FROM THE GUARDIAN
by William Boyd
Described as 'the writer's writer's writer', Elizabeth Bishop was one of the great 20th-century poets. William Boyd visits the house in Brazil she shared with her lover Lota, where she spent the happiest years of her turbulent life and wrote many of her best poems
Apartamento 1011, 5 Rua Antonio Vieira, Leme, Rio de Janeiro – this was Elizabeth Bishop's first address in Brazil. A few weeks ago I stood on the wavy black and white mosaic sidewalk of Copacabana beach gazing up at the 1940s building opposite. Eleventh floor, penthouse corner apartment. I tried to imagine Bishop looking out over the view. Not that much has changed here in Leme (apart from the odd skyscraper) – most of the apartment blocks fronting the ocean are from the 40s and 50s. Bishop's building is at the eastern end of the beach. West, a few blocks away, is the famous Copacabana Palace Hotel. On the hill behind the apartment I could see the vertically clustered shacks of the Favela Chapéu Mangueira on Babilônia Hill. From the apartment Bishop could see both Copacabana beach, with its kids playing football and its stalls selling coconuts, and, behind her, the lawless favela with its swarming poor. She wrote a ballad called "The Burglar of Babylon" about a young man she saw being chased by the police through the favela's noisome alleyways.
Bishop came to Brazil in 1951. She was 40 years old and had published one book of poetry, North and South, that had made her reputation in the small pool that was the American poetry world. She'd been living for some years in Key West, Florida, but, frustrated artistically and emotionally, had moved back to New York. Unhappy there, she decided that her salvation lay in travelling. Her aim was vague – to "travel round the world" – so she booked a cabin on a freighter called the SS Bowplate and headed south. The ship docked first in Santos near São Paulo (celebrated in her poem "Arrival at Santos"). She knew some people in Brazil, an American former ballet dancer called Mary Morse and her Brazilian lover, Lota Soares. It was at Lota's apartment in Leme that Bishop first stayed. Stay as long as you like, Lota said.
Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares was a year older than Bishop. She was a small, dynamic intellectual, bespectacled, a self-taught architect, a candid lesbian and fluent speaker of French and less fluent though equally voluble in English. Although she was in a relationship with Morse when she met Bishop, the attraction between Lota, as she was always known, and Bishop was almost immediate. Bishop was a small, dumpy woman with a round face and very thick, unruly, greying hair. She was shy. Like Lota she tended to wear the same clothes all the time, almost as a kind of uniform discreetly declaring her sexuality: a man's shirt and long trousers.
Drink was Bishop's secret problem. All her life she was an alcoholic of the bingeing variety. She would go months without booze and then drink herself into insensibility. She didn't care what she drank as long as it brought oblivion. On one binge, having exhausted all the alcohol in the house, she drank eau de cologne and other perfumes. She was also prone to allergies and suffered badly from asthma. She was in therapy for many years with a trusted psychiatrist. She smoked while she worked – never more than 20 a day, she said.
Elizabeth Bishop's status as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century is based on the smallest of oeuvres. Some 70 poems were published in her lifetime in four very slim volumes. She died in 1979, aware that her reputation was steadily increasing, eclipsing that of her close friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell. Since her death and the publication of two superb volumes of her correspondence, One Art and Words in Air (letters between her and Lowell) it has grown ever more secure. In the select pantheon of 20th-century poets writing in English, she is placed with TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Wallace Stevens and WH Auden. Her poems often took her years to write and complete, and their formal perfection and the simple, limpid accuracy of their language have always drawn the admiration of other poets. John Ashbery called her "the writer's writer's writer."
Flamengo Park in Rio de Janeiro used to be a landfill. It sits on the northern edge of Botafogo Bay, opposite the famous Sugarloaf. Over a period of years – 1960-66 – it was conceived as a large public park, designed, laid out, landscaped and supervised by Lota as part of a civic programme of reconstruction funded by the regional government. Walking through the mature park today you can see the prescient nature of Lota's design. Flamengo Park works. Everything from the children's playground to the football pitches, from the towering streetlamps (set extra high to give the effect of moonlight) to the groves of exotic trees – all reflect her passionate energy and capacity for decision-making. Lota's obsessive dedication to the design and construction of Flamengo Park brought about the end of her relationship with Bishop. Flamengo Park consumed her and made her ill – and Bishop came to hate the place.
Grinding effortfully up the steep hill, the Rua Djanira, the smell of the clutch burning out, our car reached the gate of Lota and Bishop's other home, Fazenda Samambaia, in the hills near Petrópolis, an hour or so north of Rio today, but a perilous three-hour journey in the 50s. Stepping out of the car and looking around, I saw immediately what an extraordinary project it was for Lota to dream up: to design and build a glass and steel modernist house on top of a distant, isolated hill with a beetling granite cliff at its back. It must have seemed like madness to her fellow architect, Sérgio Bernardes, but Lota would not be daunted. The house was completed in 1952, and she and Bishop moved in. Above it rises the cliff that Bishop described in "Song for the Rainy Season" – "Without water / The great rock will stare / unmagnetized, bare". The steep road to the house is paved now, but it was a dirt track when Lota chose the site. Bishop would be appalled at what has happened to Fazenda Samambaia since she came to live here and to love the place. It's now a neighbourhood of vastly expensive summer homes owned by Rio's plutocracy. Gated communities and tennis courts, uniformed guards and razor wire. But you still gain a clear sense of its magnificent isolation, what it must have been like in the 50s – the forest-covered, mist-shrouded mountains still providing an incredible view: "The mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled."
Happiness came to Bishop in Brazil – or she found happiness in her strange new life with Lota. Samambaia became her true home. She never liked Rio: too noisy, too hot, too many people. Lota built her a small studio in the garden, and Bishop wrote most of her great poems here during the 15 years she lived with Lota. She became slowly absorbed into the small community of servants and their families and the sharecroppers and peasant farmers that existed around the house; became happily accustomed to the astonishing fecundity of the rainforest and the makeshift necessities of living in the hinterland of a rackety third-world country.
Influence. Lota was given the job of supervising the design of Parque do Flamengo by her close friend, the charismatic governor of Rio de Janeiro state, Carlos Lacerda. It was a pretty clear act of political nepotism. Lota was unqualified and inexperienced – and a woman. And a gay woman, as we would now describe her. The fact that she was offered the job and accepted it and that she contentedly lived her life openly as a lesbian says a great deal for the enlightened social attitudes in 1960s Rio. It's almost impossible to imagine such a high-profile, prestigious public-sector job being handed to someone like Lota anywhere else in the world at the time, let alone anywhere else in Brazil. That said, it turned out to be something of a poisoned chalice. Lota's appointment was almost immediately resented; her patrician drive and manner irritated the civil servants she worked with; and her refusal to compromise began to grate with the jobsworths in the Superintendency of Urbanisation and Sanitation. As the park began to swallow up more and more of her waking life, Lota found herself in the firing line. Only Lacerda's support kept her in charge, even when her landscape designer publicly attacked her as an egomaniac and all-round disaster area. When Lacerda fell from grace in one of Brazil's frequent political upheavals (he feared for his life and hid for a while in Samambaia), Lota's power waned too. Embittered and ill as a result of the stress and infighting surrounding construction of the park, she tried to protect it by establishing a foundation to run and preserve it from becoming a political shuttlecock. She failed. Still, Parque do Flamengo is there today, and the fact that it is establishes it as her secret memorial – as she is nowhere acknowledged as the prime mover behind its existence. Not a plaque, not the smallest memorial. Most contemporary citizens of Rio think it was created by the landscape designer she hired, and who turned so virulently on her, Roberto Burle Marx.
Jaguar sports cars were Lota's vehicle of choice, even for Samambaia's muddy dirt tracks, though for a while she drove a black MG roadster as well – Bishop paid for it with a $1,200 cheque from the New Yorker for a short story. Such automotive statements were part of Lota's allure and part of the bravura of her personality. She and Bishop became remarkably close yet, temperamentally, they were opposites. The gregarious and the reclusive; the dynamo and the diffident procrastinator; the engagée and the politically naive; the voluble and the laconic; the hare and the tortoise. Bishop liked the sports cars but preferred them to be driven at 30mph.
Klee, Schwitters and Vuillard were Bishop's favourite painters. "Modest" artists, she called them – and I think you can see in their small-scale but vibrantly beautiful works something of what Bishop was trying to achieve in her poetry. These were her values, so she wrote to Lowell, how she faced the world: "modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time".
Lesbian was not a word Bishop particularly liked but she was already aware of the direction her sexuality was taking when she was at Vassar in the 1930s. Her first serious relationship with another woman took place while she was in her 20s. She had many affairs (including one long one during the years she lived in Key West) before she met Lota. Lota was the love of her life but, even during their years together, Bishop's affections could stray. The poet Anne Stevenson met Bishop in the 60s and wrote: "Always shy and, in a dignified way, modest, Elizabeth was pleased I took so much interest in her poetry, not her life . . . Art, for her, was crystalline, a possibility for purity. That's why she didn't sully it with excretions from her own life."
Mystery surrounds the identity of the young woman Bishop met in Seattle when she went to take up the post of writer-in-residence at the University of Washington in 1966. She's given various pseudonyms in biographical accounts of Bishop's life: "Suzanne Bowen", "Adrienne Collins" and even "XY". Bishop was in her mid-50s when she met Suzanne Bowen, who was in her early 20s and the pregnant wife of a Seattle painter. Bishop was drinking, miserable to be away from Brazil and Lota and therefore more than unusually feckless. Suzanne stepped in – found her an apartment, kept her company. They became lovers. Even when Suzanne gave birth to her child (a boy), nothing changed in this curious ménage. When Bishop returned to Brazil, Lota discovered evidence of the affair in a letter she opened inadvertently. Her relationship with Bishop never recovered.
Nobody should judge by appearances. This old adage applies resolutely to Bishop. There was something about her – photographs don't supply the evidence – that made her intensely attractive to people. Even Lowell contemplated asking her to marry him. Her various affairs lasted well into her late middle age. People – women – wanted to look after her, wanted to be with her, help her out, care for her. It has been said that this was because she was some kind of poet-genius, but I don't quite buy that explanation. Bishop had an appeal that was extra-poetic, I would say, Lota's swift dedication to her being the best case in point. Lota knew lots of famous artists – a minor American poet (as Bishop was when she first met her) would not be any kind of sexual draw, or any great scalp to claim. Lota decided to change her life when she met Bishop – and it wasn't easy, what with Bishop's drinking and other health problems. Bishop's attractiveness was something intrinsically to do with Bishop – not the poetry.
Ouro Preto is an old Baroque colonial town in the Minas Gerais state province of Brazil. It was here that Brazil's gold mines were found and exploited in the 17th and 18th centuries and Ouro Preto benefited from the vast wealth of the ore – hence the name. Bishop travelled widely in Brazil – in Amazonia and other remote parts – and was better travelled than Lota. When the affair with Lota began to founder, Bishop saw in Ouro Preto another Samambaia. She bought a semi-ruined house there and embarked on a maddening, frustrating period of trying to have it restored. Lota visited – and did not see the appeal of the town, or of the ramshackle house Bishop had bought. It became a symbol of the schism that was developing between them. While the house was being restored Bishop would stay in an inn across the street run by a Danish widow called Lilli Correia de Araújo. They had a short but intense affair.
Petrópolis is an extraordinary place, even today. Created by Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, in the 19th century, it was a summer retreat for the ruling royal family and therefore the government. It is set in the forested mountains behind Rio, so even in high summer its temperature is bearable. It's worth bearing this fact in mind: Samambaia was perhaps half an hour down the road from Petrópolis. Bishop was hardly in the sticks. The town was a Ruritanian model of an imperial retreat, full of palaces and villas, canals and boulevards, smart shops and theatres, cafés and restaurants. Le tout Rio decamped there in the hot months of January, February and March. Today it retains its faded retro charm – a 19th-century anachronism in the booming 21st-century Brazilian economy. However remote Bishop thought she was in her house on top of the hill, she was never slumming it, never really the hardy pioneer. It was all rather chic.
'Questions of Travel" is one of the rare Bishop poems that one can easily interpret as autobiographical. Set squarely in the house at Samambaia, it analyses Bishop's decision to leave America and seek her destiny, whatever that might have been, elsewhere. "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?", the poet asks. "Must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?" And then, in the very last lines, it prompts another question: "Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?" The answer we are meant to infer is, I believe, a confident "no". Bishop – born in Worcester, Massachusetts, a New Englander through and through – was made by her life in Brazil. Brazil became her home – however eccentric, irritating, enthralling, frightening, exotic and perplexing a place it might seem to be, depending on the occasion. When she finally left it in 1971, for the last time, the happiest period of her life was over.
Robert Lowell, dear friend, fellow poet, mentor, patron, ally, almost-lover, is the poetic touchstone in Bishop's life. The graph-lines of their close friendship are highly revealing: at the beginning Lowell is the undisputed star of American poetry – young, handsome, patrician, dynamic, learned, sought-after – and Bishop the country-mouse. Slowly but surely over the long, sometimes fraught years of their relationship the balance changed. Lowell's talent seemed to desert him as Bishop's became more secure. As a poet Lowell became verbose and undisciplined – Bishop eked out her perfect poems a few at a time. Lowell came to Rio to visit her in 1962 and all seemed to go well, though when he moved on to Buenos Aires he had an epic nervous breakdown. In their correspondence one sees the change as Bishop, timid disciple, becomes the new master – and the young, confident maestro senses his powers waning. Bishop's poetic example was one Lowell couldn't really live with. Their friendship nearly ended after he recycled personal letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick in a volume of poetry (The Dolphin). Lowell changed Hardwick's letters as it suited him. Bishop's condemnation was unequivocal and shocking: this was a desecration of all the unspoken laws of poetry and of personal dignity. "[A]ren't you violating a trust?" Bishop confronted him. "Art isn't worth that much," she went on. "It's not being 'gentle' to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way – it's cruel." Somehow their friendship recovered, but the equilibrium was never fully re-established. The power was all Bishop's now. Her elegiac poem written on Lowell's death in 1977 is devastatingly accurate. "You can't derange, or rearrange, / Your poems again . . . / The words won't change again. Sad friend you cannot change."
Suicide is the usual verdict on Lota's death – though her family disputed it, and still do. She and Bishop had spilt up. Flamengo Park, the affair with "Suzanne Bowen", ill-health, the progressive dysfunction of their shared life had brought about a temporary separation. Bishop had quit Brazil and moved to New York, looking for teaching posts at universities to support herself. Lota, unwell, unhappy, stressed out and humiliated by the ongoing fiasco that was the administration of Flamengo Park, came to stay with Bishop at a friend's apartment to see if they could somehow put things back together. That first night, after going to bed after a convivial, friendly meal, she collapsed in a coma. Bishop found her in the morning and she died in hospital a few days later.
Tragedy seems almost too bland a word to describe Lota's death and its consequences on Bishop. Blame, guilt, incomprehension, complete emotional trauma, personal collapse all swept in. Bishop went back to Brazil but was greeted with overt hostility by Lota's family and friends. Somehow she was seen as responsible for Lota's death, however unfair that judgment was. Even Ouro Preto and the cherished, problematic house had lost its familiar charm. Everything seemed to be going wrong. Bishop enlisted Suzanne Bowen's help and flew her out to Brazil to try to settle her affairs (this did not look good to Lota's family, as can be imagined). Then Suzanne had a breakdown and had to be hospitalised herself. Bishop's eventual departure from the place that she had loved, and that had made her as a poet, was fraught, shaming and embittering. After 1971 she never set foot in the country again.
Understanding Elizabeth Bishop is a bit like trying to understand her poems. At first glance they seem straightforward descriptions but further readings reveal new depths, more potent nuances. The same applies to Bishop – the almost schoolmarmy little woman led a life of profound emotional and intellectual complexity. She once wrote to Lowell: "My passion for accuracy may strike you as old-maidish – but since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it?"
Valium is the drug on which Lota overdosed. Although she was in a coma when she was taken to hospital, it was thought that she would survive – very few people die from an overdose of Valium. But she never came round. Bishop wrote to friends: "She was a wonderful, remarkable woman and I'm sorry you didn't know her better. I had the 12 or 13 happiest years of my life with her before she got sick – and I suppose that is a great deal in this unmerciful world."
William Thomas Bishop, Elizabeth's father, died when she was eight months old. Her mother, Gertrude, never recovered from the loss and was institutionalised for the rest of her life. The last time Bishop saw her mother was in 1916, when she was five. Her mother died in a mental hospital 20 years later. Bishop was to all intents and purposes orphaned at a very early age. She once said to Lowell: "When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived."
'X" might have marked the spot – spraypainted on the cracked and oil-stained tarmac – in a crash investigation team's attempt to understand why a Honda Accord foolishly drove the wrong way down a two-lane one-way street. My driver was trying to find the highway back to Rio from the winding lanes around Bishop's Samambaia house. He innocently turned right into the one-way street (we later saw that the "no entry" sign was the size of a beer mat). The first car hurtling towards us managed to swerve out of the way. Another car stopped, informing us we were in a one-way street. As the drivers conferred, a bus thundered by, horn blaring. I urged my driver to reverse, rapidly. We did so and found a bus stop where we could turn. Delayed shock inevitably set in as I considered this narrow escape. Bishop always dreaded these journeys back to Rio. Lota was a reckless, heedless driver – Bishop always feared she'd meet her death on the road from Samambaia to Rio.
Yeats's famous lines "I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" had a particular resonance for Bishop. She liked to quote them.
Zona Sul is the official designation of that district of Rio where Lota's Leme apartment was to be found. South Zone. In Lota's will Bishop was left the much-disliked apartment. Beloved Samambaia was bestowed on Mary Morse. And so Bishop found herself, in 1967, the owner of the apartment where she had first stayed in 1951 on what was meant to be a two-week visit to Brazil before she moved on to Buenos Aires. She sold the apartment as quickly as possible. After the Brazilian years Bishop took up a teaching post at Harvard in the 1970s. She was never that happy teaching poetry, but it provided her with an income while her fame as a poet steadily grew. She died in Boston of a cerebral aneurysm on 6 October 1979.
Described as 'the writer's writer's writer', Elizabeth Bishop was one of the great 20th-century poets. William Boyd visits the house in Brazil she shared with her lover Lota, where she spent the happiest years of her turbulent life and wrote many of her best poems
Apartamento 1011, 5 Rua Antonio Vieira, Leme, Rio de Janeiro – this was Elizabeth Bishop's first address in Brazil. A few weeks ago I stood on the wavy black and white mosaic sidewalk of Copacabana beach gazing up at the 1940s building opposite. Eleventh floor, penthouse corner apartment. I tried to imagine Bishop looking out over the view. Not that much has changed here in Leme (apart from the odd skyscraper) – most of the apartment blocks fronting the ocean are from the 40s and 50s. Bishop's building is at the eastern end of the beach. West, a few blocks away, is the famous Copacabana Palace Hotel. On the hill behind the apartment I could see the vertically clustered shacks of the Favela Chapéu Mangueira on Babilônia Hill. From the apartment Bishop could see both Copacabana beach, with its kids playing football and its stalls selling coconuts, and, behind her, the lawless favela with its swarming poor. She wrote a ballad called "The Burglar of Babylon" about a young man she saw being chased by the police through the favela's noisome alleyways.
Bishop came to Brazil in 1951. She was 40 years old and had published one book of poetry, North and South, that had made her reputation in the small pool that was the American poetry world. She'd been living for some years in Key West, Florida, but, frustrated artistically and emotionally, had moved back to New York. Unhappy there, she decided that her salvation lay in travelling. Her aim was vague – to "travel round the world" – so she booked a cabin on a freighter called the SS Bowplate and headed south. The ship docked first in Santos near São Paulo (celebrated in her poem "Arrival at Santos"). She knew some people in Brazil, an American former ballet dancer called Mary Morse and her Brazilian lover, Lota Soares. It was at Lota's apartment in Leme that Bishop first stayed. Stay as long as you like, Lota said.
Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares was a year older than Bishop. She was a small, dynamic intellectual, bespectacled, a self-taught architect, a candid lesbian and fluent speaker of French and less fluent though equally voluble in English. Although she was in a relationship with Morse when she met Bishop, the attraction between Lota, as she was always known, and Bishop was almost immediate. Bishop was a small, dumpy woman with a round face and very thick, unruly, greying hair. She was shy. Like Lota she tended to wear the same clothes all the time, almost as a kind of uniform discreetly declaring her sexuality: a man's shirt and long trousers.
Drink was Bishop's secret problem. All her life she was an alcoholic of the bingeing variety. She would go months without booze and then drink herself into insensibility. She didn't care what she drank as long as it brought oblivion. On one binge, having exhausted all the alcohol in the house, she drank eau de cologne and other perfumes. She was also prone to allergies and suffered badly from asthma. She was in therapy for many years with a trusted psychiatrist. She smoked while she worked – never more than 20 a day, she said.
Elizabeth Bishop's status as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century is based on the smallest of oeuvres. Some 70 poems were published in her lifetime in four very slim volumes. She died in 1979, aware that her reputation was steadily increasing, eclipsing that of her close friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell. Since her death and the publication of two superb volumes of her correspondence, One Art and Words in Air (letters between her and Lowell) it has grown ever more secure. In the select pantheon of 20th-century poets writing in English, she is placed with TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Wallace Stevens and WH Auden. Her poems often took her years to write and complete, and their formal perfection and the simple, limpid accuracy of their language have always drawn the admiration of other poets. John Ashbery called her "the writer's writer's writer."
Flamengo Park in Rio de Janeiro used to be a landfill. It sits on the northern edge of Botafogo Bay, opposite the famous Sugarloaf. Over a period of years – 1960-66 – it was conceived as a large public park, designed, laid out, landscaped and supervised by Lota as part of a civic programme of reconstruction funded by the regional government. Walking through the mature park today you can see the prescient nature of Lota's design. Flamengo Park works. Everything from the children's playground to the football pitches, from the towering streetlamps (set extra high to give the effect of moonlight) to the groves of exotic trees – all reflect her passionate energy and capacity for decision-making. Lota's obsessive dedication to the design and construction of Flamengo Park brought about the end of her relationship with Bishop. Flamengo Park consumed her and made her ill – and Bishop came to hate the place.
Grinding effortfully up the steep hill, the Rua Djanira, the smell of the clutch burning out, our car reached the gate of Lota and Bishop's other home, Fazenda Samambaia, in the hills near Petrópolis, an hour or so north of Rio today, but a perilous three-hour journey in the 50s. Stepping out of the car and looking around, I saw immediately what an extraordinary project it was for Lota to dream up: to design and build a glass and steel modernist house on top of a distant, isolated hill with a beetling granite cliff at its back. It must have seemed like madness to her fellow architect, Sérgio Bernardes, but Lota would not be daunted. The house was completed in 1952, and she and Bishop moved in. Above it rises the cliff that Bishop described in "Song for the Rainy Season" – "Without water / The great rock will stare / unmagnetized, bare". The steep road to the house is paved now, but it was a dirt track when Lota chose the site. Bishop would be appalled at what has happened to Fazenda Samambaia since she came to live here and to love the place. It's now a neighbourhood of vastly expensive summer homes owned by Rio's plutocracy. Gated communities and tennis courts, uniformed guards and razor wire. But you still gain a clear sense of its magnificent isolation, what it must have been like in the 50s – the forest-covered, mist-shrouded mountains still providing an incredible view: "The mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled."
Happiness came to Bishop in Brazil – or she found happiness in her strange new life with Lota. Samambaia became her true home. She never liked Rio: too noisy, too hot, too many people. Lota built her a small studio in the garden, and Bishop wrote most of her great poems here during the 15 years she lived with Lota. She became slowly absorbed into the small community of servants and their families and the sharecroppers and peasant farmers that existed around the house; became happily accustomed to the astonishing fecundity of the rainforest and the makeshift necessities of living in the hinterland of a rackety third-world country.
Influence. Lota was given the job of supervising the design of Parque do Flamengo by her close friend, the charismatic governor of Rio de Janeiro state, Carlos Lacerda. It was a pretty clear act of political nepotism. Lota was unqualified and inexperienced – and a woman. And a gay woman, as we would now describe her. The fact that she was offered the job and accepted it and that she contentedly lived her life openly as a lesbian says a great deal for the enlightened social attitudes in 1960s Rio. It's almost impossible to imagine such a high-profile, prestigious public-sector job being handed to someone like Lota anywhere else in the world at the time, let alone anywhere else in Brazil. That said, it turned out to be something of a poisoned chalice. Lota's appointment was almost immediately resented; her patrician drive and manner irritated the civil servants she worked with; and her refusal to compromise began to grate with the jobsworths in the Superintendency of Urbanisation and Sanitation. As the park began to swallow up more and more of her waking life, Lota found herself in the firing line. Only Lacerda's support kept her in charge, even when her landscape designer publicly attacked her as an egomaniac and all-round disaster area. When Lacerda fell from grace in one of Brazil's frequent political upheavals (he feared for his life and hid for a while in Samambaia), Lota's power waned too. Embittered and ill as a result of the stress and infighting surrounding construction of the park, she tried to protect it by establishing a foundation to run and preserve it from becoming a political shuttlecock. She failed. Still, Parque do Flamengo is there today, and the fact that it is establishes it as her secret memorial – as she is nowhere acknowledged as the prime mover behind its existence. Not a plaque, not the smallest memorial. Most contemporary citizens of Rio think it was created by the landscape designer she hired, and who turned so virulently on her, Roberto Burle Marx.
Jaguar sports cars were Lota's vehicle of choice, even for Samambaia's muddy dirt tracks, though for a while she drove a black MG roadster as well – Bishop paid for it with a $1,200 cheque from the New Yorker for a short story. Such automotive statements were part of Lota's allure and part of the bravura of her personality. She and Bishop became remarkably close yet, temperamentally, they were opposites. The gregarious and the reclusive; the dynamo and the diffident procrastinator; the engagée and the politically naive; the voluble and the laconic; the hare and the tortoise. Bishop liked the sports cars but preferred them to be driven at 30mph.
Klee, Schwitters and Vuillard were Bishop's favourite painters. "Modest" artists, she called them – and I think you can see in their small-scale but vibrantly beautiful works something of what Bishop was trying to achieve in her poetry. These were her values, so she wrote to Lowell, how she faced the world: "modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time".
Lesbian was not a word Bishop particularly liked but she was already aware of the direction her sexuality was taking when she was at Vassar in the 1930s. Her first serious relationship with another woman took place while she was in her 20s. She had many affairs (including one long one during the years she lived in Key West) before she met Lota. Lota was the love of her life but, even during their years together, Bishop's affections could stray. The poet Anne Stevenson met Bishop in the 60s and wrote: "Always shy and, in a dignified way, modest, Elizabeth was pleased I took so much interest in her poetry, not her life . . . Art, for her, was crystalline, a possibility for purity. That's why she didn't sully it with excretions from her own life."
Mystery surrounds the identity of the young woman Bishop met in Seattle when she went to take up the post of writer-in-residence at the University of Washington in 1966. She's given various pseudonyms in biographical accounts of Bishop's life: "Suzanne Bowen", "Adrienne Collins" and even "XY". Bishop was in her mid-50s when she met Suzanne Bowen, who was in her early 20s and the pregnant wife of a Seattle painter. Bishop was drinking, miserable to be away from Brazil and Lota and therefore more than unusually feckless. Suzanne stepped in – found her an apartment, kept her company. They became lovers. Even when Suzanne gave birth to her child (a boy), nothing changed in this curious ménage. When Bishop returned to Brazil, Lota discovered evidence of the affair in a letter she opened inadvertently. Her relationship with Bishop never recovered.
Nobody should judge by appearances. This old adage applies resolutely to Bishop. There was something about her – photographs don't supply the evidence – that made her intensely attractive to people. Even Lowell contemplated asking her to marry him. Her various affairs lasted well into her late middle age. People – women – wanted to look after her, wanted to be with her, help her out, care for her. It has been said that this was because she was some kind of poet-genius, but I don't quite buy that explanation. Bishop had an appeal that was extra-poetic, I would say, Lota's swift dedication to her being the best case in point. Lota knew lots of famous artists – a minor American poet (as Bishop was when she first met her) would not be any kind of sexual draw, or any great scalp to claim. Lota decided to change her life when she met Bishop – and it wasn't easy, what with Bishop's drinking and other health problems. Bishop's attractiveness was something intrinsically to do with Bishop – not the poetry.
Ouro Preto is an old Baroque colonial town in the Minas Gerais state province of Brazil. It was here that Brazil's gold mines were found and exploited in the 17th and 18th centuries and Ouro Preto benefited from the vast wealth of the ore – hence the name. Bishop travelled widely in Brazil – in Amazonia and other remote parts – and was better travelled than Lota. When the affair with Lota began to founder, Bishop saw in Ouro Preto another Samambaia. She bought a semi-ruined house there and embarked on a maddening, frustrating period of trying to have it restored. Lota visited – and did not see the appeal of the town, or of the ramshackle house Bishop had bought. It became a symbol of the schism that was developing between them. While the house was being restored Bishop would stay in an inn across the street run by a Danish widow called Lilli Correia de Araújo. They had a short but intense affair.
Petrópolis is an extraordinary place, even today. Created by Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, in the 19th century, it was a summer retreat for the ruling royal family and therefore the government. It is set in the forested mountains behind Rio, so even in high summer its temperature is bearable. It's worth bearing this fact in mind: Samambaia was perhaps half an hour down the road from Petrópolis. Bishop was hardly in the sticks. The town was a Ruritanian model of an imperial retreat, full of palaces and villas, canals and boulevards, smart shops and theatres, cafés and restaurants. Le tout Rio decamped there in the hot months of January, February and March. Today it retains its faded retro charm – a 19th-century anachronism in the booming 21st-century Brazilian economy. However remote Bishop thought she was in her house on top of the hill, she was never slumming it, never really the hardy pioneer. It was all rather chic.
'Questions of Travel" is one of the rare Bishop poems that one can easily interpret as autobiographical. Set squarely in the house at Samambaia, it analyses Bishop's decision to leave America and seek her destiny, whatever that might have been, elsewhere. "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?", the poet asks. "Must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?" And then, in the very last lines, it prompts another question: "Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?" The answer we are meant to infer is, I believe, a confident "no". Bishop – born in Worcester, Massachusetts, a New Englander through and through – was made by her life in Brazil. Brazil became her home – however eccentric, irritating, enthralling, frightening, exotic and perplexing a place it might seem to be, depending on the occasion. When she finally left it in 1971, for the last time, the happiest period of her life was over.
Robert Lowell, dear friend, fellow poet, mentor, patron, ally, almost-lover, is the poetic touchstone in Bishop's life. The graph-lines of their close friendship are highly revealing: at the beginning Lowell is the undisputed star of American poetry – young, handsome, patrician, dynamic, learned, sought-after – and Bishop the country-mouse. Slowly but surely over the long, sometimes fraught years of their relationship the balance changed. Lowell's talent seemed to desert him as Bishop's became more secure. As a poet Lowell became verbose and undisciplined – Bishop eked out her perfect poems a few at a time. Lowell came to Rio to visit her in 1962 and all seemed to go well, though when he moved on to Buenos Aires he had an epic nervous breakdown. In their correspondence one sees the change as Bishop, timid disciple, becomes the new master – and the young, confident maestro senses his powers waning. Bishop's poetic example was one Lowell couldn't really live with. Their friendship nearly ended after he recycled personal letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick in a volume of poetry (The Dolphin). Lowell changed Hardwick's letters as it suited him. Bishop's condemnation was unequivocal and shocking: this was a desecration of all the unspoken laws of poetry and of personal dignity. "[A]ren't you violating a trust?" Bishop confronted him. "Art isn't worth that much," she went on. "It's not being 'gentle' to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way – it's cruel." Somehow their friendship recovered, but the equilibrium was never fully re-established. The power was all Bishop's now. Her elegiac poem written on Lowell's death in 1977 is devastatingly accurate. "You can't derange, or rearrange, / Your poems again . . . / The words won't change again. Sad friend you cannot change."
Suicide is the usual verdict on Lota's death – though her family disputed it, and still do. She and Bishop had spilt up. Flamengo Park, the affair with "Suzanne Bowen", ill-health, the progressive dysfunction of their shared life had brought about a temporary separation. Bishop had quit Brazil and moved to New York, looking for teaching posts at universities to support herself. Lota, unwell, unhappy, stressed out and humiliated by the ongoing fiasco that was the administration of Flamengo Park, came to stay with Bishop at a friend's apartment to see if they could somehow put things back together. That first night, after going to bed after a convivial, friendly meal, she collapsed in a coma. Bishop found her in the morning and she died in hospital a few days later.
Tragedy seems almost too bland a word to describe Lota's death and its consequences on Bishop. Blame, guilt, incomprehension, complete emotional trauma, personal collapse all swept in. Bishop went back to Brazil but was greeted with overt hostility by Lota's family and friends. Somehow she was seen as responsible for Lota's death, however unfair that judgment was. Even Ouro Preto and the cherished, problematic house had lost its familiar charm. Everything seemed to be going wrong. Bishop enlisted Suzanne Bowen's help and flew her out to Brazil to try to settle her affairs (this did not look good to Lota's family, as can be imagined). Then Suzanne had a breakdown and had to be hospitalised herself. Bishop's eventual departure from the place that she had loved, and that had made her as a poet, was fraught, shaming and embittering. After 1971 she never set foot in the country again.
Understanding Elizabeth Bishop is a bit like trying to understand her poems. At first glance they seem straightforward descriptions but further readings reveal new depths, more potent nuances. The same applies to Bishop – the almost schoolmarmy little woman led a life of profound emotional and intellectual complexity. She once wrote to Lowell: "My passion for accuracy may strike you as old-maidish – but since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it?"
Valium is the drug on which Lota overdosed. Although she was in a coma when she was taken to hospital, it was thought that she would survive – very few people die from an overdose of Valium. But she never came round. Bishop wrote to friends: "She was a wonderful, remarkable woman and I'm sorry you didn't know her better. I had the 12 or 13 happiest years of my life with her before she got sick – and I suppose that is a great deal in this unmerciful world."
William Thomas Bishop, Elizabeth's father, died when she was eight months old. Her mother, Gertrude, never recovered from the loss and was institutionalised for the rest of her life. The last time Bishop saw her mother was in 1916, when she was five. Her mother died in a mental hospital 20 years later. Bishop was to all intents and purposes orphaned at a very early age. She once said to Lowell: "When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived."
'X" might have marked the spot – spraypainted on the cracked and oil-stained tarmac – in a crash investigation team's attempt to understand why a Honda Accord foolishly drove the wrong way down a two-lane one-way street. My driver was trying to find the highway back to Rio from the winding lanes around Bishop's Samambaia house. He innocently turned right into the one-way street (we later saw that the "no entry" sign was the size of a beer mat). The first car hurtling towards us managed to swerve out of the way. Another car stopped, informing us we were in a one-way street. As the drivers conferred, a bus thundered by, horn blaring. I urged my driver to reverse, rapidly. We did so and found a bus stop where we could turn. Delayed shock inevitably set in as I considered this narrow escape. Bishop always dreaded these journeys back to Rio. Lota was a reckless, heedless driver – Bishop always feared she'd meet her death on the road from Samambaia to Rio.
Yeats's famous lines "I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" had a particular resonance for Bishop. She liked to quote them.
Zona Sul is the official designation of that district of Rio where Lota's Leme apartment was to be found. South Zone. In Lota's will Bishop was left the much-disliked apartment. Beloved Samambaia was bestowed on Mary Morse. And so Bishop found herself, in 1967, the owner of the apartment where she had first stayed in 1951 on what was meant to be a two-week visit to Brazil before she moved on to Buenos Aires. She sold the apartment as quickly as possible. After the Brazilian years Bishop took up a teaching post at Harvard in the 1970s. She was never that happy teaching poetry, but it provided her with an income while her fame as a poet steadily grew. She died in Boston of a cerebral aneurysm on 6 October 1979.
so smart
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