Metaphysical obstetrics
As with money, others took the risks but the benefit went to her alone. She took the credit for successful healing, but when things went wrong she disowned the practitioner. There was an outcry in 1888 when a Mrs Corner attended her own daughter in childbirth, and both mother and baby died. Some Christian Science students tried to rally round the (doubly) bereaved woman, who had handled the accouchement in accordance with Christian Science practice, but Mrs Eddy wasn’t sentimental where bad publicity was involved. A statement was issued on behalf of the church pointing out, as if in sorrow, that Mrs Corner hadn’t studied obstetrics at the approved institution. Hardly surprising, since courses in metaphysical obstetrics had only recently been set up. The grieving mother was branded a quack, and the church moved on.
In her long-delayed, long-lasting heyday, Mrs Eddy was less like a person than a confluence of rivers, one of cash and one of prestige. Yet the night terrors never left her.
She depended on charismatic recruits, but was also afraid of them. Might they not break away or seek to usurp her place? She created insurance policies against rebels and rivals. The bye-laws of the Christian Scientists’ Association included this sublime combination of propositions:
‘Resolved, That every one who wishes to withdraw without reason shall be considered to have broken his oath.
‘Resolved, That breaking the Christian Scientist’s oath is immorality.’
That took care of the rebels. In 1895 she abolished the post of pastor: instead there would be Readers, whose job was literally Reading, reading aloud from the Bible and (more importantly) from Science and Health. They were required to identify her by name every time they read from her Book. They were to make no explanatory remarks. Nor should there be discussion of any sort afterwards – in any case she was to be notified of any meeting of church members, just to be safe. Rather, individuals should depart ‘in quiet thought’. She had sealed the exit doors: now she pumped all the air out of the hall. And that took care of any rivals.
I started toying, idly and then more diligently, with the idea of writing a play about Mrs Eddy. Jimmy Kettle, the pupil at Vulcan who had first sold me on the world-beating genius of Tennessee Williams, had gone on to write a play of his own (or at least to start one) based on something that had happened on school premises. Why shouldn’t I have a go myself? Bearing in mind that no one would write a tour de force solo turn for me as an immobile actor with no experience, I would have to do it myself – and in that respect Mary Baker Eddy was a gift of a subject. Power, delusion and speaking on God’s behalf. Hard to go wrong, really.
It would be awkward if my play was put on in a church hall somewhere before Jimmy Kettle’s first masterpiece was presented on Broadway or the West End, but it couldn’t be helped. We were all grown-ups.
It made sense to set my play in Mrs Eddy’s last home, Chestnut Hill in Massachusetts. I had my title already! I wrote the words Chestnut Hill in different styles of handwriting, and also explored the look of it in shorthand (Pitman and Gregg). In fact her previous home, Pleasant View, would have provided a more satisfactory title, but there was no help for that. I couldn’t play ducks and drakes with the facts of a life, even if the life in question was more of a cautionary tale than a template for virtue or happiness.
There was certainly plenty of material. In fact Mrs Eddy’s velvet-gown-and-diamonds period hadn’t lasted long, and she had begun to withdraw relatively early. She moved to Concord, Massachusetts, some way from the church’s core constituency in Boston. The intention was not to consolidate her mystique by making her unavailable, but that was the happy result.
Mrs Eddy didn’t altogether disappear from public view. She would take a daily drive in a carriage, whatever the weather. Except that she was often too unwell to do so. On those days she would be impersonated on her outing. A white-haired woman muffled up to the ears in fur would take her place in the carriage, unobtrusively adjusting the angle of her parasol so as to shield her face from any observers.
Even so, it seemed there was no safety to be had from malicious animal magnetism. Mailboxes were particularly easily charged with it, so letters would be bundled up for posting far from home. Pleasant View became a place of fear. Mrs Leonard, the woman who had so helpfully impersonated the Pastor Emeritus in her carriage, died of diabetes. She was sixty-nine, quite an age at the time, but living in Science with nothing to fear – and fifteen years younger than She whose place she was taking. It seemed clear that the innocent with the sunshade had paid a terrible price for the service she rendered. The decoy had put herself in the firing line, and her health had been broken by invisible rays meant for Mrs Eddy. The poisoned darts had missed their intended target, but they had landed where they were sent.
Contriving to fling mesmerised trains
Mrs Eddy took the decision to move from New Hampshire altogether. She had been disrespectfully treated by the local press in Concord, to the point where she had been required to demonstrate her mental competence in a court of law. If I had been writing a proper play, with multiple characters, this would have been a scene of wild comedy, with the omnipotent bureaucrat being dragged into court and required to prove that she was in possession of all her marbles, rather than some confused old dear being manipulated and bled white by those she trusted.
The quest for a new home was an urgent one, the need for secrecy vital. Her trustees found her a suitable nest – this was Chestnut Hill, a stone mansion of some thirty-four rooms, set in twelve acres of woodland. They set about modifying it to her requirements at extreme speed. Hundreds of labourers worked in shifts day and night, with prodigious arc-lights making good the short hours of winter sunlight. Mrs Eddy’s personal chambers exactly reproduced the layout and decor of her rooms at Pleasant View. There was an electric lift to spare her the effort of stairs. Steel safes were set in the walls of the landings, for the safe storage of documents – many of them giving accounts of her past rather different from the approved version. She had steadily been acquiring these for years. In the protected spaces of Mrs Eddy’s safes the urge to suppress information and the urge to preserve it reached a strange equilibrium, a sort of peace.
The actual transfer of Mrs Eddy from one place to another involved activity more appropriate to an army on manœuvres than an individual moving house. Everything was done at night and in secrecy. Only when all the baggage had been delivered and installed did the mistress of the house follow with her retinue. She travelled by train, but not in the ordinary way. One locomotive went ahead of her train, and another drew up the rear, in a sort of convoy arrangement. It isn’t clear whether the extra locomotives were there to block with sheer metallic bulk the rays of malign animal magnetism, or whether they were physical barriers, shock absorbers even, in the event that mental malpracticians maddened with hate somehow contrived to fling against their target mesmerised trains of their own. The precautions were effective, and the party travelled to Chestnut Hill without incident.
When the doors of the great house closed behind Mrs Eddy, they were locked and barred from within, and six armed men kept watch that night outside the house. What they were shutting out, of course, was far less relevant than what they were shutting in – a woman who had set her face against dying, but whose body, approaching its ninetieth year, was making its own arrangements. This was the point at which my play, my monologue, my one-man-show, began.
That was the theory. In practice I couldn’t make the monster come alive on the page, and it was all very well having her look back on her long and crowded life, all the way to those early years which she had largely obliterated from the record, sending her agents to buy up documentary evidence, but there was such a lot to explain and organise. And how much was she supposed to know about herself? She couldn’t be a complete hypocrite (no one would invent something as zany as Christian Science for fun), but nor could she completely toe her own party’s line. If she had doubts then I had to show them plausibly poking through
. It was harder than any school essay. Getting under Lorca’s tingling skin was a pushover by comparison.
I decided to compromise by introducing another character as a foil for Mrs Eddy. A two-hander wasn’t a lot less practical to stage than a solo act, and it would be far easier to get the words flowing. The other part would be a newcomer to the set-up at Chestnut Hill, thus doing most of my work for me.
Despite all the secrecy of the organisation this could smoothly be managed, thanks to a peculiarity of the church’s constitution. It was one of the bye-laws that any church member must be available to serve Mrs Eddy in her home, at ten days’ notice. The membership roster was a permanent solution to the servant problem! The stipulated period was originally a year, which was then raised to three. A member conscripted to the household staff in this way but leaving before due time, ‘upon Mrs. Eddy’s complaint thereof, shall be excommunicated from The Mother Church’.
In practice the bye-law wasn’t invoked. It was best if the actual atmosphere of the household didn’t become too widely known. Those who knew Mrs Eddy day to day found it hard to hold on to their admiration. Sometimes she was serene, lovable and wholly electric with dynamic charm, and sometimes … sometimes she was not. There was no shortage of willing helpers, which was a mercy. In those days gossip networks were very local. As long as servants were recruited from distant towns (or preferably farms), and returned there after their term of service, then Mrs Eddy’s name was likely to keep its lustre. At last Christian Science had found a purpose for the poor and the poor in heart.
Enter, in my play, farm-girl of Irish descent Ellen McAlvey, seventeen, unable to believe her luck at joining the household of a living God. A trusting girl in the house of the Most High.
My title creaked and shifted under the weight of the new character, the new situation. It became The Prophetess and the Colleen. I was very happy with that. I absolutely adored the word ‘colleen’, but it’s not an easy one to bring into general conversation.
I found no difficulty in writing speeches for this subsidiary character, her elation slightly dashed by the discovery that it was part of her duties, as a member of the household, to prevent such common occurrences of Error as snowfalls and thunderstorms. Ellen fully believed that Mother could dissipate a storm-cloud simply by looking at it, but doubted her own talents in that line.
When the shrieking started in the night, and Ellen took her place among the watchers round Mother’s bedside, all of them facing outwards to counter the incoming storm of malicious animal magnetism, her faith was not shaken. Indeed it was intensified by the revelation of how desperately Mother’s enemies wanted to harm her and bring her ministry down.
Sleepless nights, though, began to take a toll on her emotional stability … All in all, Ellen’s voice rather went to my head. Reading what I had set down, I kept vowing to cut down on charm and Irishry, but in practice each draft was more blarney-ridden than the last. There was an Irish nurse doing shifts at the time, who greeted the smallest deviation from routine with formulas like ‘That just about put the heart across me’. Ellen picked up her bad habits and added more.
Neutralising opiates on a fantastic scale
It wasn’t hard to decide on the climactic incident of the drama. Late editions of Science and Health took an oddly sophistical position about morphine, authorising its injection in cases of violent pain, not to relieve pain but to lull the belief in it, after which the sufferer would recover the ability to handle his or her own case mentally.
There had been reports from the 1870s of Mrs Eddy’s own use of the drug. Continuing rumours prompted an article in which she acknowledged that in the distant past her regular physician had prescribed morphine, ‘when he could do no more for me’, but that the glorious revelations of Christian Science had made it redundant. True, she had voluntarily taken large doses at one time, but that was to ascertain whether Christian Science could block the working of the drug – ‘I say with tearful thanks, “The drug has no effect upon me whatever.”’
In 1906 she wrote to the directors of her board of trustees asking that three more students be taught by a doctor the technique of giving morphine by hypodermic injections (in addition to the household attendant who already had that skill). Three more students! What must the directors have thought? Perhaps only that she was exercising Mind’s sovereign power as only she knew how, and neutralising opiates on a fantastic scale. She often said, ‘I am working on a plane that would mean instantaneous death to any of you …’ Perhaps this was what she meant.
At the climax of my play Ellen was present and keeping vigil when Mrs Eddy begged and pleaded for her dose of morphine. Ellen was horrified when one of her attendants seemed to be preparing an injection – clearly a traitor who was trying to poison the living God. She tried to dash the syringe out of the attendant’s hands and received a slap in the face for her trouble. Ellen watched in disbelief as the injection was given and peace came to the Pastor Emeritus at last.
At this point in my thinking, I realised that this was no longer a play about Mary Baker Eddy but about Ellen McAlvey. My title gave ground reluctantly with the burden of this new emphasis, and became The Colleen and the Prophetess.
Then at last I realised that there was no need for Mrs Eddy to appear in the play at all, since whenever Ellen had dealings with her she was either shrieking in terror or begging for morphine. I was writing a solo drama after all, but it was a one-woman show, and it wasn’t about a fascinating public figure but about a woman who didn’t exist. My title became The Colleen just before, with a final despairing crack, it splintered to matchwood.
I abandoned my grandiose scheme, retiring hurt from the competitive world of play-writing and leaving the field to Jimmy Kettle. I had no interest in writing a play I couldn’t perform. I couldn’t expect literary endeavour to take me out of my wheelchair, but I could reasonably expect it to get the wheelchair on stage, with me in it. That had been the whole point.
It was a shame. I would have liked to invite Granny to my first night, so as to hear what she had to say afterward. ‘What an abominable creature, and an historical personage of no interest whatever’? ‘A great and misunderstood woman, John, as you have helped me to see’? It would have been instructive either way.
The play-writing fiasco left me with a feeling of disgust. I wanted all my notes destroyed, and prevailed on one of my pet nurses to feed them into the hospital incinerator. I didn’t doubt that she did, although looking back I can see it as unlikely. But what I had written didn’t seem like ordinary neutral rubbish but something actively contaminated, in need of special measures for disposal.
When Mrs Eddy finally died, quietly, of pneumonia, in December 1910, her attendants were not so much grief-stricken as lost. They could hardly be surprised – Mrs Eddy had been warning them for years. The malice that had stalked her for so long had pounced on her in her flannel nightgown while the sentries dozed. If the watch had been kept as it should, she would have been a well woman still.
A will like a Möbius strip
The body itself was an embarrassment, since by its existence it contradicted the whole claim of her faith. Christian Science was lacking in something which every other religion has, something close to the root of the need for religion. A set of instructions for those left behind – a funeral service. Mary Baker Eddy wasn’t supposed to die. That was the whole point. But if a religion has nothing to say to the bereaved, what does it have to say to anyone?
Surprisingly the immortal one had made a will, but it was a document entirely characteristic of her. It struggled to anticipate the needs of a world in which Mrs Eddy was not alive and dominant. She left everything to her Church, which sounds splendidly sensible until you realise that she owned her Church. She had taken great care to be completely inseparable from her creation, and so in legal terms she was leaving everything to herself. There must have been quite a few furrowed brows when this fact sunk in. Individual Christian Scientists weren’t allowed to use
the services of lawyers without Mrs Eddy’s express permission, but luckily her Church was richly supplied with them. They found a way round the little difficulty of a document that fed remorselessly into itself, a will shaped like a Möbius strip. Otherwise the institution couldn’t have lasted long enough to open a branch in Maidenhead.
It may be that my interest in Christian Science outstayed its welcome as far as other people at the hospital were concerned. There may have been a certain amount of eye-rolling behind my back, or to the side of my neck, or above my head – in one of the many places where eyes without the help of a supple and obliging spine can’t manage to penetrate. Perhaps I forgot that anti-proselytising becomes as oppressive as proselytising itself.
I didn’t presume to proselytise for Ramana Maharshi, I didn’t and I don’t. These affinities are very personal. I just read Arthur Osborne’s book again.
Between the hysterical millionaire, cowering in her bed and shrieking for the metaphysical Home Guard, and the beaming indifference of the pauper, the choice was not hard to make.
Christian Science is a religion defined by its attitude to the failings of the body. It didn’t seem to be asking too much to expect its philosophy of suffering to hold water.
In Ramana Maharshi’s teaching, like Mrs Eddy’s, pain and illness were unreal – but they weren’t singled out. They had no special, superior unreality. They were just part of ‘everything’, everything that surrounds us without being real. Christian Science actually gives pain too much credit, granting it a wrongful position of privilege.
Later, when John Lennon’s song ‘God’ came out it gave me another way of thinking about this. ‘God,’ Lennon sang in that winningly raw voice of his, ‘is a concept by which we measure our pain.’ Not so. Speaking softly, one John to another, my Home Counties breath in your Scouse ear, which bristles with sensitivity and grievance – take it from me, John. Pain is a concept by which we measure our God, and our guru, even our businesswoman lightly disguised as a prophet.
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