A Chance Meeting, page 26
Though Mailer was troubled by his fame, years of being a public figure also gave him a rare confidence in the inherent interest of his own experience. Beginning in the late fifties, in his nonfiction, he was able to be unusually forthcoming about his inner life. He realized that his general philosophy of race wasn’t as revealing as his descriptions, particularly in his essays on boxing, of how it felt to him to be with a powerful Black man. In “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” Mailer thought that his ability to get the reader out of the convention hall and into a room with Kennedy helped Kennedy get elected. And by the time he wrote Miami and the Siege of Chicago, in 1968, Mailer was well aware that his engagement with existentialism wasn’t as profound as his explanation of what it was in a man’s soul that would lead him to vote for Richard Nixon. The careful setting out of his own goodwill, mistrustfulness, ambition, and insecurity became one of Mailer’s most important contributions to the writers coming after him.
•
In Chicago for the Liston-Patterson fight, in 1962, Mailer and Baldwin saw each other for the first time since “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.” In Mailer’s report for Esquire, he explained that between Baldwin and him there had been “a chill.” They sat at the fight with “a hundred-pound cake of ice on the empty seat between us.” Mailer included most of the details of his interaction with Baldwin but did not say that he was in the midst of a feud with William Styron and he felt that Baldwin had taken Styron’s side, nor did he acknowledge that the icy silence came in part from something he had said at a party two nights before, an unrecorded sentence that had reduced Baldwin to tears. Each man was ostensibly in Chicago to see Patterson win, but each man’s experience of the fight was more about their friendship than it was about anything else.
Patterson lost in a record two minutes and six seconds. As Patterson lay on the floor, James Baldwin was heard to say, “What happened?” Mailer thought the outcome was partly his fault, for having contributed to the terrible psychic energy in the room, sitting there “brooding about the loss of a friendship that it was a cruel and stupid waste to lose.” For his part, Baldwin later wrote that he was full of “a weird and violent depression,” which he attributed to the fact that he “had had a pretty definitive fight with someone with whom I had hoped to be friends.” After Patterson was knocked out, it transpired that Baldwin had lost seven hundred and fifty dollars and Mailer only twenty-eight. Holding back their brooding and their violent depression, they managed to laugh together, and, as will happen with people who have loved each other, for a few hours it seemed that they had made up.
Mailer made one further spectacle of himself. He stayed up all night drinking, and in the morning upstaged Liston’s victory press conference to announce himself the publicist for the next Liston-Patterson fight, at which point he was carried, in his chair, out of the room. He found his way back to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, where he was staying.
Baldwin dropped by before he left town, and they chatted together, still in the tenuous peace created by Liston’s knockout. Baldwin asked after Mailer’s sister. Mailer said she was fine, still beautiful, “and why didn’t he think about marrying her.” “So then,” Mailer wrote, still reporting for Esquire, “I was one up on Jimmy.” Mailer felt that he was being congenial, even progressive. But Baldwin, who did use to say that the true test for racial progress wasn’t the end of Jim Crow or integration of the schools, it was whether in fact white America would let Black America marry its daughters and sisters, still might have heard something quite different. He might have heard Mailer saying, “Send the love letters to her, Jimmy, but not to me.”
The bar near Hugh Hefner’s enormous pool got very quiet. Baldwin stood up and said he guessed he would be going. Mailer, after thirty-six sleepless hours of alcohol, couldn’t quite tell if he had made the break he had been wanting and dreading. He was slurring his words, but he tried to seem cool as he said good-bye.
29. ROBERT LOWELL AND ELIZABETH BISHOP
IN JANUARY or February, when the days were still blunt and short and when the wind in Maine or Boston blew especially chill, when old houses creaked and strained, the streets were muddy and bleak, and the back of winter was long from broken, then Robert Lowell would begin to crack up. He would become a more and more insistently brilliant talker; new friends were dazzled and deceived by his mania. He would talk for hours about Hitler, Stalin, Alexander, Caligula (from whom, in high school, he’d gotten his nickname, Cal). Once, traveling in Argentina, he would insist on sitting on every equestrian statue in Buenos Aires. He would begin to drink more and more—one of his companions remembered six double vodkas before lunch. Even new friends would begin to worry, while old friends would resignedly start calling doctors. Robert Lowell would fall in love with a young woman, whom he was sure he was meant to be with, without whom he could not live, and he would convince her of this. There would be “an episode,” sometimes involving the police. He would be committed to McLean’s, to Boston Psychopathic, to Columbia Presbyterian. He was once smuggled into a military hospital in Munich; the director, upon discovering that Lowell had been a conscientious objector, bellowing memorably, “Get that son of a bitch out of here!” In the hospital, he would be kept in a padded cell, given Thorazine or electric-shock therapy. In a month or two, he would settle out, raw, embarrassed, spent, and he would eat, as he once wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, “bitter coffee-grounds of dullness, guilt, etc.” Summer would come; he would write poems.
•
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell met in 1947, at Randall Jarrell’s house. Lowell had recently published Lord Weary’s Castle, a book of poetry in a more elaborate, less conversational style than that which Lowell used later, and he was about to become the consultant to the Library of Congress, a position later called poet laureate. Before she met them, Bishop had been a little in awe of Jarrell and Lowell and the authority with which they moved through the world of professional poetry; she was surprised that she was instantly at ease with Lowell. In an essay about Lowell, left unfinished at her death, she wrote that that night “Lowell arrived and I loved him at first sight.”
Lowell was very handsome and often described by people who knew him as a bear. He didn’t always know his own strength. He broke the nose of his first wife, Jean Stafford, twice. Bishop seemed to be able to see past or around this part of Lowell. She remembered, years later, thinking in the taxi on the way home “that it was the first time I had ever actually talked with some one about how one writes poetry—and thinking that it . . . could be strangely easy, ‘Like exchanging recipes for making a cake.’”
A little while after they met, Lowell reviewed Bishop’s first book, North & South (which contained “Roosters” and opened with “The Map”—“More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors”), thoughtfully and with praise. He and Jarrell were both perceptive critics and appreciated Bishop’s particular working method right away. Lowell wrote that “on the surface, her poems are observations,” but underneath there is always “something in motion, weary but persisting,” and there is also “a terminus: rest, sleep, fulfillment, or death.” This was a kind of poem from which he would learn a great deal, although Bishop used to worry that she was only writing descriptions, not real poems. Later that year, Lord Weary’s Castle edged out North & South to win the Pulitzer Prize; Lowell wondered if the better book had won.
•
Robert Lowell by Richard Avedon, 1962.
Then next summer, in 1948, Bishop was staying at a house in Stonington, Maine. She liked Maine, it felt close to Nova Scotia, where she had spent much of the first five years of her life, with her grandparents, in a village she always associated both with the clear, attentive happiness of childhood and with her mother’s mental illness and eventual institutionalization. That summer, Lowell and the woman who was then his lover, Carley Dawson, came to visit. It was a somewhat tumultuous weekend; Lowell and Dawson fought for most of it, and she left a day early. After Dawson had gone, Lowell and Bishop spent the day together. They went swimming. Mostly they sat on the rocks near the cold Maine water, Lowell laughing and splashing and saying great swooping, daring things that would make her laugh, and Bishop steady and alert, telling him a story about Marianne Moore at the zoo, at ease by the water, having grown up always swimming and boating and fishing.
In the next few weeks, Robert Lowell started to tell people that he was going to marry Elizabeth Bishop. He seems to have felt that he had proposed or made it clear that he would. Perhaps already knowing that she would not be happy with a man, she seems to have wanted that not to have happened. Once, only, in a conversation with a close friend, did she painfully suggest the possibility that it had.
When Bishop wrote to Lowell remembering that day, she mentioned the swim, and that Lowell, for a moment posed against a tree, had briefly reminded her of Saint Sebastian. Lowell worked on a poem about that day between 1960 and 1962. In “Water,” he addressed Bishop almost as a lover, “Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.” And later,
We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.
In the poem, Lowell recalled
. . . dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock.
And he enclosed the poem in a letter to her. She wrote back to say that she had liked “Water” very much, “though the houses struck me as looking like clam shells.”
Perhaps because she was always away, or perhaps because they both felt so strongly that letters were literature, his poems to her often had the quality of letters:
. . . Do
you still hang your words in air, ten years
unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps
or empties for the unimaginable phrase—
unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?
Though he teased her for her fanatic attention to the right word, his respect for her precision intermingled with something approaching envy. In this same poem, Lowell had initially written of Bishop’s “uneasy Muse,” but by the final draft of the poem the word had become “unerring.” She would work on individual poems for decades, but Bishop remonstrated with herself for laziness, using Lowell’s example. She used to write other friends of the months and months he was spending on revisions. She admired the way he asked himself questions.
•
Lowell had been turned away by the army when he first volunteered in 1942. By 1943, when he was drafted, he felt that the war of total annihilation then being pursued against Germany and Japan, in particular the bombing of civilian targets, was counter to the principles of good and fair government. In an open letter to the president, a letter setting forth his idea of democracy in a manner worthy of all the famous Boston Lowells from whom he was descended, he said so and went to jail. A number of those Boston Lowells—including Robert Lowell’s own father, whom he loved but who he felt had knuckled under to authority—had spent their careers in the military, so this was also a more immediate rebellion. People around him admired the act and also thought his motives a little confused. Conscientious objectors to World War II were, though not unheard-of, rare, and the thought of Lowell’s action might have passed through Bishop’s mind in the summer of 1948, when the war was still very present.
In 1948, it was already obvious to Lowell, and it was becoming so to Bishop, that American military actions of the last hundred years—the taking of aboriginal lands, the war against Mexico, the conquest of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and certain decisions in World War II—had all moved the country in the direction of empire. Bishop and Lowell were far from communists, but the cold war taking shape around them did little to quiet their internal uneasiness. Bishop immersed herself in geography, both reading about it and traveling through it. Within a few years, she was to leave the country for Brazil, where she would spend the entire McCarthy period, though this was partly because she took relatively easily to the life of a Brazilian aristocrat. For his part, born to a family that knew itself back over generations, it was perhaps natural for Lowell to turn to history. Bishop read the British poets, and Lowell read the Roman ones.
Lowell trusted no government entirely, and he waited for the day when a nuclear weapon might obliterate the things dear to him. Sometimes, though, his political intuition became confused with his mania, as happened in the painful period when he led a witch hunt against Elizabeth Ames, the woman who was then the director of Yaddo, the artists’ colony where he was staying. Lowell accused her of “harboring a communist.” Other people who had been at Yaddo rallied around Ames, following a strategy outlined by Langston Hughes.
Isolation could be destabilizing for Bishop, too; Yaddo was also the setting for one of her worst breakdowns. She was staying there, trying to write poems, having trouble, and going on frightening drinking binges. Her best comfort in that time was the presence of her next-door neighbor, Beauford Delaney, with whom she used to sit in rocking chairs in the area between their two studios and drink cocktails in the late afternoon. He wasn’t having the easiest time working, either. Bishop liked Delaney’s paintings. She was an amateur painter and watercolorist who made beautiful work in a tradition she deeply respected, one that others called “the primitive style.”
Delaney sometimes sang spirituals after the communal dinners; Bishop found him steadying. When Delaney left and Katherine Anne Porter showed up, intimidating everybody at dinner with her beauty and her brilliant conversation, Bishop took a turn for the worse. From Yaddo, Bishop wrote to a friend, “I’m afraid I’m really disintegrating, just like Hart Crane, only without his gifts to make it all plausible.”
Robert Lowell was drawn to Crane and wrote “Words for Hart Crane” in the voice of the poet, “Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age, / must lay his heart out for my bed and board.” The inheritance from Crane that originated with Whitman was less central to Elizabeth Bishop. When asked who the greatest North American poet was, Bishop echoed André Gide’s comment about Victor Hugo, responding dryly, “Whitman, alas!” Lowell, more excited than Bishop by Whitman’s inclusiveness and the power of Crane’s line, wanted the force of these two poets and yet, in his periodic caution about his own strength, hesitated to exercise it. Lowell was one of Crane’s inheritors, and he was affected by the poetry of others who were: Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and John Berryman. In the 1950s strong autobiographical forces were working in Lowell, allowing him to write newly self-interrogatory poems and the essay about his childhood, “91 Revere Street,” which together became his breakthrough book, Life Studies, and moved him toward For the Union Dead, whose style was later so helpful to Lowell’s students Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
•
In the summer of 1957, Bishop went to visit Lowell, again in Maine. Lowell and Bishop were each in the most stable relationships they would ever be in. Lowell was summering in Maine with his wife, the writer and editor Elizabeth Hardwick, and was delving into the effects his parents and his New England upbringing had had on him. Bishop was living in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares, feeling more at home than she had since childhood. In the atmosphere of Brazil and of Macedo Soares’s love, Bishop had been able to return in mind to the moment when she’d been most secure and most afraid—the period of staying at her grandparents’ in Nova Scotia, taking the cow down to the field, and watching the blacksmith make horseshoes. This scene had been broken open by her mother’s scream, one which had meant that her mother had to go into a sanatorium, and these incidents had become the basis of Bishop’s story “In the Village,” published in 1953, a story that, with its child’s sense of watching someone disintegrate, was terribly moving to Robert Lowell.
Bishop arrived in Maine that summer with Macedo Soares. It was, at first, a very friendly visit, but, unsettled by signs of Lowell’s mania and, perhaps, his now inappropriate attraction to Bishop, Macedo Soares and Bishop left early. Later, Lowell wrote Bishop a letter in which he told her that he was very happy and that he was very happy that she was very happy, and because they were settled now it seemed possible to tell her that asking her to marry him was “the might-have-been” in his life. Bishop never responded directly to that letter, though the careful, appreciative, friendly tone she struck in subsequent letters acknowledged its existence. He wanted, in a way, to have her, as he wanted to encompass many of the good and fine things and people and poems he found. Perhaps, at the beginning, she had also wanted him for constant companionship, for love or for sex, but by this point she mostly wanted him for letters and literature. She wanted to be near his vitality but not inside it, and she beat a retreat.
After 1957, Lowell and Bishop went through a series of appropriations and criticisms, flights and pursuits. In 1961 he dedicated to her Imitations, his translations of Sappho, Villon, Heine, Pasternak, and others. It was a book that she felt—and had tried to suggest to him before he published it—played almost criminally fast and loose with the originals. He had read “In the Village” in 1953; in 1962, he sent it back to her in the form of a poem, “The Scream,” in which almost every line had its origin in one of hers: “A scream, the echo of a scream,” and “the horseshoes sailed through the dark / like bloody little moons,” and “Mother’s dresses were black, / or white, or black-and-white.” In one letter, she remarked, with a touch of sarcasm, that she shouldn’t bother to write her own material but just send her notes on to him straightaway. He included “The Scream,” with an acknowledgment of its origin, in For the Union Dead in 1964. When her book Questions of Travel came out the following year, she included her own “In the Village.” Robert Lowell thought Questions of Travel accomplished what Bishop had set out to do, to convey not a thought but a mind thinking. “And here, or there. . . No,” she hesitated in the title poem, “Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?”
