James Merrill and David Jackson with the Ouija in Stonington, Conn. Photograph by Harry Pemberton, courtesy of Washington University Libraries Department of Special Collections
James Merrill’s first Ouija board was a store-bought one, with its Laurel-and-Hardy sun and moon facing each other from the top corners. It was a gift from artists David Jackson and Doris Sewell Jackson and writer (and Presbyterian minister!) Frederick Buechner. This was in 1952, when department stores blithely stocked toy shelves with Ouija—Merrill might as easily have ended up with Parcheesi or Chinese checkers.
By 1955, Jackson and “Sewelly” had split. And Merrill and Jackson had moved in together at the modest but elegant 107 Water Street in Stonington, Conn., where almost every night after dinner, they’d consult the Ouija at their milk glass–topped dining-room table. They’d now drawn their own version on heavy cardboard and swapped out the heart-shaped planchette for a blue willowware teacup. The first voice to break through, as Merrill recounts in the 1959 poem “Voices from the Other World,” had been “that of an engineer”
Originally from Cologne.
Dead in his 22nd year
Of cholera in Cairo, he had KNOWN
NO HAPPINESS. He once met Goethe, though.
Goethe had told him: PERSEVERE.
Jackson and Merrill’s relationship, and their nightly Ouija sessions, would endure for 40 years. During the séances at Stonington (and at their winter home in Athens, Greece), Jackson served as the “hand,” or medium; Merrill’s fingertips rested on the cup, but his role was “scribe,” marking down letters in an airless sequence that required later parsing into words and sentences. Those transcripts—sometimes written in blue ballpoint, sometimes bright pink marker (or changing from blue to red ink when a pen ran dry)—became the basis for Merrill’s 560-page poetic trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover, a book that managed to all at once horrify and embarrass the literati with its occult provenance; win major accolades and prizes; and inspire critic Harold Bloom to say it could not be praised enough, calling Merrill “the strangest, the most unnerving of all this country’s poets.”
Merrill didn’t start out to write an epic poem. He distrusted them, and was known for his technically flawless, lyrical gems that, for their old-fashioned formalism, always found respect and respectable homes in major literary journals. In fact, Sandover didn’t even begin as a poem at all, but rather as a novel that fictionalized Merrill and Jackson’s conversations with one particular spirit—not the poor choleric engineer, nor “Simpson,” who died in a warehouse fire, telegraphing a desperate HELLP O SAV ME, but Ephraim, a Greek Jew “Born AD 8 at XANTHOS,” who’d been strangled to death at age 32 on Capri. After overhearing the pair’s conversation with Simpson—and butting in—Ephraim dominated the board for the next few decades.
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“Actually, the story goes, Merrill started the manuscript, then lost it in a taxi,” says Joel Minor, curator of the Modern Literature Collection and Manuscripts at Washington University’s Olin Library. “So he’s asking Ephraim about it, and he says, ‘I did it.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Dear JM, a poem of our talks, it was lovely, thank you. The story—not so successful.’ So Merrill gives Ephraim credit, without Merrill knowing it, of pointing him in the direction of this epic poem.” (Ephraim was also offended that he was referred to as an “evil spirit” in the novel.)
Minor is reading directly from Merrill’s original Ouija manuscripts (the library’s cache dates between 1952 and 1992), neatly set out on a library table, along with typewritten versions and drafts of what became “The Book of Ephraim,” the first part of Merrill’s trilogy, published in his 1976 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Divine Comedies. The James Merrill Papers at Wash. U.’s Olin Library, the largest archive in the world dedicated to the poet, includes 83 ½ linear feet of correspondence, 19 linear feet of manuscripts, and 2 ½ linear feet of “realia,” including a pair of green eyeglasses and Merrill’s sterling-silver baby spoon. (He was born with a figurative one in his mouth—his father was the Merrill of Merrill Lynch.)
“We like to call it a true cradle-to-grave collection, from the christening gown to the death mask,” Minor says. The Merrill archive owes its existence to poet and former Wash. U. professor Mona Van Duyn, who asked Merrill for his papers in 1964, long before he was crowned one of the 20th century’s greatest poets. Merrill became a frequent visitor to campus, serving as a Visiting Hurst Professor and showing up every year with shopping bags filled with papers. Wash. U. does indeed have the death mask—cast in bronze, both heavier and smaller than you’d expect—as well as a hand-drawn paper Ouija board, though Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has the original store-bought one, the sturdier cardboard one from Stonington, and the willowware cup (patched together several times after angry spirits reportedly hurled it off the table).
Last summer, the Ouija transmissions from Ephraim—many of them fragile, with crumbling edges—were scanned, along with the typewritten versions and drafts of the 26 sections of the poem, which are drop-capped from A to Z to mirror the alphabetic arc across the Ouija board. In two short months, poet and Ph.D. candidate Annelise Duerden, undergrad Samantha Rogers, Minor, and librarian Shannon Davis created and launched the James Merrill Digital Archive (wustl.edu/jamesmerrillarchive), which went live at the end of last summer.
“During those eight weeks, I would wake up realizing that I had been dreaming lines of the poem, because they were so constantly in front of my eyes,” says Duerden, who shared scanning duties with Rogers. She also put the documents in order and worked out an organizing structure. “It was running through my head all of the time, which became crucial when it came to sorting out and figuring out chunks of lines that he would write and rewrite and rewrite. Where exactly did this come in the poem? They were in no particular order. We had to sort them out to make sense of how they would correspond to the finished poem, so that we could present them to people in the archives in a way that would represent the process of his writing and his finished work.”
Though Merrill kept nearly everything and dated things meticulously, he also used both sides of paper, often for unrelated things; doodled in the margins; wrote slantwise in pencil and pen; made poem notes on the back of ATM receipts; and even spilled wine on a draft of “Ephraim.” He also used felt-tipped marker for the Ouija transcripts, which bled through to the other side of the page. Duerden and Rogers had to experiment, slipping paper under the scan to get better resolution.
In the meantime, they were also entering all of the metadata for each folder, using a system that Davis set up in two software programs. In the last three weeks, Davis wrote custom code so the pages could be flipped through like a book, rather than just appearing as individual image files. Now, Davis says, the big project is to transcribe all of the words from the image files, so users can search the archives by the actual text, rather than just the metadata.
“Once it’s all encoded, you can do text mining and see what Merrill’s most frequently used word is, and all kinds of cool stuff,” Davis says. She says the pilot project for that may actually be Merrill’s poem “Lost in Translation,” which was also scanned last summer. (Scholars at the University of North Dakota want to access it so they can experiment with an algorithm they’ve created for studying versions of drafts.)“It’s going to be a long time before we get everything online,” Davis says, though that’s the goal. “This is to give people a taste of what we have.”
Wash. U. English professor Joseph Loewenstein teaches “Ephraim” and directs the university’s Humanities Digital Workshop, which collaborated on the project. He has long hoped to see Merrill’s archive go online. He first encountered “Ephraim” while working on his dissertation. “And it was a page turner,” he says. When he landed at Wash. U. in 1981, “I learned pretty quickly that we had the Merrill papers. And so I got terribly excited, and then I learned…” he pauses. “I didn’t learn that we had the Ouija-board transcripts; I learned that there were Ouija-board transcripts.” The revelation, he says, was startling. He says it also has that effect on his students.
“They were baffled at first about what to make of it,” he says. “Seeing the transcription made it very palpable to them that you couldn’t just treat this as a poem like any other poem. In some ways, they had to ask themselves, ‘Am I seriously reading this poem that was a message from the beyond?’” he says. “Which is hilarious, since the poem is also so wrought. It’s so crafted and constructed. There’s a way in which he’s quite a very traditional poet. And there’s throwbackness in him. He knows that he’s in Yeats’ line.
“So yeah, maybe it’s an elegant parlor game,” Loewenstein adds. “It’s also an odd traditionality. He talks about one of the big traditions in Dante criticism, in the centuries after the Commedia, up through the 17th century. People asked, ‘Did Dante really have these experiences? And if he didn’t, is the poem worthwhile?’”
That, of course, is the exact flip of the response to The Changing Light at Sandover. And that may be why, when asked whether these things had really happened, whether he actually believed this stuff, Merrill would wittily quote the Ouija board itself: “Yes and no.”
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In 1982, after completing Sandover, Merrill traveled to his friend Claude Fredericks’ house in Vermont, lit a roaring blaze in the fireplace, and threw in the Ouija transcripts for “Scripts for the Pageant,” the final third of his epic.
“Sandover, as a poem, the central question is, ‘Is the world going to go up in flames?’ And the manuscripts ultimately do,” says Langdon Hammer, Merrill’s first official biographer. (Hammer’s been working on his book for 12 years, making heavy use of Olin Library’s Merrill papers. The biography’s slated to be published in spring 2015.) Hammer says that act was stunning for Merrill, a scrupulous archivist who never wasted anything, especially paper. Merrill never explained, though Hammer speculates that he wanted to keep a sense of mystery around the poem and was probably ready to just be done with it. It’s also not hard to see why Merrill might want to unburden himself of such apocalyptic material.
Near the end of the epic, DJ and JM, as they’re known in the poem, are allowed to hear “God B(iology),” Life itself, singing through the darkness of the cosmos, “ALONE / KEEPING UP HIS NERVE ON A LIFERAFT.”
IVE BROTHERS HEAR ME BROTHERS SIGNAL ME / ALONE IN MY NIGHT BROTHERS DO YOU WELL / I AND MINE HOLD IT BACK BROTHERS I AND / MINE SURVIVE BROTHERS HEAR ME SIGNAL ME / DO YOU WELL I AND MINE HOLD IT BACK I / ALONE IN MY NIGHT BROTHERS I AND MINE / SURVIVE BROTHERS DO YOU WELL I ALONE / IN MY NIGHT HOLD IT BACK AND MINE / SURVIVE BROTHERS SIGNAL ME IN MY NIGHT / I AND MINE HOLD IT BACK AND WE SURVIVE.
That small blue teacup had traced an impossibly huge arc from Simpson’s SOS to an eerie call for help from God, shipwrecked in space.
“And it’s striking,” Hammer says, “You can see that his Ouija-board activity heats up during periods of international crisis… During the Cuban missile crisis and then in the ’70s and ’80s, there’s no question that the poem is responding to a kind of Cold War threat of nuclear holocaust, as well as other environmental threats. Merrill’s tuned into fears about global warming and other kinds of environmental catastrophes early on.”
How could Merrill bear it? Simple: JM had DJ. Hammer points out that there’s no other long poem, aside from Paradise Lost, that is focused on a couple. “And certainly not another long poem focused on a couple of men. There’s no question that daily domesticity is the kind of core and skeleton of that book,” he says. “It’s the premise of everything.” By 1983, a year after Sandover’s publication, Merrill and Jackson had parted ways. (Perhaps that, too, was a reason to burn the pages.)
After it was published, critic Helen Vendler predicted that Sandover would be remembered only as a curiosity and that Merrill would be remembered as the witty, skeptical lyric poet. But Hammer says the majority of scholarship since then has been on the Ouija poems. And the Ouija transcripts continue to spark interest at Olin Library, which is why they are online—not just for scholars, but also for students, writers, or any creative person who wants to trace the trajectory from first thought to finished work of art.
Readers still tend to be split between those who view Sandover as “a kind of folly” and those who think it is “engaging and fascinating,” Hammer adds. But Merrill was a both/and poet, a yes-and-no poet, a shape-shifter. All of the poems work together, Hammer says, and the archive is how we can see that.
“It allows us to look at a life and a body of work, how each shapes each other,” Hammer says. “It allows us to see the poetry and life in the round as a kind of very complex whole. There are prisms all through James Merrill’s poetry, prisms and jewels. And the archive is the biggest one of all—it’s a prismatic jewel that allows you to see Merrill, but also through Merrill, in a kind of complex, sparkling manner.”
Click here to listen to "An Evening of Words and Music: Settings of James Merrill's Poems by Faculty and Alumni Composers of WU Composers," recorded on April 26, 1985.
