A fascinating woman, if only a passing Fortean.
Eileen Garrett was born Eileen Vancho-Brownwell in County Meath, Ireland, on 17 March 1893. We know a lot about her life, but almost all of it comes from her three autobiographies (as well as a biography written by a friend that mostly rehashed the earlier books). She was constantly trying to understand her own life, writing it over and over again. I have no reason to doubt the factuality of what she wrote, but more corroboration from historical documents would be nice. There is some research, done in the 1980s, which suggests that her birth name was actually Emily Jane Savage, and her birthdate different, but the reasons for the revision are unclear to me.
According to Garrett, her mother was a wild child, who became pregnant by a Basque man. There was much scandal in her properly Protestant family, and soon after she was born both her mother and father—in separate incidents—committed suicide. She was raised by an aloof uncle and a disapproving aunt. From an early age, she craved being alone—the family itself were outsiders to the mostly Catholic community—and spent a lot of time in nature. She had invisible friends, whom she called The Children. And she could sense a field—an aura—about every living thing.
Eileen Garrett was born Eileen Vancho-Brownwell in County Meath, Ireland, on 17 March 1893. We know a lot about her life, but almost all of it comes from her three autobiographies (as well as a biography written by a friend that mostly rehashed the earlier books). She was constantly trying to understand her own life, writing it over and over again. I have no reason to doubt the factuality of what she wrote, but more corroboration from historical documents would be nice. There is some research, done in the 1980s, which suggests that her birth name was actually Emily Jane Savage, and her birthdate different, but the reasons for the revision are unclear to me.
According to Garrett, her mother was a wild child, who became pregnant by a Basque man. There was much scandal in her properly Protestant family, and soon after she was born both her mother and father—in separate incidents—committed suicide. She was raised by an aloof uncle and a disapproving aunt. From an early age, she craved being alone—the family itself were outsiders to the mostly Catholic community—and spent a lot of time in nature. She had invisible friends, whom she called The Children. And she could sense a field—an aura—about every living thing.
Her own aloofness seems to have sparked a kinship with her uncle, and was the source of empathy for others—but not unending empathy. She understood when her teacher punished her, or her mother, or her classmates taunted her, she said, that they were just working out their own inner conflicts. They were trapped. She and her uncle went hunting, and for a time, she became sickly fascinated with killing animals—an enthusiasm that curdled into a hatred for all forms of killing. But not before she sought revenge against her aunt, after one particularly bruising battle, by drowning the aunt’s favorite ducklings.
As she remembered years later, the conflict was about Garrett’s imagination—or clairvoyance. She had a vision of her favorite aunt walking up to the house, carrying a baby, and plaintively noting she had to leave. When Garrett told her aunt about what she had seen her aunt rushed out only to find the yard empty. She punished Garrett severely. The next day, Garrett learned that her favorite aunt had died giving birth, and the child had followed her into the hereafter. Her aunt told her never to speak of such things again, strongly implying that Garrett’s vision may have been the real cause of death.
Garrett was a sickly child, and suffered the slings and arrows of growing up as a religious minority. By fifteen, she relocated to London, for health reasons, but also, one imagines, because it freed her from the terrible pressures of her broken home. This was around 1908. She married young, wedded to the architect Clive Barry. She remembered those as difficult years. Clive was in love with someone else, and even moved in with the other woman—yet his family pressured Garrett to endure the humiliation. Loveless though the marriage was, it was not sexless, and Garrett would give birth to four children. The first three, all sons, died within months of their birth. Only her daughter survived. Garrett passes over these tragedies quickly in her autobiographies, giving a sense of distance to them, although that may have merely disguised a deep, deep pain.
The marriage ended in divorce, and Garrett began operating a hostel for recovering soldiers. By this time, the world was in flames, England devastated by the Great War. It was through this position that she met the man who would become her second husband, a young, anxious soldier, whom she seems to have married out of pity more than anything else. In her autobiographical writing, she would tell how she had a vision that he would die soon—and, indeed he did. The same aloofness characterizes her third marriage—at least she described it—to J.W. Garrett, another injured soldier. This marriage lasted nine years, also ending in divorce. There was a great deal of tension in the relationship over Garrett’s increasing awareness of her own psychic abilities, and her husband’s wish that these be ignored. Even after the divorce, though, Garrett would retain his surname, her third and final husband—but not, by a long shot, the last important man in her life.
At this time, Garrett, restless as always, found an outlet in modern literature and radical politics. She knew a number of literary greats, especially those associated with the Irish Renaissance, including James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Lord Dunsany. By all accounts, she was a brilliant partygoer and social butterfly, with a magnetic charisma. She joined the Fabian Society, where she met luminaries including Shaw and Wells. And she found a mentor, Edward Carpenter. In his 70s, Edward Carpenter was active in leftist politics, a writer, and a known homosexual, likely having been one of Whitman’s lovers. Carpenter was also interested in esoteric theories, including Theosophy and spiritualism, and he suggested to Garrett that she might have the latent abilities of a trance medium. Garrett started reading up on the new body of ideas he had suggested, and testing her own body.
Her experiments led her to several other men on the edge of British intellectual life. Chief among them was Hewat McKenzie, founder of the British College of Psychic Science. McKenzie worked with Garrett on a weekly basis, teaching her how to be a trance medium, how to access those discarnate personalities that were her link to the otherworld—mainly, in Garrett’s case, Uvani, a Persian dead some hundred years. The hope was that she could establish proof of the afterlife. Garrett also worked with the ghost hunters Hereford Carrington, Harry Price, and Nandor Fodor, investigating, especially, poltergeist phenomena. Her third and final autobiography details a number of these cases.
For all that a number of men introduced her to these new ways of thinking, used her to access parts of the universe otherwise hidden from them, and tried to explain what her actions meant, Garrett never accepted their propositions. Theosophy seemed wrong to her, although she respected Rudolf Steiner and his derivative Anthroposophy, thinking his intuitive methods for arriving at truths was akin to her own sensitivities. She doubted anything like a conventional afterlife and didn’t accept that she was speaking to discarnate spirits. She knew that her sanity was in question, and had been for all her life, and suggested that she was not schizophrenic but tapping into her unconscious, giving that tangled orectic monster different voices. She was sensitive to others, empathetic, and from that could suss out truths hidden to others. Poltergeists, she said, most often reflected repressed emotional tempests—domestic situations not unlike the one in which she grew up—and when the tension was released, so ended the poltergeist activity.
Still, even as she suggested that these were the most possible explanations for what she did, and what she saw, she never completely ruled out the possibility of life-after-death, of ghosts, and clairvoyance. She was always tricky that way, unsatisfied with any answer given. Her life was a search for meaning that was never fulfilled, a Faustian quest. There was something feminist in this resistance, not unlike the way Allison Winter has interpreted hypnosis in the nineteenth century, with the women subjects—seemingly without agency—actually able to control some of exhibitions. Garrett allowed men to teach her, even maybe to use her as a tool, but she always resisted their interpretations and, eventually, slipped away to be on her own.
She became a worldwide sensation in 1930 when, during a trance, she seemed to channel the voices of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, only recently passed, and the pilot of an air ship that had crashed two days before. While in trance, she divulged information about the crash that others at the time said would have been impossible for her to know—unless she was really in contact with the pilot. More recent investigations have cast doubt on these conclusions and suggested ways by which Garrett might have come into possession of the knowledge, mundane ways.
Shortly after her celebrity, she left England for the United States—Hewat had died in 1929, and her connections to London were meager. She traveled the country, hitting its parapsychological hotspots. She met with the American Society for Psychical Research. Went to Duke, where she was studied by J.B. Rhine; she didn’t like his card tests, finding them too unemotional to provoke her sensitivities. She visited the West Coast, where she met the director C. C. DeMille, and told him she could see his dead mother speaking to him, offering him advice. In 1934 Adolph Meyer—essentially Rhine’s boss—funded a study of Garrett by Hereford Carrington, which he said was the best proof of the afterlife yet uncovered. She also underwent studies back in London, the results of which suggested that she was not in contact with spirits. It was during the mid- to late-1930s that she wrote her first autobiography, My Life as a Search for the Meaning of Mediumship (1938).
Around the same time, she was tiring of parapsychological study. She traveled to southern France, and was there when World War II started. After the country fell to the Nazis, she helped the resistance and worked with orphaned children. She had come to the country ill—in a throw away line from one of her biographies, she said that she wore a pouch on a belt in which lived a rat; the rat ate what she ate, to see if she was allergic to some food; mysterious!—and illness ravaged her at times all throughout these travails. She did not concern herself much with trance mediumship, but worked on breath exercises to control the state of her consciousness, and, as always, she could sense the fields—of energy? magnetism?—around all beings.
(The term “field” has somewhat pseudoscientific connotations, likely the result of its use by parascientific groups. But at the time it was used by legitimate scientists to talk about subjects as diverse as magnetism and embryology—giving helping move developmental biology away from vitalism and toward more organic theories. See Donn Haraway’s Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields.)
War drove Garrett back to the United States: she was the citizen of an enemy nation, and so at risk. Still, she loved France, and promised to herself that she would buy land there someday, when the political turmoil had calmed. In the meantime, she till wasn’t ready to drop back into the parapsychological world; rather, she decided, she would starer her own publishing house and magazine. Garrett somehow had become rich—she didn’t charge for her readings, and her family situation was certainly unstable, so it is not clear how she came to be wealthy—likely she received money from the men who chose to use (or study) her skills, in some fashion—and so with very little preamble she did both, starting Creative Age Press and Tomorrow. She also became an American citizen: her wanderings would continue, but she had a new home now, Europe somewhere she visited. Given the state of international finance, her citizenship was also probably a wise choice for protecting her assets.
Both the press and the magazine offered some parapsychological writings—Garrett authored the Press’s second book, Telepathy, and there was a book on Nostradamus—but primarily they were literary. Garrett put out several books by Robert Graves; she published Theodora Keogh; there was a history of the New Deal; books by Heinrich Mann, T. F. Powys (brother of Fortean John Cowper Powys), and August Derleth, shepherd of H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy, among others. Tomorrow published the neo-pagan Gerald Heard, a raft of authors connected to science fiction—including Derleth—as well as Thomas Mann, Eudora Welty, James Hilton, Pearl S. Buck, and Ralph Ellison. Like the Press, the magazine also put out serious non-fiction: considerations of Hitler’s biography, Linus Pauling on science and the imagination, and Bertrand Russell on education. In addition, Garrett was publishing her own novels pseudonymously, as Jean Lyttle putting out You Are France, Lisette (1943), Sheila Lacey (1944), Today the Sun Rises (1944), Threads of Destiny (1961). Lyttle was the last name of her adoptive aunt and uncle.
By the early 1950s, Garrett had enough of running a publishing house, and she was looking to make what had been a continuing subterranean interest in parapsychology prominent once again. She sold Creative Age Press to Farrar, Strauss, & Young in 1951. She ended Tomorrow’s run as a literary journal and re-started it as a quarterly publication on parapsychological topics. And she established the Parapsychology Foundation in New York. Her stated aim was to make the study of parapsychological subjects more rigorously scientific. To that end, the Foundation initiated a series of international conferences, the first of which was in Utrecht, but many of the later were in France, where Garrett had indeed purchased land, in St. Paul de Vence, only about 100 miles from Nostradamus’s birthplace.
Although Garrett was now an American citizen who spent a great deal of time in France, she valued her Irish nationality. She published books and articles by Oliver St. John Gogarty, who had appeared as a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses. And her two later autobiographies increasingly dwelled on her Irish heritage. The second, Adventures in the Supernormal: A Personal Memoir (1948) took up the topic but showed she still resented some of the implications of her country’s traditions, refusing, for instance, to explain the children as fairies. The third book—Many Voices, 1968)—dropped mention of the children altogether and made belief in fairies one of the two central ways Ireland had contributed to her particular sensitivities. That the supernormal was so widely accepted set the stage, she said, for her own easy acceptance of her own powers. The other gift was the widespread fact of, and expectation of, death—she didn’t think her fellow Irish put much weight on death—it was just another stage of existence—and she didn’t either. That didn’t mean she bought into the spiritualist view of the overeater. Hers was more a monistic view, that life simply changed forms, ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Garrett continued to work on parapsychological subjects; she quit publishing Tomorrow in 1962, but put out other books, Awareness in 1943, Does Man Survive Death? in 1957, and The Sense and Nonsense of Prophecy in 1960, which dismissed much of what came under the parapsychological label as hogwash. In 1958, she edited the collection Beyond the Five Senses. The Parapsychological Foundation started publishing a newsletter in 1955, a monograph series in 1958, the International Journal of Parapsychology in 1959, and The Parapsychology Review in 1970 By then, Garrett was world-renowned, one of the most famous mediums of the twentieth century—but one who was also hard to categorize. Her illnesses continued, and she was sick when she returned to France in 1970 to attend a Parapsychology Foundation conference. She died there, either an accident or a suicide. The official notice gave the cause of death as an overdose of pain medicine. She was 77, and her cremated remains interred in Marseilles.
Not much is known about Garrett’s Forteanism, and it is only in passing references that her name is invoked in Doubt. The first notice came in issue 12 (summer 1945); Thayer was running down a lot of material from Mary Bonavia, one piece of which had come from Tomorrow, and Thayer took time to note that the magazine was edited by Garrett, who was a member. The second, and final, mention came ten years later, in Doubt 48 (April 1945). It referred to her publishing activity:
“MFS Eileen Garrett, publisher of Tomorrow, has published a new work by Honorary Founder Hereward Carrington. This is the American Seances with Eusapia Palladino. As older members will recall, Palladino put on the best and most convincing mediumistic show that the world has ever seen. Although Hereward was in on the tests, and wrote a big book about her in 1909, he still does not know how she accomplished some of her effects.
“These seances took place in 1909 and 1910, after the other book was written. For believers and non-believers in ‘spiritualism,’ this exciting data. From the Society $3.75.”
The book, which is now scarce, was put out by Garrett Publications, which was was an imprint of the Parapsychological Foundation, along with Helix Press. (Helix was an important symbol for Garrett.) Other books no Garrett Publication’s list were on parapsychological topics, including two books by Garrett herself and another about her, Ira Progroff’s The Image of an Oracle. The Helix list also included some of Garrett’s own books, along with one by Nandor Fodor.
Neither (brief) mention does much to explain Garrett’s connection to the Fortean Society. Nor does a review of her own writing. Admittedly, I haven’t gone over everything, but I have read her last two autobiographies, her biography, and scanned (some of) the tables of content for Tomorrow; there are no references to Fort at all. Likely, she was among that group I have called Forteans by name only, or close to it, paying dues (I assume) and receiving Doubt, but showing know particular interest in the magazine or Fort himself. Her focus was on other subjects, mainly establishing parapsychology as a bona fide science, which ran contrary to both the Fortean Society’s and Fort’s own aim—which was to puncture science’s inflated sense of itself. Perhaps we should just leave the matter there—it’s a familiar enough story, someone on the fringe of science becoming a member of the Society even without an interest in Fort.
But there’s more going on—more connections, intellectual and personal. These relationships do not necessarily mark Garrett as a Fortean in anything other than name, but they illustrate a nexus of connections, and show how Forteanism was entangled with talk of parapsychology, even among parapsychologists who valorized science, who wanted not to deflate science but expand it.
The personal connections are the easiest to see. In the 1920s and 1930s, Garrett worked with a number of people who would also later become members of the Fortean Society: Nandor Fodor, Harry Price, and Hereward Carrington. Thayer could be dismissive of parapsychology, and its earlier incarnation, psychical research, including the works of all three of those men, but he was also constantly promoting it; indeed, Thayer valued Carrington enough that he made him an Honorary Founder. Garrett also knew one of Fort’s most assiduous disciples. Her edited collection, Beyond the Five Senses, collected material previously published in Tomorrow and included a piece by R. DeWitt Miller, who himself wrote a number of books very much in Fort’s mold. And as Mary Bonavia’s sending in a clip from Tomorrow shows, Forteans did also read that magazine. After all, there was a significant group of Forteans who were also interested in psychical research.
The intellectual connections are sometimes explicit, other times more subtle, even speculative. The most obvious intellectual affinity between Garrett’s parapsychology and Forteanism is the subject of poltergeists. Fort covered the topic in his final book, Wild Talents, and Thayer was fascinated by the topic (Cherchez la Wonet!) The ghost hunters with whom Garrett worked were also interested in the phenomena. Garrett and Fort both located the onus of poltergeist activity in preadolescent and adolescent girls, which was likely independent discoveries, but may have reflected an influence of Fort upon Garrett. More subtly, Garrett’s literary publications involved many pieces written by science fiction authors, and science fiction was closely related to Forteanism. (At least, some science fiction was.) Science fiction shared with Forteanism an interest in alternatives to scientific laws—some of which might become new sciences. That was what John W. Campbell, for instance, saw in Fort’s books. And Garrett, too, was trying to found a new science based on what were then anomalous phenomena. The Venn Diagram of science fiction authors, Forteans, and parapsychologists (including those merely interested in the subject) would have shown a large overlap.
There’s also the issue of imagination, and how to think about it in a scientific world. Garrett chose to see her imagination as some overlap of the subconscious—a scientific category—and a scientific tool: intuition as a way of generating knowledge.
More speculatively, Garrett’s interest in modernist literature connected her to Forteanism, which in many ways drew on the modernist movement. (Science fiction did, too). Thayer was an advocate of Ezra Pound, for instance, while James Blish was a student not only of pound, but James Joyce, too—for whom Garrett obviously had affection. Colin Bennett argues in his odd book Charles Fort and the Politics of the Imagination that Fort should be understood as a modernist author, experimenting with narrative technique the same ways that Joyce was (or Thayer was). As with so many other modernists, Fort was especially preoccupied with writing about the act of writing—writing about how narratives themselves were constructed. His style was choppier than Joyce’s or Faulkner’s, but could also be read as an example of stream of consciousness.
I have not fully thought through the implications of this last point,t he relationship of Forteanism to modernity. (Which itself was influenced by ghost hunting: see Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism.) But it is an important point, and Garrett’s life—full, complicated, contradictory and worthy of note for many other reasons—points to this connection.
As she remembered years later, the conflict was about Garrett’s imagination—or clairvoyance. She had a vision of her favorite aunt walking up to the house, carrying a baby, and plaintively noting she had to leave. When Garrett told her aunt about what she had seen her aunt rushed out only to find the yard empty. She punished Garrett severely. The next day, Garrett learned that her favorite aunt had died giving birth, and the child had followed her into the hereafter. Her aunt told her never to speak of such things again, strongly implying that Garrett’s vision may have been the real cause of death.
Garrett was a sickly child, and suffered the slings and arrows of growing up as a religious minority. By fifteen, she relocated to London, for health reasons, but also, one imagines, because it freed her from the terrible pressures of her broken home. This was around 1908. She married young, wedded to the architect Clive Barry. She remembered those as difficult years. Clive was in love with someone else, and even moved in with the other woman—yet his family pressured Garrett to endure the humiliation. Loveless though the marriage was, it was not sexless, and Garrett would give birth to four children. The first three, all sons, died within months of their birth. Only her daughter survived. Garrett passes over these tragedies quickly in her autobiographies, giving a sense of distance to them, although that may have merely disguised a deep, deep pain.
The marriage ended in divorce, and Garrett began operating a hostel for recovering soldiers. By this time, the world was in flames, England devastated by the Great War. It was through this position that she met the man who would become her second husband, a young, anxious soldier, whom she seems to have married out of pity more than anything else. In her autobiographical writing, she would tell how she had a vision that he would die soon—and, indeed he did. The same aloofness characterizes her third marriage—at least she described it—to J.W. Garrett, another injured soldier. This marriage lasted nine years, also ending in divorce. There was a great deal of tension in the relationship over Garrett’s increasing awareness of her own psychic abilities, and her husband’s wish that these be ignored. Even after the divorce, though, Garrett would retain his surname, her third and final husband—but not, by a long shot, the last important man in her life.
At this time, Garrett, restless as always, found an outlet in modern literature and radical politics. She knew a number of literary greats, especially those associated with the Irish Renaissance, including James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Lord Dunsany. By all accounts, she was a brilliant partygoer and social butterfly, with a magnetic charisma. She joined the Fabian Society, where she met luminaries including Shaw and Wells. And she found a mentor, Edward Carpenter. In his 70s, Edward Carpenter was active in leftist politics, a writer, and a known homosexual, likely having been one of Whitman’s lovers. Carpenter was also interested in esoteric theories, including Theosophy and spiritualism, and he suggested to Garrett that she might have the latent abilities of a trance medium. Garrett started reading up on the new body of ideas he had suggested, and testing her own body.
Her experiments led her to several other men on the edge of British intellectual life. Chief among them was Hewat McKenzie, founder of the British College of Psychic Science. McKenzie worked with Garrett on a weekly basis, teaching her how to be a trance medium, how to access those discarnate personalities that were her link to the otherworld—mainly, in Garrett’s case, Uvani, a Persian dead some hundred years. The hope was that she could establish proof of the afterlife. Garrett also worked with the ghost hunters Hereford Carrington, Harry Price, and Nandor Fodor, investigating, especially, poltergeist phenomena. Her third and final autobiography details a number of these cases.
For all that a number of men introduced her to these new ways of thinking, used her to access parts of the universe otherwise hidden from them, and tried to explain what her actions meant, Garrett never accepted their propositions. Theosophy seemed wrong to her, although she respected Rudolf Steiner and his derivative Anthroposophy, thinking his intuitive methods for arriving at truths was akin to her own sensitivities. She doubted anything like a conventional afterlife and didn’t accept that she was speaking to discarnate spirits. She knew that her sanity was in question, and had been for all her life, and suggested that she was not schizophrenic but tapping into her unconscious, giving that tangled orectic monster different voices. She was sensitive to others, empathetic, and from that could suss out truths hidden to others. Poltergeists, she said, most often reflected repressed emotional tempests—domestic situations not unlike the one in which she grew up—and when the tension was released, so ended the poltergeist activity.
Still, even as she suggested that these were the most possible explanations for what she did, and what she saw, she never completely ruled out the possibility of life-after-death, of ghosts, and clairvoyance. She was always tricky that way, unsatisfied with any answer given. Her life was a search for meaning that was never fulfilled, a Faustian quest. There was something feminist in this resistance, not unlike the way Allison Winter has interpreted hypnosis in the nineteenth century, with the women subjects—seemingly without agency—actually able to control some of exhibitions. Garrett allowed men to teach her, even maybe to use her as a tool, but she always resisted their interpretations and, eventually, slipped away to be on her own.
She became a worldwide sensation in 1930 when, during a trance, she seemed to channel the voices of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, only recently passed, and the pilot of an air ship that had crashed two days before. While in trance, she divulged information about the crash that others at the time said would have been impossible for her to know—unless she was really in contact with the pilot. More recent investigations have cast doubt on these conclusions and suggested ways by which Garrett might have come into possession of the knowledge, mundane ways.
Shortly after her celebrity, she left England for the United States—Hewat had died in 1929, and her connections to London were meager. She traveled the country, hitting its parapsychological hotspots. She met with the American Society for Psychical Research. Went to Duke, where she was studied by J.B. Rhine; she didn’t like his card tests, finding them too unemotional to provoke her sensitivities. She visited the West Coast, where she met the director C. C. DeMille, and told him she could see his dead mother speaking to him, offering him advice. In 1934 Adolph Meyer—essentially Rhine’s boss—funded a study of Garrett by Hereford Carrington, which he said was the best proof of the afterlife yet uncovered. She also underwent studies back in London, the results of which suggested that she was not in contact with spirits. It was during the mid- to late-1930s that she wrote her first autobiography, My Life as a Search for the Meaning of Mediumship (1938).
Around the same time, she was tiring of parapsychological study. She traveled to southern France, and was there when World War II started. After the country fell to the Nazis, she helped the resistance and worked with orphaned children. She had come to the country ill—in a throw away line from one of her biographies, she said that she wore a pouch on a belt in which lived a rat; the rat ate what she ate, to see if she was allergic to some food; mysterious!—and illness ravaged her at times all throughout these travails. She did not concern herself much with trance mediumship, but worked on breath exercises to control the state of her consciousness, and, as always, she could sense the fields—of energy? magnetism?—around all beings.
(The term “field” has somewhat pseudoscientific connotations, likely the result of its use by parascientific groups. But at the time it was used by legitimate scientists to talk about subjects as diverse as magnetism and embryology—giving helping move developmental biology away from vitalism and toward more organic theories. See Donn Haraway’s Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields.)
War drove Garrett back to the United States: she was the citizen of an enemy nation, and so at risk. Still, she loved France, and promised to herself that she would buy land there someday, when the political turmoil had calmed. In the meantime, she till wasn’t ready to drop back into the parapsychological world; rather, she decided, she would starer her own publishing house and magazine. Garrett somehow had become rich—she didn’t charge for her readings, and her family situation was certainly unstable, so it is not clear how she came to be wealthy—likely she received money from the men who chose to use (or study) her skills, in some fashion—and so with very little preamble she did both, starting Creative Age Press and Tomorrow. She also became an American citizen: her wanderings would continue, but she had a new home now, Europe somewhere she visited. Given the state of international finance, her citizenship was also probably a wise choice for protecting her assets.
Both the press and the magazine offered some parapsychological writings—Garrett authored the Press’s second book, Telepathy, and there was a book on Nostradamus—but primarily they were literary. Garrett put out several books by Robert Graves; she published Theodora Keogh; there was a history of the New Deal; books by Heinrich Mann, T. F. Powys (brother of Fortean John Cowper Powys), and August Derleth, shepherd of H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy, among others. Tomorrow published the neo-pagan Gerald Heard, a raft of authors connected to science fiction—including Derleth—as well as Thomas Mann, Eudora Welty, James Hilton, Pearl S. Buck, and Ralph Ellison. Like the Press, the magazine also put out serious non-fiction: considerations of Hitler’s biography, Linus Pauling on science and the imagination, and Bertrand Russell on education. In addition, Garrett was publishing her own novels pseudonymously, as Jean Lyttle putting out You Are France, Lisette (1943), Sheila Lacey (1944), Today the Sun Rises (1944), Threads of Destiny (1961). Lyttle was the last name of her adoptive aunt and uncle.
By the early 1950s, Garrett had enough of running a publishing house, and she was looking to make what had been a continuing subterranean interest in parapsychology prominent once again. She sold Creative Age Press to Farrar, Strauss, & Young in 1951. She ended Tomorrow’s run as a literary journal and re-started it as a quarterly publication on parapsychological topics. And she established the Parapsychology Foundation in New York. Her stated aim was to make the study of parapsychological subjects more rigorously scientific. To that end, the Foundation initiated a series of international conferences, the first of which was in Utrecht, but many of the later were in France, where Garrett had indeed purchased land, in St. Paul de Vence, only about 100 miles from Nostradamus’s birthplace.
Although Garrett was now an American citizen who spent a great deal of time in France, she valued her Irish nationality. She published books and articles by Oliver St. John Gogarty, who had appeared as a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses. And her two later autobiographies increasingly dwelled on her Irish heritage. The second, Adventures in the Supernormal: A Personal Memoir (1948) took up the topic but showed she still resented some of the implications of her country’s traditions, refusing, for instance, to explain the children as fairies. The third book—Many Voices, 1968)—dropped mention of the children altogether and made belief in fairies one of the two central ways Ireland had contributed to her particular sensitivities. That the supernormal was so widely accepted set the stage, she said, for her own easy acceptance of her own powers. The other gift was the widespread fact of, and expectation of, death—she didn’t think her fellow Irish put much weight on death—it was just another stage of existence—and she didn’t either. That didn’t mean she bought into the spiritualist view of the overeater. Hers was more a monistic view, that life simply changed forms, ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Garrett continued to work on parapsychological subjects; she quit publishing Tomorrow in 1962, but put out other books, Awareness in 1943, Does Man Survive Death? in 1957, and The Sense and Nonsense of Prophecy in 1960, which dismissed much of what came under the parapsychological label as hogwash. In 1958, she edited the collection Beyond the Five Senses. The Parapsychological Foundation started publishing a newsletter in 1955, a monograph series in 1958, the International Journal of Parapsychology in 1959, and The Parapsychology Review in 1970 By then, Garrett was world-renowned, one of the most famous mediums of the twentieth century—but one who was also hard to categorize. Her illnesses continued, and she was sick when she returned to France in 1970 to attend a Parapsychology Foundation conference. She died there, either an accident or a suicide. The official notice gave the cause of death as an overdose of pain medicine. She was 77, and her cremated remains interred in Marseilles.
Not much is known about Garrett’s Forteanism, and it is only in passing references that her name is invoked in Doubt. The first notice came in issue 12 (summer 1945); Thayer was running down a lot of material from Mary Bonavia, one piece of which had come from Tomorrow, and Thayer took time to note that the magazine was edited by Garrett, who was a member. The second, and final, mention came ten years later, in Doubt 48 (April 1945). It referred to her publishing activity:
“MFS Eileen Garrett, publisher of Tomorrow, has published a new work by Honorary Founder Hereward Carrington. This is the American Seances with Eusapia Palladino. As older members will recall, Palladino put on the best and most convincing mediumistic show that the world has ever seen. Although Hereward was in on the tests, and wrote a big book about her in 1909, he still does not know how she accomplished some of her effects.
“These seances took place in 1909 and 1910, after the other book was written. For believers and non-believers in ‘spiritualism,’ this exciting data. From the Society $3.75.”
The book, which is now scarce, was put out by Garrett Publications, which was was an imprint of the Parapsychological Foundation, along with Helix Press. (Helix was an important symbol for Garrett.) Other books no Garrett Publication’s list were on parapsychological topics, including two books by Garrett herself and another about her, Ira Progroff’s The Image of an Oracle. The Helix list also included some of Garrett’s own books, along with one by Nandor Fodor.
Neither (brief) mention does much to explain Garrett’s connection to the Fortean Society. Nor does a review of her own writing. Admittedly, I haven’t gone over everything, but I have read her last two autobiographies, her biography, and scanned (some of) the tables of content for Tomorrow; there are no references to Fort at all. Likely, she was among that group I have called Forteans by name only, or close to it, paying dues (I assume) and receiving Doubt, but showing know particular interest in the magazine or Fort himself. Her focus was on other subjects, mainly establishing parapsychology as a bona fide science, which ran contrary to both the Fortean Society’s and Fort’s own aim—which was to puncture science’s inflated sense of itself. Perhaps we should just leave the matter there—it’s a familiar enough story, someone on the fringe of science becoming a member of the Society even without an interest in Fort.
But there’s more going on—more connections, intellectual and personal. These relationships do not necessarily mark Garrett as a Fortean in anything other than name, but they illustrate a nexus of connections, and show how Forteanism was entangled with talk of parapsychology, even among parapsychologists who valorized science, who wanted not to deflate science but expand it.
The personal connections are the easiest to see. In the 1920s and 1930s, Garrett worked with a number of people who would also later become members of the Fortean Society: Nandor Fodor, Harry Price, and Hereward Carrington. Thayer could be dismissive of parapsychology, and its earlier incarnation, psychical research, including the works of all three of those men, but he was also constantly promoting it; indeed, Thayer valued Carrington enough that he made him an Honorary Founder. Garrett also knew one of Fort’s most assiduous disciples. Her edited collection, Beyond the Five Senses, collected material previously published in Tomorrow and included a piece by R. DeWitt Miller, who himself wrote a number of books very much in Fort’s mold. And as Mary Bonavia’s sending in a clip from Tomorrow shows, Forteans did also read that magazine. After all, there was a significant group of Forteans who were also interested in psychical research.
The intellectual connections are sometimes explicit, other times more subtle, even speculative. The most obvious intellectual affinity between Garrett’s parapsychology and Forteanism is the subject of poltergeists. Fort covered the topic in his final book, Wild Talents, and Thayer was fascinated by the topic (Cherchez la Wonet!) The ghost hunters with whom Garrett worked were also interested in the phenomena. Garrett and Fort both located the onus of poltergeist activity in preadolescent and adolescent girls, which was likely independent discoveries, but may have reflected an influence of Fort upon Garrett. More subtly, Garrett’s literary publications involved many pieces written by science fiction authors, and science fiction was closely related to Forteanism. (At least, some science fiction was.) Science fiction shared with Forteanism an interest in alternatives to scientific laws—some of which might become new sciences. That was what John W. Campbell, for instance, saw in Fort’s books. And Garrett, too, was trying to found a new science based on what were then anomalous phenomena. The Venn Diagram of science fiction authors, Forteans, and parapsychologists (including those merely interested in the subject) would have shown a large overlap.
There’s also the issue of imagination, and how to think about it in a scientific world. Garrett chose to see her imagination as some overlap of the subconscious—a scientific category—and a scientific tool: intuition as a way of generating knowledge.
More speculatively, Garrett’s interest in modernist literature connected her to Forteanism, which in many ways drew on the modernist movement. (Science fiction did, too). Thayer was an advocate of Ezra Pound, for instance, while James Blish was a student not only of pound, but James Joyce, too—for whom Garrett obviously had affection. Colin Bennett argues in his odd book Charles Fort and the Politics of the Imagination that Fort should be understood as a modernist author, experimenting with narrative technique the same ways that Joyce was (or Thayer was). As with so many other modernists, Fort was especially preoccupied with writing about the act of writing—writing about how narratives themselves were constructed. His style was choppier than Joyce’s or Faulkner’s, but could also be read as an example of stream of consciousness.
I have not fully thought through the implications of this last point,t he relationship of Forteanism to modernity. (Which itself was influenced by ghost hunting: see Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism.) But it is an important point, and Garrett’s life—full, complicated, contradictory and worthy of note for many other reasons—points to this connection.
