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James Merrill's manners and Elizabeth Bishop's dismay
Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2004 by Luke Carson
This narrative emerges again in the same section of the memoir. In Der Rosenkavalier--which, Merrill writes, "had all but made me who I was" (115)--an older woman "detaches herself from [the] arms" of her younger lover in a way that allows her to maintain her "dignity in the face of rejection." His memories of Lotte Lehmann's performance as the Marschallin, Merrill writes, "helped [him] to smile and shrug through the worst. Here was a bittersweet, faintly homosexual, wholly survivable alternative to [his] dreams of immolation and all-consuming love." The Marschallin's shrug is a "survivable alternative" to the gestures adopted by, for example, Chester Kallman, who "had modeled himself in boyhood upon the Wrong Soprano--on Zinka Milanov, say, with her queenly airs and clutch-and-dagger reflexes" (114). The Marschallin's shrug makes it possible not only for her to detach herself and retain her dignity but also to return to "day-to-day living," to experience informed by "bittersweet" loss.
Yet as the shrug allows Merrill to sustain an identification with the diva and the heroine, it remains within the category of art. It is theatrical without being "dramatic" in the pejorative sense intended by Merrill's mother. If Merrill were to shrug in his personal life, one might not feel that the gesture was theatrical or dramatic; nonetheless, it would retain a private meaning and affect sustained by his identification with the diva. (3) While the shrug is a gesture of renunciation, it is also a performance that maintains dignity. The performance requires an audience that can perceive that dignity, just as Merrill perceived the Marschallin's dignity and made it an object of desire for himself--and so imitated the shrug. The Marschallin's gesture, in fact, might be seen as the only way in which an aging diva can retire from the stage with dignity and pass on the status of object of desire to the younger woman, or younger diva, while at the same time retaining her greatness.
That Merrill's response to the Marschallin is informed by his own diva desires becomes apparent when his lover has a very different understanding of her shrug:
Certain doubts arose belatedly when I took Peter Hooten to that
opera, which had all but made me who I was, only to see him
unconvinced by the Marschallin's "self-sacrifice." He blazed out
at her, as we walked home, like a young Chenier or Cavaradossi
attacking the corrupt regime. Manipulative, narcissistic--who
could swallow such a woman? (115)
Hooten may as well be saying that the Marschallin is being "dramatic," that her performance is not redeemed by "genuine feeling." The real object of Hooten's attack, Merrill realizes, is "certain aspects of [Merrill's] relationship to him, with its own dramatic age difference and offstage Feldmarschall (David Jackson), whose prior claims made the young Octavian's position so intolerable" (115). He listens to Hooten "without shrugging" and in that moment of restraint feels "what it had cost the Marschallin to shrug." What it cost her is measured by what she renounces with that gesture in exchange for "dignity in the face of rejection": the theatricality underwritten by "dreams of immolation and all-consuming love" and the gratification to narcissism that her youthfulness made it easier to acquire. The gesture acknowledges her transformation into aging diva and heroine.
