In 1880, Stone bequeathed a half-million dollars to Western Reserve College on the condition that it relocate from Hudson, Ohio, to Cleveland. At the same time, the philanthropist Leonard Case, Jr., conveyed $1 million to found a polytechnic school in Cleveland to be called the Case School of Applied Science. Adjacent sites were found for the two institutions on Euclid Avenue, three miles east of downtown. In honor of Stone’s son who had drowned while a student at Yale, the academic department of the newly minted Western Reserve University was named Adelbert College. The college’s first building, Adelbert Hall, was dedicated two years later, in October 1882, after Hay and Clara had left for Europe. For Amasa Stone, it was the last great achievement of his life. From then on, everything went drearily downhill.
Stone wrote frequent letters to Hay in Europe, discussing business but dwelling mainly on his health. Insomnia and chronic indigestion indicated a deepening depression, and by the first of the year, Stone began suggesting that the Hays consider abbreviating their trip. “[S]hould I be taken away,” he told Hay, “you are the one to take the helm.”
However flattered Hay may have been by his father-in-law’s trust, he was reluctant to interrupt his itinerary or his own rest cure. “I came abroad hoping to get some benefit to my [own] health,” he answered Stone, adding even more selfishly, “As this is the last visit we shall make to Europe for many years, perhaps we shall ever make, I want to see as much as convenient.”
They had accepted invitations to the Clarks in Scotland, the Cunliffes in Wales, and several more country houses. American minister Lowell had promised to present Clara to Queen Victoria at one of the first drawing rooms of the season. Both she and Hay were thoroughly in love with England, but for Hay the communion was especially profound, and thus his disgruntlement at being pulled away prematurely was more pronounced. “If I am able to spend a month or two of the early summer in London,” he reasoned with his father-in-law, “I can meet and make the acquaintance of a considerable number of the leading men of letters and science in London, whose acquaintance and perhaps occasional correspondence will be a pleasure and advantage to me the rest of my life.”
Throughout the winter, Stone’s letters grew more pitiful and his hints more plaintive. “I seem to have lost vigour,” he wrote in early March 1883. “You should not be asked to come home until you are fully ready, but it may be for your interest to come home at an early day.” It was hard to believe he was near death; then again, he honestly seemed on the verge of losing his grip. Finally Hay and Clara could stand no more mewling, and they booked passage for May 10, cutting their trip short by four months.
They were not deprived of all diversion. At the end of January they enjoyed a short jaunt through Provence, and in February they made their way to Florence and Siena, catching up with Howells and Constance Woolson. By the third week of March, they were in Paris, tarrying not as long as they would have wished but allowing plenty of time for Clara to be fitted by Worth and several other couturiers. They crossed the Channel on April 2, with a full month remaining before they had to sail home.
In London they found hardly a moment’s rest. King was in town, still tearing about, trying to round up buyers for his Mexican mines. They also saw a good deal of the Clarks, Cunliffes, and two more friends of Henry Adams, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Milnes Gaskell, all of whom were in London. They were given private tours of Windsor Castle and the galleries of the Royal Academy. At a reception hosted by Lord Granville, the foreign secretary, Hay met “many of the Diplomatic Body and principal nobility of the kingdom,” he reported to his father-in-law, whom he knew was decidedly averse to such pomp and circumstance. “As a rule the higher the rank, the uglier and queerer they looked and the worse they were dressed.” Regrettably, the queen’s drawing room receptions were delayed, due to the death of her personal servant, John Brown, at the end of March. The first was now scheduled for the day the Hays were to depart London.
There was little that either of them could say to cheer up Amasa Stone. His spirits had sunk even further after the failure of the Union Iron & Steel Company of Chicago and three more companies in which he was a major investor. “[E]verything combined to go wrong all at once,” he lamented to Hay.
Hay wrote from London a week before his departure, offering one more cup of sympathy and encouragement to his suffering father-in-law: “You have had a hard and distressing winter and spring. It seems very hard that one who like yourself has spent his life in doing good to others should now be placed in a position where nobody can do you any good. . . . I rely on your strong constitution, your sober and moral life, the reserve of vitality you have about you, to wear out all your present troubles and to bring you to a healthy and happy condition again. You have so much to live for—to enjoy the results of the good you have done, and to continue your career of usefulness and honor.”
These were his last words to Stone, and they might not have reached him in time. On the afternoon of May 11, two weeks after his sixty-fifth birthday, Stone locked himself in an upstairs bathroom of his Euclid Avenue house, climbed into the tub, and shot himself through the heart with a revolver.
Hay, Clara, and the three children were by then aboard the steamship Germanic, one day beyond the English coast. They would not receive word of Stone’s suicide until they reached New York a week later.
CHAPTER 10
Everlasting Angels
The pilot boat brought the grim news to Hay and Clara as their ship entered New York Harbor. Clearing customs with the bounty of clothing, jewelry, artwork, furniture, and antiques acquired during eleven months of travel was no small chore, but they got through as quickly as they could and hastened to Cleveland. They were too late for Amasa Stone’s funeral, but the burial at Lake View Cemetery was postponed until their arrival. The casket was interred alongside that of Adelbert Stone, on the same hilltop as the grave of James Garfield.
Amasa Stone had appointed Hay and Samuel Mather executors of his estate, and his sons-in-law set to work satisfying the will. “I have a long and toilsome task before me to bring some sort of order out of the confusion in which the Chicago [steel mill] enterprise is fallen,” Hay wrote Henry Adams two days after the burial, “but in the end there will be enough for the widow and the daughters.”
Indeed, there was more than enough. For all his financial worries and recent setbacks, Stone died a very wealthy man. Estimates of his worth ranged from $6 million to $22 million (equivalent to more than twenty and, by some indices, more than fifty times that today). His daughters each were given $600,000 in securities outright, and Hay and Mather each received $100,000 in securities. After various smaller disbursements were made to other relatives, the rest of the estate was divided between the Hays and the Mathers, share and share alike. By early June, with the debts and bequests sorted out, the two couples knew they were now not merely millionaires but millionaires many times over.
Among the many letters of condolence Hay received was a tender note from Henry James: “I thought of you when your ship came in the other day. . . . You are still in the midst of the wretchedness of the event & perhaps you will be too tired & too shocked to read these lines. Put them aside then—for they are only a handshake.” In closing, James mentioned a thought that, even in the days of grief and upheaval, might already have been forming in the mind of John Hay. “It occurs to me,” James said, “that Mr. Stone’s death may perhaps make Cleveland less your residence.”
Hay’s aloofness from Cleveland had begun well before the death of his father-in-law. Ever since moving there in 1875, he had found reasons for getting away, and The Bread-Winners was certainly no love letter to his hometown. He had hoped to be abroad when serialization began in the Century, but with the postponement of publication and his early return from Europe, he now had no choice but to hide in plain sight and hope that the veil of anonymity would not be penetrated.
The first four chapters appeared in August 1883, and sleuthing the identity of the author became a minor national p
astime. “It is hoped that in the next census there will be a special table devoted to ‘the number of persons’ who have claimed or been proclaimed as the author,” one columnist joked. “It will stand by the ‘number of persons struck by lightning’ and ‘the number run over by streetcars.’ “The journal Art Interchange offered a five-dollar reward for “the most keenly appreciative answers” to the question of whether the author was a man or a woman. (Most contestants guessed man. A woman would not allow Alice Belding to “bang and crimp” her hair, one respondent pointed out. “Every average woman of eighteen knows that banging and crimping do not go together.”) So lively was the man- (or woman-) hunt that the September number of Century, containing the second installment of chapters, sold out and went into an unusual second printing. “Everybody is reading it, everybody is talking about it,” exclaimed the Critic. “The Sensational Novel of the Year,” proclaimed another journal.
Hay, not unexpectedly, was the primary suspect from the start. One newspaper pointed out that the description of Arthur Farnham’s library “corresponds almost exactly with the appearance of that cosey room in the residence of Colonel John Hay,” including the location of the safe. Another literary Sherlock Holmes called attention to similarities between The Bread-Winners and Hay’s 1871 short story in Lippincott’s involving a séance and ending with the wholesome hero murdering the oily interloper who has made advances upon his beloved.
A few fingers pointed elsewhere, however: toward Henry Adams, Clarence King, Constance Woolson, and Hay’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder. When William Dean Howells, one of the few people who knew for certain that Hay was the author, came under scrutiny, he deftly deflected his inquisitor, saying, “I wish I had written it.” Hay and Adams found endless amusement in purporting mutual ignorance of the authorship of their respective novels. “I long ago forgave you for writing ‘Democracy,’ ” Hay wrote Adams in August. “1st because you did not write it and 2nd because you are a Five of Heart. But if you have been guilty of this . . . libel upon Cleveland, there is no condonement possible in this or any subsequent worlds.”
Adams replied: “I am glad you did not write ‘The Breadwinners.’ . . . Should I ever come to Cleveland, I hope you will introduce me to the author. . . . As a work of art, I should not hesitate to put the ‘Bread-Winners,’ as far as the story has gone, quite at the head of our Howells-and-James epoch. . . . Howells cannot deal with gentlemen or ladies; he always slips up. James knows almost nothing of women but the mere outside; he never had a wife. This new writer not only knows women, but knows ladies; the rarest of literary gifts. . . . If I had a criticism to make it would be that he is a little hard on reformers.”
Their charade bore hilarious fruit several months later when Adams’s brother, Charles, published a carefully reasoned letter in The Nation, asserting that the authors of The Bread-Winners and Democracy were one and the same. Adams’s mirth was uncontainable. “I want to roll on the floor,” he wrote Hay, “to howl, kick and sneeze; to weep silent tears of thankfulness to a beneficent providence which has permitted me to see this day; and finally I want to drown my joy in oceans of Champagne and lemonade. Never, No, never, since Cain wrote his last newspaper letter about Abel, was there anything so droll.”
At least one review saw a qualitative disparity between The Bread-Winners and Democracy, with the former shining far more brightly, a contrast that must have taken some of the bubbles out of Adams’s champagne. “The Bread-Winners . . . has what Democracy has not—it has depth,” the Saturday Review discerned, “and its author has what the authors [the Review believed there was more than one] of Democracy had not. . . . [I]t has both feeling and imagination. The characters of The Bread-Winners are rounded; those of Democracy are thin and flat. Stick a pin in the best character in Democracy—the Senator—and you can see daylight through him. Stick a pin in [Buffland steel baron] Mr. Temple or Maud Matchin, of The Bread-Winners, and they bleed.”
Reviewers spotted “touches of Fielding or Thackeray” in The Bread-Winners. One called it “a novel of action and spirited incident in an age of introspection and analysis.” A southern critic found a “largeness, a force, a vitality” in the novel and went so far as to declare it “the most masterly novel of American life that has been published since the days of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ ”
Yet for all the laudatory clippings that Hay pasted in his scrapbook, there were others far less kind. “How this disagreeable story ever got . . . access to the public through the fastidious pages of the Century Magazine we are at a loss to imagine,” Literary World derided. The Springfield Republic accused the author of having “no sympathies beyond the circles of wealth and refinement,” from which vantage point “the workingman is either a murderous ruffian, or a senseless dupe, or a stolid, well-meaning drudge, while the man of wealth is, necessarily, a refined, cultivated hero, handsome, stylish, fascinating.” Blue-nosed complainants, meanwhile, expressed dismay at Arthur Farnham’s ungentlemanly miscue—the kiss in the greenhouse. “A man of his breeding” would have resisted the “boldness” of Maud Matchin, scolded the Boston Evening Transcript.
The Cleveland papers were no more welcoming. The Leader, normally a Hay ally, advised that “the anonymous author shows more good sense in remaining unknown than anything else connected with his remarkable work. . . . If called upon to guess the writer we should say that he was a callow youth who at some period in his existence had endured the wild Western horrors of life in Cleveland and was now basking in the fellowship of like-minded dudes in the East.”
Finally, as the serial came to the end of its six-month run in the magazine and was published as a book by Harper & Bros., Hay found it impossible to remain silent. In the March 1884 number of the Century, he aired a long, unsigned letter, addressing criticisms that The Bread-Winners was “conceived from an aristocratic point of view”; that it was “not well written”; and that it was “a base and craven thing to publish a book anonymously.”
His answer to the first charge was less than forthright: “I hardly know what is meant by an aristocratic point of view. I am myself a working man, with a lineage of decent working men; I have been accustomed to earning my own living all my life, with rare and brief holidays.” As a further demonstration of his populist bona fides, he distanced himself from his leading man: “I care little about Farnham. It is true that I gave him a fine house and a lot of money,—which cost me nothing. . . . I wanted him to be a gentleman, and I think he is; but that I can not discuss, for I have never known two people to agree upon a definition of a gentleman.”
To the second charge, that the book was poorly written, he pleaded abject humility, again slightly disingenuously: “I have little technical skill in writing, and no experience whatever in writing of this kind. The fact that my purpose and feeling have been so widely misunderstood is itself the condemnation of my style and method. If people think I meant to represent Arthur Farnham as an ideal hero, or that I have any sentiment but profound admiration and respect for the great mass of American working men, I admit that I have expressed myself with singular and lamentable awkwardness. . . . All this, I admit, is a very inadequate defense against the charge that I have written an inartistic book. No matter how true it is, if the effect is untrue, the book has been badly written; but I, at least, contend that the book is true, and written with an honest purpose.”
His reason for remaining incognito was more defiant but still short on frankness: “I am engaged in business in which my standing would be seriously compromised if it were known that I had written a novel.”
Perhaps so, but his reasons for withholding his name were more involved than the one he provided the Century’s readers. First, of course, he wanted to follow in the enigmatic footsteps of Adams and to feed the confusion over authorship of their respective books. Second, he did not want to bring any further exposure to the Stone family. Then, too, he preferred anonymity because he had written anonymously all his life, beginning with his newspaper contributions d
uring the Lincoln campaign and Civil War. The Pike County ballads had initially appeared with only his initials attached; his editorials in the Tribune were unattributed; and his pact with Nicolay called for obscuring which one wrote which sections. There were exceptions to the anonymity rule—Castilian Days, several short stories—but, in general, Hay eschewed immediate recognition and the scrutiny and judgment that came with it.
The same circumspection also helps to explain why he did not allow his name to appear on a ballot and why, in later years, he was more comfortable as secretary of state and never wished to be president. Was he simply humble, or was he also wary? A man who can reap glory without fame never has to pay a public price when he falls short or topples from grace. Even after a good many people guessed correctly that Hay wrote The Bread-Winners, he steadfastly continued to take “the ascription of its authorship to him in the light of a personal grievance.”
Whatever his motives, the ruse reaped rewards. The Century reported that the serial brought in twenty thousand new subscribers. When the book came out, a single store, Brentano’s in New York, sold five hundred copies in a month. In the first year, the novel sold twenty thousand copies, more than Democracy or The Portrait of a Lady, and did well overseas, translated into French and German. However discreetly, Hay had achieved membership in a rarefied club that included Howells, Twain, James, Adams, and Constance Woolson—all of whom were at the top of their game in 1883. (A jealous Clarence King swore that he too had a novel in the works, to be entitled Monarchy, but like many of his ambitions, it amounted to so much wishful thinking.)
FOR ALL THE SUCCESS of The Bread-Winners, Hay also paid an unexpected price. A year after the book’s publication by Harper & Bros., another anonymous novel appeared, entitled The Money-Makers: A Social Parable. Hay might have been slightly amused if it had been merely a send-up of his own title, but The Money-Makers far exceeded the impudence of parody. It was a downright vicious assault on Hay and the Stone family, with plenty of slashes left over to bloody Whitelaw Reid. The author, Hay soon discovered, was Henry Keenan, a former colleague from the Tribune, who had been with him in Chicago in 1871, covering the fire. The novel takes place that same year.
All the Great Prizes Page 27
