Passing Strange

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  Within a month of Sidney’s birth, Clarence King was off visiting his mother during the height of the Newport social season. Before leaving New York, he had gone to see his physician. He felt anxious. Due to his worries over the El Paso bank failure, he said, he had scarcely been able to sleep for weeks.107 But in the early fall of 1893 he headed west to investigate a mine in British Columbia.108 King wrote to Ada, “My first duty in these hard times is to make enough for your expenses and on that I will use all my strength.”109 Back home in late October, after a month in Canada, King caught word of the engagement of Arnold Hague, his old Yale classmate and a member of the Fortieth Parallel survey. Remarking on the surprising news to Frank Emmons, King mused that he would soon “be left alone on the chill ocean of bachelorhood.”110 And to Hay he let slip an inadvertent double negative that hinted at the truth: “It always takes years for me to realize that I have not yet to marry a woman.”111

  7

  Breakdowns

  NEWSPAPERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY CARRIED THE STARTLING words: “Clarence King in an Asylum.”1

  On October 29, 1893, an unusually cool Sunday afternoon, a large group of visitors crowded into the lion house in Manhattan’s Central Park to watch the big cats and an “interesting pair of hippopotami.” The Menagerie provided one of the city’s few free public attractions for working-class families, and as one official recalled, on Sunday afternoons, “no greater crowds gathered anywhere in New York than in this part of Central Park.” Just recently, the park commissioners had acknowledged the crowd’s ethnic diversity by ending the practice of giving the animals Irish names.2

  On this particular autumn Sunday, the visitors in the animal house noticed a short bearded man in the crowd acting peculiar and agitated. Two police detectives observed him fly into a rage, then followed him outdoors to the ball field and arrested him for disorderly conduct. The distraught man identified himself as Clarence King, a resident of the Union League Club.

  King insisted that the police send for Samuel Parsons, his former Yale classmate and rowing companion, now the park’s superintendent of planting. While Parsons searched for someone to post bond, an officer booked King at the East Sixty-seventh Street station. King claimed Newport as his home, and mining as his occupation. By late that evening, when Parsons returned with the bail money, King had so annoyed the police court judge with his efforts to make him dismiss the case, the judge imposed a $10 fine. King protested that the judge was persecuting him for “refusing to vote for Isaac H. Maynard,” a local Democratic Party politician, and he denied any responsibility for the altercation in the lion house. The crowd jostled him against an African American butler, he said, and the ensuing commotion was not his fault.3

  Two physicians examined King and pronounced him “suffering from mental disturbance with occasional acute symptoms.” On Halloween night, they and three of King’s close friends sought legal help, and a judge committed King to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane.4 Two friends agreed to cover the costs of his hospitalization. Charles W. Gould, the lawyer friend with whom King had been staying in recent days, put up part of the money. Lloyd McKim Garrison, the attorney, poet, and grandson of the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, put up the rest.5 At some $40 per week, King’s care cost more than that of all but a handful of the other 313 patients. Apparently, he got a comfortable room.6

  King’s friends told reporters that the normally neat and dapper King had recently become “very slovenly and careless about his appearance and his dress. His beard and his hair grew unkempt, he wore soiled linen, and his clothes looked worn and old.” He seemed to avoid his old friends, to respond “strangely” whenever anyone spoke to him.7 Just recently he had set out on an errand, pronounced it done, but actually forgotten what he was to do. John La Farge told Adams that King had found himself “walking in certain streets without any notion of how he came to be there.” King’s agitated state makes it hard to know precisely what happened in the lion house, but Central Park was the sort of place where his separate worlds might collide. One wonders whether the black butler might have greeted him as “Jim” or “Todd,” perhaps even reminding King that he had seen him on those very streets he walked “without any notion of how he came to be there.” In his anxious state, King might imagine an altercation easier to account for than a double life.8

  Only in hindsight did King’s closest friends perceive his erratic behavior as part of a disturbing and ongoing pattern. “King was a man of remarkably robust physique,” Frank Emmons wrote shortly after King’s death, “and showed throughout his physically arduous life powers of endurance that are rarely equaled; yet it was one of the penalties of the highly sensitive and nervous organization, which rendered possible his marvelously acute and delicate perception, that he was subject to sudden and almost unaccountable break-downs in which he suffered intensely.”9

  King’s physician, Dr. Rufus P. Lincoln, told the press that an old bout of catarrh and asthma had left King weakened, and the recent strains of his professional life had worn “severely on his nerves as well as physical vitality.” The failure of the National Bank of El Paso and King’s deep sense of obligation to his professional responsibilities “brought about the condition of his present nervous depression, which, at times, assimilates melancholia.” King’s friends reported that the patient had some awareness of his own condition. Indeed, King accounted for his behavior with carefully chosen words that seemed to forestall investigation of whatever stories might emerge. He explained that “nine-tenths” of the time he felt all right, but could sometimes lose himself and later have no recollection of what he had done. Loath to believe anything serious could befall King, his friends considered his condition nothing more than what might come to anyone “who brooded too much over himself.”10 It was just “partial lunacy,” reported the Washington Post.11

  But whatever King’s affliction, the strain of his double life surely compounded it. Even now, under tremendous stress, he could not and would not speak openly of his wife and his children. If, as one psychologist suggests, deep secrets are “the currency of close relationships,” King’s closest relationships were bankrupt.12

  Charles Gould, the friend with whom he resided at the time of his breakdown, would later write a nativist diatribe on the supremacy of the white race.13 King likely knew Gould’s views; how could he share his family situation with a man like that? Even ill, he remained under tremendous stress to be watchful and alert. An accidental slip of the tongue could jeopardize all.

  Racial passing—like the assumption of a false name, the construction of a fictive job, or the invention of an alternative class identity—requires a careful attentiveness, what one scholar calls a kind of “voluntary amnesia” that involves erasing family ties and letting go of the acquired habits of a lifetime. A “hazardous” business, Nella Larsen called it in her 1929 novel Passing, “this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.”14 For five years, King had lived under the threat of discovery in his white world as well as his black one. And now, at Bloomingdale, he would need to remain on constant alert, erasing from his conversations all mention of Ada, his children, that home he and his wife had created together in Brooklyn. Even in the confines of a mental hospital, he could find no relief from the fraught doubleness that ruled his world.

  Dr. Lincoln did not consider King’s hospitalization to be absolutely essential, but he thought it best “in view of the fact that he had no family that he should go to some place where he could have good nursing and absolute freedom from care.”15

  Even if Ada saw the newspapers, none of which illustrated their stories about King’s hospitalization, she would have no reason to suspect that the man caught ranting and raving in the lion house was her husband, the responsible railroad porter. King was “a bachelor,” reported one of the New York papers, who called Newport home but “spent much of his time
in this city, staying either at the houses of his friends or at clubs of which he was a member.”16

  HENRY ADAMS SENT WORD of King’s breakdown to John Hay in Europe. It “does not make me gay,” he wrote. Adams blamed King’s troubles on the financial panic sweeping through the nation, as if that might lessen the seriousness of his friend’s problem. All his acquaintances, he said, “have been, are, or ought to be in asylums; but those who are not, are getting wives, which proves their superior fitness for the other alternative.”17 In that “disastrous year” of 1893, an escape into an asylum often seemed “the only way to escape hopeless ruin and collapse.”18 Adams himself lost money in the collapse of the banks. “Men died like flies under the strain,” he recalled, “and Boston grew suddenly old, haggard and thin.”19 Adams thought King’s madness made him the archetypal man of his age.

  At Bloomingdale, King joined the last group of patients to be treated on the hospital’s old grounds in Harlem Heights, set high on a rise at 117th Street, where the hospital’s brick and stone buildings lay scattered across grassy lawns. Most of the patients could wander at will, “harsh measures and all unnecessary confinement being strictly prohibited.” When it opened in 1821, the hospital boasted peaceful views of the Hudson River and surrounding countryside. But as the city encroached on the solitude of the place, hospital officials made plans to relocate to White Plains in the summer of 1894, making the old Morningside Heights property available for an expansion of Columbia College. What King called his “house of madness” would soon be overrun by professors. He joked with Adams, “I shan’t like it so well a few weeks hence when Columbia College moves in here and displaces these open, frank lunatics with Seth Low [the university president] and his faculty of incurables so I better move out now.”20

  James Hague visited King frequently at Bloomingdale. James Gardiner came nearly every day. “If anything can drive him to sanity,” Adams quipped to Hay, “I think Gardiner can do it; he would drive me to a much further region.”21 After several years with Ferdinand V. Hayden’s survey, Gardiner had served for a decade as director of the New York State Survey (1876-86) and as a consulting engineer for and member of the state board of health (1880-86). Now he worked in private industry as an officer and a mining adviser for several American and Mexican coal and railroad companies. He had remarried in 1881, and King so disliked his wife—the straitlaced daughter of an Episcopal bishop—that he delighted in provoking her with off-color stories. The dinner invitations stopped. But the old friendship forged in boyhood endured. After King’s death, it would be Gardiner—not Hay or Adams—who stepped in to deal with all the messy details.22

  The “merciless agony” of King’s spinal trouble “crazed and nearly killed me,” he wrote of his time in Bloomingdale. “It seems as if the human organism could not survive such suffering.”23 In late November, James Hague reported to Hay that King still felt “weak and restive,” but his spinal inflammation was improving, and there had been no sign of “mental disturbance” since his first week of hospitalization. His mental derangement seemed “a disease of the body rather than of the mind.”24

  Gardiner went to Philadelphia to seek out S. Weir Mitchell, a leading expert on nervous disorders, who echoed King’s own thoughts about the debilitating effects of modern life. “Civilization!” King once joked to a friend. “Why, it is a nervous disease!”25 Mitchell agreed, and he argued in his book Camp Cure (1877) that “the surest remedy for the ills of civilized life is to be found in some form of return to barbarism.” In 1869 the American physician George Miller Beard coined the term “neurasthenia” to describe the effect of modern industrialized society upon the nervous energy system, particularly of the elite and well-to-do. Chronic fatigue and weakness, worry, and neuralgia all made up what Beard later called the “American nervousness.”26 Mitchell found urban life similarly “perplexing and trying by its intricacy: so many wheels must be kept moving in order to the fulfillment of social, domestic, civil and professional duties that in the hurry of well-filled lives we are rarely kept at rest.”27 While Beard treated his patients with electrical therapies designed to stimulate their nerves, Mitchell advised a different therapeutic approach to the ills of modern life. He confined his female patients to bed and packed his male patients off west, to find the “peace of soul” required to restore their virile manliness.28

  Mitchell’s writing sent a generation of eastern men west to toughen up. Teddy Roosevelt, so sickly as a child, returned from his South Dakota adventures of 1884-86 a healthy poster boy for the ranching life. Mitchell’s cousin Owen Wister, who first went west in 1885, eventually dropped his half hearted legal career to become a writer. His book The Virginian (1902) became the archetypal western, a tribute to manly western ways as an antidote to the complexities of eastern urban life.29

  Mitchell advised a contemplative engagement with the out-of-doors, recommending that his male readers take with them into the wilderness a camera, a sketchbook, “a book or two of geology,” and some sample scientific instruments. He urged them to be open to the particular manly enjoyments of camp life and to take pleasure in “the contact with the guides, woodmen and trappers, and the simple-minded manly folk who live on the outposts of civilization.”30 His newest patient, Clarence King, the celebrated author of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, a man who first headed out west with “a Bible, a Table of Logarithms, and a volume of Robertson’s sermons,” might under other circumstances seem Mitchell’s ideal.31 “Nature is the greatest medicine for my soul,” King wrote to Hay the very year of his breakdown.32

  As a novelist himself, Mitchell drew upon his clinical experience to inform the psychological portraits of his literary characters. And just recently he had written about a man with a fractured, double life. His novel Characteristics (1892) considered the problem of “double consciousness,” describing the sudden disappearance of a married man “of refined and scholarly tastes, a student of Oriental languages,” who reappears as a rough and unkempt store clerk married to an older, uneducated woman. The man retains no memory of his previous life. But through literary sleight of hand, he returns to his original young, wealthy wife at the end of the novel, wholly recovered from his plight. Mitchell proposed that his subject’s second, aberrational personality stemmed directly from the first: the man sought the affections of an untutored woman as temporary respite from the stress of civilized life.33

  Mitchell examined King and detected an “anaemia [sic] of the left lobe of the brain and equally of the whole left optical system” but declared the patient’s troubles “wholly functional and not organic.” Seemingly unaware of King’s uncanny resemblance to his troubled fictional character, he recommended that his patient remain at Bloomingdale to rest. A western camp cure seemed ill advised. Mitchell told King that once recovered, his health should be as good as ever. “This I cannot believe,” King quipped to Hay, “but who am I that I should doubt Weir Mitchell? ”34

  THE WEST LOOMED LARGE in the national imagination in that depression-riven year of King’s breakdown. On July 12, 1893, a young historian from the University of Wisconsin named Frederick Jackson Turner delivered an after-dinner talk on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the scholars gathered in Chicago for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Across town at the great Columbian Exposition, Buffalo Bill Cody staged his own version of American frontier history to considerably larger crowds. Turner’s story lacked the galloping horses, Indian battles, and burning houses of Cody’s extravaganza, but it made the same imaginative point: America’s frontier past was over.

  The 1890 census report that triggered Turner’s remarks declared the nation’s “frontier of settlement” gone: “At present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” For Turner, this mattered, because the nation’s westward expansion—more than the Revolution, more than the Civil War—seemed the defining fact of American life, the
source of American political democracy and the distinctive national character. On the frontier, settlers left behind the influence of Europe, reverted to primitive conditions, and in the struggle to adapt emerged newly and distinctively American, with “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism...and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.”35

  Turner ended his speech on an elegiac note. If the frontier had disappeared, how could America renew its national spirit or maintain all that was good and fresh and distinctive about American life? Obliquely, he raised a question about the future of those men—like Clarence King—so well suited to the earlier age of westward expansion. How would they find their way in the newly industrializing, urban world of late-nineteenth-century America? Four hundred years after Columbus sailed to America, the frontier was at last gone. “And with its going,” Turner wrote, “has closed the first period of American history.”36

  Turner’s frontier thesis echoed an enduring strain of American popular thought about the physical landscape as a source of the nation’s distinctive culture.37 King himself had written a few decades before that “the conquering and peopling of a broad continent within the short span of a single century remains the most extraordinary feat in the annals of the peaceful deeds of mankind.” The heroes of this epic tale were men not unlike himself. “The sons of the pioneers are the true Americans; in the century’s struggle with nature they have gathered an Antaean strength, and, flushed with their victory over a savage continent, believe themselves the coming leaders of the world.” King thought the Civil War only “a furious, dreadful interruption” in this larger story of the nation’s westward march.38 But in the 1890s surely he, too, looked backward with a wistful air. He and his colleagues had mapped the West. But the future of the region no longer hinged on the work of a few free-spirited and government-supported scientist-explorers. It depended instead on the well-capitalized corporations that could wrest more of its natural resources from the earth. When King went west now, it was never as a pathfinder, but as a hired gun.