PEARL K. BELL
In the kitchen we dream together
how the meek shall inherit the earth -
or several acres of mine.
47
Adorably feckless, deliriously incompetent, Manuelzinho and his
family made Elizabeth feel "as if I were living in the 19th century - it's
hard to make the country seem real or contemporary."
Though she never ceased to scold herself for writing so little,
Elizabeth oscillated between a confident sense of her achievement and the
contradictory tremor that everything she had done was worthless. One
year she was intensely irritated when
Vogue
published an article about her,
riddled with slick ignorance about the nature of her poetry. When that
issue of the magazine finally reached her, she lamented: "Oh dear I hate
that picture of myself . . . and that insistence on my coldness and
precision, etc. - I think that's some sort of cliche always used of women
poets, at least I didn't
Jeel
as if I wrote that way." Time and again critics
and journalists attended only to the surface of her descriptive imagery,
and failed to hear the undertones of pain and desperation, the lonely ur–
gency behind the perfectly poised control and the mask of detachment.
Elizabeth knew better than most how easily her precarious contentment,
even in Brazil, could be threatened.
It was in part this self-knowledge that caused her to grieve so
deeply when she heard that Dylan Thomas had died in New York in
1953.
Elizabeth sorrowed not only for a poet who died so recklessly
young but for all poets, herself among them, who lived too close to the
knife-edge of self-destruction. In her letter about Thomas she wondered,
"Why do some poets manage to get by and live to be malicious old
bores like Frost or - probably - pompous old ones, like Yeats, or crazy
old ones like Pound - and some just don't?" Though her work had
scarcely anything in common with the poetry of Dylan Thomas, she re–
membered, mourning him, the "instantaneous sympathy and pity" she
had felt on meeting him in New York, for she believed that "he made
most of our contemporaries seem
small
and disgustingly self-seeking and
cautious and hypocritical and cold.... "
A few weeks later, still unable to shake off her sadness about
Thomas, she allowed herself a rare outburst of mordant candor: "Poets
should have self-doubt left out of their systems completely - as one can
see most of the surviving ones have.... And of course it isn't just poets
- we're all wretched and half the time or three-quarters I think it is a
thoroughly disgusting world - and then the horror vanishes for a while,
mercifully. But in my own minor way I know enough about drink- and-
