In May 2003 I attended an American Literature Association
conference in Boston.
I was invited to present a paper on a panel about Bishop and her New England connections. My paper was entitled:
“Elizabeth Bishop and the ‘Boston
States’.” I had only
fifteen minutes to say something on this subject, so I decided to write a poem
exploring Bishop’s ancestry, which had deep roots in both the Maritimes and New England. Earlier that year, Muir MacLachlan, a dear
resident of Great
Village and a Bishop contemporary,
had died. I took his death as the anchor for my talk. I have been wanting to post
this talk on the blog for some time, but various things have delayed me doing
so. The other day I began to read Kay Redfield Jamison’s Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire, A Study of Genius, Mania, and
Character (Knopf, 2017). This well-written, nuanced, insightful book begins
with a dive into Lowell’s
ancestry, as so much of mental illness has a hereditary aspect. Reading
Jamison’s insights brought me quickly back to my little poem, an attempt to
summarize the impact of ancestry on Bishop’s life and art. So, I thought I
would share that long ago conference paper now. Apologies for all the text, but
sometimes pictures are not enough. There must be words.
********************
“There was another little girl in
Primer Class, besides me, and one awful day she wet her pants, right in the
front seat, and was sent home. There were two little Micmac Indian boys, Jimmy
and Johnny Crow, who had dark little faces and shiny black hair and eyes, just
alike....Almost everyone went barefoot to school, but I had to wear brown
sandals with buckles, against my will. When I went home the first day and was
asked who was in Primer Class with me, I replied, ‘Manure MacLaughlin,’ [sic] as his name sounded to me. I was
familiar with manure – there was a great pile of it beside the barn – but of
course his real name was Muir, and everyone laughed. Muir wore a navy-blue cap,
with a red-and-yellow maple leaf embroidered above the visor.” (CPr 9)
On January
3, 2003, Muir MacLachlan died in Great
Village, Nova Scotia.
He was 92 years old. If she were alive today Elizabeth Bishop would be 92 years
old. What does Muir MacLachlan have to do with Elizabeth Bishop and the “Boston States”?
Nothing directly, but he has a great deal to do with Elizabeth Bishop and Great
Village and Nova Scotia; and Great Village and Nova Scotia historically have
quite a bit to do with the “Boston States.”
Muir’s
death marked the passing of an era in Great Village
– he was perhaps the last person there who knew Elizabeth Bishop as a child.
Muir’s advanced age and his death in January are linked in my mind to an
article I read a short time later, which coincidentally was published in the
January 2003 issue of Smithsonian. Written by Mary Duenwald, the article
is entitled “Puzzle of the Century.” It examines the phenomenon of the large
number of centenarians living in Nova
Scotia. To explain why this article is a chain link
in my thinking, I quote a passage:
“Yet the
province’s cluster of centenarians has begged for a scientific explanation ever
since it came to light several years ago. Dr. Thomas Perls, who conducts
research on centenarians at Boston Medical Center,
noticed that people in his study often spoke of very old relatives in Nova Scotia. (To be
sure, the two regions have historically close ties; a century ago, young Nova
Scotians sought their fortunes in what they called ‘the Boston States.’) At a
gerontology meeting, Perls talked to one of [Dr. Chris] McKnight’s Dalhousie
[University] colleagues {Dalhousie is in Halifax,
Nova Scotia}, who reported seeing a
centenarian’s obituary in a Halifax
newspaper nearly every week. ‘That was amazing,’ Perls recalls. ‘Down here, I
see obituaries for centenarians maybe once every five or six weeks.’ Perls says
he became convinced that ‘Nova Scotians had something up their sleeve’ that
enabled them to reach such advanced ages. ‘Someone had to look into it.’ (74)
In January
2003 Tom Travisano invited me to participate in this panel and speak about
Elizabeth Bishop and the “Boston
States.” Thus events,
which might otherwise have remained discrete, became linked in my mind.
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.” (CPr 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. I dedicate these words to the memory of Muir,
and 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.
********************
Notes
1. See
Sandra Barry, “Invisible Threads and Individual 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.
********************
Works Cited
Bishop,
Elizabeth. The Collected Prose. New
York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984.
Duenwald,
Mary. “Puzzle of the Century.” Smithsonian (January 2003), pp. 72-80.
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