Elizabeth Bishop Page 3

  Uncle Jack was mean, but Aunt Florence Bishop, who still lived with her parents in Worcester, was “foolish.” On a winter day when Elizabeth was out of school, wheezing with asthma and itchy with eczema, she accompanied Aunt Florence to the dentist, and sat by herself in the waiting room. Not quite by herself: there were “others waiting, two men and a plump middle-aged lady, all bundled up.” It was February 1918, Elizabeth knew—her seventh birthday was in a few days—and the cover of the latest National Geographic she was leafing through said the same. Elizabeth could read well now. The heat of the stuffy waiting room in winter, the mesmerizing yellow lamp on the side table, the frightening images of molten volcanoes and African women in tribal undress in the magazines, her foolish Aunt Florence’s cry of pain from the dentist’s chair, the false smile of the plump lady seated opposite her—all brought on “a feeling of absolute and utter desolation.” Elizabeth felt as if she were falling, “sliding / beneath a big black wave,” and another. The journey from Great Village to Worcester had brought her here, to the realization that she was alone—“myself,” an “I, I, I”—among unreliable, unpredictable adults. Worse, she would be “one of them too.” Forever. Never again an unthinking child with barnyard animals for friends, playing under the flowering syringa in Great Village, N.S. “Why was I a human being?”

  Being human, growing up too fast as the virtual orphan she was now, meant becoming a self divided from the world—“inside looking out”—and suffering ever more divisions: Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, Bulmers and Bishops. The European war was on. In Great Village there had always been “War Work,” done by men “dressed up” attractively in kilts and tam-o’-shanters. In Worcester during the winter of 1917–18, the war was new and grim: men walked the streets in drab uniforms, Grandmother Bishop required Elizabeth to learn to knit—“I hated it”—for the war effort. In school, when she was well enough to attend, there was no singing of “God Save the King” or “The Maple Leaf Forever.” Saluting the American flag felt like being “a traitor: I wanted us to win the War, of course, but I didn’t want to be an American.” Grandmother Bishop was horrified when she heard that. What else would Elizabeth need to hide inside while looking out?

  Finally, illness permitted a reprieve. She’d been sent home from first grade with terrible sores, a humiliation she would not forget, and the long days that followed at 1212 Main Street brought on asthma so severe she kept to her bed, scarcely able to breathe, feeling herself “aging, even dying.” A private nurse was no help, and John W. Bishop feared his little granddaughter, so pale and small, would die “in another two months” if she stayed in Sarah’s household. Gertrude’s sister Maud, one of the Bulmer aunts, had married George Shepherdson, the principal of the Great Village school, and followed him to Boston. Grandfather Bishop helped to fund an apartment for the Shepherdsons by the ocean in working-class Revere, an enclave of Italian and Irish immigrants near Lynn, where Uncle George found work as an accountant for General Electric. The sea breeze might do Elizabeth good. When kind Ronald the chauffeur carried weak and wheezing Elizabeth up the stairs to the Shepherdsons’ second-floor apartment and all the way to her new room, the back room of five, Aunt Maud burst into tears at the sight. But Elizabeth was happy. Soon cheerful, steadfast Aunt Grace Bulmer, Elizabeth’s favorite, a trained nurse as Gertrude had been, joined the family to work in Boston. Elizabeth’s breathing improved.

  Aunts Grace Bulmer and Maud Shepherdson (in white) with Uncle George Shepherdson

  And yet the aunts could not be Elizabeth’s deliverance. Sometimes she forgot, and sometimes she remembered, how in those first weeks Uncle George Shepherdson insisted on drawing her bath, how he fondled her until—“suddenly very uncomfortable”—she knew he wasn’t simply giving her “an unusually thorough washing,” and she twisted away from his probing fingers. He stopped giving her baths then, or she remembered no more of them.

  She didn’t forget the time Uncle George, a “very tall man,” grabbed her by the hair and dangled her over the railing of the second-story balcony. All in “good clean fun.” Elizabeth was a slip of a girl and her brown hair unusually thick and wiry. “Maybe lots of people have never known real sadists at first hand,” Elizabeth supposed, writing about Uncle George to her psychiatrist thirty years later. “I got to thinking that they [men] were all selfish and inconsiderate and would hurt you if you gave them a chance.”

  Living in Revere with the Shepherdsons, Elizabeth still suffered from asthma, enduring Aunt Maud’s nighttime injections of adrenaline, missing days and weeks of school, eventually falling behind her class by a full year. But now she was “wheezing and reading” her way through her aunt’s bookcases, reading “harder & harder” in bed in the early mornings when Uncle George’s temper erupted and he shouted at Aunt Maud before he left for work, or when he threatened Elizabeth with beatings for “answering back” or being “impertinent.” Sometimes she blamed herself for their quarrels, felt she might deserve those threatened beatings: she was the unwanted child who drew her aunt’s attention away from Uncle George. His rages dissipated as quickly as they burst forth, then Uncle George turned sentimental, tearing up over his wife’s ministrations—“everything was done for his comfort and enjoyment, nothing for anyone else.” Uncle George’s “dreadful sentimentality”—hypocritical and manipulative—was as painful for Elizabeth to witness as his “streak of cruelty,” although Aunt Maud, “small, worried, nervous, shy,” pardoned it all with “Oh you know how men are.”

  Elizabeth’s aunts Maud and Grace thrived on another kind of sentiment—the verse epics of Longfellow, Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which Elizabeth found on the bookshelves or imbibed as her aunts recited passages they had come to cherish in village reading circles through long Nova Scotia winters. The aunts played the piano too, and Elizabeth kept up her lessons. They also painted in watercolor and oils, having learned from an uncle whose rather “bad” portraits and landscapes intrigued Elizabeth, and they took her to the Boston museums. But poetry was “the most natural way of saying what I feel.” At age eight she began to write, adding her own words to the store of memorized poems that was growing to become “an unconscious part of me.” Aunt Grace read Elizabeth’s early efforts, counseled her to accept criticism gracefully and work to improve her poems, but none survive. An essay on “Americanism” written at age twelve brought her first pay as a writer—a five-dollar gold piece, first prize in a contest sponsored by Revere’s fledgling American Legion post, founded at the Great War’s end. Perhaps she wrote the essay sitting in a classroom of children whose parents she knew as “aliens, dreamers, drunkards,” she would later recall, many of them Sicilian immigrants hoping to gain American citizenship; and six years in the United States may have eroded her once-vehement loyalty to Canada. Yet her opening words—“From the icy regions of the frozen north to the waving palm trees of the burning South”—preserved only in Elizabeth’s memory, hint of Nova Scotia’s enduring claim on her imagination.

  Along with her classmates Elizabeth memorized whole poems, required by their teachers for recitations. James Russell Lowell’s “The First Snow-Fall” haunted her for years. She could still recite its singsong opening stanza word-for-word in later life—

  The snow had begun in the gloaming,

  And busily all the night

  Had been heaping field and highway

  With a silence deep and white.

  And she could easily rattle off the remaining nine quatrains, which turned macabre as they told of Lowell’s barely suppressed grief that winter day as he imagined the first snow falling on the grave of his infant daughter in the cemetery nearby, while an adored surviving child stood at his side:

  Then, with eyes that saw not, I kissed her;

  And she, kissing back, could not know

  That my kiss was given to her sister,

  Folded close under deepening snow.

  Perhaps the poem reminded her of Gwendolyn Patriquin, a frail, beautiful girl
she had played with in Nova Scotia, who died of untreated diabetes not long after spending a night with Elizabeth. Or another early-fixed memory: she could not have been more than four years old when her mother lifted her up to “say good-bye” to her little cousin Frank, laid out in a child’s coffin in her Bulmer grandparents’ winter-cold parlor, “his eyes shut up so tight / and the roads deep in snow.” Now her mother was gone, although not dead; she had never stood beside her father to receive his kiss. How to imagine a father’s grief—or love—for his child? Who would miss Elizabeth, so often scarcely able to draw breath, if she died?

  Better to read harder and harder. Elizabeth read the tales of Grimm and Andersen and imagined she was no mere orphan, but a fairy princess living in squalid Revere “just temporarily.” She read Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, a winter’s tale with a happier ending, so many times she knew most of it “by heart.” And though she still faltered in math at school, she loved the science she learned on her own in books. The British physicist C. V. Boys’s Soap Bubbles and the Forces which Mould them, with its foldout diagrams and illustrated experiments for children—requiring “no apparatus beyond a few pieces of glass or india-rubber pipe, or other simple things easily obtained”—enchanted her. The book, composed of lectures delivered “before a juvenile audience” in London, began: “I do not suppose there is any one in this room who has not occasionally blown a common soap-bubble, and while admiring the perfection of its form, and the marvellous brilliancy of its colours, wondered how it is that such a magnificent object can be so easily produced.” Elizabeth Bishop would one day tell a young aspiring writer, “Observation is a great joy.” To write one’s observations, record such wonderings, the greatest joy of all.

  The year Elizabeth won her five-dollar gold piece, Aunt Grace returned to Nova Scotia to marry, and Uncle Jack became Elizabeth’s legal guardian when her elderly Worcester grandparents died less than a week apart. Grandmother Bishop may never have learned of Elizabeth’s prize-winning patriotic turn. Mercifully, Jack Bishop and his wife, Ruby, although childless, wanted little to do with their niece; she could stay on in Revere, “dreaming deliberately,” turning a deaf ear to Uncle George’s tantrums, willing away his transgressions. And stern Uncle Jack was surprisingly liberal with the Bishop family money. Perhaps he’d imbibed the country’s postwar mood of extravagance: he established a $10,000 trust fund for Elizabeth beyond the share of the family fortune set aside for her at her father’s death. Now she could go to sailing camp on Cape Cod in the summer and a good boarding school when she was ready for it, and then college. The Nova Scotia Bulmers knew nothing of such camps or schools or colleges for women, and when Elizabeth rode the train to Cape Cod the first summer with another girl going to the same camp, she gave in to shyness and never spoke for the entire trip. The girl thought her “an idiot child,” but soon learned otherwise.

  Camp Chequesset, to which Elizabeth returned for five happy summers, opened a new life. Small for her age and still inclined to cough and wheeze, she nevertheless became an athlete, a “tomboy,” she would say: swimming, sailing, exploring beaches and woods near the camp in Wellfleet. She made friends with “other children as bright as me,” and found she could talk with them about her interests—poetry, above all. One girl gave her Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin’s anthology of modern verse, where Elizabeth learned from Monroe’s introduction that “the new poetry strives for a concrete and immediate realization of life,” and is “less vague, less verbose, less eloquent” than the Victorian poetry she had read and recited with her aunts or public school classmates: it seeks “absolute simplicity and sincerity.” There were nearly as many women writers as men represented in the book, their poems gathered by Poetry magazine’s two female editors, whose own work appeared in the volume. Elizabeth discovered Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Hilda Doolittle (who published as H.D.), among dozens of others, arranged alphabetically from Conrad Aiken to Edith Wyatt. The New Poetry, as the volume was titled, became hers.

  On a trip to Provincetown, the haven for artists and writers at the farthest end of Cape Cod, she located a secondhand bookshop, and returned to spend her allowance on the poetry of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, both priests (Anglican and Jesuit) who had lived over two centuries apart. They swiftly became her favorites, Herbert for the “simple dignity” of the language he used to express “very deep emotion,” and Hopkins for the unconventional means—“sprung rhythm”—he’d devised to accomplish the same. Herbert and Hopkins used rhyme, but not the way James Russell Lowell or Longfellow or Tennyson did—never singsong, never disrupting the natural flow of speech. There was newness in the old of Herbert, and Hopkins had studied the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf to originate his densely accented sprung rhythm, counting stressed syllables rather than regular metrical feet in each line. Elizabeth still loved the rhymes and rhythms of childhood, and put them to use composing camp songs and skits, becoming “extremely popular,” even “showing off.” When it was her turn to keep the cabin log, she wrote in verse.

  The girls at Camp Chequesset had a habit of falling in love with one another, forming naive crushes that, over the course of long days and nights together, sometimes turned physical. The summer Elizabeth was fourteen she admired from afar the camp’s swimming instructor, a young woman everyone called Mike, a favorite with campers, and she felt the thrill of Mike’s interest in return. Elizabeth—known here as “Bishie”—was one of Chequesset’s best swimmers; with her gamine look and wild hair cropped short, of course she attracted Mike’s attention. She was a favorite too, and precocious, yet under all that, lonely, an orphan, not likely to write letters home reporting a counselor’s trespass. A year later she told a fellow camper, “I haven’t any family whatever—excepting a few aunts and uncles . . . and its glorious not to feel you’ll have to turn out well or you’ll break someones’ heart.” That summer, at fifteen, Elizabeth was assigned to Mike’s cabin, a forty-seven-foot sloop in dry dock called the Ark; she was pretty sure Mike arranged it that way.

  Elizabeth and Mike on the Ark with Camp Chequesset cabin mates

  Some nights Mike climbed into Elizabeth’s bunk and stayed there, kissing her, exciting her, while the other girls slept. Elizabeth was pleased to have been remembered for an entire year, glad to be chosen, to be kissed. Had she seduced Mike with her pointed interest? she later wondered. Did she have such power? But Mike, ten years older, “should have known better” than to get in bed with a teenager, even one who had read Havelock Ellis, finding his treatise on “sexual inversion”—same-sex love—on the bookshelf in Revere among the nursing texts that had belonged to her mother and Aunt Grace. Mike gave Elizabeth a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet; Mike whispered plans for a “rendez-vous” the last night of camp, then “didn’t show up at all.” Elizabeth was left to wonder, until she heard that another counselor had discovered the plan and talked Mike out of it. Angry now and unexpectedly “feeling ashamed,” Elizabeth refused to answer any of Mike’s letters and tried to forget. The nighttime hours together in her bunk had been a secret anyway. Elizabeth hadn’t liked Gibran’s syrupy aphorisms on love and friendship; now she detested the book.

  Despite her early reading of Havelock Ellis—who described homosexuality as a naturally occurring variant in human behavior—and her strong attraction to Mike, Elizabeth didn’t think of herself as an “invert.” She simply loved the people she loved, and mostly they were women or girls of her own age. She loved Aunt Grace, who had been visiting Revere the night twelve-year-old Elizabeth’s first menstrual period arrived. Aunt Grace found Elizabeth in her room, terrified that the bleeding signaled complications from the appendicitis that had recently sent her to the hospital for emergency surgery. Aunt Grace showed her what to do and then held Elizabeth on her lap in the bathroom to calm her. “There was a white bathmat and as she talked she drew pictures of ovaries etc in the pile of the mat,” Elizabeth remembered, a map of a mystifying, scarcely com
prehensible interior. Aunt Grace slept with Elizabeth that night, holding her close, and Elizabeth was happy.

  Elizabeth loved Aunt Maud too, believed her aunt would have taken her in even without the Bishop money, which the Shepherdsons sorely needed. Uncle George had been laid off at General Electric. One night Elizabeth woke to find Aunt Maud kneeling by her bedside, praying. Had Uncle George been rough with her? Elizabeth wondered. Once he’d squeezed Aunt Maud so hard she’d broken a rib. Lately he’d taken to pawing Elizabeth, “always trying to feel my breasts” when she walked past, when Aunt Maud wasn’t looking. She pulled away, telling him “Don’t,” but he was “so very large and strong,” she still sometimes got “caught.” This too she willed herself to forget or excuse, following Aunt Maud’s example; she tried not to understand “exactly what it was he was doing.” She was glad to leave Revere for boarding school at the end of the summer she was fifteen, after the failed rendezvous with Mike.