undefinedCourtesy Rollie Mckenna Collection.

 

My first glimpse of James Merrill, a dozen years ago, was in black and white. It was a photograph of him, in the Brinnin and Read anthology called The Modern Poets. He had just turned toward the camera—his mouth slightly open, as if not expecting an observer—from a piano on which was propped a mazy score. He had on an open white dress shirt, which had the effect of elongating his neck, of giving his seated figure a slim, tense elegance. There was a pack of Chesterfields on a table in the foreground, and the edge of a potted fern.

When I visited him during July 1981, it was as if that old photograph had been retouched—by time, and in color. The piano is on the top floor of the poet’s house in Stonington, Connecticut, and he was playing it when I walked in. He turned, as if surprised. This time he was wearing a royal blue T-shirt and white slacks. His face was older, but the lines draw out a puckish quality in his features. He remains slim, his brown hair silvered, and now he smokes Camels. He had been practicing the Adagio of Haydn’s “Sonata in A,” the one with the plucked arpeggio accompaniment—and the source, Merrill supposes, of Granados’s “The Lady and the Nightingale,” itself the source (he grins) of “Besame mucho.”

We are in a big room, airy, sunny, nearly all windows, with a chessboard linoleum floor. Merrill and David Jackson, with whom he has lived for nearly thirty years, added this rooftop room to the building on Water Street they bought in 1956. There are shops on the ground floor, rented apartments on the second; the top two stories are theirs. (For years the outside was a dull aubergine, but it had just been repainted a shade of leg makeup.) Soon after, they had enclosed the roof and added a planked deck that overlooks the village and a dazzling swatch of Long Island Sound; in the cellar of nearby Connecticut College’s museum they found a marble bust of the Roman emperor Otho. It was sold to them for a song. Blackface removed, it was set up outside, and presides over the deck.

Inside, near where the poet had been practicing at the baby Steinway, is a circle: three eccentric chairs and a Victorian sofa in one of Fortuny’s magic-formula stamped cottons, low cases of novels and Gallimard paperbacks (one case hides a futon), and a freestanding garlic-head fireplace that from one end of the room faces a huge Larry Rivers landscape at the other.

Merrill has a reputation for being one of the best readers of poetry before the public. One hears why. His light baritone, with its urbane accent, has an expressive range of inflections. He laughs easily, and has a quick, enharmonic wit. On second thought, it is like his poetic voice. There is a self-possession to it that guards an abiding seriousness difficult to draw out—and thereby the more convincing.

 

INTERVIEWER

You’ve left your house in Athens for good now, right?

 MERRILL

It looks that way.

 INTERVIEWER

And your original decision to settle there—was that just an accumulation of accidents?

 MERRILL

Oh, there’s no accident. I went first to Greece to visit Kimon Friar in 1950. Between then and 1959, when I went back with David, we’d gone to a great number of other places too—to the Orient and, either together or separately, all over Europe, except Greece. And suddenly here was a place—I can’t tell you how much we liked it. We liked Stonington, too, but didn’t want to stay there all year round. It had slowly dawned on us, as it continues to dawn on young people in Stonington, that it’s a community of older people by and large. Nearly all our friends were five to fifty years older than we were. And in Greece we began seeing, for a change, people our own age, or younger.

 INTERVIEWER

I presume you came to Stonington to get away from New York. If, by analogy, you went to Athens to get away from things in America, what was it you found there?

 MERRILL

Things that have mostly disappeared, I’m afraid. The dazzling air, the drowsy waterfronts. Our own ignorance, even: a language we didn’t understand two words of at first. That was a holiday! You could imagine that others were saying extraordinarily fascinating things—the point was to invent, if not what they were saying, at least its implications, its overtones. Also, in those days foreign tourists were both rare and welcome, and the delighted surprise with which the Greeks acknowledged our ability to put two words together, you know, was irresistible.

 INTERVIEWER

What sort of people did you find yourselves falling in with? Other Americans?

 MERRILL

No, certainly not. In fact, even Greeks who spoke English or French had to be extremely charming for us to want to see them more than once. We wanted to learn Greek and we also wanted to learn Greece, and the turn of mind that made a Greek.

 INTERVIEWER

It can’t be accidental, then, that your leaving Greece coincides with the completion of your trilogy—

MERRILL

Probably not. A coincidence over which I had no control was that, within a year of my finishing the trilogy, David had come to see that Athens was no longer a livable place. We’d both seen this day coming, I’m afraid, but for one reason or another neither of us wanted to believe his eyes. If he’d stayed on, I’d still be going back and forth. Maria might have been another reason for staying. Even after her death—or especially after her death, as her role in the poem grew clearer—I couldn’t have faced, right away, cutting ourselves off from the friends we’d had in common, friends also in their own right, who made all the difference.

 INTERVIEWER

That’s Maria Mitsotáki? Was she really—

 MERRILL

Everything I say she was in the trilogy? Oh yes, and more. Her father had indeed been prime minister, three times, I think—but under which king? Constantine I or George II, or both? I’m vague about things like that. I’m vague too about her husband, who died long before our time. They’d lived in South Africa, in London . . . Maria went home for a visit and was stranded in Athens during the whole German occupation. Horrible stories—and wonderful ones: dashing young cousins in the underground, hidden for weeks in bedroom closets. Literary men fell in love with her, quite understandably—aside from being an enchantment to look at, she never missed a thing you said.

 INTERVIEWER

Your trilogy attests to a warm, intimate relationship with Maria Mitsotáki and W. H. Auden. Did working on the poem change your feelings about them?

 MERRILL

In a way, yes. The friendships, which had been merely “real” on earth—subject to interruption, mutual convenience, states of health, like events that have to be scheduled “weather permitting”—became ideal. Nothing was hazed over by reticence or put off by a cold snap. Whenever we needed them, there they were; and a large part of that wonder was to feel how deeply they needed us. I can’t pretend to have known Wystan terribly well in this world. He liked me, I think, and approved of my work; and liked the reassurance of David’s and my being in Athens to stand by Chester Kallman [Auden’s friend and collaborator] when emergencies arose. But he was twenty years older and had been famous while I was still in boarding school, and—well, it took the poem, and the almost jubilant youthfulness he recovers after death, to get me over my shyness. With Maria it was different. In the years we knew her she saw very few people, but we were part of that happy few. Many of her old friends whom she no longer saw couldn’t imagine what had come over her—“She’s given us up for those Americans!” We simply adored her. It seemed like the perfection of intimacy, light, airy, without confessions or possessiveness—yet one would have to be Jung or Dante to foresee her role in the poem.