Europe in the Work of Anthony Hecht and James Merrill

Irish Association for American Studies

Europe in the Work of Anthony Hecht and James MerrillAuthor(s): Justin QuinnSource: Irish Journal of American Studies, Vol. 5 (1996), pp. 107-118Published by: Irish Association for American StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30003239 .

Accessed: 18/06/2014 10:50

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Irish Association for American Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toIrish Journal of American Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.141 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 10:50:49 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iaas

http://www.jstor.org/stable/30003239?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Europe in the Work of Anthony Hecht and James Merrill

EUROPE IN THE WORK OF ANTHONY HECHT AND JAMES MERRILL

by

JUSTIN QUINN

107



Irish Journal of American Studies

In a recent book of essays Adrienne Rich comments on the journey to

Europe that she and many other poets of her generation made after World War II:

The exotic - that way of viewing a landscape, people, a culture as escape from our carefully constructed selves, our "real" lives - a trap for poets.

In my twenties, soon after World War II, I viewed Western Europe like that. The dollar was high, and college students from the United States could travel and study abroad with a sense of being on cultural holiday. Coming from our unscorched earth, our unblasted cities, we sought not the European present, traumatised and hectically rebuilding, but the European past of our schoolbooks. Being mostly white, we saw European culture as the ancestor of ours: we romanticised that ancestry, half in awe at its artifacts, half convinced of our own national superiority. In essence, Europe's glorious past had been saved from barbarism and for us: a huge outdoor museum.1

Rich feels that the appropriation of Europe by herself and other American

poets of this period is somehow a way of avoiding their proper subject matter. They should turn back, as she says elsewhere in the same book, and face the realities of North American life.2 While acknowledging that

Rich's statement can be backed up by many poems written during the 1950s and 1960s, I wish to complicate the picture a little and show how Europe was something more than an exotic backdrop for some American poets of Rich's generation.

For many American poets who had been schooled under the New Criticism, this trip to Europe after World War II was of crucial importance in

determining the trajectory of their further career. John Ashbeiys first full

collection. Some Ttees (1956), predates his trip to Europe, and the second, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), a much more challenging and experimental work, comes out of the ten years he spent working and living in Paris. Robert LoweU's Life Studies (1959), in the way it bids farewell to the strictures of his New Critical mentors, also tells the story of Lowell's trip to

Europe and subsequent return to America. In the course of the book Lowell moves from the more studied style of the earlier work to the looser,

autobiographical poems such as "Skunk Hour" and "Sailing Home from

Rapallo" . Europe, so far away from the universities where these poets first

108




learnt their trade, gave them an opportunity to reassess the aesthetic values of their schoolmasters. The continent was also a new world with polities and cultures that differed greatly from those of their native country and

thus was a source of new materia poetica. For some, such as James Merrill,

Europe provided a sexual freedom that was impossible at home. One could

argue that these poets would have moved away from the New Criticism

anyway, but the fact remains that it was Europe, in the fifteen years after World War II, with its exemplars and ambiences, that interwove itself - at the levels of technique and content - into the texture of this generation's

poems at a crucial Juncture in its development.

James Merrill and Anthony Hecht are American poets of Rich's generation who also made the trip to Europe; however, the circumstances of their first encounters with the continent couldn't have been more different. Hecht

graduated from Bard College in 1944 (where Merrill would later teach from

1948-49) and arrived in Germany as a counter-intelligence officer in time to witness the revelations of the concentration camps. Although his later

poems often adopt the more leisurely persona of the tourist in Europe, it is the horrific vision of the camps with their inhuman cruelty that has obsessed him throughout his whole career. Europe is the place where

ugliness and violence are revealed beneath a glittering surface of high culture and beautiful cities and landscapes. Travelling to Europe expecting to encounter the great cultural achievements of Western civilisation what meets his eyes is the extensive cruelty of Nazi Germany. In contrast with the poetry that Rich describes, Hecht's imagination was able to take on board the rich paradox of culture and violence existing in proximity and this experience shaped much of Hecht's work to date. Often he consciously plays with the idea of Europe as exotic coulisse, a magnificent arras that is

pulled away disclosing grim scenes of violence and suffering.

Even Hecht's technique, the way that he paces and constructs a poem, seems to have been influenced by this European paradigm. A typical Hecht

poem will revolve around the revelation of cruelty beneath an innocuous or calm surface, as for instance, in "It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It":

109




Tonight my children hunch Toward their Western, and are glad As, with a Sunday punch. The Good casts out the Bad.

I've made myself a drink. The giant and the witch are set To bust out of the clink When my children have gone to bed.3

Here at the end of the third verse there is but a joking intimation of danger. But as the poem continues the bogey men and women become less and less cartoonish until the speaker realises the fragility of his family in the face of

such huge dangers: And that their sleep be sound I say this childermas Who could not, at one time, Have saved them from the gas.

Thinking of his children asleep his memory flashes back to the war. The rhetorical pivot of the poem is the intrusion of the memory of wartime

Europe into the seemingly safe domestic environment, and the poem leaves us hanging there aghast. Far from being anything as innocuous as Rich's

"huge outdoor museum" , the modem horrors of Europe break into the lyric and literally bring it to an end. It will not be until later in his career that Hecht will be able to out-stare history.

And even when he is not writing about Europe, for instance in The End of the Weekend" , we see again this volta of violence revealed beneath calmness. The speaker is away for the weekend with his shapely girlfriend and is just about to bed down with her when he hears a noise in the attic. He goes up and witnesses the following scene:

A great black presence beats its wings in wrath Above the boneyard bum its golden eyes. Some small grey fur is pulsing in its grip.4

And with that the poem snaps shut. The lascivious indulgent weekend is ruined by the vision of the predator clasping its prey. For Hecht. after wartime Europe there can be no innocent pleasure, no poetic moment that

110



Europe in the Work qf Anthony Hecht and James Merrill

is cordoned off from the violent horrors of history. For all its culture this is

the enduring lesson that Europe taught Hecht.

Both "It Our-Herods Herod" and The End of the Weekend" are from The

Hard Hours (1968), one of Hecht's most acclaimed collections, which also

includes his most anthologised poems, "More Light! More Light!" . Another

poet of Hecht's generation who also fought in World War II is Richard

Wilbur. But Wilbur's experiences there did not influence him so deeply as

they did Hecht. The Beauti/ul Changes and Other Poems (1947) does indeed

have poems such as "On the Eyes of an SS Officer" , but the horrors of war are deftly confined within those few poems and do not spill over into others. This is a signal difference between Hecht and a poet like Wilbur: both are

gifted craftsmen, but with Hecht the craft, no matter how achieved and

intricate, is almost always viewed against an impending chaos or doom, thus making the reader savour the craft all the more. The doom can be the Black Death, the break-up of a relationship, the horror of the deathcamps. As Brad Leithauser commented, "Much of the power of his work derives in fact from the incongruous tension that results when the most civilized of voices confronts civilization's most gruesome barbarities" .5 In Wilbur's

poetry one often feels that poetic craft is an end in itself.

On the face of it Hecht's poem "A Hill" , which opens the Collected Earlier Poems (1990). contradicts most of what I' ve said so far. The poem's speaker is in Rome and experiences a vision of a hill in Poughkeepsie which he knows from childhood. The intensity of this vision is such that it completely erases the historic city from his consciousness. Here Europe is ignored for America:

And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved And even the great Famese Palace itself Was gone, for all its marble; in its place Was a hill, mole-colored and bare.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence That promised to last forever, like the hill.

Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored To the sunlight and my friends. But for more than a week

III




I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen. All this happened about ten years ago. And it hasn't troubled me since, but at last, today, I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy I stood before it for hours in wintertime.6

It could be said that Europe here is shown for the shallow coulisse it is and that the American poet's concerns remain firmly rooted in the American

soil. As Stephen Matterson has commented, there is a tendency among American critics to reduce the importance of Europe in the work of their best poets, displaying their unease that the Old World might still provide materia poetica superior to that of the New.7 I would argue that "A Hill" exhibits the influence of Europe on Hecht by virtue of the overall gesture of the poem, moving from the calm atmosphere of friends and historic

buildings in Rome, to the inimical vision of the hill itself, for ten years remaining the unnameable Uncanny. Furthermore, the poem starts off with Hecht saying that the vision really couldn't have happened anywhere else:

In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur, I had a vision once - though you understand It was nothing at all like Dante's or the visions of saints. And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends ...8

The location is acknowledged, and it is as if Italy provides the necessary distance for the vision to make an impression. What makes the poem so

strange is the juxtaposition of the architectural and social sophistication of Rome with the desolate hill in Poughkeepsie. If the poet had been travelling through Connemara. he would merely have exchanged one desolate vision for another. But here, as Hecht has it, even the splendour of the Famese Palace is cancelled by the force of what he sees. Our awareness of the

psychological intensity of the moment is conveyed by the erasure of an edifice as magnificent as this palace. Moreover the poem also fits into the

paradigm I sketched out earlier when discussing "It Out-Herods Herod" and "The End of the Weekend" in the way that it turns around the revelation of

disturbing realities beneath the convivial company of friends in Rome. Once again Hecht is letting us know that there can be no innocent

pleasure, no area of experience insulated from psychological or historical horrors.

112




Hecht is also sensitive to the discrepancy between the Europe which

produced wonders of architecture, art, music and literature and the Europe that perpetrated the monstrosities of the concentration camps. One of the

questions he asks throughout his career is how can these two extremes be

reconciled; he comes closest to an answer in the poem, "Meditation" , from

his 1990 collection The Transparent Man, Its third and final section is

about a Quattrocento painting of a sacred conversation of saints against a

landscape background. What the poet cannot fathom is how such holiness can exist in the same world as ugliness, violence and cruelty. This is resolved in the poem's closing lines:

The company, though they have turned their backs To all of this, are aware of everything. Beneath their words, but audible, the silver Liquidities of stream and song-bird fall In cleansing passages, and the water-wheel Turns out its measured, periodic creak. They hear the coughs, the raised voices of children Joyful in the dark tunnel, everything. Observe with care their tranquil pensiveness. They hear all the petiUons, all the cries Reverberating over marble floors. Floating above still water in dark wells. All the world's woes, all the world's woven woes. The warp of ages, they hear and understand. To which is added a final bitterness: That their own torments, deaths, renunciations, Made in the name of love, have served as warrant, Serve to this very morning as fresh warrant For the infliction of new atrocities. All this they know. Nothing is ever lost. It is the condition of their blessedness To hear and recall the recurrent cries of pain And parse them into a discourse that consorts In strange agreement with the viols and the lutes, Which, with the water and the meadow bells, And every gathered voice, every amen. Join to compose the sacred conversation.11

Here European art is enlisted to help the poet think through the violence which the continent introduced him to in 1944. We might wonder how admirable this resolution is, and are possibly reminded of the spectators in

"Lapis Lazuli" . But this is different. Knowledge here does not preclude historical agency: the saints continue to do good even while they know that their acts are twisted by others to warrant fresh atrocities. The blame does not lie with the saints. So unlike in "It Out-Herods Herod" this later poem

113




is able to negotiate the paradox of violence and goodness with deeper understanding and is not shut up by a realisation of evil, but neither does it

shut out that realisation nor preclude historical agency.

James Merrill, on the other hand, arrived in Paris in 1950: his reasons for

travelling were less pressing than Hecht's. He was bored. Bored with New

York and the comfortable life of cocktail parties, gossip and literature which

he lead there. He wanted to become, as the title of his memoir has it, 'k

different person" . Whereas for Hecht Europe was the place to confront the

most awful truths about humanity, for Merrill in 1950 Europe possessed a

"magic glow of a life not fully answerable to the grownups' world" . '0 That memoir is less an account of Europe than of Merrill's therapy under a

psychoanalyst in Rome. The culture, history and people of Europe are, in a somewhat distasteful way, subordinated to Merrill's explorations of his childhood history and relationships. The continent is turned into Rich's

"huge outdoor museum" , holding no real interest for Merrill in itself. An anecdote from his memoir illustrates how smoothly Merrill fits Rich's

description of the American poet in Europe. Merrill is complaining to his

psychoanalyst that his latest Italian lover, at their most tender moments,

says nothing more than, "71 voglio bene, Dzim, ti voglio bene" - 1 wish you well, Jim, I wish you well. Merrill decides that his lover is heartless and decides to drop him:

I expected Dr Detre to applaud my mature decision. Instead he allowed himself a youthful laugh, "You have proven to my satisfaction that the only way to learn a foreign language is in bed. Do you honestly not know what ti uogtio bene means? It is how an Italian says 'I love you' ."

I protested. Amo was the verb, just as in Latin. Lovers were amantt "L'amo," confesses Violetta in Act HI - I love him. "M'ama" - she loves me - sings Nemomino in L'Eltstr d'Amore.

'i do not question your experience of nineteenth-century opera" , said Dr Detre, "only of the Italian language as it is spoken today.""

The memoir charts only his first few years on the continent in the early 1950s. However, he went on to spend many years living in Greece

(mastering the language early on, and making him, as he commented once, exotic at home and American abroad12), and the people and the landscapes

114




that he encountered there suffused some of his best poetry. But while

Hecht's work is haunted by the "millions of strange shadows" of World War

II, Merrill's work - although it is possible to read his 560-page poem. The

Changing Light at Sandover (1982). as one of the great poems of the Cold

War - in general does not concern itself with European political or

historical themes. His engagement was on a different level.

Turning to Merrill's poetry we see that his relationship to Europe is not so outdated. Merrill is one of the great poets of friendship and Europe enters

his work on this level. There are poems for and about his European lovers

(above all, for Strato Mouflouzelis, who appears in "Days of 1971" , "The House Fly" , "Strato in Plaster" among others), his European friends (for instance, 'Words for Maria"), even for his landlady ("After the Fire" and

"Days of 1964"). and occasionally just for people he bumps into. What is

egoistic and patronising in the memoir, by some mysterious alchemical

process becomes unselfish and sympathetic in the poetry. Elizabeth Bishop once commented that it's so hard to tell the truth in prose but in poetry you can hardly avoid it. These poems of friendship and love display a generosity of imagination as Merrill refuses to reduce these people to facets of his own mind. They are given voice in the poetry, they speak for themselves and often incisively challenge Merrill's own position, whether as lover or tourist or poet. There is a willingness on his part to be steered by the course of their lives and their voices and not impose his own demands upon them.

"Kostas Tympankianakis" is both the title of a poem and the name of the

poem's speaker. We are grabbed, as Merrill probably was, by the very first lines the Greek man speaks:

Sit, friend. We'll be drinking and I'll tell you why. Today I went to Customs to identify My brother - it was him. all right, in spite of both Feet missing from beneath his Army overcoat.

He was a handsome devil twice the size of me. We're all good-looking in my family. If you saw that brother, or what's left of him, You'd understand at once the kind of man he'd been. I3

115




This voice simply must be heard out. It is as though Merrill began his

sojourns in Europe intent solely on the pageant going on in his skull only to be interrupted by voices like this that simply could not be pushed aside.14

The poem ends with Tympankianakis knowingly discussing his own position in relation to his listener, a rich American and a poet:

The girl I loved left me for a Rhodiot. I should be broken-hearted but it's strange, I'm not. Take me with you when you sail next week, You'll see a different cosmos through the eyes of a Greek.

Or write my story down for people. Use my name. And may it bring you all the wealth and fame It hasn't brought its bearer. Here, let's drink our wine! Who could have imagined such a life as mine?15

Because the speaker is acutely aware of the relationship between himself and the foreign writer, Tympankianakis is more than just a quaint native who Merrill employs for local colour. The Greek is fully aware that he will

probably be "used" as material and even gives his blessing to this. Rather than hide this transaction, Merrill is out in the open about his

appropriations as tourist-poet.

Towards the end of A Different Person Merrill sums up what he has learnt from his first extended stay in Europe:

Best of all, thanks to there being more speaker than the single all-creating J of a poem, anyone who went on at too great length could be interrupted by new information in a new voice. What most excited me was this very prospect of dividing the labor of consciousness, or whatever light the murky action engendered, among reflectors at greater or lesser odds with one another.16

He learnt how to interrupt the enclosed universe of his earlier poems and let in new voices. Such an expansion of poetic consciousness vouchsafed the achievement of The Changing Light, in which hundreds of voices compete through the ouija board from beyond the grave. Europe taught Merrill how to escape the intricate labyrinth of his early New Critical stanzas and attain a more engaging conversational poetic voice. Also, that conversational voice is an integral part of the poetic autobiography of most of Merrill's later

lyrics. Witty, sympathetic, generous, this voice accompanies us in poems like "A Tenancy" and "Clearing the Title" . It entertains us with tales of

116




Merrill's own life and those of his friends and lovers, while always able to

open out to larger vistas beyond the personal, anecdotes of the cosmos

colliding with Merrill's personal "chronicles of love and loss" .

The engagement of these two poets with Europe is, I have argued, more

complex than Rich's characterisation allows for. With both, the continent acts as a kind of interruption, disturbing their elegant but shallow

apprentice work, bringing a seriousness and depth that would have otherwise been lacking. It allowed Hecht to extend and deepen his tragic vision of history and how people deal with this. He realised that the well-

wrought urn must be confronted with the mess and violence of history. And for Merrill, it enabled him to find his strength - poetic autobiography. In both cases a valediction to the New Critical idea of a poem was implicit. In their different ways, the trajectories of these two poets' careers are

exemplary of a brilliant generation, and Merrill and Hecht are two of its more brilliant poets precisely because of their two very different trips to

Europe.

117




END NOTES

1 This article is a version of a paper given at the European Association of American Studies Biennial Conference, Warsaw. 21-24 March 1996. Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, (NewYork and London: WW Norton, 1993), 228-29.

2 The question for a North American poet is how to bear witness to a reality from which the public - and maybe part of the poet - wants, or is persuaded it wants, to turn away" , ibid, 115.

3 Anthony Hecht, Collected Early Poems (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1990), 67.

4 Ibid, 6.

5 Brad Leithauser, "Poet for a Dark Age" in The Burdens of Formality: Essays on the Poetry of Anthony Hecht, ed. Sydney Lea (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1989), 4-5.

6 Anthony Hecht. Collected Early Poems. 2-3.

7 Stephen Matterson, "The Tenth Muse and the Discontinuities of American Poetry" , paper given at the European Association of American Studies Biennial Conference, Warsaw. 21-24 March 1996.

8 Anthony Hecht, Collected Early Poems. 2.

0 Anthony Hecht. The Transparent Man (New York: Alfred A Knopf. 1990). 16-17.

10 James Merrill, A Different Person: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1993), 218.

11 Ibid, 188. 12 Helen Vendler. "James Merrilfs Myth: An Interview" , New York Review of

Books XXVI. No 7 (3 May 1979), 12.

13 James Merrill. Selected Poems (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1993). 148. 14 Another good example of this type of poem is "Manos Karastefanis" . 15 James Merrill. Selected Poems, 149. 16 James Merrill. A Different Person, 252.

118



Europe in the Work of Anthony Hecht and James Merrill

Documents

Transcript of Europe in the Work of Anthony Hecht and James Merrill