The Mirror Outdoors

A Scattering of Salts, by James Merrill. Alfred A. Knopf.

$20.00.

This latest and, it now sadly appears, last collection by

James Merrill was published only weeks after his death last

February. Thinking of wintry, spectral works like Yeats's Last

Poems or the final poems of Stevens, we might expect this

volume to have a valedictory air. But Merrill was not yet sev-

enty. While a few of these poems detail premonitory twinges

(for instance, the calm but chilling "164 East 72nd Street"),

even they are written with his customary verve and elated

attentiveness; and one imagines his death surprising him by

its suddenness only a little less than it has the rest of us. In

person he often struck observers as boyish, and even after

decades of honored accomplishment his eminence was

scarcely touched with gray.

After I heard of his death a line of verse ran through my

head whenever I thought of it-not one by Merrill but by

Yeats: "A greater, a more gracious time has gone." It was

only when I sat down to write this that I asked myself how

apposite this particular tag might be. The second half of the

twentieth century hasn't, by several obvious standards, been

all that great, and graciousness has hardly been its hallmark.

Yet this is a time in which Merrill's civilizing influence on

our literature has been gratefully felt and will be keenly

missed. Among post-World War II poets his career has had

few parallels in its degreee of dedication and in the scope of

its achievement. In numerous exquisite lyrics, in the impos-

ing trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover, he recalled for us

what heights of finesse and narrative power poetry at its best

can attain. In this regard the boyish poet was an Old Master,

and no doubt that is why the news of his passing makes one

feel that the century he graced has ended five years early.

The singularity of Merrill's background could well have

kept him clear of attempting poetry at all, and certainly could

have led his writing, once attempted, into a vein of mandarin

exclusiveness. Merrill began with the disadvantage of being

extremely rich. (Go on, say it: it's a disadvantage many of us

wouldn't mind incurring.) Joking aside, the danger of wealth

to the artist is a real one. Not having to work for a living,

having total control of one's time, can only make wasting

time an even greater temptation than it ordinarily is. There

were plenty of inducements for the son of a founding partner

of the world's largest brokerage firm to become a dilettante

rather than a serious artist. Instead, he devoted most of his

days to the ecstatic drudgery of writing and rewriting, as his

close to twenty books of verse and prose attest. He overcame

other significant obstacles as well. As a semi-expatriate, living

abroad, mostly in Greece, for much of his career, he ran the

risk of succumbing to a facile exoticism, a condescending

exploitation of local color. With great tact and with what one

might call his transcultural imagination, he managed to bring

his home in Athens and his Greek friends compellingly to life

for American readers. (It was an accomplishment similar to

that of Elizabeth Bishop's Brazilian poems.) His unvexed

treatment of his homosexuality in his writing was another tri-

umph-a personal as well as an artistic one. He took advan-

tage of society's liberalizing attitudes as they evolved, and

developed an open and enviably natural manner for dealing

with the nuances of his relationships and those of others in

his circle. He became as sensitive an explorer as we have

lately had of love in its many forms, not the least of which is

friendship.

The course of this progress is clear in retrospect, but it was

not inevitable. Until he began publishing what grew into the

Sandover trilogy, Merrill was generally esteemed as a brilliant

stylist; but, if I can trust my own memory, he was not yet the

indisputably central figure he was to become. He himself

changed, as his gift deepened and ramified, and so did the

way we saw him. From his apparently peripheral position he

reached out to struggle with the two greatest challenges

American poets have faced in the postwar period. One of

these was to find a way past Eliot's doctrine of impersonality

to achieve a more open mode of autobiography in verse, a

project pursued most noisily by the Confessional school in

the wake of Lowell's Life Studies. The other was to recover

narrative for poetry without forfeiting the strengths of

either-in short, to write a booklength poem that required

no apologies. It was his success on both counts, and our

growing valuation of it, that moved him in his later years so

decisively into our admiring spotlight. All this is but to repeat

what has been frequently said, that our better poets create the

climate within which their works are appreciated.

Like the other two books Merrill published after complet-

ing the Sandover trilogy- Late Settings (1985) and The Inner

Room (1988)-A Scattering of Salts is substantial and self-

sufficient, more than a mere coda to the magnum opus. One

mark of a major artist is his readiness to welcome new sub-

jects and to adapt forms to mesh with unaccustomed themes.

We see that here, as Merrill strikes out in directions which

are largely new, if not entirely unprecedented for him. One

highly noticeable one shows in the ecological interests he

expresses, which earlier had provided some of the finest

moments in Late Settings. Here such concerns seem to com-

pose a leitmotif, scattered like the salts of the title throughout

these pages. The viewpoint is not simple, or propagandistic:

these are not tracts against pollution. What comes through, in

views from many different angles, is the poet's fascination

with nature as something at once vulnerable and resilient,

alien and yet humanly scaled. The opening poem, "A

Downward Look," is a brief but dense conceit that sets the

tone for these reflections. "Seen from above, the sky / Is

deep," it begins; the clouds, from that perspective, appear to

"Foam on a long, luxurious bath." This benign, even cozy

image of the cosmos undergoes a startling reversal as the

poem glides to its close:

On high, the love

That drew the bath and scattered it with salts

Still radiates new projects old as day,

And hardly registers the tug

When, far beneath, a wrinkled, baby hand

Happens upon the plug.

The self-destructiveness of humanity's baby hand is neatly

and sardonically evoked as well in "More or Less," a vision

of the world of the future as a sort of Bauhaus nightmare:

In with lack of clutter, starkly styled,

Only the fittest vertebrates and plants,

Cactus habitat and goldfish bowl,

Little to smarten up our costly prefab

Unless a holograph of (say) Einstein-

Bespectacled, white-maned, a breathing sphinx -

Prints ever-thinning air with the myopic

Simplicity of those who live here still,

Their sad knowhow, their fingertip control.

The most elaborate piece on the prospects of the planet is

"Self-Portrait in Tyvek (TM) Windbreaker," recording the

poet's musing as he walks about the city wearing the epony-

mous garment, "white with a world map," and made of

Dupont's "seeming-frail, / Unrippable stuff first used for

Priority Mail." He ponders the fate of the world whose

image he wears in lines that show his gift for invigorating

intractable concepts with irony and epigrammatic force:

I detect behind

My neighbor's grin the oncoming bulldozer

And cannot stop it. Ecosaints-their karma

To be Earth's latest, maybe terminal, fruits-

Are slow to ripen. Even this dumb jacket

Probably still believes in Human Rights,

Thinks in terms of "nations", urban centers,

Cares less (can Tyvek breathe?) for oxygen

Than for the innocents evicted when

Ford bites the dust and Big Mac buys the farm.

Hah. As if greed and savagery weren't the tongues

We've spoken since the beginning. My point is, those

Prior people, fresh from scarifying

Their young and feasting in triumph on their foes,

Honored the gods of Air and Land and Sea.

We, though . . . Cut to dead forests, filthy beaches,

The can of hairspray, oil-benighted creatures,

A star-scarred x-ray of the North Wind's lungs.

Merrill offers no grand solutions to these distressing prob-

lems, and that is just as well, since poets make but dubious

global planners. His object in such poems is to give voice to

the dismay we all feel in gauging the depredation of nature

within our lifetime.

If the poems I have been discussing are something of a

departure for Merrill, his book also features numerous conti-

nuities with his earlier work. Time after time he enlivens old

themes by writing at the top of his form. Even before he gave

his reminiscences epic proportions in his trilogy, he had

developed a wondrous knack for reanimating his past. His

narrative skills were noticeable from the start-one early

chapbook of poems was entitled Short Stories-and they only

seemed to grow in cunning as he went on. If Sandover proves

too dauntingly intricate for some readers, they may well turn

with relief to the more compact, generally autobiographical

narratives sprinkled throughout Merrill's collections: poems

like "The Broken Home," "Matinees," "After the Fire,"

"Days of 1935," and (my all-time favorite, I sometimes think)

"Lost in Translation." Merrill profited from the candor, the

apparently unmasked "I" of the Confessional poets when he

wrote such pieces. But he never found it necessary to buy

into the rest of their program, which called for stylistic

roughness as an index of sincerity. Merrill's poetic surface

maintains its poise and elegance even when dealing with inti-

mate content. If his irony keeps us at something of a distance,

his narrative pace, his almost seamless transitions from reality

to fantasy, and his sensitivity to character easily hold our

interest. He continues to be a dazzling storyteller in the new

book, in the very brief poems "My Father's Irish Setters" and

"Quatrains for Pegasus," and in the more expansive "Nine

Lives." This last, a very entertaining dozen pages, returns

Merrill and his friend David Jackson to their former home in

Athens for a brief stay and dusts off the Ouija board that fur-

nished the material of the trilogy. Ephraim, their old spirit

guide, addresses JM and DJ once again in the familiar block

capitals of the board. The good-naturedly absurd plot

involves Merrill's revisiting of old haunts (as well as old

haunts revisiting him), his efforts to make friends with a fam-

ily of Athenian stray cats, and the possible reincarnation of his

beloved friend Maria Mitsotaki (the muse figure of Sandover),

who has been, according to the spirits, "reborn eight years

ago / In India, as a future (male) Nobel / Prize-winning

chemist." All of these strata come lightly together, as airy as

layers of phyllo dough in some enticing Greek confection.

Other familiar preoccupations are given fresh renditions in

these pages. Merrill had always been an adept poet of place,

especially in capturing the essence of the various places where

he lived: Stonington, Athens, Key West. But he was also one

of those tourists on whom little was lost, and here he offers a

fine homage by way of landscape to Elizabeth Bishop,

"Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia." More quirkily,

"Family Week at Oracle Ranch," a lengthy sequence of

poems in quatrains, trains a mordant but eventually sympa-

thetic gaze on a New Age rehab center patronized by

Merrill's lover. Of course, one expects music to figure in a

book by this poet, and "The Ring Cycle" returns once again

to the passion for opera so often avowed before. "Four operas

in one week, for the first time / Since 1939. I went to that

one." Merrill's visit to the Met yields some witty and unnerv-

ing déja vu effects:

Young love, moon-flooded hut, and the act ends.

House lights. The matron on my left exclaims.

We gasp and kiss. Our mothers were best friends.

Now old as mothers, here we sit. Too weird.

That man across the aisle, with lambswool beard,

Was once my classmate, or a year behind me.

Alone, in black, in front of him, Maxine... .

It's like the Our Town cemetery scene!

Once again, too, there are the mirrors. These recur obses-

sively throughout Merrill's work. In an early, much antholo-

gized poem, the mirror itself is speaker, faithfully reflecting

the passage of time, to whose "faceless will . . . I am

amenable." In the present volume, "Big Mirror Outdoors"

rings some changes on the familiar motif, the poet in this case

addressing the looking glass set at the garden's end:

much as the plot

Was to make do without us, sun and rain,

Reds and blacks, terrestrial roulette,

Nature grows strong in you. Again last night

Rustling forth in all her jewelry

She faced the glacial croupier: Double or nothing!

Again dawn hot and airtight found you sweating

Out of that horrifying, harmless dream.

It seems emblematic of Merrill's development that the mir-

ror in this late poem reveals so much more than one person's

anxiously inventoried wrinkles. It takes in mutations on a

cosmic scale, and becomes a symbol not merely of human

vanitas but of the changing face of nature against which

human life is precariously poised.

In his memoir A Different Person (1993), Merrill writes of

the vocabulary he favored in an early phase of his career:

The words I never wearied of were . . . those adverbs

like "still" or "even," or adverbial phrases like "by then"

or "as yet" or "no longer," which, sharpening a reader's

sense of time, suggested a reality forever in the process of

change, that had "only now" come into being or was

"already" on the point of vanishing.

And he speaks of "the evanescent reality mirrored in such

dewdrops of syntax." If this was his youthful ideal, we can see

it now as something grandly fulfilled. The mirror is typically

an image of imprisoning enclosure: think of the Narcissus

myth, or of Eliot's "wilderness of mirrors" in "Gerontion."

Too often we have seen writers, as they age, collapse into the

confines of egotism. For Merrill, as he succeeded in bringing

his mirror outdoors, it opened up a progressively larger vista,

a spectacle no less gorgeous for being always, as he says, "on

the point of vanishing." He was our great connoisseur of

evanescence, and the final paradox is that it is poetry like his,

so deeply alive to the transience of all things, that stands as

good a chance as any of standing fast.