Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  They nodded, swayed by the old refrain.

  They paused to admire the Tower of the Winds, then climbed a narrow street of pretty houses in disrepair.

  “This may have vanished when we return,” said (Dora). “The Americans want to dig here.”

  “How terrible,” said Sandy.

  D.: When you think that it’s Byron’s Athens, after all, this district …

  Orestes: Byron’s?

  D.: The poet.

  O.: Ah. Because I thought you meant Byron. Dora’s son, whom you haven’t met, is named Byron, Sandy.

  S. nods.

  O.: Well, let them dig. There may be treasures under these old houses.

  D.: But the houses are so pretty!

  O.: My dear Dora, prettiness can’t compare in ultimate value with a head—with an elbow—by Phidias. I don’t say they’ll find one, but more power to them for looking.

  (Mention his underwater fragment?)

  Dora: Ah, we shall never lack for masterpieces. We take care of them. It’s prettiness we’re forever sacrificing, sweeping away.

  (To be felt in the foregoing: O.’s own past is the issue. A dream of poverty & rubbish swept away to reveal the meaningful plan of temple or market underneath.)

  They arrive at the Acropolis, pass through the Propylea onto the blind, bald marble hill. Orestes makes for the Parthenon. Midway he pauses. Runnels of dampness the hot wind would otherwise have dried leak from inside his new purchase.

  His eyes also are moist.

  He has told them before, he tells them again: his first glimpse of this building, while driving that long straight road from the Piraeus to Athens. Constantly in sight, squat at 1st, more & more elevated as they neared it, stood this Thing, golden

  honeycolored, fingered by light

  a lyre the sun fingered. How dispassionately he had eyed it, not recognizing his oldest dream until, with a cry, just as it vanished from his range of vision, he fell forward onto the taxi’s floor. It had been the Parthenon!

  They admire it with him.

  Sandy (after a bit): And that smaller building over there? I forget its name.

  D. (who has draped her whole head in a chiffon scarf, Pernod-yellow, fluttering tightly like a flag): That’s the Erectheum. The one I love.

  O.: I should think that you would love it, Dora. It is a feminine building, all elegance & charm. And of course (laughing) that magnificent balcony—you know what balconies on buildings mean, according to Freud! Even in French, am I right? la balcon has become a euphemism for female charms.

  Sandy; And what arc “female charms” a cuphcmism for?

  O.: Touché.

  (Dora): (Something about its original use. A holy place.)

  S. (reading the Blue Guide): The Turks used it for a harem.

  Orestes: You see!

  14.vii..61

  What I want, here at what could be an organ point in the book, is this “Dialogue on the Acropolis” in which, starting from a difference in taste (the hat), Orestes’ & Dora’s two ways of being, their as it were moral differences, are set forth. To keep, if possible, the 2 buildings as symbols.

  Dora

  Orestes

  Erectheum

  Parthenon

  Monet

  Michelangelo

  Rameau (Schumann)

  Beethoven

  Racine

  Shakespeare

  Herbs

  Flowers

  The Subtle

  The Monumental Sublime

  The temples themselves:

  The famous one, noble, simple (deceptively so, O. will insist) rises in sunlight, marvelous for its bigness, its openness: a sire, a seer. The father in a novel about a happy childhood.

  The other by comparison seems dangerously complex & arbitrary

  Japanese a small-boned woman

  a dressing-table at which somebody has assembled the various elements—powder, eye-shadow, a pleated robe teagown—of a “je ne sais quoi” & vanished, for no more than a moment, surely, into another room.

  Orestes: One lives for the sake of one’s tragic insights.

  (Dora): If that is true, one still has access to them at one’s dressing table—more often than at one’s prie-dieu.

  O. (magnanimous): Let us say that as symbols these 2 temples have equal power, but that the states they symbolize do not.

  Dora (amused): You are more human than I am, is that it?

  Heavens, am I going to have to read Hegel & Marx?

  Both buildings are badly flawed. Yet, between them, they represent, with a purity & clarity far from mortal,* the two modes of being. The moon, the sun; the earth, the soul; the wife, the god. What other site in the world so quickens & cleanses the heart? (The blackness of Chartres.)

  The sun & moon together in the sky.

  Still, after a while, prompted by the blurred clamor from below, if not by the voices of those who like oneself have climbed this high & seen fit to describe the experience to one another, it was to the parapet one went, to see what one had left behind. There, below, lay the city, smoking, sparkling. Poverty. Urgency. Cats patrolling the rooftiles, boys playing soccer, women with burdens. Men in pyjamas at 4 p.m. Further off: one’s hotel, the house of a friend, the restaurant at which, months earlier, one had become involved in an ugly scene; the bank, the hat shop; the swimming pool; the gardens with peacock & papyrus

  & the sparse fright-wigs of the papyrus round a pool on whose cement bottom a honeycomb pattern of sun will be trembling; a duck’s bamboo bill

  A gust of wind lifts Orestes’ hat, which has been resting on the parapet, and drops it into the city the cactuses beneath.

  He won’t reclaim it. To Dora & Sandy: “The gods are on your side.”

  They sail that night.

  (A hue & cry at customs. The marble half-head found by O. is 1st confiscated then declared a fake worthless, & courteously returned.)

  George keeps sitting with me on the beach. Now that we’ve shared the fly-by-night Danish beauty, he has decided we are friends. I cannot plumb the mysterious shallows of his nature. Setting out to please, he nevertheless sees no way of doing so except through his mere presence, the offer of 1 initial cigarette & subsequent acceptance of 5. As he rises to leave, a drop of soft soap: “You good man.”

  I had never asked if he remembered Orson or Dora. He might (aged 12) have received candy from me at the panegyri. Had he? He looked doubtful. I wasn’t communicating. Kosta & Maritsa, oh yes, them he had known; they were now in Athens. As for O.—

  “The brother you,” said George, “no good man.”

  “Oh? Why?” (A word I now use all the time, mimicking G. It is our little joke.)

  “Kyrios Yannis (the E. C.) speak no good.”

  “Kyrios Yannis is wrong.” I showed him wrong in my dictionary.

  George snickered. “Kyrios Yannis is—. (A word I forget & would not have understood out of context.)

  He is a bundle of prejudice. I gathered yesterday that he has no use for Chryssoula. Why? Because she is not a Dibliotissa, but from depraved Rhodes. (C. calls him uno teddy-boy, he might care to know.)

  We talked a lot about girls. Unmarried Greek girls do not go All The Way. George confessed that Inge was his 2nd real experience.

  “Only the second?” I looked surprised. “Why?”

  “Never mind,” he grinned. “I am Greek.” (!!)

  Another hot day. The hollows of the miniature waves were black. They slid onto the beach with the sound of water drops striking a red-hot skillet.

  I didn’t go to Byron’s yesterday. We would have talked about O., I could feel it in my bones—or in my blood which by now is only a bare degree thicker than water. It is not thicker than ouzo; my tongue would have wagged disloyally. Disloyalty partly to Orson (where can he be?); mainly to Orestes, who gasps in these pages.

  The modern Greek language can be said to have suffered a stroke. Vowels, the full oí’s & ei’s of classical days, have been eclipsed to a waning, whini
ng ee. Obsessive jumbling of consonants in the dark. Speech of a brilliant, impaired mind. A crime committed in the name of Grimm’s Law.

  Dora’s amnesia

  15.vii.61

  The boat, white, graceful, is floated not in water but some insubstantial rather in an ultraviolet light against a background of heavy black & gold-green cliffs, ferned ledges for birds to nest on. A real place?

  There shall be no more travel, only the Voyage. Is that the message? Voyage (as if derived from voir): a Seeing.

  The boat at least is real. It is the N.’s caïque, a watercolor of it by Lucine which I claimed today at the postoffice. Postmarked illegibly. Am I to guess that she can be found aboard, that stroke of orange against the railing?

  It is the voyage not made. The boat missed.

  I could be a castaway, with my 9-day beard & faded shirt. Shall I be discovered at the water’s edge, shirt tied to the oar I brandish, croaking in a half forgotten tongue: I’m here! Rescue me!

  Or later, telling the tale: I was seven lean years on that island. With only a notebook parrot for company.

  By the time they reach Paris, Sandy is sick again. They take me him to the American Hospital. The doctor assures them that diet & rest will do the trick. No need for alarm, or for O. & D. to stay. They can’t afford to, at any rate. O. must resume teaching in September. Sandy promises to follow. If they had waited for him—But life became easy, opened out in strange directions he was too young, too curious not to investigate. He meets (Marianne). The letters from Houston ignored. Now he is through college, if he goes home he will only be taken into the Army. All this 7 years ago next month. It is 1½ years before he returns to America & then not for long. Marianne has found him a job as tutor to her little nephews.

  As this isn’t Sandy’s story, I could take out his jaundice altogether when I start to write. Let him vanish into the Orient as planned, while Orestes & Dora proceed from Italy to Paris—making in reverse my final trip with M. (All in that winter’s notebooks). The 2 situations much alike—younger man, older woman; monuments, arguments, a love outlived.

  Or did the jaundice mix its yellow with the blue of those far-off slopes rustling of new green

  Unless that youthful jaundice

  indispensable yellow primary color added to the blues of those lost days, turning them

  The savage beak & idiot green wings

  Full of my words, the notebook flapped its pages—

  24.vii.61

  I woke in the small hours, a sharp weight on my chest. It was Chryssoula’s cat, motors purring, claws kneading me through the sheet. I guessed rather than saw the dilated shining eyes fixed upon me. Instead of chasing it away, though, I began mumbling gently in response—“Good kitty, proud, loyal, generous Cat”—generous!—& other nonsense words until my eyes filled with tears to think that only then, in the middle of the night, rinsed by sleep and with only an animal for company, could I discover words of love. I stroked the strange, cool fur. Good, proud, loyal, who was I addressing if not this loving self of mine that had woken, that was digging its claws lightly, voluptuously into my flesh? It wasn’t comfortable, frankly. I had to shift in bed. The cat jumped to the floor, then to the windowsill, then out. A few feet to the left is a balcony that gives onto the corridor. I lay back dreaming of day, of Orson, Lucine, R. in Venice, M. in Tangier, of my mother & father, of those New York scenes I am trying to compose without opening this notebook; of the love & sweetness I had woken brimming with, and how I might nurse it, keep it from draining out of my cupped hands into dust before it reached its proper objects—O. & L. & the rest, or even (lacking them) the pages of my novel. But of course I had only to think these thoughts in order to feel the threat, then the reality, of their withdrawal. It would seem that love, , lives by its own laws, like a cat, & will not be commanded.

  PART II III?

  (A FAIR COPY)

  They reached New York on an August morning. Arthur Orson had written to Paris, after no little deliberation, offering his guest room for a week or so until they found a flat of their own. Nearly seventy now, a bachelor to boot, his hesitation was natural. Orestes’ letter told him worse than nothing regarding This Woman, as Arthur called Dora in a number of dialogues with his better nature. Who was she, and how much older than Orestes? Of just what society, please, was she the “cream”? He could hardly trust his godson’s judgment in these matters. Arthur was no prude; if they weren’t married, it didn’t concern him. But, set in his ways, fussy and autocratic from the years spent with nobody to please but himself, he did not exactly look forward to roughing it, high up there in the grand scenery of other people’s lives.

  The past took over, though. For minutes at a time he was young again, it was thirty-five years earlier, and the letter tucked in his engagement book was not from Orestes but Orestes’ father, announcing his arrival, with Eleni and the baby, in New York. The annoyance and curiosity felt then as now (who was This Woman? What business had his friend, or godson, involving himself with her, with any woman? She came from a higher class, did she? Hmf! How would he know?) gave Arthur the sense that his total personality was smoothly, intelligently functioning. “If I know anything,” he told his better nature, “I know the world, its pitfalls and deceptions. They never ask me when they make their rash decisions, but you’ll see. After one year with this woman, he’ll come whining to me, his only friend, just mark my words.” Thirty-five years ago, of course, Arthur had done everything in his power to help Orestes’ father, found him work, found them lodgings, sent them food, paid for the doctors, the hospital, the funeral of that wonderful, strong, good man. In Arthur’s bedroom stood a framed photograph of himself posing with his friend before a whitewashed house. It had been taken on a Sunday in 1915. Both were wearing dark suits and tieless white shirts buttoned at the collar. Orestes’ father would have been in his early twenties; he was looking superbly at the camera from behind a thick, curling moustache. Arthur Orson had been, of all things, a spy in the First War. During the Gallipoli Campaign he had met Orestes’ father, had in fact been hidden for a month in his house, in his room. “He saved my life,” he would say aloud, letting the magic work. “I was ill, he cared for me like a brother. His memory is sacred to me to this day.”

  “And Eleni?” asked Arthur’s better nature, one of whose favorite stories it was.

  “Agh. She remarried, miraculously.”

  “Why so? Wasn’t she still very lovely?”

  “Yes, perhaps. But a shrew. She drove him to his death.”

  “Oh? It wasn’t cancer, then?”

  “Am I expected to remember everything? Whatever it was, he died, Eleni remarried, and my little namesake—he was given Orson as a second name, you recall—went off with her to far-away Texas.”

  They had kept in touch, but Arthur did not see his godson again until he was thirty and a Professor, with degrees.

  To the surprise of both, they became friends. Each probably amused the other by his inexperience. Arthur went so far as to enroll in one of Orestes’ night classes for adults. Words like “antithesis” or “metaphysical,” or sentences beginning “The poet in his lonely search for belief …” made his eyes shift nervously, but he enjoyed the relish with which Orestes could utter them. Afterwards would come a removal to somebody’s apartment, wine and cookies, more talk. One night Tennyson was mentioned. “Oh,” said Orestes at once, “an extraordinary technician but a minor poet. It is hard for me to feel his greatness.” Wasn’t “In Memoriam” a great poem? “The poem he wrote for Arthur Hallam,” Orestes began, pausing because of the other Arthur in his audience, whom he wanted to savor the pleasant coincidence of names; “Tennyson’s friend who died young,” he went on, and now met Arthur’s eyes, reminded of his similar loss (which was, to be sure, Orestes’ own as well)—“Yes, perhaps ‘In Memoriam’ is a great poem. A sensibility as delicate as Tennyson’s could draw from a friend’s death insights analogous to those of the saint in contemplation of Christ’s passion. Thes
e insights are all the more poignant for contemporary readers like ourselves, for whom the Christian myth has fallen to pieces. Only a supreme artist in our day can solder them together. You will understand how I feel about ‘In Memoriam’ if you compare it with Eliot’s magnificent collage of faith and faiths—Tennyson on the one hand, content to echo the cadences of Anglican hymns; Eliot on the other, aware in his sophistication that the fragments he has ’shored up’ are valid because of their flaws, their inefficacy as living doctrine—” Enough. Orestes’ talk popped with allusion and paradox. It was like sitting by a fire. At the evening’s end Arthur breathed the cool of his own life gratefully.

  From him Orestes learned—no, Orestes never learned. He lacked skill and patience to help work the crazy quilt of amenity and obligation that was the older man’s daily life. Everything Arthur did related to others. Even in museums he stood longest in front of paintings whose previous owners he had known—Miss A.’s Manet, Lord B.’s Crivelli. On the way out he would stop to say hello to one of the curators. Months later he took Orestes to dinner in this man’s apartment. Orestes was the only guest not in evening clothes. He soon found, furthermore, that his discourse curdled the bland flow of talk and gossip. Before long he was listening in appalled fascination, beyond speech as the others were beyond thought—for so he unjustly dismissed them, blind to the intense thought behind the flowers, the china, the menu, and deaf to the truth of any remark clever enough to make him smile. Here Orestes was close, as Arthur pointed out, to contradicting himself. What was this cleverness if not a kind of poetry? Didn’t his own lectures sparkle with it? Ah, but no—Orestes’ lectures were about serious things. Poetry, for Arthur, might be cleverness, mere icing on the cake; for Orestes it was a way of life. “Believe me,” said his friend, “so is cleverness. By the way your manners are improving. You didn’t fold your napkin when you got up from table.”