The Prosaic Reveries of James Merrill

A Different Person

by James Merrill

Alfred A. Knopf, $25.00

After several decades of teasingly elaborate but increasingly personal short poems, James Merrill made his current, deservedly-high reputation with The Changing Light at Sandover, a "modern epic" in which Merrill and his lover chat via Ouija board with a plethora of heavenly spirits. For the last few years, Merrill has published almost no poetry: he has, instead, been writing A Different Person, a memoir of his postcollegiate years in postwar Europe. Digressions, meditations and flash-forward passages follow each of the new book's 21 chapters, intended, the poet says, as "reveries suitable for a pillow book, for gossip, for shoptalk."

After finishing A Different Person, I wished for more of the first and third, and for much less of the second. In the sense in which "gossipy, though there are some wonderful anecdotes about acquaintances who later became as famous as Merrill, or more famous: the young Alison Lurie, the old Alice B. Toklas, and the former sweetheart of Eugenio Montale all get walk-on parts. But "gossip" can mean not only a set of topics but a kind of language, the kind which fixates on names and dates, on who did what with Merrill when, and sometimes why. In this sense "gossip" is the enemy of the aesthetic, and the ally of all those who read memoirs "to find out what really happened."

In confining himself to his time abroad, Merrill has fit this "memoir" into the genre of travel-writing; but so many events, so many towns and visits and illnesses and chance meetings, are crowded into Merrill's 271-page year that the real potential of travel-writing as a form--the chance to see an unusual mind as it reacted to other cultures, towns, works of art--is largely lost.

In fact, the culture through which Merrill moved was, most of the time, not "European" at all. Expatriate Americans are more numerous and more important in A Different Person than anyone born and raised overseas. An exception is Dr. Detre, the Rome-based psychiatrist whom Merrill sees almost daily during his residence in Italy, and who eventually becomes Merrill's only reason to stay in the country.

The best stories in this book involve culture shock. Sometimes the shock is Merrill's, as when Dr. Detre explains that an Italian's repeated "Ti voglio bene" had meant not "I wish you well" (as it would in a textbook) but "I love you." At other times the culture shock is ours. Merrill inhabited, when he chose, both the inaccessible world of the super-rich (James Merrill's much-married father, Charles Merrill, helped found Merrill Lynch) and the world of young, well-educated gay men long before either Stonewall or AIDS. When Charles first suspected that James had a male lover at Amherst, Merrill's mother had to talk Charles out of hiring a hit man. (But) during the time of A Different Person, Merrill moved in a wide circle of young gay American travelers and scholars, one defined at least as much by being a "gay" circle (to judge from this book) as by anything else its members had in common.

During his months in Europe, Merrill falls in and out of love with three Americans, and in and out of crushes on the natives. Merrill explicates these loves and jealousies in sometimes interesting detail: when two objects of his admiration showed up together at an opera, he writes, "pangs reserved exclusively for the gay shot through me--I was jealous of both parties at once." "My good fortune," Merrill also writes," was to stay in one place while the closet simply disintegrated." For many, the most interesting aspect A Different Person will be its recording of a rich, moderately open gay microworld from the early 1950s.

Certainly the "gay Merrill" is more entertaining than the "family Merrill." At times the author attempts an extensive psychoanalytic reading of his own poems: "The miraculous gift of life we receive from our parents comes in a package almost impossible to unwrap; often it seems wiser not to try. Inside are the various clues--most of them older than time--to who we are and how we behave." Any careful reader of Merrill's verse could have written an essay which included those lines; it seems a waste for Merrill to have written them himself. His stories about father, mother and cousins are useful for their raw data, which clear up obscure details in the poems; often, that's about all.

Even away from the family, A Different Person can seem like an elegant book-length footnote to Merrill's poetry: not a bad reason for the book to exist, though perhaps a letdown for consumers. (The chapters on Hans Lodeizen and on Kimon Friar and his house in Greece are especially relevant to specific poems in Merrill's early books.)

"Alone," Merrill had written in the early poem "Hourglass," "one can but toy with imagery": maybe the thin narrative here, of Kimon and Seldon and Claude and mother and father and Robert and others, is Merrill's effort at a kind of writing more social, and more transparent, than the elaborated imagery of even his clearest verse. The new clarity of Merrill's prose, unfortunately, often sounds like this: "Yet I couldn't help noticing, alone with Freddy at his visit's end, how much more freely my tongue wagged and my mind worked than they did with Claude. It wasn't that I'd made the wrong choice. Friendship's chattering stream simply came as a relief from the uncharted water of love, though it was to these that I'd committed myself."

Other than that mysterious "these," which looks like an editing error (these love? these choice? these Claude?), there's nothing wrong with those few sentences: one after the other, page after page, they make up a few years of memories from a perceptive, intelligent (if insulated) man, and have that potential which all autobiographies share: to make us more informed about how other people have seen the world. But the Merrill who writes like this is hardly as insightful, let alone as fun to read, as the lyric poet who wrote

Your heart

Was large--you'd often told me--large but light,

Ant palace, tubercular coral sponge amazed

With passages, quite weightless in your breast.

(Or did my entrance weigh? You never said.)

("Part of the Vigil")

The fluency of metaphor here is (you might say) a mask; but the contours of a mask like this are the best possible guide to the emotions on the face within. Merrill's skill at the self-analysis which occurs so fluidly throughout his poetry may have grown out of his sessions with Dr. Detre: or they may not have. It's all secondary to the poems themselves, or should be. I imagine future generations of readers picking up A Different Person after, and only after, the poems have enchanted them already. Those future readers will find themselves diverted, but disappointed. I envision them clapping politely as Merrill the memoirist vanishes into the wings, while that "different person" who wrote so many good poems takes curtain call after curtain call.