The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  The argument continued into the evening. As discussion became more heated, Delia became cooler toward Carlyle. At last he, perceiving her hurt, retreated into gruff tolerance.

  He promised to keep an open mind and assist her in every way. He would submit to Fraser’s Magazine an article $he had written on the theory if she, in turn, would consent to study original source material in the British Museum. “If you can find in that mass of English records,” he told her, “any document tending to confirm your Shakspere theory, it will be worth all the reasoning in the world, and will certainly surprise all men.”

  As the months passed, Delia utterly ignored Carlyle’s advice that she test her theory against seventeenth-century papers in the British Museum. She needed no proofs beyond those she already possessed through the method of inductive reasoning so beloved by her idol, Sir Francis Bacon. Her funds, supplied by Butler, were swiftly dwindling, and she knew that she must give her great theory to the world before they were gone. She worked day and night on a detailed, book-length exposition of her hypothesis. The early chapters she expected to serialize in Putnam’s Magazine to fulfill her commitment, and with the money received from the magazine she expected to finance her work to its completion.

  During the latter days of November 1853, Delia suddenly removed herself from London to lodgings at the nearby village of St. Albans. There, a short walk from Sir Francis Bacon’s old estate and his tomb, she continued to write. Her only effort at further substantiation of her theory occurred when, through the help of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, she attempted to have Bacon’s coffin opened. Her request was refused. Feverishly, she was now suffering severe headaches and occasional hunger pangs she returned to her book. Carlyle was all disapproval “Miss Bacon has fled away to St. Albans (the Great Bacon’s place),” he reported to Emerson, “and is there working out her Shakspere Problem, from the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless, of all evidence from Museums or Archives … Poor Lady! I sometimes silently wish she were safe at home again; for truly there can be no madder enterprise… .”

  By remaining in St. Albans, Delia had, in effect, burned her bridges behind her. It was a dangerous decision, but there seemed to be no choice. She had spent the money given her for survival All that was left was the money set aside for her passage back to America. And now she began to spend that, too. As she explained defensively to Emerson: “I am living here as economically as I could in America; and as I think only of finishing my work, and have no other future … I do not see why I should spend so large a sum merely for the sake of being in America.”

  She lived meanly, dedicated and driven by her holy mission. She rarely went walking, never met a native of the community except by accident, subsisted on the cheapest of fare, and scratched out her pages of manuscript while huddled in bed for warmth. Finally, after eleven months of privation and solitude in St. Albans, and after a month in Hatfield, she packed her precious manuscript and fled the severe winter of the countryside to seek more habitable lodgings in London.

  Armed with a list of advertisements from The Times, Delia hired a cab. The driver, quickly aware of her limited means, said that he knew of reasonable lodgings in Sussex Gardens. Delia was agreeable to anything. Thus, by good fortune, she met momentary salvation in the form of a kindly, overweight greengrocer named Walker, and his wife. Walker had an unheated flat to let over his shop. Grateful for a haven, Delia moved in, paid her fourteen shillings promptly each week, and worked steadily toward completion of her book. Soon her funds were gone. Walker, a gentleman of delicacy and a patron of the arts, did not evict her. Instead, he permitted her to stay on without payment for six months. When Delia borrowed ten pounds and sent it to Walker, he returned it.

  Despite a letter from Carlyle recommending her “clear, elegant, ingenious and highly readable manner,” portions of Delia’s book were being firmly rejected by the leading British publishers. Delia was filled with despair. But her black mood was of short duration. For suddenly from New York came the first ray of hope. Putnam’s Monthly had received a chapter of Delia’s book from Emerson. The editors liked it. They were featuring the chapter in their January issue, just six weeks off, and were prepared to pay her five dollars for every page of print. Moreover, they wished another chapter for their February issue, and as many more chapters as Delia desired to have serialized.

  Deliriously happy, secure in the knowledge that this arrangement could support her comfortably in London until her masterwork was done, she prepared four more chapters amounting to eighty pages of manuscript, and posted them. But even before her editors had received the new material, Delia’s first article was in print.

  The opening feature in the January 1856 number of Putnam’s Monthly, was entitled “William Shakespeare and His Plays: An Inquiry concerning Them.” Delia devoted her entire first article to the task of maiming William Shakespeare. She referred to his authorship of the plays as the “great myth of the modern age.” She felt “that deer-stealing and link-holding, and the name of an obscure family in Stratford” were not exactly the requisites for scholarship. She berated him as “the Stratford poacher” and she ridiculed him as “this Mr. Shakespeare, actor and manager, of whom no one knows anything else.” For the defenders of the Bard, who resented the deer-poaching tradition, she had only the harshest words. “If he did not steal the deer, will you tell us what one mortal thing he did do? He wrote the plays. But, did the man who wrote the plays do nothing else? Are there not some foregone conclusions in them? some intimations, and round ones, too, that he who wrote them, be he who he may, has had experiences of some sort? Do such things as these, that the plays are full of, begin in the fingers’ ends? Can you find them in an ink-horn? Can you sharpen them out of a goose-quill? Has your Shakespeare wit and invention enough for that? … Had he no part of his own in time, then? Has he dealt evermore with secondhand reports, unreal shadows, and mockeries of things? Has there been no personal grapple with realities, here?” No, the “vulgar, illiterate man who kept the theatre where they were first exhibited” had not created the great plays. The very idea “has become too gross to be endured any further.”

  Delia went no further in this initial blast. She withheld the names of those whom she had discovered to be the real authors. She hinted only of “some friend, or friends, who could … explain his miracle to us.”

  The article was a success, and created sufficient agitation and controversy to warrant more of the same. Or so, at least, Delia was led to believe. But then, like a thunderclap, came the incredible news from New York that Putnam’s Monthly had decided to cancel the rest of the series.

  What had happened? The editors gave, as their official reason, the explanation that the four latest articles were too general and “make so little progress in the demonstration of the main proposition, that if given separately they would weaken rather than increase the interest in the subject.”

  Emerson agreed with the editors. Though he had regarded Delia as a “genius, but mad” and ranked her with Walt Whitman as “the sole producers that America has yielded in ten years,” he had now become impatient with her repetition, verbosity, and lack of solid, factual refutation. “The moment your proposition is stated that Shakespeare was only a player, whom certain superior person or persons could use, and did use, as a mouthpiece for their poetry it is perfectly understood. It does not need to be stated twice. The proposition is immensely improbable, and against the single testimony of Ben Jonson, ‘For I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any,’ cannot stand. Ben Jonson must be answered, first. Of course we instantly require your proofs. … I am sure you cannot be aware how voluminously you have cuffed and pounded the poor pretender, and then again, and still again, and no end.”

  If Delia found the cancellation of Putnam’s Monthly difficult to bear, she found Emerson’s sudden loss of faith in her even more crushing. Suddenly, in her eyes, Emerson was an unreasonable intellectual snob. He had ne
ver been interested in her, after all. He had sponsored her simply to share credit for her brilliant theory. As to his challenge that she answer Jonson’s assertion that he honored Shakespeare’s memory, that was typical Emersonian nonsense. Of course she could answer that challenge, if she wished. “I know all about Ben Jonson,” she wrote. “He has two patrons besides ‘Shakspeare.’ One was Raleigh, the other was Bacon. The author of these Plays and Poems was his Patron.” In short, Jonson knew that Raleigh and Bacon were really Shakespeare, so quite naturally, he praised his patrons by praising Shakespeare.

  Emerson’s role in the disappearance of her precious chapters added fuel to her frenzy. He had asked his brother William, in New York, to pick up the rejected chapters and return them to Concord, whence Emerson expected to forward them to Delia. William dutifully picked up the chapters and gave them to a house guest named Sophy Ripley, who was returning to Concord. “She took the sealed parcel in her hands,” explained Emerson, “and came down to the Staten Island ferry with my brother in his carriage, one and a half miles, and just before reaching the boat perceived that she had not the parcel.” Miss Ripley could not find the chapters in the straw-covered bottom of the carriage, or on the road, or in the ferry. She advertised for the lost parcel, and offered a reward, but it was never found. Delia blamed the magazine editors. She even blamed Emerson a little. But she did not blame herself for having failed to make copies of her work. As her paranoia took stronger hold on her, she hinted darkly of a plot fostered by Shakespeare-lovers. “These are not the first of my papers that have been destroyed”

  As a matter of fact, there were others to support Delia in her view. Her friends, and later her followers, believed that reasons other than mere repetition had made the editors of Putnam’s Monthly cancel her series. Elizabeth Peabody thought that Shakespeare-scholars, led by Richard Grant White, had been so horrified by the heresy of the first article that they had descended upon Putnam’s and talked them out of the rest of the series. Ignatius Donnelly, on the other hand, thought that the fault was to be found among Delia’s own friends, who begged Putnam’s to stop encouraging her eccentricity.

  At any rate, Putnam’s could no longer be depended upon, nor could Ralph Waldo Emerson. When the eighteen pounds Delia had received for her first article were spent, she was impoverished and at wit’s end. She had been unable to pay her rent for a year. She was determined not to trouble Carlyle further. She had a letter of introduction to the wealthy, elderly bachelor, James Buchanan, who was American minister to Great Britain and who would in short months be elected president of the United States. Delia wrote Buchanan, asking to see him. He replied that he would call upon her. When he came, at last, she found him formal and remote and somewhat stuffy. She could not bring herself to ask his aid.

  With Buchanan’s departure all hope seemed to fade. Delia searched her mind for someone in all Britain who might come to the rescue of her person and her completed book. Then she remembered Nathaniel Hawthorne, the brother-in-law of her friend Elizabeth Peabody. She had never met him, but she knew that his old college-friend, President Franklin Pierce, had awarded him the well-paying consulship at Liverpool. Hawthorne, if anyone, would understand the plight of a fellow author. He had struggled, too. Of course, he was known to have an antipathy toward women who were aggressive, erudite, talkative. He had disliked Margaret Fuller intensely. “She had not the charm of womanhood,” he had thought, and found her too excessively pushy for femininity, too clever, and too frank on the subject of sex. Would he, then, couple Delia’s name with Miss Fuller’s? Would he remember her writings, and the lectures, and the New England scandal, and draw away from her? Delia hesitated. But only briefly. Hunger and pain and defeat gave her courage.

  On May 8, 1856, she sat down and wrote:

  “Dear Mr. Hawthorne, I take the liberty of addressing myself to you without an introduction, because you are the only one I know of in this hemisphere able to appreciate the position in which I find myself at this moment… .

  “Of course it is not pleasant to me to bring this subject to the attention of strangers, as I have been and still am compelled to, for it seems like a personal intrusion, and like asking a personal favor… .

  “For I want some literary counsel, and such as no Englishman of letters is able to give me. Mr. Carlyle has been a most cordial personal friend to me, but there are reasons why I could not ask this help from him, which would become apparent to you if you should look at the work at all

  “The work admits of publication in separate portions. What I want is to begin to publish immediately a part of it, enough to secure the discovery. … I would not be willing to print any part of it till some friendly eye had overlooked it, if there were no other reason for delay. It is not hard reading. Would you be willing to take a part of it, a part which you could read in an evening or so … ?”

  In Liverpool the fifty-two-year-old Hawthorne, sick of his consular job, “bothered and bored, and harassed and torn in pieces, by a thousand items of daily business,” as he would write Delia, irritated by the beer-sodden British, might have been expected to possess little patience for another American in trouble. Yet, so sensitive was he to human loneliness and insecurity, and so decent and good were his instincts, that he was moved to reply to Delia at once. Within four days of writing him, she had her answer. He had heard of her several years before from Miss Peabody. And he had heard of her theory. He thought that he was too busy and preoccupied to be very helpful as critic or judge, but if she needed his reaction, or his assistance in securing a publisher, he was ready to serve her. There was only one condition, and in this Hawthorne was firm:

  “I would not be understood, my dear Miss Bacon, as professing to have faith in the correctness of your views. In fact, I know far too little of them to have any right to form an opinion: and as to the case of the ‘old Player’ (whom you grieve my heart by speaking of so contemptuously) you will have to rend him out of me by the roots, and by main force, if at all. But I feel that you have done a thing that ought to be reverenced, in devoting yourself so entirely to this object, whatever it be, and whether right or wrong; and that, by so doing, you have acquired some of the privileges of an inspired person and a prophetess and that the world is bound to hear you, if for nothing else, yet because you are so sure of your own mission.”

  Grateful, excited, and alive again, Delia sent portions of her book to Hawthorne. And with them an apology:

  “I am sorry to have hurt your feelings with my profane allusions to the Earl of Leicester’s groom, a witty fellow enough in his way. But long familiarity with the facts has produced a hopeless obduracy in my mind on that point. … I do not, of course, expect you to adopt my views until you find yourself compelled to do so, neither do I wish you to give the faintest countenance to them till you know fully what they are and their grounds.”

  Soon enough, Hawthorne had opportunity to become more fully acquainted with Delia’s views. After reading portions of her manuscript he wrote her that he still was not a convert to her theory and that she made too much of the parallels she had found in Bacon and Shakespeare, writers’ thoughts often being similar though they “had no conscious society with one another.” However, he complimented her on her knowledge of Bacon and on “the depth and excellence” of her work.

  Generously, he offered her financial assistance, and when her pride restrained her from accepting, he sent the money anyway. Desperately as she needed his money, his literary help was what she sought most. And she told him so directly. “The way in which you can help me,” she said, “will be to certify that you have read my book and that it is entitled to a publication.”

  Again Hawthorne understood her real need, and promised to do what he could. His own publisher in England was Routledge. This firm had sold “a hundred thousand volumes” of his books to their profit and his own, and he was certain that they would do anything he asked. But first he must meet Delia and discuss the matter with ‘her. When could he call upon her? Deli
a was frightened. “I am unfit to see anyone. I have given up this world entirely… . Still, if you are kind enough to look after me when you come … I will put on one of the dresses I used to wear… .”

  On July 26, 1856, Hawthorne went down from Liverpool to London, made his way to the grocery store in Sussex Gardens, met the fat, friendly Walker and his wife, and was escorted up three flights of stairs to Delia’s flat. She was still asleep, though the hour was not early. Hawthorne guessed that her hermit-like existence had made her hours erratic. While Delia was being awakened, and nervously began to dress, her benefactor had time to study her parlor. Naturally, he was drawn to her books first. They were piled high on a table, and each had some relation to her Shakespeare theory. There was Raleigh’s The History of the World, Montaigne’s Essays, Shakespeare’s Plays, a volume of Bacon’s letters, a pocket edition of the Bible, and several other works. Hawthorne settled down with Hazlitt’s translation of Montaigne, and had been reading “a good while” when suddenly Delia appeared in the doorway.

  Before her entrance Hawthorne had reflected on what her physical appearance might be. From her correspondence, from the fact that “she was a literary woman,” he had conjured up an unattractive image: “I had expected … to see a very homely, uncouth, elderly personage.” When Delia stood before him at last in person, he was agreeably surprised. He saw a woman “rather uncommonly tall,” with “a striking and expressive face, dark hair, dark eyes, which shone with an inward light as soon as she began to speak.” Though she was forty-five years of age, Hawthorne thought her aspect almost youthful and was sure that she had “been handsome and exceedingly attractive once.”