Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop

Jonathan Ellis

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351957199
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

In Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop, Jonathan Ellis offers evidence for a redirection in Bishop studies toward a more thorough scrutiny of the links between Bishop's art and life. 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of what actually happened to Bishop than with the ways in which she refracted key events into writing: both personal, unpublished material as well as stories, poems, and paintings. Thus, Ellis challenges Bishop's reputation as either a strictly impersonal or personal writer and repositions her poetry between the Modernists on the one hand and the Confessionals on the other. Although Elizabeth Bishop was born and died in Massachusetts, she lived a life more bohemian and varied than that of almost all of her contemporaries, a fact masked by the tendency of biographers and critics to focus on Bishop's life in the United States. Drawing on published works and unpublished material overlooked by many critics, Ellis gives equal attention to the influence of Bishop's Canadian upbringing on her art and to the shifts in her aesthetic and personal tastes that took place during Bishop's residence in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. By bringing together the whole of Bishop's work, this book opens a welcome new direction in Bishop studies specifically, and in the study of women poets generally.

Part I
Hiding Places

Chapter 1
Ice and Snow

Introducing Memory

Elizabeth Bishop was both gifted with and haunted by childhood memories, yet from the very beginning of her career she refused to see this double inheritance as anything particularly special. ‘Like most poets’, she once wrote to Anne Stevenson, ‘I have a really morbid total recall of certain periods and I could go on for hours – but I won’t!’ (AS, March 23rd 1964). The element of restraint here is typical of Bishop. While she admits to having ‘morbid’ thoughts about the past, she does not dwell on them for very long (or even at all). Memories of the dead die with her; they are not allowed to trouble the living, whether it be a critic, like Stevenson, asking about the specific relevance of childhood experiences, or a reader like me on the look-out for biographical evidence. According to her memoir, ‘Primer Class’, memory ‘was always right there, clear and complete’ (CPr, p.4). Paradoxically present, she did ‘not even have to try to remember, or reconstruct [it]’ (CPr, p.4). This is an incredibly idiosyncratic definition of memory, regardless of what Bishop says to the contrary. Sylvia Plath, for example, described biographical facts as a ‘complex mosaic’, a ‘nebulous seething of memory’ that the poet had to ‘yank […] out into black-and-white on the typewriter’ (Plath, 1982, p.72). Bishop, on the other hand, seems to view memory as both certain and stable. It is literally there in front of her, like a poem on a page. In fact, perhaps this is where Bishop locates memory most often, in writing rather than in life. Memory becomes a synonym for art, for that which is alive forever rather than bound by mortality. It takes on the indeterminate form of a ghost or zombie, something that has a relation to life but is at the same time on the side of the immortal or unliving. This is what differentiates Bishop from most poets. Sometimes, her poems are based on memories of people she knew and loved and wishes us to love too by making them representative. At other times, she uses allusions to other artists and writers to make them present again. Bishop’s voice is recognisable precisely because it conceals an identifiable history or past. She is the least egotistical of twentieth-century poets who remember because she never forgets to lose her self in the poem.

This chapter analyses the artistic difficulties involved in trying to express oneself through written memories that repeatedly erase that self from view. How does one actually ‘go on for hours’, or even years, as a writer, without revealing some past history to the reader? All writers inevitably draw on the past when writing in the present. According to Margaret Atwood, the artist has always ‘to go to the land of the dead’ (Atwood, 2002, p.171) to bring something back for the living:

All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. And all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more – which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change. (Atwood, 2002, pp.178–9)

As Atwood suggests, the poet, like Orpheus, regularly descends into the underworld of his/her own past in order to rescue the beautiful stories held there. But Atwood departs from the Orpheus myth at a crucial moment. While all writers ‘must go from now to once upon a time’, they cannot remain in that time if they want their work to enter ‘the land of the living’. The past has to undergo change in order to survive the transformation into art. Writers have to stop and consider ‘the realm of the audience’ above ground, waiting to see if anything has been found there. Orpheus famously looked back at Eurydice before reaching the surface, condemning both of them to a life of perpetual loss. Writers who draw on the past must always remember this lesson. Personal history is ‘useless treasure’ unless other readers can see the beauty of it in the present without recourse to biographical facts or other information. The message is perhaps similar for critics. By looking back at the past when reading poems, we risk losing sight of the beautiful object before us, condemning our own Eurydices to a life in the shadows.

Bishop works hard in every painting, poem and story, not to look back over her shoulder. Her ‘memory poems’ are nearly always told in the present, as if they were actually still happening to her now. In her best work, she reclaims the past without making any claims on the reader to know or understand the specific circumstances or history behind it. The ghosts of life are continually given artistic form to become something else. In ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’ (1975), Bishop credits her Nova Scotian grandmother for introducing her to this process. Elizabeth Hutchinson Bulmer, like her granddaughter, Elizabeth, never forgot anything. Both women turn their personal reminiscences into a kind of song, the grandmother into the motion of a rocking chair, the granddaughter into ‘a memory machine’ later:

My grandmother grew indignant. “I gave your Uncle Edward that horse on his tenth wedding anniversary! Not only that, but he sold him back to me two years afterwards and he still keeps saying I haven’t finished paying him yet! When I have! And he uses that horse all the time, much more than we do!”

“Oh, pshaw, mother,” said my grandfather. “That’s an old story now.”

“Oh yes,” said my grandmother. “Nimble, and the buffalo robe, and the dinner service, and pew rent – they’re all old stories now. You’d never remember anything. But I won’t forget. I won’t forget.” And she set the rocking chair rocking as if it were, as it probably was, a memory machine. (CPr, p.243)

Bishop seems to have possessed a similar ‘memory machine’ all her life, continually exchanging autobiographical treasure for the richer form of art. We read on not to know more about her past, but to continue to be enchanted in the present. As April Bernard states: ‘The intimacy that Bishop develops with her reader is best described as the sort that Rilke characterised as “true love,” wherein two people gaze not at each other, but at a third, shared thing’ (Bernard, 1994, p.16). The third thing is, of course, the poem or story, the ‘shared’ gift that connects writer and reader. Rilke wrote his own Sonnets to Orpheus, seeing the underground journey into the past as one of the main preconditions for writing. Obviously not all memories complete the process. The ‘memory machine’ of any poet has an extremely limited shelf life. The best a poet can do is set it ‘rocking’ and hope that it works more often than not.

Bishop’s fullest examination of this process came in her correspondence with Robert Lowell. Her comments on an early draft of Life Studies in December 1957 show her grasping with the problem of how to formulate her own autobiographical experiences:

They all […] have that sure feeling, as if you’d been in a stretch (I’ve felt that way for very short stretches once in a long while) when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry – or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time! It seems to me it’s the whole purpose of art, to the artist (not to the audience) – that rare feeling of control, illumination – life is all right, for the time being. Anyway, when I read such an extended display of the imagination as this, I feel it for you. (SL, p.350)

Bishop appreciates Lowell’s ability to illuminate past experiences through art. Yet her apparent admiration is undercut by her tongue-in-cheek tone. To Lowell’s illumination of the life, Bishop adds ‘that rare feeling of control’. This tone of hard-won equanimity – ‘life is all right, for the time being’ – is more characteristic of her use of autobiographical material than it ever is of his. It lies behind the mastery of ‘disaster’ (CP, p.178) in the villanelle, ‘One Art’, and is one of the few constant notes in her writing. In art (as in life), Bishop’s ‘whole purpose’ is to stave off crisis. She does so not by ignoring feeling, but by placing formal controls on it. Lowell’s failure to practise similar restraint is implicitly criticised here. Her scruples about Life Studies relate not to Lowell’s reimagination of biography, but rather to his failure to master emotion through form. Bishop’s poetry draws on life too, but, unlike Lowell, she never tries to ‘display’ the results. While she accepts that memories can be used as ‘material for poetry’, or even ‘be poetry’, she refuses to abandon tonal control over them.

This is Bishop’s and Lowell’s point of no return, their Orpheus-Eurydice moment. After the writing of this letter, they remained close friends whilst moving increasingly apart poetically. Bishop is one of the few poets to follow Persephone’s advice, constantly waiting for the past to change shape before looking back. Lowell, on the other hand, is much more impatient and impetuous, stumbling backwards into history as almost his first poetic step. As he states in the famous final lines to ‘Waking in the Blue’: ‘We are all old-timers,/each of us holds a locked razor’ (Lowell, 2003, p.184). For Lowell, the past makes all of us old men, robbing us of the ability to look forward. The locked razor is our only escape from this dilemma, cutting off both life and the memory of it. From Life Studies (1959) on, Lowell seems to place more emphasis on the past than the present, drawing on life as his main (and perhaps only) source of inspiration. As Bishop complained in 1964, unsure whether to blame Lowell or not for the changing cultural landscape:

Surely never in all the ages has poetry been so personal and confessional – and I don’t think that it is what I like, really – although I certainly admire Lowell’s. – He does manage to make it a bit more universal and less self-pitying – or is [it] because I know him and know how courageous he is, etc.? (AS, October 27th 1964)

Only seven years have passed between Bishop’s cautious endorsement of the Life Studies manuscript and her subsequent criticism of its influence here, though I think we can already sense her misgivings in the earlier letter. Bishop always values poetry above that which is ‘personal and confessional’. Whilst she admires Lowell’s courage in facing down personal trauma, she questions whether this form of heroism has anything to do with poetry.

Whereas, for Lowell, the past is what we ‘old-timers’ write about, for Bishop it is at best a dark, shadowy landscape, inaccessible for most of her career. She had to stay awake for almost a lifetime to see it suddenly ‘illuminated in long shafts here and there’. Childhood poems and stories increased in frequency as Bishop’s career progressed, but her memories did not become art overnight. They depended upon the ‘memory machine’ functioning properly, form and tone working in tandem. Only then could feelings of anguish diminish and the different sensations of poetry take over. The history of her career is in many ways a lesson on waiting. She writes about her Canadian childhood 35 years after it happened in the 1950s. She has the idea for ‘Crusoe in England’ during a trip to Cuttyhunk Island in 1934 but cannot finish the poem until 1971. Memories work in poems and as poems for Bishop only when they have entered ‘time once more’, when they exist in the present-day experiences of readers rather than the past experiences of writers. This is the kind of illumination Bishop was always on the look-out for, those elusive forms of writing that make memory easy to memorise, stories useful to pass on. The knowledge we find in her poems is not of the autobiographical sort. It is ‘what we imagine knowledge to be’, something ‘historical, flowing, and flown’, based on the ‘rocky breasts’ of personal experience certainly, but always moving on, elsewhere (see ‘At the Fishhouses’, CP, p.66). This is what divides her from Lowell in both 1957 and 1964, and what still divides her from the majority of poets writing nowadays. She waits for the past to catch up with the present, for her memories to make sense as our memories too.

‘How can anyone want such things?’

Perfecting this process was never an easy one. In spite of being a prolific letter writer, Bishop was never a prolific poet. While Plath completed half of her Ariel poems in a month, Bishop rarely finished more than a couple of poems a year, resolving ‘never to try to publish anything until I thought I’d done my best with it, no matter how many years it took’ (CPr, p.137). The patience that waited 26 years to finish ‘The Moose’ and at least 16 drafts to polish ‘One Art’, did not unfortunately have time to tidy up at least 100 or so more poems and stories in the notebooks now held at Vassar. Mary McCarthy picks up on this idea when she writes of an aesthetic still ‘waiting to be found’ (McCarthy, 1983, p.267). While some work has been done on editing and publishing archival poems and stories over the last decade, little has been made of the continuing relationship between published and unpublished writings. Alice Quinn, poetry editor of the New Yorker, has recently finished work on an edition of Bishop’s uncollected and unfinished poems, Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box. Barbara Page, one of the most astute critics of Bishop’s drafting process, is also re-editing the prose writings on Brazil. While both projects add to the revising of Bishop’s reputation in helpful ways, there remains an urgent need for a fuller Complete Poems and Complete Prose which incorporate all of Bishop’s work in one place. Until these books are available, various aspects of her aesthetic development will continue to be downplayed or misunderstood.

Literary historians tend to view artistic careers like Bishop’s in terms of simple journeys and trajectories, broken up by one or two eureka moments. Filtered through this narrow perspective, Bishop is usually seen as an impersonal, rather reticent writer who suddenly became more autobiographical in the 1960s and 70s. Robert Lowell is often seen as the main catalyst for this change. Critics such as David Kalstone (1989) and Lorrie Goldensohn (1992) both privilege Lowell as the most important figure in Bishop’s artistic transformation. For Kalstone, Lowell was ‘the challenging confidant to whom she would send her work and the letter-journals of her life’ (Kalstone, 1989, p.109). He was both ‘the disciplined productive poet against whom she could test and explore her anarchic side’ and the person ‘who actually provided her with suggestive models of how to do the testing and exploring’ (1989, p.115). According to Goldensohn, Bishop ‘felt Lowell’s influence as a steady enlargement of the possible subject, loosening her tighter grip on the emotions’ (Goldensohn, 1992, p.174). Such accounts, as Bishop says of Crusoe’s and Friday’s relationship, ‘have everything all wrong’ (CP, p.165). Lowell learnt from Bishop, rather than the other way round. ‘Skunk Hour’ was modelled on ‘The Armadillo’, just as ‘91 Revere Street’ was prompted by ‘In the Village’. As Lowell admitted later, ‘re-reading her suggested a way of breaking through the shell of my old manner’ (Lowell, 1983, p.199).

Reductive readings of the Bishop-Lowell relationship are just one consequence of the partial publication of Bishop’s complete writings, though they are illustrative of the damage caused to a writer’s reputation when the editing of their work is too selective. Drafts and notebooks from before Bishop met Lowell show her in a completely different light to the modest, emotionally recalcitrant poet usually painted by the biographical critics. If Bishop could stand up to Marianne Moore over her savage editing of ‘Roosters’ in 1940, she was more than ready to take on Robert Lowell in the 1950s and 60s. This book seeks to bring together the two sides of her writing life. The unpublished material does not reveal a more personal writer. It reveals a more complete one, somebody who cared enough about the sensibilities of her readers actually to suppress memory poems and stories she consi...