Thick as Thebes: Orientalist Style in James Merrill’s Divine Comedies

When asked in a 1968 interview about the day’s vogue for “automatic psychological imagery, even Oriental-mystical imagery,” James Merrill could banter with utter familiarity about trends that most literary histories omit altogether:

These things come and go. The Orient has kept breaking upon the scene in nouvelles vagues for centuries. Beautiful styles may result, which are about as Oriental as a Chinese Chippendale chair. Since they are not truly part of us, these ideas seem more attractive company than those of our guilt-blackened West. Remember how Ogden Nash put it?—

There would be less dangerFrom the wiles of the strangerIf one’s own kin and kithWere more fun to be with.

(Collected Prose 71–72)

No exaggeration, “centuries.” American poets’ fascination with the Orient—as primordial source, tourist destination, alien alternative that is “not truly part of us”—dates back past Pound’s Cathay, past Emerson’s “Brahma” and Whitman’s “Passage to India” and Dickinson’s exoticized bestiaries, all the way to Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse (1650), whose title page advertises an epic centerpiece, “an Exact Epitomie of the Four Monarchies, viz. The Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman” (title page). As Merrill recognized, and as critics since have confirmed, that fascination has often arrived in nouvelles vagues, the new waves of schools and movements: the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell; the Beats, notably Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder; the New York School; Deep Image poets; the San Francisco Renaissance; Language poetry—the list, presumably, will go on.¹ It has been less customary to wonder what Asia—its peoples and places, languages and art, religions and philosophies—might mean to any unaffiliated poet, regardless of their ties to recognized schools. Or to a poet as singular as Merrill, for whom, according to detractors and admirers alike, aesthetics precedes politics; style and not subject matters. Merrill’s characteristically witty response should unsettle our preconceptions. Marveling at “Beautiful styles,” he promptly exposes those supposedly Chinese styles as chinoiserie, an Orient not simply interpreted but fabricated by American tastes, as it once was by the English designer Thomas Chippendale. Not that Merrill, hailing from “our guilt-blackened West,” exempts himself from criticism, but he would rather side with Ogden Nash’s biting 1931 quatrain “Family Court” than today’s too-sincere nouvelles vagues. “The Orient was almost a European invention,” Edward W. Said proposed in his foundational 1978 study Orientalism (1). Merrill approximated that conclusion a decade earlier, purely by appraising and mocking so-called Oriental styles.

Save for a note here, a parenthetical remark there, Merrill has not been extensively discussed alongside any of the Orients, plural, that recur throughout his poetry and prose: the East Asia of China and Japan, the South Asia of India, the Middle East of Egypt, Iran, and Turkey.² Undoubtedly, Merrill’s foremost geographical and cultural translation was to Greece, which assumed several roles that the Orient played for other American poets, standing for world- historical origins, unfamiliar novelties, and sexual permissiveness relative to America’s machismo and homophobia. Life in Greece also familiarized him with nearby Mediterranean regions and metropolises; Merrill’s Istanbul, like his Athens, was a comfortably liminal space between East and West, whereas his East Asia was far closer to Roland Barthes’s avowedly fictive “Japan,” an “empire of signs” decoded and pieced together by the West’s blinkered onlookers.

Greece, then, should not stand for Merrill’s entire relation to the Orient. Indeed, by 1968 both East Asia and the Middle East had come and gone in his writing; they would return several times over, becoming more prominent and elaborate each time, up through his final poems in 1995. Unlike most American poets discussed alongside Asia, Merrill never took up residence there and was largely an armchair scholar of its literatures, languages, and religions. He was, instead, an enthusiast of willowware cups, kimonos, koi ponds, One Thousand and One Nights, Victorian renditions of palms and oases, The Mikado, Madame Butterfly, Noh plays, Yeats’s Byzantium poems, Asian art and Orientalist...