Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

After her death, Bishop’s remaining papers were acquired by Vassar, which now holds the major collection of her unpublished work. The unpublished pieces that appeared in Robert Giroux’s 1984 edition of Bishop’s Collected Prose are reprinted here as he edited them. Additional unpublished work is taken from manuscripts and typescripts in the Vassar College Libraries for Special Collections (numerous unfinished drafts with memorable passages require a volume of their own). The Anne Stevenson correspondence, which is printed with the kind cooperation of Ms. Stevenson, comes from the Modern Literature Collection at Washington University. All the works Bishop herself published are here reprinted from their original sources. Each section of this book is arranged, as nearly as possible, in chronological order.

The editor is profoundly grateful to the following individuals and institutions: Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who commissioned, supported, and inspired a good deal of the thought that went into this volume, and his invaluable and ceaselessly helpful assistant, Jesse Coleman; Frank Bidart, Elizabeth Bishop’s close friend, most astute reader, and literary executor; the late Alice Methfessel; Anne Stevenson; Alice Quinn; Candace MacMahon, Bishop’s bibliographer; the American Bishop scholars Joelle Biele, Gary Fountain, Laura Menides, Brett Millier, George Monteiro, Barbara Page, Thomas Travisano (a tireless resource of information and material), and Saskia Hamilton (who generously spent countless hours helping with this enterprise); the Brazilian Bishop scholars Regina Przybycien, Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins, Carmen Oliveira, and Bishop’s Brazilian translator, the poet Paulo Henriques Britto; the Vassar College Libraries for Special Collections: Ron D. Patkus, associate director, and Dean M. Rogers, Special Collections assistant; Modern Literature Collection/Manuscripts, Washington University: John Hodges, curator; the staff of Harvard University’s Houghton Library; the Library of America, Geoffrey O’Brien, editor in chief; and above all, my most generous, dependable, and indispensable sounding board, David Stang.

— L.S.

It was November. They bent in the twilight like sea-plants, around their little dark centre-table hung with a cloth like a seaweed-covered rock. It seemed as if a draught might sway them all, perceptibly. Lucy, the youngest, who still did things for her sisters, rose to get the shawls and light the lamp. She sighed. How would they get through the winter?

“We have our friends!”

Yes, that was true and a consolation. They had several friends. They had old Mrs. Peppard and young Mrs. Gillespie and old Mrs. Captain Green and little Mrs. Kent. One of them was bound to drop in almost every afternoon.

When the weather was fine they themselves could make a call, although they preferred to stay at home. They were more in command of conversation when they sat close together around their own table. Antiphonally, they spoke to their friends of the snowstorm, of health, of church activities. They had the church, of course.

When the snow grew too deep — it grew all winter, as the grain grew all summer, and finally wilted away unharvested in April — old Mr. Jonson, who had the post-office now, would bring the newspaper on his way home.

They would manage, but winter was longer every year. Lucy thought of carrying wood in from the wood-shed and scratching her forearms on the bark. Emma thought of hanging out the washing, which was frozen before you got it on to the line. The sheets particularly — it was like fighting with monster icy seagulls. Flora thought only of the difficulties of getting up and dressing at six o’clock every morning.

They would keep two stoves going: the kitchen range and an airtight in the sitting-room. The circulatory system of their small house was this: in the ceiling over the kitchen stove there was an opening set with a metal grille. It yielded up some heat to the room where Lucy and Emma slept. The pipe from the sitting-room stove went up through Flora’s room, but it wasn’t so warm, of course.

They baked bread once a week. In the other bedroom there were ropes and ropes of dried apples. They ate apple-sauce and apple-pie and apple-dumpling, and a kind of cake paved with slices of apple. At every meal they drank a great deal of tea and ate many slices of bread. Sometimes they bought half a pound of store cheese, sometimes a piece of pork.

Emma knitted shawls, wash-cloths, bed-socks, an affectionate spider-web around Flora and Lucy. Flora did fancy work and made enough Christmas presents for them to give all around: to each other and to friends. Lucy was of no use at all with her fingers. She was supposed to read aloud while the others worked.

They had gone through a lot of old travel books that had belonged to their father. One was called Wonders of the World; one was a book about Palestine and Jerusalem. Although they could all sit calmly while Lucy read about the tree that gave milk like a cow, the Eskimos who lived in the dark, the automaton chess-player, etc., Lucy grew excited over accounts of the Sea of Galilee, and the engraving of the Garden of Gethsemane as it looks to-day brought tears to her eyes. She exclaimed “Oh dear!” over pictures of “An Olive Grove,” with Arabs squatting about in it; and “Heavens!” at the real, rock-vaulted Stable, the engraved rocks like big black thumb-prints.

They had also read: (1) David Copperfield, twice; (2) The Deer-Slayer ; (3) Samantha at the World’s Fair ; (4) The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.

Also two or three books from the Sunday School library which none of them liked. Because of the source, however, they listened as politely as to the minister’s sermons. Lucy’s voice even took on a little of his intonation, so that it seemed to take forever to get through them.

They were Presbyterians. The village was divided into two camps, armed with Bibles: Baptists and Presbyterians. The sisters had friends on both sides.

Prayer-meeting was Friday night. There was Sunday School and Church on Sunday, and Ladies’ Aid every other week at different friends’ houses. Emma taught the smallest children in Sunday School. Lucy and Flora preferred not to teach but to attend the class for adults held by the minister himself.

Now each was arranging the shawl over her shoulders, and just as Lucy lit the lamp old Mrs. Peppard came to call. She opened the back door without knocking, and said, “Anybody home?” This was the thing to do. She wore a very old mud-brown coat with large black frogs down the front and a black, cloth-covered hat with a velvet flower on it.

Her news was that her sister’s baby had died the day before, although they had done everything. She and Emma, Flora and Lucy discussed infant damnation at some length.

Then they discussed the care of begonias, and Mrs. Peppard took home a slip of theirs. Flora had always had great luck with house-plants.

Lucy grew quite agitated after Mrs. Peppard had gone, and could not eat her bread and butter, only drank three cups of tea.

Of course, as Emma had expected because of the tea, Lucy couldn’t sleep that night. Once she nudged Emma and woke her.

“Emma, I’m thinking of that poor child.”

“Stop thinking. Go to sleep.”

“Don’t you think we ought to pray for it?”

It was the middle of the night or she couldn’t have said that. Emma pretended to be asleep. In fact, she was asleep, but not so much that she couldn’t feel Lucy getting out of bed. The next day she mentioned this to Flora, who only said “Tsch — Tsch.” Later on they both referred to this as the “beginning,” and Emma was sorry she’d gone back to sleep.