Prose

CORRESPONDENCE WITH ANNE STEVENSON, 1963–1965

Caixa Postal 279, Petrópolis

Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

January 22nd, 1963

Dear Mrs. Stevenson:

I have just received a letter from Marianne Moore in which she says that you would like some information about me for the “Twayne Publishers Author Series…” I can’t seem to remember what this is, although I probably should know — will you tell me something about it? She quotes you to the effect that I “despise professionalized criticism”. But I don’t think I do, and I wonder where that idea came from? (Unless “professionalized” means something very bad!) Anyway — if I can be of any help, I’ll be glad to. Sometimes letters take a long time; sometimes only four or five days—

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Bishop

Caixa Postal 279, Petrópolis

Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

March 18th, 1963

Dear Mrs. Elvin:

After reassuring you about the comparative speed of the mails here, of course I happenned to be away “in the interior” as they say — on the coast, actually — for a long stay over Carnival, where I can get no mail. I shall get off just a note to you today to tell you I did get your letter, and a second installment will be along this week.

Thank you for sending me the Twayne’s U S Author Series rules & regulations. I am enlightened, but not very much! I wonder who is the editor of the contemporary poets, what other poets are being written, up, etc? Do you think that Mrs. Bowman would be good enough to send me one or two of the books already published? Please don’t think I am interfering or am going to be difficult — but I am naturally curious.

I’d like to read your analyses of my poems very much. Are you intending to publish something in a magazine, perhaps, before the book appears?

In any case — I have another book ready—20–25 poems, some of which you may have seen in magazines — and I think you should have a copy of this as soon as possible. The title is QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL, from one of the poems, and if all goes well Farrar, Straus & Cudahy shd. be publishing it this year. I’ll write and have them send you a copy — unless I can find a complete MMS here this week. I think if you write to Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy they will surely send you a free copy of THE DIARY OF HELENA MORLEY (Minha Vida de Menina), the Brazilian book I translated a few years ago. (I’ll write my agent* about the poems and mention this, too) The English title was against my wishes — very poor, I think; the best review I saw was Pritchett’s in The New Statesman & Nation. My introduction might be of some interest to you, as a critic — the diary perhaps only as the mother of a daughter!

The biographical note in Who’s Who is correct — or was, the last time I saw it. I never lived in Worcester, however — I left before I was a year old and spent only a few months there when I was 6–7, with my father’s parents. The rest of my childhood I spent with my mother’s parents in Nova Scotia — mostly long summers, although I started school there — and with a devoted aunt, in or near Boston, until I went away to school at 16. I also went to summer camp on Cape Cod for 6 summers. I’ve never lived in Newfoundland — I took a walking trip there one summer when I was at Vassar. Since Vassar I’ve lived in New York, Paris, Key West, Mexico, etc. — mostly New York, and Key West until about 1948.—Then since late 1951 Brazil — with several trips back, of course, one of 8 months or so. I was very much amused by the clipping from the Worcester paper … (I’ve also read 2 or 3 times that I was born in Maine, or lived there — I can’t imagine where that came from. I’ve stayed various times on Deer Isle (or is it Island?) visited Robert Lowell in Castine, etc. — that’s all.) I have two published autobiographical stories, GWENDOLYN, & IN THE VILLAGE. This last is in the recent New Yorker anthology — and sticks to the facts — compresses the time a bit. Robert Lowell compressed it even more, recently, into a very short poem that was in Kenyon Review, called “The Scream”. I could give you a great deal more information if you want it! — However, for your purposes it may not be necessary. I am 3/4ths Canadian, and one 4th New Englander — I had ancestors on both sides in the Revolutionary war. My maternal grandparents were, some of them, Tories, who left upper N. Y. State and were given land grants in Nova Scotia by George III. One of my great grandfathers was an owner-captain of a ship — bark, I think — and was lost at sea off Sable Island in a famous storm when 40 or so ships went down. (I have also been to Sable Island, via the Canadian Lighthouse Service) That line of my family seems to have been fond of wandering like myself — two, perhaps three, of the sea-captain’s sons, my great uncles, were Baptist missionaries in India.

You are right about my admiring Klee very much — but as it happens, THE MONUMENT was written more under the influence of a set of frottages by Max Ernst I used to own, called Histoire Naturel. I am passionately (I think I might say) fond of painting; in fact I’d much rather talk about painting than poetry, as a rule. I am equally fond of music — although I am rather behind with that, living in Brazil. Next time round I’d like to be a painter — or a composer — or a doctor — I seriously considered studying medicine for several years and still wish I had. I am also very much interested in architecture and helped translate a huge tome on contemporary Brazilian architecture a few years ago.

I want to get this in the mail so I must get to Petropolis quickly — I live about 8 miles outside the town, although at present I divide my time about equally between here and Rio—50 miles away. While I am here this week I’ll write you another note — I’ll answer your questions about whens and wheres — although I don’t believe there are any rules about the place—poems — after, during, or before — And I’ll certainly try to get off the other book to you in MMS — or see that you get a copy—

I do want to see your analyses — but I believe that everyone has the right to interpret exactly as they see fit, of course, so as I said, please do not think I shall be “interfering.” My only request of that sort may be quite unecessary — It is just that I am rather weary of always being compared to, or coupled with, Marianne — and I think she is utterly weary of it, too! We have been very good friends for thirty years now — but except for 1 or 2 early poems of mine and perhaps some early preferences in subject matter, neither she nor I can see why reviewers always drag her in with me. For one thing — I’ve always been an umpty-umpty poet with a traditional “ear.” Perhaps it is just another proof that critics and reviewers really very rarely pay much attention to what they’re reading & just repeat each other—

I hope your little girl is better and I am extremely sorry to hear of the death of your mother. I believe you teach, don’t you? I wonder what and where? I’ll write again in a few days—

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Bishop

Please forgive this bad typing — the machine I keep here is very different from that in Rio & it takes me a few days to get used to it—

Caixa Postal 279, Petrópolis

Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

March 20th (?), 1963

Dear Mrs. Elvin:

I mailed a very hurried letter to you two days ago and now I’ll try to answer your other questions. I am also writing the agent today — Carl Brandt, 101 Park Avenue, to see if he can have a copy of the MMS of the new book, almost complete, sent to you — and I’ll mention that DIARY of Helena Morley as well.

There isn’t any particular logic to when and where the poems were written. The first 5 in the book I gather you have were written in N.Y, in 1934–5. Large Bad Picture was written a good many years later, in Key West. (Memory poems are apt to pop up from time to time no matter where one happens to be, I find. — I mean childhood-memory poems.) Man-Moth is another very early one, and Country to the City, the Miracle sestina, Love Lies Sleeping, later N.Y. ones, after my first winter in Paris, I think. The Weed I wrote on Cape Cod (It seems so obviously derived, to me, that I’m sure you’ve spotted it by now!) Paris 7 Am I did write in Paris, Quai D’Orleans, too but the second stay there — in between comes Florida — and Cirque d’Hiver was written during a later stay on Cape Cod. You ask about the title — well, the Cirque d’Hiver did use have a team of little trained ponies wearing ostrich plumes, etc. — but I think the title referred to the mood more than anything else. (Again, I think you’ll probably spot the derivation of this poem, although I believe it was unconscious.) All the others in the first book are from Key West — except Anaphora — the first stanza came to me in Puebla when the cathedral bells clanged just a few yards away from my pillow, or so it seemed — and a year or two later I finished it in Key West. So you see there is no system to them at all.

A Cold Spring is not in chronological order. There is some more Key West in it, two trips to Nova Scotia, a little New York, and at the end, the first year in Brazil. The poem about Miss Moore was written instead of an “essay” for a commemorative birthday number of Quarterly Review.

The book you will receive has necessarily a lot of Brazil in it — But the one Amazon poem — (unless I finish another one in time to get in it, too) was written before I made a trip on the Amazon. There are also several memory poems in it.

Varick Street — I had a garret on King Street in N Y for a good many years — the buildings are now torn down — between 6th Avenue and Varick Street, & in warm weather it was very noisy. I use dream-material whenever I am lucky enough to have any and this particular poem is almost all dream — just rearranging a bit — so was Rain Towards Morning — and most of the 1st stanza of Anaphora — The last four lines of the 1st stanza of At the Fishhouses—“He has scraped the scales”* etc where also a donnee, as James would say, in a dream. But all this is nothing at all out of the ordinary, I’m sure.

I studied music — piano and counterpoint — for some years and have a clavichord here, although I’m afraid I don’t play it much. It is hard to hear good music in Brazil,† except recordings — and they are hard to get in — but I do listen to the hi fi a lot. (Roosters, I remember, I got rather stuck with, and a recording of Kirkpatrick — I took a few lessons with him long ago — of Scarlatti got me going again in a particular rhythm.) I do like Webern — from the album I have — perhaps because he is small-scale and reminds me of Klee‡ (I believe they were friends). I don’t care much for grand, all-out efforts — but on the other hand, I sometimes do … I admire Robert Lowell’s poetry very much and much of Lord Weary’s Castle couldn’t be more all-out …

He and I have been very good friends since 1946, I think it was — and Jarrell is another friend, although of course I rarely see him. The Lowells were here visiting me last summer. I suppose that he & I both like the SEA a lot, which sounds rather silly — but we always seem to be going swimming together when we meet! But I have lived so much out of New York that I have never had much “literary” life, just occasional stretches of it. Edmund Wilson helped me once a great deal by publishing Roosters in a Literary Supplement to The Nation he was getting out. Jarrell has also always been very kind, critically — in general I feel I have been extremely lucky that way—

Calder is a friend (not close) who gets to Brazil every once in a while, and Loren MacIver, the American painter is an old friend, too — from about 1938—Fizdole & Gold, the pianists, are old friends—Calder is someone else who although so unlike Dewey impresses one by the old-fashioned uncompromising New England honesty of his character — and sweetness, like Dewey.

Of course I read all Miss Moore’s generation from about 1928 on and undoubtedly learned enormously from them. I think of Marianne, Cummings (we shared the same maid in N.Y. for several years), Dr. Williams, Crane, Frost, as Heroes … I wrote a poem about Pound (it is in the last Partisan Review anthology) that expresses my feelings about him fairly well, I think. Strange to say, it was put to music by Ned Rorem and, I hear, was sung a few days ago in Carnegie Hall by Jennie Tourel. (She’d already sung it here & there before — but really, I think she must be about 80 now…?) I hope I get the recording safely.

I have always wanted — like many other poets, I think — to write some really “popular” songs, not “art” songs. One thing I like very much in Brazil is the popular music — the yearly sambas are, or were (too much U S influence now, I’m afraid), often superb spontaneous folk-music, and I want very much to write a piece about them — the collecting is very difficult here, however. There is also a living tradition, in the interior, of the ballads — news events, old tales, etc. — not such good poetry as the sambas but rather wonderful all the same — Besides the DIARY I translated, and work on the book about contemporary architecture, I have done, recently, some translations of Brazilian poetry. (I’ll let you know when they’re published — some are to be in POETRY, I think.) But I really don’t care much for doing it, or believe in it, and my translations are rather literal — unlike Lowell’s — so I only do poems that seem to go into English without much loss — very limiting, naturally.

Another friend who influenced me — not with his books but with his character — was John Dewey, whom I knew well and was very fond of. He and Marianne are the most truly naturally “democratic” people I’ve known, I think. — He had almost the best manners I have ever encountered, always had time, took an interest in everything, — no detail, no weed or stone or cat or old woman was unimportant to him.

Now if you have any more questions please let me know. In about 3 weeks I am going on a trip, “to the interior”, really, this time, and will be out of touch with mail for two or three weeks, probably. Perhaps I should add one thought — perhaps it is just because I went to Europe earlier than most of my “contemporary” poets — and I am a few years older than some of them — but it is odd how I often feel myself to be a late-late Post World War I generation-member, rather than a member of the Post World War II generation. Perhaps the Key West years also had something to do with it. — (Until her death Pauline Hemingway was one of my best friends there, etc.) But I also feel that Cal (Lowell) and I in our very different ways are both descendents from the Transcendentalists — but you may not agree.

Again please excuse my bad typing — I’m not very good at best, but this keyboard with all its Çç and a §§ out of place doesn’t help—

I hope your little girl’s rash is all cured by now—

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Bishop

44 Porter Street

Watertown, Mass.

March 28, 1963

Dear Miss Bishop,

I am delighted with both your letters — really, I can’t tell you how delighted. I was in real trepidation after I sent off my letter to you in, was it February? Thought I had asked silly questions, or questions which you couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. I am amused that you call me a “critic” (one up from a reviewer?) for I am a raw amateur, preferring teaching or mothering or writing poems myself to this awful task of trying to say badly what someone else has said well. However I was pleased, when we arrived back from an early spring visit to Vermont last week, to find the streets full of children, clothes hanging out on the lines (Watertown being Watertown “awful but cheerful”) spring arrived and your letter in our mailbox. I’ll try to answer it point by point, as you did mine, and then go on to your second letter which arrived today.

I will write Miss Bowman today and ask her to send you (and me) some of the books which have been written already. I know a kind and well-meaning professor in Ann Arbor (I don’t mean those adjectives to sound derogatory) who has written a book on Wilbur and is working on one on Lowell. The Wilbur book is finished, I think. Otherwise, I don’t know who Miss Bowman has found to embellish her list of famous authors writing famouser ones. Don Hall says she is a “nut”. I suppose that means she is somewhat scatterbrained and doesn’t herself know what she wants. I have not heard from her since I left Ann Arbor (I did a MA degree there last year) so this is another reason for me to write to her.

Although I have no plans to publish something in a magazine, I do want to talk over my impression of your poems with Robert Lowell. He is lecturing at Harvard this semester; I went with some friends of mine to a poetry workshop he conducts at the Loeb theatre a week ago and arranged to show him what I had written. Then I came home and decided that everything had to be re-written, and I haven’t yet had the courage to go see him. I am such a ponderous worker, you will have to forgive me. But I would rather wait years than produce something half-baked. I plan to finish a twelve to fifteen page plan of action, so to speak, which I will send to you and to him.

Yes, I should very much like to have your new book, and I am exceedingly grateful to you for having written to your agent. I shall write to him too so that he will know that I am real. I am of course most anxious to read it, and the Diary of Helena Morley. I’ll look up Pritchett’s review and also your two published stories when I next get to Widner. (I must confess that library stacks rather terrify me — I put off going to them in the same way I put off going to the supermarket) I am grateful, too, for the information you give me about your childhood and background. Can you perhaps tell me a little about your parents. Did you know them at all? What sort of people where they? was your father a businessman of some sort? Don’t answer if you don’t want to, naturally. I like your seafaring ancestors.

I am glad to know that you are fond (passionately) of painting. And of music and architecture. I’d suspected this, and its good to have your confirmation. One of the points I am making about your poetry is that is is visual but not what I call Impersonal. That is, your sense of personality of places and people, is suggested in visual terms. There is an interaction between the animate and inanimate world which suggest that you distinguish between them in order to show how they are alike. Everything you describe seems, too, as Philip Booth put it in one review, “to build toward a metaphorical whole.” But your metaphors, while exact as paintings on one hand, are open, really, on the other. That is what I like best about poems like The Imaginary Iceberg, The Bight, The Fish, even Cirque d’Hiver. It seems to me that, while your subjects are not what you call “all out” ones, they echo with a sort of alloutness which makes them, unu[su]ally, big poems and not trivial ones. If a poet is supposed to comment upon his age (is that Spender?) you do, surely, if obliquely, even in so light a poem as The Gentlemen of Shalott (I taught that to my senior high school class this fall and they loved it — we were “studying” Tennyson). As certainly it is not imposing high sounding interpretations on your Cirque d’Hiver, Over 20000 etc (a reference to concordance of the Bible?) and Man-Moth to suggest [that] they have something “strongly worded” to say about contemporary life.

Well, this is very difficult. I think I had better send you a more organized essay next week sometime. I hope to catch you before you depart for the interior. One thing more about the poems, though. I agree that you and Marianne Moore should not be “dragged in” with each other; you write very differently, I think. If I mention Marianne Moore it will be as a friend of yours, not as an “influence.” That odious word!

Your second letter is as full of wonderful and necessary information as your first. I know that where you wrote poems is not all that relevant to how they arrived, yet what you say is interesting; I wonder if people don’t like to be told that sort of thing. Thanks also for the dream background of Varick Street, Rain Towards Morning, the last stanza of Anaphora (this last puzzles me). Of what significance [is] the title — it means a repetitive phrase at the beginning or end of successive verse in my dictionary, but does your poem repeat any phrases? Oh yes, and I wanted to ask you about your use of “syllabics.” The Roosters looks as if it were written by counting syllables, but I don’t think it is. The rhythm seems to me more subtle … as you suggest, heard, not counted.

I am interested to hear that you were a friend of John Dewey. My father is a philosopher — C.L. Stevenson, he wrote a book on Ethics called Ethics and Language and is to give the Alfred North Whitehead lectures here in May — who has the same quality of humility and honesty … no Transcendentalist, however. You ask about me. Yes, I am doing some part time teaching at the Cambridge School this year, but I am not going to continue after the summer. Mark (Elvin) is my second husband; (Caroline is my daughter by a first disastrous marriage) we were married only last November, having known each other only a month or so. He is an Englishman, historian, sinologist, linguist, brilliant and sensitive but not very well. His eye for painting and for contemporary music (he also is fond of Webern) is much better than mine, and he tells wonderful stories from Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Summerian mythology to Caroline. She adores him. I studied the cello when I was at college as an undergraduate at Michigan and I still play in string quartets when I have time. Both my sisters are violinists and my father is a fine pianist. Caroline is affectionate, beautiful, passionate and vain. I have some fears regarding her future, but many of these are motherly imaginations I think. That will give you some idea of who I am. I suppose I really think of myself as a poet. I send you these because they seem to me to “follow” you to a certain extent. I read your poems for the first time only last winter. Thank you so much again, for your patience and help.

Caixa Postal 279, Petrópolis

Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

August 24th, 1963

(in Rio)

Dear Mrs. Elvin:

Thank you for your note of August 14th — I’m in Rio at present it just reached me here yesterday. I’m sorry your first letter got lost — I believe I did warn you! I’m glad you got the DIARY and I have also written Brandt & Brandt to send you copies of the poems they have on hand — I am not sure how many, but they’re most of the next book. (If one called EXCHANGING HATS appears, please omit.) Since the last book is 8(?) years old, I think you should see some later poems.

You have been having a wonderful summer, I see, and you’ve been to all the places in the U S A I’ve never been to (except New Orleans; I have been there). And camping — heavens!

I wonder how Phyllis Armstrong is — and she’s still at the Library, I gather. I was fond of her, and she’s been a most admirable secretary to all the poets who ever worked there. But I think you should realize that we were never “close” at all; that she knew me very slightly and during probably the lowest nine or ten moths of my life, long ago in 1949–50. I did not enjoy Washington, nor the Library, — and I am afraid Phyllis may have given you a false impression of me as a figure of gloom and reclusion. If you have the opportunity, it would be much better to talk to some of my friends and colleagues — Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, say — or May Swenson, Howard Moss, or the painter, Loren MacIver. These are all old friends and would have more accurate ideas of me—

Here is a snapshot of Robert Lowell and me taken when he visited me here last year—

I do not mind criticism of my work. But That stay in Washington still remains a nightmare to me and my life there mercifully totally unlike most of the rest of it!

I am looking forward to seeing your chapters in September.

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Bishop

Caixa Postal 279, Petrópolis

Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

October 2nd, 1963

Dear Miss Elvin:

Thank you for your letters. I am actually staying in the country this week so I received them first-hand and quickly. I like what you say in the September 24th one, 2nd paragraph, about the poems. But oh dear—“the moon finds everything amusing”—how on earth did that get in there? That’s a mistake — it’s from something I never finished, scarcely wrote, I think. Will you please throw it out, and also one called “Exchanging Hats” if it has turned up again? I’m not sure what you did get. I have about eighteen poems towards a book, but I am not satisfied with them and hope to add a few more.

Since I work so slowly myself, how could I possibly object to anyone’s working slowly? Please don’t worry about it.

About Phyllis Armstrong — yes, I was a bit nervous. As I said, I liked her and I think she liked me. But at that time—1949–50—I felt that she understood very little about poetry, couldn’t tell good from bad, didn’t seem to get “the principle of thing” at all — and misunderstood, or misinterpreted, her varying poets as well, probably. She undoubtedly has learned, or had to learn, a lot since then, poor girl! And it was a bad year for me.

Now letter 2—the “Chronology”—I’ll just go straight through it making a few corrections and answering your questions as they come along.

My father was a contractor, oldest son of J. W. Bishop (who came from Prince Edward Island, so I’m ¾ths Canadian). 50 years and more ago the Bishop firm was very well known — they built public buildings, college buildings, theatres, etc., not houses. (Many in Boston, including the Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, etc.) My father died when I was 8 months old.

I lived some with my maternal grandparents in a very small village called Great Village, in Nova Scotia, and started school, just “Primer Class”, there. I lived one winter with my paternal grandparents in Worcester. Then I lived with an aunt, married but childless, in and around Boston for several years, until I went away to school. I used to go back to Great Village summers and other times, and also went to a summer camp at Wellfleet (no longer in existence) for six summers where I became passionately fond of sailing. I had very bad health as a child and my schooling was irregular until I got to Walnut Hill — that’s why I was a year or two older than average in getting through college.

My mother’s maiden name was BULMER (not Blumer, as you have it).

Yes, I began college thinking I’d “major” in music, then switched to literature. (Now I wish I’d “majored” in Greek & Latin.) I studied the clavichord briefly at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, and more briefly with Ralph Kirkpatrick. I have a Dolmetsch clavichord here—

I didn’t go to Key West until 1937 or ’38—just for a fishing trip. The next year I went back and lived there off and on for about nine years. The last year I kept a small garret — a real one — in Greenwich Village, too. I went to Yaddo once briefly in a summer (1947?) and later for longer—1950.

I don’t remember how I used the Guggenheim now! Living expenses, probably—

I wish we could forget about the Brazil Book! It is so badly written and scarcely a sentence is as I originally had it; the first 3 chapters are closest to the original. But you left out the “Diary of Helena Morley”, and I am not ashamed of that.

“In the Village” is accurate — just compressed a bit. “Gwendolyn” is, too.

By all means say I’m a friend of Marianne’s! I met her in 1934 through the college Librarian, an old friend of hers, and it was one of the great pieces of good fortune in my life. Also mention Cal (Robert Lowell, that is) and Jarrell (although I haven’t seen him for several years) (if you want to). Cal is one of my closest friends and I have the greatest admiration for his work.

I feel that the biographical facts aren’t very important or interesting. And I have moved so much, mostly coastwise, that I can’t keep the dates straight myself.

In the Pound poem, “Visits to St. Elizabeth’s”, the chracters are based on the other inmates of St. E’s, the huge government insane asylum in Washington. During the day, Pound was in an open ward, and so one’s visits to him were often interrupted. One boy used to show us his watch, another patted the floor, etc. — but naturally it’s a mixture of fact and fancy. The poem appeared in Partisan Review, not Kenyon as you have it. That’s not very important — but I have published quite a bit in Partisan, from away back, and the editors have always been friends, gave me another award, etc.—

You ask the name of the friend I took the Newfoundland walking trip with — we were not “literary” friends and I’m afraid we lost track of each other years ago, so I don’t think it matters.

I began publishing either junior or senior year at college. First, I think, were a story and a poem, maybe two, in a magazine called THE MAGAZINE edited for a few years by Ivor Winters. Before that I had received honorable mention (for the same contributions, I think) in a contest for college writing held by HOUND & HORN. I worked on the college newspaper off and on, and I was editor of my class year-book (but that had nothing to do with writing). Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clarke, Eleanor’s sister Eunice, and I, and two or three others, started an anonymous and what we thought “advanced” literary magazine. It succeeded so well that we were asked to join our original enemy, the official college literary magazine. (But I was NOT a member of Mary McC’s GROUP — the one her recent novel’s about. She was a year ahead of me.) The story Robert Lowell referred to, I think (since he likes it) must be one called IN PRISON. It’s in the first Partisan Review Anthology — but it was published after college. The first poem of mine they published, I think, was “Love Lies Sleeping.” At least I remember getting a letter from Mary McC when I was in Paris, saying that PR was starting up again and would I send them a poem, and I think that’s the one I sent—

During the war I worked briefly for the Navy, in the optical shop in the Key West Submarine Base — on binoculars. I was allergic to the acids used to clean the prisms so I had to stop, but I liked the work — and the “shop.”

While in Mexico I knew Pablo Neruda and I now realize he had more influence on me than I knew at the time. I studied Spanish with a refugee, a friend of his, we read a great deal of poetry — Lorca, Neruda, and early Spanish poets, etc.

I think that answers both your letters. I am not worried about time, so please don’t you be. I think you are probably right about my anthropomorphism — although people speak, or used to, against it, it seems to be a fairly constant ingredient in all kinds of poetry through the ages, in varying amounts — Yes, I’d like to see the Twayne Aiken very much — hope it arrives safely. I know what you mean about “mechanical” troubles — we have them here, & also light rationing, because of the drought — which means lighting candles or oil lamps for a while every evening. In the country it seem fairly natural, but in apartments, shops, restaurants, etc. in Rio, it is very strange—

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Bishop

P.S. I read this over and see that I have made my hiking-companion sound mysterious without meaning to. Her maiden name was Evelyn Huntington and she was a year or two ahead of me. I am sorry I have lost track of her and hope to see her again sometime because she was a very entertaining girl — and we had a very good time. She was a Public Health worker — If you want names, just ask — but I gather the biographical sketch is sketchy. — Others who were in on our anonymous college magazine were Frani Blough Muser (later an editor of Modern Music for many years) — and Margaret Miller, who was with the Museum of Modern Art in New York for 20 years, I think — We were all interested in “modern” art, music, and writing — sophomores and juniors at the time, I think.

I believe I mentioned that I think John Dewey also influenced me — NOT his writings, which I have scarcely read, but his personality. The poem “A Cold Spring” is dedicated to his youngest daughter, an old friend, although quite a bit older than I am. The book “A Cold Spring” is dedicated to Dr. Baumann, my doctor in New York for many years — also now the Lowells’ doctor and doctor to many of my friends — a general practitioner.

44 Porter Street

Watertown, Mass.

October 28, 1963

Dear Miss Bishop,

I received your letter of October 2nd quite some time ago. I probably should have answered it right away to reassure you about the mails, but I wanted to send you something more than a reassurance. You are very generous about my ponderous progress, but I am less so and keep wishing I could work more swiftly. However, I think I have an outline at last that will work. Next week or at worst, the week after, I’ll send you twenty or thirty pages of a first draft — really very rough, I’m afraid, but including some comments on THE FISH, THE MAP, THE IMAGINARY ICEBERG, CHEMIN DE FER, THE COLDER THE AIR, LOVE LIES SLEEPING, CAPE BRETON, AT THE FISHHOUSES, ROOSTERS OVER 2000 ILLUSTRATIONS ETC. and a number of other poems. This looks like a grab-bag, I’m sure, but I am at last satisfied that I have a skeleton of a book. I am most grateful for your corrections and amendments. These I will write up in as finished a form as I now can and send along — so as to be sure to get nothing terribly wrong. You are quite right — I must have omitted Helena Morley in the sketch I sent you. An oversight, I admire it very much, especially because you seem to have translated it, not reinterpreted it. I am very dubious about most translations, although I don’t mind out and out imitations like Robert Lowell’s. There seems to be no pretense of accuracy there. On the other hand, Ben Belitt’s translations of Neruda that I have been reading this week seem to me unreliable. Germanic and squashed, entirely out of keeping with the Spanish. Unfortunately, my Spanish is such that I need a pony if I am to read with any speed at all. I am glad you told me that you liked him. (Neruda, not Belitt) Although I never feel the violence in your poems that I do in his, nor the sensuality, there is a real affinity. Especially in the sea poems and in the ones about animals.

I sent off the Aiken volume, glowing like a stop light, last week. I don’t think it will tell you much about what I am doing, however. I am not an academic, neither do I think there is much point in encouraging the current mystique of author-worship by writing a lot about your life. One of my troubles in getting started with this book has been to decide what, exactly, is important in your poetry. The outline which follows may give you an idea of my conclusions. Perhaps you won’t agree, but I think you may at least be interested. Of course, I’ll be glad to revise and rethink. At any rate, I have taken a number of excursions — into Transcendentalism, into Imagism, into contemporary German Art — or contemporary in the 1930’s and 40’s — all with great benefit to me, returning from circuitous voyages much enriched. My husband, who is a sinologist but who also has an incredible knowledge of philosophy and art, suggested that Wittgenstein as well as Klee and Ernst, was concerned at one point in his career, with the nature of seeing. In his notebooks he writes, “All that we see could also be otherwise; all that we can describe at all could also be otherwise.” This seems to descend from Hegel — a fact that has escaped most positivist philosophers today — whose distinction between Actuality and Reality is like that of the Transcendentalists and indeed of many mystics. This kind of insight may lie behind “surrealistic[“] poems like the MONUMENT, even more, behind the kind of inversion of realities implied in THE MAP and in the last two or three stanzas of LOVE LIES SLEEPING. Perhaps this is of more interest to me than any one else, however. My father — who studied with Dewey once — is fairly well known as a follower of Wittgenstein, and is fairly hated by the theoretical poets who misinterpret what he is doing. So you see how untranscendental my own background has been.

But let me sketch my outline for you. I won’t fill in with details just now, but leave them for the next installment.

Chapter I. THE TRAVELLER A simple, rather austere account of life and travels, friends, too, like Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell who have affected your writing. Since so many poems are concerned with travel and the coast, I’ll illustrate from them from time to time. Also, mention your two childhood stories. Other sources of poetry, dreams, pictures, and a feeling for natural, unsophisticated people (Jeronimo’s House, Cootchie, even Helena Morley) will work into the introductory chapter too, so that a reader who doesn’t know you at all will get a notion of what to expect, at least.

Chapter II. THE ARTIST I’m not altogether sure about the title of this one. I think you’re an “artist” more than you are a “writer”—that is, you are preoccupied with form. What you have to say is very much the way you say it, in the stories as well as the poems. In this you are like Webern who defined life, I think, as a search for form “To life, that is to defend a form.” Also like Wittgenstein who was unable to make a system of his philosophy because he was unable not to think clearly. In this chapter, I’ll mention your liking for Klee and Ernst — artists very different in temperament but who worked in the same atmosphere in Germany and must have had an effect on you. In temperament you are probably more like Klee than the flamboyant Ernst, but Man Moth and the Monument and some of your sleeping (or not sleeping) poems are very Ernstish. I think both Klee and Ernst used hallucinatory and dream material as much as they could, and I’ll mention this. However, I think it is important to understand that they, and you too, I believe, regard dream experience as part of the continuum of experience in general. That is, there is no split personality, but rather a sensitivity that extends equally into the subconscious and the conscious world. That was one of the discoveries of the surrealists and symbolists too. Or perhaps I’m wrong? What do you think?

Chapter III. AFFINITIES This chapter will follow through your suggestion that you are a “descendant” of the Transcendentalists. Thoreau, I think, more than Emerson and some of the others. For the more intellectual transcendentalists, Nature was what Emerson called “a dream and a shade[,]” a veil in which God was immanent. They presumed that a moral order was present in the Universe, and that man interpreted that order through his observations of Nature, and, like Wordsworth, regained knowledge of immortality and eternity. It’s hard for anyone now to regard things in so simple a manner. However, once the metaphysics fades, what remains is an amazing sense of nature itself, animals as animals, plants as plants;—Thoreau’s views all along. There is a poem about the sea which I will quote, in which Thoreau says he would rather “stroll upon the beach” picking up pebbles and talking to shipwrecked sailors than plunge into the depth of the sea where there are fewer pearls. I’ll quote this in connection with The Imaginary Iceberg. I think too, that it is no longer possible to anticipate great ends for mankind. Cirque d’Hiver, “Well, we have come this far.” And the “half is enough” of The Gentlemen of Shallot, are hardly transcendentalist views.

I think Emily Dickinson moves away from transcendentalism in the direction of Thoreau. For her, there is a theological framework of course. Yet she opts for the real world when it appears to be at odds with Heaven. In that wonderful poem “I cannot [live] with you/ it would be life…” she labels paradise “sordid”. And the poem, “Because I could not stop for death…” proceeds, in thought and image, your CHEMIN DE FER. I wonder if I am right in detecting a note of loss in many of your poems. Loss of the religion Emily Dickinson had. I take the whole of CHEMIN DE FER as a parable, a conceit, really, in which the pool and the old hermit can be understood as symbols of the church, and of Christ, possibly. I’m not sure it should be overlaiden with “meaning”, but that is what I make of it. Then, your lyrics use half rhyme as E.D. did. And you personify, occasionally, as she does. “A warning to the startled grass/ That darkness is about to pass.” Again, in your sestina Miracle for Breakfast I take it there is a reference to the Eucharist … often alluded to by Emily Dickinson. Your view is far more complex than hers, and I think that particular poem plays with vision as Ernst does, but is less bitter in its implications. There’s a wonderful quotation from Hoffmansthal that I’ll quote in connection with the sestina … describing the collapse of the visible world: “My mind compelled me to view all things with uncanny closeness; and just as I once saw a piece of skin from my little finger under a magnifying lens, and it looked like a landscape with mighty furors and caves, so it was now with people and what they said and did.” This in connection with the breadcrumb that turns into a mansion. I love that poem.

I hesitate to mention, as a last Affinity, the Imagists because so many critics seem to have lined you up with them. There is, however, something to be said here. When a poet “paints pictures” or images he also, like the painter, interprets. That is, he chooses how to present something, and he presents it in a way that says something. What he says, of course, is open to interpretation of a secondary sort. I think you are right to think that the reader should make of your poems what he wants to. Nevertheless, the poet limits the canvas. William Carlos Williams limited his canvases. I know what his moral views of life are, even though he is true to his dictum, “no ideas but in things.” The same with you. When the pelicans crash “unnecessarily” hard, it is you who see them, it is you who intrude the qualification. I don’t think this is wrong — on the contrary, it is necessary and it makes the poem resonant. But I think one should mention that imagism is not so far from the stream of English Literature as some people suppose.

Chapter IV. PRECISION AND RESONANCE. I think I mentioned this pet theory of mine to you before. The success of imagist poetry depends, I think, on the tension maintained between the accurate descriptions and their possible meanings. This goes with what I mentioned above concerning interpretation. Mere accuracy is boring and flat, like a text book. (I’ll find more examples to illustrate) On the other hand, it is often more annoying to read poetry which seeks resonance without precision. In the light, Ezra Pound’s whole career may be regarded as a search for resonance, sometimes achieved, as in the translations from the Chinese, sometimes failing miserably, as in the more obscure Cantos because the allusions are not precise enough. Since I am anxious to get this to the mail, I’ll leave the illustrations from your poems and stories — IN THE VILLAGE is full of resonance — for a later letter.

Chapter V. SOURCES OF RESONANCE. There are common sources of resonance — i.e. metaphor, literary allusion, allusion to common social phenomena and background. These are frequently found in your poems and I’ll give examples. But I think there are two or possibly three sources of resonance that you have, in a sense, developed. The first I call the ambiguity of appearances. The crumb can be a mansion. The map can be more real than the land; tapestry of landscape suddenly lifts and floats away before the Christians. […] with this visual ambiguity, is the possibility of inversion — correction, almost, through inversion.

In LOVE LIES SLEEPING, for instance, the man who “sees” is the man who sees the inverted city as correct. (Is this also a play on the theory of optics?) And in Insomnia, the image of the moon in the mirror is truer, or appears more true than the moon titself. I could find many more examples — from the new poems, too.

Another source of resonance is, I think, your use of personification. However, I think there are a number of kinds of personification. Usually the pathetic fallacy is a device — saying one thing by means of another — pure metaphor. As in “the heavy surface of the sea,/ swelling slowly as if considering spilling over” or “The moon in the bureau mirror/looks out a million miles.” This is quite usual in poetry, and I don’t think you overpersonify. There are times when the landscape does not seem to be really personified but vivified — or given a life of its own, as Neruda gives the sea life and animals and plants life. Florida begins with ordinary personification — the tanagers are “embarrassed” the birds “hysterical” but then the landscape begins to live. The turtles are not like men, but like themselves, the shells lie helplessly on the beach. Perhaps I exaggerate. Yet I get a similar sense of the life of the beast from the Fish and The Armadillo.

But this will need much more working out — and I’m not sure I need make such a distinction. Certainly it is true, though, that you switch characteristics of things back and forth. There is an official name — metonymy or synecdoche.

CHAPTER VI, the last chapter has no name as yet. I’ll try to summarize what I have said and remark on “the poet’s contribution to American literature.” Because I do think there is such a contribution, I hope not to sound too asinine. I want to mention Helena Morley again, and your feeling for the truth of the child’s world — an unsentimental one for you — as for anyone who knows children at all. (I really get rather sick of people who are unsympathetic with any child but the memory of themselves. Even mothers who can’t be bothered to understand their own children, but who will reminisce about their own childhoods as if they grew up in the Golden Age.)

This is enough. I wonder if you can read it. I’ve written in a rush because [I’m going] out soon. And I don’t think everything I’ve said can be reasonable. But let me know what you think.

Samambaia, December 30th, 1963

name of place, 8 miles outside P—

means “giant fern”—Petrópolis is always the mailing address

Dear Mrs. Elvin: (or may I call you Anne?)

I have two long letters to you here, one over a month old, and I’ve carried them (off for a week at Cabo Frio) up here to the country and tried re-writing them from time to time. I am sorry to be so slow — they are in answer to yours of October 28th. I thought it was a very good letter and I have been trying to do it justice. I also received the Aiken book safely and thank you very much. I am glad to have one on hand — but I am sorry now you went to the trouble of sending it because while it was on the way a whole set of the books appeared at the Jefferson Library in Copacabana right near where I live in Rio. I’ve looked them over and taken out Edward Taylor to read (a bit dull!) They seem quite scholarly; your letter seems very scholarly! Hegel, Wittgenstein, etc — I am delighted. I have always been weak at philosophy so I am impressed by your being able to connect me with such brains. Like M. Jourdain speaking prose — I must have been philosophizing without realizing it.

Also — please don’t apologize for your typing or spelling — I’m not very strong in those subjects, either.

And thank you for the nice little Chinese drawing. In return I am sending you (I’ve had it ready to mail for weeks but held off in order to try to finish the letter) a very crude Brazilian wood-cut — one of those used on the outside of the little ballad booklets they still sell by the thousands here, particularly in the north. I suppose there are 1,000 years, technically, between your picture and mine. The poem inside mine, however, — about a spectacular murder — would be in a very strict old Portuguese form, almost like Camões. I hope you are happy to be going to England and when is it you go? Saturday I had the U S Cultural Attaché up here for the day and he brought along a young couple — Tom Skidmore — who is here learning Brazilian history in order to teach it at Harvard next year. Perhaps you know him? — an English wife. — I meant to ask him if he knew you, but somehow the chance escaped me. I’ve been up in the country for about ten days — and hope to stay over the week-end. This is where I really live, but have spent very little time here for three years now because — I may have said this before — the friend I live with here is working for Carlos Lacerda, the Governor of Guanabara State (where Rio is) and so we have to stay in the city. After looking over the Aiken book a few things have struck me — one is that for the chronology I think you could put in Lota’s name — I owe her a great deal; the next book of poems will be dedicated to her, and we have been friends for 20 years or so. (We also own, and are still building, this house together.) Something like: “November 1951—went on a trip to S.A. with the money from Bryn Mawr. Stopped over in Rio to visit Maria Carlota de Macedo Soares, an old friend, got sick — and then stayed on”—and on — However you wish to phrase it.

This is not for your book, especially—but the more I looked at those books the more I wondered how you can make one out of me! — just for your information. Lota is president of the group that is turning an enormous fill along the Rio harbor into a park — It is about three miles long, full of highways, beaches, playgrounds, etc. and a tremendous undertaking for this bankrupt city — and while Lacerda is still in office we’ll be stuck in Rio, more or less. This park is very badly written up [in] Don Passos’s last book — (I don’t recommend it). I’ll save the rest for the letter I hope to finish and get off to you tomorrow. With all best wishes for the New Year — and thank you very much for your letter and your card—

Faithfully yours

Elizabeth

Started then — now it’s Rio, January 20th — St Sebastian’s Day

Samambaia, January 8th, 1964

Dear Anne:

I hope you got my large registered envelope. The mails are quite crazy these days — I have received magazines from September, and a big pink letter addressed to “The Bishop of the Methodist Church of Brazil.”

To go on with my reply. After studying the Aiken book, I think you might also just as well say in the chronology: “1916. Mother became permanently insane, after several breakdowns. She lived until 1934.” I’ve never concealed this, although I don’t like to make too much of it. But of course it is an important fact, to me. I didn’t see her again.

I live in a very “modern” house outside Petrópolis that Lota & I own together — she had started it when I came here and we have been building it ever since, although it has been more or less finished for about seven years. It was awarded a prize by Gropius and has been in many shows, magazines, and books. I’m saying this not to boast but because I am interested in architecture and, if I do say — I think it’s a good house — not grand, elegantly finished or anything like that — that would be difficult here, even if we had the money. “L’ Architecture d’Aujourdhui” for June — July, 1960, pps. 60–61, has some fairly good photographs of it, although it was still unfinished when they were taken. (In case you’re interested!) I have foolishly not kept carbons of my letters to you and I’m afraid I may be repeating myself — but another thing I’ve done since living in Brazil was to work on a big book called “Contemporary Brazilian Architecture”, by Henrique Mindlin. I translated some for the English edition and tried to improve his introduction, rather unsuccessfully. I also did the book on Brazil for the LIFE World Library Series, 1962 (or did I say this before?). I undertook it for money and had a disagreeable time with the editors before it was done. I have just refused to revise it for them for a new edition — the political chapter is out of date, mostly. I was very much distressed by it. The text is more or less mine, but somehow is also full of their bad grammar, clichés, etc. I was not responsible for captions (mostly quite wrong!) or photographs, although I did fight to get better pictures in it, and got a few. However — imagine a book about Brazil without one bird, beast, butterfly, orchid, flowering-tree, etc. They also cut all those things out of my text, & the paragraphs about famous naturalists, etc. Recently, however, a few tourist friends coming here have told me how “useful” they had found this book (there is very little about Brazil in English), and so I look at it more calmly. But if you see it, please make allowances!

These things haven’t much to do with poetry, of course. You also spoke of translations in your letter. Perhaps you saw the small group of translations in the November POETRY? — from a long poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto. I am also publishing soon two groups by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one in POETRY and the other in THE NEW YORK REVIEW. I don’t think much of poetry translations and rarely attempt them, — just when I see a poem by someone I like that I think will go into English with less loss than usual. That means it isn’t necessarily one of the poet’s best poems. My translations are almost as literal as I can make them, — these from Brazilian poets are in the original meters, as far as English meters can correspond to Portuguese — which uses a different system. I wouldn’t attempt the kind of “imitation” Robert Lowell does, although he makes brilliant Lowell-poems that way, frequently. Ben Bellitt’s translations (you mention them) are AWFUL — have you see his Rimbaud? — very sad, since he obviously works so hard at them.

Kenyon Review is publishing, Spring or Summer issue, three very short stories I translated from a Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector. I hope that’s all the translating I do for some time now.

The most satisfactory translations of poetry, I think, are those Penguin Poets, with a straight prose text at the bottom of the page — at least those in languages I know something of seem quite good. You once mentioned Evtushenko. He seems awfully brash to me. — (I can read just enough Russian to tell how they rhyme, usually.) Pasternak one feels sure is good — and I am surprised by how good Esenin seems — but it is all gamble and guess-work. I never have enjoyed Rimbaud as much as the summer I read him in Brittany, living all alone, and really knowing very little French then. (Although I still think he’s superb, of course.)

You also mention Neruda again. As I probably said, my poem to Marianne Moore was based on a serious poem by him, one of his best. (Mine is not serious.) Since I was interested in surrealism long before I met him, I don’t believe his poetry had much influence on mine. But I like some of it — up to and including the Macchu Pichu poem, more or less. His later poetry is mostly propaganda, and bad. He was my first experience of a full-scale communist poet, in fact my only experience of a good communist poet (there are plenty of bad ones, here and elsewhere — or Brecht, I suppose, is another good one) — sad man, aware, I felt sure, of having betrayed his talent. He said many things that made me feel this, and he would tell me NOT to read certain of his poems, political ones (I knew him during the war), because they weren’t any good. I met Neruda quite by chance; I did NOT like his politics. I had introductions to many of the other party in Mexico and knew and liked Victor Serge, etc.—

I’ve never studied “Imagism” or “Transcendentalism” or any isms consciously. I just read all the poetry that came my way, old or new. At 15 I loved Whitman; at 16 someone gave me the book of Hopkins that had just been re-issued (I’d already learned the few bits of Hopkins that were in my Harriet Monroe Anthology by heart). I never really liked Emily Dickinson much, except a few nature poems, until that complete edition came out a few years ago and I read it all more carefully. I still hate the oh-the-pain-of-it-all poems, but I admire many others, and, mostly, phrases more than whole poems. I particularly admire her having dared to do it, all alone — a bit like Hopkins in that. (I have a poem abut them comparing them to two self-caged birds, but it’s unfinished.) This is snobbery — but I don’t like the humorless, Martha-Graham kind of person who does like Emily Dickinson …

In fact I think snobbery governs a great deal of my taste. I have been very lucky in having had, most of my life, some witty friends, — and I mean real wit, quickness, wild fancies, remarks that make one cry with laughing. (I seem to notice a tendency in literary people at present to think that any unkind or heavily ironical criticism is “wit,” and any old “ambiguity” is now considered “wit,” too, but that’s not what I mean.) The aunt I liked best was a very funny woman: most of my close friends have been funny people; Lota de Macedo Soares is funny. Pauline Hemingway (the 2nd Mrs. H) a good friend until her death in 1951 was the wittiest person, man or woman, I’ve ever known. Marianne was very funny — Cummings, too, of course. Perhaps I need such people to cheer me up. They are usually stoical, unsentimental, and physically courageous. The poor Brazilians, the people’s, sense of humor is really all that keeps this country bearable a lot of the time. They’re not “courageous,” however — far from it — but the constant political jokes, the words to the sambas, the nicknames etc. are brilliant and a consolation — unfortunately mostly untranslatable. Only their humor sometimes manages to sweeten this repugnant mess of greed & corruption.

I have a vague theory that one learns most — I have learned most from having someone suddenly make fun of something one has taken seriously up until then. I mean about life, the world, and so on. This is again a form of snobbery. I dislike extremely bookish people (I do happen to love some, but I think they’d be better off if they weren’t so bookish), and I don’t enjoy writers who talk literary anecdotes all the time or are preoccupied in putting other writers in the proper pecking order. Criticism is important, “weeding out has to be done,” (R. Lowell), but I don’t want to do it. I feel that art would probably struggle along without it in very much the same way, probably. I trust my own taste and usually don’t want to explain it — at the same time I occasionally wish I could it explain it better.

You mention Ernst again. Oh dear — I wish I had never mentioned him at all, because I think he’s usually a dreadful painter. I liked that Histoire Naturelle I mentioned, and his photo-collages still seem brilliant. Klee I like, of course, and Schwitters — but then — I like so much painting. Some Seurats, for example — one smallish quiet, gray & blue one of Honfluer, with posts sticking up out of the beach — at the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y. — I’d give anything to have painted that! I often think I have missed my vocation, and I do paint myself occasionally — not at all well. But I like music just as much, and that is what one misses most here. I believe I must have the “artistic temperament…”

Now I’ll be confidential. The Pauline Hemingway mentioned above sent my first book to Ernest in Cuba. He wrote her he liked it, and, referring to “the Fish,” I think, “I wish I knew as much about it as she does.” Allowing for exaggeration to please his ex-wife — that remark has really meant more to me than any praise in the quarterlies. I knew that underneath Mr. H and I really are a lot alike. I like only his short stories and first two novels — something went tragically wrong with him after that — but he had the right idea about lots of things. (NOT about shooting animals. I used to like deep-sea fishing too, and still go out once in a while, but without much pleasure, & in my younger tougher days I liked bull-fights, but I don’t think I could sit through one now.) H said, horribly, that critics in N. Y. were like “angleworms in a bottle.” Perhaps Gibbon put it better: “A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.”

I don’t like arguments (too bad, since I now live where argument, mostly about politics, is the favorite occupation …) and I approve of D.H. Lawrence’s saying he hated people discussing politics and the news they’d all read in the same newspapers. I admire both Hemingway & Lawrence — along with others — for living in the real world and knowing how to do things. I am a little vain of my own ability to do things, perhaps, — or perhaps I have just been lucky in my interests, experiences, and friends. (And perhaps on the other hand I have just dissipated my energies.) But I’m often thunderstruck by the helplessness, ignorance, ghastly taste, lack of worldly knowledge, and lack of observation of writers who are much more talented than I am. Lack of observation seems to me one of the cardinal sins, responsible for so much cruelty, ugliness, dullness, bad manners — and general unhappiness, too.

This may have little to do with the arts or with my own poetry — except that I may express some of these notions in my verse; I can’t very well tell myself. What I mean is of course more than “observation” or knowing how to care for the baby, row a boat, or enter a drawing-room! (Some of the Marxian critics have expressed it, I think.) It is a living in reality that works both ways, the non-intellectual sources of wisdom and sympathy. (And of course both Hemingway and Lawrence were capable of horrible cruelties — why did I pick them?) A better example, and something I have read & read since I have been in Brazil, is Chekov. If only more artists could be that good as well as good artists. He makes most of them look like pigs — and yet he sacrificed nothing to his art, either. I feel I could die happy if I could write one story — or poem — about Brazil one third as good as “Peasants.”

To take up your chapters. I. Most of my poems I can still abide were written before I met Robert Lowell or had read his first book. However, since then he has influenced me a great deal, in many ways. He is one of the very few people I can talk to about writing freely & naturally, and he is wonderfully quick, intuitive, modest, and generous about it. With the exception of Marianne, however, almost all my friends up until Cal (Lowell), and since, have not been writers.

II Yes, I agree with you. I think that’s what I was trying to say in the speech above. There is no “split.” Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can’t believe we are wholly irrational and I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic — and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (In this sense it is always “escape,” don’t you think?)

III I don’t believe I’ve read Thoreau’s poetry until quite recently, actually, just prose. I agree with what you say, however. At the same time I’ve always thought one of the most extraordinary insights into the “sea” is Rimbaud’s L’eternite:

“C’est la mer allée

Avec le soleil.”

This approximates what I think is called the “Anesthetic revelation,” (William James?). Two of my favorite poets (not best poets) are Herbert (I’ve read him steadily almost all my life), and Baudelaire. I can’t attempt to reconcile them — but you are obviously a very clever girl and perhaps you can!

You are probably right about a “sense of loss,” and it is probably obvious where it comes from — it is not religious. I have never been religious in any formal way and I am not a believer. I dislike the didacticism, not to say condescension, of the practicing Christians I know (but maybe I’ve had bad luck). They usually seem more or less on the way to being fascists. But I am interested in religions. I enjoy reading, say, St. Theresa, very much, and Kierkegaard (whom I read in vast quantities long ago, before he was fashionable), Simone Weil, etc. — but as far as people go, — I prefer Chekov. I’m appalled by the Catholicism, or lack of it, in this Catholic country, while remaining very interested in the architecture it produced. (In the U S A, for example, it is barbarous & shameless that only now, last year, have the clergy taken the stand on race-relations that they should have taken several centuries ago.) Nevertheless, there have been some good Christians! Just the way here in the midst of massive inertia and almost total corruption you occasionally find a real expert at something-or-other, working away unknown, honest and devoted. (The greatest authority on butterflies here was a postman for years — and you can’t get much lower, here — and was recognized & given medals, etc. in Europe before Brazil ever heard of him. But please don’t get the idea I romanticize such people. They just do come along often enough, in Church or State, or the arts, to give one hope.)

You mention Williams. I may have been influenced by him. I’ve read him always, of course, and usually like his flatter impressionistic poems best, not when he’s trying to be profound. (Of his late poems I do like Asphodel.) But that diffuseness is exhausting (like Pound’s). Williams had that rather silly language theory — but it has just occurred to me (I’ve been listening to some contemporary music on the hi-fi) that perhaps he really made some sort of advance like that made by composers around 1900 or so, and that a new set of rules & regulations might appear, to go on from there, that could make his kind of poetry more interesting and satisfying — like “serialization” in music. This isn’t exact at all — but I feel that both he & Pound, and their followers, would be vastly improved if one could lean on a sense of “system” in their work somewhere … (After an hour of W. I really want to go off and read Houseman, or a hymn by Cowper. — I’m full of hymns, by the way — after church — going in Nova Scotia, boarding-school, and singing in the college choir — and I often catch echoes from them in my own poems.)

Wallace Stevens was more of an influence, I think. At college I knew “Harmonium” almost by heart. (“Wading at Wellfleet” I believe is the only poem that shows this influence much.) But I got tired of him and now find him romantic and thin — but very cheering, because, in spite of his critical theories (very romantic), he did have such a wonderful time with all those odd words, and found a superior way of amusing himself. Cummings was often doing the same thing, don’t you think?

Now I’ve lost track of your chapter. Well — I do usually prefer poetry with form to it. I was very much wrapped up in 16th & 17th century lyrics for years (still am, in a way). I spent days in the New York Public Library copying out the songs from masques, etc. (Now you can get them in books, but a great many you couldn’t then — in the 30’s.) I also wrote about a dozen strict imitations of Campian, Nashe, etc. while at college (one or two were in that “Trial Balances” book, I think). I do have a weakness for hymns, as I said — and Cowper’s “Castaway,” etc.

But I don’t need to give you a list of my eclectic reading—

You must be right about the Eucharist in “A Miracle for Breakfast.” I had never noticed it myself until a Brazilian, Catholic, of course, translated that poem into Portuguese a few months ago and said the same thing to me.

IV I think that is a good point and, from what you say, I agree—

V This seems to make very good sense, too. It is odd what you say about “optics” in “Love Lies Sleeping,” because I was reading, or had just read, Newton’s “Optics” about then. (Although again I wasn’t aware of this until you pointed it out to me!) (I think the man at the end of the poem is dead.) At the risk of sounding Cocteau-like — I believe I told you that I did work in the Optical Shop in the Key West Submarine Base for a very short stretch during the war? Cleaning & adjusting binoculars, mostly. I’m sure I told you this — I liked it, but had to leave because I was allergic to the acids used for clean the prisms.

VI That will be hard — my “contribution”! Because of my era, sex, situation, education, etc. I have written, so far, what I feel is a rather “precious” kind of poetry, although I am very much opposed to the precious. One wishes things were different, that one could begin all over again. One almost envies those Russian poets a bit — who feel they are so important, and perhaps are. At least the party seems afraid of them, whereas I doubt that any American poet (except poor wretched Pound) ever bothered our government much. But then I remember that in the late 16th century poetry that was even published was looked down on; the really good poetry was just handed around. So one probably shouldn’t worry too much about one’s position, and certainly never about being “contemporary.”

My outlook is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see. But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy, — to make life endurable and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick.”

It would take me months to answer your letter properly so I shall send this jumble along. Please ask any questions you want to. Just please don’t quote me exactly, however, without telling me? — because I think I’ve put things rather badly. I needn’t have bothered you, probably, with so many likes & dislikes. I wish you could take a trip down here — I’m sure we could cook up lots of interesting notions in a few days. *Please tell me when you go to England. With all best wishes for the New Year — which was still new when I began—

Faithfully yours,

Elizabeth

Postcript. I mentioned that the “surrealism of everyday life” was always more successful, — or more amazing — than any they can think up, — that is for those who have eyes to see. Yesterday I saw such a good example of what I meant by that and some of my other remarks that I must add it. I went to see O Processo—“The Trial”—which is absolutely dreadful. Have you seen it? I haven’t read the book for ages — but in spite of the morbidity of Kafka, etc. I like to remember that when he read his stories out loud to his friends he used to have to stop because he got to laughing so. All the way through the film I kept thinking that any of Buster Keaton’s films give one the sense of the tragedy of the human situation, the weirdness of it all, besides being fun—all the very things poor Orson Welles was trying desperately to illustrate by laying it on with a trowel. I don’t like heaviness—in general, Germanic art. It seems often to amount to complete self-absorption — like Mann & Wagner. I think one can be cheerful AND profound! — or, how to be grim without groaning—

Hopkins’s “terrible” sonnets are terrible — but he kept them short, and in form.

It may amount to a kind of “good manners,” I’m not sure. The good artist assumes a certain amount of sensitivity in his audience and doesn’t attempt to flay himself to get sympathy or understanding. (The same way I feel the “Christians” I know suffer from bad manners — they refuse to assume that other people can be good, too, and so constantly condescend without realizing it. And — now that I come to think of it — so do communists! I’ve had far-left acquaintances come here and point out the slums to me, ask if I’d seen them — after 12 years — how can I bear to live here, etc …)

44 Porter Street

Watertown, Mass.

January 29, 1964

Dear Elizabeth,

Yes, I did receive your New Year’s woodblock. Mark and I like it extremely — such a decorous murder! I was glad to have your note with it since I was beginning to fear that in spite of having registered my letter to you, it had gone astray. Yours arrived with a snow storm about two weeks ago. Then, yesterday, with a second snow storm (I’m beginning to think there must be a connection) your seven page letter! Delighted that you seem to understand and even to like what I still feel is an inchoate mess of ideas. I agree with you in almost everything you say, which makes writing this book a pleasure, and not the burden I first thought it would be. (Agree with your views regarding gaiety and profundity emphatically. I think that is why I liked your poems so much when I first read them. Especially as this view is so unfashionable, or seemingly unfashionable among poets writing today, poets of, alas, my generation who seem to be utterly lacking in perspective. And I feel as you do about writers and literary circles. When I was at Michigan two years ago I knew a lot of literary people, liked them, but felt they never came to terms with anything except writing. Terribly limited as people, thought I never felt this about musicians, for instance, or physicists. But then, very few of the musicians or scientists I know read poetry. Very distressful.)

I did keep a carbon copy of my letter to you in October, and I am conscious of having broken my promise. I did mean to send you some parts of my completed manuscript, but, as usual, I did not complete anything to my satisfaction before November and then I had a miscarriage which sent me into a spin of depression (one feels so aware of the fortuitousness of things, like Greeks, at the mercy of fate) so that I could not write anything or read, hardly. Then Christmas and all that Nonsense. The awful dilemma of bringing up a child in this contaminated world — well, I won’t go on, but I’ll ask you to be patient. It’s hard to extract poems from the context of what I’m writing. I want to finish the three middle chapters — on the Artist, Precision and Resonance (I’ve almost done that one and I like it.) and the problem of ambiguity — before I begin on the first, which will be easier. I think, in view of your remarks on “contribution” (and I want to avoid that word — also to avoid words like “influence” and “isms” as much as possible. Much better to stick to concrete examples) I’ll try to mention your feelings about the need for gay profundity. “Awful but cheerful,” one of your best lines I think. You say you think you are “snobbish” and that your poems are “precious”. Well — yes, if you mean by snobbish opposed to the mediocrity which is published and published and praised and praised everywhere these days, and by “precious” a kind of dogged determination to express at least what you honestly feel about the world. Being you, you couldn’t write like a peasant without being false. Art is always precious, in the other sense, in the sense that it is rare. As you say, circumstances being what they are, one can’t pretend that one is natural and primitive — when at least in my case and in the case of everyone in the US, the cities are submerged in coils of super-highway and one plans to visit, by car or by air, places that should, in mood and temperament, be months away. Sorry. I am wandering from the point. (I think, who better to mention the predicament American poets are in, to contrast, as you suggest, to the Russians.)

Since writing that first letter, I have come to feel that my chapter on the artist should include this: that form is a tension in your work between what I should call New England or Yankee earthiness, humor, a reticence, even a penchant for the macabre and a more sophisticated European “modernist” attitude. Perhaps I don’t make myself clear. But what you called Transcendentalism sometime back isn’t Emerson & CO., but although the Concord people had many qualities of the New England character; what I think you meant, though, is that, in form and in content, your poetry is in some ways very Yankee. For instance, the number of poems about the sea. The way you know coldness, everything about it. You seem to take delight in superstition and eerie effects without believing — and yet you believe, too, like Hawthorne and Melville, although you have more humor. The story IN PRISON is Poe-like to me. Written in his style, anyhow. Do you see what I mean? I think there is more truth in this than in the Transcendentalist connection, especially since all of them except Thoreau were naïve optimists of a variety that doesn’t grow today (except possibly in the Southern Churches! I once taught in Atlanta, Ga., and I never heard such nonsense as was preached to the respectable parents of my girls.) I have long wanted to write a story based on a sermon I once heard. “The Signposts of Sin.” I never can get the right tone, though.)

I am very glad that you told me so much about your tastes in reading. Yes, Chekov is very fine. Mark gave me a paperback copy of the short stories by Isaac Babel for Christmas; and these are splendid, too. Like Chekov’s, but tougher and stronger without sacrifice of nuance. Some of them horrible. You no doubt know these, but if you don’t have them I’ll send you a copy. Another present, the Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon, the diary of a 10th century Japanese court lady, translated with excellent commentary by Arthur Waley, might interest you too. A society so innocent, so literary and so immoral. I was reminded of Helena Morley, not because Sei Shonagon resembled her in any way but because the diary has the same duality of innocent self-revelation. She’s awfully witty and a good poet too. I’ll send you this if you don’t have it. (I really love sending books to people who like them. So you musn’t feel embarrassed.) Another book Mark introduced me to this summer was R. H. Blyth’s four volumes on Haiku. A bit repetitious, but excellent on the poetry. Out of the modern “genre” of critical writings. Do you know that? Mark, you see, is so remarkable because he has such a huge range of interests and knowledge, (but is not “bookish” in a prideful or harmful way) and is able to see our era as part of a historical spectrum. That’s so easy to say, but he really does, so that no fashion sways him. He’s difficult to live with sometimes because he is usually right! His criticism of my analytical thinking makes me furious. But I’m grateful, and this book will be good, if it is any good, because of him and you. We are reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Fellowship of the Ring” to little Caroline Margaret in the evenings after supper. Mark and I both love it, but it’s a little beyond Margaret. Do you know that? Epic in its proportions. The supreme fairy tale.

There are hundreds of things I could say about your letter, but I don’t want to write too much today because I think you should get this soon. Suppose I stop now to get this in the mail. Later on, this week or next, I’ll write again. I have a few questions about the newer poems. Oh, how I wish I could fly to Brazil, but I can’t see how we could ever afford it. England I know well — I married, quite disastrously, in England just after I graduated from Michigan in 1954 and lived in London for 6 years. Margaret was born there. At that time I never would have had the sense to understand anything, however. I look forward to going back. Love Ireland and Scotland, but Cambridge is queer, though queerly tough.

Much love,

Rio, February 16th, 1964

Dear Anne:

It was a compliment to be the “class aesthete” … Two friends & I were cartooned, at Vassar, with the caption “The Higher Type.” Thank you very much for offering to send me books, and I am going to accept the Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon, because I’ve heard so much about it. But if it is at all expensive you must let me pay for it. I have already given away here two copies of that edition of Isaac Babel you mention, so you see what I think of him. He is superb. That brief account of the Reds taking over an old monastery (my copy’s up in the country so I can’t give the title) is one of the most beautiful short pieces of reporting I know. — He’s the other writer besides Chekov I wish some Brazilian genius would come along and write like—except that Brazil is closer to Chekov, a decidedly “feminine” country and Babel is a masculine writer. If one should make these distinctions — but compared to England, or Germany, — Brazil is decidedly “feminine.”

I’d be grateful if you’d somehow make the point that my reasons for staying here so long are personal. I’d rather live in my own country if I could. But my feelings about both the USA and Brazil would look like seismographs during earthquakes, just during any week, no doubt. My last trip back was late 1961 and I was horrified by pre-Christmas New York — it had all grown so much worse. Now I am horrified by things here, as the situation deteriorates very fast. But no one outside the country can really understand what is going on so I won’t […]

Please forgive this long digression — I am really trying to cheer myself up — things are so bad here — by talking English. I have written several poems about Brazil recently — one you will see shortly in The New York Review, and another — a fausse naïve ballad, very long, in The New Yorker.

I am very sorry to hear about the miscarriage and I know they have very bad effects … When is it you are going to England? There is a slight chance that I may go there myself for a month or two, perhaps in April. I haven’t been for so long it is hard to get going, but I’d like to make a tourist trip and see literary things I didn’t see on my trips long ago. I once drove around most of Ireland and had a lovely time — probably before you were born! If I do get there I’ll certainly try to meet you somewhere.

Some of Robert Lowell’s poetry, the first two books, certainly, is very difficult — a few poems I never did understand until I’d asked him. But then they do make very good sense. He has written a few really lovely ones in the past year or two — lyrical, finished, — musical, too — two I think among his best poems. Randall, I think — well, I think that sentimentality is deliberate, you know — he is trying to restore feeling, perhaps — but I just don’t think we can believe in it these days. I think he was influenced some years ago a bit too much by Corbière. Frost is a complicated case — a lot of what he wrote about was just homely to me, after my Nova Scotia days, but the kind of things I have tried to avoid sentimentalizing. I hate his philosophy, what I understand of it — I find it mean—while admiring his technique enormously. “Two Tramps at Mudtime” for example — what is it but a refusal to be charitable? (and he was hideously uncharitable, conversationally, at least.) Well — as Cal says frequently—“We’re all flawed,”—and as far as poetry goes I think we have to be grateful for what we do get. They all rise above their flaws, on occasion. — I am interested in Berryman and wish he’d publish that long poem soon. I wish I knew something of Chinese poetry — a nice old ex-missionary teacher in Washington told me a lot about it the year I was there and enlightened me some — and I was properly impressed by the sophistication and elaboration, etc.

Shapiro, Winters, etc. — seem sad to me — the problem is how to be justly but impersonally bitter, isn’t it. — (Even Marianne Moore’s disappointments show through too much sometimes, I think — but then she is very Irishly cagey and manages by avoiding a great deal … She’s a wonder!)

No — I just have a couple of small paper-backs on the haiku — and I don’t know how good Donald Keene (?) is (they’re up in the country, too.) I have never read Tolkien’s work after one attempt several years ago — I didn’t seem to have time, so I couldn’t have liked it much! For children — well, I still think Beatrix Potter wrote a fine prose style … I admire Jemima Puddleduck, Tom Kitten, etc. very much, and have introduced the series (along with New England Fish Chowder) to many Brazilians. This is idle chat and I must get to work — I am glad you sound happily married — As a very stupid uncle of my friend Lota’s used to say*—“I prefer my friends to be rich. I like rich happy friends better than poor unhappy friends.”

Affectionately,

Elizabeth

44 Porter Street

Watertown, Mass.

March 6, 1964

Dear Elizabeth,

As you see, I am sending you a revised chronology which I hope you’ll correct, amend, delete etc. as you see fit. As I work on the first chapter I find that I may need more factual information, and, if you don’t mind, I’ll ask a few questions before trying to answer your long letter properly. I don’t think the little I write about biography needs to be too detailed, but on the other hand, it’s best not to sound evasive, and worse, to make mistakes.

1. About your mother’s family. Was your grandfather a sea captain like his ancestors? Did his whole family come from Nova Scotia … and were there two or three aunts? Perhaps it would be helpful to know the name of your aunt in Boston — the one you liked because she was amusing. Is there anything you remember particularly about people in your childhood? Who introduced you to music, to poetry … Teachers? One can tell a great deal about your childhood in Nova Scotia from the two New Yorker stories, and the “feel” of it is in poems like Cape Breton, but I would like to be a little more precise about people and exact places. Sorry, but I must picture things to write about them.

2. You say you studied at the Schola Cantorum in Paris and later with Ralph Kirkpatrick. When was this?

3. I wonder who you knew when you went to Paris in 1935 or so? There was so much “in the air there”. One thinks of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, the Surrealists, painters and poets like Andre Breton. A great period of blossoming forth in that curious euphoric between-war period. And then the people on the Partisan Review, so fervent and determined to be “liberal” without knowing the consequences. I was looking at some old issues of PR in the library the other day and was seized with an awful sense of the bravery and, really, the fruitlessness of it all. I think it must have been exciting at the time. Again, when did you meet Calder, Dewey, Loren McIvor, Randall Jarrell. You seem to have been very fortunate in your friends. I think you are quite right about your belonging to the post world war I generation. Or, at least, I think one must make a distinction between the “you then” and the “you in Brazil.” That leads me to the poems.

4. What impresses me about the 1956 volume is a wonderful awareness of the ambiguity of things. “Faustina,” for instance … the impossibility of knowing her thoughts, that they might be either. Or the end of “Roosters” in which the sun “climbs in” … “faithful as enemy or friend.” This kind of uncertainty perhaps characteristic of the time as well of perhaps you. The new poems, except for Questions of Travel and Brazil, January 1, don’t seem to spring from the same kind of uncertainty or urgency, but from a new climate and culture really. They have the same qualities of exact discription but the perspective is different. Even the poems about childhood — Sestina, and Cousin Arthur and Manners are “detached” (Is that what I mean?) from your old vision. They don’t seem quite “it” … while the Brazilian poems have almost a settled quality. Manuelzinho, for instance, and curious mixture of superstition and mysticism and absurdity of The Riverman.

Understand I am not criticizing these new poems. I like many of them very much — and besides, as you see, I can’t really say what I mean about them. Therefore I don’t think I’ll say as much about them as about the others. The Fish, The Imaginary Iceberg, The Map, The Man Moth, Cootchie, Florida these all seem to me masterpieces — better and better as I read them. But unless you think me terribly “dated” I would rather not deal with what probably should be called the “contemporary poetic scene”. It’s a dreary one, in general, I think, and I’m not sure that any of your poems have much to do with it.

I see that I have “gone all muzzy again,” as Mark would put it. Well, maybe you can help me out. I do want to thank you for your long letter and to assure you that I will quote nothing without asking you. There is a passage that I would like to use, if I may, or if you approve. It concerns what you say about the “always-more-successful surrealism” of everyday life. As you have it, it is like this:

“There is no “split.” Dreams, works of art, glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important.” And then what you say of Darwin who builds an “endless heroic case” of observations “and then comes to a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown…”

It is that point where rationality and irrationally meet that that your poems “catch fire” for me. Their resonance, their real perceptions — not just the fine descriptions — comes from the central awareness … the hardest and most elusive thing in the world to catch.

Two weeks ago I ran away to Ann Arbor to visit my father … and to be by myself for a while. While I was there I did a sort of Victorian Table of Contents of this whole book … all the ideas written out in outline form with references to poems etc.… now I’m fitting what I have already written into my outline (and throwing reams away). So it looks as if there may be a book after all in spite of viruses, ear-aches, and headcolds which seem to afflict my family — even the cat has a cold! I haven’t yet looked up the photography of your house — I will, I’m glad you told me about “L’Architecture d’Aujord’hui” I hope I have everything you suggested include incorporated into the chronology. No, I havn’t seen “The Trial” and I won’t after your description. And I’ve been re-reading Chekov. Yes, Yes, Yes. Have you written any stories about Brazil? Somehow I think you should … What is it that makes good prose but isn’t poetry — or perhaps it is.

I’m “baby sitting” with a friend’s little girl and my own — we take turns — and I wish you could see the raisins and graham crackers piling up around the typewriter. And milk spilling! I think the time for literature has come to an end. Again, thank you for your kindness and help and patience in reading my letters to you.

Answers to your questions of March 6th—[1964]

1. It was my greatgrandfather (maternal grandmother’s father) who was a sea captain. William Hutchinson. He was lost at sea — all hands — in a famous storm off Sable Island when my grandmother was 9 years old. No — Cape Sable, I think — they’re two different places, but Cape Sable would be on his way into the Bay of Fundy. Better not say. I made a trip to Sable Island (as I believe I’ve said) on a Canadian Lighthouse Service Boat, around 1949—

My maternal grandmother had four brothers; three were Baptist missionaries in India, the 4th a painter who spent most of his life in England, George Hutchinson. (Israel Zangwill’s “Our Lady of the Snows” is supposed to be about him but I haven’t read it.) One of the others was also President of Acadia College in N S, and another taught there, etc. The Hutchinsons seem to have had brains, talents, and were rather eccentric. As I think I said — one wrote bad novels, including the first novel in Telegu.

Great Uncle George went to sea at 14 or so (he is in “Large Bad Picture”) except he never taught school; I don’t know why I said that. For a few years. Even before then, he had started painting pictures of ships for the local ship-builders; Great Village was a ship-building place then, as many Nova Scotian villages were. But it came to an end around the turn of the century. Of the Bulmer side I don’t know very much. As I said — there were Tories from N.Y. state, given farms in N S at the time of the Revolution, and more recent Scotch, Scotch-Irish, and English additions. My maternal grandmother’s mother however was from England — London — which probably accounted for many anglicisms my grandma used, such as “hard as the knockers of Newgate.” I have a lot of notes from aunt Aunt Grace about this side of the family — the ship my greatgrandmother arrived in, her fearful trip, etc. — but I don’t believe they’d be of much interest to you, really.

On my mother’s side I had three aunts: Maud, Grace, and Mary. You don’t need to mention names, I think — I lived with Maud and was — and am — fondest of Grace. Mary is only 12 years older than I am — she is mentioned in both those stories. These last two are both living in Canada; Aunt Maud died about 1942—I’m not sure. She and her husband stayed near me for two or three winters, or parts of winters, in Key West. There was also a brother, Uncle Arthur — of the poem — Their father, my grandfather, was my favorite grandparent. He owned the local tannery, until local tanning vanished — the pits for it were still there, and part of the old shop, when I was small. Also small-scale farming, like everyone else, almost, in Great Village. He was a darling; sweet-tempered, devout, and good with children. (“Manners” is about him) He was a deacon of the Baptist church and when he passed the collection plate he would slip me one of those strong white peppermints that say (still, I think) CANADA on them.

Great Village is very small and well-preserved — the last time I saw it, at least—1951, like a small New England village, all white houses, elm trees, one large white church in the middle (designed I believe by great uncle George).* It is in the rich farming country around the head of the Bay of Funday: dark red soil, blue fir trees—bur birches, a pretty river running into the Bay through “salt marshes”—a few remains of the old Acadian dikes — it is Evangeline country — Cape Breton is quite different; sparsely populated, forested, full of lakes — supposed to be like Scotland, and more Gaelic is spoken there than anywhere else in the world. I spent a summer there—48, I think, when I wrote a few poems about it. My mother went off to teach school at 16 (the way most of the enterprising young people did) and her first school was in lower Cape Breton somewhere — and the pupils spoke nothing much but Gaelic so she had a hard time of it at that school, or maybe one nearer home — she was so homesick she was taken the family dog to cheer her up. I have written both a story and a poem about this episode but neither satisfy me yet.

I went very briefly to the real “country” school where we wrote on slates and had many classes in each room — not all in one, because G V had the country school, so it was fairly large. You took a bottle of water and a rag to clean your slate — the bad boys spat on theirs. A little Micmac Indian boy, Jimmy Crow, was in “primer class” with me; most of the rest had Scotch names and looked very Scotch. Muir MacLaughlin I made the childish mistake of calling “Manure”—When I found him running a local store on my last trip there he recognized me and reminded me of this. The teacher’s name was Georgie Morash and I can see her clearly. She sang in the choir — as did my various relatives — and all those who sang in the choir I remember very well because I spent so many sermons studying them one by one. Miss Patriquin, (aunt of Gwendolyn “Applyard” whose name was really Gwendolyn Patriquin) taught the infant Sunday School class I attended. She later went mad and chased bad boys through the village with a carving knife. My aunt Mary and I actually attended school together at this stretch. She made me late and I howled in the cloakroom (I have always been over-punctual) until Miss Morash came and consoled me. Mary was very pretty and had many suitors. It was during the first World War — the village boys (a kilted regiment) would come to say goodbye and their clothes were wonderful, of course. Most of them were never seen again — almost every boy in that tiny place, from 18–22, was killed in one of the big battles — Canadians first, of course — and the whole village was in mourning — but this was after I’d left. (Over 20 boys, I think) I had a dachshund, “Betsy”—given to my mother when I was born, and she sent her to G V to her mother — the only dog of that sort ever seen there, of course, and a village character. The “big boys” hung around on the bridge, and she was afraid of them — so in order to cross the village to meet my grandfather on his way back from the farm, etc. — she would make a long detour and actually cross the river at a wide shallow place, on stepping stones. One summer Sunday afternoon, all good Baptists in the church, the doors open, Dr. Francis, the minister, was on his knees praying, when a patter-patter was heard and Betsy trotted down the aisle past our pew. She was fond of Dr. Francis and went right up on the platform and jumped to lick his face. He opened his eyes and said “Why, hello Betsy” and then went on praying.

Mary played the piano, quite well — all the aunts played some — and I think that and the hymns were how I came to love music from the beginning. This whole period in my life was brief — but important, I know.* The village was 50 years or so backwards — we made yeast from the hopvine on the barn; had no plumbing, oil lamps etc. My grandmother was a famous butter-maker. Everything is quite changed now of course. But when I came to live first in Samambaia and we had oil lamps for two or three years, etc. a lot came back to me. I helped design our sitting room stove for example needed up there “winters” and without ever having done such things before I found myself baking bread, making marmalade, etc. — When the need arises apparently the old Nova Scotian domestic arts come back to me!

Like most poets, I have a very morbid total recall of certain periods and I could go on for hours — but I won’t!

I know next to nothing about the Bishops, and have no idea when they “came over”, rather I have forgotten. There were 3 brothers, one was a doctor in Plymouth, Mass., I think—the 2nd I’d don’t know — the 3rd farmed in White Sands, Prince Edward Island. My grandfather B, according to the family story, ran away aged 12, with a box of carpenters’ tools on his back, and went first to Providence. His was an Horatio Alger story. He married very well, and made a “million,” etc. Sarah Foster, his wife, came from a very very old New England family, originally from Quincy — she came from Holden. I also have a batch of papers from that branch, about her ancestors in the Revolution on that side — but again they are really not very interesting. One man, I remember, was in and out of the army many times — the way they were — and was imprisoned in the notorious prison ship in New York harbor — and seems to have survived it because he was a cook.

The Bishop grandparents came to visit in Canada several times, apparently — twice that I remember. Although my father had married a poor country girl the older generation were still enough alike, I think, so that they got along in spite of the money difference — it was the next generation that made me suffer acutely. The B’s were very early motorists — once they actually drove to G V and their huge car and chauffer made a sensations — also the fact that they wired the local hotel for rooms & bath — when there wasn’t a bath in the village. I was probably regarded as a small fairy princess, but I was too young to notice. It The thrill of riding with that grandpa on the dusty country roads — and the chauffeur, Rondal Rondald, of whom I became fond and who was very nice to me later on in Worcester. (We had only a buggy, of course, or two, rather, one with fringe, and a wagon, and in the winter a sleigh and a “pung.”) The B’s were horrified to see the only child of their eldest son running about the village in bare feet, eating at the table with the grown-ups and drinking tea, and so I was carried off (by train) to Worcester for the one awful winter that was almost the end of me. 1917–18.

I had already had bad bronchitis and probably attacks of asthma — in Worcester I got much worse and developed exzema that almost killed me.* One awful day I was sent home from “first grade” because of my sores — and I imagine my hopeless shyness has dated from then. — In May, 1918, I was taken to live with Aunt Maud; I couldn’t walk and Ronald carried me up the stairs — my aunt burst into tears when she saw me. I had had nurses etc. — but that stretch is still too grim to think of, almost. My grandfather had gone to see my aunt M privately and made the arrangements — he said my grandmother didn’t “know how to take care of her own children”, most of them had died. — My aunt was paid to care for me — but she would have anyway, I imagine, if there’d been no money. She really devoted herself to me for years until I got better — she probably never slept for nights and nights, getting me injections of adrenaline, etc. etc.—

When I couldn’t go to school in Worcester — well, I remember one evening I was sitting under the living room table building blocks and my Grandfather said as if to himself, “I wonder if some little girl would like to take piano lessons”—so Miss Darling came to teach me. I was too small, but loved it — and always took lessons, but never had a good teacher until I got to Walnut Hill.

I began writing poetry at about 8 and when I was 11 or so I remember Aunt Grace giving me some good advice about listening to criticism, not getting one’s feelings hurt, etc. I went to school off and on, but remember chiefly lying in bed wheezing and reading — and my dear aunt Maud going out to buy me more books. When I was 13 I was well enough, summers, to go to camp, and it wasn’t until then, briefly, and then at Walnut Hill, that I met girls who were as clever, or cleverer than I was, and made friends, and began to cheer up a bit.

The last time I was in Boston I went to see an elderly uncle by marriage (his 1st wife, my father’s sister, died the year I was born) and he told me that he had tried to adopt me legally that year in Worcester because he felt so sorry for me — he had three children of his own. He also said “Your mother was the most beautiful skater I ever saw — I fell in love with her, too, when I saw her skate.” These bits of information always surprise me very much, since I know so little — I have a lot of cousins here and there — The next to last Bishop, an aunt, died last year aged 86 or 87—I’m the last actually, of that short and undistinguished line. I never fought with what family I had, never had to “rebel”, etc. — I was always on more or less visiting terms with them, and I feel that has had a profound and not altogether good effect on me — it produces passivity, detachment, etc — on the other hand making one’s friends one’s family, really. But from the age of 18 I have always been independent and gone where I wanted to. My relatives now, I think, chiefly wonder why I don’t write best sellers and earn some money if I’m supposed to be so smart — the phrase is “Too smart for her own good,” I believe …

2. I don’t think my music studies are worth mentioning, really. I took clavichord lessons the first winter in Paris, and the next year I took some more with Kirkpatrick in New York — when I lived at the old Hotel Chelsea for a few months — but I never was any good at it, at all. I always dream of studying some more, also the piano again. The clavichord is here now, in its traveling case, because I’ve at last found someone in Rio who can tune it for me — but I was never a performer — I played piano in public a few times at college and lost my nerve forever. (Two very good old friends of Lota’s and mine are Fizdale & Gold, the two-piano team — if you’ve ever heard them? They are superb. We visit them whenever we can—) So — just say I love music!

3. On my first stay in Paris (and the 2nd one, after about ten months) I knew very few people. I could have, if it hadn’t been for this “shyness”—or whatever is the word now — whatever it is, it had made my life quite different from what perhaps it might have been — I had published a few poems. I remember Sylvia Beach invited me to a party — or parties — Spender was at one, Joyce at another — and I’d get to the door, lose my nerve and run away. (I never did speak to Spender until last year in Brazil.) I had letters to people in London, Life & Letters To-day, etc. and the same thing happened — I took a taxi to the door and didn’t dare go in. (I’m afraid you’ll begin to think I am a hopeless idiot, after this True Confession, but there it is.) Also — I’m a dreadful linguist. I understand French perfectly, (and now Portuguese) and some Spanish, and read them all — but I hate to talk a foreign language — particularly French. (Do have your little girl learn a language or two well — to speak it — it will improve her social life all her life …) In Paris I did meet a lot of famous people, I suppose, — even Picasso for a moment — and many more to look at, a good many painters, etc. — but that doesn’t mean I ever exchanged any words with them except “Enchantée.” G. Stein and Alice B — I was invited to tea, with a friend — and the friend went without me, finally. What an idiot! (Since then — just a year or so ago — I’ve corresponded with Alice B who wanted to come to Brazil, of all places — I discouraged her firmly.) What was going on in Paris then was mostly surrealism, that I remember — André Breton & his gallery; I met Ernst, Giacometti, etc — but — I just looked at them. I spent a lot of time taking walks, also at the Deux Magots and the Flore — quite different then than now—

I have learned to disguise my social terrors quite a lot, and also — always — if I really like someone well enough I don’t get them — Marianne, for example — the one “celebrity” I have ever deliberately tried to meet in my life. — and We got along immediately. I was never afraid for a moment of Neruda, or Cummings, or, Cal — Jarrell, etc. — And then I have improved — over the years—

I met Loren in 1939, I think, in N.Y. — I’d seen a few of her paintings and liked them. We became friends immediately and she & her husband, Lloyd Frankenberg, stayed with me for two winters in Key West. John Dewey bought a painting she did that first winter. He bought it in N.Y. — but he used to go to KW winters then, too, — I had stared at him and his daughter as I ate the 50¢ fish dinner in a little restaurant, but never met them (the daughter who has since been a friend for 24 years — to whom the poem Cold Spring is dedicated). When Loren came back to KW we all went to call.

I met Neruda quite by accident in a hotel in Merida — I had no idea who he was when he invited me to go off to Chichen Itza with him and his wife.

Randall was in NY the winter of 1946, I think it was — he invited me to dinner to meet Cal.

Calder is really Lota’s friend. He’s been in Brazil several times and I didn’t really know him until here. I admire him very much — again with that odd in-between-generations feeling. As I said before — the simple fact that I did my traveling earlier than the poets who aren’t so much younger than I am, after all, seems to have put me in a different category — and often I’m afraid I have felt old and sophisticated, and certainly more knowledgable about art, etc. — While they were teaching and marrying, I was out observing the world. — (Mrs. Tate once reminisced about a night in Paris that I’d already heard another version of from Pauline Hemingway, etc. — Very odd.)

5. I’m afraid I agree with you only too well.

I don’t know whether this is due to Brazil, age or what. — However, I feel I could NOT have stayed on in N.Y. And I have been personally very happy here, except for this recurring sense of anxiety and loss. However, one always hopes and hopes. — Now I am hoping a trip will do wonders — and this year so far I have written a lot, for me. Good or bad I can’t say. — (Cal likes the poem in the New York Review, I think, quite a bit—)

I should mention one teacher at Walnut Hill, probably — she later taught at Wellesley. Miss Prentiss — she was an excellent teacher of English for that age (hopelessly romantic!) — and we went read some Shakespeare with her, She helped me even more, probably, by lending me all her books I took a fancy to and admiring my early verse — too much, no doubt.

[There was also an excellent Latin teacher, Miss? The best teacher there, really]

Miss Farwell, the assistant principal, was also very kind to me and had the excellent idea of taking me to some sort of psychiatrist in Boston, — Unfortunately, I clammed up and wouldn’t talk at all. But she had the right idea — too bad it didn’t work.

We were taken to Symphony Concerts, of course — also concerts at Wellesley — where, with through my piano teacher (how awful I’ve forgotten her name) I shook hands with Myra Hess (my teacher’s old teacher — later scorned by Kirkpatrick) and Prokofiev. — P’s wife sang some from “The Love of Three Oranges”,* and that and his way of playing I remember as giving me a whole new idea of music. — Possibly the idea of “irony” in music was a revelation, because at that time I liked his piano pieces best (now they’re not very interesting to me) of my simple repertoire—

I also saw one of the first Calder shows, at Pittsfield, around 1931—his very first mobiles, that had cranks, or little electric motors. We spoke of this show the last time he was here — last year — and it was funny how many of the pieces I could still remember, so it must have made a big impression—

Although I think I have a prize “unhappy childhood”, almost good enough for the text-books — please don’t think I dote on it. — Almost everyone has had, anyway — and since then I have been extremely lucky in many ways. I never had any difficulty getting published — I have had all those helpful awards — I often think I have been praised beyond my due—

Under 3 you speak rather disparagingly of Partisan Review in the late 30’s and 40’s … well, at the time I was writing the poems I like best I was very ignorant politically and I sometimes wish I could recover the dreamy state of consciousness I levd in lived in then — it was better for my work, and I do the world no more good now by knowing a great deal more. I was “left” just because my friends were, mostly — although of course we all felt the effects of the depression profoundly, and ever since noticing the split in my own family and going through my Shelley period, around 16, I had thought of myself as a “socialist.” (I was also a vegetarian until after college, I think! — and I revert to it every once in a while. I don’t advocate it or even believe in it — but they drive the cattle to market here, and after each encounter with one of the cattle trains — you park the car and let the poor beasts pour around you — I give up meat again for a week or so.)

I was always anti-communist, I believe — after one or two John Reed Club affairs. I don’t know whether this was due to my intelligence (No — not intelligence — just instinct and snobbery—) or what — but all the really “red” girls at college (one is taken off cruelly, but very comically in “The Group”) I found too silly — and now they’re the real rich conservatives, in general.

But — before the war — we knew much much less. The purges in the 30’s were what opened most people’s eyes, of course. Here now it is dreadful for me to see young men I know making the same mistake that US intellectuals were making around 1930. How they can is hard to see. — They seem totally unaware of recent history. But Brazil is unbelievably provincial, and also one of its greatest drawbacks to any kind of maturity, I’m afraid, is that it has never been through a war. However — nothing here is explainable in terms that apply in the U S. — But believe me — things are very bad here now, and I may have to leave. Or Lota and I may finally choose to—

Rio, March 23rd, 1964

Dear Anne:

I’ll enclose the fragments of a letter I did write you over a month ago, just to show you I tried. Many things have kept me from answering properly; guests, partly, but mostly I think the political situation, that is keeping everyone on edge now and which, because of Lota’s job and her close connections with the State government in Rio, I can’t forget for a moment. I made tentative reservations to go to England by boat next month, just for a breathing spell, — but just today we have decided to go to Milan in May for the Triennale May 20th we want to see — then I’ll probably stay on and go to England for a month or six weeks alone. Perhaps I’ll be able to see you there then? I think I’ll be visiting friends in Sussex, but staying mostly in London — and perhaps go to Edinburgh, since I have never seen it & want to.

I’m sending back the Chronology pages and I hope you can read my corrections. You have it mostly right, however. Somewhere along the line I had an Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship and now I have a Chapelbrook — have had it for over two years but haven’t been able to make any use of it yet. I’m also a member of the Institute of Arts & Letters — but I’m not sure of the date. Although I’m always grateful for all the money I’ve received — considering how little I have accomplished — I feel that none of these names and awards really means too much — however they’ll help fill your page … I’ve answered your questions, too, in a garrulous way — a lot of what I’ve said you don’t need at all, but I’ll let it go because perhaps anything that contributes an “atmosphere” will help you with the writing? I am appalled at how narrow, petty, gloomy, masochistic, even, this kind of condensation of my “life” sounds — but of course I’m sure you know there’s more to life than an outline! — This is just the sketchiest of armatures, really, leaving out so many friends, people, places, events — false beginnings, retreats, mistakes, and so [on].

Yes, quote my remarks on Darwin if you like. I think I said to you, when you asked about Dr. Williams, that one of his poems I admire is “Asphodel, that greeny flower…”? Well, I re-read it the other day and was surprised to see he mentions Darwin, too — not in my sense at all, but he says, “But Darwin / opened our eyes / to the gardens of the world…” I really just got off on Darwin because of my readings about Brazil when I first came here; his first encounter with the “tropics” was on the outskirts of Rio and a lot he says in his letters home about the city and country is still true. Then I became very fond of his writing in general — his book on Coral Island is a beauty, if ever you have a long stretch to read in, — specialized but beautifully worked out. It seems to me that in the world of hate and horror we all inhabit that contemporary artists and writers, some of the “action painters” (although I like them, too), the “beats,” the wildest musicians, etc. — have somehow missed the point — that the real expression of tragedy, or just horror and pathos, lies exactly in man’s ability to construct, to use form. The exquisite form of a tubercular Mozart, say, is more profoundly moving than any wild electronic wail & tells more about that famous “human condition” … But this is an idea it has probably been beyond my gifts to express in poetry.

I hesitate to suggest any reading to you since I know you must be burdened with lots of things — and perhaps you’d rather not get into such subjects — but I think that Arnold Hauser’s “The Philosophy of Art History” in the chapter called “Psychoanalysis & Art”, makes a lot of good clear points about romanticism, neurosis, what’s neurotic & what isn’t in art, and so on, — and the relationship of an artist’s life to his work.

I feel rather foolish using all these words in any connection with myself. Imagine how it must have felt to be Tennyson, to be a “bard”—It is hard to know how one should feel certainly, and for me the solution most of the time has been to forget all about it. That is not altogether right — on the other hand I dislike very much the romantic self-pity and sense of privilege I feel in some poet friends.

(Forgive this typing — I have three machines of different ages — but even the newest is already rusting in this climate. Then when I switch from one to the other I make more mistakes than usual, too)

I hope you are feeling better. I’m having copies made of a few snapshots to send you next week — mostly Samambaia (that’s the name of the place in Petrópolis — means “giant fern”. The actual name of the hillside we’re one is Sitio da Alcobaçinha, “Little Alcobáça”—that’s a favorite name here, not original with us — after Alcobaça in Portugal.) — I am very fond of cats, too (I’m going through your last paragraph) and have always had them, even if they do give me asthma — a bit — dogs do too much to attempt. I’ll send a picture of Tobias if I can find the negative — he’s thirteen now, very handsome — also a clever if not very “good” Siamese, and a Bebe Daniels — style angora who recently died and was buried under the orange tree. I have cats in the country and birds in the city — practical solutions being best. I had a toucan, Sammy, for six years — (but in the country) — and a wonderful funny bird I adored, with eyes like blue neon lights and that huge beak. I’m fond of pets, and babies up till three … I say this because we have just had a friend with two little daughters, 11 months and 3 years, here all week, and so I know how demanding child-care is, & all about colds and shots and earaches, etc. The little one slept in my room and what I really liked best about her was the way she was quite willing to stay awake for hours in the middle of the night, standing up and chattering away at me agreeably. That’s [indecipherable] age. After three comes an age I don’t like — then they improve.

I am sorry I’ve been so slow replying — I should acknowledge your letters even if I can’t answer them right away, so you’ll know whether I got them or not, at least. We have just had two hours warning—th there’ll be no water for 48 hours. This kind of thing is very common — at one point recently we had no water, no light, and no gas. The light was off for two hours only, every night, and since we were lucky enough to have an electric skillet we managed; until the gas co. strike was over — most of the wretched city ate cold food. But we’ll be going up to Petrópolis for a long Easter weekend, thank heavens. It is incredibly beautiful here — and so hopeless — imagine the million or more favela (slum) dwellers here these two days — no water — all those babies. But I shouldn’t add to your own troubles—

Affectionately Yours — Elizabeth

I should say — I am quite looking forward to your book, now!

Rio de Janeiro, April 8th, 1964

Dear Anne:

It would add interest, certainly, to your book if you could have a footnote saying I’d been shot in the Brazilian Revolution of April Fools’ Day, 1964—but I wasn’t. We had forty-eight rather bad hours and then it was all over much sooner than anyone had expected. My friend Lota was naturally very much involved, she and one other woman the only ones in the siege of the Governor’s “palace”—and I could get news of what was going on there only by short wave occasionally since the President held all radio, T V etc here in the city. — It was a tremendous relief when we finally learned he had run away and all was over — The celebration, in the pouring rain — the whole “revolution” took place in the rain — was a weird wet sight, with paper, confetti, streamers, flags, towels, everything, sticking—& dancing in bathing trunks, raincoats, with umbrellas, etc — I’ll spare you the politics of it all; however, what I see from U S papers is half-wrong, as always—

I hope you got a mass of rather uninteresting personal stuff that was mailed to you about two weeks ago now — the mails have naturally been worse than ever. If not, I’ll send you most of it over again.

I am going away, probably about May 20th, and probably first to Italy for three weeks, then to England for a couple of months — I hope. I want to go someplace where I can speak the language, more or less, and where I think they care very little about Brazil and its politics — I’d like to forget them both for a little while. Politics are scarcely my element, and here we’ve heard absolutely nothing else for months—

I’ll give you an address in England as soon as I know one — and perhaps you’ll do the same? If you write me here again before I leave, it might be a good idea to register the letter — or maybe that’s just a Brazilian superstition I’ve acquired. — With kindest regards—

Affectionately yours,

Elizabeth

Petrópolis, Sunday, April 12th? I received your letter of April 4th when I got here yesterday for the week-end — Thank you so much for your kind invitations in England and I’m sure I’ll take you up on one of them, at least — But I’ll wait until I get back to Rio tomorrow to answer you because I have no typewriter here and my writing, I know, is awful — Lota & I are going to Italy — so I probably won’t get to London until about June 20—not a good time, I know. I’ll be visiting friends at Bexley Hill (near Petworth Sussex) for a while. - // The “revolution” now has a military junta — a middle-class revolution — Castelo Branco (the president until next year’s election) has a good reputation — moderate, “liberal” (for here), honest, — & ironical — not rhetorical, at least — the new vice p. an old crook, alas. — But desperate measures had to be taken—

I wonder if you ever saw Randall J’s second review of my book? He said some very acute things, I think — about painting, etc.

Rio, May 5th, 1964

Dear Anne:

In the midst of travel preparations I can’t remember whether I answered your letter of April 4th or not — I think I did. And thanked you for your kind invitations? My addresses will be simply:

May 13th to June 13th — C/O American Express, Milan.

June 13th, August 1st— " " ", London. (Haymarket)

In Italy I’ll be in Florence a week, Venice a bit longer, and start and wind up in Milan — so that’s the best general address. I am not sure exactly when I’ll be staying in London, it depends on the friends I’m visiting, etc. But you could drop me a note there with telephone numbers, perhaps, and I’ll get in touch with you? I hope you have a nice sea voyage — I’m returning by boat but wish I were going by boat, too.

Yesterday I received a letter from my aunt Grace (Mrs. William Bowers) — enclosing the letter you wrote to the Great Village “Chamber of Commerce.” I’m awfully sorry it turned out that way. I know you were just doing your job and naturally tried to “check up” on the informations I’ve been writing you. But Great Village is so small there isn’t any such thing as a Chamber of Commerce there, and everyone knows everyone else, of course. Whoever got your letter just handed it over to my aunt. She is almost eighty years old now (although the rest of her letter was all about her first trout fishing of the season) and apparently she was baffled and a bit put out — She has never wanted to discuss the past with me at all, although she was more concerned with my mother than anyone else, and I think now, almost fifty years later, she has almost succeeded in burying it completely. She was the only daughter of that family who “went back home;”* she married a farmer, a widower with eight children, produced three more of her own, and for many years has lived on the largest farm in N.S. (They used to raise trotting horses, among other things.) By now she has many grandchildren and dozens of step-grandchildren — and so has a great deal of “life” to have buried the past under.

I know you should be able to confirm my statements somehow but I honestly can’t think how.

I’ll answer your questions myself — but again, it’s just my word for it! Long ago I used to try to get details from Aunt Grace but I never succeeded. — She is an active, strong, humorous woman, my favorite relative as I’ve already said — and she believes in living in the present. I think, too, like most families, mine has no idea that I could possibly have done anything that the rest of the world would be interested in — at least they apparently haven’t thought much of my life and works since I went away to school! Aunt Grace has given me some information about the Bulmer family, what little I do know — she and the aunt I lived with—

Well — I’ll answer for the “Chamber of Commerce” (if you could see the “Village” I think you’d be amused.) — and I wish I could think of an outside source for you …

My great-grandfather’s (One of them) name was Robert Hutchinson. He was part-owner and captain of a brig or barque (I’m not sure which) that sailed out of G V when it was a ship-building place — hasn’t been since the beginning of the century, probably.

Aunt Grace is the only real “Bulmer” left, there. — There is a sister-in-law, and some distant cousins live around there — There were five children, in this order: Maud, Arthur, Gertrude, Grace, and Mary. Aunt Mary lives in Montreal (Mrs. J.K. Ross), — the others you know about.

It has always been said that what set off my mother’s insanity was the shock of my father’s death at such an early age, and when they’d only been married three years. (He was 39 she was 29). It is the only case of insanity in the family, as far as we know. She had undoubtedly (I think) shown symptoms of trouble before — perhaps traits that in our enlightened, etc. days might have been noticed and treated earlier. As it was, she did receive the very best treatment available at that time, I feel sure. She was in McLean’s Sanitarium outside of Boston* (you must have heard of that) — once or maybe twice. Aunt Grace herself went with her, and also, I think, though I’m not positive, took her to doctors in N.Y. — At any rate, the Bishop family “spared no expense.” Since Aunt Grace was so involved with it all she naturally does not like to remember it, I suppose. That generation took insanity very differently than we do now, you know. My father did not beat her or anything like that — really! I am telling you the facts as I have always been given to understand them, and a lot I remember pretty well. (Of course I may have distorted it, but as I’m sure you know, children do have a way of overhearing everything.) The tragic thing was that she returned to N S when she did, before the final breakdown. At that time, women became U S citizens when they married U S citizens, — so when she became a widow she lost her citizenship. Afterwards, the U S would not let her back in, sick, and that is why she had to be put in the hospital at Dartmouth, Nova Scotia (across the harbor from Halifax). My Bishop grandfather tried for a long time to get her back in the US. One always thinks that things might be better now, she might have been cured, etc. — Aunt Grace suffered most of all because of it, and being the kind of woman she is, her technique is to bury it, not speak of it, etc.

Well — there we are. Times have changed. I have several friends who are, have been, will be, etc. insane; (I visited Pound many times) they discuss it all very freely and I’ve visited asylums many times since. But in 1916 things were different. After a couple of years, unless you cured yourself, all hope was abandoned—

I think that greatgrandfather was the only real “sea-farer”—the only one I know of. As I said, my mother’s father ran the tannery for many years. His people were farmers from “River Philip” (wherever that is! — I just remember hearing that). One of his cousins, very rustic, used to appear once or twice a year when I was small, with gifts of bear meat and venison, in sacks in the back of the buggy.

If I can think of anyone I know now in G V who might help you I’ll let you know — but it’s a long time ago. And they really wouldn’t understand your reasons, you know—

Well—adiozinho, as we say here—

Affectionately yrs, Elizabeth Bishop

P S. I don’t know much about my father except that his remaining sister, my last “Bishop” relative, who died last year, was devoted to him, and so had been all my mother’s side of the family, too. He was apparently quiet and gentle; I have a letter or two he wrote to my Bulmer grandmother, very funny and affectionate. He was tall and good-looking (neither of which characteristics he handed on to me). He liked to stay at home and read. Most of his books unfortunately were sold before I grew up, but I have a half-dozen or so. This week I have been reading his very elegant edition of “Stones of Venice”, with his bookplate, given him by two of his sisters for Christmas, 1898. What a madman! (Ruskin, I mean, not my pa—)

I don’t think I thanked you enough, really, for your invitations in England. I’ll get there around June 14th, I think, although my dates are a bit vague. I am hoping Lota can come with me but I’m afraid she’ll be flying back from Milan then — she can’t leave her park; no one does any work when she’s not on hand. I have a sailing back for August 1st, my comings and goings in England depend somewhat on some old friends I’m visiting, and I also want to get to Scotland for ten days, possibly.

I made a long automobile trip in Ireland long ago and had such a nice time I don’t think I want to go back unless I can drive around again that way. It seems to be much more popular for tourists than it was when I went. I saw just about all the coastline except for Wicklow, I think — spent a couple of weeks in Dublin, etc.—

About Brazilian politics — I see I’ve ignored your remarks without meaning to, and I shouldn’t have because people rarely take that much real interest in Brazil … There seems to be a tendency in the U S to take Brazilian leaders at their word — and their word, or words, for the last thirty years or so, haven’t been worth a penny. ENCOUNTER sent me a pamphlet by John Strachey about “Democracy”—platitudinous and simple as it is (meant for broadcasting, perhaps) he does make intelligent distinctions about “democracy”—how there is really so very little of it, and that little pretty much confined to the U S, Britain, and France (he says). The U S — from the press — seems to feel that the last two presidents here were really, underneath, democrats and liberals trying to help the poor masses, etc. — and were held back by greedy Senators and an entrenched rich greedy aristocracy. Well, they couldn’t be more wrong — but I’ve rarely been able to tell any American this, and have almost given up trying. One was a psychotic who had a breakdown—& this last was a crook. — I said several years ago he was closer to Jimmy Hoffa than anyone else — and my American friends thought I had turned “reactionary”. He has now, thank heavens, been kicked out — and has taken a huge fortune with him, and left the biggest property in land ever acquired in South America (this acquired by crooked deals, while he preached “land reforms”) — probably to join Peron and Franco in Spain. This is the 1st time anything quite so corrupt has happened in this now thoroughly corrupt country; the Brazilians feel ashamed, and are, in general, determined to clean things up, I think. WE (US) urge “democracy” and “anti-communism” on them for years; the minute they act on this we again turn on them and accuse them of “witch hunting”! What do we want, I wonder. April 2nd (the Day After) an important man at the US Embassy met Lota on the street and said “We don’t like your revolution!” (She had been in the Governor’s palace for 48 hours, in some real danger — while the maid and I stuck it out here at the apartment, worrying about her—)

I’m glad I wasn’t along because I really think I would have slapped him. Now the Americans are all talking in a superior way about “McCarthyism”—which is absurd, no matter what injustices — and there are some, undoubtedly — are being committed. In the 1st place this is real—(I actually met several of those Chinese spies, years ago now—& wrote my friends, who thought I was being funny) and in the 2nd, there’s no McCarthy at all. The new government is honest, at least — Castelo Branco pretty bright, one gathers — for a general, amazingly bright — his new cabinet good, on the whole, too. But the mess is too great, the financial situation too hopeless, for any one government to clean it up. And though the entrenched aristocracy is pretty much a legend by now — there are “conservatives” who won’t give up anything at all. The worst weakness of the so-called “right” (the terms we use make no sense here) is, even when well-meaning, the gap between classes here — and the horrifying lack of feeling.

Brazilians are not civic-minded, that’s all. — Rich, religious, well-educated old families, living blameless, charitable lives by their lights, commit hideous cruelties without realizing it — sometimes just a matter of intonation. They don’t like animals, don’t understand “pets.” They’ll have three gardeners — a Picasso on the wall — a library in four languages — and throw the garbage out in the street. (As Picasso might, too! — It’s something to do with being Latin, I’m afraid — and so many of the things I like them for have the same roots, it’s hard to disentangle) They are mixtures of 17th century Portugal, “Victorian”-style 19th century family-life and sentiment, and contemporary industrialized man — this last a very small admixture that doesn’t affect the “masses” much at all — To expect them to act — overnight — or react, like the U S A, or an American of the same social or financial standing, is plain silly. — I never in my previous life dreamed for a minute that I’d be glad to have an army take over — but I have been, here, — twice now—

You see, unfortunately (I often think) I am very much involved in politics here because of Lota. — It is such a small society and her family has been prominent in diplomacy etc for generations. Carlos Lacerda (you must have read of him, by now) is an old old friend of hers, and quite a good friend of mine, too — old neighbors in the country — She is working here at his request, and I suppose we are for him (he’s running for President, and I hope wins) — in spite of many reservations, and his obvious faults. — This is a part of life I never would have had much of an idea of if I had stayed in the U S and just paid my taxes and voted, and never had come within miles of any of the real leaders.

“Industrialization” is inevitably the future for all these backward countries, no doubt. Since it is a choice of evils, apparently, for Brazil (I had hoped they’d find another, neutral way out, but I don’t think they’re strong enough to) — I’d much prefer the American variety to the Russian — which is all Russia amounts to any more, isn’t it?

Carlos has been invited to England — he was so rude to the French (& very witty, too) that England immediately invited him over. Now if he’d only study British Trade Unions — but he probably won’t!

Rio, April 10th, 1965

Dear Anne:

I suddenly have realized that more than a month has gone by — almost six weeks — since I wrote you and that I haven’t heard from you. I wonder if my letter could have got lost? — or perhaps yours back did?… The “revolution” did improve the mails at first, but lately we have been losing things again — one I know of, coming from England a few weeks back — maybe your letter was in the same batch (I think they disappear in batches, and occasionally re-appear in batches, weeks later). I am packing up to spend a week or ten days in Petrópolis this morning and started putting your BOOK in my bag, when I remembered that I hadn’t heard from you at all, and I thought how awful it would be if you hadn’t received my first letter about it … Heavens — so much has been happening here lately, I hadn’t realized just how long it had been. I do hope you haven’t been worried or thought — oh dear — I didn’t LIKE the book!

This is just a note — I’ll write from the country. I did write and acknowledge the book and said I’d be sending you a long letter soon — well, the soon is now six weeks — but I’ll get it off from Petrópolis. Just now all I’ll say is (and if you got my letter forgive me for more or less repeating myself) — I know how hard you had to struggle, so I think perhaps you’ll be surprised when I say my first impression was one of remarkable freshness and spontaneity. Compared to the other Twayne books I’ve seen, it sounds fresh, young, sensitive, — not a bit like those tired academics parading all their tired little theories and clichés. — It also sounded as if (or I think it did) you had really enjoyed some of my work — and I hope you did, and are not forever incapacitated from liking it again, after all your work. I liked the quotations (I’ll write more about Wittgenstein to you someday) and delighted you dedicated it to Mark. It you have already received a letter saying all these same things, forgive me — and if you haven’t, forgive the Post Office — and forgive me for letting so much time go by before it dawned on me I hadn’t heard from you.

My “long letter”—is just a sheet or two of small corrections, all in the biographical part — nothing to do with the other parts. I must have written you awfully hurried and confused letters, like this one. The corrections are all just facts,* nothing to do with your interpretations (very nice) or opinions, etc. — I thought I’d better get them straight, since yours is the first book to publish them, and probably the last — dates, names, etc. — So please don’t worry. And as I said before — congratulations on a really difficult piece of work well done. There was so little to say about me — and you did find enough, and said it awfully well — more later … Now I hope you haven’t been sick, or your family hasn’t, and that’s why I haven’t heard — and where is your book of poems? I am eager to see that.

Much love,

Elizabeth

Did the permission get cleared up? I wrote HM [Houghton Mifflin], and the agent — long ago now. The agent was also furious with HM—“absurd” he said.

Here for a few days only—

Ouro Prêto, Minas Gerais

May 20th, 1965

Dear Anne:

I hope you can forgive my long silence, and I do hope I haven’t held up the book or given you a lot of trouble about it … I really don’t know why I found such difficulty writing about it, except that I don’t seem to like to talk about myself any more. I am afraid you will think these many little corrections both finicky and egotistical. But you are the first person who has ever written any of this down, and you may well be the only one to, and so I’d really like to get the facts right, this once. I’m sure you can understand that feeling? They aren’t important to anyone but me, really. — I must have written to you hastily and incoherently and now I am putting you to a lot of work, and I am really sorry.

Perhaps I’ll mail off just this first page today and re-write the other corrections — all Chapter 1*—and mail them from Rio. I see I started to do this for you in March … I have never stalled so before. I really am dreadfully sorry.

You know, I didn’t receive your letter written from the hospital — and I am sure now that you didn’t get at least one of mine. I have lost a lot of letters lately — Write only to the Petrópolis address (oh — I think you already do that) — because I suspect I lose even more of those sent to Rio. Now I see that a month ago you said you’d write after you got properly moved, and I do hope that didn’t go astray. I hope your new house is working out nicely — how very exciting, and send me a snapshot of it! Lota and I were supposed to go to Italy on May 2nd — and had to change our plans because of her job. I had thought I might get back to England just about the time I did last year. Now we are planning to go to Italy in late September or the first of October — but I must say it seems a bit doubtful to me, she is so busy with this last stretch of park-building.

I am sorry to hear about the miscarriage — and I’ve always been told by my friends that they have an awfully depressing after-stage. I wonder when your child & husband take off on their summers, and if you are really all alone in Cambridge? Where is Mark going? And what are you writing? Yes — please don’t get a dog until I know when I am coming back! — unless you are just too lonely, or need a watchdog badly — Surely I could stay at some inn or other — only they’re apt to have dogs, too, in England. I am trying to persuade Lota — to come to England with me — telling her London is the best place to shop in the world, because that’s what she likes to do best — but so far I haven’t had much luck.

I have been working away seriously at Wittgenstein, some every morning, after coffee, in bed, — and it still comes and goes, but I have found some wonderful paragraphs. I think the quotation you use at the beginning is splendid.

I’ve read your book through three times now, I think. — And, I think I told you — and hope it finally reached you — that my first impression was one of real freshness, spontaneity — and feeling how wonderful it is to have even one reader as good as you. Do you suppose there are any others — or even a few half as perceptive? The other Twayne books are academic-sounding—“competent”, all done in the latest approved clichés — yours is very different, thank heavens, I think it must have been horrible to do — my life is so uneventful and I have done so very little, really — but you managed it, somehow. Lota read it, and said right away “This sounds as if she really liked your poetry.” And I hope you did at the time, and are not forever incapacitated from doing in the future. […]on Monday. Please do forgive me, once more — I feel very guilty about this slowness. I hope you’re all well and will please write me again very soon—

Love,

Elizabeth

INTRODUCTION

P iii, 5 lines from the bottom. Shouldn’t or be left out?

P v: My grammatical mistake, pure carelessness. PLEASE change to “interpret exactly as he sees fit.” Horrors.

CHRONOLOGY

1934 went like this: Met MM. Mother died. Graduated. And leave out Mary — we had been friends for three years, but she graduated in 1933, and other friends were more important to me. I’m afraid I sound a bit too friendless in this part and in chapter one — I really wasn’t!

1939,—again, the emphasis seems a bit wrong. I had friends in N Y and in Key West. Loren MacIver, the painter, and her husband, Lloyd Frankenberg, stayed with me in K W, and through Loren I met the Deweys. Leave out Mrs. Hemingway here — we were closer friends in the later ’40s.

1951—Academy Award earlier — a year before Bryn Mawr, I think, or 1 in the spring, other in the fall.

1952. Lota’s name is Maria Carlota Costelat de Macedo Soares, no accent marks. But you don’t need all that, just Lota de Macedo Soares. You could say “stopped over to visit friends in Brazil” (I had others beside Lota — I met several Brazilians in N Y during the war) “Had a violent allergic reaction to cashew fruit and had to give up trip to the Straits of Magellan.” That is what actually happened. I hate “ill” and think it sounds too mysterious, or neurasthenic. (See Chap 1, p 16, for the same thing. Couldn’t you say there that I had asthma and bronchitis? Except for asthma, a hereditary tendency, I am really very healthy, and I think it is better to come out and say what ails one rather than give the impression one is a hypochondriac, or perhaps a dope-fiend …)

1952—“short stay” in N Y, rather than a “visit”. I still feel like a New Yorker. I kept my garret in N Y all the time I was in Florida, too — so I could get back whenever I wanted to. I would now if I could afford it—

1961—yr. I went to the Amazon 1st (I’m going again next month). But I have traveled some almost every year I’ve been there.

1962—Chapelbrook Fellowship

1964—Book on architecture comes 1st; I worked on it in 1956. I wish you’d skip the translations. They amount to next to nothing, no real work, and no real interest. Or just say I have translated some prose & some poetry, from the Portuguese. I can’t be considered a cultural go-between, nor do I want to be. The fact that I live in Brazil seems almost entirely a matter of chance … perhaps not, but that’s the way it seems to me.

QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL is coming out in October, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Houghton Mifflin is bringing out a re-print (paper back) of the 1st 2 books, about now. Chatto and Windus is also bringing out another collection this year or next.

I am working on a book of prose pieces about Brazil, — places, mostly, with a bit on baroque churches, popular music, one or two life-stories, — maybe. This will be done in about a year or 18 months. At present I am using the title BLACK BEANS AND DIAMONDS:

Petrópolis, this time — but Rio is the best

address these days—

November 14th, 1965

Dearest Anne:

You have been hiding your light under a bushel — at least as far as I knew. I am very much impressed with your book and think some of it is wonderful, and all good, and that you have enormous talent. Although I’d like to have seen some of these before, I also think you’re wise to spring the whole book on people like that because it does make much more of an effect. and also shows character, patience, etc. — & patience particularly seems to be a necessary ingredient in writing poetry …

I hope you haven’t been expecting to hear from me long before — I did stay in Minas for over two months to buy a completely unnecessary house, but a beauty — but this is a secret for a while, please. I’ll tell you all about it later. Lota kept forwarding batches of letters she thought were important, but she didn’t send books or magazines, etc., and then at the end she kept a lot of letters because I meant to leave, couldn’t get a plane for a week because of the weather, etc. Your books (I got 2) had been unwrapped, so I don’t know when they were mailed to me. So I’m sorry if I have been indifferent or impolite—

I hadn’t any idea you could write such good poetry and it is such a nice surprise — however, I would have thought you’d write careful & beautiful poems, if you did write them — I just never dreamed of the number or the really high quality. It has really cheered me up a great deal when I rather needed a little cheering, too. I like very much: To My Daughter in a Red Coat, (the last three lines are lovely); Fairy Tale; The Traveller (almost best of all, I think — more later); Nightmare in North Carolina; and the title poem — and lots of others, too, but those are my favorites so far. Why haven’t I seen them, I wonder — well — I get Poetry but don’t always read it carefully I’m afraid — and I used to get Paris Review but finally let it stop — and the others you acknowledge I don’t see — that’s why.

The Fullbright Prof. of American Lit. in Rio this year was so much taken with “The Travellers” he wants to put it in an anthology he and Donald Justice (?? — I think — someone fairly well-known) are doing. His name is Mark Strand — you’ll probably be hearing from him. He borrowed my 2nd copy to study and might like more poems. Also — while I’m on this promotion paragraph — Ashley Brown, one of the founders, and an advising editor still, on SHENANDOAH, thinks he would like to see some chapters of your book on me and perhaps — if Twayne agrees — one could be used in that magazine. It’s Ashley Brown, 921 Gregg St., Columbia, South Carolina, 29201—if you want to write him. I have just sent him your address, too, so probably you’ll hear from him, if you’d rather wait. He was the Fullbright Prof. here last year and we saw a lot of him — very intelligent — I may have mentioned him — I went to Bahia and Ouro Prêto, etc. with him — an excellent traveler. That would be a good place to send some poems, too, I think — send them c/o him Shenandoah & mention me—but then it is better, I suppose, to tackle the more famous ones first — Partisan, N Y Review of Books, Kenyon, or Hudson, etc. — or the New Yorker. (As you know perfectly well.)

“Harvard” is another one I like very much, too. “Winter”, too — particularly the first stanza, very beautiful, I think. I realize I know much more of you now, reading that little note at the end, than I ever did before. (And you know so many boring and unnecessary things about me!)

I brought some letters up with me to answer today but don’t seem to have one from you among them — and I’m not at all sure I really answered your last, that I received in Ouro Prêto, or not. I’ll see when I get back Tuesday. And I’ll try to write again soon. Such a lot of things accumulated because I stayed away so long. I am going to Seattle in January, or the end of December, to be a poet-in-residence for two terms — I’ve been shilly-shallying about this for a long time but finally made up my mind to mostly because I need the money to remodel my house! (1720–30—) supposed to have a treasure buried in the walls — well, I’ll write you about it and send you a picture, too.

This is just to thank you very much for your book and to tell you I really like it very much and am deeply impressed. The poems are all honest and careful and yet have great feeling, I think — I trust them completely! I’m just sorry they didn’t make a prettier book for you. Well, mine, that you may have received by now, is a bit too pretty, I’m afraid. I don’t really like the drawing of me on the back, either — but publishers always insist so on photographs, and if not a photograph of one smoking into one’s typewriter, a collection of mis-leading blurbs — so I decided this was more impersonal, since it doesn’t look much like me, and also would please a lot of Brazilian friends. I’m afraid you’ll find the contents only too familiar, and also very thin — it should be twice the size.

It is so beautiful here I can’t imagine why I want another house. (Well, to save it, for one thing — it’s falling down) — I think Mark would find my view almost Chinese in the ancient way — cascade and waterfall to the right, covered rocks, semi-tropical trees, and a lot of blue agapanthus lilies to the left — all seen through a very fine rain today.

Please write me when you can — to Rio. I have to go back to Ouro Prêto for a week or two before Christmas, to get the work started on the house, — but I’ll be in Rio most of the time until I leave now. I hope you are all well — how’s the daughter?

With much love,

Elizabeth

Sometime I want to go into more details—