Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

You ask the name of the friend I took the Newfoundland walking trip with — we were not “literary” friends and I’m afraid we lost track of each other years ago, so I don’t think it matters.

I began publishing either junior or senior year at college. First, I think, were a story and a poem, maybe two, in a magazine called THE MAGAZINE edited for a few years by Ivor Winters. Before that I had received honorable mention (for the same contributions, I think) in a contest for college writing held by HOUND & HORN. I worked on the college newspaper off and on, and I was editor of my class year-book (but that had nothing to do with writing). Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clarke, Eleanor’s sister Eunice, and I, and two or three others, started an anonymous and what we thought “advanced” literary magazine. It succeeded so well that we were asked to join our original enemy, the official college literary magazine. (But I was NOT a member of Mary McC’s GROUP — the one her recent novel’s about. She was a year ahead of me.) The story Robert Lowell referred to, I think (since he likes it) must be one called IN PRISON. It’s in the first Partisan Review Anthology — but it was published after college. The first poem of mine they published, I think, was “Love Lies Sleeping.” At least I remember getting a letter from Mary McC when I was in Paris, saying that PR was starting up again and would I send them a poem, and I think that’s the one I sent—

During the war I worked briefly for the Navy, in the optical shop in the Key West Submarine Base — on binoculars. I was allergic to the acids used to clean the prisms so I had to stop, but I liked the work — and the “shop.”

While in Mexico I knew Pablo Neruda and I now realize he had more influence on me than I knew at the time. I studied Spanish with a refugee, a friend of his, we read a great deal of poetry — Lorca, Neruda, and early Spanish poets, etc.

I think that answers both your letters. I am not worried about time, so please don’t you be. I think you are probably right about my anthropomorphism — although people speak, or used to, against it, it seems to be a fairly constant ingredient in all kinds of poetry through the ages, in varying amounts — Yes, I’d like to see the Twayne Aiken very much — hope it arrives safely. I know what you mean about “mechanical” troubles — we have them here, & also light rationing, because of the drought — which means lighting candles or oil lamps for a while every evening. In the country it seem fairly natural, but in apartments, shops, restaurants, etc. in Rio, it is very strange—

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Bishop

P.S. I read this over and see that I have made my hiking-companion sound mysterious without meaning to. Her maiden name was Evelyn Huntington and she was a year or two ahead of me. I am sorry I have lost track of her and hope to see her again sometime because she was a very entertaining girl — and we had a very good time. She was a Public Health worker — If you want names, just ask — but I gather the biographical sketch is sketchy. — Others who were in on our anonymous college magazine were Frani Blough Muser (later an editor of Modern Music for many years) — and Margaret Miller, who was with the Museum of Modern Art in New York for 20 years, I think — We were all interested in “modern” art, music, and writing — sophomores and juniors at the time, I think.

I believe I mentioned that I think John Dewey also influenced me — NOT his writings, which I have scarcely read, but his personality. The poem “A Cold Spring” is dedicated to his youngest daughter, an old friend, although quite a bit older than I am. The book “A Cold Spring” is dedicated to Dr. Baumann, my doctor in New York for many years — also now the Lowells’ doctor and doctor to many of my friends — a general practitioner.

44 Porter Street

Watertown, Mass.

October 28, 1963

Dear Miss Bishop,

I received your letter of October 2nd quite some time ago. I probably should have answered it right away to reassure you about the mails, but I wanted to send you something more than a reassurance. You are very generous about my ponderous progress, but I am less so and keep wishing I could work more swiftly. However, I think I have an outline at last that will work. Next week or at worst, the week after, I’ll send you twenty or thirty pages of a first draft — really very rough, I’m afraid, but including some comments on THE FISH, THE MAP, THE IMAGINARY ICEBERG, CHEMIN DE FER, THE COLDER THE AIR, LOVE LIES SLEEPING, CAPE BRETON, AT THE FISHHOUSES, ROOSTERS OVER 2000 ILLUSTRATIONS ETC. and a number of other poems. This looks like a grab-bag, I’m sure, but I am at last satisfied that I have a skeleton of a book. I am most grateful for your corrections and amendments. These I will write up in as finished a form as I now can and send along — so as to be sure to get nothing terribly wrong. You are quite right — I must have omitted Helena Morley in the sketch I sent you. An oversight, I admire it very much, especially because you seem to have translated it, not reinterpreted it. I am very dubious about most translations, although I don’t mind out and out imitations like Robert Lowell’s. There seems to be no pretense of accuracy there. On the other hand, Ben Belitt’s translations of Neruda that I have been reading this week seem to me unreliable. Germanic and squashed, entirely out of keeping with the Spanish. Unfortunately, my Spanish is such that I need a pony if I am to read with any speed at all. I am glad you told me that you liked him. (Neruda, not Belitt) Although I never feel the violence in your poems that I do in his, nor the sensuality, there is a real affinity. Especially in the sea poems and in the ones about animals.

I sent off the Aiken volume, glowing like a stop light, last week. I don’t think it will tell you much about what I am doing, however. I am not an academic, neither do I think there is much point in encouraging the current mystique of author-worship by writing a lot about your life. One of my troubles in getting started with this book has been to decide what, exactly, is important in your poetry. The outline which follows may give you an idea of my conclusions. Perhaps you won’t agree, but I think you may at least be interested. Of course, I’ll be glad to revise and rethink. At any rate, I have taken a number of excursions — into Transcendentalism, into Imagism, into contemporary German Art — or contemporary in the 1930’s and 40’s — all with great benefit to me, returning from circuitous voyages much enriched. My husband, who is a sinologist but who also has an incredible knowledge of philosophy and art, suggested that Wittgenstein as well as Klee and Ernst, was concerned at one point in his career, with the nature of seeing. In his notebooks he writes, “All that we see could also be otherwise; all that we can describe at all could also be otherwise.” This seems to descend from Hegel — a fact that has escaped most positivist philosophers today — whose distinction between Actuality and Reality is like that of the Transcendentalists and indeed of many mystics. This kind of insight may lie behind “surrealistic[“] poems like the MONUMENT, even more, behind the kind of inversion of realities implied in THE MAP and in the last two or three stanzas of LOVE LIES SLEEPING. Perhaps this is of more interest to me than any one else, however. My father — who studied with Dewey once — is fairly well known as a follower of Wittgenstein, and is fairly hated by the theoretical poets who misinterpret what he is doing. So you see how untranscendental my own background has been.

But let me sketch my outline for you. I won’t fill in with details just now, but leave them for the next installment.