James Merrill and Queer Fire

On the poem "Charles on Fire" and which appearances you see.

Earlier this month I wrote a post on queer themes of unruly desire in James Merrill’s poem “A Carpet Not Bought.” I thought as a sequel I’d talk about some similar issues in Merrill’s “Charles On Fire”—my other favorite poem from his collection Nights and Days (1966).

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As I mentioned in the last post, Merrill (1926-1995) was a heir to the Merrill Lynch fortune. In part as a result he had the resources and the leverage to be relatively open about his homosexuality.

Yet, despite the fact that he was (mostly) out of the closet, critics and readers of his poetry have been reticent about discussing queer themes in his work. “Charles on Fire” is another example of that dynamic.

Charles On Fire

Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false claims),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
"Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man, you are sunk." No one but squared
The shoulders of their own unlovliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,
They do it this way"--bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once gloved itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.

I’ve found one or two discussions of this poem. None talks about the fact that it appears to be occurring in an all-male space, or what that might mean. Timothy Materer in his book James Merrill’s Apocalypse says that the poem “laments that poetic vision seem to come only in brief gleams of light.” Blogger Timothy Kerlin suggests that the poem is a moralistic indictment of shallowness:

What Merrill wants us to see is a group of people focused on superficiality, appearances, fashion (i.e. what Parisians do), and good looks.  This is not a group of people much concerned with depth.  And other than Charles and the young man, no one is given any sense of individuality.  This is a group of people that functions only as a group because they do not have enough depth to be distinguishable from each other.

Both Kerlin and Materer present the poem as a parable of inadequacy; it’s a narrative about lack of insight, lack of poetic fire, lack of depth.

Queer Appearances

There’s certainly some melancholy and wistfulness in “Charles on Fire.” But there’s also I think a good bit of joy, and of what you might call, in various senses, pride.

Again, it’s significant that the poem takes place at a social occasion among a group of people who are all men; the bearded guy who has been to Paris, the poem’s speaker (presuming that speaker is an analogue for Merrill), and Charles, who “cooked and served the meal”—domestic tasks that are generally (and certainly in the mid-sixties) coded feminine.

If this is a group of homosexual friends, the discussion of  “Appearances” (capitalized at the beginning of a line) and shallowness takes on some layers. A group of gay men are talking about the worth and power of “uncommon physical good looks” to “launch one…in life.” They could be thinking in part about career success, but they also could be thinking about success in the life—the importance of (male) good looks in a particular gay subculture. That subculture has “vaporous eddies and false claims”—a way of referencing the uncertainties, silences and misdirections of the closet.

Good looks, though, aren’t enough, according to the bearded man, who says  “Without your intellectual and spiritual/Values, man, you are sunk.” That sounds like (or appears to be) a cliché; a glib surface reassertion of the value of depth. For a group of gay men, though, the obvious surface shibboleth has additional resonance; they all are under intense pressure to hide who they are and conceal thir own “intellectual and spiritual” selves and values.

The possession of “uncommon physical good looks” provides a façade of normality while also, potentially, signaling status, and participation, in a non-normative milieu. The convoluted, half opaque syntax of “No one but squared/The shoulders of his own unloveliness” gestures and enacts the dilemma; meanings half understood, obscure burdens (or burdens of obscurity) shouldered, the “unloveliness” of aging, but also of stigma, which joines everyone together, not because they lack personality or depth, but because they share a common experience of marginalization.

A Gay Light

It's at this point that “Long-suffering Charles” offers liquor in “tumblers finely etched”. The bearded man, inspired by the custom of Paris (that gay city of lights), ignites Charles’ liquor with a match. The result is a kind of magic.

A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once gloved itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again…

The commas between almost every word of  “A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went” make the line flicker and pulse like the flame it is describing. Iambic feet also come and go, giving the lines a lambent, inconsistent propulsion. “In a hush that fell/we heard the vessel crack” is enjambed iambic pentameter—an off-kilter Shakespearean declamation, which breaks the line just as the glass breaks.

The liquid escapes, like someone (Cinderella?) stepping down from a “crystal coach”, and slides across Charles’s hand with a sussurant sigh (“Charles’s…glistening…itself…eeriness...passed.”) “The moment passed” is the first non-enjambed sentence in the passage, bringing the moment to an end—but then it goes on, with a final magical wave. “He made two quick sweeps and/Was flesh again.”

Merrill uses the effortlessly elegant fragmentation of his lines to draw the beauty of a surface cracking; appearances shatter, what was inside comes out—and what that inside does is to turn into another surface, a coating of fire on Charles’ hand. The “spiritual values” are an outer appearance; Cinderella’s coach’s glamour expresses outwardly the beauty under (and now over) her rags and grime.

What is the inner beauty in question here? What are we seeing in (or on) Charles? The last lines offer some hints.

He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.

Charles asserts that the breaking of the glass “couldn’t matter less”; his gracious dismissal of the break is, perhaps, part of what the break reveals—he is lit by his own “long-suffering” kindness.

In addition, I think the enjambment again, is revealing (or concealing.) The line reads “Was flesh again. ‘It couldn’t matter less’”. The poem’s message, hidden in plain sight within Charles’ message, is about flesh, and Charles disavowal becomes a disavowal of surfaces, or perhaps of bodies. The flaming (ahem) liquid, in covering Charles’ flesh, reveals that flesh; it illuminates his skin, and particularly his hand—a potentially erotic instrument, especially in a homosexual context. The fire that lights Charles is his self-effacement, which is also his queerness—an illumination that is more visible because hidden and a surface appearance which is also a truth.

Charles, after the flame disappears, glances in the mirror—a moment which Kerlin interprets as a sign of shallowness. “What is Charles's response to this moment of power?  He wants to ignore it.  He looks in the mirror--once again he is concerned with appearance.”

There are various reasons one might reasonably be concerned with appearance though. One might want to make sure one hasn’t been badly burned, for example—a reasonable fear! One might also want to make sure that your inner self isn’t as visible as it seemed for a moment, especially if that inner self is heavily stigmatized in ways that might make one a target. Charles’ “shocked, unconscious glance” is a final revelation of a self which has reason to fear revelations.

Charles shines. But the shining, that surface gleam, exists inseparably from its containment beneath the surface—both because Charles’ light is his modesty, and because his light is his queerness. “Finding nothing had changed” is a kind of anticlimax, but it’s also an assertion that the light is there on his hands all the time, for those who aren’t (or are?) distracted by appearances.

Similarly, when Charles “sinks down among” his companions, he’s falling away from a moment of revelation, but he’s also revealing that the sudden moment of beauty is something he shares with his guests and his friends. The transient flame is something that they all hold together.

What you see, what you don’t

In writing a poem about appearances, Merrill is writing a poem about what the reader sees or does not see. The queer subtext here isn’t really sub, except in the sense that texts (like mirrors) can be limited by what you’re willing to look for in them.

“Charles On Fire” is parodying or poking fun at the gathered group to some degree, and it uses homophobic tropes around effete shallowness to do that. It’s also, though,  a celebration of Charles’ surface virtues, which are at the same time his inner virtues, and the virtues of all of them there, drinking and thinking together. That “blue flame, gentle, beautiful” is the “finely etched” poem itself, the trivial appearance of which suddenly cracks open to reveal only what was there, in flesh and fire, before it vanishes. It’s all the more precious when only those who know Charles, and know Charles, can see it.