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I
Having
all of James Merrill’s poetry between covers (with the exception only
of the quirky, bizarre, unwieldy—and in the opinion of more than a few
doyens of the craft, brilliant—The Changing Light at Sandover [1982]) is a singular achievement for
its editors J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, friends and literary
executors, both, of the much prized poet who succumbed to AIDS in 1995.
Placing the new Collected Poems
next to the much thinner Selected
Poems: 1946-1985 that came out nine years ago clearly indicates the
breadth, no less than the expense, of effort lavished by the editors on
their gifted friend’s behalf; and much gratitude is owed them for
their pains. To have this testament of Ariel at last in our hands, a
trove of beguilements so numinous that, hardly breathed upon, they can
make of the world according to Caliban—our world—a trim and magical prosperity,
is surely a signal event in American poetry and one which will send many
ripples outward for some time to come.
Less
numinous in Merrill is the split between man and artist, between voice
and vocalics. In fact, nowhere in contemporary American poetry is this
split more rivingly problematic than it is in this child of
prodigiousness and prodigality. Envied for the wealth and leisure he not
so much possessed as commanded, jealousy flowed like lava toward the
exceptional facility with which he outshone, outperformed, just plain outranked
those in competition with him for prizes and awards. Exacerbating this
was the extraordinary stewardship he showed in handling his career. It
was said that he negotiated its ups and downs like a money manager who
was good with bull markets because he was always suitably armed for
bear. Most rattling of all, his poise, studied and with an almost
reptilian indifference to publicity, made “the party’s over now”
histrionics of many peers, who like him came of age in the ‘40s and
‘50s, look scatterbrained by comparison.
But
while McClatchy and Yenser are to be praised for not letting a single
prentice work go A.W.O.L., it is the solidity of this omnium
gatherum as a whole that is in every way impressive. For one thing,
its elegance and scholarly fastidiousness break with the template
favored by many “edition managers” today, which is one of a sock
drawer, with labeled partitions for ease of access. Among the poems made
available for the first time in this Collected
Poems (seen through the press, let it be noted, by Knopf’s toniest
designers) are several in the poet’s earliest manner—pieces so
convoluted and sibylline as to have had only brief exposure before being
withdrawn. But more to the point, the reader of this complete edition
may now have in hand a batch of previously “uncollected” poems. The
majority of these fall in within Merrill’s characteristically laconic,
or even sardonic, vein of satire, where though the wit is hard-edged,
the target is often a bullseye of blurry indistinction. Among the more
trenchant of these is “Epiphalamium” (1981):
Look! in full view the
woman’s hands at his throat—
Embracing? strangling
him?—the young man rocks
Forward, back, too
glazed to struggle, wax
In those quick hands, a
smile on his lips, remote,
For of course he’s only a
dummy. She’s knotting the tie,
Manhattan this morning
is full of other such lovers
Behind glass overlaid
with clouds and gliding towers,
Trucks of the garment
district, passers-by.
Another
(1986), on the recently deceased poet Philip Larkin’s having ascended
to the ex cathedra:
He’s gone somewhere
But left his writing,
Plain and inviting
As a Windsor chair.
The sitters? Every sort.
Each struck that artless pose
We face our maker in. God knows
The likeness hurt.
His signature’s
Worm-drill and gleam of cherry
—Vacant now? Unwary
reader, all yours.
“Laser
Majesty” (1988) shows he can do hit and run—
Light show at the Planetarium.
Schlock music. Seven colors put through drum
Majorette paces. “We saw God tonight,”
Breathes Wendy. Yes, and He was chewing gum.
—while
“Delft” (1961) encapsulates the futilitarian humour of a world left
high and dry by art:
What’s left? No place.
After Vermeer
The storm roves elsewhere;
The fates make lace.
History left to steep
In teabrown water
Stretch and totter
On the brink of sleep.
Or by arrangement steal
Meekly from sight
As once more his great
Late light strikes tile
And in the cauldron
Of their own high glaze
Even nowadays
Small figures drown.
Poems like these—though
uncollected, they are in every sense mainstream Merrill—conduct
themselves as though the line of Anglo-American verse had never known a
single romantic swerve between the death of the Augustans and the
investiture of Daryl Hine at Poetry.
Their models are the chiseled musings from The
Greek Anthology and poets dear to Maecenas—mostly the latter—all
meticulously ranged on the chessboard of literature and ready to do
battle with the dumbing down of just about everything. The pantheon of
modernists (with the exception perhaps of Wallace Stevens), if anywhere
acknowledged in the Merrill canon, figure only as third-generational
ghosts, backing and filling on estates owned by Elizabeth Bishop,
Eugenio Montale, and Constantine Cavafy.
Or so it would be
simpler to maintain, were it not for the Blakean, Wordsworthian,
Yeatsian—even Whitmanian—stumbling block of Merrill’s almost
sequoia-thick entrée into a
world (and genre) likelier associated with Edgar Cayce or Shirley
MacLaine than with a distinguished formalist poet: The
Changing Light at Sandover. That poem, isolated from the rest of
Merrill’s work, gives but the scantest sense of this poet’s
formidable skill as a metricist and versifier, ambiguist and
paronomasiast. A not untypical page of Sandover
will crank itself up as follows—
MY DEARS A TOASTER! Today’s
visitor?
MM & I TWO SLICES POPPING UP
Did you peek? NO
ABSOLUTE RED BLINDNESS
SLICING DOWNWARD LIKE A KNIFE
Did you hear?
THRU OUR CLOSED EYELIDS
WHEN U CLOSED YRS A
HUMMING BEGAN THE
AUDITORIUM
TREMBLED LIKE E’S TERRACE & THE BLADE
OF SILVER FELL IT
WAS I FEAR A FAR
GRANDER MASQUE THAN OURS . . .
—whereas
the Merrill of record sounds, in the best sense, more conventionally
(and self-critically) rather like this:
All day from high within the skull—
Dome of a Pantheon, trepanned—light shines
Into the body. Down
that stair
Sometime’s there’s fog: opaque red droplets check
The beam. Sometimes tall redwood-tendoned glades
Come and go, whose dwellers came and went.
Now darting feverishly anywhere,
Manic duncecap its danseuse eludes,
Now slowed by grief, white-lipped,
Grasping the newel bone of its descent,
This light can even be invisible
Till a deep sparkle, regular as script,
As wavelets of an EKG, defines
The dreamless gulf between two shoulder blades.
(“The Instilling,” 1995)
For
who but Merrill could so caparison impression with detail that a
couturier, eyeing “Page from the Koran”’s
opening stanza, would have difficulty pointing to where the silken skin
of the one leaves off and the silk-like-skin of the other begins?
A small vellum environment
Overrun by black
Scorpions of Kufic script—their ranks
All trigger tail and gold vowel-sac—
At auction this mild winter morning went
For six hundred Swiss francs.
One
thing about which there is no doubt, however, is that the weightiness
and heft of this Collected Poems declare
on every page the care taken in provisioning (as though for the next
world) what must be the most opulently elected poetic tombeau
since Edgar Allan Poe’s by that eminent committee of Symbolistes, among whose members could be counted Baudelaire and
Mallarmé. All of which no doubt stands as a tribute (perhaps more sweet
than fitting) to a poet who, having immersed himself in la belle époque’s tenuous remains for nearly half a century,
perfected an idiom in which the piss-elegant and the comme il faut could hold converse, if only on alternate days and on
a morganatic basis. Or, to push the metaphor a silly millimeter farther,
as camp followers of what George Meredith (himself a rebellious castaway
of an age only slightly less given to political correctness than our
own) stigmatized as “the army of unalterable law.”
Taken
as a biograph (albeit detail-enhanced) of his growth as an artist over
that considerable span of years, Merrill’s Collected
Poems vaporizes Richard Howard’s view, as expressed in his
voluminous study Alone with
America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 (1971;
enlarged edition, 1980), that the poet who authored First
Poems (1951), The Country of a
Thousand Years of Peace (1959), and Water
Street (1962) was indubitably “the most decorative and glamour-clogged
America had so far produced.” As a navigator among verse forms, often
of his own curious devising and which not infrequently pitted a rhyming
Scylla against an elaborately conceited Charybdis, the young Merrill had
watched his skill in weaving pseudo-intoxicatedly between lanes of
clogging elders grow and reach mind-boggling proficiency. It could even
be said that this precocity allowed him to outmaneuver the sculls
launched against his talent by the maturational crises that befell him
in his years of setting out, when as man and poet it had seemed prudent
(as well as expeditious) to find his footing simply by sitting on his
hands.
Whether
in Greece or Rome, New York or Stonington, Connecticut (home to Water
Street, without italics), Merrill in poems preceding those in The Fire Screen (1969) and Braving
the Elements (1972) appeared to be taking an eraser to times that
had once seemed marked to him with an indelible pencil. In those volumes
a redoubtable artfulness was clearly emerging, but only because, in a
rather more subtle way, a commitment to art was being deferred. For
something as superfine as true poetry to materialize beyond a spume of
words it takes more than just a candle-length of time consuming itself in
vacuo, which means more—a great deal more—than could be brought
to book in—and here Richard Howard’s phrase is marvelously
apt—“crewell-work, lacquer-work and decorative flourishes.” It
requires all that Howard reported he had found in Merrill after Water
Street:
...I used to reproach this poet, or at least to approach him warily,
for being...bejewelled. Cloudy emeralds, star sapphires, glaucous
pearls were on every page, studding the desolation like tears. No
longer: everything has been clarified, consumed, and one looks through
the brilliant poems to the experience they render possible
by their intensity of purpose, their diamond-hard joy; nothing is
decoration or décor now in
Merrill’s poetry, for the poet has discovered the link between what is
cosmetic and what is cosmic. His poems are orders of experience from
which he has won the right to be the deus
absconditus, present everywhere in his works, and only there....
While
no poet should be denied the right to “only connect”—between
Cracker-jack and Machiavelli, if need be—allowance for certain
allowances is at times difficult to make. The one Howard
proposes—putting “cosmetic” together with “cosmic”—pays off
because of their mutual association with the Greek word kosmos (or “order”). This is good to know since it lets Howard
off the hook for appearing to let the then dominant thematic of
Merrill’s art ride on so spongy a reductio
as “The make-up of one is on the same order as the makeup of all.”
Thus his discerning of a new dynamic at work in Merrill’s verse after
1966 makes it seem a real stretch to dismiss the witty
labyrinths-in-verse Merrill was designing at that time as the
hobbyhorsing around of a sorcerer’s apprentice and not much more.
In
first trying his wings as a poet Merrill found intriguing ways to
disguise a lack of genuine originality. As a result of having to learn
how to mask absence of content with complexity roiled to an impenetrable
spume, he made the discovery that symbolic depths would appear to yawn
if distracting contextuality was laid down in sufficiently thick layers.
In the shamelessly sycophantic “Accumulations of the Sea” (to cite
but one example of the early Merrill’s “composition-by-osmosis”),
borrowings from Eliot and Stevens are inadequate proof against miscues
into side- or end-pockets that reveal that games of kiss-and-telamon
(such as those given real-life fleshing out in his memoir A
Different Person (1993) can not only be played without definite
rules but without balls as well:
We watch
the skeletons of childhood sunken
In sockets of the
beach, oyster-white stone,
Bone, shell,
sophistications of nostalgia,
A music as of time on
the victrola. . . .
The
emptiness of a gambit like this is all too quickly mocked by the time it
marks. And indeed, it soon became apparent—even to so sibylline a poet
as Merrill—that double-think alone, even with Tiresian Big Brothering
added in, does not a Waste Land
make. Having bared in First Poems
(1951) the carapaces the super-sensitive among us use to shield
themselves from untimely recognitions (and even less timely exposures),
Merrill wasn’t above banking the fires down below for the sake of
matching up—Emily Dickinson-style—compensatory balms with
homeopathic Gileads of pain adduced for the occasion. When the Belle of
Amherst was in an “acorns from lilies”-wringing mood, as in this
1891 poem—
Essential Oils—are wrung---
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns—alone—
It is the gift of Screws—
The General Rose—decay—
But this—in Lady’s Drawer
Make summer-When the Lady lie
In ceaseless Rosemary—
she
is essentially on the same wavelength as Merrill, who also holds that
the work of the sun, unaided by press or screws, is more likely to bring
forth bouillon than elixir. Lovers know their passion will not run
aground for a nettle or two, and that love coaxed from its rut can make
delicious any opening made to the ministering angel of
le dérèglement du tout, if flesh and spirit alike are willing:
The air is
sweetest that a thistle guards
And purple thistles in
our blue air burn
And spiny leaves hold
close the light we share.
The loose tides sprawl
and turn and overturn
(Distant pearl-eaters
gorging) on the shore,
While taut between
those waters and these words,
Our air, our morning,
the poignant thistles weave
Nets that bind back,
garland the hungering wave.
As
an allegory of the homoerotic give-and-take lodged within a Greek idyll
of live-and-slake, these lines seem serviceable if a trifle coy. Merrill
is plain-speaking to a well-closeted in-group whose notion of style
entails avoiding the homely at any cost while indulging (behind shielded
grins) in the familiar anodyne (famously carted out in the film version
of James Jones’s novel From Here
to Eternity) of crescendoing waves of score being paranomasially
converted into waves audibly and visibly pounding a shore. His disdain
for such compromises doesn’t stop at water’s edge, however. In poems
like “Variations . . . “ (cited above), the upper harmonics of
Merrill’s idiom invokes a form of camp so high its atmospherics hardly
reflect the pre-Stonewall stonewalling the gay lifestyle was driven to
in the straight-laced and homophobic brig that was America at
mid-century.
Similar
testing of the return policy of the Repressed (if not of the explicitly
sexual kind) may also be detected in the mastodonnish garrulities of,
would you believe it, Wallace Stevens’s later years—most noticeably
perhaps in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” “Auroras of
Autumn,” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” There may be less
querulousness shown in Merrill’s efforts to determine the domestic
content in American negativism as opposed to that imported; but by a
considerable margin those abstract and largely over-the-hill tootlings
on the kazoo laid down by the Surety Bondsman from Hartford—and
Randall Jarrell’s oft-cited impatience with them is right on the
money—are they not less seemly than their seeming might seem? Might
those reams of Emerson-stücke, so frozen in their half-light and cherished only by Harold
Bloom, be hiding something subfusc that perhaps warrants closer
scrutiny?
But to go down that
road is to open wide the door to public prying of the sort literary
studies was warned to abjure in T. S. Eliot’s door-slamming manifesto
of 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” There being no
evidence of lids being kept on by force of will—at least not sexual
ones—in these late Stevens extravaganzas, no need exists to scour the
countryside for keys with which to prise them open. Still, what remains
most odd—and difficult to pin down—about Merrill’s publications in
the ‘50s is their apparent indifference to commotions within the gay
artistic community beyond
MacDougall Street, which is to say that part of Greenwich Village
distinguishable from the zone of intemperance that in a few short years
would become notorious as the East Village, a drug culture and punk-prole
redoubt more in tune with East Berlin than Manhattan. It was precisely
these below-ground rumblings that provided the best advance notice of
the mountain building that was about to begin and later reveal itself as
the New York School of poetry. Not for Merrill the eat-on-the-run
improvisations of a Schuyler or a Koch, whose poems trope their own de
trop-ness and trump the trashiness of the popcult they venerate with
decks of flashcards canny enough for a Houdini to have stacked them.
Merrill’s composing vortex—unlike, say, Frank O’Hara’s—seems
not so much a funnel of cyclonic particulars seeking to discharge its
energy as an eddy or backwater in which flotsam and jetsam of polychrome
tint are left to swirl, whirl, purl, reel and spin in tightly concentric
patterns.
Having
perfected the dynamic able to loose these configurations into
reiterative structures similar enough within a range of variations to
constitute a style (which only
seems to fizz and pop like a force of nature), Merrill never once
looked back. Their windtunnel effects might vary from poem to poem, but
the symphony of wavelets lapping metrically over sandbars of images
remains a triumph of controlled agitation. Nor is the downward thrust to
meaning ever permitted to overtax the formalistic current giving the
wavelets their characteristic wind-bruised “thwack.” “The Blue
Grotto,” from Late Settings (1985),
sinuously demonstrates how interplay of flux and rivulet shape and
extend an aperçu most other
poets would have been content to scry through aspic:
That boatman rowed into
That often sung impasse.
Each visitor foreknew
A floor of lilting glass
A vault of rock, lit blue.
But here we faced the fact.
As misty expectations
Dispersed, and wavelets thwacked
In something like impatience,
The point was to react.
Alas for characteristics!
Diane fingered the water.
Don tested the acoustics
With a paragraph from Pater.
Jon shut his eyes—these mystics—
Thinking his mantra. Jack
Came out with a one-liner,
While claustrophobiac
Janet fought off a minor
Anxiety attack.
Then from our gnarled (his name?)
Boatman (Gennaro!) burst
Some local, vocal gem
Ten times a day rehearsed.
It put us all to shame:
The astute sob, the kiss
Blown in sheer routine
Unself-consciousness
Before one left the scene . . .
Years passed, and I wrote this.
Unself-consciousness,
years passed. . .this: the
hallmark of the early Merrillian vortex is a waterslide of sibilance (sibyllance?),
as though the only way to keep the flinty surface of time from giving
off sparks of boredom was to damp it with extinguishing sounds. But
since the meaningless must in some way give rise to the meaningful (how
else account for the poem eked from mere rummage?), from a sea-bottom of
attenuations there must surely arise, wrapped in plummy coincidence,
proof beyond sheen of credulity that "all things in time grow
musical.” Do we not still read Pound’s “Portrait d’une Femme”
to experience what it is like to be caught in the undertow of such
assurances?
II
As
with other virtualists of a style too pockmarked with candor to qualify
as “grand” but not quite enervated enough to drop to the
self-gratulatory demotic, Merrill’s forte is the “representative
poem.” The revelatory birthmark of this genre is the weighing in with
a testament whose codicils, aureate with gravity, set forth the
conditions that have shaped the poet’s calling, but its dispository
form is not set in concrete. Merrill ended up writing more poems of this
kind than almost anyone else of his generation because, quite simply, he
could afford to. By calling in the debt of his own enormous personal
wealth he could project beyond Stonewall (and later, the catastrophe of
AIDS) the almost pedestrian normality of the American homosexual poet
abroad (or the much traveled homosexual American poet with a pied
à terre in Connecticut and New York) in a way denied fellow writers
without such freedom of movement. As the privileged son of one of the
founders of Merrill, Lynch & Company, a brokerage house eponymized
as “The Thundering Herd” in days when bull markets stretched far as
the eye can see, the path lay open to him to defy convention from both
sides of sex’s third rail and try to write honestly, if somewhat
convolutedly, about the outlawry that Alfred Kinsey in his famous report
came near to identifying not with sin and vice, but with arrested
adolescence. Having himself
never experienced a bear market’s comeuppance, Merrill had to learn,
in a very different woodshed, that too much of a good thing can leave
one adrift amid hankerings—no less compensatory—for the anorexic,
the excruciating, the gorgeously demeaned and befouled.
The size of
Merrill’s Collected Poems
would appear rather to have him hoist on the petard of the observation made
by Dylan Thomas that the kingdom of versifiers is populated entirely by
slim poets with fat volumes and fat poets with slim volumes. He was, and
remained until his death, slight of build and possessed of a mischievous
charm suggesting (when The
Changing Light at Sandover is front and center) Puck with a black
belt in oneirics.
Certainly
it could truthfully (if reflexively) be said of his work that “’His
true Penelope was Auden’”—the quotes within quotes recalling Ezra
Pound’s Mauberley II rather than Mauberley
I (a heroic astringency having replaced a sedentary grace), at least
in the prolepsis of retrospect, in the verse published after Water Street (1962). A new firmness in the form of a more resonant
timbre becomes discernible in his poetry beginning with Night and Days (1966), a collection whose poem titles “Violent
Pastoral” and “Days of 1964” reflect a decided darkening
overtaking the pastel figurations of earlier pieces such as “The
Charioteer of Delphi” and “For Proust.” “A Vision of the
Garden” (from the 1962 volume) had opened with the self-administered
remonstrance of a childhood experience associated with etching faces on
a frozen pane. The poet recalls seeing in lined transparencies created
by a finger’s warmth a winter garden heavy with the promise of sun on
snow. The child, now molten man, fashions from memory and ice long since
dissolved a face whose features are made indistinguishable from his
present lover’s by the increased resolution of years spent
anticipating the melting of other, more emotionally restricting ice. But
the poet takes no comfort in having supplanted the child whose
loneliness caused him long ago to coax a rebus of warmth out of a nimbus
of frost. Rather he senses, with impending dread, the coldness that will
someday claim what two winters, coalescent in dream and synchronic in
dread, froze anticipatorily into being:
. . .
I was a child, I did
not know
That what I longed for would resist
Neither what cold lines
should my fingers trace
On colder grounds
before I found anew
In yours the features
of that face
Whose words whose looks alone undo
Such frosts I lay me
down in love in fear
At how they melt become
a blossoming pear
Joy outstretched in our
bodies’ place.
The
hesitancies attendant upon acknowledging the sexual orientation of the
love amortized in these lines cause them to be weighed down with an
agogic stammer noticeably out of sync with the emotions under review.
The rewards of synchronicity hint at their own otherworldly redemptive
potential as a metaphor of the creative process itself. To “undo /
Such frosts” as memory throws up to confirm loneliness’s capacity to
outregenerate love is to dissolve the pleasure/pane principle that
throughout much of his childhood had the poet under its green thumb.
Another poem, “After
Greece,” also from the period of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s,
presses a similar claim but appertaining to a much different homestead
and gourmet’s paradise. Its opening gambit is one of cultivated
knowingness, with a trace of Wildean wisdom adulterated—regrettably,
one feels—to a child’s dose of Gidean immoralism:
Light into the olive
entered
And was oil. Rain made
the huge pale stones
Shine from within.The
moon turned his hair white
Who next stepped from
between the columns,
Shielding his eyes. All
through
The countryside were
old ideas
Found lying open to the
elements.
Of the gods’ houses
only
A minor premise here
and there
Would be balancing the
heaven of fixed stars
Upon a Doric capital.
Real
seriousness peeking out from behind a jaded insouciance: a Cavafian
signature not at all infrequently encountered in Merrill’s first flush
of poetic maturity. It can be seen in a number of pieces in the section
devoted to previously uncollected poems at the back of the volume under
review, and it is very much the strategy shaping the sample of work
submitted by Merrill to The New
Poets of England and America (1957), a “quality paperback”
anthology edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, that
sought to capitalize upon the interest in young writers sparked by the
unusual commercial success enjoyed by such cutting-edge mass market
literary magazines as New World
Writing, New Campus Writing and
Discovery. Though a second collection along similar lines appeared
with its title unchanged seven years later, both versions of New
Poets—and especially the first—came under withering fire by
critics who later claimed the years had confirmed what many had feared
when the anthology first came out: not a single memorable poem was to be
found anywhere in its nearly 350 pages.
Merrill’s
contribution to the 1957 volume consisted of four poems—“The Bed,”
“Cloud Country,” “Variations: The Air Is Sweetest That a Thistle
Guards,” and “For a Second Marriage”—all of which were written
around 1950-51 and mirror in their primly paraded particulars the
tight-ass smarts and Funk & Wagnall dyspepsia of the poets for whom
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was the very bellow of the Anti-Christ. No need to name names
here—sobriquets like the Tweed Contingent, the Moss-covered poets, and
Wilbur’s Talking Mules, say it all: appropriate etiquette for poets
required that legs be kept closed, obscurity made a watchword, and a
grasp of technique be sufficiently flaunted to cause even deeper lines
to apear in the Audenian face and jaws to hit the floor at Bard and
similar places. Here is Merrill in “The Bed,” showing all and sundry
how this hat trick is consummated:
Where do we go, my
love, who have been led
Afire and naked to our
firelit bed?
For look! Someone is
sleeping there, his head
Pinned to the pillows by his own left arm,
Who sinks, who in swift
currents of alarm
Sinks glistening (as
though the night were warm)
Down through the rocking fathoms of the skin
To where the dreamers,
brows on arms, begin
Bearing the dream each
has been trammeled in. . . .
And
so on, coyly ad nauseam,
to the unbelievably arch conclusion (reached in the tenth and final
tercet) in which the possibility of a threesome (dangled smirkingly
thoughout) is decorously—the phrase is too delicious to resist—put to bed with a regretfully dismissive wave of the hand. The
revels having ended, the speaker calls it a night, and exhausted from so
much expenditure of wit and wisdom,
admonishes his lover to let the sleeper be, opportunities for their own
late-night wick trimming lying elsewhere.
Come, leave him to his dream. Too long we’ve kept
Watch by this bed familiar except
For one strange sleeper. It is time we slept.
The
serious and true knowledge masked by this shorted-out fabliau
is that to be part of a triangle necessitates the taking of sides, which
more often than not results in the flatlining of two relationships, not
just one. “Sleeper” is a lover’s code equivalent for fifth column,
killer virus, time bomb; the bed of the poem’s title is a seedbed, for
horrors unleashed because prudently forsworn.
Merrill’s
second contribution, “Cloud Country,” mostly forswears originality
and we see cumulous dollops of Stevensiana scudding by like conceptual
balloons in a comic strip’s idea of order. Its onset is pure Jaques to
Amiens, if how he liked it were at all ascertainable:
How like a marriage is
the season of clouds.
The winds at night are
festive and constellations
Like stars in a
kaleidoscope dissolve
And meet in astounding
images of order.
How like a wedding and
how like travelers
Through alchemies of a
healing atmosphere
We whirl with hounds on
leashes and lean birds.
What, oh what, are we to make of such
stuff? Poems like this don’t mean or symbolize, they portend. For heaven’s
sake, even Stevens’s reports to the loons on Chocorua and Catawba gave
us something mullable to moon
over, but “Country Clouds” merely leaves us with the impression of
having been mooned by the unmullable. True and serious knowledge? How
much sagesse can a passel of clouds recuperate? The “we” who “like
voyagers . . . come upon this season of right clouds, / Valors of
altitude, white harbors . . . ,” hit the gangplank of the third and
last stanza feeling as though on a tour of San Francisco Bay we’d been
shown the Golden Gate bridge from the interior of one of its girders.
Still, here’s no denying that the smugness (masquerading as gratitude
laced with wonder) undercoating the diction is as close to a content as
this smarmy simulacrum of a poem ever comes. The pea is there, but in
this game of “Con the Rube” the shells palm one another.
In
fairness to Merrill, his offerings are far from being the most blague-ridden and unreadable in the anthology. Other poets, some
destined to make as respected a name for themselves as he, turned in
performances that, to rate them charitably, range from creakingly dull
to downright wretched. Part of the problem with being a poet whose
adolescence coincided with the Depression and hard upon that, the Second
World War, was that for many the post-war years entailed a second exile,
spent most often in France or Italy. Though such an experience can
indeed be bracing, much of the
acculturation to European mores, many Americans find, occurs only in
returning home—if such a place exists—to answers outgrown and
“days reflected in a doubtful mirror”:
But where is home—these walls?
These limbs? The very spaniel underfoot
Races in sleep toward what?
It is autumn. I did not invite
Those guests, windy and brittle, who drink my liquor.
The
demeaning forgetfulness; the bait of booze (one’s own) causing
fishnets to be thrown over one’s attempts to make it upstream; the
dogcollar of class chafing from the side of privilege and servitude, both—all
three are as endemic to the “age of Auden” as a Noël Coward quip.
But the guests, windy and brittle, are as undeniably linked to The
Waste Land as that sullen (and by 1940 utterly clichéd)
Anglo-American entre-deux-guerres cocktail—with
its dash of bitters floating up astringencies of Nightwood
and Hollywood—that calls up images from West’sThe
Day of the Locust in fiction and
bits out of Kenneth Fearing’s jargon-slang-and-patter routines in
verse. Superficially, the effect is
of Auden Redivivus; but then, we’re pressed to recall that much of the
illusionism that allows us to imagine the lion’s share of Auden
surviving the tarpits of the ‘30s and ‘40s derives from the
impression conveyed—mostly by its severity and lilt—of an Eliot
clone, English-educated (unlike Old Possum himself), a smash at
unsticking wickets, and as congenially at home as at play in the fields
of the bored.
At
that time Auden could write, as he did in “September 1, 1939,” lines
that shocked readers unwilling to acknowledge that anxiety and
complacency were two sides of but one narcissistic coin—though they
would later be dropped from his Collected
Poems on grounds of dishonesty:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Though
expressions like these wormed their way into so many anthologies that
even summary expungement could not annihilate their genial chromosomes,
their flip arabesques of abstraction make them today seem hobbled by the
very nursery-bound anodynes their author once thought proof against
shadow-boxing with evil. Too facile even to be morbid, they also lacked
mordancy enough to arouse anything but the self-pitying and
vice-indulgent mea culpas that
increasingly had become the ruck of that Estate most given to taking the
Fifth.
Merrill,
to his credit, admired the less mercurial Auden, the down-at-heels
Juvenal caught between the
middlebrow pretentiousness of Harold Ross’s
New Yorker and the highbrow, High
Anglican austerity of
Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday. A grimly vacant style to airless wanness beat is what it most
resembled—or to put it another way, the Auden style that didn’t
reach its apogee of attenuation until the early to mid-‘50s, when
poems like “In Praise of Limestone” and “The Shield of Achilles”
started trickling into journals in which taste in poetry was not so much
exhibited as legislated.
It was this ability to
discern the difference between self-indulgence and self-refulgence that
turned Merrill away from the factitiously Audenish
and toward the legitimately Audenesque.
What this entailed was a virtuosic eclecticism and facility with verse
forms that made the wit-suffused moralizing that characterized the early
‘60s a medium that even an Iowa U.-hauler could thrash about in. Less
a Wildean cold shower than a “dangerous supplement” born first of
“thinking the unthinkable” with Herman Kahn and later of unthinking
the thinkable in line with the tantric pretzel-warps designed in Paris,
the New Dispensation turned the couch-potato poet away from things
bookish toward large and small screens activated by them. It also
allowed the underside of Auden, the discreetly suppressed homosexual
side, to luxuriate in the thaw which some hoped would ultimately
transform the the traditional gay as pariah into the gay as persona
grata. The latter represented a radical departure from the
compulsively overcompensating quean so stylishly outed in Susan
Sontag’s paean to the closet, “Notes on Camp” (1964). Auden
certainly could not have written the lines from “16.IX.65,” from the
1969 Merrill collection, The Fire Screen, that follow, though the vacation from rhyme and the
other amenities of formalism are not beyond the asperities of the
English poet’s later manner:
Summer’s last half-moon waning high
Dims and curdles. Up before the bees
On our friend’s birthday, we have left him
To wake in their floating maze.
Light downward strokes of yellow, green, and rust
Render the almond grove. Trunk
after trunk
Tries to get right, in charcoal,
The donkey’s artless contrapposto. . . .
These
are, as Merrill’s title flatly suggests, Ruskinesque tidbits otherwise
consignable to a Tagbuch or
artist’s diary. The poem commemorates a day of splendid Mediterranean
fishing in the company of close friends, a time of feeling gloriously at
sea and suspended within a time warp of living for its own sake—which
is to say, enjoying a life free of care and the sexual and financial
worries that care inevitably wreaks upon insouciance. The poet is
wakeful not only to the day’s unappeasable serenity, but also to its
brilliancies and half-lights which sparkle like “line after spangled
line of light, light verse”:
The tiny fish risen excitedly
Through absolute transparence
Lie in the boat, gasping and fanning themselves
As if the day were warmer than the sea.
In
this grunion run of small but unimprovable splendors, even the donkey,
Mavrili, shares in the bounty so glisteningly strewn in the path of the
blessed. The certitude of the moment’s uniqueness is matchless,
uncompromisable:
A radio is playing “Mack the Knife”.
The morning catch fills one straw hat.
Years since I’d fished. Who knows when in this life
Another chance will come?
Between our toes unused to sandals
Each step home strikes its match.
And now, with evening’s four and twenty candles
Lit among stars, waves, pines
To animate our friend’s face, all our faces
About a round, sweet loaf,
Mavrili brays. We take him some,
Return with honey on our drunken feet.
An
unsulliable contentment, which comes near to out-etherealizing the
Burguete episode of Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises, graces these day’s-end disbursements of sun
and sea. However, unlike Jake
Barnes’s redemptive interlude amid the trout-streams of Spain, it
remains very much a terrestrial, rather than a paradisial, happiness,
accoutered in the peacefulness of a singular time and place. On this
occasion the poet is enjoying a busman’s holiday from family wealth
and creative leisure management, the bliss of the super-rich child with
a blind trust in everything and everything in a blind trust.
Being
free to look, the poet is free also to overlook what mere looking will
not let him see. Which is why he is where he is, soaking up the Greek
sun and putting off indefinitely what the alternate self of A
Different Person: A Memoir (1993) later nostalgically recollected
having been part of: namely, a campaign waged during that formative
season of his life when it seemed possible to “disentangle . . .
ourselves from our past and present worlds.” Such double evasion of
indirection could, he learned, be brought off by settling into
hypostases of cinematic transcendence which in fact remained his poetic
hallmark even when, after years of draping his stage on which these were
projected in velvet of the most luxuriant sheen, it became difficult to
tell the best boy from the merely ambitious grip. His homosexuality had
something to do with this, but it tonsured, not shaped, his mature
poetic demeanor. The pudding incorporating life and art is proof against
its own too rapid eating by those too preoccupied with what Winston
Churchill in a famous after-dinner remark (involving a rather different
pudding) called its “theme.” It is perhaps unfair to say (but for
all that no less true) that later Merrill is all too often early
Merrill, second-run; but do the first stanza of “Words for Maria”
written in the late ‘60s—
Unjeweled in black as
ever comedienne
Of mourning if not
silent star of chic,
You drift, September
nightwind at your back,
The half block from
your flat to the Bon Goût,
Collapse, order a black
Espresso and my ouzo in
that Greek
Reserved for waiters,
crane to see who’s who
Without removing your
dark glasses, then,
Too audibly: “Eh,
Jimmy, qui sont ces deux strange men?”
—and
this vignette, no less filmic, from “Last Mornings in California,”
cementing the handprint of the early-to-mid-‘80s—-
Another misty one.
These opaline
Emulsions of world and
self. Paulette high up
In eucalyptus uttering
her sun cry.
Arms reaching for the
glimmer coming, going.
Tan shingle house, its hearth outcold, its tenant
Likewise, under
patchwork. Fortune told
In Cups, a child on
whom the Sun sweats fire,
The cards inverted,
strewn, and his wild words
“Fool that once was and Hermit one now is,
Simple Death we’ll
both feel like tomorrow—“
—-really
inhabit different staging areas? Or are they merely stowed in separate
compartments of the same time capsule, differently wrapped but with
bloodlines showing through multiple epidermal layers of forgetfulness?
Frank
O’Hara, Merrill’s imprecise contemporary and in more respects than
either would have been willing to cop to, his “opposing self” within
gay circles, was among the first to take the step—somewhat radical in
those days—of becoming a homosexual poet
rather than writing as a poet who happens to be gay. He felt his way, at
first haltingly and then more confidently, through a thicket of
adolescent crushes before seizing upon the artistically profitable
Arthurian/Auteur-ian romance
of American movies as a metaphorical home-away-from-home. Through a
heroic act of world-transforming imagination O’Hara made the not very
numerous readers of his Lunch
Poems, Meditations in an Emergency, and other collections feel that
the Hollywood pulsing behind the titillations hawked by the tabloids was
somehow as innocent, as inarguably
splinters of the true cross, as Dorothy’s emerald slippers or the
Crimson Pirate’s toothy smile. The golden age of the movies—auras of
Garbo and Dietrich for those cresting its swell, days of swine and
grosses for those merely indentured to its swill—was, he had come to
believe, the only Erhebung,
with or without motion, America was ever likely to be moved by en
masse, so why not encourage a distinctly American poetry to reach
for such megalopolitan nirvana in
verse? After all, had not the most accomplished Erhebungler
of them all, T. S. Eliot, created a new poetry by unleashing its
(albeit negative) form and dynamic in verse reflecting what Hugh Kenner,
in an essay on the origins of The
Waste Land, published in the 1970s, dubbed the “urban
apocalypse”?
For
the Merrill who had outgrown the facile conundrums on view in New Poets of England and America, however, the marriage of
anything—even bodies that had known heavenly embrace for a
time—cannot escape the emergence of a selfish, even sadistic, dynamic,
which is perhaps why as a critic he attains the highest levels of
perception only when plumbing another poet’s darker side. For example,
an assignment to appraise Volume I of The
California Dante, the Inferno,
edited and translated by Allen Mandelbaum, did indeed elicit some of
the most trenchant aperçus that poem of poems has managed to cull in recent years. But
just because a wedding allows to be displayed a manufacturer’s logo
reading “Made in Hell,” that is not in itself a guarantee that
precision engineering and quality control played a part in the nuptials
being celebrated. The probities Merrill finds meritorious in Dante are
quite markedly different from those he claims as indispensable to his
own purposes as a poet. As suggested earlier, he might belong to a
discriminated against minority, but he seems not at all concerned with
issues of concern to that constituency.
Can
poetry written with consummate skill, verve and intelligence somehow not be in the final analysis up there with even the work of those
giants occupying the rung below
the Homers, the Dantes and the Shakespeares? The enormously
distinguished career of James Merrill suggests that it can, though the
reservations attendant upon such a conclusion continue both troubling
and double-edged since his death six years ago. Those scrupulous
soundings of postwar epicurean Europe—and meso-stoic America—put out
over this author’s signature over the last half-century—who could
deny their salience as pulse-readings and fever charts of modern
selfhood’s new world order? And if they are not all the way to echt
as genuine article, then surely they have in them enough of the next
best thing as to bedazzle even the most demanding critic into downsizing
the disparity between so-called “classic” poetry and what the
majority of readers out to experience the Sistine Chapels and Musées
des Beaux Arts of the form usually end up settling for. Hence, the
artistic value of Merrill’s spiritualist junkets, like the meaning of
those Ouija-driven pow-wows with the Beyond that Sandover’s
megaphone refracts into
unnatural history, is neither here nor there. Since so many of that
poem’s insights transcend the quackery floated by its two amanuenses
as a breakthrough in psychic “channeling,” we can forgive Merrill
his chutzpah in trying to pass off recycled gnostic chopped liver as demiurgos-catered
ambrosia.
Still,
the obstacles presented to Merrill’s writing by such detours (and here
one can only hope posterity will not override present critical opinion)
cannot be overlooked, though the tendency of limpid conversational turns
(of which he was, in the view of many, a master) to overshadow the
shallow and meretricious in his work adds lustre to even his less
memorable efforts. In a poem like “Graffito” (1988), for instance,
what might never have risen above “times Roman, à
clef” takes on quite unexpectedly a resonance not to be predicted where
double-entendre serves both as raised eyebrow and as eyebrow-raiser.
Remarking ad lib on the found
poem of a graffito depicting a “forearm neatly drawn in black” and
bearing the logo of the Italian Christian Democratic party, the poet
ponders, with a curiosity bewitched by the fastidious indelicacy of the
icons in whose name ignorant armies of the benighted always clash with
sexual demons never consciously their own:
Arms and the man. This arm ends in a hand
Which grasps a neatly,
elegantly drawn
Cock—erect and
spurting tiny stars---
And balls. One sports .
. . a swastika?
Yes, and its twin, if
you please, a hammer-and-sickle!
The tiny stars, seen
close, are stars of David.
Now what are we
supposed to make of that?
Wink from Lorenzo, pout from Mrs. Pratt.
Hold on, I want to
photograph this latest
Fountain of Rome, whose
twinkling gist
Gusts my way from an
age when isms were largely
Come-ons for the
priapic satirist,
And any young guy with
a pencil felt
He held the fate of
nations in his fist.
No
suggestion here of Italian Hours
by Henry James tarted up as a Hans Werner Henze Singspiel;
but neither is it a drip-dry version of the all-wet (and yes, it needs
to be said, Cagily domesticated) Dada so readily given the echt stamp in such “out
there” cut-ups of the early New York School as Ashbery’s The Tennis-Court Oath or O’Hara’s Biotherm.
Fortunately for Merrill, he was always uncannily aware, even in
his own most forward-looking work, of when to leave well enough alone
and when, against the blandishments of form, to let intuition speak. He
thus escaped running afoul of the principle that better is often not
only the enemy of good, but, as that over-revised death’s head “Ode
to the Confederate Dead” by Allen Tate proclaims, its chief publicist
in hell as well. In his memoir A
Different Person (1993) Merrill
recalls how, when persuaded by his psychotherapist that he had
difficulty accepting love, he immediately sought ways to probe the
consequences of this insight to his poetry:
.
. . [In] an instant, dream-like transition I found myself talking about
my writing and defending my sense that a poem too easy to read was
without value. Not that I aimed at total impenetrability. My difficult
surfaces were rather a kind of . . . mask, an invitation to . . . to the
right reader who could have fought through to the poem’s emotional
core. Could I accept love from such a reader? I wasn’t at all sure
that I could.
Part II
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