Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

There are hundreds of things I could say about your letter, but I don’t want to write too much today because I think you should get this soon. Suppose I stop now to get this in the mail. Later on, this week or next, I’ll write again. I have a few questions about the newer poems. Oh, how I wish I could fly to Brazil, but I can’t see how we could ever afford it. England I know well — I married, quite disastrously, in England just after I graduated from Michigan in 1954 and lived in London for 6 years. Margaret was born there. At that time I never would have had the sense to understand anything, however. I look forward to going back. Love Ireland and Scotland, but Cambridge is queer, though queerly tough.

Much love,

Rio, February 16th, 1964

Dear Anne:

It was a compliment to be the “class aesthete” … Two friends & I were cartooned, at Vassar, with the caption “The Higher Type.” Thank you very much for offering to send me books, and I am going to accept the Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon, because I’ve heard so much about it. But if it is at all expensive you must let me pay for it. I have already given away here two copies of that edition of Isaac Babel you mention, so you see what I think of him. He is superb. That brief account of the Reds taking over an old monastery (my copy’s up in the country so I can’t give the title) is one of the most beautiful short pieces of reporting I know. — He’s the other writer besides Chekov I wish some Brazilian genius would come along and write like —except that Brazil is closer to Chekov, a decidedly “feminine” country and Babel is a masculine writer. If one should make these distinctions — but compared to England, or Germany, — Brazil is decidedly“feminine.”

I’d be grateful if you’d somehow make the point that my reasons for staying here so long are personal. I’d rather live in my own country if I could. But my feelings about both the USA and Brazil would look like seismographs during earthquakes, just during any week, no doubt. My last trip back was late 1961 and I was horrified by pre-Christmas New York — it had all grown so much worse. Now I am horrified by things here, as the situation deteriorates very fast. But no one outside the country can really understand what is going on so I won’t […]

Please forgive this long digression — I am really trying to cheer myself up — things are so bad here — by talking English. I have written several poems about Brazil recently — one you will see shortly in The New York Review, and another — a fausse naïve ballad, very long, in The New Yorker.

I am very sorry to hear about the miscarriage and I know they have very bad effects … When is it you are going to England? There is a slight chance that I may go there myself for a month or two, perhaps in April. I haven’t been for so long it is hard to get going, but I’d like to make a tourist trip and see literary things I didn’t see on my trips long ago. I once drove around most of Ireland and had a lovely time — probably before you were born! If I do get there I’ll certainly try to meet you somewhere.

Some of Robert Lowell’s poetry, the first two books, certainly, is very difficult — a few poems I never did understand until I’d asked him. But then they do make very good sense. He has written a few really lovely ones in the past year or two — lyrical, finished, — musical, too — two I think among his best poems. Randall, I think — well, I think that sentimentality is deliberate, you know — he is trying to restore feeling, perhaps — but I just don’t think we can believe in it these days. I think he was influenced some years ago a bit too much by Corbière. Frost is a complicated case — a lot of what he wrote about was just homely to me, after my Nova Scotia days, but the kind of things I have tried to avoid sentimentalizing. I hate his philosophy, what I understand of it — I find it mean —while admiring his technique enormously. “Two Tramps at Mudtime” for example — what is it but a refusal to be charitable? (and he was hideously uncharitable, conversationally, at least.) Well — as Cal says frequently—“We’re all flawed,”—and as far as poetry goes I think we have to be grateful for what we do get. They all rise above their flaws, on occasion. — I am interested in Berryman and wish he’d publish that long poem soon. I wish I knew something of Chinese poetry — a nice old ex-missionary teacher in Washington told me a lot about it the year I was there and enlightened me some — and I was properly impressed by the sophistication and elaboration, etc.

Shapiro, Winters, etc. — seem sad to me — the problem is how to be justly but impersonally bitter, isn’t it. — (Even Marianne Moore’s disappointments show through too much sometimes, I think — but then she is very Irishly cagey and manages by avoiding a great deal … She’s a wonder!)

No — I just have a couple of small paper-backs on the haiku — and I don’t know how good Donald Keene (?) is (they’re up in the country, too.) I have never read Tolkien’s work after one attempt several years ago — I didn’t seem to have time, so I couldn’t have liked it much! For children — well, I still think Beatrix Potter wrote a fine prose style … I admire Jemima Puddleduck, Tom Kitten, etc. very much, and have introduced the series (along with New England Fish Chowder) to many Brazilians. This is idle chat and I must get to work — I am glad you sound happily married — As a very stupid uncle of my friend Lota’s used to say*—“I prefer my friends to be rich. I like rich happy friends better than poor unhappy friends.”

Affectionately,

Elizabeth

44 Porter Street

Watertown, Mass.

March 6, 1964

Dear Elizabeth,

As you see, I am sending you a revised chronology which I hope you’ll correct, amend, delete etc. as you see fit. As I work on the first chapter I find that I may need more factual information, and, if you don’t mind, I’ll ask a few questions before trying to answer your long letter properly. I don’t think the little I write about biography needs to be too detailed, but on the other hand, it’s best not to sound evasive, and worse, to make mistakes.

1. About your mother’s family. Was your grandfather a sea captain like his ancestors? Did his whole family come from Nova Scotia … and were there two or three aunts? Perhaps it would be helpful to know the name of your aunt in Boston — the one you liked because she was amusing. Is there anything you remember particularly about people in your childhood? Who introduced you to music, to poetry … Teachers? One can tell a great deal about your childhood in Nova Scotia from the two New Yorker stories, and the “feel” of it is in poems like Cape Breton, but I would like to be a little more precise about people and exact places. Sorry, but I must picture things to write about them.

2. You say you studied at the Schola Cantorum in Paris and later with Ralph Kirkpatrick. When was this?

3. I wonder who you knew when you went to Paris in 1935 or so? There was so much “in the air there”. One thinks of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, the Surrealists, painters and poets like Andre Breton. A great period of blossoming forth in that curious euphoric between-war period. And then the people on the Partisan Review, so fervent and determined to be “liberal” without knowing the consequences. I was looking at some old issues of PR in the library the other day and was seized with an awful sense of the bravery and, really, the fruitlessness of it all. I think it must have been exciting at the time. Again, when did you meet Calder, Dewey, Loren McIvor, Randall Jarrell. You seem to have been very fortunate in your friends. I think you are quite right about your belonging to the post world war I generation. Or, at least, I think one must make a distinction between the “you then” and the “you in Brazil.” That leads me to the poems.