Collected Novels and Plays (78 page)

James Merrill was born in New York City on March 3, 1926, the son of the financier and philanthropist Charles E. Merrill, one of the founders of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch & Co., and his second wife, Hellen Ingram. Merrill, who attended St. Bernard’s School, was raised in Manhattan and Southampton, Long Island, where his family had a country house that was designed by Stanford White, and in Palm Beach, Florida. His parents divorced in 1939, and the reverberations of the “broken home” can be heard throughout his poetry. After attending the Lawrenceville School, Merrill enrolled at Amherst College, his father’s alma mater, took a year off to serve in the army, and graduated summa cum laude with the class of 1947. He taught at Bard College in 1948-1949 and although he fought shy of academe in the following years he did accept short appointments at Amherst, the University of Wisconsin, Washington University, and Yale University. In 1954 he moved with his companion, David Jackson, a writer and painter, to a house in Stonington, Connecticut, which is still maintained by Stonington Village and houses an artist-in-residence every year.

In 1957 Merrill and Jackson undertook a trip around the world, and for two decades beginning in 1964 they spent a part of each year in Greece. They owned a house in Athens at the foot of Mt. Lycabettus and were famous among the local literati for the terrace parties they threw. Beginning in 1979 Merrill spent winters in Key West, Florida, where he and Jackson acquired another house. Key West was a place he had an affinity for partly because it had previously attracted two of his favorite poets, Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, the latter his close friend for decades. Merrill, a gifted linguist and a lover of different cultures, always traveled widely, and the displacements and discoveries of his travels, along with the routines of his life in his different homes, are the stuff of many of his poems. He died away from home, in Tucson, Arizona, on February 6, 1995.

A selection of Merrill’s earliest writings, taken from his contributions to the
Lawrenceville Literary Magazine
, was privately printed by his father as a sixteenth-birthday gift in 1942, under the title
Jim’s Book.
The young writer proudly distributed most of the one hundred copies as soon as possible—and before long began to retrieve as many of those copies as he could. A group of his poems appeared in
Poetry
in March 1946, the same year that saw the publication in Athens, Greece, of
a limited edition of poems entitled
The Black Swan.
He published his first full-fledged book,
First Poems
, when he was twenty-five, in 1951. He next tried his hand at playwriting:
The Bait
was produced at the Comedy Club in 1953 (and published in a journal in 1955 and in a book in 1960), and
The Immortal Husband was
performed at the Theater de Lys in 1955 (and published in 1956). Meanwhile, his first novel,
The Seraglio
, a Jamesian roman à clef, appeared in 1957 (it was reissued in 1987), and his second commercial volume of poems,
The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace
, in 1959 (revised edition, 1970). His third volume of poems,
Water Street
—its title refers to the street Merrill lived on in Stonington—came out in 1962, and his second, experimental novel,
The (Diblos) Notebook
, based in part on his first experiences in Greece, in 1965 (reissued in 1994).

In 1966 his collection
Nights and Days
received the National Book Award. The judges for that year, W. H. Auden, James Dickey, and Howard Nemerov, cited the book for its author’s “scrupulous and uncompromising cultivation of the poetic art, evidenced in his refusal to settle for an easy and profitable stance; for his insistence on taking the kind of tough, poetic chances which make the difference between esthetic success or failure.”
The Fire Screen
appeared in 1969, followed in 1972 by
Braving the Elements
, which was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and in 1974 by a selection of previously uncollected poems,
The Yellow Pages.
When
Divine Comedies
came out in 1976, it won the Pulitzer Prize.

The narrative poem “The Book of Ephraim,” which was originally included in
Divine Comedies
, later served as the first installment of an epic visionary poem based in large part on Merrill and Jackson’s communications with the Other World by way of the Ouija board. The subsequent two parts were
Mirabell: Books of Number
, which received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1978, and
Scripts for the Pageant
, published in 1980. In 1982 Merrill brought together these three long poems and “Coda: The Higher Keys” in a comprehensive edition of the work he now called
The Changing Light at Sandover.
That landmark volume won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982, the same year in which Merrill published his first selected poems,
From the First Nine: Poems 1946-1976.
His book of poems
Late Settings
was published in 1985, and a collection of essays, interviews, and reviews entitled
Recitative
appeared in 1986. In 1988
The Inner Room
was honored with the first Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress. Merrill’s memoir,
A Different Person
, came out in 1993.
A Scattering of Salts
, the last book of poems that he saw through production, was published posthumously in 1995. His
Collected Poems
appeared in 2001.