Ange Mlinko Reviews James Merrill: Life and Art at The Nation

Over at The Nation, Ange Mlinko begins her review of Langdon Hammer's James Merrill: Life and Art by writing: "Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore: 'I lived for art, I lived for love.' The line that launches Puccini’s aria from Tosca might serve as an entrée to the life and art of James Merrill [...]." Mlinko finds much to admire in Hammer's biography, particularly in the way it serves to rehabilitate Merrill's reputation that "Since his death in 1995, from a heart attack related to AIDS [...] has been hobbled by his respectability—the respectability of a poet who hailed from the Northeast, wrote impeccably, adhered to traditional forms, and was championed by Ivy League mandarins like Helen Vendler." More at The Nation:

At the same time, too many readers have seen only the aestheticism in the work and not the vision, and have made specious connections between Merrill’s adherence to meter and his social class. (He was the youngest child of Charles Merrill, cofounder of Merrill Lynch.) Though Merrill was admiring of poets like John Ashbery and Robert Duncan—­experimentalists who nonetheless bent their individual talents toward tradition—his gracile talent has deflected attention from his own deep weirdness.

Hammer offers what we have badly needed: a posthumous reckoning of both Merrill’s ordinariness and his strangeness. The biographer reconstructs the poet’s art and his loves, writ great and small, from letters, diaries, poem drafts, Ouija-board transcripts, and interviews with those who shared his life (Merrill never lost track of a friend). One could surmise that the poet inspires friendship even after death: Hammer, who met him only once, as a college student, devoted 15 years to this book, and serves Merrill in every way that his subject might wish: as an artful storyteller, a writer of stylish paragraphs, a canny literary interpreter, and a sharer of values that spring from a deep education in centuries of literature. The biography offers scholarship but also sympathy, candor as well as delicacy. Hammer is an adept reader of human ambiguities who also refrains from pathologizing or excessively psychoanalyzing the lives of Merrill and his cohort, which were complicated by money and sexual subterfuge in pre-Stonewall America.

Continue on at The Nation as Mlinko provides a chapter and verse rundown of a remarkable study of a remarkable life.