On Elizabeth Bishop
by Colm Tóibín
Princeton University Press
224 pages, $19.95
IT COMES AS SOMETHING of a surprise to find Colm Tóibín writing a book about Elizabeth Bishop. She died in 1979, and the Irish writer (born in 1955) never met her. His bailiwick is fiction, with three novels nominated for the Man Booker Prize, while Bishop was a celebrated American poet. More fundamentally, their photos look so different: the novelist’s ruddy face, with thick dark eyebrows, furrowed jowls, and disheveled hair, versus the fair poet’s precision-combed locks, thin lips, and serene gaze—almost, but not quite, demure.
On Elizabeth Bishop describes how Tóibín was influenced early on by Bishop, not only by her assiduous attention to detail but also by what she left unsaid, by the power of her empty spaces. Conversational in tone, this book is the fifth in Princeton University’s lively series, “Writers on Writing.” But what genre of work is it? It’s not a biography, really, and the structure is only vaguely chronological. Nor is it literary criticism: there are few analytical insights, and little theory. Tóibín briefly tackles rhyme schemes and meter, but he mostly ignores mechanics in favor of imaginative associations: departure as a motif, the notion of return, the roughness of experience. The thirteen essays touch on subjects such as Bishop’s use of memory and the intricacy of her noticing, painting a layered picture of the poet’s work.
Tóibín bought Bishop’s Selected Poems as a teenager and carried the slim volume with him when he left Ireland for a stay in Barcelona, which became the basis of his first novel, The South. Bishop’s early childhood was spent in Great Village, Nova Scotia, with weather similar to that of Tóibín’s County Wexford. Fog, tides, and cold characterize both writers’ accounts of home. She later lived in South America, where Tóibín has also spent time, and in New York City, where he now teaches for half the year.
Poet Charles Simic has admired the “naturalness” of Bishop’s tone, which Tóibín links to her use of precise details. He offers as illustration “The Moose,” a poem finished in 1970 that recounts an overnight bus trip from Nova Scotia to Boston in 1946. The journey is long and tiring, and riders lapse into idle talk, or dreams. Suddenly, with no warning, an enormous moose appears in the road, blocking the bus and halting people’s chatter. Driver and passengers stare at the intruder, captivated. Given the animal’s preposterous bulk and sheer impact, a poet might be tempted to turn the animal into a symbol, but Bishop’s moose does not get transformed. Instead, she remains incontestably alive and ambles off into the woods. Bishop preferred signals to symbols, observes Tóibín, whose own fiction holds explicitly rendered scenes—of deathbed vigils, sexual encounters, and seaside wanderings—that are similarly provocative but resistant to interpretation.
Beyond her meticulous use of imagery, Bishop is praised for her appreciation of individual contingency, her willingness to grant uniqueness to every creature, whether human or beast. She discovered this singularity early, he says, citing “In the Waiting Room,” a poem in which Bishop tells how as a child of seven she came to realize her own distinctness, and by extension her isolation.
But Tóibín has been drawn to Bishop, a lesbian, on a personal as well as technical level. In two intriguing essays, “The Art of Losing” and “Grief and Reason,” he tells of reading “with considerable intensity” her work and that of three other gay writers—novelists Thomas Mann and James Baldwin, and poet Thom Gunn—while still in his teens. More recently, he published Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar, “to recover these writers, relate to them, almost get in touch with them as a gay man myself,” Tóibín says.
Reflecting now on what drew him especially to Bishop, Mann, Baldwin, and Gunn, Tóibín says that “homosexuality was only part of the story. The other part of the story was that each … had lost a parent in childhood or early adulthood.” Having suffered the death of his own father at the age of ten, he was drawn to these writers because they had endured the same devastation. Tóibín finds Bishop and Gunn in particular to be writers who “masked their grief with reason,” evolving a “tone of impersonality … of an immense and powerful withholding” as part of their poetic voice. Both kept their distance from readers by avoiding confession or easy disclosure. Bishop was “not concerned to resolve anything,” he says with approval, and her late poems especially “use exact detail to contain emotion, and suggest more, and then leave the reader unsure, unsettled.”
Tóibín recognizes this restraint as his own strategy. In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, he has told how, as an eight-year-old, he developed a stammer immediately after his father, a teacher, returned home from brain surgery at a Dublin hospital. As his father’s condition deteriorated, any exchange became awkward, and, after his death two years later, “his name was hardly ever mentioned again. It was too much that he had died, too hard,” Tóibín says, adding that as a writer he continues to have a strong sense of “things known and not said.”
He connects with Bishop in terms of this silence. Having lost her father as an infant, she became in effect an orphan when her mother was institutionalized with mental illness four years later. Tóibín says that Bishop was struck dumb in terms of writing about these catastrophes, publishing only one story (“In the Village”) about her mother’s death and nothing about the suicide of her beloved partner, Lota de Macedo Soares. But if Bishop could not confront these losses directly, she nevertheless resolved to “tell the truth” in her poetry. She did so by observing limits and using caution, Tóibín says. She also openly pointed out excess and errors in poems that her good friend Robert Lowell sent for comment, but added compliments. For example, she told Lowell “how wonderful it was when he named his posh ancestors in the poems of Life Studies,” her diplomacy helping to sustain their “rather fierce and oddly loving life-long competition.”
Tóibín’s take on Bishop’s friendship with Lowell makes sense, but he seems hesitant to parse her relationships with women and to hazard a guess about how those connections affected her writing. Bishop’s letters confirm that she was often lonely. Tóibín believes her isolation was devastating, which leaves unexplained how Bishop managed to form deep romantic bonds—for example, with Lota for more than fifteen years in Brazil; earlier, with Marjorie Stevens in Key West; and for her last years with Alice Methfessel in Boston. If she was at times desolate, it seems the poet could also find companionship, and love.
On Elizabeth Bishop conveys Tóibín’s admiration for Bishop the person and his esteem for her poems. In the last essay, “North Atlantic Light,” he links Ireland with Nova Scotia, two places where “light is scarce, the spirit is wary and much is unresolved,” going so far as to pair Bishop with that effusive expatriate, James Joyce. Both writers valued a “tone of scarcity,” he says, clearly and without further ado concluding these fresh and nimble takes on his extraordinary subject.
Rosemary Booth is a writer and photographer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
