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Patience Worth,
by Colin Wilson.
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" ... Patience seems incapable of using one word where ten will do, bringing to mind Lincoln’s remark: “He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.” It was impossible to get her to answer even the simplest question with a direct reply. ... "
"On the other hand, the book seemed to indicate a knowledge of ancient Rome that Mrs Curran insisted she had never possessed. The distinguished psychical investigator G.N.M. Tyrrell, writing thirty years later, said: “There is not here the greatness of genius, but . . . there is a fount of inspiration which might have provided the material for a work of genius had it been expressed through the conscious mind of, say, a Coleridge instead of . . . Mrs Curran”, and he went on to quote Caspar Yost’s view that the book revealed an intimate knowledge of the Rome of Augustus and Tiberius, and also of the topography of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. But then, of course, Yost was a somewhat biased witness, having been one of the original “discoverers” of Patience Worth."
"In that same year – 1916 – Emily Hutchings called upon the eminent literary critic William Marion Reedy, and showed him the first ten thousand words of a novel about Missouri politics and journalism. In recent years Emily had dropped out of the limelight, for it had become clear that her presence was not essential for Patience to manifest herself. Reedy was impressed by the novel, and congratulated her. A week later he probably felt like eating his words when Emily called again, and confessed that the novel had been “dictated” by the spirit of Mark Twain – then proceeded to produce several pages with the help of the ouija board. The novel was accepted, and published under the title of Jap Herron, and was well received – although it was generally agreed that its quality was much inferior to the works Mark Twain had produced while he was alive. An effort by Mark Twain’s publishers to suppress the novel was unsuccessful.
"During this period Patience’s fame continued to grow. The Victorian novel Hope Trueblood met with an enthusiastic reception from many respectable journals, although the reading public found that even Patience’s “modern” style was too wordy. In England the book was issued without any indication of its “psychic” origin, and received mixed reviews; but at least most of the critics seemed to assume that it was the first novel of an English writer. The Currans also launched Patience Worth’s Magazine, to make Patience’s poems and lesser writings accessible to her admirers; it was edited by Caspar Yost, and ran to ten issues."
"For those who are willing to accept the possibility of life after death, the most convincing explanation is certainly that Patience was a “spirit”. But that does not necessarily mean that she was really what she claimed to be. Anyone who has studied “spirit communication” soon recognizes that “spirits” are very seldom what they claim to be; G.K. Chesterton put in more bluntly and said that they are liars. If Patience was a seventeenth-century Quaker who was killed by Red Indians, it is difficult to understand why she was so evasive and why she failed to answer straightforward questions that might have enabled the Currans to prove that such a person really existed. Litvag’s book leaves one with the conviction that if Patience was a spirit, then it was probably the spirit of a frustrated would-be writer with a strong tendency to mythomania."
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December 22, 2021 - December 22, 2021.
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