Bishop and Biography
The first full-dress
biography about Elizabeth Bishop was Brett Millier’s ground-breaking Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It,
published in 1993. She established the complex chronology, the full arc, of
this remarkable life (no easy feat), and revealed some of the troubling and
secret aspects of what Bishop called an “untidy activity.”
In 1994 Peter Brazeau and
Gary Fountain’s Remembering Elizabeth
Bishop appeared. This mosaic of memory provided a unique perspective on
Bishop’s life through the reminiscences of 115 people who had known her.
Not everyone was happy about
this surge of biographical reveal, even though it was already fifteen years
since Bishop’s death. In 1994 I attended a symposium about Bishop at Vassar College.
During a keynote address, Robert Giroux, Bishop’s publisher and friend, more
than hinted that biography was an unwelcome intrusion into Bishop’s privacy. An
odd view since Giroux himself edited the first collection of Bishop’s letters, One Art: Elizabeth Bishop Letters, also
published in 1994. The issue at that time with Bishop and biography was, I
suspect, about who controlled it.
For the next two decades most
writing about Bishop was literary criticism, that is, the focus was on the
work, especially the poetry. Biography was, more or less, out of favour.*
After nearly twenty-five
years, a new biography about Elizabeth Bishop has appeared, Megan Marshall’s Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
(2017)** — an important event.
While I deeply admire and
respect the work done by Millier and Brazeau/Fountain, and have referred to
their books many times in the past two decades, my issue with their work and
that of most American Bishop scholars is a lack of understanding and, at times,
a dismissal of Bishop’s Nova Scotia connections.***
I came to Bishop, in the
early 1990s, from this point of view: a Nova Scotian seeking to clarify and
restore the Nova Scotia
aspects of Bishop’s life and art. Such has been my mission ever since. I have
followed this path in many ways, including writing what I refer to as a
“biographical study,” Lifting Yesterday:
Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia, a lengthy manuscript for which I have not
found a publisher (not for want of trying). It is from this perspective and
context that I write what follows.
********************
[*Note: I explore this
subject in “Elizabeth Bishop and the Biography Bogey,” an essay I wrote a
couple of years ago for a collection I was to edit with Nova Scotia writer Alexander MacLeod. Alas,
that collection never materialized. Some of the literary critical books about
Bishop in the past two decades have included significant elements of her
biography — for example, Victoria Harrison’s and Lorrie Goldensohn’s — but they
are not conventional biographies.]
[**Note: Carmen Oliveira
published a biography of Lota de Macedo Soares and Elizabeth Bishop, Flores Raras e Banalíssimas in
Portuguese in 1995. This book was translated by Neil Besner and published in
English in 2002. Its focus was primarily Bishop’s life in Brazil.]
[***Note: Millier and
Brazeau/Fountain came to Nova Scotia
to learn about it and meet Bishop’s family and friends. Brazeau/Fountain interviewed
seven Nova Scotians, including Bishop’s first cousin Phyllis Sutherland. They
did not dismiss Bishop’s Nova Scotia
connections per se, but neither did
they give them adequate weight or attention.]
********************
In the Interests of Full Disclosure
In the fall of 2014 I offered
my network an electronic version of Lifting
Yesterday. In November of that year Megan Marshall, whom I did not know,
contacted me and requested to receive it. I sent it to her. We exchanged a few
emails, mostly related to Bishop’s time in Revere,
MA (which has been discussed in print by
Michael Hood, whose contact information I passed on to Marshall). I did not hear from her again
until December 2016, when she wrote requesting my mailing address because she
wanted to send me a copy of her book. Upon receipt of this copy, with its kind
inscription, in early February 2017, I noticed I was in the acknowledgements. She
cites Lifting Yesterday eight times
in the notes, and at one point refers to me as “Sandy,” (313) a nickname I haven’t used since
my teens, and is reserved only for very old friends.
I began immediately to read it
and the reviews that John Barnstead posted in the NEWS section of this blog.
What follows is not a “review,” but a response to a subject about which I feel
strongly.
Before I get to that response,
I need to write something about my views on biography.
********************
My views on biography
I have read many biographies.
Indeed, biography is a favourite genre. Bishop liked reading biography, too. Like
her, I have read more than only biography, but it is safe to say, it is a preference.
What does this preference signify? At the very least, I suppose, an interest in
the lives of others, especially artists.
While not making an in-depth
study of it, I have also read a fair bit about biography — books and essays
exploring the nature and practice of this ancient art form. To me, biography is
an art because it is, primarily, an interpretation. From these efforts, I have
come to my views on biography:
No life, even the simplest or
most uneventful, can be easily or entirely contained on the page, even in a
large tome. And the lives of “personages,” people with significant public
aspects, are complex and, paradoxically, often elusive. The life on the page is
only an approximation of the life that was lived.
All biographers come to their
subjects with unavoidable, inevitable biases. Sometimes these are evident;
sometimes these are hidden.
Biographers attempt to gather
as much information as possible, from multiple sources. Biographers are miners.
But then they must select, arrange, compress, and distill some sort of essence
from the raw material, and construct a narrative. This practice alters what
actually happened in ways that can be obvious, but most often in ways that are
not clear at all.
The many types of records
that a biographer uses hold their own ambiguity, some closer to what actually
happened than others. When a record is cast adrift from its context, it can
take on a meaning quite different from what it originally meant.
The idea, to my mind, is to
re-construct something that sits near to what was “true” — I do not use the
word “truth” (with “the” or “a”) because, in my opinion, that is nigh
impossible.
As readers, we know a
biography presents someone’s view of a person — a well-informed, thoughtful,
good-intentioned, accurate, insightful in the guesses view; but a subjective
view none the less. The biographer must earn our trust and does so not only by
what she or he includes, but how he or she writes.
Those of us who have
researched and written extensively about Elizabeth Bishop (whether biography or
literary criticism) have our own “Bishop” — our sense of who she was based on
our biases and practices. Our Bishops are, of course, not the “real” Bishop,
only interpretations of her. Approximations are the best we can do. Still, it
is usually worth the effort to write and to read biography.
********************
A first impression
To date, I have read seven
reviews of Marshall’s
book. Four of them critical (Morris, Garner, Jollimore, Peck), three of them
glowing (Treseler, Avery-Miller, Mason). What does one make of this
disagreement, particularly since it splits, more or less, along gender lines
(most of the male reviewers on the negative side)? “Perhaps” it only reveals,
yet again, that biography is highly subjective in the telling and in the
receiving.
I put “perhaps” in quotation
marks because it is a word Marshall uses a
number of times in her book — at least seventeen by my count, which may not
seem like many for a 305 page book, but it takes on more significance when
attached to sentences such as the following: “Perhaps Elizabeth had
been better off without her parents.” (291, Italics Marshall)
This conditional adverb, a
word connoting speculation, offers a particular approach. “Perhaps” it suggests
that Marshall
is cognizant of the elusiveness of knowledge and the dubiousness of
interpretation, a semantics that allows the reader to make up his or her own
mind. Marshall
combines such speculations with many questions — indeed, her book is filled
with questions (I have not counted them), some of which she answers, some she
does not. Some of them she herself asks. Some of them she imagines others asked
of themselves. Since Bishop is a poet of an oeuvre
filled with qualification and questioning, such a biographical practice is,
arguably, appropriate. I wish I could say it convinced me, made me trust her
when she ventured into conclusions; but I am so puzzled by her overall
approach, which, I confess, unsettles me, that I am not sure how I feel about such
particulars.
********************
The approach
One of the main issues
addressed in the reviews I have read is this overall approach. This book, one
could argue, is comprised of two books: a biography and an autobiography. The
chapters alternate between Marshall’s
connection to and memories of Bishop (the book begins and ends with such
chapters) and Bishop’s own story. Indeed, what emerges is a remarkable or
strange (depending on your bent) parallelism. Marshall not only knew Bishop (she was a
student in Bishop’s last writing class at Harvard in the 1970s), she also sees
distinct similarities between their lives. The reviewers find this approach
either distasteful or compelling.
I am a writer of what I call
hybrid genres (in the academy, the label is multi-disciplinary). Indeed, ten
years ago I wrote a collective “biography” of the McQueens of Sutherland’s
River, N.S., as a book-length narrative poem, what I call a “domestic epic.”
Even Lifting Yesterday is a meld of
biography, history, genealogy and literary criticism. So, in principle, I
cannot object to another writer taking an unconventional path, which is
certainly what Marshall
has done. I have never read anything quite like her book.
Marshall is, at least, being transparent about her biases and
perspective. She tells us how she felt about Bishop and what brought her to
writing this book (including the “B” she received in Bishop’s class, (187) in
contrast to the “A-“ she received in Lowell’s (94)) — deeply personal reasons (unlike, perhaps,
the path she took to write her previous biographies about the Peabody sisters
and Margaret Fuller).*
I am just not sure Marshall has done a
service to Bishop or biography by setting her own story beside Bishop’s,
linking them almost point for point. Marshall
declares that even if “I had disappointed Elizabeth Bishop, she could never, I realized,
disappoint me.” (237) But Marshall’s approach comes off, to my mind, as getting
in the last word. After reading about what Marshall experienced with Bishop, I came away
with a picture: the unfairly rejected student becomes the authority on the
teacher.
The last page of this book
records the circumstances around Marshall
receiving a posthumous “apology” from Bishop, through one of her Harvard
classmates. Marshall
declares this apology was “unsought,” but she took it as “an invitation, a
call.” (305) Marshall’s immersion in the records of Bishop’s life was extensive
and sustained, but with the interjection of her own story, again and again, the
information and insights she reveals about Bishop seem rather beside the point,
more a means to an end, a way for the biographer to work through her own
issues.
[*Note: Over the past
twenty-five years, I have met dozens of people who told me their Bishop
stories, their encounters with Bishop herself or Bishop’s work, told me how
such encounters affected their lives. Indeed, there is a section on this blog
called “First Encounters,” with some of these stories. I have my own Bishop story,
which I have written about on a number of occasions; but I did not presume to include
it in my interpretation of Bishop’s life.]
********************
What this biography reveals
If I was asked to sum up in a
sentence of ten words or less what Marshall’s
book is about it would be: This book is about Elizabeth Bishop’s sexuality and
relationships. Marshall
frames the chronology along the line of Bishop’s friends/confidants, lovers and
partners. The list of people is long and includes: Margaret Miller, Louise
Crane, Robert Seaver, Marianne Moore, Marjorie Stevens, Robert Lowell, May
Swenson, Lota de Macedo Soares, Roxanne Cummings, Lilli Correia de Araújo,
Alice Methfessel. (Bishop’s mother is here, too; but I will address Marshall’s treatment of
her later.)
All of these relationships
were well-known before Marshall
wrote her book. Millier and Brazeau/Fountain identified them back in the 1990s.
What is new in Marshall’s book comes from the sources she mines, in particular,
letters that until recently were not known to exist, but which are now at
Vassar College — of special note are letters written to (and sometimes from)
Dr. Ruth Foster, Lota de Macedo Soares, May Swenson, Lilli Correia de Araújo
and Alice Methfessel. These letters, most not yet published, are Marshall’s primary
sources. Even a cursory glance at her notes reveals that significant portions
of her narrative are based almost entirely on the content of these letters.
Further, what is new in this
book is a serious glimpse into intimacy: thoughts and feelings between Bishop
and her partners/lovers, including the agonizing self-searchings when a
relationship collapsed (as with Lota, Roxanne and, for at time, Alice). These things are
not out of place in a biography, of course. I read these reveals with keen
interest, setting them beside what I already know about these relationships
from other sources.*
I have not read any of these
letters, so I must accept Marshall’s
use of them at face value. She has mined them, as any biographer does, not only
for facts, but also for evidence to support her perspective. Here, I can only
question her use of them in relation to facts and issues about which I know
something from my own research.
[*Note: I did wonder if we
needed to know about Bishop’s menstruation and her fear she had no clitoris (Marshall is not the first
to bring the latter into print.). I am a more overt feminist than Bishop and I
strongly believe women should not be ashamed of or hide their bodies. But, like
Bishop, I also believe there are places where others should not be admitted,
places tenderly private.]
********************
“Alternative Facts”
The facts and issues about
which I know the most are related to, but not limited to, Bishop’s Nova Scotia connections.
Below are a few particulars that caught my attention:
1. My first issue is with a
description: “in the center of tiny, primitive Great Village, Nova Scotia.”
(10) I sighed. The next time “primitive” appears in this book is on page 145,
referring to the people in an Uialapiti village in Brazil, indigenous people who
walked around their community naked. The depictions of Great Village
in books about Bishop have been, by and large, egregiously reductive. Marshall is in good
company. It is easy to dismiss what you do not know. Marshall’s evidence for this descriptor
includes a Bishop quotation, found in an essay by William Logan, describing her
grandparents’ house: “a homely old white house that sticks its little snub nose
directly into the middle of the village square.” And this confirms “primitive”
how? When I read this quotation, I thought of “The Moose”: “homely as a house /
(or safe as houses).” It seems that Marshall
views Great Village this way because “there was no
running water,” (10) an observation she repeats later in the book. “Primitive”
was a word Bishop thought quite a bit about, especially as it related to visual
art; but she understood its complexity. I can be excused, I hope, when I wonder
if Marshall actually read my book, the first
chapter of which is a detailed description of Great Village
and Bishop’s views about it.
2. “Gertrude in a sanatorium
fifty miles away in Dartmouth, across the narrow
bay from busy Halifax.”
(13) Great Village
is 117.9 kilometres from Dartmouth,
that is, just over 73 miles. The body of water between Dartmouth
and Halifax is Halifax Harbour,
and in spots is anything but “narrow,” its “Narrows”
being but one feature of what is, arguably, the largest ice-free harbour in the
world. Immediately after these incorrect facts, Marshall asks: “Was it imagining
that distance, the land and water to be crossed by carriage or automobile…that
made Elizabeth love the two glossy maps…that hung on her classroom wall…?” Marshall should have
consulted a map.
3. Marshall
states on page 14 that Bishop’s time “ended abruptly” when her paternal
grandparents appeared in Great Village and took her back to Worcester. Temporally, this claim is
incorrect. The Bishops arrived in the village in September of 1917 and stayed
for nearly a month before departing with Bishop (and her Aunt Maude) for New England. It might have felt abrupt to Bishop, but
that is not how Marshall
writes it.
4. “Elizabeth’s aunts Maud and Grace thrived on
another kind of sentiment — the verse epics of Longfellow, Tennyson, Robert and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning…they had come to cherish in village reading
circles.” (19) Let us diminish the accomplishments of people you don’t know,
dismiss whole swathes of canonical nineteenth century poetry, and dwindle
serious amateur study of literature: Great
Village had a long-standing literary society the president of
which, for many years, was a well-known Nova
Scotia poet, Alexander Louis Fraser. Gertrude was
also a member of this society.
5. “Gwendolyn Patriquin, a
frail, beautiful girl she had played with in Nova Scotia, who died of untreated
diabetes….” (20) Gwendolyn died on 1 September 1922. If Marshall had checked Wikipedia she would have
learned that the revolutionary breakthrough in diabetes treatment — insulin —
had only just been achieved in 1921 (by two Canadian doctors) and was still
very much in the experimental stage. Thus, all diabetes was “untreated” at that
time.
6. “Uncle Jack
[Bishop]…established a $10,000 trust fund for Elizabeth.” (21) This trust fund came to
Bishop from John Bishop Sr., her grandfather,
through his will, when he died in 1923, just days after his wife, Sarah Bishop.
7. “The Nova Scotia Bulmers
knew nothing of such camps [Chequesset] or schools or colleges for women.…”
(21) Grace Bulmer graduated from Acadia Ladies’
Seminary, part of Acadia University in Wolfville,
N.S. Indeed, Grace’s uncle
William Bernard Hutchinson became the first graduate of Acadia
to be its president. His brother George W. Hutchinson was a graduate of the Royal Academy
in London, who
became an accomplished illustrator, not an ancestor with “dubious talent.” (44)
I think the Bulmers knew a little more than Marshall credits.
8. “‘Apoplexy,’ the result of
a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke, was the cause recorded on her mother’s death
certificate, with ‘Chronic Psychosis’ listed as the ‘contributory’ factor.”
(45) As it goes, this is correct, except there is nothing at all about “cerebral
hemorrhage or stroke” on the certificate. This is an example of a record taken
out of context. “Chronic Psychosis” is a real winner of a term for those who
seek to reduce Gertrude Bulmer Bishop to “madness.” Gertrude Bulmer Bishop’s
hospital file offers a much more complex account of her final days, but Marshall is not
interested in the context, only the sensation of the bureaucratic label. Marshall says it is
uncertain if Bishop attended any service for her mother. I learned from Phyllis
Sutherland that Grace, her mother, accompanied Gertrude’s body back to Worcester and saw Elizabeth
at that time, which does not prove Bishop attended any service; but she was
certainly told more than only “the fact of Gertrude’s death.” (45)
9. “By age thirty-six, Elizabeth’s own existence
was painfully linked to a number of faults — shyness, dependence on alcohol,
chronic asthma — that…seemed possible to ease, perhaps even cure, through
psychoanalysis.” (77) Perhaps Marshall
means that Bishop saw these issues in her life as faults, but it does not read
like that to me. Faults imply things that are chosen, “dubious” actions one takes
though you know better. Ignorance is a fault. Alcoholism is a disease. Asthma
is a physiological condition. Shyness can be overcome, but it is a state of
being that a child does not choose, especially an introverted child. Perhaps
there are psychosomatic elements, which Bishop explored, but she never entirely
overcame any of these conditions. I found this assertion rather badly put. On
page 84, Marshall
qualifies this point, but suggests that Bishop’s shyness, “her extreme
self-consciousness — may have been the ‘fault’ her existence as a poet depended
upon.”
10. “Elizabeth made her way to Halifax and the
Department of [Public] Health, where she
sought out the records of her mother’s hospitalization and death two decades
before. Her letters to Dr. Foster don’t say what she uncovered; a cousin Elizabeth visited while in Halifax later recalled that ‘I had the
feeling that she didn’t learn a lot, but she didn’t say it had been a
failure’.” (81) The person Bishop talked to in Halifax at that time was her friend Zilpha
Linkletter, not a cousin. Zilpha reported the same thing to me when I spoke
with her in the 1990s (Brazeau/Fountain also talked with Zilpha). Marshall then speculates:
“Perhaps she had not been allowed to see her mother’s hospital records…”
Gertrude’s hospital records were released to her niece Phyllis Sutherland in
the late 1980s, so her daughter would have certainly been “allowed” to see
them, if she had pursued it. I argue in Lifting
Yesterday that she did.
11. “… ‘I was in Lockeport,’ Elizabeth wrote, a coastal town south of Halifax.” (82) The only thing south of Halifax is the Atlantic Ocean.
Lockeport is west of Halifax on Nova Scotia’s South
Shore.
12. “…the story about her
mother, now called ‘Homesickness,’ and a poem of the same title. There was a
nugget of family history at the heart of both.” (89) Beyond the mixed metaphor,
the unfinished story is substantially based on what Bishop was told about her
mother; the unfinished poem is based on Bishop’s own memories of her. Marshall contracts Gertrude’s teaching to “a job … a day’s
ride from Great Village,” which “she could not afford to
give up.” Gertrude actually taught in several schools, one as far away as Cape Breton.
Gertrude did give up teaching, to venture further than any of her sisters at
that point, to Massachusetts
where she trained as a nurse. Marshall
pans for gold selectively.
13. “The severe imbalance of
rich and poor [in Brazil]…both
disturbed Elizabeth
and fired her imagination. Elizabeth herself was born of such an imbalance, an
unusual hybrid of the extreme ends of the social spectrum: an orphan heiress
who’d spent her happiest childhood years among tradespeople, a Vassar girl
whose home address was a dingy working-class suburb.” (117–18) By now, dear
reader, you will understand why I object to such a dichotomy, because it is
more than simplified, it is untrue. “Extreme ends”! Extreme ends are Donald
Trump and an out-of-work miner in Pennsylvania.
Further, Marshall claims Bishop “lived among the
wealthy” in Brazil
“as an outsider, a dependent whose trust fund met only basic expenses.” This
claim may have been more or less true in the 1950s, but when inflation hit Brazil, Bishop’s American greenback acquired
much more buying power than Brazil’s
currency. Tilt the lens slightly and you see things differently. In the margin
of this page I scribbled, “Life is a matter of perspective.”
14. On page 142 Marshall
introduces Sable Island (which, incidentally, is not in the index): “a desolate
twenty-five-mile crescent of sand dunes and beach grass lodged in the Atlantic
between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and known as the ‘Graveyard of the Grand
Banks’ — a place that ‘has haunted my [Bishop’s] imagination most of my life,’
with its race of wild ponies, its unique Sable Island sparrow …, and ‘wonderful
ghost stories’ of shipwrecked sailors.” In my entire life, I have only ever
heard Sable Island
referred to as “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.” The Grand Banks are south east of Newfoundland. Sable Island
is 300 kilometres (190 miles) south east of Halifax,
no where near Newfoundland.
Sable Island might be remote, but it is not
“desolate” (there has been continuous human habitation on the island since the
turn of the nineteenth century). Moreover, while it is a large set of sand
dunes (yes, a 25ish mile crescent), the landscape is remarkably verdant in the
summer, with dozens of species of plants from “beach grass” to orchids, from cranberries
to wild roses. The equines on the island are horses, not ponies. And it is the Ipswich Sparrow.
15. “Elizabeth confided in no one her frightening
sense that Lota was a different person….” (166) If so, how does Marshall know? From a
journal or diary entry? She does not cite any source for this assertion. Has
she read every letter Bishop wrote at this time?
16. “Ouro Prêto — with its
ten exquisite eighteenth-century churches….” (177). There are thirteen such
churches: http://magazin.lufthansa.com/uk/en/beat-of-brazil-en/ouro-preto-the-secret-of-the-13-churches/
17. “For Elizabeth, poetry and alcohol had long been
twin compulsions….Both provided entry to an altered state, a welcome
oblivion….poetry and alcohol had become organizing principles, imperatives more
powerful than love….her daemon and her demon.” (197) Wow. What a stunning
claim. Thought-provoking, at the very least. First alcoholism is a “fault,” now
it is a “compulsion.” Marshall
writes at some length about Bishop’s connection with Aldous Huxley and Laura
Archera (143–46), and about Huxley’s experimentation with drugs, quoting
Bishop’s observation “one sd. be able to see that much by simple concentration,
absorption, self-forgetting, etc. — without eating mushrooms or taking LSD.”
(290) Perhaps poetry and alcohol were not quite the joint compulsions Marshall asserts. Did
Bishop really seek “oblivion” when writing a poem?
18. “For ‘The Moose,’
Elizabeth drew on memories going back to 1946, recorded in letters to Marianne
Moore, who had died in February 1972,” (228) the year Bishop completed this
poem. In spite of the fact that Bishop had worked on this poem off and on for over
twenty years and that she dedicated it to her Aunt Grace (telling Grace in a
letter that she was not the moose), Marshall concludes, “It could not have
escaped Elizabeth’s notice that switching just one letter in the last name of
her former mentor, whose close family members called each other by the names of
woodland characters in The Wind in the
Willows, would have made Marianne Moore a moose.” This curious alphabetic
quirk has escaped the notice of every literary critic who has written about
this poem in the past thirty years. Moreover, Marshall
writes, “a bus, halted late at night on a country road deep in the Nova Scotia woods.”
(229) Here is Bishop: “Moonlight as we enter / the New Brunswick woods…” —
the province north of Nova Scotia.
And further, Marshall
claims that “eavesdropping on gossip through the nightlong journey” is the
“chief subject of the poem’s irregular rhymed six-line stanzas before the
animal arrives.” I would beg to differ. I suggest that overhearing the “old
conversation” is but the trigger to a raft of memories the hearer evokes. Of
the twenty-eight stanzas of this poem, only six relate to this “gossip” — a
word, by the way, not used in the poem. Let us dismiss “Grandparents’ voices /
uninterruptedly / talking, in Eternity,” as gossip.
19. “Elizabeth continued to dread a ‘decrepit’ old
age, or one dimmed by senile dementia such as aunt Grace had suffered.” (288) Marshall’s source for
“decrepit” is a letter to Alice Methfessel. One must assume it also includes
the diagnosis for Grace. In all my conversations with Grace’s daughter, never
once did she say her mother had “senile dementia.” Grace was 88 when she died
on 22 August 1977, just weeks before Robert Lowell (a fact Marshall ignores). While Grace was ill and
failing in the final year of her life, she was not incapacitated. Dementia,
like psychosis, is a serious word and must be used with great care.
20. On page 291, Marshall’s narrative
reaches the end of Bishop’s life on 6 October 1979, “dead of a cerebral
aneurysm.” She writes briefly about the service that was held and who attended,
as Bishop was buried in Hope Cemetery in Worcester,
MA, beside her parents. Then she
writes: “Within the year [1980], an inscription was chiseled into the
monument…the last line [sic: lines]
of the poem Elizabeth
had written as a present to herself on a lonely birthday in 1948: ‘All the
untidy activity continues, [/] awful
but cheerful’.” I find this statement puzzling. I attended a conference about
Bishop in Worcester
in 1997. One of the final things that a busload of Bishop scholars did was go
to Hope Cemetery to see the newly “chiseled”
inscription on Bishop’s gravestone. Laura Menides, one of the conference
organizers, told me the story about how she and Angela Dorenkamp had appealed
to Alice Methfessel to have this inscription engraved before the Bishop world
descended on Worcester.
I was told that Bishop had originally wanted only “awful but cheerful,” which Alice couldn’t bring
herself to do, so a compromise was made that it would be the couplet. Laura
told me that they offered to pay for the inscription, but Alice in the end paid for it herself. Did I
dream all of this? But I even have photographs of us all, solemnly standing
there, as people spoke about this important marker being finally, properly,
made.
There are other particulars
about which I object, but I think I have made my point. I turn now to the depiction
of Bishop’s mother and the revelations of abuse.
********************
Gertrude Bulmer Bishop
Marshall begins Bishop’s story with a description of Bishop’s
baby book, which contains the title “The Biography of our Baby.” She says that
Bishop treasured this document “all her life.” (1) Almost immediately, however,
Marshall uses this document to establish the
parameters for Gertrude Bulmer Bishop as not just absent, but abandoning, by
quoting a line from the book: “Mother had
to go away with Father & leave Elizabeth
for three months.” (Italics Marshall)
While conceding that Gertrude
was “a nurse,” was “beautiful” (10) and was “a lithe skater,” (8) she quickly
becomes a “wraithlike” creature with an “unending maternal scream,” (12) who
“hit [Bishop] sometimes” (10), who “left her for weeks or months — repeatedly”
(11), and who forgot her while helping people fleeing the Great Salem Fire.
(11) I would suggest that “unending” (Marshall’s
word) is qualitatively different from the “echo of a scream” “not even loud to
begin with” that “hangs” above the village “a slight stain” “forever,” which
Bishop describes in “In the Village.”
Curiously, Marshall also describes Gertrude’s body as
remembered by Bishop (based on the unfinished poem “Homesickness” and a letter
to Ruth Foster) as “pretty curves, the vulnerable defenseless, naked white body.”
(10) It is necessary for Marshall to state that
Gertrude stood “shivering in the washbasin…with water from a pitcher” because
“there was no running water in [‘primitive’] Great Village.”
(10) I try to imagine someone standing “in” a washbasin.
Gertrude’s “mental illness,”
(11, 130) her “insanity,” (186) becomes her defining feature for Marshall, who
confidently asserts that Bishop came “to view her mother more as one of the
Bulmer aunts, and the least reliable of them,” (12) suggesting, to my ear, that
the others also had reliability issues. Marshall
is certain that what Bishop primarily felt was “maternal neglect and
abandonment” (130) of a mother who “had never protected her,” and who “had
shown her death up close and offered no words of comfort or explanation” (as
evidenced in “First Death in Nova
Scotia”). (165) So damaged was Bishop’s childhood
that she could “scarcely imagine” “parental love.” (165)
Well into this account, Marshall reveals that her
main source is letters Bishop wrote to Dr. Ruth Foster, a psychiatrist Bishop
saw in 1946–1947. After reading Bishop’s letters, Marshall states that Foster “told…Bishop she
was lucky to have survived her childhood.” (14) This childhood is subsequently
characterized as “oppressive” (129) and “harrowing.” (303)
Of all the un-mined letters from
which Marshall
quotes, these are the ones I would like to see most of all. Based on Marshall’s
notes, it appears there are two letters, one dated 24 February 1947 and another
designated “Sunday morning, February 1947” (later in the notes a third
reference is cited, “February 1947” — I assume it is just a shortened version
of the second citation). Much of what Marshall
writes about Bishop’s childhood is based on these letters that were prompted by
Foster’s request — thus, written at a particular point in time for a particular
purpose. Important? Absolutely. Definitive? I’m not so sure.*
Marshall quotes mostly phrases or isolated sentences from these
letters. For the most part, she paraphrases them. One of the longest quotations
refers to Bishop believing that she had been bottle-fed: “Heavens do you
suppose I’ve been thinking of alcohol as mother’s milk all this time and that’s
why I pour it down my throat at regular intervals? Or bottle feedings, or
what?” (80)** Bishop’s poem “A Drunkard” directly explores this idea, but Marshall does not offer
any substantial read of it. The poem Marshall
does associate with this observation is “At the Fishhouses,” particularly its closing
lines, a read that is, actually, quite interesting. Bishop knew well enough, as
Marshall later
writes, that “drinking ran in the family,” (85) among her male relatives on
both sides.
Assessing Gertrude Bulmer
Bishop’s life and illness, and their impact on her daughter, is a major
undertaking, but one most Bishop scholars ignore. In Elizabeth Bishop At Work (2016), Canadian academic Eleanor Cook
repeats the numbingly common refrain: “Her father had died when she was eight
months old, and her mother had been confined to a mental hospital when she was
five; she had not seen her mother since.” (16)*** To Marshall’s credit, she gives more attention
to Gertrude, but the result is, unfortunately, a judgmental caricature.
*******************
[*Note: Marshall cites “Reminiscences of Great
Village” only once in her notes, as far a I can see. This substantial
manuscript, written when Bishops was in her early 20s, is an important source
of information about her mother and family, as are letters to Anne Stevenson,
written in the 1960s, which Marshall cites only about a half-dozen times.]
[**Note: Marshall adds that Dr. Anny Baumann suggested
Bishop’s craving for alcohol was “a premenstrual symptom.” (80)]
[***Note: I discuss the
origin and habitual reiteration of this kind of refrain in the extensive
literature about Bishop, in Lifting
Yesterday.]
*******************
The abuse
The other big reveal in the
letters to Foster is that Bishop was abused by George Shepherdson, Aunt Maude’s
husband. In August 2016, Heather Treseler wrote an article for the Boston Review, posted online (linked to
on this blog), in which she discussed this revelation in these letters. I
responded to it here: http://elizabethbishopcentenary.blogspot.ca/2016/08/letters-to-aunt-grace-part-21-uncle.html.
Long ago, I had my suspicions, but no direct evidence. The Foster letters
provide that evidence.
Marshall goes into more detail about this unforgiveable
behaviour by an adult entrusted with Bishop’s care. Marshall’s adjectives for George are
“sadistic” (79, 129), “brutish” (27) and “cruel.” (168) He had a “temper” that could
turn into “tantrums” or “rages,” and, as Bishop told Foster, he expected
everything to be done “for his comfort and enjoyment, nothing for anyone else.”
(19) Marshall
reports that once “he grabbed her by the hair and dangled her over the railing
of the second-story balcony,” (18) an report she repeats later in the book.
Again, Marshall paraphrases, quoting only snippets.
The longest quotation reads: “I got to thinking that they [men] were all
selfish and inconsiderate and would hurt you if you gave them the chance.” (18)
The “transgressions” ranged from inappropriate touching to threats of beatings.
George was, essentially, a bully who intimidated those closest to him. In my
August 2016 post, I suggested that Maude was an abused spouse, which Marshall confirms
(describing Maude as “tender-hearted” (27) and “timid” (27, 129)), noting from
Bishop’s letter to Foster that once George had “squeezed Aunt Maud so hard
she’d broken a rib.” (25) In letters to Aunt Grace in the 1950s and 1960s,
Bishop mentions George several times, alive until 1965. As awful as George was
and as far away from him as Bishop went, she could still bring herself to write
his name, seeing him for what he was: a hypocrite.
None of this is easy to read.
Its affect on Bishop cannot be known entirely, even with her confessional letters
to Foster. George deserves condemnation. I found Marshall’s handling of this matter relatively
thoughtful, but I wished she had not so fully fragmented Bishop’s narrative.
Conclusion
In the end, one of the issues
I have most difficulty with in this book is Marshall’s consistent paraphrasing
of letters, poems and stories — applied to almost every document used, which
asks the reader to accept her judgment, because she knows what parts are most
important and relevant. Maybe this practice was done to avoid a large
permissions fee — the Bishop estate charges by the line (poetry) and by the
word (prose). I understand that issue. Moreover, Marshall is doing what all biographers do:
selecting to achieve her aim, to write the life as she believes it was, from
the sources she has gathered, the only way biography can be written. Yet, for
example, I found her use of Bishop’s masterpiece “In the Village” lacking in
nuance.
I did find a number of her
insights intriguing. For example, she describes Bishop as “an integrationist”
(292) as regarded her political beliefs, particularly related to “women’s lib.”
I think she handles politics (personal, literary, national) well. She offers
clarifying insights about Bishop’s relationship with Lowell. I thought her observations about the
nature of Bishop’s fortitude (277) insightful. She goes into detail about
changes in Bishop’s wills, a matter affecting Bishop’s legacy. I was keenly
interested in her explorations of the deepest thoughts and feelings between
Bishop and her partners. But the issues I outline above detract from the
strengths to such a degree that I was left feeling “disappointed.”
A number of times in the
autobiographical chapters, Marshall describes Bishop, as she encountered her. Of
her voice: “buttery r’s of New
England’s upper crust, yet given to flat inflections, the plain language of
country folk” (44) and “a Vassar purr with Nova Scotia plain speech.” (137) Of her
appearance at various moments in time: “coy and business like” (43); “grimmer,
grayer, possibly even smaller” (95); “somber, sallow” (95); “short,
soft-spoken, gray-haired, almost elfin…”(136); “stony-faced” (140); “smiling,
girlish, pretty. Among friends.” (140) In end, I wondered if Marshall ever really got over getting a “B”
in Bishop’s class.
Sandra Barry, Middleton, N.S.,
25 February 2017
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