Love between the lines

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell,
edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton

Why does this book need to exist? It’s a legitimate question — the correspondence of both these poets has been published in generous selected editions — but an easy one to answer. Quite apart from the fact you’d need prehensile thumbs to follow their exchanges properly through those two fat volumes, the unexpurgated version gives you not only ease but texture: their ‘helter-skelter shop-talk’; gossip about Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell; Lowell ‘exhaustingly’ changing his typewriter ribbons; Bishop getting ‘some of a very old & liquefied jelly bean’ stuck to her letter.

This was one of the great epistolary friendships of the 20th or any other century, and a hopeless love story to boot: manic-depressive toff seeks orphaned lesbian alcoholic for poetry, self-torment and perhaps more. In one celebrated

letter, Lowell writes that asking Bishop to marry him was ‘the might have been for me’.