James Merrill (1926-1995) won the Pulitzer for his book "Divine Comedies"
My first job in publishing was working as a writer at a pro-cycling magazine in Boulder called VeloNews for James Merrill’s nephew Felix. The following excerpt from James Merrill’s 1993 memoir A Different Person is about Felix’s father Robin, whom I met on several occasions:
“A boy of fourteen now joined us for a weekend from his Swiss boarding school: Robin Magowan, my half-sister’s son . . . and my father’s oldest grandchild. Robin was only ten years my junior. I knew in my bones how the pressure of upbringing (tennis lessons, languages, the dress codes of Southampton) had told upon him. Naturally left-handed, he’d been ‘encouraged’ to conform to a dextral world, a shift that marred his diction — so faintly, however, that it sounded like a throwback to his father’s Scotch ancestry. ‘I was so excited,’ he told us on arriving at the hotel. ‘I couldna eat breakfast on the train.’ Like my father and me, Robin was traveling equipped with the names of those tailors and restaurants without visiting which, in his parents’ view, no Roman holiday was thinkable. At his shy suggestion we booked a table for that evening at Alfredo’s where the fettuccini were stirred by the proprietor with a fork and spoon of solid gold . . . . Halfway through a story, my father, bent over, scarlet, is coughing up his dental bridge into the celebrated noodles. (It occurs to me that he’s had one drink too many, yet this cannot be. Liquor makes us charming, witty, accessible, not — ) In no time we are back at the hotel, and Miss Beltrami, dressed for her ruined evening, is receiving instructions from Dr. Simeons. It isn’t a heart attack, he says, putting away the stethoscope and hypodermic kit, just a close shave; a couple of days in bed, some further precautions . . .
So Robin ate his first Roman dinner off a table on wheels in my room (and Neddy’s) at the Grand Hotel. The couch had been made up into a bed, but he wasn’t sleepy. He was frightened — was Grandpa going to die? I just happened to have with me some chapters of a novel I’d begun in New York, in whose prophetic opening scene the hero’s invalid father, attended by a needle-brandishing nurse, weathers a crisis similar to the one subsiding next door . . . . I put my pages into his hands. I must have known already that he was susceptible to words. Tonight, however, it would dawn upon him that actual people, people he knew, could be written about, and not merely in the local paper’s society column but in real books. . . .
Not long ago Robin gave me a fat autobiographical typescript to read. Here I found the story of his being shown, in our Roman hotel, pages from my novel — an incident otherwise forgotten. Writing more or less overtly about his life became my nephew’s calling. Ever since that night? I can almost think so. Through the years I’ve watched him, from woman to woman, in Greek taverns, in Zen gardens, his agile frame clothed vividly as a bird’s, younger than his children, his script still cramped as a boy’s, taking patient, at time hallucinated, note. Poems, annals of bicycling, travels to Madagascar or Turkestan. The things one can be held answerable for . . .”
The Merrill Lynch bull in New York City's financial district
Merrill Lynch
In this segment, James Merrill reflects on what it was like being the son of Charles E. Merrill, founding partner of Merrill Lynch:
“To be the son of the founder of the world’s largest brokerage firms meant, among many comforts and conveniences, being liable to hear the person I was meeting for the first time say, ‘Merrill? Not so fast — any relation . . . ?’ and having to decide in a split second whether my cross-examiner was something I could fool by pretending to go along with the joke (‘Oh sure!’) or whether I must hang my head and confess. With members of the world I grew up in, it cost nothing to tell the truth. Their sense of how to live with neither mine nor, I suspected, my father’s, who, as the son of a crusty but credit-extending doctor in Green Cove Springs, had taken jobs to get through college and never left a room without switching off the lights. ‘Thank goodness I come from poor parents,’ I once said, to the hilarity of my companions. But I meant that my parents’ values had been formed long before they had money. Finally there was a world teeming with people who’d never heard of my father or the Firm, people like the girl from the hospital corridor or the models of Tsarouchis, and I yearned to know them, to be mistaken by them for their own kind. In these fantasies it had yet to strike me that my unlikeliness to their own kind was precisely what made them look twice at me. I went on trusting that some yet-to-be-achieved incognito would save me from exposure until — faint as the chances were — I should have ‘made a name for myself.’
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