Strong metonymy: reading the souls of Belasco’s storied things

The word ‘psychometry’, coined in 1842 by the American reformer, physician and spiritualist Joseph Rodes Buchanan (1814–99), expressed a new science and art of ‘soul-measuring’, and was intended by Buchanan to be analogous with thermometry and barometry, devices which registered measurements of the invisible presence of temperature and air pressure.Footnote ¹³ The reigning premise behind psychometry was the proposition that humans who had owned and handled things left traces of themselves, their histories and their surroundings on the surfaces of the objects. The psychometer (or psychometrist – the two terms were used interchangeably), in a manner similar to the thermometer and barometer, ‘read’ these object histories by touching or holding them, thereby registering their invisible, ethereal, human emanations.Footnote ¹⁴ Though remaining on the fringes of mainstream scientific thought, psychometry persisted and somewhat flourished deep into the twentieth century in the popular imagination, remaining particularly visible in spiritualist and psychical research circles. Visualizing images revealed by psychometric object reading also shared a strong affinity with the stereoscope, a popular domestic device that presented scenes on flat stereograph cards in a virtual three-dimensional format.Footnote ¹⁵ Psychometry should thus be understood as a technology of the imagination that aligned with a number of domestic visual and haptic devices reading invisible presences or visualizing personal and historical scenes.

Drawing upon and extending the influential account of object allusions offered by Elaine Freedgood in The Ideas in Things: Figurative Meaning in the Victorian Novel (2006), we can conceptualize a material theatre history whereby psychometry functions as what she terms ‘strong metonymy’, a ‘thick description’ that delineates the deeper content of objects and things. Psychometry as strong metonymy reveals intimate associations of an object’s history and stands in stark contrast to a weak metonymy that suggests only superficial impressions.Footnote ¹⁶ Freedgood seemingly casts a nod to the possibility of psychometry as a tool for reading objects with her reference to ‘the knowledge that is stockpiled in … things’, emphasizing that to access this hidden knowledge, readers of fiction ‘must follow … the protocols of the collector’.Footnote ¹⁷ Belasco, as the collector of a studio full of curios, antiques and collectibles, presented to himself and those who gazed upon his collection a rich archive inviting a ‘strong form of metonymic reading’ that Freedgood terms the ‘metonymic imagination’, described by her as ‘the cognitive motor of the reading process’.Footnote ¹⁸

In his own practice of strong metonymic reading, Belasco overcame the ‘gulf of time and space’ as he gazed ‘down the corridors of time and through the mists of memory’.Footnote ¹⁹ An example of Belasco’s metonymic imagination is his ‘reading’ of a set of old, worn and faded plush red mahogany sofa and chairs purchased from an antique dealer and stored in the Belasco Theatre basement. Not only does Belasco ‘conjure up the picture’ of past persons and events associated with the furniture, but also he envisions a play in his mind crafted around the old mahogany sofa and chairs. Though the details were incomplete, Belasco had caught from the furniture the ‘idea’ of a play depicting the lives of a ‘not too prosperous Southern family … in an old Virginia town’ in which the history of the family is metonymically revealed by the worn old furniture, which would then impart ‘soul’ into the play.Footnote ²⁰

Psychometry as both a specialized and generalized quotidian spiritual science dealing with the storied lives of things was part of the broader nineteenth-century cultural interest gathered around curios, antiques and a miscellaneous range of paraphernalia.Footnote ²¹ The craze for antique collecting ushered in popular varieties of psychometry, where the collector, antique dealer and home dweller all became amateur psychometrists, endowing their possessions with a ‘mystical aura’ that invited discerning the traces of previous times embedded within their surfaces.Footnote ²² Psychometry also emerged from the feminization of sensitivity and intuitive feeling in the Western world, a post-Enlightenment development accelerated, according to Terry Castle, by ‘moralized’ weatherglasses (barometers and thermometers) which came ‘to symbolize the feminization of human nature’.Footnote ²³ Accordingly, the psychometer, as a reader of things, became like ‘a delicate barometer’ with ‘feminine intuition … exalted’ to a remarkable degree.Footnote ²⁴ Only those persons possessing the most sensitive souls could become effective psychometric instruments, and writers on psychometry emphasized that feminized feelings were crucial to the practice, becoming a prerequisite for feeling the ‘mysterious energies’ radiating from things.Footnote ²⁵ As noted by James Gibbons Huneker, David Belasco fit this description well, possessing ‘a generous admixture of feminine sensitivity and intuition’, along with ‘a temperament that feels before it reasons’.Footnote ²⁶ Huneker attributed to Belasco ‘a sixth sense’, making him ‘an agent of clairvoyance’ for ‘[i]n his art Belasco is clairvoyant’.Footnote ²⁷ Although Huneker was referring to Belasco’s psychological management of people – the performers in his plays – the argument can be extended to his reading and handling of objects and things. As Belasco himself proclaimed on more than one occasion, ‘I see much; I feel more’, implying he possessed a deeply felt intuitive sense of the things which surrounded him.Footnote ²⁸

Psychometrically speaking and spiritually feeling the Belasco collection

A number of accounts by notable women journalists, including Djuna Barnes, Mary Watts, Gertrude Gordon and Julia Chandler Manz, appearing in newspaper columns or in published interviews, recorded their own impressions of invited tours of the Belasco penthouse studio. Mary Watts wrote of the ‘long, narrow stairs’ she climbed outside the rear entrance of the Belasco Theatre before reaching a ‘magic door’ that opened into ‘a magic realm’. Belasco’s eleven-room studio apartment, she marvelled, was ‘filled with … beautiful and interesting objects that … appeal to the imagination by their romantic or historic significance’.Footnote ²⁹ She observed how Belasco stepped ‘softly among his treasures’, opening cabinets now and then to pick something up and relate ‘some romantic story’. As Belasco told her, ‘I wander about here often by myself looking things over and they seem to speak to me as clearly as human beings’.Footnote ³⁰ Julia Chandler Manz also described entering into an ‘Arabian Night’s Tale’ filled with a collection of things ‘representing the most remarkable private ownership in the world’.Footnote ³¹ She spoke of entering the Napoleonic or Empire Room where ‘the spirit of Napoleon breathes from treasures which touched his person’, and was struck by the gentle manner in which Belasco ‘laid a caressing hand on the hat worn by the emperor’.Footnote ³² For Gertrude Gordon the rooms were ‘like a museum’, noting that Belasco knew the story of ‘every article’ in the collection, always picking up things and telling their histories. ‘His tender smile, his bent white head, his softly moving hands, and his gentle voice’, she admiringly observed, ‘shed an aura of protective love over these beautiful, beautiful things he has gathered’.Footnote ³³

As far as Djuna Barnes was concerned, there were ‘almost too many beautiful things’, and the rooms ‘seemed overcrowded with emotion’.Footnote ³⁴ In the Italian room what caught her attention was ‘a large, ivory Christ, flanked on either side by beautiful thieves with heads hung down – a mystic thing glowing in a mystic dark’. Upon noticing the passing through of ‘two tall women’ in ‘white headpieces’, Belasco informed her that they were cleaning ladies who spoke little English and cared for the studio. He said that on Sundays, their day off, he would find them in the Italian room kneeling in quiet prayer before the figure of Christ flanked by the two thieves.Footnote ³⁵ For these two women, he told Barnes, the room served as ‘a private place of devotion and worship’, giving the room ‘something that it would otherwise lack’.Footnote ³⁶ Theatre scene designer Bruce Bergner, in writing on the question of the ‘spirituality of space’, suggests that spaces have souls, rendering them places that then speak to the souls of those who encounter and emotionally engage with them.Footnote ³⁷ If Djuna Barnes felt that Belasco’s studio rooms were ‘overcrowded with emotion’, it was because, as Bonnie Ginger surmised, Belasco had ‘gathered up all [the] emotions and experiences’ the world had to offer.Footnote ³⁸ As Belasco put it to her, ‘there is not a human emotion I haven’t felt, as there is not, I believe, a human experience I haven’t come in contact with, so that I feel I have seen and known almost every phase of human existence’.Footnote ³⁹ More than that, the objects and things he collected had also witnessed all the human emotions and they too had ‘things to say’ about their past and the world around them.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ginger declared that Belasco ‘communes’ with his things and that if a poem about his studio should ever be composed, it would be called ‘Voices of the Room’, signifying the ‘air of great intimacy between him, [his] relics’ and their mutual understanding as he spoke to and of them, all the time the objects ‘nodding at each other in the most knowing way, as if they understood all about it too’.Footnote ⁴¹

One final account in particular gets to the heart of the theme this paper raises, that of Belasco’s strong belief in spiritualism and the presence of spirits in the human world. Mary Watts was with Belasco on a one-hour guided tour of his studio when, in the so-called Gothic room, Belasco, with a key carried in his coat pocket, unlocked a series of lighted wall cabinets containing a remarkably large collection of necklaces, some of which, Belasco claimed, were nearly 6,000 years old.Footnote ⁴² He then told Watts about the death of his daughter Augusta (Mrs William Elliot), who was lost to tuberculosis in 1911. ‘These chains belong to her’, he acknowledged, as both gazed admiringly into the cabinets. ‘Often when I am here alone I come out here to look them over’, Belasco quietly mused, ‘and it seems to me that she is here with me. I can see her trying them on and hear her commenting on them.’Footnote ⁴³ Watts then inquired whether Belasco believed in spiritualism, to which he responded, ‘Oh yes, I am sure that it is true that the dead are still with us, and I believe in reincarnation also. The souls of the dead are all around us. Often it seems to me that this room is peopled with those men and women whose possessions I have gathered here.’Footnote ⁴⁴ For Belasco, the objects dear to him possessed an affective radiance or ambience that gave them a strong spiritual and psychometric allure. He also brought forth an intuitive, extra-rational understanding from visitors of the mystical import the collections held for him.

The 1911 archival expedition to Alexandria, Virginia

On 3 November 1911, Belasco, in the company of actress Frances Starr, stage manager William J. Dean and the Belasco Theatre treasurer, embarked on a one-day excursion to Alexandria, VA to inspect the holdings of an antique dealer/hotel museum proprietor and finished the day purchasing nearly everything the dealer owned, as well as a variety of things from townspeople and citizenry from nearby farms. After purchasing a number of items, including a sword supposedly surrendered by Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, from an Alexandria antique store owned by William W. Simpson, the shop owner informed Belasco that he also managed a hotel museum at the city’s Braddock Hotel and Carlyle House, where there was a fair amount of old furniture, chinaware and firearms that might be of interest to Belasco.Footnote ⁴⁵ After inspecting the holdings of the nearby, adjacent sites, Belasco offered to buy everything in both the Carlyle House and Braddock Hotel, inquiring what the proprietor would take for the entire inventory. Simpson came back with a price he believed would dissuade Belasco but the theatre director agreed to the amount, upon which Belasco hired a local crew of workers to box and crate the entire Carlyle and Braddock museum holdings. Two rail freight cars were required to ship the items back to New York, where they would find new homes in the Belasco Theatre basement and warehouses located nearby. For payment, Belasco offered Simpson a personal check but the dealer refused, saying to a member of Belasco’s party that he did not know ‘Dave Blasko or whatever his name is’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Belasco’s treasurer thereupon paid a few hundred dollars in cash and gave Simpson a corporate check for the balance. When asked by a reporter about his newly acquired purchases, Belasco seemed elated. One particular three-piece bedroom set consisting of a dresser, washstand and towel rack, with their blue paint faded and ‘softened by age’, greatly appealed to Belasco, who beamed, ‘To me it is worth more than I paid for the entire collection.’Footnote ⁴⁷

News of the big purchases quickly spread throughout Alexandria and when the Belasco party was set to leave, they were met by a throng of townspeople and farmers eager to sell their old family belongings. ‘We said we wanted some old lamps’, William Dean told a reporter for the Washington Post, ‘and the villagers collected 21. So we just bought them all.’Footnote ⁴⁸ After making stops at a few nearby homes and farmhouses, purchasing at every stop, Belasco began to fear he would be looked upon as a raider of relics, in the manner of wealthy Americans who visited foreign countries, buying up rare art objects and shipping them back home. Instead, locals, none of whom recognized Belasco, thought he was something of a ‘fool collector’ who could be ‘buncoed into paying good money for a lot of junk’.Footnote ⁴⁹ ‘It is junk, a lot of it,’ Belasco admitted, ‘no responsible antique dealer, no collector with any sense of values would give most of it a thought. But it means a lot to me.’Footnote ⁵⁰ His thoughts particularly returned to the old chest of drawers in faded blue paint, looking shabby and well worn. Simpson had told Belasco and Dean that the old chest had once belonged to George Washington, but added, smiling sheepishly, ‘I’ve sold 17 chests that are supposed to have belonged to Washington. I don’t suppose he could have had so many in this one town.’Footnote ⁵¹ ‘We don’t believe the Washington stories’, Dean said, ‘But we do know that these are genuinely old, and that they really have been parts of people’s lives. That’s what matters to us.’Footnote ⁵²

Haunted archives and ghosts of material pasts

In addition to his theatre basement and studio apartment, Belasco also had a storeroom and larger warehouse at 511 West 46th Street filled with curios and antiques believed by Belasco and his property men to be haunted. Matthew Purcell, chief property man for the Belasco Theatre, told reporter Frank Vreeland that nightwatchmen from a private security firm had refused to enter either of the two sites unless Belasco property men accompanied them, particularly after one of the watchmen shot up the warehouse walls with his revolver when he thought he saw figures moving about. Even the smaller storeroom, according to Vreeland, had a ‘spooky … eerie atmosphere’, with ‘supernatural forms seeming to float near the ceiling’, even though afterward he determined that they were just ‘silken hangings’ from Polly with a Past (1917).Footnote ⁵³ A belief that people could feel that a room was haunted and that haunted rooms were ‘always full of shadows’ that could ‘rise in the corners of the room, and creep across the floor’, circulated widely at the time Vreeland’s article on Belasco’s haunted storerooms appeared.Footnote ⁵⁴ As one contemporary account put it, ‘In a haunted room there is always a shadow above one’s head’ with a ‘hovering cloud between the ceiling and midway to the floor’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Vreeland himself reported that he heard ‘the wailing of children, the yowling of cats, and the slamming of a cabinet door’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Spectres haunting the storeroom may have been drawn to items from prior Belasco productions, as well as collectables and prints relating to theatre history. Strung on wires near the ceiling, for example, were old Indian wicker baskets used in The Heart of Wetona (1916), while on top of cabinets nearby was an early nineteenth-century painted hatbox full of women’s hats worn by Frances Starr in Little Lady in Blue (1916). A Mexican guitar played in The Rose of the Rancho (1906) and a moon harp seen in The Darling of the Gods (1902) cast their shadows on a stack of telephone books from The Woman (1911).Footnote ⁵⁷ All these items from prior Belasco plays, it seemed, were inviting targets for ghostly visitations.

Particular theatre souvenirs from non-Belasco productions may also have served as objects of ghostly attraction. Displayed on a wall of the storeroom that highlighted an event of profound historical tragedy was an original programme for Our American Cousin which had played at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on the night Lincoln was assassinated. Along with engravings depicting the killing of John Wilkes Booth, a large portrait of Junius Brutus Booth in Richard III stood out among pictures of famous stage performers. Displayed also was a programme for the Hamlet benefit play on behalf of Lester Wallack performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on 21 May 1888. The play featured a distinguished cast, including Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, Frank Mayo, Herbert Kelcey, Joseph Jefferson, W. J. Florence, Helena Modjeska and Rose Coghlan. There were also a number of advertising flyers promoting Jefferson and Florence in The Rivals (1889) along with a cast that included Mrs John Drew and Viola Allen.Footnote ⁵⁸ Numerous other portraits, posters and programmes covered the storeroom walls, providing an attractive setting for drawing ghosts. According to social theorist Michael Bell, people ‘live in landscapes filled with ghosts’ and the places ‘pass[ed] through each day are inhabited, possessed, by spirits we cannot see but whose presence we nevertheless experience’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Ghosts, he continues, although ‘fabrications, products of imagination, [and] social constructions’, are nonetheless ‘ubiquitous in the places in which we live’, giving ‘life to those places’.Footnote ⁶⁰ While it is ‘only people who can conjure them up’, Bell insists, ghosts ‘are still, very real’.Footnote ⁶¹

Psychometry and theatre’s materials

The Belasco Theatre located on West 44th Street is regarded today as more than just a setting in which audiences came to enjoy plays of admired performers. As presented here, the studio apartment atop the Belasco Theatre resonated with spiritual and highly charged emotional attachments to the storied objects it housed. This essay has approached the material culture of the Belasco collections through a psychometric and spiritualist prism, which is in line with the understanding of reality and worldly experience held by Belasco himself. The spiritualized, animated studio in which objects seemed to speak became a form of theatre with guests escorted in guided museum-like tours. Belasco, a confessed believer in spiritualism, was also a kind of psychometrist in his purported clairvoyant ability to read the stories and emotions of antiques and metonymically imagine them in play scripts he was toying with in his mind. As Belasco and his guests moved through the rooms, they physically sensed and felt invisible presences and emanations from the myriad collection of antiques and collectibles. His storerooms and warehouses too were seemingly haunted by ghosts drawn to the materials of past theatrical plays.

Even beyond Belasco, varieties of object animism and psychometry routinely present themselves in the myriad ways in which objects are treated as if they were sentient subjects. Examples are abundant. Museum-goers and art show attendees, when contemplating artefacts before them, ‘see the presence of a subject or a soul’, implying that ‘in front of artistic objects we are all animists’.Footnote ⁶² In a similar sense we are all psychometrists, drawing upon a metonymic imagination from the objects which surround us in our homes. As put by one animist theorist, home is the place where we relate to our possessions as if they ‘were populated by souls different from our own’.Footnote ⁶³

Theatre history has always been a ‘thick’ academic enterprise incorporating ideas and concepts from numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Psychometry also, as a possible metonymical methodology in theatre historiography, incorporates a range of disciplines including, but not limited to, material-culture studies, art history, affect studies, museology and object relations studies. As theatre historians we should be able, through intuition and imagination, to grasp insights not just from the things we physically touch in archives but also from the evidence that we assemble and from the scenes of sets and plays we set out to investigate. Such an imaginative methodological approach has recently been suggested by two theatre historians calling ‘for a more expansive approach to the materiality of theatre history’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson, in their recent essay collection on theatre historiography, discuss the affective qualities in handling and touching archival materials, believing it the job of the theatre historian when reading such materials to undertake ‘investigative action with informed speculation and imaginative, empathetic engagement’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Such a perspective has already penetrated art history, where art historian Jennifer Fisher has explicitly argued for the employment of psychometry as a research tool that can provide a ‘haptic ability to reconstitute the affective dimensions of artifacts … beyond linear conceptions of art’s histories’.Footnote ⁶⁶ While not ‘asserting any literal claims to its “truth”’, Fisher nonetheless points to some rather ‘convincing’ psychometric experiments that suggest its applicability as a contributor ‘to the forensic methods of art history’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Heterodoxy and non-conventional methodologies in the form of strong metonymic imaginaries and speculative psychometric perspectives do have a place in the ontological and epistemological considerations of theatre historiography and may offer methodological avenues to non-standard depictions of knowledge production in theatre history.

Auction sales and the departing despair of Belasco’s theatre things

This paper has proposed extending theatre’s archives to hotel museums, antique shops and warehouse storerooms.Footnote ⁶⁸ In addition, auction houses, like museums, are a type of theatre, in the words of Marc Robinson ‘the purest [of] performance[s]’, in which curious treasure seekers and prospective bidders come to see a staged play featuring objects and people directed by auctioneers.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the auction house, objects become animated, exhibiting enormous agency as they spur humans to action or inaction – bidding on things or holding back, but always attending to the performance with great interest. The departure of a portion of Belasco’s storied things began with a New York auction offered by the American Art Association Anderson galleries, where over 1,700 items were put on exhibition for the public to inspect over a four-day period before the auction began on 20 October 1924.Footnote ⁷⁰ Upon Belasco’s death in 1931, his surviving daughter, Reina Belasco Gest, arranged for the Anderson galleries to auction off the entirety of her father’s vast collection. The catalogue printed for the sale ran nearly 200 pages, listing 1,239 lots with many lots comprising multiple items.Footnote ⁷¹ His daughter informed the press that she and her husband Morris Gest had to dispose of everything as there was no room in their home for the items and that it would require ‘an apartment the size of an armory’ to store all the things her father had accumulated over the years.Footnote ⁷² The gallery placed all lots on display several days prior to the afternoon sales running from 8 to 12 December 1931.

Unfortunately for the Gests, the auction was not a financial success, most likely because the nation was in the throes of the Great Depression, and items were pulled from the sale or purchased by the Gests at very low prices. About one year later, Belasco’s things were once again put up for auction, this time by the firm of Kaliski and Gabay. Nearly 4,000 items, including Belasco’s beloved Napoleonic and necklace collections, were put on display three days prior to the January 1933 sale at their auction house at 88 University Place in New York for interested prospective purchasers to examine.Footnote ⁷³ Much to the sorrow of these items destined for unknown parts, no sentimental feelings or storied pasts were attached to their value. They had just become more or less lifeless things, bereft of the emotional content and psychometric promptings evident in the Belasco studio guided tours.Footnote ⁷⁴ As auctioneer Arthur Kaliski put it, ‘We are selling everything in the estate – selling it purely for the commercial value … Oh, we might say that some of this early maple furniture probably was in Mr. B’s bedroom. But we really don’t know much about much of it.’Footnote ⁷⁵ And this auction too was riddled with much disappointment. No one, for example, put up the minimum one-dollar bid for an original oil portrait of Lenore Ulric, a Belasco leading lady from the mid-1910s to the 1920s. Kaliski angrily withdrew the painting, complaining, ‘I have never been so insulted [and] in my own house.’Footnote ⁷⁶

The final chapter in the storied lives of Belasco’s things concluded with a series of auctions from the estate of Belasco’s son-in-law, theatre producer Morris Gest, who died in 1942, and his wife Reina Belasco Gest, who died in 1948. Their possessions, including what they had saved from Belasco’s collections, were auctioned off into the hands of strangers. Items were sold at clearance prices – a bundle of elegant and colourful scarfs worn by Isadora Duncan and collected by both David Belasco and Morris Gest went for twenty dollars ($260 in 2024 dollars). One of them, thought Joseph Kaye, might have been the very scarf that strangled Duncan when she became entangled in the wheel well of a car in 1927 in Nice, France. Other items sold for even smaller sums, including a box of Belasco’s ministerial ties purchased for eight dollars.Footnote ⁷⁷ With the death of Morris and Reina Gest, their home at 71 East 52nd Street in Manhattan stood ‘gaunt [and] empty’ … while ‘on the old floors once trodden by the great, mice leave tracks through the thickening dust, and pieces of plaster tumble down … It’s a sad last act to a brilliant play.’ The last of Belasco’s theatre things, auctioned away devoid of emotional value and spiritual content, passed on sorrowfully into indifferent hands, never again to be caressed with the caring devotion and loving attention so affectionately given by David Belasco. Nor would they ever speak again to him or perhaps to anyone else. They became as silent as Belasco himself.