In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

59 Chapter 3 Pearl vs. Patience: Medium vs. Control Patience Worth quickly became the dominant fact of Pearl Curran’s life as the words of PW, published or reported, became the medium’s medium to celebrity . In the months following Curran’s first production of a poem without Emily Hutchings at the board, the Currans moved from their modest flat to a large house on Union Boulevard,1 where Pearl’s Patience began to add to her impromptu poetry with short fictions, set vaguely in a romance writer’s version of medieval centuries, and to respond with witty evasion or sharp counterthrust when visitors expressed disappointment or disbelief at her answers to historical questions. Casper Yost, editorial director of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, apparently alerted by Emily Hutchings, was soon attending PW sessions, beginning a long relationship as textual editor and entranced advocate for his discarnate hostess by stirring curiosity in his newspaper on the “the mystery of Patience Worth” and printing early short works like “The Fool and the Lady” and “The Stranger,” both of which he put in the paper in February 1915.2 From different perspectives as journalists, both Yost and William Reedy watched PW’s long dramatic fiction, Telka, begin to emerge, its awkward but compellingly earthy language and rapid-fire delivery from the Ouija board drawing immediate attention though it would not be published until 1928. The more discreet of the two inquirers, Yost would at first refer to Curran and Hutchings as “Mrs. Smith” and “Mrs. Jones.” A committed disturber of the peace, William Marion 60 The Patience of Pearl Reedy both followed and promoted controversy. His publication, Reedy’s Mirror , addressed a national and international audience, its masthead proclaiming distribution in London, Paris, and Venice, but its editorial voice, on both literary and political subjects, remained midwestern and no-nonsense realist. The feud between two communicants of a local writer-ghost made an irresistible story even after Reedy had begun to praise some of the PW fiction, The Sorry Tale particularly, for its own merits. After three years of observing PW dictations and printing readers’ diagnoses of the phenomenon, Reedy estimated that “if one were asked what personality in Saint Louis is most widely known throughout the country the answer would be Patience Worth. . . . More people of importance and distinction from the world outside Saint Louis visit the Curran home on Cates avenue [as of 1917] than any other house or any institution in the city.”Behind the PW transcendencies , Reedy saw from the beginning “nothing but a sort of gloss in root English of Emerson’s ‘Oversoul’”3 and cared little for the board’s “squeegeeistic ”poetry. But PW’s cultural scripture of love, beauty, and glowingly divinized nature with Christian tendencies drew on Curran’s memories of an oracular mode—FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat translation, the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and Whitman—blended with the larks, mists, and moons remaining in the popular downstream of Romantic and Victorian poetry. In what the recordkeeper , presumably John Curran, called a particularly “cosy and homey” gathering in November 1916, PW generalized the first person to include “the All”: I am of Earth, yet builded how? As the atoms dance, danced I. As the starbeams streamed, so streamed I. I am of Earth and All Things; For I am His, and He is All Things. On such evenings, the PW circle, “the Family,” could elevate its members to cosmic status and make a potential poet of a visitor whom the pointer told, “See ye, there be an song aneath the napron, dame” (PWR 4:743–44). For her visitors, PW instantiated what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “oracle effect” from “a veritable splitting of personality.” The medium, exemplifying an indeterminate “I,” gives rise to a voice that speaks in the name of everything, “even in desert places like St. Louis,” as John Curran once said.4 Unlike Emily Hutchings, eager to connect with the spirits of the dead, Pearl Curran became medium for an audience that sought entry to the spaceless source of the PW voice. As dictations multiplied, it became evident that PW, tart tongue notwithstanding , proclaimed a deeper spiritual life than her medium. In her own dialect, Curran promoted no doctrine other than Patience. Following their Pearl vs. Patience 61 disputatious meeting with Morton Prince in Boston, the Currans traveled to New York to meet publishers Henry Holt and Alfred Harcourt, for whom Pearl demonstrated a PW dictation. And in February 1916, Casper Yost...

Share