`One of the People I Like Best in the World'

It’s interesting and revealing to know which prose writers are the favorites of poets. The disciplines are so different, and usually call upon divergent emotional and intellectual gifts. Some choices seem inevitable, others baffling. Take Elizabeth Bishop. Among poets, she remained fondest of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins – orthodox Christians of very different species – yet her favorites among prose writers were Anton Chekhov and Charles Darwin. Neither was a flaming atheist, yet both could be described as passive nonbelievers, rather like Bishop herself. What Chekhov and Darwin share, and what may account for some of Bishop’s fondness for them, is their eye for detail and the rigor of their devotion to facts, coupled with powerful human empathy. Neither had much use for unexamined assumptions, thoughtless pieties that turn seamlessly into bellicose dogma. As a physician, Chekhov was a scientist of sorts, with a scientist’s dispassionate interest in the real. By the way, The Voyage of the Beagle was translated into Russian and published in St. Petersburg in 1865, when Chekhov was five, and we know he read it while still in his twenties.

In 1963, the poet-critic Anne Stevenson was researching the first book-length study of Bishop. In October of that year, Stevenson sent her an outline of the book and questions about Bishop’s early flirtation with surrealism. In a letter she wrote to Stevenson in January 1964 (republished in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, edited by Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess), Bishop quickly changed the subject:

“There is no "split" [between the role of consciousness and subconsciousness in art]. Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can't believe we are wholly irrational-and I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic -- and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”

Darwin shows up four times in One Art, Bishop’s selected letters published in 1994. In a Feb. 10, 1953, letter to Pearl Kazin, she writes: “I’ve been having a wonderful time reading Darwin’s journal on the Beagle – you’d enjoy it too. In 1832 he is saying, `Walked to Rio (he lived in Botofogo); the whole day has been disagreeably frittered away in shopping.’ `Went to the city to purchase things. Nothing can be more disagreeable than shopping here. From the length of time the Brazilians detain you,’ etc. etc. One wonderful bit about how a Brazilian complained that he couldn’t understand English Law – the rich and respectable had absolutely no advanatge over the poor! It reminds me of Lota’s story about a relative, a judge, who used to say, `For my friends, cake! For my enemies, justice!’”

Darwin the fallible man, the Victorian complaining about his Brazilian accomodations – this Darwin appealed to Bishop as much as the courageous man of science -- as did the scrupulous writer who occasionally penned “a forgetful phrase.” I take that as a compliment. In a June 3, 1971, letter to James Merrill, she wrote, “I’ve stopped reading about Greece, alas, and now read only Darwin (again, he is one of the people I like best in the world)….”