Amazon.com Review
One Art is the best biography we have of the elusive Elizabeth Bishop. Robert Giroux, her editor and friend, has chosen well--and discreetly--from among the poet's several thousand letters. The collection begins with correspondence she wrote while still at Vassar in the '30s and ends with a letter written on the day she died, October 6, 1979. ("Well, I could go on--but I won't!" Bishop writes.) Still, we now have more than 600 pages of witty, well-mannered missives that often shade into deep emotion. Seemingly casual observation is a staple of Bishop's art and a delight in the letters: writing to
Marianne Moore in 1938, she asserts that an unappealing stray she is nonetheless feeding looks just like Picasso's
Absinthe Drinker. Nor is she any less irreverent when it comes to the lifestyles of the poetic and famous. In 1950, she tells
Robert Lowell that she's reading
Yeats's
A Vision--"or trying to. Have you? Sometimes it's Jungian. The picture of Yeats going 'Woof! Woof!' in a lower berth, in the dark, in California, in order to wake up his wife, who was dreaming she was a cat, is very pleasing, I think."
Bishop often hid her sadness behind charm, but she could also be astonishingly frank. In addition to the personal revelations, there are discussions of poems' origins. "Quite a few lines of 'At the Fishhouses' came to me in a dream," she tells U. T. and Joseph Summers. "And the scene--which was real enough, I'd recently been there--but the old man and the conversation, etc., were all in a later dream." One caveat: Robert Giroux has kept commentary and notes to a minimum, so it's worth reading his introduction for deep background before you begin.
From Publishers Weekly
This selection of poet Elizabeth Bishop's (1911-1979) letters is, as Giroux observes, a virtual autobiography. And though large, the book contains only a fraction of her correspondence. Among the most interesting letters are those to literary friends, including Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Marianne Moore; among the most disturbing are the anguished letters concerning personal tragedies, letters she asked the recipients to destroy but which the editor has printed because they "have remained extant." The letters show a continuity with the character presented in Bishop's poems: apparently, she really was a brilliant, modest and kind person. They also show the poet's eye and ear for detail ("Someone asked my landlord . . . if he didn't have an 'author' living in his house, and he replied, 'No, not an author, a writer' "). There is also a disarming, even dogged sense of humor, striking given the fact that much in the letters is dark: the poet's struggles against alcoholism, loneliness and a 15-year relationship that ended in the suicide of her lover, Lota Soares. Bishop's correspondence may have been a bulwark against emptiness; the letters engage the reader not with startling revelations, but with everyday acts of courage. Thus Bishop pleads with Lowell in 1960, "Please never stop writing me letters--they always manage to make me feel like my higher self."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
