by Colin Wilson
He fell in love with an upper-class girl, and told her a romantic story that is typical of the inveterate daydreamer: that he was the son of a “great English family”, that he had become an overnight literary success in London as a result of his pastiches of Oscar Wilde, but had at first preferred to shun the limelight (this is the true Walter Mitty touch) until increasing success made this impossible. His wealth is the result of a successful play, Similia. (The similarity of the title to Salome is obvious, and we may infer that Blume was an ardent admirer of Wilde.) But in order to avoid too much publicity – after all, victims of previous swindles might expose him – he lives the quiet, regular life of a crook in hiding.
And just as all seems to be going so well – just as success, respectability, a happy marriage, seem so close – he once again runs out of money. There is only one solution: a brief return to a life of crime. One or two robberies of postmen can replenish his bank account and secure his future . . . But this time it goes disastrously wrong. Harry Whitecliffe is exposed as the swindler and murderer Wilhelm Blume. He makes no attempt to deny it, and confesses to his previous murders; his world has now collapsed in ruins. He is sent back to Berlin, where the murders were committed, and he attempts suicide in his cell. Soon after, he dies by the guillotine. And in Dresden the true story of Wilhelm Blume is soon embroidered into a horrifying tale of a Jekyll-and-Hyde mass murderer, whose early career in London is confused with Jack the Ripper . . .
Do any records of Wilhelm Blume still exist? It seems doubtful – the fire-bombing of Dresden destroyed most of the civic records, and the people who knew him more than sixty years ago must now all be dead. Yet Pauwels has obviously come across some garbled and wildly inaccurate account of Blume’s career as Harry Whitecliffe. It would be interesting to know where he obtained his information; but neither Françoise d’Eaubonne nor John Kennedy Melling have been successful in persuading him to answer letters.
62
Patience Worth
Or the Ghost Who Wrote Novels
On an August day in 1912 two women sat in a house in St Louis, Missouri, and played with an ouija board. They were Emily Grant Hutchings and Pearl Curran, and both were married to successful businessmen – their husbands were in fact playing cards in the next room. It was Mrs Hutchings who was interested in trying to “contact the spirits”; her friend Pearl Curran thought it was all a waste of time. And on that first August afternoon she proved to be right. The pointer of the ouija board spelt out a few recognizable words, but it was mostly nonsense.
But in spite of her friend’s boredom, Emily Hutchings insisted on trying again. They tried repeatedly over the next ten months. And finally, on 22 June 1913, the board spelled out the word PAT several times, then went on to write:
Oh, why let sorrow steel thy heart?
Thy bosom is but its foster-mother,
The world its cradle and the loving home its grave.
This was not only intelligible, but intelligent – although a careful reading is required before it can be seen to make sense.
That same afternoon the board went on to utter a number of similar sentiments, most of which sound like the utterances of a sentimental lady novelist of the Victorian period:
“Rest, weary heart. Let only sunshine light the shrine within. A single ray shall filter through and warm thy frozen soul”.
There were several more aphoristic sentences of the same nature.
The next time the ladies met was on 2 July 1913, and once again the ouija board began spelling out words with bewildering speed. “Dust rests beneath, and webs lie caught among the briars. A single jewel gleams as a mirrored vision of rising Venus in a mountain lake . . .” And after more poetic sentiments of the same kind, it declared: “All those who so lately graced your board are here, and as the moon looks down, think ye of them and their abode as a spirit song, as spirit friends, and close communion held twixt thee and them. Tis but a journey, dost not see”? And when the ladies asked for some elucidation the board replied: “Tis all so clear behind the veil . . .” And when they asked its name it answered: “Should one so near be confined to a name? The sun shines alike on the briar and the rose . . .” But at the next session, six days later, it finally condescended to reveal its identity. “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come – Patience Worth my name”. But she seemed reluctant to disclose more details. “About me you would know much. Yesterday is dead”. And she was inclined to express herself in aphorisms; at a later séance, when they asked her to hurry up, she replied: “Beat the hound and lose the hare.” She had a sharp tongue and a ready wit, although the old-fashioned language often made it difficult to understand. She seems to have taken a dislike to a Mrs Pollard, Pearl Curran’s mother, who was present at some of the sessions, and when asked by Emily Hutchings what she thought of Mrs Pollard, replied: “The men should stock her”. Did she mean that Mrs Pollard should be put in the stocks? asked Mrs Hutchings. “Aye, and leave a place for two” snapped Patience.
But shortly before Christmas Patience displayed an interesting ability to predict the future. Mrs Hutchings asked her what Pearl Curran intended to give her for Christmas; Patience replied: “Fifteen pieces, and one cracked”. In fact Mrs Curran had ordered a set of kitchen jars for her friend, and when they were delivered the next day one of the fifteen proved to be cracked. Asked what Emily Hutchings intended to give Pearl Curran for Christmas, Patience answered: “Table store, cross-stitched”. Again this was accurate – she had bought some cross-stitched table linen. Asked by Mrs Pollard for an inscription for a present to her daughter, Patience replied: “A burning desire never to be snuffed; a waxing faith, ever to burn”. It was remarkably appropriate: Mrs Pollard had bought her daughter a candle and snuffer.
Eventually Patience offered a little more information about herself. She was a Quaker girl, born either in 1649 or 1694 (the board dictated 1649, then changed its mind and added 94) and had been born in Dorset. She had worked hard – apparently on a farm – until her family emigrated to America, and had shortly thereafter been killed by Indians. She was certainly a talkative lady – even the incomplete records of the sessions with her, cited in The Case of Patience Worth by Walter Franklin Prince, are exhausting to read. And she was inclined to dictate lengthy “poems” which lack rhyme and show an uncertainty about metre. Her best-known utterance runs as follows:
Ah God, I have drunk unto the dregs,
And flung the cup at Thee!
The dust of crumbled righteousness
Hath dried and soaked unto itself
E’en the drop I spilled to Bacchus,
Whilst Thou, all-patient,
Sendest purple vintage for a later harvest.
This has most of the characteristics of Patience’s literary utterances. On first reading, it seems meaningless; on a second or third reading, it yields up its meaning. But the reader may be left in some doubt as to whether it was worth saying in the first place.
In 1915 Patience became something of a celebrity when Caspar Yost, the editor of the Sunday supplement of the St Louis Globe-Democrat, wrote a series of articles about her, although he was careful not to identify the two ladies who had “discovered” her. The articles caused a sensation, and Yost went on to write a book. Another St Louis journalist, William Marion Reedy, editor of Reedy’s Mirror – and one of the best literary critics of his time also attended some of the séances, and to his own astonishment was much impressed by Patience. Yost and Reedy were responsible for making the name of Patience Worth known all over America.
By now Patience had embarked upon more ambitious literary composition. First came Red Wing, a six-act medieval play. Next there was a 60,000 word medieval novel, Telka. And here it must be admitted at once that Patience is a disappointing writer. If the works were literary masterpieces, or even highly competent hack-work, they would deserve to be kept permanently in print. In fact, they are so long-winded as to be almost unreadable. “Historical” novels like Telka and The Sorry Tale (set
in the time of Jesus) are written in an “archaic” style that demands close attention and offers no adequate reward. This is from The Sorry Tale: “And his beard hung low upon his breast, and he spoke unto the Rome’s men: ‘The peace of Jehovah be upon you’ And they spat upon his fruits and made loud words, saying: ‘Behold, Jerusalem hath been beset of locusts and desert fleas . . .’” It reads like second-rate Biblical pastiches. A ‘modern’ novel, Hope Trueblood, begins: “The glass had slipped thrice, and the sands stood midway through, and still the bird hopped within its wicker. I think the glass had slipped through a score of years, rightfully set at each turning, and the bird had sung through some of these and mourned through others. The hearth’s arch yawned sleepily . . .” And after half a page of this the reader is also yawning sleepily.
Certainly Patience seems to have known little of the virtue of brevity. When a psychic named Arthur Delroy addressed a meeting in St Louis he remarked that the ouija board was of no more value than a doorknob, and that Patience’s language was not archaic English but the kind of language learned at Sunday school. (He added unkindly that he would not be surprised to learn that Mrs Curran had spent a great deal of time at Sunday school.) When this was reported to Patience, she replied: “Tis fools that smite the lute and set it awhir o’folly song, when sage’s hand do be at loth to touch.” To this Delroy replied, in Patience’s own style: “Nay, thou puttest me among the nobles. I be not the wise man from the East who wouldst prithee never be the last word, but wouldsy patiently wait, yea, t’ll’st the millionth Patient utterance . . .” Her reply, if she made one, is not recorded.
In November 1915 Mr and Mrs Curran decided to go to the east coast, where Patience was widely known, and to take the ouija board. Asked if she was willing to accompany them, Patience replied in her usual long-winded style: “E’en as doth the breath o’ thee to hug, so shall I, to follow thee. Think ye I’d build me a cup and leave it dry”? And when Patience was interviewed by the eminent psychologist Morton Prince in Boston he also found her wordiness rather trying. Asked if she objected to the investigation, she replied at inordinate length, beginning: “Ye be at seek o’ a measure o’ smoke’s put . . .” He repeated the question, and Patience explained lucidly: “Ye turn up a stone, ayea, and aneath there be a toad, aye, and he blinketh him at the light . . .” And when Prince in desperation repeated the question a third time, she explained: “Here be a one who hath ’o a ball o’ twine and be not a satisfied with the ball, but doth to awish that I do awind it out. List thee, brother, at thy poke aneath the stone! Tis well and alike unto me.” And hours of interrogation brought forth a great many more of these labyrinthine obscurities. Patience seems incapable of using one word where ten will do, bringing to mind Lincoln’s remark: “He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.” It was impossible to get her to answer even the simplest question with a direct reply. When Prince asked her how old she was when she came to America, she replied: “A goodly dame”, and when he repeated the question, advised him to look at a parable she had written about an ass. Patience herself ended the interview – the last – with an abrupt “Good night.”
Prince’s feeling was that they had been basically a waste of time. Whether or not Patience was genuine, she was certainly evasive. Mrs Curran flatly refused Prince’s suggestion that she should be hypnotized, and the Currans gave to the newspapers an account of the interviews that struck Prince as inaccurate, leading to some bad-tempered exchanges.
After this unsatisfactory encounter, the Currans went on to New York, where Patience met her future publisher Henry Holt, and rambled on in her usual infuriatingly prolix manner. But Holt was impressed, and in the following February – 1916 – brought out Caspar Yost’s book Patience Worth – A Psychic Mystery, which met, on the whole, with an excellent reception. Critics described Patience as a “powerful, unique but impalpable personality” and her work as “entertaining, humourous and beautiful”. But a dissenting note was sounded by Professor James Hyslop, of the American Society for Psychical Research, who deplored the total lack of scientifically convincing evidence, and dismissed Patience as a “fraud and a delusion”.
In June 1917 Henry Holt published the vast pseudo-Biblical epic The Sorry Tale, more than a quarter of a million words long. Again, many papers were ecstatic; the Boston Transcript wrote: “If, however, on account of its psychic claims, one approaches the story with unbelief or scoffing, one is instantly rebuffed by its quality”, while The Nation said that it “deserved to be weighed as a piece of creative fiction”. The modern reader will find these claims incomprehensible; the writing is atrocious, and often illiterate. “Sheep, storm-lost, bleated, where, out upon the hills, they lost them”. “The temples stood whited and the market place shewed emptied.” “And the Rome’s men bared their blades and the air rocked with cries of mock prayers from Rome’s lips.” If Patience had been an ambitious shop girl the novel would have been dismissed as a bad joke.
On the other hand, the book seemed to indicate a knowledge of ancient Rome that Mrs Curran insisted she had never possessed. The distinguished psychical investigator G.N.M. Tyrrell, writing thirty years later, said: “There is not here the greatness of genius, but . . . there is a fount of inspiration which might have provided the material for a work of genius had it been expressed through the conscious mind of, say, a Coleridge instead of . . . Mrs Curran”, and he went on to quote Caspar Yost’s view that the book revealed an intimate knowledge of the Rome of Augustus and Tiberius, and also of the topography of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. But then, of course, Yost was a somewhat biased witness, having been one of the original “discoverers” of Patience Worth.
One of the most bizarre episodes in the entire story began in August 1916, while The Sorry Tale was still being dictated. In her usual circumlocutory way, Patience announced that her works would bring in a great deal of money (“a-time a later the purse shall fatten”), but that this money “be not for him who hath”. The Currans were told “ye shall seek a one, a wee bit, one who hath not”, and added “Aye, this be close, close.” And soon it became clear that what Patience meant – she seems to have been incapable of saying anything in plain words – was that the Currans, who were childless, should adopt a baby, and that this baby would be in some sense Patience’s own daughter. By “the merest accident”, a pregnant widow was located – her husband had been killed in a mill accident – and she agreed to relinquish her unborn child to the Currans. Patience seemed quite certain it would be a daughter. And one evening, as she was dictating The Sorry Tale, Patience broke off abruptly with the comment “This be ‘nuff’”. An hour later the Currans heard that the baby had been born. It was indeed a girl, and had red hair and brown eyes – a description Patience had formerly given of herself. On Patience’s instructions the child was called Patience Worth Wee Curran.
In that same year – 1916 – Emily Hutchings called upon the eminent literary critic William Marion Reedy, and showed him the first ten thousand words of a novel about Missouri politics and journalism. In recent years Emily had dropped out of the limelight, for it had become clear that her presence was not essential for Patience to manifest herself. Reedy was impressed by the novel, and congratulated her. A week later he probably felt like eating his words when Emily called again, and confessed that the novel had been “dictated” by the spirit of Mark Twain – then proceeded to produce several pages with the help of the ouija board. The novel was accepted, and published under the title of Jap Herron, and was well received – although it was generally agreed that its quality was much inferior to the works Mark Twain had produced while he was alive. An effort by Mark Twain’s publishers to suppress the novel was unsuccessful.
During this period Patience’s fame continued to grow. The Victorian novel Hope Trueblood met with an enthusiastic reception from many respectable journals, although the reading public found that even Patience’s “modern” style was too wordy. In England the book was issued without any indic
ation of its “psychic” origin, and received mixed reviews; but at least most of the critics seemed to assume that it was the first novel of an English writer. The Currans also launched Patience Worth’s Magazine, to make Patience’s poems and lesser writings accessible to her admirers; it was edited by Caspar Yost, and ran to ten issues.
But by 1918 there were signs that Patience’s vogue was coming to an end. In The Atlantic Monthly that August a writer named Agnes Repplier poured scorn on this latest fad for books written by spirits, and expressed dismay at the thought that Patience, being dead, might be on the literary scene for ever. Of Patience’s books, Miss Repplier said tartly that “they were as silly as they were dull”. In retrospect, it seems surprising that no other reputable critic had already made this assessment.
The blast of ridicule was in effect the end of Patience Worth’s period of literary celebrity; Agnes Repplier had stated that the emperor was naked, and now everybody realized that it had been obvious all along. A new book by Caspar Yost on Patience’s religion and philosophy was turned down by Henry Holt; so was a volume of Patience’s poems. Pearl Curran (who had always strenuously denied that she had any writing talent) herself wrote a short story about a Chicago salesgirl – who, significantly, is “taken over” by a secondary personality – and it was accepted by the Saturday Evening Post; but Pearl’s most recent biographer, Irving Litvag, admits (in Singer in the Shadows) that the story “never rises above the level of bad soap opera”.