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Standings of poets
and their poems are susceptible to the same caprices and reweighings that
threaten (or grace) all historical subjects, but theirs is a very delicate
pedestal, tethered to earth for balance by three cords of various
constriction or slackness: critical estimation, publisher loyalty, and
public readership. Of course these three are often tangled, and if one
goes taut, the others are taken up. John Donne remained a largely obscure
poet until the modernists—notably T. S. Eliot in his essays The
Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry and New Critic Cleanth Brooks in The
Well Wrought Urn—resuscitated his poetry, canonized it, if you like,
in both possible senses of the word. The rugged English poet of the Second
World War, Keith Douglas, who died at age 24 on the beaches of Normandy,
had his first book published only in 1951, and it wasn’t until the
1970s, when Ted Hughes, who sensed an affinity with Douglas’s partly
lyrical, partly cynical, and all but Spartan view of life, took it upon
himself to popularize his work again. Since, Douglas has enjoyed the
publication of his Collected Poems,
a biography, his memoir (Alamein to
Zem Zem), and, as of last month, his letters. Quite the opposite is
more often the case, the abrupt or sometimes excruciatingly gradual slip
from fame and recognition. For instance, Edgar Arlington Robinson was once
the favorite of Teddy Roosevelt and a best-seller, but for eight decades
his allotted pages in anthologies have shriveled with age and may
eventually include only standards such as ‘Miniver Cheevy’ and ‘Mr.
Flood’s Party’, before disappearing altogether. In the easy (somewhat
glib) manner of critics who adopt financial nomenclature when relaying
judgment on poets, William H. Pritchard once declared that Robinson’s
“stock does not stand very high at present and is not likely to rise.”
Then there is the
case of James Merrill, a colossus of modern American poetry who, just when
his readership seemed about to wane in the slightest degree, was suddenly
propped not just back onto his pedestal but raised atop a column by the
triple forces of critic, publisher, and reader. Knopf’s very impressive Collected Poems coincides with Viking’s publication of Alison
Lurie’s Familiar Spirits, her
memoir of Merrill and David Jackson (with whom Merrill transcribed nine
years of attempts to summon the dead with a Ouija Board, resulting in much
of the massive postmodern epic, The
Changing Light at Sandover). Everywhere one looks, Merrill’s tanned,
always boyish countenance beams back with a patrician grin. Helen Vendler
devoted several pages of the New
Yorker to Merrill the same week that Daniel Mendelsohn devoted equal
attention in The New York Times Book
Review. The Collected is an absolutely essential volume for any
library of American poetry, containing, as it does, all of the poems
outside of (or around, one might say) the Sandover project.
It has been eagerly awaited since Merrill’s death from AIDS in
1995, during which time the bulk of critics’ attention had been given
over to Sandover, as its massive postmodernist construction provides a
sprawling ruin that rewards literary archeology, much as do James
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and
Ezra Pound’s Cantos. In
England, the only Merrill available was the Carcanet Selected. In
America, it was difficult to find any poetry by Merrill, an acknowledged
master, the man Harold Bloom, in a very Bloomian endorsement, described as
the Mozart of American poetry (Stephen
Spender continues to suffer the same fate, and one hopes that a new Collected
will emerge soon).
On
April 10th, 2001, a cool dewy evening, The New School Writing
Program and The Academy of American Poets allied for a very well
subscribed Tribute to James Merrill in the cavernous postmodern cupola of
the New School Auditorium on 12th Street in Manhattan. A
remarkable group of readers took the podium in what turned out to be a
very relaxed and dignified succession of poems from the master of the
moment. Robert Polito began with one of Merrill’s standards (if the
comparison to song may be permitted), ‘The School Play’, which set the
tone of the evening and anchored it with a word that would recur
throughout, “master”: “having put themselves / All unsuspecting into
the masters’ hands.” Alice Fulton, for the sake of brevity (it was a
Tuesday night) dropped one of the poems she earlier intended to read
(‘About the Phoenix’; later in the evening, taking her cue, Edmund
White dropped ‘Charles on Fire’; one may forward his own conclusions
about this omission), instead delivering unruffled performances of only
the six-line ‘Log’ and ‘In the Shop’ from the longer prose
sequence Prose of Departure, the series of vignettes Merrill composed on the
subject of his trip to Japan. He embedded haiku into the blocks of prose,
and these were fairly prominent to the attentive listener from their
cloudless and very close rhymes, such as “moral” and “laurel”. An
amiable and California-tanned Thom Gunn—whose most recent book Boss Cupid remains the topic of conversation—read ‘Her Craft’,
which Merrill dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop, and ‘Broken Home’, which
consists of seven 14-line poems that Gunn referred to, forgivingly,
as “variations on sonnets. They might be said to aspire to
sonnets.”
Allan
Gurganus climbed the stage as the first of the middle third of readers,
dashing off ‘Mirror’, ‘For Proust’, and ‘The Afternoon Sun’,
the last translated by Merrill from the Greek of C. P. Cavafy. He was
followed by Anthony Hecht, wearing his trademark bowtie, who delivered
stately renditions of ‘Santo’, ‘The Blue Grotto’, and
‘Pledge’, notably getting the first laughs of the evening (this was
not, after all, a funeral, but a tribute to beauty and success). Susan
Wheeler followed with her own lighthearted reading of the very fun poem
‘Scrapping the Computer’, followed by ‘A Day on the Connecticut
River’ and ‘The Metro’. Edmund White read the long and very
well-known poem ‘Days of 1964’, which he points out was inspired in
part by Cavafy. Stephen Yenser started out by remarking that many of those
close to Merrill have not been able to listen to recordings or watch films
of the departed without breaking into tears. He said that he still feels
“as though he’ll [Merrill will] call, back from a long trip.” He
recalled meeting Merrill in 1967, when the latter was working on
‘Lorelei’, Yenser’s first selection, which would appear as the first
poem in the 1969 collection The Fire
Screen. He also read ‘Last Words’ and ‘An Upward Look’, making
much on tongue and PA of the heavy Anglo-Saxon caesurae that butterfly the
lines into rhythmic pairs.
As befits a
well-subscribed literary event in the depths of the visual age, the
evening ended with a film and video presentation by J.D. McClatchy, who
has had unprecedented access to such archives. He began with a very brief
clip from the film Lorenzo’s Oil.
A casting director had the luck of seeing Merrill read his poems and felt
that he had quite a future as a Hollywood actor. Merrill, encircled by
Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon, and Peter Ustinov in a well-lit boardroom,
delivers a single line with a delicate, Astaire-like grace. McClatchy
jokingly remarked that he has been given to understand that the entire
film pivots on that one line. Despite his photogenic presence on the
silver screen, little came (thankfully, one might assume) of Merrill’s
acting career. McClatchy quipped that this one foray provided Merrill with
a screen actors card, placing the son of one of the great financiers into
the unlikely position of being a union member. This was followed by a
somewhat wobbly, documentary-style tour of Merrill’s home in Stonington,
its many gew-gaws, paintings by Larry Rivers and others, and the bookcase
that pivots, like something out of a murder mystery, to expose what Auden
would have termed a “cave of making”, where Merrill played Solitaire
and wrote poems most of the day. The camera also dwelled for a time in his
cozy kitchen, where he hung his many awards and honorary degrees (he
limited himself to two honorary degrees, and turned down Harvard because,
like Faulkner when invited to the White House for dinner, it seemed that
the reward failed to justify the drudgery of travel). McClatchy pointed
out that Merrill kept things in perspective, that the kitchen was really
the best place for such honors. Apparently, Merrill also was fond of
cooking, though on more than one occasion he “poisoned” his guests
with foodstuffs that had been left too long in the fridge (the
observation, “but he kept at it,” received a warm wave of laughter
from the audience).
The next presentation
was a film of Merrill in the upstairs room where daily he played Brahms.
He acknowledged the poet who was in his turn the “master”, reading
Wallace Stevens’s ‘Final Soliloquy of the
Interior Paramour’: “Light the first light of evening, as in a room /
In which we rest and, for small reason, think / The world imagined is the
ultimate good.” Merrill commented that it was to him what the 29th
Psalm is to many others, a source of boundless comfort and wonder. The
final offering was a scene from the film Changing
Light at Sandover, filmed at the house in Stonington, in which an
actor played David Jackson, a silent part. Merrill wandered the stairwells
and gardens reciting ‘Samos’, a tranquil and, it must be said, sunny
end to the proceedings.
Merrill
embodied much to many. A whole bookshelf and Olympus worth of quiet myth
grew up around him, and he came to represent certain expectations of what
poetry is or what it should or should not (or no longer could) be. With
boundless financial resources derived from his father’s success with
Merrill-Lynch, he was free to pursue his poetic instincts at leisure, only
accepting occasional and very leisurely teaching jobs later in life. His
famous good looks recall those of Rupert Brooke, who was described before
his death in the First World War as “preternaturally” good-looking.
Merrill possessed a rarefied grace and style both on and off the page,
exemplifying an aristocratic ideal of the poet removed from society, the
eremite Rainer Maria Rilke of Duino Castle rather than the
football-playing ex-pilot James Dickey. Such rococo poems as Merrill
composed are likely only possible for a man discharged from political
concerns, cut free from the financial worries that badger most poets (who,
if they don’t teach, are compelled to review or work in publishing to
pay their endless dues to the muse). Most accounts of him border on the
hagiographic, and one suspects that to have been admitted to the chambers
of his affection was enough to sway any would-be adversary. There is
something to be said for his stately detachment (in direct opposition to
Allen Ginsberg’s egalitarian love-ins and bellowing denunciations). His
work is not tarnished by passing political or cultural concerns. His
poetry should never be misinterpreted as a barometer of the age in which
it was written, as with Robert Lowell, whose poetry is read by some as the
evolving historical conscience of the nation. The publication of the Collected
does not guarantee Merrill a place in American literary history. He
already had that. Rather, it makes an event, a memorial observance, of his
life and work, not so long overdue considering the daunting volume of
material left to his literary executors, J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser.
Already by its first month of publication it was running into another
printing, and, if a stock index were revealed for Merrill’s Horatian
poetry of time and death, love and loss, beauty and age, one would be
energetically encouraged to purchase it now.
Editor's
Note: The first portion of this essay originally appeared in the Random
House magazine, BoldType.
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