Unlikely Friends James Merrill and Judith Moffett

In the spring of 1967, James Merrill taught a creative writing course in poetry at the Univ. of Wisconsin. Judith Moffett was a graduate student in the course. The two connected in Madison, and in the years that followed, during which Moffett completed her degree and embarked on a teaching career, Merrill served in the role of mentor, encouraging her writing and critiquing seriously the poems she sent him. Their friendship--conducted mainly through letters, as they were seldom in the same location--developed and deepened. From the start Moffett had found her mentor's poetry uniquely mesmerizing. She reviewed his books as they appeared, and a literary-critical study of his work--James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry--was published in 1984 by Columbia University Press. And through it all they wrote to each other. Merrill, one of the last great correspondents to write on paper, sent Moffett hundreds of letters, including many that covered his years at work on his Ouija board trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover. Unlikely Friends quotes extensively from these letters--letters which comprise a treasure trove of insight into Merrill's thinking and poetic practice. Scholars and critics will find them fascinating.Other readers may be engaged with the mysterious psychological side of their story. For the course of the relationship was complicated, sometimes tortuous, owing to the fact that almost at once Moffett's feelings about the gay poet approached obsession. Both found her feelings difficult to deal with, and it would be long years before the driving force behind the strange attraction became clear and allowed the obsessive quality to fade out of the friendship. But despite the awkwardness and tension which that obsession created between them for so long, Merrill remained faithful in his support of Moffett's work and career in poetry. Moreover, he continued to keep faith after she had left poetry for science fiction. Through all its ups and downs, their unlikely friendship endured until Merrill's death in 1995.