“Ladies and Gents, Ladies and Gents” – Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop and Female Autobiographies in American Postwar Literature

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Notes

¹ The version in the memoir edits the two middle lines to say “I sit and hear beyond the wall/The sad continual waterfall” (How I Grew 227), which is likely identical to the version in the Voices & Visions video, although subtitles offer this version of the fourth line: “A sad continual waterfall.”

² In 1983, Lloyd Schwartz edited the first major collection of critical statements on Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop and her Art; in 1988 and 1989, two groundbreaking and influential studies of Bishop’s work followed, Thomas Travisano’s Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, and David Kalstone’s posthumous Becoming a Poet. In fact, two of the citations of the lavatory poem were themselves part of this process of critical evaluation of Bishop’s place in American literature, from the Voices and Visions series of portraits to Gary Fountain’s oral biography.

³ Incidentally, Arendt thought the idea to commission Mailer was a “brilliant idea” (Kiernan 522).

⁴ Hereafter referred to as PPL.

⁵ Hereafter referred to as NS.

⁶ Some aspect of the events of that night, when Edmund Wilson had his “bruised and battered” (Kiernan 155) wife committed to Payne Whitney are disputed, as Frances Kiernan shows in her account, which is evenhanded to a fault. Some basic facts are not: Wilson had McCarthy committed, he had given her (at least a) black eye, and he used the opportunity to try and convince her to get an abortion for “practical” reasons (156).

⁷ Habitus is sometimes viewed as determinative. Bourdieu takes special care to make us understand that it is not: it is “une manière d’ être, un état habituel (en particulier du corps) et, en particulier, une prédisposition, une tendance, une propension ou une inclination.” (393n39).

⁸ Lakey, like Bishop, leaves Vassar for Europe, and returns to America with a lesbian partner, an obvious-seeming analog to Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop’s Brasilian partner. But no characters in The Group are clear carbon copies. The physical description of Lakey, for example, does not ressemble Bishop. Quite the opposite, “[t]he description of Lakey is Mary as she saw herself” (Kiernan 530).