Hay applauded James’s manner of drawing his characters “entirely from the outside.” Any “vagueness of our acquaintance with Miss Archer,” he declared, was in fact what made the novel so engaging. “[A]fter all, when we lay the book down, we cannot deny, if we are candid, that we know as much of the motives which induced her to refuse two gallant gentlemen and to marry a selfish and soulless scoundrel as we do of the impulses which lead our sisters and cousins to similar results.”
With The Portrait of a Lady, Hay attested, James had matured to his full potential. “Of the importance of this volume there can be no question,” he wrote in conclusion. “It will certainly remain one of the notable books of the time. It is properly to be compared, not with the light and ephemeral literature of amusement, but with the gravest and most serious works of imagination which have been devoted to the study of the social conditions of the age and the moral aspects of our civilization.”
Reid made no protest, and Hay’s review was published in the Tribune on Christmas Day. It was not the first nor by any means the only appreciative notice to appear in the American press. Most likely the book would have done well had Hay never given it his blessing; in the first month, it sold a respectable three thousand copies. Yet Hay’s recognition of the momentousness of The Portrait of a Lady meant a great deal. Henry James, post-Portrait, would join a pantheon of American fiction writers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and Hay’s announcement helped make it so. The novel is not simply “one of the notable books of the time,” but stands today as one of the most brilliant literary achievements of any time or country. That Hay recognized this and had the confidence to say so is a testimony to his own literary acuity and his appreciation of a new group of writers who were at work refining the art form—Howells, Twain, Adams with Democracy, and the new master, Henry James. Within a year, Hay would submit his own contribution to the canon, The Bread-Winners, an anonymous novel he subtitled “A Social Study.”
FIRST, THOUGH, HE PLEDGED to Nicolay that he would bear down on Lincoln. He wrote diligently until March 1882, when, inevitably, his health gave out. This time it was diphtheria, and this time he planned a convalescence even lengthier than his Rest Cure of 1878. The previous fall, Clara’s sister, Flora, had married Samuel Mather, heir to an iron-mining fortune, and a man with a good head for business, and Clara at last felt comfortable leaving her aging parents for an extended vacation. They booked passage to Europe in July. The plan was to deposit the children with their nurse “at some warm sand” on the Mediterranean while Hay and Clara wandered afield, after which the whole family would pass the winter in the South of France. “I never promised myself that much of a spree in my life,” Hay told Howells, who, he was delighted to learn, was to be in Europe for the summer as well. They also hoped to see Clarence King, who was somewhere in England or on the Continent, ostensibly to drum up investors for his mines.
In the meantime, Hay consulted a variety of doctors who “pounded and sampled” him. His newest complaint was heart palpitations, for which he was prescribed digitalis. Finally he was able to finish the seventeen chapters he had agreed to write on Lincoln’s early years. He promised Nicolay that he would continue writing in Europe, but to Howells he confessed that the notes he was taking in his trunk would more likely serve as “ballast.”
There was another reason that his work on Lincoln slowed. Sometime that winter or spring he started writing The Bread-Winners, and, once he began, he could not let go. He finished the manuscript in June and sent it to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Century Magazine, who pronounced it “a powerful book.” It is not clear whether Hay was offering the manuscript to Gilder for publication at this point or merely seeking criticism. In his response to Hay, Gilder made no formal bid, but he had good reason to curry favor. He knew that Hay and Nicolay were at work on the Lincoln biography, and he very much wanted to excerpt it in the Century.
Besides Gilder and members of the Hay family, the only other person who possibly knew about The Bread-Winners was Adams; that, anyway, is the inference of a letter Hay wrote to his fellow Heart in early June. Hay attached a newspaper clipping that declared him, Hay, the author of Democracy, and, feigning injury at the misplaced attribution, complained to Adams, “First, if people get into their heads that I wrote ‘Democracy,’ they will require of me a glitter of style and lofty tone of philosophical satire far beyond me . . . or else they will say of me, ‘Did it once, can’t do it twice.’ ”
THE HAY FAMILY LANDED at Liverpool on July 24. “The children have stood the trip beautifully,” reported Clara, who was no great veteran of sea travel herself. The nurse, whose name was Reade, was English and the happiest of all to be ashore. Leaving the children with her at St. Leonards-on-the-Sea, in Sussex, Hay and Clara went up to London. At a dinner at the house of the American minister, the poet James Russell Lowell, Hay was seated between Henry James and Robert Browning. Next they were off to Scotland as the guests of Adams’s dear friends Sir John and Lady Clark, whose estate, Tillypronie, commanded a magnificent view of the rolling hills and lush moors of Aberdeenshire. Both Hay and Clara were so smitten by the “purple glory of the heather” that after three weeks in Scotland, “the beauty and verdure of the Lowlands seemed commonplace.”
Back in London, Hay found the atmosphere no less heady. “I assisted last night at the most remarkable gathering of vagrant poets I ever saw collected at one table,” he told Samuel Mather. Henry James was on hand. Bret Harte came down from Glasgow. Clarence King arrived mercurially. Howells was also in town, as were Edwin Booth, the venerated Shakespearean actor and brother of Lincoln’s assassin; the American abolitionist Moncure D. Conway; and Charles Dudley Warner, the Hartford newspaper editor who co-wrote The Gilded Age with Mark Twain. The dinner was hosted by yet another American sojourner, James Osgood, the book publisher and owner of the Atlantic Monthly. Hay called the gathering “so improbable that a bet of a million to one against it ever happening would be a good bet.”
As for bets, guessing the authorship of Democracy was one of the liveliest games in London that summer. Hay sent Adams a sixpenny edition he had bought at a train station. The book was selling “by the thousands,” he told its clandestine author. “I think of writing a novel in a hurry and printing it as by the author of ‘Democracy.’ Have you any objection?” Adams responded with equal facetiousness, encouraging Hay to “repudiate for me and my wife all share or parcel in the authorship” and to take credit for himself. “I expect to see you a lion in British society . . . and your portrait by [Edward] Burnes-Jones at Grosvenor Gallery, with ‘Democracy’ under your arm.” (The prank was too droll to resist; later Clover Adams took a formal photograph of Hay holding a copy of the French edition of the book, Démocratie.)
At some point that summer, Hay showed the completed manuscript of The Bread-Winners to Howells, who in turn recommended it to Thomas Aldrich, the new editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Aldrich offered to serialize the book “unsight and unseen,” Howells informed Hay, but only on the condition that it bear Hay’s name. This Hay would not do. He wrote again to Richard Watson Gilder at Century, who cheerfully agreed to honor Hay’s anonymity and offered $2,500 for the serial rights.
Before leaving England, Hay and Clara paid a visit to two more of Adams’s friends, Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, at their country estate in Wales. Like the Clarks in Scotland, the Cunliffes would become lifelong favorites. Sir Robert, in addition to being a baronet, was a member of the House of Commons, and he generously provided Hay entree to the inner circles of British politics. For Clara, the hospitality shown by the Clarks and Cunliffes provided an invaluable primer in English customs. Her letters to Flora and her mother chronicled the smallest details of table and service: “The breads & muffins were at the four corners, the butter on each side. In the centre of the table was a revolving porcelain tray with jams of two kinds and two cream jugs”—and so on.
The family passed the rest of the fall in Paris, where they were
again pleased to have the company of King, who had taken to Europe, and the Europeans to him, as if he had lived there all his life, when in fact this was his first trip outside North America. “Do you think you know the aforesaid King,” Hay wrote Adams. “The revised edition bears little likeness—though it is equally loveable. . . . He is run after by princes, dukes and millionaires, whom he treats with amiable disdain. He never answers a letter and never keeps an engagement, and nobody resents it.”
In Paris they were glad to meet up with a fellow Clevelander, Constance Fenimore Woolson, who was an aunt of Samuel Mather and a distant relative of James Fenimore Cooper. She was also a somewhat frustrated friend of Henry James and an accomplished author in her own right. Her short stories appeared frequently in Harper’s; her first novel, Anne, a mystery set in the Great Lakes, had been published earlier in the year.
Hay and Clara introduced Woolson to King, who scarcely gave her the time of day. She, on the other hand, adored King at first sight. She promptly ordered a copy of his Mountaineering and was charmed all the more. After her time with Hay and King, she became convinced that they were the authors of Democracy. “They wrote it together,” Woolson proclaimed to Clara. “In this way they escape direct falsehood. They wrote it during that first winter of Col. Hay’s residence in Washington when you were not with him. Voilà.”
While in France, Hay also had the good fortune to meet one of the greatest writers of the age. Bearing a letter of introduction from Henry James, he pressed a call upon the ailing Ivan Turgenev, who was living out the final year of his life in Bougival, just outside Paris. “I never saw a great man so kind and simple,” Hay reported to James. “It fills one with a brute rage to see the mighty and gentle soul crippled by disease when thousands of people need his work.”
Hay was still quite anxious about his own health. His complaints included “dizziness, deep depression towards evening, a sense of uncertainty in my gait, irregular pulse after any muscular effort—over all the invincible sense of something worse waiting just around the corner.” In Paris, he put himself in the care of Jean-Martin Charcot, the preeminent neurologist in Europe—“the Napoleon of neuroses.” Charcot diagnosed “Neurasthenia Céphalique”—nervousness of the head—and prescribed the customary treatment for most ailments, a regimen of douche baths. When the treatment brought no improvement, Hay consulted another doctor, who suggested he might just as well continue the baths somewhere sunnier. By Christmas the entire family was installed at the Hôtel Beau Site in Cannes.
The three children adapted well to hotel life and the periodic absences of their parents. Helen, nearly eight, was petite and pretty and already an avid reader and writer of rhymes—“quite reasonable and thoughtful for her years,” according to her proud father, whom she took after most closely. Six-year-old Adelbert, or Del, as he was called, was another story. Big-boned and dark-browed, he looked more like his mother and seemed always a trial to his father. “Del is more heedless but I hope he will profit by the course of his years,” Hay wrote to his mother-in-law. This was how he would forever tend to see his son—endowed with great potential but somehow always on the brink of falling short. Meanwhile, the baby, Alice, was healthy, jolly and the joy of the family.
AFTER THE FIRST OF the year, Hay heard from Gilder, informing him that serialization of The Bread-Winners in the Century was to be delayed from May until August 1883. Gilder also presented a list of editorial quibbles, though he assured Hay that he was even more enthusiastic than ever about the book and the sensation it was bound to stir.
Hay may have insisted on anonymity, but he nonetheless left clues lying about on almost every page. Arthur Farnham, the central figure of The Bread-Winners, bears a flattering likeness to its author. His face, Hay wrote, “suited the hands—it had the refinement and gentleness of one delicately bred, and the vigorous lines and color of one equally at home in field and court. . . . His clothes were of the fashion seen in the front windows of the Knickerbocker Club [where Hay was a member]. . . . He seemed, in short, one of those fortunate natures, who, however born, are always bred well, and come by prescription to most of the good things the world can give.” (In a paragraph deleted from the manuscript, he also wrote: “His shoes might have come from distant Piccadilly—they were so strong and sensible and ugly—the sort a cad envies but never dares to put on.”)
After the Civil War, Farnham served in the army on the frontier, as had Hay’s brother Leonard. Farnham is chairman of his local library board, as was Hay’s father. Farnham keeps a greenhouse of exotic flowers; Hay’s other brother Charles was a flower fancier. Hay’s Farnham is, for the sake of the novel, a widower, whose principal occupation is to look after the “Farnham millions,” which have exercised upon him “a sobering and educating wisdom.” With a group of friends similarly heeled and enlightened, Farnham endeavors, unsuccessfully, to “rescue the city” from corrupt ward bosses; Hay’s own high-minded and deep-pocketed efforts to reform Cleveland’s government had likewise fallen short.
The setting of The Bread-Winners is the biggest giveaway. Farnham lives in a large stone house on Algonquin Avenue in Buffland, “a young and thriving city on Lake Erie.” Readers are handed the following directions: Algonquin Avenue “is three miles long and has hardly a shabby house in it, while for a mile or two the houses upon one side, locally called ‘the Ridge,’ are unusually fine, large, and costly. They are all surrounded with well-kept gardens and separated from the street by velvet lawns.”
As the story begins, Farnham sits in a room “marked, like himself, with a kind of serious elegance. . . . All around the walls ran dwarf book-cases of carved oak, filled with volumes bound in every soft shade of brown and tawny leather. . . . The whole expression of the room was one of warmth and good manners.” Hay’s own stamped-leather wall covering, the palm-leaf frieze, and even his collection of bronze and porcelain bric-à-brac are described in detail.
The “social study” of the novel is one of class. Maud Matchin, a “hearty, blowsy” girl of humble home and upward ambition, asks Farnham for help in getting a job at the library. Inflamed by the “unhealthy sentiment found in the cheap weeklies,” her greater dream is to marry a rich man, and she sets her cap on Farnham. Seeking romantic counsel at a séance, she is advised that the way to win love is to “tell your love,” which she does during a visit to Farnham’s greenhouse. Farnham, who has practiced flattery “in several capitals with some success,” is not immune to Maud’s home-sewn dress that “held her like a scabbard.” “[I]t was a pity she was so vulgar,” he thinks, “for she looked like the huntress Diana.” He gives her roses and succumbs to her “breathless eagerness,” stooping to kiss her “with hearty good-will.”
Two other women vie with Maud for Farnham’s attentions: his next-door neighbors, Mrs. Belding, genteel widow of a “famous bridge-builder,” and her daughter, Alice, of “bonny face” and “pure and noble” lineament. Meanwhile, in pursuit of Maud, not counting Farnham, are the two extremes of American labor. Representing goodness is the blond, blue-eyed carpenter Sam Sleeny, whose sense of “contented industry” serves as “a practical argument against the doctrines of socialism.” His nemesis is the dark-skinned, “oleaginous” Andrew Jackson Offitt, ringleader of the Brotherhood of Bread-winners. The Bread-winners are not a proper union, but made up of “the laziest and most incapable workmen in the town . . . a roll-call of shirks,” who preach “what they called socialism, but was merely riot and plunder.” To Offitt and his motley cohort, “wealth and erristocracy is a kind of dropsy,” Algonquin Avenue a “robbers’ cave,” and Arthur Farnham a “vampire”—this last a nod to Hay’s Vampires Club. Offitt organizes a general strike in Buffland, calling for “downfall of the money power,” although his more sinister goal is to rob Farnham’s safe and make away with Maud, fooling her into believing that he has made a fortune—shades of Clarence King—in a Mexican silver mine.
The story gallops to a melodramatic finale: Farnham’s genteel composure saves him
from further forwardness with Maud; he musters a militia of army veterans, who gallantly repel Offitt’s strikers; Offitt brains Farnham with a hammer, framing Sleeny for the crime; Sleeny escapes jail and breaks Offitt’s neck; Farnham is nursed back to health by proper Alice; Sleeny is acquitted on all charges and at last wins the heart of Maud; and Buffland forges onward, its sky “reddened by night with the glare of its furnaces, rising like the hot breath of some prostrate Titan, conquered and bowed down by the pitiless cunning of men.”
In his only published commentary on The Bread-Winners, Hay explained, anonymously still, that his account of the labor unrest that rattles Buffland was drawn from the strikes and riots that tore through the East in the summer of 1877. What he did not mention was that in June 1882, workers at the Cleveland Rolling Mills—of which the Stone brothers, Andros and Amasa, were major stockholders and whose president, William Chisholm, was one of Hay’s Euclid Avenue neighbors—staged a virulent strike which on several occasions turned violent, as union members fought to keep scabs from entering the mills. Hay’s June 30 letter to Gilder of the Century suggests that he was shaping his harsh depiction of the Bread-winners right when the Rolling Mills unrest took place.
YET HE MIGHT NOT have written The Bread-Winners at all if he had been able to foresee the tragedy about to transpire in the real Buffland.
Amasa Stone never got over the Ashtabula bridge collapse and the public shame that followed. He continued to keep a close watch on his investments—railroads, steel mills, banking, Western Union—but he was not the man of strength and confidence he once had been. After Ashtabula, he gave generously to a number of worthy causes—the city’s charity hospital, the Children’s Aid Society—and was the principal benefactor of the Cleveland Home for Aged Women. Yet still there were those who whispered that he ought to have followed the example of Charles Collins, the bridge engineer who had taken his own life.
All the Great Prizes Page 26
