Bishop’s letters to Aunt Grace, as well as to her writer
friends, were often populated by the guests who were fairly common at Lota’s
house in Samambaia, especially in the 1950s. Bishop’s vivid descriptions of
these people are highly entertaining. One of them even ended up in a poem,
“House Guest,” which Brett Millier says was “based loosely on … the sister of
one of Lota’s aristocratic friends.” (411) This funny poem rarely receives attention
(Millier gives it a sentence), but its existence comes from a fairly constant
experience of Bishop’s Brazilian life. Though “House Guest” is a kind of
caricature, still, it is entirely sympathetic toward “the sad seamstress,” who
might actually be “one of the Fates … Clotho, sewing our lives.”
(Bishop's studio at Samambaia, where
she wrote "House Guest" -- photo by Ann Marie Duggan)
In the 28 August 1956 letter, Bishop offered her aunt a lively
word portrait of another house guest, “an old friend of L’s.” This guest had
been with them for two weeks, “resting up from her husband and mother and
general debility.” She was “a beautiful Rio
‘society lady’,” who was so “delicate” that she made her hosts “feel like
peasants.”
Whereas “the sad seamstress” was obsessed with sewing, the
society lady was obsessed with “deciding what she can eat and can’t eat,”
opting for “tea and dry toast and baked apples.” The rest of her days were
spent “taking a bath, putting on make-up, taking a short walk, [and]
taking a nap.” Bishop’s conclusion is that she was a “hypochondriac.” But “in
spite of it all she’s really a very nice creature, with nice manners.”
Elizabeth and Lota tried to entertain her and persuade her
to do other things: “we’re getting really tough and taking her to a movie
in Petrópolis — I hope she doesn’t collapse on us!” (I wonder what was playing
at the cinema in Petrópolis in late August 1956!)
After all this background, Bishop finally describes this
person, physically, to Grace: “tall, blond, sort of grizzled hair [rather like
Bishop’s], big perfect teeth (I envy my Brazilian friends their teeth …) and —
one blue eye and one brown eye.” Curiously, Bishop never tells her aunt the
name of this striking person.
Bishop’s life-long struggles with asthma, allergies and
other illnesses would perhaps make her a little impatient with a relatively
healthy person believing she was ill, wasting “so much of her life being sick
like that,” with her “five bottles of medicine at her place at the table.” Even
so, Bishop wasn’t entirely unsympathetic.
This house guest was a good Catholic, too, and asked to be
taken to mass. “Lota — who is very anti-church — tried to get out of taking
her.” In the end, other friends provided that service, but Elizabeth and Lota were
required to fetch her at “a little church” near them. They arrived and “went in
and got her off her knees.”
Bishop then tells Grace an interesting fact about their
guest and about the history of Brazil:
“She had a Scotch governess for 27 years.” As a result, “she speaks beautiful
English with a slightly Scotch accent.” Bishop met other Brazilians who had had
this kind of education: “There used to be lots of these brave Scotch and
English governesses here.” One of the remnants of this pedagogy and upbringing
was that “their ex-pupils all still eat oatmeal every morning!”
In “House Guest” the seamstress confessed that “she wanted
to be a nun / and her family opposed her.”
“Perhaps we should let her go,
or deliver her straight off
to the nearest convent — and wasn’t
her month up last week, anyway?”
Tucked in this letter, long vanished, was a sprig of jasmine,
which grew outside on her studio. Scribbled in her nearly indecipherable hand,
Bishop wrote: “Smell this — if it has any smell left.” Brazilian Jasmine blooms
are red, unlike the more commonly thought of white jasmine flower. Perhaps it
was not coincidence that Bishop included a sprig of this exotic flower after
describing their delicate, beautiful, nice house guest.
(Brazilian jasmine blossom)
The next post will introduce Bishop’s letter of 19 October
1956.
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