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Object Lesson
Poetry via Ouija
January/February 2012
by Langdon Hammer ’80, ’89PhD
Photograph ©Beinecke Library
Langdon Hammer ’80, ’89PhD, is
a professor of English at Yale. He is the author of James Merrill: Life
and Art, a forthcoming biography of Merrill.
James Merrill (1926–95) was an American poet celebrated
for his refined lyric gift and skeptical moral intelligence. But he was also
another type of poet entirely: a strange visionary who renewed poetry’s ancient
task of invoking sacred speech, in his case by the unlikely, faintly scandalous
means of the Ouija board.
James Merrill’s
homemade Ouija board, which he used in writing poetry, is in the collections of
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Shown with the board and the tea
cup Merrill used as a pointer are transcripts from the board that he used to
write his epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover.
The Ouija board is a popular entertainment and a kind
of writing machine. It requires two or more people to place their fingers on a
planchette or pointer, which then moves about the board indicating letters that
spell out messages from the spirit world. Merrill received a store-bought board
as a birthday gift from a friend in 1953. As a lark, he tried the board with
David Jackson, a fiction writer he had just met, and it was an immediate
success. So was his relationship with Jackson, who would be his companion in
daily life and on the Ouija board for the next 40 years.
For the first 20 years of their collaboration, JM and
DJ—as they were known to the spirits—treated the board as a peculiar evening
diversion, to be shared with friends after dinner over wine or a joint. They
made their own board, to which they added numbers and punctuation, and they
used a tea cup as a pointer. With this apparatus, they chatted at ease with
dead friends and famous literary figures such as Wallace Stevens. Their
familiar spirit, Ephraim, a Greek Jew from the court of the Roman emperor
Tiberius, explained to them an elaborate system of reincarnation. Did Merrill
believe what the spirits told him? He liked to answer, “Yes and no,” using
words written on the board itself.
He published a long poem in 1976 about these spirit
conversations, called “The Book of Ephraim.” Then the tenor of the
communications changed. Weird new speakers gripped the cup and began to unfold
a cosmological story of creation and fall, urgently demanding that Merrill
write new poems warning readers of the threat of nuclear destruction. The
result was a 560-page poem called The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), a postmodern Dantesque trilogy in which Merrill transcribes messages
from subatomic particles, “God Biology,” and other assorted characters and
creatures, including a hornless unicorn known as “Uni.”
Merrill and Jackson’s homemade Ouija board and the dime
store tea cup they used as a pointer—glued together after more than one
occasion when the spirits pushed it off the table in a pique—are kept in Yale’s
Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library. These unusual tools of one writer’s rather mad compositional method
were a gift to the library from J. D. McClatchy ’74PhD, adjunct professor of
English at Yale, editor of the Yale Review, and one of
Merrill’s two literary executors.
With his left hand on the cup, Merrill used his right
to record letters, sorting the lexical lava into words and sentences. One of
the transcripts pictured here recounts the destruction of a world before ours
in a nuclear explosion. It is inscribed to “dearest Sandy”—McClatchy’s
nickname—by DJ and JM, who call it “a page saved from the pyre.” The “pyre”
refers not to a primeval apocalypse, but to Merrill’s choice to burn the Ouija
transcripts he used to write Sandover. The pages shown
here made it to the Beinecke, however, safe with the board and cup.  |
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