James Merrill

Knowing Innocence

Reena Sastri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135914141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

James Merrill: Knowing Innocence reevaluates the achievement of this important poet by showing how he takes up an old paradigm – innocence – and reinvents it in response to new historical, scientific, and cultural developments including the bomb, contemporary cosmology, and the question of agency. The book covers Merrill's full career, emphasizing the late poetry, on which there remains little commentary. Illuminating both Merrill's relation to a tradition of literary innocence from Milton to Blake and Wordsworth to Emerson and Stevens, and his relevance to contemporary cultural debates, the rubric of "knowing innocence" helps us to understand his achievement. Merrill undertakes a career-long effort to know innocence, and develops a thematic and stylistic attitude that is both innocent and knowing, combining attitudes of wonder and hope with reflexive wit, intellectual breadth, and an unflinching gaze at mortality. He ultimately imagines innocence as creative agency, a capacity for imagination, invention, and ethical responsibility. The book demonstrates how, addressing questions of sexual identity, childhood and memory; atomic science, the big bang, and black holes; environmental degradation; AIDS; and the notion of the death of history – while honoring poetry's essential qualities of freedom and play – his poems perform cultural work crucial to his time and ours.

Chapter 1
Scenes of Childhood

From the child of “The Black Swan” with his “hands full of difficult marvels” (CP 3) through the child of “Lost in Translation” puzzling out his parents’ divorce, and beyond, Merrill’s poetry is in dialogue with a long tradition of literary and cultural conceptions of childhood.¹ Of these, Rousseau’s influential view of children’s innocence and Freud’s emphasis on their traumatic psychosexual development are particularly powerful and problematic. Although writers such as Dickens, Proust, and Joyce have created child characters whose imagination, resourcefulness, vulnerability, and self-consciousness create complex alternatives to guilt and innocence, these two paradigms remain influential in twentieth-century representations of childhood.² Wordsworth and Freud are key figures for the mid-century American poets who, after modernists shunned it, helped to make childhood a poetic subject again.³ Merrill’s poetic responses to childhood are influenced by these two poles, but not limited to them. After very early poems that do not question the link between childhood and innocence, he increasingly dissociates the two as a necessary condition of more honest, strenuous explorations of each.

Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” is a crucial point of reference in Merrill’s thinking about childhood and innocence. Implicit in many of Merrill’s childhood poems, it appears explicitly in Book 0 of Mirabell’s Books of Number, in the context of the death of David Jackson’s parents, and thus the death of DJ’s identity as a child. In the afterlife DJ’s mother, Mary, takes tea with Marius Bewley, who “Reads her the Wordsworth Ode, /Pours out the steeping innocence she craves— / One cup too many, and he’ll see her home” (CLS 103).⁴ Merrill’s reference to the Ode figures Wordsworthian innocence as an intoxicant, one that seems harmless, resembling tea, but produces drunkenness. When Mary evokes a Wordsworthian journey “back to innocence” (106), Chester Kallman (Auden’s lover), also recently deceased, overhears her and comments with Freudian insight, “AS FOR INNOCENCE IT HAS / A GENIUS FOR GETTING LOST I FEAR / ONCE THE BABE FINDS PLEASURE WHERE IT SUCKS / THE TRAP IS SET ALREADY ITS TOO LATE” (106). Early in his career, Merrill uses Freud to counter Wordsworth, but he finds aspects of Freudian models deterministic and restrictive. Merrill’s poems about childhood imply that not only Wordsworth, with his regret for lost childhood powers, but also Freud, with his revisiting of early traumas, can foster a dangerous tendency to focus solely on the past and thus preclude growth.⁵ It is the difficult, ongoing process of growth that is at the center of his childhood poems, and not the appealing “combination of unwitting innocence, instinctual aplomb, and sensible anarchy that characterizes a child’s emotional life,” nor the longings “for the pastoral and primitive, […] paradises lost to maturity and contingency,” that critics have attributed to them.⁶ For Merrill, to write compellingly about childhood is to write about the problem of how to grow up.

Revisiting this question in 1993, his memoir A Different Person makes clear the extent to which it was complicated and intensified by his homosexuality. Freud’s model of homosexuality as a form of arrested development or regression is one Merrill confronts, with, in his early work, some anxiety, but one he ultimately decisively rejects.⁷ For the young Merrill to grow up, to become “a different person” (CPR 460), entailed both temporal change, and an acceptance of his differences from the business and family man his parents and friends expected him to become, differences “laudable and literary at noon, shocking and sexual at midnight” (650). The memoir traces Merrill’s path, over the course of a two-year stay in Europe, various love affairs, and several months of psychoanalysis, from writer’s block and what we might call lover’s block, to the beginning of his lifelong relationship with David Jackson and of his career as a writer; that is, to a commitment to his identity as an artist and a gay man. At the end of the analysis, Merrill asks Dr Detre whether he might not have achieved the growth and insight, “the longed-for changes,” with time alone, “Time passing normally, without all the probing and soul-searching, the cost to oneself and others.” The analyst concedes that time “‘approximates with surprising accuracy the work we do. But,’” he says, “‘we do it faster’” (677). The analysis provides one model of growth: not a passive relation to time’s passing, nor a regressive wish to go back, but an active matching of time’s movement with insight and change that frees the individual to create both emotional bonds and aesthetic artifacts.

This process of growth and insight might be termed a way of “finding oneself.”⁸ But Merrill resists such a teleological and reifying conception of the process of growth. For him, growing up entails the discovery that “Freedom to be oneself is all very well; the greater freedom is not to be oneself” (CPR 565). In mid-career poems, costumes, masks, and acting-out enable growth, and particularly growth into a sexual identity.⁹ They supplement, or replace, roles inherited from the family with those chosen from the world of stylized fictions (especially opera), and challenge naturalizing, essentializing models of gender, sexuality, and identity. In developing this dramatic model, Merrill draws on Wilde and Yeats. “Give [a man] a mask,” says Gilbert in Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” “and he will tell you the truth”; “To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one’s own” (389, 391).¹⁰ Wilde’s truth of masks is also the truth of change: the true critic (or artist) “will realize himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways” (393). In Yeats, “Active virtue” is “theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask” (Mythologies 333).¹¹ Wilde’s irony and his provocative and theatrical personae provide Merrill closer models than Yeats’s more weighty rhetorical stance, but both writers help Merrill develop a model of growth that is an alternative to a Wordsworthian model of teleological organic development. This theatrical mode makes his versions of childhood different from the more naturalistic, if epistemologically unstable, representations of childhood in Bishop or Lowell.

In Chapter Five, we will see how the childhood poems of A Scattering of Salts bring childhood and innocence back together, creating a fictional childhood self that offers access to a Blakean innocence. The present chapter traces Merrill’s early struggle to sever childhood and innocence, and then describes his inventive ways of writing about childhood in mid-career. His early novel The Seraglio poses the dangers of idealizing childhood innocence and the difficulties of growing up in stark, even crude, terms: innocence is so powerful an ideal for protagonist Francis Tanning that he attempts to castrate himself to preserve it. “Scenes of Childhood” marks a decisive moment in the poetry’s treatment of childhood. It wrestles with and relinquishes innocence, both as purity, and as originality, the blank slate or fresh start. It also struggles free of Freudian determinism. Later poems achieve a tone both serious and comic whose flexible lightness is a hard-won achievement of style and (what may be the same thing) of character. “The Broken Home” chooses change over continuity, tracing a series of metamorphoses—wax burning to candlelight, toy soldiers melting to form leaden printers’ type, a family home becoming a school—through which the adult frees himself from the stifling past and into the future. “Matinees” and “Days of 1935” celebrate growth through masks and fictions. They implicitly invoke drag, flaunting the performative, hence contingent, character of gender identity.¹² They also experiment with the mask of the child. Merrill stages childhood scenes with a sense of their dramatic, fictional quality and with an eye to how they can help him not to regress, but to continue to develop, in part through play. The lyrics of Divine Comedies, including “Chimes for Yahya” and “Verse for Urania,” begin to reimagine childhood from the point of view of an older man drawn to some of the qualities—playfulness, emotional openness—he associates with, if not his own childhood, then the idea of childhood, and equally drawn to the restorative myth of Proust’s Time Regained. Of these, “Lost in Translation” most persuasively entertains the consoling fiction that nothing is lost, while it simultaneously deconstructs the lost state of childhood innocence.

1

Looking back from the end of his career, we can see the first poem in Merrill’s first book looking forward to the growth charted in the backward-looking A Different Person. “Meaning to stay as long as possible,” the memoir begins, “I sailed for Europe. It was March 1950. New York and most of the people I knew had begun to close in. Or to put it differently, I felt that I alone in this or that circle of friends could see no way into the next phase. [ …] Was I ever coming back? Yes, yes, one of these days. But of course I would be a different person then” (CPR 459–60). The original version of “The Black Swan” (1946) ends with the swan in motion while the child stays still; it knows what the child does not and goes where he cannot yet follow:

Always the black swan moves on the lake; always

The blond child stands to gaze

As the tall emblem pivots and rides out

To the opposite side, always. The child upon

The bank, hands full of difficult marvels, stays

Forever to cry aloud

In anguish: I love the black swan.

(CP 3)

The child’s desire to understand, to follow the swan across or into the lake (which the poem suggests is “life”), his “anguish” at being confined to the bank, link him to A Different Person’s version of the young poet ready to set sail.¹³ Although this child is not yet able to do so, when the child wants to grow up he becomes for Merrill subject rather than object.

In early poems including “Accumulations of the Sea,” “Primer,” and “From Morning into Morning,” children appear as icons evoking a vague, idealized innocence and representing time as loss; the poems suffer from “sophistications of nostalgia” (CP 10) for which the notion of childhood innocence, always already lost, is merely an excuse.¹⁴ In The Seraglio, Merrill begins to pursue questions that will be central to his career: What is innocence and how is it embodied? What defines childhood and what does it mean to grow up? What is the relationship between the two states; does growing up necessarily entail losing innocence and taking on guilt and cynicism? The aptly named Lady Good, overwhelmed by feelings of guilt after her husband’s death, presumes “conscience” to “determine nearly all behavior, not just her own” (CNP 220); similarly, the novel relentlessly reads characters and events in terms of innocence and its opposites (knowledge, experience, guilt). Nearly every character is described as childish or childlike by another character (in dialogue or indirect discourse) or by the narrator. The only character who never appears childlike, the sculptor Xenia, is by contrast in danger of becoming a parody of insatiable sexuality and old-world corruption. A similar double bind defines the novel’s central characters: Lily Buchanan, an impressionable, imaginative child who slowly grows up as her parents wish her to, and Francis Tanning, a young man who refuses to grow up because he does not want to become who his parents expect him to be. Neither Lily’s eventual conformity to her parents’ decorous, class-bound ways, nor Francis’s refusal of adult relationships and commitments in favor of willful immaturity is a promising solution to the problem of reconciling innocence and experience: the models developed in Merrill’s later work for a fruitful relationship between these terms are absent here.¹⁵ Nonetheless the novel is crucial in establishing the passionate centrality of Merrill’s preoccupation with innocence.

Francis Tanning, son of financier Benjamin Tanning and his second wife, Vinnie, has been living in Italy on his trust fund in a version of the Grand Tour. He spends most of his time with Jane, an American graduate student in Art History whose love for Francis he chooses largely to ignore. They have also befriended Xenia, a European sculptor, whom Francis invites back to New York, ostensibly to execute a bust of his father under his commission, but also to add to the circle of women hovering expectantly around Mr. Tanning, recently divorced from his third wife. On Francis and Xenia’s arrival, they find the seraglio thriving: a nurse for Mr. Tanning (who is ill, but not as ill as he acts); a former mistress; a flirtatious cousin; and Englishwoman Lady Prudence Good (who will later become the fourth wife), are all installed at The Cottage. Xenia takes up her commission and charms everyone. Then Francis and Xenia go to bed together one drunken night, and in the morning, Francis feels she has corrupted him irrevocably and betrayed his trust. In the meantime, Jane has also returned to the States and married her childhood sweetheart. When Francis accompanies his father to Boston for a medical procedure, he meets Jane again, a meeting that precipitates his self-mutilation, an attempt at castration, at the end of Part One. In Part Two, his act seems to have produced a measure of liberation; he dresses like a dandy, takes up with a young man called Marcello, speaks of his family in a deliberately heartless manner that might indicate a healthy independence from them. However, although Francis’s analyst tells him he no longer sees himself as a child, and he agrees, he continues to behave like one throughout the remainder of the novel. In Part Three, he once again returns to the Cottage, and resumes his role as pander and keeper of his father’s seraglio.

The Seraglio is not a coming of age novel but a novel of the failure to come of age. Critics discuss Francis in terms of before and after his act of self-violence, but the novel’s three-part structure suggests that we read his development ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward Innocence as Inventive Agency
• 1. Scenes of Childhood
• 2. “Beyond Arcadia at last”?: Merrill’s Nature
• 3. The Changing Light: Innocence in Merrill’s Scientific Myth
• 4. “The X / Of the illiterate”: Origins, Translations
• 5. A Scattering of Salts: Kaleidoscopic Innocence
• Conclusion: “Seek transformation”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index