The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [137]
A larger challenge was to ensure that psychical research continued, despite the deaths of so many of its champions. James warned that Evie—“a foolish kind of woman”—was unlikely to make things easier and would probably consume far too much of their time and energy. Already, in fact, she was working herself into a state. James felt bombarded by her letters telling him that she didn’t like Lodge, didn’t like Hodgson (who had been assigned to finish Myers’s book), and didn’t like the way the SPR was preserving her husband’s memory.
Evie herself was trying to answer an overwhelming stack of letters to “my Fred.” The writing seemed endless, she told James. Her life was terrible, and she suffered from the “physical anguish” of loss. And then—as if to prove that they should have been candid after all—in going through her late husband’s papers, Evie found an early draft of that hidden autobiography, “Fragments of an Inner Life.”
She wrote immediately, and slightly hysterically, to both Lodge and James, berating them for concealing it, and demanding that any copies be destroyed, along with all records of the Annie Marshall sittings, whether they seemed solid or not. James and Lodge might consider it evidence of spirit contact—but what did that matter if it was also evidence of a failed marriage?
AS LATE SUMMER came in, with its lazy golden afternoons and slowly fading gardens, as the Jameses were returning to Cambridge from Europe, the battered psychical research group received more bad news. Leonora Piper had announced that she was calling it quits as a medium.
She’d spent enough time in enforced social isolation, feeling a kind of freak, giving up her days to the blurred reality of a trance. She wanted picnics by the Charles River, teas with friends, Sunday mornings at church, the long-deferred prospect of a normal life.
Mrs. Piper chose not to confront Hodgson directly; he was far too persuasive a debater. So she issued her declaration of independence another way. She volunteered an interview to the New York Herald, declaring that she “would never hold another sitting with Mr. Hodgson, and that [she] would die first.” All her bottled-up fears and uncertainties came spilling out. She didn’t know what happened—or what happened to her—in the trances: “I am inclined to accept the telepathic explanation of all the so-called psychic phenomena,” she said, “but beyond this I remain a student with the rest of the world.”
She felt no more than a scientific test object, an “automaton going into what is called a trance condition” for purposes of investigation. Eighteen years of study and unsolved mystery felt like enough of her life. She was giving it all up, and she planned to devote herself to “more congenial pursuits.”
Shortly before setting sail for Boston, James had assured Evie Myers that her late husband’s unfinished masterpiece, Human Personality, was coming “rapidly forward.” On arrival, he found that promise to be an inadvertent falsehood. The book rested in Hodgson’s care, and that worried psychical researcher had barely looked at it as he attempted, fruitlessly, to reason with Mrs. Piper.
James plunged into the business of mending fences. He began by telling Hodgson that he needed to work on his manners. As Oliver Lodge complained, their intrepid Australian investigator rarely bothered with the niceties of social behavior, “being absolutely fearless and uncompromising in expressing what he believes to be the truth; or, for the matter of that, the lie.” In the case of Mrs. Piper, Hodgson admitted that he’d become increasingly remote in order to fend off any suspicion of a close relationship. In their recent trance sessions, he’d barely said hello before beginning a sitting, and left with a cool farewell at the end.
Not always the most diplomatic of men himself, James “remonstrated” with Hodgson for treating Mrs. Piper as a somewhat balky machine and secured from him a promise