Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions

Foreign-Domestic: Elizabeth Bishop at Home/Not at Home in Brazil

The orienting metaphor for Elizabeth Bishop’s life and work is North and South, the poles of her travels and dialectical sources of her art. From earliest childhood to the last years of her life, with remarkable persistence, she carried core material wherever she traveled—a carapace of memory and sensibility to substitute, or compensate, perhaps, for the missing home. Some poems she began early were completed only in her last decade. Some kernels of poems traveled with her from North to South and back again, but never found resolution. As she traveled, however , certain of her core concerns reached new articulations within her growing realms of language and experience. In “The Bight,” she had bemoaned the “old correspondences” of unfinished work, but in her long life in Brazil, she found new correspondences to early preoccupations, along with the simply new. It has been remarked that Bishop found herself able to address early—often painful— childhood memories from the geographical and emotional distance of Brazil. As Lorrie Goldensohn has argued in Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, for example: “The dislocations of exile took her out of the linear, forward march of her life, and back through memory into a simultaneous recognition linking a primitive, childlike Brazil and Bishop herself as a child” (xi). Bishop remarked, “It is funny to come to Brazil to experience total recall about Nova Scotia” (OA 249), and quite early in her residence in Brazil, Bishop composed her finest story of her northern childhood, “In the Village.” It may be doubted, however, that Bishop ever considered her life a “forward march.” As she famously remarked to an interviewer : “I never meant to go to Brazil. I never meant doing any of these things. I’m afraid in my life everything has just happened” (Monteiro 128). In her writing life, however, feeling and thought circled round persistent themes, often for years, subject to reconsideration as new experience augmented and altered her imaginative carapace. And though Bishop retained a capacity for childlike wonder represented in poems throughout her career, she inevitably aged, not simply in years, but in Foreign-Domestic Elizabeth Bishop at Home/ Not at Home in Brazil Barbara Page and Carmen L. Oliveira BARBARA PAGE AND CARMEN L. OLIVEIRA 118 attitude, as decidedly un-innocent aspects of her experience in Brazil bore in on her. In her discussion of Bishop’s prose, Goldensohn writes that, in the warmer embrace of her new life in Brazil, she was able to articulate the “estranging effects” of her Nova Scotian childhood (174). Soon enough, estrangement also entered and complicated her life in Brazil. Althoughher move to Brazil released childhood recollections and brought fresh experience into her work, finally, Bishop’s South, as surely as her North, not only inspired but also troubled her art. Bishop’s papers range from juvenilia, in her elongated schoolgirl handwriting, to drafts of late poems recollecting her life in Brazil, stained with tropical damp and overwritten in a spidery scrawl. Alice Quinn’s publication of a large selection of drafts and fragments from these papers, in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, illustrates the degree to which Bishop retained material over years and decades. It also revealsjusthowmuchof herwritingsheneverwouldorcouldbringto light.Lloyd Schwartz argues elsewhere in this volume that Bishop completed a number of draft poems but never published them, evidence that Brazilian warmth never entirely thawed Bishop’s northern reticence. Bishop took pains, however, to preserve these drafts and fragments that now give us glimpses into possible poems and prose despite her chronic despair of finishing them. In this essay, we concentrate on unpublished pieces on Brazilian subjects as they shed light on Bishop’s lifelong sense of being never quite at home—a feeling that was for a time alleviated by newfound happiness in Brazil, but finally returned with haunting, estranging force. Bishop wanted to write about her travels and observations of local people in Brazil, although she sometimes considered it a distraction from poems, and she feared becoming merely picturesque. Kim Fortuny argues that Bishop’s very reluctance before her “foreign” subject made her a fine travel writer (25). In poems aboutBrazil,Bishop’sacuteawarenessof herselfasanoutsidersetsperspectivebut also limits on understanding. The traveler of “Questions of Travel” entertains seriousdoubtsabouthercapacitytobridgeculturaldistancewhensheasks :“Isitright to be watching strangers in a play/in this strangest of theatres?” (CP 93). Fortuny reflects on the disturbing ethics of distanced observation, but argues that “Bishop understood the hazards of foreign travel; she knew firsthand about the dangers of privileged observation. The risk...