I spent two and a half years reading Words In Air – reading fifty- or hundred-page chunks between other books – and I think it is the best thing I have read in a very long time. I knew nothing about Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Lowell when I entered their thirty year correspondence (I just like books of letters) and I got to know them, their brilliant poems, their debilitating faults, and the lives of poets (or some poets) from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. I spent more time than I ever expected trying to understand a defense of Ezra Pound, I researched their favorite books (including Bishop’s favorite 19th Century animal fiction, Rolf in the Woods), I listened to the classical pieces they referenced (or dwelt on), I found the Google Street View of their past residences. I didn’t become obsessed but – when I was in the book – I felt somehow enmeshed in those two lives. Books of letters leave things out: while reading the very last letter of Words In Air I discovered a rather important bit of gossip about Bishop and American literature that either was glossed over or I missed a few hundred pages earlier. So when some time passes, maybe a few years, I’m going to reopen the book and start again, picking up the pieces I missed and reliving these two lives.

Two excerpts from Lowell letters that I copied down while reading:

“Maine is restful for our jaded Boston nerves. Except for driving up it’s been pure rest cure—one much needed. Oh the drive up! We had to have a trailer. Due to some uncharacteristic oversight in my planning, I found myself faced with fearful alternatives. There are two kinds of U-haul-it trailer, the open, and the covered, little ambulance-like wagons that blot out all back-view and are entirely dangerous. The covered may be returned to the nearest large city (Belfast, 25 miles from Castine), the cozy uncovered ones must be brought back to Boston, an additional drive of 458 miles. I hadn’t understood, hadn’t securely bound the agent to the terms I had imagined. I took the uncovered trailer. For two hundred of the two hundred and twenty-nine miles, we analyzed the flaws in this choice. […] At Wiscasset, still gloomy with the boredom you felt there many summers go, I got out—I was beginning to nod at the wheel—and went swimming off the dock. While I was in the water, a freight-train slowly came to a stop and cut me off from my car and family. Getting out, I cut my big toe on the step, a barnacled tire. Oh, when we got to Castine we found a young resident poet, off to the wedding of his favorite Wellesley student, and he drove the trailer back.” (1957)

“Did I write you about having a haircut at the Ritz in Boston? When I got there there were a couple of boys ahead of me, one had about a quarter of an inch of hair left from his crew haircut and yet was waiting for that to be trimmed down. The other, I felt with relief, was at least normally in need of a haircut. Then I saw this other kept twitching and grimacing, and that his mother was begging him to calm himself and finally that his eyes were rolled so that only the whites showed. I started to read in Life, an article on megalitonic warfare, the 96 per cents that we and Russia could destroy of each other, the planes with bombs 24 hours in the air, any one able to get jittery or answer a false warning and let go. When I was in the chair, the barber was brownish, baldish, spectacled man, looking rather like William Carlos Williams. He was talking about fishing for flounder in Boston harbor. It was always spoiled one or two drunks. “The world’s fine except for the people in it,” he said.” (1961)