Bishop and the Marvelous City

Carmen L. Oliveira, Rio de Janeiro

“Monkey, mind your own tail!” Elizabeth Bishop was abused by Fernando de Castro in a page of insults in the newspaper Correio da Manha, as a reaction to her article about Rio, published in The New York Times Magazine of March 7, 1965. The title of Bishop´s article resulted from an imbroglio by the editors, who took the picture of a streetcar for a train, and mistranslated the name of the working class district it was heading to, Encantado, which does not mean Delight, but Charmed.

The Cariocan journalist called Bishop racist and vitriolic, for having exaggerated Rio´s misery, and for having suggested there was a racial segregation that would fit Atlanta, Georgia, but not Rio de Janeiro. He also con- demned the photos that showed only black people, as if Rio were “a land of niggers”. Above all, Bishop was the ungrateful author of the absurdity: “Rio is not a marvelous city; it is merely a marvelous setting for a city.”

Bishop´s poems about Rio are acrimonius. A scabby dog, a drunken beggar, a second-rate bandit, swooning round cakes and slummers parade in a surrealistic world of rationed light, kill-beggar policies, childish whores do- ing the cha cha, and a huge military operation to murder one lonely burglar. Yes, Bishop was aware of Rio´s social discrepancies and shortcomings for a marvelous city.

Bishop lived in Rio for six years, in an apartment on the 11th floor in Leme, the first section of world-famous Copacabana. The moment she went to her verandah, what would she see? Before her, lavish Copacabana beach, with indolent women lying on the sand, under colorful umbrellas. On her left, a sordid slum on Babilonia hill, with women climbing up from the asphalted avenue, carrying heavy cans of water on their heads. The same sun blazing over.

Probably Bishop was baffled the first time she heard this scene translated into a merry Carnival samba: “A water can on her head /Up hill goes Maria/ Taking a child by the hand / She never gets tired / Up hill goes Maria.” People had lots of fun singing the samba, swinging their hips, and mimicking carrying a can on their heads.

It is true that Bishop produced grim poems about Rio. Yet, it is also true — and surprising — that she would soon learn to admire the Cariocans´ ability to make social criticism through humor, and to samba unhappiness away. With an empathic mind, Bishop understood that Carnival songs were expressions of cathartic irrever- ence,   a means of exorcising hardship by making it laughable.

Like no other non-Brazilian writer, Bishop noted, in letters and journals, how “the poor” dealt with their ambivalent feelings toward the city, which during the three days of Carnival would become a marvelous one. Bishop took notice that the maid saved money all year long, to buy a costume to wear in the samba school parade. On Carnival Sunday, the maid would leave the apartment dressed in satin and pearls, with a white wig, to be a queen for one night. Sambaing in the avenue with her, courtly ladies and lords from the slum.

Carnival was the aesthetic materialization of the power of imagination and collective poetry of a people, perceived the American poet. In her unsurpassable definition: “a glorious, artistic mess”.

One day, Bishop came out to her verandah. She noticed boys in the slum were flying kites. She looked up to the sky, picked up her notebook and wrote down, possibly for a future poem: “kites hover among buzzards”. It takes a poet to see marvels.

Amy Irving Portrays Elizabeth Bishop

Laura J. Menides, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theater presented Marta Goes’s “A Safe Haven for Elizabeth Bishop” this past summer, from June 26 to July 1, in a test run of the show, which producers expect eventually to bring to Broad- way. Amy Irving starred in the play, which focuses on Bishop’s long relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares and her exploration of that relationship in her poetry.

Irving was spectacular as Elizabeth Bishop. Her soft, polished voice, her suits and pants outfits, her hairstyle and gestures all sounded and looked very much like the Bishop we know from recordings and photos. While exhibiting restraint and subtle humor, Irving also probed deeply into Bishop’s intellect, passionate nature, affec- tion for animals and children—and her long struggle with her demon, alcohol. When Irving recited Bishop’s poems, especially the haunting villanelle, “One Art,” the audience held its collective breath. I was not alone in wishing the play had allowed for more poetry recitation.

The set and sound designs for the play were elaborate and fast-changing, and I rather liked the abstract sugges- tions for each scene. Samambaia’s contemporary feel was captured, for example, by soaring architectural beams, and the port of Santos by sails and sea sounds.

Playwright Marta Goes reports that she based “A Safe Haven” on Bishop’s letters and other works and on what as a child living near Samambaia she heard about her famous neighbors, Lota and Bishop.  Sitting there in the theater on opening night, however, I kept hearing echoes from Carmen Oliveira’s Rare and Commonplace Flowers, published in Brazil in 1995 and translated into English by Neil Besner in 2002. Although I thought it not enough of an acknowledgement, the playbill recognized Oliveira’s book, stating it had “started a Bishopmania in Brazil.”

The playbill also included a lively essay by Barbara Page that outlined the story of Bishop’s Brazil years and re- counted Lota’s political battles in getting Rio’s people’s park built. Page’s essay underscored a major theme of “A Safe Haven”:   that politics in Brazil were in good measure responsible for Lota’s death and for Bishop’s decision to leave the country.

For a dozen years, Brazil was literally “A Safe Haven” for Bishop, and even after she returned to the States, she was able to look back on her Brazilian experiences, trans- forming them into some of her best and best-loved poetry. I hope that this play will make it to Broadway; I’ll get my tickets early.

Review

Steven Gould Axelrod, Univ. of California, Riverside

Goldensohn, Lorrie. Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-Century Soldier Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.

Rotella, Guy. Castings: Monuments and Monumentality in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. Vanderbilt  UP, 2004.

Excellent new books by Lorrie Goldensohn and Guy Rotella, both concerning the public role of poetry, should be of considerable interest to scholars of Elizabeth Bishop.

Lorrie Goldensohn’s name is familiar to Bishop scholars through her book, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry (1992), as well as articles in Marilyn Lombardi’s The Geography of Gender (1993) and Laura Menides and Angela Dorenkamp’s “In Worcester, Massachusetts” (1999). Goldensohn’s latest book—Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-Century Soldier Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)—discusses Bishop only in passing. It focuses instead on World War I poetry by Wilfred Owen; World War II poetry by W. H. Auden, Keith Douglas, and Randall Jarrell; and Vietnam War poetry by Doug Anderson, W. D. Ehrhart, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Emphasizing the central strain of masculinity, the book exposes a tension between heroism’s legitimate appeal and the justifiable revulsion against what heroism has wrought. Although Goldensohn identifies a recurrent admiration for values like courage in even the strongest anti-war poems, she refuses to endorse such values wholeheartedly, remaining always aware of the suffering they cause. Dismantling  Glory  traces  a  chronological  arc  of increasingly indiscriminate slaughter, in which the distinction between combatant and non-combatant vanishes. The book provides an exciting yet sobering journey. Reading it is at times an overpowering experience—as haunting as remembered trauma.

Dismantling Glory treats Elizabeth Bishop primarily in relation to Randall Jarrell. Jarrell had accused Marianne Moore’s World War II poem, “In Distrust of Merits,” of not knowing what it was talking about: “We are surprised to find Nature, in Miss Moore’s poll of it, so strongly in favor of Morality; but all the results are implicit in the sampling—like the Literary Digest, she sent postcards only to the nicer animals.” As unfair as this attack was, Jarrell did not repeat it in regard to Bishop’s World War II poem, “Roosters.” He considered Bishop the best poet of their generation. Bishop, however, did not return the compliment. She hedged her praise of Jarrell’s war poetry and complained to one correspondent of his “maudlin, morbid streak.” Nevertheless, Goldensohn argues that the two poets’ war views were largely congruent. Jarrell’s poems refuse “the greatest temptation, to surrender to the blind patriotism that inflates friend and degrades enemy.” In a similar way, Bishop’s “From Trollope’s Journal” portrays militarism as a contagion (“The soldiers poison the air”), and “Roosters” depicts it as fundamentally dirty (“He . . .  lies in dung”).

Like Lorrie Goldensohn, Guy Rotella is well known to most Bishop scholars. His earlier book, Reading and Writing Nature (1991), includes a chapter on Bishop. His new study—Castings: Monuments and Monumentality in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004)—analyzes poetry’s modern-day ambivalence toward monuments. Rotella observes that monuments have always been sites of controversy as well as social cohesion. Nietzsche’s imperative, “Away with the monuments,” has seemed increasingly pertinent to poets, given the cultural relativism of the modern and postmodern eras. Bishop, Lowell, Merrill, Walcott, and Heaney distrust the notions of universality, stability, and permanence that monuments often imply. Still, they ultimately take a nuanced view of monumentality, aware that social crises call out for some public representation, preferably ones without hegemonic agendas. These poets wish to see monuments continue, but in a revised form that takes irony and contingency into account.

In Rotella’s analysis, Elizabeth Bishop initiates this complex attitude toward monumentality. Distrustful of all sources of authority and power, she wrote poems that consider “the unsettled and unsettling political, aesthetic, and more broadly cultural issues monuments condense.” In “The Monument,” her most sustained poem on the topic, she inscribes a debate about the nature and value of monuments. The poem assumes an anti-monumental stance but one complicated by fascination and regard. That premise will seem acceptable to most Bishop readers but Rotella uses it as a springboard for ideas that are more provocative. For example, he argues that “The Monument” joins with “Roosters” as an implicitly opposi tional, egalitarian, and anti-war poem.