A Half-Closed Book
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A HALF-CLOSED BOOK Compiled by J. L. Herrera TO THE MEMORY OF: Mary Brice AND WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO: Madge Portwin, Margaret Clarke, Isla MacGregor, Bob Clark, Betty Cameron, Ken Herrera, Cheryl Perriman, and sundry libraries, op-shops, and book exchanges INTRODUCTION Just one more ramble through unexpected byways and surprising twists and turns … yes, I think everyone is allowed to go out with neither bang nor whimper but with her eyes glued to the page … Poor dear, people can say, she didn’t see that bus coming … The difficulty of course is where to store everything; and finding room in my mind is sometimes as tricky as finding room in my bedroom. But was it a good idea to do a short writer’s calendar? A year instead of my usual three years. I had mixed feelings about it. It was nice to see a book take shape so (relatively) swiftly. But I also felt the bits and pieces hadn’t had time to marinate fully. That sense of organic development had been hurried. I also found I tended to run with the simpler stories rather than the ones that needed some research—and some luck, some serendipity. On the other hand, how long a soaking constitutes a decent marinade? Not being a good cook I always find that hard to decide … So this will be a book without a deadline. One which can just wander along in spare moments. Its date will have to wait. Even so, I hope that anyone who happens to read it some day will enjoy it as much as I always enjoy the compiling of books on writing and reading. And may your eyes never grow dim … J. L. Herrera Hobart …. 2009 PS. Speaking of serendipity it seems that the minute I finish a calendar and put it aside I find something which might’ve added to it. A greater sense of completeness perhaps. I thought of this when I came upon Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World. As an eighteen-year-old she became involved with J. D. Salinger; a relationship I couldn’t help but see as damaging. When I began the book I found myself wishing I’d known about it sooner. When I finished it I was vaguely glad I hadn’t. 2 A HALF-CLOSED BOOK * * * * * January 1: Maria Edgeworth Caroline Jones January 2: Isaac Asimov Susan Wittig Albert January 3: J. R. Tolkien David Starkey January 4: Jacob Grimm * * * * * D. Scott Rogo wrote in The Poltergeist Experience, “Even the first scholars of history noted the existence and mystery of the poltergeist. Jacob Grimm in his Deutsche Mythologie cited an old German case. He reported how a house was bombarded by stones while blows erupted from its walls. These incidents occurred in A.D. 355.” And “Grimm, in his Teutonic Mythologie, records a case dating back to A.D. 856 in Kembden. Rappings, voices, and showers of stones plagued the unfortunate victim’s home.” * * * * * Puzzling as reports of ‘spontaneous combustion’ are I have never doubted that there is a natural and probably quite simple explanation. The medical and scientific establishments have pooh-poohed the whole thing; not questioning the fact that unfortunate people are found burned to death in their homes and gardens and sheds and cars—but arguing that they could not have combusted spontaneously and therefore the claim is absurd. On the surface this seems sensible. Human bodies are very damp things. Arthur Upfield wrote a short story called ‘Wisp of Wool and Disc of Silver’ in which a man manages to destroy the body of a neighbour by days of burning. This story later formed the basis for a real life attempt to destroy a murder victim in the same way. But even with plenty of space, plenty of time, and large amounts of heaped-on wood and brush, it proved to be an unsuccessful effort. The puzzle in cases of ‘spontaneous combustion’ is that people have been found by police still sitting in their almost undamaged armchairs but burnt to ashes. Even in horrifying collisions, housefires, plane crashes, and war zones horribly charred bodies have not been reduced to ash. Damon Wilson tells the story in Spontaneous Combustion of Charles Dickens and his use of the phenomenon … A case occurred in Germany in 1847 where the Countess von Gorlitz was found dead and partially burned in a locked bedroom. A doctor pronounced it as a case of spontaneous combustion but her man-servant Stauff admitted to killing her and heaping combustibles on her body. He got life imprisonment—which seems lenient for mid-19th century Germany—unless doubts remained. The defence had called famous chemist Baron von Liebig, inventor of the Liebig condenser, to prove that Stauff could not have burned her body like that because human bodies are very hard to burn. Therefore it could neither have been a case of Spontaneous Human Combustion nor could Stauff have burned the body in the way he claimed, possibly under pressure to confess. Spontaneous Human Combustion became an idea of ridicule in the scientific and medical worlds and Stauff went to prison. But the real question no one had engaged with was: if not natural combustion, and if Stauff or anyone else could not have burned the body in that room—then how did the Countess die? “Within four years, Liebig’s opinion was being used as a stick to beat England’s most famous author, Charles Dickens. In his novel Bleak House (serialized between 1852-53), Dickens kills off the villainous miser Krook by Spontaneous Combustion. “The cat stands snarling – not at them; at something on the ground, before the fire. There is very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering suffocating vapor in the room, and a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something 3 on the ground, before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light. Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, and here is – is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here!” “This grim scene affronted the senses of many of Dickens’s Victorian readers, but the scientific community was indignant for another reason. The noted rationalist George Henry Lewes lost no time in writing to The Leader magazine to say that he “objected to the episode of Krook’s death by Spontaneous Combustion as overstepping the limits of fiction and giving currency to a vulgar error.” Dickens replied in the introduction to the first edition of Bleak House, explaining: “I have no need to observe that I do not willfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject.” He went on to mention that he had studied 30 cases, including that of Countess Bandi (1731), on whose death chamber he had based his description of Krook’s bedroom.” Wilson notes that Dickens as a junior reporter had covered the inquest into just such a death, the verdict being death by misadventure, which had convinced Dickens that SHC was a reality. But Lewes wasn’t interested in cases; reason dictated that human bodies simply couldn’t spontaneously combust. Dickens’ friend Forster accused Lewes in the Fortnightly Review of being “odious by intolerable assumptions of an indulgent superiority”. But even Dickens’s reputation, and his appeal to actual cases, failed to convince the medical profession. Lewes revealed that he was basing his opinion on Liebig’s conclusions, when he declared: “I believe you will not find one eminent organic chemist who credits Spontaneous Combustion.” “And, unfortunately, he was correct. From that day to this, Spontaneous Combustion has been dismissed as a scientific impossibility.” I think Dickens who had thoroughly looked into the mystery was right and the medical men who had dismissed it out of hand were wrong. But that does nothing to explain what actually happens. Alcohol was originally seen as the main culprit. And being fat was thought to add fuel to the fire. As Julian Jeffs wrote in ‘Imbiber, Beware!’ “The conditions leading to spontaneous combustion were ably summarized by Lair, and are as follows: firstly, the people concerned made abuse, over a long period, of spirituous liquors; secondly, they were nearly all women; thirdly, they were mostly aged; fourthly, they were generally fat. When disaster overtook them, the extremities of their bodies were generally spared, and water, instead of putting the fire out, sometimes only made it more violent.” But many cases did not fit the image. Children, teetotalers, very thin people, teenagers, and people careful of their health have died mysteriously. But the majority of cases do appear to occur in fairly sedentary people— which just might give weight to the idea that a build-up of abdominal gases is a key factor. Other possibilities have included static electricity and ball lightning. But Wilson also trawls another idea which is even more unlikely to be taken on board by the medical establishment: poltergeists. Unexplained fires are sometimes a feature of an outbreak of poltergeist activity. But this would not explain why combustion tends to happen, rarely fortunately, to older people. Yet if that kind of spirit possession can feed off adolescent energy and anger—can it also feed on the kind of frustration and anger that can occur later in life as horizons shrink too soon, too drastically, too much at the whim of other people? I’m not sure if there is anything in this idea … but it struck me that it was the term ‘spontaneous’ which was the sticking point for many people.