Unknown forces
BRETT TAYLOR explores the fortean side of Nobel Prize winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Of all the writers ever to win the Nobel Prize, it’s hard to think of any who were as obsessed with fortean subjects as Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), whose given name was Yitskhok Bashevis. Often stereotyped as a specifically Jewish author, he might as well be called a fortean one.
As a Yiddish-speaking child in Poland, Isaac was taught to accept miracles: “The whole Jewish life in the Exile was one big miracle.” It was his father, a mystical rabbi, who implanted the notion of the supernatural, telling the children that hobgoblins could take over houses and demons could live in cellars. Apparently, he did this to instill in the youngsters the notion that the supernatural world was quite real. In 1910, Rabbi Pinchas Mendel Singer, wary of rural poverty, moved his family to an apartment in Warsaw. The only place to relieve oneself was a courtyard outhouse, filthy and rat infested. Rather than go there, some residents would do their business on the stairs. Walking up this dimly lit staircase filled young Yitskhok, then only six, with terror – he was convinced he was being pursued by “all the devils, evil spirits, imps of whom my parents spoke.” Even the sounds of wailing cats reminded the little boy of spirits. He would run back to the apartment, where his sleep would be disturbed by sweat-drenched nightmares.
One bizarre and frankly ridiculous anecdote demonstrates the father’s weakness in the face of superstition. A local woman came to the rabbi with a basket containing two dead geese and the bizarre claim that the fowl continued to shriek even after she slaughtered them. Father and son were terrified by this seeming proof of the supernatural. So frightened was the father that he actually ran away in fear. The mother kept her cool and offered a rational explanation: that the shrieks were mere expulsions of air and would stop when the windpipes were removed. It was up to her to disprove the story – which she did.
As Isaac grew into his teens, he became obsessed with sex. “I thought I was going crazy,” he said, “or was possessed by a
dybbuk.” But the scientific books he read taught that miracles and the supernatural did not exist. In his 20s, he began to read books on the supernatural: “I began to see that all these miracles are not complete superstition.” His father was superstitious, his mother rational. All his life, Isaac would waver between the two points of view. One of his finest stories, “The Séance”, concludes, somewhat anticlimactically, with a debate on the afterlife between the main characters, a female trance medium and a sceptical old man, her lover.
Older and now successful, Isaac grew resolute in his belief that powerful unseen forces were at work in the world, for good and for bad; but he claimed angels made for dull fiction, and so many of his most vivid stories involve demons. “The Last Demon” and “The Unseen” are even narrated by demons, the latter possibly Satan himself. His first novel Satan in Goray is a tale of possession. Even some of his more realistic works contain casual supernatural references. The Slave, frequently regarded as his best novel, includes a casual mention of the mediæval witch Baba Yaga, who supposedly swept away the daylight every evening with her broom.
“The Enemy” shows Singer’s
“I began to see that all miracles are not complete superstition”
anecdotal style at its plainest and possibly most deceptive. Since the narrator is unnamed, we must decide for ourselves: is this something that actually happened to Singer, or is the whole thing a fantasy? Reading in the Fifth Avenue Public Library, the narrator is surprised to be approached by a little old man he hasn’t seen since World War II. The old man shares a troubling experience: while travelling on an ocean liner he was persecuted by a waiter, who might be a ghost, or an anti-Semite, or a psychotic with a grudge. The old man, whose name is Chaikin, spends a night of terror when the waiter emerges from a mist and attempts to shove him overboard. Chaikin instead pushes the waiter over the side, but then sees him later at a New York tavern. The narrator automatically deduces that the would-be assassin was a malevolent astral spirit. (Any Freudian worth his salt would have interpreted the malevolent antagonist as a doppelgänger projection of repressed homoerotic desire, but Singer was resolutely indifferent to Freudian interpretations.)
The narrator’s credulity is no doubt helped by the book he is reading when he is first reunited with his long-lost friend: The Phantoms of the Living, a tome on wraiths and astral spirits. This could be proof of synchronicity, or it could be that his readings have primed him to believe; it’s striking that he is more willing to accept the reality of the experience than the old man himself, who dismisses it as a drunken fantasy or dream. It is also possible that Singer himself had such a dream while on a journey and split his personality in two for the sake of storytelling. “The Enemy” was published in Kirby McCauley’s anthology Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror (1980), where many horror-hungry readers no doubt overlooked the outwardly modest tale in favour of Stephen King’s crowd-pleasing novella “The Mist,” with its array of oversized insects.
Singer’s life was marked by a longing to make contact with the other side, a longing which seems to have gone sadly unfulfilled.
While teaching at Bard College in the mid-Seventies, Singer lived in a Manhattan apartment that he claimed was haunted. He never saw the ghost, but he knew it was there. Singer’s biographer Paul Kresh does not say how he knew it was there. Perhaps he simply sensed a ghostly presence, but it is also possible that he specifically chose the apartment because he’d heard it was haunted and wanted to make contact. One would-be author brought him a story that he thought was awful, but he dared not give his honest opinion. This was not due to politeness so much as a fear that the man might become suicidal. Later, the wannabe writer was visited by his dead father while sitting on a bench in Central Park. For whatever reason, the dead father warned him not to publish. Singer envied the man, because he was able to contact the dead and was obedient enough to follow their advice.
Not only that, but he was so heartened by the man’s story that he claimed it added years to his life.
Singer read every book on the occult he could find, and he subscribed to magazines on the subject. Asked about his preoccupations in 1975, he responded: “I read all the books and magazines of the crackpots. I consider myself one of the crackpots. But I don’t really believe that Buddha is ready to appear every time a couple of men and women in Brooklyn call him. Yet I have no axe to grind. There may be such things as psychic premonitions and psychic experiences. Yet I cannot really tell you that I saw a ghost.” One has to wonder if he ever picked up a copy of Fortean Times at some point.
One story, “The Psychic Journey”, revolves around an incident that begins when its narrator spies an article in a paranormal journal called The Unknown. The narrator has to be on the ball to get his favourite outré magazines because they sell out so quickly. For some reason, Brooklyn residents are particularly interested in the supernatural, or so the narrator observes. He soon meets a woman who shares his interests – in fact, she gets fortean magazines from as far away as India. The psychic theme doesn’t really develop, but the story does imply that being a “witch” (i.e. medium) might make a woman more alluring, even if the narrator does ultimately opt to return home with a more “rational” woman. The narrator has an odd fascination with Houdini, who he is convinced possessed spiritual powers, despite proclaiming himself a sceptic.
Paul Kresh, Singer’s friend and biographer, claimed the critics were disgruntled with Singer’s “shoddy mysticism”. Perhaps publishers feared that it would turn off highbrow readers. The 1974 novel Soul Expeditions first appeared, as did most of Singer’s novels, as a serial in the Jewish Daily Forward, in Yiddish. By the time it appeared in English, four years later, its title had been changed to the less mystical-sounding Shosha, after the main female character. Actually, it was probably Singer himself who made the change. Mindful of goyish tastes, he tended to make alterations to his works, which he personally helped translate, tailoring them for a wider audience. The novel’s most autobiographical character is Feitelzohn, a lover of life (i.e. dirty old man) and a believer in the occult. Explaining the unknown in Spinoza-like terms, Feitelzohn says: “There are unknown forces, yes, there are, but they’re all part of the mystery called nature.” It is typical of Singer that his character should follow a flight of mysticism with a casual offer of “cookies as old as Methuselah”. Shoddy or not, Singer would not abandon his interest in the supernatural. He would cite the work of Dr Joseph Banks Rhine, who coined the term “extra sensory perception” in his 1935 book of the same name, as evidence of psychic powers.
On the other hand, a later biographer, Janet Hadda, claimed that it was Singer’s references to the supernatural that appealed to English-speaking reviewers in the first place. Orville Prescott in the New York Times singled out the book’s references to “werewolves, vampires, dibbuks and even of smoks”. When Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978, the Washington Post credited much of his appeal to “supernatural legend and folklore.”
Amusingly, Singer’s son Israel attributed his father’s Nobel Prize to the Swedish fondness for trolls! Implying that his dad’s supernatural leanings were what made him appealing, the younger Singer was making a joke, but it is worth noting that the Swedish papers called the author a “little elf”.
As for Singer’s own beliefs, he claimed not really to believe in supernatural phenomena, even as he was clearly obsessed by the subject. David Stromberg, the editor of Singer’s papers, notes: “In general, my guess would be that Singer read more about séances than attended them, though I’m sure he also attended some. I don’t think it was something he did on a regular basis, but I’m sure he read about the supernatural on a regular basis, for most of his life.” Since a number of Singer’s papers have yet to be translated into English, it’s possible that some of them may shed new light on his obsession with the mystical world.