‘Elizabeth Bishop’ Details a Poet’s Life. An Author’s, Too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/books/review-elizabeth-bishop-biography-megan-marshall.html

Version 0 of 1.

ELIZABETH BISHOPA Miracle for BreakfastBy Megan MarshallIllustrated. 365 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $30.

Elizabeth Bishop published only 100 poems during her lifetime. Most were concise. “Something needn’t be large,” she maintained, “to be good.”

This is true of biographies. I was heartened to see that the text of Megan Marshall’s “Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast,” before back matter, runs to just 305 pages. Short and sharp: Bishop would have approved.

We need a new life of Bishop (1911-1979). She was a fastidious and commanding poet who won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and served as poet laureate (then called consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress) in 1949-50.

The last major biography of her, Brett Millier’s “Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It,” appeared in 1992. A flood of new material has been tapped since then, including letters from Bishop to her psychiatrist and several of her female lovers.

Yet Marshall’s biography is dull and dispiriting. The author, who studied briefly with Bishop at Harvard in the mid- to late-1970s, has made the awkward decision to interlard the text at regular intervals with detailed stories from her own life: her youth, her depression, her attempts to study music (“losing music had been part of my sadness”) and poetry.

There’s precedent for this sort of authorial insertion. There’s a good deal of James Boswell in “The Life of Samuel Johnson” (1791). Less successfully, Edmund Morris inserted a semi-fictional character named “Edmund Morris” into “Dutch” (1999), his biography of Ronald Reagan. Graham Greene’s indefatigable biographer, Norman Sherry, included a valiant photograph of himself in search of facts on a donkey in the final volume of his three-part bio.

Marshall’s attempts at memoir are painfully earnest. “I’d taken him a loaf of banana bread I baked one week, in lieu of a poem,” she reports about her interactions with one Harvard professor. Each of these reveries, some of which include samples of the biographer’s own verse (“Take flight, larks with a freedom earthbound creatures/Can’t know”), is about three slices short of a loaf and has no place here.

Marshall has proven herself, in her previous books, to be a sensitive and lucid biographer. I admired her “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life” (2013), which won a Pulitzer Prize.

Here her gifts have largely fled her. This book does not contain strong or especially perceptive readings of Bishop’s poems. Marshall fails to fully set the milieu of midcentury American poetry. She lacks seizing talons for detail.

One example: Bishop maintained over many decades a love-hate relationship with The New Yorker, to which she regularly contributed poems. This relationship is very lightly sketched in Marshall’s biography. An ocean of humane and comic detail is left on the cutting room floor.

Reading Marshall, you would never know that Bishop wrote the following to her mentor, the poet Marianne Moore: “What I think about The New Yorker can only be expressed like this: *!@!!!@!*!!” You would never know that she loathed the way The New Yorker inserted commas into her poems, rendering them less “liquid,” as she put it.

You would not know that she once composed, and sent to a friend, a cruel little poem about Howard Moss, her longtime editor at the magazine:

Reading Marshall, you would not know that Alfred Kazin, in his journals, wrote the following about Bishop’s hair: It “rises electrically up her head” and “seems to shoot up straight, connected node to node to sparks.”

Sparks are what this biography does not have, beginning with its subtitle. “A Miracle for Breakfast” is the name of one of Bishop’s best early poems (“At six o’clock we were waiting for coffee,/waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb”), but it rests oddly atop this book as a whole. What miracle? Whose breakfast?

Bishop was an only child. Her father died when she was 8 months old. Her mother was permanently committed to a mental institution when the poet was 5. She grew up with grandparents and other family members, a veritable orphan. She did have a small trust fund. She attended Vassar College, where she founded a literary magazine, Con Spirito, with Mary McCarthy.

Marshall is good on Bishop’s growing awareness that she was sexually attracted to women. She details her crushes and relationships from summer camp and prep school onward.

Bishop’s longest relationship was with Lota de Macedo Soares, an architect from a prominent Brazilian family. Bishop lived with her in Brazil for more than 15 years before Soares died from an overdose of Valium in 1967, possibly because of her deteriorating relationship with Bishop.

Tragedy streaked Bishop’s life. There was her father’s early death and her mother’s mental illness. After Bishop declined a young man’s marriage proposal, he shot himself. Bishop was a passenger in a car that overturned in Europe, causing one of her close friends to lose her right arm below the elbow.

Her own health and sanity were often precarious. She suffered from anxiety, asthma and eczema. She drank far too much. One doctor prescribed her, Marshall notes, “Theoglycinate and Bellergal pills, adrenaline shots, sulfate cartridges for an inhaler that made her feel like the caterpillar smoking a hookah in ‘Alice in Wonderland.’” She seemed to carry around a Hunter S. Thompson-ish kit bag of medications.

As Bishop aged, she increasingly took on younger lovers, sometimes women less than half her age. After decades of reading about the late-life sexual exploits of male poets, this is tonic. Bishop once boasted to Robert Lowell, a close friend, that she’d “never met a woman I couldn’t make.”

Bishop praised Lowell’s poems by calling them “as different from the rest of our contemporaries as, say, ice from slush.” I wish this biography had more ice. Sometimes less is less.