Review: Matthew Bevis on Elizabeth Bishop

“Will you join me,” the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Bishop asked a close friend, “in wading in the mud of the celestial gardens?” Modern literary biographers don’t always indulge in muckraking, but they do tend to focus on earthy as well as ethereal matters; no doubt they feel that, as the character Riverman from one of Bishop’s poems puts it, “everything must be there / in that magic mud.” Still, one of the many strengths of Thomas Travisano’s absorbing new biography of the poet is its tact. Several of Bishop’s most elusive or enigmatic poems, he writes in his prologue, “can begin to seem almost transparent when biographical insights are sensitively applied.” This is enticing, although one notes “begin,” “seem,” and “almost.” Travisano generally follows the example of one of Bishop’s best readers, fellow poet Robert Lowell, who told her that “Crusoe in England” was “maybe your best poem, an analogue to your life.” Analogues are suggestive correspondences, not definitive keys. While reading this book I recalled what Bishop’s Crusoe says of his knife (“it reeked of meaning”)—and what he says of his life: “Why didn’t I know enough of something?”

The meaningful maze of Bishop’s experience owed much to her childhood. Her father died when she was eight months old, and after suffering several breakdowns her mother was institutionalized when Bishop was five. She never saw her again. “I used to ask Grandmother,” she recalled, “when I said goodbye [for school], to promise me not to die before I came home,” and home would remain an uncertain place for her; while staying at her aunt’s, she observed that “I feel about as much at home as an elephant in negligée.” Her anxiety wasn’t helped by the family’s code of silence regarding what had happened to her mother, and there were other traumas too. Bishop’s uncle started sexually abusing her when she was eight, and she never forgot his violence. Once, she said, “he lowered me by my hair over the second story verandah railing—all in the spirit of good clean fun.”

Travisano finds in Bishop’s poetry, fiction, and letters, and his own research, a writer who became, as he puts it, “the archaeologist of her own history.” This history contributed to her later struggles with autoimmune disorders, depression, and periodic alcohol abuse, and her health was a problem from early on (“I went to school on and off but remember chiefly lying in bed wheezing and reading—and my dear aunt Maud going out to buy me more books”). Sequestration bred not just loneliness, but independence; Bishop was the only girl who didn’t sign the pledge of the Christian Association at her high school, and, as her friend Frani Blough put it, “Elizabeth was inclined to be a bit fresh.” The freshness continued at college. When T.S. Eliot visited Vassar in 1933, Bishop interviewed him and noted that he “finally asked me if I would mind if he undid his tie, which for Eliot was rather like taking off all of his clothes.”

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Her life may be, in part, a story about the art of losing, but Bishop had more than one art, and there’s plenty of receiving too. She thanks a friend for a scarf by assuring her that “I shall do the Rumba with it at Sloppy Joe’s—with a tight white satin evening dress,” and Travisano vividly portrays the highs as well as the lows of her relationships with the women in her life. Poet Theodore Roethke called Bishop “a quick kid in a caper,” and the pacing of this biography does justice to the giddy, venturesome, en-route side of its subject as we move from Nova Scotia to Florida, Brazil, Italy, England, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and beyond. Travisano quotes well, and everywhere you sense his sympathetic relish for what Bishop termed “the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life.”

The always-more-ness of Bishop’s world is present in her plentiful et ceteras, whether she’s recounting the details of Hemingway’s farm (“trees, hens, fences, etc., and a dog barking at footprints”), or telling a friend about a fishing trip that goes awry: “we were in danger of blowing up, etc.—in the midst of it all, Capt. Bra lit up a cigarette and looked very remote.” The “etc.” may itself look very remote, but it captures the mood of her poetry: amused yet engaged, watchful yet susceptible. This mastery of tone is a vital part of her quizzical tragicomedies. Bishop’s sense of humor confers a sense of perspective, as poet James Merrill appreciated when he spoke of her as peculiarly “open to trivia and funny surprises, or even painful ones, today a fit of weeping, tomorrow a picnic.”

Travisano draws on many sources, but he gives primacy to Bishop’s correspondence, and he’s right to call her one of the most enthralling letter writers of her age. He ends with her poem “The Bight” (which is “littered with old correspondences”—littered and lettered, indeed, for even the poem’s boats look like “torn-open, unanswered letters”). Bishop asked her partner and executor Alice Methfessel to inscribe the last line of the poem—“awful but cheerful”—on her tombstone (“my favorite line from my own works,” she noted). But Methfessel felt that the words seemed too stark or raw, and so the stone remained blank for years. As a way through this impasse, Travisano suggested inserting the previous line too: “All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful.” Methfessel immediately accepted the idea. The ending brings to mind something Bishop said about Helena Morley, the Brazilian diarist she translated into English: “she winds up her stories with a neat moral that doesn’t apply too exactly.”

It also reminds me of Bishop’s superbly provocative advice to a student: “Why always save your best line for last? Put it second to last.” This is in keeping with the power of some of her own best endings: of “The Fish,” for example, where she stared and stared until everything “was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go”; or of “Filling Station,” where somebody arranges the rows of cans so that they softly say “esso—so—so—so / to high-strung automobiles. / Somebody loves us all.” Sometimes the best line becomes the best on account of its placement, on account of how it plays with and against what comes next. Strictly speaking, Bishop didn’t need “all” in the penultimate line of “The Bight” (“All the untidy activity”). But, unstrictly speaking, she needed exactly that word, for it accentuates not just mess but profusion. In its obliquely insistent way, it tells of just how much life there is here—and how much remains to be done.

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Matthew Bevis teaches English at Oxford University. His most recent book is Wordsworth’s Fun.

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Book news

The National Book Awards were announced on Wednesday, charmingly hosted by national reading hero LeVar Burton. The winners were: Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise for fiction, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House for nonfiction, Arthur Sze’s Sight Lines for poetry, László Krasznahorkai Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming for book in translation, and Martin W. Sandler’s 1919 The Year That Changed America for children’s book. After a three-year hiatus, the White House this week bestowed its National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medals, to singer Alison Krauss; patron Sharon Percy Rockefeller; the musicians of the United States Military; actor Jon Voight; the Claremont Institute think tank; Texas philanthropist Teresa Lozano Long; Washington, DC, chef Patrick J. O’Connell; and novelist James Patterson. The last time the awards were given, in 2016 for 2015, there were twenty-four recipients, including actor Morgan Freeman, composer Philip Glass, record producer Berry Gordy, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. singer Audra McDonald, chef José Andrés, author Ron Chernow, poet Louise Glück, broadcaster Terry Gross, musician Wynton Marsalis, author James McBride, and historian Elaine Pagels, among others.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Newark Public Library received a donation of upwards of $2 million from the estate of Philip Roth to house and maintain the personal book collection that he left to the library and to support its operations generally. Roth said, "My decision to locate my personal library in Newark and, specifically, in the Newark Public Library, was determined by a longstanding sense of gratitude to the city where I was born.” The protagonist in his first novel, Goodbye, Columbus, is a Newark Library employee, and Roth is reported to have researched his American Trilogy (set in Newark and surrounds) in the library’s New Jersey Room. Meanwhile across the pond, the Brontë Society in Haworth, England, announced that it had succeeded in procuring a long-sought “tiny book” by Charlotte Brontë for its Parsonage Museum, with the assistance of its honorary president, Yorkshire-born actress Judi Dench. Brontë created the series of matchbox-sized adventure magazines when she was fourteen. The Random House Group announced that it will publish a series of books drawing on the New York Times’ 1619 project. The publishing industry faced a new ethical challenge when the Associated Press reported that Simon & Schuster had concluded a $2 million book deal with former National Security Advisor John Bolton, whose lawyer has told investigators that he has undisclosed information about his tenure but will not comply with a subpoena to disclose it. Observers are starting to ask whether publishing houses should be monetizing work by public servants that has been withheld from the public. The booming market in nonfiction by political figures has begun to turn on publishers the challenge put to digital platforms like Facebook: should book publishers, which have traditionally made authors responsible for factually verifying their work, be held responsible for spreading disinformation, especially when it, ironically, is routinely accompanied by attacks the truth claims of the very industry disseminating it?

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