‘I’m getting a gist of that. What did you make of his claim?’
‘I think Hazzard was convinced that a soul could leave its body after a shock, or if the soul thought that the body was dying, or had died. Most of his early experiences are in the story, “Sinking in the Dark Room. Rising in White Light”. Of course he claimed he could go much further over time, and that he’d learned to harness and control his “gift”, as he referred to it. But he kept all of that for the SPR. Its unique selling point. This was something he claimed he could teach, this gift.
‘Prudence even helped him get funding for SPR research, with her connections. But, of course, no one but Prudence knew about his past, because he was M. L. Hazzard at that point. The bogus aristocrat and fake doctor had been buried, but I don’t think she was troubled by his past.
‘He and Prudence Carey started retreats at the Hall, correspondence courses too, in the early sixties. He’d developed some technique that involved fasting and hypnosis, while using some psychedelics that he’d tried in London and then medicalized into his “formula”. There was meditation too, with the cultivation of an image and mantra that could, apparently, induce the experience and get his customers closer to the paradise belt. All of this I learned from Liza.’
‘How much of this syllabus do you have?’
‘Bits and pieces from hearsay and the short stories. Most of my book is based on assumptions, to be honest, but they’re as informed as I could manage.’
‘Hazzard never wrote a manifesto, anything like that?’
‘I don’t know. What I’ve pieced together of his ideas mostly came from his stories. I think they are a formalization of his theory, or as close to it as you can get to one. Liza’s interview pretty much attests to what Hazzard wrote about his cultivation. In fact, Liza’s interview reminded me of Hazzard’s stories. They’re cut from the same cloth. And remember, Hazzard refused to even call them stories. To him they were strange experiences.
‘But Hazzard also built all kinds of stuff into his spiel. Ideas ranging from the Hindu soft body to the vital body of the Rosicrucians. He used Greek and Roman mythology, Elysium, Hades, and stuff that was popular in the sixties, from the East, to give himself a zeitgeist and some gravitas. His adepts did most of the teaching on the retreats. There were two women in the early seventies who called themselves Alice and Fay, and they were the equivalent of enforcers at the Tor.
‘You have to realize too that his patients had to dedicate to a long haul, and cough up the cash for months at a time, before getting a private session with Dr Hazzard, or even Diane if they were lucky. And those private tuitions didn’t come cheap.’
‘Do you know what he was he like, I mean, as a person?’
‘My contacts hardly ever saw him. But they said he was some kind of David Niven type. Sharp dresser. Shades, porkpie hat. Very posh. Came across as fussy, brittle and prickly. Bit superior. Assured, one of them said, but always with a promise of confrontation in his tone. He was said to have a penetrative, intense stare, too, that could be absolutely withering if anyone challenged him. Or if he took a dislike to someone, and that was, apparently, a common occurrence.
‘The narrators in his short stories, and they’re all written in the first person, are always self-important and easily offended. I get the impression that no slight would ever be forgotten by old Hazzard. Achieving his will over others was paramount.
‘He also had two sports cars, one for him and one for his female persona. He’d greet people either as a man or as Diane, do his emotive pitch and then piss off upstairs. He had one entire floor to himself. But Diane was very posh, apparently, always immaculately done up. Quite convincing, Liza said, because Hazzard was small for a man. And this was when Hazzard’s life seemed to get even more interesting, at the Tor, but the trail of breadcrumbs thinned once he was off official radars.’
‘But you found some people, some members?’
‘Survivors, more like. But no one from the classic period in the sixties. They must have died by the time I was researching. And I only found three people who were involved with the SPR at the Tor. Liza, and two women who weren’t there for very long. They freaked out and got very frightened of the whole deal, but this was after it had been going for years. I’m pretty sure they had psychotic reactions to the “formula”. But Liza put me in touch with them. They all kept in touch after they left the SPR.’
‘How did you find her, this Liza?’
‘I posted an ad in a mind, body and spirit magazine. But that’s not her real name. She didn’t want me to use it.