Thomas Travisano’s
long-awaited biography Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop
(Viking 2019) has finally appeared. Many will be keen to read what he has
written because he has been researching and writing about Bishop for forty
years. (2) He is, arguably, the pre-eminent American Bishop scholar, having
published numerous essays and authored or edited several books about her. His
first book, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (1988), declared
in its title his primary focus, one that remains firmly in place in 2019.
Charting how Bishop became a poet and then a great poet has been a life’s work.
Co-founder of the Elizabeth Bishop Society in the U.S., Travisano has been in
some way involved in every major conference about her in the past twenty-five
years. Few other Bishop scholars carry the kind of authority he has acquired.
This biography is
a significant account of Bishop’s artistic development and an important account
of her complex life. It makes use of sources that were unknown when Brett
Millier published the inaugural biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life & the
Memory of It (1993). Travisano’s biography is structurally akin to Millier’s,
that is, basically, a chronological narrative that integrates her oeuvre
into the story, using it to explain, enhance and reflect experiences and
events. This approach is different from the previous biography about Bishop,
Megan Marshall’s Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (2017), which
includes a substantial autobiographical component. (My response to the Marshallbook can be found on this blog.)
As with Marshall’s
book, I feel compelled to respond to this view of Bishop. All biographers
select, arrange and present based on a perspective and an agenda. Biography is
an act of hindsight founded on, at best, a partial record. A biographer knows
the full arc of the life, something the person who was living it did not know.
A biographer has the right to his or her interpretation, and Travisano has
enough knowledge and experience to offer a valuable take on Bishop’s life and
work, enough authority to make this book essential reading. His scholarship on
Bishop has been done with serious regard, genuine respect and admiration, and
with discernment and care.
I am one of the
keen readers who has been waiting for this book. I respect Travisano’s view and
sometimes agree with him. I learned new things about Bishop in this book, for
which I am grateful. For years the literary critics of Bishop’s work have
repeated the same old stuff about her life. Travisano offers some correctives,
which are refreshing to read ….
Here is my “But.”
– I have not been researching and writing about Bishop for as long as
Travisano. I have reached only three decades. I have written over the years,
particularly on this blog, about some of the Bishop scholarship being churned
out at a great rate. While I recognize that no one book can say everything
about a life, especially one as complex as Bishop’s; still, it behooves
scholars to know something of the multiple contexts (historical, biographical,
cultural, psychological, aesthetic) of a subject’s life and to offer as solid a
version of these contexts as possible, especially when making major statements
about events and experiences. Sometimes in Travisano’s biography, contexts are
rich and nuanced. Sometimes they are thin or even absent. And sometimes his
facts are incorrect. At times I was puzzled by Love Unknown because of
odd inconsistencies, contradictions and repetitions, ranging from an erratic
citation system to ‘have it both ways’ conclusions.
In the interests
of full disclosure, I have known Travisano since 1994, when I met him at the
Vassar symposium about Bishop. He was instrumental in my being able to attend
that event. He has always been supportive of my Bishop work, the focus of
which, as he directly says in his
Acknowledgements, is Nova Scotia. He knows
this focus resulted in a major monograph, Lifting Yesterday: Elizabeth
Bishop and Nova Scotia, which remains unpublished, but which I have shared
electronically with a wide range of scholars and readers, including Travisano.
Moreover, he was involved in the ownership of the Elizabeth Bishop House in
Great Village, N.S., from 2004 to 2015, a project I spearheaded. I have thought
long and hard about how to respond to this book because of the history between
us. His book is too important and Travisano too authoritative in the Bishop
world to remain silent about my concerns.
The deeper I got
into Love Unknown, the more I realized its intended audience. It is
written almost exclusively for an American audience and for, primarily, a
general readership, though with established and budding scholars, and students
of literature, in mind. I say this because one of the book’s aims is to place Bishop
fully within an American context – even, perhaps, to Americanize her. Bishop is,
in this book, first and foremost, an American and, more importantly, an
American poet. Fair enough. She certainly was both. Still, that view is not the
whole picture and part of my issue with this aim is that other significant
aspects of her life that were not American are sometimes skewed or ignored.
Again, of course, no one book can cover it all; but when strong, even absolute
claims are made, the evidence and facts need to support those claims.
I offer an example
of one claim that appears on the first page and carries through to almost the
last page.
A list of
Travisano’s descriptions of Bishop’s childhood and early adolescence reads like
a set piece:
“who had grown up orphaned, abused, and isolated”
(1)
“a lifelong struggle against adversity” with “physical
and emotional liabilities” (2)
“a childhood marked by loss, isolation, and
constraint” (3)
“her work remains persevering and curiously buoyant
even as it grows out of and confronts isolation, suffering, and loss”
(4)
“frequently traumatic past” (6)
“one of the many silences that would surround
Elizabeth Bishop’s life” (18)
“the escalating series of losses and dislocations that
preceded Gertrude’s breakdown” and “more painful – [the] series of such losses
that followed hard upon it” (24)
“a vast emptiness” (28)
“the weight of anxiety and uncertainty under which the
young Elizabeth was living following the unexplained disappearance of her
mother” (37)
“she lived through her early teens in a state of near isolation”
and “confined by illness” (45)
“mirror the state of suspension and incompletion
defining the life of deferral she was now compelled to live” (48)
“confinement in a narrow world” (61)
“Bishop had lived a life of extreme isolation,
scarcely able to find any friend her own age with whom she might share her
numerous interests and passions” (65)
“long, sequestered hours in the Revere apartment” (74)
“Bishop’s social difference – born not only out of her
history of childhood isolation and abuse but also out of the Calvinist
reticence or taciturnity of her Bishop and Bulmer forebearers [sic:
forebears]” (82)
“the bleak isolation of her early years in
Revere” (241)
“having lived among the tight-lipped Puritans of her
Bishop and Bulmer families” (243)
“at 55 Cambridge Street in Revere where she had spent
so many childhood years of isolation under the eye of her aunt Maud and
uncle George” (351-2)
“Bishop passed through a childhood and adolescence
plagued by illness, isolation, and emotional distress.” (382)
I know, I have
removed these statements from their contexts, but bringing them together
provides a sense of Travisano’s overall take on, arguably, the most important
time in Bishop’s life. Repeating strong words such as isolation, abuse,
constraint – true as they are in their way – creates a sense of unmitigated
“trauma.” Yet, he asserts, incongruously it seems to me, that “at the core of
her greatness as an artist lies her unparalleled re-creation of her experience
as a child.” (4) Why would anyone so isolated, abused and traumatized in
childhood want to re-create her experience – and in a way so luminous as Bishop
did? And how did she become such a great poet, considering all those “physical
and emotional liabilities” at such a young age? Travisano argues that this
achievement happened despite the losses and suffering and, ultimately, because
of the American education system, when Bishop was well enough to enter it. He
argues that it was Camp Chequesset, Walnut Hill School and Vassar College where
Bishop blossomed, as indeed she did; but the seed had to be planted and
nurtured somewhere, somehow amid all that isolation, constraint and dislocation
– though reading Travisano one gets a sense that Bishop emerged fully formed,
like Athena from the head of Zeus, more or less in 1925-1926.
My own bias has
always been obvious. I have spent decades researching, as deeply as the record
allows, the time, people, places and experiences of Bishop’s Nova Scotia
childhood. My book follows many threads through this zeitgeist, but certainly
not all of them. I would never claim that I offer the whole story, even of the
subjects I explore, let alone of her other “worlds” of New England, Florida,
Europe and Brazil. Thus, my work has also skewed the vast fullness (not, I
would argue, “emptiness”) of Bishop’s early life. Travisano is also allowed to
bring together the evidence that supports his view and aim; but when I read,
repeatedly, a set of words that create a specific, reductive characterization
of something complex, I felt frustrated. Travisano does offer a couple of
positives amid the relentless childhood negatives. For example: “her cherished
world of Nova Scotia” (150); “As she experienced once before in her beloved
Great Village” (232); but these are few, late and weak.
What follows is my
response to some of the things that stood out for me, issues and errors I feel
need to be addressed. I have organized this response thematically. I do not
offer all my issues, but the reader will get my point. I respond mostly to the
things about which I have some knowledge. I leave a response to her Brazilian
years, for example, to the Brazilians.
PROLOGUE
Travisano begins
Bishop’s “great story” (1) with the illnesses and deaths of her parents,
unquestionably defining events in her life. My response to his take on these
events, especially to her mother’s “incurable mental breakdown” (1), follows in
the section on Gertrude. What the Prologue conveys to me is that the
challenging aspects of Bishop’s life – her “shyness and self-doubt,” her
struggle “with alcoholism and severe and lasting autoimmune disorders,” the
result of all that early trauma, contrasts sharply with the great poet’s career
(achieved against all odds it seems) and her remarkable “network of
relationships with literati, glitterati, visual artists and musicians, locals
[?], travelers, students, scholars, medicos, and politicos.” (1) This contrast
– a great divide, it seems to me – holds consistently throughout the book.
GERTRUDE
The “great story” continues
with an account of the Great Salem Fire of 25 June 1914, which Bishop and her
mother witnessed. Travisano offers a read of Bishop’s late and unfinished poem
“A Drunkard,” which recounts some of her memories of that event. Placing these
things at the start gives them great weight, sets the tone for this
relationship. Indeed, it sets the tone for Bishop’s early childhood. I
certainly agree that the fire and Bishop’s memories of it have significant gravitas,
but what this placement does is put the cause of Bishop’s alcoholism firmly at
the feet of her mother. One of the most telling lines of this abandoned poem, however,
which Travisano does not include, is the final line: “And all I’m telling you
may be a lie…” (EAP 151) All I am saying here is that Travisano
introduces these powerful, profound experiences with exceedingly thin context.
I view the fire experience and read the poem differently in Lifting
Yesterday, not discounting the negative effects, but endeavouring to
understand the bewildering layers of this moment in time. Travisano is doing
what most scholars before him have done: presenting Gertrude as the unstable,
disturbed mother who damaged her child, perhaps even intentionally. He does so
with minimal context. Gertrude had “worlds” too, just as her daughter. Even in
Bishop’s own oeuvre, Gertrude is not only “the scream.” Gertrude has
deserved far better than the treatment she has always received.
Bishop’s
alcoholism is frequently discussed, as it should be since it was such a major
condition and struggle in her life. Only once does Travisano mention the
possibility of another cause, besides “childhood trauma,” for this condition. On
page 177, he writes: “heredity may also have been a factor. There are
suggestions that Bishop’s father … struggled with alcoholism … Bishop’s uncle
Jack, had a severe problem … [and] uncle Arthur Bulmer.” The “may” keeps it
tentative, though more often Travisano uses “must” or “most” in his assertions.
If so many close relatives had problems with alcohol, surely that predisposed
Bishop to have an organic/genetic issue, and the trauma of her childhood was a
trigger, not the cause. But Travisano has already set Gertrude as the cause, so
this late “maybe” carries little weight.
William Thomas
Bishop and Gertrude were married on 22 June 1908 in New York City. My research
turned up only that the ceremony took place at “Grace Church.” Travisano states
it was the “elegant, neo-Gothic Grace Church” (14) in Manhattan. I would be
keen to know the source of this information, but none is given. In the 1990s, I
had a researcher in New York check for a marriage certificate, but she found
nothing (she told me a fire had destroyed civic records for that time). She also
told me there were several Grace Churches. With few financial resources, I did
not pursue it. Travisano later writes, “Gertrude’s younger sister Grace was
then working as a nurse in New York. Grace may have been the only family member
on either side to attend the ceremony.” (150) In 1908 Grace was attending the
Acadia Ladies’ Seminary in Wolfville, N.S. She did not go to Massachusetts to
train as a nurse until 1911-1912 and it was during World War I that she worked
in New York City. This is not to say that Grace did not attend, but it is
unlikely she was there. From what evidence I have seen, William and Gertrude
eloped. Again, no source is given for this statement.
On page 49
Travisano states: “John W. Bishop, continued to pay all Gertrude’s medical
expenses while she remained in the Nova Scotia Hospital, and according to
Bishop, her paternal grandparents made repeated attempts to have Gertrude
transferred to a private hospital in the United States, only to be defeated by
US immigration laws.” The source for the first statement is a 1923 letter from
the Municipal Clerk of Truro, N.S., to Dr. F.E. Lawlor, Superintendent of the
Nova Scotia Hospital, which is in Gertrude’s hospital file. The letter reads in
part: “The Bishop’s [sic] I understand are pretty well fixed, but in any
case, her father-in-law, John W. Bishop Sr. has always paid for her maintenance.”
The letter was written because John W. Bishop Sr. had died and his son, John W.
Bishop Jr., needed Gertrude to sign papers transferring conservatorship from
his father to him. What Travisano does not discuss in any manner is this
conservatorship, put in place in 1914, at the same time John W. Bishop Sr.
became guardian for Elizabeth. What this action meant was that he took over the
administration of their estates, inherited from William Bishop. I have a
two-inch binder filled with estate and probate documents, as well as
conservatorship and guardianship documents. These documents reveal a complex
financial situation for both Gertrude and Elizabeth; they also reveal that
Gertrude’s estate paid for all her medical and hospital bills. JWB Sr. sent the
funds for her maintenance, but it was not his own money. It was Gertrude’s
money. In Lifting Yesterday, I examine closely this highly complex
arrangement. (On page 58, Travisano writes: “John W. Bishop was paying for his
granddaughter’s expenses in Revere.” As with Gertrude, JWB Sr. was sending
payments to the Shepherdson’s from Bishop’s estate. The wording in the next
sentence irked me: “These remunerations likely had formed a significant slice
of the Shepherdson family income.” (emphasis added) Flippant phrasing does not
do his aim any service.)
As for the Bishops
repeatedly trying to get Gertrude to a hospital in the U.S, Travisano says the
source is Bishop herself in a letter to Anne Stevenson, which he does cite,
later, on the same page. There is no evidence I have seen that the Bishops made
any such attempts, but Gertrude’s hospital file does have letters from the
Bulmers asking the NSH Superintendent about the possibility of her being
transferred to a private facility in the U.S., where they felt she might get
more personal attention. It did not happen because her citizenship was in
question. That Bishop made this claim to Stevenson only shows that is what she
was told, probably by the Bishops.
Also, on page 49,
Travisano states: “There is no evidence that Gertrude Bulmer Bishop ever
received either any form of psychiatric diagnosis or analysis or any form of
drug therapy.” He asserts that “the renowned McLean Hospital … or … the
progressive Worcester State Hospital” would have been better institutions than
the Nova Scotia Hospital. I do not necessarily disagree with him, but what
annoys me is that Travisano makes statements without much or any context. I
think he has no idea what kind of institution the Nova Scotia Hospital was. He refers
to “Gertrude’s caretakers in the asylum” (51), as if there were no doctors or
nurses staffing this huge provincial facility. He mentions the “Great Halifax
Explosion, which occurred on December 6, 1917,” and says, “Gertrude’s response
to these events went unrecorded.” (52) That made me sigh. The impact of this
tremendous, tragic event (Travisano calls it a “traumatic conflagration”) was
felt across the city and directly included the NS Hospital, causing serious
damage.
He devotes several
pages (26-8, 50-3) to the “clinical record” for Gertrude, but in each instance
I winced at the insensitivity. He presents a highly condensed, simplified
version of Gertrude’s eighteen years at the NSH as a kind of backdrop to
reinforce the backwardness of psychiatric care in Nova Scotia.
In a note for the
quotation above on page 49, Travisano thanks “Dr. Kenneth Gordan, MD, for his
consultation over diagnoses of Gertrude Bulmer Bishop.” (394) On page 50 he
states, “the symptoms detailed by Grace Bulmer in her statements to the Nova
Scotia Hospital, as well as those chronicled in the hospital’s own clinical
record, might lead to a diagnosis of severe bipolar disorder with depressive
features.” The “might” is the out, of course, but the assertion is there, especially
with a doctor’s imprimatur. I am no doctor, but from my read of these
documents, I argue in Lifting Yesterday that Gertrude suffered from
untreated hyperthyroidism.
(An aside:
I had never noticed before, but Bishop mentions hyperthyroidism in “The Country
Mouse,” when she describes Beppo, the Bishops’ family dog. Travisano quotes
this description on page 40: “He had a delicate stomach, he vomited frequently.
He jumped nervously at imaginary dangers, and barked another high hysterical
bark. His hyperthyroid eyes glistened, and begged for sympathy and
understanding.” Beppo also punished himself when he committed an infraction, by
taking himself to a corner and staying there. Bishop deeply identified with
this creature, as Travisano states, especially Beppo’s sense of guilt. Her
vivid description of him could be overlaid, not incongruously, not only on the
young, ill Elizabeth, but also on her mother. Perhaps the child in the moment
and the adult in the recollection knew more about the larger circumstances and
conditions than she let on.)
At this point, I
want to ask Travisano, where is World War I? There are two passing references
to it on pages 40 and 52. This global conflict directly affected Gertrude, the
Bulmers, Great Village and Nova Scotia, even Massachusetts, for heaven’s sake –
and, consequently, Elizabeth Bishop. “The Great Halifax Explosion” (not its
official name, by the way), which he mentions on page 52, had a profound impact
on Gertrude’s life and health, indeed, on the life and health of every resident
in Halifax and Dartmouth in December 1917. Margaret Dickie wrote about the
impact of World War II on Bishop (Stein, Bishop, & Rich: Lyrics of Love,
War, & Place (1997)), but Bishop’s first war was not the 1939-1945
catastrophe (which comes in for more treatment by Travisano), it was the “Great
War” of 1914-1918. I wrote an essay about World War I and Gertrude for War,
Literature & the Arts (Spring/Summer 1999), but since this major world
conflict has no presence in this book, such scholarship has no bearing.
On page 28
Travisano writes: “Having received no explanation of what had happened, she
[Bishop] had no opportunity to share in a grieving process with her family over
their common loss. Instead, she faced a vast emptiness.” How can he claim this?
Bishop knew very well her mother was in a hospital. In 1916, when Bishop was
five, no one believed Gertrude would never come out of the hospital. That fact
was not conceded for some years. Bishop did share grieving with her maternal
family. “Sestina” is an example of shared grief with her grandmother, which
might not have been a long talk about the issues and circumstances, but it was
shared, nonetheless. Such statements are generalizations that are dismissive of
the complex reality. And what is “vast emptiness” anyway?
On page 33,
Travisano writes: “Bishop’s mother’s committal to the mental wards of the Nova
Scotia Hospital was by no means without its tangible signs.” First, what are
“mental wards” in a psychiatric hospital? Second, these “signs” are, in fact,
knowledge for Bishop, even as a child of five, six, seven. He is referring in
part to the weekly care package Elizabeth Bulmer sent to Gertrude, which Bishop
took to the post office – another shared caring-grieving ritual.
On page 123,
Travisano deals with Gertrude’s death. He offers a brief summary of the final
days of her life based on the hospital file, what he refers to as “the rapid
onset of dangerous medical symptoms.” Gertrude died on 29 May 1934, having,
according to Travisano, “spent the last eighteen years in a sanatorium, living
mostly in confinement on a solitary ward.” Again, a gross generalization.
“Most” is a common word, but just what it means quantitatively is entirely
vague. And what is a “solitary ward”? Over the years, she spent time alone (a
kind of solitary confinement) in a room on a ward that was for agitated patients.
Travisano then declares that “her mortal remains” were returned to the United
States and she was buried next to her husband “in Worcester’s Hope Cemetery”
(an irony since the Nova Scotia Hospital was commonly called Mount Hope – a
detail that does not matter to Travisano, though Bishop knew it well enough).
He then includes the inscription on the gravestone, but with a typo:
WILLIAM T. BISHOP
1872-1912 [sic] 1911
HIS WIFE
GERTRUDE BULMER
1879-1934
Then he states:
“There is no evidence that Bishop was encouraged to attend the interment.”
(123) That may be so, but Grace accompanied Gertrude’s body back to Worcester
and one might think that even if she didn’t go to the cemetery, Bishop would
have wanted to see her beloved aunt.
After this point
in the book, Gertrude disappears. She becomes “absent” (146) and then simply a
grave (352, 370, 384, 386). I suppose I should expect no more from the scholar
who wrote in Mid-Century Quartet: “Gertrude disappeared almost without a
trace. In effect she became an un-person in Bishop’s world, leaving her
daughter Elizabeth both haunted by her own lack of power to shape that future
and sensible of being ‘alone, alone.’” (97). What, I ask, is an “un-person”?
MAUDE AND
GEORGE
On page 8-9,
Travisano writes: “Between the ages of eight and sixteen [1919-1927], she lived
most of the year with a maternal aunt [Maude] in a working-class neighborhood
[Revere] near Boston. These long and weary months, when she was mostly
housebound due to illness, were relieved by summers with her maternal
grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia.” Bishop arrived at Maude’s in May
1918 (Travisano notes this on page 43) and visited Great Village (not always in
the summer) until 1930 (her last visit before a long hiatus was the
Christmas/New Year holiday of 1929-1930). Travisano is describing an eight-year
stretch. His phrasing implies that Bishop was confined in Revere for “most” of
this time. Even though Bishop felt isolated because of illness, her own writing
reveals that in Revere she had more than occasional outings and contact with
neighbours and relatives (Grace visited, the Bulmers spent at least one winter there,
Bishop often visited Mrs. Sullivan, their downstairs neighbour; and she played
with neighborhood children). How can Travisano account so generally for the
dozens of months, the hundreds of weeks, the thousands of days this stretch
comprised? Bishop often compressed space/time in her poems and stories, but she
never eschewed complexity and nuance, and she rarely sacrificed accuracy.
On page 46,
Travisano writes: “Aunt Maud had given up her career as a nurse and was focused
on her housekeeping, her marriage, and the needs of her husband, George.” A few
lines later he observes, “Maud was a painter not without talent who did
‘beautiful sewing’.” Maude was never trained as a nurse. In Nova Scotia Census
records, she described herself as a professional painter. She was quite gifted
in her own right, and indeed took art classes with George Hutchinson in 1896, and
subsequently with George’s colleague Bertram Knight Eaton. Gertrude, Grace,
Mary and two of Bishop’s cousins became nurses, but not Maude. She did, of
course, nurse Bishop back to health in 1918-1919, when Elizabeth was brought to
her ill from the Bishops’ home.
Travisano is not
the first scholar to reveal the secret of Bishop’s childhood and adolescence,
which she told to Dr. Ruth Foster, a psychiatrist she saw in 1946-1947. In 1947
Bishop wrote a long, multi-part account about aspects of her childhood and
adolescence, particularly during her time with Maude and George Shepherdson. I
wrote about this revelation – the fact that George Shepherdson physically and sexually
abused Bishop – on this blog in August 2016.
Travisano makes
ample use of the Foster letter and allows it to define George Shepherdson, who
was indeed a brutal man. What he did was unforgiveable, even criminal. I would
never defend such a violent person. My issue is with the way Travisano treats
Maude in these circumstances. He declares more than once that Bishop suffered
from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (29, 47, 59), an interesting
diagnosis, and one that makes a lot of sense. But Maude was clearly an abused
spouse. Bishop knew about Maude’s situation, she witnessed it every day. At one
point, she writes to Foster: “Yet my aunt ‘put up with him’ as they say and
even seemed pretty fond of him.” Prompting Travisano to write: “The Foster
letters also imply that one feature Bishop ultimately did see to criticize in
her shy and worried aunt was her meekness toward her husband. This, while
understandable given the physical power and threat he represented, left Maud in
no position to defend either herself or her niece.” (59) Surely Maude also
suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder or abused wife syndrome.
Considering how hard it is even today for an abused wife to leave an abusive
husband, in the 1920s it was nigh impossible, even if Maude had wanted to
leave, which Bishop also says she considered doing. I have much more to say
about this situation, but my intention is to write separately about the Foster
letter on this blog, at a later date.
THE ADOLESCENT
BISHO
One of the most
exciting new elements in Travisano’s book is the letters Bishop wrote to her
Camp Chequesset friend Louise Bradley. It would have been nice if he had
offered a note about how he came to discover this treasure trove at Wylie House
Museum at Indiana University. I checked the finding aid on their website and
there are over 75 letters, most from 1925 to 1934. Bishop was only fourteen
when she started writing to Louise. Travisano makes extensive use of these
letters, though he quotes them only in short excerpts. What they show is not so
much a revelation as a confirmation of what biographers and scholars have
already sensed, that her poetic precociousness, her desire to be a poet, was in
place early. The expressiveness and self-awareness of these letters show that
one of the foremost practitioners of the epistolary art form was engaged in it
as a teenager. As I read the quotations, I kept thinking how much I wanted to
read all the letters and hope that someday her estate will agree to publish
them. It seems unlikely, however. The Bishop estate and her publisher appear to
be interested only in correspondence with famous friends: Lowell, Moore,
Swenson, her New Yorker editors, etc. (easier to market, I suppose) Louise
Bradley is a nobody, just as Aunt Grace, Dorothee Bowie, and many other
non-famous people, are nobodies. I assume the reasoning is that these “locals”
do not have the same quotient of literary value as her writer, musician and
visual artist friends. Curiously, on page 353, Travisano quotes Célia Bertin,
one of the “famous” people who knew Bishop in North Haven, Maine: “Of her
relationship with these and other rugged-year-rounders on North Haven, Bertin
added, ‘She loved real people’.” Not that famous people aren’t “real,” but
Bertin clearly means the non-famous ones who lived there.
The letters to
Louise Bradley show, among other things, an adolescent dreaming and scheming,
resisting and even rebelling against the adults in her life. The quotations Travisano
includes to show this person are intended to reveal someone desperate to free
herself from “extreme isolation.” Here are a few of these quotations:
“Please write to
me as I am awfully lonely.” (69)
“Did you ever feel
like a cat? I do tonight. Like a battered old alley-cat with chewed ears
wandering around in the dark. It’s a very strange feeling – so alone. Did you
ever think – no matter how many friends you have – no one can really reach you?
I feel sometimes like a person on another planet – watching someone on this
world.” (71)
“I am eaten up
with dust and dullness – and Auntie [Maude] says ‘Elizabeth – if you don’t take
that bored superior look from your face no one will like you.’ What do I care –
I only want certain people to like me anyway.” (72)
“I haven’t any
family whatever – excepting a few aunts and uncles who are all trying to bring
me up a different way.” (73)
“I would give
anything I own for one hour of complete – understanding.” (73)
As I read these
and other such quotations, especially that last one, all I could think was BUT
SHE IS FIFTEEN! I felt the same way when I was fifteen. What teenage girl
hasn’t felt utterly misunderstood, bored with all those around her, ashamed of
her family, wanting to run away (Bishop did that at least once, as I wanted to).
Yes, Bishop carried more loss and trauma than most people do in an entire
lifetime, but from what I see in her letters to Bradley and even the
confessions to Dr. Foster, she was able to lift it all and even transform it.
How did she do it? Where did she get her fortitude, imagination, practicality,
humour? She struggled with serious auto-immune disorders, alcoholism and
depression throughout her life, but only death (theirs and hers, eventually)
cut the ties with the very people who had been part of that traumatic
childhood. Travisano quotes “a momentous declaration that would color her
entire future,” from a 16 October 1916 letter to Bradley: “We live but once and
I’m going to live!” Bravo to this fifteen-year-old to know her goal so
early. I’d say this declaration was the exceptionalism in her adolescent
mind-set. I don’t remember believing that I could “live!” like that. But
I do remember how important writing was to me at fifteen. It clearly was
Bishop’s saving grace and bless Louise Bradley for coming along.
On page 204,
Travisano writes of Bishop’s “resistance to hearing praise of her work.” His
reasoning goes: “Perhaps the steady disapproval Bishop had absorbed from the
Bishop side of her family, and the abuse from her uncle George, made her shrink
from openly acknowledging or accepting the approval she earned from the
distinctive quality of her work.” Perhaps this reasoning works, but as the declaration
to Bradley above declares, Bishop would have given a lot for “understanding”
– for that “approval.” Surely, a yearning that carried through her whole life.
Bishop was insecure (shy, stage fright, suspicious and distrustful of men), but
she was also certain of the “distinctive quality” of her work (Travisano shows
this many times). She could even be a snob about inferior poetry, especially as
an adolescent. Her own steady efforts to get her work published and her
frustration when editors/publishers didn’t grasp her intentions (amply revealed
in her correspondence with her New Yorker editors), shows an artist who
did care about what others thought, even if that caring didn’t control her
creative process and daily life.
Travisano makes
much of the letters to Louise Bradley, as if suddenly, Bishop is a full-blown
writer, as if these expressions burst forth unexpectedly. I wondered how
someone so extremely isolated, confined and constrained for the first fourteen
years of her life could launch such an exuberant and articulate correspondence.
Travisano implies it was a kind of miracle. But remember that Bishop grew up in
the 1910s and 1920s, a time when communication across space-time was still
primarily words on paper. Telegraph and telephone existed but was not yet
widely available. And there were certainly no computers! All around Bishop, the
adults in her life wrote letters. Taking to this form of communication and
expression was entirely natural, especially for someone as precocious as Bishop.
She embraced letter writing and made full use of it, but she was not unique,
even if she was more poetically gifted than the average person. The letters to
Bradley might have been her first sustained correspondence with a friend, but
that she could embark on it so vividly suggests she was primed for it.
THE BULMERS
(Gammie and Pa)
On page 9
Travisano quotes Bishop: “My maternal grandparents were, some of them, Tories,
who left upper N.Y. state and were given land grants in Nova Scotia by George
III.” Bishop obviously cannot have “some” maternal grandparents. We all only
have two. The sentence before this one, in the letter to Anne Stevenson from
which it comes, reads: “I am 3/4ths Canadian, and one 4th New
Englander – I had ancestors on both sides in the Revolutionary war [1770s].”
Clearly, Bishop is talking about great-great-grandparents (of whom we all have
many). Her error is not so silly in this full context – she just forgot to type
the “great.” She means ancestors, not William and Elizabeth Bulmer.
On page 12,
Travisano lists William and Elizabeth Bulmer’s remaining children (not
Gertrude), Maude, Arthur, Grace and Mary, and “Another sister, Lizzy, died
stillborn.” I have seen the stone for this infant in Mahon Cemetery in Great
Village. There is no given name on it. It was their first child, 1 August 1872.
I would like to know his source for this name, but none is given. It was common
to give the first child the name of the parent, but why nickname a child that
did not draw breath? The Bulmer’s last child also received her mother’s name:
Mary Elizabeth Bulmer.
Travisano offers a
read of “First Death in Nova Scotia” on pages 21-2, noting that, as revealed on
the “small, heart-shaped stone,” the real infant, Frank Elwood, died in June
1915, at odds with the winter setting of the poem. He wonders: “What is
impossible to know for certain, from this distance, is whether Bishop misremembered
the name of her infant cousin, or the season of his death, or both – or whether
she deliberately altered these details to create a more effective poem.” There
are two heart-shaped stones in the Bulmer plot in the Mahon Cemetery. One is
for Frank Elwood, the other is for his sister Dorothy Elwood, who died on 4
January 1909 at the age of six months. Though born and dead before Bishop
existed, Bishop knew Dorothy’s stone as intimately as Frank’s. Perhaps it is
not so hard to imagine that Bishop conflated these infants. Travisano has seen
these stones, but clearly forgot that there are two and the information on
them. And surely Bishop did not forget the name of her infant cousin, but felt
“Arthur” was a much better name (a more regal one) than Frank!
(Dorothy Elwood on the left; Frank Elwood on the right.)
On page 37,
Travisano writes, “Bishop’s sixteen-year-old aunt Mary was the child of her
grandparents’ old age.” This observation made me smile. Mary was born in 1900.
Elizabeth Bulmer was 50 years old. Mary was undoubtedly a surprise, but the
Bulmers lived for another thirty years, by which time Mary was herself married
and beginning her family. If 50 is an advanced age for a woman to have a child,
by the same token, it was not unheard of in an era when large families were
much more common than they are today. If fifty is old age, then Travisano and I
are true elders.
On page 91,
Travisano writes: “Bishop’s family life continued to be a challenge as she
approached her final year at Walnut Hill [1929-1930]. Her Bishop grandparents
had died in 1923. Bishop’s now quite elderly Bulmer grandparents had moved away
to Montreal to be cared for by their daughter Mary, so for the first time in
years, Bishop did not make her annual summer trip to Great Village following
her stay at Camp Chequesset.” Bishop’s last visit to Great Village before her
maternal grandparents died was the Christmas/New Year holiday of 1929-1930. In
February 1930 her beloved Pa died. Gammie is the one who went to Montreal later
that year. Bishop visited Montreal in the spring of 1930, where she saw her
grandmother for the last time. Elizabeth Bulmer died there in April 1931.
THE
HUTCHINSONS
George W.
Hutchinson, Bishop’s great-uncle, is mentioned three times in Travisano’s book.
On page 14 he writes that “although she ‘never knew him’,” two of his paintings
“would figure in two notable Bishop poems.” At that point, he does not name
them, but describes George as “a then-popular artist and illustrator.” (14) On page
54 he mentions “Poem,” which he describes as “a small good picture dashed off
‘in an hour, “in one breath,”’,” by her great-uncle, the artist George
Hutchinson.” “Poem” and “Large Bad Picture,” the second of these poems, appear
on page 343. He can’t help but repeat the “Small Good Picture” phrase,
attributing it to “visitors to Bishop’s apartment” at Lewis Wharf where the
painting hung in the 1970s. He also repeats the fact that “Bishop never had the
opportunity to meet” him, which is technically not correct (she did have an
opportunity in the 1930s but did not avail herself of it). He then describes
George as “a prolifically published professional book illustrator.” He then
gives a descriptive read of “Poem” (343-5). While not suggesting Travisano give
George the entire chapter that I give him in Lifting Yesterday, it would
have been nice to have had even a note offering more background for this
significant relative, about whom Bishop knew quite a lot. She also knew quite a
lot about his brothers, John Robert Hutchinson (a writer, translator and
antiquarian) and William Bernard Hutchinson (the first student of Acadia
University to become its president, also a writer, scholar and translator).
Bishop placed her wanderlust firmly at the feet of these globe-trotting
great-uncles. Moreover, Bishop herself painted and translated. As for “Large
Bad Picture,” Travisano could have seen an image of what he calls “the
technically inept bad picture” (why amplify Bishop’s more succinct, clearer
judgement?) on this blog. He does concede it was “an early work,” but that qualification
does not redeem it, and neither, apparently, does Bishop’s wonderful poem about
it. He could have explained that this painting was done when George was a young
man, before his time at the Royal Academy in London.
(Large Bad Picture painting.)
THE BISHOPS
I appreciated the
background of “Bishop’s father’s family, the Bishops of Worcester” (9),
especially of John W. Bishop, Sr., her paternal grandfather. Travisano affords
JWB’s rise to prominence a couple of pages and takes pains to link his success
in the construction business to Bishop’s artistic abilities. A fair enough
effort, I suppose; but JWB’s effect on Bishop’s life operated most directly in
the realm of finances, when he became conservator to Gertrude and guardian of
Bishop in 1914. On page 9, Travisano writes, “John W. was born on Canada’s
Prince Edward Island in 1846. At that time, PEI was a colony of the British
Empire. Canada became a nation only in 1867.
I was also
grateful for the information about William Thomas Bishop, Bishop’s father, and
especially the photograph of him, which I had never seen before. So little is
known about him and the portrait Travisano sketches is sympathetic. I was
disappointed that Travisano chose to quote only a fragment of a letter that
William wrote to his in-laws a few days after Bishop was born (12), the
fragment that Brett Millier quotes. (3) This letter is extant at Vassar and is
the only “voice” for him that we have. It is a document Bishop kept her entire
life, and undoubtedly treasured it. The subject of the quotation Travisano uses
is lactation, but there is so much more in this letter.
On page 125,
Travisano notes the death of John W. Bishop Jr. (Uncle Jack), who took over
guardianship for Bishop from his father when senior died in 1923. Jack died in
October 1934, not long after Gertrude. He observes that “her only surviving
elder Bishop relative was her ever-critical aunt Florence.” (An aside:
Travisano describes Bishop’s aunts variously as “captious” (84), “carping” (93)
and here “critical” (125) – while these characterizations are dispersed through
the text, it does set up a strongly negative view of them.) Then Travisano
makes an extraordinary claim about Florence. She “had recently spent time at
the Austen Riggs sanatorium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for what appears to
have been bipolar disorder and who was now running a bookshop in Stockbridge on
her doctor’s advice.” He gives no source for this information. It struck me
forcefully, for he also claims that Gertrude “might” have suffered from the
same thing. Poor Bishop, bipolar disorder on both sides. Since there is a
genetic component to this disorder, Bishop’s genetic cards were stacked against
her. How did she escape it? Did Florence have any more episodes of this
cyclical, recurring condition? Bishop often mentions Florence in her letters to
Aunt Grace in the 1950s and 1960s. Grace had known Florence for a long time.
Bishop passed on the stories about Florence’s behaviours that came from her
Bishop cousins. By the late 50s and early 60s Florence struggled with some form
of dementia and was often in nursing homes, but Bishop does not indicate at any
point in these letters that Florence was manic-depressive (as bi-polar disorder
was called then).
GRACE BULMER
BOWERS
This aunt comes in
for much more sympathetic treatment by Travisano, not “captious” or “carping”
or “critical,” but rather “alert, kind, levelheaded, keenly intelligent, and
more openly communicative than any of her other relatives on either the Bishop
or the Bulmer side.” (26) She warrants almost as many positive adjectives as
Lota. (239-40) On page 50 he states, “Grace continued to be involved in the
oversight of Gertrude’s care in Nova Scotia.” Besides an odd usage of the word
“oversight,” this claim is not entirely accurate. Gertrude was in the NSH from
June 1916 to May 1934. Grace, who was a nurse, kept in contact with the
hospital on behalf of the family in the late 1910s and early 1920s. The
hospital file contains letters from her to the hospital authorities; but as the
years passed, the family gave up hope and remained in touch only in a minimal
way. Grace was busy with her career and then marriage to William Bowers in 1923
(a widower with six children and a big farm) and began having her own children
in 1929.
Although he often
mentions the people Bishop wrote to and indicates if those letters survive or
were destroyed, Travisano does not mention the hundreds of letters that Bishop
wrote to Grace, which are at Vassar College. He quotes from these letters only
once. Nor does he mention Grace’s death in 1977, just a couple of weeks before
Lowell died. Bishop called Grace “the last real Bulmer” and her death severed a
bond that had endured Bishop’s entire life.
PLACES
On page 110,
Travisano writes: “Then, in August 1932, Bishop embarked on a walking tour of
Newfoundland with classmate Evelyn Huntington.” The paragraph he devotes to
this unusual choice of destination gives not the slightest indication why
Bishop would go there – her first major trip as an adult. In the 1930s,
Newfoundland was still a British colony (it did not become part of Canada until
1947). It was not the tourist mecca it is today. Indeed, at that time, it was a
neglected colonial society struggling with poverty. Yet Bishop loved being
there, writing to Frani Blough: “This place is far beyond my fondest dreams.
The cliffs rise straight out of the sea 400-500 feet.” (111) Travisano mentions
the journal she kept but quotes nothing of significance from it. What does it
say about Bishop that at twenty-one she ventured to such a place (no easy feat)
and loved it? Might she have been seeking the land that Great-uncle George
visited in the 1870s, a “large bad” depiction of which hung in her
grandparents’ home. Given his bent for definitive statements, this trip warrants
not even a slight speculation.
Bishop returned
alone to Nova Scotia in 1946, after a sixteen-year absence. She spent time in
Lockeport, Halifax and Great Village. She also visited Nova Scotia in 1947 with
Marjorie Stevens and spent time in Cape Breton and Great Village. In Cape
Breton she stayed in Breton Cove, which Travisano spells Briton Cove – not a
typo because it is found three times on pages 194-5.
On page 210,
Travisano quotes from a letter May Swenson wrote to Polly Hanson, that Bishop
was “in good health … she herself says she is as strong as a horse … maybe like
one of those sturdy little Nova Scotian ponies.” What Swenson means is a Sable
Island horse (which many outsiders called ponies, like the one Aunt Grace had
on the farm in Great Village). This slight comment is the only oblique mention
of Sable Island in Travisano’s book. Bishop went to Sable Island in the summer
of 1951, just before leaving for South America. This trip, like the one to
Newfoundland in 1932, was triggered by ancestral connections, this time her
Great-grandfather Robert Hutchinson. Bishop also intended to write an article
about this place for The New Yorker – something her editor Katharine
White keenly wanted. Bishop never finished “The Deadly Sandpile,” but intended
to for some time, even after Brazil intervened. Again, a biographer can’t
include everything, but even Brett Millier understood its importance. Might this
trip (again no easy feat to get there) have warranted a sentence?
Bishop finally
settled for good in Boston and began teaching at Harvard in 1970. One of the
first things she did was visit Nova Scotia, and she went back again, often in
the fall for a week or so, nearly every year during that decade. Her final
visit was in May 1979, when Dalhousie University gave her an honorary degree.
She died in October. There is no mention, not even a note, of any of this
re-connection.
LETTERS
Travisano not only
mines Bishop’s ample correspondence (her letters are perhaps the single largest
source in his book, naturally enough, as Bishop wrote thousands of them), but
he also speaks to this correspondence as a unique phenomenon and mentions when letters
have vanished or were destroyed. It seems to me that a whole study could be
done of “Bishop the Letter-Writer.” A hint of what might be possible is found
in Letter Writing Among Poets from William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop (2015),
edited by Jonathan Ellis, in which Travisano has an essay about his editing of Words
in Air (2008), the correspondence between Bishop and Lowell.
Besides the
Bradley letters, other significant correspondence Travisano mines, which was
not available to Brett Millier, Gary Fountain, me and all the other scholars
and literary critics writing before the 2010s are the long letter to Dr. Ruth
Foster, letters from Lota de Macedo Soares written in 1967, and letters to and
from Alice Methfessel from the 1970s. I speak to the Foster letter in the
section on Maude and George. I have yet to finish reading the letters to and
from Lota, from a transcript done by David Hoak, but what I have seen so far is
poignant. I have not seen the letters to and from Alice, but it is clear from
Travisano’s quotations, they were tender and vivid. After Lota died and
Bishop’s failed relationship with Roxanne Cumming, her partnership with Alice
was, as she put it, a “saving grace.” On page 325-6, Travisano writes: “In
fact, these words [“I LOVE YOU!”] in full caps appeared frequently in the
missives flooding Bishop’s mailbox at Casa Mariana. After the fraught
relationships Bishop had recently experienced with Lota de Macedo Soares and
Roxanne Cumming, this new and warmly affectionate bond with the young Alice
Methfessel must have come not only as an overwhelming relief but as an
overpowering surprise.” It is not that I disagree with Travisano here, but
surely linking Lota and Roxanne thusly (one relationship of over fifteen years
and one of only about two years) is unfair to Lota. Yes, the end of that
partnership was tragic and painful, but the context for it was far deeper,
greater, more enduring and tragic than the relationship with Roxanne. We are
each entitled to our opinion, but Travisano often makes strong declarations –
that “must” again – which gloss over serious complexity.
On pages 332-3,
Travisano writes about Bishop’s love of
“the epistolary form.” Throughout the book, he makes observations about
the quantity and quality of Bishop’s letter-writing, and the remarkable range
of correspondents. He mentions some of the published collections of her letters
that have already appeared. More are in the works. At one point, he concludes,
“So in teaching a course on ‘just letters, as an art form or something,’ at
Harvard in 1971, Bishop was anticipating a trend.” “Trend” strikes me as an odd
term for what is perhaps an extraordinary phenomenon. Few other mid-century
writers are an equal to Bishop’s practice of this “art form.” Travisano is
never averse to using strong adjectives, such as “great” and “remarkable” and
“brilliant” to describe Bishop’s writing achievements; but Bishop wasn’t
prescient, she was simply practicing and teaching a genre which had been part
of the world around her, essential to her gestalt. It is us who have lost this
art and in reading her, we re-discovered what she knew all along, that letter
writing was a vital and necessary part of life.
SOURCE
On page 15
Travisano states categorically of Gertrude’s hospital file that they were
“records whose content Bishop would never see.” He repeats this “never” claim on
pages 26, 50 and 183-4; but does not provide a source for this assertion. In
1946, on her first trip back to Nova Scotia after a sixteen-year absence,
Bishop asked her friend Zilpha Linkletter, a bureaucrat, how she might get
access to these records. Zilpha advised her, but she told me that she never
asked Bishop the result. Zilpha told Gary Fountain (Remembering Elizabeth
Bishop) that “she [Bishop] didn’t say it had been a failure.” (100) Unless
Travisano has another source that confirms her effort was “unsuccessful” (183),
claiming absolutely that it was is over-stepping. The best we can say, to my
knowledge, is that perhaps she saw them, or perhaps she did not. It is highly
probable that she visited the Nova Scotia Hospital in 1946. I must correct
Travisano’s name for this institution. He refers to it officially as the “Nova
Scotia Hospital for the Insane,” which is how it is listed in the book’s index
and occasionally in the text (though he also shortens it to the Nova Scotia
Hospital and in one instance the Dartmouth Hospital). It was officially the
“Nova Scotia Hospital,” as confirmed by the annual reports of its
superintendent to the Nova Scotia Legislature. It was also referred to as Mount
Hope.
On page 29
Travisano refers to “Reminiscences of Great Village,” which he says Bishop
worked on in 1936. I suggest in Lifting Yesterday that she had been
working on this account of her childhood as early as 1934 (she mentions it in a
letter to Frani Blough). This title is not Bishop’s, but a file title given to
the document by the archivist at Vassar College.
On page 32,
Travisano writes: “When ‘In the Village’ first appeared in The New Yorker
in 1953, it was attentively read and actively discussed in Great Village.
Several neighbors recollected Mate Fisher, the village smith, and his affinity
for children, and for the young Elizabeth in particular.” What is the source
for these statements? I assume Remembering Elizabeth Bishop. I learned
from Donalda Nelson that her sister Margaret Motley, living in New York City in
the 50s, saw “In the Village” and sent a copy back to Great Village. Decades
later Donalda generously gave me that very copy. Bishop was especially
concerned about what Grace thought, so a copy was sent to her. It, however, no
longer exists. Travisano is so specific here, I wonder where he learned about
the memories of Mayhew (Mate/Nate for Bishop) T. Fisher? Fisher was still very
much alive and living in Bass River in the 1950s. Indeed, he died in the 1970s,
in his 90s, not long before Bishop. I met his daughter (also now deceased) who
told me about her father: how he would recite poetry and sing while at his
forge, and how whenever she stopped in after school, he always paused to talk
with her and find out how she was doing.
CITATIONS
The general reader
probably doesn’t care a bit about sources and citations, but any scholar
reading this book will be keen about them. Having been kindly mentioned in the
acknowledgements that my “expertise on Bishop’s early years in Nova Scotia is
unparalleled,” imagine my surprise to come across the only time I am quoted, on
page 22, and to see that it is from the very first essay I ever published about
Bishop in the Nova Scotia Historical Review in 1991. While I stand by
what I wrote then, it was at the very beginning of my research about Bishop and
Nova Scotia, and since then, a good deal of its content has been expanded upon
significantly. I am cited once again on page 38, but it is for a quotation from
the Truro Daily News. My article offered a preliminary chronology of
Bishop’s time in N.S. based on information from that newspaper. Curiously,
there are two more quotations from this newspaper on page 38, but Travisano
does not cite my essay further. I say curiously because there are instances
when he cites every quotation from the same source that are immediately
sequential. For example, on pages 26-8, he quotes four times from Gertrude’s
hospital file, a section he calls “Statement.” Notes 8 to 11 are all this
statement (without page numbers). But then, there will be instances when he
will not cite any source for information that clearly he has extracted from
some place. In the end, I was puzzled by his citation method.
In Note 28, page
394, he writes: “The Dartmouth [sic: Nova Scotia] Hospital’s ‘Clinical
Record’ is now on file in the Bulmer-Bowers-Hutchinson-Sutherland family fonds
at the library [sic: archives] at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova
Scotia.” Actually, the archives holds only a photocopy of this record.
CODA
The final chapter
in Travisano’s book deals with Bishop’s legacy and the steady build-up of
interest in the decades since she died. He mentions the founding of the
Elizabeth Bishop Society and lists the initial conferences/symposia that
happened: Key West Literary Seminar (1993), Vassar College conference (1994)
and the Elizabeth Bishop Conference and Poetry Festival in Worcester, MA
(1997). C’est tout. Even if he didn’t want to list others that followed
(in Wolfville, N.S. (1998); Ouro Prêto, Brazil (1999); Halifax, N.S. (2011);
Sheffield, England; Paris, France; North Haven, Maine; and more), might he just
have indicated that such events have continued into the twenty-first century?
But all of these are outside the U.S., which would distract from the American
agenda of this book. He mentions a CBS News Sunday Morning feature about Bishop
done in 1994, but he does not mention the inaugural documentary done for PBS’s “Voices
and Visions” series in the late 1980s. This documentary is cited in the notes
(7, 25, 26, 33) for Chapter 6. (396-7) This documentary certainly would have
bolstered the argument for Bishop as an American poet. A feature film has been
done, “Reaching for the Moon,” by the Brazilians; and the late film-maker
Barbara Hammer did the most recent documentary, “Welcome to this House.” The
truncated lists he offers are another puzzling element in this book.
MISCELLANEOUS
QUIBBLES
On page 18,
Travisano notes, “Such travel, whether by rail or via a direct ferry service
between Boston and Yarmouth … was considered easy and commonplace in those
days…” Those days are the 1910s and 1920s. The sea route mentioned was not served
by a “ferry” at that time, but by a steamship. Ferries are a mid- to late-20th
century vessel.
On page 20,
Travisano quotes from Gertrude’s hospital file, “…then sent to Dr. Morton’s
private Sanatorium, Norwood, Mass.” The doctor is Dr. Eben C. Norton. If
Travisano had consulted Lifting Yesterday, he would not have made this
error.
On page 38,
Travisano writes of the Great Village School, “Bishop’s was not a one-room
schoolhouse – there were several classrooms on the first two stories of this
tall, wood-framed building.” This phrasing implies this building had more than
two stories. It has only two stories. Even so, it is an impressive structure.
On page 70,
Travisano quotes Bishop writing to Louise Bradley on 30 March 1926: “Dearest of
all dear Kindred Spirits.” (70) I guess being male, Travisano doesn’t recognize
this phrase for what it is and where it comes from, meaning that Bishop had
clearly read Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, which was
published in 1908. By the late 20s, its protagonist, Anne Shirley, had already
become the most famous cultural icon of a precocious orphan girl, living with
strangers on Prince Edward Island, making life-long friends at school. Travisano
does have a sense of the importance of this phrase because he uses it himself
on page 82. This phrase is perhaps the only direct reference to this classic in
Bishop’s writing, but perhaps indirectly, there is a hint in “The Gentleman of
Shallot.” Anne Shirley loves “The Lady of Shallott,” and while Bishop could
have come upon Tennyson’s classic solitary woman on her own, she perhaps was
sent there by Montgomery. All this is speculation, of course, and I don’t
suppose noting the origin of this phrase matters much, but Travisano
contextualizes other seemingly slight echoes and convergences.
On a couple of
occasions, Travisano invokes Calvinism and Puritanism, applying them in
negative ways to the Bulmers and Bishops. On page 82-3 he writes: “Yet Bishop’s
social difference – born not only out of her history of childhood isolation and
abuse but also out of the Calvinist reticence or taciturnity of her Bishop and
Bulmer forebearers [sic: forebears] ….” On page 221: “Bishop who had
felt so often deprived of tender care during her loss-haunted Calvinist
childhood ….” Then on page 243: “Having lived among the tight-lipped Puritans
of her Bishop and Bulmer families ….” The only definition he offers for
Calvinism comes on page 142, in a read of George Herbert’s poem “Love Unknown,”
from whence comes his title: “This interpretation is consistent with the
Calvinist view that God visits the most intense trials as acts of grace on
those he wishes most to save ….” Calvinism and Puritanism are huge, complex
movements that may or may not have affected the Baptist faith as practiced by
the Bulmers and the Congregationalist faith as practiced by the Bishops.
Travisano uses these terms as negative stereotypes, in a colloquial way:
Calvinists and Puritans are repressed, silent, punishing, even abusive people.
The Baptist faith that the Bulmers practiced was one deeply enlightened about
the importance and value of education, not the anti-intellectual, ultra-conservative
practice that can sometimes be seen in some sects of the Baptist faith today,
say, for example, in the southern United States. Bishop’s Great-uncle William
Bernard Hutchinson was an accomplished scholar of Baptist history and was the
first graduate of Acadia University (founded as a Baptist college in the
nineteenth century) to become its president. John Bishop Sr was certainly no
Puritan descendent, having migrated from PEI in the mid-1800s. William Bishop
had an open, homely, inclusive kind of faith, since he also worshiped at the
Presbyterian Church in Great Village. Travisano uses these terms to disparage
the belief systems of two families which had their own complex beliefs and
practices.
On page 100,
Travisano notes, “Beneath the intent profile [of her class picture at Walnut
Hill], and that Shelleyan motto [‘The locks of the approaching storm.’],
Bishop’s native place is given as Great Village, Nova Scotia.” I was delighted
to see this because I had not known about it, but I wondered why he did not
include the Walnut Hill class prophecy for Bishop, which Gary Fountain (Remembering
Elizabeth Bishop) found decades before: “Miss Bishop, the poet laureate of
Nova Scotia. Walnut Hill has proudly placed her bust in the alcove, while she
remains in Nova Scotian seclusion.” Bishop continued to identify her “native
place” as Great Village under her Vassar College yearbook photo in 1934. Why
mention one thing and not the other, even if only in a note?
I am not
knowledgeable enough about Bishop’s life in Brazil to speak to factual accuracy
or interpretation. What I know comes from secondary sources. But I did wonder
about a term Travisano uses to describe the people surrounding Lota de Macedo
Soares. On page 241 he writes: “Macedo Soares … depended on a shifting
assemblage of domestics, while also gathering around her a varied array of
adoptees and hangers-on who amounted almost to surrogate family.” He repeats
“hangers-on” on this page and then again on page 253. It strikes me as a
somewhat disparaging term for her “surrogate family.”
On page 248,
Travisano offers a read of “Gwendolyn,” about a Great Village childhood friend
who died young from diabetes. He writes: “But long after Gwendolyn’s death, one
of her surviving brothers, who had read Bishop’s story, insisted his parents
had no idea that sugar was a danger to individuals with diabetes. This seems
quite probable, since the risks of sugar for diabetics was only just becoming
known in the early 1920s, and the pioneering research on these risks was taking
place at Massachusetts General Hospital, where Bishop’s mother and aunts had
trained as nurses.” No source is given for the brother’s comments, but they are
from Remembering Elizabeth Bishop. (11) Intending no disrespect to the
pioneering work at MGH about the danger of too much sugar for diabetics, but it
was a Canadian team at the University of Toronto, including Frederick G.Banting and Charles Best, that discovered insulin in 1921. Gwendolyn died in
September 1922, sadly too soon for the ground-breaking discovery to have helped
her.
On page 331,
Travisano describes Bishop’s trip to the Galápagos Islands in 1971, where she
encountered “mother seals” showing “off their babies to the island visitors.”
Travisano brings in “At the Fishhouses” with its hymn-loving seal that “had
shared silent colloquies each evening” during Bishop’s Nova Scotia trip in
1947. “Now, in these much warmer waters, Bishop enjoyed casually sharing the
beach with an entire pod of equatorial mother seals and their offspring.”
Whales collect in “pods”; seals in “herds.”
Sometimes
Travisano’s characterizations of people or places or poems puzzled me. For
example, on page 356, he observes that “The End of March” “is a very different
poem from the astringent ‘Crusoe in England’ or ‘In the Waiting Room’.” What a
strange term to apply to a poem. I looked it up. My Concise Oxford gives
the first definition as “causing the contraction of body tissues.” The second
definition is “checking bleeding.” The third is “severe, austere.” How is
“Crusoe in England” any of these things? And does he also mean “In the Waiting
Room,” too? The syntax might suggest it. Both these poems are filled with vivid
detail and while they are serious, with bursts of humour, they are not severe
or austere. There are other such characterizations that puzzled me, but this
one makes my point.
On page 361,
Travisano writes: “In the 1960s, in Rio, Bishop had lived near the epicenter of
a tumultuous era of Brazilian politics …” Is it just me, or is this something
of a mixed metaphor?
On page 369, in
offering a read of “One Art,” Travisano writes: “alternating positions at the
end of each three-line stanza, carry us willy-nilly through the entire length
of the poem.” As the read progresses, he writes: “Henceforth, the poem’s
catalog of losses become more specific, and more personal.” I have never
encountered such an odd juxtaposition of the colloquial phrasing with formal
style. Moreover, it seems to me that the poem is advancing in a very specific
way, not “willy-nilly,” that is, randomly, at all.
One of the saddest
losses for Bishop in the 1970s was Robert Lowell’s unexpected death in August
1977. Travisano discusses this event and Bishop’s tender, aching poem “North
Haven,” her tribute to Lowell. Lowell was known as in inveterate reviser, which
prompts Travisano to write: “Perhaps the ultimate revision we as humans face is
death itself ….” (376). “Perhaps”? Isn’t it a certainty?
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