Passing Strange (3 page)

King’s dazzling talk was part mental exercise, part jest, and all performance. As his close friend the diplomat John Hay recalled, “It was hard to remember that this polished trifler, this exquisite wit, who diffused over every conversation in which he was engaged an iridescent mist of epigram and persiflage, was one of the greatest savants of his time.” He seemed “so deliciously agreeable” it could be hard to take him seriously.
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Like an actor, King calculated how to enthrall his listeners. “One fancied him tingling with consciousness, so thoroughly aware of himself and what he was doing, how he was appearing, as to produce the happiest possible effect,” one friend recalled.
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And sometimes he even enchanted himself. His own stories could hold him “quite enthralled within an almost hypnotic control.”
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King deployed his verbal charm to entertain, impress, disarm. “It is but a suggestion of his rare equipment,” Edward Cary wrote of King, “to say that in his talk, as in his work, his imagination was his dominant, at moments his dominating, quality.”
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But the talents that let King wear his learning lightly as he rose through the ranks of American science and letters also allowed him to conceal his secret world. Feinting and dodging with words, he could deflect probing queries, brush off uncomfortable speculation, invent plausible explanations for his sometimes inexplicable behavior. With words he wove the stories that allowed him to live not just a life of contradictions, but a truly double life.

 

 

CLARENCE KING WAS BORN in Newport, Rhode Island, on January 6, 1842, to parents of old American stock. His father’s family emigrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637. Clarence’s great-great-grandfather Benjamin King later settled in Newport and reportedly assisted Benjamin Franklin with his early electrical experiments. Benjamin’s son, Samuel, became a notable portrait painter and an instructor of the artist Washington Allston. And Samuel’s son, Samuel Vernon King—Clarence’s grandfather—became a merchant. By 1803 Samuel Vernon King was a partner in the China trading firm of King and Talbot (later to become Olyphant, King and Company), and four of his sons followed him into the business, including Clarence’s father, James Rivers King.
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Samuel Vernon King suffered some sort of mental collapse in 1809, and his sons later acquired a reputation for being “a little queer,” less for any emotional instability than for their principled opposition to the opium trade.
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Clarence himself inherited none of the family’s business sense. But from his father and uncles he acquired an expansive view of the world and a particular sense of how families worked: while men ventured far afield to earn their livings, women stayed home to raise the children.

 

 

KING’S MOTHER, CAROLINE FLORENCE LITTLE KING, also came from a distinguished family and could trace her ancestry back to Alfred the Great and three signers of the Magna Carta. Florence, as she was known, grew up in a devout Moravian household that emphasized education and public service. Her maternal grandfather, Asher Robbins, represented Rhode Island in the United States Senate from 1825 to 1839 and helped shape the direction of the new Smithsonian Institution. Some lawmakers had called for James Smithson’s bequest to support an observatory or an improved system of common schools. But Robbins articulated a broader view of government-sponsored science, much as his great-grandson would later do, arguing that the “increase and diffusion of knowledge among men” would be better achieved through the establishment of a “scientific and literary institution,” along the lines of a research university.
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Florence’s father, William Little Jr., a talented linguist and orator, died young. But her formidable mother, Sophia Robbins Little, a social reformer and writer, lived to be ninety-four. An acquaintance of Frederick Douglass, an outspoken abolitionist, and the benefactor of prisoners and homeless girls, Mrs. Little shaped young Clarence’s view of the world with her strong antislavery views and religious pacifism. She also bequeathed to him, family members thought, her “rapid diction.”
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Florence Little married James Rivers King on September 5, 1840, the month she turned fifteen. James was six years older. He had been working in the New York office of the family’s China trading firm. But his personal interests tended more to natural science, and he gave his young bride a geology book by the British scientist and divine William Buckland, whose writings about the physical evidence for a great flood gave religious conservatives a way to reconcile the Bible with the new science of geology. He wanted “to awaken my mind to the subject,” Florence later recalled.
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But there proved scant time for philosophical conversations. Within a year of their marriage, James sailed for China to fill in for his older brother, Charles, who had become too ill to return to Canton to handle the family affairs. When sixteen-year-old Florence King gave birth to her first child, Clarence Rivers King, her husband lived half a world away. She hired domestic help to assist with the baby. King’s “nurse was a colored woman,” a close friend wrote many years later, “an old family servant, for whom he ever after cherished a life-long regard and affectionate sympathy.”
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Clarence was more than three and a half years old before he ever met his father. James returned from Canton in the fall of 1845, hoping to find work at home, now that his brother Charles had returned to China. But Charles died at sea that very fall, and in the spring of 1847 James felt compelled to return to China, despite his lack of interest in the family business. Clarence was just five. Florence, still mourning the recent death of a baby girl named Florence, was pregnant again. And she was again alone, without her husband, when in late 1847 she delivered her daughter Grace. It would take months for James to receive news of his daughter’s birth; perhaps he never did. For in 1848, as a family friend put it, came “the shock of tragedy, the pall of bereavement and the manifold burdens of a sweeping family disaster.”
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In September of that year, on her twenty-third birthday, as she mourned the recent death of baby Grace, Florence opened a letter and learned that James had died in Amoy in June.
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She turned, for comfort, to her six-year-old son, their already tight bond now intensified by shared grief. As a friend later recalled, she became at “the outset, as she remained always, his sympathetic and competent intellectual companion.”
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They were “then and always a devoted pair,” recalled another.
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Florence herself thought Clarence not just “a devoted child, but the closest and tenderest
friend.
... He came to me so early in life that I can say like Goethe’s mother, ‘We were young together.’ ”
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Clarence King retained faint memory of the father with whom he lived for only a year and a half, and seldom spoke of him. But the loss haunted him. In the back of a journal he kept as a seventeen-year-old he wrote his father’s name out next to his mother’s and his own in his clear neat hand.
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He held on to his father’s Chinese phrase book and treasured the Chinese antiques in his aunt Catherine King’s house.
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Later, as an adult, he collected Chinese textiles and antiquities himself—“kakemonos, screens, porcelains, remarkable palace and sanctuary embroideries”—and kept them locked away in a storage room, faint echoes of that secret world of his father’s out on the Pacific and in the hongs of Canton.
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KING THUS GREW UP an only child in a world of women. His widowed grandmother, Sophia Little, looked outward to the world and never rested, as a friend recalled, “till such of the needy as she was able to help had been provided for, and such of the suffering as she could reach had been consoled.”
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But his widowed mother, Florence, left nervous and melancholic by the loss of two children and a husband before she was twenty-three, became “completely centred in her son.”
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She held up before him the example of her own scholarly father and grandfather.
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And she threw herself into his education, “learning with an inherited facility both classical and modern languages that she might teach them in turn to him.”
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In 1848 Florence took her six-year-old son to Pomfret, Connecticut, sixty miles northwest of Newport, to enroll him in Christ Church Hall, an academy run by the Reverend Dr. Roswell Park. A former professor of natural philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Park held liberal views about the relationship between science and religion and had a keen interest in geology, already a favorite subject of the young King.
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Florence kept close watch over her son’s education. To save the expense of keeping house, she lived with him in a crowded Pomfret boardinghouse, packed with native-born students and Irish-born laborers.
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Later she recalled the bitter winter day Clarence took her on a mile-long walk through the snow to examine a fossil he had found. Unable to answer his questions, she sent away for a copy of Edward Hitchcock’s
Geology.
And from that time on, she said, their rooms “became a veritable museum where all kinds of specimens were studied with enthusiasm.”
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As King’s secretary later noted, Florence’s single-minded devotion to her son’s interests meant that “almost from his very childhood every step of his studies was a tangential advance upon a certain goal.”
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Florence’s ambitions for her son kept them on the move. Sometime around 1852, she took Clarence to study at a Latin School near Boston, with the intention of preparing him for Harvard.
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But they soon moved on to New Haven, where her younger brother, Robbins Little, taught Greek at Yale. As a youth, Little suffered from a vague nervous malady, and he had sailed to Hong Kong on one of the King company’s clipper ships in search of a cure. He returned healthy, graduated from Yale in 1851, and stayed on to teach. Later he became a lawyer and then superintendent and trustee of New York’s Astor Library, the forerunner of the city’s great public library that would be founded in 1895.
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Florence rented rooms on Church Street, opposite the house of the university president, and there, in the shadow of Yale, she resumed her devoted instruction of her son.
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“He was absolutely obedient to her,” one friend wrote, “and she governed him with a firm will and a gentle hand. I never saw a mother with a keener sense of [the] quality and characteristics of a boy or with greater wisdom or power to develop the best possible.”
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Daniel Coit Gilman, later the Yale University librarian and president of Johns Hopkins University, remembered that the young Clarence “had the same bright face, winning smile, agile movement, that we knew in later life.”
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In the fall of 1855, Florence moved again, now taking her thirteen-year-old son to enroll in the “Classical Division” of Hartford High School, one of New England’s best public schools. They boarded together in other people’s homes as Clarence studied Latin, Greek, and English, along with mathematics and both ancient and modern history.
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But in Hartford, King finally stepped outside his mother’s orbit to form his first deep friendships with other boys. He and his fellow students Daniel Dewey and James Terry Gardiner became an inseparable trio.
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They took long tramps out across the Connecticut countryside, and as Dan later recalled, “talked as boys seldom do.” “Truly,” he wrote to Clarence, “we have had a strangely happy boyhood together.”
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The three friends addressed one another as “brother,” and King wrote that they “resolved never to lose our confidence in each other and never get the bashfulness of saying ‘love.’ ”
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Like other adolescent boys of the mid-nineteenth century, they embraced intense same-sex friendships as a matter of course, and they exchanged long, self-absorbed letters whenever they were apart. They pondered the state of their souls, worried about their futures, speculated about the mysteries of women. King, however, also worried about money.

In December 1856 mobs rose up against the foreign-owned warehouses and factories in Canton. The family firm of King and Company, in which James had invested his assets, lost nearly everything, and the company collapsed completely the following year when a steamer sent with money to Shanghai to cover the firm’s obligations disappeared without a trace.
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These far-off events halfway around the globe left Florence King and her son with scant financial resources. In April 1859 seventeen-year-old Clarence withdrew from school without a diploma because of an “illness,” unspecified in the records, but perhaps an early manifestation of the depression that would stalk him later in life.
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The future “looks very dark,” confessed “Clare” to James Gardiner in 1859. “My only comfort is that God who over-rules all, will be the father of the fatherless, and trusting to that promise I pray for patience and real humility.” He hesitated to confide even in the “kind and sympathizing” Dan, “for fear of making him sad.”
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But King did join Gardiner and Dewey that summer for a camping trip in the Green Mountains of Vermont and in the outdoor life found the balm for his low spirits and wavering self-confidence. As he would write many years later, “Nature is the greatest medicine for my soul.”
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Already, King had a keen eye for observation. “If any question arose as to any object seen during the day, whether we had particularly noted it or not,” Gardiner later wrote, “King could always describe it from memory with great minuteness. He seemed to photograph everything that passed before his eyes.”
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