The Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop
Wimsatt, Margaret
and of practicing the virtue of civility. Their work, if it bears fruit, will not restore a "Christian America"; but it will assist at the birth of what Martin Marty has called the "public...
...The prose pieces work the same way...
...For instance, on page 435, Mr...
...Her early history was tragic: her father dead in her infancy, her mother going permanently insane, and an abrupt uprooting from Nova Scotia to the home of her paternal grandparents in Worcester, Massachusetts...
...One remembers the happy poem, "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore...
...She was born in Nova Scotia in 1911, and lived at Key West, in Mexico and California and London, and near the end of her life bought a house in Brazil...
...To the Botemquim and Back," and "A Trip to Vigia" show the same sharp eye and broad tolerance -- tolerance for simple people and the dirt, and even for the often shabby or grotesque churches of a very poor country whose religion, like all others, she dismissed...
...14March 1986:153The book has been lovingly edited and introduced by Robert Giroux, who acknowledges help from many of her friends9 He wonders why she didn't collect and publish some of the pieces in her lifetime, but then remembers Robert Lowell's "For Elizabeth Bishop 4": Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps or empties for the unimaginable phrase -- unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect...
...Why was I a human being...
...the weather is all arranged...
...But, unfortunately, When I reached the last page of Mr...
...Marianne set the appointment at a precise time, at one particular bench in the New York Public Library so that she might easily escape if her visitor proved uncongenial...
...All is smooth and easy, till the breath catches...
...Such revolutionary awakenings into new worlds of meaning -- new paradigms -- are simply the most obvious twists and turns of Western philosophical history...
...Emerson summarized this epistemological situation when he said that "the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind...
...Kostof's highly praised 755-page text I felt that it was a promise largely unfulfilled...
...There are people who assume that any emphasis upon the experiential nature of art automatically neglects its historical nature...
...Helena Morley" was still alive, with a proud husband eager to forward Bishop's project...
...In the most critical sense, we do not exist in the same cosmos that people existed in before the era of Copernicus and Galileo, and we do not live in the same world that people lived in before Columbus and the Age of Exploration...
...The longest piece in the book is "Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore...
...At its best, an exploration of architectural history should tell us something about the marks people make on the ground...
...The other exploration of madness, "In Prison," describes a man obsessed by the need to control all the patterns around him: fields, cobblestone courtyards, walls, wallpaper...
...700, with the invasion of the Chichimec tribes, the great city suddenly declined...
...it can be no coincidence that the titles of her collections of verse include North ~ and South, Questions of Travel, and Geography III...
...I could praise Spiro Kostof for many accomplishments in A History of Architecture, but my classroom experience indicates that his kind of informative book -- like Janson's art history -- can do more harm than good, by convincing students that they have been given a grasp of the humanities while all they really get is some random information that reinforces their remoteness from the actual experience of art...
...The history of architecture," he writes, "should try, before it is done, to look at buildings as palpable images of the values and aspirations of the societies that produced them...
...This is evidence of the eye that made Elizabeth Bishop so good an amateur painter...
...Clearly they did not create Teotihuacan...
...And the whole is a whole, probably the last we shall see of a much-loved and muchhonored poet...
...Kostof tells us that Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico was the "great center of a people called the Toltecs . . . the noblest creation of Middle America until about 600...
...During one of her Brazilian stays, Miss Bishop was urged to look at a nineteeth-century diary, made into a cult item there by the admiration of Georges Bernanos, and warmly praised by all her friends...
...It fits too with some of the shorter pieces in this book...
...Two stories stand apart as concrete and objective...
...The Toltecs were one of the Chichimec peoples...
...And thus, as mythologist Joseph Campbell has pointed out, they mistake the metaphor for the message9 They mistake the menu for the meal...
...reminiscence goes into the essays, biography into the fiction...
...Jeumake Hlghwater T HE WORLD changes constantly because our vision of it changes...
...Some of the other essays and stories go ~back to a much earlier period of her life -- as a small child in the village of Great Neck, Nova Scotia, where the coinage wore the face of King George V, and the anthem in school was "The Maple Leaf Forever...
...Those who once may have hoped to imitate Niebuhr's personal achievement, of course, will be disappointed...
...Since he has concluded that the only place this control might be possible is in a jail cell -- for life -- how will he achieve his ambition...
...an extremely picturesque scene, in some ways like a Rembrandt, but in many ways not...
...Unfortunately, there is a good deal of cardboard in Spiro Kostof's 788-page book...
...The author uses scenes familiar to her, but perhaps exotic to her readers...
...And given its impressive range and inclusiveness and its devotion to facts, there are also a few unfortunate errors which may or may not reflect upon the general accuracy of the book...
...If only for its best parts, it was worth printing...
...This piece fits, in her work, with the Brazilian sections of Questions of Travel and her other translations from the Portuguese...
...It was looted and burned, its people were driven off or massacred, and its immense cultural influence ceased...
...Who, who has read "The Moose," can forget the giant shape looming by moonlight in the path of the bus...
...They urgently need intellectual experience that challenges their vision and imagination rather than further surrounding them with an arsenal of transient facts that encourages them to ignore conceptual issues...
...The reality of our day is essentially different from what people meant by reality before Einstein, Freud, and Marx...
...It is possible, however, that such people have not truly demonstrated a real distinction between fact and metaphor...
...Geography stirred her from the time she was old enough to look at maps...
...Handsomely produced, expansive and authoritative, containing more than 950 excellent illustrations, A History of Architecture may, indeed, become the standard textbook for college survey courses on architecture...
...but it will assist at the birth of what Martin Marty has called the "public church": a religious "communion of communions" that seeks to empower all its participants for an active role in the nation's public life and not just its celebrity theologians...
...The shift is permanently in her mind...
...An alert reader at Vassar College in the 1920s, Elizabeth was persuaded by the college librarian (Miss Fanny Borden: the tribute is typical) to go to New York to meet a still relatively unknown but already wary I Miss Moore...
...Minha Vida de Menina had been written and published under the pseudonym "Helena Morley" by a young, half-English girl who grew up in Diamantina in the mining province of Minas Gerais at the turn of the century...
...Just such a purpose seems to impel A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals by Spiro Kostof...
...What an exciting promise and what a fascinating sub-title...
...Such people insist that humanistic thinking is soft and illogical, confusing metaphors with facts...
...The prose is effortless, almost reportorial, but the affection shines...
...In truth, it is an uneven collection, sometimes sentimental, sometimes raggedly written...
...The Sea and Its Shore" about Edwin Boomer, hired to spear trash from the town beach at night, is lit by the gatherer's nightly bonfire, from which is saved scraps of writing to read by the lesser light of his lantern...
...9 300 and 700...
...the Introduction is reprinted here...
...John Mitchell in The Earth Spirit perfectly focuses upon this intricate relationship between humankind and buildings: "The marks people make on the ground reflect the philosophy of the time 9 . . the groves and temples of Arcadia, the radiating avenues of the imperial center, the neatly ordered municipal garden, and the spoils and effluents of industrial rapacity, are each the product of a certain cosmology, a certain view of the nature of the universe and its relationship to men...
...Teotihuacan flourished between A.D...
...But I hope not...
...So more often than not they end up munching on cardboard...
...Like all elements of culture, architecture makes visible the reality in which we live...
...It is, we must always remember, a history that the West writes for itself...
...Miss Bishop writes only of what she herself observed and heard: of the old-fashioned, strong-minded Miss Moore, of the other poet's tastes and whims, of her treasured basket full of rejection slips, of their shared experiences...
...They attended one together and a long friendship began...
...The casual becomes perfect THE COLLECTED PROSE F_Jizabeth Bishop Edited by Robert Girouz Farrar Straus & Giroux, $17.50, $8.95 paper, 210 pp...
...Then, about A.D...
...From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, Please come flying . . . . The flight is safe...
...or, having read "The Fish," can forget that veteran, so majestic that the author, having hooked him, must throw him back into the sea...
...What emerges is surely one of the most endearing literary portraits ever achieved...
...Rather than producing a work concerned with concepts and values, Kostof has given us a remarkably complete and intricate -- if somewhat flatfooted -compilation of historical facts, described by his publisher as "a work which will become for architectural history what Janson has been and continues to be for art history...
...AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE NOW II Barbaralee Diamonstein Rlzzon, $25, 300 pp...
...The table of contents is divided into "Memory: Persons and Places," and "Stories" but the separation is not sharp...
...The waves are running in verses this fine morning...
...Circuses were mentioned...
...The Toltec didn't arrive in the Valley of Mexico until perhaps A.D...
...It is sympathetic, and also the result of sometimes rugged, but never tedious, travel and research...
...They have simply insisted that their own metaphors are' 'factual...
...Please come flying...
...Architectural students are often inclined to seek information at the expense of ideas...
...Rather than looking at art history with the vision of those who live it, they tend ethnocentricly to make their own paradigms the measure of all experience, past and present...
...Marking time & place A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE SETTINGS AND RITUALS Spiro Kostof O~ord University, $45, $29.95 paper, 788 pp...
...A third story written in an objective voice, though many of the details are drawn from the Nova Scotia childhood is "In the Village," where selected facts and scenes are made into a poetic whole...
...but i'n light of Fox's discoveries regarding the toll exacted in achieving it, they may also be led to discover a more trustworthy foundation for "Christian realism...
...He quotes Hawthorne, but it is Poe who comes to mind...
...Who will be his victim...
...It is explored, for example, in "The Country Mouse," with its direct expression of self-pity: "It was like coasting downhill, this thought, only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree...
...Commonweal: 154...
...Margaret Wimsatt E LIZABETH BISHOP is best known as a poet, with a spare, economical style that nevertheless can startle the reader by unexpected ~insight...
Vol. 113 • March 1986 • No. 5
