PEARL
K.
BELL
baby lion that just flew in from Pretoria the other day - 4 months
old and absolutely adorable. He stands on the sofa on his hind legs
watching for her out the window - sleeps with her and tears the sheets
to
shreds, of course.... And he lies at night gazing into the open
fire like a baby King of the Jungle.
35
The fierce, unblinking eye she used with such tactile precision in her
poetry feasted on the strange and exasperating variousness of her new
home , and as Elizabeth's Portuguese improved - she was far more
responsive to the language than I had been - her reports on Samambaia
and the occasional trips to Rio grew more confident and evocative with
every letter. A few months after she moved to Samambaia, she could
scarcely contain her gratitude when Lota arranged to have a studio built
for Elizabeth, not far from the main house, but far enough away for her
to escape the daily tumult of servants and workmen. The studio was
perched above a waterfall, and its sound did not disturb the poet in this
private place where she could work in quiet peace.
"I am so overcome I dream about it every night," she wrote me in
October of 1952:
[My
studio]
has whitewashed walls and a herringbone brick floor, and
a small fireplace of a rock Lota found here , dark gray with mica
flecks, very pretty - also a small bathroom and kitch enette to make
tea, etc. I'm sure I'll just sit in it weeping with joy for weeks and not
write a line.
She was relentlessly clawed by guilt for the too small number of
poems and stories she was able to finish, and thought worthy of publica–
tion. (When she came to Brazil, Elizabeth had published only one book
of poems -
North
&
South
-
at the age of thirty-five.) In letter after let–
ter she lamented her inability to write rapidly and freely, with the confi–
dent, prolific industriousness of her college friend Mary McCarthy, and
she scolded herself mercilessly. After reading a long article about Italy
that Mary McCarthy had published in
The New Yorker,
Elizabeth con–
fessed, "I am childishly envious of [Mary's] ability to write that kind of
thing. Oh, how I wish I could.... What I envy is her
quantity
more
than anything - but poetry can't be done that way, I suppose, and I ap–
proach everything, even stories, in the same desultory and emotional way,
and
it doesn't work very well." In turn, Mary McCarthy once admitted,
"I envy the mind hiding in [Elizabeth Bishop's] words, like an
'I'
counting up to a hundred and waiting to be found." Given their very
