Man's Last Chance

THE SQUARE PEGS (328 pp.)--Irving Wallace--Knopf ($5).

"They drew all manner of things--everything that begins with an M--" "Why with an M?" said Alice. "Why not?" said the March Hare.

Irving (The Fabulous Originals) Wallace uses these lines from Alice in Wonderland as foreword to his studies of nine Americans of the March hare species. Wallace's fondness for just-this-side-of-the-nuthouse characters began in adolescence, when Wilbur Glenn Voliva, onetime high prophet of Zion City, Ill., personally assured him that the earth was shaped like a saucer and the sky ''a solid dome." Wallace concedes that Voliva's own dome was probably far from solid, but he argues that Voliva stood for ''the human freedom to be different." i.e., to be what U.S. tradition calls "individualistic" or nonconformist, what orthodoxy dubs heretical, what psychiatry calls neurotic, what some men in the street call plain cracked. Author Wallace agrees with Mill that "eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded," and then with tender gaiety proceeds to profile a handful of the most eccentric eccentrics of all:

LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER of Newburyport, Mass. Realizing, as no stuffy conformist would, that the quickest way to become a U.S. peer is to confer the title on oneself, Dexter sensibly did just that. "It is the voise of the peopel," he explained in his firm, aristocratic prose, "and I cant Help it and ... it dont hurt A Cat ..." Born in 1747, America's first peer started life "Dressin of skins for briches & glovs," would probably never have grown too big for his briches had he not spent every penny of his savings buying up U.S. "Continentals" and state securities--and harvesting a fortune when the infant Congress decided to redeem such "trash." Yankee Trader Dexter's finest feats included selling 42,000 warming pans and cargoes of mittens to the warm West Indies and, on the solemn advice of a practical joker, shipping a large quantity of coal to Newcastle. The warming pans were used as ladles in a sugarmaking factory and for frying fish; the mittens were snapped up by another trader and rushed to the Baltic. Dexter's coal reached Newcastle in the middle of a coal strike; his profits were "enormous." Most memorable, however, is his treatise, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, which is unpunctuated throughout but in later printings contains a page of mixed punctuation marks for the reader to insert wherever he pleases.

DELIA BACON. She was probably the first to insist that Shakespeare was really a whole syndicate of writers headed by Sir Francis Bacon (no kin). Her arguments "impressed" Emerson, upset Carlyle so much "that he began to shriek." and gave her loyal, kindly friend Nathaniel Hawthorne (then U.S. consul at Liverpool ) some of the most wearisome days of his literary and official life. Zealous, half starved. New England's Bacon delved into Britain's Bacon, haunted Stratford-on-Avon, struggled to pry up the gravestone of "that booby," "[that] Stratford poacher." Delia's 682-page tome, The Philosophy of The Plays Of Shakspere Unfolded, is a major milestone of the great anti-Shakespearean nut race that continues to this day. Delia, after a stretch in an English insane asylum, died in a Hartford, Conn, sanitarium in 1859.

VICTORIA WTOODHULL of Homer, Ohio. By far the most endearing of Author Wallace's nonconformists, lovable, free-loving Victoria ran for the presidency in 1872 on a third party "equal rights" ticket. Most of her previous life had been tough: she and her pretty sister Tennessee had scraped along on the pennies they earned from "spiritualism, magnetic healing, cancer cures, and prostitution." So when an "apparition in [a] Greek tunic." name of Demosthenes, appeared to. her in Pittsburgh and ordered her to try her lust in New York City, the sisters gladly obeyed. Within two ticks Tennessee was transmitting "electrical energy from her body" into the aged but still avid limbs of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. After 18 months of electrical intake, the commodore began discharging his own batteries. He installed Victoria and Tennessee in a brokerage house of their own--first a genteel place ornamented with a huge photograph of the commodore and the words: "Simply to Thy cross I cling." and later a place in Wall Street itself. Three Vanderbilt-aided years of brokerage by the sisters netted them $700,000, some of which, one critic said, came not so much out of railroad shares as out of the sisters' selling of their rich stocks of electrical energy. Victoria was the first presidential candidate who, on being asked for an opinion of another public figure, was in a position to answer simply: "He slept every night for three months in my arms." Both sisters married rich Britons, died peacefully in stately homes.

Others in Author Wallace's grand parade are King James I of Trinidad (real name: James A. Harden-Hickey of San Francisco); Emperor Norton I (real name: Joshua Abraham Norton), who "abolished" Congress and from his palace --a musty room in the Eureka Lodging House in San Francisco--issued orders to Lincoln; New York Herald correspondent George Francis Train, who inspired Jules Verne by actually going "around the world in 80 days"; John Cleeves ("I declare that the earth is hollow") Symmes; Editress Ann Royall, who trapped President John Quincy Adams swimming naked in the Potomac, sat on his clothes, refused to budge until the President, only his head above water, had given her a full statement on "the controversy surrounding the Bank of the United States."

All these, says Author Wallace lovingly, were square pegs in round holes: "They said nay when others said aye." If we refuse to "dissent and disagree" as they did, "man will have lost his last battle and his last chance." This is a deeply moving suggestion, even though many will probably prefer to lose the battle and retain their sanity.

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