Arts and Letters

My wife and I first met Elizabeth Bishop at the Eberharts' apartment in Cambridge, more than thirty years ago. She had just recently published her first book, North & South, which the reviewers had admired but which had also had the rarer fate of being instantly precious to many of her fellow poets, who rightly saw it as something new, distinguished, and inexhaustibly fresh. The woman we met that evening was not a literary figure, and was clearly not embarked on anything so pompous and public as a career. She was quiet, comely, friendly, amusing, and amusable; she spoke in a modest and somewhat murmuring way, often asking questions as if she expected us Cantabrigians to have the answers. But in matters of importance to her she turned out to have quite definite answers of her own. For example, she told me that Poe's best poem, for her taste, was a little-known piece called "Fairy-Land." Years of rereading that poem have brought me close to her opinion, and have led me to see that her fondness for it was based on a true affinity. "Fairy-Land" is a charming dream-vision, written in a transparent style unusual for Poe; at the same time, its weeping trees and multitudinous moons are repeatedly and humorously challenged by the voice of common sense; out of which conflict the poem somehow modulates, at the close, into a poignant yearning for transcendence. All of the voices of that poem have their counterparts in Elizabeth's own work.

Reticent as she was, Elizabeth Bishop wrote several autobiographical pieces in which she testified to a lifelong sense of dislocation. That is, she missed from the beginning what some enjoy, an unthinking conviction that things ought to be as they are; that one ought to exist, bearing a certain name; that the school-bus driver should have a fox terrier; that there should be a red hydrant down at the corner; that it all makes sense. Her short prose masterpiece, "In the Village," is quite simply an account of how, in childhood, her confidence in the world's plausibility and point was shaken. Behind the story lies her father's death in the first year of her life; hanging over the story, in the Nova Scotian sky, is the scream of her mother, who was forever lost to the child through an emotional breakdown. Here are two resonant sentences from the story, having to do with the sending of family packages to her mother. "The address of the sanitarium is in my grandmother's handwriting, in purple indelible pencil, on smoothed-out wrapping paper. It will never come off."

If the world is a strange place, then it readily shades into dream. So many of Elizabeth's poems take place at the edge of sleep, or on the threshold of waking, lucidly fusing two orders of consciousness. Some of them are written out of remembered dreams. And then there are superb poems like "The Man-Moth," in which a tragic sensibility is portrayed under the form of dream. In a later poem, "The Riverman," her capacity for navigating the irrational enabled her to enter the mind of a witch-doctor, and to visit the water-spirits of the Amazon. All this has little to do with the influence of French surrealism, I think; as her Robinson Crusoe says of his artifacts in Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop's poems are "home-made."

In another kind of poem, she sets some part of the world before her and studies it with a describing eye, an interrogating mind, and a personality eager for coherence. This is the kind of poem, written in a style at once natural and lapidary, in which her stunning accuracies of perception and comparison make us think of her friend and early encourager, Marianne Moore. A sandy beach "hisses like fat;" she sees on a wall "the mildew's ignorant map;" on a gusty day in Washington she notes how "Unceasingly, the little flags / Feed their limp stripes into the air." One could go on quoting such felicities forever, and it is such things which have led the critics to use the words wit, delight, precision, elegance, and fastidiousness; at the same time, her descriptive genius has led some to say that her poetry is a poetry of surfaces. At moments she seems to have felt this herself, as when, at the close of her poem "The Armadillo," she grows suddenly impatient of the prettiness of poetry and speaks in italics of fear and pain. But in fact her poems, for all their objectivity, are much involved in what they see: though she seldom protests, or specifies her emotions, her work is full of an implicit compassion, and her friend Robert Lowell justly ascribed to her a tone "of large, grave tenderness and sorrowing amusement."

That expression "sorrowing amusement" is wonderfully exact, and of course it would be quite wrong to overstress the sorrow part of it. If she was afflicted by the absurdity of things, she also took delight in everything curious, incongruous, or crazy; that's one reason why she was the best of company. Almost all of my mental pictures of her belong somewhere on a scale between amiability and hilarity; and we have one real picture, a snapshot in which, with the fiercest of expressions, she is about to use my head as a croquet-ball.

When she looked in her poetry for ultimate answers, she generally expressed the search in the key of geography, of travel. And she always reported that such answers were undiscoverable. In the poem "Cape Breton" she says, "Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned." In "Arrival at Santos," she mocks the tourist with his "immodest demands for a different world, / And a better life, and complete comprehension / of both at last," and concludes with the intensely ironic line, "We are driving to the interior." In another poem about travel, she regrets that so many sights in Rome or Mexico or Marrakesh have failed to make a pattern, that everything has been "only connected by 'and' and 'and'." She wishes that some revelation, some Nativity scene, might have brought all into focus. In and out of her poetry, she lamented her want of a comprehensive philosophy; yet I cannot be sorry that so honest a nature as hers refused to force itself into a system, and I question whether system is the only way to go deep into things.

Though she had no orthodox convictions, and wondered at such certainties in others, Elizabeth Bishop had religious concerns and habits of feeling. I think of her poem about St. Peter; I think of the "pure and angelic note" of the blacksmith's hammer in her story "In the Village," and the way that story ends with the cry, "O, beautiful sound, strike again!" I think of the fact that when she was asked to make a selection of someone's poems for a poetry newsletter, she came up with an anthology of hymns. (Her favorite hymn, by the way, was the Easter one which begins, "Come ye faithful, raise the strain / Of triumphant gladness.") Above all, I think of her poem called "Twelfth Morning:" it is a poem about Epiphany, the day when things are manifested, and its opening lines say:

Like a first coat of whitewash when it's wet,
the thin grey mist lets everything show through…

One thing that comes through the mist is a sound from the shore, the sound of "the sandpipers' / heart-broken cries," and that I take for a sign that grief is a radical presence in the world. But there is also another phenomenon, a black boy named Balthazár who bears the name of one of the Magi, and on whose head is a four-gallon can which "keeps flashing that the world's a pearl." The vision of Balthazár and his four-gallon pearl is qualified by amusement; nevertheless it is a vision. It seems to me that Elizabeth Bishop's poetry perceives beauty as well as absurdity, exemplifies the mind's power to make beauty, and embodies compassion; though her world is ultimately mysterious, one of its constants is sorrow, and another is some purity or splendor which, though forever defiled, is also, as her poem "Anaphora" says, perpetually renewed.

This appreciation has been too literary, with too little of the personal in it. Elizabeth herself would not have been guilty of such disproportion. She attended to her art, but she also attended to other people and to the things of every day. James Merrill put this happily, in a recent reminiscence, when he spoke of her "lifelong impersonation of an ordinary woman." Well, she was an incomparable poet and a delectable person; we loved her very much.