Love Unknown

September 1, 2019
How her life informed the beloved poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). Travisano (Emeritus, English/Hartwick Coll.; Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, 1999, etc.), founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, draws judiciously on Bishop's poems, prose, and letters--including those to her psychoanalyst, many lovers, and close friends--to create an authoritative and sensitive biography. Bishop carried lifelong scars from a difficult childhood: Her father died when she was an infant; her mother was sequestered in a mental institution from the time Elizabeth was 5. Passed among relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, Bishop was told nothing about her mother--and never saw her again. Besides abiding loneliness and feelings of abandonment, Bishop suffered from asthma and bouts of eczema. In adulthood, she also succumbed to autoimmune disorders; depression, made worse by cortisone prescribed for her asthma; and alcoholism. Travisano suggests that heredity may have played a part in Bishop's alcohol abuse, which sometimes occurred for no apparent reason. Often, she became a binge drinker in response to emotional distress. Since she repeatedly attached herself to women who were possessive, headstrong, or mentally unstable, her love affairs could be volatile. Travisano finds sources of Bishop's poetry in those difficult relationships and in enduring wounds as well as in various settings of her peripatetic life: among them, New York, where Marianne Moore became a mentor to whom, for several years, she would submit poems for approval; Key West, where Hemingway's ex-wife Pauline Pfeiffer became a close friend; Brazil, where Bishop lived for nearly two decades with the wealthy journalist and arts patron Lota de Macedo Soares; San Francisco; Seattle; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Maine. Although not groundbreaking, Travisano's sympathetic perspective, thorough research, and perceptive close readings lucidly portray the complexities of a writer noted for her "reserve, calm, meticulous accuracy, and humorous detachment." A finely textured portrait of an acclaimed poet.

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Starred review from September 9, 2019
Drawing on an extraordinary level of archival access, Travisano (editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell), a professor emeritus of English at Hartwick College, offers a definitive biography–cum–literary study of Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979). As Travisano asserts, even “her more elusive or enigmatic poems... seem almost transparent when biographical insights are sensitively applied.” Familial traumas (her father’s death when she was an infant and her mother’s struggles with mental illness) and a disrupted childhood spent being passed among various relatives found reflection in poems such as “Sestina,” which describes her realization that her mother had been institutionalized. Travisano follows Bishop’s career through her earliest juvenilia; her blossoming years at Vassar (1929–1934); her friendships with other poets, such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell; and her many travels—most significantly, the intended two-week stay in Brazil that stretched into 14 years, chronicled in the major work Questions of Travel (1965). Travisano also tracks Bishop’s accumulating honors—a 1946 Guggenheim Fellowship, 1956 Pulitzer Prize, and 1970 National Book Award—and deepening renown among her peers. Explaining how a writer who published barely a hundred poems during her lifetime left a lasting imprint on later generations of poets, Travisano’s essential volume illuminates Bishop’s life and, most valuably, her work.

Starred review from November 1, 2019

Drawing on a lifetime of scholarship, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society Travisano (emeritus, English, Hartwick Coll.; Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell) crafts a masterly biography that explores the enduring tension between the "mannerly correctness" and passion characteristic of the life and work of the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79). Taking its title from a George Herbert poem, the volume unfolds the many layered interconnections between Bishop's poetry and close relationships with fellow writers, artists, friends, and lovers, with sympathy, subtlety, and acute attention to detail, especially when revealing Bishop's quests for meaning in her extensive travels, illuminated through her words--always alongside what she had lost or feared to lose. Focusing on literary influences such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, as well as the Brazilian writers who captivated Bishop later in her career, Travisano securely positions his subject in conversation with major literary figures without losing sight of her more intimate, quieter relationships. VERDICT This definitive account of Bishop's contributions to American letters will attract both casual readers of her poetry as well as academics with more specialized knowledge of her work.--Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

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Starred review from October 15, 2019
As founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, it is not surprising that Travisano has an intimate grasp of Bishop's life and poetry. What is surprising is how utterly captivating his biography is, let alone his illuminating, interwoven analysis of her work. Travisano considers Bishop's writing in the context of each life event, from the childhood trauma of her father's death and mother's subsequent mental breakdown to the loneliness of being shuttled from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts, one family member to another, and school to school. Other key elements include attending Vassar and acquiring Marianne Moore as a mentor, Bishop's friendship with Robert Lowell, extensive travels, love affairs, and life in Brazil. Despite Bishop's knowledge of abandonment and loss, she found a sense of home in different places, a sense of family with lovers, friends, and devoted correspondents, and understanding and acceptance in artistic and gay communities. Just as a young Bishop's reading of a book about the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley inspired her to seek simultaneous immersion in his writing, so too, will Travisano's biography spark desire to engage with Bishop's extraordinary poems. Though not prolific, Bishop perfected her craft and left the powerful body of work so well explored here, assuring her place among the best of twentieth-century poets.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)