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Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926–95), whose life is surely one of the most fascinating in American literature. Merrill was born to high privilege and high expectations as the son of Charles Merrill, the charismatic cofounder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a muse, ally, and antagonist throughout her son’s life. Wounded by his parents’ bitter divorce, he was the child of a broken home, looking for repair in poetry and love. This is the story of a young man escaping, yet also reenacting, the energies and obsessions of those powerful parents. It is the story of a gay man inventing his identity against the grain of American society during the eras of the closet, gay liberation, and AIDS. Above all, it is the story of a brilliantly gifted, fiercely dedicated poet working every day to turn his life into art.
After college at Amherst and a period of adventure in Europe, Merrill returned to the New York art world of the 1950s (he was friendly with W. H. Auden, Maya Deren, Truman Capote, Larry Rivers, Elizabeth Bishop, and other midcentury luminaries) and began publishing poems, plays, and novels. In 1953, he fell in love with an aspiring writer, David Jackson. They explored “boys and bars” as they made their life together in Connecticut and later in Greece and Key West. At the same time, improbably, they carried on a forty-year conversation with spirits of the Other World by means of a Ouija board. The board became a source of poetic inspiration for Merrill, culminating in his prizewinning, uncanny, one-of-a-kind work The Changing Light at Sandover. In his virtuosic poetry and in the candid letters and diaries that enrich every page of this deliciously readable life, Merrill created a prismatic art of multiple perspectives and comic self-knowledge, expressing hope for a world threatened by nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Holding this life and art together in a complex, evolving whole, Hammer illuminates Merrill's “chronicles of love & loss” and the poignant personal journey they record.
- Sales Rank: #102912 in Books
- Published on: 2015-04-14
- Released on: 2015-04-14
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.60" h x 2.03" w x 6.67" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 944 pages
Review
"A gorgeously written and elegantly comprehensive study of the tumult and passion of Merrill’s Life and Art."--The Economist
"A fascinating, engrossing portrait of a deeply lived life."--Tobias Carroll, Biographile
"[Hammer] sums up people and milieus with strong, deft strokes. The historian and the critic in him are in elegant synchronicity. He goes to work on Merrill’s outsize life like a master fishmonger carving a bluefin tuna. Every cut is measured. Nothing is wasted. The best and fattiest bits – the poetry, in this case – are reserved, like sashimi, for special use."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"By a wide margin the largest, most detailed, and most convincingly atmospheric biography ever written about Merrill – it has all the rhetorical and bibliographical flavor of a durable landmark. It’s considerably helped along toward that goal by Hammer’s lively storytelling style. . . James Merrill: Life and Art is a brilliantly marshaled biography of a surprisingly elusive subject."--Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly
“Langdon Hammer’s richly textured biography of James Merrill’s life and art, which are so inextricably intertwined, is a work of great candor, insight, and sympathetic imagination. It is a magisterial achievement.”––Edward Hirsch
“This is an overwhelming book. Very few writers have been as intimately portrayed--or had their work as illuminatingly read--as James Merrill in Langdon Hammer's prodigious biography. His empathetic yet clear-eyed account shows how Merrill's exquisite "feeling for the word" merged with his lust for living in an idiosyncratic artistic heroism that produced some of the great lyric poetry of the late twentieth century.”
––Jonathan Galassi
“Fabulously wealthy, gay, prodigiously gifted, Merrill emerges in this stunningly capacious and moving biography in his full complexities: a generous man who thought himself cold; a Jamesian sensibility flinging himself upon the thorns of life; a meticulous formalist who submitted to the occult; a man who hid his HIV-positive status but became, one now sees, one of the major poets of the AIDS crisis. Merrill has found in Langdon Hammer a biographer of enormous discernment, grace and style: it is all here, indefatigably researched, delicately sifted, astutely judged, beautifully written.”––Maureen N. McLane
“Discovering James Merrill's profound masterwork, "The Changing Light at Sandover," just as AIDS was beginning to alter the way we lived then and now saved many a soul. His portrait of gay domesticity that rarely noticed its own difference not only challenged the idea of "queerness" in literature, but in the world. Langdon Hammer's epic study of an epic mind is essential not only to our understanding of the prolific poet, but to the art of biography. Beautifully written and reasoned, Hammer's book possesses all the qualities Merrill prized in his own work, and life: humor, narrative energy, acute observation and analysis that is profound because it is true.”––Hilton Als
“Meticulously researched, Langdon Hammer's James Merrill chronicles the life of a poet who believed nothing is lost-- and whose poetry of personal experience, sifted by sensibility, is a poetry of mirror and mask, flesh and spirit, disclosure and secrecy. Most of all, it's a poetry, and a life, crafted from the sublime and the elemental, brilliantly mixed, which Hammer interprets with tender insight and wise sympathy.”––Brenda Wineapple
About the Author
LANGDON HAMMER is professor of English and American Studies and chair of the English Department at Yale University. His books include Hart Crane & Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism and, as editor for the Library of America, Hart Crane: Complete Poetry and Selected Letters and May Swenson: Collected Poems. A former Guggenheim fellow and fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he has written about poetry for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book Review, and The American Scholar, where he is poetry editor. His lectures on modern poetry are available free online at Yale Open Courses.
www.jamesmerrillweb.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
In Stonington, David’s household role was to look after the property. He was no handyman, but the names of plumbers and carpenters show up in his address book. He knew the neighbors and shopkeepers; he drank at the bar of the Portuguese Holy Ghost Society on Main Street; and he came home with the town’s gossip. “David is my newspaper,” Jimmy liked to say. Jimmy’s role was in the kitchen. He was an assiduous chef, but an eccentric one, not a gourmet. He traded recipes with female friends like Toklas, who used his recipe for shrimp à l’orange in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook; in turn, she taught him how to bake hash brownies. He reprised leftovers with the stinginess of a rich Yankee-improvised concoctions that sometimes seemed like pranks. In the kitchen, as at his desk, he was averse to throwing things away. More than once, when a casserole crashed on its way to the table, he picked out the shards of glass or crockery, and served it to his guests with a smile.
Hilda was their “small, baritone-voiced, more than a little mad cleaning woman," as Jackson described her. She called Jackson “Dave" and Jimmy “Merrill.” When neighbors said that they had peered into the apartment from a nearby building "and you was running aroun up here nakid," she defended the boys: “I says, 'so what! its theah propity!’” Hilda told them about her mother in the state asylum and her father forced to work the “night ship." An elderly and entirely “stone-deaf” Englishman fell in love with her (“there’s something in her nature, primitive don’t you know, that appeals to me”); and, when Hilda welcomed his advances, and word of it got around, her husband beat her up. She took refuge in the guest apartment at 107 Water Street. The police called on her, David called a lawyer, and Jimmy called the Englishman “in pure self-defense,” so as "to give her another ear (even deaf) to pour her sad tale into.” None of this was lost on the neighbors. “The beauty of life in a small town,” Merrill reflected, “is that everyone has a little part to play, and can be watched playing it by the others.”
That spring — it was 1960 — Merrill composed a poem about his Water Street home, called “A Tenancy,” which he dedicated to Jackson. The poem “An Urban Convalescence,” a lonely poem of self-questioning in which Merrill determines to create "some kind of house/ Out of the life lived, the love spent," would come first in Merrill’s collection Water Street and “A Tenancy” last. In effect Merrill gives up New York in the book’s first poem and makes his home in Stonington in the last poem. “A Tenancy” begins by looking back even further. The snowy, March afternoon light that he savors in his present home prompts Merrill to recall his elation when he took his first apartment in Amherst in 1946. It is dawn at the end of the war:
The dance
Had ended, it was light; the men look tired
And awkward in their uniforms.
I sat, head thrown back, and with the dried stains
Of light on my own cheeks, proposed
This bargain with — say with the source of light:
That given a few years more
(Seven or ten or, what seemed vast, fifteen)
To spend in love, in a country not at war,
I would give in return
All I had. All? A little sun
Rose in my throat. The lease was drawn.
Almost fifteen years later, the duration of Merrill's first “lease” on life has turned out not to be “vast” at all. “I did not even feel the time expire,” he marvels. But that has changed:
I feel it though, today, in this new room,
Mine, with my things and thoughts, a view
Of housetops, treetops, the walls bare.
A changing light is deepening, is changing
To a gilt ballroom chair a chair
Bound to break under someone before long.
I let the light change also me.
The “changing light”: this is the first appearance of that phrase which Merrill would return to for the title of his long poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, more than twenty years later. Here it is a trope for time and the way time changes the self, which Merrill is no longer determined to resist: “I let the light change also me.”
“A Tenancy”: the title is curious, since Merrill is talking about a home he owns. It implies that we are merely tenants even in our own house. The principle holds for our bodies: “The body that lived through that day,” Merrill says about the long-ago day he is remembering, “[. . .] is now not mine.” His body, no longer the youthful one he had, will become stranger still with age. But, he reasons, perhaps the body is transformed by time before it is lost to it-like that ordinary chair which, although “Bound to break under someone before long," becomes “a gilt ballroom chair” in the late-afternoon light. “Would it be called a soul?” Merrill asks, wondering what time is making of him. He doesn't go so far as to claim for himself a metaphysical, Keatsian “soul,” but simply a developed attitude, a point of view that is worldly, practical, and witty. He knows that “when the light dies and the bell rings,” guests will appear. He ends by welcoming them:
One foot asleep, I hop
To let my three friends in. They stamp
Themselves free of the spring's
Last snow — or so we hope.
One has brought violets in a pot;
The second, wine; the best,
His open, empty hand. Now in the room
The sun is shining like a lamp.
I put the flowers where I need them most
And then, not asking why they come,
Invite the visitors to sit.
If I am host at last
It is of little more than my own past.
May others be at home in it.
The metaphorical house envisioned at the end of “An Urban Convalescence” takes shape in Merrill's Stonington home. As in that poem, the switch from free verse into metered stanzas matters. At a moment when American poets were arguing over “closed” and “open” form, Merrill recognized that, to get beyond the self-enclosure of his early poems, he didn’t have to reject rhyme and meter; he could change how he used them. In “A Tenancy," he puts them in the service not of lyric idealization and abstraction, but of sociability and comic self-dramatization, and gives us a look into his house and his writing process. “One foot asleep, I hop / To let my three friends in,” he says, getting his metrical feet in working order, ready to host his guests and readers both. “Closed” form would be his means to openness.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Life as art.
By booklover
Including its endnotes, this is an 877-page journey through the life and work of the American writer James Merrill. Hammer's subtitle ("Life and Art") accurately captures his approach to telling Merrill's story. He covers the life with carefully documented detail, he discusses the art (both prose and poetry) with sensitive and insightful analysis, and he succeeds brilliantly in showing the multiple nuanced relationships between the two.
It’s often said that Merrill’s family background did not fit within traditional assumptions (that is, stereotypes) about a poet’s origins. He was born to parents of great wealth and by the time he was twenty-one had been given enough money to live on for the rest of his life. Hammer details both the privilege and the suffocating narrow-mindedness surrounding Jimmy, as he was called, throughout his childhood and adolescence. Creatures of their class and Southern roots, Charles and Helen Merrill imbibed a depressingly familiar brew of snobbism, racism, homophobia, Republican politics, and obsession with money. Merrill fought superficially free of these perversions early, but their toxic after-effects (particularly the homophobia) clearly helped fuel the inner conflicts he contended with all his life.
The part of Merrill that does fit our traditional assumptions about great poets is the way he transformed his demons into the substance of art. Again and again, Merrill chose the people, places and things of his everyday life as starting points in his work. He used both himself and members of his family as sources for the major characters in his early novel, Seraglio. After its publication there was the expected fallout as relatives objected to what they regarded as unfair portraits, unconvinced by Merrill’s explanation that while real people may serve as initial models for his characters, they become something different once they enter fiction and acquire new names, new habits, new dramas and fates.
Through Hammer’s detailed analysis of Merrill’s writing process, we see how his family, lovers and friends occasioned problems that he wrestled with in his poems. We learn that Merrill typically went through multiple drafts before deciding whether a poem should be published. Even his initial point of view in a poem could change as he worked through drafts. Indeed, Hammer notes, at times Merrill “decides to say just the opposite, or nearly the opposite, of what he began by saying.” As with characters in Seraglio who begin as real people, Merrill constructs a persona in his poetry that might begin in his own voice, but gradually metamorphoses into the ironic, distanced, allusive, often witty speaker of his mature work.
In a letter to his mother in the 1950s, Merrill observed that “even when some external disaster takes place—within a matter of hours, like the forming of a pearl, one begins to change it into the event most appropriate to his inner life.” It is the exploration of this “inner life” that dominates Hammer’s narrative. Through close readings of the poetry, quotes from letters both to and from his subject, interviews with Merrill’s acquaintances, and patient narrative of the literal history of Merrill’s life, he traces the journey of an evolving self with all of its beauty, terror, contradictions, and epiphanies.
Hammer’s skillful handling of Merrill’s use of the Ouija board is a masterpiece of finesse. On the one hand he describes in compelling detail the conversations Merrill and his lover David Jackson have with spirits such as Ephraim, and discusses ways they influence Merrill’s poetry. On the other hand he cites rationalist explanations (rationalizations?) for the apparently supernatural phenomena that occur during a séance. Not dogmatic about the nature of the information coming from the séances, he simply documents their influence in Merrill’s writing, particularly in The Changing Light at Sandover. He then relates Merrill’s experience with the Ouija board to the larger theme of spiritualism in the works of such modern writers as Victor Hugo, Browning, Yeats, Robert Duncan, Plath and Hughes.
Hammer clearly admires his subject, but he is honest about details that detract. He explains the controversies over Merrill’s poetry awards; cites Merrill’s promiscuity and multiple sexually transmitted infections, including AIDS; and quotes from a letter Merrill wrote to his friend Stephen Yenser, where (in the voice of a spoiled rich boy) he acknowledges that he has “never denied myself anything,” and that “only the world . . . denies me things on my own behalf.” Merrill could be ruthless with his self-criticism. Ultimately his capacity for facing difficult truths about himself empowered him as an artist, and his poems went well beyond the scope of much of the confessional poetry of the twentieth century.
Compared to the book’s multiple strengths, its flaws are fairly trivial. Some readers may feel that Hammer tethers his explications of the poems too tightly to concurrent events of Merrill’s life. On a few occasions the explications contain mere restatements of individual lines from a poem. There are the usual uncaught typographical errors; and there is one inadvertently comic moment when we are told that Judith Moffett won a prize for an essay defending homosexuality at the “Baptist” Hanover College (which is a Presbyterian school). It would have been front-page news and worthy of a witty poem from Merrill himself had she won a prize for such an essay at a Baptist school.
I was twice sorry when the book ended: sorry that Hammer's fascinating narrative had to close, and sorry that, like most biographies, it concludes with the hero's death. But the end also created a beginning of sorts. Starting with the last thing Merrill published, I am now reading back through his works. Thanks to Langdon Hammer, it should be a much richer experience this time around.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
A Must Read But Not A Casual Read
By Nicholas Puner
Langdon Hammer’s James Merrill, Life And Art is too exhaustive to be a masterpiece, too all-inclusive to be riveting. That said, it’s a phenomenal achievement.
I’m interested in James Merrill’s life, a complicated one, more than in his poetry, which, from my forays, is usually beyond my powers. Merrill was born in 1926 to the enormous wealth of Merrill Lynch cofounder Charles Merrill. His parents divorced, not a common occurrence in the 1930s, when he was 11, leaving him seared for life by what he termed the Broken Home.
Merrill, moreover, was homosexual, not a cool thing to be in those times. Indeed, being homosexual before the very recent era, was a fraught condition, risky, dangerous, shameful, morally corrupt. How Merrill dealt with this, fashioning a life for himself and his long-time partner in Stonington, Conn., in Athens, and later in Key West, while devoting himself to his burgeoning art is a tale both of necessity and fortitude. Although he was never frank with his father about his sexuality, Charles Merrill seems to have understood his son, and, though not a constant presence in his son’s life, was always loving and en-couraging.
Indeed, Charles Merrill must have been an exceptional father in that his children had lives of significant accomplishment when, too often, the offspring of vast wealth lead lives of empty, dissipating pleasure.
Not a casual read, James Merrill, Life And Art is a must read for anyone interested in how this great talent developed and flourished.
I’m happy to report that Hammer is almost error free. Aside from the misuse of “discrete” for “discreet” on page 104, there is only one howler: mistakenly identifying (and confusing) Eugene McCarthy’s state as Wisconsin (home to the rebarbative Senator Joseph McCarthy) instead of Minnesota.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Avoids the biggest and most interesting question
By David Tooke
I agree with the reviewers who have pointed out how richly detailed the biography is, and have praised the strength of the discussion of the non-Sandover poetry. But why has no one noticed or commented on the fact that the thing that stands out about Merrill's masterpiece (Sandover) is not addressed at all -- the Ouija board. Oh, I don't mean Hammer doesn't talk about it. He treats it as a fact -- sort of, "At such and such a time, JM and DJ began using a Ouija board and…" He never says he believes JM believed in the board or not. Unless I missed it (I confess to not reading every page carefully), Hammer doesn't seem to have a point of view about the Ouija board stuff. In short, does he believe JM and DJ believed they were receiving messages? All the time? Even once? Does he think it started out as a folie a deux and became creatively helpful without any belief? Isn't this the single most interesting question about Merrill's main achievement? If I missed it, apologies to Hammer -- and please tell me where to find it.
It's not there isn't precedent for what JM did that other biographers of great poets have had to deal with. W. B. Yeats claimed he had supernatural messages through his wife. Every Yeats biographer discusses that, and none of them leave you wondering what they think of the claim.
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