Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  Most of the action took place, had to, here on the terrace. Lunch, tea. Orson at his typewriter, Dora sewing. I close my eyes to see before me that recurring rubbery dessert of cornstarch & boiled milk & sugar, concocted for me alone by D. who said it would do good. I could get through a few mouthfuls each meal; after 4 days half of it was still left, hardening, a jellyfish in sun. At the meal’s end Kosta would come for instructions before taking the boat to town. Maritsa, their soiled child toddling in her wake, would clear the table, dish by dish. One by one we too rose & strolled off. Last of all, the dog Kanella (Cinnamon). An act ending in a theatre where there is no curtain.

  Chryssoula had known Kosta & Maritsa; they have moved to Athens.

  It is there on the moonlit terrace that (Dora) confronts Orestes on his return from the lemon groves. At dawn. She has sat up all night.

  Entering the house: a large square hall, staircase of dark wood. A window on the landing, some clear panes, others of green or amber, making it all the harder to see the old man’s paintings. We had to take them outdoors where they showed, I fear, dismally in the live radiance. Dried blues & oranges, villas, vases, women setting tables, windows onto the sea. Blossoms pressed in a History of Impressionism.

  Orestes cannot understand why his brother is so touched by them—his own tastes run to Michelangelo, Grunewald, the monumental, the metaphysical. Picasso’s Guernica. Have him ask, when they are alone, “Why, (Name), should Tasso’s paintings move you so?”

  The reply to be carefully phrased, for here we touch an essential point. “Perhaps because they are so slight. They will not change ask command anybody to change his life”—O. having quoted Rilke in the Athens museum.

  (Dora gives the brother a little harbor scene as they are leaving.)

  Also downstairs: the salon—furniture under sheets, a marble mantel; the library—window seats, Morris chairs, a gas heater, a Revue des Deux Mondes of 1936 with a dozen pages cut. Out in back: the well, the oven, the servants’ quarters and, further off, Orestes’ cottage.

  His cottage. His rock garden. His private cove. How proud & happy it made him! Two whitewashed rooms paved with hexagonal terra-cotta, interspersed with square black, tiles. Rush chairs. A low, wide window. His marble trouvaille on the sill. The table strewn with papers, dictionaries. His life-mask, plaster painted dull red, hanging above. Two wooden beds, woven striped coverings. The pillow Mother embroidered for him—neon-pink & yellow flowers on black—which looked so sad, so cheap in Houston but was suddenly at home here

  —for although she was by now thoroughly American, (Eleni’s) hands still did what they had been taught to do in her childhood.

  All this to be recalled in idyllic contrast to the apartment Orestes & Dora take in New York.

  A name for O.’s brother: Sandy.

  Look! A figure is walking out onto the terrace: no one I have ever seen. He turns round, speaks, is joined by a girl in toreador pants. Why, this will be my “Byron.” He has overstayed the weekend.

  He is deeply tanned, more gracefully built than the real Byron—than mine, I mean. A libertine?! And his hair is turning gray.

  If Sandy ever returns to the House, he can think, “That was my youth, where it bloomed.” Will he need to recall his illness?

  Once the buds opened, the red blossoms kept their shape for days & days, without perceptibly maturing …

  I am so sleepy now. Slow bright tears of gum encrust a section of mauve bark, brownish mauve, like

  mauve-brown bark, like rouge on a negress.

  As they were leaving, (Dora) gave Sandy a little oil sketch of red geraniums.

  2.vii.61

  The Enfant Chic pauses, passing the café, to welcome me back. Mrs N. he pronounces sarmante. I smile & nod. But Mazmaselle Lucine, where is she? Gone. Then, like a cat pouncing: And your brother? I reply without hesitation: à New-York.

  Seeing the Enfant reminds me, one of his beach friends, Giorgios, practised English on me today. Where are you from? Are you married? How old are you? Why not married? What do you earn a month? What does a car cost in America? A kilo of meat? One egg? It made, I thought, for a delightful conversation. I replied as I thought best, asked my own simple questions, & that was that. Neither knowing more than 50 words of the other’s language, we were soon reduced to a friendly goodbye. (Who described talk between friends as the ticking of not quite synchronized clocks on the same shelf?)

  Mrs N. shares George’s peasant curiosity, but oh the elaborate web she must spin to trap each new fly of fact—while G. can do no better than to thread a single strand across one’s path; one sees it from far off, & arranges to trip over it just to please him.

  A month after the old painter’s death, Orestes revisited (Diblos). He called upon the widow in his soberest aspect, wearing neatly ironed pants & carrying a copy of his book on Euripides which she had asked to see. A preacherly note in his voice made (Dora) smile: it was for her to win him back to the world.

  She carried the tea tray onto the terrace. They were alone. Byron had stayed a week, was now again in Athens. Orestes knew this. They had drunk a coffee together, by chance, not long before. (Byron: “The estate must be settled, you know what these things are like”—then looked at O. with sudden doubtfulness.) B. drove off in a red sports car. Orestes had thought him quite dashing & friendly.

  “Yes,” she said without conviction. “We’ve spoiled him, though. He had the makings of a scholar.”

  Orestes glowed. She would have liked her son to resemble him!

  She has not of course offered him the cottage in a letter. She does so now:

  “… come & go as you please … a place to work … each other’s company if we want it; if not, not. I can tick on alone here quite happily.”

  Pitched low, her voice proceeded from high in her throat and made her words sound insincere to one who didn’t know that she had had an English governess.

  Orestes’ voice, answering her, shook. His heart pulses beat hard, as after some great physical exertion—a height scaled, blue waters glittering off into haze below. At that moment he had nothing to give her but his whole heart.

  He fetches clothes & books from Athens. The cottage needs a new roof. He sleeps the 1st weeks in the big house.

  September comes & goes, each week drier, bluer, a season flawlessly expiring toward storms. The question of their becoming lovers never arises; or arises once, later, too late to be answered simply.

  He can have asked, concerned for her: Won’t the townspeople talk?

  She: They’ll talk whatever I do.

  (A scene in which the Enfant Chic is made to feel unwelcome.)

  He would have become her lover, he would have been anything she wanted. Though Orestes, before this, had only loved younger women, he

  (Dora), at 56, fulfilled a classic condition. She was “old enough to be his mother.” Compared, however, to Eleni—grown puffy & ill-at-ease in unbecoming clothes, dependent on the oven that “thought for her” & the TV that “saw for her”—Dora’s person had become refined, stylized, a garment that would always be in style. Age could not wither her? It could, it had; but the process was gentle & dignified, as with an animal, and gave no offense.

  Correspondingly:

  Orestes’ Latinate vocabulary (his emotions) now gave way to authentic, simple forms: sea, sky, vine, house, plate, stone, woman

  : rock sea sun wine goat sky.

  Each was enchanted by qualities appropriate to the other’s age. What energy & imagination Orestes had! From this period dated a round table set up permanently on the terrace, the repainting of the boat (blue & white with a red-fringed awning); also, of course, the cottage itself rejuvenated, beautified, his dream come true. By spring a path that was more like a rock garden connected it with the House. O. gathered the plants on their walks. You would have thought that he had never, that nobody had ever seen a flower before. The anemone. The grape hyacinth. The orchid big as a bee. “Yes, yes,” (Dora) had to keep saying, “they are
beautiful, you are right!”—laughing because it was true, they were. Still, to be made to say so at every step—! He meanwhile had scrambled up an embankment, waved, recited a stanza, leapt back down into the road. She, thinking of Byron’s bored, cool manners, tried to imagine them screening any such blaze of vitality.

  Orestes: Do you know that I was 12 when I smelled my first rose? That I’d never been to the country—only to city parks? That’s what I would call unnatural: to grow up without nature, without seeing anything else grow. The children I knew never played.

  Dora: What did you do?

  O.: We fought. I’m playing now, at least.

  Her eyes stung. She put her arm through his.

  He on his side And among the flowers: a nest, a cuttlefish of thorns, the Medusa plant, writhing, 2 red, parted lips at the end of each tentacle. In its involuted, austere sensuality Orestes saw himself.

  And she—she looks out for his comfort; it matters to her. She seems not to expect to have her presence felt—a bouquet of basil on the tray with his tea, nothing more. If he thanks or praises her in terms that approach the gratitude in his heart, her eyes widen in a half bewildered, half deprecating look: good manners shouldn’t make so much of common thoughtfulness. He is her guest, does he think she means to ignore him? She does nothing well—her cooking can’t touch Maritsa’s, her darning is grotesque—yet whatever she does

  whatever issued from her hands gave pleasure, moved O. beyond all reason. Unlike an American woman who had never outgrown

  who demanded

  3.vii.61

  The shadows on his face, his mouth opening & shutting. The look on Dora’s face when, responding to his call from the garden below—O.’s head lifted, the 2 syllables of her name uttered as instinctively as a moo or a whinney; & this instinctiveness a key not just to his joy but to his confidence in hers—she

  (shall they have been lovers after all?)

  appeared at her window smiling: Here I am.

  4.vii.61

  A flood of letters yesterday. I wrote no more in the book. One would think friends understood the evils of correspondence.

  Bit by bit D. & O. hear each other’s lives—a page apiece?

  (Dora): Memories of St Petersburg. The white nights. A needlecase of green & blue enamel. From there to London. The first Greek lesson. Her great-grandfather’s stone house on the waterfront of which town in Crete? The young bluestocking (a photograph at 17, long braids, plump, glowing face bent gravely over her book—Shakespeare? Rostand? She no longer remembered). The wedding trip to Paris & Italy followed by—finding it hard to believe herself—nearly 40 years without leaving Greece. Byron. His nurses. Tasso. His neurasthenia. The war. The lover.

  Orestes: Parents—the goatherd and the merchant’s daughter. The emigration to New York. Old Arthur Orson. The prison of the schoolyard. The father’s illness. The Christmas he asks for a book & is given an orange. The traffic that night—lights flushing over the blistered ceiling like pages that turn & turn. The prize for an essay on what it means to be an American. Texas. Upstairs, the baby, the half brother, sleeps in the arms of a plush gnome.

  Months had to elapse before the evening when O. sat bolt upright from his book, scalp prickling, & stared across at her in her chair, reading or sewing or whatever. He knew that if he were to ask her then & there, “Dora, Dora, what are we doing?” her reply would be promptly, reassuringly forthcoming, in that all but unaccented English of hers—“Why, my dear, we are getting through our lives!”

  Save this for N. Y.?

  (Or better, what M. & I arrived at, one black afternoon in Turin:

  “What have you wanted out of this?”

  “The experience. What else should one want?”)

  One day Orestes, returning on foot from town, found the iron gate of (Dora)’s property ajar. He closed it behind him, as he had done on leaving, & started for the house. In the alley of oleanders he met a stranger, a small strong middle-aged man, well enough dressed. They nodded civilly. An artisan, O. sup

  On a proprietary impulse Orestes turned and called after him. Had he wanted anything? “Thank you, sir,” the man replied. “I’ve been to the house on business.” An artisan, O. supposed. Nevertheless, entering the library, he asked Dora who it had been. “Oh,” she said, “are you back? Will you close the door?”

  That man was now (she told Orestes) the manager of some olive groves on the mainland. Thirteen years ago, in 1941, when she had taken him as a lover, he had been in the Underground. He brought her the first British fliers to be fed & sheltered. The war over, they continued to meet. Tasso? If he had known, she dared say he would have understood & kept silent. Then he died. The lover did not wait a month before approaching her. He actually came to call! She was not at home to him. He wrote her a letter, two letters. “Ought I to have been touched? Why? It meant that he had learned very little of who I was in all those years. When he came today I received him & told him as nicely as I could that he must not come again. It’s over. He had no education, but he had a heart and he understood. Tasso old & ill was one thing. Tasso dead is another.”

  (For something largely surmised, this has the ring of truth. It is how she will treat O. later on.)

  There was a further change in Dora’s position. Not only was Tasso dead but Orestes was present. He glowed, thinking of this & of her arrogance, reasoning that, as he was not her lover, she would never use it against him.

  “ruthless pride”

  Today is Independence Day.

  5.vii.61

  Byron came regularly from Athens to see his mother. Physically vain, he took for granted that a man as plain as he found Orestes could not attract her. He told them about his love affairs & the foreign films they were missing. Once, putting a hand on Orestes’ arm, he said, “You really are my mother’s friend, aren’t you?” His tone hovered between wistfulness scorn & a bottomless self-pity. Another time, O. remarked that (Dora) had helped him with a translation he was making. Byron shot him a look of disbelief. “But you know Greek far better than she does. Greek is her third language.”

  This time Dora was present.

  “Yes,” she said, pleased, “if I am Greek at all, I am corrupt, late Greek. Or Byzantine like my namesake Theodora.”

  (But Dora must be called something else.)

  “Let’s hope the resemblance begins & ends with the name,” said Byron, then laughed uproariously.

  “Byron is not a true Greek,” declared Orestes after that weekend. “Even I, in America, would never dream of directing an off-color remark at my mother.”

  On the subject of what was & was not authentically “Greek” Orestes fancied himself an expert. A few years later, to be sure, there would be a table of Americans in every taverna of every village, loftily contradicting one another as to what went on in the Greek mind. Few of them had O.’s Greek blood or command of the language to justify their pronouncements. But though he could talk to anyone, and did—often making a dozen new friends in an evening—there was a subtler language at which he could only guess. It was that of Good Society which had no meaning for him outside of books or jokes, yet whose members—like royalty or peasants—resembled each other more than they did “Danes” or “Bostonians” or “Greeks.” To the degree that (Dora) had been formed by class, Orestes misunderstood her; what was conventional in her manner he found unique. But so was Greece unique, and at this point he surrenders himself lovingly to paradox. Dora, less than Greek by nature, can stand all the more for Greece in his imagination. Hadn’t Shakespeare, after all, taken the foreign queen & made “Egypt” out of her—the mysterious, wealthy seasons of the Nile giving substance to the metaphor? It is in landscape, too, that O. finds Dora’s correlative. In the clear dry air, in the illusory lightness of islands over water.

  (I am right in clinging to my opening page.)

  The hot water brought for shaving has cooled as usual. 6.vii.61—a beard begun.

  How to keep recent impressions from intruding? I would
never have written yesterday’s last paragraph, so torturous & smug, had it not been for Mrs N.’s saying that Dora “had a place in society.” The phrase clung & tickled; I’ve had to scratch it compulsively, thus breaking the skin of my story.

  On the other hand: Byron having been away in Switzerland throughout my time in Greece, I’ve gone ahead and sketched in the kind of mother-son thing that leaps to my mind. Casual, only mildly neurotic. For all I know, Dora was the revered Mediterranean mother & B. fiercely resented Orson’s intrusion (seat at head of table, tone taken with servants). It’s a challenge to show something more complex & interesting than either of these banal possibilities. But what?

  As Orestes grew older his imagination became an ever stronger magnetic field. New experiences whizzed past his eyes to glue themselves against the cold pull of what he had already felt.

  A novel. Not a fantasia.

  I should have made some sort of scheme to refer to. This is my 1st long piece of work, & the problems it raises are new & different from those of short stories (the single mood or action). Yet I keep imagining, wrongly perhaps, that, once I arrive at the right “tone,” the rest will follow. (My plot is of the simplest. The friendship, the marriage, the separation, basta. If the brother would only stop rearing his ugly head—)

  In form & tone the book must derive from the conventional International Novel of the last century—full of scenery and scenes illustrating the at times comic failure of American & European manners to adjust to one another. Nothing of Phèdre here.

  What could I have meant? What would my story be concealing? I’d been toying with having Sandy not be O.’s brother—was that it? What “horrible action” is implied by the fact of kinship? Well, they have quarreled, Sandy doesn’t feel warmly toward Orestes. Splendid! Haven’t I only to remember the master’s lesson, & dramatize the quarrel, the coldness? Anything rather than let it be glimpsed cutting fishily through the shimmer of a phrase.