A couple of weeks ago the London Review of Books had an essay by Colm Toibin on the complete and collected correspondence between the poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop - Words in the Air, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton. Toibin picked up on an intriguing aspect of Bishop's writing that was expressed in her letters to Lowell: Bishop's insistence that her art - and Lowell's where it crossed their shared experience - should have an almost documentary veracity. It was a commitment to truthfulness that insisted she introduce an element of doubt where she felt her own expression of what she saw, or her memory, wanting. A self-imposed limit on the boldness of poetic imagination.
Here's Toibin's introduction:
"Robert Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us. Indeed it all started from thinking about your letter, how indispensable you are to me, and how ideally we’ve really kept things, better than life allows really.’ In her response, Bishop questioned the accuracy of Lowell’s opening line, ‘It was a real Maine fishing town,’ and the line ‘where the fish were trapped’. ‘I have two minor questions,’ she wrote.
As usual, they have to do with my George Washington-handicap. I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I know, and like Marianne [Moore], sometimes I think I’m telling the truth when I’m not) . . . ‘The sea drenched the rock’ is so perfectly simple and so good."
I was struck most by Bishop's idea of her inabilty to "lie for art" which Toibin ascribes to an upbringing split between the impoverished but fondly remembered home of her parents in Nova Scotia and her wealthier father's family house where she lived less happily after her father's death and her mother's incarceration for mental illness.
I'm not sure about Toibin's explanation, which seems too mechanistically causal in a psychotherapeutic way. But that's beside the point. There is something else at work here. That is how and what we remember colours our individual experiences in different ways. And how we are attached in different ways to different aspects of that memory.
A while ago I sent a passage I had written to a friend about a day we spent together in Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad in 2003 to get her to "verify" my memories. What was striking for me was that the moment that I recalled most vividly was one she had forgotten so completely that, for her at least, it had not existed. At the same time things that had moved her most were things so peripheral to my recollection to seem hazy at least.
Which leads to the question: what is the reality of what we remember experiencing? Bishop chides Lowell in another letter that she wrote for idealising her as "tall and brown haired", while she insists she that she was short and grey-grizzled even in her twenties. But does that change the reality - for Lowell - of his romanticised recall?
It raises a more serious question. We believe that what we witness or remember is objective because it "seems" to be objective to us. Which presents a problem for observational writers. Do we insist on the veracity of our selfish and personal viewpoint or do we accept Bishop's insistence on being uncertainly literal which, as Toibin explains, led Bishop to produce:
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