The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

I

We had made too many friends and incurred too many obligations in Pasadena; so we found a cottage down on the ocean front at Alamitos Bay, Long Beach, and moved there. During both of my trips to Boston, Craig stayed alone in the little beach cottage and never minded it. Somehow she felt safe, and the waves on the other side of the boardwalk lulled her to sleep. She had become fascinated with the problem of her own mind, and studied it with the help of scores of books that I had got for her. I still have more than a hundred volumes on psychology and philosophy and psychic research that she read and marked—Bergson, William James, William McDougall, Charcot, Janet—a long list of the best. She had had psychic experiences herself in her girlhood and was tormented with the desire to understand these hidden forces of the mind. All the time that I was writing Oil! and Boston, I was also helping her to find out what her gift actually was—and to guess what it meant. The result was the book called Mental Radio.

The procedure we adopted was the simplest possible: I would make half a dozen drawings on slips of paper and put each inside an envelope. Then I would bring them to Craig, who was lying on her couch. She would lay one of them over her solar plexus—having read somewhere that this might be the center of the unknown forces. We didn’t know whether that was so or not; but the solar plexus was as good as any other place. I would sit quietly and keep watch so as to be able to say that she did not cheat—although, of course, I knew that she had never cheated in her life. She had only one obsession—she wanted to know for certain if these forces were real.

She would decide that something that had come into her mind was the reality, and she would take pencil and pad and make a drawing. Then we would open the envelope and compare the two. The results were amazing to us both.

I had been reading about telepathy and clairvoyance since my youth. At Columbia I had studied with James Hyslop, who had been a patient psychic researcher; then there was the Unitarian minister who had performed my first marriage—Minot J. Savage—who told me he had seen and talked with a ghost who said that he had just been drowned off the coast of Britain. The results in Craig’s case settled the matter for us, and settles it for anyone who is unwilling to believe that we are a pair of imbeciles as well as cheats. There is no other alternative, for we took every possible precaution against any blunder, and there is no way to account for what happened except to say that a drawing completely invisible to the eyes can make an impression on the mind by some other means.

It was not merely from my drawings that Craig got these impressions. She got them from the mind of a professional medium, whom she employed to experiment with her. I have given the details in Mental Radio. I printed several thousand copies of the book, and the experiments it describes have stayed unexplained now for thirty years. It is worth noting also that Mental Radio has just been reissued—this time by a publisher of scientific books exclusively. This is significant.

Professor William McDougall, who had been head of the department of psychology first at Oxford and then at Harvard, wrote a preface to the book. When he came to see us at the little beach cottage, he told us that he had just accepted a position as head of the department of psychology at Duke University; he had a fund at his disposal and proposed to establish a department of parapsychology to investigate these problems. He said he had taken the liberty of bringing several cards in his pocket, and he would like to be able to say that Craig had demonstrated her power to him.

Craig, always a high-strung person, hated to be submitted to tests because they made her nervous; but her respect for McDougall was great, and she said she would do her best. She sat quietly and concentrated. Then she said that she had an impression of a building with stone walls and narrow windows, and the walls were covered with something that looked like green leaves. McDougall took from an inside pocket a postcard of a building at Oxford University covered with ivy. There were two or three other successes that I have forgotten. The outcome was that McDougall said he was satisfied, and would go to Duke and set up the new department. He did so, with results that all the world knows.

I was interested to observe the conventional thinker’s attitude toward a set of ideas that he does not wish to accept. Mental Radio contained 210 examples of successes in telepathy—partial successes and complete successes. To the average orthodox scientist, the idea was inconceivable, and it just wasn’t possible to tell him anything that he knew in advance couldn’t have happened. On the other hand, the lovely personality of Mary Craig is shown all through the book, and I cannot recall that any scientist ever accused her of cheating. He would go out of his way to think of something that might have happened, and then he would assume that it had happened; it must have happened, and that settled the matter. He would entirely overlook the fact that I had mentioned that same possibility and had stated explicitly that it hadn’t happened; that we had made it absolutely impossible for it to have happened.

I won’t be unkind enough to name any scientist. One suggested solemnly that it might have been possible for Mary Craig to have gotten an idea of the drawing by seeing the movements of my hand at a distance. But in the book I plainly stated that I never made the drawing without going into another room and closing the door. That kind of oversight has been committed again and again by the critics.

While I am on this subject I will venture to slip ahead for several years and tell of one more experiment. Arthur Ford, the medium, was paying a visit to Los Angeles, and I asked him to come out to our home and see if his powers had waned. (He had never refused an invitation from us—and he had never let us pay him a dollar.) He said he would come, and Craig was so determined to make a real test that she wouldn’t even let me invite our friends by telephone. Our line might be tapped! She wrote a letter to Theodore Dreiser, and one to Rob Wagner, editor of Script, who was a skeptic but wanted to be shown.

When evening came, my orders were to wait outside for Arthur and take him around behind the house so that he might not see who came in. This I faithfully did; so there were Dreiser and his wife, and Rob Wagner and his wife, and Craig’s sister, Dolly, and her husband. They were seated in a semidark room; and when I brought Arthur in, he went straight to the armchair provided, leaned back in it with his eyes toward the ceiling, and covered his eyes with a silk handkerchief, which is his practice.

Presently came the voice that Ford calls Fletcher. “Fletcher” speaks quietly and without a trace of emotion. He said there was a spirit present who had been killed in a strange accident. He had been crossing a street when a team of runaway horses came galloping, and the center pole had struck him in the chest. And then there was a spirit victim of another strange accident. This man had been in a warship when one of the guns had somehow backfired and killed him. And then there was a newspaperman and quite a long conversation about various matters that I have forgotten. I told the full details in an article for the Psychic Observer but do not have a copy at hand.

At that point in the séance there came a tap on the door, and Mrs. Gartz came in with one of her nephews. She had known nothing about the séance; being highly antagonistic, she had not been invited. Fletcher said, “There is a strong Catholic influence here, but there will be a divorce.”

That ended the affair, possibly because of Mrs. Gartz’s hostile attitude. The lights were turned up, and the various guests spoke in turn. Bob Irwin, Craig’s brother-in-law, said that his young brother had been killed by exactly such a runaway team; Rob Wagner said that his brother had been killed in the Navy in a gun accident. Theodore Dreiser had been a journalist, but he denied that he had ever known such a man or heard of any such events as had come out in the séance. Mrs. Gartz’s nephew said that he was a Catholic, but there would surely not be any divorce.

So ended the evening; but the day after the next there came to Craig a letter from Helen Dreiser saying that she was embarrassed to tell us that Theodore had been drinking and had slept through the séance and not heard a word. When she had repeated to him the various statements, he admitted that he knew such a man and that the events mentioned had occurred.

The predicted divorce did not occur until a month or two later, when the wife of the Gartz nephew divorced him.

And now all the skeptics can put their wits to work and find out how Arthur Ford got all those facts about people he had never met, and about whom we had made such efforts at secrecy. I don’t like to be fooled any more than the next man, but I agree with Professor McDougall and Professor Rhine that it is the duty of science to investigate such events and find out what are the forces by which they are brought about.

Just by way of fun, I will add that Professor McDougall established his department of parapsychology, and Professor Rhine has carried it on; one of the things they have proved is that when Negroes shooting craps snap their fingers and cry “Come seven! Come eleven!” they really are influencing the dice. Rhine’s investigators have caused millions of dice to be thrown mechanically, and observers have willed certain numbers to come, and the numbers have come. The chances for the successes having happened accidentally are up in the billions. Most embarrassing—but it happens!