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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 WALLACE STEVENS, JAMES MERRILL, AND THE WAY OF THE DANDY by Janice Moore Fuller A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 1989 Approved by Dissertation Adviser APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dissertation Adviser Committee Members Date of Acceptance by Committee Date of Final Oral Examination 11 © 1989 by Janice Moore Fuller FULLER, JANICE MOORE, Ph.D. Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and the Way of the Dandy. (1989) Directed by Dr. Keith Cushman. 280 pp. Wallace Stevens and James Merrill seem to embody in their lives and poems the qualities of the dandy—not the fin de si&cle dandyism of mere stylized dress, social hauteur, and public theatrics but the complete philosophy of life described by Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly and Baudelaire, who recognize in the dandy's mannerisms a spiritual significance and heroic mission—escaping the triviality, conformity, and tastelessness of modern existence. In his meticulous dress, scornful aloofness, haughty wit, and cosmopolitan tastes, Stevens cultivates a dandyism that guards against the poverty of life threatened by his "burgher" existence as an insurance lawyer. Merrill uses his dandyism (his refined dress, emotional displacement, political privatization, and witty circle of friends) to transcend the mechanical life of his parents' privileged world and live the purer life of Baudelaire's dandy. Dandy personae and characters appear as masks for Stevens in his early poetry and as thinly-veiled versions of Merrill throughout his career. Furthermore, Stevens's and Merrill's poems display dandiacal traits designed to exclude the bourgeoisie and cultivate an elite readership: an apolitical stance, deliberate obscurity (including foreign phrases, allusions, riddles, complex word-play), dix- huiti&me taste, concern for decorum (including periphrasis), and half-scornful, half-ironic wit. Stevens's and Merrill's frequent use of the theme-and- variation form is roughly analogous to the dandy's use of form and artifice to shield himself from painful emotions. Stevens's and Merrill's successful borrowing of the musical form allows them to distance themselves from their subjects, suggest a changing world, represent improvisational acts of the mind, and cultivate the dandy's love of virtuosity. The dandy's self-consciousness is evident in Stevens's and Merrill's examination of perception and the interaction between the imagination and reality and their attempt to transcend the dualism of art and reality through a variety of metapoetic techniques: self-reflexive commentary, oxymoronic images, hypostatization, plural gerunds, and the blending of concrete and abstract diction. By embracing artifice throughout his career (while Stevens begins to fear its distortions and isolation), Merrill proves the purer poetic dandy. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank James Merrill for his kindness and generosity in allowing me to use his papers at Washington University and granting me an interview. I also thank Holly Hall, head of Special Collections at John M. Olin Library, Washington University, for her enthusiasm and expert guidance. My committee members made significant contributions to this project. Mary Ellis Gibson, Mark Smith-Soto, and Walter Beale provided encouragement and intelligent suggestions as this work took shape. Charles Davis gave me a love of Wallace Stevens and nurtured me as a scholar throughout my doctoral career. Keith Cushman's wit, sensitivity to contemporary poetry, and scholarly example inspired and guided me at every stage of this project. I thank my friends Catherine, Linda, Bruce, and Lou Ann for the technical assistance, concern, and constancy that have sustained me through this project's every crisis. I especially thank my parents Floyd and Doris Wilson Moore. Just as their selflessness made my early educational achievements possible, so their support has never failed me iii during this final academic challenge. Above all, I thank my daughters Megan and Alison for the seven years of patience, excitement, and pride that have made my degree possible. I dedicate this dissertation to them. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page APPROVAL PAGE ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I. THE DANDY TRADITION . 17 Notes 7 6 II. DANDYISM AND THE POETRY OF STEVENS AND MERRILL. 82 Notes 136 III. THEME AND VARIATIONS 141 Notes 194 IV. METAPOETRY 198 Notes 259 BIBLIOGRAPHY 265 v 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation began as an attempt to explore Wallace Stevens's influence on the poetry of James Merrill. In particular, I had planned to show that Stevens's influence on Merrill more closely resembles the pattern of influence discovered by Lynn Keller in pairs of modernist and contemporary poets in Re-Making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition—that is, "an early absorption and imitation followed by increasing divergence"—than does Auden's influence on Merrill, in which "the polarized impulses toward continuity and discontinuity are more simultaneously and continuously balanced" (187). I had also planned to show that, despite Merrill's apparent divergence from Stevens, Stevens's influence persisted in Merrill's later poems in subtler but more important ways. Merrill's poetry as well as his own comments seemed to encourage a study of Stevens's influence upon him as well as of the intertextuality between his poetry and Stevens's. Certainly, Merrill is comfortable with the notion of influence. J. Hillis Miller, in The Linguistic Moment: From 2 Wordsworth to Stevens, observes that Each poet's precursors are present, whether or not he knows it or wishes it, in the intimate texture of his material, in the words he must use to speak or write at all, there in language like tiny fossils in the builder's stone. (57-58) Merrill, for one, is aware of these "tiny fossils" and apparently has none of the nineteenth-century poet's anxiety about his literary precursors, as his comments in a 1982 interview with J.D. McClatchy indicate: There's always a lurking air of pastiche that, consciously or unconsciously, gets into your diction. That doesn't much bother me, does it you? No voice is as individual as the poet would like to think. In the long run I'd rather have what I write remind people of Pope or Yeats or Byron than of the other students in that year's workshop. (80) Merrill's "anti-Romantic allegiance to his literary forebears," as Keller terms it (220), is perhaps most apparent in his trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover. The trilogy presents, as WHA (or Auden) announces in Mirabell's Books of Number, a "COURSE IN HOW TO SEE PAST LONE / AUTONOMY TO POWERS BEHIND THE THRONE" (CLS 282). In studying Merrill's poetry, I came to realize that I could make a strong case for Stevens as one of those "POWERS" behind Merrill's "THRONE." Merrill first encountered Stevens's poetry during the early 1940s—his sophomore and junior years at Amherst under the guidance of Kimon Friar—when Stevens was "the one who 3 appealed to me most" among the modern poets he read ("James Merrill at Home" 23). Friar remembers his tutelage of Merrill in "Amherst Days," included in the privately printed For James Merrill: A Birthday Tribute: I sought to be sensitive to his own inclinations that he might more fully mine his own proclivities. I saw similarities in style and temperament to Wallace Stevens, and introduced him more fully to that poet's work. Certainly, it is in his early poetry written soon after this first exposure—poems from The Black Swan (1946), First Poems (1951), and The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959) with their "decorative elegance," as Judith Moffett calls it (James Merrill 22)—that the influence of the tone, diction, imagery, and form of Stevens's poetry is most evident. In these early poems, Merrill proves himself the notable exception to Joseph Riddel's claim that "younger poets" found Stevens's Harmonium "inimitable" (Clairvoyant Eve 9).