Prose

IN the decades since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop has been recognized as an American original, as much ours and not ours as Whitman, Dickinson and that transplanted Yankee Robert Frost. A reader's appetite for the lives of beloved poets can be hard to satisfy. Their mortgages are subject to scholarly study, their medical records sold in shadowy alleys, their childhood friends dunned to offer up nuggets of gossip. We would read their shopping lists if we could - such things make them more human, and therefore slightly inhuman, since how is it possible that the authors of "Leaves of Grass" or "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" or "North of Boston" could have needed new stockings, and hair oil, and cornflakes? The three selections of Bishop's letters already published are now followed by one much quirkier, "Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker," containing some 40 years' worth of exchanges between the editors of that famously secretive magazine and that famously retiring poet. Bishop's personal letters, like her poems, were full of deftly seen detail and mordant self-mockery. A little of that leaked even into these business letters, particularly after her editors became her friends. (It was hard for the editors to remember that when they became her friends they were no longer exactly her editors.) A world-class procrastinator and Olympian ditherer, Bishop sometimes didn't finish a poem for decades - she lobbied to be the magazine's poetry critic, but when appointed never turned in a single review. Too much of this overlong book is devoted to the editors' ritual cajolery; apologetic promises by Bishop; promises piled upon promises, like Pelion on Ossa, with excuses added to order; belated submissions; rapid acceptances (or, more rarely, rejections); and the inevitable wrestle over editing. The difficulties were compounded by distance. For most of two decades, Bishop lived in Brazil, having fallen in love with a Rio aristocrat while recovering from an allergic attack after eating cashew fruit. Her small inheritance went much farther there, and living abroad kept her out of the storms of American literary life. Between the perils of airmail and the untrustworthy Brazilian postal system (street mailboxes were apparently never emptied), and the lost letters and wayward proofs that followed, it was a miracle there was any editing at all. The major theme of these letters is, of all things, punctuation. Though she graduated from Vassar, Bishop was a haphazard and cruelly inventive minder of stops. ("Punctuation is my Waterloo," she wrote glumly.) Tourists hauled in off the Copacabana beach could have given her lessons; but it was up to her editors, chiefly Katharine White and later Howard Moss, to puzzle out her meanings and clarify her unintentional ambiguities. The magazine had a somewhat strait-laced view of grammatical rules (and other things - for years the two women addressed each other as Miss Bishop and Mrs. White). Her forbearing editors, however, dismissed many in-house queries, often allowing Bishop to decide just how far toward sanity she was willing to go. All this is amusing; but the book's editor, Joelle Biele, has crammed in footnotes that record every comma the editors introduced, or failed to introduce, or asked the gods of punctuation for permission to introduce. These footnotes are possibly the dullest ever written. The New Yorker has been the premier American literary magazine for most of a century. To be published there is a rite of passage for a young writer, though when the magazine was founded in 1925, after a decade in which Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens had revolutionized American poetry, it devoted itself to light verse. Later the magazine was spurned by Robert Lowell, who objected to the triviality of New Yorker poems. (Pound in his dotage was published there for the first and last time, Moss once told me, because the magazine learned he needed major dental work.) The New Yorker has suffocated at times beneath a mask of wry gentility. For all its glossy reputation, the magazine still turns up its nose at stories and poems that make too many demands on the reader. It's a middlebrow journal for people who would like to be highbrows - and perhaps for highbrows who love a little slumming. The cartoons, as Biele notes, provide an antiphonal chorus to the reckless consumerism of the ads. Just as the literature is for those who want to think themselves literary, the ads are for those who want to think themselves rich. (If you were old money, you'd already own Tiffany by the trunkload.) Bishop's close association with the magazine, almost all her best poems appearing there after 1945, probably contributed to her struggle to be taken seriously. To be a New Yorker poet was sometimes a deal with the devil. Bishop's father died of Blight's disease when she was an infant. Her mother carted the baby home to Canada and back, hither-thither, becoming so distraught she was finally confined to a mental hospital. A quiet tug of war developed between her mother's doting parents in Nova Scotia and her father's wealthier and more conventional parents in Massachusetts. The latter, shocked to find the child being raised barefoot in a muddy village, dragged her back to the States for a proper education. (It was a shock at first - Bishop didn't care to be an American and loathed saluting the flag.) The girl never saw her mother again. BISHOP suffered from a streak of perfectionism in a personality pricked with self-doubt and almost paralyzed by shyness - for all her mixed feelings about Emily Dickinson, whose letters Bishop found embarrassing, there was more than a little of the Amherst poet in her character. Bishop finished her poems slowly, when she finished them at all (though one of her best, "Visits to St. Elizabeths," was written in 24 hours). Among the minor comedies of these letters is Howard Moss pleading, year after year, for a poem he had once caught a glimpse of. Yet the perfectionism oddly made her work spring forth freshly, when it sprang. The melancholy beneath the joy of seeing darkened a style of startling and even uncomfortable vivacity. These letters offer a rare view into The New Yorker's inner chambers, as well as a workshop in editing, an editor's chief requirement being a talent for diplomacy. At times the politeness of poet and magazine seems that of two countries about to go to war - tactful enough with her editors (though she felt that reading the magazine was like "eating a quilt"), in letters to friends Bishop groused about the revisions proposed. ("They once put 23 commas in a long poem of mine," she groaned.) Every poem was read multiple times by multiple people. The legal department was consulted lest a law be broken, the fact department checked lest a fact go astray; the editors were allowed their way with the poem, and the proof room and makeup department their way; and finally the poor poet, at the bottom of this heap of helpfulness, was allowed to protest about commas merrily broadcast or facts too soon made glad. The reader begins to suspect that a dozen other departments, some with no name at all, were lodged in the obscure warrens of that Kafkaesque organization. Early in the 1960s, Bishop gave up her first-reading contract with the magazine on the grounds that she wanted to write more "experimental" poems; but she submitted her best work anyway and came meekly back to the fold not many years later. She discovered that because of her years away she was ineligible for a New Yorker pension, which was apparently almost impossible to understand or calculate anyway. No one could explain any better the cost-of-living-adjustment checks she received, sometimes followed by further checks to adjust the adjustments. There has not been an accounting scheme so Byzantine since Byzantium. Bishop was fortunate in her editors, who were half in love with her - and what fine and close readers they usually were, niggling but caring. Still, the magazine could go too far. When Bishop referred to a "large aquatic animal," the editor in chief Harold Ross, who insisted on understanding every poem his magazine published, wanted to know which animal. Bishop eventually grew impatient with the long wait for publication, some poems lingering for a year or more in the "bank" - a mysterious repository that proved merely an office wall with a note card for each unpublished piece, pinned like a dead butterfly. Once she threw a fit when a poem was printed in the back pages. Ruffled feathers were soon smoothed, and things went on as before. And a few times a year, one by one, in came the poems we now know so well; and they were snapped up, one by one. The book does one injustice to Howard Moss, that most conscientious and fastidious of editors. What had been "a creature divided" in the draft of a Bishop poem published weeks after she died was printed as the clunky "contrarily guided." Moss has been blamed, her proof copy having disappeared; but there's no evidence elsewhere in these letters of an editorial change so radical or highhanded. Bishop, on the other hand, once altered "Pajama'd aunts" to "Ananadrous aunts" and "dancing eyes" to "avernal eyes." The peculiar revision is more likely hers. Editions of Bishop's work have proliferated over the decades. "The Complete Poems: 1927-1979" and "The Collected Prose," both published in the years just after her death, were followed by two volumes of letters and Alice Quinn's captivating edition of the unfinished poems (which introduced readers to the hopeless disorder of Bishop's desk), not to mention a compendious Library of America volume (including yet more letters) and even a book of the poet's crude watercolors. Now come newly edited and much fattened collections called simply "Prose" and "Poems." Bishop was first and last a poet, but she was keenly aware that for poets the wages of sin are poverty ("I'm desperate for CASH!" she wrote a friend). The old "Collected Prose," put together by her publisher Robert Giroux, has more than doubled in size, stories and memoirs and essays now crowded into a miserly format with narrow margins and unpleasantly cheap paper. Edited by Bishop's friend Lloyd Schwartz, who has vacuumed out the archives, "Prose" is a seedy warehouse of goods mostly unwanted and unloved. Bishop's short stories were derivative fantasies out of Kafka and Hawthorne, when not painfully static versions of her unhappy childhood. She had, however, a natural gift for memoir - her moving recollections of the Nova Scotia village, the dislocated months in Worcester and post-college life in New York possess all the rueful charm of her poems. "Prose" has been pieced out, alas, with humdrum reviews and critical essays (when pressed, Bishop tended to hurl quotes at the reader), a mostly unnecessary selection of college juvenilia, a few translations and the original version of her travel book "Brazil," commissioned for the Life World Library and ever after regretted by Bishop. She accused the editors of massive rewriting, but that isn't quite true. The Life editors were gung-ho about economic development (the phrase "ugly price of progress" was dropped), and like provincial boobs they changed Bishop's description of the Iguaçú Falls from "three or four times greater and more magnificent than Niagara" to "almost as spectacular." Even so, most of her prose was left intact, and what was revised was often just tightened or corrected. Yet how laborious, how dull, the Brazil book is, livened only by a colorful anecdote or two. (A Brazilian who did nothing after being insulted was asked if he was a man. He replied: "Yes, I'm a man. But not fanatically.") Of far more value are the poet's confiding letters to Anne Stevenson, then writing the first book on Bishop's work. The poet, who didn't usually discuss her life, revealed that she had always wanted to write pop songs, wished she had gone to med school, and liked children, at least until they were 3. She recalled a little proudly that Hemingway had said of her poem "The Fish," "I wish I knew as much about it as she does." The new editor reproduces the memoirs and stories just as they appeared in "The Collected Prose." Giroux was a fine publisher; but he was a meddling editor of the old school, and his work with manuscripts cannot be taken on trust. This ungainly book is marred by a lack of notes (without explanation, Stevenson is suddenly addressed as Mrs. Elvin); and it's a pity to find in Bishop's favorite piece of prose, a gallery note for the painter Wesley Wehr, the sentence "Some pictures may remind one of agates, the form called '[illegible].'" A glance at the manuscript at Vassar, where it's held, shows that the missing words were "thunder egg." The editor might have asked a geologist. Readers will delight in Bishop's letters and wade through her prose, all for the sake of her odd, whimsical, heartbreaking poems, poems like no one else's. She hated being compared to Marianne Moore, whom she met while still at Vassar; but Moore's sidelong eye and attraction to the exotic were an indelible influence. Bishop saw the world with a willed innocence, which was not, not exactly, that of a miserable adult trying to relive childhood. Yet the pathos of such innocence lies in our knowing it is experience denied. FROM a distance, Bishop's poems are all more obviously, and all more unsettlingly, products of a life and a time. "A Miracle for Breakfast" is now plainly a poem of the Depression and "Sestina" that of an orphan in a house of secrets. Her famous descriptions can be rather severe in their dissociation - the world is freshly grasped, but also desperately transformed. A way of seeing was for her a way of knowing - and it was an unusual eye that could have seen, in "The Bight," harbor water the "color of the gas flame turned as low as possible," and the local pelicans that "crash / into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard," then "going off with humorous elbowings." "Poems" includes all the published work, with a generous sampling of the unpublished poems. Oddly, though "Poems" and "Prose" look like matched volumes, the poems have been given the finer grade of paper. There are, however, too many sections of uncollected this and uncollected that - this was a lost opportunity to find a more rational organization for her work. Bishop's lightness of bearing cannot disguise a darkness of being. Gaiety barely disguises the resistant sadness - there is a peculiar infantilism in Bishop, and I fear that is what we love. Yet her warmth and reticence divide her from the confessional poets whose blared secrets she so disliked. She was a displaced person, physically and emotionally; her poems reveal that terrible rootlessness, even when rooted in Nova Scotia, or Florida, or Brazil (she joked that she moved "coastwise"). Even her first book was discreetly fashioned like an itineraiy, from childhood in Nova Scotia through New York, Paris and Key West. Bishop worried that she had "wasted half one's talent through timidity" and feared that her poems were "precious"; yet her luxuriant vision is tempered and restrained by the anxieties beneath. Her weaker poems ramble prosaically, offering only a scatty attention to the world; and perhaps one day readers will find her portraits of Brazilians affectionate but condescending - drawn to the quaint and naïve, she was all too privileged an outsider. This poet of travel and dream, of lost childhood, of angular moral vision (and a gloomy soul) lived in a 20th century still at times lost in the 19th - indeed, the untouched jungle of the Brazilian poems sometimes harks back to the Americas newly discovered. Though American as apple pie, this three-quarters Canadian, sometime Brazilian could easily be considered the national poet of Canada or Brazil. In "The Man-Moth," "A Miracle for Breakfast," "Cirque d'Hiver," "The Bight," "The Armadillo," "The Burglar of Babylon," "Sestina," "Visits to St. Elizabeths" and a dozen others, she invented countries on a map she had drawn herself. At times in these letters the politeness of poet and magazine seems that of two countries about to go to war. William Logan's most recent book of poetry is "Strange Flesh."

The most exciting part of the Bishop reissue project may be this volume, which contains all of the prose published in her lifetime, as well as a few hard to find things and a thing or two you won't find anywhere else. As a frequent contributor to the New Yorker (the poet's decades-long relationship with the magazine is brought to life in The Complete Correspondence) and other publications, Bishop crafted all kinds of prose, from autobiographical short stories ("In the Village") to loving reminiscences ("Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore"); she was as original a prose writer as she was a poet, an under-known fact this volume may help solidify once and for all. The real gem of this book is "Brazil," a book-length essay on Bishop's adopted homeland, whose published version, which came out as a Time-Life guide, Bishop hated. Here we have her original draft, written in her inimitable style: "The history of South America in the nineteenth century resembles Shakespeare's battle scenes: shouts and trumpets; small armies on stage, small armies off stage..." Take that, Lonely Planet! (This title is also available with Poems as a hardcover boxed set, $75, ISBN 9780-374-12558-5.) (Feb) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.