Yesterday, I spent the bulk of the afternoon drinking tea and watching some documentaries on HH Holmes to supplement my research, particularly as I plan to make some headway in the poems in April. I've been doing daily writings mostly for the past year, the difference in this endeavor that I will also be writing on the weekends (I'm away next weekend without a laptop, so I may very fail in this.) I will also be posting bits daily on this very blog as I go.
One article I read compared Holmes to Paul Bunyan, as this piece of American folklore--particularly at the place where fact meets fictions. Even Holmes' own accounts of his victims are subject to suspicion and suspected over inflation. He was a compulsive liar, of course, and journalism in the 1890's was apparently just as polluted as in the modern age--people didn't seem to have much distinction between actual newspaper write-ups and grocery store tabloids. Thus, the stories grew and transformed--a basement full of remains and torture devices in Chicago (this probably isn't true). He was caught and prosecuted after the remains of the children he went on the run with (the family of his business partner, whom he'd murdered to get insurance money) were found in another state. While the lore is that the Murder Castle lured unsupecting Worlds Fair women to their deaths by the hundreds, it seems more true to say he was responsible for the deaths of a number of women he was somehow involved with and those numbers are just part of the legend.
Mostly he seems to be a swindler and insurance fraudster with a compulsion to kill the women he slept with (and sometimes their children and family members). And really just a sociopath. I've seen the personality type in real life--just not the violence. Even the hotel seemed to be a botched thing--mostly he ripped off carpenters and contractors and it was firetrap he intended to burn for insurance money according to one source. And yet, there was a dude in one of the doc talking about what a genius he was. Yeah, no...
The legends themselves of course are delightful fun--the quicklime vat in the basement, the rooms that were tiny asphyxiation chambers. And wholly, as a cultural force, the folklore is far more interesting than the facts. When I was writing the Resurrection Mary poems, years ago, I felt a little like, since there was no definitive version of the truth, I was weaving my own interpretation into the fabric of culture. I'm hoping to get a little of this dynamic happening with this project.
