Elizabeth Bishop's childhood home put me up the last week in February for several years. Precious
days for thinking, reading, writing, and walking — sometimes out to a
high frozen pasture to look down on the spire of Saint James' Church,
other times through waist-deep thick-crusted snow, up to the cemetery
where Bishop's grandparents are laid to rest. That's where I was coming
back from one day in February, 2007, just in time to catch Janet Baker
before she headed for Truro. She'd left me a copy of
February House,
hanging in a plastic shopping bag from the back door latch. "I wanted
you to have it for the week — I know you'll enjoy it," she said. It's
the story of a brownstone house that once stood at 7 Middagh Street in
Brooklyn, where a motley group of writers, musicians, and artists,
including Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Paul and Jane Bowles and W.
H. Auden, lived for a time in something between a boarding house and a
commune. Anaïs Nin named it the February House, because so many of its
inhabitants had birthdays then. Later that week we'd be gathering to
celebrate Auden's hundredth birthday. I'd heroically refrained from
putting "Carriages at One" at the bottom of the invitations, as Auden
used to do.
Who are we? Friends. Some of more than
thirty years' standing, others meeting for the first time. There would
be a menu for each of us, its cover photograph taken at the famous
writers' conclave in the back room of the Gotham Book Mart (which would
be locking its already-once-relocated-doors forever a month thence).
Auden contrives to slouch on a high stool well above all the rest, while
Elizabeth Bishop stands stiffly next to Marianne Moore and stares off
left at something Randall Jarrell is also taken by, -- something,
perhaps, behind our right shoulder as we look in on them by sixty odd
inches and back on them by sixty odd years.
We'd be having smoked salmon
puffs, chicken satsivi, mushroom pie and cucumbers in sour cream,
birthday cake and flummery — a spread Auden's companion Chester Kallman
would (I hope, anyhow) have found acceptable, if not by his standards
lavish. We'd be reading some of Mr. Kallman's poems, too, that afternoon. After
all, he wept over "The Moose," as James Merrill wrote to Bishop, and she
wrote back that she could weep herself, just thinking of it. It would
be a day for him, too.
After lunch we settled back to
read to one another. "If you really are concerned about love, I'd suggest you go and read Auden. If he doesn't know something
about that subject, I just don't know who else does," Bishop claimed in 1966,
so we started with Auden's "Some say that Love's a little boy" and "Lay
your sleeping head, my love." A bit earlier, on 21 December 1965, Bishop
wrote to a friend: "Hardy's 'Her Apotheosis' is similar to that poem of
Auden's about the matron having lunch at Schrafft's, etc.", so we read
those two. Scott MacDougall read from Hannah Arendt. We read poems from
Kallman's books Storm at Castelfranco and A Sense of Occasion.
And as we read, a companionable warmth welled into a shared happiness
that has loomed larger as the occasion has receded. It has become
something akin to that "sweet sensation of joy" we all share for those
few moments in "The Moose". Is it wrong to hear in Bishop's "where if
the river/enters or retreats/in a wall of brown foam" echoes both of
Auden's "But when the waters make retreat/And through the black mud
first the wheat/In shy green stalks appears" and of Kallman's "Evening.
Who calls? The light/Is walking on the waves; the light retreats./A word
advances and repeats"? Is it a mistake to hear Auden's "drowned
parental voices" somewhere in the back of the bus with Bishop's
"grandparents' voices"? No. On that particular afternoon, at any rate,
that bright February afternoon, with the extra bottles of Vouvray for
once entirely forgotten in the pantry until hours after we'd parted, we
felt — we all felt — that the bus climbing from the narrow plain and
later returning under a sickle moon the blue broke in a fleece-white
ribbon along the beach in Kallman's "Little Epithalamium" was, just for
that day, the same one entering Bishop's New Brunswick woods, with its
moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool on bushes in a
pasture. Certainly it was the same moon, the moon that "looks on them
all", as Auden wrote in "A Summer Night". Just as in her "Invitation to
Miss Marianne Moore," Bishop refashioned the strict sapphics of Pablo
Neruda's “Alberto Rojas Giménez viene volando," so in "The Moose" she
loosened the strict AABCCB rhyme scheme of Auden's sestains, while
echoing the epiphany of his opening stanzas in almost final lines of her
own.
The party has been looming larger, too, in the
years since it was held. There were lovely thank you notes. One said "It
was as if New York's Russian Tea Room had relocated to rural Nova
Scotia." Another friend wrote "My head is still 'fizzing' with the talk
and the wonderful readings. The memory of it will always be vivid. One
of the things I so loved was all the laughter--the house shook and it so
loves that kind of conviviality and connection." Several folks sent
photos — mostly of the food, actually… Elizabeth Jones wrote to share
the connection she had discovered between Oberon's last speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and Auden's "Lay your sleeping head, my love." Folks I met again when
we returned the summer after for the unveiling of the Bishop plaques at
the Great Village pergola confirmed what I, too, had felt -- something
about that February afternoon had partaken, to some slight extent, at
any rate, of the shared communality and commonality Auden describes so
memorably in the prose of his introduction to Anne Fremantle's 1964
anthology The Protestant Mystics,
and in his poem "A Summer Night". Perhaps not quite his "Vision of
Agape" — visions being too serious a word — but the feeling of the sight
of a door left unlocked "because someone might need to come in", the
feeling of the sight of a book in a plastic shopping bag, left because
someone thought you'd like it, hanging ever-so-slightly agape from a
yet-to-be-used latch.
_crop%2B2(gg).jpg)
.JPG)
Posts
