Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
True friendships are as rare as good governments. As we pass through the many stages of life — school years, working life, marriage, family, retirement — we gather and leave behind just as many sets of friends, each important to that time but limited as well. We grow out of friendships sometimes as easily as a pair of slacks at Thanksgiving, or having a favorite band. Some bonds, however, deny the passing of time. They deny changes of situation, absence of contact, and physical distance. Aristotle wrote, 'The perfect form of friendship is that between good people who are alike in excellence and virtue' — if that is so, and I believe that it may be, then what Words in Air depicts is not simply the gossip and shop-talk of two poets, but the written chronicle of a friendship nearing perfection. For this, these letters are a treasure.
For thirty years Lowell and Bishop engaged in an international comedy of errors, outmaneuvering each other as they tried and more often than not failed to arrive in the same place at the same time. Bishop visited New York, Lowell was in Maine. Bishop went to summer in Maine, Lowell was on a European tour. It never seemed to matter, though; not to two people for whom the written word was vivid as the living world. Their bond existed where they were both most comfortable, in poems and letters. Sometimes, the daily existence of both poets seemed mainly to be a nuisance; in nearly all cases, their prominence in the public eye was a burden, a distraction, or at best a minor amusement. However, it is the public side of their lives that is also the most entertaining element of these letters.
Interaction with poets both young (Ginsberg, Plath, Rich) and old (Frost, Moore, Pound) are occasions for anecdotes and descriptions that exhibit the un-suppressible personalities of both poets. In one especially full letter, Lowell writes, 'We've just had a visit from Snodgrass, touched with the fire of heaven I feel in a few of his daughter poems, but green and hysterical personally and rather unhinged by ten days in New York after three years of being buried and unknown at Rutgers. He wore plaid socks, woolly white underwear-like trousers, a coat made of white fibers and carbon and Ithaca, New York tailoring, spoke in a profound persuasive, hypnotic Jarrell-like whisper, then giggled.'
No other person but Robert Lowell could have produced such a marvel of judgemental description. A few letters later, discussing the affection of female poets, Bishop writes, 'They have to make quite sure the reader is not going to mis-place them socially, first — and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they'd like to say. . . I wrote a story at Vassar that was too much admired by Miss Rose Peebles, my teacher, who was very proud of being an old-school Southern lady, and suddenly this fact about women's writing dawned on me, and has haunted me ever since.'
These passages reveal volumes about each writer, and the qualities are continuous with their poetry: Lowell maniacally engaged with the details of the world, his personality shooting through in shimmering moral colors; Bishop pondering a world that judges her, and she projecting her own poignant moments unabashedly back on the world. Unlike a biography or a critical study, however, the collection is not a thesis about these poets, nor is it meant to be read from cover to cover — I tired, and failed, to do so. Thirty years of almost constant correspondence (the most common draughts caused by illnesses and travel) feels too much like living lives vicariously when reading straight through.
The best approach is to leaf through at random, as the gems are dispersed evenly, to find the inspiration for a favorite poem, or to go and find your own favorite poet in the index. Interested to see what the inspiration for 'One Art' may have been? In July 1955, she wrote, 'The word for even a small accident here is "desastre,"' and although she wrote the poem years after it pleased me to see how long a notion takes to brew. Curious about the first meeting between Ginsberg and Lowell? April of 1959, 'They are phony in [a] way because they have made a lot of publicity out of very little talent. [. . .] I think they'll die of TB;' Bishop replies, 'Oh dear, your "Beat" guests do sound awful. I have read some of the poetry and find it hopeless — and yet I sympathize with them. The trouble is mostly ignorance, don't you think — and lack of education, as well as talent.' I just wish she'd told him how she really felt. (Of course, they both eventually came around to admire Ginsberg, at least.) Frost the 'bad gray poet', Marianne Moore in her Victorian stasis, Pound mis-translating Chinese; their literary portraits alone are worth the price of admission.
It is also heartening, as a fellow poet, to read Lowell and Bishop bemoan the poor state of literature, the selections of prizes, the choices for grants and positions. Their complaints sound like any of several dinner parties I've recently attended. Bishop quips, 'And now that I have damned everyone I feel awfully cheered up.' Apparently, it is true: nothing changes. Despite their obvious personal problems, the tragedies that seemed to shadow them both, and the one that eventually consumed Lowell, nothing between the two ever seemed to change, either. They were not perfect people, neither could make that claim — but they were equal in virtue, in goodness and talent, and have left behind a correspondence as unique as their perfect friendship.
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