The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  Twain had a talent for taking the national temperature. The “fidgety, feverish restlessness” he felt in New York was a symptom of something larger: the new economic world that emerged after the Civil War. America was becoming modern. Among other things, this meant larger concentrations of capital and a starkly Darwinian approach to social relations. Also the compression of time and space, as a swiftly consolidating nation knitted itself together by rail.

  While Twain elbowed his way through Manhattan’s crowds, a similarly frenetic scene unfolded in the Sierras, as thousands of Chinese workers laid track for the transcontinental railroad. They worked at a frantic pace for pitiful wages, braving blizzards and avalanches and rockslides. Five years after Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 into law, they did the backbreaking labor required to realize such an ambitious idea. The bill had stipulated two spans, each to be built by a different corporation: the Central Pacific would be responsible for the western half, starting from California, and the Union Pacific would oversee the eastern, starting from the Missouri River. The federal government subsidized the construction with bonds and land grants, awarded per mile of completed track. In theory, this would encourage the work to go faster. In practice, the companies bribed and manipulated lawmakers into making the incentives more generous, funneling an ever-larger share of public resources into private hands. What had once been envisioned as a patriotic endeavor to bind up a nation threatened by disunion became a feeding frenzy of government largesse.

  Meanwhile, California anxiously awaited the moment when the rails would meet. The state’s vanishing isolation would inspire large changes in its literary life. From Ina Coolbrith’s parlor on Russian Hill, the Bohemians looked out over a new national landscape. A smaller country meant they could penetrate eastern markets more directly. Writers everywhere were in high demand. Surging literacy, the plummeting cost of printing, the rise of cities, and the growth of rail networks all conspired to produce a reading boom after the Civil War. The masses were ravenous for the printed word in all its bound and broadsheet varieties, and California helped sate the hunger. By 1867, Coolbrith had started publishing her poems in high-profile New York magazines like the Galaxy and Harper’s Weekly. Bret Harte was writing columns for a pair of Massachusetts papers. Charles Warren Stoddard was preparing his first book.

  Scaling the heights of the national literary scene wouldn’t be easy for any of them. It would inflict new anxieties and insecurities—and Stoddard, still the baby of the Bohemians at twenty-three, would feel these most acutely. By the spring of 1867, he was a mess. The ordeal of publishing a book was shredding his nerves. As he assembled his manuscript, the jittery streak that made him moody and impulsive bloomed into full-scale panic. Harte offered a steady hand, helping to collect the poems and read the proofs, but delays at the printing office kept postponing the publication date. Finally, Anton Roman, the enterprising local publisher, came to the rescue. He agreed to take on the project, with one caveat: Stoddard would go to Yosemite for the duration. There the author would sit tight until the book was out and the press was singing his praises.

  Before leaving for the valley that summer, Stoddard received an encouraging note from a faraway friend. “Your book will be a success—your book shall be a success—& I will destroy any man that says the contrary,” Twain wrote from New York in April 1867. “I will back up your book just as strong as I know how. Count on me to-day, to-morrow & all the time.” Stoddard had sent his autograph album for an inscription, and four days later, Twain returned it with another ringing endorsement. “My Young Friend,” he wrote, “you stand now upon the threshold of the grand, mysterious Future, and you are about to take the most momentous step in the march of your life.”

  Twain’s sympathy for Stoddard drew partly from the fact that he knew exactly what the poor poet was going through. On the opposite coast, Twain was struggling with the same agony of bringing his first book to print. He had landed in New York in early 1867 with a stack of clippings in his suitcase, eager to sell a manuscript based on his Hawaii letters. But there were unforeseen obstacles, like the heavy traffic that made traversing Manhattan all but impossible and the winter that made him shiver and curse like any good Californian. Fortunately, he found a friend to keep him company: Charles Henry Webb, the founder of the Californian, who had recently returned to New York and resumed his literary life there, writing for various papers and magazines. Webb lived only a couple of blocks from Twain’s hotel, and he invited the frostbitten humorist over to his apartment for booze and a bit of advice. He suggested Twain shelve the Hawaii project and instead build a book around “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” The still-famous story would be the collection’s centerpiece; the rest would consist of sketches from the Californian and the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Webb even set up a meeting for Twain with Artemus Ward’s publisher, George Carleton, to pitch the idea.

  In February 1867, Twain descended on Carleton’s offices at 499 Broadway, manuscript in hand. He expected the appointment to be little more than a formality: soon he would sign his first book contract, and be flying up the literary ladder he had come East to climb. In the anteroom, the clerk behind the counter greeted him warmly. When he learned Twain had come to sell a book and not to buy one, however, he did everything he could to discourage him. Undeterred, Twain penetrated this perimeter and reached the inner sanctum where Carleton sat. Twain walked in swaying and drawling like a drunk, his wild crop of red hair spiraling off his head in all directions. Carleton eyed this savage and could barely conceal his contempt. “Well, what can I do for you?” he demanded.

  When Twain mentioned his book, Carleton “began to swell.” He “went on swelling and swelling and swelling until he had reached the dimensions of a god of about the second or third degree,” Twain recalled. Then came an eruption as violent as a volcano, an angry rush of words that “fell so densely that they darkened the atmosphere.” “Books—” Carleton yelled, “look at those shelves! Every one of them is loaded with books that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I don’t. Good morning.”

  This encounter inspired Twain to spend the next twenty-one years fantasizing about killing Carleton in “increasingly cruel and inhuman ways,” until the delicious day when, on vacation in Switzerland, the publisher approached the now-famous writer to apologize. “I refused a book of yours, and for this I stand without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century,” Carleton said—or so Twain recalled in his autobiography, savoring the sweet pleasure of this “long-delayed revenge.”

  Carleton had a rough touch, but he wasn’t alone in his initial opinion of Twain. He later said he spurned the strange visitor because he “looked so disreputable,” and many people agreed. Twain was a western import, vulgar in dress and diction, and this made the path to eastern success steeper than he expected. He needed to prune his less palatable aspects while retaining enough of what made him distinctive—a delicate negotiation that would preoccupy Twain for decades. Carleton’s rejection wouldn’t be the last. But what made that day in February 1867 especially painful was another humiliation that Twain neglected to mention in his autobiography: around the same time that Carleton declined to publish Twain’s first book, he agreed to publish Harte’s. From the publisher’s point of view, Harte was surely a safer bet: less “disreputable,” more agreeable to good taste. His manuscript, like Twain’s, consisted of previously published pieces, including his “Condensed Novels” for the Californian.

  Twain was furious when he found out. Harte had always seemed one step ahead. Now, three thousand miles away, the dapper Bohemian was outmaneuvering him once again. “How is Bret?” Twain wrote Stoddard in April 1867. “He is publishing with a Son of a Bitch who will swindle him.” “I don’t know how his book is coming on—” he added spitefully, “we of Bohemia keep away from Carleton’s.” Twain had every reason to resent Harte’s advantages: despite the national renown of “Jim Smiley
and His Jumping Frog,” Twain still bore the stigma of the “low” frontier. His competitiveness with Harte only grew sharper in the coming years, as he strove to break free of that label.

  Eventually Webb offered to publish Twain’s book himself, after more publishers declined it. Twain revised the manuscript, swapping out words that might offend or bewilder eastern readers: “hell” became “hades,” “bully” became “jolly.” This self-editing would be crucial for Twain’s career: by smoothing his rougher edges, it ultimately helped him infiltrate American culture and not remain forever at its fringes. At first glance, the volume that appeared in May 1867 looked like a well-polished piece of work. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches made a gorgeous addition to booksellers’ shelves: bound in cloth, it featured a golden frog on its cover, leaping into space.

  Sadly, the pages inside presented a less distinguished appearance. To Twain’s horror, the text was full of typos, errors, and last-minute editorial changes. He had spent March back home in Missouri, and hadn’t read the proofs before they went to print. Webb, after persuading Twain to do the book in the first place, had let him down. The book sold poorly. The popularity of the jumping frog story wasn’t enough to make people buy it. Twain put on a good face in public, bragging in his letters to the Alta California about the collection’s “excellent style.” In private, however, he admitted the scale of the disaster. “It is full of damnable errors of grammar & deadly inconsistencies of spelling,” he wrote Harte on May 1, 1867. “[B]ut be a friend & say nothing about these things.” Confessing his failure to a man whose success he keenly envied only added to his embarrassment.

  Fortunately, he was far too ambitious to pin all his hopes on one project. The powerful dread of the poorhouse that kept him working even at his darkest moments carried him forward once again. In the same letter to Harte, he revealed his next undertaking: bringing his Hawaii lecture to New York. In typical Twain fashion, he picked the biggest hall in town: Cooper Union. This was the site where, in 1860, Lincoln had delivered the speech that helped pave his way to the presidency—a diatribe against the expansion of slavery into the West and a defiant response to the threat of Southern secession. That night, Lincoln had premiered the oratorical prowess that over the next five years would make him America’s storyteller-in-chief, the man who gave meaning to the Civil War, who saw in its terrible rush of events the potential to fulfill the nation’s founding promises.

  Seven years later, another western storyteller took the stage. More than two thousand people crammed inside Cooper Union on May 6, 1867, to see him. They had been lured there by newspaper ads, handbills, posters, even a free ticket giveaway—all orchestrated by Frank Fuller, an old friend whom Twain had enlisted as his manager. At seven thirty, the performer appeared—nattily dressed in a tailored suit, at Fuller’s insistence. He walked to the edge of the stage, stared at his spectators, and set about making them howl. “For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in Paradise,” Twain recalled. “From every pore I exuded a divine delight.” The reviews the next day reported a great hit. “It was certainly peculiar and original,” ventured the New York Tribune, adding that Twain’s style “needs to be seen to be understood.”

  That night, Twain proved he could bring his Pacific personality to an Atlantic audience; that, like Lincoln, he could find the filament that wove one corner of the country to another. He might’ve capitalized on this insight to embark on a lecture tour throughout the East, earning money and fame. But by the time Twain took the stage of Cooper Union in May, he already had something bigger in mind. That summer, an old Union navy ship called the Quaker City would set sail across the Atlantic with a well-feathered flock of Americans aboard. This would be the first organized pleasure cruise in the country’s history. The prospectus promised an ambitious itinerary—Europe, the Holy Land, Egypt, the Crimea—and the press gossiped about the star-studded passenger list, said to include celebrities like Henry Ward Beecher and William Tecumseh Sherman. Naturally, Twain was itching to join. “Send me $1,200 at once,” he telegraphed his editors at the Alta California. “I want to go abroad.” They acquiesced, paying his fare. After several delays, and the withdrawal of Beecher, Sherman, and many other marquee names from the trip, the Quaker City finally churned its enormous side wheel through New York harbor on June 8, 1867. The ship dropped anchor near Brooklyn to wait out a storm, lingering for two days before continuing on to the open sea. Twain was comfortably installed in an upper-deck cabin, eagerly awaiting his next adventure. He would be visiting the cradle of Christian civilization—not as a humble colonial, worshipping at the altar of the Old World, but as a new kind of American: skeptical, confident, vigorously independent. It would be a reverse pilgrimage of sorts, going to distant countries to discover his own.

  • • •

  TWAIN’S IMPATIENCE SERVED HIM WELL. Instead of dwelling on his hatred for Carleton, his jealousy of Harte, and his exasperation at Webb for botching his first book, he sprinted headlong into his next endeavor. “A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment,” he later wrote. “[H]e ought to make up his mind to get even.”

  In the summer of 1867, Stoddard could’ve used this advice. While Twain sailed across the ocean, the poet sat in Yosemite, counting down the days until his book appeared. Buoyed by the encouragement of his friends, he prayed for a victorious debut. For the past half decade, Stoddard had been Bohemia’s golden child. Now came the moment to fulfill the bright future everyone had forecast for him. In early September 1867, when his Poems finally came off the presses, he emerged from his leafy seclusion to face the public.

  Even at his gloomiest, Stoddard could never have predicted the bloodbath that broke out upon his return. Back in San Francisco, he stepped right into the firing line. Reviewers pounced on his Poems, ridiculing him as “the pet of the literary ‘Ring’”: the pampered brat of a pretentious, cliquish elite. The resentments surrounding the Outcroppings saga were still raw, and Stoddard had a bull’s-eye on his back simply by virtue of being a city boy. The soft, sensuous grain of his verse didn’t help. The response from eastern critics was equally disappointing: although not uniformly hostile, they didn’t exactly swoon either. A couple of prominent papers delivered especially harsh judgments, the kind that inevitably stuck in an author’s mind. The Nation called his poems “imitation spasms.” The Round Table lamented “the incubus of imitation which paralyzes the wings of his muse.”

  Unlike Twain, Stoddard didn’t get angry and swear revenge. He didn’t fantasize about killing his critics—he agreed with them. They confirmed what he had long suspected: that he wasn’t a poet after all; that his poetry, as he put it, was the “mere wind-fall of unripe fruit.” This discovery depressed him. Since boyhood, poetry had been a way to endure the other unhappiness in his life. If he couldn’t hold down a job or succeed in school or find a young man to reciprocate his love, at least he could write verse. Poetry provided a role to play, an identity to inhabit. Without it, he was adrift.

  Stoddard needed a new place of safety. He found it in the baptistery of St. Mary’s Cathedral at two o’clock in the afternoon on November 2, 1867, where a priest wetted him with holy water and sealed his conversion to the Catholic faith. He had been mulling over the decision for at least a year, but the fiasco of his first book stoked his need for spiritual renewal. “From the steps of that altar I seemed to rise a new being,” he remembered. He had always felt a sense of incompleteness, and a longing to be filled. He had tried Presbyterianism, Unitarianism, Methodism—but none of these plugged the hole in his heart as completely as Catholicism. It brought a more permanent version of the peace he had experienced in Hawaii a few years earlier. “I couldn’t be anything else than a Catholic,” he later said, “—except—except a downright savage, and I wish to God I were that!” His Catholicism and his infatuation with the “primitive” cultures of the Pacific belonged to the same impulse. Both satisfied his love of beauty, his ta
ste for pageantry and ritual. Both offered alternatives to the drab materialism of American society.

  Catholicism also helped Stoddard make sense of what he called his “temperament,” and what later generations would call homosexuality. The sinfulness of the flesh, the consolation of confession, the possibility of forgiveness—these were useful concepts for a man always at war with himself. In the church, he obtained a purer outlet for his passions, a way to indulge his tenderheartedness without fear of rejection. Unlike many other men over the years, Christ would always return his love. “Shun all Humans,” he wrote in his diary, “look straight to God and all is sure.”

  This was easier said than done, especially for someone as incurably human as Stoddard. Each Sunday he attended Mass and let his spirit take flight. Afterward, he walked to Coolbrith’s house on Russian Hill to resume his earthly entanglements. The two friends traded “pleasant gossip of our familiars” in her parlor, she recalled, or took day trips to far parts of the city. They went to the beach below the Cliff House, and scoured the rocks at low tide for algae to add to Coolbrith’s collection. They went to the coast along Fort Point, cooked lunch over a driftwood fire, and returned home “with too fragrant a spoil of sea-mosses, radiantly tired, in the gloaming.” Weekends were precious to Coolbrith—her only free time away from teaching school and helping run her family’s household—and she liked spending them with Stoddard. He made her laugh: often his “wit would break out” unexpectedly, she remembered, “as if he feared to appear too earnest.”