Reena Sastri on "Matinées"
Excerpt from Reena Sastri, James Merrill: Knowing Innocence (NY: Routledge, 2007): 34-41.
“Matinees” (CP 267-270) is self-consciously a public performance: theatrical, self-dramatizing but not melodramatic, assured and pitch-perfect, it enacts an achievement of style by which the adult self chooses to be publicly known. Its emphasis on the truth of masks is both Wildean and Yeatsian. The poem’s legacy to Wilde also includes its provocative, theatrical, public persona. As befits its emphasis on artifice, “Matinees”’ sonnets are formally more perfect than those of “The Broken Home”; this perfection displays virtuosity, showing off the achievement of style in which Merrill locates identity. The regularity of the sonnets (with the exception of sonnet seven, they follow the pattern 4-4-3-3, rhyming abba or abab in the quatrains) suggests continuity in this development, but at the same time, as in “The Broken Home, every sonnet is a new start, a different perspective on the past. The poem begins and ends with the child’s first trip to the opera, but the return is a staged performance, not a triumph of memory. Merrill’s variable comic tone provides alternatives to both nostalgic longing for irrevocable losses and consoling myth of recovery, and his comic donning of the mask of the child enables him to stand in two places at once with respect to his past, just as art’s fictions inspire both credulity and disbelief. This dual stance is one version of knowing innocence.
Playfully positing opera as a corrupting influence on the poet as a child, the poem tells a loss of innocence story; however, it does not mourn what is lost, but celebrates what is gained—not so much Proustian redemption of experience through art as a Wildean stance, a style: the superbly achieved tone of sonnets four and six, arch yet wise, poised in serious lightness. The opening sonnet, describing the child’s first opera, Das Rheingold, captures in miniature the transformation that the opera produces. In the first lines—
A gray maidservant lets me in
To Mrs. Livingston’s box. Its already begun!
The box is full of grown-ups. She sits me down
Beside her.
—the present tense renders the child’s point of view: his passivity in relation to the grown-ups; his simple diction and syntax; his excitement at the occasion, conveyed by the exclamation mark. However, his development into an aesthete has “already begun”: by the last half-line of the first quatrain, his language has become more sophisticated—if youthfully, exaggeratedly so—in response to the music, called “a ravishing din.” The second quatrain picks up specialized vocabulary—“proscenium,” “scrim” –and literary turns of phrase—“hither and yon.” Alliteration, consonance, and internal rhyme appear in the third quatrain: “Cold lights/ Cling to bare arms, fair tresses.” The final sentence of the sonnet is itself “aglitter” in its elegantly suspended syntax, its synaesthesia, its surprising introduction of “wealth” (the parents’ as well as the music’s), and its resolution in a characteristic doubleness:
Flat
And natural aglitter like paillette
Upon the great green sonorous depths float
Until with pulsing wealth the house is filled,
No one believing, everybody thrilled.
Coexisting with knowing disbelief, the capacity to be “thrilled” links “everybody” with the childish excitement of the first quatrain. Paradoxically it is art—the very art that is charged with the child’s corruption later in the poem—that awakens that capacity. The linked present and past participles—pulsing, filled; believing, thrilled—enact the conjoining of present and past both in the audience, and in the poem.
Complaining that “Lives of the Great Composers make it sound / Too much like cooking: ‘Sore beset, / He put his heart’s blood into that quintet . . . ,” Merrill suggests in the second sonnet that we “try the figure turned around,” emphasizing not the personality and emotion that go into art, but those that arise out of it. Operatic “strains” “fed his solitary heart” until he was, punningly, “composed” by the music:
Long beyond adolescence [One infers
Your elimination, sweet Champagne
Drunk between acts!] the aria’s remote
Control surviving his worst interval,Tissue of sound and tissue of the brain
Would coalesce, and what the Masters wrote
Itself compose his features sharp and small.
Merrill plays with Wordsworth’s notion that “The mind of man is fashioned and built up / Even as a strain of music” (Two-Part Prelude I. 67-8). While in Wordsworth the “ceaseless music” and “steady cadence” that “composed [his] thoughts” are those of the river Derwent and the “knowledge” they give “the calm / which Nature breathes” (I. 8-15), in Merrill opera gives access to heightened passions.
Proposing an inversion of inner and outer, Merrill implies “inversion” in another sense as well. The two are closely related Judith Butler’s analysis of gender as performance. The “gendered body” is “performative,” she writes; “acts, gestures articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core” (Gender 136). Drag reveals the production of this illusion. It “destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer” on which ideas of gender and identity depend (x); as “gender parody,” drag “reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin” (138). The cross-gender identifications of the male adolescent with operative sopranos in sonnets four and six similarly destabilize naturalized, deterministic models of identity.
Francis’s difficulties arose through a restrictive notion of what it meant to be a man. In the coming-of-age story told by “Matinees,” Merrill figuratively dresses up as one of his favorite sopranos, enacting a performative, liberating version of both gender and identity more broadly. “Soul” itself, which might be thought of as the innermost essence of core, pure interiority, is a performance. Sonnet four, which describes this performance, simultaneously enacts it in the form of Merrill’s mature tone, a dazzling voice that has gone to school with the operatic interpretations it describes:
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.Flesh knows by now which dishes to avoid,
Tries not to brood on bomb or heart attack.
Anatomy is destiny, said Freud.
Soul is the brilliant hypochondriac.Soul will cough blood and sing, and softer sing,
Drink poison, breathe her joyous last, a waltz
Rubato from his arms who sobs and staysBehind, death after death who fairly melts
Watching her turn from him, restored, to fling
Kisses into the furnace roaring praise.
Merrill’s rewriting of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” is wonderfully flamboyant, exploiting associations of homosexuality with theatricality. Its embodied aesthetic differs from Yeats’s even while both revel in artifice. Merrill fondly accepts even the body’s comic indignity (indigestion) and weakness for luxury. His “Flesh knows” and “tries not to brood”; his syntax and personification blur the distinction between body and soul here and when Soul coughs blood. Even as he confers the dignity of consciousness on the body, however, he refuses to be limited to the bodily or the natural; body is given, but costume, style, art are made, and freely made over. Merrill has it both ways: rejecting Plato’s ascending ladder of erotic, mental and spiritual, to divine love and confessing affection for the body and its weaknesses, he does not rest either with the view that the body is wholly determining and “fling[s]” out the punch line “Soul is the brilliant hypochondriac.” The soul’s apotheosis is the “joyous […] waltz” of embodied performance: “Soul will cough blood,” “drink poison, breathe her joyous last,” wearing the dress of the mortal body even while denying its limitations (she dies “death after death”). The poet’s performance is just as fully realized: the archness of the dismissal of Plato is keyed perfectly, and balanced by the admission of middle-aged staidness in the next quatrain, which is subverted by the humorous rhyme on “hypochondriac,” here a term of praise for the imagination. The mostly iambic rhythm gains in the sestet something of the soprano’s waltz: soul will cough blood [pause] and sing, and softer sing. Both opera and poem present a stylized version of hard truths: in life, soul, inseparable from body, finds not life after death but only death after death, and is not “restored” but thrown out with as the body into the furnace, more suggestive of a funeral pyre than of God’s holy fire.
“Soul” as an embodied female performer allows the poet a cross-gender costume enabling both freedom from gender constraints and unexpected qualities of strength or heroism—the strength, for instance, of La Traviata’s Violetta, who not only coughs blood and sings but whose self-sacrifice is the opera’s moral center. Opera enables identification with the feminine and desire for the masculine (in figures like Verdi’ attractive but sinister Duke of Mantua), useful models in the homosexual adolescent’s coming of age. The sixth sonnet evokes two of these models:
When Jan Kiepura sang His Handsomeness
Of Mantua those high airs light as lust
Attuned one’s bare throat to the dagger-thrust.
Living for them would have been death no less.Or Lehmann’s Marschallin!—heartbreak so shrewd,
So ostrich-plumed, one ached to disengage
Oneself from a last love, at center stage,
To the beloved’s dazzled gratitude.What havoc certain Sunday afternoons
Wrought upon a bright young person’s morals
I now leave to the public to condemn.The point thereafter was to arrange for one’s
Own chills and fevers, passions and betrayals,
Chiefly in order to make song of them.
The child is corrupted by opera: as in Proust, the “point” of suffering a of loving is harvesting experience in art, and Merrill suggests that this state of affairs is morally suspect. But his light touch and his refusal of judgment suggest that the reverse is just as true: to turn suffering into art is to make the best of what experience would bring in any case.
Merrill echoes “passions and betrayals” with the phrase “passionate betrayals” in a long passage on opera in A Different Person, part of which reads:
[T]he question of how to attack one’s own high notes was in no way academic. Throughout the 1960’s in Athens I off and on mourned the lengths to which Chester Kallman (Auden’s beloved and our neighbor, his life, like all or lives those years, a tissue of passionate betrayals) had modeled himself in boyhood on the Wrong Soprano—on Zlinka Milanov, say, with her queenly airs and clutch-and-stagger reflexes, or on Ljuba Welitsch, incandescent and obsessed [ . . . ]. For my part, memories of Rosenkavalier with Lotte Lehmann helped to to smile and shrug through the worst. Here was a bittersweet, faintly homosexual, wholly survivable alternative to my dreams of immolation and all-consuming love. (CPR 552)
Unlike Wagner’s self-immolating Brunnhilde, Strauss’s Marschallin survives love and loss, as well as growing older. (The role of her young lover is sung by a soprano, hence the "faintly homosexual” coloring.) Before relinquishing him to a younger woman, she broods on her inability to stop time, recognizing that “everything runs between the fingers, . . . everything we grasp dissolves”; she concludes that “how” one responds to this reality is the question, and resolves to “take it lightly, with light heart and light hands hold and take, hold and relinquish” (Hoffmannsthal 33-35). This lightness is earned: not frivolity, but a manner in which to endure change and loss. The question of “how” to grow up, which provoked confusion and anguish in Merrill’s early poetry and novel, here finds one satisfying answer.
As sonnet five illustrates, the high notes hit with consummate skill in sonnets four and six are not the full story of what the child grows up to. At the same time this sonnet shows that the poet’s mature style can serve life’s less theatrical moments—“The pipes’ aubade,” “The neighbors’ chorus,” “The love scene (often cut).” The seventh sonnet goes even further in acknowledging the down side of growing up and growing old, the falling-off of passions: “You and I, caro,” it begins, “seldom / Risk the real thing any more, / It’s all too silly or too solemn.” Preferable are “records or transcription / For our four hands,” but
Days like today
Even recur (wind whistling themes
From Lulu, and sun shining
On the rough Sound) when it seems
Kinder to remember than to play.
This evocation of the diminishments that come with age appears to work against the anti-nostalgic drive of the poem; the poet seems to rest in nature and in memory, leaving art and “play” (both musical and erotic) behind. However, in the parenthetical aside nature imitates art, and the artifice of opera is still “the real thing.” Further, the relationship of memory to “play” is not as simple as it seems. “Kinder” suggests the etymological meaning of “more natural”; it may well be more natural to remember, but I this poem, that is all the more reason to play.
Merrill enacts some of these possibilities in the eighth sonnet, a poetic representation of a letter from the child in response to his first matinee:
Dear Mrs. Livingston,
I want to say that I am still in a daze
From yesterday afternoon.
I will treasure the experience always—My very first Grand Opera!
It was veryThoughtful of you to invite
Me and am so sorry
That I was late, and for my coughing fit.I play my record of the Overture
Over and over. I pretend
I am still sitting in the theater.I also wrote a poem which my Mother
Says I should copy out and send.
Ever gratefully, your little friend . . .
Despite its return to the point of view of the child, this ending is anti-nostalgic. If the trimester and tetrameter lines of the seventh sonnet suggest the diminution of the present, the eighth does not consistently return us to the full pentameter of the first six; its short lines refuse the contrast of attenuated age with robust childhood, and childhood itself is presented as awkward in substance—late and coughing—as well as in style—uneven rhythms and off rhymes. To the extent that the (written) voice of the child is charming, it is so in its deliberate awkwardness which contrasts sharply with the poetic élan of the poem as a whole. If we have to choose between the fully realized development of sonnets four and six and the awkwardness of this one we will choose the former. But that choice includes the other; the child’s voice is as much a theatrical achievement of the adult poet as the sophisticated tone of the middle sonnets. The child is one of the masks the poet wears, one that is humorous, but whose irony is light and enabling rather than indicative of tragic loss.
In its puns and repetitions of words, this sonnet transforms the previous one: ordinary “Days” become the “daze” of aesthetic appreciation, the “rough Sound” is enacted in the choppy rhythms of the child’s letter, the older poet’s ceasing to “play” four hand piano becomes the child’s playing of his record. Merrill does not return to the past in any simple way: instead, he returns to play and uses it (including plays on words) to build something new out of both past and present. When the child writes “I pay my record of the Overture / Over and over. I pretend / I am still sitting in the theatre,” the poet also describes what he does here and in the first sonnet: replaying, and reworking, the overture, as introduction to opera and as invitation from Mrs. Livingston, extended in turn to us. The exaggerated (theatrical) contrast in tone, diction, rhythm, the changes rung on words from sonnet seven, and the latter from marking this sonnet as written all call attention to its artificiality and work against any illusion that it accurately represents a moment from the lived past. Nor does the poem supposedly written in the past appear in this new poem. The child has begun his career as a poet (and perhaps as a Proustian “brilliant hypochondriac,” with that coughing fit, the fledgling soul’s performance); he has begun to learn a new kind of play, one that is also work. It is that achievement of the grown-up play of poetry of style, rather than any ethical question, that Merrill “leave[s] to the public” to judge. Art has “attuned” the poet to living’s tone, and there will be no going back.