The (Diblos) Notebook

by James Merrill

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 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.

Genres: Fiction, American

Paperback

First published March 1, 1965

About the author

James Ingram Merrill was born on March 3, 1926, and died on February 6, 1995. From the mid-1950s on, he lived in Stonington, Connecticut, and for extended periods he also had houses in Athens and Key West. From The Black Swan (1946) through A Scattering of Salts (1995), he wrote twelve books of poems, ten of them published in trade editions, as well as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). He also published two plays, The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1960); two novels, The Seraglio (1957, reissued in 1987) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965, reissued 1994); a book of essays, interviews, and reviews, Recitative (1986); and a memoir, A Different Person (1993). Over the years, he was the winner of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the first Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[Karlyflower *The Vampire Ninja, Luminescent Monster & Wendigo Nerd Goddess of Canada (according to The Hulk)* · Rating 2 out of 5]

M (the other one), is for Merrill

2 Stars

I’m fairly sure this is a case of wrong book – wrong time. I’m sure when The (Diblos) Notebook was published (in 1965) it was a very "modern" and "edgy" romance story but today – 50 years later – it’s just a novel which lacks any real substance.

The first thing that really grabbed my attention was, naturally, the way it was written. Full of stuttering cut off sentences/ideas and stroked through lines (sometimes paragraphs) it just didn’t flow mentally for me. It was very jarring to read, in all honesty. I found it difficult (nay, impossible) to become invested in the story within the story here. This is a very deliberately non-linear story which I found difficult to follow much less care about.

Now I know that this story is meant to be a bold insight into the inner workings of a writer and the process of story constructing BUT what may have been original and modern at the time this was published now feels like a muffled echo of something which never comes to fruition.

The fault is in me. I wanted this story to be something it really could never be...

[Lee Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw the author read one night when I was in high school -- he was a visiting alumnus and purportedly a VIP. Everyone was encouraged to attend, very few did. I don't remember it at all except that he was a slight man reading poems. This novel showed promise at first with false starts, crossouts, lines abandoned midstream, marginalia, but once something of a story cohered, it wasn't much for me. Almost abandoned it, thinking it reminded me of a spare, loose imitation of the Proust society pages and then a second later he mentioned the Guermantes, so that earned him another fifty pages. I moved through the rest quickly, without much response. It seemed like weightless mannered mess, most likely intentionally so (a notebook, not a novel). Sort of interesting as an early metafictional/reality fiction variant, but still I couldn't help moving through it at an accelerated pace. Nothing recalled slowed me down.

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some beautiful descriptions of Greece, and a really promising premise (sort of a 'found text' writer's notebook which melds potential fiction & the writer's present experience) that fell totally flat. It fits into that A Sport & a Pastime or even Great Gatsby genre of an observer nattering, detachedly and meanderingly, about more interesting/powerful characters in scandalous situations. There's something about the way they're written that makes these books feel like a chore rather than something worthwhile: I finished them, all of them, because I felt I had to -- not because they had anything of value to offer. If I want to listen to rich people whining and being pretentious, I will walk down the street without my headphones, thanks.

[Mario Domínguez Parra · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary novel.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

A calmly experimental novel that combines extracts from a young man̕s journal with extracts from a novel that he is trying to write, and which is based closely on many of the same characters he writes about in his journal. Also, the novel includes words he crosses out and replaces with others, and often stops mid-sentence, to move on to another version, or just to do something else. The frequency of these games is fairly low, so it doesn̕t become a pain. But the bifurcation is constant, sometimes complicating, but mostly not a problem. Mainly because it̕s not the story or the characters that count really, but the process, which is a joy.

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not for me. Merrill's poetry was always a bore for me and this novel proved to be as well.