by Deborah Blum
Hyslop admitted that such a conclusion sounded improbable. Yet science was constantly exploring other improbable places, he pointed out, one might even say “wasting enormous resources upon expeditions in search of the North Pole, or in deep sea dredging for a species of useless fish to gratify the propensities of evolutionists.... Why is it so noble and respectable to find whence man came, and so suspicious and dishonorable to ask and ascertain whither he goes?”
New York journalists began packing into Hyslop’s talks, hoping for further signs of lunacy. “It was funny to study the newspaper reporters,” Hyslop wrote to Hodgson after one talk. “They came there as usual to watch and hear cranks” and left disappointed by his pedantic description of his work.
His detachment didn’t last long, though. There were, after all, more than two dozen fiercely competitive city newspapers. Dull copy didn’t sell. Hyslop’s cautious way of describing his research wasn’t nearly as interesting as the journalists wanted it to be. More than one journalist jazzed up a story by writing that Professor Hyslop proposed to “scientifically demonstrate the immortality of the soul,” perhaps in the next few weeks.
It dismayed Hyslop to learn that his scholarly peers were willing to take such ridiculous newspaper accounts seriously. Many didn’t care that Hyslop had been misquoted on his intentions. They cared that he had given unwarranted support to psychical research. At Columbia, James McKeen Cattell, still simmering over his debate with William James on the same subject, led these hard-liners. Outraged to find his own university associated with spiritualist nonsense, disappointed that any faculty member would call spirit communication as worthy a pursuit as Arctic exploration, Cattell openly demanded that the university president order Hyslop to abandon his crusade. Rumors had it that Cattell also met privately with Columbia’s president, demanding that Hyslop be censored and then fired.
Hyslop found himself in a fight for survival. He had some support from the younger faculty, but several told him they were afraid of Cattell’s influence on their own careers. He decided to court more established professors and administrators to gather more support against “Cattell’s insolent interference with me.... I shall make a very fight if it comes to the point where it is necessary and Columbia will not forget it for 50 years,” he wrote to Hodgson.
Hodgson encouraged him to stay calm. “It would be pretty absurd for the authorities of the college to make any move on the ground of newspaper reports about what you said at meetings.... be sure and take everything quite coolly.” But Hyslop had never been cool-natured, and he couldn’t help but worry. He was a married man. He had two children. He hadn’t expected that a scientist at his own university would regard a difference of opinion as something to be suppressed and punished.
Columbia’s administration, anxious to avoid a public fight, suggested that the whole affair would blow over if Professor Hyslop would practice more discretion. It seemed his only option. Hyslop told Hodgson that he’d canceled scheduled talks on psychical research and planned to immerse himself in classroom duties.
Hodgson expressed sympathy, but he was angry as well, dismayed by the vindictiveness of scientists in general and Cattell in particular: “He hasn’t a true scientific spirit at all, nothing but veneer, and it has always seemed to me extraordinary that he should have got to the positions he occupied.”
If Cattell had done an objective investigation of events, or even shown the slightest interest in the truth, he would have realized that the stories were simply journalistic exaggerations, Hodgson continued. Someday, Hodgson hoped, Hyslop would be able to expose Cattell’s own “unscientific attitude” regarding psychical research and turn the tables around.
HENRY SIDGWICK HAD not been not quite well for the last few months. Tired and achy, he had at the urging of his doctor gone to London in early May to consult a surgeon.
The diagnosis shocked him beyond measure; Sidgwick had all the signs of a fast-spreading cancer. The surgeon wanted to operate quickly but warned that surgery would only delay death briefly. For two weeks, Sidgwick quietly stayed home with Nora, seeking and giving comfort. By late May, though, the surgery was scheduled, and he began telling friends and family members.
“A terrible day,” Sidgwick’s brother wrote in his diary after their conversation.
Sidgwick wrote to Myers in France, apologizing for sending the bad news by mail, letting him know that he hoped to survive the surgery but not the year: “Life is very strange now: very terrible: but I try to meet it like a man, my beloved wife aiding me. I hold on—to try to hold on—to duty and love; and through love to touch the larger hope. I wish now I had told you before, as this may be farewell. Your friendship has had a great place in my life, and as I walk through the Valley of Shadow of Death, I feel your affection.
“Pray for me.”
Sidgwick’s doctors operated in mid-July, on his sixty-second birthday, removing as much of the cancer as they could. As soon as he was able, Nora took him to convalesce at the country home of the Rayleighs.
In late August, Nora summoned other family there. It was time to say good-bye: “We now have no hopes for Henry, but that the growing weakness, which he bears with unbroken patience and simplest unselfish fortitude, may soon reach the natural end he so desires,” his brother Arthur wrote to a friend.
Sidgwick died on August 28, 1900. He was buried in the village church-yard near the Rayleighs’ home. To the end he cherished his doubts about God, his sorrow that he’d failed to prove the existence of a higher power. He begged not to have a church service over his grave. He had written down, instead, a few brief lines for a minister to read: “Let us commend to the love of God with silent prayer the soul of a sinful man who partly tried to do his duty. It is by his wish that I say over his grave these words and no more.”
It would be an honest good-bye, Sidgwick told Nora; it would be a fittingly moral end to his life. She knew he was right. But she couldn’t make herself let him go so simply. In the end, he was buried with all the pomp and ceremony and calls to faith of a traditional Church of England service.
“Everything seems left undone in this world,” James wrote to Nora Sidgwick in early September. He’d come to believe, he told her, that her husband had kept psychical research sane and steady. James did not know who could replace Sidgwick in that role.
James and Myers were both sick again, each losing ground after leaving the gentle life at Richet’s chateau. James was en route to Germany for yet another round of medical treatment. He knew that Nora had decided to leave England for a while. She planned a trip to Egypt, where some of her students were working on an archaeological dig and where she might revisit comforting memories of the pleasures of doing math along the Nile.
“Dear Mrs. Sidgwick, you have no idea how many of us mourn with you in this bereavement or what an impression of flawlessness in quality your husband left by his person on all those who knew him, and by his writings on those who never saw him,” James wrote. “A spotless man, a wise man, a heroic man.”
WILLIAM JAMES NOW feared he might never again be well. Month after month, country after country, doctor after doctor, he could not seem to shake off his pain and lethargy. In despair, he wrote to President Eliot at Harvard and offered to resign his faculty position. Instead of accepting, the university extended his leave, Eliot assuring James that he was a philosopher-psychologist worth the investment.
Relieved and grateful, James decided to winter in Italy, hoping that its famously balmy climate would restore the good health achieved on the French Riviera. In Rome, James began a more aggressive treatment as well, injections of compounds taken from the lymph glands, brains, and testicles of goats. Its advocates guaranteed that the murky serum delivered animal health and vigor.
As December arrived and the year drew toward a weary end, James wrote to Myers that his health was on the mend; “my brain power is almost nil. But the arterial degeneration, mirabile dictu, does actually seem to be taking a back track.” He urged Myers to c
ome to Rome and try the therapy. Even more urgently, James implored Myers to forget the death prophecy from Mrs. Thompson’s séances—which had come up again at the chateau— to let go his promised reunion with Annie Marshall, and to put his energy into all the good life and work yet to come. “I do hope & trust, dear Myers, that your health is keeping up, and that in spite of devils, prophets, mediums and imps, you are to live long for the comfort of your family, the delectation of your friends, and the instruction of the world,” he urged.
Myers wrote back, agreeing to come to Rome and try the recommended injections to please his friend, although he doubted that they would save him. Myers thought rather that he would die anyway, and then “return as a cross between an old goat and a guardian angel.”
Privately, James feared that Myers wished to die, was not really fighting his illness, that “his subliminal is, to put it brutally, trying to kill him as well as it can,” as he wrote to friends at the SPR offices in London. In genuine concern, James suggested the SPR hold a seance with the express goal of getting messages to “neutralize the prediction.”
Before January 1901 was half over, though, James thought he knew why Myers found the image of Annie so appealing. The dead lover probably glowed as pure gold in contrast with Myers’s living wife.
Terminal illness in a loved one did not bring out Evie’s best qualities. Nervous and fretful, she longed openly for her house, her own servants, her children and friends, gossip and conversation. Evie wanted company and comfort; she followed James around like a desperate puppy. “That intolerable babbler, Mrs. Fred Myers has interrupted me by coming and talking and my mind can’t discharge the echoes of her voice,” he grumbled in a letter to his son Harry.
James had no opportunity to gather life-affirming messages from the spirit world for his ailing friend. Myers had contracted double pneumonia by the time he arrived in Rome; he was struggling to breathe, fighting such intense chest pain that James was called upon to act as a doctor as well as friend. He administered morphine instead of messages of renewal.
With a more practiced Italian physician on the case and visitors banned from the sickroom, the Jameses were left to entertain Evie and to send Myers notes of encouragement: “I think of you all the time patiently undergoing this ordeal, and my sense of human nature’s elevation rises,” James wrote. He told Myers not to worry at all about his unfinished projects. Even as he stood by, James was editing a paper Myers had prepared on Rosina Thompson, which described a visit from Annie Marshall (cloaked in anonymity) and a detailed conversation with a spirit who sounded a lot like Edmund Gurney.
James also promised to see Myers’s book-in-progress, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published—even if he had to finish writing it himself. But he assured Myers that he expected his friend to be shortly back at work, the crisis “just a memory.” Myers didn’t argue with such optimistic predictions. He lay without complaint, asking only that his favorite poetry and philosophy books be read to him. Finally, with death imminent, the doctor allowed him company. His wife and friends sat by him, reading loudly over the harsh gasps of his breath.
He died on January 17, 1901, not six months after they had buried Henry Sidgwick. “His serenity, in fact his eagerness to go, and his extraordinary intellectual vitality up to the very time that the death agony began, and even in the midst of it, were a superb spectacle,” James wrote to Nora Sidgwick.
The only odd thing was the death itself. Myers seemed to have choked to death, which was highly unusual for the type of pneumonia that he had. Both James and Myers’s doctor in Rome were puzzled by it, the Italian physician saying the fatal illness “behaved in a way that he had not seen in 1000 cases.”
It led James to ponder, once again, on the power of that prophecy, that message from Mrs. Thompson that Annie Marshall was waiting for her Fred, expecting him to join her soon. Had it been a rare instance of clairvoyance, or, as he suspected, had it come true because Myers had willed it to do so?
“IS THERE GOING to be any difficulty about poor Mrs. M? I mean about the degree of knowledge or ignorance she may possess of the A-Control,” wrote William James to Oliver Lodge, in a carefully cryptic exchange in March 1901.
Their private discussion occurred at a time when attention was focused on a much more visible, news-making death. On January 22, five days after Myers succumbed, England’s Queen Victoria had died at the age of eighty-one, ending a reign that had lasted more than sixty years. Her eldest son had since been named Edward VII, king of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland, and Emperor of India.
Lodge and James were more concerned with the legacy of the late Fred Myers. The “A-Control” was the spirit of Annie Marshall, carefully documented by Myers, in sittings with both Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Piper. In addition to those transcripts, their friend had also written a brief, privately published autobiographical monograph, which told of his longing for Annie and his efforts to find her.
“It is a delicate business, that; also for the children,” James continued. “Inevitably every thing will leak out, unless there should be a conspiracy of silence more efficiently carried out than seems possible.” He recommended being honest with Evie from the outset. Lodge was unconvinced. He hoped to avoid the confrontation, believing that they could continue to hide Myers’s other life from his widow.
A larger challenge was to ensure that psychical research continued, despite the deaths of so many of its champions. James warned that Evie—“a foolish kind of woman”—was unlikely to make things easier and would probably consume far too much of their time and energy. Already, in fact, she was working herself into a state. James felt bombarded by her letters telling him that she didn’t like Lodge, didn’t like Hodgson (who had been assigned to finish Myers’s book), and didn’t like the way the SPR was preserving her husband’s memory.
Evie herself was trying to answer an overwhelming stack of letters to “my Fred.” The writing seemed endless, she told James. Her life was terrible, and she suffered from the “physical anguish” of loss. And then—as if to prove that they should have been candid after all—in going through her late husband’s papers, Evie found an early draft of that hidden autobiography, “Fragments of an Inner Life.”
She wrote immediately, and slightly hysterically, to both Lodge and James, berating them for concealing it, and demanding that any copies be destroyed, along with all records of the Annie Marshall sittings, whether they seemed solid or not. James and Lodge might consider it evidence of spirit contact—but what did that matter if it was also evidence of a failed marriage?
AS LATE SUMMER came in, with its lazy golden afternoons and slowly fading gardens, as the Jameses were returning to Cambridge from Europe, the battered psychical research group received more bad news. Leonora Piper had announced that she was calling it quits as a medium.
She’d spent enough time in enforced social isolation, feeling a kind of freak, giving up her days to the blurred reality of a trance. She wanted picnics by the Charles River, teas with friends, Sunday mornings at church, the long-deferred prospect of a normal life.
Mrs. Piper chose not to confront Hodgson directly; he was far too persuasive a debater. So she issued her declaration of independence another way. She volunteered an interview to the New York Herald, declaring that she “would never hold another sitting with Mr. Hodgson, and that [she] would die first.” All her bottled-up fears and uncertainties came spilling out. She didn’t know what happened—or what happened to her—in the trances: “I am inclined to accept the telepathic explanation of all the so-called psychic phenomena,” she said, “but beyond this I remain a student with the rest of the world.”
She felt no more than a scientific test object, an “automaton going into what is called a trance condition” for purposes of investigation. Eighteen years of study and unsolved mystery felt like enough of her life. She was giving it all up, and she planned to devote herself to “more congenial pursuits.”
Shortly before setti
ng sail for Boston, James had assured Evie Myers that her late husband’s unfinished masterpiece, Human Personality, was coming “rapidly forward.” On arrival, he found that promise to be an inadvertent falsehood. The book rested in Hodgson’s care, and that worried psychical researcher had barely looked at it as he attempted, fruitlessly, to reason with Mrs. Piper.
James plunged into the business of mending fences. He began by telling Hodgson that he needed to work on his manners. As Oliver Lodge complained, their intrepid Australian investigator rarely bothered with the niceties of social behavior, “being absolutely fearless and uncompromising in expressing what he believes to be the truth; or, for the matter of that, the lie.” In the case of Mrs. Piper, Hodgson admitted that he’d become increasingly remote in order to fend off any suspicion of a close relationship. In their recent trance sessions, he’d barely said hello before beginning a sitting, and left with a cool farewell at the end.
Not always the most diplomatic of men himself, James “remonstrated” with Hodgson for treating Mrs. Piper as a somewhat balky machine and secured from him a promise to be more considerate. James then made a formal apology to Mrs. Piper, assuring her that all the SPR members held her in high regard, urging her to take into account the importance of the work, and begging her to reconsider.
Leonora Piper already regretted her flash of rebellion. The New York papers had made her look like a fool, she thought—a weepy, hand-wringing sort, which she wasn’t. Further, the headlines had declared that she’d recanted her entire career, that she had practically announced herself as a fraud. She hated reading accounts so entirely untrue.
After thinking it over for several days, Mrs. Piper gave another interview—this time to the Boston Advertiser—criticizing the Herald for labeling her interview a “confession.” She was returning to her work with the ASPR and Dick Hodgson. The only thing she wanted to confess to was puzzlement and frustration: “My opinion is today as it was 18 years ago. Spirits may have controlled me and they may not. I confess that I do not know.”