Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  Besides, in reading, isn’t one most moved by precisely this refreshment of familiar relationships? The word “grandmother,” thanks to Proust, will have wind in its sails for the rest of time. Why shrink from doing my best for “brother”?—or half my best for “half-brother”!

  Speaking of grandmothers, what irritates me most in what I read (& write) is the whole claptrap of presumed experience. P. C.’s new book, forwarded here, describes itself as “based on his grandmother’s early life in Kentucky.” It is full of her sensations, moral beauty, prowess in the saddle, & I don’t believe a word of it. Premise & method both seem false. As if one could still see to write by the dead, pocked moon of Madame Bovary.

  Always those “he”s and “she”s scattered about like intimate pieces of clothing, when one wants nothing so much as “I”—the anonymous nudity.

  Wait—

  From the moment of my arrival, I

  the world was transfigured for me. The language, the landscape, alike overwhelmed

  both of which I had pondered, as it were, in reproduction, now overwhelmed me with their (truth) and (beauty). I was more at home than I could ever have dreamed. Like a statue

  As if in a museum some figure streaked & pocked, a “Roman copy of a lost Greek original,” and looked at for decades by none but anatomy students, had suddenly been discovered to be the original, Orestess I

  thanks, say, to little more than a ray of sun entering the honey-cells of marble, I felt my whole person cleansed and restored. My skin turned olive brown. The Latinate vocabulary to which I leaned when thinking or speaking in English gave way to authentic, simple forms: rock, sea, sun, wine, goat, sky.

  That The land was poor & stony, that the modern language had been, like the wine, thinned and impregnated with resin, made no difference. I myself felt poor & pungent enough to take my place among the marble rubble, the lizards, spiny plants, clouds of dust and sparkle of salt water—all those things on which the Greek sun dotes & which are intolerable without it.

  “Artemis is charming,” I was able to write a month later. “She is ⅓ A salesgirl, ⅓ student, ⅓ Bacchante. Through her I am learning to know this city seen heretofore only in dreams. We walk the night streets, drink in the tavernas. She recites Sophocles, I reply with Keats & Yeats. Her parents were starved to death by the Germans. I am not in love with her, nor she with me, though we have slept together 3 or 4 times out of tenderness. How rarely one encounters this kind of understanding in America! Now I am waiting for her at a café in blinding sunlight. Oh Sandy, if I could send you the pattern cast by sun through my glass of ice water onto this page! A whole world, pure & childlike, awaits your coming …”

  But the islands were calling me like sirens. I

  Not a tone to be kept up for very long. I guess I’m not a “craftsman.”

  George plays soccer. His team won an island championship last year. (All or any of this may be wrong. Either he cannot spell or my pocket dictionary omits most of the words he uses.) He showed me a photograph: himself very snazzily dressed (check shirt, tight white trousers, pointed shoes) at some awarding of trophies; he is kissing the King’s hand with a total fervor that has made the bystanding functionaries break into smiles.

  “Kyrios Yannis,” I conveyed, pointing to the Enfant Chic’s shop, “has—a—photograph—of—me.”

  George repeated 3 syllables, nodding vigorously.

  Blankness on my side.

  But it only turned out to mean that he has seen the photograph. Chryssoula happened by in time to clear up that much, then went her way, nose in air—George’s monde is not hers. He gazed after her with eyes erotically narrowed, little guessing that her eyes are for me alone.

  I am a bad diarist not to have recorded this galloping passion I’ve inspired. The evening of my arrival I gave C. an immense bag of laundry all unwashed since Venice—shirts, pants, towels, in whose moist depths a half-full can of Nescafe had come open to encrust each item, ineradicably I’d have thought, with foul, sticky blackness. The very next morning there it lay, heaped, clean, in a basket hauled upstairs by two of her children. She must have worked all night. I asked what I owed her. A shrug. What you like. I held out 100 drachmas, keeping another 50 ready in my pocket in case she spat at it. Spat! She thrust it back into my hand. It was too much—far too much! I said these were the prices of Athens (where I’m sure double or triple would be charged). Well, she took the 100, & from that day on has stalked me with the love-juice in her eye. She is past 30 but very handsome, profile of a medal, skin white & firm, spit curls, a strong heavy body (those 6 children). She makes 50 dr. a 12-hour day at the hotel. Her husband is hospitalized in Corinth (T.B.) and sends her nothing. She no longer loves him. She loves me!

  No day begins without its bouquet of basil or bougainvillea or both, picked by her & brought to my bedside, most often by Theodoros the blondish 9 year old. Chryssoula herself follows with tea & biscuits, perhaps a bunch of grapes abstracted from another client’s room. If I haven’t managed to get up, she will sit on my bed, smile, gaze, stroke my face, her hands scented by another client’s perfume. “Bello, come un angelo, come il Cristo.” She has teased, pouted, snarled, wept, blasphemed. The whole Mediterranean repertoire. I am training her slowly to respect my privacy. It is half a joke, of course, yet I catch myself, as now, shaking not quite with laughter as I imagine a life of marriage to Chryssoula (Father & Orson have Greek wives, why not I?) or at least the scene in the Houston airport when, stepping from the plane with her & the 6 children & the black cat, I introduce them as the greatest thing since Instant Coffee: My *N*E*W* Immediate Family—just add water & serve!

  7.vii.61

  Let it be the following spring, the morning after Sandy arrives in Athens. (Artemis, real as you were, hail & farewell.) The brothers will be going to the Acropolis. (O. has taken Sandy there the night before, but too late, whistles were blowing, gates were shutting.) Orestes has come down to breakfast first.

  He was a spare, nimble man, etc.… at his best when talking

  —so long as he didn’t smile: it became a grimace, one waited for him to stop. Luckily he would soon be able to resume a conversation with his brother. They were meeting now for the first time in several years.

  When O. left the room, Sandy was still in bed. He was taller than his brother, also paler, younger, too young (he was 20) to be plausibly described. He had never been out of America before, and, now that he had obtained permission & a basic allowance from his father to “bum around the world” for a year, he was not to go back there for more than short visits in the 7 years to come. These years would pass as in a dream. A trip would lead to an illness, an illness to a love affair, an affair to a job, a job to another trip. Beyond a certain air of passivity & idealism, there was, that morning in Athens, no trace of the traveler Sandy would become, who avoided whatever countries he knew the language of, or whose art & landscape belonged to his own cultural heritage, preferring rather the relentlessly picturesque, twang of bouzoukia, jabber of fisher-folk His head lay brown-haired & soft-skinned against the pillow. His eyes were almost certainly blue. He had on white & yellow seersucker pyjamas. Orestes had squatted by him, tousling his hair, laughing in delight, “Come on, boy! Wake up! You’re in Greece!” Then, guessing that Sandy was too shy to dress in front of him, he had said he would wait at the café below their hotel, and departed, more than ever pleased with his brother.

  They were born 15 years apart, of different fathers, & into different worlds. One father was Greek, an immigrant; the other an American oil cattleman.

  The older child, born on an island off Asia Minor, christened (Yannis), renamed first (Orson) for a benefactor of his father’s, and only later, by himself, Orestes—the older child had been brought as a baby to New York, to the streets, to the prison of the schoolyard, to 2½ rooms so shabby & dark that, even when he revisited them in the glory of adulthood, their belated

  (in their glory, too, that single tenement out of the block having esc
aped demolition) their belated, hard-earned glamor filled him with self hatred despair.

  The younger brother (John), or Sandy to distinguish him from his father, was born in Texas, grew up thoughtlessly in comfort and love love.

  O. used to complain that he had no memory, & praise me for remembering so much. He meant that I remembered his life, his versions of things, ideas & tastes (“Did I say that? Really? You amaze me!”) which had often ended by impressing me more deeply than they had ever done him. For instance, the theory (Freud’s? But first expounded to me by O.) of the Mother-or Father-Substitute struck me like lightning. In New York Orson couldn’t remember our ever having talked of it, yet I see it as coloring my entire

  (Mrs N.: “The age at which whoever one meets makes an impression.)

  I can no more unlearn what O. taught me than I can turn back the clock or regain the body I had 7 years ago. How to describe the change? I use my body less. If I swim at all, it is closer to the shore. Now that I know what liquor does to my liver, I drink less more. I don’t take people as seriously. I move from place to place. I no longer think of myself as having a home. (Orson: Home is where the mind is.) I read more (alas) & (alas again) I write.

  This notebook is one of 30 filled since that morning in Athens when O. made me a present of the 1st one. The stationery store had disappeared last month. But I found a shop very much like it; a girl very much like the 1st girl, pale, dark-eyed, wearing the same black smock, waited on me. The sale went off easily—in Athens one can buy any drug without prescription—& I carried my current notebook out into the sun.

  Orestes: What, you don’t keep a journal! You amaze me!

  Sandy: Oh? Why?

  Orestes: Every sensitive young man keeps a record of what he does & feels, writes poems, tears them up, writes others. Didn’t you know that?

  Sandy: I guess so. But nothing’s happened to me yet.

  O.: How can you tell, if you don’t know what you’re like inside?

  S.: Anyhow, I wouldn’t call myself sensitive. That’s a fightin’ word in Texas.

  O.: It’s too early to fight with me. One day you will. I know you better than you think.

  S.: You certainly imagine me better than I am.

  This last is too true to have been said. If I was bewitched by Orson I see now that he was even more bewitched by me. And say so without vanity. Perhaps we all know our virtues too well to value them, but I see scant evidence, in either past or present, of the marvelous ones he assigned to me (like homework, really).

  Perhaps he was in love with me—he said he found me beautiful in every way. For all I know he was (is) queer, but if so, then only on a level at which pederast & pedagogue merge into one dignified eminence. He loved anyone who was willing to learn from him. Instead of making a pass and teaching my body something new (it had mastered little but a few active verbs, all quite regular) he taught me that the mind, that my mind, was a holy & frightening thing. Who wouldn’t have believed him? I know who. The person I am today.

  As soon as he knew when to expect Sandy Orestes accepted an open invitation to lecture in Athens. It mattered hugely that his brother see “what was best” in him. “You mean there’s a worst, too?” It had taken some seconds to chortle out this riposte, his first clumsy step in O.’s conversational footprints.

  The lecture was delivered at the British Council, a spacious, sallow, turn of the century building, which as I write they are making plans to tear down. Audience: expatriate gentility in beads; young Greek writers & their girlfriends, unsure of their English and ashamed of their un-Bohemian manners; the great poet S—; a movie actress; a sprinkling of Americans, bearded, tongue-tied—premature beatniks. Each after his fashion worshipped O.

  Title: “The Tragic Dualism of Man.” Today even the speaker would be unable to reproduce this extraordinary piece of rhetoric. As on a stage backed by the unrelieved black velvet of Bertrand Russell’s thought & flooded by the rainbow lights of Orestes’ own euphoria, his instances leapt forth clad in their classic leotards. Body & Soul, Eros & Death, Time & Eternity, the Mayfly & the Abyss. Beethoven’s gaiety, his gloom, his final ambiguous affirmation. Came also Hamlet & Horatio, Dante & Beatrice, Sancho & the Don. Mann, Joyce, Sartre, Dylan Thomas. Rembrandt & Guernica. Sandy who, for all O.’s view of him as virgin soil, had heard many of these names, had never until that evening seen anyone intoxicated by them. Orestes was. What was more, he communicated his intoxication. By the evening’s end—a chorus from The Bacchae first in Greek, then in O.’s translation—the young faces in his audience were trembling, flashing masks of insight & purpose. And the old timers, too, had an air of agreeing that, yes, when the smoke cleared, there remained 1 or 2 arguments against total extinction of the species.

  Afterwards, breathing heavily like a dancer, Orestes received their homage. He kept Sandy by his side. To those who were personal friends, perhaps ⅓ of the crowd, he said merely, “This is Sandy, he arrived yesterday,” for them to exclaim with interest &, odd though it seemed, a kind of deference: here was the brother, so long awaited by their hero.

  In retrospect, through the flattery, S.’s first sense of constriction.

  Orestes’ ideas.

  If he believed in Earth (the life of sensation & toil) it was as others believed in Heaven or in going to church; it looked well, gave weight & dignity to a person.

  Or: O. believed in his body as others did in their souls. His physical movements had the self-conscious grace of a martyr by Botticelli.

  masochistic grace, inviting harm

  Or: It was seemly (O. might have said) to taste & praise the joys of the flesh, to be Man at his most sensual. In this spirit he enjoyed both the olive & his idea of it. (From its oil came the light Plato wrote by.) He became surprisingly good at the popular Greek dances, skipping & dipping with zestful diffidence. He did not perspire like those dancers for whom the dance had been, more than play, a meditation, the body itself thinking, choosing, rejoicing.

  At his worktable he sits & writes. He is in heaven, it is the Platonic table he bends over, the one posited by all the cramped, gouged, unstable surfaces of his growing-up. What is he writing? No epic, not his own work, his real work: a mere book-review. When he has called his task “cleaning the stables” he feels better about it.

  O. valued the creative act too highly to perform it.

  He has told (Dora) & tells Sandy: It is my despair to have grown up without a language.

  He had a hollow, radio announcer’s voice, no sooner acquired than regretted, no sooner regretted than complicated by a slanginess remembered from the streets, which made his listeners wince. Yet people were swayed by him. This intermittent wrongness of tone heightened their sense of him as mouthpiece for something mysteriously right. An oracle.

  (“Americans are struggling to express themselves in a language they scarcely know.”—an English novelist.)

  Sandy’s ideas:

  (Blank minutes follow. I study the wall. Help! Then, God be praised, Chryssoula saves me. Yesterday I was brusque with her, today I gave her a full ½ hour. By its end she was sitting on my lap alternately deploring my rough cheek—Why? Perchè una barba? É brutta!—and passing candies sucked pale from her mouth into mine. My legs are still numb. I have had to invent a fiancée in America, to whom I am being true, lest I wake one day to find C. toute entière beside me.)

  What Sandy hasn’t known is how much he means to Orestes, & always has meant. O.: “This is what I most regret about being so much older. Missing you, missing your childhood.” (S. is discovering that childhood has a peculiar attraction for literary people.) O.: “But who can say? Now may be the right moment after all. Let me look at you. What a guy!”—breaking into the laughter of one puzzled by his luck.

  Sandy responds—how can he help it? That they are brothers means they have to love each other—what else are brothers meant to do? He overlooked a slight discomfort, a slight constriction of guilt that comes, he feels, from not having prepared a place in his
heart worthy of this foreknown companion. Out of good will, in a twinkling, the niche is made and, as it were, predated.

  Avoid a “pattern” where S is concerned—his rejecting the love & trust of others. Let him remain gentle, full of sympathy, as if he & his author were quite different people. Aren’t they? Would he have failed Orestes (or Lucine, or even Chryssoula)? Would he have loved Marianne who for all her charm & experience wanted only

  Throughout these days O. and S. are abnormally open to each other. 1st words & gestures of magic figures shaped in darkness, or during a long spell of fasting.

  Eleni Houston was the single topic Orestes had resolved they would not discuss. “It is not for me to interfere with your feelings about home.”

  He let Sandy feel, however, that an inner necessity, quite divorced from whatever had gone on in his stepfather’s house, had driven him forth into the world.

  (Use table-talk, pp. 29-30.)

  On state occasions, when the golden cloud

  when dressed in the golden cloth of what he desired to be, Orestes could believe that an inner necessity, quite divorced … into the world. True, he & his stepfather were not close. Nevertheless He reminded his mother of 1000 sorrows & deprivations. And she him. During crucial years she had bent all her energies upon Americanizing herself, a process he came to scorn after it had borne fruits. Both he & Sandy were used to seeing her impulsively kissed, held at arm’s length and declared, by a red-, white-or blue-haired neighbor, “just like one of us, Helen, angel, that’s what you are, you cute thing!” The point is that Orestes had not broken with Houston. He wrote letters, sent gifts, went home a number of years for Xmas; had been the 1st to speak the names of Homer & Shakespeare in little Sandy’s hearing. Yet it seemed always that somebody else was doing these things, while he, Orestes, stayed aloof in self-imposed exile. The larger-than-life Orestes acted not from 20 trivial motives, like press of work or shortage of money, but from one profound one. Why had he left home, did Sandy Hamlet wonder? Why else but that the scripture might fulfilled—scripture in O.’s case being the deeds of a composite literary hero (beginning with Agamemnon’s son & visiting like a pollen-gathering bee Perseus, Oedipus, etc.) whose predicament in varying forms & varying levels of consciousness filled many an avant-garde volume read by the