A Chance Meeting, page 22
Neither Bishop nor Moore ever broke with people, and both worked hard at friendship. They wrote several letters each day, to friends nearby and half a world away, for their entire lives, and they were constantly on the lookout for books and articles and films and art shows and seashells and details of landscape that might be of interest to their friends and particularly to each other.
There were literally hundreds of letters between them, and they tried to include something special in each one: “Dear Miss Bishop . . . what you say of Brittany and the blue nets and the circus seems like pure fairytale.” Bishop always invited Moore to things—invitations were her gesture in the relationship: “I wonder if you would care to go with me one afternoon this week” to see “Martin Johnson’s moving picture Baboons?” They talked of books. Bishop wrote, from Florida, “We have been reading Henry James’s Letters (the autobiographic ones) all week, a very good hot weather influence. I am particularly impressed with the War letters—and do you remember when he had shingles?” They admired each other’s language. “‘Nicey nice’ is perfect. How accurate you are, Elizabeth. This is just how I have felt.” Dear Marianne, in your Wallace Stevens review “your remarks on ‘bravura’ and ‘the general marine volume of statement’ have kept me in an almost hilarious state of good cheer.” They borrowed phrases from each other, sometimes consciously, sometimes without realizing it—Bishop wrote in her essay on Moore “perhaps we are all magpies.” The letters were among their most treasured possessions. Moore once wrote to their mutual friend Louise Crane: “I had a letter from Elizabeth a day or two ago, which I am thinking of having tattooed on me.”
They shared an interest in the far away, though it was Bishop’s method to go and live next to it for years and come to know it, while Moore preferred to stay at home and receive reports from various correspondents, living and long gone, to sift her researches very thoroughly, and to somehow intuit the characteristic qualities of a place. Bishop started going to Key West in 1936 and was there for many winters over the fifteen years that followed. Moore imagined Key West as “a kind of ten commandments in vegetable-dye color printing.” Bishop wrote back from Florida that it wasn’t fair that Moore sitting there in Brooklyn should “hit the Key West lighthouse right on the head.” By way of news, Bishop sent observations and books of her poems: North & South, A Cold Spring, and Questions of Travel. Her poems documented landscape and people in a way that had something in common with the Maine stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. At one point, Bishop considered editing a new collection of Jewett’s work—she had always loved The Country of the Pointed Firs—but in the end she decided that she wouldn’t do better than Willa Cather had.
In all the correspondence between Bishop and Moore, there were no pauses or breaks, the only one being recorded inside a letter itself. It was after Marianne Moore’s mother had died, and Moore was suffering very badly. Bishop sent her most loving invitation to her friend. The opening line of her poem, “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” leaned on Crane, and Whitman, and Pablo Neruda: “From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying.” Bishop invited Moore to the public library, giving her the honorific “for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait.” Writing to Bishop after she had received a copy of the poem, Moore’s salutation read: “Words fail me, Elizabeth.”
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Elizabeth Bishop lived in Brazil for fourteen years that were among the happiest and most productive in her life. Her lover in those years was Lota de Macedo Soares, an architect and a Brazilian aristocrat who eventually had a series of nervous breakdowns but who, before that, was always building a house, or a park for the city of Rio de Janeiro, and who, like Bishop, measured life in travel. The two women lived in a beautiful house on a hill outside the city; clouds sometimes floated through the windows. From Florida and Brazil and her travels in Europe and Latin America, Bishop sent Moore a paper nautilus that became the subject of a poem, grapefruits, alligator teeth, Mexican slippers, and her own translation of a book popular in Brazil—the diary of a Brazilian girl, Helena Morley, which charmed Moore as it had Bishop. Bishop also sent postcards of Argentina, descriptions of toucans, and unusual feathers. Some of these objects and images turned up in Bishop’s paintings and collages, as well as in a couple of box assemblages reminiscent of the work of Joseph Cornell. Later, needing to separate a little from Macedo Soares, Bishop also acquired her own house, in Ouro Prêto, and this house, perhaps her favorite house of all, she named for her old friend, the Casa Mariana. She had four photographs of Marianne Moore hanging inside. Bishop used regularly to invite Moore to visit Brazil, but for many years Moore wouldn’t leave her mother, and after her mother died, she was a bit old herself to make the trip.
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Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares sometimes got up in the morning and made what Bishop referred to as “gallons of coffee.” The cats strolled through, and the toucan, Uncle Sam, hopped around on the floor, and the two women settled down to read. They read Flannery O’Connor and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution and Donne and Keats. They read Coleridge’s letters, Octavio Paz, the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, Henry James and La Fontaine. There were times, Bishop wrote to a friend, when they read from seven in the morning until they went to bed at one.
Sometimes, reading, Bishop thought, I have to tell Marianne about this, and she made a little note, and a letter would start itself. Three weeks later, at home in Brooklyn, Marianne Moore would find something of Brazil or of nineteenth-century England in her mailbox. Silently commending Elizabeth for her diligence, she would tear the letter open impatiently.
24. ZORA NEALE HURSTON AND CARL VAN VECHTEN
ZORA NEALE Hurston was glad that Carl Van Vechten had invited her for breakfast. She had so often heard him say that breakfast was the most personal meal of the day. She walked through the lobby of the hotel and waited for the elevator, her mind on the rehearsal schedule and on whether or not they would be able to fix the drum that had gotten damaged on the way from Florida. It was a happy coincidence that she and Van Vechten were both in Chicago—he was on tour with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and she had driven from Florida in her little car to present Singing Steel, a revue of Bahamanian and southern folk songs such as Chicago had never heard. She had been up late the night before, going over the staging. As she rang the bell, she found she was hungry.
He called out with pleasure when he opened the door; Van Vechten was never shy. She had almost forgotten how glad it always made her to see his mischievous face and buckteeth and tall, shambling frame. “If Carl was a people instead of a person,” she had once written to a friend, “I could then say these are my people.” Van Vechten was not one of those white people who expected to be called “Mister” by his colored friends. “Carlo!” she said.
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They had been writing back and forth, as always; he had been full of compliments for her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, about a Black minister in Florida, published a few months before, in May of 1934. Van Vechten had written of it to Langston Hughes: “Your friend Zora has just written a very swell novel. . . . This is so good that I think you and Zora had better kiss and make up.” A good new book by any of his friends was always a source of pride for Van Vechten; he thought there was no more satisfying accomplishment, though, for himself, despite the fact that some of his friends thought Parties his best novel yet, he was turning more and more to his new passion, photography. He had his camera along in Chicago, and he was looking forward to taking some pictures of Hurston.
Hurston thought it was a shame that Van Vechten wasn’t writing—maybe she wondered if the reception of Nigger Heaven had been too much for him. She had sent him letters suggesting good subjects, but even she couldn’t persuade him to write fiction anymore. In 1931, the artist and illustrator Miguel Covarrubias had come back from Europe with a Leica camera and a little while later Van Vechten bought himself one and never looked back. He didn’t print his images too carefully; he was never that interested in the chemical part of the process. Photography, for him, was a social engagement. He photographed Hughes, dozens of times, and Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Ethel Waters, Arna Bontemps, Beauford Delaney, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Bessie Smith. In 1936, Van Vechten took Willa Cather in a fur wrap and delicately feathered hat. Cather disliked the photographs so much that she told their shared publisher Alfred Knopf to try to get Van Vechten to burn them; Zora Neale Hurston would have enjoyed that story. She kept track of Willa Cather and in 1934 had written to a critic who had favorably reviewed Jonah’s Gourd Vine that one of the six books that had had the most influence on her was Cather’s novel My Ántonia.
Eventually, Van Vechten also tracked down and photographed Marianne Moore, Eartha Kitt, James Earl Jones, Joe Louis, Ella Fitzgerald, Marian Anderson, Harry Belafonte, LeRoi Jones, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer. When Billie Holiday sat for him, he had trouble; she wouldn’t really settle down and open up to the camera. He showed her the photographs he’d taken of Bessie Smith, and Lady Day was so moved that she posed for him until late, late at night, and then told her life story until five o’clock in the morning. “I am just recovering,” he wrote to Hughes, relating the story with something like awe; she “was here for WEEKS.” Van Vechten was good at listening to people who had troubles—it made him sorry to see people he knew suffering, but he didn’t try to pretend life had no tragic side. He never saw Holiday again, and he often said that photographing her had been one of the events of his life. Certainly there had always been that in him that makes a portrait photographer.
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Van Vechten nodded approvingly when Hurston walked through the door of his hotel room. She had come in her coat with the fur collar and her soft hat with the long feather arching across the front. She was always a gorgeous dresser; her favorite colors were red and white. Hurston took off her hat and coat, and she and Van Vechten rang for breakfast. He gave her the stories of Stein’s latest lecture. The bellboy arrived with eggs and bacon. As they ate, perhaps Hurston told Van Vechten that the drama department at Fisk was thinking of creating a special position for her, and she had been firing off letters, with the help of the typist at the YWCA where she was staying—she disliked typing and always used a typist if one was available—to the various parties involved. Hurston was not timid about asking for favors, and after the last few years of living hand to mouth she was seizing the chance.
All the while they were talking, Van Vechten was wondering to himself what would make a good background for Hurston. He usually used patterned fabrics as a backdrop, but she looked so radiant that day that he thought they might try a plain wall. When they had finished eating, he got her coat and hat, and they went out of the hotel and found a place where the light would fall on her from slightly above—so that people would be able to see her cheekbones and the shadows under them—and they set to work.
Van Vechten wasn’t in the least worried about getting a “natural” quality in his photographs; he liked them to have drama, also one of Hurston’s favorite qualities. His subjects often seemed to be onstage or in a greenroom; they wore costumes and looked as if they had just finished a rehearsal or had stopped in on their way to dinner. In his pictures, it was clear that life was going on.
Over the course of her career, Hurston developed the idea that a sense of drama was one of the key characteristics of Black art and life. She said the others were angularity, asymmetry, originality, and what she called “the will to adorn.” Judging by the cluttered decoration in Carl Van Vechten’s apartment and photographs—both were encrusted with baubles and carpets and vases and Indonesian shadow puppets and Navajo rugs and Mexican votive art—this last was a quality he shared, too.
Zora Neale Hurston by Carl Van Vechten, 1934.
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During those weeks in Chicago, Van Vechten also took a portrait of Hurston in another role. For that photo she was dressed like an anthropologist, ready to go into the field, in a severe suit with her hat pulled firmly down. Van Vechten arranged some stripy material behind her, and she looked directly out at the camera, no nonsense about her.
Van Vechten always wanted to know all about Hurston’s latest efforts in collecting. In Chicago, she was full of “lies” and tall tales and hoodoo practices and jook-joint songs. Lippincott’s, which had published Jonah’s Gourd Vine, had accepted her folklore collection, Mules and Men, for which she had spent nearly seven years gathering material. The following year, she went collecting with the young musicologist Alan Lomax, who was later to establish one of the great archives of American folk music. Hurston helped Lomax to get work songs recorded, and sorrow songs. Lomax said he’d never, ever had an experience like collecting with Zora Hurston; she was “the best informed person today on Western Negro Folklore,” and people would tell her anything—he said they came knocking on the door all night long with more songs.
Hurston decided against the drama job at Fisk when Singing Steel was such a success that the Rosenwald Foundation, funded by Sears, Roebuck and Company’s president Julius Rosenwald, awarded her a fellowship to pursue her doctorate in anthropology at Columbia. For Hurston, the connections between drama and anthropology were perfectly evident—she sometimes remarked on the way they came together in religious ritual. Much of her fiction had to do with religion; when she died, she was writing a novel tentatively called Herod the Great, which was intended to be both a portrait of Herod and, taking on a subject that grew out of the work of William James, a history of world religions. Her projects were on a massive scale, and they were hard for her to manage—she almost never had the resources to keep pace with her ambitions.
Sometimes, she undermined herself. Just as she was nearing the completion of a book or a collection, she was often overtaken by the compelling need to buy some land in Florida to start a Black artists’ colony or to go to Honduras to do research among the Paya Indians. The officer of the Rosenwald Foundation responsible for her fellowship, Edwin Embree, didn’t look kindly on her ancillary projects and, changing the conditions of the fellowship midstream, rescinded the foundation’s support after only seven months. Hurston never finished her doctorate.
She left Columbia and went to work on Walk Together Chillun!, the first production of the Negro Unit of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project. The Negro Unit was run by John Houseman; in 1936, a year after its inception, Orson Welles staged there his famous all-Black Macbeth. Carl Van Vechten took Welles’s photograph and he saw Macbeth five times. He wrote to Langston Hughes after his third experience: “Again crowds, again cheers, again all sorts of excitement! Ive [sic] found out at last what Harlem really likes. Have you ever heard of any other playwright who could create standing room at every performance at the Lafayette for five weeks?” The year before, Hughes had written to Van Vechten to come down to Mexico to go to parties with “Diego and all his wives” and to meet Hughes’s new roommate, the young photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Van Vechten had admired Rivera’s Rockefeller Center murals, destroyed for their political content in February of 1934, but he couldn’t possibly go to Mexico when there was so much going on in New York.
A year before Macbeth, Hurston wrote for the Harlem Negro Unit an all-Black Lysistrata that John Houseman said “scandalized both the Left and the Right in its saltiness.” It was never produced. Hurston wasn’t afraid of sex—she had her own ways of dealing with the assumptions people made about Black women and with the men who seemed to think that she looked, as she said, “sort of couchy.” She didn’t bother too much about other people’s opinions: she smoked on the street before most other women would have dared; she went, her neighbors said, with different men; she generally chose her work over her three husbands and her lovers.
Though it made her life harder, Carl Van Vechten loved his friend’s independence. When the Rosenwald support was withdrawn, Van Vechten recommended her for a Guggenheim, writing, “Zora Hurston is one of the most important, some might consider her the most important, of the young Negro writers.” He continued, “She has an amazing talent, perhaps even genius, for the collection, selection, and creative application of folk material.” Van Vechten and Hurston shared a concern for preserving experience; they worried about what would happen to the vividness that they both loved. She defined this preoccupation best: “Research,” she wrote, “is a formalized curiosity.”
Zora Neale Hurston was not always quite as careful in her curiosity as the scholars who were her contemporaries would have liked—she shaped material to her own ends and, on at least one occasion, plagiarized another scholar’s work. People were quick to use this incident as an excuse for dismissing all her intellectual work. She had other troubles, too. Sometimes her Black colleagues were angry at her when she refused to make the stories she collected more polite. She didn’t see any good reason to force folk culture to conform to some scholar’s notion of uprightness.
There was something about Hurston that, if it didn’t exactly invite attack, at the very least didn’t protect her from it. Some years later, she went through one of the most painful episodes in her life: she was falsely accused of child abuse and spent humiliating months in court establishing her innocence. Van Vechten went to court with her, and she never forgot his loyalty.
