ABSTRACT
The society assembled in James Merrill’s trilogy is like that found in the better opera lobby — primarily gay and male but with a smattering of strong-willed, fascinating older women. Most of the major characters are gay men. The progenitors of the poem are a pair of lovers who, in the course of the narrative, celebrate their twenty-fifth year together: JM and DJ, who are at once fictional characters known by their initials alone (like Dallas magnates) and fictional stand-ins for James Merrill and David Jackson. It is they who work the ouija board and take down the dictées of paradise. David Jackson, in an interview with J. D. McClatchy that appeared in Shenandoah, has described their working method.1
