50
PARTISAN REVIEW
to direct this project was breathtaking in its audacity, because Brazilian
men - not only the construction workers but the self-important pack of
bureaucrats, engineers, landscape experts, architects, and politicians in–
volved in the park - had never, ever taken orders from a woman.
For a while at least, it looked as though all those Brazilian pea–
cocks had somehow managed to accept such an unheard-of division of
authority, and Elizabeth approvingly reported that "Lota has been ad–
mirable, clear, succinct, quiet - directives like Napoleon's." It made
Elizabeth very proud to know that at last her friend was "using her
brains and helping poor dirty dying Rio at the same time."
But she took no pride in her own work as she slogged through the
Time-Life book, which was proving more of a headache and frustration
than she had anticipated. It saddened me to hear that she was having "a
hideous
time writing the thing," but this was hardly surprising. It wasn't
only that she had neither the experience nor the ability to grind out the
sort of briskly informative journalistic prose the editors wanted. From
their castle keep in Rockefeller Center the editors endlessly pestered and
offended and infuriated Elizabeth. The worst of it was that:
like publishers, they keep paying lip-service to "distinguished writ–
ing," "your own opinions," "your fine reputation ," and blah blah
blah -
Lying
like RUGS.... They are INCREDIBLE, that's all - it
is really more like manufacturing whipped cream out of the by–
products of a plastic factory than anything remotely connected with
writing.... They also Tel-x-ed from NY to ask if ('d ever been a
Communist. (Probably some infant editor saw a poem in
Partisan
Review
and the name terrified them.)
Toward the end of October, 1961, Elizabeth and Lota, who had
been laboring day and night on the park and badly needed a change,
£lew up to New York for Elizabeth's final tug-of-war with the editors .
They were both exhausted, not only by work. Earlier that month, a vi–
olent political crisis in Brazil had been precipitated by the new president,
Janio Quadros, when he gave a medal to Che Guevara. For a while the
country seemed to be on the verge of catastrophic breakdown, and un–
political Elizabeth was being hotly pursued by magazines like
Encounter
and
The Atlantic Monthly
for her on-the-spot analysis of the crisis. During
the uproar she confessed in a letter that her main feeling about all the
commotion was simple: the country was just plain crazy.
Though drawn and travel-weary when they arrived in New York,
Elizabeth and Lota were overjoyed to be there, to see their friends and
