Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Words in the Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell , Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux (2009)

Both Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell would be startled at the disparity between their posthumous reputations. With Allen Ginsburg, Lowell was the most famous postwar American poet. His portrait appeared on the cover of Time. Bishop, though never less than well-regarded after her first book, was known mostly to the cognoscenti until her Complete Poems won the Pulitzer. He published every year and a half. She published every near-decade. He spear-headed the confessional movement in poetry. She disappeared into what James Merrill called a wonderful impersonation of an ordinary woman. He was almost an adjunct of Camelot, the literary equivalent of a Kennedy, a liberal conscience, and a scourge of Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam. It would be hard to infer a statement of Bishop's politics from her writings. In his manic euphoria, he became a man who W.H. Auden described as leaving behind a trail of smoking women. She was an (almost) monogamous lesbian. And now her work is as highly prized as the Vermeers to which it has been compared, while Lowell's reputation has been in respectful abeyance since his death.

The fault, if it may be called a fault, lies in the peculiar excellence of Bishop's poetry. The strategy, if it might be called a strategy, of a sort of observant self-erasure has proven tougher than the confessions of a classical-referential, socio-historical bipolar Bostonian man. Not Lowell's fault, but he started an avalanche of confession which now obscures him; he has been so influential that he no longer seems primary. This has happened to Hemingway, to T.S. Eliot, to Dylan Thomas, and the Auden of the 1930's, not bad company. But Bishop has proven impossible to imitate. Her illusion of perfect naturalness, of understated perfection is admired from the depth of envy by a number of fine poets, among them John Ashbery, James Merrill, Mark Strand. She touches some vein of their own native melody and shows how singularity may become natural. And her example proves impossible to follow, because she has a gaze which is perfectly level, and a bullshit detector which the others lack. She shares in her modest way the ability with Homer and Tolstoy of making the event which she is describing seem to happen in real time. I am not aware of another writer in English who consistently can do this. Some smidgen of exaggeration or stylization always creeps in and suddenly one has landed in Hemingway time, or Dickensian time, or Shakespearean time. It may be wonderful but it is time refracted through some specialized metabolism. It is this as-isness which accounts for the frequency with which Bishop has been compared to Vermeer, whose presence disappears with his brushstrokes. Reading Lowell's poetry, which I admire, I feel that were he a painter he would trowel the paint on in a thick impasto, like Otto Kokoscka, even stick dead leaves in it, like Anselm Kiefer.

If these letters are invaluable, it is because they record the loving good will and tender negotiations of these two very different people for close to three decades. Sometimes this was touch and go. During Lowell's notorious wrecking of his marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick for the love of Lady Caroline Blackwood, Bishop strongly objected to Lowell's use of Hardwick's letters in his poetry--letters that had been purposefully altered without annotation. He purported to find her objections hysterical--in letters to others--but his assertions in verse and in response to Bishop that poetry comes foremost seems hollow considering the poems themselves, which are slack. More often, it is striking how much like each other both sound--the reading lists alternating with personal disasters--and how they pick up on each other's phrasing as if via antennae. If their poems are very different, here we are provided a network of links between them. And if the letters from each begin to resemble the other's, it is also because both speak Beleagered Poet, a language against the tide.

Robert Giroux has published a well-annotated selection of Bishop's letters called One Art, so some of Bishop's letters are already well-known. They are a fine addition to a writer I would read all of but not to be compared to the emergence of a new continent, as one incontinent reviewer had it. It is Lowell who benefits from re-introduction. He emerges as a wry, wise-cracking, and contrite Samson Agonistes figure laboring in the Gaza of his own manic-depressive illness. As well as genius, he had humor, self-awareness, a superb level of culture, but no brakes. The faith of both, how they prop each other up through their separate crises, is touching. The high ratio of melt-downs reported here seems extraordinary only until one compares it to one's own immediate circle. The difference is in the poetry.

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