Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

There seemed to be one thing common to all their “primitive” writing, as I suppose it might be called, in contrast to primitive painting: its slipshodiness and haste. Where primitive painters will spend months or years, if necessary, putting in every blade of grass and building up brick walls in low relief, the primitive writer seems in a hurry to get it over with. Another thing was the almost complete lack of detail. The primitive painter loves detail and lingers over it and emphasizes it at the expense of the picture as a whole. But if the writers put them in, the details are often impossibly or wildly inappropriate, sometimes revealing a great deal about the writer without furthering the matter in hand at all. Perhaps it all demonstrates the professional writer’s frequent complaint that painting is more fun than writing. Perhaps the ranchers’ wives who sent in miserable little outlines for stories with no conversation and no descriptions of people or places wouldn’t hesitate to spend long afternoons lovingly decorating birthday cakes in different-color icings. But the subject matter was similarly banal in both the paintings and the writing. There was also the same tendency in both primitive painting and writing to make it all right, or of real value to the world, by tacking on a grand, if ill-fitting, “moral,” or allegorical interpretation. My students seemed to be saying: “Our experiences are real and true and from them we have drawn these unique, these noble conclusions. Since our sentiments are so noble, who could have the heart to deny us our right to Fame?”

What could I possibly find to say to them? From what they wrote me it was obvious they could hardly wait to receive my next analysis. Perhaps they hoped, each time, that Mr. Margolies would tell them he had found a magazine to publish their last lesson and was enclosing the check. All of them were eager, if not hardworking, or felt they had to pretend to be. One man wrote: “I slept on a hair all night, waiting to hear from you.” They apologized for their slowness, for their spelling, for their pens or pencils (they were asked to use ink but quite a few didn’t). One boy excused his poor handwriting by saying, “This is being written on the subway,” and it may have been true. Some referred to the lessons as their “homework,” and addressed Mr. Margolies as “Dear Teacher.” One woman decorated her lessons with Christmas seals. To my surprise, there were two or three male students who wrote man-to-man obscenities, or retold well-worn dirty jokes.

I took to copying out parts of their letters and stories to take home with me. A Kansas City janitor wanted to learn to write in order to publish “a book about how to teach children to be good radicals, of the George Washington Type or the Jesus Christ Type.” One woman revealed that her aged mother approved of her learning how to write to such an extent that she had given her the forty dollars and “ her own name to write under.” The daughter’s name was Emma, the mother’s was Katerina. Would I please address her as Katerina in the future?

Next to my “lady cattle-rancher and poultry farmer” I grew fondest of a Mr. Jimmy O’Shea of Fall River, aged seventy, occupation “retired.” His was the nearest approach to a classical primitive style. His stories were fairly long, and like Gertrude Stein, he wrote in large handwriting on small pieces of paper. He had developed a style that enabled him to make exactly a page of every sentence. Each sentence — it usually began with Also or Yes —opened at the top left-hand and finished with an outsize dimple of a period in the lower right. Goodness shone through his blue-lined pages as if they had been little paper lanterns. He characterized everything that appeared in his simple tales with three, four, or even five adjectives and then repeated them, like Homer, every time the noun appeared. It was Mr. O’Shea who wrote me a letter which expressed the common feeling of time passing and wasted, of wonder and envy, and partly sincere ambition: “I wasn’t feeling well over my teeth, and I had three large ones taken out, for they made me nervous and sick sometime, and this is the reason I couldn’t send in my lesson. I am thinking of being able to write like all the Authors, for I believe that is more in my mind than any other kind of work. Mr. Margolies, I am thinking of how those Authors write such long stories of 60,000 or 100,000 words in those Magazines, and where do they get their imagination and the material to work upon? I know there is a big field in this art.”

* * *

I stood the school for as long as I could, which wasn’t very long, and the same week that I received this letter from Mr. O’Shea, I resigned. Mr. Black begged me to stay, I was just getting going, I was turning out more and more analyses every day, and he offered me two dollars and a half more a week. Rachel seemed sorry to see me go, too. We went out for a last lunch together, to a different cafeteria, one that had a bar, and, going Dutch, had a twenty-cent Manhattan each before lunch. When I was cleaning out my desk, she gave me a present, a strange paperbound book she had just finished reading, written by a Chinese, almost in the style of some of our students. It was all about his experiences as an agricultural slave in the United States and on the sugarcane plantations of Cuba. It may have been true, but it was not “realism” because he used odd, Oriental imagery.

About two years later I met Rachel in Times Square one night on my way to the theater. She looked just the same, perhaps a little heavier and perhaps a little less shabby. I asked her if she still worked for the U.S.A. School of Writing and how Mr. Black was. Mr. Black, she announced casually, was in jail, for a second or third offense, for misuse of the mails. The U.S.A. School of Writing had been raided by the police shortly after I left, and all our work, and all my poor students’ accumulation of lessons and earnest, confiding letters, had been confiscated. She said, “I didn’t tell you while you were there, but that’s why we were doing that revising. The U.S.A. School was a new name; up until a month before you came, it was something else. Black paid a big fine that time, and we were starting all over again.”

I asked her what she was doing now, but she didn’t tell me. I was dressed to go to the theater, and she looked me up and down contemptuously, I felt, but tolerantly, as if she were thinking, Some anarchist! Then Mr. Hearn and Mr. Margolies shook hands and parted forever.

1966

The shy poet, so soiled, so poor, so polite, insisted on taking us in his own car. A friend would go along as mechanista. The car was on its last legs; it had broken down twice just getting us around Belém the day before. But what could we do? I couldn’t very well flaunt my dollars in his face and hire a better one.

He arrived at our hotel at nine (he had said eight) with José Augusto, one of his little boys, aged eleven, fair, and also very shy. Ruy, the poet, was dark, quiet, and softly heavy, his waxy face spattered with fine black moles like shot. His other children, four or five of them, were at home with “fever.” They were sick all the time we were in Belém. This José Augusto scarcely spoke, but in the course of the long day his expression became by degrees more animated, more childlike. By midafternoon he grew restless, even active; he slept all the way back from the expedition in his father’s arms.

Ruy was nervous. He kept telling us we probably wouldn’t like the famous church at Vigia; it would be too “baroque” for us. Each time he said this, our imaginations added more belfries and a slightly wilder wave of carved stone. M. and I got into the back seat that slanted downwards so that our bottoms felt as if they were gently grazing the road. The mechanista, José Augusto, and Ruy were in front. Most of the time they kept their heads bent as if in prayer. Perhaps they were praying to the tired heart of the car to keep on beating just a little longer, until the expedition was safely over.