The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  THIS REVELATION STRUCK one young girl more literally than most. On her way home from school, she crept into a shaded street to escape the Los Angeles sun. It was midsummer, and the heat made the pepper trees sink toward the ground. A gust of wind brought a torn scrap of newsprint fluttering to her feet. On the paper she found lines of poetry, and far more powerful than the verses themselves was the staggering realization that they had been written by a Californian: Edward Pollock, a popular poet of the pioneer days. The girl adored poetry, but always considered it something “wonderful and apart.” She never imagined it could be created in California.

  In later life, Ina Coolbrith would date her literary awakening to this moment. Rhyme came naturally to her, she discovered. Her face breathed poetry through every pore, from the melancholy eyes to the teasing mouth, an expression too enigmatic to unscramble but inexhaustibly interesting. “Her whole life has been a poem,” a fellow poet said. Sometimes it strode with epic strokes; other times it skipped lightly along like a limerick. But its dominant key was what Sappho, the ancient Greek poet, called glukupikron: “sweet-bitter,” the intermingling of love and loss—in Coolbrith’s words, “half rapture and half pain.”

  Her first memories were those of mourning. She was too young to remember the funeral for her father, who died five months after she was born in 1841. But she remembered that of her sister, held when Ina was two. Death pervaded her childhood—not only in the form of illnesses and accidents but through violence of the most vicious kind. Her uncle was Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. Fourteen years before Ina’s birth, he claimed to have found a set of golden plates engraved with the writings of ancient Israelites who had sailed to America centuries before Christ. Translated and transcribed, this text became the Book of Mormon—“chloroform in print,” Twain yawned, ridiculing its cumbersome prose. Mormonism faced more than just mockery, however. Smith’s disciples suffered brutal persecution, driven from one town after another. When Ina was three, her uncle died in an Illinois jail, murdered by a mob. Ina’s father had embraced his brother’s teachings but her mother’s faith faltered as the anti-Mormon atrocities grew worse. In 1846, she married a non-Mormon named William Pickett and left the church. She promised her husband to conceal her past and instructed her children to do the same.

  A dark secret: for Ina, now in her fifth year, it would be the first of several. In 1851, her stepfather led the family West. He had read reports of gold in California and, after waiting for the spring grass to grow tall enough for the oxen to eat, piled his wife and children into a covered wagon and wheeled off across the plains. The young girl loved the colors of the landscape: what Twain, who made the trip a decade later, called the “world-wide carpet” of the plains, blooming in all directions. She hated fording rivers. The wagons crossed by raft, while the oxen swam. The weaker animals didn’t have the strength to struggle through the current and, swept downstream, they drowned while Ina watched helplessly from the shore. The memory tormented her forever.

  At the foot of the Sierra Nevada came the most picturesque portion of the journey. The family met Jim Beckwourth, a freed slave turned Crow chieftain and a renowned mountain man. Ina remembered him in dazzlingly romantic hues: “one of the most beautiful creatures that ever lived,” she wrote. He wore his hair in two long braids, tied with colored string, and rode without a saddle. He had recently discovered a path through the Sierras—the Beckwourth Pass, a popular early trail—and wanted Ina and her sisters to be the first white children to cross it. “Here is California, little girls,” he said when they came within sight of the other side, “here is your kingdom.”

  Or so Ina remembered almost eighty years later. In memory, her life acquired a more poetic coloring. But it was an adventurous childhood by any measure. The family settled in Los Angeles in 1855. A town of about two thousand, its adobe-lined streets had changed little since its pueblo days. A wondrous and terrifying place, it boasted beautiful orange orchards and one of the worst murder rates in the country. Cowboys, crooks, and gamblers staged frequent shoot-outs. Racial animosity between Mexicans and Americans ran high. Lynchings were common. A minister from Massachusetts who arrived the same year as Ina tallied ten murders in his first two weeks. In his diary he recorded the sounds of an average Sabbath: children crying, dogs barking, men fighting and betting and blaspheming. “[T]his is nominally a christian town,” he wrote, “but in reality heathen.”

  Yet there was another Los Angeles, to which Ina belonged. The old Californio families of Spanish Mexican descent who once ruled the region—the Sepulvedas, the Figueroas, the Picos—held glorious fiestas. The girl who crossed the continent in a covered wagon had grown into a glamorous woman, and she became a radiant fixture of local society. She also found fame as a poet, after publishing her first verses at fifteen in the Los Angeles Star. Her poetry oozed with trite sentiment—“a sorrow dwells in my young heart,” read a typical line—but it made her a cherished figure in Los Angeles’ tiny literary scene. Fortunately, the poet was nowhere near as gloomy as her verse. Her neighbors recalled a “warm, rich personality gladdening all about her.” She sang, danced, and flirted. At seventeen, she fell in love.

  In 1858, a Californian named Robert Carsley scored the crowning victory of an otherwise undistinguished life by persuading the pretty, popular poet—already hailed in newsprint as “a young girl of genius” with “an enviable reputation”—to marry him. He earned a living as an ironworker, and occasionally blacked his face with burnt cork to play in minstrel shows. On October 12, 1861, he returned from one such performance in San Francisco suffering from a murderous fit of paranoia. He accused his wife of imagined infidelities and called her a whore. Deranged with jealousy, he tried to kill her and her mother, and nearly succeeded. Luckily Ina’s stepfather intervened, shooting Carsley in the hand, which had to be amputated. The divorce trial that followed only added to Ina’s humiliation. Once the darling of Los Angeles, she had become another victim of its violence. Once an object of admiration, she now inspired pity.

  Worse, she suffered another tragedy, one too painful for her to reveal. The details are obscure, but her relatives would divulge the secret long after her death: she gave birth to a child who died. A poem she published in 1865 called “The Mother’s Grief” comes closest to expressing her anguish at the loss. She sees her “pretty babe” playing in an open door, trying to grab a beam of sunlight lying on the sill. Then she faces the shattering fact of his absence:

  To-day no shafts of golden flame

  Across the sill are lying

  To-day I call my baby’s name,

  And hear no lisped replying.

  Tragedy changed her. It bred a depressive streak that tempered the wilder impulses of her girlhood, made her reticent, yet also unusually solicitous toward people in pain. She loved Lord Byron, and her ordeal made her more Byronic: an outcast with a secret past. “Only twenty, and my world turned to dust,” she later wrote. Like Byron, she went into exile, embarking for San Francisco in 1862. Her family decided to join her.

  She became Ina Donna Coolbrith, taking her mother’s maiden name. She buried her history and started over. Californians often reinvented themselves. “Some of the best men had the worst antecedents,” Harte observed, “some of the worst rejoiced in a spotless puritan pedigree.” Still, her past lingered. She made friends slowly and returned to verse only haltingly. She found work as an English teacher and helped her mother around the house. The change of scenery couldn’t heal her grief, yet San Francisco supplied an endless stream of distractions. She read the Golden Era every week. She plundered the shelves of the Mercantile Library. On November 4, 1862, she saw Thomas Starr King speak for the first time, at a benefit for families of Union army volunteers. The occasion wasn’t exactly somber: it featured fortune-tellers and “gipsy tents” and tableaux vivants. During his opening address, King read the poetry of his friend Bret Harte, as he often did—a writer Coolbrith had been hearing about since
her arrival. Harte’s pleas for national renewal couldn’t fail to connect. America was being reborn: Coolbrith was ripe for a similar renaissance.

  • • •

  THAT FALL, The Unitarian minister could be seen all over town. Thomas Starr King was in perpetual motion, this erudite Bostonian who skewered Copperheads and quoted Seneca and spoke of California as the new Canaan. Jessie Benton Frémont had departed the previous year, after Lincoln summoned her husband to St. Louis to take command of the army’s Department of the West. Now the burden of waging the propaganda war dreamed up in her parlor at Black Point rested on King’s narrow shoulders—and his exertions had begun to take their toll. “I have worked the last eighteen months, within an inch of my life, in speaking, preaching, orationizing, travelling, organizing,” he wrote in October 1862. Yet somehow he still found time to read the Golden Era closely enough to notice a new contributor whose poetry pleased him—Pip Pepperpod, the pixieish pen name of a nineteen-year-old bookstore clerk named Charles Warren Stoddard.

  Chileon Beach’s shop on Montgomery Street sold mostly religious books and Bibles. Inside, its clerk was constantly dusting. Not because he cared much for cleanliness, but because the monotony of the motion made it easier for his mind to wander. As he sank deeper into his daydream, the feather duster in his hands became a palm tree. He longed for the tropics. He had fallen in love with them eight years earlier, while crossing Nicaragua on his way to California. He remembered the syrupy taste of the oranges and the mist that sprayed when he broke their skin. He remembered the bright plumage of the birds, flickering against the relentless green of the jungle. Most of all he remembered the natives, who adorned their nearly naked bodies with necklaces and wreaths.

  One day, California’s most famous preacher appeared in the doorway, cutting Stoddard’s reveries short. Celebrities had been in the shop before, but never one whom Stoddard held in such high esteem. “In my youth I was a hero worshipper,” he later wrote, “and Thomas Starr King seemed to me the most heroic of them all.” After a probing glance at the trembling clerk, King drew a scrap of newspaper from his pocket. “Did you write those lines?” he asked, pointing to his “Pip Pepperpod” poems. Stoddard said he did. The minister responded by reading them aloud—a voice perfect for poetry, rendering the verses as artfully as he did Harte’s. He added words of encouragement to his favorite lines, and invited Stoddard to visit him with more work. He also presented tickets to his upcoming lecture series on American poetry, where he would be discussing those distinguished New Englanders whom Stoddard had read as a schoolboy. Then he vanished. “I was left speechless with wonder and delight,” Stoddard recalled.

  At first glance, the young poet might’ve reminded King of Harte. Both were slender and delicately built; both had large, expressive eyes—not unlike King himself. But Harte wrote painstakingly, while Stoddard’s penmanship spilled merrily down the page, often illegible, the spelling atrocious. Harte kept most people at a distance; Stoddard held on to them for dear life. Stoddard was deeply lovable; Harte was not.

  What people loved best about Stoddard was his vulnerability. His yearning for success, his dread of failure, the pain he felt when criticized and the pleasure he felt when praised—these are the emotional undertow of any writer’s life, and he experienced them more openly than most. Twain concealed his insecurities with bravado and wit. Harte hid behind a fastidious exterior and a hermetic home life. Coolbrith remained guarded after her recent trauma. Yet Stoddard aired his passions in public—and they all loved him for it. This was the true source of what Coolbrith would call his “invincible charm,” the all-conquering warmth that made people lower their defenses. They saw their struggles reflected in Stoddard’s childlike face.

  There would always be one part of his personality they couldn’t possibly understand, however: his homosexuality. Like Harte, he endured abuse from schoolyard bullies because he looked too feminine. Unlike Harte, he pursued close relationships with certain boys for whom he felt an especially deep devotion. These “chums” and “pals” rarely reciprocated his affections, and as a child he came to expect their rejection, even to take a kind of pleasure in it. He loved being in love—“The Love Man,” Jack London christened him many years later. Yet for someone who found solace in the written word, he lived in a world with no words for what he was, where gay love was not only forbidden but invisible—enciphered in metaphor, perhaps, but never plainly discussed. The term “homosexual” didn’t appear in print until 1869, in a pair of anonymous pamphlets written by an Austro-Hungarian journalist. Later, Stoddard would be relieved to discover Walt Whitman, whose “Calamus” poems in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass offered a thinly veiled celebration of same-sex love. When Whitman wrote of “the pensive aching to be together,” Stoddard knew precisely what he meant.

  Stoddard first came to San Francisco in 1855, at age eleven. His father had found a job at a merchant firm, and the rest of the family went West to join him. Stoddard loved the city’s extravagance: “a natural tendency to overdress, to over-decorate, to overdo almost everything,” he wrote. The gambling houses beckoned: in their lush interiors he discovered “enchanting music” and “beautiful women in bewildering attire.” Sin surrounded him. Just a few blocks from his family’s home had been the city’s most notorious district, Sydney-Town, where many enterprising Australians lived, peddling sex and liquor. In May 1856, the murder of a newspaper editor triggered a vigilante uprising that came down hard on the neighborhood. The vigilantes lynched the killer, James Casey, along with another infamous character named Charles Cora, who had murdered a US marshal. Stoddard remembered seeing a pair of black-hooded figures with nooses around their necks, swinging into space.

  A year later Stoddard’s brother Ned fell ill, and a doctor recommended a long sea voyage. So Ned took a clipper ship around Cape Horn, and Stoddard tagged along to keep him company. On arriving in the East, they stayed at their grandfather’s farm in western New York. Ned soon returned to San Francisco, leaving Stoddard at the mercy of their grandfather, a man whose infinite capacity for cruelty was rooted in a particularly grim Presbyterianism. He terrified his grandson with visions of God’s vengeance and, on one grisly occasion, took him to a funeral for a boy his age, in the belief that seeing the corpse would cause him to find religion.

  In California, the world had looked brighter. Stoddard couldn’t wait to get back. Finally, his father sent money for his fare and he fled New York, returning to San Francisco in 1859. The city had grown in his absence. Thirteen thousand people arrived in that year alone. The gamblers and prostitutes were still there, but the new civic mood had forced them to become more discreet. Commerce, not vice, now reigned supreme. There were fourteen gristmills, eighteen breweries, nineteen foundries, eighty-four restaurants, seventeen banks, and one sugar refinery. New neighborhoods had sprung up on land once occupied by sand hills.

  The fast-growing city kindled Stoddard’s imagination. Its many newspapers offered a way to put his mind-pictures into print. The Golden Era was “the cradle and the grave of many a high hope,” he wrote: not only for those backcountry bards scrambling to break into the “Correspondents’ Column” but for the young urban aspirants who increasingly filled its pages. Stoddard didn’t start contributing until September 1862. “No member of my family suspected that I was so bold as to dream of entering the circle of the elect who wrote regularly every week for the chief literary organ west of the Rocky Mountains,” he recalled. He came up with a pseudonym to conceal his identity—“Pip” for the hero of Dickens’s Great Expectations, “Pepperpod” for its alliterative sound—and set off for the Era’s offices on Clay Street. His heart beat frantically. He passed the mailbox at the door of the Era several times without pausing. He waited until he couldn’t see a single pedestrian on either side of the street. Then he sprinted to the box, slipped his envelope through the slot, and ran away in a cold sweat.

  After this harrowing initiation, he became an
Era regular. Under King’s guidance, his style improved. “It is because you have strong powers and good capacities that I speak of blemishes more than excellences,” the minister wrote his protégé. He used his pencil like a scalpel, trying to toughen the timid young dream-builder into a more mature poet like Harte. He even encouraged Stoddard to return to school. The discipline would do him good, King insisted. So Stoddard submitted, entering City College in early 1863. An indifferent student, he had trouble concentrating. He fell victim to a range of extracurricular temptations, and soon found that “city life in combination with City College” didn’t suit him. When the semester ended in May, he dropped out.

  • • •

  IF STODDARD PROVED Especially prone to distraction, San Francisco in the spring and summer of 1863 was an especially distracting place. On the Montgomery Street promenade, Mark Twain could be seen visiting from Washoe, shaking alkali dust from the folds of his flannel, telling meandering stories in his signature drawl. In the dining hall of the Lick House, directly across from Stoddard’s old bookshop, he guzzled champagne. One evening he attended a party at the hotel, and penned a report for the Territorial Enterprise on the ladies’ outfits. “Miss A.H.” wore a scarf “garnished with ruches, and radishes and things,” her hair held together by a “wreath of sardines on a string.” Another lady’s coiffure featured greenbacks. “The effect was very rich, partly owing to the market value of the material.”