Words in Air

A couple of days ago something about Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in one New York publication or another caught my eye. I was doing ten things at once and could not stop and read the article, but I could have sworn it said something about their letters being turned into a play. The only thought I had time for was "I'm going to this, and who is going with me?" The latter half of that question will forever be a mystery because a) I don't know anyone who is as obsessed with the Bishop-Lowell letters/relationship as I am, and b) I missed the show! A one-night-only reading at the 92nd Street Y this week. Would have loved to have seen who showed up at that event. Kindred spirits, people who love letter-writing as much as I do...a bunch of senior citizens? Betting on that last one. One of my dearest friends with whom I still correspond (though we've moved from letters to email) kidded me recently that I was channeling 40 back when I was 17. Thus finding myself in a room with senior citizens at age 33 would not at all have been surprising.

I remember wanting to write letters as soon as I learned to read. I thought it would be fun to create fictional characters and have them send letters back and forth. My neighborhood friend, whom I tried to persuade into writing with me, would have none of this so-called "fun." So instead I had to dress up as Darth Vader and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz for the next several years. Fun, I suppose, but not the kind of creative outlet I was hoping for.

I think if this blog is anything - even from the start - it's been letters. A way to process through writing where I am creatively, emotionally, and intellectually. A way to safekeep the loveliness I find in others' words. A way to share some of this with readers, though I never expect a reply.

Anyway, back to Bishop and Lowell. I find their letters, or their relationship through letters, fascinating. Two brilliant writers - both emotional messes, really - creating a world on the page that could never have come to pass in real life.

Here is my favorite snippet from one of Lowell's letters to Bishop:

There's one bit of my past that I would like to get off my chest and then I think all will be easy with us.
...I remember one evening presided over by Mary McCarthy and my Elizabeth was there, and going home to the Bard poets' dormitory, I was so drunk that my hands turned cold and I felt half-dying and held your hand. And nothing was said, and like a loon that needs sixty feet, I believe, to take off from the water, I wanted time and space, and went on assuming, and when I was to have joined you at Key West I was determined to ask you. Really for so callous (I fear) a man, I was fearfully shy and scared of spoiling things and distrustful of being steady enough to be the least good. Then of course the Yaddo explosion came and all was over. Yet there were a few months. I suppose we might almost claim something like apparently Strachey and Virginia Woolf. And of course there was always the other side, the fact that our friendship really wasn't a courting, was really disinterested (bad phrase) really led to no encroachments. So it is.
Let me [say] this though and then leave the matter forever; I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can't cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. I've never though there was any choice for me about writing poetry. No doubt if I used my head better, ordered my life better, worked harder etc., the poetry wold be improved, and there must be many lost poems, innumerable accidents and ill-done actions. But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had...

~August 15, 1957

So today on my first day off for the summer, I went back and found that article on Bishop and Lowell. Here is the link to The New Yorker's article and a video of the reading.

And here is Elizabeth Bishop's final letter to Lowell, which she wrote upon his death:

"North Haven"

In memoriam: Robert Lowell

I can make out the rigging of a schooner
a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky
no clouds, except for the long, carded horse's tail.

The islands haven't shifted since last summer,
even if I like to pretend they have
--drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,
a little north, a little south or sidewise,
and that they're free within the blue frontiers of bay.

This month, our favorite one is full of flowers:
Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch,
Hackweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright,
the Fragrant Bedstraw's incandescent stars,
and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.

The Goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the White-throated Sparrow's five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first "discovered girls"
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had "such fun," you said, that classic summer.
("Fun" - it always seemed to leave you at a loss...)

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue...And now - you've left
for good. You can't derange, or re-arrange,
your poems again. (But the Sparrows can their song.)
The words won't change. Sad friend, you cannot change.