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Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and the New Yorker

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

FIONA GREEN
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Abstract

This article reads Elizabeth Bishop's poems of the 1950s in their first publishing context, the New Yorker magazine, and in relation to their scene of production, the economic and architectural environments of mid-century Brazil. The New Yorker had an important mediating function in relation to Bishop's own role as cultural go-between, and remains a crucial interpretative context for her poetry's characteristic provisionality and self-ironies. In specifying these material aspects of the outside world in which the Brazil poems were accommodated – the buildings in which they were written and the magazine in which they were published – the article offers a new perspective on the questions of belonging that lie at the heart of Bishop's unsettled poetics, and so on the politics of her writing at mid-century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , November 2012 , pp. 803 - 829
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Biele, Joelle, ed., Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), 71Google Scholar, italics in original. Further references to this collection are cited as “Biele.”

2 “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will” is the only poem in the “Brazil” section of Questions of Travel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965) not to have appeared first in the New Yorker. Bishop submitted it to the New York Review of Books during the period when her contract with the New Yorker lapsed (1961–67). All the poems in the “Elsewhere” section of Questions of Travel appeared first in the New Yorker, except “From Trollope's Journal,” which was rejected, and subsequently published in Partisan Review, and “Visits to Saint Elizabeths,” which had been commissioned by Nuova Corriente for a special issue in honour of Pound in 1956, and was subsequently published in Partisan Review.

3 Critics who have invoked political contexts for Bishop's writing include Longenbach, James, “Elizabeth Bishop's Social Conscience,” ELH, 62 (1995), 467–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which focusses on her writing of the 1930s. Betsy Erkkila offers a corrective to earlier critics who have denied Bishop's poetry a political aspect, or confined it to the psychosexual dimension, in “Elizabeth Bishop, Modernism, and the Left,” American Literary History, 8, 2 (1996), 284–310. Axelrod, Steven Gould, “Elizabeth Bishop and Containment Policy,” American Literature, 75, 4 (2003), 843–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, centres on the year Bishop spent as poetry consultant at the Library of Congress immediately before she went to Brazil. The most reliable chronological account of Bishop's travel writing remains Harrison, Victoria, Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 5, “Confronting Brazil.” Readers who have placed Bishop's travel writing in a postcolonial framework include Camille Roman, who briefly considers the “colonial narrator[s]” of Bishop's Brazil poems in Elizabeth Bishop's World War II–Cold War View (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 146–47; Cucinella, Catherine, “Bishop and Brazil: conflicting desires, unnatural oppositions,” Q/W/E/R/T/Y, 12 (2002), 109–16Google Scholar; and Fortuny, Kim, Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003)Google Scholar.

4 Yagoda, Ben, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Da Capo, 2000), 172–73Google Scholar.

5 For an example of fact checking as it applied to Bishop's poetry, see White's query, prompted by Ross, over “the matter of the color of the Air Force band's uniforms” in “A View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress.” Katherine White, letter to Bishop, 14 Nov. 1950, Biele, 54 n. 2. When William Shawn took over from Ross as editor, White wrote to Bishop, “our new editor is much interested in poetry – far more so than Mr. Ross was – and he thinks we can use serious poetry of a more varied sort than we used to.” Katherine White, letter to Bishop, 11 March 1952, Biele, 77. Transparency remained a high priority, nevertheless: the New Yorker later rejected Bishop's “The Wit” on the grounds that the editors could not agree on a single interpretation of the poem. See Howard Moss, letter to Bishop, 20 Jan. 1956, Biele, 168.

6 Joelle Biele provides a detailed narrative account of Bishop's relationship with the magazine in her introduction to Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker. For analysis of Bishop's prose in this context, see Green, Fiona, “Elizabeth Bishop's ‘In the Village’ in the New Yorker,” Critical Quarterly, 52, 2 (2010), 31–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Corey, Mary F.discusses the New Yorker's mixed messages in The World through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, xi; Thomas M. Leitch includes acute discussion of self-irony in his “The New Yorker School,” in Noel Harold Kaylor Jr., ed., Creative and Critical Approaches to the Short Story (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1997), 123–49.

8 Iain Topliss comments on a similar in-joke played between a cartoon and an advertisement in a 1987 issue of the New Yorker in The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 255–57.

9 “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” New Yorker, 2 Jan. 1960, 26; “Arrival at Santos,” New Yorker, 21 Jun. 1952, 24.

10 “Questions of Travel,” New Yorker, 21 Jan. 1956, 40; Holiday magazine advertisement, New Yorker, 21 Jan. 1956, 50–51.

11 This advertisement presents consumer desire in much the way that J. K. Galbraith understood it in 1958: advertisers “are effective only with those who are so far removed from physical want that they do not already know what they want. In this state alone, men are open to persuasion.” Galbraith, J. K., The Affluent Society, 40th anniversary edn (London: Penguin, 1998; first published 1958), 129Google Scholar.

12 As Leitch puts it, “the ideal New Yorker reader would be able to stop chuckling at the outrageous claims made by the advertisement for a weight-loss spa just long enough to dial the 800 number.” Leitch, 136.

13 Erkkila, “Elizabeth Bishop, Modernism, and the Left,” 297; Fortuny, The Art of Travel, 62.

14 Cucinella, “Bishop and Brazil,” 115; Erkkila, 297.

15 Letter to Kit and Ilse Barker, 8 Oct. 1953, in One Art: The Selected Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 273.

16 Letter to Kit and Ilse Barker, 5 Feb. 1954, in One Art, 284.

17 Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008), 241.

18 Letter to Robert Lowell, 11 Dec. 1957, in One Art, 347.

19 Letter to Howard Moss, 9 Sept. 1955, in Biele, 155.

20 Letter to May Swenson, 27 Jan. 1956, in One Art, 315.

21 The word “staff” earns its keep too, accommodating all three elements of this micro-economy: “staff” can mean employees (OED 22a), bread (OED 4b “the staff of life”), and in a now obsolete usage, poetry (OED 19a “a line of verse”).

22 Letter to Kit and Ilse Barker, 7 Feb. 1952, in One Art, 234.

23 7 June 1956, in One Art, 320.

24 “Manuelzinho,” New Yorker, 26 May 1956, 32.

25 Corey, The World through a Monocle, 148. Robert von Hallberg's reading of “Manuelzinho” is sensitive to the poem's original readership: Bishop “knows how to make her liberal readers squirm,” he says, and goes on to explore “the dark maze of obligation and affection these people [in the poem] live in.” von Hallberg, Robert, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 127Google Scholar, 129.

26 Erkkila, “Elizabeth Bishop, Modernism, and the Left,” 301.

27 Peter De Vries, “Apple of My Eye, My Eye,” New Yorker, 26 June 1954, 31–32.

28 MacDonald, Dwight, “Laugh and Lie Down,” Partisan Review, 4, 1 (1937), 44–53, 50Google Scholar.

29 Columns of numbers produce “a strange sensation or shudder” in Bishop's childhood reminiscence “Primer Class,” in Poems, Prose, and Letters, 402. Giroux dates this story to c.1960, which means that the columns in “Manuelzinho” pre-date it. Perhaps it was the crisis-ridden economy of Brazil that took Bishop back to the columns of figures in the scenes from her Nova Scotia childhood.

30 Poems, Prose, and Letters, 166.

31 Bishop, Brazil (New York: Time, Inc., 1962), 98, calls Bernardes “the most playful” of the younger generation associated with Niemeyer and Costa: “he loves the spectacular, and at their best the buildings have an unmistakable gaiety and bravura.” Russell-Hitchcock, Henry, Latin American Architecture since 1945 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 37Google Scholar, outlines a different lineage for the character of Bernardes's buildings: “in the work of Moreira, Bratke and Bernardes, in different ways and in different degrees, a quieter and more disciplined elegance appears related ultimately to the work of Mies outside Latin America rather than to that of Le Corbusier.”

32 Letter to Dr. Anny Baumann, 28 Dec. 1952, in One Art, 253. Read, Justin, “Alternative Functions: Oscar Niemeyer and the Poetics of Modernity,” Modernism/Modernity, 12, 2 (2005), 253–272CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 272 n. 24, cites Niemeyer's statement that Brazilian architecture “is forced to make improvisation its basic element.” My discussion of Brazilian modernist architecture, especially of its functionalist and aesthetic aspects, is indebted to Read's excellent article.

33 Read, 261.

34 Letter to Marianne Moore, 3 March 1952, in One Art, 237.

35 Ibid.

36 Letter to Dr Anny Baumann, 28 Dec. 1952, in One Art, 252–53.

37 Justin Read, at 257, argues that “in general terms, then, lyricism could be construed as superfluous to the explicit aims of functionalism.” His discussion of Niemeyer's “Pombal” in Brasília lies behind my reading of Bishop's studio: “the form of the Pombal, in other words, adheres quite forcefully to the formal restrictions of functionalist modernism, it is merely that the function itself is superfluous” (268).

38 “Song for a Rainy Season,” New Yorker, 8 Oct. 1960, 40.

39 The OED helpfully exemplifies the negative and positive connotations of “unbidden” as it pertains to abundant plant growth: Dryden gives “burrs and brambles, an unbidden crew of graceless guests,” whereas in Pope's Iliad, “glad earth from her bosom pours fourth unbidden herbs and voluntary flowers.”

40 For Macedo Soares's increasingly public role in the political and cultural life of Rio, see Oliveira, Carmen L., Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, trans. Neil Besner (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

41 Bernardes, Sérgio, “Habitation aux environs de Petrópolis,” L'architecture d'aujourd'hui, 42–43 (Aug. 1952), 70–71Google Scholar. Mindlin, Henrique E., Modern Architecture in Brazil (New York and London: Architectural Press, 1956)Google Scholar. Mindlin's prefatory acknowledgements include thanks to Macedo Soares for hospitality at Samambaia.

42 In the same letter to Anny Baumann that mentions “Song for a Rainy Season,” Bishop describes an unexpected visit from a group of international architects: 5 Oct. 1960, in One Art, 391.

43 Katherine White, letter to Bishop, 5 July 1960, in Biele, 232; Bishop, letter to Katherine White, 17 July 1960, in Biele, 233.

44 The same untitled drawing appears at the end of Steinberg's “Chronology” in Harold Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg (New York: Alfred A. Knopf and Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), 243. Steinberg glosses the drawing as a series of “normal” and “neurotic or insane” lifelines.

45 Saul Steinberg, letter to William Shawn, 12 April 1947, New Yorker Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

46 Steinberg's cover for the New Yorker of 2 April 1960 shows an International-style high-rise, lined as though on graph paper, dominating the Manhattan skyline and dwarfing the art deco buildings that were, for him, the essence of the city. Iain Topliss, The Comic Worlds, 226, discusses this contrast “between the ruled straight line and the freehand curved line” in Steinberg and argues that “the former is impersonal, unexpressive, geometrically pure. the latter is profoundly personal … and is given to curves, curlicues, arabesques, and flourishes, a line that is abundant, superfluous, self-elaborating, exploratory.”

47 Letter to Aunt Grace (Bulmer Bowers), 23 Sept. 1960, in One Art, 389, italics in original.

48 The close connection between Bishop's New Yorker income and this restoration project comes through in Bishop's resuming her contract with the magazine in 1967, at which point, Joelle Biele notes, at xl, Bishop “reported to Lilli Correia de Araújo that she was busy writing poems, ‘all in the hopes of making lots & lots of money’ for Casa Marianna, the colonial house she was restoring.”

49 Castriota, Leonardo, “Living in a World Heritage Site: Preservation Policies and Local History in Ouro Preto, Brazil,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review: Journal of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, 10, 2 (1999), 7–19Google Scholar, 11. It is testimony to this twin allegiance to the national past and to modernity that the strict conservation laws protecting Ouro Preto did allow for Oscar Niemeyer's strikingly modernist Grande Hotel.

50 Bishop had been tiring of the New Yorker for some time. In October 1960 she wrote to Anny Baumann, “I've also, thank heavens, been doing some non-New Yorker poems, and what I should prefer to do is just sell them an occasional story and publish poems in other magazines.” One Art, 391.

51 18 Nov. 1965, One Art, 440.

52 Seymour Krim, “Who's Afraid of the New Yorker Now?” (1962), in Shake it for the World (London: Allison & Busby, 1970), 171–86, 180.

53 See Morgan, Llewelyn, “The One and Only Fons Bandusiae,” Classical Quarterly, 59, 1 (2009), 132–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 For these associations in the early modern period see Terry Comito, “Beauty Bare: Speaking Waters and Fountains in Renaissance Literature,” in Elizabeth B. MacDougall, ed., Fons Sapientiae: Renaissance Garden Fountains (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, 1978), 17–58, 37; and Jonathan Gil Harris, “This Is Not a Pipe: Water Supply, Incontinent Sources and the Leaky Body Politic,” in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, eds., Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 203–28, 215. For an example of the fountain trope as it develops in romantic verse see Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath,” in idem, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1, 663–64.

55 “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto,” New Yorker, 24 Dec. 1966, 34.

56 Comito, 45; Lees-Jeffries, Hester, England's Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 188–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Elizabeth Bishop, “A New Capital, Aldous Huxley, and Some Indians” (1958), in idem, Poems, Prose, and Letters, 365–401, 382. Bishop hoped that the New Yorker would publish this article, but it was eventually rejected. William Maxwell explained why: “it suffers as a piece from Huxley's taciturnity and non-attachment to everything and everybody. To make it work out for The New Yorker he should have been as attached and attaching and as talkative as our two year old daughter, and I am so sorry he wasn't.” Letter to Bishop, 19 Nov. 1958, in Biele, 208.