Langdon Hammer on JM and Strato

Langdon Hammer on James Merrill and Strato Mouflouzélis, from James Merrill: Life and Art (New York: Knopf 2015)

From Chapter 8, "Days of 1964 (1964– 65)"

Merrill arrived in Athens on September 28. For the first time in Greece, he would spend the night in a house of his own. Parigory was waiting for him, and they went out to celebrate at a bar called the Metro. The Metro was an orange- and yellow-tiled dive one floor below the street in Omonia (or “Harmony”) Square; it drew men on their way in or out of the train station in the city center. In this “airless tank,” a watering hole with a “jungle idyll” that depicted a tiger and his “lolling” mate painted above the bar, Tony and Jimmy watched “the world / Eddy by, winking, casting up / Such gorgeous flotsam that hearts leapt, or sank.” 1 This evening on their way into the bar, the world cast up something that made this poet’s heart leap: a twenty-two-year-old Greek with bright eyes and a ready smile. Strato Mouflouzélis remembers the meeting this way:

One day I was doing military service in the air force, and I went off duty. I took the train from Tatoi, the base, to Omonia, and there were two men there— Tony and Jimmy. They asked me for a light. Then they asked me, do you want a drink? There was another friend with me, Sotíri. I said to him, go. Jimmy said no, bring the friend. So we went into the bar, the Metro, and had a drink. Then Jimmy asked me, where are you going? I said, Ambelokipi. It’s not far from me, he said. Come home, and we’ll meet some others. So I did, and Jimmy called up the parea. Vassili and Mimi came. Jimmy put out tidbits. And lots to drink. At the end of the night I asked him to drive me to my home, and he did. He took me one street away from our house. We sat and talked in the car. When are you going to have another day off? he asked. Two or three days later I called, and Jimmy picked me up with Sotíri. We went to the house. Jimmy said, we’ll call Tony, and we all went to a tavern, the one called Fani. I took off my uniform at the house, and they gave me clothes. That night I stayed with Jimmy.

Do you have a light? Can I buy you a drink? James Merrill met his grand passion, the bittersweet muse of his middle years, using the oldest lines in the book. For his part, Strato was ready to supply that light, to have that drink, ready even to dismiss his air force buddy, Sotíri. But it wasn’t necessary: he was entering a world of plenty where anyone was welcome, at least once or twice. The rhythm of that evening and the next must have seemed easy and settled, as if he had only to say yes to Jimmy and take his place in the parea, the Greek word for “company,” meaning the intimate social circle that is for Greeks an extended family. But this was Merrill’s first night in his new home, and the parea was just taking shape with Tony and Vassili and Mimi Vassilikos present. Jackson wasn’t due in Athens yet. Before long Sotíri would be replaced by another friend of Strato’s, Aleko, who would be replaced by George Lazaretos, who would become Jackson’s lover, a counterpart to Strato, making two couples in the house. The little group, in one configuration or another, would meet at Parigory’s shop or at the house for drinks, eat a dinner Merrill had made or go to Fanny’s, the local taverna, before some or all of them headed out for music, dancing, and more drinks. This was the start of all that.

That first night Mouflouzélis didn’t stay with Merrill. But already their friendship was unusual enough that he thought it best to be dropped off one street away from his parents’ house, safely out of sight, so as not to provoke questions. Strato was the first child in a family of three boys and one girl. He had left home for the first time to serve in the military, as required of all Greek men; in September 1964 he had a little more than a year to serve as an air force mechanic. His working-class parents, like so many Athenians of their era, came from village societies (his father from the island of Lesvos near the coast of Turkey, his mother from Evia, a rugged island two hours north of Athens). His uncle, George Mouflouzélis, was a popular rembétika musician, a master of the urban blues that was the rough soul of Athens. There was nothing elegant or cosmopolitan about Strato’s upbringing. None of the Mouflouzélis family was college educated, and none of them spoke English. In time, they would all meet James Merrill, but he would never be easy for Strato to explain.

Mouflouzélis’s situation gave a temporary license to the relationship. In the service, he had new freedom from his parents, and he was not yet expected to establish a family of his own. He was ready to have a good time where it was offered. Was James Merrill his first male lover? Possibly, but probably not, to judge from the way they met and then the ease with which he became part of Merrill’s daily life over the next six weeks. On November 17, when Merrill mentions him for the first time in a letter to Hine, he is already well established, not a prospect or a sometime boyfriend. To Mouflouzélis, Merrill must have been interestingly foreign— an American in an era when waves of American (pp. 348-349) Do you have a light? Can I buy you a drink? James Merrill met his grand passion, the bittersweet muse of his middle years, using the oldest lines in the book. For his part, Strato was ready to supply that light, to have that drink, ready even to dismiss his air force buddy, Sotíri. But it wasn’t necessary: he was entering a world of plenty where anyone was welcome, at least once or twice. The rhythm of that evening and the next must have seemed easy and settled, as if he had only to say yes to Jimmy and take his place in the parea, the Greek word for “company,” meaning the intimate social circle that is for Greeks an extended family. But this was Merrill’s first night in his new home, and the parea was just taking shape with Tony and Vassili and Mimi Vassilikos present. Jackson wasn’t due in Athens yet. Before long Sotíri would be replaced by another friend of Strato’s, Aleko, who would be replaced by George Lazaretos, who would become Jackson’s lover, a counterpart to Strato, making two couples in the house. The little group, in one configuration or another, would meet at Parigory’s shop or at the house for drinks, eat a dinner Merrill had made or go to Fanny’s, the local taverna, before some or all of them headed out for music, dancing, and more drinks. This was the start of all that.

What drew Merrill to him? A few years later, after Mouflouzélis had put on weight and a small mustache, the waggish Chester Kallman sent Merrill a postcard of “the Apollo at Olympia, / Its message Strato as he used to be.” Strato at twenty-two was indeed a beautiful young man, and that combination of youth and beauty, an ancient Greek ideal, was powerful for a thirty-eight-year-old man just beginning to feel old. (Friar, who introduced the nineteen-year-old Merrill to classical Greek ideas of male homosexuality, was at that time roughly the same age in relation to him that Merrill, now in the role of the erastes, was in relation to Mouflouzélis, his eromenos.) He was an inch or two taller than Merrill, with wide shoulders and biceps, a broad chest and slim waist, a strong jaw and high cheekbones, and a big, arching, noble nose. Aware of his handsome features and their effect on men and women both, he carried himself with easy physical authority. He would fight (or threaten to) if he felt that his honor had been challenged. His hands were large; and he kept his right thumbnail long and sharp, a blade displayed, in the style of Greek toughs. Over the years, Merrill gave him fine clothes and jewelry that emphasized this aspect of his self-image— a big ring, a double-breasted suit, a French trench coat. More than one American friend of the poet’s commented that his paramour looked like a gangster, a thug. Perhaps he was supposed to. Strato Mouflouzélis was a god, an ancient statue come alive. But he was also a version of the fantasy character Floyd, who, as the raw, slang-talking outlaw that kidnaps the little rich boy in “Days of 1935,” was one of Jimmy’s first loves.

But Mouflouzélis’s exaggerated masculinity was just part of his attractiveness. After all, his macho style was a style, a role to be performed that allowed for props, costumes, and scenes, all of which appealed to the poet’s theatricality. And Mouflouzélis himself was an actor, a storyteller and joker who liked an audience. As Merrill’s portraits of him in “Strato in Plaster” and other poems make clear, Strato saw himself as the hero of a life story being lived in bold colors, full of injustices and triumphs, suffering and celebrations. Telling a tale, Strato acted out conversations and gesticulated. He cocked his head for effect, arched an eyebrow, threw his hands wide, sniffed to show disdain, and paused before delivering his punch line— a repertoire of gestures legible even to the highest seats in the house.

This vernacular virtuosity, suited to soap opera and slapstick, delighted Merrill. In the first letter that mentions Mouflouzélis, Merrill notes that “he is nifty in bed and, if appearances can be believed, more than a little devoted to One.” But the first thing that he praises about Strato is his verbal humor: “He knows hundreds of weird Greek jokes involving degenerate priests, morons, elephants, ‘sisters.’ ” When Merrill introduces him to Kalstone, the first thing he mentions is his jokes: “Would you like to hear one? Man has two parrots + takes them to the parrot-doctor in hopes of discovering which is male, which female. Rien de plus simple. The doctor perches them side by side and tells the first one to say co. Co. To the second: Say co. Co. To the first: say co-co. Co-co. To the second: say co-co. Co-co. To the first: say co-co-co. Co-co-co. To the second: say co-co-co. Ah lay off, you stupid jerk, you’ve made my balls dizzy. This bird, says the doctor smugly, is the male.” Not so funny, perhaps, but Kalstone would have seen the point: Merrill’s new bird had balls, and he could joke about them. He made Jimmy laugh.

“He gave you the warmth of his presence,” Vassilikos commented, explaining the young Strato’s charm. “He radiated something— what captured Jimmy’s soul was a warmth that his eyes radiated. How do you say with the open flower … ? Jimmy fell for it, the invitation.” What Merrill fell for, the open flower’s invitation, the radiance of those eyes, was a promise not only of sex, but of innocence, or sex and innocence together. In their early days as lovers, Strato’s youth and working-class manners seemed to Jimmy like simplicity, and simplicity seemed like goodness. And if Strato wasn’t as innocent or simple as he seemed, then Merrill would turn out to be the innocent one. One way or another, he would get his wish.

Merrill had been warming up for this; there’d been Georgios Politis the year before. Yet the love affair struck, in Vassilikos’s words, like “a coup de foudre. It was something that could never have happened to Jimmy before— or after. He was the right age.” He was old enough to want to reach back to youth by loving a younger man, and he was still young enough to do so believing in the possibility of success. He was the right age, also, as a poet. The first six months of the affair coincided with a period of intense creativity that carried him to a new level of artistic power. Was this a case of life shaping art, or the other way around? That was one of the questions his new poems would ask. (pp. 347-51).

* * *

On January 22, Merrill left Athens with fat white Maisie on his lap. He wrote to Mouflouzélis in flight on TWA stationery: “I thought I would die for leaving you. Please forgive me. I didn’t want to cry in front of you.” In 1965, it was not a simple thing to place a transatlantic call and reach a soldier at his barracks. No longer “mouth to mouth,” Merrill could only write to Strato, and his letters, though brief, were hard work, carefully printed in Greek with perfectly shaped, stiff letters, spelled out on lined paper, like a school assignment. He wrote to Strato from Stonington on January 28 (it was their four-month “anniversary”) and again three days later: “The village is very cold and a lot of our friends have moved south like the birds,” he said in Greek. Jackson, with classes to plan and teach, was preoccupied. Maisie was sick. Merrill looked out and saw houses he had known and loved “for years now. But they seem to me melancholic, boring. I am thinking of the other house, ours Strato, and my heart is sad.” Yet he had chosen to leave Strato and sit at his desk, chosen aching winter cold in Stonington over Athens and his passion.

In fact, he’d made a getaway, and he knew it. The risks that he took with Strato were bounded by his power to switch lives at will. That was what a double life meant. As he says in “Flying from Byzantium,” a poem about leaving his Greek lover, “ ‘What does that moan mean? / The plane was part of the plan.’ ” (pp. 367-68).

* * *

From Chapter 9, "Chills and Fevers, Passions and Betrayals (1965– 67)"

Back in Athens, Jimmy told Robin, “S. phoned in the extra-courtly, goodhumored voice that means trouble; he had ‘something to tell me’ and would be around at 6, no at 4, but he arrived at 6, joked a bit most effectively for 15 minutes, then, guiding me into the study, still all abeam, but placing my hand upon his pounding heart to show what a turmoil he was really in, asked for $ 50 … No, he could not explain— he would telephone me precisely at six tomorrow […] to tell me what it was about. No, it was not a girl. No, he was not sick. He simply could not tell me face to face. Maybe I would not want to see him again, I would tell him whether or not I did when he called.” What Mouflouzélis told him when he called is recorded in the last entry of Merrill’s log of his love affair:

The facts: “engaged” 14 or 15 months. The girl pregnant. 7th month. I understand the trip to Rhodes, the money “for the family.” To ask. Where, how, did you meet […]? How long has she been in Athens? Marriage? Where is the room? What is it like? The Greeks (you are no exception) all say “I am unlike the others.” You are as like as two peas. Two? Two million. The national sport is not football but gulling foreigners. And for all that, I bless you. It is beside the point that you are behaving like a fool: you are also behaving like a man. I don’t yet dare think what memories are to be revised. Must they be? Possibly not. But this is of all the one interesting question. I preferred Illusion to reality. I said so. And I got what I asked for.

On another page, he added: “G. says it’s Vaso.” Strato had met Vaso in 1965, while Jimmy was in the U.S., at a bar near the air force base where she served drinks. She was pretty, strong, and strong-willed. Just eighteen in 1965, and coming from Corfu, she was less experienced in the ways of the world than her Athenian boyfriend. At first, there was no great conflict. Merrill had left him behind in Greece, and didn’t Jimmy have David, anyway? It was only leaving the army that forced the issue for Strato. 7 “Now, I knew Vaso,” he recalls, “and I was in a dilemma about whether to love a man or a woman.” Keeping Merrill in the dark about his dilemma had involved sometimes elaborate lies. On the trip to Rhodes in July 1966, for which Merrill paid, Strato took Vaso. Around this time, they conceived a child. When Merrill visited Jackson in Crete in September, Strato was on Corfu meeting Vaso’s family, and she was two months pregnant. After September, when he convinced Merrill that he had to make peace with his family by living at home, he moved with Vaso into a small apartment. The Glass Cat’s brains turned out not to have been so transparent. Merrill had had suspicions, but he never looked into the case very closely. The poet “hid” his face, and Strato’s touch, “quick, merciful,” “Blindfolded” him. “If that was illusion, I wanted it to last long." And Strato had done what he could to make sure it did.

Did Strato never love him, then? “Who can say?” Vassilikos answered when asked. “But it must have been a marriage of convenience— for Strato.” It’s possible to see him as a conniver, a whore. Merrill himself would take this view, at times, and Strato sometimes behaved in such a way as to merit it. And it is unclear what it would have meant for Strato Mouflouzélis to “love” James Merrill, when he knew nothing about his poetry, his past, or his world. But, as Merrill put it, “Understanding has more than one face.” And if Strato never knew Merrill in some ways, he knew what very few people ever did— what it was like to be loved by him passionately and fully. They created a world of their own, “mouth to mouth”; they “communicated.” Mouflouzélis kept Vaso a secret as long as he did because he didn’t want to face facts, and he feared losing Merrill’s money, surely. But he also feared losing Merrill. He would have been a great deal to lose. It is not every day that a rich man with refinement and kindness, brilliance and charm, walks into a poor boy’s life saying that he loves him absolutely. As Strato told his father, Jimmy was “very affectionate, a good man,” and so he was. As Vaso put it, looking back across the decades, “It was the best thing that ever happened to Strato."

Merrill’s reaction to Strato’s revelation, as recorded in his notebook, turns rapidly from confusion and anger to acceptance. “And for all that, I bless you,” he concludes not halfway down the page. He was prepared to act bravely and generously, like the Marschallin. Perhaps he was gratified by this turn of events: Strato was doing as he was supposed to; he was behaving “like a man.” “It isn’t in me to turn against him,” Merrill wrote. “It’s not perhaps what I wanted at the beginning, but it continues, it persists, and some of the furthest fixtures of my life are reillumined by it. My mother’s exaggerated horror over Kimon, for instance— that now helps me, warns me not to overdramatize the folly of what one, as an older person, considers to be a wrong turning. She saw ruin, disaster, shame, precisely where I saw freedom and self-realization. Perhaps S. feels a bit the way I did then, and I’d never dare blame him if he did.” A few days later he wrote to Richie, “I wake up in the night and can not stop crying. Yesterday when he failed to come as promised it occurred to me to fly home at once […]. I would rather be where I can’t turn against him.”

With Strato acting as stage manager, Jimmy brought David, George, and Kostas Tympakianákis to a taverna where the party happened to run into him and Vaso. “I fear me,” Merrill told Richie, “she seemed rather sweet + touching, with a short, short haircut, big round blue eyes, singing along with the records while on every male tongue the lies positively danced.” It was a chance for Merrill to appraise his young female rival. “She isn’t dumb,” he acknowledged, “and, according to S […] ‘doesn’t mind’— by which I assume is meant that another woman would strike her as a rival whereas a poor old, rich old queen could do no harm even if he wanted to.” But she did mind. One night, the parea, with Vaso along, crowded into the car to hear music at a club. In the backseat, Strato reached around Vaso to tickle Jimmy; on the way home, with Vaso in the front, he settled into kissing Jimmy until she insisted he stop. Vaso knew she and Merrill were struggling over Strato, and her pregnancy was a move in the game. “You are caught for good my boy in the tender trap,” Jimmy told Strato when he learned of it. And he was caught too.

The baby was due soon, but Merrill wouldn’t be on hand for the birth. A year earlier, he had been invited to teach poetry writing at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in spring 1967; he accepted, as if he knew already that he would want to be a long way from Athens by then. But he was called back sooner when the phone rang and Harry Ford told him he had won the National Book Award for Nights and Days. It was a triumph, the first major prize of his career. The citation of the judges, Auden, James Dickey, and Howard Nemerov, honored Merrill for “his scrupulous and uncompromising cultivation of the poetic art, evidenced in his refusal to settle for an easy and profitable stance; for his insistence on taking the kind of tough, poetic chances which make the difference between esthetic success or failure.” Yet, when he got off the phone with Ford, “I could only think: Let me give it back, let me have Strato instead.” (pp. 405-98).

See also excerpts from "Langdon Hammer on the Poem and Manuscripts"in the left margin.