Passing Strange (36 page)

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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Two years later, he was at work on a novel tentatively called “Santa Rita,” gathering local color among the “dear old ranches” of California.
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Research into the saint’s biography gave him pause.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Perhaps, Emmons speculated, King had such a refined literary taste he avoided writing for fear nothing could meet his own expectations .
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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.
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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.
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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 years 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.
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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.”
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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.
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King wanted mail from Ada; he needed to know how she and the children were faring in Canada. But he feared letters addressed to “James Todd” would not be delivered. His caretakers thought the man coughing away in the sickbed was Clarence King. So “James Todd” wrote to his wife the letter clarifying once and for all that she had not been party to the deception all these years: he said his name was really “Clarence King.”

As if his stunning words could ever slip her memory, he directed her to write his name in her Bible, so “you can refer to it if you forget it.”
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After more than thirteen years, King had finally told his wife who he was. At least in part. Although he disclosed his name, nothing survives to tell whether he also disclosed his race or his birthplace, his family background or his profession. One imagines he felt a sense of incredible relief, and perhaps a sense of freedom that was the odd inverse of the one that had filled him with anticipatory joy when he first crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to become “James Todd.” With his newfound freedom and lightness of being probably came newfound fears: about his mother’s feelings should she learn the truth, about how his colleagues would respond and whether his scientific reputation would be subjected to critical revision.

But he needed Ada to know his name. And he wanted to protect his mixed-race children. There was no wealthy aunt, no inheritance windfall. But he could at least acknowledge his role as a father and give his family a heritage that included his old Newport world of senators and abolitionists, China traders and merchants. And maybe, at least in the utopian world of the raceless America that he had once imagined, those children might even be proud to be Kings and would reap the social benefits due the man who had helped to map the West.