I've been reading Elizabeth Bishop all year, returning to the weighty Selected Letters in One Art in between other books to continue ploughing, very enjoyably, but ploughing nonetheless through this mere selection of what must have been a busy, and fluent, life keeping in touch with her friends.Sometimes I've turned back to poems in the light of the first-hand autobiography of the letters but there will be more time for poems next year with Elizabeth Bishop at Work by Eleanor Cook on my Christmas list. I'm never entirely happy reading other people's letters and cling not quite convinced to Anthony Thwaite's assurance with regard to Larkin's Letters to Monica that he was writing for posterity, knowing that we would be reading over his shoulder. But Ms. Bishop need not worry about damage to her reputation from these letters in which she is modest, charming, disarming, honest and backs up her small but perfectly made poetry oeuvre with some immense common sense. Not all great poets look quite such admirable as people outside of their work.
Among the highlights of her observations are-
-an awful production of Murder in the Cathedral,
-there is no point wailing & gnashing my teeth at my depravity, I know,
-voting for e.e.cummings over Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize,
-I think one of the worst things about modern education is this 'Creative Writing' business,
-I think everyone feels that his or her best poems were lucky accidents,
-Why is English bohemianism more sordid than other kinds?
-If Nixon gets in, maybe I'll just stay [in Brazil] - any old revolution would be better, it seems to me,
and she regards awards as 'not about work but about personalities, likes Thom Gunn when she meets him, always refuses to be in 'women's anthologies' and feels old at 59 and then finds the butter dish on the coffee table and so deduces that her glasses must be in the fridge.
And the last of those seems more due to the onset of age that makes it so enjoyable than the prodigious drinking, which doesn't.
She makes a fine companion even in her absence seen through these letters as well as in the decorum, the lack of excess and avoidance of bad practice in her poems. Since this book of selected letters was first published in 1994, it is not fitting to review it but I have been wanting to say a few more words in praise of her all the way through. Space will always be found for more worthwhile looking books on the subject, beginning with Bloodaxe's essays from a conference in Newcastle that I sadly missed years ago.
But, here's an idea.
From To Marianne Moore, Oct 10, 1968.
I saw a number of 'Family Circle' with 'Marianne Moore on Baseball' on the cover & of course I bought it.
Now that can't be the same anodyne Family Circle, with its cake recipes and articles on housewifery, available in the UK in the 1970's, can it. But what unlikely combinations of poet and subject matter would one like to see essays on.
I'm afraid I can't solicit them all to appear here so I'd have to do Interior Decorating, Golf, Carpentry and What a Success the Conservative Party Have Been myself and not all such series that I undertake are seen through to a conclusion, like I still haven't finishing My Life in Sport with the required essays on Running, Chess, Pool, Darts and, the one they all want to see, Gaelic Football.
But, thanks for everything, Elizabeth. The world is too much with us sometimes and I expect you'd be as dismissive as I am about theories of 'poetry as therapy'. But maybe the right poets can provide something like it.