Colm Tóibín discovered Elizabeth Bishop in the 1970s around the time he happened on the work of her friend, the poet Robert Lowell. In this new book, the Wexford writer tackles one of his favourite subjects with a pleasure that is palpable, although the story involves early heartbreak and loss in the life of the poet.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) was the US Poet Laureate from 1949 to 1950. She won the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Her father died when she was eight months old. In 1916, when she was five years of age, her mother was signed into a mental hospital. They never met again and her mother died in 1934.
Family heartbreak is part of Tóibín story too as recounted here, and he shares certain comparisons from childhood with the American poet, comparisons which are sensitively explored in this fascinating 200-page extended essay, without too much being made of it all. Tóibín, who was born in 1955, writes movingly about his father Michael’s stroke, which was followed three years later by his death in July 1967. Aside from the experience of loss and upheaval, there are other traits which Tóibín believes he and the poet share, involving exile and the lure of the South, the sun and the sea.
Because the author is setting the details of his own family story alongside Bishop’s story, and addressing, however briefly, the poet’s childhood trauma, he appears to interpolate the details of his own story with more confidence than if he wrote it in a stand-alone personal memoir.
Tóibín has drawn on his family story in his fiction prior to this account – notably in his most recent novel, Nora Webster - and Penguin indeed once published a short memoir in e book format. However, it is curious that his personal memories as recounted here, when set against Bishop’s, seem on the face of it, somehow more illuminating than previous autobiographical explorations. This, despite the constraint of their being a side-plot, as it were, alongside Bishop’s life story.
Moreover, the poet’s tacit style of withholding and withdrawal has clearly influenced Tóibín's own writing. Thus the book broadens out into an exploration of the role of silence and suppression as mechanisms of self-defence when trauma occurs.
The work is another in an ongoing series from Princeton University Press, entitled Writers on Writers, which includes studies by CK Williams on Whitman, Michael Dirda on Arthur Conan Doyle (of the Sherlock Holmes stories) and Alexander McCall Smith on WH Auden.
Paddy Kehoe
