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 poem "The Changing Light at Sandover", which Merrill called his "chronicles of love and loss." Recalling Merrill and Jackson's life together in New York, Athens, and Key West, Familiar Spirits is a poignant memoir infused with great affection and generous amounts of Lurie's signature wit. "[A] remarkable and moving memoir." —The Boston Globe "Written with the poignancy of long affection." —The Atlantic Monthly "This memoir is Lurie's own Ouija board, through which she shares one final, intimate conversation with her much-missed familiar spirits." —The Washington Post Alison Lurie is the author of many highly praised novels, including The War Between the Tates , The Truth About Lorin Jones (Prix Femina Etranger), and Foreign Affairs (Pulitzer Prize for fiction). Her most recent book was Familiar Spirits . She teaches writing, folklore, and literature at Cornell University. Familiar Spirits A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson By Alison Lurie Penguin Books Copyright © 2002 Alison Lurie All right reserved. ISBN: 0142000450 Chapter One Beginnings When James Merrill and I first met we didn't take to each other. If someone hadtold me that day that we would be friends for forty years, I would have thoughtthey were joking. It was the hot summer of 1950; I and my first husband, Jonathan Bishop, were inEurope on a postponed honeymoon. We had come to Austria to stay with Lynn andTed Hoffman, who were working at the Salzburg Seminar. An acquaintance fromHarvard, Claude Fredericks, was in town, too, and they arranged for all of us tohave lunch and go for a swim in a nearby lake. Both Lynn and I were fond ofClaude, and hoped to find the friend he was traveling with, another young poet,equally likable. But Jimmy Merrill was a disappointment. Compared to Claude he seemed both coollydetached and awkwardly self-conscious. He was thin and pale and shortsighted,with thick black-rimmed spectacles (later he would wear contact lenses). Thoughonly twenty-four, he was clearly already an intellectual and an aesthete. Heappeared to have read everything and, worse, to be surprised at our ignorance. The lake turned out to be a large light-struck shiny pond, mainly surrounded bywoods. Fallen tree trunks littered the steep, sandy margin, and more floatedoffshore. The water was a clear, dark brown, and very deep; a top layer had beenwarmed by the sun, but below it was icy, and choked with the rubbery yellow andgreen straps of water weeds. Most of us splashed about briefly and then waded out, but Jimmy stayed longer;and in spite of his weedy appearance he turned out to be a skilled swimmer.Unlike professional athletes, who often seem to be fighting the water, attackingit with violent slapping assaults and throwing off sprays of liquid shrapnel,Jimmy hardly broke the surface as he swam. The dark wet element parted smoothlyfor him as it might have for some long, elegant pale fish. When he finally wadedout, however, he again seemed chilly and ill at ease. As his memoir of those years declares in its title, Jimmy was A Different Personthen, in both senses of the phrase. He was different from most other persons,and he was different from the person he would become. Most of us change as weage, but Jimmy changed more than most. He not only became more confident andbetter-looking?eventually elegantly handsome?he also became kinder, moregenerous, and more sympathetic. He never quite became an ordinary person, buthis instinctive scorn of fools, once only half-concealed by good manners,relaxed and gave way to a detached, affectionate amusement, such as a highlycivilized visitor from another planet might feel. Perhaps that is why heeventually seemed so much at home with the otherworldly beings he and DavidJackson contacted through the Ouija board. Jimmy and I might never have met again if we hadn't both found ourselves inAmherst, Massachusetts, five years later. I came in September 1954, as part ofthe baggage of my first husband, an Amherst College instructor in English.Jimmy, who had graduated from the college in 1947, arrived the following fall asa visiting writer, accompanied by his new friend David Jackson. In 1955 Jimmy, though less nervous, was still thin and pale, with flat dark hairand something of the air of a clever, inquisitive bird. Later, when I learnedthat the name "Merrill" could be traced back to the French merle, or"blackbird," this seemed appropriate. He no longer casually paraded his superiorlearning and sophistication; he had become more