The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  By the time the Central Pacific and Union Pacific finally met at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, San Francisco had been partying for two days straight. That morning, the wire ticked with the real signal—done. The city gave one last roar. The guns at Fort Point boomed, the fire alarms rang, and the rest of the country, informed simultaneously by telegram, burst into cheers. Omaha, Chicago, New Orleans, New York—the continent rejoiced. Four years after the end of the war that had almost cut the Union in two, “Uncle Sam’s Waistband” girded it tighter than ever before. A journey that lasted about twenty-four days by stagecoach from St. Louis to San Francisco, and often even longer by steamer from New York, now took a week from coast to coast. It was “a victory over space,” declared one San Francisco newspaper, a shrinking of the West’s epic scale. Californians felt confident that great things would result.

  • • •

  BEFORE LONG, THE JUBILANT MOOD Would fade. In retrospect, the story followed the typical western pattern: delusion, then disappointment. The greenhorn goes to the mines to become a millionaire and dies broke in a boardinghouse: this is the seed of California humor, the collision of romance with reality. The arrival of the railroad would close a chapter in California history, inflicting radical changes on the social world that had sustained the decade’s Bohemian experiment. At the time, however, it took an especially prescient pair of eyes to see this coming—what most people saw was a gleaming monument to the new American industrialism, a marvel of modern engineering that connected the nation both physically and culturally.

  The railroad didn’t just carry people and goods. It carried books, newspapers, ideas. It carried the June 1869 issue of the Overland Monthly, with new fiction by Bret Harte. In the ten months since “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” the magazine’s esteemed editor had continued to feed his growing fan base with stories of gold diggers, gamblers, and whores. Eastern papers reprinted them; James T. Fields, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, even offered to collect them into a book. They arrived at an ideal moment, just as the railroad stoked the country’s curiosity about the West and a postwar publishing boom created more print products to satisfy it.

  Dime novels were the lowbrow equivalents of Harte’s tales: lurid morsels of frontier melodrama, wrapped in cheap paper and popular in eastern cities. They offered parables of rugged individualism and wide-open spaces to urban readers whose lives were increasingly absent of both. They appealed to an era in which tenements and factories and corporations and bureaucracy were aggregating human beings into a mass of interchangeable parts. They provided a national epic of conquest, of white settlers subduing the wilderness and the Indians, to men whose masculinity seemed to be crumbling under the assault of the machine age. As the nineteenth century wore on, America’s infatuation with the “Wild West” would only grow.

  This set the scene for Harte’s success with eastern readers. What distinguished his stories from their pop-cultural competitors wasn’t just the quality of the writing. It was his wit—the mischievous streak that sizzled just beneath the surface. Harte had come to absorb the lesson of his friend Mark Twain: that frontier humor was the resin in which the peculiar power of American speech was caught and crystallized. Those wacky yarns told by the barroom stove held the promise of a national literature liberated from “the trammels of English literary precedent,” Harte later wrote, the “inchoate poetry” of a unique American vernacular. Twain had inaugurated this revolt with “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”; now, in the pages of the Overland, Harte tried to bring the spirit of the frontier to short fiction.

  He did so subtly: not just with California settings and characters but with finely calibrated nuances of tone. Harte’s best stories, like the man himself, relied on a measure of deception. Just as his fashionable clothes belied a sneering Bohemian wit, his fiction wore a polite disguise that let it pass easily into respectable company. At first glance, Harte’s stories appeared to satisfy the tender pieties of good taste. He laced them with bits of pathos—like orphans and hookers with hearts of gold—calculated to yank at the reader’s heartstrings. Yet on closer inspection, these were parodies of the sentimentalism they pretended to embrace. They came laden with the kind of ironic reversals familiar from everyday life on the frontier. A man stranded in the wilderness kills himself to leave enough food for his friends to survive—they die anyway. A father reunites with his estranged son—only to find out he’s an impostor. These follow the contours of frontier humor: the setup, then the “snapper,” as Twain called the punch line that concludes a comic tale.

  The Overland stories that began traveling east by transcontinental rail in 1869 would create an infinitely richer picture of the Far West than the one painted by pulp fantasy. They showed a place of paradox and incongruity, where conventional rules of sentiment and syntax broke down, and humor overlaid everything. They confirmed Harte’s calling as a humorist, and his identity as a westerner. Despite his relentless criticism of California, he loved its indigenous irony—“the Western predilection to take a humorous view of any principle or sentiment,” as he later called it. As a boy, he had developed a wry exterior to deflect the cruel taunts of other children. By the time he was thirty-three, this facade had grown virtually impregnable. His voice always hovered uncertainly between sincerity and sarcasm, his meaning as elaborately layered as his dress. He was as shifty as a frontier fabulist, as slippery as a confidence man hustling a watch off your wrist. “You could never be sure of Harte,” William Dean Howells later said. “He was a tease.”

  Yet there were a select few who cracked this armor. In 1869, as the Overland took flight, Ina Coolbrith became one of them. They had been friends for years, and had collaborated closely on the premier literary paper of the Pacific coast since its debut the previous summer. But it wasn’t until the abrupt departure of the third of the Overland Trinity—Charles Warren Stoddard—that their relationship really began.

  Ever since the failure of his first book in 1867, Stoddard had struggled. The poet had been promised a glorious career from an early age. Now twenty-five, he seemed in danger of never achieving it. His conversion to Catholicism brought a measure of peace, as did the founding of the Overland, which provided a place to publish under Harte’s patient tutelage. “He was an exacting and relentless critic,” Stoddard recalled, and those honest critiques did immeasurable good for a writer too often coddled by his literary elders.

  But sharp editing alone couldn’t solve his problems. His real enemy was the manic energy that spun his nerves into knots or left them unspooling in long stretches of lethargy. He hated being alone, and compulsively sought the company of others. “Why do you waste your time among these people?” he remembered Harte saying. “They encourage you in idleness when you should be hard at work.” Yet the harder he applied himself, the more his mind resisted. It fled to other places, like Hawaii, and the memory of the naked native boys he had found there four years earlier. He longed to return, and when the opportunity arose, he seized it. His sister had recently married a rich American in Maui, and they invited him to visit. He finagled a traveling commission from the San Francisco Evening Bulletin to pay his way, and set sail in October 1868 for eight indulgent months in the islands.

  His friends hated to see him go. “Harte says one end of our triangle is too far removed from the other two, and ought to be drawn nearer,” Coolbrith said in a letter in January 1869. She was gazing out the window of her house on Russian Hill as she wrote, watching the sun between the clouds. A light rain fell, and, in the neighbor’s garden, a bird bathed its feathers. “I’m sure it’s our bird,” she told Stoddard. She felt saddened by his absence, even more so by his silence. He was never one for staying in touch, and she couldn’t help feeling hurt when he disappeared for months without a word. “Of all of your friends am I alone to be forgotten?” But at least it had one happy result: the rest of the Overland Trinity grew closer. “Harte is not as formidable as I imagined him; we get on v
ery nicely.”

  Harte, she discovered, was hilarious. He could tell a joke with a look or a gesture, “a born actor of the subtlest, most refined type.” But beneath this performance was another Harte: petty, delicate, the boy whose pink skin struck his classmates as too girly and then grew hideous with smallpox scars, who felt the sting of every unkind word and always preferred the company of books to people. This was the Harte whom Coolbrith came to know while Stoddard cruised the Pacific thousands of miles away. Meanwhile, a different image of the author began to take shape in the nation’s mind on the strength of the stories that circulated widely in the eastern press. By 1869, Harte had begun his final ascent. It would put new pressures on his personality, and punch holes in the composure he worked hard to maintain.

  One day Coolbrith found him in the Overland office, seething. There would always be a certain class of critics who condemned him for writing about scoundrels and tramps. He wrote stories, not sermons, and this outraged many self-described Christians, beginning with the proofreader who gagged on the impiety of “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Mercifully, these prudes were in the minority. But they still got under his skin. “I tried first to comfort, then to laugh him out of his mood,” Coolbrith remembered. When that didn’t work, she took out a piece of paper and wrote five lines:

  There was a young writer named Francis

  Who concocted such lurid romances

  That his publishers said

  You will kill this firm dead

  If you don’t put a curb on your fancies.

  As he read, a “laugh twinkled in his eyes, which he tried to conceal.” Then Coolbrith scribbled another stanza, and he cracked. “I am almost tempted to box your ears!” he cried. “But instead, like a good Christian I’ll proceed to heap coals upon your head.” Limericks began flying across the table:

  Here is the young Sapphic divinity

  Number one of the Overland Trinity

  Who uses the muses,

  Pretty much as she chooses,

  This dark-eyed poetic divinity.

  They took care of each other. “Harte was good to me—good as a brother should be to an only sister,” she said. He knew her finances were precarious, subsisting as she did on a schoolteacher’s salary. He knew her time was scarce, consumed by endless hours spent scrubbing and cooking and cleaning for her family. So he came over to her house on Russian Hill and helped shell peas and hull strawberries. He kept his ears open for any paid writing work, and when the Society of California Pioneers asked him to compose a poem for its anniversary, he insisted she do it instead, earning her $50.

  Most important, he edited her. She wrote for almost every issue of the Overland, at Harte’s insistence. He was relentless. “I was quite disappointed at not receiving the poem this morning, but I suppose the weather was unpropitious for your muse,” one of his letters read. “Is it because the Muse is feminine that she is dilatory?” read another. He went to her house on a Saturday afternoon and rang and rang and rang. Sometimes he sent a messenger instead, with instructions to wait until she produced pages. “I must have my best contributors,” he explained.

  He was equally diligent in his revisions. He suggested a new title here, an extra syllable there. Coolbrith responded by immersing herself in her craft. Certain themes grew clearer. The plaintiveness that had always predominated in her verse became more openly an obsession with death, even a longing to die herself:

  What do I owe the years, that I should bring

  Green leaves to crown them King?

  Blown, barren sands, the thistle, and the brier;

  Dead love, and mocked desire,

  And sorrow, vast and pitiless as the sea:

  These are their gifts to me.

  Harte always wanted more. She saw him at his best and worst, at his most compassionate and his most childish. Once, he greeted her in the street with a red face and a menacing voice, demanding to know why she had passed him twice that day without saying hello. She hadn’t noticed him, of course—why would she snub him? But he refused to drop it. “You’ve been having a row with someone,” she said at last, “and are vexed with everyone.” This hypersensitivity “to any slight, real or fancied,” would only grow more acute as his national reputation rose. Instead of taking solace in his success, it made him shrill and defensive, with terrible consequences for those whom he felt mistreated him.

  Yet the one person who mistreated him the most never seemed to make him angry. Anna Griswold Harte dropped by the Overland offices at regular intervals to bark orders at her husband in full earshot of others. He obeyed these without protest, halting his work at a moment’s notice to join her on a shopping trip, or indulge whatever whim she had concocted to break his concentration. “How my heart aches for the poor boy,” his mother confessed to an Overland staffer. “Through the day, in his office, he is always interrupted—he is never alone, and when he comes home at night, she . . . just wears the life out of him.” The emotional energy he expended on her surely sapped his patience with others, and contributed to the widening cracks in his usually cool demeanor.

  In June 1869, when the Overland changed owners, Harte’s arrogance came out with a vengeance. Anton Roman, the founding publisher, had decided to sell the magazine. It was Roman who first conceived the venture and persuaded Harte to come aboard. But in the year since, the editor had made it entirely his own. When a businessman named John H. Carmany bought the Overland from Roman, Harte took the opportunity to flex his editorial muscle. He greeted the new publisher with a list of demands. He wanted a new office and a salary of $200 a month, plus a written guarantee of his sole sovereignty of the Overland. “Of my ability to be trusted with the exclusive control of the magazine,” he declared, “the Overland of the past year must be the judge.” He was dictating terms, not negotiating. “If I do not hear from you by tomorrow 10 a.m. I shall consider myself at liberty to enter into other negotiations.”

  Carmany surrendered. Harte would have his office, and enough money to quit his sinecure at the US Mint and devote himself to the Overland full-time. The editor’s fast-inflating ego had made him formidable at the bargaining table. The publisher would live in fear of Harte, anxious to keep him at the Overland as his national popularity grew. But Harte’s surging confidence also had some unfortunate side effects. The sense of entitlement, the prickliness over any perceived ingratitude—these could be damaging. Fame would make him ornery and overbearing, even to the point of self-sabotage. It would’ve been a good subject for one of his stories: a man who played his hand perfectly, until he shot himself in the foot.

  • • •

  IN 1869, As the Overland thrived, Twain watched admiringly from the opposite coast. “The Eastern press are unanimous in their commendation of your new magazine,” he told the Alta California in July 1869. “I have heard it handsomely praised by some of the most ponderous of America’s literary chiefs.” But whatever pride he felt at the rising profile of the Pacific coast was offset by his envy of the man leading the charge. Harte’s short fiction had made him a star. Twain needed to catch up.

  It had been one year since he sailed out of San Francisco for the last time, with the manuscript he hoped would make him famous. He had landed in New York on July 29, 1868, and delivered the text to his publisher Elisha Bliss Jr. six days later. Then the waiting began. By March 1869, the book still hadn’t appeared. Bliss cited production delays, and even got bogged down in a battle with his board of directors, who raised a sanctimonious stink about the impertinent tone of Twain’s writing. They backed off, but by July 1869, Bliss had more bad news: publication would be postponed again, this time until the fall. Twain had exercised remarkable restraint over the past several months. Now he went ballistic:

  After it is done being a fall book, upon what argument shall you perceive that it will be best to make a winter book of it? And—

  After it is done being a winter book
, upon what argument shall you perceive that it will be best to make another spring book of it again? . . .

  All I desire is to be informed from time to time what future season of the year the publication is postponed to, & why—so that I can go on informing my friends intelligently—I mean that infatuated baker’s dozen of them who, faithful unto death, still believe that I am going to publish a book.

  Bliss got the message. That month, Twain’s long-awaited comic romp through Europe and the Holy Land finally appeared. The Innocents Abroad was as prodigiously proportioned as the personality that produced it: a brick of a book, 651 pages and 234 illustrations wedged between covers of black cloth—four continents, two years, and any number of revisions in the making. Harte’s edits had been invaluable. He “trimmed & trained & schooled me patiently,” Twain gratefully recalled. But the book also bore traces of another influence, closer to his heart: a twenty-three-year-old girl named Olivia Langdon with whom he had fallen madly in love.

  In a typically Twainian coincidence, the same trip that produced The Innocents Abroad also led him to “Livy.” He had met her in late 1867 through her brother Charley, a fellow passenger aboard the Quaker City. By the summer of 1868, he had proposed. It wasn’t an obvious match. For one, she didn’t share his sense of humor. His wit ricocheted right off her, even when delivered in his rollicking drawl. She was meek where he was manic, pious where he was profane. She came from a rich, respectable family in Elmira, New York, and grew up in a cocoon of Victorian gentility entirely insulated from the frontier society that created Twain. To imagine this graduate of the Elmira Ladies’ Seminary having anything more than a passing acquaintance with the whiskey-swilling westerner was about as far-fetched as a barroom yarn about giant grasshoppers or jumping frogs.