Part I
Hiding Places
Chapter 1
Ice and Snow
Introducing Memory
Elizabeth Bishop was both gifted with and haunted by childhood memories, yet from the very beginning of her career she refused to see this double inheritance as anything particularly special. âLike most poetsâ, she once wrote to Anne Stevenson, âI have a really morbid total recall of certain periods and I could go on for hours â but I wonât!â (AS, March 23rd 1964). The element of restraint here is typical of Bishop. While she admits to having âmorbidâ thoughts about the past, she does not dwell on them for very long (or even at all). Memories of the dead die with her; they are not allowed to trouble the living, whether it be a critic, like Stevenson, asking about the specific relevance of childhood experiences, or a reader like me on the look-out for biographical evidence. According to her memoir, âPrimer Classâ, memory âwas always right there, clear and completeâ (CPr, p.4). Paradoxically present, she did ânot even have to try to remember, or reconstruct [it]â (CPr, p.4). This is an incredibly idiosyncratic definition of memory, regardless of what Bishop says to the contrary. Sylvia Plath, for example, described biographical facts as a âcomplex mosaicâ, a ânebulous seething of memoryâ that the poet had to âyank [âŚ] out into black-and-white on the typewriterâ (Plath, 1982, p.72). Bishop, on the other hand, seems to view memory as both certain and stable. It is literally there in front of her, like a poem on a page. In fact, perhaps this is where Bishop locates memory most often, in writing rather than in life. Memory becomes a synonym for art, for that which is alive forever rather than bound by mortality. It takes on the indeterminate form of a ghost or zombie, something that has a relation to life but is at the same time on the side of the immortal or unliving. This is what differentiates Bishop from most poets. Sometimes, her poems are based on memories of people she knew and loved and wishes us to love too by making them representative. At other times, she uses allusions to other artists and writers to make them present again. Bishopâs voice is recognisable precisely because it conceals an identifiable history or past. She is the least egotistical of twentieth-century poets who remember because she never forgets to lose her self in the poem.
This chapter analyses the artistic difficulties involved in trying to express oneself through written memories that repeatedly erase that self from view. How does one actually âgo on for hoursâ, or even years, as a writer, without revealing some past history to the reader? All writers inevitably draw on the past when writing in the present. According to Margaret Atwood, the artist has always âto go to the land of the deadâ (Atwood, 2002, p.171) to bring something back for the living:
All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. And all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but itâs useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more â which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change. (Atwood, 2002, pp.178â9)
As Atwood suggests, the poet, like Orpheus, regularly descends into the underworld of his/her own past in order to rescue the beautiful stories held there. But Atwood departs from the Orpheus myth at a crucial moment. While all writers âmust go from now to once upon a timeâ, they cannot remain in that time if they want their work to enter âthe land of the livingâ. The past has to undergo change in order to survive the transformation into art. Writers have to stop and consider âthe realm of the audienceâ above ground, waiting to see if anything has been found there. Orpheus famously looked back at Eurydice before reaching the surface, condemning both of them to a life of perpetual loss. Writers who draw on the past must always remember this lesson. Personal history is âuseless treasureâ unless other readers can see the beauty of it in the present without recourse to biographical facts or other information. The message is perhaps similar for critics. By looking back at the past when reading poems, we risk losing sight of the beautiful object before us, condemning our own Eurydices to a life in the shadows.
Bishop works hard in every painting, poem and story, not to look back over her shoulder. Her âmemory poemsâ are nearly always told in the present, as if they were actually still happening to her now. In her best work, she reclaims the past without making any claims on the reader to know or understand the specific circumstances or history behind it. The ghosts of life are continually given artistic form to become something else. In âMemories of Uncle Neddyâ (1975), Bishop credits her Nova Scotian grandmother for introducing her to this process. Elizabeth Hutchinson Bulmer, like her granddaughter, Elizabeth, never forgot anything. Both women turn their personal reminiscences into a kind of song, the grandmother into the motion of a rocking chair, the granddaughter into âa memory machineâ later:
My grandmother grew indignant. âI gave your Uncle Edward that horse on his tenth wedding anniversary! Not only that, but he sold him back to me two years afterwards and he still keeps saying I havenât finished paying him yet! When I have! And he uses that horse all the time, much more than we do!â
âOh, pshaw, mother,â said my grandfather. âThatâs an old story now.â
âOh yes,â said my grandmother. âNimble, and the buffalo robe, and the dinner service, and pew rent â theyâre all old stories now. Youâd never remember anything. But I wonât forget. I wonât forget.â And she set the rocking chair rocking as if it were, as it probably was, a memory machine. (CPr, p.243)
Bishop seems to have possessed a similar âmemory machineâ all her life, continually exchanging autobiographical treasure for the richer form of art. We read on not to know more about her past, but to continue to be enchanted in the present. As April Bernard states: âThe intimacy that Bishop develops with her reader is best described as the sort that Rilke characterised as âtrue love,â wherein two people gaze not at each other, but at a third, shared thingâ (Bernard, 1994, p.16). The third thing is, of course, the poem or story, the âsharedâ gift that connects writer and reader. Rilke wrote his own Sonnets to Orpheus, seeing the underground journey into the past as one of the main preconditions for writing. Obviously not all memories complete the process. The âmemory machineâ of any poet has an extremely limited shelf life. The best a poet can do is set it ârockingâ and hope that it works more often than not.
Bishopâs fullest examination of this process came in her correspondence with Robert Lowell. Her comments on an early draft of Life Studies in December 1957 show her grasping with the problem of how to formulate her own autobiographical experiences:
They all [âŚ] have that sure feeling, as if youâd been in a stretch (Iâve felt that way for very short stretches once in a long while) when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry â or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time! It seems to me itâs the whole purpose of art, to the artist (not to the audience) â that rare feeling of control, illumination â life is all right, for the time being. Anyway, when I read such an extended display of the imagination as this, I feel it for you. (SL, p.350)
Bishop appreciates Lowellâs ability to illuminate past experiences through art. Yet her apparent admiration is undercut by her tongue-in-cheek tone. To Lowellâs illumination of the life, Bishop adds âthat rare feeling of controlâ. This tone of hard-won equanimity â âlife is all right, for the time beingâ â is more characteristic of her use of autobiographical material than it ever is of his. It lies behind the mastery of âdisasterâ (CP, p.178) in the villanelle, âOne Artâ, and is one of the few constant notes in her writing. In art (as in life), Bishopâs âwhole purposeâ is to stave off crisis. She does so not by ignoring feeling, but by placing formal controls on it. Lowellâs failure to practise similar restraint is implicitly criticised here. Her scruples about Life Studies relate not to Lowellâs reimagination of biography, but rather to his failure to master emotion through form. Bishopâs poetry draws on life too, but, unlike Lowell, she never tries to âdisplayâ the results. While she accepts that memories can be used as âmaterial for poetryâ, or even âbe poetryâ, she refuses to abandon tonal control over them.
This is Bishopâs and Lowellâs point of no return, their Orpheus-Eurydice moment. After the writing of this letter, they remained close friends whilst moving increasingly apart poetically. Bishop is one of the few poets to follow Persephoneâs advice, constantly waiting for the past to change shape before looking back. Lowell, on the other hand, is much more impatient and impetuous, stumbling backwards into history as almost his first poetic step. As he states in the famous final lines to âWaking in the Blueâ: âWe are all old-timers,/each of us holds a locked razorâ (Lowell, 2003, p.184). For Lowell, the past makes all of us old men, robbing us of the ability to look forward. The locked razor is our only escape from this dilemma, cutting off both life and the memory of it. From Life Studies (1959) on, Lowell seems to place more emphasis on the past than the present, drawing on life as his main (and perhaps only) source of inspiration. As Bishop complained in 1964, unsure whether to blame Lowell or not for the changing cultural landscape:
Surely never in all the ages has poetry been so personal and confessional â and I donât think that it is what I like, really â although I certainly admire Lowellâs. â He does manage to make it a bit more universal and less self-pitying â or is [it] because I know him and know how courageous he is, etc.? (AS, October 27th 1964)
Only seven years have passed between Bishopâs cautious endorsement of the Life Studies manuscript and her subsequent criticism of its influence here, though I think we can already sense her misgivings in the earlier letter. Bishop always values poetry above that which is âpersonal and confessionalâ. Whilst she admires Lowellâs courage in facing down personal trauma, she questions whether this form of heroism has anything to do with poetry.
Whereas, for Lowell, the past is what we âold-timersâ write about, for Bishop it is at best a dark, shadowy landscape, inaccessible for most of her career. She had to stay awake for almost a lifetime to see it suddenly âilluminated in long shafts here and thereâ. Childhood poems and stories increased in frequency as Bishopâs career progressed, but her memories did not become art overnight. They depended upon the âmemory machineâ functioning properly, form and tone working in tandem. Only then could feelings of anguish diminish and the different sensations of poetry take over. The history of her career is in many ways a lesson on waiting. She writes about her Canadian childhood 35 years after it happened in the 1950s. She has the idea for âCrusoe in Englandâ during a trip to Cuttyhunk Island in 1934 but cannot finish the poem until 1971. Memories work in poems and as poems for Bishop only when they have entered âtime once moreâ, when they exist in the present-day experiences of readers rather than the past experiences of writers. This is the kind of illumination Bishop was always on the look-out for, those elusive forms of writing that make memory easy to memorise, stories useful to pass on. The knowledge we find in her poems is not of the autobiographical sort. It is âwhat we imagine knowledge to beâ, something âhistorical, flowing, and flownâ, based on the ârocky breastsâ of personal experience certainly, but always moving on, elsewhere (see âAt the Fishhousesâ, CP, p.66). This is what divides her from Lowell in both 1957 and 1964, and what still divides her from the majority of poets writing nowadays. She waits for the past to catch up with the present, for her memories to make sense as our memories too.
âHow can anyone want such things?â
Perfecting this process was never an easy one. In spite of being a prolific letter writer, Bishop was never a prolific poet. While Plath completed half of her Ariel poems in a month, Bishop rarely finished more than a couple of poems a year, resolving ânever to try to publish anything until I thought Iâd done my best with it, no matter how many years it tookâ (CPr, p.137). The patience that waited 26 years to finish âThe Mooseâ and at least 16 drafts to polish âOne Artâ, did not unfortunately have time to tidy up at least 100 or so more poems and stories in the notebooks now held at Vassar. Mary McCarthy picks up on this idea when she writes of an aesthetic still âwaiting to be foundâ (McCarthy, 1983, p.267). While some work has been done on editing and publishing archival poems and stories over the last decade, little has been made of the continuing relationship between published and unpublished writings. Alice Quinn, poetry editor of the New Yorker, has recently finished work on an edition of Bishopâs uncollected and unfinished poems, Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box. Barbara Page, one of the most astute critics of Bishopâs drafting process, is also re-editing the prose writings on Brazil. While both projects add to the revising of Bishopâs reputation in helpful ways, there remains an urgent need for a fuller Complete Poems and Complete Prose which incorporate all of Bishopâs work in one place. Until these books are available, various aspects of her aesthetic development will continue to be downplayed or misunderstood.
Literary historians tend to view artistic careers like Bishopâs in terms of simple journeys and trajectories, broken up by one or two eureka moments. Filtered through this narrow perspective, Bishop is usually seen as an impersonal, rather reticent writer who suddenly became more autobiographical in the 1960s and 70s. Robert Lowell is often seen as the main catalyst for this change. Critics such as David Kalstone (1989) and Lorrie Goldensohn (1992) both privilege Lowell as the most important figure in Bishopâs artistic transformation. For Kalstone, Lowell was âthe challenging confidant to whom she would send her work and the letter-journals of her lifeâ (Kalstone, 1989, p.109). He was both âthe disciplined productive poet against whom she could test and explore her anarchic sideâ and the person âwho actually provided her with suggestive models of how to do the testing and exploringâ (1989, p.115). According to Goldensohn, Bishop âfelt Lowellâs influence as a steady enlargement of the possible subject, loosening her tighter grip on the emotionsâ (Goldensohn, 1992, p.174). Such accounts, as Bishop says of Crusoeâs and Fridayâs relationship, âhave everything all wrongâ (CP, p.165). Lowell learnt from Bishop, rather than the other way round. âSkunk Hourâ was modelled on âThe Armadilloâ, just as â91 Revere Streetâ was prompted by âIn the Villageâ. As Lowell admitted later, âre-reading her suggested a way of breaking through the shell of my old mannerâ (Lowell, 1983, p.199).
Reductive readings of the Bishop-Lowell relationship are just one consequence of the partial publication of Bishopâs complete writings, though they are illustrative of the damage caused to a writerâs reputation when the editing of their work is too selective. Drafts and notebooks from before Bishop met Lowell show her in a completely different light to the modest, emotionally recalcitrant poet usually painted by the biographical critics. If Bishop could stand up to Marianne Moore over her savage editing of âRoostersâ in 1940, she was more than ready to take on Robert Lowell in the 1950s and 60s. This book seeks to bring together the two sides of her writing life. The unpublished material does not reveal a more personal writer. It reveals a more complete one, somebody who cared enough about the sensibilities of her readers actually to suppress memory poems and stories she consi...