One Art: Elizabeth Bishop Letters. - book reviews

ArtForum, Summer, 1994 by Justin Spring

Elizabeth Bishop, a poet of geography and distance, was a great fan of painting who counted several New York painters (none, alas, very famous) among her friends. But her contact with them was limited, much of the time, to letters, for apart from her travels she lived in quiet retreat, first in Key West and then in Brazil.

One Art describes a life that most artists will find all too familiar: long periods of solitary hard work and its attendant ennui, punctuated by random flashes of sociability, usually in the company of other individuals facing the same artistic and emotional challenges: difficult work, financial hardship, loneliness, and self-doubt. But Bishop is hardly bohemian in temperament: she prefers (in letters at least) formal contact to informal, distance to immediacy, carefulness to ebullience. There is something very ladylike about her, and remarkably self-contained.

Letters themselves are a highly controlled medium, which is perhaps why Bishop found writing them such a pleasure: through them she could be close to all her friends, yet safely keep her distance. Her correspondence is resolutely good-humored despite her frequent attacks of anxiety and self-doubt, suggesting that her lifelong nervous shyness was merely an off-shoot of her intense desire for precision in word, deed, and thought--and of her distaste for sloppy blather. This distaste is best demonstrated in her response to an extraordinary letter from Robert Lowell (reproduced in the text) in which he blurts that he had intended to propose to Bishop nine years earlier, and that even since his marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick he wished he had married Bishop. Her response--four months of silence punctuated by two letters that ignore the confession completely--is entirely characteristic. Even in letters, Bishop was not one to tolerate a "scene."

Considering her extreme sensitivity, her highly critical nature, and its attendant paranoias, Bishop seems remarkably well adjusted in her letters, and, if not always happy (indeed, who is?), at least enormously appreciative of the world that surrounded her. She demonstrates her fine-tuned awareness of nature (particularly in Brazil) with page after page of physical description, anecdotes of the garden and kitchen, and long asides about pets, flowers, and the weather. Literary gossip is present in these pages, but not overly so, and even then hers is gossip of a careful sort. Rarely does one experience the strong feelings that surface so remarkably and perfectly in Bishop's poems.

Why, always, such distance? Though no specific answer comes to mind--an isolated childhood, a puritan background in conflict with sexual identity, and an impossibly rigorous sense of vocation all seem to have played their part--Bishop herself gives another reason: namely, that distance was a logical and positive choice.

"It is one reason why I am content to leave New York for good," she writes to Kit and Ilse Barker, an artistic couple she had met years earlier at Yaddo, "Everybody is so intent on using everybody else that there is no room or time for friendship any more."

Unsatisfying to those in search of scandalous detail, these letters are nonetheless a beautiful record of Bishop's sensibility. As such they stand together as a coherent artistic work: an unconscious (and characteristically elliptical) epistolary autobiography--as splendid and melancholy as a long slow trip by sea.

Justin Spring is a fiction writer and critic who regularly reviews exhibitions for Artforum. He is currently at work on a biography of Fairfield Porter.