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Archive through 02 May 2002
Casebook Message Boards: The Diary of Jack the Ripper: General Discussion:
Diary 10 Year Anniversary; Reflections:
Archive through 02 May 2002
Author: John Omlor
Wednesday, 24 April 2002 - 07:40 pm |        | Phil and Vila,
It's a commonplace with this sort of technology. The repeated copying and reproducing and enhancement of the photos are not revealing what's there ("secret initials" or ducks or bunnies), they are creating what's "there." The same way the repeatedly enhanced and digitalized and reproduced photos of shadows in the woods "reveal" bigfoot or the repeated copying and enhancement of photos of a boat wake or a shadow on the water "reveal" Nessie. Or Dealey Plaza, or any one of a number of other examples. People begin to see what they want to see, what they are looking for, in what is a random pattern of stains on the walls of a room in a grainy photo from over a hundred years ago.
Remember, as the process of reproduction, enhancement and interpretation continues, the image is in fact moving farther from its origin, not closer to it.
--John
PS: But maybe it was "PM." Maybe the killer was secretly trying to give us a hint about Mary's real time of death! Or maybe he was dyslexic and wrote it backwards and it was supposed to be "MP" and a secret clue about a Member of Parliament -- the governing body, not the George Clinton band -- or a very, very early member of Monty Python just leaving a bit of graffiti as a clue. In fact, now that I look closer at the reproductions I have, that M looks more like a B. PB? All right, Begg -- out with it.  |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Thursday, 25 April 2002 - 03:08 am | | Vila, your post was very informative--no need to apologize, I don't believe!
Even if this were a first photograph, I'd be skeptical: the bed's in the way, after all, so we don't even know if the letters are formed the way we assume they are (if they're F and M). And what you say supports the point that the lines could have been enhanced out of a vague crack, or drips of blood, or whatever.
Of course, John could be right. Actually, it could be the Prime Minister! Or maybe it's really an FM, and the killer was the theologian Frederick Maurice. Perhaps the strain of reconciling low and high Anglicans into one happy family finally drove him over the edge....
madeleine |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Thursday, 25 April 2002 - 07:07 am | | Hi All,
We seem to have established that marks people see, or think they see, on the Kelly photos, can take almost any form, including letters, or combinations of letters, not necessarily confined to F and M.
Therefore, if the forger of JM's diary wanted to have him leave FM at the scene of crime, and say that no one would ever find it, despite leaving it in front for all eyes to see, he would have had no difficulty, with or without the photos. And I can understand perfectly why it's so tempting to assume that the forger looked for something in the photo that he could use in this way, saw the FM and thought it was for real, or didn't give a stuff either way.
But that means he is either a very foolish forger because he didn't anticipate that anyone might be able to prove there was never an FM on the wall itself - or he is a very careful forger, because he avoided writing anything too specific like, 'I left the whoring mother's initials in blood on the wall', which claim would have represented a fatal blunder as soon as it was shown that the FM was on the photo but not on the wall.
Instead, our forger talks about leaving two initials, one 'here' and another one 'there', which does not accurately describe the imaginary FM on the wall, and then talks about leaving 'it', in the singular this time, where the fools will never find 'it', and also leaving 'it' in front for all eyes to see, which again makes me wonder if he was inspired by the same FM that Feldy and Peter see when he chose what to write. Having JM wonder if he could carve his funny little rhyme on the whore's flesh next time (obviously not literally on the same whore's flesh, but the diary's JM would be 'destroying' the same whore, Florie, each time) could imply that only initials have been carved into her flesh this time, in the same way that crude marks were made on Eddowes' face - the forger having this aspect of Jack's work, or art, escalate.
Subtle and clever, or obvious and damning?
Am I reading too much in?
I guess it's always going to be left to the eyes of the beholder - unless we can shake the author warmly by the throat and invite him to tell us what he was on about.
Love,
Caz
PS John! 'All right, Begg -- out with it'? He's never got it out for me. What makes you think he'd do it for you?  |
Author: John Omlor
Thursday, 25 April 2002 - 07:34 am | | Hi Caz,
You know, I think we keep coming back to this question about whether the forger was too simple or too clever -- was vague on purpose and thereby kept their work alive, especially for those who were willing to deny reality a bit and project their own desires and fantasies, or was vague and clichéd and melodramatic by nature, because of lack of skill or certain knowledge, and reaped the benefits of their own inability to fully create characters and detailed history.
And this is one of the things that we can't tell from reading the text, since we don't know how much of it all is a result of our own inevitable participation in the creation of the text's meaning (i.e. our reading).
In a strange, almost accidental, but finally logical way, it remains perfectly possible that a strategic and careful forger and a vague and shallow forger would produce precisely the same sort of result.
And the more we seek to parse the details of vagaries, the more we write as we read, the deeper we are likely to fall into the trap the vague and fragmented and clichéd text sets for us either deliberately or simply because of the natural inclinations of a writer who could manage nothing else. That's one of the reasons that I think talk of the forger's "luck" remains problematic -- since much of that "luck" may be the created product of readers after the fact.
But I don't really disagree with anything you write above and think you point out some fascinating little inconsistencies in the text's references.
And, as we know, by 1989 there was already talk of initials being left at the crime scenes, on envelopes and even perhaps on the victims, as mentioned in the various Ripper books. So the idea of the killer leaving clues and marks (including the Goulston message, of course) was not necessarily an unmotivated invention of our forger's.
Having looked again at the photo, by the way, I notice that it is not simply a "PB" on the wall -- there is another smear next to the "B" that falls down and then seems to curl up slightly, as if it were a "J." So what we have on the wall is not "PB," it is in fact "PBJ." Could Mary Kelly have actually been murdered for the want of a PB&J sandwich? Could her death have been at the hands of someone who craved peanut butter and jelly that badly? "In Search Of" sent our cameras to the Yucca Flats desert region in the Southwestern part of North America to examine a message that many see carved deep in the sands of time -- large enough to be fully appreciated only from 1,000 feet in the air, it clearly reads "Send PBJs." Alien Children Ordering Lunch -- next week on "In Search Of." I'm Leonard Nimoy....
--John |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Thursday, 25 April 2002 - 10:07 am | | Hi John,
PBJ? Could only have been a killer with American influences then - like an American wife who chose his sandwich fillings for him. BLT would indicate an Englishman, or JB for a Liverpudlian bachelor.
Of course, I made a terrible blunder in my last post. (No, PB really has never got it out for me.) I wrote about the forger looking at the Kelly photos, seeing the FM and thinking it was for real. That is total crap. The forger would know it wasn't real - that the real JM wasn't JtR and therefore left nothing of the sort on Kelly's wall.
Our forger therefore would need to have been a moron to knowingly use this fake FM for his fake diary. As we know, it has taken very little work, on the part of ripper experts and those with photographic knowledge, to show what the forger knew already - no FM on the wall.
Oh well. Anyone want to try to identify the moron? Or go back on the idea that the forger got his FM from a photo?
The writing's not on the wall. Never was. And the diary author never thought it was or meant it to be. IMO
Love,
Caz |
Author: Richard P. Dewar
Thursday, 25 April 2002 - 10:21 am | | Hi all,
Perhaps the letters on the wall are "PM" for "pursue Maybrick."
Rich
(tongue firmly planted in cheek) |
Author: Philip C. Dowe
Thursday, 25 April 2002 - 11:02 am | | Hi all,
Vila, there is no reason for apologizing, I have been playing with computers for about 15 years and have come to same conclusion - never believe a photo! Doeas anybody remember the series of photos with I think Maggie and Ronald in Time. Great!
I was disturbed yesterday and could not end my post. Nobody had anything to say on these marks until "The author of the diary came up with them". If they can be understood as FM, then why did Mr Knight not read them as FreeMasons? Anybody got an idea why? No? He though they were not there. We are talking about an old black and white photo and if you look at the photo carefully you will see other scratches. And now take a look at the photo in "The Ultimate JtR Sourcebook"? Does anybody see anything strange? Or is just my eyes playing a trick? The foot of the P seems to be above Kelly's body.
Philip |
Author: R.J. Palmer
Thursday, 25 April 2002 - 12:34 pm | | | Caz [and John]--If you look at the first published photo of the Kelly crimes scene [Farson, 1972] only the 'M' shape is clearly visible on the back wall. The photo isn't very good in quality. There is, in addition, something that looks vaguely like an 'F' on Kelly's forearm. [Mike Barrett, our old friend, was evidently one of the first, if not THE first, to point this out] And remember also, the appropriate passage in the Maybrick diary has some nonsense about wondering if he could 'carve one of his rhymes' on the victim's flesh. So it sounds to me like the 'F' in the diary is just where Mike Barrett would have it. As far as I can tell, despite your comments above, Caz, I think the Maybrick diary's text IS completely consistent with my suggestion that the passage in the diary is written by someone who is looking at the Kelly photograph. And why wouldn't this be the case? Seems reasonable. |
Author: P. Ingerson
Thursday, 25 April 2002 - 01:45 pm | | Perhaps the initials say BFM. Proof -- yes, proof I tell you -- proof that the Blotchy Faced Man was the killer.
|
Author: Paul Begg
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 04:47 am | | A few quick observations which have probably all been made about a dozen posts ago but I haven't read that far back.
(1) Because Stephen Knight did not mention ‘FM’ doesn’t mean he thought the letters weren't there. It doesn’t mean he thought anything at all. He may not have noticed them.
(2) Simon Wood noted the existence of letters on the wall in 1988 and is cited as doing so in the A to Z.
(3) The Kelly photograph was first published in Vacher l’Eventreur et les crimes sadiques by Jean Lacassagne in 1899. I don’t know whether the FM is visible in that photograph or not.
(4) If we don’t know whether the diarist was referring to the ‘FM’ on the wall or not, and since the diarist figured that nobody would see the initials - and since the ‘FM’, if there at all, would have been visible to anyone looking at the corpse, we may suppose that the diarist did not mean them - it seems to me that debating them doesn’t lead anywhere.
(5) To my untrained eye, by the way, the ‘M’ looks to me like a gobbet of blood struck the wall where the central bit of the ‘M’ is, then splashed out to form the upward strokes and began to run down to form the legs of the ‘M’. Whether or not blood could actually do that, I haven’t the faintest notion.
(6) I don’t get it out for just anyone and sometimes not even when asked to do so. The price of beer these days means my wallet stays in my pocket! |
Author: Philip C. Dowe
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 06:54 am | | Hi Paul,
concerning (4) I am pretty sure that the author of the diary meant these two letters because where else can we find "an initial here and an initial there".
concerning (5) Yes blood can do that and when it clots it leaves a distinctive mark. Very logical explanation
Does anybody by chance know the name of the photographer?
Philip |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 07:26 am | | Hi All,
I agree with Paul - his wallet does stay in his pocket. (Only kidding Paul. )
Seriously though, I do agree that to be FM or not to be FM is a question that can't be answered with any certainty except by the diary author.
He/she could have seen a photo of MJK at any time after 1899, and I still think no one needed to see one at all to write what is in the diary.
Hi RJ,
I took a look again at the example in Farson's book and I do agree with you that it's possible the forger was sufficiently inspired by a photograph of the scene to have JM carve an initial F, on 'the whore's' forearm 'here', and daub in blood an initial M, on the wall 'there'.
But I still think it fairly unlikely that a modern forger would risk using initials he conjured up himself to claim in his diary that they were put there by the ripper in 1888. If a modern forger did this, it clearly didn't occur to him that either or both 'initials' would inevitably come under close scrutiny by those best qualified to expose them as the optical illusions he would have known them to be. And you may want to argue, as usual, that this points to the work of someone like Mike Barrett.
And I, as usual, would have to disagree strongly because of the many other factors that argue against Mike having anything whatsoever to do with the composition of this document.
And where is your justification for describing the passage in the diary, where 'JM' wonders if he could 'carve one of his rhymes' on the victim's flesh, as 'some nonsense'?
How can you call it nonsense, to find in such a document that the author is having his ripper fantasise about such things, when we know killers of his type not only entertain such fantasies but given the chance will try to act them out in practice?
I find the following passage from the diary quite chilling, in that victim and wife are clearly meant to be merging to become one and the same 'whore' in the mind of the writer:
'The bitch, the whore [Florie] is not satisfied with one whore master, she now has eyes on another. I could not cut [my latest victim] like my last, visions of her [Mary Kelly as Florie] flooded back as I struck. I tried to quash all thoughts of love. I left her [my latest victim] for dead, that I know. It did not amuse me. There was [no] thrill. I have showered my fury [with Florie] on the bitch [Florie or the latest victim?]. I struck and struck [my latest victim]. I do not know how I stopped. I have left her [Florie] penniless, I have no regrets. The whore will suffer unlike she has ever suffered. May God have mercy on her for I shall not, so help me.
Thomas was in fine health. The children enjoyed Christmas.'
Just more nonsense? Or is it possible that this passage indicates a little insight, on the part of the forger, into the motivation of a killer, and the different directions his jumbled thoughts might take him?
Have a great weekend everyone.
Love,
Caz |
Author: John Omlor
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 07:31 am | | Hi Paul,
Good points. And of course, we cannot be sure of the extent of the other staining on Mary's wall even before she was attacked (dampness, water damage, fading and simple discoloration, etc.) I keep thinking of the sweating wallpaper in Barton Fink and that passage in Hamlet where Hamlet tells Polonius what he sees in a cloud and goofy Polonious keeps agreeing with him even though Hamlet keeps changing his mind. The power of suggestion and influence has worked wonders.
Philip,
I believe info about the photographer was put up here on the boards by Martin Fido a while back -- but I can't remember it at the moment and am rushing off to Finals day at work. If you run a search though for "Crime scene photographer" or something similar, you might find out.
All the best, everyone. I'm off to collect papers and then it's a mad weekend of grading.
Ugh.
--John
PS: Caz, I'm rushing, but do you really find that "chilling?" I found it almost script-like myself, an utterly predictable and undeveloped voice. But that's the joy of reading, the differences. More later, when there's time.
PPS: And I always thought that the "struck and struck" lines might be a reference to "striking" Florie out of the will -- or maybe that's finding a pun where there's none. |
Author: John Hacker
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 07:33 am | | Philip,
"I am pretty sure that the author of the diary meant these two letters because where else can we find "an initial here and an initial there"."
That's a pretty dangerous approach to take in my opinion. The diary refers to plenty of things that don't match up to the historical record. (Because it's a fogery donchaknow) The Manchester murders, etc etc etc. Etc etc etc.
Part of the reason the diary has been so sucessfull is that people have done the forger's work for them in trying to tie these vague references to the real world. If you take the approach that there has to be a connection, you can find a connection. Always. Hence Lewis Carroll as a suspect.
If the diary had said "an initial here, etc" for any of the other killings an explination would have been found. The marks on Eddowes face, or a sign on a nearby building, or something. People are creative. And it would make sense because it's human nature to make these connections.
It's always seemed to me that the text of the diary is clearly refering to letters in 2 different places. Not to mention that I certainly don't see any "F" on the wall. It's back to John's problem with reading, but with fuzzy shapes on the wall instead of words.
That having been said, the "M" like shape is and always has been fairly clear in the photo, and it's certainly possible the forger took advantage of that fact.
Regards,
John Hacker |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 07:57 am | | Hi John O,
You are the expert here on reading and I would have to bow to your superior qualifications on that subject.
'I found it almost script-like myself, an utterly predictable and undeveloped voice.'
Ok, so in that case give me the passage again, re-writing it as you would expect a real killer to express himself in his diary, as we know Fred Baker did in his. (Remember? 'Killed a young girl today. It was fine and hot.')
I think it might be useful to compare the two so we can all see how markedly different this modern forger's work is from anything like you'd expect the real thing to be.
Many thanks.
Love,
Caz |
Author: John Omlor
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 09:45 am | | No way, Caz.
I'm not a fiction writer, nor, in this case, was I offering anything more than my own personal reaction to how I heard the passage you cited. And I would never attempt to write a believable or realistic serial killer's voice -- I'd fail miserably in part because I have been so exposed to the popular culture of serial killers and would fall into that sort of language I fear. (So, too, does the diary, I believe.)
I will say that the voice in the diary does not seem to me even to be a real person's voice (putting aside the question of it being a real serial killer's voice). It seems in many ways to be the voice of a created character, trying hard to be a character (the placed references and clue-like partial revelations and simple repetition without any sense of a natural voice).
But that's just my ear, Caz. You can feel free to ignore it.
All the best
--John
PS: It does occur to me that the melodramatic, over-the-top, and angry voice you cite in the diary is utterly different from the detached and non-associative and almost eerily placid voice you mention in the Baker. That seems interesting, but is not necessarily significant, since there are probably all sorts of variations among the written voices of real killers. |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 10:55 am | | Hi John,
'...I would never attempt to write a believable or realistic serial killer's voice...'
But that's the point. Would you know a 'believable or realistic' serial killer's voice if you heard (read) it? If so, how? From extensive experience, or from that single very brief example, taken out of goodness knows what context, of the words of a real killer?
Thanks anyway.
Somehow I guessed your reply would be 'No way, Caz'.
Love,
Caz
PS 'The whore will suffer unlike she has ever suffered. May God have mercy on her for I shall not, so help me.
Thomas was in fine health.' |
Author: Vila
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 11:39 am | | Well what do you know? Here's a subject I actually *know* something about. (grin)
As a fictioneer, I've always found the villains to be the hardest characters to script for. As I recall from the last time I read the text of the diary (several years ago) that it struck me then as being very uneven. That could tend to support the idea that it was written in stages, as would a real diary. The writer could have made each entry a separate "project" to further that image. The changes in "voice" from entry to entry would then represent the divisions between each "project" rather than going by the dates of the entries.
Anyone wanting to write for a character who is crazy will have to define what they conceive "crazy" to be. The shifts in "voice" would then be the writer's concept of how someone who was insane would write.
As a second possibility, the writer could have penned all the crazy stuff in one go, then went back and dropped in the normal stuff for contrast. I've written stories both ways, (shrug) both work. I couldn't say which way the diary was written. I read a transcript (which may or may not have been accurate) and a serious writer would have made the penning of the diary's final draft look as if there had never been any others. If I were doing it, there would be all kinds of notes and culled pages left from the previous drafts. (I assume that a serious *forger* would dispose of those, for security. Since I write fiction, I'd save 'em to go through later looking for lost ideas.)
On the other hand, someone might be able to tell us something from the handwriting itself. Not my area.
If I thought anyone would be interested, I'd dig out that file of the diary and write up a web page of commentary on the text, as fiction from a writer's and editor's point of view. I wouldn't want to go through all that work for something that no one wanted to read in the first place, though. (laugh)
I hope I've amused you all. (grin)
Vila |
Author: Paul Begg
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 11:50 am | | Hi John O.
Please be gentle in your response to this quiet old soul, but if you read the ‘diary’ and conclude that the diarist’s voice sounds unauthentic, and Dr Forshaw reads the ‘diary’ and concludes that the diarist’s voice sounds authentic, why is Dr Forshaw’s conclusion invalid, as has been argued in the past, and yours valid. Aren’t you both doing exactly the same thing, differing only in your conclusions, your conclusion being based on an extensive knowledge of and understanding of literature and his based on a knowledge of serial killers and serial killer literature? |
Author: Kevin Braun
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 01:11 pm | | Hi Philip,
Check out "The development of Photography" June 14, 2001 archive. It seems that the crime scene photographer was either Louis Gumprecht or Joesph Martin. A very interesting discussion.
Take care,
Kevin |
Author: John Omlor
Friday, 26 April 2002 - 08:35 pm | | Hi All,
Caz,
There are significant differences between critical reading and creative writing. The ability to read critically and with a learned and experienced ear and with attention to textual nuances does not imply an ability to write creative fiction. And so I feel it is still perfectly appropriate to offer critical reactions to the clichés and the melodrama and the Aristotelian structure and the repetition and the characterization inscribed in the diary prose, whether or not I feel I could myself successfully create a fictional serial killer without falling prey to the serial-killer conventions of modern popular culture (as I do believe the diary does).
Also, as I say, my argument is not even that the diary has not created a believable serial-killer, it's that the diary has not successfully created a believable person. I did not feel at any point while reading the diary that I was reading a real person's private thoughts. I've read lots and lots of diaries of all sorts, and I must say that this one never sounded very genuine to me.
In any case, I would have no problem at all offering critical thoughts about, say, nineteenth century American novels (and I often have), but I wouldn't for a moment suggest that I could write one. Those are two different things.
Incidentally, I think the quote from the Baker diary is a bit problematic, since, first of all, Baker was not a serial killer anyway, and second of all, his particular case was very, very different than the Ripper case and there is no real reason to suspect that the two voices should be either especially similar or especially different.
Hi Paul,
First, I think it is important to understand precisely what Dr. Forshaw said.
A return look at the Rendell report offers the following about Forshaw's conclusions:
"In the opening of his lengthy report Forshaw writes, 'Starting from the assumption that the journal is genuine, the aim of this contribution is to come to an understanding of James Maybrick the man, and of the state of mind of Jack the Ripper.'
"Dr. Forshaw clearly did not see his role as authenticating the text as that of a serial killer consistent with the known personality of Jack the Ripper. His role was to explain the text on the basis that it is genuine.
"More alarming is the final paragraph of Dr. Forshaw's report. It is crossed out and was not published:
"If the journal is genuine then it tells a tragic tale. The account is feasible and indeed makes sense. However, there are other possibilities; it could be a modern or old fake or the product of a deluded mind contemporaneous with the Jack the Ripper murders. In view of the detail of the journal and the insights into the psychopathology of serial killers contained within, it would seem, to me anyway, that the most likely options are that it is either genuine or modern fake. A thorough examination forensic [sic] of the journal itself and of its provence [sic] would be essential components of deciding between the two.'"
I think that is pretty clear.
Forshaw is saying that his own findings are also consistent with a modern fake. And that he can conclude nothing at all about whether it is a modern fake or not without a forensic examination of the journal and an examination of its provenance.
What he says about the prose here is that it is "feasible" and "makes sense." And he is "starting from the assumption that the diary is genuine." This latter subject position alone alone makes the scientific validity of his reading completely suspect and demonstrates vividly what I have been saying all along about the impossibility of using his reading to support any conclusions concerning the knowledge or the awareness of the author without also realizing that his reading was necessarily and inevitably influenced by his own presuppositions as he read. He was not doing psychopathology here, since he had no patient and an unsigned text, he was just reading. And nothing he has offered as findings in his reading suggests that the diary could not be a recent forgery or that the writers of the diary must necessarily have had significant insight into the psychology of serial killers. He's just saying there is nothing in the text we have that is inconsistent with a serial killer's psychology. But that doesn't say much, since there is almost no real, complex psychology in these pages to begin with.
Let's remember what we have here.
We have sixty-three pages. As I count it, the diary totals only about thirty-five pages of written prose (adding up the half pages and excerpting the poetry drafts and redrafts).
Within those thirty-five pages, there is serious repetition, a few brief recountings of particular murders, and the narratives of several well-publicized and chronicled incidents from Maybrick's life.
That whittles things down even further. The number of lines of text which actually contain some sort of psychological speculation or serious reflection turns out to be very, very small. And even they are repeated (whoring bitch, whoremaster, blah blah). The actual psychological details offered in this diary are vague and few and far between, if we read the text closely. So saying that there is nothing among them that disqualifies the text psychologically speaking tells us very little about our forger, since they wrote very little to begin with.
My analysis, on the other hand, does not offer a psychological diagnosis of the text (an impossibility finally in any case, given the unstable nature of reading) -- it offers a critical reading of the text as literature -- it seeks to examine it for structure and plot and voice and narrative -- something I can do without a patient or a signature, since it is a literary analysis rather than a psychological one, and since I do not begin with the assumption that the text is genuine or fake. It cannot, however, tell us anything at all, or very, very little, about the authors.
I do not disagree with Dr. Forshaw if all he is saying is that there is nothing in the text inconsistent with the possibility of a killer's psychology. I would not necessarily have expected there to be, given how little actual psychology is in the text after all. But that alone affords us no real, valid, or reliable conclusions about the author(s) either.
And what could have appeared in this sort of vague and fragmented text that would have psychologically disqualified it anyway? What could have been written in Maybrick's voice that would have allowed Forshaw or anyone to say "no serial killer could or would ever say that?" Couldn't alternative psychological explanations have been offered for any possible prose of this sort? After all, the psychology of diary writing is by definition a radically heterogeneous phenomenon. There are as many possible voices as there are subject positions. So with a text like this one, I do not believe that we can use Dr. Forshaw's conclusions to support any valid argument about anything the forgers necessarily had to know.
Finally, the way you phrase your question elides over an important difference between the manner in which Dr. Forshaw's conclusions were being offered and discussed here and the way mine were being offered.
Dr. Forshaw, it was being suggested, offered conclusions which allowed us to say something about the knowledge or awareness of potential authors.
My conclusions do not.
I don't believe Dr. Forshaw's do either, and I have sound and thorough documentation concerning the operations of reading and language and meaning to support my claim that they cannot.
In fact, you are, in a different way, quite right in your implication. There is no real difference between Dr. Forshaw saying the voice could sound consistent to him and me saying it does not sound like a real person to me. Neither of us can validly say anything about the authors or what they might or needed to have known based on those opinions of ours.
And seeing the paragraph from Forshaw's report that Rendell cites, I actually suspect that the Dr. would end up agreeing with me about this to at least some degree.
Hope that begins to answer your question. If not, ask again and I'll try and be more precise and clearer.
All the best,
--John |
Author: Paul Begg
Saturday, 27 April 2002 - 01:10 am | | Hi John
Many thanks indeed for such a detailed reply. I’m not sure that your conclusions don’t tell us something about the author, or that something about the author can’t be inferred from your conclusions. In a strict and precise and clinically logical analysis which gives equal weight to all possibilities, it is indeed perfectly possible ‘that a strategic and careful forger and a vague and shallow forger would produce precisely the same sort of result.’ On the other hand, presented with a vague, clichéd, melodramatic and fragmented text lacking skill and knowledge, with half-formed characters and no detailed history, wouldn’t you agree that it’s fair and reasonable to infer that we are probably dealing with a writer who could manage nothing else rather than a writer of skill and ability who chose to write like that?
This may not be a conclusion you were drawing yourself or one you are necessarily happy that other people should draw, particularly if they were to apply it to Mike Barrett and say that John Omlor’s expert testimony based on a textual analysis suggests that the ‘diary’ is more consistent with what we believe Mike Barrett’s writing skills to be than with the those of a skilled and practised writer. But I’m not sure that anyone would be entirely wrong to infer this from what you have written.
I do note, however, that you caution against anyone drawing such inferences. I am nonetheless uncertain that they would be completely wrong or, indeed, unjustified in doing so.
But what Dr. Forshaw was doing surely wasn't that different was it? The only real difference is that he has drawn his own conclusion and you haven't. He was simply asked to say whether the diarist accurately portrayed the psychopathlogy of a serial killer. In the context of this question it was wholly irrelevant to him whether the ‘diary’ was genuine or a fake. All he was asked was: ‘has the author got it right?’ And Dr. Forshaw answered ‘yes’.
Whether the ‘diary’ contains a little or a lot of psychopathology is something I am not qualified to say, nor do I know whether Dr. Forshaw judged the ‘diary’ on specifics or an overall ‘feel’, but he did conclude that: "If the journal is genuine then it tells a tragic tale. The account is feasible and indeed makes sense.’
I’m not sure what difference the journal being genuine or not makes to the feasibility and sense of the account and frankly I don’t think it makes any difference at all. The author has either told us a feasible story or he hasn’t. Fact or fiction seems to be to be irrelevant to the feasibility of the tale.
"If the journal is genuine then it tells a tragic tale. The account is feasible and indeed makes sense. However, there are other possibilities; it could be a modern or old fake or the product of a deluded mind contemporaneous with the Jack the Ripper murders. In view of the detail of the journal and the insights into the psychopathology of serial killers contained within, it would seem, to me anyway, that the most likely options are that it is either genuine or modern fake. A thorough examination forensic [sic] of the journal itself and of its provence [sic] would be essential components of deciding between the two.'"
Given that Dr Forshaw’s was never asked to authenticate the text and wasn’t qualified to do so, but was simply asked whether the diarist had got the psychopathology of a serial killer right, this conclusion to some extent exceeds what he was required to do. But far from being alarming, it is, I think, utterly fascinating. In saying that the story told by the diarist was ‘feasible and indeed makes sense’, Dr. Forshaw appears to be saying that it is an accurate portrayal; nothing appears to have leapt from the page and suggested to Dr Forshaw that the portrayal was a fiction. Indeed, and this is the crucial bit, ‘In view of the detail of the journal and the insights into the psychopathology of serial killers contained within…’ (my italics), Dr. Forshaw thought the ‘diary’ was either ‘genuine or modern fake’. In other words, he ruled out an old forgery and a deluded bloke contemporary with Maybrick.
And I don’t have my records to hand, so perhaps Caz could help here, but I recall Dr. Forshaw saying that he reached this conclusion because the diarist appeared to have read and understood modern thinking about the psychopathology of serial killers.
On the basis of the apparent or conveyed knowledge of the psychopathology of serial killers in the ‘diary’ Dr. Forshaw was therefore saying it was either written by a real serial killer or by somebody who had read sufficient modern thinking on the subject for the ‘diary’ to contain ‘insights’.
Dr. Forshaw was effectively – but cautiously allowing for the ‘diary’ to have been written by a real homicidal maniac - saying that the ‘diary’ is a modern forgery.
I think we should be cautious ourselves and not too hurriedly dismiss that conclusion.
However, the diary contains ‘insights into the psychopathology of serial killers’. Does Mike Barrett seem like someone with the necessary understanding of the psychopathology of serial killers to provide ‘insights’? Maybe he does and he’s hidden it really well. Maybe he created a text that by sheer chance and good fortune contained ‘insights’.
I don’t know, but Dr. Forshaw seemed to believe that the diarist had done some research in order to portray a serial killer in the way he did. Maybe Dr Forshaw is wrong. But if he’s right, we must again ask whether Mike Barrett has ever betrayed the knowledge that this research would have given him., and if he hasn’t then it’s just another bit of evidence in the mounting pile that suggests he didn’t compose the ‘diary’. |
Author: Peter Wood
Saturday, 27 April 2002 - 06:46 am | | Very quickly ...
You can speculate all you want on what 'FM' looks like in Rumbelow's book or Sugden's book or any other book. You can speculate all you want because Paul Feldman had access to the remaining original crime scene photos. Clearly then, the 'FM' that Paul sees comes from the original photograph and no amount of reproduction, facsimile copying or photocopying.
Then I am asked:
"If the marks are there, why aren't they mentioned in the police files?"
How do you know they weren't mentioned in the police files? Given that special attention was drawn to the marks on Kelly's wall at the inquest (remember they went to the crime scene) I think it highly likely that something was mentioned in the police files but has since, sadly like many other police files of the time, been lost or destroyed.
So Paul Feldman had access to the original photographs. 'FM' is clearly visible on the original photograph - and yet the diarist was the first to see it! Perhaps the diarist, if not genuine, was paying a lot more attention than any ripper author or reader for over one hundred years?
Here is where it gets really interesting...
"I left it there for the fools but they will never find it. I was too clever. Left it in front for all eyes to see".
John Omlor, does your selective quoting of text know no bounds?
"Forshaw is saying that his own findings are also consistent with a modern fake. And that he can conclude nothing at all about whether it is a modern fake or not without a forensic examination of the journal and an examination of its provenance".
Here is the bit you left out from what you quote of Forshaw:
"A thorough examination of the journal and it's provenance are essential components of deciding if it is authentic. If such an examination proves indecisive and all falls back on the content, then I would argue in that case, on the balance of probabilities from a psychiatric perspective, it is authentic".
Regards
Peter. |
Author: John Omlor
Saturday, 27 April 2002 - 08:41 am | | Hi Paul,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think I see where you are going, but I also think we have to be careful about what conclusions are actually possible. I understand and sympathize with a desire to keep an open mind when faced with the lack of evidence concerning the identity of the forger(s), but I also believe we should not make leaps into impossible readings or to accept unestablished conclusions.
You ask me:
"On the other hand, presented with a vague, clichéd, melodramatic and fragmented text lacking skill and knowledge, with half-formed characters and no detailed history, wouldn’t you agree that it’s fair and reasonable to infer that we are probably dealing with a writer who could manage nothing else rather than a writer of skill and ability who chose to write like that?"
No. Not necessarily. A writer of skill and ability might very well know the value of keeping his text vague and clichéd. It would lessen the possibilities for anomalies and disqualifying errors. And there are many sorts of "abilities." Our forger may have had the "ability" to play with language or to avoid telling details or to construct game clues without giving themselves away, but not have had the ability to create a fully established character or any serious or complex psychological insight. Our forger may have had the "ability" to find a scrapbook that was at least historically consistent with the time period, but not have had the "ability" to copy or even attempt to copy the real James Maybrick's handwriting. I have no way of knowing, but personally I get the feeling that in some ways (such as the handwriting and the poetry and the psychology of motive and the fraternal jealousy stuff), our forger's ability and/or sophistication might have been rather limited and in other ways (the linguistic game playing, knowing what to leave out, the use of at least somewhat historically passable physical materials) it might have been more impressive. But that last bit of mine is just a guess and cannot be fairly or validly determined simply by reading, by me or by anyone. And at this point, since the science remains conflicted, reading is all we have.
As to Dr. Forshaw's conclusions, you ask:
"But what Dr. Forshaw was doing surely wasn't that different was it? The only real difference is that he has drawn his own conclusion and you haven't."
Yes, and then I went on and argued that if, on the one hand, Dr. Forshaw's "conclusion" was only that there is nothing in the book inconsistent with the psychology of a killer, that was fine and I agree with him. However, that tells us nothing specifically about the author(s), since there is in fact almost no real psychology or psychological reflection in the book in any case. The little that the forger wrote was consistent with what psychologists believe about what killers might say -- but since our killer actually says very little about his own psychology beyond repeating certain motivational platitudes, that tells us little or nothing about the writer. And I am still not sure what sort of lines would have disqualified the text, psychologically, since diary writing is by definition a radically heterogeneous experience, even for killers, and any variation could have been accounted for within the field of differences built into the specifics of the intended "author's" subject position. I understand disqualifying the diary if the Maybrick character says he talked to Michael on his cell phone or if he says that the Grand National was "like totally awesome," but I'm not sure what he would have to say as a killer that would allow us to simply disqualify the book psychologically speaking or conclude that the writer knew nothing about serial killers -- Maybe something like "dreamt about screwing mom last night -- God I wish dad would die." -- just because it would be too obvious?
Anyway, to return to your distinction:
"The only real difference is that he has drawn his own conclusion and you haven't. "
And, on the other hand, if we interpret his conclusion as being that the author had certain and specific and in any way special knowledge about serial killer's psychology (and, personally, I ‘m not sure that actually is Forshaw's precise conclusion), then I have offered the conclusion that there is no way that Forshaw can responsibly offer that conclusion, if only because he is not doing psychology here, he is reading, and the instability of the reading process and the inevitable contamination of his own founding assumptions will not allow for it, despite his own desires.
So if all Forshaw is saying is there is nothing in the text inconsistent with a killer's possible psychology, then I agree but point out that there is little or no psychology actually in the text anyway, so that tells us almost nothing about the authors. If Forshaw is going beyond that to say that we can conclude that the author had significant or special insight into the mind of a serial killer and this is something we can conclude about the forgers from reading the text, then I suggest, critically and professionally, that Forshaw is offering a conclusion he cannot validly make and one which goes beyond what is possible and his work becomes, in terms of its hermeneutics, theoretically suspect.
No one is arguing that the prose in the diary is not "feasible." But the prose in the diary is so shallow and so vague and so fragmented and so repetitious and so undeveloped and so simple that feasibility is almost a given. I do not think that the diary's "feasibility" tells us anything about the writer except that they were literate and had a working imagination and had absorbed the conventions of writing. Beyond that, we're simply guessing, using our own desires.
Of course, since Dr. Forshaw's examination began with the assumption that the diary was authentic ("Starting from the assumption that the journal is genuine..."), any claims he might have also made about the possible authenticity of the diary are logically invalid, since he self-admittedly assumed his own conclusion as part of his investigation and therefore any claim to authenticity he might have wanted to make would necessarily be circular. But that is not actually relevant to our discussion of what his report would fairly allow us to say about the possible forgers (which, I still believe, is almost nothing).
Then we get to this problem of "insights." This seems to me a very problematic word, given the diary text. I'm not sure there is a single thing anywhere in the text that could only have been written by someone with some special "insight" into the mind of a serial killer. I can't think of one and I do not believe Dr. Forshaw ever cites one, so it is impossible to say that his conclusion about such a thing is scientifically valid.
You say:
"I don’t know, but Dr. Forshaw seemed to believe that the diarist had done some research in order to portray a serial killer in the way he did."
I don't know that that is the case. I still think that Dr. Forshaw might have only been claiming that there is nothing in this little book inconsistent with the possible psychology of a serial killer. And that tells us little or nothing about the forger, since there are so few real psychological insights in the book to begin with (what are they? where are they? which ones would be available only to researchers or killers? -- you see -- this whole claim about specific "insights" is impossibly vague and scientifically imprecise and unevidenced and uncited, hardly the sort of thorough and complete and referenced scholarship that would allow for a demonstrable and useful conclusion).
But if he is saying that the author must have had knowledge either through research or first hand experience, then I can say that there is no way he can know this much about the unsigned author, simply because of the way reading and meaning operate, and his conclusion, if it is this one, is theoretically invalid. What Dr. Forshaw can tell us is that there is nothing in the book which seems to him inconsistent with the mind of a killer, but given that the book offers so many vagaries and repetitions and so little psychological reflection, that tells us almost nothing about the author. What he cannot tell us is what the author knew or did not know and how they knew it, because reading simply will not allow for it -- so still he tells us little or nothing about the author.
Consequently, I do not believe it is fair or valid, either way, to draw any conclusions about the likely author's identity or to exclude anyone, including Mike, based on Dr. Forshaw's work. Evidence for the author's identity will have to come from somewhere else. It cannot come from this sort of reading.
Thanks, Paul, for your thoughts, and all the best,
--John |
Author: John Hacker
Saturday, 27 April 2002 - 11:55 am | | Good morning all,
I find the discussion on Dr. Forshaw's findings interesting. I must confess that I find his conclusions somewhat farfetched. That he finds the scenario painted by the diary to be feasible suggests to me that he's not familar with the Whitechapel murders and is basing his assesment solely on the content of the diary.
Just for contrast, here's a couple of quotations from John Douglas's book regarding Maybrick as a possible cantidate as JtR:
"Even more to the point, how does a fifty-year-old man with a family, children, and no sociopathology suddenly blossom into a disorganized serial killer? He can't, and doesn't. Anyone who thinks his situation through enough to decide that he wants to kill prostitutes to get back at his wife but must do so on trips to another city, where he'll hide out, stalk women of the night, and then return to his own home, would not exactly be disorganized. In fact, I've never seen one that organized. No one plans that carefully, then goes into such a frenzy of sexual pathology."
And even more telling:
"If this diary were authentic, I would expect it to shed somenew light on the crimes or their methodology, which is missing here. In a real killer's diary, I'd expect to see his whole pathological construct laid out, rather than just a simple and breast-beating excuse for why he has to kill these women. All of that is missing from the so-called Maybrick diary, which must be judged an elaborate fake."
Notice that Douglas is not attempting to analyze the writer of the document, merely commenting on the feasibility of the scenario presented. A sensible position to take considering that there has never been a case that has even vaguely paralleled what the diary is suggesting what occured. Not one. People don't suddenly decide to become a serial killer based on a cheating spouse, and then go over 100 miles to stalk victims in such a narrow geographic area. Etc etc.
I've gone through all of the Forshaw quotes that Shirley provides, and it seems to me that he's missing the forest for the trees. There's comments on some of the narritive devices, but no real assement as to whether the diary would hold together considering the historical JtR case.
We get supportive comments regarding the diaries "use of fantasy", the change in "excitement" level in the handwriting, the collection of organs (Which has everything to do with the WC murders, but nothing to do with the diary of course), etc. There is no deep analysis here, and certainly no examination of the total scenario presented. And then points that are brought forward as being supportive are not deep subtle things, they are plot devices meant to make a saleable document. This wasn't aimed at convincing profilers or psychological professionals, it was aimed at convincing the "Weekly World News" crowd into parting with a few bucks. In my opinion there is nothing that Forshaw commented on that is incompatible with someone who did minimal reading or simply watched a few good (or not so good) movies.
Regards,
John Hacker |
Author: Richard P. Dewar
Saturday, 27 April 2002 - 05:47 pm | | Hi Peter,
If the FM in the picture is so obvious, and excepting your suggestion that the police did see and the files have been lost, how do you know the quote you cite relates to the letters?
"I left it for the fools but they will never find it" is an odd quotation for a serial killer who allegedly left the clue on a wall at the crime scene. How did the killer know it would not be found?
Looks to me that this remark either has nothing to do with the FM or, if it does, the author claims to know that the authorities never found the letters. Contemporaneously, that would be impossible to know. It is only an assumption someone could make who wrote the diary years later.
Rich |
Author: Peter Wood
Sunday, 28 April 2002 - 06:55 pm | | Hi Rich
"I left it for the fools but they will never find it" ...
...has always struck me as nothing more than boasting on the part of the diarist, rather like Mike Barrett saying "Yes I am a forger, the greatest of them all".
The SK of the diary seems to me to want to be caught, thus I perceive that he wants the police to discover the 'clues' that he is leaving.
Quite what the "it" in the above quote refers to is open to speculation. I believe PHF speculates that it was MJK's heart. I'm not sold on that one, but for "it" you could substitute any number of things, like:
"I left her heart there, but they will never find it".
OR
"I left my wife's initials there, but they will never find it".
OR
"I left my jacket there, but they will never find it".
I think the SK of the diary has left a clue in MJK's room because he wants to be caught. Why does he want to be caught? To prove how clever he is of course. But in order to prove how clever he is, he has to sacrifice his freedom. A no win situation, but nevertheless he is tempted to leave 'clues', but subtle enough to disguise them, or hide them.
I would discount Feldman's theory over MJK's heart, partly because I haven't got a clue what would happen if you tried to use one to write on a wall and partly because I think the diarist is referring to a clue.
That clue being Florie's initials. "I left it in front for all to see".
Regards
Peter. |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Monday, 29 April 2002 - 10:00 am | | Hi John (O),
I understand how your extensive experience of reading works of fiction would allow you to recognise in the Maybrick diary all the signs of yet another work of fiction, albeit in this case one that evidently masquerades as something quite different.
I understand too how Melvin Harris’s extensive experience of hoaxes and hoax-busting have allowed him to recognise in the diary all the classic signs of yet another hoax, a literary one, for him to bust wide open at the earliest opportunity.
I think I can also understand how the experience of someone like Dr Forshaw might allow him to recognise in the diary the signs of a modern author making a passable job of writing as a psychopath, or, if written before certain notions on the subject were generally in the public consciousness, a real psychopath.
But how much experience do you have of reading fiction that masquerades as fact? Or of reading the words of real psychopaths? (Incidentally, judging from the few details I’ve gathered about the murder of Fanny Adams, I would certainly think of Fred Baker as a psychopath, if not a serial killer in the making, whose capture and execution prevent us knowing either way.)
Would you not expect any of the signs so recognisable to you, Harris and Forshaw, according to your individual areas of expertise and experience, to overlap between intentional fiction, fiction masquerading as fact, and the real thing? You say the voice in the diary does not sound like a real person to you. I’m just trying to imagine how ‘real’ a psychopathic voice is supposed to sound, and why you would not expect it to come across like the badly drawn boy you see in the diary. How do you imagine a real psychopath, for example, who is playing solitaire with reality and fantasy and losing the plot, would sound when writing about his deadly battle for control over his life and the lives of others he perceives as his enemies, for whatever warped reason? Clearly our forger thought, rightly or wrongly, that over-the-top melodrama was fine for the brand of self-absorbed, self-pitying psychopath he was seeking to portray. Perhaps he didn’t expect to walk into the trap that finds you, the literature professor, reserving such over-the-top melodrama for shoddy works of fiction based on the popular horror books and movies of the modern era. I do wonder if he expected to have Dr Forshaw accept it all as not inconsistent with anything a real psychopath might have written.
What would happen if you were ever faced with a piece of writing that was beyond your wide experience as a reader? Would you recognise it as being beyond that experience, or would you inevitably recognise signs pointing to it being another example from within? In other words, while you may be able to recognise a piece of writing for what it is, when it lies within your experience, can you recognise one for what it isn’t, if you lack the experience of what it pretends to be? How many diaries of serial killers have you read for comparison purposes, fake or genuine? And how many of your recognisable signs could in fact be common to both?
Love,
Caz |
Author: John Omlor
Monday, 29 April 2002 - 10:40 am | | Hi Caz,
I have plenty of experience reading fiction that masquerades as fact -- it's a common postmodern technique, blurring the boundaries of reference, in memoirs and autobiography and elsewhere, and this also includes fiction which actively breaks down the distinction between fiction and fact, such as García Márquez 's problematic pseudo-journalistic works Tale of a Shipwrecked Sailor and News of a Kidnapping.
And I have read my share of the words of real psychopaths, simply because of this little hobby we share.
Of course, you can always argue that the reason the diary might not sound like a "real person" is because the crazed killer was drifting in and out of reality and therefore his narrative is likely to resonate with his own self-created fictions anyway. It is a convenient response.
But when I say that the diarist has not created a "real" or "believable" person for me, I don't just mean that the voice seems "unreal" or out of touch with reality or living in a fiction. I mean that the text sounds created, that the narrative structure and the drafted verse and the repetitions and the plot and the characterizations of Abberline and others all seem deliberately created and arranged and presented for an effect. I mean that the text does not seem to me to read like an authentic diary of a lived life (and I have read many) but like a performatively written diary, a construct, a put-together one, that carries with it the signs of its own artifice.
This has nothing especially to do with whether it is like or unlike the other real diaries of serial killers. In fact, I would not necessarily expect an authentic diary to be anything like other real diaries of real serial killers, since diary-writing is by definition a radically heterogeneous activity that depends in large part on the idiosyncratic subject position of the author. Comparing it to other diaries of real serial killers might be interesting, but it does not address my own point about the general artificiality of the text's narrative as a whole and of the creation of its narrative voice in particular. But as I've said, this is my ear and not a scientific nor even an inductive conclusion. Anyone who wishes can feel free to ignore it.
The valid evidence for this thing's being a forgery is to be found elsewhere, in the history and the textual analysis, and the science, and the behaviors of those that surround the book. And there is such evidence, and there is no evidence at all, anywhere, of any sort, that even suggests it is authentic.
My reading of the text is simply my reading of it. I draw no conclusions about the forgers from it, nor can Dr. Forshaw finally or fairly draw any significant ones from his.
All the best,
--John |
Author: John Hacker
Monday, 29 April 2002 - 07:07 pm | | Hiya Caz,
I was hoping you could clear something up for me. You speak of how Dr. Forshaw's experience could help him to "recognise in the diary the signs of a modern author making a passable job of writing as a psychopath, or, if written before certain notions on the subject were generally in the public consciousness, a real psychopath."
What experience does Dr. Forshaw have regarding psychopaths? From looking at Shirley's book his work was primarily with addiction, and he had completed 3 years of research into "forensic psychiatry". How does this qualify him to judge the "voice" of the diary? Does he have any practical experience with real cases? After rereading his quotes in Shirley's book, I'm really curious as to what his background actually is.
Regards,
John Hacker |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Tuesday, 30 April 2002 - 08:03 am | | Hi John H,
I don’t know. Perhaps I should have been less specific, even though I did write ‘I think I can also understand how the experience of someone like Dr Forshaw might allow him to recognise in the diary the signs of….’
All I really meant here is that I can see how different people would recognise different signs in the diary, according to their own individual experience, whatever that happens to be. We do have John O saying what his own experience allows him to recognise. We have also had Melvin saying what his hoax-busting experience allows him to recognise. And we have had various others, in related or unrelated fields, with their own opinions of what their experience allows them to recognise. I’m still not sure I understand how to recognise and separate the valid opinions from the invalid ones, or what conclusions these people are entitled or not entitled to draw from their own experience.
Hi John O,
As you know, I'm not arguing for the diary's authenticity. But I am wondering about the signs (whoever recognised them, and whatever experience they thought ‘allowed’ them to do so) that here was an author who was able to produce 63 pages of writing, none of it inconsistent with what a psychopath might produce. It was presumably felt that the author would have needed more than the 'l' word to achieve this, whether it be a good basic grasp of the subject from the available literature, or, if the document was written before the author had access to certain information, personal experience.
You dismiss Dr Forshaw’s opinion, saying he can't draw any such conclusion about the 'forgers' (I prefer the neutral 'author', because a forger is usually defined as someone who wants/needs to recreate the hand of the person whose work he chooses to imitate, from a signature on a stolen cheque to a fake Renoir), any more than you can.
But on a more basic level, perhaps we can at least agree that the author shows a general kind of knowledge (quite apart from specific info like the empty tin match box) that might be rather more troublesome for you, or anyone else, to explain if we were talking about a hoaxer working at any time before, say, the 1980s.
In other words, all's well in your forged diaryland (or red dog fairyland ), and the opinions of others can't rock it. But its stability appears to depend on the fact (yet to be definitely ascertained) that the land wasn't formed before the 1980s. How sure are you that you won't one day have to reassess the whole landscape?
And how can you convince me in the meantime that I have not been reading a circular argument?
Love,
Caz |
Author: John Omlor
Tuesday, 30 April 2002 - 10:45 am | | Hi Caz,
To begin with, the forgers did not exactly "produce 63 pages of writing, none of it inconsistent with what a psychopath might produce." In all, they produced a total of about 35 full pages of actual prose (taking out the blank space and poetry reprints and revisions). And more than half of that is repetition and family details and curses on Abberline and other mock-historical stuff. So the actual risk they were taking psychologically speaking was much smaller than it sounds, since they have included, when one actually reads the pages, very little psychological reflection or detail beyond the level of repeated platitudes of jealousy, anger, and addiction, and sketches of a few other mood swings. So the fact that in those relatively short entries there is nothing "inconsistent with the words a psychopath might produce" does not tell us very much, if anything, about how much the forgers might have known.
And I repeat a question that no one seems willing to answer. What sort of lines, exactly, would have disqualified the text, psychologically, since diary writing is by definition a radically heterogeneous experience, even for killers, and any variation could have theoretically been accounted for within the field of differences built into the specifics of the intended "author's" subject position? What exactly would have been "inconsistent" with what this particular killer might have said, and how can we be sure of this? I still think this remains a completely unestablished and unreferenced claim that is theoretically suspect.
You then say:
"It was presumably felt that the author would have needed more than the 'l' word to achieve this, whether it be a good basic grasp of the subject from the available literature, or, if the document was written before the author had access to certain information, personal experience."
First of all, I'm not sure this is what Forshaw concluded exactly. There is a big difference between saying "there is nothing in these entries that is immediately inconsistent with what a killer might say" and saying "whoever wrote this had to know certain things either through research or personal experience." If Forshaw is concluding the former, I don't necessarily disagree. But that conclusion tells us nothing about the forgers, since there is so little actual revelatory psychology in the book anyway. If Forshaw is making the second claim, he is violating the most basic rules of reading and interpretation and his conclusion is, in terms of its hermenuetics, theoretically suspect if not simply impossible. So either way, Forshaw can finally tell us nothing significant or certain about the forgers.
And there is nothing at all about this argument that is in any way circular. It is in fact, simply and completely linear, presenting two alternatives and demonstrating what conclusions are available from both. In this case, each alternative offers a similar, valid, and available conclusion.
Finally, I am not sure I follow your argument about the date. What "general knowledge" do you think is contained in the diary that would be "troublesome" for us if the forger was working before the 1980's? The creation of the melodramatic villian/killer? I'm not sure why. The simplistic positing of cuckoldry and jealousy as a motive? Certainly not. The sibling rivalry and family strife? Of course not, they are ancient and universal. The killer's voice from the Ripper letters -- the "ha ha's" and cannibalism jokes and other nonsense, etc.? Nah, they were all available going way back. What psychological constructions or "general knowledge" or "insights" appear in this diary that would be "troublesome" if the forger was writing before or after 1980?
You see, ultimately I do not believe there is anything especially profound or significantly complex or telling about any of the motives or the psychology or the voice or the Aristotilean narrative construction or the repetition or the mood swings or the poetry fragments in this book. And certainly nothing in all of this allows us to claim anything for sure about what the writers must have known about psychology or the real mind of a serial killer. There is still no way we can infer that simply from reading this text, no matter who we are or what we have been trained in or what experience we might have.
All the best,
--John |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Tuesday, 30 April 2002 - 12:14 pm | | Hi John,
So, in your opinion, it could be an old fake then?
Okay, John, let's look at this another way.
What would constitute, for you then, 'revelatory' psychology? And if this can't 'reveal' a damned thing about the author anyway, what difference does it make if there is, in your opinion, very little in the diary, or there in abundance for those with eyes to see? If it can't help you, me or the psychologists, it can't help - period.
We have 63 pages of writing, half of which you feel able to dismiss because it consists of 'repetition and family details and curses on Abberline and other mock-historical stuff'. How do you know how much 'psychological reflection' the author may have meant to convey precisely by 'the level of repeated platitudes of jealousy, anger, and addiction, and sketches of a few other mood swings'?
Did the author consciously write only 35 full pages of actual prose, spreading it over 63, to keep the risk factor low, but (in a bad attempt) to make it look good? Or was it lucky that he didn't launch into War and Peace, which would have done - what? Given the game away, 'psychologically speaking'?
Oh I forgot, we have no way of answering such questions. But couldn't I ask why our author bothered writing as much as he did? And why bother with any of the repetition etc, if all he wanted to do was forge a confession by James Maybrick to being Jack the Ripper?
I know nothing of 'revelatory' psychology and how much or how little is in the diary, or how much of it is required before it can tell us anything at all (and what that would be, in any case, if it can't be anything about the author himself). But it would be interesting to know the minimum you think your forger, modern or otherwise, could have got away with knowing (about anything) in order to produce this diary in 1992 and still not see it dead and buried a decade later.
Love,
Caz |
Author: John Omlor
Tuesday, 30 April 2002 - 05:41 pm | | Hi Caz,
Let's try and be precise here.
First of all, I am not dismissing half of the diary pages "because [they] consist of 'repetition and family details and curses on Abberline and other mock-historical stuff'." A good percentage of the pages I am dismissing are blank space on half pages and repeated poetry revisions. Now, the blank space does not, by itself, indicate for certain all that much to us specifically concerning what the authors might have known, and the repetition of verse seems to be excludable for our purposes here. The other repetition, family details, and other mock-history takes up a good portion of the 35 pages of prose that are left after you take out the blank space and the poetry revisions. And in all that, there is very little prose of an explicitly psychological nature. There is some repeated talk of cuckoldry and jealousy and sibling rivalry and addiction and anger and sadness, all offered in a repetitious and fairly obvious and explanatory manner, explicitly spelled out and insisted upon, right on the surface, for all to see, even for you and I to see.
And as I have already written repeatedly, most recently to Paul, I have no idea whether the author or forgers wrote their vague, partial, fragmented entries strategically as a way of avoiding being pinned down and caught up or because it was the best prose they could manage and their talents rested more with the word games and the materials than it did with the characterization and the voices. In fact, I have said repeatedly that this is precisely what the text does not allow us to determine, and neither I nor you nor Forshaw nor anyone can base any such conclusions concerning what the forgers might or might not have known or been deliberately doing on a reading of this prose. Consequently, I have resisted making any such conclusions and insisted that no such conclusions are validly available.
Let me put it this way. Can anyone point to any line in the diary, or any passage, and say "see, that could only have been written by someone with serious insight into the mind of a serial killer or with such experience?" If so, I wish they'd please do it. One line. One thing. One entry. One passage anywhere in the diary that could only have been written by someone with special knowledge or as the result of serious research into serial killer psychology.
I doubt I will get any serious responses.
To answer your last question, I personally think the forger could have a familiarity with the serial killers of popular film and contemporary culture and familiarity with the Ripper letters and been able to write everything, voice-wise and psychologically speaking, that appears in the diary. I don't think any more than that was necessarily needed to produce this particular prose. But if you or Forshaw or anyone thinks there is prose somewhere in this diary that would have necessarily required more than that, that would have demanded a more psychologically sensitive awareness of the main character, I'd love to see it. I don't believe there is.
And still no one can tell me what specifically the "killer" character could have written that would have psychologically disqualified this narrative and this diary. Until someone can show me what sort of lines, exactly, would have disqualified the text, psychologically (considering that diary writing is by definition a radically heterogeneous experience, even for killers, and any variation could have theoretically been accounted for within the field of differences built into the specifics of the intended "author's" subject position), I don't believe we can consider anything in this text as evidence to support any claim concerning what the writer(s) would have needed to know. Can someone specify what exactly would have been "inconsistent" with what this particular killer might have said, and how we can be sure of this? If not, and until then, the theory that the forgers had to have known something more than what literate participants in the popular culture might have known remains vague, unsupported, unreferenced, uncited, and theoretically suspect.
Finally, answering your first question last, there is nothing about the general psychology of this book, the moods and motivations and anger and reflections and rhetoric of murder and jealousy and addiction, etc., that necessitates this being an old or a new forgery. That debate turns on completely different issues, such as specific references in the text and the scientific analysis of the material and the behaviors of the participants, to name just a few. But reading the rather simplistic and repeated platitudes on the page and the general psychology of this book tells us nothing for sure about when it was written or who wrote it. Nor, of course, does anything Dr. Forshaw might have said.
That should be clear by now.
All the best,
--John
PS: There is one line in the diary which does indicate a special knowledge or the possession of specific information. "O costly intercourse of death." Someone, somewhere knew this line from this lesser work by this 17th century Metaphysical poet -- which means they at least had access to some way of knowing the line. Maybe it was in a book or something. I don't know. |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Wednesday, 01 May 2002 - 05:45 am | | Hi John,
'I personally think the forger could have a familiarity with the serial killers of popular film and contemporary culture...'
'...the theory that the forgers had to have known something more than what literate participants in the popular culture might have known remains vague, unsupported, unreferenced, uncited, and theoretically suspect.'
Isn't this perhaps all I have been asking? Fair enough, if we are dealing with an author who has that familiarity and knowledge because they were working in the 1980s. I am asking if, in your opinion (just asking, that's all), your average literate man in the street could have written every line that appears in the diary before the modern age of serial killers up to our ears, popular film etc etc. If you say yes, in your opinion, anyone from Victorian times onward could have written every line without knowing anything of the serial killer psychology we are fed these days in popular films and books, that's fine. But I'm not sure that's what you have been saying.
If we assume, as you do, that the modern Sphere Guide was used to put Crashaw in the diary, obviously the chances that James Maybrick was familiar with this poem disappear into nothingness.
We also have to assume, don't we, that if it was Mike and co who put the lines in, they didn't know about Crashaw's Whitechapel roots. The chances of this obscure poet, turning up in a document about the Whitechapel murders, and turning out to have links with the very church that gave Whitechapel its name, being plucked at random from the pages of the Sphere Guide must be fairly remote too, I'd have thought. But I already know you disagree with my assessment of those odds.
But if the lines didn't come from the Sphere Guide in modern times, someone, somewhere, chose them for another reason. Perhaps someone whose interest was focused on Whitechapel, and those he knew to be associated with the place, rather than on this one Catholic poet and his works. Just an idea that struck me as I was writing.
Love,
Caz |
Author: John Hacker
Wednesday, 01 May 2002 - 06:58 am | | John O,
You said, "And still no one can tell me what specifically the "killer" character could have written that would have psychologically disqualified this narrative and this diary."
Er, well I did post a couple of quotes from John Douglas regarding this point. But to recap: ""Even more to the point, how does a fifty-year-old man with a family, children, and no sociopathology suddenly blossom into a disorganized serial killer? He can't, and doesn't. Anyone who thinks his situation through enough to decide that he wants to kill prostitutes to get back at his wife but must do so on trips to another city, where he'll hide out, stalk women of the night, and then return to his own home, would not exactly be disorganized. In fact, I've never seen one that organized. No one plans that carefully, then goes into such a frenzy of sexual pathology."
The whole thing is broken psychologically. What the diary is suggesting is simply not plausible. A quick troll through the past century of crime literature provides a quick reality check for those in need.
Looking at the individual pieces of the thing and asking if they make sense psychologically is like worrying about sentance structure in Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Regards,
John Hacker |
Author: John Omlor
Wednesday, 01 May 2002 - 07:50 am | | Hi John,
Well, I'm not sure if I completely believe that Douglas' assertion about what patterns are possible is finally exclusive. It seems to me that one could theoretically argue that perhaps this killer was an exception to the rule or that the development of serial murderers has a necessarily heterogeneous element built into it historically speaking and that perhaps this was an example of a radical difference, etc. Douglas' observations are interesting and make sense, but I'm not sure they simply disqualify the book's words, psychologically speaking. I'm not sure there are words that actually could (other than maybe something patently absurd like "Damn, I got a paper cut this morning. Then I stubbed my toe on the bedpost. It hurts, so I think I'll go out and kill a mess o' whores." -- and given the subsequent history of the US Postal Service, I'm not even sure that would be disqualifying. )
But I do understand the point, and have never really believed the motive as it is expressed in the diary.
Hi Caz,
Concerning the psychology:
Yes. By popular culture, I didn't necessarily or exclusively mean only the popular culture since 1980. I don't see, as I've said, any specific psychological insight or motivation that could not have been available to a literate reader and participant in the popular culture of any specific time, going back to the Greeks, or at least to the popularization of Freud. No, the debate about when the diary was written, it seems to me, is not advanced in one direction or another based simply on the motivation of cuckoldry or the sibling rivalry or the rhetorics of desire and addiction or the language of anger or the change in moods -- all of which seem to me as likely to appear in a Flaubert novel as in a Michael Caine movie about Jack. (Of course, as we are discussing elsewhere, there are things, like the "close call scene" and moments in the language and the specific discussion of madness and other details which seem strangely to appear in both the diary and the movie, some without any real historical precedent or reference, which might theoretically pose a different sort of problem for dating the diary. But the psychology itself, alone, is not clearly indicative of any date, outside of our peculiar and desire-filled interpretation of it.)
As to Crashaw -- you have my position slightly backwards when you write:
"If we assume, as you do, that the modern Sphere Guide was used to put Crashaw in the diary, obviously the chances that James Maybrick was familiar with this poem disappear into nothingness."
Actually, one of the reasons I believe the Sphere Guide was used is because "the chances that James Maybrick was familiar with this poem" are already and historically all but non-existent. The place of Crashaw in the canon in the 19th century (before Eliot) and his particular position at that point in strictly Catholic circles, and the extraordinarily minor and unanthologized status of this particular work and the series of translations of which it is a part, all reduce the historical likelihood of the real James Maybrick knowing this poem to practically nothing.
And even today, this is not a work that appears in standard anthologies of the period or even of the major Metaphysicals (I have been checking for a year now), and seems to be available in its entirety exclusively in volumes of Crashaw's Complete Works or as discussed in advanced scholarly and critical editions of the period and Crashaw's work. So yes, I can say with some confidence that the Sphere Guide, which just happens to have this line from this obscure and unanthologized piece excerpted in it and which also happens to already exist within the evidentiary circle of this case, is by far the most likely source for this line's appearance in the diary.
And, by the way, Crashaw himself was not meaningfully "associated" with Whitechapel. That's an overstatement based on a piece of research that tells us of his father's historical position in the church there. But Crashaw and his family left when he was still a very young child and he never referred to the place in his poetry or his prose as far as I can see and was never linked to it professionally or even through his own eventual experience in the Church. His own historical and literary reputation is certainly not one linked with Whitechapel. This is one example of what I mean by using tangential, post facto data as part of a created interpretation that exceeds the diary text and positing it as meaningful.
All that exists in the diary is the one line. And the same one line, from an obscure and unanthologized poem that has no context in the diary, also happens to appear conveniently excerpted on a page in the middle of a prose essay in a book in the same house where the diary is first known to have been. There is simply no other believable or coherent or explainable historical or modern source yet for that line. Consequently, that essay still remains the line's most likely point of origin.
I should point out, of course , that this does not mean that Mike Barrett put it there or knew it came from there, or that Anne did, or even that the entire diary was written after the Soccer disaster (the event which resulted in the book coming to the Barrett house). None of these conclusions are yet available to us given the evidence. But the Sphere Guide and the existence of "O costly intercourse of death" in the Sphere Guide and almost nowhere else except editions of Crashaw's Complete Works and a few scholarly studies on Crashaw still remains the most significant piece of material evidence that exists in this case.
All the best,
--John |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Thursday, 02 May 2002 - 06:56 am | | Hi John,
"Damn, I got a paper cut this morning. Then I stubbed my toe on the bedpost. It hurts, so I think I'll go out and kill a mess o' whores."
Actually, I believe you may have got the psychology spot on here: on the surface we see irrational anger, felt by an irrational human being, which allows him to irrationally shift all the blame for something he himself caused to happen, onto someone, or everyone else, thereby justifying to himself any irrational act of revenge he cares to take in order to make his own hurt lessen or go away - whether it be a paper cut, or a stubbed toe, that reminds him of the deeper hurt he suffered when his mommy went off with the mailman, or he read a love letter from his wife to the man at the post house.
We'll make a trick cyclist out of you yet, able to sniff out a smooth cycle path with ease.
Love,
Caz
PS If (as you once suggested it might be) the 'O costly...' lines are a later addition, we're all back to square one.
But don't worry. I personally think Audrey Giles, assuming she hasn't done so already, would conclude that the same person wrote the whole thing.
Kane - gain?
Or Barrett - carrot?
Or even Graham - play 'em? |
Author: John Omlor
Thursday, 02 May 2002 - 07:49 am | | Hi Caz,
Yup, see, theoretically anything becomes potentially allowable -- so saying there is nothing "inconsistent" with a serial killer's voice may finally mean nothing at all, since there seems to be nothing that would ultimately and absolutely disqualify the prose, psychologically speaking (the way mention of a cell-phone would, historically speaking, for instance). A possible explanation can always be formulated after the fact.
Have we ever left square one (if square one is "the diary is a forgery")?
And since we're playing wordgames...
"Cane - gain"
Take the "ai" vowels in "gain" and use them to replace the "a" vowel in "Cane." The simple substitution gives you "Caine." Cane-gain=Caine.
A crypto-clue by a tease?
Nah. But it's fun.
--John |
Author: Peter Wood
Thursday, 02 May 2002 - 05:26 pm | | So the Crashaw line was added after the diary came into MB's possession?
Interesting theory and it would still allow for the diary being genuine ...
Peter. |
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