Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “So you think they will not manage it.”

  “Will not manage…?”

  “To have a revolution.”

  “Despite your girl and her bomb, no. Certainly not. People are saying today that the old imbecile king has been persuaded to toss out the premier, shuffle some ministers around. Declare that the people have spoken, le public a parlé, remind the people that he is called Philippe-Egalité, then get on with the royal tragicomedy. As usual.”

  Ben nodded, thinking of his subscription at age fifteen to the radical Northern Star, the lectures in Cambridge and rallies in London, the pound notes he’d sent to help Engels’s organization in Manchester (one textile heir’s donations to another to liberate the workers of the world), the endless arguments with his father and brother, all the riled-up progressive impatience that in the end amounted to nothing at all. Ah no, no, no, not nothing: the government had repealed, finally, the Corn Laws. A loaf of bread was now a halfpenny cheaper. Hurrah.

  They stopped. Ben felt the crunch of glass shards underfoot. He looked up: a smashed streetlamp, and down the boulevard a dozen more.

  Twenty yards to their left they saw the burned hull of an omnibus on its side and next to it a horse, dead and still in its yoke, the head twisted nearly all the way around, its hindquarters black and blistery. Its mane was still smoldering.

  “Good God,” Ben said. “What happened?”

  Again Ashby gave him his incredulous look.

  “Of course,” Ben realized. “The rioting.”

  “They have a cute name for their buses here.” Ashby lowered his voice to a whisper again. “They call it le four banal—‘the village oven.’ There’s a French revolution for you—they make their figures of speech literal.”

  A platoon of the Garde Nationale, having disentangled the limbs and trunks of plane trees from the windows and wheels of the charred bus, began to shove it, a few inches with each collective “Un…deux…trois…poussez,” to the side of the street.

  A man wearing a real bear’s head and a red woolen liberty cap (stretched tight over the late bear’s ears) danced to a polka played by a woman on a clarinet. The tune fell into time with the soldiers’ grunting poussées. A little boy crouched next to the woman, holding out a basket for coins.

  Ashby spoke to the clarinetist’s child, who leapt up, pulled the bonnet rouge from the bear’s head, and handed it over. Ashby gave the boy two francs, which he waved in front of his mother. The mother smiled at Ashby with her lips still tight around the clarinet and, as Ashby rejoined Ben, started playing a new tune.

  “Now, what do you suppose that’s meant to signify?” Ashby said, shaking his head and smiling. “I told you they’re all children, didn’t I?” He started to sing along: “‘Lucy Locket lost her pocket/Kitty Fisher found it…’” Then he began clapping along. People stared. One man holding a drink raised it to Ashby in a toast.

  “No, Lloyd,” Ben said, shaking his head, “it’s ‘Yankee Doodle.’” In a whisper, he sang the words. “‘Yankee Doodle, keep it up,/Yankee Doodle dandy…’ And so on. She takes you for an American.”

  Ashby stopped singing but he kept on clapping. “You know, that happens frequently. ‘L’Américain.’ At the start I thought it was because of the things I say against King Louis-Philippe and his ridiculous family. But Juliet told me that it is not politics at all—it’s because I’m so jolly and loud they never believe I’m English. They ask me about the Indians and ‘les Montagnes Rocky.’ They wonder if I know ‘le Colonel John Charles Frémont.’ They sincerely imagine that I am from…Cincinnati, or Alabama.”

  “Lucky man,” Ben said.

  “Jealous, eh, Natty Bumppo?” This was another of Ashby’s nicknames for Ben. He grinned and grimaced as he pulled his new cap low on his head like some backwoods idiot, then saluted.

  Ben asked about the gray dust covering his friend’s hands.

  “Marble dust and rabbit-skin glue,” he replied, rubbing his fingers with his thumbs. “Gesso, from painting.” They continued their long walk in the direction of Ashby’s studio on the Ile Saint-Louis.

  HE WAS JEALOUS of Ashby now. America had been Ben’s hobby for years. It started the summer he turned fourteen. The Knowleses were throwing a dinner in London in honor of his cousin Mary Motley and her fiancé, a Frenchman named Monsieur Clérel, and Archie Knowles had given Ben a copy of the fiancé’s book about America. From its first pages it struck Ben with the power of Scripture, which Scripture itself had never done. “It is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on amongst us…”

  He could barely believe he had received such a manifesto from his father—the son of a South Yorkshire wheelwright now eagerly doling out bits of his broadcloth and Malay rubber and mining fortune in return for the pretense of social respect. “Yes,” his father had said to his son’s smart remark at the time, “he is a Frenchman, but he is a French count. And you like books.” (Archibald Knowles believed himself to be descended from a famous knight. His paternal great-great-great-grandfather, Archie’s mother had told him on her deathbed, was the illegitimate child of Sir Isaac Newton. One night years ago he had made a great show of revealing this family secret to his own sons, a secret Ben believed to be a fiction.)

  “There is a country in the world,” the introduction to Democracy in America declared, “where the great revolution which I am speaking of seems nearly to have reached its natural limits; it has been effected with ease and simplicity…” Ben had never been so excited by words in his life, and during the dinner with the author he concentrated so hard on every one that came out of Charles Alexis Clérel de Tocqueville’s mouth, he could barely follow what he was saying. From that moment forward, Ben was in love.

  His love for America amused his mother but rankled his father, which only increased Ben’s passion. When he practiced shooting his longbow he no longer imagined himself one of Henry V’s archers at Agincourt, but James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo hunting game in some wild, infinite American forest. He had decorated his student rooms in Bonn with aquatints of the American frontier. When the American painter George Catlin opened his Indian Gallery exhibition in Piccadilly, Ben bought an annual ticket so he could return again and again to stare at Catlin’s pictures, at the wigwam and live grizzly bears and the imported Indians in full costume miming their hunts and scalpings for the crowds of bewitched and appalled Londoners.

  He read Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies and A History of New York. He read everything by Cooper—not just The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans but novels he could not buy in London and had to order from America. He had just finished The Oregon Trail, an excitingly matter-of-fact account of a transcontinental journey just two summers ago by a young Boston gentleman.

  The walls of his house in London were covered with framed lithographs of American buildings and American scenes. Whenever his brother, father, and other Londoners frothed with anti-American sentiment, Ben privately cheered: the old and stingy and meager and stale, he thought, envious and hateful as ever toward the young and bold.

  During the year he had lived in Manchester he attended three performances by the black American actor Ira Aldridge, and when he returned to London got caught up immediately in the Nigger Minstrel vogue. He attended shows by the Ethiopian Serenaders at the St. James’s Theatre, saving his most enthusiastic applause for their one actual Negro, a dancer called Thomas Dilward. At a big party celebrating Ben’s twenty-fifth birthday at Ashby’s parents’ house on Cadogan Place, Ashby and their friend Frank Haydon had hired Dilward to appear, along with the celebrated eight-year-old American dwarf Charles Stratton—P. T. Barnum’s General Tom Thumb, who was performing at the Egyptian Hall.

  As it happened, Frank’s father, the painter Benjamin Haydon, had rented a gallery at the Egyptian at the same time to exhibit his two huge new canvases depicting Rome’s decline and fall, with the intention of attracting some of the Barnum mob. But Mr. Haydon’s scheme w
as a failure: from among the tens of thousands who came to watch the antics of the American dwarf, no more than twenty a day stopped to look at the big, serious pictures.

  The morning after Ben’s birthday party, Benjamin Haydon, aged sixty, bought a pair of pistols in Oxford Street, returned home, slit his own throat, and then shot himself. Ashby had for years studied painting under Mr. Haydon, dropping by for one-guinea lessons whenever he understood from Frank that the old man was broke. Two days after the suicide, Ashby announced that he was moving to Paris to paint.

  “I AM REALLY amazingly pleased with this new picture of mine,” he said to Ben as they entered a street so ancient and narrow that the ridge beams of the half-timbered houses on opposite sides appeared almost to kiss. “I took the idea from one of the Hans Christian Andersen stories I used to read to my youngest sister—‘Kejserens Nye Klæder.’ Do you know Andersen? The Dane?”

  “I do.” And Ben did, but only because Lydia Winslow had insisted he read the translation of Andersen’s sappy novel The Improviser. The famous children’s stories had been published when Ben was too old for nursery tales. Moreover, Ben was immune to the fashion for fairies and the magical Dark Ages.

  “Well, it is a political painting,” Ashby said. “A political allegory.”

  Ashby had always been resolutely above, or beneath, politics.

  Ben smiled, shaking his head.

  “Wait,” Ashby said, “you shall see. A year ago, I had decided this was all a ridiculous spree. Paris! Art! Did you realize that one of every eighty Parisians calls himself an ‘artist’? One in eighty! More artists than”—he scanned the street to finish his sentence—“than street sweepers. The morning I read that fact in the Messenger—a year ago, when you were in Rome breaking poor Miss Winslow’s heart—I decided that my plan to be a painter was a sham, a common sham, that I was an impostor.”

  “‘We are all of us impostors.’ That’s what you said the day Mr. Haydon died.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically at that moment,” he said. “Romantic bosh. My blue spell. But now, here, finally, these last few months, I do my best for hours to turn bits of cadmium yellow and dragon’s-blood red into a painting, and I—Ben, it is giving me moments now and then of, of…satisfaction. Dare I say? Of ‘happiness.’ I mean it, Knowles. I adore my musty studio. I adore my filthy painter’s frock. I adore the girl from downstairs, my concierge, whom I pay a half crown to model for me.”

  Now Ben had a new reason to be jealous of his friend. A model living downstairs. A passion for work. Happiness.

  “Although, to be frank with you, I may have had enough of Paris for my own good,” Ashby continued. “It is a delight, of course, but perhaps too delightful. I think now that I need to travel awhile to some rougher place—and to some place where there are not so many superior artists.”

  “Where will you go?” Ben asked.

  “A country where I know no one and nothing, where I can be a kind of…phantom. Where life itself is an empty white canvas. Like Alabama, or Canada.”

  “You are emigrating? To America?”

  “No, Juliet is insisting that we run away to the East. I’m quite sure that you, Natty, shall reach the frontier shores long before me.”

  From close by came the sound of continuous, rapid drumbeats, and Ashby’s thoughts skittered to a new subject.

  “Will you visit your cousin l’comtesse while you’re here?” he asked teasingly. He touched the package Ben carried. “A gift for them?”

  “My father’s African penguin…”

  “Ah! Of course. You have brought daddy’s penguin to Paris as your companion. Naturally.”

  “…and Mary is not a countess, as you know. But I am to dine with them Friday.”

  “Well, I expect that this business,” Ashby said, waving a hand, meaning the smashed streetlights and burned buses and liberty caps, “may require the Count de Tocqueville to cancel dinner and remain at the Palais Bourbon. In order to crush the uprising.”

  They heard a large bass sound, like thunder set to a rhythm. Both looked hard right and listened, craning their necks, trying to see through the twilight commotion of little cabs and big coaches, horses and people. Then at once they made sense of the noise—the chanting of a large crowd.

  “Sounds as if it’s over in the Capucines,” Ashby said with excitement, as if he had suddenly recalled some ultrafashionable new cabaret. “Probably the Foreign Ministry.” He was already walking briskly toward the sound, half trotting. “‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ he shouted, “‘But to be young was very heaven!’ Did I not tell you Paris is like a dream? Come, Aramis! Tous pour un, one for all!” Ben, right beside him, nodded, failing to suppress a smile.

  the same moment on the same day—

  February 23, 1848

  New York City

  “C-C-C-C-CLAMS! AND CA-CA-CA-CAT FISH!” the fellow cried as he loped up the Fourth Avenue.

  He had a stutter. Duff Lucking looked out from his seat in the New York and Harlem Railroad coach, traveling north under horsepower. He regarded the man with sympathy and a little horror, thinking of his own lisp, which he had trained himself to lose as a boy by dabbing alum on the tip of his tongue. New York was full of stutterers, it seemed to Duff. He believed that the pace of the city triggered the affliction, just as the foul air of the slums produced cholera.

  “Ca-ca-ca-ca-catfish and c-c-c-clams!” the peddler shouted again.

  Wisps of steam drifted up from the folds of burlap covering the tin pans of cooked fish rattling in his cart. A large terrier, trotting at top speed in a harness, pulled the little wagon along at precisely the pace of his master, who was dark-eyed and olive-skinned. The train moved at twice the speed of the fishmonger and his dog. Fast for the big dog is slow for the little man, Duff thought. He was pleased with himself whenever his idle thoughts assumed the form of aphorisms, and this occasional pleasure had become even greater since Skaggs had taught him the word “aphorism.”

  He took a cake of tobacco from his coat pocket and with his pocketknife pared a nut-sized plug which he tucked into his right cheek. Timothy Skaggs, sitting knee to knee with his young friend, gave the tobacco packet a glancing dirty look. He had a big box resting on his lap—a fine lacquered rosewood case with brass and ivory fittings. On top of it was another, smaller box with a hinged lid.

  Skaggs poked his head out the open coach window and barked like a dog. The terrier looked over but refused to bark back at the man wearing octagonal blue spectacles—blue glass inside blue steel frames—and a bushy beard full of cake crumbs.

  “C-c-c-clams!” the peddler cried again as the train rolled across Thirtieth Street and started the climb up Murray Hill. Not for another half mile could the horses be exchanged for steam. Steam locomotives were outlawed south of Forty-second, a frontier the city fathers pushed north every few years, every time an engine exploded.

  “Ca-catfish!”

  “Ictalurus punctatus!” Timothy Skaggs cried out.

  “Ca-ca-ca-catfish!

  “Ictalurus punctatus!”

  The coach was jammed, and all the other passengers glanced hard at Skaggs. He smiled at his audience, touching the brim of his hat in wholesale greeting. They thought he had a screw loose.

  “How do you know that little Italian’s name?” Duff whispered.

  “You mean Signore Punctatus? No—I’m translating for him, back into the ancient language of his people. Ictalurus punctatus is ‘catfish’ in Latin, and vice versa. Hey, look—Thirty-third Street. We have arrived.”

  Skaggs hefted his precious wooden boxes by their handles. He swung the larger one in front of him, and stepped off the car first.

  They walked east into a thickening crowd. Duff carried a tripod on his right shoulder, like a rifle, and enjoyed the glances of curious passersby.

  “Come out of the street, you ninny,” Skaggs commanded from the sidewalk, which had been shoveled clean of yesterday’s snow.

  But Duff continued on
his way. He took some pleasure in publicly slogging through slush and muck. He was wearing new India rubber overshoes, and as a veteran of a year in Mexico, he imagined that his undaunted marches through sloppy New York streets gave him a noble, martial demeanor. He wore his glazed leather cap in the same proud, vain spirit, although he generally declined to talk about Mexico, to Skaggs or Polly or anyone else.

  As they came upon a wheeled dram shop near the Third Avenue, Skaggs stopped to post himself at the end of the line of waiting customers.

  “You’re liable to get set up too late again,” Duff warned.

  “Hold on, bub, just a touch of irrigation before the matinee,” Skaggs replied, waving a hand.

  By the time he got his cup of hot brandy and ginger cracker, Duff had crossed the street and returned with a baked pear that he held by its stem, daintily, a foot in front of his face, so that the syrup would not drip onto his waistcoat. He had become something of a dandy since his return from the war. He did not go for the full Bowery b’hoy outfit—no loud checks, no red flannel firehouse undershirt worn in the street, no flared trousers, no greased sidelocks—but he was, for his age and station, fashionable. His sandy hair was long in front and short in back. His dress hat was a silk stovepipe, and he kept his short collar turned down over his necktie. And of course he always wore his silver-nickel breastpin, the number 15, pinned to his peacoat.

  This far up into the Sixteenth Ward, the streets were usually quiet. The new telegraph poles, stretching in a line north toward Boston, were more numerous than townhouses. As it happened, Duff had visited this neighborhood a couple of times in the last day, but he rarely came this far north. There was little paying work above Twenty-third Street. And the suburban serenity made him nervous. He was excitable, and jostling through city crowds allowed him to discharge his pent-up energies. Among people it was easier to maintain good cheer. When he was alone in the quiet fringes of the city, however, his thoughts returned too much to himself. Winter on the empty rivers reminded him of the country, of his youth, of the endless watching and waiting for his father to return home from business trips.