Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection 9780748665754

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Elizabeth Bishop Lines of Connection

Linda Anderson

For Ann

© Linda Anderson, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 6574 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 6575 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 6576 1 (epub) The right of Linda Anderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Acknowledgements iv List of Abbreviations vii List of Plates viii Introduction 1 1. Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore

9

2. A Window into Europe

32

3. The Labyrinth of Temporality

89

4. The Journey of Lines

144

Bibliography 172 Index 180

Acknowledgements

Though I have written this book during a period of leave, generously awarded to me by Newcastle University in 2011–12, I have been thinking about Elizabeth Bishop for more than ten years, ever since I first visited the Archive at Vassar College and recognised the rich web of other ­writings – drafts and notebooks – which lay behind, and connected, Bishop’s published work. Several editions of Bishop’s letters and unpublished work have been published in the interim and I am fortunate to have been able to draw on the two fine new ‘Centenary’ editions of Bishop’s poems and prose that contain many previously unpublished works, including the full text of Bishop’s correspondence with Anne Stevenson. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton have edited the complete correspondence of Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words In Air, which has stimulated many scholars and poets to eloquent reassessments. Alice Quinn assembled many of the previously unpublished poems in her book, Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box, where she appended a rich selection from the notebooks too. I regret that I have not been able to make use of her new edition of the notebooks that will be published in 2013. If I had, I would have been spared my own struggles with Bishop’s handwriting! Studying Bishop has involved me in many wonderful conversations with scholars and poets and I am grateful for the generosity with which others have shared their knowledge and insights. Here I want especially to acknowledge Sandra Barry, Fred D’Aguiar, Jonathan Ellis, William Fiennes, Linda France, Suzie LeBlanc, Paul Muldoon, Sean O’Brien, Barbara Page, Deryn Rees-Jones, Fiona Sampson and Jo Shapcott, all of whom inspired me and helped me along the way. Like all Bishop scholars, I owe a special debt to the poet Anne Stevenson, not only for her own illuminating studies of Bishop but also for eliciting the generous treasure of her correspondence with Bishop. I am also fortunate to have known Anne as a friend for many years. I have given talks about Bishop at the Centenary Conference about

Acknowledgements    ­v

Bishop in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at The Royal Society of Literature, the OGM of the Council for College and University English and at the University of East Anglia. The discussions that ensued have fed into this book and I am very grateful for all the acute and wise comments that were made and that I cannot acknowledge individually. Nancy McKechnie and Dean Rogers eased my way into the archives at Vassar and I am grateful for their unfailing helpfulness. I am also grateful to archivists at Acadia University and at Yale University who helped me to source photographs. My greatest debt is to Ann Spencer who has been on this journey and many others with me and has given me the love and encouragement I have needed to see this book through to the end.

Permissions I am grateful to the Archives at Acadia University for permission to publish the following photographs: Bulmer Family Home, Great Village, NC, Accession no. 1997.002.II.i.84; Elizabeth Bishop in front of Presbyterian Church, Accession no. 1997.002.II.i.82; Gertrude Bulmer Bishop and Elizabeth Bishop c. 1913, Accession no 1997.002.i.70; Grace Bulmer Bowers July 1956, Accession no. 1997.002.II.i.167; Gertrude Bulmer Bishop in front of Hill Home, Great Village, c. 1900, Accession no. 1997.002.II.i.20. I am grateful to Special Collections, Vassar College for images and for access to manuscript material. I am grateful to the Beinecke Special Collections, Yale University, for images of Louise Crane and Elizabeth Bishop. Some sentences in Chapter 4 were first published in an earlier article, ‘The Dubious Topography of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The End of March”’, The Royal Society of Literature Review 2012. The following are reprinted with permission: Excerpts from poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011, the Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from prose by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011, the Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Editor’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011, Lloyd Schwartz. Excerpts from ‘Homesickness’ (poem), ‘Homesickness’ (prose), ‘True Confessions’ and ‘Dear Dr.’ from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box

­vi    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Copyright © 2006, Alice Helen Methfessel. Introduction copyright © 2006, Alice Quinn © Carcanet Press, UK. Excerpts from The Diary Of ‘Helena Morley’ by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1957, Elizabeth Bishop. Excerpts from One Art: Selected Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux. Copyright © 1994, Alice Helen Methfessel. Introduction and compilation copyright © 1994, Robert Giroux. Excerpt from Words In Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Copyright © 2008, the Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Excerpt from Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Joelle Biele. Copyright © 2011, the Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Excerpts from journals and notebooks by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2013, the Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop estate.

List of Abbreviations

CEP Poems: Centenary Edition CEPr Prose: Centenary Edition EAP Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (ed. Alice Quinn) HM The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’ One Art: Selected Letters (ed. Robert Giroux) OA VC Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New York WIA Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton)

List of Plates

  1. Gertrude Bulmer Bishop in front of Hill Home, Great Village, c. 1900.   2. Gertrude Bulmer Bishop and Elizabeth Bishop, c. 1913.   3. Elizabeth Bishop in front of Presbyterian Church.   4. Bulmer family home, Great Village.   5. Grace Bulmer Bowers (Aunt Grace), July 1956.   6. Marianne Moore by George Platt Lynes, c.1935.   7. Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Crane.   8. Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Crane, dockside.   9. Elizabeth Bishop outside her studio, Samambaia, Petropolis, Brazil. 10. Elizabeth Bishop, Lota and Aldous Huxley, Samambaia, Petropolis, 1958. 11. Elizabeth Bishop with camera on Amazon trip, 1960. 12. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro.

1. Gertrude Bulmer Bishop in front of Hill Home, Great Village, c. 1900.

2. Gertrude Bulmer Bishop and Elizabeth Bishop, c. 1913.

3. Elizabeth Bishop in front of Presbyterian Church.

4. Bulmer family home, Great Village.

5. Grace Bulmer Bowers (Aunt Grace), July 1956.

6. Marianne Moore by George Platt Lynes, c.1935.

7. Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Crane.

8. Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Crane, dockside.

9. Elizabeth Bishop outside her studio, Samambaia, Petropolis, Brazil.

10. Elizabeth Bishop, Lota and Aldous Huxley, Samambaia, Petropolis, 1958.

11. Elizabeth Bishop with camera on Amazon trip, 1960.

12. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro.

Introduction

Your scenery comes and goes, half-real and half language all the time. (WIA, 403)

A Prize ‘Unhappy Childhood’ Reading Bishop’s ‘Miscellaneous Notes’ in the Vassar Archive, I came across the following comment by Bishop set out starkly on the page and offering a rare moment of self-reflection: ‘Was I adopted or adapted?’1 The change of a vowel she makes is small, but it seems to point to an ambivalence that we can see running through the whole of her life about who she was and how she had been shaped by her childhood. Technically, Bishop did not become an orphan until 1934 when she was twenty-three and in her final year at Vassar College. In reality, she had lost her parents years before: first her father through Bright’s disease when she was just nine months old, and then her mother through mental illness and subsequent institutionalisation in Dartmouth Hospital. After the age of five, Bishop never saw her mother again. The next year Bishop underwent another major trauma when she was taken away from her beloved maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, to Worcester, Massachusetts, to be brought up – or adapted – by her paternal grandparents and provided with ‘a better education’. She recalled the journey from Halifax to Boston in her story ‘The Country Mouse’ as feeling much like being ‘kidnapped’; she also found herself abruptly fitted with new clothes and surrounded by new rules: ‘I had been brought back unconsulted and against my wishes to the house my father had been born in, to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even from the inverted r’s of my mother’s family’ (CEPr, 89). A year later, disturbed and unable to settle, ill enough with asthma for her

­2    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection doctors to recommend she be taken somewhere where she could breathe the sea air she was accustomed to, she was removed once more, this time to her mother’s older sister Aunt Maud and her husband George Shepherdson in Revere where another aunt, the younger sister, Grace, also boarded. By the time Bishop entered Walnut Hill School in 1927 at the age of sixteen she was already a gifted English student and was perceived by fellow students as someone who was ‘unusual’, having read widely and being capable of finding the ‘unexpected word’ and seeing ‘the little offbeat thing’.2 Making a home with her friends at school was easier for Bishop than with her relatives and from that time onwards she would spend only brief holidays with her different ‘families’, launched as she was into an uneasy independence. In later life Bishop acknowledged how her relatives had ‘all felt so sorry for this child’ and had ‘tried to do their best’. In particular she refers to her Aunt Grace who was ‘devoted to her’ and was ‘awfully nice’. Yet her relationship with her family is expressed in a sentence which is syntactically unfinished and seems to imply that whatever they, in their kindness, offered, Bishop remained detached: ‘But my relationship with my relatives – I was always a sort of a guest, and I think I’ve always felt like that.’3 To Anne Stevenson, in the course of their correspondence in the early 1960s, Bishop returned several times to the facts of her early life yet, characteristically, she minimised their emotional import: ‘Although I think I have a prize “unhappy childhood”, almost good enough for the text-books – please don’t think I dote on it’ (CEPr, 431). As a poet, too, something of the same attitude prevailed. Famously antagonistic to confessional poetry – ‘you just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves’, she commented tetchily to a Time reporter4 – Bishop wanted the poet to have ‘ “good manners” ’ and not ‘flay himself to get sympathy or understanding’. The tragic was a lure to be resisted and Bishop, making an aesthetic out of what may have been in part psychological strategy, in part a historically conditioned family ethos, refused either to be weighed down herself or to burden her readers with undue weightiness: ‘I don’t like heaviness . . . I think one can be cheerful AND profound! – or, how to be grim without groaning – ’ (CEPr, 417).

Constant Readjustment So far Bishop’s alternatives of being ‘adapted or adopted’ have seemed to lead me in a single direction: to thinking about their content and their oblique, shorthand reference to the difficult circumstances of her early life. However, what is particularly intriguing about this statement in her

Introduction    ­3

notebook is that she quickly changes tack, signalling another path by following up her initial question with the one word written below it: ‘heterography’. Heterography is the linguistic term for different spellings of the same sound, common in English – for instance ‘two’ and ‘to’, or ‘bight’ and ‘bite’ – and indicates the way words can diverge visually and semantically whilst sounding the same. Derrida self-consciously employed it in his coinage of ‘différance’, wanting to combine the meanings of ‘difference’ and ‘deferral’, which, in French, share the same verb – différer – but not the same noun. The difference the letter a makes is silent, only apparent graphically, and comes to stand for the difference of writing, within or before speech. Derrida, in a typically playful move, both names writing as différance and conceives of the word he uses in terms of heterography, thus destabilising any prior or unified meaning for it.5 Bishop, certainly later in her career, was wary of literary theory and literary criticism and tended to dismiss any attempt to read too much into her poems.6 Anne Stevenson remembered her as ‘suspicious of academics’ and as hating ‘theorizing’: she recalled that together they had ‘laughed about “the theory boys,” as my mother used to call them. She [Bishop] believed that what matters in art is “seeing things.” ’7 This seems like a pretty clear warning to proceed with care when aligning Bishop with deconstructionist theory. Yet Bishop evidently thought deeply about aesthetics, read widely in art criticism, and was herself an astute critic, though producing little formal criticism.8 The essays she wrote while still a student at Vassar reveal a precocious critical intelligence which, it is to be supposed, then became absorbed into her poetry.9 In a sense the very beliefs she developed in relation to poetry in her early life, seeing it in terms of ‘a moving, changing idea or series of ideas’ or as, famously quoting from M. W. Croll in ‘The Baroque Style in Prose’, ‘ “not a thought, but a mind thinking” ’ (CEPr, 472–3) meant that it was also difficult for her to find a position beyond or outside her writing to speak about it. The beckoning process itself was the only guarantee of the life of the poem. Throughout this book, ‘process’ is an idea that I have returned to repeatedly. Bishop enjoyed the experimental phase that preceded the published poem as well as the sense of the provisional that was possible in ‘intermediate’ texts, like notebooks and letters. She also tried to counter the deadening effect of ‘monumentalising’ meaning or subsuming it into the grand narratives of history. Frequently she used the conditional tense in her poetry or the future perfect, to hold open the space where past and future could meet. She also employed face-to-face encounters and a child’s point of view in order to be able to write from an intimate, unique place which is not yet determined. Tom Paulin has

­4    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection rightly drawn attention to the importance of the qualities of ‘newness’ and ‘nowness’ in Bishop’s writing and the touchstone for her own writing represented by the phrase from the end of a favourite George Herbert poem, ‘Love Unknown’: ‘new, tender, quick’.10 Baroque art’s proliferating variations and absence of fixed focus in the visual realm was influential for Bishop, certainly at the beginning of her career, as the quotation from Croll suggests, and I have spent some time exploring connections. Bishop was not alone in seeing the baroque as providing a helpful vocabulary to articulate the destabilisations of the modern era, and the decentring of the subject and the authorial I/eye. There is an important link between the turn to the baroque in the 1920s and surrealism, with both placing a particular emphasis on multiple perspectives and subversions of the visual and I have seen Bishop’s two voyages to Europe, and in particular to France, in the early 1930s, as also being voyages into new topographies of space. Bishop, immersed in visual art, understood how to transfer the qualities of painting to a poetic ‘surface’. Writing about Hopkins, and the loosening up of form in his work, she describes how the poem can be given ‘a fluid, detailed surface, made hesitant, lightened, slurred, weighed or feathered’ (CEPr, 473). It was something she increasingly aimed for in her own writing as well. Bishop was drawn in her poetry towards the representation of scenes where there is a play of light and surface and has often been described, correctly in many ways, as a highly visual poet.11 Yet that sense of rippling variation was also achieved through language, and through an intricate understanding of how words can slide between versions of sameness and difference. As a poet much concerned with form and rhyme, she was interested in patterns and codes and wrote out lists of words in her notebook, assembling possible ‘matches’.12 Within her poems she also uses puns and half-rhymes, as sounds and meanings converge and diverge, and repetitions which force us to assess small differences. Sound and semantics do not necessarily cohere and there is an underlying instability to language that will make itself felt, so Bishop’s poetry seems to tell us, however much it strives towards precision. Absorbed in the process, the poet can never completely dominate the meaning. In her essay, ‘Dimensions for the Novel’, Bishop mused about how difficult it was for a novel, committed to linear plot, to achieve a sense of ‘constant readjustment’ between members of the sequence (CEPr, 482). Adjustment was a word that she often used, suggesting a malleability around borders and lack of settled meaning. Drawing attention to the importance of shores and shorelines in her poetry, Mark Ford has also

Introduction    ­5

seen them as ‘the space where the contest between different systems of meaning can be most fully and rewardingly staged’.13 ‘The Sandpiper’ (CEP, 129) becomes a key poem, with the immense, destructive forces of the ocean being contrasted with the small discriminations of the sandpiper/poet: The world is a mist. And then the world is minute and vast and clear. The tide is higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which. His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied, looking for something, something, something. Poor bird, he is obsessed! The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray, mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

The bird, we might say, is also absorbed in a process, which prevents any omniscient perspective. This may well lead us to speculate about the displacement involved in Bishop’s observational art, and the kinds of fear it overlaid. David Kalstone has written eloquently about deflections in Bishop’s writing and how objects hold ‘radiant interest’ because they ‘help her absorb numbing or threatening experiences’.14 This is an approach that helps to explain some of the intensity with which Bishop concentrated on a detailed foreground, as well as the mysterious otherness such a focus produced. Taking a slightly different approach, illuminating in this context, Susan McCabe has argued that Bishop allows an ‘oscillation’ between formation and deformation, gain and loss, preferring ‘those things that show boundaries as they quiver and waver’.15 Just as Bishop’s sandpiper finds it hard to know whether the tide is ‘higher and lower’, given the relation between sea and shore is in flux, Bishop, we might argue, found it hard to fix the line between sameness and difference. Replying to a questionnaire about poetry in 1950, Bishop wrote, no doubt frustratingly to her interviewer, that her reply to all but two of the questions was ‘it all depends’. She then elaborated: No matter what theories one may have, I doubt very much that they are in one’s mind at the moment of writing a poem or that there is even a physical possibility that they could be. Theories can only be based on interpretations of other poet’s poems, or one’s own in retrospect, or wishful thinking.16

She returns here to the sense of process and potential, and the impossibility, when she is writing, of situating herself anywhere else but on the inside; she cannot thus have an ‘overview’. As Bishop offers us the linguistic alternatives in her poetry of ‘shadows’ or ‘shallows’ (‘The Map’), ‘absorbing’ or ‘being absorbed’ (‘The Bight’) and ‘adopted’ or ‘adapted’,

­6    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection she is also saying ‘it all depends’ and is showing us the wavering line that divides one from the other, the impossibility of arriving with absolute certainty at a position of knowledge about what the difference means.

Writing Poetry By Not Writing The initial idea for this book arose from the question: why did Bishop take so long to finish her poems? Why, when there are so many promising starts, so many almost perfect drafts and so many connections between these and other writing she was more fluently undertaking in letters and notebooks, was it so hard for her to bring her poetry to completion? There are, of course, a wide variety of possible explanations: she was a perfectionist, schooled by Marianne Moore never to compromise; there were times in her life when she could not work for long periods – ­sometimes lasting years – because of illness or depression; she was unsettled for most of her life both geographically and psychologically and did not have a stable ‘place’ to write from. All these might be in some measure true but, in the end, I found myself wanting to pose the question slightly differently: what is the effect on the poems she did write of her delays and procrastination; and what did she manage to bring to her writing, that she might not otherwise have been able to, through her use of notes and drafts, written years before? How, in other words, does her writing process – seemingly so ramshackle, so inefficient – also enter and enable her poems? In 1949, Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell, musing revealingly on her own writing practice: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it’ (WIA, 81). The next week she sent Lowell an ashtray, one that ‘will really hold the cigarette while you write or scratch your head’ (WIA, 84). An ashtray, part of the paraphernalia of her desk, finds its way into ‘12 O’Clock News’ (CEP, 194–5), a poem that talks in parallel about the writing process and war reporting on the news, without us quite being sure which is a metaphor for which. Paul Muldoon has noted that the ‘shell crater’, linked to the ashtray in ‘12 O’Clock News’, also turns up in ‘Crusoe in England’ (CEP, 182–6) and seems to provide the imagery for ‘ash heaps’ of volcanoes, also described as having ‘parched throats’ that were ‘hot to touch’. 17 On another occasion, when she is writing ‘At the Fishhouses’ (CEP, 62–4) with its ‘layers of beautiful herring scales’, Bishop complains to Lowell that the overhead light is making the typewriter keys ‘look like fish-scales so I’m almost using the touch system’ (WIA, 74–5). The most famous example,

Introduction    ­7

of course, of this intermingling of her writing practice with her poetry is ‘The Bight’ with its simile of ‘torn-open unanswered letters’ that takes us startlingly back to the occluded material situation of the writer’s desk, which like a signifier, rather than the signified, suddenly comes into view. The particular, suggestive term that Bishop used as a figure in her writing, and that I have made the particular focus of the last chapter of this book, is ‘line’, suggestive of the very process of the inscription of meaning before it has shaped itself into words, of a hand drawing a pen across a blank sheet of paper. In a sense, by including that anterior time of her own writing process within the poem, whether through line or by referring to the topography of her desk, Bishop is also finding ways back to the time when the poem was still potential, the time of ‘not writing’. To say that Bishop needed time in order to write her poems may sound like a truism. However, by evolving a process of returning to drafts, using ideas and images from notebooks written years before, Bishop was also bringing other times into her work – not just the fragments of her own writing process, and not just the time before the poem, but archival traces and memories which could also provide connections and echoes across time. One of the most important discoveries Bishop made as a writer was how to use memory in her work. The need for the openings and distances of time is already there in her dialogue with Moore, and their transactions, passing letters and objects between them, also become an early paradigm for Bishop’s later poetry of gratitude and return. However, it was also, through distance, being able to write narratives about her past and, through those narratives, find a structuring form for her poems, that Bishop wrote her greatest work. By opening a gap, by introducing time, Bishop could also move towards the potential of her own poems. Though I see this as a book primarily about Bishop’s poetry and about her writing process, I have arranged the chapters in roughly chronological order across her writing career and have ‘placed’ Bishop in the context of the events of her life. It was interesting to discover that in order to be able to write about time in the poems, and the complicated ‘lines’ that connect the poems and other writing, some biographical thread was also necessary. I have drawn extensively on Bishop’s letters and unpublished notebooks for information but also because I wanted, as much as possible, to follow her own richly textured words and voice. It has also been important to explore her literary and cultural context and draw my own lines of connection between Bishop and other important contemporary figures. Sometimes I have referred to theorists whom Bishop could not have read herself – like Jacques Derrida and

­8    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Julia Kristeva – because their writing provided, at particular moments, ways of articulating ideas that seemed relevant. At others I have drawn on thinkers whom Bishop had read, like Melanie Klein, though it is more likely that what is being explored is a coincidence of ideas, rather than direct influence. Mostly, however, my intention has been to try to deepen understanding of Bishop’s own writing and to lead the reader through different lines of enquiry, both contextual and theoretical, back to the complex achievement of the poems.

Notes  1. VC 72 B.5, p. 24.  2. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 22.  3. Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, ed. George Monteiro (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), p. 126.   4. ‘Poets: The Second Chance’, Time, 2 June 1967, pp. 35–42 (p. 42) quoted in Elizabeth Bishop and her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 281.  5. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 59–79.   6. See response to letter from Jerome Mazarro, OA, p. 621. This letter is also discussed in Chapter 4, p. 168.   7. Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, p. 274.   8. See Peggy Samuels, Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), for influence of theories of visual art on Bishop; and Chapter 1 of this book.   9. The essays I am thinking of are ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: Notes on Timing in his Poetry’ (CEPr pp. 468–74), and ‘Dimensions for a Novel’ (CEPr 480–87), both of which are exceptionally mature essays. 10. Tom Paulin, ‘Writing to the Moment’ in Writing to the Moment (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 223–4. 11. See my discussion of this issue in ‘The Story of the Eye: Elizabeth Bishop and the Limits of the Visual’ in Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott (eds), Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Newcastle and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2002), p. 160. 12. Alice Quinn discusses these lists in EAP, p. 273. 13. Mark Ford, ‘Elizabeth Bishop at the Water’s Edge’, Essays in Criticism 53 (2003), pp. 235–61 (p. 239). 14. David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), p. 220. 15. Susan McCabe, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 14. 16. Schwartz and Estess (eds) Elizabeth Bishop and her Art, p. 281. 17. Paul Muldoon, ‘12 O’Clock News’ in The End of the Poem (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 102.

Chapter 1

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore

The World’s Greatest Living Observer In her memoir of Marianne Moore, ‘Efforts of Affection’, which she wrote after Moore’s death in 1972 but never published, Elizabeth Bishop remarked how a nautilus shell was one of the most ‘successful’ gifts she had given to Marianne Moore, becoming later the subject of her poem ‘The Paper Nautilus’ (CEPr, 126).1 This in all likelihood is the same nautilus shell that Bishop’s lover and companion at the time, Louise Crane, presented to Marianne Moore in February 1937 – a gift which Bishop would probably have chosen – and for which Crane received an intricately worded thank you note: A nautilus has always seemed to me something supernatural. The more I look at it the less I can credit it, – this large yet weightless thing, with a glaze like ivory on the entrance and even on the sides. How curious the sudden change of direction in the corrugations, and the transparent oyster white dullness of the “paper.” The wings are so symmetrical I should not know any part had been broken if you had not said so.2

At this time Bishop was living in temporary lodgings in Florida – the next year she and Crane would buy a house together in Key West – and it was proving a fruitful new territory for her imagination. As well as drafts of poems and prose, she would frequently send Moore gifts, mostly to do with their shared appreciation of ‘found’ natural objects. In January 1937 she offered to send Moore ‘any object native to Florida that you might want – from alligators to grapefruit’ (OA, 59). In March of the same year, Moore opened a parcel from Bishop which almost lived up to the outlandishness of this proposal since it contained not only shells but snake fangs, a snake rattle and alligator teeth as well. Moore loved the opportunity to examine in detail the mechanics of the snake rattle and snake fang – ‘what a treatise on specialization the entire

­10    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection implement is’. She also enjoyed the shell as an aesthetic object, and wrote in reply about ‘the beautiful fan shell with the heliotrope and blue tints at the apex’ and ‘the ribbed replica of it in the soft white paper you had folded round it’ which she found ‘almost as beautiful as the shell itself’.3 Replication and copying, noted here as a curiosity by Moore and appealing to her interest in containers and containment, were to become a significant anxiety within Moore and Bishop’s relationship to each other. However formative Moore was for her at the beginning of her career, Bishop later tended to disavow their artistic connection. In 1963, she replied firmly to Anne Stevenson’s enquiries in relation to a critical book she was writing about her: I am rather weary of always being compared to, or coupled with, Marianne – and I think she is utterly weary of it, too! . . . except for 1 or 2 early poems of mine and perhaps some early preferences in subject matter, neither she nor I can see why reviewers always drag her in with me . . . Perhaps it is just another proof that reviewers really very rarely pay much attention to what they’re reading & just repeat each other. (CEPr, 393)

It is interesting to observe the anxiety about imitation or repetition itself being repeated here and passed on to others, in this case the hapless reviewers. However, when Bishop first met Moore in 1934 it was as a senior student about to graduate from Vassar and an aspiring poet; Moore at 46 was already an important literary figure and, if not a model for Bishop, became, at the least, a friend and supporter who helped to launch her on the literary scene, as well as a slightly irksome mentor. Bishop was also about to embark on a period of intensive travel and her relationship with Moore, as with all her friendships, was characterised by intermittent meetings and long-distance correspondence. Through the thirties and forties Bishop spent time in Europe, Morocco and Mexico, and less far afield in Carolina and Cape Cod, as well as taking up temporary residency in Florida. She would write to Moore about what she had seen, often appending postcards, cuttings and objects, as both extensions of her descriptions and as souvenirs. In 1936 for instance, from Spain, appealing to their mutual interest in animal behaviour, she wrote to Moore about storks wandering around ‘with six-foot sticks in their beaks building their houses exactly as well as the natives’ and owls sitting by the roadside that would ‘stare quietly back at us as we went up to them’ then ‘blink once’ (OA, 40). The next month she sent her pictures ‘of baroque things we admired in Valencia’, as well as a postcard of a bullfighter (OA, 42). Moore, whose life during this period was becoming increasingly circumscribed due to her mother’s declining

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­11

health and bouts of illness of her own, appreciated Bishop’s skills as a correspondent from the start4 as well as the ‘enchantments’ of her travel descriptions5 which both she and her mother, as she complimented Bishop, found entertaining and ‘instructive’.6 Bishop, for her part, was similarly enthusiastic about what Moore gave her – a quality of attention and detailed commentary which seemed to be able to intensify her own acts of seeing: ‘I’m afraid that I can’t really have made this trip until I’ve lured you into commenting on every bit of pictorial evidence I can produce.’7 Moore, as Bishop recognised, was an outstanding observer – ‘The World’s Greatest Living Observer’, as she labelled her in 1948 (CEPr, 253). Her virtuoso descriptions, particularly of animals, seemed to derive, according to Bishop, from an ability to ‘give herself up entirely to the object under contemplation, to feel in all sincerity how it is to be it’ (CEPr, 255). She returned to this idea in her later memoir, remarking that Moore’s first book of poems, Observations, was an ‘eye-opener’ for her: ‘Why had no one ever written about things in this clear and dazzling way before?’ (CEPr, 118). Moore’s descriptions of objects were often forensic in their detail. She quite literally, for instance, put the seeds of the papaya fruit Bishop had sent her under a magnifying glass: ‘I was fascinated by the seeds; first of all by the distribution and amethyst color, and then by the necks, set so they stood up like seed-pearls on stiff silk.’8 She attempted a similar precision when she inspected Bishop’s gift of croton leaves the next year: The leaves are beyond anything we have experienced, Elizabeth, as tropical wonders. The cranberry-pink on the alligator-pear green, and the vein-system whereby each vein has a fork of hair fine ends, amaze and amaze us. Strange, too, the underside contrast, – as of a double faced ribbon, – the definitepattern of cerise and green, then underneath, a cut-leaf maple flush all over. I have seen (in a blur) a movie of croton leaves that came back to me as I thought a while – but the hedge in the movie was a dull magenta blur. I could not have imagined such zebra brilliance of piercing colors.9

Bishop, both in her early essay on Moore and in a later letter, compared her with Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of her own early touchstones for poetry, and both Moore’s use of compound adjectives and delight in multiplicity seem to justify the comparison (OA, 335). However Moore in return was keener to praise Bishop’s understanding of Hopkins in her remarkable student essay10 than she was Hopkins himself whose letters she read only at Bishop’s prompting, and found herself impressed by ‘against my will’.11 As the letter above about croton leaves demonstrates, Moore liked to hold objects up close, examining

­12    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection them as if they were scientific specimens. As a student at Bryn Mawr she had studied biology more successfully than she had English. Looking back, she described her biology courses as ‘exhilarating’, teaching her ‘precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested, drawing and identifying’, all of which, she believed, influenced her imagination.12 During the thirties, continuing to pursue the ‘imaginative’ use of biology, she made numerous visits to the American Museum of Natural History, read the Zoological Bulletin, and collected details and observations for her writing about plants and animals, valuing the fact that her poems derived from primary research.13 In a letter to her brother Warner in 1932, for instance, she described a visit to the Museum where she was trying to discover more about jerboas for the poem she was writing, but was disappointed to be brought a book by the library staff containing information ‘not from personal experience but from hearsay’. Equally revealing is the way a visit to the Museum involved an element of serendipity, so that her route towards one thing, information about the jerboa, leads her ‘by mistake’ through the Costa Rican section where she encounters a rich grouping of different animals and birds. This same visit involved a ‘terrible hunt’ for a fawn-breasted bower bird, which she also incorporates into her description of the jerboa in her poem, as if the museum itself provided not just individual examples but the possibility of new connections, a spatial re-ordering and analogical structure which could then feed into her poetry.14 The contrast Moore draws in her letter to Bishop between the cinematic blur of her previous sighting of croton leaves and the intense examination she is able to subject them to first hand would seem to confirm the value she ascribed to a scientific perspective. Yet the kinds of looking involved in early film often depended similarly on isolating bodily fragments, gestures and objects, and then, like Moore’s poems, reconstituting them – splicing them together – in a different, unfamiliar context. Susan McCabe, who has argued for an alignment between (rather than direct influence of) early experimental cinema and Moore’s poetics, refers particularly to Léger’s Ballet Mécanique: ‘A comparison between Moore and Fernand Léger’s 1924 film Ballet Mécanique reveals how avant-garde cinematic technique productively sheds light on the poet’s defamiliarization of objects and embodiment’ and she goes on to explore the shared techniques of artist and poet and their use of cutting, edges and geometric shapes.15 In an enthusiastic letter from 1921 to her friend Bryher (Winifred Ellermann) about Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Moore reinforces this sense of what she looked for and found in film, writing about the geometry of light and shade, and the

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­13

visual effect of amputation, rather than the narrative or emotional momentum of the film: All vertical lines slant and the shadows on stairs, on attic floors and through casements, are wonderful; Cesare, the somnambulist on appearing – although standing with legs side by side – looks as if he had but one leg. Later, when he is roused from a trance in total darkness against the back of his cabinet, wedge-shaped lights slant down from his eyes at Lida, the heroine, the exact shape of a dagger that he uses later when intending to kill her.16

Moore also went to see several early silent Chaplin films including The Kid, My Trip Abroad and The Circus and, not surprisingly, enjoyed natural history films. Bishop, oblivious to any interest Moore might have had in ‘art’ films, asked her early on in their relationship to a Martin Johnson film about baboons (OA, 30) and recalled later going to see a documentary about African animals with her, which contained close-up shots of elephants and elephants’ feet (CEPr, 130). The filmic body could always be caught in unnatural poses, or from points of view that disturbed a sense of its coherence or wholeness. Chaplin’s slapstick, with his clown-like character repeatedly and disconcertingly being thrown off course, unable to pursue a purposeful trajectory, became paradigmatic for many modernist writers of the body in pieces, broken into separate gestures and detached from human volition.17 For Moore both kinds of lens – both magnifying glass and cinematic camera – had the effect of introducing different perspectives, uncoupling seeing from the assumption of an all-seeing eye/I. Scientific precision could wrest an object away from its context and associations and, by enlarging it or dissecting it, break it into parts, each with a structure and form of its own. In his ‘Introduction’ to Moore’s Selected Poems – which Bishop read and made notes from18 – T. S. Eliot recognised this aspect of Moore’s work, commenting on how she ‘succeeds at once in startling us into an unusual awareness of visual patterns, with something like the fascination of a high-powered microscope’.19 In ‘The Jerboa’, for instance, which both Eliot and Bishop admired, the small eponymous creature exists outside the simply named lists of other animals, owned and used by the imperial powers of Rome and Egypt, by virtue of the intricate detail with which it is described. Its body passes through an array of subtly graded colours with only the very tip of its tail being ‘black and white’. According to Cristane Miller, ‘one sees . . . its boundarylessness in the composite quality of its description’.20 The jerboa is all movement, leaping out of the danger of being fixed, or subtly blending into its background – ‘It/honours the sand by assuming its colour’.21 Eliot praised the ‘reticence’ and ‘agility’ of Moore’s

­14    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection mind and sensibility and, whilst puzzling over the subject matter of the poem, accurately defined here something of what her ‘pleasant little sand-coloured skipping animal’ might signify.22 For Moore animals could animate an alternative reality, outside of controlling myths and narratives, but she was not beyond also employing them, as her playful and pervasive use of animal nicknames suggests, to convey moral and aesthetic qualities it would have been too obvious to incorporate into portraits of other people or herself. Linda Leavell has argued that Moore can be distinguished from her modernist contemporaries, Eliot, but also Pound and Stevens, in her respect for ‘raw material’ and primary acts of observation, which she allowed to retain ‘their mysterious autonomy’.23 Her focus on objects and animals and her emphasis on their colour, shape and surface, however interrogative and precise, also served to acknowledge their existence in their own right, beyond her grasp, and to express her delight in pluralism: ‘One dare not be dogmatic . . . We are a many-foliaged tree against the moon.’24 Referring to one of Moore’s most famous poems, ‘In the Days of Prismatic Color’, which prefers ‘all the minutiae’ to the clarity of perspective only possible when ‘Adam was alone’, without Eve,25 Leavell writes: ‘It is not hard to see that a poet who envisions truth in “prismatic color” would have little use for Stevens’ “supreme fiction” or Eliot’s “mythical method”.’26 Bishop, whilst protective of her independence and difference, acknowledged to Moore in 1954 that reading her poetry had ‘opened up my eyes to the possibility of the subject-matter I could use and might never have thought of using if it hadn’t been for you’.27 Moore enabled Bishop to see the potential for poetry of the detailed observation of objects and animals; more broadly, through the use of different perspectives and scales she helped to open up areas of vision that were oblique or peripheral, not dominated by tradition or authority.28 However, there were other aspects of Moore’s poetics that were less congenial to Bishop, much more difficult for her to feel real affinity with. Moore frequently revised her work, even after poems were published and anthologised, changing her syllabic stanzas into free verse in some cases, or dramatically cutting or changing lines. 29 She also had an eagle eye for misprints. Ironically the revision which Bishop reported Moore to have made to the ‘original’ title of her poem ‘Efforts and Affection’ in her copy of the book (changing ‘and’ to ‘of’, a change Bishop approved of and which gave her the title of her memoir) may have been simply the correction of one of a ‘mass of errors’30 Moore noted in the Collected Poems.31 However, it is certainly also the case that Moore had the habit of updating friends’ copies of her poems with her latest version before

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­15

she signed them, going well beyond corrections to the occasional misprint. In Chester Page’s copy of Poems (1921), for instance, she ‘made corrections on nearly every page, sometimes rewriting entire passages or correcting misplaced punctuation’. ‘Nothing’ he commented, ‘seemed to have escaped her scrutiny or passion for accuracy.’32 Bishop developed her own over-conscientious relationship with drafts of poems, reworking them over long periods of time with a passion for accuracy she might well have absorbed from Moore. She remembered that she always left Moore’s apartment feeling determined ‘never to try to publish anything until I thought I’d done my best with it, no matter how many years it took – or never to publish at all’ (CEPr, 128). However, Moore’s enthusiasm for revision went further than this since it was also bound up with her belief in texts as ‘fertile procedure’ or an evolving process, never established ‘once and for all’.33 In notes for an unpublished lecture on ‘The Creative Use of Influence’ she portrayed herself as a writer who was compelled to ‘import (incorporate bodily) . . . what is too unbearably valuable to let alone’. To the familiar and seemingly incontrovertible injunction ‘Be Yourself’ her response was, ‘I suppose I am myself in the way I (take things) employ what I find’.34 Characteristically, her style in her poetry was to assemble fragments, drawn not just from observation but also from her reading of diverse texts – popular, scientific and literary – and from conversations, particularly with family, annotating her sources with a sometimes obfuscating series of endnotes. Linda Leavell has seen this ‘collage’ method as having much in common with the techniques of modernist artists.35 In a letter to Joseph Cornell, who shared as an artist many of Moore’s interests in collecting and assembling objects and whose habit it was to paste cut-out engravings and pictures on his letters to her, Moore wrote: ‘Like the powdered rhinoceros horn of the ancients, your pulverizings, recompoundings, and prescribings, are as curative as actual.’36 Drawing exuberantly on quotations, both popular and literary, and thus differing from Pound and Eliot whose fragments of quoted text – mostly from European literature – invite the reader to contemplate a lost cultural wholeness, Moore’s own poetry relied on selection as much as making. ‘My writing is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber’, she wrote unapologetically about her use of quotations towards the end of her life.37 If part of her aesthetic involved dismantling hierarchies and valuing multiplicity, using her own ‘chameleon’s eye’ to express a ‘genius for differences’,38 and thus putting herself on a par with the collector, still her poetry, as she recognised, did involve such a breaking into fragments as is implied by ‘pulverizing’ and an incorporating of them – ‘recompounding’ – into her own new formal orderings.

­16    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection The paradox for her as a writer who tried to resist the idea of creativity as the outpouring of individual genius is that the poem necessarily enacts a selection and unity that leads back to one person’s overarching vision. The ‘miscellany’ which Moore valued, and out of which an anthology – or indeed a poem – might be fashioned, could not escape, as she recognised, the ‘distinct unity which is ‘afforded in the unintentional portrait given, of the mind which brought the assembled integers together’.39 As a reader of Bishop’s poems, Moore demonstrated, as we shall see, that she could be both astute and generous. However, her belief in a poem as never finished and her understanding of artistic production as a cooperative activity made her able to offer revisions and rewritings of Bishop’s poems, in a version of the paradox noted above, which posed an insoluble difficulty for a writer as haunted by her own material as Bishop was. Shortly after their first meeting, not yet ravelled in the dependencies of their friendship, Bishop explored their differences in her notebook: It’s a question of using the poet’s proper material, with which he’s equipped by nature, i.e., immediate intense physical reactions, a sense of metaphor and decoration in everything – to express something not of them – something I suppose, spiritual. But it proceeds from the material, the material eaten out with acid, pulled down from underneath, made to perform and always kept in order, in its place . . . Miss Moore does this – but occasionally I think, the super-material content in her poems is too easy for the material involved – it could have meant more.40

If Moore worked from above, imposing a form on her material that was, to Bishop’s mind, ‘too easy’, Bishop perceived there was another direction to take, and another position for the writer, working ‘from underneath’. As this thoughtful and exploratory passage demonstrates, Bishop was from the start committed to discovering her different poetic values and methods for herself.

Interiors and Interiorising In one of the most memorable anecdotes in ‘Efforts of Affection’ – worthy of inclusion in a Chaplin film – Bishop recounts the first visit she and Moore made to the circus together. Equipped with ‘huge brown paper bags’ supplied by Moore, which were, as it turns out, full of stale brown bread, Bishop was given the job of diverting the adult elephants with the bread whilst Moore snipped off some hairs from the top of one of the baby’s heads with her nail scissors:

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­17 I stayed at one end of the line, putting slices of bread into the trunks of the older elephants, and Miss Moore went rapidly down to the other end, where the babies were. The large elephants were making such a to-do that a keeper did come up my way, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Miss Moore leaning forward over the rope on tiptoe, scissors in hand . . . She opened her bag and showed me three or four coarse, grayish hairs in a piece of Kleenex. (CEPr, 120)

Moore, according to Bishop, wanted to replace a hair that had fallen out of an elephant-hair bracelet given to her by her brother Warner. However, Alison Rieke has pointed out that Bishop may well have been misinformed and that this bracelet is most likely the same one bought with a gift of money from Moore’s wealthy friend, Bryher, when Moore found herself in financial difficulty in 1933, just a year before meeting Bishop.41 The bracelet, therefore, may already have had complex psychological meanings, a supposition confirmed by the justification Moore gave for its purchase and her guilty displacement of the initiative on to her mother: ‘Under such circumstances, to be buying jewelry seemed to me dastardly, but Mother was determined your gift should be brought before us constantly by something we delight in.’ In this same letter Moore also describes how Bryher’s philanthropy has inspired some of her own: ‘I have been glad this winter to help various young writers with criticism which, when one has work pressing, one tends to evade. It is unbearable, however, to feel that one is doing nothing for anyone.’42 If Bishop was, initially at least, a recipient of this philanthropic urge then the bracelet already had a tangential connection to her, and the transgressive escapade, which Moore made her complicit with, was a further acting out of the guilty excess with which it was entangled. As a codicil to this, it is interesting to see the bracelet having a kind of posthumous place in their relationship, being the object (along with a Mexican toy chest) that Bishop requested from the estate as a memento after Moore’s death (OA, 559). That Bishop and Moore’s relationship could be playful and provocative, as well as careful and reticent, is suggested by Moore’s repeated use of the word ‘impudent’ in her introduction to Bishop’s poems in Trial Balances43 and Bishop’s solicitations to Moore to cross boundaries, begun by her with a risky invitation to the circus, and memorialised in her later poem, ‘Invitation to Marianne Moore’ (CEP, 80): Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe trailing a sapphire highlight, with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots, with heaven knows how many angels all riding on the broad black brim of your hat,    please come flying.

­18    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection That Moore, in fact, always went to the circus is symptomatic of the way Bishop could be caught out by Moore’s persona, never quite sure of how serious she was (CEPr, 119). If one version of Moore and Bishop’s relationship is of an under-confident yet more worldly Bishop coming under the wing of a spinsterish and repressive elder from whom she eventually breaks free, then recent recognition of Moore’s distance from heterosexual norms and the performative – even camp – aspects of her character help to complicate the picture. Bishop’s account in her memoir of Moore’s shocked reaction to a mutual friend’s homosexuality has been used to confirm the view that there were aspects of Bishop’s life and sexuality that she could never acknowledge to Moore (CEPr, 123). However, as Kathryn Kent has argued, there might also have been something ‘feigned’ about Moore’s response, a kind of mock horror reply to Bishop’s provocation, where both are joined in an elaborate performance of ‘knowing and unknowing’.44 Bishop, of course, is very far from making a confession of her own in the memoir, and the complicated dynamic of revealing and concealing is, we should assume, being played out in relation to the reader as well. We must add to this that Moore was intimate throughout her life with many gay and lesbian writers and that her relationship with Bryher – her benefactor and the companion of her Bryn Mawr classmate and fellow modernist poet H. D. – was flirtatious, even if, in the end, she resisted Bryher’s many blandishments to join her in ‘adventures’.45 Adding extra piquancy to the apparently veiled involvement of Bryher with the ­elephant-hair bracelet is the fact that Moore brought the romantic phase of their friendship to a close by sending Bryher a lock of her hair.46 The pattern of enticement, reciprocity and then fixity or containment within her own space is, to some extent, replayed by Moore with Bishop, though her commitment to her mother as a lifelong companion and to her own brand of passionate celibacy were by this time unassailable.47 Moore’s primary relationships were within her own family; however, a family where, perhaps surprisingly, the father’s absence does not seem to have been noteworthy and the mother was able to have a longstanding, and perhaps physical, relationship with another woman.48 Moore accepted Bishop’s ‘companions’ without demur, taking them within her own family circle and seemingly addressing Bishop as part of a couple, first with Louise Crane, then Marjorie Stevens and then Lota de Macedo Soares.49 Moore may even have indulged in a flirtation of her own with Crane, writing to her in 1940: ‘This is a rather devious and oblique valentine, Louise. But it is that, all the same.’50 Crane certainly became a close friend of Moore’s in her own right from the forties onwards and was eventually appointed her executor.

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­19

It is significant in ‘Efforts of Affection’ that Bishop immediately follows her anecdote about the circus elephants with a comment on Moore and her different attitude to caged animals: I hate seeing animals in cages, especially small cages, and especially circus animals, but I think that Marianne, while probably feeling the same way, was so passionately interested in them, and knew so much about them, that she could put aside any pain or outrage for the time being. (CEPr, 120)

This then leads in the next section of the essay to a lengthy description of 260 Cumberland Street, the small apartment in Brooklyn where Moore famously lived with her mother and then, after her mother’s death, on her own for thirty-six years and which became familiar to Bishop, a frequent visitor particularly in the first year after graduating from Vassar when she lived in New York. Bishop emphasises both the cramped nature of the accommodation – ‘a very narrow hall . . . two tiny bedrooms . . . the small living room and dining room’ – and how the space is further diminished by being crowded with furniture and possessions. For Bishop it seemed obvious that the contents of an ‘older, larger home’ (CEPr, 121) had been decanted into the confines of the apartment, and this strong sense of the past is also resonant in the image Bishop uses of ‘a diving bell from a different world, let down through the crass atmosphere of the twentieth century’, to describe the encapsulated nature of the Moores’ life (CEPr, 127). The subsequent anomie of the train journey back to Manhattan – ‘the awful, jolting ride facing a row of indifferent faces’ – heightens the sense of discrepancy for Bishop between the Moores’ apartment and contemporary metropolitan culture (CEPr, 128). At this time the city, and particularly New York, seemed to Bishop to provide ‘sudden intuitions into the whole of contemporaneity’.51 David Kalstone has suggested that Bishop was reminded through visiting the Moores of the old fashioned atmosphere of her grandparents’ house in Nova Scotia: ‘Thinking of Moore would have been in part like recognizing fragments of her Nova Scotia life “through the looking glass”.’52 This may be true but Bishop particularly lingers over the eccentricities – the trapeze that Moore exercises on, the collection of artefacts, the rituals and routines – in a way that suggests a very personal, and inwardly-facing, environment. Indeed, the passion that could overcome a hatred of captivity – which Bishop attributed to Moore in relation to animals – seems present here too in this circumscribed but densely signified space, along with some characteristics of her favourite creatures, the acquisitive bower bird, say – which Bishop saw as a significant creature in her poem ‘Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore’ – or the monkey or ape specifically called up in relation to the

­20    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection trapeze, or the Costa Rican lizard, the plumet basilisk, ‘alive there/in his basilisk cocoon beneath/the one of living green’.53 Returning to the elephant incident at the circus, we can see how it might be appropriate to say, as Susan McCabe has, that Moore ‘modelled fetishism’ for Bishop.54 Fetishism is also cited by critics in relation to Moore’s attitude to clothes where other items, not just the bracelet, were charged with personal significance and incorporated into her complicated self-fashioning.55The signature gender-crossing tricorn hat is an obvious example, but Bishop impishly talks about Moore’s curiosity about undergarments and, in a letter to Louise Crane, Moore expressed her delight in the gift of a pair of shoes in terms of her intimacy with Crane: ‘You know how much I care about my appearance just now; yet these shoes are such masterpieces, fit me so well, remind me so exactly of my pleasure in seeing you.’56 Fetishism requires a simultaneous recognition and disavowal, and its structure is not unlike the oblique flirtatiousness that we can find in Moore’s letters to her intimate friends, and her highly ironised discourse which plays with resemblances and citations, incorporating them and holding them at a distance.57 According to Freud, of course, fetishism as a form of sexual perversion was impossible for a woman who, having nothing to lose herself, had no reason to disavow the mother’s castration.58 Feminist critics have questioned this, arguing that fetishism might also function as a strategy of self-protection for a woman against her own ‘castration’ or debasement from the status of active subject to object.59 That Moore called herself ‘he’ within her own family seems to corroborate her resistance to all that was implied in her lifetime by a feminine subjecthood. It is also noteworthy in this context that Bishop keenly defended Moore against criticism by ‘feminist writers’ that as a poet she ‘ “controlled panic by presenting it as whimsy”’, by drawing attention to her feminist credentials and the ‘justified sense of outrage’ in her poem ‘Marriage’ (CEPr, 132): Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt. Eve: beautiful woman – I have seen her when she was so handsome she gave me a start, able to write simultaneously in three languages – English, German and French – and talk in the meantime.60

We could easily read this as Moore’s own riposte to Freud.

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­21

Moore latterly described herself as ‘not a collector, merely a fortuitous one’ and then provided a long list of lovingly described curios, some of which are gifts and almost all of which have some relation to animals. These include ‘a Chinese gilt-brass baby pheasant with head turning to look back; a mechanical elephant with gait that precisely mimics the lumbering gait of a live elephant; a mechanical crow that hops, squawks and flaps its wings’.61 Susan Stewart has written about the secret significance of objects within a collection which form a ‘scenario of the personal’, where the relation to the collector’s self predominates over other contexts of time and space. Elsewhere she talks about how the souvenir ‘generates a narrative which reaches only “behind,” spiralling in a continually inward movement rather than outward toward the future’.62 In his famous essay ‘Unpacking My Library’, Walter Benjamin also suggestively describes the significance of the collection as a ‘magic encyclopedia’, which can contain the collector’s emotions and thoughts: ‘The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.’63 The self is ‘within’ the collection, not just because of the collector’s role in manipulating and arranging the objects but because the collection can draw within itself a surplus of meanings which – like the fetishist’s substitutions – come to stand for interiority itself. As we shall see interiority, and the whole question of what and where it is, inspires an important debate between Moore and Bishop which, together with the imaging of interiors in their writing, helps to illustrate the distance between them. When Bishop, having eventually acknowledged to Moore ‘after quite a long time’ (CEPr, 133) that she was writing poetry, began to send her both poems and prose, much of Moore’s energy was focused on encouragement and on finding suitable publishing outlets for Bishop. At one point in 1936, early on in their relationship, when Bishop was despairing of ever succeeding at writing and proposed studying ‘medicine or biochemistry’ instead because she was ‘fairly good at college’ at science (OA, 45), Moore wrote wisely in reply: What you say about studying medicine does not disturb me at all; for interesting as medicine is, I feel you would not be able to give up writing, with the ability for it that you have; but it does disturb me that you should have the feeling that it might be well to give it up. To have produced what you have – either verse or prose is enviable, and you certainly could not suppose that such method as goes with a precise and proportioning ear is ‘contemporary’ or usual.64

What Moore skilfully managed to do here was to provide the reassurance Bishop was seeking without engaging in direct argument with

­22    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection her and seeming to overrule her own choices. The other prongs of her response were to increase her efforts to get Bishop into print – she was rather confusedly encouraging Bishop to submit to Poetry and also writing to the editor Morton Zabel on her behalf 65 – and making clear her own willingness to be used as a sounding board: I think I recall complaining of having to look at things which were sent me for advice, but I never have complained of writing that I asked to see. In fact I have rather serious cause of complaint against you for stinginess in this matter.66

However, Moore was not always so tactful and the dangers of letting her in were almost too soon apparent. Acknowledging in December 1936 that ‘zeal for improving things tends to run away with me’ yet reassuringly wishing to take care not ‘to menace your freedom’, Moore then sent back Bishop’s story, ‘The Sea and Its Shore’ (CEPr, 11–17), with pencilled suggestions, attributing them to her mother though seemingly concurring herself.67 This was an early rehearsal for that more extensive act of revision and critical symbiosis undertaken by Moore and her mother to Bishop’s poem ‘Roosters’ in 1940, where they not only bowdlerised the poem but recast its rhythm and tone, impervious to Bishop’s avowed intention to evoke ‘the essential baseness of militarism’ (OA, 96). Symptomatically, they removed words such as ‘cruel’, ‘raw’, ‘virile’ and ‘excrescence’ and inserted the word ‘fastidious’, whilst naively favouring ‘Cocks’ for the title, rather than Bishop’s specifically American and demotic ‘Roosters’.68 Bishop was provoked into her most outspoken resistance, though swiftly wrote again a few days later trying to lighten things, describing herself as ‘mulish’ and Moore’s revised rhythms as the ‘swing version’ of her poem (OA, 97). Later, in her memoir, she recalled the incident as effectively ending the period when she would look to Moore for literary advice: ‘By then I had turned obstinate’ (CEPr, 123). She did send Moore work after this date but Moore seems to have been chastened, moderating the smallest implied criticism or suggested revision: ‘Pay no attention to my technical suggestions . . . I have no confidence – truly none – in my present “ideas”.’69 During this time, and indeed afterwards, their correspondence was not solely about Bishop’s writing. Moore was also offering a level of concern about Bishop’s health and wellbeing which was prompted by the difficulties in Bishop’s life – her asthma, her depression, the loss of her house in Florida, the ending of relationships – but, as David Kalstone suggests, this involvement also seems uncomfortably merged with Moore’s own escalating anxiety about her mother’s decline.70 Perhaps Bishop exposed

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­23

her vulnerability to Moore too unceremoniously, as she was prone to with her friends when her drinking was out of control, and thus invited the older woman’s over-involvement: Marianne said to us that she was worried about Elizabeth’s drunkenness. Apparently at one point Elizabeth had gone to Marianne’s absolutely drunk as a skunk, and Marianne was very shocked and took her in like mama.71

Taking her in ‘like mama’, judging by Moore’s letters, also meant trying to draw a protective barrier between Bishop and the outside world, which, for Moore, always seemed to be the source of danger and debility. ‘I am also penalized for my wickedness (in going to things when I am not able)’ she wrote to Bishop in 1943,72 and in a similar vein the year before she referred to Bishop’s independence as posing a potential risk in itself: ‘Handicapped as we are by the slightest thing wrong with either of us you can imagine how we feel about you, Elizabeth, entirely responsible for yourself.’73 Later Bishop would complain humorously to Robert Lowell that Moore translated her expressions of happiness into demonstrations of fortitude and, perhaps even in a complicated way, needed Bishop to be ill: ‘If I say I’ve never felt better in my life (God’s truth) she writes “Brave Elizabeth!”’ (WIA, 189). Bishop must have, at some point, told Moore the story of her mother since Moore wrote to her with great insight in 1944: ‘I often have thought how your mother . . . must hover over your health and your writing.’74 Certainly Bishop, throughout her life, could not avoid the haunting reliving of early losses. However, since they had already happened, it was also the case that nothing could now protect her from them and far from having to anticipate the worst – as Moore did – Bishop’s journeys into, and indeed across, the world became her very different way of salvaging her own subjecthood. During the 1930s Bishop was writing, as well as poems, prose pieces in which she was exploring various kinds of dwellings. In ‘The Sea and the Shore’ her protagonist Edward Boomer lives in a small beach shack: This house was very interesting. It was of wood, with a pitched roof, about 4 by 4 by 6 feet, set on pegs stuck in the sand. There was no window, no door set in the door-frame, and nothing at all inside . . . It was a shelter, but not for living in, for thinking in. (CEPr, 11)

His activity, in what is almost a pastiche of Moore’s accumulation of objects and fragments of texts, is to collect and sort papers found on the beach, and eventually to burn them. However, it is not the final fate of the papers that absorbs him – the ‘inevitability’, which he does not

­24    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection enjoy, of their conflagration (CEPr, 17) – but the search for meaning amongst the randomness. The papers have ‘no discernible goal’: ‘They soared up, fell down, could not decide, hesitated, subsided, flew straight to their doom in the sea, or turned over in mid-air to collapse on the sand without another motion’ (CEPr, 13). Bishop perceived that objects could be richly suggestive and that she possessed her own store of them, but unlike Moore, she could not compress energy and movement into the objects themselves. In 1940 she wrote to Moore, struggling to find her own solution to the problem of what could connect objects: I have that continuous uncomfortable feeling of “things” in the head, like icebergs or rocks or awkwardly placed pieces of furniture. It’s as if all the nouns were there but the verbs were lacking – if you know what I mean. (OA, 94)

The ‘things’, for Bishop, could range from domestic, mundane furniture to distant and submerged icebergs, but all seem to carry some threat, some edge or hardness, which was difficult to assimilate. However, what is also apparent here is Bishop’s consciousness of geographical distance and the spatial disposition of objects, suggestive nuances in terms of how, in the future, her poetry was to develop. Bishop had already written another story, ‘In Prison’, turning away from poetry to narrative in order to experiment with verbs, connections and temporal structure. Unlike the flimsy hut, open to the elements, in ‘The Sea and the Shore’, the dwelling she describes in this story presents a solid ‘way in’, though perceived, with a certain irony, from a point of view outside: The walls I have in mind are interestingly stained, peeled, or otherwise disfigured; gray or whitewashed, blueish, yellowish, even green – but I only hope they are of no other color. The prospect of unpainted boards with their possibilities of various grains can sometimes please me, or stone in slabs or irregular shapes. (CEPr, 20–1)

Bishop seems to be setting out her own tastes in rustic interior design here, perhaps influenced by a sojourn in Europe. However, what is most significant for the narrator about a prison is the aspect of ­necessity – there is no choice – and thus the endless recurrence or cycle of moving between inside and outside is brought to an end. Within fixed boundaries, where all are the same, the danger of imitating others is also resolved: ‘In the world, for example, I am very much under the influence of dress, absurd as that may be. But in a place where all dress alike I have the gift of being able to develop a “style” of my own, something that is even admired and imitated by others’ (CEPr, 24). The anxieties

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­25

of a young poet about conscious and unconscious influence are apparent here, with perhaps, through the reference to clothes, a particular and private nod towards Moore. Bishop succeeded in placing this story for publication in The Partisan Review and winning a prize without Moore’s help and without her having read it first. Their correspondence about ‘In Prison’ ironically reflects this bid for freedom on Bishop’s part, with Bishop having to accept the ‘flaw that goes all the way through’ (OA, 73) rather than laud her success, and Moore developing a criticism of the story that circuitously contains tacit messages about the danger for Bishop of moving too far away from her influence: Continuously fascinated as I am by the creativeness and uniqueness of these assemblings of yours – which are really poems – I feel responsibility against anything that might threaten you; yet fear to admit such anxiety, lest I influence you away from an essential necessity or particular strength. The golden eggs can’t be dealt with theoretically, by presumptuous mass salvation formulae. But I do feel that tentativeness and interiorizing are your danger as well as your strength.75

The tendency for Bishop to dissolve certainty into rumination – ‘interiorizing’ – whilst based on too little ‘substance’ in these early ­ stories (this is part of Moore’s criticism), nevertheless enabled Bishop, once she had found a way of incorporating it into her poetry (in her own phrase to ‘pull it down from underneath’), to introduce the doubts and doubleness, the critique and hesitation, which for her attended any approach to truth. For Bishop, questions about the limits of language and the elusive and ineffable strangeness of subjectivity, exercised her through the thirties and forties. In her notebooks she explored states of not seeing as well as seeing and noted the duplicity of a look which could encompass both surface and depth: ‘The water is so clear & pale that you were seeing into it at the same time that you were looking at its surface. A duplicity all the way through.’76 The same duplicity is present in language where signs seem to interpose their own reality as well as provide the only way of guiding us towards depths. ‘If we only could get through our own figurativeness’ Bishop wrote in her notebook in this period, ‘image within image, metaphor of metaphor of metaphor’.77 In her published essay on ‘Miss Moore and Edgar Allan Poe’, she cited a similar anxiety that she’d found in Moore’s poem ‘Elephants’ – ‘As if, as if, it is all ifs’ – c­ ommenting ‘it is annoying to have to keep saying that things are like other things, even though there seems to be no help for it’ (CEPr, 236). It is one of the paradoxes of writing, of course, that originality depends upon a system of language and laws of substitution

­26    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection that both precede and constrain us. However, the general condition of the writer, as it affected both Moore and Bishop, also concealed some vital differences. Though both poets could be said to be poets of contiguity rather than symbolic transformation and to rely more on metonymy than metaphor, incorporating into poetry a realism more frequently associated with prose, Moore’s technique, fashioned from her collector’s instincts, tended towards the compacting of images with an emphasis on synchronicity and simultaneity. Bishop, however, was increasingly aware of the movement of displacement, a temporal sequence driven by desire and embodying its own insufficiency, which can neither retrieve nor conceal its point of origin. As the poet John Ashberry succinctly expressed the difference between them, ‘Miss Moore’s synthesizing, collector’s approach is far from Miss Bishop’s linear, exploring one.’78 The distinction is similar to the one David Kalstone had outlined when he described Moore’s beasts as ‘timeless studies’ and how, conversely for Bishop, ‘time provides the plot’.79 Significantly, both poets reacted in different ways to evidence that their writing had imitated, or had depended on, an already existing text of the other. Whilst Bishop excoriated herself for unconscious borrowings from Moore’s poem ‘The Frigate Pelican’ (OA, 54), Moore, on the other hand, seems to have been calmly insouciant about assimilating images from Bishop into her writing, a fact Bishop was still registering as a ‘slight grudge’ years later (CEPr, 130). For Moore, images could be treated as ‘gifts’, just like objects, and she would take what she was offered both from her compendious reading and from other people. For Bishop, however, images travelled with her, were part of her train of thought and were often derived from memory; their use by other people might easily have stirred feelings of loss or even been felt as an envious attack. When Moore wrote ‘The Paper Nautilus’, the poem was, as we have seen, itself born out of a specific object, the gift to her of a shell from Bishop and Crane. Published first of all as ‘A Glass-Ribbed Nest’ in Kenyon Review in May 1940, Moore had by this time read a draft of Bishop’s poem, ‘Jerónimo’s House’ (CEP, 35). Bishop, on reading Moore’s poem instantly praised it, comparing her own poem unfavourably with it and picking out in particular, as she did later in her memoir, the part from ‘ “wasp-nest flaws/of white on white”, onwards. Bishop, it is interesting to note, had already used the image of a wasp’s nest in her poem with reference to a dwelling: My house, my fairy   palace, is of perishable   clapboards with

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­27 three rooms in all,    my gray wasps’ nest of chewed-up paper    glued with spit.

Whereas Bishop describes a house which is haphazard and makeshift, Moore’s poem delights in the classical geometry of the shell’s shape and the folding together of inside and outside: ‘a dull/white outside and smooth-edged inner surface/glossy as the sea’. Bishop quotes the end of the poem, where the young are freed from the shell but not, perhaps, released from emotional entanglement: leaving its wasp-nest flaws of white on white, and closelaid Ionic chiton – folds like the lines in the mane of a Parthenon horse, round which the arms had wound themselves as if they knew love is the only fortress strong enough to trust to.80

Poignantly this poem could be read as a reworking of the terms of Bishop and Moore’s difference with the ‘flaw’, the very word Bishop used to mask her own independent judgement, incorporated here as the mark of separation. ‘I don’t know where I should like to live unless in a nautilus shell’, Moore had written to her brother in the brief period when her life was unsettled and she was free to choose.81 Moore’s poem concludes with emergence, but her imagination always tended to orientate itself towards images of reserved space, where an outer shell or surface could offer protection or covering. Moore would undoubtedly have found Bishop’s mention of spit in relation to the wasp’s nest in her poem indelicate, just as she considered her reference to the water closet in ‘Roosters’ unnecessarily ‘sordid’. It is interesting to speculate that what was at issue between them was as much a conception of the body and its limits as propriety. Moore’s images of containment do not allow for contact and exchange between the body and the world, for mutable boundaries or that sense of inside and outside experienced most intensely through the body’s orifices. For Bishop, on the other hand, the body, grotesquely uncontained and uncovered, inevitably left its traces in the world and in her poems. When Moore died in 1972 Robert Lowell wrote to Bishop, sympathising with her loss: ‘She was a star in my sky 35 years ago . . . For you though, it’s losing the person’ (WIA, 703). Bishop’s relationship with

­28    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Lowell had by this time gone through its own stresses, and Bishop had experienced another version of poetic closeness which, whilst sustaining and challenging, had also involved a sometimes uncomfortable transference of influence and images. Moreover, Lowell was not beyond repeating – as he seems to here in response to Moore’s death – his first judgement on Bishop that Marianne Moore was ‘her most important model’.82 Bishop’s elegy for Lowell, ‘North Haven’, with her own theme of time and its inevitable transitions, emphasised the difference within repetition: ‘Nature repeats herself, or almost does:/repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise’ (CEP, 210). The space within or between was an important measure for Bishop, as well as being an inevitable consequence of our existence within time. Bishop was never estranged from Moore, though their relationship changed. She also went on reworking it and writing about it, after Moore’s death. In one of Bishop’s final poems, ‘Santarém’ (CEP, 208–9), the wasp’s nest comes back, now held in tension between opposites, both ‘exquisite’, as Moore might have seen it, and ‘ugly’. Nothing is settled, just as there are no conclusions to be drawn, as Bishop also recognised at the end of her memoir. But irreconcilable points of view can be held, as Bishop had long ago discovered, within a poetry open to time and the process of journey and return.

Notes   1. The essay was first published in The Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).  2. Marianne Moore, Selected Letters, ed. Bonnie Costello (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 381 (21 February 1937).  3. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 382 (1 March 1937).   4. Ibid. p. 339 (5 January 1934 [1935].   5. Ibid. p. 353 (8 September 1935).  6. Quoted in David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), p. 10.   7. See Letter to Marianne Moore, 2 May 1936, quoted in Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 10.  8. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 423 (31 January 1942).   9. Ibid. pp. 441–2 (16 November 1943). 10. ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: Notes on Timing in his Poetry’, Vassar Review, February 1934, in CEPr, 468–74. 11. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 353 (8 September 1935). 12. Moore, ‘Interview with Donald Hall, Paris Review, 1961’ in A Marianne Moore Reader (New York: Vintage, 1961), pp. 254–5. 13. See Moore, Selected Letters, p. 252. 14. Ibid. p. 271 (19 July 1932).

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­29 15. Susan McCabe, ‘The “Ballet Mécanique” of Marianne Moore’s Cinematic Modernism’, Mosaic, vol. 33 (2000) pp. 67–87 (p. 72). 16. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 160 (9 May 1921). 17. See Susan McCabe, ‘ “Delight in Dislocation”: the Cinematic Modernism of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray’, Modernism/modernity 8 (2001), pp. 429–52. 18. See Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 6. 19. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’ in Marianne Moore, Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), p. x. 20. Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 148. 21. Marianne Moore, Complete Poems (New York and London: Penguin, 1994), p. 14. 22. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, p. xi. 23. Linda Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), p. 164. 24. Moore, ‘Archaically New’ in Complete Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), p. 323. This essay was written as preface to three poems by Bishop in Trial Balances, ed. Ann Winslow (Macmillan: New York, 1935). 25. Moore, Complete Poems, p. 41. 26. Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts, p. 153. 27. Quoted in Lynn Keller, ‘Words Worth a Thousand Postcards: The Bishop/ Moore Correspondence’, American Literature, 55 (1983), pp. 405–29 (p. 405). 28. Peripheral is a word used by Bishop in the famous ‘Darwin’ letter to Anne Stevenson, see CEPr p. 414. 29. See Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority, p. 57. 30. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 422. 31. Moore first published the poem in The Nation 167 (16 October 1948), p. 430 under the title ‘Efforts of Affection’. In The Collected Poems (1951) it becomes ‘Efforts and Affection’, a title which is changed back to the original in the later Complete Poems (1967). 32. Chester Page, Memoirs: A Charmed Life in New York (New York: iUniverse, 2007), p. 15. 33. ‘Interview with Donald Hall’ in A Marianne Moore Reader, p. 273. 34. Unpublished notes for a lecture, quoted in Robin G. Schulze, The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 7. 35. Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts, p. 102. 36. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 431 (26 March 1943). 37. ‘Foreword’, A Marianne Moore Reader, p. xv. 38. Moore, Complete Prose, p. 183 39. Ibid. p. 183 40. VC 72A, p. 6. “Plunder” or “accessibility to experience”: Consumer 41. Alison Rieke, ‘  Culture and Marianne Moore’s Modernist Self-Fashioning’, Journal of Modern Literature, 27 (2003), pp. 149–71 (p. 150). 42. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 296 (22 February 1933).

­30    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection 43. Moore, Complete Prose, pp. 327–9. 44. Kathryn R. Kent, Making Girls into Women: American Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 174. 45. Susan McCabe has written extensively about Bryher and Moore’s relationship in ‘ “Let’s Be Alone Together”: Bryher’s and Marianne Moore’s Aesthetic-Erotic Collaboration’, Modernism/modernity 17 (2010), pp. 607–37. For reference to ‘adventures’ see p. 620. 46. See McCabe, ‘ “Let’s Be Alone Together” ’, p. 624. 47. See Linda Leavell, ‘Marianne Moore, the James Family, and the Politics of Celibacy’, Twentieth Century Literature, 29 (2003), pp. 219–46. 48. See Cristanne Miller, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Else Lasker-Schüler (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 106. 49. See Moore, Selected Letters p. 393 where Bishop and Louise Crane are addressed together, p. 443 where Bishop is asked to pass on thanks to Marjorie Stevens, and pp. 540–2, letter from Moore to Lota de Macedo Soares. 50. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 397 (14 February 1940?). 51. VC 72A.3 p. 25. 52. Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 5. 53. ‘The Plumet Basilisk’ in Moore, Complete Poems, p. 24. 54. Susan McCabe ‘Survival of the Queerly Fit: Darwin, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop’, Twentieth Century Literature, 55 (2009), pp. 547–72 (p. 550). 55. See Rieke. ‘ “Plunder” or “Accessibility to Experience” ’, pp. 149–71. 56. Letter to Crane 29 August 1946, quoted in Miller, Cultures of Modernism, p. 110. 57. Naomi Schor makes the link between fetishism and irony in Bad Objects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 101–7. 58. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Fetishism’ (1927)’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XXI (1927–1931) (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1964), pp. 152–7. 59. See Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Lesbian fetishism?’ in Space, Time and Perversion (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 151. 60. Moore, Complete Poems, p. 62. 61. ‘Dress and Kindred Subjects’ 1965, in Moore, Complete Prose, p. 598. 62. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 162; p. 135. 63. Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’ in Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 60. 64. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 363 (28 August 1936). 65. Moore, Selected Letters, pp. 365–6 (1 October 1936). 66. Ibid. p. 363 (28 August 1936). 67. Ibid. p. 372 (17 December 1936). 68. David Kalstone reprints the Moores’ revised version in Becoming a Poet, pp. 265–9. 69. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 441 (16 November 1943). 70. Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 102.

Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore    ­31 71. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 96. 72. Moore, Selected Letters, pp. 442–3 (16 November 1943). 73. Letter, 21 March 1942, quoted in Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 89. 74. Letter, 4 August 1944, quoted in Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Los Angeles, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 173. 75. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 391 (1 May 1938). 76. VC 72.3, p. 2. 77. VC 72.3, p. 28. 78. Quoted in Thomas Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), p. 72. 79. Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 94. 80. Moore, Selected Poems, p. 121. 81. Moore, Selected Letters, p. 86 (13 November 1910). 82. See WIA, p. 5, n.2.

Chapter 2

A Window into Europe

Travels in the Baroque When Elizabeth Bishop embarked on SS Königstein with a Vassar friend, Harriet Tompkins Thomas, in July 1935 on her first trip to Europe, it was Paris they had in mind as a destination, the place that ‘everybody headed for in those days’.1 Unwittingly, however, they had boarded a ‘Nazi boat’ and had to contend with an ‘impossible’ group of German passengers, whom Bishop hid from as much as she could and complained about as having ‘tramped on my person and my intellect’ (OA, 33). In her notebook the ship became a model for other institutions she hated that imposed on or threatened her (only hospitals, often a haven in her life, were exempt): ‘College, school, this ship all awful places where one slips backwards into corners day after day, and the people who have a “good time” walk on one more and more.’2 The voyage itself – her first prolonged time at sea – produced an intense physical reaction in her, most notably when she was in the company of others: Twice now, both times at the table, (which is natural enough) I have been overtaken by an awful, awful feeling of deathly physical and mental illness – something that seems ‘after’ me. It is as if one were whirled off from all the world & the interests of the world in a sort of cloud-dark, sulphurous gray, of melancholia. When this feeling comes I can’t speak, swallow, scarcely breathe. I knew I had had it once before, years ago, & last night, on its 2nd occurrence I placed it as ‘homesickness’. I was homesick for 2 days once when I was nine years old; I wanted one of my aunts. Now I really have no right to home-sickness at all. I suppose it is caused actually by the motion of the ship away from N.Y. – it may affect one’s center of balance some way; the feelings seems to center in the middle of the chest.3

This very interesting passage from her notebook gives us some intimation of the intense anxiety Bishop suffered from and the extent to which she somatised its symptoms. The something that seemed ‘after her’ is, we

A Window into Europe    ­33

could presume, the trauma that came before, the child’s experience of being overwhelmed by feelings of abandonment. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok have written about the ‘stifling’ effects of a parent’s secret, entombed within the unconscious of a child, which they see as manifesting itself as asthma, and how paranoia may exist in people ‘not authorized to mourn in the name of their lost object’.4 The idea that asthma as a disease could have psychological roots, proposed here by Abraham and Torok, was a common contention throughout much of the twentieth century, though the connection is now widely refuted and the guilt such a belief produced also recognised. Bishop seems to have been prone to both the theory and the guilt. In 1937, during her second trip to Europe, Bryher wrote to her, urging her as she reported to Moore, ‘to be psychoanalysed because of the asthma’ (OA, 61). Moore wrote back, concurring with Bishop’s mistrust of psychoanalysis but observing, with characteristic acumen and perhaps hard-earned experience, that Bishop need not fear meetings with Bryher since ‘you are not a novice in evading what you don’t need’.5 It is tantalising to think what might have happened if Bishop had accepted this intriguing offer – Bryher had, after all, facilitated H. D.’s analysis with Freud just three years before. Despite her unease, however, and later irritation that ‘every magazine or paper I pick up has an article proving that asthma is psychosomatic’ (OA, 163), Bishop did seek help during the next decade from an analyst, Dr Ruth Foster, and a GP, Dr Anny Baumann, who from 1947 onwards became her mainstay and administered a combination of drugs for her asthma and discipline in relation to her alcoholism, both of which Bishop seems to have depended on. Whilst her asthma may have had other, undiagnosed physical causes – Bishop was a heavy smoker throughout her life – her letters to Dr Baumann, as well as documenting her physical symptoms, are psychologically charged, revealing her by turns as abject and defensive, struggling to acknowledge unsanctioned feelings until their urgency overwhelms her. In 1949, in the aftermath of one such episode of dire panic, exacerbated by alcohol, she wrote to Dr Baumann acknowledging a debt and trying to mitigate any damage: After I talked to you Saturday, everything seemed to start clearing up and I have been progressively less nervous & melancholy, etc., ever since . . . Everyone has been unbelievably kind. You know I’m sorry so I won’t say that. I’m taking the pills and at least feel sane again and thank you once more for your help. (OA, 184)

On another occasion she wrote to her about her fear and depression, apologising for troubling her ‘with all these imaginary ailments’ (OA,

­34    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection 199). Abraham and Torok’s idea of a subject pursued by ‘physiological calamity’6 is certainly suggestive in terms of how Bishop represented her problems to Baumann, as is the idea of its connection with a sequestered and unspeakable grief. On 29 May 1934, just the year before Bishop embarked on her trip to Europe, she learned that her mother had died. When she communicated the fact to her friend Frani Blough the next week she added, ‘after eighteen years, of course, it is the happiest thing that could have happened’ (OA, 24). Bishop seems to pre-empt both empathy for her mother and her own feelings of grief because after eighteen years of her mother’s absence in an asylum, a fact that seems not to have been talked about within her family, she may have had little wish to revive, consciously or unconsciously, the devastating loss she had suffered, or to remember a psychic death by way of this real one. Similarly, her homesickness a year later on board ship is disallowed by her because she cannot ‘authorize’ herself to have feelings in relation to a home which not only does not, but for most of her life did not, exist. Nevertheless in 1935, Bishop, with the motion of the ship – and possibly the sense of being unmoored in an uncertain, unbounded space – has a presentiment of the losses of the past in the profound feeling of destabilisation. The whole experience of being on board ship seems to have produced in her an intense self-consciousness, particularly in relation to her visual field which was distorted by distance and emanated in states of near-hallucination. ‘The horizon seems to be boat shaped – the shape of whatever you’re on’, she wrote, ‘or one, infinitely spread . . .  the eye gets tired looking from front to back.’ Later, giving the passage the heading ‘The Man on the Raft’, as if she were experimenting with the  title of a poem, she wrote about how at night, watching the foam and the ‘great “Baroque” circles’ the boat made, she can almost convince herself she can see ‘poor wretches clinging to a board or a tin . . . shouting and shouting to the ship’s lights . . . a white body, or the glitter of their eye-balls rolled toward us’.7 The term ‘Baroque’ suggests the way Bishop may also have been filtering her experiences through already established interests in style and form. As a student she had read M. W. Croll’s ‘ Baroque Style in Prose’ where, as Croll defined it, ‘the motion of souls, not their states of rest, had become the themes of art’.8 In a letter to Donald Stanford, one of the first literary peers she corresponded with, she drew a comparison between their respective poems, describing his poem – perhaps rather teasingly – as being ‘at rest’, whilst hers tried to achieve the feeling of being ‘in action, within itself’ (OA, 11). She goes on to quote the passage from Croll, which she also cited in her undergraduate essay on Hopkins, where he describes the purpose of baroque writers as being ‘to portray,

A Window into Europe    ­35

not a thought but a mind thinking . . . They knew that an idea separated from the act of experiencing it is not the idea that was experienced.’9 T. S. Eliot’s revaluation of the ‘metaphysical poets’ (Eliot did not use the term baroque) may also have been in the background for Bishop, particularly because his ideas about their capacity, before ‘the dissociation of sensibility’ set in, to ‘feel their thought’ and ‘amalgamate disparate experience’,10 were taken up and repeated by others, for example Mario Praz, and helped to create a context where the baroque emphasis on both heterogeneity and form became part of an avant-garde and modernist aesthetic.11 Bishop, we know, interviewed Eliot for the Vassar Miscellany News in 193212 and her early experiments with masques and drama in poetry were planned with the reassurance that ‘Eliot seems to be working that way’ (OA, 22). However, Bishop was also interested in art and architecture and the extent to which her response to, and comprehension of, the visual realm penetrated her writing is crucial to understanding her development at this time. Peggy Samuels has recently argued for the importance of Bishop’s room-mate at Vassar, Margaret Miller, who went on to study art history at New York University under Meyer Schapiro and later became a researcher and then associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art. She almost certainly helped to establish a context for Bishop, recommended the latest books about art that were always a part of Bishop’s voluminous reading and, as an art historian, helped to mediate for her between the visual and language.13 Bishop seems to have been intimately, though not sexually, involved with Miller, particularly in the period after Vassar14 and tried to spend the Christmas before she left for Europe with Miller and her mother, though this experience was curtailed by Bishop’s illness and she had to retreat back to her New York apartment on her own, suffering from asthma, though closely followed by Miller as nurse.15 Miller worked on the ground-breaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 entitled ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by Alfred H. Barr, which included work by Max Ernst, Man Ray, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí and later, in 1948, curated an exhibition on collage which surveyed the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris and Ernst.16 Samuels has demonstrated that Bishop and Miller shared ideas about the research for this latter exhibition during its preparation.17 A brief surviving note made by Miller about the exhibition as part of a press release is thus of particular interest. There she observes that collage not only contributed to the construction of cubist images which ‘display the power of the mind to conceive and hold several aspects of an object simultaneously’ but was the place where ‘another type of mental imagery first appeared, the free unregulated

­36    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection vision on the borderline of the conscious and unconscious’.18 Miller was also involved in the preparation of a publication by the Museum of Modern Art on Paul Klee in 1941, later revised in 1945, that contained essays and extracts from his notebooks and accompanied the Paul Klee memorial exhibition which travelled round the States and was shown in New York at the Museum of Modern Art.19 Klee was an artist whom Bishop admired and frequently referred to, as we shall explore later. Returning to the early 1930s, we can perceive how, at that time, there was sustained attention in the art world to the issue of periodisation and the extent to which influences and schools could be thought about non-chronologically. In 1934 Bishop wrote down ‘points to remember’ from R. H. Wilenski’s The Modern Movement in Art,20 where he argued that modern art, in its belief in formalism, found nineteenth-century romantic art ‘heretical’: ‘It seems a departure from the strictly classical tradition to which they themselves have now returned.’21 In a chapter, carefully noted by Bishop, on ‘The Camera’s Influence’, Wilenski draws a distinction between the ‘mechanical vision’ of the camera, which can record ‘degrees of light, obstructions to light, and reflections of light’ but cannot record forms or ‘any relation of objects or concrete things one to another’, and ‘human perception’ which is far more variable because of the influence of ‘imagination, memories, knowledge, sensations, moods, deep-seated psychological attitudes’.22 Bishop copied into her notebook a sentence from Wilenski’s conclusion: ‘What we wish to perceive depends on the character of the adjustment to life which we are attempting at the time.’23 Interestingly, Wilenski also includes, by way of illustration, photographic details of several paintings including, in almost surrealist fashion, a close-up of single eyes in portraits by Sargent of Henry James and by Rubens of Maria de Medici. For other art historians of this period it was specifically the baroque that they turned to in order to define a mood of unease. Heinrich Wölfflin, whose definitive work The Principles of Modern Art was first published in 1915 and then translated and republished in New York in 1932, helped to delineate the features of the baroque which could be usefully configured with modern art. Contrasting the baroque with the ‘perfect proportion’ of the Italian Renaissance, Wölfflin found that, whilst operating within the ‘same system of forms’, the baroque ‘in place of the perfect, the completed’ turned to ‘the restless, the becoming’ and instead of ‘the limited, the conceivable’ opened out to the ‘the limitless, the colossal’.24 He also used the idea of depth to define it, meaning by depth spatial depth, the ‘recession’ of planes and a sensitivity to textures, ‘the different skin of things’, which enabled sensation to penetrate ‘beyond the solid object into the realm of the immaterial’.25

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In more recent times Christine Buci-Glucksmann has made a similar turn to baroque style in her book The Madness of Seeing (La Folie du Voir, 1986) in order to offer a postmodern critique of disembodied vision, that ‘totalizing vision from above’,26 or alignment of seeing and knowledge, which has dominated Western post-enlightenment thinking.27 What she finds by contrast in the baroque is an ‘unstable viewer’ and a ‘cinematography of the visible’, where vision is always embodied vision, multiplied into different ‘points of view’, without a centre or a fixed focus. She describes an ‘open, serial Baroque spatiality’, opposing it to ‘geometrical, and substantialist Cartesian space’. For Buci-Glucksmann the baroque is, as she describes it, ‘in the process of becoming and in a metamorphosis of forms’ and derives its topography ‘from recovery, coexistence, the play of light and forces, the engendering of beings from the undulating line and the ellipse’. Its ‘restless wandering’ is always in the absence of a centre that can only be determined by God.28 Mary Ann Caws has also drawn modern analogies with the baroque, which she associates specifically with the visual, and has suggested in addition that it has an ‘urgent application in the world of surrealism’. For her the baroque, like surrealism, is fascinated with ‘what is complex, multiple, clouded, and changeable’ and teaches us to think about non-linear space, about ‘reversals, upside-downness, and in–outness’ – in other words a plurality of different perspectives.29 On board SS Königstein in 1935 Bishop records her dream of a painting that seems to be the perfect illustration of these concerns, shifting as it does between different planes and different points of view: I dreamed last night of paintings that wouldn’t stay still – the colors moved inside the frames, the objects moved up closer then further back, the whole thing changed from portrait to scenery and back again – keeping the same “lines” all the time.30

Bishop’s painting, like Wölfflin’s version of the baroque, stays within the same system of forms – or lines – but puts the content in motion, moving between nearness and distance in a trompe l’oeil effect and employing the kind of scanning motion Bishop reported her eyes becoming tired of on board ship. As it turns out, Bishop’s dream not only resembles Wölfflin’s ideas but was probably influenced by her reading of him.31 Elsewhere, both on this voyage and before, she reveals a fascination with eyes: the ‘glittering eyeballs’ of the imaginary men on the raft, the physical eye surrounded by eyelashes32, or the way eyebrows invite touch,33 all ways to figure the eye detached from sight. In an earlier reflection in her notebook she described a window obscured by raindrops outside and steam within:

­38    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection I tried to look out, but could not. Instead I realized I could look into the drops, like so many crystal balls, each one traces of a relative or friend: several weeping faces slid away from mine; water plants and fish floated within other drops, watery jewels, leaves and insects magnified, and strangest of all, horrible enough to make me step quickly away was one large drop containing a lonely, magnified human eye, wrapped in its own tear.34

Looking again becomes hallucinatory for Bishop, an act of clairvoyance which mixes the future with memory, and which distorts perspective. The eye within a tear that Bishop fears seeing – or being seen by – also has the force of a revelation. Derrida has written about the importance of tears as causing something to ‘surge up out of forgetfulness’. Whilst tears veil sight they unveil memory; at the same time they suggest what is distinctive about human eyes, which is not to see but to weep: ‘Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep.’35 Bishop’s image, where a tear encompasses a single eye, recalls those detachable or magnified eyes of surrealist art – Man Ray’s ‘Glass Tears’ (1933) where tears are replaced by beads, or ‘Indestructible Object’ (1923) where the photograph of a single eye is attached to the pendulum of a metronome, or René Magritte’s famous painting, ‘The False Mirror’ (1928) where clouds float within the pupil of an eye which fills the whole canvas. However, Bishop’s teardrop also contains echoes of her intensive reading of seventeenth-century poetry which she was imitating both in the masque she was attempting to write entitled ‘His Proper Tear’ or ‘The Proper Tears’36 and her student poems, including ‘Three Sonnets for the Eyes’ (CEP, 221–2) with their archaic language and rather forced ‘wit’: Withdrawing water would be thus discreet So as to make us think ‘twas in our mind – That sickening rupture happening there. “How blind Are eyes!” says it, (dragging its slippery feet) “Now they’re left vacant truths, like angel eyes on The old gravestones; seeing into the graves.

We know that Bishop admired Richard Crashaw’s poem, ‘The Weeper’, with its extended imagery of imploring tears and a non-seeing gaze turned upwards to Heaven37 and she was a lifelong devotee of George Herbert’s poetry, where the lamentations are often more restrained and ‘silent tears’, in paradoxical fashion, are seen as granting the weeper greater authority.38 In ‘The Size’ Herbert again extols ‘modest and moderate’ emotion, the ‘innate balance’39 Bishop admired him for:      Then close again the seam, Which though hast open’d: do not spread thy robe

A Window into Europe    ­39 In hope of great things. Call to minde thy dream,        An earthly globe,     On whose meridian was engraven, These seas are tears, and heav’n the haven.40

Bishop may have felt, for obvious reasons, a special affinity with this lachrymose subject matter. However, she was also drawn to seventeenth-century English poetry’s recurrent use of images to do with the deficiencies of vision even though these frequently referred to Christian theology where sight can be converted, often through blindness, to a Christian point of view.41 As a child she had a more immediate and personal example of limited sight. Her grandmother had a glass eye and, as a consequence, Bishop was, as she told Marianne Moore, fond of glass eyes. Her grandmother’s eye seems to have had particular associations for her as a child with the fragility of life: My grandmother had a glass eye, blue, almost like her other one, and this made her especially vulnerable and precious to me. My father was dead and my mother was away in a sanatorium. Until I was teased out of it, I used to ask Grandmother, when I said goodbye, to promise me not to die before I came home. A year earlier I had privately asked other relatives if they thought my grandmother could go to heaven with a glass eye. (CEPr, 81)

To Moore she wrote that it was only Herbert’s poem ‘Coloss. 3.3’, with its seeming requirement that only one eye be aimed at heaven, which assuaged her fears about her grandmother (OA, 88). She returned frequently to the notion of her grandmother’s glass eye, seeing it latterly as the putative title for another collection of poems,42 and offering her grandmother’s peculiar circumstance, combining the real and the unreal, as an analogy for the situation of the poet and as the basis for the curious effect of a poem as being ‘as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye’. In Bishop’s notes, Herbert’s poem, referred to above, becomes the literal enactment of both her grandmother’s Protestant faith and her squint, where one eye looked heavenward, or off at an angle, while the real eye looked at you: “Him whose happie birth Taught me to live here so, that still one eye Should aim and shoot at that which is on high.”43

However, if Herbert’s concerns with vision and its dialogue with the invisible seemed relevant to Bishop in a secular sense, as did – quite

­40    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection literally – his metaphor of monocular faith, he also seems to have provided her with a topography of shifting horizons, both near and far, and changes, as she described to Joseph Summers, between ‘inner and outer’.44 In his poem ‘The Size’, referred to earlier, tears and seas become interchangeable. Like John Donne in ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’, a poem quoted by Eliot in his essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, he uses the image of a globe, the miniature replica of a world, as an analogy for a teardrop and to demonstrate the intersection or mirroring of what is distant and what is intimate. In Donne’s poem it is the cartographer’s activity that literally and metaphorically ‘makes’ the world whilst the teardrops of his mistress, mingled with his own, overflow or dissolve the world they seemed to copy:     On a round ball A workman that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,       So doth each teare,       Which thee doth weare, A globe, yea world by that impression grow, Till thy teares mixt with mine doe overflow This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.45

Bishop’s own playful poem about a map was begun on New Year’s Eve, after her return from the Millers and before she embarked for Europe, and it is often seen as the first authentic ‘Bishop’ poem. ‘The Map’ (CEP, 5) according to Brett Millier, ‘presents such a contrast to those mannered, imitative college poems that the reader wishes for an explanation’.46 However, we might also make the case that Bishop was simply reworking her interest in the themes of seventeenth-century poetry, though finding a more contemporary language, developed possibly through her habit of keeping travel diaries in which she could practise modes of observation and description. ‘The Map’ was published in Trial Balances in 1935 and then became the opening poem of North & South, her first collection, more than ten years later. Bishop thereafter retained it as the first poem in her Complete Poems published in 1969. According to Bishop, the poem, which ‘wrote itself’, came out of the experience of sitting on the floor and staring at a map, fascinated in particular by ‘how the names were running out from the land into the sea’.47 Other sources within Bishop’s experiences also suggest themselves. The title of her college poem, the first of her ‘Three Sonnets for the Eyes’ quoted above, was ‘Tidal Basin’ and, while the poem quietly indicates an analogy between weeping and the sea, the title also refers specifically

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to a particular geographical region, her childhood home in Nova Scotia and the dramatic tidal effects of the Minas Basin. Like her dream of a painting on board ship, which moves between portrait and landscape, her view of landscape could also conceal the shape of a (self) portrait. A personal association is also secreted in her reference to Newfoundland and Labrador, one of the two specific countries she mentions in ‘The Map’: she had travelled there two years before she wrote the poem, her first experience of a ‘foreign’ country, and, since it was a walking tour, possibly her first experience of using a map to plot a journey. To her friend Frani Blough the picture she offers of the place is very much from her own, embodied, point of view: The streets and houses all fall down toward the water – apparently supported on the masts of the sealers and schooners below. The penetrating stink of fish and the after-effects of a sea voyage and floating and up-tipping all combine to make it very strange and frightening. (OA, 7)

Her descriptions of Newfoundland, and perhaps this new way of writing, following her subjective perceptions as an ‘unstable viewer’, found their way into another poem, ‘Large Bad Picture’ (CEP, 13–14) where it is her uncle, the artist, who provides the location or viewpoint. The poem conflates his painting with memory, or what the painting appears to refer to: On the middle of that quiet floor sits a fleet of small black ships, square-rigged, sails furled, motionless, their spars like burnt match-sticks. And high above them, over the tall cliffs’ semi-translucent ranks, are scribbled hundreds of fine black birds hanging in n’s in banks.

In ‘The Map’, the description of the map similarly seems to combine illustration with the actual territory and to demonstrate how difficult it is to separate sites from sights, the optical distortions which may give the things we see the appearance of unreality. If the map itself can come magically alive through the operations of imagination, actual places can become miniaturised or artificial according to perspective and ways of looking: The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still. Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,

­42    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection under a glass as if they were expected to blossom, or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish. (CEP, 5)

Later, in the 1950s when Bishop wrote her memoir, ‘Primer Class’ (CEPr, 79–85), she recalled how maps had figured in her early childhood and how, at that time, though aware of the distribution of different colours she had not understood their political significance: On the world map, all of Canada was pink; on the Canadian, the provinces were different colors. I was so taken with the pull-down maps that I wanted to snap them up, and pull them down again, and touch all the countries and provinces with my own hands. (CEPr, 84)

Staring closely at a map as an adult, Bishop may well have been distantly remembering that almost pre-linguistic experience of tactility and colour she associated with maps and the desire to touch or take them into her own hands. Indeed Bishop’s poem, for all its seeming abstraction, could be said to achieve much of its effect by joining the innocence and playfulness of a child’s way of seeing, recognising countries on a map as the shapes of faces or animals or making a story out of the relation between sea and land, and the adult traveller’s interest in perspectives and the problems of representation. John Durham Peters has written about the bifocalism required to use a map, looking out to a distant horizon and looking down, and the need to switch between ‘near-sight and far-sight, interpretation of detail and orientation to outline’.48 What this confirms is the way in which maps will always imply a kind of double vision. For Bishop, also attuned to baroque spatiality, or the conjunction of different planes and points of view, the map becomes an example of the instability of appearance and the impossibility of arriving at objective vision. In Bishop’s poem both the sea and the land can equally lay claim to be in the foreground: Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges where weeds hang to the simple blue from green. Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under, drawing it unperturbed around itself? Along the fine tan sandy shelf is the land tugging at the sea from under? (CEP, 5)

Despite the self-questioning and lack of fixed focus, this stanza, like the last, and like Bishop’s dream of a painting, keeps within a fixed pattern of lines produced by rhyme and repetition.

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The second irregular eleven-line stanza raises the problem of boundaries and the lack of fit between ‘emotion’ and its ‘cause’ or, as in the map, words and pictures. The excitement ascribed to the printer whose lines, like the poet’s, exceed an already established form perhaps has its source in her original inspiration for the poem, when she perceived words spilling over, enacting the same kind of restlessness she admired in the baroque. Perhaps this was also how she experienced her own creativity as it began to run away with her, producing words in place of her immobilised gaze. The last two lines of the stanza return us to analogies for the map’s appearance but could also be seen as grounding inchoate emotion in the poem itself:   These peninsulas take water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

As against the elusive and the uncontained, time can, by including human experience, become ‘a dimension of space’. This phrase is J. Hillis Miller’s and is quoted by Elisa New as part of her general proposition about how our sense of ephemerality can be temporarily ‘annulled’ in the ‘space of a poem’. In an image curiously appropriate to this discussion she contends that ‘time not enlarged by experience slips whistling by, its yardage as if jerked free of the bolt’.49 In ‘The Map’, the metaphorical presence of the women feeling the texture of the cloth – the yard-goods – also holds the moment, prevents it ‘whistling by’, demonstrating how surface can fold itself into an interior of bodily sensation. If the argument of the poem seems to conclude that geography is superior to history – ‘More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors’ – it is not, however, because history – or time – can be banished or eliminated. Thomas Travisano has argued in his early study of Bishop that it is wrong to read an ‘ambiguous line from a tensely balanced poem as if it were a bold sign pointing down a straight road’.50 Indeed Bishop’s poems almost never lead in a straight line or offer simple directions, and this early poem is no exception. In an interview with Ashley Brown in 1966 Bishop, sensitive to the effect of layering and seeing it appropriately as a particular feature of a baroque poetic style, maintained that ‘switching tenses always gives the effects of depth, space, foreground, background and so on’.51 The opposite could equally be true: planes and perspectives in space – the depth created by the ‘recession of planes’ that Wölfflin described in relation to the baroque – could also reflect or correspond to the relations between past and present, or the conscious and unconscious. In other words, Bishop’s writing could subtly implicate a shifting relation between levels or planes.

­44    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection On several occasions Bishop attributed her idea about geography and history to a ‘profound sentence’ in Auden’s ‘Journal of an Airman’ about how ‘ “geography is a thousand times more important to modern man than history” ’, adding ‘I always like to feel exactly where I am geographically all the time, on the map – but maybe that is something else again.’52 The precise reference she is recalling is to a moment in the ‘Journal’ when the airman offers an absurd calculation: ‘A man occupies 6ft. in space and 70 years in time. Assuming the velocity of light to be 186,000 miles a second, then geography is just about a hundred thousand million times more important to him than history.’53 This fragment may well have stuck in Bishop’s memory because of her own private preoccupations. However, it is worth briefly considering its context within Auden’s poem and how the airman must employ the remote perspective of an airplane to prevent himself ‘crossing over’ or giving in – as he eventually does – to the allure of self-destruction. Within this murky psychodrama, the ‘ancestral line’ leads to memories of the First World War, whilst the whole poem seems to reflect the madness of a time that saw the rise of fascism. In the Foreword to the 1966 edition, Auden writes in a bemused way about his own poem that ‘my name on the title page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented but near the border of sanity, who might well, in a year or two, become a Nazi’.54 Similarly we might say that the geographical argument within the poem is itself teetering on the brink. Bishop’s map with its inevitable implication in conquest and imperialism cannot escape its political colorations, any more than Auden’s poem. And whilst geography may have seemed to Bishop to offer a kind of security in its simultaneity and levelling, it could also conceal a profound disorientation. The question of ‘Where am I?’, a question which can be posed again and again with every fresh venturing out into the world, can also be seen as deflecting from another more fundamental question about the nature of being. ‘Who am I?’, by contrast, requires a different, more difficult engagement with the past.55

Somewhere in Europe ‘I twist like a button on a string, stretched between N.Y. & somewhere in Europe’, Bishop wrote on board ship. Anticipating arrival, she also acknowledged how her imagination was in play, creating the scenes to come: ‘Of course reality goes with one – but it is as if these cities, paintings, highways, churches are being built now, rising up, taking on color & dimension & perspective.’56 The button image resonates with

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a dream she had in Florida two years later and where the – perhaps aleatory – overtones of Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt and the sinister button moulder are hard to avoid: Dreamed I was dead, or at least in some other form of existence, and arranged on a card, like buttons . . . it was a white card with a fine gilt line around it near the edge – black tatters of my clothes hung around it.57

The string, which is stretchable and immeasurable, suspends her between the past and an unknown future and seems to save her from a fixity where images of death and mourning, easily associated with her past, gather. Travel, for Bishop, was always about potential and renewal and about the ability to construct herself imaginatively as different worlds materialised before her. Bishop’s ship docked in Antwerp but Bishop quickly moved on, visiting exhibitions in Brussels and then Paris. She was impressed by the surrealistic elements of Breughel’s drawings – ‘I remember particularly one woman’s figure, carrying a clock on her head and pair of mammoth spectacles in her hand’ – and ‘all the favorite’ modern paintings from France, ‘Matisse, Picasso, Dufy etc’.58 However, her social awkwardness prevented her from taking opportunities to meet the many expatriate literary luminaries who had gravitated to Paris at this time. She described to Anne Stevenson how Sylvia Beach had invited her to parties with fellow guests Joyce and Spender but that she would ‘get to the door, lose my nerve and run away’; the same thing seems to have happened when Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas asked her to tea. She went on to recall the prevailing intellectual ambience in Paris at this time: What was going on in Paris then was mostly surrealism, that I remember – André Breton & his gallery; I met Ernst, Giacometti, etc. – but – I just looked at them. I spent a lot of time taking walks, also at the Deux Magots and the Flore. (CEPr, 430)

Bishop seems to have frequented the places where she was most likely to encounter an artistic coterie but was happier ‘looking’ and deepening her dependence on alcohol, including Pernod – ‘not a lady’s drink, but I like it’ (OA, 38). In some ways Bishop travelled like an artist, seeking out places that would feed her visual imagination and setting herself up to experience the possibilities of quiet contemplation. On this particular trip she spent two months, first with Harriet Tompkins and then alone, in Douarnenez, a fishing town in Brittany known to her friend Frani Blough, which may well have reminded her of Nova Scotia, and to

­46    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection which she took, as she told Marianne Moore, ‘a small library of French books’ (OA, 34). It is here she read Rimbaud and seems to have studied Max Ernst’s Histoire Naturelle, ‘thumbtacking’ the plates round her hotel room.59 After the arrival of Louise Crane in France, and thanks to the higher standards expected by Crane’s very wealthy widowed mother, Bishop and Crane moved into a seven-room apartment in Paris for three months, complete with maid, cook and the owner’s clock collection.60 Before they returned to New York in June 1936, they also travelled to England, Morocco, Spain and finally Mallorca. The extent to which we can think about Bishop as being influenced by surrealism has been complicated by her later, famous refutation to Anne Stevenson where she steered Stevenson away from attributing too much to Max Ernst’s influence – ‘You mention Ernst again. Oh dear – I wish I had never mentioned him at all, because I think he’s usually a dreadful painter’ (CEPr, 413). The long passage that follows this, where she takes up Stevenson’s point about how dream experience is really ‘part of the continuum of experience in general’, is often treated as kind of a poetic manifesto on Bishop’s part: Yes I agree with you . . . There is no “split.” Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can’t believe we are wholly irrational and I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic – and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (In this sense it is always “escape,” don’t you think?) (CEPr, 414)

By this time, living in Brazil, Bishop had had a wonderful time reading Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and was memorably to visit Darwin’s house in England the next year (OA, 255). However, the train of thought which carried her from Ernst to Darwin was not entirely new, since she had described Ernst in Histoire Naturelle as ‘making fun of Darwin’ when she first encountered the book in 1935.61 Max Ernst, of course, one of the leading lights of surrealism, famously seemed to give priority to the irrational over the rational. In his essay, ‘Beyond Painting’, he took issue with the organisation of a scientific catalogue with its ‘absurd collection’ of plates for ‘anatomical or physical demonstration’ and its pretensions to rationality. For Ernst, when

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looked at differently employing the artist’s ‘hallucinatory look’, the catalogue ‘really’ enacted disjunctions and contradictions between contiguous items. The effect was thus not very different from that achieved by collage, the fortuitous encounter between ‘distant realities on an unfamiliar plane’. His drawings in Histoire Naturelle used his famous ‘frottage’ technique, his experimental rubbing of wooden floorboards to produce suggestive or reminiscent images. The images he produced were all of ‘nature’ and seem to set out a sequence ranging from the cosmic to the vegetal and the animal, including pictures of eyes disjoined from bodies, with a final image ‘Eve, the Only One Left to Us’, of the back of a human head. In this version of evolution, it is all a matter of what you see and do not see and this confusion between ‘nature’ and ‘illusion’, created by frottage, may have been exactly what Bishop had in mind as Ernst’s mockery.62 However, it would be wrong to see the surrealists as simply or crudely dismissive of science. Ernst indeed approvingly quoted André Breton’s description of how, starting with Leonardo da Vinci’s lesson for his students to draw exactly what they saw in the spots on the wall, ‘the poet, the artist and the scientist’ are united in their ability to bring forth ‘new associations of images’ by gazing on what amounts to a screen, whether that be ‘a decrepit wall, a cloud or anything else’. What they all share is concentration and responsiveness, ‘the unreserved acceptance of a more or less lasting passivity’. According to Breton the screen can be constituted in many different ways: ‘Every life contains some of these homogenous entities, of cracked or clouded appearance.’ What is critical, however, is how one looks at it and he stresses the importance of considering it fixedly and thus opening oneself up to ‘objective hazard’.63 The screen bears some resemblance to Freud’s notion of ‘screen memories’ and Ernst both refers explicitly to the primal scene and seems to found his practice in activities of ‘association’ or ‘coupling’ which he repeated in the principles of collage. He also compared his images to ‘love memories and visions of half-sleep’ and talked about reproducing his ‘secret desires’. In his use of frottage and collage there is undoubtedly a psychosexual aspect that both seeks and covers over a moment of shock and disruption. ‘He who speaks of collage speaks of the irrational’ Ernst wrote and, quoting Breton: ‘Identity will be convulsive or will not exist.’64 In general, psychoanalysis fascinated the surrealists and they found within it many ideas that were compatible or useful, particularly in relation to sexuality, dreams and the role of automatism as a way of accessing the unconscious. However, this apparent rapport obscures what was in another way a very difficult relationship. André Breton,

­48    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection for instance, who as a medical student was exposed to free association and dream interpretation as treatments for shell shock during the First World War, was receptive to Freudian ideas but as he developed his ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ his advocacy of hypnotism and automatism as an end in themselves, and as producing artistic insight, opened up a gulf with Freud who saw their use only in the service of interpretation and tended to view the unconscious not as a site of aesthetic plenitude but of conflicted and perverse fantasies. A similar difference of emphasis is at work within Breton’s concept of ‘objective hazard’ – an important idea within surrealism. Breton wanted to retain a spontaneous element within his notion of the chance encounter whilst also seeing it as suffused with unconscious meaning. Whereas for Freud the ‘uncanny’ aspect of chance was governed by a compulsion to repeat, an unconscious that predetermines experience, replaying the traumatic event or fantasy because it cannot be remembered, for Breton objective hazard could signal something external and in the future. His concept of the marvellous similarly reroutes the uncanny towards the outer world. In his ‘Manifesto’, Breton wrote that ‘what is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real’.65 The marvellous for Breton, whilst assuming the power to ‘disorientate us in our memory’66 and having the deranging effect of an uncanny return, was nevertheless unequivocally equated by him with the ideal and with beauty: ‘The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.’67 What Breton does not examine, and indeed swerves away from, is any connection between the uncanny, unconscious repetition and what Freud labelled the death drive, a repetition arising not from desire but a contrary compulsion towards destruction, inertia and death.68 Bishop in the 1930s was, as we have seen, suspicious of psychoanalysis, both for herself and in its assumption of an overarching interpretive authority. Dismissing Bryher’s claims that psychoanalysis ‘makes one write better and more easily’ she quoted approvingly from Christopher Caudwell’s ‘confused and uneven’ book Illusion and Reality to Marianne Moore, where he opines that ‘psychoanalysts do not see the poet playing a social function, but regard him as a neurotic working off his complexes at the expense of the public’ (OA, 63). Bishop was in some ways following the same track that led Breton and other surrealists to try to form an alliance with the communists in the late twenties and early thirties in an attempt to demonstrate that art had a role which was revolutionary in a social as well as aesthetic sense.69 However, Bishop was never really comfortable with the notion that art should subordinate itself to some other purpose and remained antipa-

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thetic throughout her life to what she called ‘social conscience’ writing.70 (In the end, needless to say, Breton and his followers could not sustain their sorties into communism, especially as Stalinism began to reveal its repressive and murderous nature). However, as Bishop’s journals show, she was by no means immune to political events in the thirties, and in particular the threatening atmosphere of a military build-up in Europe, though she did not allow it to curtail her tourist travels despite the advice she and Crane were given by the US Consulate about the dangers of visiting Spain. In Spain, though her stance might seem naively anticommunist, she was aware of civil disturbance, poverty and destruction, and collected cuttings about the growing violence.71 She also preserved a cutting in her notebook entitled ‘For Human Moles’ about the creation of air raid shelters in Paris. 72 To her friend Frani Blough she wrote, in response to her sense of the general mood: ‘Paris has a really sinister winter-weather – a sort of hushed, frozen ash-heap, death-bed atmosphere, but it is very beautiful all the same.’73 This unspecified negativity, with its blending of death and cold, recalls the climate of her childhood memories and perhaps suggests how childhood and the menace of war were closely linked for her. Bishop’s early traumas were played out against the background of the losses experienced by Canada in the First World War. In Great Village, according to Bishop, ‘almost every boy in that tiny place, from 18–22’ was killed. Bishop’s mother, Gertrude Bulmer, seems to have been particularly affected by the war, which became a vivid part of her own psychosis, further adding to the intermingling of private and public events in Bishop’s memory.74 The poems that came out of Bishop’s experience of visiting Europe in the thirties drew on the diverse influences of surrealism but it was perhaps its cultivation of what Ernst called, as we have seen, a ‘hallucinatory look’, a look which could encompass both the real and imagined, that was most important to her. In his Surrealism and Painting (1929), Breton asserted that it was impossible for him ‘to envisage a picture as being other than a window’ and went on to express his interest in knowing what a painting ‘looks out on, or, in other words, whether, from where I am standing, there is a “beautiful view”, and nothing appeals to me so much as a vista stretching away before me and out of sight’.75 For Breton that ‘out of sight’ united the distant real, the imagination and the unconscious and he believed that ‘the same light and the same hallucinatory shadow’ flowed through them all, both ‘things that are and things that are not’.76 Later, in 1932, he used the image of a ‘conduction wire’ to express how connection is achieved between ‘the far too distant worlds of waking and sleeping, exterior and interior

­50    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection reality, reason and madness’.77 Richard Mullen, in discussing Bishop’s surrealist inheritance, has warily noted how she eschewed the more extreme practices and ideas of the surrealists.78 This is certainly true and in particular it applies to surrealism’s linguistic experimentation, its fragmented texts and its ‘ribald reductions’ of the female body and the feminine.79 However, Bishop’s figure of Darwin, the heroic observer, which seems to have offered her a counter or antidote to surrealism, also incorporates some of the language of the surrealist ‘look’ with its reference to the ‘unconscious or automatic’. Also, Darwin’s concentration on ‘facts and minute details’ does not protect him from ‘strangeness’, according to Bishop, and she vividly pictures him as ‘sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown’. The word ‘giddily’ suggests his instability as a subject whilst the ‘sinking and sliding’ implies a slippage between internal and external worlds; Darwin’s boat, ‘The Beagle’, that Bishop was reading about at this time, seems to share the same drunken perspectives as Rimbaud’s.80 Bishop, as she developed as a poet, learnt how to approach the natural world through an estranging and yet intimate gaze; it was a gaze, however, which was also influenced by what she had learned from the interior, uncanny spaces of surrealism.

Ghosts and Distortions During the thirties, Bishop wrote poems that originated from her experiences in Europe where she often used the architectural setting of rooms, most frequently bedrooms, in order to explore spaces that were both real and interiorised or dreamlike. In ‘Love Lies Sleeping’ (CEP, 18–19) and an originally unpublished poem, ‘In A Room’ (CEP, 267–71), she considers a hinterland between sleeping and waking, the blurred sense of disorientation as one not only awakens to strange surroundings but travels mentally across other times and places to arrive where one is: Earliest morning, switching all the tracks that cross the sky from cinder star to star,    coupling the ends of streets    to trains of light, now draw us into daylight in our beds; and clear away what presses on the brain:    put out the neon shapes    that float and swell and glare down the gray avenue between the eyes in pinks and yellows, letters and twitching signs. (CEP, 18)

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In this poem, ‘Love Lies Sleeping’, the ‘gray avenue between the eyes’, taking its shape and orientation from the outside, is lit by uncomfortably bright lights that could belong either to the morning or the night before. The speaker looks out of the window at ‘an immense city’ that seems to ‘waver’ in the sky, detailed yet indistinct. In one of her most memorable images of miniaturisation, Bishop describes the city, seen in the process of formation, through glass and from far away, as ‘the little chemical “garden” in a jar’. For Susan Stewart, such miniature glassenclosed worlds, represented also by snow globes or aquaria, protected the viewer from the threat of materiality whilst enhancing the sense of ‘transcendent vision’, and we might interpret Bishop here as similarly attempting to exercise visual control over an ‘immense’ but mysteriously ineffable world. 81 In ‘In A Room’, the room seems to have no fixed proportions and what was a single contained space takes on the multiple forms of ‘three or four rooms of unequal sizes’:    There was a stain on the ceiling     Over the bed,      Shaped like a rhinoceros head With a jagged horn and a trumpet in his mouth.    The trumpet had blown, without “feeling,”    All the gilt plaster-work, hoarse,     From his jaw.      In the morning I saw Over my head the brilliant results of the music:     A molding, coarse    As an opera-house balustrade.     Off-center because      What was one room now was    Three or four rooms of unequal sizes. (CEP, 267)

The ‘stain’ generates ‘surreal’ visual associations with a rhinoceros head, rather in the way Ernst turned shapes on floorboards, revealed through his frottage technique, into images of animals. Here, however, with the paralleling or counterpointing of the visual register and music, Bishop also incorporates movement: the features of the room are not so much located in space as caught in transit across it or through it: ‘The two rusted pipes/Of the plumbing arrangements ran/To the closet in the corner and bored/within it.’ Later, in her autobiographical prose masterpiece, ‘In the Village’ (CEPr, 62–78), where she used a similar prepositional phrase in the title, Bishop evoked her mother’s scream as ‘a slight stain’ in the sky. Sound here congeals in memory into an unalienable and unforgettable marker of trauma: ‘It just came there to live, forever – not

­52    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection loud, just alive forever’ (CEPr, 62). This stain, silently resonant, may also lead us to look again at what is repressed for Bishop behind the idea of a doom-laden trumpet being blown ‘without “feeling” ’. In both these poems, Bishop uses line spacing which is ‘off-centre’, reminiscent of George Herbert’s poetic forms, and different ways of shortening or dividing the pentameter whilst employing repeated verse forms and, in the case of ‘In a Room’, a complex rhyme scheme (ABBCA). If the architecture of the poem is unsettling, using the familiar mnemonics of poetry in a new way, the same could be said of the spaces she is describing. Both poems seem to evoke a repressed history that returns in the signs of the artisanal labour of the past apparent in the ‘workmanship’ of cornices, façades and the ‘beautiful white marble fire-place’, and the ghostly inhabitants who can be observed coming and going or heard through the walls, arguing, drinking and writing: A man and his wife stayed up late in there; I could hear     Them fighting      In low voices, and a continuous writing, “Scratch-scratch-scratch,” going on, while they drank    Bottle after bottle of beer. (CEP, 269)

Perhaps Bishop, immersed in her own coupledom, is imagining heterosexual doppelgängers. Certainly, by pushing the relationship between ‘a man and his wife’ to the shadows, she is also covertly reversing a hierarchy, writing from a space which makes that ‘normal’ relationship sinister or other. The decay in the room evidenced by the stain and the rusty pipes also suggests the state of ‘ruin’ that Breton associated with the uncanny and creates the ‘atmosphere’ of a phantasmal past lodged within the same contours as the present.82 In 1935, whilst living in Douarnenez, Bishop noted her experience of looking at a mail order catalogue and, like Ernst, becoming aware of the kinds of odd juxtapositions it could throw up. She goes on to speculate wistfully about the kind of room that might hold the scattered remnants or objects gathered from her own past: That an object had an existence strong enough to produce these ghosts, distortions, funeral engraved nightmares of itself – with prices and writing underneath – this is very hard to get to the bottom of . . . Sometimes I wish I had a junk-room, store-room or attic, where I could keep and had kept, all my life the odds and ends that took my fancy. The buffalo robe with moth-eaten scalloped red-flounced edges, my aunt’s doll with the limp neck, buttons, china, towels stolen from hotels, stones, pieces of wood, beach toys, old hats, some of my relations cast-off clothes, liquor labels, tin-foil, bottles of medicine to smell, bottles of colored water – things which please by their

A Window into Europe    ­53 neatness, such as small lined blank books, blocks of solder – Everything and Anything: If one had such a place to throw things into, like a sort of extra brain, and a chair in the middle of it to go and sit on once in a while, it might be a great help – particularly as it all decayed and fell together and took on a general odor.83

The rooms she evokes – ‘junk-room, store-room or attic’ – are all ancillary but organic, ‘like a sort of extra brain’, and suggest the way Bishop is imagining a house which contains other secret spaces where the past is uncannily preserved. In discussing the atmosphere of the ‘surrreal house’, Brian Dillon makes a case for the transformative effects of dust as both residue of the past and magical covering. He also quotes Georges Bataille’s paean to dust in his journal that strangely resonates with Bishop’s own reverie about the artistic value of decomposition: Dismal sheets of dust constantly invade earthly habitations and uniformly defile them: as if it were a matter of making ready attics and old rooms for the imminent occupation of the obsessions, phantoms, spectres that the decayed odour of old dust nourishes and intoxicates.84

The house which Bishop imagines as a container of objects is also a house for dreaming, a place where the activities of amalgamation and metamorphosis, the transformations associated with art, can happen without the conscious volition of the artist. The fact that Bishop also mentions an ‘odour’ as part of her childhood memory in ‘In the Village’ suggests the importance of smell to her as an aspect of memory and, in particular, its capacity to infuse and to meld. ‘Each [of the sachets] is a different faint color; if you take them apart, each has a different faint scent. But tied together the way they came, they make one confused, powdery one’ (CEPr, 72). The past can be remembered as a series of particular ‘things’ but it is something else as well – an aura or atmosphere which creates a sense of intimacy or osmosis between things, and between the objects and the writer’s self. Bishop, as we have seen in the previous chapter, pondered how to connect the objects she felt were significant to her (p. 24) and her imaginary list of her life’s objects above, the casual flotsam of her encounters, which is very different to the actual curios and unusual gifts that Moore assembled and described in terms of their intricate, mechanical actions (p. 21). Bishop’s imaginary objects are instead the familiar turned strange and comprise both mementos and commodities. Far from a connoisseur, she is a compulsive hoarder – ‘everything and anything’ – surrounding herself in fantasy with the ‘remains’ of a history which is also merged with the process of time whose unsettling action is a source of fascination. If death is close

­54    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection here and, indeed, in many of these early poems – ‘the funeral engraved nightmares’ – the passivity of Bishop enthroned in the midst of this allembracing repository of her life is allied with wonder and creativity. In her 1938 poem, ‘The Monument’ (CEP, 25–7), Bishop went on to explore more fully the relation of the ‘artist-prince’, again conceived of as receptive rather than actively powerful, to a work that is imagined as a rough-and-ready wooden construction, as much part of nature as able to transcend it. As others have pointed out the origins of this poem seem related to an entry in her notebook where Bishop sketches a series of boxes that are almost beginning to topple over. Above them she wrote, ‘Take a frottage of this sea’ and added underneath the following five lines: this is the beginning of a painting a piece of statuary, or a poem, or the beginning of a monument. Suddenly it will become something. Suddenly it will become everything .85

The fact that the poem was written under the general influence of Ernst’s example was openly acknowledged by Bishop to Anne Stevenson in 1963 when she also added, ‘I am passionately (I think I might say) fond of painting; in fact I’d much rather talk about painting than poetry, as a rule’ (CEPr, 393). As Jonathan Ellis notes, there is an ambiguity about whether this poem is about a painting, possibly, as Bonnie Costello suggests, a particular print by Ernst from Histoire Naturelle,86 or about the monument’s relation to a real sea. ‘Is this’, he asks, ‘a surreal poem depicting an everyday scene or an ekphrasis poem desperately trying to understand an impenetrable painting.’87 The inability to answer the question of whether this view (the poem) is simply another view of a scene that is available only to the imagination (a frottage or painting) is played out within the poem through the use of two disputing voices. One argument – often used against modern art and not only in Bishop’s day – is that there is simply nothing there to see. Introduced to ‘the monument’, one of the voices complains: “It’s piled-up boxes, outlined with shoddy fret-work, half-fallen off, cracked and unpainted. It looks old.”

The other voice, the voice of advocacy, is modest. The monument is a composition that wishes to ‘cherish something’. It ‘holds together’ better than ‘sea or sand or cloud’ but is still itself a part of nature and subject to a ruinous action of decomposition:

A Window into Europe    ­55 The crudest scroll-work says “commemorate,” while once each day the light goes around it like a prowling animal, or the rain falls on it, or the wind blows into it.

Bishop’s choice of the word ‘monument’ for this debate about the meaning of art is itself interesting since it was a contested term in the thirties with Georges Bataille, for instance, linking monuments to power and Salvador Dalí arguing for an architecture less founded on geometric rationality than the shifting forms of nature.88 Bishop ends the poem by questioning what a monument in fact commemorates and proposes that it may be dependent less on an internalised core of meaning and its relationship to the artist as originator – who may after all be absent (or dead) – than on the reader/spectator’s capacity to interact with it. That this poem, like many others, emerges in sketches in her notebook – line drawings as well as the rudimentary drafting of lines of text – helps to illustrate the argument of the poem. Drawing and writing merge for Bishop in what the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott referred to as ‘desultory formless functioning’ or experimental play within a ‘neutral zone’ or ‘transitional space’ between subjectivity and external observation. It is only when reflected back, according to Winnicott, that this doodling or drafting can be integrated into a sense of the whole – the person or the work.89 ‘Watch it closely’ Bishop writes at the end of her poem. Whilst this comes across as an instruction for the reader, there is also a way in which she is educating the writer too about the process of creativity and the need to bring a reflective scrutiny to bear on a work. The dialogue between the provisional and the monumental could be seen as underpinning all creativity. Part of Bishop’s development as a writer depended on the ways she found to keep that dialogue open – to bring the kind of ‘non-intentional and random agency’90 we might associate more with her notebooks into her work, without sacrificing her sense of form: The monument’s an object, yet those decorations, carelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all, give it away as having life, and wishing; wanting to be a monument, to cherish something.

A keen keeper or hoarder of unfinished drafts herself, as we shall later explore in more detail, Bishop seems to have enjoyed the open sense of experiment that preceded the published poem, encouraging Robert Lowell in 1963 to send her his work with corrections and marginalia included:

­56    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection No – I like these “messy copies” – much better than final ones – a correction makes it breathe, after all – or turn over, or blink. Or I see your Muse, a rather large rough type, giving you a whack across the ear. (WIA, 483)

Underneath the monumentality of the poem there is a materiality, the residues and traces of how the text was produced, and through that a link to the body of the author who breathes life into the text. As Lorrie Goldensohn accurately observes, all Bishop’s early poetry is ‘pegged on questions of space and position’.91 We have seen how Bishop, in describing the interior spaces she inhabited in Europe, could use her sense of the old and the faded or decaying as part of an uncanny atmosphere or as a way of evoking otherness. However, she also played with perspective and positioning, as Goldensohn notes, often detailing intricate shapes and patterns that undermine perspective or disturb representation. This is true of ‘The Monument’ where ‘the angles alternate’ and the whole is placed in such a way that ‘there is no “far away,”/ and we are far away within the view’. In ‘Paris 7 A.M.’ the relationship between squares, stars and circles is a kind of geometric conundrum that questions the boundary between inside and outside:       It is like introspection to stare inside, or retrospection, a star inside a rectangle, a recollection: this hollow square could easily have been there. (CEP, 28)

In both ‘Sleeping on the Ceiling’ and ‘Sleeping Standing Up’ the altered reality of sleep is also related to the changed disposition of the body lying down and its different angle of perception: As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away     through ninety dark degrees;        the bureau lies on the wall and thoughts that were recumbent in the day        rise as the others fall, stand up and make a forest of thick-set trees. (CEP, 31)

The forest both introduces the fairy-tale motif to come and may allude to Baudelaire’s uncanny forest of symbols in his most famous poem, ‘Correspondances’.92 Several critics, having observed Bishop’s interest in spatial orientation, have gone on to make a connection with her sexual orientation, seeing the word ‘inversion’, which she uses in her poem ‘Insomnia’ (CEP, 68) and which calls up the term for homosexuality still in usage in Bishop’s

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day, as key to other reversals in her poetry. According to Crystal Bacon: The term ‘inverted’ has deep connotations for lesbian sexuality dating back to Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex and Julien Chevalier’s Inversion Sexuelle. It is not unlikely that . . . Bishop would have known the term inversion as code for lesbian sexuality.93

For Susan McCabe, Bishop’s use of the image of a well in ‘Insomnia’ contains a specific reference to Radcliffe Hall’s famously lugubrious novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), which drew on Havelock Ellis’s ideas about sexual inversion. McCabe goes on to comment on how the poem also transforms the well into an imaginative space, a looking glass, where ‘language does not function or becomes illegible and unnecessary’:94 So wrap up care in a cobweb and drop it down the well into that world inverted where left is always right, where the shadows are really the body, where we stay awake all night, where the heavens are shallow as the sea is now deep, and you love me. (CEP, 68)

Given readings such as these that see Bishop encoding her intimate life in her poetry, making it available to be deciphered or translated by the informed reader, it is a useful corrective to look briefly at Bishop’s own dream of a ‘complete code system’ that she recorded in her notebook at around this same time. There she describes how she dreamt of a system that: was based on the keyboard of the typewriter: in order to send or receive a message in the code, one had to know the typewriter keyboard by heart, and have a small rectangle of isinglass molded in squares to support each key. One rectangle represented one word; a line was drawn from letter to letter of the word and a little cross-line in which a diff. colon was placed at each letter used.95

The entry is accompanied by little drawings of lines and their interconnections as she tried to visualise the system. She goes on to attribute the dream to reading the description of a ‘teletypeprinter’ [sic] on the back of the telephone directory before going to bed, a confession which seems the very opposite of erotic. That Bishop’s poems draw on her sexual experiences and her complex feelings about the socially illicit nature

­58    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection of her relationships goes without saying. It is also true that these early poems seem to track something inherently unstable and changing about bodily encounters, though this does not necessarily restrict them to, or identify them as, lesbian ones. What seems significant about Bishop’s dream code is that it is both hermetic and self-referential and that it relies, not on what words and letters refer to, but on an abstract arrangement of correspondences built on the visual aspects of letters, lines and punctuation. Bishop’s notebooks, as Alice Quinn noted, demonstrate that she often worked by making lists of words, both rhymes and word associations, as she worked out the patterning and placing of words for her poems.96 Her reference to isinglass in the notebook entry above, though it is described as providing a supportive base for the letters, may also have had associations for her with transparency and with seeing, as a comparison between isinglass and the fish’s eyes in ‘The Fish’ suggests, as well as a later reference to this substance in her notebook (1951). There, writing about flying from New York to Boston, she describes in detail the different cloud effects: It reminded me of something – seen somewhere – in a window display, perhaps – a scene in which the water is a sheet of isinglass, and the isinglass accumulated a good deal of dust on its surface – still one can see the objects.97

Seeing and seeing through the eyes of memory (despite, or because of, the scratches and dust) remain consistently powerful themes in Bishop’s writing. This visual/spatial dimension of writing, prominent in her dream, was important to Bishop throughout her career, providing not just subject matter but an intricate trope, often introduced, as we shall explore later, with deceptive casualness. Her inclusion of references to her desk in poems such as ‘The Bight’ (CEP, 59) and ‘12 O’Clock News’(CEP, 194–5) reveals her complicating perspectives by including the external place from which one writes inside the work, thus disrupting the frame and calling into question a single line of vision: the poet sees and is seen at the same time. Bishop’s interest in the baroque sense of space and perspective, confirmed and deepened by her exposure to surrealism, meant that she was constantly exploring the spatial referents that are part of representation. Reversal, perspective, scale and horizon were all part of that, as was her ‘seeing’ of words as a pattern that relied on repetition, correspondence and difference. However, to think about words visually could also disturb and disrupt meaning and we can find Bishop in her notebook playfully relishing this fact: ‘I held what I had written up to a mirror to see what it meant that way. Wonderful!’98 The looking

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glass that Susan McCabe described in the poem ‘Insomnia’, that made language ‘illegible or unnecessary’, is here deliberately and playfully employed by Bishop and helps to illustrate how ‘inversion’, whatever its other connotations for her, could be part of her experimental working out of how space, meaning and perspective are intertwined. Influenced partly by the preoccupations of surrealism, Bishop was aware in the thirties and forties of the fluidity of the border between the human and the machine. This was an interesting theme for a poet who made ample use of the formal techniques of repetition in her work and for whom the ‘mechanics’ of writing were an indisputable imperative. Hal Foster has described how both the ruin and the machine were seen by the surrealists as uncanny, the ruin in terms of its aura or atmosphere and the machine or automaton as an infernal force, confusing the boundary between life and death.99 It is this demonic or compulsive character of the machine we need to look at here. Though, as we have seen, the surrealists exploited automatism as freeing the artist to experience ‘objective hazard’, the chance, unwilled encounter which could give access to the unconscious and to the marvellous, there was also a danger that compulsive repetition, inextricably linked to the death drive, could be regressive, leading only to a single, preordained end. The machine as a significant emblem or figure for the surrealists could have different, paradoxical and, perhaps, unconscious meanings that were not always apparent to them; as the human made alien or other it could be a source of uncanny encounter or recognition, but it could also be experienced as a demonic force, dominating the subject, moulding both body and mind to its repetitive rhythms and drives. In several of her poems, Bishop seems aware of these negative connotations: daybreak also sounds the beginning of the working day in some poems and Bishop incorporates the ‘whistles from a factory’ as part of the ‘ceremony’ of morning in ‘Anaphora’(CEP, 52) and the ‘boom’ of the plant starting up in ‘Love Lies Sleeping’ where, though it mimics nature in its name and its ‘blossoming’ smoke, it also conveys uneasiness and fear: (And all the employees who work in plants where such a sound says “Danger”, or once said “Death,”     turn in their sleep and feel     the short hairs bristling on backs of necks.) The cloud of smoke moves off. (CEP, 19)

In both ‘Paris 7 A.M’ (CEP, 28) and ‘Sleeping Standing Up’ (CEP, 31) militaristic associations insinuate themselves into what is also imagined

­60    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection as children’s play. In the first of these poems the ‘childish snow forts’, miniaturised versions of buildings seen from a distance, take on adult proportions and significance. With an apparent reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s story, ‘The Snow Queen’, Bishop goes on to ask: ‘Where is the ammunition, the piled-up balls/with the star-splintered hearts of ice?’ (CEP, 28). In the second poem, ‘Sleeping Standing Up’, the poem’s journey uses a sinister vehicle: The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do     so many a dangerous thing,       are chugging at its edge all camouflaged, and ready to go through       swiftest streams, or up a ledge     of crumbling shale, while plates and trappings ring. (CEP, 31)

In this poem the trail left by ‘the clever children’ is tracked by the poet, directly evoking the Grimms’ fairy tale, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, but, as in so many of Bishop’s poems, the location of home remains elusive: ‘How stupidly we steered/until the night was past/and never found out where the cottage was’. In both these poems there is an ambiguity: the militaristic machine could be seen as taking over and crushing the childlike fantasy, imposing its own fateful images, or it could be that it is itself the mechanism of repetition, dangerously and insistently steering the subject towards trauma. David Lomas has reminded us that in the 1930s ‘an ominous sense of history repeating itself was almost universally felt’.100 Bishop, as we have seen, had particular reasons to make a connection between childhood trauma and war and to experience the gathering force of this repetition, carrying her back to an inescapable and unbearable past. Like the surrealist artists – Joseph Cornell, for instance, in his Medici Slot Machine, a work she apparently knew101 – Bishop seems to have had a fascination for instances of the mechanical which are also playful, ambivalently related to childhood or chance. In the unpublished poem, ‘The Soldier and the Slot Machine’ (CEP, 287–9), the machine ominously mimics the human, returning a reflection of itself as an organism, destined to work aggressively against the soldier: Its notions are all preconceived.    It tempts one much to tear apart The metal frame, to investigate    The workings of its metal heart, The grindings of its metal brain,    The bite of its decisive teeth.

A Window into Europe    ­61 Oh yes, they decorate the top    But not the awful underneath.

If the machine has the vital aspects of a body, the opposite is also true: the soldier has the irrational compulsion of a machine; we know that the assertion of will power at the beginning of the poem will not be enough to stop him adding to the thousands of times he has played the machine before. In ‘Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box’ (CEP, 285), another unpublished poem probably from the same period in Florida, the vision is darker, and indeed Bishop uses the word darkness and the ominous repeated words beginning with ‘d’ that chime with it – drink, descends – as an insistent ‘down-beat’. In an alternative draft, she tellingly picked out the half rhyme ‘mechanical/alcohol’ which she incorporates more obliquely into this version where drink and love are seen as compulsions, both involving a ‘fall’:102 Poe said that poetry was exact. But pleasures are mechanical and know beforehand what they want and know exactly what they want. & they obtain that single effect that can be calculated like alcohol or like the response to the nickel. (CEP, 285)

Alice Quinn has noted that Bishop was reading Baudelaire’s essay on Edgar Allan Poe at this time, where he characterises Poe as a man of ‘bad luck’, and it is likely that this assessment of him, together with Poe’s alcoholism, made him a significant figure for her.103 However, in this poem she seems to be referring to Poe’s essay, ‘The Poetic Principle’, where he dissociates the ‘truth’ of poetry from an ‘efflorescence of language’ or anything self-consciously ‘poetical’: We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical.104

Bishop, in this poem that she, significantly, never fully resolved and never published, seems to be testing the necessities of poetry, which for her were just as severe and exacting as for Poe, against the (selfdestructive) drive towards pleasure. Each could be seen as bringing its own coercive pressure and sense of inevitability to bear. Indeed, Bishop seems to have experimented with the conjunction ‘and’, making poetic exactness and mechanical pleasure equivalent to each other, before she changed it to ‘but’, making the relation more equivocal.

­62    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection In another poem, ‘Cirque D’Hiver’ (CEP, 32), the mechanical toy is described in a verse form that is itself ‘hobbled’, as Bonnie Costello argues, by ‘monosyllables and identical rhymes’.105 Bishop, by making the repetitions of poetry mimic the circular and circumscribed movement of clockwork, also implicates poetry in the same dilemma. In this poem Bishop suggests a resemblance between the mechanical horse and the work of the Italian surrealist painter, Giorgio de Chirico, and whilst this may be a reference to one of his numerous paintings of horses – ‘Horses’ (1928) for example, or ‘Horses of Tragedy’ (1935) – what may be more significant is that he painted them, and many other of his themes and motifs, repetitively. In the introduction to the catalogue for the 1936 exhibition of de Chirico’s paintings in New York, Albert C. Barnes wrote, ‘De Chirico depicts horses so frequently that unless one identifies their varied compositional purposes, these paintings would be monotonous.’106 Hal Foster argues that de Chirico, in thrall to his own compulsions and obsessions, eventually could take his work no further and it ‘petrified into melancholic repetition’. Foster continues: ‘As petrification became its condition rather than its subject, his art came to intimate, as Freud once said of melancholy, “a pure culture of the death instinct”.’107 In Bishop’s poem, the dancer, bound to the horse by the pole that pierces them both, is twice described in terms of artificial attributes; the horse, on the other hand, has ‘real white hair’. Rather than the dancer who, we are told, has ‘turned her back’, it is the horse at the end who returns the poet’s gaze, in a moment that is a poignant – and uncanny – reminder of a human encounter: The dancer, by this time, has turned her back. He is the more intelligent by far. Facing each other rather desperately – his eye is like a star – we stare and say, “Well we have come this far.” (CEP, 32)

To ‘have come this far’ may be a statement about limits, but it could also – despite the horse’s melancholy – leave open the possibility of future movement. The word ‘Well’ could be read as a challenge to the poet – a challenge about how she wants to proceed in the future. In another poem, ‘Anaphora’, a poem whose title is the rhetorical term for the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of lines, Bishop rehearses many of the obsessional themes that had figured in her poems in this early period: the wakening in the early morning in a room whose details she describes, the feeling of disorientation, the activity outside. This is the poem that Bishop placed at the end of her first collection, North & South, and that is, for David Kalstone, ‘a kind of ars

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poetica for Bishop’s future work’.108 The poem takes the form of two irregular sonnets, each ending with four shorter lines, and the effect is of a dialogue, or even a look, exchanged across the space of the stanza break. Whilst the first stanza describes the process of a fall from the brilliance of that first wondering moment of seeing into ‘memory and mortal/mortal fatigue’, the second traces the fall both socially, ‘through classes’, and physically and ends with the ‘beggar in the park’. However, the poem concludes not with the ‘end’ but with the ‘endlessness’ of ‘assent’, which carries within it the hope of renewal and the ‘ascent’ into another day. The repetition of the day’s cycle brings with it something else, an awareness of time and change, and a way beyond the equivocal stasis at the end of ‘Cirque D’Hiver. In another, unpublished fragment, which shares a similar theme to ‘Anaphora’, and which also describes walls and morning light, Bishop again finds a way of countering the coming of darkness:     Bigger than anything else the large bright clouds moved by rapidly every evening, rapt, on their way to some festivity. How dark it grew, no, but life was not deprived of all that sense of motion in which so much of it consists. (EAP, 61–2)

Movement is inevitable, just as time is, and her ‘assent’ to these and to the reality they represented would allow Bishop to discover a different way of using her own unconscious repetitions and obsessions so that they would not ‘petrify’ her to death.

The Embarrassment of Poetry Bishop made two trips to Europe in the 1930s: one from July 1935 until June 1936, and the second from June 1937 until Christmas the same year. This second trip was far bleaker than the first, with preparations for war now far advanced: ‘every third man is in uniform’, Bishop wrote ominously in her notebook. The trip was also marred by a terrible car accident in France that resulted in her close friend, Margaret Miller, losing her right arm.109 Bishop experimented later in her notebook with a fictional recreation of the event, trying to imagine the trauma of the severed arm: The arm lay outstretched in the soft brown grass at the side of the road and spoke quietly to itself. At first all it could think

­64    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection of was the possibility of being quickly united to its body, without any more time elapsing than was absolutely necessary.    “Oh my poor body! Oh my poor body! I cannot bear to give you up. Quick! Quick!”    Then it fell silent while a series of ideas that had never occurred to it before swept rapidly over it.110

In a piece of serendipity that he would certainly have appreciated, André Breton had also used the example of a severed hand to illustrate the ‘lonely displacement’ of what he called ‘surreality’ in a passage which Max Ernst also quoted in his essay ‘Beyond Painting’: Surreality will be the function of our will to recognize completely our own lonely displacement (and it is easily understood that if one were to displace a hand by severing it from an arm, that hand becomes more wonderful as a hand; – and in speaking of ‘the lonely displacement’ we are not thinking only of the possibility of moving in space).111

There is no denying the power of the experience of separation that Bishop articulates in her notebook passage – especially as it is accompanied by the tiny, scribbled note that Barbara Page describes resonantly as a ‘graphic whisper’ from the margins: ‘This is what it means to be really “alone in the world”.’112 However there is also something uncomfortable about her personification of the arm – just as there is something forced and hyperbolic about Breton’s use of an amputation to speak about displacement – and it is interesting that in this same period we can see Bishop, now living in Key West, trying to work out what it is that she finds ‘embarrassing’ about surrealism. Commenting on a story by the French-American writer Jean de Crèvecoeur, from his Letters From an American Farmer (1782), she poses the question to herself of why an incident involving a wasp on a child’s eyelid should embarrass the reader. She goes on: The whole story of the wasp-nest is fantastic, surrealistic, we’d say now. Is surrealism just a new method of dealing bold-facedly with what is embarrassing? Only for sadism, accounts of atrocities, etc., embarrassing as well as horrifying?113

Her notebooks at this time reveal her experimenting with the dual concepts of ‘tact’ and ‘embarrassment’, possibly for a poem, opposing one against the other, as aspects of a relationship, where embarrassment seems to arise from self-consciousness, ‘suddenly realizing you’re alone with the person you’re loving’. In another intriguing note she writes, ‘the embarrassment of all accidents’.114 She returned to the subject of

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embarrassment some years later when she was living in Washington and experiencing a year, 1949–50, that was, as she recorded in a sad note to herself, ‘just about my worst so far’. Now embarrassment seems linked for her to some experience of inauthenticity which only ‘reality’ can dispel: Embarrassment always comes from some falsity – the situation, manners, or a work of art – (I suffer from it now so terribly) – & that’s why sometimes the strangest little detail of reality – something real coming along like a piece of wood bobbing on the waves – will provide an almost instant relief from it.115

This ‘something real’ – a spontaneous object of interest – which intervenes into boredom or compliance is not unlike the importance she attributed to humour in a relationship. Writing to Anne Stevenson in 1963, having spent more than ten years with her more worldly and humorous companion, Lota Macedo de Soares, Bishop described how freeing it could feel not to be taken seriously, to abandon who you thought you were for an unpredictable encounter in the present: ‘I have a vague theory that one learns most – I have learned most from having someone suddenly make fun of something one has taken seriously up till then.’ Significantly she goes on to talk about how she dislikes both ‘extremely bookish people’ and the kind of literary talk that seeks to establish ‘a proper pecking order’ of writers (CEPr, 412). Later she would also talk about this kind of literary activity as ‘embarrassing’. ‘There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet, really’, she told her interviewer Elizabeth Spires in 1978.116 A certain kind of solemnity and self-importance was always foreign to Bishop and, though she does not relate the point to gender, it is also perhaps implicit that she is describing her alienation from the predominantly masculine literary culture of her day. Returning to the accident in France, we get a picture, during the time of this emergency, of Marianne Moore at her most solicitous, attempting to comfort Bishop in a long, carefully crafted letter which offers the kind of connection with another, calmer life that Bishop desperately needed. Bishop wrote back, perhaps too optimistically, thanking Moore for all her care and thoughtfulness and affirming that, after the shock, ‘things are gradually resuming temporal proportions’ (OA, 62). The modulation of trauma into a narrative mode that could include temporal distance, rather than repetition, is a possibility that Bishop would explore in her later poetry. However, in ‘Quai d’Orléans’ (CEP, 29), the poem Bishop wrote in the weeks following the accident and later dedicated to Margaret Miller, her stance is more ambivalent. Here Bishop first of all seems wary of making too easy a connection between the figurative

­66    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection language of poetry and the real, carefully distinguishing between her metaphoric transformation of the barge’s wake into ‘a giant oak-leaf of gray lights’ and the ‘real leaves’ (my emphasis) which follow in the drift. The gentle wash of the river seems to offer a version of movement which can embrace endings, as the ripples ‘extinguish themselves’, and are seen to contribute to a Nature – almost Romantically conceived – where both sky and water are always ‘softly’ in flux. However, the complex ending attests to something irresolvable as Bishop attempts to hold together contradictory notions about time and the ‘real’ event: We stand as still as stones to watch    the leaves and ripples while light and nervous water hold    their interview. “If what we see could forget us half as easily,”    I want to tell you, “as it does itself – but for life we’ll not be rid    of the leaves’ fossils.”

The traumatic memory experienced by the speaker and her companion, locked in unspeakable grief, is both fossilised, as the leaves are, and enduring. This is set against, or rather held in tandem with, the everforgetful flowing, or passing, of time. By reversing the expected order – ‘if what we see could forget us’, rather than ‘if we could forget what we see’ – Bishop emphasises the unwilled nature of the traumatic event, the way it possesses the subject, rather than coming fully within her compass of knowledge and language. David Kalstone sees this poem as marking ‘one of those moments when Bishop becomes aware of what the involuntary can teach her’.117 Whilst this may be true, Bishop also suggests, more specifically, how the unbidden reality of trauma intervenes into time with a lesson that it is difficult to assimilate. The fact that embarrassment preoccupied Bishop in her notebooks during the 1940s could also be evidence of her working out of a similar unease or ambivalence at this time around ‘the real’ or ‘the involuntary’. In her book, Blush, Elspeth Probyn has suggested the way shame may be related to the experience of displacement, of feeling not only ‘not at home’, but that one is uncomfortably exposed, that there is ‘no place to hide’.118 This accords well with the anxiety Bishop felt whilst at Yaddo in 1949, both about being there and the prospect of moving to Washington to take up her post as consultant at the Library of Congress. To her friend Loren MacIver she wrote, ‘I have never felt so nervous and like a fish out of water – and dizzy all the time’ (OA, 186). Bishop also seems to confirm Probyn’s thesis that it is the body

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that feels out of place, which reacts, even violently, to the experience of dislocation. However Probyn also connects shame to the idea of ‘interest’. Paradoxically one can only feel shame, she argues, when interest is aroused, and the connection that one seeks with the world fails: ‘Shame marks the break in connection. We have to care about something or someone to feel ashamed when that care and connection – our interest – is not reciprocated.’119 Eve Sedgwick has similarly described shame as marking the very turning point between inside and outside; it is, she writes, ‘the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion’.120 Shame involves a connection or linkage to the other that is disavowed because the subject fears the withdrawal of interest or rejection. This ambivalent movement, simultaneously both towards and away, is perhaps most vividly illustrated by Silvan Tomkins, the psychologist both Probyn and Sedgwick draw upon in their writing. For Tomkins shame implicates looking. The person experiencing shame will drop ‘his eyes, his eyelids, his head, and sometimes the whole upper part of his body’ in an attempt to halt either looking at another person or being looked at. However, this look away is also ambivalent in that the other person is never renounced completely: the wish to look and be looked at continues, even as the subject looks away. Tomkins cites as example the child who ‘covers his face in the presence of strangers’ only to peek through his fingers ‘so that he may look without being seen’.121 One of the intriguing words Bishop gave prominence to in her notebook in 1948 while still living, but by now more intermittently, in Florida, was the word ‘interstitial’, first underlining it and then using it to describe how Marianne Moore’s ‘method’ might be applied to ‘interstitial situations’: ‘Oblique realities that give one pause that glance off a larger reality illuminating the light caught in a bezel.’ She returns to this same word to explore the relation between the aural and the visual, as if the notion of a gap or interstice had helped her to articulate a significant aspect of her own creativity: I see a man hammer, over at Toppino’s, (or saw him chopping wood at Lockeport) then hear the sound, see him, then hear him, etc. The eye & the ear compete, trying to draw them together, to a ‘photo finish’ so to speak . . . Interstitial. A feeling that everything is unavoidably interstitial (this word indicated by ditto marks from the line before). Nothing comes out quite right. (Science too).

Underneath she makes two further notes, separated by lines, as if they were added as separate observations, possibly at different times. First she writes ‘& makeshift everything’, and then ‘like speaking into the ear of a statue (writing poetry)’.

­68    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection A further note that Bishop made in these same pages of her notebook about the Spanish cubist painter Juan Gris, whose biography she had just been reading and about which she wrote enthusiastically to Robert Lowell (WIA, 43), allows us to make the connection directly with the discussion of shame and embarrassment above: ‘Things are caught looking the way they look when we aren’t quite looking at them.’122 This oblique or indirect look is very much like the child’s embarrassed look and suggests Bishop’s interest in ways of seeing – the glance sideways or glimpse – which avoids or misses the possibility of a reciprocity that nevertheless beckons. Throughout these important if gnomic entries in her notebook, Bishop defines how incongruity or distance – the gap between things – could paradoxically also open a space for the living encounter. She is also describing, of course, what is not foreclosed or predetermined and her interest in what is involuntary or unpredictable. If poetry could feel like the self-defeating task of speaking into the ear of a statue, then it might be worth trying to call the statue back to life, remembering the moment before when the encounter was still full of risk and uncertainty and contained distance as well as proximity. Baudelaire, a poet whom Bishop was carefully reading and making notes about at this time, and who remained one of the two poets she acknowledged as her favourites to Anne Stevenson – Herbert was the other – may well have been her guide here (CEPr, 415). As Jonathan Ellis notes, there has been very little attempt to explore Baudelaire’s influence on Bishop beyond her obvious mention of him in ‘The Bight’.123 In his essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire described how the artist Monsieur C. G. (Constantin Guys), whom he employs as his ‘semblable’ in his writing, must work with a ‘frenzy’ to transfer his impressions to the canvas before the ‘phantom’ escapes. Like Bishop who evoked a ‘photo finish’ between the eye and the ear, Baudelaire imagines a race involving ‘every means of expression’.124 As Jacques Derrida suggestively writes in his Memoirs of the Blind, using Baudelaire as an example, it is imperative to bring memory into play here since it is only memory which can hope to work beyond ‘the visible present’ and capture what is also intrinsic to the instant, the blinking of the eye or the gap or ‘eclipse’ within seeing. This gap or invisibility that, for Derrida, Baudelaire ‘restores’ to memory, cannot simply exist as part of a mimetic or representational art since it draws on anticipation and memory, a time outside visibility, the before and after of seeing.125 Walter Benjamin situated Baudelaire in relation to Freud and in particular his idea of memory traces as the residues of an incident or experience that has not entered conscious thought or understanding. It was these residues, according to Benjamin – which we might also understand in terms of Derrida’s ‘blind spots’ – that Baudelaire used

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for his poetry: ‘He imagined blank spaces which he filled in with his poems.’126 Thinking about Wallace Stevens, Bishop noted her feelings of boredom with a poetry that was too self-conscious. ‘Poetry’, she wrote, in her own articulation of this blankness or invisibility, ‘should have more of the unconscious spots left in’.127 Baudelaire drew upon various different analogous figures in his attempt to describe Guys, his artist of ‘modernity’. One comparison he used was with the ‘flâneur’, whom he described as setting up home in ‘the multitude’ and ‘in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite’. It was for Baudelaire the special talent of the flâneur ‘to be away from home’ and yet be able to feel himself ‘everywhere at home’. Though she could never be described as a flâneur and never evinced any fascination with crowds, Bishop clearly draws upon her own experience of deracination in her writing employing, in Barbara Page’s resonant phrase, the ‘fugitive glance of the vagrant traveller’.128 However, even more apposite to Bishop and more poignant is Baudelaire’s comparison of his artist with both the convalescent and the child. Seeing the rapturous return from illness as a renewing of the experience of curiosity and vividness known to a child, Baudelaire goes on to describe the special ‘genius’ of the child’s perception: The child sees everything in a state of newness; the child is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which the child absorbs form and colour.129

Bishop would become increasingly interested, as we shall see, in trying to recover a child’s way of seeing but even here, whilst in Key West, there are stray notes in her notebook which reveal her trying out ideas about how a child’s imagination works; how the child sees things differently because she ‘can’t “place” them the way an adult would’.130 As she works her way through Baudelaire’s poetry, writing comments in her notebook, Bishop seems to be particularly alert to ideas about time, noting ‘snow is often time’ and recording the story that Baudelaire was meant to have ‘removed the hands from his clock and written on the face “It is later than you think!”’. She also copied the line ‘Cieux déchirés comme des grèves’ (skies torn like seashores) from ‘Horreur Sympathique’ and a whole stanza from ‘L’Irrémédiable’ and the following lines from ‘La Beauté’: ‘Je hais le movement qui déplace les lignes,/Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris’ (I hate movement which disturbs lines, and never do I weep and never do I laugh). She also notes about this particular poem that it uses the image of a swan that is ‘the “totem” of the Symbolists’.131 If Bishop honed in on particular lines and images that were significant to her, she was also aware that Baudelaire was

­70    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection drawing on a system of ‘correspondences’, a belief in the ‘symbolic’ or inner relation between things which the almost mystical power of the imagination could reveal. Though Bishop in terms of her published work posed her disagreement with Baudelaire in these same terms, it is likely that she was also aware, like Eliot, that what he ‘reached out to’, was ultimately opaque: a movement towards an essence which remained unrevealed.132 As Mark Ford says of Bishop, ‘there is no ultimate metaphysical centre from which life’s patterns become clear’ and, reading back from this interpretation of Bishop to Baudelaire, it may also have been apparent to Bishop that Baudelaire’s correspondences could be read not as a means of discovering inner meaning but as themselves a kind of symbol for the way poetry works through tropes and analogies, for poetry’s inextricable involvement in pattern-making.133

The Painted Surface Turning to the early poem ‘The Man-Moth’ (CEP, 16–17), a poem that Bishop began when she was first living in New York after Vassar in 1934 and which was published two years later, we can see how Bishop pictured the city as a theatre of alienation in a way that recalls her own travels on the subway, with its intimations of ‘contemporaneity’, as well as Baudelaire’s unending melancholy in the face of the city’s ‘junk’.134 A newspaper misprint gave Bishop the suggestive name for her split creature and with it a way of evoking the penumbra of aspiration and futility that flits and flutters around humanity. This use of chance or accident suggests Bishop’s openness to the methods of the surrealists and to the way different kinds of text – poetry and newspapers – can intersect: ‘An oracle spoke from the page of the New York Times, kindly explaining New York City to me, at least for a moment.’135 For several critics, the poem’s tone and characterisation are also redolent of popular culture, the slapstick of early silent films popularised by Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, and we have seen in the previous chapter how the spasmodic movements of these clownish characters could be illustrative of a modernist sense of physical disunity and loss of trajectory for the subject.136 Bishop’s man-moth, unable to change direction or learn from his mistakes and also, seemingly, immune to injury, similarly ‘fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt’ each time he tries comically to push his head through the ‘round clean opening’ that he thinks the moon represents in the sky. Mark Ford has seen the presence of Laforgue in this poem and describes the man-moth as a ‘highly Laforguian creation’ thus giving

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him a lineage which links him to T. S. Eliot’s equally maladroit character, Prufrock.137 We know that Bishop knew Laforgue’s work well, latterly at least, from the review she wrote of a translation of his work in 1956. Of particular interest in this review is the way, writing about his prose, she sees him ironically see-sawing between, at one end, the solar system – ‘burning, whirling, immense’ – and, at the other, ‘our tiny planet, laden with his clowns, casinos and pianos’ (CEPr, 269). Bishop also sways between different senses of perspective in this poem: the ‘vast properties’ of the moon, whose effects cannot be calibrated, and the diminutive shadow that Man casts on the ground, ‘like a circle for a doll to stand on’. She also employs disjunctive, almost proselike, effects in her many enjambed lines and free verse stanzas where, though the pattern repeats, there is little sense of either familiarity or unity. At the end of the poem, in the last stanza, the poet addresses the reader as ‘you’ in a conditional future, an imaginative space, where the man-moth is both ‘caught’ yet frustratingly elusive:        If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink. (CEP, 17)

Looking into his eye is like looking into a blackness or blankness where the man-moth deliberately withdraws from the possibility of a reciprocal gaze, in a gesture of embarrassment or self-protection which refuses the expectation aroused by looking. The replacement of the look by a tear is suggestive in terms of our previous discussion where, drawing on Derrida, we saw how tears, uniquely human, are linked to memory; they reveal what is usually hidden, a reserve or, in Derrida’s phrase, ‘a source-point and a watering hole’, from which they well up.138 The man-moth, who ‘travels backwards’ and dreams ‘recurrent dreams’ seems to be possessed by a past which haunts him and which he cannot recover unless through his tear. It is worth making a comparison with Baudelaire here. In his poem ‘Tristesses de la lune’ from Fleurs du Mal, one of the poems Bishop included in her later reading list of Baudelaire’s poems, the moon, compared with a ‘beautiful woman’, is described as shedding a ‘furtive tear’ that the poet catches and hides in his heart:

­72    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Quand parfois sur ce globe, en sa langueur oisive, Elle laisse filer une larme furtive, Un poète pieux, ennemi du sommeil, Dans le creux de sa main prend cette larme pâle, Aux reflets irisés, comme un fragment d’opale, Et la met dans son coeur loin des yeux du soleil. (And when she happens, in her somnolence, to shed a secret tear that falls to earth, some eager poet, sleep’s sworn enemy cups his hand and catches that pale tear which shimmers like a shard of opal there, and hides it from the sun’s eye in his heart.)139

The poet’s action of turning inwards to protect his melancholy burden against the ‘eyes of the sun’ may also be a defensive reaction against the attraction and allure of the seductive woman whom the allegorical framework of this sonnet cannot quite keep at bay. In Bishop’s poem, however, the point of focus has unavoidably shifted to the encounter itself, tense and awkward rather than erotic, as the real of the narrator and reader is imagined as confronting the mythical man-moth. It is significant that whilst Baudelaire’s poet must avoid the eyes in order to protect the inwardness of his own symbolism, Bishop’s man-moth is caught in the glare of being seen, not knowing which way to turn to save himself – whether inwards or towards, wriggling like a shamed or embarrassed person between both. The poem is also undecided about the poet’s role, whether he is a martyr, a magician or someone with the gift of tapping into a symbolic spring. Bishop opens up what is implicit in Baudelaire’s poem, asking, in effect, what happens if a poem cannot remain in a single register, cannot quite sustain itself as mythic or symbolic. The poem also does not seem to know what power to ascribe to the poet and what his role is – made even more problematic, of course, if her gender difference is no longer to be subsumed into the masculine. In her poem ‘The Fish’ (CEP, 43–4), written some three years later in 1939, and which became, to her irritation, her most regularly anthologised poem, it may seem as if Bishop is describing a very different kind of encounter, one which is based squarely in reality. However, as a necessary qualification of this view, we must note that the origins of the poem were probably a dream from two years before when a fish, having taken on human characteristics as in a fable, becomes her guide, leading her through its own watery element away from their original meeting place on the margins between land and sea: ‘He led the way through the water, glancing around at me every now and then with his big eyes to see if I

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was following. I was swimming easily with scarcely any motion.’140 Part of the reason Bishop adopted Key West as her home in the late thirties and through the forties was the access it gave her to the natural world, to a sense of delight in creatures and landscape, and to a way of life that was more informal and perhaps less censorious and secretive than any she could hope to have in New York. However, this is also the period when her notebooks become most intensely preoccupied with the more conceptual aspects of writing, when she seems to be absorbing aspects of surrealism she had encountered in Europe, reading Baudelaire closely, thinking about painting, including cubism and collage, and exploring the ways in which visibility is plural, subject to multiple points of view and encounters, challenging the limits of representation. In 1939, Bishop published an essay about a painter, Gregorio Valdes, whom she met in Key West, and who became her touchstone for a particular quality of ‘flatness’ she found there (CEPr, 26–31). Unlike Baudelaire’s conscription of Constantin Guys as his exemplary artist – who remains a shadowy, almost anonymous figure – Bishop sees Valdes as a character who is as much a part of her essay as his paintings. Indeed, Bishop’s descriptions of both him and his house tend to blur the distinctions between reality and art, with Valdes himself looking like ‘the self portrait of El Greco’ and his Cuban house with its ‘bareness’ and the ‘apparent remoteness of every object in it from every other object’, giving the same impression as his best pictures, which Bishop describes as having ‘a peculiar and captivating freshness, flatness, and remoteness’. For Bishop, Valdes’ ‘primitive’ approach to perspective was consistent with his non-hierarchical approach to his art, valuing all his paintings the same, and with a ‘gift’ which was simply ‘mysteriously’ there, ‘of a piece’ with the rest of his life and character (CEPr, 27–31). The flatness, so to speak, is everywhere throughout his life. Bishop also gave a particular meaning to this flatness when in 1940 she visited her friends, Charlotte and Red Russell, in North Carolina. The contrast between the two landscapes – the mountainous landscape of North Carolina and the liminal coastlines of Key West – became the opportunity to draw out their psychological and emotional meaning for her: I am not much of a Thoreau – all this leafiness is very depressing particularly in foggy weather. I’ve never lived up in the mts [sic] before. They’re all around us, big blue shapes, coming & going through the mist – like recurring thoughts – rather depressing. I miss all the bright detailed flatness of K. W. – both the natural & the artificial scenery – all this Nature feels like a big wet sofa-pillow ugly face. I hate masses of things you can’t see the shape of, no formality anywhere.

­74    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Flatness seems to have implied boundaries – remoteness – for Bishop, the necessary distance that also allowed her to see, and a quality of ‘brightness’ that dispersed shadows. She then continued to write in her notebook this thoughtful exploration of the psychological import of looking: Every time I look at the mountains I think of the expression “at the back of my mind”. This sensation they give is so strong that I feel a physical compulsion to turn my back and then with them there, to go on looking at the ferns, roots etc.141

This passage demonstrates how Bishop’s fascination with detail could be construed as a form of displaced attention, a way of diverting her focus from the looming persistence of her traumatic past. The influence of one of her favourite poets, Hopkins, seems to hover here, providing the resonant metaphor in his ‘terrible sonnets’ for these mountains of the mind.142 By concentrating on the foreground, Bishop attempts to screen what she cannot bear to look at, defending herself against the amorphousness and immensity of what haunts her, the spectral presence ‘at the back of her mind’. Whilst the personal, psychological aspect of this entry in her notebook is revealing in itself, it is also interesting to make a link with how the surrealists turned away, as we have seen, from the implications of their use of unconscious material towards encounters with the ‘marvellous’ in the external world. Natural history could also be used to provide modernist ‘objects’– as in the case of Marianne Moore and in Bishop’s dialogue with her – significant because of their intricate structure and placing, as much as their origin within nature. Bishop’s idea of ‘flatness’ too, though derived in part from her experience of the particular location of Key West, blends with aesthetic concerns, the quality she found in Valdes’ paintings and the ‘formality’ she misses in the more abundant, mountainous scenery of North Carolina. Significantly ‘flatness’ was used as an important concept in early twentieth-century debates about painting with Juan Gris, for instance in a lecture published in the Cahier d’Art, in 1933, comparing the ‘architectural’ forms of nature with manmade ones and describing painting as ‘flat, coloured architecture’.143 Gris’s biographer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, in a book already referred to and about which Bishop wrote enthusiastically to Robert Lowell in 1948, glosses this decisive moment in Gris’s career: ‘Gris tended . . . to reduce more and more the “monumental space” of his pictures and began to collect all his forms on the flat surface.’144 This coincided with Gris’s development of the technique (papier collé) of including printed matter as part of the ‘real’ surface of his paintings. For Gris and his

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contemporaries, both Braque and Picasso, the technique was intended to encourage the viewer to look not merely beyond or through the surface as if it were transparent but to look at it as well. Bishop copied the following passage from Alfred H. Barr’s, Picasso: Forty Years of his Art (1946) which emphasises the same important discovery: ‘The sensuous tactile reality of the surface itself in contrast to painting in the past through more or less realistic methods took the eye and the mind past the surface of the canvas to represented objects such as figures or landscapes.’145 This passage was significant enough, according to Peggy Samuels, for Bishop to transcribe it several times.146 If Bishop has been praised on numerous occasions for her observation and description, particularly of the natural world, it is clear that this aspect of her writing also required, at least in part, some thoughtful glances at some of the key ideas in contemporary European art. Returning to ‘The Fish’, we can see how Bishop ‘catches,’ and then ‘holds’, her ‘tremendous’ fish for the duration of the poem between the  two worlds of air and water, but also, as her imagery develops, between the framing devices of the marvellous and the ancient or ruined. Like the poems that explore the interior spaces of rooms, and which derive from her experiences in Europe, the fish also seems to have attached to it the relics and traces of other lives:        Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. (CEP, 43)

In an image of remarkable condensation, nature and history are brought together here with the ‘full-blown roses’ suggesting seasonality and transience and the descriptive phrase, ‘stained and lost through age’, calling up a more extended historical time and the traces its passage leaves on the present. Throughout Bishop’s evocation of the fish, the physicality of the body – the weight and stress of it against the line and its suffering as well as ability to cause pain with its ‘frightening’, sharp gills – seems to offer a resistance to her different attempts to imagine it through metaphor, simile and personification. Indeed, Bishop makes three different attempts to get a more intimate, interior view. One is through her use of the simile of an interior, making the fish seem ‘homely’. The second is through imagining the ‘insides’ of the fish, as if she were gutting it: ‘I

­76    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection thought of the coarse white flesh/packed in like feathers . . . the dramatic reds and blacks/of his shiny entrails.’ The third is through a meeting of the gaze: I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. – It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light.

This unembarrassed looking is possible only because the stare is not returned. As a consequence the fish’s eyes can be seen as if they were ‘an object’, a reflective surface or lens, without affect. Whilst all three approaches to an interior help to build a picture of the fish, it is through the perception of a history of previous encounters, visible through the hooks and lines still attached to it, that the speaker feels real empathy and is able to imagine the fish as an old warrior, imputing to it the human characteristics of endurance and wisdom. As if in response to this larger ‘historical’ picture, where the speaker’s line is preceded by previous broken lines, the focus shifts, panning back as in a film and framing a wider view that includes the speaker too: I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels – until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go. (CEP, 44)

The ‘little rented boat’ with its ‘rusted engine’ is not unlike the ‘perishable clapboards’ of ‘Jerónimo’s House’, a temporary and precarious human habitation. Letting the fish go therefore seems like a consequence of the speaker recognising her own ‘little’ place within the universal scheme of things. This recognition also enables her to position herself

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in relation to what has gone before, as in language, cutting a primordial connection with nature and replacing it with a symbolic one. Many critics have addressed the moral dimension of the end of the poem, and have seen the speaker’s decision as both a recognition of difference and a relinquishing of her own will to mastery. According to Thomas Travisano, ‘for Bishop, observation is a moral act’.147 However the ‘victory’ that spreads through the boat, transforming ‘bilge’ and rust into a triumphant, epiphanic rainbow, also seems to spring from the joy at the very borders of separation, the sublimation of loss into what Julia Kristeva has seen as a seemingly boundless ‘rapture’ and ‘dazzlement’.148 The flooding of the space with ‘rainbow’ colours, therefore, is an aspect of a victory that no longer requires an object; the victory is in the ability to substitute words; to write a poem. ‘Faustina, or Rock Roses’ (CEP, 70–2), which Bishop began in 1942 but failed to finish in time to be included in North & South, seems to share some of the same insights and imagery as ‘The Fish’ and could be read as a bleak companion piece. In this encounter the ‘bleached flags’ that drape around or decorate the room, though they are shades of white, fail to add brightness and are described as ‘undazzling’, merging into each other, without differentiation: Clutter of trophies, chamber of bleached flags! – Rags or ragged garments hung on chairs and hooks each contributing its shade of white, confusing    as undazzling. (CEP, 71)

It is clear that life is leaching away from the elderly white woman in her ‘crazy bed’; however, the reality of the situation cannot be addressed and it is this falseness, this lack of real connection, which causes embarrassment: ‘The visitor is embarrassed/not by pain nor age/nor even nakedness,/though perhaps by its reverse.’ Bishop is again interested in what is exchanged or fails to be exchanged through the gaze. As the black servant, Faustina, bends over her dying mistress, it is impossible to read her and instead questions ‘proliferate’ in the mind of the observer: Her sinister kind face presents a cruel black coincident conundrum.    Oh, is it freedom at last, a lifelong dream of time and silence,

­78    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection dream of protection and rest? Or is it the very worst, the unimaginable nightmare that never before dared last     more than a second? (CEP, 71–2)

In many of her poems based on the people she met in both Florida and Brazil, Bishop was interested in the instability of power relations, both racial and social. Here the relationship is undermined, of course, by Faustina’s relative vigour and her mistress’s deathbed dependency on her. However, what seems to have intrigued Bishop most about the person she drew on for Faustina was her storytelling: ‘It is hard to choose among the various versions she gives of her life’, she wrote to Robert Lowell (WIA, 18). In the poem, this uncertainty is drawn across into the complexities of seeing. Faustina both looks enigmatic and looks enigmatically; the ‘conundrum’ of her face presents the contradictory possibilities of kindness and cruelty: ‘There is no way of telling./The eyes say only either.’ As Bonnie Costello notes, there is another ambiguity here as well, since the poem refuses to make clear who is being looked at: ‘When the beholder looks at eyes for an answer to her questions, she does not designate whose, as though the two women in the house had become one.’149 Indeed the poem evokes an uncanny doubling both in relation to the two women and the crossing of the gaze that seems to be both benign and frightening or cruel at the same time and tells us something about how risky it is to look, or be looked at, full-face. The visitor, always slightly aslant and outside this gaze, leaves behind at this scene of ruin and dilapidation a bunch of ‘rust-perforated’ roses, which, unlike the ‘rusted engine’ in ‘The Fish’, do not have transfiguring oil poured on them. Instead they scatter their petals as a reminder of transience and decay and take us back to the ‘vaguely roselike/flower-formations’ above the bed and the central question of death, which has no answer and which spreads its discomforting silences through the poem. In many ways this poem, with its truncated dimeter, or two stress lines, ending each stanza, seems to be holding itself back from reaching a conclusion, moving sideways, ‘helplessly proliferative’, away from the inevitability of death. According to Anne Stevenson, this poem ‘behaves like a painting’.150 Peggy Samuels has examined in detail how that might be so, drawing attention to the way the poem appears ‘as a collage of variously textured whites’ and how ‘inside the invalid’s room, the various surfaces are layered across or next to one another’.151 This surface flatness, or extension and placement of visual imagery across an imagined space, is nevertheless complicated by Bishop’s awareness of other dimensions in

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her poems – the surrendering of the fish to its own invisible depths (and the original dream?) the ‘unimaginable nightmare’ that operates like a dark hole at the centre of ‘Faustina’, both suggesting another reality which is, in André Breton’s terms, ‘out of sight’, beyond the frame of visibility (see p. 49). Another Florida poem, ‘The Bight’ (CEP, 59), also published in the later volume, A Cold Spring, already seemed to be in her mind when Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell in 1948: The water looks like blue gas – the harbor is always a mess, here, junky little boats all piled up, some hung with sponges and always a few half sunk or splintered up from the most recent hurricane. It reminds me a little of my desk. (WIA, 23)

What is particularly interesting about this passage is that it reveals that the comparison between the bight and her desk was part of the original inspiration for the poem and, together with the cryptic epigraph ‘On my birthday’, seems to have formed a node of meaning that never quite becomes its subject. Indeed, this is a poem that is partly about deflection, about maintaining a surface, with the ‘sheer water’ resisting its own watery nature, its depths: ‘Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,/the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything’ (CEP, 59). There is an implied violence everywhere in the poem that nevertheless never seems to quite break through its protective front of amused acceptance: The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard, it seems to me, like pickaxes, rarely coming up with anything to show for it, and going off with humorous elbowings.

According to Joanne Feit Diehl, the poem plays out both the aggressive impulses that may be an inherent part of creativity, and their necessary containment within the poetic process. For Diehl, the puns – for instance, in the title – the domestication of chaos as ‘untidy activity’, the defusing of incendiary possibilities are all examples of ‘rhetorical strategies that, if they do not exactly neutralise, nevertheless defuse or mask the presence of aggression’.152 To go a little further with this we might invoke Baudelaire, himself an important presence in the poem, who portrayed his friend Constantin Guys as ‘bent over his table’, stabbing away ‘with his pencil, his pen, his brush’: ‘He is combative, even when alone, and parries his own blows.’153 In Bishop’s poem Baudelaire’s facility for transforming one thing into another, ‘commingling’ the senses, seems to know no bounds. However, the poem also takes up his music with its

­80    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection ‘dry perfectly off-beat claves’, though substituting a breezy disharmony for his ‘deep, dark unity’.154 Bishop’s own correspondences seem to be ‘old’, stray and useless like litter; in this scene of waste it is unclear whether the dredge in its work of excavation can open up a channel of communication or whether ruin is simply replacing ruin. The letters, as simile, are drawn into the scene and withhold meaning just as a reply or connection is withheld and the letters themselves remain ‘unanswered’; the pun on ‘correspondences’ relies on language to effect a link which is more accidental than meaningful. The poem leaves us in medias res; nothing is concluded and neither comedy nor tragedy is allowed full expression in their uneasy and incongruous binding together: ‘awful but cheerful’. Bishop also wrote ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’ (CEP, 57–8) in this same period, 1946–8, and it is one of the last poems she completed before she left Florida permanently. In it she looks back over her period of travel during the thirties and forties, deriving much of the poem’s descriptive detail from her notebooks, including her visit to Newfoundland in 1932, her visit to England and Morocco during her first trip to Europe in 1936, and a later expedition to Mexico with Marjorie Stevens in 1942. Like ‘The Bight’ this is a poem that explores connection and disconnection and the way in which surface can yield meaning simply as surface or alternatively can seem to open through fissures or folds and recesses into other secret spaces of deeper significance. The poem begins with an evocation of an old book and its emblematic illustrations that are ‘engraved’, in both senses of the word, produced by a particular artistic process of incision and printing, and attaining a level of both seriousness and permanence that her own travels cannot compare with. However, the contrast between the book and the journeys she will go on to describe is not completely straightforward. For one thing the illustrations, as of The Seven Wonders of the World, can seem ‘a touch familiar’, whilst others, though ‘foreign’, appear diagrammatic, as if the ‘lines’ that produced them are too apparent: The branches of the date-palms look like files. The cobbled courtyard, where the Well is dry, is like a diagram, the brickwork conduits are vast and obvious, the human figure far gone in history or theology, gone with its camel or its faithful horse. Always the silence, the gesture, the specks of birds suspended on invisible threads above the Site, or the smoke rising solemnly, pulled by threads. (CEP, 57)

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The human figure seems occluded by the grand narratives of history or theology into which it has ‘gone’, whilst there is something predictable in the settings that ‘always’ seem to contain the same kinds of puppetry, with the threads or lines that guide them in or out of view. The idea of the eye dropping ‘through the lines’ at the end of this first section also suggests a movement inwards to what lies between or behind the lines, as well as a dissolving of fixed lines into flux or movement. The second section creates a kind of sensual immersion through the details of sound, colour and touch and the sense of moments that ‘glisten’ or ‘shine’ according to the play of light. Lines emerge here too but are in motion as the Collegians march, ‘crisscrossing the great square’, and the diagrammatic cobbles of the first section are replaced by a different flooring or surface, more colourful and more permeable, with ‘beautiful poppies/splitting the mosaics’. The grave also offers an alternative vision to the ‘serious’ engraving of the first section since what has been carved here is open to ‘every wind’ and is ‘yellowed/as scattered cattle-teeth’. Nature’s processes and actions seem to take over turning the body of the ‘poor prophet paynim’ to dust but also profanely altering the character of the ‘holy grave’ into something that looks ‘not . . . particularly holy’. The narrator admits to fear here as what she sees through the keyhole-arched stone baldaquin, behind the veil, turns out to be dust, the final destiny of the physical body this stanza has seemed to celebrate, the hollow space of emptiness and death. Bishop’s famous summation that begins the third section – ‘Everything only connected by “and” and “and” ’ – could be read as a reflection on her own struggles with connection and narrative, signalled in her letter to Marianne Moore in 1940 about the seemingly unrelated ‘things in my head’, but it could also be a more affirmative statement about the importance of parataxis as a syntax that refuses to subordinate one reality to another – sacred and profane, eternal and the quotidian, art and life. This statement also seems to signal her ongoing engagement with the meaning of ‘surfaces’ and how they connect and intersect. If history solidifies and deadens meaning, containing it within a book, her answer is to ‘open the book’, an injunction that seems to link what is inside the book to what lies beyond it, overturning oppositions and suggesting the possibility of a different way of organising knowledge. The ‘gilt’ reminds us that books also have a materiality that ‘pollinates the fingertips’ just as surely as nature. In another crossing between realities, books are also seen as part of an empirical world that is generating the future. The Nativity scene that ends the poem is expressed through a conditional or future perfect – ‘why couldn’t we have seen’- the tense that for Derrida heralds the anomalous or spectral time of both literature and the

­82    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection present, where the ghost of a past calls forth a promise for the future.155 The command or solicitation to ‘open the book . . . open the heavy book’ is spoken from just such a time, in a voice that is unbounded, displaced, both interior and distant. The imagery Bishop uses for this ‘old Nativity’, like that phrase itself, brings together opposed terms within the space of the poem: the solid and the ephemeral in the ‘rocks breaking with light’, and the constancy of a flickering flame which is ‘colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw’. In this time before what it is yet to become through narrative – story, Biblical text – the Nativity is simply ‘a family with pets’. The last line – ‘and looked and looked our infant sight away’ – offers yet another conundrum in relation to time since this is a look that goes on indefinitely through the force of desire, yet, through another temporal axis, passes away just as childhood does. That this poem, one of the most complex and thoughtful Bishop wrote about the limits of representation and the relation between art and life, should end with the child is itself significant. How to get back to that state of wonder and newness Baudelaire had linked with artistic inspiration became an aspect of Bishop’s poetic quest in the next phase of her career and would involve her in thinking about how to return to the past and to her childhood memories not as a form of repetition or reiteration, but with the sense of revelation, of what is yet to come.

Notes 1. Harriet Tompkins Thomas in Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography, ed. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 63. 2. VC 72A.3, p. 32. 3. VC 72A.3, p. 32. 4. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, edited, translated and with an Introduction by Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 163; 164. 5. Marianne Moore, Selected Letters, ed. Bonnie Costello (New York: Penguin, 1997) p. 387 (late August 1937). 6. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 162. 7. VC 72A, p. 32. 8. Morris W. Croll, Essays, ed. J. Max Patrich and Robert O. Evans with John W. Wallace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 208. 9. Ibid. p. 210. 10. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1951; first published 1932), pp. 288; 287. 11. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup (eds), Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 4–6.

A Window into Europe    ­83 12. Millier, Brett C., Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Los Angeles, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 48. 13. Peggy Samuels, Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 20. 14. Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, p. 70. 15. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 75. 16. See MoMA online archives: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/dadaatmoma/ (accessed 28 October 2012). 17. Samuels, Deep Skin, p. 17. 18. See MoMA archives online: http://www.moma.org/docs/press_ archives/1271/releases/MOMA_1946–1948_0146_1948–09–17_48917– 36.pdf?2010 (accessed 28 October 2012). 19. Margaret Miller (ed.), Paul Klee (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941). 20. VC, 72.A3, p. 33. 21. R. H. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1945; first published 1927), p. 30. 22. Ibid. pp. 82; 85; 86. 23. VC 72A.3 p. 13. 24. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1932), p. 10. 25. Ibid. pp. 15; 27. 26. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), p. 47. 27. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, ‘The Work of the Gaze’, in Zamora and Kaup (eds) Baroque New Worlds, p. 149. 28. Ibid. pp. 149–50. 29. Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 4. 30. VC 72 A.3, p. 33. 31. ‘This may be the effect of reading Wölfflin’. VC 72.A.3, p. 33. 32. VC 72A.3, p. 32. 33. VC 72A.3, p. 13. 34. VC 72A.3, p. 13. 35. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: the Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 126. 36. Alice Quinn mentions drafts of a masque in her notes. See EAP, p. 250. 37. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 141. 38. For influence of Herbert on Bishop see Jeffrey Powers-Beck, ‘  “Time to Plant Tears”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Seminary of Tears’, South Atlantic Review, 60 (1995), pp. 69–87. 39. Joseph H. Summers, ‘George Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop’, quoted in Jeffrey Powers-Beck, p. 70. 40. The Poems of George Herbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 129. 41. See Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 121. 42. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 538.

­84    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection 43. ‘ “Writing poetry is an unnatural act . . .” ’ in EAP, p. 212. 44. Bishop identified these qualities in a letter to Joseph Summers, the Herbert scholar, commenting on his translation of the Latin poems. See OA, p. 148. 45. Donne: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 35. 46. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 76. 47. See J. Bernleff, ‘A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop, 1976’ and Alexandra Johnson, ‘A Geography of the Imagination’, both in George Monteiro (ed.), Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), pp. 66; 101. 48. John Durham Peters, ‘Seeing Bifocally: Media, Place, Culture’ in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (eds), Culture Power Place (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 75. 49. Elisa New, The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 169. 50. Thomas Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1988), p. 40. 51. In Monteiro, Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, p. 26. 52. Letter written in 1948, quoted in Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 78. 53. W. H. Auden, The Orators: An English Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), pp. 62–3. 54. See Edward Mendelsohn, ‘The Coherence of Auden’s The Orators’, ELH 35 (1968), pp. 114–33 (p. 116). 55. This is Julia Kristeva’s definition of the ‘deject’: ‘Instead of sounding himself as to his “being,” he does so concerning his place: “Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?”’ See Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 8. 56. VC 72A.3, p. 32 57. VC 74.4A, p.38 58. VC 72A.3, p.34 59. Letter to Hallie Tompkins, quoted in Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 89. 60. See Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 90. 61. Ibid. p. 89 62. ‘Inspiration to Order’ in Max Ernst: Beyond Painting (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1948), p. 23; pp. 24–5. 63. Ernst, ‘Beyond Painting’ in Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, p. 11. 64. Ibid. p. 17; p. 19. 65. ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924) in André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 15. 66. ‘Max Ernst by André Breton (1920)’ in Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, p. 177. 67. Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 14. 68. I am indebted to Hal Foster’s illuminating discussion of the surrealist concepts of the marvellous and objective chance in Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 19–36.

A Window into Europe    ­85 69. See Robert S. Short, ‘The Politics of Surrealism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1 (1966), pp. 3–25. 70. See Ashley Brown, ‘An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop, 1966’, in Monteiro (ed.), Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, p. 22. 71. See Marit J. MacArthur, ‘ “In a Room”: Elizabeth Bishop in Europe, 1935–1937’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50 (2008), pp. 408–42 (p. 423). For a discussion of Bishop’s reactions to Spain see also Jonathan Ellis, Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 122–8. 72. MacArthur, ‘ “In a Room” ’, p. 417. 73. Quoted in Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 95. 74. Letter to Anne Stevenson, quoted in Sandra Barry’s very illuminating essay, ‘ “The War Was On”: Elizabeth Bishop and World War I’, War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 11.1 (1999), pp. 93–110 (p. 93). 75. André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: MacDonald, 1972), p. 2. 76. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 7. 77. André Breton, Communicating Vessels (1932), ed. and trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 86. 78. Richard Mullen, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Surrealist Inheritance’, American Literature, 54 (1982), pp. 63–80 (p. 1). 79. Caws, The Surrealist Look, p. ix. 80. See Rimbaud’s famous poem, ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ in Arthur Rimbaud: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. with introduction and notes by Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), pp. 86–93. 81. Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 68. 82. Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, p. 16. 83. VC 72A.3, p. 36. 84. Brian Dillon, ‘An Approach to the Interior’ in Jane Alison, The Surreal House (New Haven and London: Barbican Art Gallery in Association with Yale University Press, 2010), p. 55. 85. Bonnie Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 220. 86. Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, p. 220. 87. See Ellis, Art and Memory, p. 67. 88. See Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 136–8. 89. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 75. 90. Adam Phillips, ‘Contingency for Beginners’, in On Flirtation (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 20. 91. Lorrie Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 113. 92. See ‘Correspondances’ in Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), new translation by Richard Howard (Boston: David Godine, 1982), p. 193; trans. p. 15.

­86    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection 93. Crystal Bacon, ‘ “That World Inverted”: Encoded Lesbian Identity in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Insomnia” and “Love Lies Sleeping” ’ in Laura Jehn Menides and Angel G. Dorenkamp (eds), “In Worcester Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 146. 94. Susan McCabe, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 121. 95. VC 75.4A, p. 107. 96. Alice Quinn refers in her annotations to Bishop’s ‘lists and lists of end rhymes’ in her notebooks in EAP, p. 273. 97. VC 72.B7, p. 29. 98. VC 77.2, p. 29. 99. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, pp. 126–7. 100. David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 36. 101. ‘I first saw the Medici Slot Machine when I was at college. Oh, I loved it’. Interview with Elizabeth Spires in Monteiro (ed.), Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, p. 120. 102. See Alice Quinn (EAP, p. 272), for relevant passages from Bishop’s notebooks. 103. See EAP, p. 272. The essay by Baudelaire, published in 1852, is ‘Edgar Poe: His Life and Works’. 104. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1850), in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 71–94 (p. 76). 105. Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, p. 50. 106. Albert C. Barnes, ‘Giorgio de Chirico’, introduction to the exhibition catalogue Recent Paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, Julien Levy Gallery, 28 October–17 November 1936, reprinted in Metafisica, 7–8 (2008), pp. 725–7 (p. 726). 107. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 73. 108. David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), p. 96. 109. VC 77.2, p. 29. 110. Quoted in Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, p. 148. 111. Ernst, Beyond Painting, p. 13. 112. ‘Off-Beat Claves, Oblique Realities: The Key West Notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop’ in Marilyn May Lombardi (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender (Charlottesville and London: Virginia University Press, 1993), p. 197. 113. Quoted in Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: the Biography of a Poetry, p. 124 114. VC 75.4A, p. 115. 115. VC 77.4, p. 15. 116. ‘Interview with Elizabeth Spires’ in Monteiro (ed.), Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, p. 129. 117. Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 67. 118. Elspeth Probyn, Blush (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2005), p. 39.

A Window into Europe    ­87 119. Probyn, Blush, p. 15. 120. ‘Shame and Performativity: Henry James’s New York Edition Prefaces’ in David McWhirter (ed.), Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 134. 121. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Adam Frank and Irving E. Alexander (eds), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 134; 137. 122. VC 75.3B, p.189. 123. Ellis, Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop, p. 95. 124. Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 12. 125. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, pp. 45–8. 126. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ in Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 162–4. 127. VC 75.3, p. 89. 128. Barbara Page ‘Off-Beat Claves, Oblique Realities: the Key West notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop’ in Marilyn May Lombardi (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1993), p. 200. 129. Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, pp. 9; 8. 130. VC 75.3, p. 72. 131. VC 75.3, pp. 175–6. 132. Eliot, ‘Baudelaire’ in Selected Essays, p. 424. 133. Mark Ford, ‘“Mont D’Espoir or Mount Despair”: Early Bishop, Early Ashberry and the French’ in Poetry and the Sense of Panic, ed. Lionel Kelly (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 11. 134. See ‘Le Cygne’ (‘The Swan’), ‘Et, brilliant aux carreaux, le bric-a-brac confus’ (‘The junk laid out to glitter in the booths’) in Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, new translation by Richard Howard) pp. 90; 268. 135. ‘On “The Man-Moth” ’ in Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (eds), Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 286. 136. See Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, p. 32; Marilyn May Lombardi, The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995) p. 115; Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, p. 51. 137. Ford, ‘Mont D’Espoir or Mount Despair’: Early Bishop, Early Ashberry and the French’, pp. 14–15. 138. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 126. 139. See Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 246; trans. p. 69. 140. VC 75.4A, p. 15. 141. VC 77.3, p. 27. 142. See ‘No worst there is none’: ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful. Sheer, no-man-fathomed’ in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 61. 143. ‘On the Possibilities of Painting’, reprinted in Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: His Life and Work (London: Lund Humphries, 1947), p. 141.

­88    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: His Life and Work, p. 86. VC 75.4B, p. 156. Samuels, Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art, p. 119. Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, p. 67. See Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 12. Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, p. 71. Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2006), p. 104. 151. Samuels, Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art, p. 81. 152. Joanne Feit Diehl, ‘Aggression and Reparation: Bishop and the MatterOf-Fact’ in Poetry and the Sense of Panic, ed. Lionel Kelly (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 34. 153. Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, p. 12. 154. See Baudelaire, ‘Correspondances’ in Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 119. 155. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 18; 68.

Chapter 3

The Labyrinth of Temporality

The Time of Writing By the time Bishop was preparing to publish her first book of poems, North & South, in 1945, she was aware that the collection might already seem anachronistic since most of the poems had been written before the war and made little reference to it. She wrote to her publishers, Houghton Mifflin, asking them to append a disclaimer to that effect in order to protect her from the ‘reproach’ that she might attract at a time when so much war poetry was being published.1 She also explained that the reason for the belated appearance of the poems was that ‘I work very slowly’ (OA, 125). This was only one of numerous exchanges she had with her publishers before the book’s eventual publication in July 1946, some to do with timing and Bishop’s anxieties about possible delays on the part of the publishers, and others about the book’s appearance and her desire to exert control over the details of the typography, the binding and the dust jacket. Unlike letters to friends and acquaintances where Bishop’s ability to combine her gift for acute observation with a fluent colloquial style has earned her the reputation of being one of the twentieth century’s ‘epistolary geniuses’,2 these letters are often brusque and irritable: I wonder if by now I might be able to ask you for the definite publication date of my book? Not having heard from you makes me feel that there have been further postponements. It is really getting to be embarrassingly difficult for me – not only because of inquiries, but because I have the next book of poems quite well mapped out and I don’t know what to include in this one, what to work on next, etc. (OA, 134)

U. T. Summers, who worked for the publishers at the time, recalled later that ‘people at Houghton Mifflin saw Elizabeth as one of the most difficult authors they had ever known’.3

­90    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Whilst Bishop, in the letter above, took her publishers to task for failing to get her book out swiftly, her dilatory writing habits meant she struggled to complete poems she was working on at the time such as ‘Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box’, a poem that in the end she never published, and ‘Faustina, or Rock Roses’ and ‘Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’, both of which were originally intended to amplify this first collection and answer her editor’s criticism about its thinness (OA, 134). However, Marianne Moore’s vehement objection that Bishop ‘should not feel pushed and impelled by someone’s utilitarian need’ and should follow her example to ‘do what I can’, which in fact, to her mind, made her ‘no slower’, seems to have given Bishop the confidence and freedom to see these poems as belonging to her next collection.4 Later, to Anne Stevenson, she reviewed the lack of ‘system’ or ‘logic’ as to ‘when and where the poems were written’ in her first book and the absence of ‘chronological order’ in her second, A Cold Spring, whilst warning that her third book, Questions of Travel, contained an ‘Amazon poem’ written before she had travelled there (CEPr, 394). For Bishop this lack of temporal sequence for her published writing was somehow linked to her travels and her frequent moves throughout her life to different places and countries. On a purely practical level, her multiple addresses as she travelled between Florida and Nova Scotia during the production of her first book created delays and miscommunication, as she was herself forced to admit: ‘I’m afraid all my recent changes of address have been rather confusing . . . My being in another country just now is a little awkward’ (OA, 137). Once in Brazil, the sheer practical difficulty of negotiating with an unreliable postal service was transformed from excuse into amusing anecdote by Bishop for her tolerant and admiring editor at The New Yorker, Katharine White, thus performing its own version of delay and indirection: It is such a job to mail things here – the stamps have no glue, or not enough, and you have to stand in line at a glue-machine, and get all covered with it – if you trust stamps to begin with; they say they are stolen in the PO often, and the mail just thrown away . . . So if you don’t trust stamps you have to go to the central office where there is a stamping machine – and in any case you have to go to one of the few post offices, since the mail boxes are never collected – haven’t been for years.5

When, in 1963, Bishop attempted to ‘place’ her poems for Anne Stevenson, she seemed to know where each part of every poem was written. However, since location did not necessarily align with date in any straightforward way – there were multiple trips, returns and intervals which crossed between places –the result is complex, made more so by

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Bishop’s awareness of the ‘other’ time of memory which intersects with her narrative and seems to belong nowhere: ‘(Memory poems are apt to pop up from time to time no matter where one happens to be, I find. – I mean childhood-memory poems)’ (CEPr, 394). The parenthesis Bishop uses here also helps to signal memory’s status within her narrative. The organisation and titles of nearly all Bishop’s published collections enact some interrogative or ambiguous relation to place from, in her first collection, the contrast between north and south (which are also linked by an ampersand, thus making the connection less semantic than typographical) to the ‘Brazil’ and ‘Elsewhere’ division within the already dubiously named Questions of Travel, to Geography III, and its positioning after or outside an unnamed binary of previous geographies, a positioning further complicated by a disorientating series of topographical questions as epigraph. Her second collection, A Cold Spring, as well as containing poems which, as she told Anne Stevenson, had multiple locations, was also never published as an autonomous collection but was combined with the reissuing of North & South in July 1956, reflecting, perhaps, the porousness of the boundary between the two books but also solving her publisher’s ongoing problem with the slimness of both collections. Though for any writer the internal time of creativity seldom lines up neatly with the external, ‘utilitarian’ time of publishers’ or other deadlines, the disparity in Bishop’s case is legendary, with the writing of some poems, for instance ‘The Moose’, extending over decades, and many taking years rather than weeks or months to complete. Her slowness was a source of anxiety and pain to her, as well as a matter of stubborn resistance, and she returned to it many times in her letters. To Marianne Moore she wrote in 1943, in fairly jaunty mood: ‘I feel I must do something about my Life & Works very soon – this wastefulness is a sin’ (OA, 118). However, this morally inflected self-criticism became more pronounced as the decade progressed. By 1949, feeling pressured by her forthcoming appointment as Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress, the most publicly prominent position in relation to poetry in the USA, she believed she could foresee the terminal decline of both her self and her talents, writing confidingly to her friend Loren McIver: ‘I don’t want to be this kind of person at all, but I’m afraid I’m really disintegrating, just like Hart Crane, only without his gifts to make it all plausible’ (OA, 188). Even the narrative of self-destructive (masculine) poetic genius seems to evade her, in Bishop’s view. This theme of waste and failure within her letters could become more or less muted but never completely disappeared, and there is evidence that at the end of her life, despite the widespread acclaim she had received, she felt keenly how much more she should have done.6

­92    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Bishop’s alcoholism obviously inhibited her productivity and it is easy to see a connection between her habit of procrastination and her debilitating bouts of drinking.7 However, Bishop also viewed her drunkenness existentially as producing a different ‘time-sense’, with the past and the present flowing uncomfortably into each other, an experience she had also accessed through depression and, interestingly enough, through painting: I think when one is extremely unhappy – almost hysterically unhappy, that is – one’s time-sense breaks down. All that long stretch in K. W. for example, several years ago – it wasn’t just a matter of not being able to accept the present, that present, although it began that way, possibly. But the past and the present seemed confused or contradicted each other violently and constantly and the past wouldn’t “lie down”. (I’ve felt the same thing when I tried to paint – but this was really taught me by getting drunk, when the same thing happens, for perhaps the same reasons, for a few hours.)8

Julia Kristeva has written about the ‘skewed time sense’ of depressed people, for whom there is no ‘psychic continuity’: ‘It does not pass by, the before/after notion does not rule it, does not direct it from a past towards a goal.’ For Kristeva, this lack of trajectory for one’s life is tied not so much to mourning as ‘a refusal of separation and mourning’ and the preservation of painful affects in a secret, psychic interior where they remain ‘distressed and inaccessible’. There is, accordingly, no movement, no sense of a future: ‘A moment blocks the horizon of depressive temporality or rather removes any horizon, any perspective.’9 In her earlier work, Powers of Horror, exploring what she calls ‘abjection’, a psychic territory, rather than pathological condition, that precedes or borders separation, Kristeva saw the experience of abjection as one of an incomplete but continuous struggle to ward off or separate from primordial states of being, the early state of a bodily fusion which then both threatens and repels. For her the ‘deject’, the one experiencing abjection, is a ‘deviser of territories, languages, works’: The deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines – for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject – constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding . . . The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered.10

To see the demarcation of boundaries on the outside as a way of attempting to draw limits and separations – as enacting a response to

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a psychic interior – provides one way of understanding the passion and rigour with which Bishop monitored her books’ ‘finish’.11 A similar impetus perhaps influenced her care with her own appearance – which was always, according to Anne Stevenson, ‘tidy’12 – and her well-documented attention to decorum and manners, whatever slides there were privately into depression or chaos.13 The fact, however, that Bishop related her practice of painting to her ‘skewed time sense’ suggests that there was a complex interaction between creativity, particularly that discovered in the ‘time’ of painting, and the fearful loss of perspective that she describes. Luce Irigaray, drawing a fascinating comparison between the practice of psychoanalysis and painting, refers in the process to one of Bishop’s favourite painters, Paul Klee: The point about painting is to spatialize perception and make time simultaneous, to quote Klee. This is also the point about dreaming. The analyst should direct his or her attention not only to the repetition of former images and their possible interpretation, but also to the subject’s ability to paint, to make time simultaneous, to build bridges, establish perspectives between present-past-future.14

For Irigaray, psychoanalysis can work to bring the residues of the past into the present and thus release the subject from a past that has become frozen. She also describes this frozen or ‘crystallized’ past in terms of a loss of memory of bodily perception, especially the experience of  colour. Irigaray’s approach to memory is to see it as less a matter of ‘layer upon layer of catastrophes’ than the place in the present where ‘identity is formed, where each person builds his or her ground or territory’. For her the subject, by becoming immersed not simply in the narrative of the past but its colours, sounds and rhythms, is able to create a place in the present from which to relate to both the past and the future and where the imagination can flourish. Ultimately, though, by creating this ground for themselves the subject, according to Irigaray, is able to have restored to them the ‘gift of time or spacetime’, to move freely and imaginatively between the past, present and future.15 In 1946 Bishop began a period of psychoanalysis with Dr Ruth Foster in New York and seems to have been particularly interested in Foster’s theory about colour and dreaming. Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell, who had recently become a friend and was to become a major correspondent over the next decades of her life, ‘a psychiatrist friend of mine is writing an article on color in dreams’ (WIA, 16). The drafts of unpublished poems that relate to the analysis also touch on this particular idea:

­94    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Dear Dr. – Yes, dreams come in colors and memories come in colors but those in dreams are more remarkable. Particular & bright   (at night) like that intelligent green light in the harbor which must belong to some society of its own, & watches this one now unenviously. (EAP, 77)

Another version of this draft describes the ‘society’ at the end as ‘somewhere peaceful and clear’.16 Inscribed at the top of the manuscript is the note ‘from Halifax’, thus connecting the poem to the trip that Bishop made to Nova Scotia in July 1946, apparently the first time she had returned to the scene of certain key events in her childhood since her mother’s death some twelve years before.17 The visit entailed a stay near the harbour in Halifax, just across the bay from Dartmouth. On another trip a few years later she noted the prominence and visibility of the Insane Asylum in Dartmouth where her mother had been confined, expressing her dismay, but also revealing a deep and perhaps unconscious fascination: ‘I cannot seem to stop edging around it.’18 On this first trip too in 1946, her mother’s condition was much on her mind according to contacts in Nova Scotia, and she may have tried to find out more from the Department of Health, possibly because she was worried about any hereditary implication for herself.19 In addition to this approach to the deep trauma of her mother’s illness – which she had long avoided or been protected from – her 1946 visit also involved a stay with her Aunt Grace and a re-engagement with the landscape of Great Village, which she evokes in a letter to Marianne Moore like a painting through the vividness of different colours: The soil is all dark terra-cotta color, and the bay, when it’s in, on a bright day, is a real pink; then the fields are very pale lime greens and yellows and in back of them the fir trees start, dark blue-green. It’s the richest, saddest, simplest landscape in the world. I hadn’t been there for so long I’d forgotten how beautiful it all is – and the magnificent elm trees. (OA, 139)

It is in this same letter that Bishop describes the bus journey that was to become the basis for her poem ‘The Moose’, completed more than twenty years later, and there are various other notes in her notebook from this time – about the farm, the elms, the coastline – that, as we shall see, suggest that the inspiration for some of her greatest poems can be traced back to these experiences and the memories they unlocked. Indeed, Brett Millier remarks about this visit to Nova Scotia that it was ‘both deeply disturbing and deeply significant to Elizabeth in ways that

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it would take her years to articulate’.20 Whatever feelings were stirred by this trip, that double movement of return and of delay, identified by Millier here, is also important – a configuration of narrative possibilities that helps to shape the work that was to come. Going back for a moment to the ‘Dear Dr.’ poem, it seems important to note that the green light in the harbour, a simile for that other time of dreams and memories, is autonomous enough to relate ‘unenviously’ to the speaker, possibly signalling, if we take the words of an earlier draft, its own ‘peaceful and clear’ state.21 The word ‘unenviously’ may have been preferred by Bishop in the later draft because of its ambiguity, suggesting something having been worked through ‘now’ and envy being in the past. Green is, of course, the traditional colour of envy, the emotion that threatens the integrity of the other; it is also the colour of the light providing ‘intelligence’ of the harbour’s entrance. In a slightly later poem ‘Verdigris’ (1950) (EAP, 186–7) also unpublished, though it is a poem Bishop did attempt unsuccessfully to place for publication, Bishop uses the structure of a villanelle to alternate between the idea of a systematic categorising of meaning and a different experience of time that she associates with the colour green: The catalogues will tell you that they mean the Chinese bronzes were like fresh-turned loam. The time to watch for is when Time grows green.

Later in the poem she refers to the ‘Dome’, thus associating this poem with her time in Washington and with another, published poem, ‘View of the Capitol from The Library of Congress’ (CEP, 67) where ‘the light/ is heavy on the Dome’ and where the military music being played by the airforce band on the steps of the Capitol is softened and diverted by the intervening greenery of trees: It comes in snatches, dim then keen, then mute, and yet there is no breeze. The giant trees stand in between. I think the trees must intervene, catching the music in their leaves like gold-dust, till each big leaf sags. Unceasingly the little flags feed their limp stripes into the air, and the band’s efforts vanish there.

Hinting at the stupidity of militaristic noise – she is writing ‘View of the Capitol’ during the Cold War ‘victory culture’22 and the build up to the

­96    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Korean war – Bishop recognises, at the same time, that the desire of the band to go ‘boom-boom’ as she says at the end of the poem is more than play; it could also be the sound of the killing machinery of war. In a letter to Lowell, Bishop associated this same sound with her friend Jane Dewey’s work as a physicist at the ‘ “Terminal Ballistics” . . . proving ground’ in Maryland: ‘When I stay at her farm, on weekdays, the rural scene shakes slightly once in a while as Jane practices her art about 15 miles away, & then there is a faint “boom”.’ The letter suggests just how close both friendship and art were in this period for Bishop to an encroaching militarism. The ‘hard and loud’ music in the poem may be ironised and deflected by Bishop, not least by the unpredictability of her own subtle harmonics, but it is also aptly insidious. ‘It seems there are three kinds of ballistics’, Bishop adds in her letter to Lowell, leaving him to draw his own conclusions, ‘Internal, External & Terminal’ (WIA, 108). Inside the Library, in that far from safe internal space, something of the deadly music still filters through. Bishop’s first impression of Washington in 1949 was that it was unreal, a simulacrum of somewhere else: ‘All those piles of granite and marble, like an inflated copy of another capital city someplace else (the Forum?)’ (OA, 194). Six months later, complaining about the Library, and the fact that a letter from Randall Jarrell had been filed rather than read and responded to, she exclaimed in a letter to him, ‘This place! This pile of masonry!’ (OA, 202). Her poem ‘Verdigris’ seems to have originally arisen out of her imagining what the stone facades of Washington might look like covered in moss.23 The stony exterior can perhaps be softened by the green of the moss, just as the abstract formality of the catalogues can be offset or modified by the different meanings of colour. It is interesting, of course, that ‘masonry’ and filing had been allied in Bishop’s letter. Within the poem, however, that green of Time seems to imply a range of meanings, both an immediacy of perception – ‘like fresh-turned loam’ – and the patina of age and decay suggested by the title. Whilst it might be hard to disagree with the opinion of the editors at The New Yorker that the poem is ‘obscure’, much of its interest here is that it brings these different meanings of time together.24 What is unearthed or recovered can also be ‘green’ or alive. The references to Greece and Rome, those classical civilisations which the grandeur of Washington seemed to mimic, are also depicted in terms of their vibrant colour: ‘Oh blue-green Seas of Greece, and in between,/the olive- groves and copper roofs of Rome!’ (EAP, 187). Colour escapes logical systems and interposes itself through variation, ‘in between’.25 Freud, who often used the metaphor of archaeology in relation to psychoanalysis, noted that, while there was a resemblance between the work of the analyst

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and ‘the archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice’, the important difference was that ‘what he [the analyst] is dealing with is not something destroyed but something that is still alive’.26 How far was Bishop through references to buildings and archaeology in this poem, whatever the wider political context, also addressing the processes of memory and their ability to come alive?27 When she came to write another villanelle, her famous poem ‘One Art’ in 1975, the repeated phrase ‘the time to watch for’ is uncannily echoed in one of her lost objects – her mother’s watch. Watching for the time or being watched by the green light at the harbour (‘Dear Dr.’) suggests a particular focus and receptivity, a perspective that joins one with the other. This watchfulness may well equate, as Heather Treseler has suggested, with the maternal care that Bishop did indeed lose as a child.28 Bishop’s preoccupations with time had already found their way into a major poem, ‘At the Fishhouses’ (CEP, 62–4). This poem draws on her experiences during her 1946 trip to Nova Scotia when she had spent some time in the fishing town of Lockeport, south of Halifax. In her notebook she had mused about the landscape and about knowledge: ‘Description of the dark, icy water – clear dark glass – slightly bitter (hard to define). My idea of knowledge. This cold stream, half drawn, half flowing from a great rocky breast.’29 The fact that she scored out the last phrase indicates her preliminary tentativeness – of particular interest in view of Lowell’s later ambivalence about it – though she did then confidently incorporate it into her first draft and all subsequent drafts of the poem. The poem begins with the slow establishing of a scene, emerging into definition out of invisibility: Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished.

In the process of ‘netting’, the old man is also woven into his setting by the poet. Bishop later acknowledged to U. T. and Joseph Summers that whilst the scene was ‘real enough, I’d recently been there’, a later dream accounted for ‘the old man and the conversation etc.’ (OA, 308). The dream derivation for the old man adds credence to those critics who have detected Wordsworthian resonances, as if the old man has had an archival existence somewhere else, or is a figure not so much of memory,

­98    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection plying an ancient craft, but for memory itself.30 As Bishop builds her scene, her senses are implicated. The smell of codfish is ‘so strong’ it permeates the air. The translucence of the colour silver suggests the texture of light, later picked up by the ‘iridescent’ sequins of herring scales, and draws the viewer to a threshold where vision and touch seem to merge to create a shimmering surface: All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls.

The moss, which, as we have seen, Bishop seems to have had a particular interest in poetically, is also brightly coloured. Though much in the scene suggests the accumulations of age – the moss itself, the worn shuttle, an ‘ancient wooden capstan’, the ‘black old knife’ – and though Bishop roots it all in a specific historical era of decline and ­depopulation, the scene also seems to glow with presence, with quicksilver glints of light. Even the particular brand of cigarettes, Lucky Strike, seems to support this idea of a bright, but fleeting flash of light. As Bishop turns her attention from the shore towards the sea, however, there is a descent into a different medium – ‘across the gray stones, down and down’. Silver is dulled to grey whilst the body that has registered the effects of the scene on its senses is now debarred from going into the depths: ‘Cold dark and deep and absolutely clear,/element bearable to no mortal.’ The seal is a distraction from the opposition that Bishop has set up, a slightly comic intermediary who breaks into the solemnity and holds up the movement into another order of existence. It is a joke, of course, that both poet and seal share a belief in ‘total immersion’, since what it means for them is very different, just as Bishop enjoys the humour of imputing human characteristics to this alien creature.31 Seamus Heaney has written very perceptively about this delaying tactic in the poem: ‘What we have been offered, among other things, is the slow-motion spectacle of a well-disciplined poetic imagination being tempted to dare a big leap, hesitating, and then with powerful sureness actually taking the leap.’32 The leap that Bishop makes has to do with register, an intensification through paused, emphatic monosyllables -‘dark, salt, clear’ – and repetition, and a turn to abstract meditation. However, she gets there through an imaginative numbing of the body:

The Labyrinth of Temporality    ­99 If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

This accurately describes the effects of icy water on the human body but the transmutation of water and fire also seems to replace the earlier halfmocking references to baptism with more apocalyptic language, drawn from the Bible and which hints at revelation.33 The knowledge, however, that Bishop equates with the sea is far from redemptive or Christian. Instead it is elemental, harsh and indifferent: It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.

Significantly, this is also a knowledge that can only be approached metonymically, through the imagination and through language. Significantly as well, the already annihilated body must come back as figure – ‘the cold hard mouth . . . the rocky breasts’ – as if it is impossible ultimately to think beyond a human perspective, however submerged that evocation of the human has become. As we have seen, Robert Lowell, though admiring the poem’s ‘splendor’, thought the word ‘breast’ ‘a little too much in context perhaps’ (WIA, 7). Heather Treseler’s thesis that the Lowell who had recently written ‘The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket’, with its masculine energy and violence, ‘could not envision his native Atlantic as a source of maternal succour’ is a convincing explanation for Lowell’s aversion.34 It is also true that whereas Lowell in his poem can confidently address the Atlantic as encompassing both historical time and a preceding time, ‘when the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime’ – an act of generation, which requires, it seems, only masculine agency35 – Bishop cannot. For her knowledge is ‘historical’ and is ultimately as much knowledge as flux, as it is in flux. Indeed, implicit in Bishop’s turn to philosophical reflection at the end of the poem seems to be the recognition that ‘knowledge’ cannot be opposed to nature and to transience but is also born from them. While it may be difficult to resist seeing a personal resonance in those images that picture a hard, cold maternal origin, they also suggest the character of necessity that drives

­100    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection our passage through time, forbidding return, and that makes our beginnings, including our relation to the mother’s body, forever withheld, distant and aloof. Time in this modality is inevitably both ‘flowing’ and ‘flown’: already gone at the very moment that we recognise it and with no possibility of a fixed point from which to speak about it, no way of situating ourselves as observers outside time’s endless flowing. ‘Cape Breton’ (CEP, 65–6), written around the same time, shares some of the same imagery and concerns though it does not attempt a similar rhetorical turn. Here the landscape is also pictured as involved in a process of making itself: The silken water is weaving and weaving, disappearing under the mist equally in all directions, lifted and penetrated now and then by one shag’s dripping serpent-neck, and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse, rapid but unurgent, of a motorboat.

Mist and sea are folded together into layers of material whilst the whole scene seems to be one of quiet holding, of disturbances being able to be absorbed, without interrupting the sense of continuity created by the back and forth – rocking – movement of weaving. The later image of bird song ‘meshing/in brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets’ repeats the idea of something being formed out of the interlacing of different strands, in this case to create a canopy of sound, though as a metaphor that recalls the landscape of ‘At the Fishhouses’, it also seems to tie together coast and sky. During her visits to Nova Scotia, Bishop was aware of the pervasive presence of fog and mist; indeed, these remained weather effects she was sensitive to throughout her life, perhaps because they reminded her of that primary landscape. It was particularly the sense of drifting and intermittence that seems to have interested her and the way what was behind the mist could be suddenly revealed: ‘The fog came and went rapidly – sometimes one could glimpse the island, then it would disappear in an instant.’36 In ‘Cape Breton’, the mist which gathers inland provides a more threadbare and therefore a more exposed and sinister picture of what it may be concealing: The same mist hangs in thin layers among the valleys and gorges of the mainland like rotting snow-ice sucked away almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack dull, dead, deep peacock-colors, each riser distinguished from the next

The Labyrinth of Temporality    ­101 by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge, alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view. (CEP, 65)

The stereoscopic view, combining different images from each eye, is one that creates the effect of depth and here the folds of ranked trees are also pictured as dark verticals intercepting the drifting layers of mist. The sharp, ragged edges are further defined by the word ‘nervous’ which might equally apply to the viewer who can sense the edge, the danger it poses, the opposite of any comforting effect of continuity. Indeed, the risk of edges and deadly plummeting has already been broached by the fate of the terrified sheep. Now the poem increasingly begins to hint at a ghostly legacy haunting the landscape, something ‘abandoned’ or repressed ‘in the interior’. The possibility of a narrative briefly emerges in the poem as the bus ‘comes along’, ‘packed with people’. But as a man with a baby gets off the bus and we follow their journey a little way towards an ‘invisible house’, the landscape again closes over them with all its suggestion of a dream. The last line, ‘an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks’, with the inevitability and historical weight of the pentameter line, suggests the icy water of ‘At the Fishhouses’ but says little, leaving us to guess at the connection with the actual climate of Bishop’s childhood and the memories frozen by repression.37 Bishop worked on versions of a story that she entitled ‘Homesickness’ for many years, according to David Kalstone,38 though the draft of a poem based on similar experience in Alice Quinn’s edition of unpublished material dates from the same period as ‘Cape Breton’ and ‘At the Fishhouses’ (EAP, 87). To Anne Stevenson in 1964, Bishop referred to both story and poem and to the genesis of the ideas: My mother went off to teach school at 16 (the way most of the enterprising young people did) and her first school was in lower Cape Breton somewhere – and the pupils spoke nothing much but Gaelic so she had a hard time of it at that school, or maybe one nearer home – she was so homesick she was taken the family dog to cheer her up. I have written both a story and a poem about this episode but neither satisfy me yet. (CEPr, 426)

That ‘yet’ confirms that Bishop’s interest in this story had not waned sixteen years later. Interestingly the story that haunted Bishop was a story about her mother before Bishop existed. Rather like Roland Barthes discovering in Camera Lucida that it is a photograph of his mother as a child at the Winter Garden which best recalls her to him, Bishop felt the lure of a story about her mother which depicts her as a teenager, starting out in the world and experiencing homesickness.39 If homesickness was a particularly troubling and prohibited emotion for

­102    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Bishop herself, in the way we saw in the last chapter, it is poignant to see Bishop tracing, in this anterior temporality, the desire of her abandoning mother to return home. What is also interesting about the story is that, unlike the poem, the character of her mother does not appear directly in it, or at least not in the already sketched preliminary stages; rather Bishop imagines the journey towards her by the small family group in a horse-drawn wagon: No one spoke, but the old wagon shifted and creaked and the harness creaked and squeaked in a different key. As they started up the steeper branch of the road Nimble broke wind gently several times and a comfortable warm odor of manure hung for a moment in the air. The fir trees looked wet, and the few enormous old blackening, rotting toadstools and mushrooms, the last of the season, standing beneath them contributed occasional sharp whiffs of decay. (EAP, 190)

The comfort they are bringing to the homesick daughter is the family dog, a fecund mother in her time, who is ‘very settled and domestic in her manner’. At another level it is the ease of the body and its insistent presence through sounds and smells, which exists before or beyond language and can be connected with something nurturing and maternal.40 In the draft of the poem, ‘Homesickness’, her mother’s distress is circled by a series of attempts to articulate the future in the present, a fatal narrative trajectory: ‘It was too late – for what she did not know. – already – , remote’. This is followed by two spellings, ‘irrepairable’ and ‘irreparable’. The one line in this draft that Bishop seems certain of, a sure-footed iambic pentameter line, is positioned at the end and recalls the story: ‘Beneath the bed the big dog thumped her tail’ (EAP, 88). Going back to her poem ‘Cape Breton’, we can easily see how the landscape of Cape Breton, a place Bishop associated with her mother, might contain some uncanny resonances, and how the ‘man carrying a baby’ might seem an obliquely lonely figure whose story seems to beckon us beyond the frame of the poem. Whilst it is illuminating to see both this poem and ‘At the Fishhouses’ as engaging with an ongoing exploration of surfaces and the effects of texture, layering and depth and thus continuing the analogies with painting that we looked at in the previous chapter, the truncated description of journeys and narratives, and the sense of time as inevitable, demanding submission, suggests another dimension being worked on too.41 Bishop’s ‘The Prodigal’ (CEP, 69), a poem she seems to have been thinking about at the same time as her story ‘Homesickness’ (WIA, 42), offers a version of a narrative impasse, a turning away by poetry from the teleology and closure of narrative, which its form as a double sonnet

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seems perfectly to enact. On the one hand Bishop models her poem on a story that is already known, that is structured through an outward journey and a return, and the moral paradigm of enlightenment and forgiveness; on the other, she pauses the story in the middle, in the space of postponement and error, with the prodigal seeming to lack sufficient desire or incentive to leave the pigsty, his state of exile with the beasts, and begin his journey back. Brett Millier has made the autobiographical connection between the poem and Bishop’s despair about her own drinking at this time and has found within her alcoholism and the shame it exposed her to a motive for her ‘self-banishment’.42 David Kalstone, on the other hand, has pointed to the decisive influence of Robert Lowell whom he sees, through his selfexplorations, as giving her ‘a way of talking about her own instability’ as well as implicitly laying down a challenge for her to do so.43 When Bishop wrote to Lowell a few years later, responding to the fact that he had been using the poem in his teaching, she acknowledged both Lowell’s influence in the poem, and the poem’s roots in ‘that spiritual exercise of the Jesuits – when they try to think in detail how the thing must have happened’ (WIA, 171). Many years before, in 1934, Bishop had copied parts of St Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises into her notebook and framed them on either side by quotations from Henry James’ The Golden Bowl and Wings of the Dove, which presumably she was reading concurrently. Her first recorded quotation from St Loyola guides our attention to the particular: ‘For it is not abundance of knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but the unusual sense and taste of things.’44 This is taken from the second annotation where Loyola extols, rather in the manner of Henry James, narrative over explanation, seeing the ability to enter into an experience as ‘the true groundwork of narrative’ and as the most effective way of making events clearer and ‘bringing them home’. Bishop must have seen in this, and in her reading of Henry James, confirmation of her own method and a justification later for her own treatment of the biblical parable where the details of the experience – ‘the unusual sense and taste of things’ – carry their own truth. For Bishop, however, unlike St Loyola, this did not provide any obvious route to a spiritual or didactic conclusion, just as ‘home’, literally or symbolically, was never in any sense a straightforward destination. In ‘The Prodigal’ Bishop’s pigsty with its evocative detail not only helps to set the scene for the prodigal’s plight but is a decidedly ‘real’ place in the poem, with its own colourful smell: The brown enormous odor he lived by was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,

­104    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung. Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts, the pigs’ eyes followed him, a cheerful stare – even to the sow that always ate her young – till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head. (CEP, 69)

This seems to establish the prodigal’s state of brutish dereliction, with that ‘too close’ suggesting the abject, a straying into ‘the territories of the animal’45 and an inability to separate and establish symbolic jurisdiction over the body. The mother who incorporates her young, though an accurate enough representation of the behaviour of a sow, also could suggest the return of the aggression feared by the subject as part of his movement away whilst repugnance, ‘sickening’, is, in the manner of abjection, what helps to begin to define a boundary. However, contradictions abound. This place is by no means wholly negative and the details of colour and light in the mud and puddles in the sestet of the first sonnet ‘reassure’, provide a kind of grounding, and it is worth looking back, too, at the ‘comfortable warm odor of manure’ in ‘Homesickness’ to see how the miasma of the body can also suggest a benign intimacy. In the second sonnet, time becomes more definite and admonitory. The prodigal, now outside the ark of safety, cannot escape his own ‘insights’, and there are implied movements and slight disturbances everywhere, from the ‘forked lightnings’ to the ‘pacing aureole’. The last lines of the poem, however, suggest a less than direct course and seem to turn away from the expected return, inserting time and duration between the present and the inevitability of the conclusion: Carrying a bucket along a slimy board, he felt the bats’ uncertain staggering flight, his shuddering insights, beyond his control, touching him. But it took him a long time finally to make his mind up to go home.

David Kalstone has noted that ‘home’ does not have a rhyme in the poem, and thus does not convey any resounding certainty.46 Home is, therefore, not the repetition of something that has already been. Desire for the plenitude of the ending, for a ‘homecoming’, may be deeply embedded not only in the original parable but in the idea of story itself, which we read towards the culmination of meaning which the end can bring. However, as Peter Brooks has argued in relation to narrative, this moment of the end ‘does not abolish the movement, the slidings, the mistakes, and partial recognitions of the middle’; it does not, therefore, eliminate the time before when the end is still unpredictable,

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uncertain.47 Bishop’s prodigal may be mired in his state of helplessness, unable to imagine a future except as the past, his narrative trajectory stalled. However, those ‘shuddering insights’ that suggest the return of the repressed past rather than a return to it, the intense moments which come and go uncontrollably and which may or may not be reappropriated by consciousness – ‘mastered’ – in order for there to be movement and change, also suggest the difficulty of thinking of time simply as an end-directed narrative. Rather there are parentheses, multiple associations, fragments belonging to different times, layered and patched together, oddly resonant repetitions, all of which we might also see, if able to be treated symbolically, as a reservoir of poetic effects. In a review of an ‘infuriating’ book, The Riddle of Emily Dickinson by Rebecca Patterson, Bishop made her own case against determining narratives which, like a detective story, have only one end. In this instance, provokingly for Bishop, it was a repressed and hopeless lesbian passion which was seen as ‘explaining’ everything: ‘Why – but perhaps it is rather exactly because: in order to reach a single reason for anything as singular and yet manifold as literary creation, it is necessary to limit to the point of mutilation the human personality’s capacity for growth and redirection’ (CEPr, 264). Bishop worked on this review on board SS Bowplate in 1951, on the first stage, as she thought, of her trip around the world. Instead the voyage led in an unforeseen direction to a new life in Brazil where she stayed for more than fifteen years. Towards the end of her life, looking back to this time, Bishop remarked to an interviewer, ‘I never meant to go to Brazil. I never meant doing any of these things. I’m afraid in my life everything has just happened.’48 It is worth setting this alongside her defence of her indirect approach to writing which comes, significantly, at the moment when she feels it might be most under threat due to her new public role in Washington: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it’ (WIA, 81). It is as if in both spheres, both life and writing, creativity demands that there be room for procrastination, for contingency or chance, for time which is unplanned or open. Before the end of the story, or of a life, according to this view anything might still happen. Yet Bishop’s voyage and arrival somewhere else, in a country she did not know and whose language she did not speak, also turned out to be the way in which in her writing she could explore her childhood, she could return to the ‘land of oblivion’ as Kristeva called it, the repressed past. Instead, therefore, of endlessly repeating past affects in the present, she was enabled to approach her past across the distances of time and space. Perhaps, like her prodigal, Bishop knew at some level that this was something she would eventually have to do, that the contingency

­106    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection she embraced was shadowed by a deeper necessity. Yet it is also the prolongation and discontinuity of that ‘long time’ before the ‘finally’ in the poem that makes it possible – a recognition of the way time asserts difference, insists on variation and transforms any repetition or homecoming into something else, a movement away as well as a return.

Keeping in Touch On board the freighter bound for South America, Bishop almost immediately felt a sense of relief from the problems that had assailed her in New York and Washington. In her notebook she observed, ‘I know I’m feeling, thinking, looking, sleeping, dreaming, eating & drinking better than in a long long time.’ She also mused about time and its paradoxes and about how it could be experienced simultaneously as both direction or sequence and duration: When I read something like ‘The question about time is how change is related to the changeless’ – & look around – it doesn’t seem so hard or far off. The nearer clouds seem to be moving quite rapidly; those in back of them motionless – Watching the ship’s wake we seem to be going fast, but watching the sky or the horizon, we are just living here with the engines pulsing, forever.49

As before, Bishop seems to have found travel by sea highly conducive to reflection, a safe space to ‘be’, without external demands. The leisurely voyage also gave her time to write in an unstructured way in her notebook – her handwriting appears unusually fluent and clear – whilst providing a sense of progressive and goal-directed movement, that she was ‘going somewhere’.50 Her transformation into a ‘Brazilian homebody’, forgoing the opportunity for further travels, was thanks to the happiness she found with Lota de Macedo de Soares and a domestic setting which was both ‘spectacularly beautiful’ and busy and sociable with its diverse assembly of friends, servants, children and pets. As well as building an ‘ultra-modern house’ near Petropolis some forty miles from Rio de Janeiro ‘on the side of black granite mountain, with a waterfall at one end, clouds coming into the living room in the middle of the conversation’, as Bishop described it, Lota also offered to shelter Bishop’s writing, safeguarding the privacy she required to work by constructing a special studio for her (WIA, 133–4). To Robert Lowell, Bishop denied feeling ‘ “out of touch” or “expatriated” or anything like that’ since, according to her, her shyness had inhibited any meaningful rapport with the intellectual life of New York in any case. With unusual

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frankness and confidence Bishop then pronounced to Robert Lowell on her state of contentment: ‘Here I am extremely happy, for the first time in my life’ (WIA, 143). Written in the early days of her relationship with Lota, Bishop’s poem, ‘The Shampoo’ (CEP, 82), celebrates what, in effect, that ‘here’ means. Ending with a tender address to her lover, ‘The Shampoo’ contains temporal experiences which combine different speeds, gradual growth and change and the acceleration of ‘precipitate’ action, already anticipated in the oxymorons of the ‘still explosions’ and ‘gray . . . shocks’. These compressed contradictions then lead to the oddly paradoxical yet rhymed collusion of ‘arranged’, with its suggestion of purpose, with what is ‘not changed’ within human memory: The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading, gray, concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed. And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you’ve been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical; and look what happens. For Time is nothing if not amenable. The shooting stars in your black hair in bright formation are flocking where, so straight, so soon? – Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon.

Time’s existence, given special emphasis in the penultimate line of the second stanza, is annulled in the next line, made ‘amenable’, compliant, to an action that conjoins suddenness with practicality. ‘Look what happens’, we are told, rather than ‘look what has happened’, and are thus projected forward, towards the future. The ‘shooting stars’ in the next stanza, as a metaphor for the grey hairs appearing amongst the black, ‘spreading’ like the lichen whose ‘shocks’ now seem also to anticipate the hair, are an augury of ageing. However shooting stars also reach into the infinite distance and their meaning here seems to be an open question just as any human desire must be. According to Walter Benjamin, ‘distance in space can take the place of distance in time’, which is why, ‘in folk symbolism’, the shooting star ‘has become the

­108    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection symbol of a fulfilled wish’.51 The last two lines of the poem, shifting to immediate address, create their own time and context. The deictic gesture, according to Susan Stewart, always has this effect; it is ‘its own location’: ‘We find ourselves immersed in the “now” of articulation, the “here” of the space in which speech is spoken, the “I” of the speaker, the “you” of the listener.’52 The invitation addressed to a ‘you’ at the end of the poem also shifts the poem from speech to touch as its conclusion. As Peter Robinson drily notes, taking to task Helen Vendler’s assertion that there can be no-one else really listening within the space of the poem and the lyric speaker is always alone: ‘No-one . . . imagines that the “dear friend” responds to its concluding offer by, for example, laughing cruelly into the face of the poet and walking away.’53 He is right, of course: the address assumes complicity and we imagine an event, a ‘now’, a nearness entered into and the reciprocity implicit in touching. Touch is also part of how the poem instantiates a relation that is both open, non-teleological and time-bound. Subjectivity is brought into relation with an object, located in time and space through touch, and one exists as both, as both subject and object through touching. The metonymic linking of a domestic and time-worn object, the battered tin basin, with the cosmic symbolism of the moon also suggests not only the ordinary made precious but also distance brought close, given form, here and now. Bishop did not write many poems that were explicitly love poems and she published even fewer. Her poem, ‘“It is marvellous to wake up together”’ (CEP, 283), the poem that Lorrie Goldensohn discovered in Brazil, hidden in the precious ‘Nemer’ notebooks and never published in Bishop’s lifetime, was written earlier during the Florida years and is, as Goldensohn remarks, ‘an intimately first person plural love poem’ spoken ‘in that syntactically ambiguous territory’ of ‘we’ where the speaker speaks for as well as to her lover:54 It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof the rain hisses, And below, the light falling of kisses.

An electrical storm passes through the poem, safely enjoyed because outside, though in the poem’s final stanza, it also images the ‘changes’ which sexual passion brings ‘without our thinking’. Wires and electric-

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ity are recurrent figures for Bishop, as we shall explore more fully in the next chapter, and can undergo transformation from the ‘mesh’ of interconnection, as here, to the falling (also freeing?) of ‘Rain Towards Morning’ (CEP, 75), the second of the ‘Four Poems’, probably written in the year before Bishop’s departure from the USA: The great light cage has broken up in the air, freeing, I think, about a million birds whose wild ascending shadows will not be back, and all the wires come falling down.

Bishop later described ‘Four Poems’ as a ‘fragmentary . . . emotional sequence’, like Tennyson’s ‘Maude’ but ‘with the story left out’ (OA, 308). Unusually, Bishop was stoical about the rejection of ‘The Shampoo’ by magazine editors – apparently Katharine White pleaded incomprehension though it is hard not to suspect prudishness or homophobia.55 However, Bishop on this occasion proved determined to publish a poem less elusive in its treatment of love than ‘Four Poems’.56 To her friend Pearl Kazin, who had lived for a period in Brazil, she dismissed the excuse of obscurity by The New Yorker editor, seeing the poem as ‘easy enough to understand’ (OA, 241). In a subsequent letter to Kazin she referred, almost in the same breath, to ‘The Shampoo’ and her enjoyment of the domestic detail of her life with Lota, implying how closely the poem and her new sense of rootedness were bound up with each other: ‘Here is the little poem Mrs White couldn’t understand . . . Do you remember those tin basins, all sizes, so much a part of life here?’ (OA, 241).57 If Bishop revelled in her life in Brazil, complete with tin basins, a pet toucan, and the ‘unbelievably impractical’ scenery, her memories of her childhood in Nova Scotia also seemed to have been given licence (OA, 234). In a letter to her friends Ilse and Kit Barker early on in her life there, she remarked on how ‘this trip is doing my memory no good at all’ and how dependent they all were on Lota’s watch: My hostess, Lota de Macedo Soares, has one of those fancy watches that tell the day of the week, the month, the phase of the moon, etc., and almost every day we all consult with each other and think it all over & get out the latest Time (it comes airmail but often two or three numbers in reverse order) and then she fixes the astoundingly accurate piece of Swiss engineering with a pin. (OA, 233)

Handing over responsibility to Lota for keeping time in the present could also be seen as a hugely symbolic act, freeing Bishop to inhabit the different times of writing and of long-term memory as opposed to

­110    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection the short-term forgetfulness she refers to above. Having completed two stories ‘Gwendolyn’ and ‘In the Village’ in 1952, almost her first substantial new writing in Brazil, Bishop confessed to Katharine White that she was ‘a little embarrassed about having to go to Brazil to experience total recall about Nova Scotia; geography must be more mysterious than we think’.58 Bishop was not above recycling phrases between letters to different correspondents and a very similar observation is repeated to her friends Kit and Ilse Barker two days later, perhaps reinforcing its significance to her (OA, 249). The creative possibilities of a child’s different point of view – their inability to ‘place’ things as an adult would – were already being thought about by Bishop whilst she was in Florida, as we saw in the last chapter. One of her first perceptions on arriving in Brazil was that it was ‘ “good for one” to get lost in a strange city where one doesn’t speak the language’ because ‘one realizes in a dim way how the world must seem to a very young child, or perhaps a dog’.59 If a dog finds its way by following scent, sound and sight, presumably a young child, according to Bishop, without adult knowledge to refer to, will rely on a similarly heightened experience of the senses. Lorrie Goldensohn has noted that Bishop sometimes thought of Brazil’s landscape as flamboyant and unreal and compared it to a child’s drawing or painting. To her friends, the Barkers, she commented enthusiastically: It is too fantastic – we were driving home the other day more or less southwest and the lolloping mts were all pink and the moon came up perfectly white – it was still daylight – like a dinner plate – really like a child’s painting.60

That quality of excitement or wonder pervades her early letters from Brazil. ‘Well, it’s all wonderful to me’, she wrote to Marianne Moore, after describing the abundance of butterflies, hummingbirds, mice, black crabs and ‘bugs’. The closeness of ‘nature’, combined with the process of construction as the new house in Petropolis took shape – designing a stove on the model of those in Nova Scotia, laying floors, using oil lamps – also seemed to give a slightly primitive or old-fashioned feel to her life, as well as to have created an atmosphere that was playful and experimental. With so much discovery close at hand it is not surprising that she concluded her remarks to Moore by acknowledging that her ideas of further travel ‘recede pleasantly every day’ (OA, 238). Bishop’s turn to prose in her early years in Brazil seems to have been partly a response to thinking about time and, in particular, how both memory and a young child’s experience could be said to exist outside the structuring of external or clock time. Significantly Bishop read the

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popular Brazilian autobiography Minha Vida de Menina (‘My Life as a Little Girl’) by Alice Brant (pen name Helena Morley) in 1952, as part of the process of learning Portuguese, and had therefore embarked on the book at the same time as she was thinking about her own autobiographical stories, long before the years spent translating it as The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’. In the ‘Introduction’ she wrote for her translation in 1956 she remarked on how its scenes and events had seemed to her to be ‘odd, remote, and long ago, and yet fresh, sad, funny, and eternally true’ (HM, x) and it is in particular that feeling of remoteness and immediacy, of a voice crossing distances, that she also discovers in her own writing. Bishop reminds us how unique this particular diary is in being not an adult’s imitation of a child’s point of view but a ‘real’ diary, with a corresponding gaucheness and authenticity, and in its recording of village life as it was experienced by a young girl there must have been many uncanny echoes for her, carrying across national boundaries, not least in Helena’s closeness to her grandmother. Significantly, in her ‘Introduction’, the episode that Bishop selects as one of her ‘favorite’ entries is on ‘the meaning of time’ and is where Helena’s mother, dependent on a rooster to tell the hour because only the men have watches, makes a mistake and she and her daughters try to go to early morning mass at midnight. Bishop then conjures the scene for herself, vividly imagining the small, stark figures against the landscape: I like to think of the two tall, thin little girls hanging onto their mother’s arms, the three figures stumbling up the steep streets of the rocky, lightless little town beneath the cold bright moon and stars; and I can hear the surprised young soldier’s voice, mama’s polite reply, and then three pairs of footsteps scuttling home again over the cobblestones. (HM, xxx)

Bishop’s own sense of being unmoored in time and space in Brazil, dependent on Lota’s watch and unsure about ‘seasons, fruits, language, geography, everything’ may well have meant this scene took on particular resonance (OA, 243). The first story set in Nova Scotia that Bishop wrote in Brazil, ‘Gwendolyn’, (CEPr, 52–61) is about the death in Great Village of Bishop’s friend Gwendolyn Appletree, aged eight, who suffers from diabetes and who is characterised as fragile and doll-like: ‘To me she stood for everything that the slightly repellent but fascinating words “little girl” should mean’ (CEPr, 54). At around this same time Bishop made unsuccessful attempts to explore the idea of dolls, for instance in her fragmentary poem, ‘“Where are the dolls who loved me so”’ (EAP, 102), where the dolls, though ‘rigid’ and ‘glazed’, are seen as the caregivers, prefiguring the strange reversal in her unfinished and surreal story

­112    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection ‘True Confessions’ (EAP, 191–3) where an ‘elderly little girl’ is seen as having changed places with her doll: Just about at the point she was able to read Dickens as a child – say ‘Little Dorritt’ – she and her doll had decided it would be better all round for them to change places. I don’t know where the doll had gone – off being an unfaithful wife somewhere, probably – but the doll’s looks were becoming in an unnatural way so that you looked twice at that tiny chin and dimpled cheeks, and the little laugh, open to have crumbs poked in by birds, maybe. (EAP, 191)

The reference to Dickens in this story reflects comments in her letters at around the same time where Bishop acknowledges that she has enthusiastically embarked on reading ‘all of Dickens, volume by volume’ (OA, 272). Dickens’ representations of children and his transferral of qualities between them and adults, as well as his depiction of female characters who are idealised and innocent and who represent a version of femininity which Bishop always felt herself at odds with, could well have helped to stimulate, or at least reinforce her own explorations of both childhood and girlhood, with its emerging understandings of gender.61 She also may have been attracted to Dickens’ novels because of their use of repetitive images in the creation of character and their pervasive metaphors that hint at inexpressible trauma. Her story ‘Gwendolyn’ contrasts her more robust experience of gender as a child with that of her cosseted and sickly sweet friend Gwendolyn. However, it is her experience of loss and her inability to master the trauma of an early confrontation with death that is at the centre of the narrative. The ‘preliminary’ section describes Bishop as a child successfully playing with toys and objects, forming their real and symbolic connections with the outer world and with other people into a continuous internal narrative, a fusion of time and space connected to the loving presence of her grandmother who joins sewing and writing in a ‘crazy quilt’ of remembrance.62 Gwendolyn’s death belongs to another order of time: its trauma shears through the sequence of past and present and exists instead as an unbidden, intrusive memory, forcing itself into present consciousness as a repetitive feeling of terror: ‘If I care to, I can bring back the exact sensation of that moment today, but then, it is also one of those that from time to time are terrifyingly thrust upon us’ (CEPr, 59). Bishop does not reflect on this further but goes on in the story to record two memories that are obliquely connected to the death. One, predating Gwendolyn’s death, suggests that the death itself may be only a screen memory or a symbol for another trauma which is also hard to contain in a temporal sequence. Trying to refind the beautiful

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marbles that she has not thought about ‘all this time’, she discovers them spoilt and dirty: ‘They were covered with dirt and dust, nails were lying mixed in with them, bits of string, cobwebs, old horse chestnuts blue with mildew, their polish gone’ (CEPr, 60). This memory suggests a difficulty negotiating absence since the marbles, which seem to symbolise something lost and to function like the child’s play with a cotton reel which Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, are not returned to her as they were.63 The different objects found with them, unlike the odd assortment in her grandmother’s button basket and scrap bag, do not string together into a narrative but instead are experienced as invasive and polluting. In the second incident that she recounts, Bishop and her friends are attempting to alleviate the trauma of Gwendolyn’s death by acting out her funeral. The grandmother’s anger at them touching the precious doll that belongs to Aunt Mary, and which is associated with Gwendolyn throughout, ‘spoils’ the game but the anger might also be located earlier, in Bishop’s own conscious transgression of the sanctity of the doll with all that that implies about her feelings towards Gwendolyn and her dying. Referring to her childhood punishment for her misdemeanour, Bishop ends her own story with the phrase: ‘I don’t remember now what awful thing happened to me’ (CEPr, 61). It is an oddly ambiguous phrase, lightly dismissive from an adult point of view of the child’s experience yet hinting at another layer of trauma, hidden behind, or screened by, her recollections here. The response of the editors of The New Yorker to this story, and then to ‘In the Village’, illustrates the degree to which Bishop was approaching prose writing in an innovative way, testing different associative links that did not necessarily depend on clear narrative markers. ‘We all of us like its poetic quality’, Katherine White wrote to Bishop about ‘In the Village’, ‘and we all of us are for the story, if we can persuade you to clarify and strengthen the thread of narrative it is strung on.’64 The idea of the story being ‘poetic prose’ was one that Bishop repeated, sometimes, in a self-deprecating way, to pre-empt the criticism that she was ‘not a story writer’ (OA, 291). On others, however, she talked about ‘the Art of story writing’ and how she was getting interested in thinking about ‘people, balancing this with that, time, etc’ (OA, 272). To Katharine White she wrote, confirming the sophistication of her own thinking about the story, that she had worked hard to achieve a certain ‘tempo’ in ‘In the Village’ and that she had ‘wanted to give the effect of nervous voices, exchanging often ambiguous remarks, floating in the air over the child’s head’.65 Thomas Travisano has used the term ‘postmodern narrative’ to describe the overlapping techniques in both poetry and prose, including explorations of temporality and process, through which

­114    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Bishop and the poets who with her made up what he refers to as a ‘midcentury quartet’ – Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and John Berryman – were exploring ‘psychic origins (and other lost worlds)’. However it was Bishop, and particularly through this story, ‘In the Village’, whom he sees as ‘leading the way’.66 Travisano has provided a thoughtful account of the contemporary context, helping to foreground Bishop’s modernity and how she was not simply recalling her childhood in these stories but negotiating the complex process of remembering with its disturbed chronologies, its belatedness and disjunctions between event, meaning and affect. Bishop’s protective attitude to ‘In the Village’ (CEPr, 62–78) suggests that she may at some level have known what she had achieved; indeed, it is generally now acknowledged that the story is a small masterpiece, one of the outstanding stories of her era. Like ‘Gwendolyn’, the story has a preliminary, a short paragraph, which this time announces the trauma from the very start. The scream or its echo that ‘hangs over that Nova Scotian village’ relates to the mother’s breakdown but it is also initially disconnected from any particular event or particular time. As much trace as sound, its distinctiveness is that it is not heard, as sound ordinarily is, within time, but instead its traumatic resonance is a form of suspension, an endless repetition: ‘The scream hangs like that, unheard, in memory – in the past, in the present, and those years between’ (CEPr, 62). Unable to inhabit its own actualisation as sound, the meaning it would have assumed, it spreads into other forms of representation as a ‘stain’ whose darkness is less a quality, a colour, than an effect on other colours – ‘darkening’: ‘The color of the cloud of bloom on the elm trees, the violet on the fields of oats; something darkening over the woods and waters as well as the sky’ (CEPr, 62). The synaesthesia, or the exchange that seems to happen between sound and sight, plays out how symbols appear in the place of the trauma, taking on its effects without limiting it in time and space. The lightning rod become tuning fork on the top of the church steeple is miniaturised in a gesture of control familiar to Bishop; however, if the lightning rod is a way of diverting catastrophe somewhere else, bringing it to ground, as tuning fork it reactivates the scream and its waves of sound in an action which suggests that it is difficult to separate controlling or warding off the traumatic effect from simply repeating it. Throughout, the story destabilises time. From the child’s point of view, through which much of the story is focused, it is the sense of the particular that predominates and the placing of one perception next to another gives us little idea of a narrative trajectory. However, it is often the surrounding silence that is significant as well and how what

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is deflected, imperfectly understood or anticipated creates a feeling of tension. As the dressmaker fits the mother’s new purple dress that marks a move away from black and from deep mourning, the child watches: Unaccustomed to having her back, the child stood now in the watching. The dressmaker was crawling around and around on eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass. The glinted and the elm trees outside hung heavy and green, and matting smelled like the ghost of hay. (CEPr, 63)

doorway, her knees wallpaper the straw

The apprehension of the child is captured both in the seeming oddness of the dressmaker’s action – who in effect assumes the mantle of madness – and the slight portents, glints and ghosts which suggest some frisson of otherness. The idea that there is another time and place, a ‘somewhere else’, where people and things have come from and will disappear into, is expressed in numerous ways. Primarily it is the mother who comes and goes, who moves back and forth between Boston and Great Village. Boston, for the child, exists as somewhere beyond the ‘here’ she knows, beyond memory, as a lost origin: ‘So many things in the village came from Boston, and even I had once come from there. But I remembered only being here, with my grandmother’ (CEPr, 64). As her aunt and her grandmother unpack her mother’s trunks of possessions that have been sent from Boston, objects, though intimate and close at hand and minutely described, are seen as also linked to distance and strangeness. Handkerchiefs with their ‘narrow black hems’ flutter, a leaked bottle of perfume has the scent of ‘somewhere else’, postcards with illegible messages ‘come from another world’, ‘rice-grain’ porcelain contains only traces of rice that has disappeared, the silver is hidden in a ‘vault’, a fearful word – perhaps suggesting something lost or entombed forever – sending the child back to the comfort of repetitive touch. Finally, she absconds with one object, an ivory embroidery tool: ‘To keep it forever I bury it under the bleeding heart by the crab-apple tree, but it is never found again’ (CEPr, 66). The child’s act is meant, like the placing of the silver in the vault, to keep the memento safe; however, it also makes it irretrievable, and it is to be supposed that in this act of concealment, the child also buries something of herself. The story itself, however, also conceals something. If the scream of the mother’s madness is the shock that reverberates through the story, information about the mother’s absence is contained in the calm observation: ‘Now the front bedroom is empty’ (CEPr, 76). While the aunts are described as preparing to leave or having left, nothing is said about the mother’s leaving, an event which endures beyond the frame of the story and perhaps only acquires its full meaning over time.

­116    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Every Monday, we are told, the child takes a parcel to the post office packed by her grandmother for her mother in the sanatorium, always containing fruit and cake but a variety of other things as well such as a handkerchief, chocolates, a New Testament – all strung out in another list which hints at hidden or withheld meaning and a hovering unease about the connections. The child is aware enough of the situation and the shame it represents to want to hide the address with her arm. Her journey takes her past the blacksmith’s shop, which has already figured as a significant place in the story, whose durable ‘gray roof with patches of moss’ (CEPr, 63) can be seen from the end of the garden, and which provides refuge for the child. Nate, the blacksmith, performs ‘wonders’ with his hands, and his artisanal labour seems able to take charge of what is both animal and elemental, and meld it into a redemptive sound. The ‘clang’ of his anvil is the alternative sound to the scream in the story and is described as ‘pure and angelic’ and ‘beautiful’:    Clang.    Clang.     Nate is shaping a horseshoe.     Oh, beautiful pure sound!     It turns everything else to silence. (CEPr, 77)

This passage, written with the lineation of poetry, rings with decisive hammer blows, the ‘counter-music’, as Anne Stevenson calls it, to the terrible scream.67 However, Nate’s creativity, as perhaps Bishop found about her own, can only block, not answer, the nervous questions at the end of the story about the ‘almost-lost’ scream and the attendant damage: Clang. It sounds like a bell buoy out at sea. It is the elements speaking: earth, air, fire, water. All those other things – clothes, crumbling postcards, broken china; things damaged and lost, sickened or destroyed; even the frail almost-lost scream – are they too frail for us to hear their voices long, too mortal? Nate! Oh, beautiful sound, strike again! (CEPr, 78)

Using sound as a medium means that the ‘clang’ of Nate’s anvil – like the scream that quickly vanishes leaving only an after-image, a reverberation – encapsulates both the trauma and its transformation. However ‘beautiful’ the ‘clang’, however elemental, it cannot help but refer back to the essence of the trauma, to sound as a form of shock reverberating elsewhere. Indeed, the subtly worked ending could also be seen as point-

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ing to the silence behind the noise made by Nate as holding the real fear: fear belonging to belated recognition and to the aftermath of absence.

Modesty, Care, Space Robert Lowell from the first recognised the importance of ‘In the Village’. He wrote to Bishop: ‘Your New Yorker story is wonderful. A great ruminating Dutch landscape feel of goneness’ (WIA, 151). Later, perhaps picking up on the interplay between sound and silence in the story and recasting it as a compliment to Bishop, he wrote to her that it was ‘as though you weren’t writing at all, but just talking in a full noisy room, talking until suddenly everyone is quiet’ (WIA, 174). The story haunted Lowell’s imagination and the writing of his own autobiographical story ‘91 Revere Street’, published first in 1956 and then as part of Life Studies in 1959, seems to have been partly inspired by Bishop’s example. Later she would imitate Lowell by including ‘In the Village’ in her poetry collection Questions of Travel in 1965. Yet, in this to and fro between them and their joint explorations of childhood experience, it was, as Travisano argues, Bishop who seems to have been the originator.68 When in 1962 Lowell reported to Bishop that, in one of those acts of poetic ventriloquism he was prone to throughout his career, he had ‘versed’ her story, he also wrote in mitigation that it was ‘probably a travesty, making something small and literary out [of] something much larger, gayer and more healthy’ (WIA, 390). Bishop’s response to Lowell’s poem, which he entitled ‘The Scream’, was, though complimentary, also quietly incredulous and we can imagine the weight of emotion the word ‘surprised’ carries at the end of the paragraph: ‘The Scream’ really works well, doesn’t it. The story is far enough behind me so I can see it as a poem now. The first few stanzas I saw only my story – then the poem took over – and the last stanza is wonderful. It builds up beautifully, and everything of importance is there. But I was very surprised. (WIA, 402)

Worse was to come, however, when Lowell made a sonnet out of one of Bishop’s more confessional letters to him, which she wrote in a state of turmoil a few years after Lota’s death: ‘I have somehow got into the worst situation I have ever had to cope with and I can’t see the way out.’ Lowell’s version simply adds a full stop after ‘with’ and removes the ‘and’; the rest of his poem is equally blatant in its transcription of the letter.69 His brief apology makes little concession to the feelings of someone who, as he must have known, guarded her privacy

­118    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection c­ arefully: ‘Too intimate maybe, and if so I humbly ask pardon’ (WIA, 687). Bishop’s reaction came neither immediately nor directly but instead two years later in her response to another violation of intimacy and trust, as she saw it: Lowell’s use of his wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters in Dolphin: One can use one’s life material – one does, anyway – but these letters – aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission – IF you hadn’t changed them . . . etc. But art just isn’t worth that much. I keep remembering Hopkins’ marvelous letter to Bridges about the idea of a “gentlemen” being the highest thing ever conceived – higher than a “Christian” even, certainly than a poet. It is not being “gentle” to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way – it’s cruel. (WIA, 708)

Bishop could write passionately on this topic on another’s behalf because she had also experienced some version of this hurt herself. Lowell crossed boundaries in ways that dismayed Bishop and she was a witness to, and the recipient of, some of his manically charged emotional intrusiveness. Bishop remained tactfully silent when Lowell wrote to her at alarming length in 1957, remembering their past and declaring that he had wanted to propose to her and ‘half believed she would accept’ (WIA, 219–27). However, their long relationship was also sustaining and supportive. Bishop warmly confessed to Lowell in 1962: ‘You have no idea, Cal, how really grateful to you I am and how fortunate I feel myself in knowing you, having you for a friend. When I think of how the world and my life would look to me if you weren’t in either of them at all – they’d look very empty, I think’ (WIA, 388–9). She had many reasons to experience gratitude: an engaged and receptive reader of her work, he continually paid homage to her talent, affirming to her in 1957: ‘I think I read you with more interest than anyone now writing’ (WIA, 204). He was also the more worldly of the two: better networked than Bishop and more comfortable in a professional role, he was able to mediate the world of literary awards and work for her, sometimes undertaking to find financial support for her at just the right time. His boldness as a writer was also a point of growth for her own writing, even if the real impetus was often working out where she disagreed with him. Lowell, for his part, took from Bishop encouragement to achieve a more even tone, away from his own more anxious insistence. According to David Kalstone, Lowell recognised his own lack and envied and tried to emulate Bishop’s naturalness and truthfulness.70 In the letters between them, Bishop’s role was often to introduce mobility, to change the topic from work to ‘ordinary life’, as if there were other equally important claims on one’s attention.71 This deflection certainly

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had a self-protective element. However, Lowell was also being given a lesson by Bishop in how to modulate intensity. When, for instance, Lowell wrote to her excitedly about some of the poems that were to be included in Life Studies, reporting others’ praise of them, he attributed his ‘breakthrough’ to her: ‘But really I’ve just broken through to where you’ve always been and gotten rid of my medieval armor’s undermining’ (WIA, 239). Bishop’s reply came after a delay – ‘I don’t know why I haven’t been able to write to you sooner, really’ (WIA, 240). The journey back to Brazil from New York was only part of the reason for her hesitation; she also needed to approach Lowell’s poems with caution. Whilst generous in her praise – ‘I think all the family group . . . are really superb’ – she distrusted revelations and opted for a more varied, less grandiose, sense of self: ‘But “broken through to where you’ve always been” – what on earth do you mean by that? I haven’t got anywhere at all, I think. Just to those first benches to sit down and rest on, in a side-arbor at the beginning of the maze’ (WIA, 247). Bishop is not only being diffident here; she is also humorously reworking his metaphor with the kind of detail and realism which is the hallmark of her poetry and which itself enacts the philosophical point she is making: one’s direction is complex, even labyrinthine, and any overview – any god-like perspective – impossible. Bishop went on in this letter to praise Lowell’s ‘assurance’ and ‘confidence’ in the poems of Life Studies, contrasting them with her timidity. Colm Tóibín has encouraged us to read this response of Bishop’s ambiguously and to be aware of the tact involved. Bishop would have known that her strengths as a writer lay elsewhere. As Tóibín says, ‘not having confidence gave Bishop her power’.72 If, however, Bishop and Lowell engaged with each other as poets in challenging and complex ways through their letters, they also valued each other as letter writers who brought all their writerly skills to this form, too. ‘I wish I could write such good letters’, Bishop wrote, rather disingenuously, to Lowell in 1958 (WIA, 256). Her reward was a swiftly returned compliment: ‘You are the one whose letters are poetry, such a full sail, such witty stories!’ (WIA, 258). The pace and intermittence of letters suited Bishop, not only allowing her to maintain an exchange with Lowell with the saving distance she required but enabling her to articulate a different, less driven, sense of time. This extended temporality is partly the effect of letter writing itself, of course. Yet Bishop’s letters are also distinctive in the way they can unfold over days and be punctuated by other activities, which are then taken up and woven into the writing. According to Langdon Hammer her letters can seem ‘aimless’ or ‘minimally plotted’ and for Bishop there was always relief at inhabiting a writing which, as with drafts and notebooks, was not

­120    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection intended for publication, that was informal without an ‘end’ in view.73 To her friend Ilse Barker she wrote, happy to be in contact with another epistolary escapee: ‘I am sorry for people who can’t write letters. But I suspect also that you and I, Ilse, love to write them because it’s kind of like working without really doing it’ (OA, 273). Letters were a relaxed rehearsal for other writing and Bishop found they helped her to cross a threshold into poetry, as well as enabling her to discover both a voice and descriptive material – a tempo and ease – that could then be reworked in poems.74 Throughout this correspondence, Bishop was aware that Lowell’s ‘trumpet-notes’ could be overwhelming.75 As with Marianne Moore, the other poet she was really close to, she was anxious about borrowing and about sounding the same. Early on in their relationship she wrote to Lowell about his poem ‘Thanksgiving’s Over’: ‘The rhetoric is wonderful, swaying back & forth . . . I made the mistake of reading it when I was working on my own poem & it took me an hour or so to get back into my own metre’ (WIA, 30). She needed to tune him out if she were to be able to hear her own poems. However, Bishop often found a mature, calm voice in her letters to him, particularly in the aftermath of his illnesses. After the breakdown that overtook Lowell with the completion of Life Studies, she wrote to him about Webern, a composer she knew he had previously been listening to: I bought that Webern you had before I left, and I’m listening to parts every day . . . I am crazy about some of the short instrumental pieces. They seem exactly like what I’d always wanted, vaguely, to hear and never had, and really ‘contemporary.’ That strange kind of modesty that I think one feels in almost everything contemporary one really likes – Kafka, say, or Marianne, or even Eliot, and Klee and Kokoschka and Schwitters . . . Modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time. Well, maybe I’m hearing too much. ( – and admission of final ignorance!) (WIA, 250)

These descriptive words – ‘modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination’ could be read in terms of the very qualities that she valued and cultivated in her own work but it is also a gift to Lowell. In her generous acceptance and reconciliation of contradictions – ­‘helplessness but determination’ – with space for both, it could also suggest the quality of the music that flows between them. In thinking about how Bishop arrived at her characteristic voice of cheerfulness covering a basic melancholy or her acceptance of contradictions and loss in her later poems, her correspondence with Robert Lowell and the necessity of holding his different tempo within the continual movement of their exchange must be taken into account as an important part of the story.

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My Voice in My Mouth In 1952 Bishop shipped the clavichord she had originally bought from Arnold Dolmetsche in 1935 to Brazil along with her ‘library’. Although Bishop is primarily thought of in relation to the visual register and to painting and indeed identified her own interests in this way – ‘I’d like to be a painter most’ she remarked in a late interview76 – she also had a strong connection with music and her clavichord, on which she had taken lessons from the distinguished performer Ralph Kirkpatrick, was carefully stored by her when it was not, at great expense, accompanying her on her travels.77 Whereas Bishop frequently boasted about the richness of her new home and the abundance of sights and books she had access to, it was music that she identified in 1952 as ‘the one thing lacking’ in Brazil (OA, 250). It took another six years to acquire a ‘hi-fi’ – and the electricity to power it – and for her to be able to say that now she had ‘everything I want here’, though she added gracefully, ‘except for a few friends I’d like to see more often’(WIA, 250). Bishop’s taste in music ranged quite widely across jazz – her ‘Songs for a Colored Singer’ (CEP, 47–51) were written for Billie Holiday – and classical music. However, later, living in San Francisco in the 1970s with her young companion Suzanne Bowen,78 though she professed to liking the Beatles and Janis Joplin, Bishop was appalled by the ‘mechanical’ aspects of rhythm and amplification in rock music and in particular how it ‘abused’ the human voice: ‘All gone – the sexual quality of the human voice and all its infinite [variety] of appeals caresses even gratitudes, and so on – none of that’.79 Whilst it might simply suggest her age and an understandable resistance to popular culture, this lament of Bishop’s for the human voice is important, as is her emphasis on its sexual or bodily aspect. In her important study of the singularity and uniqueness of the human voice, and the challenge it represents to a political philosophy based solely on our capacity to communicate and signify, Adriana Cavarero describes the voice as ‘bodily, obscurely carnal, sensuous, passionate’. Like other theorists, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva for instance, Cavarero insists on the corporeality of the voice and its relation with pleasure. However, Cavarero does not think of voice as generalisable; instead it is embodied and unique, always the voice of someone: ‘The voice belongs to the living; it communicates the presence of an existent in flesh and bone; it signals a throat, a particular body.’80 When in 1961 Bishop was worried about whether her letters to Robert Lowell were getting through, or whether he was ill, she wrote to him: ‘Dear Cal, if you only knew how many imaginary conversations I have with you all the time

­122    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection . . . Lota and I talk about you a lot and we both hope and pray you are better’ (WIA, 363). This is obviously an expression of her concern but it is also a recognition, like Cavarero’s, that it is voice that summons the living presence of someone. As we have noted previously, Bishop prized spontaneity in writing and much of her work explores the paradox of how to sustain a sense of provisionality and process within the finality of literary works. This meant attending to the glimpse or glance and to the spaces around ‘seeing’, or incorporating face-to-face encounters with people and creatures and exploring what is irreducibly unique or not yet final about those meetings. Bishop’s use of voice works in similar ways. By drawing attention to other sounds and voices in her poems, she enables us also to see more completely the singularity of the people and places of which her poems are made. ‘Have you ever noticed that you can often learn more about other people – more about how they feel, how it would feel to be them – by hearing them cough or make one of the innumerable inner noises, than by watching them for hours’, she had commented to Donald Stanford in 1934 (OA, 18). The feeble whisper from the bed in ‘Faustina’ or the imagined duet of the last lines of ‘Cirque d’Hiver’ or the sounds of ‘click’ or ‘boom-boom’ in ‘The Bight’ and ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’ all enact the ‘inner noises’ she was particularly sensitive to and enhance a sense of singularity and immediacy. However, in the early 1950s in Brazil, as Bishop became occupied with writing poems again after her excursions into prose, she began to develop a style that was both more narrative and more interpersonal. If voice is always unique it could be said to disturb the assumption of a transcendent or universal meaning and in listening to voices in Brazil Bishop was also listening to difference. Cavarero has equated voice and listening in an interesting way to a particular kind of relation with others and to the world. Voice, she argues, is ‘irremediably relational’ since its meaning depends on another’s hearing or listening. For Cavarero, ‘the emitted voice always comes out into the world, and every ear within earshot – with or without intention – is struck by it’. This lack of intentionality extends to hearing too. We cannot always select in advance what we will hear or what we will listen to. The ear, accordingly, is ‘an open canal’ and in this openness can ‘be surprised from anywhere at any moment’.81 In other words, hearing not only exposes us by necessity to the world, it also means we hear ‘uniqueness’ every time someone speaks. Taking a stance against metaphysics and its systematic exclusion of voice, Cavarero privileges the communicative, relational aspects of speech, its necessary embodiment and uniqueness, as opposed to the rational, universalising aspects of language and her thesis takes us

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some way to understanding the philosophical project of Bishop’s poetry too. However, we should also see Bishop’s concern with voice as linked to her ongoing interests in narrative and time. As Susan Stewart suggests, listening to speech means attending to a unique speaking voice but it also attunes us to movement and change. Sound has a beginning: it is neither static nor stationary but in process across time, and has the potential again to become silence: ‘Yet as the individual voice contains within it the seed of its own disappearance, its fragility and impermanence, so, in its fleetingness, does it bear a kind of aural imprint of its history, its ancestry – in the voice is the voice of all first voices.’82 The relationship between memory and voice – how its resonance can carry us back to a distant source – is also something that Bishop was aware of and explored in her poems and we have already seen how the scream in ‘In the Village’ is used by Bishop, fleeting and ‘indelible’, as the most powerful marker of her traumatic past. In order to get close to the past and to understand its grain and its colour it was necessary to hear it too; otherwise the past was just, as Bishop had written earlier in her notebook: ‘a silent film “high and dry” and far away’.83 One of the first poems that Bishop completed in Brazil arose not from the past, however, but from the adventure of the journey to the country she then settled in. Arrival in Santos (CEP, 87–8) draws upon her voyage to Brazil and the notebook entries she made at the time. Bishop seems to have been fascinated by her travelling companion, Miss Breen, whom she described in her notebook as ‘almost 6ft. tall – enormous, rather vague in speech, manner, & shape – large blue eyes and bluish-white waved hair’. Her cameo role in the poem, a fairly literal transcription, suggests an awkward yet good humoured negotiation with the hardships of travel and cultural difference. Bishop is similarly faithful to her first impression of the mountains in Rio de Janeiro as ‘fantastic, impossible, & impractical’, a word she carried over into letters as well as into the poem, and which seems to suggest the undomesticated nature of the landscape as she sees it and thus gently to mock her own assumptions too: 84 Here is a coast; here is a harbor; here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery: impractically shaped and – who knows? – self-pitying mountains, sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery, with a little church on top of one. And warehouses, some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue, and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist, is this how this country is going to answer you

­124    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last, and immediately, after eighteen days of suspension? (CEP, 77)

Bishop’s repetition of ‘here’ at the beginning of lines in the first stanza echoes the children’s finger rhyme – ‘Here is the church; here is the steeple’ – and seems a naively optimistic attempt on behalf of the speaker to establish herself in relation to a landscape which nevertheless seems to frustrate definition. The excess of emotion – ‘self-pitying’, ‘sad and harsh’, ‘frivolous’, ‘feeble’ – is unsettling and seems to swamp its objects with an unwarranted intensity. The question of who is speaking is relevant and it is not really apparent in the immediacy of the address – ‘Oh tourist’- whether the speaker is taking to task her own touristic ‘demands’ or is being challenged by another.85 In either case ‘complete comprehension’ is impossible and is one of a number of highly ironised expectations that open up a gap between desire and its destination. Like the letters that seem fated never to reach their addressees so the idea of arrival is deferred from one place to another, from a port that is as unremarkable or as unfixable as the stamps to a vague and unspecified ‘interior’. As with Derrida, who saw letters as involved in a ‘postal regime’ that always involved interval, delay, ‘différance’, there is in this desire for a destination, always ‘the fatal necessity of going astray’.86 The poem’s form also seems to enact the idea of something delayed or unfulfilled. While it follows a traditional rhyme scheme – ABCB – and makes use of feminine rhymes in a rather nervous or comic display of rhyming, few of the lines are end-stopped but, in a process of fairly continual enjambment, slip away from the sense of completion that rhyme could bring. The poem is thus pulled between maintaining the rhyme at all costs – the most peculiar example is where Bishop displaces the ‘s’ of Falls to the beginning of the next line to preserve a perfect rhyme – and a kind of hectic forward momentum. The effect is the retention of purely formal prerequisites when everything, including the speaker, is in movement and about to change. ‘Questions of Travel’ (CEP, 91–2), a poem which Bishop worked on longer though it may have shared the same original inspiration, also begins with a landscape that daunts the speaker with its excess and mobility. There are ‘too many waterfalls’ and everything seems to be in flux, changing in a way that is almost impossible for the speaker to keep up with. Time, too, has a different tempo and rate of measurement and ‘here’ does not indicate a position so much as imply an interrogative distance from somewhere else better known.

The Labyrinth of Temporality    ­125 – For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, aren’t waterfalls yet, in a quick age or so, as ages go here, they probably will be. But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled.

The speaker imports her own oddly disjunctive imagery – tearstains and capsized ships – that suggests emotional wreckage, a submerged personal subtext but may also gesture towards how the landscape holds a lost history of travel and conquest, a previous navigation of its territory that has failed. In the second stanza, the speaker takes to task her own touristic desires to see and experience difference, hinting at the ethical problem of power and spectatorship in relation to other cultures: ‘Is it right to be watching strangers in a play/in this strangest of theatres?’ However, as Susan McCabe notes, her questioning gives way to the strength of her longing for different ‘sights’ and in the last stanza the speaker frames the particular through a negative and through the conditional or future perfect – ‘But surely it would have been a pity/not to have seen’ – a syntax and a tense which, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, leaves open a space for wonder and tries to capture the time before contingency is lost in representation and in an already determined past.87 At this point in the poem Bishop quickly switches her attention from sights to sounds, from the exaggerated beauty of the trees to the sounds that define the particular moment, both ‘the sad, two-noted, wooden tune/of disparate wooden clogs’ and ‘the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird’. As Bishop recognises here, listening means hearing the interval, the difference, the ‘two-noted’ tune rather than the single mechanically pitch-perfect sound she envisages in ‘another country’. We could think of this in relation to poetry too – certainly modern poetry in English – where voice will always be in tension with metre to a degree since it does not simply conform to a strict beat but works through stresses, rhythms and semantic phrasing. A certain irregularity creeps in, not just the beat but the ‘off-beat’, not the even but the odd numbers which Bishop seems to be referencing in her ‘disparate . . . clacking’. The fact that she is listening to the sound of feet may also be, of course, a sly poetic pun. The connections that the speaker seeks between the different forms of woodwork – ‘the crudest wooden footwear’ and the ‘whittled fantasies of wooden cages’ – can never wholly be explained except within a particular history yet it seems that our access to a larger history is through the detail of objects or through art. Bishop’s ‘weak

­126    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection calligraphy of songbirds’ cages’, gathering the images she has developed across the stanza, also associates, as poetry does, writing and song, the visual and the aural. It is also the end product of a historical process. The comparison of rain, which gets louder the heavier it is, to ‘politician’s speeches’ suggests that when the traveller experiences ‘a sudden golden silence’ it is not just the cessation of noise that is involved but the creation of room for something else, for hesitation and uncertainty, beyond the conveyance of a single, rhetorical meaning. At the end of the poem Bishop uses italics as she does in other poems – ‘The Armadillo’ for instance – to designate a writing that is the voice of consciousness or inner reflection and which belongs to no particular time and place: ‘Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? Or could Pascal have been not entirely right about just sitting quietly in one’s room? Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free. And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?’

If the idea of home is unstable then the distinction between it and travelling is hard to maintain. It is significant, too, that whilst these stanzas are framed as internal soliloquy they are not the result of sitting in a room, of a philosopher talking to himself to the exclusion of others. Instead they are traveller’s notes whose questions reflect those asked in the rest of the poem. The paradox is, however, that though purportedly more provisional these last two four-line stanzas are the only part of the poem to be in rhyme. The point, so far as Bishop is concerned, is perhaps less about trying to make a decision about which is best, travel or stasis, or answering the question of how free we really are – the questions in any case only really arise because the speaker has travelled – than finding a form which can hold contradictory ideas and which can articulate thought in terms of the mobility of voice. Barbara Page has pointed out that Bishop’s revisions of this last section, with which she seems to have had some difficulty, were towards a greater sense of insecurity away from assertion or statement.88 Subjectivity and openness are not renounced at the end of the poem, and it is interesting to consider how Bishop uses form and rhyme less as constraint or closure in these last stanzas than as a way of enabling her to introduce ellipsis and to break syntax yet retain coherence. In 1960 Bishop wrote to Lowell disagreeing with his views about

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metre. Lowell had opined that free verse was closer to ‘experience and intuition’ whilst metrical verse tried to impress the reader with its obvious difficulty (WIA, 331). Bishop wrote back, maintaining almost the opposite, that it was free verse, at this historical moment, which was the most ‘literary’: I have a theory now that all the arts are growing more and more ‘literary’; that it is a late stage, perhaps a decadent stage, and that un-metrical verse is more ‘literary’ and necessarily self-conscious than metrical. (WIA, 335)

The undercurrents of a larger disagreement are apparent here. Bishop saw the use of personal experience in poetry as unavoidable, but she would never endorse it as an end in itself and would thus never use ‘experience’ and ‘intuition’ as self -evident values for poetry. In 1974 she wrote an irascible letter to Lowell about the flaws of confessional poetry conceding, however, that ‘one does use “painful experiences” – ALL experiences – how else could one write anything at all?’ In this same letter she tries, as she frequently did, to exempt Lowell from the general criticism of a trend with which he was associated: ‘ “Confessions” – well, you’ve been blamed for starting some of that, we know – but there’s all the difference in the world between Life Studies and those who now out-sex Anne Sexton’ (WIA, 758). Just two years earlier however, at her most intensely troubled about Lowell’s incorporation of personal experience into his poems, she had sent him a telling quotation from Kierkegaard about how an author should ‘keep verity for himself & only let it be refracted in various ways’ (WIA, 719). Part of her extensive riposte to Lowell in relation to his collection, Dolphin this was clearly meant as further corroboration of her own beliefs. For Bishop there was an important moral point, as we have seen. However, it was difficult for her to separate this from an aesthetic argument about the priority of form in poetry: it was form – by which she seems to have meant abstract form – which gave expression to feeling. Bishop made her case in an unusually emphatic letter to Anne Stevenson, which she then attempts to soften at the end: It seems to me that in the world of hate and horror we all inhabit that contemporary artists and writers, some of the “action painters” (although I like them, too), the ‘beats’, the wildest musicians, etc. – have somehow missed the point – that the real expression of tragedy, or just horror and pathos, lies exactly in man’s ability to construct, to use form. The exquisite form of a tubercular Mozart, say, is more profoundly moving than any wild electronic wail & tells more about that famous ‘human condition’ . . . But this is an idea it has probably been beyond my gifts to express in poetry. (CEPr, 433)

­128    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection This may make Bishop sound old-fashioned and, in its Eliot-like embrace of impersonality, suggest that her sympathies lay with an earlier modernist era. Indeed, in an outpouring of disgust towards American culture in a letter she wrote to Robert Lowell at around the same time, she confirmed that she felt ‘more like a late late member of the post-World War I generation than my own’ (WIA, 448). It is interesting, of course, that it is music that she turns to to illustrate her ideas about form, music that has not only been venerated as the exemplary ‘condition’ of art within an aesthetic tradition – ‘all art aspires to the condition of music’, Walter Pater wrote and Bishop copied into her notebook as a young woman – but that moves and finds its shape through time.89 Obviously affected by, even envious of, Bishop’s late villanelle, ‘One Art’ (CEP, 198) Lowell wrote to her in 1976: ‘Your stoical humor persuades me that loss is an advantage. Or is it the form – each rhythm, rhyme and pause right?’ Worrying about his own writing being ‘on the edge of being too raw’, he then wonders how to ‘hold a shield before one’s feelings and the reader: . . . Right now I’d like to borrow your villanelle armor’ (WIA, 785). Whilst Bishop described form in terms of ‘expression’ and music, Lowell here sees it in terms of self-defence and protection, as an outer casing which can stand between him and his readers. Bishop’s different, more organic, way of understanding form meant she could use its subtle mnemonics and reverberations; in her personal negotiation with its aesthetic structures and its historical meanings, she saw the way of allowing it to express more. In 1963, in ‘The Burglar of Babylon’ (CEP, 110–15), Bishop turned to one of the oldest poetic forms, the ballad. She had discovered in 1960, on her trip down the Amazon, that there was a surviving oral ballad tradition amongst the rural population in the north of Brazil which also took the form of popular pamphlets (or broadsides) and which sold in their ‘thousands’. She sent Robert Lowell an example of one of these and her enthusiasm for it, as for other forms of ‘folk’ art, is clear: I know you can’t read it properly, but sometimes they are quite good, and they are composed by people who can’t read or write, and sung to guitars. Some stanzas go in for long lists of place-names, rhymed, or people’s names, with very classical effect. (WIA, 315)

Whilst in her poems of arrival Bishop could use her ‘outsider’ position as theme, exploring the traveller’s disorientating encounter with different perspectives, the ballad form, which both draws on and appeals to memory, may have given her needed access to the historical resonances and layered meanings she could not necessarily summon in relation to a place and a culture she inevitably knew little of. During the late 1950s

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and the 1960s we can find Bishop using various ventriloquist strategies to overcome her lack of ‘insider’ knowledge in Brazil: one such strategy was translation including, as we have seen, the translation of the young girl’s memoir, The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’; another was attempting to appropriate Lota’s voice and position as landowner for her speaker in ‘Manuelzinho’ (CEP, 94–7), a point of view with which Bishop also felt herself to be guiltily complicit: I watch you through the rain, trotting, light, on bare feet, up the steep paths you have made or your father and grandfather made all over my property, with your head and back inside a sodden burlap bag, and feel I can’t endure it another minute; then, indoors, beside the stove, keep on reading a book. (CEP, 94)

The reader inside, who looks out uneasily at the lives of the poor and struggles with her own distance, could also be Bishop. The dilemma of the landlord is also the dilemma of the poet who admits Manuelzinho into her poem, or allows him to trespass there, without being able fully to comprehend his life and point of view. With another poem, ‘The Riverman’ (CEP, 103–7), which she wrote in 1959, Bishop dipped into the mythology of the Amazon region, a cultural experience she adapted before she had gained first-hand knowledge of this area of Brazil herself through travel. As a poet who placed a high value on observation both aesthetically and morally, it is not surprising that she reported herself as disapproving of her reliance on secondary sources: ‘I actually just lifted whole phrases out of a couple of chapters [of Charles Wagley’s book, Amazon Town] and stuck them together – scarcely anything of my own.’90 Lota, as a committed moderniser, was far more critical, generally disliking Bishop’s fascination with Indian myths and folk art which she thought risked becoming a fetishisation of primitivism (OA, 382). However, Lota’s qualms were not shared by Bishop’s American readers for whom, without a Brazilian context, the poem was simply an exotic fairy tale. ‘For me, it’s a magical poem that casts a spell – one of your very best’, Katherine White, her editor at The New Yorker, wrote to her.91 Despite her misgivings, Bishop found that, having written the poem, she ‘couldn’t seem to get rid of it’, and despite its oddity within her oeuvre, it clearly had some important claim on her (WIA, 315).

­130    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection The poem may well have offered another version of a solution to Bishop’s problem of being a poet in Brazil. Brett Millier has argued that, by using magical realism in ‘The Riverman’, Bishop was not so much trying to create a connection with Brazil by writing a folk tale as finding a metaphor for her decision to release herself from the everyday and follow ‘the dolphin-like spirit of the muse’.91 For Lowell, the opposite was the case and the poem was ‘a very powerful initiation poem’ that he saw as allied to ‘Arrival at Santos’, echoing her own ‘entrance’ into a new country and culture (WIA, 591). Perhaps more plausible than either of these views is the idea that the dreaminess of myth allowed Bishop to dissolve the differences between her own history and unconscious associations and those of her adopted home, enabling her to inhabit what Lorrie Goldensohn has called ‘a common dream ground’.92 The thematic connections between this poem and the dream about a fish which Bishop recorded much earlier whilst still in Key West, where she is also led through water by an amphibious spirit-guide, suggests she is tapping into imagery about creativity that is as much archetypal as it is local. From our point of view, it is interesting to note that the river man is drawn by the Dolphin’s voice and the non-semantic sounds of grunts and sighs and that his meeting with Luandinha, the river spirit, involves communication in an unknown language: She complimented me in a language I didn’t know; but when she blew cigar smoke into my ears and nostrils I understood, like a dog, although I can’t speak it yet. (CEP, 104)

These lines are reminiscent of Bishop’s perception in Brazil of what she could learn from feeling lost and seeing the world like a child or a dog. A renewed awareness of listening, and of the vital dimensions of voice which escape the purely linguistic, could well have been an aspect of her life in a country whose language she never spoke with confidence. The canine comparison comes up again in an interview with Ashley Brown in 1966 when, asked about her knowledge of Portuguese, she admits that ‘after all these years, I’m like a dog: I understand everything that’s said to me, but I don’t speak it very well’.93 The river man desires to move naturally in another medium; this means adopting a ‘magic cloak of fish’ which combines invisibility and animal or creaturely physicality as he travels through the body of the country, along ‘the river’s long, long veins’. While he hears voices talking above his head he does not communicate with them but hides deep within the river that ‘lies across

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the earth/and sucks it like a child’. Listening in a different way, even recovering the feelings and physical dependency of a child, Bishop is also trying to find a language she can be fluent in. Here the poetic medium she employs is myth but it could also be, as we shall see, memory. Returning to Bishop’s adoption of the ballad form we can see how the fact that the form is an amalgam of past and present, that it draws on a tradition, adapting it and reinventing it, might have appealed to Bishop, providing her – as with myth – with a bridge into another dimension. According to Judith Seeger, who did field work on oral ballads in Brazil, there is sometimes a ‘strained accommodation between the received text and the singer’s desire to bring it to life for contemporary listeners’ and Bishop may well have enjoyed the feeling of dissonance of a form which, with each performance, did not necessarily smooth over the awkward joins.94 For Susan Stewart every ballad singer experiences a kind of haunting, presenting the gestures of a range of others but also portraying them as if they were ‘surviving symptoms of a previous action’.95 In ‘The Burglar of Babylon’ Bishop encloses her narrative about Micuçú, the ‘burglar and killer’ who escapes briefly on to ‘the hill of Babylon’, one of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, within a timeless description of the poor of Rio. The stanza that begins the poem is also repeated at the end: On the fair green hills of Rio    There grows a fearful stain: The poor who come to Rio    And can’t go home again. (CEP, 110)

Whilst the conditions are established that make her particular narrative only one instance of a story that has been – and will be – told repeatedly (another escapee at the end means the action is about to start up again), Bishop also makes a political point: that the poor have no power and no way out and the ‘stain’ of their existence on the landscape is also a stain on the conscience of others. Bishop also names all the favelas, creating the kind of list of names that she had identified to Lowell as an important, ritualised, aspect of the ballad tradition: There’s the hill of Kerosene,    And the hill of the Skeleton, The hill of Astonishment,    And the hill of Babylon.

Again Bishop sees the political potential of the form, using it to contrast the aesthetic pleasure of the words, their range and resonance, with the reality of what they represent.

­132    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Bishop’s ballad imitates the Anglo-Scots form with quatrains rhyming ABCB, rather than the Hispanic version that does not traditionally employ rhyme though, as Seeger explains, it is sung to a four-phrase tune and uses the same structure of short stanzas, incorporating repetition over an extended narrative.96 The ballad traditionally uses direct speech, and in ‘The Burglar of Babylon’ Bishop employs a range of voices: Micuçú himself, an anonymous ‘they’ as the voice of the people, a buzzard, a policemen, his auntie and her customers, all of whom engage in dialogue that to some extent works against the forward narrative trajectory, introducing something akin to the singing voice with its slower pace, duration and emotion in the structure of the poem. Ballad commentators talk about ‘leaping and lingering’ with parts of the ballad, possibly parts that are forgotten, being passed over quickly whilst other parts are embroidered and extended. According to the ballad scholar, Bertrand Bronson, the traditional ballad is pulled in different directions, between a narrative impulse and its simple melodic form with the narrative straining towards a ‘freer and more dramatic vehicle’. Yet, he argues, it is the simple repetitive structure of the ballad that is the source of its ‘peculiar power’, binding it into a ‘level impassivity’ of style. For Bronson there is always this paradox about the ballad: it provides a structure which ‘intensifies the emotional (and lyric) effect of the words as they pass’ but also draws attention away from their content, flattening and objectifying them.97 In Bishop’s poem, too, it is less important who is speaking than that voices inhabit the poem, that they haunt the narrative with their lyrical incantations and repetitions. Where, significantly, Bishop departs from tradition is in her introduction of another frame to the poem created by her use of different spatial perspectives that suggest scale and distance and points to the huge disjunction between classes: Rich people in apartments    Watched through binoculars As long as the daylight lasted.    And all night, under the stars. (CEP, 113)

Whilst we know that Bishop watched the events she records in the poem from her apartment in Rio through her own newly acquired binoculars and that she is thus implicitly positioning herself as a figure within the poem – just as she was implicitly registering her own unease in ‘Manuelzinho’, superimposing herself on her speaker – what is important is that the different angles of perception add a barrier of silence.98 There is only a voyeuristic connection between the ‘rich people’ and what is happening in the favela, and from the hill Micuçú looks down, across an unbridgeable distance, to the ‘colored spots’ of people swim-

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ming and going about their lives. Bishop uses the ballad form to enable her to hear the other voices that might otherwise be silently repressed by her privileged position within Brazilian society, rather than merely look. The ballad’s traditional, repetitive, form makes a powerful statement about a cycle of deprivation and crime. However, Bishop’s introduction of scale, distance and perspective complicates its message, turning culpability back on those who are outside the frame of the story silently watching or even not seeing at all. Bishop thought of herself in Brazil as drawn in different directions, haunted by her past at the same time as trying to engage with the political realities of Brazil: ‘All this nostalgia and homesickness and burrowing in the past running alongside trying to write articles about the Brazilian political situation – I can’t – translating some Portuguese poems, etc. Are other writers as confused & “contradictory”?’ (WIA, 403). As she returned in poems such as ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ (CEP, 123–4) and ‘Sestina’ (CEP, 121–2) to the same period in her childhood and the same use of the child’s point of view that she had found so releasing in her prose writing, particularly ‘In the Village’, she also discovered, consistent with her experiments with Brazilian material, that she could create ‘affective fields’ through form.99 Choosing the sestina, with its strict rotation of words ending the six-line stanzas, Bishop is binding her memories into a pattern of intricate repetition. As Susan McCabe has suggested, there is something reminiscent of a child’s game, or the fort-da that Freud describes in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in the ritual repetitions and the way words and sounds, once used, come back.100 Objects, too, have magical properties and are uncannily invested with human vitality: It’s time for tea now; but the child is watching and the teakettle’s small hard tears dance like mad on the hot black stove, the way the rain must dance on the house. Tidying up, the old grandmother Hangs up the clever almanac on its string. Birdlike, the almanac hovers half open above the child, hovers above the old grandmother and her teacup full of dark brown tears. She shivers and says she thinks the house feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove. (CEP, 121)

The teakettle becomes the demonic signifier for the ‘madness’ in the house (which we might surmise has to do with the events recorded in

­134    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection ‘In the Village’) whilst the almanac shrewdly presides over time, giving nothing away – ‘I know what I know’ – to the unnervingly contained child, seemingly immersed in the present. The ‘envoi’ of the sestina, with its truncated three lines, delicately recapitulates the theme of the poem and its exploration of belatedness, of the gap between the child’s and the adult’s knowledge. Whilst the planting of tears at one level develops the idea of the child drawing a flower bed, it also suggests the full flourishing of grief to come, whilst her drawing of the ‘inscrutable house’, the very site of her trauma, accommodates in its own way a knowledge she is not yet ready to understand. For Susan McCabe the form of the sestina, in its obsessiveness and rigidity (which the child reproduces in her drawings too), is a way of holding painful experiences at bay. This is only true if we acknowledge how we are also made aware of all that cannot be drawn into the pattern, a surrounding silence, and how powerful the variations are as well as the repetitions.101 Anticipating the structure, as we do, depends on memory and whilst Bonnie Costello draws attention to how the poem is based on ‘the iconicity of memory itself’, by which she means memory’s encoding within the visual and within objects, there is also a way in which it is sounds which resonate across temporal distances and which are recalled through every repeated word.102 The poem is a vehicle for the operations and recurrence of memory, but the echoes reside in the silence too, the sense of an ominous listening which permeates the poem. In ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ (CEP, 123–4) Bishop also explored silence as a carrier of trauma. Here the stuffed loon, exhibited in the ‘cold parlor’ just as cousin Arthur is in his coffin, is a sinister, silent watcher, overlooking the scene: Since Uncle Arthur fired a bullet into him, he hadn’t said a word. He kept his own counsel on his white, frozen lake, the marble-topped table. (CEP, 123)

This memory is a frozen tableau and, just as in her story, ‘Gwendolyn’, Bishop explores the child’s limited comprehension of death by having her contain it within the same frame of reference as other inanimate objects such as dolls and pictures. For the child, if Arthur is ‘icily’ inanimate ‘forever’, it could simply mean the same as that ‘forever’ blandly applied to the maple leaf in a patriotic song, making it eternal. As Jonathan Ellis has argued, Bishop seems to have connected the snowy reality of her Nova Scotian childhood with both memory and

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loss.103 Snow was often the environment of her recall of childhood but it signalled the inaccessibility of the past as well, a deathly withholding of love and warmth. In a late, unfinished, poem, ‘For Grandfather’ (EAP, 154), looking presumably towards her own death too, she imagines her beloved grandfather Boomer, ahead of her and out of reach in a snowy landscape: Creak, creak . . . frozen thongs and creaking snow. These drifts are endless, I think; as far as the Pole they hold no shadows but their own, and ours. Grandfather, please stop! I haven’t been this cold in years.

Movement is indicated by sound, the creaking snow, as she attempts to get close. In an earlier poem about her grandfather, ‘Manners’ (CEP, 119–20), which Bishop chose as the poem to introduce the other memory poems in the ‘Elsewhere’ section of Questions of Travel, physical intimacy with the grandfather is bound up with his voice and the memory of him teaching her his own old-fashioned version of politeness and social responsibility by imagining their journey as being amongst people with whom they share greetings: My grandfather said to me As we sat on the wagon seat, “Be sure to remember to always speak to everyone you meet.” (CEP, 119)

The sadness of the poem is that the world he believes in is already lost as cars speed by them, hiding people’s faces behind clouds of dust. The child’s anxiety is revealed in a question about Willy’s pet crow – ‘How would he know where to go?’ – that echoes her question in ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’: But how could Arthur go, clutching his tiny lily, with his eyes shut up so tight and the roads deep in snow? (CEP, 124)

Going or moving beyond the boundaries of her world and knowledge, with the dangers of getting lost or disappearing altogether, resonates with other departures too. In ‘Manners’ the child’s fear is unjustified, as is consistent with the nostalgic spirit of the poem; in ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ the ‘go’, sounding through rhyme with ‘snow’, opens up the implacable consequences of death and absence and the icy route to adult recognitions.

­136    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection By the mid-1960s Bishop’s relationship with Lota was beginning to fracture along the very lines of contradiction Bishop had identified to Lowell with Lota being drawn increasingly into the agonising conflicts of Brazilian politics and, as a consequence, spending most of her time away from the house in Petropolis which had for so long represented a haven for Bishop and her writing. In her poem ‘Song for the Rainy Season’ (CEP, 99–100) Bishop celebrates the house’s porous border with nature, though it is clear this also exposes it to time and to change, and the poem thus becomes oddly prescient about the loss in her own life that was to come:    For a later era will differ. (O difference that kills, or intimidates, much of our small shadowy life!) Without water the great rock will stare unmagnetized, bare, no longer wearing rainbows or rain, the forgiving air and the high fog gone; the owls will move on and the several waterfalls shrivel in the steady sun. (CEP, 100)

After Lota’s death in 1967, Bishop tried to retain a connection with Brazil, restoring the house she had bought in Ouro Prêto. The fact that Ouro Prêto contained well preserved examples of baroque architecture and sculpture must have engendered a feeling that she was again – as in the house in Petropolis with its radically modernist design – joining up significant aspects of her artistic life. However, without Lota, Bishop could never feel at home in Brazil and she spent an uneasy period moving between Brazil and the USA before she finally severed her connections. However, if Bishop’s relationship with Brazil inevitably began to wither after Lota’s death, the poems that she wrote then, that continued the exploration of her own past which her residence in Brazil seems to have stimulated, incorporated many of the discoveries of her time there. ‘In the Waiting Room’ (CEP, 179–81) is, as Anne Stevenson has noted, the last poem Bishop wrote which related directly to childhood experience and it follows a similar structure to ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’

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with ‘short two- or three-stressed lines . . . casually counterpointed against a prose-like narrative’.104 Bishop had begun this poem at least as far back as 1967 when she sent Lowell an early version of it (WIA, 629). However, she renewed work on it in 1970, after her departure from Brazil, and in response to this later draft Lowell praised it as ‘the nearest thing you’ve written to a short story in verse’ (WIA, 682). Though the poem begins as an exploration of a child’s experience of reading and looking, its crisis comes through her hearing a cry of pain, which is simultaneously her aunt’s and her own: Suddenly, from inside, came an oh! of pain – Aunt Consuelo’s voice – not very loud or long. I wasn’t at all surprised; even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, but wasn’t. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all I was my foolish aunt, I – we – were falling, falling, our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic, February, 1918. (CEP, 180)

Having her eyes glued to the cover, to the outside or the ‘margins’, in a deflection away from traumatic experience, is a characteristic mode for Bishop that she uses extensively in writing. However, in this poem when the child is drawn inside, hearing the cry of pain, Bishop perhaps approached as close as she ever did to the representation of traumatic experience, closer even than ‘In the Village’ where the sound is transmuted into a stain. The terror of recognition for the child is that, despite her aversion both to her aunt and to the ‘horrifying’ signifiers of adult femininity she has been looking at in the ‘National Geographic’, she exists in the world – is embodied – in a way that links her to both. Feeling exposed to the eyes of others is the basis of her ‘embarrassment’, which she expresses through her anxious look away. The discomfort of embarrassment, as we saw in the previous chapter, has much to do with an inability to reconcile internal and external worlds. The child, sitting in the waiting room, itself seeming to signify that vestibular space between inside and outside, avoids looking at the faces or eyes of others

­138    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection lest they inflict on her the humiliating consequences of her own visibility, her status as a being or object in the world: I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. I gave a sidelong glance – I couldn’t look any higher – at shadowy gray knees, trousers and skirts and boots and different pairs of hands lying under the lamps. (CEP, 180)

As an adult Bishop could experience dizziness when she felt displaced or exposed without a place to ‘contain’ her or to hide in. This happened, as we have seen, both when she travelled to Europe for the first time and felt uncomfortable on board ship with the other passengers and when she was anticipating her public role as poetry consultant at the Library of Congress. As she battled with the disintegration of her relationship with Lota, and the imminent loss of her home, Bishop revealingly wrote a series of prose poems, ‘Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics’ (CEP, 163–5), which explore a disjunction between inner and outer worlds through the fact of the creatures she describes – or briefly inhabits – experiencing their bodies as awkward, displaced or disproportionate. Like the giant toad, the experience of the giant snail is of feeling ‘too big’: But O! I am too big. I feel it. Pity me. If and when I reach the rock, I shall go into a certain crack there for the night. The waterfall below will vibrate through my shell and body all night long. In that steady pulsing I can rest. All night I shall be like a sleeping ear. (CEP, 165)

Though the image of the sleeping ear relates to the appearance of the snail, it is also important that the snail’s comfort depends on the fact it can find a place that diminishes sound to a quiet, steady pulse. Adriana Cavarero has argued, as we have seen, for the inevitable openness of the ear to the world as one of its particular qualities, the fact that we cannot select in advance what we hear. This is part of the child’s distress in ‘In the Waiting Room’: she cannot escape from the voice she hears and assumes it is also ‘inside’ her. Susan Stewart cites the idea that vertigo is caused by a conflict or lack of coordination between the balance system of the inner ear and the eye. It requires the impulses aroused in the labyrinth of the ear working together with our other senses for us to keep our balance, a delicate interplay that goes awry in diseases that involve a ‘loss of distance judgment, such as agoraphobia or claustrophobia’.105 It

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is a similar disturbance of the senses, a lack of being able to judge where she is, that causes Bishop as a child in the poem to imagine the terrifying sensation of falling and plunging into the obscurity of space: I said to myself: three days and you’ll be seven years old. I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world into cold, blue-black space. (CEP, 180)

The child’s ability to re-enter the world involves establishing the physical coordinates of where she is and of what is ‘outside’. It also involves being able to anchor herself through language and to punctuate timelessness with dates and numbers. Bishop’s need to orientate herself spatially was a constant feature of her life and writing. As we shall explore in the next chapter, she sometimes played with ideas of floating or being airborne and escaping physical constraints, of a vertiginous flight from the senses. Yet, more often, such flights were not imagined as sublime or ecstatic but tempered by the need to hold on to something tangible and real. ‘In the Waiting Room’ perhaps provides us with another key as to why she preferred, as she told Lowell, to sit somewhere at the edge of the maze or labyrinth where listening, however important in its endless spiral inwards, could be held in relation to seeing, enabling her in this way also to keep her balance.

Notes 1. Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 179. 2. Tom Paulin, ‘Newness and Nowness: The Extraordinary Brilliance of Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters’, Times Literary Supplement (29 April 1994), p. 3. 3. Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, p. 98. 4. Marianne Moore, Selected Letters, ed. Bonnie Costello (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 460 (27 September, 1945). 5. Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, ed. Joelle Biele (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 111–12 (18 June 1953). 6. See comments by Frank Bidart in Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, p. 339. 7. Charles Simic, ‘The Power of Reticence’, The New York Review of Books, 26 April 2006, p. 3.

­140    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection 8. VC 77.4, p. 16. 9. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 60; 63. 10. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. trans. Leon S.Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 8. 11. See an early poem by Bishop: ‘A Lovely Finish I Have Seen’, for her own use of this particular word ‘finish’. EAP, p. 11. 12. In conversation with me, July 2011. 13. See comments by Frank Bidart in Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, pp. 272–3. 14. Luce Irigaray, ‘Flesh Colors’ in Sexes and Genealogies trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 155. 15. Irigaray, ‘Flesh Colors’ in Sexes and Genealogies, pp. 157; 161. 16. VC 75.3B, p. 153. 17. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 181. 18. VC 72B.7, p. 32. 19. Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, p. 100. 20. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 181. 21. See VC 75.3B p. 153. 22. See Camille Roman, Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II – Cold War View (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 1–6. 23. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 224. 24. Biele (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker, p. 47 (20 January 1950). 25. See Irigaray, ‘Flesh Colors’ in Sexes and Genealogies, p. 157. 26. Sigmund Freud, ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1937) in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXIII (1937–1939) (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1964), 257–69 (p. 259). 27. See Steven Gould Axelrod, ‘Elizabeth Bishop and Containment Policy’, American Literature, 75 (2003), pp. 843–67, and Roman, Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II – Cold War View, for discussions of Elizabeth Bishop’s political views and connections when in Washington. 28. Heather Treseler, ‘Dreaming in Color: Bishop’s Notebook Letter-Poems’ in Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok and Thomas Travisano (eds), Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), pp. 90–1. 29. See Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 181. 30. See Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 121; Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, pp. 111–12; Ellis, Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop, pp. 77–8. 31. ‘I baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to wear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire’, Matthew, Chapter 3: 1, King James Bible. 32. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. 105–6. 33. See George Szirtes, Fortinbras at the Fishhouses, Newcastle/Bloodaxe Lectures (Newcastle and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2009), p. 10.

The Labyrinth of Temporality    ­141 34. Treseler, ‘Dreaming in Color’, p. 99. 35. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 18. 36. VC 72.B5, p. 33. 37. See Jonathan Ellis, ‘The Snow Queen: Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia’ in Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott (eds) Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Newcastle and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2002), pp. 63–86, for a discussion of the link between ice and memory. 38. David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), p. 119. 39. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Flamingo, 1984; originally published 1980), p. 64. 40. See Kristeva, Black Sun, pp. 264–5, n. 24 for a succinct account of what Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’ means. 41. See Peggy Samuels’ thoroughly enlightening discussion of both poems and her extended working out of a relation with the artist Kurt Schwitters in Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 126–35. 42. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 149. 43. Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 126. 44. VC 73A.3, p. 18. 45. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 12. 46. Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, pp. 128–9. 47. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 92. 48. Monteiro, George (ed.), Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), p. 128. 49. VC 76.1. 50. VC 76.1. 51. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ in Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 181. 52. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), p. 156; p. 150. 53. Peter Robinson, ‘Pretended Acts: “The Shampoo” ’, in Anderson and Shapcott (eds), Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Newcastle and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2002), p. 110. 54. Lorrie Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 28. 55. Biele (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker, pp. xxiv–xxvi. 56. ‘The Shampoo’ was eventually published in The New Republic in 1955 and is the last poem of A Cold Spring. See Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 248. 57. This letter, which must belong to July 1953, is wrongly dated here as 1952. See Biele (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker, p. 112 (2 July 1953). 58. Ibid. p. 85 (10 October 1952). 59. VC, 76.1. 60. Quoted in Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, p. 4.

­142    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection 61. See Barbara Page, ‘Bishop as a Poet of Childhood Recollected’ in Laura Jehn Menides and Angela G. Dorenkamp (eds), “In Worcester Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 27. 62. Bishop’s description of play accords well with that of D. W. Winnicott in Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974; first published 1971). 63. Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII, p. 15. 64. Biele (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker, pp. 94–5 (12 November 1952). 65. Ibid. p. 98 (23 November 1952). 66. Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1999), p. 228. 67. Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2006), p. 21. 68. Travisano, Midcentury Quartet, p. 41. 69. See Robert Lowell, ‘For Elizabeth Bishop 3. Letter with poems for letter with poems’, Collected Poems, p. 594. Compare this with Bishop’s letter in Travisano and Hamilton (eds), Words in Air, p. 664 (27 February 1970). 70. Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, pp. 138–9. 71. Langdon Hammer, ‘Useless Concentration: Life and Work in Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters and Poems’, American Literary History, 9 (1997), pp. 162–80 (p. 169). 72. Colm Toíbin, ‘Follow the Leader’, London Review of Books 31 no. 9 (14 May 2009), 3–8 (p. 6). 73. Hammer, “Useless Concentration”, pp. 177–8. 74. Ellis, Art and Memory, pp. 174–5. 75. See Bishop’s blurb for Life Studies, WIA, p. 289. 76. Monteiro, ed., Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, p. 129. 77. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, pp. 81–2. 78. I have followed the convention in using this pseudonym. 79. Quoted in Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, pp. 408–9. 80. Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 206; 207; 177. 81. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, p. 178. 82. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, p. 108. 83. VC 75.4, p. 113. 84. VC 76.2. 85. See Gillian White, ‘Words in Air and “Space” in Art: Bishop’s Midcentury Critique of the United States’ in Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok and Thomas Travisano (eds), Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century: Reading the New Editions (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012), p. 266.

The Labyrinth of Temporality    ­143 86. See ‘Envois’ in A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 496. 87. Susan McCabe, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 164. 88. See Barbara Page, ‘Shifting Islands: Elizabeth Bishop’s Manuscripts’, Shenandoah 33, no. 1 (1981), 51–61 (p. 51); see also discussion in Anne Colwell, Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1997), p. 150. 89. VC 75.5, p. 45. 90. Quoted in Biele (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker, p. xxxv. 91. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 304. 92. Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, p. 210. 93. Ashley Brown, ‘An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop’ in Monteiro (ed.), Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, p. 19. 94. Judith Seeger, ‘The living ballad in Brazil: Two Performances’, Oral Tradition 2 (1987), 573–615 (p. 573). 95. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, p. 121. 96. Seeger, ‘The living ballad in Brazil’, p. 578. 97. Bertrand Bronson, The Ballad as Song (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), quoted in Seeger, ‘The Living Ballad in Brazil’, p. 576. 98. See McCabe, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, p. 179. 99. Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 157. 100. McCabe, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, p. 208. 101. Ibid. p.210. 102. Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, p. 198. 103. Ellis, ‘The Snow Queen: Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia’ in Anderson and Shapcott, Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, pp. 63–86. 104. Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, p. 33. 105. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, pp. 178–9.

Chapter 4

The Journey of Lines

You and Me Among the Kites Newly established in the house in Petropolis in Brazil in 1952, Bishop recorded a ‘strange’ incident in her notebook: The other day we saw something very strange. I suddenly noticed what looked like a thread, or a drawn line, in the air, up in the vast gorge, or steep valley behind the house – about ¼ of a mile away, apparently. It stretched right across, from mt. to mt. – it disappeared against the rock but was visible against the green – about ½ mile of it, slack; like a slack-wire artists wire(?)

Commenting on the fact that it took a while for other people, including Lota, to believe her and see the phenomenon with their own eyes, she goes on: The next day it wasn’t there. The only possible explanation is that it was the string of an escaped kite that had somehow blown that far & caught on one side, with the string on the other – it was an extremely long string, if that is what it was. (I kept thinking of Klee’s ‘take a walk with a line’).1

If this struck Bishop as an odd thing to see from her remote mountain home, the fact that she noticed it was not, since it seemed almost magically to allow her to describe, in a different landscape, many of her artistic passions: wavering lines, appearance and disappearance and kites. She was also able to make a link with the painter Paul Klee, whose work she particularly admired. Whilst living in Florida as a young woman in the late 1930s, Bishop had enjoyed flying kites with her friends. In her notebook, she described the exhilaration of there being a strong wind blowing and then watching the kite as it ‘stands in the air steadily – moving very slightly from side to side once in a while’.2 She had done something similar in 1938 in Provincetown with a kite which may have been a present from Moore but which, in any case, she saw as some-

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thing her friend would take a vicarious pleasure in: ‘I actually had it up a mile one day. It looks wonderful that high up over the ocean’ (OA, 77). Kites linked the different landscapes in Bishop’s life: in Brazil they were frequently to be seen on Copacabana beach, close to the apartment Bishop shared with Lota. In 1967, worried about the interview she had done with a reporter in Rio for Time magazine about Lowell, Bishop nevertheless rejoiced in the photograph they had used of ‘you & me among the kites’ (WIA, 622). We know that, as well as appreciating visual art, Bishop also regularly painted throughout her life; since the publication of William Benton’s edition of Bishop’s paintings, Exchanging Hats, we can also judge something close to the full range of her work.3 Bishop herself was diffident about the results: ‘From time to time I paint a small gouache or watercolor and give them to friends’ she wrote in 1971, adding emphatically but ‘they are not art – NOT AT ALL’.4 In a way her paintings functioned as her notebooks did, as a traveller’s record of places and interiors she temporarily inhabited, and there is occasional overlap between them, with quick pen or pencil sketches interspersed into her writing. Though little doodles of kites turn up in her notebooks, there is only one painting where she includes kites: ‘Harris School’ (p. 21), painted in Key West probably in the late 1930s or early 1940s. In this painting kites emerge from behind the sombre, imposing building like quizzical faces, introducing a note of casual playfulness. Their strings are stretched at a jaunty angle to the straight lines of the school and disappear, with no starting point, attached to an invisible ground or person elsewhere. In other paintings, however, Bishop used as a frequent motif not kites exactly but strings and wires extending across space: in ‘County Courthouse’ (p. 23), also from Key West, wires dangle uselessly downwards, again disappearing outside the frame of the painting, intersecting with the electricity cables that run straight across between the poles; whilst in ‘Interior with Extension Cord’ (p. 43), which is undated, an electricity cable crosses the ceiling and travels down the wall of an empty room, attached finally to a lamp on a writing desk. In all these paintings – and indeed in most of the paintings Bishop did – people are absent, their presence only marked by objects such as a hastily abandoned bicycle or the kites in ‘The Harris School’ or a half-occluded mirror, a pen and an open door in ‘Interior with Extension Cord’. Both Lorrie Goldensohn and Peggy Samuels have remarked on Bishop’s use of lines in her paintings and have seen them as a subject in themselves as well as a means of tracing other representational objects. Goldensohn remarks about another Key West painting, ‘Olivia’ (p. 19), this time of a wooden clapboard church, where lines mark out the angles

­146    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection and planes of the building as well as tracing cables or wires running between a pole and their invisible destination behind the church: ‘Line in this picture – as in “Interior with Extension Cord” and others that mix the pen and brush, the writer’s and painter’s instruments – is both representation, an abstraction contouring a plane, a device representing the thing, and also the thing itself.’5 For Peggy Samuels, Bishop’s interest in lines in her paintings, particularly what she calls the ‘fluctuation between line as free graphic performance and line used to enclose form’, recalls Paul Klee.6 As we have seen, Bishop was familiar with Klee’s famous dictum about taking a line for a walk and must have known the relevant passage in his notebook: ‘A line comes into being. It goes for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk.’7 The word ‘aimlessly’ is important, recalling the automatism of surrealism and the reason Klee was enthusiastically claimed by the group though never seeking an association with it himself.8 Bishop would have read Klee’s further elaboration of this idea in the extracts from his notebooks, published in 1941 in the catalogue by the Museum of Modern Art edited by her friend Margaret Miller, which accompanied the memorial exhibition of Klee’s work which travelled to various venues in the USA. ‘The nature of graphic art’, Klee wrote, ‘leads to abstraction’ and then he sketched in words ‘a little journey’ he could take through line: The dead point must be overcome with the first act of movement (line). After a short time, stop to get your breath (broken line, articulated by repeated stops). A look back to see how far we have already come (counter-­ movement). In your mind consider the road from here to there (bundle of lines). A stream wishes to hinder us; we use a boat (wave movement). Further on there would have been a bridge (series of curves).9

Klee extends this journey over another two paragraphs, discovering en route a way of making the creative process itself engender a landscape rather than map on to, or aim for, somewhere that already exists. What is interesting about Klee’s description of line is the way subjectivity and landscape merge in an ‘intermediary realm’, a spatial equivalent for that middle voice between active and passive tenses which Klee, according to Robert Kudielka, identified from Greek grammar and then used to describe the way drawing ‘sets itself in motion’.10 Klee saw the artist modestly as a mediator, occupying that place ‘between’, neither controlled by the unconscious nor totally in control, participating in the ordinary ongoing life of society and the cycles of nature yet offering himself as a conduit for creative energy: ‘He neither serves nor commands, but acts only as a go-between. His position is humble. He himself is not the beauty of the crown, it has merely passed through

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him.’11 Bishop would have approved, of course, of this lack of grandiosity. It is also worth putting this notion of ‘an intermediary realm’ alongside the interest Bishop evinced in the term ‘interstitial’ in her notebooks, which we looked at in Chapter 2, and the importance for her as a poet of exploring that intermediate (or interstitial) space. Bishop went to see exhibitions of Klee’s work in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940 and at the Buchholz Gallery in 1950, and used his paintings as important reference points. Pushed to her riskiest disagreement with Moore over her poem ‘Roosters’ in 1940, Bishop invoked Klee’s ‘Man of Confusion’ as a visual equivalent of her state of mind and as a talisman to share with Moore if she could be tempted to visit Klee’s exhibition with her (OA, 96–7). Later, in 1961, in an exchange with Robert Lowell about the contemporary poetic landscape, and trying cautiously to explore differences between them, she again turned to Klee to help her, this time referring to his painting ‘Fear’: What you say about Marianne is fine: ‘terrible, private, and strange revolutionary poetry. There isn’t the motive to do that now.’ But I wonder – isn’t there? Isn’t there even more – only it’s terribly hard to find the exact and right and surprising enough, or un-surprising enough, point at which to revolt now? The Beats have just fallen back on an old corpse-strewn or monumentstrewn battle-field – the real real protest I suspect is something quite different. (If only I could find it. Klee’s picture called FEAR seems close to it, I think . . .) (WIA, 364)

Both these paintings from the 1930s, both ‘Man of Confusion’ and ‘Fear’, provide formal equivalents for intense emotional states, with the abstract figures drawing their expressiveness from the way they both resemble human characters and faces yet are fragmented, with relations between the parts relying instead on line, shape and colour. Kudielka has remarked on the ‘latent physiognomies’ of Klee’s late works, even though their style is abstract: ‘We may objectively recognize nothing but completely abstract elements, and yet we have an undeniable impression that the painting is looking back at us.’ This is true of both these paintings where the human seems also to underlie the abstraction, to be covert in it or to look out from it with a disquieting emotional effect for the viewer.12 Commenting on Bishop’s writing for The New York Times in 1981, two years after Bishop’s death, Mary McCarthy employed a highly apposite metaphor: ‘I envy the mind hiding in her words, like an “I” counting up to a hundred waiting to be found.’13 McCarthy, identifying a particular quality in Bishop’s style, also provides a very suggestive bridge between a child’s game and the modes of deferral and

­148    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection concealment which underlie Bishop’s work, coincidentally offering a way of thinking about what Klee and Bishop seem to have shared. Klee’s innovative understanding of line in drawing depended partly on his being able to see how different art forms traversed each other, suggesting common analogies or theoretical principles, and here too, with her own interest in different modes of expression, Bishop might have sensed an artistic compatibility. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, Bishop had already arrived at her own sense of how Webern’s music was the ‘music equivalent of Klee’ before she knew about their shared involvement with the group of artists known as the ‘Blue Rider Group’ (WIA, 250). Klee, himself an accomplished musician, developed the idea of how line and melody were similar and thus the ‘contrapuntal’ way in which lines could relate to each. According to Andrew Kagan, who has written extensively about Klee’s relationship with music: ‘A drawing in this “contrapuntal” manner would begin with the invention of a single, linear subject (the “main theme” or “melody”). The shape of all additional lines in the drawing would be determined largely by their relationship to the initial subject.’14 In his dynamic understanding of the line, Klee also saw little difference between time and space and labelled the attempt to distinguish between them an ‘academic delusion’: ‘Motion underlies all stages of becoming . . . When a point moves and becomes a line, it requires time.’ The same was true of the spectator whose activity also required time, and whose looking followed the same path of discovery: ‘He brings each part of the picture into his field of vision, and in order to see another he must leave the one just seen.’ In thinking about movement or process in art, Klee added another art form to his repertory of analogies: writing. Klee, whose resonant titles for his paintings give some indication of his interest in poetry and the poetic metaphors which underlay his art, was also aware of the merging of drawing and writing as forms of inscription with words or hieroglyphs regularly finding their way into his graphic art: ‘The genesis, or process, of writing is a very good image of movement. The work of art, too, is experienced primarily as a process of formation, never as a product.’15 Lorrie Goldensohn has remarked on a similar process of merger within Bishop’s pictures, with lines ‘probing the continuities between letters, pictographs, and likeness in varying assemblies of coded meanings’.16 In paintings such as ‘Tombstones for Sale’ (p. 31) or ‘Graveyard with Fenced Graves’ (p. 33) the gravestones present an ominous whiteness, like blank pages, invisibly marked or waiting to be written on; in others such as ‘Interior with Extension Cord’ or ‘Cabin with Porthole’ (p. 45) there are illegible markings on the wall or on labels; whilst in paintings such as ‘Chandelier’ (p. 53) or ‘Table with Candelabra’ (p. 59) the zigzag

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notation of pattern is hard to distinguish from scribbled handwriting. In her notebooks, particularly her early notebooks, it is clear Bishop was alert to instances where what she saw in nature seemed to resemble writing. On board SS Britannic, on her way to Europe for the second time, she described ‘the lines or strings of white on the mounting wave – as if the white crest were being raveled out by the pressure of a reciprocal push’.17 She also noted, back in Florida, the capacity of waves to trace what looked like ‘white handwriting’ on the beach.18 Bishop’s notebooks from the late thirties with comments about the kite mentioned earlier, and about finding a ‘big rubber ball’ in the water, ‘bouncing lazily along’ as well as a description of the beach where the sky was ‘very dark-grayblue but all the objects in the foreground were in thick golden sunlight coming from the back of us’, begin to present us with a resonant archive of images for her later poem, ‘The End of March’ (CEP 199–200).19 Indeed the process by which Bishop transfers or transports her writing from one place to another, from one time to another, is apparent everywhere in her work culminating, however, in the poems in Geography III (1976) and the later New and Uncollected Poems (1978–79). If lines provide a suggestive trope within her writing as well as her painting, they might also be seen, operating at the margins or edges of what is figurable, as suggesting connections and extensions which go beyond the immediate work. By thinking of them as a kind of trace or an energy that goes across her writing they could also be seen as marking out the poem’s process of arrival, the links that have accumulated not just across the written page but beyond it, over time. In the last, great, phase of her career, from 1972 until her death in 1979, when she was living in Harvard and then Boston, Bishop returned in many of her poems to earlier experiences, themes and images, ‘refiguring’ them ‘in wonderful ways’, as David Kalstone says, but she did so with a sense of an intervening gap, a separation that is also a conjunction, a line.20 Part of the achievement of these poems is their voice, which seems almost magically to follow its own breath and living presence across the poem. But the voice also draws on a silence, a history which is reserved, unspoken and which, whilst never ‘inside’ the poem, makes the hesitations and uncertainties of the voice, like the drawing of a line, one single tracing across a far longer – perhaps interminable and infinitely complex – approach to meaning. It is difficult to employ the word ‘trace’, of course, without referring to Jacques Derrida’s famous use of the term throughout his work by which he signals – rather than defines – what he sees as the mark of the ‘absence of a presence’, a simulacrum which can never be thought of as present but which refers endlessly beyond itself to something other than itself. A text – a word Derrida uses only provisionally – becomes for him

­150    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection a ‘fabric of traces’ overrunning ‘all the limits assigned to it’, putting in doubt the very boundary between inside and outside.21 In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida links the trace not just to writing but to the artist’s drawing of a line. As outline, Derrida believes, line wears itself out so as to mark ‘the single edge of a contour: between the inside and the outside of a figure’. Derrida is interested in the place where the line is merely a trace, the threshold where only the surroundings appear, never the trace itself: ‘Once the limit is reached, there is nothing more to see, not even black and white, not even figure/form, and this is the trait, this is the line itself.’ Accordingly, for Derrida, the line or trace, as he describes it, has no density or meaning, has no identity to speak of: ‘Nothing even participates in it. The trait joins and adjoins only in separating.’22 For Derrida the nature of line contributes to his argument that it is impossible ever fully and finally to settle the distinction between the inside and the outside of a work: lines define a boundary which turns out to be an opening, a connection to another place, all that had to happen before the work came into being. Writing from a very different perspective, that of a social anthropologist who is interested in various different kinds of constructed lines including those apparent in writing, weaving, drawing and map-making, Tim Ingold has made an interesting connection between telling a story and drawing a line on a sketch map: ‘The two commonly proceed in tandem as complementary strands of one and the same performance. Thus the storyline goes along, as does the line on the map.’23 That lines can cross into different mediums and practices, forging connections, is part of their fascination and it has been part of the argument of this book, of course, that Bishop’s journeys were intimately connected for her with the process of writing, not only providing her with her distinctive material but at times enabling her to perceive direction, to draw boundaries, and giving her an impetus she otherwise lacked. Predictably, however, as Tim Ingold’s argument proceeds, the lines also become more complex with the ‘relations’ in narrative occurring not between objects but other paths. Connections are not forged between ‘prelocated entities’ but are, as he says, ‘traced through the terrain of lived experience’: ‘Far from connecting points in a network, every relation is one line in a meshwork of interwoven trails.’24 Like Derrida’s traces therefore, the only way of closing off the endless network of traces may be arbitrarily, by trying to assign a boundary, thus disguising, but by no means precluding, the way narrative and text will always overflow their own limits. As a student at Vassar, Bishop wrote an extraordinarily mature essay, ‘Dimensions for a Novel’, to which she appended a telling epigraph from Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘The Stars at Tallapoosa’ from Harmonium: ‘The

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lines are straight and swift between the stars.’ Bishop’s argument in the essay is that the novel has traditionally thought of itself in linear terms as a military-style march towards a single destination: ‘Novels as we know them are still fairly linear: they go along, in some sort of army style; I can think of none to which the march figure could not be applied’ (CEPr, 481). Bishop’s alternate configuration for the novel draws on T.S. Eliot’s famous interpretation of the relation between a literary tradition and new writing in his 1921 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. There he sees ‘the existing monuments’ as forming an order that is then modified by the introduction of new work. ‘The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be if ever so slightly, altered.’25 According to Bishop a similar sense of ‘constant readjustment’ could be applied to any sequence of events. Having claimed that ‘one is born with a perfect sense of generalities’, she offers a strangely ominous narrative where a five-year-old ‘looks around the dinner table at the cumulative family with as great a sense of recognition and understanding as ever comes later on’ (CEPr, 483). Bishop, of course, was separated from her mother at just the age she chooses to highlight and there is much to suggest, as we have seen, that something became fixed for her around that time. Applying her insight to the novel, Bishop proposes a form where lines may create a changing pattern but essentially go nowhere: ‘From a vacant pinpoint of certainty start out these geometrically accurate lines, star-beams, pricking out the past, or present, or casting ahead into the future.’ The novel as she envisages it is a continual process of elaboration through ‘cross-references, echoes, cycles’, going over the same ground. She then uses a telling image as she tries to clarify further, seeing this pattern of repetitions and echoes, which may ambiguously belong to the outside or the inside, as one which ‘spreads its net over past and sometimes future events or thoughts’ (CEPr, 484). In 1940 Bishop wrote to Moore, as we have seen, about how difficult she found it to discover a syntax that could link her memorable objects together: the ‘things’ that preoccupied her yet lacked propulsive energy. In her notebook some five years earlier she had reflected on her childhood and the resurfacing of memories that brought with them an accompanying feeling of unhappiness. She refers ironically to her ‘ “good fortune” ’, signalling through inverted commas that she is simply ventriloquising an adult’s platitudinous response to the distressed child. She then continues: A set of apparently disconnected, unchronological incidents out of the past have been reappearing. I suppose there must be some string running them

­152    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection altogether, some spring watering them all. Some things will never disappear, but rather clear up, send out roots, as time goes on. They are my family monuments, sinking a little more into the earth year by year, boring (?) silently, but becoming only more firm, and inscribed with meaning gradually legible, like letters written in “magic ink”.26

The ‘monuments’ seem not unlike Eliot’s literary monuments, timeless – outside the order of time – yet belonging to the past and time as well. Eliot’s notion of a ghostly revival of the past in the present, of an ‘already living’ past, fits well with the disordered time of traumatic belatedness which Bishop is describing where the past does not simply belong to the past but the present too. Of course the word ‘string’ is particularly significant for our discussion. For Bishop the string or principle of connectedness, not immediately apparent, had to be inferred as a way of making sense of her otherwise fragmented and random memories that resurfaced involuntarily without a reason. Significantly, Bishop sees writing – working through a delay or time lapse, a period of latency or invisibility – as a way of eventually producing meaning, of creating the conditions for the understanding which she currently lacks. Rather like Freud’s mystic writing pad, Bishop’s invisible ink proposes a link between the processes of the unconscious and models of writing where language both stores and conceals what may not yet be known.27 The child psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott, in his case study of a boy who is preoccupied with string helpfully differentiates between two meanings. On the one hand, for Winnicott, string is an ordinary ‘extension’ of communication: ‘String joins, just as it also helps in the wrapping up of objects and in the holding of unintegrated material. In this respect string has a symbolic meaning for everyone.’ However, a ‘perversion’ develops, so Winnicott argues in the case of his patient, if the function of string changes from communication into something else: into a denial of separation: ‘As a denial of separation string becomes a thing in itself, something that has dangerous properties and must needs be mastered.’28 This case study is embedded in Winnicott’s discussion of ‘transitional objects’ or an ‘intermediate area’ of experience between inner and outer life, which is linked both with a child’s play and with adult creativity. We have seen throughout, and particularly in the use Bishop made of notebooks, her interest in writing in this intermediary area, or transitional space, where the provisional can be kept alive. Winnicott’s notion of a ‘perversion’, which denies separation, denotes the continuation into adult life of the use of an object without the mobility and experimentation experienced through creativity. If some notion of internal fixity and frozenness was part of Bishop’s early traumatic inheritance, as well as a fear of disconnection, then a way beyond

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that, tracing the whole process of emergence into forms of creativity and making, became one of her most compelling themes. Bishop’s allusions to nets in her writing, the word she used to describe her desired writing practice in ‘Dimensions for a Novel’, begin to take on a special significance as she casts her mind towards tentative forms of connection. The nets in her poems could be ‘real’ nets, as in ‘At the Fishhouses’, or the figurative, torn nets of ‘Cape Breton’ that are formed out of the melodic ‘lines’ of birdsong meshing together. The idea that material could modulate into sound, the product of the same inchoate coming together or coming apart of different strands or lines, is incorporated by Bishop into her story ‘In the Village’ where the material of the mother’s new dress seems to figure more than its own unravelling: ‘The purple stuff lies on a table; long white threads hang all about it. Oh, look away before it moves by itself, or makes a sound; before it echoes, echoes, what it heard!’ Later the child will think of herself as ‘caught in a skein of voices’ with her aunts and her grandmother speaking loudly or in whispers ‘the same things over and over’ (CEPr 67; 75). ‘Memory weaves, unweaves the echoes’ as Bishop says in ‘Objects and Apparitions’ (CEP, 201), her translation of Octavio Paz, suggesting both the reverberations of memory and their changing, unstable configurations. Bishop is interested in the moment before the pattern becomes fixed, when what is held loosely in the net of her attention and memory gives it shape and meaning yet only briefly, before it dissipates again. In other poems the lines are charged with an electricity or energy that is both real and symbolic. Just as in her paintings, the lines could be cables with the potential for communicating across different registers, conducting invisible currents or sending out messages from the hidden realm of dream and desire. This is from an early poem, ‘From the Country to the City’ (CEP, 15), where her attention is caught by the telephone wires: Flocks of short, shining wires seem to be flying sidewise.    Are they birds? They flash again. No. They are vibrations of the tuning-fork    you hold and strike against the mirror-frames, then draw for miles, your dreams,   out countrywards.

In the unpublished poem, ‘“It is marvellous to wake up together”’ (CEP, 283), electrical wires – ‘the black mesh of wires in the sky’ – transmit the surge of sexual excitement, though there are also ‘electrical wires dangling’ which carry a warning and are possibly meant as conduction wires, earthing any lightning strike. However, as we saw with the

­154    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection l­ightning rod on the top of the church in ‘In the Village’, which is also imagined as a tuning fork – a figure anticipated, it seems, in Bishop’s early poem above – there is little difference – with maybe no more than a line separating them – between avoiding or diverting and inviting danger. Certainly there is something potentially risky about those unattached, ‘dangling’ wires. It is worth recalling the image that André Breton used of a ‘conduction wire’ joining interior and exterior realities (see p. 49).Though Breton may have desired a live connection between the inside and the outside, it is possible Bishop was more wary of the consequences of unlimited receptivity to unconscious energies. Lines can of course run in either direction, to ground or to the sky, and Bishop’s eye was often drawn upwards. If kites provided an important introductory figure for this chapter it is precisely because they engage with a line that travels away or beyond, attached to a person yet never securely in their control. In ‘The Armadillo’ (CEP, 101–2), the poem Lowell admired as her ‘greatest quatrain poem’ (WIA, 591) and which he tried to emulate in ‘Skunk Hour’, Bishop begins the poem by describing ‘illegal fire balloons’ in the same landscape in Brazil as she had spotted the string of what she surmised was an escaped kite. Bishop first describes their upward flight as celestial or transcendent, a wondrous – though illusory – merging with the stars, before their inevitable downward drift or dangerous plunge to earth: Once up against the sky it’s hard to tell them from the stars – planets, that is – the tinted ones: Venus going down, or Mars, or the pale green one. With a wind, they flare and falter, wobble and toss; but if it’s still they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or, in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous. (CEP, 101)

Bishop lets her poem hover with the balloons in that intermediate area, charting their ‘solemn’ passage of separation from the human and fascinated by their unstable and unpredictable motion, before she too changes focus, concentrating instead on one incident and the holocaust caused by the fire balloon’s perilous fall to earth. It seems as if, airborne, the poet’s attention can enjoy the freedom to drift where it will; on the ground, however, the consequences of violence need to be understood

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through the vulnerability and suffering of particular creatures. At the end of the poem the poet rejects the seductions of ‘dreamlike mimicry’ perhaps, as Bonnie Costello suggests, also berating herself for the way her descriptions, resting on appearance, risk aestheticising suffering:29 Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!

In the last stanza, without succumbing to anthropomorphism, Bishop makes sure we also hear the ‘piercing cry’ and the panic. There is only one poem where Bishop imagined unencumbered flight, a leap into transcendence, and it is, poignantly, her last published poem. In her ‘Sonnet’ (CEP, 214) she allows herself to pose a pure opposite to ‘caught’, the word which introduces the poem, and which she images in terms of a spirit level and a compass needle, instruments not only of measurement but of variation and hovering indecision. The poem then takes a decisive, opposite turn: Freed – the broken thermometer’s mercury running away; and the rainbow-bird from the narrow bevel of the empty mirror, flying wherever it feels like, gay!

With its pared down dimeter lines the sonnet itself seems like a string, a thread or a line, leading our eyes upwards to the free play, not of a kite but of pure concept. Leaving behind things, the ‘awful’ ballast of the world, Bishop finds a playful or ‘cheerful’ other state, not sexual but abstract. The poem stands at the opposite pole to much of her later work which has as its theme ambivalence and reconciliation as her one brief, carefree fling with transcendence.

Writing and Indebtedness In the course of defining his ‘intermediate state’ of play and creativity, D. W.Winnicott described ‘an acknowledgment of indebtedness’ as one of the ways we experience both separation and the ability, thereafter, to relate.30 In this Winnicott seems to echo his mentor Melanie Klein

­156    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection who used a similar term, ‘gratitude’, even though he differed from her in important respects and was troubled by Klein’s emphasis in her late work on envy as the other, innate and destructive aspect of the infant’s relation with its objects. Bishop knew Melanie Klein’s work and read her book Envy and Gratitude referring to it to Lowell in 1959, just two years after it was first published, as a ‘grim little book’ yet ‘superb in its horrid way’ (OA, 371). Bishop’s encounters with Kleinian psychoanalysis were also more immediate and personally painful since, latterly in their relationship, Lota sought help from an analyst, Décio de Souza, who had trained with Klein (OA, 452). Bishop also, apparently, had occasional sessions with him herself during this stressful and difficult period in her life, writing to Anny Baumann, who had acted as support to Bishop for more than twenty years: ‘I am telling you all my troubles again – I have no one else to tell them to! – except once in a while I see the analyst, too – but he is not much practical help to me, much as I like him’ (OA, 462). When Bishop published her third volume of poems, Questions of Travel, in 1965 she found herself particularly moved by Lowell’s tribute to her in his blurb where he had written, ‘what cuts so deep is that each poem is inspired by her tone, a tone of large, grave tenderness and sorrowing amusement’ (WIA, 580). She wrote back, ‘isn’t it odd, out of all the nerves & troubles that something fairly “serene” does come?’ (WIA, 583). For Klein, according to her psychoanalytic model in Envy and Gratitude, ‘serenity’ could come about in old age if someone had established in infancy a strong enough identification with a ‘good and life-giving internalized object’ and was thus able to withstand, and win freedom from, the inevitable and destructive power of their own envy. Klein saw creativeness as linked to a feeling of gratitude for pleasures given and received in infancy and which could then be returned to in adulthood so that ‘even after great adversity and mental pain’ it was still possible for people to ‘regain their peace of mind’.31 In her application of Kleinian ideas to art and the artist, Hannah Segal stressed less the good object of infancy than the idea of a movement beyond destruction. For Segal all creation is really ‘re-creation’, the taking of a ‘now lost and ruined object, a ruined internal world and self’ and striving to make them whole again, trying to ‘infuse life into dead fragments, re-create life’.32 Making restoration or reparation for damage caused or endured is important for ‘creativeness’, according to Segal, and a return to the ‘goodness’ of infancy also becomes a return for it. It is important to note as well that such returns were not developmental, not related to a single stage, but repeated throughout life. In this way Klein and her followers moved away from a Freudian notion of repression, or the past as prior,

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viewing the past instead as ever present. The past and present were linked, therefore, as were internal and external worlds, along a single plane or line where both have equal reality. That Bishop placed ‘gratitude’ at the root of her poem ‘The End of March’ (CEP, 199–200) is significant, deriving deeper resonance in terms of the connection Klein makes between gratitude and creativity and art or writing as a return. By 1974, when Bishop wrote this poem, she had been teaching at Harvard for several years. Never a natural teacher she did not have a following like Lowell, seeming ‘dutiful’ rather than ‘inspired’, and discouraging students from ‘hanging around after class’.33 One of the places that Bishop retreated to after term ended, in order get her mind ‘on higher things than marks and bills’ (OA, 586), was a house in Duxbury, Massachusetts owned by two friends, Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read, and her poem, so she wrote to Robert Lowell, started out as a sort of ‘joke thank-you-note’ to them for the loan of the house (WIA, 767). That the feeling of gratitude persisted is evidenced by the fact that their names appear in a dedication and that Bishop was adamant that they should against the advice of her editor Robert Henderson at the New Yorker, who saw dedications, unless they were intrinsic to the meaning, as irrelevant. ‘I’d like to insist again and include the names . . . (even if they aren’t statesmen)’ Bishop wrote testily to him, repeating her tribute to her friends: ‘The poem is really a thank-you letter for their great hospitality to me.’34 Duxbury, as it turned out, was an evocative place for Bishop and not only because the Atlantic coastline was in general likely to remind her of the tides and weather of her childhood. When Lowell bought a house and settled there in the 1950s she had written to him about her own memories of Duxbury, which were quite specific, and contained a rare reference to her mother: ‘I visited there with my mother at the age of three. We visited a Mrs Tewkesbury of Duxbury and I had chickenpox.’ She then extolled it as ‘a wonderful place to live’ with ‘good beaches’ (WIA, 146). One of these beaches is the setting for the walk that structures her poem ‘The End of March’: It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach. Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. (CEP, 199)

This scene of an inhibited, depleted nature also seems to herald a slightly quizzical stoicism; the walk continues despite the bad weather and the

­158    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection good sense that might counsel otherwise. It is worth dwelling here briefly on the implication of Bishop’s use of the word ‘indrawn’ in amplification of her first choice ‘withdrawn’, thus effecting a rapid movement between outer and inner states, between what is out of reach and what is held in reserve. Bishop had reflected on the word ‘indrawn’ in another context, more than twenty years before walking along the beach on Sable Island, an almost deserted island just south of Halifax. Here the place and a distinctive characteristic of Nova Scotian speech, what she calls the ‘indrawn yes’, seem to merge: Anyone familiar with the accent of Nova Scotia will know what I mean when I refer to the Indrawn Yes. In all their conversations Nova Scotians of all ages, even children, make use of it. It consists of, when one is told a fact – anything, not necessarily tragic but not of a downright comical nature, – saying “yes,” or a word halfway between “yes” and “yeah,” while drawing in breath at just the same time. It expresses both commiseration and an acceptance of the Worst; and it occurred to me as I walked along over those fine, fatalistic sands, that Sable Island with its mysterious engulfing powers was a sort of large scale expression of that Indrawn Yes.35

The idea that the landscape in ‘End of March’ is also, like here, a tonal landscape, a landscape defined by a sustained note, the musical equivalent of ‘fatalism’, is suggestive. Equally important is the notion that memory is already present in the hinterland of the poem, drawn into it not only through the passage of ‘a lone flight of Canada geese’ but through its own ‘indrawn’ preparatory inhalation. The discovery of the string in the poem – possibly a kite string – could also be said to come with archival traces that are transferred into this poem from other places within Bishop’s life and writing. However, that idea is also figured in the ghostly presence attached to the seemingly infinite string that forms a ‘snarl’ (an early anticipation of the lion?) but never quite fulfils its promise of a human identity:               Then we came on lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string, looping up to the tide-line, down to the water, over and over. Finally, they did end: a thick white snarl, man-size, awash, rising on every wave, a sodden ghost, falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost . . . A kite string? – But no kite.

The desired destination of her walk, or narrative line, in the poem, is a ‘dream house’ which seems to share the same characteristics of retreat and isolation as the lighthouse Bishop had conjured in a letter written

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to Robert Lowell in 1960: ‘I’ve always had a daydream of being a lighthouse keeper, absolutely alone, with no-one to interrupt my reading or just sitting’, a fantasy she then goes on to relate to her memory of her grandmother’s house in Nova Scotia. Haunting as this idea has been to her the reality, as she acknowledges, would be ‘unbearable’ (WIA, 335). Her ‘proto-dream-house’ or ‘crypto-dream-house’ in the ‘End of March’, its doubly phantasmal status spaced out along the line of hyphens, seems composed of things that are lined up crookedly – pilings, shingles, palisade, railway ties – and which provide only an unstable or ‘dubious’ underpinning for the subject’s dwelling: I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of – are they railroad ties? (Many things about this place are dubious.)

The metaphorical conversion of shingles into artichoke, based on their visual equivalence, also opens into a parenthetical question – ‘boiled in bicarbonate of soda?’ – a sort of inner chuckle through which the outside, now edible, is brought inside. The inner space is itself an austere one – ‘two bare rooms’ and ‘boring books’ – but various elements seem stored there from Bishop’s past: the foggy days, associated with Nova Scotia; the stove she connected with her grandmother; even a favourite drink, grog à l’américaine, which seems to suggest its own intoxicating effects and hints perhaps at Bishop’s important historic and enduring relationship with alcohol. As she imagines this place, as happens in so many of her paintings, she includes a wire, running in this case from the house to somewhere out of sight: ‘off behind the dunes’. However, that ‘out of sight’ also implies beyond visibility and the poem thus gestures towards connections and energy drawn from an unknown source, existing somewhere else, before the poem. The ‘dream house’ of Bishop’s imagination is also a ‘room of one’s own’, a scene of reading, the very space that allows both reader and writer to take up residence within their books through absorption and concentration and which comes then to figure the interior space made possible by reading.36 By imagining this space, Bishop is also placing herself in relation to not just the individual experience of reading and writing but a tradition of reading rooms within literature. The descent into melancholy at the end of this section – ‘And that day the wind

­160    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection was much too cold/even to get that far,/and of course the house was boarded up’ – repeats the gesture of dismissal with which Bishop ended her fantasy about the lighthouse in her letter to Lowell. There is something inevitable about the reality being unable to match the fantasy but Bishop’s fatalism, her use of that patient ‘of course’, suggests too that notion of ‘resignation without undue bitterness’ that Klein saw as an aspect of successful ageing,37 the acceptance that it is only through loss, and through being able to integrate the experience of mourning, that ‘re-creation can take place’ or an inner harmony be restored.38 Bishop’s recuperative gesture in this poem is a return, going back over the same ground, but this time perceiving new detail – the multicoloured stones – and introducing the idea of play. An understanding of the importance of play is the new notion that Melanie Klein brought to psychoanalysis, seeing it as the way to create a passage between internal and external worlds. Play, for Klein, is a form of symbol formation: by transferring fantasies and feelings to objects it is a means of expressing, according to Klein, ‘what the adult expresses predominantly by words’.39 Tim Ingold notes, at the beginning of his book on lines, how frequently his colleagues misheard the word lines as lions, and in Bishop’s poem it is as if line leads to lion both as an animation of the sun, with a likeness based on colour, and as a (mis)alliance of linguistic signs.40 The putative figure of the lion also helps impart a kind of splendour, at the same time transforming its potentially aggressive associations into a benign playfulness, with the kite no longer thought of as simply lost, as in the outward journey, but as having been in movement before. The tense, the same tense of a future-past we have commented on in relation to earlier poems (see pp. 81–2), leaves open a space for the imagination and here enacts how traces of a past, now living rather than frozen or dead, open up new acts of creativity. The particular emotional quality of Bishop’s late poems was recognised by her friend James Merrill who wrote to her in 1972 about ‘Poem’ (CEP, 196–7), contrasting his response with that of Octavio Paz: Strange, in retrospect, what Octavio said – I don’t see the bitterness of that line, ‘The little that we get for free’; or if it’s there, so deep within acceptance + serenity (the goose in all of us being perhaps what feels such things) that it doesn’t count as bitterness at all. What you feel, the way you feel these things, is precious beyond words to me.41

The line that Merrill is referring to, and Paz before him, in ‘Poem’ comes near the end of the poem and is part of a remarkably ‘compressed’ invocation of the relation between life, art and memory. That the painting Bishop is contemplating, leading up to the intensity of the

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conclusion, is a modest sketch by her great uncle, the same artist responsible for the large, bad picture, is significant and joins with Bishop’s liking of what is provisional or in process: the painting itself, as she sees it, makes few claims to permanence: About the size of an old-style dollar bill, American or Canadian, mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays – this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?) has never earned any money in its life. Useless and free, it has spent seventy years as a minor family relic handed along collaterally to owners who looked at it sometimes, or didn’t bother to. (CEP, 196)

The connection between the painting and money is based on visual likeness rather than commercial value, just as its artistic value derives from its status as heirloom, something that is passed on within the family ‘collaterally’, along the line. In various ways this is an art that does not transcend its context and where the materials of its creation are part of its texture – the ‘fresh-squiggled’ or ‘dab’ of paint and the ‘filaments of brush-hairs’. The scale of it also links it to the human body and the limits of what can be achieved ‘in one breath’. In a not dissimilar way, Bishop’s poem follows its own process of arrival, showing us through a language marked by the informalities and corporeality of voice, including exclamation and hesitation, the route she takes towards her own conclusions. ‘Heavens’ Bishop declares at the moment of recognising the picture’s landscape, using a colloquialism that she frequently employs in her letters to dramatise amazement. However, its non-colloquial meaning is not lost: this is the limited version of transcendence that the poem offers. Bishop sets out a series of connections – between the painting and her poem, between ‘life’ and ‘memory’, between art and life – which depend on contiguity or ‘coincidence’, a linear relation or sequence which does not use subordinating syntax: Our visions coincided – “visions” is too serious a word – our looks, two looks: art “copying from life” and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they’ve turned into each other. Which is which? Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail – the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much.

­162    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows, The iris, crisp and shivering, the water still standing from spring freshets, the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese. (CEP, 197)

We might say that Bishop’s poignant poem, named to place emphasis on her own art form rather than that of the painter, far surpasses her uncle’s achievement. However, paradoxically, it is the smallness of his accomplishment which allows her to recall her most momentous landscape and to place it, mundane in itself, in the context of the real mystery which is time or transience. Barbara Page has noted in Bishop’s revisions of the poem how Bishop moved, as in other poems, ‘from greater to lesser security, optimism or openness of possibility, until the poem achieves a hairline balance between affirmation and denial’. Here, discarding her first choice of ‘never-be-dismantled elms’ and replacing ‘never’ with ‘yet’, Bishop transfers the emphasis from the autonomous or transformational power of art or memory to the inevitable erosions of time.42 The freedom associated with art at the beginning of the poem returns in a different sense at the end: as a freedom which exists only within circumscribed limits, where life acquires radiance through brevity, and memories return as ‘live’ only when there is also an acknowledgement of decay and finitude. Bishop was working on this poem in the early 1970s at the same time as ‘The Moose’ (CEP, 189–93) and the poems share a landscape: the same ‘richest, saddest, simplest’ landscape of Nova Scotia that Bishop had written about so evocatively in her letter to Aunt Grace back in 1946 where the ‘magnificent elms’ also form an important part of her description (see p. 94). The writing of the ‘The Moose’ was not confined, however, to this time but also belonged to all the intervening time from its first conception in 1946, being frequently revisited by Bishop in the succeeding years and undergoing many drafts. Bishop was eventually forced to finish it, or a version of it, in order to be able to read it at the joint Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa commencement ceremony in June 1972. However, this reading was not altogether the end of the story and Bishop revised the poem both for its publication in The New Yorker a month later and again before its inclusion in Geography III in 1977. Brett Millier refers to it, indeed, with obvious justification, as ‘one of her most revised poems’.43 ‘The Moose’, like ‘The End of March’, is structured as a journey, this time a bus journey that begins in a particular landscape and enters the drowsy realm of ‘dreamy divagation’ where the seemingly timeless conversations on the bus re-enact the childhood memory of conversa-

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tions in the past and the narrator is drawn inwards by the hallucinatory qualities of voice itself, its ability to lead us back to the memory of ‘first voices’: The passengers lie back. Snores. Some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle, auditory, slow hallucination . . . In the creakings and noises, an old conversation – not concerning us, but recognizable, somewhere, back in the bus: Grandparents’ voices uninterruptedly talking, in Eternity: (CEP, 191)

A gossipy trail of news and stories leads to the ‘indrawn yes’, the peculiarity of Nova Scotian speech already explored by Bishop earlier in her career, now seen as the perfect expression of ambivalence where life and death coexist equally: “Yes . . .” that peculiar affirmative. “Yes . . .” A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, that means “Life’s like that. We know it (also death).” (CEP, 192)

As we saw in the previous chapter, Bishop talked about the ‘appeals caresses even gratitudes’ of the human voice which she found lacking in the mechanical sound of contemporary pop music (see p. 121). The word ‘gratitudes’ is of particular interest here and suggests the way voice can connect us with ‘peaceful states of mind’ as Klein expressed it.44 Important too, for Klein, is the notion that gratitude is not so much a spontaneous emotion as one dependent on a process of reciprocity and integration and the poem, with its summoning of the past and its gathering of the fragments of the speech of others – not necessarily soothing in themselves, as they variously rehearse the tragedies and disappointments of life – creates a sense of containment and holding. The journey of the poem begins in a protean landscape marked out by lines, whether these be the rivulets on the mud flats or the rows of

­164    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection sugar maples or the ridges on the clapboard churches. Bonnie Costello has drawn attention to the overall ‘horizontal movement’ of the poem that helps to emphasise the idea of journeying: the departure from the ‘narrow provinces’ of the beginning and the sense of being urged on by prepositions like ‘where’, ‘on’, ‘through’, through the long first sentence that stretches away from us towards its distant conclusion in the sixth stanza.45 David Kalstone, noticing the short lines of the twenty-eight six-line stanzas, has described the poem as reading ‘like a thread the narrator is laying through a maze – to find her way back.’46 In this way the poem, with its motif of the journey and unfolding narrative sequence, seems almost to coalesce with the form, extending across the page like a line or a thread. However, the idea that Bishop in the poem is ‘finding her way back’ is perhaps too simple since the poem interrupts its own resting place in reverie and memory with the startling entrance of the moose. The moose emerges from ‘the impenetrable wood’, a place where it is impossible to go, of deep obscurity which does not yield to investigation, and we may remember that Bishop situated herself as a poet in relation to Robert Lowell not in the maze itself but rather at its edge. Kalstone, in the notes he left about the poem, offers a reading which sees the moose as seeming to ‘crystallize the silence, security, and awe of the world being left behind and to guarantee a nourishing and haunting place for it in memory’.47 Whilst this is very suggestive it also seems important that the moose is encountered in the present and that its reality is part of its mystery: Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, “Sure are big creatures.” “It’s awful plain.” “Look! It’s a she!” Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy? (CEP, 193)

This is, perhaps, the most moving of all Bishop’s face-to-face encounters in her poetry and one of the most realised, as the moose, plain to see in both senses, looks and is looked at directly. It is important, of course, that the moose is female and the encounter thus involves a meeting of

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the maternal gaze bringing with it a feeling of ‘joy’ or jouissance.48 The moment brings the passengers together and the reciprocity between them – ‘we all feel’ – is as important as the exchange of looks with the moose; this not an experience which is vouchsafed for the poet only, enhancing her vision and demonstrating her superior powers; instead the experience is intensified through the sense of kinship it realises. The moose’s relation to time in the poem is also important: she exists outside the linear time of the journey and is experienced as ‘taking her time’, inhabiting, if not ‘Eternity’ like the grandparents, then a time free of external necessity. The end of the poem, however, returns us to movement and transience as the medium, for Bishop, within which all ‘visions’ must occur. The passengers ‘crane backwards’ trying to hold the sight that dissolves into air, leaving behind in this ambivalent world of reality not a transfiguring sweetness but a faint animal smell and ‘an acrid/smell of gasoline’. The idea of serenity in relation to these late poems does not equate with stasis. Paul Klee’s dictum, already quoted, is worth repeating here, since it applies equally to Bishop’s art: ‘Motion underlies all stages of becoming . . . When a point moves and becomes a line, it requires time.’ Bonnie Costello has noted that in Bishop’s papers relating to ‘The Moose’ there is a short but telling aphorism: ‘Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.’49 For Bishop the journey motif was often a way of plotting the poetic process through time, gathering small, sometimes hesitant, accumulations which, though they build towards the affecting overall wisdom of the poems and their echoing play of memory, imagination and description, do not offer allegorical or symbolic transformation. Bishop, more often than not, tried to deflate the visionary by returning us, gently, to the motley, unfinished nature of reality at the end of her poems: the geese for instance in ‘Poem’ or the ‘gasoline’ in ‘The Moose’. Though the end of a poem brings closure, the effect to be aimed for, musically as well, was not necessarily finality and Bishop’s poems often provide a sense of the limits of what closure can achieve. One of Bishop’s students from her time at Harvard, Anne Hussey, remembered that Bishop’s criticism of her writing was that she tended to end her poems ‘with a chord’: ‘I guess I got this from Dylan Thomas, who felt that everything ought to be driving toward the last line. Elizabeth said it was all right to do that sometimes, but not to do it every time, not to close so hard.’50 The idea of ‘gratitude’ as an emotion or state which itself requires time, which has a precedent – the feeling of something having been given and received before – is important, as we have seen, and this sense of an earlier time, of artistic creation always happening belatedly, is even

­166    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection more strongly indicated in Winnicott’s term ‘indebtedness’. Bishop, as we have explored, worked primarily by reworking: opening the whole process of writing to a, sometimes painful, delay, and choosing the track of the poem through the prolonged contemplation of alternatives. The idea of the poem containing traces of a ‘phantom plurality’, of erasures and hesitations, of other paths not taken, is particularly apt in Bishop’s case.51 These late poems seem to incorporate into their voice and style the process of their own becoming and the writing of potential into the limits of final choice. For Klein the feeling of gratitude could only be arrived at with difficulty and its antithesis, envy and destructiveness, is diminished or mitigated through enjoyment and gratitude rather than ever fully eliminated. In her final essay, ‘On the Sense of Loneliness’, Klein writes: ‘It is only step by step that integration can take place and the security achieved by it is liable to be disturbed under internal and external pressure; and this remains true throughout life.’52 In ‘Crusoe in England’ (CEP 182–6) Bishop explored the inevitable proximity of destructiveness to creativeness and the death of the past in the present:            I’m old. I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea, surrounded by uninteresting lumber. The knife there on the shelf – it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix. It lived. How many years did I beg it, implore it, not to break? I knew each nick and scratch by heart, the bluish blade, the broken tip, the lines of wood-grain on the handle . . . Now it won’t look at me at all. The living soul has dribbled away. My eyes rest on it and pass on.

Crusoe, now back in England, cannot recover the living feel of objects which, in the past, he had endowed with ‘soul’ or human meaning. The knife now only speaks of its inadequate status as a substitute for a connection that has been lost. The depletion is within Crusoe’s internal world, and whilst the objects can still have value within the museum as publicly owned relics which tell his story, they no longer hold out the promise of a private reunion with his past. The death of Friday, a fact withheld until the end of the poem and the more powerful for being inadequately represented, suggests an endless yet incomplete mourning and the loss of relation not only with Friday but with himself:

The Journey of Lines    ­167 – And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles seventeen years ago come March.

In ‘One Art’ (CEP, 198) Bishop famously confronted her own history of loss. Struggling with the idea of a pattern repeating itself and her relationship with Alice Methfessel also coming to an end (in fact, it survived) she wrote what is, according to Barbara Page, the ‘nearest thing to a naked poem she ever published’.53 In this villanelle Bishop walks a tightrope in terms of form and tone, barely able to convert bitterness into resignation. Whilst the form demands completion ‘(Write it!)’ she tries to delay the poignant new experience of loss, protecting the relationship through both parenthesis and her use of tense: – Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The tension of the last line is, of course, that the form is also propelling her to close with the word ‘disaster’, so that whilst she keeps loss at bay through the rest of the poem – defiantly attempting to ‘master’ it – disaster still lies in wait for her at the end. The positioning and weight of the word ‘disaster’ also ensures that it carries us beyond the imposition of any rigid mnemonic or any formal restraint. Emotion and form merge in the last line though not simply because of the closure that the form apparently compels but because this particular ending – this particular word – forces from the poet something close to a cry. The last poem I want to consider in this chapter and indeed in this book, is ‘Santarém’ (CEP, 207–9), a different, more nostalgic poem that Bishop completed in 1978, just a year before her death. This poem was referred to in Chapter 1 (p. 28) and it is appropriate that we come back to it here after the journey undertaken in the intervening chapters through Bishop’s life and career. In ‘Santarém’ Bishop returns to Brazil, remembering the journey that she made in 1960 down the Amazon from Manaus to Belém, the first trip where she also took ‘photographic slides’. She wrote to Robert Lowell still enthralled by her journey: ‘I want to go back to the Amazon. I dream dreams every night. I don’t know why I found it so affecting’ (WIA, 316). Though the poem was begun soon after the trip, as with most of Bishop’s late poems it required a later return, and a long process of delay and reworking, to give it its form. The poem, though full of realistic detail, is also infused with the atmosphere of memory, a golden glow that recollects through desire and

­168    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection threatens to fill the scene with utopic longing. Bishop herself provides the warning at the beginning of the poem: Of course I may be remembering it all wrong after, after – how many years?

Questioned in the year of its publication about the significance of the wasp’s nest at the end of the poem by the critic Jerome Mazarro, Bishop replied unequivocally, as if forgetting the ambiguity created by her own initial question: ‘Santarém happened, just like that, a real evening & a real place, and a real Mr. Swan who said that – it is not a composite at all.’ Later in the same letter, whilst still defending the ‘plain facts’, she also allows for a greater complexity: ‘Well, it takes an infinite number of things coming together, forgotten, or almost forgotten, books, last night’s dream experiences, past and present – to make a poem’ (OA, 621). Characteristically defensive, Bishop also takes up a position as poet in the ongoing process of composition rather than somewhere beyond or above it. The same is true of the scene she creates. Composed of observational detail, ‘Santarém’ is nevertheless ambiguous, refusing any omnipotent point of view or fixed focus. Looking, as Bishop explored throughout her career, depends on the subject and therefore depends on a perspective that is variable; it does not define a stable object. ‘Place’ is not separable from ‘the idea of a place’, as Bishop says in the poem – our imaginative construction of what we see. Everything in the poem is in movement, unbounded, from the ‘grandly’ flowing rivers to the perpetual motion of the ‘embarking,/disembarking’ people; and all appearance is dependent on the play of light. In a passage which is both interrogative and conditional, and which seems to undo its own approach to meaning, Bishop stresses convergence, dismissing oppositions and the ‘literary’ terms needed to maintain them, though, paradoxically, her own ‘dialectic’ requires her to use the same language:     Hadn’t two rivers sprung from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four and they’d diverged. Here only two and coming together. Even if one were tempted to literary interpretations such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female – such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off in that watery, dazzling dialectic.

In the next stanza, however, Bishop abandons the ordering of language further, undoing its separations and boundaries, merging animals and

The Journey of Lines    ­169

people in the ‘only sounds’ of ‘creaks and shush, shush, shush’. This latter sound, of course, is also used to summon silence. The ‘watery’ scene seems to have a capaciousness that can include everything, all the ‘crazy shipping’, in its heterogeneity and lack of hierarchy. A history of slaves and slave owners has only a parenthetical place in the restless wandering of people and boats in all directions; there is no organising principle or transcendent viewpoint from which a pattern can be observed. Even the power of a traumatic event – the lightning strike to the cathedral tower – is converted into an anecdote, the ‘miracle’ absorbed into popular speech and added to the ‘dazzling’ interplay of surface energies. It is not a catastrophe but instead part of the general flow – the belvedere, we are told, is ‘about to fall into the river’. This trauma is survived through chance – the priest was somewhere else. Church tower and lightning, however, have been important signifiers of trauma for Bishop in another landscape, and it is difficult to read about this lucky escape without also recognising it as an alternate, happier, version of an anxiety that ran through her work. The episode contains its own ‘zigzag crack’, an intuition of destructiveness held for the moment in abeyance. Yet it is on a note of ambivalence that Bishop chooses to end her poem. The wasp’s nest, as we have seen, whatever its status as ‘fact’ within her actual journey, had already been part of Bishop’s imagery, leading back to the very beginning of her career and her important dialogue with Marianne Moore. For Mr Swan, within the poem, it is ‘ugly’, a response it would be wrong to dismiss simply as that of someone who, on the side of commerce, cannot appreciate art. His ‘ugly thing’ is also Bishop’s deflationary counter to the swirling, cinematic variations of the poem and a refusal by her of the harmonics of ending. The poem closes with the ‘thing’, not the transcendence of art or memory. Implicit is the recognition that, given the very starkness and inadequacy of this one, there is no final word, no completion. The tone is amused, ironic, tolerant – ‘half groan, half acceptance’ – and as the ship’s whistle blows, Bishop’s journey is about to begin again.

Notes  1. VC 76.2.  2. VC 77.3, p. 10.   3. William Benton (ed.), Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop, Paintings (first publication Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996; Manchester: Carcanet, 1997).   4. Quoted in ‘Introduction’, Benton (ed.), Exchanging Hats, p. xviii.  5. Lorrie Goldensohn, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Written Pictures, Painted Poems’

­170    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection in Laura Jehn Menides and Angela G. Dorenkamp (eds), “In Worcester Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 170.  6. Peggy Samuels, Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 145.   7. Jürg Spiller (ed.), The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1961), p. 105.  8. Paul Kudielka, ‘Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation’ in Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation (London: Hayward Gallery in association with Lund Humphries, 2002) p. 53.  9. Margaret Miller (ed.), Paul Klee (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941), p. 11. 10. Kudielka, Paul Klee, p. 54; Klee named one of his paintings ‘City in the Intermediate Realm’. 11. Klee, The Thinking Eye, ed. Spiller, p. 82. 12. See Kudielka, Paul Klee, p. 162. 13. ‘Symposium’ in Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (eds), Elizabeth Bishop and her Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 267. 14. Andrew Kagan, Paul Klee: Art & Music (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 45. 15. All these quotations from Klee are from Miller (ed.), Paul Klee, pp. 11–12. 16. Lorrie Goldensohn, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Written Pictures, Painted Poems’ in Menides and Dorenkamp (eds), “In Worcester, Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop, p. 171. 17. VC 77.2, p. 3 18. VC 77.3, p. 7. 19. VC 77.3, p. 11. 20. Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), p. 252. 21. Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On: Border Lines’ in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 257. 22. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), p. 54. 23. Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007), p. 87. 24. Ibid. p. 90. 25. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 15. 26. VC 72A.3, p. 31. 27. Freud, ‘A Note upon “The Mystic Writing Pad” ’ (1924) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XIX (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1964), p. 230. 28. D. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ in Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 22. 29. Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 79–80. 30. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ in Playing and Reality, p. 2.

The Journey of Lines    ­171 31. Melanie Klein, ‘Envy and Gratitude’ in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946 – 1963 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), p. 203. 32. Hannah Segal, ‘A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics’ in Reading Melanie Klein, ed. John Phillips and Lyndsey Stonebridge (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 209. 33. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 280. 34. Biele (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), p. 361. 35. Unpublished draft quoted in Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 234–5. 36. See Mary Jacobus, ‘The Room in the Book: Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading’ in Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 17–51. 37. Klein, ‘Envy and Gratitude’, p. 203. 38. Segal, ‘A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics’, pp. 208; 216. 39. Klein, ‘The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique: Its History and Significance’ in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, p. 123. 40. Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, p. 1. 41. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 464. 42. Page, ‘Elizabeth Bishop: Stops, Starts and Dreamy Divagations’ in Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott (eds), Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Newcastle and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2002), p. 15. 43. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, p. 466. 44. Klein, ‘Envy and Gratitude’, p. 203. 45. Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, pp. 162–3. 46. From David Kalstone, Five Temperaments quoted in Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 251. 47. Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 259. 48. See Julia Kristeva, ‘Motherhood According to Bellini’ for a description of ‘maternal jouissance’ in Kristeva, Desire in Language, ed. and trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 247–8. 49. Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, p. 167. 50. Fountain and Brazeau (eds), Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, pp. 312–13. 51. Fiona Sampson, Music Lessons: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures (Newcastle and Tarset: 2011), p. 13. 52. Klein, ‘On the Sense of Loneliness’, in Envy and Gratitude, p. 302. 53. Page, ‘Elizabeth Bishop: Stops, Starts and Dreamy Divagations’ in ed. Anderson and Shapcott, Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, p. 22.

Bibliography

Primary Works Benton, William (ed.), Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. Biele, Joelle (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Bishop, Elizabeth, One Art: Letters, selected and ed. Robert Giroux, London: Chatto and Windus, 1994. –– Poems: Centenary Edition, London: Chatto and Windus, 2011. –– Prose: Centenary Edition, London: Chatto and Windus, 2011. Fountain, Gary, and Peter Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Millier, Brett C., Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Monteiro, George (ed.), Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Quinn, Alice, (ed.) Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Travisano, Thomas with Saskia Hamilton (eds), Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, London: Faber and Faber, 2008.

Secondary Works Abraham, Nicholas and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Anderson, Linda and Jo Shapcott (eds), Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, Newcastle and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2002. Auden, W. H., The Orators: An English Study, London: Faber and Faber, 1932. Axelrod, Steven Gould, ‘Elizabeth Bishop and Containment Policy’, American Literature, 75 (2003), pp. 843–67. Bacon, Crystal, ‘ “That World Inverted”: Encoded Lesbian Identity in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Insomnia” and “Love Lies Sleeping” in Laura Jehn Menides and

Bibliography    ­173 Angela G. Dorenkamp (eds), “In Worcester Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop, New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Barnes, Albert C., ‘Giorgio de Chirico’, Introduction to the Exhibition Catalogue Recent Paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, Julien Levy Gallery, 28 October–17 November 1936, reprinted in Metafisica 7–8 (2008), pp. 725–7. Barry, Sandra, ‘ “The War Was On”: Elizabeth Bishop and World War I’, War, Literature, and the Arts: An international Journal of the Humanities 11, 1 (1999), pp. 93–110. –– Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia’s Home-made Poet, Maine: Down East Books, 2011. Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, London: Flamingo, 1984, originally published 1980. Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857, new trans. by Richard Howard, Boston: David Godine, 1982. –– ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon Press, 1995. Bazin, Victoria, Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. Benjamin, Walter, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. ––  ‘Unpacking My Library’ in Illuminations, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. Breton, André, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. –– Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor, London: MacDonald, 1972. –– Communicating Vessels, ed. and trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris, Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught, ‘Naming the Thief in “Babylon”: Elizabeth Bishop and “The Moral of the Story” ’, Contemporary Literature 42 (2001), pp. 514–34. Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, ‘The Work of the Gaze’ in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup (eds), Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Cavarero, Adriana, For More than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Caws, Mary Ann, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Cleghorn, Angus, Bethany Hicok and Thomas Travisano (eds), Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century: Reading the New Editions, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Colwell, Anne, Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Costello, Bonnie, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

­174    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Croll, Morris W., Essays, ed. J. Max Patrich and Robert O. Evans with John W. Wallace, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. –– ‘Envois’ in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. ––‘Living on: Border Lines’ in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. –– Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993. Dickey, Frances, ‘Opening the Box’, Essays in Criticism, 57 (January 2007), pp. 73–81. Diehl, Joanne Feit, ‘Aggression and Reparation: Bishop and the Matter-Of-Fact’ in Lionel Kelly (ed.), Poetry and the Sense of Panic, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. –– Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Dillon, Brian, ‘An Approach to the Interior’ in Jane Alison, The Surreal House, New Haven and London: Barbican Art Gallery in association with Yale University Press, 2010. Donne, John, John Donne: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Eliot, T. S. ‘Introduction’, Marianne Moore: Selected Poems, London: Faber and Faber, 1935. –– Selected Essays, London: Faber and Faber, 1951. Ellis, Jonathan, Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. –– ‘The Snow Queen: Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia’ in Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott (eds), Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, Newcastle and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2002. Ernst, Max, Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1948. Ford, Mark, ‘Elizabeth Bishop at the Water’s Edge’, Essays in Criticism, 53 (2003), pp. 235–61. –– ‘ “Mont D’Espoir or Mount Despair”: Early Bishop, Early Ashberry and the French’ in Lionel Kelly (ed.) Poetry and the Sense of Panic, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Foster, Hal, Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Fountain, Gary, and Peter Brazeau, Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, p. 96. Freud, Sigmund, ‘A Note upon “The Mystic Writing Pad” ’ (1924) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–1974 XIX, pp. 227–32. –– ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII, pp. 7–64. –– ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1937) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XXIII, pp. 257–69. –– ‘Fetishism’ (1927) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXI, pp. 152–7.

Bibliography    ­175 Goldensohn, Lorrie, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Written Pictures, Painted Poems’ in Laura Jehn Menides and Angela G. Dorenkamp (eds), “In Worcester Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop, New York: Peter Lang, 1997. –– Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Green, André, Time in Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects, trans. Andrew Weller, London and New York: Free Association Books, 2002. Green, Fiona, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Village” in The New Yorker’, Critical Quarterly, 52 (2010), pp. 31–46. Grosz, Elizabeth, Space, Time and Perversion, New York: Routledge, 1995. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (eds), Culture Power Place, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Hammer, Langdon, ‘Useless Concentration: Life and Work in Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters and Poems’, American Literary History, 9(1997), pp. 162–80. Harrison, Victoria, Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Heaney, Seamus, The Government of the Tongue, London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Herbert, George, The Poems of George Herbert, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953. Ingold, Tim, Lines: A Brief History, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007. Irigaray, Luce, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Jacobus, Mary, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. James, Henry, Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, ed. David McWhirter, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. Jarrell, Randall, Poetry and the Age, London: Faber and Faber, 1955. Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Kagan, Andrew, Paul Klee: Art & Music, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983. Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, Juan Gris: His Life and Work, London: Lund Humphries, 1947. Kalstone, David, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. Keller, Lynn, ‘Words Worth a Thousand Postcards: the Bishop/Moore Correspondence’, American Literature, 55 (1983), pp. 405–29. Kent, Kathryn R., Making Girls into Women: American Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Klee, Paul, The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans. Ralph Mannheim, New York: G. Wittenborn, 1961. Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963, London: The Hogarth Press, 1984.

­176    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Kristeva, Julia, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. –– Desire in Language, ed. and trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. –– Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kudielka, Paul, ‘Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation’ in Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation, London: Hayward Gallery in association with Lund Humphries, 2002. Longenbach, James, The Art of the Poetic Line, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2008. Lomas, David, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Leavell, Linda, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Colour, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. –– ‘Marianne Moore, The James Family, and The Politics of Celibacy, Twentieth Century Literature 29 (2003), pp. 219– 46. Lombardi, Marilyn May (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. –– The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995. Lowell, Robert, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. MacArthur, Marit J., ‘ “In a Room”: Elizabeth Bishop in Europe, 1935–1937’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 50 (2008), pp. 408–42. McCabe, Susan, ‘ “Delight in Dislocation”: the Cinematic Modernism of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray, Modernism/modernity 8 (2001), pp. 492–52. –– Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, University Press: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. –– ‘ “Let’s Be Alone Together”: Bryher’s and Marianne Moore’s Aesthetic-Erotic Collaboration’, Modernism/modernity, 17(2010), pp. 607–37. –– ‘Survival of the Queerly Fit: Darwin, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop’, Twentieth Century Literature, 55(2009), pp. 547–72. –– ‘The “Ballet Mécanique” of Marianne Moore’s Cinematic Modernism’, Mosaic, 33(2000), pp. 67–87. Mendelsohn, Edward, ‘The Coherence of Auden’s The Orators’, ELH: English Literary History, 35(1968), pp. 114–33. Miller, Cristanne, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Else Lasker-Schüler, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. –– Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Miller, Margaret (ed.), Paul Klee, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941. MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art) online archives http://www.moma.org (accessed 4 February 2013). Moore, Marianne, A Marianne Moore Reader, New York: Vintage, 1961. –– Complete Poems, New York and London: Penguin, 1994. –– Complete Prose, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. –– Selected Letters, ed. Bonnie Costello, New York: Penguin, 1997.

Bibliography    ­177 Muldoon, Paul, The End of the Poem, London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Mullen, Richard, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Surrealist Inheritance’, American Literature, 54 (1982), pp. 63–80. New, Elisa, The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Page, Barbara, ‘Bishop As A Poet of Childhood Recollected’ in Laura Jehn Menides and Angela G. Dorenkamp (eds), “In Worcester Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop, New York: Peter Lang, 1997. –– ‘Elizabeth Bishop: Stops, Starts and Dreamy Divagations’ in Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott (eds), Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, Newcastle and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2002. –– ‘Off-Beat Claves, Oblique Realities: The Key West Notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop’ in Marilyn May Lombardi (ed.), Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1993. –– ‘Shifting Islands: Elizabeth Bishop’s Manuscripts’, Shenandoah, 33 (1981), pp. 51–61. Page, Chester, Memoirs: A Charmed Life in New York, New York: i-universe, 2007. Paulin, Tom, ‘Newness and Nowness: The Extraordinary Brilliance of Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters’, Times Literary Supplement (29 April 1994), p. 3. –– ‘Writing to the Moment’ in Writing to the Moment, London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Peters, John Durham, ‘Seeing Bifocally: Media, Place, Culture’ in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (eds), Culture Power Place, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1850), in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, New York: Library of America, 1984. Phillips, Adam, ‘Contingency for Beginners’ in On Flirtation, London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Powers-Beck, Jeffrey, ‘ “Time to Plant Tears”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Seminary of Tears’, South Atlantic Review, 60 (1995), pp. 69–87. Probyn, Elspeth, Blush, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2005. Rieke, Alison, ‘ “Plunder” or “Accessibility to Experience”: Consumer Culture and Marianne Moore’s Modernist Self-Fashioning’, Journal of Modern Literature, 27 (2003), pp. 149–71. Rimbaud, Arthur, Arthur Rimbaud: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. with introduction and notes by Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004. Roman, Camille, Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II – Cold War View, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Sampson, Fiona, Music Lessons: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, Newcastle and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2011. Samuels, Peggy, Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Schor, Naomi, Bad Objects, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Schulze, Robin G. The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess (eds), Elizabeth Bishop and her Art, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.

­178    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection Seeger, Judith, ‘The Living Ballad in Brazil: Two Performances’, Oral Tradition, 2 (1987), pp. 573–615. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, ‘Shame and Performativity: Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces’ in David McWhirter (ed.), Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Adam Frank and Irving E. Alexander (eds), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. Segal, Hannah, ‘A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics’ in Reading Melanie Klein, ed. John Phillips and Lyndsey Stonebridge, London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Short, Robert S., ‘The Politics of Surrealism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1 (1966), pp. 3–25. Simic, Charles, ‘The Power of Reticence’, The New York Review of Books, April 2006, pp. 17–19. Stevenson, Anne, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2006. Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. –– Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2002. –– The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2011. Szirtes, George, Fortinbras at the Fishhouses, Newcastle/Bloodaxe Lectures, Newcastle and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2009. Tóibín, Colm, ‘Follow the Leader’, London Review of Books, 31 no. 9 (14 May 2009) pp. 3–8. –– Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar, London: Picador, 2001. Travisano, Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. –– Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1999. –– ‘The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon’, New Literary History, 26 (1995), pp. 903–30. Treseler, Heather, ‘Dreaming in Color: Bishop’s Notebook Letter-Poems’ in Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok and Thomas Travisano (eds), Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992. White, Gillian, ‘Words in Air and “Space” in Art’: Bishop’s Midcentury Critique of the United States’ in Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok and Thomas Travisano (eds), Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century: Reading the New Editions, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Wilenski, R. H., The Modern Movement in Art, London: Faber and Faber, 1945, first published 1927.

Bibliography    ­179 Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Wölfflin, Heinrich, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger, New York: Dover Publications, 1932. Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Monika Kaup (eds), Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Index

abjection, 33, 104; see also Julia Kristeva Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok, 33, 34 alcoholism, 33, 45, 61, 92, 103, 159 Amazon, 90, 128, 129, 167 America, 22, 128, 139; see also Boston; Duxbury; Florida; Key West; New York; North Carolina; Washington Ashberry, John, 26 asylum, 1, 34, 94 Auden, W. H., ‘Journal of an Airman’, 44 autobiography, 61, 103, 111 Bacon, Crystal, 57 ballad see poetry Barker, Ilse and Kit, 109, 110, 120 baroque style, 3, 4, 10, 32, 34–7, 42, 43, 58, 136 Barr, Alfred H., 35, 75 Barthes, Roland, 101, 121 Bataille, Georges, 53, 55 Baudelaire, Charles, 56, 61, 68, 69, 70, 73, 79, 82, 86n Les Fleurs du Mal, 71–2 ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 68–9, 79 Baumann, Dr Anny, 33, 34, 156 beat poetry, 127, 147 belatedness, 89, 114, 127, 134, 152, 165 Benjamin, Walter, 21, 30, 68, 87, 107, 141 Benton, William, 145 Bible, 82, 109, 140n Bishop, Elizabeth correspondence, 89, 91, 110, 112, 117, 118–20, 121, 123, 161 notebooks and journals, 3, 6, 7, 25,

55, 58, 64, 73, 76, 80, 86n, 108, 119, 145, 147, 149, 152 paintings ‘County Courthouse’, 145 ‘Harris School’, 145 ‘Interior with Extension Cord’, 145 ‘Olivia’, 145–6 poems ‘Anaphora’, 59, 62, 63 ‘The Armadillo’, 126, 154–5 ‘Arrival at Santos’, 123–4, 130 ‘At the Fishhouses’, 6, 97–100, 101, 102, 153 ‘The Bight’, 5, 7, 58, 68, 79–80, 122 ‘The Burglar of Babylon’, 128, 131–3 ‘Cape Breton’, 100–1, 102, 153 ‘Cirque d’Hiver’, 62, 63, 122 ‘Crusoe in England’, 6, 166–7 ‘The End of March’, 149, 157–60, 162 ‘Faustina, or Rock Roses’, 77–9, 90, 122 ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, 133, 134, 135, 136 ‘The Fish’, 58, 72–3, 75–7, 78, 79 ‘Four Poems, 109 ‘In the Waiting Room’, 136–9 ‘Insomnia’, 56–7, 59 ‘Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore’, 17, 19 ‘Jerónimo’s House’, 26–7, 76 ‘Large Bad Picture’, 41 ‘Love Lies Sleeping’, 50–1, 59 ‘The Man-Moth’, 70–2 ‘Manners’, 135 ‘Manuelzinho’, 129, 132 ‘The Map’, 5, 40–4 ‘The Monument’, 54–6 ‘The Moose’, 91, 94, 162–5 ‘North Haven’, 28

Index    ­181 ‘Objects and Apparitions’, 153 ‘One Art’, 167 ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’, 80–2, 90 ‘Paris, 7A.M.’, 56, 59–60 ‘Poem’, 160–2 ‘The Prodigal’, 102–5 ‘Quai d’ Orléans’, 65–6 ‘Questions of Travel’, 124–6 ‘Rain Towards Morning’, 109 ‘Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics’, 138 ‘The Riverman’, 129–31 ‘Roosters’, 22, 27, 147 ‘Sandpiper’, 5 ‘Santarém’, 28, 167–9 ‘Sestina’, 133–4 ‘The Shampoo’, 107–8, 109, 141n ‘Sleeping on the Ceiling’, 56 ‘Song for the Rainy Season’, 136 ‘Songs for a Colored Singer’, 121 ‘Sonnet’, 155 ‘12 O’ Clock News’, 6 ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’, 95–6, 122 poetry collections A Cold Spring, 79, 91, 151 Complete Poems, 40 Geography III, 91, 149, 162 New and Uncollected Poems, 149 North & South, 40, 62, 77, 89, 91 Questions of Travel, 90, 91, 117, 135, 156 prose ‘The Country Mouse’, 1 ‘Dimensions for a Novel’, 4, 150, 153 ‘Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore’, 19, 14, 16, 19, 28, 29n ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: Notes on Timing in His Poetry’, 8n, 11 ‘Gregorio Valdes, 1879–1939’, 83–4 ‘Gwendolyn’, 110, 111–13, 114, 134 ‘In Prison’, 24–5 ‘In the Village’, 51, 53, 110, 113–17, 123, 133–4, 137, 153, 154 ‘Primer Class’, 42 ‘The Sea and Its Shore’, 22, 23–4 translations The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’, 110–11, 12 unpublished poetry ‘Dear Dr.’, 93–4, 95 ‘Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box’, 61, 90 ‘For Grandfather’, 135

‘Homesickness’, 102 ‘In a Room’, 51, 52 ‘“It is marvellous to wake up together”’, 108, 153 ‘The Soldier and the Slot-Machine’, 60–1 ‘Verdigris’, 95, 96 ‘“The walls went on for years & years”’, 63 ‘“Where are the dolls who loved me so”’, 111 unpublished prose ‘Homesickness’, 101, 104 ‘True Confessions’, 111–12 Blough, Frani (Muser), 34, 41, 45, 49 Boston, 1, 68, 115, 159 Bowers, Grace Bulmer (EB’s aunt), 2, 94, 162 Brazil, 46, 78, 90, 91, 105–7, 108, 109, 110, 121–3, 128–31, 133, 136, 144–5, 154, 167; see also Amazon; Ouro Prêto; Petropolis; Rio de Janeiro Breton, André, 45, 47, 48, 49, 52, 64, 79 Brinnin, Malcolm, 157 Bronson, Bertrand, 132 Brooks, Peter, 104 Brown, Ashley, 43, 130 Bryher (Winifred Ellemann), 12, 17, 18, 30, 33, 48 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 37 Bulmer, Elizabeth Hutchinson (EB’s grandmother), 1, 39, 112–13, 115, 116, 133–4, 153, 159 Bulmer, Gertrude (EB’s mother), 1, 23, 34, 49, 51, 94, 97, 101–2, 114–16, 151, 153, 157 Bulmer, William Brown (EB’s grandfather), 1, 135 Canada, 42, 49; see also Newfoundland and Labrador; Nova Scotia Caudwell, Christopher, 48 Cavarero, Adriana, 121–2, 138 Caws, Mary Ann, 37 Chaplin, Charlie, 13, 16, 70 childhood, 1, 2, 49, 53, 60, 69, 82, 101, 105, 109, 113, 114, 117, 133, 134–7, 151 Chirico, Giorgio de, 62 collage, 25, 35, 47, 73, 78 collection, 15, 19, 21; see also objects colour, 13, 42, 69, 74, 77, 81, 93–6, 98, 103, 104, 114, 123, 147, 160 confessional poetry, 2, 127 Cornell, Joseph, 15, 60

­182    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection correspondence, 3, 6, 7, 15, 21, 80, 124; see also Elizabeth Bishop; Robert Lowell; Marianne Moore; Anne Stevenson Costello, Bonnie, 54, 62, 78, 134 Crane, Louise, 9, 18, 20, 26, 46, 49, 91 Crashaw, Richard, 48 Crèvecoeur, Jean de, 64 Croll, M. W., 3, 4, 34 Darwin, Charles, 46, 50, 56 death, 34, 45, 49, 53, 63, 81, 111–13, 134, 135, 163, 165 death drive, 48, 59, 62 see also Freud Derrida, Jacques, 3, 38, 68, 71, 81, 124, 149, 150 Dewey, Jane, 96 Dickens, Charles, 112 Diehl, Joanne Feit, 79 Dillon, Brian, 53 Donne, John, 40 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 18, 33 Duxbury, 157 Eliot, T. S., 13, 15, 35, 40, 70, 71, 120, 128, 151, 152 Ellis, Havelock, 57 Ellis, Jonathan, 54, 68, 85n, 134 embarrassment, 63, 65–6, 68, 71, 72, 76, 77, 89, 110, 137; see also shame Ernst, Max, 45–7, 49, 51, 52, 54, 64 fairy tales, 56, 60, 139 feminism, 20; see also gender fetishism, 10, 20, 30; see also Sigmund Freud film, 12, 13, 16, 70, 76, 123 Florida, 9, 22, 45, 61, 77, 78, 79, 80, 90, 108, 110, 144, 149; see also Key West Ford, Mark, 4, 70 Foster, Hal, 59, 62, 84n Foster, Dr Ruth, 33, 93 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 33, 47, 48, 62, 68, 96, 113, 133, 152, 156 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 113, 138 gender, 65, 72, 112; see also feminism Goldensohn, Lorrie, 56, 108, 110, 130, 145, 148 gratitude, 17, 118, 121, 156, 157, 163, 165, 166; see also Melanie Klein Gris, Juan, 35, 68, 74

Guys, Constantin, 68, 69, 73, 79; see also Charles Baudelaire Hall, Radcliffe, 57 Hammer, Langdon, 119–20 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 118 Harvard, 149, 157, 162, 165 Heaney, Seamus, 98 hearing, 52, 67, 114, 116, 120, 122–3, 125, 130–1, 133, 137, 138, 153, 155; see also voice Herbert, George, 4, 38, 39, 52, 68, 83n, 84 Holiday, Billie, 121 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 4, 21, 34, 74, 87n, 118 Hussey, Anne, 165 Ingold, Tim, 150, 160 Irigaray, Luce, 93 James, Henry, 36, 103 Jarrell, Randall, 96, 114 Kagan, Andrew, 158 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 68, 74 Kalstone, David, 5, 19, 22, 26, 62, 66, 101, 103, 104, 118, 149, 164 Kazin, Pearl, 109 Keaton, Buster, 70 Kent, Kathryn, 18 Key West, 9, 64, 69, 73, 74, 130, 145; see also Florida Kirkpatrick, Ralph, 121 Klee, Paul, 36, 93, 120, 144, 146–8, 165 Klein, Melanie, 8, 155, 156, 160, 166 Kristeva, Julia, 8, 77, 84n, 92, 105, 121, 141n, 171n Kudielka, Robert, 146, 147 Laforgue, Jules, 70, 71 Leavell, Linda, 14, 25 Léger, Fernand, 12 lesbianism, 52, 56–7 letters see correspondence lines, 7, 37, 43, 55, 58, 76, 81, 144, 145–6, 148–51, 153, 154, 160, 163 Lomas, David, 60 Lowell, Robert, 6, 23, 27–8, 56–7, 68, 74, 78, 79, 93, 96, 97, 99, 103, 106, 107, 114, 117, 118–20, 121–2, 126–7, 128, 130, 131, 136, 137, 139, 145, 147, 148, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 164, 167 correspondence, 28, 99, 117, 127, 128, 130, 137, 154 Dolphin, 118, 129

Index    ­183 Life Studies, 118, 127 ‘The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket’, 99 Loyola, St, 103 McCabe, Susan, 5, 12, 20, 30, 57, 59, 125, 133, 134 McCarthy, Mary, 147 McIver, Loren, 91 Magritte, René, 38 Mazarrro, Jerome, 168 memory, 7, 26, 38, 41, 48, 49, 51, 53, 58, 66, 68, 71, 91, 93, 97, 98, 107, 109, 110, 112–14, 123, 128, 131, 134, 135, 153, 158–65, 167, 169 Merrill, James, 160 Methfessel, Alice, 167 Miller, Cristanne, 13 Miller, J. Hillis, 43 Miller, Margaret, 35, 63, 65, 146 Millier, Brett, 40, 94, 103, 130, 163 modernism, 13, 14, 15, 18, 70, 74, 136 monuments, 3, 54–6, 74, 151, 162 Moore, Marianne, 6, 7, 10–28, 33, 39, 46, 48, 53, 65, 67, 74, 81, 90, 91, 94, 110, 120, 144, 147, 151, 169 correspondence, 9–10, 11, 13, 17, 18, 22, 23, 27, 33, 65, 90 ‘In the Days of Prismatic Color’, 14 ‘The Jerboa’, 12–13 ‘Marriage’, 20 Mary Warner Moore (mother), 10–11, 17, 18, 19, 22 ‘The Paper Nautilus’, 9, 26–7 ‘The Plumet Basilisk’, 20 Muldoon, Paul, 6 Mullen, Richard, 50 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 35, 36, 146, 147 music, 51, 96, 120, 121, 125, 127, 128, 148, 158, 163 clavichord, 121 jazz, 121 pop, 121, 163 Webern, 120, 148 New, Elisa, 43 New York, 19, 35, 36, 46, 58, 70, 73, 93, 106, 119, 147 New Yorker, The, 90, 96, 109, 113, 117, 129, 157, 162 Newfoundland and Labrador, 41, 80 North Carolina, 20, 73, 74 Nova Scotia, 1, 29, 41, 45, 90, 94, 97, 100, 109, 110, 121, 124, 143–5, 158, 159, 162, 163 Cape Breton, 100–2

Dartmouth, 1, 94 Great Village, 1, 49, 94, 111, 115 Halifax, 1, 94, 97, 158 Sable Island, 158 objects, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 21, 23, 24, 26, 36, 52, 53, 58, 74, 97, 112, 113, 115, 125, 133, 134, 145, 150, 151, 152, 166 object relations, 156, 160; see also Melanie Klein; D. W. Winnicott souvenirs, 10, 21 see also collection Ouro Prêto, 146 Page, Barbara, 64, 69, 126, 162, 167 Page, Chester, 15 painting, 4, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 45, 49, 54, 62, 73–5, 78, 92–3, 94, 102, 110, 121, 145–8, 149, 153, 159, 160–1; see also Elizabeth Bishop; Giorgio de Chirico; Max Ernst; Paul Klee Paulin, Tom, 3–4, 89 Paz, Octavio, 153, 160 Peters, John Durham, 42 Petropolis, 106, 110, 136, 144 photography, 38, 101, 145, 167 play, 14, 17, 40, 42, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 96, 110, 112, 113, 142n, 145, 152, 155, 160; see also process Poe, Edgar Allan, 61 poetry ballad, 128, 131–3 form, 4, 7, 15, 16, 34–7, 43, 52, 59, 62, 63, 102–3, 108, 114, 119, 124, 126–8, 131–4, 147, 148, 151, 153, 162, 164, 167 love poetry, 107–9 metre, 120, 125, 126–7 see also beat poetry; confessional poetry Portuguese, 111, 130, 133 Pound, Ezra, 14, 15 Probyn, Elspeth, 66–7 process (creative), 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 15, 51, 55, 79, 80, 100, 113, 122, 146, 148, 149, 150–3, 161, 163, 165–8 psychoanalysis, 47, 48, 93, 96–7, 160; see also Sigmund Freud; Melanie Klein Quinn, Alice, 8n, 58, 61, 83n, 86n, 101 Ray, Man, 35, 38 Read, Bill, 157

­184    Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection repetition, 4, 10, 28, 43, 48, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 82, 93, 98, 104, 105, 106, 114, 124, 132, 133, 134, 151; see also death: death drive; rhyme rhyme, 4, 43, 52, 58, 61, 62, 86n, 104, 107, 126, 128, 132, 135 Rieke, Alison, 17 Rimbaud, Arthur, 46, 50, 85n Rio de Janeiro, 106, 123, 131 Robinson, Peter, 108 Samuels, Peggy, 35, 75, 78, 141n, 145, 146 Schapiro, Meyer, 35 Sedgwick, Eve, 67 Seeger, Judith, 131–2 seeing, 3, 11, 13, 25, 37, 38, 42, 58, 63, 68, 78, 122, 130, 133, 139 eyes, 36–40, 47, 58, 67, 72, 76, 78, 137 Segal, Hannah, 156 Sexton, Anne, 127 shame, 66, 67, 68, 72, 103, 116; see also embarrassment; Elspeth Probyn; Harriet Tomkins Soares, Lota Macedo de, 18, 65, 106, 107, 109, 111, 117, 122, 129, 136, 138, 144, 145, 156 Souza, Décio de, 156 Spires, Elizabeth, 65 Stanford, Donald, 134, 122 Stevens, Marjorie, 18, 80 Stevens, Wallace, 69, 150–1 Stevenson, Anne, 3, 10, 64, 88, 93, 116, 136 correspondence with EB, 2, 10, 45, 46, 54, 65, 68, 90, 91, 101, 127 Stewart, Susan, 21, 51, 108, 123, 131, 138 subject/subjectivity, 4, 20, 23, 25, 34, 41, 50, 55, 59, 60, 66, 67, 70, 93, 104, 108, 126, 146, 148, 159, 168 Summers, Joseph, 40, 84n, 97 Summers, U. T., 89, 97 surrealism, 4, 35, 37, 45, 46, 48–50, 58, 59, 64, 73, 146 things see objects time, 7, 21, 26, 28, 43, 44, 53, 63, 66, 68–9, 81–2, 89–95, 97, 99, 104–6, 107–9, 110–11, 114–15, 119, 123, 124, 126, 128, 134, 136, 139, 148–9, 152, 162, 165 Tóbín, Colm, 119

Tomkins, Silvan, 67 Tompkins, Harriet (Thomas), 32, 45 tourism see travel trace, 7, 27, 56, 75, 114, 115, 149–50, 158, 160, 166; see also Jacques Derrida translation, 71, 111, 129, 153 trauma, 1, 33, 48, 49, 51, 60, 63, 65, 66, 74, 94, 112, 113, 114, 116, 123, 134, 137, 152, 169 travel, 10, 11, 40–2, 45, 46, 49, 69, 70, 80, 90, 106, 110, 121, 123, 124–6, 128, 129, 138, 145 maps, 42 voyages at sea, 4, 32, 37, 41, 105, 106, 123 Travisano, Thomas, 43, 77, 113, 114, 117 Treseler, Heather, 97, 99 uncanny, 48, 50, 52, 56, 59, 62, 78, 102, 111; see also Sigmund Freud; surrealism Valdes, Gregorio, 73, 74 Vassar College, 3, 10, 19, 32, 35, 70, 150 Vendler, Helen, 108 voice, 54, 82, 111, 113, 116, 120, 121–3, 125, 126, 129, 130, 132–3, 135, 137, 138, 149, 153, 161, 163; see also hearing war Korean, 95–6 Spanish Civil War, 49 World War I, 44, 48, 49 World War II, 89, 128 Washington, 65, 96, 115, 106, 140n Library of Congress, 66, 95 Webern, Anton, 120, 148; see also music White, Katharine, 90, 109, 110, 123 Wiene, Robert, 12; see also New Yorker, The Wilenski, R. H., 36 Winnicott, D. W., 55, 152, 155, 166; see also play Wölfflin, Heinrich, 36, 37, 43, 83n Wordsworth, William, 97 Yaddo, 66 Zabel, Morton, 22