Constant comment

In a 30-year correspondence that bridged wars, illnesses, broken marriages and affairs, Bay State poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop shared their beliefs about life and the making of art

October 26, 2008|William H. Pritchard

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 875 pp., illustrated, $45

Here is all of it, all you wanted - and can take - of the epistolary "words in air" passed over a 30-year period (1947-77) between two of the most gifted poets in our last century's latter half. The task of assembling and editing them has been fulfilled in an exemplary manner by Thomas Travisano, author of an excellent critical study of Elizabeth Bishop, and Saskia Hamilton, who three years ago admirably edited Robert Lowell's letters. In Travisano's useful introduction he correctly points out the "sustained colloquial brilliance of style" found in the correspondence, and Hamilton has contributed much to the scrupulous fullness of annotation, helpfully placed at the bottom of the page. The edition prints more than 300 hitherto-unpublished letters.

The pointed responsiveness of Lowell and Bishop to remarks made by one or the other gives continuity and dramatic impetus to their exchanges, and we turn the pages to find out what will happen next. "What happened" in the lives of the two Massachusetts-bred poets makes for a grim list of sufferings, as enumerated by Travisano: "Bishop's proneness to depression and autoimmune disorders, Lowell's hereditary disposition to bipolar disorder, and their shared struggles with alcoholism." Yet as Frank Bidart, a close friend of both, once pointed out about Lowell, "When [he] was well, he was more well than most people I know," something that could also be said about Bishop.

For all their difficulties - perhaps even because of them - each managed, with the spur given by the other, to rise in their letters to humorous, buoyant, and consistently ironical self-presentation. "I have acquired a phony, spruce disillusioned tone - but it's only Washington," Lowell informs Bishop as he goes about his poetry-consultant duties at the Library of Congress in 1948. Bishop, teaching at the University of Washington in 1966, describes her students to Lowell: "The boys are all over six feet - some girls are, too - and the girls have huge legs." She had been warned by a friend "about the bosom in the front row - but not about the large bare knee that starts creeping up over the edge of the table." Such are two minor examples of the creative spirit everywhere to be found in the exchanges.