THE DUCHESS' RED SHOES
67
South and found the manners there mighty pleasant; and the good
manners certainly helped most folks very much in communicating
with each other and being friendly. I had also lived in the "moral
capital" of New England where everyone was always very polite,
unless drunk. But neither in the deep South nor in the great mor–
al
capital was it possible for me to recognize how manners, good
or bad, had the vital and fructifying connection with literature which
Aldridge gets so excited about. In fact, almost all of the polite, well–
mannered people were absolutely uninterested in literature at all.
And one of the few exceptions, a person of exalted station, and also
a Brahmin, once remarked to me that the only people in America
he knew with good manners were Negroes. But probably he was
just joking or being supercilious. However, T. S. Eliot was probably
not joking when he said of Boston "society" that it was "quite un–
civilized, but refined beyond the point of civilization." It is likely
enough that Mr. Aldridge has spent more time in Boston in recent
years than Mr. Eliot. Time is irrelevant, however. It does seem that
one must choose between the views of the two critics; both cannot
be
right.
Nevertheless Mr. Aldridge does have some kind of point. Cer–
tainly the human beings in a subway rush are hardly to be considered
well-mannered. This does not make them seem less worthy of being
the subject of fiction than people in the deep South. But here Mr.
Aldridge might invoke the illustrious word of Henry James who sup–
posed that Emma Bovary was less worthy of attention than Anna
Karenina because the latter was a member of the nobility, a state–
ment which does not seem to jibe with the greatness of either
Madame
Bovary
or
Anna Karenina
as works of fiction, and does
seem, if I may make so bold as to say, to be a bit on the snobbish
side. Snobbish also, perhaps, is James's belief that Flaubert really
went too far in
Un Coeur SimjJie
by making a servant
girl
his
heroine. But, after all, Flaubert is not alive today and does not know
as
Mr. Aldridge does how awful it is to live in the United States
where almost no one has any manners whatever.
IV
Mr. Aldridge's communication drove me to a desperate
resort,
creating as it did the feeling that one had to find out what
