It has been some time since the last post, but I am delighted to share a review done for us by our correspondent in Tacoma, Washington, who also happens to be the newest member of the EBSNS. It is a delight to be able to offer something so substantial, after a lengthy hiatus. Happy Spring!
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On Leading Literary Lives: A Review of
Dana Gioia’s Studying with Miss Bishop
By Tristan Beach
Gioia, Dana. Studying with
Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writers Life. Paul Dry Books, 2021. 186
Pages.Every reader has two lives—one public,
the other secret. The public life is the one visible to teachers, friends, and
families… But every true reader has a secret life, which is equally intense,
complex, and important. The books we read are no different from the people we
meet or the cities we visit. —Dana Gioia
So begins “Lonely Impulse of Delight,” the
first essay of Dana Gioia’s witty and sagacious memoir collection, Studying
with Miss Bishop. Throughout the book, Gioia presents “portraits” of
important “teachers” in his growth from reader to college student to rising ad
executive enmeshed in a secretive literary life. These teachers loom grand yet
kind (Robert Fitzgerald), polite yet frank (Elizabeth Bishop), troubled yet
authentic (John Cheever), and intimidating yet human (James Dickey). The more
obscure, but arguably most important teachers, neither of whom Gioia had ever
met, bookend the collection. And each teacher provides Gioia with important
examples of how to read, how to write—how to critique writing and talk about it—and
how to live one’s life resolutely on one’s own terms.
I.
Gioia’s first great literary teacher was
his Mexican uncle, Ted Ortiz, a Merchant Marine and “proletarian intellectual” who
died in a plane crash when Gioia was only six. Gioia never knew his uncle but
nonetheless inherited his vast library. As Gioia relates, this library of
numerous authors, painters, poets, philosophers, and composers presented a gateway
to a wonderous, reading-fueled inner life that laid the foundation for his literary
pursuits. However, Gioia’s upbringing in a working-class Sicilian/Mexican
immigrant community in Hawthorne, CA, contextualizes much of his enduring efforts
to lead both a public life—one of material prosperity—and a secret literary life—as
a future revolutionary figure in contemporary poetry.
He writes, “By the standards of Hawthorne,
a rough and ugly industrial town, my love of books was clearly excessive,
indeed almost shameful… I needed to hide it, if only to keep it pure. A private
passion is free from public pressure.” Presenting, candidly, this double life to
the reader complicates Gioia, the literary giant—while paradoxically deepening
the reader’s sense of relation. This sense of relation perhaps speaks to the
strangeness and the loneliness of literary life, especially one lived in
secret. Gioia acknowledges that those of us who pursue such beautiful lives as
these will typically hide from shame or out of self-preservation.
Gioia’s upbringing also influenced his resistance
to treading the same narrow paths many of his Harvard classmates embraced in
the 1970s. In the preface he writes, “The professions we enter change the ways
in which we look at the world and ourselves. I recognized my sense of being a
poet was changing in ways alien to my sense of the art, which was neither
cerebral nor elitist. I didn’t want to write in ways that excluded people,
especially the people I came from. … I wanted my poems to be moving, memorable,
and accessible.” To him, Harvard “was training me to be a research university
professor of literature”—and not the poet he wanted to be. Thus, he left the academic
world of literature to “figure things out on [his] own” and returned to Stanford,
his undergraduate alma mater, eventually achieving an MBA and embarking on a
new path in business. He followed the examples of T.S. Eliot and Wallace
Stevens, both of whom juggled business and writing throughout their lives.
However, Gioia was more immediately and
directly encouraged through his numerous encounters at Harvard with Robert
Fitzgerald, related in “Remembering Robert Fitzgerald,” who had already led a
literary life prior to academia. While at Stanford, Gioia’s interactions with John
Cheever, as related in “A Week with John Cheever,” left a deep impression on
him: Cheever had never attended college, but was held in high esteem,
especially following his late career resurgence. Yet among these examples that
informed and affirmed Gioia’s resolve in cutting his own path, his tutelage
under Elizabeth Bishop is probably the most surprising.
II.
Although she graces the cover (and title) of
this collection of memoirs, Elizabeth Bishop’s “portrait,” which was previously
published in The New Yorker, in 1986, constitutes fewer pages than
expected. However, her presence carries throughout, and Gioia’s experiences in
her classroom provide rare insight into a side of the late poet that few
readers glimpse—Bishop, the teacher.
Early in her modern poetry class, Bishop
matter-of-factly states, “I’m not a very good teacher.” This disarming
frankness in admitting one’s shortcomings is enough to sour many people’s
confidence. Thus, by the second day of class, the roster had dwindled to five
students, Gioia still among them. Yet, Gioia’s description of Bishop’s personality
and pedagogy feel surprisingly progressive. He characterizes her as “politely
formal, shy, and undramatic… She wanted no worshipful circle of students and
got none.” At the same time, his first encounter with the poet, whom he had
known only through her books (and he had read them all), is palpable, even
strange: “It was an odd, almost uncomfortable sensation to have the perfect
world of books peer so casually into the disorder of everyday life.”
In the essay, Gioia describes Bishop
teaching her students to love and find pleasure in reading poetry through
memorization, recital, discussion, and reading closely—for effect and craft
versus critical analysis. Bishop focused more on accessing poets such as
William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell as humans laboring
to produce works of the soul. This was a far cry from the rigorous, unsparing critiquing
that Gioia had previously encountered. Bishop’s approach greatly appealed to
Gioia’s own sense of writing for readers—rather than critics. And his respect
for her sincere humility as well as her life outside of the academic
establishment (beginning teaching at 60) further provided important examples
for Gioia as a writer at a crossroads, in 1975. Gioia’s essay provides a wry,
luminous, and unadorned portrait of Bishop.
III.
Possibly the most affecting essay of the
collection, “Letters from the Bahamas: Memoir of a Poet I never Met,” pays
tribute to and preserves the memory of Ronald Perry, whom Gioia describes as “a
forgotten poet.” Gioia first encountered Perry through his poetry, reviewing
Perry’s National Poetry Series-winning collection, Denizens. Gioia
describes the book as “technically brilliant” and “surprising,” as the
ambiguous, sensual poems that comprise the collection engage the reader,
leading through uncertain and unexpected turns. In reviewing Perry’s book,
Gioia accidentally began a prolific correspondence with an obscure yet
extremely generous and intelligent friend. Perry’s presence in the final essay
of the book casts a long shadow over the rest. On the day the two were
scheduled to meet in New York, in 1982, Gioia was informed that Perry had suddenly
and mysteriously passed away the night before.
As the essay continues, Gioia relates
biographical information about Perry, detailing his upbringing, his literary
struggles, and his own double life as a poet. Being outside of the academy,
Perry was unconnected from most literary circles. Among his handful of independently
published pamphlets, he had produced two full collections of poetry, spaced
twenty-one years apart. The latter collection, Denizens, subsequently
revitalized his career for a short time and connected him with other
contemporary writers and critics, including Gioia. Yet his death cut short what
might have been.
The lesson that Perry imparted is not lost
on Gioia, who admits that his literary career, like Wallace Stevens’s before
him, “had been marked by silences,” stating that by the time he encountered
Perry, he had been “[living] in the future tense.” His brief friendship cut
short, Gioia resolved to make a change—“I, who had so carefully avoided human
drama, found myself in the midst of one.” Practically overnight, Gioia joined a
small number of Perry’s friends, including the poet Donald Justice, in working
to preserve and sustain Perry’s literary legacy.
By Way of Conclusion
If there is an arc in Studying with Miss
Bishop—a book written over the span of decades and published, at last, in
the 21st century—it is an arc of agency, of taking the reins of
one’s life and participating in the lives of others. As the book is
organized chronologically, Gioia begins modestly as an introspective and
curious child, a receiver of a vast treasure trove of literature. He progresses
into adulthood, encountering teachers and mentors, and critics—adapting to
circumstance while building his own literary life. In the final essay, we
observe Gioia taking part in managing Perry’s affairs, connecting mutual
friends together, and celebrating the deceased poet’s gift to the world: poems,
letters, and confessions now sitting “undisturbed in boxes in the University of
Miami library.”
Amid this tragedy, Gioia reveals a sobering
maturity, recognizing the frustrating blocks, long silences, and quiet, constant
defeats of literary life—whether lived solely or in secret. He remarks that
literary life is “a fragile existence made tolerable, sometimes even redeemed,
by the intoxication of creation and the intensity of literary friendship.” By
framing his literary teachers and forebearers in “portraits,” Gioia presents a collective
mirror of himself and his experiences, reflecting candid, firsthand lessons and
inviting his readers to commune within a richly storied, multidimensional inner
life, revealed.
**********
Tristan Beach is a student in the PhD in
English program (Rhetoric and Composition emphasis) at the University of
Nevada, Reno (beginning Fall 2021). He is an English lecturer at Saint Martin’s
University, in Washington state, and has taught college EFL across China,
2014–2017. He received his MFA in Poetry from Goddard College in 2013. Tristan
is also the Poetry Editor of Pif Magazine and was recently elected to
Olympia Poetry Network’s board of directors. His poems, creative nonfiction,
and commentary appear in Pitkin Review, rawboned, Pif Magazine, The Writer
in the World, and Shantih. He frequently collaborates with other writers
in the Olympia-Tacoma-Seattle area.
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