PEARL
K.
BELL
37
/ It
is the elements speaking: earth, air, fire, water") and by driving the
family cow, Nelly, to pasture ("Whack! ... Flop, flop") and listening to
the river gurgling
"Sip."
In an age when poets feel compelled to confess even sins they have
not committed, Elizabeth's resistance to the personal in her work is all
the more remarkable. But while she allowed herself in this story to write
with rare candor about the disruptions and losses of her childhood, she
remained uneasy about "In the Village." When the story, really a prose–
poem, was published in
The New Yorker,
in 1953, she rejoiced at the
money (lavish, compared to the mingy checks she was accustomed to
getting from little magazines), but could not stifle her grave uncertainty:
"I am feeling fearfully rich ... and of course having fearful doubts about
whether I should ever have written 'In the Village' at all or not, or if I
did write it if it is the slightest bit of value to the English language."
Elizabeth was a consummate perfectionist. Just as she could be cut–
tingly harsh about work by other writers that failed to measure up to her
exacting standards, she was no less hard on herself. It was this un–
compromising severity, more than anything else, that prohibited her from
sending out any poem or story she felt to be even slightly flawed - or
"awful," a favorite word. But she knew that what she facetiously referred
to as the "Flaubert stuff' - the obsessive pursuit of perfection - was the
only way she could function as a writer. As she told me in one letter,
when she felt the wolf was baying at the door, "I had a poem and a
letter for Katherine [White, her editor at
The New Yorker]
-
took them
to the P. O. - changed my mind about one line in the poem and
brought it back - now it's stuck for another five years, I suppose - and
I'm desperate for CASH!" But when she did occasionally earn some real
money, she was anything but sensible. Though she had never learned to
drive a car, she spent the handsome check for "In the Village" on a little
MG -
bought, as she wrote, "for esthetic reasons," just the way she had
placed her bets at the Saratoga racetrack. But the MG turned out to be
one of the smartest investments Elizabeth ever made: in the days before
Brazil developed its own automobile industry, cars were scarce and cost
the earth. Several years after she bought her esthetic MG, she sold it for
three times what she'd originally paid. Not so dumb about money after
all.
Most of her years in Brazil, though, were plagued with anxieties
about money, because Elizabeth's small inherited income couldn't begin
to
keep up with the chaotic inflation. (Lota had more land than readily
available cash.) She had been spared the need of most postwar American
poets to teach in order to survive, but Elizabeth was not the sort of
purist who believes that writing-for-money is demeaning or corrupt. At
