Katy Evans-Bush – ‘My People Were Magicians’: James Merrill and Michael Donaghy

I don’t think I knew, when I joined, that this workshop was a legendary alchemy laboratory; I just knew that he was a poet who spoke to me like no other, and I couldn’t believe my luck when I discovered he ran a class. And the minute he walked into the room on the first evening of term, late, talking a mile to the dozen, I knew Michael Donaghy’s City University class was my new home.

One of the best things Michael ever did for me, one of the many things he did — the community I slotted into, the way of being in the world he offered, the quiet but trenchant knockdowns of my most lumpy experiments (“If you just had better quality control”)and his nonetheless unwavering faith in my work — one real lifetime gift, aside from the jokes, the great conversations, the friendship, was James Merrill.

It was Merrill’s long poem, “The Broken Home”. A series of seven sonnets, the poem looks back over a fractured childhood, the long shadow cast by his father, and the remnants of feeling that remain. Thinking about that session now, sitting around that table with a photocopy in front of me, I can’t remember a single thing Michael said about the poem. I was too busy being overwhelmed by it. What I was thinking was, I didn’t even know you could do this with a poem. What was it I didn’t know you could do? I have no idea. But the sheer scale of the emotion, which flowed into and through the sections of the poem in a series of gentle yet highly controlled lines, whose images changed shape like clouds until coming to rest in the final line, knocked me sideways.

A little about the poet. James Merrill’s father Charles was the Merrill half of the mega-finance group Merrill Lynch; little James was born, in 1926, very seriously rich. He was so rich that when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in 1932 it seemed plausible that he could be next, so his parents sent him away to Arizona. Brought up in unimaginable luxury, he was also the son who didn’t quite fit the bill. He was dreamy. He was artistic. He didn’t particularly care about money. And he was unavoidably homosexual. As a result of this last, he spent much of his adult life in Europe, mainly Greece, where he could be himself and not have to face down the purse-lipped disapproval of his mother and the establishment. He lived simply for someone of his wealth, and in the 1950s he started a foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, for the purpose of helping writers and artists. This foundation continued until 1996 — the year after he died, aged 68, from AIDS.

“The Broken Home” is one of two long major poems that seem to exorcise the traumas — the emotional deprivations — of his childhood. The other one, “Lost in Translation”, recounts the search for a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle put together over a summer with his governess, while his parents were away getting divorced. “The Broken Home” is shorter, but takes a longer, backward look at the brokenness. The poem has a filmic quality, with bold images of specific incidents that accrue, each sonnet operating like a scene.

Just to digress for a moment, James Merrill’s greatest work is a long, audaciously eccentric and astonishingly beautiful book-length poem he spent twenty years writing, based on sessions at the Ouija board with his then partner David Jackson, called The Changing Light at Sandover. So it’s nice to see “The Broken Home” opening with a seance-like passage. This is Merrill’s manner of settling into a poem, and in adopting this customary mode he also gives us a chance to begin the poem slightly hypnotised by the flickering flame of the candle. This is a device Michael Donaghy loved. He was always talking about hypnotism, holding up a hand with the thumb and first two fingers joined, as if it were holding the hypnotist’s watch. His own poems are littered with talismans, clocks, Claude glasses, little transfixing objects. Once, in class, he handed round a bag of objects and each of us was invited to choose one to write about. I chose a brass doorknob — a little flamelike, in its globey way.

Here, then, is Merrill:

…a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim—
I have lit what’s left of my life.
 
I have thrown out yesterday’s milk
And opened a book of maxims.
The flame quickens. The word stirs.
 
Tell me, tongue of fire,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.
 

Having effectively turned himself into a ghost, the narrator proceeds to haunt his own childhood, and the emotional chill cast by his financier father:

Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze […]
The soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit — rings, cars, permanent waves.

We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.
He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

Michael’s debt to Merrill was immense. The effortless-looking elegance of his flawlessly conversational iambic pentameter, to start with. His joy in offbeat subject matter, in shaggy dog stories and poker-faced jokes — these are qualities of brilliance he shared with Merrill. And the rhetorical device Merrill uses in this stanza — the clincher — is one of the Donaghy favourites, the chiasmus. He used to talk about the chiasmus a lot in class. A trick for clicking an image into place, using a conceit of exchange to seal something in the reader’s memory; or, as he put it in his monograph, Wallflowers, “The familiar shape of ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ like a dance step in which two couples change partners.”

The chiasmus is of course the device with which Michael made his own name as a modern Metaphysical, in his poem “Machines,” about music and bicycles,

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

In this poem he writes, “The machinery of grace is never simple,” but we all know simple is much harder than easy.

This chiasmic dynamic is present in Merrill’s poem “Mirror”, which Michael also loved to teach. In this poem an ancient mirror hangs on a parlour wall, where it has hung for decades. The mirror recounts its heyday of importance, and the changes as the children grew up, and gradually everybody went away. The mirror describes the disappearance of its silvering:

…as if a fish
Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness,
I have lapses. I suspect
Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes
Through the blind flaws of my mind.

Only as the poem progresses does it become clear that the “you” it addresses, with some bitterness, is the other half of its chiasmus: the window. What sees, what is seen. And it’s a real shock.

The next few lines of “The Broken Home,” with their finely calibrated tonal shifts, could almost have been written by Michael:

When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what—the Senate or the Ritz Bar—
And bodily, at newsreel speed, attack

No matter whom—Al Smith or José María Sert
Or Clemenceau—veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War mongerer! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.

The familiar scene, as from a newsreel, or a silent comedy, could almost be Donaghy describing the Bronx of his childhood, or

… The Palm Casino, 1942.

Although he thinks she’s buying out the town
the critic’s wife sits on an unmade bed
in room 6, naked, as her palm is read
by a guitarist in a dressing gown.
He reels off lines in the forgotten script
that maps her palm: Here is your first affair…

            (“The Palm”, Conjure, 2000)

“Always that same old story,” as Merrill goes on — the woman veiled, rich, her car the same colour as Homer’s sea: “wine-dark.” A classical colour, a heroic colour. But the rhyme for that car, on the very next line, is “the Ritz Bar.” The Senate may be important, and also ancient, but it’s boring as hell. Time is moving forward, women must be emancipated, it’s the Jazz Age.

Charles Merrill, according to this and other accounts, tended to hobble everyone around him. The woman is hobbled by not being taken seriously, by her skirt, by the police, by the lack of a vote, by the whole system.

Merrill tells us all this without having to say it. His skill in rhyme pairs does half the work for him. “Rhyme, for us, is a verb,” wrote Michael’s friend, editor and literary executor Don Paterson in his essay “The Dark Art of Poetry” (2004). Michael used to talk about rhyming as being like walking onto a stage on stilts. He said this on Day One of the first class of his I attended, which was the beginners’ class, because it met on the one night of the week when I never needed childcare. He said, “You’d better make sure you do it well, otherwise you’ll fall on your face, they’ll be looking at you instead of the effect you wanted to create, and your magic trick will have failed.” In Wallflowers he writes:

“Les Murray has said that rhyme functions with the symmetry of logic. The terrifying truth is that form substitutes for logic. This is the poet’s unique power, to address the passions in their own language, the very power that got us barred from the Republic.”

Meanwhile, Merrill is still just warming up for his magic trick.

Here comes the dog:

One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed
Michael, the Irish setter, head
Passionately lowered, led
The child I was to a shut door. Inside…

The spirit guide! Michael, the dog — not any of the absent adults, the father in his office, the mother banished, the governess busy — has stayed with the boy. Inside, then, “Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread,” presumably the next wife.

…was she dead?
Her eyes flew open, startled strange and cold.
The dog slumped to the floor. She reached for me. I fled.

It’s an Orson Welles movie.

Next we see the boy in his nursery, shapeshifting again:

A lead soldier guards my windowsill:
Khaki rifle, uniform, and face.
Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.

But it’s the sort of pliable that has led the poet to ask at the very outset if he’s really real. There are things he can’t do; the lead soldier wasn’t able to protect him to that extent. And by virtue of his position, outside the he-man, heterosexual norm, Merrill denies himself even the rights claimed by the newsreel woman:

I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest within my house.

This is only the whistlestop tour I’m giving you! But here, contemplating the adjustments he has made in his own life, the self-knowledge he’s gained, there is a kind of acceptance:

Nor do I try to keep a garden, only
An avocado in a glass of water—
Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later,

When the small gilt leaves have grown
Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes,
And start another. I am earth’s no less.

What does it mean, to be earth’s? It means you’re part of the cycle, no matter what happens to your gilt, your guilt, your “evening’s mild gold leaf” as Stanza 1 has it. This passage always makes me think of the old American TV commercial — talk about bathos! — a commercial Merrill will have known, if he ever watched any television at all (moot, I know), for a brand of margarine. In it, a woman the producers clearly wished was Agnes Moorhead thinks this is butter; the strapline is ‘It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!’ Cue lightning bolt. That same old story, right? “Father Time and Mother Earth/ A marriage on the rocks.” But Jimmy is earth’s no less.

A child, a red dog roam the corridors,
Still, of the broken home. No sound…

The final sonnet begins here, “halts” before his childhood bedroom with its vividly evoked period wallpaper, nightmares, and bad memories — and then swoops, like a crane shot, into the present. Suddenly the spell is broken, and as soon as it is, it casts itself again.

The real house became a boarding school.
Under the ballroom ceiling’s allegory
Someone at last may actually be allowed
To learn something; or, from my window, cool
With the unstiflement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.

The bad memories I glided over a minute ago were of little Jimmy being bedridden with flu, and writing this now I can’t help thinking of the Donaghy poem, “My Flu”, in which time slips back — first, to June 1962:

Oswald’s back from Minsk. U2s glide over Cuba.
My cousin’s in Saigon. My father’s in bed
with my mother. I’m eight and in bed with my flu.
I’d swear, but I can’t be recalling this sharp reek of Vicks,
the bedroom’s fevered wallpaper, the neighbour’s TV,
the rain, the tyres’ hiss through rain, the rain smell…

— and then further, to:

…the pit in the woods
– snow filling the broken suitcases, a boy curled up,
like me, as if asleep, except he has no eyes.
One of my father’s stories from the war
has got behind my face and filmed itself:
[…] Now all the birds fly up at once.

Merrill wrote so extraordinarily well about being a child, because — obviously — he could still feel it. At university, a thin, bookish, boyish-looking aesthete in round wire glasses, he made friends with a young woman a couple of years below him. They got along so well they even toyed with having an affair, which failed because they were both gay. She was Louise Fitzhugh, and she would go on to write — a few years before “The Broken Home” was written — a novel about a lonely little girl raised in privilege and wealth, more attached to her nanny than to anyone else, and more attached to her notebook than to any of them. Harriet the Spy is one of the greatest novels ever written about trying to grow up as a certain kind of kid. Fitzhugh still felt it too. The two of them remained friends for the rest of her too-short life.

Merrill has a reputation for being patrician, mandarin, effete, overly concerned with surfaces. He “received his first negative review when he was 16,” writes Calista McCrea in the Los Angeles Times. It was in the high school newspaper, of all places.

“Although appreciative of Merrill’s verse, the teacher had misgivings about certain elements… Merrill, he wrote, ‘sometimes drags in color by the ears, seems like a finical interior decorator fussing over the right shade of topaz, vermillion, or mauve’.”

Certainly, in the years I was hanging out with my Donaghy crew I was teased for loving him so much — though I noticed nobody ever teased Michael for the same thing.

This facility for magic, which Michael discusses at length in his monograph Wallflowers, is of course also everywhere present in his own work, in his dizzying metaphysical conceits, his voices, his huge frame of reference, and his formal and linguistic games. And where Merrill can recreate a lonely, gilded childhood in the wealthy 1930s, Donaghy’s eye for the twin details of observation and language can create a journey of the magi in the form of a drug run, a perfume contest in medieval Japan, and backroom scenes in Chicago where lost and lonely men play the Irish music of their youth.

And The Changing Light at Sandover! What treasure. I can’t think of another poet I could have studied with but Michael Donaghy, who would have given me this.

And speaking of poets who bring each other gifts, one of the last things Merrill did in his life, as Donaghy describes in an interview with Conor O’Callaghan in 1997 (The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions, 2009) was to give him a gift:

“Someone delivered a letter from America in the middle of the night that had gone to my old address. I heard it come through my letterbox just as I was walking down the stairs in a blindpanic about money. I opened it up and it was a cheque for, well, a small fortune from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. It was almost the last thing that James Merrill did before he died, to send me a small fortune.”

The Broken Home by James Merrill

Crossing the street,
I saw the parents and the child
At their window, gleaming like fruit
With evening’s mild gold leaf.

In a room on the floor below,
Sunless, cooler—a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim—
I have lit what’s left of my life.

I have thrown out yesterday’s milk
And opened a book of maxims.
The flame quickens. The word stirs.

Tell me, tongue of fire,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.

My father, who had flown in World War I,
Might have continued to invest his life
In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.
But the race was run below, and the point was to win.

Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze
(Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six)
The soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.

He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what—the Senate or the Ritz Bar—
And bodily, at newsreel speed, attack

No matter whom—Al Smith or José María Sert
Or Clemenceau—veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War mongerer! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.

What had the man done? Oh, made history.
Her business (he had implied) was giving birth,
Tending the house, mending the socks.

Always that same old story—
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.

One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed
Michael, the Irish setter, head
Passionately lowered, led
The child I was to a shut door. Inside,

Blinds beat sun from the bed.
The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise.
Under a sheet, clad in taboos
Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread,

And of a blackness found, if ever now, in old
Engravings where the acid bit.
I must have needed to touch it
Or the whiteness—was she dead?
Her eyes flew open, startled strange and cold.
The dog slumped to the floor. She reached for me. I fled.

Tonight they have stepped out onto the gravel.
The party is over. It’s the fall
Of 1931. They love each other still.
She: Charlie, I can’t stand the pace.
He: Come on, honey—why, you’ll bury us all!

A lead soldier guards my windowsill:
Khaki rifle, uniform, and face.
Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.

How intensely people used to feel!
Like metal poured at the close of a proletarian novel,
Refined and glowing from the crucible,
I see those two hearts, I’m afraid,
Still. Cool here in the graveyard of good and evil,
They are even so to be honored and obeyed.

. . . Obeyed, at least, inversely. Thus
I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest within my house.

Shooting this rusted bolt, though, against him,
I trust I am no less time’s child than some
Who on the heath impersonate Poor Tom
Or on the barricades risk life and limb.

Nor do I try to keep a garden, only
An avocado in a glass of water—
Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later,

When the small gilt leaves have grown
Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes,
And start another. I am earth’s no less.

A child, a red dog roam the corridors,
Still, of the broken home. No sound. The brilliant
Rag runners halt before wide-open doors.
My old room! Its wallpaper—cream, medallioned
With pink and brown—brings back the first nightmares,
Long summer colds, and Emma, sepia-faced,
Perspiring over broth carried upstairs
Aswim with golden fats I could not taste.

The real house became a boarding school.
Under the ballroom ceiling’s allegory
Someone at last may actually be allowed
To learn something; or, from my window, cool
With the unstiflement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.