{"id":166144,"date":"2023-11-27T16:16:18","date_gmt":"2023-11-27T21:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=166144"},"modified":"2023-12-06T12:50:49","modified_gmt":"2023-12-06T17:50:49","slug":"postcards-from-elizabeth-bishop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/11\/27\/postcards-from-elizabeth-bishop\/","title":{"rendered":"Postcards from Elizabeth Bishop"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Unpublished postcard sent by Elizabeth Bishop, from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright \u00a9 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.<\/p><\/div>\n

Elizabeth Bishop delighted in the postcard. It suited her poetic subject matter and her way of life\u2014this poet of travel who was more often on the move than at home, \u201cwherever that may be<\/em>,\u201d as she put it in her poem \u201cQuestions of Travel.\u201d\u00a0She told James Merrill in a postcard written in 1979\u00a0that she seldom wrote \u201canything of any value at the desk or in the room where I was supposed to be doing it\u2014it\u2019s always in someone else\u2019s house, or in a bar, or standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since her death in 1979 and the publication of her selected correspondence, Bishop has become known as one of the great modern-day letter-writers. And yet inevitably something is lost when an editor transcribes a letter to prepare it for print: the quality of the correspondent\u2019s hand (or the model of her typewriter), the paper used, cross-outs and typos, and everything else that fixes the letter in time and space. When it comes to a postcard, or a letter composed on a series of postcards (something Bishop enjoyed doing), we get none of the images, and even more is lost.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But what exactly? \u201cWhat do we miss by not seeing<\/em> these postcards?\u201d Jonathan Ellis and Susan Rosenbaum ask in the catalogue for the exhibition of Bishop\u2019s postcards they have curated at the Vassar College Library, on view through December 15, 2023. Vassar, which is home to Bishop\u2019s papers, has published print and online catalogues of the exhibition. The print catalogue includes the curators\u2019 richly suggestive introduction, front and back images of the exhibition\u2019s sixty-three items, and appendices.<\/p>\n

The answer to the curators\u2019 question is: quite a lot. There is always some dialogue between the front and back of one of Bishop\u2019s postcards. Take the one to Merrill commenting on her restless habits of composition. The front of the card (\u201cthe nicest left of my postcards from the Eastman Museum,\u201d she says) is a reproduction of the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge\u2019s motion study of a goat. Bishop doesn\u2019t point out the analogy between her unsettled ways and the ambling goat. She knows Merrill will get it.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright \u00a9 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.<\/p><\/div>\n

But more often, the dialogue between the front and back of the card is explicit, and it plays with the difference between Bishop\u2019s reality and what the postcard pictures. In the middle of one summer, Bishop sent the painter Loren MacIver an image of a stag in an icy stream, thinking \u201cit might make you feel cool \u2026 to look at it.\u201d Another postcard to MacIver features a photo of the University Inn in Seattle. The hotel is her \u201chome away from home\u2014temporarily, at least,\u201d while she is teaching for a term at the University of Washington. Lest MacIver get the wrong impression of her circumstances, Bishop corrects the sunny image by drawing a line on the photo and noting that snow is currently falling into the swimming pool.<\/p>\n

Postcards began circulating in the late nineteenth century, at first in Europe. These cards carried the address on the front; on the back would be an etching of Salzburg, say, or the Tower of London, and space for a short, handwritten message. A simple but consequential redesign was introduced around 1900: the address was moved to the back of the card, the image to the front. With new visual technologies revolutionizing print media, postal rates falling, and the frequency of mail delivery rising (up to twelve times a day in Paris!), the craze for the postcard took hold. Like other consumer crazes, it seemed to many commentators to be a feminine delirium.<\/p>\n

Bishop\u2019s own interest in the postcard began early in her life. In \u201cIn the Village,\u201d a short story about her childhood in rural Nova Scotia during the First World War, she describes her mother\u2019s collection of postcards. (Gertrude Bishop must have been one of those women caught up in the postcard craze). The child in the story is thrilled\u2014\u201chow beautiful!\u201d\u2014by her mother\u2019s glitter postcards. \u201cThe crystals outline the buildings on the cards in a way buildings never are outlined but should be,\u201d Bishop writes. Compared to those sparkling pictures of distant cities, \u201cthe gray postcards for sale in the village store\u201d were a disappointment. \u201cAfter all,\u201d Bishop reasons, speaking from the little girl’s perspective, \u201cone steps outside and immediately sees the same thing: the village, where we live, full size, and in color.\u201d Notice how young Elizabeth\u2019s sense of reality has been subtly undermined by a taste for postcards. Now reality looks like a representation\u2014a superior one \u201cfull size, and in color,\u201d but a representation all the same.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Unpublished postcard sent by Elizabeth Bishop, from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright \u00a9 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.<\/p><\/div>\n

Bishop sometimes made greeting cards of her own with crayons and (in tribute to her early enthusiasm for it) glitter. She made her own collages, using, for example, a cigar-box label to create a Christmas card<\/a>. Ellis and Rosenbaum compare her camp creativity to the collage art of John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Ray Johnson, and Joseph Cornell. The rectangular frame of the postcard was for her a container something like one of Cornell\u2019s horizontal box constructions. Underlining that association, the Vassar exhibition includes a postcard of one of Cornell\u2019s works that Bishop sent to MacIver in 1977. \u00a0In \u201cObjects & Apparitions,\u201d Bishop\u2019s translation of a poem by Octavio Paz celebrating Cornell\u2019s work, Cornell\u2019s boxes are called \u201ccages for infinity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Postcards are, in their way, a species of propaganda. Whether they show grand public buildings, statues of military heroes, or clich\u00e9s like a pot of Boston baked beans, they help to constitute a quasi-official discourse, a common image-repertoire that defines what we are supposed to find admirable, interesting, amusing, and so on. Bishop did not disdain popular images of this kind; she enjoyed them, even as she mocked them. That combination of participation and parody is expressed in a souvenir photo postcard that Bishop and her girlfriend Louise Crane posed for at a carnival in France in the early days of their romance. The young women\u2019s faces, poking through a painted sheet, are joined to the burly bodies of two boxers taking swings at each other. While Crane stares coolly at the camera, Bishop makes eyes at her<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Unpublished postcard sent by Elizabeth Bishop, from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright \u00a9 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.<\/p><\/div>\n

Numerous postcards in the exhibition play with gender norms and suggest queer subtexts. Bishop once sent Merrill a card that wished him, in Greek, \u201cMany Happy Returns on Your Name Day.\u201d Like many of the cards she collected, she must have found this one in a junk shop or used bookstore (0r the Greek tea room she mentions on the card?) and picked it out thinking of Merrill, who spoke Greek and had had, she knew, more than one love affair with a Greek man. The sentimental card pictures a man\u2019s cuff-linked hand shaking a pale, ambiguously gendered hand within a decorative ring of violets and roses. \u201cI\u2019m either congratulating you on yr. engagement,\u201d Bishop types on the back, \u201cor asking you to marry me \u2026 I think<\/u>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cigar-box label that Bishop scissored and sent as a Christmas card to the Brazilian journalist Rosinha Le\u00e3o pictures a gartered and bewigged eighteenth-century courtier labeled with the words \u201cOur Aristocratic Friend<\/a>.\u201d This is most likely an affectionate reference to Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop\u2019s upper-class Brazilian lover, who had introduced Bishop to Le\u00e3o. Another postcard in the exhibition, this one addressed to Lota, is a reproduction of a Victorian painting by James Collinson of a showily dressed young woman\u2014Ellis and Rosenbaum identify her as a prostitute\u2014who turns to the viewer with a wily smile while holding an empty woman\u2019s purse. Bishop wrote nothing at all on the card but twice underlined the title The Empty Purse<\/em><\/a>. What exactly was she saying? It seems to have something to do with money and sex.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright \u00a9 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.<\/p><\/div>\n

The postcard is an object as much as a message, and sending one, for Bishop, was like giving a gift\u2014it was an expression of attention and care in the form of a four-by-six-inch keepsake. Unlike a letter, which typically suggests a chain of communication, most postcards don\u2019t call for a response. In this sense, the postcard has a one-off, standalone quality not unlike a poem\u2019s.<\/p>\n

And if Bishop\u2019s postcards are sometimes like poems, are some of her poems like postcards? The first postcard in the exhibition is a photograph from the 1910s, of Cumberland Road in Great Village, Bishop\u2019s grandparents\u2019 home in Nova Scotia. Elm-tree branches arch in a canopy above the road like guards of honor. Bishop never sent the card to anyone. Or we might say, because she kept it among her papers, that she sent it only to herself. She inscribed on the back, as if it were somehow helpful simply to say aloud\u2014for herself? for posterity?\u2014what she knew very well: \u201cI drove the cow to pasture up this road.\u201d<\/p>\n

Compare that postcard to \u201cPoem,\u201d from Geography III<\/em>, the last collection of poetry she published. The subject of \u201cPoem\u201d is a landscape painting<\/a> of Great Village by George Hutchinson, her great-great-uncle. \u201cAbout the size of an old-style dollar bill,\u201d the oil painting is small and rectangular. We might think of the painting as the front of a postcard and Bishop\u2019s poem, describing and meditating on it, as the message on the back.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright \u00a9 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved.<\/p><\/div>\n

The poem goes into considerable detail to describe the painting\u2019s representation of Great Village, which was the scene of some of Bishop\u2019s earliest and most powerful memories. In order to get at the reality she recalled, Bishop had to do her best to render the painting\u2019s version of it. This means heightening our awareness of the artist\u2019s medium. Thus the wild iris is \u201cfresh-squiggled from the tube\u201d (as if a first squirt of oil paint were the same thing as a flower blooming), and the \u201ctiny cows\u201d are \u201ctwo brushstrokes each, but confidently cows.\u201d \u201cA specklike bird is flying to the left,\u201d Bishop notes. \u201cOr is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?” This attention to the painting\u2019s materiality emphasizes the artificiality of the image, its status as a representation. Rather than make the reality of the scene more remote, it awakens Bishop\u2019s memories and brings her closer to her own experience of the place.<\/p>\n

How does that work? And what does it have to do with postcards? The poem and the painting both are pieces of correspondence. What matters for Bishop is an exchange between people: the way the painting triangulates her and her great-great-uncle\u2019s relationship to a \u201cloved\u201d place, preserved by a manifestly artificial and not particularly valuable image. \u201cOur visions coincided,\u201d she says. Then she corrects herself: \u201c \u2018visions\u2019 is \/ too serious a word\u2014our looks, two looks.\u201d The art of the postcard, for Bishop, was an art of \u201clooks\u201d\u2014shared glimpses and jokes passed from hand to hand, time-stamped, and postmarked.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale and the author of<\/em> James Merrill: Life and Art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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