Auden Sprawls: Peter Levi on Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop

It is funny how writing on one medium so often illuminates the other media through which a true artist has worked. In this excerpt from Peter Levi’s PN Review discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Prose, we glimpse a useful and sure-footed commentary on her paintings – as well, it goes without saying – as her poetry. 

Elizabeth Bishop wrote and thought with a nineteenth-century intrepidity; nothing fazed her. Her prose writings are not voluminous, but they are all measured and considered, they are elegantly exact. The precision and clarity of her eye is the same in prose as in poetry. 


In her summoning up of Key West one can feel the quality of the light. I think she is more exact about it than Hemingway was, and perhaps for that reason more intensely evocative.

Bishop's painting The Armory, Key West

Bishop belongs for sure to a whole tradition of American writers who teach us almost more than our own, but she has a Canadian or North Eastern coolness and tartness that are special to her. 

Her architectural control is apparent only in stories and set pieces, but it is always lurking. It has become in her a quality of mind. She is the only possible and the perfect disciple of Marianne Moore. Auden sprawls by comparison.

[...]

Among other things, Elizabeth Bishop was the best kind of travel writer. She noticed every detail with a bright and beady eye, and never lost her sense of the foreignness of things, acquired probably in her uprooted childhood; but she entered deeply and imaginatively into other lives and societies, as she did into foreign poetry, and she stayed in the places of her choice for a serious length of time.

What is sufficiently obvious about her in the long poem 'Burglar of Babylon' becomes even plainer in her prose account of a Key West primitive painter, Gregorio Valdes, and of Mercedes Hospital. Her understanding is subtle without any breakdown of her lucid simplicity of surface. She can silently alter her own standpoint to suit any aspect of her subject without the slightest diminution of integrity.

Bishop's painting Red Stove and Flowers

Her account of modern primitive painting is of particular interest. 'The bareness of a Cuban house, and the apparent remoteness of every object in it from every other object, gives one the same sensation as the bareness and remoteness of Gregorio's best pictures.' Something similar might be said of the spare abundance of her own writing. Not that she fell into the trap of imitating an inimitable, primitive style:

'It seems that some people receive certain 'gifts' merely by remaining unwittingly in an undemocratic state of grace. It is a supposition that leaves painting like Gregorio's a partial mystery. But surely anything that is impossible for others to achieve by effort, that is dangerous to imitate, and yet, like natural virtue, must be both admired and imitated, always remains mysterious.'

Pasternak wrote somewhere of lyric poetry, that it used to have a given language, but now how to speak at all in lyric poetry has become a moral question. It was one that Elizabeth Bishop answered admirably in her lifework.

The other great strand of Bishop’s lifework – her painting – is available in a new and updated paperback edition of Exchanging Hats, available now from Carcanet. The paintings will also shortly be shown at an exhibition of Bishop’s work – and items from her personal collection – at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in New York. You can also see some of Bishop's paintings on the exciting online gallery over at The Guardian website.

The extract above is taken from PN Review 41 (1985); the vast archive of PN Review is available online to subscribers of the journal.