Arthur Conan Doyle’s witch Helen Penclosa: Part I

While doing some research for an article about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s life in Southsea, I discovered that he had written a short novel about occult forces called The Parasite:

“…his dark tale of an evil woman possessed of such hypnotic powers that she is able to induce by remote control not only murder, but passionate love as well, in the mind of her chosen victim.”

From  A Study in Southsea: The Unrevealed Life of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle by Geoffrey Stavert.

Stavert’s summary made the story sound very interesting indeed: I immediately thought of psychic crime and psychological black magic.

I found The Parasite on Project Gutenberg. The novella, which was first published in 1894, is only four chapters long; the plot is simple and there are only a handful of characters. The language is rather old-fashioned and melodramatic and the story a bit contrived, but I found The Parasite worth reading as a source of inspiration for an article or two. It contains some very familiar elements and provides yet more independent confirmation of some of my ideas.

The characters in summary

The two main characters are Miss Helen Penclosa, the evil woman, and Austin Gilroy, the chosen victim.

Miss Penclosa, who possesses strong hypnotic powers and can project herself into people’s bodies and take command of them, is middle-aged. She is small and frail; she has a pale, peaky face and light brown hair; she has a crippled leg. Her strange, grey-green eyes are both furtive and fierce. 

She is silent and colourless, retiring and lacking presence, except when she talks about and exercises her powers. She is unscrupulous; she has no ethical sense at all; she is evil. Conan Doyle calls her a parasite and a devil woman; I would call her an energy vampire and a witch.

Austin Gilroy is a professor, although he is only 34 years old. Physiology is his field. He is interested only in the material world, and has trained himself to deal only with facts, truth, logic and proof. Yet while he operates on pure reason, he is aware of his real self:

“…by nature I am, unless I deceive myself, a highly psychic man. I was a nervous, sensitive boy, a dreamer, a somnambulist, full of impressions and intuitions. My black hair, my dark eyes, my thin, olive face, my tapering fingers, are all characteristic of my real temperament…”

Kathleen Raine, the Destroyer and the Destroyed

The poet Kathleen Raine was born on this day, June 14^th, in 1908. To mark the occasion, here is another article inspired by her autobiographical books.

One thing I noticed immediately is that, unlike many other victims of the creative spirit, Kathleen Raine made attempts to understand the occult forces and unseen influences at work in her life.

She learned from experience and took some responsibility for what happened to her:

“Because I suffered I supposed that he had hurt me… an instinctive reaction, stupid and unjust for most often we hurt ourselves whether by imagining non-existent wrongs or in persistence in some mistake we cannot or will not see…”

She thought about the effect that she had on the people around her and realised that, while she had suffered immensely, she had also caused much suffering to others.  She knew that she had treated her parents cruelly –  in return for what they had done to her – and she also realised that obsessively concentrating on someone can have a damaging effect:

“Perhaps he felt the longing dragging at him…the sense of another’s unwanted thoughts flowing towards one constantly…”

She came to understand that what happens to people in the outer world is often a reflection of what is happening in their inner world:

“… the world continually reflects back to us our inner states…”

“Everything that befalls us has its cause within ourselves… another of those seeming miracles by which a change of inner disposition is followed by a corresponding change in the outward course of events…”

“Our being responds only to that to which it is attuned…”

Much of what she says is independent confirmation of the validity of conclusions that I had already come to and the truth of insights that had come to me.

The childhood of Marie Corelli

I described some painful events in the life of the Queen of Victorian Best-sellers Marie Corelli recently. Writing about an episode in Rudyard Kipling's childhood gave me the idea of investigating Marie Corelli's childhood.

There is little information available and much confusion about her parentage. She deliberately muddied the water herself; she obscured her past with a fog of lies and deceit. We will never know for sure whether the Scottish poet, scholar and journalist Charles Mackay was her real father or, as she insisted, her adopted father. It is likely that her mother was a servant and Marie was born illegitimate. She would have seen this as a terrible disgrace, something to be ashamed of and kept hidden; she claimed Venetian blood and gave herself an Italian name in compensation and to hide her real parentage.

What we do know is that despite having a kind man as her official father, she was very unhappy as a child.

Rudyard Kipling and the House of Desolation: Part II

Part 1 described how Rudyard Kipling and his younger sister were consigned to the care of Mrs Holloway, a committed Evangelical and a bigoted and ignorant woman who took a dislike to Kipling and treated him very badly. He endured many years of her cruelty and neglect, not to mention hell-fire Christianity.

There are some more questions to be asked.

Why didn’t Rudyard Kipling say anything?

Kipling said that his beloved aunt asked him this question many times.

He later gave two reasons for his not telling anyone how he was being treated. He said that children accept everything that happens to them as inevitable and eternal; he also said that they sense what they will get if they betray the secrets of the prison-house before they are well clear of it.

These are good answers – as far as they go.

Children in general do think that whatever adults do is normal behaviour; children are often threatened with dire consequences for speaking out, perhaps verbally or perhaps with unspoken but well conveyed and understood intention. They may be afraid of losing what little they have.

However, there may be more to it.

Children in general may not be able to put things into words; they may lack the necessary concepts and vocabulary. It is up to adults to set an example and educate children in how to express themselves.

Children may also be overwhelmed, unable to speak. The necessary assertiveness and inner strength may have been destroyed by the vicious attacks. It is up to adults to draw children out and encourage them to speak up.

Children may be subconsciously afraid of mentioning bad treatment in case they find that no one cares and nothing is done; they may also fear being accused of lying. Sometimes the default, the instinctive reaction, is to hide all injuries and carry on as if nothing has happened. Some people dissociate very easily.

Rudyard Kipling and the House of Desolation: Part I

There is an episode in Rudyard Kipling's childhood that is of great interest to me: the miserable years of torment spent in what he later called ‘The House of Desolation’.

He endured five and a half years of calculated neglect, persecution, punishment and humiliation at the hands of a horrible, cruel, religious fanatic of a woman called Mrs Holloway and her awful bully of a son. Some of the damage that this prolonged and constant torture caused was permanent.

He wrote about his ordeal in the short story Baa Baa, Black Sheep, in his novel The Light that Failed and in his autobiographical work Something of Myself. It makes very painful reading, at least for people who have experienced something similar.

This nightmare interlude in Kipling's childhood has also been described and discussed extensively in many biographies, reviews, essays and articles; there is no need to reproduce all the details and cover the same ground here. I just want to concentrate on a few aspects of this case, on some unseen but familiar influences and some connections that I have noticed.

First, a few questions.

Today is the 25th anniversary of Isaac Asimov's death

Isaac Asimov died at the age of 72 on 6th April 1992. His death was a great loss to the world.

I enjoyed reading his Science Fiction novels and stories very much; I bought an old 2-volume pack of his autobiography at a big discount a while back, and found In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt just as good.

I like information, and these books are packed with it. He describes his early life so well that reading about it made me feel as though I had grown up in a poor area in 1930s New York myself.

I like the way he puts his life into the context of the times; he comes to realise that while his family were poor, they were not destitute like others in the Depression era. He also puts his life and personality into the context of other people's; he is balanced and objective when interpreting his earlier behaviour and explaining himself to his readers.

I like the way he uses these books to pay off his old debts – of both kinds. Better late than never. He thanks a teacher who let him go on the school outing even though he hadn't qualified, and he thanks a professor who had shown favouritism towards him. He also pays back a few people he had grudges against!

I like the way he makes the small stuff, the petty details of his life, seem fascinating. I enjoyed reading about the food that he ate and the books that he read.

I like his honesty when he says that a lot of people couldn't stand him, and that he failed to get into medical school because of the offensive way he behaved at the interviews. Of course, he wrote this as a rich, famous, adored and successful author who had moved on and could afford to look back with amusement at his past failures and deficiencies; he could offset the bad with the good.

Exploitation and unfinished business in the life of Marie Corelli

There are some lessons to be learned from the financially successful but personally sad life of best-selling Victorian novelist Marie Corelli. 

One of these lessons is about taking responsibility where appropriate, as opposed to blaming someone else. It particularly involves learning to be a good judge of character and not being influenced by factors such as self-interest, self-deception and wishful thinking - as opposed to blaming the other party for not being what we thought they were or wanted them to be.

Blaming people for deceiving us and letting us down seems to be the default. We need to learn to look after our side of things; we need to learn from experience what to look for in people. In particular, we need to learn to recognise warning signals.

This extract from Marie Corelli's book The Silver Domino shows that she knew, in theory at least, that people should take responsibility and blame themselves for their own poor judgement when they feel that they have been deceived by someone:

"Remember that if you do persuade yourself into thinking that I am a Somebody, and if I turn out after all to be a Nobody, it is not my fault. Don't blame me, blame your own self deception."

This is admirable; it is spot on. However, she talked a better game than she played; she didn't apply her wise words to herself. The Silver Domino was published in 1892; here is an extract from The Young Diana, first published in 1918:

"I asked for love – now I ask for vengeance. I gave all my heart and soul to a man whose only god was Self, and I got nothing back…So I have a long score to settle, and I shall try to have some of my spent joys returned to me – with heavy interest."

This is Marie Corelli speaking for herself, and from bitter experience. She was raging at a man she had been infatuated with, because she felt that he had deceived her; he was not what she thought he was and wanted him to be. She had become disappointed and disillusioned. The expression 'Hell hath no greater fury than a women scorned' very much applies in her case.