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this." In truth she had never worked so hard before, but she remained
cheerful and optimistic even when
The New Yorker
showed no interest in
publishing any part of the diary. With her new-found practicality - bol–
stered by Bernice Baumgarten, the agent I found for Elizabeth in New
York, whose literary intelligence was impeccable - Elizabeth decided that
she would give her next book of poems only to the publisher willing to
take the diary. Her subsequent association with Farrar, Straus & Giroux
proved to be the happiest of her professional life.
Not only did her labor on the translation give Elizabeth a sense of
the way most writers "have to do their work," but it nourished her
imaginative energy to an unprecedented extent, and her letters were joy–
ously full of ideas and resolution. In January of 1955 she wrote that in
snatches of time stolen from
Helena Morley,
"I've started a whole book, I
think - small but a book - about my travels to & in Brazil ... I think
now is the time to do it, before I know too much and would feel I had
to get 'serious,' also before things have stopped striking me as strange,
which they're already beginning to do .. . [The first section] is rather
hectic and surrealist and lots of fun to write.... "
Unhappily, the exciting promise of this book was not fulfilled,
though six years later she did publish a small volume about Brazil for a
Time-Life series, in which Elizabeth's voice could scarcely be heard.
Whatever she did write of the hectic and surrealist book seems to have
vanished and was not mentioned again in her letters. For whatever reason
- failure of nerve, loss of enthusiasm, the unsleeping doubts of a per–
fectionist - she couldn't sustain the original idea, just as she had earlier
run aground with a long piece about Cape Sable Island, off the coast of
Nova Scotia. The island, and the thought of writing about it, had ab–
sorbed Elizabeth for years, for it was off Cape Sable Island that her great–
grandfather Hutchinson had gone down with the sailing vessel he com–
manded. Though Katherine White was eager to have "Sable Island" for
The New Yorker
and kept asking about its progress, Elizabeth eventually
abandoned the essay as a tangle of false starts, and did not look back.
In the spring of 1956, Elizabeth's second book,
Po ems: North &
South-A Cold Sprillg,
won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry , and she re–
acted with characteristic misgivings: ''I'm sure you know how embar–
rassed I feel about that Pulitzer, fun though it has been getting it. Never
has so little work dragged in so many prizes ... and I catechize myself
minutely worrying about
why."
She sincerely felt that Randall Jarrell de–
served the prize more than she did, but she couldn't help being amused
and even a trifle impressed with the official American reaction in Rio:
"Even the Embassy, our Embassy, rose to the occasion - all the way up
the mountain, in a huge black station wagon; now they'll invite us to
