Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

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Alison Lurie’s memoir of her two friends—the deceased poet James Merrill and his partner, David Jackson—is particularly effective when it describes physical locations. From the couple’s farmhouse in Amherst, Massachusetts, to their exotically furnished homes in Connecticut, Athens, and Key West, Lurie’s prose is never quite as evocative as when she is describing the cushion on a chair or sunlight streaming through the living room window. The vivid, concrete detail of these passages is strikingly at odds with the subject of the book: Merrill and Jackson’s twenty-year long consultation with a spirit world through an Ouija board.

James Merrill is best known for a trilogy of epic poems, published between 1976 and 1980, which arose from the sessions with the Ouija board. Published as a collection under the title The Changing Light at Sandover, Merrill’s own poetry is interspersed with many of the messages he and Jackson received through their spirit guide, Ephraim. Lurie’s memoir is less concerned with Merrill’s literary achievement, however, than with the question of why two very rich and brilliant men spent more than two decades transcribing messages received from this dubious occult source.

The book suggests how two discontented people became consumed by their dependence on one another and an over-reliance on their imaginations. Lurie hypothesizes that Merrill and Jackson turned to the Ouija board when their relationship began to fall apart. She postulates that their disaffection resulted, in part, from their fabulous wealth and the growing gap between Merrill’s literary success and Jackson’s stalled writing career. Their numerous trips around the world eventually lost their thrill, and in the long Athens afternoons, Merrill and Jackson increasingly turned to Ephraim and the Ouija board as a world more vivid than the tiresome game their real lives had become.

Lurie has little sympathy for idea that her friends were really in touch with spirits. She believes that sometimes Merrill and Jackson produced Ephraim’s messages out of their own unconscious, and sometimes Jackson purposefully manipulated the pointer on the Ouija board. Her arguments are convincing. She asks, for example, whether it could have been a coincidence that Jackson and Merrill, who knew nothing about any religion other than Christianity, would be told by the spirits that Christianity was the religion preferred by God? Or that the spirits would highlight poetry and music, the arts in which Merrill and Jackson were trained, as the highest achievements of humanity?

Indeed it is difficult to dismiss the possibility that at least some of the board’s messages results from Jackson’s attempt to maintain his relationship with Merrill. When Merrill became a successful writer, he suddenly had opportunities Jackson didn’t, including offers from young men wanting to become his lover. Furthermore, Lurie argues, Jackson may well have seen the Ouija board sessions as a creative collaboration, a way to see his writing in print, since Merrill was turning the dialogues with the spirits, day by day, into epic poetry.

But a good hypothesis is not necessarily the truth when its subject is human beings. Lurie tells us that for significant parts of the time during which Merrill and Jackson were using the board, her contact with them was intermittent. Moreover she disapproved of their activity, which she found obsessive and ultimately silly when conducted by two highly educated men. Her disapproval led Merrill and Jackson to avoid talking about the Ouija board in her presence.

A strange paradox thus arises in this book about people’s inability to provide loved ones with real companionship. If Merrill and Jackson could not help each other to make peace in their lives—their relationship continued its painful demise even after they finished with the Ouija board—presumably it was because they did not quite understand one another. (Lurie never suggests that there was any malice between Merrill and Jackson, who seem mostly to have grown apart). The portrait of these two men begs the question of whether any two people can understand each other. If it is not possible, which seems to be Lurie’s claim, then how can she herself presume to understand the dynamics of the relationship between her two friends? Her best guess, which this book represents, is probably a decent sketch of what happened, but the lingering doubts remain to pose haunting questions.

Though the evocation of place and melancholy in Familiar Spirits is very strong, many of the nitty-gritty aspects of Lurie’s prose are surprisingly awkward. She mentions twice that Merrill transformed himself from a liability in the kitchen to an accomplished chef, also twice that he became “panicky” (she uses that word both times) when confronted with practical problems like faulty wiring that shoots sparks. The repetition is strange, as though the chapters of the book were written as separate vignettes and her editor somehow missed the redundant phrases.

Some of Lurie’s metaphors are so unwieldy as to break the flow of her prose. She says Jackson kept his wit “under his hat (most often a worn canvas one with a wide floppy brim).” Perhaps the cliché would have been less noteworthy if it had not followed the awkwardly vague description of Jackson as someone who had “grown up in the West, and had the kind of casual, laid-back, wide-open-spaces manner and slow cowboy drawl characteristic of the region.” Most places in the “West” don’t breed cowboy drawls. Lurie falls into a careless pretension by using such a description.

It may be, however, that great authors are allowed some leeway when they work on pet projects, and Alison Lurie is considered such an author. Her best known work is probably The War Between the Tates, and her novel Foreign Affairs won the Pulitzer prize in 1985. She is also something of an expert on children’s literature. In reading Familiar Spirits her pedigree is important. Without understanding her stature as an author it would be very tempting to dismiss Familiar Spirits as snotty. How else to explain the many passages in which she talks about her failing marriage or her inclusion of her impressions of Elizabeth Bishop or Truman Capote? Those who know she is may be interested in her life and her character assessments because they shed light on her novels and her peers. Those who aren’t may choose to grit their teeth and try to make it through. The evocation of mood and character in Familiar Spirits make it worth wading through a little conceit.