Prose

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Bishop

Please forgive this bad typing — the machine I keep here is very different from that in Rio & it takes me a few days to get used to it—

Caixa Postal 279, Petrópolis

Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

March 20th (?), 1963

Dear Mrs. Elvin:

I mailed a very hurried letter to you two days ago and now I’ll try to answer your other questions. I am also writing the agent today — Carl Brandt, 101 Park Avenue, to see if he can have a copy of the MMS of the new book, almost complete, sent to you — and I’ll mention that DIARY of Helena Morley as well.

There isn’t any particular logic to when and where the poems were written. The first 5 in the book I gather you have were written in N.Y, in 1934–5. Large Bad Picture was written a good many years later, in Key West. (Memory poems are apt to pop up from time to time no matter where one happens to be, I find. — I mean childhood-memory poems.) Man-Moth is another very early one, and Country to the City, the Miracle sestina, Love Lies Sleeping, later N.Y. ones, after my first winter in Paris, I think. The Weed I wrote on Cape Cod (It seems so obviously derived, to me, that I’m sure you’ve spotted it by now!) Paris 7 Am I did write in Paris, Quai D’Orleans, too but the second stay there — in between comes Florida — and Cirque d’Hiver was written during a later stay on Cape Cod. You ask about the title — well, the Cirque d’Hiver did use have a team of little trained ponies wearing ostrich plumes, etc. — but I think the title referred to the mood more than anything else. (Again, I think you’ll probably spot the derivation of this poem, although I believe it was unconscious.) All the others in the first book are from Key West — except Anaphora — the first stanza came to me in Puebla when the cathedral bells clanged just a few yards away from my pillow, or so it seemed — and a year or two later I finished it in Key West. So you see there is no system to them at all.

A Cold Spring is not in chronological order. There is some more Key West in it, two trips to Nova Scotia, a little New York, and at the end, the first year in Brazil. The poem about Miss Moore was written instead of an “essay” for a commemorative birthday number of Quarterly Review.

The book you will receive has necessarily a lot of Brazil in it — But the one Amazon poem — (unless I finish another one in time to get in it, too) was written before I made a trip on the Amazon. There are also several memory poems in it.

Varick Street — I had a garret on King Street in N Y for a good many years — the buildings are now torn down — between 6th Avenue and Varick Street, & in warm weather it was very noisy. I use dream-material whenever I am lucky enough to have any and this particular poem is almost all dream — just rearranging a bit — so was Rain Towards Morning — and most of the 1st stanza of Anaphora — The last four lines of the 1st stanza of At the Fishhouses—“He has scraped the scales”* etc where also a donnee, as James would say, in a dream. But all this is nothing at all out of the ordinary, I’m sure.

I studied music — piano and counterpoint — for some years and have a clavichord here, although I’m afraid I don’t play it much. It is hard to hear good music in Brazil,† except recordings — and they are hard to get in — but I do listen to the hi fi a lot. (Roosters, I remember, I got rather stuck with, and a recording of Kirkpatrick — I took a few lessons with him long ago — of Scarlatti got me going again in a particular rhythm.) I do like Webern — from the album I have — perhaps because he is small-scale and reminds me of Klee‡ (I believe they were friends). I don’t care much for grand, all-out efforts — but on the other hand, I sometimes do … I admire Robert Lowell’s poetry very much and much of Lord Weary’s Castle couldn’t be more all-out …

He and I have been very good friends since 1946, I think it was — and Jarrell is another friend, although of course I rarely see him. The Lowells were here visiting me last summer. I suppose that he & I both like the SEA a lot, which sounds rather silly — but we always seem to be going swimming together when we meet! But I have lived so much out of New York that I have never had much “literary” life, just occasional stretches of it. Edmund Wilson helped me once a great deal by publishing Roosters in a Literary Supplement to The Nation he was getting out. Jarrell has also always been very kind, critically — in general I feel I have been extremely lucky that way—

Calder is a friend (not close) who gets to Brazil every once in a while, and Loren MacIver, the American painter is an old friend, too — from about 1938—Fizdole & Gold, the pianists, are old friends—Calder is someone else who although so unlike Dewey impresses one by the old-fashioned uncompromising New England honesty of his character — and sweetness, like Dewey.

Of course I read all Miss Moore’s generation from about 1928 on and undoubtedly learned enormously from them. I think of Marianne, Cummings (we shared the same maid in N.Y. for several years), Dr. Williams, Crane, Frost, as Heroes … I wrote a poem about Pound (it is in the last Partisan Review anthology) that expresses my feelings about him fairly well, I think. Strange to say, it was put to music by Ned Rorem and, I hear, was sung a few days ago in Carnegie Hall by Jennie Tourel. (She’d already sung it here & there before — but really, I think she must be about 80 now…?) I hope I get the recording safely.

I have always wanted — like many other poets, I think — to write some really “popular” songs, not “art” songs. One thing I like very much in Brazil is the popular music — the yearly sambas are, or were (too much U S influence now, I’m afraid), often superb spontaneous folk-music, and I want very much to write a piece about them — the collecting is very difficult here, however. There is also a living tradition, in the interior, of the ballads — news events, old tales, etc. — not such good poetry as the sambas but rather wonderful all the same — Besides the DIARY I translated, and work on the book about contemporary architecture, I have done, recently, some translations of Brazilian poetry. (I’ll let you know when they’re published — some are to be in POETRY, I think.) But I really don’t care much for doing it, or believe in it, and my translations are rather literal — unlike Lowell’s — so I only do poems that seem to go into English without much loss — very limiting, naturally.

Another friend who influenced me — not with his books but with his character — was John Dewey, whom I knew well and was very fond of. He and Marianne are the most truly naturally “democratic” people I’ve known, I think. — He had almost the best manners I have ever encountered, always had time, took an interest in everything, — no detail, no weed or stone or cat or old woman was unimportant to him.

Now if you have any more questions please let me know. In about 3 weeks I am going on a trip, “to the interior”, really, this time, and will be out of touch with mail for two or three weeks, probably. Perhaps I should add one thought — perhaps it is just because I went to Europe earlier than most of my “contemporary” poets — and I am a few years older than some of them — but it is odd how I often feel myself to be a late-late Post World War I generation-member, rather than a member of the Post World War II generation. Perhaps the Key West years also had something to do with it. — (Until her death Pauline Hemingway was one of my best friends there, etc.) But I also feel that Cal (Lowell) and I in our very different ways are both descendents from the Transcendentalists — but you may not agree.