Notes on Meeting James Merrill
25 January 1990, Thursday, Glasgow
Wind & snow1.
This weather may mean that young-Toby gives up on jobhunting for the day, and stays in his youth hostel bunkbed. Or that he goes out looking for possible accommodating (and tomorrow he’ll find something). He probably isn’t doing much reading, or he is reading Proust’s In Remembrance of Things Past for the first time and it’s slowing him down. In February, he only finishes a couple of books. One is the poet James Merrill’s collection, From the First Nine. This must mean he took it with him to Glasgow.
Many of the poems he’s been writing recently have been under Merrill’s influence — they are offhand but highly literary. At this time, Merrill is not well known in the UK; I don’t think that’s changed. Young-Toby had first come across Merrill through the WH Auden Society. That’s how he got Merrill’s contact details, and then wrote him a letter enclosing a couple of poems. Merrill responded with an invitation to meet, if ever young-Toby was in America. The Changing Light at Sandover, mentioned here, is a great, weird book.
Toby met Merrill, in Manhattan, on 30 November 1989. It was the high point of his whole visit to America.
He wrote some doggerel, immediately before —
In what apparel
to meet James Merrill?
My brown trousers are, my mother said, too big
for me. But jeans are surely infra dig?
He wrote some slightly-better-than-doggerel, immediately afterwards —
..you clearly knew
it was a visit, not an interview,
and therefore let me speak for far too long
yourself too kind to interrupt the young
gusher in front of you. You knew perhaps it’s best
to listen, interject, extend the reading list
a little bit, admire the energy,
deplore the mispronouncements, try to see
a future in the glance, the gait, the gall,
not show when you’re offended, and at all
times maintain a generous demeanour
so if, by chance, the bud grows ever greener [eugh!]
the young himself will know how to behave,
how to be competent, involved and grave.
But he wrote a longer account in a notebook, that evening —
Today I met James Merrill. I will write what I remember of the visit and add to the account if I remember any further scraps later on. The arrangement, which I had made with him from a callbox in Washington, was that I should go to his apartment (164 East 72nd) at around 12:00 to 12:30. I had taken the subway to Lexington and then walked up Lexington, found the front door of his building, gone to Books & Company for one last look for The Changing Light at Sandover, had an attack of the shits and then gone straight up in the lift after telling the doorman who I wanted to see. When I got to the door of 9A I waited a couple of minutes until just before 12. I rang three times, leaving polite, understanding pauses in between. Then decided to wait. Merrill turned up at about quarter past. He’d been delayed, he said, by talking to Mary McCarthy’s husband. She has just died and there was a photocopy of an obituary on a table in his apartment. They had bumped into eachother in a store. He had also not expected me until 12:30. He apologized.
We went into his apartment. A couple of parcels were delivered. He asked if I’d like anything to drink, suggested coffee, said he had no milk, fixed it and sat down after taking a phone call.
He asked me how I found New York. Asked about places I’d seen. Whether I’d liked Seattle? But this is silly.
For lunch we went ‘round the corner’ and I had a Russian beetroot soup, which started as a starter but finished as a sweet; a mushroom omelette and a celery tonic fizzy drink that Merrill said Marianne Moore had liked. To me it tasted like a cold remedy. I didn’t finish the beetroot soup. He had a hot version of this, chunkier, and ate my sour cream. He also had the tonic and some bread. On the way to the deli he asked me when I’d started writing. i told him about rereading my earliest schoolbooks before putting them in the trunk. And then about my dentist poet, but just as I was quoting —
You sit there staring up his nose
as the tension grows and grows…
one of his contact lenses became dislodged. It was very windy but I don’t know if it was the wind. He apologized. I sort of guided him to the door and left him in the door to pop the thing out into his hand. He then went to hang his coat up and put the lens back in while I sat down with the menu. (It’s always very endearing when someone’s contact lens comes out. I remember when one of my favourite English teacher’s fell out. She had half the classroom out of their seats doing a strange dance combined of eagerness to find the lens and be the hero and fear of stepping on the lens and being the villain.) He returned and we talked until we ordered. I ordered largely what he suggested after he discovered I was a vegetarian.
Over lunch we discussed poets. Elizabeth Bishop was his favourite and he asked me if the Bishop-bug had bitten me. He approved of my favourites: Auden, Stevens, Jarrell. He gave me the names of his favourite younger American poets, Richard Keeney, Mary Jo Salter, Geoffrey Harrison plus that of Alan Ansen. He mentioned a recent book Becoming a Poet by I don’t know how. He also mentioned George Bradley, John Hollander’s Rhyme and Reason and Robin Macgowan, his nephew, who, he said, edited a magazine called Margin which had yet to discover its true character. He suggested I get in touch and submit anything I write that is out of the ordinary. On the way to lunch he actually asked me if I’d had any books published.
I replied that, as I had a normal working backlog of two poems, after receiving ‘Prospero Before’ the poem I’d give him later, he would have my complete [works].
He had already given me a copy of The Changing Light. (I was too shocked to even thank him) and signed it and the other four books by him I’d brought along whilst on the phone, again.
During lunch he asked me if there were any young British poets I liked. I said no. He said he had a fitful correspondence with Jeremy Reed, who I then told him I’d met. I gave him a brief description of Reed’s incantatory reading style, his opinions ‘On Not Going Into Supermarkets’ and his appearance. He winced in the appropriate places and said he hated such airs. In his latest letter, though, he said, Reed had announced his intention to conquer the urban, ‘So perhaps he’ll be forced to go into the supermarket.’
He mentioned admiring Geoffrey Hill. He also asked me whether my first name was Toby or Tobias.
We walked back to his apartment. I asked a couple of questions about Sandover, talked about metre, and then started talking about music. I told I was glad when I found out how much Auden liked Guys and Dolls — he said Auden had him and DJ copy out Blanche’s illness song (‘A poisun cud develop a cough’) for possible inclusion in his commonplace book A Certain World. This happened in Kirchstetten. He’d visited Auden in Greece as well. Some answer he does elsewhere about Wystan liking’s then for looking after Chester. Said they were first introduced by a mutual friend, had a drink, the three of them, in a hotel bar. How he’d dropped in on him after phoning when he went downtown. How he skipped the offered martinis. How it wasn’t really a conversation but more an audience. I asked if Auden ever relented and tried to converse. Even if he had, Merrill replied, he, a student, would have been too tongue-tied to say anything of use. But, he said, Chester, who was unafraid of Wystan, could make Wystan converse just by being there. Chester got me into trouble about once a week in Greece, he said.
There was some more talk about opera. How I’d seen Idomeneo in San Francisco, how he thought it was unfortunate that that was the first Mozart opera I’d seen. How it was the last he’d seen. Recent productions he’d liked. His love of 18th and 19th century music. There were opera magazines around his apartment.
HIS APARTMENT
Shared with a guy called H. A brief entrance hall; a dining room, in the dark when I went through; a sitting room, where we talked, of which more later; a spare room; a bedroom; a kitchen; the rest room.
THE SITTING ROOM
Visible on the Bookshelves: Dante, a life of; Gallimard French books; Dante; Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow — next to Sandover; Alan Ansen. He said he’d recently thrown out Jim Morrison’s piously edited (but wrongheadedly) discovered writings. I compared Morrison to Gerard Malanga. He said he remembered Malanga at one of Wystan’s parties — he’d brought along a record, he did not remember what. ‘What if it had been the Velvet Underground!’ I said. — This was part of the first room conversation.
There were, as far as I could see, no works by famous artists on his walls. He obviously preferred the works of friends. The TV screen was covered by a sampler, the video was visible. There was a burnt piece of incense on a tray on a table behind the sofa. There was a big glass vase of red and yellow roses on this same table. There was a humidifier puffing silently throughout. There was a piano. I moved a tall glass with a lotus or something in it so that it wouldn’t get in the way as we walked. It was on the coffee table between the sofa on which I sat and one of the set of chairs on which he said.
More later.
What do I notice about this? That young-Toby, as a developing novelist, describes the place but that, as an inexperienced novelist, doesn’t describe the physical person or their clothes. Merrill was fair, handsome, gaunt, desiccated in some way — as he’d once been abandoned in the desert, had crinkled and crisped up, and had never fully rehydrated. I can’t remember exactly what he was wearing beneath the coat. I guess — I picture — a blue shirt and slacks with expensive brown shoes.
The only other notes I have are that, about Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (written by his friend David Kalstone) Merrill said, ‘& when you’re finished reading it, start right back in again’.
Another note goes —
‘Where were we?’ he asked, after coming back from the phone.
‘I think we were in the middle of a pause,’ I replied.
He also said, ‘You’re never the genius at eleven you were at five.’
