An Imagination for Reality
Meg Eden’s Drowning in the Floating World and Elizabeth Hazen’s Girls Like Us
Washington’s Literary Monuments: Mark Merlis’s American Studies
by Albert Kapikian
Meg Eden’s Drowning in the Floating World and Elizabeth Hazen’s Girls Like Us
Post-pandemic, community spread continues in language; campaigns of disinformation, if no longer affecting hospitalizations and death rates, infect our democracy. Meg Eden, in Drowning in the Floating World, and Elizabeth Hazen, in Girls Like Us, are two poets who document not only their own areas of private and public concern, but where these concerns meet in the viral contamination of discourse that has become the hallmark of our public square. They are poets who catalogue an internal consciousness, but do so by chronicling a contamination that extends to poetry itself, evidencing an imagination for reality that may eventually be part of the archive not only of climate change and the #MeToo movement, but of the rhetorics of certainty that have gutted our public square.
Now that many of us have experienced what a random death sentence looks like— whether from coronavirus, dash cam footage of the executions of unarmed black men, the Russian invasion of Ukraine—an imagination for reality that also includes the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe (the disaster known in Japan as 3/11) might provide a record, which, when examined, offers a way forward for the poet-recordkeepers of our current civic crisis. In its concern with reportage from the wider world, Drowning in the Floating World finds its most recent Mid-Atlantic forbear in Jean Nordhaus’ Memos from the Broken World, and includes a kind of appendix, notes that Eden calls “Additional Resources,” which in some ways one-ups The Waste Land’s, because stacked with URLs, is rhizomatic, exploring what the printed page can achieve in the digital age. An outward sign of inward gifts, her notes are presented in such a way that assumes readers will find their own path, her imagination for reality accepting the truth that truth extends beyond the borders of her own insights.
In her notes Eden also acknowledges her Mid-Atlantic literary teacher-forebears encountered in the MFA program at University of Maryland. Now a teacher of creative writing at Ann Arundel Community College, she offers her ars poetica: “When I don’t understand something, when I think something is inhuman or bizarre, I try to write a poem so I can inhabit that perspective briefly—and though I may still find the practice disturbing, I can understand the humanness that invokes and abides in the experience.” Moral imagination is the highest form of the imagination of reality, and hardest to achieve, requiring entry and exit points not of our own making, especially difficult in a republic of outrage where even the poems do little more than point fingers and address readers as partisans in need of instruction, or worse, reprovement. Poetry is the form of speech impossible to completely articulate in words, and the highest form of poetic insight is that ultimate insight eludes us.
How the coronavirus pandemic will enter the literary timeline, Eden of course can give no answer, but in a chronicle that includes a decade-old record of ongoing DNA identification to identify people still missing, it seems important that her record is always grounded in the larger context of culture and country, one more way she distinguishes herself from those writers who, as Eliot said, have the experience but miss the meaning. “The evaporated people,” as Japan calls the “lost souls” who engineer their own disappearances, provide the backdrop for one poem about tsunami victims. It begins: “a fired man pretends to go to work, / his suit a performance” and ends:
some villages still have signs near water:
be careful of kappas,
as if water is needed for a person to vanish.
Jean Nordhaus’s Memos from the Broken World also includes a poem about people disappearing. “Those Who Leaped” begins:
This one jumped from a tower. This one
from a bridge. This one left the town
where everyone knew her name.
This one fled a country, this one a family,
a feeble embezzling marriage, a rigid
faith. And this one left a flaccid creed
to seek a stricter heaven.
And later:
Well, this one landed well,
found steady foothold in a promised land,
and that one washed up
on a littered beach,
a crumpled sack of bones.
Floating debris fields and rafts of trash from Sendai’s strip of beach are still washing up on coastlines all over the Pacific, the polluted ocean a metaphor for the fluidity of capital as well as the globalism has flattened all experience to consumer choice—until it doesn’t, or rather, can’t, as in the exclusion zones around Sendai, or in the places here where commerce was shut down because of the pandemic. Radioactive materials are inhaled as well, and while the levels of radioactivity in our own coastal cities are the result of background radiation, naturally occurring, coming from the sun, the three cores of the nuclear reactor that melted south of Sendai released radionuclides, not rays, so that Eden offers ontological openings for other ways of seeing and recording that reality, one in which secular truth is not monolithic, and where death is not announced as the only force exercising dominion, openings that can inspire in the reader a kind of reverence, as well as a different way of thinking. The cost of seeing beyond personal advantage and material gain might well be derangement, but Eden’s book begins with an inscription that is both a poem and a form of prayer:
Oh that my monks robe
were wide enough
to gather up all
the suffering people
in this floating world
—Ryokan
The popular thesis that Trump changed poetry, and what poetry is for, is best seen from the vantage point of another country as its own form of America-first chauvinism, partaking of the very thing it decries, justifying all manner of shortcuts, and therefore filling an unintended archive. Eden channels emergencies that hint at an ongoing one, and one that started before Trump:
That First Night, the Hospital
was the only thing left standing.
Those of us who got to it in time
sat on the third floor, praying. Thank God
for generators, why God, the generators—
that, unharmed, kept the lights on,
the only lights in our city? Outside,
Atlantis formed—my house
somewhere underneath us.
Stories of apocalypse abound, from the Book of Revelation to zombie shows on Netflix. Eden’s is real. The book’s first poem, “Hokotashi City, Ibaraki Prefecture,” begins six days before the tsunami, when fifty melon-headed whales beached themselves:
The Coast Guard carries water
to pour over the bodies.
What do they expect? That the dolphins
will walk back to the ocean?
Unlike Revelation, no one will be swept up to heaven, nor will anybody survive on an island, like Netflix subscribers in a pandemic. The effects of this apocalypse will last. In “Rikuzentakata”:
A year after the tsunami,
a fifty-year-old son
digs with his hands
through the mud
for his mother.
9/11 poetry included a page copied verbatim from the New York Times. But now that the editorial eye has been replaced by the infatuate eye of aggregation, algorithm, and self-publishing software, the only attention paid is the attention to how things make consumers feel, our entire world divided into likes and dislikes:
Google Reviews of Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant
A Found Poem
Permanently Closed. 3.1/5 stars. Sorted by: Most Helpful
10/10 no wait or lines
I saw a fish with five eyes
The people very kind
If you tip them they won’t eat you
I feel a deep sadness
No one’s ever at the beach, so you can play all alone!
Bring plenty of water or else you’ll feel like you’re melting down
Makes great electricity
Upgrade recommended
You have killed us all
Likes and dislikes are empty categories, but since they don’t require moral imagination, convenient ones, allowing us, even as we virtue signal, to put signs of support in our yards and embed Gandhi quotes in our emails, even as we turn away from the world, and rush home to our feeds and our streams. No one is left watching over the world. If a poet’s obsessions must mirror the culture’s, they must also transcend it. To have an imagination for reality today, when our feeds exclude half of it, poets must go to impossible, sometimes absurd lengths to find a voice everyone will listen to, and no one will be offended by:
I am good-fortune island,
My name means first, best
I am Tokyo’s food,
I am the core of a planet.
I am a burned offering
to myself and my aroma
is pleasing.
I give Japan its name—
I am the rising sun.
I am a radioactive god,
I am titanic.
I do not need testing.
I am a planner—I have
back-up plans for my back-up plans.
I am an abundant hive of villages;
my children won’t go hungry.
My children won’t be afraid
of waves or shaking floors.
A Poem by Fukushima Daiichi
Our likes create but also signal an insatiable appetite. Today every distinction is moral and therefore creates totalizing and absolutist claims, often on behalf of trivialities. Even in a pandemic, our silly civil war continued. Apocalypse is also a genre and a way of thinking— angels, the opening of seals, the smoke and special effects, fill in your century. These stock characters of visual impact instead of rational sense now appear in our streams, but the thinking behind them reaches us when we perceive things are so broken down the only answer is new creation, a holy, pure, sanctified creation for those who are like us, those we like, those who obey our will. The zombies, of course, are us—as in Eden’s “Response to the Brother Who Wants to Move in After the Earthquake”:
You are not welcomed here.
You are contaminated.
You have radiation in your skin.
You breathed in that nuclear air.
You are contaminated;
A power plant lives in you now.
There’s already radiation in your skin,
And I can’t risk you rubbing off on me.
Jean Nordhaus’s Memos from the Broken World also includes poems about this threshold between landlessness and landedness, which seems to be a feature of our time. Both poet-recordkeepers seem to be filling the archive with communiques that identify kernels in which you can hang an age. By looking closely at the immediate past, they close in on the future. Nordhaus’s “Memo from the Border”:
Leave your passport. Documents
won’t help. The crossing
will be treacherous. Every atom of you
will be interrogated, pockets emptied,
digits checked. Do not forget
to collect your name when you enter,
give it back when you leave.
Borders can also mark the outer edges of tsunamis, so an imagination for reality has included, over the centuries, the documentation written on hundreds of stones that scatter the coast of Japan, some more than five hundred years old. One speaks of a Valley of Survivors, another of the Wave’s Edge, a 1611 tsunami that went miles inland. These recording angels, and their evidentiary witness, have stood the test of time. Eden’s poem “Town Hall” ends:
I will always remember
should you mistakenly
forget. Here I stand,
a new tsunami stone.
In these stones, the words of the dead crown the living. In “To the Stone-Cutters,” Robinson Jeffers wrote:
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind, his heart blackening:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey peace in old poems.
For Eden, an imagination for reality means she must even inhabit the voices of cows. A narrative of desertion, Eden’s poem “Fukushima Syndrome” is nonetheless a pastoral—not a Virgilian one, but a twenty-first century necro-pastoral:
13 March 11
Where have our owners gone?
Every morning, they used to give us water.
Yesterday, I saw them fill their car with bags
And go, but they haven’t returned.
When will they return?
The poem includes “diary” entries that keep up until March 2012:
2 April 11
Our owners are not coming back.
From our stalls, we can see the world
they’ve built fall apart:
the grass has grown tall,
the building doors swing open.
If only we could celebrate
their ruin from the expanse
of an empty field!
Just as Eden re-imagines the pastoral, she re-imagines ekphrasis—exclusion zone ekphrasis is not a description of a painting or any other form of visual art:
besides the dead bodies
in fields, this town
looks like any town,
like the disappeared people
might come back
at any minute;
the oranges on the table
still look ripe,
someone’s left
their muddy boots at the door.
Auden, of course, wrote an ekphrasis about people looking the other way. He also re-imagined the Virgilian pastoral in his book-length poem, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue—his shepherds four patrons at a bar. The re-working of the pastoral is the larger project of the eco-poetic movement, and for Eden, the ever-present subject, presented in a kind of over-arching silence about that subject, is nuclear release.
Part II of Eden’s poem “Radium Girls, August 2011: Miyakoji, Japan” is a mirror held up against Part I’s “December 1923: Waterbury Clock Factory, Connecticut,” which contains the couplet “one girl’s halfway to becoming an angel her back all the way / down to her waist glowing.” In Greek, angel means messenger, and in Part II there are words that might have been spoken during the Covid-19 pandemic: “when we visit our house we wear cough masks” and “everyone wants to go back to work back to their homes and / return to what they’ve always done.” Eden’s poem “Atom” begins:
how quickly
the body unfolds
like a paper crane
unremembered
like a fish
in the silent sea
of floating fish:
black rain
leaves only a son’s shadow
memorialized in a wall.
In 2017 Japan ended housing subsidies for families who chose to evacuate from places that were affected by radiation but where evacuation was not mandatory, engendering a debate resembling our own around the withdrawal of certain forms of subsidies during the pandemic. The Exclusion Zone was about the size of the one around the Chernobyl nuclear energy plant, the site of the 1986 nuclear release—once again vulnerable because of power cuts to its critical cooling system due to the Russian invasion—chronicled as oral history in Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, and which, like Eden’s 3/11 poems, took Alexievich almost a decade to produce.
Eden’s poem “The Water Trade” describes the way people sustain themselves in her floating world. There are still so-called ama, “ocean women,” who live and work on the Japanese coastline and, though climate change has made it much more difficult to dive without gear to the ocean floor for seafood. But Eden’s water trade women engage in a much more common profession:
We create excitement out of nothing
We are god-like that way
I continue a tradition of paid companionship
started by geishas, survived in my soaplands.
They used to call this the floating world, which it is;
The pleasure world. Not just the occupation here,
But I myself—I am a floating world. I am slowly floating away,
less and less remains of me.
Our floating world exists inside and outside the ocean. A tsunami, at bottom, is an announcement that nature is linked to humanity’s survival. These floating worlds are now more vulnerable because of climate change, but there is still hope—documented, recorded hope:
Baptism
Fukuoka, Summer 2011
Our suited pastor,
standing in the ocean,
water dark up to his thighs.
From the shore, he looks
like a lone oyster buoy,
returning from a storm.
Kaylee beside him,
an American skyscraper.
In Eden’s “floating world,” reciprocity between self and world is made more difficult by catastrophe, but the poet still finds room for reverence, and correlates for awe, while for Hazen’s “girls like us” such veneration is everywhere stifled. Elizabeth Hazen’s imagination for reality includes repeated and failed attempts to come to terms with the male gaze, both real and internalized. In Girls Like Us, Hazen’s second volume of poems, that gaze is provoked, and women have little success bridging the great gulf its intrusiveness creates. For Hazen, having an imagination for reality means being able to see, and place on the page, the space women must clear in themselves to allow for the language of misplaced blame and wrongdoing—a lexicon that entered our cultural unconsciousness long ago, and that has given the nod to denigration and sexual violence. In this she meets the public moment, as the poet’s drama of reconciliation between self and world puts readers into the action so directly that we, too, occupy a self seemingly shrunken by an environment that partakes of little benignity, much less romance or mystery.
The #MeToo movement is a post-modern marker as much as any other, but even as Hazen backfills an archive of oppression with witness to its language of ruthlessly effective disguise, that act does not in itself automatically move her from immurement to autonomy. A poet’s gains, like a person’s, must be won individually—one girl at a time, so to speak. We may add our “voice” to a movement, but a poet’s voice cannot be gained by enrollment in anything. This is the model good poets provide and is the opposite of what we are sold when we are told we can “find our voice” by joining a movement or voting a certain way.
The reaching for an unmistakable individual voice can take a lifetime, so “finding one’s voice” by adding it to others, is for the poet to arrive at the worst fate possible—writing perfectly acceptable poems, but poems which could have been written by anyone. Such poems may provide a kind of business model but are little more than a signaling of consumer preference, and cannot create a covenant written on the heart, much less, a transformed social order. For a poet, an imagination for reality begins with negative capability.
While Eden sometimes imagines herself into realities, you always get the feeling Hazen has been there, and that the work of poetry is for her a form of repetition, because forced into going there again and again—in language, as in life. Poets either have to write or they don’t:
Every time I bite my tongue,
I seem to grow another one,
glossing over past mistakes,
vows I didn’t mean to break.
In neon glow of game show sets,
contestants place their sucker bets;
like them I rally, spin the wheel,
instruct myself on what to feel.
I’ve learned a thousand ways to lie,
but patience seems to pass me by.
I am conflicted; thick with gin.
I can’t remember where I’ve been.
Resentful of the task of choosing,
I find in choice I’m always losing.
My expectations are my curse;
desire only makes things worse.
Conspirator, even in sleep,
each word a promise I won’t keep.
“Addict”
Rhyme is repetition, as is addiction. Repetition is also a literary device, and writing poems can be a bad romance with a different kind of repetition—trying again and again until you get it right, or never getting it right, the gap between the wished-for result and the attained reality growing ever more cavernous. For some poets, the anxiety of influence can include a doomed struggle with the male gaze, and if sexism is at the heart of English, then that sort of assault can be repeated by the language itself. And if so, rhyme, assonance, and alliteration are also poetic devices:
Rhyme relies on repetition: pink drink,
Big wig, tramp stamp, rank skank. Alliteration
too: Peter Piper’s pickled peppers, silly
Sally’s sheep – silly trumping smart because
the lls create consonance. Assonance
Repeats vowel sounds: hot bod, dumb slut, frigid bitch.
Even his line – “Girl, we’ll have a fine time” —
or her refusals — “No! Don’t!” In metaphor
we compare two things. Suppose a man calls
a woman fox; we understand this is
not literal. Same goes for pig, dog, chick.
Same goes for octopus, as in, “His hands
were all over me.” Metonymy relies
on association: suits, skirts, that joke
About the dishwasher – If it stops working.
slap the bitch! Synecdoche reduces
a thing to a single part: he wants pussy,
by which we must infer he wants a woman.
We’ve been called so many things that we are not,
we startle at the sound of our own names.
“Devices”
Privilege can be conferred by language, but so can erasure. Girls Like Us includes poems like “Girls at the Bus Depot” and “Underwear Girl.” Poets, more than anyone else, feel how the world is made out of words, but while writing can illuminate, it cannot rescue:
Blackout is muscles
knowing what has happened,
but not how or when
or with whom.
Blackout is falling
into his bed, but before
his hands are on you,
you have faded away.
Blackout is lying, Yes,
I remember.
Blackout is absence:
a chipped tooth or prongs
of a setting that used to
grasp a gem.
Blackout is forgetting
where you left your shoes.
Blackout is for girls like us
who can be rearranged.
“Blackout”
Such “re-arrangements” can be found in all of Hazen’s work. The term is pejoration: denigration built into the language itself, as meanings rearrange to accommodate cultural attitudes. Chemically, there are also rearrangement reactions. Her first book, Chaos Theories, includes “Bed Rest”:
No, says the roofer, he doesn’t see that other
woman anymore; that other
woman is a slut and a liar. Yes, he loves you.
Yes, he’ll call later. Yes! He wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t
True.
Chaos theories endeavor to explain tsunamis and pandemics, but Hazen’s title poem, “Chaos Theory,” ends with a man:
Chaos gives us endless bifurcations,
the path of time from next to next, no chance
of turning back. Instabilities overwhelm
the earth: addiction, population growth,
disease, storms, earthquakes, infidelities,
and a simple pendulum with its routine
tick-tock, tick-tock. Even this sorry heart,
aperiodic after all, pounds wildly
at entrances, exits, the memory of his touch,
try as it will to keep a steady beat.
Hazen’s poems portray women balancing uneasily between responding and trying to forget where previous responses led, and while always apt representations of the power relations obtaining between the sexes, her poems are also always open to the reality that such power imbalances do not tell the whole story, that chaos enters, upends, and rearranges any and all attempts to embalm living encounters in sociopolitical reeducation. There may be a so-called better way of feeling about things, but poet-recordkeepers, writing from the depths of personal experience, have a higher calling than telling people what to feel. Hazen “meets the moment” by admitting that sober assessment and personal triumph is not inconsistent with torment and backsliding, unasked for snapbacks into the past, even hyperthymesia, stepping completely into a long ago and never getting back.
The capacity for a healthy emotional life, whatever that is, can be snuffed out before it begins, and repetition of trauma, even in the absence of pleasure, may be the only pleasure principle available. If poet-recordkeepers have a higher calling, then they must also trace limits and do so without pretending that suffering can substitute for character development.
Linda Pastan, the dean of Mid-Atlantic poets, who died last year in a time when her widely anthologized poem “Ethics” had become prophetic, because the COVID-19 death rate among the elderly sparked the very discussions the poem had inspired in countless classrooms, had her own Chaos Theory in her last book, Insomnia. An imagination for reality today requires, it seems, a working acquaintance with that theory’s principles:
And if what I’ve read
is true, I’m looking at
the first small flickering—
one hinged wing, perhaps—
the tiny movement
of a force
that will grow
and cascade
across oceans and
time zones, barreling on
and on until somewhere
an army of soldiers,
oiling their guns
as they wait for a break in
the weather, look up
at the clearing sky—
clouds the color of milkweed—
and like the god Mithras,
ancient namesake
to the butterfly,
prepare for battle.
Chaos theory also suggests that instability and disorder work within, and even create, order. Mid-Atlantic poetry, as well as the legacy of poets like Linda Pastan and Jean Nordhaus, is in good hands in younger poets like Hazen and Eden not only because of their talent, but because they can still find local publishers, so “the huge debt” Hazen acknowledges in her first book to Rose Solari and James Patterson of Alan Squire Publishing for “their incredible contributions to the creative lives of so many people” is an important one. Patterson and Solari, fine writers themselves, are a kind of Leonard and Virginia Woolf of the Mid-Atlantic, maintaining a tradition of local writer-publishers that includes Merrill Leffler’s Dryad Press, Richard Peabody’s Paycock Press, and Andrew Gifford’s Santa Fe Writers Project, all which are still publishing today.
Like Pastan, Hazen has a butterfly that carries symbolic weight. “Monarch,” the last poem in Girls Like Us, begins with a butterfly the poet finds in a field that spent five years “pinned to the wall above my desk”:
I took for granted
her orange-rind, stained-glass wings, slanted
bolts of black the texture of velvet
paintings, white spots along the edge like eyelets.
If chaos theory takes notice of the outsized effects of real butterflies, poets know that tiny human changes, too, can sometimes be the yeast injected into the mass, and be of enormous consequence. Still, it is perhaps not far-fetched to search, given the two-dimensional characterizations of women throughout literature and art over the centuries, for initial “butterfly effects” in the purported causes of various disasters—laying the consequences described in Revelation 17 on a “whore,” for example, giving the okay to violence against prostitutes. The attempt to construct a language of self-definition out of such a foreign tongue is the challenge in the serial diagnoses women have encountered:
Girls like you, he spat,
his breath laden with smoke
and Svedka, his hands
rough stones. Thirty-seven
years old, and still a girl torn
and waiting, the old pain
blunt inside me. Girls like
you, he repeated, leaving me
a blank to fill.
“Diagnosis III”
Misdiagnoses are always revealed in a “preacher’s / tenor,” so part of Hazen’s burden is not only to fill the archive with the language that has defined girls like us by what they are not and have never been, but how those fictitious representations have evoked and produced, because internalized, fictitious experiences, and therefore the very behavior the censuring authorities condemn. Hazen’s growth as a poet has nothing to do with eliminating such language—she can’t, no one can, because it bubbles up from within—but by creating frames and borders and forms that surround it so that she can try to enclose it. Hazen’s titles, such as “After He Calls Me a Low-Hanging Fruit,” often signal the documentation of the struggle with self-definition they create. Just because the “real” girl is not seen by the male gaze, does not mean the gaze does not still have the power to colonize and establish itself.
For Hazen, an imagination for reality must also document that for some women the real person can disappear, so when a decision is finally made to change, it is made blind. “The Clock,” a rare prose poem, begins: “The month she asks him to leave there are signs: earthquake, hurricane, a dead rabbit on the threshold.” And in “Drown,” the poet resolves, “No more being / that kind of girl”. It begins, “Mistaking immediacy for / intimacy, I frame my thoughts / of men in future tense…” Unlike the Water Trade girl in Eden’s Drowning in the Floating World, who continues to do as she has been told— “The worst thing we can do, she told me / is break him out of the dream” —Hazen’s, while repeating the same behaviors, also keeps resolving to be different:
No more being
that kind of girl—yet I wake
up in strange beds as from
dreams in which huge waves
are hands that press down on
my neck, assuring me You can
breathe down here. But I
can’t breathe under water,
and neither can I drown.
For a long time, insights merely explained and nothing more.
“Tips from a Nude Model” ends:
Know that your body may be numb awhile,
And when you see yourself revealed in paint,
Note the proportions, but ignore the faint
Glimmer he put in your eye that isn’t you.
Embrace who you are, the nothing that you do.
Eventually, however, there comes another kind of repetition, sorted out in Hazen’s poem, “Dictation,” which begins, “After days of heavy drinking, blackout” and concludes: “A different voice repeating / Unclamp your tongue.” Repetition also means having to repeat resolutions to oneself. “Lucky Girl” ends:
It’s hard to resist
the seduction of a lie,
the way it tastes like whiskey, dark
and heavy, the tongue
of a working man after
his shift. I wake up groggy;
I nod and smile. A man says something
about a girl like you and a place
like this, but I can’t see
where I am, or who.
There is something of a genetic or generational curse suggested in Hazen’s poems. When she’s looking at her own son, she hopes “the family curse / might skip him, this inward- / turning darkness.” A spreading darkness is evoked every time her “mother clinked her ice.” In “Taps, August, 1984”:
At dusk my mother pulled the eyelet
curtains closed and smoothed me into bed.
Behind our house the Naval Hospital lurked,
an uninvited guest. The recorded bugle’s lone
notes marked the passing of another day;
darkness spread.
Because the Naval Hospital is where the President, as well as countless veterans, receive medical care, the country’s archives are challenged, if not opened, by Hazen’s imaginary. #MeToo reached into privileged places and Hazen traces how the pathology it identifies spreads through language, and so can spread anywhere, like Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” It spreads in the household, too, and terms can be laid down, traps laid, by mothers as well as fathers. It was Ghislaine Maxwell, after all, who secured young girls for Jeffrey Epstein. The endless repetition—in language, colocation—that makes for the inability to break out of the self she describes, might now be a phenomenon endangering the country, but preaching from a woke pedestal, reducing poetry to describing evidence of structural imbalance, would kill poetry too. Hazen doesn’t do this: an objectified object, yes, but also a poet-recorder, not a theorist. Poetry is undocumentary writing, Hazen’s experiences part of an undercommons, but whether poetry needs to be added to the archives of the public square (it does) is a separate question. For the poetry to survive, so must the ambiguity. It’s its capacity for negative capability that saves it.
The contamination of our language relies on repetition as well. Today our very definition of a sentence’s successful construction involves its deployment, “going viral” its sine qua non. The Homeric catalogue of such tweets would not be beautiful, but incessant and repetitive. “Taps, August, 1984” ends:
Three decades on, two vodka sodas into
my afternoon, I watch a military funeral
on the TV above the bar. The bartender
buys me another round. I drink away
daylight, chat about war and weather.
In Hazen’s first book there is a poem entitled “Summer 1985,” ostensibly about playing with toy soldiers, but really about something else:
After, we gathered wreckage—
the toppled corpses and discharged rounds—as if
this game of war could win for her a battle
she seemed, in silence, always to be fighting.
For Hazen, repetition takes many forms, but begins in childhood. “Free Fall” begins:
In cartoons gravity waits for recognition—
the long pause while Wile E. lingers mid –
air before grasping his predicament.
A mature voice and vision achieved, repetition’s hold on her does not abate. “Why I love Laundry” ends:
In this mechanical dirge you find solace,
knowing that for every man you ever left
or who left you, there is this repetition
you can count on: the ritual of cleansing
sheets of their scents, their DNA; the grace
of this machine, so modest in design.
For Hazen, repetition has many iterations, including retrospective ones, as in “Photograph,” which begins:
The question of the photograph concerns
your easy heart, the reckless optimism
that leads you to believe, which each new love,
This time will be different.
For girls like us, repetition may eventually end in repeating something different, the empty space still there, but old definitions of that space gone. Hearing “I love you” can “create[s] a new space”, if only because a space has finally been cleared to hear those words. A cleared space, but still haunted by what used to fill it:
I’ve grown so still, so scared and scarce as those
lost years when I was ill. The doctors say
I’m healthy now. I eat three squares and then some.
I haven’t had a drink in months, in years,
in decades. Time, you know, is relative.
Even Saint Augustine lived in anxious
distraction, fingering beads of his rosary
just as I twist knots in my own hair.
“The Bereaved”
The poet was the monarch all along, but she was hiding from herself, so couldn’t see it. Chaos theories can begin with butterflies, or like Pastan’s, end with them. Hazen’s imagination for reality includes both, as well as an added possibility—that even in repeated failures to transform, or perhaps because of them, failed practice can succeed, at least in its repetitive imaginative recreations on the page:
I was careless with her, tossed her without thinking
into a liquor box filled with books, the spines
uneven hazards. That she was mine
to protect had not occurred to me before
I opened the box to find the right wing torn,
so all that was left was her body,
the other wing, and orange flecks like confetti
that I shook out over my empty desk, brushed
into my palm, and let fall into the trash.
I was certain she was beyond repair,
but now that she’s gone, I see her everywhere.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Washington’s Literary Monuments: Mark Merlis’s American Studies
An imagination for reality is a moral imagination, a kind of imagination, therefore, linked to knowledge, and now that there is talk, amidst domestic division, and in the wake of a pandemic, of a renewed, or second Cold War, it seems a good time to revisit the work of Mark Merlis, a Washington, DC, author whose imagination for reality included the portrayal, in American Studies, his first novel, of a period, just as the Cold War was beginning, when homosexuals and communists were hunted down in the government and the academy, and, in his second novel, An Arrow’s Flight, of a pandemic, framed as a re-telling of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, in which the titular character has been exiled not because of a snakebite, but because he has HIV.
In American Studies (1994), the character of Tom Slater, doubly condemned as a suspected communist and a suspected homosexual—a victim, therefore, of both the Red and Lavender scares—is loosely modeled on the literary critic F.O. Matthiessen, who put Henry Wallace’s name in for nomination at the Progressive Party Convention of 1948 and was foundational in creating the academic movement from which the novel takes its title. As the novel begins, Reeve, 62, a former student of Slater’s, is in a hospital bed, the victim, during a sexual encounter, of an assault that he is afraid “will be in the papers,” his fear for his life transferred to the “usual fear,” namely, that his “real life” will be uncovered. Slater’s book, The Invincible City, brought to him by a sympathetic friend, is by his bedside:
He looks like a general. The book came out in 1949, so he is fifty-five in this picture, but barely touched with gray. The hair is close-cut and stiff, and the eyes with their long lashes are the eyes of a general, soft and overcoming softness. His effeminacy, like MacArthur’s or Eisenhower’s, is just below the surface, a secret he defies you to uncover.
Between this martial picture and the hard, cadenced prose, a young reader (if anyone still reads him) must get the idea that Tom was a model of manliness and reason. The sort of chap who could order the bombing of Dresden or could inspect the line of English poets as if reviewing his troops.
Mark Merlis worked at the Library of Congress, and before that, helped author the Ryan White CARE Act, which provides support for low-income people with HIV, so his government service rendered him something of a student of such men. The narrator of American Studies, never completing his terminal degree, teaches high school for a few years and then joins the civil service, “when no one was looking:”
My thirty years, 1959-89, span nine presidentiads. This means that I have lived through eight redraftings of the organizational chart. In the first one or two my name moved vertically, toward the empyrean of the supergrades. More recently my motion has been horizontal.
In An Arrow’s Flight (1998), Odysseus is a lawyer and a general, charged with fulfilling the “classified prophecy” that the Trojans will fall only if Philoctetes’s bow is brought to Troy—for only then, according to the intelligence, will “Priam’s children raise loud their lamentation.” In the novel, General Odysseus is introduced “smoking a cigarette and looking meditatively at a tumbler of whiskey”:
He was not Achilles. You could tell he was a commander, because no one less exalted could have been so slovenly: tunic unbuttoned, graying hair drooping over his forehead. But nothing like Achilles. Of course it was the eyes Pyrrhus noticed, as Odysseus raised his head, the eyes shining with wonder. As if there were a child in him, for whom everything was still new. Above them, the heavy lids, ready to descend at the inevitable disappointment.
An imagination for reality can lay bare reality or, alternatively, create it. Joseph McCarthy didn’t invent anti-communism, just as America didn’t invent homophobia, but mid-twentieth century America had an imagination for turning both into crusades, dangerous ones, and in league with one another. An article in the April 4, 1949, edition of Life magazine, “Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Fronts,” made example of Matthiessen—this, even though the book he was known for, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (in Merlis’s novel, The Invincible City) traced, through readings of Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, and Hawthorne, the process of the creation of a uniquely homegrown, American voice. Matthiessen’s sexuality, meanwhile, had become an open secret: In a review of his final book (a review he left alongside his suicide note), TIME magazine called him a “bald, mild-mannered little bachelor.” Ironically, Matthiessen’s writings were becoming central to the U.S. government’s quest to forge a postwar, Cold War, consensus. And given his reading of Billy Budd’s death as necessary, his own persecution along political and sexual lines was consistent with the sacrifice he had described in his critical assessment of Melville’s sailor, a sacrifice Billy accepted, and offered, according to Matthiessen, on behalf of, and for, his accusers.
In his close readings of Melville, Hawthorne, and their contemporaries, Matthiessen was part of the break with the kinds of social realism espoused by writers like Alfred Kazin, and in books like Henry James: The Major Phase, Matthiessen found an example of the kind of great American artist, for whom “the separation between form and content simply does not exist.” Along with John Crowe Ransom and Lionel Trilling, Matthiessen was instrumental in creating the postwar consensus that gained United States government support for literary journals, including Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Sewanee Review, and Poetry, support given explicitly to counter communism, on the government’s theory, best expressed in Matthiessen’s writings, that the individual vision, encased in an idiosyncratic style, represented, in literature, the primacy of a system of government that exalted the individual over and against one that privileged collectivism.
If Matthiessen’s ideas were used by the government for propaganda purposes, at least his ideas were taken seriously, but the academy, which once could not accept his politics or his sexuality, now cannot accept his ideas, because, it is argued, they are reticulated through a lens of heteronormativity. Furthermore, if there seems to have been a connection between the Cold War and an official commitment to “high culture” that required Matthiessen’s argument as well as his sacrifice, a sacrifice which seems to both challenge, and at the same time, strangely affirm the now dominant framing of the Cold War as a construct which allowed the United States to look past minority demands, then there is little logic, outside, perhaps, of a repetition compulsion, to the academy’s rejection—specifically, American Studies’ oedipal rejection—of Matthiessen’s ideas when Matthiessen, like Billy Budd, was a victimized minority.
Like John Claggart’s testimony against Billy Budd, Joseph McCarthy’s accusations bedeviled Matthiessen. Such demagoguery is a feature of American public life, and as ever, the institutions that should have stood up to it were slow to respond. When McCarthy said, at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing, that “one communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many,” the National Education Association agreed, and Matthiessen’s fellow faculty at Harvard certified that decision by a count of two to one. Anti-communism had everything to do with the ascendency of certain aesthetic values—antimaterialist, anti-Marxist—just as in today’s callout culture, for ostensibly more legitimate reasons, blacklists are back in vogue, and in some instances, the very same works, once blacklisted for one reason, are now blacklisted for another. Thanks to hashtags, it is easier to see how the names on blacklists and the names on the lists of worthies are, as ever, the same names.
One would like to think Matthiessen would be accepted in the academy now, and while his politics and his sexuality are honored—today Matthiessen’s rooms, fictionalized as Winthrop House by Merlis, are restored at Harvard, where there is also a FO Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality—his ideas are dismissed as representative of the so-called “Myth and Symbol” period of American Studies, derided as the very cause of the crisis in the field he helped create. “Myth and Symbol” is now a pejorative, seen as representative of unacceptable “universalizing discourse,” because based on the now improper working assumption that there is something (a type, or emblem) linking all Americans, and thus a term now employed as shorthand for callous disrespect of heterogeneity and multiplicity, disregard and dismissal of the irreducible plurality of values. “Myth,” in this view, is depoliticized speech, whose real purpose is the suppression of dissent, and “symbol,” nothing but the sham and the empty claim of an undemocratic elite.
Merlis’s portrayal of Matthiessen is nevertheless an archive, and like other contemporary fictional projects, an attempt to recover a marginalized voice, a voice that needs to be resuscitated by the imagination, because little documentation of it exists. By 1948, the tables of contents of literary journals like Partisan Review, where Matthiessen’s criticism had once found a home, were being scanned by Congressional committees to “safeguard” readers from communists or other “subversives.” (It is an accepted axiom today that the names in the tables of contents of literary journals should be scanned, if for other reasons.)
Billy Budd’s sacrifice was, for Matthiessen, the critic, required for the sake of the collective, but it is unlikely, or at least an open question, whether Matthiessen saw his own blameless suffering and subsequent sacrifice as likewise necessary. For Merlis, Matthiessen, in the person of Tom Slater, was an innocent, and extraordinary only in that innocence, the creator of a field who embodied, in his fate, the field’s fate, all along unaware that he was recreating, in himself, the tragedy he articulated so well in others. For Merlis, Slater’s sacrifice was not only unnecessary, it was also ridiculous. There may be unavoidable sacrifices, but for Merlis there are not necessary ones. Slater does not possess Billy Budd’s “radiance that can redeem life” but for Merlis, nobody does, and nobody did. A redeemer would be nice, but for Merlis none is coming, and as a writer, furthermore, he is not interested in theodicy. Slater, for Merlis, was simply a victim, and worse, a dupe, and fall guy, for all manner of political power centers, governmental and academic, East and West—a shrewd and prescient assessment given that the process continues to this day.
Matthiessen privileged universal aesthetics but ended his life, ironically, in the kind of abandoned places and tortured psychological states that the critics who reject him, and the empire they claim he justifies, claim to care about, places where archives, as they begin to be created, trace defamiliarization. But Matthiessen is not allowed entry into this diverse collective, suggesting, inadvertently, that there can be no such collective, that real suffering is always private, and therefore resists incorporation. For suffering, there is no superior interpretive key:
“Imagine him, Melville,” Tom continued. “Silent all those years, never having what he wanted. Any more than I have.”
I was so young and self-centered, I took that as directed at me. I was starting to answer that I had been ready enough. But he went on, “Finally an old man, recovering all his powers, gathering them up just so he can rise and kill Billy Budd.”
I said, “Hm,” trying to act as if I were taking it in.
“Before Billy can turn and stammer out s-s-sissy and go on back to his Bristol Molly.”
“I’m not sure if I think that’s what it’s about,” I said. Risking that he would turn and quiz me on the book, when I just wanted him to be a little clearer.
“That is what they are all about: Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, all of them except Whitman. Idealists slashing away at the beauty they can’t hold onto, wanting it dead or transcendent, anything but material, there in front of them but out of reach.”
A similar inability characterizes our dialogue today. We have placed our faith in a social media vision of democracy that maps difference, encodes stereotypes, ingrains prejudice, and embeds micro-aggressions into its macro-expansion—a national “conversation” that shares only a common epistemic norm of self-seeking and self-regard, the endless repetition of which might now be sabotaging the country itself. That correct language alone is thought to be enough to “correct” reality and suggests an ideological parallel with McCarthyism, allowing people to slum off their civic duties and responsibilities in the name of the politically correct tweet, email, or public relations posture:
“…The committee was tired; they wanted only to get through the rest of the names. Tom just needed to affirm, for the record, that he had never had a deviant idea or attempted to impart one to a student. Then they could all go home…”
Official archives have been exposed as incomplete, requiring the kinds of readings one has to give unreliable narrators, listening to them, like Nick Carraway did, in The Great Gatsby, for the “plagiaristic” insights of the Yale undergraduates who would one day lead the nation, listening less for the truths they contain, than for what is hiding behind those “truths.” The day after Matthiessen’s death, The Harvard Crimson, a kind of semi-official American archive, reported that its own Professor of History and Literature, an “outspoken advocate of Christian socialism,” had jumped from the twelfth floor of the Hotel Manger in Boston. This characterization was, at best, incomplete, but because Christianity itself has now been “exposed” as just another unacceptable, or at least “problematic” orthodoxy, Matthiessen’s Christian reading of Billy Budd’s fate as “a testament of acceptance,” is likewise deemed unacceptable. Today our listening is plagiarized by what we are listening for, and when we hear it, we give ourselves license to reject everything associated with it.
In Matthiessen’s reading, and the government’s, Captain Vere’s verdict must prevail. For the government, it is because evil, in the form of the Soviet Union, is once again active in the world. Cold War vigilance required, as Hannah Arendt wrote, crew cuts. In Arendt’s Cold War reading of Billy Budd, “absolute goodness [is] hardly any less dangerous than absolute evil.” For us, moral definitions are vague, and shifting, so betrayal is destigmatized and rewarded, the pleasure replacing the prohibition. No one escapes the generalized halo of suspicion, and the real power of such generalized surveillance is to make everyone feel simultaneously vulnerable and emboldened, everyone now brave enough to utter, as Margaret Chase Smith did, in 1950, “Have you no shame?” But because everyone is uttering it—our vigilance now requires continuous engagement with the “super-problematic”—all moral distinctions are flattened.
And now, as then, Matthiessen is on the wrong side of the asymmetrical distribution of cultural capital, subject to a living and a posthumous vulnerability. In the 1970s, the revelation of his correspondence with his partner, Russell Cheney, if not in itself challenging the idea that he was invested in upholding a white male cisgender establishment, at least offers no argument to sustain the differential valuing to which he is still being subjected. If Matthiessen really was, in truth, merely a proselytizer for American empire, then Charles Olson, who founded, along with Robert Creeley, the Black Mountain school of poets, and, in his Maximus Poems, called America a “perjurocracy,” was himself duped. It is easy to forget that, per Allen Ginsburg, what “destroyed the best minds of a generation,” was conformity. What Olson and the early postmodernists admired about Matthiessen was not his dogmas, but his capacity for tragic vision, as rare and as necessary for their time as for ours. Olson, to be sure, was leaving “the canon” behind, refusing each and every synthesis, choosing multiplicity over unity, “fire,” as he would say, over “light,”—for him, as he wrote in his book-length study of Moby Dick, Call Me Ishmael, the central “fact” of America was space, and the central American “condition,” the awareness of difference—but to him, Matthiessen was important because he produced the kind of criticism Olson himself aspired to, equal in individual style and voice to the writers and the country he was trying to understand.
When thinking simply involves projecting our unacceptable impulses onto someone else—our conscience, as Melville says of Claggart’s, “lawyer to our will”—then it is easy to dismiss Matthiessen’s writings, sloughing off the distance between our ego ideal and its reality onto him, evincing, in us, not an imagination for reality, but a rejection, or conflation, of reality with a narrow definition of self-interest. Perhaps, then, it is not ironic, that in this environment, Matthiessen is praised and implicated on the same grounds: whether as editor of Yale Literary Magazine, member, like Bush father and son, of Skull and Bones (ironically, the one place he felt safe to be open about his sexuality), or something else, the encomiums and condemnations are always made to fit into one of the homogenized, litmus-tested, consensus narratives. On one side, Matthiessen, guilty, cancelled, but for his sexuality, essentialized into an identity category, which, in Merlis’s reading, was an encounter with non-sovereignty, a blow to ontological stability, and thus a form of disorientation—and on the other side, lionized as an intellectual bulwark against a structural, self-serving academic elite with a financial stake in centering the United States as the locus of all evil. Political correctness is itself a form of censorship and was first a Leninist term. In American Studies, the breaking up of the Soviet Union is on display every time Reeve changes the channel in the hospital room:
The new Soviet legislature has just passed a law giving workers the right to strike. They have footage of the members, giving their ten-hour speeches, and then of a Russian anchorman, vapid and solemn as any of ours, reading the announcement.
No one cracks a smile at the notion that the workers may now strike against the workers. In one last writhing the Party has absorbed this comical paradox and thinks it can go on being the Party. Could the members of Tom’s study group have followed that shift as readily as they did the popular front and the Nazi-Soviet pact and all the pirouettes after that? What if the pope were to announce one day that they were just kidding, there was no Heaven, but meanwhile they hoped everybody would be dropping by the Christian Social Club? Well. Some people would, just to see the familiar faces. But, even if they didn’t put Tom through what they did, no one in the Party was a friend of his. He had comrades but no camerados.
It is hard to be a leftist fairy. You may, with the best of will, desire for the workers such a paradise as they are capable of dwelling in. But it isn’t your paradise, not in any of its features.
An imagination for reality is the highest form of imagination because it is locked in, restricted, confined. The writer must go deep, with fact as the entry point, which is different, and harder, arguably, than going outside, and wide of fact. An imaginative reckoning with reality sometimes cannot be accomplished. Merlis’s narrator imagines the last night of Slater’s life, but imagines reality as an impossibility:
…He is nothing like them. Still, he feels a gray exuberance. The bartender’s coded welcome, the desultory glances from the other customers. Everyone here knows what he is. Or rather, they know one fact about him – one fact that, outside, beyond that door, would overshadow every other, his tilted chair and his books and his money and his politics. Here that fact is a given, almost trivial, in this room to call him queer would be as redundant as the word COCKTAILS under the neon glass outside.
The narrator then imagines the final impossibility: Tom meeting somebody, “discovering that he could do this ordinary thing, that he had an aptitude for the everyday pleasures of ordinary men:”
I can’t picture it, try as I will. I can place Tom in a requisite posture, and I can put the soldier on top, or underneath, as the case may be. I can make the bed shake. But Tom’s eyes are open and his mouth a narrow meditative line. I cannot make Tom whimper or moan. I cannot even make his eyes close…
So, it seems that even the imaginary has its limits, creates its own tests of veracity. That it is not clear if Slater’s reluctance is the result of internalized or institutionalized homophobia is part of Merlis’s achievement. Reeve has made it into the foothills of old age, and while there is no muse waiting for him at the top of the mountain, he never went looking for one:
I look around, and the people who are still standing, who haven’t yet shown up on that page in the papers we all turn to first, are the ones like Howard and me, who never fooled anybody. It is little enough to crow about, just making it to sixty-two. But I think it is better to be alive than dead.
It was Eisenhower’s executive order that initiated the purge of homosexuals in government, and so it was in this that the President who despised McCarthy and his red baiting, was his unwitting double with respect to invoking national security to persecute innocents. Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, came back to life again when his mentee, Donald Trump, became President, and Merlis’s An Arrow’s Flight offers the tantalizing portrayal of other mythic figures made visible in our time; their myths acted out in our streets. It is possible to read Odysseus’s government’s response to Philoctetes, for example, as our own response, in the 80s, to the victims of AIDS, or, for that matter, in the present day, our response to coronavirus, with health authorities employing their de facto legal and judicial powers to criminalize illness by posing homosexuals as “health threats,” or recommending the firing of those who refused the COVID-19 vaccine. Roy Cohn died of AIDS in 1986:
There is scarcely any need to describe Philoctetes in his hospital bed. The reader will have seen the image on a hundred vases. Heaven knows why this motif was so popular for a while. Drawing from the anonymous poet in the Anthology his famous reproach:
Even to paint Philoctetes is to make his misery perpetual.
His skin is dry, and from his dry eye hangs a tear,
Frozen, that the painter could have wiped away.
Which is not, of course, about the individual artisans at the pottery factories, who paint whatever they’re told. But about those of us who choose to tell the story, voyeurs who will not let the ill-starred fool rest, who would open his grave if we had to—because we have to have something to write about, and suffering is easier. Our only defense that, if we didn’t make his misery perpetual, no one would remember him at all. With our help his name and his agony survive together, almost a tautology, while his body rots. The body that brought pleasure to thousands of men gone; all he has left to give is pain.
Anyway, he is wrong, the poet, about this: the tear does not hang forever but drops at last on the sheet. Philoctetes was through crying, was almost reviving a little, stirred back to life by the sovereign elixir that had kept him going so many years: hatred.
In Merlis’s version of the myth, Philoctetes has had enough. Merlis’s rejection of the seemingly necessary tragic, come-to-grief ending required of the gay novel—the author, through his characters, punishing himself for his “crime”—is also an attack on the myths through which the liberal imagination was constructed. Neoptolemus, also called Pyrrhus, is, as in the Greek version, the son of Achilles, and sent to convince Philoctetes to join the fight, but in Merlis’s version, both Pyrrhus and Philoctetes are gay. In his hospital bed, with Pyrrhus beside him, Philoctetes is finally through bemoaning his fate:
“God I’ve been so mad all these years. When Odysseus was just some little team captain who wouldn’t choose me. They start so early, getting you ready, making you think it’s the only way to be a man. And it goes so deep inside. Even after I grew up there wasn’t ever a time…when I could walk into a disco and watch a hundred heads turn, I didn’t ever feel as proud, or as whole, as on those few magic afternoons when a bunch of snotty fifth graders let me into their world. They get so far into you, and it never goes away.”
Just as, in Merlis’s account, America used communism and homosexuality as stand-ins for the threatening grand-scale evil of the Soviet Union, public health authorities used their sweeping powers during the AIDS crisis to further stigmatize already marginalized groups. Thirty years after the events of American Studies, “the homosexual disease” is ignored by another President, and when finally recognized, the Typhoid Mary approach to the disease gives rise to stigmatization and blame because its poor storytelling blurs the lines between risk and sin, making it is easier to portray the victim not as a member of the community to be protected by public health authorities, but the kind of person the community needs to be protected from. For the narrator of American Studies, this kind of storytelling is a kind of mutilation and penetration—one that Slater will find in the American literary imagination—but perform on himself when the double destabilization of losing both his old life and his new life occur on the grounds of his “invincible city,” and he puts the revolver in his mouth. For Slater, the depiction of the mutilation of the “beautiful boys” of American fiction, like Billy Budd, are not only met with, but met for violent death. If Slater keeps secret the sexual overtones out of his imagined invincible city, he also keeps his secret at his at once first and final attempt at entrance of some pale representation of it at the Garland Bar on the last night of his life. He would never have the experience of Cirythus, in An Arrow’s Flight:
Do you remember? Loitering outside the disco, finally making yourself go in. You paid your three bucks to an improbably muscular man who looked at you with incurious disdain, got in return a little ticket good for one drink, then turned a corner and beheld: HUNDREDS OF US, under the flashing lights. Sometimes it can seem as though all the repression was almost worth it, because it made possible that explosive discovery: hundreds of us, in the disco, free, and you had turned a corner and were one of them.
For Merlis, the AIDS, and, presumably, Covid-19 pandemics, lay bare health disparities that were socially, politically, and narratively produced. A narrative such as An Arrow’s Flight, which foregrounds Greek mythology, thus also examines the intersection of science, politics and power while simultaneously questioning the constructed nature of the truths proclaimed by each—Socrates was put to death by a jury of his peers. Merlis enters the AIDS crisis as writers today enter the COVID-19 pandemic, as both material fact and crisis of representation. What’s represented by the best writers is sparked by an imagination for the levels of energy it takes to stay alive in a world that has gone viral, the results in themselves a remedy to begin to heal a sick social order. AIDS and COVID-19, then, in this sense, are comorbidities.
The invincible city is that city which, taken from the “Calamus” cluster in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, ought to exist, but doesn’t. If it’s a queer city, it also shares something with Reagan’s and Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” and with the city imaginaries that post-colonial writers are constructing out of unnoticed lives and realities. Merlis’s queer city, an actual city on a hill, is where Pyrrhus finally finds Philoctetes:
Every bar was a throng of potential castaways. It was Pyrrhus, finally, who spotted the man. Not what Pyrrhus had been looking for. He had pictured some sort of hermit, loins wrapped in fur, licking ants off a stick. But he knew Philoctetes at once: that one there, tucked away in the far corner of the U-shaped bar, next to the blender.
There was none of him to spare. He was at that eerie point in the downward glide when every redundant ounce has been pared away, as by a carver, but just before the carver has done that one stroke too many, here and then here, leaving at last bright eyes peering from a cranium all but stripped of flesh. One of death’s passing jokes, this moment: to Pyrrhus, Philoctetes looked perfect, taut as a panther. To Admetus, who recalled him strutting with the other overfed officers ten years earlier, he looked like an admonition.
He wore jeans in a waist size that was probably in single digits and a flannel shirt washed so often that its plaid had become a ghostly memory, the one soft touch on a body as austere as bone.
As with Philoctetes in his cave, Tom Slater’s interment began in life. When closeted, events occur without witness, so Merlis’s narrator will have to reconstruct, and settle for, what might have happened. Matthiessen, one of the first martyrs of the Cold War, will be its continuing witness through this reconstruction—witness and martyr come from the same word—even as it plays out today, as he is held at the same time guilty of constructing the American liberal imagination as a heteronormative structure that required an internalized homophobia while himself the victim of a form of McCarthyism that has taken over parts of academia. For Merlis, narratives existed to answer such questions and storytelling, for him, was a transformative act. Today, however, there are no questions, only answers; on one side, a vaguely defined commitment to antinormativity and anti-American exceptionalism, on the other, a vaguely defined preference for the prediscursive, the US founding as myth, and therefore, depoliticized site. But since the narratives on both sides are really arguments, not narratives, transformation is foreclosed from the start. No one reads Slater—his “voice” now but a fragment of the narrator’s lived experience:
Tom wasn’t a poet, after all. Poets who kill themselves are remembered for that first, for the work second, if it all. But a critic—who cares how he lived or died? T.F. Slater, the name could be an acronym for some committee, the book could have been turned out by a collating machine.
For me it is different, it speaks Tom as clearly as any poem could have done. Perhaps it is because I hear his voice that I cannot read him—no matter how many times I open this book, I cannot read it. But of course, it is to hear his voice that I open it at all.
I don’t suppose anyone reads it now, anymore than I do. Teachers who themselves never quite got through it assign it anyway. Students buy it, look at Tom’s picture, put it on their shelves. Like other college texts it follows them, forever virgin, as they graduate from dorm to condo.
In the field of American Studies, as in the novel, Matthiessen-Slater lives on as one side of a parent-child, father-son struggle, so if he is no longer read, he is produced, called to the stage as needed, whenever needed, in the name of some marketable essentialism. Still, there is a struggle with the past, and anxiety regarding reliving it—if Slater sees the gunning down of boys in their youthful peak as somehow behind the American literature he advocates in his Invincible City, the gunning down of boys at their youthful peak is likewise at the center of Black Lives Matter. In Matthiessen-Slater’s life, fixing the locus of evil in the USSR allowed for a certain disfigurement on all sides:
Could he have imagined his life after the victory, with some pipe fitter turned political officer sitting in on his Melville seminar and suspecting revisionism every time things got too elevated?
Once or twice Tom did admit that a political officer, or something of the kind, was in attendance at the study group. He wouldn’t say any more about it, just that they’d had a “guest” from New York; he was skirting treason even telling me he was in a cell. To this day I wish I knew which of his twenty buddies had a direct wire to Moscow. Tom would just tease me: “We all have pseudonyms,” he said. “We have to call each other by names like Mr. Jones. Silliest thing—there isn’t a man there I don’t know.”
Fiction has taken an archival turn, consciously straining to set down voices that have never been set down, and thus creating a living archive that fills, complements, questions, and changes the existing one. Merlis did this for Matthiessen, but before it was a conscious exercise (Matthiessen would be excluded from the project as he is now “constructed” as one of the very reasons the project is required). In his writing, Mattheisen was keeping everything on the metaphysical-religious-individual-voice plane, in and of itself a sort of academic crime now, even as his private life only offered him only “sex pervert” status. His view of Billy Budd willingly accepting his fate as a natural and necessary one in a democracy maybe was one he knew full well was his, and, moreover, one he accepted as an unavoidable and necessary lot; a witness / martyrdom continues—if once for one reason, now for another, when we are dystopian about social conditions but utopian about our own ethics.
For Merlis’s Matthiessen, Tom Slater, desire denotes desire for meaning, but in today’s supposed sense-making use of language, such a use of “desire” would be seen a catachresis, sequestering Slater from his own being, his real objects of desire exempted from the domain of the possible by the very heteronormative structures in which he is implicated for upholding. In this kind of reading of Slater’s life, Merlis’s narrator, Reeve, who, in doubting anyone reads Slater anymore, would also be suggesting that Slater was not even the explicator of texts he thought he was, but rather someone whose writing was itself a prosopopoeia emerging from somewhere else.
Merlis’s American Studies is a literary representation, part of a Mid-Atlantic contact zone itself a hauntology of colonialism, capitalism, and slavery, peopled by ghosts that deserve to be heard, archives that need to be filled. The bar where Slater spends his last night is one such spectral zone, shadowed by the 1947 hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, under that Capitol dome where the infamous question-formulation, “Are you a member of the Communist Party or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” accepted only one answer. Today blacklisting is acceptable again, and in our own Manichean age, the only question is are you for or are you against? It is enough to have one’s name associated with “the unacceptable,” however defined—and the definitions shift—to destroy one’s career. Like Merlis, J. Edgar Hoover’s first job was at the Library of Congress:
We were in terror for so long, not just in the dark time when Tom died but for years afterward. When I got to Washington in the late fifties it was still going on, the raids on the bars, the pickup who turned out to be a cop, the fear that you would never be promoted if you didn’t bring a date to the department picnic.
When the tension between facts and truth erupts with respect to other events under the Capitol dome, like the January 6 insurrection, what is needed is Matthiessen-like literary imagination to read facts, not just respond to them with the plug-and-play rhetoric of one side or the other. Can criticism contribute to the common good? Matthiessen likely believed so. Writing and speaking are part of the world; truth has a form, part of which is facts, part of which is the obscuration of those facts. Matthiessen was able to gain access to great writing, which could only be done by finding its inner forces, its own way of seeing, and he could articulate his findings with his own great writing—not abstracted professionalism. If Matthiessen could read a sonnet, he could analyze a political system. In Merlis’s imaginary of his life, the government finally closes in and there is, as in the academy, only the semblance of due process:
Finally the chairman said, rapidly, almost mumbling, “Professor Slater, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States.” He looked up at the ceiling, where foreshortened Pilgrim Fathers strode forth from an armada of rosy clouds.
Tom spoke the formula that became so familiar in those years. There was, afterward, some debate as to whether he had said it at the right time. Some said you had to take the Fifth right when they asked you your name; some said the address was where you drew the line; some said profession. But of course there wasn’t any right time to do what Tom had done.
The college has his homosexuality as a convenient excuse—Slater’s sexuality, an “apolitical deviation” for the Communists, is a crime against nature at university. Slater is not very experienced, and the narrator, for all his experience, is constructing his archive of Slater’s last days in a hospital bed after being assaulted by a man he has brought home. It is hard to know if Merlis means the reader to think his narrator, or Slater, or either, will achieve the clarity that comes to a dying hero at the end:
The seminar above all, that famous seminar of his, that he first had the audacity to call “American Studies.” Nowadays that means dissertations on “Gilligan’s Island.” He never meant to study America, the whole shebang, in all its imbecile complexity. For him there were, perhaps, three hundred Americans in as many years. They dwelt together in a tiny village, Cambridge/Concord/Mannhatta, Puritans and Transcendentalists exchanging good mornings, and Walt Whitman peeping in the windows.
