The Epistolary Bishop

...Though she was wary of intrusiveness, even when its intention was obviously kind, her letters show her to be exceptionally straightforward regarding whatever part of herself she did choose to share...

...The worst episodes involve her longtime companion, Lota de Macedo Soares, who suffered a breakdown in Brazil and later committed suicide in New York...

...But those who know the poem will catch the allusion to "the art of losing"?an art Bishop felt she had mastered only too well in her private life...

...No wonder dislocation remained a primary theme...

...The claim is less hyperbolic than we might suppose...

...on the page she could be more relaxed and unself-conscious...

...Most of the time she could muster enough detachment to articulate her own condition concretely, to laugh at herself, to keep overwhelming emotions that might blunt her clarity at bay...

...Geography aside, though, she had at least two strong motives for conducting so many epistolary relationships...

...As Alice J. says of Henry James: 'His intestines are my intestines...

...Preparing to return from Europe in 1937, she wrote to Marianne Moore, "Louise and I are planning to sail for New York with from two to eight owls...

...On page after page of her correspondence, Bishop's graceful manners and wit shine through, often joined by the same powers of observation that make her poems so remarkable...

...For 15 years she had been Soares' houseguest in Brazil...

...Bishop is uniquely herself when in full possession of her cool...

...The emblematic Bishop poem does, in fact, convey the development of impressions, associations and analogies as the imagination creates them...

...In 1972, Bishop was invited to compose and read Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa poem...

...During such periods she usually was incapable of producing poetry and took refuge in the Lethe of the bottle instead...

...They are very tame and friendly, although when we asked the man what they ate, he replied 'Hearts!'" Twelve years later, she regaled her Nova Scotian aunt Grace with an absurd account of an animal's election to the Rio City Council...

...Then he did the same with her stories and short pieces written for magazines...

...Writers &.Writing THE EPISTOLARY BISHOP BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL WHEN ELIZABETH BISHOP died in 1979, admirers could turn to a mere five slim volumes of verse, her translation of a young Brazilian girl's diary, and the editorially mangled text she wrote for a Life magazine coffee-table book on Brazil...

...He got over 200,000 votes?then they stopped counting them...

...The other related to her esthetic temperament: She relished written exchanges, from the most crafted to the most spontaneous...

...On the simplest level, it refers to the poet's conviction that letters can be as much a form of literature as poetry, fiction or essays...

...Nevertheless, we pick up indirect clues to how she must have composed...

...In a memorable passage addressed to Randall Jarrell, Bishop pours out enthusiasm for a book of Coleridge's correspondence she was reading...

...Fortunately Robert Giroux, her friend and publisher, soon demonstrated that there was much more to the total corpus of her work...

...As entertaining and illuminating as Bishop's letters are, however, it is doubtful they would sustain our attention over 600 pages had Giroux not arranged them to read as an autobiography...

...At 23, Bishop confided to a friend that as a writer she strove "to develop a manner of [my] own, to say the most difficult things, and to be funny if possible...

...They have also hashed over ad nauseam Bishop's lesbian relationships and battles with alcoholism...

...It's a famous rhinoceros in the zoo here and it started as a joke, then people took it up and actually voted for him, just to show what they think of their crooked politicians...

...Giroux tells us the contents of this fat tome represent a tiny fraction of her available correspondence...

...But what those accounts miss is a clear sense of the personality we encounter whenever we read her verse, the sensibility that has made us care about her...

...Yet another facet of her talent now comes to light in One Art: Letters Selected and Edited by Robert Giroux (Farrar Straus Giroux, 668 pp., $35.00...

...Her re-creations of some of the clumsy, moving missives her pupils wrote are masterpieces...

...Part of her stock-in-trade was turning embarrassing experiences of her own into humorous vignettes for her friends...

...But it was from the poet Marianne Moore, who would become Bishop's friend and mentor, that she learned to hone her powers of description and concentrate on the telling, quirky detail that would best startle readers into a sense of something freshly seen...

...She subsequently wrote to an old college friend that "the head of the law school...

...I think it is a very nice—and very Brazilian—gesture...

...From such a well-loved poet whose career had spanned five decades, it seemed a regrettably meager legacy...

...When she was still a student at Vassar in the early 1930s, for example, she got into an exchange on the nature of poetry with a graduate student at Harvard...

...A subtle humor frequently serves to maintain a balanced tone when the feelings expressed might otherwise degenerate into bathos, hysteria or stridency...

...One was psychological: In person Bishop was agonizingly shy...

...Carlyle, Chekhov, my Aunt Grace, Keats, a letter found in the street, etc., etc...

...In One Art the story is told, at last, in the poet's own inflections, and her artistry alters its impact substantially...

...Over the years she managed to remain amazingly constant in her pursuit of those qualities, and her voice became one of the most distinctive in a strong generation of poets...

...Quoting from a book she had been reading, she wrote about the idea of portraying "not a thought, but the mind thinking...

...One never catches her sounding insincere, and rarely does she come off as self-deluded...

...Despite her insecurities, Bishop had a brilliant gift for friendship...

...introduced me (every fact wrong), and then said, 'The title of Miss B's poem is "The Moose,"' and then (I suppose so that the audience wouldn't think I was going to deliver a mousse recipe) he spelled it out?The M-O-O-S'—and sat down...

...For the 20 years she lived in South America, Bishop kept in touch with friends, editors and publishers back in the States mainly through the mail, and even before moving down there she had gravitated to places remote from the literary milieu...

...I think I described to you the kind we saw in Morocco—stubby, fluffy, placid little owls that sat along the side of the road...

...In a memoir piece entitled "The USA School of Writing," she recounts her brief stint teaching at a correspondence academy?the sort that used to be advertised in Sunday literary supplements and on matchbook covers...

...Near the end of her life, Bishop taught a seminar on letter-writing as an art at Harvard and had the class read "a nicely incongruous assortment of people—Mrs...

...Adulthood brought no greater stability until she met Lota...

...Again, the dust jacket is graced by one of her watercolors—a still life of assorted field flowers crammed into what looks like an old paint can, each blossom meticulously observed in a manner reminiscent of her writing...

...What is striking about Bishop's panicky outcries to friends on these occasions is how much they sound like anybody who is miserable and desperately in need of sympathy and reassurance...

...Growing up an orphan (her mother was actually in an asylum), she spent her childhood shuttling between different relatives before being packed off to boarding school at an early age...

...I know no better way to sum up my own feelings about One Art—and it is a reaction I expect countless readers of this volume will share...

...While she excelled in crystallizing complex emotions, her verse is particularly poignant for its refusal to descend into self-pity...

...Then the audience thought I was going to read in Dutch, maybe...

...His choice resonates with meanings...

...Rather, she let her intimates—and now, at last, a great many other people—see things through her own peerless vision...

...First he brought together all of her completed poems, including some that had not appeared in books before...

...Numerous "literary" studies and one full-length life study have already picked through most of the relevant data...

...They sell them in a shop here [in Rome] for a horrible purpose—to be used to attack other birds, for the hunters...

...Thus it is with a mixture of pity and terror that we witness her loss of control at half a dozen points in the course of reading this volume...

...clearly she understood the longing of truly lonely people to reach out beyond their isolation...

...Giroux' title, One Art, is also that of a villanelle published in Bishop's last collection before her death, Geography III...

...Poems-in-progress were rarely discussed by Bishop in her letters, especially not those she went on to complete...

...Her admiration for meditative poets like Hopkins, Coleridge and above all George Herbert is well-known...

...Some writers—Sylvia Plath comes to mind—reveal their fundamental natures in moments of acute stress...

...And on the covers of those twin collections he displayed a less well-known aspect of Bishop's creativity: the evocative watercolor landscapes she painted in a primitivist style...

...She did mention some tantalizing possibilities, including a sonnet about Charles Dickens and a lyric memorializing her pet toucan, Uncle Sam...

...Robert Lowell, a close confidant of Bishop's, predicted that once her letters became publicly available she would "be recognized as not only one of the best, but one of the most prolific writers of our century...

...Although being "funny" is typically seen as a way to dodge uncomfortable or unpleasant reactions, for Bishop it serves to enhance her depictions of unhappy, even tragic, experience...

...his toothaches are my toothaches.' I'd never realized how wonderful the letters could be in bulk like that...

...Her relationships with three fellow poets—Moore, Lowell and James Merrill—were not merely highly gratifying but creatively fruitful...

...She confesses that the night before she "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...

...With Lowell in particular she was able to develop an otherwise hidden side of herself: slangy, almost amorous, quite unlike her usual reserve...

...After her lover's breakdown, Bishop wrote heartbreakingly to her own doctor, "I haven't a home anymore...