LETTERS: John Montaguereviews Words In Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell,Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton, Faber Faber, 875pp. £40
READERS SEEM TO BE fascinated by the private lives of poets, especially if they are "mad, bad and dangerous to know". Byron and Shelley are a supreme example, but our own Thomas Moore and Byron were also quite a pair, the melodious Irish Bantam and the Lordly Limp rollicking together through fashionable London. And even the hermetical Lake Poets provoke a lot of controversy: Wordsworth's relationship with women, his dust-up with Coleridge, the quarrels with Hazlitt.
While murmuring Arnold's Victorian strictures under our breath - "what a set!" on the second wave of the Romantics - we still remain intrigued. And while the Victorians do not provide as much scandal, the 20th century fairly sizzles with it. We all know the lives of Yeats and Auden make for lively reading, but now we are beginning to discern the literary outlines of the second half of that century, with all the attendant personal dramas. For example, the suicide of Sylvia Plath echoes through the recent Collected Letters of her husband, Ted Hughes. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell falls into that category, especially for readers aware that Lowell died of a heart attack in a taxi on his way back to his ex-wife in September, 1977.
Although Lowell was something of a womaniser, especially during his many manic phases, and Bishop was lesbian, there was a deep rapport between them, at once personal, poetical and political. As Lowell writes, " . . . it would be heaven if somehow something could bring you back for a visit . . . I feel so forlorn without you . . . There is no one else I can quite talk to with confidence and abandon and delicacy". Because they had different trajectories, they did not meet so often, but when they did, they chattered like starlings.
So we have two star-crossed writers, almost lovers, Lowell addressing Bishop as "Dearest Elizabeth". In fact there was a period when he tentatively proposed to her. Their affinity had deep roots; both had had lonely and difficult childhoods. Elizabeth was an only child whose father died the year she was born and whose mother was committed to an asylum five years later, so that she was reared first by grandparents and then an aunt. In the midst of all this turmoil, she unsurprisingly developed asthma and eczema. The turbulence in Lowell's upper class Boston family is well documented in the autobiographical book Life Studies, his tyrannical Winslow mother capsizing the career of her Naval husband through relentless argument night after night.
One could also say that the bedrock of the affinity between these two hurt people was their shared New England landscape, with Lowell describing ". . . the usual gray rock/ turning fresh green when drenched by the sea . . .". In the same poem he wishes that ". . . our two souls might return like gulls to the rock". And although Bishop was a great traveller, Lowell says of her in Castine Maine, ". . . you've never found another place to live,/ bound by your giant memory to one known longitude".
Cyril Connelly once cruelly described the gossip of modern poets as "jackals snarling over a dried-up well". But in the second half of the 20th century, a plethora of grants, prizes and festivals gave rise to a new kind of poetry politics (or "po-biz"). Educated by wily Southerners like John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and "Red" Warren, Lowell was a shrewd literary politician, making sure the accolades were distributed among his pals and himself. It was mainly East Coast, however: a Seattle-based lyricist like Theodore Roethke is "cowed, messy, weak . . . boisterously carrying a dull weight of defeat". And the Beats "are phony . . . because they have made a lot of publicity out of very little talent".
John Berryman was a different problem; with his sometimes marvellous Dream Songs, he was like a dark horse who wins the race only to drop dead at the post, leaving Lowell trying to catch up with his own orgy of sonnets, Notebook (1969), which begat History (1973).
A PERSONAL FOOTNOTE. In 1973, I read with Lowell and Allen Ginsberg in Rotterdam, and that evening we had a very intense discussion on the "Paleface/Redskin" dichotomy in American poetry: Eliot's Harvard-fashioned sensibility as opposed to the democratic William Carlos Williams. Intense though friendly: "No bones broken," said Lowell in the morning. But what really concerned him was that he was working on the proofs of three books, History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, the last dedicated to his third wife, Caroline Blackwood, who was with him.
He was sure he was going to be massacred for his use of the letters of his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. And indeed he had already received a scorcher from his first, best reader, Elizabeth Bishop, who invoked Hardy against such invasions of privacy: "What certainly should be protested against, in cases where there is no authorization, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that . . . Lizzie is not dead, etc. - but there is a 'mixture of fact fiction', and you have changed her letters."
She goes on to pummel him with Hopkins: ". . . art just isn't worth that much. I keep remembering Hopkins' marvellous letter to Bridges about the idea of a 'gentleman' being the highest thing ever conceived . . . It is not being 'gentle' to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way - it's cruel." Lowell accepted his punishment meekly: "I feel like Bridges getting one of Hopkins' letters, as disturbed as I am grateful".
He was anxious not to lose his first, best reader, so essential to the lonely art of poetry. Usually it is a spouse or partner: recently a fellow poet wrote to congratulate me on a line given me by my wife!
But this very close friendship between two poets was unusually symbiotic, their lines sometimes interlacing. But then Lowell, perhaps because of his manic depression, had an unusual reliance on others, like his former student, Frank Bidart, who compiled his Collected Poems.
This is definitely not a book for the Common Reader, with two editors, a Chronology, an Introduction, and a Glossary of Names that is often absurdly simplistic, eg "Yeats, William Butler, Irish poet".
Saskia Hamilton is the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell, an Associate Professor of English at Barnard College and a poet herself, while Thomas Travisano is the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development and first president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society. This volume weighs in at nearly 900 pages, and to be the ideal reader, you would have to have the Collected of Lowell (1,186 pages) - over 2,000 pages to begin with - along with the slimmer Collected of Elizabeth Bishop to act as ballast. All of this is to pile Pelion upon Ossa, in the best tradition of modern literary scholarship.
• John Montague was the first Ireland Professor of Poetry. His collected short stories, A Ball of Fire, has just been published by Liberties Press