Well, today is a very exciting day, and no mistake, because it’s the 100th anniversary of Oscar Wilde appearing at a séance and telling the assembled witnesses that he liked Shaw, wasn’t enamoured of Joyce, and was a big fan of the ladies.
This is the story of Hester Dowden “a prominent and prolific spirit medium with literary pretensions of her own” who QUITE BY CHANCE found that Oscar wanted to dictate a new play to her. Which was lucky.
Her father was an Irish critic and academic, through whom she’d actually met Yeats and Bram Stoker, but her life’s work was to be of a rather less conventional kind — meeting other, rather less available writers, through The Veil.
On 8 June 1923, she was visited by a man who’d died 22-and-a-half years before, not long after his excessive punishment for ‘gross indecency’, who somewhat remarkably spent much of his time telling her about his regard for the fairer sex.
“Women were ever to me a cluster of stars”, he continues. “They contained for me all, and more than all, that God has created … Woman was to me a colour, a sound. She gave me all.” (Please feel free to make your own ‘protesting too much’ comments here.)
It makes me wonder whether Richard Curtis and Ben Elton had heard of her when they wrote Blackadder Goes Forth ep.2, Corporal Punishment, in which Wilde is described in not entirely dissimilar terms.
Anyway, Oscar went on to say he had “great respect” for GBS, hadn’t read the poetry of the Sitwells, but had read Ulysses:
Yes, I have smeared my fingers with that vast work … It is a singular matter that a countryman of mine should have produced this great bulk of filth.
Furthermore,
It gives me the impression of having been written in a severe fit of nausea … [by] a monster who cannot contain the monstrosities of his own brain … heated vomit.
And then he dictated a play. Obviously. It came via Ouija board and automatic writing, and was originally given the wildly imaginative title The Extraordinary Play. It was “considered a poor counterfeit, even after it was self-consciously re-titled ‘Is it a Forgery?’”
Still, at least James Joyce saw the funny side. Having already taken the piss out of her dad in Ulysses (which may explain why a ‘ghost’ being channelled by Dowden’s daughter was so hostile) he had Oscar appear to a medium in Finnegans Wake:
— Is that yu, Whitehed?
— Have you headnoise now?
— Give us your mespilt reception, will yous?
— Pass the fish for Christ’s sake!
— Old Whitehowth he is speaking again. Ope Eustace tube! Pity poor whiteoath! Dear gone mummeries, goby! Tell the woyld I have lived true thousand hells. Pity, please, lady, for poor O. W. in this profundust snobbing I have caught. Nine dirty years mine age, hairs hoar, mummeries failend, snowdrift to my elpow, deff as Adder. I askt you, dear lady, to judge on my tree by our fruits. I gave you of the tree. I gave two smells, three eats. My freeandies, my celeberrimates: my happy bossoms, my all-falling fruits of my boom. Pity poor Haveth Childers Everywhere with Mudder!
…and I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive me, but having never even attempted to read Finnegans Wake, I’ve no idea if that is more or less coherent than the rest, although I believe it is… not untypical
Anyway, Hester published Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde in 1924, and one prospective publisher apparently
considered the psychic messages ‘very convincing’ … but the play ‘quite otherwise’
One man was a big fan of the messages, though. Arthur Conan Doyle sent her a telegram to say,
One could in a pinch imitate style, but we could not imitate the great mind behind the style.
I wonder about Doyle sometimes. How could a man taken in by the Cottingley fairies (and quite a lot of other complete balls) also create the great rationalist Holmes?
Well,
the path from supersleuth to ghost-hunter is shorter than you might expect … many spiritualists were greatly concerned with evidence. They conducted … experiments to expose fraudsters and provide definitive proof of life after death.
But — if the shade of Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ DL will forgive me — I still think the best analysis of Hester’s work comes from University of British Columbia professor Gregory Mackie:
