The Devil's Making (32 page)

The members of the Oneida Community, under Noyes's direction, called themselves Perfectionists. Noyes, although not proclaiming himself to be God, claimed to speak for God in the same way Christ had done. The Perfectionist way to salvation was a practice called either ‘male continence' or ‘magnetation'. This meant that in sexual intercourse, the man would penetrate the woman and move gently in such a way that an exchange of magnetism via the genital organs would take place; however, he would restrain himself from ejaculation by stopping movement if this threatened. With experience, magnetation could be continued for hours. Its essence, in fact, was to continue until the male member shrank of its own accord, but without ejaculation having occurred, while still in the vagina. This process caused no risk to health – whereas if the man withdrew while still in a state of erection or, still worse, if he practised coitus interruptus or onanism and ejaculated outside the woman, then dire physical and spiritual consequences would ensue.

McCrory had annotated Noyes's description of magnetation with the comment: ‘Possibility of eventual retrograde ejaculation or seeping into bladder? Not physiologically out of the question. Do Elders have cloudy urine?' There was no answer given to this, and I was not sure if it was deliberately irreverent, though it seemed so.

The practice of magnetation was, according to Noyes, the answer to all problems. First, it meant that women would not conceive unless they wanted to, so they would not be burdened by frequent childbirth. However the decision that a woman should conceive was not entirely hers: it was taken, or confirmed, in a Community meeting. I gathered from a note of McCrory's, perhaps added after he had cut his association with Oneida, that there was a constant problem of jealousy because the Community Elders, and in particular Noyes himself, were those selected to father the women's children. There was surely an inconsistency, I thought, in the rule of Male Continence, which was proclaimed to be infinitely superior to sexual intercourse with normal ejaculation, being broken only by the most privileged of the Community's members …
(no pun on ‘member' intended – be careful, Chad!)

The second point about magnetation was that it enabled the communal sharing of everyone by everyone. The Perfectionist ideal was a total ‘communism' (although not, it seemed of the anarchic varieties that had brought workers to the barricades in Paris in 1848), in which all properties and sexual favours were shared. The woman and man have congress in private (after approval at a community meeting), but a woman must not restrict her favours to one man. Individual attachments were the root of all evil.

The third point was that the exchange of magnetism at the physical level accompanied the union of the man's and the woman's souls. This was apparently impossible if intercourse led to climax. Climax, in fact, led to the sort of attachment (‘falling in love', McCrory had scrawled in the margin) which was banned in the community.

One insert which caught my eye was headed ‘
Criticism:
in Community meetings, Criticism can last two or three hours. Some subjects reduced to state of nervous prostration, carried from room. But following day in state of elation and spiritual renewal. ‘The storm is past, the lightning has cleft me to the root, and Lo, I am miraculously new!' as one woman said to JHN. A
technic of enormous power,
susceptible to individual application.'

On another of McCrory's inserts was a summary of the principles of ‘Ascending and Descending Fellowship', from which I gathered again that the Elders must have the best bargain at Oneida. If they had intercourse with younger, less spiritually advanced Community members, there was a certain loss of magnetism! On the other hand it was only through intercourse with the Elders that the younger members, through ‘Ascending Fellowship' could gain and store magnetism. In other words, a young man and woman together would be squandering their magnetism and impeding their spiritual development. McCrory had scribbled: ‘JHN himself initiates all female virgins.'

I laughed out loud at this solemn American version of the medieval ‘jus primae noctis' – the ‘right of the first night': Noyes had the same power over his community's virgins as that of a medieval baron over the daughters of his serfs. What humbug!

Another interesting marginal comment was: ‘Lambskin condoms, being made of gut, transmit the animal magnetism. Vulcanized rubber condoms, as proposed in Chicago, being vegetable matter, would obstruct it.'

All was becoming clear. After reading the pamphlet and its notes, I sat doodling for a while, thinking about it. First I could not help applying it to myself. I had just discovered the animal in myself, with Lukswaas, and at times I felt a return of the physical horror which had made me wash myself in the ice cold stream. But at times I felt that I had also discovered my soul. This made my heart pound with fear as well as desire. I had always known I would fall heavily in love some day: I had waited so long! But Lukswaas was an insane choice – not that such an event was really a choice. I could
not
be in love with her. So I tried, constantly, to extrapolate my experience with her to other circumstances. I had suddenly become intensely and openly interested in sex. I could imagine doing it with all sorts of women. Yet I had not been able to, or wanted to, with Sylvie. (Yes, I could get the clap, the firesickness, from a woman like Sylvie. But from a squaw too!) Could I do it with Aemilia? There I imagined a spiritual union as well as the physical. But not to melt into her, not to give myself, not to ‘come' into her? Now I thought not of Aemilia, but inevitably of Lukswaas again. There was a melting on the woman's part too. A ‘spending', in the current term. The ethos of my time is, so far as I can understand it – a difficult task, like that of a fish understanding the water it lived in – accumulative. ‘Spending' is frowned upon in financial terms, and also in sexual. The proper thing to do is to
save
– both money and sexual energy. John Noyes joined a long list of cranks whom even I had heard of, who felt that the spending of male seed depletes body and mind; that abstaining from it is rather like keeping money in a bank account at a good percentage of interest. The original idea of Noyes's Community was that they could have their cake and eat it too: fornicate and ‘save' (salvation!) at the same time. (Except for Noyes and other Elders allowed to impregnate the young women …) I find all this repugnant. Like ‘utilitarianism', another part of the contemporary ethos. Darwin's theory of evolution is based in it: a species survives if its adaptation is
useful.
Although this is materialistic, it is also common sense. It is not useful to accumulate: there is also time to spend. And for every crank with a fear of spending, there is a sexual utilitarian (a London physician by the name of Acton came vaguely to my mind) who points out the dangers of saving …

But all this is theory. In practice, I know simply that whomever the woman I love, I would want to lose myself in her. Lukswaas has shown me, to my surprise, that a woman can also lose herself in a man. I gave myself. She gave herself. What have we found? I would rather not think.

*   *   *

Here I find mysef in a quandary. My ‘introspections' are now occurring in my narrative. I have been assuming that the narrative would one day be read – by someone, if not in print, in manuscript by my friends or – even – my descendants. These passages with the line down the side are marked so as to be discarded, so that the narrative is not too private, too intimate. But I cannot keep the private out of the public. My introspections are becoming mingled with my ‘extrospections', my insights with my ‘outsights'. This whole story is not a narrative for the world. It can only be for a few. For Lukswaas, I find myself thinking – though she doesn't know a word of English. Except for ‘Thank you'.

From now on I shall see if I can include my instrospections in my narrative.

*   *   *

I turned my mind back to the case of McCrory. The annotations in Noyes's booklet made it clear that McCrory had spent time in the Oneida Community but was, at least in retrospect, highly sceptical about it. I wondered if McCrory had left voluntarily or been ejected. Sceptical or not, he had brought some ideas and technics with him. He was, I felt, above all an opportunist, disguising self interest under a cloak of high-mindedness. Perhaps that came from his Congregational background, thought the ‘old' me. McCrory would easily have been tempted by religious communism. But he was, I suspected, too much of a prima donna to stay within any community. He had, opportunistically, lived within the Oneida Community and taken away what he wanted from it. This he must have blended with Mesmerism, phrenology, medicine, French ‘aliénisme', herbalism, the technics of anti-conception, a rather old fashioned humanitarianism (as opposed to utilitarianism), and a belief that he must save people – primarily women. This mental synthesis no doubt corresponded with his more base desires. For as I see it, a Perfectionist of other people is ultimately a Perfectionist of himself, and therefore a monster of vanity. McCrory's Perfectionism led to his death.

21

My report to Pemberton was brief. I set out as strongly as I could the flaws in the case against Wiladzap and summarized what I had learned from my various interviews about the professional and private life of McCrory – in such a way, I hoped, as to make a convincing case that in view of the imbroglio of secrets and (in conventional terms) vice that was McCrory's life, it was necessary to be prudent before jumping to conclusions about the Indians. ‘It must be concluded', I wrote in the pompous style that an official report required, ‘that whatever vices, unrestrained passions, and indifference to society's rules of conduct may be assumed to exist among the Tsimshian Indians, also exist, in an equal plenitude of facts shocking to the civilized mind, among the citizens of this Colony who were Dr McCrory's patients and associates. The blows which struck him down, in their barbarity have been assumed to have been smitten by Indians, whereas they might equally be the result of the inflamed passions of a person in whom, in a nervous condition of the kind which the doctor specialized in treating, the veneer of civilization, already cracked and crazed by nervous tensions, had suddenly shattered. Until further investigation has been established beyond doubt that the victim's demise was not the result of a passionate explosion of hatred or revenge on the part of one of his patients or associates in the demi-monde of prostitution and abortion, it would seem prudent to delay bringing the Tyee Wiladzap to trial, for fear of having him convicted and hanged as a result of evidence which, although strong, is never more than circumstantial.'

It was with such flourishes that legal reports concluded. But I knew in my heart that my argument was weak until the ‘further evidence' was forthcoming.

Once written, the report could not even be presented to Pemberton right away, since he was out of town on one of several trips to remonstrate with the Chiefs of the Cowichan, twenty miles North, over their intransigence in disputes over the boundaries of their recently established reservation. There is in fact an upsurge of news concerning Indians, underlining to Victorians the fact that their garden of Eden is surrounded by a howling and barbarous wilderness. On Saltspring Island an Indian has come to trial and been convicted to hang for the murder of two white settlers. The British Columbia legislature has rushed to denounce the reformatory zeal of the mother country, and has confirmed that in the Colony executions will continue to be public. No doubt they had the Saltspring case, and Wiladzap, in mind. Public opinion, Amor de Cosmos's infernal ‘vox populi' as expressed in the
British Colonist,
is also incensed by news of the shipwreck of a small Navy boat further up the coast. The sailors' bodies were found on the beaches. They had not been drowned but instead had received a welcome from the local Indians, the Clayoquot: the bodies were headless, and pieces of flesh had been stripped from the bones. No ‘almost scalped', or ‘almost bitten off' flesh', I can't help thinking. But the details are not fully in. The fact that the news comes piece by piece, like the instalments of a serial, keeps interest high.

All this Indian news might make a jury act quickly and harshly to condemn Wiladzap. But at the same time, it diverts attention from him. Perhaps his trial can be delayed.

*   *   *

I wrote out my report to Pemberton on the morning of the day I was due to meet Lukswaas at night, in the forest. The work kept my mind off her, although my body had gone into a state of excitement on its own. No matter what I had been thinking of, each time I came back to my physical sensations I found that my heart was pounding, my head light, my genitals stirring. It was as if my body was an animal living independently of my mind.

At noon I received an unexpected visit from Mr Giles, the surgeon of HMS
Ariadne,
whom I only remembered as a gaunt, silent observer of the humiliation of the under-officers by the Captain. Giles had come to the courthouse to speak to ‘whoever is investigating the murder of Dr McCrory', and was quite startled to see me.

‘Why Hobbes,' he said, ‘I thought you would be prospecting for gold up in the Cariboo, or perhaps pushing paper at Government House. You look like a London “peeler”. But, my goodness, you've become a Sergeant already.'

‘Acting.' I said. ‘For this investigation at least.'

‘Yes. Dr McCrory. We just got back to Esquimalt yesterday and it was mentioned to me that he had been savagely murdered – by an Indian apparently, but the officer who told me said there was talk of there being other involvements and that McCrory had been a regular charlatan. So I thought I should report to you my own meeting with the man.'