Vol. 6 No. 9 · 17 May 1984
pages 8-10 | 4528 words
Good Manners
Craig Raine
- The Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop edited by Robert Giroux
Chatto, 278 pp, £12.95, March 1984, ISBN 0 7011 2809 7
Elizabeth Bishop was refined. Manners interested her, as The Collected Prose makes clear. She can remember learning ‘how to behave in school’ with more recall than most people: ‘this meant to sit up straight, not to scrape your feet on the floor, never to whisper, to raise your hand when you had to go out, and to stand up when you were asked a question.’ Fifty-odd years later in Brazil, she teaches manners to two little girls who are following a crazy woman and giggling at her: ‘I give them a look.’ At the same time, she could see the limitations of manners, could see beyond their immediate and important utility as guides to behaviour. She realises that manners are provisional. They change. Which is why her poem, ‘Manners’, carries the ironical epigraph, For a Child of 1918. Elizabeth Bishop knows that this rigid six-inch ruler, serviceable in its way, cannot measure the larger reaches of human behaviour. ‘Manners’, then, isn’t quite the charmingly simple, didactically homespun affair it pretends to be. It is an elegy for a lost, straightforward world. Present, too, squally and intractable, is the unmentioned problematic present.
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Letters
Vol. 6 No. 12 · 5 July 1984
From Robert Giroux
SIR: I find it interesting and surprising that Craig Raine in his long and perceptive review (LRB, Vol. 6, No 9) of Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Prose, which I compiled and edited, rates her story, ‘The Farmer’s Children’, so highly: not merely as a good story but a great one, as great as Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Kipling’s ‘They’. Indeed he makes his meaning clearer by calling it ‘an implacable masterpiece’ and ‘one of the greatest short stories of the 20th century’. No one would have been more surprised at this than Elizabeth Bishop, who had such little regard for ‘The Farmer’s Children’ that she omitted it from her proposed table of contents. Of course she was the severest critic of her own work, poetry and prose. Mr Raine believes that her harsh words, ‘a very bad short story’, were intended for ‘The Baptism’ rather than ‘The Farmer’s Children’, yet the former is the first story she listed for the collection and the latter is not listed at all. Her most conventional story, it was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories of 1948, though not as the best story of that year, and it is her only story that is wholly non-autobiographical. In fact she pasted the news-clipping on which the story is based on the first page of her manuscript.
None of this necessarily prevents ‘The Farmer’s Children’ from being a masterpiece. Elizabeth omitted other fine pieces – ‘A Trip to Vigia’, ‘The USA School of Writing’ and ‘The Country Mouse’ – which I also took the responsibility of including in this collection. I hope Mr Raine is right. I can hear Elizabeth, with her consistent adherence to good manners, saying: ‘If he really thinks so, who am I to disagree?’
Robert Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
