ABSTRACT
IN HIS 1995 APPRECIATION, WRITTEN SHORTLY AFTER MERRILL’S DEATH, AND again in a recent article on the figure of Merrill’s mother in his poetry, J.D. McClatchy characterizes what he terms Merrill’s “split personality” and how it was represented in and thrown into “stronger relief” by his parents’ divorce:
As much his fathers son as his mother’s boy, he had a temperament that by turns revealed what we may as well call paternal and maternal sides. He was drawn equally to the rational and the fanciful, the passionate and the ironic, America and Europe. And, from the very beginning, his ambition as a poet was-like the child attempting to reconcile his warring parents-to harmonize those two sides of his life. (“Braving” 50)
[Merrill was] as much heir to Father Time as to Mother Nature. Mind vs. style, reason vs. sensation, idea and fact, …German and French, verse and language, legend and realism-the list could be extended through nearly every impulse or setting in the poems, which tingle with such oppositions, such divided loyalties. (“Inner Room” 5)
Both as poet and as a person, Merrill is animated by the division between what McClatchy calls “paternal and maternal characteristics” (Ibid.) In his efforts to construct double-minded harmonies that would reconcile his divided loyalties, Merrill vacillates in his allegiance not just between maternal beauties and paternal power, but between a whole range of moral and aesthetic constructions or introjections of both the Good Mother/Bad Mother and the Good Father/Bad Father. Early in The Changing Light at Sandover, Merrill affirms that “my own mother…[is] the breath drawn after every line,/Essential to its making as to mine” (S. 84). Yet as well as this sustaining maternal breath, she is also “my dragon” (Ibid.). She is identified in Sandover with Joanna (“Smoke pouring from her nostrils”), the “abhorred” character distilled from Merrill’s “destructive/
Anima,” whom the “symbolic apparatus” of the lost novel requires to be “‘routed’” before Leo, a Merrill-character, can be healed and his spiritual child (the poem) be born (S. 33, 67,35, 71). Likewise, Merrill’s father both attracts and repels. He is represented as the predatory sexual shadow that “afflicts” both child and mother (“Scenes of Childhood”); his “soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex/ And business” (“The Broken Home”). But he is also depicted as the worldly and “very kind” Ali Pasha (“Yánnina”), who, in the recuperative vision of Merrill’s memoir, “remains an almost perversely mild and undemanding presence in my thoughts, triggering none of the imaginary confrontations I have with my mother…. [In his company] I didn’t care if I ever wrote another poem; I lay back, contented, in the very arms of Time” (Different 42).
