Possessed by Memory

by Harold Bloom

  John Wheelwright, “Fish Food”

  IN AN EARLY POEM composed only three years after Hart Crane’s suicide, John Berryman elegized his precursor with fervor:

  O mourn the legend left here in the first

  Full sun, fragments of light to tell the day.

  Tread slowly, softly silence while the dust

  Whirls up the sky and walls the sound away.

  Cantlets of speech: beyond reach of light

  Beyond all architecture, the last ledge,

  He is obscure in ocean in the night—

  Monstrous and still, brooding above the bridge.

  These closing lines by a twenty-one-year-old ephebe catch something of Hart Crane’s metric. The fragments of light are matched by the cantlets or fragments of speech. Crane has become a kind of god, brooding upon the face of the waters and above the bridge he celebrated.

  Elegies for Crane are numerous and very varied. There is a peculiarly nasty one by Geoffrey Hill that nevertheless beholds something of lasting value:

  Publish his name, exile’s remittancer,

  prodigal who reclaimed us brought to book.

  Yvor Winters, once Crane’s friend, indulged himself by inverting the High Romantic visionary’s Orphic identification:

  Yet the fingers on the lyre

  Spread like an avenging fire.

  Crying loud, the immortal tongue,

  From the empty body wrung,

  Broken in a bloody dream,

  Sang unmeaning down the stream.

  “Unmeaning” is too absurd to be argued. Better to look at the elegies for Crane that have some poetic value.

  He jumped, seeing an island like a hand,

  And where he lived, the hands were all unfriendly.

  The island rose to take him: at the end

  He saw all things unclearly.

  This is a tribute from 1942 by the minor British poet Julian Symons. Malcolm Cowley, Crane’s friend, saluted him in the poem “The Flower in the Sea,” alluding to the marvelous trope in “Voyages II”: “Close round one instant in one floating flower.” Except for “Fish Food: An Obituary to Hart Crane” by John Brooks Wheelwright, which I intend to appreciate more fully, the crown of laments is held by Robert Lowell’s “Words for Hart Crane” in Life Studies:

  “When the Pulitzers showered on some dope

  or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap,

  few people would consider why I took

  to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam’s

  phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds.

  Because I knew my Whitman like a book,

  stranger in America, tell my country: I,

  Catullus redivivus, once the rage

  of the Village and Paris, used to play my role

  of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs

  who hungered by the Place de la Concorde.

  My profit was a pocket with a hole.

  Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,

  must lay his heart out for my bed and board.”

  This irregular sonnet acutely names Hart Crane as both a reborn Catullus and the Shelley of our time. The contrast with Geoffrey Hill’s later squib is instructive. Reluctantly, I acknowledge, as always, that Hill is the major English poet since Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, whereas Lowell began superbly, in my judgment fell off, yet rallied again and again. I could well believe that Crane speaks Lowell’s poem, although its discursiveness is counter to the poetics of metaphor sublimely evident in almost all that characterizes the true heir of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville.

  John Wheelwright also descended from Emerson and Whitman and befriended Crane. He died eight years after Hart Crane, struck down by a drunken driver in Boston at the age of forty-three. A patrician Trotskyite, Wheelwright helped to found the Socialists Workers Party after he was expelled by the Socialists. Probably bisexual, though evidently ascetic, he was the center of Boston literary culture in his lifetime, frequently clashing with his cousin, the formidable Amy Lowell, yet on amiable terms with Robert Fitzgerald, Austin Warren, his brother-in-law the noted Blake scholar S. Foster Damon, Quincy Howe, John Peale Bishop, Malcolm Cowley, Horace Gregory, and other literary luminaries.

  Wheelwright is mostly forgotten, but I agree with John Ashbery that the Boston revolutionary was a major poet. Flamboyant and outrageous in life as in literature, he sported an archaic raccoon coat in all kinds of weather and mounted soapboxes to preach the Gospel of Leon Trotsky to the workers of Boston. Wheelwright was proud of his descent from the Reverend John Wheelwright, who was banished from the theocratic Massachusetts Bay Colony when he endorsed the antinomian doctrines of his sister-in-law Anne Hutchinson. Austin Warren, whom I knew and revered in my far-off youth, called John Brooks Wheelwright a New England saint. In religion the poet became an Anglo-Catholic, though of a sect of one, deeply influenced by the Kabbalah and other esoteric traditions.

  His elegy for Hart Crane relies upon the Old Norse fable of Thor draining a flagon and thus lowering the level of the ocean. Thor then lifted a peculiar cat and in doing so dislodged the tortoise who held up the earth, which then slipped from its accustomed place:

  As you drank deep as Thor, did you think of milk or wine?

  Did you drink blood, while you drank the salt deep?

  Or see through the film of light, that sharpened your rage with its stare,

  a shark, dolphin, turtle? Did you not see the Cat

  who, when Thor lifted her, unbased the cubic ground?

  You would drain fathomless flagons to be slaked with vacuum—

  The sea’s teats have suckled you, and you are sunk far

  in bubble-dreams, under swaying translucent vines

  of thundering interior wonder. Eagles can never now

  carry parts of your body, over cupped mountains

  as emblems of their anger, embers to fire self-hate

  to other wonders, unfolding white, flaming vistas.

  Fishes now look upon you, with eyes which do not gossip.

  Fishes are never shocked. Fishes will kiss you, each

  fish tweak you; every kiss take bits of you away,

  till your bones alone will roll, with the Gulf Stream’s swell.

  So has it been already, so have the carpers and puffers

  nibbled your carcass of fame, each to his liking. Now

  in tides of noon, the bones of your thought-suspended structures

  gleam as you intended. Noon pulled your eyes with small

  magnetic headaches; the will seeped from your blood. Seeds

  of meaning popped from the pods of thought. And you fall. And the unseen

  churn of Time changes the pearl-hued ocean;

  like a pearl-shaped drop, in a huge water-clock

  falling; from came to go, from come to went. And you fell.

  Waters received you. Waters of our Birth in Death dissolve you.

  Now you have willed it, may the Great Wash take you.

  As the Mother-Lover takes your woe away, and cleansing

  grief and you away, you sleep, you do not snore.

  Lie still. Your rage is gone on a bright flood

  away; as, when a bad friend held out his hand

  you said, “Do not talk any more. I know you meant no harm.”

  What was the soil whence your anger sprang, who are deaf

  as the stones to the whispering flight of the Mississippi’s rivers?

  What did you see as you fell? What did you hear as you sank?

  Did it make you drunken with hearing?

  I will not ask any more. You saw or heard no evil.

  Wheelwright favored long lines, here a hexameter and sometimes
the Blakean fourteener. “Fish Food” belies its throwaway title by its weight and prophetic gravity. The poem has fascinated me since I first read it in my childhood, but in old age it becomes something of a puzzle. Hart Crane, when sober, was gentle and remarkably sweet-natured. His searing poem “Possessions” calls itself “Record of rage and partial appetites,” but even that Inferno of a lyric concludes with “All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays.” Why does Wheelwright speak of Crane’s sharpening of his rage? Later, Wheelwright remarks on the departure of Crane’s rage when he forgave the elegist’s blunder. And yet Crane’s anger is invoked again in the closing lines in an allusion to “The River,” a canto of The Bridge:

  You will not hear it as the sea; even stone

  Is not more hushed by gravity…But slow,

  As loth to take more tribute—sliding prone

  Like one whose eyes were buried long ago

  John Ashbery, an intense admirer both of Wheelwright and of Crane, concludes his wonderful “Wet Casements” with lines always in my memory:

  Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.

  I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that

  Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling

  Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face

  Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

  I shall keep to myself.

  I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.

  In a conversation with Ashbery, I recall telling him that for me this links with Hart Crane’s “Brooklyn Bridge” and Wheelwright’s vision of Crane. Ashbery’s anger ensues in bridge building for our aesthetic pleasure, as the fury of creation is rightly ascribed by Wheelwright to Crane, the visionary of bridge building. I think also of T. S. Eliot’s tribute to Hart Crane in the opening lines of “The Dry Salvages”:

  I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

  Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,

  Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;

  Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;

  Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

  Ashbery, rejecting the role of Narcissus, at last will see his complete face reflected in the worn stone floor of his bridge, since we his dancers and readers have made it a mirror of the self. Wheelwright’s Crane has a more august fate, since the structures of his bridge gleam in his afterlife. “Fish Food” rises to something of Hart Crane’s own preternatural eloquence as it asks the open questions:

  What did you see as you fell? What did you hear as you sank?

  Did it make you drunken with hearing?

  I will not ask any more. You saw or heard no evil.

  Neither we nor Wheelwright know what Crane saw or heard as he fell into the Caribbean. It is enough that the most gifted of all American poets, at least since Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, returned to natal power without a sense of foreboding:

  The sea raised up a campanile…The wind I heard

  Of brine partaking, whirling into shower

  Of column that breakers sheared in shower

  Back into bosom,—me—her, into natal power…

  That is a fragment written by Crane in 1926–27. Wheelwright could not have read it, but he did not need to. Myself a reader of Crane for more than three-quarters of a century, I learn more about his unique daemon by reading Wheelwright than by all but a few of my fellow exegetes.

  James Merrill, The Book of Ephraim

  I FIRST MET JAMES MERRILL in 1959 and began reading him soon after. Though we corresponded and talked on the phone until sometime in the early 1990s, our friendship was more literary than personal. He was gentle, kind, and charmingly courteous, but we had very different temperaments, and our bafflement was mutual.

  Until I read and reviewed Divine Comedies in 1976, I had mostly a qualified admiration for his poetry. There were exceptions: “Mirror,” “For Proust,” and “Days of 1964.” These found me. All that changed with Divine Comedies, which I reviewed upon its appearance in 1976. I was charged by “Lost in Translation” and The Book of Ephraim.

  In response, Merrill dazzled with a note in which he impishly suggested he was Ganymede to my Zeus. A year later, he began regularly mailing me the developing Mirabell: Books of Number and, a touch later, Scripts for the Pageant. When I pled for more J.M. and less of the long passages in capital letters, he properly reproved me with a plaintive note saying that the cupbearer to the gods had been cast away. I repented, yet have never been as happy with Mirabell and Scripts for the Pageant as I go on being enchanted by Ephraim.

  From 1976 to 1978, Merrill and I had an ongoing conversation, sometimes face-to-face, more often by phone, in which we explored W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, the Gnostic religion, and the relation of Yeats to Shelley and to Blake. We abstained from contrasting our rival views of poetic influence. I grinned cheerfully at the palpable hit in Scripts: HIDEOUS BLOOMS TO STIR UP RIVALRY AT HIGH LEVELS.

  James Merrill experienced a long day’s dying culminating February 6, 1995, one month before what would have been his sixty-ninth birthday. Some of the final poems are extraordinary, including “Days of 1994” with its celebration of “The knowing glance from star to star, / The laughter of old friends.”

  The Book of Ephraim loses too much when excerpted, so I will center here upon “Mirror,” “Lost in Translation,” the miraculous version of Paul Valéry’s “Palme,” and the canzone “Samos,” which for me is the high point of Scripts for the Pageant.

  Though relatively early in Merrill’s development, “Mirror” is the apologia for his poetic mind:

  I grow old under an intensity

  Of questioning looks. Nonsense,

  I try to say, I cannot teach you children

  How to live.—If not you, who will?

  Cries one of them aloud, grasping my gilded

  Frame till the world sways. If not you, who will?

  Between their visits the table, its arrangement

  Of Bible, fern and Paisley, all past change,

  Does very nicely. If ever I feel curious

  As to what others endure,

  Across the parlor you provide examples,

  Wide open, sunny, of everything I am

  Not. You embrace a whole world without once caring

  To set it in order. That takes thought. Out there

  Something is being picked. The red-and-white bandannas

  Go to my heart. A fine young man

  Rides by on horseback. Now the door shuts. Hester

  Confides in me her first unhappiness.

  This much, you see, would never have been fitted

  Together, but for me. Why then is it

  They more and more neglect me? Late one sleepless

  Midsummer night I strained to keep

  Five tapers from your breathing. No, the widowed

  Cousin said, let them go out. I did.

  The room brimmed with gray sound, all the instreaming

  Muslin of your dream…

  Years later now, two of the grown grandchildren

  Sit with novels face-down on the sill,

  Content to muse upon your tall transparence,

  Your clouds, brown fields, persimmon far

  And cypress near. One speaks. How superficial

  Appearances are! Since then, as if a fish

  Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness,

  I have lapses. I suspect

  Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes

  Through the blind flaws of my mind. As days,

  As decades lengthen, this vision

  Spreads and
blackens. I do not know whose it is,

  But I think it watches for my last silver

  To blister, flake, float leaf by life, each milling-

  Downward dumb conceit, to a standstill

  From which not even you strike any brilliant

  Chord in me, and to a faceless will,

  Echo of mine, I am amenable.

  A dramatic monologue uttered by a mirror is not unique, and yet I cannot recall any reflecting glass so eloquent as this self-portrait of a decaying aesthetic sensibility fixed in place and opposing a window open to experience. Aging augmented by neglect, Mirror’s pride diminishes even as its function dwindles. Crisis arrives in Merrill’s stroke when two grown grandchildren muse upon Window’s tall transparence and one of them breaks the vessels of Mirror’s consciousness:

  One speaks. How superficial

  Appearances are! Since then, as if a fish

  Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness,

  I have lapses. I suspect

  Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes

  Through the blind flaws of my mind. As days,

  As decades lengthen, this vision

  Spreads and blackens.

  Merrill sublimely fetches a fish from superficial, and every sense of reflectiveness breaks. A paranoia enters Mirror’s lapses. Nothing is got for nothing, and poetic mind flaws blindly in a play on the etymon of “flaw” as a windblown flake. With masterly tact, Merrill associates proleptically the milling-downward of poetic conceit gone silent with the blistering, flaking, floating leaf of Mirror’s vital silver. There is a Yeatsian touch in the faceless will that echoes Mirror’s decline. The poem ends marvelously with “I am amenable,” where that rich word comprehends its full range of meanings. Mirror-Merrill is submissive, tractable, leadable, above all open to testing or to judgment.