Ghostwriting Modernism (review)

When staying in the Duino castle for his second, longer and more productive visit, Rilke, always the perfect guest, got involved in his benefactor's passion, spiritualism. The Princess of Thurn and Taxis organized four séances in September and October 1912 for Rilke and her son Pascha who had discovered he had mediumistic powers—Rilke's protocols have documented the scene. The automatic writing on the board connected them with an "Unknown Lady" who beckoned the participants from a bridge in Toledo. Almost immediately Rilke decided to leave Duino for Spain, making arrangements to spend the winter in Toledo. He would return several times to the evocation of beautiful dead women's spirits in his poems. This vignette is typical of a dominant spiritualist culture that testifies to the way most Modernist poets, writers and artists related to spiritualist invocation of famous or anonymous ghosts: hesitating between ironical skepticism and enthusiastic suspension of disbelief, they often took these messages sent to them from beyond the grave as signals that could fan the waning fire of inspiration or allow them to make sudden decisions in cases of writer's block, protracted unrest or traveler's anxiety. Even those, like Joyce, who professed their cynicism openly, ended up using these otherworldly sessions as literary material, parodying them hilariously, milking them for their obvious comical effects as in several passages of Ulysses, or so as to settle personal accounts with more "literary" mediums as in Finnegans Wake, especially in III, 3.

Helen Sword's short book is a dense and engrossing account of rarely perused writings. It documents the complexity of this spiritualist popular culture, often staged and masterminded by women. The Modernist scenography of spiritualism was often taken to be an offshoot of Romantic habits (Hugo conversing with Shakespeare in Jersey, less a "visionary" like Blake than a faithful recorder of painstakingly deciphered letters sent through the abyss) later transformed into a Victorian craze. It was seen to have peaked in the 1880s so that Madame Sosostris of the Waste Landis often presented as a hangover from the old world's credulity. However, Sword demonstrates convincingly that the age of Modernism saw an explosion of these meetings, societies and publications. Still poised between popular superstition and money-making scams, spiritualism or the mediumistic impersonation or recreation of dead people's words gained legitimacy. There is the obvious case of Yeats's early and late fascination for mediums of all sorts, including his wife, and Conan Doyle's 1922 The Coming of the Fairieswhich can be blamed on old age. But Sword demonstrates that Modernism as a whole was deeply and seriously obsessed with the phenomenon.

Sword's book is more analytic than descriptive and mercifully spares us tedious accounts of séances with their associated mumbo-jumbo. Rather than making us smile or laugh at their expense, Sword takes these manifestations as cultural symptoms that betray deep anxieties over agency, gender, authority and "control" over meaning. Some of these books do indeed make good subjects for stale jokes today. Edward Dowden's daughter, better known as Hester Travers Smith, "edited" or "transcribed" the messages sent to her by Oscar Wilde under the title Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde, in which she settles accounts with Joyce who had slandered her father, a Shakespeare scholar. It is wonderful to learn that Wilde kept up with the literature published after his death (this complicates in an interesting way Eliot's thesis about the "ideal order" of a culture made up of dead people somehow surviving in our "bones"), to the point of vituperating against the filth and obscenity of Ulysses. Moreover, a look at Sword's bibliography raises a problem of attribution that she treats at length: in a move evocative of the games played by Nabokov in Pale Fire, she lists the title Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde in her index under "Wilde, Oscar," as if he were the...