The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  Chicago felt good about its chances. The city was America’s railroad hub, a gateway between the urban East and the rural interior. Its merchants and manufacturers had followed the transcontinental track to the Pacific, poaching markets once loyal to San Francisco, and now Chicagoans hoped to lure Harte to the shores of Lake Michigan to take the editorship of their Lakeside Monthly. Soon after he and his family arrived on February 7, several prominent citizens invited him to dinner to discuss the offer.

  Inexplicably, he failed to show. This rudeness outraged his hosts, and their indignation grew when they learned the reason for it: apparently Harte had expected a carriage to be sent. This embarrassing revelation unleashed the scorn of the local press, and wormed its way through papers around the country—the first hiccup in Harte’s princely progress. Yet Harte may have concocted the carriage excuse to cover up a domestic squabble, according to a story told years later by a friend. In Chicago the family stayed with Mrs. Harte’s sister. When Mrs. Harte discovered the Lakeside dons hadn’t invited her sister to dinner, she angrily announced that none of them would go.

  Whether Bret’s ego or Anna’s temper or some other symptom of their toxic marriage produced the Chicago fiasco, it suggested a darker margin to the storybook romance between America and the author of “The Heathen Chinee.” But it didn’t do enough damage to dampen the enthusiasm generated by his trip across the country. The Hartes left Chicago on February 15, briefly visiting Syracuse and New York City before continuing to Boston, where the next phase of the wooing would begin.

  The assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly met them at the station. William Dean Howells had a simple mission: to get Harte to sign the exclusive contract that his employers had wanted to finalize for months. After he heard what happened in Chicago, he hired the best carriage available. He felt terribly anxious, and not a little intimidated. When Harte appeared, Howells took his first look: “a child of extreme fashion,” he decided, arrayed in fabrics far more conspicuous than anything one might find on Howells’s short, fat frame. Then the celebrated author “pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp,” and Howells’s fears faded: Harte, he was relieved to discover, was completely charming.

  Over the course of the following week, that charm would be put to the test, as Howells took Harte on a tour of a social galaxy unlike any he had ever seen. Chicago had heart, but Boston was “the Hub”: the high temple of the New England intellectual tradition that Harte, only six years earlier, had ridiculed as “an English graft” in the pages of the Californian. To Harte’s mind, the Bohemian scene had produced more indigenous fare, like “The Luck of Roaring Camp”—leaner, truer to life—and it wouldn’t be long before he let slip a few disparaging digs at his surroundings. He and his family stayed at the Howells residence in Cambridge a half mile from the Harvard campus, surrounded by famous writers. “Why, you couldn’t stand on your front porch and fire off your revolver without bringing down a two-volumer,” Harte cracked to his host. Literary eminences weren’t the only things nearby: pretty girls flocked to the Howells home when they heard Harte was inside. They dawdled outside in stylish dresses, hoping to catch sight of him. His engraved portrait had recently appeared on the cover of Every Saturday: a glamour shot showing him with windswept hair and voguishly long sideburns. The artist omitted Harte’s smallpox scars, making him look far handsomer than he did in person. It set off “a perfect furore in cultivated society,” reported Howells’s wife, Elinor. “All the young ladies are in love with him.”

  Harte induced nearly as much swooning at the Saturday Club, a monthly gathering of all the big-name Brahmins. He attended on February 25, 1871, his first full day in town. In an oak-paneled room on the second floor of a Boston hotel, the wizened monuments of American letters lined up to meet him: Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Even Twain would have been intimidated by such company. But if Harte felt the slightest bit starstruck, it didn’t show. On the contrary: he “had a spice of irreverence that enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked,” Howells observed. The westerner didn’t defer to his eastern elders, but held his ground, tweaking them with a subtly teasing wit and telling stories about rattlesnakes and prairie dogs. And they loved it: for the duration of his stay in Boston, Harte was a coveted caller, escorted from one function to another by Howells.

  The main event came on February 28, when Mr. and Mrs. Howells held a dinner at their house in Cambridge. At a table set with fine china sat a large sampling of the local intelligentsia—“so many we knocked elbows,” wrote the philosopher John Fiske. A twenty-seven-year-old Henry James came. So did a young Harvard professor named Henry Adams. Harte didn’t disappoint, telling Lowell that he found certain of his verses “overliterary.” Once again, everyone seemed to take it in stride. “I was so wined and dined by the literary folk whom I used to scalp in the Overland that between remorse and good liquor I hardly knew where I stood,” Harte gloated in a letter to Ambrose Bierce.

  The hostess felt triumphant. “[T]he party!” Elinor gushed in a letter. “How shall I do justice to it?” It wasn’t just the catered meal, followed by chocolate ice cream, cake, and coffee, or a guest list that boasted Boston’s best minds. It was the sense that she and her husband had finally earned their place in high society. Harte’s visit had cemented Howells’s stature at the moment he needed it most. In five months, he would inherit the editorship of the Atlantic. The task ahead was daunting. Although the Atlantic remained America’s most prestigious literary periodical, it had fallen on hard times. Circulation had dropped sharply under competition from New York magazines like Harper’s and Scribner’s—lavishly illustrated monthlies that catered to the less rarefied tastes of the rising middle class. The golden age was over: Hawthorne and Thoreau were dead; Emerson had entered his long senescence. The magazine needed more modern voices to survive. Some of these Howells would find in the next generation of northeasterners, like Henry James and his brother William. Along with Henry Adams and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., they belonged to a wave of postwar writers who helped sweep away the tired intellectual legacy of the antebellum era and innovate new ideas in law, literature, history, and philosophy.

  This experimental spirit would transform New England in the coming decades, and yield valuable items for the Atlantic. But Howells would also look farther afield, to Bohemian newcomers from the Far West. He understood the West as few Bostonians could, being a westerner himself—a midwesterner, to be exact. He was born in Ohio, and his father had been a country printer, his uncle a steamboat pilot. Like Harte, Twain, and many other young Americans of modest means and large ambition, he had gotten his start as a typesetter and wrestled up through the ranks. If his scrappy background always made him a bit of an outsider among the Brahmins, it also gave him a special respect for those frontier scribblers coming East from California. He wrote a glowing review of Twain’s The Innocents Abroad when it appeared in 1869. And in Harte, he saw not just a popular writer who could revive the Atlantic’s flagging finances, but “the earnests of an American literature to come.”

  What would this literature look like? Howells hoped it would outgrow the “intense ethicism that pervaded the New England mind”—the moralizing that made writers like Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau a little too preachy for his taste, as much as he admired them. In a word, he wanted realism: closely observed studies of everyday American life, offered for their own sake, not to prove a point. Harte’s gold rush tales gave California in its native colors, without sermons or sentimentalism. They sprang from the “soil” and “air” of “the newest kind of new world,” Howells wrote, and confirmed the editor’s belief that the “finest poetry is not ashamed of the plainest fact.” This would be precisely the sort of thing Howells would promote in the Atlantic upon his ascension in 1871: stories of America in the particular, set in the mining camps of the Mother Lode or the drawing rooms of Beacon Hill or the stea
mboats of the Mississippi.

  On March 6, 1871, Harte agreed to write exclusively for the Atlantic. He would publish no fewer than twelve pieces a year and his employers would pay $10,000 for the privilege. This was twice what they had offered back in the summer of 1870, before “The Heathen Chinee” sent Harte’s stock soaring. It was also twice the annual salary of a congressman, and a shocking amount of money by literary standards. The Atlantic had made Harte the highest-paid writer in America, and Boston felt proud to be bagging him. The city “may still claim the proud distinction of being the literary metropolis,” declared a local poet when she heard of Harte’s decision. “He tarried in Chicago. He investigated New-York. He came to Boston, he saw, he was conquered.”

  Howells welcomed the news. It helped that he liked Harte. For a week he had enjoyed the “witchery of that most winning presence,” right up until the moment when he drove his guest to the station and put him on the train to New York, where the Hartes were planning to live. The men spent their final minutes together in the parlor car, talking and laughing the way they had the past several nights. Then Harte remembered: he had forgotten to buy cigars. They ran to go get them. By the time they returned, the train was moving down the track and Harte had to scramble up the steps of the last car. Howells followed to see his friend aboard before jumping back to the ground—just missing an archway that would’ve killed him if he had held on a moment longer. He looked up to see Harte waving, cigar in hand, a look of “mock heartbreak” on his face. It was an image that remained permanently imprinted on Howells’s brain, perhaps because it came so soon after almost dying, perhaps because it seemed an ominous sign of things to come.

  • • •

  TWAIN HAD A PLAN. “I must & will keep shady & quiet till Bret Harte simmers down a little,” he wrote his brother Orion in March 1871. “I will ‘top’ Bret Harte again or bust. But I can’t do it dangling eternally in the public view.” He was flattering himself: he wasn’t in danger of dangling in public view. Two years had passed since The Innocents Abroad. He now lived in Buffalo, where he co-owned and edited a newspaper called the Express. He had taken the job to appease Livy’s parents, to prove he was ready to settle down. But the responsibilities of running a daily paper couldn’t possibly satisfy someone of his temperament. The decrepit editorial offices—laced with cobwebs, heated by old coal stoves—must have felt like a tomb to a man accustomed to the livelier pace of western papers. While Harte triumphed, Twain languished.

  How had it happened? How had the Washoe Giant, the feared hoaxer and humorist of jumping frog fame, become a burgher of Buffalo? His new domestic life was anything but tranquil. In November 1870, Livy had given birth to Langdon, their first child. Born prematurely like his father, the baby struggled to survive. Three months later, Livy came down with typhoid fever. The household slid into chaos: doctors and nurses descended while Twain sank deeper into despair. “You do not know what it is to be in a state of absolute frenzy—desperation,” he wrote his publisher Elisha Bliss. Langdon exercised his little lungs at every opportunity, to the dismay of his sleepless father. “I believe if that baby goes on crying 3 more hours this way I will butt my frantic brains out & try to get some peace.”

  Needless to say, he couldn’t write. He had told Bliss to expect Roughing It, his book of western adventures, months before. But the work went slowly, with no end in sight. “In three whole months I have hardly written a page of MS,” he confessed in March 1871. His nerves were shot, and not only on account of the trouble at home. In January, the Boston magazine Every Saturday announced that Twain had written a parody of Harte’s “The Heathen Chinee” under another pseudonym. Being upstaged by Harte was bad enough; now he was being accused of imitating him. He wrote the editor an angry letter demanding a correction. “I am not in the imitation business,” he snapped.

  Anger made him mean; fear made him frantic. He was afraid Livy or Langdon might die; that Harte’s dazzling rise meant his own inevitable decline; that The Innocents Abroad marked a professional high point he could never repeat. Three years after leaving San Francisco for the last time, he was afraid he would never be fully embraced in the East. The evil sprites of self-doubt that always harassed him in low moments made his solitary moments away from the screaming baby and his sick wife all the more miserable, and sapped the confidence he needed to write.

  One thing was certain: he had to get out of Buffalo. Livy agreed. In March, they put the house on the market. They wanted to move to Hartford, Connecticut, a flourishing city of fifty thousand halfway between Boston and New York. Its downtown was a major piece of the postwar economic machine, home to insurance companies and gun manufacturers and subscription publishers like Twain’s very own Elisha Bliss. It also had an extraordinary suburban enclave on its western border: Nook Farm, a close-knit community of liberal intellectuals who occupied a cluster of gorgeous mansions surrounded by meadows and ponds. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived there. So did Joseph Hawley and Charles Dudley Warner, co-editors of the Hartford Courant. This paradise of progressive politics and erudite conversation was where Twain longed to settle down. Here he might finally obtain a solid foothold in the eastern aristocracy, and put an end to the rootlessness that had so far defined his life.

  But first, the family would spend the spring and summer at Livy’s childhood home in Elmira, New York, where she could convalesce under her mother’s care. Her condition had gotten worse. By the time they left Buffalo on March 18, 1871, she couldn’t sit or stand, and had to be transported on a mattress. Twain prayed the move to Elmira would bring happier days; or, at the very least, nothing worse than the nightmare that preceded it: “I had rather die twice over than repeat the last six months of my life.” He also hoped to break through his writer’s block. “I want to get clear away from all hamperings, all harassments,” he told Bliss. “I am going to shut myself up in a farm-house alone, on top an Elmira hill, & write.”

  The farmhouse belonged to Livy’s sister Susan Crane and her husband, Theodore. It stood on a 250-acre estate called Quarry Farm, perched on a hill three miles from the Elmira home. This would be Twain’s writing retreat. He walked there several times a week. He loved the cool air, the quiet, and the views of the valley below, brightened by the occasional burst of summer lightning—“a foretaste of heaven,” he later called it. In this majestic setting, his brain became unstuck; the words began to flow. The agonies of the last several months faded; his fanatical work ethic returned. He immersed himself in his memories of the Pacific coast, and powered ahead on the manuscript that would restore him to the public eye. Roughing It would be part fiction, part fact: the story of the six most formative years of his life, beginning with that fateful day in 1861 when he boarded a stagecoach with his brother Orion and fled the Civil War for the far frontier beyond the plains.

  He relied on several written sources for inspiration, including a pile of his clippings from western papers and some notes scribbled by Orion. Help also came in the form of an old friend: Joe Goodman, the editor of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, who appeared in Elmira on March 24. Nine years earlier, Goodman had given Twain his first job in Nevada journalism, witnessed the birth of his pen name, and nurtured his emerging talent. Now the newspaperman was taking a trip through the East, and dropped by at just the right moment: with Twain knee-deep in Roughing It, sorely in need of guidance from someone who knew the Far West as well as he did. They rambled around Quarry Farm, reminiscing. They remembered old Washoe, its vulgar grandeur and boozy mayhem. Goodman would do for Roughing It what Harte did for The Innocents Abroad. He supplied the eye of a veteran editor, and the encouragement of a close friend. An anecdote later recorded by Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain’s official biographer, gives a glimpse of their time together. One day, Goodman read the manuscript while Twain fidgeted nearby. The author’s anxiety steadily rose, until it erupted: “I knew it! I knew it!” he cried. “I am writing nothing but rot. You have sat there all this time rea
ding without a smile, and pitying the ass I am making of myself.” “Mark,” Goodman said, “I was reading critically, not for amusement, and so far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you have ever written. I have found it perfectly absorbing. You are doing a great book!”

  Goodman’s visit lifted Twain. By early April, he could report to Orion that the book was “booming along.” Meanwhile, Livy slowly recovered: in late April, she rose from her sickbed and took her first few steps. The baby was healthy. Springtime came to Quarry Farm, greening its fields of clover and oak. Twain fell into a trance, cranking out pages at a superhuman pace. By mid-May, he was two-thirds done, and crowed to Bliss that he was writing with “a red-hot interest.” His mood had swung from one manic extreme to the other. “Nothing grieves me now—nothing troubles me, bothers me or gets my attention—I don’t think of anything but the book, & don’t have an hour’s unhappiness about anything.”

  All this confidence came through in the writing: Roughing It would be his most radical work to date. In The Innocents Abroad, Twain had softened his westernness to appeal to an eastern audience. This time he let it rip, with glorious results. Roughing It follows the picaresque tale of a young rogue discovering the “curious new world” of the pre-railroaded Far West: a kind of living spoof of American society, where the usual rules break down and become parody. Here the banker and the gambler belong to the same social rank, outlaws with names like Six-fingered Pete murder dozens of men and are revered as local royalty, and everyone suffers from the delusion that a fistful of worthless mining stock might at any moment transmogrify itself into a tidy pile of cash. Unsurprisingly, Twain gives an embroidered account of his experiences. He says little about San Francisco, and almost nothing about the Bohemian circumstances of his literary upbringing. The Golden Era, the Californian, and Bret Harte get barely a few sentences. As usual, factual accuracy isn’t his concern. Instead, he offers something far more interesting: a sprawling masterpiece of western storytelling, loosely woven from yarns collected over the years or freshly cut from whole cloth. Roughing It has the rhythms of his spoken voice, that inimitable flow where one story stumbles drowsily into another, and the populist polyphony of frontier dialect comes drawling and hollering off the page in snatches of phonetic prose.