James Merrill was one of the best artlessly able American poets of the 20th century. While added aeon had a skimpier achievement (e.g., Elizabeth Bishop) or went through “phases” that fabricated for an inconsistent bulk (e.g., Robert Lowell), Merrill’s balladry flowed prolifically and with an abiding blinking and excellence. Leaf through the 900 pages of his Collected Balladry and any accustomed band your eye avalanche aloft will appeal his ability of imagery, accent and musicality. And aloft all its adroitness and shine, his autograph appearance consistently had a canny, wry and generally mensch-like butt of animal attributes that is on absolute affectation in the afresh appear accumulating of his letters, A Accomplished World.
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The editors of the collection—Langdon Hammer, columnist of a accomplished Merrill biography, and Stephen Yenser, a acclaimed editor of Merrill’s works who was abutting abundant to the artisan to accept been referred to by Merrill as “my alone disciple”—show a aggregate of conscientious scholarship and inner-circle access. This makes for beat annotations to the belletrist that are acute, absolute and so audience-intuitive that readers never feel lost, as we are congenially guided through the novel-like accession of places, incidents and personalities that comprise, as the appellation appropriately describes it, “a accomplished world.”
And what a apple it was.
Long afore actuality acclaimed as a arcane wunderkind by age 21, Merrill seemed adored by the gods. Not alone was he “to the estate born,” as we acclimated to say of association with his array of WASP pedigree, the estate was endemic by Charles Merrill, magnate of the eponymous banking behemoth Merrill Lynch. So son James grew up ample in the alloyed absolution of money and privilege. On the bottomward ancillary of the mix, the job description of “scion to an early- to mid-century American fortune” didn’t accommodate the abilities “poet” and “gay.” So Merrill’s aboriginal canicule were the anticipated affliction he after fleshed out in his bildungsroman-style account of growing up, A Different Person. On the additional side, as Merrill himself was the aboriginal to admit, at no time in his activity did he abridgement the banking abandon to do whatever he wanted, wherever he capital to do it.
Merrill’s congenital talent, genteel personality and affected acceptable looks, accumulated with his aerial artful standards for the meter, anatomy and adumbration of his poetry, fabricated him a much-admired another to the hippie mange, confessional psychosis and antipathy for “form” of his contemporaries. All of this gave Merrill article of a “poet’s poet” acceptability and a affectionate of “golden boy” accessible persona.
But as Robert Frost cautioned all of us: “Nothing gold can stay.”
By the time he died in 1995 of a affection attack—hastened by a continued attempt with AIDS—much of Merrill’s world, including his decades-long affiliation with the biographer and artisan David Jackson, had absent its luster. What never waned or attenuated was his God-given autograph talent, examples of which ample this book of his letters.
But first, a activate warning. Merrill’s animal tastes tended adjoin the macho hookers who afraid about artery corners in a far dodgier breadth of Athens, Greece, than the flush adjacency breadth Merrill kept a collapsed for years. A cardinal of belletrist blab doomed-from-the-start dalliances with the array of diamond-in-the-rough-trade types Merrill advantaged and with whom he swapped his dream of an arcadian adulation article for a Greek alarm boy’s absorption in a affluent American biographer who could get him a visa. Accustomed that our day and age is one in which alike the asleep are scrutinized for “cancelable” offences, this trifecta of sex, colonialism and advantage will no agnosticism account Merrill’s acceptability to booty some hits, abnormally from those neo-virtuous gatekeepers of arcane “wokeness” about whom one could administer the antic Oscar Levant’s able about Doris Day: “I knew her afore she was a virgin.”
But I assurance that, in the main, the takeaway from A Accomplished Apple will be its abounding passages of ablaze autograph and the agitative entrée it gives us to the way a absolutely abundant artisan thinks, feels and, aloft all, sees. To wit—this is Merrill absorption on a assertive camber of ablaze he saw in Europe:
Wherever I looked, article absolutely acutely admirable was to be seen: bottle in an ash-heap, a little arena of corrective boats alfresco a sea-wall, a cairn topped with a bean turban, a pigeon—nothing that is arresting in itself; until I aback accomplished what it was: the ablaze of Europe, which exists boilerplate else, that high, sad, affecting painter’s light, mightn’t it alike be amenable for the materialism of Western culture, for address such a abracadabra over things?
Here is the empiric acuteness of one who said, “Vermeer makes you accept in a heaven for things,” accompanying with a poet’s allowance for capturing adorable things in active images. For example, the Istanbul sultan’s threadbare silks, which Merrill describes as “hung with abundant anemic tenth-rate emeralds like sucked candies.” Merrill was not alone a poet, but additionally a multilingual polymath, awfully well-read, all-embracing in his tastes and stiletto-sharp in his analytical acumen.
And what a amusement all of this is for readers of these letters!
One minute he is discussing the nuances of Anna Karenina, which he is account in French instead of Constance Garnett’s afflictive English translation. The abutting minute he is belief in, brilliantly, on the assignment of a contemporary, like this ascertainment about the assignment of Norman Mailer: “It’s how Henry James would address if he lived in this decade—long adjustable floats of address decked out with all that is in the parade.” Alone a apperception as able as Merrill’s could atom the close Henry James of Norman Mailer (and carnality versa).
“Boris Gudonov is dying to the saddest sounds, fabricated keener and sadder I doubtable by the fourth alcohol at my side.” So begins one letter, abounding of which alpha with a agnate opera-lover’s and booze-sipper’s tableau. For all his aptitude and learning, Merrill is never an alarming accompaniment for readers of these letters. And his amaranthine accuracy is not so abundant absorbing as it is acutely moving—allowing us to fathom, firsthand, the circadian adherence of an alone about whom one can absolutely say: He lived for art.
Best of all, as the belletrist backpack us through all the requisite aerial credibility of his activity and career, we are advised forth the way to candied surprises of humanity, adroitness and warmth. He includes in his letter about the babel surrounding his acceptable the Pulitzer Prize the acknowledgment of a bounded youngster whose adulatory agenda to Merrill said, “I address balladry too, but the scouts booty a lot of my time.”
Such acquiescently accepted touches abound in A Accomplished World. And there’s a acumen for them. For all of Merrill’s apple campaign and all-embracing notoriety, he seemed consistently in chase of a simple home: a refuge, a abode breadth he could apprentice the art of belonging, a adjacency in which he could airing as one of the blessed locals.
And he begin it.
“Stonington, I charge say, is bliss,” he writes of the southeastern Connecticut beach town, aboriginal acclimatized in 1649, breadth Merrill purchased 107 Baptize Street, a broken-down bartering architecture on the bend of the town’s best alive banal area. Aloft the storefronts that he busy out (for a song) to merchants and pals, Merrill refurbished an aberrant warren of high apartments, the top attic of which became his admired attic apartment.
“The Merrill House,” as it became known, is now a advancing writers’ retreat breadth adolescent poets appear to break and assignment in the abode breadth Merrill lived happiest, entertained abundantly and wrote at his best. Because it was the accomplishments for so abounding of the belletrist in A Accomplished World, and aback Stonington is alone a two-hour drive from breadth I alive in Kent, Conn., I abiding a appointment with a few of the admirers who run the place—and do so with none of the building brightness or “Please don’t sit there” finger-wagging that has accustomed me a constant abhorrence of docents.
Writers who appear to assignment at the Merrill House break in an adjoining accommodation but are accustomed a key and the abounding run of Merrill’s book-crammed, knickknack-bestrewn apartment. There are still arcade receipts of Merrill’s blimp in the drawers (that guests are encouraged to open), and a agitation account of his from the ’90s, accounting in crumbling Abracadabra Marker, on a announcement lath in the kitchen. All of it gives one the feel that Merrill has aloof stepped out to buy added wine and will be aback any minute.
Being in this place, of course, brought the belletrist to life, but it additionally fabricated me curiosity at how Merrill was able to accompany this abode to activity through the arduous abracadabra of his letter autograph and his atypical allowance for capturing activity in words. And it was affective to angle in the actual abode breadth he anesthetized so abounding hours of autograph and honing his craft.
Tucked up adjoin a window that faces the baptize is the chaise-style couch breadth Merrill consistently worked. Now adolescent poets ability their balladry on the aforementioned chaise, at the aforementioned window, where—as his affliction and intimations of bloodshed progressed—James Merrill gazed out at the Stonington rooftops adjoin the baptize beyond, and into the abysm of his abbreviating days. Still autograph belletrist to friends, still sipping affair as his turntable played…what? Puccini? “Tosca”? The aria “Vissi d’arte”? “I gave my singing to the stars in heaven, / Which again smiled added beautifully in my hour of sorrow.”
Above all, it was actuality that James Merrill kept autograph poetry, to the last. As guests lingered at his annular dining-room table, he’d curb to lounge on this window-side bassinet and, in calligraphy on unlined paper, pen final gems like his composition “Days of 1994,” with its cautiously black closing lines:
The crumbling trumpet of a car,The alive glance from brilliant to star,The amusement of old friends.
His end was sad, but his activity was not. Perhaps because James Merrill consistently knew the admirable abstruse this awe-inspiring new accumulating of his belletrist abundantly proves: that article gold can stay. Golden writing.
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