44
PARTISAN REVIEW
had always "reminded me of some wonderful insect - with 'mosaic vi–
sion' like the eye of the bee - really a little inhuman ... I don't believe
anyone - or we - or Americans, maybe (and she seems to have disliked
us) could ever be so purely 'literary' again...." A week later, after fin–
ishing the volume, Elizabeth was less detached, thinking of her own
"indolence": "... she is much more heroic than I had ever realized -
and the amount of work she accomplishes fills me with despair, really.
The amount of discipline is frightening - "
Elizabeth's reading in Brazil ranged far and wide: Lawrence's
Sea
and Sardinia,
which she thought the best of his books; a biography of
Melbourne; Ernest Jones's life of Freud; the journal Darwin kept on the
Beagle,
in which his complaints about Brazilian inefficiency and slovenli–
ness amused her because things had changed so little since Darwin's day.
She was outraged by a story of Salinger's in
The New Yorker,
"Seymour:
An Introduction": "That horrible self-consciousness, every sentence
commenting on itself and comments on itself commenting on itself, and I
think it was actually supposed to be
funny.
And if [Seymour's] poems
were supposed to be so good why not just give us one or two and shut
up, for god's sake?"
And sometimes Elizabeth's reading proved useful in unsuspected
ways. In a particularly endearing letter she wrote after coming down
with conjunctivitis during a trip to Ouro Preto (where she later bought
and restored an old house), she reported: "My eyes felt so horrible and I
couldn't read or type for a few days and I kept feeling if only I could
cry, I'd be all right. So finally I sat down and read 'Little Women' for
about two hours and wept a great deal, as much as I always do at senti–
mentality, and my eyes immediately felt much better. ... "
When I recalled how miserable Elizabeth could become at Yaddo
and in New York, I rejoiced when she wrote,
"It
is a little hard to get
used to being happy [she had begun writing "unh" and crossed it out]
after forty-two years - birthday two days ago - of being almost consis–
tently unhappy." The natural beauty ofSamambaia, the engulfing lushness
of the landscape, never ceased to captivate her, and the descriptive bril–
liance of her letters was a special delight. Writing one Fourth ofJuly (she
typed a rocket-burst of asterisks at the top of the page to celebrate the
day), she recounted a recent adventure in Rio, when Lota drove a group
of friends up the mountain called Corcovado (Hunchback) that towers
over the bay, with its hundred-foot- tall figure of Christ the Redeemer on
the summit. They had come to see the Sao Pedro fireworks, which, that
year, it had been announced in the papers, would include a surprise. Even
though the car was making ominous noises,
