Water. Works. Closets.

As always, one thing leads to another. This time it’s the post from Gert Loveday’s Fun With Books that highlights Elizabeth Bishop’s tribute to her friend Robert Lowell – her poem North Haven .You can read it here Elizabeth Bishop 

Islands are Beautiful

In an interview, Bishop spoke of North Haven – an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine:

I sometimes feel that I shouldn’t keep going back to this place that I found just by chance through an ad in the Harvard Crimson. I should probably go to see some more art, cathedrals, and so on. But I’m so crazy about it that I keep going back. You can see the water, a great expanse of water and fields from the house. Islands are beautiful. Some of them come right up, granite, and then dark firs. North Haven isn’t like that exactly, but it’s very beautiful. The island is sparsely inhabited and a lot of the people who have homes there are fearfully rich. Probably if it weren’t for these people the island would be deserted the way a great many Maine islands are, because the village is very tiny. But the inhabitants almost all work—they’re lobstermen but they work as caretakers . . . The electricity there is rather sketchy. Two summers ago it was one hour on, one hour off. There I was with two electric typewriters and I couldn’t keep working. There was a cartoon in the grocery store—it’s eighteen miles from the mainland—a man in a hardware store saying, “I want an extension cord eighteen miles long!” Last year they did plug into the mainland—they put in cables. But once in a while the power still goes off.

Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27, interview with Elizabeth Spires, The Paris Review Summer 1981.

Lowell had written this poem for her:

Water

It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purple,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.

by Robert Lowell

Closets

Bishop and Lowell’s friendship dated from 1947 when they met at a dinner in NYC hosted by Randall Jarrell. it was a close friendship sustained over distance and time by correspondence in which they shared intimacy without the annoyances of actual contact.

Lowell had written Skunk Hour for Bishop modeled on her poem “The Armadillo,” which she had dedicated to him.

When it came to self-revelation in their poetry, Lowell was confessional, and Bishop the well-protected armadillo. Admonished by Adrienne Rich for her reticence about her private life, Bishop is said to have responded: “I want closets, closets, and more closets.” 

Bishop chose to manage the traumas of her life with restraint rather than emotional exhibitionism. 

And that takes me to the novels and the heartless unsentimental schoolgirls of Angela Brazil.

Waterworks

Angela Brazil was a prolific author of stories for girls, Her career spanned decades and she was still widely read when I was in school, even though she was by then hopelessly outdated. Her stories of plucky girls at boarding school – their madcap escapades, trials, and tribulations – still had a following. 

In Madcap of the School, hapless and pathetic Cynthia Green is lovelorn and moony much to the disgust of her unsympathetic fifth-form classmates. She clearly needs to shape up. A lively set decides to bring her to her senses with an elaborate prank centered on a mysterious letter from an alleged suitor, 

Distracted by romance “she missed two catches when fielding at cricket, being employed in staring sentimentally at the sky instead of watching for the ball.”

“Buck up, you silly idiot, can’t you? You’re a disgrace to the school!” snarled Nora Fawcitt furiously.

When the truth of a prank is revealed she dissolves in distress. Her classmates are heartless. 

In an obvious indication of utter wetness,  Cynthia has shared a book of poems by Emma Wheeler Wilcox with her classmates. They instantly abandon it at the prospect of the prank that will bring the hapless Cynthia back to her senses. Hence the waterworks depicted above.

Lessons learned and Cynthia bucks up. “As for her volume of Poems of Love, Hermie (Hermione Graveson, a member of the Sixth) confiscated it until the end of the term, and recommended a Manual of Cricket instead.”

So much for sentimental schoolgirls. Well – there was a war on. 

And that war provides up with a powerful image of collective grief with this photograph

Recreational Grief

This last weekend saw the 27th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, a time that many point to as a marker for when the British chose to shed their reputation for emotional control and stiff upper lip approach to public displays of grief.

Whether that is accurate or not, we do now seem to live in an era where showcasing our trauma and capacity for demonstrating our feelings is almost a competitive sport. We are awash with ostentatious caring.

Heaven forfend the public figure who does not show and perform the approved measure of visible distress at the latest outrage or disaster. 

And this brings me to that memorable line from Wendy Wasserstein’s 1991 play – The Sisters Rosensweig.

The oldest sister Sara lives in England: “What a pleasure to live in a country where our feelings are openly repressed.” Would she still be happy, one wonders?