The Lowest Neurotic Denominator

...Nevertheless, as Millier notes, she was "indeed attracted to men and women of charismatic instability" who broke down as her mother had...

...Of this impulse Bishop said wryly in an interview, "The tendency is to overdo the morbidity...

...her output was small...

...yet surely many readers hope to catch, among the sob stories of "disorder and early sorrow," at least a glimpse of the magic they cherish in the subject's writing...

...A combination of overwork and the worsening political situation in South America caused Soares to collapse...

...A boyfriend killed himself...

...This rootlessness began soon after birth...

...Despite the problems of Millier's approach, she possesses a strong narrative gift and her account can be gripping...

...But her circumstances blossomed in her final decade: Lowell got her a position at Harvard, where she found a satisfying new love and published perhaps her finest collection of poetry, Geography III, to great critical praise...

...Unfortunately, she has doomed her portrait with the tenuous techniques of modern biography...

...a former classmate from Vassar and Robert Lowell—suffered psychotic episodes, as did two of her female lovers...

...Throughout her years Bishop searched for a place to call home, for the familiar comfort she lost in early childhood...

...Such cheap parlor psychoanalysis tends to reduce any person to the lowest neurotic denominator...

...Another poem, "The Bight," memorably refers to daily existence as "awful but cheerful...

...What is surprising, in fact, is that Brett C. Millier's Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (California, 602 pp., $28.00) is the first of this Pulitzer Prize-winner (though several critical studies have explored some of the territory...

...sometimes it will seem within our grasp, othertimesnot...

...The poet coped with suces-sive painful losses in part through heavy drinking, in part by exploring in her verse themes of "mutability, deceptive surfaces, eerie absences, a wish to escape, an unwillingness to take even her own point of view for granted...

...Numerous recent biographies of both contemporary and long dead authors have been swamped by trivia, ultimately tarnishing these careers with a pedestrian grimness...

...the poet would ever recall her few years there as a taste of Eden...

...The mature, amused voice in these works is that of a wise friend, offering counsel and comfort in the face of uncertainty...

...But the mother's growing instability soon turned to madness, and at age six Bishop's paternal grandparents brought her back to Massachusetts...

...Neither a glut of data nor depressing character analysis can supplant the real thing...

...Bishop lived all over the hemisphere—New England and Seattle, Eastern Canada, Key West and Brazil—and traveled farther...

...The poems discreetly allude to bouts of depression, sexual frustration and guilt...

...That made her a bit unusual in a generation of writers addicted to self-revelation...

...like disaster...

...All the reports of drunken behavior tell less about Bishop than about drink...

...Beyond occasional facts scattered in her writing, she divulged little about herself...

...Yet however private a famous figure may clearly wish to remain, sooner or later biographies emerge...

...On a visit, Soares committed suicide in the poet's New York apartment...

...so many things seemed filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster...

...Bishop's "Poem" evokes a great uncle's miniature painting of his village in Nova Scotia...

...A sickly asthmatic child, she found herself being passed among relatives she mostly despised until she was old enough to be shipped off to boarding school...

...Studying it, the poet discovers "Life and the memory of it cramped,/dim, on a piece of Bristol board,/dim, but how live, how touching in detail...

...Millier's account, on the other hand, is dominated by disaster, leaving the cheerfulness all too often in the background...

...In her writing she did not shrink from acknowledging her faults and catastrophes—but she did so with a humor and grace that provide a different perspective: —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied...

...James Merrill, one of her few literary intimates, joked that she kept up a "modest, lifelong impersonation of an ordinary woman...

...two close friends...

...Burdened by her beloved's deteriorating mental condition, Bishop accepted an offer to teach for a year back in the States...

...In 1975 she wrote "One Art," a discreetly autobiographical villanelle that begins, The art of losing isn't hard to master...

...The author does not add anything, either, with her critique from a modern vantage of the poet's old-fashioned views...

...But an astute reader can certainly recognize that Herbert was tougher on himself than either his chronicler or other contemporaries chose to be...

...Concluding on that note, Millier claims to have portrayed Bishop as a triumphant survivor...

...Similarly, Bishop's writing reveals an awareness of her own nature that is keener than any biographer's is likely to be...

...She always shunned the limelight...

...Despite the illusion of familiarity created by her verse, Bishop maintained a strict personal reticence...

...She clung to old-fashioned standards of "ladylike" behavior, and turned to stone in the company of strangers...

...When her father died, she was taken by her Canadian mother to her grandparents' village in Nova Scotia...

...Look, her poems tell us, we are all wanderers seeking a place to settle...

...Cynics claim the popularity of such works owes as much to a prurient hunger for gossip as to a desire for meaningful information...

...In short, while he too feared he was unlovable, he realized the condition is universal and we all must confront it...

...For a biography to have value, to capture its subject's personality, we need to hear the voice and sense the manner...

...Millier clearly admires her subject...

...In the manner of too many contemporary biographers, Millier contends that rummaging in the debris of Bishop's life illuminates our understanding of her work and heightens our appreciation of her method...

...The rest of the poem, a catalog of misplaced or missing objects, domiciles and people, becomes a leitmotif of the book...

...They may be right...

...This testimony—replete with humor and rueful admissions of foolishness—allows her dignity to shine through...

...As she aged, alcohol-related accidents, asthma and general ill health disabled her much of the time...

...She is particularly admired for her clearheaded acceptance of life's instability...

...It also leaves me wondering about the apparent appeal books of this sort seem to have...

...One of her most productive periods, artistically and emotionally, spanned the 16 years she lived in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares, but even that idyll ended in tragedy...

...One rejoices when Millier likewise offers enriching details—such as the poet's dream of discussing with Herbert the metrics of John Donne and Marianne Moore, or Dana Gioia's remark that Bishop's Harvard seminars recalled his fond memories of "a reading class in grammar school...

...The saintly 17th-century priest-poet's wisdom about human nature, recorded in Izaac Walton's admiring biography, continues to radiate from his verse...

...There is less danger in idolizing, in this tabloid age, than in seeing nothing except warts...

...As Bishop's first mentor, Marianne Moore, commented, "Psychology which explains everything/explains nothing,/and we are still in doubt.' To approach the issue from another angle, critics have frequently compared Bishop's work with that of her chief poetic model, George Herbert...

...The Beats, the Confessional school, poets as diverse as John Berryman, James Wright, Robert Bly, W.S...

...Reread "Crusoe in England" for her confession of self-pity, inability to handle drink, erotic impulses and the rest...

...Millier's treatment lacks that quality...

...Merwin (in The Lice), and Robert Lowell (in Life Studies, Notebooks, Day By Day)—all bared their psyches and messy stories to the world...

...Readers treasure her natural, unforced style, and her capacity to draw layers of meaning from the simple description of a locale observed with her painter's eye...

...Although Bishop managed to retain her own sanity, she frequently proved incapable of controlling her drinking...

...Writers & Writing THE LOWEST NEUROTIC DENOMNATOR BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Since her death in 1979 at the age of 68, Elizabeth Bish-op's reputation has waxed to earn her a place among the leading American poets of the 20th century...

...In appraising herself the poet's humility, as much as her instinct for tone, warned her away from the dramatized self-pity that tends to accumulate around the naked recital of one's misadventures...

...ike so many other tell-all biographies, however, this one exposes the reader to a life and career seemingly dominated byemotionalneediness, painful addictions, and a craving for romance that led to betrayals of loyal partners...

...Yet by the end she had won widespread recognition, and innumerable poets today count themselves her disciples...

...Pettiness and egocentricity pile up throughout the book, creating a devastating—if unintended—picture in sharp contrast with Bishop's serene poems...

...her style bore little resemblance to fashionable literary modes...

...At some level we treat poets as shamans...

...Why else would even a deconstructionist critic occasionally sneak off to Keats' grave, or tramp the route of one of Coleridge's walks...

...It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like fWrite it...

...What can we hope to learn?that our heroine or hero had feet of clay...