Notes on the Manuscripts

James Merrill first published “The Broken Home,” a sequence of seven sonnets, in The New Yorker for October 30, 1965. It then appeared in Nights and Days (1966), which won the National Book Award. Drafts of the poem in journals and manuscripts are held at Washington University Libraries, Special Collections. The earliest drafts appear in Merrill's journal of March 12, 1963 to January 19, 1964.

The manuscripts for "The Broken Home" on this site appear as found in the Merrill archive at Washington University. According to the late John Hodge, who was the curator of modern literature manuscripts when the manuscripts were cataloged, they were placed in this order by the author. There are 41 manuscript pages, with writing on the versos of 8 pages, for a total of 49 pages.

The manuscript pages may be divided into five groups.

Group One (1-7, with 4 versos)
begins with a page dated 18 March of three poems that show the development of a sequence that is not yet in sonnet form. Manuscript 3 is a draft of what became the central poem of the finished sequence about Merrill's visit to his mother's bedroom with his Irish Setter, Michael.

Group Two (8-13, with 1 verso) contains a draft of the sequence's opening, "Crossing the street," with the notation on the top right: "For the Broken Home." Manuscript 9 is a handwritten draft of the poem about the narrator's failed attempt to grow an avocado plant that is written on the back of a letter of April 26, 1964 from Holly Stephenson (her married name at the time), the daughter of Wallace Stevens. Manuscript 12 contains an ink sketch that appears to be a self-portrait of Merrill as an overweight adolescent around the time of his parents' separation and divorce. In a A Different Person, Merrill wrote of himself c. 1950: "Until recently I've been an overweight, untidy adolescent" (5). Robin Magowan, Merrill's nephew, recalled that Merrill’s father “made Jimmy a pawn in a custodial battle with his ‘unfit mother.' . . . By the time he was sixteen he was a two-hundred-pound little whale” (Memoirs of a Minotaur: From Merrill Lynch to Patty Hearst to Poetry. Ashland, Oregon: Story Line Press, 1999, 104). Frederick Buechner described Merrill when at Lawrenceville prep school as “Fat, effeminate, bespectacled, with braces on his teeth, and nicknamed Toots . . . ” (The Eyes of the Heart, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1999, 44). Manuscript 13B Verso opens with the lines, “Ever that Everest / Among Concepts,” which are the opening words of Merrill’s poem “Time” (Collected Poems 192-94)

Group Three (14-23, with two versos).
Written at the top of Manuscript 19 are draft titles for the sequence: "PARTS PIECES OF THE BROKEN HOME," "SOUTHAMPTON PIECES," "SELF PORTRAIT WITH PARENTS," "FRAGMENTS OF THE BROKEN HOME," "From the Broken Home." Written at the top right is "for Doris & Charles." Doris is Merrill's half-sister Doris Merrill Magowan (1914-2001) and Charles his half-brother, Charles Edward Merrill, Jr. (1920-).

Group Four (24-28)
contains 3 pages that give the titles of 6 poems in the sequence. Manuscript 24 gives the titles as "1. Crossing the street 2. When my parents 3. Father 4. Tonight 5. One afternoon 6. A child, a red dog." Manuscript 25 lists "1. Crossing the street 2. When my parents were children 3. Father 4. Mother 5. Tonight they have stepped 6. A child, a red dog." Manuscript 26 has "1. Street 2. Father 3. Mother 4. When my parents 5. Tonight 6. Child." The avocado poem of Manuscript 9 is missing from these lists.

Group Five (29-41, with one verso)
contains typescripts of which only Manuscript 31 has revisions.