Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson

by Alison Lurie

Book Overview

Alison Lurie, one of America's greatest novelists, has written a loving memoir of world-famous poet James Merrill and his longtime partner David Jackson. Drawing on her forty-year friendship with Merrill and Jackson, Lurie reveals the couple's deep involvement with ghosts, gods, and spirits, with whom they communicated through a Ouija board. Among the results of their intense twenty-year preoccupation with the occult is the brilliant book-length...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0142000450
• ISBN13: 9780142000458
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 7.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

eerie cautionary tale

This is a beautifully written long view of the lives of James Merrill, poet, and his lover and uncredited collaborator David Jackson. They dabbled through the ouija board in contact with unseen spirits that supposedly provided the material for Merrill's largest poetic works. The cost to both men of this eerie devotion is trenchantly narrated by Alison Lurie, their friend of many years. The charge that Ms. Lurie is using her connection to Merrill to enhance her own reputation is absurd, as she is far more well known in general than Merrill.

Very gossipy little book. Yet fascinating and embarassing.

In spite of the fact that the author reveals a bit too much of herself in this book (a fact which makes you like and then dislike her sometimes) she does weave an interesting theory about the inner workings of Merrill and Jackson's minds. I didn't feel she presented these men dishonestly, though some fans of Merrill's obviously resented the fact that their god was made to appear as a mere mortal---and a somewhat foolish one at that. Juicy, gossipy, lewd, audacious at times, you had to imagine she was indeed capitalizing somewhat on her friendship with Merrill because she did not wait for her friend David Jackson to die before she began revealing what a mess he had become. Why? If she were afraid SHE would die without having a chance to add her two cents she could have written the book, but not published it until after Jackson's real death. I guess it's hard to quarrel with her motives as I read it in one sitting, lapping up all the strange, weird revelations about these men. My respect for them was not diminished by her lurid details of their intimate life. Nothing in Key West is ever ordinary... What was most fascinating about the book though was the fact that Lurie herself became an equal part of the mystery. Was she obsessed with these men? Secretly in love with Jackson? Jealous of them? Twice she had to say that "they were rich and could buy anything they wanted". Twice! Sadly, Lurie never did manage to do what she wanted---to comprehend these men. This goal never got quite satisfied, so in the end the reader of this book is not quite satisfied. It is an important memoir though because it is the ONLY one right now offering any insight into Merrill, the man and the poet. I think you have to accept the book for exactly what it is, one woman's perspective about two men she was close to---but not close enough to truly understand them. It was an honest attempt on Lurie's part and a courageous one even and it did reveal Lurie's writing talent. For better or worse, she certainly did create a very vivid yet terrifying tale about two utterly amazing lives.

Alison Lurie celebrates friendship.

Alison Lurie celebrates friendship in her memoir of James Merrill, poet, and David Jackson. Her account covers the career trajectories of the two men. She describes their adventures with unknown spirits and the subsequent work product in the Sandover poems. Her description of the lives of the two and the houses they occupied in Key West are particularly alluring. She makes the outcomes of drug and alcohol abuse and an interest in the rough trade on the one hand, and an increasing diffidence and squeamishness on the part of Merrill on the other hand comprehensible and not at all unusual in that individual characters do undergo changes in the course of a span of life.

Friendship's Ends

A memoir is not a biography, as Lurie reminds us at the beginning of her book. One should be grateful for the revelations that are given, and there are many. Perhaps one should be cheered by seeing the sort of defensiveness a beloved author can arouse, but if the reviewers picked up the book they presumably wanted to "get inside," and that is where Lurie takes us. Who wants the sugar-coated anyway? Lurie opens a door on a rather Gothic menage, a very energized and energizing union, which dilapidated all too predictably into disunion and the cliched gay search for May-December love on the Greek travel plan. She writes with candor, but acknowledges the many missing spaces, temporal and informational lacunae, in her decades of friendship with these fellow authors. Her critical exegesis of the poetry is quite good for a novelist unpracticed in such analysis, and she raises some fair, troubling questions about the content of "Sandover." The Ouija board seemingly acted as a tap for the unconscious thoughts and wishes of its authors, and we find some of these messages, not all of which are palatable, give one insight into the infrastructure of creative sensibility. Ugliness and egotism are part and parcel. Overall, Merrill and Jackson are depicted as serious, generous artists who immeasurably enriched the lives of those around them. Of course, there are faults too, some of them egregious. Several reviewers acknowledge--rather ungraciously--the veracity of Lurie's claim that Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover" was produced jointly by Merrill and Jackson, via their rather Dantean peregrinations on the Ouija board. I would ask the Merrill idolators this: if J.M. himself could acknowledge David Jackson as co-creator of "Sandover" in subsequent interviews, why could he not put his lifelong lover's name on the spine of the Pulitzer-winning volume? The charges in other reviews that Lurie is magnifying her own reputation through her friendship with Merrill are shallow and spurious; there is not a single self-aggrandizing sentence in the entire volume, and that is a first for the many memoirs I have read. If anything, Lurie is self-deprecating and respectful of the rigors and liabilities of the artistic life. This book is not the typical memoir but a serious and respectful study of two artistic souls locked in a Narcissus-embrace which ended--as it must--with the mirror permanently distorted.

encourages further reading of Merrill and Lurie

Familiar Spirits is a very good, quick read. James Merrill and David Jackson's romantic relationship is lifted up with all its successes and failures.The book, in addition to being a memoir of a friendship, seems to be a warning buoy in at least a couple of areas. First, by employing counter-examples, it seems to suggest to the reader to tend regularly to one's romantic relationship, and to work through conflicts as they arise. Second, it warns those interested in the supernatural to recognize how interactions with "the invisible world" can drain one's energy and attention from the visible world.It is interesting that Lurie spends a good deal of time offering literary criticism and interpretation on Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover. There is a good case made that David Jackson is the uncredited co-author of Sandover. Lurie suggests that helping to shape Sandover was Jackson's greatest literary accomplishment.I am hoping that this memoir will encourage a Merrill biography. It would be great to get a full account of Merrill's life, along with some pictures of him and of the people most important to him.Familiar Spirits caused me to want to read Merrill, with whom I was previously unacquainted. My next stop will be The Changing Light at Sandover. I also fell in love with Alison Lurie's thoughtful and easy writing style, and have begun to read her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Foreign Affairs.