The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  While Twain thumbed his nose at the intricacies of urban couture, another high-profile personality embraced them. Bret Harte presented a very different silhouette to the spectators on Montgomery. He dressed as formidably as might be expected of the city’s fastest-rising literary star: a friend to King and the now-gone Mrs. Frémont, and a featured contributor to the Era. He could be seen shuttling between his office at the US Mint and the Era’s editorial sanctum one block away, where Joe Lawrence presided over a growing stable of brilliant young talent.

  Lawrence’s hopes for a more metropolitan Era were succeeding beyond his wildest dreams. In his sumptuously furnished offices—“simply palatial,” in one visitor’s memory—he oversaw the most varied gathering of writers the city had ever seen. Seated cross-legged in his chair, he looked a bit like Santa Claus, with his flowing beard and meerschaum pipe. His cheerful disposition aided the resemblance, as did his openhanded generosity, plying potential contributors with kindness and cocktails at the Lick House bar.

  By the summer of 1863, Lawrence had built the Era into the flagship of the city’s flowering literary scene. Harte and Stoddard both wrote regularly. Twain, who had just become the Morning Call’s Washoe correspondent, would soon join them. On June 7, the paper added another young writer to its roster: “Ina.” More than a year since leaving Los Angeles, Coolbrith had mustered the courage to make her Era debut. Her poem “June” sang of a sun-soaked summer landscape alive with birds and squirrels and flowers.

  No matter that a San Francisco summer brought mostly fog—the seasons of the heart were Coolbrith’s true subject. After a long winter, she was ready to bloom. The same could be said of California. Bolstered by a steady stream of silver from the Comstock Lode in Nevada and the invigorating economic effects of the Civil War, the Pacific coast soared. Only a decade and a half earlier, the gold rush pioneers had imported everything. They lit their lamps with gas produced from Australian coal and chilled their liquor with Alaskan ice. They bought their flour from abroad, despite living near some of the country’s most fertile valleys. They were in a rush to get rich, and couldn’t be bothered with posterity. By the 1860s, however, California had learned to grow its own crops, and was busy building its own industries. Now, in the pages of the Era, it had begun creating its own culture.

  Harte led the charge. He didn’t swing a hatchet like Whitman’s “tan-faced” pioneer, yet he staked out a literary region as rich as any riverbed. For his Era columns, which he started writing in 1860, he created a new personality for himself called “the Bohemian.” Just as “Mark Twain” enabled Samuel Clemens to scrap his impulses toward respectability and cultivate a bad-boy image, the Bohemian enabled a mild-mannered clerk to moonlight as a literary vagrant. The Bohemian drifted through the city, visiting fairs, balls, theaters, hotels—anywhere the “street music” played at a lusty pitch. In unsparingly ironic prose, he showed Californians to be sillier, stupider, and generally more human than they considered themselves. He cracked a few memorable quips: “There are moments when quiet, timid, inoffensive young men like myself are led to feel acute regret that they have not at some period of their existence dipped their hands in human gore.”

  Harte made an unlikely Bohemian. The word referred to a tribe of penniless artists seen around the seedier districts of Paris and New York. They drank to excess, contracted venereal diseases. They shivered to death in drafty garrets, toiling over masterpieces that would never be printed. But in Harte’s hands, “Bohemia” became more than just a byword for wild living. It came to represent a creative alternative to the mundane and the mercenary in American life, a way to overcome California’s crude materialism and fulfill Thomas Starr King’s call to build Yosemites in the soul. “Bohemia has never been located geographically,” Harte wrote, “but any clear day when the sun is going down, if you mount Telegraph Hill, you shall see its pleasant valleys and cloud-capped hills glittering in the West like the Spanish castles of Titbottom.”

  To the young writers of the Era, Bohemia offered a home, albeit an imaginary one. Harte, Twain, Coolbrith, and Stoddard differed widely in lifestyle and literary technique. In 1863, their paths were about to intersect. Under the banner of Bohemia, these four writers competed, collaborated, traded counsel and criticism. Some remained friends their entire lives. Others became bitter enemies. What connected them was their contempt for custom, their restlessness with received wisdom. They belonged to Bohemia because they didn’t belong anywhere else.

  Virginia City, Nevada, in 1866. This was Twain’s home base for his first few years in the Far West.

  TWO

  On September 8, 1863, Mark Twain laid siege to San Francisco for the second time. It had been only two months since his last visit, but he needed a break from Nevada. Virginia City had been spiraling into ever-greater insanity. In his first dispatch to the Morning Call, Twain grumbled about its “infernal racket”: “O, for the solitude of Montgomery street again!” Overfull wagons clattered through heavy traffic. Residents exchanged oaths and gunfire. In July, Twain’s boardinghouse burned down. He made a dramatic last-minute escape by jumping out the window, but the blaze consumed most of his belongings. The same day, he contracted a severe cold.

  Twain made the most of it. He mined his misfortunes for material, played them for laughs. When his house went up in smoke, he joked about it in the Call. When he got sick, he spent two weeks at Lake Tahoe recuperating. A lively social life impeded his recovery—he arrived with “a voice like a bull frog,” he wrote, and left with “an impalpable whisper”—but he kept his readers informed of his exploits, sending back bundles of deliriously kinetic prose. The fever dream of Washoe was in his bloodstream now. He felt invincible. When his mother implored him to settle down and find “a place at a big San Francisco daily,” he retaliated with a furiously boastful response. “Everybody knows me,” he gloated, “& I fare like a prince wherever I go.”

  He came to San Francisco by stagecoach, riding in the box beside the driver without an overcoat. By then, he had been ill for more than a month, and shivering in the brisk air of the Sierras certainly didn’t help. Perhaps the thought of convalescing at the Lick House proved too tempting to resist, or he wanted to explore the city’s countless professional opportunities. He knew San Francisco held the key to his career. During his last visit, he had signed on as the Call’s Nevada correspondent. In September he scored a bigger byline, when Joe Lawrence recruited him for the Golden Era. Twain’s first feature for the literary powerhouse of the Pacific coast, “How to Cure a Cold,” recounted all the remedies people had prescribed for his ailment over the last several weeks. They ranged from drinking a quart of salt water, which made him vomit, to spreading mustard on his chest. His style was spare, almost telegraphic. It had the clipped cadence of a man on the brink of madness, occasionally bubbling into hysterics before wrangling his demons back into the cupboard. Samuel Clemens had been writing as Mark Twain for seven months. He had faced adversity and used it as fuel to fly even higher. Intoxicated by the Far West, riding the crest of his rocketing ego, he unburdened himself of any obligation to be courteous or coherent.

  Charles Warren Stoddard in 1869, when he was about twenty-six.

  • • •

  FORTUNATELY, THE Golden Era’s EDITOR had ample experience dealing with eccentrics. The rogues’ gallery of writers that passed daily through Lawrence’s majestic offices included a number of odd characters. Charles Warren Stoddard was one of them. The blushing poet, still “Pip Pepperpod” to his readers, loved the city’s literary scene. It kept him from his studies. Why study literature in a classroom when the real thing was happening right outside? But his mentor Thomas Starr King had insisted he receive an education. So Stoddard decided to try again.

  In the fall of 1863, Stoddard went back to school. This time he chose somewhere more isolated: Oakland. The sleepy suburb across the Bay held fewer distractions, even for a mind
as hyperactive as Stoddard’s. Oakland was only an hour or so away by ferry. The passenger stepped off the plank and onto another planet: “a kind of wildwood and wilderness,” Stoddard remembered, its principal street trafficked by more cows than carriages, “almost as quiet as a cloister.” Around the first of August, he had arrived at Brayton Academy, located on the edge of town. Its eleven-member faculty taught a range of subjects, including a preparatory course for those wanting to enroll in the College of California—the privately owned predecessor to the University of California. Stoddard could study everything from botany to rhetoric, and put himself on the path to a university degree.

  Before the semester began, he rented a room in a house near the Oakland Creek. It suited his aesthetic: vines threaded the veranda, oak trees swayed overhead. In the distance, the Alameda marshes stretched to the horizon. When he first visited, the landlady showed him a room with a view of the garden. A mop of honeysuckle pressed against the windowpane. Then she led him up a narrow staircase to see another room: a box-shaped garret illuminated by a small skylight.

  “Harte used to have this room,” she said. Nine years earlier, Harte had lived here as a teenager. This was where he had barricaded himself against the world and embarked on marathon binges of Dickens and other favorite authors. Later, he would undertake his quixotic ramble across the California countryside, and begin the apprenticeship that laid the foundation for his future fame. “Much as I longed to share in the inspiration that young Bret Harte may have found in that star-lit chamber,” Stoddard recalled, he decided against taking the room. He chose the one with a view of the garden instead.

  The two men first met in 1863. Stoddard recounted the episode later in life, although he neglected to mention whether it happened before or after he saw Harte’s boyhood home. He had recently begun keeping an autograph album, and begged his elders at the Era to contribute. He was the youngest of the lot, and sought their sympathy and encouragement. King inaugurated the volume with a warm dedication to its “gifted owner,” a key endorsement from one of California’s most revered figures. As Stoddard remembered it, this helped persuade Harte when he approached him. “I might have met with a refusal had not his eye fallen upon the dedication,” he recalled. Seven years older, Harte “seemed to look upon albums and their keepers with polite scorn.” The precocious young poet with the pleading blue eyes no doubt made Harte uncomfortable. Stoddard seemed so soft, so exposed.

  In time, they would become friends. But not yet: if Stoddard expected a glowing tribute for his album, he would be sorely disappointed. Instead of praising Stoddard, Harte ridiculed him—subtly, but unmistakably. For his inscription, Harte contributed a poem about a girl named Mary. Mary has an album like Stoddard’s. Rather than filling it with words, she fills it with flowers. Later, she opens it to find the pages stained, the petals crushed, the fragrance gone:

  O Mary, maid of San Andreas!

  Too sad was your mistake—

  Yet one, methinks, that wiser folk

  Are very apt to make.

  Who ’twixt these leaves would fix the shapes

  That love and truth assume,

  Will find they keep, like Mary’s rose,

  The stain and not the bloom.

  This bit of cynicism, delivered by a writer all of twenty-seven years old, didn’t dissuade Stoddard from his ongoing quest for autographs. He needed that album. Its chorus of voices cheered him—even if, as Harte suggested, the affection they expressed was only dead residue, the “stain and not the bloom,” Harte’s curmudgeonliness on this count reflected his need to “throw the shadow of sarcasm over his sentiment,” Stoddard observed, so as not to seem sentimental.

  Harte’s inscription aside, the album would be a source of comfort to Stoddard as the school year began and familiar frustrations returned. He still couldn’t concentrate. “I conned my text-book by the hour and honestly endeavored to make its contents all my own forever, yet in the end I seemed to have accomplished little,” he remembered. Worse, he felt isolated from his fellow students. In the evenings he would walk by the dormitories and gaze achingly “at the long rows of lighted windows and wish myself a happy habitant.”

  Fortunately, there was the ferry, and the trip across the Bay, and the scenic approach by sea. He spent weekends in San Francisco. At a certain distance, the skyline resolved into distinct shapes: the old semaphore station on the summit of Telegraph Hill, the smokestacks of the ironworks puffing coal. Closer, the waterfront teemed with workers talking a babble of tongues, hauling boxes and barrels and crates from the wharves to the warehouses. The ferry from Oakland landed near the spot where traders once came ashore to buy hides and tallow from the priests of Mission Dolores, in the days when the coastline formed a cove. Now landfill rounded the shore, a row of piers split the water, and a student, happy to be home, weaved through the crowded port and into the roaring streets.

  • • •

  STODDARD AGONIZED OVER HIS FAILURES As a student. In fact, they were a blessing in disguise: they preserved him from the dangers of a formal education. His mercurial mind never lingered in one place long enough to be properly embalmed by his professors. The scholarship they patiently endeavored to hammer into his skull fled under the force of his restless imagination. He wasn’t alone. Twain’s schooling ended at age eleven, Harte’s at thirteen. Ina Coolbrith probably stayed in school until seventeen, although an itinerant childhood often kept her from the classroom. “Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned,” Twain remarked many years later.

  By this standard, San Francisco offered the best education on either coast. Harvard and Yale may have produced more polished specimens, but the Bay boasted a more varied curriculum, and a more colorful visiting faculty. In 1863, a number of writers fled the war-torn East for peaceful, prosperous California. Their arrival greatly accelerated San Francisco’s literary life. Chief among them was Charles Henry Webb, a former whaler and war correspondent from New York. The Civil War had sparked a boom in American journalism, as the newspapers created over the course of the past few decades rushed to meet the country’s surging demand for information. This gave aspiring scribblers like Webb a chance to shine. He went to the front and wrote reports of the carnage, colored by the occasional flash of humor. “I was quartered for the night, or rather halved and sandwiched, between two Colonels,” he wrote from a Virginia encampment.

  In San Francisco he slept more comfortably, lodging at the upscale Occidental Hotel. Webb was a coveted import, and didn’t lack for job offers. Joe Lawrence lured him to the Golden Era by promising the highest salary ever paid a contributor. For an outsider to capture the most lucrative post at the most prominent literary paper in California might be expected to make some people jealous. But Webb preempted whatever bitterness his presence might provoke with an irresistible personality that made friends of Harte, Twain, and Stoddard. A charming conversationalist, he loved puns and parodies. When he told a joke, which was often, his stutter made it sweeter. The “decorative impediment in his speech,” Stoddard called it, a humanizing flaw that kept listeners hanging on his every word.

  Webb began his Era column on July 24, 1863. A seasoned city dweller, he took his readers on meandering safaris through San Francisco’s social world. The puns flowed unceasingly from his pen. His subjects didn’t include just prominent citizens but fellow writers. In fact, the city’s literati were his favorite topic. He chronicled their adventures and hyped their achievements and cheered the arrival of each newcomer from the East, playing impresario to the growing carnival.

  No newcomer aroused nearly as much excitement as an actress named Adah Isaacs Menken. In August 1863, playbills with her picture began appearing all over town. Stoddard saw them in nearly every shop window. The image “caught the eye on the instant,” he remembered: a beautiful woman with a boy’s haircut, and a white throat enclosed by a tie of luxuriant silk. On August 24, she would be making her San Franci
sco debut at Maguire’s Opera House, in what was slated to be the most spectacular premiere of the season. “[I]f she is half as good looking as her picture,” declared the Golden Era, “her success is certain.”

  By the time the doors of the theater opened on the day of the first performance, people had been massing outside for hours. “We doubt if a similar audience was ever gathered together on a like occasion,” remarked a reporter surveying the scene. Even Thomas Starr King at his most popular couldn’t command such a crowd. A river of humanity surged through the streets, swept through the vestibule, scrambled for good seats under the gas-lit glare of the grand chandelier. When the curtain came up, the audience caught its first glimpse of the face that set San Francisco on fire.

  Menken didn’t disappoint. In Mazeppa, she played a Tartar prince who falls in love with the daughter of a Polish count. Performing a male role enhanced her sex appeal: liberated from confining women’s fashions, she leaped around the stage like a gymnast, flaunting her athletic figure. The climax came when the count, having discovered the affair, ordered his soldiers to tie her to a horse and set it loose across the countryside. First, they stripped off her clothes—and Menken, in an inspired bit of costume design, wore skin-colored tights that made her look naked. The sight of Menken’s muscular body laid bare before the footlights, writhing in sweet agony as the California mustang cantered offstage, whipped the spectators into frenzied applause.

  Everyone went to see her. The critics praised her “grace”; the crowds whispered about her outfit. Men went to feast their eyes on her famed physique. Women went to find out “if the performance was a proper one for them to behold,” in the judgment of one journalist. A few puritans made a fuss—“Prudery is obsolete,” wailed the Sacramento Daily Union—but Menken played to a full house every night. Her show became required viewing. “People who have not been, and who do not intend to go, will be exhibited at the close of another week in glass cages,” quipped the Era.