Unpublished postcard despatched by Elizabeth Bishop, from Particular Collections Library, Vassar School. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Belief. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Property. All Rights Reserved.
Elizabeth Bishop delighted within the postcard. It suited her poetic material and her lifestyle—this poet of journey who was extra usually on the transfer than at residence, “wherever that could be,” as she put it in her poem “Questions of Journey.” She informed James Merrill in a postcard written in 1979 that she seldom wrote “something of any worth on the desk or within the room the place I used to be imagined to be doing it—it’s all the time in another person’s home, or in a bar, or standing up within the kitchen in the course of the evening.”
Since her loss of life in 1979 and the publication of her chosen correspondence, Bishop has change into often known as one of many nice modern-day letter-writers. And but inevitably one thing is misplaced when an editor transcribes a letter to organize it for print: the standard of the correspondent’s hand (or the mannequin of her typewriter), the paper used, cross-outs and typos, and every part else that fixes the letter in time and house. With regards to a postcard, or a letter composed on a collection of postcards (one thing Bishop loved doing), we get not one of the photos, and much more is misplaced.
However what precisely? “What will we miss by not seeing these postcards?” Jonathan Ellis and Susan Rosenbaum write within the catalogue for the exhibition of Bishop’s postcards they’ve curated on the Vassar School Library, on view via December 15, 2023. Vassar, which is residence to Bishop’s papers, has printed print and on-line catalogues of the exhibition. The print catalogue consists of the curators’ richly suggestive introduction, back and front photos of the exhibition’s sixty-three gadgets, and appendices.
The reply to the curators’ query is: rather a lot. There may be all the time some dialogue between the back and front of one in all Bishop’s postcards. Take the one to Merrill commenting on her stressed habits of composition. The entrance of the cardboard (“the nicest left of my postcards from the Eastman Museum,” she says) is a copy of the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s movement research of a goat. Bishop doesn’t level out the analogy between her unsettled methods and the ambling goat. She is aware of Merrill will get it.
Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Particular Collections Library, Vassar School. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Belief. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Property. All Rights Reserved.
However extra usually, the dialogue between the back and front of the cardboard is specific, and it performs with the distinction between Bishop’s actuality and what the postcard footage. In the midst of one summer time, Bishop despatched the painter Loren MacIver a picture of a stag in an icy stream, considering “it would make you’re feeling cool … to have a look at it.” One other postcard to MacIver encompasses a picture of the College Inn in Seattle. The lodge is her “residence away from residence—quickly, at the least,” whereas she is educating for a time period on the College of Washington. Lest MacIver get the flawed impression of her circumstances, Bishop corrects the sunny picture by drawing a line on the picture and noting that snow is presently falling into the swimming pool.
Postcards started circulating within the late nineteenth century, at first in Europe. These playing cards carried the deal with on the entrance; on the again could be an etching of Salzburg, say, or the Tower of London, and house for a brief, handwritten message. A easy however consequential redesign was launched round 1900: the deal with was moved to the again of the cardboard, the picture to the entrance. With new visible applied sciences revolutionizing print media, postal charges falling, and the frequency of mail supply rising (as much as twelve instances a day in Paris!), the craze for the postcard took maintain. Like different shopper crazes, it appeared to many commentators to be a female delirium.
Bishop’s personal curiosity within the postcard started early in her life. In “Within the Village,” a brief story about her childhood in rural Nova Scotia in the course of the First World Warfare, she describes her mom’s assortment of postcards. (Gertrude Bishop will need to have been a kind of girls caught up within the postcard craze). The kid within the story is thrilled—“how lovely!”—by her mom’s glitter postcards. “The crystals define the buildings on the playing cards in a means buildings by no means are outlined however ought to be,” Bishop writes. In comparison with these glowing footage of distant cities, “the grey postcards on the market within the village retailer” have been a disappointment. “In any case,” Bishop causes, talking from the little lady’s perspective, “one steps exterior and instantly sees the identical factor: the village, the place we stay, full measurement, and in shade.” Discover how younger Elizabeth’s sense of actuality has been subtly undermined by a style for postcards. Now actuality seems to be like a illustration—a superior one “full measurement, and in shade,” however a illustration all the identical.
Unpublished postcard despatched by Elizabeth Bishop, from Particular Collections Library, Vassar School. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Belief. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Property. All Rights Reserved.
Bishop typically made greeting playing cards of her personal with crayons and (in tribute to her early enthusiasm for it) glitter. She made her personal collages, utilizing, for instance, a cigar-box label to create a Christmas card. Ellis and Rosenbaum examine her camp creativity to the collage artwork of John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Ray Johnson, and Joseph Cornell. The oblong body of the postcard was for her a container one thing like one in all Cornell’s horizontal field constructions. Underlining that affiliation, the Vassar exhibition features a postcard of one in all Cornell’s works that Bishop despatched to MacIver in 1977. In “Objects & Apparitions,” Bishop’s translation of a poem by Octavio Paz celebrating Cornell’s work, Cornell’s bins are referred to as “cages for infinity.”
Postcards are, of their means, a species of propaganda. Whether or not they present grand public buildings, statues of army heroes, or clichés like a pot of Boston baked beans, they assist to represent a quasi-official discourse, a typical image-repertoire that defines what we’re supposed to search out admirable, attention-grabbing, amusing, and so forth. Bishop didn’t disdain common photos of this sort; she loved them, whilst she mocked them. That mixture of participation and parody is expressed in a memento picture postcard that Bishop and her girlfriend Louise Crane posed for at a carnival in France within the early days of their romance. The younger girls’s faces, poking via a painted sheet, are joined to the burly our bodies of two boxers taking swings at one another. Whereas Crane stares coolly on the digital camera, Bishop makes eyes at her.
Unpublished postcard despatched by Elizabeth Bishop, from Particular Collections Library, Vassar School. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Belief. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Property. All Rights Reserved.
Quite a few postcards within the exhibition play with gender norms and recommend queer subtexts. Bishop as soon as despatched Merrill a card that wished him, in Greek, “Many Blissful Returns on Your Identify Day.” Like most of the playing cards she collected, she will need to have discovered this one in a junk store or used bookstore (0r the Greek tea room she mentions on the cardboard?) and picked it out considering of Merrill, who spoke Greek and had had, she knew, a couple of love affair with a Greek man. The sentimental card footage a person’s cuff-linked hand shaking a pale, ambiguously gendered hand inside an ornamental ring of violets and roses. “I’m both congratulating you on yr. engagement,” Bishop varieties on the again, “or asking you to marry me … I assume.”
The cigar-box label that Bishop scissored and despatched as a Christmas card to the Brazilian journalist Rosinha Leão footage a gartered and bewigged eighteenth-century courtier labeled with the phrases “Our Aristocratic Buddy.” That is most probably an affectionate reference to Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop’s upper-class Brazilian lover, who had launched Bishop to Leão. One other postcard within the exhibition, this one addressed to Lota, is a copy of a Victorian portray by James Collinson of a showily dressed younger girl—Ellis and Rosenbaum establish her as a prostitute—who turns to the viewer with a wily smile whereas holding an empty girl’s purse. Bishop wrote nothing in any respect on the cardboard however twice underlined the title The Empty Purse. What precisely was she saying? It appears to have one thing to do with cash and intercourse.
Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Particular Collections Library, Vassar School. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Belief. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Property. All Rights Reserved.
The postcard is an object as a lot as a message, and sending one, for Bishop, was like giving a present—it was an expression of consideration and care within the type of a four-by-six-inch memento. Not like a letter, which generally suggests a sequence of communication, most postcards don’t name for a response. On this sense, the postcard has a one-off, standalone high quality not not like a poem’s.
And if Bishop’s postcards are typically like poems, are a few of her poems like postcards? The primary postcard within the exhibition is {a photograph} from the 1910s, of Cumberland Highway in Nice Village, Bishop’s grandparents’ residence in Nova Scotia. Elm-tree branches arch in a cover above the highway like guards of honor. Bishop by no means despatched the cardboard to anybody. Or we would say, as a result of she saved it amongst her papers, that she despatched it solely to herself. She inscribed on the again, as if it have been one way or the other useful merely to say aloud—for herself? for posterity?—what she knew very properly: “I drove the cow to pasture up this highway.”
Evaluate that postcard to “Poem,” from Geography III, the final assortment of poetry she printed. The topic of “Poem” is a panorama portray of Bishop’s grandparents’ village in Nova Scotia by George Hutchinson, her great-great-uncle. “Concerning the measurement of an old-style greenback invoice,” the oil portray is small and rectangular. We would consider the portray because the entrance of a postcard and Bishop’s poem, describing and meditating on it, because the message on the again.
Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Particular Collections Library, Vassar School. Copyright 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Belief. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Property. All Rights Reserved.
The poem goes into appreciable element to explain the portray’s illustration of Nice Village, which was the scene of a few of Bishop’s earliest and strongest reminiscences. To be able to get on the actuality she recalled, Bishop needed to do her greatest to render the portray’s model of it. This implies heightening our consciousness of the artist’s medium. Thus the wild iris is “fresh-squiggled from the tube” (as if a primary squirt of oil paint have been the identical factor as a flower blooming), and the “tiny cows” are “two brushstrokes every, however confidently cows.” “A specklike chook is flying to the left,” Bishop notes. “Or is it a flyspeck trying like a chook?” “This consideration to the portray’s materiality emphasizes the artificiality of the picture, its standing as a illustration. Reasonably than make the truth of the scene extra distant, it awakens Bishop’s reminiscences and brings her nearer to her personal expertise of the place.
How does that work? And what does it need to do with postcards? The poem and the portray each are items of correspondence. What issues for Bishop is an alternate between individuals: the best way the portray triangulates her and her great-great-uncle’s relationship to a “cherished” place, preserved by a manifestly synthetic and never notably helpful picture. “Our visions coincided,” she says. Then she corrects herself: “ ‘visions’ is / too severe a phrase—our seems to be, two seems to be.” The artwork of the postcard, for Bishop, was an artwork of “seems to be”—shared glimpses and jokes handed from hand handy, time-stamped, and postmarked.
Langdon Hammer is the Niel Grey Jr. Professor of English at Yale and the creator of James Merrill: Life and Artwork.
