Ficção nacional que cruza fronteiras

 

 Ficção nacional que cruza fronteiras

Pesquisadores de diversos países apontam caminhos, desde dicionários bilíngües até programas de incentivo mais agressivos

Ubiratan Brasil

 

 

Enquanto os Estados Unidos assumem o primeiro posto entre os países que mais estudam a literatura brasileira, a Alemanha reserva meros 7% de seu imenso mercado editorial para a tradução de livros de escritores do Brasil. As constatações, entre outras também surpreendentes, fazem parte das primeiras conclusões obtidas pelo projeto Conexões, mapeamento internacional da literatura brasileira promovido pelo Itaú Cultural. Nos últimos meses, pesquisadores, tradutores e estudiosos de diversos países foram consultados sobre a percepção e o conhecimento da escrita literária nacional. "Já recebemos 72 questionários e, até dezembro, aguardamos mais 20", comenta Claudiney José Ferreira, gerente do Núcleo de Diálogos do Itaú Cultural.

Trata-se de um trabalho inédito, que busca clarear a real importância que a literatura brasileira ocupa no exterior. As primeiras informações serão divulgadas em um simpósio na Universidade de Salamanca, na Espanha, que acontece no dia 21. E, no ano que vem, provavelmente em agosto, acontece um congresso internacional em Chicago, nos Estados Unidos, a fim de apresentar o projeto para a comunidade acadêmica norte-americana. "E temos planos ainda para realizar o mesmo em Londres e em um país da América Latina", diz Ferreira.

As primeiras conclusões são animadoras. Segundo apontam os questionários, a quantidade de traduções vem aumentando, especialmente de autores contemporâneos e não apenas de clássicos ou best sellers, como Paulo Coelho. "O conhecimento é muito mais amplo e inclui escritores que surgiram mais recentemente, como Milton Hatoum, João Gilberto Noll, Luiz Ruffato, além de nomes mais jovens como Adriana Lisboa, Bernardo de Carvalho."

Escritores tradicionais, é claro, continuam puxando a fila, garantindo a presença permanente da literatura brasileira nos estudos e pesquisas estrangeiros. Mas, entre nomes esperados (como Jorge Amado, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Clarice Lispector, Rubem Fonseca), surgem outros que mesmo no Brasil já não têm a mesma repercussão. É o caso de José Mauro de Vasconcelos, autor de Meu Pé de Laranja Lima, clássico juvenil. "Ele é muito respeitado e traduzido especialmente no Leste Europeu, onde até é adotado em escolas", conta Ferreira, que ensaia algumas explicações. "Trata-se de uma visão nada exótica do Brasil."

O mapeamento permite também rascunhar motivos do sucesso planetário de Paulo Coelho entre os críticos estrangeiros, situação que não acontece no Brasil. "Para os resenhistas daqui, a obra dele resvala na auto-ajuda enquanto, na Europa, Coelho é considerado escritor de ficção."

Os problemas ocupam, no entanto, espaço essencial. O relativo interesse pela língua portuguesa no mundo é um dos principais entraves. Pesquisadores europeus e norte-americanos apontam o espanhol como língua latina de ponta, o que acaba ofuscando as demais. "O trabalho feito por institutos culturais como o Cervantes, é muito poderoso e faz com que o idioma espanhol ganhe um espaço precioso", comenta Ferreira. "A embaixada espanhola produz uma lista de livros novos publicados em seu país e envia às editoriais inglesas, além de divulgar em seu website", completa Margaret Jull Costa, que faz traduções para o inglês.

Claudiney Ferreira não confirma, mas há um outro entrave, provocado pelos portugueses. De acordo com alguns pesquisadores, que comentam informalmente, a divulgação maciça da literatura brasileira, reconhecidamente vibrante e conectada aos problemas atuais, poderia atropelar a portuguesa que, embora viva um momento de renovação, talvez tenha chances mais reduzidas em relação à da antiga colônia.

A tímida ação governamental também é lembrada pelos pesquisadores consultados. Todos são unânimes em apontar a necessidade de se implantar um plano que facilite a tradução de obras nacionais para diversas línguas. E a divulgação dos livros exige um projeto mais elaborado - para eles, o Brasil deveria considerar o Instituto do Livro e o Instituto Camões em Portugal como modelos a serem seguidos.

"Apenas alguns escritores brasileiros de destaque são traduzidos para o inglês, enquanto vários autores excelentes não têm nem chance de serem considerados", observa Alison Entrekin, responsável por versões em inglês. "As editoras investem no marketing de escritores cujos livros tiveram boas vendas no Brasil. A ironia é que alguns dos menos conhecidos têm muito mais a ver com o de língua inglesa do que aqueles que as editoras promovem."

Além do foco, as escassas ferramentas de trabalho são outra fonte de queixas. Os profissionais que trabalham com literatura brasileira no exterior são unânimes em elogiar dicionários como o Aurélio e o Houaiss, mas reclamam de não dispor de bons exemplares bilíngües. "Eles sentem falta, por exemplo, de um dicionário inglês-português do Brasil, capaz de dirimir dúvidas sobre a língua falada em nosso País e não em Portugal", observa Ferreira.

Fórmulas de sucesso são outro caminho a ser evitado. Pesquisadores e tradutores comentam que a literatura brasileira precisa manter sua autenticidade e jamais adotar esquemas que fazem sucesso lá fora. "Não adianta tentar copiar Borges nem Cem Anos de Solidão", acredita Regina Machado, que vive na França. "Receitas já provadas não voltam a atuar, mas talvez possam nos ajudar a estender à nossa vasta paisagem humana e literária o olhar que alguns escritores souberam lançar sobre sua própria realidade."

A grande diversidade lingüística, o uso incrível da coloquialidade, além de uma interessante e fluida liberdade de expressão são, no entender do tradutor Alex Levitin, as principais qualidades da escrita brasileira que a distingue das demais literaturas.

Virtudes também encontradas em outros meios de expressão, como o cinema, que conquista terreno com mais sucesso e velocidade que a literatura. Assim, a fama dos filmes brasileiros deveria ser utilizada como plataforma para espalhar a obra de autores nacionais, no entender do americano Ross G. Forman, que vive em Cingapura, onde divulga, com dificuldade, autores do Brasil.

Apesar de tantos empecilhos, os primeiros resultados do Conexões são animadores. "A presença da literatura brasileira no exterior é superior ao que usualmente imaginamos", comenta Ferreira. "E há um grande interesse pela escrita contemporânea - os clássicos decerto são estudados, mas os brasilianistas demonstram cada vez mais preocupação com o aqui e agora da literatura brasileira."

 

(Estado de SP -  03 nov 2008)

Works on Paper: Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

 

 

Works on Paper

The letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

by Dan Chiasson November 3, 2008

 

Through Lowell's dizzying psychological dramas and fits of despair, Bishop remained a steadfast but unsparing correspondent.

 

In 1947, Elizabeth Bishop published "At the Fishhouses," in this magazine. Among those who admired the poem was her new friend the poet Robert Lowell. "I liked your New Yorker fish poem," he wrote. "I am a fisherman myself, but all my fish become symbols, alas!" Bishop, who was staying at the time in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, had written to Lowell of the region's marvellous bird life, "auks and the only puffins left on the continent, or so they tell us . . . real ravens on the beach . . . enormous, with sort of rough black beards under their beaks." In response, Lowell lamented, "Puffins are in my book of New England birds, but I've never seen one." As for Nova Scotia, he recalled it as the site of a bad trout-fishing expedition with his grandfather, including a "horrible after sea-sick feeling" and a few "dismal low-tide gulls."

From the start, Lowell and Bishop were intent on being a mismatch. When Lowell invited Bishop to visit him in Washington, where he was serving as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a post that we now call "Poet Laureate"), she informed him that she would be travelling there with her pet canary. Staying at the home of Pauline Hemingway in Key West and deep in what she called her "female Hemingway" phase, Bishop wrote of catching amberjack and jewfish. Lowell, fresh from charming William Carlos Williams's ninety-one-year-old mother, responded that he had once "tried swimming" but "was nearly drowned and murdered by children with foot-flippers and helmets and a ferocious mother doing the crawl." The critic John Thompson recalls his friend Lowell lying in bed all day writing poems, surrounded by a "tumble-down brick wall" composed of "his Greek Homer, his Latin Vergil, his Chaucer, letters from Boston, cast-off socks, his Dante, his Milton." Bishop once interrupted a letter to witness the birth of a calf in a nearby field. These differences, sharpened for each other's amusement, made them ideal trading partners. Lowell, the literary fisherman, sent a copy of "The Compleat Angler" to Bishop in Key West, keeping the motif alive. When he absent-mindedly put away a lit cigarette in his pocket, nearly setting himself on fire, Bishop mailed him a "SAFE if not particularly esthetic ashtray."

They shared the tiny poetry orbit of stipends and seminars and itinerant jobs, but when it came to seeing each other they specialized in near-misses. Lowell's first-ever letter to Bishop rues the fact that he had already narrowly missed seeing her on three occasions. When Bishop was at Harvard to record her poems for the Woodberry Poetry Room, she listened to Lowell's recording of his poems, made there a year earlier. One season it was Lowell's turn in Washington, calling on Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital, and then it was Bishop's, bringing Pound a bottle of cologne. When Bishop wrote of blowing bubbles on the balcony outside her magnificent room at Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, Lowell wrote that he thought he had stayed in that room, too, and reminisced about games of croquet. "We seem attached to each other by some stiff piece of wire," he wrote, "so that each time one moves, the other moves in another direction." They spent their lives begging each other to visit, but when the opportunity presented itself they conspired with almost comic transparency in setting up obstacles.

Seeing each other more often would have given them less time to write, less to write about, and, since letters exist in reciprocal terms, less to read. As it is, "Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell," edited by Thomas Travisano, with Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $45), takes up more than nine hundred pages. Like Victorians hungry for the next installment of a serialized novel, the two looked to each other's letters for sustenance. "I've been reading Dickens, too," Bishop wrote, as though confirming the scope and flavor of the correspondence, the "abundance" and "playfulness" that she ascribed to Dickens. The letters abound in Dickensian caricature, mostly gentle and humane. "Several weird people have shown up here," Lowell wrote from Washington, including a Dr. Swigget with a terza-rima rendering of Dante and an aspiring writer named "Major Dyer, who takes Pound ice-cream, was a colleague of Patton's and teaches Margaret Truman fencing."

They were also adroit self-satirists. The poetry they perfected, so different in so many ways, shares a nearly absurdist attitude toward the self. Bishop, in "The Gentleman of Shalott," imagined herself as a man (she often chose male personae) standing with half his body in the mirror and half out. Lowell, in poem after poem, finds himself reflected in unlikely ways. A late poem called "Shaving" describes his face "aslant" like a "carpenter's problem," and in "Waking in the Blue" he sees himself "before the metal shaving mirrors" of the insane asylum:

After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey

The poem, written during one of Lowell's stays at McLean Hospital, outside Boston, takes a scrupulously external view: he's just another one of the Brahmin "old-timers" holding a "locked razor."

"It's funny at my age to have one's life so much in and on one's hands," Lowell wrote. Bishop responded by quoting her Maine hairdresser: "Kind of awful, ain't it, ploughing through life alone." They were introduced in 1947 at a dinner party thrown by Randall Jarrell in New York. Bishop recalled, "It was the first time I had ever talked to some one about how one writes poetry." She found that talking with Lowell, who struck her as "handsome in an old-fashioned poetic way," was "strangely easy, 'like exchanging recipes for a cake.' " It had been a strange, lonely interval for them both. Lowell was twenty-nine and coming out of his disastrous first marriage, to the novelist Jean Stafford. (Stafford had sued him, before they were married, after he permanently injured her face in a car crash. Things went downhill from there.) Bishop was turning thirty-six, and her relationship with Marjorie Stevens, from Key West, was coming to an end. Lowell's "Lord Weary's Castle" and Bishop's "North & South" had just been published to acclaim. (Lowell collected a Pulitzer Prize for his book; he was among the youngest poets ever to receive one. Bishop won the Pulitzer nine years later, for her second book.) Bishop was writing poems along with autobiographical stories and sketches, while Lowell was wringing out of his early style the long, hysterical poem "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," a daily task that he greeted with expanding dread.

Bad childhoods are a human misfortune, but for writers they are often a stroke of luck. Both Lowell and Bishop were aware that growing up lonely sponsored their imaginative lives. In the seventies, Lowell, in his great poem "Ulysses and Circe," chose a baffled and emasculated Ulysses for his self-portrait. A few years earlier, Bishop, in "Crusoe in England," had picked, for hers, a retired Robinson Crusoe nostalgic for his island days.

Both were ways of representing an essential strandedness that had its origins in childhood. Lowell was the unwanted only child of a belittling mother and a father who grew, in Lowell's eyes, "apathetic and soured." Bishop's father had died when she was eight months old. When she was five, her mother was placed permanently in a sanitarium. Bishop never saw her again, though her mother lived nearly twenty more years. Bishop was then subjected to several experiments in child rearing. She was happy in Nova Scotia with her mother's parents, but her father's parents, burghers in Worcester, Massachusetts, felt they could provide better for her. That arrangement soon failed, and she was sent to live with her aunt Maud, in Revere, Massachusetts. Maud nursed her back from the ailments she suffered in Worcester: asthma, bronchitis, eczema, symptoms of St. Vitus' dance, and allergies to practically everything in her grandparents' house. (Later, reading Proust, she discovered a voluble fellow asthma sufferer and decided wryly that she hadn't "capitalized" enough on her condition.) Aunt Maud had pet canaries and Italian neighbors with beautiful surnames that Bishop never forgot.

Poets live on two tracks: on one, life chugs along in the usual ways. On the other, art, which starts late but soon catches up, has its own landmarks and significant episodes. Interiority isn't mapped by biographical fact; that happens on the other track. And so "life" is an exceedingly difficult and unpromising subject for art. Bishop aimed for a dispassionate, even eerie objectivity, an effect that was incompatible with autobiographical writing. Lowell, the gifted parodist of persons and manners, found it comparatively easy to turn to his own person and manners, but in doing so he risked giving up the dazzling special effects of his early, Miltonic poems.

Compared with all the grand things that people have done with poems—justifying the ways of God to men, shoring fragments against their ruins, and so on—telling one's life story in more or less factual terms might seem to be a very modest goal. But Lowell was obsessed by the idea that this could be done without sacrificing poetry's ambition, its power and sweep. "Confessional" poetry—a brand inadvertently launched by Lowell's groundbreaking 1959 book, "Life Studies"—is in his practice really self-satire with the sadness left in. Bishop had a distaste for the "suffering business" of confessional poetry, but she loved "Life Studies," and thinking about why she loved it helped her define her own, very different method:

I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel that I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say—but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with his wife, and spent most of his time fishing . . . and was ignorant as sin. . . . Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American, etc., gives you, I think, the confidence you display about tackling any idea or theme, seriously, in both writing and conversation. In some ways you are the luckiest poet I know!

No poet wants to hear that he is lucky, and Lowell never responded to this rather damning praise. What makes him a great poet isn't confidence about his own centrality but his yearning, brilliantly expressed throughout his work, for rest, for peace, for an integrated life. "I am tired," he wrote. "Everyone's tired of my turmoil."

"Words in Air" may be the only book of its precise kind ever published: the lifelong correspondence between two artists of equal genius. Lowell and Bishop lived various, tumultuous lives, and yet sometimes it feels as if the outside world existed primarily to be fattened up for their letters. A new sight calls for a new sentence, a night out conjures a new paragraph, a new home calls for a new letter or series of letters capturing, by a kind of demented entomology, every last scurrying detail. They were both collectors by nature. At nineteen, Lowell, a Harvard freshman, wrote of his "violent passions" for collecting: "tools; names of birds; marbles; catching butterflies, snakes, turtles etc; buying books on Napoleon." From Europe, he writes to Bishop, "We went everywhere. . . . I can't resist putting down the names." A list of thirty place names, starting with Naples and ending with Eton, follows.

Bishop, too, connects description with irrational compulsion. "I find it hard to stop when I get to describing," she writes from Brazil, where she lived for more than a decade, and where her hostess, soon to be her girlfriend, Lota de Macedo Soares, is "building an ultra modern house":

The house is unfinished and we are using oil-lamps, no floors—just cement covered with dogs' footprints. The "family" has consisted of another American girl, also a N.Y. friend of mine, 2 Polish counts for a while, the architect over week-ends etc., all a strange tri- or quadri-lingual hodgepodge that I like very much. . . . I like to cook, etc., but I'm not used to being confronted with the raw materials, all un-shelled, unblanched, un-skinned, or un-dead. Well, I can cook goat now—with wine sauce.

The letter billows onward for pages, detail upon detail, before ending with the announcement "I have a TOUCAN— named Uncle Sam in a chauvinistic outburst." When Bishop runs out of words, she draws a picture. When the occasion demands it, she switches ribbons on her typewriter and prints in red.

The result is exhilarating, consistently so, for hundreds of pages at a time. But the torrential incisiveness can also be wearying. You'd like to spend a little more time with those dogs' footprints on the cement floor, but you can't get off the treadmill of associations, from the Polish counts to the architect, from the goat to the wine sauce. This isn't writing: it's out-writing, and the spectacle of two brilliant out-writers grinding each other down over thirty years is astounding. Just when you think someone will surrender, he or she doubles down, as when Lowell antes his trip to Swarthmore against Bishop's trip to the Amazon:

What tremendous descriptions in your letter! The sick man on the amazon, the monks and nuns and Lota, the sacred heart on your bosom. I have nothing to reply with except a prosaic trip to Swarthmore. I was visiting a minute, intelligent dry poet, Daniel Hoffman, midway in a book on vegetation and other myths in Melville, Hawthorne, James, Faulkner, etc. and the American humorists, and all the way through a dry intelligent, unreadable book of vegetation myths, poems in strange ballad meters and the alliterative stanza of Sir Gawain. Exquisite Shaker and European baroque and Swarthmore stone house; nervous, charming near-sighted wife, poetry-editor for the Ladies Home Journal (ten dollars a line). . . . After their huge cocktail party, I asked them who was interesting and they said, "We are."

Who needs the Amazon when you have Swarthmore? Hoffman has gone on to have a distinguished career as a poet, but it scarcely matters: Lowell's combustible triple adjectives (minute, intelligent, dry) are the road flares that mark Hoffman's limits. "I don't know why I've stuffed this all in," Lowell concludes, "except to plaintively suggest that even here one can see the world in a grain of sand."

It must have seemed unreal to them to see one another in person. Few photographs of them together exist; the most famous ones were taken in Rio de Janeiro. In one, they wade together on a beach; in the other, they eye each other abashedly. The correspondence seems to be a counter-life richer than any lived one: how could it be made to accommodate the stubborn impediments of actual life? When Lowell's mother makes a three-month visit to him and Elizabeth Hardwick, his second wife, in Europe, Lowell writes only after they've returned, as though newly consecrating the page: "Now it's over; we have emerged triumphantly" from three months of "behaving very badly, then being very self-sacrificing," all the while "fuming inside like the burning stuffings of an overstuffed Dutch chair." When his father dies, he accelerates rapidly past the news and talks about his travel plans. When Bishop writes back, she says nothing about his father's death. When Lowell's mother dies, in 1954, in Rapallo, Italy, Lowell arrives to collect her corpse and then, as he writes to Hardwick, spends the morning "weeping & weeping" in the room with it. When he returns to America, he has a manic attack, writes a poem in Pound's style about Hitler that he then sends to Pound, and reaffirms to Hardwick that he wants to marry his Italian mistress. Again waiting until he has recovered (even though he wrote many letters when he was ill), Lowell writes to Bishop in November of that year, "I have been sick again, and somehow even with you I shrink both from mentioning and not mentioning." He goes on:

These things come on with a gruesome, vulgar, blasting surge of "enthusiasm," one becomes a kind of man-aping balloon in a parade—then you subside and eat bitter coffee-grounds of dullness, guilt etc.

The metaphors capture the illness. The manic self is an inflated "manaping balloon in a parade"—oversized, grotesque, dangerous. "Man-aping" echoes the word "mania," while the flaccid self sits in recovery, eating morning-after "coffee-grounds" of guilt. But the successful transformation of illness into metaphor is itself a sign of recovery. Lowell's recovery letters are among the most brilliant letters ever written, for the simple reason that the writing of them operates against such tragic stakes.

By the mid-fifties, Lowell's manic attacks were causing boundless damage in his life and in his relationships. While teaching in Austria in 1952, he vanished for a day and was found wandering near the German border. After that, he had to be watched by American M.P.s. At the University of Cincinnati, where he had been invited to give a series of lectures, his mien at the lectern took on a menacing aspect; the English Department had to seat a human shield of large-bodied scholars in the front row for fear that he would physically attack his audience. Because he was brilliant and sui generis and not less so when he was ill, nobody was ever able to catch him in time. Mania sharpened his intellectual aim even as it blunted his censor. He left a trail of insulted hosts everywhere, and baffled girls who thought he really was going to marry them.

In 1957, Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares visited Lowell and Hardwick and their infant daughter, Harriet, in Maine. Lowell appears to have propositioned Bishop, suggesting that he visit her alone in Boston, New York, or Brazil. Bishop, in turn, told Hardwick. The letters that follow are grandiose on Lowell's end and strategic on Bishop's; the correspondence that had sustained so many remarkable exchanges now feels like a fraying rope over an abyss. Lowell, his mania still cresting, recasts the Maine misadventure as the unstoppering of a very old bottle. "There's one bit of the past that I would like to get off my chest," he writes:

Do you remember how at the end of that long swimming and sunning Stonington day . . . we went up to, I think, the relatively removed upper Gross house and had one of those real fried New England dinners, probably awful. And we were talking about this and that about ourselves . . . and you said rather humorously yet it was truly meant, "When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived." . . . I assumed that [it] would be a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. . . . The possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. . . . But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.

How should one take this letter? It is, of course, what one would say. Yet it is also beautifully and truthfully said, although, as he writes in a postscript, "too heatedly written with too many ands and so forth." Bishop responds with the name of a good analyst in Cambridge.

Reading this exchange is painful, but, oddly, it does not feel like eavesdropping. In a generally excellent introduction, Thomas Travisano, an English professor at Hartwick College, argues that Lowell's and Bishop's letters display "the apparent absence of this interest in posterity on the part of two poets famous for their obsession with craft." That's not so: even as fledglings, the two writers were the most posterity-obsessed literary creatures imaginable. No poet is obsessed with craft per se; craft is just a name for the mechanics of immortality. Travisano quotes the poet and critic Tom Paulin: "The merest suspicion that the writing is aiming beyond the addressee at posterity freezes a letter's immediacy and destroys its spirit." And yet what makes these letters so fascinating is their hawk's eye on immortality, even in the midst of lives lived fully, often sloppily. Writers like Lowell and Bishop are more human, sincere, candid—more genuine—the more ambitious they are.

The literary self-consciousness that Paulin and Travisano rule out is not just an aspect of these letters but their atmosphere and their deep subject. Lowell's "might have been" letter is, above all, a piece of writing—too heated, too many "and"s. At one point, he compares himself and Bishop to Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. During this period, Hardwick writes to Bishop with news of Lowell's hospitalization, comparing the whole episode to a Russian novel. Lowell recalls Bishop's prophecy that he would write her epitaph. When, late in his life, Lowell and Hardwick were estranged (Lowell had married Caroline Blackwood and had a child, Sheridan, with her), Lowell used some of Hardwick's letters in his book "The Dolphin." Bishop dissented in these remarkable terms:

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 keep remembering Hopkins' marvelous letter to Bridges about the idea of a "gentleman" being the highest thing ever conceived—higher than a "Christian" even, certainly than a poet. It is not being "gentle" to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way—it's cruel.

In a letter about the misuse of letters, Bishop asks Lowell to live up to a moral standard guaranteed by an aesthetic one: be a gentleman, like Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lowell's and Bishop's letters were themselves a long, collaborative work of art, as rich in their own way and by their own standard as the poems. But Bishop seems more concerned that Lowell had changed Hardwick's letters than that he had included them. These are the objections of an author, and one who exercised an enormous level of control over her material. That Hardwick was a fellow-writer only deepened the transgression. The idea that someone would change a letter, as Lowell did in transforming Hardwick's into poems: this was a supreme violation not only of life but of art, the art of the letter.

It was Bishop, in the end, who wrote Lowell's poetic epitaph, the beautiful elegy "North Haven," which she read on the phone to Frank Bidart soon after Lowell died, in 1977. Lowell had been a chronic, sometimes hectic reviser of his work, publishing multiple versions of many poems. This habit was anathema to Bishop, who took more than twenty-five years to write her poem "The Moose." The title of their collected correspondence is taken from Lowell's late poem about that painstaking practice:

Have you seen an inchworm crawl on a leaf,
cling to the very end, revolve in air,
feeling for something to reach to something?
      Do
you still hang your words in air, ten years
unfinished, glued to your notice board,
      with gaps
or empties for the unimaginable phrase—
unerring Muse who makes the casual
      perfect?

To "err" literally means, as Lowell knew, "to wander or stray"; Bishop, the great nomad, was "unerring" in her art, utterly on the right track and on that track alone. Lowell, the greatest poet ever to be descended from the high Wasp line, never too far from Boston and New York, should have been at home in the world; and yet he was restless, almost vertiginous in his sometimes self-destructive energies. Bishop equated that dangerous energy with his life. Here are the final stanzas of "North Haven":

Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first "discovered girls"
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had "such fun," you said, that classic summer.
("Fun"—it always seemed to leave you at a loss. . . )

You left North Haven, anchored in its
      rock,
afloat in mystic blue . . . And now—
      you've left
for good. You can't derange, or
      re-arrange,
your poems again. (But the Sparrows
      can their song.)
The words won't change again. Sad
      friend, you cannot change. ♦

The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

 

 

 

 

 

---

November 2, 2008

'I Write Entirely for You'

By WILLIAM LOGAN

 

WORDS IN AIR

The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton

Illustrated. 875 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $45

 

A poet should never fall in love with another poet — love is already too much like gambling on oil futures. Two poets in love must succumb to the same folie à deux as the actor and the actress, the magician and the fellow magician, because each knows already the flaws beneath the greasepaint, the pigeons hidden in top hats, all the pockmarked truth beneath illusion. Real lovers, Shakespeare long ago reminded us, have reeking breath and hair like a scouring pad.

Lovers may be permitted an exception to this ironclad rule, if they never achieve the bliss of consummation — and therefore never have to wake to the beloved's morning breath the morning after. Many would-be lovers have been divided by family, law or plain bad luck; before the days of long-distance phone calls or e-mail, the sublimated affair was conducted by postage stamp. The letters of Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Pirandello and Marta Abba, Gautier and Carlotta Grisi show that, though literature has always been good for love (think how many seductions may be chalked up to Shakespeare's sonnets), love was even better for literature if there was a mailbox nearby.

"Words in Air" collects the letters between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, from a few months after they met at a dinner party in 1947 to a few weeks before his death of a heart attack 30 years later, a correspondence conducted across continents and oceans as their poetry drove them together and their lives kept them apart. As poets, Lowell and Bishop could not have been more different. His heavy-handed youthful verse, solemnly influenced by Allen Tate, laid down a metrical line like iron rail. (If Lowell's early poems seem stultified now, they were boiled in brine and preserved in a carload of salt.) Her whimsical eye and wry, worried poems condemned her to be treated like a minor disciple of Marianne Moore. Bishop for much of her life was a poet's poet, which means a poet without an audience.

Lowell and Bishop felt drawn to each other's poetry from the start. Though wary of being seduced by an alien style (Bishop, after reading one of Lowell's poems: "It took me an hour or so to get back into my own metre"), they were soon exchanging their work and, sometimes by return mail, sending back fond but exacting criticism. Lowell was a poet trying to get out of his own skin — he changed styles the way some men change socks — while Bishop was desperate to vanish into her words. (The two poets went from not being quite sure who they were to grousing mildly at what they had become.) It doesn't take a Viennese doctor to suggest that the artist's relation to art reveals something about childhood — Lowell's ­poems were often an act of vengeance upon his parents, while Bishop's concealed her anguish over a childhood best forgotten (she described herself as "naturally born guilty").

Poetry can be a surprisingly lonely art — you end up wishing that Emily Dickinson had discovered someone livelier than Colonel Higginson, someone who showed a little more rapport. It's so rare for a writer to find the perfect sympathetic intelligence, we think sadly of Melville and Hawthorne, Coleridge and Wordsworth, whose hothouse friendships came to grief, in part because of the fatal attunement of their imaginations — not all harmonies survive the wear and tear of character. Bishop and Lowell passed almost immediately from awkward introduction to rapturous intimacy. Though they were delighted by that most valuable specie of literary life, gossip, it was soon apparent what necessary company these brittle, gifted intelligences were.

Their surviving 459 letters, some surprisingly long (Bishop might elaborate hers over weeks, at times swearing she had written Lowell in her imagination), give us the closest view of these wounded creatures — his muscular, bull-in-a-china-shop intellect; her pained shyness and abject modesty, and a gaze like the gleam off a knife. She brought out the boyishness in him. They worked out in verse the terms of their fragility — its character, its allowance, its burden. It is not, not just, that their sympathies were nearly absolute (letters, however adoring, begin with an affinity of prejudices), but that each poet proved a nearly ideal audience — "I think I must write entirely for you," Lowell told her.

Sometimes falling in love is as much an act of criticism as criticism is an act of love. Before, during and after his mar­riages, Lowell took lovers, from students to a Washington socialite (his poems were charged with an intensity no earthbound lover could match). At the outset of one of his "enthusiasms," as he called his shadowy attacks of manic depression, he often fixed his attention on some starry-eyed young woman. Bishop was not starry-eyed. Lowell was so much in love with her poems, however, it must have seemed logical to fall in love with her. After a near dis­astrous visit in 1957 (their meetings, long planned and longed for, did not always go well), he wrote her that asking her to marry him was the great might-have-been of his life.

Bishop, who comes across as the more sensible and insightful of the pair, placidly ignored this revelation (she remained somewhat coquettish, from a distance); and their friendship proceeded as before — they continued to address each other as "Dearest," and once Lowell called her "Dear Heart." It is to the advantage of these letters that this love was impossible, as he must have known. Bishop was an alcoholic and a lesbian, as well as half a dozen years older. We owe the brilliance of their letters not to the love that dared not speak its name, but to the love whose name — except once — Lowell dared not speak. Eight years before he died, he wrote, "I seem to spend my life missing you!"

By 1951, Bishop had moved to Brazil, more or less by accident, or the accident of love. She fell in love during a stopover on a long freighter cruise, while being nursed through an allergic reaction to a cashew fruit. She adored the frankness of Brazilians — they took no notice of her shyness. Bishop was charmed by the exotic (perhaps one day, when she has ceased to be their darling, academic critics will accuse her of imperialist fantasies). Through coup and countercoup, through the yearly snarl of Brazilian politics, she wrote lighthearted poems that kept their darkness buried in the interior. She was always good at concealing what she felt.

Lowell became her lifeline to the literary world left behind. They discussed the books they read, their motley ill­nesses, how many poems they were writing (Lowell) or not writing (Bishop), their hopes of seeing each other (half a century ago, almost every visit was preceded by protracted negotiation by letter). If they shook their heads over the antics of Richard Eberhart or the later poems of Marianne Moore, we're amused, because we shake our own heads over Eberhart and the later poems of Marianne Moore. Their peers — John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz — were not exactly dismissed, but only coolly embraced (Bishop and Lowell admired Jarrell, but were not so fond of his poems). Younger poets, if mentioned at all, were mentioned for their faults.

Yet in this avid chatter there is nothing like braggadocio, nothing as bold as Keats's quiet remark to his brother, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death." At one point Bishop says, more in sorrow than in pride, "I feel profoundly bored with all the contemporary poetry except yours, — and mine that I haven't written yet." Their mutual praise is as affecting as the way they would shyly enclose some stray poem like "The Armadillo" or "Skunk Hour," described as trifling and now an indispensable citizen of our anthologies.

Their admiration even made them light fingered — they borrowed ideas or images the way a neighbor might steal a cup of sugar. Lowell was especially tempted by this lure of the forbidden, using one of Bishop's dreams in a heartbreaking poem about their might-have-been affair, or rewriting in verse one of her short stories. They were literary friends in all the usual ways, providing practical advice (the forever dithery and procrastinating Bishop proved surprisingly pragmatic), trading blurbs, logrolling as shamelessly as pork-bellied senators (Lowell was adept at dropping the quiet word on her behalf). There was a refined lack of jealousy between them — that particular vice never found purchase, though in letters to friends they could afford the occasional peevish remark about each other. The only time Bishop took exception to Lowell's poems was when, in "The Dolphin" (1973), he incorporated angry letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick — "Art just isn't worth that much," Bishop exclaimed. She flinched when poets revealed in their poems too much of themselves, once claiming that she wished she "could start writing poetry all over again on another planet."

These poets, in short, inspired each other. Lowell always seems to be stuffing her newest poem into his billfold, so he can take it out later like a hundred-dollar bill. Bishop saw immediately how strange and even shocking "Life Studies" (1959) was (its confessional style caused as violent an earthquake in American poetry as "The Waste Land"); but he noticed something more subtle, that she rarely repeated herself. Each time she wrote, it was as if she were reinventing what she did with words, while he tended to repeat his forms until he had driven them into the ground, or driven everyone crazy with them. Bishop was loyal enough to admire, or pretend to, even Lowell's mediocre poems.

If Lowell and Bishop often seem to love no poems more than each other's, as critics perhaps they were right. A hundred years from now, they may prove the 20th century's Whitman and Dickinson, an odd couple whose poems look quizzically at each other, half in understanding, half in consternation, each poet the counter-psyche of the other. Their poems are as different as gravy from groundhogs, their letters so alike — so delightfully in concord — the reader at times can't guess the author without glancing at the salutation.

These lives were marked by terrible sadness. Bishop's Brazilian lover committed suicide; the poet continued drinking until she started falling down and injuring herself. Lowell's degrading seizures of manic depression, during which he often behaved contemptibly, left him in a permanent state of semi-apology. His three marriages, each time to a novelist, ended badly. Though sometimes blocked or depressed, as a poet Lowell would suddenly bull his way forward; Bishop, timid as a turtle, often terribly lonely, slowly produced small masterpieces, finishing only one or two poems a year (she said, "I've always felt that I've written poetry more by not writing it"). The interstices of their lives were remade as art; but that is not enough, if you have to live the life afterward. Even in their 40s, they sound worn out.

The pleasures of this remarkable correspondence lie in the untiring way these poets entertained each other with the comic inadequacies of the world. Letters offer the biographical hour — though in some phrase you may see the germ of a poem, you possess all the brilliant phrases that didn't make their way into poems, whether it's Lowell saying that he, his wife and his mother were all "fuming inside like the burning stuffings of an overstuffed Dutch chair" or Bishop describing the baptism of some babies: "The god-parents holding them shook them up & down just like cocktail shakers." Their remarks about writing have, in his case, a self-amused detachment ("I like being off the high stilts of meter"); in hers, deadpan modesty ("I have only two poetic spigots, marked H & C"). He: "Psycho-therapy is rather amazing — something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium." She: "I bought a small wood Benedito, the crudest kind of whittling and painting. . . . He's holding out the baby, who is stuck on a small nail, exactly like an hors d'oeuvres." In her mid-30s, Bishop, who called herself a "poet by default," had not read Chaucer; in his late 40s, Lowell had to look up the words gesso, echolalia and roadstead.

Admittedly, in this concrete block of a volume there are long stretches of nattering, antique gossip, ideas that come to nothing (Bishop habitually started things she could never finish). The late letters often confine themselves to worries over age, money and dentistry. As the poets grow older, there come the premature revelations of death: Dylan Thomas, then Roethke, Jarrell, Schwartz, Berryman — many of their generation died too young. Comically, Lowell and Bishop more or less adopt the younger poet Frank Bidart, who catered to Lowell during his endless revisions (or perhaps encouraged his manic over-revision — "spoiling by polishing," Lowell called it) and proved Johnny-on-the-spot after Bishop moved to Boston. If at times the poets treated him as a mere factotum, Bidart served as the surrogate son they could gossip about and fuss over.

The editing of this immense volume is so genially meticulous, it reveals that Robert Giroux's selection of Bishop's correspondence in "One Art" (1994) grossly altered her punctuation. Nonetheless, "Words in Air" is marred by a raft of typos and a sketchy, inadequate glossary of names. The editors confidently announce that the poets' spelling has been corrected — all a reader can say is, would that they had corrected more of it.

This long, leisurely correspondence seems now of another world, a fading reminder of the golden age of letter writing. For some two decades, Bishop and Lowell have divided postwar American poetry between them, a shared dominion the more remarkable because their manners, their styles and their philosophies of imagination are so different. Though Bishop was not always highly rated in a generation of poets given to Sturm und Drang, she was worshiped by Lowell; and his is the taste we share now. Their devotion was crucial to their literary life, perhaps more than any of their love affairs. These star-crossed lovers found the muse in each other.

William Logan is a poet and critic whose most recent books are "The Whispering Gallery" and "The Undiscovered Country."

 

Courtesy of Vassar College Library

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, 1962.

01 nov 2008