ON SPIRITUALISM

In October 1888, on assignment for the Philadelphia Sun , I was in the audience when Margaret Fox, the founding mother of the Spiritualist movement, stood before a packed hall at the Academy of Music in New York and confessed that she had been “instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too‑confiding public.” A year later she recanted that recantation, bringing the whole filthy business full circle. One had the sense that it could never have been otherwise, that by discrediting herself as a reliable witness to her own actions, Margaret had achieved what had always been her objective. All she would own to was her invincible capriciousness. The press called her confession “the Death Blow to Spiritualism.” But the Spiritualists ignored Margaret’s call to disarm, and ultimately the founder was abandoned by the religion she created.

Violet Petra never publicly admitted to fraud. There are those who still believe she was the genuine article – a clairvoyant of extraordinary powers. However, near the end, there was a confession of sorts, wrung from her in a paroxysm of sobbing before a solitary auditor in the lounge of a shabby Philadelphia hotel, on a chilly afternoon in November 1894.

I was that auditor.

Fraud has long been one of my interests. Doubtless it began in childhood when, like most children, I experimented with pushing the casual fib to the outright lie. I said I’d drunk my milk when I’d actually poured it down the drain; I pretended to be ill when I was perfectly well; I blamed a little friend for breaking a toy I’d broken myself. I remember these three episodes because my falsity was quickly detected and the consequences were harsh. The devil, my mother adjured me, is a successful liar and his reward is a permanent residence in hell.

In my childish imagination this made perfect sense. For the duration of my effort to carry off the thing‑not‑true, I had felt I was living in a furnace. I gave up lying and became, in fact and in practice, a seeker after truth, such as I find it. And when I do find it, it is my business to record it for the public benefit. I am that risible hobgoblin of the contemporary male novelist’s imagination: the female journalist.

In the course of my investigations, I’ve closely observed some talented and professional frauds – they abound in our times as in all others – and have even been caught up in the havoc they inevitably wreak upon those weak‑minded enough to trust them. Truly accomplished frauds are rare, but there exists a superfluity of ordinary and presumably intelligent people who are eager to court and to credit them.

The perversity of the liar is that he does not, as I did, dread the thought of being caught in the lie. In fact, the likelihood of exposure is for him no more bothersome than a buzzing insect, and his triumph is most complete when the contempt he has always on reserve for those who catch him out can be fully brought to bear.

A constant alternation between contempt and belligerence is essential to the amour‑propre of the confirmed liar. He may be said to be driven from the pillar of one to the post of the other, a hectic gauntlet that constitutes for him a simulacrum of identity. As wind fills a sail, the flagrant dispersal of that which he knows to be false inflates his sense of self. His need for an audience is great, for a podium even greater, and it matters not if his auditors be only his family taken hostage at the dining table or a mob of strangers gathered on a street corner; his lies must be broadcast on the first available soil, they must be watered and cultivated and encouraged to bloom into misshapen flowers – not of evil – but of banality and inutility.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 641