Approaches to Biographical Literature Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

The publication in 2008 of Words in Air: The Collected Correspondence of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop offers the reader a privileged glimpse into the long and emotional friendship between two major postwar American poets, who were each an active influence on the other's work. Bishop would enclose a poem in a 1961 letter to Lowell, claiming the draft "undoubtedly shows your influence" but also noting that "I'll probably make more changes" (Words in Air, 379). In a 1964 interview, Robert Lowell would claim Bishop as one of "the poets who most directly influenced me." (Kunitz 86). Indeed Travisano notes in his introduction to the letters that "Lowell's Life Studies and For the Union Dead, his most enduringly popular books, were written under Bishop's direct influence, as the letters make clear" (Words in Air, xviii). But those two titles mark a major shift in Lowell's style, to what would come to be described after the fact as "confessional poetry," while Bishop's own later work would move in the opposite direction, to a rather cool and detached reticence. This dynamic between confession and reticence would culminate with Bishop's sharp critique of Lowell's The Dolphin in 1973, and would affect even her own elegy for Lowell, "North Haven." An examination of the letters and poems reveals that the chief influence on Bishop's work was through negative example: the more Lowell revealed, the less openly autobiographical Bishop's work would become.

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop would first meet in January of 1947, and the correspondence collected in Words in Air begins in May of that year. Lowell and Bishop were friends for over a decade at the time when Lowell's own style began to make a remarkable divergence in the work ultimately collected in Life Studies. Before publication, Bishop herself was remarkably enthusiastic about the work, and in a letter from October 30, 1958 she records her glowing response to the manuscript of Life Studies, which she calls "the BOOK":

I've read through the BOOK again and really, it is very fine. The older poems are good in the old way and the new poems are good in a new way, and altogether they are (the new ones) solid, real, intensely interesting, honest -- and very interesting metrically. I think you should be very proud of the whole effort, and at the same time all the new ones have a strangely modest tone that I like too, because they are all about yourself and yet do not sound conceited! They really make almost everything I see look pretty dreary, or labored, or absolute silliness (like poor dear Eberhart)….I don't know what the real differences are, I suppose only the critics know them, but your poetry is as different from the rest of our contemporaries as, say, ice from slush… (Words in Air, 273)

It is worth observing here that Bishop praises these autobiographical poems for their coolness ("ice") rather than heat. She openly praises them for being "honest" and not being "conceited," but in the image she uses it seems like she is praising the work for avoiding the heat of emotion. Indeed it seems that she retains this association of what is best about Life Studies even after publication. In the 1961 letter where she claims Lowell's "influence" on a new poem, the work enclosed begins by describing an emotionally frozen world:

In the cold, cold parlor my mother laid out Arthur

beneath the chromographs:

Edward, Prince of Wales,

with Princess Alexandra,

and King George with Queen Mary.

Below them on the table stood a stuffed loon shot and stuffed by Uncle

Arthur, Arthur's father. (Bishop, "First Death in Nova Scotia")

It is clear, though, that Bishop confesses Lowell's influence because she is thinking in particular of his description of dealing with his mother's death in "Sailing Home from Rapallo" in Life Studies, which records precisely the same imagery of ice and family grief:

…the burning cold illuminated ?

the hewn inscriptions of Mother's relatives:

twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks.

Frost had given their names a diamond edge....

In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother's coffin, ?

Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.

The corpse ?

was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil.

(Lowell, "Sailing Home from Rapallo")

Bishop's stuffed loon corresponds to Lowell's bagged panetone, as jarring domestic objects which here stand as metaphor's for death's indignity. But poems focus on chill and ice, perhaps to capture emotional remoteness of the siutaiton. Lowell's poem is unable to repress the typographical error on "Mother's coffin," which offers the hint of a "LOVE" otherwise held at bay in the description. Bishop seems willing to imitate Lowell's recollection of the illustrious names of Boston brahmins in his mother's graveyeard by including the hovering photos of the royal family in her scene, which explains her claim of Lowell's influence on the poem.

But to a certain degree, Bishop's claim of influence here is slightly disingenuous. In point of fact, Lowell himself derived this "burning cold" nexus of imagery from the first poem by Bishop that he comments upon in their letters. In 1947, Lowell read Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" in the New Yorker, and wrote that "I felt very envious in reading it" (Words in Air, 7). But his letter criticizes Bishop's concluding lines:

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones

If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

(Bishop, "At the Fishhouses")

Lowell says in 1947 that "the description has great splendor and the human part, etc., is just right. I question a little the word breast in the last four or five lines -- a little too much in its context perhaps; but I'm probably wrong" (Words in Air, 7). Yet these lines also contains Bishop's introduction of an image of water described as both "icily free" and causing a "burn / as if the water were a transmutation of fire." Critics of Bishop as varied as Bonnie Costello and Harold Bloom have argued that the "breasts" which shock Lowell in "At the Fishhouses" in 1947 are Bishop's extremely reticent way of discussing her own fraught relationship with her mother. The suggestion is that Lowell found the "breasts" too revealing in 1947, but by the time of Life Studies he understood Bishop's method of revelation and intended to adapt it to his own purposes. But the "burning cold" in "Sailing Home from Rapallo" is clearly derived from Bishop's own poem, which is thought to be about her own dead mother, but which never confesses the fact.

Perhaps the best-known poem included in Life Studies, "Skunk Hour," is dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop. Lowell himself would later explain the dedication as an acknowledgement of Bishop's own influence upon himself -- specifically, he described "Skunk Hour" as a response to Bishop's poem "The Armadillo." As with the interrelations noted above, here Bishop and Lowell seem to be writing poems in response to one another. "The Armadillo" was dedicated to Robert Lowell and published earlier, and it seems like the two poems are intended as perfect mirrors of each other. The similarity in these two poems is purely structural, as Lowell himself would admit: several stanzas of description are followed by a focus on a single animal. Bishop's poem describes a peasant custom in Brazil, where "almost every night / the frail, illegal fire balloons appear" offered in devotion to the cult of a local saint. -- the fifth stanza ends with the note that sometimes the fire-balloons can, of course, fall, "suddenly turning dangerous." Then the next stanza begins with the event: "Last night another big one fell." The introduction of this man-made flame into the Brazilian forest results in conclusion that gives Bishop her title (and subject): "A glistening armadillo left the scene / Rose-flecked, head down, tail down." In the final stanza, though, the armadillo has become an emblem:

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!

O falling fire and piercing cry

And panic, and a weak mailed fist

Clenched ignorant against the sky! ("The Armadillo,")

In asking what Bishop's poem is about, and why it is dedicated to Lowell, it is worth looking at the reading of the poem offered by Bonnie Costello. Costello sees "The Armadillo" as Bishop's response to Lowell with "a critique of his way of making art out of suffering" (Costello 75). In particular, she understands "The Armadillo" as a direct response to Lowell's actions in the 1940s -- he would offer a self-portrait delivered in retrospect in Life Studies, in the poem "Memories of West Street and Lepke," where he describes himself in the 1940s as "a fire-breathing Catholic C.O." who "made my manic statements" ("Memories of West Street and Lepke"). "C.O." is of course "Conscientious Objector," one who resisted on moral or ethical grounds the military draft during World War Two. Lowell's original "C.O." status -- as might be hinted at in the term "fire-breathing" -- was occasioned by the Allied firebombings of Hamburg and other German cities. Hamilton reprints the "Declaration of Personal Responsibility" the young Lowell wrote when refusing to enter the army in the 1940s (before meeting Bishop), which refers to these firebombings: "Three weeks ago we read of the razing of Hamburg, where 200,000 non-combatants are reported dead, after an almost apocalyptic series of all-out air raids." (39). Costello notes that the imagery in Bishop's poem can be read as a metaphoric commentary, in some sense, on Lowell's own situation: as she notes, "Bishop's poem points directly to these fire bombings, which wreaked the same kind of horrifying destruction on a part of our universe that fire balloons wreak on the animals" (81). Yet what Costello does not note is the distinction that Bishop makes here between personal and public meanings. By naming Lowell as the dedicatee of the poem, Bishop indicates this secondary layer of meaning in which the poem is deliberately a commentary on Lowell's own autobiographical situation. But this is not available to the reader. Penelope Laurens usefully dissects the way in which Bishop uses this symbolism (and the reader's understanding of it) to maintain a kind of fundamental "reticence" in expression. Laurens writes of the conclusion to "The Armadillo" that "The whole quatrain, with its exclamations and enjambed lines, leads upward in intensity to the expression of helplessness in the face of such terror. But because this intensity has been preceded by so much reticence, the emotion here seems earned. There is no sense of false moralizing about this poem; in fact, no sense of moralizing at all, although the moral dimension of the poem is inescapably present" (Laurens 111). But Bishop is also keen to acknowledge that her picture here is aestheticized beyond recognition: It is "too pretty" and the way in which resembles the actual fury of aerial bombardment is deliberately abstract. The reader is invited to realize the meaning in an abstract way.

It is fascinating, then, to see that the introduction of Lowell's autobiographical material is what constitutes the bulk of "Skunk Hour," Lowell's response (of sorts) to "The Armadillo" dedicated to Bishop. Sandra Gilbert notes that it is not merely dedicated to her, but it also may include a pun on her name: "is it possible that 'Nautilus Island's hermit / heiress' (whose 'son's a bishop') may subtextually -- and no doubt quite unconsciously -- allude to Marianne Moore, the "hermit heiress" of American poetry whose "The Paper Nautilus" was an important precursor poem about female power and whose poetic "son" was the very Elizabeth Bishop to whom "Skunk Hour" is dedicated?." (Gilbert 77). In other words, Gilbert thinks Lowell is anxious about female writers "subtextually" and "unconsciously," and notes that Lowell's own recurrent mental instability seems to have frequently involved manic declarations of love or proposals of marriage to Bishop. A letter from 1957, at the time of the composition of "Skunk Hour," written by Lowell to Bishop confirms these facts: "All that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota [Bishop's female Brazilian lover]. But at the time everything, I guess (I don't want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept." (Words in Air, 225). In other words, Lowell's acceptance of Bishop's lesbianism had occurred not long before "Skunk Hour" was written, although Gilbert does not specifically posit lesbianism as the force animating the "unruly female figures" of the poem. But of course the "unruly female figure" that provides the central symbol for Lowell's poem is the mother skunk herself depicted at the conclusion: the skunk shrinks Lowell's most grandiose pretentions, in a way that "The Armadillo" may have inflated them.

Yet this already raises questions about the "confessional" procedure of Lowell's new style in 1959. Lowell would continue using autobiographical material in his verse, but by 1972 this became problematic when he separated from, and divorced, his then-wife (the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick) and then wrote a volume of poetry (The Dolphin) making liberal use of her letters to him, without getting permission, and frequently altering the text of what she said. Lowell would ask Bishop for her assessment of The Dolphin and for her it became a serious moral issue, in which she delicately tried to state that she thought Lowell was wrong:

One can use one's life as material -- one does, anyway -- but these letters -- aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission -- IF you hadn't changed them…etc. But art just isn't worth that much….I feel fairly sure that what I'm saying (so badly) won't influence you very much; you'll feel sad that I feel this way, but go on with your work & publication just the same. I also think that the thing could be done, somehow…But the letters, as you have used them, present fearful problems: what's true, what isn't; how one can bear to witness such suffering and yet not know how much of it one needn't suffer with, how much has been "made up," and so on. I don't give a damn what someone like Mailer writes about his wives & marriages / I just hate the level we seem to live and think and feel on at present -- but I DO give a damn what you write! (Or Dickey or Mary….!) They don't count, in the long run. This counts and I can't bear to have anything you write tell -- perhaps -- what we're really like in 1972…perhaps it's as simple as that. But are we? (Words in Air 708-9)

Lowell did not take the advice and published the poetry nevertheless. But it is clear that there was a disruption, for the following year Lowell writes to Bishop about a jacket-blurb she gave to a younger poet. The blurb included Bishop's reference to "the tedium of irony, confession, and cuteness of contemporary verse," and Lowell writes back to justify the very term which was applied to him by Rosenthal a decade and a half earlier: