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3. Allegories of Salvage The Peripheral Vision of Elizabeth Bishop’s North & South Dreams, works of art (some) glimpses of the always-moresuccessful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important.  , letter to Anne Stevenson At the end of the same year in which Muriel Rukeyser drove to West Virginia to investigate Gauley Bridge (), her former Vassar classmate Elizabeth Bishop traveled for the first time to what is now the southernmost end of U.S. , Key West, Florida. Key West would not only become Bishop’s home after this visit, it would also become the site most associated with the idiosyncratic geography of her first book, North & South (). Because of the postwar publication date of North & South, Bishop’s Florida is not usually associated with the cultural geography of the s;1 however, the Florida Keys that she visited in the winter of – evoked the apocalyptic rhetoric of natural disaster so often associated with the Depression itself.2 The ferocious Labor Day hurricane of  had decimated the Overseas Railway that linked the Keys to the Florida mainland, leaving Key West temporarily isolated, accessible only by boat. While the hurricane had inflicted little damage on Key West itself, its deadly impact was almost as notorious in the Left media as that of Gauley Bridge.The strongest hurricane in the recorded history of the Keys up to that point, with winds that reached two hundred miles per hour, the Labor Day storm leveled entire islands and even demolished the rescue train that had been sent to evacuate the Keys. Among the unsuspecting victims who were swept to sea by the storm’s fifteento -twenty-foot tidal wave were hundreds of veterans who had been hired by the WPA to construct the U.S.  Overseas Highway bridges that would connect Key West to mainland Florida.3 The avoidable death of these veterans, many of them angry “bonus marchers” who had been shipped to the Keys from Washington, D.C., so outraged Key West’s most famous literary resident and World War I veteran, Ernest Hemingway, that he wrote a scathing account of the federal government ’s negligence for the New Masses.4 The New Masses seems like an unlikely venue for a writer so skeptical of 67 68 allegories of salvage collectivism as Hemingway, but the publication of “Who Murdered the Vets?” in the CPUSA journal, which featured such revolutionary poetry and reportage as Rukeyser’s, is less extraordinary than literary histories of American modernism might suggest, especially after the emergence of the Popular Front.To locate the Florida of Bishop’s North & South in the same literary historical geography as Hemingway’s or Rukeyser’s s writing might seem like another matter altogether , though. If the Key West of Bishop’s poetry seems far removed from Hemingway ’s bitter invective about the federal government’s callous neglect of its Florida employees, it seems even more distant from the righteous indignation of Rukeyser’s exposé of Gauley Bridge. When she first visited Key West, however , Bishop was working not only on the surrealist allegorical poems that would be published in North & South but also on a fictional portrait of a disillusioned worker not unlike other WPA temporary employees, appointed to the Sisyphean task of keeping a public beach clear of trash. This story, “The Sea & Its Shore,” was published in the same British journal, Life and Letters Today, that—like the New Masses—was publishing Rukeyser’s Spanish civil war reportage.5 Bishop’s interaction with such Key West luminaries as Hemingway is well documented, but to mention her in the same breath as Rukeyser or other “revolutionary” writers of her generation is much less common. As scholars and critics of Bishop and Rukeyser would have it, their professional paths crossed occasionally, but they occupied entirely separate literary spheres.6 Such apparent distance between two writers who were not only classmates at Vassar but co-conspirators as editors of the rebellious student literary journal Con Spirito can be explained partially by Bishop’s own ambivalence about Rukeyser’s career. Her comments about Rukeyser in letters or interviews range from competitive antipathy to self-disparaging admiration of her socially conscious work. Rukeyser’s public life was, after all, “one heroic saga of fighting for the underdog: going to jail, writing about silicosis, picketing alone in Korea, also thinking very deeply about POETRY & motherhood ”; Bishop, in contrast, could...

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