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Sarah in front of the Vassar College Library
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Scholar's Journal
I passed the summer in a whirl of Elizabeth-Bishop-related travel (appropriate, I suppose, since she herself loved to travel). First, to Palm Springs, where I secreted myself away to read for a month, hoping that the unbearable heat outside would keep me at my desk, and that being away from the distractions of home would increase my ability to focus. It was a good idea. Although keeping up reading all day in a strange place where I knew no one was challenging, I managed to get done the bulk of the reading that I had hoped to, and even to see a few friends, who came out on the weekends to save me from myself and my books. In my first email update to my fellow Haas scholars, I admired the way that a tiny bird I had seen out the window held fast to a palm frond as it was whipped around violently in the wind. It seemed as though he was at ease in that constant motion, and I tried to think of myself as following the bird’s example, becoming comfortable with the discomfort of stretching my limits, and giving myself the task of simply holding on, keeping going. Persistence, not perfection.
The second phase of my Bishop adventure took me to Poughkeepsie, NY, where the majority of her journals, letters, and drafts are housed in the Special Collections Department of their library. This was my first time doing archival research, and again the challenge proved to be endurance; the initial rush of seeing originals faded as I realized that Bishop’s handwriting was maddeningly difficult to decipher, and very few pages of the materials were typed. (And how unusual, when they were typed, to see a page full of typos and handwritten corrections—from using a typewriter!) The primary challenge, then, became to stay awake in the dead quiet (save the drone of the air conditioner) of the library basement as my eyes got tired from squinting and puzzling out the most difficult words in each passage. The treats, though, included: nice hotel soap, getting to see Bishop’s unpublished watercolors, lots of juicy literary gossip in her unpublished letters, fireflies, and finding Bishop’s brownie recipe. On a more serious note, I found several pieces of text, mostly from journals, that hadn’t been used in any of the secondary materials I had read in the articles I looked at, and so am excited to potentially circulate some new fragments of her work, and to be able to be the first one to say something about a few of her lines! Although I had originally planned to spend a week at the archives, my mentor suggested I take at least two, and I am so glad that he convinced me of that. I could easily have spent another two weeks, since I was only able to get through about half of the materials there that I would have liked to. Perhaps someday I’ll have a chance to return and continue on where I left off.
