I am a great admirer of Arthur
Koestler, by which I mean the man’s writings rather than the man himself. I consider him to be one of the major
intellects of the last century, as well as one which exemplifies in a striking
fashion modernity’s quest to preserve some space for immateriality and even
transcendence in a world in which traditional religious belief has for so many
intellectuals become impossible. Several
of his books seem to pursue this project, but especially The Roots of Coincidence (1972).
“Hard” scientists have been rather hard on this work; but to those who
continue to believe that man does not live by bread alone, it is full of
interest.
As for me, I continue to be struck
by the number of “coincidences” or Jungian “synchronicities” that I run into in
life. Boethius long ago persuaded me
that there is no such thing as chance,
if by chance is meant an effect that has no cause. This week’s essay begins with a confession: I
am a lover of ghost stories. It then
moves on to an anecdote. While my son
Luke was visiting recently, we snuck away to one of our “secret” bookstores in
south Jersey where I indulged myself in the transgression of a single purchase:
an anthology previously unknown to me entitled Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, compiled by Marvin
Kaye. Its table of contents is enough to
remind one that the genre has been dear to many great writers, and that
Koestler’s obsession with the uncanny had deep Victorian roots.
There is in
the Latin Quarter in Paris a small street, probably a quarter of a mile long,
approximately linking the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Boulevard
Saint-Michel. Its charming name is the
rue Monsieur le Prince, a reminder of the ancient mansion of the princes of
Condé, a cadet branch of the reigning Bourbons, which once rose there in all
its magnificence.
an early Monsieur le Prince himself
For a few frigid weeks in the
winter of 1962-1963 my wife and I lived in a cheap hotel in the rue Monsieur le
Prince. This was your grandmother’s
Paris. Cheap hotels were part of its
still post-war dowdiness. Richard Wright, who lived in the street immediately following the war, has written about it somewhere. I went off each day
to the (old) Bibliothèque Nationale where I consulted medieval manuscripts and
kept warm. First impressions being
lasting, the “old” rue Monsieur le Prince will always be my “old” Paris. We have good friends who live just on the
other side of the Luxembourg Gardens, so I occasionally passed by the street
over the years; but my next real visit was in 2010. My daughter has just collected a prize and
delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne. I
was included in the celebrative dinner following the event, the venue for which
was a fancy restaurant in the rue Monsieur le Prince. Everything in the rue Monsieur le Prince was
now fancy—including your grandmother if she could afford to live there. I sat next to the head honcho of the
University of Coimbra in Portugal, and we talked about Luis de Camões.
By now it is over sixty years
since my first visit to the rue Monsieur le Prince and more than five since my
last visit. Fanatical readers of this
blog, should there be a couple, might remember that six weeks ago I wrote a
piece about the oddball British architect Bligh Bond, a man who believed that
fifteenth-century monks were communicating to him through the automatic writing
of a spiritualist intermediary. I included
the information that Bond’s friend, the great American architect Ralph Adams
Cram, believed every word of it. Well,
Cram happens to be a person who has had a significant influence on my cultural
development. His works on the Middle
Ages—and in particular a beautiful little book called Walled Towns—infused in me a rather romantic and Chestertonian
vision of medieval Europe that I eventually came to reject, but only long after
it had hooked me on my life’s work. Cram
was a man of parts—architect, art historian, theologian, and upper-crust bon vivant. I knew that he was also a “creative” writer,
though I knew little of his creations. I
was unaware, for example, that in 1895, Cram published in Chicago a half a
dozen tales of the supernatural under the title Black Spirits and White. No
less an authority than H. P. Lovecraft, in his influential essay on
“Supernatural Horror in Literature,” had high praise for one of his stories. “In
‘The Dead Valley’ the eminent architect and mediaevalist Ralph Adams Cram
achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties
of atmosphere and description”. But the story included in my new anthology is a different one: “No. 252 rue M. Le Prince”!
Despite the fact
that a street so short as Monsieur le Prince is most unlikely to have addresses
in the two hundreds, Cram’s narrator did spend one night in one of them in 1886. That turned out to be enough. Cram’s story is of the sub-genre “Things That Go Bump in
the Night”. One should never give away
the whole plot of a supernatural tale, but I feel justified in giving you its
flavor. Suddenly a wet, icy mouth, like that of a dead cuttle-fish, shapeless,
jelly-like, fell over mine. The horror
began slowly to draw my life from me, but, as enormous and shuddering folds of
palpitating jelly swept sinuously around me, my will came back, my body awoke
with the reaction of final fear, and I closed with the nameless death that
enfolded me. You get the
picture. And I got my third visit to the
rue Monsieur le Prince.
R. A. Cram at the door of his private Gothic chapel in Sudbury MA
