Passing Strange

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  Many years later, Henrietta Williams, the Todd family nursemaid, recalled that Mr. Todd was home in Flushing the night before he left for Arizona and assured Ada he had given money to “Mr. Gardiner,” who would take care of her and the children .40 Thirty years after the fact, subsequent events had burnished her memory. Perhaps King had taken Gardiner into his confidence by now. But it is not clear.

  King went west “to die,” as Ada later recalled .41 The eldest children likely sensed something different about this leave-taking, no matter how much their parents tried to shield them. James and Ada both knew it might be the last.

  By letter, written before or after he left for Arizona, King instructed Ada to leave New York.42 He wanted her to move the children to Toronto, using the money he had received from two friends to buy a house, taking care to find something desirable and reasonable. And on May 9, 1901, Ada took her children north. It would have been no small undertaking to close up the big house, discharge the servants, pack up the children’s belongings, and get all four of them ready to leave behind a familiar world. Grace, her oldest child, was ten; Wallace, the youngest, not quite four. Ada might know more about the world than she did as a young woman leaving rural Georgia to move to New York and have more money in her purse. She might let herself imagine that Canada would be a kind of racial Eden, unmarked by the stark fault lines that defined racial life in the United States. But it would feel daunting to be responsible for the children in a new place where she probably knew not a soul. King had a vague knowledge of Toronto from his involvement with a local mining company, and he directed Ada to enroll the children in the Logan School, which he understood to be the best school in the city. It proved useless advice. Sir William Logan had founded the Geological Survey of Canada in 1842, but no Toronto schools bore his name, and it remains unclear just what Ada arranged for the children’s education.43

  Ada crossed into Canada at a moment when race relations had dipped to a new nadir. Canadians took pride in providing a legal refuge for runaway slaves, particularly in the years following the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, as the United States lurched toward civil war. But legal safety had never been equivalent to social equality. Canada, too, had established segregated schools, seen cities erupt in racial violence, and tolerated the rise of a scientific racism that deemed people of African descent particularly ill suited to the cold Canadian climate. In the years following the Civil War, many of the American blacks who had fled to Canada returned south across the border, and in the final decades of the century, the population of African Canadians actually declined as a more virulent form of cultural racism took hold in Canadian culture. In the entire Dominion of Canada in 1901 there lived only 17,437 reported “Negroes,” just over half in the combined regions of Upper Canada, Canada West, and Ontario, the province that included Toronto. Some citizens, both within and outside the government, began to articulate the idea of closing the borders to those who could not “assimilate.” Toronto town councilman William P. Hubbard, the light-skinned son of freeborn parents, thought his city was the least racially prejudiced one in Canada. But Ada’s new neighbors would not necessarily be any more welcoming than those among whom she had lived in Flushing.44 Perhaps she imagined this sojourn as a brief respite from the ugliness in New York. Perhaps, though, she sometimes wondered if her husband had sent her off into exile, compelling her to leave the neighbors, the mothers, the gay masked partygoers who had become her friends.

  KING TRAVELED WEST. HE failed to improve in Prescott. He nearly died of heart failure there, he wrote to Hay. He moved on to Pasadena, where he hoped another doctor might help. But by August, he had lost about forty pounds and suffered days on end from fevers that kept his head “swimming and throbbing.” Still, he could muster the old spirit to write to Hay with heartbreaking “grace and tenderness” about the tragic death of Hay’s son, Del, a rising young light in the McKinley administration who fell to his death from a window while attending his third class reunion at Yale. “What would I give to be well and with you,” wrote King, “to take my share of the passing shadow and the coming light. But I am a poor, sick, old fellow, uncertain yet of life or of death, suffering more than my lot, and simply waiting till nature and the foe have done their struggle.”45

  Half lost in his own sorrow and “savage, unreasoning grief,” Hay still saw the tragedy of King’s situation. “There you have it in the face!” he wrote to Adams. “The best and brightest man of his generation, who with talents immeasurably beyond any of his contemporaries, with industry that has often sickened me to witness it, with everything in his favor but blind luck, hounded by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy of life to which he was entitled, dying at last, with nameless suffering, alone and uncared for in a California tavern.”46

  King had a bushel of mail but no strength to open the letters. For seven weeks he did not write even to his mother. By late August he still felt weak, but could drop her a line now and then and get off some notes of sympathy to Hay and his wife.47 Still, he said nothing about Ada and the children to either Adams or Hay.

  In other matters, though, Hay became King’s confidant, drawn newly close through the shared bonds of suffering and intimations of human mortality. Now they could forgo all talk of politics, all bluff talk about their travels, all sharp jokes about their mutual friends. They were just two aging men, each face-to-face with a future utterly beyond his powers to control. Forgive “my sad ramble of dull talk,” King wrote to his old friend in late August, “but I have no one else to say it to.”48

  Thanking Hay for his “superhuman” kindness and generosity over the years, King acknowledged receipt of yet another check, just arrived at his Pasadena sickroom. Then he took up the question that Hay and Adams had discussed between themselves. How could it be that such a prodigiously talented man, “the best and brightest” as Hay put it, should be dying alone and broke? “I have been trying to understand,” King wrote, “why a man as well endowed with intelligence as I, should have made such a failure of many matters as I have.”49

  Adams had pondered the same question since King’s breakdown in 1893, an event that seemed to him “singularly full of moral.” Years later, in his memoir, he tried again to understand King’s particular tragedy. “In 1871 he had thought King’s education ideal, and his personal fitness unrivaled. No other young American could approach him for the combination of chances—physical energy, social standing, mental scope and training, wit, geniality, and science, that seemed superlatively American and irresistibly strong.... The result of twenty years effort proved that the theory of scientific education failed where most theory fails—for want of money.” Money alone could make permanent and valuable what one achieved through sheer brainpower or hard work. “Education without capital,” Adams wrote, “could always be taken by the throat and forced to disgorge its gains.”50

  King had been as well equipped as any man to seize the opportunities afforded by American expansion into the West in the decade after the Civil War. He helped engineer that expansion, harnessing federal resources to map the region’s contours, catalog its natural wealth, and imagine how it could fuel the growth of American enterprise. But with the West mapped, its vast stretches of sparse settlement crisscrossed by railroads, its natural resources increasingly in the hand of large corporations, imagination and bravery were no longer enough. Nor was intellect. Scientific knowledge and personal bravado now mattered less than capital and corporate know-how.

  LIKE ADAMS, KING FOUND it hard to understand the tragic lessons of his life without talking about money, that incessant undertow of the Gilded Age. Money in the bank—more than one’s family, more than one’s books—seemed the hallmark of success in life, however fleeting its rewards. “During the last six or seven years,” he wrote to Hay from his sickroom, “I have constantly lifted my technical work and had at least a practice that yielded enough to cover my ten or twelve thousand of expenses of my dependents and myself.” Here, for all the frankness of his tone
, King knew Hay would imagine the family to which he referred: his mother, his grandmother (who died in 1893), his artist half brother George; Marian, at least, had been taken care of since her marriage to Captain Townsley. To Hay, now gripped by the grief of his own son’s death, King could say nothing of Ada and their four surviving children—Grace and Ada, Sidney and Wallace. Nor could he reveal what he knew himself about the ways in which the loss of a child could sear a father’s heart. Leroy’s death, a decade before, remained his own intensely private grief. To Hay, though, he could speak of money, the lingua franca of their late-nineteenth-century world. 51

  “Two thousand has covered my own cost of life and you know that it is not much to keep a decent position with,” King wrote to Hay. “I have check stubs for $275,000 spent on my family in the last 35 years but besides that I ought to have made abundant money. But I feared that I stayed too long in pure science and got a bent for the philosophical and ideal side of life too strong for any adaptation to commercial affairs.

  “I might have taken a college position and abandoned the family to sink. But really, whenever the moment came, I could not do it and struggled on my wavering way.

  “I believe I could have done better in pure literature, but the door seemed always shut in my face.” Now, he told Hay, he could do nothing. “Till this fever or I die out, I can only hope and wait.”52

  King deluded himself in imagining that “pure literature” might have proved a path to riches. But his failure to pursue a literary career had always puzzled his friends, who thought Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada and the short story “The Helmet of Mambrino” such evidence of his talent. “If he had given himself to literature, he would have been a great writer,” Hay thought. “The range of his knowledge, both of man and nature, was enormous; his sympathy was universal; his mastery of the word, his power of phrase, was almost unlimited.”53 And there had been so much talk of writing.

  Since adolescence, King had imagined himself a literary man. In the spring of 1876, with the survey fieldwork behind him, he told his mother, “I must write a novel.” Mrs. Howland replied that fifteen years of solitude and geological fieldwork seemed “a poor sort of preparation for the successful writing of fiction.” Not at all, retorted King. “Geology itself is chiefly a matter of the imagination—one man can actually see into the ground as far as another; best training conceivable in constructive imagination.”54

  King’s friends never knew precisely what he had in mind, but they had every reason to believe he was at work on something. King wrote to Hay in the fall of 1885 to explain that a careless chambermaid had straightened up his room at the Brunswick Hotel and tossed all his papers into the trash. It was a “horrid loss.” “All my mss.—including what little I had done on the English novel, all the London notes. My unfinished Hadrian & the odds & ends—are gone.”55 Two years later, he was at work on a novel tentatively called “Santa Rita,” gathering local color among the “dear old ranches” of California.56 Research into the saint’s biography gave him pause.57 It did seem odd to name his romance after a fifteenth-century woman with a weeping head wound who endured an abusive marriage and ended up in a convent. But King’s California trip put him in high spirits. He sent long letters to Hay about the different women he had observed, delightful sketches Hay found “full of comparative gynaecology.” King “is in delicious vein,” Hay told Adams in the summer of 1887, just a few months before King met Ada Copeland; “he ought to write his novel now.”58

  King hinted to friends that he was hard at work but rebuffed their inquiries with vague excuses. “I have a sort of grim, muttering sound in my ear that seems as if you were taking me to task for not writing literature,” King wrote to Hay in the summer of 1888, “but if you saw my life you would not. If you knew the difficulties of my situation in all its respects and phases, you would not blame me for consenting to seek out a quiet drudgery from which I frankly see that I may never emerge.”59 In the late 1890s, he told a friend that he was working on a collection of studies “of the American woman, young woman or girl,” a kind of domestic version of the book he had planned about the barmaids of London, and he later suggested it was nearly done. It consisted of three stories about women: “One of the Rocky Mountain one of the California and one of the semitropical type.” There should be a manuscript somewhere, King’s friend mused after King’s demise. “I can not remember that he ever said in so many words that he had committed his results to paper. But I had not doubt upon that point in my own mind. And the stories were charming.”60

  But there was no novel, no collection of amusing or charming stories to be unearthed among King’s papers. He squandered his literary treasures in conversation, Hay concluded. “There were scores of short stories full of color and life, sketches of thrilling adventure, not less than half a dozen complete novels, boldly planned and brilliantly wrought out,—all ready for the type or the pen.”61 But they never came to fruition. “The greater part of what he did was never published,” conceded Frank Emmons, “and very likely never even written.”62 King liked to work things out in his head before putting pen to paper. With the creative work done, writing seemed tedious. “His brilliant talk exercised and fatigued the same faculties as if it had been pen-work,” King’s engineer friend Rossiter Raymond wrote. “If he felt the impulse of utterance he wore it out in talking, and often threw away upon the transitory entertainment of a few what might have been the enduring delight of a multitude.”63 Perhaps, Emmons speculated, King had such a refined literary taste he avoided writing for fear nothing could meet his own expectations .64 Perhaps, as Raymond supposed, he was just stretched too thin. A man might be a “darling of society” and still write in his spare time, or combine a literary career with an active business life. But to do all three, Raymond thought, would be impossible.65

  From his sickroom, King complained to Hay that he failed in the field of literature because the door seemed always shut in his face. But that door did not slam before him. As King walked into his secret life, he slowly pulled it shut behind him. For many years, the imagination and curiosity, the energy and spirit that might have sustained his literary fiction instead sustained his life. He acted out on the streets of New York and in the drawing rooms of Flushing what he could not let himself explore on paper or expose to the scrutiny of his colleagues. His most dazzling words were spun not for his Century Association friends, who so admired his verbal play, but for his wife and his children, their neighbors and friends, all people oblivious to the studied artfulness of his tales. As Hay and others noted, King’s talk sparkled more brightly than his written words. “James Todd” was his greatest fictional work of all.

  As King lay on his deathbed and pondered his failed literary career, Owen Wister was finishing The Virginian, the western novel that established the very conventions of the genre—the strong silent hero, the admiring woman, the shoot-out between good and evil on the deserted street of the frontier town. A Harvard-educated Philadelphian, sent west by S. Weir Mitchell in 1885 to recover from a mental breakdown, Wister created in his literary alter ego a hero with the self-confidence he could never quite muster himself, a model for the modern western man King had never been able to be.

  The Virginian, Wister’s fictional hero, was a natural aristocrat of modest birth and common sense endowed with a strong moral code and a deep masculine bravery. In the fluid world of the ranching West, he rose to the very top of the social order. But he could foresee the imminent demise of the open-range cattle industry and knew he would need more than his gun and innate sense of frontier justice to become “well fixed for the new conditions.” So he bought land with coal that he knew would serve the needs of the expanding rail lines.66 Wister’s cowboy-turned-entrepreneur thus moved effortlessly from Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier into the more industrialized West of a twentieth-century nation. In his own life, however, Clarence King could not pull it off. He might have the Virginian’s natural talents, and they had served him well in his yea
rs as an explorer. But he lacked the Virginian’s economic foresight and business skill. He was a man with a middle-class income running with a more moneyed crowd. He never figured out how to parlay an old set of skills into the tools that would help him triumph in the new corporate economy of the Gilded Age.

  FROM HIS SICKROOM, KING likely followed news of the attack on President McKinley by a self-proclaimed anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, the stories of his uncertain recovery, and the reports of the president’s eventual death on September 14, 1901. Theodore Roosevelt, the youngest president ever inaugurated, was sworn in as his replacement. King must have thought of Hay: in a few short months he had lost to unexpected and violent death both his son and the man he served as secretary of state. He likely thought of Roosevelt, to whom Wister would soon dedicate The Virginian, a fellow western spirit King had known for years.67 The rough-and-tumble world of Washington politics had once been King’s world. Now, even with an old friend in the White House, it likely felt unimaginably far away. King was dying alone and broke.

  By October, King had moved from Pasadena to Phoenix in a last-ditch effort to salvage his health. The very day he left California, he called on the writer George Wharton James. “It is one of my constant regrets that I was not at home to greet him,” James later wrote. “To my wife he was the same courteous, happy, debonair gentleman in spite of the fact that he must have known... he had no expectation of living much longer.”68 Frank Emmons called on King in Phoenix in mid-October. He found his friend feverish, suffering from hip pain, sometimes able to walk into town but often dependent on a horse-drawn carriage to carry him home.69