Passing Strange (18 page)

 

 

SLUMMING WAS ALL THE rage in the London of the early 1880s: a “fashionable amusement,” the
Saturday Evening Post
declared in 1884.
⁵¹
And it provoked parody as readily as social debate. The British satire magazine
Punch
published a cartoon in December 1883 depicting a group of upper-class women garbed in raincoats rushing away from a social gathering: “Lord Archibald is going to take us to dear little slum he’s found out near the Minories.”
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Benevolence mixed uneasily with voyeurism, altruistic compassion with self-serving pride. It might be easy for the slummers to be “
amused
and affected, as in the same degree they would have been amused and affected at a theatre in witnessing a pathetic drama of Life in a London Slum,” wrote one critic in 1884. But it would be all but impossible for these urban voyeurs to truly grasp the horrors of poverty in London’s most desperate neighborhoods.
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King moved easily between one world and the other. One day King would be out buying extravagant antique fabrics, wrote Henry James, “selling silver mines to the Banque de Paris or philandering with Ferdinand de Rothschild, who appears to be unable to live without him.” But then he could turn away to dine with “publicans, barmaids and other sinners.”
⁵⁴

James warily accompanied King on some of his urban adventures, and King joked that whenever the novelist was more than one cab fare from Piccadilly, “there is a nervous, almost nostalgic, cutting and running for the better quarters of the town.” King confided to Hay that James so worried about being caught in “these gruesome and out-of-the-way parts of the town, he actually gathers up a few unmistakably good invitations and buttons them in his inner pocket, so that there should be no mistaking the social position of the corpse if violence befell him.” James felt compelled to hold on to markings of his social station. But for King the whole point of rambling was the opportunity to try on a new self and slip the bounds of convention.
⁵⁵

Years later, “veiling with a transparent whimsical humor of narration his earnest feeling,” King told his old mining friend Rossiter Raymond of Sunday-afternoon trips to talk with the girls who worked in Cross and Blackwell’s pickle factory. King boasted that he spoke to them in a fashion “not quite orthodox, perhaps, but then, again, not so awfully heterodox either!”
⁵⁶
Why and about what, he gives no clue. Perhaps he felt drawn to them by their speech or their dress, their reddened laborer’s hands, the strong vinegar smell that hung about their hair and clothes. In the polyglot world of late-nineteenth-century New York, King found the antidote to the smothering weight of civilization among the black and European immigrant neighborhoods of lower Manhattan. But in the more ethnically homogeneous, if economically stratified, world of Victorian London, he found the balm for his social discomfort among these white factory workers.

It remains hard to know whether the Yale-educated geologist revealed his real identity to the girls, used his own name, or perhaps disguised his background by adopting a working-class accent designed to set them at ease. He possessed a “remarkable ease in acquiring a colloquial command of languages,” Hay noted.
⁵⁷
And, as another friend remarked, King took a particular interest in all the variations of English, recording “reams of notes on dialects whole fathoms below the strata touched by Dickens in
Oliver Twist.
”
⁵⁸
But at some point, whether he revealed his identity to the girls or not, he slipped back into character and organized for the women “by unlimited use of his aristocratic acquaintances” an excursion via special train to an afternoon tea on the lawn in Windsor Park. Queen Victoria herself stepped out of the palace and joined them for tea.
⁵⁹

Such class-crossing excursions seemed to intrigue King, providing a kind of inverse of his own experience as a man of substance drawn to a working-class world. On one occasion, he introduced himself to the Honourable Maude Stanley, “founder of the first Working-Girls’ Club” in London, and announced that he wished to provide her charges with a memorable day. King “arranged every detail,” Stanley recalled. He took one hundred girls by train from Waterloo to Windsor, where each spent half the day on a carriage ride around the park and the other half out on a river launch. At midday they all joined together for an elaborate multicourse dinner in the Town Hall, “in a splendid room hung round with pictures of kings and queens,” where King gave each girl a specially printed menu to take home as a souvenir.
⁶⁰
Lady Stanley, a friend of Hay’s noted, became “quite as charmed with Frascuelo [King] as the barmaids.”
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KING FELT ATTRACTED TO the girls and curious about their lives, but by playing the host he reaffirmed the vast class difference between his world and theirs. In his frequent nighttime visits to London’s bars and pubs, however, he often concealed his background in order to grasp a more immediate experience of working-class life. Bronson recalled King’s stories of “chaffing bar maids with Bret Harte,” and Henry James drily noted after King’s departure, “The British barmaid mourns his absence.”
⁶²
To justify himself to his friends, King announced he intended to write a book with ten stories about women from the depths of London life. But most perceived what he was up to. “Think of it Hay,” one friend wrote to King’s old confidant. “He goes down to the lowest dive at Seven Dials, chirps to the pretty barmaid of a thieves’ gin mill, gives her a guinea for a glass of ‘bittah,’ [and] gets the frail, simple clean thing gone on him. Then [he] whips out his notebook and with a smile that would charm a duchess asks her to tell her story. Naturally she is pleased and fires away in dialect that never saw print, which the wily geologist nails on the spot. Of course, she is a poor, pitiful wronged thing who would have been an angel if she had been kindly treated and taken to Sunday School when she was a child—they are all so, you know.”
⁶³

“Let us
hope,
” concluded Hay’s correspondent, “that King is walking through all these narrow slippery places upright and unstained as an archangel.”
⁶⁴

King joked with Raymond about his afternoons with the working girls. But perhaps sensing King’s true attraction to the women and his deep ambivalence about the privileges of class, Raymond imagined “something dearer and deeper in it than its sparkling surface.”
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BUSINESS AFFAIRS OCCUPIED LITTLE of King’s time in Europe. In the late summer of 1883, more than a year after his arrival, he finally sealed a deal with a group of British investors for the purchase of the Yedras mine and told friends he would be sailing home in December. But the newly capitalized Anglo-Mexican Mining Company ran into financial difficulties of its own, leading King’s American investors to worry. King delayed his return.
⁶⁶

Writing from London in the summer of 1884, after two years abroad, King adopted the bemused stance of an expatriate. “All the phenomena of a sudden, unfinished civilization such as yours,” he wrote to James Hague, “will afford me the greatest amusement and keenest study.” He meant to provoke a smile. But he sounded anxious about returning home to resume his expected social station and hinted that he intended to hold himself apart as an observer, a kind of tourist in his own country. If he could stand on the outside looking in, perhaps he could avoid the suffocating crush of his old social world. “I do feel very much like an early Briton,” he told Hague, “and approach the idea of America with intense curiosity.” He joked that having become accustomed to “our well regulated and orderly methods of politics, I shall take a great interest in observing the passionate activity, and the frank corruption of your system.” And he confessed to a certain curiosity about the American social scene. “I am anxious to see what your Broadway and Fifth Avenue look like,” he wrote, “and whether the vaunted beauty of the American girl approaches that of her calmer and heavier sister over here.”
⁶⁷

King’s friend Henry James had immortalized the “American girl” in his 1878 novella
Daisy Miller.
She was pretty and fresh, audacious and charming, more high-spirited and frank than her Old World counterpart.
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From Europe, King could imagine her allure. But in America, her imagined attractions faded.

King sailed for home with his crates of treasures in September 1884.
⁶⁹
Once there, he quickly lost the hopeful optimism of a tourist who finds the charm in every unfamiliar scene. New York felt oppressively familiar. “The rush and whirl of New York life,” King wrote to his old Yale acquaintance Daniel Gilman, “the detestable social pressure of the place are so thoroughly antagonistic.... But for the crime of forsaking one’s own country, I should live in London without hesitation.”
⁷⁰

King lived out of a trunk. He stored most of the art collection he had amassed in Europe in a dark room in the old Studio Building on West Tenth Street and lent some pieces out to friends. “It pleased him to have others enjoy what he had not the time and the place for,” John La Farge recalled.
⁷¹
From time to time, King dazzled his friends with a Millet or a Turner pulled out of a chest, but most of his European treasures remained hidden away, along with the paintings acquired from friends like Albert Bierstadt, La Farge, and R. Swain Gifford.
⁷²
King fantasized about an “abiding home” for his collection. There would be a decorative frieze of scenes from Dante’s
Divine Comedy
wrapping around a grand room, high up above the doors and windows, and light would pour in through stained-glass windows to illuminate the space like a jewel.
⁷³

But it was all idle talk. There would be no grand homes for Clarence King, only a series of furnished hotel suites and the secret homes in Brooklyn and Queens of which his closest friends would know nothing.

 

 

KING SEEMED AT HOME everywhere, thought Henry Adams, ever admiring of his friend’s chameleon-like ability to blend in when he traveled. “Where was he ever a stranger?”
⁷⁴
But where, one might also ask, was he ever at home? King could settle with ease into Clover Adams’s Washington drawing room or chat for hours with the British barmaids, but he seemed unable to create a home of his own. He professed to envy his friends’ settled domesticity. “If I were married, how I should delight in buying the house you are now living in and remaking it a little to suit my need,” he wrote to Adams soon after his return to the United States. “But I am human and could not bear the exasperating spectacle of your and Hay’s domestic happiness.”
⁷⁵

At the start, when he returned to New York in the mid-1870s to finish his survey reports, King tried to maintain his own lodgings, renting rooms and employing a succession of male and female servants as befit a man of his standing.
⁷⁶
But he later came to prefer residential hotels. And these institutions, as much as the city’s segregated housing patterns and the anonymity of the crowded urban streets, helped make possible his double life.

When King moved back to New York in the spring of 1881, after leaving his job in Washington as director of the United States Geological Survey, he took up residence at the Brevoort Hotel, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street, about a block from his old survey headquarters on lower Fifth Avenue. The Brevoort boasted a reputation as one of the city’s “most elegant hotels” with “a fine view of the
beau monde.
”
⁷⁷
As one guidebook explained, the hotel’s “quiet and refined” surroundings coupled with “the superior excellence of the cuisine department” helped it attract a “cultivated class of patrons.”
⁷⁸
A decade earlier, when an African American senator from Texas and his wife tried to obtain a room by requesting reservations in advance and announcing their race, the Brevoort turned them away.
⁷⁹
It sought a different clientele. King shared the hotel that spring of 1881 with a stylish set: the Danish chargé d’affaires from Washington; the secretary of the French Legation; the painter John La Farge, his old friend; and the Duke of Sutherland, who delighted the royalty-conscious Americans by “chatting” with them in the reading room.
⁸⁰

The Brevoort and New York’s other residential hotels filled an important niche in the urban housing market by accommodating both short-term guests and long-term residents. Members of the middle and upper classes could find in hotel living a kind of instant social prestige, a domestic simplicity free of the burdens of housekeeping or the supervision of servants, and—as King would discover—an anonymity that made it possible to live a private life far from the gaze of neighbors or family. One might embrace the convivial social life of the lobby, the reading room, or the dining rooms and count on a casual exchange with the maids, a friendly wave to the desk clerk, or a brief chat with the doorman. But especially as the hotels embraced the new European style of pricing that allowed guests to take their meals elsewhere—leaving the older, all-inclusive American meal plans for “persons of regular life, who can command their time”—one could keep one’s own hours without attracting the notice of the other residents.
⁸¹
No one would notice whether you ate dinner at the hotel or what time you came home at night. An absence of days or even weeks might go unobserved by any but the paid staff: neither darkened windows nor uncollected packages would attract the attention of curious passersby. For someone like King, who would eventually direct his friends to write to him at his gentlemen’s clubs, there would not even be a growing stack of mail to signal his whereabouts. He could just shut up his hotel suite if he needed to go off to Newport to visit his mother, head west to check out a mining prospect, or go down to Washington to visit with friends. When he left for Europe in May 1882, he could simply put his few personal belongings in storage or lend them out to friends, turn in his hotel key, and leave.