A Different Person
Merrill, James
j ames Merrill's eminence among contemporary poets, ratified as it is by an ever increasing burden of awards and distinctions, is still enigmatic, uncertain. Not that there is any question of his...
...For this morning hour in San Vitale I feel like the aborigine who can describe all the people and animals who have traveled a road, just from whatever grows along its edge...
...Less unusual but more troubling was hishomosexuality, an elusive "cure" for which he pursued through much of the period described in this book...
...Through the warm and concentrated attention it pays to a few years, A Different Person gives us not only a portrait of the artist as a young man, but, in glimpses, the whole of a remarkable life, from a privileged childhood in a broken home through a long love affair with language...
...T his period in Europe was a dry spell for Merrill as a writer, but in the searching and feints at self-revelation that characterize it, there is a foreshadowing of both the matter and the material of much of his finest later work...
...He evades some of the pitfalls of autobiography (endless childhood, the boring accretion of accomplishments) by concentrating on a few years in late youth when, just out of college, he was living in Europe, undergoing psychoanalysis, trying to become a writer...
...There was a strong pressure from his mother to repress his sexuality, and a weaker one from his father to enter the family business...
...Harold Bloom calls him "indisputably a verse artist comparable to Milton, Tennyson, and Pope...
...It isn't the creeds or the crusades they tell of, but the relative eternity of villas, interior decoration, artisans, the centuries of intelligence in fingers not twenty years old...
...Among the many gems of the book, there is a detailed description of the mosaics at Ravenna that is not only a masterpiece of descriptive writing but also a lesson in how, with proper ardor and attention, a work of art can reveal its viewer to himself: The profusion of motifs, their vigor by now a reflex long past thought, gives out a sense of peace and plenty in the lee of history's howling gale...
...66, he has decided to consider those dramas at greater length...
...Merrill's psychoanalytic sessions in postwar Rome with a certain Dr...
...Though there is some of each, this memoir does not rely on either gossip or shop talk, tracing gracefully instead the line of personality drawn between the social life and the private, professional life of the artist...
...This is a canny and innovative approach to the memoir as a form...
...Not that there is any question of his ability or his achievements—in addition to The Changing Light at Sandover, the long poem of our time most likely to last, he has written a body of extraordinary lyrics of passion and experience...
...So I looked forward to distancing myself from all that...
...Detre is a perfect foil for the quicksilver of Merrill's own personality...
...The other central figures—parents, lovers, friends, extended family—are given weight and dramatic presence by their place in the inset narrative of this extended, therapeutic conversation...
...there was the high society in which he was raised with its not wholly unappealing constraints...
...Surely he will be remembered as the Mozart of American poetry...
...Detre, an Austrian Jew waiting for his American visa, provides an ironic narrative framework...
...Who needs the full story of any life...
...Even if Merrill has spoken of prose as "a mildly nightmarish medium," this burnished and inventive memoir shows him as one of its contemporary masters...
...Merrill, then, is a national treasure, but of what nation...
...CI...
...if a whisper goes ignored, try a howl of pain...
...Nothing dates like an eternal truth, and it is alarming to read about the faith Merrill placed in the arcane Freudian mythology of the time...
...Merrill's circumstances were peculiar for two reasons: money and talent...
...Already a poet of prodigious technical facility, Merrill, before leaving for Europe, realized that his poems "remained verbal artifacts, metered and rhymed to be sure, shaped and polished and begemmed, but set on the page with never a thought of their being uttered by a living voice...
...Biologists are learning how to reconstruct the complete organism from a cluster of cells...
...The proper volume for self-assertion," Merrill writes, "is hard to gauge at twenty-five...
...In place of such limiting providence, Merrill wanted to find for himself a life which would imitate art of the high, operatic variety—and which would allow him, in turn, to create art of his own...
...Like Henry James and Wallace Stevens, he is the sort of American writer who seems foreign to many merely by virtue of his social position and the undemocratic elegance of his art...
...the part implies the whole...
...In italicized sections at the end of each chapter, he looks back on his youth from the vantage of experience, considering it with the necessary charity and a certain amusement...
...The war's end," Merrill writes, "which found me eager for wicked, blackened old Europe, found him—the rest of whose family had disappeared at Auschwitz—among those millions dreaming of a passport to freedom...
...in places where the family name cut no ice, the firm had no branch office, and I might, if need be, like the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto, pass myself off as a poor student...
...Helen Vendler refers to him as one of our "necessary poets...
...In the end, though, there is something touching and even impressive about the discipline and depth of the antiquated form of therapy these A DIFFERENT PERSON: A MEMOIR James Merrill Alfred A. Knopf/271 pages / $25 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CAHILL 64 The American Spectator January 1994 two practice together, especially when contrasted, as it is by Merrill, with the flaky New Age hybrid of complaint and self-congratulation that is its successor...
...Their relationship is necessarily one-sided, with the patient describing to the doctor—and intermittently to the reader—his family problems, his romantic problems, dreams only the dreamer could love...
...For it was not only Merrill himself who was eager to make himself into a different person...
...In fact, as he says himself, he is "as American as lemon chiffon pie...
...It is heartening and delightful to see the artistic process neither mystified nor belittled but demonstrated, made real without fanfare or display...
...His father was a founding partner of Merrill-Lynch, and the disadvantages of privilege, difficult to complain of as they are, bothered him greatly at the time: The best intentioned people, knowing whose son I was and powerless against their own snobbery, could set me withering under attentions I had done nothing to merit...
...Merrill asks...
...But the solid, droll character of Dr...
...In his poetry, Merrill has drawn on his personal dramas with growing candor and conversational élan, without any sacrifice of metrical virtuosity, making art "out of the life lived, out of the love spent...
...Now, in a memoir written at the age of Christopher Cahill is the editor of the Recorder, a journal of the American Irish Historical Society...
...Among the many pieces of wisdom in this book, most impressive perhaps is Merrill's demonstration that such pressures are most often and most profitably not deflected but absorbed and rewritten, so that the son, ostensibly different in the extreme from his parents, can find the traits of each woven almost imperceptibly through the pattern of his life...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 1
