The Square Pegs by Irving Wallace Read Free Book Online Page B

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