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By Root 1133 0

or encouragement. He could listen to an overly long explanation of one’s own (nervous, pompous) and raise his eyebrows and say, “Ah-h-h…” Was that an ah of recognition and agreement? Or was it merely a slightly weary way of marking the transition into the next, more amusing topic? He loved to make puns, usually good ones (like the “slight of tongue” in the last line above), then lower his eyes and sit forward or wrap his arms around his knees and lower his lids and purr. He never tried to sell his wit but would sit back and contemplate it with no more proprietorial sense than the newest comer. He was so afraid of protracting a point that he just sketched it in and then licked his dry lips with the sudden, darting flicker of the amphetamine dieter. He could look deeply sympathetic for a short minute, but that solemnity was built on mercury, not bedrock. A moment later his eyes were flashing humor and he was quoting something one wasn’t quite sure one had recognized. When he’d been a young man, as he revealed in his memoir about the 1950s, A Different Person, he’d feared he was superficial and he’d felt easier with people of his own class who knew to do no more than smile and shrug in most situations. The one area in which Jimmy had never been superficial or dismissive was writing. As he’d said, “I wrote, therefore I was.”

I suppose it’s always strange to know in the flesh someone who is destined to be “immortal,” or at least studied and analyzed long after his death. He was the American poet who possessed a grand Proustian sense of time and a Nabokovian love of language and sensuality. Comparing him to two of the best novelists of the twentieth century makes sense given that his poems always possessed a narrative sweep—and that he wrote that most readable and enduring epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover. Having actually known such a person doesn’t give one a special purchase on the reality. In fact familiarity can lead to slightly idiotic complacencies. The French critic Sainte-Beuve wrote that he couldn’t see why everyone made such a fuss over “Beyle” (Stendhal), since good ol’ Beyle would surely have been the first to laugh at his exaggerated posthumous reputation. Even so, everyone wants to hear the story just because it “really” happened, and yet in truth its reality—fragile at best and now largely mythologized into a new shape—is scarcely telling.

But there’s another, more moving aspect of having really known someone destined for fame. It’s that they were once young, uncertain, had a roll of fat about the waistband, one nostril bigger than the other, a shifty look that gave way to a wise stare. They existed in the present, with all its contingencies, not in the safety of the past. They were breathing, digesting animals as vulnerable to injury as the next creature, at any moment liable to have been run over or to fall ill. Their careers, which in retrospect look so triumphant and inevitable, might just as easily have come to naught. Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert’s traveling companion, wrote that the great realist had an irritating way of repeating a feeble joke over and over until it became truly tiresome, and that the humor, scarcely detectable the first time around, never failed to amuse the Master each time he repeated it. He tells us how sadistic Flaubert was in the desert when a camel fell and broke their saddlebags and completely drained their water supply, how for the next three days (until they reached an oasis) they were painfully thirsty and, just to be cruel, Flaubert kept talking about the marvelous cold lemon ices they used to get at Tortoni’s in Paris. This prematurely balding man with the light eyes who refused to exercise and took almost no interest in the Middle East until they arrived in Greece—could he be the same writer the next generation of novelists would memorize (Ford Madox Ford had most of Sentimental Education by heart)?

James Merrill could be led reluctantly back to serious topics. Then he would stroke his throat almost as if he were easing down the lumpy but necessary nourishment. He’d