Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,919

This is the grave of James Merrill.

Born in 1926 in New York City, Merill grew up extremely wealthy. Like his father is the Merrill of Merrill Lynch levels of wealthy. They had it all–huge apartments in Greenwich Village, a 30 acre farm upstate originally designed by Stanford White and Frederick Law Olmstead, and of course all the fanciest schools for the kids. Well, Merrill was a lot more interested in the arts than he was in following his father into finance and to his father’s credit, he supported this. Merrill started writing poetry as a kid and his father had his early works bound when the young boy was only 16.

Merrill was rich, but unlike the Vietnam War, rich boys had to fight in World War II. He was drafted in 1944 and served eight months before the war ended. Then it was onto Amherst College, where he graduated in 1947. He wrote his first real book there, The Black Swan, a poetry collection dedicated to the poet and professor who was fucking him, Kimon Friar. College was a different world in them days. Knopf soon signed Merrill to a publishing deal–speaking of things being different in them days, poets getting book deals that would pay off for publishing houses–and First Poems came out in 1951.

Merrill mostly left New York shortly after this. He and his partner David Jackson decided to buy a house in Stonington, Connecticut, just over the Rhode Island border. The money was of course there from the parents, so they would live the winters in Greece and then Key West after about 1980. It took a long time for the next volume of Merrill poems to come out–The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace was his next book, in 1959. Turns out, as he stated later in life, he had some pretty serious writers block in these years. When I get writers block, I assume it’s that I am being a lazy piece of shit again, but then I am a historian, not a poet and thus have a much easier job. After that though, he published relatively frequently, usually a new book of poems every three or four years.

Merrill’s house in Stonington is a serious thing. They bought an old Victorian there and made it all super fancy and were so much a part of the community that after they died, the town of Stonington bought it and made it a writers’ residence. So that’s cool. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places now. In any case, Merrill and Jackson became institutions in Stonington.

Merrill was a big ouija board guy, which OMG what the Fox Sisters and their knocking was too scientific for you? I guess Merrill never got beyond being a 21 year old in some ways. But he wrote an entire 560 page poem based on this nonsense called “The Changing Light at Sandover.” This was published in three parts, between 1976 and 1980 and included all the voices they heard from the dead. Those included him impersonating the poetry of W.H. Auden, with characters also representing his friends, including the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren and the Greek socialite Maria Mitsotaki. It also included created characters such as a first century Jewish man named Ephraim. Hmmm….. I can’t speak to the quality of the poem, but I am rolling my eyes big time at the entire thing. But hey, if it’s good poetry, whatever. The complete three volume work was published as one in 1983 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Later, in 1990, he adapted it for the stage and it was performed at Radcliffe. And hey, at least he turned his ridiculousness into his own art as opposed to people cosplaying as their favorite corporate IP at ComicCons. Who knows, maybe somewhere, someone has written good poetry about their love of superheroes. Beats sexualized fan fiction about Star Wars characters, that’s for sure.

Critics often compared Merrill to Yeats. As the poet X.J. Kennedy once wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “Merrill never sprawls, never flails about, never strikes postures. Intuitively he knows that, as Yeats once pointed out, in poetry, ‘all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.’” Also, critical opinion about Merrill’s work improved greatly through his life. Much of his early work was dismissed as basically a rich guy doing the aesthetics for aesthetics sake thing, but once he started writing about himself more, critics liked it much better. As Harold Bloom once wrote of in reviewing a Merrill collection, ““the book’s eight shorter poems surpass nearly all the earlier Merrill, but its apocalypse (a lesser word won’t do) is a 100-page verse-tale, ‘The Book of Ephraim,’ an occult splendor in which Merrill rivals Yeats’ ‘A Vision,’… and even some aspects of Proust.”

In 1995, Merrill was on vacation in Tucson. He had a heart attack and died. He was 68 years old. The same year, his last volume of poetry came out. That was A Scattering of Salts. There have been plenty of collected volumes of his work in the thirty years since. Said August Kleinzhaler in reviewing his career for the New York Times Book Review, “Where a straight line would do, Merrill cannot resist using filigree. But if one were to bypass his work, one would be missing some of the finest poems written in English in the middle of last century.”

Shall we read a Merrill poem? I believe we shall.

“Voices from the Other World”:

Presently at our touch the teacup stirred,   

Then circled lazily about

From A to Z. The first voice heard

(If they are voices, these mute spellers-out)   

Was that of an engineer

Originally from Cologne.

Dead in his 22nd year

Of cholera in Cairo, he had KNOWN

NO HAPPINESS. He once met Goethe, though.   

Goethe had told him: PERSEVERE.

Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde   

Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,   

Some childish and, you might say, blurred   

By sleep; one little boy

Named Will, reluctant possibly in a ruff

Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled   

Back the arras for that next voice,   

Cold and portentous: ALL IS LOST.

FLEE THIS HOUSE. OTTO VON THURN UND TAXIS.   

OBEY. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.

Frightened, we stopped; but tossed

Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold.

Each night since then, the moon waxes,   

Small insects flit round a cold torch

We light, that sends them pattering to the porch . . .

But no real Sign. New voices come,

Dictate addresses, begging us to write;

Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom   

In ways that so exhilarate

We are sleeping sound of late.

Last night the teacup shattered in a rage.   

Indeed, we have grown nonchalant

Towards the other world. In the gloom here,   

our elbows on the cleared

Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred

Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone

Of our own voices and poor blind Rover’s wheeze,   

Than by those clamoring overhead,

Obsessed or piteous, for a commitment

We still have wit to postpone

Because, once looked at lit

By the cold reflections of the dead

Risen extinct but irresistible,

Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,   

Nor the full moon more quick to chill.

James Merrill is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington, Connecticut.

If you would like this series to visit other American poets, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. T.S. Eliot is in Somerset, England and I think I deserve a trip there and so you do, which is why you will send me there, right? Right? Sylvia Plath is also in the UK, so you can have a poetryfest. Emily Dickinson is in Amherst, Massachusetts. I’m surprised I haven’t been there, but I haven’t. Elizabeth Bishop is in Worcester, Massachusetts and I’m even more surprised I haven’t been to hers. Guess I have some work to do! Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.