Friday, June 30, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt five)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

On June 4, 1946, Juan Domingo Perón became the twenty-ninth President of Argentina. Restored to his army commission and promoted, he wore the blue dress uniform of a brigadier-general as he stood before the newly reconstituted Congress and took the oath of office, swearing by ‘Almighty God’ to uphold the constitution. Exactly three years to the day after his band of colonels seized the Government, he pledged ‘respect for the country’s traditions and institutions.’ Then, to the notes of martial music and the cheers of a million Argentines, he drove along Avenida de Mayo to the Casa Rosada.



Thursday, June 29, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt four)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

In the last few days of the campaign, Perón was handed an election issue which had nothing to do at all with economics or social justice. To his delight, the United States took that particular moment to add yet another chapter to its unhappy record of Big Stick diplomacy in Latin America. The State Department, in a move to influence the election, published a handbook reviewing Perón’s record of fascism and collaboration with Nazi Germany in World War II. Primly titled Consultation among the American Republics with Respect to the Argentine Situation, but better known as the ‘Blue Book’, it was the work of Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden, whose brief ambassadorship in Buenos Aires the previous year had been marked by the blunt, undiplomatic manner with which he had publicly attacked Perón and the Argentine Government. Braden was determined to stamp out the vestiges of Nazism in the southern continent, even though Nazism had already been replaced by Communism in the American mind as the enemy of world peace and democracy.

The other Latin American nations recognized the ‘Blue Book’ for what it was – an attempt by the Americans to go on fighting a war that was over – and they ignored it. Perón and many Argentines, not all of them Perón supporters, looked upon it as unacceptable meddling in their country’s internal affairs. Eva quickly took advantage of such a marvelous propaganda gift for those final days of the campaign. In her radio broadcasts, which went out to every town and village in the country, she called on all Argentines to repudiate the threat of ‘Yanqui’ imperialism with the cry of ‘Perón yes! Braden no!’ It was an unbeatable slogan and almost certainly won the votes of many indignant patriotic Argentines who would otherwise have voted for Tamborini.



Wednesday, June 28, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt three)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

The threat of civil war still hung in the air. Eva Duarte took to carrying a grenade in her handbag, while her lover defiantly proclaimed: ‘Everybody is demanding my head, but thus far no one has come to get it.’

He spoke too soon. Some of his fellow officers had finally had enough. But, ironically, it was not Perón’s heavy-handed dictatorship which provoked them into plotting his downfall. They simply could not stand his girl friend. They had watched with mounting embarrassment and anger as Perón turned more and more to Eva Duarte for political advice. As soldiers, they were supposed to be running a military dictatorship. Yet a woman pulled the strings. It outraged their sense of dignity and their masculine prife. No Argentine dared laugh at them, of course, at least not to their faces, anyway. But they were uncomfortably aware that ribald cartoons undermining their authority had appeared in the newspapers of neighbouring countries.

The final indignity, as far as they were concerned, came when Eva arranged for her mother’s latest boy friend, a postal clerk named Oscar Nicolini, to become Director of Posts and Telegraph, a position once held by her first military lover, Colonel Imbert. No sooner had Nicolini taken over his new job, than Eva moved right in to the office next to his. There was no doubt in the minds of senior army officers that Colonel Perón’s mistress had deftly placed herself in control of all of the nation’s communications. They were not going to tolerate it. She had to go.



Tuesday, June 27, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt two)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

The early months of 1945 were not good ones for Perón and Eva. They finally realized they had picked a loser in Nazi Germany, and their humiliation was rubbed in by Winston Churchill who commented: ‘They have chosen to dally with evil but not only with evil but with the losing side.’ Their country stood friendless in the world. And, understandably, relations with the Americans were the worst they had ever been; President Franklin D. Roosevelt pointedly remarked on ‘the extraordinary paradox of the growth of Nazi-Fascist methods in a country of this hemisphere at the very time that these forces of aggression and oppression are drawing ever closer to the hour of defeat.’ In undiplomatic language, the US Ambassador to Argentina, Spruille Braden, referred to the military regime as one ‘which in commong honesty no one could call anything but fascist, and typically fascist.’ Angrily, Perón responded: ‘Some say that what I am doing follows the policy of Nazism. All I can say is this: If the Nazis did this, they had the right idea.’ When his hero, Benito Mussolini, was executed by Italian partisans, he defiantly eulogized him: ‘Mussolini ws the greatest man of this century, but he committed certain disastrous errors. I, who have the advantage of his precedent before me, shall follow in his footsteps but also avoid his mistakes.’ To make sure the Argentines did not get ideas about one precedent, Perón banned all newsreel film that showed Mussolini’s body hanging by the heels alongside that of his mistress.



Monday, June 26, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt one)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

Life was rough for Juana Ibarguren for the next couple of years. Juan Duarte had been her sole means of support. All that he left her was a legal declaration that her children were his – in order for them to be able to bear his name. So, in order to pay the rent for her tiny one-room house, she and the girls hired themselves out as cooks in the home of the local estancias. It was then that Eva got her first close look at the rich, powerful families who controlled Argentina through the wealth generated by their ownership of the land. In Buenos Aires Province, which includes Los Toldos and is the largest of the pampas provinces, 15 families owned a million acres of land each. Another 50 families owned 50,000 acres. The estancias where Eva often worked existed virtually as independent mini-kingdoms. They had their own schools, chapels and hospitals. The estanciero families would divide their year between Paris and Buenos Aires, visiting the estancia usually at Christmas-time, at the start of the long, hot Argentine summer. Their journey to and from their nearest pampas railway station was, more often than not, their only connection with the tiny pueblos that had grown up around the stations that the British-owned railways had built to serve the estancias. For Eva, helping out in the kitchens, it was a world to be gawked at as a child – the crowds of guests and children, the nannies, governesses and major domos, and the patron, wearing the inevitable, expensive imitation of the clothes that the impoverished gauchos wore on the plains.



Friday, June 23, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt twelve)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

Certainly I hadn’t forgotten: I had a small fortune in U.S. hundreds folded into tiny strips and secreted in the waistline of my pants. It was too late for bribes. The Commissaire adjusted the large pad of lined white paper on the desk before him and asked me about my purpose and my activities in his country. I told them everything I could remember.

I gave them everyone’s name and explained what each one had done without any understanding that these simple acts the Liberians had performed on my behalf were condemnable. No, not these simple acts, but the names themselves condemned them, nothing more than their own names, because in much of the world nothing at all can actually be permitted, and simply to make your existence known is to demand punishment. But none of this occurred to me. I was angry and I wanted to make them work, writing down lots and lots of details, names and dates and places, my every move from the moment I stepped off the plane in Abidjan until I crossed the border three days later. In this way I betrayed every last person who had helped me.



Thursday, June 22, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt eleven)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

The most spectacular character-building was being undertaken by one of my classmates, a paralyzed kid in a wheelchair. His houseboy pitched his tent for him on a metropolis of jungle fire ants and drove away, and this boy spent the weekend trading his supply of ice-water—a big jug of it he had—for insecticide and bug repellant. Although we weren’t friends, just vaguely acquainted, under these unusual circumstances I suddenly recognized that we were a lot alike. He allowed himself to be enrolled in everything, clubs, Little League, choir, and so on, but he refused to stick to his script—we were supposed to admire and pity him and he was supposed to be cool, but actually he acted like a big brat, uncontrollably dissatisfied and constantly sneering or complaining or acting defeated. I still see him slumped over in his wheelchair, flushed with baby anger, squirting poison fumes into the dirt around him.



Wednesday, June 21, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt ten)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

As we gathered miscellaneous half-rotten sticks for firewood, our scoutmaster instructed us in the ancient incendiary arts. Our scoutmaster frightened me. I think his name was Jerry, a bald, spectacled figure who looked as if he’d been only recently let out of a Japanese prison camp; but this impression was wrong; he’d been let out some seventeen years before. Like many Euros who’ve lived for decades in the tropics, he’d lost a lot of his body hair and all of his fat and seemed fabricated out of cords and paper. He regarded those days of captivity and torture at the nads of his enemies as the primary character-building experience of his life, and he was bent on duplicating it, in every way possible, for his Scouts. He was enthusiastic about this opportunity. The other boys took Jerry’s attitude in stride, as far as I could tell.

The Scouts aim to build character and impart a wilderness savoir-faire with Native American overtones that would meld the Lone Ranger and Tonto into one small young self-sufficient good guy. The atmosphere on this campout was one of military discipline constantly marred by sobs and outbursts, because the Scouts were children, after all.



Tuesday, June 20, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt nine)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

The previous year, Patricia Rudolph had taken Eric and another brother, Jamie, to a commune in Schell City, Missouri, run by the Church of Israel, which was at that time, but no longer, associated with the Christian Identity movement. Christian Identity doctrine claims that Jews descended from the union of Eve and Satan, and that Anglo-Saxons are the true Chosen People. Patricia, Eric, and Jamie stayed in the commune about six months, according to pastor Don Gayman.

In high school Eric wrote a paper arguing that the Holocaust never happened. Patricia Rudolph wouldn’t disclose her children’s Social Security numbers to school officials. Eric Rudolph later rented homes under aliases and registered vehicles under phony addresses. He has never applied for a credit card or opened a bank account.



Monday, June 19, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt eight)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

“This is for the FBI and the media,” Daniel Rudolph, brother of Eric, said into a video camera he’d rigged in his garage near Summerville, South Carolina, last February, and then turned to a whirring radial-arm saw and cut off his left hand at the wrist. Dressed in a white shirt and tie and wearing a tourniquet on his upper arm, he wrapped his stump with a towel and drove himself to the hospital. Paramedics retrieved the hand. Doctors reattached it. The local police chief of investigators who viewed Daniel’s videotape, “They never want to see it again.” Apparently feeling implicated, the FBI issued a statement: “Daniel Rudolph’s decision to maim himself is regrettable and totally unexpected.” Neighbors questioned by the media claimed Daniel had never struck them as anything but completely stable. Reporters hunted down a former landlady in Florida who highly recommended Daniel and his wife as tenants and said they’d once baked her elderly mother a cake. The videotape was sent to the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit.



Sunday, June 18, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt seven)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

Eric Robert Rudolph is wanted for every bombing that somebody else wasn’t already wanted for. He’s charged with creating explosions that killed one person and injured a hundred others during the summer Olympics in Atlanta in ’96; damaged the Northside Family Planning Services and the Otherside Lounge (described in the papers as a gay nightclub) in January and February of ’97; killed an off-duty policeman and maimed a nurse at the New Women, All Women Health Care Clinic in Birmingham in January of ’98. Witnesses around the Birmingham crime scene remembered seeing a Nissan pickup. Agents traced it to Rudolph. Rudolph took to the mountainous Natahala Forest outside the town of Andrews in Cherokee County, North Carolina, where he’d lived off and on since boyhood.



Saturday, June 17, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt six)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

The Children of the Light are not children. Most of them appear to be in their seventies. They are the Elect, living as virgins and eunuchs in the Reign of Heaven, and they do not expect to die. They number nineteen—a dozen women and seven men. They grow their own food, raise their own buildings, and make most of their clothes out of white linen imported from Scotland. They offer nothing for sale and solicit no contributions. All but one has taken the name of a stone.

When I visited them in 1981 I found their leader, Opal, a tall woman in her late seventies, tearing turnips up out of the earth in one of the gardens. On her vest of white linen her identification was embroidered in gold thread: ELECT OPAL. She wore a denim skirt and tennis shoes and the sweat poured off her. “It’ll be time for water soon,” she told me. I wondered why she didn’t just stoop down and drink from the faucet two yards away, but I didn’t ask. I sensed that nothing I knew applied here.



Friday, June 16, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt five)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

But Powell was listening to local legend. In truth it’s doubtful that the Ashley who carved his name onto a rock and then wrecked his party in the Green River ever saw the temple, or even its foundation, in Salt Lake City. A William Henry Ashley, who eventually became a congressman for Missouri, is credited with having navigated the Green River in 1825 and with establishing fur trade routes in that country that made him a rich man; and in 1826 he led an expedition that reached the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake. He died in 1838. The Mormons, on the other hand, didn’t establish their colony in Salt Lake until decades later: In the late 1840s, without a map, a stream of some twelve thousand apostles of Brigham Young—a New Englander with twenty-seven wives and scores of children—crossed the world from Nauvoo, Illinois. The first of them arrived in the summer, exhausted and starved, near the endless burning white flats of the Great Salt Lake, leaving in their wake four relay colonies and more than two thousand graves.

At that time Utah was a part of Mexico, forsaken by the American people and also, according to the mountain men who had first reached her, forsaken by God. Here, in the Salt Lake Valley, a full thousand miles beyond what had been, until then, the fathest American frontier, the Mormons settled down to build their temple and lay out a celestial city and await, as they continue to do, the destruction of the world by fire.



Thursday, June 15, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt four)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

The elevators are stopped, but we have electricity four hours a day, also a few minutes of hot water in the morning or afternoon. The waiters in the restaurant are very much that—people who wait, hardly moving, and having almost nothing to say to each other—until I appear to ask what’s available today. Eggs, bread, lamb. Green or black tea or bottled water. There’s never anything else. I always tip them ten thousand of their money. I never eat in my room. I take each meal in the restaurant while they stand and wait. I don’t think they mind. It seems to give them pleasure serving as my silent hosts. Among the Afghans, it’s said, the two most important aspects of living are hospitality and revenge.



Wednesday, June 14, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt three)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

Moon Two drips and shivers. Her husband sits her down in a chair. He’s got to build a fire. But first he’d better make a speech. He takes her hands in his and promises: “Whatever happens in life, after we get out of here we’ll never, never set foot inside Alaska again.” Fortunately the rattling of her teeth prevents her from sharing her thoughts. He tries to think of something else to say. “Never,” he repeats. She probably knows he’s lying. He has certainly once again screwed everything up, but, oh well, she can’t divorce him out in the wilderness—

The wilderness! Alaska!



Tuesday, June 13, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt two)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

I’ve located Joey. He looks the same, only older, just as sad or perhaps more so, having lived thirty years longer now and found more to be sad about.

Joey and I sit out front of my tent in the dirt while he tunes up. He’s played professionally for decades, and he doesn’t do it just for fun very often anymore. But just to oblige me… We sing a few of the old ones while the teenage Ohanans get a fire going about six feet away and start good-naturedly hassling whoever wanders past for drugs.



Monday, June 12, 2017

the last book I ever read (Denis Johnson's Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, excerpt one)

from Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson:

It’s late September and the Liberian civil war has been stalled, at its very climax, for nearly three weeks. The various factions simmer under heavy West African clouds. Charles Taylor and his rebels are over here; they control most of the country and the northern part of the capital, Monrovia—the part where the radio station is, and many nights Taylor harangues his corner of the universe with speeches about who he’s killed and who he’s going to kill, expectorating figures with a casual generosity that gets him known as a liar, referring to himself as “the President of this nation” and to his archrival as “the late Prince Johnson.” Meanwhile Prince Johnson, very much alive, holds most of the capital. Johnson’s titles are Field Marshal, Brigadier General, and Acting President of Liberia; “Prince” is just his name. Johnson’s men eliminated the president two weeks ago, and they’ve been roaming the city ever since, exterminating the dead president’s soldiers, piling their bodies on the streets—as many as two hundred one night—or scattering them along the beaches. They, the president’s decimated Armed Forces of Liberia, occupy a no-man’s-land between Taylor’s and Johnson’s checkpoints, more or less in the middle of the city, a gutted landscape of unrelieved starvation where the dwindling group robs and loots and burns and the skeletal citizens wander, dying of cholera and hunger. In Johnson’s sector are stationed about a thousand troops from the ECOWAS—Economic Community of West African States—a sixteen-nation group that has sent this peacekeeping force to Monrovia with instructions, basically, not to do anything. The ECOWAS forces enjoy a strange alliance with Prince Johnson. Everybody thought they’d arrest him; instead the ECOWAS troops stood by while Johnson’s men shot and kidnapped the president, Samuel K. Doe, the first time he set foot outside the executive mansion after several weeks of lying low, and they ducked for cover while Johnson’s rebels searched out and killed sixty-four of Doe’s bodyguards, hunting from room to room of the ECOWAS headquarters. Meanwhile, two U.S. ships wait offshore with a force of Marines, exasperating everyone by merely floating and floating while the corpses mount…because nobody wants either of the rebels to rule the land, and the only people capable of installing an interim government of reasonable types are the American Marines, for two reasons absurdly obvious to all Liberians: first, because they’re Americans, and second, because they’re Marines. Liberians don’t want another coup like the one in 1980, when Samuel K. Doe, then an army officer, took over and executed the cabinet before TV cameras on the beach. The firing squad was drunk and was obliged, in some cases, to reload and shoot again from closer range.



Saturday, June 10, 2017

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt twelve)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

Since Lota’s death, thoughts of suicide had rarely been far from Elizabeth’s mind, though her concern was nearly always for the bereaved. Even with an ambiguous death brought on by an “accident of an unconscious-suicide kind, a sudden impulse,” as she’d judged Randall Jarrell’s fatal walk on the highway and possibly Lota’s overdose, Elizabeth knew how feelings of responsibility and guilt inevitably spread to survivors. After John Berryman leapt from a bridge in 1972 and Anne Sexton succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning in her garage in 1974, she’d moaned to Howard Moss, “Oh dear, oh dear—I wish people would stop doing this.” Yet Elizabeth harbored a recurrent desire, she’d once confided in Alice, “to pass quite out of the picture from time to time,” to perform a vanishing act without serious consequences. During the season of her double collapse in Ouro Prêto, she’d welcomed a “stupendous thunderstorm” that descended with biblical force on the town, she’d written to Alice, hoping “I might get struck by lightning—a dramatic demise, don’t you think--& so good for book-sales.” Alice had easily read the desperation in Elizabeth’s fantasy and scolded her: wishing to be struck by lightning was “not ok . . . . Cut that out!”



Friday, June 9, 2017

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt eleven)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

So when Elizabeth confided that her two collapses had come as she sank once again into “just plain grief” after “so many sad deaths the past few years, so much insanity, so many god-awful experiences, & so much time lost forever,” fearing above all that her new “unsuitable” love was only likely to “bring more grief & loss,” she was testing Alice, even as Elizabeth insisted she didn’t mean to burden the younger woman. This “awful tail-spin” was “not your fault.” How would Alice respond when Elizabeth foretold the worst—a day, probably soon, when I’ll have to see you going off with someone more suitable—and I’ll have somehow to turn into just being a ‘good friend’ etc.”? Elizabeth loathed the thought of “your coming to call on me in my ‘flat’ in Boston, & bringing me a bunch of flowers or something. Or your feeling you have to be ‘nice’ to an old lady because she is fond of you--& you’ll be dying to get away & go skiing or swimming or love-making with your young man—I really hope I die first.”



Thursday, June 8, 2017

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt ten)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

Y siento más tu muerte que mi vida, she copied from Hernández’s poem onto her page, but did not translate: I feel your death more than my life. In a letter to Dr. Baumann, written while Roxanne was still living at Casa Mariana, Elizabeth admitted, “Since she died, Anny—I just don’t seem to care whether I love or die.”



Wednesday, June 7, 2017

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt nine)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

After considering New York City and Puerto Rico, Elizabeth, Roxanne, and her eighteen-month-old son, nicknamed “Boogie,” set up housekeeping in San Francisco early in the new year, renting the second-floor apartment in a “pea green” double-bayed triple-decker at the edge of Russian Hill from a landlord named Mr. Pang. The building at 1559 Pacific Avenue was a “nowhere address,” in Roxanne’s argot, with a steam laundry on one side and an Italian family’s kitchen garden on the other. Across the street was a body painting shop—“CAR, that is,” Elizabeth specified in a letter to Cal; this was the winter after 1967’s “Summer of Love” brought 100,000 hippies to Haight-Ashbury for a months-long orgy of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Elizabeth and Roxanne might have been drawn to the city because of its place at the center of the burgeoning gay rights movement. San Francisco was where, in the mid-1950s, a small group of “homophile” women founded the Daughters of Bilitis, adopting the deliberately obscure name from a nineteenth-century French poet’s odes to a fictional lover of Sappho. The organization had gone national, and in 1966, the DOB’s publication, The Ladder, added a more assertive subtitle, A Lesbian Review, in tune with the restive times. But while Roxanne steered Elizabeth toward certain Bay Area radical causes, arranging for her to interview the Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, Eldridge’s twenty-three-year-old wife, for a New York Review of Books article that never came to fruition, gay liberation was not one of them. To everyone they met, Roxanne was introduced as Elizabeth’s secretary.



Tuesday, June 6, 2017

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt eight)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

And she worried for herself. In late October Elizabeth learned that Randall Jarrell, the poet-critic and friend who’d been amond her first champions, had walked into oncoming traffic on a highway near campus at the University of North Carolina, where he taught in the Women’s College. Elizabeth considered Jarrell’s death and “accident of an unconscious-suicide kind, a sudden impulse when he was really quite out of his head.” As she gave in to her own impulses, life-affirming ones she believed, Elizabeth remained “determined,” she wrote to Lilli, “that I am one poet who’s going to stay sane till the bitter end.” She had written to Randall just six months before, complimenting him on his new book of poems, The Lost World, and telling him of her reviving love for Brazil’s inland towns where “some of the Lost World hasn’t quite been lost”—“I gather up every bit of evidence with joy, and wish I could put it into my poems, too.” She had, in “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto.”



Monday, June 5, 2017

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt seven)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

In the back pages of a small notebook dated December 1961 to May 1965, the years that saw the unraveling of Elizabeth and Lota’s marriage, Elizabeth kept a list of books she meant to buy (prices were sometimes noted) or had read. She entered stars alongside some of the titles: Selected Letters of Rilke, Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, Guy Domville, The Life of Mary Wortly Montague—and The Problem of Homosexuality. The last, published in 1958, may be the only informational book on homosexuality Elizabeth ever mentioned in writing, aside from a reference to having read Havelock Ellis as a teenager in a letter to Ruth Foster. (Fiction was different: she’d read Djuana Barnes’s “good old” Nightwood soon after its publication in 1938, and told May Swenson she regretted having lost the book in her move to Brazil; she would not have been startled by The Group’s conclusion if it were not for the possibility that readers might take Lota for the Baroness.) Although she’d lived primarily in Rio during the years 1961-1965, Elizabeth eventually labeled the notebook “Ouro Prêto,” and ideas she could have gleaned from The Problem of Homosexuality may have supported the choices she began to make in 1965 that led her away from Lota. Perhaps she sought out the book for help in justifying behavior that felt natural to her—as natural as her homosexuality—even as her actions were almost certain to hurt Lota if discovered.



Sunday, June 4, 2017

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt six)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

And Cal—he’d arrived in Rio with Lizzie, five-year-old Harriet, and a “Radcliffe girl” to tend the child, only to turn garrulous and caustically opinionated, gathering velocity for yet another “attack of pathological enthusiasm,” as he preferred to view his “violent manic seizures.” There had been five breakdowns in ten years, by Cal’s reckoning, and the pattern was predictable. Elizabeth, Cal, and Lota had spent a glorious afternoon together at Cabo Frio, perched on the “very dangerous” edge of a cliff above a crater formed by jagged rocks—“just like Inferno”—mesmerized by the sight of a pair of seabirds, possibly boobies, “diving right into the wild seething foam” as the surf spilled over into the crater at high tide: “It didn’t seem possible they could fly against that wind, or see anything in that raging sea or dive so far from so high quick enough to catch anything.” When wife, daughter, and babysitter left on an ocean liner bound for New York at the end of August, Cal traveled on alone to Buenos Aires, where his mania became full blown. After tearing off his clothes and mounting equestrian statues in a city square, proclaiming himself Argentina’s Caesar, he was put in restraints and then on a plane back to the United States, heavily sedated, accompanied by a doctor and nurse and the friend, Blair Clark, who’d flown down from New York to bring him safely home.



Saturday, June 3, 2017

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt five)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

The post at the Library of Congress, which she’d been hesistant to accept, brought worries Elizabeth didn’t mention in letters or perhaps even articulate to herself. Her term in office came at the midpoint of a postwar decade during which the federal government determined to rid itself of the “constant menace” posed by homosexual employees. Six thousand workers were fired between 1945 and 1956 in a crusade for “morality and decency” nearly as visible as the concurrent hunt for Communist Party members and sympathizers. From her office at the library, Elizabeth looked out on the capital’s buildings, “all those piles of granite and marble,” which failed to impress the granddaughter of John W. Bishop, contractor. The solidity of her surroundings masked the insteady foundation of her appointment, and that of any homosexual employed by the federal government at the time. During the spring of her Washington year, in a campaign that became known as the “purge of the perverts,” security officials in the State Department boasted of firing one homosexual per day, twice the rate of firings for political disloyalty. Most of those who lost their jobs were men, but government work was one of few options for professionally ambitious women, who could fall under suspicion simply for dressing unconventionally, sharing an apartment with another woman, or socializing in bars known as meeting places for lesbians. Perhaps the loneliness Elizabeth suffered so acutely in Washington, where she lived for most of the year in a women’s boarding house in Georgetown, was due to the need for more than usual secrecy about her private life, a concealment that amounted to suppression.



Friday, June 2, 2017

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt four)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

They crossed the Atlantic together on a luxury liner, with Louise’s car stowed in the hold. Elizabeth had persuaded Margaret Miller to join them for a midsummer excursion in the French countryside, brushing aside Margaret’s qualms about Louise’s driving. At least Margaret remembered telling Elizabeth she’d been afraid to ride with Louise at the wheel. Margaret’s fears were confirmed when Louise’s speeding car was forced off the road by a passing vehicle near the small town of Montargis. The car rolled; Elizabeth and Louise emerged unhurt, but Margaret’s right arm, which she’d been resting on an open window, was severed just below the elbow. A nearby field worker applied a tourniquet, saving Margaret’s life. The driver of the other car ferried Margaret and Louise into town; Elizabeth stayed at the roadside to answer questions from officials, alone with her fears for Margaret, reliving in her mind the “freakishly cruel” accident, the sight of the severed arm.



Thursday, June 1, 2017

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt three)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

Elizabeth lived two blocks from Christopher Street, where Bonnie’s Stone Wall Inn advertised itself to those in the know as a bar welcoming lesbians, as female “inverts” were increasingly called, by taking the title of the autobiographical confessions of the pseudonymous Mary Casal for its name. Elizabeth may never have visited the place. She may not have read The Stone Wall, published in 1930. But she had probably heard of the melodramatic tale, one of the first such narratives published in the United States, in which Mary’s “sex desire for woman” leads her to propose marriage to her beloved Juno. After enacting a private wedding ceremony, the two women live happily together in what appears to others to be “an ideal friendship,” supporting themselves in the city as an artist and a schoolteacher: “No one knew of the real union, of our bodies.” Despite years of harmony, Juno strays; recriminations and recombinations with other lovers follow. “When at its best, as was ours for so many years,” Mary writes, “I still believe the love between two women to be the highest type now known. At the same time, I believe that it may lead to the most intense suffering known to woman.”