"Dead Authors" by Agnes Repplier is an essay that examines the early twentieth-century phenomenon of deceased writers and spirits purportedly communicating literary works to living mediums, and subjects this phenomenon to sustained skeptical and literary scrutiny. Repplier opens by invoking Madame de Maintenon's maxim that the dead do not write, contrasting it with the modern spiritualist conviction that the afterlife is populated with printing presses and libraries. She notes that Miss Lilian Whiting and other spiritualist advocates have proposed that every creative work possesses an astral counterpart, guaranteeing immortal preservation of all writing, good or bad. From this premise, Repplier observes, ambitious spirits have apparently decided to enter the living literary marketplace in competition with mortal authors. The essay surveys the principal methods by which spirits allegedly communicate: the ouija board, the tilting table, and automatic writing. Repplier finds each method absurd, noting that table-rapping combines maximum inconvenience with maximum absurdity, and that even Sir Oliver Lodge conceded the difficulties. She recounts with dry amusement the antics of Lodge family séance tables, which performed tricks, attempted to climb into Lady Lodge's lap, and broke repeatedly during exuberant domestic sittings before the supernatural power was brought under control. The most prolific spirit author examined is Patience Worth, who dictated to her medium Mrs. Curran through ouija board nearly nine hundred thousand words in three and a half years, producing six-act dramas, historical novels, verse, parables, and comedies. Repplier reproduces examples of Patience Worth's archaic and nearly incomprehensible dialect, questioning any resemblance her prose bears to the King James Bible despite editorial claims to that effect. Her long historical novel about the penitent thief receives particular scorn as six hundred and forty pages of confused, wandering, and wholly unreadable narrative. Repplier suspects that Patience Worth represents a syndicate of literary spirits rather than a single entity, and finds the prospect of her indefinite future productivity, since she cannot die a second time, genuinely dismaying. The essay also examines the spirit calling himself the Living Dead Man, channeled through the medium Elsa Barker, whose wartime dispatches promised revelations surpassing those of all the world's chancelleries but delivered only material already available in newspapers, along with claims to have attended German war councils in Berlin and to have met the spirit of Nietzsche, whom he instructed to return to earth and teach humility. Repplier notes pointedly that this spirit failed to mention the sinking of the Lusitania on the day it occurred, claiming afterward only that he had withheld the information to spare his medium's feelings. She observes that four words spoken in advance would have transformed modern thought, but that the opportunity was missed. Other spirit productions receive similar treatment. The letters from dead children Harry and Helen offer their living relatives advice about giving away unwanted clothing, avoiding overcrowded motor cars, and permitting tobacco use. A dead American soldier sends his mother cheerful accounts of ghost nurses tending the wounded in Flanders, spirits nudging living officers away from incoming shells, and his own developing interest in a young woman named Alice. Raymond, the dead son of Sir Oliver Lodge, reports on his comfortable brick house in the afterlife and attends lectures on spirituality and the projection of uplifting thoughts. Throughout the essay, Repplier identifies the overwhelming characteristic of all these spirit communications as didacticism. The dead, she finds, are relentlessly eager to offer moral counsel, nearly all of it either platitudinous or already available from living neighbors and clergymen. They urge drinking water, sleeping adequately, controlling temper, cultivating love, and suppressing anger, while declining to share the genuinely transcendent knowledge they claim to possess on the grounds that mortal intelligence is too limited to receive it. Repplier compares this evasion to attempting to play Beethoven on a penny whistle, a comparison the Living Dead Man himself offers with apparent satisfaction. Repplier closes by contrasting the noisy vulgarity of spirit authorship with the quiet dignity she finds more appropriate to mortality, citing Byron's admiration for two brief Latin epitaphs in Bologna that compressed all human weariness into a plea for peace and eternal rest. The prospect of passing through death only to spend eternity dictating dull books and delivering platitudinous lectures strikes her as a peculiarly dismal form of immortality. She concludes by quoting Patience Worth's own most memorable utterance, the phrase she produced when she abruptly halted midway through a long dictation session: this be nuff, which Repplier proposes as the ideal farewell message from all dead authors to the living world.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1893 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Biography, Essay