Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Another source of resonance is, I think, your use of personification. However, I think there are a number of kinds of personification. Usually the pathetic fallacy is a device — saying one thing by means of another — pure metaphor. As in “the heavy surface of the sea,/ swelling slowly as if considering spilling over” or “The moon in the bureau mirror/looks out a million miles.” This is quite usual in poetry, and I don’t think you overpersonify. There are times when the landscape does not seem to be really personified but vivified — or given a life of its own, as Neruda gives the sea life and animals and plants life. Florida begins with ordinary personification — the tanagers are “embarrassed” the birds “hysterical” but then the landscape begins to live. The turtles are not like men, but like themselves, the shells lie helplessly on the beach. Perhaps I exaggerate. Yet I get a similar sense of the life of the beast from the Fish and The Armadillo.

But this will need much more working out — and I’m not sure I need make such a distinction. Certainly it is true, though, that you switch characteristics of things back and forth. There is an official name — metonymy or synecdoche.

CHAPTER VI, the last chapter has no name as yet. I’ll try to summarize what I have said and remark on “the poet’s contribution to American literature.” Because I do think there is such a contribution, I hope not to sound too asinine. I want to mention Helena Morley again, and your feeling for the truth of the child’s world — an unsentimental one for you — as for anyone who knows children at all. (I really get rather sick of people who are unsympathetic with any child but the memory of themselves. Even mothers who can’t be bothered to understand their own children, but who will reminisce about their own childhoods as if they grew up in the Golden Age.)

This is enough. I wonder if you can read it. I’ve written in a rush because [I’m going] out soon. And I don’t think everything I’ve said can be reasonable. But let me know what you think.

Samambaia, December 30th, 1963

name of place, 8 miles outside P—

means “giant fern”—Petrópolis is always the mailing address

Dear Mrs. Elvin: (or may I call you Anne?)

I have two long letters to you here, one over a month old, and I’ve carried them (off for a week at Cabo Frio) up here to the country and tried re-writing them from time to time. I am sorry to be so slow — they are in answer to yours of October 28th. I thought it was a very good letter and I have been trying to do it justice. I also received the Aiken book safely and thank you very much. I am glad to have one on hand — but I am sorry now you went to the trouble of sending it because while it was on the way a whole set of the books appeared at the Jefferson Library in Copacabana right near where I live in Rio. I’ve looked them over and taken out Edward Taylor to read (a bit dull!) They seem quite scholarly; your letter seems very scholarly! Hegel, Wittgenstein, etc — I am delighted. I have always been weak at philosophy so I am impressed by your being able to connect me with such brains. Like M. Jourdain speaking prose — I must have been philosophizing without realizing it.

Also — please don’t apologize for your typing or spelling — I’m not very strong in those subjects, either.

And thank you for the nice little Chinese drawing. In return I am sending you (I’ve had it ready to mail for weeks but held off in order to try to finish the letter) a very crude Brazilian wood-cut — one of those used on the outside of the little ballad booklets they still sell by the thousands here, particularly in the north. I suppose there are 1,000 years, technically, between your picture and mine. The poem inside mine, however, — about a spectacular murder — would be in a very strict old Portuguese form, almost like Camões. I hope you are happy to be going to England and when is it you go? Saturday I had the U S Cultural Attaché up here for the day and he brought along a young couple — Tom Skidmore — who is here learning Brazilian history in order to teach it at Harvard next year. Perhaps you know him? — an English wife. — I meant to ask him if he knew you, but somehow the chance escaped me. I’ve been up in the country for about ten days — and hope to stay over the week-end. This is where I really live, but have spent very little time here for three years now because — I may have said this before — the friend I live with here is working for Carlos Lacerda, the Governor of Guanabara State (where Rio is) and so we have to stay in the city. After looking over the Aiken book a few things have struck me — one is that for the chronology I think you could put in Lota’s name — I owe her a great deal; the next book of poems will be dedicated to her, and we have been friends for 20 years or so. (We also own, and are still building, this house together.) Something like: “November 1951—went on a trip to S.A. with the money from Bryn Mawr. Stopped over in Rio to visit Maria Carlota de Macedo Soares, an old friend, got sick — and then stayed on”—and on — However you wish to phrase it.

This is not for your book, especially—but the more I looked at those books the more I wondered how you can make one out of me! — just for your information. Lota is president of the group that is turning an enormous fill along the Rio harbor into a park — It is about three miles long, full of highways, beaches, playgrounds, etc. and a tremendous undertaking for this bankrupt city — and while Lacerda is still in office we’ll be stuck in Rio, more or less. This park is very badly written up [in] Don Passos’s last book — (I don’t recommend it). I’ll save the rest for the letter I hope to finish and get off to you tomorrow. With all best wishes for the New Year — and thank you very much for your letter and your card—

Faithfully yours

Elizabeth

Started then — now it’s Rio, January 20th — St Sebastian’s Day

Samambaia, January 8th, 1964

Dear Anne:

I hope you got my large registered envelope. The mails are quite crazy these days — I have received magazines from September, and a big pink letter addressed to “The Bishop of the Methodist Church of Brazil.”

To go on with my reply. After studying the Aiken book, I think you might also just as well say in the chronology: “1916. Mother became permanently insane, after several breakdowns. She lived until 1934.” I’ve never concealed this, although I don’t like to make too much of it. But of course it is an important fact, to me. I didn’t see her again.

I live in a very “modern” house outside Petrópolis that Lota & I own together — she had started it when I came here and we have been building it ever since, although it has been more or less finished for about seven years. It was awarded a prize by Gropius and has been in many shows, magazines, and books. I’m saying this not to boast but because I am interested in architecture and, if I do say — I think it’s a good house — not grand, elegantly finished or anything like that — that would be difficult here, even if we had the money. “L’ Architecture d’Aujourdhui” for June — July, 1960, pps. 60–61, has some fairly good photographs of it, although it was still unfinished when they were taken. (In case you’re interested!) I have foolishly not kept carbons of my letters to you and I’m afraid I may be repeating myself — but another thing I’ve done since living in Brazil was to work on a big book called “Contemporary Brazilian Architecture”, by Henrique Mindlin. I translated some for the English edition and tried to improve his introduction, rather unsuccessfully. I also did the book on Brazil for the LIFE World Library Series, 1962 (or did I say this before?). I undertook it for money and had a disagreeable time with the editors before it was done. I have just refused to revise it for them for a new edition — the political chapter is out of date, mostly. I was very much distressed by it. The text is more or less mine, but somehow is also full of their bad grammar, clichés, etc. I was not responsible for captions (mostly quite wrong!) or photographs, although I did fight to get better pictures in it, and got a few. However — imagine a book about Brazil without one bird, beast, butterfly, orchid, flowering-tree, etc. They also cut all those things out of my text, & the paragraphs about famous naturalists, etc. Recently, however, a few tourist friends coming here have told me how “useful” they had found this book (there is very little about Brazil in English), and so I look at it more calmly. But if you see it, please make allowances!