David St. Clair’s string of misfortunes

I first learned about August Strindberg’s string of misfortunes from Colin Wilson’s book The Occult.

I found another case of interest in Beyond the Occult, where Colin Wilson gives a summary of the run of ’bad luck’ experienced by the American journalist David St. Clair.

This ‘curse or coincidence?’ case has inspired an article because of some familiar features and resemblance to other cases.

As with Strindberg’s troubles, there is an obvious starting point and an obvious - and metaphysical - cause. There is a difference in that Strindberg brought his trouble on himself whereas St. Clair was an innocent victim.

Both men experienced good patches in their lives immediately before the trouble started: Strindberg had a few good months in Paris, while David St. Clair lived a very pleasant life for eight years in Rio de Janeiro before everything started to go wrong.

Strindberg endured a long period of misfortunes, while St. Clair’s spell of bad luck did not last very long.

The misfortunes in summary

Just about everything that could go wrong in David St. Clair’s life did go wrong, and it all happened suddenly.

He was working on a book at the time, but he became stuck and his publisher rejected it.

An inheritance he had been expecting failed to materialise.

A love affair went wrong, and he fell ill with malaria.

His plans for moving to Greece had to be abandoned.

The cause and the culprit

A psychic friend stopped David St. Clair in the street and told him that someone had put a curse on him and that all his paths had been closed. This reminds me very much of the ‘closing all avenues’ feature I have mentioned a few times.

St. Clair took this diagnosis seriously; he came to suspect that the culprit was the maid who looked after his apartment.

He had given her a very generous six months’ notice when he decided to leave the country.

She was pretty, but she was nothing more than a servant to him. He didn’t realise that he had shattered her hopes for the future by deciding to move to Greece: she wanted him to marry her or buy her a house and some land.

It was these disappointed expectations of escape from a life of poverty that made her deliberately put a curse on him in revenge, using the local form of voodoo. Also, all the misfortunes and closing of options might have made him turn to her.

The end of the misfortunes

David St. Clair went to a practitioner to have the curse removed. 

Immediately afterwards, his luck changed and his life got moving again: money came in, the book was accepted and the love affair was restarted.

The maid became seriously ill with a stomach growth. A voodoo practitioner told her that her curse had rebounded and would continue as long as she stayed with St. Clair. At this point she admitted that she had tried to make him marry her by means of black magic. She then walked out of his life, acknowledging that she had brought her misfortune on herself.

All this reminds me of Conan Doyle’s witch Helen Penclosa , whose powers came from a form of voodoo, and the revenge that she took on Austin Gilroy when he rejected her.

Austin Gilroy’s Celtic heritage made him susceptible to unseen influences; perhaps his interest in and investigations of the occult did the same for David St. Clair.

Further information

Just as Colin Wilson got the story of August Strindberg’s misfortunes from Strindberg’s Inferno, he got the story of David St. Clair’s bewitchment from St. Clair’s book Drum and Candle (1971), which is about folk religions in Brazil. 

Colin Wilson’s summary of material from Inferno inspired me to go to the source, but I haven’t read David St. Clair’s book, which may well go into this episode in his life in more detail.

David St. Clair (1932 - 1991):