The (Diblos) Notebook

Best known as a poet, James Merrill is also an accomplished novelist, and in The (Diblos) Notebook artfully lays bare the process of writing a novel. A young American writer keeps a notebook that records at one and the same time a series of events on the Greek island of Diblos in which he is deeply involved, and his attempts to transform these events into a novel. Everything that might be found in such a notebook is used here with great cunning: the false starts that end in the middle of a thought; the endless revisions, canceled out in the search for the right word or phrase; the many approaches and backtrackings as the writer seeks an entrance to the materials through several possible doors; the musings on how the material is to be treated; and the wrestlings with the problem of appearance and assumed reality. The author has written an afterword for this new edition of his 1965 novel.

James Merrill (1926-1995) was renowned for the elegance and humane complexity of his work, and is considered the leading lyric poet of his generation. His travels around the world--with their displacements and discoveries--are the subject of many of his poems, but at heart he was an autobiographical poet whose "chronicles of love and loss" tracked the heart as poignantly as a poet ever has. In his huge epic poem on occult themes, in his enthralling narrative poems, or in his small exquisite lyrics, he wrote in a distinctively urbane and engaging voice that made his career one of the wonders of contemporary poetry.