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Michael Sledge drew on a rich cache of material for The More I Owe You, a novel based on the turbulent 17-year relationship between Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares. There are Bishop’s letters collected in One Art, the oral biography Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, Carmen Oliveira’s Rare and Commonplace Flowers on Bishop and Soares, George Monteiro’s Conversations With Elizabeth Bishop, and David Kalstone’s Bishop study Becoming A Poet. The source materials are so compelling in themselves that the plain fact of this novel immediately raises the question of its necessity. Attempts to mirror what we pre-qualify as the “life” rarely get further than reflecting credit on the writer’s construction skills.

But the orbit of Sledge’s The More I Owe You takes the reader far, coincident with the troubled but receptive spirit of Bishop’s wayward sojourns from north to south and back. Bishop arrived by ship in Brazil as a tourist in 1951 and lived there for 17 years with Soares, shuttling between Lota’s unconventional house in Samambaia and her apartment in Rio. In writing this novel, Sledge had to overcome his materials, the already told events of their life together, even while allowing the facts to provide the book’s armature and content.

The psychologist Adam Phillips wrote a line in Terrors and Experts that reminds me of Bishop and her poetry: “The problem of knowing is hidden by the vividness of its objects.” This is the disturbing tension underlying her best verse, usually celebrated for its surface of scrutiny. In other words, perception may be blinded by its own light. In The More I Owe You, Sledge’s third-person describes the vividly observed layer of their Brazilian world in keeping with Bishop’s tone and diction – but his novel’s dynamic relies on an unresolved rocking between opposing forces: sickness vs. health, drunkenness vs sobriety, traditional vs. modern, memory vs. experience, selfishness vs. kindness, north vs. south, Rio vs. Samambaia, impetuosity vs. passivity, and the battle between Brazil’s political parties.

Sledge invests episodes with a Bishopesque calm, close eye. In an early moment, Elizabeth gets drunk for the first time in Samambaia and injures herself in a fall. Lota locks her in her bedroom:

“Elizabeth lay for quite some time gazing out the window as the sun appeared and soft yellow light filtered into the valley. The window also framed the main structure of the house, where through the glass she could see Maria sweeping. That was the thing about Lota’s house, there was nothing hidden, there was no pretense; what you saw was what you got. It wasn’t corrupt. She loved this view with the entirety of her being. Perhaps that was why she was being punished so severely. She should have known never to love anything so much she couldn’t bear to lose it. That was life’s lesson.”

The “lesson” keeps shifting in The More I Owe You as the narrative technique pivots on its antagonisms. In the paragraph above, one of scores I could have quoted, Elizabeth’s view of house, Lota, and light all combine gracefully to illuminate the psychological forces at work.

The New York Times Book Review assigned this title to Brenda Wineapple, a biographer, who praises the “evocative effect” of the novel’s descriptive verve. She writes, “What Sledge has given us is a visually minded novel, rich in surfaces.” The very same mistake is made about Bishop’s poetry, whose richness is in its stealthy undertow. (When I can’t sense enough of this force in her work, I’m dissatisfied.) The More I Owe You is a nuanced, mentally-minded novel that is careful not to violate the actual qualities of the minds it probes. This is a novel that tests whether otherwise educated readers can accept characters that are not entirely knowable, do not “grow” and “develop,” and are ungenerous even as they love in profound measure.

Wineapple claims that Bishop and Soares are “too predictably borne back into the past.” But this is the reader’s cranky and rather absurd demand for progressive action and belief in human changeability. Thus, when at mid-book Sledge tells us that Lota will commit suicide at the story’s end, Wineapple complains that “he makes her self-immolation and the failure of her relationship with Bishop … seem predestined – or banal.” Well, yes. That’s the point. Plot is secondary here. More than just the scenery is “evocative” here. It’s the entire environment of the telling. One either hears it or not.

Sledge’s dialogue often captures a twist-of-the-knife cruelty resulting in characters turning away from each other – and the reader left alone. Driven to succeed as the designer and director of a landmark park in Rio, Lota circulates among a group of powerful Brazilian politicians who in turn come under fierce attack from their enemies. Her behavior becomes manic, panicky. Doctors and friends blame Elizabeth at least in part – which elicits the reader’s empathy. But then Sledge refuses to let us bask in our own warmth. At the beginning of the novel, Elizabeth displaces Lota’s lover Mary, who appears throughout as a grim-humored but devoted friend, including near the end:

“Elizabeth looked down at her. Mary smiled, thinking perhaps she’d gotten through her misery and helped in some small way. Elizabeth was not her rival after all, but her colleague; they both loved Lota. “Well, I’m not a nun like you.” Elizabeth’s voice was low and hateful. “I have needs, too. I can’t just serve.” Then she carried her suitcase out the door. Mary remained crouched beside the bed, stung beyond comprehension.”

Mary is among the book’s several deftly used characters, which also include appearances by Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, plus a variety of Brazilian architects, politicians, workmen, and acquaintances. “But the novelist is far less adroit when he turns from Bishop to other characters,” says Wineapple, again petitioning for “depth” when Sledge has both thematic and stylistic reasons for the sketch. Wineapple includes Sledge’s treatment of Lota among the ill-drawn characters, a tin-eared charge that simply amazes me.

With subtlety and simplicity, Michael Sledge portrays the flow of years, work, delights and dread experienced by two utterly unique people in unusual, often shifting surroundings. The More I Owe You disturbs the reader because it will not provide a comforting consensus about how its characters ought to behave, nor about their needs or desires. There is only a dueling of opposing claims, within and between Elizabeth and Lota. “Loving was not about saving yourself,” the narrator says, “nor about saving your beloved … Loving was simply about loving, as ardently and willfully, as consciously, as you were capable.” And reading is not about satisfying one’s expectations but rather about surrendering to the difficult pleasures of perception.

 

[Published by Counterpoint on May 25, 2010. 328 pages, $15.95 paperback.]