Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  But could she be sure, someone wondered. Of course, she snapped back— they could see that the point of the pin was broken, something she herself had done many years ago in a moment of carelessness. But if her word was insufficient, she had at home in New York a photographic copy of an oil painting in which Peter von Hahn was wearing the very medal to which the buckle had been attached.

  Henry Olcott could scarcely contain himself. Writing his report for the Graphic, he did not bother to disguise his total acceptance of this piece of theater, which must have been meticulously staged by H.P.B. and the Eddys, and from his pen rushed a geyser of purple prose:

  Was there ever a “manifestation” more wonderful than this? A token drug by unknown means from a father’s grave and laid in his daughter’s hand, five thousand miles away, across an ocean? A jewel from the breast of a warrior sleeping his last sleep in Russian ground, sparkling in the candlelight in a gloomy apartment of a Vermont farm-house! A precious present from the tomb of her nearest and best beloved of kin, to be kept as a perpetual proof that death can neither extinguish the ties of blood nor long divide those who were once united and desire reunion with one another!36

  The next day, October 25, Madame Magnon and a jubilant Helena Petrovna left for New York. Due to the delay in having engravings made for Kappes’ drawings, Olcott’s articles about her would not appear for several weeks, but in the meantime there was much to do. Altogether the colonel had had an exhilarating effect on her and suddenly she found herself brimming with hope. When he had mentioned collecting the Graphic articles into a book, she had thought it a wonderful idea and offered to help. At the same time it occurred to her that the stories were important enough to warrant international readership and, thinking of Davis’s friend Aksakov, she suggested translating Olcott’s work for Psychische Studien or even some Russian journal. Olcott had been thrilled by the idea.

  However much she liked Henry—and she liked him a great deal—she could not really say that she respected him. He struck her as childish—”worse than a three-year-old child” was the way she would describe him to Nadyezhda—and sometimes his “ardent and gushing imagination” pushed him to heights of gullibility that were quite amazing. Had she not warned him that William Eddy’s spooks were not necessarily proof of intelligent spirit-entities? If genuine, she had tactfully suggested, they must be the medium’s double escaping from his body and masquerading in other costumes. But Henry, “in love with the spirits,”37 had not believed her and continued to insist that many of the spirit forms, the babies for instance, could not possibly have come from William.

  In spite of their disagreements, he had taken to calling her “Jack” and she affectionately referred to him as “Maloney.” Parting the best of friends, they promised to meet when Henry returned to the city.

  Two mornings after her return from Chittenden, full of optimism and self-possession, she opened the Daily Graphic to find catastrophe staring up at her. In a sarcastic article by Dr. George Beard, the Eddy brothers were denounced as frauds—not clever frauds, but frauds of the cheapest and most transparent kind—and Colonel Olcott called a dupe who had been blinded by a handful of bad magicians’ tricks. “When your correspondent returns to New York,” Beard needled, “I will teach him on any convenient evening to do all that the Eddys do.”38

  H.P.B. had heard of Dr. Beard, a well-known New York neuropathologist who had spent two days at Chittenden just prior to her arrival there. Olcott had told H.P.B. that Beard had brought with him an electric battery. He proposed that the Eddys grasp its handles while he applied sufficient current to prevent them letting go in order to use their hands for trickery. Naturally the Eddys had refused, but when H.P.B. arrived people were still laughing about the skeptical Dr. Beard and his fruitless battery.

  Beard’s article threw Helena into an uproar. No sooner had she achieved the public eye than her area of endeavor became suspect. She was also alarmed at the slurs on Henry, for if he were made to appear less than a serious investigator, she would never be able to sell the translations of his article. Desperate to retrieve her vanishing hopes, she drafted a stinging reply to Beard in which she defended the Eddys, citing her own experiences as proof of their honesty. Then she hand-delivered the letter to the Graphic.

  A Spiritualist of many years’ standing, I am more sceptical in receiving evidence from paid mediums than many unbelievers. But when I receive such evidence as I received at the Eddys’, I feel bound on my honour, and under the penalty of confessing myself a moral coward, to defend the mediums, as well as the thousands of my brother and sister Spiritualists, against the conceit and slander of one man who has nothing and no one to back him in his assertions.39

  If Beard believed that he could duplicate the materializations, let him make good his boast:

  I now hereby finally and publicly challenge Dr. Beard to the amount of $500 to produce before a public audience and under the same conditions the manifestations herein attested, or, failing this, to bear the ignominious consequences of his proposed expose.40

  She did not have five hundred dollars of course, but she felt on fairly safe ground in calling Beard’s bluff. In her opinion he was a publicity-seeking headhunter looking for a missionary to eat, a person who went around causing “flapdoodles” (a favorite word of hers) for the want of something better to do. Unfortunately he had given her no choice but to defend the Eddys, which she had never intended, because while she did not believe them frauds (at least no more fraudulent than other mediums), she certainly did not think that the phantoms were what the Spiritualists claimed them. Rather, she was inclined to believe that the apparition of her uncle, for instance, had not really been Gustave von Hahn but a picture that she had projected on William Eddy’s astral body (an exact, non-physical replica of the individual physical body). It was Eddy who unconsciously assimilated her own mental projections, but the fact that he could objectify her thoughts proved nothing about life after death. It seemed ironic to her that never at any séance she had attended, the Eddys’ included, had she ever seen anybody she wanted to see, like Yuri or Agardi. All she ever got were servants and the perfidious Safar Ali who had betrayed her to Nikifor.

  Having done all she could to counteract Dr. Beard, Helena now redoubled her efforts on behalf of Olcott and herself. Several weeks had passed since Andrew Jackson Davis had written to Aksakov, but no reply had come. On October 28, she decided to write herself, offering exclusive translations of eminent American psychics with whom she was acquainted. As a matter of fact, the only one she knew was Olcott, who had only recently made his debut as a commentator on Spiritualism, but she was determined to impress Aksakov. “I am also working for the Graphic and can send my articles regularly,” she said, and offered to provide an additional service—pen-and-ink illustrations. Grossly inflating the importance of the subject she was trying to peddle, she airily misinformed Aksakov that Spiritualism was “no laughing matter” in America where the number of believers had recently mushroomed to eighteen million, or almost half the population! Even the press was giving respectful attention to the movement and “attempts at ridicule, condemnation and censure are rarer and rarer,”41 she said.

  The next day, when Olcott’s Sun article about “Madame Blowtskey” and her singing Georgian appeared, Helena found herself a minor celebrity, for twenty-four hours anyway. Knowing how fickle the public can be, she quickly looked for ways to garner additional publicity and, coincidentally, prove George Beard a liar once and for all. Obviously the situation called for someone to corroborate the identity of the Russian phantoms at Chittenden. As it happened, Michael Betanelly was in New York that day and she had no difficulty (one presumes) in persuading him to step forward as an independent witness who, of course, knew nothing about Spiritualism and who certainly had no connection with “Madame Blowtskey.” Giving his address as 430 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, he wrote to Henry Olcott at Chittenden:

  Dear Sir,

  Though I have not the pleasure of your pers
onal acquaintance, I take the liberty of addressing to you a few words, knowing your name from the Daily Graphic correspondence on Eddy’s manifestations, which I read with greatest interest.

  I learned from today’s Sun that at Eddys’, in presence of Mme. Blowtskey, Russian lady, a spirit of Michalko Guegidse (very familiar name to me) has materialized in Georgian dress, has spoken Georgian language, danced Lezguinka, and sung Georgian National Air.

  Being myself a native of Georgia, Caucasus, I read these news with greatest astonishment and surprise, and being not a believer in spiritualism, I do not know what to think of these manifestations.

  I address to-day a letter to Mrs. Blowtskey, asking some questions about materialized Georgian, and if she left Eddys’ please forward it to her, if you know her address.

  I also earnestly request your corroboration of this astonishing fact, materialized Georgian, if he really came out from the cabinet in Georgian dress, and in your presence. If that occurred in fact, and if anybody will regard it, as usually, trickery and humbug, then I will state to you this: There are in the United States no other Georgians but three, of whom I am the one and came first to this country three years ago. Two others whom I know came over last year. I know they are not in Vermont now and never been there before; and I know they do not speak English at all. Besides us three, no other man speaks Georgian in this country, and when I say this, I mean it to be true fact. Hoping you will answer this letter, I remain, yours respectfully,

  M. C. Betanelly42

  To Helena and Michael, the letter must have seemed like a harmless enough deception to pull on poor Olcott, who of course had nothing to lose and everything to gain if the public accepted the Eddy phenomena as real. However, it was a mistake to have mentioned the other Georgians (who were certainly fictitious), because Henry immediately asked Betanelly for their names and suggested that the three of them sign a statement swearing they had known Michalko when alive. Probably Michael had not intended to become part of an elaborate conspiracy, but now that he had put one foot into the situation, the confederate was now obliged to wriggle out as best he could. “I am perfectly willing,” he replied, “to give you all information and certificates concerning materialized Georgian spirits at Eddys’ “ but unfortunately he had lost the addresses of his Georgian friends whom he believed were living in New York or “out West.” Having admitted he did not know their whereabouts, he went on to assure Olcott that they were not in Vermont.

  Then, obviously anxious to change the subject, he hurried to tell all he knew about Michalko (not much), declared that the names of Hassan-Aga and Safar Ali Bek were “also very familiar to me,” and finally claimed to have known the late Andrey Fadeyev, “a tall and old Gentleman in Tiflis, who died several years ago.”43 Why he brought in Helena’s grandfather is a mystery, because his apparition had not appeared at the Eddys. One would think that this second letter of Betanelly’s might have aroused Olcott’s suspicions, but apparently not, for he included Michael’s testimony in his Graphic pieces and even forwarded to the paper for facsimile reproduction a Georgian newspaper that Betanelly had supplied him.

  In the meantime, Helena had her hands full. Dr. Beard’s comeback to her was a nine-column article reaffirming his opinion that William Eddy staged all the apparitions and that Olcott’s reports were “terribly and stupendously exaggerated” and his assertions that the spirits talked “absurdly untrue.” Most of the visitors at the Eddys’ were “weak-minded fools” incapable “of thinking a sensible thought.”44 Shooting back a response to his reply, Helena matched sarcasm for sarcasm and reminded readers that Beard had not accepted her five-hundred-dollar challenge.

  This media combat had a number of happy results: she received an admiring letter from Gerry Brown, editor of the Spiritual Scientist offering to publish anything she wished to write; and the Daily Graphic decided that she was sufficiently newsworthy to warrant an interview. At the newspaper office, she blew smoke at the reporter and narrated a life story peppered with more falsehoods than a cookie has crumbs. Knocking three years from her age, she presented herself as a former child-bride married to a doddering seventy-three-year-old whose “habits were not agreeable to me,” and “as I had a fortune of my own, I decided to travel.” She mentioned having lived in England and Egypt, also in the Sudan where she made a small fortune after cornering the ostrich-feather market and at Baden-Baden where she lost a fortune at the gambling tables. In fact, she declared, money meant nothing because fortunately she had received a sizable legacy from Princess Bagration.

  Goggling, the reporter kept lighting Helena’s cigarettes and repeating, “That’s a remarkable statement,” to which H.P.B. would solemnly reply, “It’s true.” Name-dropping constantly, she reeled off stories about Daniel Home, Charles Darwin (whose works she claimed to have translated into Russian while in Africa), Czar Alexander, and other persons likely to impress a newspaper reporter. However hard-pressed he may have been to believe her tales, the writer must have been impressed, because he described her as “handsome, with a full voluptuous figure, large eyes, well-formed nose, and rich, sensuous mouth and chin.” He thought her elegantly dressed, noting that “her clothing is redolent of some subtle and delicious perfume”45 that he assumed was Oriental. Possibly it was hashish.

  When the interview appeared on November 13, Helena could not have been overly pleased; unmistakably the reporter was making fun of her, for which she had only herself to blame, and afterward she would be more careful about what she said to newsmen. Still, the last few weeks had proved successful beyond her yeastiest imaginings, for now there was hardly a newspaper reader in New York who did not know of Madame Blavatsky—and all this before Olcott’s Chittenden pieces had even appeared. As Henry admitted, she generated “a blaze of publicity”46 on her own.

  Amidst the excitement, Helena found time to move twice. From East Sixteenth Street, she shifted around the corner to 16 Irving Place and then, a few days later, to 23 Irving Place, where she rented a suite of rooms in a brownstone owned by Dr. and Mrs. I. G. Atwood. The Atwoods were Spiritualists— Dr. Atwood had a successful practice as a magnetic healer—and felt honored to house the foremost defender of the faith. Helena had the entire first floor, with a front room facing on tree-shaded Irving Place and the back on a pretty garden. H.P.B. had always liked this pleasant residential neighborhood south of Gramercy Park, but her new apartment had the additional advantage of being located only a few doors down the street from the Lotos Club. It could not hurt to be Henry’s neighbor when he returned from Vermont.

  H.P.B.’s mood of exhilaration lasted until she learned from Andrew Jackson Davis that he had received a reply from Alexander Aksakov. Since it was written in French, he asked her to translate for him. Reaching the part about herself, she was horrified to read: “I have heard of Madame Blavatsky from one of her relatives, who told me that she is quite a powerful medium. Unfortunately her communications show the effects of her morals, which have not been of the strictest kind.”47 Unable to hide her violent agitation, Helena explained Aksakov’s remarks by saying that he must have heard ugly gossip about her. Davis reacted with sympathy and reassurance and promised to write Aksakov “that he does not know you personally and that I know you.”

  Unnerved, she rushed back to her apartment where she broke down in despair over her folly in trying to reach Aksakov. His words had not only “awakened all the past within me and torn open all the old wounds,” but made her realize that Aksakov had the power to destroy her even in America. There was nothing left but flight, to where she could not imagine. In this anguished mood, she decided to throw herself on Aksakov’s mercy:

  Whoever it was told you about me, they told you the truth, in essence, if not in detail. God only knows how I have suffered for my past. It is clearly my fate to gain no absolution upon earth. This past, like the brand of the curse on Cain, has pursued me all my life, and pursues me even here, in America, where I came to be far from it and from the people who knew me in m
y youth. You are the innocent cause of my being obliged to escape somewhere yet farther away, where, I do not know. I do not accuse you; God is my witness that while I am writing these lines, I have nothing against you in my heart, beyond the deep sorrow which I long have known for the irrevocable past.48

  The Helena Petrovna he had heard about and the Helena Petrovna of 1874 were “two different persons.” The old Helena had not believed in God, nor had she concerned herself with morality. Nevertheless, for the past ten years she had dedicated “every moment of my life” to Spiritualism, and were she rich, she would spend her last farthing to propagandize for the Divine Truth. “But my means are very poor and I am obliged to live by my work, by translating and writing in the papers.” Now even this would not be possible. Thanks to Aksakov’s “just but harsh judgment” of her, there was no hope but death. She had only one request to make of him:

  Do not deprive me of the good opinion of Andrew J. Davis. Do not reveal to him that which, if he knew it and were convinced, would force me to escape to the ends of the earth. I have only one refuge left in the world, and that is the respect of the spiritualists of America, who despise nothing so much as “free love.”

  Can it give you any satisfaction to morally destroy for ever a woman who has already been thus destroyed by circumstances? Pardon this long letter and accept the assurance of the deep respect and devotion of your obedient servant.49

  Helena remained depressed and frightened. The best antidote for such emotions is to get them out of one’s system by sharing them with a friend, but she had no one in whom she could confide, not even Michael Betanelly, who was, one imagines, the last person she would tell about previous lovers and an illegitimate child. Assuming a tone of breeziness, she wrote Henry asking if he could get her a writing assignment because she would soon be “hard up.” In the same rollicking style, she reported her experiences as a celebrity: