Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  “My famous Societe Spirite,” she wrote Nadyezhda, “has not lasted a fortnight—it is a heap of ruins,”100 but it was not so short-lived as she implied. When the American Spiritualist James M. Peebles visited Cairo the following year, he was heartened to learn that “Madame Blavatsky, assisted by other brave souls, formed a society of Spiritualists... with fine writing mediums and other forms of manifestations.”101 Noting that even though Madame herself was no longer in Egypt, he reported that the Society continued to hold weekly séances during the winter months.

  In April, 1872, Helena had returned to Odessa with Madame Sebir and the monkeys, but neither Russia nor her family restored her spirits. It was not merely a matter of feeling bored with her aunts—although she certainly must have been—but rather an inchoate longing for something that Russia did not provide. Away, she remembered her relatives with nostalgic craving; with them, there were quarrels because they did not understand her.

  Restive and unhappy, Helena began to think of moving on, and in March or April, 1873, she visited an old friend, Madame Popesco, in Bucharest. From there she wandered on to Paris, where her brother and one of her von Hahn cousins had temporarily settled. It was her intention to make her home indefinitely with Nicholas von Hahn, the son of her Uncle Gustave, at 11 rue de l’Universite, but apparently this was not his intention because after two months she moved in with Leonid and his friend M. Lequeux in the rue de Palais. About this time she met an American physician, Dr. Lydia Marquette, who was in Paris studying hospitals and attending lectures. Dr. Marquette, who spent all her free time with Helena, gives a lonely and somewhat pathetic picture of H.P.B.: “She passed her time in painting and writing, seldom going out of her room. She had few acquaintances, but among the number were M. and Mme. Leymarie.”102

  As followers of Allan Kardec, the Leymaries were active in Spiritualist circles and had all the current news on the movement. It was from them or their friends that H.P.B. must have heard about the popularity of Spiritualism in the United States. For anyone interested in psychic phenomena or even simple spirit-rapping, America was unquestionably the place to be, the Mecca of all that was exciting and avant-garde. In June, seemingly on impulse, Helena counted the last of her cash, headed for the port of Le Havre, and purchased a steamship ticket for New York.

  What happened in Paris that brought her to this spur-of-the-moment decision? It was, she would say, “my mysterious Hindu” who ordered her “to embark for North America, which I did without protesting.”103 And if there was no mysterious Hindu, there were equally pressing reasons. In a few weeks she would be forty-two. Her youth behind her, she had yet done nothing with her life. She wanted to be world famous, but the world so far had failed to acknowledge her. The bitter irony was that in Russia she had become too well known; she was notorious. She knew that she had intelligence and ability, perhaps a service to render humanity, but that her past would pursue her “like the brand of the curse on Cain.”104

  Desperation brought her to Le Havre. Nevertheless, she was fond of recounting how at the docks she had met a German peasant woman, weeping because she and her children had been sold bogus tickets in Hamburg. Jauntily, H.P.B. exchanged her deluxe passage for steerage berths for all of them.105 In reality, Madame Blavatsky traveled steerage because it was all she could afford. Like millions of other penniless emigrants, the rebellious aristocrat regarded the United States as a land of opportunity and hope, as a second chance. She meant to grab it.

  NEW YORK

  1873-1878

  I

  Immigrant

  Madame Blavatsky arrived in New York most probably on July 5, 1873, on the French steamer St. Laurent out of Le Havre. During the fifteen-day crossing, the St. Laurent experienced extremely heavy westerly gales and head seas, causing both damage to the engine and a four-day delay at sea.

  On emigrant ships, steerage could only be reached by climbing down a ladder through a hole in the hatchway deck. These hatches provided almost no ventilation and, in rough weather when air was most needed, they were kept shut. Two weeks of airlessness, overcrowding, lack of sanitary facilities, contamination of food and water, as well as the ever-present possibility of shipwreck, added up to downright misery. Remembering H.P.B.’s traumatic experiences aboard the SS Eumonia, one can only assume that the Atlantic crossing was a nightmare.

  Steaming past The Narrows, she must have pressed against the ship’s rail with the other passengers and scanned New York harbor: the surrounding rural landscape dotted with white cottages; the steeple of Trinity Church in the distance; and off the tip of Manhattan Island the circular stone structure, Castle Garden, once a music hall featuring Jenny Lind and Barnum’s midgets, now a landing depot, where passengers lined up to register with the Emigration Commission before being herded back to the dock to collect their baggage. If a person had friends or relatives, she was whisked away; if there was no one, she walked to one of the many boardinghouses in the vicinity of Greenwich Street while trying to get her bearings, or she consulted one of the immigrant-aid societies who provided housing information for English, Irish, French, German and Hebrew aliens. (None existed for the few Russians who had arrived.) For Helena, as for most new arrivals, it was a lonely and bewildering moment in a land of strangers and strange customs.

  On Saturday the fifth, New Yorkers were recuperating from their Fourth of July celebrations. The holiday weekend had been marred for many sections of the country by hurricanes, tornadoes and floods, but New York escaped the storms, and at 4 p.m. on Saturday the thermometer at Dickinson’s Drug Store, 3 Park Row, read ninety degrees, ten above normal. Helena quickly discovered that New York was a difficult city in which to navigate if one was a single woman, even in the simple matter of finding a place to live. First-class hotels refused to admit unescorted women, and even the lesser hotels and boardinghouses tended to regard them with suspicion unless accompanied by a male relative. Of course all these types of accommodations were far beyond Helena’s means, a predicament in which she was not alone.

  In 1873, New York had about forty thousand women who found it necessary to support themselves. As the typewriter had not yet been invented and women were generally few and far between in the business world, they were limited to working as shop clerks, telegraphers, teachers, governesses, seamstresses and factory workers, all positions offering poor wages and long hours. The fact that decent housing was virtually impossible to secure on their incomes had not gone unacknowledged; charitable organizations were making attempts to assist such women, and in a few rare cases the women had even organized to help themselves. Earlier in the year, forty women had banded together to experiment with cooperative living by renting a newly built tenement house at 222 Madison Street. What lucky tip steered Helena Petrovna to this unique women’s commune we do not know, but doubtless she herself must have regarded it as a lifesaver.

  At that time Madison was a street of small two-story houses occupied by owners who were proud of their shade trees and kept their front and back gardens in good order. The owner of 222 was a Mr. Rinaldo, who did not live on the premises but took a paternal interest in his women tenants by visiting frequently and personally collecting the rent. H.P.B., installed in a private room on the second floor, found herself next door to a good-humored Scot-Irish woman, Miss Parker, who immediately came over to get acquainted. All the residents of the house thought themselves a family, and neighbors were constantly visiting. Downstairs next to the street door a room had been specially set aside as an office where mail and messages were kept and the women could congregate to talk. Naturally the arrival of an extravagant personality such as Helena Petrovna was an exciting event and the women regarded her with unabashed curiosity.

  Despite the cheapness and friendliness of her new quarters, H.P.B.’s financial problems kept her in a permanent state of anxiety. She had so little money that even coffee became a luxury. She boiled the grounds several times to make her supply last and worried about how she was going to survive. Within
three weeks of her arrival, she took the initiative in a rather audacious manner by boldly notifying the New York Sun of her presence in the city. When a woman reporter, Anna Ballard, was sent to get an interview, H.P.B. was delighted to talk about herself along with other matters that she hoped would interest Sun readers. She told Miss Ballard that one hundred fifty aristocratic Russian women, including Czar Alexander’s daughters, had been studying medicine in Zurich when the Emperor suddenly forbade such masculine endeavors and limited them to the study of midwifery; some of the women had been forced to return to Russia while others had gone to France and Germany and a small group to the United States.

  This information was, of course, invented on the spot, but the Sun did not pause to distinguish between fact and fiction as would the Times or the Tribune, and on July 28, they ran the story as front-page news. Judging by the final sentence it is obvious that H.P.B. played her game to the hilt: “These accomplished women, polygots, travellers, scientists, nearly moneyless are able to do much and want something to do.”1

  If Helena hoped that the Sun would give her a free want ad, she must have been grossly disappointed. Not once did her name appear in the article; no employer contacted the paper to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of the gifted Russian women, starving and looking for work. After this setback, H.P.B. seemed uncertain as to her next step. Day after day she sat in the first-floor office and rolled cigarettes, garnering her tobacco supply from the head of some fur-bearing animal that she wore around her neck as a pouch; she chain-smoked and passed her time talking to anyone who happened by.

  By this time, she was beginning to understand what it took for an unknown to succeed in New York City. It was obvious that no matter how important an individual might have been elsewhere, New Yorkers automatically considered her a nobody. One had to work at building a reputation, and then she would be taken for just what she was worth and no more. To H.P.B., this seemed a mixed blessing in that it enabled her to start fresh, but by the same token it meant there would be no easy road to recognition, much less to procuring one’s daily bread. Her abortive publicity stunt in the Sun had not, actually, been a bad idea; it merely had not worked as planned, and she could see that in the future she would have to be a good deal more subtle.

  By August, she was still in the office, rolling her cigarettes and brooding. There was little use prowling about the city because she had no money to enjoy herself and, besides, she found it somewhat intimidating. New York, in 1873, had only two visible classes, the wealthy and the poor; the middle class, who could not afford the city, lived in the suburbs and commuted to work. Most noticeable was New York’s air of prosperity, the illusion that everybody had money to throw away. One had only to walk down Broadway, the city’s great thoroughfare, to observe an assorted spectacle of wealth: elegantly attired gentlemen with canes, top hats and wide cravats set with diamond stickpins; sporty fellows with derbies cocked over one eye and hair roached up in bear grease or macassar oil; corseted ladies going to extremes with powder and rouge and every variety of false hair— chignons, pompadours, braids, rolls, and spit curls. Shops displayed a generous assortment of satins, jewels, toys, paintings and silverware, and one cosmetic shop advertised thirteen different varieties of skin powder and eight kinds of creams. The Fifth Avenue Hotel charged thirty dollars a day for a suite of two rooms and a parlor (supposedly a bargain), while the one-million-dollar Stevens House apartment building on the corner of Broadway and Twenty-seventh Street offered lavish eighteen-room suites with a steam elevator, frescoed walls and separate quarters for servants. Inflation had driven up prices to the point where even essentials had become luxuries: butter was fifty cents a pound, crushed sugar sixteen, fowls twenty-five, and choice cuts of beef thirty-five.

  At the same time, there were ominous signs that the boom could not continue indefinitely. By the year’s end, depression had already begun to rock the country; on September 18, the failure of the great banking house of Jay Cooke and Company would precipitate further disasters of the Panic of 1873, as banks collapsed, five thousand businesses failed, the iron industry cut wages, and mines and textile mills closed down. By the following year, unemployment would rocket to three million. It was not the best time for an immigrant to make her way in the United States of America.

  Elizabeth Holt had spent the summer with her mother at Saratoga. In August she was sent home to New York to get ready for the opening of school, but since a proper Victorian girl could not live alone, her mother’s friend Miss Parker agreed to chaperone her at 222 Madison Street. There Elizabeth met Madame Blavatsky, which was inevitable as her room was directly opposite the office where H.P.B. spent most of her time. Madame seemed to Elizabeth “an unusual figure.” It was not only her cigarettes and the crinkled blond hair—she overflowed with a nonstop fund of fabulous stories about her life in Paris, where she claimed to have decorated Empress Eugenie’s private apartments. Elizabeth imagined her as “dressed in blouse and trousers, mounted on a ladder and doing the actual work, and I think this is what she told us; but I cannot be sure whether she said that she did the actual painting, frescoing, etc., or whether she merely designed it.” Either seemed equally marvelous.

  Elizabeth knew that H.P.B. was “greatly troubled about money,” which seemed peculiar because Madame was a Russian countess. Some skeptics in the house tartly suggested that Madame was, despite her stories, nothing but an ordinary adventuress. But Miss Parker, who had accompanied H.P.B. to the Russian Consulate, assured them that the consul knew of her family and had promised to contact them for money. In the meantime, however, Mr. Rinaldo had introduced Helena to two young friends of his who owned a collar-and-shirt factory and were willing to give her freelance work designing advertising cards. “Madame also tried ornamental work in leather, and produced some very fine and intricate examples, but they did not sell, and she abandoned the leather work,” recalled Elizabeth Holt.

  Later, when H.P.B. became well known, Elizabeth could never quite imagine her as an ethical teacher because she remembered her excitable temper and how she expressed herself “with a vigour which was very disturbing” when things went wrong. That was a genteel way of putting it, because H.P.B., angry, had a disconcerting habit of swearing like a sailor. Still, there was much about her to admire, especially her fearlessness and her instinctive response to anyone in trouble. “Undesirable people were beginning to move into the street,” recalled Elizabeth Holt,

  and the neighborhood was changing rapidly. One evening one of our young girls, coming home late from work, was followed and greatly frightened; she slung herself breathlessly into a chair in the office. Madame interested herself at once, expressed her indignation in most vigorous terms, and finally drew from some fold of her dress a knife (I think she used it to cut her tobacco, but it was sufficiently sharp to be a formidable weapon of defence) and she said she had that for any man who molested her.

  While the prim Elizabeth recognized and appreciated the guttsiness that characterized the least of H.P.B.’s actions, she also acknowledged another side of Madame Blavatsky, one that Miss Parker did not, evidently, believe appropriate for a young girl to know about. H.P.B. was in the habit of relating weird tales of the supernatural, some of them so frightening that Miss Parker stayed all night with Elizabeth instead of climbing two flights of dark stairs to her own room. Apart from spooky stories, Helena amiably dispensed information about people’s pasts to anyone who asked. Miss Parker, for one, was greatly startled to hear about incidents in her own life that were, she thought, known only to herself. When she asked to be put in touch with her dead mother, Helena refused—her mother, progressed beyond reach, involved herself in higher matters now. Since Madame continually claimed to be under the authority of unseen powers, Elizabeth and the others at 222 Madison assumed that she must be speaking of her spirit guides and naturally concluded that she was a Spiritualist. For her part, Elizabeth could not get excited about Madame’s spirits, those “tricksy little beings” whom she cal
led diaki.2

  Entertaining her co-residents with life readings was all very well but did nothing to solve Helena’s problems. As no rubles had yet appeared from Russia, her financial situation continued to deteriorate until she was reduced to relying on the generosity of others in order to live. A few blocks away in Henry Street there was a French Canadian widow, Madame Magnon, with whom Helena had grown friendly. When Madame Magnon offered to share her home until Helena’s money difficulties were straightened out, she left 222 Madison. Some of the women, notably Miss Parker, kept in touch and after the two madames decided to hold Sunday evening seances, Miss Parker was an eager participant. While Elizabeth Holt was not invited—her mother would not have approved—Miss Parker told her all the news. It seemed that one morning, when Helena failed to appear for breakfast, Madame Magnon finally went to her room and found her unable to rise. Her nightgown had been sewn securely to the mattress, stitched in such a way that Madame could not possibly have done it herself, and Magnon had to cut the threads. This, Miss Parker assured Elizabeth, was the work of the diaki.

  In early November, Helena received a letter from her half-sister with the unhappy news that their father had died on July 27 after a three-day illness; he had been buried at Stavropol in the Caucasus. Excusing her delay in writing, Liza said that she had not known Helena’s whereabouts—she enclosed a draft for Helena’s portion of the estate. The amount must have been modest, at least less than H.P.B. believed she was due, because afterward she would accuse her sister Vera of withholding half her inheritance.3