Born March 3: James Merrill

One of the greater gifts banking has given the world is James Merrill. Second son of a founder of Merrill Lynch, James was brought up in rarefied luxury and intellect: His governess taught him German and French, his father published a book of his early literary efforts when he was sixteen, his Amherst professor (and lover) published a book of his poems at twenty. Over his long career, Merrill won every major American prize for his formal, slightly old-fashioned, rhyming poetry: two National Book Awards, the NBCC, the Library of Congress's Bobbitt National Prize, Yale's Bollingen Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Although his two early novels are more muted on the subject, his poetry and his 1993 memoir A Different Person openly celebrate gay life.

Merrill and his partner David Jackson were together forty years, dividing their time annually between Stonington, Connecticut and Athens. Later they traded Greece for Key West where their long relationship frayed. Merrill started the Ingram Merrill Foundation in honor of his divorced parents and gave generous, often anonymous grants to struggling writers, including his friend Elizabeth Bishop. A later friend, Pulitzer winning novelist and Key West resident Alison Lurie, wrote a memoir of Merrill and Jackson called Familiar Spirits, alluding to their love of ouija board seances memorialized in his postmodern, free verse 560-page epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. He died in 1995 of an aids-related heart attack while visiting Arizona one month shy of his sixty-ninth birthday. His New York Times obit omits Jackson.

Comments

[Alejandro]

I don't know his work extremely well, but I've read about half of the selected poems volume I bought last year and I find him incredibly moving. It's like "reading" a Rothko painting for me. His words hit me that hard and that mysteriously.

[Lori Hobkirk]

I love Merrill. I worked for Merrill's great nephew, here in Boulder, where we fondly referred to him as Uncle Merrill. I remember when he died and the obit that aired on NPR. It was a sad day.