by Marion Meade
Don’t you know, the fellows of the Graphic bored my life out of me to give them my portrait... I told them that nature had endowed and gifted me with a potato nose, but I did not mean to allow them to make fun of it, vegetable though it is. They very seriously denied the fact, and so made me laugh...50
But there was little reason for laughter. Any day Aksakov might strike again and then she would be finished.
Toward the end of November, Olcott returned to New York and Michael also came in from Philadelphia. In the course of their correspondence, Michael had expressed a strong desire to meet Olcott’s colleague and “talk over Spiritualism,”51 and now the unsuspecting Henry agreed to arrange an introduction. Afterward when Betanelly confided to Henry his profound admiration of Madame Blavatsky, there was no reason for Henry to read special significance into it, especially since H.P.B. seemed indifferent to the young man’s attentions. And a few days later, when Betanelly had returned to Philadelphia and Helena suddenly announced she was going there on business, Olcott still made no connection. After two months in Vermont among the apparitions, he was having difficulty adjusting to reality: his estranged wife, his two sons who were at boarding school in New Haven, Connecticut, and his neglected law practice. There were more pressing matters to think about than an unconventional Russian woman, however charming she might be.
II
“John King” and Other Spooks
Of course Helena had no intention of letting Olcott go that easily. In her mind, the colonel was the key figure in the Spiritualist movement and, as such, a person essential to her personal plans, however vague these still were. In her relations with Olcott, as with others, there was a strong element of exploitation, but it could not be called a one-way street. One of H.P.B.’s traits, amounting almost to an obsession, was fairness, and she tried to give something in return for what she took. In Olcott’s case, she began translating his Chittenden articles into Russian for publication in Psychische Studien. (Although Aksakov received these translations, he did not, so far as is known, print them—nor did any other publication.)
Mid-December, she joined Henry at Hartford, Connecticut, where the American Publishing Company was preparing for publication his Graphic articles under the title People from the Other World. Not only did H.P.B. help read proof, she aided him in the task of making enough last-minute revisions and additions to fill a five-hundred-page book. In many of the additions it is easy to detect her influence, not only her thinking but her prejudices as well. For example, she gave Henry an earful about Daniel Home, whom she had hated ever since her affair with Nicholas Meyendorff, and she spitefully depicted him as a mentally and physically ill machine unable to control itself—and also as a fraud. Olcott, delighted to have an inside scoop, slipped the material into his manuscript without, evidently, considering that this totally unjustified attack on Home might cause unpleasant consequences for both himself and H.P.B.
After a few days at Hartford, Helena returned to Philadelphia where she settled for the winter at Mrs. Morton’s private hotel, 1111 Girard Street. She bought a bird, an ordinary little hen canary, who was not much to look at or listen to, but Helena became deeply attached to Jenny. During this period she found herself in a curious frame of mind. Inwardly she felt a growing sense of discontent and anxiety, which seemed odd because within three months she had achieved more than she could reasonably have hoped for. Thanks to Olcott, and to her own efforts, she had become an overnight celebrity in both the general and Spiritualist media, a spokeswoman and leader whose activities were deemed worthy of news coverage. The Religio-Philosophical Journal and other papers were begging for articles; well-known Spiritualists, such as Epes Sargent, Gen. Francis Lippitt, Hiram Corson, Louisa Andrews and Robert Dale Owen wrote for her opinions; in Philadelphia, local Spiritualists flocked to her hotel room for conversation and guidance. Suddenly she found herself in possession of an item she had never owned before—standing in the world. Furthermore, Alexander Aksakov had hastened to assure her that it would give him no satisfaction to destroy her. She hardly knew how to express her gratitude for his “infinite goodness.” Apologizing for having sent him an hysterical letter, she continued to thank him effusively for his kindness to “a sinner like me.”52
In addition to her new-found celebrity, she had the continued attention and support of a man who loved her. There is no question of Betanelly’s love for her and it was not the platonic admiration of Olcott, but real sexual passion. She had told him her age was thirty-six and probably claimed to be a widow, a story she had repeated so often she must have half-believed it. At any rate, when Michael pressed her to marry him, she did not reject him. He had become too important to her emotionally, probably sexually, and certainly financially, to be dismissed. What she did, however, was delay her decision for most of the winter of 1875.
Betanelly was an ingenious and ambitious businessman, but he lacked capital, so H.P.B. offered to use her contacts to arrange a loan.
As a Spiritualist, he was strictly along for the ride on her trip; he attended séances and accompanied her to experimental sittings where she tested various mediums. Probably it did not displease him to be mentioned in the New York Daily Graphic and the Religio-Philosophical Journal as a “cultured gentleman” who “seeing the falsity of the popular religions, disbelieved in all spiritual existences”53 but who, nonetheless, had been converted after receiving messages in Russian from an old college friend. His conversion, if there was one, would prove short-lived however.
Life was going well for Helena Petrovna, but, as happened repeatedly when such a fortuitous state of events occurred, she could not cope with success and unconsciously set about wrecking it. Betanelly, who knew her well enough to notice this self-destructive trait, would write later that if only she would keep her mouth shut she could avoid all sorts of troubles. But she could not. In fact, about this time she involved herself in a rather messy scandal, which she would have done well to ignore.
At the séances of two Philadelphia mediums, Jennie and Nelson Holmes, there regularly appeared the “materialized” spirit of a pretty young woman named Katie King, who caught the fancy of Robert Dale Owen. An elderly man, a respected writer for twenty years, Owen was an honest and generally sane person, but Katie must have bewitched him; soon he was calling her “daughter” and presenting her with expensive rings and bracelets, evidently in the belief that his gifts went with her into the spirit world.
When a friend tipped off Owen that Katie was no spirit, but a living woman, he refused to believe it. He was later forced to alter his opinion when he not only got back his jewelry but also met Eliza White, the “real” Katie King. Shocked into physical illness by the fraud, Owen had the courage to announce publicly that he had been bamboozled.
Madame Blavatsky, casting herself as the Sir Lancelot of Spirtualism, leaped to the Holmes’s defense by insisting she had seen no fraud. Katie King was, she declared, a spirit, and went on to attribute the scandal to a plot on the part of “the Protestant Jesuitical society called the ‘Young Men’s Christian Association.’”54 It is not entirely clear why she felt compelled to defend two mediums so obviously suspect that the Spiritualist press rejected them; she must have believed that the scandal would cause incalculable damage both to the movement and to her personal credibility. Writing about the matter to Aksakov, she stated significantly that she was ready to work day and night for the cause, “so long as I have a morsel of bread, and that only because it is hard to work when one is hungry.”55 Robert Dale Owen’s accusations might snatch away her bread crusts, and, coincidentally, have a disastrous effect on the sales of Olcott’s forthcoming book.
The year 1874 had ended sadly for Henry, because on December 28, after fourteen years of marriage, his wife divorced him.56 In Victorian America, where it was considered a disgrace, divorce was an unusual action for any woman, especially a clergyman’s daughter like Mary. Even though Henry always refused to comment on the divorce, it must have been a piercing blow.
In later years, it would be alleged that Helena had stolen him from his wife, while Theosophists would insist he had been divorced long before he met her. Neither version is accurate. Helena and Henry had known each other for three months before his divorce, but at the time, they were still casual acquaintances. Friendship and intimacy lay in the future.
At the beginning of 1875, Helena invited Olcott to Philadelphia, booked him a room at her hotel, and began arranging test séances to rehabilitate the Holmes’s reputation. Henry, acting as prosecutor and jury, assured her that he would keep an open mind and “start at the very bottom.” Naturally, he did no such thing. At the first séance, the spirit John King came to his daughter’s defense by rapping out an account of what really had happened. A certain Dr. Henry Child had hired Eliza White to impersonate Katie, money had passed hands, and various agents had been employed in carrying off the fraud. In short, John declared, the Holmes had been framed. The testing continued until the night before Henry’s return to New York. He watched in breathless silence as the door of the Holmes’s cabinet opened and out stepped “a short, thin, girlish figure, clad in white from crown to sole.”57 Obviously it could not have been Jennie Holmes, because Olcott had tied and sealed her in a sack; nor did the apparition seem to be a living confederate. Accordingly, he concluded that Jennie and Nelson Holmes were innocent.
Most people disagreed, charging collusion between Madame and the Holmes. The weight of evidence confirms this cynical conclusion as does the fact that the couple was subsequently caught in numerous other deceptions. Some years later, Jennie Holmes would admit to a founder of the Theosophical Society that Madame had arranged the spurious phenomenon for Olcott’s benefit. She further insisted that H.P.B. had proposed a partnership in the “materialization show business.” Henry would manage them because Madame had already so “psychologized him that he did not know his head from his heels.”58
A few months later H.P.B. herself would repudiate the Holmes and insist to Olcott it was she who had “materialized” Katie at the test seances. Nobody, she claimed, had been more surprised to see Miss King than Jennie Holmes.
Helena’s fraternization with the Holmes, honest or otherwise, had an unhealthful effect on her. Even after Yuri’s death, she had continued to will herself free from hallucinations and poltergeists. Now, in Philadelphia, due either to constant contact with sensitives or to her unstable emotional state, she suffered a relapse. Once again, she began to experience visions and voices, this time visitations from the spirit John King, whom she called her only friend. A letter to Aksakov dated February 11 reveals her intense depression and inadvertently illuminates her psychic distress:
I have quite ceased to get any letters from my aunts and sisters; they have evidently all forgotten me, and so much the better for them. I shall now never go back to Russia. My father is dead, nobody wants me, and I am altogether superfluous in the world. Here I am at least a human being; there, I am—Blavatsky. I know that everybody respects me here, and I am needed for spiritism. Now the spirits are my brothers and sisters, my father and mother.59
One person alone, she asserted, was sufficient recompense for the loss of her family; not the living man with whom she was currently involved, but the disembodied John King “with his own black beard and his white Chinese saucer-upside-down cap.” He was to her “a personality, a definite, living, spiritual personality” who did her “the honour of visiting me incessantly.”
So engagingly popular a personality was John King that he had been appearing to mediums for two decades. By the same token, he was so very ordinary a spook that H.P.B.’s interest is surprising. He seems to have appeared first in the early 1850s to a farmer-medium living in Ohio, and later would control the famous Italian medium Eusapia Palladino. But no matter what country or which medium, John King was always the same—a raucous phantom-about-town, a rough ex-pirate who loved recounting his adventures not only through mediums but also by Ouija Board and automatic writing. H.P.B., who disliked sharing her spirits, dismissed all the other John Kings and referred to this one as “my John King.”60 She certainly tried to monopolize “Johny”: he wrote notes to Henry that mysteriously appeared in a notebook Olcott carried in his pocket; he also painted pictures on satin, attended Helena’s seances, wrote letters to her friends, scared the servants and stole her money. There was no mistaking John’s virility and dash: he was practiced at the earthy banter Helena loved in a man, and even went so far as to kiss her on the lips. She told Michael she had hated the kiss, but she still allowed King to call her “his lass Ellie,” “a fine Spanish wench,” and “a fancy she-dumpling.”61 Michael evidently did not regard John as a rival—yet.
In late January, H.P.B. badly injured her knee and leg. To some, she claimed she had slipped on an icy sidewalk. To Gen. Francis J. Lippitt, Boston attorney and Spiritualist, she reported she had “nearly broken my leg by falling down under a heavy bedstead I was trying to move and that fell on me.”62 The latter version may well be true since about this time she moved from Girard Street to the Holmes’s former apartment at 825 North 19th Street. When her leg refused to mend as expected, Helena was forced to spend much of her time in bed where she distracted herself by reading and by writing surprisingly cheerful letters. From Andrew Jackson Davis she ordered a complete set of his works, as well as a set of Shakespeare and several books on magic. The bill came to a whopping $33.15, which she did not have and therefore neglected to pay.63 In addition to Davis and Shakespeare, she also read Epes Sargent’s Proof Palpable of Immortality, which fascinated her more than any other Spiritualist book she had seen. “You may tell him so if you see him,” she wrote to General Lippitt, “and say to him that he has perfectly psychologized a true born Cossack and made her fall in love with him. My best leg won’t heal and seems determined to remain lame.”64
Despite the bravado, she sensed that all her old insecurities were waiting to pounce. Since her defense of the Holmes, the Spiritualist journals who had clamored for her work refused to buy. She felt poor, ill, and unprotected; unseen voices kept whispering in her ears.
Troubled by her inadequacies as a writer and fearful once again that she would be unable to earn a living, Helena keenly felt the need of a sponsor. The ideal person would have been Henry Olcott, but he was busy in New York and Hartford and, in any case, as she observed to Aksakov, “he is far from rich and has nothing to live on but his literary labours, and he has to keep a wife and a whole lot of children.”65 There remained only Michael, whose business, while still small, was prospering. He was even predicting that “in a few years I will be able to open a large trade between Russia and America.”66 Toward the middle of March, Helena moved into a house Michael had leased at 3420 Sansom Street in West Philadelphia and on April 3, they were married in the First Unitarian Church by Rev. William H. Furness.
H.P.B.’s ambivalences about the marriage are evident in her behavior. She even neglected to inform her houseguest, Henry Olcott, of the wedding until after the event. Stunned, Olcott called the marriage “a freak of madness” and added, “when I privately expressed to her my amazement at what I conceived to be her act of folly in marrying a man younger than herself, and inexpressibly her inferior in mental capacity,”67 she had her defense prepared: their fates were linked by karma, and the marriage was her punishment for “awful pride and combativeness.”68 Besides, she insisted, Michael had threatened suicide if she refused him.
She was not so frank as she might have been with Henry, but certainly more candid than she was with others. She told him that Michael asked “nothing but the privilege of watching over her, that his feeling was one of unselfish adoration for her intellectual grandeur” and added “he would make no claim to any of the privileges of wedded life.”69 Why she felt compelled to convince Henry the marriage would not be consummated is unclear, for surely it was no scandal for a married woman to sleep with her own husband. Incredibly, Henry seems to have bought the story. While there is no reason to doubt Helena’s account of her
non-sexual marriage to Blavatsky, it is almost impossible to believe her relationship with Michael Betanelly was not physical.
Unable or unwilling to admit she had sexual needs, Helena spent the rest of her wedding day pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. She dashed off a postcard to General Lippitt telling him she was sending him a self-portrait done by John King on white satin. He must excuse the smudges because Michael had taken it to his office “and it passed through so many uncleanly hands that it lost partially its virgin purity.”70 Aside from the references to John King’s non-virginal portrait, there is no allusion to having been married earlier in the day.
Ten years later she would look back on her wedding and claim that a black wizard, possibly some beast or devil, had taken possession of her body and spoken with her tongue. When she regained consciousness, she found living in her house a “handsome young Armenian” who treated her as if he were her husband. “I order him off, but he does not go, declares that I am his wife, and that he has just been legally married to me, married before witnesses, Olcott among them.” She herself remembered nothing. “I turn to Olcott; imagine my horror when he confirms it. He was a witness at the wedding, and signed the register.”71 A decade hence, such a colossal mistake must have seemed to her to be due to possession.
Actually, she had simply made the conventional error of marrying for financial security. But to her dismay, she discovered almost immediately that Betanelly’s business was in trouble, and that her groom was virtually bankrupt.
Michael’s situation did little to improve a temper already short from pain and incapacity. She must have made her resentment obvious enough to spark reciprocal feelings in Michael. Whatever ties of affection there were binding them began at once to crumble, and within ten days, she had begun to call John King “my only friend.” Claiming to be “fonder of him than of anything on earth,” she praised King for having “transformed”72 her.