Patience Worth

 Pearl Lenore Curran (1883-1937)

 

Perhaps the most famous United States case of 'automatic writing' is that of 'the invisible author' who became known as 'Patience Worth' manifesting in the presence of Mrs. Pearl Lenore Curran of St. Louis, Missouri.  The books by Patience Worth communicated through Curran include novels such as Hope Trueblood (1918) and The Sorry Tale (1917);  and an anthology of poetry, Light From Beyond (1923).

 

The first book to be published about the case was Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery (1916) by Casper S. Yost, who reported about "The Coming of Patience Worth" in the first chapter.  He described how on a July evening in 1913 Curran and her friend Mrs. Emily Grant Hutchings were sitting with a Ouija board when — "The pointer suddenly became endowed with an unusual agility, and with great rapidity presented this introduction:"

"Many moons ago I lived.  Again I come.  Patience Worth my name."

The women gazed, round-eyed, at each other, and the board continued:

"Wait.  I would speak with thee.  If thou shalt live, then so shall I.  I make my bread by thy hearth.  Good friends, let us be merrie.  The time for work is past.  Let the tabbie drowse and blink her wisdom to the firelog."

"How quaint that is!" one of the women exclaimed.

"Good Mother Wisdom is too harsh for thee," said the board, "and thou shouldst love her only as a foster mother."

 
The women began keeping a record of the communication.  Curran was found to be the apparent medium "for the communications came only when she was at the board, and it mattered not who else sat with her."  This beginning of the transcripts was due to the appreciation of Hutchings for the quality of the messages.  She was a newspaper and magazine writer who later would publish the novel Jap Herron also communicated via Ouija board.  Here are links to articles about the Hutchings case, including a book synopsis.

Yost commented about the "marvelous facility" of the manifesting intelligence:

She is surprisingly familiar with the trees and flowers, the birds and beasts of England.  She knows the manners and customs of its people as they were two or three centuries ago, the people of the fields or the people of the palace.

Yost mentioned that Patience had "never admitted a residence in England or New England, has never spoken of a birthplace or an abiding place anywhere, has never, in fact, used a single geographical proper name in relation to herself."  Yost observed how perceptions of 'Patience Worth' were conceived.

When she first introduced herself to Mrs. Curran, she was asked where she came from, and she replied, "Across the sea."  Asked when she lived, the pointer groped among the figures as if struggling with memory [MRB comment: this is a cursory observation], and finally, with much hesitation upon each digit, gave the date 1649.  This seemed to be so in accord with her language, and the articles of dress and household use to which she referred, that it was accepted as a date that had some relation to her material existence.  But Patience has since made it quite plain that she is not to be tied to any period.

"I be like to the wind," she says, "and yea, like to it do blow me ever, yea, since time.  Do ye to tether me unto today I blow me then tomorrow, and do ye to tether me unto tomorrow I blow me then today."

An eminent philologist asked her how it was that she used the language of so many different periods, and she replied: "I do plod a twist of a path and it hath run from then till now."  And when he said that in her poetry there seemed to be echoes or intangible suggestions of comparatively recent poets, and asked her to explain, she said: "There be aneath the every stone a hidden voice.  I but loose the stone and lo, the voice!"

Here are responses quoted by Yost from occasions when Patience was asked, "Who are you?"

"I be Him," she replied; "alike to thee.  Ye be o' Him."

At another time she said:

"I be all that hath been, and all that is, all that shalt be, for that be He."

Taken alone this would seem to be a declaration that she herself was God, but when it is read in connection with the previous affirmation it is readily understood.

"Thou art of Him," she said again, "aye, and I be of Him, and ye be of Him, and He be all and of all."

Yost commented about the poetry: "Love of God, and God's love for us, and the certainty of life after death as a consequence of that love, are the themes of Patience's finest poetry . . ."

Yost's case study includes two complete stories ("The Fool and the Lady" and "The Stranger") that he appraised as "dramatic."  The stories preceded longer works, including what is now known as the novel Telka: An Idyl of Medieval England (1928).  

 

Another case study of the Patience Worth phenomena is the anthology The Case of Patience Worth: A Critical Study of Certain Unusual Phenomena (1927) by Walter Franklin Prince, Ph.D.  Prince's other books include the two-volume The Doris Case of Multiple Personality (1916).

In his Introduction, Prince raised the question of the "mystical theory that 'Patience Worth' represents the results of an unusual reception of knowledge and power from the 'Cosmic Consciousness.'"  He explained:

This is the thesis which I formulate after a ten months' study of the data: EITHER OUR CONCEPT OF WHAT WE CALL THE SUBCONSCIOUS MUST BE RADICALLY ALTERED, SO AS TO  INCLUDE POTENCIES OF WHICH WE HITHERTO HAVE HAD NO KNOWLEDGE, OR ELSE SOME CAUSE OPERATING THROUGH BUT NOT ORIGINATING IN THE SUBCONSCIOUSNESS OF MRS. CURRAN MUST BE ACKNOWLEDGED.  In the former case we normalize what hitherto would have seemed "supernormal" (in the same manner as hypnosis, which a hundred years ago was thought to involve a supernormal claim, has been normalized); in the second case we admit the supernormal.

The following excerpt provides an example of transcribed conversation from the chapter "Table Talk of Patience Worth."

     Sept. 11, 1913.  The board seemed slow, and the sitters urged more speed.

P. W.: Beat the hound and lose the hare.

Mrs P.: That seems to be a rebuke.  I wonder if she is particularly fond of Mrs. C., and if that is the reason for coming always to her.

P. W.: To brew a potion, needs must have a pot.

Mrs. C.: I wonder what she thinks of the women of this day?

P. W.: A good wife keepeth the floor well sanded and rushes in plenty to burn.  The pewter should reflect the fires bright glow.  Clip the wings of the goose.  'Twill teach thee clever tricks and brush the dust of long standing away.  [Undoubtedly a reflection on Mrs. C.'s housekeeping.  Ed.]

Mrs. P.: I wish we could get something besides sarcasm.  I wish—

P. W.: From constant wishing the moon may tip for thee!

Mrs. P.: I don't wish for anything, but I do want a lot of things.

P. W.: The swine cry "Want, want, want."

Mrs. P: I yield to Patience.  She's cleverer than all three of us.

P. W.: Some folk, like the bell without a clapper, go clanging on in good faith, believing the good folk can hear.

Mrs. P.: I hardly think I needed that scolding.

P. W.: Nor does the smock need the wimple.

Mrs. H.: Just what do you think of Mrs. P?

P. W.: The men should stock her.

Mrs. P.: She should not select me for her sarcasm.  It's you two who interrupt and laugh at her.  It's that that makes her angry.

Mrs. H: Do you mean that Mrs. P should be put in the stocks?

P. W.: Aye, and leave a place for two.

Mrs. P.: I knew she didn't mean all that solely for me.  I wish, though, that she would give us something nice.

P. W.: Mayhap thou wouldst have a pumpkin tart?

Mrs. P.: If she cannot forego sarcasm, then I wish she would stop altogether.

P. W.: Then beat the hound.

Mrs. C: We ought to be satisfied with what is given us.

Mrs. P: Well, I don't feel as though I am to blame.  I have been trying all evening to encourage you to be nice to her so that she would give us a nice message.

P. W.: Gadzooks, hear her!

Mrs. C.: You've been listening to what we've been saying, Patience.

P. W.: A whip in time saves nine.  Get thou thy kettle of brass and  burnish bright its sides, so she may see herself therein.

Mrs. C.: Whom do you mean?

P. W.: She of the peppery tongue.

Mrs. C.: She wants you to see yourself as others see you.

P. W.: A look around would not be amiss.

Mrs. P: She means it for each one of us.

Mrs. H.: She is caustic, but what she says is full of homely wisdom.

P. W.: Oh, then hast thou looked beneath the goose's feathers and discovered the down?

     A rather heated discussion ensued, no one wanting to take  the blame for having put Patience in such a bad humor.

P. W.: Dost thou know what war is?  Hell.

Mrs. C.: That is the first thing she has ever said that was out of keeping with her time.  That expression originated  during our own Civil War.

P. W.: Dost thou flatter thyself that today's thoughts and deeds were born today, by [of] such a fledgling as thou?

Mrs. H.: Whew!  She must have been wonderful at repartee when she was young?

P. W.: Young?  Am I not young?

Mrs. H.: Then just what is your age, Patience?

P. W.: Seven is odd.  'Tis so my age.  'Tis odd; I forget it.

Mrs. P: She will not betray her age.  It is when we begin to get old that we are touchy about it.

P. W.: Let the cat have her nine lives.

Mrs. H.: Tell us something of conditions when you were here on earth, Patience.  You told us once than men were a farthing-worth to you.

P. W.: A man loveth his wife, but ah, the buckles on his knee-breeks!

     The sitters clamored for more.

P. W.: Over-feeding will kill the Yuletide goose.

The following passages provide an example from the chapter "Discourses" from The Case of Patience Worth.

A Gospel of Today

Mark ye, a Gospel of Today.  He who considers today and today's incidents, shall not find him woed o'er yesterdays or tomorrows.  He then who is of today vitally concerned.  For him there is no tomorrow and no yesterday.  In this is he satisfied, making the incident at hand sufficient in its action to tip the beam of certainty.
 

Labor moves upon its trend by the application of urge upon the incident.  Thereby hath labor no part with tomorrow.  She is concerned not.  In this is the symbol of the gospel of today.  Today is sufficient.  Today is bread.  Today is wine.  Today is life.  Today is—Thou art.

Yesterday is remorse, and has no part as an implement in labor.  Tomorrow is foreboding, and is in no part a sinew which lifts.

The gospel of Today.  He who reads the law becometh both his own physician and his own master.  Today is intimate.  It hath the prick of contact which goads life to attainment.  Yesterday is  a worn shoe.  Tomorrow is a garment which ye sew today.

Then at labor, lest tomorrow thou art naked!  The jest is this: there is no mark which sets aloof tomorrow and awhither yesterday.  Today is, and yesterday and tomorrow are today.  Then in thy certainty of today acknowledge the defeat of gloom and doubting.

 
The following passage is from Prince's commentary about Curran's psychic experiences reported in the chapter "Visual Preludes and Accompaniments":
 

I note that the imagery which precedes and accompanies the stories of Patience Worth is usually realistic, descriptive of the text, though frequently containing many details not in the text, as Mrs. Curran shows us in her article, "A Nut for Psychologists."  But the imagery which precedes and accompanies a poem is prevailingly, so far as I have been able to observe from the examples found in the record or given in my presence, symbolic in character, pictorial metaphors as related to the text of the poem.

 
Further details about the Patience Worth case, the research conducted by case commentators, and the life of Pearl Lenore Curran are presented in Singer In The Shadows (1972) by Irving Litvag.  At the time of Curran's passing in 1937 when she had been residing in the Los Angeles area, Litvag reported that the official written record of the case was closed after numbering 4,375 pages.  The Patience Worth collection of writings are archived at the Missouri History Museum.