I seemed to be getting a little more control over my reactions with each operation. This time as I reassembled the world after anæsthesia I neither swore nor chanted mystical Hebrew letters. I recited German verbs ending in -ern.
One more time my ankylosed bones had given Mr Arden a challenge and a sense of job satisfaction. He paid my ossature more extravagant compliments. ‘I break bones every day,’ he said. ‘It’s what I do for a living. But I can tell you, John, that knee of yours was something special!’ Perhaps not the most tactful thing to say to someone whose body was still reverberating with the agony of it. I’d slept through the assault, yes, but my body had to stay put. It had nowhere to go, and was visited by nightmares independent of consciousness.
After a day or two I settled down to read The Biography of a Virginal Mind. The author was right in his own way – Mrs Eddy’s life story was indeed a glorious adventure. It was even better than Pamela!
Part of the adventure was becoming famous late in life. The first edition of Science and Health didn’t appear until 1875 and was slow to make its way in the world even so. Mrs Glover (her name at the time) was fifty-five then, in an age when a woman’s fortieth birthday was a sort of instantaneous autumn. She was not only a widow, with an estranged – not to mention ne’er-do-well – son, but more recently a divorcée. Neither status was desirable or promising. Soon, though, she had acquired a third husband, and the name by which she is remembered.
I longed to re-enact significant episodes of the Mary Baker Eddy story. It maddened me to be surrounded by people with (as far as I could see) nothing better to do, but with a fixed resistance to taking direction. I could just about make one flinty physio (‘anything for a quiet life,’ she muttered, though life in the hospital was far too quiet already) act out one side of the crucial dialogue between Asa Gilbert Eddy and the man who had seemed to have a hot line to Mrs Glover’s heart, Daniel Spofford.
He was her blue-eyed boy (the colour of his eyes was intense), a dreamy sort despite his rough history of farm work and service in the Civil War. Asa Gilbert Eddy, biddable, spinsterish, wearing his hair in an eccentric rolled arrangement, was not an obvious choice of husband. Then in 1876 there came a curious conversation between the two men, on the day when the engagement was announced. I coached my pet physio intensively until she could at least deliver Mr Spofford’s line clearly: ‘I confess I am surprised.’
Then as Mr Eddy I simpered, ‘As am I – I have only just received the news myself!’
On the marriage certificate Mrs Glover tactfully subtracted seventeen years from her age, so as to harmonise it with her groom’s, though presumably at the cost of making the ceremony illegal. Lemonade and cake were served.
Mary Baker Eddy’s religion was a bit of a mess in doctrinal terms. As a solo turn I practised saying Mr Dakin’s description of its system of beliefs – ‘a cabinet of theological bric-à-brac!’ – in tones most usually associated, on the English stage, with the incredulous question, ‘A handbag?’
Edible uncut jewels
There was one scene I was particularly keen to stage: Mrs Eddy screaming for help in the middle of the night. This happened a lot. Christian Science had disposed of the possibility of ill health to its own satisfaction, but not every part of Mrs Eddy was convinced. As a child she had been sickly and subject to fits of hysterical rage, but then in her view every symptom was psychosomatic, including obesity (no more than an ‘adipose belief of yourself as a substance’). After all, ‘we have no evidence of food sustaining Life, except false evidence’.
Yet she was never a peaceful person. Her fear and pain had not been abolished by the flourishing of her church. They went into hiding merely, and reappeared in ever more distorted forms. She had banished error, sickness and pain, so if she experienced anything other than full health and happiness there could only be one explanation. Hostile agents were beaming destructive energy at her. The likely culprits were Mrs Eddy’s own disaffected followers. Some of those she had once most relied on were trying to destroy Her (by this time pronouns attaching to her were routinely capitalised) with ‘mental malpractice’.
There were other ways of describing the same destructive force: Electricity of Mortal Mind, The Red Dragon, The Trail of the Fiend, The Sting of the Serpent. The preferred term in Christian Science publications was Malicious Animal Magnetism. The attacks would normally come at dead of night, but if the magnetic assailants expected to find Mrs Eddy undefended they were mistaken. The alarm would go up – a shriek is an effective alarm. Helpers were waiting for the call (they stayed awake in relays of two-hour watches throughout the night, keeping the mental force-field charged). They would rush to Mrs Eddy’s bedside and form a ring around her, bravely facing outwards, human shields against the metaphysical malice, for as long as it took her attackers to lose their destructive concentration, to abandon yet another attempt to incinerate the Pastor Emeritus from a cowardly distance with the emanations of their loathing.
What a tableau! So much more satisfying dramatically than pressing the buzzer (if it has been left within reach) and waiting for a nurse to have a spare moment.
Animal Magnetism was a powerful force. Mrs Eddy suffered from renal calculi – kidney stones – which were really only crystallised malice (I couldn’t help picturing the edible uncut jewels of crystallised ginger). Rays of metaphysical hatred had found tiny cracks in the array of mental armour raised by Mrs Eddy’s helpers. She had to resort to a dentist’s services on a regular basis, in the teeth of her published and preached beliefs, since her upper jaw had been poisoned by the Sting of the Serpent.
I was gradually waking up to the fact that Mary Baker Eddy, elderly, disintegrating and imperious, was exactly the sort of rôle that Dad had had in mind all those years ago, when he had suggested that I could manage rather well as an actor, by playing an old lady in a wheelchair who bossed everybody about. Unfortunately I couldn’t make the rest of the company play along or acknowledge my star quality.
I had to make do with the very limited supplies of curiosity available. A nurse might say, ‘And what did Mary Baker Eddy do today?’ and I’d say, ‘You’ll never guess!’ How could they possibly? She was making it all up as she went along.
What I would really have liked was a tame Christian Scientist to wrangle with. Granny had introduced me to this attractive word, commenting that wrangling was certainly one of my talents, and that it was a shame I wasn’t more gifted in the field of mathematics, since the top student in that subject at her beloved Cambridge University was known as the Senior Wrangler.
Even wrangling of a junior sort was in short supply during my recovery and rehabilitation. Tame Christian Scientists weren’t provided free under the National Health, and unfortunately, because of the very nature of their faith, a hospital was the last place such people would come of their own accord. Perhaps they should have done. At least they wouldn’t be preaching to the converted.
It’s a good job I didn’t come across any patients with kidney stones. I couldn’t have stopped myself from asking, ‘Do you have a lot of enemies? People who might wish you metaphysical harm?’ I’m not that strong. In the watches of the night, do you feel the black searchlights of your foes as they search out the chinks in your walls?
No vapour more easily ignited
My reformulated knee wasn’t supposed to move, and it didn’t, but still it found inventive ways to act up. It was enclosed in a large cast running more or less from hip to ankle, inside which it swelled and gave great pain. Concentrating on Mrs Eddy’s life was increasingly difficult as my own became filled with intensely erroneous sensations. I thought my knee would burst. I pleaded with Mr Arden to remove the cast so as to relieve the pressure, but he said he couldn’t do that. The leg must be held in place. He compromised by having a little window cut in the plaster where the knee was, which allowed the distressed tissue to expand without jeopardising the process of healing. Then it began to itch and I had to poke at the window with anything that ca
me to hand.
During this (third, was it?) rehabilitation my sensitive nose noticed something different in the atmosphere of the hospital. It wasn’t a new smell, exactly, it was the attenuation of an old one. Times were changing. There were fewer volatilised molecules of amylum, that white powder prepared from potato and other vegetable tissue which yields a transparent viscous fluid when boiled – laundry starch, in fact. Starch was still being used in the laundering of nurses’ uniforms, but in significantly smaller quantities. Nurses gave off a less peremptory rustle when they passed. It was almost a soothing whisper.
Of course the high tradition of nursing goes back to Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War. Many of the original nurses were genteel volunteers rather than professionals. I imagine that in those days the uniforms were so stiffly starched for a definite purpose. A squeamish nurse confronted with the horrors of warfare, infection or surgery, could faint without actually falling down, propped up by her amylum-impregnated clothes long enough to be trundled unobtrusively from the scene by colleagues, without her moment of weakness having an effect on the morale of the patients.
Mrs Eddy’s psychology seemed very extreme and remote, and then suddenly it came into focus and sat right next to me. This unstable woman was destined to failure, until suddenly she wasn’t. What had happened?
Christian Science would have been one more fizzling firework, hardly even a footnote in the history of cultic religion of America, where there is rarely a shortage of prophets and always a surfeit of disciples, if it hadn’t caught fire at a single meeting in Chicago, in June 1888. Mary Baker Eddy was sixty-six, and very hit-or-miss as a public speaker. Her belief in herself fluctuated wildly between dogged assertiveness and a querulous shrinking. Even when she was advertised as a speaker, she would often quail at the last moment and delegate the task to someone else. She rebelled against anonymity but could not fully face fame.
On this occasion the local pastor was shrewd enough to advertise Mrs Eddy as a speaker, but without telling her in case she took fright. He told her only as he escorted her to her place on the stage – too late for her to appoint a substitute.
It turned out that she was having one of her good days, though Chicago was far from the Church’s roots in New England. There were three thousand in the audience, on top of the eight hundred delegates. She stood up to speak, and the whole crowd came to its feet. She exported her hysteria in grand style. She released it into the hall and licensed every emotion, every wish.
But how did she do it? What did she say? She started off with the ninety-first psalm: ¶He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. Not one of David’s best efforts, you’d have thought, but experienced reporters were reportedly so spellbound that they forgot to take notes. There are paraphrases, but they don’t give much indication of what the fuss was all about – what it was that made the crowd surge forward, desperate to touch her hand or her dress, while some cried out that their ailments had been mysteriously cured and others that they were (less mysteriously) being crushed.
If ever the guru spoke through her, it was that day – but it isn’t necessary to suppose his presence. A room containing close to four thousand people is a candidate for spontaneous combustion even without the cue of a spark (spontaneous seems the wrong word for something building up so relentlessly). Few in the audience were believers already, which sounds like a disadvantage but was actually an enormous help, since there is no vapour more easily ignited than the desire to believe.
Mrs Eddy spoke, and that was all she needed to do. Whether she was the clapper or the bell, the two parts came together and the clang was immense. There followed a ‘mad rhapsody’ of press coverage, and it never really died down until she died herself, which she declined to do for the next twenty-two years.
The effect of becoming a public figure on this desperately unstable woman was dramatic. She showed a sudden genius for leadership. She developed astoundingly in her ability to direct and manage, to formulate plans and carry them to successful conclusion, to analyse a problem and put her finger on the underlying difficulty.
‘The psychologist holds,’ according to Mr Dakin, ‘that there is no more able and efficient personality than the introvert who through some change of circumstances acquires or develops some extrovert tendencies.’ At first I thought there was a particular psychologist being referred to at this point, but then I realised that it was the statement of a basic principle, even a commonplace. It was still news to me.
Could it really be true? Was this something everybody knew, except the one person who needed to? That person being me. I thought of myself as an extrovert billeted on an introverted body. Introverted bones, above all. Living an introverted life despite myself. Now the possibility was being floated that I might be able to transform myself, becoming so effective in the world as to be virtually unrecognisable. This was no longer a case history of an eccentric and long-dead figure, it was virtually a manifesto. There was plenty to hold me back, but no more than there had been to block Mrs Eddy’s progress. Mrs Eddy had succeeded late in life in unfurling the umbrella of her character and displaying the lurid colours of its lining, and perhaps my own umbrella only seemed to be rusted shut, the catch useless if not actually broken off. I must be prepared to wait, just as she had, and watch for my moment, which would not necessarily be dramatic in any obvious way. When the time came, perhaps all I would have to do, like her, would be to open my mouth and say what I had to say.
Mrs Eddy went on being an inspiration even while it became clear she was a total monster. The two things were logically separate. What she did with her transformed character was her own affair. The inspirational thing was that she had been able to transform it.
Mrs Eddy stood revealed as a master manipulator whose tools were bureaucracy and public relations. The new religion had a particular appeal to the well-off – to people prosperous enough to identify ageing and ill-health as their supreme enemies.
A book dictated by God needs revision
The wealth of its supporters was a great asset to Christian Science. If a newspaper carried a derogatory article, or even if it referred to ‘faith healing’ (though surely there was faith and there was healing?), then complaints would be laid. If apologies were slow to appear then a local advertiser would telephone the newspaper offices – at a time when the telephone was a great luxury in itself – to express disappointment at such prejudicial expressions. That usually did the trick.
At a time when the church had about sixty thousand members, there were fifty publicity men paid to keep its image gleaming. One publicity man for every twelve hundred or so believers. Quite a tally. Church members were forbidden to reveal the number of believers, so as to give the impression of a vast movement.
Mrs Eddy was in her own way an innovator and inventor – something that Ramana Maharshi never claimed to be. In Hinduism it is always a question of old wine in new bottles, except that from a non-dualistic perspective wine and bottles are necessarily of the same substance and the same age. Mrs Eddy’s innovations, though, were in the field of business studies rather than spirituality.
By the end of her life Mrs Eddy was making $400,000 a year from the movement’s periodicals, and she knew about the importance of revenue. She never put her own money into the church. The flow of cash was quite the other way. In the 1880s she constituted the entire teaching staff of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, which earned her over a million and a half dollars over that decade. A book dictated by God should hardly need revision, but new editions of Science and Health appeared very regularly, and each time the faithful were required to buy the new and discard the old, however minor the changes. Even so Mrs Eddy came to feel jealous of the profits made by the printers, and absorbed that aspect of the business also.
When a new Mother Church was built in Boston, it was paid for before its dedication. In fact an appeal had to be made asking that no more donations be made to the build
ing fund. The newspapers couldn’t get over this. They were accustomed to the moaning and wheedling of Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Campbellites seeking to find enough money to pay the preacher and a janitor. They publicised continual fairs, bazaars, ladies’-aid sociables and picnics dedicated to raising funds for a parsonage roof here, a Sunday-school carpet there. And now in three short years this curious sect of Christian Science had built a domed white temple of Bedford stone and granite taller by one foot than the Bunker Hill monument. Some newspapers ran articles every day for a week.
The financial miracle, at least, was well attested. Some vocations require a vow of poverty. Mrs Eddy had made a vow of wealth, and over time poverty took on the status of original sin. When it was suggested that wearing purple velvet and diamonds hardly went with the humility of the Lord’s handmaid, she knew better than to say, ‘If you’ve got it, baby, flaunt it!’ She remarked that the diamonds were a present from someone whose life she had saved, which she had worn round the house until her husband reproached her, saying she was belittling the gesture of the gift. As for the velvet, it was really only velveteen and had cost barely a dollar years and years ago but was mysteriously renewed, ‘like the widow’s cruse’.
Healing was the key ingredient in this new religion – nothing fills a room like the prospect of a miracle cure. It was a stroke of genius for her to make out that healing was a lowly power, and to delegate it. To be sure, Mrs Eddy claimed cures of her own, up to and sometimes including the raising of the dead, but these miracles were long ago and far away, impossible to verify.
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