Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  (ENID shakes her head, forcing a smile.)

  She didn’t want me to stay either, if you ask me. Just trying to be polite, being my mother and all.

  TITHONUS:

  Wilful waste makes woeful want. Nothing succeeds like success. I have learned all this through bitter experience.

  MEMNON:

  Can’t see that it’s much fun for you, sitting with him.

  ENID (tonelessly):

  I don’t mind. More and more it appears we have interests in common.

  MEMNON:

  How do you mean?

  TITHONUS:

  I feel a storm approaching. That is not as it should be.

  MEMNON:

  Oh, I get it! His wife, your husband, you mean?

  (Laughs weakly.)

  That’s pretty good! Well, I guess you don’t have anything to worry about there!

  TITHONUS:

  I am still remarkably sensitive to everything around me.

  ENID:

  I believe a storm is coming. You’d best be on your way.

  TITHONUS (dropping off to sleep):

  Though we travel the world over in search of the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

  MEMNON:

  Well, if you’re sure there’s nothing, I’ll say goodbye.

  ENID (giving him her hand):

  Goodbye.

  MEMNON:

  Au revoir, I guess I mean.

  ENID:

  Goodbye.

  MEMNON:

  Goodbye, Dad.

  (Shouts.)

  Goodbye, Father!

  (Shrugs.)

  ENID:

  I wish you success with your book.

  MEMNON:

  Oh, thank you! I’ll send you an autographed copy.

  (Exit, waving his briefcase. A silence.)

  TITHONUS (dreaming):

  My love, my love, was it a dream …?

  ENID (stroking his brow):

  Be still. It is a dream.

  (She rests her head on her arm. It is conceivable that she and TITHONUS dream this final scene. AURORA enters upstage with the NURSE. The latter is dressed entirely in white cap, veil, shoes, stockings, etc.)

  AURORA (whispering):

  There he is. I can’t stay, the car’s waiting. We must be off at once.

  NURSE (moving about, tidying things up):

  It seems we are hand in glove with one another. You don’t want it known that you’ve sent for me. I have my pride, too. I’m not the sort of woman one sends for.

  AURORA:

  Oh, I didn’t mean—

  NURSE:

  I am not hired by the hour.

  AURORA:

  When I needed you I called. I never meant to imply—

  NURSE:

  Don’t try to apologize. You don’t know how. You’ve made your decision, Aurora. Henceforth, if I’m to care for him, I’ll do it in my own way. Your way, to judge from the results, has failed.

  AURORA:

  You will be good to him? You won’t try to disillusion him when you talk about me?

  NURSE:

  We shall never talk about you.

  AURORA:

  They’re both asleep. I think I shall just tiptoe over and kiss him lightly once, on the forehead ….

  NURSE:

  No.

  AURORA:

  Is it so much to ask?

  NURSE:

  If you have any fondness left for him, leave him to me. Go. Go now.

  AURORA (after a pause, smiling brilliantly):

  Yes, of course! What could I have been thinking of?

  NURSE:

  Goodbye, Aurora.

  AURORA:

  Goodbye! Oh, do you know what it’s like, to feel love, to feel love for the first time? Bless you!

  (She blows a kiss and runs out. An uneasy twilight falls.)

  NURSE (to ENID):

  You need watch no longer.

  ENID (starting):

  Oh!

  NURSE:

  I have come to sit with him.

  ENID:

  Oh, yes of course—no, I don’t mean that. I’m sorry, I can’t think. Did Aurora send you? Have they been delayed?

  NURSE (as if she had never heard the name):

  Aurora?

  ENID:

  Well, she’s not here. I’m sitting with him. This is Aurora’s husband. I’m her guest …. I must still be half asleep ….

  NURSE:

  I know.

  ENID:

  She ought to be back any moment, there are her flowers. They went off, Aurora and—my husband, for only an hour or so, to the village. You must have come from there. Perhaps you saw the car? I couldn’t describe it, never having kept a journal, but it’s Aurora’s car, there’s no mistaking it.

  NURSE:

  I have not come from the village. Is there a village here?

  ENID:

  Well, I don’t want to pry …. Do sit down, won’t you, anyhow?

  NURSE:

  Yes, I have come to sit with him.

  ENID:

  Not on my account, I hope. I enjoy sitting with him, really I do. It’s an education in itself.

  NURSE:

  I have not come on your account. He knows why I have come.

  ENID:

  Oh, you’re his friend!

  NURSE:

  He wanted me. I know how to make myself useful.

  (A pause.)

  Thank you.

  ENID:

  What?

  NURSE:

  I am here. He will not need you any more.

  ENID (starting out reluctantly, then stopping):

  I—have nowhere else to go.

  NURSE:

  Are you sure? Isn’t it more that you really want to stay?

  ENID:

  Yes. I want to stay.

  NURSE:

  Then do. We shan’t mind. Yes, by all means, stay. Now that I look at you, I can see that you are very tired.

  ENID (nervously):

  That’s my hay fever. Every summer. My eyes swell up.

  NURSE:

  Do whatever you please. Sit in that chair, why don’t you? Knit him a scarf if you enjoy doing things with your hands. You need time, my child, time in which to think about time, to think of it no longer as a packed bright space entered and left behind, to think of it rather as a gray wind, a soft thread wound, endlessly, about you ….

  ENID (as it struggling to wake):

  But that isn’t true! Time does end!

  NURSE (gently restraining her):

  For some of us perhaps.

  ENID:

  It does! It must!

  NURSE:

  Not for him, whom we are here to care for.

  ENID:

  But we’ll be caring for him all our lives!

  NURSE (radiantly): Yes!

  ENID:

  He’ll never die!

  TITHONUS (opening his eyes and looking meaningfully from one to the other):

  A watched pot never boils.

  NURSE (sweetly, to ENID):

  You see? You see?

  (TITHONUS chuckles on and on. ENID crumples obediently into her chair and begins to unravel some yarn. The NURSE, with many smiles of encouragement, takes up her position by the lawn chair.)

  APPENDIX

  Preface to THE SERAGLIO

  When The Seraglio was reissued in 1987,

  thirty years after it was first published,

  Merrill added a preface to the book:

  I began The Seraglio in the late Spring of 1954, after moving to Stonington, Connecticut, and finished it by the end of the following year. In order to escape Manhattan and its pitfalls, David Jackson and I had rented half of the third floor of a “block”—as several huge wooden gardenless constructions were locally known—in the center of the little dock-fringed peninsula we would call home from then on. Our landlord, Mr. Hoxie, a former W.P.A. artist who now kept a paint store in Mystic and a residence down by the r
ailroad tracks, was practically giving away rooms in this otherwise empty building (the Sanitary Barber Shop and Marion’s Department Store functioned feebly at street level) to members of the “artistic confraternity” as he called us—painters in need of studio space, novelists in flight from the telephone and the children. Thus it was something of a Writer’s Block even before our occupancy.

  Mr. Hoxie collected books. Rather, he had bought up whole libraries of travel or medicine or theosophy, topics he might one day wish to explore, and stored them in the attic above us. His wife made sure that only Reader’s Digest condensations entered their home. When we bought the old building from him in 1956, Mr. Hoxie promised to “take care of” all the books we couldn’t use ourselves. This meant sending a couple of high-school boys to the attic where they proceeded to hurl boxful after boxful down an empty dumbwaiter shaft to the basement, four stories below. Each book at the thud leapt eagerly out of its binding. It took all afternoon. Eventually a truck hauled them off to the town dump. David and I were by then known to be “writers,” and this public display of bibliophobia required a certain amount of explanation. We hoped, when our turn came, to produce more durable volumes than those by dead-and-gone members of Mr. Hoxie’s artistic confraternity.

  That first season we patched up our four rooms and furnished them from a nearby warehouse full of now priceless brass bedsteads and wicker armchairs. We knew two people in the village, we had no telephone, we were over a hundred miles from the nearest relative. After some cluttered years out in the great world—Europe, independence, psychotherapy—it was the right vantage for an inward look. Under the dining room’s impressive tin cranium David put together a sideboard which doubled as desk for me. He himself was at work, in the kitchen, on his third novel—at least one of us knew the ropes of prose. I secretly counted on beginner’s luck, while trying in vain to overlook the one false start I’d already made.

  For The Seraglio is a hybrid. Its better part is a comedy of manners about the world I was born into and fancied myself to have risen above merely through reading Proust and James, and writing a handful of poems. Its lesser part is the residue of an untitled novel, begun a few years earlier in Europe, which had at no great length refused to take shape. Here, of course, all was to have been symbol and sensibility, fine feelings and writing finer yet. Here also figured Francis and his father, along with clumsy sketches for Xenia and Jane. In both books Jane (or Hermine, as I’m afraid she was named at first) attends the same portentous opera and suffers the same exquisite discriminations. But my early effort came to nothing. Before giving up, I must have retyped its poor beginnings a dozen times, as if a fresh page, rather than the experience it was starved white for lack of, would do the trick.

  To my eye, these graftings upon the riper book—completed as its author approached the tremendous age of thirty—stand out glaringly from the rest. A new reader, thirty years later, years during which the novel of manners and that of sensibility have come to seem equally outmoded, may find simple fustiness making for a unity never before attainable.

  A borrowing even more shameless was from the transcripts of David’s and my initial sessions at the Ouija board. It would take me the two decades between The Seraglio and The Changing Light at Sandover to arrive at a way of using these to my satisfaction. At the time the best I could do was make them the measure of Francis’s “alienation” instead of honestly trying to render their ambiguous and pervasive place in our lives.

  Friends who read the book in manuscript begged me to reconsider the episode of Francis’s self-mutilation. I was too pleased by its neat “objective correlative” for my quarrel with the prevailing social and sexual assumptions to listen to reason. Freely granting its Grand Guignol aspect, I’ll stand by the scene to this day. The victim is after all only a character in a book.

  Harder to face were repercussions from the rest of the cast. Before he had met any of them, David Kalstone sent me a postcard of François-Xavier Fabre’s Virgil Reading the Aeneid to the Family of Augustus, The listeners are contorted and drained by their powerful neoclassical emotions. On the back my friend wrote: “The first reading of The Seraglio at Southampton?” He had a point.

  I like to think that my father’s portrait would have entertained him. I sent him the final draft, but he was ill and had never taken to convoluted sentences. Probably he read no more than the opening pages before his death two months later. Others, when the book appeared, dissembled their embarrassment by a kind of domino reaction: “I don’t mind for myself, but how could you have done what you did to _________?” The book at that level remains a callow act of self-assertion hardly called for in view of the love and tact I had always been shown by my family. I feel the full truth of this observation whenever I encounter—it still happens now and then—some old party connected with the Firm, who tells me with a knowing twinkle that he read The Seraglio hot off the press. I twinkle back, biting my tongue not to say, “Indeed? And what business was it of yours?”

  The personal rots away, Yeats tells us, unless packed in ice or salt. What lives on in the brackish puddle is happily not for me to decide. A reader of my poems may linger over certain images, as may the anthropologist of privilege. Few books absolve their authors from the original sin of Class. If you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart?—it was good fun, this turning inside out, as others from Petronius to Proust had done, of the old retort. But the appalling intellectual conditions of Palm Beach or the Hamptons weren’t to be stamped out by a foot shod in an evening pump, and there was as yet no other milieu (or only the first inklings of one) that I had more right to call my own.

  Afterword to THE (DIBLOS) NOTEBOOK

  When The (Diblos) Notebook, originally published in 1965,

  was reissued in 1994,

  Merrill added an afterword to the book:

  18.X.93

  This little fiction, written to conceal how little of a fiction it is, like the Purloined Letter hides its strategy in plain view.

  The book during its composition struck me as perilously drenched with real life. Much of it was written in the field—in the shade of the brilliant midsummer waterfront on Poros, the island where I had visited Kimon Friar and Mina Diamantopoulos on my first trip to Europe, fourteen years earlier. To be sure, Kimon and I were not half brothers. Neither of us had a mother in Texas. “Lucine” is smuggled in from a quite different part of my life, and “Arthur Orson” is based on a fussy old man I knew in Athens, who had no connection whatever with this story. So on second thought, more invention must have come into play than I supposed at the time.

  I hadn’t, of course, set out to be “experimental”—heaven forbid! Ideally I would have aimed for the readability conferred by a seamless, all-knowing narrative voice. With this voice, however, I kept painting myself into a corner. Surely there were different kinds of readability, texts whose very fragmentation quickened the pulse. If the voice broke in self-revision no harm was done to the quasi-Aristotelian unity of the page. Hadn’t I received letters with words scratched out? Seen phrases scored through on the printed page in Buxton Forman’s edition of Keats? Worth remembering was how unerringly the eye flew to precisely what the writer had thought better of: there, if anywhere, would be a truth unvarnished, which predated artifice.

  Even at the time I glimpsed in my project a wistful, half-conscious critique of the Beat Generation. To Kerouac, Ginsberg, et al., revision was an all but criminal betrayal of the “spontaneity” of their vision. This view I was by temperament unable to share; true spontaneity came for me, as when Rome burned, after hours of Neronian fiddling. Thus the most successful moments in the book may well be those where the device plays with itself, when for instance a notation of the color of night (“dark bl indigo”) encapsulates the self-dramatizing “Blind I go!”

  To lend weight to the device there would ideally have been some justifying narrative twist: a fact thrown into relief by its very suppression, whose discovery leaves a handful of readers wiser t
han the keeper of the notebook. Possibly some suspicion as to Sandy’s and Orestes’ “real-life” story might have been made, in more skillful hands than mine, to serve. But I was young and cavalier, and counted on the formal novelty of the book to make up for its not going very deeply into a Theme.

  Sitting, then, under an awning on that blazing waterfront, at an hour when the little town nodded off, I cast about for language. When phrases took shape I welcomed them grudgingly, disdainfully, as if “we artists” were entitled to scorn our medium. But entries in a notebook also helped to pass the time, until something better came along. In another hour David Jackson would reappear to show me his afternoon’s watercolor, and we could begin to think about wine and company, our reward for time so profitably spent. Those evening pleasures left no trace the next day. But their brevity and recklessness are here between the lines, if anything is.

  THE BAIT

  REVISED VERSION

  (1988)

  Characters

  Julie

  Jan, her lover

  Charles, her husband

  Gilbert, her brother

  (The action takes place both in Venice and at sea in the Gulf Stream. On one side of the stage, a suggestion of the Pizza; on the other, the stern of a fishing boat. It is a summer afternoon.)