James Merrill (1926–1995)

Anyone who’s played with Ouija (rhymes with “squeegee”) boards knows how much good clean fun they are. There’s something wholesome, as well as thrilling, about producing text collectively — that is, if you don’t think you’re actually in touch with the beyond. But in my experience, if you look around the table, there are generally one or two people who’d be much more likely to come up with those cryptic memoranda on their own than the one or two others.

The more you think about the squeegee board, the less fun it is. And I think that’s true of The Book of Ephraim, too.

Merrill is a wonderful formal poet, in his element in the terza rima section or any of the casual dives into sonnets, couplets — or some gorgeous weighty hendecs in a late section. The problem is that so much of the subject matter is diaristic, to be charitable — navel-gazing, to be mean. Much of it revolves around the loss of a novel on the same subject (whatever that is) — I found myself wishing the novel had remained intact. Most of this long poem is just a couple of guys arsing around with a Ouija board. There are exceptions: I loved section P, which spirals from power in general to a full-on cold-war nightmare. But the panoply of characters come and go (talking of Michaelangelo). Half of them are just ghosts symbolic to Merrill and half are real (Maya Deren e.g.) but never really realized. The title fellow is the prime example of the former. The more I read of Eph’s all-caps, the more it sounded very much like a couple of well-educated aesthetes harmonizing. And not at all ancient. That’s the squeegee for you. Lots of fun at the time, best if you don’t write it down.

The only phrase I remember from my ouija days is “wend your way to Damascus, jaded though you are”.

My enjoyment of the poem was lessened by Yenser’s lickspittle annotations which frequently call our attention to how subtle, pertinent, or wonderful some vague reference or pretty construction is. But I want to end positively — JM is a god at putting words in the right order. If you like long poems with masterful metre, little connection to the world, absurdly arbitrary structures and no real sense of purpose, you’ll dig The Book of Ephraim.… (meer)

An odd novel, probably of enduring interest mostly because it is semi-autobiographical, and the author is a famous poet. It was panned by the TLS when originally released, and it's not really difficult to see why. In the afterword accompanying the book's republication thirty years later, Merrill acknowledges that he basically patched the novel together from a set of loosely connected fragments, an admission of laziness apt to make many readers feel ill used. I had trouble keeping track of the many minor characters, and it seems that other reviewers did as well. I think the novel's strengths are Merrill's descriptions of things and places--he has a lovely talent for using color in his prose. Recommend for readers interested in the lives of the extremely rich, and who have exhausted all other options. Also, of course, for Merrill fans.… (meer)