Fitz-James O'Brien Once More

The Diamond Lens, Ferdinand Huszti Horvath 1932

This is the third in a series of three posts questioning the attributions of some short stories to Fitz-James O'Brien. The first was  "Removing a Story (via misattribution) from Fitz-James O'Brien's oeuvre", linked here; the second was "Taking Out another Story from the Fitz-James O'Brien Canon", linked here. 

"The Diamond Lens" is O'Brien's most famous story. It has been designated as a plagiarism twice, from two very different directions. 

The story appeared anonymously in third issue, January 1858, of the recently founded Atlantic Monthly. Immediately it was attacked, and there was an extensive correspondence about the situation in the New York press in February and March. 

The gist of the controversy is that some friends of William North claimed O'Brien had plagiarized a story by North, who (like O'Brien) had come to America in the early 1850s, after which he and O'Brien had become companions and friends. North killed himself by drinking Prussic acid on 14 November 1854, a little over three years before the publication of "The Diamond Lens." North's friends claimed vociferously that O'Brien had plagiarized an unpublished tale by North called "Dew Drop" or "Microcosmos."

On North's side, one said:

Among other things which he [North] wrote, was a delicious little fantasy called the 'Dew Drop' in which he saw a fairy-like and beautiful city; soon in this city he distinguished a house, in the front of the house a balcony, upon which the form of a beautiful girl, whom he watched until he became intoxicated with love for her. By and by, an elegant young man comes along, who is received with favor by the lovely maiden, whereupon the poor imaginary lover became so jealous that he dashed his dew drop to pieces, thus destroying his whole castle in the air at one blow. 

This story was circulated only in manuscript among a few intimate friends, and the idea has been wholly transferred to the "Diamond Lens," in which Mr. O'Brien sees everything that Mr. North saw in the "Dew Drop." It is mixed with some German diablerie, but all the touching, tender poetic beauty of the original is retained. (J.J, the New York correspondent of the New Orleans Delta, 7 February 1858, quoted in The New York Times, 26 February 1858)

O'Brien leapt to his own defense:

I assert, without any reservation whatever, that I am the sole author of the story called "The Diamond Lens," which was published in the January number of the Atlantic Monthly; that I am indebted to no one for any portion of the plot or language; and that previous to its composition I never had any knowledge, direct or indirect, of any similar story, whether by Mr. North or any other person. (quoted in The New York Times, 5 March 1858)

Then O'Brien curiously states:

I am very well aware that a story called "Microcosmos" was sent by Mr. Wm. North to the editor of a leading Magazine in this City. This tale was promptly rejected on account of its incoherence. The editor of the Magazine in question has a distinct recollection of Mr. North's story and states that it did not bear the slightest resemblance to "The Diamond Lens." (quoted in The New York Times, 5 March 1858)

And the controversy continued, but it could never come to any resolution, then or now, one hundred sixty-odd years later, for no manuscript of North's tale survives. We are left merely to wonder about the controversy. 

A more recent charge of plagiarism has also been levied against "The Diamond Lens." In The Literary Fantastic (1990), Neil Cornwell remarked on the similarities between Vladimir Odoevsky's "Sil'fida" ("The Sylph") and O'Brien's tale. His subsequent discovery of a translation, from an 1855 French edition of Odoevsky, attributed to O'Brien (and discussed in the second part of this series), heightened his suspicion into a charge of plagiarism, for Odoevsky's "Sylph" also appears in the French translation from which the other story certainly derived. 

In comparing the two stories, Cornwell wrote:

Both stories feature sylphs, observed with the naked eye in a vase of water (Odoevsky) or through a microscope in a drop of water (O'Brien). In both the sylphs are surrounded by poetic worlds of great beauty; the protagonists fall in love with their sylphs and lapse into madness when they lose contact with them. ("Piracy and Higher Realism: The Strange Case  of Fitz-James O'Brien and Vladimir Odoevsky" in Vladimir Odoevsky and Romantic Poetics: Collected Essays, by Neil Cornwell, 1998, p. 157). 

Which sounds damning, but reading the two stories in succession, Odoevsky first and then O'Brien, I found the style and content extremely different in the two tales, and feel that Cornwell has centered on a few almost insignificant points of similarity. But for O'Brien's use of the word sylph (once), the stories are very different, and O'Brien grounds his sylph in alchemy in ways that Odoevsky does not. It is not (to me) plagiarism.  The worst (legitimate) charge one could make against O'Brien is that he might have used one idea from Odoevsky as a springboard for an entirely different story. 

Cornwell's own translation of "The Sylph" from the Russian into English is available in The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales: Eight Stories by Vladimir Odoevsky (1992). Try it  yourself. I think "The Diamond Lens" is the superior tale, wherever O'Brien got some of its ingredients from (North or Odoevsky or both).