“He That of Repetition Is Most Master”: Stevens and the Poetics of Mannerism

WALLACE STEVENS connected the concept of manner with the practice of mastery in a 1943 letter to his friend Henry Church on the subject of Vincent van Gogh. In an attempt to summarize Van Gogh’s paintings, which he had recently seen at the Wildenstein gallery in New York, he writes, “The word for all this is maniement” (L 459). The French word translates literally as “handling” and derives from the Latin manus for hand. Indeed, Stevens alludes to the figure of the master’s hand when he explains, “that is so often what one wants to do in poetry: to seize the whole mass of everything and squeeze it, and make it one’s own.” What appeals to Stevens is Van Gogh’s technical mastery—the commanding manner of brushwork that enables “the total subjection of reality to the artist.” Van Gogh is masterful not because he indulges in any “mania of manner,” Stevens adds, but because his technique forcefully appropriates “reality” by means of a maniement, a deeply characteristic manner of handling his medium.

The following paragraph of the letter returns to Van Gogh in a fascinating way. Describing the impressive collection of books housed at the Pierpont Morgan Library, where he had visited after going to Wildenstein’s, Stevens expresses admiration for Pierpont Morgan and suggests that the library “will give you something to think about,” especially “when you consider that every book in the place is, after all, only another old pair of shoes” (L 459). The allusion is to Van Gogh’s famous paintings of pairs of used-up peasant shoes, which suggest the quality of a person having lived deeply within himself. By associating great literature with the maniement of Van Gogh’s paintings, we can imagine that what appealed to Stevens in general was the ethos of an artist, where ethos refers to habit: the shoes, by being so well-used, have authentic character. And this is analogous to the way that Van Gogh’s style of brushwork has integrity—a sense of having mastered the material through the repeated or habitual actions of walking and working. Stevens’ passage from the word “maniement” to the image of an “old pair of shoes” implies a passage from the hands to the feet—from figures of technè to figures of ethos.

These reflections are significant with respect to the complex etymology of the word “manner.” While the word refers back to manus, it is also related to the postclassical Latin maneries, which, according to Giorgio Agamben’s analysis in The Coming Community, possesses a range of ontological and taxonomical meanings: class, kind, sort, but also habit, conduct, and manner. Above all, Agamben interprets the term maneries by tracing it back to the verb manere, which means to persist. That which persists in its own mode or manner of being is, Agamben argues, singularity itself: “such a being is neither accidental nor necessary, but is, so to speak, continually engendered from its own manner” (27; emphasis in orig.).

As early as 1918, Stevens understood this about himself. In a now-famous letter that William Carlos Williams quoted in the prologue to Kora in Hell, Stevens explains,

My idea is that in order to carry a thing to the extreme necessity to convey it one has to stick to it; . . . Given a fixed point of view, realistic, imagistic or what you will, everything adjusts itself to that point of view; and the process of adjustment is a world in flux, as it should be for a poet. But to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility. . . . A single manner or mood thoroughly matured and exploited is that fresh thing. . . .

(Williams 15; 1st ellipsis in orig.)

Or to put the matter in more philosophical terms, Agamben suggests,

Perhaps the only way to understand this free use of the self . . . is to think of it as a habitus, an ethos. Being engendered from one’s own manner of being is, in effect, the very definition of habit (this is why...