Review: “Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from A Young Writer’s Life” by Dana Gioia

Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young
by Dana Gioia
Paul Dry Books, 2021; 184 pp., $16.95

In a journal entry from 1948, Thomas Merton remarks on the dilemma of the Catholic poet noting: “We who say we love God: why are we not anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God?” When compared to secular poets, the famous monk goes on to say, “it is depressing that those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well.” In Dana Gioia’s latest book of essays we get both: the narrative of a young Catholic poet anxious to perfect his art and taking what would be the necessary pains to learn how to do it. Luckily for Gioia Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life is full of the pleasures of a literary education rather than the pains. And luckily for us, his readers, Gioia presents us with the opportunity to learn along with him and experience a semblance of what it was like to be in the presence of some of the most important writers of the last century: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Fitzgerald, John Cheever, and James Dickey.

While the bulk of Gioia’s memoir takes up the figures above, it is bookended by two chapters of equal importance despite the obscurity of their subjects. First, an uncle that he never met due to a tragically early death when Gioia was only six years old. Uncle Ted Ortiz left the family a sizable library to the family that proved to be a lasting influence on Gioia’s early love of reading. The second, Ronald Perry, an all but forgotten American poet who also had a decisive role in Gioia’s life despite having never met him. It is also worth noting that the discussion of Perry’s work in this chapter has the potential to rekindle critical interest and, if my own reaction is to be any indication, result in more copies of Denizens, Perry’s major work, to be sold. Both the first and the last chapter are necessary to fill out the narrative themes and, taken together with the more recognizable names mentioned above, will be of particular interest to the readers of Dappled Things. But if one comes to Studying with Miss Bishop, however,in the hope of scratching some voyeuristic itch for scandal or literary gossip, they will leave quite unsatisfied save for a brief encounter with an inebriated James Dickey that is tame compared to other stories anyone familiar with the Southern poet’s life will have no doubt heard before. If one comes to the book looking for both a tender homage and a keen literary analysis that refuses to be needlessly academic, then the reader will find just what they are looking for.

For instance, in the chapter that lends the book its name, we find Gioia at Harvard University in the Spring semester of 1975 as a sixty-four year old Elizabeth Bishop has been assigned to teach English 285: Studies in Modern Poetry. During the course of this chapter, Bishop comes across as a self-admittedly unnatural teacher in many ways and one, to her credit, that allows students to experience poetry directly. This pedagogy is confirmed in a letter Bishop wrote to a young unknown poet only referred to as “Miss Pierson” in the May of that same year. The letter, which can be found in Bishop’s collected letters, One Art, finds her advising a young poet to avoid the various critical apparatuses too often associated with college poetry courses: “From what you say, I think you are actually trying too hard—or reading too much about poetry and not enough poetry. Prosody—metrics—etc. are fascinating—but they all came afterwards, obviously. And I always ask my writing classes NOT to read criticism.” It seems Bishop was not so much teaching her Harvard students, as allowing them the opportunity to experience poetry. In the same way that T.S. Eliot famously decried the “lemon-squeezer school of criticism” for their overemphasis on formal methods of analysis, Bishop eschewed criticism in the classroom in favor of having students memorize poems to internalize their music and concentrate on the fundamentals—like looking up unknown words in a good dictionary! As Gioia observes, for Bishop, “the images and the music of the lines were primary.” Overall the impression of Bishop that Gioia leaves us with is that of a generous teacher who allows herself to be fully present with her students in ways that more than compensate for any perceived lack of structure the course may have suffered from. As Gioia rightly observes later in his memoir, “Teaching hovers between two realities. First there is the formal curriculum. Then there is what one really learns, which may have little to do with the syllabus.” Further, Gioia goes on to say that it is the “way a person teaches” that “becomes an essential part of what is taught.”

The next chapter is notable to readers of Dappled Things as we not only get a loving representation of what it was like to be in the classroom with another Harvard luminary in Robert Fitzgerald, but also for Gioia’s deft analysis of Fitzgerald’s Catholic, even neo-Thomastic, poetics. This section is a good example of the frequent shifts from the narrative mode to more critical ways of understanding their subjects. Taken together, these critical aspects of the memoir exalt Studying with Miss Bishop from the merely cozy to the near sublime. Particularly in this chapter when we are treated to Gioia reading Fitzgerald, through Jacques Maritain, in order to define poetic form as a “sacramental instrument of perception.” Without going into detail, as I want to leave much for the reader, it is obvious that this section will prove to be enlightening to anyone with more than a passing interest in a theological perspective of literature. It is clear that Gioia is drawing from a lifetime of writing and thinking carefully about literature as he is able to not only make compelling arguments of theologically informed analysis, but correctly diagnose some of the problems of contemporary literary criticism as he does in the chapter dedicated to Dickey. It should be noted, however, that the critical moments in the book are always couched within intimate portraits and never cross over into the academic for the sake of being academic. Overall, Gioia’s memoir is a joy to read. This is especially true in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying social distancing requirements, when the nostalgia for what it was like to gather together—in a classroom, or at a reading—is felt so intensely.

The question Gioia presents us with in the preface is: “How does someone learn to write?” To the careful reader, this book will demonstrate that despite the long hours spent alone at the desk, it is always the time spent with others that is most formative in learning how to write and what it means to live a writerly life. Each of the six essays that make up the book take the reader through very different relationships and settings in order to show just how wildly varied the literary education can be, but ultimately shows that Gioia himself, arguably the most important Catholic poet in the United States writing today, took the necessary pains to learn his craft.