The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  The book’s freewheeling form wasn’t purely a matter of choice. Subscription publishers like Bliss needed to publish big tomes, so their salesmen could persuade the frugal residents of Middle America that the product peddled on their doorstep was worth the price. In a rush to meet the required word count, Twain loaded his manuscript with all kinds of filler, including several chapters on his trip to Hawaii. He made little effort to stitch these strays into a tight narrative arc; rather, he trusted himself to perform each bit piece brilliantly enough to keep people reading. Twain was a miniaturist. Both onstage and in print, he worked best in short bursts, stringing anecdotes together without much thought for the overall shape. This elastic structure gave him room to wander, to improvise, to probe those serendipitous places inaccessible to more formal writers like Harte. The result was a fuller portrait of the Pacific coast than anything to be found in Harte’s fiction, and a wistful remembrance of the region that had made him a writer:

  It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. It was a curious population. It was the only population of the kind that the world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the world will ever see its like again.

  • • •

  BY THE FALL OF 1871, Twain was back on track. He was wrapping up Roughing It. He felt bullish about its prospects. He planned another lecture tour. Livy was pregnant again. In October, they left Elmira for Hartford, renting a house while preparing to build one of their own. And he had finally begun repairing his relationship with Harte.

  It’s unclear who made the first move. But by mid-1871, the two men were talking again. Their official reunion came in early November, over beefsteaks at a fancy Boston restaurant. The occasion was a lunch hosted by Ralph Keeler, a minor writer from San Francisco. The other guests were more distinguished: William Dean Howells, now editor of the Atlantic Monthly; its former editor, James T. Fields; and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of Every Saturday. For Twain, this wasn’t just about reconnecting with Harte. It also marked his social debut among the New England literati. He had already met Howells back in 1869, when he swung by the Atlantic’s offices to thank the young editor for his generous review of The Innocents Abroad. But Twain was still very much an outsider. With his strange voice and swaying gait, his slangy diction and sealskin coat, he faced an uphill road to eastern respectability.

  Fortunately, this was a forgiving crowd. The conversation consisted of “nothing but careless stories, carelessly told, and jokes and laughing, and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes,” Howells recalled. It was an unbuttoned, unpretentious affair, with the guests exchanging good-natured taunts across the table. One of these came at Twain’s expense, when Harte couldn’t help noticing how much pleasure his old Bohemian colleague took in his first taste of Boston society. “This is the dream of his life,” Harte said mockingly, placing a hand on Twain’s shoulder.

  Later, Howells claimed Twain took it in stride, giving a look that “betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.” But Twain never took ridicule well, especially when it touched on a sensitive subject. Harte was pulling rank. He was reminding his fellow westerner that, although both writers came from the same Bohemian milieu, only one of them had gained access to America’s most exclusive literary club. This wasn’t the same Harte who had patiently mentored Twain, who had published him in the Californian and edited The Innocents Abroad—this was someone darker, more aloof. And more anxious: Harte’s hold on the eastern elite had recently grown more tenuous, owing to a series of embarrassing failures.

  Only nine months had passed since Harte’s transcontinental crossing. The expectations surrounding him had been intense, and he acquitted himself well during his whirlwind week in Cambridge with Howells as his host. While “not quite au fait in everything,” Elinor Howells concluded, he still made a satisfying addition to eastern literary society. But he would have to be more than just a good dinner guest going forward: he needed to become a public figure. People had seen his dashing portrait; now they wanted to see him speak. This wouldn’t be easy. Harte didn’t have Twain’s electric stage presence. He “was not much of a talker,” Howells recalled: his charm came in small, intimate doses, not the celebrity-sized ones America wanted.

  His first test came in May, when the Army of the Potomac asked him to read at its reunion in Boston. “You could hardly find a worse reader than myself,” he told the organizers. So he sent his friend James T. Fields in his stead, with an atrociously bad poem that took him only an hour to write. He admitted the verses lacked the “dignity and fitness” demanded by the occasion, and even apologized to Fields. In June he had a chance to redeem himself, when James Russell Lowell invited him to read at the annual Phi Beta Kappa gathering in Cambridge.

  This time, Harte went. He marched through Harvard Yard in a procession led by university president Charles William Eliot, and took his seat in the crowded Unitarian church across the street. When it came time for him to speak, no less a personage than Richard Henry Dana Jr.—whose classic memoir Two Years Before the Mast gave American readers their first glimpse of California in 1840—rose to introduce him. Spirited applause greeted Harte as he took the stage. His clothing made a sharp contrast to the somber-suited men around him: he wore green gloves and a gaudy suit. This foppishness might have been forgiven if what happened next hadn’t been so unpleasant. He bent his head and shoulders and spoke straight down, like a teenager mumbling some sullenness he hoped his parents wouldn’t hear. Hardly anyone could understand him, and when people asked him to talk louder, he ignored them. He recited an old poem of his from the Golden Era: “a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so inadequate that his enemies . . . must have suffered from it almost as much as his friends,” Howells wrote. “The thoughtful portion of the audience were disgusted,” reported a correspondent for a Washington paper. The press hammered him for weeks. “Bret Harte’s ‘Fizzle’ at Harvard,” read a representative headline.

  These disappointments put a dent in Harte’s reputation. They suggested he might not fulfill his anointed role as America’s next literary savior—a suspicion confirmed by the July 1871 issue of the Atlantic, which included Harte’s first story since signing his $10,000 contract. “The Poet of Sierra Flat” told the oddly autobiographical tale of a young man who publishes a poem in a country paper and becomes an overnight sensation, before botching an attempt at public speaking and falling from public favor. Yet the writing felt slack, toothless: those sharp grains of frontier humor that serrated Harte’s earlier gold rush fiction had become blunter, less precise. It was the work of a writer straining for effect, closer to the slapstick West of the “horse operas” and other pop theatricals performed on Broadway than to the nuanced ironies of the region’s better storytellers. The critics weren’t impressed. “[S]carcely as striking as expectation demanded,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer, and most others agreed.

  May, June, July: in three months, Harte had done a heap of damage to his career, and he still had further to fall. What bothered people weren’t just his failures, but how indifferent he seemed to them. He had shot to the top of the literary totem pole in record time, and now was in danger of sliding off it nearly as fast. He maintained his ironic exterior throughout, as if the vagaries of his professional life were too trivial to take seriously. Another writer might be motivated to make amends by working harder. Not Harte: in August, he published nothing at all in the Atlantic. “It is a serious damage to both of us that you should not appear in the August number,” wrote the magazine’s publisher, James R. Osgood. He had kept the issue open longer than usual to accommodate a last-minute offering from his star contributor, and was angry when it didn’t appear.

  Beneath his insouciant facade, Harte felt confused. He had expected to love the East. He thought of his trip as a homecoming, Howells wrote: an “exodus from the exile” of the Far West after seventeen years, and he told anyone who would listen how happy he was to be free of dusty, pro
vincial California. But he couldn’t adjust. He seemed “bewildered by the strangeness of his new surroundings,” a friend said. First he tried living in New York—“this noisy yet lonely city where they set such infinite values on finite and valueless things”—and hated it. Then he looked for a house in the countryside, and found the landscape entirely changed from the one he remembered. “[W]hat have become of all the farms I knew as a boy? Where are the farm yards—meadows, barns, orchards?” he wrote Howells despairingly. He found temporary refuge in Newport, Rhode Island, where he rented a place for six months, staffed it with a cook and a maid, and sauntered around town in a velvet waistcoat, attending picnics and sailing parties, hobnobbing with luminaries like George Bancroft and Julia Ward Howe—and hemorrhaging money at a terrible rate. When he returned to New York, he “left Newport in debt to the butcher, the baker, and the rest,” Twain recalled. That $10,000 from the Atlantic had gone fast, and it wouldn’t come again. His mediocre output hadn’t measured up: publisher Osgood later complained that never in his career had he “gotten so little out of a contributor.”

  All of Harte’s misfortunes drew from a simple fact: his muse had fled. He couldn’t write. He was a foreigner in the East, a man out of context. By the time he reunited with Twain in Boston in November 1871, his best years were behind him. “There was a happy Bret Harte, a contented Bret Harte, an ambitious Bret Harte, a hopeful Bret Harte, a bright, cheerful, easy-laughing Bret Harte, a Bret Harte to whom it was a bubbling and effervescent joy to be alive,” Twain remembered. “That Bret Harte died in San Francisco. It was the corpse of that Bret Harte that swept in splendor across the continent.”

  • • •

  NEITHER CHARLES WARREN STODDARD Nor Ina Coolbrith heard anything from Harte after he left. They heard nothing about the connections he promised to make for them, nothing about Chicago or Cambridge or New York—nothing to imply the three of them had ever been friends. For years, he had mentored them. He had given them a platform, a Bohemia to belong to. Then he went East and slammed the door shut behind him.

  Coolbrith never recovered. “I had my own heartache when he went away and seemed to forget his old friends in San Francisco,” she later said. She had always felt doomed, and the coming years confirmed her fatalism. As boredom and bad luck made her life bleaker, the memory of her Bohemian days grew brighter. She took comfort in the past, in the nostalgia that made her present feel strangely posthumous. She hadn’t lost just a literary circle but a fraternity that “toiled and suffered together; sorrowed and despaired and hoped together.” The offices of the Overland Monthly had been an expanding universe; her family’s home felt more like a prison. “[My] duties . . . leave me no time to scribble my miserable little verses, except what I steal from sleep,” she told Stoddard. She wrote at night, by lamplight, composing a commencement ode for the University of California in the summer of 1871 and continuing to publish in the Overland under its new editor, William C. Bartlett. Her poems reflected her mood: “The sorrow infinite / Of earth; the closing wave / The parting, and the grave.”

  She couldn’t help it: “I cannot sit in the shadow / Forever, and sing of the sun.” The worse thing would be not to sing at all—to be too tired, or not have the time. In January 1872, a poet friend named Joaquin Miller deposited his teenage daughter on her doorstep. The girl needed a home while Miller traveled the world, and Coolbrith agreed to take her. By then, Coolbrith had inherited the household: her father had mysteriously disappeared. Relatives later said he returned to Los Angeles, or went prospecting somewhere. Reports differed, but the result was the same: Coolbrith now had sole responsibility for her aging mother. As her domestic burdens grew, her dream of someday leaving California for a literary career in the East faded. She would be forced to remain while her friends roamed free—and no one roamed more freely than her closest friend, Stoddard. She envied his freedom and his free time, those languorous stretches spent roving the South Seas, and the more focused moments writing about them. She felt like a relic, she told him:

  The last of the brood, left alone in the old nest . . . Do you think of that, and of how lonely it is to be?—Now that all are flown over the seas and away, and how gladly I would follow you if my wings were not clipped so closely, and so heavy a burden about the poor little throat, that has grown too tired even to sing? You see how I seek consolation in self-pity. Alas! No one else pities me.

  Stoddard was no stranger to self-pity. He had indulged in it his whole life, usually after being spurned by a love interest or dismembered by an unkind critic. He, too, felt hurt at Harte’s silence, at the bewildering snub from his literary sage. But he didn’t let it derail him. His skin had grown thicker in recent years. With Harte’s help, he had discovered his talent for prose, publishing tales of his tropical adventures in the Overland. By the spring of 1871, he had his first piece accepted by the Atlantic: “A Prodigal in Tahiti,” a comic account of his recent trip. Howells adored it: “infinitely the best thing of the kind that I ever read,” he told Stoddard. He wouldn’t be able to publish it for more than a year, owing to a hefty backlog of articles inherited from his predecessor, but he wanted more: “Do send us something else in the same vein, and believe, if you can, my promise that it will be promptly printed.”

  Encouraged, Stoddard powered ahead. In February 1872, he boarded a schooner for Samoa—but after a hellish sea voyage, he opted to remain in his beloved Hawaii, where he wrote more stories of island life. By now he had enough for a book. After returning to San Francisco that summer, he began looking for a publisher. He wanted a prestigious house, one that would give him a proper launch in the East. Fortunately, he had found a friend in Howells, who helped him pitch Atlantic publisher James R. Osgood. “I have spoken to Osgood about it, and I know that it will have a fair and favorable chance,” Howells wrote Stoddard in early 1873. “At any rate it shall not lack my friendship.” Howells didn’t disappoint: Osgood agreed to do the book. He gave it a title—South-Sea Idyls—and scheduled its release for October.

  South-Sea Idyls would be an anti-travelogue in the tradition of Twain’s Roughing It. In its sixteen sketches, fact and fiction freely intermingle; disquisitions on local history are mercifully absent. The narrator is a parody of the white colonizer, a Robinson Crusoe in reverse. He doesn’t come to conquer, but to be converted. “[B]arbarism has given me the fullest joy of my life,” Stoddard once told Walt Whitman, and South-Sea Idyls is delirious with the thrill of that discovery. A hidden current of homoeroticism runs throughout. What Stoddard didn’t have to hide was how relieved he felt to find a place that didn’t make him feel like a freak. He loved the islands not just for their naked boys and their scented frescoes of foliage but because they let him inhabit more of himself. They let him be lazy and mischievous, sleazy and spiritual; above all, to speak in his own voice instead of perpetually imitating everyone else’s.

  This voice was distinctly Californian, as reviewers of South-Sea Idyls recognized. In the Atlantic, Howells noted the similarities between Stoddard and Harte and Twain: “[T]hey have each deeply received the same California stamp,” he wrote, “and their humor, broad or fine, has the same general character.” This included a “careless, audacious irreverence” and an intimate, uninhibited tone—qualities that liberated Stoddard’s style, and led to his first major success on the national scene. South-Sea Idyls established his bona fides as a western writer. It also represented a farewell of sorts before he followed in the footsteps of his more famous colleagues and left California. He headed East in August 1873, the month he turned thirty. He planned to explore Europe, paying his way with weekly dispatches for the San Francisco Chronicle.

  Coolbrith was in Los Angeles visiting her sister when she got the news. “When I received your goodbye it seemed as if our long companionship had suddenly ended,” she wrote Stoddard, “and with my living eyes I was to see you no more forever.” He had skipped town many times over the past several years, but usually returned after
a few months. This trip would take him farther and last longer. “You cannot avoid meeting Harte,” she continued. “Don’t mention me to him please, and if he should ask of me, which is not probable, say nothing of my poems. The subject has ceased to be other than ridiculous.”

  Stoddard would remain a faithful friend but an inconstant correspondent. He rarely remembered to write. Coolbrith could follow his progress in the Chronicle, as he traveled from Salt Lake, where he heard a Mormon sermon, to Chicago, where he saw a thousand shrieking trains, to New York, where the crowds wore him out and the beggars made his heart bleed. He didn’t see Harte. But he did meet Howells. “I shall be among the first to welcome you,” the Atlantic editor had written him, and the two hit it off. Stoddard’s face expressed everything Howells liked best about his writing. The dainty lips, the soulful eyes, the receding hairline revealing the ovoid shape of his skull—it was the face of a man-child, vague and sweet and sad. “More delightful than either his prose or his verse was the man himself,” Howells recalled.

  Stoddard liked the East but couldn’t linger. His Chronicle editors wanted European correspondence, and on October 3, 1873, he departed for England. Ten days later he landed in Liverpool, took the train to London, and read in the paper that Mark Twain was in town. Stoddard found his old friend in a suite on the third floor of the Langham Hotel: bored, restless, and happy to see someone from his San Francisco salad days. They would spend the winter together in London, enduring a season of especially thick fog—not the damp, purifying mists they remembered from San Francisco, but the choking particulate haze of an industrial city burning millions of tons of coal, the kind that clogged the lungs and made the days so dark that people needed lanterns at noon.