"In a Room": Elizabeth Bishop in Europe, 1935–1937
We do not always remember that Elizabeth Bishop came of age as a writer during the rise of fascism, and that she composed a number of the poems for her first collection, North & South (1946), in Europe, as the Continent consciously prepared for world war. One reason we do not often connect her early work to such dramatic historical context is the late date of her first book: her poems had been appearing in major magazines for a decade when North & South was published. While a few scholars, notably James Longenbach and Betsy Erkkila, have begun to consider Bishop's early poetry within the political context of the 1930s, and to "locat[e] Bishop's work within the debates about the relation between literary modernism and the American and international Left[,]" the tendency of many critics has been to focus on what seem to be the purely aesthetic, apparently surrealist elements in Bishop's writing from the '30s and '40s, and to characterize her later work in Brazil, from the '50s and '60s, as a political awakening (Erkkila 285).1 At the same time, insightful biographical and psychoanalytic studies of her work sometimes downplay or overlook the impact of the larger, dramatic historical context in which she was writing her early poems.2 Here I want to consider more deeply the influence, on Bishop's early work, of the year and a half she spent in Europe shortly after college from July of 1935 to June of 1936, and from June to December of 1937 and to attend to the startling ways that three of her strange, early poems register contemporary anxieties about the development of fascism and militarism in Germany and Italy, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. Bishop's work has always resisted easy categorization, and it has been subject frequently to ahistorical readings. Bishop can be aptly discussed as a postmodernist poet, yet her early work can be considered late modernist; the aesthetic-political dilemmas of late modernism in the '30s were
New York
Revised data for assets and liabilities and number of all banks in New York, as of June 30 or the nearest available date, in the period 1896-1955 are shown in Table 1; for all commercial banks, in Table la; for national banks, in Table 2; for State commercial banks, in Table 3; and for mutual savings banks, in Table 4. Because of the incomplete coverage in reported data for unincorporated banks in the State, a separate balance sheet was compiled for these banks (Table 3a); Table 3 includes data for these and other State commercial banks. A general description of the compilation of all-bank figures for the United States as a whole is given in Part I of this volume, the United States Summary. This summary includes the definition of "bank" as used in this study and a description of the balance-sheet items, the classification of banks, and the principal methods used in compiling the figures. The figures for national banks in New York were obtained from abstracts and annual reports of the Comptroller of the Currency with relatively minor adjustments; a description of these figures is included in the United States Summary. Compilation of figures for other classes of banks presented a number of problems and considerations not encountered in compiling the balance sheet for national banks. The following sections describe these problems and the methods used in deriving the revised series. In the description the banks are classified in three groups: (1) State com-
An Actor Prepares
Stanislavski's simple exercises fire the imagination, and help readers not only discover their own conception of reality but how to reproduce it as well.