Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker

One of the pleasures of “Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker,” a new collection of her correspondence with that magazine’s poetry editors, is snooping around in the excellent footnotes and front matter for the wicked comments she made behind the magazine’s back. She deplored its “ ‘How nice to be nice!’ atmosphere,” its sense of “false refinement,” and declared that reading the magazine was “getting to be like reading a quilt — eating a quilt, I mean — full of starchy fillers and ‘enough water to properly prepare’ etc.”

After The New Yorker bought one of her rare short stories, Bishop wrote to a friend: “At first I thought it was my best, but after they took it naturally I had serious doubts.” When the magazine rejected one of her poems, which had some slight political content, she suggested that the editors feared “to annoy their Republican readers.”