"Our James"

By Mrs. V.T. Boatwright

Remarks made at the dedication of the James Merrill Reading Room in the Richard W. Woolworth Library of the Stonington Historical Society, June 20, 1998.

How blessed were we, the Village of Stonington and all of us, to have been able to know and love James Ingram Merrill. To have the icon of American literature living here, acting just like one of us, an ordinary citizen, for forty-plus years, while touching our lives with light.

Dining room of James Merrill's Stonington apartment.

Before we forget, let me list some of he awards heaped upon him: Jimmy won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award; and he was a judge of Yale University's Younger Poets' Award. In addition, he established the Merrill Ingram Foundation to help young poets financially, as well as giving of his time and effort. He continued to do his throughout his life and everywhere he lived. The Changing Light at Sandover was certainly America's most ambitious poem since Leaves of Grass or The Wasteland.

Let me interrupt and read a few lines he wrote about just this place, from Mirabell: Books of Number, Book 2:

And the outside-world, crayon-book life we led,
White or white-trimmed canary clapboard homes
Set in the rustling shades of monochromes;
Lighthouse and clock tower, Village Green and neat
Roseblush factory which makes, upstreet,
Exactly what, one once knew but forgets --
Something of plastic found in luncheonettes;
The Sound's quick sapphire that each lay recurs
Aflock with pouter-pigeon spinnakers
-- This outside world, our fictive darkness more
And more belittles to a safety door
Left open onto light. Too small, too far
To help. The blind bright spot of where we are.

Jimmy was a friend of Boat's, mine and our children. They, in awe of his genius at an early age, loved dearly this slender, debonair and very modest man.

For many years, our James used me as a "groupie" -- an aging groupie. It started when I drove him to the Lyman Allyn Museum one night where he was giving a reading. As we sat there, listening to his introduction, he leaned against me and the convulsions of nervous apprehension which shook him in stage fear made me wonder why he read his poetry to audiences at all. Of course, when he rose, his performance was flawless, his voice moving and his delivery radiant. Jimmy read in a sure voice, sometimes he almost sang, but seldom giving time to sort out the ideas and allusions that crowded his work. And a frisson would descend, as in his last lines, he so often leapt to the unexpected.

From time to time Jimmy asked me to go with him when he read. We made short hops on planes, trains but mostly in cars; sometimes it would be necessary to make sandwiches bring apples. Sophisticated travel indeed. Comfort food. Comfort old lady. We went to all reaches of Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, and New England. Unfortunately, he never asked me to accompany him in a reading in London, Paris, or Tokyo.

Imagine the joy of bumping along on black night on unknown highways, listing to Jimmy who was in command of a vast treasury of linguistic, literary, visual, social, musical, and geographical education and experience. A man of sovereign intellect discussing "How maddening the way everything merges and reflects."

From year to year, he kindly read us at the Stonington Library, and of these times with his old friend, Sir Stephen Spender -- a lovely occasion. At Yale one rainy graduation day, he received an honorary degree and Jimmy was honored, lectured, and lunched.

In 1986, the Arts Commission appointed our James to be Connecticut's first Poet Laureate. So up we went to have more honors and laurels heaped upon him. At his installation in the governor's office that morning, he said, "Who can decide, if not our readers -- all five or fifty or five hundred of them, if a poet really has more than five hundred true readers at any given me? It is for them, however, to sense what our images are worth, and for us to sympathize on those all too frequent occasions when our best means absolutely nothing to them. Today finds me full of respect for the readers and writers of Connecticut." It was a long day, filled with ceremonies, flash bulbs, and banquets.

When Jimmy went to the hospital in Tucson on the fourth of February 1995, he called me, and again on the fifth. It was the sixth when the call came in of his death. Oh desolation. We lost our finest lyric poet, our firmest believer in the transcendental power of language and our dear friend.