The first time I heard Elizabeth Bishop’s voice was in the
early 1990s. I went to Special Collections at Dalhousie
University in Halifax and borrowed an lp record done at the
Library of Congress (you could take things out from S.C. at that time). The lp
was translucent red! I took it home and listened to a young Bishop reading “Jerónimo’s
House” and a couple other early poems. Bishop made this recording at the
invitation of Robert Lowell, then Poetry Consultant, in October 1946. It was,
however, not her first recording. Brett Millier notes that Bishop made a
recording at Harvard
University in September
1945, but it wasn’t very good. (194)
For someone as shy as Bishop, there is a remarkable archive
of audio recordings of her reading, particularly from the 1960s and 1970s. So
many are there that Random House included her in its “Voice of the Poet”
series, which is still available, if one is able to play cassettes.
The Library of Congress has recently launched an online
digital archive of many of its recordings of poets. Bishop is included, but interestingly,
the 1946 recording is not listed. The recordings are of events at which Bishop read with other poets in 1969 and 1974.
It appears that Bishop made another recording at Harvard in1947. You can hear it on Harvard’s “Listening Booth” website. Along with a
number of other recordings connected to Bishop.
Bishop’s next extant letter to Grace is dated 28 August
1956. Bishop noted, “I’ve been very busy the last few weeks.” She had made a
number of trips to Rio, mostly to see the
dentist and the doctor; but one thing she did during the previous week’s visit
was spend “a horrible day making a recording of poems” in a recording studio at
the U.S. Embassy. The recording was for “a commercial company in N.Y.” — what
would that have been and why? Bishop doesn’t say. She says that the embassy let
her use the studio and her friend Rosinha went with her “and held my hand,
figuratively speaking….Lota couldn’t get away.” The recording took all day, “10
to 5, with lunch out.” Bishop’s assessment: “I record abominably, but sort of
felt I had to [do the recording].” This commercial outfit did “make a little
money,” but Bishop couldn’t “imagine anyone buying them, really.” By the end of
the day, she, Rosinha and the sound-engineer were “exhausted.”
One of the Rio trips took
her to see the young allergy doctor, whom she had mentioned to Grace a number
of times. It is in this letter we learn what gift Bishop decided to give him,
since he would not take any money from her: “so I gave him a copy of my book,
and now I’m trying to get someone in New
York to buy me some sort of very elegant brief-case.”
Such items were not easily bought in the Rio
of the 1950s. She was quite determined to find some way to repay him for all
the “tests and serums etc.,” which he had been giving her for a couple of
years. “I hate to think what I would have paid a doctor in N.Y. for it all.” It
was this young doctor who had “hit on the infection or whatever it was.” And
she happily declared to her aunt that she hadn’t had “asthma for months, for
the first time in 15 years or so.”
In Rio she also was getting
some clothes made: “a suit and two dresses” because of her weight loss. These
new outfits were tailored with such precision that if she gained “an ounce” she
wouldn’t “be able to get into them; they’re like the paper on the wall.”
One of the wonderful things about these letters is the way
Bishop writes to her aunt as if she is simply talking to her, as if they were
chatting over coffee and not thousands of miles apart, with weeks, even months
between the letters. Clearly, Grace was a vivid presence in Bishop’s mind, and
staying connected was a priority between aunt and niece.
The next post will introduce a house guest.
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