Passing Strange (30 page)

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? ”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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 .
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King had known Waring, a fellow Newporter, for decades; well enough, it seems, to ask a favor.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 interest 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.”
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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?”
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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.”
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