Credulity

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Lee Sandlin's endlessly interesting new book on the Mississippi, Wicked River, is a work of history, so ordinarily I would wait to write about it until October's ghosts have returned to their crypts. But one passage from its panorama of adventure and incident suits the month's theme, and thus seems worth sharing. It comes from a chapter titled "Oracles," which, in Sandlin's wonderfully meandering way, wanders through millenarian prophecies, circus boats, minstrel shows, ice jams, and steamboat explosions--but it starts firmly in October country:

It was a credulous age. . . . [People] were eager to believe in anything, no matter how strange, as long as it was bad news. They were particularly fascinated by occult portents of doom. Everybody knew that owls and whip-poor-wills were evil omens, that a dog howling in the night meant somebody was about to die, that prudent people had to carry a tuft of wool tied with thread at all times to prevent being ridden by witches. It was a time of seances and mirror divination and spirit rapping--an era when, as Melville observed in Moby-Dick, "the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city."

Sandlin then turns to the truly strange example of Harriet Beecher Stowe's husband, Calvin, who

was a down-to-earth and practical man, but . . . was tormented all his life by visions of weird presences infesting the world. On the streets mingling with ordinary people, he said, was another race, "with the human form and proportion, but under a shadowy outline that seemed just ready to melt into the invisible air, and sometimes liable to the most sudden and grotesque changes." These "rational phantoms," as he called them, were hunted by yet another supernatural race, which appeared as "heavy clouds floating about overhead, of a black color, spotted with brown, in the shape of a very flaring inverted tunnel without a nozzle. . . . They floated from place to place in great numbers, and in all directions, with a strong and steady progress, but with a tremulous, quivering, internal motion that agitated them in every part." And then there were the devils--a great many devils, down every street and in every meeting place. They were "very different from the common representations," he said. "They had neither red faces, nor horns, nor hoofs, nor tails. They were in all respects stoutly built and well-dressed gentlemen. The only peculiarity that I noted in their appearance was as to their heads. Their faces and necks were perfectly bare, without hair or flesh, and of a uniform sky-blue color, like the ashes of burnt paper before it falls to pieces, and of a certain glossy smoothness.

Those descriptions come from a biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe that Charles published in 1891; although his account seems utterly bizarre to us now--and, frankly, in its specificity and insistence can’t help but seem like the product of a disordered mind--it’s not particularly strange that Stowe went pubic with his visions: 1891 was still the heyday of the spiritualist movement, which had erupted in midcentury and gained strength after the slaughter of the Civil War (as it would again after World War I). And Harriet herself was, at least in some form, an enthusiast, as shown by a letter to her from George Eliot that D J. Enright included in his Oxford Book of the Supernatural. Stowe had written to Eliot of a two-hour conversation with Charlotte Bronte that Stowe had conducted via a Ouija Board; Eliot, politely, was having none of it:

Your experience with the planchette is amazing; but that the words which you found it to have written were dictated by the spirit of Charlotte Bronte is to me (whether rightly or not) so enormously improbable, that I could only accept it if every condition were laid bare, and every other explanation demonstrated to be impossible. If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Bronte--if here and there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know already or should be as well without knowing--I must frankly confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings, feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we could help--then I think we should pause and have patience with their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don’t feel bound to study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a particular phase of human society. Others, who feel differently, and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come of it. At present, it seems to me that to rest any fundamental part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of men’s minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion.

Among those “[o]thers, who feel differently,” was another of the era’s sharpest minds, William James. Along with the Society for Psychical Research James conducted investigation after investigation into mediums, spiritualist practices, and unexplained phenomena. James himself, though interested, was skeptical--yet even as he was disappointed again and again by fraudulent mediums, he never quite gave up his willingness to be open to the idea that there are things beyond our ken. In his great biography of James, Robert D. Richardson quotes a letter from James to a family friend that, better than anything else I’ve encountered, helps me--a natural skeptic--understand the way that a piercing, inquisitive mind can be drawn by the currents of the time:

I have hitherto felt . . . as if the wonder-mongers and magnetic physicians and seventh sons of seventh daughters and those who gravitated towards them by mental affinity were a sort of intellectual vermin. I now begin to believe that that type of mind takes hold of a range of truths to which the other kind is stone blind. The consequence is that I am all at sea, with my old compass lost, and no new one, and the stars invisible through the fog.

Reflecting in another letter on the sordid trail of chicanery and falsehood he and other researchers had uncovered, James refines that “at sea” feeling to a concise statement more clearly befitting a scientist:

It is a field in which the sources of deception are extremely numerous. But I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon are impossible.

A perfect skeptic’s creed for October nights if ever I’ve seen one!

"All that is required in studying them is patience," or, On youthful enthusiasm

We had an old college friend in town this weekend, which made me take particular note of two descriptions of college life that I encountered in my reading the past few days. First, there's the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Peter De Vries' Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (1983), who, fearing that his bad study habits are about to prevent him from reaching high school, offers a prematurely wistful riff on what he'll therefore ultimately miss by not going to college:

Lights blooming at dusk along the Quad. Girls with convertibles. The glee club singing "Brown October Ale." Swallowed oysters retracted on the end of a string by potential fraternity brothers. Limburger set by wits on dormitory radiators.

Then I came across a reminder--not dissimilar to what one gets from accounts of Lord Rochester's "growing debauched" as a twelve-year-old at Oxford in the seventeenth century--that even De Vries' midcentury vision of gentle college prankery is a step up from earlier days, as displayed in this description by Robert D. Richardson of early nineteenth-century Harvard:

The three Rs at Harvard during Thoreau's time were rote learning, regimentation, and rowdyism. Boys commonly entered college at fifteen, sometimes younger. Dress, hours, and attendance were all prescribed. Meals were in commons, and the food was said--as all college food is always said--to have been dreadful. Breakfast consisted of hot coffee, hot rolls, and butter. Supper was tea, cold rolls "of the consistency of wool," and no butter. The midday meal was the only one that was plentiful, and students sometimes affixed a piece of the noon meat to the underside of the table, with a fork, in order to have meat for supper. . . The habits of the students were rough; throwing food at meals was nothing compared to the habitual destruction of property, which was not confined to breaking up furniture. Public rooms in inhabited buildings were blown up with gunpowder "every year," according to some accounts. . . . Many [dorm] rooms had a cannonball, useful when hot as a foot warmer, when cold to roll down the stairs in the middle of the night.

Our college lives were . . . um, a bit different from both those accounts, not even really partaking in the contemporary versions of those ignoble pastimes. Nary a keg stand have I done.

Instead, my college days were marked, at their best, by a realization that sprung pleasantly upon me in my first days as a student, as I was starting to discern potential friends in the mass of my contemporaries: here, and here, and here again, were people who were openly enthusiastic! These people, the ones to whom I found myself drawn (and with many of whom I am still close eighteen years later), were excited about things--art, books, movies, sports, ideas--and weren't the slightest bit ashamed to reveal that excitement. Coming hard on the heels of high school, with itsde riguer poses of disenchantment and disdain, that fervor was tonic. Its unabashedly nerdy charms carried me through my English degree, and they continue to underlie nearly everything I do today, from my writing here and other places to my baseball fandom to my fumblings at the piano.

In his biography of Thoreau*, Richardson uses a line from Madame de Stael to describe Thoreau's intellectual eagerness as a young man:

Thought is nothing without enthusiasm.

It's appropriate that Thoreau was one of the people who set me off on this train of thought, for enthusiasm--as seen in his unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the natural world--is one of his most endearing qualities. I'll close this post with a demonstration, from his journal entry for this day, April 18th, 1857:

Frogs are strange creatures. One would describe them as peculiarly wary and timid, another as equally bold and imperturbable. All that is required in studying them is patience. You will sometimes walk a long way along a ditch and hear twenty or more leap in one after another before you, and see where they rippled the water, without getting sight of one of them. You sit down on the brink and wait patiently for his reappearance. After a quarter of an hour or more he is sure to rise to the surface and put out his nose quietly without making a ripple, eying you steadily. At length he becomes as curious about you as you can be about him. He suddenly hops straight toward you, pausing within a foot, and takes a near and leisurely view of you. Perchance you may now scratch its nose with your finger and examine it to your heart's content, for it is become as imperturbable as it was shy before. You conquer them by superior patience and immovableness; not by quickness, but by slowness; not by heat, but by coldness.

To which the wonderful new edition of Thoreau's journals from NYRB Classics appends this note:

A Concord farmer's perspective: "Why one morning I went out in my field across there to the river, and there, beside that little old mud pond, was standing Da-a-vid Henry, and he wasn't doin' nothin' but just standin' there--lookin' at that pond, and when I came back at noon, there he was standin' with his hands behind him just lookin' down into that pond, and after dinner when I come back again if there wasn't Da-a-vid standin' there just like as if he had been there all day, gazin' down into that pond, and I stopped and looked at him and I says, 'Da-a-vid Henry, what air you a'doin'?' And he didn't turn his head and he didn't look at me. He kept on lookin' down at that pond, and he said, as if he was thinkin' about the stars in the heavens, 'Mr. Murray, I'm a-studyin'--the habits--of the bullfrog!' And there that darned fool had been standin'--the livelong day--a-studyin'--the habits--of the bull-frog!" (Quoted in Mrs. Daniel Chester French, Memories of a Sculptor's Wife, 1928)

The outside world may frequently be bemused by such unfettered enthusiasm, but we of the not-so-secret society of nerds and scholars, oh, we understand!

"Avoid naming it straight," or, Reading Henry James

A recent post by OGIC at About Last Night having convinced me that I'd been away from Henry James too long, I'm currently hip-deep in The Ambassadors (1905), which, knowing my tastes, was where OGIC suggested I dive in--right into the heart of baroque, roundabout late period James. And she was right: I find myself deeply admiring James's odd combination of tenacity and circumspection, his constant circling about an idea or emotion not so much out of delicacy as out of a desire not to miss a single nuance.

Yet at the same time I find that reading James is a lot like watching a performance of Shakespeare: it takes me a few minutes, every time I open the book, to settle into the rhythms of the prose, and, almost as if I'm translating from a foreign language, I can feel my brain engaging some higher, rarely tested gears. A passage like this one, perfectly grammatical though its sentences may be, requires an attention to its elusive thread of thought that's hard to maintain in the quiet bustle of the L or the bus:

The fact was that his perception of the young man's identity--so absolutely checked for a minute--had been quite one of the sensations that count in life; he certainly had never known one that had acted, as he might have said, with more of a crowded rush. And the rush, though both vague and multitudinous, had lasted a long time, protected, as it were, yet at the same time aggravated, by the circumstance of its coinciding with a stretch of decorous silence. They couldn't talk without disturbing the spectators in the part of the balcony just below them; and it, for that matter, came to Strether--being a thing of the sort that did come to him--that these were the accidents of a high civilization; the imposed tribute to propriety, the frequent exposure to conditions, usually brilliant, in which relief has to await its time. Relief was never quite near at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such people, and though you might be yourself not exactly one of those, you could yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a little how they sometimes felt.

Though the reward is palpable--that memorable insight about delayed relief--there is nonetheless an inescapable air of obsession to the slightly overcooked precision of that account; you can feel the hand of revision, of what Alice Munro in an interview called James's habit of rewriting "simple, understandable stuff so it was obscure and difficult."*

And, much as I'm enjoying The Ambassadors, it's hard not to sympathize with the frustration of Henry's brother William--whose whole philosophical project was to render the unknown in plain language--when confronted with such fussy concatenations of prose. In his biography of William James, Robert D. Richardson draws from a letter William sent Henry in 1907:

"You know how opposed your whole 'third manner' of execution is to the literary ideals which animate my crude and Orson-like breast," William rumbled, "mine being to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it forever; yours being to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn't!) the illusion of a solid object, made (like the 'ghost' at the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space."

Many's the day I understand William's position (and oh, how much more might I do so were Henry my brother!), but for today I'll gladly plow ahead in Henry's mode, which I'm currently thinking of in terms he employs to describe one of the female characters in The Ambassadors, who is "a slow contemporaneous fact who had been distinctly slow to establish herself." Indeed.