The Paris Assessment – Postcards from Elizabeth Bishop

2023-12-20 23:47:10

Unpublished postcard despatched by Elizabeth Bishop, from Particular Collections Library, Vassar School. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Belief. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Property. All Rights Reserved.

Elizabeth Bishop delighted within the postcard. It suited her poetic material and her lifestyle—this poet of journey who was extra typically on the transfer than at dwelling, “wherever that could be,” as she put it in her poem “Questions of Journey.” She informed James Merrill in a postcard written in 1979 that she seldom wrote “something of any worth on the desk or within the room the place I used to be speculated to be doing it—it’s all the time in another person’s home, or in a bar, or standing up within the kitchen in the course of the night time.”

Since her loss of life in 1979 and the publication of her chosen correspondence, Bishop has change into often known as one of many nice modern-day letter-writers. And but inevitably one thing is misplaced when an editor transcribes a letter to arrange it for print: the standard of the correspondent’s hand (or the mannequin of her typewriter), the paper used, cross-outs and typos, and every thing else that fixes the letter in time and house. In the case of a postcard, or a letter composed on a sequence of postcards (one thing Bishop loved doing), we get not one of the photographs, and much more is misplaced.

However what precisely? “What can we miss by not seeing these postcards?” Jonathan Ellis and Susan Rosenbaum ask within the catalogue for the exhibition of Bishop’s postcards they’ve curated on the Vassar School Library, on view by December 15, 2023. Vassar, which is dwelling to Bishop’s papers, has revealed print and on-line catalogues of the exhibition. The print catalogue contains the curators’ richly suggestive introduction, back and front photographs of the exhibition’s sixty-three gadgets, and appendices.

The reply to the curators’ query is: rather a lot. There’s all the time some dialogue between the back and front of one in every of Bishop’s postcards. Take the one to Merrill commenting on her stressed habits of composition. The entrance of the cardboard (“the nicest left of my postcards from the Eastman Museum,” she says) is a copy of the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s movement research of a goat. Bishop doesn’t level out the analogy between her unsettled methods and the ambling goat. She is aware of Merrill will get it.

Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Particular Collections Library, Vassar School. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Belief. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Property. All Rights Reserved.

However extra typically, the dialogue between the back and front of the cardboard is express, and it performs with the distinction between Bishop’s actuality and what the postcard footage. In the course of one summer season, Bishop despatched the painter Loren MacIver a picture of a stag in an icy stream, pondering “it would make you are feeling cool … to take a look at it.” One other postcard to MacIver contains a photograph of the College Inn in Seattle. The resort is her “dwelling away from dwelling—quickly, no less than,” whereas she is educating for a time period on the College of Washington. Lest MacIver get the mistaken impression of her circumstances, Bishop corrects the sunny picture by drawing a line on the photograph and noting that snow is presently falling into the swimming pool.

Postcards started circulating within the late nineteenth century, at first in Europe. These playing cards carried the handle on the entrance; on the again can be an etching of Salzburg, say, or the Tower of London, and house for a brief, handwritten message. A easy however consequential redesign was launched round 1900: the handle was moved to the again of the cardboard, the picture to the entrance. With new visible applied sciences revolutionizing print media, postal charges falling, and the frequency of mail supply rising (as much as twelve instances a day in Paris!), the craze for the postcard took maintain. Like different client crazes, it appeared to many commentators to be a female delirium.

Bishop’s personal curiosity within the postcard started early in her life. In “Within the Village,” a brief story about her childhood in rural Nova Scotia throughout the First World Warfare, she describes her mom’s assortment of postcards. (Gertrude Bishop should have been a kind of girls caught up within the postcard craze). The kid within the story is thrilled—“how lovely!”—by her mom’s glitter postcards. “The crystals define the buildings on the playing cards in a means buildings by no means are outlined however ought to be,” Bishop writes. In comparison with these glowing footage of distant cities, “the grey postcards on the market within the village retailer” have been a disappointment. “In any case,” Bishop causes, talking from the little woman’s perspective, “one steps exterior and instantly sees the identical factor: the village, the place we dwell, full dimension, and in coloration.” Discover how younger Elizabeth’s sense of actuality has been subtly undermined by a style for postcards. Now actuality appears to be like like a illustration—a superior one “full dimension, and in coloration,” however a illustration all the identical.

Bishop typically made greeting playing cards of her personal with crayons and (in tribute to her early enthusiasm for it) glitter. She made her personal collages, utilizing, for instance, a cigar-box label to create a Christmas card. Ellis and Rosenbaum examine her camp creativity to the collage artwork of John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Ray Johnson, and Joseph Cornell. The oblong body of the postcard was for her a container one thing like one in every of Cornell’s horizontal field constructions. Underlining that affiliation, the Vassar exhibition features a postcard of one in every of Cornell’s works that Bishop despatched to MacIver in 1977. In “Objects & Apparitions,” Bishop’s translation of a poem by Octavio Paz celebrating Cornell’s work, Cornell’s containers are referred to as “cages for infinity.”

Postcards are, of their means, a species of propaganda. Whether or not they present grand public buildings, statues of navy heroes, or clichés like a pot of Boston baked beans, they assist to represent a quasi-official discourse, a standard image-repertoire that defines what we’re supposed to seek out admirable, fascinating, amusing, and so forth. Bishop didn’t disdain standard photographs of this sort; she loved them, whilst she mocked them. That mixture of participation and parody is expressed in a memento photograph postcard that Bishop and her girlfriend Louise Crane posed for at a carnival in France within the early days of their romance. The younger girls’s faces, poking by a painted sheet, are joined to the burly our bodies of two boxers taking swings at one another. Whereas Crane stares coolly on the digital camera, Bishop makes eyes at her.

Quite a few postcards within the exhibition play with gender norms and recommend queer subtexts. Bishop as soon as despatched Merrill a card that wished him, in Greek, “Many Comfortable Returns on Your Title Day.” Like most of the playing cards she collected, she should have discovered this one in a junk store or used bookstore (0r the Greek tea room she mentions on the cardboard?) and picked it out pondering of Merrill, who spoke Greek and had had, she knew, multiple love affair with a Greek man. The sentimental card footage a person’s cuff-linked hand shaking a pale, ambiguously gendered hand inside an ornamental ring of violets and roses. “I’m both congratulating you on yr. engagement,” Bishop varieties on the again, “or asking you to marry me … I assume.”

The cigar-box label that Bishop scissored and despatched as a Christmas card to the Brazilian journalist Rosinha Leão footage a gartered and bewigged eighteenth-century courtier labeled with the phrases “Our Aristocratic Friend.” That is more than likely an affectionate reference to Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop’s upper-class Brazilian lover, who had launched Bishop to Leão. One other postcard within the exhibition, this one addressed to Lota, is a copy of a Victorian portray by James Collinson of a showily dressed younger lady—Ellis and Rosenbaum establish her as a prostitute—who turns to the viewer with a wily smile whereas holding an empty lady’s purse. Bishop wrote nothing in any respect on the cardboard however twice underlined the title The Empty Purse. What precisely was she saying? It appears to have one thing to do with cash and intercourse.

The postcard is an object as a lot as a message, and sending one, for Bishop, was like giving a present—it was an expression of consideration and care within the type of a four-by-six-inch memento. In contrast to a letter, which generally suggests a series of communication, most postcards don’t name for a response. On this sense, the postcard has a one-off, standalone high quality not not like a poem’s.

And if Bishop’s postcards are typically like poems, are a few of her poems like postcards? The primary postcard within the exhibition is {a photograph} from the 1910s, of Cumberland Street in Nice Village, Bishop’s grandparents’ dwelling in Nova Scotia. Elm-tree branches arch in a cover above the highway like guards of honor. Bishop by no means despatched the cardboard to anybody. Or we would say, as a result of she stored it amongst her papers, that she despatched it solely to herself. She inscribed on the again, as if it have been by some means useful merely to say aloud—for herself? for posterity?—what she knew very effectively: “I drove the cow to pasture up this highway.”

Examine that postcard to “Poem,” from Geography III, the final assortment of poetry she revealed. The topic of “Poem” is a landscape painting of Nice Village by George Hutchinson, her great-great-uncle. “Concerning the dimension of an old-style greenback invoice,” the oil portray is small and rectangular. We’d consider the portray because the entrance of a postcard and Bishop’s poem, describing and meditating on it, because the message on the again.

The poem goes into appreciable element to explain the portray’s illustration of Nice Village, which was the scene of a few of Bishop’s earliest and strongest recollections. With the intention to get on the actuality she recalled, Bishop needed to do her greatest to render the portray’s model of it. This implies heightening our consciousness of the artist’s medium. Thus the wild iris is “fresh-squiggled from the tube” (as if a primary squirt of oil paint have been the identical factor as a flower blooming), and the “tiny cows” are “two brushstrokes every, however confidently cows.” “A specklike chicken is flying to the left,” Bishop notes. “Or is it a flyspeck wanting like a chicken?” This consideration to the portray’s materiality emphasizes the artificiality of the picture, its standing as a illustration. Quite than make the truth of the scene extra distant, it awakens Bishop’s recollections and brings her nearer to her personal expertise of the place.

How does that work? And what does it should do with postcards? The poem and the portray each are items of correspondence. What issues for Bishop is an change between folks: the way in which the portray triangulates her and her great-great-uncle’s relationship to a “beloved” place, preserved by a manifestly synthetic and never significantly priceless picture. “Our visions coincided,” she says. Then she corrects herself: “ ‘visions’ is / too critical a phrase—our appears to be like, two appears to be like.” The artwork of the postcard, for Bishop, was an artwork of “appears to be like”—shared glimpses and jokes handed from hand handy, time-stamped, and postmarked.

Langdon Hammer is the Niel Grey Jr. Professor of English at Yale and the writer of James Merrill: Life and Artwork.

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