This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 1980, 1982 by James Merrill
Compilation copyright © 2006 by The Literary Estate of James
Merrill at Washington University
Editors’ Note copyright © 2006 by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry
“The Book of Ephraim” originally appeared in Divine Comedies, copyright © 1976 by James Merrill
Mirabell: Books of Number, copyright © 1978 by James Merrill
Scripts for the Pageant, copyright © 1980 by James Merrill
All originally published by Atheneum
Voices from Sandover copyright © 1988 by James Merrill
Photograph on this page of James Merrill and David Jackson in Stonington, c. 1980s, by Harrison Pemberton. Courtesy of Special Collections, Olin Library, Washington University
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Cover photograph by Tom Victor
Cover design by Chip Kidd
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Merrill, James Ingram.
The changing light at Sandover: including the whole of the Book of Ephraim, Mirabell’s books of number, Scripts for the pageant, and a new coda, the Higher keys / James Merrill.—1st Knopf ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-375-71174-9
I. Title.
PS3525.E6645C48 1992
811′.54—dc20 91-58621 CIP
Ebook ISBN 9780525659280
v4.1
a
EDITORS’ NOTE
The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrill’s grandest poetic project, had a long gestation. He and David Jackson, his companion for many years, began their sessions at the Ouija board in August 1955, not long after they had settled in Stonington, Connecticut. Fourteen years later, Merrill contemplated writing a novel (the “lost novel” that is the subject of his poem “The Will”) and began to mention it and his and Jackson’s otherworldly contact, Ephraim, in his correspondence. A year later, in his notebook, alongside further mention of the novel, he envisioned a poem organized according to the alphabet. Here is the entry: “1.iv.70. An alphabet. 26 poems (on any or all subjects), loosely written, odes, elegies, what you wish, each beginning with an ornate capital letter, A through Z.” But it was apparently not until 1974, following the death in January of his Athens friend Maria Mitsotáki, that Merrill began on “The Book of Ephraim” in earnest. At various points during the composition of “Ephraim,” which he finished within a year, Merrill digressed to write other poems, but once he had finished “Ephraim,” he worked obsessively to complete what he did not at the time realize would become a trilogy of long poems. Even before “The Book of Ephraim” was published in Divine Comedies (1976), Merrill and Jackson had resumed their sessions—or, by their account, had been summoned back to the board for the revelations detailed in Mirabell: Books of Number (1978). The summer of 1976 was preoccupied with “Mirabell’s dictation.” A year later, during what his notebook called “the Angels’ summer,” he and Jackson sat for the lessons that Merrill turned into Scripts for the Pageant (1980). Merrill added “Coda: The Higher Keys” when he merged the three parts into one volume, also changing the title of the second to “Mirabell’s Books of Number.”
This volume, his epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), is dramatic from its outset. At the beginning of “Ephraim,” Merrill sketches the setting for many of the increasingly astonishing dictées:
Backdrop: The dining room at Stonington.
Walls of ready-mixed matte “flame” (a witty
Shade, now watermelon, now sunburn).
Overhead, a turn of the century dome
Expressing white tin wreathes and fleurs-de-lys
In palpable relief to candlelight.
The stage properties, he proceeds to tell us, include “a milk glass tabletop” and “a blue-and-white cup from the Five & Ten” that served as a planchette, along with a homemade Ouija board, a “heavy cardboard sheet” (with the capital letters of the English alphabet arranged in an arc, the Arabic numerals, and “YES” and “NO”), and a pencil and paper for transcription. The backdrop will change and the board will be somewhat augmented, but the essentials are strikingly simple throughout the Ouija boarders’ extravagant adventures, which include exchanges not only with recently deceased friends (including Robert Morse, the poet’s neighbor in Stonington, Connecticut, and George Cotzias, a scientist and acquaintance of the poet’s sister) but also with such luminaries among the dead as Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, Maya Deren, and W. H. Auden—as well as the intimidating spirits of an inhuman race who “THINK IN FLASHING TRIGONOMETRIES” and have a firsthand acquaintance with nuclear destruction. JM and DJ, as our guides are known, also encounter the archangels; an eerie, lonely eminence known as God Biology; and Mother Nature herself. The conversations with the au-delà recall Yeats’s communications with the other world (by way of his telepathic wife), Victor Hugo’s séances, Blake’s prophetic books, Milton’s evocation of his “Celestial Patroness, who…dictates to me slumb’ring, or inspires, / Easy my unpremeditated verse,” Dante’s redactions, and indeed the Homeric Muse. At the same time, the poem gleams with mercurial, mundane wit, and just as its tone shifts from the apocalyptic through the meditative to the comic and back, so its normative blank verse gives way frequently to couplets, sonnets, terza rima, a villanelle, syllabics, a canzone, and other prosodic schemes, many of them set pieces.
A poem so complex makes formidable demands on a reader. “The Book of Ephraim,” in section D, includes its own dramatis personae, but the later volumes and the coda are less accommodating. The new reader would be hard-pressed to know the background of various characters in the poem. But patience allows context to clarify, and for what puzzlement remains, there exists an invaluable guide, Robert Polito’s A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s “The Changing Light at Sandover” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). This handbook provides an alphabetical index that identifies and cross-references not only the names and places that occur in the trilogy but hypotheses and ideas as well.
Between the initial publication of the individual volumes and their final merger into Sandover, Merrill made small changes in his texts. There are twenty such changes in “Ephraim,” sixteen in Mirabell (including an alteration of the book’s title), and another twenty in Scripts. In some instances, typographical errors were corrected; in others, his phrasing was amended for the sake of clarity or rhythmic balance—the kinds of changes any writer is grateful for the opportunity to make. He made no further changes between the trilogy’s first appearance from Atheneum publishers in 1982 and its later republication by Knopf in 1992. The text of that 1992 edition, the last that Merrill himself supervised, has been reproduced here, with a small number of printing errors silently corrected.
Voices from Sandover, included here as an appendix, is Merrill’s distillate of his epic, which he produced for dramatic performance. As he wrote in 1988, “Since The Changing Light at Sandover would take over seventeen hours merely to read aloud, it seemed wiser to extract from the many narrative and thematic strands that compose this very long poem an arbitrary few and weave them into a script for three voices. Lines have been distributed with a certain freedom, and each of us [the three a
ctors] will be taking on more than a single character.” Voices is not merely a literal abridgment. For the sake of dramatic clarity, the poet made changes to his original text and occasionally wrote new bridge material. The script was privately printed for friends in 1989, and this is its first commercial publication.
Orbiting around Sandover are other poems that made use of Ouija board material; they can be found in his Collected Poems. There also exists, though not in the typographical format established for transmissions received over the board, a series of “interviews” requested by the Paris Review called “The Plato Club” (published in the Paris Review, no. 122, Spring 1992). JM and DJ conducted conversations with writers the magazine had been prevented from contacting for its famed series, including Alice B. Toklas and Henry James.
We are again indebted to Deborah Garrison and Patrick Merla for their invaluable editorial assistance.
JDMcC and SY
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Editors’ Note
Note to Readers of the Ebook Edition
THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER
I: The Book of Ephraim
III: Scripts for the Pageant
Coda: The Higher Keys
Appendix
Voices from Sandover (1980)
Note
Biographical Note
A Note About the Editors
A Note to the Ebook Reader
Please note that poem line breaks will vary across e-reading platforms. To experience the intended presentation of each poem, please set text on your e-reading device or platform to the smallest comfortable reading size. Enlarging the text too much will cause a poem’s lines to break in places the author did not intend.
THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER
I
THE BOOK OF EPHRAIM
Tu credi ’l vero; ché i minori e’ grandi
di questa vita miran ne lo speglio
in che, prima che pensi, il pensier pandi.
Paradiso XV
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.
Knew my setting; and had, from the start, a theme
Whose steady light shone back, it seemed, from every
Least detail exposed to it. I came
To see it as an old, exalted one:
The incarnation and withdrawal of
A god. That last phrase is Northrop Frye’s.
I had stylistic hopes moreover. Fed
Up so long and variously by
Our age’s fancy narrative concoctions,
I yearned for the kind of unseasoned telling found
In legends, fairy tales, a tone licked clean
Over the centuries by mild old tongues,
Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.
Lacking that voice, the in its fashion brilliant
Nouveau roman (even the one I wrote)
Struck me as an orphaned form, whose followers,
Suckled by Woolf not Mann, had stories told them
In childhood, if at all, by adults whom
They could not love or honor. So my narrative
Wanted to be limpid, unfragmented;
My characters, conventional stock figures
With personality and past experience—
A witch, a hermit, innocent young lovers,
The kinds of being we recall from Grimm,
Jung, Verdi, and the commedia dell’ arte.
That such a project was beyond me merely
Incited further futile stabs at it.
My downfall was “word-painting.” Exquisite
Peek-a-boo plumage, limbs aflush from sheer
Bombast unfurling through the troposphere
Whose earthward denizens’ implosion startles
Silly quite a little crowd of mortals
—My readers, I presumed from where I sat
In the angelic secretariat.
The more I struggled to be plain, the more
Mannerism hobbled me. What for?
Since it had never truly fit, why wear
The shoe of prose? In verse the feet went bare.
Measures, furthermore, had been defined
As what emergency required. Blind
Promptings put at last the whole mistaken
Enterprise to sleep in darkest Macon
(Cf. “The Will”), and I alone was left
To tell my story. For it seemed that Time—
The grizzled washer of his hands appearing
To say so in a spectrum-bezeled space
Above hot water—Time would not;
Whether because it was running out like water
Or because January draws this bright
Line down the new page I take to write:
The Book of a Thousand and One Evenings Spent
With David Jackson at the Ouija Board
In Touch with Ephraim Our Familiar Spirit.
Backdrop: The dining room at Stonington.
Walls of ready-mixed matte “flame” (a witty
Shade, now watermelon, now sunburn).
Overhead, a turn of the century dome
Expressing white tin wreathes and fleurs-de-lys
In palpable relief to candlelight.
Wallace Stevens, with that dislocated
Perspective of the newly dead, would take it
For an alcove in the Baptist church next door
Whose moonlit tower saw eye to eye with us.
The room breathed sheer white curtains out. In blew
Elm- and chimney-blotted shimmerings, so
Slight the tongue of land, so high the point of view.
1955 this would have been,
Second summer of our tenancy.
Another year we’d buy the old eyesore
Half of whose top story we now rented;
Build, above that, a glass room off a wooden
Stardeck; put a fireplace in; make friends.
Now, strangers to the village, did we even
We had each other for communication
And all the rest. The stage was set for Ephraim.
Properties: A milk glass tabletop.
A blue-and-white cup from the Five & Ten.
Pencil, paper. Heavy cardboard sheet
Over which the letters A to Z
Spread in an arc, our covenant
With whom it would concern; also
The Arabic numerals, and YES and NO.
What more could a familiar spirit want?
Well, when he knew us better, he’d suggest
We prop a mirror in the facing chair.
Erect and gleaming, silver-hearted guest,
We saw each other in it. He saw us.
(Any reflecting surface worked for him.
Noons, D and I might row to a sandbar
Far enough from town for swimming naked
Then pacing the glass treadmill hardly wet
That healed itself perpetually of us—
Unobserved, unheard we thought, until
The night he praised our bodies and our wit,
Our blushes in a twinkling overcome.)
Or we could please him by swirling a drop of rum
Inside the cup that, overturned and seeming
Slightly to lurch at such times in mid-glide,
Took heart from us, dictation from our guide.
But he had not yet found us. Who was there?
The cup twitched in its sleep. “Is someone there?”
We whispered, fingers light on Willowware,
When the thing moved. Our breathing stopped. The cup,
Glazed zombie of itself, was on the prowl
Moving, but dully, incoherently,
Possessed, as we should soon enough be told,
By one or another of the myriads
Who hardly understand, through the compulsive
Reliving of their deaths, that they have died
—By fire in this case, when a warehouse burned.
HELLP O SAV ME scrawled the cup
As on the very wall flame rippled up,
Hypnotic wave on wave, a lullaby
Of awfulness. I slumped. D: One more try.
Was anybody there? As when a pike
Strikes, and the line singing writes in lakeflesh
Highstrung runes, and reel spins and mind reels
YES a new and urgent power YES
Seized the cup. It swerved, clung, hesitated,
Darted off, a devil’s darning needle
Gyroscope our fingers rode bareback
(But stopping dead the instant one lost touch)