James Merrill: Life and Art by Langdon Hammer New York: Knopf, 2015. 944 pages For those familiar with James Merrill's poetry, reading Langdon Hammers James Merrill: Life and Art for the first time is like reading it again. Hammers subject is threefold: Merrill's life, Merrill's art, and the relationship between that life and art. This is precisely Merrill's own threefold subject throughout his poetry. result, then, is not so much a biography of discovery and revelation as one of confirmation and filling-in-the-gaps. It is its own kind of delight to read because almost everything within it is already familiar: here are all of the characters from the poetry (including Merrill himself) converted by the biographer's art back into the people they were, all gathered together between two covers in a chronological narrative that sheds new light on them without exposing them to any kind of over-factual fluorescent glare. That is, there's no presumption that we're being told who these people really were, with the attendant attempt at a reduction to some kind of revelatory truth. Instead, they're filled in and filled out, given historical contour without being entirely severed from their representation in Merrill's art, where the real revelations occur. And it is quite a cast: the mogul Charles Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch, many of whose interests and imperatives, Hammer shows, were the opposite of the eventual interests and imperatives of his son and yet also clearly reflected in them, the son growing up, for instance, to become the chair of his own kind of board; Merrill's mother, Hellen Ingram, whose life, amazingly, began in the nineteenth century and ended in the twenty-first, casting a shadow from which Merrill never could entirely emerge, though he could convert it into art; David Jackson, Merrill s longtime partner both in life and at the Ouija board, whose own attempts at writing fiction met with continual frustration as Merrill's star only ever continued to rise, making for an eventual source of considerable tension between them; Strato Mouflouzelis and Peter Hooten, the two great passions of Merrill's life outside, or rather inside, of his love for Jackson, as they both took place while Merrill's relationship with Jackson was ongoing; the mesmerizing Greek, Maria Mitsotaki, one of Merrill's many muses (and, Hammer hints, substitute mothers); the literary critic and ballet enthusiast David Kalstone, a close friend of Merrill's whose death from AIDS sadly prefigured the poet's own; and so on. They're all in the poetry; they're all in the biography. Then there's the list of more peripheral figures, a veritable who's who of twentieth-century art and culture, the names spanning from A to Z in a Ouija-like arc of fame. Merrill's life itself was like the operas he loved from a young age, full of intrigue, splendor, and dazzling, sometimes bizarre, set changes and costumes. Or else it was a play, a tragicomedy in five acts reflected in Hammer's division of the biography into five parts, each consisting of three to six titled scenes, some, appropriately, taking their titles from the poetry. I.i: Broken Home. II.iii: Water Street. III.vi: Proust's Law. The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the wrote Yeats toward the end of his life. It's a choice that Merrill never made. He opted, instead, to adhere to a more Proustian dictate: perfection of the life through transposition of it into the realm of art, making it the subject of the work. If one chooses the work, Yeats continues, one must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark (1997,115). But Merrill proves that it is not so: he was raised in mansions, always had at least two well-kept residences throughout his adult life, and found or built for himself a heavenly home indeed in the fantastic ballroom at Sandover, located on the borderland between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. …
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May 1, 2021
William M Chace 
Open Access