Try 3: Merrill/Big Books

[Eric Alan Weinstein, Centre For English Studies, University Of London]

   ( I do apologize if this has been sent and recieved earlier;
but the message keeps being returned to me entirely blank.
Perhaps the internet litcrit god is trying to tell me something.)  

	MERRILL:  "Pynchon's enthralling.  He's ten times brighter than I 
>am, yet I can recognize, in his centripetal paranoia, a lot of the same 
>energy -- the same quality of energy -- that shaped the trilogy.  We've 
>both made spider webs on a rather grand scale.  Something fairly sinister 
>is sitting at the heart of his.  Is that because he knows things I 
>don't?  Or purely a matter of temperament?  I'm not sure I want those 
>questions answered."
>	This passage comes from RECITATIVE, a collection of prose by 
>James Merrill, an American poet who died this spring.  THE CHANGING LIGHT 
>AT SANDOVER, his masterpiece, rivals the best of Pynchon, and I recommend 
>it to anyone who likes Big Books.
>
>					Andrew Walser
>					University of Illinois-Chicago
>

   Thank you for this titbit Andrew. I'm not sure RECITATIVE  has
been published here yet, but I'm fond of Merrill, especially
FROM THE FIRST NINE, and look forward to this new, last prose.
Helen Vendler had some good, interesting things to say about Merrill 
during some lectures she gave here a few months back She is a critic
I very much enjoy. I would like to read her on Pynchon, but she 
stays closer to poetry than to the novel. I think I may have read 
something by Harold Bloom, who is a great fan of both Pynchon and
Merrill, which pertained to both writers. Perhaps I'll try to dig it up.

    Isn't it strange, by the way, that Merrill, who has gone to such 
strange lengths to get "those questions answered," who is rather 
a fearless poet, (unafraid even of sillyness---quite a feat, really)
 should demure exactly where he does, on a question of 
writerly temprament? Also, this "web" troupe: I get a sense
that Merrill may be portraying his (poetic) web as being the 
inheritor of that of the Whitmanian spider, while perhaps seeing 
Pynchon's web as a decendant of Dickens' darker prose webs
 in Bleak House (another BIG BOOK). I wonder, however, if 
Merrill's webs might not themselves be, quite often, more 
Dickensian (or even Kafka-esque) than Whitmanian.

     Perhaps I have gone too far?  


Eric Weinstein
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk