Sometime in the Seventies the Harvard Advocate sponsored a reading by Elizabeth Bishop. My then-partner
was something of a Bishop fan. I knew her work only superficially, but admired
“The Man-Moth” and “At the Fishhouses” and the poems collected in Questions of Travel. When we arrived at
the reading, which was scheduled, I think, in Emerson Hall, we found ourselves
the only audience. No one from the Advocate
appeared, so when Bishop showed up, alone and bemused, we shucked the reading
and took her across the street to the Toga, the favorite watering hole of half
of the Harvard faculty and some of the Emerson College faculty, of which I was
then a part-time member. We later heard a rumor that one member of Bishop’s workshop
had organized a boycott of the reading in protest of her burdensome
assignments, but if this was intended to embarrass the poet it didn’t succeed.
Bishop was relieved to get out of the reading, always an ordeal for her. We had
a pleasant gossipy chat about various subjects in common, particularly Robert
Lowell, with whom I had taken a workshop a few years before and whom Bishop was
replacing at Harvard. I also began telling Bishop a lengthy story about
something I can no longer recall; but before I could finish we all, for some
reason also forgotten, had to leave.
My other job, at the Temple Bar Bookshop on Boylston Street
(now JFK Street) in Harvard Square, occupied my non-teaching days. A few days
after our evening at the Toga, Bishop dropped into the bookstore on her way to
her workshop and asked me to continue the story. First, leaving her in
conversation with Jim O’Neil, the bookshop proprietor, I walked down to Leo’s
Place and got coffee for us. Then I finished the story, whatever it was. She
loved stories: that I remember. For the rest of that semester, and for at least
one more, Bishop on her teaching days (she was then living on Brattle Street) came
by for coffee on her way to her workshop, and then again after the workshop.
Jim, his brother Gene, and I greatly enjoyed her visits, chatting with her on
every possible subject except poetry, which she rarely mentioned except in
connection with her teaching. Our raucous and slightly off-color milieu amused
her, and we liked making her laugh, maybe because we recognized that she had a
deep need for humor. We knew, as everyone did, about her long-term lover Lota’s
suicide in 1967, but although I had heard from Lowell something of her struggles
since, we had only a faint intuition of the real depth of her difficulties.
Although we generated a crudely male atmosphere, Bishop
liked our company. Maybe she just appreciated the fact that we looked forward
to seeing her, and greeted her with silly and surreal comments. But we noticed that in the morning, on her way
to work, Bishop seemed nervous and apprehensive, while in the afternoon, on her
way home, she seemed triumphant. We concluded that she dropped by in the
morning for our perverse version of moral support. Maybe because we were
uninhibited with her (as we were with everyone) we projected a normalcy and nonchalance
that helped her face a task she hated. In the afternoon, when we drank tea
instead of coffee, she would regale us with stories about her workshop
students. Most of them, if we had to judge by her observations, were ignorant
troglodytes inert to poetry and everything else beautiful in life. We knew some
of her students as customers, and didn’t find them offensive, despite our
reservations about the manners of the typical Harvard student. But Bishop
described them as insulted by the exercises she assigned (hence the alleged
boycott), thoughtless and crude in their responses to each other’s work, and
generally untalented and hopeless.
When I told Bishop that I sold rare books on the side (I
never mentioned that I still wrote poetry), she exposed her exploitative side.
She told me she owned a scarce Wallace Stevens book, a lettered copy of the
limited edition of Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction, and was considering selling it. At the time the book at retail was
worth something around a thousand dollars, and I would have paid her five
hundred for it. Fifty percent was and is a fair price for a dealer to pay a
private individual, and when I mentioned this to Bishop she seemed to approve.
But when I went to her apartment to see the book she redirected me to a pile of
review copies she wanted to sell. I wasn’t particularly interested, and knew a
bait and switch tactic when I saw it, but offered her a modest sum for the
books. She accepted, and then produced the Stevens book. However, as I
slathered over it she told me she wasn’t sure she wanted to sell it quite yet,
but would certainly give me first refusal. I had doubts, but kept them to
myself. A few months later she repeated this performance. I realized she was
never going to give up the Stevens book. It was probably still in her library
when she died.
Although biographers and memoirists have made much of
Bishop’s alcoholism, I saw only two moderate instances of inebriation. As I
mentioned, the Emerson College faculty—or at least the most prominent members
of the English Department—drank at the Toga on Massachusetts Avenue around the
corner from the Grolier Bookshop. Jim Randall, whose Pym-Randall Press
published the work of many poets who would go on to distinguished careers,
gathered around him a coterie of poetry wannabees and genuine talents. On my
teaching days I often joined his circle (at the time I was living right under
him in an apartment building on Harvard Street), and well-known poets would occasionally
show up. Lowell dropped in a few times, as did Richard Wilbur, Richard
Eberhart, Mark Strand, and others. One night Bishop came in and sat with us for
a few hours. When she rose to leave she was a little worse for wear, so I
walked her back to Brattle Street (after an absentminded detour past Cambridge
Common toward Chauncy Street, where she had lived for a while) and made sure
she got through the door without too much difficulty. Since Jim Randall and I
sometimes got so drunk we had to crawl home on all fours (it was only three
blocks from the bar), no one thought anything of this. The second time occurred
a couple of years later, when Bishop was living on Lewis Wharf. She stayed at
the bar with us until after midnight, and I had to shovel her into a cab and
accompany her to her condominium. Fortunately, Alice Methfessel, the lover who
sometimes lived with Bishop, wasn’t there, and I didn’t have to deal with her
disapprobation. Four years after Bishop’s death, I met Alice under other
circumstances, and mercifully she didn’t seem to remember or associate me with
Bishop’s occasional lapses.
Is any of this relevant? Elizabeth Bishop wrote some of the
most memorable poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, and her
personal qualities no longer matter the way her work does. But for what it’s
worth, I found her charming, engaging, shy but curious, quick with humor, and
alert to everyone she encountered. I don’t even mind that she stiffed me on the
Stevens book. Her poetry is her monument, and long after everyone who knew her
is gone it will remain unassailable in its purity and perfection.
(published in The Worcester
Review, 2017)
