James Merrill: Sublime Poet of the Everyday

James Merrill (Photo by Rollie McKenna)

Edward Mendelson, in his “The Genius and Generosity of Jimmy Merrill” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2016), says of Merrill, “Poetic artifice was his natural voice.” I’m not sure he’s right. He makes Merrill sound as if he’s anti-realist. What I cherish in Merrill’s poems is his deep engagement with quotidian reality. For example, the description of the New Age shop where he bought his world-map-imprinted white Tyvek windbreaker, in “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker” (The New Yorker, February 24, 1992):

I found it in one of those vaguely imbecile 


Emporia catering to the collective unconscious 


Of our time and place. This one featured crystals, 


Cassettes of whalesong and rain-forest whistles, 


Barometers, herbal cosmetics, pillows like puffins, 


Recycled notebooks, mechanized lucite coffins 

For sapphire waves that crest, break, and recede, 

As they presumably do in nature still.

Dan Chiasson, in his brilliant “Out of this World” (The New Yorker, April 13, 2015), a review of Langdon Hammer’s James Merrill: Life and Art, says of Merrill:

His work is replete with the transfigured commonplace, bits of the world reclaimed in his daily imaginative raids: an “Atari dragonfly” on the Connecticut River, a joint smoked on a courthouse lawn, a trip to the gym, a Tyvek windbreaker.

This, for me, is a more accurate description of Merrill’s work than Mendelson’s “poetic artifice.”  

Moralistic Mendelson - Part II

I want to consider some comments about William Maxwell that Edward Mendelson makes in his “Magus: William Maxwell,” included in his new essay collection Moral Agents. Maxwell was a longtime New Yorker fiction editor and author of, among other works, the novella So Long, See You Tomorrow, which originally appeared in The New Yorker (October 1 & 8, 1979). In his essay, Mendelson says,

“Saintly” is a word that recurs in everything written about Maxwell and his work. But in the same way that his friends ignored the primitive, amoral magic that governs the realistic-looking world of his fiction, they ignored his contempt for any ethical understanding of life – any way of thinking in which actions have consequences, and events are the outcome of human choice, not of arbitrary, impersonal forces.

That first sentence isn’t true. There’s at least one piece on Maxwell’s work in which “saintly” doesn’t occur, namely, John Updike’s great review-essay, "Imperishable Maxwell" (The New Yorker, September 8, 2008; in Updike’s Higher Gossip, 2011).

Mendelson appears intent on setting Maxwell up as a “saint” in order to show he really wasn’t. His talk of Maxwell’s “contempt for any ethical understanding of life – any way of thinking in which actions have consequences, and events are the outcome of human choice, not of arbitrary, impersonal forces” is low snark. Maxwell was a moralist to the core. It’s just that his morality, unlike Mendelson’s, wasn’t judgmental. Alec Wilkinson, in his My Mentor (2002), says,

His friends often felt that no matter what they did, he was unlikely to view their behavior judgmentally. It is not that he was without opinions concerning right conduct, or that his moral standards were elastic; it is that once he regarded someone as a friend, he was likely to consider his or her actions sympathetically, as a response to the complications of life or as understandable within the context. He was aware that people don’t always act in their best interests, and often make choices that appear to work against them. [My emphasis]

What irks Mendelson is Maxwell’s lack of plot. He says, “All of Maxwell’s novels have a story but no plot.” He defines plot as “the means by which fiction portrays the consequences of actions.” He further says,

Maxwell succumbed to an error common among writers who organize their work for the finest possible rhythms and textures: the error of thinking of plot as mechanical and therefore trivial. As he explained to John Updike: “Plot, shmot.”

But I think Mendelson misinterprets what Maxwell meant by “plot.” Maxwell took his plots from life. As Alec Wilkinson says in My Mentor,

Somewhat subversively, he [Maxwell] believed that the patterns of ordinary life, acutely observed, provide more drama and structure and emotional resonance than purely imagined events are likely to.

I agree. Most novels’ plots seem artificial – “cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and ‘conflict,’ ” James Wood calls them ("Reality Testing," The New Yorker, October 31, 2011). It’s why I find Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow so appealing. It reads like a painstaking attempt to be as true to life as possible. Where there is fabrication, it’s admitted. At one point in the story, Maxwell says,

If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.

Tastes differ, and Mendelson is welcome to his dogged quest for “moral content.” As for me, I’m with Maxwell: “Looked at broadly, what happened always has meaning, pattern, form, and authenticity. One can classify, analyze, arrange in the order of importance, and judge any or all of these things, or one can simply stand back and view the whole with wonder” (from the Author’s Note of Maxwell's superb 1989 essay collection The Outermost Dream).

Moralistic Mendelson - Part I

Edward Mendelson, in his Moral Agents (2015), claims that the “New Yorker style” of the 1940s and 50s had “no moral content.” He says,

The “New Yorker style” got its name from the stories that appeared there weekly, written by John O’Hara and John Cheever, later by J. D. Salinger, John Updike, and scores of others, some famous, many forgotten. It flourished in American soil because it fed on American myths of detachment as the purest mode of existence and thinking. What distinguished it from the detachment of Huck Finn and Lambert Strether was that it had no moral content, no impulse to escape corrupt entanglements. Its detachment was aesthetic: it treated the world as interesting place to write about in a tone of calm, cool observation.

I’m not sure what stories Mendelson has in mind when he makes this statement. He mentions O’Hara, Cheever, Salinger, and Updike. Their styles differ from each other, of course. But their stories are all deeply felt. Look at the way Salinger empathizes with the children in his stories. You’d hardly call that detachment. Were they moralists? Cheever, in the Preface to his The Stories of John Cheever (1978), wrote, “The constants that I look for in this sometimes dated paraphernalia are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.” Updike explored sexual morality in his Maple stories (e.g., “Sublimating,” “Separating,” “Eros Rampant,” “Your Lover Just Called”). But he pursued other interests, too. “Discontent, conflict, waste, sorrow, fear – these are the worthy, inevitable subjects,” he says in the Introduction to his The Early Stories, 1953-1975. All four writers probed the nature of human character. So, yes, I would say they are moralists. But more to the point is that they’re artists – four of the greatest. It’s their art that interests me. O’Hara’s dialogue, Salinger’s narrative, Updike’s description, Cheever’s poetics - how did they do it? Critics who can illuminate their technique are the critics I want to read. Mendelson’s focus on “moral content” is too narrow. Without style, moral content is just a sermon.

Mendelson's Moralism

Edward Mendelson, in his “Old Saul and Young Saul” (The New York Review of Books, September 26, 2013), sets out a quote from James Wood’s “Sins of the Father” (The New Yorker, July 22, 2013) and calls it “immoral.” Mendelson writes,

Bellow’s literary heirs like to imagine him as a nineteenth century artist-hero, beyond good and evil, exempted from all other obligations by the service demanded of his art. One reviewer who savaged Greg Bellow’s book argued that Saul had

struggled to create something out of nothing, and had to justify that scandalous magic in conventional, unmagical, mid-century America. This justification expressed itself all too often as self-justification, and the storm of assertion cleared a brutal path…. In two or three generations, that story will have faded from memory, outlived by what it enabled.

It was of course Bellow’s brutal actions that “cleared a brutal path,” not his self-justifying “storm of assertion” about them, and these sentences argue for a fantasy of writing as “scandalous magic,” a godlike creation ex nihilo (a “nothing” that was in fact crowded with living wives and friends), and a fantasy of brutality as something that only the boring bourgeois recoil from. Like all immoral arguments, it is also illogical, relying as it does on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that Bellow’s brutality “enabled” his writing rather coexisting with it or diminishing it. Had Bellow done less damage in life he might have written even better novels, without the preening and point-scoring that disfigure most of his later books.

Can the writing justify the life? Some say yes, others say no. For example, John Updike, in his “On Literary Biography” (Due Considerations, 2007) sides with the ayes. He says, “If literary biography enhances our access to literature, populating its annals with graspable, provocative personalities, then it does perform, I suppose, useful work; but in deflecting our attention from the work itself, the work in its necessary aloofness and autonomy, literary biography participates in the curious modern deconstructive neutering of art, which discredits its testimony and belittles its practitioners.”

Cynthia Ozick also chooses the perfection of the work over the messiness of the life. In her great “Justice (Again) to Edith Wharton” (Art & Ardor, 1983), she writes,

But we know, and have always known (Freud taught us only how to reinforce this knowledge), that the secret self is the true self, that obsession is confession. For Edith Wharton that is the only acceptable evaluation, the only possible justice. She did not doubt her allegiance. The writing came first…. Otherwise she can be defined only by the horrific gyrations of “a life” – by the spiraling solipsism and tragic drift that led to her small dogs instead of babies, servants instead of family, high-minded male distance instead of connubial friendship, public virtue instead of private conscience, infatuation instead of the love that sticks. Only the writing board could justify these ugly substitutions. And some would say – myself not among them – that not even the writing board justified them.

In condemning Wood’s position as “immoral,” Mendelson goes too far. He fails to acknowledge the competing views – “the work in its necessary aloofness and autonomy” (Updike), “Only the writing board could justify these ugly substitutions” (Ozick) – that complicate the choice between the perfection of the work and the life. Mendelson’s moralism diminishes his credibility.

Credit: The above portrait of Saul Bellow is by David Levine.