JACKSON, David and James Merrill | David Jackson: Scenes from His Life

New York: Nadja, 1994.

4to.; bright blue cloth and paper chemise portfolio; loose leaves of Arches mouldmade paper; illustrated with fourteen color plates, including the label on the front board of the portfolio.

Limited edition of 100 copies, the full edition. Signed by David Jackson on the printed gift card laid in. Inscribed to Peter Gillis by David Jackson on the half-title: “For dear Peter, longtime friend, dear love, and enchanting sometimes neighbor – ever David”.   

A writer and artist, David Jackson is remembered today primarily for his literary collaboration with his life-partner, James Merrill. The two men met in May 1953 in New York City, after a performance of Merrill’s play, The Bait. They shared homes in Stonington, Connecticut, Key West, and Athens. “It was, I often thought, the happiest marriage I knew,” wrote Alison Lurie, who got to know both men in the 1950s and wrote a memoir, Familiar Spirits [New York: Viking, 2001], about their relationship.

Jackson collaborated with James Merrill on much of his most significant poetic output. Over the course of decades conducting séances with a Ouija board, Merrill and Jackson took down supernatural transcriptions and messages from otherworldly entities. Merrill's and Jackson's ouija transcriptions were first published in verse form in “The Book of Ephraim” [from Divine Comedies, New York: Atheneum, 1976, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1977]. Mirabell: Books of Number [New York: Atheneum, 1978] and Scripts for the Pageant [New York: Atheneum, 1980] were also written with Jackson's assistance. Together, they constitute the epic trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover, which Atheneum printed in its entirety as a 560-page apocalyptic poem in 1982. 

Although the two became estranged in the 1980s, Merrill produced a “lavish chapbook,” David Jackson: Scenes from His Life, published hors commerce, for Jackson's 72nd birthday in 1994. It contains fourteen of David's sketches and paintings from the 1950s to 1970s, and each image is paired with a related passage from Jackson’s or Merrill’s writing. The handset Garamond type is letterpress printed on Arches mouldmade papers and bound in portfolios by Nadja. The color reproductions are printed on Mohawk Superfine by The Stinehour Press. Jackson and Merrill are buried side by side at Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington.