Merrill, James Ingram

views updated

Merrill, James Ingram

(b. 3 March 1926 in New York City; d. 6 February 1995 in Tucson, Arizona), writer who published a memoir, a collection of essays, two novels, and two plays but whose reputation rests principally on his fifteen books of verse, including The Changing Light at Sandover (1982).

Merrill was the youngest son of Charles Edward Merrill, a founding partner of the equities brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith, and his second wife, Hellen Ingram, a Jacksonville, Florida, newspaper reporter and socialite. He had a half brother and a stepsister by his mother’s second marriage to Colonel William Plummer. Merrill grew up in resplendent surroundings, first in an elegant federal-style brownstone at 18 West Eleventh Street in New York City and later at the sumptuous Southampton estate the “Orchard” on Long Island. Merrill was rich at the age of five, “whether I liked it or not,” he later wrote, and never lived on his writing income.

Merrill’s parents separated during the summer of 1937. Two of his frequently anthologized poems, “The Broken Home” and “Lost in Translation,” deal directly with the anguish of his childhood and home, a metaphor often recapitulated in his verse, according to the critic David Kalstone. After his parents’ divorce, Merrill and his mother returned to New York City. From 1939 to 1943 Merrill attended the Lawrenceville School near Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked on the literary magazine’s staff. Although he had penned his first poems at the age of eight, a friendly rivalry with his classmate Frederick Buechner, the author of A Long Day’s Dying (1950), spurred Merrill to dedicate his life to writing. He could not be deterred by his father, who eventually came to appreciate his son’s dedication. Merrill’s father privately published the young poet’s first collection of juvenilia in 1942 to his son’s surprise and later chargin.

Merrill said in an interview that he cared about music long before he concerned himself with literature. In 1939 he heard the complete cycle of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, and those performances initiated him into a lifelong passion for opera. Merrill claimed his true education occurred at the old Metropolitan Opera house, where he heard many of the twentieth century’s great singers.

Merrill entered his father’s alma mater, Amherst College, in 1943. His studies were interrupted by the draft in 1944. Because demobilization had begun, Merrill was not deployed in Europe, and after his discharge in 1945, he returned to Amherst. He had a romantic relationship with a teacher, the Greek poet and translator Kimon Friar, which scandalized his parents. Merrill dedicated the privately printed collection The Black Swan and Other Poems to Friar in 1946.

Merrill graduated from Amherst summa cum laude with a B.A. degree in 1947. He wrote his thesis on the French novelist Marcel Proust and published poems in the Kenyon Review. An early appearance in Poetry in 1946 garnered Merrill the Oscar Blumenthal Prize in 1947. He taught at Bard College for a year. Culling the best poems from The Black Swan into a manuscript, he submitted it to one publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. He learned of the acceptance of First Poems (1951) shortly before he sailed for Europe in March 1950. Merrill traveled the Continent for two and a half years and later chronicled his odyssey in the memoir A Different Person (1993). This poignant account of the life of the gay expatriate in the 1950s is colloquy between the dapper young poet and his older self from the vantage point of experience and years.

With the publication of First Poems, Merrill marked the formal beginning of his long career, distinguishing himself among the poets of his generation with his technical virtuosity and stylistic brilliance. In retrospect this early collection and the next, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace and Other Poems (1959), in part an elegiac tribute to the Dutch poet Hans Lodeizen, whom Merrill knew at Amherst, exhibit a reticence reflective of the suffocating political and cultural climate of the United States in the 1950s. Like his contemporaries, Merrill eventually wrote more autobiographical verse. Influenced by the Proustian concept that memory harbors patterns of childhood experience that a writer is fated to revisit, Merrill explored his past and articulated the details of his formative years with peerless imagination and intellect, molding them into an art that held a mirror not only to himself but to his age.

In the 1950s Merrill experimented with other literary forms. The Bait, a one-act play, premiered in New York in 1953. The Immortal Husband, a three-act, modern retelling of the Greek myth of Tithonus and Aurora, premiered in 1955. Both plays were directed by Herbert Machiz and produced by John Bernard Myers for the Artists’ Theatre. In 1956 Merrill published his first novel, The Seraglio, a roman à clef about his father. The (Diblos) Notebook, published in 1965, grew out of his sojourns in Greece.

At the premier of The Bait, Merrill met his lifelong companion David Jackson. In 1954 Merrill and Jackson moved to the coastal village of Stonington, Connecticut, retreating from the literary scene of New York City. In 1956 they bought a home together, and Merrill’s collection Water Street (1962), a seminal work in his artistic development, is named for its address. With Water Street, Merrill proclaimed his poetic vocation as the “need to make some kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of the love spent.” In 1959 Merrill bought a house in Athens, Greece, and for twenty years he and Jackson divided their time between the two cities.

At the time of his father’s death in 1956, Merrill funded the Ingram Merrill Foundation with a portion of his inheritance. From its inception to its cessation of activities in 1996, the foundation awarded millions of dollars of grants and prizes to writers, musicians, and visual artists. In 1966 the state of Connecticut named Merrill its first poet laureate.

Minutes before noon on Friday, 6 March 1970, Merrill’s childhood home at 18 West Eleventh Street attained a grim notoriety when dynamite stored in the basement of the premises by the radical group the Weathermen accidentally detonated, killing three bomb makers. Cathlyn Wilkerson, the daughter of the building’s owner and a member of the group, escaped the rubble and remained a fugitive for a decade. Characteristically, Merrill registered his shock at his “vainly exploded” former home with a poem named for the address. It was published in Braving the Elements (1972) and won the Bollingen Prize in poetry.

Merrill and Jackson began experimenting with a homemade Ouji board and chipped willowware teacup in 1955, and in the 1970s Merrill conceived of a long narrative poem based on the voluminous transcripts of the couple’s conversations with their personal pantheon of friends, mentors, and spirits. “The Book of Ephraim,” which recounts twenty years of conversations with their favorite voice, first appeared in the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Divine Comedies in 1976. It was followed by Mirabell: Books of Number (1978), which won Merrill’s second National Book Award, and Scripts for the Pageant (1980), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for 1983. With an epilogue titled “Coda: The Higher Keys,” Merrill published the entire trilogy in one volume, The Changing Light at Sandover, in 1982 to the delight of his admirers and the bewilderment of the skeptics, who poured over its cosmogonic revelations, its melange of science and occult, and its portrait of the couple’s relationship.

Merrill’s other works include Nights and Days (1966), for which he won his first National Book Award in 1967; The Fire Screen (1969); Late Settings (1985); and The Inner Room (1988), which garnered the first Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry awarded by the Library of Congress.

In February 1995, while vacationing in Tucson, Merrill was admitted to the hospital for acute HIV-related pancreatitis. He died of cardiac arrest at the Arizona Health Sciences Center in Tucson. His ashes are interred in Stonington Cemetery, Stonington, Connecticut. A Scattering of Salts, his last book of poetry, was published a month following his death.

Revered by fellow poets and readers alike for his peerless mastery of an eclectic mix of poetic forms, his affinity for paradox and pun, his great tonal range, his urbanity and wit, few twentieth-century poets achieved a genuine metamorphosis of the autobiographical into art. Calling him “one of our indispensable poets” in 1972, the critic Helen Vendler noted that his lyric poems were “autobiographical without being ’confessional.’ “But the zenith of his imaginative powers remains his eccentric magnum opus The Changing Light at Sandover, which the poet J. D. McClatchy names “with the possible exception of Whitman’s ’Song of Myself’ America’s strangest and grandest poem.”

Merrill’s papers reside in the collection of the James M. Olin Library of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The essential text on Merrill remains his memoir, A Different Person (1993). Stephen Yenser, The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1987), is an exhaustive study of Merrill’s art. David Kalstone, Five Temperaments (1977), is an intuitive and well-written analysis of the autobiographical impulse in Merrill’s work and the work of four contemporaries. Two superb collections of essays on Merrill’s work are Harold Bloom, cà., James Merrill (1985), and David Lehman and Charles Berger, eds., James Merrill: Essays in Criticism (1983). Interviews with Merrill are in Paris Review (Summer 1982), and Saturday Review of the Arts (2 Dec. 1972). Helen Vendler’s review of A Scattering of Salts in the New York Review of Books (11 May 1995) is an excellent piece of scholarship. Among the numerous tributes to Merrill after his death, J. D.