The Ghosts of My Travels

Angel of Grief by William Wetmore Story, a stone’s throw from Constance Fenimore Woolson’s grave at the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome

A Haunted Trip

Since I arrived in Europe last September, I’ve been somewhat haunted by the idea of ghosts. It began when I first arrived in Paris and met an American woman who had retired and moved to Paris, having been drawn there by some sort of spirit guide. She has believed in ghosts all of her life, she said, having had many encounters with them. When she told me about writing a memoir of her move to Paris, mixed with the biography of the18^th-century courtesan whom she discovered to be her guide, I thought—Of course! What is a biographer but a person haunted by the dead?

Then in October, while I lived in Dora Maar’s house in Menerbes, France, I couldn’t help but feel a bit haunted by her. I read all of the books in English on her that I could find in the library, and I discovered that she lived there for 50 years, her room on the same floor as mine. One morning, while I was making my coffee in a moka pot on the very large stove in the kitchen, I was talking to my housemate, a sculptor from Houston, about the woman in Paris who believed in ghosts. I also said that I wondered if I was staying in Dora Maar’s room, and I facetiously suggested that she could be responsible for the chill there. Her response was, “Ghosts haunt people because they want to be remembered, don’t they?”

Later, I found out that I wasn’t in Dora’s room, but the idea of haunting as a kind of protest against erasure has stuck with me. For like so many women artists and writers, Dora Maar has only recently been remembered.

When I was in London in November, I saw that the Charles Dickens’s House had an exhibit on Christmas ghosts. Of course, I had to go.  I’ve always thought the British tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmastime to be strange, too much like Halloween. But it seems that it has something to do with the merging of pagan and Christian traditions. On the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, the veil between this world and the next was believed to be particularly thin.

Dickens was the childhood idol of both Constance Fenimore Woolson and Louisa May Alcott. His influence was vast, and his ghost story A Christmas Carol most so. Alcott tried her hand at a Christmas ghost story, The Abbot’s Ghost, as did Henry James in The Turn of the Screw, one of his most famous works. Or at least these are stories about ghosts told at Christmastime.

An anthropological essay on ghosts that I found online says that haunting “undoes a forgetting,” another evocative phrase, suggesting that forgetting is a kind of knot, something tied up that wants to be set free. I don’t believe that forgetting is simply a benign, neutral process. The forgotten has usually been repressed in some way, determined by someone to be dangerous, unfit, or simply not worth remembering.

I once tweeted something about a class I was teaching on Forgotten Books, and someone pushed back against my claim that these books had been repressed or erased from memory. Forgetting was just a natural by-product of time, he believed. However, the choice to remember some things and forget others is not happenstance.

This means that memory is also not a neutral process. It is an act of reclaiming or revaluing, which is the work of most biography and historical writing. It certainly has been the motivation for all of my work. Although I wondered if it would continue to be as I reshape my life and pursue other forms of writing, I’ve come to see that my desire to connect with the past and undo the forgetting of what has been left behind has not lost any of its hold on me.

The Haunted Biographer

I came to Europe haunted by the American writer Kay Boyle. As I’ve mentioned before, I was supposed to be writing a biography of her, but my grand plans and two years of research evaporated in the face of my own transformation. I wasn’t sure I could be a biographer anymore. My career had been grounded in the effort to resurrect forgotten women writers from the grave of neglect. (The highest compliment you can give a biographer, in fact, is to tell them that they brought their subject back to life.) But writing another biography would mean living amongst the dead, and life was calling me.

I’ve found that those dead women are still with me, however. They are friendly spirits, I like to think. I don’t believe in ghosts in any sort of literal way, but I think that those of us who are fascinated by women of the past must believe in ghosts at least a little bit.

One of the scholars who helped resurrect Woolson from neglect certainly seems to. She had wanted to write Woolson’s biography. Instead, she ended up writing a memoir, Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak, about her “imaginative relationship” with the long-dead author. In the text, Woolson appears in the room with her, talking to her, even giving her a bop on the head at one point. Woolson is a ghost with decided opinions and a feisty personality. Near the book’s end, Weimer even travels imaginatively to Venice to visit Woolson her on her sickbed. Her longing for Woolson, to understand her suicide, even to prevent it somehow, are surely all evidence of a powerful kind of haunting.

Woolson herself believed in the supernatural and felt that the living could communicate with the dead. The late-19^th century was the heyday of spiritualism. William James helped found the American Society of Psychical Research in 1884, at which, he wrote to a cousin, “ghosts, second sight, spiritualism, & all sorts of hobgoblins are going to be ‘investigated’ by the most high toned & ‘cultured’ members of the community.” Rather than skeptics set on disproving such “hobgoblins” as haunted houses and telepathy, these male professors went in search of scientific proof. Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, and Arthur Conan Doyle were also adherents of spiritualism, so Woolson was in good company.

Although I never heard or imagined that I heard Woolson speaking to me, I suppose I was haunted by her, in way, for the 7 or so years I worked on her biography. The times when I felt closest to her where when I visited places where I knew she had been, which felt a little bit like communing with her spirit. Place has a tremendous power to bring the past to life, I feel. As I wrote in my last letter, I sensed the presence of James’s memory of Woolson at his home, Lamb House in Rye, England.

It is always an incredibly moving experience for me seeing the objects left behind by a person I have admired and longed to know. Most researchers would say they have felt something profound reading the actual letters that their subject had written. To hold in your hands the very paper they had held and inscribed with their thoughts is an experience that can never be duplicated by reading digital scans online. There is something about the physical object that brings the person to life. I certainly felt that when I held the love letters that Kay Boyle and her husband, Joseph Frankenstein, had written to each other during WWII. I felt ushered into their private, heart-felt moments, and could feel a kind of energy coming from the paper itself, not just from the words they had written upon them.

Certainly, I felt the same way holding Woolson’s letters or Alcott’s original manuscript of chapters from Little Women. But in the case of Woolson, I’ll never forget the moment 10 years ago that I stumbled upon a memorial to the novelist Dinah Mulock Craik in Tewksbury Abbey and suddenly realized that Woolson must have stood on that exact same spot. I recall reading a letter in which she mentioned seeing it during her visit there. I was overwhelmed with emotion. I had been searching for her everywhere, but she lived such a peripatetic life and left few traces. Yet, here she was, I felt, just as if she were standing with me on that spot, and I’m pretty sure I shed a few tears.

However, in my search for Woolson, I came to find her most vividly in her works, however much she tried to hide herself from view. As she once told a friend, she only told the truth in her fiction. So that was where I had to look for her.

The Haunting of Literature

I’ve never subscribed to New Criticism’s assertion that only the text—and not the person who wrote it—is relevant. I can’t be moved by a piece of literature without wanting to know about the life and mind out of which it grew. The desire to get behind the work and understand the person who created it is what drives literary biographers, of course. Beyond that, they want to inspire readers to seek out the writers’ works for themselves.

I have come to believe that literature is the art form most capable of bringing us into the presence of another human being’s mind and lived experience. This is no small thing. We live so much in our own heads, and most of the time can only guess what even those closest to us are thinking and feeling. Yet, we never stop trying to break through what separates us—call it a veil or even a wall. In life, the attempt often feels futile, but by reading, we can find that desire satisfied.

The fiction of Henry James was obsessed with the impermeability of the barrier between minds, in the sense that his characters are constantly trying to read each other, and most often failing at it. As much as he gives us access to characters’ minds, exploring them with excruciating detail at times, he also leaves us frustrated, just as his protagonists are, in their desire to understand each other.

In Woolson’s eyes, James failed even with his main characters to give readers access to what she felt was infinitely more important than their minds, namely their hearts. In fact, reading The Portrait of a Lady, which she thought a masterpiece, she nonetheless felt it wanting in its refusal to address the question of whether Isabel Archer actually loved Osmond. How are we to believe that she felt deeply betrayed by him, Woolson wondered, if we don’t know her deepest feelings for him? In her own writing, Woolson brought us into the sacred presence not only of her characters’ hearts, but also her own.

I still wonder a bit at our sometimes insatiable desire to get beyond the text and into the heart of the person who wrote it. Writers themselves have often resented the intrusion, destroying their private papers in great bonfires, as James did, or trying to find a sympathetic biographer they can work with. (Kay Boyle tried this, and unfortunately she failed miserably in her judgment of Joan Mellen, who would publish one of the most vicious biographies I’ve read, less that two years after Boyle’s death.) I’ve wrestled with my own intrusiveness into these women’s lives, but I’ve determined that both Woolson and Boyle deserve a more empathetic understanding than they had been given by earlier biographers.

Bringing Stories to Life

I have always felt most inspired by literature over other art forms for its ability to connect me to the inner life of others. Yet recently I’ve also been introduced to another way of looking at story and the written text. I’m taking a storytelling class that has turned out to be devoted solely to the art of oral storytelling. It focuses on folk talks in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where there is a concerted effort to revive and reinvigorate oral storytelling as an important site of cultural transmission (see, for instance, the Scottish Storytelling Centre). For some, such as Sharon Blackie, the author of If Women Rose Rooted, who will guest teach one of the sessions, storytelling can be a vital part of personal transformation as we reclaim ancient stories of women’s power, many of which have been nearly forgotten.

On the first day of the class, the teacher, who has immersed herself in the Welsh folk stories of her heritage, said that a story dies when it’s written down. Only by retelling it orally do we bring it to life. The story lives only so long as it is told and retold. We dove right in during the first class, working in groups to digest a story in its rather skeletal form on the page and then each taking a section and retelling it to our group. Each teller found new meanings in the story, adding and embellishing parts in a kind of play that was both startling and exiciting for this literary scholar.

For three decades I taught my students to always return to the text for evidence to support their readings, reminding them not to extrapolate or imagine what isn’t there on the page. In some sense, I can see that the study of literature performs the opposite role that an enlivening storytelling tradition does. When we study texts, the written story is as a graveyard of sorts, the product of an individual mind, which inevitably haunts the written text. And our readings and interpretations of the text are a kind of communing with the dead.

In contrast, in oral storytelling traditions the world over, the story is more clearly a product of a culture, a group of people, who are all responsible for keeping it alive. By retelling the story, we are in communion not with an individual mind, but with our ancestors and the world that produced them. This process is as old as the human species itself. For it’s only in the past century or two that we’ve stopped gathering around a fire or a stove to share stories.

A Little Haunting Is a Good Thing

I am finding it increasingly difficult to live in the present (which my mindfulness training has helped me to do) without looking back at the past, which includes for me the lives and writings of Woolson, Alcott, and Boyle. They have become a part of me. Taking this time out from so-called “real life,” in order to figure out how to live more deeply, I have been turning inward, but the more I think I’m turning away from the dead, the more I’m aware of their presence, shaping my impressions of the present.

Although ghosts tend to incite our fears of mortality, they also have the capacity to lure us toward life rather than death. I can see clearly now how, especially in the case of Woolson and Boyle, my interest in them had a lot to do with the fact that their lives as expats abroad appealed to me deeply. Studying them brought me back to Europe, first to do research on them, and ultimately to begin my own journey.

Getting older is perhaps a process of collecting ghosts—of old friends and lovers, of past selves, of historical figures we find fascinating, and of our ancestors, who we increasingly want to connect with as we age. Coming back to Europe has brought me into contact with all of these. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to live fully in the present without a great capacity for appreciating the past. Unlike America, which looks so relentlessly toward the future, repressing the parts of its past it would like to forget, Europe is a haunted continent—a vast graveyard full of bones, ancient standing stones, and structures built layer by layer through time.

During my last days in Scotland, I was astounded by the 5000-year-old stones (according to the dating of human remains) at Clava Cairn, just outside of Inverness. Walking through the narrow passageway into a round cairn (a memorial to the dead), which was built sometime around 3,000 B.C., felt like falling through time. I could see how carefully the stones had been laid upon each other, by hands long gone but still somehow visible to me through this feat of engineering.

Now I’m in Berlin, as haunted a place as I’ve ever been in before. The specters of WWII and the Cold War are everywhere, not just tucked away in museums. I’ll say more about Berlin in my next letter, my free monthly update, which I’ll send out soon.

Until then, I hope you are doing well, haunted only by friendly ghosts who enrich your life and your understanding of yourself in this vast web of life we are a part of. I’d love to know about your own hauntings, if you’d like to share them. Are there any particular historical figures you can’t get enough of or who have helped to form your understanding of your own life?

Until next time,

Anne