Remembering Bishop, Bishop remembering

    Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
    I have thee still, and I rejoice;
    I prosper, circled with thy voice;
    I shall not lose thee though I die.
    --Tennyson (In Memoriam 130: 13-16)

    Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
    repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.
    --Bishop ("North Haven," Poems 188)

On 1 March 1978 Elizabeth Bishop gave a reading at Harvard in memory of her friend Robert Lowell. Some 18 months later, Bishop died of a stroke, ironically on the night before she was scheduled to read again at Harvard, with poet Mary Lavin. That poetry reading became an unrehearsed tribute to Bishop, and on the following day, 21 October 1979, Bishop's friends and colleagues gathered in the Agassiz Ballroom at Harvard University to remember her. Unfortunately, the reading for Bishop was not recorded. However, Bishop's Lowell commemoration and the 21 October memorial service in her honor were. What Bishop scholars might make of those recorded memorials--what literature scholars might make of such recordings generally--is the subject of my essay.

In the following pages I will examine two forms of poetic memorial as they appear in Bishop's works and reception: the familiar elegy for the poet, a subgenre that Lawrence Lipking, following Mallarme, has designated the "tombeau" (138); and the memorial service, specifically public services carried out by fellow poets and friends. As I will show in a close analysis of drafts of Bishop's "North Haven," her elegy for Robert Lowell, Bishop struggled with the fine balance between loving tribute and critique, accurate representation and artful remembrance--a struggle among artist, text, and memory that actually began in public, when Bishop read at Harvard to commemorate Lowell. I will argue that just as Bishop's commemorative reading was a prelude to her composition of "North Haven," the memorial service for Bishop anticipates her posthumous reception, in which the intersection of her life and poetry has been a principal concern: as Dana Gioia put it in a recent review of two decades of Bishop criticism, "her work responds to, indeed often seems to demand, autobiographical readings" (24) despite her skepticism toward confessional verse. Moreover, I hope to show the value of treating recordings of events such as Bishop's Lowell reading and the memorial service as texts, specifically as annotated selections of a poet's work.

Bishop remembering

In the year following Robert Lowell's death, Elizabeth Bishop offered two public remembrances of the poet and their friendship: a reading at Harvard on 1 March 1978 and the publication of "North Haven," first on illustrated broadside, then in the 11 December 1978 New Yorker. I want to compare these two literary events and link them with Bishop's private ruminations on how to remember Lowell in "North Haven." In effect, this series of events constitutes a short chapter of literary history. The theme of the Lowell reading, I will argue, is remembering--we see it in Bishop's choice of poems and her commentary. More to the point, Bishop begins a public dialogue with her late friend on the question of why and how to remember, a question that will be central to "North Haven."

Reading aloud, whether for a poetry reading or a studio recording, had always vexed Bishop. In her first letter to Lowell (14 August 1947) she mentions the "dreadful" results of her being recorded at Harvard, though she jokes about the process--she is "like a fish being angled for with that microphone"--and writes admiringly of Lowell's recordings (One Art 147). While Bishop's reading could never be fairly described as "stammering elocution" (Bishop, Poems 5), it is often flat and breathless, the latter an effect of asthma brought on by anxiety. The public reading, unlike the studio reading, took away the possibility of revision, and in an academic setting, it exposed the poet to the scrutiny of scholars. Or so Bishop felt:

    I absolutely hate reading my work aloud under any circumstances. The
    first time I gave a reading [at Wellesley College, 19 October 1949]
    I stopped for twenty-six years. Harvard is a terrible place for
    reading; they are famous for being cold and you feel your voice
    getting deader and deader. The further west you go, the better the
    audiences, because they're not showing off. The nicest audience I
    ever had was children (at the American school in Rio).They asked
    such good questions, like, Why did you choose this word instead of
    that. Simple, practical things, which is the way you write, of
    course. (qtd. in Monteiro 113)

So the circumstances of the Lowell memorial reading must have been particularly dreadful to Bishop: a public reading at Harvard for its most celebrated poet, and for a friend whose significance in Bishop's life could not be overestimated. On the day of the reading, she wrote to Ashley Brown that she "wish[ed] the next two days were over with!" (One Art 620). The results of Bishop's "remembering Robert Lowell" reading, however, were hardly dreadful, providing as they did a public prelude to the private ruminations that led to "North Haven."