In February 1947, not long after the publication of her inaugural, prize-winning collection, North & South, Elizabeth Bishop wrote a letter to her therapist, Ruth Foster, in which she attempted to identify the salient characteristic of her life. She settled on the quality of "being brave" – "for years and years," she wrote, "my major theme".
To make such an assessment of one’s life might seem melodramatic. But as Megan Marshall’s new book makes heartbreakingly clear, Bishop (who was born in 1911 and died in 1979) had a lot to be brave about. By her late 30s – the age at which she sent her note to Foster – the poet had already suffered a dismaying amount of emotional turmoil. The distress began in infancy, when, at the age of five months, she was abandoned by her parents, Gertrude, who enjoyed apparently good physical health, and William, who had a form of kidney dysfunction known as Bright’s disease.
It is possible that William and Gertrude decided to leave their baby daughter in an attempt to find a cure for William’s affliction. It is also possible that they simply wanted a final holiday before settling down to family life. What is clear is that the trip, which lasted for three months, was not a success: almost as soon as the couple returned to their home in Worcester, Massachusetts, William died, providing Bishop with what Marshall describes as the first tragedy of her life.
Unstable mother
William’s death had the unfortunate effect of consigning Bishop to the care of her grieving and increasingly unstable mother, who subjected her daughter to an array of abuse and neglect that veered from the unhappily mundane – beatings, congenital absenteeism – to the fantastically sinister: one relative recalled finding Gertrude sleeping next to her daughter while Gertrude was armed with a knife.
Gertrude’s mistreatment of her daughter was almost certainly the product of severe mental illness: around the time of the incident with the knife she tried to throw herself out of a window, attempted to hang herself, and was subsequently incarcerated in a sanatorium. But this didn’t make things any better for Bishop, who later characterised her childhood as one unending maternal scream. She would never see, or hear from, her mother again.
After a brief period in the custody of her paternal grandparents Bishop was sent to live with her mother’s sister, Maud Shepherdson. It was under Shepherdson that she began to develop her love of poetry: she would read Longfellow, Tennyson, Carlyle, the Brownings. But she was also exposed to the hideous ministrations of Maud’s husband, George, a sentimental tyrant who took to fondling Bishop while she was in the bath (Bishop knew this was not “an unusually thorough washing”) and who once seized her by the hair and dangled her over the edge of a second-storey balcony. Writing to her therapist a few decades later, Bishop recorded that the experience instilled in her the conviction that men “were all selfish and inconsiderate and would hurt you if you gave them a chance”.
Refuge came in the form of obsessive reading and writing, and the enhanced aptitude for noticing that accompanied them. “Observation is a great joy,” she once said to an aspiring writer. And, in an astonishing essay she wrote at Walnut Hill School, she reflected beautifully on the ways in which the intense fear and loneliness she felt as a child could be set against “all those innumerable hours of loneliness ahead of us”. Such moments will be frightening, but, managed with courage, they might connect us with “the companion in ourselves who is with us all our lives . . . the rare person whose heart quickens when a bird climbs high and alone in the clear air”.
A life marked by trauma
With these thoughts in place Bishop embarked on her life as a poet. She enrolled at Vassar College, where she founded a literary magazine with Mary McCarthy. She was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1949-50. She won a Pulitzer Prize. Yet her life continued to be marked by trauma. When she declined a young man’s marriage proposal (Bishop had from an early age been attracted to women) he shot himself. Her lover Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she lived in Brazil for more than 15 years, died, in 1967, from an overdose of Valium – quite possibly taken because of her fraught relationship with the poet. And throughout all of this Bishop was absorbing oceans of alcohol and a daily pharmacy of prescribed medication.
Marshall chronicles these struggles with warmth and insight. Yet her narrative fails to deliver a substantial sense of Bishop's literary significance, and suffers from the digressive chapters in which Marshall recounts stories from her own life, some of which deal with a period in the 1970s in which she studied with Bishop at Harvard. These add little to our understanding of Bishop and sit awkwardly with the larger story that Marshall (herself a winner of a Pulitzer Prize) is attempting to tell. They also make one wonder if she might more profitably have spent her time attending to the reservoir of new material relating to Bishop's life, including her letters to therapists and lovers, that has appeared since Brett Millier's Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It appeared, in 1992.
Had she done so this slight but absorbing book might have offered a new and unprecedentedly full account of its subject. In its present form it offers only an impression of the sensibility of a poet who was born into trauma, was nurtured by fear, and composed the words that have helped us to be brave.
