The first time I almost met Elizabeth Bishop occurred in San Francisco in 1968, at the home of married poet friends who had studied with her in New York City some four or five years previously. I wasn’t sure of the exact reason for this party, whether it was already planned and she surprised them with a visit, or whether it was designed to introduce her to their writer friends, though we were all made aware of the fact that she, Bishop, would be there.
She was sitting over in a corner of the living room, in a big, overstuffed Salvation Army armchair, a woman of fifty or so, handsome in a somewhat schoolmarmish way, her trim wavy brown haircut and collarless blue blouse and long gray skirt props, I thought, designed to underplay the fierce intellect and shy cunning behind her very charming, almost girlish smile. She was doing my friends a favor, no doubt, providing them with a boost in this tiny society of mostly transplanted New Yorkers, all of whom looked so pleased to be here, with her, in this tiny house on a hill in the Mission District whose living room windows all seemed to look out over other hills that appeared to be climbing the vibrant sky like so many steps in a stage setting designed for the benefit of only one person there. Yes, the party was for her, she and the young attractive woman with a very young child who was sitting at her side, both looking adoringly at her. They were a couple, my friends later explained, the young woman had been some kind of assistant or graduate student to Bishop at the University of Washington in Seattle, where Bishop was teaching, and there was also a young husband involved, they thought but weren’t sure, who appeared to no longer be in the picture. Bishop, they said, had finished her teaching semester and was now headed back east, most likely with the young woman and her child. This was all stated in a whispered rush in a far corner of another room a very long time ago, but the young woman did appear to be the reason Bishop looked so happy, which is also, perhaps, the reason my friends so adamantly attempted at various times to introduce me to her. She had been a great source of inspiration in their lives and perhaps I too might benefit from knowing her. I tried, however unsuccessfully, to explain that I didn’t want to intrude on Bishop’s happiness and was more than happy to just hover near enough to eavesdrop and observe her every move, of which there were, in fact, few. Behaving, for the most part, like the royalty everyone there seemed to believe she was, she essentially never moved from her chair. When she wasn’t talking to the young woman and her young child, she was laughing at something someone said, or graciously accepting a drink. It was a role she seemed not entirely comfortable with, and that she perhaps felt somewhat obligated to fulfill.
Once or twice, I considered introducing myself, perhaps by remarking on the view of hills and incoming fog, fog being a dependable source of conversation for us local Mission District dwellers. I lived only a few blocks away in an ancient duplex apartment that one had to pass through a kind of tunnel to reach, which, for a reason no one understood, was always filled with fog, the air mysteriously clean and crisp on either end, its single lightbulb forever unlit, and through which, sober or not, I’d run, especially at night, once passing a shrouded figure standing in a doorway, who whispered softly, “Good evening and good luck.” I could tell her about this fog-encrusted passageway or my invisible neighbor Paddy Edgewood, who lived in the other part of the duplex, and whose accordion I often heard at night, but whose face I never once saw in the three years I lived next door—yes, I could tell her all this, it almost always got a good laugh, or I could just continue to stand there like a coat stand, tongue-tied and silent.
Which is when, as if to rescue me, the wife of my host friend came over to ask Bishop if there wasn’t something she could do to improve her husband’s mood—he was, in fact, sulking at his own birthday party (which it turned out to be)—since she, Elizabeth, was something of a magician, after all. Smiling generously, Bishop asked for a newspaper and, being given one, quickly tore off a page and began, with the alacrity and skill that seemed nothing less than miraculous, folding it into the figure of a bird. Yes, a life-sized, newspaper bird that actually looked as if it could fly of its own powers. We were all staring at her and it now, because it, this magical paper being, did seem to be coming to life before our very eyes. It was a performance unlike any I’d ever witnessed. And now, having finished creating it, she took a cigarette lighter out of her purse and, pausing to smile at her audience, called my friend over in a voice no larger, louder, or more commanding than that of a small girl. He, my friend, who had been standing nearby watching along with all the rest of us, now came over to stand obediently before her, as curious as he was perhaps concerned—what role, after all, could he possibly be playing in all this? Glancing around at her enraptured audience, she paused only to smile first at my friend and then at the paper bird, both of whom seemed anxious for the next act to commence, and then, with a snap of her thumb, she lit the lighter and then the bird, which seemed of its own volition to float up into the air, its wings aglow with fire. As if choreographed to do so, we all stepped back in unison, to see the paper bird hover high above her head, its tiny wings robustly flapping in what perhaps was a sudden breeze bestowed upon it and us by some indigenous god who just happened to be passing by and, like all the rest of us, became so enthralled as to forget wherever else had occupied her. Along with all the rest of us, my friend was laughing and clapping his hands, and then was dancing from foot to foot, as if he too had been set on fire and transformed into someone entirely new and happier.
I remember little of what followed, only that I could barely bring myself to look her way, fearing the slightest distraction might spoil the sheer exhilaration of the moment. And when I did glance at her, she was still sitting there, in her overstuffed chair, smiling a smile of pure contrition, as if she too, along with all the rest of us, was awe-struck by her own wizardry. Was this her expression after she completed writing “One Art” and was too exhausted by the effort to feel anything other than some small sense of wonder, and pride? In any case, she now had successfully completed her chore and could enjoy the results. My friend’s mood, along with everyone else’s, had been, for the foreseeable future, very much improved.
IN THE FALL OF 1979, my editor at Viking Press called to say that my first book of poems, Like Wings, had been nominated for a National Book Award, and, knowing my admiration for Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, she added that Bishop was one of the three judges. The book had just come out that fall and was, for the most part, well received, and I now had a part-time teaching job at NYU, so things were going okay, though I felt some frustration at being alone. I remember wondering what this would all mean, this kind of recognition. It might help me find a full-time teaching position, I thought, and maybe even a girlfriend. I was unsuccessful, however, in allowing myself to feel anything in particular about Bishop being one of the judges. Another judge was a friend of mine, the poet Michael Harper, who had befriended both Ralph Dickey and me, and there was a poem about Dickey in the book that I’d worked on for nearly five years—“The Gift”—of which he had seen several drafts, and I assumed he was the reason I’d been nominated for the award. It was even possible, given how these kinds of literary negotiations went, that Bishop didn’t even like my book, or hadn’t even read it. James Merrill’s Mirabell: Books of Number, was also nominated and she and Merrill, as everyone knew, were close friends. He would most certainly win, and deservedly so. Just being mentioned in the same breath as Merrill was a high compliment. But thinking further about Bishop and my book seemed futile, and self-defeating.
But news about things like this gets around fast and within an hour or so friends were calling to congratulate me. All of them mentioned the same thing: that Elizabeth Bishop was one of the judges and what did I think about that. I said I was truly honored and changed the subject, at least in these conversations. Not so much in my mind. A lot was going on suddenly, reading offers and the kind of attention a young poet can only dream about, this being New York City, where fame can come as easily and swiftly as it leaves. The one thing that was constant, however, was my endless curiosity and internal debate about whether or not Bishop liked my book. I worried, for the most part, that she didn’t, couldn’t possibly, we were so different in background and bearing, I wrote about attending girlie shows, for God’s sake, and possessing savage feelings, and Darwin, tortoises, and the Galápagos Archipelago, and a whole lot of love poems about various women, compared to her more elegant and sophisticated poems—why in the world would she like my work well enough to select it out of hundreds of poetry books published that year, it didn’t seem to be even a remote possibility. Even considering doing what just about all my friends were trying to convince me to do, which was write her and ask if she in any way had anything to do with my being nominated, was a terrible, truly awful idea. Yes, I knew my shitbird was going to town over this, my dreams were filled with my being trapped indefinitely in revolving doors and falling off subway platforms into oncoming trains, all and each with its particularly odious signature. And now, I was convinced, it wanted me to completely ruin whatever joy I might be feeling by writing her and receiving, most certainly, a response of silence.
Mainly to stop the torturous indecision, I finally decided to write her asking for a recommendation for a Guggenheim fellowship, which I truly wanted, and needed to help pay off my remaining student debt. So I wrote her a brief note asking her if she would be so kind as to allow me to use her name as a recommendation for a Guggenheim fellowship, mentioning the party in 1968 in San Francisco at the home of our mutual friends, where she had performed a magic act that still delighted me. I was pleased, I said, to be nominated for an award in which she was one of the judges. After a good number of drafts, my note was brief and casual sounding enough to sound reasonable to me. Reasonable in the sense that I wasn’t really asking her for her opinion of my book, at least not outright. I remember addressing the envelope and placing a stamp in the nearly appropriate place on the envelope and walking down the stairs of my building and then down the hall and out to the street. I remember that it was a crisp late-September morning and that the flower boxes in many of the first-floor windowsills looked particularly splendid. I walked quickly and didn’t hesitate in opening the lid of the mailbox and dropping the letter inside. I then went back home quickly and saluted myself with a shot of single-malt scotch that I’d been keeping for just such an occasion.
I don’t remember how much later—four or five days, a week or two?—I received a postcard back from Miss Bishop, but suddenly it seemed as if she were in the room with me, performing yet another magic act:
LEWIS WHARF, OCTOBER 5TH, 1979
Dear Mr. Schultz: I am sorry to be so late in answering your note about the Guggenheim. It was forwarded, re-forwarded to Boston, and then when I finally got to Boston, I was sick for ten days or so.
I hope this doesn’t come too late. I’d be glad to have you use my name as a reference—so if this isn’t too late, tell them to send me the forms.
I did admire LIKE WINGS—in fact it was one of the few of the 100’s of books one receives to read for the NBA that I actually kept.
Sometime we must discuss NYU—perhaps later, when I’ll be feeling more objective about it!
With best wish—& good luck with the G! [ELIZABETH BISHOP’S SIGNATURE]
I was overjoyed and, to my surprise, believed every word of it. Why would she lie? She didn’t have to even answer me, let alone agree to write a recommendation for me. And I had heard rumors from colleagues about her brief and unpleasant tenure at NYU; when her name came up the subject was quickly changed. I was the first poet hired since her and was also met by some with a degree of skepticism. In fact, on my first day on the job, I found in my mailbox, along with everyone else’s, a six-page single-spaced letter from an anonymous source outlining the changes my hiring would most certainly bring to the department, not the least of which would be creative types running through the halls emoting. To make sure I understood the meaning, I looked the word up: a gerund or present participle, it meant portraying emotion in a theatrical manner. Without doubt, however successfully, it’s what writers and their students did, perform and display human emotion. And this prediction proved entirely accurate; within a year or two MFA students were in fact flavoring the halls in a highly charged manner. Yes, we would have things to discuss—perhaps a friendship would ensue. I kept standing up and sitting down, and then walking around my small apartment—she was ill, sick for ten days, and still she wrote me! But she liked my book, my poems, she wouldn’t lie about that. It was a feeling unlike any I’d ever had. I had to tell someone, and I called my dear friend, the wonderful poet Grace Schulman, whose silence after I read her Bishop’s card was alarming. I’d expected her to be overjoyed for me, having been one of the friends who had convinced me to write Bishop. When I asked what was wrong, she said something to the effect that she was sorry to have to tell me, but Bishop’s obituary was in the New York Times that morning. She then asked me to tell her the date on Bishop’s card, which was October 5. She had died on the sixth, Grace said, a day after writing and sending the card. It was a beautiful note, she said, which confirmed in no uncertain terms her admiration for my poetry.
I sat in that same black phony leather chair I’d sat in after I’d learned of my nomination. I sat staring at nothing in particular. Only a few moments before, I was as happy as I could ever remember being. A few moments that already seemed hours, days, weeks, years away. Was this just another of her magic acts, appearing so vibrantly alive one minute and so thoroughly absent the next? But she had gifted me with her words, words I would cherish the rest of my life. She was clearly sick when she wrote it, too ill to be writing letters to strangers, having to testify on their behalf. Too ill to be giving such precious last words.
I sat there a long time, remembering her magic act for my friend. The look on her face as the paper bird flew up into the air and everyone laughed. It seemed like only yesterday, a yesterday I find almost impossible to lift.