Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

I do not remember her ever referring to Emily Dickinson, but on one occasion, when we were walking in Brooklyn on our way to a favored tea shop, I noticed we were on a street associated with the Brooklyn Eagle, and I said fatuously, “Marianne, isn’t it odd to think of you and Walt Whitman walking this same street over and over?” She exclaimed in her mock-ferocious tone, “E liz abeth, don’t speak to me about that man!” So I never did again. Another time, when she had been talking about her days on The Dial, I asked how she had liked Hart Crane when he had come into her office there. Her response was equally unexpected. “Oh, I liked Hart! I always liked him very much — he was so erudite. ” And although she admired Edmund Wilson very much and could speak with even more conviction of his erudition, she once asked me if I had read his early novel I Thought of Daisy, and when I said no, she almost extracted a promise from me that I would never read it. She was devoted to W. H. Auden, and the very cat he had patted in the Brooklyn tearoom was produced for me to admire and pat too.

Lately I have seen several references critical of her poetry by feminist writers, one of whom described her as a “poet who controlled panic by presenting it as whimsy.” Whimsy is sometimes there, of course, and so is humor (a gift these critics sadly seem to lack). Surely there is an element of mortal panic and fear underlying all works of art? Even so, one wonders how much of Marianne’s poetry the feminist critics have read. Have they really read “Marriage,” a poem that says everything they are saying and everything Virginia Woolf has said? It is a poem which transforms a justified sense of injury into a work of art:

This institution …

I wonder what Adam and Eve

think of it by this time …

Unhelpful Hymen!

a kind of overgrown cupid

reduced to insignificance

by the mechanical advertising

parading as involuntary comment,

by that experiment of Adam’s

with ways out but no way in—

the ritual of marriage …

Do they know that Marianne Moore was a feminist in her day? Or that she paraded with the suffragettes, led by Inez Milholland on her white horse, down Fifth Avenue? Once, Marianne told me, she “climbed a lamppost” in a demonstration for votes for women. What she did up there, what speech she delivered, if any, I don’t know, but climb she did in long skirt and petticoats and a large hat. Perhaps it was pride or vanity that kept her from complaints, and that put her sense of injustice through the prisms dissected by “those various scalpels” into poetry. She was not too proud for occasional complaints; she was humorously angry, but nevertheless angry, when her publisher twice postponed her book in order to bring out two young male poets, both now almost unheard of. Now that everything can be said, and done, have we anyone who can compare with Marianne Moore, who was at her best when she made up her own rules and when they were strictest — the reverse of “freedom”?

Soon after I met Marianne in 1934—although I concealed it for what seemed to me quite a long time — somehow or other it came out that I was trying to write poetry. For five or six years I occasionally sent her my poems. She would rarely say or write very much about them except that she liked such and such a phrase or, oddly, the alliteration, which I thought I tended to overdo. When I asked her what the poems she had written at Bryn Mawr were like, she said, “ Just like Swinburne, Elizabeth.” Sometimes she suggested that I change a word or line, and sometimes I accepted her suggestions, but never did she even hint that such and such a line might have been influenced by or even unconsciously stolen from a poem of her own, as later on I could sometimes see that they were. Her notes to me were often signed “Your Dorothy Dix.”

It was because of Marianne that in 1935 my poems first appeared in a book, an anthology called Trial Balances. Each of the poets in this anthology had an older mentor, who wrote a short preface or introduction to the poems, and Marianne, hearing of this project, had offered to be mine. I was much too shy to dream of asking her. I had two or three feeble pastiches of late seventeenth-century poetry called “Valentines,” in one of which I had rhymed “even the English sparrows in the dust” with “lust.” She did not like those English sparrows very much and said so (“Miss Bishop’s sparrows are not revolting, merely disaffecting”), but her sponsorship brought about this first appearance in a book.

One long poem, the most ambitious I had up to then attempted, apparently stirred both her and her mother to an immediate flurry of criticism. She telephoned the day after I had mailed it to her, and said that she and her mother had sat up late rewriting it for me. (This is the poem in which the expression “water closet” was censored.) Their version of it arrived in the next mail. I had had an English teacher at Vassar whom I liked very much, named Miss Rose Peebles, and for some reason this name fascinated Marianne. The revised poem had been typed out on very thin paper and folded into a small square, sealed with a gold star sticker and signed on the outside “Lovingly, Rose Peebles.” My version had rhymed throughout, in rather strict stanzas, but Marianne and her mother’s version broke up the stanzas irregularly. Some lines rhymed and some didn’t; a few other colloquialisms besides “water closet” had been removed and a Bible reference or two corrected. I obstinately held on to my stanzas and rhymes, but I did make use of a few of the proffered new words. I am sorry to say I can’t now remember which they were, and won’t know unless this fascinating communication should turn up again.

Marianne in 1940 gave me a copy of the newly published Last Poems and Two Plays, by William Butler Yeats, and though I dislike some of the emphasis on lechery in the poems, and so did she, I wrote her that I admired “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” and the now famous lines “I must lie down where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” She replied:

I would be “much disappointed in you” if you could feel about Yeats as some of his acolytes seem to feel. An “effect,” an exhaustively great sensibility (with insensibility?) and genius for word-sounds and sentences. But after all, what is this enviable apparatus for? if not to change our mortal psycho-structure. It makes me think of the Malay princes — the horde of eunuchs and entertainers and “bearers” of this and that; then suddenly the umbrella over the prince lowered, because a greater prince was passing. As you will suspect from my treachery to W. B. Yeats, I’ve been to a lecture on Java by Burton Holmes, and one on Malay …

One day she abruptly asked me, “Do you like the nude, Elizabeth?” I said yes I did on the whole. Marianne: “Well, so do I, Elizabeth, but in moderation, ” and she immediately pressed on me a copy of Sir Kenneth Clark’s new book, The Nude, which had just been sent to her.

Some Expeditions

This was a story told me by Mrs. Moore, of an outing that had taken place the summer before I met them. There had been a dreadful heat wave, and Marianne had been feeling “overburdened” (the word burden was an important one in the Brooklyn vocabulary) and “overtaxed.” Her mother decided that Marianne “should take a course in the larger mammals” and said, “Marianne, I am going to take you to Coney Island to see Sheba,” an unusually large and docile elephant then on view at a boardwalk sideshow. Coney Island is a long subway ride even from Brooklyn, but in spite of the heat and the crowds, the two ladies went. Sheba performed her acts majestically, and slowly played catch with her keeper with a shiny white ball. I asked about the elephant’s appearance, and Marianne said, “She was very simply dressed. She was lightly powdered a matte rose all over, and wore ankle bracelets, large copper hollow balls, on her front legs. Her headdress consisted of three white ostrich plumes.” Marianne was fond of roller coasters; a fearless rider, she preferred to sit in the front seat. Her mother told me how she waited below while the cars clicked agonizingly to the heights, and plunged horribly down. Marianne’s long red braid had come undone and blew backwards, and with it went all her cherished amber-colored “real tortoiseshell” hairpins, which fortunately landed in the laps of two sailors in the car behind her. At the end of the ride, they handed them to her “very politely.”