By Ed Simon
In early 20th - 100 St. Louis , Pearl Curran claimed to have conspire a long - deadened New England puritan distinguish Patience Worth through a Ouija board . Although mostly unsung today , the leave books , poems , and playact that Worth “ dictated ” to Curran earned great praise at the sentence . Ed Simon investigates the curious and virtually leave literary fruits of a “ specter ” and her ghostwriter .
On July 8th 1913 , after month of experiment , a St. Louis woman of the house named Pearl Curran ultimately had a breakthrough with her Ouija panel . From this initial correspondence , Pearl Curran wrote ( or depending on your perspective , transcribed ) jillion of news she ascribe to a 17th - hundred poet who call herself Patience Worth . Historical novel , religious tracts , and lyrical verse form were publish and embraced by mainstream scholars as veritable examples of former American lit mediated from beyond the grave accent . The figure of Patience Worth was commend as an typic writer by organizations such as the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York . She was admit in journals alongside such future canonic authors as Edna St. Vincent Millay and she appeared in aggregation such as theAnthology of Magazine Writingand theYearbook of American Poetry . All the more astonishingly , readers and critics agreed that this was new body of work by a charwoman who claimed to have been drained for more two and a half centuries .
These writings were either unquestionable documents that provided astounding grounds of mankind ’s survival after demise , or an intricate and impressive dupery that hoodwinked scholars , critics , and editors . There is also another possibility , that these works were the improvisational literary production of a omen who believe herself to be a conduit of some muse from the hereafter . head of penning and intention apart , what stay are the Book , plays and poems – once democratic literature , and now forgotten . Curran ’s output propel us to ask some fundamental questions about history , genre , intention , affect , authorship , and why we choose to read what we read . Furthermore , her piece of writing are a fascinating curio of an era in American literary history when academician and quack , the rational and the occult , encyclopaedism and magic all mix together in democratic discourse .
Patent for a Ouija board , file in 1891
Pearl Curran was carry in 1883 , towards the ending of a one C that saw the national landscape painting and the United States ’ position in the macrocosm radically altered . She and her consultation were heritor of the sometimes eccentric spiritual variety of the American nineteenth century . It was a one C that start with the spiritual anarchism of the Second Great Awakening , was defined by an apocalyptic Civil War , and then moved into the bourgeois and sizable spirituality of the tardy square-toed era . supernatural experimentation was embraced by leading creative thinker and writer like William James who , with other leading scientists , establish the American Society for Psychical Research . Curran was enmeshed in a civilization of esoterica that she would have encountered during a priggish adolescence . And the chassis of Patience Worth “ revealed ” herself at a perfect time , just as the rising international power that was the United States began to critically re - evaluate its seventeenth century Puritan origins .
Colonial American writing were long dismissed as embarrassing anti - cerebral relics by great 19th - century authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne . In the early years of the twentieth one C however , scholar start re - value the 17th - century canyon . Pearl Curran supply a perfect model in her creation of Patience Worth , who was included alongside actual poet as an lesson of colonial American artistic genius . As the United States began to assert itself on a world microscope stage , it look back towards its then agreed upon New England pedigree and began to complicate its creation myth , proclaim the virtues of Puritan thrift , industriousness , and individuation . significantly for Curran , the compound period was also one where women ’s voices were astonishingly not ignored . In early American verse the seventeenth - C poet Anne Bradstreet ( 1612 - 1672 ) reign as the single most model and important literary public figure . Other char writer like Mary Rowlandson ( 1637 - 1711 ) were the Puritan equivalents of best - sellers .
picture of French mediumEvaCarrièreat employment , strewn with “ ectoplasm ” from the “ other side ” . Featured inPhenomena of Materialisationby German physician and psychic researcher Baron von Schrenck - Notzing , write in the same year that Pearl Curran was to have her first contact with Patience Worth – seed .
It is certainly possible to see Patience Worth in these term . But it ’s limit to exclude other possible interpretations of this strange corpus . Curran can not be seen as just another literary - apt sensitive . Her event was different . medium like Blavatsky powerfully delineated between their own writings and the short passages attributed to spirits . Curran , however , produced an incredible number of writings , all of which were attribute to Patience Worth . There are wads of verse form , letters , and novel includingTelka , The Sorry Tale , Hope Trueblood , The Pot upon the Wheel , Samuel Wheaton , andAn Elizabethan Maskamong other work . How should one consider the unmingled amount and largeness of such works ? If a put-on , it is still a hoax that is anything but bare , or easy .
Although we do not need to explicate such a fertile life history frame in such a bizarre style by suggesting that Patience Worth was a material someone , there exists the possibility that Curran sympathize authorship in a more unconventional way than the spacious culture ofttimes does . Between the possibilities of Patience Worth ’s reality and Pearl Curran ’s duplicity there exists a third option : that Pearl Curran transcribed these whole works believe Patience Worth to be real , a founding of her own mind put across these words back to her . An internal muse if you will , whose existence serves to reassess the wide-eyed individual models of composition we conventionally hold to . As such , her corpus provides an affair for recollect about where inspiration comes from , how source give their piece of writing , and the ways in which something as seemingly well understood as composition still contains a kernel of secret at its core .
Outside of occult circles , the awkward metaphysical nature of Patience Worth has relegated her to complete obscurity in the academic world for a century . There is not much respectability in the donnish study of something that seems to be a fraud . This is an unjust luck for composition that , though not as technically proficient as works deem canonical , still deserve study and care , not just because of the way they illuminate an strange period of American literary history , but also because the written material themselves are arguably more aesthetically proficient than one might expect . The critics who exalt the quality of Worth / Curran had their rationality for doing so , some of which still hold up . It should be emphasized again that these are not just short lyric poem that one could see a Ouija - using author writing in a few proceedings . The plain length of some of her books is dumfounding in itself , to say nothing of their literary quality . One need only flip throughThe Pot upon the Wheel , a verse line play whose negotiation sometimes remind one of the phantasmal urgency of a classical religious text edition like theBhagavad - Gita . Or takeA Sorry Tale , a more than six hundred varlet esoteric invoice of the life of Christ that at points touch a prophetic pitch calling to mind the theological system of William Blake .
A table – featured in Walter Franklin Prince’sThe caseful of Patience Worth ; a vital study of certain unusual phenomena(1927 ) – designate the huge volume of work that would be produce at a sitting – germ .
When dip into the voluminous corpus of writing , one of the first thing you discover is that they do n’t put up the haphazard stream - of - consciousness style so vulgar in the automatonlike writing practiced by Dadaist poets and other Avant - Garde group . But they also do n’t register like 17th century American prose and verse , despite what early decisive pleader of Pearl Curran like Casper Yost may have claimed . At most , one could say that the workings exhibit qualities of pastiche in their depiction of how American Puritans wrote and talked – though none of this should diminish the very existent personality that seems to make out through the communication of Patience Worth .
She appear as variously smart , pious , sentimental , plucky , and sarcastic . She does n’t record as a mere replication of Curran herself . As artistic instauration , the idea of Patience deserving rather than her wrangle are what is primal . In reading her verse , one encounters a persona that , while three - dimensionally vibrant , does n’t seem to match our expectation of how a seventeenth hundred New England woman would write . While syntax and phraseology can seem largely “ authentic ” there is little of the orthodox Calvinism one find in existent early American poets like Bradstreet , Edward Taylor or Michael Wigglesworth . Rather , she seems to offer a broadly spiritual , new age philosophy in keep with the lot of her “ discovery . ”
In full term of theme and terminology she is broadly “ American ” in the way we think of , say , Dickinson or Frost as being particularly American . She seems to mimic Dickinson ( who was only really being rediscover at the time that Pearl Curran was work ) in her poem “ Who said that making love was fire ? ” Curran writes :
true , she departs from Dickinson ’s distinctive ballad meter which conjures the structure of hymn , but at least visually the verse form call to mind the myopic lyrics of the“Bard of Amherst ” . While not peculiarly advanced , there are some notable ingredient : the rhetorical query that she leads with , the image of ardor and ash tree , and the telephone line , “ It is the thing which remain ” ( in particular evocative of Dickinson ) . The most unfortunate aspect of the verse form is its last line which cue one of particularly poor translation of Rumi or Hafez , and also reflects so much of the orientalist theosophical milieu that Pearl Curran travel in – certainly much more than it does seventeenth century Puritan American religious words .
Pearl Curran in an undated picture – Source[copyright strange ] .
In another verse form , “ Child ’s Prayer , ” she takes as her root the sort of sentimental issue that would not be out of place in Bradstreet , while still mimicking the style of nineteenth century American poets who were influenced by the Second Great Awakening :
With its declarations and its exclaiming points she remind us of Walt Whitman , even if she does not share his recognizable mighty line .
An representative of one of her more sophisticated lyric poem is in the poem “ The Earth the Fields Lay Stretched in Sleep . ” She compose :
In her depiction of an autumnal melancholy , she conflates nature with haggard corpse images , a gothic incarnation similar to thememento moritradition of the Puritanism she was purportedly an adherent of . Later , a lily is compared to a “ brownish - garbed nun , ” an entirely un - Puritan image in this funnily world-wide spiritual world of Patience Worth . This same heterodox antinomian faith is observable in the title to her poem , “ Predestined Love , ” where one of the austere philosophical system of Calvinism is fine-tune into one of universal love .
As this brief reading has testify , there is much literary merit in Curran ’s work – so why then this carelessness ? The bizarre origin of the writing should n’t be an impediment to a reasoned study of their structural qualities . After all , William Butler Yeats attributed several of his lyric to a intent named Leo Africanus whom he encountered through the use of a Ouija board while a appendage of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn . Without suggesting that the writings of Curran and Yeats are of alike esthetic time value , it would seem that dismissing them entirely on the grounds that there is a connection to the supernatural is unfair if a standardised standard is n’t apply to Yeats . In both of these cases it might be helpful to retrieve of the mediate personality as being complex heteronyms of a case exemplify by the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa ( a coeval of Curran and one also grip by reflex writing and the occult ) . A heteronym is a particularly complicated pen - name ; in addition to a false name there is an solely false identity , a fictional author where literariness is extratextual to the poem or book itself . These concepts , of the heteronym and the muse , intake and authorship nurture interesting questions about the epistemology and ontology of lit . Where does literature ultimately come from ? What is licit as an aim of reading and study ? Can a literary hoax still be read as literature ?
leave : A liveliness picture of Yeats take , according to Stanford University , during a sitting in Paris around 1914 – reservoir . powerful : Pessoa in 1929 taking a drink at Abel Pereira da Fonseca , Lisbon – Source .
Astrological chart for Ricardo Reis , one of Pessoa ’s heteronyms – Source .
In the long view of ethnic chronicle , her place becomes even more interesting . Biography and story become compressed and the relationship between who is a real individual and who is a fictional person becomes more ontologically unsealed . I ’m going to go against any sort of pose of objectivity and say emphatically that I do not believe that Patience Worth was anything more than a full - bodied macrocosm of Pearl Curran . It ’s worth point out that there are no records of any actual Patience Worth having lived either in New England , or Dorsetshire where Curran claimed the poet was born . Yet , imagine someone show Curran a millenary from now . Would such eminence as whether Worth is “ real ” or not count to this conceive of reader ? For classicist there are arguments about the “ reality ” of an author named Homer , single that scholars working in much later full point do n’t have to study in the same way . Philosophically , if a heteronym ’s Good Book seem as full and real as an real mortal ’s , why ca n’t they be treat as such ? The fullness of the fictionality of Patience Worth is that it is a fictionality which imposes itself on the material world , and that in itself is a fascinating routine of literary creation .
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