Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again

by Sarah Ruhl Narrated by Julian Sands, JoBeth Williams

Overview

The complicated relationship between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is revealed in nearly thirty years' worth of correspondence. Taken from their exchange of letters, Dear Elizabeth is a study in friendship, intimacy, and the power of words.

An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast production starring JoBeth Williams and Julian Sands, with narration by Chris Hatfield.

Directed by Rosalind Ayres and recorded before an audience by L.A. Theatre Works.

Editorial Reviews

JANUARY 2016 - AudioFile

The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in her poem “One Art,” most likely thinking, in part, of her lifelong friend, poet Robert Lowell. Both poets won numerous awards for their works, and both went on to define American verse in the 1950s and ‘60s. In this deft and intimate examination of their thirty-year relationship, film stalwarts JoBeth Williams (THE BIG CHILL) and Julian Sands (THE KILLING FIELDS) deliver Bishop’s and Lowell’s own words through the many letters they wrote back and forth. This production, recorded before a live audience, allows Williams and Sands to lift the words from the written correspondence and turn them into a true conversation between equals about life, longing, and loss. B.P. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

Ruhl's gentle treatment of the poems, the way she finds the breathing space between life and art, can't be overpraised. She crystallizes the magic of what is left unsaid and the piercing intimacy of regret in one beguiling passage after another.” —Karen D'Souza, San Jose Mercury News

“Ruhl delicately explores, through nothing more than the letters and her own theatrical imagination, the solitude of the artist, the exactitude of the writer's craft, the balance between confession and privacy and, in the end, why poetry matters.” —Frank Rizzo, Variety

“Dear Elizabeth mesmerizes in every way. An articulate, imaginative, and moving theatrical experience. . . . uniquely its own engaging creation. In an age of mutilated language and truncated texts, such a play commands every ounce of our attention.” —E. Kyle Minor, New Haven Register

“Watching poets, even eminent poets, read and write to each other shouldn't be half as gripping as playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Les Waters make it in Dear Elizabeth.” —Robert Hurwitt, SFGate

“Playwright Sarah Ruhl and her director and frequent collaborator Les Waters have re-set the rules and raised the bar for epistolary theatre in their bracing, moving and theatrically exciting production.” —Andrew Beck, Hartford Examiner

“Riveting. A moving, funny, and highly theatrical experience.” —Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post

JANUARY 2016 - AudioFile

The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in her poem “One Art,” most likely thinking, in part, of her lifelong friend, poet Robert Lowell. Both poets won numerous awards for their works, and both went on to define American verse in the 1950s and ‘60s. In this deft and intimate examination of their thirty-year relationship, film stalwarts JoBeth Williams (THE BIG CHILL) and Julian Sands (THE KILLING FIELDS) deliver Bishop’s and Lowell’s own words through the many letters they wrote back and forth. This production, recorded before a live audience, allows Williams and Sands to lift the words from the written correspondence and turn them into a true conversation between equals about life, longing, and loss. B.P. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169847611
Publisher:	L.A. Theatre Works
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Dear Elizabeth

A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again

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By Sarah Ruhl

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2014 Sarah Ruhl
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86547-815-2

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CHAPTER 1

ACT ONE

Part One: Water

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell enter and sit at a table.

A SUBTITLE FLASHES: May 12, 1947.

BISHOP

Dear Mr. Lowell,

I just wanted to say that I think it is wonderful you have received all the awards; the Guggenheim, the Pulitzer, and — I guess I'll just call them 1, 2, & 3 ...

Maybe if you're still in town you would come to see me sometime, I should like to see you very much, or just write me a note if you'd rather ...

Elizabeth Bishop

LOWELL

Dear Miss Bishop,

Sorry to have missed dining with you yesterday, and reading with you. You are a marvelous writer, and your note was about the only one that meant anything to me.

Last night at three we had a fire. The man who started it fell asleep drunk and smoking. He ran back and forth from his room to the bathroom carrying a waste-basket with a thimble-full of water shouting at the top of his lungs, "Shush, shush, no fire. Stop shouting you'll wake everyone up. An accident. Nobody injured," until a policeman shouted: "Nobody injured? Look at all the people you've gotten up." Today my room smells like burnt tar-paper.

I'm going to Boston on the 2nd and then to Yaddo. I hope that I will see more of you some day.

Robert Lowell

BISHOP

Dear Robert,

(I've never been able to catch that name they call you but Mr. Lowell doesn't sound right, either.) I had meant to write to you quite a while ago, to answer the note you sent me in New York, and I certainly meant to do it before your review of my book appeared, but it's too late now.

It is the first review I've had that attempted to find any general drift or consistency in the individual poems and I was beginning to feel there probably wasn't any at all ... I suppose for pride's sake I should take some sort of stand about the adverse criticisms, but I agreed with some of them only too well — you spoke out my worst fears as well as some of my ambitions ...

Elizabeth Bishop turns away from the audience for a moment.
Robert Lowell looks up, looking for her.
The vague sound of wind and an indeterminate cow sound.
Robert Lowell looks confused.
Elizabeth Bishop turns back toward the audience.

Heavens — it is an hour later — I was called out to see a calf being born in the pasture beside the house. In five minutes after several falls on its nose it was standing up shaking its head and trying to nurse. They took it away from its mother almost immediately. It seems that if they take the calf away immediately then they don't have the trouble of weaning it — it will drink out of a dish.

The calf's mother has started to moo, and the cow in the next pasture is mooing even louder, possibly in sympathy.

I hope you're liking Yaddo — I almost went there once but changed my mind.

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Bishop

LOWELL

Dear Elizabeth:

(You must be called that; I'm called Cal, but I won't explain why. None of the prototypes are flattering: Calvin, Caligula, Caliban, Calvin Coolidge ...)

I'm glad you wrote me, because it gives me an excuse to tell you how much I liked your New Yorker fish poem. Perhaps, it's your best. Anyway, I felt very envious reading it.

I question a little the word breast in the last four or five lines — a little too much in its context perhaps; but I'm probably wrong.

She thinks he is wrong.

P.S. I'd like to have you record your poems when you come here. I hope you'll really come here this fall and we can go to the galleries and see the otters.

Yours,

Cal

BISHOP

Dear Cal,

I think I'd rather see the otters than make recordings, but I am quite sure I'll be there for a day or two, and I'd like to see you, recordings or no.

P.S. I'll have a canary with me ...

INTERLUDE

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop see each other in person.
She carries a canary. She puts the canary down.
She shakes Robert Lowell's hand. She is nervous.
It is strangely intimate reading a poem aloud for one other person.
He puts on headphones and records her saying this poem into a
microphone:

BISHOP

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all ...

I stared and stared
And victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels — until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

She looks at him.

And I let the fish go.

A moment.
They part.

LOWELL

Dear Elizabeth,

I've at last heard the records and some of them couldn't be better — "Fish" and "Fish-Houses" are wonderful.

Since your visit several weird people have shown up here. Major Dyer, who takes Ezra Pound ice-cream, was a colleague of Patton's and teaches Margaret Truman fencing. And Mrs. Lowell Conger, a mystic and a relative who — but the language fails me, and anyway she's gone back to California.

Affectionately,

Cal

Elizabeth Bishop puts on a sun hat and sunglasses.

BISHOP

Dear Cal,

It has been very pleasant at Hemingway's house but I really couldn't get to work at all of course and am just beginning. The swimming pool is wonderful — it lights up at night — I find that each underwater bulb is five times the voltage of the one bulb in the light house across the street, so the pool must be visible to Mars — it is wonderful to swim around in a sort of green fire, one's friends look like luminous frogs.

I received a very obscene letter in verse from Dylan Thomas — A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as "A Truck Called Fuck."

I still think it would be nice if you could visit here sometime, maybe Christmas — if turtle soup can attract you ...

Affectionately yours,

Elizabeth

LOWELL

Dear Elizabeth,

I tried swimming — was nearly drowned and murdered by children with foot-flippers and helmets and a ferocious mother doing the crawl. Then came down with a cold.

Had a fine week-end with William Carlos Williams. He took me to see his old Spanish mother — 91, and was like a Dickens character patting her hands and making her laugh saying, "Mama, would you rather look at us or 20 beautiful blonds?"

I heard Anaïs Nin read — pretty thin stuff, though not unattractive personally.

Key West tempts me.

BISHOP

Happy New Year!

I'm sorry not to have written before. I've been sick most of the last month — asthma — it doesn't completely incapacitate one but is a nuisance. I am feeling much better, maybe the drugs, maybe two new hats, or maybe just getting away from my friends who are so full of solicitude.

LOWELL

So sorry to hear about your asthma — how I thank God that my imaginary asthma was cured by a chiropractor.

Here's my poem, in time I hope to cheer you.

She reads his poem.

BISHOP

I've read your poem. I like it more than I can say. In fact I can shed tears over it very easily & I hardly ever do that except over trash, frequently, & over something at the other extreme, very rarely. I think one weeps over two kinds of embarrassment — & this is so embarrassing in the right way one wants to read it without really looking at it directly. That damned celluloid bird ...

I made the mistake of reading it when I was working on a poem & it took me an hour or so to get back into my own metre. There are only about 3 words I'd take objection to, at my most carping —

I'm going back to New York in April & hope to stop off in Washington to see a couple of friends — including you — will you be there then?

LOWELL

I'm delighted you liked my poem. I was afraid you'd find it violent and dry.

I won't mail you any more poems, if they take you from writing your own.

How would August be for a visit? Do you think you might have room for my friend Carley? Her little boy is here now, an angelic child, I think, and I'm not soft on children.

BISHOP

I really feel you should struggle against your feeling about children, I suppose it's better than drooling over them like Swinburne. But I've always loved the stories about Shelley going around Oxford peering into baby-carriages, and how he once said to a woman carrying a baby, "Madame, can your baby tell us anything of pre-existence?"

LOWELL

My feeling about babies is mostly a joke.

At last my divorce is over. While I was in New York, I saw Jean — all very affectionate and natural, thank God.

It's funny at my age — all the rawness of learning, what I used to think should be done with by twenty-five. Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing. I suppose that's what vocation means — at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I'm thankful, and call it good.

BISHOP

Thank you for your letter which did me a great deal of good.

It's very hot today, and I guess I must hike down to that so-called beach and get into that icy water for a while. Having just digested all the New York Times and some pretty awful clam-chowder, I don't feel the slightest bit literary, just stupid. Or maybe it's just too much solitude.

Wiscasset is beautiful and dead as a door-nail. I think its heart beats twice a day when the train goes through.

I think almost the last straw here is the hairdresser — a nice big hearty Maine girl. She told me: 1, that my hair "don't feel like hair at all." 2, I was turning gray practically "under her eyes." And when I'd said, yes, I was an orphan, she said "Kind of awful, ain't it, ploughing through life alone." So now I can't walk downstairs in the morning or upstairs at night without feeling I'm ploughing. There's no place like New England.

LOWELL

I know the solitude that gets too much. It doesn't drug me, but I get fantastic and uncivilized.

Tell me how to get to your house. Are you sure one more visitor won't be too many? In Maine your friends pour in like lava — hot from their cities. I'll understand if you want a rest.

P.S. There's something haunting and nihilistic about your hair-dresser.

They see each other in Maine.
Suddenly the stage is full of water and a rock.
They stand waist high in cold water, holding hands, looking out.
A silence.
She turns to him.

BISHOP

"When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived."

She starts laughing at herself.
Suddenly it's not funny.
He stops laughing and touches her face.
A moment.

A SUBTITLE FLASHES:

He thinks the question: Will you marry me?
She thinks: What did you say?

The gulls, the sea, and a wave almost engulf them.
They come up for air.
The water dries rapidly.

CHAPTER 2

Part Two: Come to Yaddo

Bishop and Lowell back in their separate spaces, no hint of the sea.

A SUBTITLE FLASHES: August 16, 1947.

BISHOP

Dear Cal,

A commission for you. To find me a rich husband in Washington — one with lots of diamonds and absolutely no interest in the arts.

LOWELL

I'm having a form printed. Age, weight, income, interests, apathies, aversions, and a composite physical examination stamped by a notary.

If you come to Yaddo, you'd find waiting ... my first project for you: age: 41, weight: 155, hair: full black graying. He has lived for 20 years in a spic and span little white house with two aged servants tending lambs and reading Thoreau.

Outs: He has gone mad once or twice (very stable at present); means small but adequate. I think we'll use him as a decoy.

Here is my starting list: Ted Roethke (only makes $6000 which doesn't cover his drinking, but he has a genius for sponging) ... My cousins Carlisle and Pearson Winslow, and my Uncle Cot. Really the best of all: 3 houses, a yacht, an income, absolutely no interest in the arts. He's married at the moment to Aunt Sarah but he's already divorced an actress and knows all the ropes.

This is all I've been able to scare up for the first day, but things are in the saddle. You'll make your headquarters here. With each candidate you'll go on a moonlit paddle. We'll see which one you would least know was in the house before five and is most entertaining after five.

Ah me, back to life. I'll write you a serious letter later. You were an angel to put up with all my imbecility and bad behavior. I'm almost a new man thanks to you — or is one ever?

BISHOP

I think you've done an enormous amount of ground-work ... I must say I like the sound of the uncle best so far — in fact I'd settle for some form of dignified concubinage as long as it was guaranteed ...

Your room is now occupied by a very cheerful lady-water-colorist who transports a Yogurt-making machine around with her, and also the works of Mary Baker Eddy. I suppose I'm going to find out how she reconciles them, although I don't want to.

I do hope you had a good time in spite of all your troubles, because I did.

They look at each other.

I just hope I didn't get too teasing and opinionated which I guess I'm apt to do with any encouragement at all.

She looks away.

I am alternately thinking of Yaddo & studying my freighter-trip booklets. Can you tell me how one applies to Yaddo?

Affectionately yours,

E.

LOWELL

New thoughts from E's letter: Eliz. equals Betty, you might be called: Eliz, Liz, Lizzie, Betty, Bess, Bessy, Lizbeth or Lisbeth, Ba, Bee, Bet etc. But I guess I'll stick to Elizabeth, though Lizbeth is tempting.

I guess I've emphasized all the charms of Yaddo: large house, trees, space, economy and irresponsibility. Perhaps, you should combine your alternatives — try Yaddo, and if it becomes oppressive, fly away on a freighter.

I did enjoy Stonington.

Apologies for this flood of letters ... Somehow I feel myself again, as I haven't for months, except for bits of Stonington.

During the heat, I've been living on one solid meal, and a detestable thing in blunderbuss glasses, called "orange drink."

I'm feeling fine except:

Thirty-one

Nothing done

keeps going through my head; and I hate to think of packing.

P.S. Next year if our books were done and we had the cash, wouldn't you like to try Italy? The imagination roars with possibilities and inducements.

BISHOP

I sang that song you sing to myself when I was twenty-one, and thirty-one, and I suppose I'll sing it at forty-one. For the meantime I guess my refrain is:

thirty-seven
& far from heaven.

I think you said a while ago that I'd "laugh you to scorn" over some conversation you & I had about how to protect oneself against solitude — but indeed I wouldn't. That's just the kind of "suffering" I'm most at home with & helpless about, I'm afraid, and what with 2 days of fog and alarmingly low tides I've really got it bad & think I'll write you a note before I go out & eat some mackerel.

She looks at a plate of mackerel.
She pushes it aside.
Instead, she takes a sip of red wine.
She puts that aside.
She produces a bottle of whiskey.

If I have any money, & if nothing out of the ordinary happens personally, or nothing ordinary, like a war, happens impersonally — I'd like to go to Italy very much. Oh and I think I'll go to Bard for that week-end — will you?

LOWELL

My Bard letter had the phrase: We expect poets like Bishop and what's his name? Yeah, I'm going.

I now have — let me boast — 53 stanzas, over 800 lines and am working harder & more steadily than ever in my life. Now shut up about yourself, Cal!

Write some more poems — there are so few in the world now.

A SUBTITLE FLASHES: Bard

INTERLUDE

Bard.
They see each other.
They embrace.
Music.
They toast each other with whiskey.
They dance.
He is suddenly falling-down drunk.
She covers him with a sheet.
He grabs for her hand.
She holds it for a moment.
She takes her hand away.
He grabs it again.
He snores.
She replaces her hand with a wrapped present and flees.

BISHOP

I am so sorry ...

LOWELL

No! My apologies!

BISHOP

I'll explain it all when I see you — if I can, that is.

LOWELL

This is a before-breakfast letter — I'm sure this practice isn't habit-forming.

BISHOP

I want to hear all that took place after I vanished, and to make my apologies in person —

LOWELL

I've been fingering & weighing and wondering about my present — what happens if you open presents before Christmas?

But I wish you'd come instead.

Bishop sits down with a plate of food and pushes it aside.
She takes a sip of wine.
She pushes it away.
She produces a bottle of whiskey.

An emotional last meeting with Pound: "Cal, god go with you, if you like the company."

Why don't you come for a visit?

Do try to come and spend the night; there's a good morning train — then we can have a fine long evening!

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Dear Elizabeth by Sarah Ruhl. Copyright © 2014 Sarah Ruhl. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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