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The 1930 spring–summer double issue of Eugene Jolas’s transition 19–20 featured a section entitled “Cambridge Experiment: A Manifesto of Young England.” Prefaced with an unsigned manifesto, this section collected many of the contributors to the Cambridge-based magazine Experiment (1928–31), and this event has served for several literary historians of English Surrealism as an early instance of the Paris-based movement’s engagement by British writers.1 Yet, it is clear from the selection in the pages of transition that its British adherents would treat Surrealism very differently. None of the work published could be described as “automatic writing” or in any sense engaged with avant-garde formal experimentation. “Experiment: A Manifesto” establishes the following ground: A sense that literature is in need of some new formal notation: an attempt to show how such a notation can be built out of academic notations, where academic means perhaps no more than non-moral and is after all best explained in our poetry: a belief in the compact, local unit: and in the impersonal unit: a belief finally, and a disbelief—for it is about this mainly that we are at odds—in literature as a singular and different experience, something more than an ordering of life. (106)

The year is 1920. Cottingley Dell, just outside of Bradford. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle opens a letter from Edward Gardner, a well-known lecturer on occult subjects and president of the Blavatsky Lodge of Theosophy in London. Gardner reports an amazing discovery: fairies have been photographed in the north of England. The same letter informed Doyle that the images capture an angelic ten-year-old girl, Frances Griffiths, playing with hand-sized and togaed pixies. The photographs were taken about three years earlier by Frances’s sister Elsie: Elsie said she wanted to photograph them, and begged her father to lend his camera. For long he refused, but at last she managed to get the loan of it and one plate. Off she and Frances went into the woods near a water-fall. Frances ‘ticed’ them, as they call it, and Elsie stood ready with the camera. Soon the three fairies appeared, and one pixie dancing in Frances’ aura. Elsie snapped and hoped for the best. It was a long time before the father would develop the photo, but at last he did, and to his utter amazement the four sweet little figures came out beautifully!1 Gardner wrote excitedly to the girls’ mother, Polly, asking for permission to see more photos and to interview the children. The mother, a fellow Theosophist, was honored and agreed.2 After just a single meeting with the girls, Gardner speculated that the fairies had appeared to the children because they were both natural mediums, especially Frances, whom Gardner describes as having “a beautifully clear, yet loosely knit, etheric aura, yielding easily accessible ectoplasmic material.”3

The year is 1884. Philadelphia . A LONE woman, dressed in black, leaves the house of Shakespeare scholar H. H. Furness. In her bag is a train ticket to New York. She has little else in the world. She is 51 years old, destitute, single, childless, nearly friendless, and longing for a drink. She is Margaret Fox, the high priestess of American Spiritualism.

The year is 1913. Edinburgh . We are at the deathbed of Edward Dowden, author of Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), Shakespeare Primer (1877), and a study of The Sonnets (1881). It should have been a moment of Shakespearean serenity and supinity. As Gordon McMullan’s recent Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (2010) documents, throughout much of the nineteenth century, critics and biographers generally linked Shakespeare’s work to his life and invariably did so with one aim in mind: to demonstrate that Shakespeare himself progressed morally and spiritually, that he was a “genius standing at the brink of heaven.”1 What was so of Shakespeare was equally true, at least in theory, of those who spent a lifetime studying his works. It certainly should have been true of Dowden, who so often claimed a penetrative understanding of Shakespeare’s artistic and spiritual coalescence. In Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875) he famously conflated the wizard Prospero with Shakespeare: “we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakspere himself … If I were to allow my fancy to run out in play after such an attempted interpretation, I should describe Prospero [i.e., Shakespeare] as the man of genius, the great artist, lacking at first in practical gifts which lead to material success, and set adrift on the perilous sea of life in which he finds his enchanted island, where he may achieve his works of wonder.”2

In 1957, fresh off the success of “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg arrived in Paris, where he and his fellow Beats Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and then William Burroughs would settle into a rundown boarding house soon dubbed the Beat Hotel. During their time in Paris, from 1957–1963, though Ginsberg stayed just nine months and their presence tapered off after 1960, the Beats managed to convert their dilapidated quarters into the next in a long line of Paris communities of creative and bohemian activity. The move to Paris placed the Beats in the heart of the same Latin Quarter where earlier American writers such as Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald cemented their literary reputations as did an even larger number of French and European artists and writers who owed much of their notoriety to the city itself.

Like Doolittle’s, Gertrude Stein’s exposure to ideas of psychology was more than superficial. As an undergraduate, Stein trained in psychology with William James at Radcliffe.1 Her experiments with Leon Solomon into automatic reactions were important enough to get a rise from B.F. Skinner in his attempts to explain away, through ridicule, her later experimental writings (Brinnin 32). Her experiments in “The Place of Repetition in Memory,” “Fluctuations of the Attention,” and “The Subversion of Colours” (Hoffman) show her training not only in James’s classes but also in the laboratory.2 Cynthia Secor reminds us that “Stein wrote about human nature and the human mind, and her point of view was philosophic, as befitted a student of Santayana and William James and a friend of Alfred North Whitehead” (“Gertrude” 30). With this grounding in philosophy in addition to biology, already her approaches were different from Ellis’s and Freud’s. The famous anecdote rendered by Stein herself, which is frequently used to show William James’s partiality for Stein, reveals her rejection of a “subconscious”: Gertrude Stein never had subconscious reactions, nor was she a successful subject for automatic writing. One of the students in the psychological seminar of which Gertrude Stein, although an undergraduate was at William James’ particular request a member, was carrying on a series of experiments on suggestions to the subconscious. When he read his paper upon the result of his experiments, he began by explaining that one of the subjects gave absolutely no results and as this much lowered the average and made the conclusion of his experiments false he wished to be allowed to cut this record out. Whose record is it, said James. Miss Stein’s, said the student. Ah, said James, if Miss Stein gave no response I should say that it was as normal not to give a response as to give one and decidedly the result must not be cut out. (Autobiography 79)

Incongruity is a fundamental condition of fundamentalism. For a religious tradition that fears the distortion of its sacred texts by centuries of erring interpreters and that aspires to return to the unsullied, “primitive” society that allegedly preceded the present corrupt times, being out of place is a normal state of affairs. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the world’s most widely read would-be fundamentalist texts, presents both characters and theologies that never manage to fit together with anything, including themselves. original version of Christianity, the more he is drawn into allegory, symbolism, and the metaphorical extension of “literal” meaning. The more Bunyan indulges his taste for “types,” “shadows,” and “dark figures,” the more he veers from anything that could be understood as “literal” or “pure.” As the quotation opening this chapter suggests, fundamentalists regard religious writing itself as an exercise in incongruity. Authors may believe that they are taking up the pen only to discover that they are really engaged in automatic writing guided by the “author of nature.”