The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  Their time together also had a more melancholy side, and by early 1868, this would have been especially apparent. Stoddard’s religious awakening helped settle his spirit but did little for his professional life. Within the brick-walled stillness of St. Mary’s, he found peace; in the noisy world without, he still struggled to find his place. The disappointment of his Poems unmoored him, and left him anxious about making a living. If he wasn’t a poet, then what was he?

  While looking for the answer, he decided to give acting a try. His friend managed a theater company that would travel to Sacramento that spring, and Stoddard, despite his extreme sensitivity to criticism, had much to recommend him as a performer: a rich, deep voice and large, evocative eyes. He took the river steamer to Sacramento and, on March 13, 1868, made his theatrical debut. He played a minor character in a forgettable melodrama but acquitted himself admirably enough to impress the Sacramento Union, whose critic called him “natural and self-possessed.”

  Unfortunately, his talent for self-sabotage swiftly intervened. The day after his premiere, a pair of boys recognized him on the street. “That feller made his first appearance last night,” one said to the other, “and he done bully!” This embarrassed him, and revealed a downside to being an actor: if he stood in one spot for any length of time, strangers would start talking to him. He hated it. The sort of stardom that Twain relished, Stoddard recoiled from. Soon an even bigger hurdle emerged: he couldn’t learn his lines. Touring companies often performed many plays over a brief period, and the memorization proved too much for Stoddard’s feeble powers of concentration. At night he tied a wet towel around his head to keep himself awake for long hopeless hours spent studying his script, and prayed the words would be in his brain by morning.

  His friends did their best to support him. The letters they sent to Sacramento conveyed their sympathy and devotion. “Follow your own guidance,” Coolbrith counseled, a couple of days before Stoddard first took the stage. She had just celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday, and missed him desperately. “I could not help wishing for a glimpse of your face,” she wrote. Her correspondence reflected how intimate they had become, how much she relied on him as her confessor and confidant. Birthdays always brought her down: “They remind me too forcibly that life is passing to no purpose.” She was widely known in San Francisco, but largely unknown everywhere else. She had seen her poetry praised in the Nation and published in a pair of popular New York papers, yet these were the sum total of her exposure in the eastern press. She couldn’t help feeling “as if I had wasted, wasted utterly, every year and hour and moment of my life.” She didn’t have any suggestions for how Stoddard might resolve his latest difficulty; if anything, she found herself suffering from a similar crisis.

  Harte wasn’t much help either. “I’ve much to say but nothing to advise,” he wrote Stoddard on March 16, 1868. “Whatever you do—short of arson or Chinese highway robbery, which are inartistic and ungentlemanly—I am, my dear boy, always yours.” Harte, too, was feeling demoralized—although he had too fine a sense of decorum to confess this in his letter. By early 1868, the biggest name in the literary West had succumbed to the same feelings that had lately infected one after another of his friends. The contagion took many forms—Twain’s frustrations with his first book, Stoddard’s anguish over his, Coolbrith’s more diffuse despair—but it shared a single root.

  All four writers had recently seen rising success. But this brought rising expectations, and with it, more potential for disappointment. Harte was long thought to have the most promising future, and thus the most to lose by failing to fulfill it. As he readied his first book, he appeared poised to succeed where Twain and Stoddard had fallen short. George Carleton, the New York publisher who had humiliated Twain, would bring Harte to an eastern market. His prospects for a brilliant debut seemed assured.

  When Harte’s Condensed Novels and Other Papers appeared in October 1867, however, Twain could take vengeful pleasure in the result. It looked awful: poorly printed, on cheap paper, and marred by comic illustrations commissioned by Carleton. These engravings horrified Harte. They were caricatures, broadly drawn, and they skewed the book’s tone too “low.” Despite the high polish of Harte’s prose, the pictures gave his pages a crude feel. As Twain had learned with The Celebrated Jumping Frog, presentation mattered—especially for western writers repackaging themselves for an eastern audience. Harte felt compelled to write letters to friends and potential reviewers disavowing Carleton’s changes, but he couldn’t entirely undo the damage. Even favorably inclined critics couldn’t fail to notice them. The Atlantic Monthly praised his “charming parodies” but denounced the images as “vulgar and inappropriate.”

  Harte hated his first book. A “deformed brat,” he called it, “malformed in its birth” by Carleton. What made the defeat harder to bear was a tragedy that hit Harte the same month: on October 27, 1867, his third son died. The child lived for only eight days. For a man who took pride in fatherhood, who parented his children with an affectionate intensity rarely seen in the rest of his life, his grief can only be imagined. He never discussed it. The loss certainly compounded the bitterness of his recent literary misfortune, and contributed to the gathering gloom that threatened to entirely submerge him by early 1868.

  For the past eight years, Harte had wrestled with California. Their relationship was never easy. He didn’t mind taking unpopular positions when he felt the dictates of conscience or good taste required it, as when he narrowly escaped being lynched after defending the Indians of Humboldt Bay, or braved the ire of the country bards excluded by Outcroppings. A loner since childhood, Harte saw independence as a virtue. His favorite writers were those who stood apart. He liked Stoddard’s poetry because it resisted the groupthink of the “tuneful mob,” and rose above the “hardness, skepticism and Philistinism of life on this coast.” The pitiful reception of his friend’s Poems could only confirm Harte’s low opinion of local culture. “The curse of California,” he wrote in February 1868, “has been its degrading, materialist influences which have reduced man and woman to the lowest working equivalents.” For nearly a decade, Harte had done battle with these forces. Now he began to lose faith the fight could be won. Perhaps the “twitter, whirl and excitement” of the region would never settle into a rhythm conducive to deep thought. Perhaps Californians would never put art above commerce. Perhaps the East held more opportunities. He considered moving his family across the country to find out.

  Just as Harte was getting ready to wash his hands of the West, however, something changed his mind. This would be the luckiest break of his life—the boon that rallied him from his slump and catapulted him to the attention of the postwar reading public. It would reunite him with Twain, and lift Stoddard and Coolbrith at the moment they most needed it. In retrospect, 1868 would be a turning point: the year when the long literary wave of California finally crested.

  • • •

  HARTE HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT California needed to outgrow its mercenary instincts to sustain a true literary culture. He had it backward. The only reason the region boasted so many writers to begin with was because it could afford to. The wealth generated by agriculture, mining, and trade created a market for local literature and gave people the leisure time required to read it. Harte could inveigh against California’s “degrading, materialist influences,” but those same influences subsidized his creativity. The cultural and economic fortunes of the state were inextricably linked.

  Anton Roman understood this. The Bavarian-born bookseller had come to California during the gold rush, and made his fortune peddling books to bored miners. More recently, he had cashed in on the Bohemians by publishing both Outcroppings and Stoddard’s Poems. No one had a better vantage point on the local literary scene, and by 1868, Roman felt California was on the verge of a breakthrough. The manuscripts piling up on his desk showed a new depth to local talent. Never before had he seen such a surplus of good writing. So he
came up with an idea that most people must have seen as suicidal: a monthly magazine that printed only original work. There would be no pirated items of the kind that padded out most literary papers—and, astonishingly, he would pay cash for each contribution. Roman’s name for his venture reflected his bullish faith in its success: the Overland Monthly, a transcontinental challenger to the mighty Atlantic Monthly.

  First he needed an editor. Harte was the obvious candidate. Roman had his reservations. He worried Harte might “lean too much toward the purely literary”—a subtle way of saying he worried Harte might be too anti-Californian. The publisher wanted “a magazine that would help the material development of this Coast” by boosting its cultural profile among a national audience, and he hesitated to hand control to a man who made a point of spotlighting California’s flaws.

  Predictably, Harte didn’t thrill to the idea either. He “threw cold water on the project” in their early meetings, Roman recalled. Harte doubted California had enough talented writers to make such a project possible. The collapse of the Californian lingered in his mind, as did the uproar over Outcroppings. But Roman believed. He felt it “in his bones,” a friend observed, and once he had decided Harte should be his editor, he applied his considerable energies toward achieving that goal. One can picture the gregarious publisher parrying Harte’s concerns, one after another. Roman had already extracted advertising pledges from local merchants to cover the Overland’s start-up costs. He also promised to supply a portion of the content himself, with selections drawn from his ever-growing stack of manuscripts.

  But the most memorable moment of their negotiation, as Roman remembered, involved a geography lesson. A map hung on the wall of Roman’s office. He showed Harte “the central position of San Francisco” between the hemispheres. The transcontinental railroad would be completed in a year. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company had recently started regular service from San Francisco to Japan and China, accelerating transpacific traffic. Once the coasts were connected by rail, California hoped to become a nexus for global trade, bridging Asia with America and Europe. This was the basis of Roman’s unshakable optimism: the belief that the railroad would make San Francisco the center of the world.

  Harte accepted. He was still skeptical of the magazine’s survival but couldn’t pass up the chance to continue his cultural crusade. “I am trying to build up a literary taste on the Pacific slope,” he explained to a friend. “I want to make a good fight while it lasts.” The outcome was anyone’s guess. “The Overland marches steadily along to meet its Fate,” he wrote Stoddard, “but what [it is] I know not.” In the spring of 1868, Roman took his editor on a trip to help answer this question. They brought their respective families, and spent nearly three months touring the countryside south of San Francisco. The two men had much to discuss before the unveiling of the Overland that summer. Their differences ran deep. Roman admired the pioneers of California’s past and felt confident of its golden future; Harte ridiculed the former and felt ambivalent about the latter. Roman was a booster, Harte a Bohemian—yet, somehow, they found a way to build a mutually beneficial relationship that brought the Overland to life.

  The cover of the first issue of the Overland Monthly.

  When the first issue landed in July 1868, its cover carried an engraving that neatly illustrated the constructive tension at its core. Originally, the design had featured a grizzly bear, a symbol of California. Then Harte drew two parallel lines under it, to represent the approaching railroad. This simple image offered a complex commentary on the Far West’s future. It showed the miracle of steam and steel awaited by Roman and many others—yet its tone was hardly triumphant. As Harte himself explained, the bear “recognizes his rival and his doom” in the “coming engine of civilization and progress.” Their encounter would be violent. It would involve the annihilation of the primitive past by the industrial future—a microcosm of the economic forces overhauling the country as a whole.

  Twain loved the engraving. He later called it the “prettiest fancy” that “ever shot through Harte’s brain.” He could congratulate the Overland’s editor in person: in a typical feat of good timing, he had swept back into San Francisco on April 2, a few months before the magazine’s launch. He hadn’t set foot in the city for more than a year, and had been breathtakingly busy in the interval. His voyage aboard the Quaker City in 1867 had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. For five months, he had watched a horde of American tourists overrun the Old World’s holiest and most historic sites, and captured the comic spectacle in fifty letters for the Alta California. In the spring of 1868, the San Francisco–based paper published the last of them.

  Twain’s dispatches didn’t just circulate in California. They also caught the eye of a Connecticut publisher named Elisha Bliss Jr., who offered to turn them into a book. The author enthusiastically agreed. After the anticlimax of The Celebrated Jumping Frog, he leaped at the chance to mount another assault on the publishing world. There was only one problem: the Alta owned the copyright to the letters. When the paper’s editors got wind of Twain’s plans, they shot off a telegram reminding him of this fact in no uncertain terms. They had bankrolled his overseas adventures, and didn’t like losing their investment to another publisher. Twain brushed them off, but the editors soon raised the stakes. They threatened to preempt Twain’s book with their own collection. Twain swallowed his pride and tried asking their permission nicely. When the editors again refused, he boarded a steamer for San Francisco to talk face-to-face. This was what brought him West at the same moment that Harte was assembling the Overland: a deadlocked copyright dispute that threatened to torpedo his next book. “Mark Twain has got a scrape on his hands,” howled the Marysville Appeal.

  Those hoping for blood would be disappointed. Twain didn’t come to California “to break somebody’s head,” as the Appeal presumed. He came to negotiate. Whatever his flaws as a businessman, he excelled at the bargaining table. In the spring of 1868, he strode into the Alta’s offices in San Francisco and faced off with one of the paper’s owners. Somehow, Twain walked away with everything he wanted: the Alta wouldn’t publish its book; he would go ahead with his. On May 5, 1868, Twain gave Bliss the good news. “The Alta people, after some hesitation, have given me permission,” he wrote. “I am steadily at work, & shall start east with the completed manuscript about the middle of June.”

  This gave him little more than a month. He had a tremendous amount to do. The letters alone weren’t enough to sustain a whole book. Written on the fly, they made a scattered, uneven chronicle of his trek through Europe and the Middle East. He promised Bliss to “weed them of their chief faults of construction & inelegancies of expression.” He needed to build a continuous story from their diverse parts, one that could appeal to a national audience. This meant not merely punching up the prose but eliminating regional references that only made sense to Californian readers. It also involved purging the profanity, irreverence, and mean-spirited mockery that occasionally made his Quaker City correspondence too risqué for mainstream tastes.

  Twain had recently been reminded of how much he could benefit from this sort of self-censorship. Barely two weeks after stepping off the steamer, on April 14, 1868, he had played a sold-out show in San Francisco and was eviscerated by the critics. Entitled “Pilgrim Life,” the lecture gave highlights of his time abroad, in the same comic-travelogue vein that produced his first Hawaii talk. Only this time, the jokes had a nastier flavor, particularly in his merciless portrait of the other Quaker City sightseers and his general contempt for Christianity. The Morning Call upbraided Twain for “carving the sconces of proper folk.” The California Weekly Mercury deplored his “sacrilegious allusions.” His treatment of the Holy Land invited special outrage, as when he cast doubt on the Second Coming by saying Christ wouldn’t dare return to so dreary a part of the world as Palestine. Soon the pulpits joined the papers in condemning such blasphemy. “The most straigh
t-laced of the preachers here cannot well get through a sermon without turning aside to give me a blast,” Twain complained.

  If he wanted his book to be a hit, he would have to tone it down. For help, he turned to an old friend: Harte. The fellow writer had long helped Twain tame his wilder impulses, ever since their days together at the Californian. Now, in the spring of 1868, Harte took time from his busy schedule to wade through Twain’s unwieldy manuscript. Many of the pages had been composed in manic all-night writing binges. They included cut-and-pasted letters from the original newsprint, with revisions penned in the margins, plus entirely new passages. Twain later estimated that he had worked from eleven or twelve in the evening until dawn the next day for an entire month. The result was a mishmash of reheated and freshly cooked copy, just the sort of literary mélange that could use Harte’s meticulous editorial eye.

  For Harte to undertake such a task while also preparing the first issue of the Overland Monthly demonstrated true devotion. Whacking a path through Twain’s shaggy draft would be hard work. Happily, Harte had no scruples about cutting with a wide stroke. He “told me what passages, paragraphs & chapters to leave out—& I followed orders strictly,” Twain later said. This would be Harte’s greatest act of friendship, and Twain, all competitiveness aside, felt grateful for it. He credited Harte with transforming him from “an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses” into an author suited for the national scene. Harte wouldn’t be the book’s only editor, but he left a sizable mark. A comparison of the Alta letters with the book manuscript offers hints of his influence. The language grew tighter, the storytelling more coherent. The slang vanished; the diction matured. “Jackass” became “donkey”; “fooled” became “deceived.” Most important, the humor softened. The insolent digs at religion and his Quaker City shipmates mellowed into gentler gibes.