October 6, 1960
I have an awful lot to tell you, I think, and yet actually no news except the first item.
Bishop writes this line to Lowell in 1960 in a letter that is unfinished and later picked up again. It is a funny line in that it is a near-perfect characterization of their style of discourse. Revealing news of the day and in the next sentence one’s deepest regret in life. There is news, and then there is other material. Many of Bishop’s letters wander from place to place, not unlike her physical self. She starts off with an item of news then enters into a discussion of Baudelaire’s translations, and a few paragraphs later reveals to Lowell when mentioning his daughter Harriet that:
…and that is my worst regret in life, although I would have been such a nervous, over-devoted mother probably.
The next paragraph begins immediately and with “Well----…” introducing a new subject entirely, a world away from the revelation of regretting not being a mother and the speculation that she likely would have made a bad one anyway.
Bishop tries to hide herself well, even after blurting out her deepest fears, regrets, and dreams, but masterfully brushes them off with self-effacing humor and abrupt shifting of topic. Back to the newsroom I suppose.
Another remarkable element I recognize in her exchanges with Lowell is that despite her tireless and witty dismissal of self and abilities as a writer and thinker and artist her work continues, perhaps at a slower pace (and with a much smaller output) than others, particularly Lowell. Not only did it persist but it was printed and read and eventually the world was able to witness her talent as her dear friend did. It isn’t hard to understand how Lowell could be so charmed by Bishop. It is hard, however, to believe that he would have been drawn to one more puffed up writer mailing letters filled with self-exaltations and news of their latest achievement. No letters would exist if she wasn’t exactly who she was and he wasn’t exactly who he was. Perhaps their candor with one another from the start was key. And the rapport that formed so swiftly between the two brings to mind a line from Woody Allen’s Matchpoint. His character Chloe strolls through Tate Modern with a friend who tells her of the dumb luck their mutual friends had after meeting during a traffic accident saying, “All their neuroses intertwine so perfectly, and it just works like a charm.”
Which brings me to humor. This is a fundamental part of their letters’ architecture. A former teacher of mine once spoke of this subject in a poetry workshop. He said something along the lines of:
Look everyone, don’t be afraid to be funny. It’s okay to be funny.
I’m not sure if this was a reaction to our small group bringing in poems lined with gloom and doom and sturm und drang. I’m also not sure if everyone understood what he had said or, moreover, how it possibly had anything to do with them. I knew he wasn’t suggesting we morph into Woody Allen by next Thursday evening. What he was saying is that humor has its place in poems, in literature. In living.
Bishop clearly reserved a place for humor in her stanzas and her letters.
In letter 222, she writes:
Dearest Cal:
The good news came yesterday and what wonderful lovely $$$$$, 7,000 of them for 2 years…It is all thanks to you, I know perfectly well…I’ve already written, to Mr. Harry K. Mansfield, who wrote me—it must be that I have a guilty conscience about all this because from his quite innocent and formal little letters I have drawn morbid conclusions that he doesn’t like me, personally; disapproves highly of my poetry; and probably thinks it should have gone to Donald Hall or somebody…
And in “One Art”:
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
When Lowell died in 1977 it is hard to imagine Bishop being able to master this art of losing, not when it came to the loss of her longtime correspondent and devoted companion. And yet, despite her unknowable grief, one wonders after 30 years of living apart yet residing constantly in one another’s minds if she was still writing to him. Just not on paper.
Dear Cal, if you only knew how many imaginary conversations I have with you all the time…
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