James Merrill's Masks

Mask of Agamemnon, National Archaeological Museum of Athens

Mortuary Mask of Khaemwaset, Louvre Museum, Paris

James Merrill's Death Mask, Special Collections, Washington University

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." --Oscar Wilde as quoted in section "I" of Merrill's "The Book of Ephraim."

As cited in the note to the term "thin mask" in "For Proust," Stephen Yenser in The Consuming Myth (Harvard 1987) suggests that the mask "evokes some perdurable work of art comparable to Yeats's bird of 'hammered gold and gold enameling,' that will have transfigured the world. Yet if the gold mask makes us think of any specific piece, it would be the so-called death mask of Agamemnon that Schliemann unearthed at Mycenae." Yenser also suggests the image is a "figure for dawn" (80-81).

Erica Kao's essay cites Proust's description of Marcel waking on a summer's day as a possible source of the image: "the summer day which [Françoise] disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorial, as a sumptuous millenary mummy from which our old servant had done no more than cautiously unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it, embalmed in its vesture of gold" (Within a Budding Grove). Thus the "thin gold mask" might also evoke the masks of Egyptian mummies, such as the Mortuary Mask of Khaemwaset in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Langdon Hammer quotes a letter Merrill wrote in 1960 about the antiquities in the Cairo museum: "the sphinx, the masks of beaten gold, the little gods . . . . are lamps against which I can feel my wings tattering as they beat." Merrill also refers to the mummy of a child, "the very flesh covered with gold leaf" (James Merrill: Life and Art 288).

The mask image also foreshadows the death mask of Merrill himself held in Special Collections at the Washington University Libraries.