The next mail at Bloomingdale delighted King with an almost identical traveling proposition from Adams. “Curious that the impulse should have seized us simultaneously,” he wrote back at once. “I am overjoyed that you are minded to join forces with me, it was what I have been secretly longing for.”
“Comfort him and jolly him up,” Hay instructed Adams from Rome when he learned of the plan. “Saturate him with sunshine and sapodillas, and get him to come and live in Washington like a man and brother. Now that his affairs have gone to everlasting smash, we can set him up in a bijou of a house, and give him corn and wine and oil to educate us in viscosity.” From King’s stepbrother in Paris, Hay had heard that Mrs. Howland planned to take King to Nassau, a prospect that chilled Hay to the marrow. Happy to learn that Mrs. Howland had been outflanked, Hay felt free of all worries but one: King’s silence. Hay had not heard from him for more than a year, he told Adams. “I have sent him money and securities sufficient, I hoped, to clear him, but have never been informed that he received them, much less what use he made of them. I am as much worried over him as if he were my child, but I do not know what to do to help him, in face of his obstinate silence.”
Henry guessed the reason at once. “I never owed money to anyone,” he answered, “but imagine how it must alter relations.”
At the end of January, just before Adams and King started for Cuba, the Hays were drawn into a crisis that rivaled King’s for tragedy and enigma. In Rome they received word that their old friend Constance Fenimore Woolson had died unexpectedly in Venice—by a fall from an upper-story window. She had been ill with influenza and had hired a nurse, but the nurse was elsewhere in the apartment when the fall occurred. An accident, some said. The Italian newspapers suspected suicidio.
Fenimore had returned to Italy in 1893 after three frustrating years in England, where she had gone to be near Henry James. James was courtly and attentive but could not—or would not—see that she hoped for more. Alone in Venice in December, she hired a gondola the day before Christmas and traveled out to the Lido, where she walked the beach for hours, gazing beyond red sails and the blue Adriatic to the snowy Alps in the distance. On Christmas, having turned down an invitation to dinner, she strolled in the Piazza San Marco and sat by her fire reading Milton’s “Hymn on the Nativity” and A Christmas Carol. “I have taught myself to be calm and philosophic,” she wrote to a niece, “and I feel perfectly sure that the next existence will make clear all the mysteries and riddles of this. In the meantime, one can do one’s duty or try to do it.” But, she added, “if at any time you should hear that I have gone, I want you to know beforehand that my end was peace, and even joy at release.”
Nine years before, when she learned of the suicide of Clover Adams, Fenimore had remarked to John Hay that she would not mind a sudden death, “but for those who are left, it is very terrible.” For Henry James, Fenimore’s suicide was terrible indeed—so ghastly that he could not face going to Rome for her burial. “Before the horror and pity of it I have utterly collapsed,” he wrote to Hay, who had been enlisted to oversee the interment. Claiming that his presence would add nothing, James promised to wire money for flowers and asked Hay to lay them at her grave.
Thoroughly traumatized, unable to admit that he had played any part in Fenimore’s unhappiness, James immediately set about transforming her incomprehensible death into a private work of art, a work that would proceed, with the logic and order of fiction, from cause to inevitable effect. Writing to a friend the day after hearing the rumor of suicide, he ascribed the event to a physiological cause: “some sudden explosion of latent brain-disease.” A day or two later, he still leaned toward a physical explanation but suggested that “the sadness of her lonely Venetian winter” combined with the fevers of influenza might “abruptly have deepened into suicidal mania.” A few days afterward, writing to his friend W. W. Baldwin, an American physician who had known Fenimore well in Florence, James allowed himself a brief burst of anger and offered a wholly psychological explanation: “Miss Woolson’s evident determination not to send for you seems to me insane—just as her silence to me does: in spite of letters which in a normal state she would infallibly have answered. She kept us both ignorant—with a perversity that was diseased.”
By March 24, exactly two months after her death, the novelist had constructed the sad tale of Constance Fenimore Woolson from start to finish. Writing to his brother William, who had always found Fenimore happy and sociable, Henry described her gaiety as a “purely exterior manifestation.” Because of her deafness, he explained, she was more isolated than anyone knew, and her deafness combined with “her tragically conscientious politeness” gave her an air of cheerfulness that belied “her whole general feeling about life, her intimate melancholy.” The novelist claimed that Fenimore had been close to suicide once before and was stopped only by the kindness of two or three friends. To know Fenimore well was to be in a state of “constant vague anxiety” about her, he said. The “irresponsible delirium of fever” had caused her death, “but this delirium worked upon a predisposition unmistakable—a predisposition which sprang in its turn from a constitutional, an essentially, tragic and latently insane difficulty in living—; an element rendered unspeakably touching by her extraordinary consideration for others—those to whom she was attached.” The narrator, full of sympathy, apparently never guessed that he might have played a role in the unhappy events he described.
At her own request, Fenimore was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, the resting place of another of James’s great fictional creations, Daisy Miller.
On February 3, 1894, three days after the Hays stood in the bright Roman sunshine at Fenimore’s grave, Adams met King in Tampa and dashed off a reassuring note to Hay. “He feels better and seems fat, bright and active…. He says he is writing to you now. Perhaps he is.”
He was. Apologizing for his silence, King explained that during his illness he had found it impossible to write to “those for whom I have the most feeling—my mother and you. It seemed as if the stirring of a sentiment overcame me hopelessly.” He had “a world” he wanted to say to Hay, but it would have to wait: “I have to avoid business and anything serious and keep in shallow water,” he said. For the moment, he was grateful to have survived. “Looking back to last July when my spinal trouble with its reflex effect began, I cannot understand how I have ever lived through the merciless agony which crazed and nearly killed me. It seems as if the human organism could not survive such suffering. But here I am gradually but apparently surely recovering with the promise from the doctors of a new lease of life, and health as good as I ever had in my life. This I cannot believe but who am I that I should doubt Weir Mitchell?”
King and Adams posted their letters to Rome and boarded the evening steamer to Havana. King chatted excitedly of the voluptuous femininity awaiting them and vowed to introduce Adams to the tropical carnalities he had urged upon him for years. When King’s “ideal negro woman” chose not to show herself in Havana, he was undaunted. If they headed east to Santiago de Cuba and stationed themselves in the center of town, King insisted, they were sure to find “five hundred exquisite females, lovely as mulatto lilies and graceful as the palm-tree.” But Santiago also failed them, in spite of their rigorous adherence to King’s plan. “We took meals at the Restaurant Venus on the Plaza, and sat there with lizards up our legs and down our necks, while the band played, and the five hundred women did not come,” Adams told Hay with unconcealed glee. “Not a one! King was broke up. He had lived only on this dream of unfair women, and he could not believe it was thin air.”
Adams undoubtedly was relieved not to find the women of King’s fantasies, but he worried that the noisy hotels and vile meals they had endured for two weeks were working against King’s recovery. After a sleepless night in Santiago, Henry proposed that they rent a house. With the help of the British consul, whom King knew from a business trip to Cuba, they came into possession of a country place in the hil
ls of Dos Bocas, eight miles from Santiago. Airy and comfortable, the house overlooked a narrow valley brimming with trees and flowers. The silky breezes, sublime view, and the tranquility “were enough to make life what it ought to be,” Henry thought. In white linen trousers and “baked in joy and sweat,” according to King, Adams puttered in the garden, hiked the trails along the mountain ridges, and painted watercolors of their surroundings. He also helped himself to the books in the house, which included, he told Hay, “your detestable and ribald novel Democracy.”
Sleep came easily in Dos Bocas, and King set off every morning at six with pickax and basket to collect specimens of the local geology. Courtesy of the British consul, the visitors passed a day studying rocks from a narrow-gauge railroad that carried freight along the coast. “We ran close along the seashore, under a cliff of coral rocks,” Henry wrote to Lizzie, “and whenever King saw anything that amused him, he stopped the engine and we strolled among the stones.”
In the evenings King and Adams sat down to “most complicated harmonies” arranged by their cook, Pepe, who had liberated them from a regimen of canned food fried in garlic. Pepe’s culinary philosophy, which mandated the use of “a little of everything in every dish,” enchanted King more than Adams. Unable to appreciate such exotica as beans with saffron, Adams cursed his Bostonian narrowness and fought Pepe’s blazes by mixing sweet fried bananas into everything he ate.
After dinner, King could not be kept at home. Scrambling up and down the steep slopes of the valley during the day, he had met dozens of natives and was determined to study them as intently as he studied the geology. Within ten days he made the acquaintance of all the elderly blacks in the hills, unabashedly conversing in a Negro-Cuban variation of the Spanish he had concocted for dealing with Mexican miners. He learned their dances, grilled them about voodoo, and listened in fascination to their plans for an insurrection against the Spanish. The last major uprising, which dragged on for ten years, had ended in 1878 with promises of reform, but the promises had gone unfulfilled. The panic of 1893 created new tensions as thousands of workers lost their jobs on sugar and tobacco plantations. The plight of the Cubans—noble primitives crushed by the forces of civilization—was made to order for Clarence King, and he soon managed to talk his way into a prison to visit a Senor Guillermon, one of the rebel leaders. “When the sentinel paced into the dungeon toward us,” King said, “Guillermon talked in ordinary tones of a recent coal discovery, but when the soldier retraced his steps, strode out of the room and across a wide corridor, the old fighter’s eyes blazed and his lips poured into my ear the secret of the coming war.”
As the intoxicated King narrated his adventures, Adams grew alarmed. If the Spanish found out, he and King could be jailed or deported. King laughed. If the governor arrested them, he told Adams, he would have to arrest the entire population of Santiago because “every man, woman, or child in the entire province was a rebel or a brigand or both.”
No Spanish soldiers knocked at their door, and the only observable consequence of King’s nocturnal prowlings was a flood of hospitality. For Senor King, friend of the revolution, the natives stopped at nothing. One Sunday morning the visitors found themselves in receipt of a brace of fighting cocks, thoughtfully provided to spare them the necessity of traveling all the way to the town plaza for blood and gore.
On April 10, after a brief jaunt to Nassau, King and Adams sailed into the green waters of Tampa Bay. “Whatever else our trip has been, it has certainly been good for King,” Henry reported to Hay. King struck him as “more sane now … and if he would be obliged to stay quiet for half an hour, I think he might be quite reasonable. I tell him this every two or three minutes, but it doesn’t affect him.”
Back in New York, King filed his own dispatch with Hay. “That pessimistic angel Henry has been more kind and gentle and healing in his way with me than, as Ruskin expresses it, ‘an eternity of clear grammatical speech would explain.’ He was simply delightful, genial and tropical in his warmth, physically active as a chamois, and as for his talk there was only bitter enough to give a cocktail effect to his high-proof spirit.” Henry talked of building a winter house at Dos Bocas, and King hoped he would. “I think the world-hate would perspire out of him and he might take hold of life and even of letters again.” As for his own future, King said he had “resolved (and have thus far succeeded) to smother and hide my pessimistic hate of civilization and be as straightlaced and wooden and fatuously American as anybody. I shall go to the Metropolitan Club and make myself beloved of all the stable boys whom fate has raised to the nth power and chum with all the huxters manquées and carry off the role of a good practical sensible American bourgeois cad, to the queen’s taste.” Faulting himself for having let his “detestation of things New Yorkean” stand in his way, he said he was now “going with a singleness of purpose, an early and late devotion to the New York struggle for money. No matter how much I hate the people and the life no one shall see it or know it…. I have sinned, I own, in allowing my nature to influence my life. I shall do it no more till I am able to say to my nature, ‘at last it is your turn, be free!’”
Adams too received word that King had developed “an undreamed of power to hold back from expressing anything I really believe” and an iron determination to “attend strictly to business.” So far, though, he had had little success. Fortunes, he noted astringently, were difficult to make when one had to devote the larger part of one’s day to rustling up enough money for dinner. But, he added, “I harbor hopes.”
PART FOUR
CULMINATIONS
18
A Splendid Little War
Banking on his hopes, King moved Ada and the children from Brooklyn to roomier quarters on North Prince Street in Queens. The neighborhood, once a nursery, boasted some of the most exotic foliage in New York City—ginkgos, Japanese maples, dwarf horse chestnuts, and Chinese cypresses. With eleven rooms, the new house easily accommodated a piano, and James Todd promised his little girls that when they were old enough, they would have music lessons. Though his work still kept him away from home for long intervals, he engaged a nurse, a cook, a laundress, and a gardener to help Ada run the household.
In the summer of 1894, when the strains of this new establishment proved more than King could manage, he took the drastic step of dismissing his mother’s servants and installing her in a Newport boarding house. He would not “start her housekeeping again till the current of my affairs turns in a better direction,” he wrote Hay from a silver mine near Spokane, where he hoped to earn enough to cover expenses for a few months. Frustrated, full of remorse, he was still determined to persevere. “The one great sin of my life is to have blindly got into such a miserable position with you who are the dearest friend I ever had or ever shall have on earth. I never should have recovered reason and dared to begin life again had there not been a germ of faith that refused to perish. That little mustard seed grows within me and its still small voice keeps me up with a promise of remaking my life and of righting myself so far as mere debit and credit goes with you.” Ailing, he gamely vowed to “do without” his health, “as other invalids do.” Heading East he intended to call on mining entrepreneurs in Denver and Chicago, and there was a hopeful glimmer from one of the old Mexican silver mines.
After a visit to his mother in October, King overcame the “almost painful hesitation” he felt to see old friends and went up to the Hays at Lake Sunapee. He stayed only a day before a telegram summoned him back to New York—to help “an exigent millionaire,” Hay supposed—but Hay was pleased to inform Adams that their cherished vagrant was “in fine form, cheerier than I have seen him for several years,—full of schemes, all of them brilliant, not to say iridescent, in promise. I was glad to see him hopeful again, with, or without, reason.”
The true state of King’s affairs was soon made known to Hay by an unexpected source: Ferdinand de Rothschild, the English baron who had trailed King everywhere during his European holiday in the
1880s. King asked Rothschild for a loan early in 1895, and the baron, who knew of King’s stay at Bloomingdale, wanted Hay’s advice. “Personally,” he said, “I have always had the greatest trust in the perfect honour of our friend, but should his mind be deranged I would consider it waste to send over the money.” Hay undoubtedly put the best face on his friend’s circumstances, but whatever he concealed from the baron mattered less than what the baron had revealed to him: King could no longer bear to ask Hay’s assistance. Henceforth Hay would have to connive in secret to help him.
The first move in this new game came in the summer, when Hay learned that King’s half brother, George Howland, wanted to return to Paris to continue his art studies. Hay considered George a thirdrate Sargent and an imbecile to boot, but he seized the moment to write a generous check in order to relieve King of one dependent. A few months later Hay conspired with Adams in a convoluted plot whereby Adams offered to buy King’s most valuable painting, The Whale by J. M. W. Turner, which had already been mortgaged to Hay. When King asked Hay’s permission, Hay immediately wired his consent, then dashed off a triumphant note to Adams: “I feel as if I were giving King the money and the picture, giving you the picture and the chance of doing a good deed with the money, and saving myself the price of the picture, all at once.”
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