December 12, 1993

How James Merrill Came of Age

By BRIGITTE WEEKS

A DIFFERENT PERSON A Memoir. By James Merrill.

ames Merrill has written a beguiling and deceptively simple memoir, at once a period piece and a gloss on his brilliant but sometimes daunting poetry. "A Different Person" is a coming-of-age portrait of the wealthy young scion of a famous financial family (Merrill of Merrill Lynch), going off to Europe at the age of 24 in the manner of a 19th-century grand tour. He has just published his first volume of poetry and hopes to find himself and become a man of the world. But it is 1950 when Mr. Merrill sets sail, and he also hopes that the trip will provide the opportunity for him to build a life, far from censure, with his lover, Claude.

He is seeking in part to escape his energetic, successful and overbearing father. What is more important, he is constantly struggling with his mother's lack of acceptance of both his art and his homosexuality. Looking back 40 years later, he observes: "The miraculous gift of life we receive from our parents comes in a package almost impossible to unwrap; often it seems wiser not to try."

Students of Mr. Merrill's poetry will pore over these pages seeking clues to its sources, although the actual writing of poetry has only a minor role in this memoir. Mr. Merrill spent most of his European years living in Rome. He stayed in Rome for the same reason that he wrote little poetry: he went through a period of analysis with a mysterious but perceptive Hungarian psychiatrist called Dr. Detre. Whether or not Mr. Merrill has endowed the good doctor with some of his own gifts of language we may never know, but Dr. Detre is no ordinary psychiatrist: "When Dr. Detre smiled he looked like a different person. 'Time,' he said, 'approximates with surprising accuracy the work we do. But we' -- his satisfied pronoun embracing a host of colleagues -- 'we do it faster.' "

The search for erotic satisfaction permeates Mr. Merrill's narrative not with explicit love scenes but with humor and wistfulness. Friends and lovers drift in and out of these pages like holograms. Claude and he separate with sad dissonance after 15 months. Mr. Merrill doesn't spend time setting the scene for his readers. Mr. Merrill's companion of 25 years, the "D J" of "The Changing Light at Sandover," that dazzling and exasperating Ouija board-inspired sequence, is never formally introduced here, although he appears a couple of times. Late in the narrative: "The man with the smile and the wedding ring walked in, alone. This time I got his name: David Jackson." This aside means everything to Mr. Merrill and to readers of "Sandover." Mr. Merrill offers no further explanation.

Mr. Merrill's artistic distinction is for the most part acknowledged, particularly in the academy, where he has already become part of the permanent canon. With his technical virtuosity and his metaphysical broodings, he is, like Wallace Stevens, an ideal seminar poet whose complex work lends itself to exhaustive explication. Outside the classroom, a Washington Post review proclaimed him the equal of Dante, Homer, Milton and Blake; The New Leader positioned the 1978 Merrill volume, "Mirabell," as "central to our generation," as central "as 'The Waste Land' was to the one before us." On the other hand, Denis Donoghue has complained in The New York Times Book Review of "camp silliness," and James Dickey has accused his fellow poet of "needless artificiality" and "prim finickiness."

Genius or conjurer? Readers will not find the answer in this memoir. Mr. Merrill is at all times urbane and a gentleman. He gives the impression that he was tidying up his psychological closets to prepare himself to return to the United States. One symptom of his distress was his inability to write. He describes his mental state tersely: "I didn't know how to love, I didn't know how to live, but I did know how to write a poem. Did once and didn't now."

Even as he struggled to regain his poetic voice and establish his sexual persona, he saw his self-deceptions: "Why did I need someone to spend the night in the first place? Because I had no Inner Resources and feared being alone. Because, as in Auden's tongue-in-cheek utopia, what was no longer forbidden was compulsory. Because in a few years I would be an old man of 30 and no one would ever look at me again." His tone is always self-deprecatory, witty and tolerant of his own younger self, struggling so hard to find himself and his poetry. We learn about the peregrinations of his journey but not about the sorrows and the sloughs.

WHAT sets this memoir apart is the writing and the humor. Every page contains a sentence one wants to quote to a friend -- "The moment was like a sprain; henceforth our intimacy would limp somewhat." Mr. Merrill is often hilariously funny about himself and his entangled life. His humor is subtle and literary, as in "It was a truth universally acknowledged in those innocent decades from 1950 to 1980 that a stable homosexual couple would safely welcome the occasional extramarital fling." Or, going from Jane Austen to Rene Descartes: "I wrote, therefore I was; if I couldn't write, I was nobody." This memoir is aptly titled: James Merrill at 67, wryly amused by his youthful adventures, is a decidedly different person from the insecure young man who, years ago, set out to find the answers to the big questions. Both make exhilarating and charming traveling companions.

Brigitte Weeks, formerly the editor in chief of the Book-of-the-Month Club, was also the editor of The Washington Post Book World. Brigitte Weeks, formerly the editor in chief of the Book-of-the-Month Club, was also the editor of The Washington Post Book World.

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