It is rare for those born with great talent and great wealth neither ostentatiously to display either one, nor to coast on these golden flying carpets of advantage. James Merrill did neither. He lived modestly, and all his life he almost invisibly shared his fortune with less fortunate artists and writers, most notably through the Ingram Merrill Foundation—the name of which reunited his long-divorced and estranged parents, Helen Ingram and the Wall Street tycoon Charles Merrill. There were also many individual gifts, one of which underwrote the publication of my first book, a memoir of a friend.
It wasn’t only financial support that Jimmy Merrill and his partner David Jackson gave: they were also amazingly generous with their time, attention, and affection. For many years, whenever I thought I had finished a manuscript, I showed it to them, and many of my books were saved by their tactful comments from a fate worse than publication.
In the same way, Jimmy did not use his literary gifts to trumpet their own brilliance. On first reading, his work often seemed unassuming even casual; only gradually did its wit, invention, and serious engagement with both the world around him and the poetic tradition appear. Even in his autobiography and in the dramatic Sandover poems, he gave “JM” no special privileges, but turned his cool, amused, sometimes frighteningly penetrating gaze on himself as well as on the world around him. His attitude towards “real life” and world news was the same. Everything, even the most obscure news item or the slightest flicker of a match or a joke, might be serious—yet nothing was solemn.
In the last chapter of his memoir of his early years, A Different Person, James Merrill speaks of his love affair with certain words. The affectionate, detailed consideration he brings to the subject would not surprise anyone who knew how intensely aware he was of language, even in the most casual and banal circumstances. Sometimes when I was with him, I would hear a cliché hop out of my mouth, like the toads and snakes that afflict the bad sister in the fairy tale. Most of the time he would just slightly wince, but now and then he would scrutinize the cliché with a herpetologist’s care and detachment.
For instance, when I described my ten-year-old son’s state of mind by saying that he was “As mad as a wet hen,” Jimmy’s response was “Yes. I wonder, would the juvenile equivalent be ‘as mad as a wet chicken’? Or perhaps one could use the masculine form, ‘as mad as a wet cock.’”
Almost every time I spoke to Jimmy, or read something he had written—whether it was a poem or a postcard—I was reminded that it is the job not only of a writer, but also of every living person, to take language both lightly and seriously, as he did—often at the same time; he must be one of the few writers who could successfully use words like “asymmetries,” “X-raywise,” and “oops!” in the same poem. In his work the flattest clichés are transformed into glowing images, and worn-out puns and similes expand and come alive. And almost always, behind the flash and shimmer of his language, there are deeper meanings.
In the black light of his death, many of his lines reverberate even more. At one point he published a wonderful travel essay, “Japan: Prose of Departure,” a travelogue that flows effortlessly into and out of a series of haiku and thoughts about a dying friend in New York. In the poem “Japan,” he remarks that the New York clinic where his friend is dying is “vast and complex as an ocean liner.” He goes on to speak of the passengers, “all in the same boat … each of them visibly
At sea. Yes, yes, these
old folks grown unpresuming,
almost Japanese,
had embarked too soon
—Bon voyage! Write—upon their
final honeymoon.
Later he describes a visit to a Noh theater, where an actor plays the parts successively of a maiden pearl-diver, her mother’s ghost, and a dancing dragon. The performer is
a middle-aged man—
but time, gender, self are laws
waived by his gold fan.
A pearl-diver, a benevolent ghost, and a dancing dragon; that sounds about right. Bon voyage! I miss you all terribly.