67. Triangulations: The letters of James Merrill and “La Piscine”, reviewed by Sandy
Louise Ebersdorf has asked me to plan our evening that will officially open the new dance space, Ballet 33, at Ebersdorf Tower. I will also man the new video equipment for a recording of the concert in addition to handling the lighting board. Pippa will be in the wings as the stage manager. The running order will be: my Visions, performed by Cheryl; my Oestrus, danced by Master Raro; intermission; then Cheryl’s Nekomata, performed by Cheryl and Master; and, finally, A&P’s Catalytic, with its cast of twenty-one felines, plus Albertine as its ring-mistress. If things go well, we will have four works that can go into the main Louise Theater post-pandemic. The only problem I can imagine is that Albertine and Paco, our cat wranglers, will not be able to fit their animal act into the new space. The pair have known the dimensions of its stage for months, so I hope they have adjusted their choreography and thoroughly retrained their creatures. We’re not going to rush anything, what with the current distancing regulations within theaters. There should be time to work out any technical problems. With a successful premiere here on home site, we will have a program aimed toward the re-opening of The Louise with its newly constituted company, The Ballet. Until that not-so-distant night, we’ll also have a video. My organizational duties await me.
Knowing my enjoyment of the art of James Merrill, Pippa gave me a copy of the new collection of the poet’s letters, A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021). As you might expect, he turns out to be a brilliant letter-writer. Since Merrill went out of his way to save his correspondence throughout his life, the letters were clearly written to be encountered by future generations. Merrill probably had in mind the missives of John Keats, which contain fascinating comments on art and life. Merrill’s do too.
And the volume does indeed create a “whole world”. Merrill was a wealthy and independent practitioner of the art of poetry throughout his career. He had four homes at one point (New York, Connecticut, Athens, Key West) and loved to travel, including one trip around the world with his partner, David Jackson. The collected letters have been edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser. Hammer wrote the “official” biography (James Merrill: Life and Art), and Yenser was present at the creation of the poet’s magnum opus, The Changing Light at Sandover, and benefited from Merrill’s many private notes illuminating that work. From the beginning of his career, Merrill gathered literary lights around him. For example, his first lover was the Greek poet Kimon Friar, the translator of the Kazantzakis masterwork, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. Friar dedicated that enormous feat of translation to the young Merrill. In addition, a reader of the letters will find correspondence with Marianne Moore, John Hollander, Elizabeth Bishop, Alice B. Toklas, Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, Alison Lurie, David Kalstone, Richard Howard, J. D. McClatchy, John Ashbery, Thom Gunn, Donald Windham, Edmund White, Allan Gurganus, and André Aciman. You see the literate company this man kept, at least via mail. It is interesting to think how little of this area of his output would have survived the onset of email. Or would it? Perhaps I underestimate Merrill.
There are two types of letters here which are particularly interesting: correspondence on art and poetry and letters on love. Merrill had many beloveds during his life, and his warmth in responding to them in writing can be deeply moving. I am especially struck by the way the poet’s letters to the painter David McIntosh can turn the analysis of painterly techniques into a language of love directed to the recipient. Here Merrill in Athens writes to a distant McIntosh in the U.S. about seeing Vermeer’s “The Artist in his Studio”: “The genius of Vermeer (or is it the genius of any painter?) struck me as a highly personal selection of the exact point in distance at which the surface no longer ‘represents’ but disappears into sheer brushwork + color; at which one no longer ‘reads’ the young woman’s glistening lip – only those three little moons of clearest pink spread across its brownish rose; a step forward, a step back, and the device becomes one with the illusion.” Somehow, that is one of the most sensual epistolary passages I have ever encountered.
The editors claim that they have omitted some letters where Merrill became too “technical” in his discussion of his poetic art (perhaps these can be gathered in a future collection?), but much survives the pruning. Merrill’s voice is almost as precise and evocative as in his poems. He can be camp, satiric, witty, critical, and rhapsodic. About the literary world of New York City, he is respectful but not overawed. For example, at a party given for the ballerina Suzanne Farrell, he is amused when she complains that her articulate admirers cannot imagine that she can use words for a real conversation. I have been in equivalent situations where balletomanes assumed that I couldn’t hold up my side of a discussion. But, usually, this only meant that they didn’t know how to conduct a conversation about dance beyond an opinion or two. The result: a standoff. Luckily for Merrill, he had his friend David Kalstone to take him to the ballet and to balletomane parties.
One of the revelations of the volume of letters is the clear suggestion that a strong influence upon The Changing Light at Sandover was Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire. Both deal with the subject of an influence upon literary works from beings beyond the grave. Nabokov’s characters search for evidence of ghostly behavior, and Merrill and David Jackson evoke them in spectral statements through sessions with a Ouija board, replies which Merrill then transcribed, edited, and versified. The first part of Sandover – The Book of Ephraim – is composed of material of three types: accounts of the daily life of Merrill and Jackson, including their travels; references to characters from a lost novel, written and then misplaced by “JM”; and the revelations of the board’s initial ghostly interlocutor, Ephraim. Until the publication of the Hammer biography and the new volume of letters, it could be difficult in reading Sandover to identify what was fiction and what was autobiographical in source, especially since some readers could be skeptical about the spiritualistic elements. Now the autobiographical information (however skewed in turning James Merrill into the poem’s “JM”) are clearer, and we can triangulate toward the poem’s version of truth. Merrill clearly wants the three realms to inform and to clash with one another.
A clarified understanding of that initial book of the trilogy is made all the more possible with the aid of the 2018 annotated edition of The Book of Ephraim (Knopf), where the introduction and annotations by Stephen Yenser add immensely to our knowledge. In his introduction, Yenser quotes a passage from the third letter in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet on the necessity for endurance for artistic creation and the sense of timelessness in the birthing of works of art: “. . . patience is everything”. This may be a key to understanding The Changing Light at Sandover. Not only does a space open up between the three realms of the poem. Their interaction with one another is its central motif.
At least three other influences are revealed by the letters. C. G. Jung’s writings appear to underwrite the Sandover components that follow Ephraim -- both Mirabell: Books of Number and Scripts for the Pageant. To one student, Judith Moffett, Merrill writes: “I wouldn’t like to think that personality is merely anybody’s sum of contradictions; what I value more is the tone or style in which these are arrived at, but that tone may no longer be ‘personality’ so much as the key-signature of the next variation.” Two poets especially inform all of Merrill’s writings: George Herbert and Wallace Stevens. In Stevens, there is that line about musical chords where “A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.” For Merrill, such a spiritual dispersal (so philanthropic) in space and time appears to equate to lyricism itself. And there is Herbert’s poem “The Flower”, arguing against those who try to swell and store and who, in such pride, thereby forfeit Paradise.
Merrill contracted AIDS toward the end of his life, and he underwent medical treatments to ward off its effects. Perhaps weakened by the medicines, he died of heart failure at a facility in Arizona in 1995, just short of his sixty-ninth year. The letters provide evidence of his physical endurance and mental vitality to the very end. The volume’s climax is another series of advice-to-a-young-poet missives written to Torren Blair. I especially like the use that Merrill makes of Auden’s advice re the importance of craft. Auden claimed that while attending to technical matters the poet’s subconscious has an opportunity to add something of its own to the composition. Formal constraints thus become a source of invention if the student-artist develops them beyond mere technical facility. Perhaps such skills provide that delight in versification that is everywhere in Merrill’s oeuvre.
At one point in Langdon Hammer’s biography of Merrill, the author pauses in his narrative momentum and offers an apology to the reader for the amount of sexual activity that his subject prompted and indulged throughout his life. It is true that Merrill falls in love and lust a great deal in the new collection of letters. But I have also been reading the first selection of the unexpurgated diaries of Henry Channon (Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38, edited by Simon Heffer, Hutchinson, 2021), and I must report that nothing much has changed through the ages. Not only is Channon himself quite active sexually, but he reports on a certain Cedric Alexander who between the age of 13 and 28 managed to find time for four hundred lovers. With enough wealth and time, much is possible.
And speaking of volupté: Cheryl and I went to Film Forum last week to see a screening of the 1969 French movie, La Piscine, directed by Jacques Deray, and starring Romy Schneider, Alain Delon, and Maurice Ronet. Here is film eroticism without the mechanical constraints of porn. I suspect that this film’s revival is provoked by the death a few weeks ago of its screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière, famed for his masterful work with late-period Luis Buñuel.
In La Piscine, we find the journalist Marianne, played by Schneider, and the advertising man Jean-Paul, played by Delon, enjoying the amenities of a deluxe villa in the south of France, while its owners are touring India. Marianne and Jean-Paul are lost in the delights of a physical passion for one another at the film’s start. Seldom has a movie camera been used to celebrate bodily beauty in such detail and for such full-time-lapse explorations of active desire. Schneider is given silvery highlights along the length of her body that all but memorialize her form. Delon strikes many poses that have to be satiric references to fashion model adverts and film-star pinups. Into their very private, heated lives comes a blast from the past: Harry, a rich music recording executive, and his teenage daughter on their way to Italy but willing to join our couple at Marianne’s invitation. Harry is one of her lovers from the recent past, and Jean-Paul and Harry were once best friends. Here is the film’s fated triangle, le trio infernal. The teenager daughter, played by Jane Birkin, lolls about the pool and drops hints of her father’s vicious nature to a newly jealous Jean-Paul. Both of the men begin to circle about Marianne, whose passivity before their worship may turn rivalry into something lethal. By the end of the film, Marianne is bonded forever to a surviving male admirer.
Much of the movie’s style and form is glaucous, wave-like in its rhythms. In its slow, immersive approach to its subject, La Piscine reminded me of the Japanese novelist Kawabata’s The Lake, in which the protagonists are connected to one another by underground currents of attraction and loathing. Here, in Deray’s mise-en-scène, we find the camera using two regular techniques to show a growing psychological entanglement. We watch an interview shot from slightly behind the players who converse with one another casually, suggestively, and the camera floats around to reposition itself in front of them, as though a mind is being made up or a new point of view has been achieved. The legato impetus of the camera eye is just as important as its vantage. The other technique is even riskier when employed often. We watch one or two of the characters arriving poolside or emerging from the villa, and the camera is far back from the action. The performer is caught deep in a moment of realization or command, but the director does not go in for a close-up. Instead, his choice of camera lens and careful distance manages to suggest how chance-taking, how tenuous the depicted act is. We, as viewers, are drawn into the scene because we must peer from a distance at a crisis. Here, Deray is utterly dependent on the strengths of his actors and their skills for the verity of such gestures.
Romy Schneider’s Marianne reminded me of the actress’ triumph in Luchino Visconti’s short film, The Job, which is found in the anthology titled Boccaccio '70. There she plays an upper-middle-class wife of a young industrialist who has lost interest in her. The woman tells her money-mad spouse that she will find a job rather than be dependent on him. But such is her love for her husband, she ends by accepting money from him in regular payment for conjugal duty. This excites the husband but leaves the wife frustrated. Under Visconti’s direction, Schneider is wonderfully mercurial in mood and calculation.
In La Piscine, Maurice Ronet makes Harry’s slow turn toward viciousness fascinating to observe. Alain Delon is caught at an age where his youthful good looks begin to suggest the effects of an indulged decadence.
There are several scenes set to the music of Michel Legrand. The camera manages, Antonioni-like, to track across a party in progress, arriving at just those moments where character points appear with a slight underlining from the musical score. These can be powerful in the context of the film’s growing mood of psychological suspense. They must have required much rehearsal to set up and accomplish. The actors all look like they are having the time of their lives. Schneider, Delon, and Ronet are part of the care that went into the movie’s achieved portraiture. Delon eventually made seven films with Deray. I would like to see their Borsalino, in which Delon and Belmondo play 1930s hoods dressed to the nines. La Piscine will soon be released as a blu-ray disc by Criterion.
Afterwards, Cheryl and I discussed the fact that La Piscine could never be made in the United States because it is forthright in its depiction of a couple’s physical celebration of one another. And I noted that James Merrill lived in Athens during much of his career as a poet. Europe beckons.
S.
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