PEARL
K.
BELL
31
ered, her typewriting was almost as hard to make out, filled as it was
with dashes, like the poems of Emily Dickinson.) She was a marvelous
letter-writer, the words £lowing from her fingers with an uninhibited
spontaneity so very different from the reticence and restraint of her poems
and stories. Far from prolific in her published work, she poured her days
into thousands of letters with unstinting vitality and ease. She could
evoke the atmosphere of her palatial office in the Library of Congress in
a few tossed-off phrases (her secretary, she wrote, "handles me very gently
and just suggests one little chore at a time, and serves sherry to callers,
etc.") and her image of Washington has a ghostly exactness:
Washington doesn't seem quite real - all those piles of granite and
marble - like an inflated copy of another capital city someplace else
(the Forum?) - even the Lincoln Memorial, which I went to see, af–
fected me that way.
At the end of her year as Poetry Consultant she returned to New
York and her tiny apartment on King Street, on the fringe of Greenwich
Village, but as always the city soon exacerbated her irrepressible restless–
ness, her passionate need to travel, driven to be on the move even when
she could not find the answer to her "questions of travel":
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around? ...
"Is
it
lack oj imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or cotdd Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never jree.
A~ld
here, or there
. . .
No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"
As a child Elizabeth had been shuttled by grandparents and aunts
between Nova Scotia, Worcester, and Boston. As a young woman she
wandered, of her own volition, between Europe and New York and
Key West, where she settled for several years during the war. In 1951,
having published a highly praised book,
North
&
South,
she was awarded
a generous fellowship by Bryn Mawr College, and embarked on her
