Island Industries

Now I have a little flat, a little car, somebody else’s little boy, and have joined the great lower-middle-class American public in spending a lot of my time looking for a place to park.

– Elizabeth Bishop, in a letter to Louise Crane, October 10, 1968

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It’s April and people like to ask about poems. What should they read? What collections have they overlooked? What are your favorites? What poem, they ask, do you love more than any other in the world?

I hadn’t thought of it this way, in terms of love, but I realized that I do love Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England” more than any other poem. And how appropriate it feels to love it, since the novel I love most is Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Bishop’s Crusoe and David Markson’s Kate are both castaways of a sort – the former on his island and the latter on her deserted beach. Both are industrious and creative in their environments; both respond imaginatively to the mundane. Crusoe compares the clusters of “bright violet-blue” snail shells that gather beneath the island’s “one variety of tree” to iris beds. Later, a flock of gulls taking flight conjures the leaves of a tree in a strong breeze – “an oak, say, with real shade.” Kate, squatting in a crumbling beach house after years of traveling around an abandoned world (she says) looking for another person, hears a loose strip of tape tapping at a window in one of the upstairs rooms and thinks of a cat scratching to get back inside. “Here cat,” she sometimes calls, as though there really were another living creature there to join her, just out of sight.

Kate cycles through stories, paintings, symphonies – whatever comes to mind as she types, ostensibly, the text we’ve found. Crusoe carries his own baggage and digs through it for whatever he can, but often comes up short:

Because I didn’t know enough.

Why didn’t I know enough of something?

Greek drama or astronomy? The books

I’d read were full of blanks;

the poems – well, I tried

reciting to my iris-beds,

“They flash upon that inward eye,

which is the bliss…” The bliss of what?

One of the first things that I did

when I got back was look it up.

The “bliss” is solitude – from Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”¹ But “solitude” seems a venomous word for Crusoe’s isolation. He isn’t, as Hannah Arendt once put it, the partner of his thoughts; he is lonely, not alone. Crusoe comes to imagine this loneliness as a kind of punishment – for what, he doesn’t say. “I’d have / nightmares of other islands,” he says, “stretching away from mine, infinities / of islands, islands spawning islands, / like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs / of islands, knowing that I had to live / on each and every one, eventually, / for ages.” Like Kate, Crusoe has no self if there’s no one to share it with – only a lifetime of stories, themselves of no use with no one to tell them to.

Even when someone does arrive – “Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it / another minute longer, Friday came”– Crusoe’s tone is still one of distance. While he clearly loves Friday – “If only he had been a woman! / I wanted to propagate my kind, / and so did he, I think, poor boy” – this is love from behind glass, more admiration or infatuation than it is a bond. After all, Crusoe loves with his eyes: “Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.” And despite being the great event of the poem – and perhaps of Crusoe’s life – Friday doesn’t appear until line 142. By line 153, the two are whisked back to England, where Friday doesn’t get another mention until the final two lines:

The local museum’s asked me to

leave everything to them:

the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,

my shedding goatskin trousers

(moths have got in the fur),

the parasol that took me such a time

remembering the way the ribs should go.

It still will work but, folded up,

looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.

How can anyone want such things?

– And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles

seventeen years ago come March.

A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine was reading Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, and he told me how much of Geryon and his mother he now saw in Colin and Diane, the mother and son in my first novel, Some Hell. Until then, I hadn’t seen it at all, but it made perfect sense – a book I love deeply making its way into my own, like a virus fastening itself to the writer’s genome. And it wasn’t until I began writing this (and listening to Bishop herself read “Crusoe” over and over), that I realized how my own notion of happiness not meriting much time on the page – which is something that made its way, consciously, into my new novel, The Future Was Color – is an unconscious notion that comes from this poem. I had a sense, in short, of something that felt true to human life, or at least human memory – and now I know why.

“There is very little to say of joy,” my protagonist, George, tells the novel’s narrator. “It may be that’s what’s so special about it, that it’s nondescript, even banal.” What is this but the brevity, in Crusoe’s telling, of the most beautiful time in his life? Because once Friday shows up, he’s already gone: “And then one day they came and took us off,” he says – the only single-line stanza in the entire poem.

In 1951, Bishop received a fellowship from Bryn Mawr College. She decided she would use it to travel around South America, and sailed from New York to São Paulo. In early January, 1952, she arrived in Petrópolis, where her host, Lota de Macedo Soares, took care of her after she’d had a “a fantastic allergic reaction to something or other” in Rio de Janeiro: “The doctor thought it was to the fruit of a cashew.” By February 9 – her 41st birthday – Bishop had yet to continue her tour of the continent. “Friends of Lota’s came bringing a cake,” she wrote in a letter to Ilse and Kit Barker. Her illness, she told them, “wasn’t too bad because Brazilians seem to adore illness, and all took such an interest, brought their own medicines, crowded into the room saying ‘The poor one’ and calling on the Virgin, etc., every time I had an injection. That was before we moved up the mountainside.”

Bishop remained with Soares, a self-taught architect and landscape designer born into an influential political family, until 1967. It was that September that Soares, distraught and depressed after months of fighting with Bishop, took an overdose, spent a week in a coma, and died. “I had the 12 or 13 happiest years of my life with her, before she got sick,” Bishop wrote, “and I suppose that is a great deal in this unmerciful world.” Bishop returned to the United States, where she established herself in an apartment, hired an assistant, taught poetry, and wrote the poems that would become Geography III – including “Crusoe in England.” Her letters in these years are full of questions. Like anyone who’s lost someone they love to suicide, she wonders if there was something she should have done – or worse, something she did. This was in no way helped by Soares’ family, who accused Bishop of driving their daughter to suicide.

“And then one day they came and took us off.” It’s hard not to read Bishop’s own comment – those “12 or 13 happiest years” – into this line, its here-and-goneness. That flash was life, and the rest was waiting around for life to show up or come back. Similarly, Friday’s death of measles – ultimately a consequence of his relationship with Crusoe – echoes Bishop’s feelings surrounding her lover’s death: that Lota died of Elizabeth. I didn’t know this when I first read the poem, but I know it now, and it stains it – not a bad thing, but a stain nonetheless. Everything gets stained if you keep it around long enough.

On her own deserted beach, Kate is living with a parallel guilt. Early in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, she mentions having visited “the grave of a child I had lost.” This child, referred to as “Lucien” by the end of the book (Kate never quite commits to telling us his name), comes up now and then in her cycle of anecdotes, but no more than Brahms does, or William Gaddis; and certainly not more than Helen of Troy. Toward the end of the novel, Kate – listening to that strip of tape paw at the window – thinks of a cat she’d given Lucien long ago, but whom they’d never named: “Which is a curious thing to have done. Or rather not to have done.” But there are as many things, she concedes, “one would prefer never to remember as there are those one would wish to, of course,” including how drunk her husband, Adam, “had gotten on that weekend, for instance, and so did not even think to call for a doctor until far too late. Well, or why one was not there at the house one’s self, those same few days.”

But it would be dangerous to assign blame “that Lucien died after all. Although probably I did leave out this part before, about having taken lovers when I was still Adam’s wife.” One’s self, it turns out, isn’t quite as estrangeable as the neutral one Kate would have us (or herself) believe.

If it’s this mix of their narrators’ shame and grief – their lament over what they’ve done and who they’ve become, and their sense that their one chance at happiness has come and gone – that draws me to “Crusoe” and Wittgenstein’s Mistress, it’s not quite what holds me. It’s not why I love this poem and this novel, why I reread them over and over. It’s not why they’ve gotten so deep into my bones.

One of art’s burdens is that no one wants it, and on Crusoe’s island and in Kate’s empty world, each craves to make what no one else will see. What’s worse, each has the added burden of being themselves unwanted or unnecessary; each has become superfluous. Crusoe, “so tired of the very colors,” decides to use the island’s one kind of berry to dye a baby goat bright red, “just to see / something a little different. And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him.” Kate, in the novel’s most memorable scene, leaves messages scrawled in sand – “Somebody is living on this beach” – that the tide soon washes away. There’s no one to share Crusoe’s baby goat, no one left to read Kate’s messages – nor even, as far as she knows, to read the manuscript she’s been typing, all this time. But both make little alterations in their empty, unwelcoming worlds; both show their resilience, after everything they’ve lost.

It’s this resilience that I love. Not because it inspires me. Not because I’m going to pull myself up by my bootstraps, or that I’m going to put my butt in the chair every morning or whatever bullshit everyone’s always trying to sell us. In Crusoe and in Kate I recognize the loneliness of wanting to make a change to a world that doesn’t want you, that didn’t ask for you, and that certainly doesn’t want anything to do with what you go around calling your “art.” Each answers the question, “Why make anything at all, if this is what’s left of the world?” with the simplest answer there is: Not because it’s what I do, but because it’s what I am.

I haven’t done it (long story), but Somebody is living on this beach is the only line from any work I’ve considered tattooing on my body. Even if everything she’s told us is a lie, or a version of what she feels to be true, the simple act of Kate writing this phrase in the sand doesn’t justify her life or her loneliness; it is her life. It is her loneliness. It’s a phrase echoed in Markson’s last book, The Last Novel – its last line, in fact: “Als ick kan,” which the novel’s narrator has already told us is how Jan van Eyck signed one of his portraits: The best I can do. Once you say it, it’s obvious there’s no other way to work – and certainly, as Markson’s Novelist comes to understand, no other way to die.

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Thank you for reading! It feels impossible to believe, but my new novel, The Future Was Color, comes out in six weeks. This is when preorders matter the most, so if you’re able to have your local indie store set one aside for you, it would do wonders for the book’s chances out in the world, once June 4 rolls around. Preorders drive buzz; they help boost first-week sales; and they help retailers (including BN and, yes, the A-word) gauge interest. It’s received positive early reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, and has its share of great blurbs from wonderful writers.

Lastly, I also gave a pretty good talk about social media and fascism for

SecularAZ

last month, which you can view here. I hope to write again with more news soon <3

1. Strangely, this detail in Bishop’s poem bears yet another relation to Markson’s novel. Reading Wittgenstein’s Mistress, one learns quite early that Kate is untrustworthy – or perhaps “mad” as she so often claims. Names change, details change, timelines change. She tells us stories as though she hasn’t told them before, but the people in them – or the places – are altered. It’s easy enough to miss, but in “Crusoe,” his vague familiarity with a Wordsworth quote introduces a similar instability found nowhere else in the poem. In Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe leaves Kingston upon Hull in 1651, 119 years before William Wordsworth is born.