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ARTISAN REVIEW
dissimilar temperaments and talents, there was clearly no way, ever, that
their envy could be assuaged.
It
wasn't just Elizabeth's "indolence" - her self-berating word -
that accounted for the meager literary yield. Though she had the studio
to
escape to, everyday life in Brazil, even for the efficient Lota, could be
an exasperating, time-devouring struggle: with the climate, the lunatic
inflation, incompetent workmen who resisted any new and better way of
doing anything. Since Lota's house was still a-building, without a tele–
phone or electricity, when Elizabeth came to stay, there were many
practical reasons for putting off further work on an unfinished poem or
story. There was, for example, the American-type stove that Lota craved
for heating the living room:
We cut pictures out of magazines and had the iron-worker make us
what is really nothing but an ordinary sheet-iron stove, oval, rather
like a cake of soap on legs, with stove pipe. But since they have never
used anything like that here before, it is creating quite a sensation: he
swears it will never work, and every inch of it has been a battle–
ground and he and Lota have screamed their heads off at each other -
worse scenes than usual, because carried on in the shop with twenty
men hammering iron and working buzz-saws and blast furnaces, etc.,
all around us. .. .
I
don't know whether it's admirable or not to have
absolutely no sense of comfort like the Brazilians.
Despite such commotion, this strange country did provide Elizabeth
with the calm security of a home, and it was this stability that enabled
her to tap ineradicable memories of childhood in ways she had not at–
tempted before. As John Unterecker has remarked, in Brazil "she [was]
freed by her foreignness to be most like herself," and for the first time she
could directly confront in her writing the confusion and sense of aban–
donment she had felt as a child about her mother's insanity.
Elizabeth's father had died when she was eight months old, and the
young widow never recovered from the shock of her husband's prema–
ture death. Gertrude Bishop returned with her infant daughter to her
parents' home in rural Nova Scotia, where her condition steadily deteri–
orated, until, when Elizabeth was five, her mother was confined to an
asylum for the remaining eighteen years of her life. As Elizabeth sum–
moned up that tragic finality in the story, "In the Village," which she
wrote in Samambaia, the recollection begins with "A scream, the echo
of a scream" that hangs over the village. Like Caliban's isle, the story is
"full of noises," as the child tries to
mume
her pain by visiting the black–
smith's shop ("Clang. /
Clang .
.. /
It
sounds like a bell buoy out at sea.
