Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (85 page)

As a result of this flattery, and because H.P.B. and Olcott liked him, Coues found himself appointed Chairman of the American Board of Control. By 1889, both of the founders were writing him chummy, conspiratorial letters in which they used him as a convenient outlet for releasing their grievances against each other. Olcott warned Coues to ignore any order H.P.B. might issue outside the perimeters of the Esoteric Section; he would “stand no nonsense, nor shall I ratify a single order or promise of hers made independently of me... She seems a Bourbon as to memory and receptivity and fancies the old halcyon days are not gone.”
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For her part, Helena contented herself with sniping references to Olcott as a “psychologized baby.”
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Apparently Coues could not resist taking advantage of the strained relations: he began sending H.P.B. mocking letters jeering at “Your ‘first-born,’ the meek Hibernian Judge” and at “your psychologized baby Olcott,” at the same time patronizing her as “the greatest woman of the age, who is born to redeem her times.”
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The point of this fulsome message was an almost threatening request, that she cable the American convention gathering shortly in Chicago and order the delegates to elect him president. H.P.B. did no such thing.

Seeking a way to retaliate, Coues hit upon the idea of joining forces with another dissatisfied Theosophist, Mabel Collins, and the two of them attacked in a way that H.P.B. could not have anticipated. Coues had never met Collins, although in 1885 he had written her after the publication of
Light on the Path
to inquire who might be the real author, and she had explained that he was an adept of Madame’s acquaintance. In the spring of 1889, however, he suddenly received another letter from Mabel confessing that Madame’s friends had nothing to do with
Light on the Path;
she was the sole author and the reason she had lied four years earlier was that H.P.B. “begged and implored me to”
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and that she had dutifully written the letter at her dictation. The fact of the matter was that Helena could not have begged Mabel because at that time she scarcely knew the woman and, moreover, was not even in England in 1885, when her book was published. Now, neither Collins nor Coues, bound by their mutual hatred for Madame Blavatsky, were paying strict attention to truthful details, and Coues made sure that Mabel’s letter was published in the
Religio-Philosophical Journal.

Mabel was feeling particularly resentful; not only had she been unceremoniously ousted from
Lucifer,
but H.P.B. had told people she was suffering from a mental breakdown. Then in April Madame expelled Mabel from the Society, an event which proved unnerving for Mabel, but entertaining for the rest of the Blavatsky Lodge. “There has been a great row,” Yeats wrote Katharine Tynan,

Madame Blavatsky expelled Mrs. Cook (Miss Mabel Collins) and the president of the Lodge for flirtation, and Mrs. Alicia Cremers, an American, for gossiping about it. As a result, Madame Blavatsky is in high spirits. The society is like the “happy family” that used to be exhibited round Charing Cross Station—a cat in a cage full of canaries. The Russian cat is beginning to purr now and smoothen its fur again—the canary birds are less by three—the faithful will be more obedient than ever.
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From Yeats’ sardonic description, it sounds like a Theosophical version of
The Mikado,
in which the punishment for flirting is decapitation; Madame merely exacted her most deadly penalty on the pretty Mabel, but to some in the Lodge, expulsion was on a par with beheading. Later Yeats would supplement this gossip with another tidbit and claim that Mable, who impressed him as a “handsome clever woman of the world,” had actually been involved with two of H.P.B.’s young ascetics; when Helena got wind of the double affair, she allegedly lectured Mabel on the beauty of chastity and concluded with unexpected tolerance: “I cannot permit you more than one.”
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The story is probably apocryphal since H.P.B. was as adamantly anti-sex as she was anti-Mabel; she had been looking for an excuse to banish her, and flirtation seemed as good a pretext as any, but she had no illusions that the unrepentant Mabel would silently disappear. As Koot Hoomi warned her, “you have deprived her of a toy” and must now expect Mabel to retaliate because “she will not repent as you hope and death alone can save her from herself.”
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Once again Koot Hoomi proved a shrewd observer, for soon Mabel learned of uncomplimentary comments about her in Madame’s private correspondence and speared her with a libel suit. However, since Helena had somehow come into possession of even more unpleasant, indeed positively hateful, letters Mabel had written about her, she could afford to smile, sit back, and wait until the case came to trial.
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Next, she decreed her standard penalty for Elliott Coues and ordered his expulsion from the Society in June, hoping vainly that he would not be heard from again.

But by the time she got around to chastizing the combative bird-lover, there had come riding into her life a shining knight on a white horse to perform the classic last-minute rescue. Her name was Annie Besant, and it was she who would make it possible for Helena to die content.

By the time she was forty, Annie Besant was known over half the world as one of the most remarkable women of her day. She was an agitator in radical political circles, a strike leader and union organizer, a champion of science and materialism working in partnership with the radical free thinker Charles Bradlaugh, an atheist, a feminist, a social and educational reformer, an early convert to Fabian Socialism by her friend Bernard Shaw, a prolific author as well as editor and publisher, the first prominent woman to wage open battle on behalf of birth control, and, not least, an orator of such power that her contemporaries unanimously acclaimed her as the greatest woman speaker of the nineteenth century.

Born Annie Wood on October 1, 1847, in London, she was three-quarters Irish, a fact which she frequently mentioned with pride. Her mother’s Irish family, the Morrises, were said to have had royal blood in their veins, while her father’s people were a prosperous, highly respected clan who had done well for themselves in commerce and public life, one of them having even served as lord mayor of London and as a member of Parliament. However, William Wood, Annie’s father, was much too volatile to settle down and, despite a medical degree from Trinity College, Dublin, decided to accept a position with a London commercial firm rather than practice medicine. Annie and her two brothers grew up in the middle-class neighborhood of St. John’s Wood, and her recollections were of an uneventful but happy childhood.

When she was five, her father died unexpectedly and left the family almost destitute; Emily Wood moved them to Harrow, where she enrolled her son Harry in the school and opened a sort of dormitory-boardinghouse catering to Harrow boys. When Annie was eight, she caught the notice of a local Lady Bountiful, the wealthy, unmarried Ellen Marryat who satisfied her maternal needs by taking on bright but genteelly impoverished children whom she reared and educated. Annie had spent most of her adolescence at Miss Marry at’s estate on the Devon border.

A rather precocious bluestocking, Annie was also a pious girl whose adolescent daydreams centered, not on romance, but on the apostles and martyrs of the early Christian Church. She read St. Augustine, went to weekly communion, fasted herself into ecstatic meditations, and dreamed of the days when girls could become martyrs. In this mood of religious preoccupation, she met and married in 1867 the Rev. Frank Besant, a cold, domineering martinet of an Anglican minister. As her friend W. T. Stead put it in later years, “She could not be the bride of Heaven, and therefore became the bride of Mr. Frank Besant. He was hardly an adequate substitute.”
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The marriage was troubled from the beginning because Annie could not be so submissive as Frank thought proper and they quarreled fiercely, sometimes physically. Once, she asserted, he threw her bodily over a fence and later, threatened to shoot her with the loaded gun in his study. After a miserable six years in the provinces, and having had two children, Mabel and Digby, Annie could no longer endure her husband and fled to London. Since divorce was out of the question, a separation agreement was drawn up by which four-year-old Digby would stay with his father and three-year-old Mabel would live with Annie, with summer visitation privilege.

Faced with respectable starvation on the hundred ten pounds a year Besant gave her from his modest salary, Annie began to look for work and finally found a position as a governess. Soon afterward she met forty-year-old Charles Bradlaugh and began her career as a militant atheist, exhorting, organizing, writing, speaking and leading thousands for whom she would come to symbolize the triumph of science over the decaying old faiths. At the same time, she spent four years at London University trying unsuccessfully to earn a B.Sc. degree, despite having failed chemistry three times.

In 1877 the crusading Besant and Bradlaugh published a forty-year-old American medical pamphlet advocating birth control and specifically describing several methods—
Fruits of Philosophy; or, The Private Companion of Young Married Couples,
by Charles Knowlton. Since distribution or advertisement of contraceptives was illegal, the police took swift action and Besant and Bradlaugh were prosecuted on the grounds that the pamphlet was “lewd, filthy, bawdy, and obscene.” Both of them suffered violent public abuse and social ostracism; worse still, Frank Besant sued to remove Mabel from Annie’s custody on the grounds that the child was in moral danger through association with an atheistic woman who published “indecent and obscene” writings. Despite Annie’s vehement defense, she was deprived of the right to see either of her children until they attained their majority; in the opinion of the Lord Chief Justice, she had violated “morality, decency, and womanly propriety,” both in her writings and in publication of a pamphlet “so repugnant, so abhorrent to the feelings of the majority of decent Englishmen and Englishwomen.”
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During the early 1880s, Annie threw herself into work with a ferocity that astonished her contemporaries. Recalled Bernard Shaw:

Her displays of personal courage and resolution, as when she would march into a police-court, make her way to the witness stand, and compel the magistrate to listen to her by sheer force of style and character, were trifles compared to the way in which she worked day and night to pull through the strike of the over-exploited matchgirls who had walked into her office one day and asked her to help them somehow, anyhow. An attempt to keep pace with her on the part of a mere man generally wrecked the man.
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By 1889, however, despite her enviable reputation and excellent income from writing and speaking, Annie was forced to admit that she still had not found happiness. She had seen neither of her children for more than ten years, although she hoped that someday they would return to her of their own free will. In spite of her intimate association with Bradlaugh, a stormy romance with Shaw, and close friendships with a number of men, some of whom she had been in love with, she seems to have successfully repressed her need for physical love. Hypatia Bradlaugh once commented that had her father and Annie Besant both been single, they would have wed; still she believed their love unconsummated because Annie “was the one person who was capable of the deepest affection without any thought of sex.”
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In the opinion of one of her biographers, Arthur Nethercot, “it is very unlikely that she ever took a lover,”
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a supposition that is probably correct because if she had, it would have come to the attention of the detectives Frank Besant hired to shadow her movements for evidence of immorality.

Generally disillusioned with life, Annie slowly came to feel that “my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind were other than, more than, I had dreamed.” A professional atheist, she suddenly began to interest herself in psychology, hypnotism and Spiritualism. “Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me, demanding explanation I was incompetent to give.”
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In February, 1889, she undertook a private course in psychic training, probably in telepathy, from a Rev. J. Williams Ashman, an Anglican clergyman who was interested in the occult and, coincidentally, acquainted with H.P.B. though not a member of the Theosophical Society. On February 14, she wrote Ashman, “I have
studied
nothing in ‘occult’ science, only read anything that came in my way—two books of Sinnett’s, some stray pamphlets. I have not been able to get anything. But I am quite ready to study carefully any works throwing light on the matter. Thank you very much for giving me the possible chance of knowing more.”
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She was ripe for change of some sort, but no one, including Annie herself, would have predicted that the answers she sought could be found in Theosophy.

In early March, a copy of
The Secret Doctrine
reached the editorial offices of the
Pall Mall Gazette.
As W. T. Stead had met Madame Blavatsky, he felt an obligation to take review notice of her, although the two thick volumes made him “shrink in dismay” from mastering their contents himself. Aware that Annie Besant had been quietly pursuing a study of other-worldly subjects and had even attended a few seances, he took the books to her.

“Can you review these?” he asked. “My young men all fight shy of them, but you are quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them.”
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