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(maybe) felt fraudulent. He knew the value of Bishop’s letters—when he sold his papers to Harvard, he made sure she was paid a decent sum for hers, but that’s not what I mean—even as he apologized (“your letters always fill me with shame for the meager illegible chaff that I send you back”) for the thinness of his own. “You & Peter Taylor both make me feel something of a fake—so I love you both dearly,” he remarks in 1949. It sounds flip, but of course it was deadly earnest. Lowell understood that there was an agility and a naturalness in Bishop that he would never have; he and most of the rest of his generation were manufactured. To my possibly anachronistic modern ear, he sentimentalizes and patronizes her all the time. His letters keep her in place, and almost invariably the wrong place; telling an audience that with her he “felt like a mastodon competing with tanks” is typically inept, but maybe no more than telling her, “Honor bright, I’m not a rowdy.” For decades he championed her prose, the story “In the Village” in particular ad nauseam—an obviously ambiguous accolade to any poet—and praises her poems—it’s a heretical thought, but it did cross my mind—without much sign of having read them. One succeeds the other in his “billfold,” but maybe they didn’t do him much good there: “It’s like going on the pilgrimage of your Fish, or the poem ending awful and wonderful, yet the journey is as utterly new and surprising as a first discovery of what life is all about. And so it is. If I can’t stop what I’ve already done, I must stop. Maybe, if I carry your ‘[Under the] Window’ around long enough, I’ll learn. It’s a kind of patience and freshness.” The enthusiasm is vitiated by the confusion around the “what” and by the stale terms at the end. I’ve developed a thoroughgoing aversion to the (now routine) cult of Bishop as a perfectionist slow coach (Lowell was an early high priest): she was a fast and sure and instinctive writer, but when a vein or a jag broke off, it was much harder to patch or extend than with less sensitive matter. Beyond that, it’s mystifying how anyone could misremember “awful but cheerful.” But then, in a letter near the end, he manages to misremember the whole of her: “I see us still when we first met, both at Randall’s and then for a couple of years later. I see you as rather tall, long brown-haired, shy but full of des[cription] and anecdote as now. I was brown haired and thirty I guess and I don’t know what.” This elicits a characteristically accurate harrumph of friendly fire from her:
    However, Cal dear, maybe your memory is failing!— Never, never was I “tall”—as you wrote remembering me. I was always 5 ft 4 and ¼ inches—now shrunk to 5 ft 4 inches— The only time I’ve ever felt tall was in Brazil. And I never had “long brown hair” either!— It started turning gray when I was 23 or 24—and probably was already somewhat grizzled when I first met you. I tried putting it up for a very brief period, because I like long hair—but it never got even to my shoulders and is always so intractable that I gave that up within a month or so. I think you must be seeing someone else!*
    The asterisk is to her footnote: “so please don’t put me in a beautiful poem tall with long brown hair!” which of course, as she very well knew, is just what he would have done.
    He knew she had everything he didn’t; she—in terms of his persistence, his confidence, his diligence—will have known the same. A kind of justice and a kind of vicariousness prompted each of them in hopes for the other, though in the end I don’t believe that either helped the other’s writing very much. (The title, “words in air”—the words