The Square Pegs (2 page)

The usual dictionary definition of conformity is “correspondence in form, manner, or character; a point of resemblance, as of tastes … Harmony; agreement; congruity . . Action, or an act, of conforming to something established, as law or fashion; compliance; acquiescence.” In short, the conformist moves in step with his fellows, following the social standards, established and supported by law, religion, and custom, generally practiced by the majority in his time. Various psychological tests, given through the years, have indicated that from ninety to ninety-eight persons out of every hundred conform to the dictates of their law, religion, and custom. They conform for many reasons: because it is easier and less exhausting; because it is simpler and less confusing; because it is safe and less dangerous; because it enhances the ego and invites less disapproval; because it is more relaxing and less lonely; and because it is a habit of long training, and less radical. No doubt, many of these very reasons for conformity had great appeal to Mary Shelley, who had lived with a total nonconformist for eight years. Shortly after the drowning of her poet-husband she was urged to send her son to an advanced school, where the boy might be encouraged to think for himself. “To think for himself!” she exclaimed. “Oh, my God, teach him to think like other people!”

The most spectacular type of nonconformist is, of course, the eccentric. The word itself derives from the Greek “out of the center.” The historical and literary definition of eccentricity is “deviation from customary conduct; oddity … divergence from the usual.” Psychiatric sources are even more explicit. According to one, eccentricity means “off center or unsymmetrical with reference to a center; hence odd in behavior.” According to another, eccentricity denotes “unusual freedom from conventional types of response.”

While psychiatrists, in their exploration of eccentricity, have found that causes vary widely in individual cases, they have emerged with a few basic generalities. Most full-time eccentrics are regarded as psychopathic personalities who, in the words of a British psychiatric dictionary, “have been from childhood or early youth abnormal in their emotional reactions and in their general behavior, but who do not reach, except perhaps episodically, a degree of abnormality amounting to certifiable insanity, and who show no intellectual defect. They exhibit lack of perseverance, persistent failure to profit by experience, and habitual lack of ordinary prudence.”

Dr. Eugen Kahn, who was Sterling Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University, finds that most eccentrics, emerging from an insecure childhood, grow up in opposition to their environment, intent on making their way alone. Usually, they become obsessed by some “overvalued idea,” and their personalities are clouded by dementia præcox, excessive fanaticism, paranoia, and schizophrenia. They may be more imaginative and even more intelligent than the so-called average person, but at the same time they are likely to be more immature and impractical.

Above all, most psychiatrists seem to agree that the lot of the eccentric is unhappier than that of the conforming “average personality.” If the eccentric is sufficiently integrated to succeed in some field, to gain wealth or power, he is admired and respected and his oddity is overlooked. But if the eccentric fails, he is pitied or ridiculed and shunned as something strange. Most often, the penalties for deviation from the norm are harsh. The eccentric is alone, suspected, and often hurt. Constantly, he is hounded by society’s watchdogs the government, the church, the social organization, the community and he suffers physical punishments such as arrest, exile, personal violence, or spiritual punishments in the form of social boycott and disapproval.

Yet, despite these unhappy prospects, men have continued to indulge in eccentricity sometimes because they could not do otherwise, but as often because they preferred the freer air of nonconformity. And all through history these few individualists, though often persecuted by the many, have had encouragement from the best minds of their day. Ralph Waldo Emerson dared, as we shall see, to flaunt public opinion in assisting the eccentric Delia Bacon. “The virtue in most request is conformity,” wrote Emerson. “Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs … Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

In all ages the eccentric perhaps because of, and not in spite of, his nonconformity has furthered the cause of science, built great empires, improved the public welfare, and created memorable works of art. In their own time such men as Kant, Thoreau, Paganini, Pascal, Disraeli, Poe, Whitman, Heine, and Goldsmith were considered eccentric. History has recorded countless other names of rare individualists ranging from the poet Charles Baudelaire, with his green hair and his confessions of cannibalism, to the millionaire businessman Russell Sage, with his pride in eight-dollar suits and formal lunches at which he served only apples all of whom contributed to their contemporary society and to civilization. Yet, the major bequest of most eccentrics has been something less tangible. In subtle ways, they have helped their fellows profit by their original example. “Eccentrics do a lot of good,” Henry Morton Robinson once wrote. “They point out what the rest of us forget the delightfully erratic possibilities of human life. They get far away from the good, the true, and the beautiful, substituting for this dour trinity the rarer qualities of the rare, the cuckoo, and the courageous.”

Intolerance for the eccentric has known no geographical limits. Yet, possibly, in the West, Europe has been more appreciative of its irregular personalities than has America. Europe, with an older civilization and character, with sharper variety in its landscape and nationalities, with more differences in its systems of government and teachings and social life, has quite naturally bred a greater proportion of eccentrics and has learned to tolerate and even to encourage them. Especially is this true in Great Britain.

England has always had its eccentrics the French like to say that “the British prefer to walk in the road, although there are pavements laid down for their convenience” and, generally, the English have been proud of their most outrageous nonconformists. Edith Sitwell tried to account for this happy condition in the security that Englishmen have always found in their superiority and tradition. “Eccentricity exists particularly in the English … because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.”

In discussing the Whig aristocracy of the eighteenth century in
Melbourne
, Lord David Cecil also examined this English phenomenon of nonconformity: “The conventions which bounded their lives were conventions of form only. Since they had been kings of their world from birth, they were free from the tiresome inhibitions that are induced by a sense of inferiority. Within the locked garden of their society, individuality flowered riotous and rampant. Their typical figures show up beside the muted introverts of today as clear-cut and idiosyncratic as characters in Dickens. They took for granted that you spoke your mind and followed your impulses. If these were odd, they were amused but not disapproving. They enjoyed eccentrics: George Selwyn, who never missed an execution, Beau Brummell, who took three hours to tie his cravat. The firm English soil in which they were rooted, the spacious freedom afforded by their place in the world, allowed personality to flourish in as many bold and fantastic shapes as it pleased.”

In England, Utopia of the individualist, eccentricity has indeed taken on many bold and fantastic shapes. The nation’s vast and continuing literature of oddity points with pride to unusual men and women who would have been quickly stunted or stoned in less amiable lands. While the English quality of eccentricity has been matched elsewhere as I shall attempt to demonstrate in this book nowhere else has as much sheer quantity of eccentricity been achieved. “Clearly, it is in the individualist phases of society,” said Richard Aldington, “that the eccentric flourishes. In other epochs he becomes a heretic and goes up in flames, or is marked down as politically undesirable and is liquidated.” In England the eighteenth century was particularly amenable to the unrestricted growth of the individualist. During sixty-nine years of that century there were born four classical examples of Sydney Smith’s “square human.”

In 1713 occurred the birth of Edward Wortley Montagu. His father was a millionaire member of Parliament renowned for his miserliness. His mother was the clever and eccentric “female traveler,” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who attained notoriety for her journeys in the Near East and fame for her remarkable letters. But, by a dint of perseverance, Edward Montagu exceeded his mother in eccentricity. As a boy he could curse in Greek and Turkish. At Oxford, when he was thirteen, he took his landlady for his mistress. He was an officer at the battle of Fontenoy, he was a member of Parliament for one month, and he was an outstanding Arabic scholar. He assumed, and discarded, almost as many religions as wives. He was a Protestant, then a convert to Catholicism, and at last a Mohammedan. At seventeen he married a washerwoman, and then, neglecting to divorce her, he was wedded successively to ,a Miss Elizabeth Ashe, to a Catholic widow named Caroline Feroe, and to an Egyptian serving girl known as Ayesha.

At the age of sixty-three Montagu advertised for one more wife, demanding only that she be of “genteel birth, polished manners and five, six, seven or eight months gone in her pregnancy.” This startled no one since, only three years before, at sixty, he had asked to be circumcised arguing that Abraham had been circumcised at ninety-nine so that he might make a pilgrimage to Mecca. His gaudy attire forever attracted crowds. He wore a turban and an embroidered coat with diamonds for buttons, but that was not all. “The most curious part of his dress,” said Horace Walpole, “is an iron wig; you literally would not know it from hair.” He was aware of his oddity, and no less proud. “I have never committed a
small
folly,” he once remarked. He died in 1776.

William Beckford was sixteen years old when Montagu, whose Oriental manuscripts he would collect and translate, expired in Italy. Beckford followed in the capricious footsteps of his idol. When Beckford was still a child he inherited his father’s West Indies plantations, one million pounds, and the family estate near the village of Fonthill in Wiltshire. His education was acquired through private tutors. He learned Arabic and Persian from an Orientalist, and he learned to play the piano from Wolfgang Mozart. He traveled to France, Portugal, and Italy. In Venice he supported an elderly mistress who had earlier entertained Casanova. Though he had married a lady of title, and had had four children, he was publicly accused of homosexuality. Scandalous rumor, which he never legally denied, revealed to the world that he had been seen committing perversion in Powderham with a young man named Courtenay.

Beckford wrote ten or eleven books, two under women’s names. His masterpiece, admired by Lord Byron, was an Oriental romance entitled
Vathek
. He composed it in French, and then had a clergyman translate it back into his native English. He collected books both rare and popular, scribbled brilliant criticisms in their margins, and then offered these jottings for sale to the publisher Richard Bentley under the title of
Fruits of Conceit and Flowers of Nonsense
, but they were rejected as too controversial. He was certainly, as Richard Garnett remarked, “the most brilliant amateur in English literature.” As such, he decided to build a monument to himself. In 1790 he told Lady Craven: “I grow rich and mean to build towers.” He determined to abandon Fonthill and nearby erect the tallest private residence in all Europe.

Beckford hired the leading architect of the day, James Wyatt, and had him construct a wall twelve feet high and seven miles in circumference to keep out sightseers. This done, work was promptly started on the Great Tower. Because of Beckford’s impatience to see his monstrosity completed, 500 laborers were employed to work in two shifts half by sunlight and half by torchlight. In 1800 the flimsy timber-and-cement structure, set on a narrow base, was done. It rose 300 feet into the air and the very first mild wind broke it in two and sent it crashing to the ground.

Undeterred, Beckford ordered another Great Tower built on the rubble of the old. At an expenditure of 273,000 pounds, stone was added to the timber and cement, and the new 300-foot structure was finished in less than seven years. Beckford moved into one of its eighteen cramped, unventilated bedrooms. Here, with a Spanish dwarf in livery receiving guests, he entertained his friends, among them Lady Emma Hamilton, but refused to invite the curious Prince Regent. After fifteen years, having lost his income and his fortune, Beckford sold the tower for 330,000 pounds to a munitions dealer named John Farquhar. He was not surprised to learn that, shortly after his own removal to Bath, the tower again collapsed in a gale. On a hillside near Bath, Beckford built a third tower, this one a mere 130 feet in height, and peopled it with dwarfs. His aversions were mirrors and women (special niches were built in the corridors for his maids to hide in when he passed). Aged eighty-four, he died in 1844. As Beckford was a devotee of the arts, he may at some time have been witness to the dogged eccentricity of a contemporary named Robert Coates, who had been born in the West Indies in 1772. Coates, nicknamed Romeo for his passionate desire to act, and Diamond for his originality in attire, became stage-struck in his puberty. In 1809 he invaded perhaps assaulted would be the more accurate word the London theater. Often referred to as the Gifted Amateur, Coates devoted a long and riotous life to proving he was another Garrick. He was not, but he was certainly as entertaining. He liked to play Shakespeare, and he designed his own costumes for Hamlet and Macbeth as Romeo he appeared in white feather hat, spangled cloak, and pantaloons. He wore these same costumes in public. Before appearing in a Shakespearean play, he would rewrite it to suit his talents. “I think I have improved upon it,” he told his shocked friends. In
Romeo and Juliet
he improved the ending by trying to pry open Juliet’s tomb with a crowbar. If he particularly enjoyed playing a scene, he would repeat the same scene three times in one evening as his audiences sat stupefied. He was probably the worst actor in the history of the legitimate theater. Yet he tirelessly tramped up and down the British Isles declaiming from the boards. Year after year he was met with derision and catcalls and hilarity, but he persisted. At a performance in Richmond, several spectators were so shaken by laughter that a physician had to be summoned to attend them.