Literature, Language, and the Classroom

Essays for Promodini Varma

Sonali Jain, Anubhav Pradhan, Sonali Jain, Anubhav Pradhan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000432398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This book is a Festschrift dedicated to Promodini Varma, a meticulous scholar, teacher, and administrator of extraordinary rigour, grit, and perception. It presents reflections on researching and teaching English literatures and languages in India. It concerns itself broadly with literary modernism and English language teaching and classroom pedagogy, some of the core concerns of the literary fraternity today. The volume examines how the literary and cultural manifestations of modernity have pervasively informed not just much of our disciplinary framework but many of the key issues—decolonisation, globalisation, development—our society grapples with.

With essays on William Butler Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling, the volume presents fresh insights on familiar canonical ground. It discussesELT and classroom pedagogy and provides grounded appraisals of teaching and translating for multilingual classroom audiences given the demands of employability and the hierarchical dynamics of educational institutions. An interview on feminist pedagogy and theatre and an essay on urban nostalgia and redevelopment act as pertinent outliers, reflecting the ongoing transition to more multi-sited and interdisciplinary research and praxis.

An engaging read on some of the most pressing concerns in the field, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism, English language studies, and education.

1
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS AND ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

Links, affinities, and the occult¹

R.W. Desai

DOI:10.4324/9781003049777-2

Points of contact

What degree of awareness did these authors have of each other, both of Irish descent and involved in the study of the occult and spiritualism? Both achieved international fame: Yeats (1865–1939) for his memorable poems and plays, winning the Nobel Prize in 1923; Doyle (1859–1930) for creating Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion Dr Watson, culminating in the publication of his superb detective novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901). Doyle’s public recognition of Yeats’s stature as poet-prophet occurs in The Land of Mist (1926) and The Edge of the Unknown (1930). Reciprocally, Yeats’s appreciation of Doyle’s views on the occult appears in his spiritualist play The Words Upon the Window-Pane (1930). This chapter also records instances of circumstantial evidence suggesting their mutual recognition of each other’s work. Apart from being great writers, they were social reformers of a high order. Doyle devoted three years of his life to securing the acquittal of two men wrongly sentenced.² For Yeats, the disastrous consequences of unfettered individual freedom in sex and marriage, which threatened to destabilise society, is the theme of his play Purgatory (1938) written five months before his death.

In the year of Doyle’s death, 1930, each mentions the other by name, but going back four decades there is considerable circumstantial evidence to suggest a meeting of minds: both were members of The Society for Psychical Research, which, Doyle says, he had “joined in 1893 or 1894 and must now be [in 1930] one of the oldest members” (Edge 104), while Yeats was an associate member from 1913 to 1928 (Brown 192); both were members, along with Dickens, of The Ghost Club (see the history by Murdie on the official website); both were well versed in Sir William Crookes’ researches (Edge 137), and Yeats recalled that “somebody years ago, at, I think, a meeting of the Society … suggested that we transfer thought at some moment when we cease to think of it”. It is likely that this person was Doyle, since a tragic incident that he records from his correspondence with an English lady tallies with Yeats’s explanation of the “Dreaming Back” process of the dead whereby the “unconsciousness” of the living is “inhabit[ed]” by what the dead are experiencing (Vision 1937, 226–27). In Yeats’s consolatory, poignant, yet cheerful little poem “Shepherd and Goatherd” that he evidently felt might help Lady Gregory to come to terms with the death of her 37-year-old son Robert, whose combat plane was shot down on 23 January 1918 on the Italian front, his spirit re-lives his life in reverse: “jaunting, journeying/To his own dayspring,/He unpacks the loaded pern/Of all ‘twas pain or joy to learn,/Of all that he had made,/The outrageous war shall fade”.

Doyle’s account, similarly, “takes us back into the black days of the war” in a letter he received from the English lady mentioned above whose brother was killed at the front. “At that hour”, Doyle records:

the lady went through his whole experience, visualized the battlefield, heard the guns [and] had every reason at the time to think that her brother was at the depot and not in the firing-line. It was after the Armistice that official news was given of his death.

(Edge 58)

This remarkable thought-transference, if narrated by Doyle at the meeting, could well have been remembered by Yeats many years later, the death of the lady’s brother having taken place in the same context of war as that of Major Robert Gregory.

Affinities

Hitherto, the relationship between the two authors lacked a focus: while an interest in spiritualism is present in their early writings, they developed a concentrated absorption in the occult in 1916/17 through the instrumentality of their wives, Lady Jean Conan Doyle and Mrs Georgie Yeats (nee Hyde-Lees), respectively. They were greatly activated in this pursuit on account of the death by pneumonia of Doyle’s son Captain Kingsley Conan Doyle while on active military service, and in the case of Yeats by the death of Major Robert Gregory—noted earlier—as a result of which Yeats wrote two of what many readers regard as among his most deeply moving poems, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” and “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”. Within the next ten years both authors wrote extensively on their experiments in spiritualism: Doyle’s The New Revelation (1918), The Land of Mist (1926), The History of Spiritualism (1926), and The Edge of the Unknown (1930) contain his most detailed treatment of the subject, while during these decades appeared Yeats’s Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917) and A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded Upon the Writings of Giraldus and Upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka (1925), which was re-published with revisions and additions in 1937. A Vision (1925) concludes with the marvellously evocative poem “All Souls’ Night”, which he wrote during “moments of exaltation” (Critical Edition xii), the opening stanza of which I quote:

Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church bell,

And many a lesser bell, sound through the room;

And it is All Souls’ Night

And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel

Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;

For it is a ghost’s right,

His element is so fine

Being sharpened by his death,

To drink from the wine-breath

While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

Further affinities between the two authors may be seen in Doyle’s ‘Preface to The Edge of the Unknown:

We who believe in the psychic revelation, and who appreciate that a perception of these things is of the utmost importance, certainly have hurled ourselves against the obstinacy of our time. Possibly we have allowed some of our lives to be gnawed away in what, for the moment, seemed a vain and thankless quest. Only the future can show whether the sacrifice was worth it.

(Doyle 4)

Somewhat similar to Doyle’s anticipation of the hostile criticism his book would invite is the comment of one of Yeats’s oldest friends, George Russell, editor of The Irish Statesman, whose opinion on Yeats’s A Vision (1925) was sought by Yeats’s sister Elizabeth, a publisher, who feared that her brother’s “wits were astray”. Russell replied:

My opinion is that anything Willie writes will be of interest now or later on, and a book like this, which does not excite me or you, may be, possibly will be, studied later on when the psychology of the poet is considered by critics and biographers … Some will dislike it or think it fantastic nonsense, others will study it closely.

(Hone 406)

Another noteworthy similarity between the two authors is that they kept separate and distinct in their most memorable creative writing their oppositional commitments. In the case of Doyle, no one will dispute that for the general public Sherlock Holmes is his most unforgettable fictional character—even more memorable than Hamlet or Falstaff—but Doyle refrains from introducing the supernatural in any of the mysteries that he solves. In “A Scandal in Bohemia”, Dr Watson observes that Holmes is “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” (I 209), and John Dickson Carr, his biographer, notes that “Doyle went out of his way to make Holmes deny all belief in the supernatural” (330). In The Hound of the Baskervilles Holmes admits the possibility of “forces outside the ordinary laws of nature” but adds, “we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one” (II 24–25). Even as late as “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, published just three years before Doyle’s death, Holmes summarily dismisses the belief in “walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts” with an emphatic “Rubbish Watson, rubbish!”, adding, “the world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply” (II 55). Likewise, Yeats was told by his ghostly “Instructors” (as he termed them) that they did not want him “to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences … We have come to give you metaphors for poetry”, they famously declared (Vision 1937, 8), advice that Yeats heeded and kept the supernatural out of his greatest poems like “Among School Children”, “Leda and the Swan”, or “Sailing to Byzantium”, among others too well known to need listing. In his elegy on Yeats, Auden saw the astonishing poetry behind the vast and complicated paraphernalia of the occult in A Vision (1925 and 1937) as his cheeky yet complimentary apostrophe shows: “You were silly like us: your gift survived it all” (“In Memory” 65). Thus did both Doyle and Yeats have two distinct sides of their creative identities and kept them apart consistently.

Yeats’s The Words Upon the Window-Pane (1930)

While all of the above circumstantial evidence is suggestive of an interaction between the two authors, what follows is the mutual direct mention of the other in the context of the extra-sensual and the occult. In failing health during the last decade of his life, Yeats was now an avid reader of crime fiction: he wrote to Lady Gregory on 7 April 1930, “When I am not reading detective stories I am reading Swift” (Wade 773; see also 743, 762, 772). During this phase he wrote two of his most powerful plays, The Words Upon the Window-Pane and Purgatory, both being permeated by the occult, murder, and the afterlife. The former was first performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on 17 November 1930, the year of Doyle’s death on 7 July, and contains—as far as I know—Yeats’s first and only mention of Doyle by name (line 28). The play dramatises Jonathan Swift’s involvement with two women, Stella and Vanessa. It opens with preparations for a séance to be held in an eighteenth-century house which “belonged to friends of Jonathan Swift, or rather of Stella”, and “somebody cut some lines from a poem of hers upon the window-pane—tradition says Stella herself”. Dr Trench, the President of the Society, explains this to John Corbet, a Cambridge doctoral student doing research on Swift. Corbet is apologetic in his response, hoping that the medium Mrs Henderson “will not mind my skepticism. I have looked into Myers’ Human Personality and a wild book by Conan Doyle, but am unconvinced”. Most probably this “wild book” is Doyle’s The Land of Mist (1926) and, as we shall see later, it describes the happenings during a séance which would, understandably, have interested Corbet. Yeats’s play re-enacts the purgatorial dreaming-back process of Swift’s relationship with the two women, neither of whom he married for fear of transmitting his incipient insanity (or perhaps syphilis) to his progeny. During the séance Mrs Henderson, speaking in the stentorian voice of Swift, reprimands Vanessa for trying to displace Stella through her sexuality: “How dare you write to her? How dare you ask if we were married? How dare you question her?” The crucial question the play raises is whether the spirit of Swift is genuine or a fraud.

After the séance is over Corbet gives Mrs Henderson a one-pound note, more than any of the others have paid her, and says:

This is my contribution to prove that I am satisfied … When I say I am satisfied I do not mean that I am convinced it was the work of spirits. I prefer to think that you created it all, that you are an accomplished actress and scholar. In my essay for my Cambridge doctorate, I examine all the explanations of Swift’s celibacy offered by his biographers and prove that the explanation you selected was the only plausible one.

MRS. HENDERSON: Wh...