The art of using

American poet Elizabeth Bishop was no stranger to accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and two Guggenheim fellowships, among many others. But Bishop's reputation has increased steadily since her death in 1979, and grown even to eclipse that of her close friend Robert Lowell, whose stylistic whims steered mid-century American poetry.  Several publications in recent years, including her complete correspondence with Lowell, have allowed Bishop's own masterful prose to foster insight into her personal life.

Michael Sledge therefore has a difficult task in his debut novel The More I Owe You, which is centered on Bishop's nearly 20 years in Brazil with her lover, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares: to create a narrative of Bishop's life that improves upon her own voluminous paper trail.

Sledge has clearly done his homework consulting Bishop's letters, her poetry and several biographical accounts. His creative retelling of Bishop's life is full of minute particulars that do indeed provide an intimate picture of Bishop and the love of her life. Several questionable narrative choices, however, keep the reader at a distance from Bishop and her famous friends and throw into question the necessity of Sledge's project.

Many of the most interesting passages in the book have nothing to do with Bishop or her poetry. Sledge's descriptions of the lush Brazilian landscape are especially vivid. Soares' passion for building is investigated in fascinating detail, and the history of Brazilian architecture, specifically the intervention of modernism, is brought to light in passages such as the following conversation between Bishop and Soares at a hotel outside the village of Ouro Preto:

The More I Owe You
By Michael Sledge
Counterpoint 2010
328 pages

Heda Kovály
(1919-2010)

Czech writer, translator and Holocaust survivor Heda Margolius Kovály has died in Prague after a long illness, her son Ivan Margolius of London has confirmed. Born in Prague, Kovály was sent to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland in 1941 and to Auschwitz in 1944, where her parents were killed. After escaping from a column of prisoners in 1945, Kovály returned to Prague, where she married Rudolf Margolius, who was soon promoted to deputy foreign trade minister before being convicted of conspiracy in the 1952 Slanský show trial and hanged. Kovály made her living translating American writers including Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth into Czech. She is best known, however, for her evocative memoir of life under communism, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968.

"This hotel makes me feel like a canary asphyxiating in a mine," Elizabeth said.

"Yes, bad modernism is terrible. It hurts the soul."

"It is the precise opposite of everything wonderful about your house, the lightness and glass ? like a translucent balloon that could float above the earth. I love that house."

Such exchanges exemplify Bishop's wry sense of humor, while illuminating her relationship with Soares, whose zealous interests have not always been explicated by Bishop's biographers.

The More I Owe You also contains several fascinating passages that put a creative spin on Bishop's writing process, especially the composition of "The Scream," her most famous short story.

"Elizabeth wrote on the typewriter with unusual confidence and speed. The piece came to her in a form that felt complete, instinctively right, though the form was not a conventional one for prose; it lay somewhere between story and poem. The writing of poetry was such an exacting labor that it could take years to bring one poem to an acceptable state; she might work for months on a single line. Yet with this piece she did not second-guess her choices."

Sledge imaginatively illustrates the process of this most fastidious of writers, who was known to have such exacting standards that she worked on a single poem, "The Moose," for more than 20 years. Sledge's knowledge and passion for his subject fuse seamlessly in these passages.

But midway through the novel, the narrative slips into the future tense with occasional authorial commentary, jarring the reader in a rather cloying appeal to sentiment.

"After Lota, and after Brazil, she will love other people and other places, but it will be a different species of love. ? Her last apartment will overlook Boston Harbor, and it will hold many beloved possessions from her years in Brazil. ... In those last years, she will reach a kind of peace, not completely free of drinking or painful shyness, but those she will allow to wash over her, and then she will reemerge."

The shift in tense and narrative strategy is a confounding choice, given the glancing tone in these passages, which stands in stark relief to the lush accounts of love and landscape that make up the rest of the book.

Several other famous American poets, including Robert Lowell, James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara, make appearances in The More I Owe You, but they come off as little more than set pieces. Mentioning O'Hara's enthusiasm or Schuyler's depression is a quirky nod to readers in the know, but these cameos do nothing to further the plot of the novel and read as needless asides.

There is little about Elizabeth Bishop's life that remains unexamined, by herself, her critics and her biographers. Devotees of Bishop's poetry - especially those who have read her correspondence and biographies - are unlikely to learn anything new from The More I Owe You and, indeed, may be left wondering whether Sledge chose to fictionalize Bishop's life simply because it made good novelistic fodder. Nonetheless, Sledge's novel is a love story as touching as it is traumatic, involving one of the most interesting - and most brilliant - poets of the 20th century.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com