John Peale Bishop | Biography

John Peale Bishop, essayist, fiction writer, critic, and poet, was never in Paris for longer than a year or so, but he spent nearly a quarter of his short life in fairly close proximity to the city, passing in and out of it and through it for about ten years. The experience of Paris had, seemingly, little influence on Bishop's work, but the French culture of which it was the capital meant much to him: it symbolized both contemporaneity and tradition.

Because of a protracted childhood illness, Bishop, a native of Charles Town, West Virginia, was twenty years old when he entered Princeton in 1913. At Princeton he quickly distinguished himself among the minority of students concerned with writing and the serious study of literature; he also entered upon his lifelong friendships with Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald (who portrayed him as Thomas Parke D'Invilliers in This Side of Paradise). Upon graduation in 1917, he published a slim volume of verse, ironically titled Green Fruit, and he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the army. Bishop went overseas in the summer of 1918 and served there until September 1919, but he never saw action. His first experience of Paris was as an officer in the American Expeditionary Forces. This first encounter with Paris is refracted in a story, "Resurrection," which Bishop published just prior to his second departure for Europe in 1922. The story has to do with a young lieutenant's sense of "all the rotting desolation which filled the world," a feeling which comes upon him in the thronged streets of Paris as well as amidst the war-torn landscape of the battlefields. Ultimately, however, the young officer realizes that Paris is a city of life, that in Paris "whatever was left of life ran at the full."

"Resurrection" was included in The Undertaker's Garland (1922), a cynically nihilistic potpourri of poetry and prose which Bishop produced in collaboration with Edmund Wilson. The two young veterans had returned from the war to become staff members of Vanity Fair, contenders in the New York literary scene, and two of Edna St. Vincent Millay's suitors. They remained friends, but their paths diverged after Bishop's marriage to Margaret Hutchins in 1922; her wealth made it possible for the couple to live abroad, and for the next ten years or so Wilson was to fret about Bishop's continued residence overseas. From 1922 to 1924, the Bishops traveled through Italy, Austria, and France, but they also spent much of their time in Paris. There, Bishop became well acquainted with Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, and Ernest Hemingway. He became a knowing connoisseur of the work of the painters and sculptors of the School of Paris; he sought out and visited with other young writers; and he did much to further the careers of fellow writers. (For example, he took charge of the preparation of a number of the little magazine S4N which featured the work of E. E. Cummings.) Something of the spirit of Paris in the twenties is conveyed in Bishop's Hemingway: "I had just come abroad and, calling on Ezra Pound, had asked him about American writers of talent then in Paris. Pound's answer was a taxi, which carried us with decrepit rapidity across the Left Bank, through the steep streets rising toward Mont Saint-Genevieve, and brought us to the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. There we climbed four flights of stairs to find Ernest Hemingway." And a glimpse of how Bishop fitted into the Parisian scene is provided in Donald Ogden Stewart's autobiography, By a Stroke of Luck! (1975). In the spring of 1923, Bishop urged Stewart in a letter to read The Waste Land and "to look up an interesting young writer in Paris named Hemingway." Stewart remembers being "extremely grateful" for the Eliot suggestion; he "was even more grateful to him for Hemingway."

During his two-year stay in Europe, Bishop appeared frequently in American publications and European-based little magazines; he continued to do so after his return to New York in 1924, but he was not able to find a publisher for the novel he had been projecting since the early twenties, a novel which he abandoned after Fitzgerald advanced the opinion, "It has occasional spurts ..., but it is terribly tepid." Wilson believed that Bishop's unsuccessful resolution of the novel, which was to have dealt at length with the young hero's return to the United States after a sojourn in Europe, was linked to his distaste for the jazz-age America to which he himself had returned and which he judged to be, in Wilson's phrasing, "intolerable."

In 1926 Bishop sailed back to France, where he and his family were to reside until 1933. This time, however, after a brief stay in Paris, the Bishops purchased a centuries-old house in Orgeval, a village some thirty kilometers northeast of Paris. Bishop made occasional visits to the city, but for the most part he and his family lived apart and to themselves. Allen Tate, who visited the Bishops frequently during the latter part of their residence in Orgeval, concluded that Bishop "had not been happy in that charming isolation. More dependent upon a sympathetic literary society than most writers, he seemed in that period remote and without concentration, except at intervals when he produced, in a burst of energy, a group of poems or an occasional story."

Not until 1933, the year of his final return to America, would Bishop be able to assemble poems enough to make up the relatively slight volume, Now With His Love. Some of these poems are excellent, but many show too much of the influence of Pound and Eliot. Very few reflect anything of Bishop's sojourn in France, although it might be argued that three of the most successful--"Ode," "The Return," and "Perspectives are Precipices"--owe a good deal to the paintings he had viewed in the galleries and museums of Paris. The fiction Bishop was working at during these years was concerned with the remembered world of his Southern boyhood. The short-story cycle, Many Thousands Gone, was published in 1931, but the novel, Act of Darkness , would not be completed until 1935. Both of these genuinely distinguished books deal with the ambiguities of the Southern tradition. It seems likely that Bishop's sense of his Southern heritage was given an edge by his immersion in French culture. Looking back to the twenties, in 1941 he observed: "Nowhere was one more conscious of living in the present time than in France, and yet there the present was continuously enriched by the past."

When Bishop spoke these words, France had fallen to the Nazis, and he himself was in failing health, but he spoke with confidence and with a faith in the future. In the previous half-dozen years, he had completed and published Act of Darkness; he had finally realized, and demonstrated at length, his poetic talents (his elegy to Fitzgerald, "The Hours," is one of the finest of twentieth-century poems); and his wide-ranging taste and critical intelligence had found expression in a number of important essays. Bishop's contemporaries knew him as a critic as well as a poet and novelist; it is unfortunate that today he is known, if at all, only as the author of one or two essays. As an essayist, Bishop never attempted to develop, or promote, a body of critical theory. He was never programmatic; in fact, he was not, essentially, a literary critic. Instead, his essays are, as Wilson noted, "a set of discourses on various aspects of civilization: literature, painting, moving pictures, architecture, manners, religion"--discourses which are utterances of a man capable of both scorn and sympathy, a man possessed of, and by, passionate intelligence. It may be that he had to come home to America before his gifts could be fully realized, but Bishop seems never to have regretted the years abroad, and he particularly relished his memories of Paris. For Bishop, as for many of his contemporaries, the central meaning of Paris was derived from its preeminence among those European centers of civilization where, "in each art, the tradition can best be acquired and with it an intenser consciousness of one's own time.... Twenty years ago there were many capitals in the world, but in only one was it possible to know the extreme moment of time. And that was Paris."