Passing Strange

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  Turner synthesized popular thinking about westward expansion with powerful metaphors and persuasive historical examples, capturing brilliantly a broader cultural anxiety about industrialization, the integration of immigrants into American life, and the shifting role of masculinity in Victorian America. S. Weir Mitchell’s neurasthenic man was a creature of the post-frontier West. In an earlier age, when muscular masculinity played an important role in the settling of the West, such a man might have found his natural calling on the frontier—fighting Indians, clearing a new settlement, even surveying the land for the federal government. But the proving ground for young men was shifting from the open plains to the boardrooms and factories of the East’s great cities, with debilitating consequences for America’s men. The economic depression of 1893 catalyzed American unease about the future and played off these deeper anxieties about the direction of American life.

  WHILE THEY CONSULTED WITH his physicians, King’s friends also ran interference with his mother. Mrs. Howland wanted to visit her son, but King had no desire to see her at Bloomingdale. He had always protected her from his financial problems, his medical worries, the daily uncertainties of his life. And just now he had little spirit for soothing her perpetual anxieties. But a few days before Christmas, Mrs. Howland closed her house in Newport and told friends she was off to New York to collect her son, “quite himself again mentally,” in order to travel south with him for the winter.39

  King, however, had other plans. Come with me, he begged Adams in a New Year’s Eve note written from his hospital room. He envisioned a sailing trip to the Windward Islands in the southern Caribbean, with a few months on the British island of Dominica, and he promised “a light opera bouffe effect” to be given “by the extremely characteristic darkeys with their chatter and bandannas, with something serious and orchestral in the way of gumbo and pepperpot.” His release from Bloomingdale seemed imminent, and they could then sail as soon as his servant, Alexander Lancaster, returned from South Dakota, where he had gone to secure a divorce. Even in Sioux Falls, the nation’s divorce mill, the procedure required a temporary residency of three to six months. But, as one observer noted, “if the defendant puts in an appearance the Dakota decree is legal even in New York State.”40 King explained to Adams that since Alexander was a trained nurse, “You need have no fear of my suffering a recurrence of disability, and even if I do you could cut my acquaintance and leave me to Alexander.” Somehow King ditched his mother.41

  King had never been to Dominica, but the very idea of the island fired his imagination. He used his connections to secure introductions to the island’s elite and contemplated “doing” the island, once he felt well enough to practice geology. But first, he wrote to a friend, he would “lie in the shade of some palms and continue the practice of patience and rest till the fire goes out in my poor nerves.”42

  To a friend, King sent the information necessary to secure passports for Alexander Lancaster and himself. He described himself as fifty-two, with a “florid” complexion, hazel eyes, and hair “gray and scant.” He was five feet six inches tall, 166 pounds, and by profession a geologist. His “man” was precisely the same height, a thirty-one-year-old mulatto from Petersburg, Virginia, with black hair and eyes, by profession “valet of professor.”43 King’s desire to bring Lancaster suggests an unusual closeness and hints at the possibility that King might have confided in his servant. Although Lancaster was smart, dutiful, and ambitious, his later career within the New York municipal government bears all the hallmarks of a quid pro quo, a possible reward from King for his discretion and loyalty. In the mid-1890s, while still working for King, Lancaster began his ascent through the ranks of the city patronage system, moving from a position as messenger for the all-powerful commissioner of street cleaning, Colonel George E. Waring, to a job as “Inspector of Scows and Tug Boats” and doorkeeper for Waring’s office, controlling access to the commissioner and his largesse .44 King had known Waring, a fellow Newporter, for decades; well enough, it seems, to ask a favor.45

  KING LEFT BLOOMINGDALE ON January 5, 1894, after a stay of just over two months. The discharge notice stated simply: “Form of Insanity: Acute Melancholia.” From this particular form of depression it pronounced him “recovered.”46

  Ada and Clarence probably did not communicate during his hospitalization. Ada could not visit. And until the tail end of his stay, King could not write. Letter writing “has been next to impossible to me during all my illness,” he told Hay a few weeks after leaving the hospital, “and strange to say next [to] impossible to those for whom I have the most feeling—my Mother and you.”47

  But James Todd likely reappeared in Brooklyn in January 1894 after a not-uncharacteristic two-month absence to tell his wife about an imagined train trip, leaving an envelope of money on the kitchen table when he left again within two weeks. This time he would be gone for three months. His three children, the eldest scarcely three years old and the youngest not yet able to crawl, would hardly recognize him when he returned. He would be in their memory little more than a smell, a tone of voice, a man who carried treats in his pockets. And Ada would welcome him back.

  AT THE BEGINNING OF February 1894, King and his “man” Alexander joined Adams in Tampa to sail for Havana. King had been “fiercely curious” to see Cuba ever since reading “Mrs. Horace Mann’s poor but instructive ‘Juanita,’ ” a novel that explored the island’s vexing problems of race and slavery through the eyes of a naive New England visitor.48 And he fantasized about what the tropics might do for all those cold New England women for whom he felt such scorn. He dashed off a short story, never published, about the emotional and erotic awakening of a New England spinster as she sailed on a small boat through the “languorous golden air,” ever closer to Cuba: “Oh that some strong Christian man would call me his own and I could lay my head on his breast and cry for joy.”49 As always, the warm humid air of the tropics (and the darker-skinned women who lived there) seemed intertwined for King with dreams of romance and fantasies of escape.

  To Adams, Havana seemed as “noisy and fascinating” as ever, but King sought a more erotic sort of entertainment and protested that “the ideal Negro-woman is más allá, lejos [farther away], not at Havana . . . but at Santiago de Cuba, where the charming little plaza is the evening resort of five hundred exquisite females, lovely as mulatto lilies and graceful as the palm tree.” He did not find his ideal there either. Adams reported that King “had lived only on this dream of unfair women, and he could not believe that it was thin air.” His unrealized ideal now seemed “geographically vague.” We will seek her out on some other islands, Adams wrote to Hay, and then return through Mexico, “certain to find her there anyhow, because King knows her well in Central America and Mexico.” Even as they searched, King had begun to seem quite well. 50

  Adams felt colorless by King’s side, “a drag—perhaps even a drug” acting upon the frenetic energy of his friend. And yet he enjoyed observing King, “whose restless energy will last till ninety, [fret] himself because the women have no charm.”51

  Hard-pressed to keep up with his friend, Adams struggled to amuse him. “Had I been a Cuban negro, it would have been easy, or a Carib or a brigand,” he later recalled, “but unless I could find some way of reverting, step by step, through all the stages of human change, back to a pithecanthropos, or much better, a pithecgunai, I could not keep King occupied for twenty-four hours.”52 The British consul in Santiago, F. William Ramsden, arranged for a colleague to lend them his country house for a month. This “loan of . . . Paradise,” high up in a narrow mountain valley, became their base. While Adams sketched and read, King tramped about “geologizing.”53

  At first all went well. But “within very few days,” Adams reported, “King showed signs of coming to the end of his interest in science and landscape. Even paradox failed to stimulate him.” Adams feigned an interest in geology to buoy King’s flagging spirits. But he finally realized that his friend’s “real interes
t was not in science, but in man, as he often said, meaning chiefly woman.” King regarded the male “as a sort of defence thrown off by the female, much like the shell of a crab, endowed with no original energy of his own; but it was not the modern woman that interested him; it was the archaic female, with instincts and without intellect.” Intellect seemed a defective instrument, but it was all the male had to rely on. The female, however, “was rich in the inheritance of every animated energy back to the polyps and the crystals.”54

  King often left Adams at home and disappeared into the streets and back roads of Santiago. “Within ten days he knew all the old negroes in the district,” Adams recalled, “and began to go off at night to their dances.” He gathered tales of political unrest, glowed with stories of “brigandage,” thrived on stories of the coming revolution. Later, he published several essays calling for the United States to support Cuba’s overthrow of Spanish rule. “Why not fling overboard Spain and give Cuba the aid which she needs...?” King asked. “Which cause is morally right?—which is manly?—which is American?”55 But Adams quickly observed that Cuba held for King attractions greater than coffee or cigars or talk of politics. As he had observed of his friend so many times before, “if he had a choice among women, it was in favor of Indians and negroes.”56

  In mid-March, after a month in Cuba, Adams and King sailed on: to Puerto Rico, to St. Thomas, where they were stuck for two weeks in a smallpox quarantine, to Martinique, and on through the British West Indies. Finally they landed in the Bahamas. Adams found it dreary, but reported that “King manages to amuse himself with the habits and manners of the Bahama niggers, who are a peculiar type.” After a fortnight around Nassau, they returned to Florida, King’s initial dream of Dominica foiled by inconvenient sailing schedules.57

  By late April, Adams had King with him back in Washington, “well and gay,” but worried that his friend might find New York depressing when he finally returned. King ought to leave New York at once, Adams told a friend, “and stay out of it.”58 King seemed “more steady, quiet and sane than I ever knew him,” Adams wrote, “but he has still to face the intense depression which New York never fails to excite in every sane mind.... He had better geologize the negro with me in eastern Cuba.”59

  SOMETIME AROUND M AY DAY, King took the train from Washington back to New York, caught a local train to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and transferred to the elevated line that would carry him out to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. King’s “Cuban dream” was over. 60 After more than three months, James Todd was home. The children must have looked at him with shy curiosity, Ada with relief. She would not have heard from her husband. No matter how anxious he felt about her welfare, James Todd the Pullman porter could not send his wife a letter postmarked on a distant island. Not even Mr. Pullman’s vast empire extended that far.

  “How hard and cold and hateful the whole face of New York is with its veneered parvenues, and its ebb and flow of vulgar, clumsy, jostling peasantry,” Clarence King wrote to Adams from the Century Association after being back in the city for less than two weeks. He would rather be a stowaway in the hold of a southbound steamer “than dwell in the tents of the Metropolitan Club.” He tried his best, he told Adams. “I drivel away like all the rut and the optimistic lie rolls from my sinful tongue in oily stream.” Next week, he would even go to the country home of his old friend, the journalist Whitelaw Reid, “to pass some days amidst marble, truffles, tapestry and nasal commonplace and I am going to be breezy and effective and talk like a genuine ‘American’ and be truly popular.” It would make you sick, he told Adams.61

  Every midtown dinner party seemed to demand of King a kind of painful charade. “I shall go to the Metropolitan Club,” he wrote Hay, “and make myself beloved of all the stable boys whom fate has raised to the nth power and chum with all the huxsters manquée and carry off the role of a good sensible American bourgeois cad, to the Queen’s taste.” His intense dislike for “things New Yorkan” had driven him into isolation, and to make a living he would have to crawl out. He “would go back into this hated thing called society and make myself as popular and commonplace and like the average as I can (and I know I can do it) till I get some of the dollars them fellers are in and then!!! Then my beloved tropical islands!!! ”62

  King despised the infernal struggle for money. Like his friends, he wondered how someone with his talents could be so bad at making it. To Hay, whose financial generosity kept him afloat, he vowed to try harder, by suppressing his natural inclinations and adopting the cutthroat tactics of the self-made millionaires he viewed with such scorn. “No matter how much I hate the people and the life no one shall see it or know it. I am going in not as a skirmishing amateur in the part but as a man who means blood and loves the road that leads to it,” King wrote. “I have sinned I owe 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!’ ... I have been a practical duffer and have not had the real life which my secret soul longs for. Now I am going to be practical all the time with all the energy and the brains I have got left and silence the cries of the soul till I can break the chains.”63

  If King had found in Brooklyn the “real life” for which his soul longed, he did not tell Hay.

  In mid-June, within six weeks of arriving home from Cuba, King was off again, to check out some mines in the upper Columbia River region of the Pacific Northwest for prospective investors in Chicago. James Todd presumably told his family he would be off on a long train trip west.64 Ada might have felt apprehensive, her customary worry over her husband’s frequent absences now compounded by worry over her family’s safety. A fatal shooting down the street in late May—the consequence of a landlord-tenant dispute among Italian immigrants in a boardinghouse—ended in a violent scuffle with the police in broad daylight, right on Ada’s corner.65

  But her husband left. By mid-July King was in Colville, Washington, investigating a mine. He had hoped to break away for a bit to join John Hay and Henry Adams, who were vacationing in Yellowstone National Park. But a Pullman strike derailed his plans. Angered by layoffs and wage cuts precipitated by the company’s response to the financial crisis of 1893, the Pullman workers had gone on strike in May 1894, and by late June sympathetic railroad workers across the country were boycotting trains carrying Pullman cars. For once, Clarence King and James Todd could share the same excuse for not showing up on time. 66 In this “glorious sea of mountains I am pacified and the tranquility of my soul comes back,” King wrote to Adams. But he dreamed at night of the sailing ship that would carry him back to the tropics.67

  King seemed distant to his friends that summer of 1894 he spent away from New York. “You have often complained that I told too little of my life in my letters,” King wrote to Hay from Spokane. “That old habit of silence about myself (on paper) has come in well these days when there is only a dull and sad story to tell.”68 Adams hung about the Knickerbocker Club for three days in late September waiting for King to reappear so that they could plan a fall trip to Trinidad and Martinique. Alexander Lancaster assured him his employer would show up any moment. But King never appeared; a large stack of mail sat waiting for him, unopened, at the Century.69

  And then he returned “in fine form,” John Hay thought, and too busy “trying to make a living or swindle some foreigner” to accompany Adams to the Caribbean.70 King felt tortured by “neuralgia”—presumably a recurrence of the nerve pain in his back—as he engaged in the “more or less fruitless struggle for mere board money.” He dreamed of going to Santo Domingo or Venezuela, but for now would settle for South Carolina, simply to be warm. But even there he could not travel until he had made enough money to pay for his trip and to cover the living expenses for his mother and stepbrother while he was away. He was detained, he told Adams, “by the vulgar problem of the daily loaf.”71 He headed back west to investigate some mining ventures in the fall of 1894, but returned to New York as depres
sed as ever, just after Christmas and a holiday spent with his mother in Newport. “This place will not do for me!” he wrote to Adams. “I must avoid it in the future! Really I am more at home with populists than these hard mechanical victims of respectability.”72

  King faced more than the usual family dramas that Christmas with his mother. Mrs. Howland had just testified for a friend in a peculiar legal case revolving around a secret identity, a mental breakdown, and an illicit family that might have made King wince at its uncanny similarity to the hidden drama of his own double life. One imagines Mrs. Howland eager to talk about her minor role in the unfolding scandal and her son loath to hear a word about it.

  Mrs. Howland had traveled to Boston in early December to testify in the sensational case of William H. King, who was not a close relative but a member of another Newport family involved in the China trade whose “family connections were such as to afford him access to the highest social circles of that period.” William King had alarmed his family with the “eccentric” ways he spent his China-trade money on the Continent. In 1866, as he was about to wed, his brothers dramatically appeared to whisk him off to an insane asylum. For twenty-seven years he lived at the McLean Asylum near Boston, and then in August 1893—just a few months before Clarence King’s breakdown at the lion house—a mysterious Mrs. E. Webster Ross of Boston filed legal papers to secure William King’s release. She refused to disclose her connection to the man but maintained he was illegally detained. The courts rebuffed her, and William’s family moved him to an asylum in Newport. Mrs. Webster persisted in her claims, but the courts refused to admit her as a party to the case unless she disclosed her connection to King. Finally, she presented herself as his niece, and thus his would-be heir. And then she made an even more startling claim: she was his daughter. The New York Times reported in early December 1894 that Mrs. Ross “avers that King and her mother signed in Boston a marriage agreement which they regarded as a common-law marriage and that she is the offspring of the union.”73 To support her claim, she summoned witnesses. As the Times reported, “Mrs. Ross names as a witness Mrs. F. K. Howland of [Newport], a highly-respected lady, mother of Clarence King, the scientist of New-York.”74