TY - JOUR
AU - Baldock,, Sophie
AB - Abstract This article examines parallels between the exchange of miniature portraits in late eighteenth-century letters and the exchange of photographs and keepsakes in the twentieth-century correspondence of American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Drawing on theories of the miniature in Susan Stewart’s work, alongside art-historical and literary-critical accounts of the practice of exchanging miniature portraits in letters, the article builds on arguments that portraits go hand-in-hand with the genre of letter writing. I argue that previous criticism of the Bishop-Lowell correspondence has not yet adequately explored their epistolary discussion and exchange of visual materials. As in the case of their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, for Bishop and Lowell, letter writing frequently involved a literal and metaphorical exchange of portraits. The article places particular photographs in their original context alongside letters, demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between images and text and the key role played by the visual in letter writing. It provides a fresh reading of Bishop’s and Lowell’s linked poems, ‘The Armadillo’ and ‘Skunk Hour’, arguing that these poems are a means of portrait-painting in relation to the other. The poems are examined alongside descriptions of an antique miniature cameo, sent by Lowell to Bishop as a companion to his poem, which functions as an ambivalently gendered portrait of Bishop. Finally, the poets’ interlocking memoirs, ‘91 Revere Street’ and ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’, are analysed to show their origin in letters, and their shared preoccupation with portraiture, scale and framing. I. INTRODUCTION Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell’s extensive correspondence played a formative role in the development of their creative work. David Kalstone’s seminal study, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (1989), set forth the story of Bishop’s development as a poet in relation to her two most important literary friendships, those with Moore and Lowell.1 Kalstone’s analysis captured the cocktail of admiration and resentment, imitation and envy, affection and despair, which often characterized, in different but related ways, Bishop’s creative relationships with the two poets. He also demonstrated the essentially epistolary nature of this triangle of literary influence, drawing on the large, and at the time unpublished, collections of Bishop’s letters with Moore and Lowell. With the publication of the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell in Words in Air (2008), which contains all 459 of their surviving letters to one another, the long and enduring epistolary friendship between the two has come under the spotlight.2 Moreover, the structuring of the volume of letters as a two-way conversation that captures the original back and forth between the two correspondents makes possible more extended analyses of interactions between Bishop and Lowell’s letters to one another and their published works. This article looks at the connections between Bishop and Lowell’s conversation in letters, and the conversation that also takes place, in a related way, in their poems and memoirs. I focus particularly on a preoccupation on the part of both poets with portraits and portraiture, which a close reading of their letters alongside their poems, memoirs and photographs makes visible, and which is missing from previous analyses. I argue, drawing on accounts of the practice of exchanging miniature portraits in late eighteenth-century letters, that portraits go hand-in-hand (often literally) with the genre of letter writing, and that visual elements in letters are a key part of their meaning. Letters are themselves a kind of self-portrait, as well as often facilitating a literal exchange of portraits. In the correspondence between Bishop and Lowell the material practice of eighteenth-century miniature portrait exchange is replicated in their exchange of photographs and keepsakes. These function in a similar manner to their eighteenth-century counterparts in the way that they act as talismans and physical substitutes for the two correspondents. Bishop and Lowell are playful and self-conscious in relation to the images of themselves that they exchange, drawing attention to the ways in which their correspondence mimics earlier, often gendered, epistolary conventions, whilst also questioning the accuracy of the literary and photographic images of themselves they include. The exchange of portraits reinforces the view that Bishop and Lowell’s correspondence was essentially a collaborative one, despite recent criticism that sees the pair as in competition with one another. For example, Colm Tóibín and Paul Muldoon, respectively, focus on the egotistical impulses behind Lowell’s refashioning of others’ letters for personal and artistic gain, and the ways in which he appropriates and absorbs Bishop’s material into his own more confessional style. There are indeed a number of examples of this. His versification of Bishop’s subtle memoir ‘In the Village’—‘The Scream’—takes Bishop’s quiet and implicit tone and makes it explicit and confessional. Lowell’s poem, ‘Water’, presents an altered and romanticized version of his friendship with Bishop. Furthermore, Lowell’s sonnets for and about Bishop published in Notebook (1970) and History (1973) re-use elements of Bishop’s correspondence in ways that she objected to, and which highlight the dangers of forms of mirroring and copying that trespass into areas of another’s life and biography. In On Elizabeth Bishop (2015), Colm Tóibín is rightly critical of what he sees as Lowell’s inaccurate imitations of Bishop’s reticent poetic and epistolary style: ‘the tone of the third poem, in which Lowell had seemed to quote from a letter of hers, seemed strange, a dramatic, personal and highly charged tone that had never entered into Bishop’s poetry and seemed closer to Lowell’s own work. It was Bishop’s calm voice turned shrill’.3 Tóibín finds a subtext in the correspondence in Words in Air, arguing that Bishop’s letters to Lowell, although they appear on the surface admiring and complimentary, betray an uneasiness with Lowell’s increasingly confessional style: ‘There is an undertow in the letters Bishop wrote about Life Studies and Imitations, a sense that she was containing herself […] and that she was deeply uneasy about Lowell writing so openly about himself and his family’.4 Similarly, in an essay on the Bishop-Lowell letters, Paul Muldoon paints a picture of a mutually critical relationship between the two poets, again reading, almost to the point of over-interpretation, a subtext into the correspondence and poems. He casts Lowell as frequently self-aggrandising with ‘a penchant for self-dramatisation’.5 Yet a reading of Bishop and Lowell’s literal and figurative portrait exchange, along with their linked poems and memoirs, demonstrates the deep level at which their later work is inextricability entangled in a relationship of mutual influence. Although I agree that Lowell’s tributes and imitations of Bishop sometimes misfired, taking too many liberties with personal details, a close reading of the entirety of their correspondence reveals the complexity of their friendship, and the difficulty of making broad statements or generalizations in regard to which poet borrowed from, imitated or copied the other. As Richard Flynn writes in his analysis of Words in Air and ‘the aesthetics of autobiographical poetry’: ‘what seems striking in light of their complete correspondence is the extent to which they helped each other both to define and to pursue their particular excellences. Through a combination of admiration, fierce competition, envy, and genuine affection, they seem to have brought out the best in each other’.6 Bishop’s poem, ‘The Armadillo’, and Lowell’s response, ‘Skunk Hour’, experiment with representations and reflections of themselves and each other, which are facilitated by their correspondence. Their two memoirs,‘91 Revere Street’ and ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’, arose directly from the correspondence between the pair, and mirror each other in their preoccupation with scale and use of heirloom family portraits as a framing device. Here, Bishop draws on the correspondence with Lowell, and the portraits featured in the memoirs, as a prompt for self-exploration and a means of foregrounding the similarities and differences in their two approaches. II. LETTERS AND MINIATURE PORTRAITS Epistolary critics have observed that letters can be a form of self-portraiture. Jonathan Ellis highlights the necessary connection between the materiality of letters and the physicality and personality of their authors: ‘Letters bring people closer together without them ever actually touching. They are perhaps the closest literary form to physical flirtation, hence the popularity of letter writing as a means of courtship and seduction. Letters are not just about communicating with the world, however. They can also be a form of self-portrait’.7 As Hugh Haughton observes, such epistolary self-portraits can be humorous and playful, as in the case of one of Edward Lear’s letters, which includes a self-portrait of the author as a snail with the text of his letter wrapped around the snail’s shell: ‘This comic self-portrait in letter form tells us something about the form of the letter, about its materiality, its mimetic relationship to its author, and its essential mobility (however slow)’.8 But, as these and other critics caution, we cannot read letters as straightforward self-portraits nor uncomplicated windows into character or biography. Letters are by their nature performative. They can be a mirror or a self-portrait for the writer, but this portrait is often crafted and constructed, and more like a kind of ‘mask’. Janet Altman writes: ‘The letter has been extolled by epistolary authors for its potential both as a faithful portrait and as a deceptive mask.’9 Similarly, Tom Paulin observes that ‘In letters […] the self wears the mask of the performing self, making an artful naturalness seem artless, as though self and mask are the same’.10 An analysis of Bishop and Lowell’s exchange of photographs with letters reveals a preoccupation with literal and figurative portraits, self-portraits and the accuracy of these likenesses. Throughout their correspondence, Bishop and Lowell speak of photographs of themselves that they exchange and which help to bridge the geographical distance between them. This exchange of photographs resembles the exchange of miniature portraits that became popular in Europe during the late eighteenth century. Although Bishop and Lowell send photographs rather than painted miniatures, the significance of the exchange of likenesses between the correspondents and the way that they are enclosed in letters is similar to this earlier practice, which has recently received a greater degree of attention from both art historians and literary critics. Marcia Pointon has demonstrated the importance of what has previously been considered, partly due to their size, a marginal genre of portraiture. Pointon, however, argues that it was exactly their size that made miniature portraits both special and, crucially, portable. Pointon writes that ‘the grand tour (leading to lengthy sojourns in Rome by young aristocratic men), military and naval campaigns, mercantile expansionism, and emigration generated the conditions for the production and circulation of portrait-objects’.11 These portraits, Pointon argues, became part of ‘social and economic exchange systems’ and were ‘acquired, given, received and circulated as objects’ in the form of gifts, jewellery and as an addition to a letter.12 In the case of Bishop and Lowell, lengthy geographical separation also facilitated the exchange of letters, gifts and photographs. Indeed, Pointon also demonstrates that the practice of exchanging miniature portraits is intimately bound up with the exchange of letters. Like letters, the portraits ‘not only represent people, they also stand in their stead’ and ‘secure a connection between an absent person and the viewer’.13 She observes that ‘miniatures are culturally related to, if not actually analogous to, letter writing’; they were sometimes sent as ‘substitutes for letters of introduction’, and in the reverse case, as demonstrated by a gift from Queen Charlotte to a friend that contained a miniature letter, a letter could also act as a substitute for a miniature portrait.14 Hanneke Grootenboer focuses on eye miniatures as further examples of portraits that overlap with epistolary spaces.15 Grootenboer finds the bond between letters and miniatures to be even closer than Pointon indicates, arguing that the two forms were often ‘interchangeable’ and concludes that ‘[l]etters and miniatures collaborate in creating the shrunken sphere of intimacy’.16 For Grootenboer, it is not simply the case that letters possess many of the same qualities as miniature portraits, but that letters themselves are also a miniature form. When opened and read, letters have the ability to halt time and create an intimate space and a separate world: ‘The opening of a snuffbox or a letter will result in the redesign of the surrounding space to the extent that time will come to a halt, and the room will shrink’.17 Joe Bray has also explored the close connections between miniature portraits and letter writing in his analysis of eighteenth-century novels of sensibility, arguing that: ‘it is often not who or what the miniature portrait claims to represent which makes it significant in fiction of this period, but rather how it is circulated and interpreted’.18 Similarly, for Bishop and Lowell, the photographs they exchange are part of a ‘symbiotic’ (to borrow Pointon’s term) relationship with the letters themselves.19 Bray and Pointon both observe that the small size of miniature portraits served to heighten their symbolic value, bestowing on them talismanic properties. Pointon describes similarities between miniature portraits and ‘sacramental artifacts and reliquaries’, particularly in the case of miniatures that were displayed in a case along with a lock of hair.20 Similarly, Bray recounts the use of a miniature portrait as a talisman between the lovers St Preux and Julie in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie; ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761).21 In seeing the miniature as a talisman, which is often intimately connected to and worn on the body, both Pointon and Bray cite Susan Stewart’s influential study of the function of miniature forms, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Stewart sees the miniature as ‘a metaphor for the interior space of the bourgeois subject’, comparing this to ‘the gigantic’, which conversely she describes as ‘a metaphor for the abstract authority of the state and collective, public, life’.22 The miniature is very fluidly defined in Stewart’s work, and her study analyses a variety of forms including miniature books, portraits, photographs, souvenirs, family heirlooms and Tom Thumb weddings to show the connections between these similarly small, enclosed worlds. Drawing on psychoanalytic and feminist theory, specifically Lacan and Kristeva, Stewart argues that what all these miniature forms and practices have in common is a nostalgic longing for a lost connection between signifier and signified, and between the self and the maternal body. In their shrunken size, miniature forms embody the desire to return to a feeling of wholeness and presence. A decrease in size is paradoxically accompanied by an increase in significance. Stewart writes that a reduction of scale ‘increases the significance of the object within a system of signs’.23 Along with this, the key features of the miniature, according to Stewart, include an excessive attention to detail, accuracy of representation and an exaggerated focus on interiority and timelessness.24 These characteristics apply particularly to forms of miniature portrait, which emphasize proximity to the body and a desire for connection between self and other. Stewart gives examples, like Pointon, of miniature portraits that were worn as jewellery, and exchanged as love tokens. Portrait miniatures ‘allowed possession of the face of the other’ and ‘are emblematic of a distanced and abstracted sexuality’ in the way that they represent an image of the self ‘independent of the life of the body’. The miniature is a kind of abstract ‘mirror’ for the subject’s desires, and by a talismanic ‘magic’ conjures the ‘presence’ of the other.25 Stewart gives a brief example of miniature portraits exchanged as physical substitutes in letters, citing a nineteenth-century letter-writing manual, which gives suggested form letters for sending and receiving miniatures in a romantic correspondence. While these letters are idealized and hackneyed, they pinpoint the talismanic ‘magic’ of miniature portraits, and the central role they play in gendered conventions of epistolary courtship. The ‘Lady’ correspondent is instructed to write in a self-deprecating yet coquettish manner: ‘While I feel that my personal pretensions are but humble, I believe that you will be pleased with the enclosed miniature, the view of which, in my absence, may call to your mind a remembrance of me’.26 But the desire for connection and presence that miniature forms embody is often frustrated. Despite this idea that the miniature portrait/letter stands in a person’s stead, and that their exchange brings people together and strengthens social or romantic ties, a repeated theme in relation to epistolary portrait exchange is the inaccuracy or inadequacy of the images and their promotion of misunderstanding and discord. The exchange of miniatures did not simply help to collapse geographical distances between correspondents, nor always bring them closer together in an emotional sense. Bray observes that ‘miniatures will not fully compensate for the lack of presence’, noting that miniature portraits exchanged in novels often prove to be inaccurate copies of their subjects.27 Similarly, Grootenboer records that in the medieval correspondence between Heloise and Abelard, and also in Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, portraits are characterized as ‘mute’ and ‘cold’ representations of the self, which are inferior to letters.28 This provides a link to the vexed status of presence/absence in the genre of letter writing itself. As Altman observes: ‘The letter is unique precisely because it does tend to define itself in terms of polarities such as portrait/mask, presence/absence, bridge/barrier’.29 Most epistolary theorists, and letter writers themselves, lament the physical absence that letters try, but ultimately fail, to make up for. Similar to miniature portraits, which frequently turn out to be inaccurate likenesses or inadequate substitutes for the person they represent, letters are often seen as frustrating as much as facilitating connection between correspondents. Many of the key aspects and functions of miniature portraits that Stewart, Pointon, Grootenboer and Bray observe can equally be applied to photographs, which supplanted their painted precursors. Portraits and photographs both ‘work actually and metaphorically to secure a connection between an absent person and the viewer’.30 Similarly, portraits and photographs, like letters, can possess ‘talismanic’ properties. Stewart writes that ‘the significance of the wallet photograph, may be seen as descending from such miniatures’ since these are often carried around as intimate reminders of, and in a sense replacements for, absent loved ones.31 Grootenboer argues that, contrary to accepted wisdom, it was not straightforwardly the case that ‘photography killed miniature art’, but rather daguerreotypes and later photographs, in their small proportions, incorporated and took on the role of miniature portraits: ‘photography embraced the proportions of miniature as the standardized format for the representation of the human figure’. Photographs, liked painted miniatures, are often small and tactile and designed to be looked at while held in the hands. The ‘fundamental role’ of the miniature in photography has, Grootenboer argues, ‘not yet been fully explored’.32 I add that the fundamental role that images and photographs play in the practice of letter writing, similar to their miniature predecessors, has yet to be fully explored and provides further insight into the interplay between image and text in correspondence. For Elizabeth Bishop, the exchange of photographs is a part of the formation of her identity as a poet, and is bound up with the genre of letter writing. An early exchange with Marianne Moore includes a discussion of a photograph Moore sent while Bishop was travelling in France (Fig. 1). Like a miniature, the photograph of Moore acts as a visual stimulus and aid to the correspondence. Bishop uses the photograph as an imaginary interlocutor. Writing to Moore in May 1937, Bishop remarks: Thank you so much for your letter, which lightened my sensation of being an EXILE very much, and for the wonderful photographs. I had scarcely dared hope you would send the one with the long fingers leaning on the ‘manuscript’ and the typewriter to one side. I shall treasure them all, even though I fail to find a trace of you among the sand dunes33 Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Unidentified photographer, Marianne Moore by typewriter and desk in her bedroom, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, c.1911. Courtesy of The Rosenbach, Philadelphia, PA (Moore XII: 02: 26 b). Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Unidentified photographer, Marianne Moore by typewriter and desk in her bedroom, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, c.1911. Courtesy of The Rosenbach, Philadelphia, PA (Moore XII: 02: 26 b). Both the letter and photographs from Moore help to soften Bishop’s sense of isolation, and provide a connection to a sense of literary community. Bishop’s reference to the arrangement of objects in the photograph signal Moore’s role as her literary mentor. The presence of the ‘manuscript’ and ‘typewriter’ clearly point to Moore’s literary status and dedication to her craft. Yet, there is also a sense here that the letter and photographs, while they help to bridge the distance between the two correspondents, cannot wholly compensate for the lack of physical presence. Bishop’s placing of the word ‘manuscript’ in inverted commas draws attention to the apparently staged nature of the photograph, which shows Moore poised as if having just transcribed a poem. Bishop’s final comment, ‘I shall treasure them all, even though I fail to find a trace of you among the sand dunes’ is evidence of the failed connection and the physical separateness that letters and miniature portraits try to, but can never quite entirely, make up for. Bishop mentions this favourite photograph of Moore again in a later letter, which makes clear that she views the photograph as a kind of talisman. She writes: Before your letter came I had tried in vain to semaphore myself back into normalcy by putting one of your pictures in the mirror frame (the one with the fingertips resting on the little heap of ‘work’ […]) but, probably because Louise has a very languorous picture of Proust on the other side, it wouldn’t work.34 Bishop uses the photograph of Moore as a means of calming her following the car accident that she, Louise Crane and Margaret Miller (who was badly injured and lost an arm) were involved in during their travels in France in 1937. However, the attempt here to conjure a ‘sense of normalcy’ using the visual prop of the photograph does not succeed. The ‘languorous picture of Proust’ on the other side of the mirror disrupts this séance-like operation. Moore’s picture represents an image of the unassuming, conscientious female writer at work, which contrasts, and contradicts, the ‘languorous’ image of Proust. The placing of Moore’s picture in the mirror is further evidence of Bishop’s conflicted relationship to both Moore as a mentor figure, and to her own work. By positioning it in such a way Bishop is able to view herself and Moore simultaneously, thus offering a kind of visual representation of the mentor relationship and its influence on her. This earlier exchange with Moore gives an indication of the ways in which Bishop and Lowell exchanged photographs in their correspondence. In July 1953 Bishop wrote to Lowell requesting that he send her some photographs of himself for her studio in Brazil: ‘I’m getting old & sentimental, but now that I have a studio I think I’d like to have some photographs to put in it. I have only one, of Marianne. Could you give me one of you?’ (WIA 144). In her letter, Bishop enclosed pictures of herself and her studio at Samambaia. In a following letter she enclosed a photograph of herself posing in an MG sports car with her cat Tobias seated on her lap and the mountainous scenery of Petrópolis in the background (Fig. 2). Bishop had purchased the car with the money she earned from The New Yorker for her memoir ‘In the Village’. She writes to Lowell: Well, I got a car, too—I guess since I wrote you. I think I’ll even enclose another bad picture that looks as if I were heading into the Andes in it, when as a matter of fact I can’t even get my license yet. I made enough on a story in the New Yorker to get it—a slightly second-hand MG, almost my favorite car, black, with red leather (WIA 147) These photographs are a visual counterpoint to the descriptions of her new Brazilian life in the letters, which also abound with visual details. However, as in the case of Moore’s image, with its self-consciously staged arrangement of Moore with a typewriter, Bishop here draws attention to the way that her own photograph is staged and deceptive. She calls it a ‘bad picture’, and notes that while it ‘looks as if I were heading into the Andes in it’ she is in fact unable to drive the car because she cannot get a licence. The car functions primarily as a prop in the photograph. Furthermore, Bishop could not head off ‘into the Andes’ even if she were able to drive the car, since these mountains are on the western side of South America, and Petrópolis, where Bishop lived and the photograph was likely taken, is in Brazil on the eastern side. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Unidentified photographer, Elizabeth Bishop in her MG sports car with cat Tobias, c.1953. Reproduced by permission of Monica Morse. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Unidentified photographer, Elizabeth Bishop in her MG sports car with cat Tobias, c.1953. Reproduced by permission of Monica Morse. For Bishop, the photographs of Moore and Lowell that she intends to place in her studio are a means of engaging with her two most important literary mentors, yet her letters demonstrate a degree of ambivalence in relation to the accuracy of these portraits. When Lowell neglected to send a photograph of himself in exchange for this image, Bishop reiterated her request: I should like so much to have a picture of you, or of you & E. [Lowell’s wife Elizabeth Hardwick] maybe. I never had such things before but somehow they seem to go in my estudio—age or Latin sentimentality I don’t know which. So far I have only Marianne and 3 Brazilian birds, so it really isn’t like the Gotham Book Mart. (WIA 163) A bookstore in New York City open between 1920 and 2007, Gotham Book Mart was famous for the many photographs of writers on its walls. There is a characteristic touch of irony in Bishop’s comments. The mention of Gotham Book Mart may also refer to a famous photograph of a group of poets at a reception held for Osbert and Edith Sitwell at the now defunct bookstore (Fig. 3). The photograph, published in Life Magazine in 1948, featured Bishop alongside Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams, W. H. Auden, Charles Henri Ford, Randall Jarrell and others. In a previous letter to Lowell, Bishop had objected to its staged nature, and its hints of a male-focused literary elitism: ‘you may have seen the picture now with everyone of the extra-select group of poets looking distorted as well as wretched. Pauline kindly pointed out to me that I looked as if my head had been removed and then screwed back on again the wrong way. Marianne looks like a little ghost’ (WIA 67). The stiff formality of the two women poets contrasts with the easy postures of some of the male figures, particularly Charles Henri Ford who is shown cross-legged on the floor in the centre, and W. H. Auden perched on a stepladder. While the photograph tries to capture a literary salon-style gathering, Bishop’s comments draw to attention its elements of fabrication and ties to a male-dominated, posturing literary celebrity culture at mid-century.35 Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Lisa Larsen, ‘A Collection of Poets’, Life magazine, 6 December 1948, Getty Images # 50516672. Reproduced by permission of Getty Images. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Lisa Larsen, ‘A Collection of Poets’, Life magazine, 6 December 1948, Getty Images # 50516672. Reproduced by permission of Getty Images. In a letter which followed, Lowell claimed he had positioned the photograph of Bishop in her car at the top of a small Christmas tree, demonstrating the talismanic role of photographs exchanged by the pair: ‘We have your photograph perched high on our little foot-and-a-half Maine Christmas tree, sent us by my Cousin Harriet. I’m sure you remember her from Washington. I’d never dare take the wheel holding a kitten, and I doubt my car would be up to reaching to that roof of the world you seem to have attained’ (WIA 150). Lowell’s comment is jocular, and the diminutive nature of both the photograph and the tree itself make the whole arrangement comedic. Yet, the positioning of Bishop’s photograph atop the tree mimics the positioning of angels at the top of Christmas trees. Lowell’s reference to ‘that roof of the world you seem to have attained’ suggests admiration (and some envy) for Bishop’s new geographical surroundings and the elevated burst of creativity that they have facilitated. Therefore, Bishop and Lowell both mock quasi-religious reverence for (miniature) images of literary idols yet take part in it at the same time, exchanging photographs as talismans. III. ‘LAVA CAMEO’ Some years later, in December 1957, Lowell sent Bishop a Christmas gift of an antique miniature cameo along with a letter. This miniature portrait of a kind is another important talisman in the correspondence between the two poets, and again echoes (gendered) traditions of miniature portrait exchange in late eighteenth-century letter writing. It represents an oblique portrait of Bishop, and functions as an accessory to the pair’s complementary poems ‘The Armadillo’ (Bishop) and ‘Skunk Hour’ (Lowell).36 Bishop wrote to Lowell in December 1957 thanking him for both a photograph of himself that he had sent and as well as the Christmas gift of a cameo brooch, a nineteenth-century curio apparently carved from volcanic stone: The Christmas present—well, I kept it unopened for a week, thinking I’d keep it that way until Christmas. But finally that label ‘lava cameo’ was too much for me, and I opened it […] It’s really a marvelous, curious, quaint, and evocative piece of workmanship and I am crazy about it… It makes me think of the Brownings, The Marble Faun, Roderick Hudson, and my own strange stay in Naples. (WIA 241) The allusion to the Brownings’ epistolary courtship is evidence of the way that Bishop and Lowell’s correspondence often hovers on the boundary between romance and friendship. There is no evidence that the two poets were ever lovers, although Lowell famously wrote a letter to Bishop in August 1957 (six months prior to sending the antique lava cameo) in which he described having half-contemplated proposing to her during the pair’s stay in Stonington, Maine in 1948: ‘I assumed that [it] would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept’ (WIA 225). In the same letter, Lowell compares his relationship with Bishop to another famous literary, and epistolary, pairing: ‘I suppose we might almost claim something like apparently Strachey and Virginia Woolf’ (WIA 226). Strachey and Woolf are perhaps a more appropriate comparison for Bishop and Lowell, since the pair were briefly engaged on 17 February 1909, but their relationship faced the impediment of Strachey’s homosexuality, in a reversal of the situation between Bishop and Lowell and Bishop’s lesbianism. Lowell’s reference to Woolf and Strachey, and Bishop’s mention of the Brownings, represent a trying-on of likenesses that is connected to the idea of letters as an exchange of portraits, and a comparison of the self with representations of others. While the many exchanges of photographs, gifts and poems in the letters do at times mirror a romantic correspondence, by the same token, what could be a mutually affectionate and admiring correspondence also had a distinctly competitive edge. The figurative portraits that the two poets painted of each other in letters and poems were not always wholly complimentary. In the case of their two interlocking poems—‘The Armadillo’ and ‘Skunk Hour’—Bishop and Lowell’s tributes to each other are as flattering as they are ambivalent. Taking his cue from the image of the ‘weak mailed fist’ (‘mailed’ in the sense of both armour and letter writing) at the close of Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’, Paul Muldoon writes that the correspondence between the two poets ‘was more often than not guarded rather than unbuttoned, more often than not representing an iron fist in a velvet glove, but sometimes, a velvet fist in an iron glove’.37 Muldoon finds a subtext in the correspondence and poems suggesting that the pair were more mutually critical than they might first appear. For example, Muldoon cites an early review of Bishop’s work that Lowell published in the Sewanee Review around the time of their first meeting in 1947 in which he wrote: ‘Compared with Moore, she is softer, dreamier, more human and more personal; she is less idiosyncratic, and less magnificent’ (qtd. in WIA 5). Muldoon reads these comments as profoundly double-edged: ‘It’s hard not to read the phrase “less magnificent” as another put-down. “Softer” and “dreamier” are hardly qualities we normally associate with first-rate poetry’.38 Muldoon sees this review as one of the key influences behind Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’, finding echoes of Lowell’s language in the poem’s closing lines ‘Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry’.39 Here, Bishop moves from a literal to a symbolic register, first describing the St John’s Day fire balloons and then moving to contemplate something larger and more mysterious that is played out in the damaging effect of the balloons on the animal world. These final lines point to the dangers of the ‘frail, illegal fire balloons’ in the poem as well as seeming to question the associated dangers of a poetic style too prone to ‘dreamlike mimicry’ and a form of miniaturist copying which is an escape from reality into a world of imagination and fancy. Muldoon goes on to link these lines to Bishop’s anxieties surrounding her supposed ‘imitation’ of Moore, who Lowell saw as an idiosyncratic and unworldly poetic influence.40 The gift of the lava cameo (not discussed in Muldoon’s analysis) is another facet of this particular exchange and its attendant concerns surrounding copying, mimicry and miniaturist description. Lowell sent Bishop ‘Skunk Hour’ in a letter written in September 1957. He dispatched the lava cameo three months later, commenting that: ‘I am dedicating “Skunk Hour” to you. A skunk isn’t much of a present for a Lady poet, but I’m a skunk in the poem’ (WIA 239). In his earlier letter Lowell again used diminutive language to describe Bishop’s poem, thus somewhat tempering his praise. Lowell’s comments keep coming back to ideas about size, specifically the ‘small’ size of Bishop’s poems. Compared to his other new poems, which Lowell says ‘beat the big drum too much’, ‘Skunk Hour’ is written ‘in a small voice that’s fairly charmingly written I hope (called “Skunk Hour”, not in your style yet indebted a little to your “Armadillo”.)’ (WIA 230). A ‘small voice that’s fairly charmingly written’ is another example of the sometimes muted nature of Lowell’s praise for Bishop. In his 1947 Sewanee Review, Lowell had remarked on the ‘size’ of Bishop’s poems saying that: ‘[t]he splendor and minuteness of [Bishop’s] descriptions soon seem wonderful. Later one realizes that her large, controlled, and elaborate common sense is always or almost always absorbed in its subjects, and that she is one of the best craftsmen alive’ (qtd. in WIA 5). What the lava cameo gift captures is this sense that Lowell sees Bishop (and himself, in ‘Skunk Hour’) as a miniaturist writing in a ‘small voice that’s fairly charmingly written’. The lava cameo itself is small and charming yet it might also represent the other side of Lowell’s praise, what Muldoon terms as ‘the iron fist in a velvet glove’. In another sense, the ‘lava cameo’ (WIA 241)—again, Bishop’s use of italics here as in the close of ‘The Armadillo’ are significant and revealing—taps into the fire imagery that Muldoon highlights as central to Bishop’s poem.41 Lowell’s gift is another ‘fire balloon’ itself: both ‘pretty’ and ‘dangerous’ at the same time. This tiny cameo, like the fire balloons that mirror and replicate, in miniature form, the sun, is loaded with significance. Lowell’s comments in relation to the dedication of ‘Skunk Hour’ to Bishop are distinctly gendered, associating Bishop’s poems with feminine delicacy and his own with a kind of odorous masculinity. The two gifts—‘Skunk Hour’ and the cameo—are both portraits of a kind. ‘Skunk Hour’ is Lowell’s own animal self-portrait and also reflects Lowell’s image of Bishop as a ‘Lady Poet’, and a stickler for ‘minuteness of detail’.42 As Jean Arnold has argued, cameos were highly gendered objects in themselves, and served to reinforce Victorian stereotypes of femininity.43 Bishop strongly disliked being referred to as a ‘Lady Poet’, as a number of her comments in letters indicate. In July 1953 Bishop responded to an article published in Vogue, titled ‘Poets Among Us’, which profiles both Bishop and Lowell: ‘(The blurb said my poetry was written like chiselling in quartz—quite a feat.) But “women poets” either have to be COLD or HOT, obviously’ (WIA 141). The chiselling metaphor in Vogue echoes Lowell’s earlier description of Bishop as a ‘craftsman’, which is also reflected in the delicately chiselled image in the lava cameo. In a later exchange in 1956, Lowell writes: ‘There’s a review of Auden’s Faber Book of Verse in the New Statesmen by Walter Allen, who calls you the best woman poet since Emily Dickinson. I know you like neither E.D. nor being called a “woman” poet’ (WIA 188.). That Lowell later chose to use the term ‘Lady Poet’ to describe Bishop in proffering his gift of the poem ‘Skunk Hour’ along with the lava cameo might therefore be read as an ironic gesture. The cameo represents part of a figurative, and distinctly gendered, if also partly ironic, portrait of Bishop that Lowell is painting. However, Lowell’s Sewanee Review comments, ‘Skunk Hour’ and the lava cameo, cannot be read as straightforwardly gendered, nor as wholly derogatory statements about Bishop’s poetry. Lowell’s description of Bishop as a ‘Lady Poet’ and himself as ‘a skunk’ is complicated by the fact that the skunk in his poem is female. As Sandra Gilbert points out: ‘it seems to me not insignificant that the first of these fierce familiars is a female animal – a mother skunk who leads her “column of kittens” to the sour cream […] culminates a volume that also includes […] explorations of female potency and male impotence’.44 Gilbert sees the image of the mother skunk as part of a pattern in the whole of Life Studies. A number of poems in the collection, she argues, feature a male speaker encountering threatening and ‘unruly female figures’, thus representing a crisis of masculinity at mid-century.45 However, Lowell’s association of himself with the mother skunk in the letter to Bishop further complicates this, suggesting, despite the poem’s confessional status, that the poem is not a straightforward self-portrait of Lowell. Similarly, the lava cameo itself is a multi-faceted portrait, acting as a substitute miniature likeness of Bishop, and reflecting back some of what she previously called her own ‘worst fears’ about her poetry. These ‘worst fears’ were, paradoxically, in many ways exactly what Bishop was aiming for. In the 1947 letter in which Bishop responded to Lowell’s Sewanee Review comments, she wrote: It is the only review that goes at things in what I think is the right way … I also liked what you said about Miss Moore […] I suppose for pride’s sake I should take some sort of stand about the adverse criticisms, but I agreed with some of them only too well—I suppose no critic is ever really as harsh as oneself. It seems to me you spoke out my worst fears as well as some of my ambitions (WIA 5). Bishop’s comments demonstrate that, rather than taking offence at the apparent criticisms levelled at her, she agreed with them, and that these same criticisms can also be read as Lowell’s prescient recognition of Bishop’s miniaturist ambitions. Bishop deliberately incorporated and reflected upon these apparent ‘worst fears’ in her poetry. In ‘The Armadillo’, and also in her response to the lava cameo, she keys into the set of miniaturist characteristics that Lowell attributes to her poetry. To go back to the 1957 letter in which Bishop thanks Lowell for the cameo, she writes that: ‘It’s really a marvelous, curious, quaint, and evocative piece of workmanship’ (WIA 241). The choice of words and sentence structure almost repeat Lowell’s much earlier account of Bishop as ‘softer, dreamier, more human and more personal’ along with his comments about the ‘minuteness of her descriptions’. In what she writes about the cameo, Bishop enacts what Lowell sees as her inescapable Marianne Moore influences, describing in minute and painstaking detail the appearance of the hair on the miniature: ‘I also like the other cruder curls of gold, which remind me strongly of sucked dandelion stems; but I’m getting altogether too Marianne-ish about this, I’m afraid’ (WIA 241). The choice of the word ‘curious’ in this letter is also significant. This is another term that Lowell went on to use at the start of a blurb that he wrote for the publication of Bishop’s Questions of Travel (1965): ‘I am sure no living poet is as curious and observant as Miss Bishop […] She has a humorous, commanding genius for picking up the unnoticed, now making something sprightly and right, and now a great monument’ (qtd. WIA 580). As Muldoon has also observed, the word ‘curious’ is double-edged ‘meaning both “careful attention to detail” and, more often in the popular imagination, “somewhat surprising, strange, singular, odd, queer”’.46 Yet, the terms ‘curious’ and ‘queer’ need not be read as a negative description. Bishop’s later poem ‘The Moose’, for example, celebrates the ‘curious’, otherworldly appearance of the moose on a bus journey through Nova Scotia.47 Bishop knowingly plays with the representation of herself as she sees it reflected in Lowell’s comments, re-appropriating the miniaturist characteristics with which she is associated. In an article on Bishop’s miniaturist interests, Susan Rosenbaum argues that Bishop deliberately positions herself as a miniaturist in ways that challenge a dominant post-war American culture obsessed with gigantism: ‘In both her poems and watercolour paintings, Bishop employs forms of representation associated with the miniature—namely copying, reduction of scale, and an exaggerated attention to detail—so as to challenge the perspective of the “huge and roaring world”’.48 Bishop’s delight in the gift of the lava cameo, not one that features in Rosenbaum’s analysis, reveals Bishop’s fascination with miniature forms. The portraits of Bishop that Lowell painted in his reviews, blurbs and letters are ones that Bishop seems generally to have agreed with, and which she responded to in letters and poems. What Muldoon is in danger of missing in his use of the metaphor of the ‘fire balloons’ to describe Lowell’s letters is the extent to which both Bishop and Lowell were engaged in an exchange of portraits which was productive for both poets. The letters in Words in Air demonstrate repeatedly Lowell’s admiration for Bishop’s ‘Armadillo’, and the extent to which he saw it as the inspiration for his own miniaturist description in ‘Skunk Hour’. Twice in the letters to Bishop, Lowell remarks that he carried the poem around in his ‘billfold’, much like a treasured wallet photograph, taking it out to ‘amaze people with it’ (WIA 324, 517). IV. MEMOIRS In this final section, I want to argue that Bishop and Lowell’s exchange of miniature portraits in letters and poems carries over to, and becomes, in a sense, a conversation about family portraits in their two interlocking memoirs, ‘91 Revere Street’ (Lowell) and ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’ (Bishop).49 These two memoirs grew directly out of the pair’s correspondence and bear a number of similarities to one another, including a preoccupation with portraiture, scale and framing. In the same 1957 letter to Lowell in which Bishop thanks him for sending the lava cameo, she mentions that she has recently received two (full-size) child portraits, sent to her in the post by her aunt Grace in Nova Scotia, depicting her uncle Artie and mother Gertrude ( Figs. 4 and 5). Bishop borrowed aspects of this letter for her memoir ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’ about her uncle (referred to as Uncle Neddy in the story), although it would take her many years to write, and was published much later in 1977 in the Southern Review. At the close of her letter, Bishop describes the two portraits, which have arrived in Brazil from Nova Scotia: They are awfully nice, just as I’d remembered them, except that I’d had Uncle Arthur leaning on the red-plush-hung table and my mother leaning on the red-plush chair, instead of vice-versa, I suppose because I like the chair so much. They are in huge gold frames, a little hard to reconcile with our modern architecture, but so charming we can’t resist them. ‘Gertie’ aged 8, wears little boots with one leg crossed over the other, and ‘Artie’ aged 12, has his little boots crossed the other way. (He looks very much like me.) And how strange to see them in Brazil. (WIA 244) This description acts as a form of epistolary draft material, and establishes key themes that Bishop goes on to explore in more detail in her later memoir. These include the staged nature of the portraits and the way that they mirror one another, the discrepancies between the paintings’ origin in Nova Scotia and their new home in Brazil, and the importance of the frames that encompass the paintings, both real and symbolic. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Artist unknown, Gertrude Bishop (nee Boomer), oil on canvas, 23 3/4 x 17 5/8 inches, n.d., Courtesy of The Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Artist unknown, Gertrude Bishop (nee Boomer), oil on canvas, 23 3/4 x 17 5/8 inches, n.d., Courtesy of The Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Artist unknown, Arthur Boomer ‘Uncle Neddy’, oil on canvas, 23 11/16 x 17 5/8 inches, n.d., Courtesy of The Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Artist unknown, Arthur Boomer ‘Uncle Neddy’, oil on canvas, 23 11/16 x 17 5/8 inches, n.d., Courtesy of The Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY. Lowell’s ‘91 Revere Street’ and Bishop’s ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’ both use family portraits as a framing device, beginning and ending their respective memoirs with detailed descriptions of these portraits. Although the portraits are full-size, their status as family heirlooms means that they share many qualities with miniature portraits since they are exchanged and handed down through families and generations. Susan Stewart sees heirlooms as a species of miniature, connected to the souvenir and the museum collection. She argues that these objects function as a kind of cipher, often representing wealth and status, and holding a value which is disconnected from their material worth: The narrative of origins generated [by the heirloom] is in effect a genealogy, […] anything giving evidence that wealth has been in a family for several generations has particular value to the leisure classes. The function of the heirloom is to weave, quite literally by means of narrative, a significance of blood relation at the expense of a larger view of history and causality.50 This idea of the heirloom as a form of social collateral fits very well with Lowell’s description, at the beginning of ‘91 Revere Street’, of his family’s portrait of Major Mordecai Myers, which used to hang in the parlour of his parents’ Boston home.51 Major Myers, whom Lowell describes as ‘my Grandmother Lowell’s grandfather’, is displayed by his mother as evidence of the family’s ‘Boston Brahmin’ pedigree, and therefore evidence of the ‘wealth’ of the ‘leisure classes’ that Stewart sees as part of the heirloom’s appeal. Lowell’s memoir begins with a description of the portrait: The account of him is platitudinous, worldly and fond, but he has no Christian name and is entitled merely Major M. Myers in my Cousin Cassie Mason Myers Julian-James’s privately printed Biographical Sketches: A Key to a Cabinet of Heirlooms in the Smithsonian Museum. The name-plate under his portrait used to spell out his name bravely enough: he was Mordecai Myers. The artist painted Major Myers in his sanguine War of 1812 uniform with epaulettes, white breeches, and a scarlet frogged waistcoat. His right hand played with the sword ‘now to be seen in the Smithsonian cabinet of heirlooms’. The pose was routine and gallant. The full-lipped smile was good-humouredly pompous and embarrassed. (LS 11) In this description Lowell quotes from a book by his ancestor Cousin Cassie, which acts as a counterpoint to his own memoir. Cousin Cassie’s Biographical Sketches (which exists and was published in 1908) includes a sepia version of the portrait of Major Myers aged 33, along with ‘a miniature painted on ivory, by Tisdale’, which depicts Major Myers aged 22.52 However, the ‘narrative’ of the portrait is more complicated than it might at first seem, and rather than collaborating in Cousin Cassie’s ‘platitudinous’ account of Major Myers, Lowell draws attention to the elements that it elides. Lowell states later in the memoir that Major Myers ‘was a dark man, a German Jew – no downright Yankee’ (LS 12). In Cousin Cassie’s account, as Lowell points out, the name ‘Mordecai’ is omitted, thus skirting over the Myers family’s Jewish heritage.53 Moreover, Lowell draws attention to the awkward theatricality of the painting. In the portrait, Major Myers appears somewhat uncomfortable and at odds with his grand, military surroundings. According to Lowell’s account, the portrait tries but fails to paint a picture that did not exist in reality: ‘Disappointingly, his famous “blazing brown eye” seems in all things to have shunned the outrageous’ (LS 12). For Lowell, the ‘exotic’ Major Myers portrait had been in his youth another kind of talisman, and a means of rebelling against his parents, particularly his status-obsessed mother. He describes his fantasy of the painting’s subject as an exciting image of ‘a true wolf, the wandering Jew’ (LS 13). But through the lens of adulthood and memory, this image of Mason Myers is revealed as fantastic, and the man it depicts as a more ordinary ‘leisured squire and merchant’ (LS 12). If family heirlooms weave a miniature narrative ‘at the expense of a larger view of history and causality’ then Lowell’s aim in his memoir is to put the larger history and causality back into the narrative. His memoir points out the ways in which this heirloom does not fit the Mayflower-derived family heritage that Cousin Cassie and Lowell’s mother sought to create, nor does it fit the narrative of the dark and mysterious outsider that Lowell fantasized about as a child. In the memoir, Lowell uses the portrait as a springboard into wider concerns: Major Modercai Myers’ portrait has been mislaid past finding, but out of my memories I often come on it in the setting of our Revere Street house, a setting now fixed in the mind, where it survives all the distortions of fantasy, all the blank befogging of forgetfulness. There, the vast number of remembered things remains rocklike. Each is in its place, each has its function, its history, its drama. There, all is preserved by that motherly care that one either ignored or resented in his youth. The things and their owners come back urgent with life and meaning—because finished, they are endurable and perfect. (LS 13) In the passage above, Lowell implies that the particularities of his own experience when viewed in this way become representative of something wider, larger and more universal. There is a shift from the first to the third person when Lowell writes, ‘There, all is preserved by that motherly care that one either ignored or resented in his youth’ [my emphasis]. It is significant too that in the preceding paragraph Lowell tells us that Major Myers had been ‘a mayor of Schenectady’ (LS 12). Schenectady is a city in New York State, but it also sounds very similar to the figure of speech synecdoche (a part standing in for the whole) thus gesturing at the representative nature of Lowell’s memoir. Lowell seeks to represent his own individual experience, as well as accessing a shared American experience. This is a theme that Bishop picks up on in her comments about the memoir in a letter to Lowell where she makes the point that his life seems to translate more easily than hers into this symbolic, universal register. She writes that Lowell’s memoir ‘seems significant, illustrative, American’ (WIA 247). Bishop’s memoir ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’ is remarkably similar to Lowell’s ‘91 Revere Street’ in a number of ways, demonstrating that it was an important source of inspiration for her own thinking in relation to her family history and memories. Bishop takes up the idea of family portraits as a framing device, describing the two child portraits of her Uncle Arthur and her mother, Gertrude, at both the beginning and the end of her memoir. The two memoirs use very similar list-like sentence structures in order to describe the family members depicted in the portraits. In ‘91 Revere Street’ Lowell describes Major Myers as: [M]y Grandmother Lowell’s grandfather. His life was tame and honourable. He was a leisured squire and merchant, a member of the state legislature, a mayor of Schenectady, a ‘president’ of Kinderhook village. […] After his death he was remembered soberly as a New York state gentleman (LS 12) Bishop’s description of the portrait of her Uncle Neddy/Artie reads like a deliberate comedic reversal of these traits: ‘This is “little Edward”, before he became an uncle, before he became a lover, husband, father or grandfather, a tinsmith, a drunkard, or a famous fly-fisherman—any of the various things he turned out to be’.54 In contrast to the image of ‘little Edward’ in the portrait, who Bishop describes as looking ‘young and clean’, the memoir tells the story of a complicated and sad life. Bishop recounts Uncle Neddy’s difficult marriage to her fearsome Aunt Hat—‘redheaded, freckled, red-knuckled, strong, all fierce fire and flame’—as well as his gradual descent into alcoholism (Prose 147, 152). As with Lowell’s Major Myers portrait, when looked at, the picture of Uncle Neddy appears to come alive: And Uncle Neddy, that is, my Uncle Edward, is here. Into this wildly foreign and, to him, exotic setting, Uncle Neddy has just come back, from the framer’s. He leans slightly, silently backwards against the damp-stained pale-yellow wall, looking quite cheerfully into the eyes of whoever happens to look at him—including the cat’s, who investigated him just now. Only of course it isn’t really Uncle Neddy, not as he was, or not as I knew him. (Prose 146) The comma after ‘Uncle Neddy has just come back’ creates a deliberate pause in which Bishop almost suggests that Uncle Neddy has come back to life. The emphasis on ‘here’ points to the mismatch between this seemingly life-like child portrait and his new surroundings of Rio de Janeiro. The detail of the curious cat investigating this new portrait heightens the sense that Uncle Neddy is a foreign object in ‘wildly foreign’ surroundings. The way that the portrait appears to come back to life is similar to Lowell’s account of family portraits, which, he writes, ‘come back urgent with life and meaning’, and to examples of talismanic, life-like miniature portraits. Both memoirs show a preoccupation with miniaturized and/or maximized scale. As in Lowell’s memoir, Bishop plays with the concept of frames and framing. Uncle Neddy is not only literally in a new frame; he is also framed anew by the setting of Rio de Janeiro. Bishop highlights the dialogue that takes place between the pictures and the frames that contain them (both literal and contextual frames). Bishop’s diminutive child-portraits sit in large gold frames. Fittingly, the paragraph in which Bishop describes these frames is itself framed in parentheses: (The frames that these ancestor-children arrived in were a foot wide, painted and repainted with glittery, gritty gilt paint. They were meant to hang against dark wallpaper in a hair-cloth-and-mahogany northern parlor and brighten it up. I have taken the liberty of changing them to narrow, carefully dulled, gold ones, ‘modern’. Now the portraits are reduced to the scale suitable for hanging in apartments.) (Prose 147) The phrase ‘ancestor-children’ is an oxymoron. Similarly, the original large gold frames seem out-of-place and out-of-time in the context of Bishop’s Rio de Janeiro apartment, since they were originally intended, as Bishop explains, to be hung in a ‘northern parlor’ in Nova Scotia. A number of the details within the paintings themselves also seem out of scale. As in the case of Lowell’s memoir, in which he highlighted the staged and theatrical nature of the family portraits, Bishop draws attention to the idealized and logically impossible elements in the paintings. The fringed chair on which Uncle Neddy’s arm rests appears to levitate is not one that Bishop remembers having been in her grandmother’s possession: This chair is a holy wonder; it must have been the painter’s ‘property’ chair—at least I never saw anything like it in my grandmother’s house. It consists of two hard-looking maroon-coloured pads, both hung with thick, foot-long maroon fringes; the lower one makes the seat, the upper one, floating in the airless air, and on which Uncle Neddy’s arm rests, the back. (Prose 147–8) Not only is the chair a prop that seems to have been pre-inserted into the painting, it defies the laws of physics and serves only an ornamental purpose. Bishop extends this theatricality to her description of Uncle Neddy’s face, which again seems out of place in the painting: ‘It could almost have drifted in from another place, or another year, and settled into the painting. Plump (he was never in the slightest plump, that I can remember), his hair parted neatly on the left, his cheeks as pink as a girl’s, or a doll’s’ (Prose 148). Later in the same paragraph Bishop remarks that ‘[h]is body looks neatly stuffed’ as if describing a taxidermy animal. Although the ancestor-children are not depicted on a miniature scale, the children are miniaturized in other ways. They belong, like miniatures, to the genre of the ‘copy’.55 Bishop speculates that the two paintings ‘unsigned and undated [are] probably the work of an itinerant portrait painter’ (Prose 150). They appear to have been copied partly from photographic ‘tin-types’, and partly from life, thus adding to their air of unreality: ‘Or perhaps the painter did the faces—clearer and brighter than the rest of the pictures, and in Uncle Neddy’s case slightly out of proportion, surely—from “life”, the clothes from tintypes, and the rest from his imagination’ (Prose 150). Bishop compares both to dolls. Uncle Neddy’s cheeks are ‘as pink as a girl’s, or a doll’s’ (Prose 148). The two portraits also follow a trend in nineteenth-century American ‘folk art’ in that they look like miniature adults rather than real children. Bishop remarks on their stiff, formal-looking poses, and the mismatch between their child-like, doll-like heads and older (but still smaller) bodies. Referring to the portrait of Neddy, Bishop writes: ‘I want to try to be chronological about this little boy who doesn’t look much like a little boy. His semidisembodied head seems too big for his body; and his body seems older; far less alive, than the round, healthy, painted face’ (Prose 149). The portraits appear to disregard time and depict a state of perpetual, albeit staged and unreal, or ‘stuffed’, childhood. The phrase ‘from “life”’ to describe the two child portraits anticipates Bishop’s use of the same phrase in her later ‘Poem’, in which she considers the nature of the miniature landscape painting by her great-uncle George Hutchinson. In ‘Poem’ the miniature is itself a composite painting, which copies both from life and from memory and the imagination, like the child portraits with their mixture of tin-type, life and fantasy. In ‘Poem’ Bishop writes (of herself and her great-uncle contemplating the same scene in Nova Scotia): ‘Our visions coincided—“visions” is / too serious a word—our looks, two looks: / art “copying from life” and life itself, / life and the memory of it so compressed / they’ve turned into each other’.56 Although ‘Poem’ makes no explicit reference to Lowell, Bishop sent it to him in a letter dated 12 April 1972 in which she objected to Lowell’s poems in The Dolphin, which included sections of Lowell’s ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters. Bishop writes that in Lowell’s poems it is ‘the mixture of truth & fiction that bothers me’ (WIA 716). Thus, Bishop must have had Lowell’s poems, and her own objections to them, on her mind when she drafted ‘Poem’. It also revisits many of the themes that Bishop and Lowell explored in relation to miniatures and paintings in their two memoirs and the correspondence that surrounds them. Lowell is a silent presence in the poem, representing another figure with whom Bishop’s ‘visions’ often coincided in an exchange that prompted Bishop to reflect on portraits and her own childhood memories. For both Bishop and Lowell, looking at the family portraits becomes a kind of looking in the mirror at themselves, and a means of self-exploration. This recalls the use of miniature portraits in letters as mirrors onto which subjects project images of themselves and their correspondents. The descriptions of their respective family portraits allow both Bishop and Lowell to paint a composite self-portrait, formed from family images and memories. In both memoirs, the portraits appear to come alive or transform. Towards the end of her memoir, describing the damp climate of Rio de Janeiro and the tendency of everything in her apartment, including pictures, to mould, Bishop writes: ‘I must watch out for the mildew that inevitably forms on old canvases in the rainy season, and wipe them off often. It will be the gray or pale-green variety that appears overnight on dark surfaces, like breath on a mirror’ (Prose 161). This comment invokes a ghostly image. It is as if Bishop is Uncle Neddy in some sense, or elements of Uncle Neddy are alive within her. For Lowell, the portrait of Major Myers comes to stand for a kind of fantasy father-figure, which brings into relief the disappointments of his real-life father. At the close of ‘91 Revere Street’, the portrait appears ‘apotheosized’: When I shut my eyes to stop the sun, I saw first an orange disc, then a red disc, then the portrait of Major Myers apotheosized, as it were, by the sunlight lighting the blood smear of his scarlet waistcoat. Still there was no coup de théâtre about the Major as he looked down on us with his portly young man’s face of a comfortable upper New York State patron […] Great-great-Grandfather Myers had never frowned down in judgement on a Salem witch. There was no allegory in his eyes, no Mayflower. (LS 51) Here, as elsewhere, Lowell deliberately undercuts his mother’s narrative of the Lowell family as descendants of the Mayflower and Puritan settlers. As Stuart Schoffman points out, Major Myers’s Jewish identity is key to this, and Lowell ‘slyly celebrates [his] Jewish heritage’.57 For Bishop, the social context in which she places her two family portraits appears very different from Lowell’s. Uncle Neddy was a man who was not well travelled, who lived a relatively simple and rural life, and who was in many ways an outsider: ‘a tinsmith, a drunkard, [and] a famous fly-fisherman’ (Prose 146). As Bishop puts it in her letter to Lowell, this seems a far cry from the portrait of Major Myers and the Cabinet of Heirlooms in the Smithsonian Museum: And here I must confess […] that I am green with envy at your kind of assurance. I feel that I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say—but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with his wife, and spent most of his time fishing … and was ignorant as sin. It is sad; slightly more interesting than having an uncle practicing law in Schenectady maybe, but that’s all. Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! (WIA 247). The irony is that Bishop did go on to write her memoir about Uncle Artie/Neddy, and used the down-and-out status that she describes here as the glue to hold her story together. Rather than using Uncle Neddy’s story as a representative of a larger story about American identity, as in Lowell’s memoir, Bishop’s stated intention is to write about Uncle Neddy for the story’s own sake, and to sketch the details of memories to create as accurate a picture as possible.58 Bishop’s letter is also quietly critical of Lowell’s social standing. In comparison to Bishop’s Uncle Neddy, Lowell’s family portraits seem to be of social insiders. However, there is an air of pretence about Lowell’s paintings, and a claim to a social standing that was perhaps not quite as grandiose as the paintings would suggest. After all, the painting of Major Myers is now symbolically ‘mislaid past finding’ (LS 13), and does not include a link to the Mayflower. Yet Bishop suggests in this letter that Lowell still trades on his names and social standing. She sees the memoir as evidence of the easy confidence that Lowell derives from his upper-class lineage: ‘all you have to do is put down the names!’. Perhaps the memoirs were more similar than Bishop realized, however, since, like Uncle Neddy, Lowell identifies with Major Mordecai because he too represents an outsider figure that failed to fit in. This article has argued that there is a close, analogous relationship between letters and (miniature) portraits. The exchange of miniature portraits in letters in late eighteenth-century correspondence is a useful parallel to the way that Bishop and Lowell exchange photographs, as well as Lowell’s gift of a lava cameo. Bishop and Lowell’s exchange replicates many elements that are fundamental to miniature portraits, in particular their status as talismanic objects, similar to religious relics and reliquaries. In the context of the Bishop-Lowell correspondence, photographs of literary mentors or friends take on symbolic importance. Bishop attempts to create a kind of shrine in her estudio, and Lowell playfully places a photo of Bishop atop his Christmas tree. Both poets demonstrate a degree of ambivalence in relation to the accuracy of photographs and portraits, as their letters, poems, and particularly their interlocking memoirs—‘91 Revere Street’ and ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’—show. ‘The Armadillo’ and ‘Skunk Hour’ feature animal portraits, which act as a kind of portrait-painting in relation to each other, and a form of self-portraiture. The two memoirs describe family portrait heirlooms that seem somehow out of scale, unreal or embellished. These memoirs grew out of the correspondence between the two poets, and demonstrate a shared attempt to represent the complex narratives that these family portraits reveal. The similarities and differences in the two memoirs, and their ambitions in terms of size and scale, hark back to their correspondence. Ultimately, the exchange of portraits in letters produced a contemplation of the self in relation to the other, which is a central facet of correspondence. Their exchange also emphasizes the extent to which correspondence is necessarily tied to the material and the visual. Portraits in letters, whether faithful or, as is more often the case, inaccurate representations, add an important dimension to the multi-faceted messages that letters convey. Footnotes 1 David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001). 2 Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas J. Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (New York, NY, 2008). Hereafter abbreviated as WIA and quotations are cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 3 Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton, NJ, 2015), 46. 4 Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop, 154. 5 Muldoon argues that Bishop and Lowell’s linked poems, ‘The Armadillo’ and ‘Skunk Hour’ are not just dedicated to, but are about, each other. For example, he suggests that the word ‘armadillo’ contains echoes of ‘Lowell’, and that Lowell’s reference to a ‘hermit’ in ‘Skunk Hour’ is a representation of Bishop. Muldoon ‘Fire Balloons: The Letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop’, in Jonathan Ellis (ed.), Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop (Edinburgh, 2015), 221. 6 Richard Flynn, ‘Words in Air: Bishop, Lowell and the Aesthetics of Autobiographical Poetry’, in Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicock and Thomas Travisano (eds), Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions (Charlottesville, VA, 2012), 208–9. 7 Jonathan Ellis, ‘Introduction: “For what is a letter?”’, Letter Writing Among Poets, 2. 8 Hugh Haughton, ‘Just Letters: Corresponding Poets’, Letter Writing Among Poets, 62. 9 Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH, 1982), 45. 10 Tom Paulin, ‘Writing to the Moment’, in Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays, 1980–1996 (London, 1996), 222. 11 Marcia Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England’, Art Bulletin, 83 (2001), 48–71, 67. 12 Pointon, ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’, 49, 50. 13 Pointon, ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’, 57. 14 Pointon, ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’, 65, 66. 15 Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (Chicago, IL, 2012). Grootenboer describes eye miniatures as a ‘short-lived subcategory of portrait miniatures, eye portraits are renderings in miniature of an individual’s single eye that were exchanged as gifts in Britain, and later in Europe and the United States, around 1800’, 5. 16 Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze, 30, 41. 17 Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze, 41. 18 Joe Bray, The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period (London, 2016), 48. 19 Pointon, ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’, 57. 20 Pointon, ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’, 60–1. 21 Bray, The Portrait in Fiction, 55–60. 22 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC, 1993), xii. 23 Stewart, On Longing, 48. 24 Stewart, On Longing, 45–6. 25 Stewart, On Longing, 126. 26 Frank Tousey, How to Write Letters: Everybody’s Friend, Samples of Every Conceivable Kind of Letters (New York, NY, 1890), qtd. in Stewart, On Longing, 187. 27 Bray, The Portrait in Fiction, 55, 61. 28 Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze, 31. 29 Altman, Epistolarity, 186. 30 Pointon, ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’, 57. 31 Stewart, On Longing, 126. 32 Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze, 179, 180. 33 Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: The Selected Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (London, 1994), 60. 34 Bishop, One Art, 62. 35 Andrew Thacker has highlighted the role of this photograph in portraying an image of literary celebrity culture, and the bookshop as a ‘staging venue’ for collaboration. See Andrew Thacker ‘“A True Magic Chamber”: The Public Face of the Modernist Bookshop’, Modernist Cultures, 11 (2016), 429–51. Rather than being exchanged as intimate tokens in correspondence, photographic portraits such as this became vehicles for literary celebrity. Bishop preferred the private space of the letter for the sharing of images, and as a place for literary collaboration. 36 Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Armadillo’ in Poems (London, 2011), 101–2. Robert Lowell, ‘Skunk Hour’ in Life Studies (London, 2001), 97–8. 37 Muldoon, ‘Fire Balloons’, 216. 38 Muldoon, ‘Fire Balloons’, 229. 39 Bishop, Poems, 102. 40 Muldoon, ‘Fire Balloons’, 223–4. 41 Discussing Bishop’s emphatic use of italics at the close of ‘The Armadillo’, Muldoon writes: ‘The italicisation of the sentence may be read as a restatement of the argument, if we may term it such, of the last stanza of ‘The Armadillo’ in which the ‘pretty’ response is inadequate to either the fate of the animals before the fire or the fate of the citizenry of Hamburg or the Bikini Atoll or Rio de Janeiro in the face of their predicaments’ (‘Fire Balloons’, 228). 42 Sandra Gilbert, like Paul Muldoon, has argued that ‘Skunk Hour’ includes cryptic allusions to Moore and Bishop: ‘“Nautilus Island’s hermit / heiress” (whose “son’s a bishop”) may subtextually—and no doubt quite unconsciously—allude to Marianne Moore, “hermit heiress” of American poetry whose “The Paper Nautilus” was an important precursor poem about female power and whose poetic “son” was the very Elizabeth Bishop to whom “Skunk Hour” is dedicated’. Sandra Gilbert, ‘Mephistophilis in Maine: Rereading “Skunk Hour”’, in Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese (eds), Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry (Cambridge, 1986), 77. 43 Jean Arnold, Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel: Prisms of Culture (Farnham, 2011). Arnold writes that cameos were, in the nineteenth century, ‘a small fashion detail that replicated the gender separation of Victorian culture’ and presented idealized images of women (107). 44 Gilbert, ‘Mephistophilis in Maine’, 77. 45 Gilbert, ‘Mephistophilis in Maine’, 78. 46 Muldoon, ‘Fire Balloons’, 226–7. 47 Bishop, Poems, 193. 48 Susan Rosenbaum, ‘Elizabeth Bishop and the Miniature Museum’, Journal of Modern Literature, 28 (2005), 61–99, 63. 49 ‘91 Revere Street’ was first published in Partisan Review (1956). ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’ was first published in the Southern Review (1977) but begun much earlier, as the letters in Words in Air indicate. 50 Stewart, On Longing, 137. 51 Lowell, ‘91 Revere Street’ in Life Studies (London, 2001), 12. Hereafter abbreviated as LS. 52 Cassie Mason Myers Julian-James, Biographical Sketches of the Bailey-Myers-Mason Families, 1776 to 1905: Key to a Cabinet of Heirlooms in the National Museum, Washington (Washington, DC, 1908), online at <https://archive.org/details/biographicalsket00slsn/page/n7> accessed 12 July 2019. 53 Stuart Schoffman, ‘The Lowells and the Jews’, Jewish Review of Books (pubd online fall 2017), <https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2777/the-lowells-and-the-jews/> accessed 12 July 2019. 54 Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’, in Lloyd Schwartz (ed.), Prose (London, 2011), 146–61, 146. Hereafter abbreviated as Prose. 55 As Marcia Pointon states: ‘Eighteenth-century miniaturists were part of an industry of copyists who provided full-scale replicas for a range of residences and official sites or reduced life-size portraits to handy pocket-size miniatures’ (‘Surrounded with Brilliants’, 55). 56 Bishop, Poems, 197. 57 Schoffman, ‘The Lowells and the Jews’. 58 Bishop writes: ‘Although there are more, these are all the memories I want to keep on remembering—I couldn’t forget them if I tried, probably—and remembering clearly, as if they had just happened or were still happening’ (Prose, 160). © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press 2019; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - ‘Our Looks, Two Looks’: Miniature Portraits in the Letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
JF - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgz097
DA - 2020-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/our-looks-two-looks-miniature-portraits-in-the-letters-of-elizabeth-lodETppP5o
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -