THE WRITING OF A MASTER always makes us reflect, again, on the mystery of writing—how it happens, what it is. For a master reminds us with her every sentence that while prose can be, in some cases, improved, there are no directions or guides for “rightness,” that quality that strikes us as an embodiment beyond all analysis, as a form of being that has surpassed its orchestration of moving parts. Here we include—but do not confine ourselves to—verbal texture, rhythmic movement and modulation, diction, the selection and placement of detail, the presentation of situation and the decision about digression versus elision that is renewed at every pen-stroke.
The best prose, masterly prose, is a window onto the self of the writer—not the self enslaved by the contingencies of the moment, but the self more essential: the self that looks out artlessly from the photographs of the child, or that feels like a thing gathered and hoarded behind the concertedly thoughtful poses of the adult. How is it that one self writes one way and another completely differently? The sentences of different writers move—even breathe—differently. Nouns have different weight depending on what sort of medium they are suspended in. A certain sensibility will always insert the qualifying phrase, the discriminating twist, as if to say that with enough pressure, enough care, the words can map the least iridescence on the shifting scales of the world. Another will approach to pounce, or grip by main force, then suddenly round on himself, breathing in essences and exhaling them as a kind of cloud formation.
I think of Orwell, or Hazlitt, or Hoagland, or M. F. K. Fisher, or any number of other writers whose worlds I happily inhabit and who are entirely exclusive of one another. How completely, I wonder, does a given reflection or episode take its character from the mode of narration? And how much of what we regard as narration is just a more or less oblique transposition to the page of the mysterious formations of the self? In other words, is there really any world to be encountered in a writer’s prose, or do we go to that prose to feel how the complex projections—manifestations—of the author’s sensibility merge with or ricochet off our reading selves? Could these engagements with books really be the occasion for the subtlest linguistic intimacies, with subject matter merely serving as a legitimizing pretext? And what if it were so?
I have had these inklings and questions in mind recently because I have been reading the prose of Elizabeth Bishop. Reading it to discover what it says, yes, but also in order to study the deeper manifestations of the how of the saying. I first opened The Collected Prose because I wanted her particular impressions of things—her childhood, Brazil and so on—but I soon found myself more occupied with the atmospheres of identity that seem to hover everywhere around the matters presented. Something about Bishop’s writing made me feel as if I were in contact with the self behind the sentences, almost as if the reverie induced by my reading were not merely adjacent to but contiguous with her own language impulses.
Bishop, it should be said, is a great poet, alive across a generous spectrum; as a prose writer she is brilliant, but only in the narrowest way. In her various memoir essays and stories she brings forward, over and over, the soul of the child she was—either directly, in writing about childhood memories, or indirectly, by filtering some other subject (travel in Brazil, her friendship with Marianne Moore) through the scrim of an innocent’s sensibility. This, as will be seen, is operative even on—especially on—a syntactical level.
I will not report here on the stuff of Bishop’s prose, except to affirm that much of it retails impressions from her girlhood years, especially the period when she lived with her grandparents in a village in Nova Scotia. The other pieces—her witty memoir of working at a correspondence school for would-be writers, her introduction to the diary of Helena Morley, etc.—finished as they are, lack the special intensity that derives from her efforts to write her way back into the earlier epochs of her life.
Interestingly—and tellingly—a selective tissue-sample approach to the writing does not do violence to some larger integrity, not much anyway. Bishop’s prose does not, as does the prose of so many other writers, ride on accretion. Her unique ability, which is directly bound up with her limitations in the genre, is to render the world as if seen through the eyes of a preternaturally watchful child. There is a powerful—and fruitful—tension on the page between the highly receptive senses and the countering force, the fear, that would keep the world at a manageable distance.
Here is a passage from her autobiographical essay, “The Country Mouse”:
Grandpa once asked me to get his eyeglasses from his bedroom, which I had never been in. It was mostly white and gold, surprisingly feminine for him. The carpet was gold-colored, the bed was fanciful, brass and white, and the furniture was gold and white too. There was a high chest of drawers, a white bedspread, muslin curtains, a set of black leatherbound books near the bed, photographs of Grandma and my aunts and uncles at various ages, and two large black bottles (of whiskey, I realized years later). There were also medicine bottles and the “machines.” There were two of them in black boxes, with electrical batteries attached to things like stethoscopes—some sort of vibrator or massager perhaps. What he did with them I could not imagine. The boxes were open and looked dangerous. I reached gingerly over one to get his eyeglasses, and saw myself in the long mirror: my ugly serge dress, my too long hair, my gloomy and frightened expression.
I offer this paragraph in order to make a few observations. First, that it, like most of the other paragraphs in the essay, is excerptible. We don’t require background information: the prose does not refer backward, nor does it ride on the surge of anticipation. A portion of the world is registered, described, almost as if a camera eye had lopped off one full portion of the past and would soon be taking the next.
But this is no mere surface oddity. The writing embodies the perceptual movement, and this verges—here and elsewhere—on dissociation. We feel almost no sense of cumulation or causal connectedness. Rather: one thing, another, another. The Humean world, the child’s world. Intense, not yet grounded in the explanation-making impulse.
Reading, we are affected by the calm tone—uninflected, utterly unemphatic—as well as by the simplicity of the expression. Colors are white, gold and black. The chest of drawers is merely “high,” the black bottles “large.” Nor are the presumably mysterious machines regarded in any way that reflects a child’s deeper curiosity; only the surfaces are grazed. Moreover, the sentence constructions are passive, the syntax parsimonious in its means (“The boxes were open … ” “There were also medicine bottles … ”).
But how could it not be so? The little girl is terrified—by life, by loss. She is living with her grandparents because her mother has been institutionalized—she is reflexively compelled to hold the looming particulars of the adult world at a distance, even if the natural movement of a child’s sensibility would be to get in close, devouring each protruding bit of matter. How differently Nabokov would have written it! But then he, as a child, was lord of the dacha. From Bishop’s presentation we glean intuitively, without having to be nudged, that these are the observations of a child who is stepping hesitantly into a foreign space; she will not linger to investigate because she is deeply cowed. Her only actual brush with the surface of things comes late, when she reaches “gingerly” to get the eyeglasses.
Bishop’s technique here is in some ways similar to that used by Hemingway in his fiction, though his adaptation of primer constructions was more stylized. Hemingway deployed his repetitions and pruned back observations to suggest the badly damaged nerves and depleted responsiveness of his characters. Bishop, by contrast, transmits an almost arrested innocence—a self struggling to stave off further news of the adult world. The black bottles are not, just then, understood to contain whiskey, though Bishop sees fit to tell us that she realized this later; the possible purposes of the machines remain unplumbed.
It is natural, of course, that a writer seeking to recreate the childhood scape from the inside would use the stylistic devices at her disposal. But what we discover as we read on is that Bishop has, perhaps unconsciously, adapted these very same options for her other purposes as well, in the process producing a prose that could be called “faux naive”: not primitive—Bishop is too enamored of the natural surface for that, but syntactically restricted in a way that keeps the surface simpler than her mastery of diverse means might otherwise allow.
In 1967, Bishop wrote an essay, “A Trip to Vigia,” in which she narrated a visit she had undertaken with a shy Brazilian poet to a town some hundred kilometers distant from where she was then living. Here we see a different sort of convergence of matter and method. This is a travelogue, and what is a travelogue but a sequential showcasing of the world as it offers itself to the senses? The best ones—and Bishop’s is delightful in every way—give evidence that new sights and experiences have broken the crust of habit. The renewal of perceptual clarity is seen, invariably, as a return to a state of prior innocence.
Here is Bishop entering a small backcountry store during a stop:
The store had been raided, sacked. Oh, that was its normal state. It was quite large, no color inside or cloud-color perhaps, with holes in the floors, holes in the walls, holes in the roof. A barrel of kerosene stood in a dark stain. There were a coil of blue cotton rope, a few mattock heads, and a bundle of yellow-white handles, fresh cut from hard ipé wood. Lined up on the shelves were many, many bottles of cachaça, all alike: Esperança, Hope, Hope, Hope. There was a counter where you could drink, if you wanted. A bunch of red-striped wicks hung beside a bunch of rusty frying pans. A glass case offered brown toffees leaking through their papers, and old, old, old sweet buns. Some very large ants were making hay there while the sun shone. Our eyes negotiated the advertisements for Orange Crush and Guarana on the cloud-colored walls, and we had seen everything. That was all.
As with the earlier passage, we get a sense of the eye moving deliberately from thing to thing, only here—and perhaps this is an indication of maturity, or greater self-confidence in the presented “I”—discriminations supplant what were formerly approximations. The handles are “yellow-white,” and the toffees are seen “leaking through their papers.” The eye lingers now, engages more with the grain of things. But the enumeration also feels—as it can in Bishop’s numinously charged poetry as well—like a way of holding other aspects, or awarenesses, at bay.
This description also violates many of the standard precepts for lively writing—almost, we feel, deliberately. “It was quite large … ” “A barrel of kerosene stood … ” “There were a coil … ” And on and on. Yet the perceptions themselves—the barrel standing in the stain, the odd invocation of “cloud-color”—flex against the bonds of the rudimentary sentence structure. We finish the paragraph with the feeling that we have been and have seen, even if the impression itself is humble and in some primary way gravity-bound.
A prose style is a metaphysics, and the fact that we do not just now pay much attention to writers’ styles only means that we are letting our relation to things—the things which are the case—get muddled. In Bishop’s work—and this is one of the reasons she is so prized by readers—there is no such confusion. We come away from whatever we read, poetry or prose, with a sense that the world has been seen steadily, indeed with the kind of heightened (or restricted) focus that we feel we may possess in our finest moments. The writing confers an impression of control, of elusive materials caught into place; of specific things known because observed with great care.
But by the same token we rarely feel that the “I” of these pieces ever acts upon the world, or in any way even ruffles the surface of things. This sensibility would never presume; its reticence is Prufrockian. To act, to interfere, to get caught up in any sort of business with other people—this would be almost hubristic. It would presuppose a volitional self, and Bishop’s is not. Recall her famous poem “In the Waiting Room,” wherein she reports her experience—she is almost seven—of realizing “you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth,/ you are one of them.” Reading her prose I often think that it was all she could do to hold that precious awareness intact through her life, that there was scarcely enough surplus to use for living. Bishop’s great achievement was to turn what would be in a less grounded person a serious psychological deficit into the cornerstone of her art. In her work self-effacement is somehow transmuted into what feels like an extraordinary humility before life—not just things and beings, but the underlying—or in-dwelling—force that makes them possible. “I’m just looking,” she seems to be saying, but as we look with her we feel the world recharging itself for us.
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The final piece in the book, “In the Village”—called a story, but by Bishop’s own admission a scarcely modified work of autobiography—is the narrative of life in a Nova Scotian village as seen through the eyes of a little girl. It is, more particularly, the account of a mother’s return from a stay in an institution—before the collapse that would return her there for good. “Unaccustomed to having her back,” writes Bishop, “the child stood now in the doorway, watching.” The mother is being fitted for a dress; she wants to come out of mourning for her husband. But suddenly the dress seems all wrong and she screams. The daughter is transfixed; in her imagination the scream hangs over that village “forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies.” And if we look, following the risky path of the explanatory conceit, for some way of understanding that limpid, detached, slightly stunned quality in Bishop’s writing—where it comes from—we might linger meditatively on the image of that little girl standing in that doorway, observing as the dressmaker “was crawling around and around on her knees eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass.”