ACT TWO

Part One: Skunk

LOWELL

P.S. The last part is too heatedly written with too many ands and so forth. The record is French Renaissance Vocal Music.

She takes the record.

Love,

Cal

She puts the record on.

She picks up a pen.

She tries to write.

She stops and crumples the paper.

She tries again.

SUBTITLE: 115 East 67th Street, New York, August 28, 1957

BISHOP

Dearest Cal:

I wanted to answer your wonderful letter right away … but …

She stops.

Meanwhile he climbs a ladder.

But we’ve been so busy … And I’m apt to be interrupted at any moment by my Brazilian friends returning from Bloomingdale’s.

LOWELL

Asking you is the might have been—

BISHOP

I don’t know how Lota does it, really; I hate to shop so.

A moon appears.

LOWELL

—the other life that might have been had—

He reaches the top of the ladder and tries to grab the moon.

The moon won’t budge.

BISHOP

New York is awful I think.

LOWELL

I am sure it is the will of the heavens—

BISHOP

After racking my brains I just this minute decided it is like a battered-up old alarm clock that insists on gaining five or six hours a day & has to be kept lying on its side.

LOWELL

So it is …

BISHOP

I do hope you’re feeling much, much better, Cal, and realize now that I may not have written a very cheering letter.

She is not cheerful.

With lots of love as always—

Elizabeth

She puts her head in her hands.

He jumps off the ladder.

Or appears to jump off a ladder.

But maybe he just disappears into thin air.

The record ends.

He reappears.

She looks up.

LOWELL

I want you and Lota to know that I am at last in reverse. I am taking my anti-manic pills—75 mgs. of sparine, no more than what my doctor prescribed on the bottle but too much to drive or even see people much. The effect is something like the slowing and ache of a medium fever.

I want you to know … Oh, dear, I wanted you to know so many things …

Yesterday was mostly bed and letting my beard grow. Today I feel certain that I am not going off the deep end.

One is left strangely dumb, and talking about the past is like a cat’s trying to explain climbing down a ladder. Gracelessly, like a standing child trying to sit down, like a cat or a coon coming down a tree, I’m getting down my ladder to the moon. Ask Lota to forgive me. And forgive me yourself, dear old friend. I’ll make no solo descents on you either in New York or Brazil.

He walks to her and gives her a book.

A rare volume of George Herbert that was in his family for many years.

P.S. The George Herbert! I’ve really always wanted you to have it. I’ll be mortally hurt if you don’t keep it.

BISHOP

Thank you for the book. This is the first time I’d ever gone traveling without George Herbert so it is nice to have him again—even if I feel you really really shouldn’t have given it away. I’ve been reading him a lot—

LOWELL

Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing—

BISHOP

I think we should read his “Treatise of Temperance & Sobriety” out loud to each other. It begins “Having observed in my time many of my friends, of excellent wit & noble disposition, overthrown & undone by Intemperance; who, if they had lived, could have been an ornament to the world and a comfort to their friends…”

Dear Cal, do please please take care of yourself and be an ornament to the world (you’re already that) and a comfort to your friends … There are many hopeful things, too, you know. Sobriety & gayety & patience & toughness will do the trick. Or so I hope for myself & pray for you too.

You weren’t “inconsiderate,” Cal! You were a wonderful host, and we had such a nice time with you, really. Even if Lota does think all fir trees are deliberately planted, she liked Maine very much.

I’ll write soon—

LOWELL

Dearest Elizabeth,

We are going to have a child.

She looks surprised.

Then melancholy.

Her greatest regret in the world is not having a child.

LOWELL

It will come sometime in January, and already we are exhausted. We lie about on sofas all day eating cornflakes, no-calorie ginger-ale and yogurt. Elizabeth never moves except to turn the page of an English newspaper or buy a dress. I never move except to turn on my high-fi radio or to go on expeditions for second-hand books … We hear of women who ski all through pregnancy, give birth in bomb shelters, but we don’t approve, and are timid, delicate, and ante-bellum. We are so much older than other beginning parents.

How we boast! People whom I had utterly felt cut off from: my barber, my dentist, the head of the Boston University English department, wives of friends, children … to all of them I can’t stop talking and bragging.

Elizabeth Bishop feeds her toucan.

LOWELL

Do you stop in the States on your way to Europe? I wish with all my heart that you could somehow stretch things and see us. We seem attached to each other by some stiff piece of wire, so that each time one moves, the other moves in another direction. We should call a halt to that.

A horizontal wire comes down from the ceiling, connecting them.

It is something of a pulley, or an old-fashioned thing children used to make to connect one attic with another, and attach items in between, or pretend to use the telephone on either end.

A baby cries.

Bishop hears. She smiles.

She attaches a postcard to the stiff piece of wire.

It travels across the stage to him.

LOWELL

Our little girl, Harriet Winslow Lowell was just born last Friday, weight 6 pounds and 14 ounces, and already more with both feet on the ground than her fatuous and boasting parents.

He receives her postcard.

BISHOP

Just a note of congratulation on the arrival of Harriet Winslow Lowell. What should I bring her from Brazil, I wonder? Lota is magnificent with child-problems. I suspect it’s because she’s had so much practice with me.

LOWELL

Upstairs, Harriet Winslow Lowell is crying as rhythmically as breathing. Lizzie and our beaverlike professional baby nurse, Miss Elsemore, are not in theoretic or emotional agreement. Poor Lizzie isn’t allowed to play with Harriet except for thirty minutes between six and six-thirty when she would like to be relaxing over an Old Fashioned.

I’m really mad about my little daughter and feel as though I had been up to now lacking some prime faculty: eyesight, hearing, reason.

BISHOP

Miss Elsemore sounds terrifying. It’s funny how caring for helpless babies builds character.

You probably know all about the Pulitzer business … I was really surprised … It was very funny here—a reporter from O Globo shouting at me over the telephone, and I kept replying in a cool New Englandy way, “Thank you very much,” and he shouted again, “But dona Elizabetchy, don’t you understand? O Prémio Pulitzer!”

Well, one never knows about these things, or how one should feel about them. I am taking the money, or part of it, to buy a high-fidelity victrola.

LOWELL

I am so delighted by the Pulitzer. I was on the National Book Award committee and tried to get the prize given to you and/or Randall. Your chances were killed by Phyllis McGinley who thought you were serious or a woman or something.

I’ve read your poems many times. I think I read you with more interest than anyone now writing. I know I do, but I think I would even if it weren’t for personal reasons. I feel that I write only for you and Lizzie. I’m dedicating “Skunk Hour” to you. A skunk isn’t much of a present for a Lady Poet, but I’m a skunk in the poem.

She reads his poem aloud.

BISHOP

One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;

I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town.…

My mind’s not right.

LOWELL

A car radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love.…” I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat.…

I myself am hell;

BISHOP

nobody’s here—

She puts down the poem.

LOWELL

We’ve talked over a lot of things together I’ve never mentioned to Elizabeth. If you ever feel like writing me privately (I don’t mean anything by this)—

She looks suspicious.

BISHOP

I don’t know why I haven’t been able to write to you sooner, really.

LOWELL

—you can address the letter c/o The Dept. of English, Boston University.

BISHOP

I don’t often get these letter-writing blocks, & particularly about my favorite correspondents.

LOWELL

I really glory in the memory of your visit and miss you terribly.

BISHOP

All the way down on our freighter I composed endless letters to you, full of profound new ideas, but they just evaporated into the ocean air.

So glad you liked the Purcell. I had intended to send you, for Christmas, “Dido & Aeneas,” but I wasn’t sure whether you had it or not.

Music plays, Purcell.

My idea is to wean you away from those French songs, because I think the English ones are so much better and so much more appropriate to us!

I’d be particularly charmed to have “Skunk Hour” dedicated to me. I started a poem to you and Marianne Moore two years ago, called “Letter to Two Friends.” It is rather light, though. Oh heavens, when does one begin to write the real poems? I certainly feel as if I never had. But of course I don’t feel that way about yours. They all seem real as real—and getting more so— They all have that sure feeling, as if you’d been in a stretch when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry. If only one could see everything that way all the time. It seems to me it’s the whole purpose of art—that rare feeling of control, illuminating—life is all right, for the time being.

And here I must confess that I am green with envy of your kind of assurance.

He lies down.

In some ways you are the luckiest poet I know!—in some ways not so lucky, either, of course. But it is hell to realize one has wasted half one’s talent through timidity that probably could have been overcome if anyone in one’s family had had a few grains of sense or education … Well, maybe it’s not too late!

He rubs his temples.

January 29th, I think—1958, I know

I began to worry a bit when I didn’t receive any answer to my two long letters to you before Christmas, then I heard that you’d been sick, so I wrote Elizabeth. I do hope and pray you are feeling yourself again. (Not that I pray very much, but I mean the intensity of hoping…)

Robert Lowell gets up.

LOWELL

Almost immediately after writing you my last letter, I wanted to write another taking it back. Elizabeth and I are happily back together … after the voyage to Somes Sound. It was rich in undramatic mishaps. We went ashore … Elizabeth had drunk a whole water tumbler of the martinis to which she is allergic. She sprawled on the fore-cabin and began to discuss sotto voce an amazingly frank and detailed reappraisal of our entire marriage. It went on for an hour and a half. She said that we were all leaving the next day for Boston where we would both go to doctors.

Now I spend long week-ends at home and will soon leave the hospital entirely. I am part of my family again, I love my family again.

I live in an interesting house at McLean’s Hospital, one which no man had entered since 1860; suddenly it was made co-ed. It was like entering some ancient deceased sultan’s seraglio. The man next to me is a Harvard Law professor. One day, he is all happiness, giving the plots of Trollope novels, and on another day, I hear cooing pigeon sounds, and if I listen carefully, the words: “Oh terror, TERROR!”

BISHOP

McLean’s is a good place, I think. My mother stayed there once for a long time. However, I hope you don’t have to stay very long—the people are so fascinating I think one begins to find the usual world a bit dull by comparison.

My darling toucan died. It was all my fault. I used an insecticide the man in the store said was “inoffensive” to animals, and it killed him. There he lay, just like life only with his feet up in the air. I want to get another one, but Lota says we’re having a little vacation from toucans now.

I seem to be writing poems again at last—they are all such old poems, though, it’s like cleaning up the attic. Wishing I could start writing poetry all over again on another planet.

A planet comes down. She approaches it.

LOWELL

Such an age since I’ve heard from you. Your telegram was a joy, but I was grieved to think of the lost letter. Please write it again …

She gets on her planet.

BISHOP (composing on her planet)

Let Shakespeare & Milton

Stay at a Hilton—

I shall stay

At Chico Rei—

She shakes her head and tries again.

Marianne, loan me a noun!

Cal, please cable a verb!

Or simply propulse through the ether

some more powerful meter …

LOWELL

For Elizabeth Bishop 4:

Have you seen an inchworm crawl on a leaf,

cling to the very end, revolve in air,

feeling for something to reach to something? Do

you still hang your words in air, ten years

unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps

or empties for the unimaginable phrase—

unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?

He looks up from his book. They look at each other.

He yells up to her on her planet.

On, Dear, with those painful, very large unfinished poems!

She writes a poem, “The Armadillo,” which she dedicates to Lowell.

BISHOP

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 …

She gets off her planet.

I hope you aren’t thinking that I am a: dead b: annoyed. I’m neither; but I did have flu.

LOWELL

I am back from a month in the sanitarium …

BISHOP

I made up my mind to go to teach in the States. I don’t want to one bit, but need the money.

Lota hates having me go—very nice of her—but after a sad scene she is now resigned!

LOWELL

The day after tomorrow, I’ll be fifty, and Lizzie is arranging a party of almost thirty …

BISHOP

Well, now I know when your birthday is— Many happy returns. I minded being 35 very much, but haven’t been able to give a damn since—there are too many other things that one can do a little something about, possibly.

LOWELL

I seem to spend my life missing you!

BISHOP

Well, now I’m in New York. The plan is that as soon as Lota is well enough she will join me …

I went out this afternoon and again spotted you looking very unhappy, this time on the New York Review of Books … It is nice to be on the same continent with you again!

Found a lovely word—you probably know it—ALLELOMIMETIC. (Don’t DARE use it!)

SUBTITLE: Lota commits suicide.

Elizabeth Bishop looks up.

She falls over.

Lowell picks her up and steadies her.

LOWELL

It was a joy being with you, even in this sad time—all the more perhaps because the sorrow can be shared a little.

I feel for Lota, though I’ve no right to; a part of my life has fallen away, a part of my life in you.

I enclose a poem to you, the old Castine poem I could never finish. You may not like it, or what it says, but I hope you will.

The stage becomes the memory of sea and rock again, with no real water.

It was a Maine fishing town—

… Remember?

BISHOP

We sat on a slab of rock.

LOWELL

From this distance in time

it seems the color

of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

BISHOP

but it was only

the usual gray rock

turning the usual green

when drenched by the sea.

LOWELL

The sea drenched the rock

at our feet all day …

BISHOP

We wished our two souls

might return like gulls

to the rock.

LOWELL

In the end,

the water was too cold for us.

The sea recedes.

BISHOP

Oh, thank you; thank you very much—you can really never know how much this has cheered me up and made me feel a bit like myself again.

I love my poem—and you, too, of course …

I have two minor questions, but, as usual, they have to do with my George-Washington-handicap. I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, rather than fishing town …

He smiles. And revises, with a pencil.

My passion for accuracy may strike you as old-maidish—but since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it?

LOWELL

I worry about you so and wish you’d come home.

BISHOP

Well, you are right to worry about me, only please DON’T!—I am pretty worried about myself. I am trying to sell the house, go through all the books, papers, letters—about 3,000 or more books here … meanwhile it is too damned lonely and disagreeable and I have not been able to work. There are endless interruptions, noise, confusion, thefts. I really love my house and would like to stay in it, if—if—if things were different. The very thought of all the packing makes me sick—and then, where to go? How to live? I miss Lota more every day of my life.

The stage darkens.

He sends her a lantern on a pulley.

Have you ever gone through caves?—I did once, in Mexico, and hated it … Finally, after hours of stumbling along, one sees daylight ahead—a faint blue glimmer—and it never looked so wonderful before. That’s what I feel as though I were waiting for now—just the faintest glimmer that I’m going to get out of this somehow, alive. Meanwhile—your letter has helped tremendously—like being handed a lantern.

She takes the lantern.

Now I must pack an overnight bag and try to lock up this too unlockable house and try not to think of what will be missing when I get back—it gets to be a sort of game: what goes next? Or, how many things can you count that are missing in this room? How many beginning with A? With B?

She looks for something underneath a pile of papers.

She throws the papers on the floor.

She looks wildly for something.

She finds it.

It is a poem that she wrote, “One Art.”

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like

LOWELL

(Write it!)

BISHOP

like disaster.