1876

by Gore Vidal

  “I must say…I don’t know…perhaps…I shall look…”

  That disposed of the literary editor. I was then introduced to a Mr. Henderson, the business head of the paper. The two men spoke of business. I proposed that I go.

  “No, Mr. Schuyler. I’m the one who’s going.” And Mr. Henderson did go.

  “Would you like to write something for us on the Centennial Exhibition?” I had forgotten how swiftly Bryant comes to the point when he is at his desk, at work.

  “Why, yes. I would.”

  “It opens in Philadelphia. May or June, I’m not certain. Anyway, there will be time to prepare yourself, to think through all the changes you will have noted…”

  “Not least, amongst them, let us hope, the rates of payment at the Post?” How impossible it would have been for the young Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler to mention money to William Cullen Bryant. But I am old, needy, triplebound with brass, and would that it were gold. I managed to get him to agree to a flat payment of five hundred dollars for no less than ten thousand words, an excellent price for the Post, though hardly in the Ledger class.

  I rose to go. “I am to take tea with our old friend John Bigelow.”

  Bryant was interested. “I’ve not seen him since the election and his…uh, elevation.”

  “What does the secretary of state of New York do?” Bigelow was elected to the post last month.

  “Whatever it is, let us say that some do less of it than others. I presume this secretary of state will be very busy trying to elect Governor Tilden president…”

  “That is my impression. I assume you will support Tilden.”

  The deep-set eyes almost vanished beneath the noble brow as he turned his head away from the window. “The Post is a Republican newspaper. Governor Tilden is a Democrat…” And so on. But Bryant’s tone was pensive, tentative. This means that he is not decided; must mention this to Bigelow.

  Bryant accompanied me to the office door, from which he had so recently hung. “Tilden is my lawyer, you know. A splendid man. But not perhaps strong enough for the highest place. I speak of his physical health—not mental, of course. And then, of course, he’s not married. This may disturb the electorate.”

  “But Jackson, Van Buren, Buchanan—any number of presidents have been bachelors in the White House.”

  “But they once had wives. Saving the egregious Buchanan, they were widowers, while Samuel Tilden has never married, nor, one gathers, even contemplated matrimony. If elected, he would be our first…our…our first…”

  “Our first virgin president?”

  Bryant was taken aback. Then, almost shyly, he laughed through that enormous waterfall of a beard, in itself a suitable subject for ode-making.

  “Dear Schuyler, you have been too long in Paris! We are simple folk in this republic.”

  On that amiable note we parted.

  I was so exhausted from the morning’s hike that I had more energy than ever: a phenomenon that Emma’s father-in-law used often to remark upon as he would tell us for the thousandth time about the retreat from Moscow.

  I was drawn irresistibly to the Astor House despite its decline—which is relative only to the new grandeur of the uptown hotels.

  I found the lobbies crowded with people; most looked to be businessmen from nearby Wall Street and the various exchanges.

  I stood at the door to the vast dining room and beheld half a thousand men at breakfast. There was hardly a woman in sight as the bearded, frock-coated, stout burghers of the district gorged themselves on plates of ham and eggs, on enormous beefsteaks and cutlets. Hungry as I was after my walk with Bryant, I could not face so many red-faced carnivores so early in the morning.

  Instead I made my way to the tile-floored bar room, a dim congenial place with the longest bar that I have ever seen. Bronze Venuses and Dianas alternated as decorations with innumerable brightly polished spittoons.

  Those given to heavy drink had already taken up their positions at the bar, gulping down their pick-me-ups—more put-me-downs I should think, for I dislike strong drink so early in the day.

  In one corner, shaded by a spiky green plant that looked as if it might devour an entire businessman, I found a small table beside a rack containing all the morning newspapers. Not until I had sat down did I realize how truly exhausted I was: my right leg began uncontrollably to tremble from the tension of no longer having to support my considerable weight.

  “What’ll it be?” was the waiter’s gracious question.

  I said that it would be a bock beer and, perhaps, if it was possible, a cup of coffee. All things were possible, including a most astonishing array of food that I watched being laid upon a long table at a right angle to the bar.

  Waiters hurried in and out, depositing platters of cold meats, lobsters, salads, cheeses, as well as large mysteriously covered dishes. This was the famous “free lunch” one has heard of for so many years, a specialty of certain New York bars. For a single five-cent glass of beer one may eat to one’s heart’s content the free lunch.

  Possible piece for a Paris paper: how much cheaper food is here than in Europe. Just now I walked by a decent-looking restaurant that advertises a meal of hot beef “cut from the joint,” bread, pickles and potatoes for seventy-five cents. In the shops, beef costs thirty-five cents the pound. John Apgar says that one can live comfortably in one’s own home with three servants on six thousand a year. Unfortunately, Emma and I have less than half that amount.

  Luxuriously, I read the dozen morning newspapers, so conveniently collected for me by the friendly Astor bar. Each front page was bold with Tweed’s escape. Since I am not easily distressed by the familiar corruption of my native and still (to be confessed only to this page) hopelessly provincial city, I tend rather to be on the side of that large bearlike man with the small clear eyes and thick beard and I hope that Mr. Tweed manages to escape for good with all his swag. But then I tend to side with criminals. Although my sympathies in France are officially republican, at heart I delight in all Bonapartes—particularly in the first one, whose crimes were on such a large scale that they have ceased to be the stuff of moralizing and are simply history.

  The inner pages of each journal announce the arrival of Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler and his beautiful daughter, the Princess Dag Regent, Degregene, Dahgreejuhnt, widow of Napoleon’s famed marshal, daughter-in-law of the Emperor Napoleon III, intimate of the Empress Eugénie…a jumble of information, mostly false.

  But I was pleased that my support of Governor Tilden was everywhere noted. Less pleased to read of the “florid, portly novelist whose fame in Europe is far greater than it is here in what was once his native land.” This from the Sun. Although I have never written a novel, my “fame” ought to be more considerable here than in France where I publish seldom, unlike England where I used often to publish. Now I know how those acquaintances of my youth, Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper, felt upon their respective returns to these States after so many years abroad: Welcome home, traitor, was the tone then—is the tone now.

  Suffering a pang of hunger (hominy and milk is not my idea of the perfect breakfast), I made my way to the buffet table—or “free lunch counter,” as the waiter called it, giving me a speculative look that seemed to say, Is this a “dead head” (new expression to me—it means one who travels on a railroad pass or goes to the theatre free)? and will he, for the price of one stein of beer, eat three meals? I daresay the state of my finances make me oversensitive.

  I indicated, modestly, a tureen of chipped beef. The waiter filled my plate. “That about the size of it?”

  Another new expression. I must make up a glossary. “Yes, that is exactly the right size of it.” I suspect that I gave the wrong response.

  On my way back to the blessed table beside the rack of newspapers, I was stopped by two men who had been seated at the opposite end of the long dim bar. />
  “Mr. Schuyler?” asked the younger of the two, an elegantly turned-out young gentleman with a full moustache, and what looked to be a black orchid in his buttonhole.

  “Sir?” I felt a fool, as the chipped beef slopped ever so slightly onto my thumb.

  “You don’t remember me.” And of course for a moment I did fail to recognize the one man in New York I ought always to remember, for it was none other than that exquisite athlete, yachtsman, equestrian, millionaire publisher—my publisher, James Gordon Bennett, Junior, of the New York Herald, in whose pages my reports from Europe have been appearing for close to forty years.

  “Sorry, Jamie! Forgive me. I’m just off the boat. A dazzled immigrant.” I played the part of foolish elder sage, of Falstaff to Jamie’s Prince Hal—except he is now king in his own right, for his grim Scots father who started the Herald as a penny horror in ’35, died three years ago, leaving Jamie as the sole proprietor of a newspaper which has the largest (if not the best, as Bryant would undoubtedly observe) circulation of any newspaper in the United States.

  Much of the Herald’s success is based on its “Personal Column” advertisements that are nothing more than a straightforward guide to the Sodom below Bleecker Street, to the Gomorrah of Sixth Avenue, to every prostitute with a few dollars and a desire to see her name in print. Good folk complain about the Herald’s advertisements, but everyone reads them.

  Jamie introduced me to the elderly man with him, a sort of doleful farmer type whose name meant nothing to me.

  “I’ve known Mr. Schuyler since I was—how old?”

  “Before birth, I should think. When your mother paid us a call in Paris, a month before you were born.”

  Having failed to make his way in the proud self-contained aristocracy of New York, the older Bennett had vowed that his son would one day prevail amongst the Knickerbocker nobles and so sent the child off to Paris to be brought up.

  My wife and I used often to see Jamie and his mother. Because the boy was the same age as Emma, they were often together, and I always thought that he showed some interest in her; but in those days she was not much inclined to her father’s countrymen. Eventually Jamie returned to take with the greatest ease that place in New York society his father had wanted for him. Everyone was enchanted by Jamie’s Parisian elegance, his superb sportsmanship and, of course, his quite unexpected gift for the most sensational sort of newspaper publishing.

  The year of old Bennett’s death, Jamie arranged for one Henry M. Stanley to search for one David Livingstone, reputedly lost in Africa. Lavishly financed by Jamie, this entirely boring saga filled miles of newsprint for what seemed a decade, ensuring the Herald its American pre-eminence despite my own unremittingly dim reports on such trivia as Bismarck, Garibaldi, and Napoleon III.

  “I must leave you here, Mr. Bennett.” The sad farmer clung a moment to the younger man’s hand; then he squeezed my elbow and lugubriously departed.

  Jamie turned to me. “Come see our offices. We’re right across the street where Barnum’s used to be.” But I had had my fill of newspaper offices for one day.

  “Another time. My chipped beef grows cold.”

  Jamie made a face at the plate. “Then I’ll have a drink with you.” He joined me in my friendly green-shaded corner, and divined why I had placed myself so close to the newspapers. “You wanted to read all about your splendid arrival for free. A razzle-dazzle!” He shouted this last phrase which referred not to my arrival, as I feared, but to a perfectly terrifying cocktail that contains, in equal parts, brandy, absinthe and ginger ale. Hard drinkers, these New York gentlemen.

  “How’s Emma?”

  “She would like to see you.”

  “Handsome as ever?”

  “As always, to a father’s eye.”

  “I shall arrange something. Perhaps the theatre. Whatever Emma likes. Mr. Schuyler, what are your politics?”

  “If you’d read your own paper this morning, you’d know that I am an admirer of Governor Tilden.”

  “Cold as a clam. But that’s good.” The waiter brought Jamie his razzle-dazzle in a frozen glass, and beamed respectfully as the young lord downed the drink and asked for another. Obviously Jamie is well known at the Astor bar; but then he must be well known everywhere for New York is very much his city.

  “Good that Governor Tilden is a cold clam?”

  “No.” Jamie wiped his moustache—handkerchief heavy with eau de Cologne. “Good that you’re a Democrat. Good that you’re not one of those high-minded Republicans who’s willing to accept all sorts of thievery at Washington just because of the hallowed memory of Honest Ape.” Yes, “Ape” for “Abe.” But these New Yorkers were never partial to President Lincoln. In fact, during the late war, many distinguished New Yorkers actually favored the city’s secession from the Union.

  I looked at Jamie with some disapproval: not because of the reference to Lincoln but because no one ought to drink absinthe at nine in the morning. But he is not the sort of young man to take seriously anyone’s criticism. He sipped the second deadly concoction. For Jamie the rule has always been, Nothing in moderation. “How would you like to interview General Grant for the Herald?”

  “I cannot think of anything I would enjoy less.”

  “I know he’s dull but…”

  “Dull or not, I am your European correspondent.”

  “But it’s going to be awfully interesting the next few weeks, next few days in fact.”

  “But he’s finished, isn’t he? I mean he has only one more year as president…”

  “Unless he runs for a third time.”

  “Even I, in Paris, have read that he will not be a candidate again.”

  “Even you, in Paris, believe the newspapers?”

  “Only yours!”

  “Well, don’t!” Jamie laughed. Then he looked most grave, like his father about to reduce a journalist’s wage. “That old boy you met with me just now, that’s Abel Corbin.”

  “Am I to be impressed?”

  “You have been away! Abel’s married to Grant’s sister Jenny. He’s the most remarkable old crook. Don’t you recall…”

  I recalled. In 1869 Abel Corbin had joined with Jay Gould and Jim Fiske in an attempt to corner the gold market. Corbin also involved his brother-in-law the President—or tried to. The subsequent panic of ’73 was, in many ways, a result of that curious swindle which bankrupted a number of people, just as the disaster of ’73 was to finish off the rest of us, except the very rich.

  “Well, Abel Corbin’s got some interesting news from Washington. Scandals are about to break…”

  “Even if Grant turned out to be the devil himself, I can’t think what I could do with him as a subject.”

  “You do your subjects very well, Mr. Schuyler.” Jamie was beguiling, like a flattering son—which, of course, is the rôle he’s played most of his life. “Frankly, we’ve had too much of the usual writing. Not that Nordhoff isn’t good. He’s our man at the capital. Even so, there’s too much of the same old view from the same old lobby sort of thing. But if you and Emma were to descend on Washington, meet the President, his cronies—and they’re such yokels they will make a great fuss over the two of you—well, your impressions of the last days of Ulysses S. Grant would be quite a coup for the Herald.”

  “And for me?”

  “Do you never tire of Bonapartes and Bismarcks?”

  As Jamie talked I naturally began to think what I might be able to make of Grant. The subject certainly has its charms—or horrors. Delicately I gave Jamie to believe that I might be persuaded for a considerable fee to go down to Washington City in a few weeks’ time and begin my investigation, and as I backed and filled most tentatively I could not help but think that here at last—and most unexpectedly—is a marvellous way for me to be of assistance to Governor Tilden.

  “I am glad!” Jamie was on his
feet. “I’ll call on Emma tomorrow. We’ll arrange something. Meanwhile prepare yourself. If that old devil Corbin is right, there will be some news this week!”

  “Of what sort? On the order of the Crédit Mobilier?”

  “Much worse.” Jamie lowered his voice. “There is evidence that the President himself is about to be involved in a Tweed-ish scandal. Corbin says it looks bad, which means that for you and me it looks like purest gold!”

  I am now in the thick of things rather more than I had hoped to be, but considering my dilemma, all this activity is to the good. I cannot say that my heart leaps with joy at the thought of “doing” General Grant, a man as famed for his silences as for his military victories. But Washington City will provide a good setting for Emma: diplomats are to be found there as well as every sort of politician, and so our time should be well spent. Even so, I fear that I shall be bored to death by “court life,” by all those senators who take money from railroad tycoons at the dark of the moon. After all, that is the custom of the country and I am no reformer. But I daresay I shall find something of interest to write about—if only Mrs. Grant’s celebrated cross-eyes.

  All in all, I’ve not done too badly for one morning. I have acquired the Centennial Exhibition for the Evening Post; unfortunately, that won’t be until May or June and we will be penniless by then unless I can contrive an advance payment. Also, I am to begin in February or March—Jamie is not certain—my analysis of “Washington City in the Age of Corruption,” as editors melodramatically put such things.

  Jamie and I have not yet agreed upon a price. He is celebrated for his generosity (none of which has ever come my way, but then I’ve not come his way except as an occasional correspondent since old Bennett’s death). I ought to be able to get five thousand dollars for five pieces—no, that’s just a dream. Ten for five…?

  I must stop this or I shall soon be writing imaginary numbers in the margin: gleefully adding that which each day I glumly must subtract.

  On my way back to the hotel, I stopped by Brentano’s bookstore at Union Park or Square. The clerks recognized me and showed me a great number of my books on sale in secondhand. Yet nowhere a copy of the Paris Under the Commune, which is, after all, only two years old. I must speak to Dutton about this.