Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

Abstract

It is time for a new biography of Elizabeth Bishop (1911–79), considering that Brett Millier's Life and the Memory of It (1993), Lorrie Goldensohn's The Biography of a Poetry (1992), Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau's Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (1994) came out in the early 1990s. That decade saw the rise of “The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon” (Thomas Travisano, “The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon,” Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, ed. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano [Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996], 217–44), which accelerated with this century's publications of posthumous material: Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box. edited by Alice Quinn (2006); Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, edited by Lloyd Schwartz and Robert Giroux (2008); Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton (2008); and the centenary editions of Poems and Prose from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2011). Then came Bruno Barretto's film, Reaching for the Moon (2013), a sensationalized adaptation of Carmen Oliveira's Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares (2002). As welcome as Marshall's new biography is, its partiality and incompleteness leave readers wanting.Since Elizabeth Bishop's last partner, Alice Methfessel, died in 2009, leaving behind more letters for the Vassar College Archives, including those to Bishop's psychiatrist Ruth Foster, scholars have been able to discover more intimate details about Bishop, thereby fleshing out interpretations of her work. Megan Marshall makes excellent use of archival research and posthumous draft poems unpublished in Bishop's lifetime to weave together a vivid account of Bishop's life. The brevity of this biography at just over three hundred pages plus notes is mostly a blessing, but partly a curse.Marshall's swift prose style quickly covers Bishop's restless existence. There was never a boring moment; however, I was initially annoyed with Marshall's seemingly indulgent first-person narrative of Bishop's funeral on page 1. Worse was page 2's comparison with Robert Lowell's funeral “with six hundred mourners filling the cavernous sanctuary and two wives—which of them was former? possibly not even they were sure” and “[n]o one of any importance arrived late.” Is Marshall's gossip merely trying to stir up the pot? There are also some questionable early judgments, such as stating that Bishop “despised sentimentality,” which is only partly true of the author who wrote, “What's wrong with self-pity, anyway?” (Poems [New York: Farrar, 2011], 183). Although Bishop was a college devotee/protégé of Wallace Stevens, who wrote that “sentimentality is a failure of feeling” (Opus Posthumous [New York: Vintage, 1990], 189), she loved to nudge the edges of sentimentality to pinpoint our misgivings.The first chapter is called “Balcony,” and each successive chapter's title follows the key words of Bishop's sestina, “A Miracle for Breakfast” (1937). The greatness of the sestina is assured, but the significance of crumb, coffee, river, and miracle are not clear. With “Sun,” the final chapter thematically weaves in Bishop's desire for blue skies, blue eyes, and light in contrast with her late fogginess, but the sestina's key words are often uncertain or arbitrary.Likewise, early quotations from poems are integrated without context. In chapter 1, Marshall recounts Bishop's early horrific witness of the Great Salem Fire of 1914, quoting the line, “I was terribly thirsty but mama didn't hear me calling” (11). As readers, we understand the compounded trauma here, but we are not informed that Bishop's words come from “A Drunkard,” a draft discovered posthumously. Marshall does not provide this context for other fiery observations recalled from young Elizabeth's crib, and she does not let readers know that “A Drunkard” ends with “[a]nd all I'm telling you may be a lie” (Poems 318). This complex alcoholic perspective is left out, although there are notes in the back acknowledging that the line comes from “The [sic] Drunkard” (311). Likewise without contexts are Marshall's blended accounts of Bishop's mother trying to hang herself, then her scream echoing across the village “as [Elizabeth] drove Nelly to pasture” (12). These stories come from different sources but are written quickly in one paragraph. Readers who happen to know “In the Village” (1953) will recall that Bishop's fictional autobiography of Great Village, Nova Scotia, features the young narrator whacking Nelly the cow with a stick later in the story. These early signs of biographical misprision, I suspect, may be due to Marshall's challenge of trying early on to integrate key material without completing narratives that will be filled in later in the book. Perhaps the haste can be forgiven for the pace of integration.By the end of chapter 1, the biographer has already informed readers of Bishop's parental lineages and losses, her fondness for her Nova Scotia relatives, abuse by her American Uncle George, development of artistic and athletic freedoms at boarding school and summer camp, including initiations into modern poetry and sexual exploits with a female camp counsellor named Mike. Woven into this narrative is Bishop's early reading of same-sex love and her understanding of the female body from her Aunt Grace, who was with her when she experienced her first period and “slept with Elizabeth that night, holding her close” (24). By this point in the biography, Marshall has begun to win me over because I can imagine how this memory contributed to the late, posthumous poem “Dear, my compass / still points north,” with its mysterious imagery of “crab-apples / ripen to rubies, / cranberries / to drops of blood” (Poems 313). We also read of Bishop's formative Vassar years, major friendships, Depression-era politics, and early literary work with Marianne Moore, as well as her unlikely interview of T. S. Eliot. Bishop had the gall to ask him if he had “ever done a girl in.” “I am not the type,” he replied (34). Eliot explained his “rhythmic forms, and rhymed verses,” enduring poetic elements in Bishop's poetry that also have ongoing interest to scholars of Bishop, who in her senior year took a course in “Music as a Literature” (36).Each of Marshall's chapters ends with a first-person coda from the biographer's life at Harvard in the 1970s. These can seem self-indulgent, but skepticism ebbs when we read of echoes between the lives of Marshall and Bishop: writing poetry at age eight, unwarranted bodily intrusions from elder males, homesickness (a repeated theme in the book), and feminist ambivalences. Marshall's classes with Professors Bishop, Lowell, and Robert Fitzgerald bring readers immediacy. These codas are unnecessary for Bishop's biography, but they do reveal significant cultural trends in twentieth-century America.Chapter 2, “Crumb,” deals with the 1930s, especially Bishop's years in France with Margaret Miller and Louise Crane, the latter of whom she later was apparently surprised to find in bed with Billie Holiday (66). This sensational incident is revealed somewhat hesitantly, although it is mentioned again later (200). Another loose observation revolves around a conversation in Paris with Vassar classmate Hallie Tompkins about beauty, which led to Louise Crane's finding Bishop “weeping in frustration over a glass of gin” (62). Marshall's note on this reference is to Quinn's Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, page 260; however, I found the quotation on page 274 in different words attributed, not to Louise Crane, but to Hallie Tompkins Thomas (who was there with her husband). The meaning of Bishop's sad words remains similar, but in addition to the above errors, Marshall does not contextualize the conversation as one these friends were having about Poe's sense of beauty. This was a pivotal moment in Bishop's artistic development that resulted in her growing admiration of Charles Baudelaire, who led her through decadent explorations in Florida, as indicated in “The Bight” (1949). Baudelaire does not come up in the book, although Marshall does effectively describe other French influences such as Arthur Rimbaud and surrealism.Chapter 2 explains Bishop's Floridian drift away from Moore through analysis of “The Fish” (1940) and “Roosters,” which in 1941 “would be the last poem she completed for publication in nearly four years” (70). At this time, Bishop began a relationship with Marjorie Stevens and wrote an unpublished love poem, “It is marvellous to wake up together” (Quinn, ed. Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box [New York: Farrar, 2006], 44). In this part of the book, drinking and sex are prevalent, but Bishop's suite of bawdy, bodily Florida poems planned for a volume titled “Bone Key” are not mentioned. This is unfortunate because Marshall's final chapter emphasizes Bishop's reluctance directly to reveal bodily desires like such other feminist poets as Adrienne Rich and May Swenson. Marshall does not inform readers that Bishop was promised publication of “Pleasure Seas” back in 1939, but it never saw print. We do, however, read about Bishop's effective therapy with Dr. Ruth Foster, culminating in her nurturing presence at the end of “At the Fishhouses” (1947).The smell of “Coffee” fills Bishop's Brazil, where she had “died and gone to heaven without deserving to” (103). The seventeen years with Lota de Macedo Soares were divided between the conjoined bliss of the 1950s and the gradual separation of the couple due to Lota's anxious commitment to the Flamengo Park project in Rio and Bishop's increasing alcoholism when alone in Rio or Samambaia. Brazil inspired much of Bishop's best work, including poems about class differences and poverty, such as “Squatter's Children” (1958). Unfortunately, Marshall offers some decontextualized interpretation of the squatter's shack in a storm “like the Oz-bound tornado that swept up an orphan Dorothy” and the “lawfulness” of the children's “soggy documents” in the poem “is the new world of 1955, where a handful of Negro schoolchildren in Topeka, Kansas, had just won, at least in court documents, the right to cross thresholds into classrooms previously closed to them” (118–19). American politics is not the focus, point, or perspective in “Squatter's Children.” It was precisely the intrusion of American imperialist politics into Bishop's Life World Library Brazil book (1962) by American editors that “massacrated” (Travisano and Hamilton, eds., Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell [New York: Farrar, 2008], 413) that project, as Lota said. In the case of “Squatter's Children,” Marshall eventually grounds her analysis by describing the poem's publication in “the progressive Brazilian monthly Anhembi, where it followed the serialization of Vinicius de Moraes's ‘verse tragedy’ of favela life, Orfeu du Conceicao, from which the movie Black Orpheus was derived” (119). Overall, Marshall emphasizes Bishop's unifications, as in the “Elsewhere” poem, “Filling Station” (1955), which could be set in Canada and Brazil. Brazil's alternate home provided total recall of the northeast. “United we shall be happy,” Bishop translated “the words UNIDOS SEREMOS FELIZES … of Rio's popular Mangueira samba school” (121) for Howard Moss, her editor at The New Yorker.Chapters 4 and 5 contain Marshall's thorough explanation of the dissolution of Lota and Elizabeth's relationship. Marshall emphasizes the roles of Lilli Correia de Araujo as lover, friend, house manager, and confidante in Ouro Preto. Correia de Araujo would eventually help Bishop out of her affair with Roxanne Cumming, a student of Bishop's at the University of Washington in 1966. Cumming had sent a letter to Bishop in Brazil that, when found by Lota, led to their tumultuous break-up. Marshall carefully explains the complexities of these relationships as they break down; Bishop's time in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York are described vividly and convincingly.After the 1967 death of Lota de Macedo Soares due to an overdose of valium, Bishop struggled in every way imaginable, trying to sell Casa Mariana in Ouro Preto and abandoning writing projects. By 1972, she managed to complete and read “The Moose” for Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony. The final chapters recount Bishop's passionate relationship with Alice Methfessel in Boston. Marshall explains how Alice almost left Bishop in the mid-1970s due to Bishop's drinking and Alice's engagement to a man named Peter; this step into heterosexual conformity was possibly also enacted in deference to Methfessel's traditional Republican parents. Bishop's fear of a loss that might be more than she could bear led to “One Art” (1976), her one “immortal” (305) poem. Comparatively significant is the poem “Sonnet” (1979), published shortly after Bishop's death of a brain aneurysm. Readers are rarely sure how to take the poem's last word, “gay,” a joyful release at the end of the poem with its rainbow imagery coinciding with the new symbol of gay pride at the time, the rainbow flag.One of the most fascinating parts of this final chapter is the treatment of Bishop's short friendship with Adrienne Rich, who gave Bishop a ride from New York to Boston. Upon reading Rich's Diving into the Wreck (1972) and “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1972), Bishop admitted that Rich could express emotion directly, whereas she herself had to chisel it into artistic forms; Bishop's aesthetic resembles Emily Dickinson's credo, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant — / Success in Circuit lies,” for this is how Bishop manages to juggle her poetic values of mystery and spontaneity into accurate, dazzling poems. Marshall emphasizes Rich's outspoken feminism in contrast to Bishop's reserve: “Elizabeth attributed her instinctive reticence … to her ‘Scotch-Canadian-Protestant-Puritan’ temperament” (250).This book's energetic movement works at liberating Bishop and Marshall in the spirit of the 1970s. The extensive use of archival exchanges of letters, especially those with her doctors Ruth Foster and Anny Baumann, amplify Bishop's private ordeals. While there are interesting forays into how Bishop's errant personal life affected her poetry, too many contexts and poems are left hanging as “gaps / or empties” (Robert Lowell, “For Elizabeth Bishop 4,” History [New York: Farrar, 1973]). While Bishop's “unimaginable phrase[s],” as Lowell describes them, enable readers to make “the casual perfect” (48), these poetic gifts are less pronounced than the contextual gaps and emotional longing prevalent in this biography. Despite its shortcomings, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast is an engrossing read.