A Note on “The 1001 Seances”

Figure 1.

North Plain St., Altered Polaroid self-portrait by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Ithaca, New York, 1980

When Eve died, in April 2009, her papers were scattered, disorganized, and incomplete. The process of sorting through, organizing, and preserving what remains is still ongoing. In August 2009 we were looking through a box marked “Eve’s personal papers” that had been stored in a rented storage locker. Among the papers was a photocopy of a typescript of “The 1001 Seances,” Eve’s essay on James Merrill. I remembered the paper, but it had been many years since Eve had mentioned it to me, and I had not known that it still existed. As far as we knew then, this was the only surviving copy.

The typescript was undated, but something about the date could be inferred from the Cornell University address in its heading. Eve’s paper focuses on “The Book of Ephraim” in Merrill’s The Divine Comedies, which was first published in 1976. After five years as a graduate student and instructor at Yale, Eve had moved to Cornell in the fall of 1976, supported by a two-year postdoctoral Mellon fellowship. So this typescript was produced during her fellowship. It’s quite possible, however, that she was already working on the essay during her last year at Yale. We can further narrow down the date to the first year of Eve’s fellowship because of a letter in her files dated June 7, 1977, from the editor of Salmagundi. The letter declines to accept “The 1001 Seances” but encourages resubmission with some changes to make it less “like an academic paper.” It appears that Eve chose not to change her paper.

We prepared a clean, digitized copy of the paper. In doing so, we checked Eve’s quotations from Merrill and made a few small corrections. Additionally, Eve had made a few very minor handwritten changes in wording on the photocopy, and we have incorporated those.

We have since learned (with the help of Google) of the existence of two other photocopies of Eve’s paper. One is in the Merrill archive at Yale’s Beinecke Library. It was given to the archives, as part of two boxes of Merrill’s papers, by J. D. McClatchy, Merrill’s literary executor, in 1991. McClatchy had received the paper from Joseph Gordon, a close friend of Eve’s and a fellow graduate student, along with McClatchy, at Yale.¹ The other photocopy is in the files of Mark Bauer, Joseph Gordon’s partner. In 1996 Bauer had organized a panel on Merrill for that year’s meeting of the Modern Language Association. Eve had agreed to give a talk (about twenty-five minutes long) based on a much-shortened version of “The 1001 Seances” and had sent Bauer a photocopy of the full-length paper, which is what he has now. These two photocopies both have a Hamilton College address on the first page, so Eve presumably retyped that page after she moved to Hamilton (her first faculty position) in the fall of 1978. The other pages of both these photocopies, however, were clearly made from the same typescript that Eve used in making the Cornell photocopy that we have.

There’s much that we don’t still know about the history of this paper, but what we do know makes it clear that Eve maintained her interest in her writing about Merrill over at least the twenty-year period from 1976 to 1996.

A dear friend of Eve’s remarked that readers of GLQ may not recognize in “The 1001 Seances” the Eve who was “the founding voice of Queer Theory”—that the author of this essay may seem like an Eve before she was Eve. This remark deserves careful thought.

There are, of course, many differences between the Eve of this essay and the more familiar Eve of the 1990s. Looking back, though, for me the most salient difference between the Eve of “The 1001 Seances” and the Eve of, say, “Queer and Now” lies...