As a Nova
Scotian, born and raised, and trained as an historian and archivist, I am aware
of the close ties between Nova Scotia (and the Maritimes) and Massachusetts
(and New England), which have existed for centuries. I began to research and
write about Elizabeth Bishop’s life and work in 1991, with a deliberate focus
on her Nova Scotia connections and childhood, which encompassed multiple,
active, abiding links with New England (after all, she was born there). From
the outset, I was open about my intention and bias, which was to explore,
explicate and evoke the places, people and experiences of that Nova Scotia
childhood; and I more or less confined my analyses and interpretations to these
areas. What I saw in the burgeoning academic scholarship around Bishop in the
1990s and 2000s (what Thomas Travisano labeled the “Elizabeth Bishop Industry”)
was a disinterest in her maternal heritage and Nova Scotian experience — or
worse, a dismissal of it — which was upsetting because judgements were made by
people who had virtually no idea who Bishop’s maternal family was — as
individuals and as a collective — even when they read her autobiographical
prose, which tends to be undervalued in preference of her poetry.
I published
a small book in 2011, Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia’s Home-Made Poet, an
introduction for Nova Scotians about her life, work and legacy; but the bulk of
my research was collected in a lengthy biographical/literary study, “Lifting
Yesterday: Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia,” which remains unpublished (not
for want to trying).1 A few people, including Bishop scholars, have seen it, some of them
have even read it. The manuscript was completed in the late 1990s and over the
years I made revisions as new information arose. This manuscript has chapters
on Great Village; members of Bishop’s maternal family, including a chapter
about her mother; a mini-biography of Bishop’s life in three chapters; and
several chapters analyzing unpublished work that is directly connected to her
childhood and maternal family. Why this manuscript has never been published is
a complex matter having to do, in part, with my lack of ambition for it and, in
part, with national chauvinism in the USA and national indifference in Canada.
To counter these vague forces of resistance, I have posted a good deal of
information on the above subjects on this blog, in the “Nova Scotia Connections” section. I have also responded, at length, on this blog to recent
books about Bishop, including biographies by Megan Marshall and Thomas Travisano.
This post
is another response to something written about Bishop by an American academic scholar:
Langdon Hammer’s “Grandfather’s Bible,” which appeared on 23 February 2025 on The
New York Review of Books website. This essay is connected
to a biography that Hammer is writing, yet to be published.
I met Langdon Hammer in Wolfville, N.S., in 2019, when he
visited the Acadia University Archives to look at material in the
Bulmer-Bowers-Hutchinson-Sutherland family fonds. The object
that most caught his interest was the large family Bible, hence the title of
his essay. He also visited the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village. Thus,
he spent a few days in the province visiting places that mattered to Bishop.
After our meeting, I sent Hammer the PDF of “Lifting Yesterday,” so he had
direct access to my research/sources.
Hammer’s essay begins with a one sentence synopsis: “In the
world of her grandparents in rural Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Bishop found a deep
well of inspiration — and Christian belief she would always struggle against.”
This matter-of-fact statement seems to me fair enough, even if I wondered about
its simplified definitiveness. But then, as I read his essay, it struck me that
he was doing something similar to what Thomas Travisano did in his biography.
One of the main purposes of Travisano’s book was to place Bishop firmly, if not
absolutely, as an AMERICAN poet, so he marshalled evidence to support this
claim. Hammer’s purpose, in this essay at least (it remains to be seen how the
rest of the book will unfold), is to account for how Bishop became an
“Unbeliever” (as the title of one of her poems declares). He does so by lining
up people, places, experiences, objects in her Nova Scotia childhood as
negative elements against which she resisted, recoiled even. He sees her work
as an effort to free herself from the grip of restrictive and judgemental
religious and cultural forces.2
To do this, he engages in a process of reductive thinking, reducing a place and
a people to singularities, even though he had access to my manuscript (I know
he has read at least some of it because he incorporates facts from it that are
found no where else). He also selects lines, phrases and images from Bishop’s
poems and stories that support his argument, though there are others that would
question it.
Hammer begins by quoting from an unpublished manuscript at
Vassar, “Reminiscences of Great Village,” a nearly 40-page document Bishop
wrote in the early to mid-1930s. He scatters a few quotations from this
document throughout the essay, excerpted out of context. Nowhere does he
mention that this piece was a first version of “In the Village,” which Bishop
wrote in the early 1950s in Brazil, though he juxtaposes references and
quotations from the later piece with those of “Reminiscences.”
The scene Hammer offers is one of the first in this
document: Bishop’s maternal family sitting together after their evening meal
while her grandfather reads from “Burns or the Bible.” Hammer then introduces
Bishop’s maternal grandparents: William Brown Bulmer and Elizabeth Hutchinson
Bulmer, sketching their characters in two paragraphs, again, with brief
quotations from unpublished and published sources, which leads him to describe
them thusly: William “had a working man’s blocky body, bald head, round face, and
thick white moustache”; Elizabeth “was short, square-jawed, fretful, and kind.”
In “Reminiscences” Bishop names the child “Lucius” and the
mother “Easter.” Hammer’s suppositions about why Bishop chose the mother’s name
(he doesn’t seem interested in the child’s name) are vague and untethered, and
he sets up Bishop’s mother as a woman gripped by “religious mania.” I have
written at length about Gertrude Bulmer Bishop and why Bishop might have named
her “Easter,” not only in “Lifting Yesterday,” but also in my essay “Shipwrecks
of the Soul: Elizabeth Bishop’s Reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins” (Dalhousie
Review, 1, 74, Spring 1994, 25-50).
Hammer then describes the interior of the Bulmer home, with
particular focus on the artwork on the walls, including two portraits: of
Gertrude and Arthur Bulmer as children. Hammer writes: “The children’s stiff
poses, derived from generic models, were joined a bit awkwardly to their
likenesses, which had been done from life, suggesting an imperfect fit between
body and soul.” (!) Bishop’s memoir about her uncle, “Memories of Uncle Neddy,”
describes these paintings in detail. Indeed, her receipt of them from her aunts
Grace and Mabel triggered the memoir. Nowhere in the memoir does she say their
heads were awkwardly joined to generic bodies (like some 21st century meddling
by AI). She writes: “The paintings are unsigned and undated, probably the work
of an itinerant portrait painter. Perhaps he worked from tintypes….” (PPL,
622), because Bishop had seen many tintypes of her aunts and uncles in family
albums. The Acadia University Archives holds a tintype (circa 1885) of Arthur
Bulmer that is the exact image of his portrait. If you look closely at the
tintype you can see faint lead pencil lines that the painter drew for
reference. Sadly, Gertrude’s tintype is lost. The paintings still exist, though.
Unfortunately, I have lost track of them, not for want of trying to repatriate
them when they went up for sale at the Tybor de Nagy Art Gallery in New York
City in 2011.
(Arthur Bulmer, tintype, BBHSff, AUA)
(Arthur Bulmer, portrait, location unknown)
(Gertrude Bulmer, portrait, location unknown)
(The two portraits hanging in the Tybor de Nagy. Photo by
Judith Stark)
Why make such an odd claim when Bishop explains clearly the
origin of the paintings? It is hard not to conclude that it is because it
allows Hammer to make a strange judgement about these two children, that their
bodies and souls never really fit together, thus, perhaps, accounting for their
adult struggles and troubles. Hammer reduces Gertrude to her breakdown and
Arthur to his alcoholism, though Bishop clearly regards these two central
people in her childhood with a refined and sympathetic perception of the
complexity of their lives.
The next section of Hammer’s essay is a description of the
Bulmer family Bible, which he says “weighs ten pounds,” and states: “This
wonder was purchased from a salesman traveling by horse through Nova Scotia’s
fields and forests.” The Bible was published in 1870, so certainly before
automobiles, but there were trains and major gravel roadways across Nova
Scotia, which connected Great Village to the town of Truro and the city of
Halifax (the province’s capital). The salesman who Hammer claims sold this tome
did not have to wander around “fields and forests.” How many ten-pound Bibles
could he carry on a horse? Might he have taken the train? Then Hammer writes,
“It may have been a gift from Bishop’s great-grandmother to her grandmother on
the occasion of her marriage in 1871.” No “may” about it.
I quite like Hammer’s detailed, poetic description of this
holy book, which goes on for several paragraphs, and concludes: “It is tempting
to trace Bishop’s life long fascination with the materiality of books and other
printed matter, including maps, to her childhood experience of this mighty
object.” I certainly agree with this suggestion, but why so tentative when
other conclusions are more categorical?
Then comes the shift to the more oppressive side of what
this “mighty object” represented: “its claim to bind, define, and complete,
and its sacred authority, with the power to command, to tell the reader what to
believe and how to live.” Resisting, even repudiating this kind of
confinement and control was, according
to Hammer, a main program and process of Bishop’s life and art. I actually do
not disagree with this assertion, either. What I take issue with is not so much
the “what” (though some of that, too) but the “how” of Hammer’s thesis.
Much of Hammer’s essay centres around two of Bishop’s great
poems: “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” (with direct links
to the Bulmer Bible) and “At the Fishhouses” — both poems triggered by Bishop’s
return to Nova Scotia in 1946 after a 16-year absence. Before dealing with
these poems in detail, Hammer gives a chronology of Bishop’s childhood from
1915 to 1930. Nearly every book about Bishop condenses this long stretch into a
few paragraphs, even the full-dress biographies, the intention being to
compress the presence and influence of Nova Scotia. And fair enough in Hammer’s
essay, which has limited length, so he cannot be discursive. But he echoes many
of these earlier chronologies by using adjectives such as “brevity” and
“periodic” for Bishop’s time in Great Village, arguing these fleeting
encounters “made the place matter more, not less.” Then he describes this
place:
… a traditional community, closer
in character and tempo to the early nineteenth century than to the early
twentieth century. There was no plumbing in the Bulmers’ house; they made do
with pitchers, basins, and a privy. Gammie churned her own butter. Carts were
more common than cars. Evenings were spent with Burns and the Bible rather than
the radio.
Why do so many scholars need to point out the plumbing? (Do
you hear my sigh here?) The Bulmers had a well and indoor pump with some of the
best water on the planet (that water is still drunk out of the tap by every
artist in residence who stays at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village).
Churning one’s own butter meant self-reliance, not deprivation or poverty. A
farming area would, of course, have lots of wagons (not “carts”). There was a
coach that carried passengers to and from the train station in Londonderry. And
Arthur Bulmer was one of the first people in the village to get an automobile
(not a “car” in the 1910s). Commercial radio came to Canada only in 1918 in
Montreal, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of Canada. By 1922 there were
39 radio stations across the whole of Canada. If radio had been available in
Great Village, the Bulmers might very well have been the first to get one.
The remainder of this section summarizes the time between
1930 and 1946 — Bishop’s Vassar years and her first major travels. He
inaccurately observes of this time: “Elizabeth had last visited [Great Village]
in 1930 and it would be twelve [sic: sixteen] years before she
returned,” which she did in 1946, a year Hammer is keenly focused on.
This synopsis leads directly to that return to Nova Scotia
in the summer of 1946, clearly triggered, as Hammer says, by her psychoanalysis
with Dr. Ruth Foster. Hammer mentions (and excerpts from) a remarkable
multi-part “letter” Bishop wrote to Foster, which became available only a few
years ago. Hammer writes that this letter shows that “Bishop was ready to
explore deep secrets and conflicted feelings, and even finally to go ‘home’.”
An astute assessment.
The next section describes in some detail that trip home to
Nova Scotia, all the while she was struggling with her drinking. It took Bishop
some time to reach Nova Scotia, as she took a circuitous route out of New
England; but, eventually, she arrived. Hammer writes: “Bishop … passed Great
Village without stopping, continued east to Halifax, and took a room in the
Nova Scotian, a grand hotel on the waterfront, which directly faced [the] Nova
Scotia Hospital across the harbor in Dartmouth.” Halifax is south-southwest of
Great Village, not east. One does travel east-southeast for a very short
distance from Great Village to Truro, but then it is directly south. Why should
this small error of fact matter? If you are going to include it at all (which
isn’t actually necessary for the progression of the narrative or to support the
thesis), try to get it correct.
That view of the Nova Scotia Hospital is the focus of what
follows, and Gertrude Bulmer Bishop’s time there — and Bishop’s interest in
learning about her mother’s experience. Hammer states, “Bishop visited the
Department of [Public] Health3
looking for her mother’s medical records” and speculates that Bishop also
visited the hospital itself. Both claims seem likely, based on the evidence I
have found. Hammer quotes a brief section from a draft poem Bishop wrote in one
of her travel notebooks (I have never seen this notebook):
I see you far away, unhappy,
small
behind those horrible little green
grilles
like an animal at Bronx Park.
It is not clear if Bishop refers to her mother or Foster
(perhaps to both), but when I read these words I immediately thought of an
unfinished poem, “the walls went on for years and years…” (Edgar Allen Poe,
FSG, 2006, 61-2), which, from my analysis, is about the Nova Scotia Hospital
and Gertrude’s time there.
Hammer then writes, “Bishop traveled from Halifax to the
Atlantic coast” and on to Lockeport in Shelburne County, where she stayed for
some weeks. Halifax is ON the Atlantic coast, she would have travelled
along it, westward, to Lockeport, which Hammer says is 200 miles from Great
Village: Great Village is 308 kilometres (191 miles) from Lockeport, and 261
kilometres (162 miles) from Halifax. But I am being nit-picky.
It was while staying at the Ragged Island’s Inn in Allendale
(near Lockeport) that Bishop experienced the trigger for “At the Fishhouses.”
The powerful concluding image of this poem, the “rocky breasts,” was linked in
Bishop’s mind to a dream she had about nursing at Foster’s breast, which occurred
just before going to Nova Scotia. Sitting on the rocky shore near Lockeport,
Bishop made the link between the dream and that place — and with her
existential crisis — and the poem began.
After Lockeport, Bishop finally went to Great Village where
she stayed with her aunt, Grace Bulmer Bowers, on the Bowers’s farm called
Elmcroft. Hammer writes of Grace and William Bowers: “The couple … lived in his parents’ house ....” William
Bowers bought Elmcroft himself in the 1890s when he married his first wife Kate
Blackadar. Where did Hammer find this detail? He gives no source (a common
omission). Why include this tangential, incorrect, fact at all?
What follows is a description of the landscape, the
geography of this area, most of which is more or less accurate, e.g., the
massive tides ebb and flow “across great tracts of glassy sand [sic:
mud] that reflect the sky.” Sand, mud: what is the difference? It is, after
all, just earth. But sand is very different in colour and texture from the “lavender,
rich mud” (“The Moose”) in that part of the Bay of Fundy.
As Bishop prepares to leave Nova Scotia, Hammer notes the
family stands on the side of the road hailing a bus, a scene Bishop incorporated
in “The Moose,” which took decades to complete. Before this departure, Hammer
writes, “Grace fed Elizabeth ‘a drink of rum’ while they chatted in the
kitchen, ‘& I think I took a sleeping pill’,” thus, the “dreamy divagation”
Bishop experienced on the bus ride back to Boston, similar to the dream about
Foster that she had when she was on a bus in New England. What irks me is “fed,”
as if Grace was enabling Bishop’s alcoholism. Why not simply: Grace gave Bishop
a drink of rum? Again, the source of this information is not given. Considering
what Hammer claims about Grace immediately afterwards, there is an implication
here that Grace is not only an enabler, but a hypocrite.
What follows is a meditation on Grace which I find at best
puzzling and at worst insulting, patronizing. Bishop dedicated “The Moose” to
Grace — a clear expression of her abiding love and admiration for her aunt.
While Hammer acknowledges Grace’s devotion and states that she “did not judge”
Bishop, he observes: “her [Grace’s] way of life was very different from
Elizabeth’s and an implicit rebuke to it.” What in heaven’s name does this
mean? That anyone’s chosen way of life is innately a rebuke to someone dear who
does not emulate it?! Grace lived her life according to her character, choices
and circumstances. So did Bishop. Both subject to forces within and beyond
their control. As with us all. I knew Grace’s daughter Phyllis Sutherland well.
We were good friends. While I never knew Grace, I learned enough from Phyllis
to know that Grace never “rebuked” Bishop (either directly or implicitly), not
even as concerned Bishop’s sexuality. Hammer writes about Grace:
[she] lived in a small town [sic:
village] where she was born, firmly rooted in her home and family and supported
by religion and custom in a routine organized around farm work,
church-sponsored activities, and her children’s progress in life. She wasn’t
prim or pious. Yet even her name, Grace, called to mind [whose mind?] divine
goodness and the demand for the believer to be grateful to God and faithful to
the church’s teachings — which promoted temperance, disapproval of pleasures as
mild as dancing, judged homosexuality a sin meriting damnation.
I was flabbergasted by this assessment of a person Hammer
never met. What biography of Grace did he read to conclude such sweeping
statements? If he had read my account of Grace Bulmer Bowers’s life in “Lifting
Yesterday,” he would have seen a different person. Good grief, he even enlists
her name, given to her, not self-chosen, confining it to its theological
definition, to prove his point. In my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,
the first (that is primary) definition of “grace” is: “The quality of pleasing
attractiveness, charm, esp. that associated with elegant proportions or ease
and refinement of movement, action, expression, or manner.” (1140) The theological definition is number
nine. “Grace” is a large, complex, generally positive concept with multiple
definitions. Of course, the faithful Bulmers chose the name especially, perhaps
aware of some or all of its meanings, but surely not with the intention of
loading their daughter with a posteriori judgement of her niece’s way of
being! When Grace was born and given her name, she had no niece. I mean, really!
Imagine Hammer’s conclusion if the Bulmers had named their daughter Charity!
I will not counter Hammer’s characterization of Grace here.
If anyone is interested, I can share my take on Grace (from birth to death) in
“Lifting Yesterday.” Suffice it to say, Grace was far livelier and more
broad-minded than Hammer presents. For one thing, Grace loved to travel, to
“gallivant” as Bishop described it. If Hammer has read the hundreds of extant
letters Bishop wrote to Grace, he would know just how much trouble Bishop had
keeping up with her aunt’s trips, done for all sorts of reasons, work and pleasure.
Not only did Grace (her name, faith and way of life) embody,
according to Hammer, an implicit rebuke to Bishop, so too did the family Bible,
which Hammer states Bishop encountered again during her 1946 visit (he writes
that she saw and held it again when she visited Grace). I would like to know
the source of that fact. Grace did possess the family Bible by then, but I have
never seen any reference to Bishop seeing it at Elmcroft. The next section is a
lengthy analysis of how the Bible extended this rebuke and how Bishop resisted
and repudiated it, as evidenced in “Over 2,000 Illustrations…,” which poem
Hammer says “is an act of stock-taking, in which she evaluates her life in
relation to the Bible and its claims on her.”
I have read this section a number of times and find some of
its insights compelling and some puzzling. Bishop did repudiate organized
religion generally, and Christianity particularly. She was an “Unbeliever” and
“Over 2,000 Illustrations…” is her coming to grips with aspects of her cultural
heritage and judging it wanting, as, according to Hammer, it found her wanting
(that assessment seems to be his main point: that Bishop’s familial heritage
found her person and way of life wanting). There is an implication, though,
running through this analysis, that Bishop escapes a cultural prison rather
than comes to terms with her heritage (one thinks of Wallace Stegner’s concept
of “angle of repose”). Bishop’s poetry is filled with images from Western
Christianity — yes, often with irony, but if she had to and did escape
completely, why does she continue to hold onto and convey in her art images and
metaphors from this heritage? While irony is a key element in her poetry, it is
by no means the only quality and intention (I think of her humanity, curiosity,
doubt, humour). Bishop often said, simply, that something “just happened.”
To indict Bishop’s heritage even more strongly, Hammer then
refers to her story “The Baptism.” Curiously, this piece is almost universally
ignored in Bishop scholarship (at least what I have read). I have, however,
looked at it closely in “Lifting Yesterday.” Hammer has reduced Great Village,
almost categorically, to “a community centred in religious belief and
practice.” I wonder what he would think to learn that Great Villagers were keen
about sulky horse racing and baseball; eagerly embraced amateur theatre and all
manner of lectures by itinerants; were passionate about education, sending
dozens and dozens of teachers out into the world; and were not above enjoying
fancy dress balls at the Mason’s Hall.
“The Baptism” is a fictional story which draws on Bishop’s
experiences and memories, but it is not one of her autobiographical pieces.
Hammer introduces it to reinforce his argument about the grip that the Baptists
and Presbyterians had on the village (thus on Bishop), represented by the
“looming” St. James Presbyterian Church, with its 112-foot steeple, that sat in
the centre of the village. He writes: “Both sides of Bishop’s maternal
grandparents were Baptists.” Not quite accurate. William Bulmer was Presbyterian,
but he also attended the Baptist church because his wife was a Baptist. Hammer
does get correct that William Bulmer’s ancestors were from Yorkshire, and that
Elizabeth Hutchinson’s “line came from England.” Indeed, from London area; but
that is as far as he goes in contextualizing these people.
Then Bishop’s great-grandmother is introduced: Mary
Elizabeth Black Hutchinson Gourley. Hammer has seen photographs of her that are
in the Acadia University Archives. Indeed, he describes one such image in
detail (see below) and remarks that “the roundness of her soft face reappears
in the faces of her daughter … and granddaughter: a physical, visceral marker
of the poet’s connection to her family’s Victorian past and Baptist faith.”
(How does having a soft round face make one Victorian or Baptist? Is Hammer
implying this quality is more organic to culture than to genes?) In the family
I met, it was always said that Bishop had a Bulmer look, especially “the Bulmer
lip.” So, it depends on who you ask.
(Mary Elizabeth Black Hutchison Gourley, AUA)
Next up are Mary Hutchinson’s sons. I wonder why Hammer does
not mention Bishop’s great-grandfather Robert Hutchinson, who was shipwrecked
off Nova Scotia in the 1866, the ancestor who most intrigued Bishop? Perhaps
because he cannot be implicated in the Baptist cage from which Bishop escaped.
The three brothers: George Wylie Hutchinson, John Robert
Hutchinson and William Bernard Hutchinson. Each of these men had long, lively
and controversial lives. And Bishop knew a lot about them. Hammer is most interested
in the two younger brothers, who were directly connected to the Baptist church:
John Robert was a missionary in India and William Bernard was a Baptist
minister and scholar. Hammer writes of John: “After five years [in India] he
abandoned his wife and children [sic: they had only one son, who went on
to become a gifted cartographer] for a scandalous romance with a young woman.”
The rest of his remarkable and, yes, scandalous life, including eschewing his
Baptist faith, just like his great niece, does not matter. He was, for example,
the author of many books (fiction and non-fiction), a couple of which Bishop
owned. Of William Bernard, Hammer writes, he “was notable in an upstanding way.
He became a Baptist minister, educator, and eventually the president of the
Baptist college near Great Village in Wolfville.” That “college” was Acadia
University, William being the first graduate of it to become its president in
1907. Depending on which route you take, Great Village is between 145 and 180
kilometres from Wolfville, so, not very “near.”4
The next relative to contribute to the dubious Baptist
heritage of Bishop’s childhood is Arthur Bulmer, information about him coming
from Bishop’s lengthy memoir, “Memories of Uncle Neddy.” Hammer’s selection of excerpts
focus on Arthur’s childhood involvement with this denomination, especially the
temperance pledge, which the adult alcoholic Arthur broke repeatedly. Hammer,
quotes this pledge, which Bishop could recall from memory, though he suggests
it was “her own exuberant version of it,” all of which is to highlight Arthur’s
failings, even as it is clear in the memoir that Bishop identified and
sympathized with him — after all, she kept his portrait on a wall of her home
in Samambaia and later in Boston. Why would she do so? Surely not to remind her
of what she had successfully escaped?
The purpose of Hammer’s inaccurate geography lesson and
selective roll call of Bishop’s maternal family was to reach a sweeping
conclusion:
Great Village: it was a beautiful
place, a gentle landscape of pink tidal flats and rolling farmland. It was also
a place of poverty, material hardship, and unforgiving cold, where death came
suddenly to the young as well as the old. The people born there were honest and
good. They were also zealots, missionaries, temperance crusaders, adulterers
who fled their families, and drunken ne’er-do-wells.
Such a judgemental view of historical, cultural and familial
reality is disheartening. If Hammer read “Lifting Yesterday” (which it seems he
has) he has dismissed it categorically. His prerogative, of course. But I
cannot be silent.
All the preceding was done to set up the next section
wherein Hammer lines up the evidence that, unlike as she writes, ironically, of
course, in “At the Fishhouse,” Bishop was not “a believer in total immersion.”
Remember, Bishop is comparing her belief in total immersion with a seal’s,
which is bobbing around in the Atlantic Ocean — might the “immersion” she
refers to be something other than the dogma of the Baptist hymns she sings to
this seal? Isn’t Bishop being funny here, not literally theological, making a
good joke amid the deep existential exploration she engages in in this poem?
What follows is a series of claims (quotations) proving
Bishop’s unbelief; yet in the end, Hammer settles on ambivalence. Bishop
described herself as an agnostic rather than an atheist, which was both a
strength and a weakness in her own estimation: “I wish I could go back to being
a Baptist — not that I ever was one — but I believe now that complete
agnosticism and straddling the fence on everything is my natural position,
although I wish it weren’t.” So, if she was to take a side, might it just be
the Baptist side?
Then Hammer returns to “Over 2,000 Illustrations …,” which he
notes “was published in Partisan Review in June 1948 … placed first in
the issue, followed by a piece by Jean-Paul Sartre titled ‘Literature of Our
Time’.” For Hammer, this juxtaposition (imposed by the editors not chosen by
Bishop) is significant, and he proceeds to explain why — a fascinating analysis
of the poem’s importance in relation to the geopolitical and cultural reality
of Cold War America, concluding: “The poem pivots from the vertical authority
of Grandfather’s Bible to the horizontal plane of ‘travel’, where everything is
a matter of ‘relativity’ and ‘perspectivism’ (these are Sartre’s terms), and poetry
becomes a practice of what Bishop called ‘geography’.”
Finally, a detailed exegesis of “Over 2,0000 Illustrations…”
follows, line by line, image by image, comparing them to images in the family
Bible. The images become increasingly uncomfortable, even grim, all related to
the control and inadequacy of Biblical scripture, and how it has undermined
Bishop’s world and self. The conclusion for Bishop, as Hammer sees it: “She
turns back to the Bible at the end of the poem as if it might be possible
really to go home again and start over.” But that is not possible, of course:
“Yes, to be born into a Baptist family can be punishing.” The “gilt rubs off”
the “mighty object” tainting Bishop with “guilt.”
What about that “old Nativity” at the end of the poem? That
“family with pets.” Hammer is at pains to say that Grandfather’s Bible does not
contain an illustration of the Nativity: “The only image of the Holy Family in
it represents Joseph, Mary, and the Baby Jesus attended by a lamb.” (Might this
domestic, not miraculous image more accurately echo William, Gertrude,
Elizabeth and Betsy the dog?) But Bishop’s invocation of it — calling it old —
“suggests not just that this is a picture … in an old Bible, but that the idea
of the Nativity is old, part of a cultural and personal past that is now
outdated and obsolete, no longer to be believed in.” So, the happiest time of
Bishop’s life, with her mother and father in the first months of her life
before all the tragedy began, according to Hammer’s assessment, is no longer to
be believed in? So, Bishop must repudiate not only scripture but also her
entire cultural and familial origins, as if the latter were based “completely”
on a Christian text? Would the often literalist Bishop have intended all this
repudiation? It seems to me that Hammer is setting up a kind of false
dichotomy.
Hammer concedes that Bishop’s Nativity is actually found in
the pages of her writing — the tableau in “Reminiscences” that he invoked at the
beginning of his essay. Bishop never “went back home” to live, but she returned
again and again and again to visit — her last visit in May 1979 to receive an
honorary degree from Dalhousie University, just months before she died. She
told Dorothee Bowie, “this one rather pleases me.” (One Art: Letters,
633)
Hammer concludes finally that “Over 2,000 Illustrations …”
“is a rival to the heavy book — smaller, improvised, personal, secular — a
critique of the sacred text and an alternative to it”; but without this book,
without the Nova Scotia cultural and familial world of her childhood, would
“Over 2,000 Illustrations …” have been written at all — or any of Bishop’s
poems for that matter. All children accept or eschew or adapt their birthright,
a natural, necessary and inevitable right of passage, a maturation process.
Bishop was NOT unique in this process — she was perhaps unique in using it to
create her great art. The people, places and communities she grew up in (I
wonder how Hammer will treat Worcester and New England in his biography) were
not chosen by her any more than they are for all children — then and now. She
may have repudiated what she saw as the far too common hypocrisy practiced in
Christianity, some of which she experienced in her family. But she never severed
contact with her family (even the more problematic Bishop side), or with Great
Village. She continued to respect deeply and be influenced profoundly by her
childhood, maternal family and Great Village, to the end of her life.
*****************************************
Notes
1. “Lifting Yesterday” is a convergence of
years of research, locating as many primary sources as I could find with the
time and resources I had. The text is as faithful to these sources as I could
be, but what was clear to me was that the records I found represented a
fraction of the lives and times of the people in question — the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Most of their lives and times remained undocumented. What did that time
contain? How many unrecorded conversations, decisions, actions, ideas and dreams
remain unknown remain invisible? What was the influence of all of this “Love
Unknown,” as Travisano titled his biography of Bishop.
2. I am a Nova Scotian poet born and raised in a community with
four churches, with a devout Presbyterian maternal grandmother — who just
happened to be born the same year as Bishop — and a maternal uncle who became a
senior cleric in the United Church of Canada. I remember a large illustrated
children’s Bible in my childhood, which my sisters and I poured over, when we
were very young. I, too, have repudiated it, am an atheist and believe
organized religions of all kinds have blood on their sacred texts; but I am
just as much part of my cultural milieu as Bishop was. I love classical sacred
music (Bach, for example) and the beautiful architecture and art that organized
religion created, just like Bishop. I offer this personal aside only to say
that as opposed as I am to theological dogma, I would never have repudiated my
grandmother and uncle, or the culture in which I was raised. It has influenced
me both positively and negatively.
3. Gertrude’s time at the Nova Scotia
Hospital was from 1916 to 1934. The legislation governing the Nova Scotia Hospital
underwent periodic revision. The Revised Statutes for 1923 stated, “The object
of the hospital shall be to ensure the most humane and enlightened curative
treatment of the insane in the Province.” (Revised Statutes 453) In 1916
the hospital’s operation came under the control of the Board of Commissioners
of Public Charities, but was transferred in 1931 to the Department of Public
Health, the name of the department in the 1940s.
4. One of the things Hammer does not understand, it seems to
me, is that the Maritime Baptists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
were keen supporters of education and scholarship — they founded a college/university
for goodness sakes. These Baptists were not the anti-intellectual,
fundamentalist evangelicals that dominate this denomination in many places (especially
in the USA) in the early 21st century.
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