A Different Person: A Memoir [Paperback]

James Ingram Merrill (Author), James Merrill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1994

James Merrill--winner of the Pulitzer and National Book Award--is one of America's most celebrated poets. This acclaimed memoir--nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award--traces Merrill's painful yet often hilarious life as a young man. "Stands with Merrill's finest work."-- Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Visiting his youth glancingly and elegantly in prose, Merrill ( Selected Poems 1946-1985 ) chooses to focus on the two and a half years he spent in Europe as a young man in his 20s, summoned to remember things past by themes that reverberated then and after: his munificent yet difficult heritage as the affluent son of "the founder of the world's largest brokerage firm;" the beginnings of his life as a poet; the facts of love for a gay man; the fickle, seductive flowering of adult friendships; and the needful challenge of aesthetic sensibility, gradually formed. The memoir is also filled headily with portraits of people whom Merrill knew at the time, from his passing romantic infatuations to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Detre, and also including memorable encounters with Alice Toklas and W. H. Auden. The main subject of any memoir is the search for self-knowledge, and Merrill applies a sophisticated, light touch to the story. Some will find him coy, occasionally--but that, too, is part of this well-dealt and amusing game. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

$25. LIT As much a storyteller as a poet, Merrill, the Pulitzer Prize-winning heir to the Merrill-Lynch fortune, delights with this graceful account of a 30-month stay in Europe in the 1950s that was to become the pivotal time of exploration and self-discovery. In his mid-twenties, after having his first book of poems published, Merrill and the "love of his life" depart for Greece and Italy. When the passion disappears, Merrill stays on, attending concerts, meeting and entertaining friends, undergoing psychoanalysis, and, most importantly, writing poetry. His narrative style is so flowing that the account reads more like a novel than a memoir. With refreshing honesty and perception, Merrill introduces us to a young man full of self-doubt, incredible ego, and a large capacity for human kindness. Most libraries with poetry collections will want this. Because of its wonderful sense of immediacy and story, it is also recommended for libraries serving avid biography readers. This fall, Knopf is also issuing paperback editions of The Changing Light at Sandover: A Poem, originally published in 1982 and reprinted in hardcover in 1992, and Selected Poems, 1946-1985, published in 1992.--Ed.
- Denise Sticha, Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins (September 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062510797
• ISBN-13: 978-0062510792
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #258,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful life in perfect focus - read with the poems., July 8, 2004

By 

Benjamin S Glaser (NY, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Different Person: A Memoir (Hardcover)

When I first expressed interest to my adviser in pursuing work on Merrill, she leaned back slightly, admitting that she had known him, commenting on the sadness of his death, and how beautiful a person he was. With each page of this memoir I discovered anew how much force such a simple statement, such as could be made about many a friend or relative, could have between the anonymous reader and master poet. Perhaps the greatest credit to this fascinating narrative skimming back and forth across oceans of memory, time and water lies in the constant delight of coming across the title phrased within the work. Never overstated, the phrase reverberates effortlessly as JM, (for those who love The Changing Light at Sandover - and this work is, though more than worthy in its own right, ultimately intended and most valuable for those who have read or wish to read Sandover) translates his non-egotistical love of the experience and metamorphosis of the self into a selflessly shared region for his reader to explore, guided by the gentlest of hands. "A Different Person" dispenses with a distinction from his poetry. Indeed, I found myself supplying the lines with hidden rhymes, Merrill's voice and its shifting tones of surprise, glee, facility followed by grave discovery, so on. But perhaps unique to our experience is the sense that at a remove from poetic form, the metaphors, images and dramatis personae behave at once with the force we permit in poetry (and tend to ignore as flourishes when reading a biography), and the weight of that which irrevocably occured and influenced a man's life, about which we care deeply. We cannot help but be reminded that we are in a sense writing ourselves, hoping that the nuances of our self-reflection can make good of our experience, as Merrill does of his life, which like the lightening flashes of Oujia inspiration, "dwells all along in a manner of speaking."

Additionally, for those interested in either critical analysis of Merrill's work or simply improving their familiarity with his oeuvre, "A Different Person" offers numerous insights into Merrill's poetics, as in his hope, expressed towards the end of the memoir, for the "perpetual freshening of human language" through slang, dance or Astrophysics.

Nor should it go without mention that Merrill's numerous acquantainces, flings, soirees and hesitant appraisals of this whole world delight throughout. And the prose (if it can be so called) is of course masterful - fluid and deep.

Only fittingly - Ad plures ire, JM

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Hindsight Can Be As Complicated As Youth, February 11, 2011

By 

disco75 "disco75" (State College, PA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Different Person: A Memoir (Paperback)

This is a reminiscence of the author's apres-school expedition to post-War Europe around 1950. He presents related but separate European essays. In each, he first tells of a youthful exchange, reminiscing in it to a childhood experience, then adds a coda to each essay like John Walton, reflecting on the meaning of it all.

Merrill certainly possesses the capacity for self-reflection, contemplation, and language to attain his goal-- disentangling his daily psychoanalytic sessions in Europe from his acting-out of subconscious urges with lovers and parents. He does not achieve the goal in this volume. He makes some self-deprecating statements as both youth and mature commentator suggesting perspective; his repeated fascination with naming celebrities in his midst suggests continuing egoism and his somber navel-gazing at his internalized father, mother, inner child, and imaginary spouse can exhaust: "what I dream of ...is a steadying male presence who, finding in me elements of both mate and child, would bind himself to me sexually for a while."

His highly detailed self-portraits in each essay are impressively thorough but the failure to adequately differentiate his lovers' personalities and his providing 3, 4, and 5 titles for each essay suggest muddled thinking. He gains fascinating mileage from his favorite metaphor for life, the opera, but this also reflects his penchant for purple prose. Both insight and over-statement can be contained in a single sentence: an opera imparts "the sense, all evening, of sheltered communion and psychodrama" but he unfortunately goes too far, rhapsodizing the "dimming of the pineal baubles at the auditorium's inner zenith." This book shows how tricky it is for even the talented to write about psychoanalysis, much as it is to write about dreams in REM, in ways that are engaging to other people.