Vassar Exhibition Chapbook by Thornwillow Press

THE BANNON MCHENRY JAMES MERRILL COLLECTION

the bannon mchenry james merrill collection

THE BANNON MCHENRY JAMES MERRILL COLLECTION

 an exhibition

va s s a r c o l l e g e libraries 2020

CONTENTS the bannon mchenry james merrill collection at va s s a r c o l l e g e By Ronald Patkus

james merrill (1926 â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1995)

living in style: james merrill with elizabeth bishop By Langdon Hammer

the collection Prepared by Emma Iadanza

THE BANNON MCHENRY JAMES MERRILL COLLECTION AT VA S S A R C O L L E G E



By Ronald Patkus

a r i e b a n n o n j o n e s was born in Baltimore in 1930. She attended the Bryn Mawr School and then Vassar College, graduating from the latter institution in 1952. In the same year she married Barnabas McHenry and started a family. Bannon McHenry’s intellectual interests focused on art, and she began a career as an art historian, teacher, and journalist based in New York. She became especially interested in James Renwick, Jr., architect of Vassar’s Main Building, and authored several articles on him. Along with her husband she also collected art and books. Bannon McHenry has served on the boards of several cultural institutions and her donations can be found at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. 9

For many years the McHenrys lived at 164 East 72nd Street, in New York’s Upper East Side. Also living in the building for an extended period was the poet James Merrill, who had inherited an apartment from his grandmother. This address was the subject of a poem by Merrill which appeared in the New Yorker and is discussed further by Langdon Hammer in his essay “Living in Style,” which appears in this volume. The McHenrys and Merrill lived just one floor apart, and given their common interests in the arts, they developed a close relationship. It should come as no surprise that Bannon McHenry started collecting materials relating to Merrill’s life and work. Some of the materials were given — and in a few cases, inscribed — to McHenry by Merrill himself; others were acquired by her from dealers, bookshops, or other means. Over the years the collection grew to a notable size, focusing primarily on published works, though some interesting nonprint matter was gathered as well. In terms of dates, the materials range from Merrill’s high school years to the first decade after his 10

death. The collection is composed of seven diverse series: Books by James Merrill; Books and Pamphlets with Original Contributions by James Merrill; Periodicals with Original Contributions by James Merrill; Manuscript Materials and Correspondence; Photographs; Miscellaneous; and Materials About or Related to James Merrill. Among these series are several highlights. They include a copy of Jim’s Book, the privately-printed first edition of Merrill’s poetry; Ten Student Poems, a 1951 Amherst College publication with a Merrill poem; a manuscript of the poem “16 4 East 72nd Street;” various snapshot photographs of Merrill; memorial programs; and signed books from Merrill’s personal library. Of course there are other interesting items as well; these are but a few worthy of special mention. A full inventory is available at the back of this catalogue. It should be noted that several other libraries in the United States house substantial collections relating to James Merrill, particularly his personal papers. The largest can be found at Washington University in St. Louis. It consists of more than 175 linear feet of manuscripts 11

and other materials; the university also hosts a James Merrill Digital Archive. Another large collection is at Yale University; here about 3 5 linear feet of materials are preserved. The New York Public Library has a synthetic collection of 284 items gathered from various sources. Though not as large as these collections in terms of manuscripts, the Bannon McHenry collection still provides useful documentation of Merrill’s life and work. Discussions about the possibility of transferring the collection to the Vassar Library began in 20 12. The Library was interested in the collection for several reasons. One was Bannon McHenry’s connection to the college. Another was that a collection relating to Merrill would nicely complement other holdings in the Archives & Special Collections Library, particularly the papers Mary McCarthy ’33 and Elizabeth Bishop ’34, which already hold letters of Merrill. A fuller collection of his work would provide coverage of another mid-century literary figure from New York who was closely associated with Vassar graduates. The

collection was formally donated in 2017, and a press release was issued in May. Once in the Library, the first task was to catalog the materials so that they would be findable by researchers. The books in the collection may be located by doing a subject search in the Library catalogue for “Bannon McHenry-James Merrill Collection;” the search yields 119 titles. Other printed items and the manuscript material are housed separately, so that they can be better preserved. These materials are described in the Bannon McHenry-James Merrill Collection online finding aid, which is posted on the Library’s website. Soon after the collection arrived at the college, the Library discussed plans for an exhibition, would bring further publicity to the collection. It was decided to wait until 2020 for this event, since that year would mark the 25th anniversary of Merrill’s death. The exhibition has been a long time in the making, and aims to highlight some of the key pieces in the collection. It features examples from all series of the collection, with an emphasis on the printed

items that form the bulk of the holdings. It is on display for the entire spring semester. A checklist of items on display is included in this publication. At the time of this writing, plans are also being made for a symposium on Merrill to be held on campus. There are a number of people to thank for their help with the exhibition and this catalogue. First and foremost is Bannon McHenry herself, whose generosity made this exhibition possible. I would also like to thank colleagues in the English Department, namely Paul Kane, Mark Amodio, and Wendy Graham, for their willingness to collaborate. Langdon Hammer of Yaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s English Department very kindly agreed to write our lead essay, which brings out ties between the the collection and Vassar. Michelle Martinez of the Poetry Foundation granted permission to use the biography of James Merrill from their website. Luke Pontifell of the Thornwillow Press oversaw the printing of this publication; I extend our appreciation to him and his team. In the Library Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m grateful to Sharyn Cadogen, who

produced digital images; Mark Seidl, who wrote captions; and Dean Rogers and Emma Iadanza, who both helped with the production of publication texts. Ronald Patkus is Head of Special Collections and Adjunct Associate Professor of History on the Frederick Weyerhaeuser Chair at Vassar College.

Box enclosures from the Bannon McHenry James Merrill Collection.

JAMES MERRILL (1926 –1995)

a m e s m e r r i l l was recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation. Praised for his stylish elegance, moral sensibilities, and transformation of autobiographical moments into deep and complex meditations, Merrill’s work spans genres — including plays and prose — but the bulk of his artistic expression can be found in his poetry. Over the long course of his career, Merrill won nearly every major literary award in America: he received two National Book Awards, for Nights and Days (1966 ) and Mirabell: Books of Number (1978); Merrill’s long Ouijainspired epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and he was awarded the inaugural Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry by the Library of Congress for his book The Inner Room (1 9 8 8 ); he also received both the Bollingen Prize in Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize, the latter for a book of occult poetry called Divine Comedies (1976). 19

Merrill was born in 1926 in New York City, the son of investment banker Charles E. Merrill, co-founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm. Brought up in fabulous wealth, Merrill’s interest in language was piqued by his governess — a Prussian-English widow called Mademoiselle who was fluent in both German and French. Merrill’s first book of poems was privately printed by his father during his senior year of high school. Merrill attended Amherst College; though his education was interrupted by a stint in the U.S. army during World War II, Merrill’s future as a poet was all but decided during his years in college. In 19 46 he published his first collection, The Black Swan. Spending a few years traveling abroad in Europe after graduating, Merrill eventually settled in Stonington, Connecticut with his long-term partner, the writer David Jackson. Though Merrill was wealthy his entire life, he understood the plight of many artists and founded the Ingram Merrill Foundation in 19 56, a permanent endowment created for writers and painters. While at Amherst, Merrill wrote his thesis 20

on Marcel Proust, and in many ways the great French writer’s themes of memory, nostalgia, and loss became Merrill’s own. The fusion of autobiography and archetype was a hallmark of Merrill’s verse. David Kalstone explained in the Times Literary Supplement that Merrill’s relatively privileged existence allowed him to focus intensely on the poetic act itself: “He [Merrill] has not led the kind of outwardly dramatic life which would make external changes the centre of his poetry. Instead, poetry itself has been one of the changes, something which continually happens to him, and Merrill’s subject proves to be the subject of the great Romantics: the constant revisions of the self that come through writing verse. Each book seems more spacious because of the one which has come before.” Though centered on the self, Helen Vendler observed in the New York Times Book Review that the best of Merrill’s poems “are autobiographical without being ‘confessional’: they show none of that urgency to reveal the untellable or unspeakable that we associate with the poetry we call ‘confessional’.” A master of forms, Merrill’s later poetry rarely 21

feels formal. In the Atlantic Monthly, poet X.J. Kennedy observed that “Merrill never sprawls, never flails about, never strikes postures. Intuitively he knows that, as Yeats once pointed out, in poetry, ‘all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.’” Comparisons to W.B. Yeats recurred throughout Merrill’s career, particularly during the periods in which Merrill wrote Divine Comedies and his master-work, The Changing Light at Sandover. Embracing mysticism and the occult, Merrill believed, like Yeats — whose wife was a medium — that he received inspiration from the world beyond. His Divine Comedies features an affable ghost named Ephraim who instructs the poet; Yeats’s “A Vision” features the spirit Leo Africanus in a similar role. Critics have found other influences at work in Merrill’s poems as well, drawing parallels between his writing and the work of Dante, W.H. Auden, and Marcel Proust — who was also dismissed as a mere aesthete early in his career. Merrill’s early work, in First Poems (1 95 1 ) and The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace and Other Poems (1959), was criticized for 22

its insistence on “connoisseurish aesthetic contemplation,” in the words of James Dickey. In the 19 60 s Merrill began to incorporate more autobiographical and personal elements into his work, leading to “a toughened and colloquialized…verse line” according to Ian Hamilton in the Washington Post Book World. With each step he took away from formalism, Merrill gained critical ground. As his verse became more conversational, it began to mimic the structures of prose, as Vendler noted in the New York Review of Books: “The flashes and glimpses of ‘plot’ in some of the lyrics — especially the longer poems — reminded Merrill’s readers that he wanted more than the usual proportion of dailiness and detail in his lyrics, while preserving a language far from the plainness of journalistic poetry, a language full of arabesques, fancifulness, play of wit, and oblique metaphor.” In fact, Merrill considered writing his epic poem “The Book of Ephraim” as a prose narrative, though he eventually abandoned the idea. “The Book of Ephraim” — which appeared in Divine Comedies, considered to be Merrill’s breakthrough — prompted 23

many critics to reevaluate the poet. Among them was Harold Bloom, who wrote in the New Republic that “the book’s eight shorter poems surpass nearly all the earlier Merrill, but its apocalypse (a lesser word won’t do) is a 10 0 -page verse-tale, ‘The Book of Ephraim,’ an occult splendor in which Merrill rivals Yeats’ ‘A Vision,’… and even some aspects of Proust.” The two volumes that followed Divine Comedies, Mirabell: Books of Number (1 978) and Scripts for the Pageant (198 0), continue the narrative that “The Book of Ephraim” begins. Together these three poems form a trilogy that was published with a new coda in The Changing Light at Sandover, an unprecedented 5 60 -page epic that records the Ouija board sessions Merrill and David Jackson conducted with spirits from the other world. Merrill organized each section of the trilogy to reflect a different component of their homemade Ouija board. The twenty-six sections of “The Book of Ephraim” correspond to the board’s A to Z alphabet, the ten sections of Mirabell: Books of Number correspond to the board’s numbering from zero to nine, and the three sections 24

of Scripts for the Pageant (“Yes,” “&,” and “No”) correspond to the board’s Yes & No. The progression of poems also represents a kind of celestial hierarchy, with each book representing communication with a higher order of spirits than the one before. Humans in the poem are identified by their initials — DJ and JM; spirits speak in all capitals. By the time Merrill transcribed the lessons of the archangels in book three, he offered nothing less than a model of the universe. According to Mary Jo Salter in the Atlantic Monthly, the long poem is “a hymn celebrating, among other things, ‘resistance’ as ‘Nature’s gift to man.’” As the myth is reappraised and corrected by the characters who are themselves a part of it, Salter believed that “‘Yes No’ becomes an answer to every question: not an equivocation of authorial (or divine) responsibility, but an acknowledgment that ‘fact is fable,’ that the question of man’s future, if any, is one he must answer for himself.” James Merrill died of a heart attack in February of 1995 while vacationing in Tucson, Arizona. He continued to write poetry and prose until 25

his death, often treating, in subtle ways, the AIDS epidemic that ravaged his friend group, and to which he himself succumbed. Merrill published a memoir, A Different Person, in 19 9 3; his final volume of poetry, A Scattering of Salts (1995 ), “provides an elegant closure for his life’s work, the kind of bittersweet ending he treasured,” remarked Phoebe Pettingell in The New Leader. Other posthumous volumes followed, including Collected Poems (2 0 0 1 ) and Selected Poems (200 8 ), both edited by J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. Collected Poems is the first in a series that will present all of Merrill’s work, including his novels, plays, and collected prose. It includes his entire body of poetry excluding juvenilia and The Changing Light at Sandover. In addition, Collected Poems brings together for the first time 21 translations from Apollinaire, Montale, Cavafy, and others and 4 4 previously uncollected poems, including elegies to Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. Selected Poems does excerpt The Changing Light at Sandover, presenting a sampler of a poet who wrote “New Critical Rococo” in the words of 26

James Merrill in Key West, ca. 1986.

August Kleinzhaler in the New York Times Book Review. Kleinzhaler added: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Where a straight line would do, Merrill cannot resist using filigree. But if one were to bypass his work, one would be missing some of the finest poems written in English in the middle of last century.â&#x20AC;? This unattributed essay also appears on the website of the Poetry Foundation, at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/james-merrill

LIVING IN STYLE: JAMES MERRILL WITH ELIZABETH BISHOP

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By Langdon Hammer

i k e h i s f r i e n d Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill is typically introduced by reference to his childhood. In Bishop’s case, that means mention of the death of her father when she was eight months old, her mother’s permanent hospitalization for insanity five years later, and the child’s removal by her paternal grandparents to Massachusetts from her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, which supposedly saved her “from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even from the inverted r’s of my mother’s family,” as Bishop recollected rather bitterly. Merrill’s childhood, on the surface, couldn’t be more different. If Bishop is a pitiable orphan, Merrill is the enviable princeling, born to bright glamour and easy privilege as the son of Charles E. Merrill, co-founder of the 31

brokerage Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Plummer, a smart (in both senses) New Woman who rose from middle-class Florida origins to a place in New York society. The family, riding high on “Goodtime Charlie’s” industry, savvy, charm, and luck, lived in a brownstone just off Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, a grand house and gardens called The Orchard on Long Island, and Merrill’s Landing, an estate stretching from Lake Worth to the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach. To sharpen the contrast with Bishop, picture one of these mighty properties set down beside her grandparents’ clapboard farmhouse in Great Village — which shows to the street just one window on either side of the front door and a narrow skylight in the roof, beneath which the child was tucked into bed. While Bishop effectively lost her parents by age 5, Merrill’s were outsized presences in his life. They may have been often absent from his daily routines at home, but their eyes were always on him, each one concerned with how what he did reflected on them. His first poem, “Looking at Mummy,” was a prodigious effort for the child of six: three rhymed ballad stanzas 32

about the beauty of his mother. Hellen made the fair copy of the poem that survives, signed it for her son, and may have helped with a rhyme, or suggested that he write a poem to begin with. The famous American financier Merrill had for a father expected his son to develop a love of baseball and business, and grumbled when he didn’t. But Charlie had a taste for literature too, and he sponsored the boy’s literary efforts by quietly collecting his writings at boarding school and printing them in Jim’s Book, a handsome limited edition that surprised the junior author on his sixteenth birthday (and later, when he could publish books on his own, embarrassed him). So the differences in Bishop’s and Merrill’s biographies are striking. But they had more in common as children than this makes it seem, and their childhoods shaped their imaginations in similar ways. Bishop’s paternal grandfather was the president of the construction firm that built Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Public Library. His business success provided sufficient support for Bishop to attend Vassar College and then to take the risk of 33

becoming a writer. In short, Bishop also had social and financial advantages, not so dramatic as Merrill’s, but enough to give her a view inside the lives of people from markedly different classes and circumstances, which attuned her to the contingency of every perspective. For Bishop, the world needed to be seen in motion, shuttling between points of view, as she had shuttled between her mother’s and father’s families, Canada and the United States. “North’s as near as West,” she says in “The Map.” And with that relativity of perspective came a refusal to see the world as comic or tragic. The last line of her poem “The Bight,” “awful but cheerful,” expressing a sense of plus and minus tentatively balanced, is inscribed on her gravestone. Merrill too had a capacity for “seeing double,” as he called it, and like Bishop’s, that disposition was rooted in his early experience. His parents’ angry, tabloid-worthy divorce when he was twelve wounded him badly, while also teaching him the permanently valuable lesson that there is more than one side to any story. In “The Broken Home,” his best-known poem, he 34

elevates that idea to a cosmic principle when he describes his parents’ drunken fighting as a mythic battle of the sexes: “Father Time and Mother Earth, / A marriage on the rocks.” Seeing daily life as symbolic, as he does here, is typical of Merrill. So is this combination of seriousness and joking. And let’s not overlook his punning: “the rocks” that this couple has foundered on are tinkling in their strong cocktails. Puns discover doubleness in words themselves. Merrill, who was fifteen years younger than her, approached Bishop as a model and a guide. He saw in her work a poetry of sensibility in which the self is present as an intelligence and a point of view, rather than a character. What was personal in Bishop was her style, which reflected her particular way of living, of being in the world. Shifting the weight of the poem from the story of an individual to the interest of an individual sensibility, Bishop invites readers into an intimacy in which metaphor is always operating and much goes without saying. It was a way of writing under the restrictions on speech by gay people that attracted 35

and empowered Merrill, and it provided an alternative to the oracular, confessional, and political poetries dominating the period. Bishop’s writing is full of homes and houses, some remembered like her grandparents’ home in Great Village, and some fantasized about, like the “proto-crypto-dream house” in her late poem “The End of March.” The house in Bishop’s work is a recurrent motif that stands for a poetics of the interior and the everyday, concerned with the lives people create for themselves. It functions the same way, only more insistently so, for Merrill, who wrote about the homes he lived in with his partner David Jackson in Stonington, Connecticut, in Athens, Greece, and in Key West. The quirky, small houses Merrill chose were backdrops for poetry from successive phases of his career, beginning in the 1950s. Merrill was interested in how we interact with domestic spaces in daily life, shaping and shaped by them, filling them with experience and feeling, and recollecting them in memory. The house was for Merrill a sort of poem, and the poem a sort of house. He makes that analogy explicit in “An Urban 36

Convalescence,” a poem from 1959, where he determines “to make some kind of house / out of the life lived, the love spent.” He begins the poem by describing himself on a city street, fearing that he is wasting his life and talent, and disgusted by that. The turn toward resolution and conviction comes when he moves “Indoors at last,” and at the same moment moves from free verse into rhymed pentameter quatrains. The switch connects his choice of privacy and interiority with the choice of traditional versification. Implicitly Merrill is punning on “stanza,” linking the formal unit of the poem with architectural space by way of the Italian word for “room.” The analogy is everywhere in Merrill’s work. The title “The Broken Home” refers to The Orchard and the family that once lived there. But the poem is itself a broken home, a collage-like series of sonnets that reconstruct in verse the rooms of childhood’s lost world. Merrill was a virtuosic poet of meter and rhyme at a moment when American poetry turned away from those techniques. His lifelong commitment to them was not the ideology 37

of a traditionalist, however. It expressed his continual preoccupation with the medium of the poem and his belief that language itself has something to say of more power and originality than the individual language-user. Meter and rhyme were consistent with his punning and other forms of wordplay — including controversially the Ouija board, which he used with Jackson throughout the four decades they lived together. That practice eventuated in the writing of an epic verse trilogy about the origins and fate of the world. The poem was based on transcripts from Merrill and Jackson’s conversations with spirits that range in nature from friends and family members to famous authors and figures from history to subatomic particles and a hornless unicorn named (in denial of Merrill’s usual preference for dualism) Uni. This spiritualist, mythological poetry seems far distant from daily life and the wry lyric poems Merrill made of it. But The Changing Light at Sandover, as the trilogy is called, is really an extension, rather than a rejection, of Merrill’s personal mode. The Ouija Board was above all something that Merrill and 38

Jackson did at home, and the personal is not renounced but rather elevated to an epic theme in Sandover. The continuity is clear enough in the fact that the name “Sandover” refers to the redbrick manor in the Other World where the various spirits gather to converse with Merrill and Jackson via the Ouija Board. So the trilogy produces another house, a virtual, imaginary structure this time, to add to the many homes Merrill wrote about, this one made of the letters of the alphabet, turned into words by the hands of the mediums and the tea cup (a nice, homey touch) that Merrill and Jackson used as a planchette.



“Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?” Bishop asks in her late poem “Crusoe in England.” She didn’t live to see The Changing Light at Sandover published in 198 3, and just as well, since she was skeptical about the Ouija Board and the poetry Merrill was writing with its help. Merrill’s visionary spiritualism was too far removed from the material facts Bishop took as the basis for her poetry of description. 39

Against his better instincts, Merrill had created a long work of extraordinary complexity and ambition that flew past the “human scale” that inspired him in Bishop’s writing. They met in 194 8 , and began a correspondence that lasted until Bishop’s death in 1 979. Always cordial friends, they became close when Merrill visited Bishop at her home in Brazil in 19 7 0 (Merrill was one of the few American colleagues to make the trip to see her during the roughly twenty years she lived in Brazil). Then, when Bishop returned to live in Boston, she and Merrill saw each other regularly. After her death, he worked hard to promote her reputation. He wrote separate remembrances, commentaries, meditations, and a poem centering on her and her work, far more than he wrote about any other friend or writer. He was on hand when Vassar College celebrated the purchase of Bishop’s papers in 198 2. Then one day he appeared unannounced at the college library with three decades of his and Bishop’s correspondence, which he presented as a gift. It is fitting therefore that, thanks to Bannon McHenry, Merrill’s work will now be well 40

represented at Vassar. McHenry and Merrill became friends as fellow residents of (one more house for Merrill!) an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and McHenry’s gift illuminates the origins of a poem Merrill wrote with the building’s address for title, “16 4 East 72nd Street.” The poem was prompted by a memo from the management to apartment owners in the building, including McHenry and Merrill. Dated September 1, 198 8, it begins: “Your board of directors is currently considering the options available for dealing with the deteriorating condition of the widows in our building.” Merrill was not one to overlook such a slip. The humor of it was deepened for Merrill by the fact that he had inherited his apartment from a widow, his grandmother. But the resonance was still deeper, in view of his deteriorating physical condition as an AIDS patient. Merrill never publicly acknowledged his diagnosis, although this poem, like all of his late poetry, were written in the shadow of it. Merrill would no doubt have noticed that the building was erected in the year of his birth, 1926. He is defending the world he grew up 41

in and his perspective on life when he speaks wistfully about the eccentricities of the panes now scheduled to be replaced by standardized views. “It’s noon,” he writes in a draft of the poem that is housed in Vassar’s Archives and Special Collections. I’m playing hide-and-seek with a sylphlike Quirk in the old glass, making the brickwork Opposite ripple minutely. Soon that distortion Which may well have warped my grandmother’s views — herself An easy-to-see-through widow by the end — Won’t be available.

Merrill signed a typed copy of the draft to McHenry: “for 8 c from 9a with more than neighborly affection.” But he was far from done with the poem. He turned the original sonnet-length draft into eight eight-line stanzas, each starting and finishing with a rhymed couplet. Think of those old-fashioned rhymed, rectangular stanzas as so many rippling panes. After Merrill’s grandmother died in 1 961 , he used the apartment irregularly until 1 983 , 42

when he renovated it, and he lived there frequently until his death. With a nook for his study, he found for the first time that he could work in the city “instead of running to Bloomingdale’s with the other lemmings.” In that same year, 198 3, he fell in love with Peter Hooten, an actor. Hooten constitutes the “we” in “164 East 72nd Street” when Merrill writes about the healthy life he is leading in the apartment: Juices, blue cornbread, afternoons at the gym — Imagine who remembers how to swim! Evenings of study, or intensive care For one another.

This is a poem about living with AIDS in an era when there was no effective treatment for the disease, and people suffering from it were brutally stigmatized and shamed, with an early and difficult death all but assured. In this context, provided to Merrill by a widow with good sense, the apartment is a retreat, a shelter of bland civility “Far from those parts of town / Given to high finance, or the smash hit and 43

steak house, / Macy’s or crack, Saks or quick sex.” Yet the apartment’s peace and quiet are fragile, its insulation delicate. East 72 nd Street is a crosstown thoroughfare close to hospital emergency rooms, and the deteriorating windows let in too much street noise: “Sirens at present like intergalactic gay / Bars in full swing whoop past us day and night.” The screaming sirens prompt a question from the poet’s companion: “‘Do you ever wonder where you’ll — ’” With typical discretion, Merrill doesn’t fill out the thought by bluntly specifying the future he is facing. Instead he suavely interrupts: Oh my dear, Asleep somewhere, or at the wheel. Not here. Within months of the bathroom ceiling’s cave-in, Which missed my grandmother by a white hair, She moved back South. The point’s to live in style, Not to drop dead in it.

It’s a funny line, and a touching one. It averts a potentially restrictive stance Merrill easily

Manuscript of “164 East 72nd Street”, 1988.

might have been susceptible to: fetishizing a certain style, or even stylishness itself, as ultimate good. Instead, living in style is presented as a pragmatic matter. When your dwelling starts to cave in, it’s time to renovate, or get out. Merrill might have said as much about his rhyme and meter. If you let a particular style define your life, like a brand name, you are bound to “drop dead” in it, since every style is passing. Such is the fate of style as fashion. But style as distinctive literary self-expression made out of one’s way of living, which is by definition a process and therefore subject to change and open to re-location: that is something else again, something no less historical, but personal and individual, “home-made” in Bishop’s phrase. “164 East 72nd Street” ends by savoring the way that the security of the apartment and the simplicity of Merrill’s routines in it take him back in time: “it’s impossible not / To feel how adult life, with its storms and follies, / Is letting up, leaving me ten years old,” — that would be just prior to his parents’ divorce — “Trustful,

inventive, once more good as gold.” He counts on this feeling to help, should a new spasm Wake the gray sleeper, or to improve his chances When ceilings flush with unheard ambulances.

Merrill says “when” not “if.” Imagining what it will be like to lose consciousness on the verge of death, he speaks of himself here in the third person. It makes for another doubling: Merrill is at once the poet and a character, that body on the floor. By the complex temporality involved in lyric poetry, he goes on speaking to us of the prospect of his certain death long after it has come to pass. Notice also his rhyming of “chances” and “ambulances.” The most conventional sort of rhyme is the matching of so-called masculine, strongly stressed final syllables, as for instance in the earlier couplet “Oh my dear”/ “not here.” But at the end of the poem Merrill rhymes a two- with a three-syllable word, each ending in feminine or weakly stressed final syllables.

This is just the sort of clever rhyming that was Bishop’s trademark, and an important feature of her “awful but cheerful” tone. It makes a heavy moment here just a little lighter. It also introduces a small element of surprise into what is inevitable: that one day Merrill will leave home in one of those ambulances. The subtle management of rhyme, tone, metaphor, and more — this is what style comes down to. It was what Merrill lived for, and hoped to live on in. Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University. His James Merrill: Life and Art, a critical biography, was published by Knopf in 20 15 .

THE COLLECTION

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Prepared By Emma Iadanza b ooks by james merri ll 1 . *Jimâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Book (privately printed, 1942) Hagstrom & Morgan, a1. One of ca. 200 copies. 2 . *The Black Swan (Athens: Icaros, 1946) Hagstrom & Morgan, a2. One of 100 copies. 3 . *First Poems (Knopf, 1951 ) Hagstrom & Morgan A4. One of 900 copies. 4 . Short Stories (Banyan Press, 1954 ) Hagstrom & Morgan a5 . One of 210 copies. 5 . The Seraglio (Knopf, 1957) Hagstrom & Morgan A8a. One of unknown number. 6 . The Seraglio (Chatto & Windus, 1958) Hagstrom & Morgan a8b. One of 3000 copies. 7 . The Seraglio (Atheneum, 1987) Hagstrom & Morgan a8c. One of 4000 copies.

8 . The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (Knopf, 1959) Hagstrom & Morgan A10a. One of unknown number. 9 . The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (Knopf, 1970) Atheneum a10b1b. One of 10 copies. 1 0 . Selected Poems (Chatto and Windus, 1961) Hagstrom & Morgan a13. One of 750 copies. 1 1 . Water Street (Atheneum, 1962) Hagstrom & Morgan a14a1. One of unknown number. Hardcover. 1 2 . Water Street (Atheneum, 1962) Hagstrom & Morgan a14a2. One of unknown number. Paperback. [2 copies] 1 3 . The Thousand and Second Night (Christo Christou Press, 1963) Hagstrom & Morgan a15 . One of 100 copies. 1 4 . The (Diblos) Notebook (Atheneum, 1965 ) Hagstrom & Morgan a17a1a. One of 1500 copies. [2 copies] 1 5 . The (Diblos) Notebook (Atheneum, 1965) Hagstrom & Morgan A17b. One of unknown number.

1 6 . The (Diblos) Notebook (Atheneum, 1975) Hagstrom & Morgan a17c. One of unknown number. 1 7 . The (Diblos) Notebook (Dalkey Archives, 1994) Hagstrom & Morgan a17d. One of 3075 copies. 1 8 . Violent Pastoral (Adams House, 1965 ) Hagstrom & Morgan a18. One of 100 copies. 1 9 . *Nights and Days (Atheneum, 1966 ) Hagstrom & Morgan a20a1. One of 600 copies. Hardcover. 2 0 . Nights and Days (Atheneum, 1966 ) Hagstrom & Morgan a20a2. One of 1400 copies. Paperback. 2 1 . Nights and Days (Hogarth Press, 1966 ) Hagstrom & Morgan a20b. One of 500 copies. 2 2 . The Fire Screen (Atheneum, 1969 ) Hagstrom & Morgan a23a1. One of 4000 copies. Paperback. 2 3 . The Fire Screen (Hogarth Press, 1970) Hagstrom & Morgan a23b. One of 800 copies. Hardcover.

2 4 . 59 Poems (Temple Bar Bookshop, 1974) Hagstrom & Morgan a25b1. One of 50 copies. 2 5 . 59 Poems (Temple Bar Bookshop, 1974) Hagstrom & Morgan a24b2. One of 800 copies. 2 6 . Two Poems (Hogarth Press, 1972) Hagstrom & Morgan a26. One of 800 copies. 2 7 . Braving the Elements (Atheneum, 1972) Hagstrom & Morgan a27b. One of unknown number. 2 8 . Braving the Elements (Hogarth Press, 1973). Hagstrom & Morgan a27d. One of 800 copies. 2 9 . Braving the Elements (Atheneum, 1973) Hagstrom & Morgan a27e. One of unknown number. 3 0 . Yannina (Phoenix, 1973) Hagstrom & Morgan a28. One of 26 copies. 3 1 . Five Inscriptions (The Pomegranate Press, 1974) Hagstrom & Morgan a29. One of 180 copies. 3 2 .*Divine Comedies (Atheneum, 1976) Hagstrom & Morgan a31a. One of 3000 copies.

Jimâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Book (privately printed, 1942).

3 3 . *Fort Lauderdale (Folger Poetry Broadside, 1977) Hagstrom & Morgan a32. One of ca. 200 copies. 3 4 . Poor Shattered Hip (1977) Hagstrom & Morgan a33. One of 100 copies. 3 5 . Metamorphosis of 741 (Banyan Press, 1977) Hagstrom & Morgan a35. Number 37 of 440 copies. 3 6 . From Mirabell (Alderman Press, 1978) Hagstrom & Morgan a36a. One of 14 copies. 3 7 . From Mirabell (Alderman Press, 1978) Hagstrom & Morgan a36c. One of 38 copies. 3 8 . *Mirabell: The Books of Number (Atheneum, 1978) Hagstrom & Morgan a38b. One of 3000 copies. Hardcover. 3 9 . Mirabell: The Books of Number (Oxford University Press, 1979) Hagstrom & Morgan a38c. One of 500 copies. 4 0 .*Scripts for the Pageant (Atheneum, 1980) Hagstrom & Morgan a39b1. One of 1000 copies. 4 1 . Samos (Sylvester & Orphanos, 1980) Hagstrom & Morgan a40a. One of 300 copies.

4 2 . Samos (Sylvester & Orphanos, 1980) Hagstrom & Morgan a40a. One of 10 copies, marked â&#x20AC;&#x153;Presentation copyâ&#x20AC;?. 4 3 . Ideas, Etc. (Jordan Davies, 1980) Hagstrom & Morgan a41. One of 180 copies. 4 4 . Santorini: Stopping the Leak (Metacom Press, 1982) Hagstrom & Morgan a42b. One of 300 copies. 4 5 . Peter (Deerfield Press, 1982) Hagstrom & Morgan a43. One of 300 copies. 4 6 . From the First Nine (Atheneum, 1983) Hagstrom & Morgan a44a1. One of 1500 copies. 4 7 . The Changing Light at Sandover (Atheneum, 1982) Hagstrom & Morgan a45a1a. One of 1500 copies. 4 8 . The Changing Light at Sandover (Knopf, 2006). Edited by J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. Hagstrom & Morgan a45c1a. One of 4000 copies. 4 9 .*The Changing Light at Sandover [proofs] Hagstrom & Morgan a45. 5 0 . Marbled Paper (Rara Avis, 1983) Hagstrom & Morgan a46a. One of 200 copies. 5 1 . Think Tank (Amherst College, 1983)

Hagstrom & Morgan a47. One of 450 copies. 5 2 . From the Cutting Room Floor (Abattoir Editions, 1983) Hagstrom & Morgan a50. One of 290 copies. 5 3 . *Occasions & Inscriptions (Jordan Davies, 1984) Hagstrom & Morgan a51. One of 58 copies. 5 4 . Orfeo (Palaemon Press, 1982) Hagstrom & Morgan a52. One of 50 copies. 5 5 . Souvenirs (Nadja, 1984) Hagstrom & Morgan a53a. One of 26 copies. 5 6 . Souvenirs (Nadja, 1984) Hagstrom & Morgan a53b. One of 200 copies. 5 7 . Bronze (Nadja, 1984) Hagstrom & Morgan a55a. One of 150 copies. 5 8 . Bronze (Nadja, 1984) Hagstrom & Morgan a55b. One of 26 copies. 5 9 . Plays of Light (Lawrence Scott, 1984) Hagstrom & Morgan a56. Copy M of A-Z. 6 0 . Snapshot of Adam (Lawrence Scott, 1984). Hagstrom & Morgan a57 . One of 60 copies. 6 1 . Trees Listening to Bach (Lawrence Scott, 1984). Hagstrom & Morgan a58. One of 60 copies.

6 2 . Late Settings (Atheneum, 1985) Hagstrom & Morgan a62a1. One of 2000 copies. 6 3 . The Image Maker (Sea Cliff Press, 1986) Hagstrom & Morgan a66b. One of 220 copies. 6 4 . Recitative (North Point Press, 1986) Hagstrom & Morgan a68a1. One of 992 copies. 6 5 . Japan: Prose of Departure (Nadja, 1987) Hagstrom & Morgan a69b1. One of 26 copies. [2 copies] 6 6 . Three Poems (Aralia Press, 1987) Hagstrom & Morgan a70. One of 225 copies. 6 7 .*The Inner Room (Knopf, 1988) Hagstrom & Morgan a72a1. One of 2500 copies. Hardcover. 6 8 . The Inner Room (Knopf, 1988) Hagstrom & Morgan a72a2. One of 4500 copies. Paperback. 6 9 . Mir Poets (Words Press, 1988) Hagstrom & Morgan a74 . Two copies: one of 75, and one of 125. 7 0 . Voices from Sandover (1989) Hagstrom & Morgan a76c. [5 copies] 7 1 . Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia (Nadja,

1990) Hagstrom & Morgan a77a1. One of 75 copies. 7 2 .*Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia (Nadja, 1990) Hagstrom & Morgan a77a2. One of 26 copies. 7 3 . JM 7 December 1989 RW (Academy of American Poets, 1990) Hagstrom & Morgan a78 . 7 4 . More Or Less (DIA, 1991) Hagstrom & Morgan a80. One of 500 copies. 7 5 . Vol. XLIV, No. 3 (Sea Cliff Press, 1991) Hagstrom & Morgan a81. One of 100 copies. [3 copies] 7 6 . Selected Poems (Knopf, 1992) Hagstrom & Morgan a82a. One of 3000 copies. 7 7 . Pledge. First published in Pequod (New York), 1990. Hagstrom & Morgan a83. 2 of 200 copies. 7 8 . Volcanic Holiday (Nadja, 1992) Hagstrom & Morgan a84. One of 74 copies. 7 9 . A Different Person: A Memoir (Knopf, 1993) Hardcover. Hagstrom & Morgan a86a. One of 11,000 copies. 8 0 . A Different Person: A Memoir (Harper Collins, 1993) Paperback. Hagstrom &

Morgan a86b. One of 15,000 copies. 8 1 . Nine Lives (Nadja, 1993) Hagstrom & Morgan a88a1. One of 100 copies. 8 2 . Nine Lives (Nadja, 1993) Hagstrom & Morgan a88a2. One of 26 copies. 8 3 . Page from the Koran (Academy of American Poets, 1994) Hagstrom & Morgan a89. One of 800 copies. 8 4 . A Scattering of Salts (Knopf, 1995 ) Hagstrom & Morgan a90a1. One of 3000 copies. 8 5 . A Scattering of Salts (Knopf, 1995) Hagstrom & Morgan a90a2. One of 2000 copies. 8 6 . A Scattering of Salts (Knopf, 1996) Hagstrom & Morgan a90c1. One of 1500 copies. [2 copies] 8 7 . b o d y (Amherst College, 1955) Hagstrom & Morgan a91. One of 700 copies. 8 8 . Self-Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker (Dedalus, 1995) Hagstrom & Morgan a92. One of 250 copies. 8 9 .*Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1996 ) Hagstrom & Morgan a95. One of 800 copies.

9 0 .*Last Poems (Thornwillow Press, 1998) Hagstrom & Morgan a97. One of 185 copies. 9 1 . The Voice of the Poet: James Merrill. (Random House, 1999) Hagstrom & Morgan a100. One of 10,000 copies. [2 copies] 9 2 .*Collected Poems (Knopf, 2001) Hagstrom & Morgan a102a1. 9 3 . Collected Poems (Knopf, 2001) Hagstrom & Morgan a102b1. 9 4 . Collected Novels and Plays (Knopf, 2002) Hagstrom & Morgan a104. [2 copies] 9 5 . Collected Novels and Plays Hagstrom & Morgan a104. [proofs] 9 6 . Collected Prose (Knopf, 2004). Hagstrom & Morgan a106. 9 7 . Selected Poems. (Knopf, 2008) Hagstrom & Morgan a109. One of 25,000 copies. 9 8 . Selected Poems. (Knopf, 2008) Hagstrom & Morgan a109. [proof ]

b o o k s a n d pa m ph l e ts w i t h original contributions by james merrill 9 9 . *Ten Student Poems (Amherst College, 1951) Contains James Merrill Poem. Hagstrom & Morgan b2. [2 copies] 1 0 0 . Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Theatre New York (Grove Press, 1960). Hagstrom & Morgan b6. 1 0 1 . Corot (Art Institute of Chicago, 1960 ). Hagstrom & Morgan b7. 1 0 2 . Poetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Choice (Time Inc., 1966 ). Hagstrom & Morgan b10c. 1 0 3 . *Translations by American Poets. (Ohio Univ. Press, 1970). Hagstrom & Morgan b16. 1 0 4 . Tom Ingle (Lyman Allyn Museum, 1974). Hagstrom & Morgan b21 1 0 5 . Nineteen Poems by Robert Morse (Moac, 1981 ). Hagstrom & Morgan b33. [2 copies] 1 0 6 . Navigable Waterways (Yale University Press, 1985). Hagstrom & Morgan b42a. 1 0 7 .*A Memorial Tribute to David Kalstone (Vintage, 1986). Hagstrom & Morgan b50. 1 0 8 . A Memorial Service for John Bernard

Myers (Sea Cliff Press, 1988). Hagstrom & Morgan b54 . 1 0 9 . A Garland for Harry Duncan (W. Thomas Taylor, 1989) paperback, one of 500 copies. Hagstrom & Morgan b59b. 1 1 0 . *David Jackson: Scenes from his Life (Nadja, 1994). Hagstrom & Morgan b71. 1 1 1 . The Academy of American Poets A 60 th Birthday Celebration (Academy of American Poets, 1994). Hagstrom & Morgan b73. 1 1 2 . A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994). Hagstrom & Morgan b74b. 1 1 3 . Greek translation. Hagstrom & Morgan d14. One of 300 copies. 1 1 4 . Writers at Work (1984). Hagstrom & Morgan e12. 1 1 5 . Moss, Howard. Selected Poems. Hagstrom & Morgan h11. 1 1 6 . Publisher’s promotional leaflet for J.D. McClatchy contains James Merrill statement. 198 7. Hagstrom & Morgan h70.

periodicals with original contributions by james merrill 1 1 7 . *A small collection of periodicals which feature James Merrill’s works, including Envoy, Erato, Laurentian, The New Yorker, Poetry, Shenandoah, and Voices.

m a n u s c r i p t m at e r i a l s and correspondence 1 1 8 . Manuscript, typed, signed, with note to Teed Danforth. 8 1/2 x 11 in., 1p. “Popular science used to claim…”, 1988. 1 1 9 . *Manuscript, typed, 1 p. “164 East 72nd Street”, 1988. 1 2 0 . *Manuscript, typed, 2p. “The Metro” layout design signed “PH from JM”, n.d. 1 2 1 . *Notes by James Merrill, 2, various dates. 1 2 2 . Recipe by James Merrill, handwritten, n.d. 1 2 3 . *Correspondence: 1980 –88. 5 postcards from James Merrill, various dates. 1 2 4 . Christmas cards from James Merrill, various dates. 1 2 5 . Note to Peter, “What a joy to think of your being back!” n.d.

1 2 6 . Proof for James Merrill’s translation of Palme by Paul Valry, 1982.

photog raphs 1 2 7 . *Photographs of James Merrill, various dates. 1 2 8 . 13 snapshots, 1 5 x 7, 3 8 x 10, 1 7 x 10

mi scell a neous 1 2 9 .*Olio, 1946. James Merrill’s yearbook. 1 3 0 . Analekta 1924 – 54 . Contains James Merrill poems. [2 copies] 1 3 1 . Program for the Harry Ford Memorial, 1999. 1 3 2 . *Program for a Tribute to James Merrill, April 10, 2001. [3 copies] 1 3 3 . *Memorial to James Merrill, 1995 [9 items: various memorials and duplicates]. 1 3 4 . Memorial Program, Amherst College, 2004. 1 3 5 . James Merrill blank stationery, various sizes, dates, and addresses, n.d. 1 3 6 . Advertising flyer for Voices from Sandover, n.d. 1 3 7 . Proposal for Voices from Sandover, n.d.

1 3 8 . Advertising flyer for Volcanic Holiday, 1992, with printed invitation from Peter Hooten. 1 3 9 . *Program for Marie Bullock Poetry Reading, Sept. 30, 1992. 1 4 0 .*Drawings of James Merrill’s house in Greece by David Jackson, 1964 /1988? 8 x 9 , hand colored. 1 4 1 . 2 invitations, not signed, 1988. 1 4 2 . 4 miscellaneous notes from Peter Hooten, various dates. 1 4 3 . Hellen’s Book. (NY, 1991) cloth. 1 4 4 . James Merrill: Voices from Sandover. Film for the Humanities and Sciences. [cassette] 1 4 5 . Dorothea Tanning: Hail, Delirium. Exhibition catalogue, 1992. 1 4 6 . JM: A Remembrance. NY: Academy of American Poets, 1996 . One of 1000 copies. 1 4 7 . Set of postcards “Bird Cage on Mallorca”, set of 7 cards, plus 3 duplicates. Hagstrom & Morgan j49 , n.d. 1 4 8 . Catalogue of the James Merrill collection at Washington University, 2001. Hagstrom & Morgan j71. 1 4 9 . Literature d’America (Rome, 1984). Hagstrom & Morgan cr80.

1 5 0 . Jackson, David. Pigeon Vole (Rodi Brothers, 1966). Hagstrom & Morgan de5 . 1 5 1 . Advertisement for reading of James Merrill at Guggenheim Museum, December 1, 1999. 1 5 2 . Decorated envelopes, 2, various dates. 1 5 3 . Folger Shakespeare Library 1986â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1987 Evening Poetry Series. 1 5 4 . For sale ad, penthouse duplex apartment, n.d. 1 5 5 . J.I.Mâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Book: A Collection of Works by James Ingram Merrill. Collection of Dennis M. Silverman. 1995. 1 5 6 . Memorial Program, Washington University, March 22, 2001. 1 5 7 . Memorial Program, Amherst College, April 12, 2001. 1 5 8 . Merrill, James. Forward for program to Phaedra, n.d. 2 printed paintings. 1 5 9 . 2 obituaries, Harry Duncan, April 23, 1997. 1 6 0 . Obituary, James Merrill, New York Times, February 7, 1995 . 1 6 1 . Program for James Merrill exhibition. Washington University Libraries, 1985. 1 6 2 . Pamphlet of Manuscript Collections of the

Washington University Libraries, 1989. 1 6 3 . Taaffe, Philip. Exhibition catalogue, 1998. 1 6 4 . Voices From Sandover. Academy of American Poets. Presented at the Guggenheim Museum, May 23 and 24, 1989.

m at eri als about or rel ated to james merri ll 1 6 5 . James Merrillâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Apocalypse, by Timothy Materer, 2000. 1 6 6 . Playbook. 5 plays, 1956 . 1 6 7 . James Merrill. Essays in Criticism, 1983. 1 6 8 . Ronsard His Life and Times, by D.B. Wyndham Lewis. 1945. 1 6 9 . For James Merrill, A Birthday Tribute (Jordan Davies, 1986). 1 7 0 . FaurĂŠ, Gabriel. Wanderings in Italy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991 [with autograph of James Merrill]. 1 7 1 . *Thurber, James. The Male Animal. NY: Random House, 1940 [with autograph of James Merrill]. 1 7 2 . The Victor Book of the Opera. 1936. 10 th

edition [with autograph of James Merrill]. 1 7 3 . *Lee, Vernon. Gospels of Anarchy. NY: Brentanoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, 1909 [with ownership bookplate for Charles Edward Merrill]. 1 7 4 . A Catafalque for David Hill (Pasdeloup Press, 1986 ). 1 7 5 . The Best of Modern Poetry. Edited by Milton Klonsky (Pocket Books, 1987). 1 7 6 . Emery, Ola Bland. The Changing Colors of Love (Paramount Press, 1965 ). With an inscription to James and Hellen Merrill. 1 7 7 . James Ingram Merrill: A Descriptive Bibliography (Oak Knoll Press, 2009). 1 7 8 . McClatchy, J.D. An Old Song Ended (Sea Cliff Press, 1987). 1 7 9 . Tanning, Dorothea. Another Language of Flowers (George Braziller, 1998). Signed. 1 8 0 . Wilbur, Richard. Some Opposites: For Children and Others (Nadja, 1990). Fuller descriptions of the works above are available in the Vassar Library catalogue. Reference here is frequently made to Hagstrom and Morganâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s James Ingram Merrill: A Descriptive Bibliography (Oak Knoll Press, 200 9). Items preceded by an asterisk appear in the exhibition.

the bannon mchenry james merrill collection

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was set in Garamond and printed letterpress on vellum paper at Thornwillow Press in January 2 0 2 0 . Two hundred and fifty copies were bound in handmade paste paper wrappers and three copies in half-leather. It was designed and produced under the direction of Luke Ives Pontifell and Savine MGS Pontifell.

“a virtuosic poet of meter and rhyme …” langdon hammer