conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Collected Novels and Plays about Following, Collected, Poems with the genre: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Following the widely celebrated "Collected Poems, this second volume in the series of the author's works brings us the author as novelist and playwright. Just as in his poems we come upon prose pieces, dramatic dialogue, and even a short play in verse, in his novels and plays we find the rhythms of his poetry reflected and given new form. <BR>the author's first novel, "The Seraglio, is a daring "roman a clef derived in large part from his early life as the cosmopolitan son of Charles the author, one of America's most famous twentieth-century financiers. Written in a highly refined prose that owes something to Henry James, the book is a compelling portrait of the luxury and treachery swirling around the Southampton beach house of an irrepressible family patriarch, with his many mistresses and ex-mistresses in attendance, told from the point of view of his lively but troubled son. At the other end of the narrative spectrum we find "The (Diblos) Notebook, an experimental novel in which a young American's adventures on a Greek island are deconstructed and assembled into a tentative fiction before our eyes. the author's plays, including the one-act comedy of manners "The Bait and the Chekhovian" The Immortal Husband--a reinvention of the myth of Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth--are also fresh turns on his characteristic themes: home and travel, reality and artifice, simplicity and complication. And, for the first time in print, here is the author's short play "The Birthday, a fledgling effort written in 1947 and a fascinating window onto the concern with spiritual communication and the otherwordly that would later blossom into his great epic," The Changing Light atSandover. <P>"From the Hardcover edition.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: <P>"From the Hardcover edition. Just as in his poems we come upon prose pieces, dramatic dialogue, and even a short play in verse, in his novels and plays we find the rhythms of his poetry reflected and given new form. <BR>the author's first novel, "The Seraglio, is a daring "roman a clef derived in large part from his early life as the cosmopolitan son of Charles the author, one of America's most famous twentieth-century financiers. Written in a highly refined prose that owes something to Henry James, the book is a compelling portrait of the luxury and treachery swirling around the Southampton beach house of an irrepressible family patriarch, with his many mistresses and ex-mistresses in attendance, told from the point of view of his lively but troubled son. At the other end of the narrative spectrum we find "The (Diblos) Notebook, an experimental novel in which a young American's adventures on a Greek island are deconstructed and assembled into a tentative fiction before our eyes. the author's plays, including the one-act comedy of manners "The Bait and the Chekhovian" The Immortal Husband--a reinvention of the myth of Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth--are also fresh turns on his characteristic themes: home and travel, reality and artifice, simplicity and complication. And, for the first time in print, here is the author's short play "The Birthday, a fledgling effort written in 1947 and a fascinating window onto the concern with spiritual communication and the otherwordly that would later blossom into his great epic," The Changing Light atSandover.Following the widely celebrated "Collected Poems, this second volume in the series of the author's works brings us the author as novelist and playwright.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'Collected Novels and Plays
  L'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Collected Novels and Plays
  L. is funny enough, if less useful. I've sat beside her both nights at Epidauros. She watched the plays with a concentration I'd have thought impossible to muster out of doors. The more glorious the natural setting, the less I care for the human figure. At Epidauros it was like a ballet of fleas on a round, lamplit table. When the gods finally came, I wanted them to be 40 feet tall.
  Orestes might reply: I refuse to believe that. The tensions within man's soul, within society, must effect the miracle.
  Lucine's attentiveness. The unfolding story must have come as a surprise. When she gathered that Orestes was going to kill his mother, she gave a short gasp, her eyes were sparkling with tears. She impressed me as belonging there, her short curls & clenched hands, uncreasable white dress knotted at the shoulder, there under the rising moon. She was in a sense far more Greek than the N.'s.
  A car drove us from the theatre to Nauplion where the caïque was already moored. Town jammed. 100's of torches streaming along jetties & up hillsides in honor of the drama festival. We sat at an outdoor taverna. Mr N. thought of going into the kitchen to order our food. L. accompanied him.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I had reached the hilltop with its white chapel, door & window sliced out of unbaked meringue, a baby's confection—yet wholly itself, an innocent, arbitrary shape. I sat in the white shade, sweating, looking back. The wind blew. There below, at different points round the lagoon, were all my landmarks. I felt light & happy, & at rest.
  I let the day's events play themselves once more in my head. As they did, I had a sense of other, less personal elements, beauty, joy, truth, splendor—things ideas all whose ebbing over the years had been so gradual that I'd never registered it—flowing back now to their place at the heart of the scene, pure & compelling. In their light, Byron himself seemed not so much a spiteful neurotic as a proud
  B. himself, in their light, stood forth in dark, glowing colors, velvet & gold braid, & dagger handle flashing—a costume from the vendetta country of Crete or the Mani. Banked like a coal, his pride had burst into flame at last. He raised
  In my head he raised his beautiful clenched hand. The riding crop descended, once, twice, again, upon my
  Had anyone discovered me up there, I would have been caught in flagrante with a myth-making apparatus every bit as vigorous as O.'s & probably a trifle more depraved. I come back today to how little I cared for him, how much for the idea of him.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: You've talked all day—less for my enlightenment than for your own pleasure. I'm not even allowed to comment upon what you say.
  James Merrill was born in New York City on March 3, 1926, the son of the financier and philanthropist Charles E. Merrill, one of the founders of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch & Co., and his second wife, Hellen Ingram. Merrill, who attended St. Bernard's School, was raised in Manhattan and Southampton, Long Island, where his family had a country house that was designed by Stanford White, and in Palm Beach, Florida. His parents divorced in 1939, and the reverberations of the "broken home" can be heard throughout his poetry. After attending the Lawrenceville School, Merrill enrolled at Amherst College, his father's alma mater, took a year off to serve in the army, and graduated summa cum laude with the class of 1947. He taught at Bard College in 1948-1949 and although he fought shy of academe in the following years he did accept short appointments at Amherst, the University of Wisconsin, Washington University, and Yale University. In 1954 he moved with his companion, David Jackson, a writer and painter, to a house in Stonington, Connecticut, which is still maintained by Stonington Village and houses an artist-in-residence every year.
  In 1957 Merrill and Jackson undertook a trip around the world, and for two decades beginning in 1964 they spent a part of each year in Greece. They owned a house in Athens at the foot of Mt. Lycabettus and were famous among the local literati for the terrace parties they threw. Beginning in 1979 Merrill spent winters in Key West, Florida, where he and Jackson acquired another house. Key West was a place he had an affinity for partly because it had previously attracted two of his favorite poets, Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, the latter his close friend for decades. Merrill, a gifted linguist and a lover of different cultures, always traveled widely, and the displacements and discoveries of his travels, along with the routines of his life in his different homes, are the stuff of many of his poems. He died away from home, in Tucson, Arizona, on February 6, 1995.