VOICES FROM THE PAGEANT
ERIC HOFFMAN tackles James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, a vast postmodernist poem derived from sessions with a Ouija board, and asks whether this occult epic was the product of communication with the denizens of the ‘Other world’.
ERIC HOFFMAN considers the baroque strangeness of James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, a vast postmodernist poem derived from sessions with a Ouija board, and asks whether this baffling and (sometimes literally) batty occult epic was the product of poetic vanity, folie a deux or genuine communication with the uncanny inhabitants of the ‘Other World’...
SCRIBE: FALL AS DEEPLY INTO OUR METAPHORS AS U WILL.
THE ATOM, IS IT THE VERY GOD WE WORSHIP? IS IT
ONLY AT GREAT RISK PURSUED? THE ATOM, IS IT MEANING?
& IF SO WHAT BUT CHAOS LIES BEYOND IT?
“Mirabell: Book 7”
Time is a child playing a board game; the kingdom of a child.
James Merrill
Long poems are one of the major forms of modernism. Modernist poets, well aware of the poet’s marginalisation after the increase of literacy among the masses, the advent of journalism, and the rise of the novel in the 18th century, often took to the long form as a means to reclaim cultural relevance, and in so doing hearkened back to the Homeric epic. They composed allusive, ambiguous, fragmented works that reflected the disintegration of a unified culture in industrial and post-industrial society, in an attempt to tell, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, the “tale of the tribe”.
Modernism as a philosophical and literary movement has its origins in the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment positivism and its perceived over-dependence on reason – but, crucially, Modernist poets also rejected Romanticism’s reliance on clichés and linguistic archaisms, while they simultaneously evinced scepticism regarding language’s transparency in its reflection of extra-linguistic reality. The two definitive long poems of modernism are TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (1919) and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (1915-1962). Modernistinfluenced long poems were attempted by the later generation of poets who might best be described as postmodernists; one such is James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (1976-1995), a kind of “occult epic”, with allusions to culture both high and low, from Dante, Milton, Blake, Hugo, and Yeats, to Madame Blavatsky, JRR Tolkien, Star Trek and Star Wars. Unique among long poems,
merrill seems an unlikely person to develop an interest in the occult
Sandover is co-authored with various “spirits” or “ghostwriters”, as they are humourously and self-consciously referred to within the poem. Accompanied by his partner, the fiction writer, composer, and painter David Jackson (1922-2001), Merrill (1926-1995) claimed to have communicated with these spirits during a decades-long series of séances undertaken via the use of a Ouija board, an object of relatively recent popularity.
As an example of modernism, the poem’s occult characteristics are not all that unusual. The modernist tradition arguably developed out of Victorian occultism, and religious syncretism profoundly influenced modernism’s foundational texts, from Eliot’s use of Buddhism and Hinduism in The Waste Land ,to
Pound’s frequent allusions to and translations of Confucianism, Egyptology, and other premodern traditions.
What is perhaps most surprising about Merrill’s epic, however, is how unanticipated the work was. Prior to the appearance of the initial instalment of the poem, entitled The Book of Ephraim (1976), Merrill was primarily regarded as an established and well-recognised lyric poet, who wrote decidedly formal poetry inspired by WH Auden and WB Yeats – indeed, the shades of both poets would be characters in Merrill’s epic. Childless and independently wealthy – he was the son of the banker Charles Merrill, founder of MerrillLynch and of the Safeway grocery chain – Merrill had ample time to indulge in literary pursuits, particularly wordplay: anagrams, spoonerisms, and the invention of new words and phrases. This naturally carried over into his poetry; for example, the Sandover of the title is a fictional place; the name “Sandover” is, in fact, a corruption of Saintefleur, or Santofior; its Old English equivalent meaning is “sandy ford”. Yet Sandover, as implied in the final section of the poem, Scripts for the Pageant, might also refer to the Ouija board itself: “PARCHED OBLONG FIELD, 2 OLD ZEN MONKS [a reference to Jackson and the shade of Yeats] RAKING DESIGN AFTER DESIGN, STRUGGLING FOR THE SENSE OF IT”. Finally, the name also suggests “sand over”, which suggests the secrecy and concealment of an occult text. Indeed, the poem unfolds and behaves much like the sands of the desert: unpredictable, unnavigable, impenetrable.
As a sardonic, ironic, and well-educated upper-class poet who wrote primarily in traditional meters, Merrill seems an unlikely person to develop an interest in the occult. His first encounter with the Ouija board resulted when a friend, writer and theologian Frederick Buechner, bought him a massproduced board for his 27th birthday as a gag. It was, according to Merrill’s biographer Langdon Hammer, “cheap, unpretentious kitsch. It spoke to Jimmy’s pleasure in games and word games in particular; and for [Buechner], who
was about to enter a Presbyterian seminary, it was a half-joking appeal to his friend’s spiritual side.” 3
Initially, Merrill and Jackson (whom Merrill had just recently met) treated the board as an amusing pastime, an after-dinner entertainment conducted in the dining room of their spacious apartment on Water Street in the town of Stonington, Connecticut. They constructed their own board. Using a crayon, they added numbers and letters (and later punctuation to assist in transcription); a teacup was used as a pointer. Other than the employment of candles and mirror, which they were told was a method of seeing in and out of the “Other World”, these Ouija sessions were unaccompanied by any occult trappings, but rather were conducted casually, almost as nonchalantly as after-dinner table talk.
The séances proved highly productive. ‘Voices from the Other World’ (1957), a short poem that introduces the thematic and stylistic features that dominate Sandover, was the first to make use of the séance materials. The poem contrasts the idiom of Merrill’s spirit communication with moving lyric meditations on his and Jackson’s domestic life. By the time Merrill began work on The Book of Ephraim, the two had amassed a considerable amount of transcribed communications, a mythology and cosmology Merrill dubbed “the Material”.4 At times, the mythology of Sandover comes across like an eccentric compendium of familiar esoteric themes – a syncretic, deeply individualistic hybrid religious belief that possesses characteristics of Egyptology,
Eastern philosophy, Spiritualism, Mesmerism, scientism, and the supernatural. As the communications increased in complexity and perplexity, the diversion became an obsession. Merrill and Jackson’s friend, novelist Alison Lurie, notes that as this complexity increased, it consequently became “more deeply disturbing.” 5
THE BOOK OF EPHRAIM
A Greek Jew, Ephraim was “born 8 AD AT XANXOS” – all communications from spirits are fully capitalised in the poem – and “Died / AD 36 ON CAPRI”. Ephraim was a favourite of Caligula’s, and once occupied the court of Tiberius, the Roman Emperor from AD 14 to 37; Tiberius, in the last years of his life, secluded himself on the island of Capri, where at the island’s tip he constructed the Villa Jovis, reportedly the site of considerable debauchery. Strangled to death on the order of the Emperor for his affair with a teenaged Caligula, Ephraim, like Virgil in Dante’s Commedia before him, serves as spirit guide to Merrill and Jackson. Merrill goes so far as to fold the mythology of Dante’s epic into his own (the poem was first published in the 1976 collection Divine Comedies). Ephraim, therefore, is Merrill’s familiar, much as explorer and author Leo Africanus acts as Yeats’s familiar in A Vision. Merrill would later compare Ephraim with the “daimon” encountered by Yeats in his automatic writing sessions. The poem that resulted, the 90-page, 3,200-line epyllion (or ‘little epic’) The Book of Ephraim, is a dense, ambitious work in itself, inaugurating a self-constructed mythology and cosmology that eventually came to rival William Blake’s Prophetic Works in its complexity and eccentricity.
In addition to the Ouija transcripts and their communications with Ephraim, during the poem’s composition, Merrill and Jackson undertook extensive trips around the world and visited their many friends in foreign countries. They routinely moved between their apartment in Stonington and their other homes in New York City, Key West and Athens, Greece, where they lived in comfortable anonymity. These travels provided the real-world setting in which their travels into the Other World via the Ouija board took place, and their discussions with other well-to-do sophisticates, artists and intellectuals provided a domestic contrast to their uncanny communications with the spirit realm.
Merrill was eager to transmute the Ouija transcripts into art. Initially, he considered the form of a novel; though he was at this point primarily a lyric poet,
he experimented with other genres, and this helped him to refine his talent for plot, characterisation and dialogue, abilities that would prove crucial to his transformation of the raw séance transcripts into a comprehensible, linear narrative, an aspect that distinguishes The Changing Light at Sandover from other Modernist and postmodernist long poems.
Yet the novel never materialised as, Merrill claims, Ephraim objected to Merrill’s use of the material as fiction, which would require too much alteration of facts. Merrill’s first draft of the novel from 1972 was left in a taxi while he visited his mother in Macon, Georgia; he later wondered whether he might have subconsciously left it behind on purpose. He at once set about a rewrite in the fall of 1973, on a return journey from Athens to the United States. While in Frankfurt, that manuscript too mysteriously disappeared. Merrill began to suspect that the same otherworldly beings that had at first warned him against his communications with the spirit realm had attempted to suppress the material – or perhaps were encouraging him to write Sandover as a poem. As Merrill admits: “The more I struggled to be plain, the more / Mannerism hobbled me. What for? / Since it never truly fit, why wear / The shoe of prose? In verse the feet went bare.”
The form of Book of Ephraim would eventually assume is abecedarian: it is divided into 26 sections, each beginning with a letter from the alphabet, the first with ‘A’ and the last with ‘Z’, a metonymic device wherein each letter in the alphabet also serves as a key term or motif. This structural device is certainly necessary, as the poem favours associative or thematic as opposed to chronological arrangement. One section, ‘Q’, consists entirely of quotations from various texts Merrill read at the time of the poem’s composition, and this dependence on the alphabet as framework provides Merrill with the opportunity to exercise rhyme, wordplay, and puns. Throughout the poem, Merrill adheres to a strict rhythmic pattern that differentiates human speech from the otherworldly. Human voices are decasyllabic, written in what Merrill describes as a “rough pentameter, our virtual birthright”. While both living and dead human beings speak in rhymed couplets and quatrains, the spirits speak in blank verse.
True to mediumistic practices, communication with the spirit realm is best facilitated by a spirit guide. Merrill and Jackson’s initial guide, Ephraim, puts them in touch with departed friends and family – yet, curiously, as their interactions with the spirit world increase, they begin to communicate with other spirits without need of an intermediary.
One notable aspect of The Book of Ephraim is its use of multiple voices and viewpoints, resulting in a variety of motivations, meanings, and interpretations, undermining any single authoritative view or interpretation. This structure reflects the poem’s theology, as voiced by Ephraim, of the transmigration of souls, wherein individual souls move from body to body and where the afterlife is crowded by the constant coming and going of souls from one incarnation to the next. Ephraim’s major theme, indeed the major theme of Sandover as a whole, is the decline of the old mythologies and the urgent need to replace them with a new mythology – one ultimately intended to save humanity from destruction brought about by atomic warfare or the threat of environmental collapse due to overpopulation. Throughout, Merrill displays an almost Malthusian elitism wherein he decries the “breeders” and their insatiable desire for procreation.
MIRABELL: BOOKS OF NUMBER
Upon publication, The Book of Ephraim
alternately provoked shock, consternation, bewilderment, and delight among readers and critics. The literary establishment, however, generally embraced the work; Divine Comedies was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977. As the trilogy progressed, it became increasingly elaborate, and incorporated additional, disparate voices, among them Jackson’s parents, mutual friend Maria Mitsotáki, and the poet WH Auden, who now enjoyed a passionate love affair with Plato. Auden is not the only poet with whom Merrill and Jackson made contact; others include TS Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and WB Yeats.
Where The Book of Ephraim utilised the alphabet, the second volume of Merrill’s epic, the 6,500-word Mirabell: Books of Number
(1978), takes the Arabic numeral portion of the Ouija board for its framework. The poem consists of 10 sections, each of which is additionally subdivided into another 10. As the poem’s length increased, so too did its scope: here Merrill began to look to previous epic poems as both resource and guide, most notably Yeats’s A Vision or Dante’s Commedia, with which Sandover came to share its tripartite structure. Like Ephraim, Mirabell
moves between the cosmic and the mundane; the poem intermixes communications with
mirabell claims to be a mothman-like “huge squeaking” creature with “hot red eyes”
the dead and the spirit realm with accounts of Merrill and Jackson’s lives in Greece and Stonington.
Mirabell is arguably the poem’s most didactic section. In it, Ephraim is replaced as a guide by a fallen angel named “Mirabell” who instructs Merrill and Jackson about the nature of the Universe, with the intention that Merrill will eventually be compelled to write “POEMS OF SCIENCE”. Mirabell explains that the language of science has been designated to replace a corrupted commonplace one in an effort to bring about an Earthly paradise.
The fallen angels exist at a much higher level than Ephraim; in fact, they are not human, and they are referred to by numbers as opposed to names (Mirabell’s is 741). They “SPEAK FROM WITHIN THE ATOM” and represent its negative charge; they are the creators of black holes and pure reason. When asked by Merrill and Jackson to describe himself, Mirabell claims to be a Mothmanlike “HUGE SQUEAKING” creature “WITH LITTLE HOT RED EYES” and points to the bats in the pattern of Merrill and Jackson’s wallpaper as a close depiction. (Satan and his myriad demonic fallen angels are often depicted in Western art with bat-like wings, as is Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.) These bat-creatures, then, lived on Earth in the Arcadian civilisation of Atlantis, at a time long before humans, a period of antigravity and relative weightlessness, and were bred and ruled over by a race of centaurs, which represent the positive force of energy, who act as their messengers.
It’s important to note here a more specific context for the era in which the Ouija sessions took place, and the Sandover poem was composed. Romanticism – and its American outgrowth Transcendentalism – saw the introduction into Western tradition of the Eastern notion of immanence, that is the perceived unity of God and Nature, in opposition to the traditional Judeo-Christian view of a remote God of judgment. Victorian Era occultists, in the wake of Darwinism, began to see a correlation between biological and spiritual evolution, a holistic belief in a coterminous relationship between humanity and nature, and therefore between nature and God, that would substantially inform the environmentalist movement.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
(1962) contributed to a growing awareness of the environmental impacts of modern industrial society, and gave rise to environmental activism. The period also saw an explosion in the US population, and overpopulation became a concern alongside worries about rapid technological innovation, the expansion of the military industrial complex and substantial increases in nuclear weaponry. American youth culture began to experiment with psychedelics and free love, and to question the established structures of power; this gave rise to antiwar activism and added new energy to the civil and women’s rights movements. Within this 1960s counterculture, certain New Age themes – some of which developed out of the same occult, theosophical, and spiritualist activities that led to the Ouija board – took hold, including UFO cults, the Human Potential and Inner Peace movements, and Transcendental Meditation.
Merrill, undoubtedly familiar with counterculture literature, read John Michell’s The Flying Saucer Vision (1967) and The View Over Atlantis (1969). Michell’s theory that sacred sites throughout the world are areas wherein earth energies could be harnessed by ancient spiritual masters in possession of a secret knowledge, since lost, plays a crucial role in the development of Sandover’s mythology. At the time of the composition of Mirabell, Merrill and Jackson visited the Neolithic sites of Avebury and Stonehenge. As Mirabell maintains, man’s ultimate destiny is to reconcile these negative and positive forces of energy. The centaurs tasked the bat creatures with the construction of an atomic bomb, yet eventually, the bat creatures overthrew their centaur overlords
– who later evolved into dinosaurs before being destroyed in the bats’ atomic conflagration – and established an enlightened civilisation. They constructed floating cities chained to the Earth at 14 specific points (“EACH SET AT SOME NERVE CENTER OF THE SACRED EARTH PEKING / JERUSALEM AVEBURY THESE ZODIACAL GARDENS / EACH ENDING WITH FLAME OR FLOOD”). Vegetation eventually decayed, and this resulted in the destruction of their society as the floating cities, unmoored, gravitated into the sky to gradually coalesce into what became the Moon, a “tidy reminder” of an ancient, lost civilisation. Subsequently, the bat creatures rebuilt the Arcadian civilisation of Atlantis, which lasted through six different periods or kingdoms, each of which was later destroyed. The bat creatures then compelled Akhenaton to construct a crystal pyramid that would result in the Earth’s immolation, yet the plan failed as the crystal had flaws in its manufacture. Mirabell claims that Akhenaton’s pyramid “STILL EXERTS AN INFLUENCE
IN CARIBBEAN WATERS”, which Jackson takes to mean the Bermuda Triangle, and that flying saucers are in fact piloted by an alien race who inscrutably “scout our greenhouse”, stating “BUT CAN U DOUBT THAT WE HAVE VERIFIED THE UFO’S [sic] / ON OUR SCREENS? THESE REFLECT EACH SMALLEST POWER SOURCE. BEING / AS YET SO FOREIGN TO THE DENSITY OF THE WORLD SCIENCE, / THE SAUCERS SHOW UP BEST IN A REALM OF SPECULATION”.
To which Merrill responds: “A mirror world” – Mirabell’s own. When Merrill complains that discussion of UFOs is an insult to his intelligence, Mirabell responds that it is “CURIOUS THAT YOU ACCEPT THE CUP [Merrill and Jackson’s tea cup pointer] & NOT THE SAUCER”. Throughout the poem, a thoroughly nonplussed Merrill cannot resist calling into question Mirabell’s various claims. In so doing, Merrill effectively acts as a stand-in for the reader, who Merrill must have anticipated would remain sceptical, especially given the poem’s strangeness and eccentricity, its mishmash of “MYTH & LEGEND, FACT & LANGUAGE”. When Auden protests that he finds the poem “VERY BEAUTIFUL”, Merrill responds, incredulously:
Dear Wystan,VERY BEAUTIFUL all this Warmed-up Milton, Dante, Genesis? This great tradition that has come to grief In volumes by Blavatsky and Gurdjieff? Von and Torro in their Star Trek capes, Atlantis, UFOs, God’s chosen apes—? Nobody can transfigure junk like that Without first turning down the rheostat To Allegory, in whose gloom the whole Horror of Popthink fastens on the soul, Harder to scrape off than bubblegum.
Mirabell also informs his students that, contrary to Ephraim’s claims, the other world’s hierarchy of nine stages is not the centre of the Universe but occupies a region of space that is both lonely and distant. The Universe is in fact ruled by a God of Biology. Auden declares this God to be “NOT / ONLY HISTORY BUT EARTH ITSELF. HE IS THE GREENHOUSE” – again this was the 1970s, when the postwar environmentalist movement became increasingly important. God B is followed in the hierarchy by Nature, which is associated with Chaos, then by the four archangels Michael, Raphael, Emmanuel, and Gabriel.
Mirabell then describes Ephraim’s transmigration of souls, and explains that the main work conducted in Heaven is to produce refined souls – these souls are, oddly enough, manufactured somewhere in outer space in a place referred to as the “Research Lab”. Because of a decided lack of quality material – overpopulation, it seems, has thinned it out – there now exists an overabundance of unrefined incarnate souls. To rectify this overpopulation, the spirits release upon the Earth various natural and manmade disasters. “WE ONLY WISH TO
PURIFY / CERTAIN RANCID ELEMENTS FROM THIS ELITE BUTTER WORLD. / THE HITLERS THE PERONS & FRANCOS THE STALINS… / … ARE NEEDED”.
Impure souls, refinement through selection, animalistic traits of the rabble, the reduction of the population through mass murder… Gradually it dawned on Merrill and Jackson that the Spirit World’s manipulation of humanity possessed uncomfortable echoes of Malthusianism, eugenics, and racism – what Maria describes as the “INFLEXIBLE ELITISM” of the Other World. Jackson in particular would later acknowledge its genocidal overtones. Mirabell is seemingly unaware of the implications of these sinister machinations, and wonders if in fact the archangels are actually evil. He concludes his lesson with what amounts to a cliffhanger, and informs his students that the Archangel Michael has brought humanity a divine message, namely that man is “A SPECIES OF THE SUN’S MAKING”, whose cells comprise “AN ANCIENT AND IMMORTAL INTELLIGENCE”, namely God.
SCRIPTS FOR THE PAGEANT
The third and final section of The Changing Light of Sandover, Scripts for the Pageant (1980), written at Merrill and Jackson’s home in Key West, Florida, is also the longest. As with its predecessors, Scripts uses
the spirit world’s manipulation of humanity contained echoes of eugenics
a wide range of poetic styles, while jokes, puns, and wordplay accumulate. Like Mirabell, the poem employs a classroom setting. Further up the hierarchal chain of teachers, Mirabell is replaced by the four archangels themselves, who present Merrill and Jackson with 25 lessons on the secrets of the Universe. Unlike Ephraim or Mirabell, however, the angels’ instructions are decidedly eschatological.
As with previous volumes, Scripts borrows from the features of the Ouija board for its structure: Ephraim is an abecedarian, Mirabell depends on numbers, while Scripts uses the board’s ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. In this sense, Scripts is the most straightforwardly didactic. Merrill here relies on a questionand-answer format, and its four principal characters – Merrill, Jackson, Maria, and Auden – interrogate the archangels. Because the responses must be answered yes or no, they are by design unequivocal. Nevertheless, the complexities of the structure of the Universe mount, and the four angels alternately confirm and correct a number of their previous explanations of its nature. As it turns out, Ephraim and Mirabell, as lower forms, are somewhat unreliable narrators.
The instruction takes the form of a Platonic symposium. Included are the Nine Muses, the four prophets (Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, and Mercury), novelist Vladimir Nabokov, and Merrill and Jackson’s close friends, scientist George Cotzias and filmmaker Maya Deren. At one point, WB Yeats takes up occupancy in a lump in Jackson’s hand. Uni, a unicorn-like creature from Atlantis who speaks in an Anglo-Saxon-style alliterative verse, also appears. UFOs are revealed to be the property of angels, “NOT ‘SAUCERS’” but “LIGHT DISCS WHICH HAVE AN INWARD PULL, INSUBSTANTIAL / MICHAEL’S TEASPOONS TESTING THE SOUPY ATMOSPHERE”.
In the face of this bafflingly byzantine cosmology, Merrill can only lament:
It all fits. But the ins and outs deplete us. Minding the thread, losing the maze, we curse
Language’s misleading apparatus.
Sandover concludes with the comparatively brief Coda: The Higher Keys (1982) – the title is reminiscent of early 20th century pulp grimoires – which focuses primarily on the rebirth of Robert Morse, one of Merrill and Jackson’s Stonington neighbours, as a famous composer. Morse is depicted in Scripts as having been taken up into Heaven to move among Merrill’s select pantheon of sainted souls: Wilde, Proust, Austen, Colette, Sarah Bernhardt and Pythagoras. The Higher Keys ends with Merrill as he prepares to read Sandover to the shades of Jane Austen,
Dante, and Proust. “…a star trembles in the full carafe /
As the desk light comes on, illuminating / The page I open to.” In a nod to Joyce’s ubermodernist text Finnegans Wake,
perhaps, Merrill ends the poem with the first word of Ephraim,
“Admittedly…”
THE BOARD GAME
The progression from Ephraim to Mirabell to Scripts to the Higher Keys, with their increasingly baroque mythology, meant that Merrill’s epic came to alienate many of his readers, many of whom appreciated his work most for its deeply conservative poetic values, values that Sandover delightfully resisted.
So what are we to make of Merrill’s disconcertingly peculiar, and at times frustratingly dull, epic poem? Was this simply an example of a wealthy couple who cultivated their eccentricities into art? Or did Merrill and Jackson really make contact with otherworldly beings? If they did, what is the veracity of the information they were given?
To address these questions, it is important to consider first the consensus among psychologists and sceptics that if the Ouija board, as with other forms of automatic writing, does not represent actual communication, then it must be the result of manipulation and suggestion. Indeed, for the Ouija board to work, sitters must first anticipate that the pointer will move freely of its own accord and thereby submit to an illusion of autonomous movement, independent of the sitters’ manipulations. Such manipulations generally consist of either conscious covert manipulation, wherein one of the sitters knowingly moves the pointer in order to deceive the others, or, as is more likely in Merrill and Jackson’s experience, unconscious manipulation, wherein sitters make minute adjustments for each other’s movements with the result that neither participant is certain whose movement actually occurred – a process suggesting that an additional, invisible, autonomous presence is somehow involved in the movement of the pointer.
Some critics see the fiction writer Jackson’s hand – no pun intended – in these ‘spirit’ communications, a perhaps unconscious attempt on his part to manipulate the credulous Merrill. Critics have noted a number of similarities and parallels in the literary style of these voices and in Jackson’s writings, yet it is difficult to parse Jackson’s intentions or to conclude with any certainty whether his actions were ultimately malicious. Alison Lurie speculates, admittedly without any evidence, that “while Jimmy was busy writing the messages down, David was gently but firmly pushing the teacup.” 6 She suspects that David was “the essential sitter” in that he was “more skeptical about the external reality of the spirits, but he was also more afraid of them. And he was also more attuned to their existence. Jimmy used to maintain, only partly in jest, that David had ESP...” Merrill, Lurie continues, “was also far more suggestible psychologically”; he could easily undergo hypnosis or be put into a trance. 7
Still another possibility is that one of Merrill’s reasons for taking part in the Ouija sessions was to give Jackson, a frustrated novelist, a literary outlet. In an interview conducted in 1981, Merrill readily admits that “David is the subconscious shaper of the message itself, the ‘Hand’ as they [the spirits of the “Other World”] call him… The transcripts as they stand could never have come into being without him. I wonder if the trilogy should not have been signed with both our names – or simply, ‘by Jackson, as told to Merrill?’” “The poem isn’t mine”, Merrill once confessed to a friend. 8
Nevertheless, contrary to Lurie’s assertions of Jackson’s scepticism as opposed to Merrill’s credulity, it was Jackson who experienced several supernatural occurrences, among them a vision of Ephraim’s reflection in a mirror. He also allegedly witnessed a demon hovering outside their living room window, three floors up. These events gave him cause to be, in Lurie’s description, “more afraid” of the spirits. Moreover, Merrill would continually question whether Ephraim, Mirabell, and the other supernatural denizens with whom he and
“it has given me proof of a world i had not hitherto believed in”
Jackson claimed to have communicated were in fact objective beings or simply the fanciful construct of his and David Jackson’s imagination, a folie à deux –as suggested to Merrill by his psychiatrist – or perhaps an experiential emanation, a kind of Jungian archetype of sorts, a physical manifestation of unconscious desires and energies. Despite this, Merrill’s scepticism wavered considerably. Lurie confessed that she “sometimes had the feeling that my friend’s mind was intermittently being taken over by a stupid and possibly even alien intelligence.”
Despite repeated warnings at first to break off communication with the spirit realm, the couple persisted. These collaborative sessions provided Merrill and Jackson with an important bond long after their physical and artistic relationship began to deteriorate. By the time they made contact with Ephraim, their relationship was already considerably strained. The Ouija sessions, therefore, were simultaneously an escape from the doldrums of their daily lives and an affirmation of what they perceived to be their inherent exceptionalism as artists. As Lurie observed, Ephraim spoke to their essential vanity; in the spirit world “they were superior, enlightened beings… at the centre of a web of connections to lost friends and former selves past and present… And in the spirit world, they would be forever young and beautiful.”
In a letter, Merrill writes of the seductive, dreamlike pull of the Ouija board and their communication with the spirits of the Other World: “These voices are essentially human – hence fallible – prejudiced, even as we. Very often they do not recall the past accurately, and are unable to predict the future except in very abstract ways. To be guided by it is surely dangerous. What it has given me is simply proof of a world I had not hitherto believed in – like the proof of the existence of God. Upon such proofs one must build one’s own systems, or go to priests or philosophers for guidance. Yeats quotes an ancient utterance attributed to Orpheus: ‘Do not open the gates of Pluto, for within is a people of dreams’”.
Upon completion of Ephraim, Merrill contemplated putting the Ouija board away permanently, yet the fact remained that he and Jackson still enjoyed their nightly
séances; as Merrill admitted, they were “never to forego, in favor of / Plain dull proof, the marvelous nightly pudding”. Their use of the Ouija board, which lasted some 40 years, provided them with more than simply the material; it was a source of entertainment, excitement, and, of course, literary inspiration. Indeed, Merrill took considerable liberties with the “material” when he fashioned it into a poetic form, and often rewrote the transcripts in order to clarify, heighten the language, or fit the epic’s prosody or thematic structure. The spirits were inconsistent, unclear, incoherent, contradictory, and often used a kind of occult shorthand. Merrill had to rearrange, cut, change spellings, and reword so that he could locate the repeating themes and images with which to piece together a coherent story. These were not verbatim transcriptions, like the “materials”; Merrill in no way felt obliged to maintain anything like absolute fidelity to the spirits’ communications. He frequently took significant liberties, even going so far as to invent and assign dialogue to spirits not present in the transcripts.
Moreover, Merrill’s expansion, ostensibly at the spirits’ behest, of Sandover’s mythology into “POEMS OF SCIENCE”, the introduction of a God of Biology, and the passages that detailed the spirits’ genetic manipulation of humanity, followed his studies in biology and genetics. Lurie wonders if the pseudo-scientific material conveyed by the spirits was easier for Merrill to accept given his relative ignorance of the natural sciences and an absence of “strong religious or personal commitments”. She goes on to say that “Any imaginary world, of course, tends to bear traces of the world its inventors already know, and to incorporate their life experiences, memories, and dreams, their ideas about science, morality, and the arts. The resulting construct will
inevitably reflect its creators’ knowledge, opinions, and tastes, both conscious and unconscious.” 12
On this point, Ephraim, notably, shares a number of biographical similarities with Merrill. Both he and Ephraim came from a broken home. Ephraim’s father, like Merrill’s, had a career in finance. Like Tiberius, Charles Merrill could go to tyrannical extremes; at one point, he threatened to have his son’s first lover murdered. To give Merrill the benefit of the doubt, however, one might suggest that it is these shared traits that drew Ephraim and Merrill together in the first place. As his biographer, Langdon Hammer, notes, the name Ephraim, which means “double fruitfulness” in Hebrew, also appears in Stonington, Connecticut, history: the name of Ephraim Williams, a 19th century Stonington resident, is carved into the gate of the Old Stonington Cemetery, and his tomb is visible to anyone who enters.
Merrill and Jackson’s Ouija board sessions also carry with them an obvious wish-fulfilment. Communications from the dead are generally messages meant to reassure the living that their departed family and friends comfortably enjoy the afterlife, that they have managed to reconcile any regret or guilt accumulated during their lives and achieved peace. For example, in the afterlife, Merrill and Jackson’s parents are no longer uncomfortable with their homosexuality. In fact, male homosexuality, far from being the shunned and taboo subculture that it was on 1970s Earth, is in the Other World a superior condition, with homosexual men largely in control of the Universe. Maria, the only female in the main quartet, is later revealed to have been a male in a past life who decided to be reincarnated in a female body. Heterosexual “breeders” are the cause of the overpopulation and ecological disaster that threatens the fate of humanity. Population reduction is an important first step to humanity’s salvation
– as Mirabell proclaims: “AN INTELLIGENT RACE ONE 100TH THE SIZE / OF EARTHS POPULATION WOULD RAISE YR PYRAMID ANEW” – and homosexual men must therefore work to bring it about. Unable to procreate in physical form, in the spirit realm they are in fact in charge of the transmigration of souls, and determine who is reborn and who is recycled. As Hammer observes, the elevation of male homosexuals to such lofty positions in the Other World may be the result of “the compensatory elitism of the poet and the cultured intellectual in a society which values neither one very highly. It’s also the snobbery of a gay man trying to convert a style of life commonly seen as sinful, self-centred, or simply alien, into a sign of spiritual superiority.” 13
Finally, it is explained to Merrill and Jackson that in the spirit world poets have an integral role, as they are tasked with “DEVELOP[ING] THE WAY TO PARADISE”. That poets are accorded such a special responsibility is perhaps not at all surprising, given Merrill’s occupation, and it neatly explains why the spirit world sought out communication with him in the first place.
Toward the end of their lives both Merrill and Jackson, reflecting on their 40-year project, commented on the veracity of the communications with the spirit realm and their roles as students and ‘messengers’ enlisted to record and disseminate the information provided to them by their otherworldly contacts. Jackson’s statement in a late and revealing interview is one of mystification and ultimately of regret: “I remember thinking, if this is us doing it, what a hideous kind of schizophrenia as it were, with time just disappearing… And the idea that I’d spend those hours at a Ouija board seemed to me obscene; what a way to spend time, you know. That was before we got on to the Lessons, when it seemed that we were summoned to something. And then another feeling took over, the feeling of it being very, very egocentric, the idea that we were supposed to be taking and delivering these great messages. That seemed to me really bizarre and vain and bogus. It was the hardest thing to take… It immediately stopped being somewhat enjoyable and just became a big chore, one that didn’t end till the Epilogue.” 14 When asked by critic Helen Vendler in an interview, “How real does it all seem to you?” Merrill responded, with typical aplomb: “Literally, not very – except in recurrent euphoric hours when it’s altogether too beautiful not to be true.” 15
NOTES
1 Victor Hugo and WB Yeats were writers who, like Merrill, were interested in the occult; Hugo took part in table-tapping while Yeats studied mysticism, astrology, Spiritualism and the occult extensively, was a member of the paranormal research society “The Ghost Club”, Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, helped to found the Dublin Hermetic Order, and experimented with automatic writing in the form of spirit dictation taken by his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees and published as A Vision (1925).
2 Though various implements for communicating with the dead have existed since ancient Egypt and Greece, the Ouija board is a relatively recent invention. In the mid-19th century, mediums used a device called a “planchette”, a heartshaped board resting on wheels, and holding a pencil. As the planchette moved, it would at times produce words of varying degrees of legibility. William Fuld, a businessman, came up with a new design meant for mass production: a heart-shaped pointer that would move across a board decorated with the alphabet, an ampersand symbol, the numbers 1-10, and a yes and no. He named this board “Ouija”, which meant to suggest something vaguely exotic, Near Eastern, and Arabic, but which, in fact, is merely the combination of the French and German words for “yes” (oui and ja). Ouija boards were introduced commercially in 1902, yet they did not receive popular recognition until the occult revival of the 1920s, when family members began actively seeking out methods of contacting those who died or went missing during the First World War. For more on the history of the Ouija board, see
FT249:30-37, 318:14-15, 269:48-49.
3 Langdon Hammer, James Merrill: Life and Art, New York: Knopf, 2015, p.49.
4 The entirety of the transcriptions of the Ouija sessions has been digitized and is now available for perusal by the public on the James Merrill Digital Archive: http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/jamesmerrillarchive/ouijatranscripts. 5 Alison Lurie, Familiar Spirits, New York, Penguin Books, 2000, p.77.
6 Lurie, pp.90-91.
7 Ibid., pp.92-93.
8 Lurie, pp.135-36; Hammer, p.585.
9 Lurie, p.63.
10 Ibid., p.103.
11 Quoted in Hammer, p.200.
12 Lurie., pp.84-85.
13 Hammer, p.596.
14 Quoted in Lurie, pp.117-118.
15 Quoted in Hammer, p.612.
✒ ERIC HOFFMAN is the editor of Conversations with John Berryman (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) and the author of Oppen: A Narrative (Shearsman, 2013, rev. ed. 2018), a biographical study of poet George Oppen. He lives in Vernon, Connecticut and is a frequent contributor to FT.