Michael Sledge’s novel The More I Owe You imagines Elizabeth Bishop’s life, and love, in Brazil.
If you could hold a seashell to your ear and hear an account of a poet’s life, it might have the exquisite depth and simplicity of Michael Sledge’s The More I Owe You, a novel about Elizabeth Bishop. Although the Pulitzer Prize winner was born in Massachusetts in 1911, Sledge’s novel begins with Bishop on her way to visit Brazil for the first time in 1951: “The ship crossed the equator some time in the night… the sky was vast, with half a moon and masses of soft, oily-looking stars.” Thus a reader is primed for prose that will consistently reach for and attain the heights of poetry.
Divided into three parts by time period, The More I Owe You braids together three strands of the poet’s life: the allure of Brazil, where Bishop sojourned for fifteen years; her long-term relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares; and her creative process. Along the way, readers are treated to fascinating descriptions of plants, animals, politics, architecture—all of which take on urgency that is crucial to our understanding of Bishop herself.
“I’ve been working more steadily than ever,” Bishop tells a friend, confessing in the next breath to the anxiety which is becoming an internal conflict—that people living in the favelas (slums) will never read her poems. “I know that sounds self-absorbed, but what I mean is, they don’t truly benefit anyone.” From the terrace of the Copacabana apartment where she writes—often wearing only a slip due to the oppressive heat—she overlooks a tarp city erected by striking workers. When Governor Carlos Lacerda, who is closely allied to Bishop’s lover, Lota, issues a call to Rio’s citizens to defend his administration, the poet runs out into the rainy streets to join a crowd that’s “jubilant, shouting and calling to one another, just like Carnaval, when people were soaked to the skin with sweat and joy and cachaça.” But trouble soon arrives: “A rumbling and clanking, then the human sea parted before three tanks advancing toward the palace.” Bishop stays to see the soldiers declare their loyalty to the governor, and the scene ends with her and Lota madly kissing each other “right there in front of the world.”
The More I Owe You is, above all, a love story. Even for those readers familiar with Bishop’s biography, Sledge creates suspense in the dance of attraction between the shy poet and charismatic Lota. One step forward, two steps back… how will they ever get together? The inevitability of their union becomes more and more palpable, but is complicated by Lota’s live-in lover, Mary, who will play a role in Bishop’s life for years to come. The complications proliferate: Elizabeth’s asthma and drinking bouts, Lota’s frustrated ambition, friendships that get in the way, social taboos. With respectful delicacy, Sledge probes the quarrels and outbursts of temper that result in separations followed by joyful reconciliations. His Bishop recalls both the “nightmare” years leading up to Lota’s death and “the exquisite tenderness of floating side by side in the pool at Samambaia on a hot summer afternoon, such peace between them that butterflies alit on their arms and faces to drink the moisture from their skin.”
Sledge has authored one previous book, the memoir Mother and Son. To write this novel, he relied on Bishop’s journals and letters (her correspondence with Robert Lowell alone fills a large volume), as well as published biographies. Each section of the novel is prefaced by one of Bishop’s poems, setting the mood and providing clues to what will follow. Unsparing of Bishop when describing her capacity for wounding the people closest to her, Sledge introduces Part Three with a poem that takes on a piercing sadness in the context of Lota’s death.
We see “the immediate world” mostly through Bishop’s eyes, though brief sections are written from Lota’s point of view. Departing from chronology, Sledge describes key events from Bishop’s childhood and treats some of the Brazil episodes through flashbacks. When referring to mementoes of Brazil that Bishop had with her at her death, years later in Boston; Sledge uses the future tense to recount their acquisition for the reader: “The oratorio of Saint Barbara that Lili gave her will sit on a shelf above her desk. Fittingly, on the autumn afternoon Saint Barbara witnesses her death, Elizabeth will be at work, making revisions to a poem that isn’t yet right.” Elsewhere Sledge tells us, “She will dream of the Amazon for the rest of her life, she will write about it, but she will never go back,” and concludes with the image of the poet clutching “the hard mud nest of a wasp given her by a friendly pharmacist,” a fitting metaphor for this stunning, heartbreaking novel itself: hard to let go of, and impossible to forget.
