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Judith Moffett Judith Moffett, who "...brought a strong moral idealism, sensitivity to the perspective of gay men, and an appetite for literature."
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Strato Mouflouzelis Strato Mouflouzelis, "...the bittersweet muse of [James Merrill's] middle years..."
See also "Days of 1964" manuscripts, November 17, 1964 letter to Daryl Hine and "Violent Pastoral" broadside.
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Maria Mitsotaki and James Merrill Maria Mitsotaki and James Merrill. Merrill's face is bound as a result of Bell's Palsy, an episode recounted in "The Thousand and Second Night" (see also the manuscript pages for that poem).
"[Maria] was pert, pretty, small and sweet...and able to choose her friends. [Jimmy] adopted her as a mock mother, making himself small in her presence, as if he were her boy, her puppet."
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Leila "Zelly" Howard Leila "Zelly" Howard, James Merrill's beloved governess, with whom he remained close until her death in 1977.
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James Merrill and Kimon Friar James Merrill and Kimon Friar, Merrill's Amherst teacher and lover. "Short, wiry, and dark, he was a high-minded, charismatic man of letters and an unabashed self-promoter."
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Frederick Buechner Frederick Buechner, James Merrill's good friend from Lawrenceville, hanging from tree. "Freddy was an enthusiastic reader and a talented writer, with a confident, energetic mind that reveled in words and stories."
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An Evening at Sandover Draft Fifteen pages (out of sixty total) of a corrected typescript draft of An Evening at Sandover, Merrill's first stage adaptation of the Ouija board epic, performed as part of the revived Poets' Theatre at Hasty Pudding theater at Harvard. Peter Hooten worked with Merrill on both a stage and video adaptation, to very mixed results.
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James Merrill letter to Irma Brandeis James Merrill letter to Irma Brandeis explaining Psyche's realization in "From the Cupola," the drafts of which he had been sending to her (see also "From the Cupola" draft page).
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James Merrill as a boy on slide James Merrill as a boy on a slide. "As a child, Jimmy was always attended by someone...So it's striking that, as an adult, he remembered his childhood as painfully lonely...the loneliness of a young mind engaged with private thoughts of mortality, puppets, and romantic legends...Jimmy was essentially an only child."
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James Merrill as a baby James Merrill as a baby with his parents, Charles and Hellen. After three weeks in the hospital, Hellen recorded James's weight weekly, through December.
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"The Book of Ephraim," Section P Draft pages from Section P, which is an important section about power and apocalypse that foreshadows the revelations in Mirabell: Book of Numbers and Scripts for the Pageant.
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"The Book of Ephraim," Section A Draft pages of "The Book of Ephraim" Section A, with corrections to the beginning, which addresses James Merrill's uncertainty over the format in which to tell this story. Claude Fredericks had convinced him it had to be in verse.
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The Yellow Pages, cover mock-up The Yellow Pages cover mock-up for the paperback edition of this limited edition volume, which compiled uncollected poems composed between 1946 and 1971. The book was published in cloth (50 copies) and paperback editions (750-800 copies) by Temple Bar Bookshop in Cambridge, MA in 1974.
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The Seraglio notes Notes on an alternative to the castration scene in James Merrill's "strange coming-of-age" novel.
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The Immortal Husband A script for James Merrill's play, "The Immortal Husband," an update of the classical myth of Aurora and Tithonus. Included here are twenty of a total sixty-five manuscript pages.
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"Lost '70s Novel" These are the only surviving remnants of James Merrill's attempted Ouija board novel, in a folder labeled "Lost 70's Novel," in Merrill's hand. After losing two different prose drafts of the novel, he decided to write a verse narrative instead, which became "The Book of Ephraim."
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"Stonington Novel" fragment This fragment is the start of a never-completed novel about James Merrill's and David Jackson's evolving relationship with Stonington and each other.
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National Book Award Acceptance Speech National Book Award Acceptance Speech for Merrill's first NBA, for Nights and Days. There was a sideshow at that year's ceremony, with a large group in the audience walking out in protest of the Vietnam war when Hubert Humphrey spoke.
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“A la Recherche du temps perdu: Impressionism in Literature” “A la Recherche du temps perdu: Impressionism in Literature” was James Merrill's senior thesis on Proust from Amherst, 1946. At 106 pages, it is by far Merrill's longest piece of literary criticism and his most scholarly production. Merrill discovered Proust as a freshman and he immediately became an obsession. Proust's themes of memory and turning one's life into art would directly inspire Merrill's entire poetic oeuvre. Included here are the first seventeen pages.
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"Tony: Ending the Life" "Tony: Ending the Life," published in A Scattering of Salts, is an "expansive elegy for his friend" (Tony Parigory, who died in summer 1993 of AIDS), "and (it is all but explicit) himself." Merrill had been largely silent about his AIDS diagnosis but it came out in his poetry. Included here are three of a total 61 manuscript pages.
