Merrill's Last Act
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry MERRILL'S LAST ACT BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THE HEART ATTACK that carried off James Merrill last February, a few weeks short of his 69th birthday, caught the poet's friends and fans by...
...Yet even this is not quite the last word on the subject...
...James Merrill's playful treatment of Auden and Eliot actually hints that he felt enough self-confidence to consider himself their peer...
...Part of the problem was that Merrill felt constrained to conceal his homosexuality in the 1950s...
...My father, whose tastes were not highbrow, delightedly compared a Merrill performance to his recollections of Noel Coward, Cole Porter or the Gersh-wins...
...We have long evenings to absorb together Before the world ends in Gotterddmmerung...
...As things turned out, we can be grateful for Merrill's prudence...
...His salt never lost its savor...
...In the '60s the poems became more forthright...
...the Biblical adage about salt losing its savor...
...Like the earlier installments, this one combines farce and drawing room comedy with something darker, more akin to Shakespeare's The Tempest...
...the amniotic sea from which earth's first life, and ours, came into being...
...His self-portraits could be critical, yet the overall image that emerged tallied with the genial, generous, deeply intelligent individual his friends so appreciated...
...Merrill and Jackson (called JM and DJ in the poem) never managed to discover whether the post-Christian angels who communicated with them from the Ouija board were external beings of the spirit world or merely autoprojec-tions...
...It's like the Our Town cemetery scene...
...MERRILL was arguably the most entertaining poet of his generation...
...sweat...
...That man across the aisle, with lambswool beard, Was once my classmate, or a year behind me...
...By age 20 he had already published poems whose theme was the reconciliation of opposites...
...Born to privilege, he was the son of Charles Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith...
...The "familiar ghost" must be sparred with one last time in "Nine Lives," a final coda to The Changing Light at Sandover...
...But not until the '70s, when he was composing his Ouija board epic, The Changing Light at Sandover (published in three individual volumes from 1976 to 1980...
...The Ring's Teutonic gods have come to seem more vulnerable and human...
...Nevertheless, he clearly derived a delicious sense of power controlling their voices...
...Yet, somehow, the elderly poet never loses touch with the eager little boy and remains enchanted by this musical tale of death and rebirth...
...As the scene opens, they are trying to tame a feral kitten that has caught their fancy, but the cleverest plots to capture it go awry...
...The seasoning of wit kept genuine seriousness from sounding earnest or forced...
...The confirmation they seek never quite materializes—nor, for that matter, does the domestication of the kitten—leaving the original question still hanging: Do those marvelous voices from the Ouija board, which keep Merrill in touch with his beloved dead and explain part of the divine plan of the universe, only come from the subconscious after all...
...President...
...The portraits of the bards who dominated Merrill's younger days were admirably mimicked and lovingly drawn...
...The lyrics are literate but not highbrow...
...In his 1993 memoir, A Different Person, the writer confessed that the popular music of his childhood had helped him find his voice, and he remembered nostalgically the charm of songs that still sound "catchy, metropolitan, popular without being entirely of the people...
...Now, old as mothers, here we sit...
...The poem then meditates on the way opera productions reflect the quirks of the cultures that perform them and how, over the years...
...The epic turned WH...
...One did not have to be a die-hard poetry groupie to find his public readings enthralling...
...Erda, her cobwebs beaded With years of seeping waste, subsides unheeded —Right, Mr...
...Eliot had made de rigueur for the previous poetic generation...
...The contemporary poetry scene looks a little less bright, now that he has left the stage...
...When he wrote about intimates, he emphasized the qualities he loved, making them equally endearing to the reader...
...hinted at sophistication, even as recurrent words like 'tears' or 'heart' or 'Baby' confirmed the soft spot beneath a glamorous, know-it-all veneer...
...Had he managed to produce a 20th—well, being a music lover he knew that nobody holds Mozart's false codas against him, and that more than one diva has extended her "farewell" performances over decades...
...That allowed Merrill to take on the greats every poet fears may eclipse his own work and make them dance to his tune...
...Nine Lives" transports JM and DJ back to Greece...
...In retrospect, however, his 19th book, A Scatteringof Salts (Knopf, 96 pp., $20.00), published this spring, sounds likea veiled goodbye...
...Ultimately, the poem turns to Merrill's rueful coming to terms with old age...
...Merrill's true subject always was his own story...
...On Poetry MERRILL'S LAST ACT BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THE HEART ATTACK that carried off James Merrill last February, a few weeks short of his 69th birthday, caught the poet's friends and fans by surprise...
...The world's his tonight...
...His mother, who survives him, wafted through his work, a gracious muse, representative of a civilized elite that her only child tweaked but never quite rejected...
...No pet pussy he, but "An old torn...
...The spirits prophesy a rendezvous with JM and DJ on a certain afternoon at a favorite cafe where, in the old days, they used to meet Maria...
...In his poetry, two qualities that do not often go together—genius and kindness—coexisted happily...
...Merrill readily mastered this heady cocktail of effects, with its mix of irony and feeling...
...In its concluding stanzas, "Nine Lives" asks plaintively, "Did T.S...
...His last volume provides an elegant closure for his life's work, the kind of bittersweet ending he treasured...
...In between we encounter the mineral in grains sown on fields by a conqueror to make them barren...
...Right, Texaco??Into a gas-blue cleft...
...Our mothers were bestfriends...
...Both his writing and his person had continued to radiate the vigor we associated with him...
...Alone, in black, in front of him, Maxine...
...Hence those cats from Old Possum, not to mention "Shanty," whose name is derived from the end of The Waste Land...
...Too weird...
...The association was astute...
...For example, one of the new book's lyrics, "The Ring Cycle," initially uses the Metropolitan Opera's recent revival of Wagner's classic tetralogy—staged by the company for the first time in a half century on four consecutive nights, as the composer intended—to recall similar performances during the poet's childhood, before anti-German sentiment interrupted the practice...
...Thus Merrill, who spent a lifetime trying to escape the shadow of the Master of Modernism, throws up his hands in mock defeat and acknowledges the influence...
...Wagner's parable warned against the evils engendered by quests for power...
...It could be spotted as well in the way The very industries whose "majorfunding " Underwrote the production continue to plunder The planet s wealth...
...What can be said, though, is that in our time he was a perennially fresh and inventive writer—a lovable one, too...
...Soon, the 10-year-old child will be accompanying his family to Athens on a government mission...
...The poet shrewdly notes that this allegory did not confine itself to the drama inside the proscenium arch...
...The kind of details that in, say, Robert Lowell revealed painful psychic turmoil, Merrill turned into a comedy of manners...
...The matron on my left exclaims...
...As JM wryly observes here, "That black hole is three-quarters literature...
...then in loto in 1982) did he present the complete picture to outsiders, including his long-term domestic relationship with David Jackson...
...His parent's divorce turned his inner world upside down, though he implied that it also sharpened his creative faculties...
...Their control from the Ouija board distracts them with a tantalizing possibility of the "proof" for the objective reality of their angelic voices...
...The "salts" in the title of his last book range from colored, aromatic pellets that soften bath water in the opening poem ("A Downward Look") to a mystic "recrystallizing" of a corpse's elements on the final page ("An Upward Look...
...We gasp and kiss...
...The Ring Cycle" recapitulates Merrill's own life and concerns, from those innocent pre-WWII Wagnerian performances he witnessed as a youth to the more ominous revivals of his late maturity...
...House lights...
...Auden into a principal character, with cameo walk-ons by the likes of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams...
...It helped him shake free from the portentous certainties T.S...
...Clever polysyllabic rhymes, allusions to remote places...
...Since his inspiration drew heavily on interrelations with friends and lovers, what could be said openly was limited...
...The Mefs revival interpreted this as commentary on our technological hubris, on the greed that tempts humankind to tamper with nature and neglect its responsibility toward the earth's resources...
...Merrill has never sounded narcissistic because he always brought the real world into his self-scrutiny...
...Of course, nothing turns out as planned...
...Still, nobody would have characterized him as a confessional poet...
...Reading it, one can't help feeling that the author wanted to tie up loose ends, just in case time was running short...
...Those early works displayed delicacy and lyricism, but were hampered by a disconcerting elusiveness...
...and the tears of pain Merrill frequently compares to ink—fluid emotion welling up into words on a page, the liquid music of his songs...
...Die Walkure magically captures Young love, moon-flooded hut, and the act ends...
...Eliot/Devise the whole show from his sepulcher...
...Now, the voices tell them, she has been reincarnated "in India, as a future (male) Nobel Prize-winning chemist" with a long, unpronounceable name shortened to "Shanty...
...No one can predict how the future will rank him...
...Paradoxically, A Scattering of Salts demonstrates that the relationship with Eliot (that other poet who was a scion of the American business world) had not really been resolved...
...Maria Mitsotaki, an old friend and one of Merrill's muses, died early in Sandover, only to be transformed in her afterlife into "the poem's Beatrice, its very Plato...
Vol. 78 • June 1995 • No. 5
