Volume 40, Number 18 · November 4, 1993
'One Life, One Writing'
By John Bayley
A Different Person: A Memoir
by James Merrill
Knopf, 271 pp., $25.00
Selected Poems: 1946–1985
by James Merrill
Knopf, 339 pp., $25.00
A literary category much more common in Europe than in America depends on its unliterary charm. The author seems to take being a writer as a purely social phenomenon, without either the trouble of a sought-for vocation or the wish to make money by writing books. He writes as he might eat good food, wear good clothes, visit the right people and the right places. Sometimes a writer like Byron or Pushkin, who half despises the medium his genius compels him to work in, makes a nostalgic gesture toward the other sort of gentlemanly life he would half prefer to be living. 'I hate a fellow who's all author,' said Byron, with feeling, longing in patrician disdain to stand apart from the inky tribe.
Review, 2691 words
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