Elizabeth Bishop Wrote Me Once

A St. Louis story of the 1970s

(Note: This is an older piece that some may have seen on Facebook. It has been rejected by two different literary magazines lately - including one at Washington University, where it all happened, many years ago. I don’t want it to feel unloved, so I’m sending it out on Substack, in the hope that some of you may find it in your hearts to give it a little of the love that others haven’t.)

Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, 1954.

Elizabeth Bishop – yes, the poet – wrote me once. It was only a postcard, but I still have it, tucked into a paperback edition of her Complete Poems. I’d written her a fan letter after reading the poems, and also some of her own letters. I’ll explain that later. In one she mentioned that during her Brazilian days (she lived there for many years with her partner, Lota de Macedo Soares) she sometimes got her mail addressed only to “the Bishop of Brazil.” Then she was quite famous there, apparently. I think I was more precise in addressing mine to her. By the time I wrote, her Brazilian life and love had faded, and she had returned to Boston, where other Bishops also received their mail.

She began her note to me: “Not knowing whether you are a gentleman or a lady … .” It was 1975; how different the times, and concerns were then, though I may have been somewhat confused that way myself.

“… I don’t know how to address you properly – but please feel assured that I am very pleased & touched by your note of Christmas day. I was away for the holidays & it was very nice to find it when I got home. Thank you very much – with best wishes, Elizabeth Bishop”

At the time, I was manuscript cataloger in a Modern Lit Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. It was a writers’ colony of sorts in which I was housekeeper, tidying up their manuscript messes. If they were adept at “The art of losing…,” my task was the art of finding – and foldering and filing, so that others could find later.

There were Truman Capote letters written from Yaddo, so scandalous they had to be closed until 50 years after everyone was dead – (but I got to read them sooner!). And Samuel Beckett manuscripts, kept locked up in the vault of most precious items – manuscripts I didn’t understand, and mostly still do not. And tidbits of Ezra Pound and TS Elliot (a local boy), and Auden – though it was his anonymous Day for a Lay that impressed me most, and not his manuscripts.

But most of our writers (MY writers, as I’ve always thought of them) are not now famous names, except maybe to those who are writers themselves, so you might wonder why I bother dropping them. Even Bishop is only semi-famous these days, except in literary circles. But to me they are famous, whether I knew them in person or only as manuscripts to be put in order.

Oh, what memories we share! I was there the morning Howard Nemerov walked down the path where the “golden and green” ginkgo trees dropped “… all their leaves / in one consent…”; I saw the slight, sly smile on his lips and the delight in his eyes as the poem arrived – at least the germ of it – that November morning.

I remember the brief visit when James Merrill, flying through from Athens or Stonington, on the way somewhere else, took a moment to sign my copy of his yellow pages. And I remember Richard Howard, channeling Edith Wharton, with majestic gesture and scented cigarette. And Allen Ginsburg “Om-ing” for an enthralled roomful of us.

And Robert Creeley, breaking his drive from Buffalo to Bolinas, to drop off the latest boxes of the “everything” he kept through each year – so that I could put his electric bills in chronological order, and keep an eye out for scraps of poems on diner napkins and envelopes

Do you remember Donald Finkel, Antarctic poet, or Mona Van Dyne or William Gass (enigmatic William Gass)?

For those brief years I shared a “life beside this one” with John N. Morris, a life of committee dinners and over drinking that did neither of us much good.

Of course, I wasn’t always going to be just housekeeper for the writers of my colony. I was going to join them and make the mess myself. Jarvis Thurston read my stories and told me one about a woman who dealt with men like a “pencil sharpener” – an image that still makes me squirm, as no doubt it was intended to.

I took a class in story writing from hard-boiled Brooklyn-Chicago  Stanley Elkin, who praised one of my images – the one I stole from Vonnegut, so of course it was good. Why steal anything that’s not? Though perhaps “appropriate” is a less damning word. Elkin didn’t praise the story my “appropriation” decorated – though that may have been a break for me, remembering the comic story by another student that he did praise, gleefully, offering to send it to his editor at Esquire – a story not written to be comic, to the chagrin of the reddening author. So maybe I’m glad he didn’t spend much time on me.

They’re all dead now, I think, the writers of my colony.  I never made it into their ranks. And none of the others sent me a postcard like the one from Bishop. I wish I’d kept a copy of mine to her; it’s always good to have both sides of a correspondence. If she kept it, put it with her papers, sent it with her box of “things kept” for some year, then maybe some other housekeeper of manuscripts somewhere cataloged it, put it in a folder, filed it away, awaiting the day it’s author becomes famous, and someone asks to see it. It’s possible, I suppose – all things are possible, in “the life beside this one.”