Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

My reformulated knee wasn’t supposed to move, and it didn’t, but still it found inventive ways to act up. It was enclosed in a large cast running more or less from hip to ankle, inside which it swelled and gave great pain. Concentrating on Mrs Eddy’s life was increasingly difficult as my own became filled with intensely erroneous sensations. I thought my knee would burst. I pleaded with Mr Arden to remove the cast so as to relieve the pressure, but he said he couldn’t do that. The leg must be held in place. He compromised by having a little window cut in the plaster where the knee was, which allowed the distressed tissue to expand without jeopardising the process of healing. Then it began to itch and I had to poke at the window with anything that came to hand.

During this (third, was it?) rehabilitation my sensitive nose noticed something different in the atmosphere of the hospital. It wasn’t a new smell, exactly, it was the attenuation of an old one. Times were changing. There were fewer volatilised molecules of amylum, that white powder prepared from potato and other vegetable tissue which yields a transparent viscous fluid when boiled — laundry starch, in fact. Starch was still being used in the laundering of nurses’ uniforms, but in significantly smaller quantities. Nurses gave off a less peremptory rustle when they passed. It was almost a soothing whisper.

Of course the high tradition of nursing goes back to Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War. Many of the original nurses were genteel volunteers rather than professionals. I imagine that in those days the uniforms were so stiffly starched for a definite purpose. A squeamish nurse confronted with the horrors of warfare, infection or surgery, could faint without actually falling down, propped up by her amylum-impregnated clothes long enough to be trundled unobtrusively from the scene by colleagues, without her moment of weakness having an effect on the morale of the patients.

Mrs Eddy’s psychology seemed very extreme and remote, and then suddenly it came into focus and sat right next to me. This unstable woman was destined to failure, until suddenly she wasn’t. What had happened?

Christian Science would have been one more fizzling firework, hardly even a footnote in the history of cultic religion of America, where there is rarely a shortage of prophets and always a surfeit of disciples, if it hadn’t caught fire at a single meeting in Chicago, in June 1888. Mary Baker Eddy was sixty-six, and very hit-or-miss as a public speaker. Her belief in herself fluctuated wildly between dogged assertiveness and a querulous shrinking. Even when she was advertised as a speaker, she would often quail at the last moment and delegate the task to someone else. She rebelled against anonymity but could not fully face fame.

On this occasion the local pastor was shrewd enough to advertise Mrs Eddy as a speaker, but without telling her in case she took fright. He told her only as he escorted her to her place on the stage — too late for her to appoint a substitute.

It turned out that she was having one of her good days, though Chicago was far from the Church’s roots in New England. There were three thousand in the audience, on top of the eight hundred delegates. She stood up to speak, and the whole crowd came to its feet. She exported her hysteria in grand style. She released it into the hall and licensed every emotion, every wish.

But how did she do it? What did she say? She started off with the ninety-first psalm: ¶He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty . Not one of David’s best efforts, you’d have thought, but experienced reporters were reportedly so spellbound that they forgot to take notes. There are paraphrases, but they don’t give much indication of what the fuss was all about — what it was that made the crowd surge forward, desperate to touch her hand or her dress, while some cried out that their ailments had been mysteriously cured and others that they were (less mysteriously) being crushed.

If ever the guru spoke through her, it was that day — but it isn’t necessary to suppose his presence. A room containing close to four thousand people is a candidate for spontaneous combustion even without the cue of a spark (spontaneous seems the wrong word for something building up so relentlessly). Few in the audience were believers already, which sounds like a disadvantage but was actually an enormous help, since there is no vapour more easily ignited than the desire to believe.

Mrs Eddy spoke, and that was all she needed to do. Whether she was the clapper or the bell, the two parts came together and the clang was immense. There followed a ‘mad rhapsody’ of press coverage, and it never really died down until she died herself, which she declined to do for the next twenty-two years.

The effect of becoming a public figure on this desperately unstable woman was dramatic. She showed a sudden genius for leadership. She developed astoundingly in her ability to direct and manage, to formulate plans and carry them to successful conclusion, to analyse a problem and put her finger on the underlying difficulty.

‘The psychologist holds,’ according to Mr Dakin, ‘that there is no more able and efficient personality than the introvert who through some change of circumstances acquires or develops some extrovert tendencies.’ At first I thought there was a particular psychologist being referred to at this point, but then I realised that it was the statement of a basic principle, even a commonplace. It was still news to me.

Could it really be true? Was this something everybody knew, except the one person who needed to? That person being me. I thought of myself as an extrovert billeted on an introverted body. Introverted bones, above all. Living an introverted life despite myself. Now the possibility was being floated that I might be able to transform myself, becoming so effective in the world as to be virtually unrecognisable. This was no longer a case history of an eccentric and long-dead figure, it was virtually a manifesto. There was plenty to hold me back, but no more than there had been to block Mrs Eddy’s progress. Mrs Eddy had succeeded late in life in unfurling the umbrella of her character and displaying the lurid colours of its lining, and perhaps my own umbrella only seemed to be rusted shut, the catch useless if not actually broken off. I must be prepared to wait, just as she had, and watch for my moment, which would not necessarily be dramatic in any obvious way. When the time came, perhaps all I would have to do, like her, would be to open my mouth and say what I had to say.

Mrs Eddy went on being an inspiration even while it became clear she was a total monster. The two things were logically separate. What she did with her transformed character was her own affair. The inspirational thing was that she had been able to transform it.

Mrs Eddy stood revealed as a master manipulator whose tools were bureaucracy and public relations. The new religion had a particular appeal to the well-off — to people prosperous enough to identify ageing and ill-health as their supreme enemies.

A book dictated by God needs revision

The wealth of its supporters was a great asset to Christian Science. If a newspaper carried a derogatory article, or even if it referred to ‘faith healing’ (though surely there was faith and there was healing?), then complaints would be laid. If apologies were slow to appear then a local advertiser would telephone the newspaper offices — at a time when the telephone was a great luxury in itself — to express disappointment at such prejudicial expressions. That usually did the trick.

At a time when the church had about sixty thousand members, there were fifty publicity men paid to keep its image gleaming. One publicity man for every twelve hundred or so believers. Quite a tally. Church members were forbidden to reveal the number of believers, so as to give the impression of a vast movement.