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David Kalstone " An Urban Convalescence" is designed to act out a false start and implicitly to suggest a search for more revealing and durable images. What he appears to be learning to do is to disentangle his own needs and style from the clich? s of the world of fashionable destruction a clarification of feeling signalled in the crisp rhymed quatrains [at the end of the poem: Kalstone cites the last stanzas]. Much of the poems feeling is gathered in the now charged associations of house: the perpetual dangers of exposure and change, of fashion and modishness; the sifting of memory for patterns which will truly suffice. [This poem] is just such a shifting of memory. Entangling inner and outer experience, it leads us to see the poem itself as potentially a " house, " a set of arrangements for survival or, to use Merrill's later phrase, for " braving the elements. " Poems were to make sense of the past as a shelter or a dwelling place for the present.
from David Kalstone, " James Merrill: Transparent Things" (Chapter 3) in Five Temperaments (New York: Oxford U P, 1977), 87 - 8 Lynn Keller (1987) [" An Urban Convalescence" ] is the first of Merrill's lyrics to employ what was to become one of his most characteristic and effective patterns: A present experience recalls some past event (s) and the overlay of several temporal frames, like transparencies that build a single image, brings new insight as well as resolution of some internal conflict. The primary model for his rendition of mental process seems to be Elizabeth Bishop, whose work he has so often praised, particularly for its refusal of oracular amplification. The informal talking to oneself and wondering aloud " Was there a building at all? " " Wait. Yes" the questions, as well as the explanatory parentheses " (my eyes are shut) " are surely inspired by Bishop. The deliberate flattening and slackening, however, can be traced to Auden, from whom Bishop also learned: " I have lived on this same street for a decade, " " It is not even as though the new / Buildings did very much for architecture. " [A]mong the developments signaled by " An Urban Convalescence" is the transformation it records in the speakers attitude. The poem portrays a conversion experience of sports; religious allusions the crowds " meek attitudes, " the old man like a vengeful God directing the cranes demolition, the speakers posture of prayer with " head bowed, at the shrine of noise" prepare for the speakers confrontation with his own failures, or, one might say, his sins.
By the poems close, he no longer rationalizes his behavior with " that is what life does" and instead determines to care for whomever and whatever he encounters. Refusing to fantasize about a lost world of Jamesian elegance " that honey-slow descent / Of the Champs- Elysees, her hand in his" he focuses on another destination: " the dull need to make some kind of house / Out of the life lived, the love spent. " Audens Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being, the work that (along with The Sea and the Mirror) so captivated Merrill in the forties, helped Merrill to identify that destination. Audens poem celebrates Mary and Joseph as people who might " Redeem for the dull the / Average way" and insists that moments of revelation have little to do with lifes real challenge: " In the meantime / There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, / Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem / From insignificance. " From Lynn Keller, Re-making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition (New York: Cambridge U P, 1987), 201 - 202. Copyright 1987 Cambridge University Press. Mutlu Konuk Blasing (1995) For Merrill, change and continuity are not polar opposites; continuity is infected with change and change with continuity.
For example, situating himself inside quatrains in " Urban Convalescence" allows him to revise himself and question what are presumably his authorizing values. He begins with a diagnosis of planned obsolescence as " the sickness of our time" that requires things be " blasted in their prime. " Yet he immediately overturns this judgment: [Blasing cites lines that begin " There are certain phrases" and end " debases, what I feel" ] The " revision" calls into question his " conservative" rejection of novelty, for his rejection itself joins " progress, " or " the great coarsening drift of things. " His second thoughts occur, however, in a conventional form that would conserve the past. In this disjunction, his conventional forms divest themselves of authority, for they are dissociated from a conservative ideology that would judge the present by taking refuge in the canonical authority of the past. If originality and novelty are outmoded concepts for Merrill, so is the expectation of a correlation between convention and authority.
He employs conventions not because they carry a prescriptive authority but as if they did, at once remembering and transmitting a past and denying it any absolute vitality beyond the fact of its being there a shared, public past. Merrill's distinction is his ability to register at once the textualist and the historical nature of writing. His polyvalent literalism and his fondness for " accidents" and puns in general foreground the play of the signifier and approach an internalization of history within poetic language. His conventional formalism, however, holds this tendency in check by placing poetic language within a public literary history. Thus he can be grounded in textualist, doing without historical or metaphysical foundation, yet stop this side of an a historical, self-reflexive subjectivity, for the textual inside is governed by publicly recognizable, historically coded rules, which transmit a past even if they do not carry any inherent validity. From Mutlu Konuk Blasing, " James Merrill: Sour Windfalls on the Orchard Back of Us" in Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: OHara, Bishop, Ashley and Merrill. (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1995), 167 - 168.
Guy Rotella The major poem of Water Street is " An Urban Convalescence" (3 - 6), a narrative meditation occurring in the time and space between sickness and relative health. Its unnamed " generalized" ailment at once physical and psychic, private and public, literal and figurative suggests that this mediate place is one we all always inhabit: life. The word " convalescence" derived from the Latin inceptive (a verb form expressing the onset of process) implies a condition of ongoing cure rather than a progress from illness to health. The speaker of " An Urban Convalescence" (Ill call him Merrill) is out for a walk after a week in bed. This bland activity yields a dizzying mixture of attitudes, tones, and ideas, all rendered with feverish clarity in a blend that is somehow both seamless and transgressive disrupted. A portion of Merrill's " block" is being tom down (or " up, " as the poem puts it in a half-mocking echo of the lingo of urban renewal).
As he observes this quotidian rite, Merrill's descriptions are both secular and religious, restlessly up-to-date and rooted in tradition. He is caught in the drift of the contemporary, where everything comes down " Before you have had time to care for it. " (The mixture of affectless factual description, implied social criticism, and self-accusation although he has lived on the street for ten years, Merrill cant " recall / What building stood here" is characteristic. ) Meanwhile, the poets witness to the scene whether its conceived of as mere event, as careless or mad destruction, as the cyclical repetition of a secular sacrament, or as a sacrificial prelude to renewal also partakes of pious traditions: he joins " the dozen / In meek attitudes. Head bowed, at the shrine of noise. " How far such language mocks or blesses a remnant community or an apostolic succession seems beyond definition. The effect is to keep all aspects and implications of the experience in play rather than to choose among them, redeem them, arrange them in a hierarchy, or otherwise control or " finish" them. Given the contents of Merrill's particular " block" (his " head, " in the flip pun the richly layered edifice, or pussy-cafe, of his own cultural consciousness), the scene evokes literary and aesthetic matters.
Watching a crane transfer rubble, Merrill recalls the avian crane at the end of Robert Graves The White Goddess, where it represents the chastisement of a paternal, mechanical, and linear art by the maternal, organic, and cyclical forces of myth. This reference might imply an attack on " progress" (in city building or art), but the terms and significance of Graves monitory tale arent preserved intact here, any more than New Yorks buildings are. This crane is a machine (although represented as female); an old man (Graves, with his half-cracked theories? ) " Laughs and curses in her brain. " Again, Merrill doesnt select from or make a hierarchy of aesthetic arguments and positions; instead, he represents a postmodern situation in which all of the pasts ideas and approaches are available for use, along a continuum of imitation extending from respectful repetition through eclectic pastiche to derisive travesty. The " construction" site typifies artistic decoration and creation; it suggests such large, opposed aesthetic categories as innovation and conservation. But it does so in such a way that those categories and their multiple variants (including the modernist debate between the idea that destruction is the necessary prelude to renewal and the contrasting belief that the broken link with the past must be restored, if only by shoring fragments against our ruin) are equally present possibilities rather than mutually exclusive ones demanding a thoroughgoing commitment to one aesthetic position or another. Merrill's reconstructive effort to recall the torn-down building fails, but it engenders other, associative memories: a building in Paris, the end of a heterosexual love affair (among the poems themes is a closeted declaration of alternative domestic arrangements: " another destination" ), and a shard of decorative garland (this remembered detail at first seems a solid architectural element, then a flimsy bit of cheap engraving; as Merrill prepares to leave New York for Stoningtons seaside village, it invokes and dispels pastoral treatments for urban ills with the same mixture of coolness and warmth that marks the poems setting forth of its other plural arrays).
Aestheticizing memory may ameliorate, but here (sadly, happily) it lacks the power either to restore or replace the poems damaged structures, whether the citys lost buildings, the poets fading memories, or the competing counters of a historically aware aesthetic consciousness. The house of memory and imagination " shudders / And collapses, filling / The air with motes of stone" ; " Wires and pipes, snapped off at the roots, quiver. " The scene (outer and inner) is deracinated, yes, but with the old connections showing. This including the relations, mirroring's, and repetitions of outer and inner, past and present realms is Merrill's version of the postmodern condition; perhaps the term " convalescence" defines it more nearly than " sickness" or " health. " From this point, " An Urban Convalescence" seems to advance toward a traditional conclusion, drawing a lesson from the experience undergone and rendered. Having described a series of broken connections, Merrill writes, " Well, that is what life does, " then swears to abide by dark revelations: " Gospels of ugliness and waste. " But the exhausted or indifferent delivery drains those gestures of conclusiveness; it calls into question the whole history of redemptive literary gestures which convert sites of destruction to sites of instruction. At the same time, the speaker does seem to have learned something about his own involvement as person and poet in the cuttings off and tracings hes observed (grudgingly, he admits that the tears in his eyes come from " self-knowledge" ). Perhaps that will provide a conclusion.
It doesnt. In an autobiographical poem written at the height of the " confessional" period, Merrill is dissatisfied with confessional isms authorizing aesthetic, in which painful experience is redeemed by the self-discovery it provides. As the poems symmetrically paired but also sequential phrases have it, " Wait. Yes. " ; " Wait. No. " Now the poem moves indoors: literally, in that the poet returns home; figuratively, in that the form tightens into the rootlike enclosures of quatrains. But once again, what seems like a gesture of summation and closure isnt exactly.
Rather than resolve the poems issues, the quatrains repeat them. In the process, they subject their own language to criticism (in a small reprise of the poems larger buildings and breakings, the slick phrase " 'the sickness of our time" " Enhances, then debases" what the poet feels). And the quatrains themselves are deliberately imperfect, with rhymes displaced or slanted. That is, Merrill turns to traditional form here without claiming for it any conservative or other guarantee to restore " health" or preserve it. Like old and new buildings, like the forms of memory, or the range of available aesthetics, conventional form is one of many fashions for representing or constructing experience. It is neither to be discarded as outmoded nor revived as redemptive Even so, as my use of the word " deliberately" above suggests, Merrill remains committed to the faith that art can be convalescent, although not salvific.
After so many false starts at conclusion, " An Urban Convalescence" does conclude, with a promise both sturdy and chastened, rich with the humanist effort to make a satisfactory structure and bereft (and purged) of humanist confidence that a single structure will satisfy everyone (including the always altering self) in every time and place. What remains is " the dull need to make some kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of love spent. " The past tense, the air of exhausted expenditure, the tricky implications of distance and engagement in the expression " out of" all those details qualify without canceling the poems affecting commitment to constructive building. The overall effect of " An Urban Convalescence" is something like that of a work Merrill alludes to covertly, its presence all but concealed by his overt reference to Graves. During the 1950 s, Merrill had been learning from Elizabeth Bishop how to use self-corrective interruption as a strategy of inclusion and complication, a way to roughen without destroying a too-perfected poetic surface. In Bishops " The Bight" (Complete Poems 61), a crane like dredge bears " a dripping joyful of marl" ; Merrill's cranes " jaws dribble rubble. " " The Bight" also shares with " An Urban Convalescence" the depiction of a scene of domesticity and destruction through an amalgam of pastoral and mechanical details. Purged (and bereft) of redemptive faith, it, too, accepts the distressing, convalescent fact that " untidy activity" (the fall and rise of cultures, aesthetic theories, human relationships, houses, poems) " continues, / awful but cheerful. " from " James Merrill's poetry of convalescence. " Contemporary Literature 38. 2 (Summer 1997) Timothy Mature The domesticity of the opening and closing poems of Water Street, " An Urban Convalescence" and " A Tenancy, " establishes the volumes down-to-earth quality.
Both poems express Merrill's need for a settled life after the rootless one he had been living since 1947. " A Tenancy" concludes the volume with the poet welcoming his friends into his new life in Stonington, Connecticut, where in 1956 Merrill and David Jackson permanently moved into a house on Water Street. Before Merrill attains this fulfillment, the opening poem must deal with the internal and external destructiveness that threatens the hope of stability. In " An Urban Convalescence, " the poet is still in New York, which resembles Robert Lowells Boston in " For the Union Dead. " Like Boston, New York is suffering through an urban renewal in which buildings are destroyed before " you have had time to care for them. " Although there is nothing in " An Urban Convalescence" as apocalyptic as the Hiroshima image of " For the Union Dead, " Merrill s poem also envisions total destruction. The equivalent of Lowells dinosaur-like steam shovel in Merrill's poem is a " huge crane" from which the " jaws dribble rubble" An old man Laughs and curses in her brain, Bringing to mind the close of The White Goddess.
The allusion to Robert Graves The White Goddess is to a disaster as total as the Hiroshima bomb. Graves maintains that all true poets write in praise of the female, natural life force represented by the Moon goddess. As the triple deity Diana (virgin huntress), Ceres (mother goddess) and Hecate (goddess of hell), she is called the White Goddess. Her nature may thus be destructive as well nurturing. We glimpse her destructiveness in " Childlessness" when " the enchantress, masked as a friend" appears in the heavens as a sunset that is both beautiful and noxious, with " poisons visible at sunset" (SF 71). A, rationalistic, patriarchal, urban culture has suppressed the worship of the White Goddess, which will lead to a destructive reassertion of her power.
In the conclusion to The White Goddess, Robert Graves says that " the longer her hour is postponed, " the more " exhausted by mans irreligious improvidence the natural resources of the soil and sea " will become; and so the more mercilessly destructive her return. Graves portrays her apocalyptic return in the form of a " gaunt, red-wattled crane" who will use her beak " like a spear" to wipe out a society of frogs who worship a log. The jaws of Merrill's crane destroy the urban landscape and threaten those who watch with " meek attitudes, " but it is only preparing the way for more " towering voids. " Borrowing an image from Mallarme, Merrill imagines the " massive volume of the world" closing after its revelation of " Gospels of ugliness and waste" (SF 58). More serious than this physical destruction is the internal loss of places and people whom Merrill's persona can no longer envision. His attempt to imagine the destroyed building sets off a series of associations in which he tries to recapture his past and a vaguely remembered personal relationship.
But the " who Ie structure" of the attempt collapses like a building, " filling / The air with motes of stone" (SF 58). Returning to his apartment, its " walls weathering in the general view, " he imagines the destruction of the new buildings and then even entire cities: The sickness of our time requires That these as well be blasted in their prime. You would think the simple fact of having lasted Threatened our cities like mysterious fires. Merrill is not so willing to moralize or invoke apocalyptic imagery as Robert Lowell is in " For the Union Dead. " Instead, he criticizes his own phrase " sickness of our time" as a facile expression that " Enhances, then debases, what I feel" (SF 59). What gives anyone the right to diagnose the moral sickness of the times? After admitting his own inner waste, Merrill can only acknowledge the need to make something out of his rootless life: " some kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of the love spent" (SF 59).
from James Merrill's Apocalypse. Copyright? 2000 by Cornell UP.
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