The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [140]
Myers had given privately printed copies of “Fragments” to a few close friends. Evie wanted James, Lodge, Hodgson, and anyone else in possession of the humiliating document to turn his copy over to her. She asked William James to oversee the recall, beginning with Hodgson, who was such a difficult person; and she also asked that he please visit Lodge when he was next in England.
She couldn’t talk to Lodge herself. She didn’t trust him; she didn’t trust his wife; she didn’t even trust his children. She hoped James would persuade Lodge to give up his copy in the name of his friendship with her dead husband, who would have been “the last person to wish to harm his wife and children—and this would be the inevitable result,” if the autobiography gained wider circulation.
Lodge was in an assertive mood. In early 1902, King Edward had knighted him for his scientific achievements. While waiting at the palace to officially become Sir Oliver, he’d struck up a friendship with a writer also awaiting the knighthood ceremony, Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Lodge and Conan Doyle had continued their acquaintance, and their discussions of spirit communication. The talented mystery writer would eventually become a notable spiritualist and author of a two-volume history of the subject, which he dedicated to Lodge as “a great leader in both physical and psychic science.”
Sir Oliver Lodge now headed the physics department at the newly established University of Birmingham. He’d made five demands before taking the Birmingham job: a research laboratory, the retention of his secretary and two assistants, an endowment fund, protection from “mundane” aspects of research projects, and no interference with his interest in psychical research, “although I knew it would be unpopular.”
In his spare time, Lodge was engaged in a patent battle with the Marconi Radio Company, demanding (ultimately successfully) that the company honor his early work on radio receivers. He’d taken to tinkering with automobile mechanisms and invented a new kind of spark plug for internal combustion engines—the power behind the horseless carriage. Two of his sons were drawing up plans for a Lodge Motor Plug Company.
As Myers’s friend, Lodge wasn’t willing to abandon his friend’s autobiography. He thought the book a lovely, eloquent thing, laced with some of Myers’s best poetry. True, many of the poems were love songs to Annie Marshall, but in Lodge’s opinion, Evie’s actions would only serve to erase Myers from his place in history. The best Lodge was willing to offer was a compromise. The society would, for now, publish only a few of the better poems, as a booklet called “Fragments of Poetry.” But, Lodge insisted, Meyers’s friends would also save the manuscript as a record of a friend, of a love affair, of faith in the possibility of life after death.
IN FEBRUARY 1903 the publisher Isaac Funk—famed for the Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary, less well known for his ongoing curiosity about spiritualism—decided to visit a private medium in Brooklyn.
At first the woman, a sixty-eight-year-old widow, seemed unimpressive, maybe a little unstable. In trance, she seemed to represent a veritable crowd of spirits—male, female, drawling southerner, twangy westerner—and Funk, bored, decided that he was observing some kind of strange split personality disorder. As he wrote later, the idea of mental dysfunction was fixed in his mind, “up to the time that I had the singular experience which I give below.”
The medium suddenly announced that a spirit had come who was concerned about an ancient coin, called the Widow’s Mite for its tiny size and minimal value during its day.
“This coin is out of its place and should be returned,” the Brooklyn medium insisted, adding sharply that