THREE
Things are not that simple after you die
Fodor was born Nandor Friedlander in the Hungarian town of Beregszász on 13 May 1895, the sixteenth of eighteen children. Both of his younger brothers died in childhood, leaving him the baby of the family and, he said, his father’s favourite. The Friedlanders were part of a thriving Jewish community, several thousand strong, who had built a grand synagogue in the centre of Beregszász, a cemetery, an elementary school, a religious court, a bath house, ritual slaughterhouses, butchers and bakeries. The town lay in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains, in wine and timber country 200 miles east of Budapest. Nandor loved to hunt beetles and butterflies in the woods, orchards and meadows near his home. His best friends were a small, hunchbacked child and a mischievous boy who regaled his companions with tales of huge penises and giant vaginas.
Nandor’s first supernatural experience took place when he was seven. His grandfather was being buried, and he was playing on a ladder propped against the cemetery wall. He felt happy and free, and was looking forward to inheriting the long muslin sheet that the old man liked to drape over his head as protection against flies – Nandor planned to use it as a butterfly net. But when the coffin was opened for a final blessing, the boy heard his grandfather’s voice issuing from the box. He could not tell what the spirit said, because it spoke in Hebrew, but he was frightened, and felt rebuked for his irreverence.
Nandor narrowly missed conscription in the war of 1914 to 1918, when he was studying law in Budapest. He worked in the city through both the Red Terror (a short period of Communist rule in 1919) and the White Terror (an ultra-nationalist backlash from 1919 to 1921, in which thousands of Jews and Communists were imprisoned and killed). In 1921, he left a staff job at Az Est, the leading Hungarian daily, to try his luck as a journalist in America. By then the family had adopted the surname Fodor, in place of the more obviously Jewish Friedlander, and it seemed a good time for a young Jew to get out of the country. His father wept as they parted at Budapest railway station: ‘I know I will never see you again,’ he told his son.
Fodor also left behind him a rosy-cheeked, elfin young woman, Irene Lichter, with whom he had fallen in love. He begged her to accompany him, but she refused: she was promised to a banker, she said.
In New York City Fodor became a reporter and feature writer for the Hungarian-American press, which catered to the hundreds of thousands of rural Hungarians who had moved to the US before 1914 and the smaller number of urban intelligentsia, many of them Jewish, who had arrived since the war. He read avidly, partly to improve his English, and, having loved fantastical stories since childhood, he developed a passion for true tales of the supernatural. His first purchase was Hereward Carrington’s Modern Psychical Phenomena (1919), which he found on a bookstall on Fourth Avenue. ‘This work was a revelation to me,’ he wrote. ‘From then on I spent my lunch money on books, feasting on psychic knowledge in preference to the nourishing food of the Hungarian restaurants near my work.’ He read about spiritualism, a religion that emerged in upstate New York in the middle of the nineteenth century, and about the Society for Psychical Research, founded in England in 1882 to establish a science of the ‘supernormal’. Spiritualists held that the dead survived in another world, and could communicate with the living. Psychical researchers investigated weird experiences to find out whether they were governed by spirits or by natural laws that were not yet understood.
Fodor befriended Carrington, who lived in New York City, and he arranged to interview other men whose work intrigued him, such as the Hungarian-born magician Harry Houdini, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi and the British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Houdini and Conan Doyle had once been friends, but they fell out over the supernatural: Houdini was a zealous exposer of phoney mediums, and Conan Doyle a great champion of spiritualism. Fodor asked Conan Doyle if he would write Sherlock Holmes stories from another planet after his death. The question was typical of Fodor, at once wide-eyed and playful. ‘Things are not that simple after you die,’ said Conan Doyle sternly. ‘You cannot move to this or that planet.’
In the summer of 1922 Irene Lichter followed Fodor to America, her parents having persuaded her to accept his marriage proposal. As soon as they were married Irene became pregnant, to her distress, and she tried to induce a miscarriage with hot baths and roller skating. In April 1923 she endured a feverish, two-day labour before giving birth to a daughter, Andrea.
Fodor’s father died in Hungary in 1924. Three years later Fodor called out to him in Hungarian in the darkness of a Manhattan seance room – ‘Apam? Apam?’ – and heard his father respond with the words he had used at their parting: ‘Édes fiam’ – ‘sweet son’. When Fodor walked home from the sitting that night, the coloured lights of Broadway seemed to glow richer and brighter; the stars sparkled overhead. The spiritualists must be right, he thought: the dead survived and could speak to the living.
In 1928 Fodor conducted an interview with the British newspaper mogul Lord Rothermere, who was emerging as an unlikely champion of the Hungarian people. The press baron agreed with Fodor that far too much land had been stripped from Hungary after the war – two-thirds of its territory, including Fodor’s home town, had been ceded to other nations – and that religious and racial intolerance was harming the country’s reputation.
Once the interview was published, Rothermere offered Fodor a job as his adviser on Hungarian affairs, with a generous annual salary of £1,000 and a comfortable berth in the Associated Newspapers offices in Fleet Street. Fodor moved to England with Irene and their five-year-old daughter Andrea, and began to campaign on Rothermere’s behalf for the restoration of Hungarian land surrendered in the Treaty of Trianon. His new boss was the third richest man in Britain, and the owner of a newspaper empire unrivalled in reach and influence.
Fodor also threw himself into the London psychical scene. He joined the Ghost Club and the London Spiritualist Alliance, befriended members of the Faery Investigation Society, contributed articles to the spiritualist weekly Light. Spiritualism was big business in Britain. Three-quarters of a million Britons had been killed in the Great War, and another quarter of a million in the influenza pandemic that followed. Thousands of spiritualist seance circles were established by the wives and husbands and sweethearts of the dead, their mothers and fathers and children. The faith offered ‘something tremendous’, said Conan Doyle, ‘a breaking down of the walls between two worlds… a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.’ In effect, a seance was a voluntary haunting, a summoning of ghosts, at which the dead would speak through trumpets or through mediums, rap on tables and blow cold breezes, sometimes even let themselves be touched, smelt or seen. These forms of contact seemed hardly more outlandish than the other means of communication that had become familiar since the war. Nineteenth-century inventions such as the radio, the electric telegraph, the telephone, the camera and the gramophone player were now commonplace. Soon, predicted Fodor, ‘the mechanism of psychic communication will be understood and used with the same facility as the wireless and the telephone’.
Scores of seances and private consultations were advertised in the psychic press, along with books and lectures on all aspects of the occult. Some spiritualists believed that there was so much supernormal activity because the dead were straining to come closer. ‘The boundary between the two states – the known and the unknown – is still substantial,’ wrote the renowned physicist and radio pioneer Sir Oliver Lodge, who had lost a son in the war, ‘but it is wearing thin in places, and like excavators engaged in boring a tunnel from opposite ends, amid the roar of water and other noises, we are beginning to hear now and again the strokes of the pickaxes of our comrades on the other side.’