The Square Pegs (3 page)

When theater managers, fearing violence, barred him from their stages, he bribed them to let him appear. When fellow thespians, fearing bodily injury, refused to act beside him, he provided police guards to reassure them. Eventually, by sheer persistence and by the audacity of his mediocrity, he became a legendary figure decked out in furs, jewels, and Hessian boots. He starred in London’s leading theaters and responded to command performances before royalty. Nothing, it seemed, not criticism, not ridicule, not threats of lynching, could remove him from the footlights. Only death, it was agreed, might silence him and save the English stage. But he would not die. In his seventy-fourth year, reduced in circumstances, but spouting and gesturing still, he was as active as ever. But the year following, on an afternoon in 1848, a carriage ran him down, and he died. Though English drama survived his passing, its comedy would never be the same again.

While perhaps no English eccentric would ever exceed Coates in audacity, it is possible that Charles Waterton, in his own field, was his match. Waterton was born of wealthy parents in Yorkshire during 1782. At the Jesuit College of Stonyhurst he demonstrated a talent for natural history. Sent to British Guiana to supervise the family plantations, he displayed the first evidences of his originality during a four-month sojourn in the Brazilian jungles. During this exploration Waterton sought the poison Indians used in their blowguns, which he called wourali and which we know as curare. He hoped to employ this poison as a cure for hydrophobia. In the course of this and three other trips, Waterton performed incredible feats of oddity. Moving through the bush on bare feet, he captured a python by binding its head with his suspenders. On another occasion he was having some difficulty pulling a crocodile from the river. “I saw he was in a state of fear and perturbation. I instantly dropped the mast, sprang up, and jumped on his back.” After riding the crocodile forty yards to the bank, Waterton relaxed only briefly. He became enchanted with the idea of having a vampire bat suck blood from his big toe. He took one into his sleeping quarters, and dozed with a foot nakedly exposed, but the reluctant bat preferred the less formidable toe of a neighbor.

Upon his father’s death Waterton returned to England to become the twenty-seventh squire of Walton Hall. He decided to convert the family property into a bird sanctuary. He constructed an eight-foot barrier three miles around his grounds to keep out beasts of prey and hunters. He brought in an ex-poacher to serve as game warden, and he set up a telescope for use in birdwatching. His greatest pleasure was in clambering up trees and observing his creatures at close hand. When he had guests he would invite them to climb with him. At the age of eighty like “an adolescent gorilla,” Norman Douglas observed he was still ascending trees. Occasionally, as when he visited Vatican City, he would climb something else. In 1817 he scaled St. Peter’s to its summit, and then went thirteen feet higher to plant his gloves at the top of a lightning conductor. Pope Pius VII was unamused, and made him climb back up again to remove the gloves.

At Walton Hall, where no gunfire was permitted and where all dogs were confined, he dwelt as naturally as the first man on earth. He went about barefooted, prayed in a private chapel, slept on the floor of his bedroom with a block of oak for his pillow, and rose at four o’clock in the morning. He occupied himself by building a stable so arranged that his horses might converse, by playing practical jokes on friends (often pretending to be a dog and biting them), and by attempting to fly with the use of homemade wings. His hobby was taxidermy. Every nook of his house was filled with some strange, preserved specimen. Sometimes, like Frankenstein, he created composite creatures made of the parts of four animals. Because he was a Catholic he named many of these monsters after prominent Protestants. His favorite, with the head of a red howler monkey, was called The Nondescript and looked startlingly human.

On the rare occasions when Waterton left Walton Hall he was no less eccentric. He visited the London zoo to interview a savage orangutan recently imported from Borneo. Though warned that he would be torn apart, he insisted upon entering the cage. “The meeting of those two celebrities,” said his friend Dr. Richard Hobson, “was clearly a case of love at first sight, as the strangers not only embraced each other most affectionately, but positively hugged each other and … kissed one another many times.” Waterton visited Italy accompanied by a retinue of owls. And finally, excited by an American book on ornithology, he traveled to the United States in 1824. He saw New York and adored its women. He saw Charles Willson Peale, who had painted Washington, and who had four sons named Rembrandt, Raphael, Titian, and Rubens. He saw Niagara Falls, and having sprained his ankle and been advised that it should be immersed in water, held his ankle beneath the great Falls. The year after returning from America he published a successful account of his travels and explorations. In 1829, in. Belgium, he met a convent girl who was the granddaughter of a Guiana Indian princess and thirty years his junior. He married her at four o’clock one May morning, and for their honeymoon took her to Paris to study stuffed birds. In his eighty-third year, on his estate, he tripped, fell against a log, and was seriously injured. He died in May 1865.

In the English atmosphere of conformity, mellowed by centuries of individualism, such extreme nonconformists as Waterton, Coates, Beckford, and Montagu met with little resistance. In the United States, with its deep-rooted and rigid Calvinistic beginnings, similar nonconformists grew and survived, but with far more difficulty and with far less tolerance. Many reasons have been put forward by sociologists, historians, and psychologists to explain the undeviating worship of group living and group thinking in America. James Bryce credited American conformity to uniform stretches of landscape, to uniform cities, to uniform political institutions in federal, state, and municipal government. Everywhere schools, libraries, clubs, amusements, and customs were similar. “Travel where you will,” he wrote, “you feel that what you have found in one place that you will find in another.”

Above all, there was the rapid advance of industrial science. In America an all-powerful technology, with its standardized techniques and methods of mass production, reached its zenith. As technology attracted larger numbers of people to urban centers, and compressed them into smaller areas, community living became a necessity. This, in turn, encouraged people to cooperate, and created relationships that invited similar activities and opinions.

Gradually, there emerged on the American scene, against all natural development of culture and against all individual traits inherent in every man, two striking attitudes that made American conformity broader, more unyielding, and more dangerous. The first attitude, assumed by the majority, was that the act of becoming average, of being normal, was more important than that of being distinct or superior. The second attitude, also assumed by the majority, was that the state of being well adjusted to the crowd and the community was more important than that of being a unique and original human being.

Today this growing affection for the safety of the similar, the usual, and the accepted, and the consequent fear of any challenging ideas or personalities, presents a serious threat to the development of American society. But how then to allay this threat? What practical course is open? In his book
Must You Conform?
Dr. Robert Lindner supplied an answer:

“The first requisite for a teacher or parent who wishes to assist the evolutionary process by rearing our young toward genuine maturity is that he root out from himself every last vestige of the myth of adjustment. He must exorcise from his heart and mind, and from his behavior, adulation of the fiction of conformity that has brought society within sight of doomsday and that threatens to engulf the world in another long night of medievalism. He must deny that passivity, surrender, conformism and domestication pave the road to human happiness and salvation. Instead he must affirm the rights of protest and individuality, encourage uniqueness, and be unshaken in an abiding faith that only in these ways will he discover himself and the true vocation of his life.”

To be one’s self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity. That is the contention and that is the theme of this book. Sociologists and psychologists have, in the past, propagated this point of view in their own specialized terms. While my own interest, like theirs, is the human animal, I have preferred to dramatize the subject as storyteller and biographer.

Since 1932, when I met Wilbur Glenn Voliva, and since 1945, when I began to make notes on the gyrations of individualists who had swung away from the safety of society’s center, I have been rather constantly in the company of the American eccentric. I have met him in the pages of yellowed newspapers, periodicals, and books. I have visited the arenas where once he performed, and have often seen his autograph on cracked documents and creased letters. For all of this, I may not have loved him, but I have known him well and respected him.

To be sure, I have not attempted to include every American eccentric in this modest examination. There were more of these unfettered souls than the reader may imagine, though, indeed, altogether too few for the nation’s need. I have made hard choices. My formula has been simple: I would write not about celebrated men and women who were possessed of eccentricity, but rather about men and women who were celebrated
for
their eccentricity.

It was with genuine reluctance that I was forced to discard Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, Governor of New York in 1702, who charged admissions to his private dinners, wore his wife’s dresses, and taxed all male colonists who used wigs; William Miller, the Massachusetts prophet of doom, who delivered 3,200 speeches predicting the end of the world in 1843 and sold muslin ascension robes at a profit; Hetty Green, the miser of Wall Street, who wore newspapers for undergarments, subsisted on onions and eggs, dwelt in a fireless tenement, permitted only the lower half of her petticoats to be laundered, and was worth eighty million dollars; and Joseph Palmer, a New Englander, who persisted in wearing a beard in a cleanshaven society and was jeered, beaten, and finally sentenced to jail for one year.

These eccentrics were good, but I feel I have settled upon eight who were better. The nonconformists in this book represent the complete saga of American eccentricity from the days of the founding of the republic to modern times. Their stories are not success stories in the familiar language of accumulated wealth, power, fame, or contributions to their time. True, some, like George Francis Train, were rich, and some, like Victoria Woodhull, were politically renowned, and some, like Anne Royall, were pioneers in free speech. But such tangible accomplishments are not the point. For, what these eccentrics offer, beyond diversion, is the example of uninhibited personality in America, a trait so lacking in this highly organized age. By their presence in these pages it is my hope that some small boundaries of sympathy, understanding, and tolerance may be broadened.

Though these eccentrics contributed little to science, government, or the arts, it is my belief that they gave something of more value to their contemporaries and, as a consequence, to us, their heirs. A James Harden-Hickey can still remind us that the age of the plebiscite and the machine need not be an age without dreams and romance. A Delia Bacon can remind us that the libraries of scholarship, even if tidy and already filled, must always allow room for one more investigation, no matter how disorderly. A Timothy Dexter can remind us that public hearing and attention need not be the private prerogative of the formally educated and the well bred. A John Cleves Symmes can remind us that the frontiers of science and imagination must know no limits and no dogma, but that they may be crossed by anyone in the hope that once in a century, by a miracle of freedom and genius, a trespasser may contribute to the welfare of all humanity.

These are the square pegs who would not fit into round holes. They went backward when everyone went forward, and they went forward when everyone stood still. They said nay when others said aye, and they saw black when others saw white. Despite suffering, economic and spiritual, they refused to be garmented in the strait jacket of conformity.

This, and no other, is their achievement and it is enough. For when our society no longer has a single square peg, when it no longer has a recalcitrant individual out of step, when it no longer has a voice that will rise to dissent and disagree and persist in an unorthodoxy, then, and only then, will man have lost his last battle and his last chance.

In 1859 John Stuart Mill, the brilliant and sensitive English political economist and philosopher, published
On Liberty
. In it he defended the square peg, and he wrote a warning to generations yet unborn:

“Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.”

II

The King of Thirty-Sixth Street

“We, James, Prince of Trinidad, have resolved to commemorate our accession to the throne of Trinidad by the institution of an Order of Chivalry… .”

JAMES A. HARDEN-HICKEY

Surprise was an emotion few subscribers to the
New York Tribune
felt by the year 1893. During the previous half decade, most had been stunned into silent acceptance of every new human hydra-head. Through the medium of their favorite front-page, readers had absorbed cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of Ignatius Donnelly, who ran for vice-president and published a book resurrecting the lost continent of Atlantis from the sea; Anthony Comstock, who disapproved of Little Egypt and was well on his way to destroying 160 tons of obscene literature; and Dr. Mary Walker, who served as a physician during the Civil War and frightened a Medal of Honor out of Congress with her daily attire of frocked coat and striped trousers.