Voices From the Other World: A Review of 'The Selected Poems of James Merrill

The Selected Poems of James Merrill
edited by J.D. McClatchey and Stephen Yenser
Knopf 2008

This is the third selection of Merrill's poems to be published, superseding the two selections which appeared in his lifetime, From the First Nine (1982) and The Selected Poems of 1992. The difference between those two seemed to be a kind of clean-up job, de-emphasizing the somewhat over-written earlier poems, with their fin de siecle properties, the surfaces like jewels on brocade, in favor of the more conversational ones of his maturity. This selection, done by two fine poets long associated with Merrill, differs from the previous selections mainly in the presence of large excerpts from The Changing Light At Sandover, "the Ouija board trilogy", as well as including poems from Merrill's posthumous collection A Scattering of Salts, and a few stray items which otherwise only appear in the huge Collected Poems. It is a judicious selection of a great poet, but implies that the greatness to which he aspired was not the greatness which he achieved.

The adjective applied frequently to Merrill during his lifetime was "Mozartian," due to his technique, superior to any other poet of his time, excepting Elizabeth Bishop, who always hides hers. Merrill's weakest line of resistance is to the pyrotechnical. The danger of such a talent was facility as an end, as he surely knew, not to be like Mozart, who developed throughout his life, but to be like Saint-Saens, of whom Berlioz said, "he lacks nothing but inexperience." For such an artist, skill can become a golden bubble in which he is enclosed for life. Merrill had been born into another sort of golden bubble as well, as a son of Charles Merrill, the co-founder of Merrill Lynch.

The struggles against good fortune which he underwent are chronicled in two prose works, a roman a clef written early in his career called The Seraglio, and a memoir, his next to last book, A Different Person. The Seraglio, whose title refers to the veritable harem of attendant women held in tow by his father, reads weirdly like a synthesis of Tennessee Williams with Robert Musil - melodrama with articulate extreme self-consciousness. Midpoint in a narrative devoted otherwise to the positionings of Charles Merrill's female satellites, the James Merrill character, here called "Francis Tanning,” castrates himself in the bathtub, becoming an acolyte of the other world via the Ouija board thereafter. Merrill defends this startling narrative turn in a preface to the re-issued edition but it has the effect of a werewolf at a tea party, as perhaps he felt.

A Different Person, Merrill's account of his year in Rome undergoing psychoanalysis in quest of transformation, is as charming as The Seraglio is jarring. The purpose of the therapy is outgrow his position as a pawn in the major traumatic event of his life thus far, his parents' divorce, to stop being a lightweight, and to love rather than juggle lovers, a demanding course. Throughout it runs the thread of not wanting to be mistaken for what he was, a scion of wealth, rendered superfluous because rich. In The Seraglio he at one point tries to divest himself of his fortune. And early in A Different Person he catches himself hoping to be mistaken for a poor undergraduate, someone who can be liked for himself.

Merrill tells a sad story in A Different Person, in which Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas bolt from a presentation of his play “The Bait,” saying, "You know this guys got a secret and he's gonna keep it." The secret of the early poems, bristling with allusions and a repertoire of symbols, was that he had plenty of ways of saying little; there was no treasure in the box, the box was the treasure, which is why people resented the effort of unlocking it.

Readers of the truly terrible first drafts of early Rilke or of Yeats throughout his life will grow to understand that it is persistence as much as talent or technique which creates the true poet each becomes. Merrill had this type of relentlessness, too. By his third book he finds his voice, revelatory on the sly rather than confessional, witty or humorous rather than hierophantic. There are very few poems by Merrill which are not worth reading once, and there are enough masterpieces among his mixed successes to warrant a selected poems which represents more than half of his oeuvre. This says a great deal when time will preserve a reputation based on a poem or two.

Which are masterpieces will be debated for years to come. "Lost in Translation" has become so popular - rightly, I believe - that some critics omit it, foppishly, as too obvious a choice. It is typical in that it builds a story through a short lyric sequence, each section a different type of poem with a different facet of the narrative, a technique which allows an almost novelistic richness in the span of a few pages. This faceting technique, begun in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace with little mini-series of two or three poems, comes from W.H. Auden, who steals it from William Butler Yeats. A nice anthology might be made of these narrative-faceting poems, which include “A Thousand and Second Night,” “Yannina,” “From Byzantium,” “Up and Down,” “Verse for Urania,” “Losing the Marbles,” “Lost in Translation,” and “Bronze.” But this would eliminate a number of fine, sometimes great, individual poems, as well as what Merrill believed to be his chief work, The Changing Light at Sandover, or the Ouija board trilogy.

The first book of this trilogy, The Book of Ephraim, is as singular work as may be found. Reviewers compared it to everything prophetic from Milton to Blake to Keats' “The Fall of Hyperion” and Yeats' A Vision when it first came out in 1976. It is the autobiographical narrative of Merrill's encounter with the Other World or the Afterlife via sessions with his lover, David Jackson, at the Ouija board. Like the previews of this work appearing in The Seraglio or the poem “Voices from the Other World,” it keeps a stereoscopic split view between belief and disbelief. His technical resources, always formidable, are used with an art which conceals art. It begins with domestic arrangements and ends with a question mark on which the cosmos hinges. It is suspenseful, funny, and eminently readable. Is there a better narrative poem of its length in English? I can think of rivals but of nothing which surpasses it.

The problem begins with Mirabell: Books of Number, which is tedious. This is not due to Merrill's technical virtuosity, but the ideas espoused, which are that of the Afterlife as a Chinese Bureaucracy or a branch of Merrill/Lynch. A more skillful costuming of barren notions would be hard to imagine. But here's the rub: If you are going to presume to found a religion, it had better have its uses by offering hope or guidance. Mirabell merely consists of correcting a number of mistaken views - Plato's for example - about Atlantis, and the valentines that the luminaries of the Afterlife send via Ouija board to Merrill and Jackson. Think of Dante or the Bardo Thodol; each offers some view of the afterlife which contains ethical instruction on how to live here and now. Whereas Merrill's poem mainly affirms Merrill's personal choices. Disturbing, also, that Auden, who plays a star role, sounds so unlike the author of “Horae Canonae” and so much like the author of “Losing the Marbles.” No amount of scene painting, however gorgeous, can conceal the ventriloquy.

The final segment Scripts for the Pageant and the coda “In the Higher Keys,” represent a partial recovery. The celestial apparatus still creaks, but they may be read as an autobiographical poem concerning the difficulty of belief, or as a cosmic self-portrait, and Merrill's virtuosity will be enough to carry it off. On these grounds, it is entertaining if not credible, and Merrill's gifts are such that credibility can be jettisoned temporarily. He himself wanted to believe it very badly, and at times he did.

One evening he came for dinner at my loft in Soho shortly after Edwin Denby, best of dance critics, had dispatched himself. This came up in conversation and he quietly boasted of using his celestial connections to pop poor Edwin out of purgatory. Others were given advice from posthumous sources. And yet in his last book of poems he records his disappointment when his friend, Maria, who acts as a Beatrice figure throughout the trilogy, is not able to rendezvous with him in her new incarnation, as the spirit world claims she will. Did he know he was dying? The greater, then, the need for proof on this plane.

I shocked a local poet by suggesting that we stage a séance and contact him, but I myself believe that I wouldn't mind the attentions of the incarnate were I available. We do not dismiss Yeats because of A Vision or Robert Graves because of The White Goddess and the possibility of actual revelation accompanies Keats, Shelley, and Blake. We read Rilke without necessarily subscribing to his belief in angels "more like the apsara in Persian miniatures" than those in Fra Angelico, but at some time the myth necessary for the making of art will be questioned by a reader for its applicability. Merrill, despite those tremendous gifts and the great discipline he brought to them, hankered after the role of Dante but lacked, in the end, Dante's imagination and theological architecture as well as Dante's faith. In this he is no different from any other writer in the western canon. There still remains a body of poems as good as any done in English over the last half-century, including those parts of trilogy best read as excerpts.