Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall (review)

These comments appeared in substantially different form on the Baltimore page of BroadwayWorld.com in July 2017.

In the nearly forty years since Elizabeth Bishop’s death in 1979, her reputation has grown to exceed that of any of her contemporaries or successors. Her friend Robert Lowell stands nowhere close to the pinnacle he stood on at the time of his own death in 1977, while John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton, or Theodore Roethke scarcely challenge Bishop’s supremacy. The next generation of poets, born a decade or more later, for all their acknowledged technical and human accomplishments haven’t and probably won’t win the special place accorded Bishop. To put it flatly, she is the poet no one is permitted to condescend to, surely not to dislike. Brett Millier’s sturdy 600-page biography of the poet appeared in 1993; the Library of America has published in one volume everything of Bishop’s except her incomplete, unpublished work, which has been collected in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box. Now Megan Marshall, who won a Pulitzer some years back for her biography of Margaret Fuller, has ambitiously attempted a very personal account of Bishop’s life, while singling out for brief commentary a score or more of, in Marshall’s opinion, her best poems.

What makes this book something other than a straight biography is the active presence in it of the biographer. Marshall has chosen the somewhat risky procedure of alternating her account of Bishop’s life with a parallel (much shorter) one of her own. A student at Radcliffe in the 1970s, she took writing courses from both Lowell and Bishop, and the six parts into which her book is divided are each prefaced by an account of her own relation to the scene in question. For example, the book begins not with Bishop’s childhood, but with an account of a memorial service held for her at Radcliffe shortly after her death. Marshall gives us the picture of an audience waiting for the poet John Ashbery, who is scheduled to kick off the proceedings by reading a Bishop poem, to appear. Ashbery is late, and Alice Methfessel, the young woman who was Bishop’s devoted secretary and final love, decides to start things off regardless. We are then told that in fact Marshall was not there for the occasion, since new interests were replacing her once central aspiration to be a poet. Eventually Ashbery arrives and reads Bishop’s early sestina, “A Miracle for Breakfast,” thus providing Marshall with her book’s subtitle. She proceeds to quote the poem entire, and organizes her book around its end line words––river, balcony, sun, miracle, crumb, coffee––that combine in the poem’s final three lines as follows: “We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee. / A window across the river caught the sun / as if the miracle were working on the wrong balcony.” Since the sestina is the most difficult and ingenious of poetic forms, her own book puts itself forth as a corresponding, if smaller, miracle.

It would be surprising if this rather extravagant organization of a biography didn’t provoke some less-than-enthusiastic responses, and Dwight Garner, noted for his sometimes acerbic reviews in the New York Times, landed hard on Marshall’s effort, calling it “dull and dispiriting.” I found the book not at all dull, though on occasion the intrusion of personal “coloring” detracts rather than aids my perceiving Bishop, as when we hear that Marshall, settling into Radcliffe as a somewhat older student, salutes her “tarnished but still-whirling eggbeater I’d picked up at Goodwill for a few dollars.” Mainly though, the personal narrative is straightforward, thoughtful, maybe a bit less than humorous, but steadily committed to the reasonable belief that, for Marshall to talk about her growing involvement in Bishop’s work, she needs to make some sightings of her own changing career.

The book is handsomely designed, with its 45 illustrations, most of...