GREATEST NATIONAL TREASURE: ELIZABETH BISHOP’S INFLUENCE ON JAMES MERRILL

by

Alexandra Lopez-Nadal

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Wilkes Honors College

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

with a Concentration in English Literature

Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Jupiter, Florida May 2019 GREATEST NATIONAL TREASURE: ELIZABETH BISHOP’S INFLUENCE ON JAMES MERRILL

by

Alexandra Lopez-Nadal

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Gavin Sourgen, and has been approved by the members of her/his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Dr. Gavin Sourgen

______Professor Rachel Luria

______Dean Ellen Goldey, Wilkes Honors College

______Date

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

James Merrill met Elizabeth Bishop as a 22 year old professor. I wrote this thesis as a 22 year old thanks to the constant motivation from my mami. Thank you Viviana Nadal for always believing in me.

Endless gratitude to Gavin Sourgen and Rachel Luria for working with me through periods of doubt, procrastination, and my move across the world.

Thank you also to Yasmine Shamma for your guidance early on that kept me at the honors college. Thank you to my sister Virginia for saying “good job” every time I needed it most.

iii ABSTRACT

Author: Alexandra Lopez-Nadal

Title: Greatest National Treasure: Elizabeth Bishop’s Influence on James Merrill

Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Gavin Sourgen

Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

Concentration: English Literature

Year: 2019

At the 1993 Key West Literary Seminar dedicated to poet Elizabeth Bishop, Merrill shared his poem “The Kimono” and “The Victor Dog”, which he dedicated to Bishop. He then recited three short poems by Bishop: “Exchanging Hats”, “The Shampoo”, and ended with “One Art.” The event is crucial to understanding Bishop’s influence on Merrill’s work as a valuable resource that provides insight directly from the authoritative wordsmith. Close reading the poems side-by-side allows for comprehension and appreciation of their friendship and work. The indirect confessional mode, traditional forms, and literary devices of Bishop’s poems are found in Merrill’s work as well. Examining “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia”—not only as Merrill’s late elegy for Bishop but as his ultimate attempt to contend with her loss and understand her guidance—provides a thorough fleshing out of his relationship with Bishop and its effect on his life and work.

iv To the memory of my Papi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1

CHAPTER ONE: INFLUENCE………………………………………………………………………………………………3

CHAPTER TWO: EXCHANGING HATS & THE VICTOR DOG………………………………32

CHAPTER THREE: THE SHAMPOO & THE KIMONO………………………………………………50

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………78

vi LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1. James Merrill wearing a life mask of John Keats (© Photo by Kimon Friar, WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions)……………………………………………………………………………………3

Figure 2. The cover of The Changing Light at Sandover a 1930s photograph of the ballroom in James Merrill’s childhood home. The 30-acre estate known as “The Orchard” is in Southampton, New York and belonged to his father, Charles E. Merrill of Merrill Lynch. (© Atheneum Books, 1982)……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………6

Figure 3. James Merrill in his home in Key West during the early 1980s. A photo of Elizabeth Bishop in Key West, taken by Rollie McKenna, is on display beside him. (© WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions…………………………15

Figure 4. James Merrill backstage during the reading in New York on April 11, 1973. (© Photo by Mara Pilatsky, 92nd Street Y)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………18

Figure 5. James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop receive laurel crowns. (© Photo by Mara Pilatsky, 92nd Street Y)……………………18

Figure 6. James Merrill reading outside of Elizabeth Bishop’s Key West home at 624 White Street during the Key West Literary Seminar of 1993. Photograph by Richard Watherwax. (© KWLS)……………………………………………………………………………………………………29

Figure 7. Elizabeth Bishop wearing a hat with a “shady, turned-down brim” circa 1940. She would have been 29 around the time. (© Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Louise Crane Papers, Yale University)……………………………………………………32

Figure 8. Elizabeth Bishop also painted, as seen in the book Exchanging Hats: Paintings (Lives & letters) where this piece Brazilian Landscape was printed in 1997. Her work was curated by writer William Benton. (© Carcanet Press)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………38

!1 Page

Figure 9. Elizabeth Bishop in Key West.(© Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Louise Crane Papers, Yale University)…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………48

Figure 10. Elizabeth Bishop holds a cat in Brazil, in the year 1954. (© Photo by J.L Castel, Vassar College Archives and Special Collections Library)…………………………………………………………………50

Figure 11. James Merrill happens to be wearing a blue kimono in the 1988 Voices and Visions hour feature on Elizabeth Bishop. (© Produced by New York Center for Visual History……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………58

!2 Fig. 1 James Merrill wearing a life mask of John Keats. (© Photo by Kimon Friar, WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions)

CHAPTER ONE: INFLUENCE

In living as in poetry, your art Refused to tip the scale of being human By adding unearned weight. “New, tender, quick”— Nice watchwords; yet how often they invited The anguish coming only now to light In letters like photographs from Space, revealing Your planet tremulously bright through veils As swept, in fact, by inconceivable Heat and turbulence—but there, I’ve done it, Added the weight. What tribute could you bear Without dismay?1

In September 1948, at the age of twenty-two, James Merrill took a temporary teaching position at Bard College. He had just graduated from Amherst College and was only slightly older than

1. James Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” Voetica Poetry Spoken, accessed November 2, 2018, http://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=1&poet=669&poem=6513

!3 his students. At the time, Merrill’s literary talent was already lauded. Having read Merrill’s senior thesis on novelist Marcel

Proust, a professor told his Amherst class that they were “all privileged to be students at the same time and in the same place as Jim Merrill, who was destined for some sort of greatness.”2

His position at Bard manifested after Theodore Weiss, editor of the Quarterly Review and professor in the literature department, read Merrill's submitted poems. It was the first and last time

Merrill would interview for a job.

That November, Merrill first saw Elizabeth Bishop on campus among poets such as William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and

Richard Wilbur. They were present for a poetry conference.

Merrill had read Bishop’s North & South after a mutual friend supplied him with a copy. Bishop was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her efforts. After Merrill “bowled over”3 her poem,

“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” which had appeared in the Partisan Review, he invited her for lunch:

I naively thought I could spend most of the lunch telling her how wonderful I thought the poem was. It only took a couple of minutes, and whatever we talked about from then on, we were on our own. Elizabeth wasn’t affected at all. I

2. Langdon Hammer, James Merrill: Life and Art (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 102. 3. Hammer, 108.

!4 think she knew how much she had put into her poems. She must have known they were wonderful.4

Thereafter, Merrill began to correspond with Bishop and they formed a friendship independent of literary means. Merrill later called Bishop and Proust, his “surrogate parents.”5 The term sheds light on two important factors of their friendship.

Bishop was fifteen years older than Merrill. He must have treasured the maternal aspect of her friendship, as with her age came experience and therefore guidance. The phrase also calls to

Merrill’s use of W.H. Auden and friend Maria Mitsotáki as parental figures in his work Mirabell: Books of Number. When

Helen Vendler mentioned this “ghostly father and ghostly mother” in 1979, Merrill said, “Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.”6 He had a privileged upbringing as the son of Charles E. Merrill, a founding partner of the large investment firm, Merrill

4. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 266. 5. James Merrill, Recitative: Prose (New York: North Point Press, 1986), 7. 6. Helen Vender and James Merrill, “James Merrill’s Myth: An Interview,” The New York Review, May 3, 1979, accessed November 3, 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/05/03/james-merrills-myth- an-interview/

!5 Lynch. His mother Hellen Ingram Merrill worked as a publisher and editor, having moved to New York from Jacksonville, Florida to study at Columbia University. Merrill’s parents had separated by the time he was eleven. They had quite an impact on his life and Merrill subsequently wrote of them, most notably with the narrative poem “The Broken Home” which appeared in his volume

Nights and Day in 1966.

Fig. 2 The cover of The Changing Light at Sandover a 1930s photograph of the ballroom in James Merrill’s childhood home. The 30-acre estate known as “The Orchard” is in Southampton, New York and belonged to his father, Charles E. Merrill of Merrill Lynch. (© Atheneum Books, 1982)

!6 Merrill writes how, as a child, his mother laid in bed with

“hair undone, outspread, / And of a blackness found…” and when she woke “startled strange and cold”, the passage ends with complexity regarding their kinship: “She reached for me. I fled.”7 Bishop was also no stranger to a “broken home”—her father died when she was a baby and at the age at five, her mentally- ill mother was committed to a hospital. Bishop never saw her again and instead bounced back and forth between her parents’ families like an orphan would. Merrill’s term for Bishop reveals the many ways in which he respected and admired her.

To discuss Bishop’s influence on Merrill requires revised or brand-new, alternate understandings of the concept. Harold

Bloom’s 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, on the development of poets and their relationships with one another’s work, is a foundational study in modern literature. In

The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom uses Freudian language to discuss the relationships between elder and younger poets, as he found “intra-poetic relationships as parallels of family romance”8 to be compelling. The essay ultimately tackles the

7. James Merrill, Merrill: Poems (New York: Knopf, 2017), 65. 8. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8.

!7 variety of ways a poet may feel the weight of literary history, primarily through psychoanalysis and theories based off fieldwork from Bloom’s predecessors such as Sigmund Freud and

Samuel Johnson. However, in part because of Bloom’s influences, his model does not apply to understanding Bishop’s impact on

Merrill as a poet. This has been noted by scholars in the past:

Yet Merrill — with his reference to psyche or anima showing that he speaks in Jungian rather than Freudian terms — admits to seeking a female role model...their relationship seems to be not a combat to the death between father and son but a decades-long friendship over the course of which the aspiring ephebe gradually becomes the friend, and as time passes, sometimes the practical guide and emotional supporter of the elder poet.9

It would not be the first time Merrill’s poems provided a counter to Bloom’s theory. The Anxiety of Influence was published three years before Merrill released Divine Comedies in

1976 which ends with the epic poem, The Book of Ephraim; Bloom’s treatise no doubt influenced its narrative. Book of Ephraim tells the story of how Merrill and his longtime partner, David

Jackson, sat with a Ouija board and a teacup to communicate with a guiding spirit who connected them to spirits in the Other

World. Transcripts from their séances—hundreds of pages collected in their homes around the world whether in Athens or

9. Thomas Travisano, “What Tribute She Could Bear,” The Smart Set, last modified June 3, 2015. https://thesmartset.com/what-tribute-she-could-bear/

!8 Key West—were manipulated into long poems by Merrill. The voices that come to Merrill in his ouija board poems could be considered echoes of influence. Additionally, the chosen photograph on the cover of Changing Light reveals once again how

Merrill’s early life functioned as an influence on his work.

In his last chapter of Anxiety of Influence, Bloom introduced the concept of apophrades. While most of Bloom’s theories on poetic relations stay rooted in male rivalries or

Freudian terms, Merrill incorporating voices of the dead into his work is an effort akin to what Bloom describes for this theory also known as a “Return of the Dead”:

Apophrades, when managed by the capable imagination, by the strong poet who has persisted in his strength, becomes not so much a return of the dead as a celebration of the return of the early self-exaltation that first made poetry possible…the central problem of apophrades: is there still an anxiety of style as distinct from the anxiety of influence, or are the two anxieties now one? 10

Moreover, biographer Langdon Hammer found Merrill’s work with Auden’s spirit in The Book of Ephraim to be “playful, touching sentimental at times, and collaborative, far from the winner-take-all contest described in Anxiety of Influence.”11 The most relevant theory from the work in terms of describing

10. Bloom, 148. 11. Hammer, 593.

!9 Merrill and Bishop’s intra-poetic relationship comes from

Bloom’s definition of poetic influence as “a variety of melancholy or an anxiety-principle.”12 If Merrill experienced concern for his work writing after Bishop, it would more likely be an anxiety of style rather than an anxiety of influence.

Merrill’s friendship with Bishop outside of their careers allowed him to consume her work as a reader. Bishop embodied a form of melancholic inspiration for Merrill as a role model with literary achievement despite obscure mannerisms that distinguished her from the rest of the literary scene. She only published a poem or two a year as an evident perfectionist and this individuality was attractive to Merrill. He seemed to have a preference for women writers, or any that were “homosexuals,

French, or some combination thereof, although he didn’t select them with those labels in mind” but was drawn to “the force of a passionate, artful female voice.”13 Despite surrounding himself with powerful women like Vendler, and admiring a female predecessor like Edna St. Millay, there had been no other that influenced Merrill like Bishop—from before their meeting and up until her sudden death in 1979.

12. Bloom, 7. 13. Hammer, 66.

!10 The first collection of poetry published after Merrill made acquaintance with Bishop was his collection First Poems in 1951.

Merrill told the Knopf publishing house to send proofs to Bishop in addition to more famous writers like Wallace Stevens and T.S.

Eliot. Good friends received copies of First Poems; two were influences of Bishop’s poetry such as Marianne Moore, and Robert

Lowell, who Merrill remarked can be sent a proof “less forcefully.”14 The hesitancy toward luring Lowell as an early reader is understood through Merrill’s later criticism for

Confessional poetry. In October 1968, he journaled "What one cannot bear in Lowell & those who imitate him (myself included, when I do) is his ghastly creaking, 1st person narrative present tense…”15 His stance stems from Bishop, whose literary devices

Merrill admired, as Hammer notes in James Merrill: Life and Art:

Yet the form that [Merrill’s] self-examination takes—a questioning of his own language and perceptions—derives from Bishop, for whom self-questioning was a trademark device. Her poetry was richly personal, but she shied away from Confessional poetry’s bold self-dramatizations and, in Lowell’s case, its claims for public authority.16

14. Hammer, 132. 15. Timothy Materer, “Mirrored Lives: Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill,” Twentieth-Century Literature 51, no. 2 (2005): 198. 16. Hammer, 267.

!11 Three years later in 1954, Merrill’s Short Stories appeared and he only sent a copy to three poets: Richard Wilbur,

Elizabeth Bishop, and T.S. Eliot.17 Merrill’s eagerness to share his work with Bishop parallels the semantics of poet-to-poet relationships before them. Nicola Healey’s Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship demonstrates how a lateral kinship may be the most influential kind of relationship between poets—as opposed to Harold Bloom’s paternal theory. Healey supports this theory with the Wordsworth siblings and how “William always presents or recites his work to

[Dorothy] and is heavily influenced by her suggestions.”18

Merrill’s correspondence with Bishop indicated a supportive friendship. Merrill called Bishop’s letters “magically chatty.”19

They maintained communication without solely discussing literary pursuits. When they did discuss poems, the poets typically showered one another with compliments.

In a letter to Merrill in 1972, Bishop reflected on “Strato in Plaster” which was a poem he wrote for his longtime Greek

17. Hammer, 188. 18. Nicola Healey, Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 176. 19. Merrill, Recitative, 123.

!12 lover Strato: “I envy you [for] your industry and application and discipline.”20 Her comments came two years after the poem was written and therefore indicate a solidified friendship in which

Bishop admired a poet fifteen years her junior after careful consideration of his work. Bishop especially praised Merrill’s efforts on Book of Ephraim, in particular his form: “the variety is there, but it doesn’t sound difficult—as if you found rhyme or assonance the easiest thing in the world.”21 The comment on form must have pleased Merrill; he particularly marveled at

Bishop’s ability to adopt traditional forms without confining her poetry. As Merrill remarked in conversation with J.D.

McClatchy after her death, one does not “have to be just a stolid ‘formalist.’ [Bishop’s] forms, the meters and rhyme- sounds, are far too liberating for that.”22 Throughout their correspondence, there is only one remark in which Merrill questioned an element of Bishop’s work.

20. Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 567. 21. Bishop, One Art, 597. 22. Merrill, Recitative, 82.

!13 Merrill heard Bishop read her poem “Crusoe in England” at least three times23 before he wrote in 1974 to provide criticism for the first and last time. Merrill’s comments referred to how

Bishop treated the relationship between two characters, Crusoe and Friday. Merrill wrote, “I found I was yearning for, say, some lines about how they communicated, Crusoe + Friday: did they make a language? of sounds? of signs?”24 Merrill was no longer another admirer of her work. Bishop’s response validated

Merrill’s opinion as a poet of equal merit: “I think you are right and I’ll try to restore or add a few lines there before the piece gets to a book. In fact...I can almost remember 2 or 3 lines...”25 Bishop went on to acknowledge about how there may have been manuscripts under her ping-pong table which, if true, she may have never found.26 Although no changes to “Crusoe” appeared when it was published in Geography III in 1976, Bishop responded positively to Merrill as a friend would: “No, I am

23. Kamran Javadizadeh, "Elizabeth Bishop's Closet Drama,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 67, no. 3 (2011): 142, accessed October 16, 2018, https://muse.jhu.edu/. 24. Hammer, 380. According to Life and Art, Merrill underlined the words “how they communicated” in his letter. 25. Javadizadeh, 143. 26. Materer, 190.

!14 very glad you wrote what you did about ‘Crusoe.’ I don’t get much criticism, perhaps because of my gray hairs...and I’m really grateful.”27

Fig. 3 James Merrill in his home in Key West during the early 1980s. A photo of Elizabeth Bishop in Key West, taken by Rollie McKenna, is on display beside him. (© WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions)

Despite differences in age and personality, their longtime friendship was rooted in affection and admiration with professionalism maintained out of respect. In rich detail,

Merrill reflected on a reading by Bishop at the Guggenheim

Museum in May 1969. Robert Lowell introduced Bishop and

27. Bishop, One Art: Letters, 584.

!15 rambled on about Their Generation, her Famous Eye, good heart, good humor, etc until finally out she came, hunched, powdered, looking grim + sad, to shuffle papers + fidget with the mike before uttering her first words of the evening—’The famous eye will now be hidden behind glasses’ and all was well from then on.28

In contrast to Bishop’s shy stage presence, Merrill performed in a way that compliments the high art style of his poetry with “a relaxed, assured, and, yes, aristocratic voice.”29

His readings were theatrical; three months before his death, a reading from The Changing Light at Sandover shows Merrill switching between voices for different characters.30 In contrast,

Merrill described Bishop at the Guggenheim reading as being

“without inflection or change of pitch, in a no-nonsense tenor voice” and yet still found her performance “strangely moving...one wanted it to be like that.”31 Poet Andrew Motion offered a more contemporary note on Bishop’s reading in The

28. Hammer, 457. 29. Wen Stephenson. “High-Performance Poets,” The Atlantic, April 2000, accessed November 4, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/04/high- performance-poets/378130/ 30. James Merrill, “ModernLitCollection”, The Changing Light at Sandover, video, 12:30. Published October 21, 2015, accessed November 4, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPVZpqftueA&feature=youtu.be 31. Hammer, 458. According to Life and Art, Merrill humorously underlined the word “read” in his letter.

!16 Guardian, finding her recitation of “Filling Station” to be

“self-deprecating, nearly throwaway...for all its modesties it is absolutely mesmeric and authoritative.”32 At another reading, without changing opinion, Merrill again found that even though

Bishop read without variation of cadence or sound, “somehow it’s perfectly all right.”33 Bishop’s performances were sure to resonate with listeners and Merrill knew this when offered to read with her in 1973 at the Poetry Center in New York (now known as the 92Y). Merrill replied, “I couldn’t dream of a grander co-star” and in a silly attempt to coerce Bishop to join such a big event, wrote her to say, they didn’t have to “read the whole time, you know. A ping-pong table could be borrowed from some recreational wing of the Establishment, or a samba routine worked up, with spangly blouses + purple lights.”34

As Langdon Hammer tells in his biography of Merrill, that night the two poets made a decision to wear gifted, gold laurel wreaths as crowns to an afterparty. “Maybe it’s just my natural modesty,” Bishop later reflected in a letter to a friend, “but I

32. Andrew Motion. “The 10 best recordings of poets,” The Guardian, June 6 2014, accessed October 15, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2014/jun/06/the-10- best-recordings-of-poets 33. Hammer, 325. 34. Hammer, 533.

!17 felt a wreath was more becoming to Jim.”35 Bishop’s actions reflect her demure image: she had the audio tape of her reading destroyed, as well as photographs of her from the event. Only three photos from the event show Bishop out of the thirty-three negatives reproduced while a shot of Merrill, crowned, remains in the center’s archives.36

Fig. 4 (left) James Merrill backstage during the reading in New York on April 11, 1973. (© Photo by Mara Pilatsky, 92nd Street Y)

Fig. 5. (right) James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop receive laurel crowns. (© Photo by Mara Pilatsky, 92nd Street Y)

The image of Bishop and Merrill entering John Hollander’s party together with matching laurel crowns is more heartfelt

35. Bishop, One Art, 579. 36. Javadizadeh, 132.

!18 when their time in Brazil three years prior is considered.

Bishop was living in Ouro Preto, a remote Brazilian town, when

Merrill accepted her half-hearted invitation to visit in July

1970. Bishop’s longtime partner Lota de Macedo Soares had overdosed and died in 1967. Bishop became dependent on alcoholism. The two grew closer over mutual hardship. After

Merrill left, Bishop wrote to say, “You are without doubt the

World’s Best Guest and I never realized before how much I really love you. There. In fact I might say I adore you.”37 In further correspondence, Bishop confided her heartbreak and affection for

Merrill once more:

But of course the real trouble is, as you say, that “someone I loved very much is no longer to be seen”—and so very few things seem worth the doing any more. Forgive me, but I feel sure you are one person I can say this to (thank heavens).38

Perhaps it was this time in Brazil with Bishop that enlightened Merrill on a personal level. Bishop was no longer only an influence on his work but in life. Likewise, Bishop was inspired by Merrill. After the visit, she wrote to say she was

“quite crazy” and “determined to write a lot of things I suppose

I just lacked the courage to before” after reading his poem “To

37. Bishop, 531. 38. Bishop, 512.

!19 My Greek.”39 As for Merrill, Bishop served as an example to understand he was not confined to busy, literary and elitist means in order to craft good poetry:

I saw the daily life that took my fancy even more [with Elizabeth]...today a fit of weeping, tomorrow a picnic. I could see how close that life was to her poems, how much the life and the poems gave to one another. I don’t mean I’ve “achieved” anything of the sort in my life or poems, only that Elizabeth had more of a talent for life—and for poetry—than anyone else I’ve known, and this has served me as an ideal.40

The “ideal” that Merrill describes to McClatchy late in his life is nostalgic of Bishop’s wayward habits, which she herself acknowledged to him before: "I've rarely written anything of any value at the desk...it's always in someone else's house, or in a bar, or standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night."41

Merrill kept Bishop as an example of living true to oneself in order to write authentically. He believed Bishop’s poetry “was a life both shaped by and distinct from the lived one.”42

Merrill’s words clarify how Bishop was an influence not only on his life, but on his work. In Poetics of Relationship

39. Bishop, 532. 40. Merrill, Recitative, 79. 41. David Kalstone, “Prodigal Years: Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell 1947-49,” Grand Street 4, no. 4 (1985): 175. 42. Merrill, Recitative, 121.

!20 Healey touches on Hartley Coleridge, son of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, and how he dealt with writing under the influence of his father. She introduces evidence that goes against Bloom’s patriarchal theory of an “anxiety of influence”, which insists writers engage in oedipal battles with their literary predecessors. Hartley’s poetry, however, recognized “the state of poetry as distinct from and above any individual” and therefore there is a “state of poetic perfectibility to which each poet strives to contribute…[and] can only be realized if the poetic predecessor is embraced.”43 Many of Merrill’s poems therefore reflect this concept as he embraced Bishop’s influence over other poetic predecessors. For example, Merrill criticized modern poets like T.S Eliot, and Ezra Pound who “tries to write like a god” while he believed Stevens and Bishop “merely write like angels.”44 This was a significant stance to take because

Bishop “was a minor figure in 1967, admired by other poets but not at all widely read.”45 In the same year, Merrill taught at the University of Wisconsin. He devoted class time to poems he

43. Healey, 99. 44. David Sheehan and James Merrill, “An Interview with James Merrill,” Contemporary Literature 9, no. 1 (1968): 5. 45. Hammer, 419.

!21 admired with “the only contemporary poem being Bishop’s ‘The

Shampoo’ from her recently published Questions of Travel.”46

Merrill stayed true to his beliefs on the male poets he followed, but in a 1982 interview, he isolated Bishop from

Stevens, and instead summed him up with Eliot and Pound as poets

“who seem in their life’s work to transcend human dimensions.”47

Merrill feared his poems mirrored these grandiose poets of the literary canon in terms of their extravagance. On the other hand, Bishop was a fellow poet whose work already illustrated a preferable standard; she wrote without the restraints of the adopted traditional forms. A poem such as “One Art” is evidence of such technical success. While written in the form of a villanelle, Bishop only repeats the line “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”48 instead of including two refrains as expected of the form. The poem literally loses its fixed form because even the iambic pentameter of “One Art” is loose, as if maintaining steady meter is also lost as the poem continues.

These details emphasize the theme of loss in Bishop’s poem. In

46. Hammer, 413. 47. James Merrill, Merrill: Collected Prose (New York: Knopf, 2004), 22. 48. Elizabeth Bishop, Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 198.

!22 his biography on Merrill, Langdon Hammer acknowledged her skill in these matters: “Bishop approached the given form of a poem not as a fixed plan but as a provisional structure...Merrill experiments with the same principle.”49

As Merrill wrote his poetic trilogy of epics, which began with The Book of Ephraim and ended as a 560-page compilation in

The Changing Light at Sandover, he struggled with its ambitions.

Merrill treasured Bishop’s influence opposed to those “male giants”, whose legacy may have

made a greater shadow on the wall behind them. I’ve noticed in my own work, to my horror, writing this trilogy, that suddenly everything was getting much bigger than I thought a life should be. I kept clinging to the idea of Elizabeth with her sanity and levelheadedness and quirkiness of mind.50

When describing the accessibility of Bishop’s poetry which inspired him, Merrill’s words are likewise descriptive of

Elizabeth’s personality. For him, Bishop’s poems and her life seemed to blur into one over time. As Thomas Travisano wrote,

“Merrill sees Bishop as facing a set of problems...in ways that he finds both reassuring and instructive — ways that are modest, adroit, funny, devious, and enthralling.”51 Through his work with

49. Hammer, 277. 50. Merrill, Collected Prose, 23. 51. Travisano, “What Tribute She Could Bear.”

!23 using the Ouija board as a poetic tool like his predecessor W.B.

Yeats, Merrill was able to reduce other influences into a manageable manner with his craft. In his volume of poetry

Mirabell, Merrill wrote lines for poets Stevens and Auden based on his contact with them in the spiritual world. Bloom even criticized Merrill for this and called his work with the ouija board an “outrageous, tactless presumption—unprecedented in the history of poetry” to which Bloom recalled Merrill “smiled broadly, evidently very pleased” in response.52 Perhaps he accepted Bloom’s comments as a compliment because Bloom was acknowledging that Merrill successfully presented an alternative to the foundational Anxiety of Influence in terms of embracing poetic predecessors.

Bishop died in October 1979 at home in Boston of an aneurism in the brain. Hammer summed up Merrill’s grief with facts: “Merrill had known Elizabeth for thirty years; they’d been close friends for seven; there was no contemporary poet—no contemporary writer—he admired more, or wanted more to please.”53

There is a noted sense of anxiety in his desire to impress

Bishop that reflects Bloom’s treatise on the anxiety of

52. Hammer, 593. 53. Hammer, 631.

!24 influence. Later that year, Merrill continued mourning for his long-time friend through one of many future written tributes:

With her death a darkness all but literal falls over our poetic scene; for her intelligence—so all-seeing, original, undidactic—like the very light of day revealed her subjects there in the world where she found them, casting them, for the length of a poem’s charm, into effortless and humane relief. This ease, this natural perfection, along with the technical mastery it implied, were not always prized in the workshops.54

As the last line above indicates, the tribute is one of many examples in which Merrill spoke up for Bishop’s underwhelming legacy. No longer with her words, Merrill lamented in a letter to his friend Henry Sloss: “Suddenly to realize that there is no one left—no one, that is, whose postcards, whose idlest remarks (not to speak of the poems) gave rise to plain old adoring wonder.”55 There is proof Merrill struggled to adjust to Bishop as an influence from beyond the grave; as he stated in his first tribute for Elizabeth, “for her the sun has set, and for us the balcony is dark.”56 For example, in 1987, Merrill took back the one criticism he ever made on Bishop’s work. In the afterword he wrote for David Kalstone’s book, Becoming a Poet:

54. Merrill, Collective Prose, 229. 55. Hammer, 631. According to Life and Art, Merrill humorously underlined the words “no one left” for emphasis. 56. Merrill, Recitative, 123.

!25 Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, he writes that he “idiotically” made the remarks on “Crusoe” back in 1974.57 Merrill comes to terms with this almost a decade later. It so happens that Kalstone’s book studies Bishop’s relationship with her primary influences, Moore and Lowell. In close reading Merrill’s afterword for the book, Timothy Materer finds that Merrill “seems to be considering his own relationship with Elizabeth as well as his misreading of ‘Crusoe’ when he admires the feelings” between Bishop and Lowell, specifically

“the clear-eyed reading (or misreadings) of poems sent back and forth, the letters exchanged, and the climate of faith and gratitude.”58 The relationship Lowell had with Bishop is another interchange that provides enough evidence to establish a post-

Bloomian theory of influence based upon a friendship between poets.

Travisano defined a contemporary theory of influence as one that accounts “for the way influence and affinity have reached across boundaries of gender, language, sexual orientation, and nationality.”59 Bishop was a teenager when Merrill was born; she

57. Merrill, 253. 58. Materer, 191. 59. Travisano, “What Tribute She Could Bear.”

!26 was also Canadian, and discretely gay. She refused to be part of anthologies devoted to women, and at the time of her death,

James Fenton wrote Bishop “might well have resented a pressure to solidarize. She was a poet’s poet (John Ashbery called her a writer’s writer’s writer) but she was not a lesbian’s lesbian.”60

Merrill, on the other hand, was a little more open with his sexuality, if not explicitly through his poems. Vendler reviewed his book Braving the Elements in 1972 with close readings of poems like “After the Fire” and “To My Greek” with no shortage of personal details. Vendler goes as far as writing that the poems are “autobiographical without being ‘confessional.’”61

Merrill wrote to Bishop in October 1972 to remark how Vendler

“told all” about his sexuality, but according to Materer,

Merrill “took it lightly and joked to Bishop that he hoped he was not ‘turning into a Gay culture-hero.’”62 Similar to how

Merrill joked about doing a samba routine for their reading at

60. James Fenton. “The Many Arts of Elizabeth Bishop,” The New York Review, May 15, 1997, accessed October 14, 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/05/15/the-many-arts-of- elizabeth-bishop/ 61. Helen Vendler. “Braving the Elements,” The New York Times, September 24, 1972, accessed October 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/1972/09/24/archives/braving-the- elements-by-james-merrill-73-pp-new-york-atheneum-595.html 62. Materer, 190.

!27 the Poetry Center in New York, he seemed to always write with

Elizabeth’s insecurities in mind. Bishop’s friend Mary Meigs recorded the reasoning behind this, saying they “belonged to a generation of women who were terrified by the idea of being known as lesbians, and for Elizabeth as poet, the lesbian label would have been particularly dangerous.”63 Merrill’s passing remark to Bishop about not wanting to be an idol for the gay community is therefore tinged with mutual understanding and honesty.

Treasuring Bishop as a friend, Merrill did experience a lack of anxiety at times in terms of her influence on his work.

Travisano wrote that “an anxiety of literary influence appears to recede when one can choose one’s literary antecedents, based on their congeniality both as poets and as people.”64 The importance of choice rings true in light of Healey’s work on

Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge—two writers who wrote after more famous family members. However, Healey proposes that authorial identity is “more significantly governed by domestic environment, immediate kinship and familial readership.”65 As

63. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, 86. 64. Travisano, “What Tribute She Could Bear.” 65. Healey, 233.

!28 poets who treasured domesticity and normalcy in light of their literary success, Healey’s theory is more applicable to Merrill and Bishop than that of Bloom. The intimacy between Merrill and

Bishop is evident in the decades of exchanged letters, but the influence of Merrill’s “surrogate parent” is best seen in his poetry. Merrill enlightened readers on Bishop’s effect during a

Key West Literary Seminar dedicated to her in 1993.

Fig. 6 James Merrill reading outside of Elizabeth Bishop’s Key West home at 624 White Street during the Key West Literary Seminar of 1993. Photograph by Richard Watherwax. (© KWLS)

The Key West Literary Seminar for Bishop was the first of its kind. Merrill was elated to have such an event dedicated solely to Bishop. An attendee and friend wrote Merrill as having said, “Of all the splendid and curious work belonging to my time, these are the poems (the earliest appeared when I was a

!29 year old) that I love best and tire of least. And there will be no others.”66 Merrill died only two years later in February 1995 to complications from AIDS. He spent a large portion of his life admiring Bishop but paying mind to not smother her about literary talent. Merrill described Bishop’s humbleness two months after her passing in a tribute for The New York Review of

Books. His favorite contemporary poet was someone with

instinctive, modest, lifelong impersonations of an ordinary woman, someone who during the day did errands, went to the beach, would perhaps that evening jot a phrase or two inside the nightclub matchbook before returning to the dance floor.67

Merrill was still considering Bishop’s shy nature when he immortalized his fascination for her writing and work ethic in the elegy he wrote ten years after her death, “Overdue

Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia.” In the poem Merrill asks, “What tribute could you bear / Without dismay?”68 In addition to reading the elegy during his part of the program, Merrill shared his poem “The Kimono” which was inspired by Bishop’s tender work

“The Shampoo” as well as his poem “The Victor Dog” which he

66. Spencer Reece, “To Recall, To Praise,” Granta Magazine no. 129 (January 19, 2015), accessed November 4, 2018. https://granta.com/to-recall-to-praise/ 67. Merrill, Collected Prose, 231. 68. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” Voetica Poetry Spoken.

!30 dedicated to Bishop in 1969. He addition to reciting “The

Shampoo” Merrill recited “Exchanging Hats” and ended with her popular achievement “One Art.”69 The event is crucial to understanding Bishop’s influence on Merrill’s work. It is now a valuable resource that provides insight directly from the authoritative wordsmith.

Close reading the poems Merrill curated for the program side-by-side in the following chapters allows for further comprehension and appreciation of their friendship and work, respectively. The indirect confessional mode, traditional forms, and literary devices of Bishop’s poems are found in Merrill’s work. In addition, examining “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova

Scotia”—not only as Merrill’s late elegy for Bishop but as his ultimate attempt to contend with her loss and understand her guidance—provides a thorough fleshing out of his relationship with Bishop and its effect on his life and work.

69. Arlo Haskell, “James Merrill: A reading for Elizabeth Bishop,” Key West Literary Seminar, audio archives | vault (blog), last modified April 4, 2017, https://www.kwls.org/audio/james-merrill-a-reading-for- elizabeth-bishop/

!31 CHAPTER TWO: EXCHANGING HATS & THE VICTOR DOG

Fig. 7 Elizabeth Bishop wearing a hat with a “shady, turned-down brim” circa 1940. She would have been 29 around the time. (© Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Louise Crane Papers, Yale University)

Bishop’s poem “Exchanging Hats” and Merrill’s “The Victor

Dog” appear quite different despite being considered metaphysical poems. However, they share formal and artistic values. They have similar rhymes and narrative tones while both adopting a collective voice which Merrill may have done as an ode to Bishop herself; the two poets could be Merrill’s mentioned “us” because he dedicated “The Victor Dog” to her after all. As a poem that regards influence, close reading it along with “Exchanging Hats” provides insight on how Bishop helped shaped Merrill’s style.

!32 When Bishop wrote “Exchanging Hats” it was a brave poem, albeit published in a quiet manner. It first appeared in the journal New World Writing in 1956:

Unfunny uncles who insist in trying on a lady's hat, --oh, even if the joke falls flat, we share your slight transvestite twist

in spite of our embarrassment. Costume and custom are complex. The headgear of the other sex inspires us to experiment.

Anandrous aunts, who, at the beach with paper plates upon your laps, keep putting on the yachtsmen's caps with exhibitionistic screech,

the visors hanging o'er the ear so that the golden anchors drag, --the tides of fashion never lag. Such caps may not be worn next year.

Or you who don the paper plate itself, and put some grapes upon it, or sport the Indian's feather bonnet, --perversities may aggravate

the natural madness of the hatter. And if the opera hats collapse and crowns grow draughty, then, perhaps, he thinks what might a miter matter?

Unfunny uncle, you who wore a hat too big, or one too many, tell us, can't you, are there any stars inside your black fedora?

Aunt exemplary and slim, with avernal eyes, we wonder what slow changes they see under

!33 their vast, shady, turned-down brim.70

In his book Elizabeth Bishop: life and the Memory of It,

Brett Millier writes that Bishop “never reprinted the poem—in retrospect it embarrassed her...she had come to see the poem's possible meanings long after she wrote it.”71 Bishop was raised by aunts and uncles and may have taken precaution in releasing work that could be read autobiographically. Such a choice emphasizes how private she was. The piece also stands out among the poems Bishop had published thus far—and often in public spheres like the New Yorker—because of its blatant, sexually corporeal topic.

The subject matter of the piece tackles gender roles through describing aunts and uncles who are portrayed behaving in an almost innocent manner. As they dawn hats belonging to the opposite sex, they lack awareness that such a switch could be interpreted literally, as recognized through the speaker’s embarrassment. The speaker is an onlooker as they describe aunts who have stereotypical “exhibitionistic screech” on a beach while the uncles are “unfunny” and wear hats “too big, or one too many.” However, it is not until the end of the first stanza

70. Bishop, Poems, 230. 71. Brett Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 277.

!34 that the reader picks up on the sexual undertones of the piece:

“--oh, even if the joke falls flat, / we share your slight transvestite twist.”72 It is Bishop’s carefully selected diction that reveals a narrator’s unsettling examination of their family. Another example of her skill is seen with the word chosen to describe the aunts—anandrous, a botanical term for not having stamens. The definition of the word relates to gender while cleverly mirroring the word androgynous as well. The pun resonates with the reader in order to lighten or even distract from the poem’s serious subject.

Moreover, certain words can be interpreted to reveal a darker reading. After the imagery of aunts wearing “yachtsmen's caps” the phrase “perversities may aggravate / the natural madness of the hatter” evokes the silly yet multifaceted fantasy of Alice in Wonderland: a child’s story on the surface but through its symbolism reveals a scathing parody of Victorian society. The phrase “mad as a hatter” on its own originates from

18th century hat-makers who suffered from insanity because of mercury poisoning. It was Bonnie Costello who noted the poem’s

“insistent, end-stopped rhymes and processional tetrameter build

72. Bishop, Poems, 230.

!35 to a reeling rhythm that express the ‘madness’”73 and adds a tone of anxiety to the speaker’s voice. The aunts have “avernal” eyes and the poem ends with a “vast, shady, turned-down brim.”74

Bishop wrote John Malcolm Brinnin at New World Writing to have the words “anandrous” and “avernal” added to her submission because she was not “satisfied with those aunts—now I think they will do, and since I am being precious I feel I might as well be good and precious while I’m at it.”75 Merrill regarded the unexpected power of the word “avernal”, which brings the reader to view the aunts with satanic imagery because of the word’s roots in relation to Hades, god of the underworld:

it dawns on us that a certain uncle and aunt are no longer among the living, are rather shades in a classic underworld...each figure now wears forever that hat appropriate to his or her gender, a lone identifying attribute, limiting and melancholy, like the headstone on a grave.76

The speaker of “Exchanging Hats” perhaps reflects Bishop’s mindset at the time she wrote it. In the 1950s, her poetry began to contemplate intimacy and ideologies with newfound comfort.

This is seen with poems like “The Shampoo” and “From Trollope’s

73. Bonnie Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 83. 74. Bishop, Poems, 231. 75. Bishop, One Art, 309. 76. Merrill, Collected Prose, 355.

!36 Journal” which Bishop called “an anti-Eisenhower poem”77 inspired by Victorian writer Anthony Trollope. After all, she was writing from Brazil while living in lesbian domesticity with her more lively partner, Miss de Macedo, where she’d remain until the early sixties. Still, in “Exchanging Hats” the subject is curiously approached with clever subtlety. In his essay

“Elizabeth Bishop’s Closet Drama”, Javadizadeh similarly writes that “Exchanging Hats” indeed “demonstrates [Bishop’s] ultimate resignation to the rhetorical mode of retreat.”78 By setting the scene at a beach and depicting the mundane action of characters trying on hats, the poem conceals the speaker’s already restricted beliefs on gender—or at least indicates an effort to do so. However, writing a collective “us” and “we” while addressing the characters with “you” creates a visceral moment.

A personal interpretation is still obscured to the reader.

Instead, the narrator opts to craft a universal experience:

“tell us / can’t you?”79 Even in terms of biography, Hammer noted

“unable or disinclined to speak of sexuality openly, the “I” in

77. Bishop, One Art, 439. 78. Javadizadeh, 131. 79. Bishop, Poems, 230.

!37 her poems assumes an intimacy with the reader...it is unnecessary to spell everything out.”80

Fig. 8 Elizabeth Bishop also painted, as seen in the book Exchanging Hats: Paintings (Lives & letters) where this piece Brazilian Landscape was printed in 1997. Her work was curated by writer William Benton. (© Carcanet Press)

Bishop’s skill of being poignant without oversharing in the time of confessional poetry was a clear influence on Merrill. As

Travisano said on the two poets, “Bishop showed a way to deal with ambiguities of feeling, ambiguities of commitment,

80. Hammer, 276.

!38 ambiguities of identity and self-definition that run through the work of each of these poets.”81 Merrill was taken with the ambitions of “Exchanging Hats”. At the time it was published, his own poetry concealed any sign that the love poems concerned other men.82 The poem affected him enough that it became a staple at many readings throughout his life. Before reciting

“Exchanging Hats” at the 1992 Key West Literary Seminar, Merrill stated what he found most impressive with “Exchanging Hats.” The personal connection made is clear when he says that “with really quite inflammable subject matter for the mid-fifties...she had found a way to slim it down to an experience that everyone has shared or seen in innocent context.”83 Merrill then shared a memory from 1970, when he visited Bishop in Brazil. He remembers

Bishop told him a tale of swapped gender from local folklore.

The anecdote confirms how Bishop became less guarded in Brazil.

It further enlightens us to how “Exchanging Hats” may have helped begin a transition out of her shell, at least poetically:

81. Travisano, “What Tribute She Could Bear.” 82. Materer, 141. 83. James Merrill, Key West Literary Seminar and Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University. James Merrill: A reading for Elizabeth Bishop, audio recording, 21:24, 1993, https://www.kwls.org/audio/james-merrill-a-reading-for- elizabeth-bishop/.

!39 It had rained about seven or eight days...and finally the sun had come out and everything glittered and sparkled and dripped. And [Bishop] said she had hired a car to take us to a nearby town...and there was a rainbow, at least one rainbow, that kept just ahead of us and it seemed to me that it was all that we had passed under it a couple of times. And Elizabeth said something to the driver who began to shake with laughter and I said what did you say? And she said in the north of Brazil they have this superstition that if you pass under a rainbow you change your sex. Anyhow, that was years after Exchanging Hats; she was more outspoken then.84

Two years later, Merrill published “The Victor Dog” which he began composing in late 1969. It was released in his poetry collection Braving the Elements and it was Merrill’s first poem dedicated to Bishop. Utilizing the white dog of the RCA Victor record label that was a familiar icon at the time, the poem describes the difficulty of devoting one’s life to art:

Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez, The little white dog on the Victor label Listens long and hard as he is able. It's all in a day's work, whatever plays.

From judgment, it would seem, he has refrained. He even listens earnestly to Bloch, Then builds a church upon our acid rock. He's man's -- no -- he's the Leiermann's best friend,

Or would be if hearing and listening were the same. Does he hear? I fancy he rather smells Those lemon-gold arpeggios in Ravel's "Les jets d'eau du palais de ceux que s'aiment."

He ponders the Schumann Concerto's tall willow hit

84. Merrill, “James Merrill: A reading for Elizabeth Bishop,” Key West Literary Seminar.

!40 By lightning, and stays put. When he surmises Through one of Bach's eternal boxwood mazes The oboe pungent as a bitch in heat,

Or when the calypso decants its raw bay rum Or the moon in Wozzeck reddens ripe for murder, He doesn't sneeze or howl; just listens harder. Adamant needles bear down on him from

Whirling of outer space, too black, too near -- But he was taught as a puppy not to flinch, Much less to imitate his bete noire Blanche Who barked, fat foolish creature, at King Lear.

Still others fought in the road's filth over Jezebel, Slavered on hearths of horned and pelted barons. His forbears lacked, to say the least, forbearance. Can nature change in him? Nothing's impossible.

The last chord fades. The night is cold and fine. His master's voice rasps through the grooves' bare groves. Obediently, in silence like the grave's, He sleeps there on the still-warm gramophone

Only to dream he is at the premiere of a Handel Opera long thought lost -- Il Cane Minore. Its allegorical subject is his story! A little dog revolving on a spindle

Gives rise to harmonies beyond belief, A cast of stars. . . . Is there in Victor's heart No honey for the vanquished? Art is art. The life it asks of us is a dog's life.85

The piece is a metaphysical poem like “Exchanging Hats” in terms of its meta-textual context and the use of the RCA logo’s dog as a conceit for an artist. Merrill’s choice for a main character is fitting for the genre, because as Poetry Foundation

85. Merrill, Poems, 131.

!41 notes, a dog “listening to a phonograph prompts the imagination to fill in the logical gap between the image and ordinary experience”86 which a metaphysical poem will typically demand of the reader. Because the poem is dedicated to Bishop, one might draw similarities between her and the main character. An ideal routine is described: the dog is dedicated to music, or poetry in Bishop’s case, but still waits for his master as expected of him—an image fit to represent the everyday life. Merrill admired his idol as someone who seemed to effortlessly balance writing and a social life. Hammer acknowledges the possible comparison in “The Victor Dog” based on Bishop’s life: “That life requires diligence and modesty, such as Bishop exemplified for Merrill.”87

Readers have repeated Stephen Yenser’s theory of the poem responding to Bishop’s poem “Cirque D’Hiver” which appeared in

The New Yorker in 1940, for both poems are “are about art and the sacrifices it requires.”88 Bishop’s poem tells of Pegasus the mechanical circus horse and its female rider doing circles on the carousel: “He canters three steps, then he makes a bow, /

86. Ange Mlinko, “James Merrill, ‘The Victor Dog’,” Poetry Foundation (October 1st, 2015). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70269/james-merrill- the-victor-dog 87. Hammer, 463. 88. Materer, 187.

!42 canters again, bows on one knee, / canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.”89 Merrill runs his subject through similar mechanics with the “little dog revolving on a spindle.”90

The poem could be a playlist for the many musical allusions in it. From the first line with its sing-song alliteration directly inspired by Bishop’s name—“Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez”— the poem goes on to reference more composers such as Bach and

Schumann.91 In his work “Mirrored Lives,” Materer found that like

“Merrill and Bishop themselves, the dog likes jazz, calypso, and classics.”92 The cadence of the poem itself exaggerates the theme of music. The images of “lemon-gold arpeggios” and how the

“master's voice rasps through the grooves' bare groves” help the reader hear the tunes in addition to the inclusion of a melodic

French line, “Les jets d’eau du palais de ceux qui s’aiment.”93

As a result, the reader is immersed in the poem aurally as well as semantically, as if hearing the record along with the dog.

In addition to being heavy-handedly conversant with classical music, the poem often features puns. The literary

89. Bishop, Poems, 32. 90. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 132. 91. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 131. 92. Materer, 218. 93. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 131.

!43 device is utilized similar to the playful and borderline sarcastic tone written by Bishop in “Exchanging Hats.” The wordplay in “The Victor Dog” works in the reader’s favor. Each pun eases the strain of understanding the many allusions. While art can be stressful, the wit implies that the reader should enjoy the poem, the ultimate symbol of art, in the moment. For example, take the line: “Or the moon in Wozzeck reddens ripe for murder, / He doesn't sneeze or howl; just listens harder.”94

Wozzeck is a 1925 opera by Austrian composer Alban Berg based on

Woyzeck by playwright Georg Buchner. The play depicts the sadistic nature of militarism in early 20th century Germany.

Merrill subtly alludes to the dark theme with imagery of a symbolic blood moon. The dog does not physically react to the vile nature of the piece, but only listens closer as if inspired. For Merrill, this is an ideal for the consumption of art. The end-stop rhymes of these two lines also nods to

Bishop’s consistent tetrameter rhymes in “Exchanging Hat”.

With “The Victor Dog”, its ABBA scheme and iambic pentameter aid for a rhythmic pace that is easy for the reader to follow despite the dense references. Ange Mlinko describes the flow well: “the quatrains enact the seesaw between work and

94. Merrill, 131.

!44 play, action and passivity, as surely as the tick-tock of a metronome.”95 Merrill quite literally implies this as a theme of the poem in the first stanza with the line, “It's all in a day's work, whatever plays.”96 Many of the allusions and puns reference more than one artist at a time as with Wozzeck. The pun on the saying “man’s best friend” is a reference to the song “Der

Leiermann” from Franz Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle.

Schubert based the pieces on 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, one which “addresses a cold, hungry organ grinder whose music falls on deaf ears and growling street dogs.”97 The dog, once again, represents ideal contrast to those uncultured hounds. Merrill goes as far as to say “he was taught as a puppy not to flinch.”98

Like “Exchanging Hats”, the poem takes on the collective voice in the final stanza by directly and finally addressing art itself: “Art is art / The life it asks of us is a dog's life.”99

Merrill uses the point of view as Bishop did. True to metaphysical nature, “Exchanging Hats” includes lines that seek answers such as “we wonder” and “tell us, / can't you, are there

95. Mlinko, “James Merrill, ‘The Victor Dog’.” 96. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 131. 97. Mlinko, “James Merrill, ‘The Victor Dog’.” 98. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 132. 99. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 132.

!45 any / stars inside your black fedora?”100 As seen in his manuscripts at Washington University, Merrill varied the ending of “The Victor Dog” in drafting and did not always utilize the collective “us”:

Is there in Victor's heart No mercy for him the vanquished by so much art? The life it asks of him is a dog's life.101

The finally version revises these lines from a seventh draft to focus not solely on “him”, the Victor Dog. Instead,

“the vanquished” can refer to any artist with failed dreams.102

The dog’s pipe dream involves starring in his own opera, Il Cane

Minore which is another pun. Merrill mentioned this specific wordplay to his 1993 audience in Key West before reciting the poem: “You might want to remember that there is a constellation called Canis Minor,”103 also known as Lesser Dog. Both Merrill and Bishop reference stars in their poems, but in “The Victor

Dog” the word is used in order to describe the dog dreaming about the starring roles in his opera, which would include

100. Bishop, Poems, 230. 101. “Victor7,” WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions, accessed November 16, 2018, http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/13457. 102. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 132. 103. Key West Literary Seminar, “James Merrill: A reading for Elizabeth Bishop.”

!46 German composer George Frideric Handel. The poem therefore touches on the theme of anxiety from influence when illustrating the failure to act out artistic endeavors. The overwhelming successes in art is depicted by the excessive musical allusions in the poem. The Victor dog cannot join their ranks artistically, by remains dedicated to the form: “Obediently, in silence like the grave's / He sleeps there on the still-warm gramophone.”104 In his reading of “The Victor Dog” for an essay on Bishop and Merrill, Materer believes “Merrill is haunted not only by the great poets that precede him but also the musical composers.”105 The dedication to Bishop is fitting, then, for a poem inspired by great influences. Merrill wrote it with his favorite contemporary poet in mind.

The collective “us” at the end of “The Victor Dog” can be interpreted, then, as Merrill and Bishop. One might recall their shared moment of presenting work at the Poetry Center in New

York—wearing golden laurels, Bishop was ever more the shyer poet despite her precedent status. Indicative of Bishop’s personality, “Exchanging Hats” adopts an embarrassed tone, while the narrator of “The Victor Dog” is confident. However, the two

104. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 132. 105. Materer, 218.

!47 poems both lack solutions for the rhetorical questions brought up in their respective topics: gender roles and sexual fluidity, and the quintessential, unobtainable life of an artist.

Javadizadeh reads Merrill’s poem as “another attempt on

Merrill’s part” to draw Bishop out of her shell and “into an acknowledgement of her starry achievements that need not compromise.”106

Fig. 9 Elizabeth Bishop in Key West.(© Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Louise Crane Papers, Yale University)

In summary, Merrill’s poem reaches an acceptance of philosophical knowledge on a lighter note than the foreboding

106. Javadizadeh, 140.

!48 final stanzas of “Exchanging Hats”. As a poem for Bishop, “The

Victor Dog” embraces her artistic success amidst acknowledging the demands of a poet. Merrill may as well believed Bishop surpassed the anxiety of influence and grants her the esteem she’d never admit. It celebrates Bishop’s modesty through the loyal dog, a trait she at least illustrated herself in the final line of “Cirque D’Hiver”: "Well, we have come this far."107

107. Bishop, Poems, 32.

!49 CHAPTER THREE: THE SHAMPOO & THE KIMONO

Fig. 10 Elizabeth Bishop holds a cat in Brazil, in the year 1954. (© Photo by J.L Castel, Vassar College Archives and Special Collections Library)

Written in 1952 during her time in Brazil, Bishop first revealed “The Shampoo” that August in a letter to close friend

Marianne Moore. Bishop sat on the poem until 1955 when it appeared in The New Republic and soon after, in her Pulitzer

Prize winning book, Poems: North & South - A Cold Spring. The collection was an expansion of her first book from 1946. “The

Shampoo” may reveal Bishop in her most tender and vulnerable state—the product is a surprisingly personal poem that utilizes metaphors in order to shroud an intimate moment between the !50 speaker and her lover. Her use of metaphors and even the topic of time directly influenced Merrill and his poem “The Shampoo.”

Despite Bishop's effort to conceal personal details, “The

Shampoo” is a love poem above all else. In the worried tone that underlies the poem, there is an acute awareness of time, and specifically, age:

The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading, gray, concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you've been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical; and look what happens. For Time is nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair in bright formation are flocking where, so straight, so soon? -- Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon.108

True to her character, Bishop never makes it clear that the affectionate poem addresses a woman. It is assumed to be for her

Brazilian partner Lota, who Bishop was living with at the time.

108. Bishop, Poems, 82.

!51 When speaking about “The Shampoo,” Merrill even said that

“Brazil must have represented for Elizabeth a kind of clarifying mirror.”109 The speaker, however, only refers to her as a gender- neutral “dear friend.”110 Biographically, it is known that Bishop had named the poem “Gray Hairs” in earlier drafts, and also wrote privately of de Macedo’s sprouting gray hairs which made her appear “exactly like a chickadee.”111 The poem was turned down by The New Yorker and Poetry. Bishop acknowledged to friends, with a tinge of sarcasm and perhaps hurt, that it was because there was “something indecent about it” and went as far as calling to attention its “tender passion.”112

Above all, the vivid imagery of “The Shampoo” is the most clear indication of what is and isn’t revealed in the deeply emotional poem. For its publication in the rampant age of confessional poetry, “The Shampoo” is still notoriously indirect like most of Bishop’s work. The oddly specific creatures on

109. James Merrill, “Elizabeth Bishop,” filmed 1988 at the New York Center for Visual History, video, 57:09, accessed December 5, 2018, https://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/Bishop.html. 110. Bishop, Poems, 82. 111. Millier, 248. 112. Victoria Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy, ed. Robert Giroux (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 72.

!52 rocks offers an image presented as if the speaker means to stall. The contradicting phrase of “still explosions”113 implies uncertainty, as if the speaker is unsure how to accurately depict the subject. From a creek to outer space, the reader is taken into a broader setting “to meet the rings around the moon”114 —an expansion of space that reflects how the speaker begins to open up to her feelings. As if warming up to her own sentiment, the final line in the first stanza mentions a personal “our” while the next continues to introduce first- person pronouns that still, powerfully, exclude gender: a touching “us” and a fond “you.”115

Despite the first two stanzas eventually giving away to personified moments, it isn’t until the third that the reader can comprehend whom the poem is for. The final stanza begins with the “shooting stars in your black hair,”116 a line that echoes the lichens and universal elements first brought up by the speaker. Costello analyzes this curious comparison of the lover to nature and its relation to time:

113. Bishop, Poems, 82. 114. Bishop, 82. 115. Bishop, 82. 116. Bishop, 82.

!53 The association of the lover's hair with the lichens in the next stanza has a grotesque effect, but again there is no repulsion. The shocks in the visually accurate oxymoron “still explosions” turn out to be imperceptible and harmless, making the aging process more acceptable. But the sense of alarm remains.117

Bishop managed to write of the graying hairs in a subtle but tender manner that, while not avoiding the anxiety of aging, manages to momentarily embrace it in the company of a loved one.

After all, time is the only subject mentioned by name with a capital ‘T.’ When the speakers asks, “so straight, so soon?”118 the only punctuation of its kind stands out in order to illustrate consistent worry. The repetition of the word ‘so’ along with the specific description of the subject’s hair texture adds a nostalgic tone to the rhetorical question. This is where the speaker discloses the most along with the poem’s true intentions.

In addition to the fear of decline, the contrasting images of slow-growing lichens and quick shooting stars indicate a complex relationship. Harrison writes that the poem suggests an intimacy “that ranged from the seeming immutability of lichens’

117. Costello, 74. 118. Bishop, Poems, 82.

!54 growth to the volatility of shooting stars.”119 However, before the poem can even become confessional, the em dash is utilized to obscure any fret along with the simple yet meaningful action of washing the subject’s hair. Merrill has commented on the diction of the poem and specifically the line “Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,”120 a gesture directed to the subject.

“Otherwise,” Merrill said, “the language is supremely plain, and the everyday gesture it clothes, supremely tender...It is as unexpected and convincing a love poem as I know.”121

It was in 1983 that Merrill mentioned the poem, in an interview with the Washington Post, where he also noted that “a young Bishop fan told me that his favorite was ‘The Shampoo.’ I wonder if it isn’t mine as well.”122 Four years earlier he had recited “The Shampoo” by memory at a memorial reading following

Bishop’s death.123 Because of the technical accomplishments of the three stanzas, in addition to the strict, crafty treatment of the topic, it is clear to see how “The Shampoo” captured

Merrill’s attention. Bishop’s use of oxymorons mirrors what

119. Harrison, 70. 120. Bishop, Poems, 82. 121. Merrill, Collective Prose, 239. 122. Merrill, 239. 123. Materer, 191.

!55 Merrill called one of her “loveliest tricks” which is “to say something and then to say, ‘No, that’s not what I mean’—to take it back and to present it differently. She manages simply to interiorize the theory.”124 Effectively, the poem transforms into an introspective piece. For example, following an affectionate moment in the ninth line, the speaker calls the lover

“precipitate and pragmatical”125 which is to say they suddenly appeared in her life hastily—and then Bishop immediately rejects that statement to say they’ve actually been considerate.

Bishop’s characteristic skill acknowledges her speaker is preoccupied with thought as well as emotion. The lines are therefore only a fraction of what she dares emotionally admit to the addressed and to the reader. This characteristic of Bishop’s craft, a reflection of her personality, inspired Merrill to write his poem “The Kimono” in 1992:

When I returned from lovers' lane My hair was white as snow. Joy, incomprehension, pain I'd seen like seasons come and go. How I got home again Frozen half dead, perhaps you know.

You hide a smile and quote a text: Desires ungratified

124. Merrill, Collective Prose, 126. 125. Bishop, Poems, 82.

!56 Persist from one life to the next. Hearths we strip ourselves beside Long, long ago were x'd On blueprints of "consuming pride."

Time out of mind, the bubble-gleam To our charred level drew April back. A sudden beam . . . Keep talking while I change into The pattern of a stream Bordered with rushes white on blue.126

Merrill drew inspiration from “The Shampoo” as immediately seen in its form, with the same three six-lined stanzas, and the title. Merrill stated that in thinking of “The Shampoo” he thought he “might try to write a love poem, which it is, in the same indirect manner with some of the equivalent abstract, difficult things to get through.”127 The poem’s flow differs from

Bishop’s in its nursery rhyme pattern. Because of this, it is easier to read than most of Merrill’s typically dense stanzas.

This characteristic of “The Kimono” reflects how the poet aimed for “ease + lucidity” in his poems, which are two values he associated with Bishop’s work.128

126. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 135. 127. Merrill, “James Merrill: A reading for Elizabeth Bishop,” Key West Literary Seminar. 128. Hammer, 488.

!57 Fig. 11 James Merrill happens to be wearing a blue kimono in the 1988 Voices and Visions hour feature on Elizabeth Bishop. (© Produced by New York Center for Visual History)

Another nod to “The Shampoo” is seen in how Merrill writes of time. Similar to how Bishop wrote of gray hairs almost four decades earlier, the poem begins with an image of the speaker’s hair being “white as snow.”129 A manuscript from Merrill’s journal reveals early lines for “The Kimono” written as “When I came back from lover’s lane / My hair was white as frost.”130 The symbolism of frost would introduce a cold, bitter tone from the speaker at the very beginning. In the poem's final form, a

129. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 135. 130. James Merrill, “Journal 7 - notes on David McIntosh,” WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions, accessed November 24, 2018. http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/12639.

!58 similar emotional detachment is directed at the reader by the end of the first stanza with “perhaps you know” and the frost is reworked when the speaker is described “Frozen half dead” when arriving home.131

While Bishop used graying hair to illustrate passing time, seasons in “The Kimono” evoke the same effect of change.

Furthermore, Merrill personifies feelings like Bishop did with the line, “For Time is / nothing if not amenable.”132 The cliched normalcy of seasons coming and going is meant to mirror how it is typical of love to change and leave: “Joy, incomprehension, pain / I'd seen like seasons come and go.”133 Romance is not hinted at until the second stanza of “The Kimono.” Unlike “The

Shampoo”, Merrill’s homage is not so much a positive love poem, but rather one in which the speaker mourns for loss affections—a heavy topic to compose towards the end of the poet’s life. His relationship with a younger and healthier man, Peter Hooten, late in life brought Merrill much grief as the companionship was often plagued with emotional problems. Yet Merrill preferred it to loneliness and stated “Life without Peter is grim”—without

131. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 135. 132. Bishop, Poems, 82. 133. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 135.

!59 Hooten he was companied only by the sickness which would end his life.134 Similar to his 1995 poems, such as the elegy for Bishop

“Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia” and the unpublished poem,

“Elizabeth you should have”, Merrill tapped into his self-pity with “The Kimono.” As he wrote in “Elizabeth you should have”

Merrill knew that "soon, to his misfortune, / Whoever I may be /

Will have run out of time.”135 Materer also noted how Merrill was

“facing the threat of illness and death” with the AIDS diagnosis he kept hushed, and in result, questions of life and art culminated “in the unusual bitterness” seen in his later poems.136

When the supposed lover in “The Kimono” is mentioned, the subject is, as Hammer put it, a “half-smiling teacher.”137 They are as gender mutual as Bishop’s “dear friend.”138 Again,

Merrill’s poem takes on a more obvious tone of discontent. The subject can hardly smile and the repetition of them hiding the

134. Hammer, 726. 135. James Merrill, “Elizabeth, you should have,” WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions, accessed November 24, 2018, http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/12661. 136. Materer, 201. 137. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 135. 138. Bishop, Poems, 82.

!60 expression emphasizes a failing relationship. The memory of

“Hearths we strip ourselves beside” is only brought up to acknowledge the times “Long, long ago were x’d” just as the plans they had made are likened to “blueprints.”139 The emotions behind these anecdotes are made more powerful when the speaker quotes from a text, again exaggerating how, like Bishop before him, someone else had dealt with the trials of love because of time’s cyclical nature. Hammer close-read the lines in his biography for Merrill and understood “our loves are like lives, incarnations, and we carry ‘Desires ungratified’ from one to the next, seeking illumination.”140

Another device that bolsters the pessimism in Merrill’s poem is the use of quotations that seemingly refer to words from the mouth of the straying lover themselves such as the

"‘consuming pride.’"141 The phrases then sting in their truth, and bring no relief to the speaker or the reader. However, the comfort is found in a kimono. It is put on much like the false smiles Merrill mentions. The kimono echoes the mention of seasons because in Japanese culture, various designs and fabrics

139. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 135. 140. Hammer, 489. 141. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 135.

!61 are worn depending on the occasion and time of year. The comparison of nature and the kimono is most direct in the final lines: “Keep talking while I change into / The pattern of a stream / Bordered with rushes white on blue.”142 Similar to how

Bishop distressed about time in “The Shampoo” with metaphors of nature, Merrill repeatedly alludes to seasons to acknowledge a similar awareness: the inevitability of death. The kimono is worn and mentioned as a costume in order to signify the symbolism of changing oneself as the weather. Unlike relationships with others and oneself, the kimono will for the most part remain the same.

“The Kimono” is not the first poem of Merrill’s to mention the garment. In 1987, a year after his AIDS diagnosis that previous April, he wrote “Investiture at Cecconi’s” which also features themes of time and specifically death. The first line of the poem “that dream (after the diagnosis)”143 refers to, not only his own diagnosis, but that of friend and literary critic,

Mr. Kalstone who was ill with AIDS at the time. The dream

Merrill had in real life which inspired the poem was one in which he revisited a Venetian tailor he knew named Cecconi.

142. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 135. 143. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 194.

!62 There Merrill dreamt being clothed in a white kimono gifted from

Kalstone.144 Aware his friend was sick, Merrill’s speaker responds to the gift with profound emotion: “Wonderstruck I sway, like a tree of tears. You-- / miles away, sick, fearful-- have yet arranged this / heartstopping present.”145 The robe has been called a metaphor of AIDS itself, as its depiction is rooted in thoughts of an oncoming passing. With its “Cool / silk in grave, white folds--Oriental mourning--”146 the wordplay on grave alludes to death, while also noting the significance of the kimono as a symbol. The em dashes Merrill utilizes to set apart the fretful thoughts about Kalstone happen to function similar to the dash ending “The Shampoo.” The words after both examples of punctuation are emotive diction that effectively conclude the poems.

The robe in “Investiture at Cecconi’s” offers the reader similar messages as the one in “The Kimono.” A drafted line of its description in the earlier poem echoes how Merrill later reuses the image: “An oriental robe of mourning <, white,> /

144. Timothy Materer, James Merrill’s Poetry Manuscripts, “Three Late Poems,” (blog), accessed November 17th, 2018. http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/merrill-poetry-mss/ three-late-poems) 145. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 195. 146. Merrill, 194.

!63 Beautiful as anything could be.”147 While Merrill’s speaker does not aesthetically admire his blue and white kimono, its beauty in “The Kimono” is revealed in its mundanity and how, when the speaker dresses in it, they are sidetracked from the negativity of their current state in the “charred level” and instead tell the subject to “Keep talking.”148 This demand creates an intimate scene. Because of the ellipsis that proceeds it, the line is a clear homage to “The Shampoo” whose speaker tells their lover to

“-- Come,”149 and have their hair washed. The dawning of the robe in “The Kimono” and the loving cleanse in “The Shampoo” serve as temporary answers to the subjects of grief and aging that are acknowledged. Merrill said so himself on the ending of his homage to Bishop’s famous poem: “it ends again with a simple, rather domestic gesture that seems to resolve some of the issues and ideas which have proceed it.”150

Thirteen years after Bishop’s death, “The Kimono” again professes how the style and literary devices of her work so

147. “invest17,” WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions, accessed November 24, 2018, http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/12239. 148. Merrill, Merrill: Poems, 136. 149. Bishop, Poems, 82. 150. Merrill, “James Merrill: A reading for Elizabeth Bishop,” Key West Literary Seminar.

!64 ingrained Merrill’s poetry—but especially as his own life was threatened with severance.

!65 CHAPTER FOUR: OUR GREATEST NATIONAL TREASURE

Elizabeth, you should have Seen me today, alone, In January sunlight, Ignored by midday crowds On the corner of Fifth and Fiftieth --Where, in a happier life, I might have sold balloons.151

After Bishop’s death in 1979, Merrill continued writing of the poet and composed lines for her. A poem like the aforementioned “Elizabeth, you should have” reveals how their friendship and Bishop’s influence allowed for philosophical contemplation and artistic renditions even in her absence.

Merrill said Bishop’s poems were “like the very light of day.”152

They kept him company through the years she could not.

“Elizabeth, you should have” is significant enough to analyze because it is a three-page draft, unfinished without a title and uncharacteristic of Merrill’s poems. Its raw details stand out from the elitist diction and refined, high-art passages Merrill often published. Although it is not his elegy for Bishop, the poem is as powerful as one not least because it

151. Merrill, “Elizabeth, you should have,” WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions, accessed December 2nd, 2018, http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/12661. 152. Merrill, Collective Prose, 229.

!66 was composed close to the end of Merrill’s life when he was consciously reflective and nostalgic. He was living with AIDS and understood his days were numbered. As he posits in the tenth stanza, “...to his misfortune / Whoever I may be / Will have run out of time.”153 The matter did not sit well with Merrill, who already felt plagued with separate woes of life. For example, as in “The Kimono,” Merrill continues to refer to troubled love with specific pronouns. The line, “He called me co-dependent” most likely refers to beau Peter Hooten.154 The imagery of drowning that follows is a cliched depiction of sorrow, that could almost be regarded as juvenile for Merrill. The poem further utilizes characteristics of confessional poetry with the use of “I” and commonplace settings. The speaker shifts through

New York City, from a therapist’s office to the sidewalk for street food. The lines directed to Bishop are tragic and devastating in the speaker’s resigned tone and disclosures:

I didn’t dare go home, Didn’t know where to ask

153. Merrill, “Elizabeth_You_Should_Have_003.jpg,” WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions, accessed December 2nd, 2018, http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/ 12661. 154. Merrill, “Elizabeth_You_Should_Have_002.jpg,” WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions, accessed December 2nd, 2018, http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/ 12661.

!67 (That falafel was salty) For just a drink of water. Didn’t know anything--

Where I lived, who I was (As you in your poem, Elizabeth, For better or worse did).155

With “your poem,” Merrill refers to “In the Waiting Room” which the speaker discusses with his therapist in an earlier stanza. Merrill found inspiration from this poem for “The

Kimono” and even his elegy for Bishop. The poem is in free verse and mentions the speaker’s surroundings in order to exaggerate that she is unsure of her future and hesitant to understand.

Bishop writes “I could read” in parenthesis which signals the speaker is pubescent. Nevertheless, she finds herself aware of adult experiences that await her after picking up the February

1918 copy of National Geographic.156 The magazine is known to be for adults as the speaker notes the room is full “of grown-up people.”157 Although she repeats specific, concrete settings throughout the poem—the waiting room of a dentist’s office in

Worcester, Massachusetts on the fifth of February 1918—it is the figurative image in the fourth stanza that signals the speaker’s

155. Merrill, “Elizabeth_You_Should_Have_002.jpg.” 156. Bishop, Poems, 179. 157. Bishop, Poems.

!68 true place in life. The waiting room suddenly begins “sliding beneath a big black wave, / another, and another. / Then I was back in it. / The War was on.”158

The First World War would end later that year, but Merrill understood the metaphor to represent time itself. In “Elizabeth, you should have” Merrill writes how Bishop’s poem “was somehow the story / Of my life, too” and how his “childhood / Seemed often to slip past, / Waiting for life to begin,” a sentiment immediately contrasted with the speaker’s present day of old age and sickness: “Waiting, awake and lonely / For my nurse to come and wake me.”159 Moreover, Merrill includes similar imagery found

“In the Waiting Room” for Bishop’s elegy, “Overdue Pilgrimage to

Nova Scotia,” in the following lines:

In living as in poetry, your art Refused to tip the scale of being human By adding unearned weight. “New, tender, quick”— Nice watchwords; yet how often they invited The anguish coming only now to light In letters like photographs from Space, revealing Your planet tremulously bright through veils As swept, in fact, by inconceivable

158. Bishop, Poems, 181. 159. Merrill, “Elizabeth_You_Should_Have_001.jpg,” WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions.

!69 Heat and turbulence—but there, I’ve done it, Added the weight.160

The heat and turbulence that sweeps Bishop’s planet, a spatial metaphor for her life or solely her work, echoes the description of Bishop’s waiting room in Massachusetts. The room at the dental office was “bright” and “too hot” and notably,

Merrill’s imagery further reflects the first photograph young

Bishop saw in the National Geographic: “the inside of a volcano,

/ black, and full of ashes; / then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire.”161 Bishop’s volcano may represent the emotional eruptions to her life that she would later experience through depression and alcoholism. Merrill calls her troubles

“inconceivable” because of his initial belief that nothing seemed to affect her poetry which refused “to tip the scale of being human.”162 Merrill reiterated the profound yet compound and modest nature of Bishop’s work in 1991 when he said she created an “oeuvre on a human scale. Simple enough for a child, subtle enough for a philosopher, sad, amusing, never dull.”163

160. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” Voetica Poetry Spoken. 161. Bishop, Poems, 179. 162. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” Voetica Poetry Spoken. 163. Merrill, Collective Prose, 163.

!70 In his elegy for Bishop, Merrill “adds the weight” to

Bishop’s legacy as an act of accolading the poet further than she preferred.164 Despite having praised her the same with poems like “The Kimono” and “The Victor Dog” this poem stands out because “Merrill’s devotion to Bishop is the theme of ‘Overdue

Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia.’”165 At the Key West Literary Seminar in 1992, Merrill reiterated how the poem “is an account of visiting Great Village in Nova Scotia in 1988 or '89...addressed to Elizabeth.”166 Ten years after Bishop passed, the poem first appeared in the New Yorker.167 The poem was also notably published the year of Merrill’s own death in his 1995 collection, A Scattering of Salts.168 By the time Merrill passed he had been “awarded virtually every major honor given to poets” including the National Book Award twice and the Pulitzer and

Bollingen Prizes.169 Despite of, or perhaps because of his

164. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” Voetica Poetry Spoken. 165. Hammer, 800. 166. Merrill, “James Merrill: A reading for Elizabeth Bishop,” Key West Literary Seminar. 167. Travisano, “What Tribute She Could Bear.” 168. Materer, 194. 169. Haskell, “James Merrill: A reading for Elizabeth Bishop,” Key West Literary Seminar.

!71 success, Merrill kept both Bishop’s work and friendship on his mind throughout the years.

As the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic

Development argues, Merrill was drawn “to what one might call

Bishop’s human, impressionable, and marvelously non-monumental use of traditional poetic forms.”170 The influence of Bishop’s characteristic skill is seen in “Overdue Pilgrimage.” Merrill maintains a conversational tone throughout and utilizes exclamation points to do so with phrases like “Look, those were elms!” and “Excuse our dust!”171 The speaker mocks their own voice, calling them “phrases for tomorrow’s cards” while also again referring to correspondence kept with Bishop over the years.172 However, while keeping a varied, irregular rhyme scheme, Merrill evokes Bishop’s craft through writing the five stanzas as subtle pentameter sonnets. Bishop symbolically and immediately appears in “Overdue Pilgrimage” in the first stanza:

“a whole wall hung / With women’s black straw hats, some rather smart / —All circa 1915, like the manners / Of the fair, soft-

170. Travisano, “What Tribute She Could Bear.” 171. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” Voetica Poetry Spoken. 172. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia.”

!72 spoken girl who shows us through.”173 Bishop loved straw hats and wore them in her Key West portraits. Moreover, she certainly contrasted Merrill’s outspoken nature for most of her life.

Merrill acknowledges Bishop’s personal life when he presents her as a child in the second stanza. He imagines “The child whose mother had been put away / Might wake, climb to a window, feel the bay” which touches on the poet’s early life when her mother was institutionalized for poor mental health.174

Scholars have noted how Merrill “sees that he has failed to offer homage to Bishop” as exhibited through the social anxiety present in the poem.175 When Merrill talks about the “soft- spoken” tour guide, his similarities with Bishop, specifically where they came from, is acknowledged while maintaining casual nostalgia: “She knows these things you would have known by heart

/ And we, by knowing you by heart, foreknew.”176 Luke Carson further notes “the poem allows us to suspect that Merrill did

173. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia.” 174. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia.” 175. Luke Carson, “James Merrill's Manners and Elizabeth Bishop's Dismay,” Twentieth Century Literature 50, no. 2 (2004): 184, accessed November 2, 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4149277. 176. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” Voetica Poetry Spoken.

!73 not, as he claims, know Bishop ‘by heart.’”177 This can be argued due to the bond the speaker illustrates between Bishop and him in the elegy.

For example, Merrill alludes to Bishop’s 1965 poem,

“Filling Station” in order to exaggerate what he remembers about her. It is an attempt by Merrill to “narrow the distinction between author and poetic persona.”178 Diction and imagery from

“Filling Station” is visible in the elegy such as the word dirty in the “dirty look” Merrill describes. Costello acknowledges that the Bishop poem has “an attitude of class revulsion”179 seen in the first lines:

Oh, but it is dirty! —this little filling station, oil-soaked, oil-permeated to a disturbing, over-all black translucency. Be careful with that match!180

Merrill first refers to “Filling Station” directly, with the speaker recalling the poem when he stops at an ESSO gas station: “We filled up at the shrine.”181 However, as Bishop’s

177. Carson, 185. 178. Materer, 194. 179. Costello, 37. 180. Bishop, Poems, 125. 181. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” Voetica Poetry Spoken.

!74 speaker felt in “Filling Station,” Merrill’s speaker seems emotionally detached from the station and the town it is located in. After all, “Overdue Pilgrimage” is primarily spent leaving

Bishop’s hometown as opposed to reflecting within it. The speaker’s detachment and use of the negatively connoted word

“dirty” establishes a state of unease in the scene. Moreover, a car wash is needed before departing the town, in which “the pent-up fury of the storm hits: streaming, / Foaming ‘emotions’— impersonal, cathartic.”182 The speaker’s sentimental reflection during the removal of the dirtiness mimics the way “Filling

Station” ends, that is, with an unlikely, overwhelming sense of emotion: “Somebody loves us all.”183

Merrill is overcome with similar affection, but is for

Bishop as a person realized albeit with self-contempt. Carson also analyzed the speaker’s ending: “while he maintains his cosmopolitan aloofness, he is embarrassed by the failure of his manners...[and] sees that he has failed to offer homage to

Bishop.”184 This is undoubtedly the anxious aftermath of Bishop’s influence. Merrill worries he did not do her art justice—

182. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia.” 183. Bishop, Poems, 126. 184. Carson, 184.

!75 especially if she’d have considered it “unearned” or again, refuse the tribute in “dismay.”185

Nevertheless, Merrill publicly and literarily supported

Bishop. Two months after her passing, Merrill spoke on the lack of critical acclaim for Bishop during her lifetime. He claimed a next generation of open-minded readers would better understand:

[Her poetry’s] ease, this natural perfection, along with the technical mastery it implied, were not always prized in the workshops. Young people saw by other lights...Her fellow poets read her, as E.M. Forster said of Jane Austen, “with the mouth open and the mind closed.”186

Spencer Reece, a mentee and friend, wrote that Merrill was

“one of the earliest champions of Bishop, and he wanted to pass on to me what he knew of her, not to show off that he knew her, but to help me.”187 Now it is his repertoire of twelve collections that provides a modern reader, not only with an understanding of his literary genius, but an indication of

Bishop’s talent as well. His mastery of traditional forms in the modernity of 20th century poetry is inseparable from North &

South. By analyzing the poems inspired by and written for

Bishop, their relationship can be interpreted as one that

185. Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” Voetica Poetry Spoken. 186. Merrill, Collective Prose, 230. 187. Reece, “To Recall, To Praise,” Granta Magazine.

!76 impacted Merrill’s work beyond the bounds of inspiration. She provided Merrill guidance and insight on the craft of writing both on paper and through everyday life. Bishop’s influence brought Merrill anxiety to the point where his elegy for her illustrates caution—he did not want to offend her even a decade after he’s been left with only her poems in the world. He loved

“both the poet and the person.”188

Mark Strand, a mutual friend of the two, wrote of Merrill alluding to Bishop as “our greatest national treasure” in 1977, two years before her sudden death.189 Examining Merrill’s relationship with Bishop as a distinct interrelation through their balance of friendship and professional admiration bolsters a reader’s analysis of his work. Close reading any Merrill poem provides insight to what he treasured all the same.

188. Hammer, 484. 189. Mark Strand, “Elizabeth Bishop: an Introduction,” in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, eds. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 243.

!77 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art: Letters. Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Carson, Luke. “James Merrill's Manners and Elizabeth Bishop's Dismay.” Twentieth Century Literature 50, no. 2 (2004): 184. Accessed November 2, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4149277.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Fenton, James. “The Many Arts of Elizabeth Bishop.” The New York Review, May 15, 1997. Accessed October 14, 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/05/15/the-many-arts-of- elizabeth-bishop/

Fountain, Gary and Peter Brazeau. Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

Hammer, Langdon. James Merrill: Life and Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy. Edited by Robert Giroux. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Haskell, Arlo. “James Merrill: A reading for Elizabeth Bishop.” Key West Literary Seminar, audio archives | vault (blog). Last modified April 4, 2017. https://www.kwls.org/audio/james- merrill-a-reading-for-elizabeth-bishop/.

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