Elizabeth Bishop's New York Notebook, 1934-1937 Loretta Blasko

What It Means To Be Modem: Elizabeth Bishop’s New York Notebook, 1934-1937 Loretta Blasko Presented to the American Culture Faculty at the University of Michigan-Flint in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Masters of Liberal Studies in American Culture May 4, 2006 First Reader Second Reader, Blasko ii Acknowledgements A special thanks to: Sandra Barry of Halifax, Nova Scotia, for your knowledge in all things E.B. and your encouragement; Susan Fleming of Flint, Michigan, for your friendship and going the distance with me; Dr. J. Zeff and Dr. J. Furman, for your patience and guidance; Andrew Manser of Chicago, Kevin Blasko and Katherine Blasko of Holly, Michigan, my children, for pushing me forward; Alice Ann Sterling Manser, my mother, for your love and support. Blasko Contents Acknowledgements, ii Forward, vi Introduction, x Part I 1934 Chapter 1. The Water That Subdues, 1 Cuttyhunk Island. Chapter 2. It Came to Her Suddenly , 9 New York, Boris Goudinov , Faust , The House o f Greed. Chapter 3. Spring Lobsters, 20 The Aquarium, the gem room at the Museum of Natural Science, Hart Crane’s “Essay Modem Poetry,” Wilenski’s The Modern Movement in Art, John Dryden’s plays. Chapter 4. The Captive Bushmaster, 34 Marianne Moore’s “The Frigate Pelican,” Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises . Chapter 5. That Face Needs a Penny Piece of Candy, 54 Henry James’s Wings o f the Dove, What Maisie Knew, and A Small Boy and Others, The U.S.A. School of Writing, Salvador Dali. Blasko Part II 1935 Chapter 6. Wonder Bread, 54 Romeo and Juliet , Wonder Bread, one man band, the Book o f Job, Rilke’s Elegies, what it is to be modem. Chapter 7. Water Meshing Like Gears, 62 Waconah Falls, the zoo, dreams, George Herbert, John Donne, Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing , Til the Day I Die, Waiting For Lefty. Chapter 8. Epaulets of Foam, 73 Trip to Europe on the Konigstein, River Scheldt, Brussels Exposition. Chapter 9. Cats and Bats, 80 Douamenez, France, the river, gypsy family, mail order catalogues, Madame Miroux. Part III 1936 Chapter 10. B-r-r-r the Water’s Cold, 89 King Edward VIII, Koenigsberg, Germany, Two Boys Killed by Cold, war in Spain, letter from Aunt Grace. Part IV 1937 Chapter 11. Especially Virgie Necessary, 102 Family wears clothes in shifts, Oedipus and the Sphinx , flower print, Florida pamphlets. Chapter 12. He Talked Too Much, 115 Playmate stoned to death, deaths attributed to the Black Legion, La Serva Padrona, Leonore Fini, and Max Ernst. Notes, 127 Appendix, 182 Blasko vi Forward I first became acquainted with Pulitzer Prize winning American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) in 1999, during an American poetry class where we read Bishop’s book Geography III. The poems were funny, clever and interesting. I liked Bishop’s choice of simple words to describe ordinary events made extraordinary. Wanting to know more about her I scanned the internet and found that a literary conference would be taking place in a month in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil. I jumped at the chance to learn more about Bishop and see Brazil. Bishop had lived in Brazil for fifteen years. I was privileged to visit the house she lived in with her lover Lota de Macedo Soares in the mountains of Petropolis and sat at a desk in what was once Bishop’s writing sanctuary that Lota had built for her. As I looked out the window I could see a narrow waterfall and towering bamboo. I also went to a garden party at the hillside house Bishop bought and rebuilt that had a spectacular view of Ouro Preto. She named it Casa Marianna after her friend, poet Marianne Moore, and because the house was on the road leading to the town of Marianna. At the conference I met many of the top Bishop scholars, a very fine group of people, some who urged me to write my thesis on Bishop. One scholar, Sandra Barry, invited me to Halifax, Nova Scotia and to Great Village, Nova Scotia, Bishop’s maternal grandparent’s home so I could do North and South, the title to Bishop’s first poetry book. I visited Great Village in the summer of 1999 and saw where Bishop spent her early childhood years, living at her grandparents’ house along with her mother. I saw the lavender, red sand of the Bay of Fundy that Great Village curves along, Bishop’s grandparent’s house, her elementary school and the church she attended. Blasko vii After learning so much about Bishop it seemed a shame not to do anything about it, yet it was difficult to settle on a good topic. Thinking that I might be able to find something new in Bishop’s poetry drafts, I spent one week at Vassar College, perusing the Elizabeth Bishop Special Collection in the Vassar College Rare Books and Manuscripts. Bishop graduated from Vassar in 1934 and later in life donated her papers to their library. What I found was a staggering amount of poetry drafts, letters and notebooks written in a spidery pen and ink handwriting that was exhausting to read. Since I only had one week, I decided to get copies of her work to read at my leisure. I did not find anything startling in the drafts of published poems, at least not enough for a paper. The one thing that caught my attention was a notebook written between 1934 and 1937 where Bishop wrote her observations on life in New York, her first visit to Europe and had pasted all sorts of odd newspaper fragments, photographs, postcards, art and music programs and letters. The later part of the notebook is almost like a collage or scrapbook and I wondered what all these things meant and how they related to Bishop and her work. After much encouragement from Dr. Zeff, my primary reader, I transcribed the journal, tracked down many of the newspaper articles and noted when something corresponded with Bishop’s writing. I also made an appendix comprised of photographs that further explain what Bishop observed and wrote about. To my knowledge, this notebook has never been transcribed in its entirety. Many different passages have been used by various scholars, but very little has been written about the articles that Bishop saved and they have never been presented for reading. To alleviate any confusion as to which notebook I have transcribed, Bishop’s New York notebook is denoted as 72A.3 in the Vassar Collection. During roughly the same Blasko viii time period, Bishop kept two other notebooks. In notebook 72A.2, Bishop started an unfinished masque “The Proper Tear,” another notebook (72A.1) contained poetry drafts and writings. For ease of reading, the notebook has been divided into twelve chapters, and four parts, one for each year. Every attempt has been made to accurately transcribe Bishop’s handwriting, but mistakes are inevitable. For example, what looked like “cut fences” became “eat berries.” For words that have defied transcription, a has been used in place of the unknown word. Bishop was an excellent speller, with the exception of two words. She wrote “mask,” for “masque,” and “coxcomb” for “cockscomb,” although later she correctly wrote “masque.” These words have been left intact and noted in the endnotes. A few words such as “she” have been silently added, along with any missing quotation marks. Numbers such as “2” have been replaced with “two.” Another small change was replacing with “and.” With these few exceptions, the text is the same as the notebook. Any passages that were lightly crossed out, but still readable, have been included. Bishop often used dashes (-) instead of periods, and underlined text for emphasis. These markings have been retained. Bishop seldom saved complete news articles. When possible, the original newspaper clipping has been used, but if it was difficult to read, it has been transcribed as well. To identify the news articles from Bishop’s own writing, they have been single-spaced and either the title or the first few words have been highlighted in bold type. It is my wish that future Bishop Scholars will be able to use this notebook as a tool to further their work, without having to go through the trouble of deciphering Bishop’s hand Blasko ix writing. More than a help to Bishop Scholars, this notebook is like a time capsule to the era it was written. It is a fun and fascinating read, giving people another side to Bishop in addition to her letters, poems, prose and the many excellent books written about her. Blasko x Introduction One of the dominant themes in American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s New York notebook (1934-1937) was modernism. Modernism was a reaction by writers and artists to the sweeping changes taking place in Europe and the United States from slightly before WWI and up to WWII. It was a reaction to the machine as a replacement for craftsmanship, and transportation: the crowded yet loneliness of big city living versus the small yet intimate feeling of a village or small town. It was also a reaction to the devastation of WWI and the promise of scientific progress. Bishop tried to capture the feeling of modernism in a notebook entry dated 1935: I think that it is in the city alone, maybe New York alone, that one gets in this country these sudden intuitions into the whole of contemporaineity. You go for days reading the newspapers every morning, feeling a certain responsibility about all our, everyone’s predicaments, making use of all inventions, ideas, etc., looking at modem pieces of art, buildings, scenery- and the sense of the present, the actual sensation of it like riding a surfboard, never afflicts you.

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