Elizabeth Bishop, Wilkie Collins

What came next off the top of the waiting pile of books was Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Post. 

It's a self-deprecating title, not all that short and somewhat deeper than a mere 'introduction', I'd think. In the same way that Vermeer was just about one's favourite painter before finding out that there is more to him than than one had thought, it offers some admirable analysis without yet providing material towards the sort of succinct sentence with which one could lazily, casually, claim to have summarized the work of other great poets. 

I'll leave out the details of those but one can give some sort of idea of what a poet is like in only a few words, obviously without doing them justice.

 

I can't even get close to providing an idea of what Elizabeth Bishop is like in one or two sentences. One would stand more chance with Shakespeare. 

Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets is a reliable place to return to when in need but even he only gives us 'travel', looking and seeing, and the ways in which she relates to Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell and John Ashbery but I'm not convinced how useful those correspondances are and find it as meaningful to compare her with Wallace Stevens whose poems, whatever you think they are about, turn out to be about much more than that. Or even not that at all.

You'd think A Very Short Introduction would show you the easy way in but no sooner have we had some biography, some hints about place, travel, gender and descriptions of nature than we are into all those abstractions that academics deal in. This is the twelfth book written by or about Elizabeth Bishop that I now have and it means she takes up just about a foot of shelf space which is three inches more than Edward Thomas but three less than Dr. Johnson. You'd think that by now I'd be in a position to define her, however loosely, but whereas in her poems 'less is more', more seems to make such an effort less possible in her case.

But perhaps that's why she's so good. Perhaps being indefinable is the endlessly interesting thing. Vermeer was very much that until Andrew Graham-Dixon came along and explained so much of it away. Larkin is relatively easy to write about. The fact that I've understood Thom Gunn to my own satisfaction hasn't diminished the greatness of his best poems. Of course, Auden, Rosemary Tonks and all that top echelon of my favourite poets. 

I'm not even saying that this elusiveness makes Elizabeth Bishop better than the others. She's not 'elusive', she's just -apparently- impossible to summarize. And that's a good thing to be.

Top 6, without commentary,

Sandpiper,

The Map,

Crusoe in England,

One Art,

The Shampoo, 

In the Waiting Room 

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And so, we move on. Which is the greatest/best/most famous novel I've never read. Probably War and Peace, maybe something by Dostoevesky or Jane Austen. But I have read things by those authors. What about The Woman in White, picked up in the Chichester Oxfam shop recently. Hugely enjoyable in its first section and there's no reason to think it will falter. As far as C19th fiction goes, it might not quite be Hardy or George Eliot. I know Dickens has his admirers. Jane Eyre, George Moore, George Gissing, the Great French and Russians, Samuel Butler but Wilkie Collins might not be far away.

The 'action' might yet be to unfold but it was a great choice and won't be the Best Book I've Never Read for much longer.

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I need a rest from the music writing and the midwinter hiatus arrives just in time. I'd write a poem is one presented itself but they don't. As with the essays, it's not easy to think of anything to say that I've not said before although that doesn't deter me here. Like, for example, intermittently saying how I'd so like to write some satisfactory fiction. Just one thing to begin with would do.

I'd be calling the new little effort The Woman In Black if Susan Hill hadn't got there first but I'd better finish it before giving any more thought to a title. A Perfect Muder, at about 3500 words proved longer than what most amateurish outlets want so I'll try to bring it in at under 3000. That's still a lot of words for me when poems rarely go beyond, say, 200. C19th novels have barely got beyond their opening scene in 3000 words but in those days both writers and readers had world enough, and time.

I'd better see if I can make further progress, even finish a tentative first draft. If one lets these things lie too long one doesn't go back to them.