Arts and Letters

Our vision, says Proust, can make temporal, as well as spatial mistakes. Remembering an ever-to-be-absent friend can cause gaps to occur in the remembered presence, and elicit curious reversals of time. James Merrill's own account of his life, A Different Person, ends with the year—1957—in which he and I first got to know one another and was, when I read it a few years ago in manuscript, like a very belated introduction. Rereading it recently I realized that he had lived one of the most heavily documented lives I have known of. Going through his study after his death, his literary executors turned masses of newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, performance programs from childhood that he had saved. They provided an array of glimpses, a sequence of vignettes that—framed by the discourse of speculation ("that must have been"…“look at that") elicited by seeing them now—seem material, reductive representations of those moments of time redeemed that flash out and are meditated upon throughout the life of his writing. Even one's old letters from him, reread since his death, suggest these spots of time. They are like those which mark the loci of his literary art, as they did for Wordsworth and—in a jagged but continuous line—through to Proust. The life of such a master of summoning up the dead in fictive language as James Merrill should not be celebrated in imitative vignettes, and I shall not try to be anecdotal here.

But the voice of his poetry remains present and need not be summoned up. It was always the voice of a story teller and soliloquizer who somehow never stopped being a conversationalist, and whose tales and meditations were never only and baldly about himself, but ultimately about his listeners. The two major poets of this century who preceded him (and how very differently!) in the matter of the poetic revision of prose narrative—Hardy and Robert Penn Warren—were both novelists who turned in their major later work to verse. James had indeed written three novels. The first was his somewhat autobiographical roman-a-clef, The Seraglio (1957); the second was a brilliant experimental novel—a novel en abîme like Gide's The Counterfeiters, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, or Albert Memmi's The Scorpion—called The (Diblos) Notebook (1965). The final prose fiction was to have been a novel based on twenty-five years of his and David Jackson's communion through the medium of the Ouija board with those voices of the past that come to poets in so many varied ways. As is well known to his readers, the manuscript of what had been written of that book was lost in a taxicab in Atlanta, and the story of its loss recorded in a poem called "The Will." Subsequently, a complex poetic narrative of 2500 lines replaced it. The Book of Ephraim eventually emerged as the first part of his wonderful trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover. But perhaps it is the general figure of a poem replacing a story that generates so much of Merrill's poetry.

That poetry was deeply autobiographical without ever once being self-centered, and always candid without being grossly confessional. To know it was to know a good deal of the map of his life. He was born in New York City on March 3, 1926, and grew up in the house at 18 West 11th Street in which he lived until he was five, and which decades later became briefly celebrated when it was blown up by Weatherpersons in 1970. His father, Charles Merrill, was an energetic and imaginative financier and co-founder of the brokerage firm. He and the poet's mother, Hellen Ingram, were divorced in 1939, an event which remained profoundly affecting for James. His childhood was also spent in the grand house called "The Orchard" in Southampton which figures in those central poems "The Broken Home" and "Lost in Translation," and a photograph of whose ballroom is reproduced on the jacket of the complete version of The Changing Light at Sandover. He went to school at St. Bernard's and then Lawrenceville; while there his first published poem appeared in the school literary magazine; in it, on a screen, was "a Nippon maid, / Her ageless eyes unshielded by her fan." (This was quite Yellow-Book, but for a fifteen-year-old, expert.) At Amherst he studied under the great teacher Reuben Brower who would later go on, at Harvard, to train some of the finest critics and teachers of literature of their time. It was there that he first met Robert Frost. Years later, he spoke of the older poet's tolerance of the undergraduate poet in a way that suggested it had provided an example.

He graduated in 1947 (after a brief period of service in the Army); having come into considerable wealth he was able to live and travel thereafter as few could. But in his case, freedom from labor meant opportunity for work. In 1955, he moved with his companion David Jackson into the house on Water Street in Stonington, Connecticut, and some years later into a house in Athens in which they spent part of every year until 1979, when they would be in Key West during the winter. The houses in Stonington and Athens play a considerable role in the world of his poetry. His work, up through the powerful and beautiful final book "A Scattering of Salts" which appeared shortly after his death, was continually reengaging those Proustian themes of the retrieval of lost childhood, the operations of involuntary memory and of an imaginative memory even more mysterious, and the mutual impersonations of life and art which he kept discovering and inventing in the materials of language itself.

He left us sixteen books and collections of verse, two plays, a memoir, and a volume of essays, all accorded recognition—Bollingen Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the Bobbitt Prize (the first national prize given by the Library of Congress), two National Book Awards and one by the National Book Critics' Circle—but they were in his case the kinds of prize which honor the award rather than the recipient. He was from the start extraordinarily productive. A volume of his work his father had printed when he was sixteen, called Jim's Book, contained poems, a young American poet's almost inevitable translations from Baudelaire, stories—including a two-page sketch in the manner of Dorothy Parker—and a very good essay on Elinor Wylie. His First Poems of 1951 were stunningly elegant: as he later remarked (half-admiringly, half selling them short in the way that serious writers so often must with their early work) when writing them, he "fed / Feelings genuine but dead / With language quick but counterfeit." Oscar Wilde observed that all bad poetry is sincere, and the poet's problem is always to marry the genuine traces of experience with the living turns of language.

James Merrill was always quickening yet again the already living language, and the wordplay which marked his writing and his astonishing conversational improvisation—he was more brilliantly funny than anyone I've known well—was always a kind of noble word-work. So that when he spoke in one poem of "that same old story / Father Time and Mother Earth, / A marriage on the Rocks" he is at once talking of titanic personages and—through the poem's previously implied citation of the old "Time is Money"—his own family. His wit always hovered between the deeply lyrical and the momentarily epigrammatic, and always beautifully easy. But the way of his work was never that. "I trust I am no less time's child than some / Who on the heath impersonate poor Tom / Or on the barricades risk life and limb" he went on to say in that same poem, "The Broken Home," reminding us that there are aspects of our lives in which to be on the barricades is indeed to be on the sidelines. Exemplary always was his refusal (or was it merely a blessed inability?) to—as his friend Wystan Auden put it—“ruin a fine tenor voice for effects that bring down the house."

In a late phase of twentieth-century American culture which seems to celebrate incapacity, to praise a poet's exceptional craft and structural skills seems like special pleading. James took craft for granted, and knew that for a poet to be praised merely for skill, rather than for imagination and true originality was hardly the point. Yet his skill was not only remarkable, and his verse—for which I'll borrow Liszt's phrase, "of transcendent execution"—showed unmatched power over the minutest and, thereby, often the strongest details of language. So, too, with his oral performance of it, whether to a large audience or in a small room to two or three people (as I remember first hearing "Lost in Translation" shortly after it was written). Anyone who heard him read from Sandover must remember shivering when the ghostly return of the voices of the dead one had remembered—W. H. Auden's, in particular, filled the room and the attention. James was one of the few great oral performers of his own or anyone else's poetry; there are writers of verse today who, when they read, yammer, or drone, or whimper, or strut, or mince, or harangue. But very few indeed can read aloud so as to keep their listeners constantly aware of the beauty of sense—however complex—and the sense of beauty that arise from the compelling ways, powerful and delicate at once, in which sense is made by poetry. And beyond this, his great intellectual and oratorical skill gave unimpeded access to his character, and thereby some of his remarkable personal qualities were encountered even by those who never knew him but had heard him read from his work. His readings were radiant with the light of his poetry, rather than with heated self-assertion.

Radiant also was his talent for friendship, as are the traces of this which are to be found in his letters, which will turn out to be among the most beautiful bodies of epistolary literature of our generation. And in that correspondence would also be revealed his remarkable generosity toward younger writers, whom he always took seriously, and encouraged, but never trivially or irresponsibly. We should also note his major generosity of another sort: he gave away considerable sums of money throughout his life, both through personal gifts (including some to this Academy) and through the foundation he established that gave grants to hundreds of writers, artists, and musicians over a period of nearly forty years.

Fate gives us the raw material out of which we shape our lives, and the value of how we live them is determined not by the cost of that material, but by the shaping. Jimmy Merrill was the heir to much money, and to an even more prodigious talent. He also inherited what is always there for the asking—a poetic tradition which can never be followed directly thereby without abandoning it, but which demands an oblique continuation even as the truth it propounds must be told, in Emily Dickinson's word, "slant." Jimmy squandered none of these inheritances, and returned to all of us, and those who will follow us, a substance far beyond that of his endowments.