Over the ages, however, spinning, lace making, and embroidery had become so intertwined with the deepest assumptions about femininity that well into the nineteenth century it was impossible to disentangle the two. “Skill with the fingers, this domestic work, is what truly constitutes a woman,” the renowned French author Madame de Genlis (1746–1830) noted. Another French writer on manners, the Baronne Staffe, put it more bluntly. “The woman who does not enjoy needlework,” she wrote in 1900, “is not a woman.”
In 1968, the mysterious artist Ray Johnson (1927–1995) convened six meetings of the New York Correspondence School, its members all artists and hipsters who participated at Johnson’s behest by mailing art to one another. One afternoon, they gathered in Central Park and strutted about on stilts, but more often at NYCS events they “sat around wondering when the meeting would start,” a journalist wrote. “It never did—and that was the point.” Nothing happened.
Johnson was a “nothingness” connoisseur who performed his well-attended Nothings as an antidote to the art world’s Happenings. “His most eventful Nothing, a half minute affair, came about when he dumped two boxes of wooden dowels down a stairwell, just out of earshot of an invited audience,” The New York Times reported. “It sounded to me like a waterfall or coal going down a chute,” Johnson told the paper. What else Happened? “Nothing.”
At NYCS’s height, Johnson spent some eight to ten hours a day in his spartan Lower East Side apartment managing its cross-country postal network made up of several hundred of his friends. He would start a cartoonish drawing, or a Pop-inflected collage, and send it off to another member, directing that person to add to the piece and mail it on to a third person—Chuck Close, say, or Dennis Hopper or Ultra Violet. Photocopied ads were layered over strange bits of ephemera and doodles in a way that mirrored Johnson’s aesthetic. His look, Johnson said, was “sandpapered painted cardboard chunks casting shadows with hand-lettered poems, ink drawings of combs, condoms, massage balls and snakes, lists of famous people and Movie Stars and dollar bills painted on white backgrounds.” He described the NYSC as a “fantastic, gigantic Calder mobile … constantly in motion.”
Someone new to the list might receive an envelope posted from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and containing a stick of Wrigley’s gum, or a set of hospital forms to be filled out, or an advertisement for a smoking product made from lettuce leaves, and then an envelope from MoMA containing nothing at all. “I was no longer sure what was or wasn’t a communication from the NYCS,” said one correspondent. When a young woman received a packet of indecent material labeled with Johnson’s return address, the NYPD called him in for questioning.
Sometimes larger objects entered the mailed melee, as when Johnson received elephant dung from the Sacramento Zoo. “It was beautiful, almost a religious object,” he said. “I put it on a Victorian table and made drawings of it.”
“My fondest memories,” another correspondent recalled, “are of a series of chairs, smaller chairs mailed whole, larger chairs mailed disassembled to fit within postal size limits. The challenge was to mail them unwrapped and visible, persuading postal clerks to accept the items as falling within regulations.” It made for some exciting trips to the mailbox.
During the NYCS’s heyday, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) tried to buy up all the Johnson mail art he could, but, overall, Johnson’s wasn’t a commercial endeavor. Apart from a handful of gallery shows, he shunned the moneyed side of the art world, preferring to display his artworks on the sidewalk or in Grand Central Terminal. He once showed his latest pieces to a collector at a rest stop just off the Long Island Expressway. He didn’t sell much and he liked it that way, remaining in “voluntary poverty” in an apartment that contained a bed, a table, a chair, a typewriter, and a coffee pot. “Living this way, I can do what I want,” he told an interviewer, “which is, to write letters.” Like Warhol, he was captivated by pop culture, and, in the spirit of his Nothings, held fan club meetings for Marcel Duchamp, Anna May Wong, and Edie Beale, while images of Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and Marianne Moore peppered his artwork. One well-loved collage is an image of James Dean wearing Mouseketeer ears made from a pack of Lucky Strikes. For the most part, however, mailed artwork couldn’t be bought or sold, only received. After many years of discussing the possibility of a show with one gallerist, he told her he’d come up with the perfect solution. “We’ll have,” he said, pausing, “Nothing in the show.”
Johnson’s art was in the creative act itself, something he tried to explain during a lecture. The talk “consisted of my trying to move a piano across a stage,” Johnson remembered. “People kept coming up to ask if they could help, and I said, ‘Certainly not! I mean the point is that I can’t move this piano, and I’m struggling to move it and it’s obviously not going to get moved across the stage, and I’m putting out a great exertion of energy, and I’m on a public platform and you are all viewing me, which is the whole point of this thing.’ I said, ‘You figure it out.’ ”
Some did, some didn’t. Sometimes even Johnson’s NYCS members didn’t understand what was going on. “I didn’t go to many Correspondence School meetings,” one artist remembered. “A lot of them were very boring. They were like cocktail parties without drinks.”
A vogue for walking tours swept England in the 1780s. “Shall we suppose it a greater pleasure to the sportsman to pursue a trivial animal, than it is to the man of taste to pursue the beauties of nature? To follow her through all her recesses?” asked the great English walker William Gilpin (1724–1804). Guidebooks like those by Gilpin led ambitious and rustically romantic pedestrians to England’s relentlessly idyllic Lake District, where poets such as Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, Thomas De Quincey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge liked to roam. For their ilk, walking was akin to religion, and by De Quincey’s estimate, William Wordsworth (1770–1850) walked some “175 to 180,000 English miles” during his lifetime.
When the Wordsworth siblings and Coleridge (1772–1834) teamed up to trek together in 1798, they raised the five pounds they needed to cover their expenses by writing a poem together for a literary magazine, a collaboration that later became “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Their friendship wasn’t always so breezy, however. After they’d spent some days walking together across Scotland a few years later, tensions drove the party apart and Coleridge struck out alone, walking 263 miles during an eight-day stretch. He knew how to keep himself amused. Instead of following a path down a mountain—too boring—he took the “first possible” way down, no matter where it led, relying “upon fortune for how far down this possibility will continue.” He nearly killed himself that way once, descending Scafell Pike.
Coleridge wasn’t the only one who liked to walk alone. For writer William Hazlitt (1778–1830), never known for his sociability, it was the only way to go. “I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time,” he declared in 1822. Without company, he was unencumbered, free from distraction. “I want to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy,” he continued. “Give me the clear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.”
Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), who crisscrossed 120 miles of French countryside while walking alongside a donkey, echoed the notion. “If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but name; it is something else and more in the nature of a picnic,” he argued in 1876. “A walking tour should be gone on alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl.”
Stevenson, no mincer, wasn’t searching out t
he picturesque, after all, but “certain jolly humors,” gently fatigued muscles, and a big appetite. Setting the right pace, with the right intention in mind, was imperative. The blissful walker wasn’t an “overwalker,” who “stupefies himself at 5 miles an hour,” Stevenson noted, but one who might still linger a bit by the side of the road, if he felt like it. “It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more,” he wrote. “You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer’s day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy.”
When the Chinese emperor Mu-tsung played a card game with his wives on New Year’s Eve in 969 CE, he probably had no notion that the amusing invention would travel the Silk Road through India and Persia before reaching the West, forever changing the nature of entertainment. But when the first playing cards arrived in Italy and Spain around 1370, they ignited a veritable card craze. In a swift fifty years, the irresistible plaything spread from the Mediterranean to Russia’s Ural Mountains. Everyone was consumed.
Almost as quickly as they caught on in Europe, however, cards were banned. By 1394, the City of Paris had enacted laws forbidding the lower classes from playing cards on weekdays, to keep them safe from the novel vice. On the steps of St. Peter’s in Rome, Saint Bernard of Siena preached against playing cards in 1432, demanding that the pious come forward into the square, heads hung low, to burn their decks. In England, the outspoken preacher John Northbrooke cursed “carding” in 1577, claiming it led to “idleness, loitering, blasphemy, misery, infamie, shame, penury, and confusion.”
Meanwhile, the European gentry took up a series of games that promised the thrill of dice and the strategic intrigue of chess. They obsessed over two-player piquet in the sixteenth century, and sat at triangular tables to play ombre in the next. Faro and whist came into style in the eighteenth century, as did brelan—a precursor to poker—which, because of its high stakes, was favored by Parisian libertines, according to Denis Diderot (1713–1784). “It is most enjoyable, that is, most ruinous, when there are three or five players,” he wrote. “One cannot play it without becoming obsessed by it, and once taken with it one loses all taste for other games.” Brelan relied on bluffing, which appealed to the sly nature of the city’s aristocrats, though the Marquis de Mirabeau (1715–1789) fretted over its influence on the citizenry at large. “In Brelan everything is a function of shrewdness,” he declared, “and it is important to stop citizens from growing accustomed, even in their games, to using sharpness to set traps for one another.”
One of that era’s greatest gamblers knew a thing or two about using his wits to meet his ends—Giovanni Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798), the Venetian adventurer who loved cards almost as much as he loved women. Casanova described his very gentlemanly passion for gaming while traveling in Sulzbach, where a brusque young Frenchman named d’Entragues challenged him to a game of piquet. “I am not interested,” he told d’Entragues, recalling the occasion in his memoirs, “for you and I do not play in the same way. I play for my pleasure, because play amuses me, whereas you play to win.” D’Entragues took his comment as an insult, and Casanova decided to play him after all, betting the hotheaded young man that whoever left the gaming table first would forfeit fifty louis d’or.
They sat down at three in the afternoon and got right to it. The game went on for hours. Friends watched for a while, then left for dinner, drifting back again afterward to find the two still hunched over their cards at midnight, playing in silence. Casanova took only a cup of hot chocolate and a little broth for strength and held his ground through the night. At six the next morning, the friends returned to cheer on the dogged players. Casanova was down one hundred louis—“yet the game was going my way,” he wrote. The two men pressed on through the day and into the next night, never interrupting their play. By then, Casanova noted, his opponent was flagging, mixing up his cards and losing track of the score. He looked, Casanova said, “like a dug-up corpse.” Casanova wasn’t faring so well himself. But neither would quit. “I felt my strength failing,” Casanova remembered, “and I hoped every minute to see him drop dead, for fear that I should be beaten despite my strong constitution.”
At daybreak of the second morning, Casanova finally took the lead and the realization of certain defeat proved too much for his poor opponent. After a sip of broth, d’Entragues “became so ill that he reeled in his chair, broke into a sweat, and fainted,” Casanova wrote. After forty-two hours of gaming, he was carried off to bed and Casanova pocketed the winnings. The two men agreed never to play cards together again.
American reporter Nellie Bly (1867–1922) reached Jersey City at 3:51:45 one January afternoon in 1890, just seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and a quarter second after she’d left to travel around the world—and eight days faster than Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of Around the World in Eighty Days. That she was only twenty-two years old, a woman, and that she had traveled alone made Bly a phenomenon.
The young reporter had set sail in November 1889 wearing a blue plaid traveling coat and taking with her £200 in gold and English banknotes. In a small bag she carried some underclothes and a giant jar of cold cream. As the ship got under way, she immediately became seasick. “And she’s going ’round the world!” a fellow passenger scoffed. After arriving in London and crossing the Channel, she traveled on from Calais to Brindisi by train, noting that she “might have seen more while traveling through France if the car windows had been clean.” On the boat from Brindisi to Port Said, a rumor circulated that she was “an eccentric American heiress, traveling about with a hairbrush and a bank book.” At Ismalia she watched a juggler do a magic trick. At Aden she marveled at the locals’ beautiful teeth. In Ceylon she bought some baubles and a monkey she named McGinty. At a Japanese teahouse, she and her fellow travelers refused to take off their shoes, though they “effected a compromise” with the management by pulling cloth slippers over their shoes before entering. Bored and ship-bound once again, she thrilled to the sight of a monsoon out at sea. It was “the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” she wrote. “I would sit breathless on the deck watching the bow of the ship standing upright on a wave, then dash headlong down as if intending to carry us to the bottom.”
The World, Bly’s paper, trumpeted her progress on its front page. When she couldn’t file her stories at a distance, her editors in New York improvised, writing about the sights she would probably see wherever she was. Circulation numbers went through the roof. Bly had become known to readers two years earlier with “Ten Days in a Madhouse,” an exposé for which she’d had herself committed to a “human rat-trap,” the notorious asylum on Blackwells Island. Her stunt inspired throngs of female reporters to pose as factory workers, beggars, chorus girls, and opium den habitués (presaging Gloria Steinem’s stint as a Playboy Bunny). Bly arrived in Hong Kong to learn that her latest imitator, Elizabeth Bisland (1861–1929), an editor for Cosmopolitan, had set out from New York on the same day as she had, racing in the opposite direction, west to east. Bly affected nonchalance. “I am not racing with anyone,” she told her informer. “If someone else wants to do the trip in less time, that is their concern.”
It seems Bly had a much better time than her competitor, despite her seasickness. While Bisland bristled at celebrity, calling those who came out to get a peek at her “martyrs to curiosity,” Bly reveled in the limelight. In the final stretch of her trip, as she crossed America by train, thick crowds pressed in at each station while Bly shook so many hands that “my arms ached for almost a month afterwards,” she reported. It was a “maze of happy greetings, happy wishes, congratulating telegrams, fruit, flowers, loud cheers, wild hurrahs, rapid hand-shaking and a beautiful car filled with fragrant flowers attached to a swift engine.” Bisland had been ahead of Bly in Hong Kong, but she’d missed her connection in Brindisi, and Bly beat her to New York by four d
ays.
As Bly arrived at Pennsylvania Station, the police could hardly contain the crowd. Somebody snatched her gloves and handkerchief as souvenirs. People stood on overturned carriages in the street to see the woman who’d gone around the world. Bly was happy to be home. In some ways, she was extraordinary, but she was also the archetypal American tourist. “There is really not much for Americans to see in the foreign lands,” Bly told an interviewer. “They are so very, very slow in Europe and to my mind are behind America in almost everything.”
ANCIENT ROME SAW ITS SHARE of tightrope walkers, as did medieval Paris, where the most dashing daredevil descended from the top of Notre-Dame cathedral with a candle in each hand, according to some accounts, gingerly placing a golden crown on the head of Queen Isabella of Bavaria upon landing. In London, diarist Samuel Pepys saw a rope dancer, as they were called in the seventeenth century, “who danced blindfolded on the high rope, and with a boy of 12 years old tied to one of his feet about twenty feet beneath him, dangling as he danced, yet he moved as nimbly as if he had been a feather,” he wrote. “Lastly he stood on his head on the top of a very high mast, danced on a rope that was very slack, and finally flew down the perpendicular on his breast, his head foremost, his legs and arms extended.”
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