Marshall’s student attempt at the mad complexities of Catullan hendecasyllabics) and in her unwavering reverence for the magic that form cannot explain. The book is ultimately about how words ordered on a page may supply some order for one’s life, may assuage and even redeem tragedy.
Because Bishop didn’t just survive. By the time Marshall entered her class, she had won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and an award from the government of Brazil, where she lived for many years. She’d been the subject of a brief biography; Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter had set her poems to music. But the Bishop phenomenon had barely begun. In 1983, the revelation of Bishop’s sexual identity prompted Adrienne Rich, our leading feminist poet, to discern qualities of “outsiderhood” and “marginality” throughout the poems; Bishop’s work now appeared to be not merely good but “remarkably honest and courageous,” and Bishop herself became a contemporary heroine. In the decades since, her relatively small body of work—some hundred published poems, a dozen stories—has been greatly outweighed by volumes of letters, previously unpublished poems and drafts of poems, biography, and criticism. In 2008, she became the first female poet to be published by the Library of America. She even made it onto a U.S. postage stamp, in 2012. As Marshall points out, an Internet search under her name today yields millions of results, ranging from “Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia” to “Popular Lesbian and Bisexual Poets.”
She would have been appalled. Except perhaps for her mentor, Marianne Moore, it is hard to name a poet whose work so thoroughly disinvites private scrutiny. Admirers of Bishop’s early work—Moore, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell—praised its cool objectivity, its calm impersonality, what Moore described as its “rational considering quality” (hardly the usual praise for poetry), its “deferences and vigilances.” What the young poet deferred to was poetic form and an increasingly old-fashioned sense of manners and discretion. She was vigilant in giving nothing of herself away.
“I hadn’t known poetry could be like that,” Bishop wrote of her first encounter with Moore’s work. Bishop was a literary star at the élite girls’ boarding school where she was sent, at sixteen, courtesy of her father’s family, and maintained a similar status when she got to Vassar. She was a class behind her equally ambitious friend Mary McCarthy. When the stodgy Vassar literary magazine wouldn’t accept their writing, the two young women joined with friends to form a magazine of their own. As the campus poet, Bishop was chosen to interview T. S. Eliot when he came through during her junior year, in 1933. Her own poems at the time tended toward imitations of Gerard Manley Hopkins or of the English Baroque: elaborate, archaic in tone, willfully artificial. Discovering Moore, the following year, changed everything. Here was a poetry resolutely modern and hard-edged yet meticulously structured and linguistically glittering. Perhaps most important, here was a rich new variety of subjects: in place of romantic love or God or childhood, Moore offered poems about animals—snakes, chameleons, a big-eared desert rat—and exotic objects (“An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish”); she even had one about a gritty American coastal town, like the town where Bishop had lived with her aunts. Strong yet mysterious, set in the immediate world, these poems demonstrated a way to proceed. Bishop had no religious beliefs; she couldn’t bear to contemplate her childhood; she couldn’t reveal anything about whom she loved. For all her determination to be a poet, what was she to write poetry about?
Thanks to a good word from the Vassar librarian, Moore agreed to meet her young admirer at a bench outside the main reading room of the New York Public Library, in April, 1934. Moore, at forty-six, was not yet famous, but she was esteemed among poets. She was then being courted by Eliot, who, as editor at Faber & Faber, wanted to bring out a British edition of her poems; Ezra Pound had written to implore her (she was characteristically filled with reservations) to “LET HIM DO IT.” Prim and erect in a blue tweed suit, she wore her hair in a braid wound around her head, a style that she had not changed since her student years at Bryn Mawr. The contrast between Moore’s radical poetry and her old-fashioned demeanor was always a surprise. In fact, the fearless modernist still lived with her mother, in a small apartment in Brooklyn, in a relation that had the appearance of deep filial devotion. Only the closest observers understood that Moore was permitted virtually no freedom and no privacy. Linda Leavell’s biography of Moore, published in 2013, reveals that the two women even shared a bed, and that the relation more accurately resembled psychic subjugation.
Bishop, with her round, cherubic face and mop of curly hair, looked even younger than her twenty-three years, but she was fully as proper as Moore, in white gloves and pearl earrings. She arrived early, but Moore was earlier. They talked about Hopkins’s poetry, among other things, and it’s hard to say which of them came away more impressed, or more in need of what the other had to give. Bishop later recalled that she loved Moore immediately. Moore began enthusiastically recommending Bishop’s poetry to editors, including Pound, before the acutely shy young poet had allowed her to read a word of it. By the time Bishop started showing Moore her work, the following year—by the time they had become friends, going to the movies together, and the circus—the poems were starting to resemble everything that Moore had said they were.
Did they ever speak about mothers, families, their inner lives? Bishop’s mother died a month after she met Moore, in the institution where she had been confined since 1916; Bishop had not seen her in all the intervening years. She had frequent crying jags that spring, usually fuelled by alcohol: this was the year she began to drink in earnest. Beyond the shock of the death, she was frightened that her mother’s illness was hereditary, and she was also suffering from a blossoming love for an unresponsive Vassar beauty. There was apparently nothing Bishop felt she could say about any of this to the abstemious, morally upright Moore, although she might have found more sympathy than she expected.
Or, at least, more experience. Moore never met her father, who was confined to a mental institution before she was born. Her puritanical mother had lived in a lesbian relationship (who would have thought it?) from the time that Marianne was twelve. It was when her mother’s lover deserted her that Marianne, age twenty-three and thrilled with being on her own, with a job and friends—“I am spending a wild life, wild and glorious”—was summoned home to heal the wounds. Like Bishop, she used poetry to survive. But these two profoundly afflicted and original women never ventured past the white-gloved propriety of their sustaining myths; it was four years before they were on a mutual first-name basis. Even so, the bond was exhilarating. Moore had found not only a friend of her own rare mental calibre but an adventurous young soul who brought light and air into her cloistered world. Bishop later pictured Moore’s double-initial “M” as standing not only for “manners” and “morals” but for “mother.” Of course, such intimate feelings went unsaid. But perhaps the silence gave each woman what she wanted most: a poetry whose surface composure—as hard won as her own surface composure—glimmered with the depths of what she dared not say.
“The Map” is the first poem that Bishop wrote in her own, recognizable voice, as she well knew: she placed it at the start of her first published book, “North & South,” in 1946, and, twenty-three years later, in the same position in “The Complete Poems.” The subject appears to be exactly what the title claims: a map, specifically of northern regions (“The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still”), described with the flatness and stillness of the two-dimensional shapes themselves, as though the poet were becalmed by focussing on them.
It may have been just such a calming exercise that Bishop set herself when she wrote the poem, sick and alone, on New Year’s Eve of 1935. She was living in New York by then, a logical post-college move, although she’d been drawn chiefly by the presence of Margaret Miller, the Vassar beauty she still hopelessly loved. In fact, she was having Christmas dinner with Margaret and her mother when she had to flee because of an asthma attack; flu compounded her miseries, leaving her bed-bound. Maps had been used by Moore to great effect. Her long poem “An Octopus” is about the eight-armed glacier system that Mt. Rainier presents on a map—more than two hundred lines of minute description and fearsome intellectual vigor. Bishop’s poem (a mere twenty-seven lines) is modest, gentle, and filled with questions (“Is the land tugging at the sea from under?”) about the meaning of what she sees. For a moment, pondering how printed names overrun the places they identify, the poem offers a hint of unlikely emotion:
But what is the printer’s excitement to us, or to the author of this determinedly unemotional poem? For some readers, there was no meaning to Bishop’s exercise. Adrienne Rich admitted that she found this poem (like other early works by Bishop) “impenetrable: intellectualized to the point of obliquity.” Another estimable critic, William H. Pritchard, finds the poet’s questions simply annoying. (“Oh, you decide, I really don’t care.”) Megan Marshall views the childlike questions and the northern setting biographically, and imagines an immense unspoken question—“Will my mother come back?”—hidden beneath the rest. But this question does nothing to unlock the poem: it is hard to imagine any emotion about Bishop’s mother exceeding its cause. Bishop’s previous biographer, Brett C. Millier, more convincingly links these lines to thoughts that Bishop confided to her notebook a few months earlier, while suffering over Margaret Miller: “Name it friendship if you want to—like names of cities printed on maps, the word is much too big, it spreads all over the place, and tells nothing of the actual place it means to name.”
“Friendship” is the overspilling word that Bishop used, perforce, for the love she felt for Margaret, and the word she used (out loud, at least) for the subsequent women in her life. Her asthma-inducing emotion may well have exceeded its cause at Christmas dinner, and found its way into the poem. The lines are filled with feminine imagery (those peninsulas) and a subdued sensuality—the bays within the peninsulas can be stroked, “as if they were expected to blossom”—which exert some subliminal counterforce against the poem’s insistently neutral tone, even if the force never quite breaks through. Of course, any such biographical explanation is a cheat: the reader cannot be expected to supply these facts; the poem means what it means, on its own. Bishop’s withholding is less a matter of Moore-like modernist obliquity, however, than of the guarded reticence that was her legacy and her means of control. The result, in her poetry, is a mysteriously muted ever-presence that Mary McCarthy—another orphaned, abused child—saw most clearly, and most beautifully, as “the mind hiding in her words, like an ‘I’ counting up to a hundred waiting to be found.”
Bishop began to travel restlessly—France, Morocco, Spain—at about the time she began to publish, in the mid-thirties. She had no real home, after all. At school, she had always hated holidays, getting through in an empty dormitory or as a friend’s appendage or sometimes just staying in a cheap Boston hotel. Her father’s estate provided enough money so that she didn’t need to work, and the Vassar classmate who did respond to her feelings, Louise Crane, was seriously rich. (The Crane family made paper, including the paper used in dollar bills.) Bishop was attractive to both women and men, sometimes too much so for her own good. In 1935, she turned down a marriage proposal from a young man she had strung along (just in case?) since college. He committed suicide the following year, and a postcard he’d sent her arrived a few days later, inscribed “Elizabeth, Go to hell.”
Louise whisked her off to Florida to recover, and she soon discovered Key West. Still a sleepy backwater of an island, it became her regular haven for nearly a decade, long outlasting the relationship with Louise. Bishop was deeply drawn to islands—places where she felt isolated, solitary, safe. Although she continued to spend time in New York, she hated the city’s pressures. Even having lunch with people from Partisan Review (including McCarthy) gave her nightmares. She wrote very slowly, often working on a poem for years, and increasing requests for publication only made her aware of how little she had done. Her finest works of the late thirties were two Kafka-like stories that seem to reflect her emotional state: “The Sea & Its Shore,” in which a man toils to keep a public beach free of ever-accumulating papers, working every night, by lantern light, and trying to make sense of the scraps he finds; and “In Prison,” a condition that the narrator anticipates with relief.
Bishop managed to keep travelling during the war years—in Mexico, she got to know Pablo Neruda—but her health was poor, and after 1942 she wrote almost nothing. By the time she began regularly seeing a psychiatrist, in 1946, when she was thirty-five, her low literary production seemed to her a problem comparable with her drinking, her disabling shyness, and the asthma that medical science was identifying as psychosomatic. It’s no surprise that Marianne Moore disapproved of psychiatry; Bishop had quit an earlier attempt at treatment, under Moore’s counsel, after only a few sessions. But she was desperate now, and had also learned to assert some independence after Moore and her mother largely rewrote a poem that Bishop had sent to Moore (and not her mother) for her thoughts. The high-handed mother-daughter team had regularized the deliberately jagged rhyme scheme, omitted terms they found offensive (including “water closet”), and even changed the title from “Roosters”—Bishop’s derogatory term for men who propagate war—to “The Cock,” a classical usage in which the decorous ladies saw no possible misreadings. Bishop politely declined almost all the changes, and was vindicated when “Roosters” was singled out in reviews of “North & South.” Reactions to the book itself were mixed, but the most influential voices were highly favorable. Moore, wholly ungrudging, wrote a keen appraisal in The Nation, and Randall Jarrell, the most brilliant critic of the time, set the tone for future evaluations with his praise of Bishop’s “restraint, calm, and proportion,” just as she was entering a period when she seemed to be trying to drink herself to death.
Jarrell gave Bishop another important gift when, in January, 1947, he introduced her to Robert Lowell. Tall, handsomely tousled, and six years Bishop’s junior, Lowell charmed her as no one had since she’d met Moore. Indeed, he soon replaced Moore as her most valued friend, even though his first commercial book, “Lord Weary’s Castle,” also published in 1946, beat out “North & South” for the Pulitzer Prize. Throughout their lives, his work was far more celebrated than hers. Yet any competitiveness was softened by his devotion to her writing, by his eagerness (and ability) to help her in material ways—grants, jobs, reviews—and by an aura of romance, which he perpetuated (Lowell gave pretty much everything an aura of romance) and she indulged. Two years after they met, he nearly proposed; he remembered later that she told him, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
She had given up seeing the psychiatrist by then, after little more than a year, whether because she believed that she was sufficiently healed or that she never would be healed is impossible to say. In May, 1949, her alcohol consumption out of control, she checked into a Connecticut psychiatric hospital for a two-month stay. Depression, alcoholism, asthma, writer’s block: nothing seemed to alleviate her problems, not a prestigious job as poetry consultant at the Library of Congress (arranged by Lowell), not lengthy stays at the writers’ colony Yaddo. (“At Yaddo,” she complained, “one must produce.”) She was running out of possibilities when, in the fall of 1951, she decided on a “crazy trip” and took a freighter to Brazil.
She’d meant to travel on through South America. But, stopping in Rio to see a couple of women she had met in New York, she discovered one of them to be the love of her life. Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares, known as Lota, was a wealthy landowner, an art collector, and a woman of such inordinate confidence and strength that she was directing the construction of a sleek new glass-and-steel house for herself in the mountains outside Rio. She had no doubt that she could heal the troubled poet who had turned up at her door, and she soon added a gleaming studio for Bishop behind the house—“way up in the air,” Bishop noted with pleasure, as she settled in. It was not quite happily ever after: the asthma got worse before it got better, the drinking abated but did not stop. Yet, if the poems came as slowly as ever, the silences were not as punishing. Bishop had found a home, at last, and, fifty miles inland, her perfect island: lushly beautiful, isolating—although she eventually translated both prose and poetry from Portuguese, she never really learned to speak it—and exactly the liberating prison she had wanted. She began almost at once to write stories drawn from long-forbidden childhood memories. The best of these, “In the Village,” tells of a fragile woman’s mental collapse, as seen (and overheard) by her little girl, who confuses “mourning” with “morning” and is haunted for the rest of her life by her mother’s scream. Even in Brazil, though, in perfect safety, Bishop couldn’t finish a story she began about her later childhood, outside Boston, a story that would have had to include Uncle George.
It was years before she was able to write about her new home. There is nothing about Brazil in her second book, “A Cold Spring,” published in 1955, unless one accepts a glancing little poem of unusual warmth, titled “The Shampoo,” which begins with lichens growing slowly, promises such measureless time to a “dear friend,” and concludes:
The fact that the black hair was Lota’s—her grays, the shooting stars—has led biographically informed critics to greet “The Shampoo” as a tender celebration of love between two women, although the poem contains no reference to gender. The fact that both The New Yorker and Poetry rejected the poem, after accepting virtually everything Bishop had submitted for years, is suggested, by Marshall, as proof that its meaning was understood even at the time. When Bishop sent the poem to Moore, she received no response, a lapse that Bishop excused by noting, in a letter to another poet friend, the openly lesbian May Swenson, “I’m afraid she can never face the tender passion.”
The poems about Brazil that finally started appearing, in the late fifties, have raised charges of condescension toward the people Bishop treats as characters. “Manuelzhino,” for example, is a fond but exasperated complaint, in a landowner’s voice, about an inept gardener—“half squatter, half tenant (no rent)”—who genially fails at every assigned task. The speaker is fully aware of the inequities between master and servant (“the steep paths you have made—or your father and grandfather made—all over my property”) but also fully enjoys the system’s benefits. Marshall makes a strenuous case for Bishop’s social enlightenment, and argues that, while Bishop indeed lived a life of privilege in Brazil, she was nevertheless “an outsider, a dependent whose trust fund met only basic expenses”—a rationale that may make one queasier than anything in the poems. There are a few startlingly ugly statements in another letter that Bishop wrote to Swenson (quoted in Millier’s biography but not by Marshall, nor is it included among the published “Letters”), concerning “backward people who are incapable of any of the more highly refined emotions.” On the other hand, there is the piercing empathy of a poem titled simply “Squatter’s Children.” For Bishop, Brazil was above all a sanctuary, a place to breathe and to write. The finest poem she set there, a multipage elaboration of an Amazonian folk tale, “The Riverman,” has the Yeatsian radiance of a land beyond human discourse.
By the time she collected these poems into a book—“Questions of Travel,” published in 1965—her life in Brazil was essentially over. The descent began when Lota’s skill at managing construction was noticed by a politically minded neighbor who went on to become the state governor, and hired her to build an enormous park on a stretch of landfill along Rio’s Guanabara Bay. Through the early sixties, the complex project came to possess her; she spent all her time in Rio, working, increasingly nerve-racked and depleted, and didn’t notice, at first, when Bishop started drinking heavily again, or stopped writing, or took a lover in a distant, quiet town (an act that Bishop described as finding “a mother-figure and a refuge”). In early 1966, Bishop escaped for a few months to a teaching job in Seattle, where, amused by the genteel Lady Poet treatment she received, she began an affair with the pregnant twenty-three-year-old wife of a local artist, a young woman named Roxanne Cumming, apparently less than fully stable herself. The relationship continued by letter, which was how Lota discovered it, once Bishop returned to Brazil. Bishop was almost literally suffocating by then, experiencing her worst asthma attacks since childhood. But it was Lota, suddenly ousted from her job through political changes, and madly jealous, who broke down. Hospitalized, she became hysterical whenever Bishop entered her room. Even after her release, the doctor ordered Bishop to stay away, but Lota persuaded him to change his mind and the women were reunited—with Lota now the sick, fearful, and dependent one.
When Lota broke down again, the following summer, Bishop fled to New York. She was giving her time to recover; the doctor said that it would take months. So Bishop was wary when, just a few weeks later, in September, 1967, Lota claimed to be well enough to visit. Bishop picked her up at the airport, they had dinner together, and, exhausted, they went to sleep; in the early hours, Bishop awoke to find that Lota had taken an overdose of sedatives. She died in St. Vincent’s Hospital the following week. Bishop, consumed with guilt and blamed by Lota’s friends in Brazil, insisted that there had been no harsh words between them: Lota had simply been too sick to make the trip. And although Bishop moved in with Roxanne (and her eighteen-month-old son) just after Christmas—a disastrous relationship that lasted roughly two more years—she found that she missed and loved Lota more as time went on.
On the unnamed island, overhung with all the hemisphere’s leftover clouds—“a sort of cloud-dump,” in Bishop’s phrase—Robinson Crusoe had nightmares of countless other islands, and feared that, eventually, he would have to live on every one. Bishop started writing a poem about Crusoe in the mid-sixties; she took it up again three years after Lota’s death. (“I seem to be working again at last, after three years,” she wrote to The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Howard Moss.) The poem takes the form of a monologue by Crusoe, long after his rescue from the island and the death of “my dear Friday.” It is the account of a man grown old, looking back at a time marked by harsh solitude and anguish, but also by energy, invention, and an intense and irretrievable sense of meaning: even the knife he used for daily tasks “reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.” Bishop’s Crusoe, unlike Defoe’s, managed to brew alcohol from island berries—Bishop’s little joke on herself—and struggled to remember lines from books far out of reach. Now, back at home (if he is truly “home”: Bishop changed the title from “Crusoe at Home” to “Crusoe in England”), he drinks real tea and can look things up. But he lives “surrounded by uninteresting lumber.” The precious knife is just another thing. Of course, in England he is still living on an island, although it doesn’t seem like one—“but who decides?”
The year Bishop began writing again, 1970, was also the year she began to teach at Harvard. The prestigious and much needed job had come to her through Lowell, now Harvard’s star poet-teacher and still looking out for her after nearly twenty-five years, although they’d spent hardly any of that time together. (Their published correspondence runs to some eight hundred pages.) She was the first woman to teach an advanced writing course at the university—it probably would have taken longer, without Lowell’s interference—but on any terms she was not the obvious choice, since her work was now entirely out of fashion. These were the glory days of “confessional” poetry, and, ironically, the most glorified of the self-confessors was Lowell, who displayed no qualms about making poetic use of his marital problems, or his stay (one of many) in a mental hospital, or even other people’s private letters. That year, he had quoted a particularly anguished letter of Bishop’s, in a series of poems dedicated to her, compounding the offense by making her identity impossible to ignore.
It seems unlikely that she would have forgiven anyone else. She never quite forgave Mary McCarthy for her portrait of a lesbian member of their old Vassar circle in her scandalizing novel “The Group.” The character looks nothing like Bishop, but the notably butch partner she brings back from Europe—“This woman was her man,” the other girls realize, with shock—was a dead ringer for Lota de Macedo Soares, whom McCarthy had met once in New York. Lowell, however, was exempt even from Bishop’s outrage over the dominating School of Anguish, as she scornfully called the poets—Anne Sexton, John Berryman—who had learned from his example. (An even more telling term she used was “the self-pitiers.”) In an interview for a Time cover story on Lowell, in 1967, she was careful to implicate only his imitators when she said, “You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves.”
On campus, she cut an almost exaggeratedly modest figure. At a time when Sexton was giving readings accompanied by a rock band, Bishop was assigning her class exercises in iambic pentameter. She was fifty-nine when she arrived, and remained until she was sixty-six; her students often described her as looking like someone’s aunt or grandmother. (This was the only sort of comment, she admitted, that brought her “feminist facet uppermost.”) The poems she wrote in these years were no less modest than her demeanor, and no less deceptive. The missing word in a Wordsworth line that Crusoe, on his island, struggles to remember, is “solitude”; some things cannot be faced head on.
In “The Moose,” completed (after some twenty-five years of work) in 1972, madness and illness and dark family secrets are the murmured stuff of conversations on a long country bus ride, at night, until the passengers are jolted by the emergence, from a nearby wood, of a towering, gentle, otherworldly moose. Despite the passengers’ lack of anything remotely resembling expressive language (“Sure are big creatures.” / “It’s awful plain”), they are overcome with joy, lifted from their narrow selves for a luminous moment, before the bus rolls on. Bishop, who complained of the “egocentricity” of a confessional poet like Sexton, found deliverance in gazing steadily outward. Her later poems are filled with a quiet, tentative gratitude—like the passengers looking at the moose, hushed in wonder at the things that save them from themselves.
Bishop was writing the finest poems of her life, one after the next. Not quickly, to be sure. Her final book, “Geography III,” published in 1976, contained just nine new poems (and one translation), written over ten difficult years. The book was dedicated to Alice Methfessel, the attractive blond administrative assistant for Harvard’s Kirkland House, who was just twenty-seven when, in the fall of 1970, she helped Bishop adjust to university life. During the next few years, the women behaved with utter discretion. And, given Bishop’s increasing infirmities—the old asthma (aggravated by smoking), the new rheumatism, recurrent dysentery, the occasional broken bone due to a drunken fall—the young woman could easily have passed for her caretaker. But their community of students and poets soon understood that the two were lovers. Marshall heard the gossip during her Harvard years; Millier’s biography, published in 1993, makes the outlines of the relationship clear. But it’s something else to read the newly unearthed, intensely ardent letters that Bishop wrote to her last love, the young woman she was bound to lose, as she imagined her going off to ski or swim or make love with some young man—“I hope I die first”—which is more or less what seemed to be happening in the fall of 1975.
By October, Alice had delivered the news, and his name was Peter. Bishop went to Florida in December (Alice drove her to the airport) and in mid-January took an overdose of pills with alcohol. Discovered by neighbors, she survived. Being Elizabeth Bishop, she apologized, aghast at having almost caused the kind of pain she’d always known. Poetry had failed her this time. She’d fought to master the loss, writing seventeen quickly successive drafts of an exactingly structured villanelle, a form with origins in the French Baroque. The result is her most famous poem, a mixture of a higher Dorothy Parker with (in the commanding aside to herself, as she struggles to write) Gerard Manley Hopkins, the neat summing up of a life, titled “One Art”:
A fixed form of nineteen lines: five tercets, a concluding quatrain, and a rhyme scheme tight enough to keep any feeling from spilling over the borders. A triumph of control, understatement, wit. Even of self-mockery, in the poetically pushed rhyme word “vaster,” and the ladylike, pinkies-up “shan’t.” An exceedingly rare mention of her mother—as a woman who once owned a watch. A continent standing in for losses larger than itself.
But it wasn’t a disaster, after all. Alice returned at winter’s end, and remained with Bishop until she died, of a brain aneurysm, a year and a half later. “One Art” was finished in time to be included in “Geography III,” and Bishop seemed to enjoy “all the fuss” about her “very thin book,” even if she claimed that she didn’t. There were few completed poems after that, but many letters in which she reported on the pleasures of having survived yet again: the pleasure of teaching good students, of eating Boston spumoni, of snubbing Mary McCarthy. Most of all, there were the pleasures of being with Alice, during summers on North Haven, Maine—her last island—and of travelling, restless as ever, from place to place. Driving through what she called “the wilder sections of Maine,” the summer before she died, she and Alice saw “TWO moose,” she wrote, beside a deserted road. One of them, standing behind a tree, thinking that it could not be seen, was looking back at her. ♦
