Criticism of "For Proust"

1. Coffman, Christopher K. "Swann's Way. Basic Training: Interpretation in James Merrill's Late Collections and À la recherche du temps perdu." Comparative Literature. 61 (Fall 2009): 400-415.
2. Lehman, David. "Elemental Bravery: The Unity of James Merrill's Poetry."      In Lehman, David & Berger, Charles, ed. James Merrill: Essays in Criticism . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. 23-60.
3. McClatchy, J. D. "James Merrill's Inner Room." Raritan . 19.1 (1999): 1-22.
   ---------. "On Water Street." Lehman, David and Berger, Charles, ed. James Merrill: Essays in Criticism . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. 61-96.
4. Moffett, Judith. James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry . NY: Columbia, 1984.
5. Taylor, Tamara Baker. Species of the Sun's Making: Reading Light, Proust to Merrill. Washington U. Dissertation. August 15, 2013. Copyright: Tamara Ellen Baker Taylor, 2013.
6. Trousdale, Rachel. "Transformations of Memory: Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and James Merrill.” Vol. 2. Reading Nabokov . Ed. Jane Grayson et. al. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 193-203.
7. Yenser, Stephen. The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
8. Hammer, Langdon. James Merrill: Life and Art (p. 266-67). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

1. Coffman traces Proustian concerns and motifs such as “involuntary memory and its revelatory flashes of recognition” (405) or the “apprenticeship to signs…the ‘invisible history’ of an artistic vocation” (406) in Merrill's late works to demonstrate the intertextual presence of Proust’s novel. He states that in A la recherché du temps perdu, “Marcel intends to retreat from society into the isolation of artistic endeavor; but the retreat is a project involving the future rather than a return to the past” and Merrill’s poetic speakers “follow Proust’s narrator in affirming the past as a project of more genuine openness” (413).

 2. Lehman states: “After the example of Proust, Merrill endeavors to read his days, as though they constituted an unwritten text; he would determine what valences the elements of his life might be said to have; he would leap to poetry from exercises of the involuntary memory . . . . As Proust did, Merrill relies on his fictions to guide him past astonishment to the truth” (39).

Lehman discusses the following passage as an example of Merrill playing both shrink and analysand.

 …Too violent,

I once thought, that foreshortening in Proust—

A world abruptly old, whitehaired, a reader

Looking up in puzzlement to fathom

Whether ten years or forty have gone by.

Young, I mistook it for an unconvincing

Trick of the teller. It was truth instead

Babbling through his own astonishment. (39; Sandover, 70-71) 

3. McClatchy speculates on the narrative of the poem:

“It recounts an imaginary but characteristic episode of the novelist leaving his room, venturing out into the world to retrieve a detail for this novel, then returning at dawn to pull the curtains and make what had happened into literature. In the poem, Proust’s rendezvous at the Ritz is with a young girl who can remember and hum for him a tune that haunts him. Before we know it, it is two decades later; then—they are still conversing at the hotel table—she has a white lock in her hair. ‘In pain/You let her leave—the loved one always leaves,’ the poem goes on to say; and so Proust returns home and sinks exhausted into bed, while ‘an old, old woman’ draws the curtains against the dawn.” (“James Merrill’s Inner Room” 10).

McClatchy gives several explanations for the mask:

He notes that Richard Howard writes on the “thin gold mask” in such a way as to merge the artist and the world”; the mask “is not a defense against reality, nor a concealment from it; it is a funerary enduement which will withstand and redeem the wreckage of a life” (“On Water Street” 63). In a footnote (n. 2, p. 310), McClatchy states that when the poem was first published in the Quarterly Review of Literature, the phrase read "frail cold mask." The change may be an improvement, but it also a presumably unconscious echo of Elinor Wylie’s “Sunset on the Spire,” which ends “All that I / Could ever ask / Wears that sky / Like a thin gold mask” (n.2, p. 310).

4. Moffett quotes the passage in Merrill’s senior essay on Proust in which he states that Proust distances the reader from “human suffering”: “there is always a protecting surface of metaphor. It is as though we were skating upon a sheet of ice that formed above a black torrent . . . .”  Moffett observes that the mask image that concludes “For Proust” is “the ‘sheet of ice’ of the thesis made into an artifact—is Proust’s art, or Merrill’s, the shape and containment with which from gilds even tragic experience: for a creative act can only be an act of affirmation.” (18-19).

5. Taylor writes that in “For Proust” the phrase

"What happened is becoming literature” defines that crucial translation into art. And rather appropriately the “thin gold mask” Proust puts on the world reminds of the magic in the magic lantern scene of the "old-gold sonorous name of Brabant," as it casts light into the imagination; of the day the narrator departs Balbec, when Francoise draws back the curtain displaying a day "embalmed in its vesture of gold," becoming mummified, immemorial, beyond time (Within a Budding Grove II. 356); and of the literal breath-taking View of Delft with its yellow wall transforming, though light and color, the artist's soul. In "For Proust" Merrill offers his readers a view of the longest work in literature at its heart, in poetry turned golden and immortal.

"But it seems Merrill wanted to add to his ongoing relationship with Proust. In an unpublished poem titled "For Proust, II" Merrill explores that other side of the Janus profile, behind the gold mask. This poem opens with concern for something Proust seems to largely ignore, which for Merrill becomes an imperative, the future. The darker side of Proust's obsession with lost time comes through with the reiteration: "The future? Nothing-- nothing" in the poem's first line. For a moment the poem lightens with sleep, as the voice speaks of dreaming "of course, of the past," with "Its precious dust writhing / Within Down an amber ray." As always, Merrill returns to the translation of perception through light. "Ignore" is not quite correct, as the narrator does feel himself in a race against death to write his great text by the end of À la recherche. But on one level this concern with the future is itself already "past" as it is enclosed within the existing text. The Proustian future becomes an all-consuming text. Overall, the future for Proust is focused on the individual, of the artist's struggle to produce a lasting work. In Merrill the future becomes a question not just for the survival of the writer, but a question about the survival of the human species, mostly against the looming threat of nuclear annihilation.

But the last stanza moves from golden-brown dust falling onto the dreamer, to a chilling encounter with otherness and creativity: "I am wakened by my breathing, / Harsh with terror of the energies / I had mistaken for my own." Merrill softens the "energies" slightly by deleting "terror," but still this poem dedicated to Proust moves influence to possession. In the first poem to Proust the world turned golden as it entered the space of aporia, placing a mask upon its face in the creative moment, while the second poem confronts the creative moment's and subject's internal aporia. The terror Merrill writes about, but then strikes through, signals how "There is always an element of risk in the process of creation, of trusting to the future, of a certain helplessness in the face of what is coming" (Attridge 26). The gold mask can possess the artist, mold to his or her face, rather be simply placed upon the world. Fittingly speaking of Merrill's powers of description and observation, Michael Harrington finds "Merrill is possessed, he himself understands, of an 'unrelenting fluency,' a talent to turn everything into 'slant, weightless gold' (201). Harrington's quoting from "The Book of Ephraim" points us to a larger struggle Merrill encounters with Proustian "energies," a tendency to "remake" the world through slant of light over-fair, in too golden hues:

Remake it all into slant, weightless gold:

Wreath at funeral games for the illusion

That whatever had been, had been right.

Revise--or let it stand? Here I'm divided.

Wrong things in the right light are fair, assuming

We seize them in some holy flash past words.

6. Trousdale triangulates Merrill, Proust, and Nabokov, observing that Merrill defends Proust to Nabokov in A Different Person ("Merrill quarrels with Nabokov"): "Nabokov takes Proust’s original goal--reconstruction of the past--and changes the means; he prefers eternalized moments to a real-time construction. Merrill resents Nabokov's charges; he thinks they are too glib or too easy..." (202).

7. Yenser states that the poem “follows the novelist on one of the nights when he would leave his cork lined bedroom to attend a soirée where he might glean some more tiny details from the memories of old acquaintance “(79).  Concerning the poem’s structure, Yenser writes:

So prudent are the choices of key words and so sensitive is the disposition of syntax that one might read much of “For Proust” without realizing that the middle lines in each of these quatrains end in identical rhymes. The form is integral to the poem’s plain but complex statement because its rigor answers the scrupulousness of its subject’s attempts to get things right in his novel, and because the repetition it involves matches the novel’s repetition of events from Proust’s life. But the very pairing of terms in lines two and three of each quatrain makes us aware of difference at the same time that we see identity. We are led to consider the interplay between the same but different words and between the world and the literature that reflects it (79).

8. From Hammer’s Life and Art: Merrill’s vignette insists on the necessary failure not only of our desire to be loved, but even of our desire to understand why we were not. Yet something is gained. As Merrill’s syntax winds through an unusual verse form— rhymed abba quatrains in which the second, interior rhymes consist in the same word, repeated with subtly altered sense— he evokes a rhythmic alternation of experience and memory, life and writing. The climax comes as the writer returns home:

Back where you came from, up the strait stair, past

All understanding, bearing the whole past,

Your eyes grown wide and dark, eyes of a Jew,

You make for one dim room without contour

And station yourself there, beyond the pale

Of cough or of gardenia, erect, pale.

What happened is becoming literature.

Feverish in time, if you suspend the task,

An old, old woman shuffling in to draw

Curtains, will read a line or two, withdraw.

The world will have put on a thin gold mask.

Proust was on Merrill’s mind as he mounted the “strait stair” of his own apartment, past those illustrations of Proust’s novel on the stairs, and stationed himself in the “dim room” of his study, his brown eyes looking (when he pinned a postcard portrait of Proust to the wall beside the desk) into the novelist’s own. Like Proust, he had chosen a way of life that was childless; not reproduction, but a return to his experience in writing, defended him against passing time— although there was no defense against time, he knew. 

            Merrill ends the poem in the future perfect tense, imagining the moment when Proust will have stopped writing. “An old, old woman,” a version of the muse, will draw the curtain; and, by a sort of alchemy, the “world will have put on a thin gold mask.” That mask is the aim of the writer’s “task,” as the rhyme emphasizes. It is an image of the world renewed by morning sun and re-created on the writer’s page— stamped with the writer’s face, like a death mask. This is not the gold his father worked for, nor the “Gold pollen” of a healthy garden. But Merrill could use it to settle accounts with both his parents (266-67).