Survey of Literary Criticism

Criticism of "Minotaur," "Farwell Performance," and "Investiture at Cecconi's"

Works Discussed

Hammer, Langdon. James Merrill: Life and Art. NY: Knopf, 2015.

Materer, Timothy. "James Merrill's Late Poetry: AIDS and the "Stripping Process" Arizona Quarterly 64.2  (Summer 2008.)

Vendler, Helen. "Losing the Marbles: James Merrill on Greece." The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard, 2015.

Additional Works (some referred to in the Materer article)

Egan, Moira. "Techne in Textiles: Merrill's 'Investiture at Cecconi's." Contemporary Poetry Review (21 Nov. 2013).

Gordon, David J. Imagining the End of Life in Post-Enlightenment Poetry: Voices against the Void. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.

Gregerson, Linda. "Faith and the Impossible: The Gay Sublime." Georgia Review 58.2 (2004): 310-17.

Hammer, Langdon. "Art and AIDS: Or, How Will Culture Cure You?" Raritan: A Quarterly Review 14.3 (1995): 103-18.

Hadas, Rachel. "'We Both Knew This Place': Reflections on the Art of James Merrill." Merrill, Cavafy, Poems, and Dreams. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 2000.

Jarraway, David R.: "From Spectacular to Speculative: The Shifting Rhetoric in Recent Gay AIDS Memoirs." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary         Study   of Literature 33.4 (2000): 115-28.

McClatchy, J. D. "Two Deaths, Two Lives." Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS. Ed. Edmund White. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2001.   213-39.

Monette, Paul. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Nunokawa, Jeff. "'All the Sad Young Men': AIDS and the Work of Mourning." Inside/Outside: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York:Routledge, 1991. 311-23.

Sontag, Susan. Illness as a Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

White, Edmund. The Farewell Symphony. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Zeiger, Melissa F. Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

For Hammer on "Farwell Performance," and "Investiture at Cecconi's," see link to "Langdon Hammer on Kalstone and Merrill."

 Langdon Hammer on "Minotaur"

Two readings of the Minotaur figure are presented by Langdon Hammer in James Merrill: Life and Art and Helen Vendler in The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry. Langdon Hammer notes that this poem was prompted by Merrill’s friendship with Torren Blair, a teenage Stonington boy, whom Merrill met when Billy Boatwright brought him to tea at 107 Water Street. Merrill and Blair spent hours talking and would correspond regularly when Merrill traveled, almost as if Merrill wanted to transmit as much of his “mind’s meat, heart’s blood” as possible.  After a “near fatal" car accident in Arizona, Merrill confessed in a letter to Torren that it left him “with a sense that it is vital—to me, to us both—that I tell you whatever I can while I’m still around” (788). The Minotaur “imagines a scene of ritual human sacrifice where the old are fed to the young for the sake of the future: ‘Devour my life each prays’ “ (783). Merrill remakes the myth of the Minotaur when this minotaur turns out to be the erotic, blue-eyed youth dressed in a sinister tribal cloak dense with soft, black spines. In a reversal of the traditional Greek myth where the Minotaur preys on young men and maidens, the minotaur is a youth who consumes “Ten / old women ten old men.”  Furthermore, although in the traditional myth the reluctant tributes are chosen by drawing lots, the tributes of Merrill’s poem are eager to sacrifice themselves. 

Helen Vendler on "Minotaur"

Vendler also notes how Merrill reconceives the Minotaur figure as a life-giving presence to the aged men and women arriving as tribute, suggesting sexual intimacy in old age with a young lover (387).  She suggests another implied reading of the minotaur as a lover with AIDS, perhaps deriving from the unknown person who was the source of Merrill’s infection and death. The fact that the tributes of the original myth were sacrificed to avert a plague poses an eerie connection to the HIV infection ravaging Merrill’s immune system, especially since AIDS was first referred to colloquially as a “plague” in the 1980s. Besides exploring the symbol of the minotaur, Vendler focuses on the unusual form of the poem, noting that it is in trimeter where the “pause after each line (a musical ‘rest’ in lieu of the expected fourth beat) offers a natural space for thought, for query, for additions as we read” (385-386). She then offers the following as an imagined dialogue of how the reader would fill the natural pause built in to the poem’s structure:

This youngster is expected [to do what?]

to feed on what we are [or?]

or were  Mind’s meat heart’s blood [and?]

all that we’ve seen and known [and yet more: all that we’ve]

treasured up rejected [will?]

will now become his body [why? Because]

Devour my life each prays

Vendler states that Merrill does not use punctuation (sentences begin with capital letters but end in air) as if to forestall an ending, as befitting a labyrinth. She also notes the irregular rhymes of the first stanza: “nougat” with “nugget,” “portico” with “Cocteau,” “head” with “red,” when the speaker wonders aloud about the Minotaur’s identity. According to Vendler, the rhymes mark an imaginative method of using free indirect discourse rather than narrative order to retell the myth (386). Thus, Merrill remakes the minotaur myth not only in theme by reversing the sacrifice and sacrificer, but also in form by employing a punctuation and meter that draws the reader into the poem like tributes through a maze.

From Materer, Timothy. "James Merrill's Late Poetry: AIDS and the "Stripping Process." Arizona Quarterly 64.2  (Summer 2008).

Merrill writes of the AIDS crisis of the Eighties in The Inner Room (1988). The volume's narrative "Prose of Departure," a travel  journal interspersed with hokku, still demonstrates Merrill's wish to strike an [End Page 124] "affirmative" note in a poem's conclusion. In contrast, two elegies in the same volume treat the subject with the uncompromising bleakness characteristic of  Merrill's finest late poems. All three poems concern the illness of Merrill's close friend David Kalstone. "Prose" is about Merrill's trip  to Japan with his companion Peter Hooten while Kalstone (referred to as "Paul" in the narrative) is at a clinic having a series of  tests for AIDS. The narrative attempts to find consolation for the suffering that AIDS has inflicted on Paul and deal with the threat it poses to JM. (Merrill also uses the initials JM to indicate his implied self in The Changing Light at Sandover and his memoir A Different Person.) On the visit to Japan in "Prose" he finds healing rituals everywhere: in the Noh theater, the temples, the cemeteries, the burning of incense and a viewing of the moon's eclipse. A passage from Lafcadio Hearn states that "To die without an assurance of a cult was the supreme calamity" (Collected Poems 541), and JM can at least insure that such a calamity will not befall his friend. The rituals he observes in Japan both memorialize the deceased and reflect a reality thatis so dire that it cannot be looked at steadily. As bad news about Paul's condition "keeps dawning on us," JM writes in a statement punctuated by a hokku:

I need a form of evasion, that at best permits odd moments when the subject

 looking elsewhere strays

 in a local muse's

 number-benumbed gaze

 —fixed there, ticking off syllables, until she blinks and the wave breaks. (546)

Now that the hours of Paul's life are running down, the metrics and imagery of the "local" muse of the hokku cannot hold back the wave. But the evasive look of art, which Merrill calls "A Look Askance" in a poem in A Scattering of Salts (1995), may make the blow seem less brutal.5 "Prose" tells the story of an Emperor who must behead his boyhood friend and gives him a banquet entertained by a "legendary troupe" of dancers. When the friend tells the Emperor that he is ready to end the night, the Emperor replies: "'My poor friend . . . haven't you understood? Your head was cut off an hour ago'" (550). The wave breaks without pain because both friends have a palliative ritual. A final [End Page 125] metaphor for art appears in the final section of "Prose" when a kimono dyed purple ("Dyeing. A homophone deepens the trope" 560) reveals a white starry path (a result of the intricate knottings that the dye does not touch) becomes a trope for art finding something beautiful within death:

 star-puckered moral—

white, never-to-blossom buds

of the mountain laurel—

may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night. (560)

Although the consolation that art offers in "Prose" may be admittedly an "evasion," the poem's final image is affirmative when light emerges triumphantly from dark. But the word "triumphant" rings hollow in a poem about the fatal illness of a friend.

No such affirmative gesture is found in Merrill's elegies for David Kalstone, who died in 1986. The image of a kimono, or robe, reappears in "Investiture at Cecconi's" in a form that is a virtual critique of the conclusion of "Prose of Departure." The troupe of dancers of "Prose" also appears again in "Farewell Performance." Although critics have seen the robe and dancers as images of aesthetic triumph in these elegies, the tragic irony is that both the robe and the dancers are also images of the transmission of AIDS from lover to lover without the brief triumph the robe implies in "Prose." Merrill is "beyond consolation" in these two elegies.

In "Investiture," the poet dreams that he is at the door of a tailor in Venice. (In White's Farewell Performance, the characters based on Merrill and Kalstone wear silk robes and patronize the same Venetian tailor.) The dreamer wants the "evening/ clothes for the new year" (580) that he believes he has ordered, but the optimism of looking forward to a new year will be crushed by the old woman who answers the door while exclaiming over the lateness of the hour. When she recognizes the poet, she assumes he has come not for evening clothes but a robe ordered by "the Professore" (Kalstone was a Rutgers University professor). The white silk of the robe that the old woman of "Investiture" asks the poet to wear recalls the crêpe de Chine of "Prose." Yet everything about this dream of an after hours visit to the Venetian tailor is sinister compared to the visit to the silk store in Japan in [End Page 126] "Prose." The poet is simply "found," bewildered, like Yeats's persona in "Cuchulain Comforted," in the land of the dead; and, again like Cuchulain, he meets those who sew the shrouds. The old woman who "stitches dawn to dusk" and comes from a back room to open the door changes into "three bent crones" within the tailor's mirrors. From her hands, and as a "gift" from the poet's friend, the robe becomes a burial shroud or, as Rachel Hadas suggests, "the special gown that belongs not only to the mourner but to the  patient, hospitalized, perhaps quarantined" (43). Although Melissa Zeiger describes the gift as "a benign, and dressy, feat of communication with his friend" (127), this intimate communication is deadly rather than benign.

"Investiture" unfolds in Sapphic lines of falling rhythm from three lines of eleven syllables into the five syllables that end each stanza on a note of bewilderment:

Up my own arms glistening sleeves are drawn. Cool

silk in grave, white folds—Oriental mourning—

sheathes me, throat to ankles. I turn to face her,

uncomprehending.

Thank your friend, she cackles, the Professore!

Wonderstruck I sway, like a tree of tears. You—

miles away, sick, fearful—have yet arranged this

heartstopping present. (580)

Hadas notes that gift of the kimono is "double-edged " (43) and that the grave, white kimono is a metaphor for AIDS. Even so, Hadas suggests that, much as "the dying man has nevertheless managed to effect one last passionate connection," the living do not die "if they are artists, without having passed on their gifts to still others, in an endless reticulation of connections, a fertile cloud of cross-fertilization" (44). This view of the artist and aesthetic experience is undercut, however, by the irony that the passionate connections extend the reach of the fates that may sever one's life. The "present" is indeed stopped by the gift. Since Merrill knew he was seriously ill when he wrote "Investiture," the diagnosis referred to in the poem's first line is not necessarily Kalstone's alone. According to J. D. McClatchy, Merrill noted in his journal a diagnosis with ARC (AIDS Related Complex) at the Mayo Clinic in April 1986 (223). The circumstance of Merrill's death from a heart attack when in [End Page 127] a condition weakened by AIDS underlines the poem's crowning irony that the "heartstopping present" is deadly. Merrill is not of course hinting that his love specifically for Kalstone was fatal. Although Alison Lurie records Merrill's quip that he might have contracted AIDS "from David Kalstone's razor" (173), she notes that the statement is obviously and comically implausible. Instead, it emphasizes as we will see in "Farewell Performance," the obvious and tragic fact that the disease can be transmitted by intimate contact among friends and lovers.

In the second elegy for Kalstone, "Farewell Performance," a ballet performance, like the New York City Ballet performance that was dedicated to Kalstone after his death, is the kind of ritual that Merrill is searching for in "Prose." The troupe of dancers in the elegy recall the ones in "Prose," who beguile the condemned man at the Emperor's feast and make his death painless. Langdon Hammer writes of "Farewell Performance" that "esthetic experience . . . break[s] down the boundary between people on stage and in the audience" and that the aesthetic unity of the dancers gives a "feeling of complicity I want to call love." (118) Hadas writes that in this poem "Aesthetic experience is also the place where the living can commune with the dead" (41). Both critics are aware of how Merrill's appreciation, or even love, for the poem's dancers is qualified by the threat of contagion that they also symbolize; but I would take this qualification much further. Interpretations of this poem as an affirmation of love or community, including Zeiger's that the poem "sketches a cherished network of affection and affinity" (128), are not supported by the poem's despairing tone. To use Merrill's word in the final stanza, such interpretations "self-destruct" under scrutiny.

The opening statement of "Farewell Performance" emphasizes its ironic technique: "Art. It cures affliction" (Collected Poems 581). The statement expresses a belief Merrill cherished from the time of his undergraduate thesis on Marcel Proust when he insisted that metaphor is a "form of healing" and "a way of making pain bearable" (qtd. in Moffett 18). Merrill may also be alluding to Wallace Stevens' lines in "The Rock" that a poem may provide a "cure of the ground / Or a cure of ourselves"(Collected Poems 526). Both "The Rock" and "Investiture" begin by positing that art is a healing force and then subject the assertion to a rigorous interrogation. Describing the dancers, the poet writes that "Limber alembics once more / make of the common / lot a pure, brief gold" (581). The "purity" of this alchemical gold is undercut by [End Page 128] images in the second and third stanza. In the second stanza, the dancers return after the performance—no longer glamorized but "sweat-soldered and leotarded." They are sinister like the "limber, leotarded, blue-eyed bats" in The Changing Light (98) that prefigure the bat-like supernatural creatures that terrify Merrill and David Jackson later in the poem. In the third stanza, Kalstone is transformed not alchemically but through cremation: "parched to / . . . a mortal gravel / sifted through fingers" (Collected Poems 581).

Although there has been a community of feeling that involves spectators such as Kalstone with the dancers, the poem presents it in terms of a dangerous commingling, as in the phrase "sweat-soldered" and in a simile that equates enthusiasm for the aesthetic experience with the transmission of an illness: "You'd caught like a cold their airy / lust for essence" (581). These lines recall Thom Gunn's "The Missing," which was written in 1987 and appeared with other AIDS poems, such as "In Time of Plague,"in The Man with Night Sweats (1992):7

 Contact of friend led to another friend,

 Supple entwinement through the living mass

 Which for all that I knew might have no end,

 Image of an unlimited embrace. (483)

Neither Gunn nor Merrill deny the reality of or condemn the "brief gold" offered by the embrace, but both emphasize the tragic outcome of the dream of joining the dance or, in Gunn's poem, the "living mass" that in its "supple entwinement" also suggests a dance of death. Gunn concludes in his final stanza, "Trapped in unwholeness, I find no escape" (484).

In the middle of Merrill's poem, the focus changes from the ritual art of the dancers to a personal ritual in which Merrill and his companion Peter Hooten release Kalstone's ashes into the Long Island sound near Merrill's home in Stonington. The ceremony offers some satisfaction as the "gruel of selfhood take[s] a manlike shape for one last jeté," and as the poet feels Peter's "sunwarm hand" (Collected Poems 581) on his own. In contrast to this personal ritual, the communal ritual of the dancers is fatally flawed:

 Back they come. How you would have loved it. We in

 turn have risen. Pity and terror done with, 

 program furled, lips parted, we jostle forward

 eager to hail them,

 more, to join the troupe—will a friend enroll us

 one fine day? Strange, though. For up close their magic

 self-destructs. Pale, dripping, with downcast eyes they've

 seen where it led you. (581–82)

Despite the aesthetic beauty of the performance, once it's over ("Pity and terror done with"), the "unlimited embrace" (in Gunn's phrase) that the sweaty troupe offers is threatening. Hammer notes that the "fluids their bodies release (like tears, like cum, like night sweats) enact a radical dissolution of self " (117). The audience is imagined in sexual terms ("program furled, lips parted"), approaching "to join the troupe—will a friend enroll us / one-fine day?" (Collected Poems 582). Kalstone's "airy lust for essence," his love of life and art, contrasts with the "mortal gravel" he has become.

In a draft of the poem written in 1986, Merrill made the dancers' guilty role in Kalstone's death explicit by describing their downcast eyes as begging for forgiveness.8 Although the completed poem eliminates this explicit suggestion that the pale, "magic" and "lust for essence" has ended in "ten or twelve light handfuls" of dust. Both audience and performers have been become part of a "pale, dripping" downcast group in a community of death. The communication from the dead is simply that one must join them. Hammer comments that it is "hard not to hear a homophobic moral" (117) in the last sentence of "Farewell Performance" but suggests that this note is softened because of the community of feeling between dancers and spectators, living and dead. Nevertheless, the irony is that the very things that one loves lead to death. The community or troupe has "self-destructed," and the speaker anxiously wonders if a "friend" will enroll him as well.