New Bishop Biography Falls Short, Writes NYT

Although the poet Elizabeth Bishop valued concise messaging, Megan Marshall's concise new Bishop biography is unfortunately "dispiriting," according to Dwight Garner at New York Times. Here, the fatal flaw according to the reviewer may be Marshall's decision to thread her own biographical details (they crossed paths at Harvard) within the "fastidious and commanding" poet's life story. Garner:

The last major biography of her, Brett Millier’s “Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It,” appeared in 1992. A flood of new material has been tapped since then, including letters from Bishop to her psychiatrist and several of her female lovers.

Yet Marshall’s biography is dull and dispiriting. The author, who studied briefly with Bishop at Harvard in the mid- to late-1970s, has made the awkward decision to interlard the text at regular intervals with detailed stories from her own life: her youth, her depression, her attempts to study music (“losing music had been part of my sadness”) and poetry.

There’s precedent for this sort of authorial insertion. There’s a good deal of James Boswell in “The Life of Samuel Johnson” (1791). Less successfully, Edmund Morris inserted a semi-fictional character named “Edmund Morris” into “Dutch” (1999), his biography of Ronald Reagan. Graham Greene’s indefatigable biographer, Norman Sherry, included a valiant photograph of himself in search of facts on a donkey in the final volume of his three-part bio.

Continue at New York Times. For a different take on the bio, check out this post from yesterday.