Art and Memory in the Work

of Elizabeth Bishop
For Ana María
Art and Memory in the Work
of Elizabeth Bishop

Jonathan Ellis
University of Sheffield, UK
First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ellis, Jonathan
Art and memory in the work of elizabeth bishop
1. bishop, elizabeth, 1911–1979 – Criticism and
interpretation 2. bishop, elizabeth, 1911–1979 – themes,
motives 3. Art in literature 4. Memory in literature
i. title
811.5'4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ellis, Jonathan.
Art and memory in the work of elizabeth bishop / Jonathan ellis.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-7546-3566-X (alk. paper)
1. bishop, elizabeth, 1911–1979—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women
and literature—United states—history—20th century. 3. Autobiographical
memory in literature. 4. Memory in literature. i. title.

ps3503.i785z664 2006
811'.54—dc22

2005024022

ISBN 13 : 978-0-7546-3566-6 (hbk)

 Contents

List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1

PART I: HIDING PLACES

1 Ice and Snow 21

2 The Sea and Its Shore 54
3 The Long Trip Home 83

PART II: WASTING TIME

4 Travelling 111
5 Exchanging Letters 142
6 ‘Taking her time’: ‘The Moose’ and Other Poems 176

Bibliography 192
Index 202
 List of Figures

1.1 Gertrude May Bulmer and Elizabeth Bishop, ca. 1916 28

2.1 ‘Interior with Calder Mobile’, ca. 1950s 69

3.1 Elizabeth Bishop and her cat Tobias, ca. 1950s 88

3.2 ‘Red Stove and Flowers’, 1955 94

3.3 ‘Chandelier’, undated 106

 Acknowledgements

This book began life with a question: ‘Have you ever read anything by Elizabeth
Bishop?’ Since I hadn’t even heard of Elizabeth Bishop at that time (April 1996),
never mind read any of her poems, my first thanks must go to the person who posed
that question, my undergraduate tutor, Jamie McKendrick.
The bulk of the research and writing of this book since then has been
conducted at the universities of Hull and Reading, where I have been lucky to discuss
Elizabeth Bishop with many gifted teachers and students. I particularly wish to
acknowledge the intellectual support of my doctoral supervisor, Angela Leighton, who
gave me the best general advice about completing such a large-scale piece of work
(‘Keep writing every single day’) and some of the most insightful criticism (too many
individual suggestions to count and thank here). From my time at Hull University, I
also wish to thank Caitríona O’Reilly and David Wheatley for various Bishop and
non-Bishop themed conversations and dinners, and Julie Ellam and Mitoko
Hirabayashi for their sympathetic ears. At the University of Reading, I have been glad
to share ideas about American poetry with Pat Righelato and letter writing with Mark
Nixon; I hope some of their insights are evident here. Susan Rosenbaum from the
University of Georgia was also a rigorous and thorough reader of a chapter of this
book.
One of the pleasures of studying Elizabeth Bishop has been the sheer
number of lovely people I have got to know over the years, not just at conferences
and seminars on her work but also through articles, books and reviews. Celebrations
of Bishop’s work in Brazil and Mexico in particular allowed me to make several
wonderful friends. Sandra Barry, Anne-Marie Duggan, Monique Fowler and Brian
Robinson, have all been encouraging fellow-scholars as well as great fun to be with.
This book draws on all of your love of Bishop’s work. Anne Luyat’s invitation to talk
about Bishop at the University of Avignon also provoked several new lines of
thinking. My ideas about Bishop are necessarily indebted to the rich body of
scholarship that comes before me, even where I quarrel with individual readings of
poems. My own (by no means exhaustive) list of essential reading on Bishop would
have to include criticism by Lorrie Goldensohn, Seamus Heaney, David Kalstone,
Marilyn May Lombardi, Tom Paulin, Adrienne Rich, Anne Stevenson, Thomas
Travisano and Kirsten Hotelling Zona.
At crucial stages of this project, I have also had the good fortune to receive
several research awards. At Hull University, I wish to thank The Carol Baron
Memorial Fund, and its executor, Helen Baron, for enabling me to visit the Vassar
College archives in 1999. This book also owes a great deal to The Leverhulme Trust’s
decision to award me an Early Career Fellowship in 2003. A British Academy Small
Research Grant the same year helped pay for the Permissions License.
A significant part of the argument of this book draws on Bishop’s
unpublished writing. Like most Bishop scholars who travel to Vassar, I am
profoundly grateful to all the archivists who helped me there, particularly Nancy
viii Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop

MacKechnie and Dean Rogers. At Ashgate Press, I am indebted to the good sense
and patience of my Commissioning Editor, Ann Donahue, who has carefully
shepherded this book from start to finish. The anonymous reader of the initial
manuscript also offered several helpful suggestions for improvement.
There have been many other friends to this book over the years, including
my parents and brother. In the difficult couple of years between finishing my doctoral
thesis and being awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship, Neil Sinyard’s friendship was
extremely important. At the same time, Bridget and Sam Ellis cheered me up with
numerous unexpected kindnesses. My family and friends in Spain may not understand
a word of this book, but they also showered its writer with love.
The book’s ultimate acknowledgement, however, must go to the person who
has debated and discussed all of the arguments and ideas here and certainly read and
reread every single sentence with me – Ana María Sánchez-Arce.
Faults and flaws of emphasis and interpretation remain mine.

Permissions

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC on behalf of the Elizabeth
Bishop Estate: excerpts from The Collected Prose by Elizabeth Bishop (copyright ©
1984 by Alice Helen Methfessel); excerpts from The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 by
Elizabeth Bishop (copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel); excerpts from
One Art: The Selected Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux
(copyright © 1994 by Alice Helen Methfessel, introduction and compilation copyright
© 1994 by Robert Giroux); ‘Blue Postman’, ‘In the Tower’, ‘O for the pathetic
fallacy’, ‘Sled Poem’ and ‘Travelling, A Love Poem’, from forthcoming Edgar Allan Poe
& the Juke-Box by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Alice Quinn (copyright © 2006 by Alice
Helen Methfessel); ‘Murray Hill Hotel’, ‘Chandelier’, ‘Interior with Calder Mobile’ and
‘Red Stove and Flowers’, from Exchanging Hats: Paintings by Elizabeth Bishop
(copyright © 1996 by Alice Helen Methfessel); excerpts from unpublished letters by
Elizabeth Bishop to Anne Stevenson and unpublished prose by Elizabeth Bishop
(copyright © 2006 by Alice Helen Methfessel).
An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published under the title, ‘The Snow
Queen: Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia’, in Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott (eds),
Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Bloodaxe Books, 2002), pp.63–86. An earlier
version of Chapter 2 was published under the title, ‘From Maps to Monuments:
Elizabeth Bishop’s Shoreline Poems’, in Mosaic Vol. 36, No. 4 (December 2003),
pp.103–119. An extract from Chapter 4 was published under the title, ‘“A Curious
Cat”: Elizabeth Bishop and the Spanish Civil War’, in The Journal of Modern Literature
Vol. 27, Nos. 1/2 (Fall 2003), pp.137–48.
 List of Abbreviations

AS Elizabeth Bishop/Anne Stevenson Correspondence, Washington University

Library, St. Louis

CP Complete Poems

CPr Collected Prose

EB Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop (ed. George Monteiro)

EH Exchanging Hats: Paintings (ed. William Benton)

OB Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (eds Gary Fountain and Peter
Brazeau)

SL One Art: The Selected Letters (ed. Robert Giroux)

VC Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New

York
2 Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop
 Introduction

According to Italo Calvino, a classic is any work of literature ‘which constantly

generates a [...] cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the
particles off (Calvino, 2000, p.6). Books, for Calvino, are curiously touchable,
unbreakable objects. They attract opinions as the bookshelves that hold them attract
dust, yet the lines and stories they are made of are somehow magically self-cleaning.
They repeatedly shake themselves free of critical ‘particles’.
Calvino’s Romantic-inflected image of the book as an unravishable object
obviously owes something to Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Keats’s lovers famously
never get to kiss, ‘Though winning near the goal’ (Keats, 1995, p.215). Figures for
Keats’s own autobiographical frustrations with Fanny Brawne as well as for the static
beauty and tension of frozen art, these bold adolescents seem also to stand in for the
activity of most critics, desperately trying to leave their touch on how we see a poem
or story afterwards. This desire is not as blameless as it first appears. In the opening
stanza, Keats represents the lover’s pursuit as ‘mad’ and the chase to possess another
human being (or object) as akin to rape: ‘What struggle to escape?/ What pipes and
timbrels? What wild ecstasy?’ (p.215). Keats’s bold lover generates an awful amount of
poetic hot air in the poem —‘For ever panting, and for ever young’ (p.216) —without
ever getting to touch the object of his obsession. She always remains out of reach.
The same is true of course of the urn, crucially gendered female like the maidens
about to be caught. The poem (in)famously adopts several different aesthetic poses in
relation to the urn’s significance. Is this a celebration of art’s separation from human
passion, or an indictment of art’s silence on the matter of history and politics? While
the ending of the poem offers a quotable summary of the speaker’s feelings (“‘Beauty
is truth, truth beauty,” — that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’),
who or what is actually being addressed here, the reader, the urn, or humanity as a
whole? To paraphrase Calvino, Keats seems to provoke a great deal of critical dust
here without ever really exhausting the urn’s meaning. It is cold and silent again by the
end of the poem, as if waiting for the next reader to arrive. Art thus allows us to look
and even to question its significance at some length, but in exchange for that look we
have to agree to have our touch rebuffed.
Of course, as Calvino and Keats both recognise, it is not just a case of letting
the meanings of books and urns escape; they will do so anyway. Art objects
continually object to being held tight, to being suffocated by single interpretations or
readings. In fact, they do more than simply object. They positively resist. As Jeanette
Winterson points out in her collection of literary criticism, Art Objects (she is using the
verb here as well as the noun), books exist independently of their beginnings as still-
life objects:

You can pick up a book but a book can throw you across the room. A book can move
you from a comfortable armchair to a rocky place where the sea is. A book can separate
you from your husband, your wife, your children, all that you are. It can haul you out o f
2 A rt and Memory in the Work of'Elizabeth bishop

a lifetime o f pain. Books are kinetic, and like all huge forces, need to be handled with
care. (Winterson, 1995, pp. 122-3)

A poem or story is not something fragile, but it is something we can spoil for the next
reader, either by kicking up too much ‘critical discourse’ around it, or, paradoxically,
by kicking up too litde. While readers are frequendy scared off books with
reputations, they may never even pick up a book with none. As critics, one of our
main problems is how to pass on books we want others to read without covering
them in too much interpretative dust. Like Keats’s lover, we need to give up the
fantasy of capturing an artist’s meaning in a single word, phrase, or book, so that
paintings, poems and stories remain ‘to be enjoy’d’ (Keats, 1995, p.216) by others,
long after our own looks and readings of them have been forgotten.
Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry can hardly be seen at the moment for the dust
storm of articles, collections of essays and monographs that have gathered around it.
This has not always been the case. As recently as 1988, there were but two critical
studies of her writing, both rather traditional analyses of her influences and artistic
development, the first by Anne Stevenson in 1966, the second two decades later by
Thomas Travisano. Since then, hardly a year has passed without the publication of a
new book on Bishop, submitting her published and unpublished writing to a range of
methodological and theoretical approaches, from feminism, psychoanalysis and Queer
theory, to studies of form, register and tone. There are several reasons for Bishop’s
rapid and somewhat surprising ascendancy among contemporary critics. These include
a change in the way feminist scholars approached Bishop’s work in the 1990s, the
widening of the Bishop canon through the release of unfinished and unpublished
poems and stories, and the increasing recognition of Bishop’s more political side (see
Travisano, 1996, pp.217-44).
Outside the academy, Bishop has always been a loved and respected poet by
her peers. In fact, for a time the poetic community seemed just about the only one to
be reading Bishop’s work. When John Ashbery nicknamed her ‘the writer’s writer’s
writer’ (Ashbery, 1977, p.8) in the late 1970s, he was quite literally describing her main
readership in North America. Poets have been queuing up to praise Bishop from the
moment she began writing. She seems to have received more fan letters and tribute
poems, both during her life and posthumously, than any other twentieth-century
writer. Her poet-fans include almost every American, British and Irish poet of note in
the last 50 years, from Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, to
Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin and Paul Muldoon.
All this criticism and praise has made Bishop a much kicked about and
talked-about writer, fulfilling one of Calvino’s main criteria for classic status. Yet in
the clamour to get Bishop read at all there has been a tendency among some Bishop
scholars to overlook the very act of reading. In the rush to see Bishop as alcoholic,
Bishop as lesbian, or Bishop as postcolonial (to give just a few examples of the main
trends in Bishop studies over the last decade), critics seem somehow to have ignored
Bishop as poet. In doing so, they have skipped over the very objects that actually
encouraged them to read her work in the first place. This is not to diminish or
question the value of political criticism of Bishop’s work in any way. It is merely to
demand of readers that they handle books with more care.
 Introduction 3

How, then, should one read Bishop’s work today? In a further resonant
image, Calvino compares the experience of reading a classic book to the physical joy
of opening an artichoke: ‘What counts for us in a work of literature is the possibility
of being able to continue to unpeel it like a never-ending artichoke, discovering more
and more new dimensions in reading’ (Calvino, 2000, p.197). While books have always
doubled as useful hiding places for authors’ biographical lives and political allegiances,
this is not, I think, why we first read them, or even why we read on. These
assumptions and ideas come after reading, not before. We need somehow to pay more
attention to the packaging, lest we end up scattering the pages in our hand, looking
for a centre that might not be there. A concern for form is not separate from a
concern for politics or reality. Indeed, as with Calvino’s ‘never-ending artichoke’,
perhaps a sense of form and history are always there on the surface of things.
Ironically enough, Bishop once conceived of an artichoke-shaped house in
which she could retire and do ‘nothing much, forever’ (CP, p.179). Her thoughts on
what she might do there seem almost like an object lesson in reading. ‘The End of
March’ (1974) is usually discussed in relation to Bishop’s lifelong interest in shoreline
retreats and temporary homes, but I think its message about how to read has often
been overlooked. After following a formation of geese in the sky and a series of dog-
prints in the sand, the poem’s speaker turns to contemplate a house in the distance:

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream house,

my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort o f artichoke o f a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate o f soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
o f — are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
Fd like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog à r américaine.
I’d blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
— at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something o ff behind the dunes.
A light to read by — perfect! But — impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and o f course the house was boarded up. (CP, pp. 179-80)
4 A rt and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop

This is as close as Bishop ever got to a clearly defined theory of reading. Critics
usually read her expression of despair (‘perfect! But — impossible’) immediately
following it as testament to her doubts about the wisdom of ardstic isolation, yet I
think these lines still offer us a rare expression of her innermost feelings on the
relationship between books and readers.
Bishop’s ‘proto-dream-house’ obviously has several literary precursors, from
Daniel Defoe’s dwelling within a rock in Robinson Crusoe to Henry David Thoreau’s
shelter in the woods by Walden Pond. Whatever the source, Bishop expresses
sympathy here not just for the idea of doing ‘nothing much, forever’, but also for the
idea of reading for nothing, of clearing the mind of the usual assumptions and
theories that clog the brain even before picking up a book. In order to do this, her
holiday reading list is largely made up of books she has never heard of before: ‘boring
books,/ old, long, long books’. The repetition of words here, combined with a
claustrophobic use of alliteration and sibilance, convey the monotony of reading
simply for the sake of reading. It is perhaps no surprise that Bishop is without grand
theories on life afterwards. All she leaves behind are ‘useless notes’ that presumably
have little relation to the books in question and can be quickly disregarded by the next
reader to come along. We have returned via ‘a sort of artichoke of a house’ to the
terms of Calvino’s classic as a book that generates discussion without being confined
by it.
Bishop is not recommending a canon of dull books in the poem, nor does
she see all criticism as simply ‘useless’. This apparendy extreme position needs to be
read within the context of her personal life and professional experiences. ‘The End of
March’ was completed in the early 1970s during the first years of her teaching job at
Harvard. This was a decade dominated at Harvard and elsewhere by the influence of
continental theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva.
Bishop’s position on the usefulness of literary theory was fairly unequivocal. In her
writing class, she advised students to read only primary sources. ‘I would suggest you
read one poet - all of his poems, his letters, his biographies, everything but the
criticisms on him’ (Wehr, 1981, p.322). Her comments in the poem on the importance
of a solitary reader’s communication with a book (however boring, old, or long)
appear to reflect her privately-held belief that the reading of books in universities was
somehow being replaced by the reading of criticism or theory. Read everything and by
implication anything, she advised, except the critics. Bishop is advocating an old-
fashioned, almost Paterian, style of reading. In the famous preface to Studies in the
History o f the Renaissance, Walter Pater stressed the importance of ‘seeing one’s object as
it really is’. While there is no evidence that Bishop ever read Pater, her preference is
more or less identical; to read the book as it is without critical distraction,
accompanied by no more than some heat and drink and ‘[a] light to read by’.
Pragmatic enough to see this aesthetic ideal as ‘perfect! But — impossible’, Bishop
still wishes readers to attempt it. Her theory of reading is thus in essence a kind of
anti-theory. She wants students of literature to read books as books and poems as
poems.
A number of critics have already followed Bishop’s directions along the
shore, setting up their own version of a ‘crypto-dream-house’ in which books can be
read again for form. Before looking at their work in more detail, it is useful to recall
 Introduction 5

the critical consensus against which they had to struggle. As John Ward points out in
The Aesthetic and Literature’ (2001):

Since the 1960s much literary criticism has been pervaded with an aggressive-defensive
feeling that in a world o f injustice, starvation and brutality sustained interest in the
aesthetic is both luxury and escape. What mattered was to uncover the ideology behind
the work; where the writer was coming from and with what political and cultural result,
to its greater and truer understanding. A literary “work o f art” became an item wherein
to read the class struggle or privilege-dynamism o f its time. (Ward, 2001 p.l)

At the beginning of the 1990s, aesthetic criticism was still a devalued practice.
Arguments about the role of form in literary thinking seemed to be over. As Ward
points out, the ‘literary “work of art” became an item’, an object of Marxist attention
as if it was a manufactured product, something to be counted and classified (or of
course itemised) like any other part of the economy. The emphasis is obviously on
‘work’, not ‘art’. The problem with this kind of Marxist criticism is not its interest in
class dynamics and historical forces, but the way in which it applies a universal
template of ideas to every single artistic enterprise regardless of whether the particular
theoretical model fits or not. Aesthetic (or Formalist) critics, no doubt aware of their
stereotyping since the 1890s as apolitical, unprincipled readers, have been careful to
focus their attention on the methodological flaws of this kind of approach to reading.
They see the work of art as providing a stepping stone to politics - something
connected to literature without necessarily being the same thing. As Ellen Rooney
observes:

Formalism is a matter not o f barring thematizations but o f refusing to reduce reading

entirely to the elucidation, essentially the paraphrase, o f themes — theoretical,
ideological, or humanistic. The various modes o f thematization that currendy dominate
critical readings o f both the literary and the extraliterary kind are no longer simply
inescapable; they are the only game in town. When the text-to-be-read (whatever its
genre) is engaged only to confirm the prior insights o f a theoretical problematic,
reading is reduced to reiteration and becomes quite literally beside the point. (Rooney,
2000, p.29)

Formalist critics do not wish to bar ‘thematizations’ from the study of literature. But
they do wish to reverse ‘the theory first’ approach to reading books. Political readings
of art should be secondary to the reading process. Otherwise the study of literature
becomes simply the reading of politics. This is not to see art as separate from ‘a world
of injustice, starvation and brutality’, but actually to recognise art’s power as a
language that sometimes wriggles free of these forces, that affects and influences
historical change just as much as it is defined by it.
This emphasis on the connections between, or even the interrelation of
aesthetics and ideology, is one of the main elements of what has recently been called
New Aestheticism (or even New Formalism). Aesthetics <&Ideology, a collection of
essays edited by George Levine in 1994, was the title of one of the first books to argue
for a return to the study of form and is one of the key principles around which New
Aestheticist critics now gather. As Levine states in the introduction to that book, ‘The
aesthetic is not outside of politics [...]. But it makes its way by indirection and by
6 A rt and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop

infusing all questions with affect and value’ (Levine, 1994, p.17). New Aestheticism’s
concern for the indirect ways in which art and politics run into each other is what
most separates it from the aesthetic movement of Pater, Ruskin and Wilde. According
to their philosophy, ethical sympathies actually blind one to questions of form and
style. As Wilde observes in his ‘Defense of Dorian Gray’: ‘An artist, sir, has no ethical
sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colours on his
palette are to the painter. They are no more, and they are no less’ (Wilde, [1890]
1970a, p.248). A century later, an ethical sense remains a rather minor function of
aesthetic criticism. But its role is still important, not just to counter the arguments of
ideological critics that aestheticism always operates in a political vacuum, but also
because a new generation of critics actually believe in the confusion of form and
content, artifice and reality. They offer the suggestion that perhaps both sides are right
and wrong, that looking at form need not necessarily signify a denial of history and
politics.
Romantic Studies has been one of the fiercest debating grounds for the
battle between aesthetes and ideologues over the last few years. Susan Wolfson is one
of the few critics to articulate a truce between them. In her influential book, Formal
Changes: The Shaping o f Poetry in British Romanticism (1997), she argues for a return to
close reading as a way back to historical analysis. Wolfson is careful not to see all
formal structures (or formal readings) as politically inscribed or socially informed. She
accepts the arguments of Eagleton and others that uses of form are sometimes
identifiable with conservative positions, but she does not agree that this is always the
case. As she states in her introduction: ‘Some poems do turn from social conflict, or
use their forms to exile and displace disruptive knowledge; but other poems, far from
concealing the problematic of form, provoke it anew, as a condition of their very
composition’ (Wolfson, 1997, p.15). According to Wolfson, there are two ways for
poets to approach the question of form. They can either reproduce old forms without
thinking, implicitly supporting the linguistic, political or sexual status quo residing in
different poetic forms; or they can push against existing poetic structures to create
new vessels of being and thinking:

Some poetry, usually not the most durable, may look like cookie-cutter products of
systematic formations; but other texts, particularly when a systematic formation is a
critical subject, take shape as creative work across the grain, putting — again, in
Foucault’s terms - forms o f continuity “in suspense”, not “rejected definitively, o f
course, but ... disturbed”. To see all aesthetic form as only subordinate to an all­
determining social form, I think, is to miss the dialectical interaction o f aesthetic
imagination and social information, to miss how the materialities o f literary, and more
specifically, poetic performance may resist, revise, or reform a prevailing social text.
(Wolfson, 1997, p.231)

The difference between poets who use form to support convention and tradition and
those poets who use it to resist and revise prevailing ideas is, for Wolfson, akin to the
difference between manufactured cookies, shaped and tested in advance for the
marketplace, and home-baked versions, eccentrically moulded, never-to-be-repeated
taste experiences. The cooking lessons are surely the same for critics. We have to pay
attention to the ‘materialities’ of poems: their images, rhymes, and metres. Only after
this can we see if they stand for anything else.
 Introduction 1

While Bishop was occasionally interested in philosophical and

psychoanalytical approaches to literature, she always felt the work should come first.
In a letter to Marianne Moore from 1940 she wrote of agreeing with Mallarmé ‘that
poetry was made of words, not ideas’ (SL, p.94). Thirty years later, she shared this
feeling with a bewildered classroom of Harvard students. At the time, Bishop must
have seemed like a teacher from another world, constandy referring her students back
to poems rather than to books about poetic language. The only extra book she would
allow them to consult was ‘a good dictionary’ (qtd. in Gioia, 1986, p.101). The
teaching methods that must have seemed wilfully old hat in the 1970s now seem to be
back in fashion. Most contemporary critics are careful to pay lip service to close
reading, even if they do not do very much of it themselves. Converts from Theory to
Post-Theory abound, almost as if one were in the midst of an intellectual reformation.
In a recent article on English Studies, Catherine Belsey admits that the academic
community ‘may have neglected the signifier’ (1999, p.l 30):

There is, perhaps, a tendency for current readings to go straight to the signified, to
uncover the thematic content o f the text, whether conscious or unconscious, and
ignore the mode o f address. How ironic if postmodernity, so conscious o f surfaces that
it is often accused o f taking style for substance, should generate a criticism which,
though often eminendy stylish in itself (I think here particularly o f American New
Historicism, for example), takes litde or no account o f the signifying practices o f the
texts it interprets. This is a loss. I am not, of course, asking for an empty formalism, a
descriptive account o f register or structure. But conventions, and breaches o f
convention, do signify; genres, and generic surprises, constitute something o f the
meaning o f the text. (Belsey, 1999, pp. 130-31)

The critical orthodoxies seem to be shifting. Where once critics went ‘straight to the
signified’, they now urge caution. Where once they ignored ‘signifying practices’, they
now encourage us to notice them. Where once formalism was a bad word, now only
‘empty formalism’ is to be distrusted.
Belsey is right to sound this note of caution. Formalist criticism has to be fo r
something beyond the appreciation of form. It cannot simply map or repeat what the
artist has already done, like Borges’s famous map. Valentine Cunningham falls straight
into this trap in his recent polemic, Reading After Theoiy (2002). In the first half of the
book, Cunningham criticises theory for limiting and simplifying texts. ‘Literary
theory’, he argues, ‘diminishes the literary, diminishes texts, by reducing them to
formulae, to the formulaic, to the status only of the model, of models of literary
functions, even of the literary at large, but still only a model’ (2002, p .l22). Yet
Cunningham’s alternative to theory is just as repetitive. What one needs apparently is
‘close reading’:

Tact: proper tactility; the gentle touch o f the right-minded communicant. [...] tact as
due attention, a proper attending to; a tenderness o f touch; tender attention. Tact as
that approach with the right hands, the attentively tendered hand o f the attentive body,
o f the body tending towards, the body approaching near, coming carefully close up to
the object to be received. The touch that will result in the toucher being touched, in the
sense o f emotionality, affect. (Cunningham, 2002, p.l 56)
8 A rt and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop

Cunningham is guilty here of exactly the kind of ‘empty formalism’ with which
Aestheticist critics were once associated. He defines critical ‘tact’ as something almost
reverential. One approaches a book like a penitent before his or her confessor with
the correct behaviour and posture (‘the right hands, the attentively tendered hand of
the attentive body’). This almost sounds like Calvino again, except for the fact that
Calvino always allows for the reader’s grubby touch. Our impression on the book may
not last long, but at least we are encouraged to take it home and own it a while. New
Aestheticists do not wish to make museum pieces of art. They see poems as living
forms rather than dead objects. As such, a poem or story is continually contaminated
and informed by the touch of history and politics, biography and ideology. I see the
study of form as coming before these things or at least occurring at the same time;
never form for its own sake, without awareness or reference to other matters.
Bishop’s education at Vassar in the 1930s trained her in the reading practices
of New Criticism. Yet I doubt even she would have agreed with Cunningham’s
argument. As she admits in ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’
(1948), the act of reading is never blameless or selfless. Some element of guilt -
whether cultural, personal or political —always rubs off:

Open the book. (The gilt rubs o ff the edges

o f the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Open the heavy book. Why couldn’t we have seen
this old Nativity while we were at it?
— the dark ajar, the rocks breathing with light,
an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,
colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,
and, lulled within, a family with pets,
— and looked and looked our infant sight away. (CP, pp.58-9)

Bishop wishes to approach the reading process as Cunningham advises. Given the
identity of the ‘heavy book’ - her Nova Scotian grandparents’ family bible — a
reverential attitude might seem even more appropriate. Yet on opening the pages, she
is immediately stained by them. In a clever pun, physical and spiritual ‘gilt’ are
immediately released into the air. These material and immaterial particles rub against
‘the edges/ of the pages’ and pollinate the fingertips. No clean hands here. The
placing of the word ‘edges’ on the edge of the line draws formal attention to this.
Bishop tries to sideline awkward material in the poem, but her extra-literary
experiences remain live. As Angela Leighton points out in her reading of Sylvia Plath’s
poem, ‘Edge’, poets often use language to shrug off ‘biographical, moral, [and]
political messages’. The choice of words ‘edges them out, while, at the same time
reminding us of what poems might be up against’ (Leighton, 1999, p.18).
Bishop’s edges, like Plath’s, push certain moral interpretations to the
margins, but they do not exile them entirely. Her stereotyping of Arabs as ‘plotting,
probably,/ against our Christian empire’ (CP, p.57) remains in the opening stanza, as
does the poet’s confrontation of mortality in her memory of a bare grave, ‘open to
every wind from the pink desert’ (CP, p.58). A different edge comes into play at the
poem’s conclusion when Bishop abandons her reputation for literalness and attempts
to place something both motionless (‘undisturbed’) and silent (‘unbreathing’) into
words. This is the edge against which many lyric poems struggle: the expectation to
 Introduction 9

make narrative sense, to tell stories in verse. John Ashbery once confessed to being
puzzled by the poem’s last line (‘— and looked and looked our infant sight away*)
whilst suspecting ‘that its secret has very much to do with the nature of Miss Bishop’s
poetry’ (Ashbery, 1983, p.204). If so, Bishop’s secret remains to be uncovered. While
the epiphany works as music, it seems to fail in terms of meaning. Perhaps she is
commenting on the difference between Christ’s childhood story (the sentimental
picture of ‘a family with pets’) and her own unhappy early years. Perhaps she is trying
to get beyond the constructed nature of the world as experienced by adults. Whatever
the case, this is certainly one of Bishop’s most imagistic moments in poetry, a carefully
crafted tribute to poetic effects she had long admired in writers like Wallace Stevens
and Dylan Thomas. Language is no longer used for descriptive purposes. It is
suddenly liberated from its responsibility to accuracy and truth.
Reading a book, Bishop’s poem seems to say, one always carries the burden
of memory and prejudice. In the famous ‘Darwin letter’ to Anne Stevenson, Bishop
admitted that what ‘one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that
is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfecdy useless concentration’ (AS,
January 8th 1964). This is not the same as Cunningham’s tactful close reading. In
calling attention to self-forgetfulness, Bishop shows how much of an ideal leaving the
self behind actually is. She can ‘want’ all she likes, but that does not make it any more
likely. In a similar vein, she may desire art to be ‘perfecdy useless’, separate from the
messy world of economics and history, but surely this too is only an aim in Bishop’s
art. She is constandy brought back into a world where ‘commerce or contemplation’
(‘Large Bad Picture’, CP, p.12) co-exist. Reading Bishop re-reading the bible, one sees
the difficulties she experienced trying to focus simply on the pages of a book. Travels
in the mind and travels in the world repeatedly intervene, putting to historical or social
use her ‘perfectly useless’ book. The same is surely true of how we read any poet or
writer. As soon as we open the book, other issues are edging in. A New Aesthetic
approach is novel only in trying to pay attention to music first and meaning second. It
consists of what Leighton memorably describes as ‘getting something for “nothing”
from the text, a kind of lucky bargain’ (Leighton, 1999, p.8).
In his book, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002), Peter
McDonald discusses the central role form plays in the shaping of twentieth-century
poets. McDonald’s definition of poetic seriousness is carefully phrased. ‘Serious’ is, he
admits, ‘a problematic term’ that has ‘more than a smack of the humourless about it, a
suspicion of dour intensity and prim high-mindedness’ (2002, p.5).

For all that, form is the serious heart o f the poem —an amused or amusing poem as
much as a troubled or perplexed one —where such “authority” as poetry bears must
reside. In this sense, the poem is a serious business, however the poet chooses to run
his business in broader senses. (McDonald, 2002, p.6)

McDonald sees form as ‘a real poem’s final, and binding, authority. In the end, there
is nothing a good poem would rather be than the words it is’ (2002, p.16). McDonald,
like Leighton, cherishes art for having nothing to do with authorial fame, moral
perspectives or political relevance. He even recognises the problems most of us face
reading a poem in this way. ‘If learning to live with this, as readers and critics, has
some serious difficulties, it is not without serious rewards’ (2002, p.16). Returning to
10 A rt and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop

look at the end of Bishop’s poem again without something else beside us (a
biography, essay, or monograph), we do feel lost. For in the final reckoning, Bishop
gives us nothing more than words themselves. ‘[CJolorless’ and ‘sparkless’ emblems of
beauty, we are ‘lulled within’ without ever knowing the reason. Bishop scholars have
largely been uncomfortable in the presence of this kind of lyric ambiguity. They tend
to bring the biography and politics Bishop edges to the side of the poem back into the
centre. In doing so, complicated edges become straight lines, the confusion between
art and life, straightforward autobiography. McDonald thinks the arrangement of
words in the best place enough of a reward for the reader. Reading Bishop, one is
inclined to agree.
However, as the title of the book indicates, I am interested in more than just
the art forms of Bishop’s poems and stories. I also want to look at the memories that
provoked them, memories not simply of the people and places Bishop knew and
visited but of the books, letters and paintings she read and responded to at the same
time. Memory, after all, involves visual and written works as well as life. The ways in
which other artists’ images or words are translated into new poems can be compared
to the ways in which a poet rewrites his or her own life story. The word, ‘memory’, is
thus preferred to the expected word, ‘life’. This is not another critical biography of
Bishop’s work - there have been several of these already - but a critical discussion of
artistic memory, as it transforms life into art. The book is less concerned with the
details of what actually happened to Bishop than with the ways in which she refracted
key events into writing: both personal, unpublished writing as well as letters, paintings,
poems and stories. I want to look at Bishop’s entire artistic output, the dead ends,
drafts and notebooks as well as the final versions and complete collections. Art, for
me, is always moving away from the fixed nature of biography-based truth. It is what
Sven Birkerts describes as ‘the afterlife of facts’ (Birkerts, 1999, p.133); or what poet,
Louise Glück, calls the writer’s ‘revenge on circumstance’ (Glück, [1994] 1999, p.25).
This book does not promise to reveal a new biographical Elizabeth Bishop. Its
concerns are the work Bishop does to become a writer, the distances travelled in form
and language to transmute life into afterlife: memory into art, not art into life.
This distinction is essential to my reading of Bishop’s work in this book. As
long ago as 1891, in ‘The Decay of Lying’, Wilde warned artists and critics not to
become infatuated with Life at the expense of Art:

Art begins with abstract decoration with purely imaginative and pleasurable work
dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then Life becomes
fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art
takes life as part o f her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is
absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and
reality7 the impenetrable barrier o f beautiful style, o f decorative or ideal treatment. The
third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness.
This is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering. (Wilde, 1970b,
P-301)

Wilde’s words on the decadence of a literary culture attracted to fame, gossip and
scandal are just as relevant today. By focusing too much on life in our readings of art,
we miss that which is ‘purely imaginative and pleasurable’ - the element of beauty,
 Introduction 11

music, and mystery (call it what you will) that differentiates poems and stories from
politics and propaganda.
When Bishop died in 1979, her reputation rested mainly with the poems.
Her stories had still to be collected, her letters edited, her paintings found. Life began
to intrude in 1983 when Adrienne Rich broke through the critical silence surrounding
Bishop’s sexuality to connect the ‘themes of outsiderhood and marginality in her
work’ with ‘a lesbian identity’ (Rich, 1987, p.125). David Kalstone and Lorrie
Goldensohn continued to make connections between Bishop’s art and life in Becoming
a Poet (1989) and The Biography o f a Poetry (1992), still two of the best and most subtle
biographical studies of Bishop’s writing. The publication of the first biography of
Bishop by Brett Millier in 1993, the Selected letters in 1994 and an oral biography a year
later, inevitably encouraged even more biographical scrutiny of the work, to such an
extent that there is now a danger of ‘Life getjting] the upper hand, and driving] Art
out into the wilderness’. Biographical studies of Bishop’s writing since the early 1990s
include Joanne Feit Diehl’s Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics o f
Creativity (1993), Marilyn May Lombardi’s The Body and the Song (1995), Anne Colwell’s
Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors o f the Body in the Poems o f Elizabeth Bishop (1997) and
Margaret Dickie’s Eyries o f Hove, War, and Place (1997). As the titles indicate, the focus
in each of these works is on how Bishop reveals a more ‘truthful’ self - whether
politic, sexual, or social —in spite of the poetic forms she uses. The critics work in one
direction mainly, from the body of the poem to the body of the poet.
Bishop herself was never moralistic about the role of biography in art or
criticism. She accepted the fact that artists used autobiography and that it was
legitimate for critics to investigate how this process worked afterwards. What she
objected to is the idea that one can ever retrace the moment when life became art,
memory language. The best we can offer is a series of coincidences and questions,
similar to the ones Bishop gives us in ‘Poem’ (1972):

I never knew him. We both knew this place,

apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it’s still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided — “visions” is
too serious a word — our looks, two looks:
art “copying from life” and life itself,
life and the memory o f it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which? (CP, p.177)

Bishop cannot tell whether the painting is a representation of a place —a ‘literal small
backwater’ - or something based on a memory later. Is Bishop’s Uncle George
drawing from life, or memory? What is actually being commemorated here, Nova
Scotia itself or the painter’s memories of it later? As Bishop tells us in parenthesis,
places are not the only things that look different on a second visit, memories change a
lot too. Whatever the truth, both place and painting are ‘still loved’ in the poem,
regardless of which comes first. In a typical Bishop gesture, all our ‘looks’ are invited
into the poem, beginning with her Uncle George’s but opening out to include the
reader’s look too. In the poem’s most famous line, Bishop hides the shift into a more
12 A rt and Memory in the Work ofElizabeth Bishop

philosophical register by appearing to quote a popular saying (‘art “copying from life”
and life itself). Life, for Bishop, is as false as art, as composed and invented as a
poem, just as art too has something of life’s famed link to truth, its connections to
history, politics and society. Bishop does not say as much explicidy. She thinks vision
‘too serious a word’. Yet I think we can find within these lines some of her most
suggestive writing on the ways in which art and memory continually ‘turn into each
other’, not simply from autobiography to book, but also from painter to poet, poem
to reader. As critics, we need to respect, as Bishop respects, ‘our years apart’. We
cannot tell if she is describing a place or person clearly, or whether she has simply
looked ‘at it long enough to memorize it’. Too many critics seem to love Bishop for
what they think she has experienced and seen, not for what she has actually passed on
to us later. As the tide indicates, she gives us no more than a poem, yet within this
‘Poem’ there is life too. Life that cannot be explained away or retold by the
chronology of a biography.
Reading Flannery O’Connor’s stories in 1960, Bishop makes her own (rather
revealing) stab at a biographical reading:

[T]he writing is so damned good compared to almost anything else one reads —
economical, clear, horrifying, real. I suspect that this repetition o f the uncle-nephew, or
father-son, situation, in all its awfulnesses, is telling something about her family life -
seen sidewise, or in distorted shadows on the wall. (SL, p.382)

Bishop’s sense of the relationship between art and memory looks at first disarmingly
simple. She moves from story to life in a sentence, suspecting O’Connor of
‘something’, without ever quite finding the evidence for it. Like a detective catching
glimpse of a criminal escaping, the author is no more than a fleeting image, ‘seen
sidewise’. Bishop’s surreal evocation of the shadowy artist hiding inside the work is
reminiscent of the dreamscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, one of Bishop’s favourite
painters. O’Connor’s stories become box-like stages, a series of figures repeatedly
replaying the author’s view of family life (at least as Bishop sees O’Connor’s family). It
is difficult to tell O’Connor apart from her stories, Bishop apart from her readings of
them. Details and language become compressed to such an extent that it is impossible
to see whose memories of family life are actually being recalled here, O’Connor’s or
Bishop’s. Bishop frequendy delights in the creation of riddles that can never be
solved. She places the ‘real* within the matrix of art, viewing it as a kind of life too, or
at least as autobiography in disguise. As she writes in a notebook from the same
period: ‘Art is never altogether pleasing unless one can suspect it of ulterior motive
[...] of a “secret confidence’” (qtd. in Lombardi, 1993, p.59). Writers, according to
Bishop, should appear to be confiding in the reader. They should not actually confess
what is on their minds. While Bishop’s work, like that of any writer, has ‘something’ in
common with her life, this is not the whole story of her career, or even the most
interesting part. We lose sight of Bishop the artist if we spend too long gazing at the
‘shadows on the wall’. The poems and stories are real enough in their own right
without continually returning to the life as backup.
This is not to dismiss biographical readings out of hand. A sense of an
artist’s life should always inform criticism. Yet there is, I think, an urgent need to use
biographical facts in a different way, as something one brings in addition to a reading
 Introduction 13

rather than its real explanation. For life is surely a kind of text too, with the same
ambiguities, contradictions and variations. While one of the aims of Bishop’s work is
to turn art and memory ‘into each other’, criticism cannot then reverse the process.
The question ~ Which is which?’ —is not one we are expected to answer in this poem,
or indeed in any poem. It is beside the point, not just of Bishop’s work but of any
reading of literature. As Jacqueline Rose observes in her recent collection of essays,
On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modem World (2003), biographers and
biographical critics run the risk not just of simplifying the relationship between art and
life but of insulting the writer’s imaginative reinvention of his or her own private
experiences:

Biographies o f writers have to move obstinately in the opposite direction from their
subject, going back over the ground, filling in the space —the one pulled open on the
page - between writing and its source. They have to wrestle with the fact that, for the
writer, the lived life was the point o f departure rather than the place at which, unlike the
biographer, they are desperately trying to arrive. A t worst it is a kind o f insult - don’t
think that this life, for all your efforts, will ever be anything other than the thing you
truly are. (Rose, 2003, p.53)

As Rose points out, critics are desperately ‘trying to arrive’ at the point the writer has
already left. They are quite literally chasing shadows. The work is elsewhere, living on
in a different place to the room or study in which it was first conceived. It is ‘this life’
that interests me here rather than the life that has already happened.
According to Bishop, ‘biographical facts aren’t very important or interesting’
(AS, October 2nd 1963). It is what one does with them that makes one a writer.
Although she admitted to having ‘a prize “unhappy childhood”, almost good enough
for the text-books’, she made a continual point of downplaying it (AS, March 23rd
1964). The main facts of Bishop’s life seem on the surface fairly tragic. She lost her
father to Bright’s disease when she was only eight months old and her mother to
mental illness shortly afterwards. From the age of five, when her mother entered a
mental hospital in Dartmouth, Bishop always felt ‘a sort of a guest’ in other people’s
homes, travelling from relative to relative without ever feeling settled (EB, p.126).
This feeling was obviously emphasised by her mother’s death in 1934 when Bishop
was just twenty-three years old. Although she settled down in several places later,
buying homes in Key West, Brazil and Boston, she always felt excluded or isolated in
some way. Critics have rightly drawn attention to the pressures Bishop felt as a lesbian
poet trying to make her living in a predominandy heterosexual culture. Asthma,
eczema and, later, alcoholism, all affected her life in negative ways, to say nothing of
the chronic shyness and occasional depression that restricted her attendance at literary
events and poetry readings.1 While all of these facts obviously had an impact on
Bishop’s writing, as she herself admitted many times, we need to be careful of taking

1 For more on the connections between Bishop’s alcoholism and depression, see work by Brett
Millier (1995, 1998), Marilyn May Lombardi (1995), and others. Their readings o f Bishop’s life
(and the extent to which it impacted upon her daily life and writing) emphasise her depressive
nature rather more than I think necessary or true. In my opinion, she was always moving
between emotional states, neither wholly depressed nor cheerful. Biographical interpretations o f
any person’s life must o f course remain subjective.
14 A rt and Memory in the Work ofElizabeth Bishop

our eyes off the page, of reading poetry simply as if it were a diary or memoir. When
Bishop left a poem or story incomplete, it was not because of the subject involved or
its connections to her own life story. Her Complete Poems and Collected Stories are full of
explicit and implicit transformations of autobiographical material. As she admitted to
Anne Stevenson: ‘Memory poems are apt to pop up from time to time no matter
where one happens to be’ (AS, March 20th 1963). When Bishop abandoned or
suppressed something, it was usually because of a problem with form rather than
theme. The ‘lived life’ had to become something else to live as a poem. Crucially, it
had to move beyond a single person’s expression of pain or suffering. Everything
comes back to finding the correct form for Bishop, form in terms of artistic structure
primarily, but also in terms of the correct relationship between art and memory, poem
and poet.
All of Bishop’s comments on other writers return to this theme: how a poet
puts experience into words and what this suggests about their audience. Her dismissal
of German art, for instance, is almost entirely related to the question of form:

I don’t like heaviness - in general, Germanic art. It seems often to amount to complete
self-absorption —like Mann & Wagner. I think one can be cheerful AND profound! -
or, how to be grim without groaning —
Hopkins’ “terrible” sonnets are terrible —but he kept them short, and in form.
It may amount to a kind o f “good manners”, I’m not sure. The good artist assumes a
certain amount o f sensitivity in his audience and doesn’t attempt to flay himself to get
sympathy and understanding. (AS, January 8th 1964)

‘[CJomplete self-absorption’ is one of Bishop’s bete noires. So too is tonal regularity. She
wants her writers to be ‘cheerful AND profound’, or at least ‘grim without groaning’.
There are of course various expressions of this note in her own work, most famously
in ‘The Bight’ where the ‘untidy activity’ of the poem is left to continue after its
conclusion, ‘awful but cheerful’ (CP, p.61). Funnily enough, this does not stop her
making exceptions. She allows poets like Hopkins to be “‘terrible’” because of his
adherence to form. ‘“[G]ood manners’” gets one a long way with Bishop. For it
‘assumes a certain amount of sensitivity’ in one’s audience. Hopkins respects the
formal distance between terrible events and formal expressions of them later. Thus, in
Bishop’s scale of things, form always comes before subject manner and tone as that
which the poet has to correct first. Without this, there is no art.
Bishop felt similarly about the Beat poets in comparison with Mozart:

It s,eems to me that in the world o f hate and horror we all inhabit that contemporary
artists and writers, some o f the “action painters” (though I like them, too), the “beats”,
the wildest musicians, etc. - have somehow missed the point —that the real expression
o f tragedy, or just horror and pathos, lies exactly in man’s ability to construct, to use
form. The exquisite form o f a tubercular Mozart, say, is more profoundly moving than
any wild electronic wail & tells more about that famous “human condition”. But this is
an idea it has probably been beyond my gifts to express in poetry. (AS, March 23rd
1964)

It is easy to reject these ideas as simply those of a woman out of step with
contemporary American culture. She seems to revise the idea that confessional or
 Introduction 15

expressionist art actually communicates anything. This is not how we usually see the
breakthroughs of painters like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, or the poetry
of John Berryman and Anne Sexton. What Bishop dislikes about them, however, is
not confession or expression per se, but the ignorance of form in dealing with ‘that
famous “human condition’”. In doing so, she returns to an italicised sense of the 'real*
again as something that lies inside a work of art, in ‘man’s ability to construct’ or
confuse the barriers between life and art, not to break them down. Bishop is not
rejecting all modern art here. She herself collected art works by Alexander Calder and
Joseph Cornell and was a prominent supporter of poets like Robert Lowell and May
Swenson who both actively used their lives as a basis for art. ‘[Ejxquisite form’ moves
Bishop more than the ‘wild electronic wail’ of the Beats. She sees musical inventions
and variations as the ‘real’ definition and future of art, not the so-called breakthroughs
of self or story. This is where I choose to locate Bishop’s genius and originality, in the
form and formality of her writing rather than the secrets and lies of her life. In the
former lies ‘the real expression of tragedy’, in the latter only confusion and dead ends.
This book is structured according to the artistic forms of Bishop’s writing
rather than the facts of her life. As Bishop divides her books along geographical lines
—North and South, Brazil and elsewhere —I have divided my own book into different
spatial and temporal zones: the places Bishop liked to imagine and the things she liked
to do there. The first three chapters analyse different physical hideaways that
repeatedly recur throughout Bishop’s writings, from the imaginary icebergs and snow-
forts of Chapter 1 through the coastal hideaways and seashore retreats of Chapter 2 to
the darkened rooms and haunted villages of Chapter 3. The emphasis in this half of
the book is on the notion of poetic form as a hiding place for autobiographical
secrets, somewhere to absorb, codify and often re-imagine memories, not just of
friends and relatives but of other painters and poets. The second half of the book
travels further away from the life. It investigates some of Bishop’s favourite ways of
wasting imaginative time, from travelling abroad in Chapter 4 to writing letters in
Chapter 5. At this point of the book, I look at the relation of form to politics and the
art of letter writing as a genre in its own right. Art and memory meet again in the final
chapter of the book, on Bishop’s most resonant lyric poem, ‘The Moose’.
These divisions seem to reflect Bishop’s formal and informal obsessions
more accurately than a year-by-year account of her life. A linear narrative is but one
way of telling the story of a writer. An account of the inscapes and metaphors that
artists come back to, wherever they happen to be, is, in my opinion, a more
illuminating one. The idea of order has to be given up. One cannot divide the life into
neat, sequential periods of discovery and movement forwards. Yet there is much to be
gained by adopting a less rigid structure. An imaginative life does not proceed from
youth to maturity as we sometimes think. On the contrary, it moves accidentally
forwards and backwards, stumbles upon breakthroughs and then forgets them, hits
form for a time but then takes years to recover it. If an attention to form is what
makes a poet, attention to forms should likewise make a critic. This book stands and
falls on its attention to detail. Enough has been said and written about Bishop as an
autobiographical writer, as somebody who perfected a series of ‘impersonations of an
ordinary woman’ (Merrill, 1983, p.259). What about the poems and stories which
remain after this life? What about the forms of writing she hands on?
16 A rt and Memoiy in the Work ofElizabeth Bishop

A few years after Bishop’s death, Mary McCarthy, compared the experience
of re-reading Bishop’s work to a game of hide-and-seek: ‘I envy the mind hiding in
her words, like an “I” counting up to a hundred waiting to be found’ (McCarthy,
1983, p.267). Bishop, in her writing, remains ‘waiting to be found’. We can never be
sure where (or even whether) the poet’s ‘I’ lies within the poem, whether art mirrors
life or runs away from it. It is important to remember that McCarthy is recalling a
‘mind hiding’ (my emphasis) here, not an actual person. Bishop’s ‘real’ life, such as it is,
cannot be found or recovered even by the writer, certainly not by this critic. All that is
left to be written about are words forming and reforming on the page, the mind’s
exquisite transformation of the life of a person into the life of the poem. Writers can
give us no more; critics should expect no less. As the speaker in ‘The Gentleman of
Shalott’ (1935) warns us:

Which eye’s his eye?

Which limb lies
next the mirror?
For neither is clearer
nor a different color
than the other,
nor meets a stranger
in this arrangement
o f leg and leg and
arm and so on. (CP, p.9)

Bishop disrupts thinking about the relationship between art and life by stressing the
lack of difference between the two ‘eyes’ in the poem, for ‘neither is clearer/ nor a
different color/ than the other’. Which ‘eye’ is the poet’s, if any? How do we separate
Tennyson’s perspective from Bishop’s? How does a male character in a poem relate to
the female poet writing it?
Bishop sets up similar riddles throughout her work. She shows how poems
can be used to move between art and life, neither concealing nor revealing the poet’s
secrets or exhausting her meanings. The game of hide-and-seek never really comes to
an end, for the gentleman, the poet, or the reader:

The uncertainty
he says he
finds exhilarating. He loves
that sense o f constant re-adjustment.
He wishes to be quoted as saying at present:
“Half is enough.” (CP, p.10)

To stay close to Bishop is to accept the ‘uncertainty’ principle her poems are founded
upon, loving that ‘sense of constant re-adjustment’ they demand of us, even to the
point of finding it ‘exhilarating’. Art and memory are part of this game of hide-and-
seek, as Bishop herself seems always to have been aware. In Brazil, she notes the fact
that the two words, ‘art’ and ‘memory’, mean the same in Portuguese: ‘The singers are
privileged people in these little communities. They [...] have a high opinion of
themselves and of their “memories,” their word for poetic talent’ (Bishop, 1962, p.86).
 Introduction 17

In her own way, Bishop restores the link between memory and poetic talent, drawing
on the life without ever sensationalising it. This is, after all, what differentiates poetry
from other means of communication. For if we dispense with form in creating or
describing poetry, surely we are dispensing with poetry itself, that element of beauty
that differentiates it from biography, polemic, or politics.
The poet Jorie Graham once described form as ‘a vessel for active tension’
(qtd. in Gardner, 1999, p.223). According to this analogy, poetic forms are like
holding places for volatile substances. Rather than emptying out the poem of
biographical experience or political dissent, the employment of form in fact keeps it
dramatically alive, as Bishop said of Mozart. Graham does not romanticise the
compromises this entails. The stand off between art and memory, poem and politics,
is not easy. It is perhaps this element of conflict which critics run away from when
denigrating or simplifying the study of form. They do not want their analogies upset,
their theories disproved. To look at form, therefore, is not to turn away from
biographical complexity or social conflict, but to see how other human beings
accommodate such pressures within the compressed space of very strict linguistic
room. This meeting of poem and critic afterwards produces another kind of ‘active
tension’, one that can release as well as repress disruptive history. Form unsettles
because of the informal intimacies it holds in play for our reading. It is our decision
whether to notice them or not. Bishop lives on in this form and it is with form in
mind that criticism will live again. The afterlife of poems and poetry in general
depends on it.
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