THE LIFE LIVED

1 3 2 Y T H E L I F E L I V E D D A N I E L H A L L He was rich. And even though it irritated him that every review, every article about him began with that fact, why shouldn’t I honor the tradition? Especially since Langdon Hammer does so at the very beginning of his magnificent biography, James Merrill: Life and Art, which opens with a quotation from its irritated subject, who, in response to a friend’s snide complaint, ‘‘Some of us have to work for a living,’’ replied, ‘‘I merely live to work.’’ Hammer examines the remark: ‘‘Typical of Merrill to turn a cliché on its head. Typical of him to pack a serious statement into a quip,’’ at the same time demonstrating Merrill’s method while proving that he’d learned much from his subject. A few pages along we get actual numbers, though they don’t quite seem to add up: an annual income of three hundred thousand dollars derived from trusts worth $20 million (figures from 1995, the year of his death). It’s amusing to hear of his annoyance because he himself drew attention to his life of privilege constantly, not just through references to his famous parents – the financier Charles Merrill and his J a m e s M e r r i l l : L i f e a n d A r t , by Langdon Hammer (Knopf, 944 pp., $40) 1 3 3 R second wife, Hellen Ingram – and his lavish upbringing, but in his manner, diction, and tone. Perhaps there wasn’t much to be done about these last three, but if he wanted to move among us incognito , he might have mentioned simply that he’d had dinner, for example, rather than specifying jellied sole or steak au poivre. After a thief broke into his apartment – a story told in The Book of Ephraim – he reported with relief that nothing was missing: ‘‘We had no television, he no taste / For Siamese bronze or Greek embroidery,’’ delineating, with one well-placed line break, their immense di√erence in social status. Poet of the people or not, by the mid-twentieth century James Merrill had established himself as one of America’s finest lyric poets; by the time of his death, five years shy of the millennium, he had confirmed that reputation and extended it: he was also one of America’s great epic poets, though by that time he may have been America’s only epic poet. Seldom does a body of work divide itself so neatly: on one hand is the Collected Poems, running to some nine hundred pages; on the other, his Ouija Board epic, The Changing Light at Sandover, which is around six hundred. (He wrote in addition two novels, short stories, plays, and essays, but nothing, I’m guessing, that would be remembered if not for the poetry.) One irony, then, of the burden of his great wealth is that he worked harder than many who have no choice but to work, who struggle to keep a roof over their heads. It’s also worth pointing out that through his easy generosity – to friends, fellow artists, even strangers – he made the burden of need significantly lighter, thus helping to keep roofs over the heads of others. Indeed, funds distributed through his Ingram-Merrill Foundation made it possible for many writers and artists to ‘‘merely live to work,’’ if only for a time. In a way, the money was the least of it: once he was on his own, his living arrangements were fairly modest. Obviously, though, from the moment he was born he enjoyed material benefits and other advantages at every turn. For example, who among us in largely monoglot America would not like to have been raised by a trilingual governess? In an autobiographical essay, ‘‘Acoustical Chambers,’’ he recalls that ‘‘by the time I was eight I had learned from her enough French and German to understand that English was merely one of many ways to express things. A single everyday 1 3 4 H A L L Y object could...