It says Collected Prose on the cover rather than Complete but it would be a desperate pity if these memoir pieces and stories were all there is, the prolific letters notwithstanding. But I'll always take the frugal writer who only produces great writing over those that can't stop churning it out but don't always do it quite so well.A proper writer is a 'writer' rather than sdpecifically a poet, novelist or dramatist and one wonders if Elizabeth Bishop ought not have given over more time to prose and be as well known for it as she is as a model poet. But the brevity, concentration and lighter demands on one's time of poetry lend themselves to anyone liable to periods of hospitalization after drinking binges or rendered incapable. (The answer to 9 across in this week's TLS crossword, Places around old Republican state De Quincey was often in, is 'stupor').
The memoir here on Marianne Moore is touching and hilarious. The mentor she surpassed is a quaint figure, objecting to such phrases as 'water closet' in a poem by Elizabeth, and the stylish hats she is usually seen in have to be reinterpreted as genuinely old-fashioned rather than the retro chic of the period. Marianne's poems will have to be revisited in the light of Elizabeth's vivid portrait. Her fastidious personality is not apparently an affectation.
The Collected Prose is a paragon example of the sort of book one reads too readily, using up its all too few pages while wanting it to last longer. But what can you do. You use it up too soon because you want more but there is no more. Happily, you don't wear it out because I'm sure it will stand re-reading.
As striking as anything in it, and its hard to think of anything that isn't, is the story Memories of Uncle Neddy. It is hard to believe that this belongs among the fiction and not the first section, Memory, Persons & Places. We always know if we are reading memoir or fiction because we are told, however much fiction might be based on life, but the character is brought to life so convincingly that I couldn't accept it as fiction and thought it must be real. It's a great problem to have and not one that I'm aware of ever having had before in any of the most realistic, plausible literary story telling. It undermines the whole idea of the 'suspension of disbelief'. It was belief that needed suspending.
I feel as if I'm raving like a teenager suddenly in the grip of the latest pop music craze, as if my bedroom walls will be covered with pictures of Elizabeth Bishop. She's no new discovery. The poems have been there and been admired for quite some time but it's not every poet that one has the time or inclination to go this much further into, like almost every word they ever committed to paper. That probably won't be possible. The Selected Letters is a big enough book without yet wanting the whole of everything and that must wait. There are other writers. I wouldn't want to be anything like those I've heard from who say Larkin's the only poet they read because he's the best or the admirable high camp of one who wrote that they only listen to The Magnetic Fields and Handel.
How do they know, then.
It is, however, great to know that places are still available at the top table for anyone who convinces quite so thoroughly that they are worthy.