Enter
a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s: Revision and Craft
by William H. Gass, Harper’s Magazine,
October 2011
Discussed
in this essay:
Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete
Correspondence,
edited by Joelle Biele. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 421 pages.
$35.
Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Farrar, Straus
& Giroux. 352 pages. $16.
Prose, by Elizabeth Bishop. Edited by Lloyd Schwartz. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 507 pages.
$20.
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia
Hamilton. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
875 pages. $26.
In
Worcester, Massachusetts,
I
went with Aunt Consuelo
to
keep her dentist’s appointment
and
sat and waited for her
in
the dentist’s waiting room.
Well, Miss B.,
this is perfectly plain prose, I smell no poetry, but I see several errors
right away, especially the lack of a comma following “appointment,” the wholly
indigestible first line (Worcester, Massachusetts, my god, what a mouthful!),
and the needless repetition of dentist, followed by two appearances of waiting,
no more than a second apart.
Take another look at your syntax,
Miss B. You say you went to keep your
Aunt’s appointment. Isn’t the dentist
likely to be surprised, especially if he has run out of treats? Of course we know what you meant. You meant you accompanied your Aunt to her
appointment. Ordinary speech is full of
such errors. Semantics is constantly
correcting our carelessness.
Once upon a time, the line, in a bit
of poetry, was revered: its length was meaningful; the placement of the word
that opened or closed it was particularly important. Words finding themselves in such places go
after the gritty, and like hawks that have swooped to seize on their prey, rise
on an elevated diction before heading to heaven and its lying stars. Here there is so little length to the line as
to rule out beginnings and endings. At
the Magazine, we pay by linear inch, so a long poem made of brief breaths
benefits the poet. Also, our readers
prefer short lines. The next rhyme comes
along more rapidly, like a Local, so there’s less waiting.
Let us remind you that the poet must
establish his or her authority over the text immediately lest all the wrong
feelings about the genre be encouraged: namely the impression that this example
ain’t poetry. Not only is Worcester,
Massachusetts, not a poetic place, (however you pronounce it), neither is the
dentist’s. As for Aunt Consuelo, nobody’s
aunt has dared haunt a line of poetry in five hundred years. Works of prose, on the other hand, can hardly
be imagined without aunts inhabiting them, though never as heroines, rather as
reinforcements, stuffed in the corner of useful everyday things like rolled
socks in suitcases. In sum, the subject
is too coarse, the writing too amateurish, the meaning too uneconomical. We don’t need to waste a line to say the
youngster sat, do we? Are we worried she
might stand? I think we can return this
MS to its address. Postage is provided.
The events of “In the Waiting Room”
are being remembered by a girl named Elizabeth.
The child will be seven years old in a few days, on February 8. She is having one of those unspeakable
revelations that ruin childhood, and that we remember later in life like a
spanking or a spelling prize. Readers
cannot know this yet. They shall have
had to understand the entire poem before they get a hold on any part. The reading eye may travel as the text
instructs it—from line to line in the company of little gulps of
understanding—but the mind will need to rove irregularly from point to point in
order to gather up the whole. The poet
is suggesting, by her Dick-and-Jane mode of speech, the manner in which she saw
and thought about things in her youth.
This intention accounts for and appears to justify the childlike
simplicity of the poem’s prose and its seemingly thoughtless repetitions.
But look at what you’ve done, Miss
B. If this is a child let it be a child,
not an adult in the guise of a child.
The “I” of the poem is alternately—tick, the poet herself (August 8,
1967)—and tock, her childhood self (February 5, 1918). Are we to believe that the Bishop name refers
to the same person from cradle to grave?
Yes, your syntax and sly pronouns suggest it. “Congratulations, Madame, you have given
birth to Sir Walter Scott, the author of Waverley.” Look at him, the sweet thing. His eyes rhyme.
In the waiting room, to endure the
wait, Miss Almost Seven picks up a magazine, not ours (it never shows up in
such places) but the National Geographic.
…while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
Studied the photographs:
Do
we need “carefully” here? Does on ever
carelessly, lazily, haphazardly study?
Then the subjects of the pictures get announced: a volcano—look!—with
lava and ash, too—look! look!
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Whereupon
the poem makes obscure and trivial references to a pair of jungle campers who
will certainly be forgotten after fifty years (except in Kansas where they were
both born): “Osa and Martin Johnson dressed in riding breeches, laced boots,
and pith helmets.” Not a true sentence,
notice. In poems we should try and stay
inside the sentence, otherwise the whole thing begins to unravel like a card of
wool. Is the volcano’s phrase, “rivulets
of fire,” within a seven-year-old’s price range? Might I suggest “tears of fire” instead? Or “tears of rage”? I’d wager few sevens, even if they could
read, as the kid declares she can, would know what “pith” is or recognize what
the noun does to whatever it touches: compresses them, comprises them. What are pithy remarks? That’s the trouble with autobiography. You think you are remembering how you were,
when what you are remembering is a depiction of your earlier self. Moreover, I’m certain she did what we all do
with the National Geographic: look at
the photos and maybe read the captions.
Boys like me would search for naked natives—any naked natives—whether or
not they bore saggy breasts like badges awarded them for their impoverished
lives.
I am carving up
the poem as though it were a turkey. I’m
the host here.
A dead man slung on a pole
—“Long Pig,” the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
Ah,
now I understand why her studying needs to be undertaken so carefully: the
child is endeavoring to escape her surroundings via the curiosities of nature
pictured in the magazine— exotic offerings, symbols of adventure—because her
outside world is cold and snowy while her inside world is hot, confined, and
stuffy. In Worcester both her boredom
and her fright are smothered by dull routine.
The swollen clothing—galoshes, “arctics,” and overcoats—as well as the
skinnies—lamps and magazines—will naturally clutter the dentist’s office,
whereas the boots in the Geographic
are militarily laced and polished.
Although I am old enough to remember these adventurers, I looked them up
in an online archive. The pair sits in a
dome-like meadow made of confused weeds.
Both Johnsons sport smiles and wide-brimmed cowboy hats. Martin is dressed in a rifle.
Now I know why—apart from
autobiographic necessity—Worcester is immediately invoked. Trade names, the customs of neighbors, the
day’s news, and similar contemporary references give the poem a cozy feeling,
and none of the highfalutin mannerisms we associate with elegies and odes. Miss B. needs a town as ordinary to the mind
as visitors to the dentist are to ordinary life. She needs “Massachusetts” because there is
the county of “Worcester” in Maryland. Indeed,
the book this poem will ultimately inhabit is to be called Geography III.
Why is a six-year-old accompanying
her aunt to the dentist? Because Aunt
Consuelo daren’t leave a six-year-old alone in the house, and Miss Bishop is an
orphan. Her father died following a
kidney failure, after which (if not on account of which) her mother lost her
mind and is presently in an asylum where a medical corps in looking for it.
However, the real reason the child
in the poem studies the Geographic is
that the Geographic is the periodical
little Miss Bishop really picked up. Reality
wrote this line! “I always tell the truth in my poems,” she told one of her students.
With The
Fish, that’s exactly how it
happened. It was in Key West, and I did catch it just as the poem says. That
was in 1938. Oh, but I did change one thing; the poem says he had five
hooks hanging from his mouth, but actually he had only three. Sometimes a poem makes its own demands. But I always try to stick as much as possible
to what really happened when I
describe something in a poem.
She writes to her mentor and friend
Robert Lowell, when asking for his help with “In the Waiting Room”: “It was
funny—queer—I actually went to the Library & got out the no. of N G—and
that title, The Valley of 10,000 Smokes—was right, and has been haunting
me my entire life, apparently.”
Such fidelity is, conveniently, a
principle every department of the Magazine subscribes to, whether the pieces we
print are fiction or verse, reportage from Around Town or Around the
World. If we like a poem we do not
simply accept it for publication, we buy it; and having bought it we own it;
and if we own it we can suggest changes with various degrees of subteltl or
insistence; or we can forget its existence altogether and let it lie about for
months hoping to se the ceiling. If a
firecracker goes off in one stanza, it is likely to decorate our Independence
Day issue like celebratory bunting. When
nicer to stop a sleigh in the woods on a snowy evening if not on a snowy
evening? When our interest in a poem has
rather thoroughly subsided we will shelve it somewhere in the late pages, past
the mustard. We did so relegate Miss
Bishop once, but it was late in our relationship, she had become fearless, so
we heard several yelps from her injured ego about it. “In the Waiting Room” waited
over a year and might be waiting still if Bishop hadn’t complained about the
delay. Then it appeared in a July and
not a February. We promised not to slight
her work like that again.
At this point it
is obvious that I am speaking of a particular periodical—among writers
delightedly disliked but undeniably desirable—instead of a stereotypical
composite: The New Yorker of a
certain era, the golden days of Harold Ross and William Shawn, back when the
magazine was puritanical to a point of principle, timid yet caring, apologetic
but stubborn. Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker is a record of editorial
collisions, confusions, snarls of meaning, entanglements of intention…as well
as some remarkable successes. The course
of correspondence between Bishop and a number of editors, in front of us now,
deals with submissions of both prose and poetry—bought or returned—and seems to
follow an exemplary pattern.
Reasons for refusals:
“Sunday Morning”
“…the poem was a little too remote for
us…”
“…having printed at least two verses
about Florida in the past two weeks, we couldn’t go another…”
“Letter to N.Y.”
“…doesn’t seem right to us.”
“Poem on Dolls”
“We all liked this one, but felt it was
far too special—or perhaps I should say personal—a statement for us to print.”
“The Street by the Cemetery”
“Apparently THE STREET BY THE CEMETERY
is one The New Yorker is unable to use.”
“Sunday Morning”
“I’m afraid that we still feel the same
way about this as we did when we first read it some months ago.”
“A Cancelled Dream”
“I’m afraid we didn’t feel that this one
quite came off, though we liked parts of it very much.”
“The Slot Machine”
“I am sorry indeed to say that we cannot
use this poem about the slot machine—at least, not in its present form. It doesn’t seem quite precise enough (I
believe that is the right word), just to use as light verse and also, as it
stand, it is a bit long, we feel.”
“A Bitter Day—Key West”
“It’s been decided that we cannot use A
BITTER DAY—KEY WEST, I regret to say.”
“Full Moon: Key West”
“ I am sorry indeed to tell you that we
will not be able to use FULL MOON: KEY WEST…”
“Large Bad Picture”
“…LARGE BAD PICTURE doesn’t seem quite
to work out for us.”
By 1945, Bishop has begun to catch
on. She says to a friend: “Nobody wants
to send them anything really ‘good.’” We
all say that but we keep submitting.
“The Farmer’s Children”
“…our final decision, I’m sorry to say,
is that it is rather remote for us.”
“…this particular story didn’t appeal to
us quite enough to compensate for its remoteness in spite of its merits and its
considerable charm.”
By
November 1946, at age thirty-five, Bishop publishes her first book, North & South. She has becoe a prizewinner and therefore
worthy of a warm friendly letter full of (a) apology; (b) flattery; (c)
refusal; and (d) regret.
“Full Moon, Key West”
(a) “I owe you an apology for not
thanking you long ago for the copy of ‘North and South.’”
(b) “The volume, in print, seems to me
even finer than it did when I read it in manuscript and already I have read and
reread it.”
(c) “Now after all this, it is
particularly sorrowful for me to have to report that in a mixed vote here on
your two latest poems, the’no’s’ have it.”
(d) “I therefore return now ‘Argument’
and ‘Full Moon, Key West’ with many regrets and many thanks to you for having
let us see them.”
Not all the salves of deference and good
manners belong to the obliging staff.
Writes Miss Bishop:
Before the fact:
“I don’t know whether you’ll be able to
make use of this or not…” “I am
enclosing two poems, neither of which, I’m afraid, you’ll be able to use…” “I don’t know whether you could possibly be
interested in another plain description from me or not…” “I shall enclose one of my own works—which
you will definitely not like—in fact
I don’t know what to do with it…” “I’m
afraid this will be too grim for you.”
“I probably shouldn’t bother you with this slight poem…” “I doubt that
you will be interested in this [‘Sestina’]…”
“I’d hate to have you see a poem by me somewhere that you hadn’t seen
first…”
And so on.
Upon
the fact:
“I am sorry to have been so much trouble
to you with my poem.” “It is quite
alright about your returning the two poems—it probably was not a very wise
selection for me to have made, & I shall try to send some other things
soon.” “Thanks you for your kind letter
& please don’t feel badly about having to return the poem!”
After
the fact:
“Thank you so much for a very enjoyable
luncheon. I’m afraid I was suffering
from New York-it is that day and feel that I probably talked my head off and
said all sorts of things I shouldn’t have.
I hope not.” “I’ll try to make
myself plain about this silly little poem.”
As if in the
shade of Emily Dickinson (at first not a favorite), Elizabeth Bishop was
inclined to scatter dashes about (a habit perhaps borrowed from her letters, or
in hidden imitation of a mentor, Marianne Moore), which these New Yorker editors have removed and
replaced with commas, also, it seems, in similar abundance. Alas, there are so many kinds of commas:
those that lie like rocks in the path or a sentence, slowing its gait and
requiring the reader’s heed to avoid a stumble; their gentler cousins,
impairing a pell-mell flow of meaning the way pebbles slow a stream; commas
that indicate a pause for thinking things over; commas enclosing phrases the
way the small pockets in a purse hug hairpins or collect bits of loose change;
commas that return us to our last stop, and those that some schoolmarm has
insisted should be placed, like a cop, between “stop” and “and.” Not to mention those comma-like curvatures
that function like overhead lighting—apostrophes they’re called—that warn of a
bad crack in a spelt word where some letters have disappeared to no one’s
alarm; or claws that admit the words they enclose aren’t theirs; or those that
issue claims of ownership, called possessives by unmarried teachers. So many kinds of inky dabs—they enable Jose
Garcia Villa, in some of his wonderful comma poems, to write lines that ring
like blows from a hammer:
And,lay,he,down,the,golden,father,
(Genesis’,fist,all,gentle,now)
Between,the,Wall,of,China,and,
The,tiger,tree,(his,centuries,his,Aerials,of,light)…
By 1949, Bishop and her editors have
become chatty. They begin trading news
about ailments, of which they have the physician’s plenty: Bishop complains
about her allergies, Katherine White about her spine, heart, shingles, or
mumps, Howard Moss about his hodophobia; then in unison they crab about the
unreliability of the mail, how they must endure plagues of visitors, and
suffer, of course, from the weather: when fair because one cannot get out in
it; when foul because one is compelled to be out in it. Slowly Bishop’s tone becomes warmer and more
confident, but also more stubborn and occasionally peevish.
Over time each participant in these
exchanges becomes more entangled in contraries.
Howard Moss must look at Bishop’s poems as an editor, yet he is a poet
himself and a rival, as well as a friend and confidant. Bishop is at once grateful to the magazine
and annoyed with its weekly change of focus, its momentary intensities, its
nervous blinking. She is increasingly friendly
with its helpful, gutless staff, and appalled by the magazine’s love of light
verse, its rigid rules, its low opinion of its readers whose intelligence must
be nursed like someone dying.
The
New Yorker is happy to buy “Cape Breton,” White writes, although they don’t
understand four lines in stanza two.
Joelle Biele, in her splendid edition of this correspondence, provides
us with the first version of these lines.
They are clear enough, but contain a rather radical image to which the
editors give three different readings.
Bishop offers two solutions.
White prefers the first and vows to argue for it. “You know one of Mr. Ross’s fetishes is that
he understand every poem we publish.”
The crime in this case is one of indefinite reference. (In neglecting to quote the lines in question,
I am this minute committing it.)
Which regions now have little to say for
themselves
except in thousands of light
song-sparrow songs floating upwards
freely, dispassionately, through the
mist, and meshing
their brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets
Which regions indeed? And whose fish-nets are being meshed? The region’s?
Its fishermen’s? I guessed that
the editors’ tactic would be to complain about a weakness ion such a way as to
(a) take on the blame of being critical by appearing dense, (b) accuse a single
word of causing the confusion, or (c) notice a misstep in grammar, and hope,
out of the ensuing revisions, to get a helpful improvement. They aren’t then actually rewriting the text,
but at certain tender spots simply saying “ouch.” To my ear and my surprise, by this method,
the stanza was occasionally bettered by even the smallest move, replacing
“Which” with “And,” removing the real criminal, “their” with “in”: “And these
regions now have little to say for themselves…in brown-wet, fine, torn, fish-nets.”
Too often, however, the magazine has
generated the issues. One innocent line
ends with the rather nice image “a snowfall of daisies.”
Here is your author’s proof of “Cape
Breton.” There are very few problems
about it but there is one that you can help us with and that is when is the
best season to use it. I can’t be
absolutely sure when daisies come in Cape Breton.
Another
line merely remarks that, since it is Sunday, no flags are flying. Why should that create a problem?
If we use it in summer, say July or
August, your next to last stanza poses a problem because if Cape Breton is at
all like Maine there are no flags flying even on weekdays during the summer
holiday. Would it be safe to use the
poem about the middle of June?
These
fuddy-duddy queries carry weight with Bishop, as we have seen. One of her finer poems, “A Cold Spring,”
notices, with customary visual acuity, that “Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated
the wood, each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt.” Once, to impress my own class, I visited my
backyard to examine the dogwood there. I
was not disappointed, for the cigarette’s mark was as prevalent among the
blooms as a rancher’s brand in a corral of cattle.
In due time, Bishop’s several
editors, reveal the real reasons for their rejections and begin to bump
Bishop’s submissions in bunches. The
New Yorker could afford to be picky now because on December 1, 1946,
Bishop had signed a “first reading” agreement. Novelists already had
such understandings with their publishers: it was a promise to show
them the next book before anyone else caught even a glimpse of it;
or, in this case, her next poem, article, story, or even her
translations, from the Portuguese, of Clarice Lispector’s
stories. Such an agreement was called, not very hopefully, “first
refusal.”
For
a needy author, the lure was powerful but innocent enough. A look is but a
look. Except the writer always had The New Yorker tinting her ink when
she wrote, and the poem was faintly tarnished when sent on, as it often was, as
a favor, by The New Yorker itself, to the Partisan and Paris
Reviews, or to Poetry Magazine, last in line like a
caboose. (Count the commas.) I first
encountered this practice while I was reading submissions for Accent, a
magazine published by J. Kerker Quinn at the University of Illinois. We would
receive stories from J. F.
Powers that had
been rejected by The New Yorker, and, with shouts of unashamed Freude,
publish them in our magazine for thirty dollars instead of the more
attractive three thousand alleged to be his going rate. The New Yorker loved
his stories about priests and would not publish any other kind (readers were
said to want Powers’s polished Catholic comedy), except on those occasions when
the pieces were exceptionally good and engulfed the reader in a profound
sadness while offering him the thinnest grin; then, incomprehensively, the work
again became unacceptable.
Bishop,
meanwhile, continues to preface every submission with a routine apology for the
poor quality of her work, but now she makes excuses for sending The New
Yorker things that are obviously unsuitable (whether or not they are).
Finally, on December 14, 1956, after ten years of monied bondage, she returns
her contract and its stipend to Howard Moss because the Partisan Review has
awarded her a fellowship, and she feels she should, in a show of gratitude,
publish some poems with them. Immediately the powerful infield of Shawn, White,
and Moss respond by making the Partisan an exception, giving her leave
to let that magazine have an initial peek, so long as her award should last. By
November 1957, she has renewed her former relationship. And she feels comfy
enough to ask Howard Moss for help finding a New York City apartment following
her return to the States from Brazil.
Many poets,
perhaps believing that they have done their duty to the language, leave their
prose to manage as it can in untended circumstances; but Elizabeth Bishop was not
one of them. On October 10, 1952, she mailed, from Brazil, a pair of very
autobiographical fictions. The first was “Gwendolyn,” a piece she had sent
earlier but had typed so badly she was remailing a more intelligible version.
The other was “In the Village,” in my opinion a small masterpiece, a necklace
made by a linked series of powerful descriptive passages. “Gwendolyn” the New
Yorker editors admire, but they have a problem with one disagreeable moment
that is serious enough to draw a threat. White writes:
The
problem is the episode about the soiled drawers, which we don’t think we can
use as it stands. It is unpleasant, I’m afraid, in spite of being true, and
there is a very strong feeling here against our running such a passage. I
understand why you put it in and in my opinion on the story I said why I
thought you might feel it important to the story, but even so, and even though
I am not as a rule squeamish on such references, I must reluctantly agree with
Shawn, Lobrano, and Maxwell that the passage should come out for New Yorker
publication, since it does apparently offend the sensibilities of a lot of
people, and is definitely repulsive to some.
Ross, recently
dead, is also invoked, and gets a vote.
Biele
furnishes us with the text of the original submission:
I
couldn’t seem to get into my side of the bed so I went around and picked up
Gwendolyn’s clothes where she had thrown them on the floor. I put them over the
back of a chair, the blue and white striped dress, the waist, the long brown
stockings. Her drawers had lace around the legs, but they were very dirty, with
some brownish stains.
White’s
amputation, which drops, as offensive, the final phrase, leaves the sentence
lame, and forces the reader to infer from a vague general condition (dirty) to
a specific one (brownish stain). The direction of the mind should be left to
rest in the squalor of the particular.
There
were two more complaints about “Gwendolyn,” but Bishop was not so easily
coerced about these.
I
feel much more obstinate about the other two things you mention: not bringing
in the locale right away, and the fact that at the end I say I don’t remember
who it was who said first that the doll’s name was “Gwendolyn.” I do mention
Nova Scotia after three short paragraphs—and I do feel a reader should be able
to wait that long. I hope you won’t mind my saying so, but I think the convention
of situating everything clearly and immediately can get to be boring . . .
If
“Gwendolyn” measured the magazine staff for squeamishness, “In the Village”
tested its artistic taste; or rather, made plain its estimation of its
readership. This story begins with a scream. “A scream, the echo of a scream,
hangs over that Nova Scotian village.” Whose scream is it? No one (in the
story) hears it. Nevertheless, they (the populace) wait to hear it again. At least
we are informed right away where we are; still, editorial questions fall like
hail. Hunks of prose float by like clouds. How are they connected? A woman is
being fitted by a seamstress, but there is no thread. The editors don’t always know
who is speaking or who is related to whom. A few of them think it would help if
some of the sentences, presently alone as their own thoughts, were gathered
together in paragraphs. When the text shifts from first person to third,
readers will hear a clash of gears. Squeamishness makes a reappearance: The
New Yorker could tolerate the story’s creaks, clangs, smacks, whacks,
slams, even the passing river whispers, but not, it turns out, any bovine
plops.
On page
13 there is a section that bothers us again, because of the functional
references. I myself [Katherine White] feel that the cow flops should remain
and that it should be said that they fascinated you. But the elaborate
description of them seems to turn many people’s stomachs and I am sure we could
never publish the pun, “Lucy Bowels,” which seems out of key with the rest of
the story and far more unpleasant than amusing or charming.
The pun is
pretty bad, but the image is exquisite: “. . . fine dark-green and lacy and
watery at the edges.” Good sign. Nelly is healthy.
The
dedicated reader, anticipating the scream, or the echo of a scream, that
threatens the village, will understand how the lines of “In the Waiting Room” are
not only performing their function within this poem but positioning that echo
of pain and terror at the center of Bishop’s body of work. So, apparently, did
Elizabeth Bishop’s dear friend Robert Lowell, who dedicated a poem of his own
he called “The Scream” to her “cow flops” and tried to rival it with his own: “A
cow drooled green grass strings, made cow flop, smack, smack, smack!”
Suddenly,
from inside,
Came
an oh! of pain
—Aunt
Consuelo’s voice—
not
very loud or long.
I
wasn’t at all surprised;
even
then I knew she was
a
foolish, timid woman.
Elizabeth
Bishop the person located her poem in a dentist’s office because that’s where
it happened; Elizabeth Bishop the poet put it in a dentist’s office because the
mouth is where screams come from, and the office is where such screams might be
publicly heard. Aunt’s yelp is brief, involuntary, and physical. She has had a
tooth drilled or a tooth pulled. Suddenly, Elizabeth feels her mother’s outcry too,
in her own mouth, as if all three composed “the family voice,” simultaneously
expressing the fear and grief that hang on the edge of Being like an incipient
storm—rightly then described as the echo of a scream, a scream stifled just a
moment before the scream is screamed.
I
was saying it to stop
the
sensation of falling off
the
round, turning world . . .
But
I felt: you are an I,
you
are an Elizabeth,
you
are one of them.
Why
should
you be one, too?
I
scarcely dared to look
to
see what it was I was.
In
1961, Bishop wrote a piece of memoir called “The Country Mouse.” It concludes
with this paragraph:
After
New Year’s, Aunt Jenny had to go to the dentist, and asked me to go with her.
She left me in the waiting room, and gave me a copy of the National Geographic
to look at. . . . There were others waiting, two men and a plump
middle-aged lady, all bundled up. I looked at the magazine cover—I could read
most of the words—shiny, glazed, yellow and white. The black letters said:
FEBRUARY 1918. A feeling of absolute and utter desolation came over me. I felt
. . . myself. In a few days it would be my seventh birthday. I felt I,
I, I, and looked at the three strangers in panic. I was one of them
too, inside my scabby body and wheezing lungs. . . . “You are you,” something
said. “How strange you are, inside looking out . . . you are you and you
are going to be you forever.” It was like coasting downhill, this
thought, only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree. Why was I
a human being?
Why
should she be going on seven instead
of twenty-three? Why should she be in Worcester rather than Nova Scotia? Why is
she a girl rather than a boy or a person far different than she supposes she
is? Why does she resemble her aunt or anyone else, why can’t she be what she
wants to be, unique But if unique, then alone, disliked, unaided,
misunderstood. Every poem presents the same dilemma: to maintain its own
singularity, yet be memorized by schoolkids for recitation, adopted by the
heart, spoken in awe by strangers, loved even by dead leaves and wind.
A
girl, she will learn, must wait for her lover to love her while hoping not to
be left to become an aunt. But wait, those worries come later.
You
will have a tooth removed. Vodka will break your left arm and shoulder with a
fall, then your right wrist with another; sober you will tear the ligaments of
an ankle. You will dress like those around you, in high heels and whatnots. Your
breasts will sag. You will lose those you love to depression. You will be a gay
alcoholic poet who teaches at Harvard instead of leading a gypsy’s life,
passing from port to port without effect or cargo. On October 12, 1978, Howard Moss
sent Bishop a note accepting her poem “Sonnet” and relaying to her the
magazine’s routine delight. Because we know that the end of the poet’s life is
close at hand, these brief lines take on a greater significance.
Caught—the
bubble
in
the spirit-level,
a
creature divided;
and
the compass needle
wobbling
and wavering,
undecided.
Freed—the
broken
thermometer’s
mercury
running
away;
and
the rainbow-bird
from
the narrow bevel
of
the empty mirror,
flying
wherever
it
feels like, gay!
The
poem chooses four objects to serve as metaphors for the poet’s condition: the
spirit-level that measures evenness; the compass that determines direction
(standing for constraints and aims); the thermometer that would read degrees of
heat if its mercury had stayed on the job instead of run; and the prismatic reflection
of a mirror that would normally register her emotional state, now on a frolic
of its own. The broken instruments free the poet from what? A constant state of
indecision. The freedom enjoyed is the result of what? The whimsical gaieties
the sun chooses and the mirror moves.
At
this moment The New Yorker has no melancholy forecast about its author,
nor any particular infatuation for her poem, because the latter languishes for
over a year in the magazine’s proverbial inbox until it becomes sadly topical.
It was published three weeks after Bishop’s death on October 6, 1979. On the
author’s proof of “Sonnet,” Bishop admonishes Howard Moss to leave the dashes
alone. He gives her no argument.
