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Overview
In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences—the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling double portrait that will intrigue readers interested in both Bishop and Tóibín.
For Tóibín, the secret of Bishop's emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop’s famous attention to detail, Tóibín describes how Bishop is able to convey great emotion indirectly, through precise descriptions of particular settings, objects, and events. He examines how Bishop’s attachment to the Nova Scotia of her childhood, despite her later life in Key West and Brazil, is related to her early loss of her parents—and how this connection finds echoes in Tóibín’s life as an Irish writer who has lived in Barcelona, New York, and elsewhere.
Beautifully written and skillfully blending biography, literary appreciation, and descriptions of Tóibín’s travels to Bishop’s Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, On Elizabeth Bishop provides a fresh and memorable look at a beloved poet even as it gives us a window into the mind of one of today’s most acclaimed novelists.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691154114 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/22/2015 |
| Series: | Writers on Writers , #7 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 541,277 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.50(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
On Elizabeth Bishop
By Colm Tóibín
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Colm TóibínAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15411-4
CHAPTER 1
No Detail Too Small
She began with the idea that little is known and that much is puzzling. The effort, then, to make a true statement in poetry—to claim that something is something, or does something—required a hushed, solitary concentration. A true statement for her carried with it, buried in its rhythm, considerable degrees of irony because it was oddly futile; it was either too simple or too loaded to mean a great deal. It did not do anything much, other than distract or briefly please the reader. Nonetheless, it was essential for Elizabeth Bishop that the words in a statement be precise and exact. "Since we do float on an unknown sea," she wrote to Robert Lowell, "I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it?" In her poem "The Sandpiper," the bird, a version of the poet herself, was "a student of Blake," who celebrated seeing "a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower."
A word was a tentative form of control. Grammar was an enactment of how things stood. But nothing was stable, so words and their structures could lift and have resonance, could move out, take in essences as a sponge soaks in water. Thus language became gesture in spite of itself; it was rooted in simple description, and then it bloomed or withered; it was suggestive, had a funny shape, or some flourishes, or a tone and texture that had odd delights, but it had all sorts of limits and failures. If words were a cry for help, the calm space around them offered a resigned helplessness.
In certain societies, including rural Nova Scotia where Bishop spent much of her childhood, and in the southeast of Ireland where I am from, language was also a way to restrain experience, take it down to a level where it might stay. Language was neither ornament nor exaltation; it was firm and austere in its purpose. Our time on the earth did not give us cause or need to say anything more than was necessary; language was thus a form of calm, modest knowledge or maybe even evasion. The poetry and the novels and stories written in the light of this knowledge or this evasion, or in their shadow, had to be led by clarity, by precise description, by briskness of feeling, by no open displays of anything, least of all easy feeling; the tone implied an acceptance of what was known. The music or the power was in what was often left out. The smallest word, or the holding of breath, could have a fierce, stony power.
Writing, for Bishop, was not self-expression, but there was a self somewhere, and it was insistent in its presence yet tactful and watchful. Bishop's writing bore the marks, many of them deliberate, of much re-writing, of things that had been said, but had now been erased, or moved into the shadows. Things measured and found too simple and obvious, or too loose in their emotional contours, or too philosophical, were removed. Words not true enough were cut away. What remained was then of value, but mildly so; it was as much as could be said, given the constraints. This great modesty was also, in its way, a restrained but serious ambition. Bishop merely seemed to keep her sights low; in her fastidious version of things, she had a sly system for making sure that nothing was beyond her range.
Bishop was never sure. In the last line of her poem "The Unbeliever," she has her protagonist state that the sea "wants to destroy us all," but the last line of "Filling Station" will read: "Somebody loves us all." In the poetics of her uncertainty surrounding the strange business of "us all," there was something hurt and solitary. In the first poem in her first book, a poem called "The Map," it was as though the world itself had to be studied as a recent invention or something that would soon fade and might need to be remembered as precisely as possible by a single eye.
For her, the most difficult thing to do was to make a statement; around these statements in her poems she created a hard-won aura, a strange sad acceptance that this statement was all that could be said. Or maybe there was something more, but it had escaped her. This space between what there was and what could be made certain or held fast often made her tone playful, in the same way as a feather applied gently to the inner nostril makes you sneeze in a way that is amused as much as pained.
In an early essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Bishop wrote about "motion" in poetry: "the releasing, checking, timing, and repeating of the movement of the mind according to ordered systems." Hopkins, she wrote, "has chosen to stop his poems, set them to paper, at the point in their development where they are still incomplete, still close to the first kernel of truth or apprehension which gave rise to them." Thus the idea of statement in Hopkins, the bare sense of a fact set down, offers a revelation oddly immediate and sharp, true because the illusion needs to be created that nothing else was true at the time the poem was written. And that making a statement has the same tonal effect as recovering from a shock, recovering merely for the time necessary to say one thing, including something casual and odd, and to leave much else unsaid.
Thus a line in a poem is all that can be stated; it is surrounded by silence as sculpture is by space. Hopkins could begin a poem: "I wake and feel the fell of dark not day." Or "No worst, there is none." Or "Summer ends now." Only then, once the bare statement had been made—something between a casual diary entry and something chiseled into truth—could the poem begin to be released and then controlled "according to ordered systems."
Bishop would begin poems with lines such as "I caught a tremendous fish" or "Here is a coast; here is a harbor" or "September rain falls on the house" or "Still dark" or "The sun is blazing and the sky is blue," and manage even in such inauspicious openings a tone that attended to the truth of things, a tone also of mild, distracted, solitary unease in the face of such truth.
In her poems Bishop often corrected herself, or qualified herself, almost as a duty or a ceremony. In the second line of "The Map" she wrote the word "Shadows," and then immediately wondered "or are they shallows"; in "The Weed," she wrote, in a dream, "I lay upon a grave, or bed" but immediately again she had to qualify that slightly by writing: "(at least, some cold and close-built bower)"; in her poem "The Fish," when she wrote the words "his lower lip," she had to wonder "if you could call it a lip." Before she could allow the mountains in "Arrival at Santos" to be "self-pitying," she had to impose the words "who knows?"; in "The Armadillo," when she mentioned "the stars," she had to correct herself to say "planets, that is"; in "Sandpiper," she wrote:
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
—Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them, where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs, he stares at the dragging grains.
So, too, in her poem "Trouvée" about a white hen run over on West 4th Street, she was forced to make clear that the hen, while once white, was (or is) "red-andwhite now, of course." In "Poem," when she used the word "visions," she instantly wanted to change it: "'visions' is / too serious a word"; she found a calmer word: "our looks, two looks." In "The End of March," she wanted to retire and "do nothing, / or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms." In one of her last poems, "Santarém," she mentioned a church twice and had to correct herself each time. The first time it is "the Cathedral, rather," and the second it is also a "Cathedral," in parentheses, but with an exclamation mark.
This urge to correct herself also appeared in her letters. In 1973, for example, she wrote to Robert Lowell: "James Merrill and I gave a joint reading—no, a sequential reading—at the YMHA."
This enacting of a search for further precision and further care with terms in the poems (and maybe in the letters too) was, in one way, a trick, a way of making the reader believe and trust a voice, or a way of quietly asking the reader to follow the poem's casual and then deliberate efforts to be faithful to what it saw, or what it knew. The trick established limits, exalted precision, made the bringing of things down to themselves into a sort of conspiracy with the reader. But she also worried about anything that might be overlooked ("no detail too small"), or not noticed properly, or exaggerated, or let too loose into grand feelings, which were not fully to be trusted. In that first poem, "The Map," Bishop seemed to disapprove of the moment when the map's printer experienced "the same excitement / as when emotion too far exceeds its cause." She was careful, or as careful as she could be, not to allow that to happen in her life or, more accurately, in her poems.
CHAPTER 2One of Me
The sense that we are only ourselves and that other people feel the same way—that they too are only themselves—is a curious thought. It is so obviously true that it is barely worth mentioning. Most people seem happier constructing other ideas that mask this basic one.
In notes he made in August 1880, Gerard Manley Hopkins considered the idea of the solitary self:
When I consider my selfbeing; my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: What must it be to be someone else?). Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained so far as the cases are like and do resemble. But to me there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.
For Elizabeth Bishop too, the idea of the lone self, the single eye, the single voice, the single memory, seemed to isolate her further, especially when dramatized. It seemed to her remarkable that we are each alone. In her most openly autobiographical essay, "The Country Mouse," published in 1961, she concluded with a memory of a first, sharp realization of her own singleness as she accompanied her aunt to the dentist's office and sat outside in the waiting room reading National Geographic. "A feeling of absolute and utter desolation came over me. I felt ... myself. In a few days it would be my seventh birthday. I felt I, I, I, and looked at the three strangers in panic. I was one of them too, inside my scabby body and wheezing lungs."
In a poem written more than a decade later, "In the Waiting Room," she contemplated once more this first realization of her own solitary self, her single identity. In the opening of the poem, as in much of her work, she used a calm system for pretending that nothing, or nothing much, was going to happen, that she was going to stick to the known facts and add no flourishes. This is hardly poetry at all, the opening lines seemed to say, it is merely a modest statement, something that could not be disputed:
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
The child, as she reads the National Geographic magazine, is horrified by the photographs of naked black women until she is distracted by the sound of her aunt in the dentist's chair crying out. For a second she begins to believe that the cry is coming not from the aunt but actually from her ("Without thinking at all / I was my foolish aunt"). Then slowly it occurs to her that she is not her aunt, but herself:
But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too?
This realization at the age of seven seems to her strange indeed:
I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen.
The strangeness was the realization of the solitary nature of the self, of our identity and our destiny as single and separate. This was something obvious to the world but utterly odd to the child and, by implication, to the poet writing more than fifty years later: "How—I didn't know any / word for it—how 'unlikely' ..."
"In the Waiting Room" appeared as the first poem in Bishop's final book of poems, Geography III, and was followed by another, longer meditation on the solitary self, on solitude at its most intense. This poem, called "Crusoe in England," had echoes of Bishop's own experience. By now, she had two landscapes to remember—Nova Scotia, where she grew up, and Brazil, where she had lived for many years and had now left. The poem deals with Crusoe's remembered solitude, a solitude recalled from a position of an even greater, stranger solitude, that of being alive in a populated England.
In the poem, Crusoe remembers his island:
The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun
rose from the sea,
and there was one of it and one of me.
The island had one kind of everything ...
In this solitary space, filled with singleness, the narrator remembers poems he has read, but there are blanks, including a crucial word in Wordsworth's poem "Daffodils":
"They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss ..." The bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
When I got back was look it up.
The word, of course, is "solitude."
Toward the end of the poem, the rescue of Crusoe is rendered starkly, in an iambic pentameter line whose rhythm is singing, almost silly, suggesting inconsequentiality, but with an undertone that is almost melancholy: "And then one day they came and took us off."
And now, no longer captive on an island, no longer living in isolation, Crusoe is imprisoned within the self, within a place where other people intrude: "Now I live here, another island, / that doesn't seem like one, but who decides?"
His knife, which held such meaning while he was alone, now seems utterly useless. It, too, is totally alone:
Now it won't look at me at all.
The living soul has dribbled away.
My eyes rest on it and pass on.
These poems by Bishop are full of resigned tones and half-resigned undertones, but there is always something else there in the space between the words, something that is controlled but not fully, so that the chaos or the panic held in check is all the more apparent because it is consigned to the shadows.
CHAPTER 3In the Village
The modest house in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where Bishop spent some of her childhood still stands in a strange costal flatness, with deep inlets all around. It is as though the whole place could be inundated by the tides at any time. If the village is built on dry land, there is a suggestion that it was not always dry, or its dryness comes as a sort of accident, a quirk of nature. The place is filled with watery northern light, which Bishop described in her poem "The Moose"; it is a place of
... long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,
where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home.
The house of Bishop's grandparents, later an artists' retreat, has an air of comfort and ease and warmth. Bishop captures some of this in her poem "Sestina," where "the old grandmother / sits in the kitchen with the child," but there is also a sadness in the poem, something that cannot be easily mentioned as the grandmother is "reading the jokes from the almanac, / laughing and talking to hide her tears."
What is not mentioned in the poem is that Bishop's father died when she was eight months old, and when she was five her mother was incarcerated in a mental hospital and never saw her again. As Bishop grew older and moved away, the village in Nova Scotia and the landscape around it became a place for her of longing, of dreams. She wrote directly about what happened to her as a child not in poems, however (although what happened is buried between the words of poems, sometimes surfacing obliquely), but in two prose pieces, "In the Village" and "The Country Mouse." In the first of these, everything that happened, everything she saw in the village, is given equal weight by the child almost as a way of avoiding the idea that her mother's scream will not stop echoing in the landscape and in her memory: "The scream hangs there like that, unheard, in the memory—in the past, in the present, and those years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live, forever—not loud, just alive forever. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On Elizabeth Bishop by Colm Tóibín. Copyright © 2015 Colm Tóibín. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
No Detail Too Small 1
One of Me 9
In the Village 15
The Art of Losing 30
Nature Greets Our Eyes 41
Order and Disorder in Key West 62
The Escape from History 77
Grief and Reason 96
The Little That We Get for Free 115
Art Isn't Worth That Much 135
The Bartók Bird 162
Efforts of Affection 174
North Atlantic Light 193
Acknowledgments 201
Bibliography 203
What People are Saying About This
"Colm Tóibín's perfectly judged study of Elizabeth Bishop's writing, and especially her mastery of tone, has itself the tonal intimacy of a letter. He explores the places (Nova Scotia, Brazil) and working friendships (Moore, Lowell) central to Bishop's poetry of solitariness and exile; he finds her true companions in this 'restrained but serious ambition' (Wyatt, Herbert, Gunn); he distinguishes the candor of her art from the facts of her life, the emotions of her poetry from its causes. Above all, he honors Bishop's exact ways with language, and his sifting of what is said from what is unsaid in her poetry illuminates his own watchful and patient art as a novelist."—Saskia Hamilton, coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell"This book offers the reader a luminous meditation on Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. It focuses, among other things, on the restraint of her style and the power of the unsaid in her work. But more than that: Colm Tóibín meshes his journey as a writer with hers, showing with unique eloquence how her poems have entered and guided his life. I have no doubt this book will become one of the essential texts on Bishop's work."—Eavan Boland, author of A Woman Without a Country: Poems"Colm Tóibín—a sensitive critic as well as a novelist—has written an almost ideal introduction to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. This could become the introduction to Bishop for people who intend to read her for pleasure."—Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry