Writers on Writers

Colm Tóibín

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400865574
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

A compelling portrait of a beloved poet from one of today's most acclaimed novelists In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences—the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling double portrait that will intrigue readers interested in both Bishop and Tóibín.For Tóibín, the secret of Bishop's emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop's famous attention to detail, Tóibín describes how Bishop is able to convey great emotion indirectly, through precise descriptions of particular settings, objects, and events. He examines how Bishop's attachment to the Nova Scotia of her childhood, despite her later life in Key West and Brazil, is related to her early loss of her parents—and how this connection finds echoes in Tóibín's life as an Irish writer who has lived in Barcelona, New York, and elsewhere.Beautifully written and skillfully blending biography, literary appreciation, and descriptions of Tóibín's travels to Bishop's Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, On Elizabeth Bishop provides a fresh and memorable look at a beloved poet even as it gives us a window into the mind of one of today's most acclaimed novelists.

Art Isn’t Worth That Much

Thom Gunn once noted that Elizabeth Bishop had told him Robert Lowell was her best friend; Gunn seemed pleased to record that when he met Lowell a few years later and mentioned Bishop, Lowell said, “Oh, she’s my best friend.” What was peculiar or perhaps what was sustaining to the friendship was how little Lowell and Bishop ever actually saw each other. Bishop lived in Brazil from 1952, and when she returned to the East Coast of the United States, where she lived between 1970 and her death in 1979, Lowell was mainly in England until his death in 1977. They sent each other poems, and Lowell helped Bishop win prizes and deal with publishers. They wrote letters to each other. Mostly, between 1947, when they first met in New York, and Lowell’s death, they seemed, as Lowell wrote, “attached to each other by some stiff piece of wire, so that each time one moves, the other moves in another direction.” On the other hand, he also wrote to her in 1963: “I think I must write entirely for you.” She became his most avid reader. In 1964 she wrote to him: “I’m afraid you’re the only poet I find very interesting, to tell the truth.”

It is notable that despite the closeness of their friendship, there were things that could not be easily mentioned. When Lowell wrote to her in 1950, for example, to say that his father had died, there is no evidence that Bishop made any reference to the death in return. Her long letter to him after his mother’s death, in 1954, began: “What a joy to hear from you! Heavens—I’ve felt much better ever since; I hadn’t realized just how worried I had been, I guess. I had heard vaguely … about the death of your mother and felt I should have written about that but scarcely knew what to say and of course do not even now.” She made no other reference to the death of his mother in a letter filled with news and trivia.

Some of their exchanges remain fascinating, such as the letter in 1957 when Bishop read a draft of a poem (which later became “For Elizabeth Bishop 2: Castine, Maine”) Lowell had written about her in which he mentioned that her mother had tried to kill her. “I don’t remember any direct threats,” Bishop wrote, “except the usual maternal ones. Her danger for me was just implied in the things I overheard the grown-ups say before and after her disappearance. Poor thing, I don’t want to have it any worse than it was.” The following year, it must have struck

Bishop with considerable force when she learned that Lowell, who had had a breakdown, was incarcerated in the same mental hospital where her mother had been. “My mother stayed there once for a long time,” she wrote to him. “I even have some snapshots of her in very chic clothes of around 1917, taking a walk by a pond there.”

Bishop was careful when Lowell published his volume Life Studies, which contained autobiographical or confessional poems, in 1958. When he asked her to write a blurb for it, she produced an elaborate note of support, writing of the personal section of the book: “In these poems, heart-breaking, shocking, grotesque and gentle, the unhesitant attack, the imagery and construction are as brilliant as ever, but the mood is nostalgic and the meter is refined.” She concluded: “Somehow or other, by fair means or foul, and in the middle of our worst century so far, we have produced a magnificent poet.” She liked the idea, she wrote to Lowell, that the confessional poems “are all about yourself and yet do not sound conceited.” In 1960, when she read some deeply personal poems by Anne Sexton (which were often compared to Lowell’s), she wrote to Lowell: “There is all the difference in the world, I’m afraid, between her kind of simplicity and that of Life Studies, her kind of egocentricity that is simply that, and yours that has been—what would be the reverse of sublimated, I wonder—anyway, made intensely interesting, and painfully applicable to every reader.”

The following year she wrote to Lowell to complain about W. D. Snodgrass’s personal poems, calling Snodgrass “one of your better imitators” and saying: “You tell things—but never wind up with your own darling gestures, the way he does. … I went straight through Life Studies again and there is not a trace of it, and that is really ‘masculine’ writing—courageous and honest.” In 1974, complaining about a tendency toward the confessional and the explicitly personal in other contemporary poetry, she wrote to Lowell: “There’s all the difference in the world between Life Studies and those who now out-sex Anne Sexton.” In 1974 Lowell wrote to Bishop: “By the way is a confessional poem one that one would usually hesitate to read before an audience? I have many (they are a perfectly good kind) but have none in my last lot, and you have none ever.”

Robert Lowell wrote the poem “Water” about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it at the beginning of his book For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, adding that it was “more romantic and gray than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us. Indeed it all started from thinking about your letter, how indispensable you are to me, and how ideally we’ve really kept things, better than life allows really.” In her response, Bishop questioned the accuracy of Lowell’s opening line, “It was a real Maine fishing town,” and his line “where the fish were trapped.” “I have two minor questions,” she wrote, “but, as usual, they have to do with my George-Washington-handicap. I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on—where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped—(this is trivial, I know, and like Marianne [Moore], sometimes I think I’m telling the truth when I’m not.) … ‘The sea drenched the rock’ is so perfectly simple but so good.”

Lowell replied: “Your suggestions on ‘Water’ might be great improvements.” The poem finally read:

It was a Maine lobster town—

each morning boatloads of hands

pushed off for granite

quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak

white frame houses stuck

like oyster shells

on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped

the raw little match-stick

mazes of a weir

where the fish for bait were trapped.

Six years later, Bishop sent Lowell a postcard from the Art Institute of Chicago of Winslow Homer’s Marblehead, which is an image of two people in conversation on a coastal rock. “Out of all the masterpieces in this place,” she wrote, “I chose this to send you, for obvious reasons.”

Five years before he wrote the poem, Lowell sent Bishop a long and somewhat manic letter about that time in Maine. At the end of a day’s swimming, he remembered,

you said rather humorously yet it was truly meant, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” Probably you forget. … But at the time … I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept … and when I was to have joined you at Key West I was determined to ask you. … The possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. … But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.

Bishop, in her response, did not comment on this.

In 1974, when they had known each other for almost thirty years, Lowell wrote to her: “I see us still when we first met, both at Randall [Jarrell]’s and then for a couple of years later. I see you as rather tall, long brown-haired, shy. … I was brown haired and thirty I guess and I don’t know what.” Bishop replied, once more seeking accuracy from him and a sharper sense of detail: “Never, never was I ‘tall’—as you wrote remembering me. I was always 5 ft 4 and ¼ inches—now shrunk to 5 ft 4 inches—The only time I’ve ever felt tall was in Brazil. And I never had ‘long brown hair’ either!—It started turning gray when I was 23 or 24—and probably was already somewhat grizzled when I first met you. … What I remember about that meeting is your dishevelment, your lovely curly hair. … You were also rather dirty, which I rather liked, too. … Well, I think I’ll have to write my memoirs, just to get things straight.”

In his letter remembering their first meetings, Lowell returned to the image of water. “But the fact is we were swimming in our young age, with the water coming down on us, and we were gulping.” They were unusual as poets, or indeed as citizens, in that they did not have to work, as Lowell pointed out to Bishop in 1953; they both had trust funds that kept them going. They were both also only children.

The last poem in Lowell’s Life Studies, “Skunk Hour,” was dedicated to Bishop and written during a period when Lowell had discarded a number of poems about her. As he worked on it, he wrote to Bishop to say that it was “indebted a little to your Armadillo,” but later he stated publicly that he “was intent on copying” the form of Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo”: “Both poems have an ambling structure, little stanzas and the final natural but charged image that gives the poem its conclusion and title.” As David Kalstone pointed out, however, the poem was not simply an homage to Bishop and her work, but a way of using her tone and then moving away from it, a way of separating himself from her as much as moving close.

In Bishop’s work, much was implied by what seemed to be mere description. Description was a desperate way of avoiding self-description; looking at the world was a way of looking out from the self. The self in Bishop’s poems was too fragile to be violated by much mentioning. Slowly, the self then emerged with the same stark force that silence has in music. Bishop managed to unsettle the tone of a poem by watching a scene with a fierce precision, as though the scene or she herself would soon disappear; many of her best poems offered little real sense of the personal, nor any single meaning. The fact that the world was there was both enough and far too little for Bishop. Its history—or her own history—was beside the point. In an effort to praise Lowell, she mentioned a composer and a painter, Anton Webern and Paul Klee, whom she admired, who had used silence, blankness, minimal means; she wrote of their “modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time.” Her poem “The Armadillo” opened:

This is the time of year

when almost every night

the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.

Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint

still honored in these parts,

the paper chambers flush and fill with light

that comes and goes, like hearts.

What Lowell saw her do was find something moving, an armadillo, and offer it in the poem a resonant and disruptive mystery, a task and function that were surprising, not fully clear, and then all the more powerful for that. In the poem Bishop may have implied a great deal about her own helplessness, but she managed also to suggest that such an implication might be both taken for granted and also fully taken in by the reader and felt. For Lowell, such an implication was precisely and openly and only what he wished the poem to have. He wanted, in his own words in another context, to make the scream clang. He saw what could be done in the tone of Bishop’s poem by using short lines, with three beats, against a longer line with five beats. He adapted this system of short and long and short to superb effect for the last stanza of his poem:

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air—

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.

In “Skunk Hour,” Lowell had found a set of metaphors that were loose, suggestive, and ambiguous enough to encapsulate the personal plight he had outlined more clearly, perhaps even more flatly, in some of the earlier pages of Life Studies, but sharp enough to push further, or dramatize his place in the world more fully, than any of his merely confessional poems. It would, as David Kalstone wrote, launch “him into his true subject, investigation of the debilitated historical and personal forces that had shaped his life.” His dramatization of this subject would culminate in a number of magisterial poems, such as “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” “The Fourth of July in Maine,” and “Near the Ocean” in his volume Near the Ocean (1967).

To some of the other poems in Life Studies, the ones where Lowell mentioned members of his grand family by name, as though they were personages, such as “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” Bishop’s response should be read ambiguously. “I must confess,” she wrote, “that I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel that I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say—but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with his wife, and spent most of his time fishing … and was ignorant as sin. … Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American, etc., gives you, I think, the confidence you display about tackling any idea or theme, seriousl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• No Detail Too Small
• One of Me
• In the Village
• The Art of Losing
• Nature Greets Our Eyes
• Order and Disorder in Key West
• The Escape from History
• Grief and Reason
• The Little That We Get for Free
• Art Isn’t Worth That Much
• The Bartók Bird
• Efforts of Affection
• North Atlantic Light
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Permissions Acknowledgments