One Art, Reflected

The second or third time a book falls into my hands, if I didn't want to read it before, I pay attention. So I'm reading my way through a stack of books purchased for almost nothing within the last month at various thrift stores, found here near home or while on the road. I collect very few mystery series by particular authors in hardcover, and I read more mystery and science fiction than I decide to keep. I have all of Raymond Chandler, who I reread every few years. In hardcover I have most of Tony HIllerman and Dana Stabenow. And now I find I have a taste for collecting Ellis Peters' meticulously-researched Medieval mystery series featuring Brother Cadfael, a former man-at-arms who served in the Crusades, now a Benedictine monk. The books are set for the most part during the turbulent civil war period of the middle 12th Century in England, a chaotic period that in some ways is a mirror for our own.

One of the functions of literature, of course, is to mirror back our times and ourselves. Literature provides us ways of thinking about ourselves, and our conditions. So literatures of particular historical eras, written in those times, can be a way into understanding how writers thought about life, and people, at those times.



I'm reading through—skimming at present, would be a more accurate phrase, due to its vast size—One Art: Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by her long-time publisher and friend, Robert Giroux. Bishop is experiencing a renaissance at this time, a rediscovery, as poets and readers are beginning to discover she was more complex, and a better poet, than they thought. I approached this volume with wariness, this second time a copy has fallen into my hands, not expecting to like Bishop much; and I haven't read enough to dispel my wariness, although I do find myself liking her, at times, far more than I suspected I might. This is a person that comes through these letters, despite many of them being performances rather than a self revealing itself openly, who at times I find a great deal in common with; and the roots of empathy lie in common, shared human experience.

We have no other official autobiography of Bishop—reticence could have been her middle name—and these letters—500 in number, mined from the thousands she wrote throughout her lifetime—provide the reader with both personal stories that give context to her life-history, and with abundant opinionating about literature, and the business of the arts.

In one sense it's perilous to read a volume of selected letters as a de facto autobiography, as we're encouraged to do here by the editor. We can discover via this reading only a series of individual snapshots, fragments of reflective broken glass (if one might continue the mirror analogy), quanta or packets of experience rather than a smooth narrative. On the other hand, constructing a smooth linear narrative is always a fiction, whether it's storytelling or memoir; life itself is lived much more, for most people, as a series of small story-arcs, or fragments, than as a smooth continuous narrative.

Self-reflective writers have noted this themselves, of course. Virginia Woolf, in an essay criticizing the way fiction is usually constructed, wrote: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Ever since I first heard that, it's stayed with me; because it contains a profound insight into both how we tend to construct our myths, and why.

Bishop, for her part, was a master letter-writer. It was in fact her major literary output, counted by volume alone. She viewed the letter itself as a valid literary artform, and reading her own letters, it's hard to disagree. (And Bishop taught a seminar in literary letter-writing, late in life.) There are several different styles in play in her letters, from formal, carefully-composed letters, to hurried, breathless epistles in which the details of life are thrown at you like asides to a story of deeper significance. Bishop could be very self-conscious of what she was doing; but also deliberately casual, deliberately revealing. Sometimes it's up to the reader to figure out which mode she is using at any given moment. This is why I must warily view many of these letters as a performance of self, rather than purely revelatory.

Some of the most interesting letters here, to me, are those written to the two poets Bishop regarded as mentor-friends, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Two very different poets, with very different temperaments and attitudes towards poetry. Perhaps they represent, in some way, two aspects of Bishop's own unresolved inner conflicts as a poet: on the one hand, fiercely independent, cerebral, strongly interested in words themselves; on the other hand, more socially aware, more rooted in family and it complexities of relationship and drama. The paradox being of course that Moore was the more cerebral and reticent of the two, Lowell the more social and apparently emotional, even drama-addicted. A reversal of the usual stereotypes of gender performance.

It is fascinating to read, in One Art, of the story, told in segments and fragments, of Bishop's great love of her life, Lota (Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares). Bishop, always a bit rootless, made a home with Lota in Brazil for several years. The relationship ended only with Lota's deteriorating mental health, and eventual suicide. Bishop is characteristically reticent about certain aspects of their lives together, revealing of others. That Bishop was same-sex oriented is not news, but in these letters we hear her versions of the story; "versions," because they are multiple. As with every life there is a period of reflection and reassessment after the loved one has died, in which the writer discovers new insights, both positive and negative, upon going over the whole story after it's done.

It's difficult not to draw parallels with other artists of the 20th C. who were also same-sex oriented. The writer that comes first to my own mind is May Sarton. Sarton was a turbulent, willful, passionate person, who was never really tamed by anyone; although some of her New Hampshire friends came close. Bishop was far more domestic, in a way, while simultaneously far more rootless. Both writers had great loves, and more than one female Muse, who inspired their work and fed their passion for life itself.

And in both Sarton's and Bishop's case, one of the chief heartaches of aging was witnessing the person(s) most loved age and die. Both Bishop and Sarton dealt with serious mental illness in their beloved, and the insanity such drama puts the survivors through. There are other parallels as well. Perhaps, as Sarton opined, the artist is just more sensitive to these hardships, and less stoic about them; I am not certain that Bishop would verbally agree, but in her life, her letters lead me to surmise she must have felt that way at least once or twice. Even though Bishop is, overall, I think more stoic in nature than Sarton.

How much more do I feel I know about Bishop, now, having read many of these letters (if not yet all)? Certainly I know more of her biography than before. But this biography remains detached from her poems, in my mind, which are lapidary and self-complete as always. Bishop was capable of spending literally years on a poem, to get it finished, just right, before releasing it. So her collected poems are small in number, especially set beside her collected letters. But poetry is an art of compression, of getting words to say as much as they can within the limits set by the small words of poetic form. Poetry also then is exalted, heightened language, because it does so much with so little.

It's another paradox that Bishop was so close to Lowell, who is so closely associated with the Confessional Lyric poem that has come to dominate a great deal of poetry's mainstream nowadays. Much speculation about this connection between the two poets has been inked already; I won't rehash the popular theories here. Nonetheless I find it interesting how Bishop's native reticence responded at times to Lowell's mining of family life and history to make his at time almost-exhibitionist poetry. There are letters from Bishop here that awkwardly try to find a balance between her reverence for one of her mentors, and her distaste for his project. Here she is, writing to Lowell in March of 1972 about his book The Dolphin:

In general, I deplore the "confessional"—however, when you wrote Life Studies perhaps it was a necessary movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh and immediate. But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students' mothes & fathers and sex lives and so on. All that can be done—but at the same time one surely should have a feeling that one can trust the writer—not to distort, tell lies, etc.

What Bishop is deploring is not Lowell's poems, which she is at pains in the same letter to repeat she likes very much, but rather Lowell's influence on poetry. And her criticism was prophetic, in turns out: many students and poets alike continue to write as if "anything goes" in the quest to use personal detail to both pull the reader into the poet's life, and (let's be honest about this) to shock them. Bishop, I have learned from reading these letters, was opposed to titillation for its own sake. So, what Bishop was most disliking about Lowell's poems, in this letter, was his tendency to fictionalize details to create heightened dramatic effects. She objected to his adding details to his source materials that made them seem more prurient, dramatic, and in a word dysfunctional. Bishop did not like the blend of memoir and fiction that Lowell's poetry sometimes was.

Bishop wanted her art to be the art, not a form of autobiography. It's clear to me, from reading the letters, that she compartmentalized her forms of writing—remember, she viewed letter-writing as an artistic literary form in its own right—and kept the personal details found in the letters largely out of her poems. At least in any obvious way, with one on one correspondence between art and life.

So, if I go back to read through Bishop's poems, say, Geography III, I perhaps might discern another layer of resonance within the poems, having read One Art: Letters—but not that much more, as the poems themselves are still their own complete world. It's tempting for literary readers and critics alike to try to connect every poem's generation to biographical moments; with Bishop, this just isn't going to work. One of the best aspects of her poetry is that it is distilled, refined, timeless. Bishop's poetry can be visceral, compelling, stunning, without being so personal that it prevents itself from being universal. She found a way to write from the guts and the head—Lowell and Moore in her simultaneously—while avoiding the topical and timebound. I believe one of the reasons Bishop's poems are experiencing a renaissance right now is that people have finally discovered how universal and enduring they truly are.

And since Bishop's poems are their own complete world, what is the purpose of reading a huge volume of her letters? Beyond interest in the person herself, interest in the artist as a person, I'm not convinced there's any good purpose at all. In her letters she's not going to tell you how she made the poems; there is no guidance for imitators here. They're almost separate universes. So why bother? I remain divided on that question. I do find Bishop's life interesting, because it is a life, as presented in the letters, that was lived fully, passionately (no matter who reticent at times), and deeply. Especially in the letters where Lota is dying, and the aftermath, I feel strongly connected to Bishop as a fellow person; she went through many of the same horrifying isolations and emotional traumas, after the death of Lota, that I find myself going through in the wake of my own parents' deaths, and now my aunt and uncle's; there are many parallels therein that allow me to feel kinships with Bishop. So I like Bishop more, as a person, from this reading, than I had surmised I would. But my opinions about Bishop's poetry have not been dramatically altered by reading the letters; I could read, or not read, Bishop's letters, and feel little change in my high respect for her poems.

So I cannot recommend this volume of letters to those who would seek to know more about the poems than the poet. There's not much about poetry itself in here; although there is a great deal about the business of being an artist. This is not a literary autobiography in any conventional sense—except of course that it is a writer's de facto piecemeal autobiography, and is presented as such by her editor, her friend. The letter-writer remains almost a separate person from the poet: we can tell they're the same person, but the poems continue to stand on their own, on their own merit, making up their own complete world. Read these letters for the right reasons only: because Elizabeth Bishop was a person you might have liked knowing, and you want to learn about her for her own sake.