Pondering styles for Grant’s monument, King ruled out Egyptian and Greek models on the grounds that America had little in common with either civilization. Renaissance styles struck him as better suited to sumptuous palaces than memorials, modern French architecture as “too gay and bright” for a tomb, and Gothic motifs as too easily abused in translation. The correct model, he felt, was classical Rome. “The chief experiences of the Roman people were what ours have been—war, trade, and sudden expansion into national greatness.” Both Romans and Americans “loved luxury and pomp” and “adored quantity,” he wrote. “Size, brute mass, the big figures of the census are our pride.” King also detected parallels between General Grant and the captains of the Caesars. “Simple and direct, uncomplicated by the high-strung self-consciousness of the present age,” Grant had gone to battle “with the absorbed directness of a soldier of the second century.”
Since the monument would crown a bluff above the Hudson River and be visible from all sides, King suggested a domed drum akin to the Tomb of Hadrian. In place of the emperor’s masonry, King proposed the use of as much stained glass as the structure would support. Illuminated from within, it would gleam like a jewel in the night.
Remembering the plan years later, La Farge said the design had proved “too poetic and ideal” for the likes of a committee. The stained-glass jewel lost out to a stubby Greco-Roman pastiche that undoubtedly confirmed King’s low estimate of American taste.
Long before, in one of his mountaineering sketches for the Atlantic, King had catalogued the crudities of the West and then paused to reflect that what a man was mattered less than what he might become. Holding forth on Grant’s Tomb, King revealed more than he knew of what he himself had become in the years since his adventures in the Sierra Nevada. In aesthetic matters, he was surer than ever of his superior delicacy and refinement. Like La Farge, who believed the world was “stuffed with sawdust,” King saw himself a lonely standard-bearer in a vulgar wasteland.
The essay also hinted at King’s increasingly troubled relations with women. Among the philistines he excoriated were a bevy of “bediamonded women” he had once encountered in a Fifth Avenue drawing room. He admired the room, but his companions declared it inferior to the boudoir of one of their fashionable friends. Safely anonymous, the author gave full rein to his scorn. The boudoir in question was “nothing but the disjecta membra of a once important bank account,” he wrote; “it reeks money, it exudes costliness—very likely the chairs are stuffed with curled coupons—but to an art-loving mind it is a dreary, poverty-smitten waste.” Turning to New England’s crimes against the architecture of classical Greece, King sneered at the imitation Parthenon found in every village—executed in pine and typically inhabited, he suspected, by a “prim little Puritan maiden, sharp as a stock-broker, and with an unabridged dictionary of a mind.”
At the time King composed his sermon on style, he despaired of ever finding a wife. Writing to John Hay on Five of Hearts stationery in May 1885, he confessed to feeling “very sulky” as the result of one of his “conscientious efforts … to find the sixth heart.” The young women who had flanked him at dinner the night before, he said, “were in fine form (as the hostess afterwards told me) and screamed scraps of subjects at me in their macaw voices till they left my slow faculties in a state of irritated daze. The New York girl is certainly a phenomenon. What she would doubtless call her mind is a mere crazy quilt of bright odds and ends. Bits of second-hand opinion cut bias, snips of polite error patched in with remnants of truth which don’t show the whole pattern, little rags of scandal &c &c all deftly sewed together in a pretty chromatic chaos well calculated to please a congenital dude but fatiguing to a lover of natural women, such as I am.”
At forty-three, King was as defensive about his bachelorhood as Henry and Clover Adams had been about their lack of children. If a conversation turned to marriage, King snuffed it at once with an outlandish pronouncement. He explained his unmarried state by taking a coin from his pocket, flipping it, and declaring, “Woman is too one-sided—like a tossed-up penny—and I want both sides or none.” On another occasion he insisted he would never marry a woman just because he had said he would: “People who marry without any better reason than that must surely come to grief.” His friends shrugged off his bravado and joked that Clarence King had never married because he was so complete he did not need a second half.
By 1886, indictments of womankind had become a staple of King’s letters to Hay. Meeting a Mrs. Davis at Lake George, he complained that her mind was “crammed full of remnants” picked up “at Macy’s when they were selling off, for below cost, a world of snips of unreasonable information. She has something quite a propos but utterly mistaken about everything.” On a trip to Lake Sunapee, he was stunned by a kiss from Sarah Durgin, wife of the man who tended the property which Hay and King hoped to buy. “It was a revelation; so thin and cold, so dreary and colorless,” King said. “… I am capable of walking up to the cannon’s mouth but I refuse to ever again march up to the mouth of a New Hampshire woman.” Poor Sarah, he moaned. Her kiss “seemed like the only one she had, the little pittance she had saved for heaven knows how long.” Thoroughly depressed, King vowed to go “far up on the side of [Mount Sunapee] out of human hearing and fetch two or three long drawn howls, by way of relief. I have seen this work well with wolves: they scream away their griefs and then brace up in capital form.”
The visit to New Hampshire also produced a specimen of Boston femininity for his vivisection. “You know the type,” he told Hay, “caramels, matinees … the last slang, a good dress and a bad hat.” When she displayed “a charmingly pretty little pink blister on her plump white palm,” acquired while rowing on the lake, King mused that it was the sort of detail W. D. Howells would invent. King prescribed resin and gallantly volunteered to show her how to feather the oars. A few days later he reported that he had indeed taught her to row and had offered further counsel on blister prevention: henceforth she was not to wear her “huge diamonds” while working the oars.
Reading the Sunapee letters, Hay thought his friend “in delicious vein” and wished he would write the novel he had long promised. Hay did not perceive that King’s disdain of women masked enormous fears. An account of a visit with Miss Gail Hamilton, a writer who had also been one of his schoolteachers, spoke volumes of the dangers King felt in the presence of women. Having known Miss Hamilton for most of his life, he told Hay he had watched her pass from “the sweetness of natural womanhood … through the acetous fermentation of belated virginity into the hard cider of middle age.” At fifty-five, she had “like some old Madeira passed into the flavorless rainwater stage. She is pellucid and harmless, amiably neutral, unintoxicating. She buzzes pleasantly and like certain bees has left her sting in some victim or other. I liked her more than ever before.”
Though King’s anxieties did not turn him against all women, he abominated the ones deemed most acceptable for a man in his position—the spirited, thoroughly modern types who populated the fiction of Henry James. Like others who felt misplaced in the Gilded Age, King liked to maintain that civilization was a nervous disease, and he lodged numerous complaints against his overcivilized male contemporaries, including the fastidious Henry James. King accused the novelist of looking “a little askance” at his fictional characters unless they belonged to his own class, and he suspected that before James ventured into the darker quarters of London, he “gathered up a few unmistakably good invitations and buttoned them in his inner pocket so that there should be no mistaking the social position of his corpse if violence befell him.” But King reserved his most savage attacks for the modern female, whom he saw as badly educated, overly talkative, and sexually inhibited. Unable to abide her, he idealized her primitive sister. “Paradise, for me, is still a garden and a primaeval woman,” he told Hay. “I have a feeling that I should not have eaten the forbidden fruit, but somehow I would have fenced with the two edged sword and defended my Eden, and
to-day there would have been much less sorrow and fewer mugwumps.”
In Newport for a visit with his mother, King waxed lyrical about a “grandly barbaric Congo woman” and her “tribe,” who had come to work in the house. “They are all very black and very silent, all have teeth like glistening ivory,” he told Hay. “We are living with the hordes of the Congo and you taste mysterious spices and poke your fork into incredible ragouts, and hear songs of the Guinea Coast and see faces gay and loose with a heredity of sweetly dissolute centuries.” Reveling in the new sensations the blacks had brought to the “grim calvinistic scotch propriety” of his mother’s house, King could not help contrasting the naturalness of the servants with the life that modern men and women were expected to lead. “Civilization so narrows the gamut! Respectability lets the human pendulum swing over such a pitiful little arc that it is worthwhile now and again to see human beings whose feelings have no inflexible bar of metal restraining their swing to the limits set by civilized experience and moral law.”
During his European holiday, King had boasted to lords and ladies of his escapades in the slums, but in America he felt obliged to temper his conversation. Perhaps he feared that word of his special tastes would reach his mother or that his business partners would read his sexual predilections as one more sign of flawed judgment. His fellow clubmen had heard him proclaim that miscegenation was the only hope of the white race, and his intimates knew, in a general way, of his attraction to dark-skinned women. But he was reluctant to share the particulars with anyone except John Hay. In the spring of 1887, King went out west on mining business, and somewhere in California he fell in love with an Indian woman named Luciana. She was “as near Eve as can be,” he told Hay. Riding with Luciana in the mountains, King said, the “world was all flowers and Luciana’s face the most tender and grave image of Indian womanhood within human conception…. We came upon a spring high up in the mountains, where the oaks were dewy with sea fog and the orange poppies all aflame in the grass; and there we dismounted and looked out on the silver sea, and I came as near it as I ever shall.”
As grieved as King was to part with Luciana, he had no intention of forging a permanent bond. Like the girls of the London slums, she was supposed to be material for a novel. But after the icy kiss at Lake Sunapee, so unlike the “oceanic fullness of blood and warmth” he had tasted among the poppies, King moaned that his efforts to reduce Luciana to “a mere literary figure, a lay woman draped with rich emotions and posed as model for my book” were dismally unsuccessful: “she will not down.” With a flash of grim humor, he remarked that his situation was not without hope. “Business troubles I am told have a way of grinding off the fairest pictures from the soul and I have always enough of them to erode the bloom off anything.”
Luciana faded from his letters, but as his financial woes deepened, King felt himself increasingly attracted to the forbidden world of dark skins. In 1887, forced out of the management of the Yedras mine and faced with expensive delays at Sombrerete, King traded his Savile Row suits for rough clothes and prowled the black neighborhoods of New York, registering at hotels under an alias. He also undertook a secret mission on behalf of a seventy-year-old quadroon who was said to be the illegitimate daughter of a leading Southern politician. She and King had chatted briefly years before during a chance meeting in a lawyer’s office, and they had charmed each other instantly. Despite her age and white hair, King found himself taken with “an eye like incandescent lava.” The lawyer, now in failing health, asked King to act as guardian of her affairs, which had been left in “the trusteeship (not with legal form of course) of a gentleman of the old school who with his wife have been true and faithful to her.” His own finances in shambles, King nevertheless hastened to New Orleans on her behalf. This much he reported to an old mining colleague, Samuel Barlow, in hopes that Barlow could recommend a discreet attorney in New Orleans—an older man, a Creole perhaps, “who knows about such histories and has outgrown idle curiosity.” Here the matter dropped. King’s letters never revealed the identity of the old quadroon or her celebrated father. The episode would not warrant mention were it not for another secret that soon overwhelmed King’s life.
Sometime during 1887, at the home of a friend in New York, a young black nursemaid named Ada Copeland caught the geologist’s eye, and they struck up a covert romance. He was forty-five, she was twenty-six. This time King would conceal his passion even from John Hay. It was one thing to own up to an exotic liaison in far-off California, quite another to do it amid the proprieties of home. But the most startling aspect of King’s secrecy was his unwillingness to reveal his real identity to Ada. For fourteen years she would know him as James Todd. And somehow James Todd managed to persuade her to become his bride in a ceremony that included everything but a marriage license.
The unorthodox wedding took place in September 1888, at the home of the bride’s aunt on West 24th Street in Manhattan. An organ and a Bible were installed for the occasion, and a black Methodist minister was invited down from his 85th Street church to perform the rites. The groom, in a dress suit, put a ring on the bride’s finger, and the Reverend Mr. Cook pronounced them Mr. and Mrs. James Todd. Chocolates and a cake with white icing were shared with her friends and family. Their impressions of the mysterious, well-spoken stranger with the deep-blue eyes and the receding blond hair went unrecorded.
What explanation would have persuaded Ada to wed King without a license? What account of himself did he give her family? Why, after a succession of subterranean affairs with dark-skinned women, did he seek a permanent attachment? These questions and dozens more remain unanswered. Apart from the wedding details, all that is known is that the groom soon rented a house for the bride on Hudson Street in Brooklyn. Afraid of being found out, he decided to keep rooms at the Brunswick Hotel or one of his clubs. The gentlemen of the Union League and the Metropolitan, long accustomed to his comings and goings, would think nothing of his frequent absences. In Brooklyn, he told curious neighbors what he had told Ada and her family: he was a railroad porter from Baltimore.
In the house on Hudson Street, Ada gave birth to a son. In yet another deception, King named the baby after himself, calling him Leroy, from the French le roi—the king. Over the next several years, Ada would bear two more sons and two daughters. However King viewed the obligations of fatherhood, his experience with the ancient quadroon had taught him that such affairs could be managed honorably without the formalities of legal documents.
Despite their sketchiness, the facts of King’s relationship with Ada do much to explain the escalating tension between his private and public selves in 1887 and 1888. Publicly, he balanced his Mexican mining defeats with high hopes for new business ventures—banks in El Paso and San Diego as well as a coal partnership with Henry Adams’s brother Charles, president of the Union Pacific. Their enterprise mined anthracite for locomotive fuel, and they soon hit on the lucrative idea of selling most of their stock to one of their largest customers, the Erie Railroad.
After hours, King divided his time between Hudson Street and dinners with such friends as John La Farge. On occasion they were joined by the architect Stanford White and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who was as dilatory in business matters as King and La Farge. Nearly a year had passed since Henry Adams had commissioned a sculpture for Clover’s grave, and Saint-Gaudens had given it almost no thought. In the summer of 1887, the quartet dined amid some rather pungent horses at the Riding Club, an experience King found “a curious mixture of art and hippodrome: some very good talk, but I confess I don’t like an ammoniacal flavor to my iced lemonade.” King’s chief delight that evening was Saint-Gaudens, who had just shaved his beard and “laid bare the most extraordinary chin—long, pointed, equine…. I had no idea that beneath that peaked beard was a chin as severe and hard and sharp as his sculptor’s chisel.”
La Farge was working on the church mural he had planned during his Japanese travels with Henry Adams. In a single day, he told King, he had “w
hacked in a whole Apostle.” He was also painting two decorative panels for the music room of Whitelaw Reid’s new mansion. Hay had recommended La Farge for the job, advising his old Tribune colleague to give the artist a free hand. Reid took the counsel, and La Farge was working with rare contentment. King, however, was not enthusiastic about the results. One female figure was “as nude as Eve,” he told Hay, but “so entirely without temperamental charms, that I do not want her.” To Adams, King wrote that La Farge’s nudes were “beautifully executed but not archaic enough to suit my grovelling mind.”
Neither King’s secret pleasures in Brooklyn nor his male friendships sufficed to ward off restlessness and despair. From time to time he thought about moving himself and his mother’s Newport household to Washington, ostensibly to be near Hay and Adams. He also may have meant to move Ada and the children, who could blend easily into the life of the capital, which Henry James had described as “a Negro village liberally sprinkled with whites.”
Rebelling against the knowledge that his relationship with Ada would rule out summers at Lake Sunapee, King bombarded John Hay with confusing letters and wild plans. Hay relished King’s discourses on “comparative gynaecology,” with their description of Sarah Durgin’s glacial kiss and the volcanic warmth of Luciana, but King had neglected to mention whether the land purchase had been consummated or not. With a good-natured sigh, Hay said he supposed he would find out when his bills arrived.
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