12 minute read
In Praise of Hagop Merjian
Returning from Afar
In Praise of Hagop Merjian
Story by Benson Bobrick ’65
After Tuxedo Park, I had gone on to Pomfret School, a boys’ prep school founded in 1894 in Northeastern Connecticut. It had a handsome, rural campus designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and a Romanesque stone chapel, radiant with medieval stained glass. Its Rose Window, above the entrance, as well as two of its arched, oblong side windows, had once belonged to the 13th century French cathedral of St. Julien of Tours. Various other campus buildings, designed by the architect Ernest Flagg, followed the Beaux-Arts style he had developed for the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, which secured his fame.
My principal guide at Pomfret was Hagop Merjian, who helped confirm my bearings toward a life of literature and learning and by his own, high example showed me what such a life could mean. Other teachers served as ancillary lights; but Hagop was my North Star. He taught English and Humanities and came to enjoy in my eyes an Olympian stature among his peers.
Though only a decade or so older than myself, he spoke six languages other than English — Armenian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, and Greek; had studied at Columbia under a number of notable poets and scholars (including Mark Van Doren, Louis Simpson, Jacob Taubes, and Walter J. Ong); had lived in Egypt and Greece; and brought to his teaching a scholar’s passion for learning, a poet’s passion for words, a prodigious linguistic curiosity and knowledge, and a humane devotion to his students and the impact of learning on their lives. Beyond his school obligations, he wrote when he could and occasionally published articles or poems in magazines. Meanwhile, at Pomfret Center, he built his own house and barn; established a farm; grew lettuce, spinach, onions, chard; raised and slaughtered his own livestock (turkeys, lambs, and pigs); and in general recreated a “little Armenia” for himself adjacent to the pristine campus of the School.
Beyond the usual syllabus of assigned reading (Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, O. Henry, and the like), Hagop introduced me to poets like Nâzim Hikmet and Conrad Aiken, mythopoeic ideas of language, Greek literature (in particular Plato, in his Humanities class), and controversial social analysis by such figures as Eric Hoffer and C. Wright Mills. His exuberant energy and manifold range made him a force of nature; yet mingled with that gusto was a deep, mournful understanding of the tyranny of history over persecuted lives. Both of his parents had been orphaned, and after barely surviving the Armenian genocide of the Turks, had run a gauntlet of tribulations before making their way from eastern Turkey to New York. There Hagop had grown up in polyglot communities in Brooklyn and Queens, where his family mingled with Arabs, Greeks, Turks, Russians, and Jews. Every weekend, he once told me, his father (who cleaned oriental rugs for a living) would “rehearse and repeat ‘good morning’ and ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’ to me in a dozen languages, always repeating to me, in Armenian, ‘a new language learned is a new world understood.’”
In addition to his teaching, Hagop counseled college admissions; advised the School’s literary publications; and coached soccer and wrestling, among other sports. Some years after my time at Pomfret, he won the Gold Medal National Wrestling title in his weight class in the Master’s Tournament at the age of forty-four.
***********
As an editor at Pomfret, I must have had a critical eye, but my own writing was incredibly turgid and heavy-laden with involved expressions and abstract words. What might have been said simply was often mouthed over and obscure. There was a tortured quality to it, like a voice in chains. I can barely understand what I was saying; or why I said it as badly as I did.
The general quality of The Pomfret Review (the School’s literary magazine) was high. In 1962, for example, there were essays on Joyce and Aristotle, Copernicus, Debussy, Thomas Mann, Augustine and Boethius, Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies; in the following year, on George Bernard Shaw, Robert Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” Adam Smith, Bishop George Berkeley; and so on. Other issues had papers on “The Folk Tale as Psychic Revelation,” “The Aftermath of the Expulsion of the Bonus Army, July 28, 1932,” concepts of Time, and “Echolocation in Bats.” That spoke well for the School.
However, the best thing about the Review in my day were the blurbs with which Hagop introduced each piece. Here, for example, is how he prefaced a paper on “A Study in Time: Mythic and Religious”: “The Western consciousness, our consciousness, contains within it three basic time motifs: 1. cyclical time: the idea of time as a natural, regenerative thing, manifested and witnessed in the seasons of the year, believed in the festivals of man, and worshiped in the perpetuation of life year after year. 2. vertical time: the Graecic contribution to our consciousness that drives man out of time, for it awakens our souls to the idea of perfection, of absolute forms and divinely perfect ideas. The dialectical quest for absolute truth must end in a goal outside of history, supra-historical, and so it does — the immortality of Socrates. 3. horizontal time: out of the Hebraic experience of the Old and New Testaments comes the idea that time has a divine origin, is divinely ordained and is progressing toward a divine conclusion. Time becomes invested with sacrality: is holy. History becomes, therefore, sacred; the arena where man’s relation to God is revealed.”
There is a whole education in that paragraph.
***********
The summer before my freshman year at Columbia began, Hagop sent me a letter of advice. Wondering how I would manage, he advised me to “get a haircut,” find practical employment (if possible at a big corporation); urged me to check out the Thalia Movie Theater (famed for its foreign and avant-garde films); explore the bookstores below Herald Square; remain an activist; but “stay out of trouble with the law.” He also offered to read (and critique) anything I wrote: “I always have time for this,” he said.
Two years later, he and his wife, Aggie, came to the East Village, where my Pomfret classmate, Peter Murkett (then also at Columbia), and I both lived. He wrote afterwards: “Very fine to see you last week. Very painful to leave so early; there is no doubt about it, we should not get together again unless we have a full day or even a few days to spare…. [Aggie] finds both of you beautiful and quick; the only alternative in the Nicene Creed — remember?? I will keep in touch with you somehow…. For any old thing, keep me posted.” He included a calendar of poems: “Each day of the year’s avarice will perhaps be satiated by flowers rather than cadavers if it is met with one of these poems. Enjoy this calendar. I do so much. It is and has been the greatest and most meaningful anthology of poetry for me — and perhaps for our carcinogenic nation.”
Thirty-two years would pass before I saw him again…
***********
In February 1998, I received a notice from Pomfret School that its wrestling room was to be named in honor of Hagop Merjian, who was about to retire. We hadn’t seen each other in thirty-two years. I decided to attend — and there he was, the grizzled old warhorse of the School, aged but ageless, vibrant, massive, quick. At our Reunion, we could hardly say enough. So it has been for twenty years now since. As I begin to grow old, he is one of my dearest friends.
Typically, our visits to his home occasion bold etymological excursions embellished with a Middle Eastern feast — bulghur pilaf spiced with cumin, shish kabob, prasa (leeks), sumpug (eggplant dishes), boureg, spanakopita, and so on — often accompanied by a little discourse on the history of each dish and the meaning of its name. I have stood with him in his kitchen as he talked non-stop about something or other while he simultaneously cooked, steamed, or grilled xema, imam-bayeldi, shish kebab, and fish.
He is full of good stories. I once sent him a recording of early Christian Syrian chants. He replied with a short, dramatic tale of a detour he and his beloved wife, Haiganoush (or “Aggie,” as we called her), once took by car through the mountains between Bulgaria and Greece. The usual road had been blocked by a farmer’s strike, so his driver careened up the side of the mountain onto a narrow path used by sheep and goats. The path, winding along a precipice, was slick with manure. “I looked out the window on my side,” he recalled, “and saw that the tires of the mini-Renault were inches from the edge. One tiny mistake would send us to our deaths. We were almost a quarter of a mile up that mountain, and in the intensity of that moment, in the silence of those fears, I heard behind me in the back seat, where Haiganoush had dropped her head into her lap — unable to endure the sight of our demise — a whispered moaning, Armenian liturgical chant, the soft litany of the Song of the Dead. That melody stays with me even now.”
Many of Hagop’s letters are marvels of length and animation, with wide-ranging commentary on art, politics, wrestling, pets, history, and other preferred topics, with a diagnosis (always introduced by an ellipsis) of the weather at the top —“ … lambent, frutescent showers,” “ … first snow … good air to split splits in,” “ … early evening, the barn shimmering in the mushroom light, the sweet gloom of dusk.” In all, they reflect the bountiful energy and interests of his capacious life. When typed haphazardly, they are often scrawled over with Armenian, Turkish, Greek, and Arabic words. His ethnic salutations — “Affandim, Magnoon, Barry-Jan, Ya Benson Philimou, Ya Benson Kyrie, Ya Sidi Benson, Khadifa” — are an ever-affectionate reminder to me of the world from which he came. Almost always, too, there is some surprising word — “diaskeuasis,” “zetetic,” “paraleipsis,” “thurible,” “ensorcelled,” “anagnoresis,” “chatoyant,” “nacreous,” “glaucous,” “marcesent,” “tabescense,” “chrestomathy” — naturally spawned by his love of unorthodox terms. Then out of the sometimes obscure thicket of his coinage will emerge a time-honored, exquisitely simple Armenian phrase. And so, of a dear friend who died, he wrote: “She was the wild jasmine of our lives.”
He has fought to find time to do his own writing and in April 2001 told me: “I share with you the anchorite’s deepest hunger for the cloister and the privileges of the adytum.” His dedication as a teacher long made that hard to indulge. At his retirement dinner in 1999 (attended by hundreds, where I spoke briefly), he declared in an unusually spare speech that the foundation of all good teaching was “love.” For emphasis, he repeated the word several times.
***********
Poetry has been the work of his old age. Like his letters, his poems are crowded with unusual, often foreign words, coined or re-minted, neologisms and the like, verbalized nouns — “mausered,” “coriandered,” “ruddled,” “creviced,” “dervished,” “gargoyled,” and so on. At times, they are reminiscent of the word-play of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Also, as in the work of Cavafy (one of his favorites), past and present mingle with equal familiarity in the memory of place. When an uncle learned that Hagop’s mother didn’t know the day of her birth, he exclaimed: “She was born a few days before the full moon/ After the New Year of the big fire that/ Burned the city of Harpoot!” (“Birth Days”) For Hagop, the past is never quite past, but a ripe, ambiguous taste upon his tongue.
Hagop once asked me to make a list of “publishable” favorites, concerned that some of his poems might seem too “ethnic” for much appeal. I replied:
12 April, 2009, Easter Sunday.
Dear Hagop,
Your poems have everything. They are prodigies of bounty — ambitious, broad, full of life, ferocity, light, tenderness — forces of Nature, like the verses cast up by the sea in ‘Walking Carpenter’s Beach.’ Out of your own tidal mix of Greek, Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, English, and German words you seem to have created your own compact poetic diction, in which nothing is trite, and no horror of the past is sullied by platitude.
The might of them grows with each reading, and their ‘ethnicity’ (to address your concern) is — as any authentic, strong sense of place is, or provenance — a singular virtue, not a flaw. No one with any true poetic sense would say these poems are ‘parochial’ or ‘Armenian,’ but come out of the Book of the World in which the Armenian holocaust is a Rubric, writ large.
I tried to make a list of my ‘publishable favorites’ but the list grew absurdly long. Here and there, of course there is some overlap (‘Memory’/’Mnemdje Baba’) (‘Grimoire’/’Bones’); and now and then my ear tells me some might be trimmed. But there isn’t one I don’t think well of, with their knowing embrace of far-flung lands; the architecture of flowers; the sensate, wholly original details of New England winters; poetic tradition; History; and the sacred obligation of poetry to keep Memory alive.”
BENSON BOBRICK ’65 earned his doctorate in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He has been called “perhaps the most interesting American historian writing today” (The New York Times). In 2002 he received the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
EXCERPTED FROM
RETURNING FROM AFAR: A MEMOIR
By Benson Bobrick Published by Stillwater Books
Price: $16.95
ISBN 978-0-578-52642-3
