Colm Tóibín’s novels include The South, The Master and, most recently, Brooklyn.
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Vol. 16 No. 15 · 4 August 1994
pages 7-9 | 6187 words
The South
Colm Tóibín
Even in the morning in that year the two-hour hotels were in bloom. The city was full of desire. It was hot. I stayed for a while in a narrow street near the Flamingo Park and went out some days to swim at Copacabana. It was that time between the death of Elizabeth Bishop and the appearance of the first biography and this volume of letters, when the ordinary reader on this side of the Atlantic knew very little about her. I did not know that for 15 years she stayed in an apartment overlooking the beach. ‘It is such a wonderful apartment,’ she wrote to Robert Lowell in 1958,
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 17 · 8 September 1994
From Robert Giroux
Colm Tóibín, in his interesting review of One Art, the selection of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters I edited (LRB, 4 August), is mistaken in his statement that Brett Millier’s biography of the poet ‘names the woman’ (I call her X.Y.) ‘whom Bishop met, and had an affair with, in Seattle’ in 1966. It’s true that Millier refers to her throughout as Suzanne Bowen, but that is not her name. One learns this only if one reaches page 566, where inverted commas are used for the first (and unique) time: ‘“Suzanne Bowen” is a pseudonym.’ Understandably, Mr Tóibín and other reviewers missed this important revelation; even the book’s index lists it as if a real name. They would not have been misled if ‘Suzanne Bowen’ had been identified as a pseudonym whenever used. The person referred to is entitled to her privacy; I believe X.Y. protects it without falsifying it – even inadvertently.
Robert Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
