Forteana and imagination

Having made the choices she did throughout her lifetime, and having written The English Eccentrics (1933), Edith Sitwell certainly set herself up for an article like ‘The Strangest Family in England’ [ FT333:36-41], but SD Tucker’s article was only a gloss on some unusual personal habits (and perhaps personal limitations).

I wish the article had questioned and explored what the role of being an artist might have had on the choices of the Sitwell siblings, especially since even a cursory study of the lives of many creative individuals will reveal an equally odd set of choices, actions and personal styles, from Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Nathaniel Hawthorne and August Strindberg to WB Yeats, Carl Jung, Lytton Strachey, Djuna Barnes, Isak Dinesen, Hilda Doolittle, TS Eliot, Anna Kavan, Jean Cocteau, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Bowles and his wife Jane Bowles, James Merrill, Denton Welch, Yukio Mishima and Muriel Spark. And that’s a very short list of writers, excluding painters, actors and musicians (though Cocteau was also a filmmaker and Paul Bowles a composer).

Most of these artists also took forteana as their subject matter at least on occasion, and many had one or more brushes of some kind with what we think of as the paranormal. Many experienced severe mental breakdowns or some kind of apparent mental illness throughout their adult lives. Early in her career, Muriel Spark stated that one of her goals was, to paraphrase, “to show that the supernatural is the natural”. Yeats reported on his own experiences as a young man with fairies near Ben Buben, a fact many of his academic biographers like to ignore or brush aside; while living in London during World War II, Doolittle held extensive séances and believed she had contacted the spirits of airmen killed during the Battle of Britain; James Merrill transcribed a 640-page poem, ‘The Changing Light at Sandover,’ which he ‘received’ via years of sessions on a Ouija board; and Yeats’s experiences with ‘au- tomatic writing’ – and the book that resulted, A Vision (1925) – are fairly well known. Jane Bowles found herself on the wrong end of North African magical practices before her early death at 56, and Jung’s long psychic ‘conversations’ with his ‘personal daimon’ Philemon are familiar to most forteans. Like Edith Sitwell, Isak Dinesen adopted an elaborate gothic style of dress in later life, presenting herself to the world not so much as an elderly woman, but as an archetypal figure, an “abbess of the nightingales”; and Eliot wore “green face paint” to Bloomsbury parties.

I believe there’s a crossroads where the private-personal and the fortean intersect in many lives, so that one’s literal and figurative passions, perspective of the moment, and character may play a significant role in what one experiences of an unusual nature. As it relates to creative individuals, this is a vein of forteana rarely explored by forteans, and one that I believe can bear a lot of fruit. Gary Lachman has written extensively on Jung and a number of 19th century writers, but those of the 20th century have been largely ignored thus far. Kenneth Macpherson, Iris Murdoch, Kenneth Anger, Nico, Marianne Faithfull… There’s a lot of questions out there just waiting to be asked. Even the stoic, plainspoken American painter Grandma Moses reported seeing the ghost of what she called ‘a sea captain’ in her biography, My Life’s History (1952). Joseph Barnes By email unpleasant experience of being cursed by the filmmaker/magus. As a member of the London rock aristocracy in the 1960s and 1970s, Faithfull developed a substantial relationship with Anger, culminating in her starring role as the demon goddess Lilith in Anger’s magickal epic Lucifer Rising (1972). However, having penned a purportedly unflattering portrayal of the filmmaker in her 1994 autobiography Faithfull, a miffed Anger retaliated by sending her a rather literal ‘poison-pen letter’ (the precise date of this incident was not provided).

Faithfull’s description of the curse is that “visually it was an astonishing item. Very graphic and ghastly at the same time, and as maliciously conceived as only a true Satanist and twisted individual could conjure up. It was this huge piece of paper with threats inscribed in blood – Max Factor blood, I’m sure, completely fake – but as an artefact it looked incredible. It was a big, malign, poisonous curse – maybe a bit too wordy, maybe he raged on a bit too much. I mean, does the Devil rant you to death?” While being initially amused by the theatricality of the artefact, and Anger’s anti-Semitic railings against her Jewish ancestry – “You Jew! You Jew, like Kirk Douglas, like DANNY KAYE!” – Faithfull quickly becomes freaked out by “all the really vile stuff [that] started to spew out: ‘DIE OF LUNG CANCER!’ and all that generic malice right out of The Common Book of Beastly Spells”.

Guided by her spiritual intuition to do something to counteract the curse, Faithfull consults some esoterically inclined friends, who advise her to “take it to the crossroads where there was a Lady Chapel and burn it with salt, rosemary and rue”. Having dispelled the hex through this act of white magic, Faithfull then proceeds to formally rebuke Anger via “a stiff letter” in which she reminds him of her long-term support for his work and person, and admonishes him for throwing “a queenie fit about the book”. A placated Anger replies in turn, only to end his response with the caveat “unfortunately, I can’t take the curse back”.