"I'm back from my week at Elizabeth Bishop's childhood home in Great
Village, Nova Scotia. What follows is the beginnings of an essay on the
experience -- in the form of the raw entries in my day-to-day notebook.
I'll pretty these up, elaborate them, and essay-fy them over the next
few days. It was a bigger experience than I can encompass in words, I'm
afraid -- and it'll take months to come to grips with it. Anyhow..."
[...]
"[23 February - Wednesday] I didn't get to sleep until after midnight,
and got up a little before six. I read what criticism there is in the
house about "Filling Station" -- not much, really -- certainly it seems
to be relatively neglected compared to many of her other things. Divisions of the Heart
has two amusing interpretations of the last line -- one erudite, the
other McLuhan on acid -- the first one found that the 'so, so, so' line
echoes Prospero in The Tempest; the second claims only we
can be the 'somebody' who loves us all... the 'we' being poetry-lovers,
or maybe McLuhanites, I don't know for sure which. Anyhow, I'm going
to combine the two into 'prospero-us' for the poem I'm contemplating as
an entry, or part of one, in the House Journal before I leave. The whole problematic of the House Journal
will have to form a separate essay, I suppose -- anyhow, I have one
almost complete in my mind about the concept and its realization.
Yesterday my walk took me up the road past the funeral parlour and out
of town. There was almost no traffic. I walked a couple miles or so on
the way out -- on the way back I took a side road upward and through
what I thought was a ridge but turned out to be a high pasture covered
in crusted snow -- you could see for miles and miles, also down on Great
Village -- just the church spire, really. I snapped a picture. Back
in town I stopped at the antique store that is now next to the Bishop
house and browsed for a pleasant hour -- I got a volume of Lowell's
poems for the house -- James Russell, not Robert, and an old book on
English composition which emphasized memorization -- some of the
passages were half decent, but it's remarkable how bad many of them
were. I also got a little plate with a crack in it that reminded me of
Russian lubki, with their colours applied with violent inattention to
the stippled outlines of the country scene -- and a turned birdseye
maple bowl made by somebody named Bell out on Prince Edward Island --
fairly recently, I presume. Towards evening I went to the little
Quickmart that the old grocery has turned into, and got munchies and
dip, Pirate peanut butter cookies and a locally-made curriwurst sausage.
This morning it is snowing rather hard, so I'll have to think twice
about going out."
"[24 February - Thursday] Yesterday wasn't
productive. In the afternoon I got this sudden intense urge to go up
the road to the left of the church, despite all the snow, and out to
where I knew, vaguely, the cemetery was. I turned left about a mile out
at what almost looked like a driveway; there was an enormous pile of
snow across it a few yards in that would block access to anybody who
wasn't on foot -- I expect they must salt any winter corpses away somewhere
until spring, or at least until a thaw long enough to soften the
thoroughly frozen ground. It was heavy going getting out there --
sometimes I could feel that I was crossing water, perhaps deep water,
under all the crusted snow; sometimes the crust would break and I was
thigh-deep, almost, in snow. But I made it, albeit with several almost
disastrous falls along the way. Most of the stones were completely
obscured by the snow. But as luck would have it, I found William Brown
Bulmer (Bishop's maternal grandfather, whom she referred to as 'Pa')
almost immediately. Probably her grandmother was buried next to him --
they died a year apart, in 1930 and 1931, but the snow had hidden her
completely. Anyway, I said a silent thank you for the love and care
they had given her. Then I struggled toward the power lines that I thought
marked a country road -- no, it was just the power lines -- so I had to
retrace my steps and struggle back to the highway. Then I went home. I
got the fixings for making an apple pie, but ended up making a kind of
apple oatmeal mush instead.
"I called Mark around eight that evening. It turned out he thought I was coming here next
week. He called back an hour or so later, after putting his two little
girls to bed, and we thrashed out what to do. Then around half past
ten he drove over from Brookfield and stayed about an hour. He brought
with him all the files, so I'll be able to concentrate on what hasn't
been done yet. He likes the house. His boss is keeping him very busy
at work, but we will have Friday evening and most of Saturday to work.
The book won't get done in the time we'll have, of course, but it's
better than nothing. I read Susan Halpern's Migrations to Solitude and Howard Norman's My Famous Evening, with its charming essay, "Driving Miss Barry", about his time with Sandra."
"[25
February - Friday] About five hours sleep. "Music by Letter" is
playing on CBC-2 -- they're up to 'Q'. The programme begins with a
medley of alphabetical songs - "R-E-S-P-E-C-T", "L is for..." "M is
for..." "YMCA" and the Jackson Five's "ABC -- simple as 1-2-3" among
others -- so I am taking that as a Divine Prompt to pursue the ideas
I've had for composing a "Filling Station" palinode.
"I made a
couple of apple crisps yesterday - consumed one entirely by myself, and
about a quarter of the second one -- finished off the hot dogs, and ate
about a third of the chicken thighs I brought with me -- boiled. The
curriwurst was great boiled, and the water it boiled in, when I added a
couple tablespoons of peanut butter and about a cup of milk, made a
really delicious soup -- no further seasoning was necessary.
"Mark
called around eight or so that evening to say he couldn't come out
because of road conditions. I felt bad about that, but I did make
progress on a translation of Kuzmin's "Faustina", which has the same
title as one of Bishop's poems -- I noticed for the first time that it
is written in sapphics, and that proved to be the key to
producing a version that pleased me more than anything I had got from it
before. It is one of Kuzmin's "Gnostic Poems" -- all of which are
terribly obscure and difficult. I worked some more on the Filling
Station palinode, and took quite a number of pictures the past couple
days -- I guess I'm glad I took Evan's suggestion to bring the camera
along after all. Endless listening to Shostakovich's preludes and
fugues, and Glenn Gould playing the first half of the well-tempered
clavier, and Bishop reading her poems, again and again -- you can make
out background voices in quite a number of them. Also, I used my little
micro-recorder to make a copy of the Bishop recording, and spent about
an hour reading some of my poems from last year and Canticle onto a tape."
"[26
February - Saturday] Mark finally made it over at about two in the
afternoon. We took some more pictures, and talked and talked about many
things, and I read him some of my poems from last fall -- he was
enthusiastic about them. We finished my "End of the Month Club" soup
for supper -- made from the water I had boiled the chicken thighs in,
two packages of Caesar salad, and the rest of the duck egg instant
noodles I'd brought with me, along with the rest of the milk. Then he
settled down to work and I settled down to reading -- he took a nap for
an hour or so with a poem pressed to his chest, and then got up and did a
creditable job on a version. Around nine o'clock I finished cleaning
up and shut out the lights and turned down the furnace, and we left for
the Truro bus station. I got in to Halifax at about half past eleven,
and took a cab straight home."
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