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 The
publication of James Merrill’s
Collected Poems this year has made his long poem, The Changing
Light at Sandover, appear somewhat eccentric to the course of his
career. While some of his outstanding lyric powers are in evidence in the
long poem, they are drowned out by the unremitting prose and theories of
science. One can’t take it seriously as a comment on the state of
civilization, and one can’t take it seriously as an extension of the
tradition of the long poem. It is perhaps best considered as an oblique
autobiography which picks up the thread where his memoir, A Different
Person, left off, and traces the poet’s life into middle-age.
The two books under review here
are both concerned with it and they complement each other well: their
central concern is James Merrill’s long poem, The
Changing Light at Sandover, and they disagree fundamentally about it.
For Materer, the theme of apocalypse is not restricted to Sandover,
but pervades Merrill’s poetry from the beginning; and so, by attending
to this theme, Materer feels that it is possible to reassess Merrill’s
whole career. Necessarily, then, he is convinced of Sandover’s
importance, whereas Lurie views it as an aberration which wreaked havoc in
Merrill’s personal life, parasitically feeding off the creative energies
of Merrill’s lifelong partner, David Jackson, and estranging him from
friends for long periods. Further, where Materer’s approach is dryly
LitCrit, Lurie’s is the intimate memoir of someone who was close to the
two lovers in the 1950s and later on in the late ’70s and ’80s. But
Materer also offers privileged knowledge of a kind as his is the first
study to be written with access to the Merrill archive. It would be fair
to suppose that between them the books would transform our view of one of
the outstanding American poets of the last century, but they fail to
deliver.
Materer is methodical, but has
little intuition when reading the poems. He dutifully remarks on the
presence of apocalyptic imagery throughout the poetry, but does not
persuade us that apocalypse was central to Merrill’s poetic imagination.
There might indeed be many images of mass destruction (it was after all
the time of the Cold War), but to suggest that such a theme was as
important as the themes of love, friendship, and art in Merrill’s poetry
seems misguided. He is less than judicious when assessing Merrill’s
prose: “The Seraglio is comparable to the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry
James in its subtlety of plot, characterization, and a setting which is
both realistically vivid and symbolically suggestive.” But the main
problem is that his central chapters on the long poem itself do little
more than paraphrase it, and the only kind thing that can be said for them
is at least they will save students the labour of reading Sandover.
There are some tantalising quotations from the letters that whet the
appetite for their publication, but Materer has not capitalised on his
access to the archives. Either that, or there’s nothing in them, which
possibility seems unlikely, given the extent of Merrill’s
correspondence. There is also a worrying slip which makes one wonder how
well Materer knows other poets: he believes that W.B. Yeats criticised
William Blake for lacking a sense of evil, when it was Emerson that the
Irish poet accused. This from someone who wrote a book on poetry and the
occult is surprising.
The
highlights of Alison Lurie’s book are the passages at its beginning and
its end. They recount her friendship with the two men, first when they
were all living in Amherst in the 1950s, and once again together in
Florida in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The central section of the
book is a negative critique of Sandover.
While I agree with its general verdict, it is lazily written, with Lurie
often considering that her demurrals are their own explanation. One sees
the same points made more intelligently and compellingly by Vernon Shetley
in his After the Death of Poetry (1993)--a book which Materer also would
have done well to consult more often. She argues that Jackson deserved
co-authorship of Sandover, at
the same time she thinks it is not an important poem. The memoir also
seems to be written with a smouldering resentment that her friends never
considered her quite as brilliant as themselves, and it is true that
Lurie’s position as a novelist is nowhere near that of Merrill as a
poet. Nevertheless, the memoir offers valuable insights into the tensions
of Merrill’s life, especially toward the end, when Jackson and
Merrill’s younger lover, Peter Hooten, jockeyed for the poet’s
affections and time. For these alone, the book is a must for all fans of
the poet, and is to be recommended.
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