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PARTISAN REVIEW
lantern of her imagination dissolves the stabilities of the present and
casts up old correspondences. The past implants itself in images
which, encountered by chance, send the beholder into reverie.
Sweetly or relentlessly, childhood's tender joys and longings, its in–
sights, its bewilderments, play themselves back. But Bishop's
memory, for all its affinities to Proust's, does not provide an
aesthetic happiness to counter the pain of deprivation. Nor is the
afterimage a corrective to the distortions of adult life, as it is in
Wordsworth, her more direct precursor. Rather, memory involun–
tarily exposes the beholder to the intrusions of the past - sometimes
delightful, sometimes traumatizing, always disruptive and disorient–
ing. Unfinished business and uncomprehended dramas force their
way into consciousness . Beneath the surface charm of Bishop's an–
tique dolls and horse-drawn wagons lies the turmoil of Dickinson, of
Poe, of Baudelaire.
The Collected Prose
opens with a passage designed to conduct the
reader to the writer's memory of her primer class in rural Nova
Scotia, but serves also, like Proust's overture, to characterize the
faculty of memory that controls so many of the pages which follow:
Every time I see long columns of numbers, handwritten in a cer–
tain way, a strange sensation or shudder, partly aesthetic, partly
painful, goes through my diaphragm. It is like seeing the dorsal
fin of a large fish suddenly cut through the surface of the
water- not a frightening fish like a shark, more like a sailfish.
The numbers have to be only up to but under a hundred, rather
large and clumsily written, and the columns squeezed together,
with long vertical lines between them, drawn by hand, long and
crooked. They are usually in pencil , these numbers that affect
me so, but I've seen them in blue crayon or blurred ink, and they
produce the same effect....
The real name of this sensation is memory.
It
is a memory I
do not even have to try to remember, or reconstruct; it is always
right there, clear and complete. The mysterious numbers , the
columns, that impressed me so much - a mystery I never solved
when I went to Primer Class in Nova Scotia!
The shudder in the diaphragm is not simply the result of math
anxiety, of course. The story which follows tells of a child's feelings
about a world she cannot control- a world of older children who
make one late for school, alphabets too long to remember, but also of
poverty and even madness. The unmentioned but probably operative
