The Art of Losing

During her lifetime, Elizabeth Bishop was, even more than most poets, underappreciated. Her work—spare, witty, observant—won the admiration of her fellow-poets but never brought her the wider recognition she deserved. In recent years, Bishop’s reputation has grown to the point where she is now universally regarded as one of the great masters of poetry in this century. James Merrill wrote after her death, “One has to blush, faced with poems some of us feel to be more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime.”

This peerless poetry emerged from a difficult, often painful life, with hard-earned periods of stability and joy. Bishop’s father, a successful executive at his family’s construction firm in Worcester, Massachusetts, died of Bright’s disease in 1911, when Elizabeth was eight months old. Her mother then returned to her own home town, Great Village, Nova Scotia, and there suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. She was sent to an asylum when Elizabeth was five, and Elizabeth never saw her again.

Elizabeth lived with various relatives, and in 1927 was sent to the Walnut Hill boarding school. Three years later, she enrolled in Vassar College. She studied science and music but focussed mainly on literature, publishing poems and stories in the rebel literary magazine that she and her friends Mary McCarthy and Eleanor Clark founded. She graduated from Vassar in 1934, at the height of the Depression, and moved to New York, determined to be a writer. The city was not the place for her. In 1955, she wrote to the poet Randall Jarrell, “Exile seems to work for me,” and the first right spot she found was Key West, Florida. In 1938, she bought a house there with her college classmate and lover, Louise Crane, and over the next eight years she worked on the poems that would make their way into her first book, “North & South,” which in 1946 received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. All along, she had been sending the poems to Marianne Moore for review, immensely grateful for the older poet’s guidance and touchingly skillful at resisting her sometimes too staunch advice.

The letters quoted here, from “One Art,” a selection edited by Robert Giroux (to be published next month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), reflect Bishop’s gaiety of spirit and her love of precise and resonant detail. They also document her growth as an artist and illuminate her struggles: the search for fundamental security—for a home—was foremost; and then there were the painful bouts of drinking that plagued her intermittently; her intimacy with dearly cherished, sometimes frighteningly unstable people; and her uneasy dealings with the literary world.

In an unhappy period in the mid-forties, Bishop sought the counsel of Dr. Anny Baumann, a physician who treated numerous artists, and who became a mainstay in her life. In 1951, a fellowship from Marianne Moore’s alma mater, Bryn Mawr, provided Bishop with the money to embark on a long-dreamed-of trip through the Strait of Magellan. She became ill from eating cashew fruit in Rio, and a woman whom she had met in New York years earlier, Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares, and who eventually became the master planner and overseer of Rio’s Flamingo Park, invited her to recuperate at her home. A few weeks later, Lota asked her to stay forever. Years of happiness followed: a fulfilling domestic life; an outpouring of poems and stories; the Pulitzer Prize for her second book.

As a result of the prolonged strain connected with the park project, Lota’s physical and emotional health suffered, and in September, 1967, she committed suicide in New York, leaving Bishop adrift again. In the fall of 1970, she agreed to take over Robert Lowell’s classes at Harvard while he was on sabbatical. She taught there for many years, and in 1976 published what many people consider her best book, “Geography III.”

Bishop died of a cerebral aneurysm, in her apartment in Boston, on October 6, 1979, a week after writing the note to her students which concludes this selection. The following poem, “Sonnet,” was published in The New Yorker later that month.—Alice Quinn

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!

————

To Frani Blough:

Boston
April 1, 1934

A couple of weeks ago I met Marianne Moore. I think I told you that I found Miss Borden [the Vassar librarian] had known her all her life. Frani, she is simply amazing. She is poor, sick, and her work is practically unread, I guess, but she seems completely undisturbed by it and goes right on producing perhaps one poem a year and a couple of reviews that are perfect in their way. I have never seen anyone who takes such “pains.” She is very impersonal and she’s a little like Miss Borden—speaks just above a whisper, but at least five times as fast. I wish I could tell you about her—I will sometime in person—she really is worth a great deal of study.

To Donald E. Stanford:

Vassar College
April 5, 1934

The most interesting thing I’ve been doing lately is taking Marianne Moore to the circus. We went last Wednesday and had a perfectly beautiful time. She arrived carrying two large bags or satchels. One of them contained two paper bags, one for each of us, full of stale graham bread to feed the elephants with. They like it even better than peanuts and we were uncomfortably popular with them. All up and down the line of elephants they were pushing and writhing their trunks and trumpeting. I was mystified as to the other bag until halfway through the performance, when Miss Moore produced from it a large green glass bottle and some paper cups and napkins. It was orange juice. I became so impervious to the public that I even ate a large juicy pear on the train coming back. In the circus the seals were particularly good, especially the ones that can play “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” on pipes. Marianne Moore really is so nice—and the most interesting talker; I’ve seen her only twice and I think I have enough anecdotes to meditate on for years.

To Marianne Moore:

Hotel Venecia, Seville
April 6, 1936

All the houses and city walls in Marrakech are covered with storks’ nests—they are very “familial,” as a French lady said to me, and wander around with six-foot sticks in their beaks building their houses exactly as well as the natives. But the nicest of all were the little owls we saw out in the country—stubby and almost tail-less, about six inches high, and very soft looking. They would sit right by the side of the road, sometimes in the road, and stare quietly back at us as we went up to them, then just as we got quite close, the eyes would blink once and the face would seem really to change expression—becoming surprised, and annoyed with itself for being surprised—and the owl would fly off. . . .

The Holy Week processions are not being held in Spanish towns because of the Communist troubles—but here they draw so many tourists that the government has ordered them to go on—well interspersed with police—whether the Church wants to or not. A Spanish monk in Tangier, when we asked him whether they were going to be held or not, said “Yes—but not for God.”

Key West, Florida
February 4, 1937

The purpose of my trip to Fort Myers was to see Ross Allen wrestle with his alligator and give a lecture on, and exhibit of, snakes. I do wish you could have seen it, Miss Moore. I am so sure you would have liked it. He had two tremendous diamond-back rattlers; they popped balloons with their fangs, and you could see the venom springing out—it was in a floodlight. Then he extracted venom in a cocktail glass set on a little white table. The rattling sounded like a sewing machine. He had some other beautiful snakes, especially one, a long shiny “chicken snake” vertically striped black and yellow. The Harloquin Coral snake is too small to exhibit that way, but I have seen some lovely ones, and some puff adders. Did you know—I didn’t before—that when the puff adder plays dead and rolls on his back, a little blood actually trickles from his mouth?

January 14, 1939

Key West is nicer than ever. I don’t believe I have ever told you about Mrs. Almyda, our wonderful housekeeper. She is very solemn, gentle, and good as gold, and a very good cook for all the exotic local dishes that we eat—turtle, conch-shell chowder (the inside of those beautiful conch shells), etc. What I like best about Mrs. A., though—aside from her character—are her exclamations, which are almost heavenly. “Oh my precious love!” (that’s for breaking a dish, or any catastrophe), “Oh my blessed hope!” etc.—and at anything you tell her that surprises her, and so much that we say seems to, she says “Oh hush!”

November 20, 1939

I have now heard from four separate sources that you were the most ravishing of the personages at Louise’s tea party the other day. You and the opening of the Picasso show [at moma] fill every letter, until I’m beginning to wonder why I left New York. . . .

Now that the weather is nice, I’ve embarked on a great planting plan. There is an old, old Negro with white hair and a large white mustache here this morning “budding” a rosebush. I thought it would be spectacular to have white, red, pink, and yellow roses all on the same bush. He has tied it up in little rags like curl papers. I have also planted a ravaged-looking palm tree, and I hope to get a ten-foot Night Blooming Cereus planted in the front yard to make Louise open her eyes when she arrives. Mrs. Almyda had a permanent wave this summer and when I got here both she and the yard presented the same appearance of baroque abandon.

September 11, 1940

Thank you again, Marianne, for all the first part of the first letter. It seems to me that I make such demands on your thought and time and almost never give anything in return. I scarcely know why I persist at all. It is really fantastic to place so much on the fact that I have written a half-dozen phrases that I can still bear to reread without too much embarrassment. But I have that continuous uncomfortable feeling of “things” in the head, like icebergs or rocks or awkwardly placed pieces of furniture. It’s as if all the nouns were there but the verbs were lacking—if you know what I mean. And I can’t help having the theory that if they are joggled around hard enough and long enough some kind of electricity will occur, just by friction, that will arrange everything. But you remember how Mallarmé said that poetry was made of words, not ideas—and sometimes I’m terribly afraid I am approaching, or trying to approach it all, from the wrong track.

To Robert Lowell:

Stonington, Maine
September 8, 1948

I think you said a while ago that I’d “laugh you to scorn” over some conversation you & J. had had about how to protect yourself against solitude & ennui—but indeed I wouldn’t. That’s just the kind of “suffering” I’m most at home with & helpless about, I’m afraid, and what with two days of fog and alarmingly low tides, I’ve really got it bad & think I’ll write you a note before I go out & eat some mackerel. The boats bringing the men back from the quarries look like convict ships & I’ve just been indulging myself in a nightmare of finding a gasping mermaid under one of those exposed docks—you know, trying to tear the mussels off the piles for something to eat—horrors.

To Carley Dawson:

New York
November 10, 1948

After being so social in Boston once the “reading” was over, and then here, and then the weekend at Bard & then yesterday a reception—or something—for the Sitwells, I don’t feel like myself at all. I’m exhausted all over but particularly the face, which I suppose comes from wearing a horrible fixed grin for so long. I’ve just put some Arden lotion in the icebox and am looking forward to lying down and putting a nice cold washcloth full of it on my poor hypocritical features. . . .

Those present were Richard Wilbur, Eberhart, Cal [Robert Lowell], Lloyd [Frankenberg], Jean Garrigue, Dr. Williams & Miss B [Louise Bogan], me, and a wild man from California in a bright red shirt and yellow braces named Rexroth, who did his best to start a fight with everyone and considered us all effete and snobbish Easterners. He never quite succeeded and finally had to prove his mettle or his reality or something by taking three of the prettiest undergraduates off for an evening in the cemetery. . . .

Yesterday was rather like a party in a subway train—at the Gotham Book Mart with Life magazine somehow horning in on it. Miss Steloff rushing about in an Indian print dress, Miss Sitwell wearing a gold turban that looked like a tiara from the front, Marianne in one of her large black numbers (& me in what M. referred to as a nominal hat), hordes of people, everyone, my dear, including Auden and Spender, whom I’d never seen before. Miss Sitwell was very nice—much nicer than I’d thought from the poetry. It was there that my grin really began to hurt.

To Dr. Anny Baumann:

Yaddo
November 26, 1950
(The day after the hurricane)

I’ve been having a sort of brainstorm ever since I got here, just can’t stop writing, can’t sleep, and although at the time I wrote before I had managed not to drink for a stretch, I’ve certainly made up for it since & made a damn fool of myself & got into a peck of troubles—& made a very good friend of mine here very unhappy.

Well, last night as the trees came crashing down all around me and I felt like death, it seemed a sort of natural phenomenon equal to the brainstorms and I suddenly made up my mind. I will not drink. I’ve been stalling along now for years & it’s absolutely absurd. Dr. Foster once said: “Well, go ahead, then—ruin your life”—and I almost have. I also know I’ll go insane if I keep it up. I cannot drink and I know it. . . .

You know, two of the people I like best in the world never touch a drop—and Father had to stop, and his father, and three uncles. It can be done. And I’d like not only to do it, but be cheerful about it—and shut up about it. It would be so nice if I never had to have one of those painful conversations with you again. Well, somehow the hurricane seems to have cleared my head. Yaddo is a complete mess though, and one of my walls actually fell off—maybe did me good too—all that fresh air—and water.

To Marianne Moore:

Rio de Janeiro
February 14, 1952

There are so many things here you would like; I have written you so many imaginary letters and bored you to death with descriptive conversation many times. I have been staying mostly at my friend Lota’s country place in Petrópolis, about 40 miles from Rio, and it is a sort of dream-combination of plant & animal life. I really can’t believe it at all. Not only are there highly impractical mountains all around with clouds floating in & out of one’s bedroom, but waterfalls, orchids, all the Key West flowers I know & Northern apples and pears as well. Lota has sold one of her places to a famous Polish zoo man and you just have to drive down the mountainside for two minutes to see a black jaguar, a camel, all the most beautiful birds in the world. I think of you every minute there. The zoo man—I can’t believe this yet myself, and we have no common language even—gave me a toucan for my birthday, the other day. He, or she (the toucan), is very tame and mischievous—throws coins around the room—flies off with the toast from my breakfast tray. He is black, to begin with, but with electric-blue eyes, a blue-and-yellow marked beak, blue feet, and red feathers here & there—a bunch under his tail like a sunset when he goes to sleep. . . . Anyway, I’ve never had a nicer present and his name is Uncle Sam.

Samambaia, Petrópolis
March 3, 1952

The mail from Petrópolis to Rio—30 or 40 miles—often takes two weeks. I used the above address because I think it is so pretty—it means “Fern”—but it is not really usable. The same friend brings my mail up from Rio every weekend. I don’t mean to complain about the mails—they are part of the really lofty vagueness of Brazil . . . where a cloud is coming in my bedroom window right this minute.

To Dr. Anny Baumann:

July 28, 1952

It has taken me a long time to get down to work, I am sorry to say—I guess I have lived without any working habits for too long. And then everything is so beautiful it is hard to stay indoors. It is very cold nights and mornings, but hot enough in the middle of the day to eat lunch outdoors, and brilliant, brilliant blue—a few clouds spill over the tops of the mountains exactly like waterfalls in slow motion. I wear long woolen underwear, several sweaters on top, which I take off one by one during the morning and put back during the afternoon. It seems to be mid-winter, and yet it is time to plant things—but my Anglo-Saxon blood is gradually relinquishing its seasonal cycle and I’m quite content to live in complete confusion, about seasons, fruits, languages, geography, everything. . . .

While we were away, the cook took up painting—proving that art only flourishes in leisure time, I guess—and has turned out to be a really wonderful primitive, so we shall probably soon start peddling her on 57th St. & making our fortunes. We found a large rock painting she had done—a bird—using a big lichen as part of his body. We are afraid to comment too much for fear she’ll begin on the walls. Lota told her to please clean the garbage pail—she is half-savage and very dirty, although a fine cook—and ten minutes later we found it painted in violent reds and pinks and blacks. Lota has some pots that Portinari did for her and we have to admit that the cook’s are much better. . . .

There are so many mice that I said I wanted to get a cat and the animal dealer who gave me the toucan immediately said, “Oh—would you like a pair of Siamese? I am importing 200.” So I guess I shall have them soon—wishes seem to come true here at such a rate one is almost afraid to make them any more.

September 16, 1952

The drinking seems to have dwindled to about one evening once or twice a month, and I stop before it gets really bad, I think. Of course that’s still once or twice too often, but what is best about it is that I don’t seem to think about it any more at all, or go through all that remorse. I get to worrying about the past ten years or so and I wish I could stop doing that, but aside from that the drinking and the working both seem to have improved miraculously. Well no, it isn’t miraculous really—it is almost entirely due to Lota’s good sense and kindness. I still feel I must have died and gone to heaven without deserving to, but I am getting a little more used to it.

To Kit and Ilse Barker:

Rio, Sunday a.m.
May 24, 1953

The nicest thing I saw on a drive yesterday was a man trying to sell papayas by the side of the road. He had them hung up by strings, like a little clothesline, and was seated beside them on the ground and as each car approached he raised an old bugle to his mouth, blew a bugle call and pointed majestically at the line of big sagging yellow fruits. I think they all are slightly crazy sometimes (the cliché remark about Brazilians). We stopped to buy oranges on our trip, about 8 a.m. and while we bought, the man put on a Victrola record on an old wind-up Victrola standing in the ditch.

Samambaia
February 5, 1954

The Biennale was thoroughly exhausting, but we had a nice time, even so. . . . Fortunately we got there rather late and almost everything good had been sold to rich São Paulo coffee planters—otherwise I don’t think Lota—who adores to buy things—would ever be able to leave Brazil for the rest of her life. . . .

But in spite of inflation Lota is feeling very set up these days. Her house won the first prize in the architecture exhibit for an architect under 40, or something like that. Gropius was a judge, and naturally Lota is bursting with pride because she knows, and I know, and a few other friends, that all the good ideas were hers and not the architect’s at all, charming man as he is.

To Randall Jarrell:

October 7, 1956

Those two volumes of Coleridge’s Letters arrived last night, and I read until two and woke up at six to start in again—and only the pleasant and relieving prospect of writing you can tear me away from that adorable man. As Alice J. says of Henry James: “His intestines are my intestines; his tooth-aches are my tooth-aches.” I’d never realized how wonderful the letters could be in bulk like that, and how contemporary he sounds. Have you read them?

It’s funny, but true, that just the day before your letter arrived I’d been giving your collected works a thorough re-reading. You know, I was pleased about the Pulitzer business, and particularly here, where it was lots of fun—but I really cannot for the life of me understand why they didn’t give it to you. Some of the war poems are surely the best ever written on the subject, honestly—and as far as “our” wars go, the only ones. But re-reading them I began to think that perhaps that’s just why; that’s why they settled on someone innocuous like me. The war is out of style now and they want to forget it? And of course I don’t know who “they” were, anyway—it all depends on that, I suppose. Perhaps I’m just as happy not knowing, so don’t tell me, if you know, who the committee was!

To May Swenson:

July 3, 1958

I think everyone feels that his or her best poems were lucky accidents—I know I do. But of course they really aren’t at all—they are really the indication that you have worked hard on all the others, and felt deeply, and somehow managed to create the right atmosphere in your own brain for a good poem to emerge.

And as to experience—well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have. There’s no way of telling what really is “experience” anyway, it seems to me. Look at what Miss Moore has done with what would seem to me like almost none, I imagine, and the more “experience” some poets have, the worse they write.

To Robert Lowell:

March 30,1959

I have no news of any importance—but then, I don’t believe I ever have. We had a large dinner party for 20 on Lota’s birthday and it was quite successful, I think—dozens of Japanese lanterns and lots of plants and orchids our florist neighbor happened to give us at just the right moment. We set up five card tables in the “gallery”—all different colors, reflected in the rippled aluminum ceiling—very gay, if modest; and I produced an iced chestnut soufflé with fancy work in whipped cream, etc. It looked almost professional, by lantern light at least. . . .

During the ten weeks I read & read & read—the 3-volume life of Byron, Greville in 3 volumes, Lucan (didn’t you say you were reading that, too?), etc. etc.—and now am finishing the new edition of Keats’s letters—all to what purpose I’m not sure, but all fascinating. At the moment I find the Keats the best of the lot, though. Except for his unpleasant insistence on the palate, he strikes me as almost everything a poet should have been in his day. The class gulf between him and Byron is enormous. As Pascal says, if you can manage to be well-born it saves you thirty years.

Rio de Janeiro
August 26, 1963
Monday morning bright & early

I’ll start a letter to you and heaven knows when I’ll finish it. Virgil Thomson says, “One of the strange things about poets is the way they keep warm by writing to one another all over the world. . . .”

I felt very badly when I read about poor Ted Roethke—must have been a heart attack? Please, take care of your health! Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs—no regular hours, so many temptations! . . .

Yesterday was one of the weirder events of my life. To begin with, it was the inauguration of a big show at the Museum of Modern Art about Lota’s park. Rather to our surprise, it was a huge success. Never so many people at any opening—and the wooden models, aerial photographs, model playgrounds, toy trains, etc., are all very attractive. I think Lota was very pleased, although she still isn’t up to all the work and excitement and goes around looking like a ghost. . . . Anyway, a huge success. Lota untied the ribbon & was dragged into the limelight & given sheaves of wilted roses. I sat on the tiny platform too and there were thousands of people. There is so little for the poor public in Rio; anything’s a godsend. It was funny hearing the speeches praising Dona Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares to the skies as a lover of children & a benefactor of humanity. Meanwhile Lota was yelling at, and almost kicking at, little boys who were trying to climb up on the platform, cursing photographers, etc., with her most terrifying scowls and language. I kept saying, “Try to look pleasant! They’re all looking at you!”

To Dr. Anny Baumann:

October 22, 1964

The park is looking better and better . . . by leaps & bounds. There was a long television program devoted to it Monday night. Lota refused to be in it, of course, but Dr. Peixoto (if you remember him) talked and talked and knew everything Lota had ever told him by heart, I think. Lota is getting so famous that shopkeepers, etc., all recognize her. She has just had a wonderful idea for children’s reading rooms in both playgrounds—there is a dearth of them here. . . .

Lota has read this and approved so far, and now I can add that she comes home from work every evening looking so pale and exhausted that I get very worried about her. I wish I could get her out and exercising a bit more—but that’s almost impossible! She falls asleep at 9 or 10, sometimes with her clothes on, etc. Do you think that vitamins help any? . . . But I don’t see how she can keep going like this until next April, or whenever she’ll consent to take another vacation. . . . “Flamingo Park” is a wonderful project, but I don’t want it to kill her.

To Frani Blough Muser:

December, 1965

I don’t think I told you, because I didn’t make up my mind until the very last minute, but I am going to be one of those awful poets-in-residence for the two next terms (they have a three-term year) at the University of Washington, Seattle . . . I am not looking forward to this very much, but they pay awfully well—at least by my standards, which scarcely seem to be American any more! . . .

I hope Lota will be able to get away from her job and join me for May, at least. But at this very moment things are so awful for her that she may resign today and come with me on December 27th! Heavens, how I hate politics after the last four years—and I’m against the two-party system, and maybe even democracy, for all I know, after the latest events here. Anyway—it has been a nightmare stretch for her, and I don’t like to abandon her this way, but I can’t be of any help, and scarcely see her, so might as well go off and earn some money.

To James Merrill:

Seattle
February 22, 1966

Trying to teach verse-writing and something called “Types of Contemporary Poetry” (it gets called other things, too), when one has never faced a class in one’s life, is rather staggering, and I found Seattle, the West in general, and all these academic people pretty staggering. . . . I keep running out of things to say to the writing class, and either they don’t write at all, or the six or eight bright ones write so much I can’t keep up with them. . . .

Lota’s park is finished, more or less, but now she is president of its “Foundation” for five years. This will mean a little less work, I hope, and much more time in Petrópolis, and perhaps we may even get away for a trip to Europe this year or next—I don’t know. We both want to go to Greece badly. Oh dear, it is Carnival now in Rio. Sunday night was the “samba schools,” the night I always attend, staying up all night and driving back to Petrópolis at dawn. Here I played a few samba discos I brought with me and samba-ed about all by myself.

To Dr. Anny Baumann:

March 19, 1966

As you may have gathered, I have been rather upset by many problems in Brazil lately—well, not lately exactly, because they have all gone on since Lota took on the job. Of course I am going back, and of course I mean to live there, and with Lota, forever and ever. I couldn’t possibly think of anything else—but I feel that lately I have not been managing my life there, and with her, as well as I should and I feel I need advice, quite badly perhaps. She has been wonderful about writing to me—I don’t see how she does it. I called her last night but the connection was bad; I woke her up (I’d canceled the call, but they put it through anyway). However, I think I managed to convince her all was well with me and that I was quite sober, and that was the main thing. She writes me that she wants to write you explaining the various things that went wrong.

To Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale:

Petrópolis
March 18, 1967

Lota had a real physical breakdown—nervous breakdown—from all those years of overwork and worry—and now I also wish I had not gone to Seattle, but it seemed like the best thing to do at the time. Her park—she did a magnificent job, but what’s the use of working for any government, I wonder. After the last city elections the party in power has been doing everything they can to undo all she has done—not aimed at her personally (in fact, the new Governor offered her the same job under him and she refused it)—just politics. And damned shortsighted of them, since the park is extremely popular—two beaches crowded all the time—when it doesn’t rain too hard—and bandstands, dance floors, futebol fields, a puppet-theatre—everything Rio needs. It’s a city with nothing for the poor & what remains of the middle class now—nothing but movies, really.

Our big problem right now is what shall Lota do next? She’s so used to being very important and working very hard that she is terribly lost without the full-time job, although she’s on some committee or other. She is still very weak and depressed. Please don’t mention all this when you write; her friends and I are all feeling desperate at the moment, but surely her brains and natural energy will get her through this bad stretch eventually.

To U. T. and Joseph Summers:

New York
September 23, 1967
Saturday p.m.

It is very bad, I’m afraid, and please forgive me if I don’t make very much sense. Lota came up last Sunday—18th?—the plane was three hours late, and the minute I saw her I knew she shouldn’t have been allowed to come—in fact I think I’ll go back to Brazil and shoot her doctor. Anyway—she was exhausted—we passed a quiet afternoon, no cross words or anything like that—but I could see she was in a very bad state of depression and [I] didn’t know what to do, really, except try to get her to rest. Well—sometime toward dawn she got up and tried to commit suicide—I heard her up in the kitchen about 6:30—she was already almost unconscious. I thought she had taken Nembutal since she had a bottle of it in her hand—but later blood tests showed only Valium, I think. I’ll not go into details except that within about 20 minutes—I don’t think it was much longer than that—we had her in the ambulance and off to St. Vincent’s—and they were giving her oxygen on the way there. —I never thought I’d be glad to see three cops in my bedroom but I certainly was. She has been in a coma ever since, but now they think she is probably going to live—although still unconscious she has opened her eyes and moved her arms and legs a bit, etc. . . .

I’m just stunned, that’s all—this is so totally unlike the Lota of the last 15 years of my life with her.

September 28, 1967

Lota died Monday morning sometime without having regained consciousness. That’s about all I have to tell you now—Tuesday was taken up with all the arrangements necessary for sending a “body” (oh god) home to a foreign country. . . .

She was a wonderful, remarkable woman and I’m sorry you didn’t know her better. I had the 12 or 13 happiest years of my life with her, before she got sick—and I suppose that is a great deal in this unmerciful world.

To Maria Osser:

San Francisco
January 4, 1968

I left Brazil with a very heavy heart and I hope never to see Rio again. . . .

Those last years were so awful, so exhausting, I didn’t behave the way I wish I could have, often, but I didn’t realize for a long time . . . how desperately sick Lota was. You must believe me when I say we loved each other. Other people do not have the right to judge that. She went to sleep in my arms the night of September 17th. There will never be anyone like her in this world or in my life, and I’ll never stop missing her—but of course there is that business of “going on living”—one does it, almost unconsciously—something in the cells, I think. Do you think if all the above weren’t true, I’d be here? . . . No—I’d be dead, too.

To Robert Lowell:

Boston
January 16, 1975

I am now going to be very impertinent and aggressive. Please, please don’t talk about old age so much, my dear old friend! You are giving me the creeps. The thing Lota admired so much about us North Americans was our determined youthfulness and energy, our “never-say-die”ness—and I think she was right! . . . Of course—it’s different for a writer, I know—of course I know!—nevertheless, in spite of aches & pains I really don’t feel much different than I did at 35—and I certainly am a great deal happier, most of the time. (This in spite of the giant oil tankers parading across my view every day.) I just won’t feel ancient—I wish Auden hadn’t gone on about it so in his last years, and I hope you won’t.

However, Cal dear, maybe your memory is failing! Never, never was I “tall”—as you wrote remembering me. I was always 5 ft. 4 and l/4 inches—now shrunk to 5 ft. 4 inches. The only time I’ve ever felt tall was in Brazil. And I never had “long brown hair” either! It started turning gray when I was 23 or 24—and probably was already somewhat grizzled when I first met you. I tried putting it up for a very brief period, because I like long hair—but it never got even to my shoulders and is always so intractable that I gave that up within a month or so. I think you must be seeing someone else! So please don’t put me in a beautiful poem “tall with long brown hair”! What I remember about that meeting is your dishevelment, your lovely curly hair, and how we talked about a Picasso show then on in N.Y., and we agreed about the Antibes pictures of fishing, etc.—and how much I liked you, after having been almost too scared to go—and how Randall and his wife threw sofa pillows at each other. And Kitten, of course, Kitten. You were also rather dirty, which I rather liked, too. And your stories about the cellar room you were living in and how the neighbors drank all night and when they got too rowdy, one of them would say, “Remember the boy,” meaning you. Well, I think I’ll have to write my memoirs, just to set things straight.

To Miss Pierson:

May 28, 1975

I am answering you because (1) You enclosed a stamped, self-addressed envelope. (This happens very rarely.) (2) You think that poetry discussion groups are “a bloody bore”—and, although there are exceptions, in general I agree with you completely. . . .

I think you have set up difficulties for yourself that perhaps don’t really exist at all. I don’t know what “poetic tools & structures” are, unless you mean traditional forms. Which one can use or not, as one sees fit. If you feel you are “moralizing” too much—just cut the morals off—or out. . . . Your third problem—why shouldn’t the poet appear in the poem? There are several tricks—“I” or “we” or “he” or “she” or even “one”—or somebody’s name. Someone is talking, after all—but of course the idea is to prevent that particular tone of voice from growing monotonous. . . .

Read a lot of poetry—all the time—and not 20th-century poetry. Read Campion, Herbert, Pope, Tennyson, Coleridge—anything at all almost that’s any good, from the past—until you find out what you really like, by yourself. Even if you try to imitate it exactly—it will come out quite different. Then the great poets of our own century—Marianne Moore, Auden, Wallace Stevens—and not just 2 or 3 poems each, in anthologies—read all of somebody. Then read his or her life, and letters, and so on. (And by all means read Keats’s Letters.) Then see what happens.

That’s really all I can say. It can’t be done, apparently, by willpower and study alone—or by being “with it”—but I really don’t know how poetry gets to be written. There is a mystery & a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work.

To her poetry students:

September, 1979

Miss Bishop is in hospital & is very sorry she will be unable to meet her classes this week. She will meet them on October 7th and 8th.

  1. Will English 285 please continue studying all the Roethke poems in the Norton Anthology.

  2. The list of students for English 582 will be posted here by noon on October 7th. In the meantime, please try to finish a ballad (at least 8 stanzas). It can rhyme a-b-c-b or a-b-a-b. ♦