Bishop Elizabeth - Love unknown: the life and worlds of Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishops life is a great story. It is the story of a young girl who lost her father to Brights disease when she was eight months old and lost her mother to an incurable mental breakdown when she was five. It is the story of a woman who struggled with shyness and self-doubt, with alcoholism and severe and lasting autoimmune disorders, with barriers imposed by gender, andas Adrienne Rich notedwith the eye of the outsider imposed by her lesbian sexuality. It is, at its core, the story of how a young girl who had grown up orphaned, abused, and isolated made herself, with determined effort, into a world traveler and into the creator of unforgettable poems.

Within this great story lies an intricate web of smaller storiesstories about Bishops relationships with celebrated writers, artists, and composers, and with many lesser-known friends and lovers across the globe. Exploring Bishops network of relationships with literati, glitterati, visual artists and musicians, locals, travelers, students, scholars, medicos, and politicosalong with an international gay underground then nearly invisible to the dominant culturebrings to life the varied mid-twentieth-century worlds on the three continents through which she moved. Bishop began writing self-exploratory letters that were vivid, funny, and sophisticated by the age of fourteen. Her later verse, prose, and letters depict her early experience, starting at the age of three, with extraordinary clarity. Family records, too, paint a remarkably lucid picture of Bishops life before the age of three. Even if Bishop had not become a world-renowned poet, her life history would be worth exploring because it offers such a portrait of a distinctive human individuals lifelong struggle against adversity. But Bishop did make herself into an author of true greatness, and the record she left behind offers a compelling account of how a unique creative artist was first born and then made. In her self-deprecatory way, Bishop often maintained in interviews that the pattern of her life was the result of a series of sheer accidents. But her precocious adolescent writings make it crystal clear that from her middle teens she was already sketching out a life plan prioritizing travel, love, friendship, independence, observation, and the making of poetry. From adolescence onward, Elizabeth Bishop kept to the basic outlines of her plan, and as a writer and a person, she made the most of it.

The Elizabeth Bishop who has emerged for me, after forty years of engagement with her life and art, was a quietly determined individualist whose actions and choices were marked by a consistent willingness to accept risk, flavored by a keen eye for detail and a dry and distinctly wicked sense of humor. Bishop was a woman who struggled persistently against physical and emotional liabilities that might have disabled others. Yet she made a life that, for all its imperfections, was marked by wit, energy, courage, dedication, and lasting artistic achievement. As her friend and protg James Merrill observed, It was du cot de chez Elizabeth... that I saw the daily life that took my fancy... with its kind of random, Chekhovian surface, open to trivia and funny surprises, or even painful ones, today a fit of weeping, tomorrow a picnic. For Merrill, Elizabeth had more talent for lifeand for poetrythan anyone else Ive known, and this has served me as an ideal. One of the most famous recurring images in Bishops writing is the rainbow, and she certainly viewed life in its full spectrum. Her openness to all kinds of experience, be it perplexing, bitter, funny, or invigorating, remains one of the chief attractions of her life and art. These characteristics also account, at least in part, for Bishops profound and ongoing influence over her fellow writers and her steadily growing attractiveness to readers.

It has become an axiom among critics that Bishops lifelong dedication to travel was determined in large measure by a search for home. Yet travel was not simply a search for security or shelter. It was also a search for adventure, risk, and discovery, a search for friendship and lasting love, a search for artistic material, and, perhaps most important, a quest for freedom that found its basis in a childhood marked by loss, isolation, and constraint. The art of losing Bishop ruefully celebrated with such poignant irony in perhaps her most famous poem, One Art, was linked in equal part to a life and art of findingan art demanding the sort of encounter, appraisal, and understated epiphany that appears in such abundance throughout her work.

Bishops uncanny knack for balancing depth and lightness in a completely natural and engaging manner helps her readers to see the world in new ways. As Merrill observed shortly after her death in 1979, I like the way her whole oeuvre is on the scale of a human life; there is no oracular amplification, she doesnt go about on stilts to make her vision wider. She doesnt need that. Shes wise and humane enough as it is. Yet her quality of lightness, and the consistently human scale of her poetry, did not preclude profundity. As another friend and protg, Frank Bidart, observed fifteen years after her death,

Bishops life, idiosyncratic, seemingly marginal, was exemplary. Her masked but intense refusal to be anything but herself reveals like an X ray the contradictions and pleasures of twentieth-century culture. The tragedies at the root of her life were at the root of the mastery achieved by her art.