5
THE SERAGLIO
1955–57
The Ouija board was portable, and so was Ephraim. Merrill and Jackson took him with them when they decamped from Stonington in mid-September and moved into a rambling red farmhouse, the home of Bill and Nancy Gibson, on a hilltop in Amherst. Merrill had agreed to replace Gibson in the Amherst English Department while Gibson spent the year on a sabbatical leave. The Gibsons’ house, far from town with beautiful rural views, would enable Merrill and Jackson to go on living together in privacy at a distance from New York City. Jimmy’s enthusiasm for it in letters indicates that staying clear of Manhattan had become important to his work. It was also important to his life with David, which, disguised by David’s marriage and their separate apartments in New York, remained half hidden from Merrill’s family—who could only approve of Jimmy returning to his and his father’s redbrick alma mater.
Merrill was paid $5,600 to teach two courses per semester. He took a section of Advanced Composition1 and a section of Introduction to Literature, the course created by Reuben Brower, who had left Amherst for Harvard. He was not a natural in the classroom, and he didn’t apologize about it. “I don’t really enjoy teaching,” he told Irma Brandeis. “The students aren’t nearly as individual as I remember them in my day (does everyone remark on this?).” He complained of the generic quality of the work he got in Advanced Composition, where students could choose to write fiction or poetry: “[T]he writers write either a short version of The Old Man and the Sea which I never read, or, still worse, of Prufrock, which I wish I’d never read; the really original spirits invent dry, dead, Teachable little poems, in which the surface of literature is marvelously reproduced—well,” he admitted, catching himself, “that is a way of learning; as long as one doesn’t stay in the museum, copying … Many’s the day I’ve done it myself.”
He didn’t let teaching stand in the way of his writing. While another writer would have been kept from the desk by his classroom duties, the opposite was true for Merrill. When Friar wrote to him skeptical about this decision to teach, he fired back, “Of course I do not need to teach; what saves me, even, is that I do not particularly like to teach.” The logic, though tortured, made sense: for Friar, who threw himself into his classes, “teaching represents a pitfall,” whereas for Merrill it was easy to set limits, and this gave him a freedom he didn’t have in the city, with its social demands, to which he found it much harder to say no. The Amherst job afforded him “3 full days a week in which to work and get my novel done—instead of living in New York, working no days a week. […] Surely of the last 5 or 6 years, this will be the least wasted.”
Merrill made friends with Benjamin DeMott, a young professor who would become a noted critic and novelist and a force in the Amherst English Department for many years to come. But he didn’t get on with most of his colleagues. All of them were men. His yellow shirt, French cuffs, and paisley ties mocked their regulation pipes and tweeds. He found them “tremendously touchy”: “one has only to remark, pleasantly enough, that one dislikes the short story as a form, and from the far end of the room a colleague will rise, turn purple, reveal himself as an author of several, and with a parting thrust—once, actually, ‘Well, I hate poetry!’—go off to share the incident with his coterie.” Robert Frost visited the campus, and Merrill, meeting him for the second time, found him “enchanting, a kind of Job in his long-johns and dazzling drift of hair, laughing to himself and muttering under his breath, well, well, it’s all been fun, it’s all a lark!” Jimmy was not cowed by the master, or by the institution’s reverence for him. He liked to imitate Charles Cole, the Amherst president, who introduced Frost with a lisp: “The winkles you see on Mr Fwost’s bwow are not age or wowwy, but the weight of the weath!”
DeMott remembered the difference between Frost and Merrill as guests at his family’s dinner table. Frost asked DeMott’s young daughter to copy one of his poems by hand, which he signed and presented as a gift to her. “Jim on the other hand made zero of his poetry. He concentrated purely on the kid, and dealt with the person before him not as someone to be schooled but as someone of independent human interest.” Over the years, DeMott saw that “Jimmy was very attached to families. He knew that ‘family fun’ was a crock. But his willingness to play the family game was marked.” In Amherst, Jimmy and David were surrounded by married couples and young families. They visited, and hosted visits from, Joe and U. T. Summers and their three small children, who were living in Connecticut now that Joe had joined the faculty of the state university in Storrs. After one visit, David was left reeling: “what a night, one child or another screaming, demanding water, feet tramping up and downstairs, the baby boy screaming for his 2am, 4am, and 6am bottles, doors shutting, johns flushing, faint sobbings. Boy …” The Summers family expanded Jimmy and David’s family by giving them a white kitten from their pet’s litter. Thinking of Henry James, Jimmy called her Maisie—“because of what she knows”—as if the cat were the queer couple’s only child, precociously sophisticated by exposure to their scandalous lives.
Another friend Merrill made during this year was Alison Lurie. Lurie was a graduate of Radcliffe and an aspiring fiction writer. She had come to Amherst with her husband Jonathan Bishop, a young instructor in the English Department and the son of the poet John Peale Bishop; they were the parents of an infant and a toddler. Merrill had met the Bishops five years before in Austria through Claude Fredericks, and the occasion had gone badly. He and Lurie faced off across a picnic blanket: he found her judgmental; she thought he was a snob; and neither one hid their reactions from the other. “After that, I hoped never to see her again,” Merrill admitted. Amherst gave them a second chance, yet they might not have become friends, Lurie reflects, “if it hadn’t been for David Jackson. I liked David instantly—almost everyone did, while it was common back then for people to take time to warm up to Jimmy.” David, she recalls, was “wonderfully attractive: blond, tanned, strong.” With a “casual, laid-back, wide-open spaces manner and slow cowboy drawl,” he dressed casually in “faded khakis and corduroy jackets and white or blue shirts with the sleeves rolled up” and “old tennis shoes or loafers.” He was, in short, nothing like the stereotype of an effeminate gay man. “David knew how to talk to a woman as if he were a straight man, whereas Jimmy talked to you as if between women.”
Jackson recorded his first impression of the Bishops in his diary:
J.B. strikes me as quite without compassion, […] and unhappily affected in ways only sons of famous men often can be […]. Allison [sic], brittle, tiny-voiced, her face wrenched down by a paralysis of one side is often very droll—usually at the cost of someone […]; telling indiscreet things in a faraway, innocent voice … They are not satisfied, obviously, with Amherst and, at the beginning of the evening, remarked that J.M. had a lucky position of being here one year, with detachment (money), and power (his father’s money). Tactless, if accurate, I thought.
His feeling warmed two weeks later when he and Merrill went to the Bishops’ for dinner. Encouraged that night by Lurie, who performed Tarot readings for them that night, they made and used a Ouija board on the spot, but had second thoughts on the way out the door:
A Roast, with J. B. carving careful, tiny slices (one had a picture of at least two other meals coming from it). But we began to feel at home. A bare, college rental, divided up house. Allison told our fortunes with Taro cards, at which she’s splendid. Long white fingers, her crooked mouth and high, careful voice being hypnotic. JM + self got poor Ephraim on the board, how we use him […]. Leaving, we wondered if—in front of all people—we should have demonstrated Ouija in front of her. She loves gossip. Ah well, would one want to slip through life unobserved?
Jackson was right: whether or not they wanted to be, he and Merrill were being observed, and those observations would turn up in Lurie’s prose.
Over the decades, they would be involved in several ways in her career as a writer. At first, they were simply an interested, supportive audience for her work. “I used to read my manuscripts to them,” she recalls. “They were both always flattering, and suggestions came from both of them.” Jackson liked the short novel she showed him, and commiserated when she couldn’t find a publisher. Merrill tended to have ideas about style and plot. Unlike some poets, he knew the history of the novel, and he liked many kinds of fiction. Lurie used to hold that “there were three writers you could use to figure out where someone stood: Dickens, James, and Dostoevski. But that didn’t work for Jimmy,” who relished all three. And of course he too was at work on a novel. For the time being, the three friends were on equal footing as yet-unpublished novelists.
Lurie had been involved with the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, and Merrill and Jackson went with her to see the theater’s performances of scripts by Richard Wilbur and John Ashbery. She introduced them to her friend V. R. Lang, known as Bunny, the eccentric, effervescent force behind that theater company. After Lang died of Hodgkin’s disease in the summer of 1956, Lurie composed a memoir in tribute to her. “I wrote it,” she explains, “because I was afraid I would forget about Bunny. People wanted copies. If Xerox had existed, the book never would have.” The book was a limited edition of the eighty-page memoir with a cover illustrated by Edward Gorey—which Merrill arranged and paid for to be printed in Munich in 1959. It turned out to be Lurie’s break. An editor saw it, asked if she wrote fiction, and the publication of the first of her many novels followed. “If there were no copies of the memoir” in circulation, she notes, “it is quite possible that I would never have been published.”
Merrill and Jackson fueled Lurie’s later work in another way by providing her with material. Her first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), evokes very closely the period of their friendship in Amherst a few years before. The central character is Emily Stockwell Turner, an English Department faculty wife who is alienated from her husband’s struggles on the tenure ladder, burdened by motherhood, and bored by the closed society of a small-town campus. She begins an affair with Will Thomas, who, once a promising composer, “doesn’t do anything now except play the piano now and then and talk.” Lurie narrates the novel from Emily’s point of view. But each chapter ends with a letter written by a visiting instructor in the English Department, a novelist with a camp style who describes life at Converse College (“Converse” was the name of the Amherst College Library) with bemused detachment to a painter in New York. In these epistolary codas, Lurie experiments with a voice based on Merrill’s: comic, biting, weary, and detached. The novel suggests how important he and Jackson were to her in 1955 as friends who had horizons larger than the Amherst English Department. She called the letter-writing novelist “Allen Ingram” and the painter “Francis Noyes”—combining the middle names of her two friends (Ingram and Noyes) and the names of the protagonists in the novels they were writing in Amherst, “Allen” in Jackson’s case, “Francis” in Merrill’s. There is also more than a dash of David in the charming libertine, Will Thomas, whose languishing musical talent may have derived from Lurie’s mistaken impression that Jackson had given up a potential career as a pianist and composer.
Lurie’s fourth novel, Imaginary Friends (1967), would draw on her friendship with Merrill and Jackson again, but this time without the identification and approval expressed in Love and Friendship. The novel is a satirical story about two male social scientists. While researching a cult, they are bewitched by a beautiful female medium who practices automatic writing and produces block-capital messages like the kind Jimmy transcribed from Ephraim; caught up in the cult’s pop-psych jargon and millennial fever, the two men succumb to the folly they came to study. Lurie was satirizing phenomena she was herself intrigued by. Jackson remarked on her talent for Tarot cards in 1955, and she cast horoscopes for her family and friends, including Jimmy and David. Yet Imaginary Friends reduces spiritualism to a risible mix of showmanship, vanity, and misplaced libido. She dedicated the novel to David and Jimmy in gratitude for their support of her career. But the story implied a negative judgment on their use of the Ouija board.
She made that view explicit in Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson, which appeared in 2001, six years after Merrill’s death and shortly before Jackson’s. It describes their Ouija board experience as a game that got badly out of control, until they couldn’t tell what was real and what was not. According to her, the board became a form of self-induced demonic possession, to which Merrill, driven by his ambition to make poetry out of spirit messages, was especially susceptible, and in which Jackson was enlisted against his will. For evidence, she quotes passages from The Changing Light at Sandover, as if the trilogy were a factual record of their séances rather than a poetic fiction based on them. “As I read through the last two-thirds of the book,” she writes, “I sometimes had the feeling that my friend’s mind”—Merrill’s mind—“was intermittently being taken over by a stupid and possibly even evil intelligence.”
This reaction to Sandover is consistent with her initial response to the Ouija board, back in Amherst in 1955. From the beginning, Lurie admits, “I didn’t care for Ephraim. […] He was foreign, frivolous, intermittently dishonest, selfishly sensual, and cheerfully, coldly promiscuous.” In turn, Ephraim didn’t care much for her. When she consulted the board with Jimmy and David, Ephraim explained that she was still at a low level of spiritual development, stage two. In her previous incarnation, she learned, “I had been a nineteenth-century English spinster missionary named Helena Pons-Toby who was sent to Africa to convert the heathen. After a while the heathen found her so annoying that they murdered her.” She read the message as a not-so-veiled threat from the heathen lurking in her friends’ unconscious.
U want expression the way a child who is too precocious wants it. A larger audience than dear JM + plates + candles. U remind me of a writer of our court who was a sec’y 2 Tibrex’s astronomer [secretary to Emperor Tiberius’s astronomer] who sat + sat + finally at 36 was discovered 2 have written many moving poems + a history of the senate […]. Brilliant, but 4 10 years we only knew of him as the astronomer’s sec’y.
If Jackson was the astronomer’s secretary who “sat + sat,” Merrill was the astronomer, his eyes boldly set on heaven. He asked Ephraim to send them “prophetic dreams,” but the spirit brushed aside the request (“Now now—JM”). Merrill wanted to make creative use of Ephraim, but didn’t yet see how to. After their first contact with Ephraim, Jimmy began a poem called “Voices from the Other World.” He completed it in November, and Howard Moss took it for The New Yorker. It was his first, and for many years it would remain his only, treatment of the Ouija board in a poem. In “Voices from the Other World,” Merrill receives a call from the Other World to which he responds hesitantly, diffidently, awaiting further instructions.
He begins by wondering whether these “mute spellers-out” should be called “voices” at all. To represent the spirits’ speech, he chooses small block capital letters. These give his verse a wholly original texture and “sound.” The capitals were a discovery that he made in verse: the transcripts from the Ouija board that he made in prose in the mid-1950s did not use them. Layering his voice with the spirits’ voices in this poem, Merrill combined colloquial aplomb and gnomic urgency, artful syntax and the crude shouting of headlines and telegrams. The board’s “voices” were an alternative to and escape from his voice as he was used to rendering it on the page, a voice that, at the same time, becomes notably more casual and colloquial, more natural and intimate in contrast to them. The first speaker is the young engineer from Cologne conjured when Merrill tried the board that first time with Buechner. He is followed by more:
Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde
Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,
Some childish and, you might say, blurred
By sleep; one little boy
Named Will, reluctant possibly in a ruff
Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled
Back the arras for that next voice,
Cold and portentous: ALL IS LOST.
FLEE THIS HOUSE. OTTO VON THURN UND TAXIS.
OBEY. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.
Little Will seems like a joke about Merrill’s reduced sense of willpower and his regression to childhood play at the Ouija board. The boy ushers in the alarming imperatives, “FLEE THIS HOUSE […] OBEY. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.” The poem steadies itself, shifting focus from the Other World to this one:
Frightened, we stopped; but tossed
Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold.
Each night since then, the moon waxes,
Small insects flit round a cold torch
We light, that sends them pattering to the porch …
The danger implied is that the mediums will end up like Shelleyan moths, singed by their brush with the “cold torch” of the supernatural. When they see nothing more forthcoming, however, they settle into a “nonchalant” attitude toward the spirits’ demands and threats:
But no real Sign. New voices come,
Dictate addresses, begging us to write;
Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom
In ways that so exhilarate
We are sleeping sound of late.
Last night the teacup shattered in a rage.
Indeed, we have grown nonchalant
Towards the other world. In the gloom here,
Our elbows on the cleared
Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred
Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone
Of our own voices and poor blind Rover’s wheeze […]
“Our lives,” Merrill says, “have never seemed more full, more real.” Queried by one of the scrupulous copy editors at The New Yorker, Merrill replied that Otto von Thurn und Taxis was a “fictitious,” not a real, name. Like the old dog Rover (at one point Merrill called him “Homer”), Otto was invented for the purposes of the poem. The one “real” voice quoted in the poem had come from that séance with Buechner. As if he wanted to claim his new experience with the Ouija board for poetry and yet also keep it a secret, Merrill makes no mention of Ephraim and his teachings.
Slight as it is, “Voices from the Other World” is an important poem. Two crucial subjects—the supernatural and Merrill’s domestic relationship with Jackson—enter his poetry here, and do so in tandem. Jimmy and David had discovered the Other World, but they didn’t disappear into it, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Like a mirror, it showed them to themselves, and it added meaning to their daily life together. Rather than Yeatsian “metaphors for poetry,” it gave them instructions for living. Merrill held the poem to a mirror so that Ephraim could read it, and he approved:
That is what u should feel, a higher sense of the life you have. JM u are an artist. ([JM:] Help inspire us!) I do not like 2 play the parent, but I must say in the work U do, in its vision[,] U recreate in it + then (in?) urselves. U R helping urselves. The happy accident is when work + life + merit combine. […] He like u who begins a work he can do + who only struggles 2 do it do more of it + better, is on his way 2 heaven. That is a law. […] Have courage, revel + faith. […] ([JM:] Are we too frivolous?) Never. I wd see U laughing, loving + devoting all of that + urselves 2 work. That, my earnest loves, is yr way.
Despite Ephraim’s confidence in both of them, work went more easily for Merrill than for Jackson. David was proud to see his name in print that fall as the author of a note in the Amherst Journal-Record and of a short story in Semi-Colon (Merrill’s poem, “Three Sketches for Europa,” appeared in the same number). But other news was bad. Harcourt Brace rejected his novel; three poems (David had tried his hand at poetry) came back from the Partisan Review; and his application for support from the Saxton Foundation was turned down. “F—k ’em all,” he grumbled.
Showing how it was done, Merrill pushed on in his novel. He hoped to complete it by his thirtieth birthday, but he finished six weeks sooner. Jackson was “ablaze” with admiration: “what a splendid and craftsmanlike, beautiful novel J.M. has done. I am taking careful notes on paragraphs and lines, making suggestions, but more often breaking off, rhapsodically, into praise!” (David suspected that, by means of his enthusiasm, he was trying “to get the novel out of my mind ‘as an example.’ Setting it too high or too distant to be a marker for my own writing.”) Merrill circulated the manuscript next among friends. By July, he had finished revisions and submitted it to Knopf, which scheduled the book for publication in 1957.
The Seraglio, composed with Merrill’s thirtieth birthday as a deadline, is a strange coming-of-age story. The broad lines and specific details of his own life are clearly visible in it. His parents are identifiable as Benjamin Tanning, the Wall Street tycoon, and Vinnie, Ben’s second wife, whom he divorced years ago. Vinnie has a rather minor role; the action centers on the father and his son. This focus promises an Oedipal confrontation in which Francis will break with his father and his insulated, moneyed world—represented by the Buchanans, Enid and Larry, who are clearly modeled on Doris and Bobby. But the father-son conflict is curiously muted; and the violence, when it comes, is turned against Francis himself in a sensational scene of self-castration. Francis finally reconciles himself to his family and his place in it, but just what this new feeling consists in, and what it means for his future, remains mysterious.
Part of the mystery comes from the fact that The Seraglio is not only a coming-of-age story; it is also a coming-out story, a story of homosexual self-assertion and self-acceptance. But the homosexuality of Francis, Merrill’s surrogate, can only be inferred on the basis of his refusal of the straight-male potency embodied by his father. For that reason, The Seraglio is a contradiction in terms: a secret coming-out story that speaks in symbols, as if in a dream. Its theme is Merrill’s sexual self-censorship, his life in the closet with respect to his family and the pain that it caused him. By the end of the novel, Francis has accepted his sexual difference from his father, but that doesn’t mean he is a gay man. Rather, Francis is a safely neutral, neutered presence in Benjamin’s household, the “unique” in his seraglio. Francis turns himself into a child who will never have to grow up, if growing up means maturing into heterosexuality. The Seraglio returns to the problem of aging in The Immortal Husband and imagines another deviant life course.
The seraglio is Ben’s Long Island beach house, called the Cottage. The novel begins with an act of generational rebellion inspired by the defacement of Doris’s portrait in 1953. Francis’s niece, Lily Buchanan, is the only child of Enid and Larry, who have a summerhouse nearby. Lily has been confined to her room by her mother after a morning of misbehavior, brought on by the approach of her twelfth birthday and the fact that her mother is pregnant. She escapes from her room, sneaks into her grandfather’s house, and, finding an oil portrait of her mother, slashes it with a paper knife. Rushing home, she leaves the identity of the vandal a mystery.
We meet Francis in Rome, about to return home after three years abroad. When he runs into one of his father’s business associates who guesses his identity, Francis denies that he is Ben’s son.2 He hides the fact of his trust fund from his friends Jane, an art historian based on Marilyn Lavin, and Xenia, a sculptor based on Guitou Knoop. When Xenia learns how rich he is, she protests, “How dare you allow me to pay my share all the times we’ve gone out!” He replies, “I loved it. I felt it was me you liked.” Francis suffers from Merrill’s self-doubt: he fears that no one will care for him apart from his name and money, both of which come from his father.
The Seraglio is a fantasia on the themes explored in Merrill’s psychoanalysis with Detre in Rome. It represents paternal power by the Freudian symbol par excellence: the phallus—which Merrill introduces in a scene early in the novel. Hunting for a souvenir before he leaves Rome, Francis stops in a shop of antiquities that he and Jane had visited together. Seeing that Francis is alone this time, the shopkeeper produces a box containing “perhaps a hundred phalluses, of clay, of marble, some primitive […], others monumental and detailed, evidently chipped from sculpture under whichever Pope had been responsible for fig-leaves.” “Porta fortuna!” he croaks, promising that the “winged and erect” object catching the American’s eye will bring him luck. Francis is embarrassed by the shopkeeper’s intuition that he will be excited by these erotic fetishes, and, in irritation, he tries to conceal his interest. He settles for a ring that “looked Greek, of soft gold, with an owl in relief, and very small, a child’s ring, found in the grave of a dead child”—like the pinkie ring Jimmy bought in the Istanbul bazaar with Robert Isaacson.
Back at home with his father in the Cottage, Francis is oppressed by a “feeling of loneliness, of being the one real person in a ghostly world.” The grand ocean room makes him feel that he must hold still, like a child obliged to behave. “Wouldn’t it help, he brooded, to leap up, cry out, smash something? But the room met his eye so trustingly; it was easier to do violence to himself.” If Francis could express his anger, he might feel more adult, more independent. But Benjamin, like his house, makes protest all but impossible. Weakened by his failing heart and yet endlessly gallant, he seems too ill to withstand anyone’s hostility and too charming to deserve it. He rules his house like a cheerful, gracious tyrant: “Whatever he decided to serve—whether caviar or humble pie—the victim was meant to choke it down and be grateful. Nobody had ever had a chance to refuse the brutal bounty.”
But Francis tries to do just that. He drops in at his father’s Wall Street firm to ask his brother-in-law Larry, an executive officer at Tanning, Burr, how to “get rid” of his money. Explaining his request, Francis describes a troubling sense of unreality:
I don’t want the power that goes with money. It’s a crippling power; whoever uses it is at the mercy of it. No freedom goes with it. One’s forever being watched and plotted against, or else protected from the very things that don’t do harm! One’s never in a position to find out what’s real and what isn’t—with the result that nothing’s real, nothing in the whole world is real!
Larry, who wasn’t born to money, reminds Francis that he can join the firm any time he likes. Or “if all you want is to have your monthly check stopped, I can arrange that in no time flat.” “No,” Francis quickly specifies, “I mean stopping it at its source.” But that’s impossible, Larry explains: the principal in their trust funds “goes to Enid’s children, and to your own, after your death.” Francis’s own future as a father is projected in advance; Ben’s money will flow through him to the next generation. “It means I’m doomed,” Francis concludes, “I’m doomed never to be real.”
Xenia and Jane reenter the story. Francis brings Xenia to the Cottage to make a bust of Benjamin and sets her before his father as a likely candidate for an affair. One night, however, she takes drunken Francis himself for a lover. In shame the next day, he covers his nakedness by putting on her slip: Xenia is “a vampire” who makes him feel like a little boy. Meanwhile, he ponders his feelings for Jane, who has married her sweetheart, Roger, and moved to Boston. Francis travels there with Ben, where Ben will receive an experimental heart treatment. Ben’s companion is Lady Good, the wife of one of his business associates and his newest mistress. When the two of them and Francis have dinner with Jane (but not Roger, who is away), Ben is delighted by his son’s companion. After dinner, Ben slips money into Francis’s hand and tells him, “Paint the town red!” Ben then kisses Lady Good and winks at the young people, as if to show his son how to treat a married woman. Repelled by this display, Francis escorts Jane home. He thinks himself safe from any sexual impulse until he finds himself aroused by her; he flees, deeply embarrassed.
Back in his room, Francis is shaken and drunk. He gazes blankly at his nakedness, and draws a bath. Phrases from the Italian shopkeeper and his father echo in his mind, taunting him:
His bath was full. He sprinkled it with a handful of pine-scented salts. Before dipping a foot in the water he unlocked the door—it had never been his wish to die—and looked about one last time. There was the mirror, the razor, the towel. He took from his finger the little gold ring with the owl, kissed it and set it upon the basin. Presently he heard—but from where?—the voice of an old man whispering Ecco, Signore! and the razor was placed in Francis’s hand. Paint the town red! Up to his neck in warm water now, almost afloat, he used his last defense against the flesh. The blade was very sharp; something began easily to separate, then to resist, tougher than a thong of leather. The water, so dazzling clear when he began cutting, turned red instantly. Porta fortuna! He could no longer see what he was doing, or tell, when the severe pain overcame him, whether or not he had succeeded. He cried out once, and lost consciousness.
It’s a shocking event, reported in a style as dreamlike and determined as the action described. Unable to stop his father’s money “at the source,” Francis has found another way to cut himself off. He survives this self-mutilation, but the doctor tells his mother when she arrives at the hospital, “It’s unlikely, I’m afraid, that he’ll be able to lead a normal life, in the fullest sense.”
But Vinnie doesn’t know the nature of his injury yet. Assuming Francis has cut his wrists, she prepares to face that fact. Keeping this scandal as private as possible is her paramount concern. At first she is relieved as she studies her son’s “bare throat, his smooth wrists.”
Mercifully, the wound wouldn’t be visible, wherever it was. Her gaze shifted. She froze.
He had turned towards her a face whose open eyes, though unseeing, expressed wonder and joy. It came over Vinnie that he knew, that nothing short of realizing what he had done could have produced the look on Francis’s face.
This scene is a fantasy rewriting of the revelation of Jimmy’s homosexuality in 1945. His mother had had to face then the fact that her son would not “lead a normal life, in the fullest sense,” defined as becoming a father. Here, the son feels “wonder and joy” when he makes his mother confront a truth that hurts and horrifies her. Rather than castrate his father, or risk being castrated by him, he has done the job himself. While the fact is kept from his father because, his mother says, it might kill him, he has struck a blow at her, and he is satisfied.
The novel leaves to our imagination the question of precisely what part of his body Francis has wounded. Even the word “castration” was cut out of Merrill’s text “so that the squeamish reader can take it as a suicide attempt, if he must.” The uncertainty is consistent with a shift to indirection in Merrill’s approach to his protagonist’s psychology in the rest of the book. Until the castration scene, Francis is the novel’s center, the consciousness through which the reader views its characters and events. When he wounds himself, he blacks out, then recedes from view. Later, after his recovery, we see him through Jane’s eyes. Meeting him at his New York apartment, she finds Francis in a distracted state. She notes spilled candle wax, a shattered teacup, pages of scribbling, and a Ouija board: debris from an orgy of communication with the Other World. “You understand,” Francis remarks, “I’ve never had the slightest interest in any of this rot. […] I’d amused myself before with this,” he nodded to the Ouija board, “but nothing came of it. It depends so much, you know, on who your partner is.” His Ouija partner is Marcello, a suave Italian. Where Marcello has come from, and whether he is a sexual partner for Francis, Merrill doesn’t say. We learn only that he and Francis have been in touch with a spirit named Meno, whose story is more or less the same as Ephraim’s (except Meno is heterosexual). Francis is obsessed with arranging for the soul of Meno’s representative to be born to Xenia so that Francis can take care of the child personally. For Xenia is pregnant, and Francis mistakenly believes that he’s the father on the basis of their night together.
This scene was added to the novel late, drawing on Ouija board sessions from summer 1956. The scene that follows it survives from the manuscript Merrill took with him to Europe in 1950. It involves the underworld of classical mythology, rather than the Other World of the Ouija board. With Xenia, Francis and Jane attend the first performance of Orpheus, an opera by Tommy Utter—who has become Xenia’s lover (and is actually the father of her child). Before the curtain rises, Francis leaves his seat, and we watch the performance through Jane’s eyes. It is as if Francis had slipped away in order to reappear onstage as Orpheus (the role Merrill had played in Cocteau’s Orphée at Amherst). The set, which cunningly imitates the opera house itself, is peopled by infernal doubles of the opera’s audience: “Before them, beyond the glowing apron of the stage, could be distinguished the lights and boxes of a theater so like their own that a vast mirror might have been set up inside the proscenium.”
The subject of the opera is apt, because Francis’s story develops certain motifs from the Orpheus myth. In Ovid, after he fails to rescue Eurydice, Orpheus spurns the love of women for that of boys. So, with his razor, Francis cuts himself off not only from his father, but from women; and after this de-naturing of himself, he journeys to the land of the dead through the Ouija board. His story and Orpheus’s further converge in the fact that the leading role in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo was written for a castrato. By linking Francis and Orpheus in these ways, Merrill invents a fable concerning his own creativity. Becoming a poet or singer, spurning women for boys, and communing with the dead, all turn out to imply each other.
The end of The Seraglio returns to the Cottage one year after Lily slashed her mother’s portrait. On the day before her birthday, Francis finds his niece sitting in her grandfather’s study, having returned to the scene of the crime. Francis happens to pick up the paper knife, and with this clue in hand, he grasps the truth. It is easy to make the deduction because he and Lily have both rebelled against their family by taking a blade in hand. When, back in the opening scene of the novel, Lily began to brush the knife against her mother’s portrait, chipping the paint by accident, she had to go on: “The knife with a will of its own pierced the canvas and tore briskly down five or six inches before she succeeded in letting go.” Similarly, with a dreamlike loss of agency, “the razor was placed in Francis’s hand.” The knife and razor, like a planchette, are impersonal tools. Lily and Francis use them to express not only anger, but also a metaphysical desire: discovering forces beyond (or deep within?) them, they cut through the resistant face of things to see what’s on the other side.
The answer is mortality. When Lily frees her hand from the knife, “[s]he closed her eyes. She knew she was going to die.” But mortality, as Merrill was beginning to conceive it, was far from simple. Meno teaches that death does not mean “total annihilation.” “I tell you,” Francis exclaims to Jane, “this other world is real!” Yet Merrill stops short of blindly agreeing with him. Half of his mind sides with Jane, who sees that Francis has “dumped the whole burden”—the burden of trying to speak openly and truthfully about himself—“in Meno’s lap. It left him free to snap his fingers blithely at history, at human reason,” as if he were above it all.
The final scene of The Seraglio is a fête at the Cottage. Benjamin by this time is happily wedded to Lady Good, and Francis has brought Vinnie back for a visit. In this fantasy of family repair, Benjamin gets to have a new wife while Francis’s mother makes her return: Francis has put the Broken Home back together; the break, an invisible cut, is inside him. On a fantasy level, he has made the reunion possible: it is as if his penis had come between his parents and needed to be removed.
In this mood of reconciliation, Merrill’s characters gather. The occasion is the christening of Lily’s newborn brother, named Tanning Burr in honor of Benjamin’s firm. At lunch, the grown-ups gobble the decorations on the cake: “a border of babies,” candies with tiny pink faces and liquor inside. The real children survive this cannibalism perfectly well, and Lily’s birthday party follows. Francis finds Lily and her friends playing hide-and-seek—practice for the games of secrecy the adults play. Lily invites Francis to play too, but with a condition: “Uncle Francis is It. […] If he wants to play he has to be It.” He agrees, counts to one hundred, and then sets out in search of the children—but they’ve snuck off and left him to play alone. The novel ends with these paragraphs:
But only after coming upon the children building castles at the sea’s edge, oblivious to him, did Francis stare out over the lulled water and understand. He was It. He tentatively said so the first time, then once more with an exquisite tremor of conviction: “I am It.”
The words carried with them wondrous notions of selflessness, of permanence. His father coughed behind him in the house. The children trembled against the sea. He knew the expression on his own face. The entire world was real.
Borrowing these images of children sporting on the shore from Wordsworth and the mood of hushed epiphany from Woolf, Merrill ends his book with a lyric tableau, rather than a clarifying statement or last turn of the plot. Being “It,” Francis is neither “he” nor “she”: he has passed beyond self and gender, the burdens of his money and his name, and found a permanent, impersonal identity, which he gained by giving something up. Now, “[t]he entire world was real.” The modifier includes every possible reference, both the Other World and this one. There is a feeling of triumph and relief; Francis has nothing to fear, not even from himself.
And so, with respect to his family, Merrill seems to insist that they have no reason to fear him. The Seraglio imagines a position for Francis that was like the one Jimmy would occupy in life: he would come and go in Southampton when he liked, neither quite belonging to the Merrills’ and Magowans’ world nor wholly alien to it. He would be his nephews’ and nieces’ queer uncle.
Merrill sought legal advice as a precaution in the event of a libel suit. At the request of his publisher, he went so far as to submit a legal release for Knoop to sign, which she did. But the real issues the novel raised were moral rather than legal ones. Merrill debated them with a friend he could trust, Ephraim. The spirit told JM to tell those friends who opposed the novel’s publication that “all art is its own reality.” But The Seraglio was too close to real life for this argument to hold water. The problem, Jimmy told him, was that the novel was “hurting people.” “Life is not painless,” Ephraim replied, jettisoning his argument about the special reality of art. “Books inform, not soothe.” But Merrill came back to the point: “the truth hurts.” If the truth had to be avoided because it hurt, Ephraim declared, it would be impossible to “read, live, or write it.” The Seraglio was meant to prove Merrill could write the truth, even if it hurt.
Pain is at the center of the novel in the castration scene. When Jackson got off the telephone with Lurie, he laughed: “What she really wanted to know—avid as she is—is JM castrated?!?” Merrill told him what to do the next time she called: “If she asks or hints at this, I want you to draw yourself up and say, ‘That I can’t divulge!’ ” It was a funny line, but there was much more at stake than teasing Lurie. In Francis’s self-castration, Merrill dramatized the pain of his sexual self-censorship in a way guaranteed to horrify and disgust his family, while showing them what they had, in effect, asked for.
When the book was published, the pain was widely distributed. Lillian Coe was portrayed as greedy, scheming Irene Cheek, whose husband Charley is a weak-kneed drunk and cuckold. Merrill, suggesting his view of the Coes and Southampton gossip, disposes of the Cheeks in two brisk sentences when they drown in a sailing accident, and their bodies are “badly mutilated by sharks.” He liked Lady Constance Saint and treated her with respect and affection. But “Lady Prudence Good” is a ludicrous name, and Connie Saint must have been aghast to see her adulterous romance with Charles Merrill adapted for the plot of his son’s novel and available for the public to read about in hardcover. Finally, no one whose name appeared in the Social Register could be proud when tipsy Boopsie Gresham corners Francis and demands, “Do you now, looking straight into my eyes, dare to deny the ethos of the Anglo-Saxon race?”
Enid and Larry Buchanan embody that ethos in the novel, as their models, Doris and Bobby Magowan, did in life. Larry is a war hero and a practical man of affairs whose financial savvy and common sense make Francis look foolish when he consults Larry about eliminating his trust fund. But Merrill doesn’t let Bobby off the hook so easily. Habitually turning red in the face and snorting with derision, Larry is brusque and irritable with his wife and daughter, and narrowly concerned with the bottom line and the family’s reputation: a dull heir to the business empire of his father-in-law. Merrill treats his sister gingerly, even tenderly, in his depiction of Enid, who has beauty, elegance, smarts, and a talent for social delicacy worthy of a character in James. But she is infantilized by her loyalty to her father: this perfect daughter uses all her energy to keep up appearances and push away pain, which she pays for with the torturous headaches Doris habitually suffered from. It’s Enid who created the “swamp of chintz” that makes Benjamin’s house so oppressive.
The Seraglio flagrantly breaks the code of family loyalty Doris insisted on when she and Jimmy argued about Guitou in 1953. He made partial restitution by dedicating the novel to “my nephews and nieces.” Even that gesture had its subversive side, however: one of the novel’s aims was to recruit allies for Jimmy from the next generation. Merrill Lynch Magowan, Doris’s second son, the inspiration for Enid’s “Tanning Burr,” was a teenager when the book was published; he read it avidly with a mental “scorecard,” keeping track of the local targets hit. His older brother Robin was in a position to identify with Francis. Having begun to think of himself as a writer and to quarrel with his parents over his sense of vocation as well as his romantic choice of Betty Rudd, a Radcliffe girl he had met at Harvard, Robin made his uncle feel “really encouraged, even at times a Prophet” as the author of The Seraglio. Jimmy went so far as to urge Robin to enter psychoanalysis. Like a sweet-tongued serpent, he tempted his nephew: “[Y]ou are so knowing, how can you resist knowing more?”
Merrill didn’t show the novel to his father until he had sent the manuscript to his publisher and there could be no turning back. But he showed it to his mother before he made revisions. Even in the case of this novel, he wanted his writing to be something he could show her, which she could be proud of too, and show to others: as at every step in his career, his literary ambition was constrained by her ambitions for him. The Seraglio put this principle to the test. And their exchange about the book was one of the important battles they fought.
It was prepared for at a lunch in Hellen’s honor hosted by David and Sewelly at 950 First Avenue in April 1956. Jimmy was in New Jersey, where he would usher at the wedding of Freddy Buechner and Judith Merck. Judy’s family was prominent in drug manufacturing, and this was to be a grand occasion, a Lawrenceville reunion with champagne toasts and dancing. The plan was for the Jacksons to drive to the ceremony with Hellen, following a lunch for her when they would break out “all the disguises and subterfuge of our cozy married life,” as David put it, coaching Sewelly in advance. They’d argued about this sort of deception before. Sewelly told David that she felt “cheapened by pretending to be married for easier acceptance with society. […] I want to feel true and honest!” “Then,” he said, “she accused me of being amoral. Which, perhaps, I am.” But it would be hard to say who was fooling whom. Hellen can’t have failed to grasp the nature of David’s relation to her son, even if Jimmy’s letters downplayed how often David had “visited” Amherst. The point for Hellen—and therefore for Jimmy, David, and, grudgingly, Sewelly—was only how plausibly they could pretend. And everyone passed. When the wedding was over and it was time to say goodbye, Hellen gave David’s wife a hug that, as Sewelly experienced it, “went on and on. I thought it would never end!” They were all engaged in keeping up the social lie that The Seraglio protested.
David recorded his lunch conversation with Hellen in his journal. After the meal, “she finally put elbows on the table and spoke her mind, as best she could, about JM’s Seraglio. She was hurt and bitter, appalled at what she thought of as his callous and deliberate insult to everyone who had ‘done the best in the best way they were able’ for him.” David “urged her to write it to JM if she could not say it to him.” He was impressed: “HP can be all charm, almost sensationally so. She misses nothing, forgets no name, catches people on little asides and remarks, and plays the comic whenever it pleases her.” Her sociability was part of her toughness: “Such a mother, as Sewelly says, is almost impossible to resist and formidable to stay eye-level with. One admires JM all the more for realizing all the firmness necessary in any love for her, and however reluctantly, using what must be a family firmness in their dealings.”
Hellen wrote the letter that David urged her to. She simply passed over the castration scene, treating it as unspeakable. But otherwise she didn’t mince words: Jimmy’s novel was “inconsiderate, disloyal, and downright callous.” Her son replied in a letter displaying his “firmness.” “I have had to ask myself, with every point you make, whether I have failed to communicate or whether you have failed to understand,” he began, ready to prove why the failure was hers. Enid and Larry are not “ridiculous,” he insisted; or if they are (and if Francis is “ridiculous” when he puts on Xenia’s nightgown—a scene Hellen especially hated), that’s because we see their “limitations” as well as their virtues, as we should expect in a novel, and they are “not necessarily the less lovable for it.”
Hellen’s objection to her portrayal as Vinnie was stronger and harder to answer, since there was a lot to object to. The Seraglio introduces Vinnie with a stifling monologue unbroken by comments from her son or the novel’s narrator. Speaking to Francis from her bed, she begins, “Run into the next room, dearest, and bring me a little cushion […]—that’s a good boy.” Finally, after almost three pages of cloying small talk, she breaks off: “ ‘[I]t’s,’ she kissed him, ‘so wonderful to have you back. Wait! I put some lipstick on your chin. Bend down, I’ve a Kleenex right here.’ ” After which Merrill dryly concludes, “These were a few of the things Francis’s mother said to him on the occasion of their first meeting in over two years.”
Hellen was particularly hurt that Vinnie “bored” her son. Jimmy replied, “[W]hat I have tried to dramatize here is the failure to communicate” on both their parts since she confronted him about Kimon and expressed her “disgust” in the winter of 1946:
Since that time, I recognize that you have made a tremendous effort to withhold judgments or questions about my life. In fact, I realize more and more that (but for this particular tact on your part) the silence is largely my own. As in the novel, it isn’t that you don’t let me talk […]—I don’t let myself talk. I would rather tax you with silence, and I know it taxes you, than with things you might not want to hear. No—that has all kinds of false implications, as if anything more I might tell you would be by definition dreadful. Closer to truth might be to say that, after seeing how you were appalled once—or even twice, counting the matter of the letters at 231 E 35 [when Hellen entered her son’s apartment and destroyed correspondence from Friar and others]—by something of the foremost importance in my life, I have to admit that at these times I fear you, I fear your power to create guilt in me to a degree that nobody or nothing else in the world can equal. It should not be necessary to point out to you how far from boredom such a feeling must be.
“You can perhaps see, though, how useful the mask of tedium is,” Merrill continued, discovering a new depth of feeling, “considering all that lies beneath the surface. That is by no means purely fear; there is love there, as strong as in childhood—how can you imagine one ever loses that love for parents? Any other, yes, but not that one.” He would never, could never lose that love for his mother, which was “as strong as in childhood.” But that love, mixed with fear and guilt, brought with it a “fierce pressure” he needed to protect himself from:
The important thing to say is that the “mask” is kept on not by a whim or any cold decision; it is kept on by a fierce pressure—one that only a greater pressure (such as my wish now to be honest, preferring to hurt you rather than let you imagine I am indifferent to your feelings […]) can dislodge. There! I have a sense of breathing freely. I am not for a moment afraid of giving pain if I can admit not only the coldness from which that proceeds, but the warmth as well. I feel I am acting Fairly—and that this fairness lies behind the book I’ve written.
Commenting on the novel, Hellen made no distinction between Francis and her son; she refers to both of them as “you.” We might expect the novelist to object to this confusion of life and art, but he didn’t. It was how he himself thought of the story. The Seraglio, he declared, was “a symbolic unity analogous to my own experience in the last 10 years; it has been carefully composed and is as accurate as I can make it without its being unbearable to myself or others,” since “my experience hasn’t, after all, been that.” He was not saying his experience had been less painful than the novel makes out, but that he had had to take that pain, he could take it, and other people should be able to take it too.
When the novel was published, Hellen wrote to Doris, commiserating with her about the picture of her father in it. At the same time, Hellen tried to justify the novel by quoting the letters Jimmy had written to her defending the book. She felt responsible for what he wrote, especially about his father. She feared that, in Doris’s eyes, Jimmy had cast his mother in a bad light, and she needed to insist that his family disloyalty was not hers. When she fought with him over The Seraglio, she was still trying to make her son behave. Whether as a source of pride or of shame for her, her son’s writing was never fully his own.
The new novelist was still a poet. He published two poems in Poetry in February 1956. One of them, “Upon a Second Marriage,” was composed in 1950 for the Plummers’ wedding3 and presented “for H. I. P.” (with no mention of her new husband). Its conceit is this: a life is like a tree in an apple orchard; after spring blossoms and summer fruit, “autumn reddens the whole mind”; but even for one who resists “the old persuasion,” spring returns, and “the whole world grows / Fragrant and white” again. This is, the poem insists, a perfectly natural pattern of renewal in which new bonds add to prior ones without canceling them, creating a series of expanding circles, like the rhyming lines of this poem’s stanzas. Thus “a tall trunk’s cross-section shows / Concentric rings, those many marriages / That life on each live thing bestows”—each ring like a wedding ring that doesn’t oblige one to give up the past and forsake all others. Merrill wanted to understand the history of his own heart this way. The poem was meant to reassure his mother, as if she needed it, that his love for her remained “as strong as in childhood” when they lived with his father at the Orchard.
The poem was a dutiful, ceremonial production HIP could show to Atlanta friends. Beside it, Merrill printed another sort of poem entirely, “Salome.” The center of it, the second of three parts, is a fable about the violence just under the surface of family life. As a child, the “I” of the poem saw a boy run out to welcome home “his runaway pet,” only to be “fearfully mawled” by the chow—which the speaker’s father promptly shoots dead with a pistol. The poem’s sympathy is with the chow. The dog, following his natural curiosity, had disappeared “Into the brambles of a vacant lot,” where he forgot the “back porch, whistle, and water bowl,” and soon reverted to “his first nature, which was animal.” The moral is clear. The family that wants you for a pet, and subdues you with sweet caresses, cannot tolerate your animal nature. If you give in to it, you may be shot. Even as a child, the speaker “suspected what I now know as law: / That you can have enough of human love.”
In March, Merrill read his poetry at Harvard. He had been anxious about the event in advance. “I cannot promise very much by way of a ‘stage presence’—have very little to say about my work,” he told his inviter. He “would feel more comfortable sharing the evening with another poet,” and he proposed David Ferry as a “co-star” (he and Ferry, who overlapped with him at Amherst in the 1940s, had become friends on his trips to Cambridge that year). After the reading, Merrill recorded seventeen poems for the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard, starting with work in Short Stories and winding up with “Orfeo.” That tape is the earliest record of his reading voice.
He gave another reading at the Poetry Center in New York. Then, back at Amherst, he hosted a visit to campus by Marianne Moore. Before her reading, he and David served dinner for her: “roast beef, potatoes, peas, crème brûlée—an elderly Poet’s menu,” Jimmy wrote to Hellen (with no mention of David), “as I’d discovered last fall the day I had two dinners in honor of Frost […] with exactly the same meal.” For Merrill, Moore was “pure enchantment.” She appeared “in a chalky faded blue ankle length dress with lace around the neck.” He found her “all generosity and modesty and simplicity, and of course she is one of the half dozen poets of the century (I said so in introducing her).” At one point in her reading, Moore interjected a comment about her young introducer: “Now Mr Merrill tells me that he doesn’t read the newspapers. That’s hard for me to understand. Just last week I learned from the NY Times that our State Department is donating all those egret feathers confiscated by the U. S. Customs during the ’20’s to the Kingdom of Nepal, where they’re needed. How would you find out about something like that if you didn’t read the papers?”
In the evenings, Ephraim continued to give JM and DJ lessons in the workings of the Other World. He described a soul-switching system whereby a ghost enters the body of a sleeper for a single night in order to sever ties with life while the soul of the sleeper, making room below, takes the place of the revenant “Up There!” Ephraim had met Guitou this way: she’d been transported in sleep to “the Sixth Stage” where “Ephraim wooed her and made her promise to marry him!” “The funny thing is,” Jimmy mused, “she has told D. and me about this wonderful dream that had left her free from all death-fears.” (Merrill would later retell this story in The Book of Ephraim, claiming that Dante’s vision of heaven was based on this sort of soul switching. But he assigns the dream there to dignified, mystical Maya Deren, rather than silly Guitou.) Eager to see Ephraim also, Jimmy and David tried hypnosis. They discovered that David was highly susceptible to suggestion. With Jimmy serving as hypnotist, David wrote his name in his child’s hand, recalled certain scenes from childhood, and met a glowing angelic figure.
By summertime, the New York apartment was packed up, and Merrill and Jackson were back on Water Street, playing with the Ouija board night after night. They did the board with Irma, Stonington neighbors, and Hellen’s spiritualist friend, Gert Behanna. Frederick “Boom-Boom” Beck, a friend from Amherst days, who was himself “in furious communion with the spirits,” arrived in town on a mission: a literal-minded spirit had told him he could find his father reincarnated in Australia; to locate him, he needed only contact “Grandma at 32,” and he wanted help from Ephraim to put through the call. Ephraim was offended by this abuse of the board: “No one is a grandma at 32,” he cracked. Jimmy and David themselves were not immune to this kind of thinking, however. David, ever more desperate to get published, asked Ephraim to “infuse” the manuscript of his novel with magic powers so that Random House might accept it. Ephraim scolded him: “Now this is serious. DJ U must rely on yr work. If you are proud of it that is the compensation. […] I have joshed with U about my poor powers. Yr own are more real. But DJ persistence is the greatest power of all.”
If the spirits couldn’t help the mediums, could the mediums help the spirits? Ephraim told them that Hans’s representative was due to be reborn, and wondered whether Jimmy and David knew a suitable pregnant woman who might give birth to this hapless creature whose recent lives had all been ill-fated. (This séance worked its way into the plot of The Seraglio.) Jimmy volunteered Betty, his stepsister, who had married and was expecting. Ephraim noted the suggestion. But with the “hysterical” Boom-Boom as a case in point, Ephraim warned that there were limits to how the dead and living might aid each other: “No real dead suggest any involvement. That is why I am still with U. U have not become dependent on me nor I on you. It wd be quickly ended, not by us my dears but by yr own sense. I know I am a diversion + an enlightenment at best, but I am not life and I cannot B as important as life.”
Life in Stonington that summer included Truman Capote. “He is divine. Strident, earnest, hard as nails,” Merrill said about the pale, squeaky-voiced Capote, who was already a best-selling writer mixing with the glamorous society that Merrill had definitively turned away from when he moved to Stonington. “He is not liking it here very much,” Jimmy went on. “His boat keeps sinking. The other night he waved goodbye to friends on the street only to have a boxer dog leap from a car and sink his teeth into his little hand […] … his writing hand.” Capote didn’t last long in “Creepyville.” Jackson picked up the nickname for the little town and went on using it, though not out of any special affection for Truman. Perceiving what their friends preferred not to notice—the basic imbalance in Jimmy’s and David’s means—Capote ridiculed his neighbor as a kept boy. “Tell me, David,” he poked, “how much do you get a throw?”
I grow old under an intensity
Of questioning looks. Nonsense,
I try to say, I cannot teach you children
How to live.—If not you, who will?
Cries one of them aloud, grasping my gilded
Frame till the world sways. If not you, who will?
While inquiring faces come in and go out, the mirror stays put. It speaks with the wisdom of one who dwells in an interior world, like an old woman content to sit in her parlor, or a painter satisfied with still life:
Between their visits the table, its arrangement
Of Bible, fern and Paisley, all past change,
Does very nicely.
The mirror understands that there are other ways of looking at things. It turns to the window:
If ever I feel curious
As to what others endure,
Across the parlor you provide examples,
Wide open, sunny, of everything I am
Not. You embrace a world without once caring
To set it in order. That takes thought. Out there
Something is being picked. The red-and-white bandannas
Go to my heart. A fine young man
Rides by on horseback. Now the door shuts. Hester
Confides in me her first unhappiness.
This much, you see, would never have been fitted
Together, but for me.
The mirror and the window stand for competing types of imagination. One is “Wide open, sunny,” and transparent, while the other is lamp-lit, melancholy, reflective. The window “embraces” the world “without once caring / To set it in order.” “That takes thought,” the mirror observes, rather sharply. Maybe it envies the window’s openness and warmth. But it expresses pride and impatience when it tells Hester’s story in a few rapid sentences: “This much, you see, would never have been fitted / Together, but for me.” The poem’s unusual verse form is the one Merrill created in “The Octopus”: the last syllable in every second line rhymes with the penultimate syllable of the previous one. This buried pattern slyly “fits together” free-verse lines of unpredictable length, just as the mirror links disparate images “Out there” in the world. The “thought” required to order experience in this way is self-conscious, reflexive: to say that we need the mirror to see the world means that we can only look out at things by also looking at (and thus through and beyond) ourselves. The mirror stands for a poetics of subtly encoded meaning and self-conscious technique, opposed to transparency. Indeed, “Mirror” is a sort of manifesto, a passionate reply to the poetry of “open form” derived from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams that was fast gaining adherents in the later 1950s.
On another level, “Mirror” echoes the conversation that Merrill had been having for three years with Jackson about his work. If the window’s warmth and openness are David’s strengths of character, its shortcomings are his weaknesses as a novelist: an inability to fit a story together, a lack of focused “thought.” In June, David had found Jimmy’s reaction to his most recent draft of a novel “devastating.” The problem was technical: “I am episodic for want of connecting the dramatic sequences of the novel.” The mirror’s anger hints at Jimmy’s mounting frustration with David’s difficulty telling a simple tale like Hester’s (Look how easily it’s done! the mirror says), and his anxiety about what his companion’s failure as a novelist might mean for both of them.
On still another level, “Mirror” suggests Merrill’s dissatisfaction not with Jackson’s novel writing, but with his own. For all of its strangeness of plot, The Seraglio is a relatively conventional realist novel, a window on the world; and once Merrill sent off the revised manuscript to Knopf, he abandoned that form for good. Already, in order to represent the person that Francis becomes, Merrill had had to expand the realist premises of The Seraglio, moving into the realm of symbol and myth with the Ouija board and the Orpheus story. He began making notes for his second novel immediately after finishing The Seraglio. But The (Diblos) Notebook, when it appeared in 1965, would be a very different kind of book—an anti-realist nouveau roman that self-reflexively calls attention to its own process. It is the type of novel the mirror might write.
“Mirror”: Merrill was aware of how close the noun is to his name. Over time, mirrors became iconic for him, an obsessive emblem of his creativity. By speaking for the object in this poem, he spoke for aspects of his taste and temperament that were essential to his art but difficult to stand by. In the mirror, he identifies with interiority, discrimination, artifice, and a frankly superior tone; and he all but dares the reader to accuse him of narcissism, or the superficiality and selfishness, the vanity, for which gay men are derided. Its voice is the cold, hard voice of a “mask” like his mother’s. But the mirror is aging and vulnerable. “Why then is it / They more and more neglect me?” it asks about those young faces as they grow older. The children prefer the window’s “tall transparence” to the mirror’s prismatic reflections; their “grown grandchildren” prefer it too. The mirror describes two of them gazing outside “with novels face-down on the sill.” One of them exclaims airily, in a tautology both clumsy and poignant, “How superficial / Appearances are!”
On the final page of The Seraglio, Francis stands alone in an ecstatic present, fearing death no more. The mirror, by contrast, is haunted by time and mortality. The end of the poem plays with the fact that a mirror’s surface decomposes in rippling circles and black stains as it loses its silver backing. The remark about the superficiality of appearances introduces Merrill’s final turn of thought:
Since then, as if a fish
Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness,
I have lapses. I suspect
Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes
Through the blind flaws of my mind. As days,
As decades lengthen, this vision
Spreads and blackens. I do not know whose it is,
But I think it watches for my last silver
To blister, flake, float leaf by life, each milling-
Downward dumb conceit, to a standstill
From which not even you strike any brilliant
Chord in me, and to a faceless will,
Echo of mine, I am amenable.
The black, spreading “vision” gains intensity as the rhyme sticks on “ill,” pounding on that sound five times before the poem gives in, and the mirror becomes “amenable.” The “milling- / Downward” of each “dumb conceit” is an image of a humbling breakdown of metaphorical “order.” The mirror, so proud of its power to fit things together and keep up appearances, comes apart as “a faceless will” takes over, a power beyond appearances that hints at the Other World of Ephraim, “where nothing is.”
While I’m away
Please water the plants every other day,
Not forgetting
The window-box requires a thorough wetting
In dry weather. Feed the cats
According to your own judgment, but plentifully, I beg.
One teaspoon and a quarter Vionate a day, perhaps one egg
In the time I shall be absent, and that’s
That. Except for the most important part
Of all. Work on your novel. Work on your novel. Art
Outlasts the small trivialities of the daily grind.
Keep that in mind.
That and the improviser of this didac-
Tic page. He will count the days till he is back.
On the same page, DJ welcomed his partner back:
While you were away,
Plants, cats, and novels may
Have suffered some;
But none of us com-
Plained, as much as me—
See?
Now that you’re back
Keeping track
Of all of us,
Cooking, suggesting, sus-
Taining—
Who’s complaining?
Not me,
See.
Jimmy’s visit with Mama, he told her, did him “an extraordinary amount of good”; it put the two of them “on more of an equal footing.” Hellen had sent Jimmy a box of documents from the time of his parents’ divorce, including letters from Charlie, sworn statements from the servants defending her honor, and once-urgent telegrams. “Even those letters—CEM’s for instance—seem, if only retrospectively, woefully adept, as if he were forever saying ‘What can best be said? I shall set about feeling that,’ ” Jimmy wrote to her. It confirmed “my description of him in the novel—that even then he should have been such a showman.” Hellen must have shared with Jimmy this archive of divorce in order to produce the effect it had: this renewal of their whispering intimacy at his father’s expense. But he didn’t simply take his mother’s side. He was interested to learn from certain letters that “Daddy and I both” had felt the strain of Hellen’s “remoteness”: CEM called it her “shell” while JM called it her “mask.” Jimmy allowed that she’d used it for self-defense, to shield herself from Charlie. Perhaps, he told her, “your incapacity to cope with me in 1946 was nothing but a long-range effect of that disaster 10 years before.” He understood from his own behavior, modeled after all on hers, that “when we suspend feeling, we get out of practice.” His father was different from both of them: “He of course has never had that trouble; he is a virtuoso, a Paderewski.”
Charlie’s virtuosity may be one reason why Jimmy didn’t take his deteriorating heart condition as seriously as he might have. In July, CEM was back in the hospital in Boston, where he sounded “dreadful” on the phone. His condition had not improved by September. Yet Jimmy went forward with his trip abroad. He noted in a letter to his mother that Lady Saint had flown from Barbados to see his father for a single day. “Strange … ,” he trailed off. He seems not to have considered that Lady Saint had come to say farewell to a dying man. Jimmy too visited his father in late August. “I think Daddy is a bit better,” he wrote to Hellen, “but still in a very sorrowful state. He has sores in his mouth + hadn’t been able to eat.” Jimmy sat by his bed, reading aloud from a commissioned biography of his father, who “hung on every word with the greatest interest.” Doris urged Jimmy to plan to return from Asia in January to see his father, and he said he would. On September 3, back in Stonington, he told Ephraim “CEM is dying” and asked, “How long will he last?” Ephraim explained that CEM had been close to death several times, though his recent “approaches have been closer and closer.” “Can one resist death?” Jimmy wondered. “O yes each morning U cd sleep on,” Ephraim said. (“I could,” DJ put in.) But CEM’s resistance was wearing down. Ephraim put a date on the time left to him: “1 year 2 go; before another winter.” “Will I really return in Jan. from Bombay to see him?” Jimmy asked. “Ah JM u will not. He will not press u. It will interrupt his grand farewell with life.” “So I’ll see him again though,” Jimmy said, sheepishly asking for reassurance, which Ephraim supplied: “Longer than u suppose.”
In New York, Merrill signed a contract for The Seraglio (he’d written the book without one) and made out his will. Maisie was handed off to Sewelly, like Henry James’s heroine being sent to one of her stepparents. The Rover Boys had booked passage by ship from San Francisco to Yokohama. In San Francisco, they visited Doris and Bobby. With Doris running the household, she and Bobby and their bright-eyed boys in matching clothes were photographed for a magazine feature as “Togetherness Family of the Month.” “No More Tilting at Windmills,” read another article with a photo of Bobby, now the no-nonsense CEO of Safeway supermarkets, whose business was booming as suburban homes jumped up across California. It was a pleasant visit for all; so far the “Togetherness family” hadn’t read The Seraglio.
The Magowans’ world of fine things and high finance stood in contrast to the scene at the Poetry Center, where Jimmy had been invited by Robert Duncan to read from his plays and poetry. Allen Ginsberg had just published Howl, a book that included a poem about meeting Walt Whitman in—no doubt—a Safeway supermarket, and the sensational Beat poets were national news. Ruth Diamant, the Poetry Center director, fretted about audience reactions to Merrill’s poetry in advance: “I hope there’s no trouble … ,” she fluttered as she escorted him to the stage. The Beats were out in force. But Jimmy’s encounter with the “wild little group of Zen-hipster poets” didn’t make for a historic East-West battle. After they’d heard him read, Ginsberg and Gregory Corso gave him some friendly advice. “What’s the matter?” he quoted them. “Why don’t you scream? That’s what people out here want! Embarrass yourself! Talk about cock! We’ll do anything if you just scream!” At the reception, Ginsberg and Corso enjoyed the spread by constructing great cold-cut sandwiches for themselves, took off their shoes, and read “their poems in squeaky, faint voices,” showing Merrill the way. The next day, he gave away his copy of Howl to Kay Meredith, Bill’s sister, who had come with Bob Grimes to see him and David off at the pier. Merrill fussed about the inferior cabin they had been assigned, and Jackson sweated to get them a better one. Then the ship pushed off, “the long paper streamers sank or snapped,” their friends grew tiny, and they steamed under the Golden Gate Bridge into silence. Surprised by his sadness at that moment, Merrill suddenly understood “why death is spoken of to children as ‘going on a trip.’ ”
Neither the Mikado nor R. H. Blyth prepared him and David for the Tokyo to which Meredith Weatherby introduced them. “Tex” Weatherby, an American expatriate and one of Guitou’s many lovers, translated Yukio Mishima’s novels. (They didn’t meet him on this trip, but Mishima stayed with Merrill and Jackson once they got back to Stonington.)5 They shopped in the Ginza District; took in the scalding tubs of Tokyo Onsen, featuring a steam bath, milk bath, mah-jongg club, and cabaret; and wandered among the brothels of Shinjuku and the penny arcades of the old town, Asakusa, with its bright pachinko parlors and ancient temple of Kannon, Bodhisattva of Mercy. For nightlife, Weatherby took them to the Silver Dagger, a gay bar, and Starlight Chrysanthemum Water, a working-class bar cum strip club, for a glimpse of its star, Sada Abe. Twenty years earlier, Abe had been convicted of a spectacular sex crime: murder by strangulation of her lover, after which she cut off his sex and carried it away in her handbag. Her prison term behind her, this latter-day Salome enjoyed a celebrity afterlife as folk hero. Every night at the club, she made a grand entrance, searching the eyes of the drinkers while they hooted and whistled, crossing their legs.
On hand those first nights was another American, a friend of Weatherby’s named Donald Richie. Tex didn’t stick in Jimmy’s life, but Donald did. Bighearted and sharp-eyed, equally comfortable in the memoirs of the Duc de St. Simon and the louche bars of Athens, Richie became one of Merrill’s closest friends and an intimate confidant. He was already an unusual, self-invented man. Two years older than Jimmy, he was broad-shouldered, assured, and quietly adventurous. He had grown up in a middle-class home in the flatlands of western Ohio, where, like many people in Depression-era America, he spent his free time in the movie theater. After serving in Europe in the war, he joined the American occupation forces in Japan as a typist. Soon he was writing “human interest” stories for Stars and Stripes. He learned to speak Japanese fluently, and the language gave him access to that culture in a period when it was still mysterious to Westerners. Having arrived less than two years after the U.S. Air Force firebombing of Tokyo, he was in a position to watch—and interpret for English-speaking readers—the prodigious transformation of postwar Japan. He moved on from journalism to write short stories and fables, novels, travelogues, and cultural notes. He studied Zen. Before he could speak Japanese, he haunted movie houses, focusing not on the plot, but on cinematic effects and performance styles. He became an experimental filmmaker himself, and established himself as an authority on Japanese cinema, a friend of the directors Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, and their influential expositor in the West. All that lay in the future, however, when Donald took Jimmy and David to the top of Mount Tsukuba to gaze at miles of rice fields below, and mighty snow-crowned “Fuji disclosed Himself.” Jimmy took the cable car down while, with Donald, David ran “singing and laughing down [the] green mountain.”
On October 1, Jimmy wrote to his father about The Seraglio, which he had sent to him before his departure. The question was how to think about “the connection between real life and fiction.” Jimmy admitted that, when they talked about the book, he himself had spoken
as if Lillian were Irene, you Benjamin, myself Francis. This, you must realize, is a brutal oversimplification. One starts with a situation, if you will, that corresponds to something that has happened in Life; from then on the major work begins—inventing, composing, smoothing, and patching until the book is a fiction. In my treatment of Francis I project into make-believe, certain insights I have had about myself—ways I might act, things I might do, much as one does things in dreams that it perhaps never occurs to one to do in waking life. It has been the same with the other characters; the elements that I have taken from life, I have taken because they fit into the imaginative scheme of the book. This may not keep people from being hurt—It didn’t keep me from painful feelings as I was writing. But I have tried to be as true to my experience as possible.
Charlie never read the novel or the letter. Telegrams from Hellen and his brother Charles reached Jimmy on October 5: his father was “very ill.” He phoned Southampton and spoke with Doris as well as Charles, who had flown in from Paris where he was living that year. CEM, he learned, would “not last more than a day or two. A helpless feeling,” he wrote to Alice B. Toklas, “this great distance—luckily the two other children are with him.” He decided not to fly back home, even if it meant that he would miss his father’s funeral. What he would miss, he told his mother, was not “the feeling of being helpful, or of seeing Daddy one last time—but the feeling of being helped, of being with Doris and Charles and with or near you, because it’s to us that he has mattered most; and because by oneself, without family, there is nobody’s example to get through days like these.”
Merrill had of course put himself at that “great distance,” which made it impossible to be close to his father and his siblings in the end, although he may very well have felt that the distance between them was his father’s fault; Charlie had left first, at the time of the divorce, and now he was doing it again. Charles Merrill died on October 8, 1956. The immediate cause was “uremic poisoning,” brought on by the radioactive iodine that he had been taking for his experimental heart treatments. There was a funeral for him at the Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue; he was buried in Palm Beach.
In the days before his father’s death, Merrill chose simply to “let things work on me.” He and Jackson went to the seaside town of Kamakura to visit the Daibutsu. Once housed in a temple, which was washed away by a tsunami in the fifteenth century, the massive, placid statue of Buddha sat in the open air, a monument to detachment. The Americans were getting used to the protocols of Buddhist temples and chose paper fortunes. “Mine good, D’s fair,” Merrill noted at one stop—the usual imbalance between their prospects. In Kyoto, they visited Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion Temple with its stark Zen garden of raked sand, and pondered the exalted view above the city at Kiyomizu-dera. They saw ancient cherry trees propped to keep them alive like venerated elders. They strolled in gardens “designed to resemble somebody’s description of paradise,” studying the manifold varieties of moss. “Over and over the point is reached where Art and Nature cannot be told apart,” Merrill wrote, contemplating the presence of craft, design, and meaning everywhere they went. In their socks in the Shogun’s rooms in Nijo Castle, they saw screen after screen that depicted, in vibrant, flat panels of color, a lonely crane, a stately peacock, gnarled pines, swirling rivers, and swirling clouds, the seasons turning as they passed from one room to the next, under the control of art.
News of Charlie’s death reached Jimmy in Kyoto. Hellen wrote to her son describing how she had placed her wedding ring from Charlie among the flowers on his casket, and at last Jimmy cried. “My tears are, still, I guess, partly for myself,” he replied to her, “that I wasn’t there; but partly too for the terrible way in which death smoothes out all the anxieties and confusion to reveal the feelings one hadn’t really been aware of feeling, they were so choked by pointless fears and awkwardnesses.” The same day that Jimmy wrote to his mother, he received news from his father himself. Ephraim reported that in heaven CEM was once again “surrounded by pretty ones.” Jimmy wanted to know how he looked. “O quite handsome in a green suit. 32 I would say. A beautiful smile. He asked 1st 4 his father [and] was relieved not 2 find him.” Due to be reborn in two months, CEM advised his son, “Beware of the money” (he was “most sorry for that”). As to his recent change of state, he said, “Better to be in yr heart than on everybody else’s shoulders.” Like Jimmy, he was “bored by the eulogies.” He was worried about his son Charles, and asked Jimmy if his brother had talent. Jimmy responded with some measured reassurance: “In teaching, family, maybe in writing.” “He is my problem,” CEM sighed. “Am I yrs?” JM asked. “U r very nearly my only claim to fame,” his father said, exaggerating considerably. “I have felt so strangely these days,” Jimmy replied, “grieving for you, as though I were you, shedding your tears …” “I am the same old fool,” CEM returned. “I love u Jimmy. That is enough. Now enjoy it all.”
During these days in Kyoto, Merrill visited Katsura Rikyu, the Detached Palace, and, struck by the name as much as the site, he wrote a short poem, “Kyoto: At the Detached Palace,” about emotional detachment and letting go. It is a silent elegy for his father, whose death the poet is too detached to mention. Also sightseeing in Kyoto was Arnold Toynbee, the British historian celebrated for his twelve-volume study of the rise and fall of civilizations. Merrill was struck by the newspaper commendation of this distinguished visitor, as rendered for him by his Japanese guide: “His magnanimity was apparent to all who met him. Never once did he show his true feelings.”
From Kyoto, Merrill and Jackson traveled on a cog railway, creeping up steep green gorges, to Mount Koya, the center of Shingon Buddhism. This temple complex, founded in the ninth century, was the vision of Kobo Daishi (also known as Kukai), the sage who brought Esoteric Buddhism to Japan from China. Interred on the mountain, Kobo Daishi dwells eternally in a state of meditation in anticipation of the Buddha of the future. His mausoleum is the center of the largest cemetery in Japan, a vast city of the dead—which Merrill and Jackson approached down a long avenue lined by tall cedars and red maples. It was “the most magnificent place we have seen yet.” They stayed in one of the monasteries and sat cross-legged for morning and evening prayers as saffron-robed priests “made weird sound effects with bells, woodblocks and their own voices.” At one point, the sage of the West, Professor Toynbee, “a tall, ethereal man” who was following the same itinerary, “drifted past in a cloud of incense and bearded priests.”
At Hiroshima, Merrill and Jackson surveyed another necropolis. To visit the city, Merrill told Buechner, “is one of the most painful experiences imaginable.”
Oh, some of it is built up, a big shopping section, a few buildings that either stood up under the Bomb or were purposely designed in the style of 1910 to look as if they had. But the rest—! mud streets, great empty purposeless lots full of rubble and strange stunted trees, trunks like toothpicks. […] In the middle of this wilderness rise up 3 modern cement buildings, the New Hiroshima Hotel, the Peace Museum, and a special museum with a poorly-named “Grill Room” upstairs. The Peace museum is given over to displays related to the Bomb, from scientific charts and diagrams all the way to the end of a child’s thumb, with nail, brown, dry, cooked, which dropped off during the five days before the little boy finally died. This is displayed with a photograph of him in school uniform, a sickly-delicate face, great big eyes, even the picture somewhat faded. Melted rock, flattened bottles, scorched clothing, photographs of horrible burns, a shot of Truman at the telephone—and beyond the plate glass, that filthy flat field with a man on crutches picking through a garbage pail. Well … I had never for a moment, before this, felt, what my brother would call, the national burden of guilt; but there we couldn’t meet people’s eyes.
If Hiroshima was what history, what the rise and fall of civilizations, looked like, it was horrifying, and Merrill wanted none of it.
By contrast, he was at ease in the theater and fascinated by the traditions of Japanese performance. In Tokyo and Kyoto, he sat for daylong programs of Kabuki, from which he found it “impossible to tear oneself away.” The stage’s garish colors, the actors’ outsized gestures, the zany humor, sudden twists of plot, and protracted, “quavering” death scenes, carried the essential effects across the language barrier. Merrill learned the language of Kabuki’s hyperconventional elements: the hanamichi, a narrow walkway reaching into the audience, used for exits, entrances, and exciting scenes; the mie, the pose that an actor strikes and holds, crying aloud, to indicate his intentions (and command applause, like a Verdi tenor with both arms raised at the end of an aria); the kuroko, the stagehands dressed in black and therefore “invisible,” who supply a desperate hero with his weapon, or reveal the “blood-red undergarment” meant to represent a mortal wound; and the kesho, the white makeup and painted lines that mask the actors and indicate the vice or virtue they embody.
Part of Merrill’s fascination with Kabuki had to do with gender. He and Jackson saw Nakamura Utaemon perform, a fabled actor of female parts who inherited the stage name of an eighteenth-century master of female impersonation which had been passed down over generations. In Kabuki, there are no women actors. Merrill saw their exclusion from the stage as consistent with male dominance everywhere in Japanese culture: in Japan, “[w]oman […] doesn’t matter much. She has less face to lose and proportionately more ‘personality’ than her refined husband. He knows that he invented her, that she is part of the Dream”—a male fantasy in which woman is costumed and scripted to act in certain ways. “At one time, the [Kabuki] actor of women’s roles learned many a trick from geisha,” Merrill goes on, teasing out an irony of cross-gender emulation. “But I think there must have always been geisha in the audience, white-faced, attentive, getting pointers on how to be themselves.” When geishas study female impersonators in order to emulate the type of women whom the actors are imitating and audiences desire, the notion that gender is a natural human attribute, and one that will align with sexual desire predictably, simply falls away: another instance of Art and Nature confounded. But Merrill doesn’t leave the thought there. Giving it another twist, this one with sardonic implications for gay men, he reflects that men themselves do not reliably impersonate the object of desire: “In the end, perhaps, even man falls short of the Dream.”
Merrill also saw Noh drama and the puppet theater called Bunraku. He found the Noh simply “bewildering”; it would take a second trip to Japan, thirty years later, before he was enthralled by this ancient, hieratic mode of performance. The Bunraku puppets lent themselves more easily to appreciation and analysis. Their veiled, black-costumed manipulators “cluster, 2 or 3 to a puppet, like embodied passions,” Merrill felt, noting however that the faces of “the master manipulators” are “exposed.” These shadowy manifestations of impulse and convention cause “the eyebrows to move, the fans to slam shut, sending the actor onto his knees or into the air, sleeves floating, mouths wagging. […] It all gives rise to a most peculiar theory of psychology, a New Meaning to the phrase ‘to be moved …’ ”—an alternative to the throes of romantic passion and the Freudian unconscious both.
Merrill was exhausted by Japan. At last, he stared at what he had bought to send home to Water Street: a noble Tokugawa-era treasure chest, a deep blue cotton kimono with the pattern of a stream, more kimonos, another chest of drawers, prints depicting Kabuki actors, ladies in kimonos, and children playing, masks, tea bowls, clog shoes, fans, and “a huge Doll of a Warrior that David found in a flea market for $1.50 […]—[…] it stares at me while I write, and gives no inkling (this goes without saying) of its true feelings.”
· · ·
Robin Magowan reflects on his uncle’s lifelong wanderlust: “Jimmy wasn’t a travel writer; he was a writer who traveled. He wants something new from a place. He collects objects and people. But he’s not interested in the place.” He did that collecting on this nine-month journey not only with his wallet, but, as usual, with his typewriter, which he unpacked at each stop. When he is typing in his bathing suit under a straw awning on the beach in Ceylon, it’s hard to say whether he’s in the scene or outside it, at work or at leisure, in the moment or thinking ahead to the point when he will be looking back at it. As he did in Rome, he used his correspondence as his journal: he typed letters on carbon paper and kept copies in a binder, to which he added notes, jotted on a blank page or at the bottom of a letter. He put his letters to use in “The Beaten Track,” a series of travel notes written en route which appeared in Semi-Colon that winter. The title disclaims in advance any excitement or novelty he might offer, being painfully aware of the conventionality of the wish to see and describe exotic places. The tone of the piece follows suit: snide, taut with contained anger, and mixed with frustration, incapacity, and even something like hurt. “It is very lonely here, with no way of sharing in anything,” Merrill says of Japan. “The language barrier is severe; that of manners, monstrous. One can endure just so long the hours spent drinking tea, or trying to get a straight answer, or holding some inscrutable ornament to the light in one’s great clumsy fingers.”
Hong Kong was a stopover. There was more shopping, this time for suits, shirts, and shoes. Merrill knew that the cost of the clothes said something about the quality of the lives of those making them: “It is painful to imagine people working all night long embroidering monograms at 5 cents an hour or something like that.” The small children begging were still harder to contemplate. “As in Japan,” he told his mother, “the cheapness of human life is a very chilling spectacle; one sees how it has helped form the glorious spiritual attainments of the East. The Chinese, I was once told, believe that man should resemble water, forever seeking the lowest level, effacing himself. But it is one thing to be effaced by oneself or by other Chinese; another thing to be effaced by Englishmen or Russians.” He met a Mrs. Church, an English businesswoman who had lived in Hong Kong for forty years. “[S]triking the table and glaring about,” she complained to Jimmy and David that “[t]he young people here now, […] have no conception of empire-building!”
Bangkok was different. “This is the land of heart’s desire,” Merrill wrote to Rosie Sprague, who was confined far away in a Massachusetts sanatorium, being treated again for tuberculosis. Here people smiled at him mildly, like the antique Buddhas he admired. Gazing at the small boats heavy with shining goods, the canal-side houses on stilts, and the temple exteriors glittering with gold leaf, he compared the atmosphere to “the kind of spirit you find in Congreve, Couperin, the architect Borromini—an air of being a trifle too chic and therefore, out of sheer ennui, using dangerous, perishable mediums, ornaments that the underlying structure may or may not support; the fun is in the uncertainty.” To climb to the top of a temple—the flights of interior stairs growing steeper as one square roof opened to reveal the four walls of the next platform—was to enter a secret place created for beauty and contemplation, like “the heart of a quatrain by Mallarmé.”
Jimmy and David got high in another way when they spent the night in an opium den. Puffing at that “black bead” bubbling “far, far off” in the mouth of the pipe, “I tried too hard and was sick, but David had visions all night long of unknown charmers and moonlight on leaves.” Robin notes that “Jimmy was really sick. He told me that his heart stopped and he thought he was going to die.” That didn’t stop him, however, from going back and trying a second time: Bangkok’s fanciful temples, he supposed, must have been created from a vision like David’s opium haze, and he wanted that experience.
During their three weeks in Thailand, Merrill was loosening up, as “The Beaten Track” suggests. After his account of Japan, he relaxes into a note on Bangkok, which concludes with two comic vignettes. The first describes a visit to the home of a new acquaintance, a friendly young man named Chew. “That fat lady is my mother,” Chew says to Jimmy and David, innocent of the insult he is giving. Most of one room is taken up by a homely shrine: “twenty Buddhas on bleachers, surrounded by flowers, photographs, extinct incense.” In a shrine to other gods, Chew displays snapshots of himself beside pictures of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean: he plans to make his name in Hollywood, as they did, he explains. Then Jimmy and David put on sarongs and casually bathe with him in the river. Before they part, he signs a photo for them: “To my best American friends. I hope you will not remember me.”
Merrill’s touch is very light in all of this. He gives us no reason to look down on either party in this intercultural exchange; he only asks us to appreciate with him a gentle comedy of manners. The same feeling comes across when he describes himself pressed knee to knee with an American woman on the bottom of a delicate river craft paddled by a Thai prince. At the end of their jaunt to some ruins, Merrill swivels his head abruptly. He has just a moment to glimpse the prince’s annoyance—a reflection of the haughty young man inside Merrill himself?—before the boat tips over, and suddenly “we were all three waist-deep in the warm exhilarating water.”6
When they brought out the Ouija board in India, the mediums learned that Ephraim had followed Jimmy’s advice and arranged for Hans’s representative to be reborn to an Elizabeth Plummer—who was not, however, JM’s stepsister, but another Betty, and not a suitable mother at all. There were consequences for all concerned: “HL [Hans Lodeizen] in his disappointment with a wretched mongolian has let me say protested and I have had many restrictions put upon me. I no longer have such interesting work 2 do, and I am often threatened with losing you. It wd be possible 4 me 2 be completely discredited by an agent.” “An agent?” Jimmy replied. “How Kafka!” The spirit world was policed, it seemed, and there were rules, about which Ephraim was now explicit: “I can tell U anything but I must be sure U will not do anything abt it + U can tell me anything but we must not set up our own little system.” He reported that CEM had been reborn to a Jewish haberdasher living at 3 Rogers Lane, Hampstead, in London (parents chosen, it would seem, to gratify the old clotheshorse and Anglophile—while teaching him a lesson about his anti-Semitism). Jimmy might look for the little boy’s house or ask about him “at the greengrocers” but that was it: “we must not do do do anything […]. Imagine the confusion!”
Merrill was deep in English fiction at the time. He read Bleak House in India, entranced, and went on directly to Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend. The colonial bureaucracy of India was positively Dickensian, it struck him, as he and David arranged to get their newest round of purchases to America and themselves to Europe. The Suez Crisis canceled their plans to sail through the Red Sea to Cairo. They flew instead to Istanbul, that “astonishingly beautiful city” where they savored the treasures of the Seraglio, before moving on to Rome, where Quinta and Dr. Simeons greeted them, as well as a crew of Americans on holiday: Bobby Isaacson and his wife Jane, the William Jay Smiths, the Browers, even Bernie Winebaum. From here on, the trip would return them to familiar places and people. In Vienna, they met up with Charles and Mary Merrill and their children. Charles was writing a historical novel, which Jimmy mildly praised. Charles had had no role in The Seraglio—no doubt happily, from his perspective. The choice made sense—Charles’s filial rebellion had removed him from his father’s retinue long before—but even so, it was pointed: a brother’s presence would have compromised Francis’s position as the “unique.” After five days in each other’s company, it was clear that CEM’s death had not brought the brothers closer. As usual, his half brother struck Jimmy as “remote, perhaps unhappy, pompous, disinterested.”
In Munich, German friends of David’s shepherded them through the wild parties of Fasching, or Carnival, keeping them up past dawn on Mardi Gras in costume—David sporting a Chinese jacket, Jimmy a kimono and clogs. Since Rome, Merrill had been wearing, for the first time in his life, contact lenses. He marveled: these and a jet black cape produced “marked personality changes.” They retired to the mountains in Switzerland, snuggled in the quaint high dairy country of Appenzell, where Jackson had begun writing his first novel in 1949. It was for him a bittersweet return to that idyllic setting. After being interested in that novel enough to ask David for revisions, C. Day Lewis at Chatto & Windus in London wrote to turn down the book. Merrill called it “a horrid disappointment.” This was the closest DJ had come to commercial success. Now he proposed to friends—for example, the Lavins—that they collaborate “on a bosomy sexy Italian Novel.” He was entirely serious: they could write whatever part of it they wished and simply assign him a role. He planned to publish it under the nom de plume “Hope St. Argent” (“Hope sans argent, get it?”).
By now, Merrill had a copy of The Seraglio in hand, and it was time to face the question of what other people thought of it. He directed Knopf to send clippings to his mother. He and Hellen were still arguing over the book. She felt, after CEM’s death, that it shouldn’t be published, or should at least be revised. “I honestly don’t see what Daddy’s death does to change it,” replied Jimmy, who felt he had created “a very true and lovable portrait”: “Now that he is gone I’m more than ever glad to have made a kind of memorial that will offset some of the obvious garlands anybody could contrive.” He also decided against Hellen’s advice not to “prepare” the Magowans for the book, since that would increase their apprehension and make a “fair reading” unlikely. His mother complained that she didn’t know how to answer when friends asked her what the book was about. Jimmy made two milquetoast suggestions: “old age, or: the difference between 2 generations.” When it came to the reactions of friends and family, he urged her just to brazen it out, and “by showing a minimum of embarrassment,” to convince everyone there was nothing to be embarrassed about. This was the approach he would take.
Jimmy himself was satisfied. The Seraglio seemed to him, he told Hellen, “very strong, not just as ‘writing,’ but as a vision of life, of a life if you will, glimpsed and expressed.” If that vision was cold, as she charged, that might be “a quality of my sensibility at present, or a primarily esthetic matter: a kind of ‘academic palette.’ ” He continued, “But as for the picture itself, and your saying I have chosen a subject unworthy, I do not even need, in order to disagree with you, to resort to the painter’s tenet that all subjects are potentially worthy.” For that matter, “what other subject, at this early stage, have I at my fingertips? what world comparable in complexity + richness to the formed world I have watched since infancy[?]” As to his relations with that world, he felt better now about Daddy and Doris too; and “where you are concerned,” he ended, “I think you have seen how not the writing so much as the fact of the book’s having been written + being the book it is has led us into a much more open relationship; simply, perhaps, a relationship, there having been precious little before.” Soon after that, Hellen forwarded to him “an astonishing letter” CEM had written to Jimmy “that his sec[retar]y had kept for a year and a half[.]” In it, Charlie urged him “not to be swayed by anyone, in or out of the family, concerning the novel, and to say whatever I chose about ‘Benji.’ ”
Still, the novel was a great deal for his family to swallow, even sympathetic Robin. “I was astounded by the anger in The Seraglio,” he recalled. “Jimmy is saying”—to his parents, to the rest of the family, to everyone—“you wish my essence were not in existence. That rejection was devastating, and he wrote a devastating book in response. He knew that people would be angry and he didn’t want to deal with it. So he went abroad.” Jimmy had expected to return to America in March; in the end, he stayed in Europe all the way into summer, lying low. Doris and Bobby got their copy in March, and Bobby wrote praising it vaguely (Robin said his father never read it). That was enough to be a relief: Jimmy had wondered “how deep in villainy I had dipped myself.” Superior manners on all sides allowed him to pretend otherwise, but Doris was injured on too many counts to get over the book easily. She did not speak to her brother for two years. He’d chosen to focus his satire on her and her family for complex reasons. He was jealous of her intimacy with his father. He also understood Doris’s compliant relation to the old man, and in attacking her, he was attacking part of himself. Above all, he knew his sister was a peacemaker and one day would forgive him.
Gerrish Thurber could imagine how Jimmy’s family felt. Exercising the authority of a mentor, he wrote a letter forcing Merrill to admit some misgivings. The novel, Jimmy replied to him, “was written in something of a trance, there was the illusion that everything in it had to be (not altogether dispelled, that illusion), and [only] when all the work was done did I begin to perceive Consequences. I realize all too well that the link between Consequences and Motives is all too real—but I feel now that, with the book, I have reached the end of a long dark period that could not otherwise have been reached but by writing as I have, not only the novel, but a number of rather hard and cold poems,” by which he probably meant “Salome” and “Mirror.”
The reviews were not gratifying. Critics simply did not know what to make of Francis’s story. They were put off by the novel’s wealthy milieu (one quoted Fitzgerald’s line to Hemingway: “The very rich are different from you and me”) and baffled by Francis’s sexuality; most simply avoided mention of the castration scene, and none of them used the word. The Nation called the novel “a Freudian diagram” and complained of its “unreality”—as if the book and Francis suffered from the same condition. The Atlantic described Merrill’s protagonist as “an inadequate man, damaged by his background, who retreats from love and sex,” and seemed to blame the author for it: the portrait of Francis, like Francis himself, was “faltering and unsatisfactory.” The New York Times stressed the pure strangeness of the story. Its review quotes Francis’s remark—“How weird”—when he learns that his father’s heart treatment will not eliminate pain, only prevent him from feeling it. The review predicts that “the average reader” will say the same thing about “this excellently phrased and often witty yet somehow remote and casual novel”: “How weird!”
The Seraglio is indeed a “weird” book, but the repeated charge suggests a queasy distaste on the part of reviewers in excess of the novel’s peculiarities of genre and plot. It wasn’t easy for Herbert Weinstock, Merrill’s editor, to recruit support for the book to begin with. When he asked Richard Wilbur for a blurb, Wilbur replied with a sentence that, although just and nicely phrased, Weinstock couldn’t use or even show to Merrill: “I think that James Merrill is one of the best young poets in America; the only thing that puts me off his poetry is the extent of his preoccupation with neurosis. I have, of course, the same reservations about his first novel. I am glad to say—and I hope you will find it acceptable for your purpose—that The Seraglio is witty, well-shaped, finely written, and thoroughly desolating.”
Wilbur’s reference to Merrill’s “preoccupation with neurosis” points to the homosexual subtexts in his work—for which the novel’s reviewers had no more precise word than “weird.” Resigned to their judgment, Merrill turned the charge of strangeness around by blandly remarking upon “how strangely other people experience things.” His faded tone disguises the fact that the novel’s reviews were a massive disappointment to him; he’d counted on them to defend him against opprobrium and justify the work. Detre had said that his family’s pain was not “too high a price” to pay for “great writing.” But no one but Detre had called this writing “great.”
Jimmy and David journeyed up the Rhine. Their goal was Amsterdam, where they saw their Stonington neighbor George Copeland—“in a tailcoat (and a tizzy)”—make his return to the recital hall, to modest applause. Through April and May they zigzagged across southern England and northern France, seeing Alice B. Toklas, Tony Harwood, and Charlie Shoup in Paris, and Umberto Morra in London. Their pace was desultory, their enthusiasms mild. “Conceivably,” Merrill mused, “we are far, far beyond new experiences.” When the New Amsterdam pulled up at the pier in Chelsea at last, Claude and Sewelly met the world travelers. They put Maisie in the car and drove home to Water Street.
