The Last Days of Night(110)
When I first discovered that a twenty-six-year-old attorney, only eighteen months out of law school, was at the center of the current war before going on to found one of America’s most preeminent law firms, I immediately wanted to learn everything I could about him. I was shocked to find that there is no proper biography of Paul Cravath. It was this absence of scholarly history that inspired me to write this book, and it was the paucity of material available that dictated it should be a novel.
The basic biographical information about Paul Cravath and his family contained in the novel is true. My descriptions of Paul and his life come from the few sources we have: The Cravath Firm and Its Predecessors 1819–1948 (Robert Swaine, privately printed), a New Yorker profile of him from when he became chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Opera in 1932 (“Public Man,” The New Yorker, January 2, 1932), an entry in The National Cyclop?dia of American Biography (Volume 11, 1902), his and Agnes’s wedding announcement (“Marriage of Agnes Huntington,” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 1892), the Oberlin student newspaper, and of course his court filings.
My depiction of Thomas Edison is largely based on The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World, by Randall Stross. It’s a wonderful and highly engaging biography of Edison, and it supplied a lot of Edison’s personality and biography in this book. Edison’s voice is drawn from his letters and journals, which are kept at Rutgers University. Edison wrote in his diary most every day of his life, and through it one gets a fascinating glimpse of his inner thoughts. The majority of the Edison Papers at Rutgers are online, as of this writing.
There is no definitive biography of George Westinghouse, but that’s a book that I would very much love to read one day.
All personal and biographical description of Nikola Tesla contained here is accurate. Margaret Cheney’s Tesla: Man Out of Time was an extremely helpful resource, as was Tesla’s own autobiography, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. It’s as singular a reading experience as you’d expect.
Many historical accounts of Nikola Tesla mention his impenetrable accent and the difficulties faced by those struggling to decipher his speech. In real life, however, his grammar was impeccable, if elaborate. It was only his thick accent that made him so hard for Americans to understand. This left me with a problem: How to convey Tesla’s accent on the page? I could transliterate his Serbian accent, but that seemed inelegant to read. (“Meeesterr Crahvahth…”)
But as I read through Tesla’s autobiography, a solution presented itself. Tesla wrote in long, winding, grammatically adventurous sentences. His English was fluent, but it was almost archaic, even for the 1880s. Every sentence reads as if it’s about to fall in on itself from the grammatical circumlocutions and unexpected word choices. What I’ve done here is to use his writing style as a model for his speaking style, while upending the grammar so he’s even harder to understand. This makes his sentences as confusing to read as they would be to hear.
When it comes to Agnes Huntington, the historical record is shockingly blank. All information that we have about her comes from an article about her career and marriage in The Illustrated American (December 3, 1892); her entry in The Dramatic Peerage from 1892; her entry in Woman’s Who’s Who of America (1914–1915); an interview she gave about her legal troubles with W. H. Foster (“Agnes Huntington’s Story,” The New York Times, December 14, 1886); her entry in Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature, Science and Education (Volume 49, 1892); a review of her performance in Paul Jones (“Paul Jones in New-York,” The New York Times, September 21, 1890); the 1870 U.S. Census of Kalamazoo; gossip reports of her engagement to Henry Jayne (Town Topics, November 3, 1892; “Did He Jilt ‘Paul Jones,’?” The Washington Post, October 30, 1892; “Denied by Miss Huntington,” The New York Times, October 30, 1892).
From those sources, I can confidently assert the following: Agnes Huntington was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but never found renown (or even mention!) in society until her first appearance singing in London. She made a name for herself in Europe, accompanied always by her mother, who seemed oddly silent about their family background. As far as I can tell, even though Agnes and Fannie have the last name Huntington, they were not related to the famous Huntington family, either its California branch or its East Coast one. Agnes had some sort of murky legal squabble with the manager of the Boston Ideals. She had many gentleman admirers of very high status on both sides of the pond. She was engaged to Henry Jayne for a time, but he broke it off in 1892. She later married Paul Cravath, an up-and-coming New York lawyer who at that point in their lives would have been of considerably lower social status.
Everything else about Agnes’s story in this novel is imagined (the stolen dress, the borrowed name, etc.). The manner in which she meets Paul—hiring him as her attorney—is also imagined, though the case for which she hires him is real. (In reality her lawyer was named Abram Dittenhoefer.) In compressing the timeline of events, however, I’ve moved this legal case from 1886 to 1888. In real life it would have been resolved before Paul became Westinghouse’s attorney.
It is my belief—though I can’t prove it—that the historical Agnes Huntington was hiding something about her past. Something tells me her real story is even more fantastic than the one I’ve created for her in these pages.
Chapter 1: The opening scene of the burning workman is based on two real public immolations: one on May 11, 1888 (“A Wireman’s Recklessness,” The New York Times, May 12, 1888) and another on October 11, 1889 (“Met Death in the Wires,” The New York Times, October 12, 1889). Paul was likely not present for either of these, but as the first took place mere blocks from his office, placing him on the scene seemed reasonable enough.