But the biographical sketch in the first anthology I was in said, “Oh, she’s been to Morocco, Spain, et cetera,” and this has been repeated for years even though I haven’t been back to any of these places. I could get along in Brazil for some years but now I couldn’t possibly live on it. It just happened that although I wasn’t rich I had a very small income from my father, who died when I was eight months old, and it was enough when I got out of college to go places on. a very funny trip.ĭid you spend so much of your life traveling because you were looking for a perfect place? We splashed along slowly for days and days. The riverboat, a stern wheeler, had been built in 1880-something for the Mississippi, and you can’t believe how tiny it was.
I made a weeklong trip on that river in 1967 and didn’t see one. It’s beautiful, a great thing like this one, a horse with its mouth open, but for some reason they all just disappeared. There’s a famous one called the Red Horse made of jacaranda. Some of them are made of much more beautiful wood. There was a black man who carved twenty or thirty, and it’s exactly his style. It’s nothing compared to the Amazon but it’s the next biggest river in Brazil. They were used for about fifty years on one section, two or three hundred miles, of the river. Some are more beautiful this is a very ugly one. This figurehead is from the São Francisco River. I really like modern things, but while I was there I acquired so many other things I couldn’t bear to give them up. It was very beautiful, and when I finally moved I brought back things I liked best. I lived in an extremely modern house in Brazil. Is there a story behind any of the pieces, especially that figurehead? It’s quite imposing. Your living room seems to be a wonderful combination of the old and new. Though Miss Bishop did have the opportunity of correcting those portions of this interview incorporated in the Vassar Quarterly article, she never saw it in this form. Seven or eight months later, after reading a profile I had written for The Vassar Quarterly (which had been based on this interview) and worrying that she sounded like “the soul of frivolity,” she wrote me: “I once admired an interview with Fred Astaire in which he refused to discuss ‘the dance,’ his partners, or his ‘career’ and stuck determinedly to golf-so I hope that some readers will realize I do think about art once in a while even if babbling along like a very shallow brook. Although she looked well and was in high spirits, she complained of having had a recent hay fever attack and declined to have her photograph taken with the wry comment, “Photographers, insurance salesmen, and funeral directors are the worst forms of life.” She was wearing a black tunic shirt, gold watch and earrings, gray slacks, and flat brown Japanese sandals that made her appear shorter than her actual height: five feet, four inches.
“This is after he abdicated and shortly before he died-he looked very sad.” Her desk was tucked in a far corner by the only window, also with a north view of the harbor.Īt sixty-seven, Miss Bishop was striking, her short, swept-back white hair setting off an unforgettably noble face. Photographs of Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and other friends hung on the walls one of Dom Pedro, the last emperor of Brazil, she especially liked to show to her Brazilian visitors. Literary magazines, books, and papers were piled everywhere. Her study, a smaller room down the hall, was in a state of disorder. The most conspicuous piece was a large carved figurehead of an unknown beast, openmouthed, with horns and blue eyes, which hung on one wall below the ceiling.
Besides some comfortable modern furniture, the room included a jacaranda rocker and other old pieces from Brazil, two paintings by Loren MacIver, a giant horse conch from Key West and a Franklin stove with firewood in a donkey pannier, also from Brazil. Her living room was spacious and attractive, with wide-planked polished floors, a beamed ceiling, two old brick walls, and one wall of books. Her living room, on the fourth floor of Lewis Wharf, had a spectacular view of Boston Harbor when I arrived, she immediately took me out on the balcony to point out such Boston landmarks as Old North Church in the distance, mentioning that Old Ironsides was moored nearby. The interview took place at Lewis Wharf, Boston, on the afternoon of June 28, 1978, three days before Miss Bishop and two friends were to leave for North Haven, a Maine island in Penobscot Bay where she summered. Photo by Alice Helen Methfessel, courtesy of Frank Bidart Interviewed by Elizabeth Spires Issue 80, Summer 1981