The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  He was always prone to extremes. “He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end,” William Dean Howells wrote, “and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to another.” He made a loyal friend and a ruthless enemy, as immoderate in his affections as he was in his resentments. Since boyhood he had delighted in feuds, and found no shortage of them in Virginia City, where rival journalists fought constantly, not only in print but in person. Twain liked the city’s combative culture. He and his friends frequently went to a gym for an hour or two in the afternoon, and Twain grew especially fond of fencing. “In attack he was fiery and particularly dangerous,” Dan De Quille recalled, “for the reason that one could not watch his eyes, which he habitually wears about half closed.”

  Since Twain’s days as a typesetter for his brother’s Hannibal Journal, he had excelled at making other people look stupid. He enjoyed being on the attack, and loved causing mischief. Before long, he would pull another ill-considered stunt, and be punished with an even fiercer backlash.

  • • •

  BY LATE 1863, San Francisco’s writers were growing restless. The Golden Era had gone from being an amateurish frontier rag to a savvy competitor on the national scene. “As a literary paper it has no equal on the Atlantic side,” bragged the Alta California. Its editor, Joe Lawrence, had cultivated illustrious newcomers like Charles Henry Webb and homegrown talents like Harte. But as his regulars became better known, they began to resent him for how shamelessly he used their names to sell his paper. Webb teased Lawrence for treating his top-tier contributors like prizefighters: not as “graceful and elegant” men of letters but as carnival attractions, blazoned in big letters and hyped by the Era’s relentless publicity blitz. “[S]o loudly is the poor paper made to blow its own trumpet,” Webb wrote, “that the popular impression will be that it is a BRAZEN ERA.”

  Ina Coolbrith around 1871, when she was about thirty.

  This kind of puffery felt crass in light of the city’s new sophistication. The past year had boosted San Francisco’s prosperity and prestige. An influx of easterners had invigorated its culture. The Civil War had made it rich, and set in motion the construction of the transcontinental railroad, whose western span workers began building that year. The Era had dominated the first phase; now a new periodical was needed, as San Francisco’s Bohemians came into their own.

  Building a better paper would bring Twain, Harte, and Stoddard closer together. They went from being acquaintances to friends, from colleagues in the Era’s crowded firmament to co-conspirators in a literary crusade of their own. Another writer joined them: Ina Coolbrith. She had stayed mostly out of sight since relocating from Los Angeles in 1862. She taught English at a language school from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon, and then returned home to help her mother wash dishes, scrub linens, and do the rest of the domestic work. She had trouble sleeping at night, persecuted by memories of her past. By the age of twenty-two she had endured an abusive husband, a humiliating divorce, and the death of her infant child. She remained wary of what she called an “unpitying world,” and wrote bitter verses about suffering “the shafts of enmity and scorn.” Yet she needed a way out: beyond grief, beyond the burdens of her dreary work and demanding family. In San Francisco’s literary scene she would find friends, fulfillment, and, finally, a life worth living.

  She first met Stoddard at the home of a mutual friend. A “slender, delicate, handsome” figure playing “dreamily” at the piano, his fingers skipping confidently across the keys, improvising a tune—this was how she remembered him some sixty years later. “We were little more than boy and girl,” she recalled. He was only twenty, but his success had been swift. He no longer put poems in the Era’s mailbox and ran away in a cold sweat. He was now a fixture of Bohemian San Francisco: “petted and spoiled by everyone because of his youth, his physical beauty, magnetic personality,” Coolbrith remembered. It helped that he looked the part: the “ideal Poet in appearance,” she wrote, as “beautiful as Shelley.” Especially poetic were his frequent mood swings, his soul-expiring sighs, his moments of “moonstruck vacuity.”

  Like the other friendships that formed what Coolbrith later called “the tribe,” the bond between her and Stoddard took time to develop. Eventually they became like brother and sister: Coolbrith threatening to box his ears for some silliness, Stoddard acting puppyish and coy. Stoddard would always strike others as childlike, confined to the sorrows and solaces of a permanent adolescence. Coolbrith would always appear too mature for her years, having lived a lifetime by her early twenties. Neither would ever enjoy the comforts of a conventional adulthood. Both kept secrets that precluded traditional paths, and they never started families of their own. But they remained close their entire lives. “The friendship between us has been more to me than the love of any man,” she once told him.

  In December 1863, Coolbrith published her second poem in the Era. It struck a hopeful note, describing the “seedling” of spring, “growing to its slow / Yet sure fulfillment.” She was steadily emerging from her shell, just in time to take part in California’s latest literary experiment. In recent weeks, the Era had been buzzing with talk of a new periodical. “Bret and I laid our heads together over a Mint Julep the other day,” Webb announced in his column, “and have determined to start a paper.”

  They shared a single purpose: to wage all-out war on mediocrity, materialism, and the middlebrow. They deplored California’s “depraved intellectual condition,” its preponderance of “nervous old dandies” and “silly young girls,” its taste for clumsy melodrama and moralizing. The time had come for a new kind of journal, more discriminating in tone. The Era had been a good start, but the Bohemians had outgrown it. They needed a platform of their own—“a Bohemian’s Protective Union,” as Webb put it—modeled on more metropolitan papers like the defunct Saturday Press, formerly the organ of the New York Bohemians. They would enlist San Francisco’s best writers, at typically Bohemian rates. “Any author expecting pay for anything which he contributes, is to be kicked down stairs in an ignominious manner by the Washoe Giant, whom we intend to employ specially for that purpose,” Webb declared.

  In early 1864, Webb and Harte rented an office on Montgomery Street, not far from the Era building, and began assembling their first issue. Their ambitions were large. They wanted to publish not only the best literary paper of the Pacific coast but the equal of any on the continent. Before they got their venture off the ground, however, a sudden shock sent them reeling.

  On February 26, 1864, Thomas Starr King ran into a friend on the street. The preacher always appeared frail, but today he seemed more fragile than usual. His bones ached, he said; his throat was sore. He felt like a sponge squeezed dry. He feared he wouldn’t be able to preach on Sunday, and returned home to rest. The next day he looked worse. He stayed in bed. His doctor came: the diagnosis was diphtheria, followed by pneumonia. The symptoms grew more severe. On the morning of March 4, he composed his will. He calmly recited the Twenty-third Psalm—“I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever”—and bade farewell to his two-year-old son. “Beautiful boy,” he said, before the child was taken from the room, and he closed his eyes and his breath became slower and then stopped altogether.

  Twenty thousand people came to his funeral. They gathered outside the church he had spent the last year of his life building in the heart of the city, across from Union Square. The mourners filed through its Gothic facade for a final glimpse of the baby-faced reverend lying serenely in an open casket at the altar. On his chest was a bouquet of violets sent by Jessie Benton Frémont, who had learned the tragic news by telegraph. Her dear friend was only thirty-nine when he died. Never robust, he had worked himself to the bone on behalf of the pro-Union campaign hatched in her parlor, and succeeded miraculously. He wasn’t one of those saviors who prefer humanity in the abstract to people in particular: in his busiest moments he sti
ll made time for targeted acts of kindness, like tracking down a young bookstore clerk named Charles Warren Stoddard and telling him how much he enjoyed his poetry. The grand gesture came as easily to him as the small, intimate one, and when he died, Californians mourned him as they would a close friend.

  Of course, his actual friends felt special pain. The Era published tributes from several of them. Stoddard dedicated a poem to his memory. Coolbrith grieved the loss of her “gentle Teacher, and true friend” in verse. Harte contributed “Relieving Guard,” the best of the lot. The poem describes a conversation between two soldiers. One has been keeping watch during the night. When another comes to relieve him, he says he saw a falling star, sinking in the western sky:

  “A star? There’s nothing strange in that.”

  “No, nothing; but, above the thicket,

  Somehow it seemed to me that God

  Somewhere had just relieved a picket.”

  A fitting eulogy for a man who said he didn’t measure enough inches around the chest to be a soldier, but saw a way to fight. “Every sufferer for the redemption of our land now is sacred,” King once told someone whose brother died in the Civil War. In death he, too, became sacred. A mountain in Yosemite was named for him, and a giant sequoia in the Calaveras Grove. In 1931, California honored him with a statue in the US Capitol. It stood for nearly eighty years before being replaced, in 2009, with one of Ronald Reagan. “I wasn’t sure who Thomas Starr King was,” explained the legislator responsible for the change.

  Fortunately for King, his legacy endured in other ways. To San Francisco’s writers he had been a patient father, scribbling edits in the margins of their manuscripts and administering fortifying doses of moral support. He taught them to take themselves seriously, and helped kick-start a literary culture that, after his death, grew in directions he could have never foreseen.

  • • •

  TWO MONTHS AFTER SAN FRANCISCO Lost its best-loved preacher, its favorite heretic returned. Twain’s principal vice was pride, followed closely by greed and gluttony. He had been in Nevada for seven months, blistering from the heat of the desert sun, and he atoned for the long absence by splurging on the special charms of “the most cordial and sociable city in the Union.” Feasts of fried oysters, salmon, and fowl. Parties of polka and other popular dances. He had sampled similar offerings before, but this time was different. The trunk that accompanied him across the Sierras in May 1864 held the sum total of his belongings. He had come to San Francisco to stay. “I had longed to be a butterfly,” he later wrote, “and I was one at last.”

  Recently, Nevada had begun to lose its appeal for Twain. It wasn’t just the steady diet of lager beer and Limburger cheese, or the sharp odor of sagebrush, or the dispiriting bleakness of the scenery. He had more urgent reasons for leaving. In the three years since he and his brother made the trip from Missouri in 1861, Twain had undergone a transformation. Virginia City had radicalized him, spurring him to greater wildness and defiance. His literary powers had grown precipitously in the pages of the Territorial Enterprise. But as he became a better writer, he had also become harsher, more inflammatory. “A Bloody Massacre near Carson,” his bruising hoax from October 1863, had been an early sign. The eruptions that followed left even larger stains on his reputation, and helped hasten his exit from Virginia City.

  The Civil War loomed large in all this. It drove him to Nevada in 1861 and now, through a tortured chain of events, triggered his departure. On May 5, 1864, the ladies of Carson City held a fund-raising ball for the US Sanitary Commission. This was a national charity that provided food, medicine, and other supplies to sick and wounded Union soldiers. Before his death, Thomas Starr King had raised more than a million dollars for the Sanitary cause. On May 17, 1864, readers of the Territorial Enterprise learned that the cash collected in Carson City wouldn’t be sent to the commission’s headquarters in St. Louis, but diverted “to aid a Miscegenation Society somewhere in the East.”

  This hoax delivered a painful blow. Twain had located a sore spot in the collective psyche and hit it as hard as he could. The idea of blacks and whites getting married wasn’t simply taboo; it also tapped an anxiety about the ultimate aim of the Civil War. When the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in 1863, the Union formally committed itself to freeing the Confederacy’s slaves. President Lincoln defended this as a war measure, intended to undermine the South’s ability to fight, but it made many Northerners uncomfortable. They were fighting to keep their country in one piece, not to liberate the slaves. “Miscegenation” in particular meant something very specific in 1864. The term had been coined the year before, by two editors at a Democratic paper in New York. They had concocted a powerful political hoax: an anonymous pamphlet in favor of interracial marriage entitled Miscegenation, which they attributed to antislavery Republicans. Democrats seized on this to build momentum for their campaign to unseat Lincoln in the election of 1864, while Republicans disavowed the pamphlet and distanced themselves from such radical views. When Twain joked that the money meant for the Sanitary Commission would instead be used for miscegenation, he articulated an awful fear festering in white minds throughout the Union: that the war would result in full equality for blacks, who would soon be taking white jobs, white land, white women.

  The fallout would be severe. The next day, the ladies of Carson City wrote the Enterprise an enraged reply. The article was “a tissue of falsehoods,” they fumed, “made for malicious purposes.” When the Enterprise refused to print the letter, the rival Virginia City Daily Union ran it for three days in a row. What made the scandal especially embarrassing for Twain was the fact that Mollie Clemens, the wife of his brother Orion, had helped organize the Sanitary ball. When her friends learned she was Twain’s sister-in-law, they expelled her from Carson City society. Three days after the hoax, he wrote Mollie a halfhearted apology. “I am sorry the thing occurred,” he conceded, as though through gritted teeth. It was all a drunken misunderstanding: he had scribbled the joke when he was “not sober,” and showed it to his friend Dan De Quille. They agreed it was too offensive to publish, but he must’ve left the manuscript lying around the Enterprise office by mistake. “I suppose the foreman, prospecting for copy, found it, & seeing that it was in my handwriting, thought it was to be published.” A public admission of guilt, however, was out of the question. His pride wouldn’t permit it. “I cannot submit to the humiliation of publishing myself as a liar.”

  Meanwhile, Twain opened hostilities on a second front. Fancy social functions weren’t the only way westerners raised money for the Sanitary Commission. A more eccentric method came from Reuel Colt Gridley, a schoolmate of Twain’s from Hannibal who owned a grocery store in Austin, Nevada. Gridley carried a sack of flour to nearby towns and “auctioned” it off repeatedly to benefit the Sanitary fund. The bidders knew that no one would ever win the sack: the only prize was the pleasure of outbidding one’s rivals, and in the briskly competitive West, this proved a clever incentive to pry open people’s pocketbooks. On May 18, 1864, the day after the miscegenation prank, Twain leaped headlong into the flour-sack fray by accusing the Daily Union of outbidding the Enterprise at one of Gridley’s auctions and then refusing to pay. This was a lie, but the Union rose to the bait, and soon the two papers were exchanging taunts, strutting and crowing like a pair of fighting cocks. Twain hadn’t picked this particular fight so that it could fizzle into another amusing sideshow for the Washoe reading public, however. He wanted blood.

  The inner devils of a man drawn to his own destruction, inflamed by large infusions of liquor and the company of violent men: this was Twain at his most menacing. On May 21, he wrote a furious letter to James Laird, the Union’s publisher, urging a retraction of the paper’s “insulting” editorials. Laird referred him to J. W. Wilmington, the author of the offending items, who curtly refused. His bile rising, Twain called Laird a “cowardly sneak” for hiding behind Wilmington and demanded, “without a
lternative,” the “satisfaction due to a gentleman”—in other words, a duel. Laird again deflected: “Mr. Wilmington has a prior claim upon your attention. When he is through with you, I shall be at your service.” But Twain persisted and, after receiving another infuriating refusal from Laird, published their entire correspondence in the Enterprise, with a postscript lashing the Union’s publisher as an “unmitigated liar,” “an abject coward,” and a “fool.” Twain’s baiting, bullying stream of abuse had backed Laird into a corner. Then, on May 29, 1864, five days after publishing his last attack, the Washoe Giant disappeared. He boarded a stagecoach with his friend Steve Gillis, a typesetter for the Enterprise, and decamped for San Francisco.

  The reasons are unclear. Perhaps his courage failed him, or he never intended to fight in the first place. Nevada had a strict law against dueling, stipulating a maximum penalty of ten years in prison simply for issuing a challenge. Twain alluded to this in a letter to his brother, written a few days before leaving Virginia City. Yet he was careful to make clear that he wasn’t “afraid of the grand jury”—nor of Laird—but merely felt restless after three years in Nevada. He said he planned to stay in San Francisco for a month, sell some Nevada mining stock, and then return to the East. Boredom, not fear, motivated his departure: “Washoe has long since grown irksome.” But his enemies didn’t buy it. They proposed another possibility: shame. “The indignation aroused by his enormities has been too crushing to be borne by living man,” suggested the Gold Hill Evening News. “Mark Twain’s beard is full of dirt, and his face is black before the people of Washoe.”

  Not exactly a fond farewell. The sting of his self-inflicted wounds lingered. “It cannot be said he made many friends in Nevada,” remarked one contemporary. In later writings, Twain finessed the infelicities of his Nevada years—the massacre hoax, the miscegenation mischief, the near-duel with Laird—either by omitting them entirely or applying a thick lacquer of lightheartedness.