Stockbroker Father, Poet Son : THE SERAGLIO <i> by James Merrill (Atheneum Publishers: $19.95; 320 pp.) </i>

It is a testament to the breadth of James Merrill’s influence that one can, without ruffling too many feathers, declare him the greatest living American poet. I often approach his work skeptically, imagining it’s going to be precious or ornately solipsistic, but I always turn the last page of Merrill’s poems feeling purified, astonished, enlightened. Few writers approach his exquisite knowledge of the English language, its beauty and oddity--he breathes vigor into our most common words--and even fewer have managed to combine a sense of elegance with the momentous intellect and feeling that Merrill, unashamedly, brings to his poems. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down to read “The Seraglio,” Merrill’s only conventional novel, published 30 years ago and now being rescued from out-of-printness by his longtime publisher, Atheneum. The novels of poets--like the poems of novelists--tend to be treated as oddities or artifacts, at least on this side of the Atlantic (to American ears, “novelist James Merrill” sounds as odd as “poet John Updike”), and, when you add to that the peculiarity associated with an old book’s resurrection, the result is a novel that’s nearly impossible to read as a novel. How can you observe the prose without always looking for the poetry? How can you ignore the gulf of 30 years? And even more important: How can you remove the neophyte novelist from the shadow of the great poet he was destined to become?

The answer is, of course, you can’t. Even Merrill himself seems to call for “The Seraglio” to be read as artifact; in his eloquent introduction he refers to the book as “a hybrid” coming to light in an age when “the novel of manners and that of sensibility seem equally outmoded.” Still, it is a testament to Merrill’s skill as a novelist, as well as to the inherently entertaining character of “The Seraglio,” that for extended periods of reading time one forgets all of these things and finds oneself just reading a novel--as Merrill puts it, “simple fustiness (makes) for a unity never before attainable.”

At the center of “The Seraglio” is Benjamin Tanning, a version (Merrill admits in the introduction) of his own father. Merrill’s family founded the Merrill-Lynch empire; and, in the novel, Benjamin Tanning heads an investment company known as Tanning, Burr. He is a remarkable, vivid character, his life demarcated by three constants: illness, wealth and women. As “The Seraglio” opens, the much-married Tanning has set himself up for the summer at The Cottage, a palatial estate on the East End of Long Island in which he lives surrounded by women, mostly middle-age or even elderly, all of whom are vying on some level for his affections. Yet Benjamin is a far cry from the rich old codger of pulp fiction; he’s, instead, an enormously appealing and complex man, at once gruff, gentle, brilliant and incurably sentimental, particularly where his “seraglio” of ladies is concerned. It is in describing life at The Cottage that Merrill demonstrates his skill as a novelist of manners: These scenes veer between the hilarious and the precious, culminating in a christening party at which the women guests must wade through the moral muck of deciding whether it is right to eat the liquor-filled candy babies decorating a cake.

Scandal--small and immense--suffuses the atmosphere at The Cottage. As the novel opens, a portrait of Benjamin’s daughter, Enid, has been slashed. Is the culprit his malicious ex-wife, Fern, who refers to him as “the monster”? Or is it the sluttish Irene Cheek, who calls Benjamin “lover-cousin” and, in spite of the presence of her drunken husband, Charlie, flirts with him outrageously? The true answer, of course, is neither: Benjamin’s granddaughter, Lily, we learn on the first page, has in fact committed the crime for reasons having less to do with malice than mysterious and inchoate urges, and it is here that “the novel of sensibility” that Merrill describes himself as having “grafted” onto the novel of manners finds its beginning.

It is Benjamin’s son, Francis Tanning, who serves as tour guide for both halves of the hybrid. Having just returned from a year of pretending to be poor in Rome, Francis is, admittedly, at a loss, seeking in the United States what has eluded him in Italy--some mysterious ingredient that will make his life seem “real.” He arrives at The Cottage for the summer, and, in hope of strengthening his relationship with his father, brings along as a contribution to the Seraglio a sophisticated European sculptress, Xenia Grosz (or “Zinnia,” as the American women call her), commissioning her to do a bust of Benjamin and secretly hoping to spark a flirtation between the two. Xenia awakens Francis to the life of his own family; she talks to everybody and acquires in a few weeks a knowledge of the sexual and psychological underlife of The Cottage so much more extensive and rich than Francis’ own that he is humbled and awed. Francis is, admittedly, a virgin at 25, yet he blames his money for the unreality of his life. Indeed, the ostensible subject of “The Seraglio” is money; its more pressing concern, Francis’ homosexuality, is secret, never mentioned, though constantly alluded to. Until his gruff, pragmatic brother-in-law summarily disabuses him of the notion, it is an overabundance of money that Francis blames for keeping him from feeling that his life is “real.”

Later, a pair of sexual encounters with women lead Francis, in a fit of sexual self-hatred, to take a razor and emasculate himself in a bathtub. The scene is shocking, and meant to be. In the introduction, Merrill explains that he kept it against his friends’ advice because “I was too pleased by its neat ‘objective correlative’ for my quarrel with the prevailing social and sexual assumptions to listen to reason.” The result reads peculiarly, particularly 30 years later. Although Merrill manages to elicit surprising comedy from the scene--a lady friend’s use of the cliche “don’t cut off your nose to spite your head” sends Benjamin into a mysterious depression--what is, to my eyes, most disturbing about the scene is the fact that Francis undergoes a sort of awakening as a result of his self-mutilation; he returns to the book transformed from an artistic gadabout into a genuine eccentric, obsessed with communication with the “other world” through a Ouija board, yet apparently utterly self-possessed, at peace. The implication seems to be that Francis’ unsexing of himself has given him the freedom to become homosexual, or at least take on the trappings of ‘50s homosexual life: he moves to Greenwich Village, fills his apartment with antique furniture, sees a Freudian psychoanalyst (who gives him permission to wear women’s clothes) and spends most of his time in the company of a sleek Italian named Marcello, engaging in the appropriately Bohemian pleasure of communion with spirits through the Ouija board. Though the Ouija-board scenes are mesmerizing in their own right (prefiguring Merrill’s great epic “The Changing Light at Sandover”), there is something wooden and false about the act of violence that leads to them; it’s as if the young Merrill had somehow seen only the narrative rightness of such an act, its philosophic side. In the psychologically acute ‘80s, we reel from such a scene; we want to say, “Do it if you must, but show the horror! You must show the horror!”

This is not to say that horror is altogether missing from the book; it is there, in the slashing of the portrait, in the descriptions of Benjamin’s sick room, in the cruelly laid-out facts of an elderly woman’s financial dependance on her lover of 20 years ago. But the horror is punishingly subdued. For all its comedy and wicked wit, “The Seraglio” leaves an acrid aftertaste; it’s an incriminating, brave book; one that shies from very little, and through it, Merrill manages the seemingly impossible task of actually convincing the reader that the lives of the very rich really can be dreadful and ought not necessarily be envied. Yes, the poetry is there, rich and gorgeous, leaping from the lively paragraphs, impossible to ignore.

As for that central scene of Francis’ self-emasculation, it is certainly impossible to forget and bound to spark discussion and argument among all those who read the novel. Whether it succeeds or fails, it was a daring effort, one that a lesser or less-brash writer wouldn’t have tried. But Merrill has never held anything back from us. Here, as in his poetry, we are subject to the full, sometimes overwhelming force of his imagination, and the result is real literature--open-ended, impossible to stop thinking about.