City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [59]
Jimmy’s favorite books were E. F. Benson’s Lucia series because Benson’s English town (based on Rye, Sussex) he thought so resembled Stonington with its feuds, its petty rivalries, and its eccentric “characters.” In Benson there was a lesbian named Quaint Irene. In Stonington, there was the photographer Rollie McKenna, a kindly soul who’d been around so long she had done portraits of Jimmy in the fifties and the eighties, of Richard Wilbur then and now, of Truman Capote then and now, of Dylan Thomas then. Eventually Rollie was virtually kidnapped and held hostage by a hostile, violent lesbian who beat her up physically and bilked her of her money, then left her to die penniless in a New England nursing home. From the start, Rollie’s friends had suspected no good would come of the relationship and tried early on to intervene, though already she was creepily under the spell of her tormentor—a woman who’d fleeced two previous elderly ladies.
The town was crowded with Cheever characters, hard-drinking readers and writers with old patrician names and big houses along the coast and genteel jobs in the law or publishing. Jimmy, whose ugly Victorian was the highest in town, stood on his topmost terrace looking out and imagining all those lives below him. Stonington was his “two inches of ivory,” as Jane Austen put it: on her birthday in 1816 Austen wrote her literary nephew, “What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow?—How could I join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labor?” Merrill started with his own two humble inches, but abandoning immediately the brush and using the knife of his keen wit soon turned them into a vast scrimshaw carving of the past and the present. He may have been a social satirist, but in Jimmy’s hands satire was transformed into epic—and malice was changed to bliss.
One of the guests that weekend was Alfred Corn, an erudite and handsome poet I’d known since the sixties—Forgetting Elena was dedicated to him and his wife at the time, Ann Jones, who, much later, after their divorce, became a brilliant Renaissance scholar. Al had brought along a copy of John Ashbery’s newest poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a long poem that was the best thing of John’s any of us had ever read.
Alfred was three years younger than I, and he and I shared a fascination with Jimmy Merrill and David Kalstone as well as Richard Howard. We could both be ill at ease at a social event hosted by any of these guys. Al and I were probably the youngest people at the joint fortieth birthday party in 1969 for Richard and John Hollander, another poet who seemed to have read everything. John and his then wife, Anne, lived in an immense West Side apartment, and despite its many rooms it was crowded with guests. Not knowing anyone, Alfred and I stepped back and were content to watch things as they unfolded. We witnessed the, to many, historic moment when John Ashbery was introduced to the critic Harold Bloom. John was John and was so drunk that when he stumbled out at the end of the evening, Bloom said in his best orphic manner, “I revere the poet but I deplore the man.”
Merrill was the patron not only of writers but also of performers who matched his taste for refined and sometimes absurd entertainment. I can remember one afternoon attending with David a performance by the Little Players, a finger-puppet troupe Jimmy subsidized. Five puppets were putting on plays or operas in which they impersonated classic characters from Chekhov, Maeterlinck, Wilde, and Shakespeare. Though they had no legs, they once danced the entire Giselle. Two shy older men, William Murdock and Francis Peschka, hand-fashioned the puppets and did the sets and lighting entirely themselves,