Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

I am certain that the reader who manages to understand even a small portion of Robert Lowell’s poems — and they have no snares — will come to a better understanding, in the same measure, of the contemporary American land from which he comes.

1962

When it means a book, I love the word Reader; it has only pleasant associations for me. I learned to read out of a reader, a small brown book still in my possession, rather worn and dirty, with some of the pictures colored in in crayon and my name appearing a good many times, in embryonic handwriting. My reader, like this selection of Miss Moore’s writings, is a mixture of prose and poetry. I seem to know it by heart, and I know some of Miss Moore’s poems by heart. The likenesses end there. No, not at all: a few of Aesop’s Fables appear in both books and both give “The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg” (except that in Miss Moore’s translation of La Fontaine’s version of the story, the goose is a hen). I find the presence of this small, pure, literary stream or rivulet both touching and miraculous: rising somewhere in the sixth century before Christ, running through millenniums of Ancient History and Middle Ages, flowing faster to refresh the jaded court of Louis XIV, sending off, here and there, little branches as far as country-school “primers,”—and then reappearing, “to sparkle out among the fern” in the work of our most sophisticated, most childlike, and dearest poet. “For men may come and men may go, / But I go on for ever.”

Miss Moore has proved her fondness for La Fontaine; probably she and Aesop would have got along well, too. All three derive much profit and pleasure from the folk-ways of birds and animals; they have little of the professional writer about them (I don’t know much about Aesop but I doubt that he had); their imaginations are strongly original but decorous and uninsistent, and they do relish a good moral. I am speaking here of the translator-and-essayist-Miss Moore; the poet-Miss Moore has all the same characteristics but is an infinitely more complicated personality, mysterious but frank, generous but strict, intimidating but lovable. Probably everyone who knows anything at all about American poetry has some sort of mental picture of Miss Moore; probably thousands have seen her. We have been lucky that in her later years she has been so generous and courageous about travelling all over the country to give readings and lectures. She has become almost a familiar figure, and this is one of the happier wonders of the literary age. I first met Miss Moore by appointment, in 1934, in the New York Public Library. I had actually picked out a tall, eagle-nosed, be-turbaned lady, distinguished-looking but proud and forbidding, as a possible Miss Moore, when to my great relief the real one spoke up. One can’t imagine a college student of literature making such a mistake these days.

A reader, says the dictionary, is to teach one how to read. It seems doubtful that anyone needs or wants to be taught to read Miss Moore at this date. However, in case any readers (in the “dear reader” sense) are unfamiliar with her work and this book is their introduction to it, I shall make a few suggestions as to how to read it. First, read the Foreword carefully. Then skip to the back and read the Interview with the Paris Review. Then concentrate for a long time — a week or so — on the twenty-three marvelous earlier poems. After that I think I’d read the prose pieces in chronological order (the dates are given at the back of the book); and by then one should be advanced enough to study the La Fontaine translations, or to take a holiday with the Carnegie Hall and Yul Brynner poems.

The Foreword is full of wonderful things, and it explains a lot, too, for those who want explanations. The best way to take it (and to take all of Miss Moore’s writing, poetry and prose) is as she herself takes the statements of ex-President Eisenhower (see page xvi)— at her word. “More than once after a reading,” she says, “I have been asked with circumspectly hesitant delicacy, ‘Your … poem, Marriage ; would you care to … make a statement about it?’ Gladly. ” (My italics.) It is the word gladly that is typical of Miss Moore: the obliging promptitude, the willingness to respond to all normal interest and requests, the democratic refusal to consider herself a privileged being, a White Goddess, to drape herself in chiffon and assume a deep, dark voice. Her sense of the age, her real sense of style (in clothes, I should add, as well as words), have kept her reassuringly 19th-century, yet, at the age of seventy-four, still the most modern of moderns.

“Appoggiaturas,” she says, “—a charmed subject. A study of trills can be absorbing to the exclusion of everything else.” One hesitates. Is that going too far? But then one remembers that gladly. She believes that what the poet and scientist have in common is their willingness “to waste effort.” Let us be poets over and above the call of duty. Give more than is required; throw in trills and appoggiaturas for the joy of it. Both in writing her own poetry and in judging that of others, her guiding principles are seen to have been passion, accuracy, and pleasure. Under each of these headings, of course, one could set down sub-headings, sometimes contradictory ones. For example: how does Miss Moore reconcile pleasure with the fatigue and drudgery that must go into writing? I once saw in her apartment two bushel baskets, the kind apples come in, full of rejected versions of a rather short review. I thought it was one of her very best reviews, but it is not in this collection. Does that mean that after two bushel-baskets-full of work it did not come up to her standards?

She admits the hard work: “I never knew anyone who had a passion for words who had as much difficulty in saying things as I do and I know I’m trying.” In spite of her wish to be clear and simple, this last phrase brings up the question that always baffles us with great artists of Miss Moore’s kind: the supremely original, nevertheless unpretentious, small-scale ones: Klee, Bissier, or Webern, for example. Just how deep does their self-consciousness go? I certainly can not measure it, and there is always the perfectly agreeable possibility that I am being teased a little on purpose. Lately I have heard one or two poets and critics sound upset because they don’t think that the poem about Yul Brynner is as good as, say, The Pangolin. How solemn can one get? Surely by now Miss Moore is entitled to write any old way, any new way, she wants to.

It is nice to think that the correspondence with the Ford Company will outlast the Ford. Imagine an examination for future English scholars, based on the First Ford Epistle: “I have seen and admired Thunderbird as a Ford designation. It would be hard to match; but let me, the coming week, talk with my brother who would bring ardor and imagination to bear on the quest.”

1. Give the derivation of the word Thunderbird.

2. Describe how the custom developed, in the mid-twentieth century, of asking famous poets to christen the automobile.

Miss Moore says of animals and athletes: “they look their best when caring least.” She says, “I had no ambition to be a writer” and I believe her implicitly. This is her greatest secret and her greatest lesson for us now, when ambition comes first, publicity-seeking second, and writing third. Think of Miss Moore’s years at the Branch Public Library; go to the tortoise, thou hare!

Another lesson we can learn from Miss Moore — if I may relish a moral or two myself — is in how to lead the city-life. Besieged by “culture,” bewildered as to what we should like and shouldn’t like, timid TV watchers or brave non-TV watchers, spending so much time and energy in criticising and comparing likes and dislikes — Miss Moore shows us how it is possible to preserve one’s own pure taste and go one’s own sweet way. We carp and are niggardly, but she can find a moment of lucidity in Eisenhower, and admire the Duke of Windsor’s prose.