Browse Items (22 total)

Photograph of David Jackson and James Merrill standing in front of a window, April 1965.

This James Merrill postcard to David Jackson is one of the first mentions of Jackson in Merrill's Papers. The postcard was written shortly after they first met, and Merrill is wondering when he will see Jackson again.

James Merrill letter to David Jackson with a poem, drawings, and a photo Merrill made for Jackson's 40th birthday.

James Merrill letter to Daryl Hine describing his and David Jackson's latest sexual partner. Merrill mentions his new relationship with Strato Mouflouzelis and also complains of spiritual and historical debates with Tony Harwood.

See also Journal…

A Ouija séance transcript regarding Wallace Stevens in the afterlife. This serves as one example of Merrill and Jackson frequently communicating with recently-deceased writers and friends, and also of the topics of literary vocation and sexual…

Journal entry by David Jackson about jealousy and promiscuity between James Merrill and Jackson.

James Merrill and David Jackson's second séance (and the first that Merrill transcribed and preserved), in which they reached the spirit of "Kabel Barnes," a colonial farmer.

During the March 29 and April 26, 1976 séances, higher powers (over Ephraim) began revealing the cosmology that Merrill would document in Mirabell: Books of Number and Scripts for the Pageant. It was during this time period, after finishing…

"Voices from the Other World," published in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, was James Merrill's first--and for many years, only--treatment of the Ouija board séances in a poem. Merrill's supernatural and domestic life with Jackson…

This fragment is the start of a never-completed novel about James Merrill's and David Jackson's evolving relationship with Stonington and each other.