A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill

A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill
Edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser
Knopf, 2021

Readers of Langdon Hammer’s monumental 2015 biography of the great American poet James Merrill likely noticed something in the course of its nearly 1000 pages: Merrill’s writing gifts weren’t confined to poetry. Every time his narrative voice is heard - in occasional prose, in verse, in memoir - it’s similarly arresting, as clear and compelling as a tolling bell. If those readers found themselves hoping for a volume exclusively devoted to Merrill’s letters, they’re in luck: Hammer (in collaboration with UCLA professor and Merrill expert Stephen Yenser) has now produced A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill.

It’s a fundamentally surprising kind of volume, something that already feels like an anachronism encountered in some museum’s dusty basement. How many more correspondence collections are we likely to see as the 21st century grinds on? When Yenser comments simply that “Merrill might turn out to be the last great American letter writer,” he’s of course not referring to the correspondence we all generate all day long every day, not referring to the email that pings around every aspect of our lives like hydrogen molecules. Instead, he’s referring to old-fashioned letters written or typed on paper and sent through the post, what the 21st century, with a delicate mixture of playfulness and contempt, calls “snail mail.” 

Merrill was a master of that antiquated kind of correspondence, and for the whole length of his life, he wrote a raft of letters virtually every day to friends, acquaintances, lovers, and strangers. These letters could often strive for the feeling of being dashed off, but Merrill cared about them quite a bit. He encouraged his correspondents to keep his letters, and he himself often kept copies of his own. Not for him the swanning, faux-modesty of so many poets (including his friend Auden) who begged for their letters to be destroyed; Merrill considered them, as he considered everything, to be thrillingly valuable conversation.

About A Whole World it must be said: huge chunks of this thrill are not preservable. Hammer and Yenser are as conscientious as you could reasonably hope. They carefully footnote every letter, identifying all the names of people, places, and books that fill Merrill’s chatter, and they include a glossary of important recurring names. But that only goes so far.

The problem - and, far from being a problem, it was a glorious gift to the recipients of these letters - is that although Merrill was a literary perfectionist of the first water, he never insulted his correspondents by turning his letters into set pieces. Each letter in this volume is written to somebody, about things, with no attempt made at contextualizing. The prompting letters are not included, and neither are the responses, and no amount of either would be sufficient in any case. The result makes for fragmentary reading at best. A 1979 letter includes a wonderfully chatty character sketch:

He was first of all extremely intelligent about writing; I should like to second Wystan’s endorsement of his ear and his judgment. He was funny and shameless and obsessed by sex. I asked him, a year before the end - he repeated the question to Wystan who laughed approvingly - when he intended to give it up and start living for pleasure. But by then it was an uncontrollable reflex. He was a brilliant story-teller, though, and could make the most spellbinding monologues out of the often rather limited material of casual pick-ups or recurrent household scenes. 

But even here, with readers already knowing that “Wystan” is Auden and appreciating the sinuous roll of the lines, will wish they knew more about this character than the book has space to tell them. This vacuum opens up to one extent or another in almost every letter. Gifts in the mail are mentioned, meals are alluded to, small favors, smaller grievances, the most evanescent gossip … all receive knowing glances but necessarily no appendices. The result is a persistent feeling of listening through a keyhole to one half of the middle of a conversation.

There are wonderful moments, everywhere. A 1961 to John and Anne Hollander opens with a museum visit that’s fast, pure James Merrill:

Well now we are back from Berlin. I flew, David took the train; when we met in Munich we agreed that it had been worth the trip, if only for the ART. The city itself, or call it the life, struck us as flimsy without being febrile enough to capture the imagination. I daresay in summer id is autre chose. But my, that museum! The Bellini Christ, to pre-Raphaelite for words. And the Rembrandt Rape of Proserpina which could have been done by Moreau if not Max Ernst. And those Amberger portraits. And a strange snake-throne with figures holding rifles, all made out of small red, white + blue beads, from Africa. Nefertite looks out of place, they should have let Hearst buy her.

But such moments are confirmations rather than discoveries - they’ll always tend to reward the faithful while confounding newcomers. Readers of that big 2015 biography will feel as if they’re getting a wonderfully generous codicil to it. Readers of the magnificent collected-writings volumes created by Yesner and J. D. McClatchy ten years ago will feel they’ve been presented with the final such volume. And maybe that’s audience enough in any case; newcomers will always have the poems. 

Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly and is currently the Books editor for Big Canoe News.  His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.