Merrill, who died in 1995, never wrote much like anybody else. But one poet he admired and learned from, Wallace Stevens, said Merrill reminded him of his younger self; another, W. H. Auden, called him his favorite young American poet. After John Berryman and Robert Lowell died, he was widely considered American poetry’s top dog–except by those who thought his formalism was retrograde. When he won the Bollingen Prize, poetry’s Academy Award, in 1973, The New York Times (of all places) denounced him for being “literary, private and traditional.” It must have struck him as high praise.
As far as we know, Merrill hasn’t kept versifying beyond the grave–unlike the clamorous spirits who supposedly seized control of the willowware teacup used for a pointer on Merrill’s homemade Ouija board, and dictated large chunks of his 560-page poem, “The Changing Light at Sandover.” But he left behind plenty of work for the living to wrestle with–and to delight in. As his friend and fellow poet J. D. McClatchy puts it, “the pleasure principle is high in Jimmy’s sense of what a poem ought to provide.” He also left friends who still lapse into present tense when they speak of him, and summon him back to life in such written reminiscences as Lurie’s “Familiar Spirits,” her new memoir of Merrill and his companion David Jackson.
This month Knopf begins republishing Merrill’s work, supervised by McClatchy. First up: the handsome, 885-page “Collected Poems” with the poet’s toothy half-smile on the two-inch-thick spine and a lilac-colored ribbon marker. (This includes only his lyric poems, not the epic “Sandover,” in which various spirits talk poetry, philosophy, reincarnation and cosmology, to Merrill’s own wonderment, bemusement and consternation.) For a poet praised as meticulous and dismissed as precious, the volume is surprisingly beefy, though nearly fat-free. Merrill was at his desk early every day, and in the course of 50 years–he was 68 when he died–even a meticulous poet’s work will accumulate. And he was always working. “If he found a honeydew melon at the market and gave it to a neighbor,” McClatchy recalls, “he would write a quatrain on it–now lost to history down the garbage disposal.”
Even McClatchy admits “Sandover” is daunting. “It’s not a poem that I have taken the measure of,” he says. “Or I should say, it has not yet taken the measure of me. It would take a lifetime to give a poem of 17,000 lines the sort of attention you can give the shorter poems. I feel like the blind man walking around the elephant, you know?” The pleasure of the “Collected Poems,” though, comes in doses small enough for mortals. Merrill rhymes, scans, writes sonnets and sestinas, but for a formalist he’s unusually light on his feet–“effervescent and slithery,” as McClatchy puts it. They’re about the usual–love, loss, mortality, imagination, poetry itself–suggested by what’s close to home: food, rain, a burning log, a childhood memory.
But things get complicated. Consider “Charles on Fire,” a short poem from the mid-’60s, based on a gaffe at a dinner party. A guest touches a match to liquor in a “finely etched” glass: “A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went/Above the surface. In a hush that fell/We heard the vessel crack… Steward of spirits, Charles’s glistening hand/All at once gloved itself in eeriness… He made two quick sweeps and/Was flesh again.” Merrill wraps that unforgettable image–“gloved… in eeriness”–with Biblical allusions involving language: Christ as the Word made flesh; the Pentecost, when the disciples, crowned with flame and filled with the Holy Spirit, spoke in unknown tongues. But no one familiar with Merrill could read about a hand and a “steward of spirits” and not think of those sessions at the Ouija board, when Merrill’s left hand and Jackson’s right gripped that cup together. Literary? Private? For sure. But slithery.
Over the next few years, Knopf will publish Merrill’s novels, plays and nonfiction, a new edition of “Sandover” and selected letters. And it has just signed Yale professor Langdon Hammer to do a biography. (“I don’t envy him the research,” McClatchy says. “Jimmy saved every electric bill.”) Meanwhile, an essay collection called “Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS” includes McClatchy’s reminiscence of seeing Merrill through his deterioration with HIV–and keeping his condition secret, to protect his privacy and, equally important, his uniqueness. “He didn’t want to run away with the AIDS circus, in the company of a menagerie of less than minor talents hoisting a banner.” And Lurie’s “Familiar Spirits” tells about the warming and cooling of her long friendship with Merrill and Jackson–and her growing discomfort at their involvement with both the spirits and the flesh.
Lurie acknowledges that she may owe her career to these friends: they not only encouraged her but paid to have her first book printed. But she came to dislike Jackson’s one-nighters with young men in return for meals or “loans.” And she began to feel that during the Ouija board sessions Merrill’s mind was “intermittently taken over by a stupid and possibly even evil alien intelligence.” She doesn’t believe in the spirits’ literal reality–and Merrill, as she notes, wrote his skepticism into the poem. But she does believe “there are, in most people’s minds, dark corners and unfriendly forces.” Perhaps even worse, she found much of “Sandover” boring. Her friends felt the chill. And soon their familiar spirit Ephraim was telling them that in her last incarnation Lurie had been one “Helena Pons-Toby,” an “English spinster missionary.”
Of course Lurie’s entitled–in fact, obliged–to be honest about her reactions. But other friends disagree with her judgment that Jackson, whom she considers the more important “conduit” for the spirits–or the unconscious–“was in an essential sense the coauthor of ‘Sandover,’ so much of which flowed through his hand and none of which could have been written without him.” Poet and scholar Robert Polito, author of “A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s ‘The Changing Light at Sandover’ " (written with Merrill’s advice and consent), calls this theory “sentimental.” True, he says, Merrill and Jackson together produced the raw, unedited Ouija board transcripts, but “it was Merrill who got up every morning at 6 o’clock and turned those transcripts into literature.” McClatchy agrees. “It’s like giving the lump of ore credit for the Mercedes-Benz that was made out of it.”
In the 2050s, “Sandover” could be a canonical masterpiece like the “Divine Comedy,” an oddball curiosity like Poe’s cosmological prose poem “Eureka” or–most likely–an endlessly contested document like Pound’s “Cantos.” But the lyrics in Merrill’s “Collected Poems” ought to last as long as people still care about poetry. True, the estimates vary on how much longer that will be; but poetry as alive as Merrill’s is why people care. And come to think of it, being endlessly contested isn’t the worst thing, either.
