Recently I’ve been reading British detective fiction written almost 100 years ago––Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham. Detectives reveal the guilty, absolve the innocent, and soothe a reader by returning the moral balance to society. The society in these novels is, of course, fully hierarchical. The titled are admired, lower classes too if they know their place; foreigners, Jews, dark-skinned characters, and women are stereotyped, trivialized, or exceptions to the rule. Published in the 1930s––after the First and before the Second World Wars––these books, still in print, are contemporary with the young adulthoods of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.
Last week the Grolier Poetry Bookshop presented an oral history and discussion of Bishop and Lowell to an audience of 100, both live and remote. Panelists Frank Bidart and Lloyd Schwartz were friends of both Bishop and Lowell; Martin Edmunds and Megan Marshall were students in Bishop’s Harvard creative writing class. All were superbly introduced by Askold Melnyczuk (who admitted he avoided Lowell during his Cambridge salad days) and equally well moderated by John Okrent. Was it surprising that most of the discussion centered on Bishop, and that Lowell was hardly mentioned outside of their friendship? An audience member noted this and wondered why.
One answer is the tide of academic fashion. Lowell was a cis, straight, pedigreed white male, and though Bishop advocated for “closets and more closets” she was queer and female, her family history mostly undocumented. If memory serves me, she wrote to Lowell about family as subject matter in poems like “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” declaring that his family experiences were worthy of poetry because his ancestors were important, and that hers couldn’t be because her family wasn’t.
The scenes in “Uncle Devereux” could have come out of a Margery Allingham novel. One expects Albert Campion to join Grandmother in a game of Auction. But how different is this from Bishop’s poem of a child’s brush with mortality in “First Death in Nova Scotia”? Lowell’s child is surrounded by the imperious “works of my Grandfather’s hands,” Bishop’s with pictures of the royal family. Aunt Sarah is immured like a stuffed loon; the dead bird foreshadows Cousin Arthur’s corpse the way Sarah’s stasis foreshadows Devereux’s death.
While Bishop’s poem lives in the child’s confusion and Lowell’s more in the memory of it, both detail the nature of a child’s imagination, and each distills an essence of family life. I think Bishop was more leery of the direction in Lowell’s poetry that would be called “confessional” than of the legitimacy of her own subject matter. She wrote about family inheritance when it suited her, in prose as well as poetry.
The question of why Bishop is more popular today than Lowell, the panel agreed, has no final answer. Perhaps his use of Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters in The Dolphin repelled readers. Perhaps he was so well-known during his lifetime, his reputation could rise no further after death. Bishop, on the other hand, had years of biography and poetry to be discovered after hers, all of which added to her renown.
“One wants words meat-hooked from the living steer,” Lowell wrote. So do I, and adore his “book-worming/ in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning”––as visceral, if not as bloody, as the encounter between the “fly-weight pacifist” and two Hollywood pimps who “blew their tops and beat him black and blue” (oh, the staccato of those one-syllable words!). How could I not go back to both Bishop and Lowell when I need spark to jump-start my own stalled vehicle?