by Ben Tarnoff
Touring the island on horseback, they spent a week in the home of a missionary at Hilo. Each afternoon, Stoddard visited a nearby waterfall. A mountain stream skated across a sheet of volcanic rock, vaulted off a cliff, and fell into an oasis fifty feet below. Floating in the water were naked brown bodies—young natives on their daily swim—and this was the real reason Stoddard went: to admire “angels in liquid amber,” arching “their lithe length in ecstasy.” One of the bathers, Kane-Aloha, became his companion. “Friendship ripens quickly in the tropical sunshine,” Stoddard recalled.
Perry strongly disapproved. Twelve years older, he presumably felt responsible for his young, eccentric friend. But Stoddard outsmarted him. He persuaded Perry to enlist Kane-Aloha as their guide, and then lost his “chaperone” in the bush. “I cut loose from the gentleman who was nobly striving to restrain me,” he remembered, “and became an easy convert to the un-trammelled delights of barbarians.” Kane-Aloha led him through the jungle, feeding him freshly picked fruit. “We reveled in riotous living,” Stoddard remembered. “We had certainly transgressed the unwritten law but we were not in the least sorry for it.”
What kind of transgression, Stoddard never said. He and Kane-Aloha were almost certainly lovers, and their parting, as he reminisced in a later sketch, was an emotional one. Long after Stoddard left, the tropics remained engraved in his mind: a landscape of kaleidoscopic color, the cure to the monochrome Presbyterianism of his childhood. Like Paul Gauguin three decades later, Stoddard saw the Pacific Islands as a refuge from civilization. He considered the people primitive, unembarrassed by their sexuality, uncontaminated by the shame that weighed so heavily on him. This fantasy sustained his lifelong obsession with “barbarianism.” He infantilized the natives—partly to make his affection for them more innocent, partly because he felt more comfortable with children, being childlike himself.
Back home, he nerved himself for another semester in Oakland. It wouldn’t take long for him to realize, once again, that he would “never become a student worthy of the name.” Fortunately, he had an extracurricular source of sanity: the Californian still wanted his poems. These were no longer the semi-saccharine warblings of Pip Pepperpod, the parlor tricks of a precocious child hoping for another pat on the head, but the tighter lines of a more mature poet, signed under his full name: Charles Warren Stoddard.
He couldn’t have asked for better company. As 1865 dawned, the Californian entered its finest year: the moment when it finally fulfilled its promise to be the best literary paper of the Pacific coast and the equal of any on the continent. Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ina Coolbrith, and Charles Warren Stoddard made regular appearances. Eastern newspapers lifted liberally from its pages. Webb, who had returned as editor, protested loudly about the practice, although he undoubtedly loved the attention. In fact, plagiarism was the least of his problems. The Californian suffered from a permanent shortage of cash. As Webb put it, the paper “nearly bankrupted” him “in an inconceivably short space of time.” By April 1865, he had run out of money to pay his contributors and moved the offices into an alley off Montgomery Street.
But the future of California literature could wait: that spring, momentous news came tapping over the telegraph wire. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were tightening the Union’s stranglehold on the South. Four years after the first shot at Fort Sumter, the Civil War was almost over. On April 3, 1865, the Confederate capital of Richmond fell to Union forces. When the report reached San Francisco, people took to the streets to celebrate. On April 9, Robert E. Lee surrendered. Thomas Starr King’s dream had come true: the Confederacy crushed, the Union triumphant, and California standing proudly on the winning side. The Pacific coast would never again see America as something separate: the abstraction of national life had become a living Union, fused in the crucible of war, bound not only by geography but by bloodshed, myth, and the terse eloquence of Lincoln.
• • •
AT 10:20 P.M. ON APRIL 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth put a bullet in the brain of the president. Lincoln spent nine hours in a coma and died at 7:22 a.m. the next day. That afternoon, as mournful streams of Morse code crisscrossed the continent, 150 citizens of San Francisco assembled at the corner of Montgomery and Clay. They marched to the offices of the Daily Democratic Press, broke into the building, and demolished the composing room. They stormed another anti-Lincoln paper, and another, before a squad of fifty policemen and the city’s military commander persuaded them to disperse.
That night, the army kept the peace. San Francisco looked like an occupied city of the defeated South, with troops in formation, cavalry rattling the pavement. The evening passed without incident, and by Wednesday, April 19, the city had found a more dignified way to express its grief. A funeral procession fifteen thousand strong snaked through the streets. Six white horses shrouded in black drew a casket emblazoned with LINCOLN in gold letters, surrounded by soldiers, clergymen, foreign consuls, and toward the rear, a large number of black men. They stopped at Union Square, where a fraction of them fit in the crowded pavilion and the rest remained outside to listen until the services ended and everyone sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: Harte, a patriot who had written many pro-Union poems, found his pen paralyzed at the news of Lincoln’s death. A reality too terrible to render in words, it shattered his composure and brought a demoralizing sense of uncertainty. In an article for the next issue of the Californian, printed with heavy black borders between its columns to commemorate the fallen president, Harte tried to focus his thoughts. Lincoln didn’t just lead the nation, Harte reflected: he embodied it. The landscape of the West lived through him: his tall, lanky frame relayed the “continuity of endless rivers and boundless prairies,” his “eloquence and humor” drew its power from “the easy intercourse of the pioneer.”
Everyone knew that Lincoln was a westerner. He had been born in a log cabin on the Kentucky frontier, planted crops on his father’s farm, and practiced law on the prairies. Supporters revered him as “the rail-splitter,” the ax-swinging pioneer who built fences from split wood, and he still had enough backcountry in his blood to laugh heartily at Artemus Ward during the darkest days of the Civil War. But Harte’s point went deeper: Lincoln did more than save the Union. This “simple-minded, uncouth, and honest” westerner liberated America from the cultural choke hold of New England—those Anglophilic Brahmins with their “crisp and dapper style of thought,” which had for so long “retarded the formation of National character.” Decades earlier, Thomas Hart Benton had predicted that a new, original civilization would sprout on western soil. Lincoln prepared the ground for this flowering. He tilted the continent’s center of gravity: not only from South to North, but from East to West, fulfilling a long line of Jeffersonian prophecy.
But the Civil War, like all revolutions, didn’t change everything all at once. Politically, America emerged from the conflict transformed; culturally, it hadn’t fully absorbed the shift. American literature still awaited its Lincoln. The Bohemians of San Francisco offered a promising alternative to New England, but so far had yielded little on a par with Emerson or Thoreau. The Californian, despite its tasteful typography and metropolitan polish, still felt young: the work of writers in their twenties, quicker to criticism than to creation. Its strongest suit was always parody—parody as a petri dish for the budding writer: a way to study style, to digest influences, to ventriloquize different voices.
In the summer of 1865, Harte began publishing his “Condensed Novels” in the Californian. These were artful pastiches of famous novelists, with each writer’s idiosyncrasies amplified to the point of absurdity. His victims included writers he loved, like Dickens, and those he didn’t, like the popular sensationalist Mary Elizabeth Braddon. James Fenimore Cooper, whose Leatherstocking Tales had cast a sickeningly genteel glow over the American frontier for decades, came in for an especially sa
tisfying shellacking. The “Condensed Novels” succeeded because of Harte’s freakishly precise ear for word music, for how subtle shifts of language produced different chords of meaning.
He showed less enthusiasm when it came to producing compositions of his own, however. He wrote no fiction during his years at the Californian, abandoning the narrative vein that had produced his debut in the Atlantic Monthly. Perhaps he preferred to put his energy into parodies; perhaps certain domestic developments made it harder to concentrate. His second son was born on March 5, 1865: Francis King Harte, named for the late Thomas Starr King. Harte took fatherhood seriously. A visitor to his house might find the distinguished writer on all fours, wearing a feather duster on his back, pretending to be a funeral hearse while his children delightedly took part in the procession.
His friends admired his devotion. When Webb came over one day, he discovered his friend lying on the floor, using his feet to catapult one of his boys into the air, “turning the little fellow over like a butter-ball, and making him throw all sorts of [somersaults] and hand-springs.” Then, abruptly, the fun ended. “A summary stop was put to the amusement when Mrs. Bret entered the room,” Webb observed, “and from the rapidity with which the curtain fell on the performance, I’ve an idea that she does not wish to see her children made a circus of.” Webb had stumbled upon the central friction of Harte’s home life. Fatherhood made him happy; marriage made him miserable.
Anna Griswold Harte may not deserve the scathing descriptions left by her husband’s friends over the years, although the sheer number of them suggests there is some truth to their collective portrait of her as jealous, tyrannical, pretentious, stubborn, sullen, and shrewish. At the very least, Mr. and Mrs. Harte had little in common, as their grandson tactfully put it decades later. Photographs reveal a woman with low-lidded, unplayful eyes and a thin mouth firmly set in its grooves—“positively plain,” in the judgment of William Dean Howells’s wife, Elinor. She came from a wealthy New York family, a fact flamboyantly transmitted by her expensive tastes and faultless posture. Whether she considered her husband’s literary calling insufficiently aristocratic, or coveted the time it took, she interfered with his writing at every opportunity. Their marriage became a lesson in low-intensity warfare, a game of sabotage and subversion. She conducted constant insurgencies to destroy his peace and quiet, and the struggle only intensified as his success grew.
The Californian helped keep him sane. It offered an alternative family: looser knit, but no less in need of a father figure. He couldn’t clown around on the floor with its contributors, perhaps, but he could enjoy the subtler satisfactions of nurturing their talent and watching them succeed. He spent time with Twain, helped Stoddard with his poetry, cultivated a closer acquaintance with Coolbrith. She was everything his wife wasn’t: smart, sympathetic, beautiful. Her eyes were large and gray, her voice soft and deep. Her skin had the color of olives or, in Stoddard’s words, “the ripe glow of the pomegranates.” If Anna Griswold was a creature of the Northeast, Coolbrith “might easily have been mistaken for a daughter of Spain,” Stoddard said: the dark eyes, the flushed skin, “the contralto voice,” streaked with “gentle melancholy,” always “Spanish and semitropical.” She also had a sense of humor. Harte loved to tell funny tales about his children, and recite the limericks he wrote for them. “We used to shout with laughter at these child-stories and verses, recounted in his inimitable manner,” she remembered.
Coolbrith gave Harte the female companionship he couldn’t find at home. In return, he provided something equally valuable: a supportive mentor. By 1865, she had begun to reveal more of herself in her writing. In March, she published “The Mother’s Grief” in the Californian, a poem that hinted at her long-hidden heartache over her dead child. About the same time, she showed another, fiercer side in a pair of meandering essays. In one, she sneered at the Victorian domesticity that Anna Griswold Harte and other American women embraced:
Unfortunately, I seldom attend balls and merry-makings, being a very quiet, stay-at-home little body; in fact, one of those model wives, of which the newspapers are forever preaching, who pass their lives in a most exemplary devotion to the members of their own households, alternating between the bliss of mending husband’s stockings and feeding “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup” to a teething baby.
Coolbrith would never make a model wife. If she ever felt shame at this fact before, it had by now become a badge of pride. This was the root of her Bohemianism: not the supercharged sexuality of Adah Isaacs Menken, who married four men in ten years, but a refusal to play the game. Even later in life, when marriage might have saved her from financial hardship, she held firm. “Why doesn’t some rich man fall in love with me, and give me a chance—to refuse him!” she told Stoddard. In 1865 she was twenty-four. Instead of “mending husband’s stockings,” she rode the streetcar to the end of the line and strolled along the sand at North Beach, not far from where Jessie Benton Frémont once lived on Black Point. “How grand the Bay looks with its white waves dashing on the shore,” she rhapsodized in the Californian, “and stern old Alcatraz yonder, standing like a tried and faithful sentinel keeping watch and ward over the hidden treasures of the deep.”
It was the same view that Harte had seen in 1860 when he first met Mrs. Frémont at her house, in that unimaginably distant day when James Buchanan sat in the White House and no American had ever filed an income tax return or fired a Gatling gun. Thomas Starr King was still an unknown preacher, often joining Harte in Jessie’s parlor for conversations on poetry and politics and how to steel California for the coming conflict as the South inched closer to secession. In the half decade since, the country had been split and brutally sutured. California had prospered. King had shown heroism in life and been deified in death. Harte had gone from setting type for the Golden Era to co-editing the Californian, and now led a literary scene vastly more sophisticated and self-aware. Writers of proven talent had materialized from the primordial soup of the Far Western frontier. And Twain was on the verge of a discovery that would eventually enable him to eclipse all of them.
A replica of Jim Gillis’s cabin on Jackass Hill, 1947. “The headquarters of all Bohemians visiting the mountains,” Dan De Quille called it.
ON DECEMBER 4, 1864, Twain arrived at Jackass Hill in Tuolumne County, where Steve Gillis’s brother Jim had a cabin. The contrast with San Francisco couldn’t have been more complete. During the gold rush, the area overflowed with prospectors. Now only a handful remained: a “forlorn remnant,” Twain wrote, human ruins in a lunar landscape. These raw, desperate men had no hope of becoming millionaires. The boom was over: they were lucky if they gleaned enough gold from the exhausted earth to cover their grocery bills. These were the survivors of 1849, the ones who hadn’t sailed home, or destroyed their bodies with overwork, or died of delirium tremens in dilapidated boardinghouses, or been shot or stabbed in street fights. In their clay-stained faces, the myth of the heroic pioneer met harsh reality.
The cabin at Jackass Hill presented a cheerier picture. It was a hallowed spot in the literary geography of the Far West: the “headquarters of all Bohemians visiting the mountains,” in the words of Twain’s friend Dan De Quille. Harte had stayed there in the mid-1850s, absorbing the scenes of mining country that would later infuse his fiction. He came “ragged and hungry,” Jim Gillis remembered, and sullen with despair over his yet-unacknowledged genius. Jim let him stay a week before putting $50 in his pocket and sending him back to San Francisco. Years later, after Harte became famous, he treated his former host so rudely that Jim demanded his money back.
Twain was in a bad mood when he arrived. The weather didn’t help. The winter rain fell constantly, turning the soil to sludge. He shared the cabin’s damp, narrow confines with three men: Jim Gillis, Jim’s brother Billy, and their mining partner Dick Stoker. After San Francisco, Twain’s new surroundings almost certainly came as a shock. Here he ate beans, not shellfish. Wor
se, the “high-toned” literary career he had spent the last two months cultivating—producing weekly pieces for the Californian—came skidding to a halt. For fifteen weeks, he published nothing in the San Francisco papers.
But rural California had its rewards. Jim Gillis was one of them. A native of Mississippi, he bridged the two worlds of the Far West, fusing Bohemian brains with backwoods brawn. He knew how to mine gold, and how to read Latin and Greek. He stocked his shelves with Byron, Shakespeare, and Dickens. Best of all, he told stories. Decades later, Twain recalled how Jim would “stand up before the great log fire” and soberly deliver “an elaborate impromptu lie.” He studied Jim’s special genius: how he made it up as he went along, “enjoying each fresh fancy,” not caring “whether the story shall ever end brilliantly and satisfactorily or shan’t end at all.” It resembled the storytelling of the slaves Twain heard as a boy, and drew heavily on the Southwestern humor that had shaped him as a writer. As he watched Jim solemnly conjure “monstrous fabrications” from thin air, the literary possibilities of this soggy patch of California began to unfold in Twain’s mind.
In Angel’s Camp, a decrepit mining town seven miles from Jackass Hill, Twain struck an even richer vein. He and Jim traveled there on a prospecting trip in late January 1865. By all accounts, Twain never had any luck digging for gold. He preferred lounging at the local tavern, observing the society of “marooned miners” who gathered by the stove. He sketched them in his notebook—“T.—Age 38—stature 6, weight 180”—and recorded snatches of overheard dialogue. He catalogued the meals: “beans & dishwater” most days and, on special occasions, four kinds of soup known as “Hellfire, General Debility, Insanity & Sudden Death.” He heard tall tales, including one about a jumping frog. On February 6, he scribbled the following: