The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  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.

  Yet, despite their resistance to bizarre individualists, even the oldest and most calloused Constant Readers blinked on the morning of November 5, 1893, when they picked up their twenty-four-page Sunday Tribune and read the exclusive lead story on page one.

  The column-long story, which spilled over into the next column, was headlined “To Be Prince of Trinidad.” The subheadline explained: “He Is Baron Harden-Hickey.” Beneath that, in slightly smaller type, one more bit of exposition: “His Ambition Is To Found A Nation On A Little Island In The Sea.”

  The opening paragraph of the news story, which would have been considered somewhat lackadaisical by latter-day Tribune editors and stockholders, stated:

  “If the plans of Baron James A. Harden-Hickey are carried out there will be a brand new nation brought into existence on the face of the earth next spring. That sounds like a remarkable undertaking, but Baron Harden-Hickey is confident that it can be carried through successfully and as easily as many other remarkable and apparently impossible achievements. He does not propose to overthrow any established government or split any twain. He is not going to encroach upon anybody’s territory or interfere with anybody’s rights. He has found a place where nobody lives, which, he says, nobody owns, and which is not claimed among the possessions of any existing nation. The place is the Island of Trinidad, situated in the South Atlantic Ocean, in latitude 20 degrees 30 minutes south and longitude 29 degrees 22 minutes west. It is 700 miles from the coast of Brazil, which is the point of land nearest to it. It contains about sixty square miles of territory. There Baron Harden-Hickey proposes to found an independent state, the head of which shall be sovereign and treat on equal terms with the mighty rulers of the earth.”

  Five paragraphs later, the Tribune took time out to remind its subscribers that this was an authentic scoop. “A Tribune reporter found Baron Harden-Hickey at his home last evening, and asked him about his extraordinary undertaking. Baron Harden-Hickey expressed surprise that the Tribune should have learned of his scheme, but added good-naturedly, I know that great newspapers have wonderful means of getting information. I used to be a newspaperman myself. As for my plans, they are not yet mature, but I will tell you as much about them as I can.’”

  What Harden-Hickey did not tell the Tribune, in the twelve quotes that followed, and what the Tribune did not tell its readers, was that Harden-Hickey planned not only to found a new island-nation, but also to crown himself King James I of that nation.

  In subsequent months most of New York, as well as the rest of America, became more fully acquainted with Baron Harden-Hickey ‘s project. At first, much to the consternation of his wife, a Standard Oil and iron heiress, Harden-Hickey worked out of his residence at 18 West Fifty-second Street in Manhattan. Later he established the more formal Chancellerie de la Principaute de Trinidad in a brownstone house at 217 West Thirty-sixth Street. While he toured the country to arrange for serfs he left an old Parisian friend and onetime wine merchant, Count de la Boissière, behind as his Secretaire d’Etat pour les Affaires Étrangères.

  In San Francisco, Harden-Hickey purchased a schooner to transport colonists to Trinidad and to ferry supplies and mail between Trinidad and Brazil. He hired an a
gent to bargain for construction of docks, wharves, a lighthouse, and homes. As he planned an idle aristocracy, with four orders of chivalry, and as his island-empire had nothing native to subjugate beyond turtles, Harden-Hickey decided to buy himself a ready-made proletariat. After months of dickering in California, he contracted for five hundred Chinese coolies to do all the manual labor on the island. Back in New York, he ordered a quantity of postage stamps bearing pictures of the island, several red flags imprinted with yellow triangles, and one sparkling royal crown.

  Constant Readers scratched their heads. Nine days had elapsed, and then nine months, and the cuckoo was still with them. But between November 5, 1893, when the Tribune first broke the story of Harden-Hickey, and August 1, 1895, when his island-kingdom became an international cause célèbre, some New Yorkers slowly began to realize that what they had on hand was not a madman, but simply a human born out of time. It was like having King Arthur in we ll Bridgeport, Connecticut.

  James Aloysius Harden-Hickey was born in San Francisco on December 8, 1854. His father, E. C. Hickey, was a well-to-do Irish miner. His mother was French. Thirty-three years after his birth, in a book called Our Writers, an encyclopedia of famous French authors which he wrote in French and had published in Paris, Harden-Hickey included a full page of material on himself and his antecedents alongside biographies of such other writers as Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Victor Hugo and their families.

  “My old Irish family traces its origin to Milesius, King of Spain,” he wrote. “Several members of the Hickey family have served the French kings as officers in the Irish Brigade. One of them was wounded at Fontenoy. The Hardens were from Normandy. Their nobility was acknowledged by a charter given Antoine de Harden by Henry II in 1556. Jacques de Harden, the last offspring from this family, took a ship with James II for Kinsale, settled in Ireland, and allied himself to the Hickey family.” When King James II, a converted Catholic, tried to fight the Established Church of England, he met strong resistance from clergy and gentry alike. By November 1688 William of Orange had landed at Tor Bay, and James II was on his way into French exile, dutifully followed by the Hickeys, ardent Catholic Royalists.

  Harden-Hickey’s parents were among San Francisco’s earliest settlers. As he was born only five years after the gold rush, the San Francisco of his youth was one vast brawling beerhall. His French-born mother, remembering the amenities of the Old World, remembering perhaps that not so long before, other Hickeys had known courtlier days at Saint-Germain, suggested that the boy be educated in a more cultured climate.

  Harden-Hickey was taken to Paris, It was the Paris of Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, Jean Troppmann, Cora Pearl, the Goncourts, and the young Sarah Bernhardt, “Paris at her maddest, baddest and best,” a New York correspondent reported. Above all, Paris was again part of a storybook monarchy, gay and garish in the old tradition. Sober historians spoke of “the French Court’s glitter and intrigue.” J. M. Thompson wrote that “the Court had never been so formal or magnificent since the time of Louis XV, or so frivolous since that of Marie Antoinette.”

  Napoleon III, though he appeared ill-cast for his glamorous role and though he too often resembled a figure misplaced by Madame Tussaud, proved himself a true grandson of the earlier Napoleon’s Josephine. He instituted the Médaille Militaire for courage in the field of combat. He resumed the stag hunts, in eighteenth-century costume, at Fontainebleau. He constructed the great Paris Opera, and he completed the Louvre. He introduced footmen in knee breeches and Cent-Gardes in steel helmets to the Tuileries. He again made the institution of mistress fashionable: Elizabeth Howard, the onetime English barmaid, who saved 20,000 pounds from the generosity of her patrons and backed Napoleon’s coup d’état; Marguerite Bellanger, the circus rider and acrobat, whose remarkable energies gave the Emperor a child and a physical collapse, thereby provoking the Empress to rage at her: “Mademoiselle, you have got to go! You are killing the Emperor!”; and the Contessa Nicchia de Castiglione, the Florentine beauty who counted the Pope her friend and the King of Sardinia her lover, whose mission by order of her King was to win Napoleon’s affection for herself and for her homeland and whose mission was, at least partially, accomplished.

  This dazzling, dreamlike environment was James Harden-Hickey’s childhood playground. It made a lasting imprint on his memory. For while impressionable youngsters in the New World were being prepared for the American Century by Ragged Dick and Mark The Match Boy, Harden-Hickey was becoming convinced that Napoleon III, who had won the Crimean War, restored the Pope to Rome, and sent Maximilian and Carlotta to Mexico, could defeat and dominate anyone on earth. The Emperor could not, of course, as the Germans proved a few years later at Sedan, but Harden-Hickey always thought so. He would never quite forget Napoleon’s waxed mustache, the giant Zouave guards, the Empress Eugénie in her carriage, the jingling of medals and the rattling of swords in the Tuileries and about the Elysées, the prefect Baron Haussmann’s sweeping grand boulevards (widened so that mobs could no longer impede troop movements by throwing furniture into the streets), and, as he would later write, “the Parisian crowds gaily leaving the theatres to fill the brilliantly lit cafés with their windows sparkling as from a thousand fires.”

  He was soon taken from Paris and enrolled in the Jesuit College at Namur, Belgium, near Liege. The change seems to have distressed him. The only record Harden-Hickey left of that experience was in an autobiographical novel, Souvenirs of a Gommeux, published in Paris during 1877. Gommeux was slang of that period for dandy. In this novel Harden-Hickey sends his hero, Henri, “son of wealthy though honest people,” to a Jesuit College in Belgium. “Lock up the youth, as is the habit nowadays,” wrote Harden-Hickey, “and they become sullen, unhealthy; their sap dries up.”

  After the Jesuit College, Harden-Hickey was sent to the University of Leipzig for two years to study law. When he was nineteen it was agreed that he would make the French Army his career. He passed the competitive examinations for the Military College established by Napoleon I in 1808 at Saint-Cyr-L’École, three miles west of Versailles. This, apparently, was more like it. In Saint-Cyr, where students wore

  uniforms, swords, and monarchist manners, Harden-Hickey had little difficulty in conjuring up a very real picture of the imperial court.

  In 1875 Harden-Hickey was graduated, with honors, from Saint-Cyr, and shortly thereafter, his father died in San Francisco. There was a small inheritance. Reluctantly, Harden-Hickey decided to abandon his military career and to spend the money on a new profession in France. For two years he dabbled in sculpture, and, under the pseudonym of Saint-Patrice, wrote and sold his first novel. Angered by the attacks of Parisian Republicans on the Catholic Church, he turned his full attention to writing. By 1878 he had been made a Baron of the Catholic Church for his numerous pamphlets defending the Faith and had married the Countess de Saint-Pery, by whom he later had a boy and a girl. He was twenty-four years old, powerfully built, a tall, square-faced young man with a crew haircut, drooping mustache, cleanshaven chin, and thick neck. Though he wore a low collar, and affected to dress like the late Baudelaire, he was proper, conservative, Catholic, and a little dull. If he possessed the qualifications for royal rule, no one, not even his wife, yet suspected it.

  Between 1876 and 1880, Baron Harden-Hickey poured forth eleven full-length novels. All were written in French under the name Saint-Patrice. Recently, when I visited the Bibliothèque Nationale I found all but three of Harden-Hickey’s novels still on the shelves. His first, A Love in Society, moves its cosmopolitan characters from Paris to Interlaken to Lourdes to Moscow. In the climax of the book, the young Scottish-born, French-bred hero, Robert, pursues his Polish love, Sophie, who is being forced to marry rich old Barewski, to the wintry (twenty-two degrees below zero) steppes of Russia. Robert kidnaps Sophie and flees with her in a sleigh while hungry wolves and Barewski give chase. Robert fights them off with a hatchet. The wolves, discouraged, give up and settle for Barewski.

&nbs
p; Four years later, Harden-Hickey’s eleventh and final novel, Fierpepin’s Metamorphosis, written in Belgium during September 1880, appeared. Fierpepin is a bony, haughty nobleman, a dim carbon-copy of Don Quixote, whose ancestors were all failures (one, notably, left his wife in a chastity belt, forgetting that her lover was a locksmith). Fierpepin determines to run for the Chamber of Deputies against a common Republican, Dr. Theodore Globule, the town doctor and mayor. As Dr. Globule hypnotizes the masses with magnificent oratory, Fierpepin knows he must muffle the man. Fierpepin employs an air pump to extract the bark from a large dog, and with this goes to call upon his opponent. When the doctor stands open-mouthed at some audacious remark made by his visitor, Fierpepin promptly stuffs the dog’s bark into his rival’s mouth. After that, instead of speaking, Dr. Globule can only woof at political meetings. Fierpepin wins the election easily.

  While all of Harden-Hickey’s novels contain a certain amount of muttering against democracy, his most socially significant effort, presented in the form of twelve satirical letters exchanged between an underpaid American correspondent in Europe, Jonathan Smith, and his editor on the Boston Daily News, Samuel Jones, was called Letters from a Yank. Editor Jones assigns his correspondent to seek out an amazing new French invention “a power capable of replacing water, steam, horses, windmills, velocipedes and all known engines” a bottle of human perspiration, extracted from “the toil of others.” In Paris, while hunting down the concoction, Reporter Smith is chased by the police, hides in a stuffed ostrich, is given away as first prize in the National Lottery, and is won by James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald.