Letter from the Archive: Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters

Elizabeth Bishop’s first poem in The New Yorker, “Cirque d’Hiver,” appeared in 1940, but that wasn’t her first contribution to the magazine. In November of 1934, a few months after she graduated from Vassar College, Bishop was one of three writers who contributed to a tiny, funny Talk of the Town story about a man and his cleaning lady. And, in the decades since, The New Yorker has published a surprisingly diverse collection of Bishop’s work: more than fifty poems, as well as Talk stories, short fiction, and even, in 1996, one of her paintings.

There’s also “The Art of Losing,” a delightful, moving selection of Bishop’s letters, published in 1994, with a short biographical introduction by Alice Quinn, The New Yorker’s poetry editor at the time. (The title is taken from Bishop’s poem “One Art”: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master; / so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”) The first letter is from 1934, when Bishop was twenty-three; the last, from 1979, is the note she left on her classroom door when she fell ill, just before her death, at the age of sixty-eight. The letters capture her in many different phases of life, and show her hopeful, exhausted, struggling, and satisfied. Here’s one letter I’ve never forgotten, written to Donald Stanford in 1934:

Vassar College
April 5, 1934

The most interesting thing I’ve been doing lately is taking Marianne Moore to the circus. We went last Wednesday and had a perfectly beautiful time. She arrived carrying two large bags or satchels. One of them contained two paper bags, one for each of us, full of stale graham bread to feed the elephants with. They like it even better than peanuts and we were uncomfortably popular with them. All up and down the line of elephants they were pushing and writhing their trunks and trumpeting. I was mystified as to the other bag until halfway through the performance, when Miss Moore produced from it a large green glass bottle and some paper cups and napkins. It was orange juice. I became so impervious to the public that I even ate a large juicy pear on the train coming back. In the circus the seals were particularly good, especially the ones that can play “My Country ’Tis of Thee” on pipes. Marianne Moore really is so nice—and the most interesting talker; I’ve seen her only twice and I think I have enough anecdotes to meditate on for years.

“The Art of Losing” is available to everyone in our online archive. And, for more on Bishop, you can read Lloyd Schwartz on Bishop and Brazil, Dan Chiasson on the letters between Bishop and Robert Lowell (some of Lowell’s were published in the magazine in 2004), and Dana Gioia’s memoir about his time studying with Bishop at Harvard. (For completists, “Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker,” edited by Joelle Biele, offers a selection of letters between Bishop and this magazine’s poetry editors; there’s also the volume of Bishop’s uncollected poems and fragments, edited by Quinn, “Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke-Box.”)

Above: Elizabeth Bishop, April 27, 1951. Photograph: AP