Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

My outlook is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see. But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy, — to make life endurable and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick.”

It would take me months to answer your letter properly so I shall send this jumble along. Please ask any questions you want to. Just please don’t quote me exactly, however, without telling me? — because I think I’ve put things rather badly. I needn’t have bothered you, probably, with so many likes & dislikes. I wish you could take a trip down here — I’m sure we could cook up lots of interesting notions in a few days. *Please tell me when you go to England. With all best wishes for the New Year — which was still new when I began—

Faithfully yours,

Elizabeth

Postcript. I mentioned that the “surrealism of everyday life” was always more successful, — or more amazing — than any they can think up, — that is for those who have eyes to see. Yesterday I saw such a good example of what I meant by that and some of my other remarks that I must add it. I went to see O Processo—“The Trial”—which is absolutely dreadful. Have you seen it? I haven’t read the book for ages — but in spite of the morbidity of Kafka, etc. I like to remember that when he read his stories out loud to his friends he used to have to stop because he got to laughing so. All the way through the film I kept thinking that any of Buster Keaton’s films give one the sense of the tragedy of the human situation, the weirdness of it all, besides being fun —all the very things poor Orson Welles was trying desperately to illustrate by laying it on with a trowel. I don’t like heaviness —in general, Germanic art. It seems often to amount to complete self-absorption — like Mann & Wagner. I think one can be cheerful AND profound! — or, how to be grim without groaning—

Hopkins’s “terrible” sonnets are terrible — but he kept them short, and in form.

It may amount to a kind of “good manners,” I’m not sure. The good artist assumes a certain amount of sensitivity in his audience and doesn’t attempt to flay himself to get sympathy or understanding. (The same way I feel the “Christians” I know suffer from bad manners — they refuse to assume that other people can be good, too, and so constantly condescend without realizing it. And — now that I come to think of it — so do communists! I’ve had far-left acquaintances come here and point out the slums to me, ask if I’d seen them — after 12 years — how can I bear to live here, etc …)

44 Porter Street

Watertown, Mass.

January 29, 1964

Dear Elizabeth,

Yes, I did receive your New Year’s woodblock. Mark and I like it extremely — such a decorous murder! I was glad to have your note with it since I was beginning to fear that in spite of having registered my letter to you, it had gone astray. Yours arrived with a snow storm about two weeks ago. Then, yesterday, with a second snow storm (I’m beginning to think there must be a connection) your seven page letter! Delighted that you seem to understand and even to like what I still feel is an inchoate mess of ideas. I agree with you in almost everything you say, which makes writing this book a pleasure, and not the burden I first thought it would be. (Agree with your views regarding gaiety and profundity emphatically. I think that is why I liked your poems so much when I first read them. Especially as this view is so unfashionable, or seemingly unfashionable among poets writing today, poets of, alas, my generation who seem to be utterly lacking in perspective. And I feel as you do about writers and literary circles. When I was at Michigan two years ago I knew a lot of literary people, liked them, but felt they never came to terms with anything except writing. Terribly limited as people, thought I never felt this about musicians, for instance, or physicists. But then, very few of the musicians or scientists I know read poetry. Very distressful.)

I did keep a carbon copy of my letter to you in October, and I am conscious of having broken my promise. I did mean to send you some parts of my completed manuscript, but, as usual, I did not complete anything to my satisfaction before November and then I had a miscarriage which sent me into a spin of depression (one feels so aware of the fortuitousness of things, like Greeks, at the mercy of fate) so that I could not write anything or read, hardly. Then Christmas and all that Nonsense. The awful dilemma of bringing up a child in this contaminated world — well, I won’t go on, but I’ll ask you to be patient. It’s hard to extract poems from the context of what I’m writing. I want to finish the three middle chapters — on the Artist, Precision and Resonance (I’ve almost done that one and I like it.) and the problem of ambiguity — before I begin on the first, which will be easier. I think, in view of your remarks on “contribution” (and I want to avoid that word — also to avoid words like “influence” and “isms” as much as possible. Much better to stick to concrete examples) I’ll try to mention your feelings about the need for gay profundity. “Awful but cheerful,” one of your best lines I think. You say you think you are “snobbish” and that your poems are “precious”. Well — yes, if you mean by snobbish opposed to the mediocrity which is published and published and praised and praised everywhere these days, and by “precious” a kind of dogged determination to express at least what you honestly feel about the world. Being you, you couldn’t write like a peasant without being false. Art is always precious, in the other sense, in the sense that it is rare. As you say, circumstances being what they are, one can’t pretend that one is natural and primitive — when at least in my case and in the case of everyone in the US, the cities are submerged in coils of super-highway and one plans to visit, by car or by air, places that should, in mood and temperament, be months away. Sorry. I am wandering from the point. (I think, who better to mention the predicament American poets are in, to contrast, as you suggest, to the Russians.)

Since writing that first letter, I have come to feel that my chapter on the artist should include this: that form is a tension in your work between what I should call New England or Yankee earthiness, humor, a reticence, even a penchant for the macabre and a more sophisticated European “modernist” attitude. Perhaps I don’t make myself clear. But what you called Transcendentalism sometime back isn’t Emerson & CO., but although the Concord people had many qualities of the New England character; what I think you meant, though, is that, in form and in content, your poetry is in some ways very Yankee. For instance, the number of poems about the sea. The way you know coldness, everything about it. You seem to take delight in superstition and eerie effects without believing — and yet you believe, too, like Hawthorne and Melville, although you have more humor. The story IN PRISON is Poe-like to me. Written in his style, anyhow. Do you see what I mean? I think there is more truth in this than in the Transcendentalist connection, especially since all of them except Thoreau were naïve optimists of a variety that doesn’t grow today (except possibly in the Southern Churches! I once taught in Atlanta, Ga., and I never heard such nonsense as was preached to the respectable parents of my girls.) I have long wanted to write a story based on a sermon I once heard. “The Signposts of Sin.” I never can get the right tone, though.)

I am very glad that you told me so much about your tastes in reading. Yes, Chekov is very fine. Mark gave me a paperback copy of the short stories by Isaac Babel for Christmas; and these are splendid, too. Like Chekov’s, but tougher and stronger without sacrifice of nuance. Some of them horrible. You no doubt know these, but if you don’t have them I’ll send you a copy. Another present, the Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon, the diary of a 10th century Japanese court lady, translated with excellent commentary by Arthur Waley, might interest you too. A society so innocent, so literary and so immoral. I was reminded of Helena Morley, not because Sei Shonagon resembled her in any way but because the diary has the same duality of innocent self-revelation. She’s awfully witty and a good poet too. I’ll send you this if you don’t have it. (I really love sending books to people who like them. So you musn’t feel embarrassed.) Another book Mark introduced me to this summer was R. H. Blyth’s four volumes on Haiku. A bit repetitious, but excellent on the poetry. Out of the modern “genre” of critical writings. Do you know that? Mark, you see, is so remarkable because he has such a huge range of interests and knowledge, (but is not “bookish” in a prideful or harmful way) and is able to see our era as part of a historical spectrum. That’s so easy to say, but he really does, so that no fashion sways him. He’s difficult to live with sometimes because he is usually right! His criticism of my analytical thinking makes me furious. But I’m grateful, and this book will be good, if it is any good, because of him and you. We are reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Fellowship of the Ring” to little Caroline Margaret in the evenings after supper. Mark and I both love it, but it’s a little beyond Margaret. Do you know that? Epic in its proportions. The supreme fairy tale.