{"id":161127,"date":"2022-08-16T17:12:36","date_gmt":"2022-08-16T21:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=161127"},"modified":"2022-08-22T10:45:02","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T14:45:02","slug":"past-present-perfect-an-overdue-pilgrimage-to-stonington-connecticut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/08\/16\/past-present-perfect-an-overdue-pilgrimage-to-stonington-connecticut\/","title":{"rendered":"Past, Present, Perfect: An Overdue Pilgrimage to Stonington, Connecticut"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

James Merrill with wisteria in Charlottesville, 1976. Photograph by Rachel Jacoff.<\/p><\/div>\n

In French the word merle<\/em> means blackbird, a dark bird of the thrush family. A blackbird\u2019s song marks its territory. The male has black feathers and a yellow beak. It is in the same genus as the meadowlark. Forty years after first meeting James Merrill at my teacher David Kalstone\u2019s Chelsea apartment, I am sitting at his desk in Stonington, Connecticut, with his large Petit Larousse<\/em> open before me. Searching for the meanings of our names in French, I am distracted by a blackbird perched on the windowsill, drinking a little dew and then swaying on a nearby branch. It speaks in polished, rudimentary tones with a slow tempo.<\/p>\n

Merrill\u2019s big desk is in a small room\u2014in an apartment of small rooms\u2014behind a hinged bookcase that creates a very private space. Still, I can hear a train whistle, a foghorn, halyard lines clinking against the masts of sloops anchored in the harbor, church chimes, and bits of conversation from villagers below on Water Street. These must be the sounds Merrill heard, too, while working. He was an early riser and liked to give the first hours of the day to his poems, which reflect, mirrorlike, so many of my own feelings. Mirrors are also a motif in his poems\u2014mirrors that remember us across the years, reflecting our beauty and dissolution alike. It has taken me some days to sit at his desk.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Mirror in the Merrill House. Photograph by Henri Cole.<\/p><\/div>\n

In French, my name means collar<\/em>, and I think immediately of the metaphysical poet George Herbert\u2019s poem \u201cThe Collar,\u201d published in 1633, a poem in which the fervid speaker seeks more freedom in his life. It is a poem of strong feeling, almost like a rant. Like his friend Elizabeth Bishop, Merrill loved Herbert\u2019s poems and could quote them by heart. During my twenties and thirties, perhaps there was no living poet I admired more than Merrill, and I am drawn still to this American poet, who was said to be writing even while needing oxygen on the night before his death more than twenty-five years ago.<\/p>\n

Long ago, in the eighties and nineties, Merrill and I shared an editor, Harry Ford, who seemed unconcerned that publishing poetry can be a money-losing proposition and gave our books his distinctive typographical cover designs. When he took me on, I was his youngest poet, as Merrill had been years before. Though Harry had found Merrill\u2019s First Poems<\/em>\u00a0\u201cornate,\u201d he loved his second book, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace<\/em>, and eagerly published it. This put Merrill on the map of American poetry, if there is such a map hanging in a long hall somewhere in America. In 1995, when Merrill died unexpectedly in Arizona while vacationing, his body was flown to New York City, where Kathleen Ford, Harry\u2019s wife, was asked to identify it. She told me, \u201cIts solidness befitted the great poet he was.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photograph by Henri Cole.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sometimes I think Merrill is misunderstood as a technically masterful, unemotional poet. This is what was once said about his friend Elizabeth Bishop, too. Because he is so often described as elegant, I wonder if this is code for homosexual, for this is how my work is sometimes described also. Long ago, Merrill told me that he was grateful for the neglect of his early work, because when the praise came later in his life, it came abundantly for this visionary author of\u00a0The Changing Light at Sandover<\/em>. This was his complex, epic poem, one which seemed authorized by Dante, with its guide figure, Ephraim, standing in for Virgil, with its conversations with \u201cthe other side,\u201d with its occasional terza rima, with its repeated theme of stars, and with an epigraph from Paradiso <\/em>XV: \u201cYou believe the truth, for the lesser and the great \/ of this life gaze into the mirror \/ in which, before you think, you display your thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Stonington, I am pretending not to be a guest as I climb the steep and narrow studio stairs to water Merrill\u2019s ancient jade plant. It appears to thrive even in neglect, like a poet in middle age. Is it true that a jade plant brings financial good luck? Is it true that an extract from its succulent leaves can be used to treat wounds? Is it true that the jade is a tree of friendship, something Merrill had a marvelous gift for?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dining room table. Photograph by Henri Cole.<\/p><\/div>\n

Each day I walk around the village. Sometimes Gigi, a friend of my youth, accompanies me. Her family has lived in Stonington for six generations. When she was a teenager, she met Merrill because her grandparents lived across from him on Water Street. He read Gigi\u2019s first poems before she went off to study writing at Iowa, and she gave him vegetables grown in her backyard garden. As a young woman, she married a local artist and teacher, who later died at sea while lobstering. She once lived in a little house without central heat over on Gold Street. The village was different then, with its noble houses falling down and laundry hanging out on lines to dry. Now the homes have been refurbished. The artists and the Portuguese fishermen have been replaced by wealthy summer people, but there is still a fishing and lobstering fleet.<\/p>\n

On Saturday mornings, I accompany Penny, a new village friend, to the farmers market on the other side of the railroad tracks, where we buy fresh bread, local vegetables, and a basket of white peaches to share. Because Penny is a patient listener, the pretty cheesemonger tells her the story of her life, while angry bees fly around and explore the little mountains of pungent cheeses. Every evening a small group of villagers swims from DuBois Beach to the breakwater. I am afraid of the jellyfish and stand alone on the shore to watch the swimmers until their arms and legs disappear into the chop of dark water.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

James Merrill and Rachel Jacoff. Photograph courtesy of Rachel Jacoff.<\/p><\/div>\n

Ever since Hurricane Henri, the tropical cyclone that made landfall in late August, the blue sky has sparkled without a cloud. All day I listen to seagulls, who have so much to say as they circle around the harbor. I am relieved not to be visited by the restless, lonely spirits that frequented Merrill\u2019s Ouija board. Later today, I am meeting Jonathan for a BLT. We\u2019ll sit on a park bench near the library and talk about his new book on Bishop. He\u2019ll show me his signed first edition of Geography III<\/em>, and I will feel covetous. Then Sibby, a villager, will introduce me to her goats, her hens, and her aggressive, polyamorous rooster, whose comb will turn pale a few days later, a fatal sign. Then I\u2019ll have a drink with the village warden, Jeff, the mayor of the borough, and his wife, Lynn, who will dig up a gorgeous autumn fern from their yard for me to plant at Merrill\u2019s grave.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat would Merrill think of my being here?\u201d I ask my friend Rachel, a retired Dante specialist who knew him. \u201cHe would be so delighted,\u201d she insists. In his too short, peripatetic life\u2014like Bishop, he died at sixty-eight\u2014he frequently loaned his homes to his friends, as he did to Rachel during a sabbatical in the eighties. In his will, Merrill left the three-story building at 107 Water Street, including his penthouse apartment, to the Stonington Village Improvement Association, which conceived of the one-month writers\u2019 residency program that brought me here. I imagine Merrill folding his clothes in the basement laundry room like me, and walking to the post office to mail his postcards, and putting an avocado pit in a glass of water to start its rooting. He kept no garden, but he was \u201cearth\u2019s no less.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Per\u00e9nyi\u2019s front door. Photograph by Henri Cole.<\/p><\/div>\n

At a handsome house on Main Street, I visit the ashes of my poetry teacher David Kalstone, who was a brother-like friend of Merrill\u2019s from the sixties. David died of AIDS<\/small> in 1986, when he was only fifty-three. That was the year I came out to my parents. I don\u2019t know how I survived that dark decade. David\u2019s illness was mercifully brief\u2014pneumonia, the dimming of his mind, and confinement to bed. Like many, he was cared for by friends and had no formal funeral. Some of his ashes were emptied \u201cinto the black, starlit water of the Grand Canal\u201d in Venice, as Merrill told those gathered later at a memorial. Some more of his ashes were taken in a dinghy out into the tidal river just east of Stonington and emptied underwater. In an unpublished diary, which was preserved along with his papers, Merrill describes \u201ca \u2018man-sized\u2019 cloud of white, dispersing, attended by a purple-&-white jellyfish acolyte.\u201d A last teaspoon was sprinkled with lilies of the valley under an old apple tree in the writer Eleanor Per\u00e9nyi\u2019s garden. There was a reading of the Sidneys\u2019 translation of the twenty-third Psalm: \u201cThus thus shall all my days be fede, \/ This mercy is so sure \/ It shall endure.\u201d Though the apple tree is gone, a horse chestnut reaches happily toward the sunlight today. Per\u00e9nyi\u2019s son, Peter, and his wife, Sharon, who live there now, serve me a slice of coffee cake with a cappuccino on their back porch. While we talk about the past, Libby, their handsome rescue dog\u2014part Great Pyrenees, part Anatolian shepherd\u2014sits at my feet. Unusual mushrooms\u00a0like \u201c<\/i>shameless phalluses,\u201d known as stinkhorns, grow around the garden. If eaten when young, they are said to be crisp and crunchy with a radishy taste. Their caps are coated in a dark, olive-green slime and crowned with a small white ring.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Shameless phalluses.\u00a0Photograph by Henri Cole.<\/p><\/div>\n

Soon after David\u2019s death, Merrill composed a quatrain in his diary: \u201cBeloved friend, the sky + sea \/ of Stonington\u2019s your limit? No: \/ To Heaven fly, to Venice flow. \/ Home-free, home-free.\u201d And there are these sorrowful sentences: \u201cEvery \u00bd hour I just break into sobs\u2014sounds I\u2019ve never before heard come out of me. No quarrel ever. No tension. Pure fun & communion. A 2nd<\/sup> self I could reach by telephone, or walking into the next room \u2026 there are no more where they came from, the friends of one\u2019s heart.\u201d The poet Adrienne Rich wrote to J.\u2009D. McClatchy, who\u2019d helped care for David: \u201cWhen I first knew David he was a graduate student at Harvard and I was a divided woman poet\/faculty wife with 3 young children \u2026 He and Randall Jarrell were the first critics to encourage what I was doing in the 1960\u2019s when many who had approved my earlier work were getting uneasy.\u201d Unlike other critics of the day, David didn\u2019t think the generation preceding Rich and Merrill\u2019s was \u201cthe last word, the ultimate canon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

David Kalstone in his apartment reading. Photograph courtesy of Rachel Jacoff.<\/p><\/div>\n

Some years after David died, I visited Merrill in Key West, where he then spent his winters. We sat at the back of his house in a big sunny room with cedar walls. John Malcolm Brinnin\u2014the biographer, critic, and poet\u2014was there. Both men wore Birkenstock sandals, and Merrill sat in a big bamboo chair that was a birthday gift from the poet Mona Van Duyn. They were talking about their elderly mothers\u2014Merrill\u2019s was 92 and Brinnin\u2019s 102. When Brinnin recounted how on his mother\u2019s hundredth birthday she\u2019d asked, \u201cWhat\u2019s birthday?\u201d there was silence. After all, they were elderly, too.<\/p>\n

Merrill invited me to lunch at a small Spanish restaurant with only a handful of tables that was tucked away on a back street. It was unchanged from \u201cElizabeth\u2019s time,\u201d he told me. In 1938, Elizabeth Bishop had bought a house in Key West at 624 White Street, with her friend Louise Crane. In her journal, she writes about the lime tree in her yard, in whose \u201ccool shadow\u201d love was nurtured and betrayed. We shared an order of rice and beans with plantains, and for dessert, we divided a serving of flan, which he slid off the plate with his fingers and then licked them. On a tiny shelf over the door to the kitchen, there was a display of large dusty santos\u2014ornamental figures from the Christmas cr\u00e8che\u2014and I remembered Merrill’s poem \u201cSanto\u201d:<\/p>\n

Francisco on his shelf,
\nWreathed in dusty wax
\nRoses, for weeks and weeks
\nHadn\u2019t been himself\u2014<\/p>\n

Making no day come true
\nBy answering a prayer
\nJust dully standing there \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Merrill said this poem expressed \u201cin miniature the whole self-revising nature of the Sandover<\/em> books, where no \u2018truth\u2019 is allowed to rot under a single, final aspect.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Merrill paid for our lunch, he calculated to the penny what the tip should be and left this exact amount. Then we walked to the library, where he hoped to find an English-French dictionary at the used-book sale to help him translate a sonnet by the French poet, novelist, dramatist, freethinker, and occultist Victor Hugo. Today I can find no translation of Hugo in his Collected Poems\u00a0<\/em>and I wonder which sonnet it was. It was Merrill\u2019s sonnet sequence \u201cThe Broken Home\u201d that first made me a fan of his work. The poem appeared in his breakthrough volume, Nights and Days<\/em>, published when he was only forty. It is composed of seven sonnets about his relationship with his wealthy, energetic father, Charles E. Merrill, a founding partner of the investment firm of Merrill Lynch. The poem is a meditative lyric, but narrative, too, with psychological intensity. As there are in some of Bishop\u2019s poems, there are discreet references to the poet\u2019s homosexuality.<\/p>\n

The poem\u2019s sonnets are not strict\u2014each is linked to another by a theme or image. Because each sonnet presents a self-contained scene, the poem expands and contracts like the reader breathing, feeling, and thinking. It begins with the speaker alone on the street observing a little family framed by a window. Then, later, \u201cin a room on the floor below,\u201d Merrill lights a candle and speaks to the flame: \u201cTell me, tongue of fire, \/ that you and I are as real \/ At least as the people upstairs.\u201d The word real<\/em> reappears, because the solitary speaker longs to be as real as the little family he sees in the window.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

James Merrill’s embroidered child’s chair. Photograph by Henri Cole.<\/p><\/div>\n

Some years before my visit to Key West, Merrill had flown to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and been diagnosed with ARC or AIDS<\/small>-related complex, though this was something he remained silent about for the rest of his life, telling only a few friends. Merrill was not a poet of grievances, but in his diary he opens up:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe state of my health has made me stop drinking (or all but) + smoking (entirely) and kept me harder at work, I think, than I\u2019d have been otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cArt is a not-at-all reluctant alternative to life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy days are numbered. But so are everyone\u2019s, if only in retrospect \u2026 Thousands of people are in my exact position, only they haven\u2019t thought (or wished) to take a blood test. I know that I shall (unless a miracle cure emerges) be dead in 3 years, more or less.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though Merrill described his illness as \u201cbearable,\u201d he wrote that it was nevertheless \u201cappalling to live in a present whose future \u2026 has been so frostbitten.\u201d He reminded himself to reread the lines 8\u201314 on page 304 of his\u00a0Changing Light at Sandover<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Ah, it\u2019s grim. Yet what to ask
\nOf death but that it come wearing a mask
\nWe\u2019ve seen before; to die of complications
\nInvited by the way we live. Bad habits,
\nOverloaded fuses, the foreknown
\nStroke or tumor\u2014these we call our own
\nAnd face with poise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was written before the modern drugs for treating HIV. I say modern, though forty years later there is still no miracle vaccine or cure.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

James Merrill\u2019s dictionary. Photograph by Henri Cole.<\/p><\/div>\n

During my stay in Key West, I borrowed Merrill\u2019s bicycle and rode across town while he exercised on his cross-country skiing machine. I rode through the vast cemetery and found Bishop\u2019s house, which was hidden by a jungle of trees and potted plants. Its unpretentiousness pleased me\u2014its wide-open shutters and front door, motor scooter parked in the yard, and comforter hanging from a second-floor window. Merrill wrote in his diary: \u201cEB more present<\/u> in later poems. The figures walking up and down the icy beach \u2026 we stand back from them \u2026 we see more of the human condition mimed out for us than ever previously.\u201d Certainly, this is true of one of Merrill\u2019s last poems, \u201cChristmas Tree,\u201d in which he sees himself and his destiny in a tree brought down from \u201cthe cold sighing mountain\u201d to be \u201cwound in jewels\u201d and kept warm for a short time, with a \u201cprimitive IV\u201d behind it \u201cto keep the show going,\u201d before it is left out on the \u201ccold street\u201d\u2014just \u201cneedles and bone\u201d\u2014to be \u201cplowed back into the Earth for lives to come.\u201d Elsewhere in his diary, Merrill writes, \u201cLife is so like Chekhov\u2014the characters + motives all sweetness, the plot deadly nightshade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Merrill wanted me to see his Key West study and he was amused when I feigned indifference. It was a small space with a single bed at one end and a narrow desk beside a window at the other. The room was divided by tall bookshelves, and when I told him it reminded me of a student\u2019s dorm room, he was pleased. He showed me the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary<\/em> that had once belonged to Auden, in which he still hoped to discover marginalia. The small office\u2019s modesty made me remember something the poetry critic Helen Vendler once said to me about Merrill: \u201cHe could have chosen anything, but despite enormous wealth and good looks, he chose poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

David Jackson and James Merrill\u2019s graves. Photograph by Henri Cole.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He has published ten collections of poetry, most recently <\/em>Blizzard, and a memoir, <\/em>Orphic Paris. A selected sonnets is forthcoming.<\/em><\/p>\n

James Merrill diaries quoted courtesy of the James Merrill Papers, Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, Washington Universities Libraries. Copyright to the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University.<\/em><\/p>\n

Adrienne Rich letter to J.\u2009D. McClatchy (dated January 6, 1987) quoted courtesy of the Adrienne Rich Literary Estate. Copyright Adrienne Rich Literary Estate, 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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