Ethernet: 83

23 "Efforts of Affection" is included in The Collected Prose: 133. It was first published in Vanity Fair, May 1983.

house "gloomy". 24 Years later, when she taught at Harvard in the 1970s, she became good friends with Octavio Paz and they translated some of each other’s poetry. However, Bishop showed no interest in Mexican literature at this time. Instead, she loved the Mexican Indians’ primitive, folkloric culture. When Bishop moved to Brazil she fell in love with indigenous Brazilian culture such as the samba, macumba and the African- imported shamanism to an even greater degree. Bishop’s love of the Brazilian samba was so great that she included a translation of the 1965 Carnival sambas in the 1969 edition of The Complete Poems.

In a letter to Moore from Mexico dated May 14, 1942, Bishop described a day out to the beach at Progreso near Mérida. Everything Bishop saw was miniaturised; the train she and her friends travelled on was "a little wooden train", they then took "the tiniest trolley car I have ever seen", and the house they visited "was also very small". Everything enchanted Bishop: she marvelled at the produce in the market and at the practicality of hammocks to sleep in a small house. Bishop’s description of her journey around Progreso resembles a children’s miniature theme park of an idealised toy town:

Then we got on the tiniest trolley car I have ever seen, smaller than the Toonerville, and went round and round the town, so close to all the little buildings you could touch them. The trolley car had a small engine inside that kept boiling over, and the wind blew, and the waves ... splashed, and the band played in the park, and the church bells rang - it is really very nice (1 0 9 ).

Bishop’s diminution of her surroundings finds a parallel in her painting of Mérida, entitled "Mérida From The Roof" (1942 ).25 In Bishop's painting the houses and streets are dominated by a large date palm which is out of scale with everything else in the picture’s background. Dwarfing the roofs behind the date palm are masses of oil rigs which seem to have overtaken the town. The town’s cathedral has to compete to be noticed, since it is outnumbered by the prolific oil rigs.

Bishop continued to view Mexico in the diminutive some twenty years after her initial visit. By 1963, Bishop had been in Brazil for twelve years and considered that 24 Bishop found out about Siquieros’s house from the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda

(1 9 0 4 -1 9 7 3 ), whom she met while they were climbing a pyramid at Chichén Itzâ. Bishop was initially dismissive of Neruda’s poetry, but later acknowledged its influence on her work. In a letter to Moore (May 14, 1942) Bishop said: "I bought Pablo Neruda's poetry ... and I am reading it, with the dictionary, but I’m afraid it is not the kind I - nor you - like, very very loose, surrealist imagery, etc." In the interview with Brown in

1966, Bishop said: "... I lived in Mexico for a time twenty years ago and I knew Pablo Neruda there. I think I was influenced to some extent by him (as in my 'Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore'), but he is still a rather 'advanced' poet, compared with other South American poets." In Schwartz: 290.

25 The painting was used for the cover illustration of the paperback version of The Complete Poems 1927-1979.

Mexico no longer had any attraction for her, suggesting that she viewed the two countries as being essentially similar. She wrote to Robert Lowell asking advice about where to vacation, exclaiming: "I don't WANT to go back to Mexico! Unless to Yucatân or the southern parts, way off the beaten path. I imagine even Oaxaca is spoiled now, and it was so beautiful. It's a much sadder country than Brazil, and all those Indians are so awful, poor things, except the little Mayas in Yucatân."26 Bishop imbued Mexico with a lyrical, prelapsarian and non-human quality as she compared the Mayan Indians to birds: "They're nice, gentler, cleaner, don't carry guns, big hooked noses, quiet and almost gay - like little parakeets. But I've had ten years of a backward, corrupt country ... and I yearn for civilization."27 in a later poem about the discovery of Brazil, "Brazil, January 1,

^ 502", Bishop compares the Brazilian Indian women to birds: "those maddening little women who kept calling, / calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)".

In her letter, Brazil and Mexico were interchangeable concepts for Bishop, and neither signified "civilisation". As an American, she lumped together the "south". Despite Bishop's love of Mexican indigenous culture, she pitied the Indians whom she now viewed, in 1963, as down-trodden victims in an uncivilised country. When Bishop finally did return to Mexico, in 1975, she was shocked by the changes she found, and complained that only Tepotzotiân was as she remembered (Mexico City's population had increased from one million to eleven million in the intervening years). Bishop did concede to some improvements: the Aztec pyramids of Teotihuacân, north of Mexico City, were much better excavated and restored than the last time she had visited them, but nothing else was as she remembered. Bishop expected Mexico to be as she remembered, despite the thirty- two year interval.28

Bishop's changing attitude to Mexico over the years gives some indication of what she expected from a placé. Rationally Bishop knew no place remained immune to change, but emotionally she wanted Mexico to be as she first saw it. Since it was not, she decided that any change was for the worse. 29 Bishop's most damning comment was not that Mexico was uncivilised, but that its Indians reminded her of birds. Whilst this is a lyrical and poetic metaphor, it can also be read as reducing the Indians to part of nature's backdrop, further suggesting that Mexico existed outside the twentieth century. Bishop's private comments on Mexico are significant because in their raw, unedited letter forrh we glimpse Bishop as a tourist with her own prejudices unguided by any mediating force. In 26 Letter dated August 2 6 ,1 9 6 3 , in One A rt 4 1 8 .

27 Ibid.