[.ca] Familiar Spirits (ISBN 0142000450)

From Amazon.com:
Written with her characteristic grace, novelist Alison Lurie's memoir of her friendship with the poet James Merrill and his companion David Jackson offers more than reminiscences, though these are tender, frank, and perceptive. Lurie also considers the broader subjects of fame's arbitrary nature and its impact on a relationship, as well as the perils and pleasures of dabbling in the occult. When she first became close to the couple in 1954, all three were struggling young writers. But while Merrill soon became a critically respected poet, and novels like The War Between the Tates made Lurie some money as well as a reputation, Jackson remained unpublished and obscure. He was understandably frustrated, and Lurie suggests that the pair's increasing involvement in sessions on their Ouija board were partly an effort to find an outlet for Jackson's creative energies. These sessions formed the basis for Merrill's long poem "The Changing Light at Sandover" (in Lurie's estimation not the best use of his gifts), and she believes they encouraged the men to become dangerously isolated from the real world. Jackson began to drink more heavily, and his casual affairs grew more irritating to Merrill, who launched a serious relationship with a young actor whose uncritical devotion exacerbated tensions between the longtime lovers. Merrill died of AIDS in 1995; the physically and mentally debilitated Jackson, writes Lurie, "is now a ghost in Key West." Her sensitive recollections bring back the time when they were young, beautiful, and in love, with the world before them. Examining the personal and artistic cost of their decades-long engagement with the spirit world, Lurie asks the always relevant, never resolvable questions, "How much should one risk for art? What chances should one take?" --Wendy Smith

why did it have to end like this?:
The story is strongest when she is most generous to her characters and most fully shares her own story within theirs. At times, she writes out of her anger at those who hurt her friends, at them for not staying true to love and beauty, and at the world for its unhappiness. She doesn't have nearly enough distance from JM's spaghetti western svengali and DJ's young black hustlers to write about them for publication. How could two so full of love have come to such a sad end? The answer, it seems at times, is that gay marriage in our world doesn't have the structuring social context to do the work we expect from marriage. But we need to know more about her, her own loves, her children and her novels in order to speak honestly with her about the long haul. The ouija board saves the marriage by holding it together under the burden of professional success and failure. And it destroys them both. It ruins JM as a poet -- he writes a beautiful "Book of Ephraim," then two more fat, quick and unreflective books of spirit-writing, then not much else. It draws them away from friends and life into a compelling fantasy they only partly believe in, are afraid of, and that becomes gradually coarser and uglier. As she sees it, James dies bewildered and ruined, while David loses his mind and soul to the devils. She paints beautiful, vivid portraits of her friends in their youth.

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.

With friends like this...:
Admittedly I err in posting this review. After all, I didn't even become "literary" until I read James Merrill for the first time in 1992, late in his career and well after the world of letters had recognized and honored his life's work. His writing led me to Dante and Milton and eventually to a broad sweep of modern poets. It might lead you there as well. Alison Lurie, on the other hand quickly establishes her credentials in "Familiar Spirits" as both early, close friend of Merrill, and established member of his literary circle going back over forty years. Who am I to question her re-casting of the poet I know only through luminous verse and conversations with the gods, as a mere mortal? She knew the man. It was she, Lurie reminds us, whom he called, even in his sixties, to weep about a quarrel with his lover. She called him Jimmy. James Merrill's poetry seemed so often to be glancingly autobiographical... the people and places (and absences) in his life were a substrate upon which he grew some startling and wonderful poetry. But it was always only refracted autobiography. One wondered at the life itself. Yet, during his lifetime, Merrill rarely obliged with more than the slightest bits of extra-poetic reflection. When Merrill died in 1995 many readers mourned the fact that we would be offered no more glimpses of that life, which had come to illuminate our own in surprising ways. Perhaps, had he lived, his admirers would have eventually, greedily, consumed him. Instead, into the vacuum of that terminated story, came this insider view - a delightful prospect. Reading it, delight turns to dismay as Merrill is, instead, consumed here by a friend. This book is a rambling hodge-podge of disconnected anecdote and amateurish psychology. Lurie trots out sweeping theories of Merrill and Jackson's flaws while repeatedly noting that in 40-plus years of friendship, of observing the damage she documents here, she was silent. I kept wondering, "why didn't you say something to them?" She notices that in the single reference to her in "Sandover" Merrill mentions "Alison's shrewd / silence." Perhaps she neglects to wonder if Merrill's famously developed pun'ishness wasn't anticipating this shrewish and narrow 'memoir.' Lurie is almost embarrassing in her evident need for us to believe she was a key player in lives and works that she is simultaneously trashing. She hints that her own comment about the lack of prose writers in the pantheon of characters visited in Sandover might account for the "sudden appearance of Jane Austen and Dickens" in the last part of the trilogy. That coy "sudden" is emblematic of Lurie's style here. (Odd, too, that she was such a fine observer of the poem when she acknowledges that she did not ever read the final two-thirds of "Sandover" until setting out on this book). The credits do not roll the other way, though. She is deeply troubled by David Jackson's inability to get his own work published (rightly suggesting that he deserves some form of co-authorship for "Sandover") and mourns his creative decay. She cites as an example of his "intermittent" creative energy his writing of "proposals for work other people might write." One of these, "a Key West ghost story that I eventually wrote" - she hastens to assure us, "in a different version." Doubtless Merrill's relationships were as complex and reactive as life will always provide. It's sad to learn that his lifelong beloved, Jackson, is now an emphysemic and alcoholic ghost. It's instructive to consider how their 20-years-long connections to their muses at the Ouija board might represent a collaboration deserving of more examination. It's troubling to wonder at how Peter Hooten, the last love of Merrill's life, might have manipulated the ego of the poet to gain latecomer entrance to the sanctorum Lurie describes from within. But it's just plain unsettling to be led to wonder at the more complex nature of these deep and abiding relationships in Merrill's life by such a shallow and un-insightful guide. Within "Sandover" itself, Merrill refers to the story as that of "the incarnation and withdrawal of a god." For those of us whose admiration of the man's work cast a mirrored glow on the man himself, a similar withdrawal toward reality is probably a necessary salting. But for the dose of reality to be delivered in such an arch and artless way would surely have left Merrill himself wincing. Not at Lurie's accusations of his myriad blind spots when it came to love, he centered much of his writing around that mystery, but at the singularly graceless form in which they are delivered, here, decades too late. The appearance of this book becomes something of a commentary on the nature of friendship, on fame, and on the conjunction of the two. Frankly, if Lurie's was as reciprocal a friendship as she would have us believe, that, alone, raises more powerful doubts in one's mind about Merrill's ability to build relationships than any of her psychobabble. But too many, commenting more briefly thus far, have claimed the opposite - have glowed in their descriptions of Merrill as friend - for one not to conclude that Lurie drew some of her conclusions through a darker glass. The book ends with a luridly counterbalancing "afterwards", waxing eloquent about Merrill's life and work - even to the extent of including Hooten, cast throughout as gold-digger and "B" movie player, in a trio of "beautiful and gifted young men." It neatly reflects the schizophrenia of this book, or perhaps the post-prandial doubts of its author. If you know little of James Merrill's work, read his poetry first, read "Sandover", too. If, instead, you know and love his work, you are in for a strange experience if you read this book. The second star in this review exists only because the complexity of Merrill's work and life reflects light into this strange, dark little book in ways its author cannot be credited with.

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.

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.