Golden Fate

A memoir of James Merrill

[Today, March 3, 2026, marks the centennial of the USAmerican poet James Merill. I was a close associate of his in the years when I first began to publish, but then in the final part of his life, we were no longer on speaking terms. The following consists of a series of excerpts from a much longer chapter on James Merrill taken from an unpublished memoi…