James Merrill in Iowa City

In October 1992 the poet James Merrill visited the University of Iowa. During an informal morning session he talked about writing--poetry in general, his own poetry in particular--and answered various questions put by members of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and graduate students in the workshop courses. I had not actually seen James in several years, though we talked regularly by phone and wrote often. It was our joint intention to use the few uncommitted hours between the informal session on Friday morning and James’s formal poetry reading on Friday evening (and before his departure on Saturday) to share with each other all we could about our lives and concerns. There are few people in my life with whom I feel as intimate as I did with James. He seemed able to grasp by intuition what others had to have explained to them. Conversation would be comfortable with him and I looked forward to "our" weekend.

During that morning session, one student asked how to explain formal verse--rhyme and meter--to his own students in an undergraduate poetry class. Jorie Graham, one of the most popular and distinguished writers in the Workshop, was sitting on my left and whispered in my ear that all poetry students now had a hidden political agenda. The implication was clear: formal verse wasn’t "politically correct." James replied that it is a pity one needs to explain it to them. "Why," he wondered, "can’t we simply ask them to read it?" At Amherst recently his mention of "Lycidas" produced a sea of blank looks from the assembled undergraduates. He thought this an indication that one could no longer take for granted a background in poetry among students who were studying literature. James said, with emphasis when the question was put to him directly, that form in verse is not intended as an obstacle to understanding but as an enhancement of it. A student asked whether, when one concentrates on the form in writing a poem, the subject or theme becomes more subconscious. James agreed that in his own experience it did. Several students pursued the question of formal verse and whether it is suitable for the personal subject matter that one finds in his work. James said that there are many styles of writing about personal matters and reminded the students that in Life Studies Lowell chose to switch to prose for a large part of the confessional material. James replied to a question about how he composes (apparently quite often on the computer in recent years) that usually he sits with an open notebook on his lap to write down impressions, ideas, bits of verse, work out relationships. The previous spring included a driving trip through Scotland with another person when he kept an open notebook for many days where he could write whatever he wished about that experience.

On our walk to lunch after the morning session, I asked more about the trip to Scotland. James’s friend Peter Hooten was the driver. James described it happily as nine days of driving in a magnificent landscape. Skye was particularly lovely. I asked about Peter. This produced a saga: Peter in detox at a retreat in the Southwest, Peter in the South at a sort of monastery (where presumably his spirit could be healed as well). James, actively involved in Peter’s treatment, explained that he went himself to meetings of Adult Children of Alcoholics because it (of all that sort of group) seemed to give him the moral support he needed to be helpful to Peter.

At our lunch one hot topic was the memoir that James had given to his publisher, and which would be out possibly as soon as the following spring (as A Different Person). He had written to me earlier in the year that his mother objected strenuously to his writing a memoir, saying that "it would be the death of her." Yes, James acknowledged, indeed her friends would "find out things about them both" that couldn’t be discovered by reading his poems. "And," he said, "it is my story to tell after all." He then recalled his mother’s anxiety about something she once did to him—for which he was quick to add she’d made ample atonement. He seemed to be almost ruthless about telling everything. Although he was clearly sparing his mother (then 92) by waiting until its publication to tell her the memoir was forthcoming.

James was willing to tell everyone he loved about the failings he believed were unworthy of them. Hearing about my own faults from him seemed so close to a compliment that I worked hard—and I imagined the same of his other friends—to eliminate (or at least diminish) some offending characteristic or behavior. I suspect that James molded any number of us into better people—more sensitive, more thoughtful, effective, creative—chiefly by his own example; but also (when pressed) by a gentle hint. Once, when I was mourning excessively over a shattered relationship, he wrote: imagine it as "part of a song cycle in the manner of the Schumann Dichterlieber. This will allow you to get rid of what I see as flaws . . . listen to the Schumann, listen to Schubert’s Die Shone Mullerin and ideas will flood you." Another time, when I expressed what was in James’s view unreasonable sympathy at the outrageous behavior of a friend, he said: "I think the experience is meant to be a good deal more aggressive on our own part than it is defensive on [his]." I knew, and James knew, that he was asking me to take a very firm and uncomfortable line (for me at least). But he knew equally well that it was The Right Line, cheerfully prepared to take it himself, and expected no less of me.

So the occasional congratulation was all the more precious because I knew its genuineness. After a few sharp words about someone we both loved and worried over, and who desperately needed renewal of both the spiritual and physical sort, he quipped: "Don’t you wish the whole world were as flexible and resilient as you and I are?" And once in many years he returned a present I sent, a book that I adored: "I’m afraid it’s not for me," he wrote on returning it. But then added: "You have touched in the course of our friendship so many responsive spots in my psyche that it remained only for you to find my blind one; and I’m afraid this book, which to my mind isn’t really a book at all, is too cute and whimsical for this old poet."

Lingering over lunch that October day, we talked about what James had been reading in 1992. He was rereading Mansfield Park with great pleasure. We discussed how Fanny could be so good in the face of such opposition: "She gets down on her knees every night to the spirit of Jane Austen!" he exclaimed. James remarked about the short stories of a young woman (Ms. Isenberg) who was currently in the U of I Writers Workshop: "I read them on the plane and liked them so much (they have a theme in them) that I kept her in a constant blush for about 10 minutes talking to her about them."

After lunch we walked to Prairie Lights (my favorite bookstore on earth) where I pointed out the extensive collection of "little magazines" on a rack at the entrance. James, transfixed, reached instantly for a copy of Antioch Review saying "Melissa [Berton] has a poem in this issue." I looked over his shoulder as he read aloud and when he got to the lines "thin/then" James said" isn’t it wonderful?" After that we had an orgy of book-buying: James for my children, for me, me for James, James for the purpose of having everyone in the Writers Workshop sign their volumes for him—very generous as always. James bought my children each a book in French: Madeleine for Stephanie, Frederick for Zach; and bought Randall Jarrell’s Animal Family for them to share with their parents. James bought me a copy of The Singing Underneath by Jeffrey Harrison, which he’d mentioned to me in a letter (5 January 1987) after he’d chosen the book for a poetry series. We bought each other copies of the Writers Workshop cookbook edited by Connie Brothers (for her to sign). Then James asked if he’d sent us a copy of Selected Poems yet; and when I said "not yet" he suggested that he present me with the copy from which he planned to read that evening. We got a beautiful calendar of Scotland, which James would give to Peter.

Dinner that evening at Linn Street Cafe in downtown Iowa City was a very pleasant and witty meal--with Jorie Graham and Jim Galvin, Phil Levine (visiting the Workshop that term) and his wife, Gerry Stern with his girlfriend, James and me. James (nervous but playful) ordered a pasta dish colored with squid ink "so as to be able to compare it to the offerings at a new restaurant opened recently" on his block in NYC called Squid Row. Much talk by all the others about the intricacies of publishing volumes of poetry. I heard enthusiastic chat about Harry Ford, legendary editor of several of those present (and of other very famous poets). James recalled that he had been edited by Harry Ford since 1959 and knew him as a book designer in the 1950’s. We heard about the Dante translation "by many hands" (including James and Jorie) to be read aloud in New York the next spring. When I thanked Jorie quietly for including me in the dinner, she very graciously said "but you are closer to him than anyone here." Which seemed so odd to me, since I was not a part of their world at all. This led to the story of how I’d come to know James and his work. I described my pilgrimage to St. Louis to explore Merrill manuscripts in Special Collections at Washington University (in the summer of 1974). Everyone was immensely kind and helpful: Holly Hall, assistant to the Special Collections librarian at that time, had a tea party for me and displayed personal items from their extensive collection (including Jim’s Book, which I never thought I’d see, much less peruse); Mona Van Duyn and Jarvis Thurston, who heard I was at work in the library, took me to lunch and dinner nearly every day, and talked to me at length about James. It was all very magical and unexpected. James explained: "But they just loved you!" Later I discovered that James had written to them all when he sent a note to me (a stranger to him and a grad student in a distant city) giving me permission to look at his materials in St. Louis. Needless to say, after tracing (a genuine "scissoring and mending") his poems through worksheet and notebook for that week in St. Louis, and meeting and talking to his dear friends (Mona had a draft of Divine Comedies in the house when I was there and read parts aloud to Jarvis and me), I felt very close to James indeed. It was an extraordinary experience, one that I still regard with some awe.

Dinner in Iowa City ended with expressions of concern over James’s present method of composition, which involved the computer and thus few copies of early versions of any poem. I suggested that some day a student would be editing his back-up disks.

The formal poetry reading on the university campus was introduced by Jim Galvin, quoting from "Yannina" and saying many charming things I am sure. But I was concentrating at the time on James, who is surprisingly nervous before a reading and who was looking for something in his bag that clearly had to be found. James read poems from Water Street about the death of his grandparents, and "To a Butterfly" (about which Richard Howard has written at length, describing it as a technical emblem poem and the beginning of James’s psyche/soul motif). James also read from Divine Comedies, a section on his friend Maria Mitzotáki, especially her voice from the "other world" talking to "Zimmy." This ability to capture the speech of another person is one of the gifts James had so abundantly (clearest in the transcriptions from "The Book of Ephraim"). James also read from a bound volume of unpublished poems, "because people ask for nature poems" and he had a couple which (barely) qualify. At the end of the reading he did the poem "Self-Portrait in a Tyvek Windbreaker" which was a virtual condition of his appearance in Iowa City. It created a sensation. Jorie and Jim, who had been holding their collective breath through most of his reading were in raptures over his vivid description of a Nature Company store: "vaguely imbecile emporia . . . crystals,/ Cassettes of whale song and rain-forest whistles,/ Barometers, herbal cosmetics, pillows like puffins,/ Recycled notebooks, mechanized Lucite coffins/For sapphire waves that crest, break, and recede." At the end of the poem, where the lines include a series of asterisks, out came the object of the earlier search—a flashlight—to emphasize the ******** points. The entire audience burst into spontaneous shouts of joy.

The following morning a much-subdued pair went together in my car to the airport in Cedar Rapids where James would go his way (by plane) to New York, and I would go my own (by interstate) to Chicago. Neither of us looked forward to the significant others we were headed back to. Both of them were ill: mine with some undefined but lingering disease, and his with a clearly defined, acute and soggy condition. Peter was alternately belligerent and remorseful, fitfully capable of contriving wild entertainments for James or of leaving him prostrate with despair and regret. My own partner was equally phlegmatic, ridiculing my unwilling and painful adjustment to a new city and life just as I’d finally become comfortable with the old one, promising me comforts we could not afford and pleasures I could not enjoy. It was a positive relief to tell James everything and to hear his encouraging and steady, if predictably stoic, advice. For a brief weekend (enclosed in time and space and car) I had what I most craved, sympathetic understanding; and James gave me yet another reason for being always his "perfect reader."

Kathe Bonann Marshall