This review appears in the July/Aug 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review
Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character. Kay Redfield Jamison. Knopf, 2017. 532 pp. $29.95.
Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. Megan Marshall. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. 365 pp. $30.00.
On Elizabeth Bishop. Colm Tóibín. Princeton University Press, 2015. 210 pp. $19.95.
In 1965, shortly after the publication of Robert Lowell’s fifth collection of verse, For the Union Dead, the British critic Irvin Ehrenpreis confidently proclaimed that the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century would be christened the “Age of Lowell.” You have to enjoy quite a reputation if you’re going to have an age named after you: it makes you sound like a geological era as much as a literary figure. But Ehrenpreis was echoing the critical consensus of his day, at least that of the dominant literary circles. And there seemed to be abundant evidence to bolster Eherpreis’s claim: the dense, stentorian music and theological struggle of Lowell’s second collection, 1946’s Lord Weary’s Castle, had won him the Pulitzer Prize at the age of thirty, and his fourth collection, 1959’s Life Studies, with its direct and abject treatments of formerly taboo subjects such as dysfunctional family histories, marital strife, mental illness, and psych ward stays (Lowell was afflicted with bipolar disorder during a time when the condition was little understood), can be said to have radically altered the course of American poetry, spawning a movement toward a straightforward and militantly autobiographical poetry that still remains a signature element of our period style, practiced even among poets who may well never have read Robert Lowell. Lowell’s apotheosis was also due in part to his considerable skills at self-promotion at a time when there was still a significant enough regard for poetry to make certain poets actual public figures. In 1965, Frost and Eliot had recently died—Lowell seemed first in line to take their places. Lowell had a spread in Life magazine and appeared on the cover of Time; Lowell told off Lyndon Johnson when he escalated his bombing campaign of North Vietnam, and the poet possessed sufficient cache to cause Johnson’s press secretary to issue a White House response—in the process attributing to Lowell some lines from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Lowell was subsequently instrumental in the antiwar movement and was at the height of his literary fame in 1973 when he simultaneously issued three collections of his loosely metered unrhymed sonnets.
And this was the event that began Lowell’s slide down the mountainside of Parnassus. One of the volumes, The Dolphin, chronicled the end of his second marriage (to the novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick) and the start of what would be his disastrous third marriage to the British journalist and short story writer, Lady Caroline Blackwood. By this point readers expected unabashed frankness from Lowell, but the book quickly came to be seen as self-justification rather than self-disclosure, largely because Lowell larded its poems with passages of the anguished letters Hardwick wrote to him during the period when their marriage collapsed. Worse still, Lowell saw fit to modify and distort the letters when he felt that his phrasing or meter called for it. Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell’s most stalwart correspondent, was not the only one of his circle who counseled him not to print the book, famously telling him that “art just isn’t worth it.” And Lowell’s one-time friend Adrienne Rich excoriated the volume in American Poetry Review, labeling it “bullshit eloquence.” In eight short years Lowell had gone from being the defining poet of his age to being branded a “sexist elitist bullshit artist.” And each of these extremes has a certain validity. Suffice to say that readers and critics have been hotly debating Lowell’s stature for almost fifty years. And if Lowell’s reputation has recovered to some degree from a kind of nadir in the 1980s and ’90s, his status as major major poet still seems a bit tarnished.
Of course, as Lowell’s reputation faltered, that of his unlikely but devoted friend Elizabeth Bishop has grown exponentially. The critical studies and articles keep piling up (some with decidedly oddball titles such as “‘O Canada!’: The Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop” and “Awe, Wonder, and Wit: Elizabeth Bishop and the Modernization of Calvinist Mood”); there’s an oral history of Bishop, a snazzy Library of America volume of her work, even a passably good bio-pic about the poet titled Life and the Memory of It. Moreover, the “contemporary” volume of the most recent edition of the two-volume Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, the industry standard for undergraduate poetry anthologies, begins with selections by the improbable pairing of Charles Olson (b. 1910)—part Poundian and part “Incredible Hulk”—and the decidedly un-Poundian and retiring Bishop (b.1911), the implicit message being that all contemporary poetry derives from one poet or the other. As Bishop’s most recent biographer Megan Marshall notes, Google “Elizabeth Bishop” and you get over twenty-five million results. Bishop is that avis raris among the last century’s poets, both a critical darling and a figure who actually possesses a readership beyond that of the academy. The retiring and preternaturally shy Bishop would surely have cringed had she been able to know about her current fame. This is not surprising—outsiderhood provided her with her most abiding themes and subjects. Whereas Lowell sought overtly to be, as one critic put it, “the representative man of his time,” Bishop’s poems thrive on skewed perspective, scrupulous observation, and sudden insights that derive from a mania for self-forgetfulness as much as from authorial self-regard. And yet, neither poet would have achieved whatever we might old-fashionedly call greatness had it not been for the other’s example. Bishop’s “The Armadillo” provides the form and much of the imagery of “Skunk Hour,” one of Lowell’s most characteristic poems. And Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” her painstaking re-creation of a child’s introduction to the woes of the adult world, was written in no small measure thanks to the similarly autobiographical recollections that Lowell offers in Life Studies. We know something about the intricacies of the ways that the two poets influenced one another through Words in Air, a collection of letters the pair exchanged over four decades, many written during Bishop’s long residence in Brazil and one of the most engaging literary correspondences in the language.
But here’s something odd. Despite the vast amount of critical attention that has been heaped on Bishop and Lowell, neither poet has been particularly well-served by biographers. Only two biographies of Lowell exist, and both are more than a little deficient. Ian Hamilton’s Robert Lowell: A Biography is afflicted with the sort of snooty condescension and prurience that seems inevitably to result when a British writer gets an American poet in his or her gunsights. The exhaustingly prolific Paul Mariani—who pens biographies of poets with a graphomaniacal zeal—sets out to correct these indelicacies in his Robert Lowell: Lost Puritan, but the result is somewhat awkward hagiography. As for Bishop, Brett C. Millier’s dutiful but dull Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It was for almost twenty-five years the sole, full-length biography of the poet. At the same time, both poets—but especially Lowell—have been subjected to treatments that can be said to fall into neither the category of biography nor of criticism: they can best be described as case studies authored by people lacking the requisite credentials and fall somewhere between armchair psychoanalysis and National Enquirer–style salaciousness. The titles of these volumes say it all: there’s Sarah Payne Stuart’s My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell; and two volumes by Jeffrey Meyers, the ominously titled Manic Power: Robert Lowell and his Circle and Robert Lowell in Love. Meyers, like Mariani, is a very prolific biographer but not an especially subtle thinker. Manic Power examines what Meyers appallingly calls the “nourishing effect” of mental illness on the writing of Lowell and his fellow middle-generation poets, thereby reducing their anguish to a kind of problem of poetic technique.
Into this strange state of affairs come three new volumes. Kay Redfield Jamison’s book on Lowell is yet another case study, but a brilliant one. Megan Marshall’s Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast is the first full-length biography of Bishop since Millier’s book, but the book is decidedly—and uniquely—flawed. And finally, there’s On Elizabeth Bishop by the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, an eccentric but always judicious study, one of the best books yet written on the poet.
I have to admit to opening Jamison’s 527-page tome with some misgiving. Jamison is not a scholar, but a psychiatrist, and her previous foray into something like literary criticism was a similarly weighty endeavor titled Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, an erudite but cluttered book, filled with lots of graphs and charts and capsule diagnoses of a whole pantheon of artists, especially poets, ranging from Mayakovsky to Lord Byron. Jamison’s intentions for the book are stated grandly—and verbosely:
The main purpose of this book is to make a literary, biographical, and scientific argument for a compelling association, not to say actual overlap, between two temperaments—the artistic and the manic-depressive, and their relationship to the rhythms and cycles, or temperament, of the natural world. The emphasis will be on understanding the relationship between moods and imagination, the nature of moods . . . and the importance of moods in igniting thought, changing perceptions, creating chaos, forcing order upon that chaos, and enabling transformation.
The problem with this thesis as it pertains to Touched with Fire is that Jamison then leads her reader through a woozy tour of so many mentally afflicted artists’ lives that the book favors anecdote over analysis, the charts and graphs notwithstanding. But when her objectives are applied to the work of a single individual—one whom Jamison both admires as an artist and understands with exceptional acuity as a clinician—the result is both majestic and heartbreaking. Jamison has written not so much a full-length biography of Lowell as she has a biography of his illness, one so debilitating and mysterious that it takes Jamison five hundred pages to tell its story.
And she tells it, in part thanks to information no other writers on Lowell has had access to or would likely have made good use of were they to have possessed it: Lowell’s executors gave her permission to “request and review” all of Lowell’s medical and psychiatric records. Jamison examined material going back as far as a psychological evaluation Lowell underwent at the age of fifteen, and there certainly is a wealth of material to inspect—Lowell was, after all, hospitalized sixteen times as a consequence of his mental breakdowns and surely endured additional manic episodes that did not result in hospitalization. The treatments he was subjected to during the heyday of Freudianism seem scarcely more medically beneficial than leeches or trepanning: lots of electroshock, antediluvian psychotropic drugs such as lithium and chlorpromazine, “relaxing baths,” and talk therapy with a small army of psychiatrists. And, like many sufferers of bipolar disorder, Lowell also did his share of dubious self-medication, usually in the form of prodigious quantities of alcohol. Is any writer better (or more sadly) suited to illustrate Jamison’s notion of the “compelling association” between artistic temperament and manic depression? But Jamison must also thread a needle here—she is keen to avoid what she calls “a naïve romanticization of mental illness and a clichéd caricature of the tormented artists.” But the “compelling association” she insists upon seems to be borne out by recent brain research, leading Jamison to assert that “accumulating evidence for a connection between creativity and mood disorders, especially with manic-depressive (bipolar) illness is proving even stronger than previously thought. And Robert Lowell was right: poets are uniquely marked and fretted.”
The singular achievement of Jamison’s study, however, is not so much to show how poets are uniquely afflicted by this particular mental illness as to show how it uniquely marked and fretted the writing process of Robert Lowell. Make no mistake about it: Lowell was driven by a sometimes-hubristic—and perhaps somewhat quaint—desire to be a Great Poet, a peer of the most formidable writers of the canon, and the writer who best represented the particular anxieties and weltschmerz of his time—to make the latter twentieth century the “Age of Lowell” was exactly what he desired. And he possessed all the goods to achieve this goal: an infallible ear, a knowledge of the tradition that also begat a desire to transgress its pieties, an uncanny sense of the interstices between personal and public history, and above all—and this final point is surely linked to the helpless alteration between states of mania and despair that characterized his mental condition—a stance toward experience that seemed to demand imperiousness at one moment, vulnerability and abjection the next. He sought to be both Virgil and Dante: at once an imperturbable tour guide to our age of horrors, and a pensive and troubled spiritual seeker. It’s a particular quality of tonal slipperiness that makes Lowell’s greatest poems so enthralling: just when we seem to be tiring of his rhetorical and imagistic bombast, he suddenly offers statements of disarming candor. Consider two lines from one of his many poems about writing and self-doubt, the “Epilogue” to his final collection, Day by Day. The Shakespearean sonorities of “All’s misalliance” are followed immediately by the plaintive vernacular of “But why not say what happened?” Jamison surely recognizes this quintessential element of Lowell’s manner, and she is able to persuasively (but never reductively) link it to his mental condition.
Jamison is, of course, right to assert that Lowell wrote poetry in no small measure “to keep his demons at bay,” but the particular pathos of her book is due to its ability to sketch out just how Herculean that struggle could be for the writer. Lowell in his manic states could produce prodigiously, but the writing tended to be undisciplined and unsettling. You can see this in certain of his letters; for example, a rambling (and supposedly comic) epistle to Bishop about a day spent with the now-forgotten poet Richard Eberhart aboard his yacht. It begins in farce but soon devolves into manic incoherence and breathless run-ons that sound a lot like speed-freak argot. You can also see it in the initial version of one of Lowell’s greatest poems, “Waking in the Blue,” which Hamilton discusses in some detail. Written during one of his stays at McLean, the upscale mental hospital outside of Boston where Lowell was a regular patient, the poem’s first draft is a kind of mash note to Ann Adden, one of the women Lowell so frequently developed crushes on during his manic phases. Many of the lines are howlers—“Your salmon lioness face is dawn,” “Ann, what use is my ability / for shooting the bull / far from your Valkyrie body. . . . ” But this singularly unpromising draft also contains snippets of the poem’s final version, with its tragi-comic portraits of Lowell’s fellow Boston Brahmin patients, each a “figure of bravado who ossified young”—this characterization remains, almost unchanged, in the poem’s published version. Lowell’s writing during mania was usually followed by periods of debilitating depression and attendant writer’s block. But the writing always came back, characterized not by mania but a chastened self-awareness and by Lowell’s habit of obsessive revision, which he regarded as a kind of talisman against future breakdowns. As he wrote in one of his letters, “I think I am escaping my destiny by writing, much, much too much my habit and even now unescapable.”
An additional virtue of Jamison’s book is that she writes exceptionally well about Lowell’s poems. Her concluding chapter, an analysis of Lowell’s magnum opus, “For the Union Dead,” breaks no new ground, but it is a canny and sensitive reading, both of the poem’s prosody and its myriad historical references. And it is fitting that Jamison seeks to complete her study, not with the focus on Lowell’s brain disorder that so dominates the several hundred pages that come before it, but with a bracing appreciation of his most enduring poem. If you want to know something about Lowell’s life and character—beyond what’s there in the poems—you probably should start with his letters or the Mariani or Hamilton biographies, imperfect though these books may be. But after that you should immediately go to Jamison in order to be given a complete portrait. Lowell saw himself as a heroic poet; Jamison’s book, although it is a case study and not a hagiography, allows us to see why he was justified in his view.
I had high hopes for Megan Marshall’s Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. Marshall has some compelling credentials, having written two well-received biographical studies, most notably a Pulitzer–winning biography of Margaret Fuller. Marshall was also a student in one of the poetry workshops Bishop taught at Harvard in the 1970s. But from the very moment I opened the book, the red flags began to unfurl. Book-jacket descriptions are almost always puffery, but the material provided by Marshall’s publisher is especially cringe-worthy: Bishop has “never been seen so fully as a woman and an artist.” Marshall makes “incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop’s letters—to her psychiatrists and three of her lovers—to reveal a much darker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with the Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares.” It’s the breathless prose of a trailer for a movie you would not be remotely inclined to see, even after it has come out on Blu-ray. The book’s introduction creates a similar unease. We’re given a weirdly jaunty description of Harvard’s 1979 memorial service for Bishop, lively enough to lead us to believe that Marshall must have attended the event. But then, as the introduction moves toward its conclusion, she confesses that “I wasn’t there. . . . I had not been close to Elizabeth Bishop, indeed I had reason to think she might dislike me”: a cheap rhetorical trick in the form of a comma splice. It was only page three, and I, too, was beginning to feel as though I had my own reasons for disliking the author. Two pages later, Marshall reprints—as a kind of overture to the book—“A Miracle For Breakfast,” the poem alluded to in the volume’s title. As most poetry readers know, that poem is a sestina, and sestinas are notoriously difficult to write. Bishop authored two of them, one that is arguably among the finest examples of the form in English, another that is cumbersome and strained, one of the rare missteps in Bishop’s almost flawless oeuvre. That latter poem is “A Miracle For Breakfast.” By page six of the book, we have been set up to distrust the author, to question her discernment, and to expect any number of stylistic infelicities.
Sadly, these expectations are borne out in manifold ways. Yes, Marshall was privy to information that Millier, Bishop’s previous biographer, did not possess. But it doesn’t make for a more complete portrait of Bishop—Millier approached her subject with tact and restraint, whereas Marshall wants a good yarn at any cost. Overheated prose abounds. For example, here’s a passage set shortly after Bishop’s arrival in Brazil, about the budding romance between Bishop and her great love, Lota de Macedo Soares: “When did they first touch? Perhaps Lota stroked the suffering Elizabeth’s stiff wild hair with its ripples of gray.” Marshall is preternaturally fond of rhetorical questions of this sort. Later in the book, after Bishop’s trust fund is depleted and she must return to the US from Brazil for a teaching gig, Marshall offers this: “Where (and with whom) should she live? Would she remain ‘passive forever,’ the submissive wife in her marriage to Lota, or would she find some way to prove ‘I am not a helpless child anymore and can’t be treated like one?’ ” Despite these ham-fisted forays into stream of consciousness, Marshall really doesn’t get into Bishop’s head—or seem to get her on any but the most superficial of levels. She understands that the poet’s life was a painful admixture of tragedy and triumph. But by now anyone with a passing knowledge of Bishop’s life is already aware of the circumstances that prompted her to lament to Lowell that “when you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived”: the early death of her father, the mental breakdowns of her mother, the shuffling of the de facto orphan between the homes of various relatives in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, her sickliness, her alcoholism, her excruciating shyness and lack of self-confidence, and her love affairs, most of which turned out badly. We know the triumphs of the life as well, in the form of those hundred-odd poems of flawless observation and inquisitiveness; and we know, too, that the literary world recognized that achievement, not so much during her lifetime, but certainly in the years since. Try as I might, I could find nothing in Marshall’s book that adds to that knowledge, nor does she possess any particular skill at illuminating the poems.
Particularly egregious is Marshall’s decision to include those “brief passages of memoir,” focusing on the author’s undergrad days at Harvard. First of all, these passages are not so brief—they take up nearly forty pages of text, a fairly substantial portion of a book that is scarcely three hundred pages long (not counting the back matter), that purports to be a biography of Elizabeth Bishop. Yes, there are some reasonably interesting recollections of the Bishop poetry workshop in which Marshall was a student, but there are also hand-wringing descriptions of Marshall’s troubled relationship with her father, a couple of pages devoted to the niceties of her job at the Harvard admissions office, an account of a poetry reading by Robert Penn Warren, and too many oversharing paragraphs devoted to Marshall’s own attempts at writing poetry, in which she comes off as a moderately talented and moderately motivated undergraduate writer. I am not being unjust here, honest: the reason that Marshall concluded that Bishop didn’t like her is that Bishop gave her a B as her final grade, and much is made of this event. Mind you, getting a B from Elizabeth Bishop is perhaps a bit more stinging than getting one from your average professor. And your average professor would probably not have been as generous as Bishop was when the poet discovered that Marshall had tried to pull a fast one on her: she had submitted for workshop discussion a poem she had composed for a prosody course with the classicist Robert Fitzgerald, and Bishop had warned her students that they could not submit poems that had been written for other courses. To spend more space talking about your B in a poetry workshop than you do discussing key individual Bishop poems—“The Prodigal” gets one sentence; “Anaphora” is allotted three; “Filling Station” is granted four—is an abnegation of critical responsibility. Sure, “hybrid” texts are very much in fashion these days, but Marshall’s mixture of biography and memoir creates not a hybrid, but something akin to a jackolope. A friend of mine, who has himself authored several poets’ biographies, allowed that if you simply skip Marshall’s chapters of memoirs, you’ll encounter a reasonably effective portrait of Bishop. I wish I could feel so magnanimous.
Irish novelist Colm Tóibín’s exquisite short study of Bishop, composed for Princeton’s “Writers on Writers” series—which has included a book on Whitman by C. K. Williams, and an appraisal of Susan Sontag by Philip Lopate—is the perfect antidote for Marshall’s self-absorption. The editors of the Princeton series allow their authors a good deal of latitude in respect to their approaches, trusting that writers of substance will find engaging means to discuss other writers of substance, even if this means tangents and unconventional assessments. So perhaps it’s better to start by saying what Tóibín’s study is not—it is neither an introduction to Bishop’s work, nor a scholarly study, nor a biographical sketch. Perhaps it’s best to call it a haunted meditation: haunted because Tóibín, like many readers of Bishop, finds Bishop’s poetry, and the circumstances of her life that created it, mysterious and contradictory. He reminds us repeatedly that the poems are emotionally detached but agonizingly self-revelatory; description is their means toward revelation, but these revelations always eschew the stock epiphanies and shopworn sentiments that so sadly characterize the modern and postmodern lyric poem. They are made of tougher stuff: when the poems arrive at their moments of reckoning, the result is often a pained expression of solitude or an acute awareness of transience, a wounded understanding of the limits of human perception and aspiration, and a reluctantly expressed conviction that, as Rilke put it in the Dunio Elegies, “beauty is only the beginning of terror.” The limpidity of Bishop’s most famous poems—“One Art” and “At the Fishhouses” are apt examples—masks the terrible desolation at their core. But why—and this is a big why—do the poems, despite the austereness of their message, seem at the same time abidingly consoling? I have never been able to arrive at an answer to this question—and neither does Tóibín. But the genius of his book arises from his dogged search, carried out in a dizzying variety of ways, for provisional answers to the Bishop conundrum, and the very provisionality of Tóibín’s answers enhances their resonance. For example, one couldn’t ask for a better appraisal of the tension Bishop created between description and self-portraiture than this:
In Bishop’s work, much has been implied by what seems to be mere description. Description was a desperate way of avoiding self-description; looking at the world was a way of looking out from the self. The self in Bishop’s poems was too fragile to be violated by much mentioning. Slowly, the self then emerged with the same stark force that silence has in music. Bishop managed to unsettle the tone of a poem by watching a scene with a fierce precision, as though the scene or she herself would soon disappear; many of her best poems offered little real sense of the personal, nor any single meaning. The fact that the world was there was both enough and far too little for Bishop. Its history—or her own history, was beside the point.
After the stylistic effronteries of Marshall, the unobtrusive elegance of Tóibín’s prose is especially welcome: there’s the quiet insistence of the repetition of “self,” the deliciously quirky phrasing of “Bishop managed to unsettle the tone of the poem,” and “the self in Bishop’s poems was too fragile to be violated without much mentioning.” Craftsmanship of this sort helps to make Tóibín’s reading of individual poems—and of her essential prose memoir “In the Village”—especially gratifying and perceptive. His analysis of “The Moose,” for example, is an unassuming tour de force.
Tóibín is especially skillful at examining Bishop’s influences, something that goes almost unexplored in Marshall’s book. He does a solid job of explaining her debt to the writers whom Bishop frequently cited as her masters—Herbert, Hopkins, and Moore. He’s on shakier ground when he points out affinities between Bishop and figures such as Philip Larkin and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and he spends a good many pages drawing a parallel between Bishop and Thom Gunn that doesn’t quite jibe. Gunn may have shared Bishop’s restraint as a stylist, but whereas Bishop is big-hearted and inquisitive in her approach, Gunn, for the most part, just comes off as rigid—so deterministic as to seem, in certain poems, a bit reptilian. But, again, Tóibín’s meticulous prose is a joy to read, even when he’s making a somewhat dubious case.
The very best thing in Tóibín’s book is its final section, a stunning little personal essay titled “North Atlantic Light.” It’s not about literary influence as much as about how a singular artistic work can be so transformative as to change one’s consciousness, alter indelibly one’s way of being in the world. Tóibín writes it during a stay in a seaside house at Ballyconniger in Ireland’s County Wexford, a vacation locale favored by his own parents during their courtship and the site of family vacations during his childhood. He evokes this landscape in a distinctly Bishopian (and Proustian) manner—it is at once deeply familiar and utterly strange: “While we lived our ordinary lives in the town, it is here, in this literal small backwater, where I feel closest to something I know, or wish to see again, write about again.” The familiarity of the “marly sand of the cliffs” and the waves “at the edge of the shoreline that make a hollow rattling sound as they hit against one another when a wave comes in” console the writer in and of themselves, but they also speak to a deeper stance toward recollection, a Wordsworthian sense of memory alive within the present. But Tóibín also adamantly insists that if he is to evoke the place accurately, he must abjure easy nostalgia: “There has been coastal erosion, so that the hill where my parents were photographed and which used to have a lookout on top is completely gone”; “my father’s first cousin Dick Whelan’s house, which was close to the cliff, has fallen into the strand, or most of it has.” And the house his family rented each summer? “Of the dozen or so people who came to that house, only three of us are alive.” At this point Tóibín shifts to an appreciation of a local artist, Tony O’Malley, who specialized in Ballyconniger seascapes. Tóibín then focuses on a particular O’Malley painting that he encounters at an auction: “It is small, eight inches by ten. It is a scene that is not there anymore. It is the soft marl of a cliff that was below Keatings’s house gradually going down to be eaten away, washed away, to become nothing. . . . Soon it will be remembered by no one, and no one will recognize the scene in this painting.”
If you know Bishop’s poems, you know at this point where Tóibín is taking us: he is reimagining—or perhaps it is better to say reliving—the narrative of what I would submit is Bishop’s finest individual lyric, the humbly titled “Poem,” a meditation on an unequivocally mediocre painting of a Nova Scotian landscape, done by an uncle deceased before the poet was born. Yet the painting, with its “gabled wooden houses,” its “tiny cows, two brushstrokes each,” and its “wild iris, white and yellow / fresh squiggled from the tube,” shocks the poet into what is perhaps Bishop’s most ardent moment of epiphany: “Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!”
It is precisely the sort of convergence between two sensibilities, two selves, which Tóibín experiences as he gazes on the O’Malley painting—a moment of excruciating intimacy, one that might endure in art but cannot endure in quotidian existence. But Tóibín says this all better than I can—and almost as well as Bishop herself. Here is the passage which concludes his study.
O’Malley’s seascape was
. . . part of what was normal, what was there. But I remember it. I believed perhaps that it would always be there. I must have taken it in on the same summer days, or days like them, days a few days after the painting was done. In any case, we both were there. “Our visions coincided,” as Elizabeth Bishop wrote in “Poem,” on seeing a painting of a childhood scene, and then she tempered that with “ ‘visions’ is too serious a word—our looks, two looks: / art ‘copying from life’ and life itself, / life and the memory of it so compressed / they’ve turned into each other.” This feeling that we know somewhere, or that we know it, and it is “live” and “touching in detail,” is, as Bishop says, “the little that we get for free, / the little of our earthly trust. Not much.”
Not much perhaps, but enough to be going on with. Or perhaps not.
