The Square Pegs (6 page)

Before the storm abated and the
Astoria
was able to continue on its way, Harden-Hickey apparently revisited the island, solemnly claimed it in his own name, and “planted a flag of his own design.” As he did nothing more about the island at once, this seemed to be merely a momentary romantic gesture. He spent the entire following year in India, listening to holy men and learning Sanskrit, after which he went for brief visits to China and Japan. At last, in 1890, he returned to Republican France, where his earlier offenses seem to have been forgotten.

In Paris, which was just then becoming a shopping center for American heiresses who did their sightseeing from the
Almanach de Gotha
instead of
Baedeker
, Baron Harden-Hickey met Anna H. Flagler, daughter of John Haldane Flagler, a man whom newspapers referred to as “the Standard Oil magnate,” but who had actually made his fortune in the manufacture of iron (some of which was used to construct the $275,000 ironclad
Monitor
in 1861). In 1891, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York City, Harden-Hickey and Miss Flagler were married by the Reverend John Hall.

During the next, few years, while residing in the Flagler home in New York, Harden-Hickey unnerved his family by devoting his energies to several highly original projects, among them translating a book on Buddhism, completing his volume
Bible Plagiarisms
, perfecting a plan for missionary work to convert Americans to Buddha, and developing means of extracting money from his disapproving father-in-law.

Flagler had powerfully opposed the marriage. He regarded Harden-Hickey as a foreign fortune-seeker. In a temper, Harden-Hickey married Anna Flagler “without settlements” and supported her out of his own dwindling savings. When his money was gone, Harden-Hickey tried to obtain his wife’s money, left her by her mother, with her father as executor. Flagler, not unexpectedly, refused to turn over the money. He said he had it soundly invested, whereas Harden-Hickey might do something foolish with it. Harden-Hickey was soon reduced to seeking funds from Flagler, whom he hated with mounting intensity, through his friend, Count de la Boissière, who, as a former stockbroker, got on well with Flagler, and who himself was now an American citizen after having married a Virginia heiress.

With this painfully acquired cash, Harden-Hickey not only supported his wife, but also purchased, ranches and mines in Texas, California, and Mexico. This involvement in commercialism seemed to have a discouraging effect on the Baron. He was a nonentity without a future, and his mind was filled with the delights of self-extinction. “While he was in New York, I was a reporter on the Evening Sun,” wrote Richard Harding Davis in 1912, “but I cannot recall ever having read his name in the newspapers of that day, and I heard of him only twice; once as giving an exhibition of his water-colors at the American Art Galleries, and again as the author of a book I found in a store in Twenty-second Street, just east of Broadway, then the home of the Truth Seeker Publishing Company.”

This slender, 167-page volume, entitled
Euthanasia; the Aesthetics of Suicide
, by Baron Harden-Hickey, published by the Truth Seeker Company in 1894, is perhaps one of the most depressing documents in the history of literary eccentricity. Copies have become extremely rare. I was able to find one in the New York Public Library and one in the Library of Congress. Recently, I visited the Truth Seeker bookstore, at 38 Park Row, New York, on the chance that they might still stock one of their old authors. The store was on the tenth floor of an office building, and the glazed-glass entrance bore the names of three organizations: “Truth Seeker Company … National Liberal League … American Association For The Advancement of Atheism, Inc.” The Truth Seeker people were somewhat suspicious of my request for a volume on self-destruction by an American Buddhist. Their latest catalogue, while listing such titles as
What Would Christ Do About Syphilis
? and
Bible Myths
and recent volumes on free thought, made no mention of
Euthanasia
; the
Aesthetics of Suicide
. One of the clerks in the office telephoned his father, Dr. Charles F. Potter, who had been the first president of the Euthanasia Society. I repeated the title and the name of the author to Dr. Potter, and he thought he remembered it. “If I remember correctly,” he said, “there was a brief flurry of sales, and then the authorities suppressed it. They never seem to like books condoning suicide.”

In this book, the only one he wrote wholly in English, Harden-Hickey discusses suicide and justifies it with four hundred quotations ranging from the Bible to Shakespeare. While he claims to have written only the preface, it seems certain that many of the quotations “by the greatest thinkers the world has ever produced” are of doubtful parentage.

Harden-Hickey does not credit the sources of his quotations, and many may have had the origin in the study of the Flagler residence.

At any rate, the preface is the author’s own handiwork. On page 4, after a wordy attack on “avaricious and knavish priests … vain philosophers … cranky scientists” who would obscure the Truth, Harden-Hickey finally gets to the point.

“Suicide has become such a common occurrence in our time the average being one every three minutes that it merits to attract more attention than the morbid curiosity of the readers of daily papers. To the Christian, suicide appears as a heinous crime; the followers of Christ seem to have forgotten that if the legend on which their religion was founded were true, Christ would occupy a very prominent place in the annals of suicide plenty of men have cut the thread of their own life, but we have no authentic record of any God having done so; it may also be added that we have no authentic record of a God performing any act whatsoever.”

But Harden-Hickey is just warming to his subject. On pages 6 and 7, he continues with more vigor: “One can readily understand that priests who live off men should object to their dying without paying toll, under the form of sacraments and indulgencies, for crossing over the fatal bridge; but in the name of Reason why should free-thinkers indulge in snickering and bickering at the man independent and brave enough to throw off the burden of life when it has become cumbersome. In so doing they place themselves on the same level as the most blatant churchman.

“To return to suicide, it has been universally approved of by all philosophical religions, and has been practiced by some of the most noted men of antiquity.

“In the following pages will be found the pith of what has been written on the subject by the greatest thinkers the world has ever produced: Zeno, Epictetus, Diogenes, Seneca, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Rousseau, Donne, Hume, Gibbon, Montesquieu, etc.

“May this little work contribute to the overthrow of the reign of fear! May it nerve the faltering arm of the poor wretch to whom life is loathsome, but death full of terrors; let him say with the noble Cato:

‘Thus I am doubly armed; my death and life,

My bane and antidote, are both before me:

This in a moment brings me to an end;

But this informs me I shall never die.

The soul, secured in her existence, smiles

At the drawn dagger, and defies its point.’

And let him calmly, without anger or joy, but with the utmost indifference, cast off the burden of existence.”

The text and illustrations that follow are for adults only those with the thickest of skins and the strongest of stomachs. In collaboration with the “greatest thinkers,” Harden-Hickey suggests the best means of self-annihilation, mentioning fifty-one instruments (among them scissors) and eighty-eight poisons. The content of the book is further enlivened by a half dozen black-and-white drawings of men and women in various postures of suicide. Few, however, appear to be proper examples of Harden-Hickey’s theory that suicide is a privilege. Most seem distressed or downright miserable. The first picture exhibits a man in full attire seated on his bed with a revolver against his right temple. Another picture displays a woman slumped before a coal stove, expiring from the fumes. A third shows a fop writhing on the floor, his glass of poison overturned nearby.

The quotations, whatever their sources, are more convincing and cheerful. On page 43 the intelligent are advised; “The wise man lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can.” On page 128 the hedonists are courted: “We must shake off this fond desire of life and learn that it is of little consequence when we suffer; that it is of greater moment to live well than to live long, and that oftentimes it is living well not to live long.”

The very year this book appeared, Baron Harden-Hickey seemed suddenly to have found a reason for
not
committing suicide. Hemmed in, as he was, by Flagler’s New York—Wall Street, J. Pierpont Morgan, Sr., Procter and Gamble’s first $40,000 advertising campaign, the Plaza, the horseless carriage Harden-Hickey began to retreat more and more into the world of Napoleon III. Retreating, he remembered Trinidad. Or perhaps he had never forgotten it. At once the raucous new civilization of the stock exchange and the skyscraper seemed less real than the barren isle off Brazil. Harden-Hickey decided to claim the isle off Brazil for his very own.

By the time the
New York Tribune
reporter came calling, in November 1893, Harden-Hickey had managed to endow his fantasy with a certain amount of legality. “I propose to take possession of the Island of Trinidad under a maxim of international law which declares that anybody may seize and hold waste land that is not claimed by anybody else,” he explained. “The island is uninhabited and has been so for more than a hundred years. Two or three centuries ago the Portuguese attempted to colonize it, probably by a penal colony. They soon gave up the attempt, however. The English also once made a feeble effort to plant a colony upon it, but the project was abandoned after a short settlement. The remains of these early settlements may still be seen upon the island.”

The
Tribune
representative, still skeptical, then inquired: “How will other nations regard the fact of your possession? Does Portugal or England or any other nation lay claim on the island?”

“No nation lays any claim on it,” Harden-Hickey insisted. “It has been abandoned for over a century. I do not expect any difficulty. I have already informed several governments of my purpose, and have received favorable replies from some of them. I am assured that at least one nation will formally recognize my government as soon as I get it established.”

In succeeding months, after crowning himself King James I of Trinidad, and appointing Count de la Boissière his Foreign Minister, Harden-Hickey opened his chancellery at 217 West Thirty-six Street, New York City, to treat with potential subjects as well as with other powers. “Trinidad’s Chancellery is not a palace,” reported
The New York Times
. “It is in one of the rooms of a dwelling house built on the block system.” A
Tribune
man, going to visit de la Boissière, found it “a surprisingly humble place for so high a dignitary.” Richard Harding Davis, calling for an interview, reported: “The chancellery was not exactly in its proper setting. On its doorstep children of the tenements were playing dolls with clothes-pins; in the street a huckster in raucous tones was offering wilted cabbages to women in wrappers leaning from the fire-escapes; the smells and the heat of New York in midsummer rose from the asphalt. It was a far cry to the wave-swept island off the coast of Brazil.”

Almost two decades later, Richard Harding Davis returned to Thirty-sixth Street, and then recorded: “Three weeks ago I revisited it and found it unchanged.” The neighborhood was the same except that the York Hotel had replaced the brownstone.

Four decades after Davis’s last visit, I went to 217 West Thirty-sixth Street. The chancellery had undergone one more metamorphosis. It was now a narrow barbershop, with a watch-repair concession in the front of the shop near the window. This was located in what was called the Garment Center Building, and it looked out upon a street thick with trucks, vans, and taxis, and upon a sidewalk filled with workmen who were pushing racks of dresses. I did not go inside.

In 1894 the interior of the chancellery, while it gave more promise of adventure than a barbershop, also invariably disappointed those who had been educated to expect a certain lushness in connection with the purple. On the door to the chancellery was pasted a strip of paper which, in the handwriting of de la Boissière, announced: Chancellerie de la Principaute de Trinidad. The austerity of the interior made a Trappist monastery, by comparison, seem positively frivolous. “There is an oilcloth covering on the floor of the room,” reported the
Tribune
, “and the furniture of the room consists of a small wooden table, much the worse for wear and having a covering of wrapping paper; three chairs, which bear the marks of age; a bookcase such as might be bought in a secondhand store for one dollar, and some shelves with pigeonholes. Some rubber-stamps on the table take the place of State seals.” Richard Harding Davis recalled that on the chancellery table were also copies of a recent royal proclamation, newly printed Trinidad postage stamps, and several pasteboard boxes filled with gold-and-red enameled crosses of the Order of Trinidad. On the wall hung a large announcement: Sailings To Trinidad March 1 and October 1.

When the press asked the sorely tried John H. Flagler if he recognized King James I, he, busy as he was with his National Tube Company and his banking, insurance, and mining investments, replied seriously: “My son-in-law is a very determined man. He will carry out any scheme in which he is interested. Had he consulted me about this, I would have been glad to have aided him with money or advice. My son-in-law is an extremely well-read, refined, well-bred man. He does not court publicity. While he was staying in my house, he spent nearly all the time in the library translating an Indian book on Buddhism. My daughter has no ambition to be a queen or anything else than what she is an American girl. But my son-in-law means to carry on this Trinidad scheme and he will.”