James Merrill was born on this day in 1926. We were closely associated beginning in 1973, up to 1989, and the penniless young novice I was cheerfully accepted the perks that went with that association. He is the subject of one of the chapters in a memoir I’ve written but not yet published. During his life, he was adored by a public rather in awe of the verbal skill that enabled him to record, with complexity and sophistication, his rich life experience. He was also disdained by the part of the readership that is unimpressed by white privilege. The public was equally divided about his gigantic “epic” titled The Changing Light at Sandover, which used Ouija board transcripts as the substance of a series of mystic revelations vouchsafed by cosmic spiritual entities to Merrill and his partner David Jackson, a middle-aged gay couple residing in Connecticut. Some readers were enraptured by the work, others regarded it as monumentally silly and narcissist.
Merrill didn’t choose to be born to his rich parents, Southerners by origin, no, but he could have if he’d wanted to, discarded their racist attitudes. He did not, as many of the jokes and comments he made in private showed. Anyone uncertain about it should consider the record of grants awarded by the Ingram Merrill Foundation, which overwhelmingly went to white artists and writers. But there’s more to say, and to get it said, I’m going to excerpt a passage from the memoir. It follows.
It wouldn’t be right to ask that an imputation of racism be accepted if based on mere hearsay. But it can be corroborated by reading a few pages in the second part of the Ouija trilogy, specifically, Mirabell: Book 2.5, where Merrill sums up the spirit world’s lessons on the topic of “density.” Insofar as I understand it, “density” means a combination of intelligence, passion and aesthetic sophistication, a quality not equally distributed among the “races.” A quintessence called “Jew” is at the pinnacle, and then other ethnic groups are credited with less of it. Jews, of all people, do not welcome any theory of racial superiority (or “density”), having themselves been the target of a comparable theory in reverse. Most of them dislike the epithet “the chosen people,” fully aware that all such claims create resentment and sometimes even lead to violence. But here are the lines:
The chief subdensities
—African, Arab, Teuton, Slav, Chinese,
Down to a murky aboriginal
Of Borneo….
Mirabell, the second book of the Ouija trilogy, is billed as a series of lessons in science, but this travesty of the study of human genetics is just as inaccurate and fanciful as the bizarre lessons in physics offered in the same volume.
There is also the conclusion of Book 4 of this same work, the moment when Jimmy and David contact Chester Kallman after his death. The mediums are told that Kallman will be reborn as a Black person, but that his Jewish quality will upgrade the new incarnation. It “WILL BRING COHERENCE TO A RACE LARGELY WITHOUT SPOKESMEN.” Not satisfied with this prejudiced remark, the board next presents Kallman as experiencing bitter disappointment about the coming rebirth. I can’t bring myself to retype the text, a combination of prejudice and flippancy, except to quote its last word, what the board thinks will be Kallman’s new name: “MUD”. I suppose one could in private let pass Kallman’s Ouija persona and his distaste at the prospect of being Black and having African physical characteristics. But Merrill was the author, and it was his decision what part of his Ouija transcriptions would go into the book; he chose to include those silly/ugly remarks. The celebrated trilogy also includes justifications presented for historical figures like Stalin and Hitler (so much for the “Jew density”), who are said somehow to be necessary expressions of the divine will as it is worked out in history. None of Merrill’s critics discuss this part of the content, which should certainly temper unqualified admiration of it. Having seen Pound’s work survive the same kind of critical myopia, though, I guess one can’t be surprised.
As in the case of Pound, I’m not saying that Merrill’s work in general is without value, especially in the medium of the extended lyric genre. But any responsible critic or sycophantic disciple ought, I believe, to acknowledge the negative aspects of the work before going on to praise and exalt it.