The Square Pegs Read online

  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 hi
s 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.

  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 su
pplied 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.