96 This magazine is all about the outré, the marvellous, the surreal and the occult. You’re rather on the positivist side of the equation, though you do allow for ghosts, if I’m remembering Other Paris aright. Does your naturalism have a hidden bizarrerie, like Flaubert’s, which erupted so entertainingly in Temptation of St Anthony?
LS You’re right that I tend toward the positivist side. This is partly due to a lifetime as a vulgar Marxist, partly to a lifetime spent shedding the tentacles of Catholicism, and partly to my severest limitation—my difficulty with thinking in abstractions. I’m a peasant. (My ancestral language, Walloon, has no words for things like “law” and “justice” and “virtue.”)
As noted in the book [Santé’s memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name] my belief in religion just kind of ended one day. My mother must have detected this, because soon I found myself being transported every week to a monastery in northern NJ to meet with a German Benedictine. This begins to sound like conversion therapy, no? But the monk and I got on famously, because we chanced on a mutual interest: small miracles. We were both fascinated with chairs that bleed on Easter and suchlike, and that’s what we talked about every week. Around that same time I started getting interested in every manifestation of the occult and exhausted my local library’s holdings (mostly journalistic accounts). When later I got the Whole Earth Catalog I found out about the Lucis Trust Library, the free lending library based on the library of the medium Alice Bailey. (Did you know that Lou Reed was her follower? I rejoined the library when I thought I was going to write a bio of LR, but that’s a story for another day.)
When I started going to Regis [a Jesuit High School in NYC] I’d often visit Samuel Weiser’s bookstore on Broadway. I made my way systematically through the aisles, opening book after book whose prose dissolved into gray mush when I tried reading. I liked Gurdjieff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men and Alexandra David-Neel’s Journeys to Tibet and not much else. But then I noticed the single shelf of fiction, at floor level midway down the third aisle. It really contained only two things: H. P. Lovecraft (I bought all the Arkham House editions) and UK new wave sci-fi (most of the best writers, Ballard excepted, were American expats—the ineffable Pamela Zoline!). That pretty much says it for me, that mapping of Weiser’s. So I’m a materialist. I think that we know very little about the brain, and that therein lie the explanations of many mysteries, such as apparent precognition and telepathy. I’m endlessly fascinated by my unconscious, which does so many weird things.
But my shelves today hold such recondite matter as the works of the mysterious Fulcanelli, half a dozen books on Theosophy, various approaches to hermetic philosophy (Frances Yates is my heroine), and even the blather of Le Sar Peladan. I have a dedicated shelf under the stairs devoted to UFOs. And I collect spirit photos (don’t have many, because they’ve gotten ridiculously expensive) and books about spirit photos, of which I have many. I’ve lectured about spirit photos. Does any of this count as bizarrerie?
96 It does to admiration.
LS I’m here in the Victorian darkness of Yaddo [a retreat for artists in Saratoga Springs NY: this interview was conducted via email] where I’ve never been before. It’s the perfect setting for a conversation on the subject. Ghost sightings have been many here.
96 Please tell us about the ghosts of Yaddo, what you’ve seen or sensed there. Do you yourself ghost hunt? Have you had personal encounters of the spooky kind?
Spencer and Katrina Trask, who built Yaddo, lost all four of their children at early ages, and somewhere in there their first manor house burned to the ground. But they rebuilt, and successively dug four large ponds: Lake Spencer, Lake Katrina, Lake Christina, Lake Alan. The house has a fireplace mosaic with a phoenix motif, many idealized portraits. More even than that there are the prevailing blacks and browns and gloom of the late nineteenth century, which Lewis Mumford (The Brown Decades) ascribes to the long period of general mourning after the Civil War. Enormous rooms filled with heavy dark furniture, with silver trophies, with church art transported from Europe, with dark bookcases containing rows of dark books, with supernumerary light fixtures that give off a dull glow, with heavy drapes that prevent too much outside light from getting in. The dining room is crepuscular at noon on a sunny day. It’s very Edward Gorey.
Those things–early deaths, Victorian bricolage, morbid Ruskin tastes, not to mention more than a century as an artists’ colony, with famous breakdowns and open scandals and a boatload of dead celebrities–make it catnip for ghosts, right? So it isn’t surprising that quite a few people I’ve talked to, before coming here and since, have offhandedly mentioned that they felt…something; something unnameable that was nevertheless definitely something. Nothing like that has happened to me yet, maybe because my apartment is not in the mansion but in a more livable smaller building nearby. (Some of the grandest rooms in the mansion are not air-conditioned, for example.) But I don’t know how likely it’d be for me to experience soimething like that, since I don’t believe in spirits.
But having said that, I’m forced to recognize that I do understand genius loci, which for me is associated with the accreted layers of the past, which somehow circulate in microbe form. Beats me. The most vivid example I’ve experienced was sometime in the mid-80s, when with my first wife I went for the weekend to a house in Litchfield County, Connecticut. The house was one of a cluster; it had once been a village, entirely decimated by smallpox in the early nineteenth century. The houses had stood empty for many years, until they were bought in toto sometime after the war by a consortium of Harvard alums. We moved in around three, and I immediately felt something amiss. We went out for dinner and came back, and by that time I was becoming physically ill. I felt something definite that did not want us there. I was sufficiently freaked out that April agreed to go back to NYC that night. That is the closest thing I’ve experienced to a haunting.
96 I can’t help wondering whether your interest in ghosts relates to your work on cities, Low Life and The Other Paris. These accounts of the New York and the Paris that are no more, the invisible cities of memory that underlie the present ones—these tours of the unseen—are these of a piece with your interest in the spectral?
LS Yes, my greatest interests are time and memory. Temporality has been unstable in my life since we went back to Belgium, apparently for good, late in 1960, and I discovered that just as it was possible to jump into the future, as we had six months earlier, it was equally possible to return to the past. Belgium was the past not only in its narrative function, but also because in terms of technology and lifestyle it was at that point 30 years behind the US. A few years later I experienced the joy of hopping back and forth several more times. Time, memory, cities, photography—all my major themes are rooted in my childhood. I moved to the Lower East Side in 1978, when it was on fire every night. The red brick and the ruins spoke directly to my childhood. My native town, Verviers, was a red-brick factory town, and in my ’50s childhood there were still a fair number of war ruins—shelled houses that hadn’t been razed or rebuilt. In addition, being the only child of isolated immigrants, with interests notably at variance with the culture of my peers (until late in adolescence), I was deeply alone and always searching for kin. So I searched the past, too. And the past, of course, represented home. All those things intermesh. And I just think chronologically. I can’t remember numbers–except for dates. I shelve literature chronologically. I can run a movie of my life, year by year (except maybe more recent years), and I can run a movie of 1948 or 1907 too (I’m shakier on pre-20th). The past, or a portion of it, somehow just lives in my head. So I guess ghosts are part of the package.
96 For me, the most arresting observations in I Heard Her Call My Name, were the ones you made about not understanding the semiotics of male society, the unspoken rules and conventions which males in male bodies intuitively grasp. You related this very poignantly to your immigrant’s uncertainties about American ways, moving here from Belgium in early adolescence. Other trans persons describe a similar sense of displacement in more physical terms, as a feeling of not really being entirely “there” in their bodies. Do you think your interest in disembodied spirits might echo of your sense of gendered self?
LS I’ve always thought of myself as an observer, not entirely by choice. I was always vaguely ashamed of my body, without necessarily thinking of it as a gendered thing—I was just too good at compartmentalization to allow myself to make connections. Beginning when I entered my late teens and began to get serious about self-presentation, I have always—even now—been torn between attracting attention and striving for invisibility, the latter not for physical but psychic self-protection. I badly wanted to be a star—but I could never be one because I was bald; that was my rationalization. So yes I felt a displacement from my body, always. I was irredeemably ugly, and as I wrote in my book, I prevented myself from being aware that my beauty standards for myself were all feminine in essence. So undoubtedly I would identify with disembodied spirits were it not for the fact that my early experience of religion inoculated me against spirituality in any of its manifestations.
I have some trouble with the concept of spirit. I’m skeptical, deeply, of all post-life scenarios, generally considering them to constitute wishful thinking. But I am fascinated by human belief, and especially by attempts to render yearning in material form, hence my interest in spirit photos. I try to be as dispassionate and clearsighted as William James, but a century plus of steadily mounting barbarism has hardened me. I do, however, think a case can be made for emotional accumulation in places–not entirely unlike the phenomenon of inheritable trauma. I’ve now been at Yaddo for two weeks, and while I’ve been working I’ve also been massively depressed. Finding out about a week after I got here that I have the apartment Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes occupied in late 1959 does make me wonder… I do think humans–some more than others–have modes of perception outside the five senses, that have not been adequately studied or accounted for. I think elements of the past cling on in certain locations, based in some way on depth of feeling, and that we can have limited access to them although we cannot control or fully enter them.