The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  The narrator is baffled by Wheeler. He can’t keep his soliloquy moving in a straight line, and never once smiles at the ridiculous things he relates. He talks in the Pike County dialect native to Missouri, and transplanted to California by migrating southwesterners. Yet he is by far the smarter of the two, despite his lack of education. He isn’t some dumb yokel presented for the reader’s ridicule, but a savvy storyteller, painting pictures with words as vividly as Dickens. Unlike the narrator, who speaks the humdrum idiom of eastern respectability, Wheeler skips along in a richly imaginative vernacular. His similes are especially graphic: a dog’s jaw sticks out like “the fo’castle of a steamboat,” his teeth “shine savage like the furnaces.” The jumping frog goes “whirling in the air like a doughnut,” and lands “flat-footed and all right, like a cat.” These are the melodies of the frontier, the lyrical realism of a region recording itself.

  Twain inverts the typical Southwestern frame. The joke is no longer on the frontiersman, but on the flummoxed narrator who can’t quite follow him. The frontier is no longer a lower stage of development struggling up toward the level of Atlantic civilization, but a universe all its own.

  “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” made Twain a household name. The story “set all New York in a roar,” reported the San Francisco Alta California, and spread swiftly across the country. “I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near.” “No reputation was ever more rapidly won,” raved the New York Tribune.

  The tale’s deeper significance, however, wouldn’t become clear until later. The jumping frog spelled the beginning of the end of the old guard in American letters: the decline of a genteel elite that looked to Europe for its influences, and the rise of a literature that drew its inspiration from more native sources. In 1865, Twain started down the path that would later produce masterpieces like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In the “low” frontier, he found the makings of an authentic American art—a force powerful enough to exorcise the ghosts of the Old World and redeem the literary promise of the West.

  Thomas Starr King had been an early believer in this promise. Before his death in 1864, he had encouraged California’s writers, and urged them to follow the example of his native New England. But the Bohemia that sprang up in San Francisco strayed from his blueprint. It entertained eccentric visitors like Artemus Ward, and refused to adopt anything like a house style. San Francisco’s Bohemia took all kinds. It let a boy named Charles Warren Stoddard set his daydreams to verse, and a poet named Ina Coolbrith rail against the restraints of Victorian womanhood. At its helm was the unlikeliest Bohemian of all: a salaried employee of the US Mint and devoted family man, who expressed contempt for the conventions of California life while taking part in nearly all of them.

  By the end of 1865, Harte had hit a wall. The Californian soared, his parodies sparkled, and a cluster of obscure writers had solidified into a well-defined clique centered on him, Stoddard, and Coolbrith. But his creativity had stalled. He wrote clever burlesques of famous novelists, but no good literature of his own. He attacked the literary aristocracy of New England as “an English graft,” while scorning California for its crudeness.

  Twain found a way forward. He moved from critique to creation—no longer simply lampooning New England but surpassing it. Instead of ridiculing a place like Angel’s Camp for its coarseness, he saw what made it special. Harte’s disdain for the rougher colors of the region had blinded him to their artistic potential; Twain used them to build a new kind of literature. This was the source of his genius, the quality that would ultimately distinguish him from his Bohemian brethren. He wasn’t the most meticulous writer, or the most disciplined. But he had an eye for the extraordinary in ordinary American life, for the unsung sublimities of the continent’s language, geography, and myths, and “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” gave an early glimpse of that power.

  No one recognized the story’s revolutionary importance at the time, least of all Twain. He enjoyed his newfound fame but felt ambivalent about where it came from. In a letter to his mother and sister in January 1866, he expressed surprise that “those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on.” But the success clearly lifted his spirits. The gnawing doubts of the previous year had faded under a fit of manic energy. He was now bursting with book ideas, eager to capitalize on his popularity.

  Harte followed Twain’s ascent closely. He had laughed at the jumping frog long before anyone in the East. “[I]t will never be as funny to anyone in print as it was to me, told for the first time by the unknown Twain himself on that morning in the San Francisco Mint,” he recalled decades later. Harte reprinted the story in slightly edited form in the Californian in December. By January, they were talking about writing books together. “Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country,” Twain told his family, “the place properly belongs to Bret Harte.” They planned to collaborate on two projects, he said: a collection of sketches, and one of burlesques. “I wouldn’t do it,” Twain added smugly, “only he agrees to take all the trouble.”

  Harte had his reasons for wanting to publish something soon. A book with both of their names on it would sell very well—owing not only to Twain’s recent celebrity but to Harte’s. In December 1865, while Twain basked in the glow of the jumping frog, Harte also came under intense scrutiny. This wasn’t for anything he wrote but for a book of poetry he edited. With one stroke, Harte had ignited a controversy that outdid Twain at his most inflammatory.

  It began innocently enough. A Montgomery Street bookseller named Anton Roman wanted to publish a volume of California verse called Outcroppings, and asked Harte to edit it. This would be a showcase for the Far West’s finest writers, a chance to astonish the East with the literary riches of the Pacific coast. Such a project had special significance. Poetry wasn’t just something that happened in the pages of the Californian, or in the red-plush parlors of rich neighborhoods like Rincon Hill. It belonged equally to the mining camp and the metropolis, to the worlds of Angel’s Camp and Montgomery Street. Californians recited poetry at public gatherings. They scribbled verses and sent them to their local papers. They took a personal interest in the literary fortunes of their state, and as soon as they heard of Harte’s anthology, they swamped him with submissions. Each morning another infusion littered his desk. Sometimes the “chill wind from the Bay” came in through the window and blew one of the poems outside, Harte remembered—“attaining a circulation it had never known before.” The aspirants included “practical business men, sage financiers, fierce speculators, and plodding traders, never before suspected of poetry, or even correct prose.” They touched on similar topics: the Golden Gate, Yosemite, California flowers.

  These happened to be precisely the sort of subjects Harte hated. He had zero patience for the pastoral and the picturesque. The book he completed in time for Christmas 1865 reflected his exacting taste—and inflicted a wholesale humiliation on the writers of the Far West. Outcroppings included only nineteen poets. Many were Harte’s friends: Coolbrith and Stoddard contributed four poems each. In the preface, Harte attacked California literature, blaming the state’s “monotonous climate” for the generally bad poetry it produced.

  Predictably, Outcroppings provoked a furious response. “Bret Harte has given the world to understand that of the 1300 poets of California, there are less than twenty whom [sic] come up to the austere standard of his fastidious taste,” wrote the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle on December 7, 1865. “The rejected 1280 will probably take his scalp.” In the coming weeks, the prediction proved painfully accurate. Especially angry were the rural writers who fumed at the spectacle of an effete city dweller passing judgment on their state. As the Sacramento Union observed, the poems in Outcroppings could’ve been written anywhere: it “contains as little of the spirit, sentiment and imagery of California as might be expected
from one who frankly avows his mean opinion of the country and its bards.” The Virginia City Territorial Enterprise put it less tactfully: Outcroppings was “the very trashiest of the trash.”

  Harte had started a culture war. On one side were San Francisco’s Bohemians. On the other were the provincial pastoralists. “One of the most astonishing characteristics of the San Francisco Bohemian is the importance he attaches to his metropolitanism—considering its recent date,” scoffed the Territorial Enterprise. To their critics, the Bohemians were poseurs: former bumpkins dressed up in fancy clothes. “He affects to scorn everything provincial before he has scraped the mud of the country from his feet or its dirt from his face.” The Bohemians struck back, assailing the backwater bards for their hackneyed verse. In a parody for the Californian, Harte imagined a volume called Tailings made up of poems rejected from Outcroppings: “Methinks I see the swaddling clothes of mist,” ran one representative line.

  The two camps had more in common than they cared to admit, however. The Bohemians weren’t nearly so urban, and their enemies weren’t nearly so rustic. San Francisco’s writers frequently drew their inspiration from the countryside, and Outcroppings included poems about farmers and birds. The anti-Outcroppings crowd, on the other hand, didn’t live in a landscape of sylvan simplicity. California’s mines and farms increasingly resembled little cities, with industrial machinery, well-capitalized companies, and complex regional economies.

  The struggle over Outcroppings, then, reflected a divide more imagined than actual. But this didn’t diminish the ferocity of the fight. At stake was more than just rival styles of poetry. The real issue concerned California’s public image. As the state grew closer to the rest of the nation, it became more mindful of the impression it made. The transcontinental telegraph, completed in 1861, didn’t just bring eastern news west, but western news east. Harte recalled that California papers suppressed reports of unsavory local incidents because they didn’t want them to end up in the eastern press. A negative story might impede the westward flow of people and capital, and threaten California’s economic future.

  Outcroppings’ critics feared the book would present a distorted, and possibly damaging, picture of California to the country as a whole. Ironically, the collection had originally been conceived along boosterish lines: its publisher hoped “to foster Eastern immigration by an exhibit of the California literary product,” Harte wrote. The final product didn’t make much of an advertisement, however. Not only did it fail to include any local color, it openly insulted the state’s intellect.

  Yet the eastern press liked it. Critics in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston gave Outcroppings high marks. Meanwhile, the wailing of the western papers ensured excellent sales. Harte appeared to enjoy his new role as the villain of the Pacific coast. In a letter he boasted of being “abused beyond his most sanguine expectations,” and he fanned the flames at every opportunity. When the anti-Outcroppings camp announced its intent to publish its own book of verse, Harte teamed up with Twain to plan a parody. “We know all the tribe of California poets, & understand their different styles, & I think we can just make them get up & howl,” Twain told his mother and sister. He loved the backcountry’s fibbers and fabulists, but felt no sympathy for its “poetical asses.”

  By early 1866, he and Harte had become the literary giants of the Far West. In person and in print, they made an unlikely pair. The same papers that revered one ravaged the other. When the Sacramento Bee learned that Twain wanted to write a book, it suggested a title: “‘Deep Diggings,’ in contradistinction to the ‘Outcroppings,’ that have been crushed by the entire press, and found to yield 000 to the ton.” Yet the two men liked each other, and respected one another’s work. Harte embraced the jumping frog; Twain publicly defended Harte for his “rare good taste” in editing Outcroppings. Their affinities ran deeper than their differences. Both felt restless with the Pacific coast, and anxious for a wider audience. They wrote with one eye eastward, hungry for bigger victories. They had grown up with the West, and now they were in danger of outgrowing it.

  • • •

  IN 1866, California turned sixteen. It was a young state, self-conscious and arrogant. Its best writers were thirty or under, and they wrote with an irreverence native to the West and to the young. They no longer gathered in the offices of the Golden Era, or those of the Californian a few blocks away. Those were the places where, for the past six years, the literary seams of the Pacific coast had been prospected, extracted, refined. Now Bohemia found a new berth, farther from the city center.

  Inside a quiet house on Russian Hill was a parlor that smelled of fresh violets or lavender. Marble busts lined the mantel. Books lay everywhere. Through a curtained window came a view of the neighbor’s garden, with statues of Cupid and a swan, and a fountain that made soothing music. This was Ina Coolbrith’s home, and in it she hosted a salon that formed the core of literary San Francisco for the next several years. “She was the center of a little world,” recalled a visitor—no longer the shy girl who came from Los Angeles four years earlier, but a woman of growing confidence and wicked humor. “Those eyes of hers were wondrously changeful and reflective,” another observer said, equally given to sympathy and scorn. Harte admired her verse, and featured it prominently in Outcroppings. The ensuing uproar spread her name farther than ever before. “Miss Coolbrith is one of the real poets among the many poetic masqueraders in the volume,” wrote the Nation—a major acknowledgment from the eastern press.

  Her parlor gave the Bohemians a place to meet. Russian Hill made an especially scenic setting, rising three hundred feet above the city. The houses looked fragile from this height, row upon row clinging precariously to the hills: the Italianate of the imperial present, the wood-frame dwellings of the recent past, and in the distance, the adobe Presidio of Spanish prehistory. In a later poem, Coolbrith called it a “hill of Memories.”

  Harte came often. The rarefied air of Russian Hill offered a refuge from the ceaseless mercantile buzz below. It also gave him an excuse to get out of the house—the domestic battleground where his unpleasant wife, Anna Griswold Harte, kept up a perpetual stream of distractions to derail his writing. By 1866, Harte had lost the center of his literary life: the Californian was sinking. Its founder, Charles Henry Webb, briefly resumed control but couldn’t revive the paper’s flagging fortunes, and he sailed for his native New York in April 1866. He had been in San Francisco for only three years, and his writing never quite won the audience he wanted. Keeping the Californian alive had been a constant struggle. Like all things Bohemian, the periodical had burned brightly and for a brief period. Its decline left a vacuum in the city’s literary fabric, one filled by Coolbrith’s salon.

  Charles Warren Stoddard also became a regular on Russian Hill. “I was nowhere more at home than there,” he recalled: high praise from someone who felt at home almost nowhere. In December 1865, he had finally left Brayton Academy in Oakland after two excruciating years. “It was now evident to me the world was my school and in it I must learn all that I hoped to know,” he wrote. Coolbrith’s “restful room” was a good start. Harte gave editorial guidance: “He would jump upon my faults quite frankly, and was equally open in appreciation.” Coolbrith provided personal advice. “In mood he was as variable as a San Francisco summer day,” she remembered. “I used to say to him, ‘Charloway, if there were as many legs as there are sides to you, a centipede would not be in it!’”

  Outcroppings brought them closer. Stoddard recalled “the abuse which was heaped upon us,” and in particular upon him. The delicate, unmanly poet represented everything the countryside critics hated about the city, and thus made a big target for the book’s enemies. The Territorial Enterprise slammed his poems as “the worst specimens of this imperfection.” Since boyhood he had been bullied for being too girly, and he never learned to insulate himself with irony or pride. His work gave him “no satisfaction,” Coolbrith observed. “It was i
n reality his despair.” Negative criticism only confirmed his inner sense of worthlessness. He needed other people’s approval, and went to extraordinary lengths to obtain it.

  In 1866, shortly after the Outcroppings saga, Stoddard mailed copies of his poems to his favorite authors. He had kept an autograph album for years, asking his friends for inscriptions. Now he took it a step further, fishing for compliments from the most famous writers in the English language. These included the literary lords of New England—Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes—and British eminences like Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, and Anthony Trollope. Once the letters went out, the trembling set in. “I was hoping against hope,” he recalled, madly nervous, ashamed of his presumptuousness in begging “the attention of the immortals.”

  Incredibly, most replied. Emerson enjoyed his poems: “I am much touched with them, and I think so well of their superior skill and tone that I would hear with pain that you had discontinued writing.” Tennyson offered fainter praise: “I have read your verses & I liked them.” Herman Melville, whose novels of the South Seas helped awaken Stoddard’s love for the tropics, said he had been “quite struck” by one of the items. Others gave less favorable feedback. John Stuart Mill urged him to publish only poetry “of the very highest quality.” Oliver Wendell Holmes warned him not to use writing as “an apology for neglecting humbler and more steadily industrious pursuits.”

  But Stoddard was unfit for more industrious pursuits. High-strung and hopelessly impractical, he had made a terrible student and an indifferent bookstore clerk. He would never outgrow what Coolbrith called his “ethereal unreality.” He was “as much out of place in this very material country as Pegasus in a quartz mill,” Harte said, and he meant it as a compliment. By age twenty-three, Stoddard had tried and failed to fit in. He now decided to make a bold concession to his nature: to embrace his literary calling by publishing his first book. In 1866, he and Harte began selecting poems for it. This would be his chance to prove he was a real poet.