James Merrill. Collected Novels and Plays.
Garrett, Daniel
James Merrill. Collected Novels and Plays. J. D. McClatchy, Stephen
Yenser, eds. New York. Knopf. 2002. 676 pages. $40. ISBN 0-375-41137-2
JAMES MERRILL'S Collected Novels and Plays is surprisingly
fresh while being very elegant (yes, elegant: delicate, detailed, fine,
light, and shaped by significant resources).
The Seraglio (1957) is a novel as family memoir, a satire of male
sexual and class privileges, with reports from the international scene
set in Italy, Jamaica, and America. The novel's central figure is a
young man, Francis Buchanan, smart, decent, and too fond of his own
innocence, trying to come to terms with being rich, heir to one of the
founders of a great financial services firm. While in Italy, Francis
befriends Jane, who has a fiance but is infatuated with Francis, and
Xenia, a passionate older woman sculptor whom Francis will invite to the
family estate to distract his womanizing father from a more crude
conquest (who is referred to by Francis's brother-in-law as la
trampessa, the tramp, though she has cause for her amoral ambition:
"Either security or imagination was needed in order to care for
others; Irene lacked both.").
The Seraglio includes erotic flirtation, war heroism, blackmail, an
out-of-wedlock birth, self-mutilation, the conjuring of spirits, an
opera premiere, sudden death, and a reunion of wives and lovers
(seraglio is a word for harem). It is an intricately plotted and
engaging novel, whereas the play The Immortal Husband (1955), the other
long and strong work in the volume, is something of an allegory about an
angry youth who mourns his mother's death and asks the favor of the
immortal woman he's in love with to help gain him immortality,
which he is granted without eternal youth. The conversations in the play
are full of unheard wisdom as well as cliches, misunderstandings, and
lies; the play is a comedy with tragic aspects.
The (Diblos) Notebook (1965), an experimental fiction in the form
of notations and drafts for a novel, focuses on a writer visiting Greece
and his scholar-brother, who becomes involved with an older woman whose
son does not particularly like him. The writer notes how Americans
travel abroad in search of the past, not realizing how their presence
changes the places they find. A later comment concerns how high
society's conformist values can be mistaken by outsiders for
individuality. The Birthday (1947) is a well-constructed free-verse
play, both charming and stimulating, with an unusual scenario--a man is
invited to a party of strangers, and the other guests are told it is his
birthday though it is not, and the guests tell him things about life and
love, intending to awaken him, to possibly give birth to a deeper self.
The Bait (1953), a play partly about emotional dishonesty, centers on a
woman, her too-close brother, her husband, and her fiance. The sister
finds revelation of her husband's good character intolerable: she
can no longer think herself superior, and she leaves him.
Although Merrill (1926-95) is better known as a poet, his Collected
Novels and Plays should not be ignored: this work is part of our
inheritance.
Daniel Garrett
Queens, New York
