Air-Bird in the Water: The Life and Works of Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) (review)

About a third of the way into her biography of Pearl Richards Craigie (1867–1906), the singular turn-of-the-century woman who produced an astounding number of novels and plays within the brief span of her pseudonymous career as John Oliver Hobbes, Mildred Davis Harding introduces us to Zoë Procter, Hobbes’s career-long secretary, one of those curiously Jamesian lingerers in the shadows of interesting celebrities. A kind of “odd woman” in the George Gissing style, niece of the fabled poet Adelaide Procter and daughter of a general in the Indian army, Procter (who is familiarly “Zoë” to Harding, as Craigie in her private persona is always “Pearl”), was almost exactly Craigie’s contemporary. But Procter outlived her by half a century, and included revealing recollections of her in her 1960 autobiography, Life and Yesterday.

One senses a certain jealousy in Harding’s feeling for this lucky precursor, who had the living Pearl to adore as well as the dead one, and whose taste for the gossip surrounding the lusciously enigmatic “Mrs. Craigie” was nearly as insatiable as her own. Giving Procter’s account of Craigie’s tabloid love-life, Harding reports Zoë’s belated realization “that none of Pearl’s relationships with men ‘contained the least trace of passion.’” She counters with a barbed parenthetical caution against assuming that even “this trusted spinster friend” would have “the whole truth,” but follows it shamelessly with Zoë’s account of a game Pearl had invented in which she shared a boat with all the men in her life, and pondered which of them she could see go overboard in heavy weather: “I would want to save Walter, because he is so weak, but I think it would be Curzon, because he would naturally expect it [. . .]. Of course if the boy (her son) were in the boat, there would be no doubt [. . .]” ; and then she ends the whole episode with the absolutely deadpan observation that the game grew “more complicated” in later years, “when Father Brown was in the boat” (168).

It may be difficult to imagine a 480-page biography conducted end-to-end at this level of evenhanded detail, capable of collapsing the silly, the strenuous, the snobbish, and the sentimental into the same superficial plethora. But besides having an enchanting woman for its subject (a skewering Craigie one-liner can rescue a whole chapter), Harding’s near-genius for superficiality may be what saves her story. There is something about the life and work of Pearl Craigie, however disquieting at its points of crisis, that craves weightlessness. It was she who called herself an “air-bird in the water,” a phrase that in all its ambiguity is purest Pearl on Pearl, a free-bird metaphor paradoxically buoyed in a metaphor for drowning, not only catching her sense of extremity but drawing us into inadvertent empathy with her scared, teasing courtship of the dangers of life.

The impression Craigie leaves is less of a risk-taker than of an incurable skimmer of risk, who preferred speeding over the mirror surface of her world to sinking herself into it. She had had one near-suffocating total immersion, when, as the nineteen-year-old American-born Pearl Richards—brilliant daughter of the doting “Yankee pedlar” who successfully marketed American cigarettes and Carter’s Little Liver Pills to the British— she had blithely wed a rich Englishman named Reginald Craigie who promised the stars but turned out virtually on their honeymoon to be a brutal, syphilitic philanderer. They had one child, John—“the boy” in the boat—to whom Pearl was devoted, but she quickly broke with her husband, and in order to gain exclusive custody finally scandalized even the nineties with a lurid divorce suit in 1895. Harding’s account of the court case, though better than any in print (and...