Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop by Thomas Travisano (review)

Elizabeth Bishop's father died when she was eight months old. Her mother was sent to a state hospital for the mentally disturbed when she was five. Elizabeth never saw her again. She had no siblings. "When you write my epitaph," she told Robert Lowell, "you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived."

If it is true that an unhappy childhood provides the best preparation for becoming a writer, it is hard to imagine anyone more sadly prepared for that role. Perhaps Bishop's fellow poet Conrad Aiken rivaled her in suffering family trauma. His father killed his mother and himself in a murder-suicide when Conrad was 11. The boy heard the gunshots and discovered the bodies.

Both orphans were brought up by relatives, in Bishop's case a mixture of paternal and maternal ones in two different countries. Elizabeth felt far more at home in the "beautiful but homely" Great Village, Nova Scotia than in various sites in Massachusetts, though the family's financial security rested on the accomplishments of her grandfather John W. Bishop, a builder and architect with headquarters in Worcester, MA. She felt herself three-fourths Canadian, an appropriate attitude for a woman later called a citizen of the world. She eventually lived nearly two decades in Brazil, spent extended periods in France, Mexico, Boston, DC, Seattle, and San Francisco, and logged briefer stopovers in coastal Maine, Cape Cod, Newfoundland, Spain, North Africa, Tuscany, and—often—Greenwich Village.

School was a saving grace for Bishop growing up. She loved her Great Village primer class so much that she excoriated herself to her instructor on the single occasion when she arrived late to class. Her extreme anxiety stemmed from a childhood fear of abandonment, Travisano maintains. In the mornings, on the way to school, she asked her grandmother to promise not to die before she returned. School itself served as a refuge. As a teenager she escaped the abuses of her uncle George, first at a summer sailing camp and then at Walnut Hill, an academy for girls. Letters to Louise Bradley, a slightly older companion of that time, make it obvious that Bishop felt a strong sexual attraction to her. She was lesbian then and always, though reticent about public revelation.

Classmates at Walnut Hill and at Vassar (class of 1934) recognized Bishop as a genius. She entered college as a musician in the making, but soon discovered her calling as a poet. This came without much help from the stodgy Vassar Review. Instead she announced herself as a contributor to the rival and radical Con Spirito, which eventually achieved respectability by merging with the Review (her Con Spirito colleagues included Mary McCarthy and Eleanor Clark). Bishop produced a somewhat sarcastic poem about the union of the two literary magazines.

Literature had reached a deadlock.Settled now by holy wedlock,And sterility is fled.Bless the happy marriage bed.

As Bishop began to publish in more professional venues, she adopted the distinguished Marianne Moore as an epistolary mentor. After graduation she moved to Greenwich Village, spent a year in Paris, and then set up housekeeping in Key West with Louise Crane, the first of a series of partners. In Key West, she became a close friend of Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, then separated from husband Ernest. She thought Pauline the "wittiest person, man or woman" she ever knew.

Though she did not publish widely or often, and for many years did not give public readings, Bishop gained a reputation as a poet of promise during those early years. But she was shy and withdrawn, and if, as Travisano believes, she was privately confident that she was good, she was damned if she would declare so publicly. Always an outsider, she did not belong to any artistic group. She knew and liked members of New York's Partisan group, and had a "first refusal" contract with The New Yorker, but widespread critical acclaim came slowly. Her North and...