James Merrill (1926–1995)

Anyone who’s played with Ouija (rhymes with “squeegee”) boards knows how much good clean fun they are. There’s something wholesome, as well as thrilling, about producing text collectively — that is, if you don’t think you’re actually in touch with the beyond. But in my experience, if you look around the table, there are generally one or two people who’d be much more likely to come up with those cryptic memoranda on their own than the one or two others.

The more you think show more about the squeegee board, the less fun it is. And I think that’s true of The Book of Ephraim, too.

Merrill is a wonderful formal poet, in his element in the terza rima section or any of the casual dives into sonnets, couplets — or some gorgeous weighty hendecs in a late section. The problem is that so much of the subject matter is diaristic, to be charitable — navel-gazing, to be mean. Much of it revolves around the loss of a novel on the same subject (whatever that is) — I found myself wishing the novel had remained intact. Most of this long poem is just a couple of guys arsing around with a Ouija board. There are exceptions: I loved section P, which spirals from power in general to a full-on cold-war nightmare. But the panoply of characters come and go (talking of Michaelangelo). Half of them are just ghosts symbolic to Merrill and half are real (Maya Deren e.g.) but never really realized. The title fellow is the prime example of the former. The more I read of Eph’s all-caps, the more it sounded very much like a couple of well-educated aesthetes harmonizing. And not at all ancient. That’s the squeegee for you. Lots of fun at the time, best if you don’t write it down.

The only phrase I remember from my ouija days is “wend your way to Damascus, jaded though you are”.

My enjoyment of the poem was lessened by Yenser’s lickspittle annotations which frequently call our attention to how subtle, pertinent, or wonderful some vague reference or pretty construction is. But I want to end positively — JM is a god at putting words in the right order. If you like long poems with masterful metre, little connection to the world, absurdly arbitrary structures and no real sense of purpose, you’ll dig The Book of Ephraim. show less

I resisted Merrill for a long time, thanks to the whole 'major experimental poem dictated by spirits from the netherworld via a Ouija board' thing. Then a friend, whom I greatly respect, said (or at least implied) that I should read Merrill. Well, it took a while, but I got around to it. And my respected friend was right. Merrill's the perfect mix of experiment and form, feeling and intellect. I sometimes have no idea what he's talking about, but I know that the next poem will be show more comprehensible, witty, and beautiful. Particularly recommended: Days of 1971, Dreams about Clothes, After the Fire. show less

If your father ever knew about your life it would be the death of him. from A Different Person by James Merrill

In 1950, after the publication of his first book of poetry, the twenty-four-year-old James Merrill went to Europe. He planned to rendezvous with his lover, and had planned visits from his father and sister. The trip was meant to be life altering.

Merrill was the son of one of the founders of Merrill Lynch. In Europe, he could be more open about his relationships with men, past and show more present.

Abroad, Merrill failed at writing a novel. He saw his relationship deteriorate. He started seeing a psychoanalyst. He visited the sights, enjoyed operas and art.

The memoir is a view of youth from the vantagepoint of age, each chapter ending with notes and comments.

The writing is wonderful, from the first line. “Meaning to stay as long as possible, I sailed for Europe. It was March 1950. New York and most of the people I knew had begun to close in. Or to put it differently, I felt that I alone in this or that circle of friends could see no way into the next phase.[…] Was I ever coming back? Yes, yes, one of these days. But of course I would be a different person then.”

A classic coming of age story of a young gay man.

Thanks to Vintage for a free book. show less

How does one describe a 560-page modern day epic poem, which goes beyond the bounds of nearly anything that is out there, perhaps even beyond the bounds of reality and mortality? This is the question I was left with after finishing Sandover earlier this week. Perhaps I should start with a description of what the poem is about. In Sandover, James Merrill, with the very considerable help of his partner David Jackson, created an epic of the same scale as Dante's Divine Comedy. Already, that show more seems like a big, bold claim to make. But the scope of Sandover demands big, bold claims. The poem consists of Merrill and Jackson's communications, by way of a Ouija board, with spirits, angels, demons and other powers and principalities. Whether one believes in these entities is, if not inconsequential, at least tangential to one's enjoyment of Merrill's aesthetic achievement. The fact is that neither Merrill nor Jackson always believed in the reality of their spiritual communicants. The fact also is, however, that sometimes they did.

The poem can be deeply disturbing - on many levels - deeply touching - on many levels - and deeply puzzling - on many levels. It is divided into three sections, mirroring the outlay of a Ouija board. The first section, The Book of Ephraim, is divided into 26 sections, each beginning with a letter of the alphabet. The second section, Mirabell's Books of Number, is divided into ten books, 0 to 9, each further divided into nine sections. The third book, Scripts for the Pageant, is divided into three sections, called (respectively) Yes, &, and No. Finally, the poem is rounded out with a coda, The Higher Keys.

So much for the shape of the poem, labyrinthine as it is. What about the substance? The Book of Ephraim contains comparatively little messages from the 'spirit' world (which Merrill represents by printing the words in small block letters, LIKE SO). It is 'about' Merrill and Jackson's communications with the spirit Ephraim, ostensibly a first century Greek, but the book is about so much more. Merrill is in many ways a classical verse artist - he usually writes in a fixed metre, and often employs rhyme - but this is to sell him short. As Harold Bloom says of him, he was a 'Mozartian verse artist', and this shows in his use of classical tropes to present a wholly new spin on epic poetry. In Ephraim, we are introduced to a varied dramatis personae of spirits, ranging from friends of JM and DJ (as Merrill and Jackson usually are called in the poem) to WH Auden and WB Yeats.

In Mirabell's Books of Number, Merrill and Jackson are introduced to a new occult system of knowledge, which Mirabell, a spirit from a primordial existence, teaches to them by way of several 'lessons', interspersed with more of Merrill's own poetry. Of course, one might argue that it is all his own poetry - or is it? As more and more of the poem is taken up by spirit communications, one begins to wonder how in control Merrill really is. What of Jackson's influence? I have more to say about this in the second review, but for now let us say that I personally think that Merrill was more in control than some writers have claimed. And what of the spirits? How real are they? I cannot really say. They probably are not real. Probably. As Merrill later explained. "If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five."

The last section of the poem, Scripts for the Pageant, again takes a different tack. In it, the communications are presented as if they are a script for a play. Even more astonishing is the range of new voices found in this section. After Mirabell's instruction, JM and DJ attain a higher level, and are now to be instructed by none other than the archangels Michael, Gabriel, Emmanuel and Raphael. They are joined in the 'schoolroom' by the spirits of Auden and Maria Mitsotaki, a deceased Greek friend of theirs. The lessons, as in Mirabell are strange, otherworldly, and, at times, disturbing. What the real Auden (if this isn't the real Auden) would have made of this spiritual instruction is anyone's guess, but I tend to think he would have been amused and a little angry. Yeats makes more appearances, and JM and DJ learn about the plans of 'God Biology', (or God B, for short).

The (relatively) brief coda presents the immediate aftermath of JM and DJ's communications and instructions, with appearances made by Jane Austen, TS Eliot, Nabokov, etc.

I found the poem by times brilliant, funny, even exasperating. As poetry, the spirit communications do not always work, but that is to be expected in any long poem. Most of the time, the otherworldliness of the poem captivated me. But I have always been interested in both poetry and the supernatural. Perhaps that allowed me to accept the more disturbing aspects of the poem. I certainly would not recommend the poem to fundamentalist believers of any faith - figures from all the main religions, including Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha make their appearance in the poem, and not always in the most flattering ways. The spirits can also be very elitist, judgmental, even racist. Whether this reflects something of JM and DJ's subconcious minds, or the actual spirits, seems to me pragmatically unimportant. It may have been subconcious promptings - it may even have been an ironic way of distancing themselves from the spirits. I do not know. What I do know is that this is in many ways an extraordinary achievement, eldritch and enchanting, puzzling and profound. show less