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Langdon Hammer on Matinées

Excerpts from Langdon Hammer's James Merrill: Life and Art (New York: Knopf, 2015).

[Merrill] was “polishing things hastily flung on paper a year ago,” including “To My Greek.” He also began a longer poem about his opera-going, “Matinees.” It was the first ambitious poem he’d undertaken since he completed Nights and Days; it employed the same verse form— stanzas made of linked sonnets with varying rhyme schemes— as “The Broken Home” had, and it picked up the autobiography begun in that poem. Opera, according to “Matinees,” explained in his character “the destruction of what Henry James would have called the Moral Sense— through watching all those characters love and betray and kill and renounce and catch TB merely, as it now and then seemed, in order to have something beautiful to sing on the subject.” As much as his parents’ divorce, it was a key to the person he had become. War shadowed his work on the poem. In June, Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria with stunning force and quickness in the Six-Day War. Merrill, thinking of his visit with Marianne Moore, joked in a letter to Moffett, “Did you enjoy that little chamber war in the Middle East? I thought it had ‘concentration and gusto’— two of the 3 things Miss Moore looks for in poetry (the third is humility)— and could well serve as an example to other wars in the present + future.”  (421)

 

The war made Merrill doubt his humanity, as he often did. If his money set him apart from other people, so did the writing of verse. Even those he “would protest against” were more “human” than he.

            “Matinées” wittily describes the growth of this singularity. In summer 1967, he drafted this piece of it:

The soul, no doubt, is feminine,
Does not forge swords or use them— or at worst
Drives a dagger into its own breast.
The soul enters smiling through the din

Of a cheap dining room, a Marschallin
All noble proud forebearance, dressed
As one who means to love + suffer must:
Her ostrich fan, her trailing ice-blue satin.

The soul Merrill pictures is more passive than pacifist, inclined to self-destructiveness rather than aggression. He calls it “feminine” because it is costumed as the aristocratic heroine in Strauss or Proust who exerts power through chilly, “ice-blue” elegance. This is not a conventional basis for human sympathy. “Matinées” argues, however, that opera’s arch poses and exaggerated gestures reveal something basic about the common human condition. The published poem explains Merrill’s remark about the Six-Day War:

We love the good, said Plato? He was wrong.
We love as well the wicked and the weak.
Flesh hugs its shaved plush.Twenty-four-hour-long
Galas fill the hulk of the Comique

 This view of human nature is based on Merrill’s knowledge of his own nature, of his desire not for “a wise ruler,” but for someone weak and just possibly wicked. The flesh, he knows, settles into its red velvet seat, hugging its creature comforts, and ignores the threat of “bomb or heart attack,” while the soul “is a brilliant hypochondriac,” a diva who (in a grim send-up of a line from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”) “will cough blood and sing, and softer sing, / Drink poison” at center stage. 

            Yet . . . Merrill returns to Strauss and the Marschallin as his model. She rescues herself from the destructive power of passion by means of a comic awareness of the roles people play, a knowledge that, in allowing her young love to take his leave, is generous and self-protecting. Thinking of her,   Merrill formulated his ideal of personal relations for Moffett. She had written to him about her relationship with an older man and the scenes between them. “I have scenes myself,” Merrill contributed, “hate getting angry, hate hurting people I love and who I know love me, yet it happens, I do it, they do it, and somehow the horrified heart accommodates the memory of those hardly believable instants.” The matter of their difference in age Merrill understood too. Without mentioning Strato, he proposes that “human character” has “a comic structure”: “All I know is that when one takes people very seriously indeed one either hurts them, or is hurt by them, or both. My ethics in this respect were formed by Lotte Lehmann in Rosenkavalier, Act I—‘ Light must we be, light-hearted and light-handed …’ ”

            Lehmann’s Marschallin gives voice to Merrill’s distinctive version of the calculated, willed lightness of feeling that is a familiar gay style from The Importance of Being Earnest to the work of contemporaries as different from Merrill (and each other) as Andy Warhol and Joe Brainard. Merrill shares with these and other male homosexual sensibilities, as if by kind, a capacity to wish away tragedy while remaining aware of the limits of wishfulness. The bitter truths of “Matinées” are framed by opening and closing sonnets that depict the poet’s first visit to the opera, including Merrill’s pastiche of his younger self’s thank-you note to his host, Mrs. Livingstone (a half-serious tribute to the Southampton matron who welcomed Hellen in her house after her divorce). Those framing sonnets miniaturize the opera’s outsized passions. The performances in question are matinées, after all, from which the audience emerges in daylight. The poem’s “light-handed” idiom is not made for expressing desire, but for pondering it at a distance on the phone or in letters, when “it seems / Kinder to remember than to play.” The addressee is not a lover but a friend, David Kalstone, the poem’s dedicatee, the “Caro” to whom Merrill was making calls and writing letters throughout the summer. In the ruins of his affair with Strato, with Jackson an ocean away, Kalstone (and the kind of friendship he represented) was becoming more and more important to the poet— and the person— Merrill wanted to be. (422-23)