What I’m Reading: Dear Elizabeth
Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell is composed of parts of poems and the more than 400 letters that the two poets sent each other between 1947 and 1977. Playwright Sarah Ruhl was inspired to compose this chronicle of friendship after reading Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. She wrote that she loved “how the letters resisted a sense of the usual literary ‘story’ – how instead they forced us to look at life as it is lived. Not neat. Not two glorious Greek arcs meeting in the center.”
The tone is alternately intimate and restrained, formed from not actions but words spoken to someone both far away and trusted. Still there is a shape, partly made by the placement of a seminal letter which refers to a conversation they had wading in cold Maine seawater, when Elizabeth said, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
There’s a sense not only of looking back at this in the letters, but anticipating the loneliness even within the friendship of two very different people over the course of Robert Lowell’s marrying and divorcing, and Elizabeth Bishop settling in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares. Elizabeth and Robert carry poems by each other like talismans. They sympathize and misunderstand. Tension comes from the space between letters, which like spaces between lines of poems, suggest something beyond the words. Weeks pass, decades pass, memories come and go, which we feel as natural, familiar. Elizabeth writes near the end, “Why all this change? My favorite eye shadow – for years – suddenly comes in 3 cakes in a row and one has to use all one’s skill to avoid iridescence.”
Here are two people who care for poetry and each other, even through their arguments and different literary choices, with Elizabeth preferring more formalism and restraint, while Robert chose a wider range of forms and claimed a right to every subject, even while Elizabeth pleaded with him to keep out his wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters from his collection, Dolphin. This argument comes near the end of the play, where we get a sense of the hundreds of letters that have passed between them – all those dears – both the missed marks and tenderness.
Sarah Ruhl arranged these letters into a play as she wanted to hear them out loud, but I very much enjoyed them reading silently in a big soft chair, hearing voices that came together across years and continents, often with the memory of a conversation standing in cold water, about loneliness and love.
