James Merrill's manners and Elizabeth Bishop's dismay

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, more generous, and more 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
      a detached, affectionate amusement, such as a highly civilized
      visitor from another planet might feel. (7)

Since the politeness of a bemused alien among human fools would satisfy no one's criteria for manners 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 manners 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 a work of literature that doesn't depend on manners" (Recitative 33), the question of manners bears also on style, which Stephen Yenser rightly calls the "literary allotrope" of manners (58).

For Merrill, Wallace Stevens's work exemplifies the "poem of manners" because of his inclination to "present the world through, say, a character's intelligence or lack of it" (Recitative 32). Such first-person enactments of "social behavior" are "more hospitable to irony, self-expression, self-contradiction, than many a philosophical or sociological system" or the "descriptions of social behavior" that according to Merrill inform Eliot's work (33). The qualities of "tone or voice" that Merrill values are evident in Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time: "The real triumph of manners 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 manners and morals as Merrill does is to challenge the familiar claim that manners 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 a 1967 interview with him, seems to reflect "a more or less unified social world" constituted by "taste, intelligence, and manners rather than class or family" (qtd. in Merrill, Recitative 32). Merrill's imagination of the social world is notoriously hierarchical in appearance, and in The Changing Light at Sandover becomes unabashed in its appeal to the spiritually elite world 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 a more democratic and impartialist notion of respect. (1) In this essay, then, I will examine Merrill's concern with manners in order to discover if manners, and therefore style, are ultimately aligned with a 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 manners with style: just as politeness without moral substance would be merely aesthetically pleasing, so might a pleasing literary style be merely "ornamental" (Recitative 32) or "elegant," a charge frequently aimed at Merrill, to which he replies with a 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 manners and style were representative of a generation of economically privileged gay men who were educated in the private schools and colleges of the American Northeast. This story, which Merrill tells with some critical bemusement, is in tension with another story, one of vocation, maturation, and individuation: his becoming not so much someone different from his group identities and affiliations but a person whose difference is that of an individuated self. The most important figure in this story is Elizabeth Bishop, a "female role model" (141) more important than the operatic divas from whom he learned a representative gay style. Though Merrill does not tell that story in his memoir, Bishop's own reflections on the relationship between manners and morals suggest a number of ways in which Bishop as role model may have helped Merrill. In his tribute to Bishop, "Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia," in his final collection, A Scattering of Salts, Merrill dramatizes the relationship of manners and morals by representing his visit to Bishop's childhood village as an occasion on which his manners are challenged to prove themselves as more than mere politeness, as having moral substance. Though he attempts to pay "tribute" (Poems 667) to Bishop in a manner that would not cause her "dismay," Merrill's urbanity contrasts so strongly with the social world of Great Village and rural Nova Scotia that it is difficult for him to imagine the place and its inhabitants without a condescension that would indeed likely dismay Bishop. Merrill concludes his tribute by acknowledging this failure--but this acknowledgment is itself a form of tribute to what he has attempted to learn from Bishop's example.