In January 2003, Tom Travisano invited me to participate on a panel
about Elizabeth Bishop and the “Boston
States,” given at an American
Literature Association conference in Boston,
MA, in May 2003. Below is part of
my presentation. I dedicated it to Muir MacLachlan of Great Village,
who died on 3 January 2003, at the age of 92.
I have written at some length about the close historical ties between
the Maritimes and New England, about the rôle this geo-political,
socio-economic interconnection played in Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood and
adolescence.1 The metaphor I have used most frequently is that of
migration – the continuous toing and froing between both regions, so regular in
certain eras that it seemed a force of nature, it seemed as regular as tide. It
was so for Elizabeth Bishop: “First, she had come home, with her child. Then
she had gone away again, alone, and left the child. Then she had come home.
Then she had gone away again, with her sister; and now she was home again....So
many things in the village came from Boston,
and even I had once come from there. But I remembered only being here, with my
grandmother.” (Collected Prose 252,
254)
The idea of the “Boston States” is inextricably linked to the Maritimes.
It is a Maritime phrase. It has lost much of its currency and relevance in
today’s globalization, yet even in my childhood I remember it being
used. When I was three my parents took a trip (still frequently done then), to
the “Boston States” to visit Nova Scotia
friends who had moved to Worcester.
I decided the best way to convey the organic quality of this ebb and
flow in Bishop’s life was to write a kind of litany. I have chosen to frame
this litany impressionistically. The facts are multiple and highly intertwined,
fascinating in themselves but too involved to recount here. So I offer a poetic
version instead. Keep in mind that Elizabeth Bishop knew a great deal about
each of the relatives I mention, knew their stories. The “here and there” of
this litany was her earliest “total immersion.” She was a full participant
(willing and unwilling) in the tide of life between these regions. My apologies
to Elizabeth Bishop for my awkward narrative (as opposed to lyrical) lines:
Her ancestors sailed from England
for every reason imaginable,
sailed towards the future, which is now
the unreclaimable past.
Fosters trace to William the Conqueror.
Bulmers trace to before William the Conqueror.
Bishops and Hutchinsons trace beyond memory.
Somewhere, so far back,
hidden in the folds of Fales, Meade, Hooper and Black,
the lines diverged from the seven clan mothers.
Somewhere, not so far back, the codes held
in these bones and blood washed up
on nearby shores: colonies of wilderness,
colonies of hope, colonies of construction
and deconstruction, and every ancestor must account.
Fosters trace to Massachusetts.
Bulmers trace to Nova Scotia.
Bishops trace to Prince Edward
Island.
Hutchinsons trace to New Brunswick.
The matrix is artisans – weavers, farmers,
carpenters, tanners; seamstresses, gardeners,
healers, cooks – crafting from scratch
(she once wrote “in a pinch”) new lives
“in unthought of ways,” new ideas forged
from molten iron (the too hot imagination),
cooled into judges, deacons and politicians
with obedient or not so obedient wives.
The circle constricts towards the centre;
the trajectories lie in closer proximity.
What force in nature brings together
disparate lives as though on purpose?
She would have said “wanderlust.”
It must be a gene.
The matrix set inside a vast historical pattern
because the sea is the first highway,
an element of motion older than all pilgrims
combined. Its paradigm is tide. Time.
The wanderlust kept alive by the Hutchinsons
– master mariners and missionaries who sailed
around the Horn, sailed to Egypt,
to India and back to England. Sailed
and spoke
the journeys – this line was the artists: writers,
translators, painters, orators.
Her affinity was always with the artists,
who settled and never settled, who appeared
and vanished, because that is what artists do.
John Bishop emigrated from Prince
Edward Island
to Rhode Island to Massachusetts. He married
Sarah Foster; their large family included William.
William Bulmer took a young man’s tour
of New England, then settled in Nova
Scotia.
He married Elizabeth Hutchinson;
their large family included Gertrude.
All the ancestral inclinations converged here,
at the turn of the twentieth century,
in a moment (lost to the record)
when this William and this Gertrude met.
It all happened for this one reason
(why not?) – it all happened for every
other reason imaginable or unimaginable,
remembered or lost. Is there a reason
to choose a nexus, study it,
realize, as she did,
truth is an imaginary iceberg,
visceral, looming, cold?
Her study of the consequences
of this lost moment lasted a lifetime.
Begin again: to Boston to Boston to train
as a nurse; home again, home again
because she was ill. Back to Boston
where he was ill; she nursed him
back to health.
The bond can only be imagined: She fled
to Great Village afraid of the power
of her love. He followed her to Great Village
determined to declare the power of his love.
In 1908 they were married. They sailed
to Jamaica, to Panama for
their honeymoon.
Back in Massachusetts
they lived and loved
their only child into being.
1911 was a year of life and death (isn’t every year?).
1911 began the back and forth of her imagination;
life began like a cradle rocking. Rocking gently
on the sea between worlds, both worlds home,
neither world home. She said the poet
“carries home within.”
Is there a reason
to choose? Let the rocking continue
her whole life: aboard the North Star
(ponder all the shipwrecks); aboard
the Königstein, the Normandy,
the Britannic,
the Exeter,
the Bowplate, the Jarlsberg,
the Prince of Fundy. Life began en route:
steam back and forth between Yarmouth
and Boston,
ride the “unk-etty” train
between Londonderry Station and Boston,
motor the to and fro in early Fords and Chevrolets,
sit in the long bus limbo on trips between
Great Village
and Boston.
Occasionally fly,
if you have to.
Great-grandparents did so.
Grandparents and great-uncles did so.
Maternal aunts and girl cousins did so.
Even Uncle Arthur, who never went anywhere
in his life, drove from the village to Boston
once or twice, to visit his daughters.
Look at him, he ended up in Brazil,
like she did. Willingly
and unwillingly she came to and left
Nova Scotia. Willingly
and unwillingly she came to and left
Massachusetts. Patterns as old
as her ancestors,
as new as her own next breath.
Lost and found words were mantras,
she called them “first syllables,”
which vanished from her tongue
like her father and mother from her life.
Where does the historian, the biographer,
the critic, the artist locate the initial conditions,
the uncanny convergences, the accidents?
In her lines, in her vision (“look,” that is),
in her memory, which lift the weight
of uncountable yesterdays, as far back
as William the Conqueror,
and as close as old men named Muir.
*****
1. Sandra Barry, “Invisible Threads and Indivdual Rubatos: Migration in
Elizabeth Bishop’s Life and Work.” In “In Worcester, Massachusetts”
Essays on Elizabeth Bishop. ed. Laura Jehns Menides and Angela G.
Dorenkamp. New York:
Peter Lang, 1999, pp. 59–73.