Where Have You Been? (10 page)

In 1984 there came
The Collected Prose
and
The Complete Poems
(now dated 1927–1979), with added juvenilia, more translations (more Paz), and a
klein aber fein
section of “new and uncollected poems”—all of four pieces, the
récolte
of 1978 and 1979. Since then, the posthumous publishing of Bishop has gone steroid, volumewise, but still more pagewise: a book of her watercolors, a book of uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments called
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box
, and then the letters, big books of letters, a selected letters, her correspondence with Lowell, her correspondence with her editors at
The New Yorker
, her correspondence with Marianne Moore (forthcoming), a Library of America single-volume edition of poems, stories, drafts, reviews,
and
fifty-three letters, again—it's the inescapable come-on—“many published for the first time.” There is a sort of sibylline deal with Bishop, in reverse. She comes to us originally with very little, eighty or a hundred poems, and we offer her the farm; then she comes again, with a little more, and then a little more, but we have already given her everything. She has always had everything we have to give. And we stand there with our pockets turned inside out and our shoulders at half-mast, and she keeps giving more.

The poems are one-offs and all sorts. They seem to have remarkably little in the way of preset or dependable qualities to fall back on—no constancy in the way of grammar or line length or rhythm or gesture or fable or machinery. They have tics aplenty—waywardnesses, one might call them, and Bishop liked to come across as wayward—but always different ones. They repeat words, they don't repeat words; they jump, they don't jump; they widen out, they don't widen out; there are runs of questions, there are no runs of questions; there is a section in italics, there is no section in italics. It's as though each poem has to be designed separately, from scratch; there is no blueprint, no assembly line. It's hard to argue that rhyme is always important to Bishop, or a lavish way with words, or an attractive quibblingness of tone, because straightaway one can turn up examples to the contrary and find her unrhymed, parsimonious, decisive, and just as good. She was raised on psalms, studied music, was fond of singing, translated sambas, wrote Dylanesque ballads about innocent miscreants (“The Burglar of Babylon” reads to me like something that might have appeared on
Blood on the Tracks
) and blues (“Don't you call me that word, honey, / don't you call me that word. / You know it ain't very kind & it's also undeserved”), and yet the poems of hers that I go back to are composed in a straggling, spifflicated, slightly backward, Victorian-hued, indifferently musical
talk
. Others again are stiff, almost puritanically joyless, in their acceptance of menial descriptive duties. The result is that line by line, she may be as anonymous, as manifold, or, better, as
mistakable
as a great poet gets. Other poets are predictably and more or less unvaryingly themselves, like cellophane packs of cigarettes from a vending machine: With Bishop you get an unpredictable kickshaw or notion in a plastic ball for your money—sometimes purposeless and perplexing, more often flat-out exhilarating, the toy of your dreams, “an acre of cold white spray […] Dancing happily by itself.” Bad Lowell is just bad Lowell, it has something parodic and clanking about it, the epigrams sail bafflingly past their targets; lesser Bishop may be disappointing, but it is oddly inconsequential, doesn't weaken the whole, isn't demoralizing, somehow doesn't affect the whole. You stand in front of the machine, the dispenser of miniature planets, and throw in more quarters; surely you will be luckier next time; you have the obscure but possibly correct feeling that it is your fault for not understanding the toy you have been given.

It is strange, leafing through these
Poems
, that while most of the pages seem to come up in color as expected, are vibrant, gaudy, imperishably familiar, full of lush deep-pile detail, others look utterly unfamiliar (really as though I had never seen them before)—“From the Country to the City,” “Little Exercise,” “Anaphora,” “Letter to N.Y.,” “Sunday 4
A.M.
,” “Night City.” A book of Bishop's is a funfair, each ride or booth is its own idiom, and still there are corners backstage where no one looks and there isn't anything much going on. She is one of those poets where you endlessly revisit the individual poem, where you gorge and glut yourself on a few individual poems—in my case, “Large Bad Picture,” “Florida,” “Roosters,” “Seascape,” “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” “The Bight,” “Cape Breton,” “Filling Station,” “Sandpiper,” “Crusoe in England,” “Poem,” “The End of March,” “Santarem,” “North Haven,” and as many more—without getting any closer to an encapsulation of the poet, or perhaps—because of the way the poems abide and deflect our questioning—without even having to reach for the poet at all.

Bishop is—this isn't the same, but it may be related—a poet of “eye” and not “I,” or even of “eye and tears” and not “I,” and also of “we” and not “I.” Both the “eye” and the “we” are ways of not saying “I,” of getting around it or playing it down. (It's not that Bishop never says “I,” but she seems almost to ration it, in a militant modesty, to no more than its statistically probable occurrence among the other pronouns.) She makes that very change, movingly, in the fragment “A Short, Slow Life”:

We lived in a pocket of Time.

It was close, it was warm.

Along the dark seam of the river

the houses, the barns, the two churches,

hid like white crumbs

in a fluff of gray willows & elms,

till Time made one of his gestures;

his nails scratched the shingled roof.

Roughly his hand reached in,

and tumbled us out.

Originally, that read “I lived in a pocket of Time” (and also “and tumbled me out”)—a little nightmare of scale and vulnerability and the end of coziness, alongside the pocket plays on “close” and “seam” and “fluff.” But no, that wouldn't do, too much pathos, too much drama of self, too much contemplation of the ungainly blunt fingers (what is their rude gesture?), and so “I” is scratched out and becomes “we,” and the poem loses its identity and its urgency (perhaps neither of them especially Bishop-like qualities anyway), and the Robert Louis Stevenson or Hans Christian Andersen idea, now gone mousy and a little folksy, fails to survive.

A Bishop poem (its watchword, “Watch it closely”) goes on looking long after one thinks it should have looked away—from having seen enough, from having got or given the message, from irritation or boredom or pain. It is a type of looking, in part a quantity of looking, that sees—literally—sideshows where it looks, that specializes in distracting the reader (what is the main item here?), that disregards the conventional cut-to-the-chase grammar of looking that winnows as it sees, that is unafraid of outlandish qualifiers and similes, that continually proposes and interposes objects or scenes of probable symbolic worth (but are they?). The old man in “At the Fishhouses” sits there, “sequins on his vest and on his thumb. / He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, / the blade of which is almost worn away.” If he was in a nineteenth-century painting, he would surely have had some splendid allegorical or mythological label, but here he's just a quiet and slightly sad man (the phrases seem to proceed, too, in short hacking motions), unheroic, but also (given that he is a destroyer of beauty) unvillainous. In “Cape Breton,” “A small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes, / packed with people, even to its step.” Like a sort of crowded pogo stick. Things in Bishop are not groomed and grooved and normed, but anarchically themselves. Her shoes clack in different keys. The noticing itself confers value, and is its own reward. It is worth paying attention; you will not be belabored. In “Under the Window: Ouro Preto”:

A big new truck, Mercedes-Benz, arrives

to overawe them all. The body's painted

with throbbing rosebuds and the bumper says

HERE AM I FOR WHOM YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING.

The driver and assistant driver wash

their faces, necks, and chests. They wash their feet,

their shoes, and put them back together again.

The awe—technology overlaid with romance overlaid with religion—disappears the moment the clapped-out huaraches make their entrance. These are just men, men in magnificent machines. Plenty of poets would have given you the Mercedes, and most the ill-translated and vainglorious annunciation (what's not to like about found poetry?); but few the rosebuds (and another truck is described as having “a syphilitic nose,” though Bishop doesn't work in that designing or conniving way), and probably none the shoes. (As often in Bishop, there's a persistent, slightly mocking
tendresse
toward men.) There is a motivelessness, a plenitude, a willingness to sweep and pan as well as seize and resolve, both a petillance and a panorama, a comprehensive refusal of hierarchy and abstraction. It's a fabulous orchestra—and no conductor. The ground note is often humorous—the frantic little bus, bounding over the landscape—but never abjectly depends on being so. A passive, or latent humor.

It is not that Bishop's life was short of disturbance, or even tragedy. Quite the contrary: her father died before she was one; her mother lost her mind and was committed, leaving her to be raised by grandparents and aunts; there were accidents and suicides, ill health and alcoholism, breakups and breakdowns—all those things that were fuel and grist for her generation of American poets, and one wouldn't know it. “Although I think I have a prize ‘unhappy childhood,' almost good enough for the text-books—please don't think I dote on it,” she wrote to an early biographer; the “I think” there is already heroic. To use a somewhat banal but in its empirical way unusually dependable measure, she probably suffered as many broken bones in her life as John Berryman, but unlike his (the admittedly charming “An orange moon”), hers didn't make it into her writing. The little girl narrator of “In the Village”—a story that reflects the last crack-up and committal of Bishop's mother—is, in her dreamy, only-child way, endlessly plucky and resolute. She both knows and doesn't know what is going on. The poems end either with a slightly unlikely exhortation—“Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!” (“Pink Dog”), “Somebody loves us all” (“Filling Station”), “from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, / please come flying” (“Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore”) or with reserve and ambivalence—“faithful as enemy, or friend” (“Roosters”), “‘half is enough'” (“The Gentleman of Shalott”), “again I promise to try” (“Manuelzinho”). The stereotypical form of words is “awful but cheerful” (“The Bight”).

It is in rare, late poems that Bishop permits herself not a long look as much as a brief glance at the worst: “(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift)” (“Five Flights Up”) or in “One Art” (a poem so rigid with the hieroglyphs of determination and so stifled in its compressed clamor I must admit I've never cared for it): “It's evident / the art of losing's not too hard to master / though it may look like (
Write
it!) like disaster.” Whether it was bravery, discretion, stoicism, writerly morality (a refusal to pass off despondency on the reader), or a life aesthetic of no fuss, Bishop was reluctant to make herself the subject, much less the object, of her poems. Either she clapped the telescope to her blind eye—a blind I, that would be—or else she swung the thing round and minimized the hurt in that oddly inclusive and luminous context produced by looking through a telescope the wrong way. The ending of a story called “Mercedes Hospital” makes the point: “The Mercedes Hospital seems so remote and far away now, like the bed of a dried-up lake. Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the salty glitter at its bottom, a slight mica-like residuum, the faintest trace of joyousness.”

The decades have worn against the writers of disaster. They set, as one might put it in the contemporary British idiom, a rubbish example. “I am tired,” Lowell wrote in
For the Union Dead
, “Everyone's tired of my turmoil.” (That was in 1964; most of his moiling was still ahead of him.) Fifty years later, poetry is a card-carrying career; we are all, in Berryman's sardonic words, “Henry House,” all “the steadiest man on the block,” and the stronger the reaction against the so-called confessional poets, the more prominence accrued to Bishop's self-exemption, the more stark and heroic and solitary her small output, her refusal to (Berryman again) “get down in the arena,” the more remarkable her finicky pursuit of accuracy, beauty, detail. She seems to be continually revising for a closer approach to the truth—“not a thought, but a mind thinking,” as Bishop describes the characteristic posture of a poet perhaps unexpectedly dear to her, G. M. Hopkins—but even then it's not possible to say whether it's as a scientist twiddling a microscope, or a slightly tongue-tied trainee delivering a report to a roomful of middle managers. More and more, Bishop seems like a humble and prudent saint among self-destructive and swaggering deviltons. I was haunted, for instance, while writing this, by the notion that I had come across the plural form of the word “linoleum” somewhere, and I hadn't been reading much of anything but Bishop. Sure enough, there it was—or there they were—a couple of days later, in “A Summer's Dream”: “the floors glittered with / assorted linoleums.” Her grateful and somehow practical vocabulary—like a milliner's or a cabinetmaker's or a costume jeweler's—full of exquisite and
real
color distinctions (a palette like Vuillard's: “the smallest moths, like Chinese fans, / flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt / over pale yellow, orange, or gray”), and justified flights of fancy (“impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains”) seems increasingly immune to the ravages of time and literary inflation. There wasn't a knack, and so it couldn't be learned, you thought; whereas just possibly something like Lowell's “a red fox stain covers Blue Hill” could. One is at an extreme end of loose-mindedness—almost
Illustrious Corpses
looseness—the other is done by a sort of eye-popping exertion of will and muscle. One is contrived and synthetic—you can imagine Lowell muttering, “I want to get some color clash going, and the whole thing is to sound doomy and monosyllabic and Gothic, and I need something to deepen the color and keep everything from just sounding superficial—I know, ‘fox'”—the other is beyond contrivance. Maybe there is something in those bell-curved Brazilian mountains that echoes the outline of Eeyore, but other than that I have no idea where “self-pitying” might come from. But it's absolutely right, the inturned curl, the slump, the soft steepness of it.