“The art of losing isn’t hard to master” is the refrain in Elizabeth Bishop’s masterful villanelle “One Art,” and the irony cuts several ways at once. She spent her life as a woman and as a poet modestly–and fiercely–perfecting that “art.” She never knew her father, a prominent builder who died at the age of thirty-nine, before her first birthday. Her grief-stricken mother had to be institutionalized in her native Nova Scotia in 1916, and Bishop never saw her again; she received news of her death as she graduated from Vassar in 1934. Raised by her Canadian grandparents and an aunt, Bishop searched all her life–in Manhattan, Paris, Morocco, Key West, Seattle, San Francisco, various places in Brazil, at Harvard University, and finally in a wharf flat with a marvelous view of the harbor in Boston–for “home.” Through her successive losses of all these homes, she created, for her readers as well as for herself, the place wherein to resolve and objectify all memory and all loss: her verse.
Elizabeth Bishop
Bishop had a gift for forging deep relationships with cats, birds, flowers, and seascapes as well as with people. Her relationships with people included those with children and common folk in the Brazilian slums and highlands; a succession of lovers, mainly women, who remained friends; revered literary figures such as William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Baudelaire; and such living colleagues as Marianne Moore (her first verse tutor), Robert Lowell (who later wondered why he had not married her in 1948), Randall Jarrell, Adrienne Rich, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, James Merrill, and John Ashbery.
Bishop, one of the first twentieth century American poets, had an eye, sharp, objective, and intelligent, with which she zeroed in on concrete physical detail. That detail is carefully chosen to operate within a complex psychological, inward drama that drives always for that imaginative truth that, as Wallace Stevens said, “would suffice.” In “Fish,” for example, the reader comes to see that the victory belongs not only to the meticulously described hooked fish but also to Bishop, whose deep identity with her catch projects the “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow”–and lets him go.
Bishop’s descriptions, however seemingly objective, always penetrate the physical surface not only to the life within that outward fact but also to the life within the inquiring and tensely observant mind. When the seven-year-old girl in “In the Waiting Room” hears her aunt’s small scream from the dentist’s office, it is the girl being remembered in the poem who suddenly realizes that what she’s hearing is an empathic sound in her own throat: I, too, am destined to become a woman who will suffer. Bishop’s work presents the surrealism of everyday life, wherein the truths of terror, madness, beauty, love, and death come to be recognized and accepted without self-pity.
She steeped herself, wherever she was, in the sense of place. An inveterate traveler though never a tourist, she sought out her own deepest life “geographically.” She knew that life was of the mind and that the mind is in the body, enfleshed; her most intense curiosity was with just where her body–and so her mind–was. She loved the other arts as well, including opera, theater, dance, and painting; she took her clavichord along on her travels around the world, and she had a water-colorist’s gift with the brush. What she found in cultural high art she also found in the simple freedoms and necessities of ordinary life. For her, ordinary life included her running battles with severe asthma and alcoholism.
Bishop wrote prose as well as poetry. Eight short pieces of biographical memoir and eight short stories, together with her introduction to her Portuguese translation, were published in The Collected Prose. Of these, the autobiographical “In the Village,” which most critics consider a masterpiece, also provides interesting gloss on several of her poems. The Diary of “Helena Morley,” which translates the diary of a young girl living in the family compound of her father, a Brazilian mining engineer, in 1893-1895 also throws considerable light on the translator. The work reflects a sense of deep kinship between that young girl’s growing and humorous awareness of self in place and Bishop’s own imagination.
For all her relationships with people, animals, and places, Bishop always maintained her privacy and independence. She disliked what came to be known as “confessional poetry,” believing that in art unrestrained subjectivity violated personality, exploited the self as merely a means, and distorted the sense of truth. Bishop’s work in memoir, fiction, and verse is always concerned with the processes of her mind in some “geographical” relationship. Her work may thus be seen as offering a more profound definition of what constitutes a genuine self.