James Merrill’s Manners and Elizabeth Bishop’s Dismay

Abstract

Alison Lurie's impression of James Merrill on first meeting him was that he seemed both coolly detached and awkwardly self-conscious.... He appeared to have read everything and, worse, to be surprised at our ignorance (6). As Merrill matured, she writes, he became kinder, generous, and sympathetic. He never quite became an ordinary person, but his instinctive scorn of fools, once only half-concealed by good manners, relaxed and gave way to detached, affectionate amusement, such as highly civilized visitor from another planet might feel. (7) Since the politeness of bemused alien among human fools would satisfy no one's criteria for that are not merely polite, Lurie's portrait of Merrill's maturity is hardly flattering. It raises the question of the relationship between Merrill's detachment, his affection, and his amusement. Do his transform his scorn, or do they simply relax it? Does Merrill mature, or was he simply well brought up? Since, according to Merrill, It's hard to imagine work of literature that doesn't depend on manners (Recitative 33), the question of bears also on style, which Stephen Yenser rightly calls the allotrope of (58). For Merrill, Wallace Stevens's work exemplifies the poem of manners because of his inclination to present the through, say, character's intelligence or lack of (Recitative 32). Such first-person enactments of behavior are more hospitable to irony, self-expression, self-contradiction, than many philosophical or sociological system or the descriptions of social behavior that according to Merrill inform Eliot's work (33). qualities of tone or that Merrill values are evident in Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time: The real triumph of in Proust is the extreme courtesy toward the reader.... Proust says to us in effect, 'I will not patronize you by treating these delicate matters with less than total, patient, sparkling seriousness' (33). Marcel's voice restores to the social graces of the Proustian salon, so easily pressed into the service of flattery and aggression, the moral function of demonstrating respect. To align and morals as Merrill does is to challenge the familiar claim that are essentially practices of exclusion and inclusion, social strategies of power and distinction. This is an important issue in reading Merrill because of the perception that his work, as Donald Sheehan puts it in 1967 interview with him, seems to reflect a or less unified social world constituted by taste, intelligence, and rather than class or family (qtd. in Merrill, Recitative 32). Merrill's imagination of the social is notoriously hierarchical in appearance, and in Changing Light at Sandover becomes unabashed in its appeal to the spiritually elite constituted by the poem's circles of the brilliant and creative (383). And the kind of friendship Merrill's style inclines toward is indeed based on small partialist communities of friends rather than on democratic and impartialist notion of respect. (1) In this essay, then, I will examine Merrill's concern with in order to discover if manners, and therefore style, are ultimately aligned with certain moral substance, or if they are essentially strategies of social distinction that serve to mark group membership. At stake in this question is the extent to which an ethical claim is asserted by Merrill's association of with style: just as politeness without moral substance would be merely aesthetically pleasing, so might pleasing literary style be merely ornamental (Recitative 32) or elegant, charge frequently aimed at Merrill, to which he replies with polite shrug (33). One story in Merrill's memoir A Different Person narrates the birth in his teens and twenties of his opera-going self (112), whose and style were representative of generation of economically privileged gay men who were educated in the private schools and colleges of the American Northeast. …