Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (32 page)

Personally H.P.B. was faring no better than the Society. In the
Banner of Light,
Hiram Corson, whom she considered a true friend, had called her an “imposter.” This attack was not unexpected since the Spiritualists now had nothing but harsh words for her. Still, Corson’s betrayal hurt; newspaper articles insinuating that she was immoral and anonymous letters accusing her of prostitution devastated her. But her biggest shock came from Daniel Dunglas Home. Home had not appreciated being called a fraud in Olcott’s book
People from the Other World,
and retaliated by writing to the Boston
Herald
that Madame Blavatsky was the most notorious cheating medium he knew of. He went on to attack her private life by including a letter from Nicholas Meyendorff, who declared that he had known Madame intimately.
¹⁵³
Enraged, H.P.B. wrote to Alexander Aksakov, one of whose cousins was married to Home,

How on earth do I interfere with Home? I am not a medium, I never was and never will be a professional one. I have devoted my life to the study of the ancient cabbala and occultism. My position is very cheerless; simply helpless. There is nothing left but to start for Australia and change my name forever.
¹⁵⁴

She begged Aksakov to make Home hold his tongue by conveying her warning that if he persisted she would spread frightful stories about him. Despite her spirited self-defense, she felt sickened at Home’s treachery.

On May 20, Baron de Palm died in Roosevelt Hospital. Olcott, already overworked and exhausted, was obliged to carry out the dead man’s last wishes in regard to a funeral. Instead of arranging for the modest non-sectarian service, which Palm had requested, Henry saw an opportunity to grab publicity for the Theosophical Society, and engaged the two-thousand-seat Masonic Temple at Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue.

The New York papers had a field day ridiculing in advance Henry’s “pagan funeral.” Colonel Olcott, jeered the
World,
would appear as high priest wearing a leopard skin and carrying a roll of papyrus; Madame Blavatsky would play an ancient Egyptian instrument called a sistrum; George Felt would bear an asp purchased at a toy store on Eighth Avenue; and the procession would also include slaves carrying offerings of “early potatoes, asparagus, roast beef, French pancakes, bock-beer, and New Jersey cider.” Naturally, more than a few New Yorkers turned out to see this spectacle.

That afternoon, when Helena and Henry arrived at the Masonic Temple, the police were struggling to keep order among a mob of Sunday idlers looking for amusement. Inside, where every seat was filled and the aisles jammed, nobody paid much attention to the baron’s embalmed body lying in a rosewood casket on the stage.

Olcott, wearing a disappointingly conventional black robe, attempted to get the service under way with an Orphic hymn, but there was so great a commotion in the audience that he had to remind people repeatedly they were in the presence of death. Not until Emma Britten appeared to give a ten-minute oration and sprinkle the coffin with rose petals did the hecklers quiet down, but once Henry appeared the yelling and whistling started up once more. Helena, sitting quietly in the audience, was torn between laughter and tears, but when a particularly noisy spectator called Henry names, and was removed by a policeman, she stood up, pointed to the heckler, and shouted, “He’s a bigot, that’s what he is.”
¹⁵⁵
Her outburst drew from the audience a huge laugh in which she herself joined.

After the funeral, Henry rushed to Palm’s trunk and found two of his own shirts with the name-tags ripped out, old love letters from obscure actresses, and a heap of shabby clothing. There was no money, jewelry, and certainly no manuscript of
Isis Unveiled,
as Helena’s traducers would claim. There remained only the will.

Still hopeful, Helena told Aksakov that Palm owned rich silver mines and 17,000 acres of land and went on to announce that “eight of us are preparing to set off for Thibet, Siam and Cambodia”
¹⁵⁶
after first making a side trip to Yucatan where they planned to investigate certain ruins. This, of course, was wishful thinking on a grand scale. In reality, as they learned several months later, Baron de Palm’s property had been sold for taxes years earlier. “The mining shares,” Olcott reported, “were good Only for papering walls, and the Swiss castles proved castles in the air.”
¹⁵⁷
The baron’s assets did not even reimburse Henry for the costs of the funeral and the probate. And as if that were not bad enough, they were stuck with Palm’s corpse because there were no facilities for cremation in the United States. Storing Palm in carbolized clay, Henry investigated the possibilities of open-air burning only to learn that the city’s sanitary laws forbade it. Not until midsummer would he read in the newspaper about a Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne who was building a crematorium for his own personal use in Washington, Pennsylvania.

Soon after Palm’s funeral, H.P.B. and Olcott took an apartment together at the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue. This time there was no pretense of separate quarters. Those who had come to regard them as a couple did not find this daring step hard to accept, but it served to outrage others.

The new neighborhood was too far uptown to be regarded as fashionable, but the flat itself perfectly suited H.P.B.’s needs. A sunny suite of rooms on the second-floor corner, the place boasted a large parlor, dining room, three bedrooms, kitchen and bath. In the main room Helena arranged an office for herself by using her desk and bookshelves to fence off a three-sided enclosure. Seated inside this pen, she had only to reach out an arm to get any book or paper she needed.

At the outset, she made it clear that she would not involve herself in housekeeping. After Henry saw her trying to boil an egg by laying it on the live coals, he promptly concluded that she lacked the vaguest notion of cooking. A series of maids-of-all-work were hired, but stayed only until they got a taste of Madame’s temper. Rather than complicated meals, Helena required large quantities of fried foods, endless cups of coffee, and of course her cigarettes, but her eating habits were extremely capricious. One day she would ignore lunch altogether, the next day she would demand to be served an hour ahead of time, then complain over the half-boiled vegetables and underdone meat.

Her habits horrified Olcott. Not only did she overeat relentlessly, but she poured melted butter on her fried eggs and devoured the boxes of caviar, sweet cakes and other Russian delicacies that Nadyezhda thoughtfully provided. “Her only exercise,” Henry recalled, “was to go to the dining room or bathroom and back again to her table.”
¹⁵⁸

When the maid had either gone home or quit, Henry cooked while Helena sat at her desk writing and smoking; if she did come into the kitchen, it was only to pester him. When guests were present, she would grandly offer tea, ignoring Henry’s desperate signals that the pantry was empty. Often at 1 a.m. he would set out to scour the neighborhood for milk and sugar. If his foray was successful, he would rush back to prepare the tea. In disgust he finally solved the problem by posting a sign:

TEA

Guests will find boiling water and tea 

Iin the kitchen, perhaps milk and sugar, 

and will kindly help themselves.
¹⁵⁹

Since self-service fit the bohemian atmosphere of the apartment, nobody seemed to object, and a procession of learned professors and elegantly dressed women could be seen quietly slipping into the kitchen to put on the kettle.

After initially rebelling against shared domestic responsibilities with the maid, Henry eventually surrendered. By his own admission, he and Helena were pupil and teacher, although some of their friends saw them as slave and master. Olcott took Helena’s merciless bullying for granted, but it shocked others. Albert Rawson felt sincerely sorry for Henry who, despite his total devotion to Madame, was the object of her most vicious abuse.

“Those scenes,” Rawson recalled, “were highly amusing, although somewhat hair-raising at the time.”
¹⁶⁰
R. B. Westbrook, an attorney friend of Henry’s, did not find it amusing that Helena called Henry a liar before a room full of company. Westbrook decided the colonel was so deeply influenced “as to be utterly incapable of judging correctly anything she might say or do. He was as crazy as a loon on anything relating to Blavatskyism, though perfectly sane on every other subject.” Nevertheless, her “contemptuous treatment of him was humiliating to behold.”
¹⁶¹

Henry always forgave Helena, for the truth was he had grown to love her. He adored her vitality, her cerebral playfulness, her brilliant conversation and epigrammatic wit, and he never failed to be enchanted by the clear, rollicking laugh that seemed to him the very essence of laughter.

What did it matter if she “swore like the army in Flanders?” She meant no harm. Was it really important if she “put on her night-dress, went to bed, and received a mixed company of ladies and gentlemen”
¹⁶²
in her bedroom? Secretly he applauded her pranks to shock the prudish.

Of course she knew nothing about fashion or grooming, and he had to admit that her general appearance was outrageously untidy. Around the house she wore a dressing gown or a baggy shift that looked like a potato sack; when they went out she would make a stab at elegance and get herself up in a plumed hat, satin dress dripping with trimmings, heavy gold chain attached to a blue-enameled watch with a monogram of cheap diamonds, and a dozen or fifteen rings on her nicotine-stained fingers. He learned not to cringe when people laughed at her, but still recalled that “I have gone to the theatre with her when I expected the house to rise at us.”
¹⁶³
Her indifference to feminine concerns merely reflected, he thought, both her high birth and her subsequent revolt against the commonplace conventions. He had never known, could not have even imagined, a woman like Helena Petrovna. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” he mused one winter evening about 1 a.m., “to have some hothouse grapes?”

“So it would,” she agreed blandly, and asked him to dim the gaslight. A moment later, hanging from a nearby bookshelf, he saw two large bunches of ripe black grapes “which we proceeded to eat.”
¹⁶⁴

What other woman, or man for that matter, could create fruit out of season, or a red clay Turkish pipe with a purple velvet stem, or sugar tongs that resembled a pickle fork? Who else could fling out her hand and
“ping! ping!
would come the silvery tones of a bell?” Of course some people might think she concealed the bell under her dress, but Henry sincerely believed that the range of notes precluded any such trickery. Still, that did not prevent him from pestering her for explanations. How did she do it? It was hard to explain, she told him, just as difficult as for him to describe how he produced a whistle. Only when he persisted did she reluctantly speak of working “the astral currents by my trained will.”
¹⁶⁵

Those who said, like Westbrook, that Henry tolerated Madame Blavatsky only to achieve adeptship were wrong. To be sure, he was excited by her phenomena, but he genuinely loved her. She may have abused him in public, but alone with him she could be whimsical and utterly lovable, drawing comic caricatures of him and calling him “Maloney” in her funny Russian accent. They were not merely a couple, but a family, because Henry bought a mate for her canary; Jenny and Pip, Henry remembered, “came to be almost like children as it were.”
¹⁶⁶
Later they added a cat named Charles.

Throughout the summer of 1876, work on
Isis
went steadily forward and in less than four months Helena had completed a second draft. The trouble with the earlier draft had been not merely a need for focus, but the utter lack of any structure. The ideas had come pouring out higgledy-piggledy, each paragraph complete in itself but bearing no relation to its neighbors. In desperation she had finally begun cutting apart the pages and trying to paste them back together into a coherent narrative. When this too proved a failure, Henry suggested dividing the material into two volumes, the first devoted only to science, the second to theology, then further subdividing each volume into chapters. To do this entailed the disheartening business of excising repetitions, transposing nearly every passage, and then interposing the transitions. As Helena’s English was still far from perfect, Henry would read aloud her nearly indecipherable handwriting and translate the sentences into proper English while Helena copied them down. Without him, it is safe to say there would have been no book.

As poor as she knew the actual writing to be, H.P.B. felt lucky in one respect: no matter what the subject, whether it be philosophy, metaphysics or ancient religion, the words came easily. Writing was so simple, “the greatest pleasure,”
¹⁶⁷
she wrote Vera, that it did almost seem as if someone were dictating to her.

It is interesting to note that the principles of what would later become Theosophy emerged in
Isis
only occasionally and in seminal form. She made no attempt to organize the whole field of human and divine knowledge, as she would a decade later when writing
The Secret Doctrine.
In 1876 she could only point to evidence for the existence of that knowledge, could only dimly suggest the outlines of a grand cosmic scheme. But if all she could manage was a panoramic survey of the literature from which she would eventually fashion the system of Theosophy, she would have done a great deal. To resuscitate archaic wisdom was an immense undertaking, even for one with extraordinary speed in absorbing material.