7

THE CRACK IN THE MIRROR

1962–64

As if taking Water Street with them, Merrill and Jackson began their journey to Greece in the company of Grace Stone and Eleanor Perényi. “Well, it is really the end, dullness-wise,” Jimmy wrote on board the Queen Mary; “G. is constantly haranguing pursers, stewards, anyone who will listen.” In Paris they parted ways with the Stone Women, and had tea with Alice B. Toklas. They acquired a red VW, and drove through gray and snowy Yugoslavia “into green and sunny Greece.”

Prepared for their longest stay yet in Athens, they took an apartment on Ploutarchou Street, near where they stayed in 1960. Their Athens was agreeably small. They could find someone they knew at a table in Kolonáki Square at any time of day or night. They could walk two blocks further and enter the cool shadows and gravel paths of the National Garden. They could take a taxi to shop in the flea market in Monastiráki, sun themselves at the beach at Falerón, eat at a restaurant in the Plaka, the old town at the base of the Acropolis, or visit the celebrated ruins in moonlight. Cafés and tavernas closed late, if at all. Fresh from siestas, people strolled or chatted under stars that were as sharp and clear as they had been above the first Attic shepherds. The city’s first traffic light had only been installed recently. Fruits, vegetables, and household goods were sold by street vendors. “Every other day,” David noted in his journal, “a big block [of ice], wisped with straw, arrives […] for deposit in our oak ice-chest.” It was delivered by Niko, a dark-haired boy who sat in good clothes on his day off, earnest and handsome, while David painted his portrait in watercolors. “We still know nothing about him—at 18 what is there to know about anyone?—but we can see his eager good nature for decades to come.” The eager good nature of Athens seemed just as bright, just as apparent.

It was not the same capital that Merrill had first visited in 1950. Along with that first traffic light had come other developments. Greece was the only noncommunist state on the Balkan Peninsula, and the U.S., competing with the Soviet Union for dominance in the region, expanded its commercial investments and military presence in Greece, installing nuclear weapons in its bases there—which would be a source of controversy for years to come. The economy was thriving, leading to dramatic increases in industrial production and per capita income.1 The population of Athens grew by leaps; new housing linked outlying towns to the city center, creating a vast concrete metropolis. Olympic Airways, founded by the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in 1957, introduced jet service from Athens to Rome, Paris, and London in 1958 (direct flights from Athens to New York began in 1966), and Greece became a favored destination for the jet set. The paparazzi trailing Jacqueline Kennedy and Sophia Loren turned its sun-raked beaches, vine-roofed tavernas, and sugar-cube villages into familiar images. Tourists followed. Pleasure seemed like a fitting reward after the suffering and shortages of the past decades, for Greeks as well as western Europeans. Melina Mercouri, who starred as a Piraeus prostitute in the film Never on Sunday (1960), symbolized the nation’s rough new glamour and sexiness. The glow extended even to poetry: in 1963, crowning the modern movement in Greek letters, George Seferis won the Nobel Prize.

The change could be felt in daily life. “The broad brown peasant hand sports a manicure,” Merrill noted. “In the jeweler’s showcase appear worry-beads of lapis lazuli. The tavern with its dirt floor and unshaded bulbs, its ill-carpentered table revolving, plates and all, in a dancer’s strong teeth, has been supplanted by some ‘instant’ folklore of whitewash and candlelight, woven hangings, and music to which no one moves except the maître d’hotel, advancing with a bilingual menu.” Such innovations were less to be lamented than wryly observed, Merrill suggests: another object lesson in the way of the world. Besides, the opening up of traditional Greek society brought with it a general atmosphere of sexual excitement and experiment—“more and more people are doing it for fun instead of for money”—and that was part of what Merrill came for.

He was hardly the first English-speaking writer to journey to Greece. The tradition begins with Lord Byron’s heroic mission to restore ancient liberty to the Greek people, who were under Ottoman rule when he came in 1823. In the 1930s and 1940s, a new cohort of Anglo-American Philhellenes renewed Byron’s quest while altering its terms. In Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) and Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell (1945), the Greek adventure is about sensual self-discovery, rather than political and cultural regeneration. In this new myth of Greece, the freedom to be discovered is personal, and its exemplars are Dionysian, hypermasculine heroes, such as Miller’s George Katsimbalis or Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba. Friar absorbed and passed on to Merrill this new myth while adding a homosexual theme, derived from Cavafy. Merrill, always ironic, resisted the idealization of Greece in both its Byronic and modern versions. Yet he wanted a release from his world-weary irony and sophistication. He wanted to believe in the existence of the world Friar had promised him years before, a world antithetical to his, where his senses might be cleansed and liberated. At thirty-six, he was entering middle age, and he wanted another life.

In 1972, in an interview with David Kalstone, one of the friends he made in the 1960s, Merrill looked back at this earlier moment: “I began going to Greece […] very much in the spirit of one who embarks upon a double life. The life I lived there seemed I can’t tell you how different from life in America. I felt for the first time that I was doing exactly as I pleased.” On one level, the meaning of Greece was just that—Merrill enjoyed the power and freedom of doing just as he pleased, within limits. At first, his Greece was a carefully circumscribed diversion, like Algernon’s weekends with Bunbury in The Importance of Being Earnest. Merrill and Jackson came to Greece for two months in 1959. They were back for a month in 1960–61, and for three months in 1962, and three months again in 1963. But in 1963 and 1964, when he was at home in Connecticut, Merrill was writing fiction and poems about Greece, writing letters to friends there, and practicing reading and writing in Greek. In 1962, he began writing his name in his notebooks with two addresses, one in Stonington and one in Athens. By 1964, the center of his life had shifted, if only temporarily, to Greece.

During this period, Merrill was growing into his maturity as a man and an artist. His face became tanned and lined, his expression bolder, more comic. Although he’d always been attractive, it was not until his later thirties and early forties that he might be thought handsome. In photos from the 1940s and 1950s, he seems wary and averted behind his thick-rimmed glasses. Now his eyes (under contact lenses) were open and bright; his lips, once pursed and ready to sneer, broke easily into a grin. He was quick to see the humor in a situation and less likely to take offense. As always, he made friends wherever he went; now many of his new friends were working people. And his writing developed in related ways. His poems became more welcoming, more intimate, less encumbered by symbol and ornament. There was a person in the poetry, not merely behind it. He was learning how to manage self-disclosure and a new directness, while his poems became more daring, complex, and experimental in form.

The second life Merrill found in Athens was built on top of his life on Water Street, which he had no plans to give up. It was “greedy” of him to want both lives, he knew. “A writer already has two lives, don’t you think?” he muses in the interview with Kalstone. “Not so much in the obvious division between experience and its imitation on the page as in the two sides of”—here he hesitated before making a weighty pronouncement—“the two sides of the creative temperament.” By those “two sides” he seems to have meant that part of an artist which is passive and inspired, a vessel or vehicle, and that part which is cool and calculating, a plotter and craftsman. We see both “sides” in his attraction to Greece. Making a life there was a choice, a design, a move. Yet what he was choosing was a certain passivity, an openness to the designs life might have on him. In time, his double life demonstrated to him the unity of his experience in Greece and the U.S., so that he could say, laughing at his own expense, “How we delude ourselves! As if there were ever more than one life.” But that lesson lay years ahead.

When he arrived in 1962, he knew few Greeks and spoke little of the language. Friar was in Athens that spring, but Jimmy didn’t see him much: he meant to discover his own Greece. He and David fell in with the internationals they had met in 1959, mostly British and American expatriates who convened at bars with names like Apatsos and Zonar’s. One was Gordon Sager, a friend of Jane and Paul Bowles, who had published a novel about them called Run, Sheep, Run (1950). Another was Peter Mayne, the author of books about Marrakech and Pakistan, whom Merrill called “the sweetest man alive.” Alan Ansen had been thrown out of Venice by a chief of police fed up with his and Gregory Corso’s uncouth ways; he was settling into forgiving Athens. “I’m not such a great one for bella figura,” he reflected, “and the Greeks didn’t care for it that much.” Ansen, with his snort and chortle and a long-limbed, awkward body, was a foil for the impish, stylish Jimmy. They had poetry and poet friends (Auden, Kallman, and Hollander) in common. Merrill might roll his eyes, but he couldn’t entirely resist when Ansen tipped back his head, closed his eyes, and chanted Alcman in ancient Greek. It was a “nightmare,” however, when Ansen got drunk and began breaking furniture.

Meanwhile, another, crucial friendship was taking root. On this trip, Merrill and Jackson saw Tony Parigory every day, and they loved him “more and more.” Their flat, which he found for them, was a short walk from his antiques shop. One block from Kolonáki Square, the shop was set in shadow a half flight below ground in a bland new apartment building. It offered fine or amusing things from across the eastern Mediterranean for well-to-do Athenians with wit and taste. At the end of the day, it became a salon where Tony’s friends made themselves at home amid the merchandise—thick layers of Turkish carpet, a Sèvres clock, a nineteenth-century pine secretary from Corfu with hidden drawers—and gabbed over cocktails before dinner at a nearby taverna.

Tall, smiling, Alexandrian Tony, with a shining bald pate, dark eyes, and devilish black eyebrows he arched for effect, was giddy and wily, a gossip who knew everyone and yet was always ready to meet someone new. In his worldly wisdom, off-color jokes, and macaronic bons mots, braiding English, Greek, and a camp French, he resembled none of Merrill’s friends so much as Ephraim, the Familiar Spirit. And like Ephraim, Tony came when Jimmy called, able and eager to satisfy his needs, whether for an apartment to rent or company for a night on the town. He was Merrill’s age and, like him, the son of a stockbroker. He was educated and cultured, but he was not an intellectual. He’d known Lawrence Durrell’s wife in Alexandria, and he could tell his own version of the stories behind Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. He left Egypt at the time of the Suez Crisis and came to Greece on his own. In Athens, a friend of his father’s introduced him to a single woman fifteen years older than he, Nelly Liambey. Liambey invited a childhood friend of hers, Maria Mitsotáki, to her first meeting with the new arrival, and the three of them became fast friends.

Merrill met Nelly and Maria in Tony’s shop in 1962. Always susceptible to people of charm and mystery, Jimmy was easily seduced in this case. Nelly and Maria were rich and, like Tony, intensely cosmopolitan. Liambey was born in Ioannina, a city in the northwestern region of Epirus, which was once the Turkish capital of Greece; and her stories of the place stuck in Jimmy’s memory. Ioannina, a center of Greek Jewry, was a trading post through which goods, money, and people had long flowed between central Europe and the Levant. Liambey learned English, German, and French there. She spent the 1930s and the war years in Vienna, Budapest, and Paris. In Athens after the war, she led the untypical life of an independent woman dedicated to her friends. Postwar Athenians, many of them with roots in a province or village, had traditional social ideas just beneath the surface of their urban manners. In contrast, Liambey had Ioannina and the great European capitals in her past. Her mother was a trained singer; and Nelly traveled to Salzburg, Paris, and Venice, to attend concerts—which was a bond with Jimmy. She liked to be entertained, and she could afford to be. She was pert, pretty, small, and sweet—yet not too sweet, seeing no need to stand for pretense or convention, and able to choose her friends. Mitsotáki, who had names for everyone, called her “La Petite.”

Maria, three years older than Nelly, was born in Athens in 1907. She was the middle child and only daughter in a prominent family. Her older brother died in youth from tuberculosis. Seeking treatment for him, the family moved to Davos, Switzerland, where they joined the cast of elegant prewar sanatorium clients evoked by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain. A photo of the dark-eyed schoolgirl suggests the privilege of her childhood: blank and direct, her stare hints at the steely command of style she was being taught to wield. Her father, Constantine Demertzis, a professor of civil law at the University of Athens and a royalist, had a moment on the stage of Greek history: appointed acting prime minister of Greece in 1935 by King George II, he oversaw the failed elections that resulted in the rise to power of the dictator, General John Metaxas. There was discipline as well as luxury in his household. On Maria’s wedding day, the guests gathered in the house—and were kept waiting while she lingered in the bath. When at length she descended in her wedding dress, her father greeted her by slapping her in front of the assembly. Her husband, several years older, was Niko Mitsotáki, from a Greek family of Liverpool wine merchants, one of Britain’s major importers. He and Maria lived near London without children; his younger brother lived with them, carrying on an affair with the butler. Niko was handsome in the sepia-tinted fashion of leading men in 1930s Hollywood. In one snapshot, he leans on a fat roadster in a double-breasted pinstripe suit with burning pale eyes and his black hair slicked down. Maria, in fur stole and a dress designed by Molyneux, was costumed to match. She and Niko had a house on Capri and a schooner, the Tuscano, to convey them from island to island in Greece. This was the triumphant style of elite society entre deux guerres. Hotel labels decorated their steamer trunks.

After her father’s death in 1936, Maria returned to Greece to take care of her mother, who was dying of cancer, and she was trapped in Athens by the war. When Niko died too, she became a very wealthy widow. She put on mourning clothes and dark glasses and never took them off, becoming Mavre Maria, the “Black Maria,” Merrill knew. “She was still young and very good-looking,” Liambey remembered, “but she didn’t have to remarry. Why should she?” With Niko’s fortune, no children, and one surviving brother, she had money and few obligations. She could love the men she wished, and walk away from them when she wished. Her lovers were public men—a composer and a professor in the School of Art at the University of Athens. But these were the private affairs of a secretive woman. There is a comic “portrait” of her by the artist Laskaris in which the back of her head is turned to the viewer. Few friends visited her flat in Kolonáki. After her father’s death, she burned his correspondence. She sealed her own in envelopes with instructions for her niece, Nina Koutsoudakis, to burn them after her death, which she did. “It’s funny how she sealed things,” Koutsoudakis commented. “Her own secrets—or a friendship once she was done with it. She sealed off anything that was painful to her. She never spoke of her brother or husband after they died.” Instead, she joked in a voice without warmth, “sans rire.” “Surface! Surface!” she insisted, with the French pronunciation, whenever a conversation threatened to become deep.

To Maria, Merrill and Jackson became “les enfants.” (Ansen, less dignified, was “Baby Alan.”) Jimmy responded by calling her “Maman” and himself “Le Petit.” He adopted her as a mock mother, making himself small in her presence, as if he were her boy, her puppet. “Jimmy was médused by her,” observed Natalia Méla, who often saw them at lunch in the square, the poet spellbound by this older woman. Maria had for him the authority of an archetypal, polyglot diva with red lipstick, powdered face, dark glasses, and a cigarette—a habit that gave her voice so thick a timbre it could be mistaken on the phone for a man’s.

Tony was the Mercury who led Jimmy to her. He was also Merrill’s way into less Olympian corners of Athenian society. In a sailor’s bar on the water in Pérama, Merrill learned new phrases in Greek: “ ‘Let’s you and me have a party’ or ‘I shall be sleeping on my feet’ or (raising a glass) ‘To your eyes.’ ” With Parigory as guide, he and Jackson enjoyed frequent sexual “Exploits,”2 which they laughed over the next day at a table on the square or in Tony’s shop. Merrill had come to Greece, in part, for just this experience—to live out his sexual double life. But he felt the need to maintain his self-control, even as he was letting go of it. At times the merriment grew tense.

In April, returning from the beach in a convertible, he suddenly found that he couldn’t move the right side of his face. Comically, grotesquely, the lower eyelid sagged, and half of his mouth remained stiff as he laughed or ate. “A doctor came and ran pins up and down my palms and footsoles and pronounced the word Psyxis (freezing).” The condition is better known as Bell’s palsy. It is “a form of facial paralysis resulting from damage to the cranial nerve,” in most cases due to a form of herpes virus (which, in Merrill’s case, might have been sexually transmitted); there is usually improvement within two weeks, and full recovery within three to six months. Merrill visited the hospital where he had been treated on his first visit to Greece. He was X-rayed, given diathermy, and told to rest. The patient took to bed, attended by young “well-wishers, drinking beer + orangeade, and playing cards.” For a few days, an elderly man, wearing a black armband, arrived from the pharmacy to administer an injection “in the rump and another in the vein of my golden arm.”

Merrill soon recovered, but the illness had shaken him. To feel his face “freezing” was disturbing to a poet who was fascinated by appearances and feared his own coldness of heart. He was quick to read his symptoms as symbols. “I suspect that we have here the materials of a poem,” he told Hine, explaining that the partial paralysis was “the crack in the mirror of the soul, if that is what the face is, but I think the setting ought to be Istanbul”—a city divided between East and West, and a macrocosmic image of his divided soul. Merrill set down notes for a poem, but he wouldn’t develop them until the autumn.

Istanbul was on his mind because he and Jackson were planning to meet his mother there. But Hellen Plummer took a fall at home, breaking a bone in her leg, and canceled her trip. They had worried in advance about their plans to entertain her and other guests whose curiosity about Greece had been aroused by, as David put it, “our raptures so irresponsibly poured out.” Dignified Count Morra visited during Merrill’s phase of bed rest. When he departed, “my face began to mend,” Merrill confided in Hine. “I have toyed, fustily, with the Psychological Interpretation. His being here was going to cramp my style, and so it did.” His mother’s presence would have been worse yet, and the injury preventing her visit felt to him, guiltily, like a close call. As he told Fredericks, “We have a door right on the street, and the people who drop in are very heterogeneous and only rarely heterosexual.”

Robin and Betty Magowan followed Morra. Robin was now a doctoral student in comparative literature at Yale, working on his dissertation in Paris. A snapshot shows him leaning forward, slight and boyish in the glare of a taverna lunch by the sea in the Piraeus; he is seated with his uncle, whose bandaged face lurches drunkenly from Bell’s palsy, and Mavre Maria, chic and presiding. Looking back on this initial visit to Greece, Robin described “that feeling of having stepped into the morning of the world; a light so sharp that, standing on the Acropolis, there seemed to be nothing in the whole of Athens, not a kite, not a bus turning a hundred blocks away, we could not see.”

His uncle’s nighttime, Dionysian Greece, made an even deeper impression. One evening, taking the Magowans on a tour that they wouldn’t have given Morra or Mrs. Plummer, Merrill and Jackson brought them to the bar in Pérama. Here Greek navy men in white uniforms and trim caps went to drink ouzo and meet male prostitutes. The music was rembétika, the urban blues brought to Athens with the Greek refugees from Asia Minor in 1922. Rembétika is a raw, nervy sound, played with the bouzouki, a string instrument like the mandolin or balalaika. The sound is rich with the history of forced migration and struggle of the working people who play it, and their stories of longing, love, and violence. It is the music for a meditative dance, the zembeikiko, in which a man rises and circles the floor in seemingly private reverie, stamping and clapping, slowly slapping his thighs or his heels, dipping and rising in a loose improvisation on familiar steps, as the music gains in tempo and intensity. Sometimes the dancer is joined by a second, who holds out a handkerchief, and both men grasp it. As the high spirits called kéfi take hold, rhythmic clapping builds. At last, the crowd pays tribute to the dancers by smashing plates and glasses on the ground.

Robin was entranced: he jotted down his reactions to the dancing in the taxi on the way home, and these notes became the basis for his “first real poem.” Immediately a conflict arose when a letter arrived from the English Department at the University of Washington offering him a post as an assistant professor. He hesitated to accept it, fearing that teaching and scholarship would take away his newly discovered sense of poetic vocation. So he brought the decision to his uncle. Merrill had led his nephew to Greece; now he sent the young man home. Robin summarizes his advice: “Teaching, for you, may be a means to an end. But the confidence that can accrue from it is no small matter. If it hadn’t been for the invitation I received on graduating from Amherst to teach at Bard, I’d have gone to work at Merrill Lynch. It was that year which allowed me to see myself as a full-fledged writer.” “The next day,” Robin writes, Jimmy and David, “after plying me with a pair of highballs, marched me down to the one open post office, under Omonia square, where I dutifully fired off my telegram of acceptance.”

Grace Stone visited next, and received the red carpet treatment: Jimmy and David brought her to Delphi, held a big cocktail party in her honor, and, to entertain her and another American visitor, John Myers, arranged “the Athens premiere of ‘Byrone,’ ” a ballad opera with hand puppets and a cappella singing created by Parigory’s fellow Alexandrian, Bernard de Zogheb. Merrill had been delighted by de Zogheb’s zany genius when they met in 1960 in Alexandria. Byrone was the first of several de Zogheb ballad operas for puppets that Merrill sponsored. He brought the act to New York in January and, subsequently, introduced de Zogheb and his work to the Little Players, Peschka and Murdock, who made de Zogheb’s libretti staples of their repertoire.

Bernard’s parodies suited the irreverent spirit in which Merrill met the grandeur of ancient Greece. When he and Jackson took a trip to Crete in May and visited the ruins of the palace at Knossos, Merrill was dismissive of the main attraction, likening Heinrich Schliemann’s last discovery to “a grand villa built by Frank Lloyd Wright for Louis B. Mayer,” the MGM mogul. Yet he was taken by the site itself, and compared the “very circumscribed horizon of gentle hills covered, now, with yellow daisies and coquelicots” to a Proustian “invalid in bed, idle, all magazines read. […]” He had a similar reaction on a visit to the Acropolis. It wasn’t the massive, masculine structure, the Parthenon, to which he responded, but the Porch of the Maidens, the Caryatids: “Whenever I see the Erectheum, I all but faint with pleasure, and would if I were not vigorously stopping my ears against the babble of tongues describing over how many years it was built, what it was used for (the Turks used it for a harem), because I know that it was designed and built in a fortnight by a Japanese. It says everything the Parthenon doesn’t say, that is, a good deal more than the P. actually says. How marvelous that they are there together, those two; it makes one believe in love between the sexes.” He tucked the thought away for use once he got back, at the end of June, to his desk on Water Street.

Shortly before he left Athens, Merrill received a three-page letter, typed and single-spaced, from Friar. Jimmy had complained to Kimon that he’d been indiscreet about Merrill’s Greek sex life in front of Grace. “As you talked, over the telephone, I knew immediately that you were right,” Friar began. “But also, as you talked, in that querulous tone which has become more and more your pitch lately, I knew that I no longer cared to see or to know you.” This was not, Friar continued, a “sudden revelation.” Merrill had long ago admitted that he had two emotions toward Friar that made any simple friendship between them impossible. Friar listed them: “one was a sense of guilt, and the other a feeling that I was trying to dominate and direct you as I had when I was your mentor.” As a result, Merrill showed a put-upon “tolerance” for his company, Friar maintained, and a lack of respect for his literary work. “I could accept your rejection of me as a lover,” Friar wrote, “[…] but I was puzzled and hurt again and again by your rejection of me as a person and a writer. You early repudiated anything I might have meant to you, as one who encouraged you and one whom you loved, by emphatically entitling your third book FIRST POEMS, and thus assigning me with your father to oblivion, or at least to no place in your creative and emotional life.” Yet it was only now, and on different grounds, that Friar felt a break was necessary:

What has helped me to let go is what seems to be a deepening change in your character. We seem to have little in common any more. Your mother was right: we certainly do not belong to the same social class. But more, we certainly do not care for the same kind of people. I look with distaste at the kind of “gay” temperament, either over-vulgar or over-chic, with which you seem to surround yourself. I have watched what was refined and delicate in your character become affectation, mannerism, precious. […] A long time ago I found a phrase to describe your own brand of tactlessness and aggressiveness: the insensitivity of the sensitive. […] My carelessness before Mrs. Stone […] must be placed beside my recent pictures of you necking in the back of automobiles or in your parlor in the presence of others (one whom you once professed to love and the other whom you say you still love). […] My own sense of what is permissable has never gone this far. David, I think, can come out unscathed under these circumstances, but not you. With you, it is all a bit shrill, over intense and demonstrative, as though you were trying to show that you too can have many successes and be loved many times by many people. […] You have come to Greece for the wrong reasons, and I am bitterly aware of the irony that it was I who first brought you here.

It was an extraordinary outburst. Over the past decade, the former lovers had fallen into a stiff, formal relationship that was both more and less intimate than a friendship. They had seen each other at odd intervals in New York. Their correspondence shows, on Merrill’s side, only short, sporadic letters, low on news, occasionally affectionate but just as often testy as Merrill shirks an accusation from the easily injured Friar or parries with a pointed comment. Friar dedicated his English translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Odyssey: A Modern Sequel to Merrill, who showed no appreciation for the poem, the translation, or Friar’s gesture. Instead, Jimmy was repulsed by what he saw as Kimon’s attempts to market the work in New York and Hollywood.

He didn’t respond to Friar’s letter until he returned to the U.S., and then not until Independence Day, July 4. Friar had said, Merrill told him, just what he had expected him to say; “thus, in a sense, it must be what I hoped you would say. It confirms me in a respect for you which you imagine I do not have. You are managing to be yourself; it’s what we’re all trying to do.” As to the sexual freedom that he required to be himself, Merrill sighed, “Alas, I have always been tempted by the lives of others. The truest perception in your letter is the phrase ‘as though you were trying to show that you too can have many successes, etc.’ For me, these ‘successes’ are a novelty of much the same quality as Hollywood was for you. […] It makes me smile to think how I lectured you about your intimacy with rich and corrupt people, and how you now lecture me about sex—as if in both cases one had trespassed on the other’s terrain.”

Friar’s “terrain” was also Greece, and Merrill wasn’t about to cede his new claim on the country, especially if it was Friar who had brought him there first. “I did not need, on my first visit, to behave in the way you complain of, in order to be affected deeply, physically, as psychologically now. I have never left that country without feeling that my fate was there. If that means I come back ‘for the wrong reasons,’ well and good. I cannot ask you to see these reasons any more sympathetically than you do my—pleasures? experiments? ordeals?” He met Friar’s cutting portrait of him with a cutting portrait of Friar—“Where you find me affected and querulous, I find you narcissistic and pompous”—and ended by linking Friar and Greece once again: “Like Greece, you are part of my fate, whether or not we ever meet again.”

Merrill had held himself to a page, but not before indulging in the type of lofty rhetoric he complained of Friar’s using. Always the teacher, Friar made checks in the margins of the letter, noting points to respond to. He was silent for six months. Then he reiterated and defended his earlier claims: “I strongly feel that, regardless of my many inadequacies, you have treated me shabbily, niggardly. It was only when I saw you treating yourself in the same manner that I could bear it no longer.” This time Merrill didn’t respond by letter. But he wasn’t content to let Friar have the last word: he was hard at work on his reply, as he had been since July, which was growing into his second novel, The (Diblos) Notebook.

Notes for The (Diblos) Notebook appear in Merrill’s journal as early as September 1957. In 1958, he challenged himself to write “a non-objective novel,” “a book the main energy of which is to make the writer’s creative impulse the central theme. I have a story to tell. The story is not about real people, or could be. K’s Vita Nuova idea. ‘This happened to me last night, therefore I made character X. behave like this.’ ” The idea was to write a book about the writing of a book, exploring the process by which life is turned into art. This Merrill did by presenting the novel as if it were a writer’s notebook, including crossed-out words, phrases, and even pages, and diary comments on daily life mixed in with reflections on the process of composition. At one point Merrill introduces a paragraph upside down, as if the writer had grabbed the book that way.

The idea for the book had been Friar’s (“K’s”). He envisioned it as a poet’s coming-of-age story and the prelude to a great work, something like Dante’s Vita Nuova. Friar wasn’t simply the source of the book’s idea, however. Kimon and Mina both appear in the novel-within-the-novel as characters called “Orestes,” a Greek-American man of letters known as “Orson” in “real life,” and “Dora,” a cultured, older Greek woman, recently widowed, who lives in a grand house on Diblos, based on Mina’s house on Poros. (“Diblos,” which sounds like it might be a cognate of the English “double,” is not a Greek word at all. The Greek word Merrill thought of using for the island is skismos, or “division.”) Merrill casts himself as the narrator, Orestes’s younger half brother. Unnamed in “real life,” he calls himself “Sandy” in his novel, a joke about his dry heart.

As this double-entry book of names indicates, The (Diblos) Notebook is a Möbius strip in which life and art turn into each other. The story opens in summer 1961. The narrator is staying on Diblos and writing in his notebook in a café on the harbor. The notebook glances at his clumsy, fitful relations with several people on the island. These include two women—an American tourist and a maid in the hotel—and a young man, a friendly Diblosite named Giorgos. To these people, all potential romantic partners for him, the narrator prefers the company of the characters in his notebook. The story he is drafting is based on his previous visit to Diblos. It describes Orestes’s chance meeting with Dora on the Diblos waterfront, where she finds Orestes trying to catch sight of the Sleeping Woman. The child of a Greek-American immigrant, Orestes is moved by Greece because it is his mother’s native land. Dora is won over by his enthusiasm, and she invites him to use the cottage on her property for his literary work.

When Sandy visits him there, Orestes wants to share his good fortune and instruct Sandy in the Greek heritage he shares with Orestes as his half brother. So Orestes takes him to a local panegyri, where he teaches him how to dance like a Greek. That night, Sandy overhears Orestes and Dora talking: she reveals her love for him—painfully, because both of them know he can’t return it. The implication, although it is only an implication, is that Orestes is homosexual. Yet each has something to offer the other, since Dora is interested in America, and they decide that she will return with him to New York as his wife in a marriage of convenience. In New York, things go badly for them. Dora is disoriented, and she and Orestes turn out to dislike each other. The novel-within-the-novel and the present moment of composition converge when Orson returns to Diblos to reclaim the cottage, now in the possession of Dora’s son, Byron.

Merrill worked on the novel intermittently between 1958 and 1962. After his letter to Friar in July 1962, he focused on the manuscript until he completed it in February 1964. Taking stock, he thought the book “either a little masterpiece or a ghastly mistake.” In truth it was neither. The novel is too involuted, too involved with the particulars of Merrill’s life, to qualify as anything like a masterpiece. The transformation of life into art it explores is incomplete—insofar as Merrill was writing about actual people for whom his characters could only ever be masks and primarily interesting as such. As his writer-narrator pithily puts it, “Books ought to consume their sources, not embalm them.” Yet the novel is an advance on the roman à clef method of The Seraglio, since it exposes to scrutiny the imaginative process by which Merrill wrote fiction, with an increase in his self-knowledge and his technical resources. He was seeking a literary form that would be adequate to the risk-taking double life he led in Greece, and it opened the way for the risk-taking poems he was beginning to write.

The novel’s first page demonstrates its formal procedure and introduces its psychological project:

Orestes

The islands of Greece

Across vivid water the islands of Greece lie. They have been cut out of cardboard and set on bases of

at subtle odds with one another, upon bases of pale haze. Their colors are mauve, exhausted blue, tanned rose, here & there crinkled to catch the light. They do not seem

It is inconceivable that they are of one substance with the warm red rock underfoot

rock of one’s own vantage point (?)

The crossed-out name, there on the threshold of the novel, recalls the ripped portrait mentioned in the first sentence of The Seraglio. By referring to Friar as “Orestes” and striking through the name, Merrill strikes at his teacher. He does so specifically by attacking Friar’s identification with a tragic hero from classical Greek drama—with the implication that Merrill, or his narrator-surrogate, must clear away Orestes before establishing his own “vantage point.” What that point of view consists in is uncertain, however, flagged by a parenthetical question mark. Securing it will require Sandy to accept a “contradiction.” To the new arrival, it is “inconceivable” that the “warm red rock underfoot,” indubitably real and objective, is the same landscape as the one he sees before him, half dissolved in a play of changing light he is only too able to evoke in gorgeous lyric prose. Merrill has in mind the optical effect when hot sun and chill sea meet, creating a shining haze above which the rocky Greek coastline seems to float. Putting together “the warm red rock underfoot” and the misty vista will mean reconciling Sandy’s sense of touch and his rarefied seeing—body and soul.

But The (Diblos) Notebook is less concerned with reconciliation than with unmasking, with the clearing away of vanity and pretension, and Friar-Orestes is the target of a bitter satire. Lest there be any doubt about the link between them, Sandy gives Orestes Friar’s looks, down to the thin black mustache of “a sharpie” that Kimon wore briefly after his first trip to Greece. Sandy compares his voice to that of “a radio announcer”; when Orestes chooses a hat to buy, it is a Borsalino, what a salesman might wear, and here a symbol of “the Greek American dream.” Orestes’s personal style unfailingly reveals, not the refinement he aspires to, but his anxious effort to acquire it. Merrill treats Orestes’s ideas similarly. Orestes lectures on the weighty topics that Friar spoke on at the Poetry Center in the mid-1940s: “Darwin & the Poetry of Science” and “The Tragic Dualism of Man,” for instance. As a lecturer, he is “intoxicated” by his own ideas. His exaggerated self-importance expresses his fear that he is a latecomer to culture. The economic deprivation of an immigrant and the historical belatedness of the twentieth-century author meet in his ambition, “as both a Greek & a ‘modern man,’ ” “to enter that world of myth,” a shining realm that he feels both entitled to and excluded from. Seen from this angle, his fascination with myth is another misjudged stylistic choice, like his mustache and his hat:

O. wore myth day & night like an unbecoming color.

“I am Orestes, Perseus, Hamlet, Faust.” And, in the piping whisper of a child, unheard by him: “I am Pinocchio.”

Ah, but it made him so happy, made the ills that befell him bearable. Myth Metaphor formed like ice between him & the world.

Perseus turns out to be Pinocchio, the Italian cobbler’s son.

We can gauge the force of Friar’s early spell on Merrill by how much force he exerts, years later, to break it. On Friar’s first visit to Greece, he wrote to Merrill that the land was there “for our colonizing.” Sandy makes Orestes’s colonizing of Diblos seem imperial and pitiable: “His cottage. His rock-garden. His private cove. How proud & happy it made him! Two white-washed rooms paved with hexagonal terracotta, interspersed with square black, tiles. Rush chairs. A low, wide window. His marble trouvaille on the sill. The table strewn with papers, dictionaries. His life mask, plaster painted dull red, hanging above. Two wooden beds, woven striped coverings.” This is an accurate description of the Medusa on Poros as Merrill saw it in 1950, with Friar’s life mask, first seen in Amherst, hanging on the wall. The passage reads like a deliberate, disenchanted rewriting of Merrill’s diary entry from 1945 describing his lover’s rooms in Amherst, when he was fully under Friar’s sway and hushed in reverence for the symbols Kimon had selected and placed around him.

Merrill’s argument with Friar rises to the level of aesthetic debate in a scene where Orestes, Dora, and Sandy visit the Acropolis. Predictably, Orestes prefers the Parthenon to the Erectheum, while Dora prefers the latter. Echoing Merrill’s reflections on his own recent visit to the ruins, she and Orestes argue over the values embodied in the two temples. The “famous one” “rises in sunlight,” upright and noble as “a sire, a seer,” whereas the other, “dangerously complex & arbitrary,” “Japanese,” is like “a small-boned woman,” or perhaps the “dressing-table” at which she sits.

Orestes: One lives for the sake of one’s tragic insights.

(Dora): If that is true, one still has access to them at one’s dressing-table—more often than at one’s prie-dieu.

O. (magnanimous): Let us say that as symbols these 2 temples have equal power, but that the states they symbolize do not.

Dora (amused): You are more human than I am, is that it?

In this dialogue Dora is speaking for Sandy, too, and behind him is Jimmy, arguing with Kimon for his equal humanity.

But Merrill was far from confident in his own humanity, or at least in his capacity to sympathize and give love. Friar’s letter in June, when it accused him of heartlessness, must have shaken him no less than the episode of Bell’s palsy, and for the same reasons. In The (Diblos) Notebook, he accuses Friar, via Orson-Orestes, of coldness: “Myth Metaphor formed like ice between him and the world.” But when he replaces “myth” with “metaphor,” he implies a criticism of Sandy too, and of himself through Sandy. Burrowing in his notebook, Sandy fends off those around him. His lavish descriptive abilities shield him from experience, which he turns into metaphors before he can fully live it. When Dora offers her love to Orestes, Orestes’s reaction is “to take charge of the situation” and “help Dora accept & overcome her feelings”; he does not think “to return the love.” Nor would Sandy. Not for nothing are they half brothers.

Sandy and Orestes share a Greek mother—her name is “Eleni,” the Greek form of “Helen,” which calls to mind Hellen Plummer. This way of defining their bond suggests that it is based in a shared femininity (as opposed to the masculine bond that a shared father would represent), and it hints at the homosexual basis of Merrill and Friar’s relationship. The scene most imbued with homoeroticism in the novel—and the most vivid homoerotic scene anywhere in Merrill’s work—is the description of the dancing at the panegyri. Flushed with wine, Sandy watches as Orestes and Kosta, Dora’s workman, modeled on Friar’s lover Mitso, get up to dance. The two men approach each other hissing “like serpents.” Kosta leaps, landing “not on the ground but in midair, with legs wrapped about O.’s waist, head fallen back, shoulders still undulating.” Next it is Sandy’s turn to dance with his brother. Reluctant, he is content “with repeating, most gracefully, he thought, the basic steps Orestes indicated.” Then Orestes commands him to leap as Mitso did: “Now.” Doubting his capacity, but complying anyway, Sandy “springs upwards & backwards to lock his thighs around his partner’s waist,” while “O.’s face grins down: the look of the initiator.” “O. hisses lightly, provocatively,” before releasing him. But Sandy is not done: they must trade places. While the music insists, Orestes “confronts” him,

and in a flash the whole staggering weight of another body has become his. But he’s mad, S. thinks, I can’t hold him up! as they go reeling towards a group of tables and Orestes, blissful & trusting, smiles up at him. I cannot. Sandy has opened his mouth to cry—the blood pounding beneath his sunburn—he cannot—yet within seconds it appears that he can; he can, he can. Power & joy fill him. His eyes fill. He can dance under his brother’s weight. Then it is over, & the music, too.

“Bravo,” said Dora, welcoming them back. “You’re going to make an excellent Greek, Sandy.”

The dance is a way of representing men making love, including, by an implication that Merrill is willing to dare, his own initiation into sex by the smiling Friar, treated here as Sandy’s initiation into his Greek heritage. He learns what it is like to give himself to another man and take on that man’s full weight; the two half brothers, locking together, make a whole, like “Narcissus & his image” or “the Jack of Clubs.” But the narrator quickly draws back from this experience of communion and trust. He, or rather Merrill as he worked on the novel, ends this episode by cautioning himself: “(Make the dancing less euphoric?)”

As he worked on the “n-v-l” in Stonington in 1962, Merrill took stock: “We know too many people. For the first time it really hits me between the eyes, the madness of it all. What, for instance, is Bernie doing here?” Winebaum kept turning up in Jimmy’s life. A Harvard graduate, Bernie painted and occasionally wrote poems while getting by on a few investments in real estate. Over the years, he became subject to increasingly violent mood swings and manic behavior. Now he was renting the second-floor apartment on Water Street; his “soft footfall and apologetic cough” announced his presence “at odd times throughout the day.” Jimmy’s niece Cathy and her husband were in residence too, having arrived with a “motorscooter, crash helmets, [and] large unfinished oil paintings,” to bide their time between summer jobs on Fishers Island and travel in Europe. The village made its own demands. The death of Stephen Vincent Benét’s widow required Jimmy and David to attend the funeral—Jackson’s first. Around the same time, delicate Isabel Morse fell and broke her hip. Grace refused to visit the invalid “because, well, when Ellis had his heart attack she didn’t hear from Isabel for three weeks, or speak to her for 2 years thereafter as a result.” But soon she had joined the rest of the Surly Temple at Isabel’s bedside, taking turns reading Persuasion aloud and “then playing bridge” until late. Weary from all this activity, but amused too, Merrill reflected, “Part of me […] wants to see nobody, nobody at all.… And part of me, as always, wants only to go about sniffing lampposts + hydrants, the social animal happily ever after.”

Water Street was published in September 1962, and X. J. Kennedy reviewed it in The New York Times in terms that ought to have reassured the author about his coldness of heart: “Merrill has developed a deeper compassion, a kind of humility, a capacity for bitter amusement at his own expense. […] At 36, he is surely one of the American poets most worth reading.” Atheneum quickly ordered a second printing. Merrill appeared on television to introduce a scene from The Immortal Husband. In December, a Newsweek photographer snapped his picture for an article on American poetry. “I wonder,” Merrill wrote to Donald Richie, “if Edna Millay ever felt the sort of creeping unease that comes over me as I think about it all. David,” he added, “shame on him, hasn’t been writing much of anything.”

“Oh,” Jackson asked in a postscript, “how can poor me compete with Edna?” The contrast between his and Jimmy’s literary success was more striking than ever. He reported to Richie, “JM’s at work. I’m trying still.” His phrase suggests that not trying had become a tempting option. Over the summer, David had supervised the restoration of the house opposite 107 Water Street. He spoke of making a profit on its resale, or using it to put up friends, but he and Jimmy didn’t need more money or more company. Merrill had bought the house merely so that Jackson would have something to do. “That’s David’s house, you know,” Jimmy said to friends, vague about what that meant, leaving open the possibility that Jackson had paid for it. In need of recognition and reluctant to say so, David threw a party in New York to celebrate his fortieth birthday, while keeping the occasion for the party a secret. Jimmy marked the date with a tender message:

               Passing of time unnerves us all.

               Last month at your first funeral

               I saw you taken by surprise,

               A burning water fill your eyes

               As if the years had stolen your—

               Your—something you did not insure.

               Dearest and best, what could they steal?

               A few gold hairs? some sex-appeal?

               Or faith? or fear? Suppose they did.

               There is no loot but must be hid.

               And yours has fallen to the care

               Of all who love you, everywhere.

               It can be looked at in one place

               As safe as any. Now, my face,

               Show David if he still believes

               He has been robbed by forty thieves.

Despite the face he puts on it here, Merrill felt “unnerved” by passing time too, and in need of reassurance himself. On the day before David’s birthday, he learned from Tony that a truck driver named Taki, a sweet young man who’d been a sexual partner for Parigory and then Merrill that spring, had been run over and killed while taking a nap in the shade of another driver’s truck. Shaken by this news, Jimmy turned to “Planchette, toujours consolatrice.” He narrated his and David’s séance for Tony: “Breaking a long silence we inquired of our enchanting Familiar (Ephraim… ) for Taki, who was instantly summoned. E’s mother came from Larissa, and E. volunteered a comparison between Taki and the centaurs of old, whose mental powers were often not very strong. ‘How he chatters!’ said E. ‘Taki mou-polylogou! [my talkative Taki]’ said I, and the reply was: ‘Sika! [sister]’ He was in high spirits, thrilled to ‘be’ in America for a bit, wanted to know what truck-drivers’ wages are here, in case he is reborn in this country. Ephraim began to rehearse a long history of early, clumsy deaths […] but thought him a charming fellow, while Taki thought E. a big Sika.” Merrill wound up the report a bit self-consciously, admitting to Parigory, “It is foolish to carry on like this, I mean telling you such things, but they do mean something to us even if someone else would call them blasphemous.”

Again the nation was gripped by fears of nuclear attack. In October, with Russian missiles placed in Cuba, the U.S. and the Soviet Union lurched on the brink of mutual destruction. For some days, it appeared that the dreaded future might have arrived. By November, Merrill looked back on the passing of the Cuban Missile Crisis, giddy with relief: “It was a real orgy of anxiety all the more intense for my having abstained from it for more than a year beforehand. Now, once again, I’m off the stuff.” As in 1961, the nuclear threat receded into the background of daily life. But the garish light of total war, narrowly averted, colored Jimmy’s and David’s days. With the fate of the world swinging in the balance, it was easy to feel that nothing mattered very much.

Friar had accused Merrill of a general lack of faith and seriousness. Still smarting from that attack, he was forced to recognize and question his ways of protecting himself. In November, Fredericks gave him another occasion to do so by renewing a criticism he had often made: Jimmy’s sociability made him cold to those closest to him, unable to respond to what was most urgent and important. In his reply, Merrill seems to have been thinking both of Friar’s accusations and the new friend he had lost in the sweet, talkative Taki. He returned to a remark made at a party in New York in October:

I wish I could come to grips with what lies behind the sweetly fluttering veil of your reproach, which I feel as a reproach not only from you but two or three other friends. Certainly there must be grounds,—in each case,—and it makes me sad because I realize I can only do what I do. I guess you would say I was a cat at heart, but I can remember when I was a dog and can’t easily account for the transformation. I was talking to Jane Bowles a month or so ago, off the top of my head, about how I loved no conversation better than the ones imposed in Greece by lack of a common language + common interests—“What does meat cost in the U.S.?” “How many brothers have you?”—and she gave me one of her disquieting looks + said “well, of course, you just want to be alone. What’s wrong with that?” I couldn’t say—I can’t now—Something does however seem wrong.

Indeed, something had seemed “wrong” since Merrill’s episode of Bell’s palsy in Greece. Back in April 1962, he had taken his partial facial paralysis as a sign of some personal, metaphysical disorder, “the crack in the mirror of the soul.” The condition thus described was alarming, but there was something hopeful about it too, since he saw in it “the materials of a poem.” At first, the projected poem, to be called “Rigor Vitae,” appeared as one of a series of titles listed in his notebook:

               POEMS TO WRITE:

               The Double Life

               Rigor Vitae

               The Planet. The Libertine

               The Orgy: “This is my body. Eat this … ”

                         (The French Postcards)

Merrill made his first notes for these poems in April and began concentrated work on them in September.3 He found himself responding not only to the episode of Bell’s palsy, but also to Friar’s letter, Fredericks’s “reproach,” Jane Bowles’s remark, Taki’s death, and his own intimations of mortality, all pondered in the glare of Cold War fear and anxiety. He soon came to see these topics as related, and, if we can believe his airy account in an interview a few years later, “suddenly an afternoon of patchwork” saw his fragments “stitched together” in a single poem.

“The Thousand and Second Night” was the longest poem he had yet attempted, and it is a pivotal poem in his development. Composed while he was at work on The (Diblos) Notebook, it is, like the novel, a formally experimental work in which Merrill stakes out an artistic position. He advances the revision of his early manner, roughening the verbal texture of his work, pushing further the strategies of interruption and revision discovered in “An Urban Convalescence,” and replacing the symbolic scenes of his early poems with specific lived experiences, while giving up the unified lyric voice of his early poems in favor of many tones and speakers. As a result, Merrill made his poetry funnier, more dynamic, able to represent time in new ways, and to address the deep questions posed by his living.

Taking off from the notebook form of the novel, the first of the poem’s five parts begins with a mock diary entry, headed “Istanbul. 21 March.” The place and date locate the poet between seasons and continents, March 21 being the vernal equinox, dividing winter and spring, and the Straits of the Bosporus being the boundary between Europe and the Middle East, “The passive Orient and our frantic West.” The poet awakens to “an absurd complaint. The whole right half / Of my face refuses to move.” When he sets out to see Hagia Sophia, the “house of Heavenly Wisdom” is in crumbling disrepair, suggesting an analogy to his facial paralysis, the crack in his own “façade,” seen as the symptom of a moral state. He chides himself: “You’d let go / Learning and faith as well, you too had wrecked / Your precious sensibility. What else did you expect?” He has wasted his gifts by leading the life of a libertine, for which his promiscuous travels are both a vehicle and a metaphor.

In the poem’s second part, Merrill depicts the type of conversation he mentioned to Jane Bowles. As he recovers from his paralysis in Athens, he meets a Greek in the Royal Park—where Jimmy, David, and Tony went to find off-duty evzones. The stranger is the antithesis of the effete poet: “Superb, male, raucous, unclean, Orthodox // Ikon of appetite feathered to the eyes / With the electric blue of days that will / Not come again.” “My friend with time to kill,” he continues,

               Asked me the price of cars in Paradise.

               By which he meant my country, for in his

               The stranger is a god in masquerade.

               Failing to act that part, I am afraid

               I was not human either—ah, who is?

               He is, or was; had brothers and a wife;

               Chauffeured a truck; last Friday broke his neck

               Against a tree. We have no way to check

               These headlong emigrations out of life.

“These headlong emigrations out of life”: even as the poet mourns his honest friend, honoring his superior humanity, his grim punning wit oddly de-realizes this death and makes the dominant tone one of breezy resignation. It’s probably this tone that his friends back home have in mind when they suggest that he has become “the vain // Flippant unfeeling monster” he always feared he might turn into.

He has lost track of “love,” he admits, and precisely in the act of looking for it, or at least for sex. Merrill modulates next into frank self-disgust:

               A thousand and one nights! They were grotesque.

               Stripping the blubber from my catch, I lit

               The oil-soaked wick, then could not see by it.

               Mornings, a black film lay upon the desk[.]

Rather than narrate his own nighttime sexual adventures, Merrill turns to a set of vintage pornographic cards. In one picture, “She strokes his handlebar who kneels / To do for her what a dwarf does for him.” In another,

               He steers her ankles like—like a wheelbarrow.

               The dwarf has slipped out for a breath of air,

               Leaving the monstrous pair.

               Who are they? What does their charade convey?

               Maker and Muse? Demon and Doll?

               “All manners are symbolic”—Hofmannsthal.

The story of the cards came from Irma Brandeis, to whom the poem is dedicated: she’d told Merrill about finding a cache of them, which she destroyed.4 Merrill puts himself on the scene of their discovery with an Aunt Alix who “turned red with shame, / Then white, then thoughtful. ‘Ah, they’re all the same— / Men, I mean.’ A pause. ‘Not you, of course.’ ” For Aunt Alix, the gay young man is an exception to the rule, a different type of man. Does that mean he is more or less human, more or less a monster than other men? Or maybe he is no different after all. Indeed, Merrill is every bit as secretive and sexual as the “Morose Great-Uncle Alastair” the cards came from—a few of which the poet pockets to take home and use as an aid to masturbation.

Two pseudo-quotations follow in prose, the second of which provides an allegorical interpretation of Merrill’s “grotesque” sexual pursuits. Here he links the libertine’s quest for stimulation and pleasure, as he would much later in The Changing Light at Sandover, to man’s abuse of the planet: “Likewise, upon Earth’s mature body we inflict a wealth of gross experience—drugs, drills, bombardments—with what effect? A stale frisson, a waste of resources all too analogous to our own. Natural calamities (tumor and apoplexy no less than flood and volcano) may at last be hailed as positive reassurances, perverse if you like, of life in the old girl yet.”

By a clever turn, Merrill comes around to saying that his symptoms are a positive reassurance of life in him yet. The idea is enough for him to proclaim, slipping into verse again, the recovery of love. But he backs away from this affirmation as soon as he makes it, suspicious of his own rhetorical powers, his too-easy wish for a simple, decent, sunlit solution:

               Love. Warmth. Fist of sunlight at last

               Pounding emphatic on the gulf. High wails

               From your white ship: The heart prevails!

               Affirm it! Simple decency rides the blast!—

               Phrases that, quick to smell blood, lurk like sharks

               Within a style’s transparent lights and darks.

We can’t trust his language, it seems, unless he distrusts it. Merrill must move indoors and back into abba quatrains (as in “An Urban Convalescence”) before he can speak with full confidence. Now, writing at home in winter, Merrill reviews his travels with a spirit of acceptance, even triumph:

               Lost friends, my long ago

               Voyages, I bless you for sore

               Limbs and mouth kissed, face bronzed and lined,

               An earth held up, a text not wholly undermined

               By fluent passages of metaphor.

The nouns here (“limbs and mouth,” “face,” “earth,” and “text”) are arranged in apposition. The grammar implies that they are connected, perhaps equivalent. Merrill is envisioning a way of writing that is equally a way of living. His face will become his text, and vice versa.

“The Thousand and Second Night” suggests an artistic program, then, but it does so by leaps and implications, rather than claims and assertions. It projects, as Merrill said in an interview, a “musical” rather than a logical sense of the relations between its parts. These he fits together in a collage, placing heterogeneous materials in evocative patterns. This method required a tolerance for loose ends and a relish for seemingly arbitrary, offhand connections. It enabled Merrill to move boldly outside the constraints of the tightly packaged New Critical lyric he had been trained in.

One model for “The Thousand and Second Night” is, Merrill observed, Lord Byron’s Don Juan, with its “air of irrelevance, of running on at the risk of never becoming terribly significant.” The great poetic sequences of Eliot and Yeats are another, very different model for the poem’s quest motifs and collage technique. Merrill pays tribute to Eliot and Yeats, as well as Hofmannsthal and Valéry, by quoting them directly. But there is something ambivalent, even hostile about his conspicuous bows. Take these lines brooding on the Bell’s palsy episode, which hold like a kernel the problem of the entire poem:

                         once you’ve cracked

               That so-called mirror of the soul,

               It is not readily, if at all, made whole.

               (“Between the motion and the act

               Falls the Shadow”—T. S. Eliot.)

               Part of me has remained cold and withdrawn.

               The day I went up to the Parthenon

               Its humane splendor made me think So what?

“So what?,” we note, is made to rhyme with “T. S. Eliot.” The solemnity of the quotation from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” satirized here, is at the very opposite end of the rhetorical spectrum from Byron’s “air of irrelevance.” In Merrill’s hands, the quest poem becomes a carnivalesque genre, amenable to both modernist discontinuities and an old-fashioned, romantic virtuosity, rejecting the high-culture seriousness of Eliot.

Before his reader can complain that the literary historical dimension of the poem, brought to the fore by his quotations, makes it feel like an academic exercise, Merrill adds a parody of a classroom discussion of the poem. “Now,” Merrill’s imaginary English Department lecturer begins, “if the class will turn back to this, er, / Poem’s first section—Istanbul—I shall take / What little time is left today to make / Some brief points.” The comic device cuts two ways. First, it forestalls the reception of the poem as an object requiring expert care, the kind of professional attention given poems at Amherst, say. The lecturer’s gentle, stuffy voice is enough to make any reader feel that a poem should not mean but be. With his lecturer as a guide, Merrill implies that the structure and meanings of his poem, unlike Eliot’s Grail myth or the occult symbols of Yeats, have been planted in plain sight. What this poem offers, it appears, is wit, not mysterious wisdom.

From another angle, though, the device does not forestall interpretation so much as initiate and direct it. It allows Merrill to face hard questions that might well be asked of his poem; and as he does, he smuggles in ideas, even a statement of principles. The lecturer points out correlations between form and content in the poem. While he fumbles to provide a reason for them (“No, I cannot say offhand / Why this should be. I find it vaguely satis—”), he implies that such designs can only ever be an expression of artistic choice, rather than objective truth. Then another hand goes up: “Yes please? The poet quotes too much? Hm. That is / One way to put it.” The lecturer himself quotes in reply: “Mightn’t he have planned // For his own modest effort to be seen / Against the yardstick of the ‘truly great’ / (In Spender’s phrase)?” Here Merrill makes us see the modifier “truly” in Stephen Spender’s “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great” either as an awkward redundancy or as a form of grade inflation (the category has been so diluted that a specification must be made—not merely “great” but “truly great”). Greatness is the property of T. S. Eliot and the Parthenon. Merrill, at this point in his career, isn’t interested in honoring or achieving it.

What ground, then, has he to stand on? What is the basis of his self- defense? Just before the class period ends, a student poses his version of these questions:

                    Yes, what now? Ah. How and when

               Did he “affirm”? Why, constantly. And how else

               But in the form. Form’s what affirms. That’s well

               Said, if I do—[Bells ring.] Go, gentlemen.

“Form” is shorthand for style or manner, the poet’s bearing on the page and not simply his skillful prosody, although that is essential to it. “Form” implies a contract with the reader, an intimacy grounded in shared respect that is like the good form Merrill shows at the end of “A Tenancy” when he welcomes readers into his past as if into his home. The possibility of constructing such an intimacy in poetry is presented as itself sufficient grounds for affirmation, a basis for faith that will do in place of metaphysics or myth. From this perspective, mere wit begins to look like wisdom.

There are limits on what “form” can accomplish, however. The healing Merrill holds out as his goal is not a repair of the “crack in the mirror of the soul,” but an acceptance of division; and thus the appropriate image at the poem’s close is not a reconciliation, but an amicable divorce. The title “The Thousand and Second Night,” adapted from The Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights, puts the story of Scheherazade in the background throughout; in the fifth and final section, Merrill brings it forward. The story is familiar: Scheherazade nightly makes love to the murderous Sultan and then, before he can cut her head off like the hapless virgins before her, she tells him a tale so compelling and yet incomplete that he postpones her execution to the next night in order to hear more. Sex and storytelling, joined by feminine guile, are partners in mastering male violence and the threat of death. We might expect Merrill to identify with the female storyteller exclusively, to side with her; but that is not the case. The Sultan and Scheherazade embody opposing principles—male and female, body and soul, day and night—that he can neither choose between nor bring together, like warring parents. So he lets them depart in separate directions, she to “ ‘refresh / Her soul in that cold fountain which the flesh / Knows not,’ ” and he “ ‘to go in search of joys / Unembroidered by your high, soft voice, / Along the stony path the senses pave.’ ” We wake alongside the Sultan in bafflement:

               They wept, then tenderly embraced and went

               Their ways. She and her fictions soon were one.

               He slept through moonset, woke in blinding sun,

               Too late to question what the tale had meant.

After Christmas, Merrill visited Amherst. There he saw Rosemary Sprague, her parents, and other old friends, and read “my long poem,” meaning “The Thousand and Second Night.” Merrill must have been satisfied to read his racy, ambitious poem at his alma mater, standing at the front of Johnson Chapel and facing the sober portraits of Amherst presidents on the white walls before a packed house. The students had been assigned Water Street to study in class; the clever ones among them could savor the classroom parody in “The Thousand and Second Night.” Jimmy made a few minor adjustments to the poem, gave up on doing anything more (“I did hope, I did try, to cling less to artifice—in vain; my muse will pluck her eyebrows despite my prayers”), and sent it off to The New Yorker, where Howard Moss accepted it—although the poem didn’t appear in print until June 1964, after long debate among the magazine’s other editors, presumably concerning its length, difficulty, and sexual content.

On January 15, Merrill and Jackson went into New York for the opening of Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, directed by Herbert Machiz, with music by Paul Bowles. Merrill had little regard even for Williams’s great plays, and Milk Train wasn’t one of them. He “loathed its roughness, its slickness, its confusion, its obviousness”; it was “a mess of unspecified Meaning, deliberately so I fear, TW being as always a devotee of the vaguely resonant.” Machiz threw “a far too nice party afterwards”; 140 well-wishers appeared at the restaurant, only to depart en masse after word went around that Walter Kerr had panned the play on television. A Don Giovanni followed, with Leontyne Price as Donna Anna, and then a party given by the Hollanders “to say goodbye to their 70 most intimate + distinguished friends” before John, taking a fellowship year away from his new appointment at Yale, moved the family to Europe. Poets turned out that night, including Louis Simpson, W. S. Merwin, Robert Penn Warren, and Auden and Kallman, who invited Jimmy and David to their apartment to listen to a tape of Elegy for Young Lovers, Hans Werner Henze’s opera, for which they had written the libretto. Meanwhile, in Irma Brandeis’s apartment, with Bernard de Zogheb flown in for the event, Merrill himself played host to “the NY premiere” of a de Zogheb ballad opera, Le Sorelle Brontë, performed by the Little Players. This event took place “before a glittering and rapt public of perhaps 20. […] It was an immense success,” he gushed about the miniature gala, aware of the contrast it made with bloated occasions like Williams’s opening night.

As Merrill continued to showcase works by the oddball Alexandrian and they gained a small notoriety as a result, some supposed that de Zogheb must be a nom de plume for the poet, an alter ego. But Bernard was entirely real. Jimmy once described his “Levantine face” as “dimpled + creased like a bride’s first muffin, eyes tiny as currants.” Born in 1924, he was the last descendant in Alexandria of a Greek Catholic family that came to Egypt from Syria in the nineteenth century and prospered, to the point of acquiring an obscure Italian title, until they lost their fortune in the 1920s. Samuel Lock, a novelist and the companion of Adrian de Menasce, who was part of Tony Parigory’s circle of Alexandrian friends, knew de Zogheb well. Angular and wiry, he regularly appeared at de Menasce and Lock’s flat in London wearing the tightest jeans “and a t-shirt with an anchor on the back,” and announcing, as he sunk into the couch, “I’m shipwrecked again.” “He carried with him, but always,” Lock remarked, “a cloth bag containing cash, a camera, a Times crossword puzzle, his diaries, and a tin box with felt pens in many colors.” The myth among his friends was that “Bernard had been dumped out of his pram as a child, and that had made him strange.” He spoke several languages and had a precise verbal memory. As he sat on his friends’ couch, he colored the words of his puzzle, using those felt pens, printing each letter in a different ink and adding a bright, childlike sketch of flowers, a seascape, women’s fashions, a view of the Nile or the Sphinx, and then dating the page when he was done.

Merrill paid for Tibor de Nagy Editions to publish the libretto of Le Sorelle Brontë (which is dedicated to Menasce). The book appeared in 1963 in an edition of three hundred copies with a deep-hued lilac cover and wide, small, nearly square pages. Merrill sent copies to many friends. His short introduction suggests some of his fascination with Le Sorelle Brontë. “It is designed,” he explained, “for that small red theater in the soul where alone the games of childhood are still applauded.” That “small red theater” is the tiny realm of fantasy young Jimmy explored with his marionettes and later rediscovered in the great red theater of the Metropolitan Opera. De Zogheb linked these theatrical forms in a mischievous way. He recast the familiar story of the Brontës as a miniature grand opera, setting lyrics to popular tunes from many countries. The result was an anarchic parody, the main object of which was romantic melodrama as found in the Brontë story and Verdi’s operas.

The tunes, printed in red in the margin of the text beside the speeches they accompany, include “Yo te quiero mucho,” “La vie en rose,” “Funiculi-funicula,” and the Ella Fitzgerald standard, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” (the setting for “Oh Rosa, che cosa!”), among other songs from Italy, Greece, Russia, and the eastern Mediterranean. The music, by calling to mind the original lyrics, provides comic comment on what is being sung. As brother Branwell drinks himself into oblivion, the Brontë servants wring their hands to “Old Man River.” When Emiglia discovers Signor Hegez, Carlotta’s tutor, kissing her, he defends himself by singing “Mio intention è honorabile” to the tune of “The Marine Anthem.” The opera’s dramatic climax comes when Emiglia dies from consumption. The final ludicrous lament for four voices is set to the “Beer-Barrel Polka” (“La sorella morta, oh la la!”). The result was hilarity on the edge of hysteria, but it comes to more than a joke. “On every page,” Merrill says of the libretto, “something is made clear about the tenacious inanity of human emotion.” By flamboyantly ridiculing the conventional pathways to feeling, Le Sorelle Brontë arrives at what Merrill calls “our hearts’ inmost haven.” Or so it was for Merrill. De Zogheb made him laugh until he cried.

De Zogheb composed his ballad operas in a “kitchen Italian.” It was the idiom in which the old Alexandrian elite and their Italian servants communicated, a pidgin full of error and nonce expressions into which were marbled bits of Greek, French, Arabic, Spanish, and English, like nuts and spices in a strudel. Merrill slipped in and out of this jargon in his letters to Parigory and de Zogheb. As the editor of Le Sorelle Brontë, he “took the liberty,” he told Bernard, “of inserting in the stage directions a candle in Anna’s hands for her 3rd act entrance. Una candela—literally, a spark plug, if memory serves; but I feel it is right.” Merrill relished both the staging and the publication of Le Sorelle Brontë as a collaborative word game, satisfying for him in some of the ways Robert Morse’s spoonerisms were, or his hours at the Ouija board with David.

Merrill’s frequent letters to Daryl Hine from this period were filled with more madcap wordplay. Jimmy calls Hine “Engel,” “Pen-Pal,” and (mimicking Winebaum’s stutter) “P-p-p-et.” While the poets traded workshop commentary on each other’s work, they exchanged versions of an anagram poem they invented together, in which a proper name is used as title and each subsequent line is an anagram of the name. In November, Merrill got the game going with this card:

Here is an example of a new verse form guaranteed to make hours pass like minutes.

               TERESINA OF AVILA

               A sane, trivial foe.

               Are feats in? Voila!

               Faeriest Ovalina,

               O rival saint, a fee!

Fuller rhymes, longer lines, all are desiderata. But the ground has been broken!!!

Yours, dear Princess, ever, …

Before Hine could return serve, Merrill produced another quatrain made of the same set of letters, this time, in a fit of deranged inspiration, adding rhymes:

Ay di mi! The Muse is a cruel mistress.…

               Rant, Flavio. I ease

               In a vale of tears. I

               Faint; o’er a valise

               Avare of satin, lie.

I cannot sleep. My tongue is swollen, my eyes red + burning. Pity me, Petulant!

Witwood

c/o Can Grande; Verona

Petulant replied to Witwood (they are fops from Congreve’s The Way of the World) with his own virtuosic turns on the odd form, in this case introducing a further complication: the title of the poem must be the name of a poet. Hine’s “Li Po” and “Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde” were respectively the shortest and longest examples of the form. But Merrill had successes too, as in “W. H. Auden”:

               Ha! We dun

               Had U wen

               Nude (Haw!),

               Hued wan,

               A hun’dew.

               Awed? Nuh.

               Wud a Hen.

These and similar verses, hesitating on the cliff-edge of nonsense, but somehow holding fast to the rail of meaning, Merrill shared in letters to other friends. Yet with only this sort of poem to show since he completed “The Thousand and Second Night,” he felt that he was only wasting time at his desk.

Jackson too complained of distractions impeding his work in the form of regular visits by “the full-blooded american Indian chaufeur [sic] of an aged couple, up the street,” who came to their apartment armed with bottles of scotch and stacks of blue movies. Then, too, “It is hard to work when all those children we befriended when we first moved into Creepyville have reached the ages of 17 plus and during these turbulent days come up for advice and talk with old Dave.” The almost-grown-ups were local boys named Joe Bruno, John Ainsworth, and Peter Tourville; they hung around 107 Water Street often enough for David to call them “our Teenage Club.” He told Richie, “[A]ll the village idlers (of certain ages) have come up Monday thru Thurs (roughly) to learn about life and put together our Ginza Chinese puzzles, sit for me via pastel and poloroid [sic], and musingly rub their h. .d ons. As yet I do not know how to transmute this experience into art.”

Two weeks later, Stonington was the scene of drama worthy of Tennessee Williams—or was it a farce by de Zogheb? Merrill told Hine,

[I]t has been a week of horrors: infant rape; attempted suicide of 17-year-old-girl upon finding her 15-year-old-chum in the arms of “our” Red Indian chauffeur—so that the whole story is out and he in jail on $15 grand bail, accused of things the local police chief couldn’t even tell Billie Boatright, among them, it appears, “sodomy” (ah! che cosa quella?) and finally the successful suicide of Carlotta Dodge, the youngest daughter of [the sculptor Augustus] St Gaudens (another tear on the marble cheek of “Grief”) whom nobody much liked anyhow—she stood in her kitchen, the story goes, after dinner, taunting her meek, disagreeable husband by playing Russian roulette at the sink until Bang! Ker-plooie!

Despite his tone, Merrill may have feared that “their” chauffeur, who evidently had his own teenage club, might let their story out with his. His arrest reminded Jimmy and David that there were laws against “sodomy,” and that Stonington was ready to eat up the next morsel of gossip.

Not all the news was lurid. In March, Robin and Betty in Seattle announced the birth of their first child, a son; and the infant’s “father’s mother’s father’s younger son” wrote “Little Fanfare for Felix Magowan” to celebrate the occasion, welcoming him “to earth, time, others; to / These cool darks, of sense, of language, / Each at once thread and maze.” More babies were on the way that spring: a daughter, Maud, for the Burnetts, and a second daughter for the Hollanders, Lizzie, to join five-year-old Martha. In April, Charles and Mary arrived on Water Street for Easter with three young Merrills in tow, each of whom signed the house’s guest book. David commented in looping cursive on the train trip from New York—“at Gransentrel Stiation, Help! P.S. (I’m lost)”—and Paul, the littlest, noted “I like to draw” beside two dueling knights. Sixteen-year-old Amy’s hand is poised, almost an adult’s. In the summer she returned on her own for a short visit with her uncle. Under his supervision, she sampled her first gin and tonic, played croquet with Rollie McKenna, and read the poet’s copy of Lolita, which he’d smuggled into the country in 1957.

May 30 marked Merrill and Jackson’s tenth year together. The message to David from Jamie, as Merrill signed himself, is that of a spouse too optimistic about the future to be nostalgic about the past:

               Ten, did I hear?

               T-E-N—ten?

               If they have gone,

               Would you, my dear,

               Live them again?—

               Every last day

               Of cold + hot,

               Of evil + good,

               Of rich + meager?

               You think you would?

               Well, I would not,

               I’m sorry, I’m too

               Ready, too eager

               For the next ten

               With you, with you.

In Merrill’s notebook from 1963, the draft of a poem called “The Other,” never completed, tells a different story:

    Sometimes you can feel him straining

    Towards you, in the smile

    Of frightening intimacy with which

    An intimacy began that did not scare [replacing “frighten”]

    Until much later, when the blue

    Eyes had brightened [“ripened”] to sapphire, the pale hair

    Richened to gold, and the whole face

    So known, so loved, become

    Something no longer seen, a cry, a chord,

    Crimsoning wet where it has pressed

    Vaguely against your heart of ice.

In his birthday message, Jimmy urges David not to fear passing time but to look forward to their future. Here, he feels trapped in a “scary” intimacy, and his heart has turned to ice. “I wanted love, if love’s the word / On the foxed spine of the long-mislaid book,” he says in “The Thousand and Second Night.” He had decided that, if he was going to find love, he would have to find it somewhere else.

He and Jackson left for Greece in June. Hine, the Burnetts, and Sewelly would take turns on Water Street, looking after the house and feeding Maisie. From this time on, with improved air service, David and Jimmy made their passages to and from Greece separately. Even if they were traveling at the same time, David, afraid to fly, would be on the ocean, while Jimmy was in the air. More and more, each would be going his own way.

Merrill flew first to Istanbul to meet his mother. The visit was tiresome; he had to tour the city with Hellen and two of her female friends, one of them seventy and the other seventeen. One night, when the ladies had turned in, he took to the park, where he met a handsome, well-dressed young man. The stranger declined to come back to Merrill’s hotel, and proposed that they take a taxi to his home instead. Twelve kilometers later—far enough for Merrill to wonder about the wisdom of this plan—the man stopped the car and sent the driver away. It was midnight. The poet found himself alone with this man on top of a hill without houses or streetlamps near, under a half moon with the glittering water of the Bosporus below. In Turkish, the man asked for Merrill’s watch, and Merrill laughed. Then he asked for money, and Merrill gave him some. They had sex, and he again demanded Merrill’s watch. Merrill could see he meant it now, and for the first time he became frightened. He gave him his watch—and made the mistake of asking for money for a taxi back to the hotel. For reply, the man punched Jimmy in the jaw, knocking him down, kicked him, and left him in the grass.

Merrill told the story to Hine in a letter composed entirely in French. He addresses Hine as “Ma Soeur” and calls himself “Ta pauvre Sophie” who lacks the courage “de te ranconter dans sa propre langue ce que lui est arrivé” (to tell you in her own language what happened to her). The worst part of the night, he explained, came only back at the hotel once what might have happened struck him. “Tu riras, mais à deux heures du matin ta soeur était à genoux, toute nue, pour remercier le bon dieu—en français, la parole me manque encore en anglais—de lui avoir sauvé la vie” (You will laugh, but at two in the morning your sister was on her knees, naked, to thank God—in French, since English still escaped her—for having saved her life). There is plenty of humor here, but Merrill was serious when he begged Hine to tell no one of “l’honteuse expérience de ta soeur” (your sister’s shameful experience). He had needed a disguise simply to put the story in writing.

He rejoined Jackson in Athens. With Parigory, they traveled to Samos and then Rhodes, where Tony had found them an apartment for July. Bernie was along for the fun, and there was a lot of it, so much that the landlord complained about the traffic on the stairs. When Merrill grumbled that one of the boys they’d met was “stupid & slow,” Bernie drawled, “What did you expect—a Rhodes scholar?” The “scholar” was Georgios Politis, a Greek army lieutenant whom, Merrill told Hine, “I’ve come as close to falling for as anyone in years: he is dumb, good-humored, kind, and 19, and not marvelously good in bed—which always, sad to say, goes straight to the over-experienced heart.” Merrill, enclosing a photo, asked Hine not to mention his interest in Politis, in order to keep it from Jackson.

They went to Patmos next (the island of St. John, “where no doubt Revelations await us, thumbs hitched into their jeans”) and then back to Athens. They overlapped there with Richie, who noted the routines surrounding Merrill’s sexual diversions in Athens: “Jimmy socialized cruising. Sunday would be the day to go down to the duck pond and pick up evzones or sailors. It had to be planned, timed, and if it didn’t pan out, we’d come back. Sometimes the trawling was successful. He and David went in the spirit that others would have gone to the Waldorf. They had reserve; they looked over the menu.”

In another mood, but with an equal sense of ritual propriety, Jimmy made a habit of joining Maria Mitsotáki for drinks on Kolonáki Square—the “bidet,” as it was known to its habitués, in reference to the fountain trickling at the center of it. Merrill dressed for the occasion in a seersucker suit and a rainbow tie, while Maman ordered her usual—champagne and angostura bitters. Merrill or Jackson or both would make trips with her to Cape Sounion, a ninety-minute drive from Athens. When Maria was young, her family was one of three that owned the land surrounding the Temple of Poseidon. The temple, high above the sea at the southern tip of Attica, is one of the most sacred ancient sites in Greece. Mitsotáki’s father sold the house and land to pay off political debts; Maria, a determined woman, bought the property back at auction after the war. On a steep hill, lashed by fierce winds, the house was a lonely, two-story stucco box, with shutters and a tile roof, looking out to sea. Mitsotáki decorated the rooms with a few keepsakes from the long-gone schooner Tuscano, but made no other improvements. “I’m tired, so my house should look tired,” she said. The large fireplace was backed by an iron contrecoeur with a neoclassical scene on it, its pastoral, mythological figures burned black.

She never spent the night in the house. Driven by a chauffeur or by Jackson, she came for the day to garden. Merrill would bring a notebook, Jackson his watercolors. Merrill’s “Words for Maria,” written in Connecticut in the summer of 1965, describes a visit when he watched her “prune, transplant, / Nails ragged in a daze / Of bliss.” In his mind’s eye, she resembles a mythological figure, an earth mother in haute couture:

               In smarter weeds than Eve’s (Chanel, last year’s)

               You kneel to beds of color and young vines.

               The chauffeur lounges smoking in the shade …

               Before you know it, sunset. Brass-white, pink-

               Blue wallowings. Dismayed

               You recollect a world in which one dines,

               Plays cards, endures old ladies, has to think.

               The motor roars. You’ve locked up trowel and shears.

               The whole revived small headland lurches, disappears

               To float pale black all night against the sea […]

“Words for Maria” is Merrill’s first detailed portrait in poetry of a specific friend. It is an early example of the sociable middle style in which much of his later poetry—including many hundreds of lines of Sandover—was written. That manner, chatty, deft, and conspiratorial, was modeled on the kind of conversation with Maria that it is used to evoke in this poem. In Athens in August 1963, Merrill had had a chapbook printed of “The Thousand and Second Night.” He inscribed her copy “for Maria—a muse present when the tale began—from the doting author.”

Merrill and Jackson were laying down tentative roots of their own. One day they drove west to Salamis “with an eye to buying a tiny piece of land on a very pretty, empty cove at the end of a ghastly road”; it wasn’t right, but they were taken with the idea of owning property in Greece. Around this time, David applied to serve as a foster parent for a Greek child.5 Dimitrious Alexandropoulos, aged eleven, and his brother Elias, thirteen, lived with their mother in Kalamata; their father was dead, and Jackson’s regular contributions (funded by Merrill, to be sure) enabled their mother to keep them with her, rather than put them in a state-run home. The boys flew to Athens to meet David and Jimmy, who drove them back home after a short visit. Jackson and Merrill kept up regular contact with both children and their mother as the boys grew, and paid for their educations. It was another way of having children.

Tony visited Jimmy and David back on Water Street that fall. Jimmy planned to show him the U.S. on an elaborate tour. The first stop was a Manhattan cocktail party hosted by Grace Stone, with Elizabeth Bowen, Dawn Powell, Truman Capote, John Mason Brown, Gold and Fizdale, and Donald Keene, a Japanese scholar, among the guests. Parigory did not impress Perényi. “Tony was pure kitsch,” as she put it, “a lounge lizard from the Levant” rather than a person of quality, in her eyes.

With David traveling, as he put it, “out to Nowhere” (that is, Los Angeles), Jimmy and Tony flew to Chicago. The Burnetts were living there, and Hine had joined them as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, with money and encouragement from Merrill. The attention that Water Street won had resulted in invitations for Merrill to read from schools outside the few in the Northeast where his work was known, including the University of Wisconsin and Washington University in St. Louis. From the Midwest, with Parigory in hand, Merrill flew to Seattle for a visit to Robin and his family that he had promised to make when he persuaded Robin to take the job at the University of Washington. Merrill read at the university; he also sang the libretto of Le Sorelle Brontë and discussed de Zogheb’s weird work on a weekly radio show about poetry hosted by Robin. Jimmy drove with Tony and Robin to Victoria, British Columbia, where they learned of John F. Kennedy’s assassination by overhearing two clerks discuss it. “How sad, how horrid,” he wrote limply to the Burnetts. “One can think of little else.”

On the road, Merrill taught “the Landscape Game” to his friends. The game was part psychological test, part party game. Merrill played it often over the years; he also wrote a short story called “Peru: The Landscape Game” that makes use of the game as a motif. It requires one person to daydream in response to specified prompts, while others ask questions and later interpret the player’s fantasy. Merrill explains the rules in his story:

[E]ach person describes a house he then leaves in order to take an imaginary walk. One by one he discovers a key, a bowl, a body of water, a wild creature, and finally a wall. Free association is invited at any stage, and nothing explained until the last player has spoken.

The house is your own life, your notion of it. Trees roundabout stand for Other People.

The key is Religion. The bowl, Art. The water, Sex.

The wild thing is Yourself—the unconscious.

The wall is Death.

In the car, Merrill guided his nephew’s symbolic journey. The body of water Robin imagined? “The Mediterranean,” he answered. “What do you do,” Jimmy asked, “when you come to it?” “I’d like to go swimming,” Robin said wistfully, “but it’s so late in the day.” Less inhibited, Merrill, in his own fantasy walk, used his bowl to drink from a flowing river: “Just enough sex,” he joked, “to irrigate one’s art.” Tony was less circumspect. The water he imagined was the beach in Athens: “[I]t was nighttime and pitch black. But that didn’t stop me, I just ripped off my clothes and dove in. Voilà.”

In San Francisco, they stayed with Robin’s parents and met up with David. The Magowans brought them for drinks to “the Magnin Dept Store Magnins, to see their 8 French pictures and their 800 framed flower pieces, street scenes, ballet dancers, signed, if not conceived, by themselves.” Jimmy arranged to see Robert Duncan (“whom I quite admire”) and his partner, the collage artist known as Jess. David climbed aboard the train to travel east, while Jimmy showed Tony one last corner of North America—Santa Fe—before they flew to New York, and Parigory continued to Greece.

Now Merrill was ready to finish The (Diblos) Notebook. He supposed, in early February, that “it might be done in a few months. […] The last scene is sketched.” It was only a few days, however, before he decided that the manuscript was complete, and by summer, Harry Ford had committed to publish the book at Atheneum.

The last scene was violent. When, after separating from Dora in New York, Orson-Orestes returns to Diblos on his own, intending to occupy “his” cottage again, he is met by Dora’s son, Byron—who turns him away from the property by striking him in the face with a riding crop, bloodying him. The narrator replays Byron’s act in his notebook:

B. himself … stood forth in dark, glowing colors, velvet & gold braid, & dagger-handle flashing—a costume from the vendetta country of Crete or the Mani. Banked like a coal, his pride had burst into flame at last. He raised

In my head he raised his beautiful clenched hand. The riding-crop descended, once, twice, again, upon my

once, twice, again, inscribed its madder penstroke upon my brother’s face, at the tempo of a slowly pounding tempo of a giant’s drugged pulse

of the dolphin’s progress through glittering foam

That phrase “madder penstroke” connects Byron’s act with the narrator’s act on the first page of the notebook when he writes Orestes’s name and strikes through it: “Orestes.” The narrator, by working to unmask his half brother, has been striking through his heroic self-image throughout the book. He has been doing his version of what he imagines Byron doing. Byron is also acting on behalf of Merrill, punishing Friar for his power over Merrill. There is an allegory at work: Merrill identifies with the aristocrat, Lord Byron, who turns back the Keatsian parvenu, Friar-Orestes, from Dora’s property, and so defends his own claim on Greece. This fantasy draws out the aggressiveness in the Byronic manner, the “air of irrelevance,” that Merrill adopted in “The Thousand and Second Night.” The beating is reminiscent of Francis’s sensational self-mutilation in The Seraglio, because there is a self-reflexive turn: the way the narrator breaks off his sentence at “my” implies that Byron’s crop also comes down on “my [face]” as it strikes “my brother’s.” As the Freudian Friar taught him, the man who fantasizes a scene of beating occupies in imagination both active and passive roles: the parties are reversible, like Narcissus and his image, or the Jack of Clubs. As the narrator says near the end of the notebook, admitting his inability to find a satisfying form for his novel, “I did do my best, but, as the Gorgon’s face was mine, never succeeded in getting a full view of it.”

The book began with Orestes on the Diblos waterfront, trying to find the right angle to see the Sleeping Woman. It is easily visible from the harbor on Diblos, where the narrator has been writing all summer in a café. Passing by ship to Athens, having had his fill of her and the Oedipal drama she presides over, he sees the future open before him: “On deck. We have sailed past the House. The Sleeping Woman has veered & reshifted into new, nonrepresentational masses. Diblos lies far astern. Here is the open water. A sun preparing to sink. Other islands.”

Merrill had closed the book on Poros and Friar, but he was hardly done with Greece.

In the letter that announces completion of The (Diblos) Notebook, Merrill first mentions a potential house to buy in Athens. He thanks Tony for finding it for him:

Oh my darling, we are so excited about the house. It is a big + perhaps dangerous decision, but, with it, our lives—our Athens lives—would change a little. We would “belong” there, somewhat, instead of just coming there for the sex cure. The house would mean other things to us than just a place to entertain evzones; and […] you do make “that” sound not quite as easy + fun as it used to be when we were younger + Athens was smaller. And about 69 per cent of our regrets, on that score, are cancelled out by the thought that there was a place of ours where we could come + grow old […] near you and Maria and that whole heavenly monde, when the heavenly monde of Stonington has become too much to endure.

It would be another house Tony found for him that Merrill bought that spring; but the “big + perhaps dangerous decision” was already made.

In February, Joe Bruno was busy painting one of the apartments on the second floor of 107 Water Street. The Beatles, who were making their first appearance in America, sang out on Joe’s transistor—“I Want to Hold Your Hand”—rocking the old wooden building. Merrill liked to put on a Beatles wig, a Valentine’s gift from Kay Meredith, though it made him look like “l’Impératrice Joséphine.” He and Jackson enjoyed the friendly Bruno. When the young man related to them a recent experience with “a W O M A N,” who told him, “I’ve had a lot of men, but you’re something special,” Merrill told Joe he hoped “he had said exactly the same words to her!” Correspondence suggests that Bruno and Jackson went to bed together that spring. It was around this time that Merrill began having sex with Bruno’s friend, Peter Tourville. Joe and Peter were easy to be around, and available to please David and Jimmy in ways they no longer pleased each other.

Stalled on another novel, Jackson worked on television scripts at the suggestion of Truman Capote (which, in the end, were rejected). “We do whirl into the big city, now and then,” he told Richie.

Last week [we] saw: “Dr Strangelove” and the new Bergman [The Silence], and Joanie Sutherland in Rossini’s Semiramide (Jimmy will correct spellings[)]. Ravished by the first and last, and particularly by a contralto [corrected: soprano] named Marilyn Horne! Then we went off, in black ties, to a dinner which turned out to be FOR Jimmy.… Full of celebrities all of whom had received WATER STREET the day before—so they could talk intelligently to the author. As cocktails lasted two hours and there were four wines with dinner, plus brandy served in little goblets made of chocolate (yes) plus hot sake! (yes) by something like 11:30 yer old buddies, D&J, were STONED. I mean we had to be carried into a taxi … after lots of yaks: JM losing a contact lens, and exaulted [sic] company crawling around looking for it; me making out with the Help, JM and I in the john with Andy Warhol (sp? the Pop artist) who, as I urinated, kept saying, “Look, I mean it, I wanna come up there and do a Pissing Movie on Water Street of you two in the John, I MEAN it!” a miserable fag, man, if ever one met one. Etc. And so our life goes. Creativity vs Destructiveness. Terribly Tense.

In April, Merrill went to Athens by himself to buy a house on the outskirts of Kolonáki. It was “really just what we want.” Winebaum had rented a flat nearby. Kallman, “agonizingly in love” with a young evzone, was on hand too, living with Ansen. Merrill found that his dear, innocent Georgios Politis, after six months in Athens, was “ruined!” He purchased furniture and arranged for work to be done on the house, so that all would be ready when he and Jackson came back in the fall. After a brief stop in Rome to see Umberto and Grace, he returned home in time for the arrival of David’s parents. Their visit “set off a round of parties, at whose still centers they sit smiling + dazed. After dinner, drunk, we sit down to the bridge table […] and Mary + I,” Merrill told Hine, “holding dreadful cards, can do nothing but win, win, win.” Then Hellen Plummer came. Her son met her in New York, where they toured the World’s Fair in Queens before coming to Stonington.

David Kalstone also visited that June. He’d put his name in the guest book for the first time a year before in March 1963. Over the next twenty years, he would stay for long weekends with Merrill and for weekends, weeks, and long summer months when Merrill was in Greece. They’d met by chance on a train in 1962. Kalstone was a junior professor of English at Harvard, where he had studied with Reuben Brower and taught in Brower’s lecture course, “The Interpretation of Literature,” Humanities or “Hum” 6, whose brilliant staff included at one time or another Stanley Cavell, Paul de Man, Anne Ferry, Richard Poirier, William Pritchard, Stephen Orgel, Frank Bidart, and other writers and critics who went on to distinguished academic careers. Brower’s practice of “slow reading” shaped Kalstone’s approach as a poetry critic. Like Merrill, he had little interest in abstract ideas, preferred particulars, and emphasized the role of personal taste in the making and evaluation of literature. His study of Sir Philip Sidney’s poetry appeared in 1965. Already writing on contemporary American poetry, he would become one of the first scholars to write about Merrill’s work, which he did in his book Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery (1977). In Merrill, Kalstone found a poet perfectly suited to his training and disposition; in Kalstone, Merrill found his first fully sympathetic commentator.

Yet they were less likely to talk about poetry than about opera, recipes, friends, movies, or sex. David was gay and “a tremendous gossip.” He could be clever and caustic, but was more often sweet, rueful, and considerate. He had grown up in a world quite different from Merrill’s. He was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, the first of two sons in an affectionate Jewish family. His father owned a small men’s clothing store; his mother, who had attended college, was a talented painter and taught art. Kalstone went to public high school before Harvard. As a student, he had thick, bottle-bottom glasses, wore regulation academic tweeds, and had a bookworm’s kindly, absentminded air. Merrill took him in hand, and under his influence Kalstone remade his image. He got contact lenses at Merrill’s instigation, and a reliably stylish haircut. He moved to Rutgers, found an apartment in Chelsea, began writing for The New York Review of Books, and became a devotee of the New York City Ballet, attending performances every night at the height of the season. Then came summers in Venice, when he began to dress in Italian suits and sweeping capes, at last as suave in person as on the page—so that Helen Vendler, his friend and colleague from Harvard days, hardly recognized him when they met again.

Over the summer, Merrill received a letter from Mona Van Duyn, the poet who had reviewed The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace favorably. She was writing as a consultant to Washington University’s Olin Library in St. Louis. The letter she wrote to Merrill does not survive, but similar letters she wrote at the same time on behalf of the library to Robert Creeley and May Swenson do. “Washington University has a new and spacious library, which has developed new and spacious ambitions,” she explained to Creeley. “The Rare Book Room is beginning the collection of a Scholars’ Library of about fifteen poets,” including “all first and variant editions of their works, all non-book publications […], translations, tapes, and so on,” and Merrill, along with Creeley, Swenson, and a few other poets of their generation, was on the list. Van Duyn continued,

The collection of works will […] be complemented by as big a collection as the library can get of each poet’s worksheets and notebooks and jottings of ideas for poems; original typescripts of books; galleys and pageproofs (corrected) of books; letters pertaining to the poetry from editors and writers. Anything, that is, which has to do with the genesis and process of the poems and the process of getting the poems from the typewriter into final print.

We are hoping to get some or all of these things from you, and hoping you will feel that Washington University is “home base” for your manuscripts when you want to dispose of them.

The appeal worked. In later years, when someone wondered why his papers were in St. Louis, Merrill liked to say, “They asked.” The consequences of that asking were far-reaching, for the library and poet both. The library came to house what could not have been foreseen—a huge archive of great literary interest for which the university did not have to pay (Merrill declined even to take a tax credit for his donations of materials) and which would eventually be endowed by the poet himself. The archive encouraged Merrill in his working habits, both confirming and furthering his interest in the process of composition. He had no association at all with Washington University—which was a plus; and it was flattering to be collected alongside other poets of the first rank. Not only was the library betting that his poetry would be read in the future; they would help assure it. And the promise of a “home base” for his work might have appealed to Merrill just when he was launching out on a new life in Greece.

In July, Mary McCarthy and her husband James West arrived in Stonington for a month away from Paris, where West was posted in the foreign service. McCarthy was not merely the leading woman of letters of her generation; she was now a best seller. Her new novel The Group, a roman à clef that followed the fortunes of a set of young women modeled on members of her class at Vassar, remained on the best-seller list in the summer of 1964, a year after its publication. It was also a subject of controversy among Vassar alumnae, including some who summered in Stonington, and there was a “big hullabaloo” at the yacht club before McCarthy was granted guest privileges for West’s three children to swim and play tennis. “The climax of that summer,” Merrill remembered much later,

was a huge picnic. Mary got this old Frenchwoman who lived out in the country to let us use her property. I think there must have been thirty people. […] Grace and Eleanor. Harry and Elizabeth Ford were up visiting for the weekend. […] Rice salad and potato salad. Very elaborate hampers were packed. Those who wanted to could strip down to their suits and hop into a stream with a waterfall. It was just a lovely day. And this was her sense of showing the children something American. We didn’t have flags and bunting, but it was a very grand moment.

In the afternoons, Merrill walked two blocks to the Morses’ to sit for his portrait by Robert. On September 6, the likeness was unveiled “to literal applause, before a dozen champagne-primed intimates” at 107 Water Street. The Stone Women, offering up their own delicious Americana, furnished “a knock-out dinner (chicken stuffed with ham + truffles), succotash, ginger ice-cream, to bid farewell to us and the McCarthy-Wests.” With all this social life, “[o]ur ‘double’ life has had a time of it wedging itself in,” Jackson wrote to Richie, “but a few lost nights found their way.” During a week of “glorious,” end-of-summer weather, cool nights and warm days, Merrill sat on the deck reading Isak Dinesen. He also reread Artagal, Christian Ayoub’s novel, in which he found a sentence he would use as the epigraph for his new novel: “Isidore a menti, je ne méprise personne et ne hais point mes parents” (Isidore lied, I scorn no one, and I do not at all despise my parents).

On September 16, Merrill flew to London. He arranged for Chatto & Windus to sell The (Diblos) Notebook in Great Britain, and he saw Tony Harwood and Bernard de Zogheb, who had traveled from Paris to meet him. On a visit to the National Portrait Gallery, he admired the “radiant young portrait of John Clare at the height of his brief fame, with Bedlam round the corner.” And what lay around the corner for him? He went next to Berlin to take part “with people like Auden + Spender + the sublime J. L. Borges” in a poetry conference sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (an organization supported by the Ingram Merrill Foundation which, a disgusted Jimmy learned later, was funded by the CIA). Then he got on a plane to Greece.

¹ “Average per capita annual income had risen from 112 dollars in 1951, to 270 in 1956 and was to reach 500 dollars by 1964.” Richard Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece (Cambridge University Press, 1979; 2nd ed., 1986), 176.

² JM to DH, letter, April 21, 1962 (WUSTL). He claimed to have had “40 or 50” sexual partners during this three-month period in Greece. JM to DR, letter, June 12, 1962 (WUSTL).

³ The evidence of Merrill’s letters and the dating of his work sheets for “The Thousand and Second Night” show that most of the poem was written in fall 1962, starting in September, although some drafts reach back as far as 1960, and the section called “Rigor Vitae” was begun in April.

⁴ “The postcards + their story were Irma Brandeis’s and she, in the first shock (although a little voice reminded her of her many friends who would have enjoyed the postcards) tore them into tiny pieces, all 300 of them.” JM to Virgil Burnett, letter, November 6, 1963 (Waterloo).

⁵ The program was called “Foster Parents’ Plan, Inc., Greece.” Jackson was the designated foster parent. JM to DJ, letter, July 8, 1966 (WUSTL).