Writing his way out of his father’s shadow

Before he was a poet, before he had written any of the works that made his reputation, James Merrill was the son of Charles Edward Merrill, one of the most influential and inventive stockbrokers of all time, a man who predicted the stock market crash of 1929. Merrill’s relationship with his famous father -- and everything represented by him -- animates much of the material in “Collected Novels and Plays,” the second volume in a series edited by J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. (Merrill’s “Collected Poems” was published last year; a “Collected Prose and Letters” will follow). Aside from their inherent interest -- Merrill rarely wrote a dull word -- these fictions, particularly the autobiographical novel “The Seraglio,” mark a dramatic phase in his development as a writer, providing -- oddly enough -- perhaps the most accessible introduction to Merrill’s poetry, known for its obscurity. It was here, rather than in his earliest poetry, that Merrill acted out his first transforming struggle with the conditions that defined his life: wealth, class and homosexuality.

Although he died in 1956, Charlie “Good Time” Merrill, the self-made founder of Merrill Lynch, has had and continues to have an enormous effect on the lives of average Americans. Foreseeing the importance of chain stores -- underwriting and ultimately controlling the S.S. Kresge Co. (now Kmart) and the Safeway grocery chain -- Charlie Merrill also revolutionized the brokerage and investment industry, moving it away from the clubby elitist bankers’ enclave that it once was and toward the free-wheeling free enterprise system -- open to the humblest investor -- that it now is. Whether they know it or not, millions of middle-class Americans anxiously watching the stock market are following the path laid out for them by Charlie Merrill. And whether Merrill Lynch knows it or not, it owed the good name and consumer trust it recently squandered in conflict-of-interest scandals to its founder, whose horror at what has become of the company he built can only be imagined.

The elder Merrill’s origins were modest. Born in 1885 to a country physician in Florida, he worked his way through Amherst College and headed the bond department of a New York firm before founding his own company in 1914, making his first fortune not long after. He had two children by his first wife; his second, Hellen Ingram, bore his third and last child, James Ingram Merrill, in 1926. By that time, the Merrills were living the life of New York’s captains of finance, dividing their time between a townhouse in Greenwich Village (immortalized in Merrill’s poem, “18 West 11th Street”) and two homes in Southampton.

After his parents’ acrimonious breakup when he was 12, James struggled to come to terms with his father and the veritable force field created by his narcissistic bluster and his scandal-ridden private life (the “Good Time” nickname originated in salacious fact), as well as his vast wealth and the hangers-on that it attracted. The two novels in this volume track Merrill’s journey from being the son of a powerful man to being his own man: “The Seraglio,” published in 1957, vividly captures Charlie Merrill’s harem-style household while announcing its author’s emancipation from his family. “The (Diblos) Notebook” of 1965 -- an experimental novel incorporating a novelist’s fits, starts and revisions -- carries us well into the life that Merrill would lead in Greece and into its “pure aesthetic pleasure,” the exploration of the possibilities of language, that would characterize his later work.

“The Seraglio,” a fluent and assured debut from someone who had, as yet, published only stiff early poems and an even stiffer play (“The Immortal Husband,” also included in this volume), operates on several levels, as a roman a clef about one of America’s foremost financial families, a witty Jamesian novel of innocents abroad and, strangest of all, perhaps the only comic novel ever written featuring the castration of its protagonist. That particular detail, of course, was invented, but much of the novel was so close to life that it created something of a sensation in its day, of which James Merrill was inevitably reminded, he wrote in a later preface, “whenever I encounter -- it still happens now and then -- some old party connected with the Firm, who tells me with a knowing twinkle that he read ‘The Seraglio’ hot off the press. I twinkle back, biting my tongue not to say, ‘Indeed? And what business was it of yours?’ ”

In the novel, Merrill Lynch becomes Tanning, Burr, or, simply, the Firm; Merrill’s father, Benjamin Tanning; his delicate, socially correct half-sister (Doris Merrill Magowan), Enid Buchanan; and her gruff, irascible husband (Robert Magowan, who would become president and chairman of Safeway), Larry Buchanan. Merrill himself is rendered as Francis: young, sexually confused and benumbed to his own feelings.

It opens with the re-creation of an actual event, the mysterious knife slashing in the early 1950s of an oil portrait of Doris Magowan. Here, however, the slasher, “the little murderess,” is Lily, Enid Buchanan’s 9-year-old daughter, “in full revolt,” as Francis himself will ultimately be, against her family’s concern with appearances. Armed with a paper knife and a child’s dreamy unconscious fascination with destruction, Lily traces her mother’s features in the portrait, only to see the knife chip and then penetrate the image:

“She wouldn’t have dreamed this face could be so fragile. Experimentally she touched the point of the knife to the same spot; a second, larger flake of paint fell off, exposing the dead white canvas. She had now a sense of fatigue. It was becoming such a slow, complicated process, not like the shattering of an ornament. And beyond repair. That fragment of a face could no more be put back than could the daisy petal pulled to see whether you were loved or not

Francis, on a European tour as the novel opens, longs to perform a similar kind of reconstruction on his father. First he contracts with Xenia, a louche European sculptress (a portrait of Guitou Knoop, who was hired by Merrill to do busts of his father and one of his nephews), to interpret the old man, as well as his niece, Lily, establishing the leitmotif of the novel: art’s power to strip away superficiality and reveal fundamental truths. As soon as he returns from Europe, Francis visits his brother-in-law at the Firm and demands to be cut off from the family money:

“What I mean is, I don’t want the power that goes with money. It’s a crippling power; whoever uses it is at the mercy of it. No freedom goes with it. One’s forever being watched and plotted against, or else protected from the very things that don’t do harm! One’s never in a position to find out what’s real and what isn’t -- with the result that nothing’s real, nothing in the whole world is real!”

But the family’s wealth is not the only barrier separating Francis from “what’s real.” His sexuality truly puts him at odds with the world’s, and his family’s, fondest expectations. Although the novel is hardly explicit on this score (it was 1957), it’s nonetheless obvious to the reader that Francis -- in renouncing “the dark side of love, the whole degrading panicky sexual side” -- actually hopes to renounce homosexuality and his parents’ accompanying disappointment: “What Benjamin ... [wanted] was to see his son behave as men did behave with a pretty woman ....This Francis knew he had never learned to do.” So Francis, quite literally, makes himself a eunuch in his father’s house of love.

In his later preface, Merrill wrote: “Friends who read the book in manuscript begged me to reconsider the episode of Francis’ self-mutilation. I was too pleased by its neat ‘objective correlative’ for my quarrel with the prevailing social and sexual assumptions to listen to reason. Freely granting its Grand Guignol aspect, I’ll stand by the scene to this day. The victim is after all only a character in a book.”

Not quite. The real, the intended victims were Merrill’s parents, doubtless mortified by such a graphic violation of social propriety. In essence, their son held up a mirror to them, saying, “Is this really who you want to be? Who you want me to be?” In the novel, Merrill describes his father’s highhandedness (“Whatever he decided to serve -- whether caviar or humble pie -- the victim was meant to choke it down and be grateful. Nobody had ever had a chance to refuse the brutal bounty.”) and neatly hands it back to him in a package that constitutes a “brutal bounty” of its own. “The book at that level,” its author later acknowledged, “remains a callow act of self-assertion hardly called for in view of the love and tact I had always been shown by my family.”

Although loving, however, Merrill’s parents were not always tactful. In his memoir, “A Different Person,” Merrill recalls their horror at and rejection of his sexuality, tensions that would echo through his later work. Callow or not, the act of writing “The Seraglio” may have been an essential act of separation -- albeit less drastic than Francis’ own -- that Merrill’s subsequent life and career would depend on.

In her recent memoir of her friendship with Merrill and his longtime partner, David Jackson, novelist Alison Lurie remarked on how total that separation was: “Over the many years [Merrill and Jackson] were together, they lived in attractive but in no way grand houses .... They traveled a lot; but they dressed simply, drove small, inexpensive cars, and did their own shopping and cooking. The only servant they ever had was a cleaning lady. Throughout his life Jimmy spent only a fraction of his income. Much of it went to a nonprofit organization he had set up called the Ingram Merrill Foundation ... [that] gave grants to writers, artists, and musicians.... My guess is that no one will ever know the extent of their generosity, which tended to be secret -- but which often changed lives....”

Yet, despite the pointed satire of his station and class that Merrill achieved in “The Seraglio,” despite his lifelong dedication to art, more unwarranted ad hominem nonsense has been written about him than about virtually any other American poet. In 1991, memoirist Mary Karr in the literary magazine Parnassus accused him of “emotional vacuity” and derided his “chief talent ... his mastery of elegant language.” More recently, an essay by Adam Kirsch in The New Republic allows for his “achievement” while dismissing his work as “decadent” and “superficial ... profoundly concerned with surfaces.” “It is easy,” Kirsch writes, “to see why Merrill has often been dismissed as a merely decorative poet, an aesthete playing with form.” Such charges seem to Kirsch “all the more credible because of [Merrill’s] great wealth: In the old American contest between paleface and redskin, Merrill’s money and status place him firmly in the first camp.” Those sensitive to language should recognize words such as “elegant,” “decadent” and “aesthete” for what they are: barely disguised code defaming Merrill’s homosexuality and wealth.

To anyone familiar with Merrill’s true achievement, beginning with the separation acted out in “The Seraglio,” the injustice of such slurs is clear. Producing a body of work that stands in contrast to the life of ease and leisure that he could have had, Merrill was every bit as industrious as his extraordinary father, but the treasure he laid up, as represented in these collected editions, may well outlast all the lucre that Merrill Lynch could ever amass. His greatest work, his poems, plumbs the depths of elemental feeling: love, sexual ecstasy and humiliation, jealousy, self-doubt, disappointment, loneliness, and the pain of losing friends and lovers to death. These are the subjects of all great lyric poetry, and they are indisputably Merrill’s subjects. The only superficial aspect regarding his work has been, too often, the criticism of it.