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PARTISAN REVIEW
Prison," "The Sea and Its Shore ." Regrettably, Bishop did not pur–
sue these "horrible fable ideas." But perhaps their success owes less to
their genre than to their autobiographical themes: the inheritance of
an over-inscribed world, the isolation of self and the substitution of
writing for society, writing's part in the strange collusion between
freedom and necessity. The autobiographical protagonist of "The
Sea and Its Shore" is deeply at odds with himself, employed "to keep
the sand free from papers" (joining the priesthood of the silent sea) ,
but also occupied with reading and interpreting those papers. While
place is reduced to the bare boundary between life and death (his
house resembles a grave) , it is "littered with old correspondences"
which hold out the promise of some apotheosis. The yellowing
papers on their way to obliteration look like sand, yet the sand looks
like print , the sandpiper's tracks like punctuation marks. Bishop
leaves her persona caught between incomplete and excessive mean–
ing, between interpretation and silence. "In Prison" deals with a
similar uncomfortable state of between-ness, but her protagonist
dreams of ending the ambiguity between inner and outer worlds by
choosing imprisonment. In his purified condition, he thinks , mean–
ing can be invented, interpretation freed from reality . But his mind
continually wanders from its purpose toward the impurities of the
world.
Both protagonists are literary men trying to situate themselves
in a dizzying landscape of texts. Their undertakings are doubtful at
best and suggest Bishop's unease about the profession of writing.
Such ambivalence about writing gets subtly purged in "The USA
School of Writing," a memoir of the shabby correspondence school
where Bishop was first employed. The school exposed a side of liter–
ature which artists repress : literature as means to fame, as source of
revenue, as a platform for ideologies, as a cure for loneliness. More
profoundly, Bishop may be questioning the meaning of authorial
identity itself. Is literature as "correspondence" with the world, with
readers, inherently false? As an "author" in the school she takes on
the fake identity of Mr. Margolies (she is one in a line) through
whom she is able to be "kind" to her students. Not often ready to
spell out the implications of her work, Bishop's central passage in
this memoir leaves the power of writing mysterious:
It was here, in this noisome place, in spite of all I had read and
been taught and thought I knew about it before , that the myste–
rious , awful power of writing first dawned on me . Or, since
