SOURCE: “The Error of His Ways: James Merrill and the Fall into Myth,” in American Poetry, Vol. 7, No. 3, Spring, 1990, pp. 64-86.

[In the following essay, Materer probes the mythic unconscious of Merrill's poetry.]

You will recall that in the case of the [slip of the tongue] the man was asked how he had arrived at the wrong word ‘Vorschwein’ and the first thing that occurred to him gave us the explanation. Our technique with dreams, then, is a very simple one, copied from this example … the dreamer knows about his dream; the only question is how to make it possible for him to discover his knowledge and communicate it to us.

—Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

The prosaic first lines of The Changing Light at Sandover, “Admittedly, I err by undertaking / This in its present form” (3), are a key to its poetic technique. The “error” referred to is James Merrill's decision to narrate his occult adventures in a long poem rather than in a novel of “unseasoned telling.” In the first book of the trilogy, The Book of Ephraim, he explains that

my narrative
Wanted to be limpid, unfragmented;
My characters, conventional stock figures …
The kinds of being we recall from Grimm,
Jung, Verdi, and the commedia dell'arte.

(4)

Merrill admits that “such a project was beyond me” and that he had to abandon the “mistaken enterprise.” Instead he will err by describing his “Thousand and One Evenings Spent / With David Jackson at the Ouija Board” (3) in a fragmented form which now merely alludes to events and characters from the “ill-starred novel.”

The sense of “error” as a “mistake,” however, is qualified by its root meaning, “to wander.” Merrill's decision to narrate his story as the Ouija Board dictates and according to a scheme drawn from the letters and numbers on its face limits his conscious control over its development. Despite the difference in their poetic styles, Merrill is like Pound in embarking on a poetic voyage that is a “periplum” and not a journey from one point to another. Both Pound and Merrill know how weak the structures of their long poems are in comparison to that of Dante's Divine Comedy. Merrill indirectly comments on this problem when his friend Robert Morse, within the poem itself, criticizes the poem in manuscript:

Everything in Dante knew its place.
In this guidebook of yours, how do you tell
Up from down?

(256)

The title of the volume in which part one of Changing Light, The Book of Ephraim, first appeared is Divine Comedies, and the plural form of “comedy” itself acknowledges the poem's fragmentation. Merrill could only agree with Pound that the modern world gives the poet no “Aquinas-map” such as Dante's culture gave him (323). When the cup Merrill uses as a pointer begins transmitting messages through the Ouija Board, it moves “dully, incoherently” before it “swerved, clung, hesitated, / Darted off.” Even when Merrill becomes more adept at both following and transcribing its movements, “THIS TOPSYTURVY WILLOWWARE / IGLOO WALTZING WITH THE ALPHABET” (“The Will,” 343) delivers anything but an ordered or even rational discourse. Yet even the most “fragmentary message” the Board spells out is “Twice as entertaining, twice as wise / As either of its mediums.” (6-7) The two mediums, Merrill and David Jackson (referred to throughout as JM and DJ), their hands placed together on the willowware tea cup, will follow its wanderings wherever it takes them. Despite his distrust of such a poetic method, Merrill trusts that “Wrong things in the right light are fair … (63).”¹

From the sense of error as a “mistake” and then as a “wandering,” Merrill relates the word still more widely to a “lapse” and a “fall.” (In his poem “The Grand Canyon,” he makes a similar play on words by describing the geological “fault” of the canyon as “This mistake / Made by your country … [14].”) The “error” of the poem is a “fall” or “lapse” into the bizarre world it explores, and many passages in the poem express Merrill's worry that his and Jackson's obsession with the Ouija Board may be “folie à deux” (30), or even a dangerous incursion into a demonic world (9, 73), which would be a fall in an ethical sense. And yet one only enters this world through some kind of fall, as Merrill says through a crucial play on the words lap and lapse. This passage, which occurs in section “U” (the letter highlights its concern with the Unconscious) of The Book of Ephraim, ends with an address to the “familiar spirit” who is JM's and DJ's mediator in the spirit world (the ellipsis mark in the ninth line is in the text):

Jung says—or if he doesn't all but does—
That God and the Unconscious are one. Hm.
The lapse that tides us over, hither, yon;
Tide that laps us home away from home.
Onstage, the sudden trap about to yawn—
Darkness impenetrable, pit wherein
Two grapplers lock, pale skin and copper skin.
Impenetrable brilliance, topmost panes
Catching the sunset, of a house gone black …
Ephraim, my dear, let's face it. If I fall
from a high building, it's your name I'll call,
OK?

(74)²

Jung speaks of the relation of God to the Collective Unconscious in many places, but the closest he comes to equating the two is in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (336-37), which Merrill cites elsewhere in the poem (229). Despite the uncertain or even dubious tone of the “Hm” in the above passage, Merrill is nevertheless making a major statement about his poetic subject. The world of Manichaean gods, black and white angels, and spirits who are desperately dependent on the living, is also the world of the Jungian Unconscious. To borrow a phrase from Merrill's poem “Bronze,” Merrill is using the “Jungian dreamer's / Diving bell” (51) to explore the unconscious mind. However, Merrill's point is that this exploration is no planned descent via anything so safe as a diving bell or any other rational contrivance, but is rather a “lapse” that “tides us over, hither, yon” into the other world of occult experience. The term “lapse” is drawn from psychoanalytic vocabulary. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud shows how verbal mistakes, the famous “Freudian slips,” can reveal the contents of the unconscious mind. Freud himself did not use the term “lapse,” but his American disciple E.G. Brill introduced the terms lapsus linguae, lapsus memoriae, and lapsus calami to indicate slips of the tongue, memory, and pen. An example of such a revealing slip is described by Merrill in his poem “The Will,” which tells of how he lost the manuscript of the “ill-starred novel” in a taxi cab. Brooding on a slip with a carving knife which nearly cost him his thumb, he asks:

Where was my mind? Lapses like this become
Standard practice. Not all of them leave me in stitches.
In growing puzzlement I've felt things losing
Their grip on me. What's done is done, dreamlike;
Clutches itself too late to stop the oozing
Reds, the numbing inward leak
Of pressures we have effortlessly risen
Through on occasion to a brilliant
Ice blue and white sestet. …

(340)

The lapse into a dreamlike state as unconscious motivations control the psyche can be embarrassing or dangerous, but it may also enable the poet/dreamer, employing these psychic pressures, to create a work of art. To return to the passage from Changing Light, these slips or lapses are thus traps that lower us into the “Darkness impenetrable” of the Unconscious, where the poet can nevertheless glimpse the struggle of dark and light: “pale skin and copper skin.”

The “Tide that laps us home away from home,” to the unconscious level of our own minds, is related to the image of the “house gone black.” The pervasive image of the house in Merrill's poetry usually signifies, as he phrases it in “An Urban Convalescence,” “the life lived … the love spent” (6). In the lines addressed to Ephraim, it is more specifically the life experience stored in the unconscious mind. Merrill uses the image in this sense in his story “Peru: The Landscape Game.” A woman who is thought to be Jung's widow has the narrator play a game of “free association,” in which he has to interpret the meaning of the contents of an imaginary house: “The house is your own life, your notion of it,” and the “wild creature” which inhabits the house “is Yourself—the unconscious” (105-06). The light of consciousness is the “impenetrable brilliance of a house gone black,” its “topmost windows,” like the human mind, illumined by a dying light. A similar image is used in Merrill's “The House,” where the west walls of the house “take the sunset like a blow,” and the house contains “wet-faced sleepers” who awaken at the poet's glance (35-36). The waking of those who are asleep or dead is ominous in this early poem, but in the Changing Light communication with the dead is more often consoling than it is frightening.

The Unconscious is thus the world of the dead, and the “fall”—say, a “fall / From a high building”—is a literal one that could cause Merrill's or anyone's death. On the point of death, it would be Ephraim's name that Merrill would call. His reason for calling on his familiar spirit as a Christian might on God is clarified in section X. Following a passage on Time as a personified ritual victim of death, the poet asks about the “Spring-tide” of his own death:

Shall I come lighter-hearted to that Spring-tide
Knowing it must be fathomed without a guide?
With no one, nothing along those lines—or these
Whose writing, if not justifies, so mirrors,
So embodies up to now some guiding force,
It can't be simply be written off.

(85)

The “guiding force” is Ephraim. If the writing of Ephraim does not justify or authenticate the experiences narrated, then it at least “mirrors” some force or other that cannot be ignored. Though his faith in a “guiding” and benevolent force will be challenged, the force is not only personified as “Ephraim” but addressed as an intimate friend: “Ephraim, my dear … it's your name I'll call.” In the lost novel, Ephraim's name is “Eros” (47); and in the poem he mirrors and personifies the love between JM and DJ. JM fears the loss of this love, which we sense in one of the multiple meanings of the “failure” referred to in the conclusion to section U:

what vigilance will keep
Me from one emblematic, imminent,
Utterly harmless failure of recall.
Let's face it: the Unconscious, after all. …

(74)

The immediate meaning of the “failure of recall” refers to the difficulty of getting through to Ephraim which is described in section U. Some sinister force intervenes in the seance and pressures DJ's hand—harmlessly, but with enough force to leave it sore and to serve as a warning. The “failure of recall” is also the potential failure of JM's and DJ's love; but it is still more ominous as the “failure of recall” that comes with death. The repetition of the phrase, “Let's face it,” recalls the passage about the fall from a high building and reintroduces a statement about the Unconscious, which this time ends in an ellipsis mark. The Unconscious, after all, is what … Merrill is even less sure than Jung about how to describe it and so fails to conclude the passage. The same technique of elision is used in the concluding lines of section X:

… Heaven is all peppered with black holes,
Vanishing points for the superfluous
Matter elided (just in time perhaps)
By the conclusion of a passage thus. …

(85-86)

The Book of Ephraim is persistently skeptical of the events it narrates, as in the above passage where the occult experience is virtually a “black hole” in Merrill's life.

Merrill readily admits that his occult world may be a projection of his own mind, although he is Jungian enough to add that “consciousness doesn't stop with human beings. There is probably a great untapped mind, if you can call it that, in the natural world itself” (Labrie, “James Merrill at Home,” 24, 35). But he wisely refuses to make an issue, even to the extent that Yeats did, of the “reality” of his experience, which can be taken for whatever it's worth—particularly, of course, its poetic worth. It would therefore be pointless to argue that the poem is “really” about the Jungian Unconscious, or that the psychoanalytic “level” of the poem is the basic one. Even to Merrill the issue of whether the subject matter of the poem is merely a compulsive or neurotic personal experience devoid of the universal qualities necessary for a work of art is a crucial one. A personal mistake is bad enough, but an aesthetic one is really serious.

This issue is handled with understated humor in section “I” when JM goes to see his “ex-shrink” after an earlier incident in which they lose touch with Ephraim. The doctor's judgment on the affair is expressed in a trimeter couplet in which the simple rhyme and meter emphasize his superficiality:

—what you and David do
We call folie à deux.

(30)

Under the shrink's prodding, JM then states an orthodox Freudian interpretation of his experiences. “Somewhere a Father Figure shakes his rod” at JM and DJ because their love is barren, and their creation Ephraim allows them “to shuffle off the blame / For how we live” … (30). Following the consultation, they again try to recall Ephraim, and to their surprise he answers and delivers a terse judgment of his own (in the capital letters JM uses for all transcriptions from the spirits) on the shrink: “FREUD / we learned that evening DESPAIRS / OF HIS DISCIPLES. … ”³ Their self-doubts have fallen away as Ephraim returns and “clouds disperse / On all sides.” The issue of Ephraim as a psychological project is faced and then definitely resolved. It may be Ephraim's

lights and darks were a projection
Of what already burned, at some obscure
Level or another, in our skulls.
We, all we knew, dreamed, felt and had forgotten,
Flesh made word, became through him a set of
Quasi-grammatical constructions which
Could utter some things clearly, forcibly,
Others not.

(31)

Ephraim's revelations should not be taken as in themselves “true” but as a language capable of uttering statements valid within its own “system”: myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room. … It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche” (183).

Merrill's anxiety over this supernatural influence is perhaps still stronger than Jung's because he feels his autonomy as a poet is being lost as he merely transcribes the thoughts Ephraim and his successors relay to him. When a bat-like creature named 741 begins dictating, the shade of W.H. Auden (who joins the “seminar” in Book 1 of Mirabell and is always referred to as “Wystan”) assures JM that “THESE CREATURES ARE / MORE LIKE INFORMATION BANKS TO TAP” (129). Yet the information begins to shape the poem, preventing Merrill from returning “To private life, to my own words” and even keeping him from shaping his narrative as carefully as he did Ephraim (261). He is not disturbed to learn that “Rimbaud ghostwrote ‘The Waste Land’” (217), but later in Mirabell the idea of the author as medium makes him feel like “a vehicle / In this cosmic carpool” (262). The Changing Light at Sandover can illustrate all six of the ways poets deal with their poetic precursors that Harold Bloom identifies in The Anxiety of Influence; for example, Merrill's distortion of Auden's Anglo-Catholicism is the kind of misprision that Bloom calls clinamen, and his linking of his own poem to Yeats's occult works and Eliot's The Waste Land is what Bloom calls tessera. Moreover, Merrill's poem itself is a literal case of Bloom's “Apophrades or the Return of the Dead.” Although Merrill's precursors return in abundance (Auden, Blake, Dante, Eliot, Hugo, Pope, Stevens, and Yeats, to name some of the major influences), there is no sense, as in Bloom, of an agonizing wrestling match with the powerful dead. Merrill's evident ambition to rival Pope's irony and descriptive powers, Auden's intellectual depth and lyricism, and Yeats's richness of imagery must weigh upon him. But he appears not to share Bloom's feeling that, “in poems as in our lives,” the dead do not return “without darkening the living” (Anxiety 139).

Indeed, it is Auden's schooling of Merrill in the modernist doctrine of impersonality that allays his anxieties over being a mere medium. Wystan tells JM he must learn “TO SEE PAST LONE AUTONOMY” to the powers that transcend the poem and to give up his desire for “DOING YOUR OWN THING: EACH TEENY BIT / … MADE PERSONAL AS SHIT … ” (262). The couplet form itself, perfected in a neo-classical age when originality meant less than it does now, illustrates the inheritance that a poet receives from beyond the self. Wystan lectures on the “MINOR / PART THE SELF PLAYS IN A WORK OF ART” in a passage on poetic language as landscape which is indeed worthy of W.H. Auden:

FROM LATIN-LABELED HYBRIDS TO THE FAWN
4 LETTER FUNGI THAT ENRICH THE LAWN,
IS NOT ARCADIA TO DWELL AMONG
GREENWOOD PERSPECTIVES OF THE MOTHER TONGUE
ROOTSYSTEMS UNDERFOOT WHILE OVERHEAD
THE SUN GOD SANG & SHADES OF MEANING SPREAD
& FAR SNOWCAPPED ABSTRACTIONS GLITTERED NEAR
OR FAIRLY MELTED INTO ATMOSPHERE?

(262)

And so JM faithfully transcribes what Ephraim and a host of spiritual beings tell him. But what are these “lessons” (as they are called in Mirabell) that are so important that Merrill must efface his poetic will in order to record them?

JM himself does not readily admit the importance of the spirits' occult teachings on such matters as the nine stages of reincarnation, the three terrestrial races, or the fall of Atlantis. He complains to Wystan about the topics of his ouija lessons:

all this
Warmed-up Milton, Dante, Genesis?
This great tradition that has come to grief
In volumes by Blavatsky and Gurdjieff?

(136)

The doubts in this passage are echoed by critics of the poem such as Irwin Ehrenpreis, who disapprovingly but accurately states that Merrill “presents us with inversions of Biblical myth and Christian morality that suggest the tradition of gnosticism” (48). Ehrenpreis thinks that Merrill's Gnosticism is incoherent because it does not oppose matter to the spirit; but Ehrenpreis' conclusion is based on a far too narrow (and Manichaean) understanding of the Gnostic tradition. It is true that Madame Blavatsky and the Russian mystic Gurdjieff raided Gnostic traditions and that their formulations of spiritualistic doctrines were less than coherent. It is also true that Merrill's occultism is a strange jumble of material—stranger, even, than the eclectic myths in the Rock-Drill or Thrones section of Pound's Cantos. But it is already clear that Merrill presents nothing as “true,” as did Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and even Pound. The reader should look through the occultism to see the issues that Merrill is trying to raise by using the Gnostic tradition.⁴

Jung's reading of Gnosticism provides a guide to Merrill's concerns because both men turn to this tradition for similar reasons. In his autobiography, Jung says that the Christian tradition of the West has been unable to explain the evil unleashed by the World Wars and the advent of nuclear weapons (Memories, 333). His later work was preoccupied with what he called “the still pending answer to the Gnostic question as to the origin of evil, or, to put it another way, the incompleteness of the Christian God-image” (Memories, 318). He considered the Christian image of God incomplete not only because it neglected the feminine but also because its conception of God as entirely good and just failed to account for the existence of evil. Although this failure is especially acute in this century, the Gnostic tradition had always struggled with the problem, and by the eleventh century:

the belief arose that the devil, not God, had created the world. Thus the keynote was struck for the second half of the Christian aeon, after the myth of the fall of the angels had already explained that these fallen angels had taught men a dangerous knowledge of science and the arts. What would these old storytellers have to say about Hiroshima? (Memories, 333)

Through Merrill's poem, we can easily imagine what these old myth-makers might have said. He continues their tradition, which is the very point the spirit named “BEZELBOB” makes: “INDEED JM WE HAVE ALWAYS SPOKEN THROUGH THE POETS” (114).

Ephraim is displaced by the sinister powers JM and DJ sensed in section “P” of Ephraim, and they are disturbed by the way the “Powers … we've been avoiding” seem to possess them and “speed us far downstream / Through gorges echoing at the pitch of dream” (108). JM's assumption that “they're the fallen angels” (114) is correct, but every aspect of the Christian cosmology undergoes a Blakean transvaluation in this poem. These bat-creatures are indeed damned for their transgressions: “WE TRIFLED & FELL NEGATIVE ENERGY THE BLACK HOLE / WAS BORNE WE BURN” (113). But they claim not to have done evil but to have released it and, moreover, that “evil” is a negative force in the heart of matter. Having destroyed their civilization 500 million years ago, “IT IS OUR DUTY TO WARN MAN AGAINST THE CHAOS ONCE / WORSHIPT BY US”:

FOR NOW THE PHYSICIST IS DRAWN IF UNWITTINGLY TO
FIRE EXTINCTION THAT ANCIENT GLAMOR & COULD AGAIN
WRECK THE LAB THE BIOLOGIST SEEKS THE FRUITFUL UNION

(115)

The “lab” is the term the spirits use for the earthly life, in which “V” work (“V” for French “vie” and for the five reincarnated spirits who lead it) is meant to perfect it; and the “biologist” refers to those able to reconcile the opposites that exist in everything from the positive and negative forces in the atom to the deity.

In Mirabell, the reader is faced with a theosophical system of bewildering intricacy, which becomes frankly inconsistent with the advent of a series of unreliable narrators, including major ones like Bezelbob (later spirit 741), the peacock Mirabel (a transformation of 741), the hornless unicorn Uni, the angels Michael and Gabriel, and minor ones like Jesus, Buddha, and other historical and allegorical figures. There is no need here for the kind of detailed study that critics such as Ross Labrie (James Merrill) and Judith Moffett have devoted to the poem. An identification of the Gnostic and Jungian features of the poem will reveal the major elements that inform the poem's structure.

One of Jung's critics has summarized three features in his Gnosticism that are related to the dynamics of the unconscious mind:

the call—from the God beyond who has nothing to do with the established theology … the primacy of the feminine principle and the corresponding divine child in the constitution of the world and in its redemption. … (Hogenson 37)

The “call” in Changing Light occurs in one of its central and most affecting passages in which “God B” (or “Biology”) calls to his “brothers” in the cosmic pantheon. The call is heard by the principal members of the “seminar,” JM, DJ, Wystan and Maria Mitsotáki (1907-74), the widow of a diplomat and member of a distinguished Greek family with whom DJ and JM share a deep friendship (13, 101-02). The Call is tuned to “mortal wavelength” by the fifth principle member, Mirabel:

IVE BROTHERS HEAR ME BROTHER SIGNAL ME ALONE IN MY NIGHT BROTHERS DO YOU WELL I AND MINE HOLD IT BACK BROTHERS I AND MINE SURVIVE BROTHERS HEAR ME SIGNAL ME

IN MY NIGHT I HOLD IT BACK I AND MINE SURVIVE BROTHERS SIGNAL ME IN MY NIGHT I AND MINE HOLD IT BACK AND WE SURVIVE (360)

This “Pulse of the galactic radio” that fills the void of space comes from God B, who in Wystan's phrase, is “KEEPING UP HIS NERVE ON A LIFERAFT (362), and it performs the Jungian task of enlightening the hearer. As JM remarks to Wystan, God B seems a “Far cry from the joyous Architect” (362) that Michael, the Angel of light, had described in the last lines of Mirabell. The call from God B helps to correct what Jung would call the “incompleteness” of such a “God-image.” The God we learn about in Changing Light belongs to a Gnostic cosmology in which “good” or positive forces barely “SURVIVE” and “HOLD BACK” the “evil” or negative forces. In relation to our earth, “2 GODS / GOVERN BIOLOGY & CHAOS” (113). But there are many more gods in this Gnostic universe. Michael as the angel of light is balanced by Gabriel, who destroyed the first two terrestrial races when they transgressed (God B could not bear to do it) and who describes himself in a Jungian phrase as “THE SHADOW OF MY FATHER” (316). In Scripts, he tells the two mediums of

THE PANTHEON OF GALAXIES FROM WHICH OUR
FATHER COMES, I HAVE HEARD HIS VOICE:
‘GABRIEL, MY DARKER SIDE, THERE ARE GALAXIES, GODS AS POWERFUL
AS I. SON GABRIEL, WE ARE WARND. WE ARE HARD PREST.’

(330)

We learn nothing about the “BROTHERS OF THE PANTHEON,” except that they allowed God B, the “YOUNGEST BROTHER,” to shape the world on condition that he install the “MONITOR” at its heart (392). Although it is once referred to as a god, the Monitor is not one of the pantheon but appears to represent the destructive power of time. A variety of Gnostic demiurges create life on earth. For example, a race of centaurs created the bat-creatures JM met at the beginning of Mirabell and were destroyed by them—hence the bats' punishment (or “damnation” in the Christian sense) by God B. The shaping of the earth and of mankind was the work of the four angels who narrate much of Scripts, especially the first book, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Emmanuel. But it was the dark angel Gabriel who gave man the spark of consciousness that transformed him from ape to human—and made him capable of the self-destruction that now threatens the race. The Monitor seems to wait upon this destruction, but there is also a God who actively opposes God B who is called God A, the Adversary. God A is a void rather than a positive evil and is related to antimatter, black holes, and the negative charge in the atom. God Biology must press back against this “insane / Presence beyond our furthest greenhouse pane” (398), but the energy needed is enormous and may be declining.

This fear is expressed in perhaps the finest lyric passage in the poem. JM and Wystan are reflecting on the strange music (“NO MELODY BUT TONE / LEVELS”) that accompanied the lyrics of God B's song. When DJ says that “Dante heard that Song,” Wystan asks a question that JM answers:

WHO WD THINK THAT THE SONG HAD HAD SUCH LYRICS?
The lyrics may be changing. Dante saw
The rose in rose in fullest bloom. Blake saw it sick.
You and Maria, who have seen the bleak
Unpetalled knob, must wonder: will it last
Till spring? Is it still rooted in the Sun?

(363)

After hearing God B's song, DJ laments that their ouija sessions now “Print out in Manichaean black and white” (362). Although Evil has been redefined as negativity or a void or a black hole, it still threatens mankind's existence. God B is assisted by his “TWIN SISTER” Nature, but her concern for the earth's survival is questionable since she is both a creative and a destructive force. This balance between good and evil, creation and destruction, and positive and negative is reflected in the title of the three sections of Scripts: “Yes,” “&” and “No,” which are marks on the Ouija Board. In answer to the question of the survival of mankind the cup wavers throughout between the “yes” and “no,” with the “and” serving as a “bridge” (362). The hope for survival is centered in the “feminine principle,” but not in the figure of Nature. With the possible exception of Wystan Auden, Maria Mitsotaki is the major character in the poem, and it is the appropriately named Maria who is the reconciling and redeeming force.

We saw that Jung considered the thoughts that arose from his Unconscious as objective as “animals in a forest, or people in a room.” He had a sense of the dead crowding in on him, and he wrote his early work Septem Sermones ad Mortuous (1916), during a mental crisis over the World War, to answer their demands and free himself from them. Hogenson believes that the return of the dead was in Jung's case a “metaphor for the explosion of the contents of the unconscious” (144). The same may be said of Merrill's encounter with the dead. The way the supernatural beings in Merrill's “salon” or “seminar” express their strangest doctrines without our losing a sense of them as characters in a developing drama of ideas is one of the triumphs of the poem. Characters like Wystan, Maria, George Cotzias, Robert Morse, and of course DJ and JM, are indeed “people in a room” who question and modify each other's ideas. As in Jung, the dead are eager to communicate with the living. Early in the poem, a host of the dead descend on the house in Stonington (22). To Merrill's surprise, the dead “all burn / To read more of this poem” (72). The dead are demanding a poem from Merrill just as they demanded the Gnostic fantasy of Septem Sermones from Jung. In both cases, the dead desire instruction by means of a visionary work. As Merrill puts it, the dead see themselves “in the mirror only / Of a live mind” (105). The figure of Maria is the key to this demand from the dead for Merrill's poem as well as to the reconciliation it offers.

Merrill began Ephraim within days of hearing that Maria had died. In his interview “The Art of Poetry,” Merrill describes his friendship with her as “the perfection of intimacy, light, airy, with no confessions or possessiveness—yet one would have to be Jung or Dante to foresee her role in the poem” (189). The first hint of her special role in the poem is when she appears (mirrored in DJ's and JM's imaginations)

TRIMMED WITH EMBROIDERIES BLUE GREEN YELLOW RED
SO LIKE THE LOVELY TITIAN IN THE FRARI
In Venice, of the cherub-wafted Virgin
God waits with open arms for.

(257)

It is Maria's name-day, and the vision of her as the Virgin Mary suggests her mediating role between JM and the other world. Her initial role in the poem is to explain organic nature to the seminar: “MY SOUL / SPEAKS FROM WITHIN THE GREENNESS OF A BLADE OF GRASS” (388). But Wystan suspects her larger role and tells JM that she has the “SPECIFIC GRAVITY / OF A CULT FIGURE” (422). Later Maria reminds him that he once called her “‘THE MUSE OF YOUR OFF-DAYS’” in a poem (“Words for Maria”), and he then recalls the coincidence of her death and the beginning of the poem (465). We now learn that Maria is one of the five immortal souls who cycle through earth's history insuring the creativity of the race and protecting it from destruction. It was she as Muse who inspired JM to write the trilogy and alert mankind to the life and death issues the poem raises. In her epiphany as “ALL NINE” of the muses, she is God B's “STAR TWIN” (480)—both human and divine (467).

Maria is thus the central “cult figure” in Merrill's Gnostic cosmology. She delivers the strongest defense of mankind to Gabriel and expresses the Gnostic hope for a “divine child,” or in this case a race superior to the present human race. When Gabriel complains that the present race has become too curious about nuclear power and genetics, she defends mankind's Promethean drives:

IS IT NOT THAT WE, MANKIND, MUST DO
IMMORTAL WORK? AND WHEN HEAVEN, LIKE A LOVELY
MINT-SCENTED FRESHENING SETTLES & EARTH BECOMES
PARADISE, MY LORDS, WILL NOT OUT RACE OF THIEVES
HAVE EMERGED AS THE ELDERS IN A RACE OF GODS?
DEFENCE RESTS.

(455-56)

Early in Mirabell, JM is told by 741 that “THE NEXT RACE WILL BE OF GODS” (117), and Gabriel tells the scientist George Cotzias that he will be reborn as “ONE OF THIS NEW GENERATION, AN ALPHA MAN … ” (439). Merrill seems reluctant to use this element of the Gnostic pattern, and its presence nevertheless demonstrates its strength over his imagination. He is uncomfortable with these “Alpha men” who seem to come straight out of G.B. Shaw or H.G. Wells. Concerning this new race, he tells the spirits, “No details, please”:

lest they issue from the teller's cage
As cheap Utopian script (blurred smile of sage
Framed by scrollwork) promising untold
Redemption, ages hence, in fairy gold …

(511)

Almost unwillingly, he has thus completed a version of the Gnostic myth, including the Call, the reconciliation through the feminine, and the expectation of a perfected race. The myth includes many secondary Gnostic features such as a Manichaean pantheon, creation by demiurges, and reincarnation. Bizarre as these features are, they provide the symbolic language by which Merrill releases his fears for the human race and achieves a sense of reconciliation with our fate and a hope for its positive fulfillment. Such a release of fantasy material helped to settle Jung's mind during World War I. At the conclusion of Septem Sermones, “the dead were silent and ascended like the smoke above the herdsman's fire … ” (389-90). A similar release of the dead occurs at the end of Changing Light.

James Merrill began his poem with the feeling that using his ouija board fantasies was an error. It was a mistake for a poet whose “downfall was ‘word painting’” (4) to begin a long narrative; a mistake for a poet who strives for a sensibility “‘no idea violates’” (14) to create a “seminar” in which such “great ideas” as the existence of god and the destiny of mankind are debated; and it was a mistake, or at least a lapse in taste, to plunge into Gnostic traditions: “Raw revelation typed to maximum / Illegibility” (256), as his friend Robert Morse (before he dies and joins the seminar) describes it. Out of such mistakes, and out of the fall into the dark materials of the unconscious mind, Merrill creates an image of wholeness in the figure of Maria and in many other symbolic characters, such as Wystan and Mirabel, and emblems, such as the rose and the circle. But he never forgets the incompleteness out of which the image arises (the rose is sick, the circle is a void). At the poem's conclusion, he must let the dead leave the occult world he and DJ have formed. This farewell is expressed through the imagery of breaking, which thus joins errors, lapses, and falls in one of the poem's major image clusters.

The departure of the spirits is planned at the conclusion to the first section (“Yes”) of Scripts. The spirits “see” JM and DJ through a mirror that is always present at the seance. Wystan and Maria are the spirits present at this time, and JM feels that he and DJ could well be on their side of the mirror thanks to their growing intimacy. Maria then warns him that when the “lessons” are finished, he must break the mirror and let them go. JM's and DJ's shocked reaction to this news is clear from Auden's “—IDIOTS DRY YR EYES” (364). When Maria suggests that it might be a gentler farewell if the ritual of departure used water poured out into a plant. JM disagrees because “The poem's logic … Calls for the shattering of a glass” (364). The glass recalls the epigraph of Scripts from Proust's Jean Santeuil, in which the breaking of a vase is interpreted as a good omen, like the shattering of a glass at a Jewish wedding: “‘Ce sera comme au temple le symbole de l'indestructible union’” (278).⁵ In a valuable study of “interruption” in Changing Light, Willard Spiegelman finds another allusion to Jewish culture in the shattering of the glass: “For Harold Bloom, reflecting on the cosmology of the Kabbalah and finding in the schemes of Isaac Luria and others a prototype for literary tradition, all acts of creation are catastrophes, broken vessels … ” (222). The “breaking of the vessels” is not only a metaphor for what happens in Merrill's poem; it is also a final, masterly statement of the poem's Gnostic vision.

Like orthodox Christianity, the Talmudic tradition rejected Gnosticism and did not dwell on the problem of evil. As Bloom observes, however, “the true dark heart of Kabbalah [is] its vision of the problem of evil,” and this is particularly true in the Kabbalism of Isaac Luria, which learned much from Gnosticism's engagement with “evil as the reality of this world” (Kabbalah 37). Bloom's study of the Kabbalah draws on the scholarship of Gershom Scholem, who describes the breaking of the vessels which occurred when God's light entered the ten vessels he formed to manifest His being:

The divine light entered these vessels in order to take forms appropriate to their function in creation, but the vessels could not contain the light and thus were broken. … The light was dispersed. Much of it returned to its source; some portions, or “sparks,” fell downward and were scattered, some rose upward. (Messianic Ideal, 45)

According to Scholem, Lurianic Kabbalism particularly reveals Gnostic influence in the speculation that the “Kelipot,” or forces of evil, existed before the breaking and were mixed with the light of God's emanations: “What really brought about the fracture of the vessels was the necessity of cleansing the elements of the Sefiroth by eliminating the Kelipot, in order to give a real existence and separate identity to the power of evil” (Jewish Mysticism, 267). Even though the vessels are reduced into fragments or “shards,” the shattering is a purifying act (Bloom, Kabbalah, 43, 85). Still another unorthodox and Gnostic element of Kabbalism in this late tradition was the belief that the sparks of holiness which fell into human souls pass through various forms: “transmigration was not an appendage but an inextricable basic element. Transmigration, too, symbolized the state of the unamended world, the confusion of the orders of creation … ” (Messianic Idea, 47).

The concepts of the breaking of the vessels, catharsis, and transmigration are all crucial to understanding the breaking of the mirror at the end of Scripts. Throughout sections two and three of Scripts, the changes of the moon bring us closer to the moment when JM and DJ must release the spirits. Maria appoints the time as three days after a new moon. At DJ's suggestion, they will break the mirror into a bowl of water and pour it over a cassia bush that Maria discovered and which still blooms on JM's terrace in Athens. The bowl, “brimming with water, / Lobs an ellipse of live brilliance” (515), which recalls the elliptical shape of the new moon and the pattern of the letters on the ouija board as well as anticipating the shapes of the fragmented glass. JM will speak the ritual words and break the mirror into the cup that DJ holds, which will then be poured into the golden branches of the cassia bush:

Our eyes meet. DJ nods. We've risen. Shutters
Click at dreamlike speed. Sky. Awning. Bowl.
The stylus lifted. Giving up its whole
Lifetime of images, the mirror utters
A little treble shriek and rides the flood
Or tinkling mini-waterfall through wet
Blossoms to lie—and look the sun has set—
In splinters apt, from now on, to draw blood,
Each with its scimitar or bird-beak shape
Able, days hence, aglitter in the boughs
Or face-down, black on soil beneath, to rouse
From its deep swoon the undestroyed heartscape
—Then silence.

(517)

The elliptical phrasing in the first three lines is appropriate to a ritual of shattering in which a virtual lifetime is lost in an instant or the snap of shutter. Much earlier, in section “V” of Ephraim, JM recalled that he was lucky when he lost his camera during a tour: “Never again / To overlook a subject for its image, / To labor images till they yield a subject … ” (76). The implied poetics of these lines helps us understand Merrill's ambition (as it was Ezra Pound's) to write a long poem that would be more than a “batch of images” (75). But now that the poem is finished he reminds us, as Yeats did in “The Phases of the Moon,” that poetry is “mere images.” Although they are fragments, the pieces of the mirror assume recognizable shapes of “scimitar” or “bird-beak” that can recall their friends and reopen the wound of their loss. The shattering is thus, as JM notes, like Prospero's burying of his rod and freeing of Caliban and Ariel.

But is it a loss? Like the Kabbalistic shattering of the vessels, the shattering of the mirror is a beginning as well as an end. It signifies the “Giving up” of a “whole lifetime of images” in the creation of a poem. The marble wedge, which was merely a door stop, now becomes a “stylus” which frees images through writing. In signifying the departure of his friends, it also reminds us that the transmigration of their spirits has begun again as Maria becomes an Indian religious leader (there is more about her new life in the poem's “Coda,” 526-28), George Cotzias a scientist who will be the first of a new race, Robert Morse a great composer, and Wystan (with the whimsicality that always surrounds his character) one with the kind of landscape (“A CLIFF? A BEACH?”) celebrated in his poetry. The freeing of the spirits has the cathartic quality Luria gave to it in which the “shards” assume a separate existence. Using the Kabbalistic word, Maria applies it in this case to forces of good:

SEND OUR IMAGINED SELVES
FALLING IN SHARDS THRU THE ETERNAL WATERS
(DJ CUPBEARER) & INTO THE GOLDEN BOUGH
OF MYTH ON INTO LIFE

(516)

The last two quatrains of the poem turn from the shards, “face-down, black on soil beneath,” to thoughts of the early race of centaurs and the present one of mankind. The first of these quatrains is a conditional clause that is suspended into the first line of the second quatrain's allusion to Dante and then broken off by God B's signal, which is itself broken off.

—Then silence. Then champagne.
And should elsewhere
Broad wings revolve a horselike form into
One Creature upward-shining brief as dew,
Swifter than bubbles in wine, through evening air
Up, far up, O whirling point of light—:
HERS HEAR ME I AND MINE SURVIVE SIGNAL
ME DO YOU WELL I ALONE IN MY NIGHT
HOLD IT BACK HEAR ME BROTHERS I AND MINE

(517)

The divine order of Dante's cosmos proceeds from the “whirling point of light” that he sees in Canto XXVIII of the Paradisio. Merrill's universe has no such center. God B's message, which reaches us only in an elliptical form, is merely that “I AND MINE” … hold back the void. Nothing within the passage allows us to interpret the “HERS” that begins the signal, but we may assume that it acknowledges Maria's benign influence. Merrill's universe is like the broken vessels, fragmented and seeking wholeness.

If Rimbaud “ghostwrote” Eliot's The Waste Land, as we are told in Mirabell, then we may say that Eliot at least co-authored The Changing Light at Sandover. Eliot later repudiated his fascination with mysticism and the occult with what he called “the reformed drunkard's abhorrence of intemperance” (261). At the time of The Waste Land, however, he longed for beliefs or myths that were still vital after the manifest death of a Christian civilization in World War I. The Tarot and various rituals of death and rebirth were, in the language of The Waste Land, a “heap of broken images”; but they were also for him “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Like Merrill, he fashioned from occultism a phantasmagoria of images that is unforgettable as poetry however suspect as orthodox belief. As we have seen, Merrill himself is suspicious of his subject matter. The poem is a “fall” or “lapse,” and the images it gives us fragments of a “great tradition that has come to grief.” The organizations of Eliot's and Merrill's poems seem haphazard—one structured around a Tarot pack, the other around a Ouija Board. But in both Eliot and Merrill the occult myth or counter-tradition provides a psychologically satisfying context for their images.

In length, of course, Merrill's poem seems closer to The Cantos than The Waste Land. Pound's epic is also a journey or periplum without an “Aquinas map” in search of beliefs that might vitalize a culture. But the weakness of Pound's great poem, in comparison with Eliot's and Merrill's, is that too many ideas, drawn from any number of disciplines and cultures, are presented with a bitter certainty about their truth or falsity. Eliot's relative detachment in The Waste Land seems preferable, even though it is a measure of his despair; and Merrill's ability to mock the weirdness of his ideas while still drawing on their imagistic power (an ability he shares with Yeats) seems better still. We can see Merrill's ironic stance toward his subject matter in Gabriel's description, late in the poem, of

THAT DEFERENTIAL & RELIEVED AWARENESS GIVEN
TO HIS EX-BOSS BY A FORMER EMPLOYEE
OR BY THE POET TO A USED IDEA.

(553)

The ideas in Changing Light are no less incoherent or fragmented than those in The Waste Land and The Cantos. But the charming and often humorous scenes Merrill creates of friends debating occult doctrines not only gives the poem its reassuring ironic tone but also a dramatic interest that is Merrill's unique achievement in the modern long poem.

Merrill shows how conscious he is of inheriting a challenge equal to the one that faced the Eliot/Pound generation in his foreward to a recent book of verse:

If World War I caused, as we hear tell, the total cave-in of civilization except where it glinted in the minds of writers like Valéry and Joyce, the problem of later generations has been to create works whose resonance would last for more than a season. (“Foreword,” xi)

Caught in this “cave-in,” Merrill recreates out of its darkness, and from traditions that were once discredited or lost, a Gnostic myth for what he describes as a “myth starved culture” (“Art of Poetry,” 32). Admittedly he has erred, but in this case one may recall Stephen Dedalus's conviction that the errors of an artist are “the portals of discovery” (Joyce, 190). Both Freud and Jung saw intimate revelations in errors. Like a dream, the error carries the message from the unconscious mind. For the dreamer or the person who errs, Freud says, “the only question is how to make it possible for him to discover his knowledge and communicate it to us” (Introductory Lectures 104-05). In The Changing Light at Sandover, Merrill communicates a myth that he discovers deep within his own mind through a “lapse that tides us over … home away from home” (74).

Notes

1. Paul de Man's Blindness & Insight analyzes the creativity of error, as is indicated in the book's epigraph from Proust, which is also appropriate to Merrill's work: “Cette perpetuelle erreur, qui est precisement la ‘vie’. … ”

2. In section “S” of “The Book of Ephraim” (“S” for Stevens in part), Merrill cites the passage in Wallace Stevens' “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” which states (or almost does) that “ … God and the imagination are one.” The reference to Stevens indicates Merrill's ambition to extend the power of his imagination into the “other world.” The citation of Jung is to the passage in his autobiography in which he says that “I am aware that ‘mana,’ and ‘God’ are synonyms for the unconscious … (337).” Merrill may also be alluding to the temptation of Christ by the Devil (Matthew 4:6) in the reference to a “fall / from a high building.” A more important biblical allusion is to story of Israel's blessing of Ephraim (the name of Merrill's familiar spirit) in Genesis 48: 13-22. Israel (mistakenly, according to his son Joseph) reverses the order in which Ephraim and Manaseh are brought to him and puts his right hand upon Ephraim—placing him above his first-born son, Manaseh. The mistake as well as the mirror-like reversal from left to right are relevant to the themes of Merrill's poem.

3. The orthodox Freudian may well disapprove of Merrill's Jungian approach to his subject, as Harold Bloom does when he refers to Merrill's use of “troublesome and in-authentic” sources “such as Dr. Carl Gustav Jung” (Bloom, James Merrill, 1). As Jacques Lacan has observed, the contemporary Freudian conception of the unconscious “is not at all the romantic unconscious of imaginative creation. It is not the locus of the divinities of night. This locus is no doubt not entirely unrelated to the locus towards which Freud turns his gaze—but the fact that Jung, who provides a link with the terms of the romantic unconscious, should have been repudiated by Freud, is sufficient indication that psychoanalysis is introducing something other (24).” This “something other” has little room for the strange “divinities of the night” which inhabit Merrill's poem. Lacan believes that Freudian “research into the unconscious moves, on the contrary, in the direction of a certain desiccation.” We instinctively turn away from the world of “spiritist, invocatory, necromantic practice … of what, in the construction of the Gnostics, are called the intermediary beings—sylphs, gnomes, and even higher forms of these ambiguous mediators.” But Merrill has not turned away.

4. Ehrenpreis's criticism of Merrill's Gnosticism recalls Shaun's facile dismissal of Shem in Finnegans Wake (170:11) as a “gnawstick.” Harold Bloom calls Merrill a “curious kind of religious poet, ‘curious’ because the religion is a variety of Gnosticism … ” But despite his discomfort with the poem's ideas, he readily admits the poetic genius revealed in its three books: “They are miracles of poetic achievement, and if I call them ‘spurious’ I only confess my own bewilderment or startled skepticism at being confronted by a contemporary Dante or Blake who follows Victor Hugo and Yeats by spending thousands of evenings at the Ouija Board in touch with alarmingly familiar spirits” (Bloom, James Merrill, 1). In American Poetry and Culture, Robert von Hallberg has an excellent account (113-15) of the uneasy critical reception of Merrill's trilogy and a description of his own reservations about the poem.

5. Freud refers to this custom in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: “Recently we passed through a period in my house during which an unusually large amount of glass and china crockery was broken; I myself was responsible for some of the damage. But the little psychical epidemic could easily be explained; these were the days before my eldest daughter's wedding. … This custom may have the significance of a sacrifice and it may have another symbolic meaning as well” (173).

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford U. Pr., 1973.

———, ed. James Merrill. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.

———. Kabbalah and Criticism. New York: Seabury, 1975.

de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford, 1971.

Ehrenpreis, Irvin. “Otherworldly Goods.” The New York Review of Books 22, January 1981: 48.

Eliot, T.S. “A.R. Orage.” The Criterion, January 1935: 260-261.

———. “A Commentary.” The Criterion, 14 January 1935: 260-64.

Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1977.

———. Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Trans. A.A. Brill. New York: Macmillan, 1915.

Hogenson, George B. Jung's Struggle With Freud. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1983.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1961.

Jung, C.J. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe; trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage, 1965.

———. “Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (1916).” Jung 378-90.

Kenner, Hugh. “Poetize or Bust.” Harper's Magazine, September 1983: 67-70.

Labrie, Ross. James Merrill. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

———. “James Merrill at Home: An Interview.” Arizona Quarterly 38 (1982): 19-36.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundemental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Pr., 1977.

Merrill, James. “the Art of Poetry XXXI.” The Paris Review 24, Summer 1982: 185-219.

———. The Changing Light at Sandover, Including the Whole of The Book of Ephraim, Mirabell's Books of Number, Scripts for the Pageant and a new coda, The Higher Keys. New York: Atheneum, 1984.

———. “Foreword.” Pamela Alexander, Navigable Waterways. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. ix-xiii.

———. From the First Nine: Poems 1946-76. New York: Atheneum, 1984.

———. “The Grand Canyon.” Water Street, 14-15.

———. “The House.” From the First Nine, 35-36.

———. “Peru: The Landscape Game.” Prose, Spring 1971: 105-14.

———. Water Street. New York: Atheneum, 1980.

———. “An Urban Convalescence.” Water Street, 3-6.

———. “The Will.” From the First Nine, 339-45.

———. “Words for Maria.” From the First Nine, 177-79.

Pound, Ezra. Selected Letters: 1907-1941. New York: New Directions, 1971.

Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken, 1941.

———. The Messianic Idea in Judaism. New York: Schocken, 1971.

Spiegelman, Willard. “Breaking the Mirror: Interruption in Merrill's Trilogy.” Eds. David Lehman and Charles Berger. James Merrill: Essays in Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. 186-210.

von Hallbereg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture: 1945-80. Cambridge: Harvard, 1985.