22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
With friends like this..., July 8, 2001
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.
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
What Makes for a Friendship?, March 7, 2001
Lurie didn't like James Merrill when she first met him. Five years later, when she was an unhappy faculty wife at Amherst, Merrill appeared on the scene as a writer-in-residence. Either he had changed enough, or she had changed enough, that Lurie ovecame her initial dislike of him so that they could become buddies. In the sexist academic setting of the 1950s (Lurie is savage in describing that jail), Merrill and his lover David Jackson threw her a lifeline, treating her like a person with a brain and someone to have fun with, not to mention publishing her first book. Lurie repays their friendship and favors with this odd little book that is so thin it almost evaporates in front of your reading glasses. As we know from her novels and essays, Lurie is an intelligent and witty writer, and from time to time here she gets off a few zingers. The problem is that there aren't very many, nor are there more than a handful of interesting stories of any depth. Were these celebrated personalities and writer/geniuses, really this pedestrian (Merrill chops vegetables beautifully in a kimono and teaches Lurie how to make a chicken stock!) and at sea? Half of the book covers Merrill and Jackson's experiments with the Ouija board (and their use of it in generating the epic poem that became "The Changing Light at Sandover"). A large portion of this section consists of quotes from the poem along with Lurie's diatribe against Ouija boards in particular and the spirit world in general. What's that about? I closed the book wondering if the few dry personal scraps Lurie spreads out on the table constitute the entirety of what she took away from their 40 years of friendship. If they are, her relationship with the two men seems to have been more superficial than substantive. To her undying credit, though, Lurie is merciless with herself about her biases (she took a dim view when Jackson casually discussed his tricking, and their intimacy died at that point; she also didn't like Merrill's last boyfriend and reams him with an acid tongue). The presence of those biases without more juice to offset them, alas, makes the book rather sour. As a chronicle of "friendship," it clearly broadcasts the age-old warning that in a relationship that goes bad, make sure not to die first.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very gossipy little book. Yet fascinating and embarassing., August 28, 2004
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.
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