John Neal

As an American Studies undergraduate at Yale, I took a course in the history of witchcraft that covered both Europe and America but put particular emphasis on the Salem witch trials, which had fascinated me ever since I read Marion Starkey's majestic The Devil in Massachusetts as a teen. For my term paper, I decided to concentrate on later literary responses to those events of the 1690s; that was the wonderful thing about American Studies, you could toggle between history and literature, between sociology and visual art, and it was more than acceptable, it was expected. I found an article on "New England Witchcraft in Fiction" published by G. Harrison Orians in the journal American Literature in 1930, that discussed a number of American literary treatments of the Salem events published up to the year 1860, including seven novels that center on the events. (There were a few others that dealt with the episode tangentially, and many more fictional versions in later years.) As I recall, Orians had not been able to find a copy of one of the more obscure texts, and had to rely on descriptions for that one; but using the resources of Yale's wonderful Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I was able to find all seven novels on campus. There were several that I had to read on the Beinecke premises. It was exciting to trump an earlier scholar of American literature and, as an undergraduate, be the first to discuss these texts from experience as a complete set. I wish I still had that essay!

The seven novels were Salem Witchcraft (first published serially as Salem, An Eastern Tale) and The Salem Belle, both anonymous; The Witch of New England, also published anonymously but known to be the work of John Cadwalader McCall; William Leete Stone, The Witches; Eliza Lee, Delusion; John Neal, Rachel Dyer; and John William DeForest, Witching Times.

DeForest is the best known of these novelists, not perhaps saying much, but Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), his most famous novel, has been reprinted a number of times. Witching Times, his first novel, was only published serially in 1856-57 and didn't see hard covers until late in the 20th century. It is by far the best novel of this group of seven witchcraft novels, ethically luminous and beautifully written.

The stand-out among the others, in more ways than one, is John Neal's Rachel Dyer (1828). Even as a budding and not yet terribly well-read scholar of American literature, I could tell that Neal was one freaky novelist. Stylistically spasmodic, Rachel Dyer is composed mainly of high-intensity dialogue, some high-toned, some colloquial, some legal, unburdened by quotation marks, apparently written in a headlong rush and inviting you to read that way, too. There is no gainsaying the vividness Neal achieves, or the utter individuality of such a style in 1828 (not just in America, but anywhere). It's all a little crazy, and not exactly what you would call mature, but it's definitely something.

From Benjamin Lease's excellent biography, That Wild Fellow John Neal and the American Literary Revolution, which I just finished, I learn that Rachel Dyer is, in fact, Neal's most sedate and disciplined novel. He wrote thirteen in all, the last three being dime novels written out of "a desperate need for money"; Rachel Dyer was his seventh novel. The novels that preceded it (including the wonderfully titled debut, Keep Cool) sound like a mad, sexed-up cross between Charles Brockden Brown's Gothics and James Fenimore Cooper's historicals, written as if Neal had been taking peyote -- although, I don't think he needed drugs. I would love to read these -- Lease provides some very juicy quotations -- and now I might even be able to, because a few are available (albeit expensively) as publications-on-demand. Up till the advent of that technology, Rachel Dyer was the only Neal novel that even a university press had the cojones to reprint, and I don't think any but a few die-hard 19th century enthusiasts noticed. If William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson had ever been made aware of Neal and given the chance to read him, I guarantee you he would have been their favorite pre-20th century American novelist. Punks might like him still.

POSTSCRIPT: I looked at the Orians essay again today at the Polk Library at the University of Wisconsin -- Oshkosh. The early witchcraft novel he could not obtain to read was The Witch of New England, and he did rely on a description. He read Salem Witchcraft in its 1820 serialized version, rather than the revised 1827 book version that I read at Beinecke (of which he seems not to have been aware; even the Library of Congress doesn't appear to have a copy). Eliza Lee's Delusion was also published anonymously; Lee's authorship was established later. I made a couple of slight revisions to the main text of the post, but all in all I was remembering things pretty well at thirty years distance. I had kept a list of the novels, as I do of all books that I read.