Annotated and introduced by Stephen Yenser. New York, NY: Knopf, 2018. 216 pages. $18.00.
The main plot of The Book of Ephraim—the first third of The Changing Light at Sandover, but also a stand-alone poem itself—is as follows: around 1955, James Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, begin communicating with a sly, gossipy spirit, who talks with them about the past and current lives of dead friends, as well as about the workings of the universe. The means of communication is a homemade, slightly customized Ouija board: A-Z, 1-0, and a few common words like YES and NO.
A poem that is based in part on questions and answers is opened to dialogue, uncertainty, and some degree of mess. Merrill lets in voices that aren’t his typically elegant, witty one: the first words taken down from the other world are “hellp o sav me,” from a desperate and incoherent spirit contacted unintentionally. Even Wallace Stevens can sound rather similarly ungainly, in this unpunctuated small-caps mode: “wheres my hat,” he demands from the afterlife, as he tries to leave a séance. (Where is his hat? Can one have a hat in that other world?)
This texture, which lets something manifestly rough run alongside Merrill’s typical polish, is one of many things that makes Ephraim fascinating. When the spirit of Alexander Pope comments on the work in progress, he asserts that “while bits / still want polishing the wholes a ritz / as big as a diamond.” Not quite as diamond-like as Merrill’s short lyrics, Ephraim resembles the Ritz in that it’s populated with a variety of characters, many of them poetic celebrities, who keep moving between the realms of the living and the dead, across centuries and decades. The book itself actually has three layers, as Stephen Yenser’s introduction lays out: that of the twenty years over which Merrill and Jackson occupied themselves with the Ouija board; the “shadow narrative” of the novel Merrill lost not once but twice, before starting again in pentameter; and that of the present-day writing of Ephraim itself, in 1974.
“the whole” of Ephraim is also like the crystal-encrusted grotto that Pope himself made around 1725, a description of which Merrill places into section Q (the alphabet gives the poem its spine). At one point, Yenser describes Ephraim as “radically intricate,” and both the sociable, slapdash Ritz and the private, stylized grotto come to mind: in this poem, pattern coexists and cooperates with randomness. The quotations of Q, for example—Auden, Issa, Heraclitus, personal letters—come from what Merrill happened to be reading that year.
I imagine that such density—of reference and design—makes Ephraim especially formidable to annotate. How does one construct an editorial apparatus around a long, eccentric poem that’s almost incessantly punning, formally and linguistically self-reflexive, filled with in-jokes and postwar cultural references? Does one confine oneself to relaying information that could not be found quickly on the web? Or does one more actively synthesize and guide? In this edition of Ephraim, the first to be supplied with notes, Yenser’s references both help one get one’s bearings, and help make one aware of the poem’s vivid “tribute to the convergence of means and meaning.”
As demonstrated by the flurry of reviews that followed Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s edition of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems in 2005, readers differ in opinion as to what makes it into notes: some will find the more general explanations here unnecessary, or will want to see notes that dig in further. (More on puns, more on meter, more on the poignant, unnerving section where Merrill watches and is watched by a chimpanzee.) In general, Yenser has a light touch: he leaves space for readers to form their own ideas about the poem’s concerns, digressions, and connections. For example, Yenser draws one quick, slight line to Nabokov’s novels: after using Nabokov’s image of “link and bobolink” to describe Merrillian networks, he notes that Merrill responds to the idea of a monograph on Ephraim by saying it might look something like Pale Fire. Rather than spelling out the ways Merrill might have drawn on Nabokov, Yenser lays the ground for readers’ own investigations. He encourages us to think more about Ephraim’s relation to postmodern fiction, twentieth-century epic, fairy tales, and postwar culture more broadly. (Merrill’s horror at the “new formulae of megadeath” he saw entering the language overlaps, incidentally, with the binder labeled “World Targets in Megadeaths” that perches on a desk in Dr. Strangelove.)
While sending out threads to other authors and genres, Yenser simultaneously notices the very local. On the poem’s first lines (“Admittedly I err by undertaking / This in its present form”), he brings up the Latin admittere, with its implication that “the poet has been permitted to enter a certain realm,” and reminds us that “‘undertaking’ is also the work of the person who looks after the dead.” These words indicate not only self-consciousness, but the elegiac glints in Merrill’s project: he is writing about people whom he misses. Here as elsewhere, Yenser also draws on correspondence with Merrill, and on Merrill’s archives at Washington University; he notes that Merrill’s earlier drafts use not err—which allows one to wander—but fail.
Yenser’s introduction, reinforced by his endnotes, sets up the rationale for Ephraim, and presents an array of ways to read it: as a book with “its own integrity,” as a miniature epic, as a “compact anthology of formal schemes,” as a “literary romance.” Above all, Yenser underscores the idea of devotion: Merrill was preparing to write this poem since the beginning of his career. While I’ve stressed the odder and more slapdash elements in this poem, Yenser distinctly corrects the idea that Merrill jumped the shark by spending years with the Ouija-board project: he makes clear how much planning went into its structure. Even the book’s end-papers show Merrill organizing and cross-referencing with at least five different pens.
Devotion has been evident in the scholarship produced on Merrill—Yenser’s own 1987 monograph; Robert Polito’s 1994 A Reader’s Guide to The Changing Light at Sandover (which includes a hundred-page index and another hundred pages of early reviews); Reena Sastri’s 2007 study Knowing Innocence; Langdon Hammer’s recent biography; and the forthcoming Selected Letters, co-edited by Yenser, Hammer, and the late J. D. McClatchy. To this welcome array of work, Yenser’s edition is an absorbing, lively contribution—complete with at least one appalling pun about Ezra Pound. We can now explore Ephraim both with Polito’s impressive Guide, which is more of a neutral concordance (you would go to its index, for example, when you want to find where Pope or Amenhotep IV or antimatter appear in Sandover), and with Yenser’s expansive commentary—a compelling appreciation, orientation, and grotto of unexpected facts. One learns, for example, that somewhere in the world there is an ancient stone ibis and part of an unfinished Merrill novel, both of which the poet left in a taxi in Macon, Georgia.
