Langdon Hammer on Poem and Manuscripts

Langdon Hammer on the Poem and Manuscripts, from James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf 2015).

From Chapter 8, "Days of 1964, 1964-65)"

. . . Merrill and Jackson had chosen to buy the house in Athens not merely to take “the sex cure,” but to “ ‘belong’ there,” and belonging there, for Merrill, quickly meant belonging to Strato. Since the episode in Istanbul, when he was beaten and robbed by his pick-up, he had been thinking about changing his sexual behavior, and Mouflouzélis gave him an occasion for it. In December, Merrill told Richie, Strato “arrived unexpectedly at the house + caught me red-handed. The scene that followed was so wrenching, and the reconciliation so exquisite, that I have turned into a one-man dog, much to Tony’s amusement. Such a relief. How I hated those ghastly strolls through the gardens.”  When Mouflouzélis discovered Merrill in bed with someone else, he saw it as an infidelity, as Jackson would not have. Merrill’s choice of words (“ wrenching,” “exquisite”) suggests grand opera, where, as in the domestic theater put on by his parents.  (p. 355).

*          *          *

His memory of Nelly’s party includes Strato: their glances meet for a moment across the crowded room. Their first separation was already coming into view. Jackson had been hired to teach a fiction-writing class at Connecticut College in New London (it would be the first time he taught a class of any kind). So he planned to sail home to Stonington before the start of the spring term; Merrill would fly home a week later, still in time to arrive before him. The day of Jackson’s departure, January 16, Merrill made a first attempt to describe in verse his new home and what had happened there. The cross-outs in this case are a record of false starts and corrections, rather than a simulation of them as in The (Diblos) Notebook.

Concrete villas. A few stores.

Apartment houses. Stores. The hospital.

It Ours is a quiet neighborhood.

Across the street you take to the center of town

A steep hill of pines keeps you company.

It looks very large but

It can be climbed in fifteen minutes

For a fine view of the city and the sea.

Underfoot, cyclamen, autumn crocus,

A fine sweat of wildflowers

And the traces, even in cold weather, of smoking +

            eating + loving.

 The free verse and the syntax would be tightened up, the images refined, complicated, developed. But much of “Days of 1964,” the love poem that these lines would grow into, is already in place in his first draft. The draft moves next to a portrait of Kleo:

She is fat + sixty + her legs hurt. She looks

Like a Palmyra sculpture reproduced in horsehair

            + guttapercha.

She loves me, you, loves us all. She groans

All day with love or is it pain?

We do not notably communicate.

She lives nearby with her pious mother

And wastrel son. Who knows how they make do?

We pay her generously, by her lights.

Love makes one generous. Look at you + me.

We’ve known each other so briefly that our bodies

Still seem blessed, young, infinitely resourceful.

We lie mouth to mouth, whispering, all night,

Or sleeping. 

Kleo is caricatured as “a Palmyra sculpture reproduced in horsehair + guttapercha.” “She loves you, me, loves us all”; in the finished poem, he adds, “I think now she was love,” as if hobbled old Kleo were the goddess Aphrodite. She sponsors the lovers, tending to them, caring for them, while they turn toward each other, joined “mouth to mouth,” kissing or talking or both at once, breathing into each other. Strato had “rejuvenated” Merrill, he said. “Mouth to mouth” implies more: it’s an image of resuscitation— or inspiration?

            The directness of this writing, notable and new in Merrill’s work, remained in the poem, although that image did not. The title—“ Days of 1964”— alludes to Cavafy’s similarly titled love poems. Limpid, refined, and dry, Cavafy’s “Days of …” poems are disenchanted modern love stories that honor passion as its own good, in memory. The allusion to Cavafy specifies the sex of the beloved as clearly as “he” or “him” would, even while the poem remains unspecific about the lover’s gender. (Mouflouzélis is always “you” in the poem; he is seen from too close up to require his name or gender to be mentioned.) The allusion links the poem to a gay male artistic tradition, modern and Greek, that includes Yannis Tsarouchis as well as Cavafy. Across from the draft lines about Kleo, Merrill wrote, “It takes courage to love.” It also took courage to write about love in this way.

            Courage, or perhaps desperation, since “desperate” is the word he uses when the draft turns to describe the poet and his beloved in bed at night. They are laughing, just as Merrill and Mouflouzélis did over Strato’s “weird Greek jokes.” This time the joke is the poet’s. Ostensibly a funny story, the anecdote he shares introduces a powerful, oneiric image. That morning, “on the way to market,” he happened to see Kleo near the house

Trudging into the pines. I called,

Called 3 times before she turned around.

She was wearing a bright skyblue sweater, + her face

Was painted. Yes. Her face was painted

Moon white, blue lidded, mouth a pointsettia leaf,

The mask known to many women,

Often in some kind of desperate need.

I waved and walked on.

The draft goes on: “One must be desperate to love.” The next day, writing to Richie, Merrill put the anecdote into prose: “A week ago exactly I was driving to Kolonaki and saw a familiar figure trudging up into the pines of Lykabettos on her bad legs— Kyria Kleo who cleans for us. I honked + honked + finally she looked around.” Her face was “painted + powdered … within an inch of her life, or mine.” They were both embarrassed. “Was she off to a rendezvous? to sell herself?” he wonders. “The memory absolutely haunts me.”

             Whether or not the sixty-year-old matron was going into the park to “sell herself,” as is doubtful, Merrill was ready to think she was. Entering the wood, she entered his imagination as an archetypal figure, the mother who is also a whore, a symbol of human duality. “She called me her real son,” he says about Kleo in “Days of 1964.” The poem sets us up to think that Kleo is really his mother: she and her “pious mother” are Greek, working-class translations of Mama and Mis’ Annie, and Jimmy, taking “the sex cure” in Greece, is a version of Lakis, the “wastrel son” who causes them grief. It makes sense that Hellen would have a role, if only in disguise, in this poem celebrating his love for Strato: she had obstructed Jimmy’s love for Kimon; wouldn’t she want to step in again with Strato, if she could? Going back to the U.S., as Merrill was about to, would always mean going back to her.

             But Kleo doesn’t stand in Merrill’s way, as Hellen would have. In fact, when they recognize each other on the street, he identifies with Kleo, as if she and he shared a condition of “desperate need.” Her mask, in the finished poem, demands in two stabbing monosyllables: “Eat me, pay me.” In his notebook, Merrill apologizes to his beloved, saying “Forgive me” for his demands. “And may Kyria Kleo,” he asks, “Forgive me, if anyone ever translates this / Into her language + reads it to her.” The first draft ends,

I’ve gone so long without loving

I do not know what I’m saying.

Perhaps I am wearing a mask.

I feel I am climbing constantly these days

            shameless world of

Into a region of excrement + wild/ flowers

Trembling in wind. My legs give under me

            But you are at my side, masked in my love

 

            (pp. 363-67)

*          *          *

 On February 6, shortly before he sent “From the Cupola” to Poetry, Merrill went back to “Days of 1964” and rapidly finished the poem. In Nights and Days, Merrill placed “From the Cupola” and “Days of 1964” side by side at the end of the book, “Days of 1964” coming last. Together the two poems demonstrate his ability to work in different poetic modes at once. It is not that the mythological poem was built upon the actuality of the love poem;  nor was the immediacy of the love poem won by abandoning the artifice of the other, like an unnecessary disguise. Merrill wanted both kinds of poem. He even wanted aspects of each kind of poem inside the other. His affair with Strato is present in the sensuality of “From the Cupola”— in the bright lamp and its scalding wax; and the lovers of “Days of 1964” are not only their ordinary, quotidian selves, but embodiments of Eros and Psyche.

            The finished poem begins,

Houses, an embassy, the hospital,

Our neighborhood sun-cured if trembling still

In pools of the night’s rain …

Across the street that led to the center of town

A steep hill kept one company part way

Or could be climbed in twenty minutes

For some literally breathtaking views,

Framed by umbrella pines, of city and sea.

Underfoot, cyclamen, autumn crocus grew

Spangled as with fine sweat among the relics

Of good times had by all. If not Olympus,

An out-of-earshot, year-round hillside revel.

Compared with the first draft of these lines, some changes stand out. In the new second and third lines, there are those “pools of the night’s rain,” suggesting a flood of feeling that has left the poet, like the landscape, “trembling,” not yet “sun-cured.” There is also a shift from the present into the past tense. Distance has opened between the poet and his experience. He can see it more fully and clearly now. But something has been lost.   

            As he worked on the poem, Merrill made the mountain more important. The dew, a motif from ancient Greek love poetry, rinses “the relics” of lovemaking; its “fine sweat” indicates the heat of passion, the natural forces within the lovers. The mountain, Kleo’s destination when Merrill saw her cross the street with her face painted, promises both debasement and purification. Back home in Connecticut, he added these lines, describing his route after encountering her:

Startled mute, we had stared— was love illusion?—

And gone our ways. Next, I was crossing a square

In which a moveable outdoor market’s

Vegetables, chickens, pottery kept materializing

Through a dream-press of hagglers each at heart

Leery lest he be taken, plucked,

The bird, the flower of that November mildness,

Self lost up soft clay paths, or found, foothold,

Where the bud throbs awake

The better to be nipped, self on its knees in mud—

Here I stopped cold, for both our sakes;

 

And calmer on my way home bought us fruit.

 

In the market’s commotion, food and goods, not love, are on sale. But for the poet, under the pressure of the question posed by Kleo’s painted face—“ was love illusion?”— the market might as well be the Metro, where Jimmy and Strato met. Here everyone is a “haggler” looking out for himself, flirtatiously, anxiously delaying the moment of exchange, “Leery” of others (a word suggesting both “wary” and “leering”). One fears being “taken” or cheated. But “taken” is also exactly what one wants— in the sense of chosen, singled out, transported.

             “I’m so in love,” Merrill told Vassilikos, “my soul flies up to heaven!” “Days of 1964,” developing that idea, plays on the motif of the soul’s ascent to heaven through love in Plato’s Symposium. But there’s no question here of leaving the body behind. The poet, like Psyche, is coming to terms with the “physical source” of his “fine feelings.” So it is no surprise when Eros materializes in the poem’s superb climactic lines:

 Where I hid my face, your touch, quick, merciful,

Blindfolded me. A god breathed from my lips.

If that was illusion, I wanted it to last long;

To dwell, for its daily pittance, with us there,

Cleaning and watering, sighing with love or pain.

I hoped it would climb when it needed to the heights

Even of degradation, as I for one

Seemed, those days, to be always climbing

Into a world of wild

Flowers, feasting, tears— or was I falling, legs

Buckling, heights, depths,

Into a pool of each night’s rain?

But you were everywhere beside me, masked,

As who was not, in laughter, pain, and love.

The “you” is Strato. Yet, with that blindfold, the lover becomes precisely no specific person, but Eros, covering Psyche’s eyes. At the same time, the poet’s identity is transformed, for he is Eros too: “A god breathed from my lips.”      

            When we think back to Merrill’s sense of personal crisis during 1962 and the complex self-disgust conveyed in “The Thousand and Second Night,” a poem placed second in the order of poems in Nights and Days, these lines, coming at the end of the volume, seem like a saving answer: love, the title of the “lost” book, has been found. He achieves this renewal of belief, furthermore, without renouncing his skepticism. In reply to Tony Harwood, he wrote in his notebook, “[ F]or you delusion seems to be something one must try to vanquish at all costs, while for me it is more like a trusted friend with whom I’ve been on excellent terms for years + years.” The word returned as he worked on “Days of 1964”: “If that is delusion, may it last long, long.” Moving, in revision, from “delusion” to “illusion” (“ If that was illusion …”), he chose a word associated not with madness but conscious, crafted artifice.

            Evidently he was ready to answer the question: yes, love is illusion; or, it depends on illusion. Saying so in this poem releases him to affirm his own ascent “each night” in Kleo’s footsteps. He climbs like her to “the heights / Even of degradation.” Just so his free verse lines climb and buckle before coming to rest in a last, unrhymed pentameter couplet. Earlier he debates whether Kleo sighs in love “or pain,” and whether his lover gasps in love “or laughter.” Here “and” replaces “or” and leaves no choice between these terms: they are all part of the same experience. His lover is “masked, / As who was not, in laughter, pain, and love.”

             The masks Merrill’s lovers wear at the end of “Days of 1964” are necessary for the illusion of their union, for love, to work. But masks also separate them. Perhaps that consciousness of necessary separateness is expressed in Merrill’s choice of the past tense. No, he hasn’t already lost Strato— only left him in Athens, for now— but it is as if he has, because he knows that, as Friar taught him, the love that the lover “brings may pass over the threshold of the other’s solitude, but not he.” The lover has to remain behind, like Strato. Cavafy’s “Days of …” are set in the erotic haze of the past. “Days of 1964” is a poem about a love affair in progress that it is already being pushed into memory. Now, in late February 1965, as this period of fervent composition ended, Merrill could take satisfaction in his achievement. Over the past year he’d composed three poems of undeniable boldness and originality: “The Broken Home,” “From the Cupola,” and “Days of 1964.” Each poem puts its faith in a poetics of masks and illusion. But artifice is one thing in art and another thing in life. What would it be like to live an illusion? Over the next two years, in his relationship with Strato Mouflouzélis, Merrill was going to find out. (pp. 373-75).

See also Excerpts from  Langdon Hammer on "Days of 1964," Chapter 9, "Chills and Fevers, Passions and Betrayals (1965– 67)" in the left margin.