James Merrill: Life and Art

Image of James Merrill: Life and Art
Author(s): 
Release Date: 
April 17, 2015
Publisher/Imprint: 
Knopf
Pages: 
944
Reviewed by: 

Life and Art is a fine-line portrait of the award-winning gay poet. Hammer is professor of English  and American Studies at Yale University and in its scope and intimacy, his portrait of Merrill is a masterful performance of the biographer‘s art.   

Merrill traveled his own road of literary individualism, decidedly not part of the Beat poets seducing the counterculture or the staid poets under glass in the academic establishment. In getting to the crucial heart of Merrill’s creative drive, Hammer chronicles Merrill’s daily life as it was  inextricably linked to his ever evolving aesthetic.  

Hammer is meticulous in his corroborating interviews with many of Merrill’s lovers, friends, confidants, and literary colleagues. Born, fittingly enough, in a Greenwich Village townhouse on West 11th St., and as the son of Charles Merrill of the investment firm Merrill Lynch, Merrill had more than a leg up in the otherwise penniless world of serious poets. But growing up, he lived largely outside of his privileged background and he remained quietly rebellious. He was also exceedingly generous to friends and other artists throughout his life. 

His mother, Hellen, was a writer and editor in Florida. She gave it up when she married Charlie and becomes a premier hostess to New York and high society in Southampton. Jimmy was closer to the household staff than he was to his parents. Later he made admirable overtures to get closer to his parents emotionally; even as he never bowed to their wishes, he sought an honest relationship with them even after they separated. 

At prep school, Merrill was bullied and resisted conforming to the roughneck academic culture although his ultimate revenge was to excel academically. At Amherst, where he graduated cum laude, Merrill had his first full love affair with his 28-year-old Greek scholar Kimon Friar. Hellen discovered this while reading his mail and pursued ways to get rid of Friar, which included having him either fired or even “rubbed out.” The affair ran its natural course, but not before Friar had Merrill’s first complete book of poems privately printed in Europe. 

As he approached 21, Merrill was already living the New York artistic gay life, a regular at the Metropolitan Opera and otherwise defining himself as a poet of distinction. He also fell deeply in love with writer Claude Fredericks, and they toured post-war Europe of exclusive hotels and remote villas among the moneyed and connected. Back in the U.S., Merrill embarked on a disastrous mounting of a lofty literary play in the commercial theater that was also vilified in a scathing gay-baiting review by Brooks Atkinson.  

In 1953 everything changed for Merrill when he fell in love with David Jackson, a struggling writer who was in a marriage of convenience to Doris Sewell, who knew he was gay. Merrill and Jackson bought a home in Stonington, Connecticut, remodeling it as a writer’s retreat, with cloistered areas, and filling it with artwork from around the world, a grand piano, and a harpsichord.  

Merrill was looking deeper into what would be meaningful craft and wild experimentation with Ouija board séances. What was a curious pastime for the couple became an obsessive literary device for Merrill, as vital to him as other applied literary devices. The world of poetry was also changing radically, and The Beats had thrown down the renegade gauntlet; confessional memoir poetry was the rage.   

Had Merrill not been such a literary craftsman, using a Ouija as a literary conduit might have been professional suicide. Instead, the verse from Divine Comedies, Lost in Translation, The Book of Ephraim and Mirabell: Books of Number, and The Book of Ephriam established him firmly as a serious poet  He picked up a Pulitzer Prize, and when The Book of Ephriam won the National Book Award, it came with apologies from influential critics who had been dismissive of the depth of Merrill’s artistry.  

 Jackson remained directionless, which led to bitter issues between the men. Jackson and Merrill moved to Greece in the early 60s, each pursuing affairs with other men, but staying devoted to each other. His volume The Changing Light at Sandover, delves into his transcendental life with Jackson, who had all but given up trying to make it as a writer or painter in the shadows of Merrill’s success. 

Merrill fell obsessively in love with Strato Mouflouzelis, a 22-year-old soldier doing his national service, who was shortly to be a husband and father, but was nonetheless involved with Merrill sexually and tapping him for cash. 

The intensity of their affair fueled Merrill’s writing for his collection Nights and Days and his novel The (Diblos) Notebook, a roman a clef with thinly veiled characterizations of friends, relatives, and lovers of this period, including an unflattering one of his first lover and now estranged friend, Kimon Friar.   

In the 70s and 80s, Merrill was at his literary peak, but he was also dealing with clinical depression, exacerbated by drinking and not embracing middle age, even though he was now the darling of the university reader-lecture circuit and in demand as a guest professor.  

Merrill continued to pursue a series of affairs with admiring younger poets and notably with abstract artist David McIntosh. He was still deeply involved with Jackson and continued to reunite with him for short, but regular visits. He had made relationship peace with Jackson, but things were far from rosy as Jackson slipped into more and more carousing and a nasty nicotine addiction that was taking its toll. 

By the early 80s, Merrill was keeping at bay more depression and mysterious health problems; he was eventually was diagnosed with AIDS-related illnesses. Meanwhile, Merrill kept his health relatively stable, receiving frequent blood transfusions and specialized care. He had also fallen deliriously in love with the TV actor Peter Hooten, 28 years his junior, who was equally smitten.  

If there is one criticism of the book it would be that Hammer gets sidelined by the function of the Ouija board sessions vis-à-vis the development of Merrill‘s poetry. That said, Hammer sustains this large biography, weaving chunks of Merrill’s poetry with altogether engrossing prose that brings full dimension to this complex man and his world. Along the way there is vivid imagery and atmospherics from New York, Europe, and South America, with drop-in portraits of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Truman Capote, and other luminaries in Merrill’s orbit.