APPROACHING ELIZABETH BISHOP'S LETTERS TO RUTH FOSTER
2015; Wiley; Volume: 103; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2015.0119
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
Resumo1 R A P P R O A C H I N G E L I Z A B E T H B I S H O P ’ S L E T T E R S T O R U T H F O S T E R L O R R I E G O L D E N S O H N After the death of Elizabeth Bishop’s literary executor, Alice Methfessel , a mass of unidentified paper was found sitting in a storage container in the home of Methfessel’s heir, who was in the process of moving. Having a hunch that the papers contained something more important than tax ephemera, this subsequent heir to Bishop’s estate stopped the pile on its way to the shredder, checked the contents, and promptly sold the lot to Vassar. By the summer of 2011, the large, unexpected, and surprising trove of letters, documents , and photographs had all arrived at the college archive. Although the photographs are fascinating and the memorabilia evocative , the salvaged letters from various hands are full of turbulent information, only a small part of which I am able to consider here. This collection, fittingly enough, includes the draft of a long letter to Alice Methfessel, dated 8 October 1975, which sets out, among other end-of-life matters, the disposition of Bishop’s papers, leaving the posthumous publication of her work to the joint discretion of Methfessel and Frank Bidart. A typed note running up the lefthand margin says, ‘‘My letters to others, such as have been saved, shd., I think, also be destroyed – even if R. Lowell thinks they’re good!’’ 2 G O L D E N S O H N Y That ‘‘I think’’ records Bishop’s ambivalence. She loved letters, wrote thousands, and owned collections of many. In a 1971–72 seminar, ‘‘Letters – Readings in Personal Correspondence, Famous and Infamous, from the 16th to 20th Century,’’ she had her Harvard students poring over everything from the epistles of Keats to ‘‘a letter found on the street.’’ After the brilliant critical essays of her undergraduate years, Bishop had come to rely on letters, with their volatile immediacy, as her preferred form of prose. By the time of her death, Lowell’s good opinion of her letters and her own decision to cede her papers to Vassar suggest that Bishop had swung cautiously away from a rigid defense of privacy toward an acceptance of the publication of intimate materials. Besides the letter to Alice Methfessel, there are three photocopied letters that form a remarkable twenty-two-page typescript , ending with a chronology. Throughout, the handwritten marginalia are instantly recognizable as Bishop’s. All three letters date from February 1947 and seem to be carbon copies; in some cases there are multiple copies of the original pages meant to catch text slipping o√ the bottom. Addressed to Bishop’s Kleinian analyst , Dr. Ruth Foster, they contain no clue as to who copied them, or when – but clearly the first person to lay them aside, safe from destruction, was Elizabeth Bishop. Crucially, nothing indicates whether the letters were ever received by Foster – a sketchy presence in all the current biographical writings about Bishop. We can guess that in all probability Bishop went to see Ruth Foster because Dr. Anny Baumann sent her there. In 1948, letters exchanged between Bishop and Baumann discuss how Bishop’s friend, Tom Wanning, might also be gotten to see Foster. Wanning reports to Bishop in March 1949 that Dr. Foster seems ‘‘a good solid sensible old Battle-axe, as easy as anybody would be for me to talk to.’’ He ‘‘likes her’’ – but admitting the poverty of his ‘‘narrative powers’’ he stops seeing her. My attempts to trace Dr. Ruth Foster through the New York Psychoanalytic Association yielded virtually nothing about her history, training, or publications. Poet and scholar Heather Treseler notes that Foster looms over a few drafts of poems about dreaming in color, which are dedicated to ‘‘Dear Dr – .’’ Dreams often inhabit these letters. Bishop dreams about her traumatic automobile accident in France in A P P R O A C H I N G E L I...
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