Elizabeth Bishop - A Miracle for Breakfast, by Megan Marshall; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30
There are few lesbian couples who are as famous, highly regarded, and talked about in Rio de Janeiro as American Pulitzer and National Book Award honoree poet Elizabeth Bishop and Brazilian "modernist designer" Maria Carlotta Constallotta de Macedo Soares. Their passionate love affair of 17 years, subsequent "calamitous breakup," and Soares' premature death by a drug overdose are what many complex social and rich cultural lives are made of.
While there have been many biographies written about Bishop, Megan Marshall's A Miracle for Breakfast is a compelling read, the author having gained access to a "cache of letters" discovered after the death of Bishop's last lover, the much younger Alice Methfessel, in 2009. These are personal entrees into Bishop's most intimate life - from the death of her father when she was only eight years old, to her mother's descent into madness, and her being shuttled through childhood between grandparents in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, to her many lovers, and even letters to her psychoanalyst. I suspect Bishop would not have appreciated the public sharing of such revelations, for she was intensely private, "famously self-depreciating and famously shy."
The poet's love of women was hardly fleeting. One of her first summer "outings" began at Camp Chequesset with an audacious "swimming instructor" known as "Mike." Sensing their evolving mutual physical and emotional attraction, Mike had her young protege reassigned to her cabin while the affair seemed to flourish, sadly drifting apart come summer's end. Bishop would go on to have love affairs with many other women along with the infamous Soares, inspiring her to write some 100 poems, and essays and short stories. She "published a modest book of verse once a decade."
Some of her closest friends were also some of her greatest promoters, who encouraged her publication in The New Yorker and ascension to a teaching position at Harvard. Both were hard for the self-conscious Bishop, frustrated with the male-dominated Harvard and with The New Yorker, which "maintained a strict code of suitable topics" on which to publish. Homosexuality was not one of them.
Seeing herself increasingly marginalized as both a woman and a lesbian, Bishop accepted a position at the Library of Congress as a "poetry consultant" at the height of the Cold War. During her tenure, there were constant threats of upholding "morality and decency," along with an extended campaign to "purge the perverts" in an obsessive search for Communist Party members and their sympathizers.
While she published only 100 poems in her lifetime, Bishop left behind many unfinished drafts and unpublished poems, essays, and short stories, receiving many honoree degrees and fellowships, including a Guggenheim. Her first payment as a writer was a $5 gold piece for an essay she wrote at the age of 12, in a contest sponsored by the American Legion entitled, "Essay on Americanism."
2011 marked the 100th anniversary of the poet's birth. It was greeted by an "enormous critical reputation and great overall popularity," according to George Monteiro in his book Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After. The publication of dozens of editions of her poetry, prose, letters, drawings and paintings, and of the requisite biographies and monographs, was a long overdue tribute. I wonder what Bishop would have thought of all this attention.
In 1951, it was Lota's "impulsive" invitation that prompted her to stay in Rio, in Lota's Copacabana penthouse during the construction of a house in Petropolis, in the mountains above the sweltering city, where the rich retreated to escape the summer's heat. Brazil had a long history of tolerance, abolishing sodomy laws after independence in 1830. Bishop had lived in Key West, and after Lota's death, in San Francisco. She immersed herself in these places and relished their multicultural societies and unique characteristics, including "the really lofty vagueness of Brazil," with its "complete confusion" and its "extremely affectionate people."
Bishop's gratitude for Lota's hospitality and kindness was telling in her poem "The Shampoo": "And since the heavens will attend/As long on us, you've been, dear friend,/Precipitate and pragmatical;/And look what happens. For time is/Nothing if not amenable."
Brazil and Lota thoroughly changed Bishop's life and work, from the children of the favelas to the smell of coffee, to the estudio Lota built for her, where she lived openly with her Brazilian lover. In America, she felt her reputation was on the line - thus many biographies perceived her as being "closeted." One commentary on her life described her as "anchored by whiskey and works."
The death of Lota, of a drug overdose, seemed to haunt Bishop for her remaining years - she referred to it as the "big black wave." Grief consumed her as she tried to complete an "Elegy," a heartbreaking tribute to Lota, all to no avail: "No coffee can wwake yo/no coffee cane wakeyou no coffee/can wake you/No coffee."
To Bishop, the tempestuous Lota was "small, impulsive, and imperious," "and finally, too impatient to live."