‘Everything has written under it – I have seen it.’ Randall Jarrall is right. However, what Elizabeth Bishop saw was never quite what the rest of us see, nor indeed was it how we see it. And she knew it. She challenges us to look again. Her declared intention to combine ‘the natural with the unnatural’ gave us poetry as ‘normal as sight . . . as artificial as a glass eye’. Well! It’s hardly surprising that it takes us some time to adjust to the view. The landscape is unfamiliar. The temperature is arctic and is therefore less than seductive. However, deep treasure lies within the extreme geography of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘ice writing’. She gifts us what few other poets ever have, a strange, exact hallucination of ‘the always more successful surrealism of everyday life’. It is thus – after the necessary period of adjustment – that she becomes not just compelling but addictive. She is the poetic equivalent of a Dalí or de Chirico. Like them, she disturbs the universe and our limited perception of it. We are indeed ‘far away within the view’, longing to understand, if a little nervous of revelation. In ‘Love Lies Sleeping’ she word-paints, perhaps, inert terror in her portrait of the man . . . ‘whose head has fallen over the edge of his bed, / whose face is turned / so that the image of / the city grows down into his open eyes / inverted and distorted. No. I mean / distorted and revealed, / if he sees it at all.’ Is he, eyes wide open, in some hypnotised dream-state, a state she declared vital to the creation of her poetry? Is he dead? Miss Bishop herself is less than certain. She is the poet of question marks and when she answers it is rarely reassuring. ‘I think [my italics] the man at the end is dead,’ she told a rather startled Anne Stevenson. She’d been reading Newton’s ‘Optiks’ during the writing of the poem – ‘Reflections, Refractions . . . and Colours of Light’ were as much her obsession as the subject of his masterpiece. (Is Bishop uniquely the only poet to have worked grinding binoculars at a US Navy shop?) Newton, whose work of discovery inspired eighteenth-century poets, is not normally a presiding figure in twentieth-century poetry. Nor indeed is Darwin, whose continued literary influence lies more within fiction. Bishop, the poet of vision, deeply admired his ‘heroic observations . . . his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown’ and they became scientific inspiration to her own poetic discoveries. Though Elizabeth Bishop’s four small collections, North and South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel and Geography III, would in time win many awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, the first was, in 1940, firmly turned down by Random House, Viking and Simon and Schuster. It was finally published by Harcourt Brace in 1947. Originality comes at a price. James Merrill famously commented on her ‘instinctive, modest, lifelong impersonation of an ordinary woman’. Perhaps she felt she needed the disguise. Her beginnings were traumatic. ‘Although I think I have a prize “unhappy childhood” almost good enough for text-books – please don’t think I dote on it.’ She didn’t. That does not mean she ever escaped it either. Her need for ‘mastery’, which Bonnie Costello sees as an ‘urge for order and dominance confronting a volatile inner life,’ is wholly understandable. She was born on 8 February 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, to William T. Bishop and Gertrude Bulmer [Boomer] Bishop. Her father died, aged thirty-nine, in October of that same year. Mother and child moved to Boston, and then to the charmingly named Great Village, Nova Scotia, in Canada, where Elizabeth’s young life was, sadly, less than charmed. In 1916 when she was five, her mother, after a series of nervous breakdowns, was admitted to a state mental institution. Though Gertrude Bishop did not die until 1934, Elizabeth never saw her again. She was eventually returned to live with her mother’s sister in Boston. Much was lost and far too early. In ‘One Art’ she notes that ‘things seem filled with the intent / to be lost’ and, with admirable, defiant courage, ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’. It wasn’t easy either. Her adult life was one of often alcohol-fuelled departures, both emotional and geographical. The poetry survived it all. She started writing at Vassar, the exclusive women’s college in New York, where she befriended Mary McCarthy, whose novel The Group would profile her classmates.There remains considerable controversy as to whether the lesbian
Lakey, played in the film by the ethereally beautiful Candice Bergen, was based on Bishop. Though Elizabeth Bishop had six intense, sometimes concurrent, often tumultuous lesbian love affairs (one with
Brazilian aristocrat Lota de Maceda Soares that lasted, on and off, for decades) love is not really her subject. Loss, deep-rooted in her personal history, and a subdued though multi-layered pattern of essential distancing, haunts her work. Her compulsive travelling inspires her poetic eloquence of elective rootlessness. But despite telling Randall Jarrall that ‘Exile seems to work for me’ she remained uncertain of its purpose. ‘Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay at home? / Or could Pascal have been not entirely right / about just sitting quietly in one’s room? . . . Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?’ From whichever perspective, in real or imagined landscapes, Bishop contains their discovery, and loss, within an ever-steely elegance of vision. ‘I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses went . . . I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.’ In truth the abyss was closer than she allowed. Though she was never, in the Lowell sense, a confessional poet (and profoundly disagreed with her old friend over what she saw as the cruel intimacy of ‘Dolphin’), in her own later poems, particularly in her prize-winning collection Geography III, she returned – a poetic Livingstone – to the source. ‘In the Waiting Room’, itself a provocative title, is a masterpiece of existential terror. As the seven-year-old Elizabeth sits quietly reading National Geographic: ‘Suddenly, from inside, / came an oh! of pain / – Aunt Consuelo’s voice– . . . What took me /completely by surprise / was that it was me: / my voice, in my mouth . . . I knew that nothing stranger / had ever happened, that nothing / stranger could ever happen.’ She was ill and in her sixty sixth year when this poem was published. Baudelaire is right, ‘genius is nothing more than childhood recovered at will’. Elizabeth Bishop, whose work Marianne Moore described as ‘beautifully formulated aesthetic-moral mathematics’, died in 1979 of a cerebral aneurysm. She asked that ‘Awful, but cheerful’ should be inscribed on her tombstone. Which changes the view. Again. The secondary characteristic of the glass eye is its incapacity for tears. Which leaves us with language – if we can find the words.