Elizabeth Bishop Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  October 21, 1979: Agassiz House, Radcliffe Yard

  BALCONY

  April 29, 1975: Ninth-Floor Conference Room, Holyoke Center

  CRUMB

  October 5, 1976: Robinson Hall, Harvard Yard

  COFFEE

  January 12, 1977: 437 Lewis Wharf, Boston

  RIVER

  Spring 1977: Pusey Library, Harvard Yard

  MIRACLE

  June 14, 1977: Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall

  SUN

  Envoy: January 23, 2014, Patou Thai, Belmont Center

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Text Permission Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from MARGARET FULLER

  Buy the Book

  Read More from Megan Marshall

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Megan Marshall

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-61730-8

  Acknowledgments for permission to publish previously unprinted material and to reprint previously published material can be found on page 366.

  Cover design by Jackie Shepherd

  Cover photograph by Josef Breitenbach © The Josef and Yaye Breitenbach Foundation, courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson

  eISBN 978-0-544-61842-8

  v1.0117

  for Emily

  and for Scott,

  then and now

  Every living human being is a biographer from childhood, in that he perpetually studies the souls of those about him, detects with keen and curious thought the resemblances and differences between those souls and that still more present and puzzling entity, his own, and weighs with the most anxious care the bearing and effect of others’ thoughts and actions upon his own life.

  —GAMALIEL BRADFORD, “Confessions of a Biographer,” 1925

  SESTINE, SESTINA.—A very elaborate measure invented by the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, imitated by Dante and other Italians, tried inexactly by Spenser, and sometimes recently attempted in English.

  —GEORGE SAINTSBURY, Historical Manual of English Prosody, 1910

  SESTINA French. Syllabic. Thirty-nine lines divided into six SESTETS and one TRIPLET, which is called the envoy. The poem is ordinarily unrhymed. Instead of rhymes, the six end-words of the lines in stanza one are picked up and re-used in a particular order, as end-words in the remaining stanzas. In the envoy, which ends the poem, the six end-words are also picked up: one end-word is buried in each line, and one end-word finishes each line. Lines may be of any length.

  The order in which the end-words are re-used is prescribed in a set pattern. . . . What the numerological significance of the set is, however, has evidently been lost since the Middle Ages, though the form is still a popular one.

  —LEWIS TURCO, The Book of Forms, 1968

  List of Illustrations

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1: BALCONY

  page 9: Elizabeth Bishop at six months, baby book photo. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 10: Great Village postcard, ca. 1910s. George A. Shepherdson to H. B. Shepherdson. From the Bulmer Bowers Hutchinson Sutherland family fonds, 1997.002.I.i.23. Courtesy of Esther Clark Wright Archives, Acadia University.

  page 11: Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, date unknown. From the Bulmer Bowers Hutchinson Sutherland family fonds, 1997.002.II.i.48. Courtesy of Esther Clark Wright Archives, Acadia University.

  page 13: Elizabeth Bulmer and William Brown Bulmer on verandah of Bulmer family home, Great Village, Nova Scotia. Photograph ca. 1920s. From the Bulmer Bowers Hutchinson Sutherland family fonds, 1997.002.II.i.95. Courtesy of Esther Clark Wright Archives, Acadia University.

  page 15: Elizabeth Bishop on beach at Spencer’s Point, Nova Scotia. Photograph ca. 1921. From the Bulmer Bowers Hutchinson Sutherland family fonds,1997.002.II.i.102. Courtesy of Esther Clark Wright Archives, Acadia University.

  page 18: Una Layton Frances, Grace Bulmer Bowers, Maude Bulmer Shepherdson, and George A. Shepherdson. Photograph ca. 1910s. From the Bulmer Bowers Hutchinson Sutherland family fonds, 1997.002.II.i.57. Courtesy of Esther Clark Wright Archives, Acadia University.

  page 23: Snapshot from Camp Chequesset (“Bishie–Mike–Happy–Buddy–Brownie”). Courtesy of the Esther Merrell Stockton Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 25: Staff photograph of the Blue Pencil, 1929. Courtesy of Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

  page 33: Elizabeth Bishop, Vassar College yearbook, 1934. Courtesy of Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 37: Drawing of birds on the roof by Elizabeth Bishop, from letter to Donald Stanford, April 5, 1934. Courtesy of Donald E. Stanford Papers, Special Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries.

  CHAPTER 2: CRUMB

  page 47: Margaret Miller, ca. 1937. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 52: Marianne Moore, 1935, by George Platt Lynes. Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., LC-USZ62-101955. Copyright the Estate of George Platt Lynes.

  page 56: Elizabeth Bishop passport, 1936. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 58: Louise Crane and Elizabeth Bishop, ca. 1937. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 63: Louise Crane and Elizabeth Bishop in Paris, ca. 1937. Courtesy of Louise Crane and Victoria Kent Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  page 71: Marjorie Stevens and Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway at Caroline Shop. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 73: Portrait of Elizabeth Bishop by Loren MacIver. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library. © Estate of Loren MacIver, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.

  page 76: Robert Lowell. Photographer and date unknown. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Robert Lowell Papers, MS Am 1905 (2859).

  page 85: Elizabeth Bishop at her desk in the Poetry Office, Library of Congress, ca. 1949–50. Courtesy of Office of Communications, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  CHAPTER 3: COFFEE

  page 102: House at Samambaia, date unknown. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 105: Lota with large fish, Cabo Frio, date unknown. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 109: Elizabeth Bishop swimming at Samambaia, date unknown. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 116: Elizabeth Bishop on patio at Samambaia, date unknown. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 123: May Swenson, 1954. Photograph © Erich Hartmann, Magnum Photos.

  CHAPTER 4: RIVER

  page 144: Elizabeth Bishop with Aldous Huxley and Laura Archera Huxley, Samam­baia, ca. 1958. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 145: Laura Archera Huxley touring a Uial
apiti village, ca. 1958. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 153: Landing at Gurupá on the Amazon, ca. 1958. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 157: Lilli Correia de Araújo, date and photographer unknown.

  page 163: Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop on beach in Rio de Janeiro, 1962. Photograph by P. Muniz. Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, from Robert Lowell Papers, series III, box 21, folder 12/13.

  page 166: Flamengo Park, Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1966. Photograph by Marcel Gautherot. Courtesy of Instituto Moreira Salles Collections.

  page 182: Elizabeth Bishop with Lota de Macedo Soares and Lilli Correia de Araújo, Ouro Prêto, ca. 1960s. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  CHAPTER 5: MIRACLE

  page 204: Ouro Prêto house under renovation, ca. 1965–66. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 206: Riverboat interior, ca. 1966–67. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 217: Telegram, September 26, 1967. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 223: Lota with Sammy the toucan, date unknown. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 228: Marianne Moore at the Bronx Zoo, ca. 1953–54. Photograph by Esther Bubley. Courtesy of Estate of Esther Bubley, © Jean Bubley.

  page 231: Elizabeth Bishop reading “The Moose” at Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, June 1972. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  CHAPTER 6: SUN

  page 241: Elizabeth Bishop with Alice Methfessel, ca. early 1970s. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 247: Adrienne Rich, ca. 1974. Photograph by Thomas Victor.

  page 252: Robert Lowell, 1973. Photograph by Walker Evans. © Walker Evans Archive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.252.153.1–234.

  page 259: View of backyards, Cambridge, Massachusetts, ca. 1970s. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 262: View from Lewis Wharf, ca. 1973. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 266: Frank Bidart and Elizabeth Bishop on the ferry to North Haven, 1974. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

  page 272: Self-portrait of Elizabeth Bishop’s hand, October 2, 1975, from the collection of Burt Britton. Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate.

  page 280: Elizabeth Bishop, ca. 1974. Photograph by Thomas Victor.

  October 21, 1979

  AGASSIZ HOUSE, RADCLIFFE YARD

  John Ashbery was late. The man who’d won, all in a season four years earlier, the three major prizes—National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize—that it had taken Elizabeth Bishop, the poet whose work and life the day’s crowd had gathered to honor and mourn, a lifetime of fitful yet painstaking effort to garner, was late and holding up the proceedings.

  A Harvard man, Ashbery knew the campus well, though perhaps not this lesser brick building in Radcliffe Yard—Agassiz House—where more than one hundred of Elizabeth Bishop’s friends and former students sat on folding chairs in a mahogany-paneled reception room, growing warm in the sunlight from the high windows on an unusually hot Sunday in late October. Waiting. Waiting to hear from a succession of friends and poets, Ashbery most eminent among them, the one assigned to read first. Waiting to sing, accompanied by portable Hammond organ, the hymns—“Rock of Ages,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “Dear Lord and Father of mankind, Forgive our foolish ways!”—that buttressed the poetry but not the faith of Elizabeth Bishop, a resolute “Unbeliever,” as she had titled an early poem.

  It was not Harvard’s usual site for an important funeral. That would have been Memorial Church, or its smaller side chapel, across a broad lawn crisscrossed with pathways from the imposing Widener Library and adjacent to stodgy Robinson Hall, the classroom building where Elizabeth Bishop had taught eleven aspiring poets, myself among them, through a fall semester three years before in a dimly lit seminar room. That was her last “verse-writing” class at the college, which had let her go in the spring of 1977 when she turned sixty-six, passing the mandatory retirement age for nontenured faculty members. It was the year I graduated. The year Robert Lowell, the poet and friend who had brought Elizabeth Bishop to teach at Harvard, died, just after Labor Day at age sixty. Lowell had been my teacher too, and I’d attended his funeral in Boston’s incense-laden neo-Gothic Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill. There had been no amiably consoling program of poets reading and friends reminiscing and Hammond organ quavering that day, but rather a solemn high-church Episcopal requiem, with six hundred mourners filling the cavernous sanctuary and two wives—which of them was former? possibly not even they were sure—dressed in stylish black and seated in the front pew. No one of any importance arrived late.

  Now in Agassiz House, Alice Methfessel, Elizabeth Bishop’s close friend (Elizabeth would never describe Alice to others as anything but “friend”—not as “lover” or “partner,” words that might have begun to seem right had she lived a decade longer), signaled the organist to begin. “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing,” the mourners sang. And then blond, athletic Alice spoke in her steady musical voice, quoting the elegiac last lines of E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, saying all she would in public: “Wilbur felt about Charlotte exactly the way I feel about Elizabeth . . . [she was] ‘a true friend and a good writer.’” Alice, who was so much younger than Elizabeth, more than thirty years, and had been her close friend for less than a decade, could not have known Elizabeth’s pronouncement on Charlotte’s Web when it was first published. Alice had been scarcely ten years old in 1953 when Elizabeth wrote to the poet Marianne Moore, recalling a visit to “Mr. White” and his wife, Katharine, Elizabeth’s editor at the New Yorker; Elizabeth had admired the spider webs in the Whites’ barn in North Brooklin, Maine, and learned of the work in progress: “I ordered the book but, Marianne, it is so AWFUL.” Elizabeth despised sentimentality, particularly about death. She had not wanted a memorial service.

  Alice again: “Mr. Ashbery doesn’t seem to be here, so I guess we can just move along.”

  I wasn’t there either. In the two years since graduation I’d fallen away from what I once hoped was a calling to write poetry, into magazine journalism and the occasional more literary book review. Solving the riddle of what I might accomplish with such talent with words as I possessed would take decades. I had not been close to Elizabeth Bishop, indeed I had reason to think she might dislike me.

  Those decades passed. Biographies, critical studies, volumes of Elizabeth Bishop’s correspondence, and new editions of her slender oeuvre—one hundred poems, a dozen stories—were published. In 2011, Elizabeth Bishop’s hundredth birthday was celebrated at readings and conferences across the United States. In 2012, Bishop’s face—sleepily beautiful, pale and just a bit puffy, topped by a shock of unruly hair—made it onto one of the U.S. Postal Service’s ten “Twentieth-Century Poets” stamps. Robert Lowell’s did not.

  When I told my writing students I’d studied with Elizabeth Bishop, their eyes widened in amazement. Typing “Elizabeth Bishop” into Google’s search engine (a phrase the poet never heard) netted more than twenty-five million “results,” from “Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia” to an entry in a catalogue of “Popular Lesbian and Bisexual Poets” at www.sappho.com. The Internet brought me to a recording of the memorial service in Agassiz House, the one I’d missed.

  Sitting at my desk and staring into a dark computer screen (the website offered few graphics), I listened to anot
her of my former teachers, Robert Fitzgerald, translator of the Odyssey and the Iliad, thirty years dead, recall a humorous encounter with “Elizabeth.” Meeting unexpectedly in a waiting room at University Health Services on a day at the height of the 1973 energy crisis, when OPEC had forced gas prices to double or triple, Elizabeth had refused to admit to Robert the least concern about the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. She took the long view: “My grandmother in Nova Scotia used whale oil in her lamps.” I heard Bishop’s publisher, Robert Giroux, read a letter in which the author, famously self-deprecating and painfully shy, wrote of learning she’d won the National Book Award in 1970: “It was very nice.” No, she couldn’t make the trip from the Brazilian countryside to New York City on a day’s notice for the award ceremony in early March: “I have nothing to wear . . . nothing with me but summer frocks.”

  And John Ashbery finally arrived, to read Elizabeth Bishop’s sestina “A Miracle for Breakfast.” It was the first of two she’d written, sparking a vogue for the ancient form in younger writers. Ashbery had discovered the poem as a college student in the mid-1940s, he explained, ten years after its initial publication in Poetry magazine. Bishop’s sestina—clever, incantatory, casually epiphanic—inspired him to try one of his own, the first poem he’d written that he considered worth saving. He’d felt “close” to her ever since, though like many of her admirers, he scarcely knew Elizabeth Bishop.