Possession

  In my family’s possession was one letter—one very significant letter—addressed by Randolph Henry Ash to my great-grandmother, Priscilla Penn Cropper, née Priscilla Penn. This ancestress was a most forceful, and so to say eccentric personality, a native of Maine, a daughter of devoted Abolitionists, who had housed runaway slaves and had participated in the ferment of new ideas and lifestyles then to be found in the New England States. She was a fervent speaker for the Emancipation of Women, and was also, as was common with those doughty fighters for human rights, involved in other movements. She was a firm believer in mesmeric healing, from which she claimed to have benefited greatly, and she was also very much involved in the spiritualist experiments of those days, which blossomed so freely in the United States, after the Fox Sisters heard their first “raps”; she entertained the visionary Andrew Wilson, author of the Univercoelum, or Key to the Universe, who in her house (then in New York) conversed with the spirits of Swedenborg, Descartes and Bacon. I should perhaps add that though she did not disclaim any kinship with the Pennsylvania Penns, the Quakers, my own researches do not indicate that there was any solid connection. She went down to history, maybe unfairly when we consider her versatility and inventiveness, as the creator of Priscilla Penn’s Regenerating Powders, a patent medicine which I devoutly believe killed no one, and may have saved some at least of the thousands of lives claimed by my ancestress, if only through a placebo effect. The Powders, imaginatively marketed, made Priscilla’s fortune, and Priscilla’s fortune erected Everblest House. Everblest House comes as a considerable surprise to visiting strangers, being an exact replica of a Palladian mansion in Mississippi, lost during the War between the States by my paternal great-great-grandfather, Mortimer D. Cropper. It was his son, Sharman M. Cropper, who rode North in those troubled days in search of a living and was, so family legend runs, transfixed by the sight of my great-grandmother addressing an open-air meeting on the Fourierist principles of Harmony and the duty to prosecute a search for free passion and pleasure. Whether from passion or opportunism I do not know, he attached himself to her following and thus came in 1868 to New Mexico when a group of them attempted to found a phalanstery. Some of them had previously formed part of what we would now call splinter groups from the model communities and rectangular villages built unsuccessfully by Robert Owen and his son, Robert Dale Owen, author of The Debateable Land Between This World and the Next.

  The project of the phalanstery, less austere than Owen’s villages, failed because the magic number of 1620 inhabitants, representing all possible variants on all possible passions of both sexes, was never attained, and also because among the enthusiasts there was no one who was skilled in agriculture or knew anything about desert conditions. My great-grandfather, a Southern gentleman, also an entrepreneur in a personal way, bided his time and proposed to my great-grandmother a rebuilding of the Paradise of his lost youth according to the rational and harmonic principles of her way of life—basing their happiness on the attainable pleasures of family life (with servants, though of course without slaves) without repining for the enthusiastic group-love that had proved so divisive and so unmanageable. Accordingly, the proceeds of the Regenerating Powders were put into the erection of the lovely house which I and my mother still inhabit, and my great-grandfather turned to collecting.

  There are many portraits of Priscilla Penn Cropper in existence; she was obviously a person of considerable beauty and ample charms. During the 1860s and 1870s her house was a centre for spiritualist research, in which, with her customary enthusiasm, she attempted to involve the thinking men of the whole civilised world. It must have been one of these attempts that elicited the letter from Randolph Henry Ash which for some mysterious reason excited me so and gave rise to my life’s absorbing interest. I have never, despite my most diligent enquiries, been able to come across the letter she must have written to him, and the fear is constant that he may have destroyed it. I do not know why this one of the many treasures in our possession moved me most. God moves in a mysterious way—it may even be that Randolph Henry’s rebuff to my ancestress’s interest gave rise to my wish to show that we were, after all, worthy to understand, and, so to speak, to entertain him. Certainly I felt, when my father first handed me the handwritten pages, preserved in tissue, to see if I could decipher them, something akin to the thrill of Keats’s stout Cortez, silent on his peak in Darien. And when I had touched the letter, I felt, in Tennyson’s words, that the dead man had touched me from the past: I have made my life among “Those fallen leaves which keep their green/The noble letters of the dead.”

  Our Cabinet of Treasures has an ingenious little cupola with a windowed dome of plain, not many-coloured, glass, which can be shaded by half-blinds or wholly shuttered by the turning of a handle. On that day, unusually, my father had opened not only the shutters but the green blinds through which a soft safe light is slowly filtered, so the room was full of sunbeams. In that sunlit hush was conceived the germ of the idea that gave rise to the Stant Collection which adorns the Harmonia Museum of Robert Dale Owen University, of which my ancestor Sharman Cropper was an illustrious co-founder, and to which the Regenerative Powders contributed their fertilising mite.

  I give in full my great-grandmother’s letter. It now stands in its proper place in Volume IX of my edition of the Collected Letters (No. 1207, p. 883), and an excerpt from it is included in the footnotes to Mummy Possest, RHA’s spiritualist poem, in the edition of the Complete Works, proceeding surely, if regrettably slowly for enthusiasts, under the overall editorial direction of James Blackadder of the University of London. I do not accept Professor Blackadder’s identification of my ancestress with the grossly credulous fictional Mrs Eckleburg in that poem. There are far too many striking points of dissimilarity, which I have detailed in my article on the subject, “A case of mis-identification” (PMLA, LXXI, Winter 1959, pp. 174–80), to which I refer the curious.

  Dear Mrs Cropper,

  I thank you for your communication to me about your experience with the planchette. You were right in supposing that I might feel some interest in anything at all that came from the pen of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I must also feel, I shall tell you directly, considerable abhorrence at the thought of that bright spirit, having made his painful way out of our weary and oppressive earthly life, being constrained to heave mahogany tables, or float partially embodied, through firelit drawing-rooms, or turn his liberated Intelligence to the scrawling of such painful and inane nonsense as you have sent to me. Should he not now feed in peace on honeydew and drink the milk of Paradise?

  I am not jesting, Madam. I have attended attempted exhibitions of the kind of manifestations you allude to—nihil humanum a me alienum puto, I may say, as all of my profession should say—and I think the likeliest explanation is a combination of bald fraud and a kind of communal hysteria, a miasma or creeping mist of spiritual anxiety and febrile agitation, that plagues our polite society and titillates our tea-party talk. A speculative temperament might find the cause of this miasma in the increasing materialism of our society, and in the rigorous questioning—both natural and inevitable, given the present state of our intellectual Development—of our historical religious narratives. All is indeed uncertainty in that field, and the historian and the man of science alike make inroads on our simple faith. Even if the end result of our strenuous inquisitions be to strengthen that faith, it will not, quite properly, happen with ease, or in our time, maybe. This is not to say that the Nostrums thrown up to gratify a queasy public hunger for certainties or solidities are either sanative or solidly based.

  The Historian and the Man of Science alike may be said to traffic with the dead. Cuvier has imparted flesh and motion and appetites to the defunct Megatherium, whilst the living ears of MM Michelet and Renan, of Mr Carlyle and the Brothers Grimm, have heard the bloodless cries of the vanished and given them voices. I myself, with the aid of the imagination, have worked a little in that line, have ventriloquised, have lent my voice to, a
nd mixt my life with, those past voices and lives whose resuscitation in our own lives as warnings, as examples, as the life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman. But there are ways and ways, as you must well know, and some are tried and tested, and others are fraught with danger and disappointment. What is read and understood and contemplated and intellectually grasped is our own, madam, to live and work with. A lifetime’s study will not make accessible to us more than a fragment of our own ancestral past, let alone the aeons before our race was formed. But that fragment we must thoroughly possess and hand on. Hoc opus, hic labor est. There is, I am tempted to assert, no easy way, no short cut: we are, in attempting those, like Bunyan’s Ignorance who found a path to Hell at the very gate of the City of Heaven.

  Think what you do, Madam, in attempting to address them, the dear and terrible dead, directly. What wisdom in all this waste of time have they imparted? That Granny has left her new brooch in the grandfather clock, or that an ancient Aunt resents, from beyond the bourn, the imposition of an infant coffin upon her own in the family Vault. Or as your S.T.C. solemnly assures you, that there is “eternal bliss for they who deserve such and a time of correction for they who do not” in the Beyond. (He who never misplaced a pronoun in seven languages.) It needs no ghost, Madam, come from the grave, to tell us this.

  That there may be wandering spirits I grant you, earth-bubbles, exhalations, creatures of the air, who occasionally cross our usual currents of apprehension, proceeding on their own unseen errands. That agonised reminiscence of some kind in some mental form does inhere in some terrible places there is some evidence. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. But they will be found out I believe, not through rappings or tappings or palpable handlings or Mr Home floating round and round the chandelier with his arms stiffly upheld, nor yet through the scribblings of your planchette, but through long and patient contemplation of the intricate workings of dead minds and live organisms, through wisdom that looks before and after, through the microscope and the spectroscope and not through the interrogation of earth-obsessed spectres and revenants. I have known a good soul and a clear mind, quite unhinged by such meddling, and to no good end, indeed to a bad one.

  I have written at such length because I do not wish you to think I take your kind thoughts of me frivolously or in a spirit of unthinking bellicose denigration, as some might say. I do have deep-rooted convictions—and a certain amount of apposite experience of my own, which precludes my receiving your communication—your spirit communication—with any great interest or pleasure. I must ask you to send no more such writings. But for yourself, and for your disinterested pursuit of truth, I do of course feel great respect and enthusiasm. Your fight on behalf of your Sex is noble, and must succeed, sooner or later. I hope to hear more of that in the future, and beg to remain

  Yours most sincerely

  R. H. Ash

  The transcription of this letter always marked, in Mortimer Cropper’s autobiographical sketches, a high point, from which they tailed off rapidly into banal childhood memories or a mere scholarly cataloguing of his subsequent relations with Randolph Henry Ash—almost, he sometimes brushed the thought, as though he had no existence, no separate existence of his own after that first contact with the paper’s electric rustle and the ink’s energetic black looping. It was as though his unfinished scripts were driven by a desire to reach and include the letter, the perusal of the letter, the point of recognition, and then lost their drive and tension, shuddered to a stop. There was a sentence he often appended, for no very good reason, about the involving of this early memory with the ancestral smell of his grandmother’s excellent pot-pourri imported to that desert, rose-petals and essential refreshing oils, sandalwood and musk. He was aware also, without wishing in any way to examine this awareness, that his reluctance, or incapacity, to continue in this mode of writing was to do with some prohibition set on writing about his mother, with whom he shared his American domestic life and to whom he wrote, every day when he was abroad, long and affectionate letters. All of us have things in our lives which we know in this brief, useful allusive way, and neglect deliberately to explore. Mrs Cropper sat in the desert and made it blossom and flower by power of will and money. In his dreams of her Professor Cropper always lost his sense of proportion, so that she loomed large as his capacious entrance hall, or stood hugely and severely astride his paddock. She expected much of him, and he had not failed her, but feared to fail.

  He arrived, reasonably satisfied, at Barrett’s Hotel, which he had chosen partly for its comfort, but more because American writers, visiting Ash, had stayed there in the past. A heap of letters was waiting there for him, including one from his mother, and a note from Blackadder saying that he saw no reason to emend his note on Ask to Embla III in the light of Cropper’s discoveries about the Icelandic landscape. There was also a catalogue from Christie’s, where a sale of Victoriana included a needlecase traditionally believed to have belonged to Ellen Ash, and a ring, once owned by an American widow in Venice, which was said to contain, in its crystal cavity, a few of Ash’s hairs. The Stant Collection contained several consecutive clippings from that great mane, in its faded darkness, its later grizzled mix, and its final post-mortem silver, now the brightest, the most enduring. The Ash Museum in Ash’s Bloomsbury house would perhaps bid, and Cropper himself would certainly bid, and the needlecase and the curl of hair would be enshrined in the hexagonal glass room at the very centre of the Stant Collection, where Ash’s relics and those of his wife, family and acquaintances accumulated in the still, regulated air. Cropper sat by a leaping fire in a high leather chair in the bar and read his letters and was briefly visited by a vision of his white temple shining in the desert sun, enclosing cool courts, high staircases and a kind of glass honeycomb of silent cells, radiating carrels and mounting interlinked storage and study rooms, their frames gleaming and gilded, enclosing shafts and pillars of light, within which, cocooned in gilded shuttles, the scholars rose and descended, in purposeful quiet.

  When he had made his purchases he would, he thought, take Beatrice Nest out to lunch. He would also, he supposed, see Blackadder. He had expected Blackadder to say something dismissive about his Icelandic observations. Blackadder, to his knowledge, had not stepped outside the British Isles for many years, except to attend international conferences on Victorian poetry, all of which took place in identical seminar rooms reached by car from identical hotels. He, Cropper, on the other hand, had early begun to trace the journeyings of Randolph Ash—not consecutively, but as the chances presented themselves, so that his first expedition had been to the North Yorkshire Moors and coast where Ash had enjoyed a solitary walking-tour, combined with amateur marine biologising, in 1859. Cropper had repeated this tour in 1949, searching out pub and rock-formations, Roman roads and pearly becks, staying in Robin Hood’s Bay and drinking warm disagreeable brown beer, eating unspeakable neck-of-mutton stews and pieces of braised offal, which had turned his stomach. Later he had followed Ash to Amsterdam and the Hague, and had walked in Ash’s tracks in Iceland, contemplating geysers, seething circles of hot mud and those two poems inspired by Icelandic literature, Ragnarök, the epic of Victorian doubt and despair, and the sequence of poems, Ask to Embla, the mysterious love lyrics, published in 1872 but certainly written much earlier, possibly even during his courtship of Ellen Best, daughter of the Dean of Calverley, whom he had loved for fifteen years before she, or her family, would consent to the marriage, which had taken place in 1848. It was certainly typical of Blackadder’s snail-like progress with the Edition that he should just have got round to considering Mortimer Cropper’s Icelandic observations made in the 1960s. Cropper had published his biography—The Great Ventriloquist—in 1969, taking his title from one of Ash’s teasing monologues of self-revelation or self-parody. Before doing so he had undertaken all Ash’s major journeys, visiting Venice, Naples, the Alps, the Black Forest and the Breton
coast. One of his last ventures had been the reconstruction of the wedding journey of Randolph and Ellen Ash in the summer of 1848. They had crossed the Channel in a storm in a packet-boat, and proceeded to Paris in a carriage (Cropper had followed their route in a car) and had taken the railway from Paris to Lyon, where they had travelled down the Rhône by boat to Aix-en-Provence. Their journey had taken place in lashing rain. Cropper, ever resourceful, had negotiated a passage on a cargo-boat, carrying timber, smelling of resin and oil, and had been lucky with the weather, bright sun on the yellow water, burning the skin on his long wiry forearms. He had settled in Ash’s hotel in Aix and had done the Ashes’ excursions, culminating in a visit to the Fontaine de Vaucluse, where the poet Petrarch had lived in solitude for sixteen years, contemplating his ideal love for Laure de Sade. The profit of this journey could be seen in Cropper’s account of the Fountain in The Great Ventriloquist.