Medium with a message

A 560-page poem about the other world drawn from some 25 years of conversing with spirits at the Ouija board, James Merrill’s “The Changing Light at Sandover” inevitably calibrates among the strangest performances in American literature. But what else is new? From Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe and Melville through Stein, Williams, Pound, Eliot, Hart Crane and Zukofsky, the instigators of the American tradition (or is it anti-tradition?) have inclined toward the idiosyncratic, the sui generis, maybe also the crackpot. Think of “Moby-Dick,” “The Bridge,” “Patterson” and “The Cantos.” Originally published in three parts -- “The Book of Ephraim” (1976), “Mirabell: Books of Number” (1978) and “Scripts for the Pageant” (1980) -- “Sandover” first appeared in a single volume in 1982. To revisit it now, newly reissued in an exquisite edition edited by J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser on the occasion of what would have been the poet’s 80th birthday, is to confront a poem as daring, ambitious and necessary as any of these other prodigious American landmarks.

When Merrill died in 1995, “Sandover” still posed an obstacle, even an irritant for readers who envisioned (or wished) him another sort of poet. Detractors and admirers alike tended to diminish him into a maestro of witty surfaces, a wizard of bravura verse forms and tonal finesse. His artistry was legendary. So how could the most intricate and resourceful devisor of rhymes in English since, say, Byron, allow his verse to be overtaken by such effronteries as the Ouija board, bat-winged angels, black holes, centaurs, talking subatomic particles, Research Labs, soul densities, anti-matter, heaven, GOD BIOLOGY and “POEMS OF SCIENCE”? As Merrill himself grumbled, inside the poem, to W.H. Auden, one of his shadow guides:

Dear Wystan, VERY BEAUTIFUL all this

Warmed-up Milton, Dante, Genesis?

This great tradition that has come to grief

In volumes by Blavatsky and Gurdjieff?

Von and Torro in their Star Trek capes,

Atlantis, UFOs, God’s chosen apes -- ?

Nobody can transfigure junk like that

Without first turning down the rheostat

To Allegory, in whose gloom the whole

Horror of Popthink fastens on the soul,

Harder to scrape off than bubblegum.

But what if “transfigure” is not what you are after? What if the stock postures of both the “great tradition” and “Popthink” won’t wash? At once visionary and matter-of-fact, “Sandover” embodies a conversation with intransigent otherness. It’s a poet’s account of what someone might do -- and what JM (as he is referred to in the poem) and his companion David Jackson, or DJ, did -- when experiencing something as bewildering, wild and transformative as a sudden and prolonged visitation by voices purporting to speak from the other world. Variously enthralled and dismissive, fearful and cheered, skeptical and jubilant, “Sandover” tracks a serpentine of yielding and refusal, as JM and DJ engage their Ouija board spirits, first as a couple -- and this may be the fullest account of domestic life in American poetry -- and later as part of a mock cross-worldly symposium of the living and the dead.

Early on, and with scant intuition of the convolutions ahead, Merrill focuses this riddle of self and otherness:

... Better to stop

While we still can. Already I take up

Less emotional space than a snowdrop.

My father in his last illness complained

Of the effect of medication on

His real self -- today Bluebeard, tomorrow

Babbitt. Young chameleon, I used to

Ask how on earth one got sufficiently

Imbued with otherness. And now I see.

As that glance at Keats’ “chameleon” poet suggests, Merrill’s conversation with the other world is, above all, a self-revising immersion in the discovery -- or invention -- of a language that might give form to chance, coincidence, the impossible. But is that really such a departure? At least as early as “Water Street” (1962), this poet was as fascinated by those aspects of language he could not control as by those he might brilliantly orchestrate. Merrill famously referred to the Oxford English Dictionary as the “collective unconscious of the race,” insinuating that inside their lost or forgotten roots, words possess minds of their own -- as of course they do.

In an essay on Francis Ponge, he defended puns by noting that “[t]he pun (or rhyme, for that matter) ‘merely’ betrays the hidden wish of words.” The ornate forms of his poems appealed to him, one sensed, because they were similarly ready-made. When Merrill is read alongside poets such as Richard Wilbur, John Hollander or Anthony Hecht, with whom -- particularly during his early career -- he might have been linked, he emerges as both more of a virtuoso and someone with an almost Shakespearean suspicion of his own gifts. Still, as he once marveled about Eugenio Montale, “Any word can lead you from the kitchen garden into really inhuman depths.”

By the time Merrill arrived at “Sandover,” he had evolved an obliquely conversational style, as oracular as chatty, and alert to static, friction, hazards and reversals. In “Braving the Elements” (1972) and “Divine Comedies” (1976), any line might fly apart in multiple, contradictory directions simultaneously. His opening to “Sandover” epitomizes this style:

Admittedly I err by undertaking

This in its present form. The baldest prose

Reportage was called for, that would reach

The widest public in the shortest time.

Time, it had transpired, was of the essence.

Time, the very attar of the Rose,

Was running out. We, though, were ancient foes,

I and the deadline. Also my subject matter

Gave me pause -- so intimate, so novel.

Best after all to do it as a novel?

Looking about me, I found characters

Human and otherwise (if the distinction

Meant anything in fiction). Saw my way

To a plot, or as much of one as still allowed

For surprise and pleasure in its working-out.

Here, Merrill appears to amble through a linguistic minefield. “Surprise” and “pleasure” vie with implicit urgencies, intimations of mortality. Hesitations over form and audience (his spirit voices carry warnings about atomic power and the “SMASHED ATOMS OF THE DEAD”) are registered and not fully shrugged off. Cliches implode -- Merrill’s “subject” after all is the destruction of “matter.” As “foe” to the “deadline,” he signals his resistance to his Ouija board interlocutors and to closure; his opposition to fixed meanings and to flat writing, the dead line.

Commentary on “Sandover” either leans toward scrupulous redaction of the otherworldly upper-case dictation or disregards those dense communiques for a vision of the poem as an anthology of sparkling set pieces. The set pieces are of course astonishing, as Merrill dispenses sonnets, villanelles, Spenserian stanzas, terza rima, Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter, Rubaiyat quatrains and a ravishing canzone, “Samos.” But the stories, caveats, formulas, prayers, history and gossip that his spectral voices recount -- those escalating portions of the poem Merrill makes clear he did not choose -- also electrify. While the sun sets at the conclusion of “Mirabell,” the angel Michael sustains an American sublime:

I LEAVE NOW AS THE LIGHT LEAVES AND WIND MY

PATH OVER ITS TRACK ON EARTH I AM A

GUARDIAN OF THE LIGHT

LEAVE THIS FIRST OF THE FIRST TWO MEETINGS

IN A CYCLE OF TWINNED MEETINGS IN A

CYCLE OF TWELVE MOONS

LOOK! LOOK INTO THE RED EYE OF YOUR GOD!

Small moments, too, lodge their recurrent wonders. Here Uni, a kind of unicorn, talks with JM about his dead friend Robert Morse:

... IT IS RARE

WHEN A BETWEENER GETS SUCH ATTENTION

AS MR ROBERT HE SPOKE OF MY LAND

HE SAID ‘MY LIFE WAS AN ATLANTIS

SUNKEN & PERFECT & DOOMED’ WAS IT?

Perhaps so. Much of himself lay under a surface

Perfect in all arrangements. There could be

No bitterness, no daring, no regret.

Enough to doom one in the end? And yet ...

Because the accents in “Sandover” fall so heavily on the complex ways JM and DJ hear, absorb and deflect their Ouija board transmissions, I’ve come to think of the poem as an anatomy of spaces.

There is the house in Stonington, Conn., where they first reach the spirit Ephraim, and another house in Athens, the setting of “Scripts for the Pageant.” There is the mirror Ephraim asks them to prop on a facing chair, so the spirits can view them, a sort of portal from one world to another. There is the fictive space of the novel JM started as a first vehicle for Ephraim, lost in a taxi in Georgia. There is the space of the bat-angels, Mirabell and Co., and their Research Lab, where souls and even great poems are cloned. Mirabell reveals that Rimbaud ghostwrote Eliot’s “The Waste Land”:

NO MAN CAN REACH US DIRECTLY TSE HAD

A NUMBER FROM OUR ORDERS AR HAD THAT

SAME NUMBER

POINT ONE THUS YEATS & DJ TSE DOWN ON

CERTAIN

SUPERSTITIOUS SCRIBES WE HAD TO APPOINT

RIMBAUD HE WROTE

THE WASTE LAND WE FED IT INTO THE LIKE-

CLONED ELIOT

There is the void, from which GOD B sings his plangent song:

IN MY NIGHT I HOLD IT BACK I AND MINE

SURVIVE BROTHERS SIGNAL ME IN MY NIGHT

I AND MINE HOLD IT BACK AND WE SURVIVE

Finally, there is Sandover, “THE ROSEBRICK MANOR,” a stylized version of the mansion on Long Island where JM grew up. But always, before or behind or beyond these other spaces, there is the Ouija board, site and crossroads of every exchange. “WE MET ON THIS FAIR FIELD,” Mirabell says, “& SEEM BY ITS EASE TO BE / IN CONVERSE YET WE ARE ALL THE DEAD & YOU THE LIVING.”

The vivid sweep of domestic dailiness that Merrill sucks into “Sandover” still surprises amid all the careering disclosures. DJ’s parents die, and he undergoes surgery; close friends also die, and are taken up at the board, as are anniversaries, travel, meals, phone calls, houseguests, pets, remodeling, films, books, music and especially conversation. Yet Merrill never conceals the human toll of his otherworldly yielding. Art, he suggests, “survives / By feeding on its personages’ lives.... It’s the price we pay.” By the end of “Sandover,” it’s almost as if the living and dead had switched places at the Ouija board.

I was a friend of Merrill’s (and in the interest of full disclosure, the book I wrote about him is recommended by the editors in this new edition of “Sandover”). On the occasions when I watched him and David Jackson at their homemade, cardboard Ouija board, the cup darted so quickly that Merrill could take down the messages only as a headlong rush of letters; after the cup paused, he would go back and discover what words the letters had formed.

As for belief, or ultimate mystery, Merrill was as canny about the uncanny outside his poem as inside. He told J.D. McClatchy in a Paris Review interview: “I believe the secret lies primarily in the nature of poetry -- and of science too, for that matter -- and that the ability to see both ways at once isn’t merely an idiosyncrasy but corresponds to how the world needs to be seen: cheerful and awful, opaque and transparent. The plus and minus of a vast, evolving formula.” Merrill could be oddly fascinated, too, by any new resonances others found in “Sandover,” much as though he felt he hadn’t really written it.

Whatever else they are, poems are conversations with the dead -- and “The Changing Light at Sandover” rendered that implicit promise of poems literal. But Merrill is also dead, and on this reading I hear those conversations differently. If “Sandover” once was a way for Merrill to keep talking to his beloved dead, now it’s one of our ways to talk to him. *