Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, and: Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel (review)

Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares. Carmen L. Oliveira. Neil K. Besner, transl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 192. $26.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel. Kim Fortuny. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 121. $45.00 (cloth).

"Should we have stayed at home?" asks Bishop in "Questions of Travel." There were certainly Brazilians who, even before the suicide of Lota de Macedo Soares, clamored "Yes!" Bishop felt the weight of their blame and disdain in the years after the "disaster." But the poems offer a resounding No to "just sitting quietly in one's room." "Home" is a fiction, a provincial state of mind, a longed-for destiny rather than a point of origin. Houses, while sometimes "loved," are more often places of death, denial or madness. But travel (as opposed to tourism) makes us experience the world, and ourselves, and helps us glimpse "reality" through the shocks to and displacements of our "knowledge." Long before she composed "Questions of Travel" Bishop took a notebook and wrote about going to "imagined places":

If I stretch my thought to Egypt, to India, downtown, it is in my thought I see them and they are not, at the time, reality for me. If I go to these places it is a different matter. Reality, then is something like a huge circus tent, folding, adjustable, which we carry around with us and set up wherever we are. It possesses the magical property of being able to take on characteristics of whatever place we are in, in fact it can become identical with it.¹

The many experiences of erecting and folding this circus-tent construction called "reality" form the story of Bishop's nomadic life and the narrative of many of her poems. The process also structures the sequence of her poems in Questions of Travel. The title poem marks an "interior" reached after the puncture of outdated tourist "dreams" upon arrival in Brazil. One senses Bishop's imagination filling out a new, flexible tent as she traces Brazil's human history inscribed in objects—the Dutch influence left in wooden clogs, the Spanish mission remembered in a bird cage shaped like "a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque." "Surely it would have been a pity," says the still-condescending traveler, letting her "pity" fall in anaphora over the surfaces of quaint, impoverished objects of memory. But gradually she sees more, and finally adjusts her gaze to focus an image of her own limits and desires. ("Pity should begin at home," says Bishop's Crusoe in "Crusoe in England," "so the more I pitied myself, the more I felt at home.")

It would certainly have been a great pity for Bishop not to have met Lota de Macedo Soares. Lota was a brilliant, passionate, and generous woman, and Bishop came closest to finding "home" with her in Brazil. In Rare and Commonplace Flowers Carmen L. Oliveira tells the story of their relationship, weaving the language of Bishop's poems into her narrative, sometimes in quietly borrowed phrases, other times explicitly. Indeed, one of Oliveira's projects seems to be to put these poems into their lived context—Brazil, and the love between two women from different continents. Bishop scholars already know this context well. It is wonderfully recorded in her letters (published and unpublished), in her memoirs, in Brett Millier's biography, Peter Brazeau's oral biography, accounts by Lorie Goldensohn, Lloyd Schwartz and others, and—frankly—through an unending chain of gossip. We have been more than a little obsessed with the biographical context of these impersonal-personal poems. Oliveira aims for a balanced account, but her book was written for a Brazilian audience and fills out, more than other narratives, the Brazilian side of the story. Through interviews with Lota's friends and associates she draws a fuller portrait than...