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James Merrill: Life and Art by Langdon Hammer

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/0041462x-3112300

2325-8101

Ben Leubner,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

For those familiar with James Merrill’s poetry, reading Langdon Hammer’s James Merrill: Life and Art for the first time is like reading it again. Hammer’s subject is threefold: Merrill’s life, Merrill’s art, and the relationship between that life and art. This is precisely Merrill’s own threefold subject throughout his poetry. The result, then, is not so much a biography of discovery and revelation as one of confirmation and filling-in-the-gaps. It is its own kind of delight to read because almost everything within it is already familiar: here are all of the characters from the poetry (including Merrill himself) converted by the biographer’s art back into the people they were, all gathered together between two covers in a chronological narrative that sheds new light on them without exposing them to any kind of over-factual fluorescent glare. That is, there’s no presumption that we’re being told who these people “really” were, with the attendant attempt at a reduction to some kind of revelatory truth. Instead, they’re filled in and filled out, given historical contour without being entirely severed from their representation in Merrill’s art, where the real revelations occur.And it is quite a cast: the mogul Charles Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch, many of whose interests and imperatives, Hammer shows, were the opposite of the eventual interests and imperatives of his son and yet also clearly reflected in them, the son growing up, for instance, to become the chair of his own kind of board; Merrill’s mother, Hellen Ingram, whose life, amazingly, began in the nineteenth century and ended in the twenty-first, casting a shadow from which Merrill never could entirely emerge, though he could convert it into art; David Jackson, Merrill’s longtime partner both in life and at the Ouija board, whose own attempts at writing fiction met with continual frustration as Merrill’s star only ever continued to rise, making for an eventual source of considerable tension between them; Strato Mouflouzélis and Peter Hooten, the two great passions of Merrill’s life outside, or rather inside, of his love for Jackson, as they both took place while Merrill’s relationship with Jackson was ongoing; the mesmerizing Greek, Maria Mitsotáki, one of Merrill’s many muses (and, Hammer hints, substitute mothers); the literary critic and ballet enthusiast David Kalstone, a close friend of Merrill’s whose death from AIDS sadly prefigured the poet’s own; and so on. They’re all in the poetry; they’re all in the biography. Then there’s the list of more peripheral figures, a veritable who’s who of twentieth-century art and culture, the names spanning from A to Z in a Ouija-like arc of fame. Merrill’s life itself was like the operas he loved from a young age, full of intrigue, splendor, and dazzling, sometimes bizarre, set changes and costumes. Or else it was a play, a tragicomedy in five acts reflected in Hammer’s division of the biography into five parts, each consisting of three to six titled scenes, some, appropriately, taking their titles from the poetry. I.i: The Broken Home. II.iii: Water Street. III.vi: Proust’s Law.“The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work,” wrote Yeats toward the end of his life. It’s a choice that Merrill never made. He opted, instead, to adhere to a more Proustian dictate: perfection of the life through transposition of it into the realm of art, making it the subject of the work. If one chooses the work, Yeats continues, one “must refuse/A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark” (1997, 115). But Merrill proves that it is not so: he was raised in mansions, always had at least two well-kept residences throughout his adult life, and found or built for himself a heavenly home indeed in the fantastic ballroom at Sandover, located on the borderland between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. And there was, too, as Hammer reveals and as Merrill’s readers already know, plenty of “raging in the dark” over the vicissitudes of love for more than half a century.“Anything worth having’s had both ways,” Merrill wrote in Sandover, and he adhered to the thought as to a dictate (2003, 174). Easy, one might contend, for one born not with a silver spoon at one’s disposal but instead the entire set. Merrill has always had to face such charges, both in life and in death. But it wasn’t easy; saying yes and no (or rather: “&”) to one thing after another had a habit of leaving one torn: between parents, between lovers, between continents, between friends, between selves. Between life and art, too. Indeed, it was a life’s work to make art out of life. And “the toil has left its mark” indeed (Yeats 115). Merrill’s oeuvre has a cohesion to it that few poets can match, Yeats no doubt among them. But he’s still more Proust here than anyone else; his famed “chronicles of love and loss” possess a narrative integrity worthy of a great novel despite the fact that they stretch from the 1950s to the 1990s. They constitute their own kind of attempt at a recovery of lost time, sometimes even as it’s passing.“Life and the memory of it so compressed/they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?” asks **Elizabeth Bishop (2008, 166). Hammer’s subtitle, “Life and Art,” is deceptively misleading in this regard: the two terms aren’t mutually exclusive. Which is which? Merrill was one of Bishop’s greatest and earlier admirers, as well as a devoted friend. Hammer tells the story of how when Merrill visited Bishop in Brazil toward the end of her residence there, the senior poet requested that the junior one bring along a number of things from New England that were hard to come by where she was living: tea, ginger, curry, ChapStick, a specific brand of cigarettes, scotch, and part of a stove. Merrill brought them all. Another muse to please. His own variation on Bishop’s conundrum concerning life and the retrospective ordering thereof through memory and art, however, occurs in his poem “Days of 1935,” which predates Bishop’s “Poem” and is now one of Merrill’s most famous lyrics. He recalls a childhood epiphany born of the fantasy of being kidnapped and held for ransom: “Pluck,/Some deep nerve went. I knew//That life was fiction in disguise” (2001, 305). The memory of life held in a work of art—lost time recaptured—and life itself: which is the greater fiction? And if life is fiction “in disguise,” that is to say, fiction itself participating in a process of fictionalization (life a fiction of fiction), then Yeats’s imperative is indeed confounded, and his more paradox-inclined countryman’s claim confirmed, that “Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality” (**Wilde [1889] 1905). Here is no decision to be made between mutually exclusive spheres, but only, in Bishop’s words from “Poem,” “life and the memory of it cramped.” How can we know the dancer from the dance indeed?“There’s an unhappy paradox about literary biographies,” says David Foster Wallace, whose middle name, like Merrill’s, was his mother’s maiden name, and who attended Merrill’s alma mater, Amherst College, where he could often be found studying in the Merrill Science Library (Charles, not James). Too often, Wallace laments, the person whose work we love comes across in the pages of biography as having been all too human, small and petty in any variety of ways, reduced under the fluorescent glare of intrusive scrutiny and too deliberate fact- or fault-finding. Wallace laments the “vain, timid, pompous mama’s boy” who comes through in a biography of Borges—surely this can’t have been the crafter of so many exquisite metaphysical parables? Indeed not, he continues; the fault lies with the biographer who feels compelled, in the service of the genre of biography, to engage in what Wallace says ends up being “a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism.” To read thus, reducing the work across the board to a series of “correlative[s] of the author’s emotional state” won’t do; it belittles both parties, the work and the author, not to mention the biographer (2012, 285–87, 290).Still, Wallace doesn’t want to dismiss entirely the idea that familiarity with the author’s “personal and/or psychological circumstances” can be valuable, even crucial, to our understanding of the author’s work. It’s just that the idea shouldn’t be taken as axiomatic and exclusive, and that it’s going to work “a lot better on some writers than on others.” It would work better on Kafka than on Borges, says Wallace, strangely. And perhaps it would work better on a poet like Robert Lowell than it would on a poet like John Ashbery, Lowell’s poems frequently being records of his “personal and/or psychological circumstances” while Ashbery’s poems, while no doubt also stemming from the events and emotions of his own life, are nevertheless veiled in a kind of haze that dissociates them from those events and emotions (287). To dispel that haze in the service of supposed illumination would be to violate the very tissue of the poems considerably, and thus to do a disservice to the poet. In this regard Merrill is a curious case indeed. His poems, like Lowell’s, are predominantly autobiographical, and explicitly so, inviting the biographer to simply and tightly lace together the life and the work. But a great many of Merrill’s lyrics are also intimidatingly hermetic, more so even than Lowell’s, perhaps. Both poets moved from writing more “closed” poems to more “open” ones as they matured, but Merrill maintained a greater fidelity to artifice over the years even as he became more breezy—an artifice that has more in common with the surface sheen of Ashbery than it does with Lowell’s confessions or the transposition of letters into sonnets.How, then, as a biographer, even as a reader, to approach Merrill’s life and art? How to respond to a genuine invitation into an inner room the door to which is often either shut, open only imperceptibly, or so beguiling in its own right as to counter the idea that it is something one is meant to move past and through to begin with? Here Merrill takes his cues from earlier legends of Amherst. First, Frost, whom he once met there: “I wouldn’t have a poem that hadn’t doors. I wouldn’t leave them open, though” (**Thompson 1966, 397); and, second, Dickinson: “So we must keep apart—/You there—I—here/With just the door ajar.” What is the biographer’s task in regard to these doors? To open them for us? To show us how to open them? To leave them closed? To guard them in such a way that they stay shut or just ajar “almost successfully,” as Stevens said poems ought to resist the intelligence? (1997, 306). How to keep from letting in or, worse, generating the glare that shrivels by making merely “real”?But Merrill is unique in that perhaps more than any other recent poet his reputation suffers from an overexposure of certain biographical details before the poetry is even approached. Familiarity with certain circumstances of his life, that is, often precedes or accompanies an introduction to his poetry, which it then militates against. Simply as a result of being his father’s son, he’s already vain and pompous before much of anything is known about either him or his work. This is Merrill the quintessential spoiled rich snob who wrote ornamental and/or obfuscated lyrics in an era when to refuse to deliberately exercise one’s voice directly within the political arena was to invite scorn and charges of isolationism, all the more so if you’re sitting on millions. This is the Merrill whom Rita Dove dismissively characterizes as a representative, or maybe even chair, of “a largely whitewashed poetry establishment” (2011, xlvii) whose other members include poets like Howard Moss, one of Merrill’s editors at the New Yorker, and Richard Wilbur, with whom Merrill liked to make anagrams out of other poets’ full names. Being “pro”-establishment would entail formalism and, according to a logic as ruthless as it is faulty, white conservatism. Being “anti”-establishment means free verse, liberalism, and activism, as well as opposition to a “white” tradition. As reductive as it is, Merrill has never been able to entirely surmount this line of thinking that plagued him while he was alive and that has continued to plague him in the twenty years since his death. It was always going to be a task of his biographers to recover him from such misguided criticisms. The biographer, in this case, was going to have to rescue the poet from “simplistic, dishonest” criticism, not run the risk of giving rise to it.Merrill is nothing if not a poet concerned with the complicated, often confusing relationship between psychology and aesthetics. One of Hammer’s main tasks in the biography was to explain in a way that Merrill himself never did—and never ought to have had to, as the poems speak for themselves—that such concern for questions of aesthetics, questions of psychology, constitutes not an elitist withdrawal from political engagement but an indirect form thereof, where indirection, as Kierkegaard knew, often makes for as effective a route to liberation as any kind of brazen frontal assault is likely to.The Merrill of Hammer’s biography is not only a poet whose meditations on personal love and loss are among the most enchanting lyrics produced in the twentieth century, not only a poet who wrote a hypnotic spiritual epic about conversing with the spirits of the dead via Ouija board séances. Merrill’s work, Hammer makes clear, is no less political than Proust’s or Dante’s before his. Serving as a framework for both those meditations and that epic is an epistemology skeptical of the rigidities of a predominantly Christian heteronormativity and wary of a scientific progress that resulted in the atomic bomb and the degradation of the environment. The Sandover trilogy is predicated upon and drawn from the Ouija board largely as a result of the board’s being neither the Bible nor the Periodic Table of Elements, and therefore providing a standpoint from which to question various projects and dogmas that have arisen from each. It is a decidedly queer epic, delineating an afterlife that offers a corrective to the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos of the Inferno, to the clinical diagnosis of the aberration of inversion, and to the latent sense of vindication inherent in an acronym, just around the corner, like GRID. It thus turns out that the establishment poet par excellence was actually quite antiestablishment. And for nearly the last decade of his life, post-Sandover, Merrill lived with and wrote about AIDS with an insight and courage that afforded an opportunity for analysis, concern, and, eventually, outreach, no less important than that of the protester’s pulpit. The Inner Room and A Scattering of Salts, Merrill’s last two books, are attempts to confront and come to terms with the AIDS epidemic that ought to be read in the company of Mark Doty’s Atlantis (1995) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991).To turn Merrill into a mere radical, however, or even into a “political poet,” would be as incorrect as reducing him to a self-absorbed formalist. As always, he is both: the radical formalist, the formal radical. Nor did Merrill shy from acknowledging, sometimes even affirming, his involvement in a number of the very things he decried. Sandover is part of and predicated upon the epic tradition even as it interrogates and attempts to unravel that tradition’s complicity with various imperialisms. (In this it has much in common with Derek Walcott’s Omeros [1990].) For all of the eventual openness of his poetry (especially from the 1970s on), Merrill never really did come out of the closet; instead, as he said, he simply let it deteriorate around him—largely as a result of work that others were doing. And despite all of the friends, artists, and charities that Merrill aided with his money, he continued to live a life of privilege that left him open to various forms of attack, both from others and from himself. He actually lived quite modestly given his means—he could, Hammer points out, have spent his life on yachts and in penthouses, opting for an existence of leisure rather than one that revolved around the dedicated pursuit of a vocation—but it remains the case that living modestly based on his means would entail a life of extravagance for most of us. And as one of his last great poems, “Self-Portrait in a Tyvek™ Windbreaker,” makes clear, Merrill knew that his lifestyle was as much in league with the destruction of the environment as it was opposed to it—possibly more so. But to make Merrill a kind of poster boy for hypocrisy as a result of this is tantamount to scapegoating, a way of evading our own complicities when in fact the first step in dissolving them is knowing they’re there. Anything worth having is indeed had both ways, including that very sentiment itself, insofar as it functions not only as an expression of entitlement but also as a kind of fatalistic credo. It is an acknowledgment of necessity and of the desire to have it all. What’s worth having must also be had in such a way that it’s not worth having, even money, even love.Hammer worked on this book for a long time, and it’s well worth the wait. A rumored collection of Merrill’s letters edited by Stephen Yenser will, one hopes, follow it shortly. The two volumes together should help to create a new surge of interest in Merrill, a surge that ought to place him in the company of his friend, Bishop, as one of the great poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Up until now the Merrill industry hasn’t taken of quite like the Bishop industry has, but whether or not it will remains to be seen. Bishop’s star, after all, first began to rise steeply in the 1990s, with the publication of a biography in 1993 and a selection of letters in 1994. (It’s nice to think that Merrill could have read that biography or those letters.) That was fifteen years after Bishop’s death in 1979; we’re now twenty years removed from Merrill’s own in 1995. Is the timing right? The online archive is in place at Washington University in St. Louis. Here is the biography, thorough, authoritative, patiently labored over, and entirely impressive. The letters are perhaps on the horizon. Will there be enough momentum now to overcome the persistent and ill-formed hunch that Merrill was never more than an overprivileged formalist who dabbled in the occult while others were doing the real work of trying to change the world?This is the second phase of his supporters’ overall bid for a posthumous promotion on Merrill’s behalf. At the turn of the millennium, handsome editions of his Collected Poems and Collected Prose came out, along with a new edition of Sandover. Here, too, Bishop provided the model. Her own Collected Poems and Collected Prose came out five years after her own death. Will the next fifteen years follow the same arc, with, for instance, a Library of America edition of Merrill’s works, or a publication of his correspondence with the New Yorker? Will there be new, even larger editions of Poems and Prose, along with several anthologies of critical essays and the inevitable backlash that always seems to arise as a result of this kind of attention? I feel both ways about the prospect, as no doubt Merrill himself would.Imagine Mrs. M. Jarrell.