6
WATER STREET
1957–61
During the next four years, Merrill published two books of poems: The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, in 1959, and Water Street, in 1962. The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace collected poems that were written over an eight-year period, starting in 1950. Most of the poems in Water Street, a shorter book, were composed rapidly between spring 1958 and fall 1960. To open Water Street just after closing The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace makes an impression. The poet speaking in “An Urban Convalescence,” the first poem in the book, shows a colloquial ease and intimacy, a fluency and urgency, which are not found in the polished, poised, oddly abstract poems of the earlier book.
The development implied a new understanding of the relationship between his life and writing. The poems in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace are a collection of symbols and epiphanies drawn from experience but set off from it in an ideal, timeless space, a Switzerland of the imagination. In Water Street, Merrill acknowledges that time is passing, and his poetry is not exempt from it. If the first title is literary and general, the second one is local and particular: it calls attention to where, and by implication how, the poet is living. The task Merrill set himself was to come to terms with his life in the process of inhabiting the world imaginatively and emotionally, day after day; and the metaphor he found for this process was the making of a house, a dwelling where he and his readers could be at home.
It was natural for Merrill to think of his poems as a kind of house, because his house was a kind of poem. In his father’s homes in Southampton and Palm Beach, Kimon’s rooms at Amherst and on Poros, Claude’s Pawlet farmhouse, Umberto’s Cortona estate, and Alice B. Toklas’s flat in Paris, he had seen how rooms could collect the story of a life, and how the inner life of daydream and memory might express itself in a home, as in a work of art. He liked the fact that “stanza” was the Italian for “room”: “given arrangements,” whether of poetic form or interior design, were structures to be inhabited, where the self could be apprehended in a daily dialogue with spaces and objects. He pored over Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, which describes the house as a “shell” or “nest” for poetic reverie. Yeats’s Tower and Pope’s Grotto intrigued him. As a student at Amherst, he’d gazed at the windows behind which Emily Dickinson wrote her poems, and brooded on his hero Proust, writing in his cork-lined bedroom.1
The apartment to which he and Jackson returned from Europe in 1957 was much changed. Up to this point, Merrill had worked on a sideboard in the dining room. Now he had a study of his own in a small, west-facing room overlooking Water Street. He turned his desk and typewriter away from the harbor view. A silhouette of Hans’s profile—a gift from him—stood propped on volumes of new poetry. Jimmy lay on a small daybed to read, or sat on it cross-legged with a deck of cards, playing games of Patience between drafts of a poem. The other side of the study door was fitted with shelves; when it swung shut, the room vanished behind a wall of books. The study was Ali Baba’s cave, a room hidden inside other rooms. When the house filled with guests, Jimmy disappeared behind the heavy, creaking door, maintaining his routine of morning and afternoon work at the desk. Catherine Merrill, Jimmy’s niece, remembers that when she visited Water Street with her family or on her own, that room was “strictly off-limits.”
A sharp turn at the study door led up a short steep flight of stairs to the attic, now remodeled as a spacious room, the biggest in the house. The north side of the room slanted under timbered eaves; windows facing south let in sun. When the contents of the West Tenth Street apartment came out of storage in June 1957, a long, stiff-backed Queen Anne couch and a shining grand piano, a Steinway Merrill had purchased in 1947, went soaring four flights above the street “in the jaws of a yellow crane,” and were safely deposited in this top-floor room with a harpsichord that Merrill had bought in Rome, a memento of his days with Bobby Isaacson. Larry Rivers’s pastoral view of Water Mill covered the back of a freestanding bookshelf; his paired portraits of Jimmy and David hung downstairs. Black and white squares of linoleum made the floor a chessboard. The room was a lair, a “high retreat.” Sliding glass doors gave onto a wide wooden deck where the small, interlocking rooms below opened to a view—beyond treetops, shingled roofs, chimneys, and cupolas—of sea and sky, answering to another side of Merrill’s sensibility. The deck baked in the sun and glowed under the moon or stars. Seagulls sailed by at the same height, as voices drifted up from the street. Jimmy and David could lie there naked, tanning, or sit talking with friends over drinks, and yet be hidden from view: only the tower of the vacant Baptist church next door saw “eye to eye” with them.
Merrill installed a telephone in an alcove at the bottom of the stairs. He stood and talked while his right hand sketched on what paper came to hand, his squiggles turning into “sunbursts, garlands, creatures, men” (as he says in “The Doodler,” a poem composed that year). Or he pulled the cord into the sitting room, reclined on a small chaise, and looked down at Water Street through colored panes. The alcove was now a tiny music room with a record player and a growing collection of classical recordings. Merrill listened to song cycles, chamber music, piano, and opera, from Mozart and bel canto to Wagner and Strauss. Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Schumann dominated, but there was lots of French music, too, from Rameau to Fauré, Satie, and Ravel. Merrill’s preferred performers were mid-century virtuosi like Pablo Casals and Artur Schnabel (the complete Beethoven piano sonatas in 78 and LP) and the sopranos he’d heard in the concert hall and opera house so often: Maggie Teyte, Lotte Lehmann, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Kirsten Flagstad. Ralph Kirkpatrick, a Yale professor with whom Merrill became friends, performed the complete Scarlatti sonatas and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier on the harpsichord. There were only a few lighter touches—such as Ruth Etting, “The Happy Singer of Sad Songs,” the jazz balladeer Don Shirley doing standards like “Someone to Watch Over Me,” or the Neapolitan folk singer Roberto Murolo, whose gentle strumming Merrill evokes with envy and irony in a poem written three decades later, “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker.”
Painting ranks below music in the hierarchy of the arts propounded in Sandover, but pictures covered the walls on Water Street. These included work by figures from the New York art world: Fairfield Porter, Nell Blaine, Grace Hartigan, Rivers. A tempera image of a bird in profile called Time of Change by the mystical Oregonian Morris Graves hung in the dining room. From Merrill’s father, after his death, came a landscape by Maxfield Parrish—shadowy trees and a pale twilight sky—and a misty mother and child from the “Maternité” series, a piece of gloomy camp, by the French Symbolist Eugène Carrière. Ghika’s small woodcut of a black swan, frontispiece for The Black Swan, moved from one room to another over the years. A pair of geisha in big Japanese prints guarded the door that led to the study and upstairs. A watercolor bouquet by Proust’s friend Madeleine Lemaire, the model for his Mme. Verdurin, hung in the sitting room behind a Louis XVI chair. The stairway leading to the apartment was decorated with etchings by Philippe Jullian portraying characters from À la recherche.
The surfaces of the house—windowsills, bureaus, tabletops—filled up with curious objects. Some of these were toys and trinkets, talismans and totems. Others, like the pair of Empire candlesticks on the dining table, were finely crafted things. Still others were ingenious, like the Tanagra figure set in a glass lamp which came as a gift from the Lavins. Most of these objects were inexpensive; they derived their value from their place in Merrill’s life and imagination. They were a lexicon he used for self-expression, even while they entered and shaped his writing, as if, in thing-poems like “Prism,” “Willowware Cup,” and “Radiometer,” objects were using him to express themselves.
Mirrors symbolized that reciprocity. The apartment accumulated them, beginning with the wall mirror Jimmy and David propped upright in a chair facing them during their early séances. The surface of a decayed-looking glass in a gilt frame opened black-edged holes like the “blind flaws” in the mind of the speaker of “Mirror.” Sitting in the recessed frame of another mirror, a tiny porcelain shepherd dozed among his reflections. The apartment’s prize was an enormous Venetian mirror framed by a proscenium of “gilded palms and sphinxes,” which Jackson brought home when the new owners of a mansion on Main Street gave it away. This unnervingly large mirror stood in the sitting room, “Exactly six feet tall like Christ our Lord,” as Merrill puts it in Sandover. Backed by bookshelves that walled off the front door, it was revealed only when one walked fully into the room and turned to find it staring back—an uncanny surprise for the first-time visitor.
Merrill liked the sense of being looked at that his mirrors produced. He also liked how they redirected light, multiplying it. Light filled the house from morning sun to evening’s lamps and candles. It was refracted by crystals and prisms, and tinted by beach glass, colored bottles, and bright stained glass salvaged from the Baptist church. It made the apartment a secular, private place of worship, a compact temple of art, setting idiosyncratic personal taste against the powers of darkness and gravity. Light: the final touch in the apartment’s decor, it was also the first thing to be noticed. It suggested a metaphor for Merrill’s own creative energy, which played on the house’s quirky spaces and fanciful objects, bringing them to life.
Grace Stone had lived in far-flung places with her husband, from Shanghai to Paris, where Captain Stone was stationed as the U.S. naval attaché during World War II. Not a typical navy wife, she was a novelist who combined historical drama and sentimental plots, with much popular success. The Bitter Tea of General Yen, the tale of a New England missionary taken captive by a Chinese warlord, who is soon captivated by her, became a film starring Barbara Stanwyck (1933). Hollywood also adapted two of the novels that she published under the pen name “Ethel Vance”: Escape with Norma Shearer (1940) and Winter Meeting with Bette Davis (1948). Grace spent winters in Rome. She prized her friendships with Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy, and other famous writers. She was determined and decisive by nature. In her seventies she fought off a mugger in New York with her umbrella. She was in her sixties when she met Merrill, and she lived to be one hundred. When her eyes began to fail, he read long works aloud to her, including the Odyssey and all of The Changing Light at Sandover. Grace was an indefatigable great lady on whom he doted, like a child. Robert Morse painted a group portrait of the Temple; it captures Jimmy leaning forward, hanging on Grace’s next word. Sometimes, her daughter recalls, “he literally climbed into Mother’s lap.”
Eleanor was strong-willed and a match for Grace. It was no secret that they fought with each other “like an old couple.” Jimmy once took Louise Fitzhugh to dinner at their house, without explaining their relationship; back on the street after dinner, she asked him, “How long have they been together?” Eleanor’s early life was worthy of her mother’s romantic fiction. In 1937, at nineteen, when she was living abroad with her parents, she fell in love with and married a Hungarian count. When the war began, Eleanor, now Baroness Perényi, came back to the U.S. to give birth to her son, Peter. Her husband, Zigismund Perényi, stayed in Europe and joined the Hungarian resistance; they divorced in 1945. She worked at Harper’s Bazaar before becoming an editor at Mademoiselle. In 1946, she published a memoir of her life with the baron on his family estate, titled More Was Lost. The Bright Sword, a novel about the American Civil War, appeared in 1946. Two books followed much later: Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero (1974), a finalist for the National Book Award, and Green Thoughts (1981), a meditation on gardens and gardening. A classic in its genre, Green Thoughts consists of brief essays on topics arranged alphabetically from “annuals” to “woman’s place” (the latter a reflection on “the two-thousand-odd years of women’s incarceration in the flower garden”). Eleanor was brown-haired, big-featured (dark eyebrows, a strong nose), and bosomy, with a deep, gravelly voice. Merrill liked to refer to her by her initials, ESP. Both sophisticated and practical, and a staunch liberal in politics, she had a fine prose style, a sharp tongue, and utter confidence in her moral judgment and literary taste. She was a proud, independent woman, who spoke her mind without bothering to be nice.
The Morses lived in a rambling house, sections of which were built in the 1780s and 1880s, with a garden and centuries-old boxwood hedges, diagonally across the street from Grace and Eleanor. Isabel was the source of their money. The daughter of a diplomat under President Herbert Hoover and a mother from high society in New York, she was a modest woman who came from privilege and power. Small and delicate, she had broken her jaw as a child, and it was improperly set, which gave her a flat, compressed chin. She had crippling arthritis, which worsened as she aged, curling her body, and she used a cane. She didn’t argue with the opinionated Stone Women, or rise to the bait of their provoking remarks. A painter who had trained as a sculptor, she made still lifes, domestic scenes, and bold, large-canvas landscapes, crosshatched with vibrant color, recording scenes from her and Robert’s travels. She was an attentive mother to their only child, Daniel.
Robert was a dignified man with dark eyes and dark hair that fringed his bald head. He was born in 1906 in Toledo, Ohio. His mother had emigrated from Sweden; his father played the piano for silent films. Having grown up as the precocious youngest child in a family of girls, he was accustomed to being made much of. After he graduated from Princeton with a degree in art in 1928, he went to France to study painting. He met Isabel via her mother, whom he had befriended in New York. When they married, Isabel gave him a quarter of a million dollars (a great sum) to regard as his own fortune, relieving him of the need to make a living. Robert continued to paint, and he practiced the piano daily; he and Jimmy liked to play four-hand. There were two grand pianos in the Morses’ house in Bedford Hills, where Robert and Isabel were friends with their neighbors, the composers Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti, whom Merrill made friends with too. The very type of the dilettante, Robert dabbled in poetry as well as painting and music. He published in a private edition two long narrative poems on classical themes, titled The Two Persephones.
But his special gift was for zany, impromptu wordplay. Verbal baubles dropped from him in conversation, spurred on by Jimmy, who gathered these witticisms in lists in his notebook. Some of the jokes were literary, as when Robert called George Eliot “a Lewes woman,” playing on her scandalous liaison with George Henry Lewes. Other lines were delivered à propos de rien, such as “moist with your own moutarde.” The spoonerism, a phrase in which parallel elements exchange places, was his signature form; with it, he turned clichés topsy-turvy, often to lewd and surreal effect, as in “a gritty pearl is like a titty prune.” (At Jimmy’s urging, Auden printed Robert’s spoonerism-poem, “A Winter Eve,” in his commonplace book, A Certain World.) He was given to Groucho Marx–style bawdy one-liners: “I’ll give you just 10 minutes to take your hand off my knee!” or—replying to Grace’s reference to his “expressive mouth”—“Hundreds of satisfied users!”
Despite his giggling wit, Robert was a reserved, controlled man who, in Perényi’s words, “seemed slightly mysterious, as if he had some special knowledge.” Morse’s air of mystery was perhaps readily explained: Robert was a family man who was also a homosexual. His illustration for the jacket of The Two Persephones, which shows the goddess divided down the middle by light and shade, to represent her dual identity as Demeter’s daughter and Hades’s bride, the Queen of Hell, hints at his duality. Jimmy and David must have guessed the truth early on; usually they were too tactful even to mention it behind his back. For Robert, being gay on Main Street in Stonington meant playing madly with words and remaining “slightly mysterious.”
Merrill and Jackson were almost as self-protective. For some time, even with the Morses and Grace and Eleanor, they maintained the fiction that they were friends, not lovers. David’s wedding ring was the disguise. He tried to convince Eleanor that, just as he had Sewelly, Jimmy had “a mistress in Mystic,” the town just west of Stonington. The ludicrous alibi registers the social pressure they lived under: both Merrill and Jackson produced amusing lies and strategic silences to defend their life together and keep other people at arm’s length. They had cause to be wary of the judgment even of friends. When David taught a teenage girl in town how to drive, Eleanor reprimanded him for promoting the girl’s crush on him, and told the girl to stay away from him, because he was a homosexual. Fuming, he and Jimmy spent an evening writing poison-pen letters to Eleanor. Despite the familiarity and mutual devotion that developed within the walls of the Surly Temple, there was never much openness and trust. At the end of an evening, the three odd couples retired to their separate corners, picking over what the others had just done and said.
The chill air and elevation—Santa Fe is built at an altitude of 7,000 feet—were exhilarating. So were the desert’s pinks and tans, which glistened that year after a series of heavy snows. They had just one friend in town, Mary Lou Aswell. A small woman with dark hair and a vivid smile, she was an editor from New York who lived in a house on Canyon Road with her partner, Agnes Sims, a painter. Mary Lou and Jimmy’s friendship lasted twenty-five years. When she died in 1984, he felt “only pure grief.” “We were alike in our love of amusement,” he wrote in his journal. “Like me, she aged without maturing.” She took him and David that winter to ritual dances in the nearby pueblos. She also introduced them to Witter Bynner, Wallace Stevens’s friend from youth, a poet and translator from the Chinese who held court around the piñon-scented fire in his old adobe home, a short walk from where they were living. Bynner’s house had begun as a “shack,” to which he’d added one room after another, like railroad cars. Within were Chinese scrolls, Navajo blankets, and Hispanic santos. As he told stories and played the piano, his laugh rose “above the noise in a room like the whoop of a crane.” Bynner was “a doll,” Merrill thought. But he hadn’t come to Santa Fe for its social life. He passed up the chance to meet the poet Robert Creeley, who lived nearby.2 He wanted seclusion in order to finish the book of poems that he had been at work on, fitfully, since 1950.
It worked. “Poems drop like apples,” Merrill boasted. Besides writing new poems, he was revising old ones and experimenting with the organization of the book as a whole. It was a large manuscript (he considered some fifty poems before settling on a selection of forty-one) composed over a long period during which he’d written two plays and a novel and traveled across Europe and the U.S. and around the world. His first, finicky impulse was to order poems according to strictly formal principles: “a) the earlier ‘serious’ poems in stanzas; b) the blank verse poems; c) lighter poems, early and late; d) later ‘serious’ poems in stanzas.” But, stimulated by reactions to the manuscript from Barbara Deming, a poet and future political activist who was a good friend from his days at Bard, he decided to mix these groups up. The arrangement introduced “formal dissimilarity” and a “greater interchange” between one section and another, and between “serious” and “lighter” poems.
From a distance, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace looks like many other books of American poetry from the 1950s. Its foreign scenes and its obsession with art and perception identify it with the “tourist” poetry being written by Americans who traveled abroad in this period with the support of newly established academic and artistic fellowships and on the strength of the postwar U.S. dollar. Its wit, elegance, personal reserve, and technical skill—everything that could be summed up as its formalism—date the poetry just as clearly. But even while it exemplified these period conventions, Merrill’s poetry chafed against them. Wherever the tourist travels, he knows that what he is seeing has been seen before: his poems are only “images of images.” He also knows that his expert verse forms threaten him with lifelessness or entrapment.
Merrill made that threat the theme of “Dream (Escape from the Sculpture Museum) and Waking,” the longest poem in the book. The walls of the “Sculpture Museum” symbolize the conventions that set art apart from life and the artist apart from other people. The poem’s chaotic flow of dream images strains against the structure of its rhymed six-line stanzas—the unconscious pitched against controlling form. Wanting “to be more natural” than the statues, but inhibited by the self-consciousness that even his wish to be natural expresses, Merrill’s speaker, trapped in the museum, is frozen in a formal “show / Of being human.” Love should be a solution, a way out of the self-enclosure represented by the statues. But love is a sign of everything that’s wrong here. In the closing stanzas, the speaker addresses his lover, who is asleep and as still as a statue. He recalls their conversation of the night before:
You called me cold, I said you were a child.
I said we must respect
Each other’s solitude. You smiled.
The poem ends with the speaker’s resolve to wake his friend and communicate. His dream of “blinded” travelers on a “road in snow” suggests a pair of lovers who are isolated from other people and each other, having lost their way in life, and unable to warm themselves:
Well, I shall wake you now,
Smiling myself to hide my fear.
Sun turns the stone urn’s overflow
To fire. If I had missed before
The relevance of the road in snow,
The little dogs, the blinded pair,
I judge it now in your slow eyes
Which meet mine, fill with things
We do not name, then fill with the sunrise
And close, because too much light stings,
All the more when shed on these
Our sleeps of stone, our wakenings.
The lovers’ communion consists in shared silence. When their eyes meet, they close again, as if by agreement, because it “stings” to look at each other in the light.
Like the truth in The Seraglio, love hurts in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace. In “Stones,” a short poem probably also written during this period, the speaker hardens his heart, thinking that if he were able to be more like a stone, he would have “Neither to suffer, grow nor die.” But that hard heart isolates him from his lover:
Now just the least part of you
Can be reached by love, as when
The world coming between
Causes a crescent moon.
What Merrill’s speaker is trying to protect himself from is clarified in the powerfully concise “A Renewal,” where love makes itself felt as a penetrating blow. This is the whole poem:
Having used every subterfuge
To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of passion,
Now I see no way but a clean break.
I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.
You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge,
A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on.
We sit, watching. When I next speak
Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.
Love involves, it seems, helpless submission to pain. The desire Merrill expresses in this passive idiom is a wish to be penetrated and to be hurt. The “hilt” of love’s sword rhymes with “guilt”: it punishes the lover as it wounds him, and it makes desire difficult to tell apart from the desire for punishment, or at least the need for it.
Merrill was unsure what to call the book. His draft titles show him wondering whether to stress certain symbols (“Mirrors + Stones” or “Mirrors + Journeys”) or to apply a neutral label, such as “46 Poems” or “L Poems.” The long, metrical title he chose—The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace is a line of iambic pentameter—was a significant solution. By reaching back to one of the earliest poems in the book and highlighting Hans’s death, the title called attention to the drama of Merrill’s creative and emotional development. He placed the two poems about his dead friend—“The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace” and “A Dedication”—first and last in the book, framing the other poems. Together, they implied that facing up to death in order to live fully, as Hans had done, was the challenge facing him in both life and art, and that Hans would show him how to do it.
Merrill finished his manuscript in February, although he made more revisions before Knopf set the book’s pages for publication in January 1959. Contemplating what he had done, he noted “a kind of obsessive subject-matter which perhaps gives a curious slant to the book,” foregrounding “dissolution, being consumed, evaporation, etc. But I suppose there is nothing I can do about it now, except to register the fact and see if I can’t find a path into a different field under a different sky.”
The Santa Fe sojourn ended in March after visits from Lurie, Fredericks, and David’s parents. Before returning to Stonington, Jimmy and David spent two weeks in Mexico. Mexico City was not the “different sky” Merrill was hoping for. A journal entry shows him remembering his first visit to the city twelve years before:
I can see, as I could not in 1946, the charm of the place. Dust + sun + pocked facades. But I am so depressed. Possibly it is one of my rare revisitations, of a place or a feeling from before that fatal year 1947, the year in which I took my first resolve not to feel. I broke it, of course, but made others and others. And now, back here in a city, in a park even, where in all good faith I sat + suffered, the geography of so much that I did not understand, it is painful to feel how these trees have grown, these faces weathered, those houses torn down and these constructed. Where is my youth and my feeling? What is this that has thickened + wrinkled, + that has turned bitter + dry?
Merrill’s self-protective “resolve not to feel,” like the wish expressed in “Stones” “Neither to suffer, grow nor die,” was formed in the wake of his battle with his mother over Friar. Back in Mexico City, he registers the time that’s passed since “that fatal year” by recalling “those houses torn down” and noting “these constructed.” His resolve has made him “bitter + dry.”
And where is David while Jimmy sits alone, writing in his notebook in the park? “D. is sleeping” in the hotel; “but I resist comforts today,” Merrill adds, underlining the contrast between them. After a pause, he asks himself, “Am I resisting feeling or am I resisting D. today?” This journal entry’s estranged lovers recall the pair of lonely, directionless travelers in “Dream […] and Waking,” one of whom sleeps while the other ruminates. “You called me cold. I said you were a child”: surely Jimmy and David had said these words (or others very like them) to each other. Jimmy had fallen in love with David because, like Claude, he promised to open Jimmy up—to feeling, to the world. And so he did. But it was difficult to open up, and there were times when Jimmy resisted both feeling and “D.” While helping him to change, David inadvertently goaded Jimmy to dig in and define himself by the differences between them. And their differences, during this, their fifth year together, were hardening.
· · ·
Merrill looked back on the next nine months spent in Stonington—from April 1958 to January 1959, when he and Jackson would set out on their second long trip abroad—as a period “very aimlessly and frustratingly spent.” They squabbled in court, “suing our neighbors for their share of an enormous sewer bill.” Pipes leaked in their building. Friends came and went: Lurie, for a spring weekend of “Deep Dish”; the Fords, who brought Harry’s cover design and the page proofs for The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace in July. (Merrill chose a shade of puce for the jacket: “it will be a volume that can only be looked at in our rose and violet room.”) Hellen Plummer saw her son in Stonington that summer, and he visited her in Atlanta in the fall. He was taking diet pills and vitamins for energy. Weight gain and fatigue: his familiar symptoms of depression.
The period may have seemed “aimless” to him because there was, for the first time in five years, no project on his desk, no book he was burning to complete. But it may also have seemed “aimless” because, when they were not traveling, it was unclear where he and Jackson were going, as “Dream […] and Waking” suggests. Their life as a couple had to be invented, partly in secret. It conformed to no obvious model or approved plot. They could not measure—and yet they could not help but measure—their passing days against the marriages and births that were milestones in the lives of their friends and family. In 1958, Robin, recently graduated from Harvard, prevailed against his parents’ wishes and married Betty Rudd. The Lavins announced the birth of their first child, Amelia, and they asked Jimmy to be her godfather. John and Anne Hollander were another married couple with whom Jimmy and David became close when John took a job teaching at Connecticut College in nearby New London. John was a literary scholar and poet, Anne an art historian and authority on costume. They too were expecting their first child.
These and other young families pointed up Merrill’s childlessness. It was—and would remain—a source of anxiety for him. The issue was raised by the dynastic ambition of his father, by the fruitfulness of his siblings (Doris and Charles both had five children by this time), and by the expectations of American society at large in a period known as the “Baby Boom.” In A Different Person, Merrill recalls that “the genetic angel, as in a parody of the Annunciation, struck” during the first season that he and Jackson spent on Water Street. “What was this—nearly thirty and not yet a father!” Detre saw this feeling as Merrill’s reaction to “settling down” with Jackson, and he made a few practical suggestions: “go back to teaching, don’t spend so much time by yourselves.”
A year later, in 1955, “the house filled up—not quite what Dr Detre had in mind—with Ephraim and Company, who were prepared, like children, to take up as much of our time as we cared to give, […] and who never had to be washed or fed or driven to their school basketball games.” “Ephraim and Company,” who were the result of Jimmy and David’s union, and offspring of a kind, put the question of reproduction in a wholly new light: reincarnation trumped reproduction as the source of human identity; and spirit-homosexuals like Ephraim were in charge of the system, or at least they knew how it worked. From the perspective of the Other World, mothers were merely the biological vessels of rebirth, and fathers hardly counted at all. Merrill may have welcomed these ideas because they relieved him from the pressure to become a father. When he proposed his pregnant stepsister as an appropriate mother for Hans’s representative, he was acting as a proxy parent, a fairy godfather. He was serious enough about the project to mention it to his mother, with the implication that success in this department would be satisfying to her. Tom, as Merrill calls Detre in The Book of Ephraim, refers to this silliness as “insemination by psycho-roulette.” Asked by the psychiatrist to explain himself, JM ventures this:
“Somewhere a Father Figure shakes his rod
At sons who have not sired a child?
Through our own spirit we can both proclaim
And shuffle off the blame
For how we live—that good enough?”
Tom had “heard worse.” But he might have asked Merrill how his mother, in addition to his mighty phallic father, entered into his feelings in this matter. Did his intimacy with her prohibit—or demand—that he procreate? Did he feel he needed to produce a baby for her in place of the other children his father never gave her?
By 1958, JM and DJ were no longer deeply absorbed by the spirit world, to judge from the few séances Merrill recorded or referred to following the fiasco of Hans’s representative’s rebirth. His feelings about childhood, children, and childlessness began to fuel poems on these topics, rather than Ouija board sessions. Water Street contains a cluster of them, including “The World and the Child,” another poem about childhood loneliness called “A Vision of the Garden,” the short comic variations on the Oedipal theme in “Five Old Favorites,” and the rhapsody, “Childlessness.” The latter poem is set on an ordinary street like the one on which Merrill lived, lined by houses like his, to whose inhabitants he compares himself and finds himself wanting. His “dream-wife,” a winter storm, wakes him at night. “Ranting and raining,” she has come to “Arraign” him for failing to produce what is demanded from him as a man and a citizen for “the common good”: “rare growths yielding guaranteed / Gold pollen, gender of suns, large, hardy, / Enviable blooms[.]” Reproduction and financial investment are braided here as two sides of a single social imperative. The implication is that Merrill has failed to live up to a contract: only fleurs du mal grow in the barren garden of the aesthete.
“Scenes of Childhood” was the first and longest poem in this group about parents and children. Merrill began it in May 1958 after he and Jackson visited Fredericks, and Claude showed them home movies he had made at the age of twelve. Merrill dedicated the poem to him in gratitude for their friendship and in a spirit of solidarity, since they were both only sons from broken homes. Merrill was using Fredericks’s childhood to explore his own. Writing in the first person, he describes a son and mother watching film from their lives “thirty years ago.” He makes the son much younger than the child Fredericks was in his movie: Merrill’s boy is four years old—and therefore in the throes of the Oedipus complex, according to Freud. Mother and son watch the past materialize once again. The “primal / Figures jerky and blurred / As lightning bugs / From lanterns issue.” “A man’s shadow mount[s]” the woman’s dress. Next there appears
A fair child, or fury—
Myself at four, in tears.
I raise my fist,
Strike, she kneels down. The man’s
Shadow afflicts us both.
Her voice behind me says
It might go slower.
I work dials, the film jams.
Our headstrong old projector
Glares at the scene which promptly
Catches fire.
Those memories are still too hot to handle. The son wants to be free of them; he would like to run outside and breathe “In and out the sun / And air I am”—but even that phrase, in which he notes a homophonic pun, is enough to drag him back to his conflicted role as “son and heir.”
Psychoanalysis was one frame of reference for the poem. Another was Proust’s search for lost time. When he completed “Scenes of Childhood,” Merrill turned to a poem of tribute, “For Proust,”3 which he put next to “Scenes” in Water Street. He looked to Proust, the dilettante who became a great artist, to see how he might redeem time “very aimlessly and frustratingly spent”:
Over and over something would remain
Unbalanced in the painful sum of things.
Past midnight you arose, rang for your things.
You had to go into the world again.
In order to balance the “painful sum of things,” Proust must “go into the world again” in search of a friend he loved long ago. When he finds her, she seems “a child still,” though “in her hair a long / White lock has made its truce with appetite.” “In a voice reproachful and low / She says she understands you have been ill.”
And you, because your time is running out,
Laugh in denial and begin to phrase
Your questions. There had been a little phrase
She hummed, you could not sleep tonight without
Hearing again. Then, of that day she had sworn
To come, and did not, was evasive later,
Would she not speak the truth two decades later,
From loving-kindness learned if not inborn?
She leaves without answering, just as she did in the past, illustrating the principle in Proust’s novel that “the loved one always leaves.” Merrill’s vignette insists on the necessary failure not only of our desire to be loved, but even of our desire to understand why we were not.
Yet something is gained. As Merrill’s syntax winds through an unusual verse form—rhymed abba quatrains in which the second, interior rhymes consist in the same word, repeated with subtly altered sense—he evokes a rhythmic alternation of experience and memory, life and writing. The climax comes as the writer returns home:
Back where you came from, up the strait stair, past
All understanding, bearing the whole past,
Your eyes grown wide and dark, eyes of a Jew,
You make for one dim room without contour
And station yourself there, beyond the pale
Of cough or of gardenia, erect, pale.
What happened is becoming literature.
Feverish in time, if you suspend the task,
An old, old woman shuffling in to draw
Curtains, will read a line or two, withdraw.
The world will have put on a thin gold mask.
Proust was on Merrill’s mind as he mounted the “strait stair” of his own apartment, past those illustrations of Proust’s novel on the stairs, and stationed himself in the “dim room” of his study, his brown eyes looking (when he pinned a postcard portrait of Proust to the wall beside the desk) into the novelist’s own. Like Proust, he had chosen a way of life that was childless; not reproduction, but a return to his experience in writing, defended him against passing time—although there was no defense against time, he knew.
Merrill ends the poem in the future perfect tense, imagining the moment when Proust will have stopped writing. “An old, old woman,” a version of the muse, will draw the curtain; and, by a sort of alchemy, the “world will have put on a thin gold mask.” That mask is the aim of the writer’s “task,” as the rhyme emphasizes. It is an image of the world renewed by morning sun and re-created on the writer’s page—stamped with the writer’s face, like a death mask. This is not the gold his father worked for, nor the “Gold pollen” of a healthy garden. But Merrill could use it to settle accounts with both his parents.
Their base camp that winter was Munich, from which they took trips to Berlin, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Copenhagen. They stayed in a pension close to the vast English Gardens and the rebuilt Cuvilliés Theatre, a Rococo jewel box—“all white + gilt with 6 tiny chandeliers that go up and down”—where Mozart’s Idomeneo had premiered. Postwar Munich, Merrill felt, “was ever so pretty, almost as good as new.” Robin and Betty joined them for nine days. But Merrill had little connection to the city. David knew it from his time in Germany with Sewelly. He brought out his watercolors to sketch cityscapes and took travel notes, while he and Jimmy were caught up again in the revels of Carnival. They weathered a visit from Gregory Corso, who departed having cadged $300 from Jimmy. “He is a rather gifted poet, I’m afraid,” Merrill sighed, “but terribly uneducated, and a real vampire; one is Drained after an hour with him, while he of course bursts with energy from his bloodless convives.”
After Munich, they drove to Spain in a “dreadful black Mercedes,” intended for delivery to Hellen Plummer when the trip was over. They liked the country, or what they saw of it from the car: “marvelous skies, granite upthrusts, tonsured hilltops, olives and oranges and corktrees and tiny cubist villages.” They spent two weeks with Ben DeMott and his family in a seaside village in Portugal. Then they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to visit Jane Bowles, the novelist and playwright who lived in Tangier near her husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles. Though hampered by a stroke, Jane was “spry and funny.” She took Jimmy and David to the Casbah and “a restaurant with real dancing boys, all wrapped up in colored stuffs and doing grinds and bumps with tea trays on their heads.” They saw the Roman ruins at Volubilis—which, Merrill told Elizabeth Bishop, they went to “entirely” because of “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” her poem that mentions the archeological site. “Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and,’ ” Bishop laments in that poem about anxious, directionless travel. Merrill and Jackson were in the midst of such a journey.
In Madrid, they met up with Cecil Beaton, the portrait photographer, and Truman Capote. “Such a peculiar pair,” Merrill reflected, “Beaton all bored and British—should he have a suit of wine red or of midnight blue velvet made? Truman terribly funny—buying capes and bullfighter’s shoes and eating caviar to a ruinous degree; he showed us the beauty treatment he must go through 3 times a day in order not to change for the rest of his life.” From Barcelona, they took the ferry to Genoa, making friends en route with Cesare Siepi, the basso they had recently heard sing Don Giovanni at the Met. They visited Morra (“the nicest man in the world”) in Cortona, then veered north, passing through Ravenna—it was Merrill’s third visit to the Byzantine mosaics—and on to Venice, where, for three weeks in May, they kept company with Chester Kallman and Alan Ansen. Ansen, crossing literary party lines, was both a friend of Auden’s and an honorary Beat—in fact the model for characters in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (Rollo Greb) and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (A.J.). Merrill tucked a sketch of him in a letter to Hollander, who was a friend of Ansen’s too: “Sometimes he is wearing a bright red double-breasted suit, sometimes a white one. After midnight he is apt to be sound asleep in Ciro’s bar where nothing wakes him, not even sharp prods from an umbrella.” From Venice, they continued by ship, stopping in Dubrovnik (where they swam below the castle walls), Patras (a taxi ride from there to Olympia), the amusingly named port Idea (another side trip to Delphi), and at last Athens.
Charlie Shoup was their host. Shoup had moved from Paris to a large apartment with a view of the Acropolis, which he turned over to Jimmy and David for the summer. “Charles’s fantasies,” David noted in his diary, “revolve almost exclusively around money.” In Greece, Shoup had found a place where he could live out those fantasies on a very grand scale. He gave up his society portraits and trompe-l’oeil still lifes (“I was an awful painter,” he admits) and became an architect and landscape designer. Over the next forty years, he led a neoclassical movement in Greek architecture, designing extravagant private residences and elaborate gardens, with eighteenth-century ornaments, classical statues, marble obelisks, Empire furniture, and Orientalist touches. During the summer of 1959, while Jimmy and David stayed in his apartment in Athens, Shoup bought a ruined castle on the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Three years later he bought land nearby on which he built his own villa. Shoup, who had enjoyed signing Charles Merrill’s name on bar bills when he visited Jimmy in Florida in 1947, used this remote patch of the Greek coast to create for himself a house grander and more fantastic than Merrill’s Landing or the Orchard.
Like Tony Harwood, Shoup lived a kind of life that Merrill might have chosen and did not. They didn’t remain friends much longer, but Shoup gave Merrill and Jackson a beginning in Greece. He introduced them to his circle of expatriate friends, including Tony Parigory, a Greek born in Alexandria. Shoup also introduced them to the protocols and possibilities of homosexuality in Greece. It was a world in which male beauty and gay desire were for once not forbidden subjects. The mood in Athens, Jackson marveled after a day spent watching young Greeks “swagger, crotch out,” at the public swimming pool, was “so amoral and sensual, sexes seem to disappear and what looms instead is an air magnetized in all directions.” Gay sex was a game played by the international “team” on one side and young Greek men on the other. For the Greeks, it was easier and safer to pursue same-sex relations with foreigners than with fellow Greeks, for whom the local culture was not the “magnetized” space of sexual freedom that it seemed to the Americans and British. The Greeks were straight, or so they presented themselves. They maintained that self-image by taking the penetrating role when they had sex with the internationals, who offered them, as Merrill liked to joke, the back door, “l’entrée des artistes.” Thus the Greeks upheld the spirit of the masculine ideal, if not the letter of the moral law, in what was still a highly traditional, village-bound society. The arrangement appealed to a young Greek soldier or policeman for whom sex with women required wedding vows or a costly trip to the brothel. (In Greece, the police were not the threat that they were in Stonington or New York City; they were more likely to be part of the party.) Edmund White, the American novelist who became a friend of Merrill’s in the 1970s, explains the codes of this gay subculture: “The old Mediterranean world operated with an almost pagan idea of homosexuality, where the older, wealthy gay man could buy the favors of the young, usually heterosexual boy, and that was fine with everyone, often even the boy’s family.” The older man bought the younger man’s “favors,” but not outright: the Greeks whom Merrill and Jackson met weren’t “trade”; yet they expected gifts, “loans,” or some other sort of patronage in return for sex. “After 1965,” White adds, “everyone got richer, the Church declined, and teenagers started dating. But this way of doing things was well established in Greece, and it held on longer there.”
From the beginning of their relationship, Merrill and Jackson had cruised for sexual partners in the parks and bathhouses of New York and other cities. “It was a truth universally acknowledged,” Merrill explains in A Different Person, giving a twist to the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice,
in those innocent decades from 1950 to 1980 that a stable homosexual couple would safely welcome the occasional extramarital fling. David and I, still in our early thirties, found that a good deal of anxiety could be finessed by setting out together when we felt the itch, rather than carrying on behind each other’s backs. We kept on the lookout for a threesome or a “double date” with some other couple on our wavelength. Like high-school buddies we compared notes afterwards, laughed and commiserated, took care to smooth the plumage of any third party who felt he’d been badly treated. By and large, though, we gravitated towards the kind of exploit offered by [an] unlit garden in Rome, or a New York bathhouse. For me those hours were the adolescence I’d been too shy or repressed to put into action at the time. The polymorphous abundance spilling over into our lives kept us primed and sexually alert towards each other.
In the 1950s, David was better at turning heads than Jimmy, and David went outside their relationship first, Jimmy told friends. But he followed soon enough and with an intensity all his own. Indeed, the notion that cruising simply amounted to the “adolescence” that Merrill had missed normalizes and understates an experience that absorbed him for many years. What were his motives? He was drawn to the park and bars in a spirit of competition: with Jackson, with other friends, and probably, in a way, with his father. Like Charlie, Jimmy had a great appetite for sex. He was attracted to many different men, and to men different from him in class and manners. Like a rake, he enjoyed sexual pleasure for its own sake. But he was also drawn to danger and pain (or so the erotic images in his poetry suggest). If his money put him in a position of power in Athens, he preferred sexual roles of service and submission. As a medium, he had opened himself to the will of the spirits. In his sexual adventures, he was doing something related.
A Different Person mentions nothing of the guilt and self-accusations that came with this experience. Nor does it mention the threat of betrayal, the risk of abandonment, or the anxieties of rivalry from which he and Jackson both suffered. The “polymorphous abundance” of Greece brought out those dangers. One night in Athens, Jimmy brought home a man from a bar—not a Greek but an American, breaking an unwritten rule against pairing up with a member of one’s own “team”—and David, humiliated, frightened, and angry, shut the door in his rival’s face. A “crisis” followed. As the days passed, David asked in his journal:
what is meant by our living together, what is possible, what is the meaning of our fairly constant search for outside physical releases. I am not in the least embarrassed by my actions that night; but, since, I realize I should have allowed JM to have his night and see if I was right in my fears of losing him. Neither of us will ever know, now, and, of course, the next time I cannot cry wolf and—what then? Promiscuity is the result of some kind of fear: of rejection, of death, of loss of independence. […] We know we do not need sexual extras; but we have for a long time looked for + found them. Men are promiscuous, but the naturalness of that is met by the necessity of our staying together. Both conditions I accept. But each, I believe, imposes its needs: promiscuity must be experienced with truly unrelated bodies, staying together must be a constant need, expressed with the same urgency as that felt with strangers flirted with. My first reaction, and a lingering one, has been that JM is ready for a new life, but that I am someone he cannot bring himself to leave. My first impulse is to bring that feeling out: to offer to leave. As I did. As, of course, I’ve ended not doing.
This “crisis” was a chance for David to shut the door for good on third parties or to walk out himself. But he saw his and Jimmy’s promiscuity as natural and inevitable, and he saw how much he depended on Jimmy. He would take other lovers in the future. And when his lover did, he wouldn’t “cry wolf.”
That summer, they went to Paros, Kos, Mykonos, and Delos, the Cycladic islands. They also visited Poros, close to Athens, where, in the shade of a waterfront café, with a view of the Sleeping Woman, Merrill began work on the novel that he had been thinking about off and on since he finished The Seraglio in 1956. While Jackson went off with his paints to capture a view, Merrill turned in memory to 1950 and the days he spent with Kimon and Mina on the island.
On their final day in Greece, Merrill climbed the Acropolis for a last look at the monuments. Then Jackson discovered that their ship to Venice left not at midnight, but at noon—which was already some time past; yet they might make it aboard if they could meet the ship at the Corinth Canal. David ran into Parigory; Parigory hailed a “pirate taxi,” “a huge American car with a driver looking not unlike a pirate,” who assured them that their problem was “no problem,” as Parigory later told the story. They called Jimmy’s name on the steps of the Parthenon; soon their pirate cab was hurtling along the “very dangerous” road to Corinth. Parigory continues, “That a customs official had to be found was again ‘no problem’ and as it was now siesta time, the exit-visa stamp must have been on his bedside table. How could one get to the ship short of swimming? A tiny rowboat appeared from nowhere and was loaded with the luggage and two panting travelers. Also panting were the driver and myself watching the rather undignified boarding on a rope ladder.”
Merrill and Jackson pulled into New York Harbor with “18 pieces of luggage” and a Mercedes. “Surely,” Jimmy wrote to Bill Meredith from the ship in the Corinth Canal, “it is a form of lunacy, […] lurching about the world, every few days asking a new person if he knows somebody somewhere else.” But Greece was not merely “somewhere else,” one more stop on an itinerary connected only by “and” and “and.” It was a “marvelous” country and a “very strange” one. They were going to be back.
There were sympathetic reviews by Mona Van Duyn, a young poet whom Merrill didn’t know, and by Meredith and Marius Bewley, who were both his friends. Bewley’s review, a copy of which Merrill kept in his study for the rest of his life, is the most discerning early appreciation of his work. Dapper, cultured, and gay, a professor of English at Rutgers, Bewley was eight years older than Merrill. He had been a protégé of F. R. Leavis at Cambridge; over the course of an evening, as drinks followed dinner in Bewley’s apartment on Staten Island, his American voice became more and more British. His review described Merrill’s poetic inspiration as “essentially metaphysical.” “The most recurrent image in Mr. Merrill’s poetry is the mirror,” he wrote, “and closely related to this central symbol are images of glass panes, images of dreams that reflect hidden thoughts, of art that reflects reality, and the camera lens that reflects appearances.” “The first act should be to reach toward” the real. But the poet is turned back by the glittering surfaces to which he is attracted. “Returned into himself, the person withers in loneliness, rejected by a universe of mirrors that holds him from reality.” The image is tinged with a Decadent mawkishness that Merrill would not have wanted to display. But it accurately points to the pain in his early poems, and it links that pain to an epistemological condition: the problem of knowing what is real beyond one’s perceptions. It also implies a course of action. “The subject that is deeply at the heart of James Merrill’s poetry,” Bewley ended, “is his search for integrated experience in a world of unrelated appearances. This fragmentation can be resisted, overcome, only by breaking through the prison of self, only by the discovery of others in love, only by pursuing the vision beyond the glass barrier.”
Bewley’s piece appeared in the Partisan Review, the influential magazine of the New York Intellectuals. The back cover of the same issue announced a new collection of poems by Robert Lowell: Life Studies. That book became a major literary event: Lowell was praised in it for shedding the rhyme, meter, and symbolism of his earlier work, for the sometimes brutal candor with which he treated his own mental breakdown and family history, and for the confidence with which he analogized his personal suffering to a state of collective, national malaise. Life Studies inaugurated an era in American poetry in which Confessional poetry was central, and Lowell was widely hailed as the central poet. Beside Life Studies, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace might very well seem a work of “determined inconsequence,” as Dickey put it, and Merrill took notice. Not surprisingly, he resented Lowell’s dominance of the poetic landscape in the 1960s. But Life Studies and the general turn to autobiography in American poetry that it represented had an immediate impact on his work.
Between fall 1959 and spring 1960, Merrill completed “From a Notebook,” “An Urban Convalescence,” “Poem of Summer’s End,” “Angel,” “Childlessness,” “After Greece,” and “A Tenancy”4—poems that, with “Scenes of Childhood” and “For Proust,” make up most of Water Street. The key poem in this group, “An Urban Convalescence,” appeared in the Partisan Review, where Hollander was the poetry editor. It is an ambitious poem, a stab at the “long breath” Alice B. Toklas wanted from Merrill. Though it confesses nothing very specific, it shows the influence of Confessional poetry in being a poem of stringent moral self-assessment. Its first person is not the impersonal “I” in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, but the intimate, brooding voice in Merrill’s notebooks.
The poem grew out of Merrill’s increasing self-consciousness about his own writing process. That self-consciousness shows in the notes he made on Poros for his novel, which would take the form of a writer’s notebook, as well as in a poem like “From a Notebook.” “An Urban Convalescence” was the product of many drafts, and Merrill made a careful archive of them: in addition to the notebook pages on which he began it, he preserved more than forty work sheets. These reveal him engaged in verbal self-analysis: in ink and sometimes pencil on unlined pages with a casual hand or in the margins of the typewritten text, he quibbles and doodles (making faces, lips, eyes, hands), crosses out and queries, adds new words and lines, moving on or going back, talking to himself. At times he decides to say just the opposite, or nearly the opposite, of what he began by saying.
“An Urban Convalescence” begins with the poet on a walk around his neighborhood in New York. The day is cold and inhospitable. He is recovering from an illness that has kept him “a week in bed.” He watches “a huge crane / Fumble luxuriously in the filth of years” as a building is razed. “As usual in New York,” he remarks, “everything is torn down / Before you have had time to care for it.” The problem seems to be outside him, where money is restlessly remaking the city, erasing the past, but then he reflects that he can’t remember what building used to stand on the site, although “I have lived on this same street for a decade.” He falls into a reverie in which the vanished building gradually emerges as a vague presence. He can see above the lintel a “garland” of leaves and fruit carved in stone, an emblem of the former house’s promise. The vision leads to another memory, this one of a “cheap engraving” of a garland he bought “for a few francs” to “stanch”—like a bandage—“dripping” branches held by a companion’s “small, red-nailed hand.” Her identity, like the house being torn down, has been lost to memory, “toppled under that year’s fashions.”
The house Merrill only half remembers “soundlessly collapses,” and he is left at a loss in front of the empty lot where he began: “Wires and pipes, snapped off at the roots, quiver.”
Well, that is what life does. I stare
A moment longer, so. And presently
The massive volume of the world
Closes again.
In his drafts, punning on “volume,” Merrill came to a halt a few lines further:
Upon that book I swear
To abide by what it teaches:
Gospels of ugliness and waste,
Of towering voids, of soiled gusts,
The shrieking I face into, eyes and nose
Astream with cold as with foreknowledge of destruction.
Unsure how to continue the poem, he went on by making another inward turn, calling his rhetoric into question. This is something that goes on throughout the poem when the speaker checks himself, testing what he sees or says with questions. Now, raising an eyebrow about the source of those tears, Merrill asked at the bottom of one work sheet, “With cold?” The finished poem incorporated both that skeptical question and the answer he jotted below it:
Gospels of ugliness and waste,
Of towering voids, of soiled gusts,
Of a shrieking to be faced
Full into, eyes astream with cold—
With cold?
All right then. With self-knowledge.
He stops short of saying just what he knows about himself. It is enough to admit that the coldness bringing tears to his eyes is within him.
Merrill’s effort to tell the truth in a passage like this was provoked by Confessional poetry, not only Lowell’s Life Studies, but also W. D. Snodgrass’s “Heart’s Needle,” which he greatly admired. Yet the form that his self-examination takes—a questioning of his own language and perceptions—derives from Bishop, for whom self-questioning was a trademark device. Her poetry was richly personal, but she shied away from Confessional poetry’s bold self-dramatizations and, in Lowell’s case, its claims to public authority. Her reticence was subtly adjusted to the constraints on her as a lesbian: unable or disinclined to speak of sexuality openly, the “I” in her poems assumes an intimacy with the reader like that of a friend or a lover, for whom it is unnecessary to spell everything out. Casual (at least in appearance) and exploratory, her style made what was most personal in her poetry accessible as a matter of sensibility and idiom—of how things were felt and seen, and how they were put.
Merrill learned from this strategy of Bishop’s. He also took something from Bishop’s sense of poetic form. Bishop approached the given form of a poem not as a fixed plan but as a provisional structure, open to modulation and revision in the course of a poem’s unfolding, depending on shifts of perspective and mood. Merrill experiments with the same principle in “An Urban Convalescence.” In a bolder modulation than anything in Bishop or his own work previously, he moves, after the stop arrived at in the phrase “With self-knowledge,” from free verse into rhymed pentameter quatrains. Part of the power of this abrupt shift lies in the way it reverses attitudes toward poetic form prevailing in American poetry of the period. From the 1950s to the 1960s, American poets moved en masse from meter and rhyme to free verse, the new period style. Life Studies exemplified this development. The poems at the start of that book, like most of Lowell’s earlier poems, were composed in rhyme and meter, while the poems later in the book, which included the ones about Lowell’s mental illness and his family, were composed in free verse—making free verse seem like the necessary vehicle for telling personal truths.
Merrill goes in the opposite direction in “An Urban Convalescence” when he moves from free verse to quatrains. The move is correlated with the relief he expresses as the focus shifts from the public space of the street to the privacy of his home. “Indoors at last,” he exhales. His manner becomes argumentative and crisp after the poem’s wayward self-questioning. About “the new / buildings” going up everywhere, he writes,
The sickness of our time requires
That these as well be blasted in their prime.
You would think the simple fact of having lasted
Threatened our cities like mysterious fires.
There are certain phrases which to use in a poem
Is like rubbing silver with quicksilver. Bright
But facile, the glamour deadens overnight.
For instance, how “the sickness of our time”
Enhances, then debases, what I feel.
To speak of “the sickness of our time” is to indulge in an inflated, cliché rhetoric, the language of Madison Avenue and Time, which reaches for a spurious public authority as it deflects responsibility away from the self. Merrill takes responsibility for his language, scrutinizing phrases like “with cold” or “the sickness of our time” along with his motives for using them. He insists that his desk is the scene of moral action for the writer, not the street.
“The poet is a man choosing the words he lives by,” Merrill remarked in an interview in 1967. In “An Urban Convalescence,” he dedicates himself to a discipline in which life and work are two aspects of a single process, for which revision, his laborious practice of composition, is both the instrument and the symbol. This idea emerges in the poem’s closing lines. The poet gazes again at the city, this time from high above it:
back into my imagination
The city glides, like cities seen from air,
Mere smoke and sparkle to the passenger
Having in mind another destination
Which is now not that honey-slow descent
Of the Champs-Elysées, her hand in his,
But the dull need to make some kind of house
Out of the life lived, out of the love spent.
Letting go of that daydream, Merrill drops the hand of—whom exactly? The unnamed woman mentioned earlier? His mother? Or the wife she imagined for him? Without that female companion, he must make something on his own “Out of the life lived, out of the love spent.” The last phrase gestures toward a profligate sexual self. Merrill’s goal is to keep from wasting his life and love by making “some kind of house” out of them. That phrase, purposefully and fruitfully vague, evokes a figurative structure, a dwelling both actual and imagined. It suggests the house on Water Street where he wrote and the writing he produced there, beginning with a book of poems bearing the street’s name. The making of that “house” would be as dull, ordinary, and repetitive as any domestic task, a matter of going over and carrying forward what he wrote the day before. The drama would come down to his daily choice of words.
Perhaps, in this context, the “illness” in “An Urban Convalescence” refers less to any physical condition than to homosexuality, which American society understood as an illness, a “neurosis,” from which one could be cured. Over the course of the poem, Merrill seems, if not to welcome, then to accept his illness. It’s tempting, when he gives up the vision of walking hand in hand with a female companion on the Champs-Élysées, to feel that he has “come out” as a gay writer. Yet “coming out” was no more of an option for him now than it had been when he wrote The Seraglio. Merrill’s concern in this poem is with “self-knowledge,” with the price and the feel of it, not with self-revelation. Rather than come out, he brings his reader “indoors” with him.
“Convalescence” was a literary pose that Merrill adopted in imitation of the invalid Proust (the allusions to Paris in the poem evoke Proust too). Merrill’s feeling for Proust was profound, but never pious. At least since the “Proust Party” in 1947, he approached the novelist in a spirit of winking gay identification, which he shared with friends like Howard Moss. Moss was known for his Mr. Magoo looks: bald head, nearsighted squint, and sagging, rueful expression. As the poetry editor of The New Yorker, he was an important ally for Merrill’s poetry. With Moss’s support, the magazine printed some of Merrill’s longest, most ambitious poems in the 1960s, making him a poet whose new work many, many readers were sure to see. Moss himself was a poet, funny, sad, and elegant, and the author of a short critical study, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust. On a visit to Water Street in winter 1960, he and Merrill amused themselves by writing rhymes on Proustian themes which could be sung to the tune of “Colonel Bogey’s March” in the popular war movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. Several other friends made contributions; Merrill collected these in what he called the “Balbec Liederbuch,” after the seaside resort in Proust’s novel. Moss’s effort led off:
“Wednesday,” said Mme. Verdurin,
Ready to serve her dreadful flan.
Morel
Has had a quarrel
With Baron Charlus for using Man-Tan.
Merrill gleefully shared these and other rhymes in letters to friends. For Bishop, he provided a footnote for Moss’s: “Man-Tan, in case you haven’t heard, has covered New York. It is a colorless liquid that turns skin brown several hours after application. As it streaks and clots easily, one has no trouble telling it from a real suntan, but that hasn’t kept people from using it.” He had composed a ditty of his own:
“Swann’s Way,” a book by Marcel Proust
Tells how the hero took to roust
Racy
Odette de Crécy
Who to his friends could not be introduced.
Lest he offend the reticent Bishop with a “smutty note,” he didn’t show her the most inspired entry, this one by Bernie Winebaum, in which the child Marcel addresses his nanny:
“Francoise, why must I go to bed?
I’d rather play with girls instead.
Later
I’ll have a waiter,
But only after my grandmother’s dead.”
Whether or not Merrill spent “a week in bed” in September when he began “An Urban Convalescence,” he was flat on his back with the flu in January. He recovered slowly. As feelings of weakness and lassitude persisted, he saw a doctor in March in Atlanta on a visit to his mother and Mis’ Annie. He returned north freshly supplied with vitamins and thyroid pills, and prepared for “the imminent extinction of my grandmother,” who was almost blind now and rapidly failing. “The Water Hyacinth,” a poem Merrill wrote that spring, ponders the ironies in the reversal of the child’s relation to his grandmother:
Now all is upside down.
I sit while you babble.
I watch your sightless face
Jerked swiftly here and there,
Set in a puzzled frown.
Your face! It is no more yours
Than its reflected double
Bobbing on scummed water.
Other days, the long pure
Sobs break from a choked source
Nobody here would dare
Fathom, even if able.
Despite his physical complaints, Merrill gave a reading in New York; he was again a judge for the Glascock Poetry Prize at Mount Holyoke College; and he was writing new poems. In May, he looked back on the past months with satisfaction: “I can’t think when we’ve worked so well.”
“We” included Jackson, who had drafted a new novel and completed a short story, “The English Gardens.” The story grew out of his and Merrill’s encounter with Gregory Corso in Munich. It concerns three characters: Meredith Wilder, a young American poet in Munich on a fellowship; Nicolas Manas, a Beat poet freeloading his way across Europe; and a young American, Mary Jane Lerner, who comes to Munich in pursuit of Manas. The story is an amusing satire of an expatriate milieu Jackson had observed firsthand, but its comedy is very broad. Wilder is the postwar American model of the aesthete who enjoys the largesse of private foundation support without deserving it; Mary Jane is impressionable, shallow, and too well heeled to do more than toy with bohemian living; and Manas, based on Corso, is simply ridiculous. A pretender to poetry, he uses his clumsy boyish “reactions to, say, jazz, cars, and sex” to get “what he wanted: a beer, a convert, a fix (marijuana, heroin, or opium), or at least a ‘connection’ or money, or a place to stay—a ‘pad’ in the new jazz language.” The tone is superior but fragile. A man on the fringes of the literary scene, David Jackson, is trying to secure a place for himself by laughing at another, Corso, whom readers of the Partisan Review—where the story appeared in the company of writers like Lowell and Mary McCarthy—are already prepared to find risible.
In the 1960s, Jackson continued to write fiction, but his publication in Partisan Review, gratifying when letters of congratulation came in, did not open publishers’ doors to his novels. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, he spent much of his time painting and drawing. Watercolors were an afternoon pastime; they didn’t demand or allow for the careful revision that David found so hard to face in his prose (exasperating Jimmy, the inveterate reviser). As an artist, Jackson could render with freshness and charm a room or a view, a bouquet or a façade, or nicely catch the expression on a face. But he had no formal training, and his figures tend to be awkwardly placed; his effort and his lack of ease show in the sheer meticulousness of his work. Unlike his fiction, David’s art wasn’t intended for the public. He made it to please himself, and to share with friends. For better or worse, “Writer” remained the occupation listed on his passport.
In Stonington, David’s household role was to look after the property. He was no handyman—according to Sewelly “David didn’t know what a hammer was!”—but the names of plumbers and carpenters show up in his address book. He knew the neighbors and shopkeepers; he drank at the bar of the Portuguese Holy Ghost Society on Main Street; and he came home with the town’s gossip. “David is my newspaper,” Jimmy liked to say. Jimmy’s role was in the kitchen. He was an assiduous chef, but an eccentric one, not a gourmet. He traded recipes with female friends like Toklas, who used his recipe for shrimp à l’orange in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook; in turn, she taught him how to bake hash brownies. He reprised leftovers with the stinginess of a rich Yankee—improvised concoctions that sometimes seemed like pranks. In the kitchen, as at his desk, he was averse to throwing things away. More than once, when a casserole crashed on its way to the table, he picked out the shards of glass or crockery, and served it to his guests with a smile.5
Hilda was their “small, baritone-voiced, more than a little mad cleaning woman,” as Jackson described her. She called Jackson “Dave” and Jimmy “Merrill.” When neighbors said that they had peered into the apartment from a nearby building “and you was running aroun up here nakid,” she defended the boys: “I says, ‘so what! its theah propity!’ ” Hilda told them about her mother in the state asylum and her father forced to work the “night ship.” An elderly and entirely “stone-deaf” Englishman fell in love with her (“there’s something in her nature, primitive don’t you know, that appeals to me”); and, when Hilda welcomed his advances, and word of it got around, her husband beat her up. She took refuge in the guest apartment at 107 Water Street. The police called on her, David called a lawyer, and Jimmy called the Englishman “in pure self-defense,” so as “to give her another ear (even deaf) to pour her sad tale into.” None of this was lost on the neighbors. “The beauty of life in a small town,” Merrill reflected, “is that everyone has a little part to play, and can be watched playing it by the others.”
That spring—it was 1960—Merrill composed a poem about his Water Street home, called “A Tenancy,” which he dedicated to Jackson. “An Urban Convalescence” comes first in Water Street and “A Tenancy” last. Thus Merrill gives up New York in the book’s first poem and makes his home in Stonington in the last poem. “A Tenancy” begins by looking back even further. The snowy, March afternoon light that he savors in his present home prompts Merrill to recall his elation when he took his first apartment in Amherst in 1946. It is dawn at the end of the war:
The dance
Had ended, it was light; the men look tired
And awkward in their uniforms.
I sat, head thrown back, and with the dried stains
Of light on my own cheeks, proposed
This bargain with—say with the source of light:
That given a few years more
(Seven or ten or, what seemed vast, fifteen)
To spend in love, in a country not at war,
I would give in return
All I had. All? A little sun
Rose in my throat. The lease was drawn.
Almost fifteen years later, the duration of Merrill’s first “lease” on life has turned out not to be “vast” at all. “I did not even feel the time expire,” he marvels. But that has changed:
I feel it though, today, in this new room,
Mine, with my things and thoughts, a view
Of housetops, treetops, the walls bare.
A changing light is deepening, is changing
To a gilt ballroom chair a chair
Bound to break under someone before long.
I let the light change also me.
The “changing light”: this is the first appearance of that phrase which Merrill would return to for the title of his long poem more than twenty years later. Here it is a trope for time and the way time changes the self, which Merrill is no longer determined to resist: “I let the light change also me.”
“A Tenancy”: the title is curious, since Merrill is talking about a home he owns. It implies that we are merely tenants even in our own house. The principle holds for our bodies: “The body that lived through that day,” Merrill says about the long-ago day he is remembering, “[…] is now not mine.” His body, no longer the youthful one he had, will become stranger still with age. But, he reasons, perhaps the body is transformed by time before it is lost to it—like that ordinary chair which, although “Bound to break under someone before long,” becomes “a gilt ballroom chair” in the late-afternoon light. “Would it be called a soul?” Merrill asks, wondering what time is making of him. He doesn’t go so far as to claim for himself a metaphysical, Keatsian “soul,” but simply a developed attitude, a point of view that is worldly, practical, and witty. He knows that “when the light dies and the bell rings,” guests will appear. He ends by welcoming them:
One foot asleep, I hop
To let my three friends in. They stamp
Themselves free of the spring’s
Last snow—or so we hope.
One has brought violets in a pot;
The second, wine; the best,
His open, empty hand. Now in the room
The sun is shining like a lamp.
I put the flowers where I need them most
And then, not asking why they come,
Invite the visitors to sit.
If I am host at last
It is of little more than my own past.
May others be at home in it.
The metaphorical house envisioned at the end of “An Urban Convalescence” takes shape in Merrill’s Stonington home. Again, the switch from free verse into metered stanzas matters. At a moment when American poets were arguing over “closed” and “open” form, Merrill recognized that, to get beyond the self-enclosure of his early poems, he didn’t have to reject rhyme and meter; he could change how he used them. In “A Tenancy,” he puts them in the service not of lyric idealization and abstraction, but of sociability and comic self-dramatization, and gives us a look into his house and his writing process. “One foot asleep, I hop / To let my three friends in,” he says, getting his metrical feet in working order, ready to host his guests and readers both. “Closed” form would be his means to openness.
The writer will always envy the painter. Even those who write well about painting, he will envy for having learned to pay close attention to appearances. And not the writer alone; it is the rare person who can look at anything for more than a few seconds without turning to language for support, so little does he believe his eyes.
At least Merrill was not such a person. Despite his claim, often made, that he cared only for appearances, he was too hungry for meaning to be satisfied with them in a painting. He went on in this essay to take up one work by Corot after another, patiently extracting meanings and morals. And the writing was an ordeal: “3000 words that left me gassy and weak.”
In Paris, besides the Corots and, as usual, Miss Toklas, they saw the American expatriate painter David Hill. Hill’s neoclassical sensibility was offbeat and austere (his definition of a portrait: “a painting with something funny about the eyes”). Through Hill, Merrill met a Canadian poet, Daryl Hine. An erudite classicist and puckish wit, Hine, with tousled brown hair, glasses, and a cape, could have strolled out of a French novel, and he charmed Merrill instantly. Less than a year later, with Merrill’s encouragement, Hine would move to New York, where he became Merrill’s confidant and, after his nephew Robin, his first protégé. Merrill showed Hine’s poetry to his editor friends Hollander and Moss, brought Hine to parties, pointed out prizes he might compete for, and helped him financially. In A Different Person, Merrill recalls their initial meeting in Paris. The two flâneurs were taking the air after lunch, when a prostitute called out, “Quel joli papillon.” “We’ll pretend she means your bow tie,” Hine quipped, knowing just how flamboyant he and Merrill looked. He cleared his throat: “Shall I call you James—” and Merrill, who was ten years older but only thirty-four, rushed in to give permission to use his first name. But Hine wasn’t done with his question. He finished: “—or Jimmy?” “Embarrassed,” Merrill ends the anecdote, “I let my answer stand.” With that, Jimmy had become “James”—what many friends, but especially younger people, would call him in the future.
Back at home, Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy were debating each other in the campaign for president. “Well,” Merrill sniffed when Jackson mailed his absentee ballot, “one day I simply must arrange to be in the states for this quaint demonstration.” They returned to Munich, where, as opposed to Paris, Merrill observed, “there are fewer associations, so one can breathe without choking. Rilke’s leaves have turned gold, fallen, and turned black […]. The War Ministry has turned into a Piranesi.” David wasn’t writing—“alas,” Jimmy sighed—but he was “doing some lovely sketches.” They’d bought a new black Volkswagen convertible, a car so ugly “we can use it only at night.” Jimmy read Casanova’s memoirs. “Every night,” Jackson recorded him saying, “we spend looking for sex; and, as I am becoming impotent”—that theme again—“I must simply face up to having to find something else to fill my evenings.” So they tried the opera: Il Trittico, I Puritani, Mathis der Maler, The Egyptian Helen. They went to Oktoberfest beer halls and caroused with the German translator of The Seraglio (which appeared in 1961 under the title, irritating to its author, of Tanning Junior). John Cage and Merce Cunningham passed through Munich, then Donald “Richie-san,” Capote, and Hine. Hine brought with him Anne and Virgil Burnett, she a scholar of ancient Greek literature and he an illustrator of fine books and literary broadsides, who would become good friends with Merrill.
From Munich, they made trips to Hamburg and Berlin. Thom Gunn, a British poet three years younger than Merrill with a hard-edged intelligence and working-class tastes, recalls Ellis Bierbar in West Berlin, where he first met “the Merrills.” Improbably, the place had been run since 1942 as a queer bar by Elli, a determined woman who wore men’s suits. “An old fellow in Edwardian dress, always sitting at the same place at the bar, was appropriately known as Queen Mary,” Gunn recalls. Local workmen, East Berlin hustlers (the Wall didn’t go up until 1961), and traveling writers like Gunn filled out the clientele.
One day I noticed—everybody noticed—the entrance of two young Americans nattily dressed alike in brimmed hats and expensive raincoats. (Very American Express, I thought.) One of them I hardly noticed, but the other caught my eye and I couldn’t take it off him. Eventually, after a lot of looking on both sides, they stepped forward and the other one said, “Excuse me, but isn’t your name Thom Gunn?” I then recognized him: it was James Merrill, with whom I had given a poetry reading a year or two before. The other one, the one I found so attractive, was David Jackson. They asked me to join them for lunch the next day, and I felt rather sheepish.
Merrill and Gunn, two laureates of gay desire, admired each other’s poetry for the next thirty years without becoming friends. “I met Merrill only once more,” Gunn notes, “at the end of our lives, when I asked him to lunch in my home in San Francisco—a repayment for the generous lunch he had given me so many years before. Again the level of conversation was that of small talk. It would have been nice if we could have chatted about the supreme themes of sex and poetry, but that was that. If we had seen more of each other, I probably would have found him too elegant, and he would have found me too much of a slob.”
The Merrills crossed the Alps in their ugly Bug and matching raincoats. In Venice they were treated to a “masque” in their honor written by Alan Ansen, presented in the garden of Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo. They drove to the heel of the Italian boot and boarded a ferry for Egypt. The sixteen days they spent there, mostly in Alexandria, were important to Merrill for the rest of his life. Primed by Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and the poems of Cavafy, Jimmy became, in spirit, an honorary citizen of Alexandria.
Their host was a schoolmate of Tony Parigory’s, Christian Ayoub. The dark-featured, handsome Ayoub came from a Greek Catholic family of civil servants. Like most people of his class in the port city, he was a Francophone who knew Arabic, Italian, Greek, and English—which he spoke with a crisp Oxbridge accent. He wrote lyric poems in English and French; he was also the author of two experimental novels in French, Artagal and Pola de Pera, both of which Merrill relished. Through Ayoub, Merrill made “a half dozen perfectly delicious friends.” These included Ayoub’s cousin Bernard de Zogheb and the Nahmanns—Jean, a cotton merchant nicknamed “Johnny,” and his wife Germaine, “a small black-eyed gamine known in Paris it seems as Moustafette.”
Along with Parigory, these Alexandrians had been “prammed” together, ferried to parks and parties by their English nannies, educated in elite schools, and accustomed to exquisite social rituals—polo, costume balls, “les visites des tantes.” The city founded by Alexander the Great, battled over by Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, had enjoyed a modern efflorescence, beginning with the cotton boom of the 1860s when Alexandria became a capital of the colonial world, “une ville européanne” on the Nile delta. La Belle Époque hung on there all the way into the postwar era: in 1960, the city (or the narrow strip of coastline on which Merrill’s new friends lived) seemed more like Proust’s Paris than Paris itself. Ayoub and his friends inherited that world, with its frippery, snobbery, and mongrel chic, just as it was about to vanish. But the city had always been a haunted, half-imagined place. As Christine Ayoub, Christian’s daughter, explains, “Alexandria could only exist in your imagination. You never would have seen Cleopatra, or the Ptolemies, or Cavafy.”
At a cocktail party to welcome them, the Americans found the other guests disorientingly “unplaceable”: “it would have been impossible to tell from names or faces […] what would have been the ‘original’ race of any one.” (Jimmy and David must have seemed just as mysterious to the Alexandrians. As one remarked, “[M]ais ces américains, tu dis qu’ils ne sont pas cottoniers—qui sont-ils donc?”) The tone of the milieu was giddy, “so enchanting as to faire peur.” “As the colony shrinks, the gossip and private jokes grow, I suspect, increasingly animated, like the thrashing of fish in a pond that is drying up. One spent the whole evening laughing wildly,” Merrill wrote to his mother, “over stories involving people one had barely glimpsed,” while outside the muezzin’s call to prayer and the jangling music of car radios rose and fell in waves.
Traveling south, Merrill was mesmerized by the “fantastic landscape”: the Nile flowed north, lined by palms and tents, while farmers in “long nightshirts” worked the earth, and “strange, nougat-pale mountains that are not on the map rise behind it all.” He already knew he was “very susceptible to Egypt.” But he was less interested in the massive monuments at Aswan and Luxor (“we didn’t even go inside the Sphinx. Or ride a camel”) than in the delicate antiquities displayed in Cairo: “those THINGS, the sphinx, the masks of beaten gold, the little gods […], are lamps against which I can feel my wings tattering as they beat.” He stood for a long time before the mummy of a child, “the very flesh covered with gold leaf.” “I think I know what the soul is,” he wrote to Freddy, trying to say what he felt in the presence of those funerary treasures. “It is the body we no longer have.”
They spent Christmas in a flat in Athens decorated with a tree and fresh-cut boughs of mistletoe: “We have the best-hung doorways of anyone you know,” Merrill bragged to Bernie Winebaum. Donald Richie was there too. He made an album of photos portraying the young Greek men he and Jimmy and David were meeting. Today, sepia tinted by time, the collection could serve as illustrations for Cavafy’s erotic memory poems: strong, poor men with sharp features, naked and muscled with erections, some of them wearing army fatigues and a beret, the room bare—an ashtray or a faded window sash for ornament—and from the window or balcony, a clear view of the Acropolis, tiled houses clustered at the base of it, and no skyscrapers anywhere. No longer complaining of impotence, Jimmy wrote to Claude, “I blush to say that I am blooming for the first time in a year, or the last time in this life.”
His mother had told him to keep a bag packed against the day when she called to say that Mis’ Annie had died. That call came in May, and Jimmy flew south to Atlanta. He sat in the presence of his grandmother’s body, which was laid out wearing a red velvet dress, her face prettily made up, on her bed in the Plummers’ home. Alone with the body, he had the disturbing sense that Mis’ Annie wasn’t dead—an uncanny sensation that would linger with him for years. Then came the funeral and burial in Jacksonville. “I had never seen anyone dead, or even been to a funeral—all that was appalling and fascinating,” he told Kimon. He tried to face the event in a poem titled “Annie Hill’s Grave.” It begins,
Amen. The casket like a spaceship bears her
In streamlined, airtight comfort underground.
Necropolis is a nice place to visit;
One would not want to live there all year round.
Grim, jaunty, satirical, plangent, stoic—Merrill’s tone shifts from one mood to another in the course of the poem. The mourners link arms in relief and, in their “sunnier / Counterclockwise movement” away from the grave, they resist “the whirlpool that has swallowed her.” In her casket, sucked into the earth, Mis’ Annie remains somehow still alive. “Alone, she grips, against confusion, pictures / Of us the living, and of the tall youth / She wed,” who has spent the past thirty years awaiting her company in the next plot. The poem’s final lines express Jimmy’s terror of being left alone. As “the brief snail-trace / Of her withdrawal dries upon our faces / The silence drums into her upturned face.”
“Annie Hill’s Grave,” finished in July 1961, was a late addition to the manuscript of Water Street. Merrill shuffled poems in and out of the book over the summer and fall. He decided to dedicate it to the Surly Temple—Robert and Isabel, Eleanor and Grace—and sent it to Knopf in September. The venerable firm had undergone changes: Random House purchased Knopf in 1959, and Harry Ford had left to join Atheneum, a new house. Merrill’s poems came back from Knopf in November; their note rejecting them was “considerably nastier than the one I sent them saying I wouldn’t much care if they did.” The rejection must have stung, but he knew he could depend on Ford, who quickly arranged to publish Water Street at Atheneum in fall 1962.
Merrill trusted the curmudgeonly bon vivant Ford, depending on his aesthetic discrimination and his business sense not only in the making and marketing of his books, but in the administration of the Ingram Merrill Foundation. For years, Jimmy had had to deal with pleas for money from friends that arrived unpredictably by phone call or cable. Once he’d made up his mind to help, he phoned Larry Condon. The lawyer cross-examined him before agreeing to make the often complex financial arrangements necessary to give away the money, entailing signatures, carbon copies, annual statements, and so forth. “And, of course,” David remarked gloomily in his journal, oppressed by the continual demands on his partner, “this money thing is attended by the guilts and enforced odd attitudes of the borrowees and by what ever curious underground reflexes JM attaches to it.” Because Merrill kept no records of his personal “loans” and seldom mentioned giving money in his correspondence, there is no telling how many people he helped. From a letter by John Myers we know that, when the poet James Schuyler had a nervous breakdown in 1961, Merrill paid for Schuyler’s in-patient psychotherapy, which Thomas Detre supervised. It was typical of Merrill that the matter was handled by a go-between—Myers—so that, although Schuyler surely knew who his benefactor was, he would not be beholden to Merrill.
The Ingram Merrill Foundation offered a partial solution to this dilemma. By the late 1950s, Merrill simply referred most requests for money to the IMF. It provided “partial relief” and, Jackson felt, “a glimmer of a sense of accomplishment and creativity with the money.” A selection committee consisting of Harry Ford, Marius Bewley, John Myers, Irma Brandeis, and Merrill himself met twice per year to consider formal grant applications. John Hollander joined in 1960; he and Ford remained on the committee until the foundation went out of business after Merrill’s death. The selection committee preferred to give money to people with no other obvious sources to appeal to (so grants were seldom made to academics, or performers and artists for whose work there was a commercial market) or to people who the committee knew to be in a state of need. The selectors took their duties very seriously, carefully reading applicants’ work, attending various performances and gallery openings, and arguing the merits of each case. Investigating an application from a theater group, Jimmy and Irma took part in a movement class called “Sitting, Standing, and Walking”—just to be sure that the subjects of instruction didn’t also include “Getting Away with Murder.”
Over the decades, the foundation would give grants to many poets and writers celebrated today: among them, Derek Walcott, Susan Sontag, Randall Jarrell, James Purdy, Jean Stafford, Jane Bowles, W. D. Snodgrass, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Charles Simic.6 Special awards were made in literature to eminent writers, including William Empson, Francis Ponge, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Marianne Moore, Auden, A. D. Hope, Zbigniew Herbert, I. A. Richards, and V. S. Prichett. But most of the foundation’s money went to young or little-known people. The IMF supported the avant-garde filmmakers Gregory Markopoulos and Stan Brakhage, and visual artists such as Nell Blaine and Joe Brainard. Dance was represented by Jean Erdman, the Dance Notation Bureau, and the School of American Ballet. Substantial grants were made to colleges and universities so that they could buy for their museums specific works of art from New York School painters like Hartigan and Rivers. The foundation supported the Hudson Review, the Partisan Review, Poetry magazine, and the Quarterly Review of Literature, among other literary journals, as well as an array of arts schools and charities: Lighthouse for the Blind, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Aspen Music Festival, Spanish Refugee Aid, Italian Earthquake Relief, and the Animal Welfare Institute, among other concerns, and most of these year after year. In 1962, a fairly typical year, the IMF divided a little more than $100,000 between thirty-two individuals and organizations. Special awards were made to Nicola Chiaromonte and F. R. Leavis. A large gift—$3,000—went to Djuna Barnes, the author of Nightwood. The elderly Barnes, who hadn’t applied, was awarded money for the second time as “a distinguished and neglected writer who is penniless and ill.” Fifty applications were passed over that year. The refusées would have made a lively salon: Alex Katz, Allen Ginsberg, Merce Cunningham, and James T. Farrell were among them.
The foundation was never endowed; the money it gave came directly from Merrill’s income. It was a considered, conscientious way for him to put his wealth to use, and he never took any conspicuous credit for it. In turn, it was very useful to him. It shielded him from petitioners, and it defended him from the disgruntled rejected applicant, to whom he could shrug and point out that the committee had made the negative decision. Yet the arrangement was an imperfect compromise. By putting himself on the committee, which was composed of his friends, he kept close watch on the awards, and the annual list of beneficiaries reflected his preferences, many of which were based in friendships. He never insisted on having his way, but he didn’t have to. As Hollander puts it, “When James expressed a preference, that was that.” His involvement in the IMF kept him in the role of a benefactor, subject to resentment and fawning, and it made the foundation’s awards appear, to the skeptical, like court favors. Merrill encouraged certain friends to apply, and some artists and ensembles won IMF support many times. New York Pro Musica Antiqua was one of these. Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, duo pianists, and the Little Players, the puppet troupe of Francis Peschka and Gordon Murdock, were another instance. These two pairs of performing artists—both pairs were also gay couples—were special favorites. It’s doubtful that their eccentric artistry would have flourished without the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
Merrill collaborated very closely with the Little Players. The troupe consisted of five glove puppets that the peculiarly gifted Murdock manipulated and gave voice to. Their faces, bodies, and costumes were simple, even crude, evoking children’s play and Punch and Judy. They performed Wilde, Maeterlinck, and Chekhov, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear, and other theater classics, but seldom in their entirety: as a rule, their evenings were a miscellany of famous scenes, a selection of show tunes, or a program of French songs or German or Italian arias. Despite the fact that they had no legs, the puppets danced highlights from Pelléas and Mélisande and Giselle. The offerings mixed high and popular art, grand opera and the music hall. Performances were interrupted by the puppets’ exchanges with the audience and with each other. A puppet in the wings might pipe up to criticize a scene, or announce that another puppet due onstage was indisposed, breaking the dramatic frame, such as it was.
“The five actors composed an ad hoc family—resembling a household in a novel by, say, Ronald Firbank or Ivy Compton-Burnett,” writes Kenneth Gross, author of a brief history of the Little Players. The “founder” of the troupe was Isabelle Standwell—an allusion to Edith Sitwell and to the fact that Isabelle, like the rest of her company, could not stand on her own. With a proper English accent, she played grandes dames like Lady Bracknell. Heroic parts went to her twin brother (their heads were made from the same mold). The company’s diva, and a character of special interest to Merrill (he wrote a poem about her), was Garonce—whose name suggested Garance, the heroine played by Arletty in Marcel Carné’s film about another theatrical troupe, Les Enfants du Paradis (another favorite of Merrill’s).
The mock troupe, Gross remarks, “suggested an alliance that ran against the grain of a heterosexual family, an odd, faithful, hospitable gathering of exiles, survivors, and orphans, a clutch of sophisticatedly child-like adults who neither married nor begot children nor even had affairs, whose sexuality was never confessed, who wove their lives out of so many threads of theatrical play.” The feeling of “an ad hoc family” was reinforced by the fact that the Little Players performed in the living room of Peschka and Murdock’s small Upper West Side apartment. Folding chairs accommodated about twenty-five people, who came by invitation or word of mouth. The audience included celebrities in postwar arts and letters (George Balanchine, Leonard Bernstein, Susan Sontag, Lowell, Saul Steinberg, Edward Gorey, Willem de Kooning, Richard Avedon) and many of Merrill’s poet friends: Ashbery, Ford, Hollander, Hine, Bishop, and Richard Howard. Tea was served before the performance, and everyone went “backstage” afterward to congratulate Peschka and Murdock. “Their theater,” Gross summarizes, “was about making and inhabiting a home.”
Gold and Fizdale also were regulars in the Little Players’ audience. Their partnership was almost as unusual in music as Peschka and Murdock’s was in theater. They offered the spectacle of two men in matching tuxedos, who were former lovers and lifelong companions, making music on the same instrument while sitting side by side and often on the same bench. Their playing was touching and showy, golden and fizzy. The special charm of it lay in how, like Peschka and Murdock, they drew on the energy of childhood play. Fittingly, Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals was a showpiece for “the boys.” They performed the whole repertory of piano works for four hands and two pianos, including the concerti for two pianos by Mozart and Poulenc (which they recorded with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic) and works commissioned for them by John Cage, Paul Bowles, and Ned Rorem. Merrill’s favorite in their songbook was the Dolly Suite by Fauré, “a lemony, edgy, sometimes sad, sometimes frothy duet written for Debussy’s stepdaughter.” Their concerts were events in New York’s gay high-culture calendar, followed by parties hosted by Jerome Robbins or Lincoln Kirstein, with a crush of guests. In fall 1961, Merrill heard them perform Schumann’s Spanische Liebeslieder (a work they recorded for the first time) with the baritone William Warfield. The evening was so affecting that, Jimmy laughed, it made “an entire audience (Marianne Moore and 1200 white faggots) think twice about their love lives.”
“glaze of bory”
glaze of boredom
a round red blaze of glory, the sailor’s
Delight. It would be fine tomorrow,
The thought put you excitedly to sleep.
It happened so often as to be worth remarking
That tomorrow was not fine at all.
A God weaker [crossed out: stronger] than the sun, but eviller,
Turned your life gray, chill. You sat in a glaze of boredom.
Hands interlocked, making the church, the steeple,—thunderclap!
Your thumbs flew open, the people lay,
A ten-legged insect of flesh,
A pink, loathed, wriggling insect in your lap.
Merrill’s “glaze of boredom” turns “blaze of glory” on its head, and, with it, the overheated rhetoric of Cold War headlines. The bomb and the hovering threat it released reminded him of days of vague anxiety in childhood when he was left to amuse himself, and he played with his hands. Rather than a reassuring community in a church, he turned his splayed fingers into a scene of people lying wounded and “wriggling.”
Typically for Merrill, the draft poem grew out of wordplay. Anagrams and spoonerisms decorate the borders of his notebook entries and poem drafts throughout his career, but with increasing frequency in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Wordplay filled in, not only the empty space of a page, but empty time, like the faces he idly doodled, or the games of Solitaire—he preferred to call it Patience—which he played as a break from writing. He played with the letters of the alphabet as if with a pack of cards: the kinds of game associated with both of them entail the same sort of process—the recombination of elements within a fixed set. Using block capital letters, Merrill would take a word or phrase or, more often, a proper name and, working systematically down the page, sometimes using a typewriter, rearrange the letters to produce new words and phrases. The process released the hidden potential, often hilarious or titillating, in a common expression or familiar name. “SELF SERVICE” turned into “SILVER FECES,” and “POSTAGE” into “GESTAPO,” while “PROUST” induced “STUPOR,” and “MARCEL PROUST” revealed a “PEARL SCROTUM.” The name of Mary McCarthy hid a poignant demand: “CRY AT MY CHARM.” Sometimes the wordplay made for a piece of naughty light verse, as in this epigram:
THE MODEL’S CONFESSION
RICHARD AVEDON’S
HARDONS I CRAVED.
The author presiding over the anagram and other wordplay in Merrill’s work is “Vivian Darkbloom”—the anagram of his own name that Vladimir Nabokov embeds as an alter ego in Lolita. Merrill began a page of anagrams with “Vivian Darkbloom” at the top of it, below which he rang changes on “Irma Brandeis” and “David Jackson.” “JAMES MERRILL,” allowing for a missing “E,” yielded “RIMER J. SMALL.”
Anagrams felt like a mildly shameful addiction to Merrill. To us, they might seem like a diversion from writing, or a finger exercise, occasionally producing, at best, a nugget of wit. But Merrill’s anagrams and other forms of combinatory play show his drive, even as he seemed to be wasting his time, to make something of it. They show his hunger for meaning, for motivated rather than arbitrary signs. They show him keeping in shape—for poems and for Ouija dictées. They show his faith that, for anyone who is patient and clever enough, meaning is there to be discovered in the alphabet itself.
Like doodling and Patience, these combinatory games dramatized how the writer generates characters out of the repertoire of types found in mythology, literary or social convention, and the unconscious, suggesting, even, a way to think about human generation and the course of individual lives. Merrill makes the point in “Time,” a poem he began in fall 1961. In any game of “blessed Patience,” the deck of cards provides “Fifty-two chromosomes permitting / Trillions of ‘lives’—some few / Triumphant, the majority / Blocked, doomed, yet satisfying, too,” because even when the player fails, he can, “before starting over,” discover where the game went wrong, and observe its logic. Play of this kind implies a vision of life in which everything makes sense, even the failure to make sense—which is the perspective Merrill had discovered through the Ouija board, where the twenty-six letters of the alphabet worked like the fifty-two cards of the playing deck to generate the voices from the Other World that spoke to JM and DJ. The Ouija board taught Merrill to think of people as anagrams. They are subject to cycles of reincarnation on earth during which, as in a game of Patience, the soul takes one form after another, “some few / Triumphant, the majority / Blocked” and obliged to start over.
When humanity seemed freshly menaced with extinction in fall 1961, Merrill and Jackson appealed to Ephraim. In The Book of Ephraim, Merrill quotes a long Ouija transcript dated October 26—at the height of anxiety about the fifty-megaton bomb. Lyrical and lucid, Ephraim begins,
AM I IN YR ROOM SO ARE ALL YR DEAD WHO HAVE NOT GONE INTO OTHER BODIES IT IS EASY TO CALL THEM BRING THEM AS FIRES WITHIN SIGHT OF EACH OTHER ON HILLS U & YR GUESTS THESE TIMES WE SPEAK ARE WITHIN SIGHT OF & ALL CONNECTED TO EACH OTHER DEAD OR ALIVE NOW DO U UNDERSTAND WHAT HEAVEN IS IT IS THE SURROUND OF THE LIVING
Ephraim goes on to describe the plight of the patron as he works to educate his representative: “O MY DEARS WE ARE OFTEN WEAKER THAN OUR REPRESENTATIVES IT IS A SILENT LOVE WE ARE IN A SYSTEM OF SUCH SILENT BUT URGENT MOTIVES,” like Cold War secret agents, working against time to save not only earth but heaven, since the spirits themselves seem to depend on the living for survival. “DEVOTION” binds the two levels together. Ephraim rises to prophecy—“A FLOOD IS BUILDING UP”—while remaining touchingly personal, offhand:
O MY I AM TOO EXCITED SO FEW UP HERE WISH TO THINK THEIR EYES ARE TURNED HAPPILY UP AS THEY FLOAT TOWARD THE CLIFF I WANT TO DO MORE THAN RIDE & WEAR & WAIT ON THE FAIRLY LIVELY GROUND OF MY LIFE I HAVE THIS HIGH LOOKOUT BUT FIND TO MY SURPRISE THAT I AM WISEST WHEN I LOOK STRAIGHT DOWN AT THE PRECIOUS GROUND I KNEW
He ends by promising further revelations:
THERE IS AHEAD A SERIES OF PICTURES I BELIEVE I CD SHOW U TO MAKE CLEARER MY SELF & WHAT IT IS I THINK THE FORCE OF THE FLOOD HAS ONLY ADVANCED A DROP OR 2 DOWN THE FACE OF THE CLIFF & MAN HAS TAKEN THEM TO BE TEARS NOW U UNDERSTAND MY LOVE OF TELLING MY LIFE FOR IN ALL TRUTH I AM IMAGINING THE NEXT ONE WHEN WE CRASH THROUGH IN OUR NUMBERS TRANSFORMING LIFE INTO WELL EITHER A GREAT GLORY OR A GREAT PUDDLE
Hine, who had moved to New York by this time, did the board with Merrill and Jackson that fall, and he suggested that Merrill might make poems out of messages like these. JM was trying to. On the notebook pages with his poem about a “glaze of bory,” Merrill adapted images from Ephraim: “The dead shine back like coins,” “tears on the cliff face.” But he was stymied. He would have to wait another twelve years before he could write Ephraim’s poem.
Side by side for hours at the table in their red dining room on Water Street, candles glowing and guttering, their hands on the darting willowware cup, Merrill and Jackson were like Gold and Fizdale at the piano, virtuosi of the spirits, creating with their homemade properties a private puppet theater far stranger than the Little Players of Peschka and Murdock (but was it the spirits or their mediums who were the puppets?). At the Ouija board as in daily life, David and Jimmy were by now skilled, familiar partners. Their relationship had taken on many aspects of a conventional heterosexual marriage. They knew each other’s families. One added messages on letters the other wrote. They sent out Christmas cards printed with a poem by the one or a sketch by the other. When they socialized, they wore coordinated, sometimes identical outfits. They had their household duties, daily routines, shared jokes, a cat. But “the Merrills,” whether despite all of this togetherness or because of it, had grown apart from each other—which was conventional too.7
No small part of their initial attraction had been sexual, and part of their new distance was sexual. “The time for making love is done,” Merrill says in “Poem of Summer’s End,” which he wrote after he and Jackson returned from Greece for the first time. He was referring, on one level, to Jackson and himself. In the late 1950s, they stopped making love. David, with his William Holden good looks and wedding ring, had always been the straight man in the couple. In Greece, David “graduated” to the “passive” role that the internationals took with the Greeks; he became one of “the sisters,” like Jimmy, who wanted to be penetrated. For David, this amounted to a gain in power and status from one angle and a loss of those things from another one. Sexual position and preference were strictly defined, if not consistently adhered to, in the pecking order of queer culture, in New York as well as Greece. To be the one thing was not to be the other; in David’s case, it was not to be the kind of partner who attracted Jimmy, and Jimmy may have felt betrayed or rejected by the change. On Water Street, he and David became accustomed, as Charles and Hellen Merrill had, to separate bedrooms. DJ began sleeping in the guest apartment, which gradually became his. “A Tenancy” is dedicated to him, but he doesn’t appear in the poem. Merrill is the host. The house he describes is “Mine,” not “ours,” “with my things and thoughts.”
The distance they were growing into could have been predicted. Jackson and Merrill had met as men of different classes, with different educations, sensibilities, talents, and expectations. Their matching outfits, chosen and paid for by Merrill, tried to disguise those differences, to wish them away. Perhaps Jimmy simply grew tired of David—who, even in the 1950s, drank too much, stayed in bed too long, and couldn’t establish himself as a writer. His warmth and vitality, his sense of adventure and capacity for play, whether on the Ouija board or the streets of Munich at Carnival, were not always enough to hold Jimmy’s attention. But Merrill might have grown apart from any companion. He was born to and required a certain solitude: that of the only child in a family of great wealth, adored and neglected both, whose mind worked faster and traveled farther than anyone he was with, and who was driven every day, in the privacy of his study, to make himself a poet of enduring achievement. For all his generosity, his ambition and privilege sometimes made him selfish, and selfishness sometimes made him “cold.”
In early November 1961, as the radioactive dust from “Baby Ivan” settled, Merrill and Jackson made arrangements to sail to France, their first stop on the way to another, this time longer, stay in Greece. They planned to depart on March 3, Jimmy’s thirty-sixth birthday. No sooner had Merrill made a life for himself on Water Street and claimed it in his poetry than he felt the need to leave and create something else. During the “crisis” of their first trip together to Greece in 1959, Jackson had sensed that his companion was “ready for a new life.” It turned out that he was right, and Merrill would search for that new life in Greece. This did not mean, however, that they were about to break up, as David had feared. Jimmy had too much of a “horror” of the broken home to set out on his own, or to force David out. Besides, he was going to need David in Greece, as he had needed him on Water Street.
