Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Mrs Eddy was in her own way an innovator and inventor — something that Ramana Maharshi never claimed to be. In Hinduism it is always a question of old wine in new bottles, except that from a non-dualistic perspective wine and bottles are necessarily of the same substance and the same age. Mrs Eddy’s innovations, though, were in the field of business studies rather than spirituality.

By the end of her life Mrs Eddy was making $400,000 a year from the movement’s periodicals, and she knew about the importance of revenue. She never put her own money into the church. The flow of cash was quite the other way. In the 1880s she constituted the entire teaching staff of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, which earned her over a million and a half dollars over that decade. A book dictated by God should hardly need revision, but new editions of Science and Health appeared very regularly, and each time the faithful were required to buy the new and discard the old, however minor the changes. Even so Mrs Eddy came to feel jealous of the profits made by the printers, and absorbed that aspect of the business also.

When a new Mother Church was built in Boston, it was paid for before its dedication. In fact an appeal had to be made asking that no more donations be made to the building fund. The newspapers couldn’t get over this. They were accustomed to the moaning and wheedling of Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Campbellites seeking to find enough money to pay the preacher and a janitor. They publicised continual fairs, bazaars, ladies’-aid sociables and picnics dedicated to raising funds for a parsonage roof here, a Sunday-school carpet there. And now in three short years this curious sect of Christian Science had built a domed white temple of Bedford stone and granite taller by one foot than the Bunker Hill monument. Some newspapers ran articles every day for a week.

The financial miracle, at least, was well attested. Some vocations require a vow of poverty. Mrs Eddy had made a vow of wealth, and over time poverty took on the status of original sin. When it was suggested that wearing purple velvet and diamonds hardly went with the humility of the Lord’s handmaid, she knew better than to say, ‘If you’ve got it, baby, flaunt it!’ She remarked that the diamonds were a present from someone whose life she had saved, which she had worn round the house until her husband reproached her, saying she was belittling the gesture of the gift. As for the velvet, it was really only velveteen and had cost barely a dollar years and years ago but was mysteriously renewed, ‘like the widow’s cruse’.

Healing was the key ingredient in this new religion — nothing fills a room like the prospect of a miracle cure. It was a stroke of genius for her to make out that healing was a lowly power, and to delegate it. To be sure, Mrs Eddy claimed cures of her own, up to and sometimes including the raising of the dead, but these miracles were long ago and far away, impossible to verify.

Metaphysical obstetrics

As with money, others took the risks but the benefit went to her alone. She took the credit for successful healing, but when things went wrong she disowned the practitioner. There was an outcry in 1888 when a Mrs Corner attended her own daughter in childbirth, and both mother and baby died. Some Christian Science students tried to rally round the (doubly) bereaved woman, who had handled the accouchement in accordance with Christian Science practice, but Mrs Eddy wasn’t sentimental where bad publicity was involved. A statement was issued on behalf of the church pointing out, as if in sorrow, that Mrs Corner hadn’t studied obstetrics at the approved institution. Hardly surprising, since courses in metaphysical obstetrics had only recently been set up. The grieving mother was branded a quack, and the church moved on.

In her long-delayed, long-lasting heyday, Mrs Eddy was less like a person than a confluence of rivers, one of cash and one of prestige. Yet the night terrors never left her.

She depended on charismatic recruits, but was also afraid of them. Might they not break away or seek to usurp her place? She created insurance policies against rebels and rivals. The bye-laws of the Christian Scientists’ Association included this sublime combination of propositions:

‘ Resolved , That every one who wishes to withdraw without reason shall be considered to have broken his oath.

‘ Resolved , That breaking the Christian Scientist’s oath is immorality.’

That took care of the rebels. In 1895 she abolished the post of pastor: instead there would be Readers, whose job was literally Reading, reading aloud from the Bible and (more importantly) from Science and Health . They were required to identify her by name every time they read from her Book. They were to make no explanatory remarks. Nor should there be discussion of any sort afterwards — in any case she was to be notified of any meeting of church members, just to be safe. Rather, individuals should depart ‘in quiet thought ’. She had sealed the exit doors: now she pumped all the air out of the hall. And that took care of any rivals.

I started toying, idly and then more diligently, with the idea of writing a play about Mrs Eddy. Jimmy Kettle, the pupil at Vulcan who had first sold me on the world-beating genius of Tennessee Williams, had gone on to write a play of his own (or at least to start one) based on something that had happened on school premises. Why shouldn’t I have a go myself? Bearing in mind that no one would write a tour de force solo turn for me as an immobile actor with no experience, I would have to do it myself — and in that respect Mary Baker Eddy was a gift of a subject. Power, delusion and speaking on God’s behalf. Hard to go wrong, really.

It would be awkward if my play was put on in a church hall somewhere before Jimmy Kettle’s first masterpiece was presented on Broadway or the West End, but it couldn’t be helped. We were all grown-ups.

It made sense to set my play in Mrs Eddy’s last home, Chestnut Hill in Massachusetts. I had my title already! I wrote the words Chestnut Hill in different styles of handwriting, and also explored the look of it in shorthand (Pitman and Gregg). In fact her previous home, Pleasant View, would have provided a more satisfactory title, but there was no help for that. I couldn’t play ducks and drakes with the facts of a life, even if the life in question was more of a cautionary tale than a template for virtue or happiness.

There was certainly plenty of material. In fact Mrs Eddy’s velvet-gown-and-diamonds period hadn’t lasted long, and she had begun to withdraw relatively early. She moved to Concord, Massachusetts, some way from the church’s core constituency in Boston. The intention was not to consolidate her mystique by making her unavailable, but that was the happy result.

Mrs Eddy didn’t altogether disappear from public view. She would take a daily drive in a carriage, whatever the weather. Except that she was often too unwell to do so. On those days she would be impersonated on her outing. A white-haired woman muffled up to the ears in fur would take her place in the carriage, unobtrusively adjusting the angle of her parasol so as to shield her face from any observers.

Even so, it seemed there was no safety to be had from malicious animal magnetism. Mailboxes were particularly easily charged with it, so letters would be bundled up for posting far from home. Pleasant View became a place of fear. Mrs Leonard, the woman who had so helpfully impersonated the Pastor Emeritus in her carriage, died of diabetes. She was sixty-nine, quite an age at the time, but living in Science with nothing to fear — and fifteen years younger than She whose place she was taking. It seemed clear that the innocent with the sunshade had paid a terrible price for the service she rendered. The decoy had put herself in the firing line, and her health had been broken by invisible rays meant for Mrs Eddy. The poisoned darts had missed their intended target, but they had landed where they were sent.