SOURCE: “James Merrill: Revealing by Obscuring,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. XXI, No. 4, Autumn, 1980, 549-71.

Too much understanding petrifies.

“From the Cupola”¹

The term “confessional poetry” has earned widespread skepticism: as a generic term, it is mainly misleading.² Yet it would be hard to trace the development of recent American poetry without reference to the influence of Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959), W. D. Snodgrass' Heart's Needle (1960), and the poems collected in Sylvia Plath's Ariel (1966). Whatever claims may be made on behalf of “confessional poetry,” it is plain that these books all contributed to the reinstatement of two closely related literary conventions: the notion that poems originate in their subject matter, and the corollary that poets mean, at least literally, what they say. These are of course not “facts” about literature (nor even about these four books) but conventions, rhetorical rules whereby poems are understood, if not often written. My point here is only the obvious one that during the sixties these conventions, which have their roots in common-sense notions about poetry, were more accessible than they had been in decades. Which is to say not only that many sixties poems invoke these conventions, but that many others deliberately flout them. My interest in this essay is James Merrill's ironic wrenching of these rules. For a number of his most important poems, as I will show, originate in calculated reticence; whereas confessional poets characteristically hold a sharp focus on subject matter, Merrill often writes around interpretable silences. More importantly, the obliqueness I am describing conforms to the attitudes and proprieties invoked by Merrill's characteristic style.

Merrill himself has insisted that confessional poetry is as conventional as any other, that it has no special claims on truth-telling (CW, pp. 139-140). Confessions, however, have a special place in Merrill's writing—from Francis Tanning's confession of wealth and sexual inexperience to Xenia in The Seraglio (1957),³ to Merrill's seductive invocation of his muse, Psyche, in “From the Cupola” (1966)—

Tell me about him, then. Not a believer,
I'll hold my tongue while you, my dear, dictate.

(ND, p. 38)

—right up to the coy opening lines of “The Book of Ephraim” (1976): “my subject matter / Gave me pause—so intimate, so novel” (DC, p. 47).⁴ Full disclosure, however, is the last thing one has reason to expect of Merrill. He has admitted that one part of the subject of “From the Cupola” is “an unknowable situation, something I'm going to keep quiet about.” Yet he invites his readers “to guess at, to triangulate … [that] story, the untold one” (CW, p. 146). Loaded silences are a rhetorical trope for Merrill. In “Part of the Vigil” he imagines himself, tiny, plumbing the inner passages of his lover's heart: “What if my effigy were down there? What, / Dear god, if it were not! / If it were nowhere in your heart! / Here I turned back. Of the rest I do not speak” (FS, p. 24). And near the end of “Words for Maria” he feigns interest in his housekeeper's buried life:

About what went before
Or lies beneath, how little one can glean.
Girlhood, marriage, the war …
I'd like once (not now, here comes Giulio)
Really to hear—I mean—I didn't mean—
You paint a smiling mouth to answer me:
“Since when does L'Enfant care for archaeology?”

(FS, p. 13)

Merrill's joke is that contrived obstacle to his hearing Maria's “secrets”—“here comes Giulio.” Maria knows as well as Merrill's readers that what L'Enfant most enjoys is her painted face. These little tricks, rhetorical caresses of ignorance, have a serious tacit point to register. Speculating on the transience of glory, Merrill says: “—Might reputations be deflated there? / I wondered here, but Ephraim changed the subject / As it was in his tactful power to do” (DC, p. 98). Quiet evasions like Ephraim's, like Merrill's, testify to a delicate system of human meaning whose categories, felt by people of understanding, might be compromised by express formulation. Reticence, for Merrill, is painstakingly deliberate and exact in its meaning: thus, in “The Summer People,” Andrew, Margaret, and Nora “dealt with Jack from then on / By never mentioning him” (FS, p. 68). There is a class of people for whom silence is a badge of discretion and a measure of controlled power, the power to ignore.

There are more strictly literary ways to explain Merrill's inclination to bury certain subjects, and some of these are pertinent. Merrill himself has spoken of “buried meanings” as a kind of hedge against trivia: “Without something like them, one ends up writing light verse about love affairs.”⁵ But perhaps more important is his early declared allegiance to the commonplace that music and meaning rob from each other in poetry. These lines come from “The Drowning Poet” (1947):

To drown was the perfection of technique,
The word containing its own sense, like Time;
And turning to the sea he entered it
As one might speak of poems in a poem
Or at the crisis in the sonata quote
Five-finger exercises: a compliment
To all accomplishment.

(FP, p. 17)

The poet dedicated to his craft scorns referential meaning; he prefers poems which refer only to other poems (better yet, to translations of poems) and thereby honor the boundaries between Art and Life. By this understanding, allusions do not, in Eliotic fashion, deepen the resonance of themes; they gesture disdain for the bourgeois or common-sense expectation of moral wisdom from poetry. Thus the arch-poet, Apollo, “Inflicted so much music on the lyre / That no one could have told you what he sang” (1958; CT, p. 52). Music properly overpowers sense. According to this Shelleyan revision of the French Symbolists, the poet aims “at something not unlike / Meaning relieved of sense, / To plant a flag there on that needle peak / Whose diamond grates in the revolving silence” (1964; ND, p. 24).

Yet Merrill is self-critical always, and he has nicely revealed the blindness of a poetic which takes for granted the sanctified reserve of art. Here are some lines from “Mirror” (1958), a poem reworking the traditional art-as-mirror topos (the mirror is addressing the window):

You embrace a whole world without once caring
To set it in order. That takes thought. Out there
Something is being picked. The red-and-white    bandannas
Go to my heart. A fine young man
Rides by on horseback. Now the door shuts. Hester
Confides in me her first unhappiness.
This much, you see, would never have been fitted
Together, but for me.

(11. 13-20; CT, p. 36)

Constructed order characterizes the special province of art, yet the fullness and depth of this art's order is in question. For the mirror arranges surfaces on a plane, as some poets constellate images in verse. (Merrill, in a playful moment of self-parody, has referred to his own version of this poetic as “word-painting” [DC, p. 48].) The three indicative sentences stretched over lines 16-18 all but iron the human drama out of the narrative: the language makes little distinction between the closing of a door and a young woman's feeling when her first romance has ended. The mirror cannot connect events: the three sentences, without conjunctions, line up like beads on a string. The mirror prides itself on the thoughtfulness of its order (1. 14), but Merrill uses his buried-subject trope to show where an art of dazzling surfaces cannot penetrate: “Out there / Something is being picked.” One must guess at what is being picked, but the mirror, blindly, supplies clues. The persimmon mentioned later in the poem (1. 30) is raised chiefly in the South, and the bandannas dear to the heart of the mirror may well be worn by slaves picking cotton. What the mirror cannot penetrate is the depth of human motive in both politics and love: why is “something” being picked? Why is that “fine young man” riding away? These are questions about the human presence beyond appearances, and the mirror cannot respond to them. For the mirror, as for a poetic of artfully disposed imagery, slaves are “red-and-white bandannas,” and a failed romance is a man on horseback and a shut door. On occasion, however, Merrill has obliquely honored the humaneness of this sort of poetic, for part of what it supresses is destruction. There are moments in Merrill's verse (as in the opening five lines of “A Timepiece” [CT, p. 8], or in this clause from “After the Fire”: “Remembering also the gift of thumb-sized garnet / Bruises he clasped round Aleko's throat” [BE, p. 6]) when his painterly style quietly indicates that below the dazzling surface lies the alternative to civilized manners: violence. But in “Mirror” Merrill suggests that the passing of this poetic in time is as natural and inevitable as erosion.⁶

In 1964 Merrill published “The Thousand and Second Night,” a wonderful poem literally about a buried subject. James, the “speaker” of the poem, likens himself to Hagia Sophia.

The building, desperate for youth, has smeared
All over its original fine bones
Acres of ochre plaster. A diagram
Indicates how deep in the mudpack
The real facade is. I want my face
back.

(ND, p. 5)

C. B. Cox once noted that the subject of the poem is the anxiety of middle age,⁷ but beneath that subject lies another. Merrill himself has said: “I don't know what the main subject [of “The Thousand and Second Night”] is—the poem is flirtatious in that sense.”⁸ In the third section, “Carnivals,” Merrill leans rather heavily on his trope of evasion—

We had made our peace
With—everything.

(ND, p. 9)

Here's the dwarf back with cronies … oh I say!
Forget about it.

(ND, p. 11)

I spent the night rekindling with expert
Fingers—but that phase needn't be discussed. …

(ND, p. 11)

And now the long adventure
Let that wait.
I'm tired, it's late at night.

(ND, p. 13)

—and for good reason: this middle section bears most directly on the true subject of the poem. The opening quatrains refer to a change James has undergone: his friends accuse him of having become a “vain / Flippant unfeeling monster” (ND, p. 9). Although he resents that formulation (“To hear them talk”), he does not dispute the basic diagnosis—“they were right.” He has changed, and his recent meeting with M. (on whom he once had a crush) and his wife comes into the narrative as implicit evidence of that change. Their “war” is over, because James has lost feeling for all past pursuits of Eros:

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.
… Where just a week ago I thought to delve
For images of those years in a Plain Cover.
Some light verse happened as I looked them over.…

(ND, p. 10)

“The Thousand and Second Night” is a morning-after poem; James surveys his past in hung-over disgust. For James, Psyche and Eros, thought and feeling, mind and body, cannot reach each other; the right half of his face is paralyzed by that split. The witty lines on Great-Uncle Alistair's pornographic postcards enter the poem under the auspices of that colon: they describe scenes from Alistair's suppressed sexual fantasies, but James makes them serve as “images of those years in a Plain Cover”; James regards his own rendezvous with Eros as grotesque and comically pointless—much like Alistair's silly postcards. Alistair's daughter Alix wants to banish these sordid mementos: “‘We'll burn them. Light the fire’” (ND, p. 11)—but James knows better the consequences of fire for Psyche and Eros. The two prose passages which follow offer a rationale for re-uniting Eros and Psyche. The paragraph by “Germaine Nahman” claims that “the libertine was ‘in search of his soul.’” (ND, p. 12).⁹ The extraordinary sexual ambitions of Great-Uncle Alistair and of James himself might be understood, by this analysis, not as base debauchery but as quests back toward that infantile state in which “The soul … could not be told from the body.” The libertine (Alistair, James) sought all along to bring Eros and Psyche together again. And James's limp face is testimony that they never were entirely separated. “Natural calamities (tumor and apoplexy no less than flood and volcano) may at last be hailed as positive assurances, perverse if you like, of life in the old girl yet” (ND, p. 12). Just as the earth kicks back against the abuses inflicted upon her, so the body complains of the excesses imposed upon her. And these complaints are proof that the body is more than just physis, that James's “precious sensibility” has not been entirely wrecked (ND, p. 5), though now it may take a good “pinch … to recall how warmly and deeply those two [Eros and Psyche] did, in fact, love one another” (ND, p. 12).

The true, and buried, subject of the poem is the difficulty one has reconciling ideas about love with erotic experience itself. Promiscuity is said to be more common, more often central to homosexual than to heterosexual experience, and that promiscuity is frequently cited as a major cause of homosexual anxiety. There is a sense, then, in which the subject of the poem has a special bearing on homosexuality. Specifically, the phrase “images of those years in a Plain Cover” may suggest that what James refers to as erotic grotesquerie dates from a period when he had not worn his homosexuality proudly, that James's “change” is related to Francis Tanning's change in The Seraglio: they will no longer keep their preferences under cover. Merrill's use of Great-Uncle Alistair's postcards, however, seems especially oblique, for Alistair's fantasies are plainly heterosexual and James has already indicated that his erotic inclinations have been homosexual (ND, p. 9). Yet Merrill introduces those postcards in order to suggest that the split between Eros and Psyche should not be smugly dismissed or clinically “understood” as a consequence of that homosexual promiscuity which Merrill depicts as a series of whaling expeditions (ND, p. 10). For in the end Merrill will make very traditional claims for his conclusions:

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.

(ND, p. 12)

This section of the poem (the five sestets following the prose passages) was the most difficult for Merrill to write (CW, p. 145), and for good reason. His thematic conclusion, here as elsewhere, is easily formulated in conventional, trite language, and he steps free of the inert burden of such phrases only by openly displaying, without disowning, the staleness of these truisms. This rhetorical maneuver Merrill learned in writing “An Urban Convalescence.” In fact, he claimed that just this trope—

The sickness of our time requires
That these as well be blasted in their prime.
You would think the simple fact of having lasted
Threatened our cities like mysterious fires.
There are certain phrases which to use in a poem
Is like rubbing silver with quicksilver. Bright
But facile, the glamour deadens overnight.
For instance, how ‘the sickness of our time’
Enhances, then debases, what I feel.

(1960; WS, p. 5)

—was the turning point which led to Nights and Days.¹⁰ The debasement comes when Merrill sees that his analysis of experience travels the well-worn grooves of contemporary journalism. To recognize that one's ideas are as common, as vulgar, literally, as the thoughts of those who daily deal in pontifications is the challenge Merrill modestly accepts in the books following Water Street. For instance, in “From the Cupola” he offers Psyche the counsel of commonplaces:

Weeping? You must not.
All our pyrotechnic flights
Miss the sleeper in the pitch-dark breast.
He is love:
He is everyone's blind spot.
We see according to our lights.

(ND, p. 46)

To posit these sentences as conclusions is Merrill's way of mildly suggesting that there is nothing new under the sun. And much the same point is made by setting the Eros-Psyche myth on Long Island Sound, and by bringing the Tithonus story forward through the centuries, as Merrill does in The Immortal Husband (1955). Merrill is plainly skeptical of the poetic claims often made on behalf of one or another unusual subject matter. He is a poet for whom subject matter is properly subordinate to style. He has never claimed, as so many of his contemporaries have (Olson and Ammons are obvious examples) to have many ideas of his own: “In neither / The world's poem nor the poem's world have I / Learned to think for myself, much” (DC, p. 129). Commonplaces, truisims, clichés may sound their notes flatly, but the sense of such formulations resonates through long experience:

take
Any poor smalltown starstruck sense of “love
That makes the world go round”—see how the phrase
Stretches from Mystic to Mount Palomar
Back to those nights before the good old days,
Before the axle jumped its socket so
That genes in shock flashed on/off head to toe
Before mill turned to maelstrom, and IBM
Wrenched from Pythagoras his diadem.

(DC, p. 32)

The resonance is directly due to the age-old truth (as they say) of the proposition.

Novelty and variety certainly have a place in Merrill's poetic: they are criteria of surface excellence, sheen. Likewise subject matter (though not theme) is something to be “worked up”:

Hadn't—from books, from living—
The profusion dawned on us, of “languages”
Any one of which, to who could read it,
Lit up the system it conceived?—bird-flight,
Hallucinogen, chorale and horoscope:
Each its own world, hypnotic, many-sided
Facet of the universal gem.
Ephraim's revelations—we had them
For comfort, thrills and chills, “material.”

(DC, p. 75)

Merrill's theme in the “Book of Ephraim” is the coming and going of love, or, as he puts it, “The incarnation and withdrawal of / A god” (DC, p. 47). Ephraim's transmissions on the Ouija board are, properly speaking, his subject matter—but that hardly matters. Ephraim and the subject of ghosts (a subject that may not be there at all) are no more than a vehicle for the theme Merrill long ago took for his own. To manage that theme, he now wishes for (of all things) a plain style:

the kind of unseasoned telling found
In legends, fairy tales, a tone licked clean
Over the centuries by mild old tongues,
Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.

(DC, p. 47)

Although his deepened commitment to narrative verse holds some of his mannerisms in check, he is still the last poet whose plainness can be trusted, and I will suggest below why plainness is at odds with the larger ambitions of his style.

But before turning directly to matters of style, I wish to look briefly at “Lost in Translation” (1974), Merrill's most recent rationale for constructed secrets. In this poem, Merrill tells how, as a young boy, he spirited away a single, palm-shaped piece of a jigsaw puzzle successfully completed with Mademoiselle in 1939. This single missing piece reminds him of his boyhood infatuation for his governess, but more importantly of his parents' divorce in 1939 (his father remarried two weeks later: hence the boy's fond imagination that “old wives who know the worst / Outsweat that virile fiction of the New … ” [DC, p. 8]). Merrill indirectly recollects feeling torn between his mother and father:

Houri and Afreet
Both claim the Page. He wonders whom to serve,
And what his duties are, and where his feet. …

(DC, p. 8)

That missing piece is a token of Merrill's lost footing, for it reminds him of his surrogate parent Mademoiselle, who kept her then dubious German ancestry a secret, and through her of the global fracture of 1939 which made her reticence prudent. And through a literary recollection of another French-German nexus, Merrill recalls “Palme,” the poem Valéry wrote in 1917, one year before the threat of a German advance led him away from Paris, five years before Rilke translated the poem.¹¹ The tree in “Palme” manages to keep its footing in sand and, like a secret, bear its fruit in silence (“Chaque atome de silence / Est la chance d'un fruit mûr!”); it stands securely between earth and sky (“L'attirance de la terre / Et le poids du firmament!”), or mother earth and father sky/time, as Merrill imagines them in “The Broken Home” (ND, pp. 27-28). Rilke knew, Merrill suggests, how much of Valéry's poem would be memorialized in the translation only by silent loss, absence: a phrase like “d'un fruit mûr” becomes “das Reifen genau.” (“Verger” and “parfumer,” incidentally, are absent from this particular Valéry poem.) And Merrill claims to know, from looking at the German text,

What Pains, what monolithic Truths
Shadow stanza to stanza's symmetrical
Rhyme-rutted pavement. Know that ground plan left
Sublime and barren, where the warm Romance
Stone by stone faded, cooled; the fluted nouns
Made taller, lonelier than life
By leaf-carved capitals in the afterglow.

(DC, pp. 9-10)

His secret homage to Rilke's self-deprivation is a haggard ghost of that stanzaic scheme (ababccdeed) buried in his own poem (11. 19-30). And Merrill's image of the prosody as a pavement reinforces the recollection of that passage in “From the Cupola” in which the palm-Aphrodite gradually undermines the paved sidewalk at its base, just as Psyche's fantasy of Eros obscures her grimy house-cleaning chores on Long Island Sound.¹² For the take-home message—and Merrill does choose the most inspirational passage of the Valéry/Rilke poem for his epigraph—is that even the waste and failure of misunderstanding and misstatement (on one level, his parents' divorce) harbors sustenance (on that same level, material for poems, Mnemosyne).

Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?
But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found—I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.

(DC, p. 10)

Finally, the palm represents the translator himself. There are at least six translators in the poem: Rilke; Mademoiselle, who misstates her own ancestry; her nephew, the UN interpreter, who translates the misstatements known as diplomacy; Maggie Teyte, the English musical translator of French songs, who disguised her name (Tate) so that the French would pronounce it properly; Stonington, that translation of Greece on Long Island Sound; and Merrill, who brings near English the Valéry/Rilke poem and near stage-Arabic his parents' relationship (Houri and Afreet). They all suggest, diversely, that effacement, the keeping of secrets, in the translator's code is as important to communication as disclosure is. Rilke's direct translation of Valéry's stanza and his effort to make exactitude take the place of Valéry's sensuosity (fruit mûr-Reifen genau) suggest that plainness itself can be yet another version of obscurity, of shadowy self-effacement.

The patterns of thematic secrecy which I have been tracing correspond profoundly, I think, to certain of Merrill's stylistic manners. Periphrasis, talking around a subject, is the most obvious of these correspondent manners. “Maisie,” the poem following “The Thousand and Second Night” in Nights and Days, is an extended periphrasis: Merrill never mentions that the subject of the poem is a cat. These arabesques around reticence—“the mirror of the tide's / retreat” for wet sand (CT, p. 59); “Great drifts of damask” for napkins (ND, p. 9)—are part of the joy of Merrill's writing. Some of the wittiest moments in his verse occur when he twirls words, euphemistically, around what need not be said. For example, these lines from the postcards-section of “The Thousand and Second Night”—

She strokes his handlebar who kneels
To do for her what a dwarf does for him

(ND, p. 10)

—twist around the contortions of double fellatio for three. For Merrill, the language of poetry is implicitly prefaced by a contractual “In other words.” In fact, the more obvious the periphrasis, the purer and more apparent the playful spirit behind it—which turns out to be a grandly liberating principle.

Because Merrill wears his periphrastic motive on his sleeve, he can pursue words and phrases that are off limits to his contemporaries. From the beginning. his diction has been precious—“smilingly” (FP, p. 14; CT, p. 9), “swifterly” (FP, p. 23), “amberly” (FP, p. 43), “lucent” (FP, p. 67)—in ways that would make Robert Lowell or Charles Olson blush. Similarly, from his First Poems to his most recent, Merrill has maintained easy access to that stable of words which trail behind them the label “Poetic.” In his early poems, bodies are “winsome” (FP, p. 42) and, for a rhyme, can even be made to “wend” (FP, p. 71). In The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace there are Miltonic “lowing beasts secure” (CT, p. 11), and in “The Thousand and Second Night” on billboards “Loom wingèd letters” (ND, p. 4). In The Fire Screen “Piebald hindquarters of another guest” identify someone vomiting in a toilet (FS, p. 34). In Braving the Elements, Merrill sees his mother as “bepearled” (BE, p. 14), just as in “The Book of Ephraim” his mirror is said to be “bespattered” (DC, p. 86). And still more firmly impressed on his diction than these archaic poeticisms is that odd category of adjectives beginning with “a-” which, like tableaux, freeze actions into qualities. A few of these words are inconspicuous, ordinary: asleep (BE, p. 16), awake (WS, p. 27), ajar (CT, p. 63; BE, p. 30), aloud (CT, p. 36). Others are less so, but still familiar: askance (FP, p. 36), aghast (CT, p. 27; ND, p. 16), askew (CT, p. 54), aloft (CT, p. 6), agape (DC, p. 63). But most of these adjectives are strikingly rare or novel: aspin (CT, p. 6), atremble (CT, p. 9), atilt (CT, p. 11), aswirl (CT, p. 47), atwirl (CT, p. 33), ableach (CT, p. 33), adrowse (CT, p. 47), aflicker (WS, p. 22; FS, p. 43), aswim (ND, p. 30), acrackle (ND, p. 52), abubble (FS, p. 24), ashiver (FS, p. 33), aglitter (FS, p. 47), aflush (DC, p. 48), awince (DC, p. 77). The list, little in itself, shows Merrill's willingness to indulge his own painterly mannerisms. He would be the last poet to use such words and phrases naively; he knows that the components of his diction—precious, archaic, poetic, and mannered—have been so firmly displaced from usage that their appearance nudges his poems outside the spoken language. But that may be greater gain than loss for Merrill: his poems proudly occupy a special corner of the language where the possibilities of play are unlimited by mundane considerations of democratic usage. Likewise, syntax, which ordinarily preserves, for narration or ratiocination, the distinct categories of agent, action, object, in poems like “Olive Grove” and “Thistledown” becomes a game of suspense; questions of who did what to whom are submerged in the fluencies of syntax, as in a solvent (CT, pp. 5-7).¹³

Merrill demands all the special prerogatives of poetic language: diction, syntax, and, perhaps most strikingly, metaphor. He is a master of the obviously “clever” figure. Figurative language, for him, is plainly ornamental and playful. The burden of striking figures is that they are so obviously “poetic,” that they seem to display the powers of the poet more boldly than they do the facets of the subject. But this is a light burden for Merrill: he would never attempt to conceal his artfulness. His figures are almost tricks, because they rest on certain set moves. For instance, one move which often generates a figural showstopper is to liken language to objects:

On which (to the pilgrim who forgets
His Arabic) a wild script of gold whips …

(ND, p. 4);

or the same move in the opposite direction:

A mapmaker (attendant since Jaipur)
Says that from San Francisco our path traces
The Arabic for GREAT WONDER. …

(DC, p. 83)

The most common move behind these witty figures (and of course it is not just Merrill's) is a mild personification: objects or animals are likened to people. Often these are just quick, deft touches, as with the “dove with Parkinson's disease” (DC, p. 28) or the “snapshots old / Enough to vote” (DC, p. 85). But in other instances, these figures are sustained for a line or two, as though Merrill were in no hurry to be getting anywhere. Here, for example, are two lines describing a ski-lift:

Prey swooped up, the iron love seat shudders
Onward into its acrophilic trance.

(BE, p. 53)

And a few more toying with an etymological possibility:

Moonglow starts from scratches as my oval
Cheval-glass tilting earthward by itself
—The rider nodding and the reins gone slack—
Converges with lamplight ten winters back.

(DC, p. 94)

Economy be damned: Merrill takes time to have fun. And that is a freedom sanctioned, he knows from reading Auden, by no lesser precedent than Don Juan, with its “air of irrelevance, of running on at the risk of never becoming terribly significant” (CW, p. 151); and Merrill has lately acknowledged his debt to Byron's master, Pope (DC, pp. 56, 92, 105, 116). For Merrill, energy, invention, ornamentation—not signification—are what make poetry.

These stylistic manners are mostly idiosyncratic: they are the marks by which Merrill allows his language to be identified. There is, however, a greater ambition behind his verse, one which is manifest mainly in diction and tone. He is unusual among his contemporaries, and more generally rare among American poets, in his effort to imply by his style a set of attitudes and values which is claimed by a class of American society. This is a difficult claim to substantiate, not because many other poets make the same effort (they do not: the effort itself is widely held in suspicion) but because American class boundaries are elusive; and to identify the style of an American class is doubly difficult. I will begin, therefore, by identifying the attitudes and values invoked by Merrill's writing and end by suggesting the class loyalties of those attitudes.

Some of these values have already been described: periphrasis, euphemism, and various other mannerisms—such tropes testify to Merrill's esteem for extravagance; he is a poet who, rather than unify style and content in postromantic fashion, prefers to set style at odds with content. His style often throttles content. And style, for Merrill, is a way of playing, not working, for the force behind style is energy serving no particular end but itself. The characteristic tone of his verse is ironic, but only lightly so. In “The Book of Ephraim” he identifies

the tone
We trusted most, a smiling Hellenistic
Lightness from beyond the grave.

(DC, p. 59)

Neither naively jubilant nor bitterly sardonic, the tone he aspires to is one of undeluded good cheer. Here are the first two lines from his elegy for his friend Hans Lodeizen:

Here they all come to die,
Fluent therein as in a fourth tongue.

(CT, p. 2)

Any magazine editor might have altered the second line to conform to the canons of sixties poetic diction (the poem was actually published in the winter 1951-52 issue of Origin, which was militantly opposed to the reigning editorial policies of the fifties):

Fluent in death as in a fourth tongue.

The meter and sense would be preserved and that awkward legalese (“therein”) avoided, but the line would be too heavy by a tone, too naively self-absorbed by a ton.

The proper word for Merrill's tone is arch. That tone is first heard, in Merrill's oeuvre, in the opening line of “Medusa”:

The head, of course, had fallen to disrepair
If not to disrepute.

(FP, p. 10)

This tone is often nicely tuned to syntax. Merrill strikes his note most effectively by tossing off ironic parenthetical clauses so that the irony seems casual, incidental, a result more of his temperament than of any norm or principle of judgment implied by the irony. The tone of the lines from “Medusa” is established not in the main clause but in the “of course” and “if not … ” clauses. Rhetorically, this is a variety of understatement, for the qualifying irony of the lesser clauses in fact throws an entirely new perspective on the main clause. Here are two more examples of this archness:

Tell me, tongue of fire,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.

(ND, p. 27)

From judgment, it would seem, he has refrained. (BE, p. 70)

The tone of the first passage, from “The Broken Home,” is set by two words so placed, syntactically, as to seem parenthetical: “at least.” The irony of the passage can be measured not just by the apocalyptic periphrasis for a candle-flame, “tongue of fire,” but by the difference between “at least as real” (which would be the ordinary syntax) and “as real / at least.” Merrill's version of the phrase makes the ironic stab at his neighbors an off-hand afterthought—easy, for him. Similarly, the single line from “The Victor Dog” sets its tone in the throw-away clause, “it would seem.” And the conditional mood turns the volume lower, as though the claims of the statement were being posited ever so hesitantly and politely. Yet politeness, in this context, has little to do with concern for others: for this archness can become, in the words of Merrill's friends, “vain / Flippant unfeeling” (ND, p. 9).

Merrill is his own critic in this regard:

My friend with time to kill
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.
Try, I suppose, we must, as even Valéry said,
And said more grandly than I ever shall. …

(ND, p. 8)

These lines from “The Thousand and Second Night” move as far toward self-criticism as Merrill has ever cared to go. He criticizes his own willingness to allow archness to become more than mischievous. On occasion, Merrill can be snotty, often when he deals with people he considers his inferiors, either in terms of class or of sensibility. Take, for instance, this quatrain from “Days of 1971”:

Can-can from last night's Orphée
aux Enfers
Since daybreak you've been whistling till I wince.
Well, you were a handsome devil once.
Take the wheel. You're still a fair chauffeur.

(BE, p. 65)

What Merrill tries to censure in the lines quoted from “The Thousand and Second Night” is this sort of glib condescension.¹⁴ But, finally, the point of the passage is that he can only try. The first sign of his effort comes in those lines “I am afraid / I was not human either—ah, who is?” No sooner is he self-critical than his all-embracing skepticism lets him off the hook—“ah, who is?”

Merrill has developed this strategy into tropes for casually universalizing chagrin:

She has brought a cake “for tomorrow”
As if tomorrows were still memorable.

(BE, p. 4)

Look at what's left of that young fellow strapped
Into his wheelchair. How you pity him!
The city ripples, your eyes sicken and swim.
The boy includes you in his sightseeing,
Nodding sociably as if who of us
Here below were more than half a man.

(BE, p. 64)

Tonight in the magician's tent
Next door a woman will be sawed in two,
But right now she's asleep, as who is not, as who …

(DC, p. 25)

I'll never know.
Who ever does?

(DC, p. 34)

A dirtbrown helicopter …
The sunniness beneath it, up and went
As much had, without saying—

(DC, p. 43)

For if, poor soul, he did so, he was lost.
Ah, so were we!

(DC, p. 99)

World-weariness, the tone of the perdu, is an attitude Merrill dons like a theatrical mask; it is purely conventional, void of genuine emotional significance—pure style without content. In these two stanzas from “The Summer People” Andrew and Margaret toy with the conventionality of their own cries of despair:

“Oh God, this life's so pointless,
So wearing,” Margaret said.
“You're telling me,” Andrew agreed.
“High time we both were dead.”
“It is. I have pills—let's
take them!”
He looked at her with wit.
“Just try. You know we'd never
Hear the end of it.”

(FS, pp. 68-69)

Clever to the end, they know that weariness, like various small courtesies, is demanded of them; it is a code-attitude no more to be taken literally than the “love” such people express for four-hand piano, bridge, gossip, croquet, and entertaining (FS, pp. 58-59). Thus when James (to return to the passage from “The Thousand and Second Night”) says “He is, or was,” he is calling into question the propriety of this programmatic skepticism. The next two and a half lines describe the death of an ordinary worker, and these lines quietly accuse James of a failure of feeling, flip callousness. But Merrill goes only so far in implicit self-accusation: at this point the suspect archness resumes control of the passage and continues with the poem—“We have no way to check / These headlong emigrations out of life.” Archness is Merrill's ground-note: he cannot silence it, though he can acknowledge and regret, from time to time, its impoliteness, or, worse, insensitivity.

Archness is an apt term for describing Merrill's characteristic tone, but it does not indicate the greater aspiration of his style; for that, another term will serve better: camp. In 1929 Ezra Pound described what he called logopoeia: “It employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play. … It is the latest come, and perhaps most tricky and undependable mode.”¹⁵ Merrill, more than any of his American contemporaries, successfully invokes by his tone and diction patterns of usage which add up to a coherent sensibility, one whose class allegiance, or aspiration is explicit. Here are some lines from “Words for Maria” that display the camp tone:

I'm calling you henceforth
The Lunatic.
Today at 4 a.m. in a snack bar
You were discovered eating, if you please,
Fried squid; alone. Aleko stood aghast.
.....Sappho has been to your new flat, she says.
Tony, who staggered there with the Empire
Mirror you wanted from his shop, tells how
You had him prop it in a chair and leave
That instant. Really now!

(FS, p. 12)

The campiness of these lines is established largely by insistence: certain words are italicized to insist on one emphasis rather than some other, and the word “alone” is isolated by punctuation to suggest that it is full of meaning that need not, in some company, be elaborated upon. The tone suggests that there is some secret, something not being said, which would explain both the extravagance of Aleko's response and Merrill's implication that Sappho may not be telling the truth. Merrill's success with this tone is measured partly by his ability to make this voice heard, yet he uses it not just dramatically. He can attribute it to anyone, even “the man in the moon”: “The point's to live, love, / Not shake your fist at the feast” (FS, p. 30). And Ephraim, too, has his share of camp lines (DC, pp. 41, 78, 94).

The camp tone is less a dialect Merrill can use for some types of characters than a norm—social as well as stylistic—which his verse erects. With that tone goes a set of attitudes and values which is boldest in its political aspect.

Where are the chimneys, the traffic? Instead come  strange
Horizons of ink, and livid treetops massing raggedly
Beyond the sill like poor whites in a study
Of conditions we must one day seriously try to change.

(FS, p. 37)

The Air
Above Los Alamos Is Like A Breath
Sucked In Horror Tod Mort Muerte Death
—Meaning the nearby nuclear research
Our instinct first is to deplore, and second
To think no more of.

(DC, p. 77)

Politics, with few exceptions, is a subject Merrill deliberately, and wittily, disdains:

I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest within my house.

(ND, p. 29)

From the camp viewpoint, politics is stylelessly overladen with content; it can be ignored, because the camp sensibility is premised, as Susan Sontag has noted, on detachment.¹⁶ Merrill—and not just in his campier moments—claims an aristocratic aloofness from political activity.¹⁷ Yet the anachronism “aristocratic” can be taken only metaphorically, even in Merrill's case: it indicates aspiration or desire rather than actual loyalty. The camp sensibility aspires to a stable, sanctioned position from which detachment can be easily afforded, or from which engagement is impractical, uneconomical. Susan Sontag points out that the camp sensibility wants as well to take up one of the supposed burdens of the aristocracy: “Since no authentic aristocrats exist today to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of this taste? Answer: an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste. …”¹⁸ This is not to say that Merrill's style is restrictively homosexual: often he uses phrases which are commonly upper-class without being necessarily camp: “ghastly scenes” (CT, p. 28), “to launch one” (ND, p. 25), “I dare say” (ND, p. 54), “I'm pained” (ND, p. 9), “mayn't I” (ND, p. 53); and the diction of the “The Summer People” shows that Merrill makes no hard and fast distinction between upper-class and camp manners. The line Merrill is likely to insist upon is between upper- and lower-class diction: he typically distances himself from the language commonly understood as colloquial. For example, in “The Locusts” he makes a parenthetical joke of his second-hand rendering of a ruralism: “Come spring (he says) / The grubs will hatch …” (CT, p. 78). And in “Days of 1971” he resorts to a vulgar expression only in a sentence which goes on to climb to high-culture:

One self-righteous truck
Knocked the shit out of a eucalyptus
Whose whitewashed trunk lay twitching brokenly—
Nijinsky in Petrouchka—on the
quai.

(BE, p. 68)

Street-fighting to ballet—that is the distance Merrill puts between himself and what many of his contemporaries regard as colloquial usage.¹⁹ Which is to say that Merrill has no truck with the Whitmanesque, or Wordsworthian, dream of speaking to or for “the people.” Regardless of where his poems appear, of how many copies of his books sell, or of which prizes are awarded him (so far he has received the three most prestigious American awards for poetry: the Bollingen and the National Book Award for Nights and Days, and the Pulitzer Prize for Divine Comedies), Merrill is a coterie poet by rhetorical choice: his diction and tone locate his poetry in a world (wished, of course) where the reigning sensibility is camp. From Merrill's point of view, to have it any other way is, frankly, disgusting:

Must I grow broad- and dirty-minded
Serving a community, a nation
By now past anybody's power to shock?

(DC, p. 12)

Ezra Pound once said that the most intense form of criticism is new composition, and Merrill's verse is critical in just this sense.²⁰ He has been rightly praised for making his own way during a time when gusts of literary fashion blew many of his contemporaries about. Poems such as “The Thousand and Second Night” and “Lost in Translation,” to name only two, seem from one point of view to have “confessions” to make; yet the conventions of confessional poetry are invoked only to be artfully eluded. Merrill's ironic pirouettes around these conventions are more than incidental; his unique position among recent American poets can be located by the social ambitions of his poetry. Like many of the modernist poets of the first half of the century, Merrill is a master of tone. Through his diction and syntax, he manages to situate his writing in relation to patterns of usage which confirm social relations. During the sixties, while some of his contemporaries, under the influence of W. S. Merwin, were pursuing styles that apparently disowned social relations, and others, like Lowell, were attempting to democratize with free verse, low colloquialisms and brand names the densely metaphorical styles they learned in the fifties, Merrill held by his meters and chose his phrases with a sense of class. So distinct a sense of class is implied by his style that he, at least as much as any of his contemporaries, has altered the politics of style in American poetry; which is to say that he has expanded the stylistic horizon of American poetry. Other American poets have succeeded in implying by their styles the attractions of a particular class or political camp: during the thirties there was something of a vogue in leftist literary journals for dialect poetry, and a good deal of recent black poetry is written in dialect. But, for ideological as well as artistic reasons, Merrill would rightly resist that company; the proper analogy is to British poets, and chiefly to Auden. Merrill's distinction is his skeptical view of that American idée fixe, the democratic or classless style.

Notes

1. James Merrill, Nights and Days (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 38; hereafter references to this volume will be abbreviated ND. The following abbreviations will also be used for parenthetical references to Merrill's works: First Poems (New York: Knopf, 1951)—FP; The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (New York: Atheneum, 1959; enlarged edition, 1970)—CT; Water Street (New York: Atheneum, 1962)—WS; The Fire Screen (New York: Atheneum, 1969)—FS; Braving the Elements (New York: Atheneum, 1972)—BE; Divine Comedies (New York: Atheneum, 1976)—DC; The Contemporary Writer, ed. L. S. Dembo & Cyrena N. Pondrom (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1972)—CW. The quotation in my title is taken from “Little Fanfare for Felix Magowan” (ND, p. 31).

2. For an example of how the term has been inflated, see Robert Phillips, The Confessional Poets (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1973), esp. pp. 16-17.

3. James Merrill, The Seraglio (New York: Knopf, 1957), pp. 107-108.

4. In a review of Nights and Days David Kalstone discusses Merrill as a master of the confessional mode (Partisan Review, XXXIV, 1 [Winter 1967], 146-150); however, in his recent discussion of Merrill, Mr. Kalstone prefers to emphasize the ways in which Merrill departs from “confessional” practices (David Kalstone, Five Temperaments [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977], p. 79).

5. Ashley Brown, “An Interview with James Merrill,” Shenandoah, XIX, 4 (Summer 1968), 10.

6. A comparable poem, thematically, is “The Friend of the Fourth Decade” (1968). In this later poem, Merrill still feels the lure of an aesthetic experience without any referential sense, a poetic of surfaces, but he is unable to slip free of human ties to the past—“Certain things die only with oneself” (FS, p. 7).

7. Cox actually said: “‘The Thousand and Second Night’ describes a breakdown in his identity in middle age, the end of purposive union between mind, soul and body or perhaps between himself and his Muse” (The Spectator [21 October 1966], 523).

8. Ashley Brown, “An Interview with James Merrill,” p. 13.

9. “Germaine Nahman” and “A.H. Clarendon,” so far as I can determine, are phantom authors, absences to which Merrill ascribes meaning.

10. Ashley Brown, “An Interview with James Merrill,” pp. 12-13.

11. Henry A. Grubbs, Paul Valéry (New York: Twayne, 1968), p. 61.

12. Judith Moffett has discussed this connection to the Aphrodite-palm of “From the Cupola” in her review of Divine Comedies (Poetry, CXXIX, 1 [October 1976], 42-43).

13. For an excellent discussion of Merrill's syntax, see Richard Howard's essay on Merrill in Alone with America (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 329.

14. The most recent instance of Merrill's condescension is a little more comic than snide:

    Another memory of Mademoiselle.
    We're in a Pullman going South for Christmas,
    She in the lower berth, I in the upper
    As befits whatever station we pass through.

    (DC p. 15)

15. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T.S. Eliot (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), p. 25. Pound goes on to say that the roots of logopoeia lie in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satire (p. 30); Laforgue, however, is the modern exemplar and true master of logopoeia (p. 33).

16. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), p. 288. My discussion of camp style is deeply indebted to her essay “Notes on Camp”; the only other discussion of camp which I know is mentioned by Sontag: Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening (London: Methuen, 1954), pp. 125-126.

17. See, e.g., CW, p. 148; and The Seraglio, pp. 48-49 & 217.

18. Against Interpretation, p. 290.

19. It should be clear, though, that Merrill wants to preserve his ironic access to this level of colloquial usage; the wittiest example of his delight in that language comes in “Days of 1935” (BE, p. 13).

20. Literary Essays, p. 75.