Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Boomer wondered about this lady for two nights. On the third he found this, which seemed, to his way of looking at things, to clarify the situation a little further. It was part of a page from a book, whereas the first item was a bit of newspaper.

“Her ladyship’s assumption was that she kept, at every moment of her life, every advantage — it made her beautifully soft, very nearly generous; so she didn’t distinguish the little protuberant eyes of smaller social insects, often endowed with such range, from…”

It might be two nights more, or two weeks, however, before he would find the next step in this particular sequence.

Among the third group, of things that fascinated but puzzled, Boomer saved such odds and ends as this: (a small, untorn slip of pink paper).

“JOKE SPECS WITH SHIFTING EYES. Put on the spectacles and place the mouthpiece in the mouth. Blow in air intermittently; the eyes and eye-brows will then be raised and lowered. The movement can be effected quickly or slowly according to what joke effect it is desired to obtain. If the ear pieces are too short in case of a large head bend the curved portion behind the ear. Celluloid is inflammable! Consequently do not bring your spectacles near a naked flame!!”

This would seem properly to belong to the set of warnings referring to himself. But if he was able to heed the last warning, there was much in the earlier instructions that he could not understand.

And this, written in pencil on letter-paper, blurred but readable:

“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 although 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, for I am concentrating on the lessons, frequently, many times.

“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.

“I would be very pleased to write such stories as those Writers.”

Although Boomer had no such childish desire, he felt that the question posed was one having something to do with his own way of life; it might almost be addressed to him as well as to the unknown Mr. Margolies. But what was the answer? The more papers he picked up and the more he read, the less he felt he understood. In a sense he depended on “their imagination,” and was even its slave, but at the same time he thought of it as a kind of disease.

We shall give one more of our friend’s self-riddles. It was this, in muddy type on very old, brown paper: (he made no distinction between the bewilderments of prose and those of poetry).

“Much as a one-eyed room, hung all with night,

Only that side, which adverse to the eye

Gives but one narrow passage to the light,

Is spread with some white shining tapestry,

An hundred shapes that through the flit airs stray,

Rush boldly in, crowding that narrow way;

And on that bright-faced wall obscurely dancing play.”

That sounded like something he had experienced. First his house seemed to him to be the “one-eyed room, hung all with night,” and then it was his whole life at night on the shore. First the papers blowing in the air, then what was printed on them, were the “hundred shapes.”

Should we explain that by the time he was ready to start reading Boomer was usually not very drunk? The alcohol had worn off. He still felt isolated and self-important, but unnaturally wide-awake.

But what did these things mean?

Either because of the insect-armies of type so constantly besieging his eyes, or because it was really so, the world, the whole world he saw, came before many years to seem printed, too.

Boomer held up the lantern and watched a sandpiper rushing distractedly this way and that.

It looked, to his strained eyesight, like a point of punctuation against the “rounded, rolling waves.” It left fine prints with its feet. Its feathers were speckled; and especially on the narrow hems of the wings appeared marks that looked as if they might be letters, if only he could get close enough to read them.

Sometimes the people who frequented the beach in the day time, whom he never saw, felt inclined to write in the sand. Boomer, on his part, thought that erasing these writings was probably included in his duties, too. Lowering the lantern, he carefully scuffed out “Francis Xavier School,” “Lillian,” “What the Hell.”

The sand itself, if he picked some of it up and held it close to one eye, looked a little like printed paper, ground up or chewed.

But the best part of the long studious nights was when he had cleared up the allotted area and was ready to set fire to the paper jammed in the wire basket.

His forehead already felt hot, from drink or from reading so much, but he stood as near as he could to the feverish heat of the burning paper, and noticed eagerly each detail of the incineration.

The flame walked up a stretch of paper evenly, not hurriedly, and after a second the black paper turned under or over. It fell twisting into shapes that sometimes resembled beautiful wrought-iron work, but afterwards they dropped apart at a breath.

Large flakes of blackened paper, still sparkling red at the edges, flew into the sky. While his eyes could follow them he had never seen such clever, quivering manœuvres.

Then there were left frail sheets of ashes, as white as the original paper, and soft to the touch, or a bundle of grey feathers like a guinea-hen’s.

* * *

But the point was that everything had to be burned at last. All, all had to be burned, even bewildering scraps that he had carried with him for weeks or months. Burning paper was his occupation, by which he made his living, but over and above that, he could not allow his pockets to become too full, or his house to become littered.

Although he enjoyed the fire, Edwin Boomer did not enjoy its inevitability. Let us leave him in his house, at four one morning, his reading selected, the conflagration all over, the lantern shining clearly. It is an extremely picturesque scene, in some ways like a Rembrandt, but in many ways not.

1937

I can scarcely wait for the day of my imprisonment. It is then that my life, my real life, will begin. As Nathaniel Hawthorne says in The Intelligence-Office, “I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform … and which I have vainly sought all my life-time.” But I am not that nostalgic about it, nor have I searched in vain “all my life-time.” I have known for many years in what direction lie my talents and my “proper sphere,” and I have always eagerly desired to enter it. Once that day has arrived and the formalities are over, I shall know exactly how to set about those duties “Nature intended me to perform.”

The reader, or my friends, particularly those who happen to be familiar with my way of life, may protest that for me any actual imprisonment is unnecessary, since I already live, in relationship to society, very much as if I were in a prison. This I cannot deny, but I must simply point out the philosophic difference that exists between Choice and Necessity. I may live now as if I were in prison, or I might even go and take lodgings near, or in, a prison and follow the prison routine faithfully in every detail — and still I should be a “minister without portfolio.” The hotel-existence I now lead might be compared in many respects to prison-life, I believe: there are the corridors, the cellular rooms, the large, unrelated group of people with the different purposes in being there that animate every one of them; but it still displays great differences. And of course in any hotel, even the barest, it is impossible to overlook the facts of “decoration,” the turkey carpets, brass fire-extinguishers, transom-hooks, etc., — it is ridiculous to try to imagine oneself in prison in such surroundings! For example: the room I now occupy is papered with a not unattractive wall-paper, the pattern of which consists of silver stripes about an inch and a half wide running up and down, the same distance from each other. They are placed over, that is they appear to be inside of, a free design of flowering vines which runs all over the wall against a faded brown background. Now at night, when the lamp is turned on, these silver stripes catch the light and glisten and seem to stand out a little, or rather, in a little, from the vines and flowers, apparently shutting them off from me. I could almost imagine myself, if it would do any good, in a large silver bird-cage! But that is parody, a fantasy on my real hopes and ambitions.