Travels in the Baroque

When Elizabeth Bishop embarked on SS Königstein with a Vassar friend, Harriet Tompkins Thomas, in July 1935 on her first trip to Europe, it was Paris they had in mind as a destination, the place that ‘everybody headed for in those days’. Unwittingly, however, they had boarded a ‘Nazi boat’ and had to contend with an ‘impossible’ group of German passengers, whom Bishop hid from as much as she could and complained about as having ‘tramped on my person and my intellect’ (OA, 33). In her notebook the ship became a model for other institutions she hated that imposed on or threatened her (only hospitals, often a haven in her life, were exempt): ‘College, school, this ship all awful places where one slips backwards into corners day after day, and the people who have a “good time” walk on one more and more.’ The voyage itself – her first prolonged time at sea – produced an intense physical reaction in her, most notably when she was in the company of others: