JULIE:
Go on. Tell me more about my dishonesty. You asked if I was bored. Far from it, I’m fascinated!
JAN:
I don’t ask for absolute honesty. You alone know what to tell me and what not to. But when—
JULIE:
Yes?
JAN:
What you told me today. It’s not for myself I want to know, but for you. I’m not asking for an explanation. What matters is that you begin explaining it to yourself.
JULIE:
“It?”
JAN:
That episode with Charles, your leaving him.
JULIE:
There are times when you remind me forcibly of him. I foresaw that we’d be returning to the topic.
CHARLES (to himself):
Julie’s leaving me? Is that what Gilbert meant? Wait and see, he said.
JULIE:
Oh Jan, you are such a reproach. I can hear the excuses you’re making for me. “I must bear with her because she’s suffering.”
JAN:
Not at all. I don’t feel that you are suffering.
JULIE:
You’re right. I’m not suffering.
CHARLES (to himself):
Whatever I do, it’s the wrong thing. And talking to her leads nowhere.
JULIE:
I’ve been arbitrary, I’ve been heartless. Is that what you want to hear? I was brought up to have the proper feelings.
CHARLES (to himself):
But if she leaves me I’ll be able to write to her. Letters will say what I can’t say to her face. She’ll understand, she’ll want to come back.
JULIE:
That’s why I can’t read his letters. They shame me.
JAN:
They don’t shame Gilbert? No, Gilbert has his own funny integrity.
JULIE:
And now you’re trying to shame me. You mustn’t.
JAN:
Ah Julie, you’re selfish.
JULIE:
I know. I ask everything.
JAN:
You’ve talked all day—less for my enlightenment than for your own pleasure. I’m not even allowed to comment upon what you say.
CHARLES (to himself):
And if she doesn’t come back, what then? She can fall in love with somebody else.
JULIE:
I’ll say no more then.
JAN:
That’s not what I mean!
CHARLES:
Strange. I can already feel sorry for him, the one who loves her next.
JULIE:
Oh why are we putting ourselves through this? If you love me—
JAN:
Julie, Julie …
JULIE:
The one who loves isn’t the loser. Charles
Isn’t the loser. To have hurt him unveils
In me, as in a public square,
An image tasteless and cheap, I mean my own.
The tourist wouldn’t even stop for it,
Whitewashed at day’s end by dreadful birds.
But Charles—my dear, I even dream of him.
I see him continue to act in honest concern
According to what he feels. I see his face
Turn beautiful under the pumice of rebuff.
One could almost pretend I’d made him a gift of it.
JAN:
And to me what gift do you make?
JULIE:
I have been happy with you here.
Encompassed by things so fabulous and rare
They can’t be hurt by the conscience we bring to them.
We stand in the center of this glimmering square
As we might stand within a human mind
At its most charitable. By tomorrow
We shall be standing in Ravenna,
Quite as if standing in the mind of God.
Much constellated gold, dolphin and seraphim
Shall blind us with the blessing
Of something fully expressed, the sense of having
Ourselves become expressive there. Kiss me.
JAN:
My book says it’s not the ornament but the architecture
That is meant to be most moving at Ravenna.
JULIE:
Jan, you are sublime, my student princess.
Isn’t it strange how little difference
It makes, whatever we say or do or are?
CHARLES (to himself):
I have observed
That is a question people do not ask
Unless they know the answer.
JAN (to herself):
Now it is not just myself I feel
Endangered. The lover may not be the loser.
I’ve no desire to win at her expense.
CHARLES (to himself):
No matter what the lines were baited with,
The fishermen concluded their affair,
Reached land without a certain sinking sense
I am still weighted with.
JULIE:
There is such lightness in the midnight air.
The undulating dome, the orange peel,
The very stars drift outward on its tide.
JAN:
Beautiful. Ignorant, too, of any real
Human consequences, like a flare
Lighting the field where innocent men hide.
JULIE:
The story’s finished now. Kiss it goodbye.
No, kiss me. The cool night air
Has taken my words up into its high gauzes
Before the first of them could reach your ear.
CHARLES:
I have observed …
JAN:
It’s not the danger or the hurt I fear
But vagueness, secrecy, the shapeless sky,
The iridescent sea, whatever causes
Thousands every day to live and die
Not knowing.
JULIE:
Never think, my dear,
That we contrive this lightness. No.
JAN:
Each little wave, before it crests it pauses,
Gathering its nerve to disappear?
CHARLES:
… that is a question people do not ask …
JULIE:
Something makes light of us, that much is clear.
Hold me down, I’m rising like a dancer!
JAN:
Wait, come back here!
(She does. They kiss.)
CHARLES:
… unless they know the answer.
NOTES
When the narrator of The (Diblos) Notebook refers back to previous pages in the notebook, as he here refers to “pp 29-30,” the passage can be found, in this volume, starting here. When he refers back to his own “p. 17,” here and here, the corresponding page is now here; he refers to his “p. 18,” here, also corresponding to here in this volume.
The Birthday was first presented at Kirby Theater, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, on May 22, 1947, as part of an evening of three one-act plays produced by the Dramatic Arts Class. The play was directed by Robert Brown; the designer was Perry Minton; the technician was Perley Boone.
Cast
Charles Thomas Howkins
Mrs. Crane Thelma White
Max James Maxwell
Mr. Knight William Burford
Raymond Chauncey Williams
The Bait was first presented by The Artists’ Theatre at the Comedy Club in New York City on May 18, 1953. The production was directed by Herbert Machiz; setting and costumes were designed by Al Kresch; lighting was by Mildred Jackson; incidental music was by Ben Westbrook; and Jack Harpman was the stage manager.
Cast
Julie Gaby Rodgers
John Alan Shayne
Charles John Hallo
Gilbert Jack Cannon
The Bait was later presented by the BBC on its Third Programme, November 28 and December 1, 1955. Mary Hope Allen was the producer.
Cast
Narrato
r Rolf Lefebvre
John Richard Hurndall
Julie Pamela Alan
Gilbert Phil Brown
Charles Simon Lack
The text of The Bait first appeared in The Quarterly Review of Literature (vol. VII, no. X, 1955), and later in Artists’ Theatre: Four Plays, ed. Herbert Machiz (New York: Grove Press, 1960).
The Immortal Husband was first produced by John Bernard Myers in association with The Artists’ Theatre at the Theater de Lys in New York City on February 14, 1955. The production was directed by Herbert Machiz; settings and costumes were designed by Richard V. Hare; lighting was by Peggy Clark; and Gene Perlowin was stage manager.
Cast
Mrs. Mallow, Olga, Nurse Jean Ellyn
Maid, Fanya, Enid Mary Grace Canfield
Tithonus William Sheidy
Gardener, Konstantin, Mark Scott Merrill
Laomedon, Memnon Frederick Rolf
Aurora Anne Meacham
The Immortal Husband was next presented on September 29, 1969, at the Dublin Gate Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. This production, mounted in association with The Artists’ Theatre, was directed by Herbert Machiz, with settings by Brian Collins from designs by Jane Eakin; the stage managers were Douglas Wallace and Alan Coleridge.
Cast
Mrs. Mallow, Olga, Nurse Jacqueline Brookes
Maid, Fanya, Enid Garn Stephens
Tithonus Bruce Kornbluth
Gardener, Konstantin, Mark Jack Ryland
Laomedon, Memnon Edward Fuller
Aurora Elizabeth Franz
The text of The Immortal Husband first appeared in Playbook: Five Plays for a New Theater (New York: New Directions, 1956).
The Bait was extensively revised for a new production of the play, paired with The Image Maker, which was first presented at the National Arts Club in New York City on November 19, 1988. The production was directed by James Sheldon, with sets by Paul Merrill and lighting by Amy Whitman.
Cast
Julie Mary Bomba
Jan Diane Dreux
Charles Martin Donovan
Gilbert Peter Hooten
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
James Merrill was born in New York City on March 3, 1926, the son of the financier and philanthropist Charles E. Merrill, one of the founders of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch & Co., and his second wife, Hellen Ingram. Merrill, who attended St. Bernard’s School, was raised in Manhattan and Southampton, Long Island, where his family had a country house that was designed by Stanford White, and in Palm Beach, Florida. His parents divorced in 1939, and the reverberations of the “broken home” can be heard throughout his poetry. After attending the Lawrenceville School, Merrill enrolled at Amherst College, his father’s alma mater, took a year off to serve in the army, and graduated summa cum laude with the class of 1947. He taught at Bard College in 1948-1949 and although he fought shy of academe in the following years he did accept short appointments at Amherst, the University of Wisconsin, Washington University, and Yale University. In 1954 he moved with his companion, David Jackson, a writer and painter, to a house in Stonington, Connecticut, which is still maintained by Stonington Village and houses an artist-in-residence every year.
In 1957 Merrill and Jackson undertook a trip around the world, and for two decades beginning in 1964 they spent a part of each year in Greece. They owned a house in Athens at the foot of Mt. Lycabettus and were famous among the local literati for the terrace parties they threw. Beginning in 1979 Merrill spent winters in Key West, Florida, where he and Jackson acquired another house. Key West was a place he had an affinity for partly because it had previously attracted two of his favorite poets, Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, the latter his close friend for decades. Merrill, a gifted linguist and a lover of different cultures, always traveled widely, and the displacements and discoveries of his travels, along with the routines of his life in his different homes, are the stuff of many of his poems. He died away from home, in Tucson, Arizona, on February 6, 1995.
A selection of Merrill’s earliest writings, taken from his contributions to the Lawrenceville Literary Magazine, was privately printed by his father as a sixteenth-birthday gift in 1942, under the title Jim’s Book. The young writer proudly distributed most of the one hundred copies as soon as possible—and before long began to retrieve as many of those copies as he could. A group of his poems appeared in Poetry in March 1946, the same year that saw the publication in Athens, Greece, of a limited edition of poems entitled The Black Swan. He published his first full-fledged book, First Poems, when he was twenty-five, in 1951. He next tried his hand at playwriting: The Bait was produced at the Comedy Club in 1953 (and published in a journal in 1955 and in a book in 1960), and The Immortal Husband was performed at the Theater de Lys in 1955 (and published in 1956). Meanwhile, his first novel, The Seraglio, a Jamesian roman à clef, appeared in 1957 (it was reissued in 1987), and his second commercial volume of poems, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, in 1959 (revised edition, 1970). His third volume of poems, Water Street—its title refers to the street Merrill lived on in Stonington—came out in 1962, and his second, experimental novel, The (Diblos) Notebook, based in part on his first experiences in Greece, in 1965 (reissued in 1994).
In 1966 his collection Nights and Days received the National Book Award. The judges for that year, W. H. Auden, James Dickey, and Howard Nemerov, cited the book for its author’s “scrupulous and uncompromising cultivation of the poetic art, evidenced in his refusal to settle for an easy and profitable stance; for his insistence on taking the kind of tough, poetic chances which make the difference between esthetic success or failure.” The Fire Screen appeared in 1969, followed in 1972 by Braving the Elements, which was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and in 1974 by a selection of previously uncollected poems, The Yellow Pages. When Divine Comedies came out in 1976, it won the Pulitzer Prize.
The narrative poem “The Book of Ephraim,” which was originally included in Divine Comedies, later served as the first installment of an epic visionary poem based in large part on Merrill and Jackson’s communications with the Other World by way of the Ouija board. The subsequent two parts were Mirabell: Books of Number, which received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1978, and Scripts for the Pageant, published in 1980. In 1982 Merrill brought together these three long poems and “Coda: The Higher Keys” in a comprehensive edition of the work he now called The Changing Light at Sandover. That landmark volume won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982, the same year in which Merrill published his first selected poems, From the First Nine: Poems 1946-1976. His book of poems Late Settings was published in 1985, and a collection of essays, interviews, and reviews entitled Recitative appeared in 1986. In 1988 The Inner Room was honored with the first Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress. Merrill’s memoir, A Different Person, came out in 1993. A Scattering of Salts, the last book of poems that he saw through production, was published posthumously in 1995. His Collected Poems appeared in 2001.
Collected Novels and Plays Page 60