by Anna Vaught
9
Madame Blavatsky’s London residence, Holland Park.
1889.
After Dublin, London. The Gibsons, liberated by money and unconstrained by school terms or suchlike, shuttle between Dublin residence and London; Madame Blavatsky, Violet has told me, flits too. Rumours of tosh and nonsense have not cost her all her adherents, so tonight Helena Blavatsky is talking of secrets revealed to her, and well-off people from this part of London attend a séance at her house. We are watching from a discreet distance, before we try to go in and see what lies behind Madame’s purple velvet drapes.
And I’ve asked you before. I know that everything Violet tells me to write down asks you the same question: who is mad here?
W.B. Yeats comes down the steps. He’s been having a private conversation with Madame Blavatsky. A year or so from now, he’ll be asked to resign from the London branch of the Theosophical Society after he gets together a group to raise a flower from its ashes and they tell him he’s become a disruptive influence. It’s the same year he writes his famous poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Bertha has read this; she loves poetry and tries to imbibe it from all sources. She tells me that she loved this poem in particular, with its invocation of a peaceful place where evening is full of the linnet’s wings. These passerines get everywhere and oh, for an uninhabited island to share with them! As Violet and Bertha whisper about this, about a place that is peaceful and of time to indulge in poetry, Violet, having identified the poet, who politely bids them good evening as he descends, looks at Bertha, who says she feels disappointed: He believed in this lunacy?
Well dear, why should that detract from such a beautiful poem? You know, after this he was all keen on a magical fraternity—The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—and I heard that Bram Stoker was a member. But, dear girl, you should still read Dracula. Thought: stay off the poetry of Pound, he who found the monster so endearing and called him Muss: I will not tolerate a fascist, so I’ll be banning his poetry for you, my dear girls. Now let’s go in.
I, meanwhile, am compelled to keep my cover, standing behind Blanche, evading Yeats. This could go wrong. He’d mentored the young James Joyce, seen me in my younger days: he should not see me now, in this shift in time and world; this transposition. It would... interfere. But he passes by. One day, long into the future (don’t ask me yet how I know this) Yeats’s son Michael will stand up at a Joyce conference and directly address Stephen Joyce, my naughty nephew (or is he merely misunderstood? Madness sends ripples of shame and of pain through a family), keeper of the Joyce flame. He, Michael Yeats, will identify himself as the poet’s son and ask my nephew Stephen not to destroy further records. In effect, not to further rub me out. But then maybe, if things change for me, so much younger than the others, if Violet is able to help me change, then this will not have to happen. Or could it be that it won’t matter, what he does, if I am strong enough, at some future time, to fill in the gaps? When I talk with Violet, I do feel more hopeful.
But back to Blavatsky. In we go.
There are clouds of incense as we enter, and those heavy velvet drapes keep out a pretty twilight. Inside, tall tapers and heavy furniture continue a theme of opulence and darkness; in the hallways are photographs of the host in India, New York, on her secret trips to Tibet. As I said, she gets to flit. Here she is by Lake Mansarovar. She looks terrifying, her face lit up like a torch in a bowl of butter tea. Children scatter.
Now, we women peer through the clouds in the parlour. Blanche is stifling a giggle: She looks like a man. A big face like a butcher!
And Violet says: Can you all see her clearly? She has a group in position around the table and others ready to spectate, sitting in those overstuffed armchairs. It’s going to be a fine old séance. Shall we have some fun? There are still chairs enough for us.
So we slip in, faking confidence, as if invited. In the room, Madame Blavatsky is already expounding on ancient mystics and long-deads and saints. All higgledy-piggledy; a melding of barely explained sources into one unintelligible whole which people really respond to, in the way people do. She is an impressive polyglot, but those around her don’t yet realise that her rumblings and screechings are not real languages but utterances she is improvising. Listen; she is talking, first, about her theories, all bound up in fat volumes. I know, whispers Violet, that our smiles mock at her moon face, jesting at her big jowls all wrapped up in a massive shawl, but it wasn’t all bad, you know. Theosophy was, at least, inclusive. Everyone could do it, everyone was welcome.
Well, Violet, say I, a bit like madness, then. Though not necessarily going back the other way, When you try to convince them you’re sane, I mean. You cannot come in then. They see the fervour in your eye and they know you are a feeble.
And I think, as I listen to the Blavatsky drivel, that some of it sounds, in its dreadful confidence, like the odd diagnosis I’ve had. Oh Miss Joyce, is it this... Oh Miss Joyce if you will only join the dots... Oh Mr Joyce, if your daughter will only respond to enemas and sitz baths...Then I think... qua qua qua...
Absolutely to the point, Lucia. Excellent. A bit like madness. Violet is brisk: Now attend, dear girl. I need you all just to see this, mainly for entertainment, but also because—I’ve asked it before and I am sure you have too—who do we say is mad here? Now, as I said, she’s talking about her theories.
Madame Blavatsky’s words in a breathy torrent thus: Well, ahhhhh, let me explain to you about the astral perispirit! The astral perispirit is contained and confined within the physical body as ether in a bottle, or magnetism...
Blanche calls: Oh spare me from more of that! I never want to hear again about magnets or healing. What merde!
Shhhhhhh, barks the moonface. Or the jowls. Or the shawl. Is she a bit like the barnacle, to look at? She goes on:
...as ether in a bottle, or magnetism in magnetized iron. It is a centre and engine of force, fed from the universal supply of force, and moved by the same general laws which pervade all nature and produce all cosmical phenomenal. Its inherent activity causes the incessant physical operations of the animal organism and ultimately results in the destruction of the latter by overuse and its own escape. It is the prisoner, not the voluntary tenantal, of the body.
Oh God. Cod Plato—and I cannot help but laugh. Jumbled up with a load of nonsense and extra suffixes.
Yes, sounds like merde to me! Absurdité! This, Blanche: But at least we’re off the magnets. I cannot go back there. Makes me think of Charcot’s hands all over me!
Shhh, I will not be derailed-raileded! asserts Madame. What is imagination? Psychologists tell us that it is the plastic or creative power of the soul, but materialists confound it with fancy. The radical difference between the two was, however, so thoroughly indicated by Wordsworth, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, that it is no longer excusable to interchange the words. Imagination, Pythagoras maintained to be the remembrance of precedent spiritual, mental, and physical states, while fancy is the disorderly production of the material brain.
Ah now, hang on, says Violet: She’s got a point there, though probably accidentally. About the imagination. What it can do and as for the Lyrical Ballads, well yes, Coleridge and Wordsworth had a point. If fancy is fritter, then imagination is power.
And who might yooooo be? says the great moon face in our direction.
Oh, adherents, Madame Blavatsky, replies Violet, bowing slightly.
Well sit downal! Now, you were asking, dear (to a richly dressed but sickly-looking lady) about death. I have good news for you there and shall give you a clear answer and, I hope, great comfortal in such clarityal. Annihilation means, with the Buddhistical philosophy, only a dispersion of matter, in whatever form or semblance of form it may be; for everything that bears a shape was created, and thus must sooner or later perish and change that shape; therefore, as something temporary, though seeming to be permanent, it is but an illusion, Maya; for, as
eternity has neither beginning nor endage, the more or less prolonged duration of some particular form passes, as it were, like an instantaneous flash of lightning. Before we have the time to realise that we have seen it, it is gone and passed away for ever; hence, even our astral bodies, pure ether, are but illusions of matter, so long as they retain their terrestrial outline. The latter changes, says the Buddhist, according to the merits or demerits of the person during his lifetime, and this is metempsychosis. When the spiritual entity breaks loose for ever from every particle of matter, then only it enters upon the eternal and unchangeable Nirvana. He exists in spirit, in nothing; as a form, a shape, a semblance, he is completely annihilated, and thus will die no more, for spirit alone is no Maya, but the only REALITY in an illusionary universe of ever-passing forms.
Yes. Indeedal-all.
And are there further questions?
I do think that, accidentally, she’s onto something about reality, though. I just cannot articulate it yet. Something about it being an illusion, don’t you think? But no. There are no questions for Helena Blavatsky. The participants are exhausted. But Oh Lord, say I, What is it with all the pressing definite articles and those bloody suffixes added all over?
Have you not read your own father’s work? This, Violet.
Madame Blavatsky glares at us: We will begin.
The lights go dim.
Just watch them, whispers Violet: These séances are very inclusive. So she has rich and poor appearing, the odd social outcast and tries to mix it all up—a stew of Jewish and Hindu mysticism, garnished with gobbets and dollops of all sorts. Does voices like amateur dramatics, but her audience laps it up. Her séance practices have already all been debunked, from her time in India, I know. She had bedsheets on strings, a strange trap door and mirror contraption was her Magic Materialisation Cabinet. If your eyes are alive to it, you’ll see the seams, even in this darkness.
There are rattles and howls: Ohhhh, spirits, speak to us! and Madame Blavatsky gurgles and chants. An old boy speaks, had a barge on the river, a bad boy; there’s a dowager from Chelsea. They have a lovely conversation. Someone from the East End, an old Jewish man who reckons he started the craze for fish and chips and on and on. Some people have dead relatives appear, although they are not named, until the relatives present name them and Madame Blavatsky concurs.
Ow! A bunch of flowers, hurled through the air, misses the table and lands on Blanche.
Ah! An empty needlework box catches me on the temple. Both objects snatched up by Blavatsky’s hand as she shrieks: Both deemed to be true possessions of the departed, yes? Some of your sister’s favourite flowers? Dear, she is with us. You believe that might be your mother’s needlework box. Empty? Yes, of course, they keep busy on the other side!
There’s a bang and a rustle from above.
That’ll be the helpers upstairs, says Violet: It’s why the drapes and tapestries extend across the ceiling. The guests don’t look up; they’re consumed by the spectacle and can’t, like us, do so well in darkness. Violet is giggling
Hoi! What about the fish and chips? I think they will catch on, says the old man from the East End. We are all laughing so much that, in the darkness, Madame Blavatsky now attempts to expunge us: I already had occasion to tell off Mr Yeats and will brook no further nonsense. Now! Please leave!
There’s a fine line between laughter and crying, of course and soon they are commingled—and with disbelieving talk of who gets to be out and about and who might be considered a crazy. There are people in our loony bin conducting more civilised lives, and with thought far less opaque or disordered than this lot. Violet knows this; it’s partly why we’re here. For us, but also for you, reader: this is her testament and a lesson if you’ve not caught on. Who is mad here?
Violet clutches my hand: But will you walk with me, or rather fly, and hold my hand, as I hold yours? I need you to see another place. I was always so alone, you see.
Poor Violet. But as we descend the steps, friends, Violet, Lucia, Bertha and Blanche, we grasp each other’s hands and in this still moment we stop and we laugh. It is deep booming, uncontrollable laughter. We are hysterical. We are liberating our laugh! You see, in an asylum your life is supposed to be improved with good behaviour; I’d add that your emotions are often forced to smoulder low or that you might stifle them altogether. That’s to escape notice or chance parole. And if you laugh too loudly or for too long, there’s a risk, I’ve found, that someone will think your compass is spinning. Violet got lines when she made a joke, as I told you earlier. As we laugh now I think of Daddy. I remember he spoke about liberating sounds—and this is what he did in Finnegans Wake—from their servile contemptible role. I thought it was so exciting it made me quake. Oh God, but I miss him. And when I laugh now, I think of how, one day, like him, I shall take pleasure in grafting and grinding words, in experiment and in laughing safely so loudly it hurts. And what is more, you can spill me stark and spell me swooning! (Or something like that.) I just don’t care what my thwarters think! Ha ha ha. I am coming Violet.
10
Rookeries. Southwark and Kennington, London, 1902. This is where she has placed us now:
This, says Violet, is more of my London. As a child and teenager I would creep around London’s Theosophists and Christian Scientists. As I got older, I thought I might have found a way in through these things. I thought... I might find an open door, acceptance, company, faith unstinting, but even when I went over to Rome, I was not at peace. For me, faith has never been like that. The most remarkable thing about it, dears, was not the quality of its faith but of its doubt. Yes, this was what Mr T.S. Eliot said about that Tennyson poem, ‘In Memoriam’ I recall; yes, I read this just the other year: a comment I felt fitted me. And you see, I never gave up and through my faith, or doubt, I tried to do good. Certainly, that day in Rome, 1926, but also before that in alms I gave and things I tried to understand; suffering that was otherwise hidden from people like me, from the landed and titled; from the aristocracy.
We’d been talking, back at the madhouse, about her times in London. Willie, one of Violet’s brothers, the family’s first Catholic convert and disinherited for it, had begun social work in the most impoverished districts of the city. He’d have been known as A Squire of the Slums. Oxbridge and a toff with an eye for this place. It was not uncommon.
Violet begins:
My brother Willie was well known in these parts. These are the slums at Southwark. Do you see them, there? Those poor haggards. Bear to?
Well yes, Madame Title. This is what my world looked like, too, before I was at the Salpêtrière. You forget.
Violet understands that she does; touches Blanche’s hand and continues. Violet is not, as she will tell you, a modest woman, but now she reflects that she has failed to compute Blanche’s life in poverty and that the Salpêtrière was not, like St Andrew’s, for paying guests. She touches Blanche’s hand again and goes on.
These places are carved up into ever smaller boxes, filled with families whose every day is appalling struggle. In here, or in Kennington (which I remember as yesterday), are workhouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums. A million people live here; such like these gap-toothed mothers in stews and hollows. These are the rookeries that Dickens described. Here your heart will break at the pretty child; the blue-eyed consumptive baby. Filth is everywhere.
I have, I think, the sort of memory to recall in exquisite detail tomes and long poems. I read, at Willie’s suggestion, In Darkest England and the Way Out by William Booth. I tried to understand. Back home in Dublin, as I told you, we were kept properly away from knowing what occurred in the slums of Liffey, not so very far from our house, but for my brother, and especially after his conversion, to fully know and to engage was important, although he was commuting from Mayfair and was hardly going to move in here. Still I cannot be snide: I did not have the strength or the goodness to live among them and I might
have been mocked for keeping my title; I kept it because I hoped one day it could be useful, for my own survival. In this, I was wrong.
But as I was saying, here is a passage I particularly remember. Booth told: Some seven years ago a great outcry was made concerning the Housing of the Poor. Much was said, and rightly said—it could not be said too strongly—concerning the disease-breeding, manhood-destroying character of many of the tenements in which the poor herd in our large cities. But there is a depth below that of the dweller in the slums. It is that of the dweller in the street, who has not even a lair in the slums which he can call his own. The houseless Out-of-Work is in one respect at least like Him of whom it was said, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.
I might be in a loony bin, but I see that I have that. A place to lay my head. And crumpets. Tea. Yet, dear, dear girls, I do not think I had fully understood that even below what we see here, all of us, is another layer. The person who walks all night, who sleeps on the Embankment or underneath the arches. And working all night, gutter all day: the child sold into prostitution by her mother. Here, in these buildings, I went to give alms and I stood back a little because I was ashamed of what I had and ashamed of myself and of my unhappiness. I was ashamed of my abiding grief and of my illness. I did the same on my last visits to Rome, the one where I shot first myself and, later, Mussolini. I portioned out alms and kept them all safe and regimented while I went to the most unsafe quarters of Rome. I thought it was part of my calling; part of a mission—to martyrdom, like the early Christians in Rome who cared for the sick and the poor. But I was not strong enough.
What we are looking at now is Tabard Street in Southwark. I read that it was demolished in 1916. Do you know that in these places, heaps of bodies to a room, sometimes the landlord removed the door if tenants were a little late with rent? We should not, cannot go inside. It would be wrong and we are in the way. These people are desperate victims and prisons come in many shapes and sizes. At St George’s Fields, just streets away, is Bedlam. Such a famous lunatic asylum! This, too, had been a place of little sanitation; where the incontinent were kept in straw and where, Willie once told me, many had been chained and naked, where there was little diagnosis and where a harness kept some in place for decades. You already described, sweet Blanche, what you overheard at the Salpêtrière. This, still, is the history of people like us and one of my dying wishes is that it should never be. Never be again. Had I been well and strong, understood to be recovered, or at least to be allowed to do productive things, I could have done so much more. Because I had a notion of madness and knew the effects of being shut up and away. Oh…
