James Merrill: Life and Art by Langdon Hammer (PDF)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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.

⭐“James Merril: A Life and Art” by Langdon Hammer is a large (800 pg) and through book. I’d never heard of James Merrill but I had heard of Merrill-Lynch. I read a few things about James and I thought he lived an interesting life (social, sexual & philanthropy) so I wanted to know more. I bought the book for the biography, which I did like. There was also a lot of poetry, which I’m not good at and this poetry was difficult for me to comprehend. Eventually though, I did get better at it the further I got into the book. Overall, it was a good story but difficult reading in places.

⭐Well, yes, I will give this book five stars. It is long and it is dense, but it is worth it. I’d read Merrill’s poetry and his memoir, “A DifferentPerson,” and had liked both of them. I liked this biography by Langdon Hammer well enough that it has sent me back to Merrill’spoetry, and really, is there higher praise that one can give? Langdon treats the unsavory aspects of Merrill’s life (his emotionalcoolness, his sexual excesses) with delicacy and understanding, and he’s a marvel with Merrill’s poemsWhether he’ in Venice, Florida, Connecticut, New York, Greece– Hammer is with the poet every step of theway. It’s sort of hard to feel sorry for someone so hugely rich and privileged, but the old saw “to understand all is to forgive all,”and that’s how I feel now about James Merrill.So. This is a long but terrific biography of a great poetic talent. It is perhaps for a narrow audience, but watch out for it whenawards season comes around.

⭐this is and will surely be the definitive biography for at least a couple generations. perfect balance of his life, his work, his times by a man competent to write biography AND about art [as opposed to, say, those journalists who turn out competent biographies of scientists without knowing really any science and therefore sounding false or awkward when discussing that part of the subject’s life]truly a must for all fans of american poetry, and especially, like me, admirers of james merrill

⭐One of the most astonishing biographies—perhaps nonfiction books, period—I’ve ever read. It’s exhaustively researched, never dry, and captivating for someone as fascinated with JM as I am. Hammer devotes a significant amount of pages to analyses of Merrill’s poetry, which he always integrates beautifully with the biographical narrative. It’s not a fast read—It will be the longest & mist time-consuming book I’ve ever read once I’m done—but it’s essential for those devoted to its subject. I can’t imagine a more useful and maybe I’d even say canonical and representative literary biography being published, certainly on Merrill, or even a contemporary. It’s really just a triumph. I’m crushed out on it and Hammer and JM, completely.

⭐Fourteen years in the making, this exhaustively detailed, extensively researched, monumental biography of the great American gay poet, has kept me enthralled throughout its 800 pages. Although I’m not familiar with Merrill’s poetry – he’s not made a major impact in the UK to date – I was drawn to this book by a curiosity about his life, as a poet, as an American gay man living in an oppressively homophobic time, and as someone who made elaborate use of the Ouija board to inspire much of his work. Merrill, coming from a rich family, always had great wealth – much of which he gave away to worthy causes, supporting many writers and artistic enterprises through his charitable foundation – and this meant he could dedicate himself fully to his art. This he did with extraordinary application. He is principally an autobiographical writer: he turned everything that happened to him into poetry, sometimes immediately, sometimes drawing upon memory. He often drew upon myth and symbol to express it or obscure it, to add another layer of meaning. He was a master of the art of poetry, conservative in his use of formal techniques, always inventive in their use, and was not seduced by the movement towards free verse in his later years. Everything he experienced was filtered through a finely-tuned poetic sensibility.This includes a lifelong fascination with the spirit world as accessed through the Ouija board. With his long-term partner David Jackson, over decades he famously ‘spoke’ with spirits from the afterworld, notably one called Ephraim, but others, later, higher in the spiritual hierarchy, and used the material in a series of books. This both fascinates and divides his readers and critics. It’s a delicate area – a self-deluding one, or as a means to grapple with life’s problems? – and Hammer treads a delicate line here, as any commentator must.We also learn much about his complicated love life, the story of several important love affairs, people who meant so much to him, who found their way into his poems. He had an open relationship with his partner – they ceased having sex about a third of the way through their relationship – and they both had an extensive love-life. All this is richly detailed. Hammer had the fortune to be writing about a subject who kept extensive diaries, wrote numerous letters, turned his life into poetry, and was close to many highly literate people who kept their own records of the relationship. He was generous in his correspondence, held out a helping hand to many aspiring writers, kept notebooks on everything that was happening to him. In short, a biographer’s dream.This is one of the great biographies, to be set along side those by Ellman, Edel, Hermione Lee, and others. A hefty, all-absorbing read that makes its way around complicated material with deft intelligence, is always clear in style and judgement. A great read.

⭐A great American poet (born in 1926, he died from AIDS-related illness in 1995) who is almost completely unknown in the UK. Merrill’s poetry built, in his own words, ‘some kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of the love spent’. And what a life. He was heir to the Merrill Lynch fortune, his father, Charles Merrill, being one of the founders. He had homes in Key West, Stonington, New York and Athens, a hectic social life, hundreds of friends and gay lovers – at several points in his life he is having so much sex you wonder how he ever found the time to write poetry. This exhaustive but not exhausting biography links the life and the art, deepening one’s understanding of, and love for the poetry; almost everything in his life made it into the poetry, and, as Hammer observes, the life, however squalid at times, was transmuted into gold, into memorable poetry. This biography is a gem, and, after finishing it, I had to keep reminding myself that Merrilll had not been a close friend of mine so vivid was Hammer’s account of his character. Read this fine biography and read Merrill’s poetry.

⭐Outstanding biography of wonderful poet. Read it with the poems at your elbow.

⭐just another great book about a man who loved literature, and men.

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