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By Root 1146 0

make his eyes round and would say, “Ahh…,” but with more a sagacious than an astonished intonation. His eyes would get so wide it wasn’t even certain he was still paying attention instead of miming it. If his interlocutor wasn’t careful, Merrill would soon slip free of the bridle pulling him toward solemnity and dart off toward the gay and frivolous wilds. He wanted to laugh, though not in some familiar, commonplace way, but rather at his own jokes, told in his own particular way. Listening to his sudden shifts in register was a way of learning how to read his poetry with its corrugated surfaces, its way of moving from the lightest tone of social gossip to the most Dantesque invocations—a tone he’d learned from Pushkin and from Nabokov, not to mention the Byron of Don Juan or the Pope of The Rape of the Lock, but one he’d made entirely his own.

Young people (especially the uninitiated) were always astonished at Merrill’s readings by how much was funny, how much everyone around them laughed. What interested me was how Jimmy made use of so much that came his way—and how deliberately reducing that flow from the indiscriminate flood of Manhattan to the mere trickle of Stonington or Key West or Athens (his three “villages”) had been a central creative act of his life. He thrived on anagrams (and belonged to an anagram club in Key West) and crosswords and, of course, the Ouija board, not to mention acrostics and all disciplined forms of poetry, the sestinas and rondeaux. Sometimes I’d be reading a long poem by Merrill with all the concentration I’d naturally bring to a cliff-hanger—and suddenly I’d notice the narrative was being relayed through a string of sonnets.

Merrill loved to tease and maybe couldn’t bear to do too much hand-holding, but in spite of this he was kind and sponsoring. He certainly nurtured me without ever being mindlessly affirmative. He could be harsh if the occasion required it. After reading my novel Caracole he voiced my worst fears, saying, “That first chapter, my dear!” and rolling his eyes.

His mother was from Georgia and his father from Florida, but Merrill had grown up on Long Island and had had foreign nannies and then had been sent off to Lawrenceville School. His accent was his own, drawled in a soft Southern way, but the vowels weren’t twangy or yearning or eager to open up into diphthongs. No one could say his voice was irritating or off-putting, and when he gave a reading, it was a beautiful orchestration out of which many different expressions, from the silly to the oracular, could be coaxed.

That first evening I found him polite but remote. He would so obviously have preferred a good informal talk with David alone and wasn’t interested in David’s protégé. I suppose, being a generation younger than either, I projected a certain raw sexiness. But as I found out later, Jimmy’s type was the tall, romantic youth, preferably straight and unavailable though longing to be a best friend and fellow poet; someone serious and talented who, even if much younger chronologically, would treat Jimmy as a sweet if devilish little brother. I wasn’t eligible for any of those roles—and as David’s beloved I was off-limits in any event.

David urged me to read Merrill the first chapter of Forgetting Elena. During the whole recital of fifteen terrifying minutes, Merrill’s face was illegible. Jimmy didn’t give a hint as to whether he was amused or struck or bored, and when it was all over, he didn’t say a word but merely nodded, giving the smallest possible indication that he was still alive. I gathered up my papers and hurried the fifteen blocks home. I was so distraught, I longed to throw myself in front of the first speeding car that came along. I felt that I’d failed in my first great test. My failure was especially painful because David was so enthusiastic about my work—and would he now have the independence of spirit to remain convinced of my book’s worth?

Eventually I found out that Jimmy liked Proust, sure, but he also liked to read the bestseller of the moment if it had any literary merit, just as he