Love between the lines

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell,
edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton

Why does this book need to exist? It’s a legitimate question — the correspondence of both these poets has been published in generous selected editions — but an easy one to answer. Quite apart from the fact you’d need prehensile thumbs to follow their exchanges properly through those two fat volumes, the unexpurgated version gives you not only ease but texture: their ‘helter-skelter shop-talk’; gossip about Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell; Lowell ‘exhaustingly’ changing his typewriter ribbons; Bishop getting ‘some of a very old & liquefied jelly bean’ stuck to her letter.

This was one of the great epistolary friendships of the 20th or any other century, and a hopeless love story to boot: manic-depressive toff seeks orphaned lesbian alcoholic for poetry, self-torment and perhaps more. In one celebrated

letter, Lowell writes that asking Bishop to marry him was ‘the might have been for me’. Bishop — with her characteristic Nova Scotian reserve — blanked the subject in her letter back. It wasn’t mentioned again. Their love always belonged between the lines rather than between the sheets. ‘One of the strange things about poets,’ Bishop quotes a friend remarking, ‘is the way they keep warm by writing to one another all over the world.’

The first letter here is from Bishop, concisely courteous and dated 12 May 1947. It is addressed to ‘Mr Lowell’ and sent care of his publisher. The last is from August 1977, a month or so before Lowell’s unexpected death. It was a poets’ friendship, and not always a high-minded one. The log-rolling was relentless: each of them hitting the other up for blurbs, conspiring to fix grants and fellowships and prizes and teaching jobs at universities.