Langdon Hammer on "The Thousand and Second Night"
From Langdon Hammer's James Merrill: Life and Art. NY: Knopf, 2015. Pp. 322-29.
. . . Merrill felt “unnerved” by passing time too, and in need of reassurance himself. On the day before David’s birthday, he learned from Tony that a truck driver named Taki, a sweet young man who’d been a sexual partner for Parigory and then Merrill that spring, had been run over and killed while taking a nap in the shade of another driver’s truck. Shaken by this news, Jimmy turned to “Planchette, toujours consolatrice.” He narrated his and David’s séance for Tony: “Breaking a long silence we inquired of our enchanting Familiar (Ephraim… ) for Taki, who was instantly summoned. E’s mother came from Larissa, and E. volunteered a comparison between Taki and the centaurs of old, whose mental powers were often not very strong. ‘How he chatters!’ said E. ‘Taki mou-polylogou! [my talkative Taki]’ said I, and the reply was: ‘Sika! [sister]’ He was in high spirits, thrilled to ‘be’ in America for a bit, wanted to know what truck-drivers’ wages are here, in case he is reborn in this country. Ephraim began to rehearse a long history of early, clumsy deaths […] but thought him a charming fellow, while Taki thought E. a big Sika.” Merrill wound up the report a bit self-consciously, admitting to Parigory, “It is foolish to carry on like this, I mean telling you such things, but they do mean something to us even if someone else would call them blasphemous.”
Again the nation was gripped by fears of nuclear attack. In October, with Russian missiles placed in Cuba, the U.S. and the Soviet Union lurched on the brink of mutual destruction. For some days, it appeared that the dreaded future might have arrived. By November, Merrill looked back on the passing of the Cuban Missile Crisis, giddy with relief: “It was a real orgy of anxiety all the more intense for my having abstained from it for more than a year beforehand. Now, once again, I’m off the stuff.” As in 1961, the nuclear threat receded into the background of daily life. But the garish light of total war, narrowly averted, colored Jimmy’s and David’s days. With the fate of the world swinging in the balance, it was easy to feel that nothing mattered very much.
Friar had accused Merrill of a general lack of faith and seriousness. Still smarting from that attack, he was forced to recognize and question his ways of protecting himself. In November, Fredericks gave him another occasion to those closest to him, unable to respond to what was most urgent and important. In his reply, Merrill seems to have been thinking both of Friar’s accusations and the new friend he had lost in the sweet, talkative Taki. He returned to a remark made at a party in New York in October:
I wish I could come to grips with what lies behind the sweetly fluttering veil of your reproach, which I feel as a reproach not only from you but two or three other friends. Certainly there must be grounds,— in each case,— and it makes me sad because I realize I can only do what I do. I guess you would say I was a cat at heart, but I can remember when I was a dog and can’t easily account for the transformation. I was talking to Jane Bowles a month or so ago, off the top of my head, about how I loved no conversation better than the ones imposed in Greece by lack of a common language + common interests—“ What does meat cost in the U.S.?” “How many brothers have you?”— and she gave me one of her disquieting looks + said “well, of course, you just want to be alone. What’s wrong with that?” I couldn’t say— I can’t now— Something does however seem wrong.
Indeed, something had seemed “wrong” since Merrill’s episode of Bell’s palsy in Greece. Back in April 1962, he had taken his partial facial paralysis as a sign of some personal, metaphysical disorder, “the crack in the mirror of the soul.” The condition thus described was alarming, but there was something hopeful about it too, since he saw in it “the materials of a poem.” At first, the projected poem, to be called “Rigor Vitae,” appeared as one of a series of titles listed in his notebook:
POEMS TO WRITE:
The Double Life
Rigor Vitae
The Planet.
The Libertine
The Orgy: “This is my body. Eat this … ”
(The French Postcards)
Merrill made his first notes for these poems in April and began concentrated work on them in September. 3 He found himself responding not only to the episode of Bell’s palsy, but also to Friar’s letter, Fredericks’s “reproach,” Jane Bowles’s remark, Taki’s death, and his own intimations of mortality, all pondered in the glare of Cold War fear and anxiety. He soon came to see these topics as related, and, if we can believe his airy account in an interview a few years later, “suddenly an afternoon of patchwork” saw his fragments “stitched together” in a single poem.
“The Thousand and Second Night” was the longest poem he had yet attempted, and it is a pivotal poem in his development. Composed while he was at work on The (Diblos) Notebook, it is, like the novel, a formally experimental work in which Merrill stakes out an artistic position. He advances the revision of his early manner, roughening the verbal texture of his work, pushing further the strategies of interruption and revision discovered in “An Urban Convalescence,” and replacing the symbolic scenes of his early poems with specific lived experiences, while giving up the unified lyric voice of his early poems in favor of many tones and speakers. As a result, Merrill made his poetry funnier, more dynamic, able to represent time in new ways, and to address the deep questions posed by his living.
Taking off from the notebook form of the novel, the first of the poem’s five parts begins with a mock diary entry, headed “Istanbul. 21 March.” The place and date locate the poet between seasons and continents, March 21 being the vernal equinox, dividing winter and spring, and the Straits of the Bosporus being the boundary between Europe and the Middle East, “The passive Orient and our frantic West.” The poet awakens to “an absurd complaint. The whole right half / Of my face refuses to move.” When he sets out to see Hagia Sophia, the “house of Heavenly Wisdom” is in crumbling disrepair, suggesting an analogy to his facial paralysis, the crack in his own “façade,” seen as the symptom of a moral state. He chides himself: “You’d let go / Learning and faith as well, you too had wrecked / Your precious sensibility. What else did you expect?” He has wasted his gifts by leading the life of a libertine, for which his promiscuous travels are both a vehicle and a metaphor.
In the poem’s second part, Merrill depicts the type of conversation he mentioned to Jane Bowles. As he recovers from his paralysis in Athens, he meets a Greek in the Royal Park— where Jimmy, David, and Tony went to find off-duty evzones. The stranger is the antithesis of the effete poet: “Superb, male, raucous, unclean, Orthodox // Ikon of appetite feathered to the eyes / With the electric blue of days that will / Not come again.” “My friend with time to kill,” he continues,
Asked me the price of cars in Paradise.
By which he meant my country, for in his
The stranger is a god in masquerade.
Failing to act that part,
I am afraid I was not human either— ah, who is?
He is, or was; had brothers and a wife;
Chauffeured a truck; last Friday broke his neck
Against a tree. We have no way to check
These headlong emigrations out of life.
“These headlong emigrations out of life”: even as the poet mourns his honest friend, honoring his superior humanity, his grim punning wit oddly de-realizes this death and makes the dominant tone one of breezy resignation. It’s probably this tone that his friends back home have in mind when they suggest that he has become “the vain // Flippant unfeeling monster” he always feared he might turn into. He has lost track of “love,” he admits, and precisely in the act of looking for it, or at least for sex. Merrill modulates next into frank self-disgust:
A thousand and one nights! They were grotesque.
Stripping the blubber from my catch,
I lit The oil-soaked wick, then could not see by it.
Mornings, a black film lay upon the desk[.]
Rather than narrate his own nighttime sexual adventures, Merrill turns to a set of vintage pornographic cards. In one picture, “She strokes his handlebar who kneels / To do for her what a dwarf does for him.” In another,
He steers her ankles like— like a wheelbarrow.
The dwarf has slipped out for a breath of air,
Leaving the monstrous pair.
Who are they? What does their charade convey?
Maker and Muse? Demon and Doll?
“All manners are symbolic”— Hofmannsthal.
The story of the cards came from Irma Brandeis, to whom the poem is dedicated: she’d told Merrill about finding a cache of them, which she destroyed. 4 Merrill puts himself on the scene of their discovery with an Aunt Alix who “turned red with shame, / Then white, then thoughtful. ‘Ah, they’re all the same— / Men, I mean.’ A pause. ‘Not you, of course.’ ” For Aunt Alix, the gay young man is an exception to the rule, a different type of man. Does that mean he is more or less human, more or less a monster than other men? Or maybe he is no different after all. Indeed, Merrill is every bit as secretive and sexual as the “Morose Great-Uncle Alastair” the cards came from— a few of which the poet pockets to take home and use as an aid to masturbation.
Two pseudo-quotations follow in prose, the second of which provides an allegorical interpretation of Merrill’s “grotesque” sexual pursuits. Here he links the libertine’s quest for stimulation and pleasure, as he would much later in The Changing Light at Sandover, to man’s abuse of the planet: “Likewise, on Earth’s mature body we inflict a wealth of gross experience— drugs, drills, bombardments— with what effect? A stale frisson, a waste of resources all too analogous to our own. Natural calamities (tumor and apoplexy no less than flood and volcano) may at last be hailed as positive reassurances, perverse if you like, of life in the old girl yet.”
By a clever turn, Merrill comes around to saying that his symptoms are a positive reassurance of life in him yet. The idea is enough for him to proclaim, slipping into verse again, the recovery of love. But he backs away from this affirmation as soon as he makes it, suspicious of his own rhetorical powers, his too-easy wish for a simple, decent, sunlit solution:
Love. Warmth. Fist of sunlight at last
Pounding emphatic on the gulf.
High wails From your white ship: The heart prevails!
Affirm it! Simple decency rides the blast!—
Phrases that, quick to smell blood, lurk like sharks
Within a style’s transparent lights and darks.
We can’t trust his language, it seems, unless he distrusts it. Merrill must move indoors and back into abba quatrains (as in “An Urban Convalescence”) before he can speak with full confidence. Now, writing at home in winter, Merrill reviews his travels with a spirit of acceptance, even triumph:
Lost friends, my long ago
Voyages, I bless you for sore
Limbs and mouth kissed, face bronzed and lined,
An earth held up, a text not wholly undermined
By fluent passages of metaphor.
The nouns here (“ limbs and mouth,” “face,” “earth,” and “text”) are arranged in apposition. The grammar implies that they are connected, perhaps equivalent. Merrill is envisioning a way of writing that is equally a way of living. His face will become his text, and vice versa. “The Thousand and Second Night” suggests an artistic program, then, but it does so by leaps and implications, rather than claims and assertions. It projects, as Merrill said in an interview, a “musical” rather than a logical sense of the relations between its parts. These he fits together in a collage, placing heterogeneous materials in evocative patterns. This method required a tolerance for loose ends and a relish for seemingly arbitrary, offhand connections. It enabled Merrill to move boldly outside the constraints of the tightly packaged New Critical lyric he had been trained in.
One model for “The Thousand and Second Night” is, Merrill observed, Lord Byron’s Don Juan, with its “air of irrelevance, of running on at the risk of never becoming terribly significant.” The great poetic sequences of Eliot and Yeats are another, very different model for the poem’s quest motifs and collage technique. Merrill pays tribute to Eliot and Yeats, as well as Hofmannsthal and Valéry, by quoting them directly. But there is something ambivalent, even hostile about his conspicuous bows. Take these lines brooding on the Bell’s palsy episode, which hold like a kernel the problem of the entire poem:
once you’ve cracked
That so-called mirror of the soul,
It is not readily, if at all, made whole.
(“Between the motion and the act
Falls the Shadow”— T. S. Eliot.)
Part of me has remained cold and withdrawn.
The day I went up to the Parthenon
Its humane splendor made me think So what?
“So what?,” we note, is made to rhyme with “T. S. Eliot.” The solemnity of the quotation from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” satirized here, is at the very opposite end of the rhetorical spectrum from Byron’s “air of irrelevance.” In Merrill’s hands, the quest poem becomes a carnivalesque genre, amenable to both modernist discontinuities and an old-fashioned, romantic virtuosity, rejecting the high-culture seriousness of Eliot.
Before his reader can complain that the literary historical dimension of the poem, brought to the fore by his quotations, makes it feel like an academic exercise, Merrill adds a parody of a classroom discussion of the poem. “Now,” Merrill’s imaginary English Department lecturer begins, “if the class will turn back to this, er, / Poem’s first section— Istanbul— I shall take / What little time is left today to make / Some brief points.” The comic device cuts two ways. First, it forestalls the reception of the poem as an object requiring expert care, the kind of professional attention given poems at Amherst, say. The lecturer’s gentle, stuffy voice is enough to make any reader feel that a poem should not mean but be. With his lecturer as a guide, Merrill implies that the structure and meanings of his poem, unlike Eliot’s Grail myth or the occult symbols of Yeats, have been planted in plain sight. What this poem offers, it appears, is wit, not mysterious wisdom. From another angle, though, the device does not forestall interpretation so much as initiate and direct it. It allows Merrill to face hard questions that might well be asked of his poem; and as he does, he smuggles in ideas, even a statement of principles. The lecturer points out correlations between form and content in the poem. While he fumbles to provide a reason for them (“ No, I cannot say offhand / Why this should be. I find it vaguely satis—”), he implies that such designs can only ever be an expression of artistic choice, rather than objective truth. Then another hand goes up: “Yes please? The poet quotes too much? Hm. That is / One way to put it.” The lecturer himself quotes in reply: “Mightn’t he have planned // For his own modest effort to be seen / Against the yardstick of the ‘truly great’ / (In Spender’s phrase)?” Here Merrill makes us see the modifier “truly” in Stephen Spender’s “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great” either as an awkward redundancy or as a form of grade inflation (the category has been so diluted that a specification must be made— not merely “great” but “truly great”). Greatness is the property of T. S. Eliot and the Parthenon. Merrill, at this point in his career, isn’t interested in honoring or achieving it.
What ground, then, has he to stand on? What is the basis of his self- defense? Just before the class period ends, a student poses his version of these questions: Yes, what now? Ah. How and when Did he “affirm”? Why, constantly. And how else But in the form. Form’s what affirms. That’s well Said, if I do—[ Bells ring.] Go, gentlemen. “Form” is shorthand for style or manner, the poet’s bearing on the page and not simply his skillful prosody, although that is essential to it. “Form” implies a contract with the reader, an intimacy grounded in shared respect that is like the good form Merrill shows at the end of “A Tenancy” when he welcomes readers into his past as if into his home. The possibility of constructing such an intimacy in poetry is presented as itself sufficient grounds for affirmation, a basis for faith that will do in place of metaphysics or myth. From this perspective, mere wit begins to look like wisdom.
There are limits on what “form” can accomplish, however. The healing Merrill holds out as his goal is not a repair of the “crack in the mirror of the soul,” but an acceptance of division; and thus the appropriate image at the poem’s close is not a reconciliation, but an amicable divorce. The title “The Thousand and Second Night,” adapted from The Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights, puts the story of Scheherazade in the background throughout; in the fifth and final section, Merrill brings it forward. The story is familiar: Scheherazade nightly makes love to the murderous Sultan and then, before he can cut her head off like the hapless virgins before her, she tells him a tale so compelling and yet incomplete that he postpones her execution to the next night in order to hear more. Sex and storytelling, joined by feminine guile, partners in mastering male violence and the threat of death. We might expect Merrill to identify with the female storyteller exclusively, to side with her; but that is not the case. The Sultan and Scheherazade embody opposing principles— male and female, body and soul, day and night— that he can neither choose between nor bring together, like warring parents. So he lets them depart in separate directions, she to “ ‘refresh / Her soul in that cold fountain which the flesh / Knows not,’ ” and he “ ‘to go in search of joys / Unembroidered by your high, soft voice, / Along the stony path the senses pave.’ ” We wake alongside the Sultan in bafflement:
They wept, then tenderly embraced and went
Their ways. She and her fictions soon were one.
He slept through moonset, woke in blinding sun,
Too late to question what the tale had meant.
After Christmas, Merrill visited Amherst. There he saw Rosemary Sprague, her parents, and other old friends, and read “my long poem,” meaning “The Thousand and Second Night.” Merrill must have been satisfied to read his racy, ambitious poem at his alma mater, standing at the front of Johnson Chapel and facing the sober portraits of Amherst presidents on the white walls before a packed house. The students had been assigned Water Street to study in class; the clever ones among them could savor the classroom parody in “The Thousand and Second Night.” Jimmy made a few minor adjustments to the poem, gave up on doing anything more (“ I did hope, I did try, to cling less to artifice— in vain; my muse will pluck her eyebrows despite my prayers”), and sent it off to The New Yorker, where Howard Moss accepted it— although the poem didn’t appear in print until June 1964, after long debate among the magazine’s other editors, presumably concerning its length, difficulty, and sexual content.