Collected Prose - Hardcover

Merrill, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375411364 ISBN 13: 9780375411366

Verlag: Knopf, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Following James Merrill’s widely celebrated Collected Poems and Collected Novels and Plays, this volume gives us, most intimately, the man himself and his charmingly straightforward exploration of how he became himself. As much as any poet of our time, Merrill conceived of his work and his life as warp and woof, and the prose collected here (from his juvenilia and occasional pieces through his critical writings to his interviews and memoir) shows how bound up in his craft (itself a recurrent topic) were his readings and reflections, his travels and friendships. Even Merrill’s most devoted readers will be startled anew at the range of his aesthetic concerns and the depth of his knowledge. Dante and Ponge, Cavafy and Montale, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, all figure prominently here, and the volume is shot through with commentary on music, especially opera, and descriptions of the world’s great cities–including New York, Paris, Istanbul, and Kyoto–and their cultural treasures. The volume closes resoundingly with A Different Person, Merrill’s memoir of his young life, in which he travels to Europe to explore the culture, comes of age as a gay man, and faces down his legacy as the son of the renowned financier Charles E. Merrill.

As Merrill remarks to one interviewer here, a poet is “someone choosing the words he lives by.” This volume, a cross section of a singularly complex literary life, showcases the care for verbal nuance and the inimitably varied tones that distinguish this great American writer.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Merrill was born on March 3, 1926, in New York City and died on February 6, 1995. From the mid-1950s on, he lived in Stonington, Connecticut, and for extended periods he also had houses in Athens and Key West. From The Black Swan (1946) through A Scattering of Salts (1995), he wrote twelve books of poems, ten of them published in trade editions, as well as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). He also published two plays, The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1960); two novels, The Seraglio (1957, reissued 1987) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965, reissued 1994); a book of essays, interviews, and reviews, Recitative (1986); and a memoir, A Different Person (1993). Over the years, he was the winner of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser are James Merrill’s literary executors. J. D. McClatchy has published six volumes of poetry and two collections of essays. He teaches at Yale and is the editor of The Yale Review. Stephen Yenser has written three books of criticism (one about Merrill) and a volume of poems. He is a professor of English and the director of Creative Writing at UCLA.

James Merrill’s Collected Poems is available in Knopf paperback. The Voice of the Poet: James Merrill is available from Random House Audio.

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Acoustical Chambers

Interior spaces, the shape and correlation of rooms in a house, have always appealed to me. Trying for a blank mind, I catch myself instead revisiting a childhood bedroom on Long Island. Recently, on giving up the house in Greece where I'd lived for much of the previous fifteen years, it wasn't so much the fine view it commanded or the human comedies it had witnessed that I felt deprived of; rather, I missed the hairpin turn of the staircase underfoot, the height of our kitchen ceiling, the low door ducked through in order to enter a rooftop laundry room that had become my study. This fondness for given arrangements might explain how instinctively I took to quatrains, to octaves and sestets, when I began to write poems. "Stanza" is after all the Italian word for "room."

Foreign languages entered my life early in the person of my governess. Although we called her Mademoiselle she was not a spinster but a widow. Neither was she French, or even, as she led us to believe, Belgian, but part English and part, to her undying shame, Prussian. She had lived in Brussels at least, and her sister, who now taught music in Pennsylvania, had been decorated for playing duets with the old Queen Mother of Belgium. Mademoiselle's maiden name was Fanning. This meant some distant kinship with the explorer who discovered-I can see her finger poised above the open atlas-those tiny Pacific islands, and whose house a block away from mine in Stonington, Connecticut, I would be able to point out to her when she spent a day with me thirty years later.

I worshipped this kind, sad woman: her sensible clothes, her carrot hair and watery eyes, the sunburnt triangle at her throat, the lavender wen on her wrist. She taught me to say the Ave Maria and to sing Carmen's "Habanera." I got by heart the brother heroically dead, the sister in Johnstown, the other sister in Copenhagen. I resolved as soon as I grew up to marry her daughter, Stella, at that age plain and rather disagreeable, who was boarded out to a refined Catholic family in East Hampton-the light of love suffused even them. I heard all there was to hear about Mademoiselle's previous charges and prayed every night to grieve her less than spoilt Constance M. or devilish Peter T. had done. While she talked a needle flashed-costumes for my marionettes. Stories that ten years later would have convulsed me, I drank in solemnly. For instance: Having to relieve herself at a border checkpoint during the war, Mademoiselle had overlaid the "infecte" toilet seat with some family letters she happened to be carrying in her purse. In the course of the "formalities" her innocent buttocks were bared by a uniformed matron and found to be stenciled with suspicious mirror writing, which triggered a long and humiliating interrogation. "Figure-toi!" she exclaimed, gravely fixing me through her gold-rimmed spectacles. I could indeed imagine. I too was being imprinted, there and then.

By the time I was eight I had learned from her enough French and German to understand that English was merely one of many ways to express things. A single everyday object could be called assiette or Teller as well as plate-or were plates themselves subtly different in France and Germany? Mademoiselle's French and Latin prayers seemed to invoke absolutes beyond the ken of our Sunday school pageants. At the same time, I was discovering how the everyday sounds of English could mislead you by having more than one meaning. One afternoon at home I opened a random book and read: "Where is your husband, Alice?" "In the library, sampling the port." If samples were little squares of wallpaper or chintz, and ports were where ships dropped anchor, this hardly clarified the behavior of Alice's husband. Long after Mademoiselle's exegesis, the phrase haunted me. Words weren't what they seemed. The mother tongue could inspire both fascination and distrust.

But back to those octaves and sestets. Words might frustrate me, forms never did; neither did meter. Children in my day were exposed to a good deal of competent verse. Each first grader at St. Bernard's memorized his hundred lines of Sir Walter Scott and received an apple for so doing. Before graduation he would speak deathless poetry in the annual Shakespeare play. The masters somehow let meaning take care of itself, a chip borne along by the rhetorical surge. Accordingly, frustration was reserved for the content, or lack of it, in what I'd begun to write at boarding school. Gerrish Thurber, the mild and merciful librarian who "advised" the young editors of the Lawrenceville Lit, read through my first submission and nodded, saying only, "We can always use a well-made sonnet." It took me a while to fathom what he hadn't said.

My classmate Frederick Buechner wrote his poem first. In a flash I thought: I can do that too! And away we went. Luckily perhaps, since it allowed us to polish without much thought for what (if anything) we were communicating, our callowness led us to second-rate, fin de siècle stuff-Wilde, Heredia, Alice Meynell. These writers didn't figure in the Lawrenceville curriculum, although they met its chief requirement by having died. The living poets (unlike Milton or Keats, on whom white-haired Mr. Raymond had given us the last sonorous word) were still scandalously eluding definition in the pages of anthologies never seen in the classroom. Would our style ever mature? Or rather, dripping and sugary, would it ever unripen? Long after Freddy had gone on to Blake and Whitman, I dawdled behind with Elinor Wylie and the gaudier bits in Baudelaire.

On the threshold of our senior year the Lit's graduating editor summoned his two least trustworthy successors. Sucking at a pipe, this man of eighteen urged us to recant. "Write about real things for God's sake: blondes and pistons!"-fetishes no less conventional than the moonlit foliage, masquerades, mad crones, and pet monkeys that clotted our own poems and stories. We left his room with scornful smiles.

The airs I was giving myself ran in the family. My father had offered his aunt Grace the sum, unheard of in those Depression years, of five dollars a page for memoirs of her Mississippi girlhood. She couldn't do it; the truth froze her pen. Not that she stopped writing. One summer a flier came in the mail from a vanity press in New York, announcing Aunt Grace's novel, Femme Fatale. "Set against the turbulent background of the French court, this tale of searing passion . . ." My mother and I, alone that year and needing diversion, at once ordered our copy-several copies: Christmas was coming. Before it did, German troops overran a real France Aunt Grace wouldn't have crossed the street to see, and Femme Fatale was never published or our money refunded.

Like Aunt Grace, and like many adolescents, I needed to feel that I was fulfilling myself in the face of heartless indifference. In fact my mother was both proud and critical of my early writing. She had taken a summer course in the short story at Columbia, worked on the Jacksonville newspaper, and edited until her marriage a weekly gazette of her own. Some satirical doggerel she dashed off about the preparations for my sister's wedding dazzled me, at nine, with its zany, end-stopped rhyming. My father, who could compose long lucid letters in his beautifully rounded hand and read with X-ray eyes the to me impenetrable editorials in the Herald Tribune, looked to literature for a good cry. His favorite author was J. M. Barrie-indeed, Alice and her port-sampling husband may be found in Barrie's play Dear Brutus. My father had a way of his own with rhyme. Here is how he acknowledged one of my letters when I first went abroad:

Though we're apart,

You're in my heart-

I too love...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375411364
• ISBN 13: 9780375411366
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 752
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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