Elizabeth Bishop: Life and Letters

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. A poet and story writer, known for her spare and witty style, she won many prizes and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. Her output was small, but her reputation was high in literary circles. After she died in 1979, her work reached a wider audience. Today, she is acclaimed as one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. “Bishop’s uncanny knack for balancing depth and lightness in a completely natural and engaging manner helps her readers to see the world in new ways,” says Thomas Travisano.

Bishop published in several magazines, above all The New Yorker, which had a rare right of first reading. The poems appeared in several collections, such as North and South, Questions of Travel, Geography III, and The Complete Poems, which was not complete. Bishop wrote slowly, revised often, and left many unfinished and unpublished manuscripts when she died. Farrar Straus & Giroux, on the anniversary of her birth, issued new editions of Bishop’s Poems and Prose in 2011. Robert Giroux, her editor, also selected five hundred of her personal letters for the popular book One Art in 1994. The Library of America collected all the poems, prose and fifty-three letters in one volume in 2008.

Bishop’s early life was marked by loss. Her father, a successful building contractor, died when she was a baby. When she was five years old, her mother Gertrude Bulmer was placed in a mental hospital from which she never emerged. Her malady was listed as “chronic psychosis.” The little girl was raised by her wealthy Bishop grandparents in Worcester, an aunt in Revere, Massachusetts, and her rustic Bulmer grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Bishop remembered her father’s family as gloomy and repressed, but the Bulmers as warm and loving. She later wrote about life in Nova Scotia as a childhood idyll. Taken from it by the snobbish Bishops, she suffered yet another loss.

As a girl, Bishop was bright and precocious. She attended private schools, summer camp, and Vassar College. She intended to major in music, as she played the piano well, but she was too nervous to perform. She graduated from Vassar in 1934. In the same year, her mother died, still confined to the mental hospital, of a stroke. Her uncle, who was her legal guardian, also died. Free of family ties, she rented a garret apartment in Greenwich Village. Her father had left a modest fortune in trust. For most of her life, then, Bishop had an income that freed her from the need to work for a living.

Bishop wanted to travel, she liked being independent, and she had a knack for taking pleasure in ordinary things. She read widely and deeply, formed lasting friendships, and impressed editors and writers with the quality of her writing. Influences are hard to detect, but Bishop admired Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot. In New York in the 1930s, the poet Marianne Moore, twenty-four years older, was a model and mentor. Later, the poet Robert Lowell from Boston became a close friend and helpful ally in obtaining awards and appointments. Bishop met quite a few literary lions, but she felt and often acted like a mouse, quiet and tentative. She complained of loneliness, yet her nonfiction shows a reporter’s gift for winning the trust of strangers.

Bishop had problems, to be sure — asthma, alcoholism, bouts of depression, and in later years a stubborn case of dysentery. She also had a way of shedding responsibility. Reading about her many lapses, you might conclude she was careless and self-absorbed, but those who knew her best adored her. To her biographers Megan Marshall and Thomas Travisano, she is a heroine. They document the story and let others praise or blame, or Bishop herself does so. Travisano quotes a letter she wrote in 1970:

I see now I have been very stupid or naïve all my life: I truly didn’t realize how cruel and vicious people one actually knows could be, until I was 58 years old.

Bishop was lesbian, and she understood this side of her nature about age twenty. At Vassar, she met Louise Crane, an heiress to the Crane paper company fortune. The two traveled and lived together in Paris and Key West, Florida. Over the course of her life, Bishop had four other partners and many affairs. Marshall goes into grainy detail on Bishop’s love life, while Travisano treats it with tact. Bishop’s sexuality was an open secret, accepted by her friends, but possible at the time only for a woman of her means and social standing. Mary McCarthy used Bishop as a model for the lesbian “Lakey” in her 1963 novel The Group, about eight Vassar women.

In 1951 at the age of forty, on what was to be a ship voyage around South America, Bishop stopped at Rio de Janeiro, where she met the rich and connected Lota de Macedo Soares. Bishop stayed for fifteen years — in Rio, in Soares’s modernist hilltop mansion Samambaia north of the city, and in the historic town of Ouro Preto. She became fluent in Portuguese, translated literary works from Portuguese to English, and wrote poems, stories, and letters about her life in Brazil.

Soares was a real estate developer and architect, whose biggest project was Flamengo Park in Rio. Dynamic, an astute collector of modern art, an aristocrat in the semi-feudal society of Brazil, Soares suffered later in life from overwork and depression. She died on a visit to Bishop in New York in 1967. Despite quarrels toward the end, this was Bishop’s great love affair and adventure. And Brazil furnished exotic landscapes, animals, and people for her to write about.

Most American writers teach English literature and/or creative writing to support themselves. Bishop escaped this necessity until age fifty-four, when she took the place of Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington in Seattle. She prepared for class, and students liked her. In 1970, at the request of Robert Lowell, she accepted a post at Harvard University, where she taught on and off for several years. After the turmoil of settling Soares’s estate, Bishop settled in a newly renovated condominium on Lewis Wharf in Boston Harbor. She loved her last home, and she died there in 1979.

At Harvard, Bishop met a young woman named Alice Methfessel, who became her last partner. Tall, capable, and reliable, Methfessel took care of the aging and ailing Bishop, who named her executor of her will and literary papers. We owe Methfessel a debt of gratitude.

Megan Marshall won admittance to Bishop’s poetry writing seminar at Harvard in 1976. Marshall did not become a favorite student like Frank Bidart, nor did she gain great personal insight. Bishop was famously reserved and shy. Marshall did not continue to write poems, either. She became a professor at Emerson College, and she published a biography of Margaret Fuller that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. In Elizabeth Bishop; A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) Marshall is complete and fair-minded. Her portrait shows flaws amid the sparkle. It makes sense of many sharp turns in Bishop’s journey. Unwisely, Marshall inserts passages of college memoir between the chapters, and she leads with a memorial service for Bishop that she did not attend. These personal touches add nothing to the book.

Marshall takes her title from a poem Bishop wrote. When she lived in Greenwich Village in 1934–1935, one morning a woman came door to door with samples of Wonder Bread, a new product. Bishop hungrily ate the samples, and the incident inspired “A Miracle for Breakfast,” written as a sestina, which repeats certain words at the end of lines. Repetition, with strategic variation, is a hallmark of her verse, which looks more sedate on the page than her life does. Later, for example, on an exploratory trip in Brazil, she met Lilli Correia de Araujo, the Danish widow of a diplomat, and the owner of a hotel in Ouro Preto. The women had a passionate affair. Bishop bought a decrepit house across the street from the hotel, a house she called Casa Mariana. Over several years and at great expense, she restored it. The incident shows how impulsive and impractical she could be.

Over forty years ago as a young English professor, Travisano decided to devote himself to Bishop, who was then considered a minor poet. He wrote or edited three books on Bishop’s poetry and letters, and he founded the Elizabeth Bishop Society. Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop (Viking, 2019) combines a thorough account of her life with a sensitive reading of her poetry. More conventional than Marshall’s book, Travisano’s has less of daily life. As a model of critical biography, it may better stand the test of time.

Poor physical and mental health are a constant theme, for Bishop and everyone near her. Travisano notes the help she received from her doctor and psychiatrist in New York, both of them women. Her letters to them are an important source of information on her state of mind. The year she met them, 1946, marks a turning point in her art, he says.

Bishop was less an innovator than a perfectionist. To the end, she worked in old-fashioned forms — rhymed verse, the sestina, and the villanelle. She used conventional grammar, ordinary speech, and simple images. Her poems and stories are generally short, and she never attempted a novel. The marvel is that she brings off special effects with such plain materials. She wrote few book reviews or critical articles. As a teacher she was uninspired, and she disliked speaking in public.

Today, a reader who comes to Bishop fresh may wonder at her lack of engagement with the issues of her time. Like Emily Dickinson, she can seem aloof. Out of context, some of her poems verge on nonsense. They acquire depth from the details of her life, as in her famous “One Art” with the recurring line, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Possibly, her reputation will shift toward the lively travel and memoir pieces, and the letters. Travisano, in his oblique way, alludes to this when he quotes Pearl Kazin:

She was a marvelous letter-writer, the words flowing from her fingers with an uninhibited spontaneity so very different from the reticence and restraint of her poems and stories.

Bishop’s prose can be masterful, biographical, and laugh-out-loud funny. “In the Village” is both an impressionist sketch of her childhood in Nova Scotia and a disturbing account of her mother’s insanity. “The Country Mouse” continues the childhood tragicomedy. “The U. S. A. School of Writing” is a self-portrait as young woman in New York in the 1930s. Just out of Vassar, she takes a job at a shady correspondence school that promises to teach anyone how to write. The grimy, smoke-filled office, the business scam, and the co-worker Rachel are vivid and hilarious. “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore” is a tribute to the poet and friend, breath-taking in its power of observation and understanding.

The Brazilian travel pieces, reporting, and translations have gotten less attention than they deserve. “A Warm and Reasonable People” and “On the Railroad Named Delight” depict the color, beauty, and high drama of life in Rio de Janeiro. “A Trip to Vigia” has it all — bad weather, car breakdowns, a poetical driver, a Baroque church, and the skull of a saint.

The sacristan, an old fisherman, appeared . . . and he handed me — a bone. A skull! The children reached up for it. He patted the skull and said yes, that was Father So-and-So . . . I thought he was speaking of some forgotten saint of the seventeenth century who had never been properly recognized. No, Father had died two years before.