Last Friday night my
daughter Zoe and I went to see Dear Elizabeth—a play in letters from Elizabeth
Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again—at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. The
play depicts a lifetime of friendship in letters between the two poets, both
brilliant and troubled, throughout the years between 1944 and 1977. The playwright, Sarah Ruhl, had to work under
the strict constraints given by the poets’ estates, to use their verbatim words
and their words only to create the play, so she could add no invented dialogue
to fill in the parts of the story that happened outside the letters. Instead, she
did so beautifully, using stage magic and visual cues to paint a vivid picture
of this extraordinary relationship.
The letters are at turns exuberant, witty, acerbic,
affectionate, and compassionate. They take on each other’s work, each other’s
lives, offering both praise and criticism, sympathy and advice. They share new
work and give each other honest and at times, harsh feedback.
Elizabeth Bishop was a very private person; most of what the
public knows about her is through her poems and letters. She moved throughout
her lifetime; New York, Cambridge, Florida, Seattle, Europe, Brazil. She drank
a lot and had a number of tumultuous relationships. In one of her letters in
1948 to Lowell, she told him, “When you write my epitaph, you must say that I
was the loneliest person who ever lived. “
Robert Lowell was known for his brazen and evocative poetry,
his clever quips, his heavy drinking, manic behavior and multiple marriages. Anne
Sexton called him “gracefully insane.” He was arrested and hospitalized after
holding his former mentor, poet Allen Tate, out a two story window in Chicago
while reciting Tate’s poetry.
Both won Pulitzer Prizes; Bishop in 1956 for her second
book, Poems: North & South—A Cold
Spring and Lowell, three times, the last for The Dolphin in 1977 six months before he died.
As writers, we learn that the best way to reveal a character
is through what they say and what they do. If you have any doubt, go see Dear
Elizabeth or read Elizabeth Bishop’s and Robert Lowell’s poems and
letters; the glimpses you’ll get into
the inner regions of their souls will make you a true believer.
Take Good Care,
Sharry
Here is a poem Elizabeth Bishop wrote for Robert Lowell:
The
Armadillo
For Robert
Lowell
This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire
balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain
height,
rising toward a saint
still honored in these
parts,
the paper chambers flush and
fill with light
that comes and goes, like
hearts.
Once up against the sky it's
hard
to tell them from the stars—
planets, that is--the tinted
ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,
or the pale green one. With
a wind,
they flare and falter,
wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer
between
the kite sticks of the
Southern Cross,
receding, dwindling,
solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a
peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.
Last night another big one
fell.
It splattered like an egg of
fire
against the cliff behind the
house.
The flame ran down. We saw
the pair
of owls who nest there
flying up
and up, their whirling
black-and-white
stained bright pink
underneath, until
they shrieked up out of
sight.
The ancient owls' nest must
have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left
the scene,
rose-flecked, head down,
tail down,
and then a baby rabbit
jumped out,
short-eared, to our
surprise.
So soft!--a handful of
intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.
Too pretty, dreamlike
mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic,
and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!
Elizabeth
Bishop
