<i>Becoming Kathrine Talbot: A Jewish Refugee and the Novelist She Invented</i> by Christoph Ribbat

As the publisher’s summary explains, “[a]s Ilse Barker, she share[d] a close friendship with American poet Elizabeth Bishop. In their extraordinary letters the two women cover everything: from the mundane to the traumatic.” Becoming Kathrine Talbot begins by providing a thorough understanding of a young Jewish refugee’s life during the Second World War and traces that life through the rest of the twentieth century. From 1950 until 1979, Ilse Barker and Elizabeth Bishop were great friends and correspondents. Prior to the war, Ilse Gross grew up in Bingen, Germany, went to high school in Geneva, left home at age 17 to become a maid in London, and then in 1940 was deported as a foreign alien during the Nazi regime to a British government labor camp on the Isle of Man.During Ilse’s internment, her fiancé Geoffrey Pittock-Buss from London sent her Ford Madox Ford’s The March of Literature, which champions George Herbert and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the camp, Ribbat writes that “Ilse has three jobs [. . .]. She teaches German to the Methodist minister, she knits socks and sweaters, and she serves as the English teacher for a group of old German ladies [. . .]. As a textbook for her course, she uses The March of Literature” (24). She is released in 1941 to London and a brief marriage to Pittock-Buss follows while working as his secretary. Ilse’s writerly fire is fanned by reading Henry Green’s Loving, which as Ribbat writes is “psychological fiction. Green seems to understand the servants completely: their strengths, their weaknesses, their fears” (34).Identified by the publisher as a “creative” biography, the book begins to ascend after its somewhat stylistically stilted beginning; perhaps the staccato prose represented the loneliness and forms of hunger Ilse felt. After her first marriage dissolved due to Geoffrey’s infidelity, the novel of her life takes off as Ilse starts to find her way in bohemian Cornwall. There she has an affair with lauded poet George Barker before meeting his brother Kit. Poverty shrouds Kit and Ilse like a tattered blanket. They can’t pay rent so their farmer landlord takes their bed. In 1948 they get married, Kit wearing brother George’s suit. Kit has some paintings exhibited while Ilse writes a novel.They move to New York City and Ilse, after having received some negative reviews, becomes a prize-winning novelist for Fire in the Sun (1952), The Innermost Cage (1955), and Return (1959). Ribbat reminds the reader repeatedly that women writers in the early twentieth-century art world often took the back seat to their husbands; for instance, Ilse and Kit were too poor to visit the Museum of Modern Art together, so Kit would go round it then tell Ilse about what he saw afterwards. Ilse finds a similar story in Catherine Talbot, a prominent intellectual of the eighteenth century. “Ilse Barker’s new pen name: Kathrine Talbot” (55).Kit and Ilse are “granted fellowships at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs” (57). The style and content of Kathrine Talbot’s fiction are influenced by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad. At this time in autumn 1950, 12 German men “stand trial for ‘crimes against humanity,’ committed on November 9 and November 10, 1938, when mobs destroyed both synagogues of Bingen and looted Jewish shops and homes” (59). The judge drops the charges. This book reveals numerous anti-semitic events in the broader culture of the first half of the twentieth century, which Ilse represses to some extent in her development as an artistic person.Ribbat’s abrupt description of Bishop is comically blunt:She shows them the poem she wrote to end her writer’s block. Ilse Barker and Elizabeth Bishop become “passionate letter writers” (61) for decades.Ribbat’s biography inspires readers to go back to One Art. Bishop’s letters to the Barkers seem unfiltered as they ramble freely and extensively with detailed lists of observation. Unlike letters to Moore and Lowell, this correspondence is born out of spontaneous friendship; Bishop has no demands or restrictions, and nothing to prove. In a 1952 letter to the Barkers, Bishop reveals that in Brazil she thinks she’s “died and gone to heaven,” and that it “is funny to come to Brazil to experience total recall about Nova Scotia—geography must be more mysterious than we realize, even” (Bishop 249). Here’s the last paragraph of a letter written in Samambaia to Ilse and Kit from late February 1954:Bishop sends parcels of “Brazilian coffee, guava jam, and two kinds of salsa: ‘fearfully HOT so watch out’” while Ilse mails Elizabeth stories (Ribbat 81). Bishop does not shy away from telling her “to get to the point more quickly,” and curtail the pretty and “nice” depictions of the world that plague women writers of that time, as Bishop suggests.In 1958 Ilse opens up about her experiences in internment camps; Bishop tells Ilse in a letter addressed only to her and not Kit that she and Lota “stayed up all night talking about [. . .] ‘the whole tragedy’” (82). Ribbat’s book has vast range. In addition to revealing the weight of genocidal warfare, he includes early scholarly reactions to Bishop by Anne Stevenson, Jerome Mezzaro, and Victoria Harrison who in 1988 discusses Ilse and Kit: “No rules governed the Bishop-Barkers correspondence. In Contemporary Literature, Victoria Harrison concludes: ‘They loved her and she them, unconditionally and unproblematically.’ These letters, she says, were more explicit, more loving, and more intimate than all other exchanges” (96).They can also be a lot of fun. In 1968 “Bishop writes from San Francisco about one of her dinner parties where marijuana brownies were served. Ilse is surprised” (87). As life moves swiftly, there are tumultuous changes. By this time Ilse and Kit have a six-year-old son named Thomas, and Kit is having affairs. Lota de Macedo Soares has overdosed. In 1979 Bishop and Alice Methfessel visit the Barkers in London. “A few months later, Bishop dies. Ilse keeps cutting tomatoes with the knife that Bishop bought for her. She calls it ‘Elizabeth’s tomato knife’” (92).Ilse Barker perseveres, and in 1992 even attends Vassar College for an “Elizabeth Bishop Symposium” where she tells “Bishop scholars about her profound mistrust of biography and any sort of history writing in general” (97). Artistry can be ruined by biography when it overdetermines the art. What do we make of Alice Munro now? People are horrified, as many were about Michael Jackson. Does that diminish their art? “Biographies are so useless, [Ilse] writes. Think about Larkin: how much she loves Larkin’s poems and utterly uninterested she is in Larkin the person” (101). She has also seen history written and rewritten by propaganda. She begins writing poetry to access her true story. “Like Elizabeth Bishop before her, she understands poems as a nonfictional art form” (99): one of many threads that knit them together in common pursuit, friendship, and correspondence for 29 years.

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