A Note on “The 1001 Seances”

Figure 1. North Plain St., Altered Polaroid self-portrait by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Ithaca, New York, 1980

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H. A. Sedgwick

W hen Eve died, in April 2009, her papers were scattered, disorganized, and incomplete. The process of sorting through, organizing, and preserving what remains is still ongoing. In August 2009 we were looking through a box marked “Eve’s personal papers” that had been stored in a rented storage locker. Among the papers was a photocopy of a typescript of “The 1001 Seances,” Eve’s essay on James Merrill. I remembered the paper, but it had been many years since Eve had mentioned it to me, and I had not known that it still existed. As far as we knew then, this was the only surviving copy. The typescript was undated, but something about the date could be inferred from the Cornell University address in its heading. Eve’s paper focuses on “The Book of Ephraim” in Merrill’s The Divine Comedies, which was first published in 1976. After five years as a graduate student and instructor at Yale, Eve had moved to Cornell in the fall of 1976, supported by a two-year postdoctoral Mellon fellowship. So this typescript was produced during her fellowship. It’s quite possible, however, that she was already working on the essay during her last year at Yale. We can further narrow down the date to the first year of Eve’s fellowship because of a letter in her files dated June 7, 1977, from the editor of Salmagundi. The letter declines to accept “The 1001 Seances” but encourages resubmission with some changes to make it less “like an academic paper.” It appears that Eve chose not to change her paper. We prepared a clean, digitized copy of the paper. In doing so, we checked Eve’s quotations from Merrill and made a few small corrections. Additionally, Eve had made a few very minor handwritten changes in wording on the photocopy, and we have incorporated those. We have since learned (with the help of Google) of the existence of two

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other photocopies of Eve’s paper. One is in the Merrill archive at Yale’s Beinecke Library. It was given to the archives, as part of two boxes of Merrill’s papers, by J. D. McClatchy, Merrill’s literary executor, in 1991. McClatchy had received the paper from Joseph Gordon, a close friend of Eve’s and a fellow graduate student, along with McClatchy, at Yale.1 The other photocopy is in the files of Mark Bauer, Joseph Gordon’s partner. In 1996 Bauer had organized a panel on Merrill for that year’s meeting of the Modern Language Association. Eve had agreed to give a talk (about twenty-five minutes long) based on a much-shortened version of “The 1001 Seances” and had sent Bauer a photocopy of the full-length paper, which is what he has now. These two photocopies both have a Hamilton College address on the first page, so Eve presumably retyped that page after she moved to Hamilton (her first faculty position) in the fall of 1978. The other pages of both these photocopies, however, were clearly made from the same typescript that Eve used in making the Cornell photocopy that we have. There’s much that we don’t still know about the history of this paper, but what we do know makes it clear that Eve maintained her interest in her writing about Merrill over at least the twenty-year period from 1976 to 1996.

A dear friend of Eve’s remarked that readers of GLQ may not recognize in “The 1001 Seances” the Eve who was “the founding voice of Queer Theory” — that the author of this essay may seem like an Eve before she was Eve. This remark deserves careful thought. There are, of course, many differences between the Eve of this essay and the more familiar Eve of the 1990s. Looking back, though, for me the most salient difference between the Eve of “The 1001 Seances” and the Eve of, say, “Queer and Now” lies in her complex and changing relation to her own poetry. In 1976, although Eve hoped to earn her living in academia and certainly had serious ambitions as a literary critic, she thought of herself, in the first place, as a poet. In October 2006, in a public conversation with Gavin Butt at the Frieze Art Fair in London, Eve set out to briefly “tell the story of my development as a critic.” She went on to say, “I didn’t start out to be a critic. I started out to be a poet from very, very, very early on, but my muse was very fickle, and so there was a lot of time when I just couldn’t write. And so my sense of identity as that kind of a writer was kind of excruciatingly tenuous. So I found my way — I’m talking about college and graduate school here — into seeing myself as a literary critic.”2 The transition, however, was a slow one, extending well into the 1980s. In the most recent curriculum vitae of Eve’s that we have, all five of her publications

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from 1980 and earlier are poems or groups of poems. Eve’s first listed publication as a critic, apart from her dissertation, was in PMLA in 1981.3 It was also as a poet that Eve sought and received early recognition. In the section of Eve’s curriculum vitae listing her awards and honors, there are five listings from 1968 to 1975; all are prizes for poetry. The next listing is from 1984; it’s an award for a piece of critical writing. Both external and internal causes must have made Eve’s self-identification as a poet increasingly difficult to maintain from the late 1970s through the 1980s. First, during her two-year fellowship at Cornell, Eve assembled the manuscript for a book of her poems. Its title was Traceable, Salient, Thirsty: Poems, 1973 – 1977. She was, however, unable to find a publisher for this book. Among her papers, in addition to several revisions of the manuscript, is some of her correspondence with publishers, as well as a list of publishers to whom the manuscript had been sub- mitted. These papers show a sustained effort over a number of years, continuing well beyond her move to Hamilton College in the fall of 1978, before it was finally abandoned. Many of the poems from the manuscript were included, years later, when Eve finally did publish her first book of poems, Fat Art, Thin Art, in 1994. Others remain unpublished. Second, in 1978 Eve began work on a book-length poem, The Warm Decem- bers, that she was (as she wrote in her note to the poem) “to regard as current work” for the following decade. She made extensive preparatory notes and plans for the poem, including a trip to the south and east coasts of England to study the poem’s locales. She continued to work actively on the poem while she was at Hamilton and after she moved to Boston University in 1981, although she was also working then on the critical essays that would be published as Between Men in 1985, shortly after her move to Amherst College. The Warm Decembers remained a central project for her during her years at Amherst as well. But, although she continued planning and sketching fragments, it proved “unable to be written.” In her note, in 1994, to the publication of the half-finished poem, she sees “quite precisely the 1984 line . . . [that] . . . was the last one destined to have been written out of a relatively seamless sense of the integrity and momentum of this writing process. Yet it took me three or four more years of a punishing incredulity to understand that this poem was not being written. In fact it was nine years . . . before I seemed to be able to write poetry of any kind.”4 In saying, in 2006, that she came to see herself as a literary critic, Eve does not say that she ceased to see herself as a poet. Indeed, she was again highly productive as a poet in the 1990s while her critical writing became more personal

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and more experimental (one of the graduate seminars she offered then was called Experimental Critical Writing), extending even to writing about her own poetry (in “A Poem Is Being Written”). So, to the literary critic of “Queer and Now,” the boundary between criti- cism and poetry was more permeable, more fractal, than to the newly credentialed literary critic of “The 1001 Seances.” But it seems to me that there may be a further way in which Eve’s very active engagement with her own poetry affected her writing in “The 1001 Seances.” I remember Eve being intensely engaged with “The Book of Ephraim” and working on her essay for an extended period. I remember, too, that she sent a copy of her paper to Merrill and that she received back from him a short, polite note, thanking her for sending it, but saying nothing of substance. I remember that Mer- rill’s evident lack of interest was a serious disappointment to Eve. Thinking about it now, I doubt whether there was any indication that he had read her paper. Although the reader may perhaps feel that Merrill would not have been altogether pleased if he had read the paper, my guess is that this was not what Eve felt when she imagined him reading it. Although the paper is plain- spoken in places about what Eve perceived as limitations in his writing, she gen- erally suggests that Merrill was aware of these limitations himself and that he worked with them in productive ways. What are most salient in the paper are the care, the intelligence, and the empathy with which Eve reads Merrill. I imagine that he was the reader she had most in mind in writing this paper. I imagine that she hoped her paper would create an impression and would perhaps be an opening to further communication. Eve evidently felt that Merrill’s poetry was close enough to her own for her to be able to learn from him. For example, her formal use of capitals for the voice of a queer little god in her long poem “Trace at 46,” which was written in the late 1970s, is clearly adapted from Merrill’s use of small caps for the voice of the spirit Ephraim. She uses this typographic differentiation of Merrill’s again, for the voice of her therapist Shannon, throughout her second book of poetry, A Dia- logue on Love, published in 1999.5 Also, Dialogue is written in the Japanese hai- bun form, an interweaving of poetry (haiku) and prose that Eve first learned from reading Merrill. I want to say that it was primarily as a poet that Eve was drawn to read Merrill and to write about him. The absence of any hint in this essay on Merrill’s poetry that she herself is a poet might then seem puzzling. To me it suggests more than simply a carefully maintained separation between her critical writing and her poetry. Her absence as a poet suggests a reserve, perhaps a reluctance to make

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that particular claim on the reader’s interest, that constrained her voice as she wrote this essay.

Notes

The writing of this note has been greatly helped by conversations and correspondence with Mark Bauer, Jonathan Goldberg, Joseph Gordon, Neil Hertz, Sarah McCarry, Tina Meyerhoff, Michael Moon, and Joshua Wilner. I am grateful to the Beinecke Library at Yale University and the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library for sharing their archives of Merrill’s books and papers. I am especially grateful for the help of Sarah McCarry, who is working with me on Eve’s archives and who did most of the work in researching and preparing the manuscript of “The 1001 Seances.”

1. At the top of the first page of my copy of this paper — the copy bearing Eve’s Cornell address — is Eve’s handwritten inscription “For Joe Gordon,” which I take to be a dedication. 2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gavin Butt, “Art, Writing, Performativity,” Frieze Foun- dation, MP3 audio file, October 13, 2006, www.friezefoundation.org/talks/detail/art _writing_performativity/. 3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96.2 (1981): 255–70. 4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Note on ‘The Warm Decembers,’ ” in Fat Art, Thin Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 159. 5. For a short description of Eve’s formal ambitions for A Dialogue on Love, see “Art, Writing, Performativity.”