book review | BENJAMIN DeCASSERES

By BENJAMIN DE CASSERES

YOUR PSYCHIC POWERS AND HOW TO DEVELOP THEM. By Hereward Carrington. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.

MODERN SPIRITISM. By A. T. Schofield, M. D. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son & Co.

VOICES FROM THE VOID. By Hester Travers Smith. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

IN the heyday and freshness of our youth we used to laugh at Signor Mantalini’s bit of Apocalyptic humor that things mundane were going to the “demnition bow-wows.” Mantalini was a prophet. We, personally, were an ass. The torrential bombardment out of the void of a thousand thousand sick brains of books on psychic phenomena proves it.

Man is so sophisticated that he is sick. The earth, with its perpetual carnival of miracles, no longer gives him a thrill. He heaves with the great Flaubertian yawn of pan-ennui and calls on the Witch of Endor, the Eleusinian Abracadabrists and the sensibilities of jaded ex-scientists to give him a final thrill. He is tired of being the Great Wonder, Man; he wants to be a ghost. The Great Decay has set in. Universal repression and travail have released his insane complexes. The Far-Off Divine Event has issued in haunted houses, ouija boards, crystals, psychometric pussyfooting back to pre-Devonian Devas and other fallals. These things are all true and interesting, like cancer and fire-damp. But it is springtime, and the appearance of the tiniest bud is more amazing than all the ghosts and subconscious maunderings in the thousand and one tales of the New Arabian Nights of the Underworld.

Hereward Carrington seems to have taken over all syndicate rights on the “other world.” From the number of books to his credit on psychic phenomena we believe he must work in three shifts in the spiritist factory, catching cat-naps in some divinely intercalated hour. We have not read all his books merely because the rent problem has kept us in the courts so much of the time.

“Your Psychic Powers” is a complete angler in the sub-dimensions. How to fish for ghosts and tame them; how to trawl in the running river of Time and scoop up auras; how to bait your fingers for psychometric visions; how to tell a real “control” nibble from a false one—all these things are set forth in 358 pages of substantial English.

Mr. Carrington has a businesslike, direct style. We desire to persuade the Government to employ him to get up its next series of income tax blanks. These bureaucratic excursions in mystical mathematics could, under Mr. Carrington’s direction, be reduced to the simplicity of the auric egg, or the homogeneity of the akasic fluid, expounded and made so comprehensible in this book that the veriest child, whether in the primary, secondary or tertiary stage of his childhood, can understand it.

Credit must be given to Mr. Carrington for explaining in a preface that he doesn’t necessarily indorse all the “truths” or the practices recommended in the book; and it is without question the best and most complete, the clearest and the most sensibly compiled compendium of “dippy” lore that we have read.

“Modern Spiritism” is by A. T. Schofield, M. D., whose book on “The Unconscious Mind” was, he says, the first one on that tremendous subject ever written in English. Science received it then with “howls of derision.” That was then. Now nobody can get along without an unconscious mind. It is the rowdy rathskellar of our suppressed karmas.

Mr. Schofield, being an M. D., naturally runs to “cases.” He throws wide the doors of the psychic clinic and lectures on the “evidences” strewn around on the marble slabs. Mr. Schofield, being more of a religious turn of mind than Mr. Carrington, has installed an “Elijah Chorus” and an organ in the loft of the demonstrating room, and every hour or so the reader and the author knock off work together and take a cacophonic dose of the Glad Tidings in the Light of Modern Spiritistic Phenomena—and all that. There is nothing original in Dr. Schofield’s book. He is even “deeply conscious of its imperfections.” But it is an imperfect world, and we fear that even the psycho-ghost luminaries are made in its image.

“Voices from the Void” is by the daughter of the late Professor Edward Dowden, Mrs. Hester Travers Smith. Sir William Barrett has written the introduction and avouches for the genuineness of the experiments carried on by Mrs. Smith. All checks drawn on the other world nowadays have an endless number of indorsers, but is there any money in the bank?—that is, is there anybody or anything “over the line”?

A close reading of the book indicates to us that the title, “Voices from the Void,” is strictly true. There is a void—even a vacuum—and the human race is the victim of unconscious ventriloquy. It is listening to its own voice in the belly of the void.

These psychic books—what are they all worth beside this tremendous book of psychic phenomena that nature is opening before our eyes?

Sursum Corda! Here is springtime again—Spring, the perpetual, transfigurating, undecipherable miracle of a sublimely ironical Dieu.

Messrs. Carrington, Schofield and Madam Smith, come to the séance in my back yard, for the blush is on the horseradish!

Original publication
Benjamin DeCasseres, “Psychic Phenomena and Humble Horseradish,” New York Times Book Review, April 18, 1920, p. 189 (index-supplied).

Books reviewed

Modern Spiritism
A. T. Schofield, M. D.
Voices from the Void
Hester Travers Smith
Your Psychic Powers and How to Develop Them
Hereward Carrington

This book review was published in The Sun (city?) on July 20th, 1919.

By BENJAMIN DE CASSERES.
GIOVANNI PAPINI, the Italian iconoclastic and sometimes humorous, all too humorous, philosopher, has written an amusing sketch for one of the magazines called “The Satanic Genius.” It tells of the quest of a youthful worshipper of a world famous poet who lives in Paris. The poet’s Satanism has thrilled the world and made the gooseflesh vibrant where none had vibrated before.
The breathless disciple after many attempts at last stands face to face with the Master in the latter’s very commonplace apartment. And the Great Man is still more commonplace—a sort of baldheaded and bowlegged D’Annunzio.
To the killing astonishment of the believing boy the Genius relates just how be concocts his flights, aphorisms, demoniacal frenzies and super-vamps. Even shows him his catalogue of paradoxes, his dictionaries of obsolete phrases and words, his assortment of nude jokes, medical terms—in fact, all the trappings and Liberty Motors that beautify the outside and buzz inside of Pegasus!
He relates his money wrangles with his publishers and bows out the young man with a satanic grin after explaining that the water colors on the wall were painted by his wife.
This is the very triumph of Satanism, but the boy didn’t know it—and he probably bopped off the Pont Neuf forthwith.
In the age long controversy whether genius is a matter of infinite pains or inspiration, Signor Papini seems to go in for the infinite pains side. Inspiration, anyhow, is only the result of the infinite pains of our ancestors. All the words that Shakespeare used in his plays are in the dictionary. Take twenty thousand of them, sit down sonic Saturday afternoon and arrange them as Shakespeare knew the trick and—pouf !—you’ll have something bigger than Hamlet on your paper. Personally having been a genius up until my fortieth year, and having then given it up in order to live decently, I can now blazon the secret of the concoction of those great books that no publisher will publish—Roget’s Thesaurus, the Standard Dictionary, Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary, Smith’s Classical Dictionary, Woods’s Dictionary of Quotations and a briar root pipe, mixed with tea and rum.
But here comes another ready genius maker just as we were all going in for Bolshevism and root beer. It is A Dictionary of 6,000 Phrases, compiled and arranged by Edwin Hamlin Carr. It is an aid to ready and effective conversation and to social letter writing, with over 100 model social letters. It is (Papini, Pegasus and fooling aside) a valuable book for beginners in the art of conventionalizing their style if they flout the genius game. The author truly says “We think in phrases as well as words.” Can you deny it? And here is the phrase for any exigency, social, political, religious or literary.
A person that could memorize them all would go through the world as slickly as a kitten in a molasses factory. He would be a perfect genius of manners, poise, courtesy and grace, the Fourteen Points of elegance and the Ten Commandments of fashion. May I venture to suggest that with this book one could write a peace treaty that posterity would look on as a Magna Charta of Thought?
At the top of each page there is an index word. Suppose, for instance, you are interested in “Progress.” Page 203 is your cubbyhole. Here are “the chariot of progress,” “an aggressive movement,” “a thorough going reform,” &c. In fact there are 17,000 ready made editorials right on this page. Every man his own brisbane.
As I am seriously thinking of becoming a genius again, thanks, Mr. Editor, for this valuable book.