The next letter Bishop wrote to Grace is dated 3 January
1962, from Rio. The fraught, exhausting time
in New York City
was past and with the start of another year, Bishop settled herself at her
typewriter and began what would be one of her longest letters to her aunt.
Actually, it was a long letter to “My dear Aunties.” As Bishop explained at the
top, she was “going to do something I really think is very impolite — write you
both a letter at the same time.” The other auntie in question was Mary. Bishop
used “carbon paper.” (Does anyone remember this device? One had to be a good
typist to manage it, as making corrections was difficult. I wonder which one
got the carbon copy.)
Bishop reasoned that since she had “the same things to tell
both of you, more or less” and since she owed “you both letters,” she opted for
this less than ideal approach. She also noted, perhaps with a bit of
frustration, that she had not “written any [letters] to speak of since last
October,” at least since she and Lota had arrived in New York. In addition to all of these
circumstances, she returned to Brazil
to find “stacks of mail.” Everything combined caused her “shortcut methods,”
for which she wrote, “please forgive me.”
Her claim that she had not written any letters was not
actually true, at least in terms of her aunts (and perhaps for others as well),
which she corrected at the start of the next paragraph: “I DID, however, write
you each a letter shortly after I got to New York.” Upon that arrival, Bishop
still believed she might “still make it to either Montreal
or Nova Scotia.”
Quickly, the amount of work on the Brazil book made her realize that
plan was unlikely. Bishop tried to recall just when those letters were written:
“around November 15th, I think” (It was actually 10 December for her last
letter to Grace in 1961.) As if she needed to defend her claim, she added, “I’m
positive about this.” As a rule, Bishop did not make copies of her letters,
which went off into space-time never to be seen by her again. With all the
frustrations and the need to leave the US quickly in December, it is
little wonder Bishop lost track in her mind about when she had written.
After all this avowing, Bishop got to the crux of her
frustration, the fact that she had not heard from her aunts, “Apparently
neither of you received these letters.” Bishop’s endless complaints about “the
Brazilian mails” being “the worst,” had to be rethought in light of these
missing letters. But in fact, Grace had received her letter. Perhaps her own
busy “Christmas rush” prevented her from writing. Having been told they would
be immediately returning to Brazil,
perhaps Grace felt it best just to wait until Bishop was settled again. Bishop
speculated on what could have happened to her letters: “maybe they still
haven’t got to you,” because of that “Christmas rush”; “maybe they got lost”;
“or, even more likely — they are there somewhere in that apartment on Perry Street, under
the table or something.” Bishop was sure she had given her aunts the Perry Street
address, more than once. She clearly had an expectation that she would hear
from them at some point while in the US.
When she arrived in NYC, she fully intended to try to see
one or both of them, that she would be done with the “Time, Life, Inc.” book by
“the end of November.” She never did finish the work on the book and the IRS forced her out earlier than planned, “December 15th or was it 17th, finally.”
Those final weeks and days in the US
were rather chaotic for Bishop and she came back to Brazil with the book unfinished:
“and I am STILL working on” it. One can hear the exasperation when she moaned,
“I don’t think it will ever end.” If Bishop learned anything in this process it
was that she “wouldn’t work for them again for $50,000.” She had “never worked
so hard in my life” on something that she felt, in the end, “was an absolute
waste of time.” The stress had taken a toll physically. She reported she had
“lost ten pounds and have had bronchitis ever since I came back!” She was so
exhausted by the experience, she also reported that she “slept from the time we
got back until Christmas, I think.” Well, an exaggeration, but to make a point.
This “poor little book” was still filling her mind, even as
a new year was getting underway. She was sure it “isn’t going to please anyone
— me, LIFE, nor the Brazilian friends I did hope to please.” She stated again
that both aunts would receive copies. As displeased as she was, she needed her
family and friends to see the evidence of all that hard work, fraught and
unsatisfactory as it was. She reiterated that even as relentlessly ongoing as
the process felt, there was an end in sight: “it will be out around the end of
February I think.” She pleaded with her aunts not to “judge my prose style by
it, for heaven’s sake.” Bishop was even “awfully disappointed in the
photographs.” The Time-Life editors had, apparently, boasted about this part of
the book, but Bishop reported that “they had almost none [photographs] when I
got there.” She concluded this final chapter of a dreadful saga declaring that
she “fought a blood fight for every one you will see,” ending this long
paragraph with a hand-written scribble, “— that is any good at all.”
This long letter is just getting started and will require
many posts to work through. Before getting to new topics, there was yet one
more long reiteration about their time in NY and its impact on her and why she
was unable to see either of them, as she so desperately wanted to do. It will
comprise the next post.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment