Elizabeth Bishop's Christian sin

In the August-September 1938 issue of the Partisan Review, alongside Trotsky’s “Art and Politics” and Victor Serge’s “Marxism in our Time”, Elizabeth Bishop gave a first airing to her poem “The Unbeliever”. Later collected in her first volume, North & South (1946), the twenty-six-line lyric became the favourite of Harold Bloom, who declared in 1983 that he loved it best of all her poems: “I walk around, certain days, chanting ‘The Unbeliever’ to myself, it being one of those rare poems you never evade again, once you know it (and it knows you)” (from Elizabeth Bishop and her Art, edited by Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess).

“The Unbeliever” carries a motto attributed simply to “Bunyan”: “He sleeps on the top of a mast”. This sentence also forms the first line of the first of the poem’s five stanzas, rather as if the strange expression in Bunyan had been the starting-point for the poem (just as the newspaper misprint for “mammoth” had been the given element in “The Man-Moth” – a work from the same volume):

He sleeps on the top of a mast
with his eyes fast closed.
The sails fall away below him
like the sheets of his bed,
leaving out in the air of the night the
sleeper’s head.

The natural place to look for Bishop’s source in Bunyan would be The Pilgrim’s Progress, and sure enough the notion of sleeping at the top of a mast occurs twice in its pages, although on neither occasion in precisely the form Bishop uses. In the First Part, Christian comes upon three men fast asleep, with fetters on their heels. They are Simple, Sloth and Presumption:

Christian then seeing them lie in this case went to them, if peradventure he might awake them. And cried, “You are like them that sleep on the top of a mast, for the Dead Sea is under you, a gulf that hath no bottom; awake therefore, and come away; be willing also, and I will help you off with your irons.” He also told them, “If he that goeth about like a roaring lion come by, you will certainly become prey to his teeth.” With that they looked upon him, and began to reply in this sort: Simple said, “I see no danger”; Sloth said, “Yet a little more sleep”; and Presumption said, “Every fat [vessel] must stand upon his own bottom, what is the answer else that I should give thee?” And so they lay down to sleep again, and Christian went on his way.

In the Second Part, the pilgrims come to an Arbour in the Enchanted Ground, where they find Heedless and Too Bold, also asleep. The guide tries to wake them, and they speak as if from a dream. Christian asks the meaning of this:

The guide said, “They talk in their sleep. If you strike them, beat them, or whatever else you do to them, they will answer you after this fashion; or as one of them said in old time, when the waves of the sea did beat upon him, and he slept as one upon the mast of a ship, When I awake I will seek it again . . . ”

It is the first of these two passages that has been taken as Bishop’s source in Bunyan. And it has been noted that the reference to sleeping on the mast of the ship has its origin in the Book of Proverbs, as does the italicized quotation from the Second Part, which reads in the original (as the Authorized Version has it): “When shall I awake? I shall seek it again”. The “it” that the sleeper on the mast intends to seek again is wine, and the passage that it belongs to is a warning against drink (Proverbs 23: 29–35). Here it is as given in the Geneva Bible (which Bunyan used, in addition to the Authorized Version):

31 Looke not thou upon the wine, when it is red, and when it sheweth his colour in the cuppe, or goeth down pleasantly. 32 In the ende thereof it will bite like a serpent, and hurt like a cockatrise. 33 Thine eyes shall looke upon strange women, and thine heart shall speake lewde things. 34 And thou shalt bee as one that sleepeth in the middes of the sea, and as he that sleepeth in the top of the mast. 35 They have stricken me, shalt thou say, but I was not sicke: they have beaten me, but I knew not, when I awoke: therefore will I seeke it yet still.

This vivid evocation of habitual drunkenness gives us a sense of the biblical meaning of “sleeping at the top of the mast”; it is one of two parallel impossibilities – the drunkard is like one who sleeps in the middle of the sea, or who sleeps above the sea. (The Geneva Bible explains the first part of verse 34 as implying “In such great danger shalt thou be”.) Sleeping at the top of the mast would be both precarious and giddy-making; nevertheless the drunkard prefers sleep to waking, and so, if he does wake up, he will drink himself back into a stupor. As the Geneva note puts it, “Though drunkenness make them more insensible then beasts yet they can not refraine”.

Clearly the passage impressed Bunyan, since he not only alludes to it twice in The Pilgrim’s Progress, but also quotes it extensively in the book which seems more likely to have been Bishop’s source, The Life and Death of Mr Badman. The worst thing about drunkenness, says Mr Attentive, is that “it prepares men for everlasting burnings”. With this Mr Wiseman concurs: “Yea, and it so stupefies and besotts the soul, that a man that is far gone in Drunkenness, is hardly ever recovered to God. Tell me, when did you see an old drunkard converted? No, no, such an one will sleep till he dies, though he sleeps on the top of a Mast, let his dangers be never so great, and Death and damnation never so near, he will not be awaked out of his sleep”. This not only has the words in the form (though not the punctuation) of Bishop’s motto; it also makes the connection between the sleep of drunkenness and unbelief. The drunkard puts himself beyond the opportunity for conversion by preferring sleep to waking, preferring the imminent danger of death and damnation at the top of the mast to repentance and salvation. There is no point in urging the drunkard to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved, because the drunkard is in a stupor, and that is where he wants to remain. “When shall I awake?” as Proverbs asks (in the New Revised Standard Version); “I shall seek another drink.”

The Life and Death of Mr Badman is by no means one of Bunyan’s best-known books. It tends to be mentioned less often than The Pilgrim’s Progress, Grace Abounding or even The Holy War. But there is no reason to be surprised that Bishop should have read it or dipped into it in the course of her study of seventeenth-century literature. Nor is it far-fetched to suppose that she might have been introduced to it by Marianne Moore, who was an admirer of Bunyan and who twice refers in reviews to the title of Mr Badman as if she expected the reader to know what she was talking about.

It has to be conceded that there is a particular biographical interest in locating the source of “The Unbeliever” in Mr Badman: it suggests that the poem has a concealed subject, to which the epigraph from Bunyan is the clue, and, since that concealed subject is drunkenness, and since Bishop is well known to have been an alcoholic, it hints – perhaps it rather grossly hints – that the poem is in some sense a self-portrait. (According to her biographer, Brett C. Miller, in Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the memory of it, alcoholism had begun to dominate her life by 1939, soon after the poem was published.) But we may not want poems like “The Unbeliever” or “The Man-Moth” to be turned into anything other than what they once seemed to be: not confessions or portrayals of the self but independent objects, beautifully made in the age of Surrealism, designed to convince us, but to resist exegesis.

Marianne Moore, in her review of North and South, writes in connection with this very poem that “With poetry as with homiletics, tentativeness can be more positive than positiveness . . .”. In that spirit at least, we can say that there are three texts (there may be other sources in Bunyan that I have overlooked) which seem closely connected: the passage in Proverbs, the exchange in Mr Badman, with its marginal reference back to Proverbs, and the Bishop poem. Much can be suggested about the connections involved.

Moore herself, bracketing “The Unbeliever” with “Roosters”, is not afraid to moralize:

Art which “cuts its facets from within” can mitigate suffering, can even be an instrument of happiness; as also forgiveness, symbolised in Miss Bishop’s meditation on St. Peter by the cock, seems essential to happiness. Reinhold Niebuhr recently drew attention in The Nation to the fact that the cure for international incompatibilities is not diplomacy but contrition. Nor is it permissible to select the wrongs for which to be contrite; we are contrite; we won’t be happy till we are sorry. Miss Bishop’s speculation, also, concerning faith – religious faith – is a carefully plumbed depth in this small-large book of beautifully formulated aesthetic-moral mathematics. The unbeliever is not ridiculed; but is not anything that is adamant, self-ironised?

Art can mitigate suffering and be an instrument of happiness, but in order to be happy we must first be sorry. We must ask for forgiveness. The unbeliever is not ridiculed by Bishop, but inevitably presents himself in an ironic light by being “adamant” in his wish to remain asleep at the top of the mast.

If Moore was the first notable critic of “The Unbeliever”, she was also, it would seem, among the last to take it seriously as a speculation concerning religious faith. In a letter to Bishop at the time, she says: “As for ‘you won’t be happy until you are sorry,’ it is my whole life. If I counted what I do and multiplied it, the inferno would be so congested, not a demon could find space to sit down”. The kindly tone and the tactfulness of this passage make one almost miss what Moore is suggesting Bishop should do: repent, say sorry, for her sins.

A quite different tone is set by Denis Donoghue, in an essay on Bishop in which he identifies her source as the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and notes Bunyan’s use of the expression from the Book of Proverbs. Donoghue points out that there are three speakers in Bunyan (Simple, Sloth and Presumption – but there are of course four if you don’t forget Christian) and three in “The Unbeliever” – the unbeliever himself, the cloud and the gull. He tries to link the two sets:

Bishop’s poem retains the three speakers, but distances their characters: they are the unbeliever, a cloud, and a gull. The cloud would correspond to Bunyan’s Simple if Bishop’s poem were at all religious or doctrinal, but it is entirely secular. What she ascribes to the cloud is modern subjectivity; this character is “secure in introspection.” The gull would correspond to Bunyan’s Presumption: a visionary, imperious in its certainty . . . the moral of the story is that the sea is omnivorous, indifferent to the nice distinctions between one aesthetic attitude and another.

(Connoisseurs of Chaos: Ideas of order in modern American poetry, 1964.)

The assurance that Bishop’s poem is “entirely secular” seems to have been taken over wholesale by Harold Bloom, in the short piece from which I quoted above. The five stanzas of “The Unbeliever”, says Bloom, are essentially variations on the Bunyan epigraph. “Bunyan’s trope concerns the condition of unbelief; Bishop’s does not.” Quite how he could be so sure he does not say, but he continues: “Think of the personae of Bishop’s poem as exemplifying three rhetorical stances, and so as being three kinds of poet, or even three poets: cloud, gull, unbeliever. The cloud is Wordsworth or Stevens. The gull is Shelley or Hart Crane. The unbeliever is Dickinson or Bishop”. No doubt generations of diligent students have been recycling this taxonomy of poets ever since. It seems meaningless to me, and typical of an academic tendency to reduce poems to statements about poetry, or rhetoric. Marianne Moore, with her Presbyterian sense of sin, and – who knows? – perhaps her superior knowledge of Bunyan, seems closer to the mark.

What sort of a Christian sin is drunkenness? The answer depends on which Church you belong to. As an admirer of the Anglican George Herbert, Bishop could have read The Country Parson, in which we find that

because luxury is a very visible sin, the parson is very careful to avoid all the kinds thereof, but especially that of drinking, because it is the most popular vice; into which if he come, he prostitutes himself both to shame and sin, and by having fellowship with the fruitful works of darkness he disableth himself of authority to reprove them; for sins make all equal whom they find together, and then they are worst who ought to be best. Neither is it for the servant of Christ to haunt inns, or taverns, or alehouses, to the dishonour of his person and office.

This is stern, but it has nothing of Bunyan’s fearsome implication that this particular sin cuts us off from the possibility of conversion, and therefore redemption. The sin of drinking is a branch of the sin of luxury, and if the parson drinks he loses the authority to reprove others. Herbert also translated a Treatise of Temperance and Sobriety by Luigi Cornaro, whose author recommends sobriety on purely medical grounds as a way to prolong life. In this, we find that a temperate diet consists of “twelve ounces exactly weighed” of food per day, and fourteen ounces of drink – by implication, wine. (George Herbert, The Complete English Works, edited by Ann Pasternak Slater, 1995.) Temperance in those days did not mean teetotalism.

In Bunyan, as we have seen, there recurs the figure of the sleeper who is unaware of the immediate danger to his soul. He must wake, he must repent, he must be converted – that is, undergo a religious experience and become a believer – and then he must be baptized, as a prelude to full membership of the Church. This is the Baptist model of salvation. Presbyterians insisted that “Not only those that do actually profess faith and obedience unto Christ, but also the infants of one or both believing parents, are to be baptized . . .”. Baptism alone was not enough to ensure redemption, since “Grace and salvation are not so inseparably annexed to it, as that . . . all that are baptized are undoubtedly regenerated . . .”. But for Presbyterians, as for Anglicans, baptism could be administered to those too young to profess faith.

For the stricter sort of Baptists this was not so. Baptism, they argued in the First Confession of 1646, was

an ordinance of the New Testament, given by Christ, to be dispensed upon persons professing faith, or that are made disciples; who, upon profession of faith, ought to be baptized and after to partake of the Lord’s Supper . . . . The way and manner of dispensing this ordinance, is dipping or plunging the body under water. It, being a sign, must answer the things signified; which is, that interest the saints have in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ; and that as certainly as the body is buried under water, and risen again, so certainly shall the bodies of the saints be raised by the power of Christ, in the day of the resurrection, to reign with Christ.

If this seemed to leave infants without the protection of baptism as hitherto understood, the Baptists, in their Second Confession of 1677, insisted that “Infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ, through the Spirit; who worketh when, where and how He pleaseth . . .”.

All this must have been present in Bishop’s Nova Scotia background, for it provides the theme for “The Baptism”, a short story which appeared in 1937, the year before “The Unbeliever”. Three devout Presbyterian sisters, Emma, Flora and Lucy, receive a visit from a Mrs Peppard, whose sister’s baby has just died, “although they had done everything”. The women discuss infant damnation “at some length” before moving on to the care of begonias. Although infant damnation is lightly touched on here, and treated ironically as being a conversational subject on a par with the care of house plants, the fate of the baby’s soul preys on Lucy’s mind and keeps her awake at night. Lucy is the youngest of the sisters, and not yet a church member. As the burden of guilt begins to drag her down, she decides she must join the Church as soon as she can, but the Church she must join is the Baptist Church. Not only that, but “She now believed ardently in the use of total immersion as practiced by the Baptists, according to their conception of the methods of John the Baptist. She could not join without that, and the river, of course, was frozen over. She would have to wait until the ice went out”.

As her mind begins to go, Lucy begs the Baptist minister to have a hole cut in the ice so that she can be baptized before she is eternally damned. But the minister feels that this would be unnecessary in Lucy’s case, although it has happened in the past that a hole has been cut in order to make a font. Both of the cases mentioned involved drink. “One had been a farmer, converted from drinking and abusing his wife. He had chopped the ice open himself. Another had been a young man, also a reformed drunkard, since dead.” Heavy drinking, reform, conversion, baptism – a sequence of events Bunyan thought hardly ever happened – followed in the young man’s case by death; and then in Lucy’s case an apparently blameless life, leading to visions, conversion, baptism by total immersion after the ice has gone, also leading, more or less immediately, to death: these are some of the stories Bishop was thinking about around the time she wrote “The Unbeliever”, in which some of the same elements of poetic imagery appear in different form:

But he sleeps on the top of his mast
with his eyes closed tight.
The gull inquired into his dream,
which was, “I must not fall.
The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy
us all.”

The sign, the Baptists said, must answer the things signified. The dipping or plunging the body under water – through falling off the mast – signifies death for the drunken unbeliever, just as it does for the saints with their interest in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. The water, the sea, seems hard to the unbeliever, just as the ice in “The Baptism” is hard. Lucy, the believer, prays for an early spring, and it seems her prayers are answered:

On the nineteenth of March, Flora woke up and heard the annually familiar sound, a dim roaring edged with noises of breaking glass.
“Thank goodness”, she thought. “Now, maybe, Lucy won’t even want to be baptized.” Everyone heard the cracking start, off in the hills, and was at the bridge. Lucy, Emma, and Flora went too. The ice buckled up in shining walls fifteen or twenty feet high, fit for heavenly palaces, then moved slowly downstream.
Once in a while a space of dark brown water appeared. This upset Lucy, who had thought of the water she would be baptized in as crystal-clear, or pale blue.

It is a wonderfully devised moment, with the ice going out like the walls of heavenly palaces, leaving the muddy water, “very high, with spots of yellow foam”, in which the fatal baptism will take place.

Bishop liked to play around with her images, turning the room upside down in one poem, on its side in another, playing with the idea that something rather small is actually very large, or that something soft is hard, that (in “The Imaginary Iceberg”) “all the sea were moving marble”. In “The Unbeliever” a cloud speaks:

“I am founded on marble pillars”,
said a cloud. “I never move.
See the pillars there in the sea?”
Secure in introspection
he peers at the watery pillars of his reflection.

And a gull remarks that the air is “like marble”.

The motif of looking down on pillars has its own association, in Bishop’s imagery, with drink. In her Key West notebook (dating from the 1930s) we find a sketch later worked into an eventually abandoned poem: “In the cheapest café the drinks were naturally much smaller . . . . The glasses resembled little pillars of crystal [with] little hollows in the tops of the capitols [sic] . . .”. This becomes, in “The Salesman’s Evening”:

Naturally the drinks are smaller
At such a down-at-heel café
But really his glass there looks like a little
crystal pillar
Slightly worn away
In the centre of the capitol by the action
Of rain storms, or sand and winds’ friction.

Or a bar-keeper sharpening his / / there. In
this small depression
Lie his tiny drinks
A brightly colored, adulterated procession.
The salesman thinks,
“Yellow, then red, and now I’ll have a yellow.”
People at the next table are pitying the poor
fellow . . . .

The lonely salesman getting drunk belongs with “The Soldier and the Slot Machine” and “A Drunkard” among the unpublished poems (all to be found in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, drafts and fragments, edited by Alice Quinn) and “The Prodigal” and the short story “Memories of Uncle Neddy” (among published works) as attempts at an intractable subject – that “abnormal thirst” and consequent unhappiness that dogged the poet all her adult life.

That the sea could always mean death is clear from “At the Fishhouses”:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested
in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”

– thereby, even when singing to a seal, preserving one of those distinctions between Christian and Christian – here, Baptist and Lutheran. Bishop’s seaside repertoire of Baptist hymns no doubt included Bunyan.

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James Fenton's Selected Poems was published last year. He has written the introduction to a new edition of The Life and Death of Mr Badman, to be published later this year.