Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

I was shown many old photographs and snapshots and, once, a set of postcards of their trip to England and Paris — at that time the only European traveling Marianne had done. The postcards were mostly of Oxford, and there was a handwritten menu, including the wines, of the luncheon George Saintsbury had given for her. I was also privileged to look into the notebooks, illustrated with Marianne’s delicate sketches.

Besides exercising on the trapeze, Marianne was very fond of tennis. I never saw her play, but from the way she talked about it, it seemed as if she enjoyed the rules and conventions of the game as much as the sport. She engaged a young black boy to play with her, sometimes in Prospect Park and sometimes on the roof of the apartment house. He was finally dismissed because of his lack of tennis manners; his worst offense seemed to be that instead of “Serve!” he would say “Okay!”

The bathroom in the apartment was small, long, and narrow, and as if I were still a child, I was advised to go there when Marianne thought it would be a good idea. (Also in subway stations: “I’ll hold your bag and gloves, Elizabeth.”) In their bathroom was an object I liked, an old-fashioned shoeshine box with an iron footrest. On one visit this had just been repainted by Marianne, with black enamel, and so had a cast-iron horse, laid out on a piece of newspaper on its side, running, with a streaming mane. It looked as if it might have originally been attached to a toy fire engine. I asked about this little horse, and Mrs. Moore told me that when Marianne was two and a half years old she had taken her to visit an aunt; the horse had had to go along too. Mrs. Moore had gone into the guest room and discovered that Marianne had taken a length of lace, perhaps a lace collar, from the bureau and dressed the horse up in it. “Marianne!” she had said — one could imagine the awful solemnity of the moment—“You wouldn’t take Auntie Bee’s lace to put on your horse, would you?” But the infant Marianne, the intrepid artist, replied, “Pretty looks, Ma! Pretty looks!”

Mrs. Moore’s sense of honesty, or honor, like her respect for the proprieties, was staggering. Marianne occasionally teased her mother about it, even in front of me. One story was about the time Mrs. Moore had decided that five empty milk bottles must be returned to the grocery store, and thence to the dairy. They were not STORE BOTTLES, as bottles then said right in the glass, nor the kind that were to be put out on the doorstep, but they all came from the same dairy. The grocer looked at them and pushed them back on the counter toward Mrs. Moore, saying, “You don’t have to return these bottles, ma’am; just throw them away.” Mrs. Moore pushed the bottles back again and told him quietly, “It says BORDEN on the bottles; they belong to the dairy.” The grocer: “I know it does, ma’am, but it doesn’t say STORE BOTTLES or RETURN. Just throw them away.” Mrs. Moore spoke more slowly and more quietly, “But they don’t belong to me. They are their bottles. ” “I know, ma’am, but they really don’t want them back.” The poor man had underestimated Mrs. Moore. She stood firm, clarifying for him yet again the only honorable line of action to be pursued in regard to the five bottles. Finally the grocer took them all in his arms and, saying weakly, “My God, ma’am!” carried them into the back of the store.

Clothes were of course an endless source of interest to Marianne, increasingly especially so as she grew older. As she has written herself (in a piece for The Christian Science Monitor ), her clothes were almost always hand-me-downs, sometimes very elegant ones from richer friends. These would be let out or, most frequently, let down (Marianne preferred clothes on the loose side, like the four-sizes-too-large “polo shirts”). The hats would be stripped of decorations, and ribbons changed so all was black or navy blue, and somehow perhaps flattened. There was the Holbein/Erasmus-type hat, and later the rather famous tricorne, but in the first years I knew her, only the large, flat, low-crowned hats of felt or summer straw.

Once when I arrived at the Brooklyn apartment, Marianne and her mother were occupied with the old-fashioned bit of sewing called “making over.” They were making a pair of drawers that Marianne had worn at Bryn Mawr in 1908 into a petticoat or slip. The drawers were a beautiful garment, fine white batiste, with very full legs that must have come to below the knee, edged with lace and set with rows of “insertion.” These I didn’t see again in their metamorphosed state, but I did see and was sometimes consulted about other such projects. Several times over the years Marianne asked me abruptly, “E liz abeth, what do you have on under your dress? How much underwear do you wear?” I would enumerate my two or perhaps three undergarments, and Marianne would say, “Well, I know that I [or, Mother and I] wear many too many.” And sometimes when I arrived on a cold winter evening dressed in a conventional way, I would be greeted by “E liz abeth, silk stockings!” as if I were reckless or prone to suicide. My own clothes were subject to her careful consideration. The first time I ever met a publisher, I reported the next day by telephone and Marianne’s first question was “What did you wear, Elizabeth?”

Marianne’s hair was always done up in a braid around the crown of her head, a style dating from around 1900, I think, and never changed. Her skin was fair, translucent, although faded when I knew her. Her face paled and flushed so quickly she reminded me of Rima in W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. Her eyes were bright, not “bright” as we often say about eyes when we really mean alert; they were that too, but also shiny bright and, like those of a small animal, often looked at one sidewise — quickly, at the conclusion of a sentence that had turned out unusually well, just to see if it had taken effect. Her face was small and pointed, but not really triangular because it was a little lopsided, with a delicately pugnacious-looking jaw. When one day I told her she looked like Mickey Rooney, then a very young actor (and she did), she seemed quite pleased.

She said her poem “Spenser’s Ireland” was not about loving Ireland, as people seemed to think, but about disapproving of it. Yet she liked being of Irish descent; her great-great-grandfather had run away from a house in Merrion Square, Dublin (once, I went to look at it from the outside), and I remember her delight when the book in which the poem appeared was bound in Irish green.

She had a way of laughing at what she or someone else had just said if she meant to show outrage or mock disapproval — an oh-ho kind of sound, rough, that went with a backwards and sidewise toss of the head toward the left shoulder. She accepted compliments with this laugh too, without words; it disparaged and made light of them, and implied that she and her audience were both far above such absurdities. I believe she was the only person I have ever known who “bridled” at praise, while turning pink with pleasure. These gestures of her head were more pronounced in the presence of gentlemen because Marianne was innately flirtatious.

The Moore chinoiserie of manners made giving presents complicated. All of her friends seemed to share the desire of giving her presents, and it must sometimes have been, as she would have said, a “burden.” One never knew what would succeed, but one learned that if a gift did not succeed it would be given back, unobtrusively, but somehow or other, a year or two later. My most successful gift was a pair of gloves. I don’t know why they made such a hit, but they did; they weren’t actually worn for a long time, but they appear in a few of her photographs, held in one hand. Marianne brought them to the photographer wrapped in the original tissue paper. Another very successful gift was a paper nautilus, which became the subject of her poem “The Paper Nautilus”: