Chapter One
Beginnings
When James Merrill and I first met we didn't take to each other. If someone hadtold me that day that we would be friends for forty years, I would have thoughtthey were joking.
It was the hot summer of 1950; I and my first husband, Jonathan Bishop, were inEurope on a postponed honeymoon. We had come to Austria to stay with Lynn andTed Hoffman, who were working at the Salzburg Seminar. An acquaintance fromHarvard, Claude Fredericks, was in town, too, and they arranged for all of us tohave lunch and go for a swim in a nearby lake. Both Lynn and I were fond ofClaude, and hoped to find the friend he was traveling with, another young poet,equally likable.
But Jimmy Merrill was a disappointment. Compared to Claude he seemed both coollydetached and awkwardly self-conscious. He was thin and pale and shortsighted,with thick black-rimmed spectacles (later he would wear contact lenses). Thoughonly twenty-four, he was clearly already an intellectual and an aesthete. Heappeared to have read everything and, worse, to be surprised at our ignorance.
The lake turned out to be a large light-struck shiny pond, mainly surrounded bywoods. Fallen tree trunks littered the steep, sandy margin, and more floatedoffshore. The water was a clear, dark brown, and very deep; a top layer had beenwarmed by the sun, but below it was icy, and choked with the rubbery yellow andgreen straps of water weeds.
Most of us splashed about briefly and then waded out, but Jimmy stayed longer;and in spite of his weedy appearance he turned out to be a skilled swimmer.Unlike professional athletes, who often seem to be fighting the water, attackingit with violent slapping assaults and throwing off sprays of liquid shrapnel,Jimmy hardly broke the surface as he swam. The dark wet element parted smoothlyfor him as it might have for some long, elegant pale fish. When he finally wadedout, however, he again seemed chilly and ill at ease.
As his memoir of those years declares in its title, Jimmy was A Different Personthen, in both senses of the phrase. He was different from most other persons,and he was different from the person he would become. Most of us change as weage, but Jimmy changed more than most. He not only became more confident andbetter-looking—eventually elegantly handsome—he also became kinder, moregenerous, and more sympathetic. He never quite became an ordinary person, buthis instinctive scorn of fools, once only half-concealed by good manners,relaxed and gave way to a detached, affectionate amusement, such as a highlycivilized visitor from another planet might feel. Perhaps that is why heeventually seemed so much at home with the otherworldly beings he and DavidJackson contacted through the Ouija board.
Jimmy and I might never have met again if we hadn't both found ourselves inAmherst, Massachusetts, five years later. I came in September 1954, as part ofthe baggage of my first husband, an Amherst College instructor in English.Jimmy, who had graduated from the college in 1947, arrived the following fall asa visiting writer, accompanied by his new friend David Jackson.
In 1955 Jimmy, though less nervous, was still thin and pale, with flat dark hairand something of the air of a clever, inquisitive bird. Later, when I learnedthat the name "Merrill" could be traced back to the French merle, or"blackbird," this seemed appropriate. He no longer casually paraded his superiorlearning and sophistication; he had become more sensitive to social situationsand able to employ the perfect good manners he had learned as a child from hismother and governess. These good manners were one of his most strikingqualities, and they carried over into his work. As he told an interviewer in1967:
Manners for me are the touch of nature,... Someone who does not take themseriously is making a serious mistake....
The real triumph of manners in Proust is the extreme courtesy towards thereader, the voice explaining at once formally and intimately.
By 1955 Jimmy had also become something of a dandy. Though he wore conventionalsuits and shirts and neckties to official academic occasions, his everydayclothes were elegant but odd, sometimes slightly comic. He had a subtle, ratherArt Nouveau color sense: he liked mauve and purple and apricot and turquoisesilk or Egyptian-cotton shirts, and bright flowered ties. At home he oftencooked breakfast in a Japanese kimono and sandals. I remember especially somered straw and silk sandals and a gray-striped silk kimono with deep sleevescuffed in black.
At this time Jimmy had not yet achieved the attentive, contained, charmingmanner of his later years. He fidgeted with things, and was sometimes awkwardand uneasy with strangers. He misplaced ordinary objects, and did not know howto drive. He frequently became panicky when faced with a mechanical or practicalproblem: a broken window blind, frozen pipes, missing student papers, a canceledplane flight.
This, I felt then, was to be expected. I saw Jimmy as a kind of Martian:supernaturally brilliant, detached, quizzical, apart. Naturally he was someonewith whom the invisible energies of this world would not cooperate, whom theywould trick and confuse. In a sense I was wrong: but in another sense I wasdeeply right.
Whenever practical things failed, Jimmy's friend David would come to the rescue.He was at ease in the world: he calmed, he coped, he repaired and replaced andreassured. He understood electricity and plumbing and automobile engines. Later,with David's occasionally impatient encouragement, Jimmy would come to managethe practical side of life better. He would own a VW beetle with the licenseplate POET and drive it skillfully; he would learn to operate a computer, andbecome a brilliant, inventive cook.
But from the start Jimmy was in stunningly perfect control intellectually. Hismind worked faster than that of anyone I'd known: he could answer most questionsbefore you finished asking them. Words for him were like brilliant colored toys,and he could build with them the way gifted children build with Lego blocks,constructing and deconstructing elaborate, original architectural shapes andfantastic machines.
Jimmy also had a gift for making everything relevant. He shared E. M. Forster'sbelief that one must connect with other people—perhaps only some other people,in his case. If Jimmy liked someone, he would often try to find a bond betweenthis person and himself, a coincidence: he was delighted, for instance, todiscover that he and a new acquaintance had stayed in the same pension inFlorence, or that I'd been born on September 3, exactly six months later thanhe.
But what Jimmy connected best wasn't people but words and ideas. He was keenlyalert to ambiguity and multiple meanings, and scathingly and inventively alertto banality. Sometimes when I was with him, I would hear a cliché hop out of mymouth, like the frogs and toads that afflict the bad sister in the fairy tale.Usually he would only wince slightly; but now and then he would repeat thecliché in his characteristic drawl, half eastern upper class and half southern.He would play with it in a mild, devastating way, scrutinizing the words with aherpetologist's detachment.
For instance, when I described my six-year-old son's state of mind by sayingthat he was "as mad as a wet hen," the response was: "Yes. I wonder: would thejuvenile equivalent be 'as mad as a wet chicken'? Or perhaps you could use themasculine form, 'as mad as a wet cock.'"
In his writing Jimmy would often casually rescue clichés from banality. InSandover, for instance, he speaks of "this net of loose talk tightening toverse." He was able to give any word or phrase, even the most ordinary, doubleand triple meanings, connecting it with weather, music, interior decoration,art, literature, myth, history, or several of these at once. A kind of poetic,meaningful punning was one of his specialities. One famous early example is thedouble pun in "Three Sketches for Europa." The nymph Europa, kidnapped byJupiter in the shape of a bull, eventually becomes Europe:
The god at last indifferent
And she no longer chaste but continent.
Jimmy could make puns in several languages at once: both he and David werefluent in French, German, Italian, and modern Greek, and Jimmy also knewclassical Latin and Greek. Most readers and listeners were awed, but a few weremade uneasy by the flow of wordplay. One of these dissenters, when I praisedJimmy's verbal wit and skill, remarked, "Uh-huh. A disconnected man, a manwithout a job or a family or a permanent home, no wonder he's fascinated byconnections."
The English Department at that time had only ten members, and they and theirwives saw each other often. Even so, Jimmy and I mightn't have become friends ifit hadn't been for David Jackson. I liked David instantly—almost everyone did,while it was common back then for people to take time to warm to Jimmy. Becauseof our bad start in Salzburg, it probably took me longer than most; certainly itwas David I loved first.
It's difficult to explain to anyone who only met him later what David Jacksonwas like in 1955. He was, to start with, wonderfully attractive: blond, tanned,strong. He had grown up in the West, and had the kind of casual, laid-back,wide-open-spaces manner and slow cowboy drawl characteristic of the region.Unlike Jimmy, whose initial reaction to most phenomena was complex andtentative, David seemed easily and warmly interested in everything and everyone.In spite of his down-home manner, he was sophisticated, widely traveled, andmultiply talented: at UCLA he had studied music composition with Hindemith andSchoenberg. He wrote and drew and painted and played the piano expertly.
Most of all, David was an acute observer of human behavior. He could see twopeople glance at each other and guess that they were in love. He noticed whenone of my husband's colleagues spoke quietly but unpleasantly to his wife at aparty, and that she then rushed into the bathroom and reappeared later smudgedwith makeup and tears. He pointed out that a certain professor always blinkedhis eyes several times after he had made a rude remark, as if pretending not tohave spoken, or not to have seen its effect.
Sometimes, I discovered later, David's interest in observation led him farther,into what anyone who wasn't a writer might call snooping. He was unashamed ofthis. "Why should we not exercise our curiosities as freely as other people dotheir 'manners?'" he wrote me in 1956. "I have never hesitated eavesdropping,peering into letters & diaries—nor do I intend starting to."
In David's published short fiction, and the novels he never found a publisherfor, his gifts of observation and deduction were fully in evidence. In real lifehe usually kept these skills under his hat (most often a worn canvas one with awide floppy brim), displaying only the casual wit and affectionate concern thatmade him so popular.
Back then, when homosexuality was less widely accepted, it was to David'sadvantage that he didn't resemble the stereotype of, as even some enlightenedpeople would have put it, a "pansy" or a "fairy." This was long before thousandsof gay men came out of their closets wearing lumberjack mustaches and lumberjackshirts, and worked out in gyms to develop lumberjack muscles. David did not looklike a lumberjack, but he looked like a man who had—as he had—been married andfought in Europe in World War II. He dressed casually, in faded khakis andcorduroy jackets and white or blue shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and woreold tennis shoes or loafers.
In the 1950s, having been in the army was a source of pride and honor, and therewas an invisible line between men who had and hadn't served in the armed forces.It was possible to escape the draft by declaring, in answer to the question,that no, you didn't "like girls"; but this was considered cowardly and shameful.Many young men who could honestly have used this excuse lied in order to serve,as both David and Jimmy did. The lie was always accepted, even when one mighthave thought it couldn't possibly have been.
Though I had made a few friends in Amherst, I was lonely. My husband, findinghimself at twenty-seven the sole support of four people, two of them under theage of three, had become serious, distant, and preoccupied with the need tofinish his Ph.D. thesis and hold on to his job. He left the house every weekdaymorning at 8:30 and returned at 5:30, expecting dinner to be ready and thechildren quiet and out of the way. In the evenings he read or corrected papers.He also usually spent most of Saturday and Sunday at his office or in thelibrary.
I missed his company, but I also missed Cambridge and the people I'd knownthere, especially the members of the Poets' Theatre. This was an informal,somewhat disorganized collection of young writers committed to putting on playsin verse: both those of classic authors like Yeats, and ones they wrotethemselves. Among them were John Ashbery, Edward Gorey, Frank O'Hara, DonaldHall, V. R. Lang, and Richard Wilbur. Today this list sounds impressive, but inthe 1950s all these people were unknown, and the Poets' Theatre was abroken-shoestring operation, mocked in the Harvard Crimson, always running overbudget and into crisis. Nevertheless it was full of casual excitement, fun, anddrama.
Jimmy and David knew some of the members of the Poets' Theatre because by 1955two of them, John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, had moved to New York and helped tostart another, similar organization called the Artists' Theatre. Jimmy's twoverse plays, The Bait (1953) and The Immortal Husband (1955), had just beenproduced by the Artists' Theatre. That was one bond between us: the other wasthat we were all young, practically unknown writers. David and I had published afew short pieces, and we both had a rejected novel or two in our bottom drawer.Three slim collections of Jimmy's poems had appeared, but one was a vanity-pressproduction paid for by his father. (It came out when Jimmy was sixteen andbecame a lifelong source of embarrassment.) Like the plays, his poetry hadcreated only a shallow though pleasant ripple in the literary world. One of thegifts we gave one another was to read and praise—perhaps sometimesoverpraise—one another's work. But overpraise has its uses as well as itsdangers. It's possible that without David's and Jimmy's encouragement I mighthave given up during the ten years in which everything I wrote was rejected.They weren't the only friends who encouraged me to carry on—but they were theonly friends who were also writers.
Like most faculty members at Amherst College, we were living in college housing:I and my husband and children in the bottom half of a big, cold white framehouse on the Northampton Road, Jimmy and David in a picturesque farmhouseoutside of town that belonged to Bill and Nancy Gibson, who were on sabbatical.It has not occurred to me until now that David and Jimmy were probably not onlypaying more rent than we were, but that they could easily afford it. It was awhile, even then, before I realized that Jimmy hadn't come to teach at Amherstfor the money, like my husband and his colleagues, but for the fun of it.
In a vague way I gradually gathered that both David's and Jimmy's families wererich, but at first I didn't know how rich they were. I remember the moment Ibegan to understand. David was over at my house, and we were having coffee andcookies. My children, then aged one and three, were napping; and the late-wintersun shimmered through the long, lumpy green icicles that fringed the kitchenwindow. David was describing the extensive plans he and Jimmy had to travel whensummer came, and I said it sounded exciting but awfully expensive. "No, it'll beall right," David reassured me. "We can manage.
"People always think Jimmy's keeping me," he said suddenly, shoving back theflop of dark-blond hair that fell over his square forehead.
Surprised, I said that I'd never thought so. In fact, the question hadn'toccurred to me.
"I don't mean you. But I have my own money," David insisted. "People here don'trealize. I have forty thousand a year."
"Wow," I said. In 1955 forty thousand seemed an immense sum—over ten times whatmy husband was currently paid by Amherst College. "That's great."
It was true, David admitted, that Jimmy's income was larger—well, maybe aboutnine or ten times larger. He didn't mention a figure, but I did the calculationin my head, and the result was off the map.
Jimmy was very rich, it turned out, because he was the son of the Wall Streettycoon Charles Merrill, co-founder of Merrill Lynch. David was moderately richbecause his father was a successful southern California businessman. But afinancially knowledgeable person, observing Jimmy and David's lifestyle at thetime, would have estimated their combined yearly income as well under fortythousand. This suggests, as I believe was the case, that they split expenses,and both of them gave the rest of the money away. Over the many years they weretogether, they lived in attractive but in no way grand houses in Connecticut,Athens, and Key West. They traveled a lot; but they dressed simply, drove small,inexpensive cars, and did their own shopping and cooking. The only servant theyever had was a cleaning lady.
Throughout his life Jimmy spent only a fraction of his income. Much of it wentto a nonprofit organization he had set up called the Ingram Merrill Foundation,the name of which reunited his divorced parents, Hellen Ingram and CharlesMerrill. The foundation gave grants to writers, artists, and musicians; thechoice of grantees was not made by Jimmy alone, but by a four-person board ofwhich he was a member.
He and David also made many individual gifts. My guess is that no one will everknow the extent of their generosity, which tended to be secret—but which oftenchanged lives, including mine. In 1959 they paid for the private printing of myfirst book, a memoir of one of the founders of the Poets' Theatre, V. R. Lang. Acopy of this memoir eventually reached Al Hart, an editor at Macmillan, and hewrote to ask if I had ever written a novel. If there had been no copies of thememoir, it is quite possible that I would never have been published. Luck, andthe fact that the computer and desktop printer had not yet been invented, was onmy side. If I'd been able to produce the fifteen or twenty copies that friendsof my subject wanted, Jimmy and David would never have ordered five hundred froma printer, and many fewer people would have seen the memoir.
As he became better-known, Jimmy was also generous with his time and his words.He signed and donated books, appeared at benefits, read manuscripts, judgedcontests, recommended other people's poetry. As far as I know, he never refusedto comment on a manuscript or provide a blurb for an acquaintance, though someof his comments, read carefully, had a subtly concealed sting in their tail.Manuscripts he didn't wholly like, if he liked or at least tolerated the writer,would be described as "unique," "remarkable," or "an extraordinaryachievement"—phrases that pleased the author and publisher but warned off thosein the know. "No one but X could have written a book like this" was one of hishappiest solutions to the blurb problem.
Occasionally, when I visited Jimmy and David, I would notice some new objectthat must have cost a good deal—a grand piano, or a wonderful large blurrylandscape painting of trees and cows and clouds by their friend Larry Rivers,for instance. But these purchases were infrequent. Most gay men I knew alsotraveled and bought art, and this seemed reasonable; unlike heterosexualcouples, they didn't have to support children and save to send them to college.
I realize now that this lifestyle, far more modest than necessary, must havebeen a deliberate choice. If they'd wanted to, Jimmy and David could have ownedmansions and yachts, expensive cars and Impressionist paintings. They could havejoined the international set of rich, famous homosexuals: designers, actors,producers, agents, investors, and men who lived on inherited wealth. That theydid not do so was clearly deliberate. Eventually they knew a number of rich andfamous gay men, but they saw far less of them than they did of people who wereneither rich nor famous nor gay—people like my old tutor, Joe Summers, whomJimmy had taught with at Bard College, and his wife; Grace Stone, a retiredpopular novelist, and her daughter Eleanor Perenyi, a journalist and dedicatedgardener; and Isabel and Robert Morse, Stonington neighbors.
Amherst in the 1950s was a patriarchal, family-centered society. Men went towork, and women stayed home and took care of the house and children. There wereno women on the faculty at Amherst College, and no women students. At facultyparties, the men tended to stand at one side of the room and talk shop, whilethe women sat at the other side, discussing domestic matters. (It occurs to menow that the reason the men stood up was that they sat down most of the day,reading and writing and having conferences. The women sat down because they hadspent most of the day standing up, cooking and cleaning and washing and ironingand shopping and carrying babies and groceries.)
Most of the men at these parties didn't seem to have much to say to the wives oftheir colleagues, unless they went in for flirtation and seduction. Jimmy andDavid, by contrast, were happy to speak to us. They also seemed to have lots offree time; they could come to lunch and to tea as well as to dinner parties. Andeven at dinner they were more apt to talk to me and the other wives, and did notregard subjects like art, interior decoration, clothes, and films as unfit forserious discussion.
In contrast to David and Jimmy, most of the men I met in Amherst seemed solemnand heavy. They were interested in sports and politics, and though they readliterature, it was for serious professional reasons, and their reading excludedwhatever might seem light or ephemeral. (Most—in some cases all-living womenwriters, for example, were in this category.) Their recreational intereststended to involve competitive physical exertion, even when no competitor was insight.
My husband, Jonathan Bishop, for instance, was at this time writing a Ph.D.thesis on Emerson, and was also deeply interested in Thoreau. He was notinterested in going for short, slow walks with me or the children, but when notteaching or working on his thesis or correcting papers, he took long, exhaustingThoreau-type hikes in the woods, and up and down the hills around Amherst, wherehe identified trees, flowers, and birds from guidebooks.
I still vividly recall one warm spring afternoon when, cashing in mybaby-sitting credits with another mother, I went to tea with Jimmy and David attheir house in the country. They had set a tea table on the lawn, with anembroidered white tablecloth, a silver teapot, sugar bowl, and creamer, floweredchina cups, and plates of shortbread cookies and—in honor of The Importance ofBeing Earnest—cucumber sandwiches. In the spirit of the occasion, I had on aflowery, ruffled frock, and David and Jimmy wore pale summery clothes—Iespecially remember Jimmy's lavender shirt.
Suddenly my husband appeared. He did not walk up the driveway, but smashed andstamped his way out of the thick woods and brush behind us, red-faced andsweaty, in stained khakis and a dark plaid wool shirt-and, as Jimmy put itlater, recalling the event in a letter, "plastered with leaves, mud, welts."
No, he didn't want anything to eat, Jonathan insisted: what he wanted was for meto drive him home, now. I didn't want to go: I had hardly started to drink mytea. David and Jimmy, gracefully suppressing their evident amusement, persuadedJonathan to sit down and join us, but only for a few minutes. For the first timein my marriage, I looked at my husband through their eyes, and found him bothridiculous and unattractive. The moment passed, but in a way it was thebeginning of an end that came twenty years later.
When I left Amherst for Los Angeles in the summer of 1957, one of my specialregrets was that I wouldn't see David and Jimmy so often. But we met when I cameback for visits, and more often after I and my husband and children moved backEast in 1961. Meanwhile, so as not to lose touch, I included Jimmy and David inmy next novel. In the book, which was set in an academic small town much likeAmherst, most of the characters were intensely involved with themselves and eachother. The character based on David and Jimmy did not play any important part inthe plot; instead he commented on the action in letters at the end of eachchapter. To create him, I put my two friends into an imaginary bowl and stirred,and then divided the batter. What came out was a novelist called Allen Ingram,who was teaching at "Convers College" and writing letters to a painter friend inNew York, Francis Noyes. (Allen was the name of the hero of David's currentnovel, and Ingram was Jimmy's middle name; while Noyes was David's middle name,and Francis the name of the hero of Jimmy's novel, The Seraglio.) Like myfriends, Allen Ingram represented detachment, worldly sophistication, and ironicsympathy; he was in the book partly to remind the reader that there is a lifeoutside adultery and academia. It occurred to me only recently that my mergingof Jimmy and David into a character who contained parts of each was a crudeversion of the process that may have created the spirits of the Ouija board.
Continues...
Excerpted from Familiar Spiritsby Alison Lurie Copyright © 2002 by Alison Lurie. Excerpted by permission.
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