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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Elizabeth Bishop once attributed her alcoholism to her childhood experience of the famous Salem fire of 1914. In an unpublished poem entitled "A Drunkard,which dates from about 1960, Bishop remembered her three-year-old "amazement" at the fire's glow and being "terribly thirsty" but unable to capture the attention of her mother, a ghostly figure on the lawn, giving coffee to refugees arriving on the beach in boats. The poem recalls a great many details of the fire: cinders and ash in the air and on the beach, boards "shiny black like black feathers," furniture and clothes washed up with the tide. When, the next morning, the curious child picks up a woman's black cotton stocking from the rubble, she remembers her mother saying sharply "Put that down!":
I remember clearly, clearly--
But since that day, that reprimand . . .
I have . . . suffered from abnormal thirst--
I swear it's true--and by the age
of twenty or twenty-one I had begun
to drink, & drink--I can't get enough
and, as you must have noticed,
I'm half-drunk now . . . Bishop ends the draft with a half-hearted disclaimer: "And all I'm telling you may be a lie...." But her description of the Salem fire corresponds perfectly with newspaper accounts of June 26, 1914 (when she was three years old), and her distant relationship with her mother in this scene is familiar from her descriptions in her memoir "In the Village" and in other unpublished poems and stories. Inadequate mothering, with consequent insecure attachment and low self-esteem, is a frequent common denominator among female alcoholics (Gomberg 629).
"Lucius," an autobiographical figure in Bishop's early stories about her childhood, fixes his grandfather rum toddies on winter evenings. But Bishop's first mention of her own drinking places it at the "age / of twenty or twenty-one"--during her junior year of college at Vassar, just before the repeal of Prohibition, when she and her literary friends would sit discussing politics and books in a local speakeasy, drinking bad wine out of teacups. In the summers, they brought bottles of scotch and bourbon as "house presents" to one another, and drinking figures large in their chronicle of activities. Bishop drank destructively from this time forward, and the burden of concealing such a social liability on the small Vassar campus made her a solitary figure there. By about 1939, her life was dominated by her need for alcohol, and by the effects of heavy drinking on her body, on her mind, and on her relationships. Guilt and shame attached to her abuse of alcohol made it impossible for her to live her life comfortably, and alcoholism fed her sense of homelessness.(1)
Elizabeth Bishop drank destructively because she was an alcoholic, and she was an alcoholic for a number of possible reasons. She may have inherited the tendency; her memoirs of her family reveal that there were alcoholics on both sides. As Bishop said, "Father had to stop [drinking], and his father, and three uncles. It can be done" (One Art 211). Alcoholism responds to environmental triggers as well. Not all children of alcoholics are affected by the condition; some event or series of events leads the potential problem drinker--who may have inherited a faulty alcohol-processing enzyme, or a tendency to fear strong emotion or direct confrontation--to her nemesis. In the lives of writers, those triggers might include the romantic notion of the drinking writer, the solitary and undefined nature of a writer's "work," or the belief that a writer needs to be free of ties to the mundane world in order to create.
Why Elizabeth Bishop in particular developed alcoholism we may never know. But why she drank at all is a more interesting question and is as individual to a writer as her education or personal background. The answer posited in "A Drunkard" is comprehensive: many users of alcohol report drinking to fill a perceived void, and the ache at the heart of that poem is the distance between the child in her crib and the mother on the lawn, and the harsh words that are their only exchange. There was a void at the center of Elizabeth Bishop's life: her father had died when she was eight months old; her mother was mentally ill and permanently institutionalized when Elizabeth was five. Her daughter never saw her again. Raised in the homes of relatives in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, Bishop never acquired the knack of homemaking--that is, of finding a permanent place to call home. Bishop was aware of this void, but she was poorly suited by temperament and training to confront it, mourn it, heal it. She chastised herself for lapses in her restraint (in an unpublished poem she compared herself unfavorably to the dolls of her childhood: "Their stoicism I never mastered / their smiling phrase for every occasion"). In a nature so reticent, which kept painful memory and personal anguish even from itself, alcohol provided license to talk, to cry, to stop being the stoical New Englander she'd been raised to be. But Bishop's friends report that her most painful self-revelations often occurred in alcohol-induced "blackouts," and she would not remember having made them at all.
Elizabeth Bishop was troubled throughout her life by the physical sensation of the passage of time. She said she could feel, even hear, time rushing past, and this worry finds its way into all her work--from letters and journals to published poems. In the prose version of the events also described in the poem "In the Waiting Room," the terrible anxiety that six-year-old Elizabeth feels that day at the dentist's with her aunt is more explicitly associated with a rush to maturity, represented in the poem by her aunt and by the "awful hanging breasts" she sees in National Geographic (Collected Poems 161). Unable to comfort herself with a precise reckoning of time ("In a few days it would be my seventh birthday"), she is caught in its unstoppable flow. "It was like coasting downhill, this thought, only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree. Why was I a human being?" ("Country Mouse" 33). In her most cogent and persuasive statements about her use of alcohol, Bishop said she drank in order to lose that dizzying sense of time rushing by. But the stepping out of time that being very drunk seemed to allow was itself frightening. When Robert Lowell in 1960 sent her a draft of his poem "The Drinker," which begins, "The man is killing time--there's nothing else," she responded with empathy, identifying first with the man's need to escape time: "The sense of time is terrifying--have hours gone by, or one awful moment? How long have the cars been parked?" She commended the "sense of release" of the poem's ending, "a sense ... that only the poem, or another fifth of bourbon, could produce" (One Art 386). Bishop found brief respites from her anxiety about time by escaping New York for the tropical south--Mexico, Key West--finally settling for fifteen years in Brazil.
Bishop's nature was as fearlessly observant as it was reticent, and she also drank to escape the tyranny of that observing consciousness. Several times she complained in letters about the burden that her "famous eye" placed on her, and her autobiographical Robinson Crusoe laments in "Crusoe in England" that his dreams are of
other islands
stretching away from mine, infinities
of islands, islands spawning islands,
like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands, knowing that I had to live
on each and every one, eventually,
for ages, registering their flora,
their fauna, their geography.
(Complete Poems 165)
He then ferments his island's one kind of berry and makes homebrew.
Hemingway's oft-quoted point about drinking in order to "stop writing" when he had done his days work is useful, although by middle age Hemingway was combining alcohol with work to the...
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