Prose (68 page)

You are right about my admiring Klee very much—but as it happens, THE MONUMENT was written more under the influence of a set of frottages by Max Ernst I used to own, called Histoire Naturel. I am passionately (I think I might say) fond of painting; in fact I'd much rather talk about painting than poetry, as a rule. I am equally fond of music—although I am rather behind with that, living in Brazil. Next time round I'd like to be a painter—or a composer—or a doctor—I seriously considered studying medicine for several years and still wish I had. I am also very much interested in architecture and helped translate a huge tome on contemporary Brazilian architecture a few years ago.

I want to get this in the mail so I must get to Petropolis quickly—I live about 8 miles outside the town, although at present I divide my time about equally between here and Rio—50 miles away. While I am here this week I'll write you another note—I'll answer your questions about whens and wheres—although I don't believe there are any rules about the
place
—poems—after, during, or before—And I'll certainly try to get off the other book to you in MMS—or see that you get a copy—

I do want to see your analyses—but I believe that everyone has the right to interpret exactly as they see fit, of course, so as I said, please do not think I shall be “interfering.” My only request of that sort may be quite unecessary—It is just that I am rather weary of always being compared to, or coupled with, Marianne—and I think she is utterly weary of it, too! We have been very good friends for thirty years now—but except for 1 or 2 early poems of mine and perhaps some early preferences in subject matter, neither she nor I can see why reviewers always drag her in with me. For one thing—I've always been an umpty-umpty poet with a traditional “ear.” Perhaps it is just another proof that
critics and
reviewers really very rarely pay much attention to what they're reading
& just repeat each other
—

I hope your little girl is better and I am extremely sorry to hear of the death of your mother. I believe you teach, don't you? I wonder what and where? I'll write again in a few days—

Sincerely yours,

        
Elizabeth Bishop

 

Please forgive this bad typing—the machine I keep here is very different from that in Rio & it takes me a few days to get used to it—

 

Caixa Postal 279, Petrópolis

Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

March 20th (?), 1963

Dear Mrs. Elvin:

I mailed a very hurried letter to you two days ago and now I'll try to answer your other questions. I am also writing the agent today—Carl Brandt, 101 Park Avenue, to see if he can have a copy of the MMS of the new book, almost complete, sent to you—and I'll mention that DIARY of Helena Morley as well.

There isn't any particular logic to when and where the poems were written. The first 5 in the book I gather you have were written in N.Y, in 1934–5. Large Bad Picture was written
a good many years
later, in Key West. (Memory poems are apt to pop up from time to time no matter where one happens to be, I find. —I mean childhood-memory poems.) Man-Moth is another very early one, and Country to the City, the Miracle sestina, Love Lies Sleeping, later N.Y. ones, after my first winter in Paris, I think. The Weed I wrote on Cape Cod (It seems so obviously derived, to me, that I'm sure you've spotted it by now!) Paris 7 Am I did write in Paris, Quai D'Orleans, too but the second stay there—in between comes Florida—and Cirque d'Hiver was written during a later stay on Cape Cod. You ask about the title—well, the Cirque d'Hiver did
use
have a team of little trained ponies wearing ostrich plumes, etc.—but I think the title referred to the mood more than anything else. (Again, I think you'll probably spot the derivation of this poem, although I believe it was unconscious.) All the others in the first book are from Key West—except Anaphora—the first stanza came to me in Puebla when the cathedral bells clanged just a few yards away from my pillow, or so it seemed—and a year or two later I finished it in Key West. So you see there is no system to them at all.

A Cold Spring is not in chronological order. There is some more Key West in it, two trips to Nova Scotia, a little New York, and at the end, the first year in Brazil. The poem about Miss Moore was written instead of an “essay” for a
commemorative
birthday number of Quarterly Review.

The book you will receive has necessarily a lot of Brazil in it—But the one Amazon poem—(unless I finish another one in time to get in it, too) was written
before
I made a trip on the Amazon. There are also several memory poems in it.

Varick Street—I had a garret on King Street in N Y for a good many years—the buildings are now torn down—between 6th Avenue and Varick Street, & in warm weather it was very noisy. I use dream-material whenever I am lucky enough to have any and this particular poem is almost all dream—just rearranging a bit—so was Rain Towards Morning—and most of the 1st stanza of Anaphora—The last four lines of the 1st stanza of At the Fishhouses—“
He has scraped the scales
”
*
etc where also a donnee, as James would say, in a dream. But all this is nothing at all out of the ordinary, I'm sure.

I studied music—piano and counterpoint—for some years and have a clavichord here, although I'm afraid I don't play it much. It is hard to hear good music in Brazil,
†
except recordings—and
they
are hard to get in—but I do listen to the hi fi a lot. (Roosters, I remember, I got rather stuck with, and a recording of Kirkpatrick—I took a few lessons with him long ago—of Scarlatti got me going again in a particular rhythm.) I do like Webern—from the album I have—perhaps because he is small-scale and reminds me of Klee
‡
(I believe they were friends). I don't care much for grand, all-out efforts—but on the other hand, I sometimes
do
 … I admire Robert Lowell's poetry very much and much of Lord Weary's Castle couldn't be more all-out …

He and I have been very good friends since 1946, I think it was—and Jarrell is another friend, although of course I rarely see him. The Lowells were here visiting me last summer. I suppose that he & I both like the SEA a lot, which sounds rather silly—but we always seem to be going swimming together when we meet! But I have lived so much out of New York that I have never had much “literary” life, just occasional stretches of it. Edmund Wilson helped me once a great deal by publishing Roosters in a Literary Supplement to The Nation he was getting out. Jarrell has also always been very kind, critically—in general I feel I have been extremely lucky that way—

Calder is a friend
(not close)
who gets to Brazil every once in a while, and Loren MacIver, the American painter is an old friend, too—from about 1938—
Fizdole & Gold, the pianists, are old friends—
Calder is someone else who although so unlike Dewey impresses one by the old-fashioned uncompromising New England
honesty
of his character—and sweetness, like Dewey.

Of course I read all Miss Moore's generation from about 1928 on and undoubtedly learned enormously from them. I think of Marianne, Cummings (we shared the same maid in N.Y. for several years), Dr. Williams, Crane, Frost, as Heroes … I wrote a poem about Pound (it is in the last Partisan Review anthology) that expresses my feelings about him fairly well, I think. Strange to say, it was put to music by Ned Rorem and, I hear, was sung a few days ago in Carnegie Hall by Jennie Tourel. (She'd already sung it here & there before—but really, I think she must be about 80 now…?) I hope I get the recording safely.

I have always wanted—like many other poets, I think—to write some really “popular” songs, not “art” songs. One thing I like very much in Brazil is the popular music—the yearly sambas are, or were (too much U S influence now, I'm afraid), often superb spontaneous folk-music, and I want very much to write a piece about them—the collecting is very difficult here, however. There is also a living tradition, in the interior, of the ballads—news events, old tales, etc.—not such good poetry as the sambas but rather wonderful all the same—Besides the DIARY I translated, and work on the book about contemporary architecture, I have done, recently, some translations of Brazilian poetry. (I'll let you know when they're published—some are to be in POETRY, I think.) But I really don't care much for doing it, or believe in it, and my translations are rather literal—unlike Lowell's—so I only do poems that seem to go into English without much loss—very limiting, naturally.

Another friend who influenced me—
not
with his books but with his character—was John Dewey, whom I knew well and was very fond of. He and Marianne are the most truly
naturally
“democratic” people I've known, I think.—He had almost the best manners I have ever encountered, always had
time,
took an interest in everything,—no detail, no weed or stone or cat or old woman was unimportant to him.

Now if you have any more questions please let me know. In about 3 weeks I am going on a trip, “to the interior”, really, this time, and will be out of touch with mail for two or three weeks, probably. Perhaps I should add one thought—perhaps it is just because I went to Europe earlier than most of my “contemporary” poets—and I am a few years older than some of them—but it is odd how I often feel myself to be a late-late Post World War I generation-member, rather than a member of the Post World War II generation. Perhaps the Key West years also had something to do with it.—(Until her death Pauline Hemingway was one of my best friends there, etc.) But I also feel that Cal (Lowell) and I in our very different ways are both descendents from the Transcendentalists—but you may not agree.

Again please excuse my bad typing—I'm not very good at best, but this keyboard with all its Çç and a §§ out of place doesn't help—

I hope your little girl's rash is all cured by now—

Sincerely yours,

        
Elizabeth Bishop

 

44 Porter Street

Watertown, Mass.

March 28, 1963

Dear Miss Bishop,

I am delighted with both your letters—really, I can't tell you
how
delighted. I was in real trepidation after I sent off my letter to you in, was it February? Thought I had asked silly questions, or questions which you couldn't or wouldn't answer. I am amused that you call me a “critic” (one up from a reviewer?) for I am a raw amateur, preferring teaching or mothering or writing poems myself to this awful task of trying to say badly what someone else has said well. However I was pleased, when we arrived back from an early spring visit to Vermont last week, to find the streets full of children, clothes hanging out on the lines (Watertown being Watertown “awful but cheerful”) spring arrived and your letter in our mailbox. I'll try to answer it point by point, as you did mine, and then go on to your second letter which arrived today.

I will write Miss Bowman today and ask her to send you (and me) some of the books which have been written already. I know a kind and well-meaning professor in Ann Arbor (I don't mean those adjectives to sound derogatory) who has written a book on Wilbur and is working on one on Lowell. The Wilbur book is finished, I think. Otherwise, I don't know who Miss Bowman has found to embellish her list of famous authors writing famouser ones. Don Hall says she is a “nut”. I suppose that means she is somewhat scatterbrained and doesn't herself know what she wants. I have not heard from her since I left Ann Arbor (I did a MA degree there last year) so this is another reason for me to write to her.

Although I have no plans to publish something in a magazine, I do want to talk over my impression of your poems with Robert Lowell. He is lecturing at Harvard this semester; I went with some friends of mine to a poetry workshop he conducts at the Loeb theatre a week ago and arranged to show him what I had written. Then I came home and decided that everything had to be
re
-written, and I haven't yet had the courage to go see him. I am such a ponderous worker, you will have to forgive me. But I would rather wait years than produce something half-baked. I plan to finish a twelve to fifteen page plan of action, so to speak, which I will send to you and to him.

Yes, I should very much like to have your new book, and I am exceedingly grateful to you for having written to your agent. I shall write to him too so that he will know that I am real. I am of course most anxious to read it, and the
Diary of Helena Morley.
I'll look up Pritchett's review and also your two published stories when I next get to Widner. (I must confess that library stacks rather terrify me—I put off going to them in the same way I put off going to the supermarket) I am grateful, too, for the information you give me about your childhood and background. Can you perhaps tell me a little about your parents. Did you know them at all? What sort of people where they? was your father a businessman of some sort? Don't answer if you don't want to, naturally. I like your seafaring ancestors.

I am glad to know that you are fond (passionately) of painting. And of music and architecture. I'd suspected this, and its good to have your confirmation. One of the points I am making about your poetry is that is is visual but not what I call Impersonal. That is, your sense of personality of places and people, is suggested in visual terms. There is an interaction between the animate and inanimate world which suggest that you distinguish between them in order to show how they are alike. Everything you describe seems, too, as Philip Booth put it in one review, “to build toward a metaphorical whole.” But your metaphors, while exact as paintings on one hand, are open, really, on the other. That is what I like best about poems like The Imaginary Iceberg, The Bight, The Fish, even Cirque d'Hiver. It seems to me that, while your subjects are not what you call “all out” ones, they echo with a sort of alloutness which makes them, unu[su]ally, big poems and not trivial ones. If a poet is supposed to comment upon his age (is that Spender?) you do, surely, if obliquely, even in so light a poem as The Gentlemen of Shalott (I taught that to my senior high school class this fall and they loved it—we were “studying” Tennyson). As certainly it is not imposing high sounding interpretations on your Cirque d'Hiver, Over 20000 etc (a reference to concordance of the Bible?) and Man-Moth to suggest [that] they have something “strongly worded” to say about contemporary life.