42
PARTISAN REVIEW
of space they either returned them to the sender or exacted outrageous
amounts of duty.
To get around this "trade barrier" - the
alfandega
maze of indiffer–
ence, corruption, and incompetence - Lota and Elizabeth had to depend
on the kindness of friends returning to Rio from visits in the north.
Oddly, the customs agents were much less sticky about "accompanied
baggage" than about packages arriving by mail. A number of Elizabeth's
friends in New York, especially those like myself who knew how few of
the comforts Americans take for granted could be found in Brazil, were
at times deluged with shopping lists from Samambaia - everything from
panty girdles (because the Brazilian kind, Elizabeth pointed out, "have
more take than give") to phonograph records and window blinds. Be–
cause Elizabeth said she was better known in Brazil as a cook than a
poet (she loved to serve American specialities like Apple Brown Betty to
her Brazilian friends, who thought them exotic) she found it hard to
manage without cake racks, cream of tartar, a doughnut cutter ("because
it's an awful nuisance to use a glass and then another glass"), none of
which had been heard of in Brazil. Once the motley assortment of shop–
ping was delivered to the returning friend's hotel, we all held our breath,
above and below the Equator, until the stuff had arrived safely in
Samambaia. Elizabeth and Lota were always ecstatically grateful and sent
wonderful presents in return: kilos of coffee that actually tasted as good
as it smelled,
bambi/has
(silver straws for drinking mate tea, a speciality of
the Brazilian south) and tiny silver spoons festooned with a plastic coffee
bean.
Fortunately, books and magazines, for some mysterious reason,
were deemed of no value by the customs, and could be mailed to Eliza–
beth with near-perfect confidence. One of the special pleasures of Eliza–
beth's letters was the running account of what she'd been reading, and
the pointed freshness of her comments. She could be scathing about a
bad or pretentious poem or novel, or a book she thought ludicrously
overrated (E. B. White's
Charlotte's Web,
for one example), and she al–
ways had something original to say about writing she admired. When I
sent her the English translation of
Doctor Zhivago
in 1959, she galloped
through the book and wrote me immediately:
I found it not a good novel but a marvelous book. Now I feel I
k,1OW
what
it might have been like if I'd been born in Russia instead of Massachusetts..
. . After long gruelling days of fleeing, packing, etc. tipping the family out of
the sledge into snowbanks 'for fun' - then taking baths and doing a big
washing. Theil
sitting down to write poems the rest of the night. No doubt
about it - they'll conquer the world all right if even the 'degenerate' poets
