I Hope I Haven’t Bored You

It was 1941, the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey was on summer break, and a prodigiously talented and equally bored 15-year-old named James Merrill had received a life-saving gift: a letter from his schoolmate Frederick Buechner, bursting with gossip. “Dear Freddy—,” Merrill replied, “The last thing I ever expected from you was a six page letter.” What follows, like plenty of good gossip between friends, is conveyed in a coded, giggly lingo, significant to insiders but impenetrable to everyone else. First comes an obligatory rundown of the latest book purchases: a few editions, in English and French, of a cherished author and model aesthete, Oscar Wilde. Then come summaries of social happenings, then a callback to the notorious “gingerale scandale”—the day Merrill laughed so hard that soda spurted from his nose. And, of course, there’s a raised-eye acknowledgement of Freddy’s latest letter, with its reporting “about S.J.’s brother (male nymphomaniac).” Whatever Freddy divulged (Merrill dares not repeat it) was so earthshakingly scandalous that it threatened to cause aftershocks, including for Merrill, who had to snatch the letter out of his mother’s hands: “I said quickly, ‘Thereissomethingpersonalonthatpage!’” When it’s Merrill’s turn to share—“Boy, oh, boy! Have I got a juicy bit of gossip to tell you!! And it’s perfectly true”—the stakes remain undeniably high, even if the plot is as knotty as a film noir: something about a “gambling joint,” women nicknamed “La Rose” and “La Flamme,” and an excursion to “Detroit or some other den of iniquity.” “I’ve run out of gossip,” the letter ends, “except the very trivial things such as Mrs. O. Munn’s love, Peppe Russo being slapped in public by a french matron—whoever said that the French had no courage is wrong.” If that sentence mystifies you, here’s a simpler one, characteristic of the man this adolescent would become: “I hope I haven’t bored you.”

This letter comes early in A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021), coedited by Merrill’s biographer, Langdon Hammer, and his literary executor, the poet-critic Stephen Yenser. It’s not the book’s first letter, which one ought to read in its entirety: “Dear Santa Clause please bring me a flash-light.” (Merrill was about six years old.) But it may be the earliest letter that flaunts all the paradoxical registers readers hear in Merrill’s mature voice, which in the span of a breath could be refined then passionate, cultivated then occult, baroque but never—what could be worse?—boring. A Whole World, the first collection of Merrill’s correspondence, rests on a related paradox. It contains a bounty of writing as exquisite and as effortlessly witty as anything Merrill produced, yet much of this mammoth book consists of what would have to be called gossip—gossip performed with sparkling virtuosity.

These performances were already underway when Merrill was 15—“Au revoirrr, Fishface,” he signs the above letter—and they developed, with increasing elaborateness, until his death a half-century later. The poet signed off as “James Merrill” only when on official business or out of patience. Instead, as the mood struck, he referred to himself as Jamey (early), JM (late), Τζάημς (Greek, amateurishly), or by a puzzlelike pseudonym such as “Ida Belle Morgenstern” (his new IBM typewriter). Most often, with love always, he was Jimmy, Jamie, Jim, or J. His myriad self-presentations were functions of his many addressees, kept at concentric circles of closeness: lovers, family, friends, fellow artists, strangers. All of them, as Merrill knew, played crucial roles in shaping his singular sensibility. For decades, he sketched his character by quoting Lord Byron’s line about a heart being “Wax to receive and marble to retain”—which is to say, impressionable, quickly molded by others’ warm, receptive hands and bearing those impressions for life. Merrill’s poems may have been written in concentrated solitude, but he couldn’t imagine a good life, or great artistry, without constant companionship. “I’m not used to spending evenings alone,” he admitted in a 1967 letter to the author Donald Richie; he was newly teaching at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and newly friendless. For once, there was nobody to gossip with when night came around.

If Merrill spoke gossip as fluently as a mother tongue, one reason may be that he, his family, and even his poetry were so often the subjects of gossip. Few lives in American poetry lend themselves so smoothly to one prying question after another. What does he do with all that money? (Merrill’s father co-founded the brokerage Merrill Lynch; with his inheritance, James founded an arts philanthropy, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and had plenty of cash left over to devote himself to poetry and display little anxiety of affluence.) Who were all the secretive, anonymized men populating Merrill’s writing? (Merrill met his lifelong partner, the writer and artist David Jackson, in 1953; within their open relationship, both sustained long-term lovers, short-term flirtations, and “one-noon or one-night stands.”) Did he really believe everything the Ouija board told him? (For decades, Merrill and Jackson communicated with spirits via homemade Ouija boards; those conversations offered the alphanumeric raw material for Merrill’s 560-page epic, The Changing Light at Sandover, published in 1982.) Finally, how did this boyish poet age so rapidly and die so early? (In 1986, Merrill was diagnosed with ARC, or AIDS-related complex, which he told to only a few confidants and which was disclosed years after his 1995 death.)

Before A Whole World, readers seeking fuller answers to these questions could turn to a shelf of dense prose tomes, among them Yenser’s unsurpassed study The Consuming Myth (1987); Merrill’s memoir of the years 1950 to 1952, A Different Person (1993); and Hammer’s sumptuous biography James Merrill: Life and Art (2015), the most exhaustive record of Merrill’s many public and private selves. (In Hammer’s index, under Merrill’s name, four pages are listed for “kidnapping threat to,” followed by four more for “kimonos worn by.”) A Whole World amounts to something new and indispensable: a never-planned autobiography, assembled piecemeal, written with dozens of unwitting collaborators. It is not the longest or most concentrated account of Merrill’s progression as a writer, but it is the fullest account written “from the inside” by the writer himself, showing and telling his stylistic development one letter at a time.

***

In his earliest letters, Merrill was already a precocious impressionist, trying on new roles in an effort to stretch his vocal range. His parents divorced when he was 12, a formative rupture he revisits in the heartfelt reminiscences of “The Broken Home” and “Lost in Translation.” Neither poem prepares readers for the startlingly sweet letter Merrill sent his father after turning 13, which thanks him for his birthday presents (“stock and books”) and, a sentence later, offers a pseudo-paternal blessing, from son to father: “Daddy, I DO wish you happiness because I have always felt you have never gotten your full share of it. And now, you are taking a third try at life and I hope you will be successful.” At 20, writing furtively to his first love (and professor) Kimon Friar, Merrill casts one letter in accusatory legalese (“your postcard which did not escape unnoticed was regarded as a serious break in the solemn compact”) and, five days later, admits his “deep and lasting love”—but only to cap off a 155-word sentence, all enraptured cadences and Proustian syntactic squiggles. When Merrill first entered literary society as a 20-something poet, he proved himself a natural at high-culture gossip and verbal caricature. At a 75th birthday luncheon for Wallace Stevens, Merrill is unimpressed with his favorite Modernist’s outfit (“green shirt, gaudy tie”) but won over by his small talk and taste for English mustard; he is absolutely smitten with Marianne Moore, who has the speechless eloquence of a silent-film star: “She laughed and threw up her hands as if to say, ‘Is it possible that anybody anywhere could not passionately desire to read everything?’”

As Merrill’s 20s closed, momentous changes reset his life’s course: he received his first Ouija board (from “Freddy” Buechner); he bought 107 Water Street, his lifelong residence in the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut; and he learned, days into a round-the-world trip with Jackson, that his father had died. He found fast success in drama and fiction, but in poetry, he had not yet become a magnetic autobiographer of “chronicles of love and loss,” as he later labeled his most distinctive work. A chief step in his evolution was mastering the form of the letter, whose brevity and breeziness taught him how to write about his life while floating above it, coasting on an airy, ironic buffer. “[T]here’s a distortion in distance, an exaggeration implicit in letters, so much wrenched onto a little space,” Merrill wrote to Jackson in 1953, adding, “Enough of THAT.” Far from it: Merrill craftily refashioned distance, exaggeration, and compression into self-representational tools. Chatty, campy, utterly unflappable, Merrill’s letter-writing persona treated the “little space” of a letter as a leveling plane, capable of courting anything: pages of record recommendations, a self-anatomizing account of being “a child of the Broken Home,” a recipe for “OMELETTE SOUFFLEE (for 4),” or a summary of the summer’s fun, “not just the sex marathon, but conversations, bridge parties.” Anything goes in these letters, from gracefully dirty jokes to breakneck philosophizing, until the page runs out or work calls. “Big thoughts at 8 a.m.,” he closes a rhapsodic 1968 love letter. “Back to deciding whether the or a is best in a line about a tablecloth.”

Yet if there’s any subject Merrill never dwells on for long, it’s his own poetry, with all its “relentless relevance.” At 52, he could confess a lifelong “impatience with any ‘life of the mind’”; what he preferred was “mindless company.” His letters aspire less to scholarly exchanges than to the chitchat he shared with friends such as Elizabeth Bishop, with whom conversations were “easy + funny + intimate, and all the more ‘binding’ for not being bookish.” Even when writing to his most astute readers—the critics David Kalstone and Donald Richie, his ingenious “disciples” Yenser and J. D. McClatchy—Merrill rarely leads with poetry. “Today’s events,” he reports in a 1971 letter to Kalstone, “include my injection of 10cc of novocaine into that ghastly wart on my sole (sometimes it makes them go away for good) and putting the next-to-finishing touches on an excessively rhymed ballady sort of thing, some 300 lines.” It’s no accident that Merrill paired biological growth and poetic composition in the same sentence, as though tending to literal feet and metrical feet, soles and souls was all in a day’s work. Tolstoy likened discussing death in polite society to a bodily indecency, “something like dealing with a man who comes into a drawing room spreading a bad smell.” No subject was beneath Merrill, but reading his letters gives one the sense that nothing could be ruder, more offensive to the game of good correspondence, than harping on about poetry.

***

If Merrill won’t say how the poems got written, what can we gather from reading his letters? Not much, according to the skeptical view that what truly matters in a writer’s life are its major events and nonevents—foundational traumas, domestic battle scenes, could-have-beens—and the day-to-day activity is trivia at best. As Terry Eagleton puts this view of biography, “We are interested in what Jane Austen had for breakfast because we are interested in her fiction; but what she had for breakfast throws exceedingly little light on the fiction.” But with an autobiographer as resourceful as Merrill, these trusty hypotheses short-circuit: life and art, flowing unimpeded, feed directly into each other. For Merrill, every day, every unfateful hour, had the makings of a potential first draft, and even the artist who sits down to breakfast could be the subject of an unforgettable self-portrait. (If the letters are to be believed, Merrill ate little before noon. Mornings were booked; he was busy writing.)

Revelations abound in A Whole World, but there’s nothing of the headline-making variety, no secret that hasn’t been disclosed by friends or addressed in Hammer’s biography. Instead, Merrill’s letters give three resounding reminders about his idiosyncratic sensibility as a writer, even when they make no mention of the mechanics or business of writing whatsoever. First is the reminder that Merrill’s poetry could be even more transparently autobiographical than his readers suspected. Consider perhaps his most acclaimed poem, “Lost in Translation.” At its heart is a serendipitous symbol that seems too good to be true, implausibly “right” in every way: a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, rented to distract the young Merrill during his parents’ divorce. An object lesson, then, in piecing together a fraying family, a sense of self in fragments, an unfinished artwork—wouldn’t it have been easier if Merrill had made all that up? A Whole World dispels that notion on its first page, with a letter Merrill wrote to his half-sister in 1933, days after he turned seven: “Do you like jigsaw puzzles? I love them! We have just finished one called The Lily Pond with 750 pieces.” It is a paradoxical case of life corroborating art, and it keeps happening, in letter after letter. Even that very first letter asking “Santa Clause” for a “flash-light” resurfaces in the work. For his deathbed self-portrait, Merrill casts himself not as a gift-requesting child but as a "Christmas Tree," festive amid decay. Merrill wrote out of flat fact as artfully as he worked within rhyme, meter, and ornate formal architectures. Constraints, whether of life or art, buttressed rather than bounded his towering invention.

The second reminder in these letters is that Merrill, in every form he attempted, was a producer of entertainments. To be sure, his letters are irrepressibly entertaining, festooned with wisecracks, spur-of-the-moment couplets, and T*Y*P*E*W*R*I*T*E*R gimmicks. Some are giggly with puns (on Stonington life: “Here, the Tedium is the Message”), others prankish as a preteen’s (“woof! grrrrr….bow-wow?” reads one postcard in full). But being entertained by one of Merrill’s letters doesn’t stop at amusement: it’s more like being entertained as a guest in his home, ushered inside and encouraged to stay. His mature letters are written performances of hospitality, one-page reductions of one-week stays. Often, Merrill opens a letter on his household’s present-tense hubbub, depicting as with a roving Steadicam his life’s cast of partners, friends, neighbors, guests, and pets, all together but independently in motion. He relishes serving as his circle’s dedicated society correspondent, offering dish-by-dish reviews of dinner parties, skimming off la crème de la crème of the table talk: “Not to be outdone in sophistication, Grace then said: ‘But Robert, it’s a well-known fact, isn’t it, that opium and sex don’t mix?’ Robert smiled and said, ‘Poppycock!’” Unless they’re blushing love letters or confidential dispatches, Merrill’s letters are written to be huddled around, like shared desserts or board games. And, invariably, Merrill rarely writes for himself alone—he relays news from mutual friends, tags in Jackson to add a postscript, or sends updates from the spirit Ephraim, “A Greek Jew / Born AD 8 at XANTHOS” and the otherworldly pen pal of “The Book of Ephraim,” the first third of Merrill’s Ouija-board trilogy. For the poet-critic Chad Bennett, Merrill’s epic trilogy ventures into "the queer afterlife of gossip," communing queer figures, living and dead, in a “celestial salon.” From that vantage, Ephraim is a better gossip than anyone alive: he has a two-millennium head start, and he hears news mere mortals can’t. “We had a wonderful talk with Ephraim,” Merrill reports in a 1957 letter, sent from abroad. “He says the air over India ‘howls’ with spirits; he’s hugely enjoying the whole trip, isn’t that nice?”

Welcomeness is not always a quality associated with Merrill’s refined, intricate verse. But ever since Water Street (1962)—a title borrowed from his one-way thoroughfare in Stonington—he conceived of his poems as virtual meeting places, his sturdy stanzas as verbal rooms. “If I am host at last / It is of little more than my own past. / May others be at home in it,” that collection ends, in a poem titled “A Tenancy.” At first, Merrill had trouble feeling at home on the page, where he gave himself punning, one-dimensional pseudonyms such as Sandy (desert-dry) and Jack Frost (frigid). To step fully into his art, as his middle-period books show, Merrill needed to bring along friends and the full-blooded relationships they shared. Styling himself a poet of open-hearted dedication, Merrill began titling poems as though they were personalized gifts (“Words for Maria,” “Chimes for Yahya”), and he balanced them on small feats of care and company: pouring tea, philosophizing over after-dinner drinks, people-watching at the bar. Merrill’s coziest metaphor for his impressive yet intimate art may be the titular dish of a late poem, “Ginger Beef.” Not delicate finger food, not empty calories, but “tonight’s pièce / De resistance,” the ginger beef is at once a satisfying meal and a showstopping display of craft, designed to allure and indulge: “Lift from the crock, let stand; / Then chill, trim, slice, and recompose / Within its essence, clarified topaz / (Afterwards, find a moment, thank the cook).”

That last dab of courtesy leads to A Whole World’s third reminder: Merrill, whether in verse or in prose, was supremely alert to convention. A pristine formalist in his poetry, he also understood the letter as a genre with given requirements, above all the necessity to write appropriately to the occasion at hand. It’s no wonder that the fullest imitation of correspondence in Merrill’s Collected Poems is a gentle pastiche of a child’s thank-you note. In the closing poem of the sonnet sequence "Matinées," a younger Merrill thanks an elder operagoer, “Mrs. Livingston,” for taking him to “My very first Grand Opera!”:

I play my record of the Overture
Over and over. I pretend
I am still sitting in the theater.
 
I also wrote a poem which my Mother
Says I should copy out and send.
Ever gratefully, Your little friend…

Both the thank-you note and the sonnet, Merrill implies, are modes of writing that allow dressing up stylishly, in linguistic formal wear; both honor the tradition while permitting old themes to be played to new tunes.

A Whole World has no real-life, unrhymed equivalent to Merrill’s sonnet, but it does include an abundance of thank-yous, apologies, birthday notes, Christmas well-wishes, congratulations on victories, and condolences for losses. (There are also letters for those occasions—messy breakdowns, messy breakups—for which there are no dedicated Hallmark cards.) For these events, some trifling and some traumatizing, the notches of life, people often fall back on what Merrill calls “the language of the naively literary” or its close cousin, “greeting-card jargon.” Those are precisely the occasions that spurred Merrill, who found demanding forms the most fitting, to write his most original letters. None are more moving, in their stoic control and self-diverting wit, than his late letters concerning dying and dead friends. Increasingly, Merrill finds himself braiding bad news and consolations into the same sentence: “A sad occasion for a letter—or not a letter, then, so much as reaching out to press your hand.” His campy irony, a mainstay of his early letters, hardens into a protective coating: “One used to go to the theater in New York, or to cocktail parties—not this year. This year it’s memorial services.” And Merrill’s flair as a host, a master of setting others at ease, makes him a conscientious yet pragmatic funeral-planner. “CAREFUL: A GLOOMY LETTER, BY AND LARGE,” Merrill types across a 1986 letter before covering logistics for the upcoming memorial for Kalstone, his first close friend to die from AIDS. “Time canters by, kicking up dust as we squint vainly after it.”

Besides naming antiviral drugs and alluding to wearying side effects, Merrill’s letters never explicitly mention his own AIDS diagnosis. At most it is “my secret,” a phrase used only with those who knew exactly what it meant. But the disease never needed naming; in retrospect, Merrill’s mortality goes unspoken throughout the late letters, haunting every statement of finality about ailing friends, dire headlines, life or art. The last letter in A Whole World (“Merrill’s last complete letter,” according to Yenser) was sent to a stranger, the then-début author André Aciman, in praise of his memoir Out of Egypt (1994). Aciman’s home of Alexandria, Merrill explained, had “permanently colored my days. To find it now in your pages, all rosy and clear-eyed from the tonic of your telling, is the greatest imaginable gift.” In later printings of Out of Egypt, that last sentence is whittled into a freestanding blurb. But Merrill’s letter continued:

That whole world of the trivial & the tragic, interwoven as in Chekhov, and underscored as in opera, is for me the very best life has to offer, and as close to a “real” home as I’ve ever come. No reflection on my parents, that the Stork delivered me to West Eleventh Street instead of the Corniche. But here I am. What do you do with so much blue, once you’ve seen it? (Terrible things await us before the book ends. Meanwhile, just a long sigh of relief…)

Well, I could spin this all out at greater length—you can't be averse to praise. Most of all, though, I want to go back to the beginning and read it through a second time.

A life summarized, from the Stork’s delivery to “Terrible things” in store; the shrugging acceptance in “But here I am”; and, just as things are wrapping up, the all-encompassing wish “to go back to the beginning,” to experience the whole thing “a second time.” It is an extraordinary self-epitaph, composed by accident and mailed off five days before his death. Uncharacteristically, he signed off with his full name: “Sincerely, James Merrill.”

***

A funny thing about A Whole World: It all but forces you to read Merrill’s life through a second time, almost immediately after you've finished the letters. If, like me, you read Merrill’s note to Aciman and turned a hopeful page searching for more, you found instead a 10-page chronology, a year-by-year account of climactic events and pivotal friendships, travels and teaching posts. As an epilogue to the preceding 643 pages of letters, it’s largely clarifying, if intermittently bewildering; it includes entire relationships, intercontinental trips, honors, and even books that Merrill never brings up in the letters, as though they made for less captivating correspondence than last night’s dinner or this afternoon’s weather. In a prudent editorial decision, Hammer and Yenser aim to reproduce every selected letter in full, “from the salutation to the signature,” and readers can thank that inclusive policy for the book’s spacious sense of presenting “a whole world,” with room for pleasantries, marginalia, postscripts, and other evidence of busy lives. But we should also be thankful for their chronology, a reminder of how much illuminating writing, how much of Merrill’s own life, had to be omitted from A Whole World. One of Merrill’s favorite metaphors for poetic revision was leaving material “on the cutting-room floor”; editing his drafts into shapely wholes required strenuous deletions, even scrapping material so strong it could stand separate and enclosed, a whole world of its own.

I saw Merrill’s metaphorical cutting room firsthand in 2017, when I visited the Modern Literature Collection at Washington University in St. Louis, which holds the lion’s share of Merrill’s literary and personal papers. (Merrill, cheerfully accepting an invitation from Mona Van Duyn, began depositing his papers there in 1964; other letters are housed at Amherst College, his alma mater, and at Yale’s Beinecke Library, among dozens of other archives.) Until then, I hadn’t spent much time in an archive, which meant I had yet to learn what strange tricks archives play on time itself. As real time persisted outside—and that week, “real time” encompassed everything from earplug-requiring construction on WashU’s Olin Library to the “Great American Eclipse” sailing right over Missouri—a few academics sat in an air-conditioned room, necks craned over yellowing papers; the work may be indistinguishable from monastic study, but it’s as eerily transporting as time travel. How strange it is to see, laid out before you, decades of unpublished writing by a poet you thought you knew well plus a garage’s worth of personal objects designated "realia," from a silver baby spoon engraved with “This little piggy went to market” to a death mask, cast in plaster and bronze. Even stranger is what’s actually there: All the above was carefully sorted, listed in a finding aid more meticulous than any will and testament, and converted into estranging units of measurement. Papers and objects are items, which are organized into folders, which are arranged in boxes, which are finally measured in linear feet—a life’s temporal span translated into a strictly spatial extent. Assessing a poet’s influence may be a thorny endeavor, but measuring the stuff his life produced is pretty easy: 68 years, 11 months, 3 days = 175.5 linear feet.

Strangest of all was getting into papers themselves—tracking down the folder dedicated to a poem, opening it to find a stack of drafts in varying paper sizes and colors—and seeing what Merrill, mid-revision, could do to the medium of time in his poetry. His ease within acrobatic forms (alongside an eloquence sometimes set to autopilot) meant that his early drafts can glisten with a too-perfect polish. In revision he labored to stage-manage a show of spontaneity, introducing talky digressions, roughening up metronomic rhythms, planting Freudian slips. “Tears have begun to flow // Unhindered down my face,” reads one version of “Family Week at Oracle Ranch,” a rare instance in Merrill’s late work of permitting welled-up nostalgia to burst openly onto the page. Only after the poem was published in the New Yorker in 1993 did Merrill make a miraculous one-letter revision—no, not Tears but “Years have begun to flow.” The change looks like a typo, but the unguardedness is entirely staged; the effect is of a tiny animating spell, as if Merrill had bewitched his T to become a Y, simply by raising its arms.

My stated academic reason for visiting Merrill’s papers was to research and write about the origins of one pivotal collection, Divine Comedies (1976). By my last afternoon, I had seen all the relevant journals, manuscripts, and galleys, and I had read my fill of Ouija transcripts. All that remained were letters: where to begin? Since David Jackson, abbreviated to DJ, plays a major role in Divine Comedies, I started on the five folders of correspondence between him and Merrill, skipping to the 1970s. I never got around to reading anything else. Here was what remained, in writing, of Merrill’s longest relationship, relayed in weekly or daily dispatches, on pages blanketed so thoroughly with typewriter ink that Merrill barely had room to sign his name. In the photographs of the letters I took that day, I see little about literature, even less about Merrill’s own writing. Instead, there is the everyday back-and-forth between two people who have written each other for so long they have discovered ways of writing frankly about (or gallantly skirting around) any topic, from home renovation to sexcapades, from the soap opera of family squabbles to the tragedies of medical conditions. The texture of these letters had such a high thread count of abbreviations, inside jokes, and tacit understandings that they felt impervious to voyeurism. I didn’t understand everything I read; then again, only two people, JM and DJ, ever could.

It would have taken weeks to read all 819 items in those folders, so I began skimming through, pausing on only the most exceptional items. An Italian telegram, from “JIMMY” in Stonington to Jackson in Venice: “LITTLE BOYS WHO DONT ANSWER TELEPHONE GET BIRTHDAY CABLE LOVE.” A faintly stained napkin, name brand Softex, with a doodle of a pink peacock, its ballooning, heart-shaped tail filled in with “HAPPY 1977 I LOVE U.”

James Merrill Papers, Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, Washington University in St. Louis.

 

And my favorite: a postcard with a reproduction of an art nouveau poster on one side, an uncollected Merrill poem on the reverse. It was a rhyming quatrain for Jackson’s 49th birthday, and Merrill inscribed each line in a new autumnal hue—orange, pink, purple, red:

Happy Birthday. Who said ‘old’?
Raise them glasses, break them plates!
Forty-niners all struck gold.
Fifty’s just a sum of states.

"PLACE STAMP HERE" reads one corner of the postcard. Presumably, it was hand-delivered to the precise coordinates specified:

à Monsieur
     David Jackson
          in bed,
      Athènes, G 16.ix.71

James Merrill Papers, Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, Washington University in St. Louis.

 

It is likely the sole manuscript of a poem never intended to be read by me or you. Even more, it is the scant textual evidence of an oddly inferable series of actions—Merrill rummaging about for the right postcard, capping and uncapping markers, walking giddily from desk to bed—that a responsible biographer would leave to readers’ imaginations. The quatrain is quoted in Hammer’s biography but not in A Whole World, which condenses Merrill and Jackson’s four-decade relationship to 18 letters, all high highs and low lows. In 1978, Merrill writes to mark the couple’s 25th anniversary, wishfully asking Jackson, “the greatest blessing to me,” for “25 more???” Then nothing, until two last letters in 1994. In the first, also hand-delivered, Merrill confronts Jackson over accumulated domestic grievances: “So all that matters—right?—is your gratification. I doubt that I have the strength to live under the same roof with you ever again.” The second, mailed from a safe remove, concerns an unspeakable betrayal. Jackson, sworn to secrecy, divulged Merrill’s AIDS diagnosis to someone he met at a party: “Try, try, TRY to think what you’ve been doing, and how horribly it upsets me.”

In an early appearance of the multifaceted phrase “a whole world” in Merrill’s Collected Poems, a speaking “Mirror” glares at the window opposite it: “You embrace a whole world without once caring / To set it in order. That takes thought.” A Whole World offers a wide-open window onto Merrill and his interlocking social worlds; it is also, by necessity, one thoughtfully angled view, selective in scope. Just outside the correspondences it frames, readers must imagine tens, hundreds, thousands of letters left out—all the errands, happy birthdays, pranks, doodles, valentines, celebrations, and condolences; all the conversations to revisit and plans to finalize; all the mindless accounts of yet another delightfully uneventful day. So many hours of letter-writing, detailing so many untold years better off measured in linear feet. None of those letters will be collected anywhere soon, but rest easy knowing they’re safely stowed in an archive somewhere, sent with love always, ready to be reread.