One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

Author:Elizabeth Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466889439
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

October 24, 1959

… “Helena Morley” is going to appear in Japanese. They are using both Portuguese and English texts, so I’ll get about $100 advance for that. Did I tell you that—even after the [V. S.] Pritchett review—the royalty check from England was $4.90? That’s worse than poetry …

We went to São Paulo for the opening of the Biennale this year. They invited us and paid our hotel bills, so we really could relax and have a lovely time! Thousands of abstractions—horribly depressing after a few hours—but a few very good things—folk stuff from Bahia, a wonderful show, the Burle-Marx was good, and Francis Bacon and Mies van der Rohe. We stayed five days … Then we saw Meyer Schapiro for a day on our way back. I’d never met him, but got up my courage and accosted him in the hotel, and he couldn’t have been nicer. It is rather nice the way things, or people, turn up—sometimes just as I think life is too isolated or provincial, we find ourselves with a whole bunch of celebrities on our hands. Just after Schapiro who should arrive at the house one day (I was in the shower!) with our architect but Neutra and his wife. He is very handsome but must be a bit gaga. He squeezed me tenderly to his side, upon introduction, peered into my eyes and asked me, “Do you know who I am? Have you ever heard of me?”

To May Swenson

November 10, 1959

You have FLOORED me … but of course I am perfectly delighted. It is the nicest and most overwhelming present I’ve received for years and years. While we waited for Mary [Morse] to get through Customs (actually for once she had no trouble at all—I’d gone with lots of money, expecting to have to pay 100% duty on the four records she was bringing me, and she didn’t have to pay a cent)—all members of our welcoming party tried out the binoculars right away. I found I could read the titles on the pocket books at the other end of the airport, and after exhausting that pleasure I went outside and looked at Rio off in the distance. They seem fearfully powerful to me—but I’ve forgotten about binoculars, or put the science out of my mind since my wartime experiences with them.

We’ve been using them constantly ever since. Lota finds she can oversee all the trees she planted on the nearby hills without actually climbing up the mountain—the buds, the leaves, and even if they have ants on them. I have found out that I was missing a great many little sitting birds—the first thing I watched this morning out the bedroom window. By chance I spotted a little green female something-or-other just sitting, resting, after making the beds and washing the dishes no doubt—yawning from time to time, or examining a toenail. I watched her for a long time. The bigger, flashier birds are apt to be bolder and come close and we see them, but it was really a surprise to see the little ones like that.

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