THE BIOGRAPHICAL CONTAINER

Abstract

1 9 R T H E B I O G R A P H I C A L C O N T A I N E R L A N G D O N H A M M E R ‘‘I merely live to work.’’ That’s James Merrill replying to David Kalstone. Merrill had been needling him about how slow a writer he was, and Kalstone, a professor of literature, defended himself: ‘‘Some of us have to work for a living’’ – referring to how little time he had left over after teaching. Typical of Merrill to turn a cliché on its head. Typical of him to pack a serious statement into a quip. As his friend pointed out, he had no need to work: the wealth he was born to ensured that. But rather than freeing him from work, his money allowed him to devote himself to the work he wanted to do. It was a kind of work – the writing of poetry – that drew on and shaped the rest of his life, giving meaning and design, a tone and a style, to everything he did. ‘‘Poetry made me who I am,’’ he commented on another occasion, slyly reversing the usual relation between maker and made. Merrill sounds in these remarks like Oscar Wilde, the subversive master of antithesis, for whom the self was not a natural fact but material to be fashioned, like a work of art. He also sounds like his father, Charles Merrill [the financier 2 0 H A M M E R Y and cofounder of Merrill Lynch], who made his fortune working very hard on Wall Street. Indeed, strange to say, Merrill resembled both of these self-made men. He created a version of Wilde’s aesthetic lifestyle, updating the artistdandy ’s role for late-twentieth-century America, and he brought to the project an intensity of industry his father would have understood. As you might guess or even recognize, if you’ve opened it in a bookstore or Looked Inside on Amazon, these are the first paragraphs of a biography I wrote, James Merrill: Life and Art. They establish the frame for the biography. They point out that Merrill lived a certain type of life – the life of a poet – and lived it in a certain way. In this essay I want to take a further step back, look at that frame, and draw another frame around it, to give some definition to the deceptively simple-seeming abstractions in the book’s subtitle: ‘‘Life and Art.’’ This will involve asking what kind of book it is that I wrote. The answer may seem obvious enough: a biography. But surely it’s a work of criticism too. So it’s a critical biography, then (a familiar category). But what does that mean exactly? Is a critical biography a book in which a potentially interesting story is periodically interrupted by niggling literary analysis? Or is it a series of close readings arranged chronologically by order of composition and nested in a detailed, not to say (as one evidently overworked reviewer said of my book) ‘‘punishingly long’’ record of a poet’s life? The challenge, of which Merrill was always acutely aware, comes in trying to say what a poet’s life and work together add up to. I take him fully at his word when he says, ‘‘Poetry made me who I am.’’ This is a marvelously condensed statement. What does it mean? Compare it to a principle articulated by the fiction writer (an acquaintance of Merrill’s) Italo Calvino: ‘‘The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work.’’ The example Calvino has in mind is Flaubert: ‘‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’’ Yes, but the Flaubert who wrote Madame Bovary is not the same ‘‘author-cum-character’’ who wrote Salammbô and Flaubert’s other novels because, Calvino goes on, ‘‘Writing always presupposes the selection of a psychological attitude, a T H E B I O G R A P H I C A L C O N T A I N E R 2 1...