PEARL K. BELL
Dona Elizabetchy:
A Memoir of Elizabeth Bishop
The first time I saw Elizabeth, she was blowing bubbles from a small,
elegantly curved clay pipe. As the iridescent globes of fragility rose on the
air, floated hesitantly for an instant, and vanished in the summer sunlight,
she followed their ascent to oblivion with an affectionate and watchful
eye, then dipped the pipe carefully into the cup of soapy water and blew
until she released another bouquet of bubbles. I knew that Elizabeth had
been affiicted with chronic asthma since childhood, and I had recently
read her strange, gasping poem, "0 Breath," each line broken in two by
the deep, recuperative caesura. The poem mimed her struggle with the
mystery within her lungs ("something moving but invisibly,
I
and with
what clamor"). I was struck by the quiet intensity of her play - with her
breath, the soapy water, the fragile clay pipe - and she appeared to me,
as I saw her then, as round and neat and bright as the bubbles she was
creating with such serious delight.
It was August of 1949, and we were both spending the month at
Yaddo, a colony for writers and artists in Saratoga Springs. In the midst
of pampered green acres, now heavy with the dust of late-summer heat,
stood the eccentric mansion built at the turn of the century by heirs to a
railroad fortune. Now its labyrinthine vastness provided a quiet refuge for
novelists, painters, poets, and composers. Elizabeth had been given a
room in the tower, with its own curved balcony overlooking the
courtyard of the neo-Renaissance, neo-Gothic, neo-everything-money–
could-buy mansion. A friend in New York who knew Elizabeth had
urged me to look for her when I got to Saratoga. I had approached her
room, its door open, but I hesitated to disturb her as she leaned against
Editor's Note: Citations in this essay are from the unpublished letters of Elizabeth
Bishop
©
1990 by Alice H . Methfessel, literary executor, and are used with permission.
