Strange Tales from the Ancient Capital: Biloquism, or a Spurious Footnote to Early American Literature (1793)
From an ongoing series of historical weird fiction
News and Sundry
The novelist, translator, and short story writer Lydia Davis has a wonderful essay up at Harper’s Magazine. Focusing on the criticism of the poet John Ashbery—a Paradise Almanac favorite—Davis explores what memory (or lack thereof) means in poetic practice.
Friend of the Almanac
will be doing an online reading with another friend, the poet , this Sunday, August 3rd. Daydreamers, Alvin’s mystery novel about Chinese-American emegré writers, has recently been published by FC2. Also on the theme of emigration and transcultural identity, My Heresies, Alina’s poetry collection about family life between Romania and the American South, has recently been published by Sarabande.Last but not least, another friend, the Venezuelan-American writer
has been getting rave reviews for his novel Fresh Green Life, a satire a 21st century academic life told from the perspective of a Columbian-American writer, who also happens to be named Sebastian Castillo. You can read an excerpt over at Hobart Pulp.
Strange Tales from the Ancient Capital: Biloquism, or A Spurious Footnote to Early American Literature (1793)
This story is part of an ongoing series of weird tales set in and around historical Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1682-1976). If you would like to read more in the series, check out previous entries published through the excellent online literary magazines ergot and minor literature[s]
In the summer of 1793, months before the cold of the advancing year would arrest the epidemic of yellow fever that had stricken the city, a man claiming to be a physician entered the city on foot. He came from the north, following the banks of the Delaware, and enquired about the lodgings that might be available to him. He was ready and proved able, so it was said, to furnish medical credentials, though none could recall his name or the institution that had educated him. With Philadelphia in such a vacant and derelict state—two-thirds of its inhabitants had already fled into the countryside—the physician was unable to find regular accommodations, that is, until he arrived at The Widow’s Tavern, in the district of Southwark, where, incidentally, the pestilence was said to have originated. Witnesses recalled the tavernkeeper holding conference with the physician from the third-floor window. Some token must have assured him, since those very same rooms were immediately rented to the physician, who used them as his office and consultancy in the days following.
His medical practice was singular to the highest degree. It was restricted to the hours between dusk and dawn. Patients were directed to wait at the bar and in the stairwell up to the physician’s rooms. During consulting hours, the door was kept firmly shut, and no one was allowed to enter or exit. As the sun began to set, a preternatural hush came over the tavern and the surrounding district, punctuated intermittently by the coughs of the afflicted and the barking of famished dogs left to roam about the city. Then a sound was heard from inside, like the rustling of curtains, along with loud shuffling noises, as of furniture being moved, followed by a conversation among several voices, which proceeded along this general line: “Is that you, Uriel?” the physician would inquire, his voice thin, barely audible. Another would answer, his voice deeper and with more resonance: “It is. I am here.” “Has Azriel come with you?” “I have,” answered yet another, his voice deeper still. The three would then converse at length, and though they were not always audible, the patients were assured, by the grave tone of the conversation, that the physician and his celestial visitors were going to heal them soon.
Once this initial conversation had ceased, the physician, still with his hoarse, barely audible voice, would call the patients one by one, prescribing cures by means of a slip of paper passed through the door. The remedies were not out of the ordinary and could have been furnished by a common peddler. Indeed, one was close at hand, having set up on South Front Street with an ample stock of what had been prescribed. These remedies included a bag of camphor to be hung about the neck, a tea made from verbena leaves, and a length of wax cordage kept in the hand or in a trouser pocket. Despite the improvised nature of his practice, the physician aroused the jealousy of his supposed peers, especially those working in the hospital at Bush Hill. A gang was organized to drive this so-called charlatan away from the city. They arrived at the tavern at sundown, carrying a ladder, which was to be used, in case all other methods failed, to effect entry into the physician’s lodgings. But the ruffians were astonished, as they prepared to scale the tavern wall, to see a large arm, heavily muscled, bronzed by the declining sunlight, grab the ladder and pull it up into the room, where it disappeared completely. The patients, angered at the disruption of their treatment, took to the street and beat back the ruffians, though some were in the gravest of ill health, disgorging the blackened, pestilential contents of their stomachs as they fought. The physician, likely sensing that his welcome had become threadbare, departed the tavern that night and was never heard from again. His rooms were left immaculate, as though he had never rented them, and the ladder was never recovered.
There has been considerable debate about the veracity of this incident and whether it was known to Charles Brockden Brown, though the pioneering novelist of the occult and macabre was present in Philadelphia during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. It is never mentioned in the writer’s correspondence, and no similar episode takes place in Arthur Mervyn, Brown’s novel about the epidemic. However, the presence of mysterious voices does find an echo—the pun being intended here—in Brown’s previous and far better-known novel Wieland. In that book, the wandering charlatan Carwin visits an estate on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He uses techniques of ventriloquism (then called biloquism) to confect ghostly voices, seeking to isolate and seduce the narrator of the novel, Clara Wieland, who is nevertheless able to resist Carwin’s advances. By contrast, her brother, Theodore, proves disastrously pliable, and he murders his wife and children under what he claims is divine command. Carwin, confronted by Clara, denies that he has influenced Theodore through biloquism, and the true motivation for the crimes remains a mystery, since Theodore, urged on by Carwin, kills himself out of grief.
The story of the mysterious physician, on the other hand, though resembling Wieland in certain details, differs markedly in style. First related in the satirical magazine Atkinson’s Casket in 1837, the incident is told in the form of a dialogue between elderly inhabitants of the area below South Street, which then consisted mostly of warehouses and open fields. The interlocutors are presented as simple rustic stereotypes, mixing folk superstitions with the barely digested contents of sectarian literature. An editorial note, unsigned, expresses skepticism that Southwark and other such districts of the city can be reformed and sanitized, but then adds that they do preserve, among their various inhabitants, certain picturesque recollections which would otherwise escape the notice of a more sober and systematizing historian.
