The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks –Agnieszka Taborska

[Twisted Spoon Press; 2024]

Tr. from the Polish by Ursula Phillips

Nearly two centuries ago, in the sleepy town of Providence, Rhode Island, an orphaned heiress named Phoebe Hicks began to hold seances for her neighbors and friends. Her adventures with spiritualism followed a near-death experience involving the creatures of the deep and projectile vomiting. From that fateful night onwards, Phoebe would feel an innate, feverish connection to the Beyond. Scores of ghosts took up residence within her College Hill mansion, much to the awe and horror of the local community, the scorn of skeptics, and the ensuing wonderment of all of New England. Until, one day, Phoebe disappeared into the ether, leaving behind an “unusually” elegant maid and a cat.

In The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks, Agnieszka Taborska attempts to “recreate the history of Phoebe Hicks, restore her historical significance,” and to dispel the “silence that smacks of conspiracy” surrounding Phoebe’s mysterious disappearance. The all-seeing narrator sets to work, briskly describing Phoebe’s apotheosis from spinster to medium, her seances, and nineteenth-century Providence, a city remarkable for its eccentricity, even within New England, (once?) America’s hub of “lunacy.” She also peppers the text with asides on Victorian mores and the broader history of Spiritualism, aided by Selena Kimball’s atmospheric collages composed from archival photographs.

At its heart, The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks is a quirky love letter to the city of Providence. Realizing that Phoebe’s story is “not only very American, but connected to a very specific place,” the narrator immerses the reader in Phoebe’s surroundings, which have changed less over the centuries than you might think. “Phoebe’s story seems to belong more to a dream than to reality,” the narrator concludes,

but everything in this town creates a similar impression. Even today, female inhabitants of Providence are convinced that Phoebe Hicks has been reborn in them. Bleached-blonde clerks, green-haired students in ripped jeans, the bored wives of bankers, are all united by a common secret: certainty that they are incarnations of the imposter medium.

The story continues, as the solidarity of Providence women triumphs over boundaries of class, time, and metaphysics. In the globalized, divided America of 2024, such strong community ties seem far more remarkable than ghosts.

I found the book’s local color highly appealing. Even though I have only visited Providence a few times in my life, I was immediately transported to Rhode Island’s capital as I read Taborska’s remark that, “all of its streets give the impression of being side streets, so limited is the traffic on them and so insignificant the role they play in the life of the town. They are like old stage sets stored in a prop room.” And, as the narrator is sure to point out, “the murky backstreets of Providence” can exert “a powerful effect on [the] imagination.” The town’s peculiar atmosphere is particularly inspiring when aided by spoiled seafood and coffee cabinets (a coffee milkshake that only exists on certain side streets within Rhode Island.)

Much like the seance itself, The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, deceptively cosmopolitan project. Ursula Phillips’s translation from Polish features the work of three women, all of whom straddle the art world and academia. Agnieszka Taborska is an art historian at RISD specializing in surrealism, as well as a literary scholar and prolific author. Taborska divides her time between her native Warsaw, France, and Providence, three dissimilar locales that exert untold influence on the author’s creative output. Selena Kimball, a Brooklyn-based artist who teaches at the New School’s Parsons School of Design in NYC, contributed the book’s collages. Taborska and Kimball previously collaborated on The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz (2004), a biography of “the Spanish visionary nun, who slept through a large portion of her life dreaming prophetic dreams,” before becoming the patroness of the French Surrealists and “manifesting herself in all her glory” at one of Phoebe’s own seances.

The book might be worth buying for the collages alone. Kimball combines historical, black and white photographs and illustrations into roughly-cut, inscrutable fantasies of times passed. For example, a seated portrait of two middle-aged men in the nineteenth or early twentieth century is interrupted by an upside-down cut-out of an exasperated, perhaps insane young woman from the mid-twentieth century. This post-hoc photobomb questions patriarchal structures without providing answers; characters, epochs, and textures are brought together for our surprise and delight. My favorite collage depicts two largely obscured figures. A pair of bare legs peeks out from under a white sheet hung up to dry. To the figure’s right stand a pair of legs clothed in dashing white trousers and covered from the waist up in a sheet cut to resemble a horizontal phallus on the move. This image proves as humorous and bawdy as the early erotic photography from which it is composed. More traditional examples of surrealist collage, such as a man in a suit with a finger instead of a face, fail to elicit as much excitement, but they look cool, as René Magritte’s bowler hat paintings did a nearly century ago.

The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks was brought into flawless English by Ursula Phillips, a deservedly lauded scholar and translator of Polish literature. Her ability to transform the Polish text into equally erudite, appropriately-dated, English-language prose will likely go unnoticed by the casual reader, and that is a very good thing; the intrusion of latinate syntax and the elevated, even Baroque, register of vocabulary in the original Polish would have destroyed the translation’s charm. For example, the first sentence of Phillips’s translation goes like this: “It was the year when a vague, indefinable restlessness seized the inhabitants of Providence and gnawed at their souls.” In Taborska’s Polish, the line reads, “Był to rok, gdy mieszkańców Providence ogarnął bliżej nieokreślony, wżerający się w dusze niepokój.” This sequence of words, though harmonious and sensible in its particular register of written Polish, would sound quite strange in English (in either its contemporary or Victorian variance) if the syntax remains unchanged: “It was the year, when the inhabitants of Providence were grasped by a largely undefined, gnawing at the soul anxiety.” Good translators never translate “word for word,” ignoring the differences between their source and target languages. Still, Phillips’s unfailing ability to recreate the spirit of Taborska’s text in English deserves praise. Phillips understands, as Phoebe did, that two realities can exist alongside one another, so long as they remain distinct. Like the world of the living and the spirit realm, Polish and English grammar abide by different sets of rules, and function best when left to their own devices. When worlds begin to interpenetrate, chaos reigns.

This is, by the way, exactly what begins to happen in Phoebe’s living room. The convention of the seance allows for an astonishing array of characters, from flesh-and-bone New Englanders to a more diverse range of vaporous visitors, including visions of ancient royalty and foul-mouthed fishermen from summers in Nantucket past. I found longer passages describing meetings with improbable historical and literary figures relatively tiresome and skipped the Houdini chapter entirely on my first reading. The fact that this very passage was featured as an excerpt in the Guardian in 2016 could be indicative of a misalignment between my personal taste and that of the rest of the reading public, as well as Houdini’s uncanny ability to pop up uninvited in the zeitgeist from time to time. (Remember Eminem’s 2024 comeback, Houdini? Or Dua Lipa’s Houdini, released a few months before?) Regardless, the narrator’s choice to bring up this chestnut once again, at the end of the work, exemplifies her ability to enjoy the same joke multiple times, a skill that might not be shared by the reader, especially if they read the book in one sitting, as I did. Niche, intertextual references (bless you, Leonora de la Cruz) shine all the brighter in contrast. Eventually, Phoebe’s fame spreads too far, and imitators try to steal her gifts.

To me, the greatest mystery of The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks remains its target audience. Although I enjoyed it a great deal, I had trouble grasping its genre and anticipating what others might see in the text. For a book ostensibly about ghosts, it is shockingly devoid of horror. In place of unsettling events and cryptic messages about the afterlife, the reader finds an assemblage of winks and nudges, with more than one piquant aside, usually about the “erotic charge emitted by touching palms, knees, and feet.” Frequent references to Victorian sexuality—from the corset to nocturnal emissions of ectoplasm—contribute to the work’s saucy sense of humor, as well as a larger statement about the role of Spiritualism in the history of women’s emancipation. As the narrator points out, seances and other such performances allowed women to speak publicly and subvert patriarchal social norms. While this idea is never fully fleshed out, it remains a grounding, ideological underpinning of this biography of Phoebe Hicks.

In result, the book seems too feminist and edgy to sell particularly well at the gift shops of New England tourist attractions (except in Provincetown, perhaps). At the same time, I imagine that Taborska’s prose styling reads as too accessible to win over readers with a taste for challenging, hermetic texts. Indeed, the prevailing tone of the work is pleasantly witty. Take, for example:

Almost all mediums suffered from a great variety of ailments ranging from epileptic fits and labyrinthitis to what malicious commentators might call hysteria. Medics favorably disposed towards contact with spirits saw the disease as a means of purifying the soul and preparing it for unusual encounters. The idea that the source of such theories lay in Phoebe’s poisoning by a clam fritter may seem exaggerated, yet when it comes to Spiritualism, it is hard to exaggerate.

Passages like these are more reminiscent of the dialogue in popular costume dramas, rather than a work of horror or a challenging text of cultural theory.

Yet, to paraphrase one such theoretical text, ghosts come from the future, not the past. In Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993), the casualties of history keep getting resurrected and repurposed according to present-day need. Evidently, the weird, hard to sell, local folklore so abundant in The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks is a spirit worth bringing back, something we never thought we needed, that haunts us all the same.

Jess Jensen Mitchell is a scholar and translator of Polish literature. She is finishing her dissertation on contemporary depictions of Upper Silesia, a region in Western Poland known for its mining industry, distinct language, and superb rail system. To learn more about her work, see https://jessjensenmitchell.com/.