WITH LARRY RIVERS AND THE
POETS IN SOUTHAMPTON
Visitors to my uncle James Merrill’s house in Stonington, CT were regularly stunned by a seven-by-nine-foot Larry Rivers painting of a bucolic Water Mill scene mounted in the
attic, which had been remodeled to accommodate it. The painting served as a trompe
l’oeil wall in front of which, at five in the evening, the poet and his friends would assemble for cocktails and cigarettes.
The subject was a 19th century one, familiar perhaps from Corot: a central tree, a
pair of huge cows on a meadow, a late summer’s day clouds and racing Long Island fog.
But walking about in front of it—the painting compelled viewers to move in order to
see—felt more like looking at a film that a static tableau. Everything—the tree, the grass, the cows—had been half-erased, wiped with a rag, leaving only hints and indications, a dab of color or no color at all but the charcoal of an immensely self-assured preparatory under-drawing. Through the vivid and improvised gestures and erasures, I felt the city- bred painter’s excitement, a 30-year old saxophonist who was simultaneously discovering the Hampton’s countryside and 19th century landscape painting. It was almost as though
Rivers had foreseen the speed with which the car, and its dedicated weekenders, would transform the South Fork’s cow pastures into acres and acres of mega-mansions.
Page 1 of 18 A work of such size and vivacity challenged what Merrill was himself about. The
multi-layered set pieces of the neoclassical poets of the 1950’s, such as Richard Wilbur’s
“For the New Station in Rome,” or Merrill’s “Hotel de l’Univers et Portugal,” kept the
reader at a formal distance with their deft metrics and metaphorical scaffolding;
equivalents of the then fashionable four-button suit. Rivers’ painting, with its scumbled
rubbings, its splotchy unfinished look, invited the viewer to participate in the
impulsiveness of the artist’s rethinkings and improvisations.
Peter Hooten remembers Merrill saying about a small ghost-like Rivers still life
(1956) in their 72nd Street apartment, how much he had once wanted to write the way
Larry painted. Merrill’s second novel, The (Diblos) Notebook, with its lists, diagrams and
scratched-out paragraphs, its fore fronting of the compositional dilemma, reads as a direct
homage to Rivers’ Water Mill landscape, as do Merrill’s two breakthrough poems of the
early 60’s, “Urban Convalescence,” and “The Thousand and Second Night.” Like Rivers,
Merrill employs pastiche as a way of saluting his sacred monsters; not Corot or Courbet,
but Yeats and Eliot. Mockery is but another form of homage.
Pastiche suits a reality as up-for-grabs as New York before landmark legislation,
where any building that caught the eye was likely to be demolished in the next instant—a
triumph of commercial reality over human need. For Rivers and Merrill, and for many of
their war time generation, modern life exuded a post-Hiroshima impermanence: less a
question of if, than when. And, as they composed, so they lived: always on the go, as if only a speed of footwork could avert the impending disaster. Was it Adlai Stevenson who remarked, at the opening of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1946, that our one hope of survival lay in not being around when the Big One struck?
2 Whenever I visited, Merrill kept insisting that I look up Rivers in Southampton.
“He has a house on Little Plains, in back of the high school. I know the two of you will
like each other.” He knew that I, then only a teenager, admired Larry’s work, and that, for
a substantial $50 out of my monthly allowance, I had purchased a drawing of his son
Steven, done in the style of Picasso’s blue period saltimbanques. My uncle didn’t say
that, after some rather heavy browbeating from Larry’s dealer, he had provided the
$2,500 down payment that enabled Larry to move out of the shack on Toylsome Lane he
was renting and obtain the mortgage on the eight-room house in which he would reside
for the rest of his life—a generosity that still awed Rivers when he informed me of it in
1999—not a loan, but a gift!
Why my uncle wanted me to meet Rivers he didn’t say, other than we would enjoy each other’s company. In the cultural desert of Southampton wasn’t that incentive enough? But he must have known that Larry held the keys to a whole new world: not wealthy society, but the artistic underworld of Bohemia.
Under normal circumstances, I might never have followed through on my uncle
Jimmy’s suggestion. I didn’t possess anything like his social appetite; or rather, I had more personal concerns than meeting someone who happened to be a struggling artist.
For that matter, what did I know about art? In first grade, at St. Bernard’s School, my paint spills were such that I received an F in Art on my first report card, and was thereafter sentenced to making clay tunnels through which I rolled marbles. None of my childhood nannies knew English well enough to read to me, and later, when I had learned to read, I saw illustrations as distractions to be skipped over. In consequence, I had not acquired the visual language by means of which artists illustrate narrative. Nor did it help
3 to be cross-eyed, with one eye farsighted and the other nearsighted, neither easily
accommodating corrective lenses. With such handicaps, I had not dared to enroll in even
a basic art appreciation course. Even today, despite years of haunting museums and
sojourning with artist friends, I feel uncertain about the meaning of what I’m seeing: the
color values, the perspective planes, the way the eye is led from A to B. In the
circumstances, one can understand my hesitancy in inflicting myself on Larry Rivers.
It happened, however, that I found myself in Southampton in the dead of March in
1956, for an appointment the following morning. With time on my hands, late that
afternoon, I resolved to drop in unannounced on Rivers. After all, I did not need
directions to locate his house.
“You must be Jimmy’s nephew,” Larry remarked as he held open the door,
appraising me with a portrait painter’s hawk-eyed scrutiny before I could open my
mouth. Then this very handsome, black-haired, falcon-beaked man introduced me to his
13-year old son Steven, his 17-year old stepson Joseph, and his mother in law Berdie,
kindly insisting over my protests on my staying for dinner. By the end of the evening, we
had become firm friends.
Over the next four or five summers Larry’s house, with its eight-foot tall male and female nudes looming from the variously reconstructed walls, its blue painted kitchen floor boards, its stuffed sharp-shinned hawk on the fireplace mantel reminding me of
Larry’s animal alertness (eyes that did more than look, that seemed ready to seize with a predatory grasp whatever came into view), became a second home for me. I could drop by whenever I liked, at whatever time. Strangely, Larry usually seemed glad to be interrupted. If he had work in preparation for a show, he would excuse himself and I’d
4 come back later. Now and then he might take me to one or another of the black dance halls out toward Riverhead where he was blowing.
The house was large enough that houseguests were often down from the city for a few days. To my surprise, I met the clothed originals of those life-sized nudes; among them Larry’s estranged wife, Augusta, and the poet Frank O’Hara. With no money to speak of, Larry entertained at home. The wit and pungency of his conversation (uttered in an idiosyncratic Bronx accent that people like Merrill could never resist imitating) were such that many of his friends would drop by to see what new piece of art history he was preparing to turn on its pretty head. So contagious was the atmosphere that a number became my friends as well.
My horizons expanded in 1957 when I met Merrill’s close friend and Rivers’ dealer, John Bernard Myers, a former puppeteer who had helped edit Charles Henri
Ford’s surrealist magazine, View, during the war. After summering for a couple of years in Venice, this self-styled “tracker of the marvelous,” had taken a house a block from
Larry in downtown Southampton despite being unable to drive. But Southampton has streets, not canals, and because I had a car, I found myself pressed into service as John’s occasional chauffeur. A number of artists from John’s Tibor de Nagy gallery either lived, like Larry and Fairfield Porter, in Southampton year-round, or summered nearby, like
Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie and Helen Frankenthaler. With John’s social appetite, the scene extended into a veritable pantheon of New York’s art royalty who, for reasons obscure, had suddenly blown onto my native isle.
I actually relished playing Caliban to their shipwrecked Tempest crew. That I personally despised Southampton did not prevent me from escorting them to the whitest,
5 least tar-filled beaches and showing them where to obtain oysters and dig for the choicest littleneck clams. On a couple of occasions, I even conjured my grandfather Charlie
Merrill’s tuxedoed valet, Leroy Johnson, then in his farewell summer with us, to serve
daiquiris in champagne goblets by my family’s pool with its thumb-sized tiles of a rich sapphire blue. Some of them may still recall the small black man with his brimming silver tray advancing towards them against the pink-orange background of zinnias, tiger lilies, brick walls and tall copper slide, just as I remember the ample-bodied painter ladies in their one-piece bathing suits, magnified like miniature whales by the sunken pool
lights. As for the drunken Trinculos, they too were to be found, prostrate at dawn in the
back seat of my blue and white Bel Air, doing their best to vomit gracefully into the side
door’s ashtray.
Their dereliction owed much to the recently deceased genius loci, Jackson
Pollock. If Pollock could drink, dance and generally spatter his way into immortality,
why couldn’t they? In their voyage into the unpremeditated courage was everything, the
courage to paint with the body, piling up the gestural waves until a title emerged, “Blue
Disorder,” “Pale Rider,” “Number 13; ’57.”
At this distance it’s hard to imagine how work so stripped of reference could
command such prestige. What was memorable about the drips, the splashes, the rush of
color squeezed out of a tube? But those swipes of the leading elbow, those big arcs of the
moving hand catered to the instinctual self rather than one’s visual memory. They painted
“like birds singing,” for the joy of letting go.
At the parties, the days’ work done and the night open to celebration, it was clear how fulfilling they found their instantaneous medium. “You don’t paint?” they’d ask in
6 disbelief. “Why, you must!” (as if I had only to pick up a rag and a set of brushes my
identity issues to be resolved). Their gatherings provided a welcome escape from the moneyed boredom, the ring of the cashbox that marked our every step. For Larry and
Fairfield and the other displaced New Yorkers, the parties represented more than a social
“scene.” This was family, an expression of Bohemian solidarity.
Southampton, for me, was home and my localisms (such as calling old Artie, the veteran Beach Club lifeguard, “the man with the hair,”) seemed to amuse O’Hara when I showed him my one completed story. I knew Frank mainly as a poet, a small if essential part of the art world figure that he cut. At Merrill’s invitation I reviewed O’Hara’s
Meditations in an Emergency for an issue of Voices. What did I make of poetry so
different from what my uncle was composing?
According to the New Critics, poetry’s power derives from its metaphorical way
of saying one thing while implying another; the implication, like a football, gathering
weight as it spirals downfield into the receiver’s arms. What beguiled O’Hara and his
accomplices, however, was not power but a moment-to-moment lightness: why compel
anything of a viewer other than a gasp of surprise and perhaps amusement? They
replaced the deliberate scaffolding of figurative language with sensational images; the
more mixed the references, they argued, the more alive the writing. Rather than construct
multi-leveled arguments, they sought a poetry that hovered on the page’s surface with the
instantaneous flatness of a painting; or a series of random actions tossed together in the
same way one might prepare a salad. As with a Rivers painting, it was not the
“smorgasbord of reality” that counted, but the “I did this, then I did that” recording
7 process. O’Hara’s poems tell us what it was like to be young and poor with lots of pals in
New York, undertaking several different things at once, successfully.
By now, my friends’ work was beginning to turn up in the classroom. I was delighted to hear the novelist John Hawkes read O’Hara’s “Poem” in his fiction class, of all places. But to Hawkes that’s what so many of the poems were— stories:
The eager note on my door said, “Call me,
call when you get in! So I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and
headed straight for the door. It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!
Compared to the end-stopped lines in traditional poetry, each a deliberately crafted unit, the effect here is breezy and whimsical. I was thrilled by the insouciance of the throwaway line endings and run on conjunctions that set up the very New York comment, “But/ the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk;” distracted maybe, but so self-defining! Like a Rivers painting, “Poem” is all about speed: the spontaneous jumble of city life, so much activity headed where? When in the final quatrain the speaker arrives, months later, at his rendezvous, he finds his would-be host, the fabled
“jai-alai champion…there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that/ ran down the stairs.”
8 Are we to take such a macabre bit of news as a not untypical tenement happening? Or is the flatness that of a painting, the smear of red in a de Kooning or an Arshile Gorky abstraction? For me, O’Hara’s “Poem” reflects the jet-propelled sensibility he shared with Koch, Rivers and Ashbery: must one’s conversational feet ever touch the ground?
Never do business with a friend? Frank made a point of doing business with most of them, and the time he put in touting them in his day job at the Museum of Modern Art was merely the minor part of an ongoing 24-hour involvement. Even an hour or two asleep was likely to find him in one or another of their arms. And his talent was such that ex-lovers remained, just as remarkably, friends. He was the spirit of the community, their artistic catalyst and their most lucid apologist. The critics who defined Action Painting,
Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, were persuasive theorists; but they had no clue as to what gave a painting its vitality. Frank had a pair of eyes and his comments reveal what the slashes of knife-wielded paint, the drips, squiggles and gestures were actually about.
But family was family and Frank drew a line between the vanguard he befriended and a fly on the wall like me. I remember once, in Larry’s absence, crashing a birthday bash Frank was giving himself in Larry’s house. A number of friends were, I knew, attending and it seemed a chance of catching up. When I walked in with my brother-in- law asking for Larry, Frank was far from taken in. He only reacted, however, when I blundered in on him at midnight smooching a male friend. Then, in one of his drunken rages, he threw me out. A person who wasn’t sharing the bohemian life had no place at a party of his.
9 This whole-hearted commitment is what made O’Hara’s death a year later, run
over at 2 a.m. by a dune buggy on the private part of the Fire Island beach, so
catastrophic. Frank was Larry’s best friend. But there were, as Larry pointed out at
Frank’s funeral, “at least sixty people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their
best friend.”
But that made him their artistic conscience as well. The poets wrote and the
painters painted for his approval, one bestowed with the sole caveat that the work be
genuinely new. It was the enterprise linking them—the adventure of the Modern—that gave them their reality. Had Frank lived, I believe he would have reminded Kenneth
Koch and Larry Rivers that they once had aspired to being something more than stand-up
comedians. Nor would he have tolerated the doodling that John Ashbery now seems to
confuse with poetry.
Of the poets around Larry, it was not Frank, but Kenneth Koch I knew best. For much of the late summer after my junior year in college we played tennis every afternoon on my family’s newly rubberized court; an uneven challenge, it might be thought, as
Kenneth had only recently taken up a sport I had been playing since childhood. But gamesmanship could tip the balance: rile me enough and he might make off with a set, to be held up thereafter as a triumph of age over youth (he was 32). After a game and a swim in the ocean we often repaired to the house on Flying Point Road he and his wife
Janice were renting. In the course of one such afternoon I remember describing my exasperating writer’s block, the seven pages of a would-be novel I seemed doomed to keep retyping while I stared at the wall of my Massachusetts Avenue apartment. Kenneth confronted the same demons rather more briskly. “I write ten poems every afternoon,
10 choose the best one and throw the others away.” At the time there were any number of poets who could claim to be, in the metaphysical sense, “witty.” But no one else was out and out funny. The high jinks did not exclude an occasional line as painterly as “Portugal was waiting for him at the door, like a rainstorm of evening raspberries.” (“Lunch”).
The inability to concentrate on any subject for more than a minute does not normally make for a sustained body of work, let alone a School of Poetry. But imagine in those self-medicated times being there when they were all gathered in Larry’s kitchen, the quips flying faster than the ball at doubles tennis. For a saxophonist whose fingers could never scurry fast enough over the keys, a lightning brush bespoke the virtuosity painting could celebrate; think Franz Hals, Manet or Sargent.
The poets’ “first expression, best expression” mantra came out of the same crucible. All it required was a hand capable of keeping pace with the racing mind. If, for some reason, one needed to write with more empathy, there were hangovers. Others, like
Larry, resorted to more problematic potions, such as heroin, to knock themselves out.
How Larry managed to inject himself without descending into lifelong addiction mystified us all. But then Larry’s experiments, sexual and artistic, showed a remarkable range. Here was a man obsessed with the geography of the self, reconnoitering the jagged precipices like a mountaineer. Nor was there anything secretive about him. With his life on display in enormous ten-by-fifteen foot “ME I,” “ME II” paintings, he joined the queue stretching back to “Song of Myself,” Walden and Franklin, celebrating the mythology of the self that seems so American.
I remember Larry remarking of Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana whose opening he had just attended. “Once you step out of the theater it’s hard to remember
11 what the play was about. But in the theater it all seemed absolutely electrifying, just like
great jazz.”
Larry brought that jazz-like panache to his big, shocking paintings. In the sixteen- foot-long “Studio,” (1956), now in the entrance hall of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts,
a viewer may feel he has stepped onto the stage set of a movie, with its central black nude
dancer, Frank O’Hara and the variously clothed family members all competing with one
another from an array of angles and time-lapse style perspectives. Against all this
virtuosic in-and-out-of-focus acting out, a background of unifying white lends a jazz-like
electricity. With every stroke, every wash of thin rag-swiped paint, we feel something
new flashing into being: a way of seeing and, with it, a record of bohemian life in all its
flamboyant fragility.
During this time, Larry’s mother-in-law, Berdie, usually dressed in her kitchen
apron when I appeared, provided the domestic stability he needed to make his art. There,
too, she was a true “heroine of the chair.” Of the twenty paintings he did of Berdie, the
“Double Portrait” of her standing naked at the edge of her bed in all the vulnerability of
her sagging corpulence may represent the acme of his art. Larry complained to me that
getting the magic realist brushstrokes right cost him more hours than he had ever lavished
on a painting. But the work shows how much he cared.
When Berdie died in 1957, Larry couldn’t help but feel that the figurative cycle
she had nourished had reached its end. I remember Larry pointing out, in a small painting
he had just completed of the headstones surrounding her in the Water Mill cemetery, how
close to abstraction he had come. From the same period I remember an abstract painting
of fiery stripes, a reaction to the sensations of heat reverberating through Anton Webern’s
12 “Five Pieces for Orchestra.” I can see the temptation for a musician/painter to translate the emotion he is hearing. But how justify going out on an abstract tangent that might not sell?
Larry’s dilemma seemed resolved when he won the then astronomical sum of
$32,000 answering questions on the history of art on “The Sixty-four Thousand Dollar
Challenge.” I recall Larry’s growing nervousness as his stake doubled week by successful week. With so much on the line, could he trust the promoter’s assurances and soldier on?
Then, came the question of the use to which he might put his windfall. I saw Larry opting out of the gallery rat race and making paintings no one else had the gumption to attempt.
Wasn’t a broadening of sensibility a modernist goal?
That remained my question four years later when Larry and I happened to find ourselves on the S.S. France crossing from New York to Cherbourg. I had just taken my doctoral orals and was headed to La Rochelle to research the painter Eugene Fromentin’s pastoral novel, Dominique. Larry and his Welsh fiancée, Clarice, were going to Paris where Niki de St. Phalle and Jean Tinguely had lent them their studio, and then to a show and wedding in London. I happened to be reading Pasternak’s I Remember, a recommendation I owed to O’Hara. Knowing of Larry’s interest in autobiography, I decided to pass it on. That must have gotten me championing the international work of
Pasternak and Rilke and my uncle Jimmy, an art independent of place and time.
Larry wasn’t about to buy my elitist line. “For an American,” he replied in words that still reverberate, “to make pure art requires moving abroad. The artist who stays in
America has no choice but to make an art that fights back. When it’s the culture you are trying to change, you have to be part of it, attacking from within.” Instead of holing up by
13 some Walden Pond, Larry preferred to see himself in the cavalcade of cars headed back
to the city.
Larry’s take on the process by which great art and its artists are commercially co-
opted was coming out at the time in work like “The Dutch Masters,” in which he
reconfigured Hals, Rembrandt & Co. by squeezing them into the confines of a cigar box.
Equally satiric was “The Greatest Homosexual,” his louche version of the David portrait
of Napoleon standing in that hand-in-the-lapel pose that the emperor affected; Napoleon perhaps as played by Marlon Brando.
As for the $32,000 won on the quiz show, Larry invested it in a two-story high
block-long studio on 14th Street and First Avenue. It gave him a big city life and the base
from which to make work sizeable enough to carry a social impact. The abstract
expressionist work with which he was competing could be just as monumentally scaled.
But in ways that now seem all too typical of the 50’s it eschewed social meaning. Larry
aspired to do more than decorate the wall of a corporate lobby.
Larry was primarily a narrative painter, with a story to tell, or to avoid telling, or
to mock. His drips and smears and scumbles suited the speed at which he wanted to work.
But keeping the process legible required a prodigious industry. After Berdie’s death, he
may have found it easier to stop painting in that scumbling fashion. But for all the wit
that went into his invention of Pop Art, something got flattened out. An engagement with
art in all its complexity was reduced to cutouts, to caricature and satire.
Then again, I may have misjudged Larry’s painterly calling. Reinventing modern
art could never bring the excitement he had known as a young man with a golden horn.
Instead it was the best way he had found for supporting a sizeable family. Not that he
14 wasn’t proud of how hard he had worked to acquire his métier: among them the eight
months spent abroad in 1950 mastering the figure by copying in the time-honored way at
the Louvre. As a painter, he wanted to rival the Old Masters. But he also needed to
challenge their traditions with such tactics as blowing up a two-foot Géricault male nude into his stark eight-foot-tall “Frank O’Hara.” Yet getting himself every morning “up to
the wall,” as he put it, had a going-to-work factory aspect he genuinely loathed. Finding a
subject was a torment, and often it was only the pressure of a show, “With what shall I
astonish them this time?” that got his competitive vibes flowing.
For many writers and artists there is an impish gleam in the making of art—what
can I get away with? Most confine the outrage to risks only the closest attention will
catch. Larry exercised his license on a grand scale. Nearly every one of his major
paintings, from “Washington Crossing the Delaware” onwards, carries a provocative
intent. If you were a poet, how would you feel about seeing yourself portrayed naked on
the front cover of your posthumous Collected? In Rivers’ “Frank O’Hara” front and back
cover illustrations, the provocation succeeds. He presents the image of a writer and a
poetry unashamedly different and self-revealing. Larry lived his bohemian existence so
he could launch such sallies. Not that there isn’t a quality of épater le bourgeois contempt
for his audience. The outrages convince to the extent that the satire rakes as much inward
as it does outward. In the relentlessness of his ambition Larry is just as much that
“Napoleon” as we are.
For Larry, I suspect, the gallery scene held something of the suspense of a
tournament. The thrill lay in competing, in learning how far up the art ladder he could
ascend. Enough was never enough; there was always a rung more. That may be why in
15 the 1980’s, when Larry had become commercially successful, it was not my doings he
wanted to hear about but those of my old man, the retired Safeway CEO. Again and
again, when I dropped by during my now infrequent visits to Southampton, he kept
pressing me to arrange a meeting at my parents’ house. “It’s the zoo-goer in me,” Larry candidly admitted. I hadn’t ever seen my father in quite that light, one of the big cats at the Bronx Zoo whom Larry would visit four or five times a week between the ages of six and ten. Larry’s curiosity, alas, was not one shared by my old man (a “typical Republican carnivore,” as my uncle Charles once put it), who always referred to Larry as “that kike friend of yours.”
Between Larry’s adamant curiosity and Father’s unwillingness to grant him so much as a name, there was little I could change. The last thing I wanted was to expose my friend to a meeting with a man capable of such vituperation.
Over the next twenty years I lost touch with Larry as I was living in Europe.
When I returned to the United States in 1991 it was to the rural northwest corner of
Connecticut. But in 1999, while in Southampton with my children, I did manage to slip in a visit. Two of my works had just been published, and I wanted to thank him for the friendship and trust he had offered me at such a young age. Larry seemed genuinely startled by my offerings. I don’t know what he had expected me to become, but he clearly had not imagined my being a writer, let alone a fellow intimist, involved in some of the same issues of autobiography, of portraying a life that was also to some extent America’s life.
As we sat on his studio couch I couldn’t help being struck by a painting, done in the early 90’s, of the black saxophonist Sonny Simmons, “Umber Blues II.” It was
16 another of those big-scale nudes, just as confrontational, and every bit as gorgeous as the
early portraits of O’Hara and Berdie. We are in a room of the musician’s home, but all
we glimpse is the bed with its rumpled sheets, a striped dissonant coverlet, and Sonny’s
discarded shirt and trousers. Sitting on the edge of the bed, fully naked but wearing dark
glasses as he plays his golden horn, his concentrated face turned slightly away, is the
large middle-aged musician. Larry has given his skin a tonality similar to the purple
Manet employs in painting the velvety couch on which a Spanish lady in a matador’s
silky white outfit reclines; but here the interest lies in the sensuously handled umber
paint. Thus depicted, Sonny is as much an embodiment of fear and desire as Berdie and
Frank O’Hara. But sex, too, is what jazz celebrates. In this portrait, rendered from a point
as intimate as paint can take us, Larry put all the warmth of his lifelong love affair with
the saxophone and the African-American spirit jazz embodies.
When I said as much, Larry identified it as another of his “Golden Oldies, one of
those subjects I keep returning to.”
That was the last time I saw Larry. He died four years later, a few days shy of his
80th birthday.
Merrill died in 1995, Rivers in 2003. In the time since I’ve thought of him and my uncle often, two not dissimilar figures. That recognition, of affinities shared, may have
prompted Merrill to propose my calling on Rivers fifty-odd years ago. Certainly, there
were no other visual artists by whom he felt challenged. (His heroes were puppeteers of
various persuasions and, to be sure, opera divas.) The affinity lay, I think, in the comic
perspective each brought to the adventure of the self. For Merrill, the role model was
17 Proust, a Proust filtered through the lens of Byron’s “Don Juan.” For Rivers, it was
Picasso, a choice abetted by O’Hara’s equally presumptuous Apollinaire.
Merrill’s personae were by and large mythic ones: Marsyas, Orpheus, Father
Time and Mother Earth. For Rivers, it was the well-lighted countenances of politics and history: Washington, Napoleon, and the last Confederate soldier, Primo Levi. At the time, our teachers were fond of quoting Yeats’s lines describing the dichotomy of life and art, the choice to be made between “Perfection of the Life, or of the work.” For Merrill and
Rivers there was no such dichotomy: life flowed into the art and the art, in turn, irrigated the life. For a youth, their flamboyant self-inventions opened paths they could never have anticipated.
18