The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  Twain’s relationship to this dynamic was complex. From living in the Far West, he knew what rapid growth did to a community, how certain moral considerations got lost in the general rush for riches. He knew the mind of a speculator, being one himself. He loved risky ventures, whether betting on mining stock in Virginia City or his own books on the subscription market. Yet he also felt disgusted by the postwar free-for-all. He hated the sleaze and rapacity of the new industrial order, how capitalism corroded people’s sense of right and wrong and perverted the mechanisms of democracy. He fulminated against the era’s tycoons and politicians—and also admired and befriended many of them. He understood the Gilded Age from the inside: not merely as a critic, but as a participant and beneficiary. The economic forces accelerated by the Civil War created the conditions for his commercial success. They supported a rising middle class and a broadening publishing culture that enabled him to connect to a popular audience. The Gilded Age would be the first novel to be sold by subscription, and Twain threw his usual entrepreneurial zeal into making it a hit.

  This was why he was back in London by November 1873: to sell his book. He wanted to supervise its publication in England by Routledge & Sons, and secure an English copyright to preempt the pirates. But first he had to wait for Elisha Bliss to publish the American edition, and, as always, this took longer than expected. Fortunately, he had lined up some companionship for the season. He knew he would be lonely without Livy. So when his old friend Charles Warren Stoddard came to London as a roving correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, Twain persuaded him to move into his suite at the Langham Hotel and stay the winter as his private secretary.

  Stoddard had little to recommend him for the role. His handwriting was frightful, his spelling even worse. But it didn’t matter: “I hired him in order to have his company,” Twain later wrote. Stoddard remembered it more vividly: “He seized me at once and said how nervous and miserable he was.” Twain was about to return to the London lecture stage. He was feeling moody, introspective, and less social than before. Instead of partying with aristocrats, he wanted to hunker down with his fellow Bohemian and reminisce—to indulge in “long, long talks about old times in the New World and new times in the Old,” Stoddard said. The secretary made a good companion. He was gentle and patient and kind. Over the next several weeks, he would spend nearly every waking minute with Twain, and get as close to him as anyone ever would.

  On December 1, 1873, Twain began performing at the Queen’s Concert Rooms in Hanover Square. He and Stoddard settled into a daily rhythm. They slept late. At twelve thirty, a servant brought breakfast. Stoddard sorted the morning mail, declining countless invitations to croquet and suppers and garden parties. Afterward they took a walk or visited an art gallery. A heavy coal fog covered London that winter. It greeted them the moment they left the hotel, burning their eyes, depositing bits of soot on their cuffs and collars. Streetlamps barely penetrated the murk; carriages moved at a crawl. The sunless gloom “nearly broke my heart,” Twain told Livy, and it doubtless sped the onset of the crankiness that descended on him each day around three in the afternoon, as the hour of the lecture drew closer. Stoddard did his best to keep Twain distracted as he grew anxious and irritable, right up to those last agonizing minutes backstage at the Concert Rooms with the performer pacing in full evening dress, threatening to rush onstage early so he could get the damn thing over with.

  Finally, the time came. Stoddard escorted Twain to the steps leading to the platform and watched him wobble out. He walked slowly to the footlights at the edge of the stage and rubbed his hands—one of his trademark tics. Then he began to speak, and the dread that had been building unbearably for the last five hours melted away. “The moment he heard his own voice he began to feel better, and I knew he was all right,” Stoddard said. It wasn’t a voice English audiences were accustomed to hearing: the deadpan drawl of the American West, enlivened by what one critic called the “delicious dialect of California.”

  He opened with his very first lecture, the one he had debuted seven years earlier in San Francisco: “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” based on his Hawaiian adventures. After a week, he switched to a new one about Nevada, drawn from Roughing It. The room always reacted differently, Stoddard observed. A joke could kill one night and bomb the next. Even the laughs came in various kinds: the big ones that broke out everywhere at once and the slow ones that started in one corner and gradually spread. Twain’s listeners never quite knew when he was joking, because he never smiled. He loved how they sat “still as statues, for fear they might miss a word,” and how their composure crumbled when his drolleries became too ludicrous to resist. He remembered their faces: the fat lady who laughed so hard she cried, the young girl who seemed to be having a seizure in the second row. “Bully audiences,” he told Livy.

  Lecturing energized him. When they got back to the hotel, he bounced around the suite, hammering out a Negro spiritual on the piano, fixing cocktails at the bar. His taste for liquor hadn’t subsided since becoming a family man. Neither had his skill in preparing it: he “knew the art to perfection,” Stoddard reported, concocting masterly creations of Scotch mixed with sugar and lemon and bitters. After they drank one, Twain demanded that Stoddard make the next. “With fear and trembling I’d make an effort,” remembered the secretary, and the result always fell short. But it gave Twain an excuse to keep drinking. “Yours was so damned bad I’ll have to make another one to take the taste out of my mouth,” he said.

  Twain was a born performer. He performed onstage, and in the street. He lived as a character of his own creation, blurring the line between his public and private selves, and between his life as he imagined it in his books and as it actually happened. Even with Livy he played roles: the adoring husband, the scoundrel in need of reform. But during those long nights with Stoddard in the winter of 1873, shut up in “gorgeous seclusion” with a cozy fire crackling in the hearth, Twain let his many faces fall away and something more intimate emerge. He spoke, and Stoddard listened:

  Very, very often these nightly talks became a lament. He was always afraid of dying in the poorhouse. The burden of his woe was that he would grow old and lose the power of interesting an audience, and become unable to write, and then what would become of him? He had trained himself to do nothing else. He could not work with his hands. There could be no escape. The poorhouse was his destiny. And he’d drink cocktails and grow more and more gloomy and blue until he fairly wept at the misery of his own future.

  This wasn’t the stand-up comic that left posh Londoners in stitches. This was a man of great vulnerability, prone to apocalyptic bouts of fear and sadness. His dread of poverty came partly from the painful memory of his father’s financial failures, and his alcohol-fueled confessions involved detailed recollections of his past. Twain discussed “his youth with a charm and a freshness that was positively fascinating,” Stoddard wrote—and with a stamina that wore out his secretary. As the church bells chimed one, two, three, Twain’s speech got slower and Stoddard got sleepier, until he couldn’t stay awake any longer. He remembered Twain following him to his room, “now talking so slowly that the syllables came about every half minute and the last picture I’d have as I dropped off to sleep was of Mark bending over me, glass in hand, uttering the second syllable of a word he began a full minute ago.”

  A vivid panorama of Twain’s personal history emerged from these sessions. “I could have written his biography at the end of the season,” Stoddard said, and he wasn’t exaggerating. He had seen Twain as a poor Bohemian in San Francisco, and as a rich celebrity in London. Now he struggled to stay awake as Twain’s manic brain churned through the material that would supply the next and greatest phase of his artistic evolution: his childhood.

  By 1873, Twain was in the midst of a fit of remembering. As a boy he had soaked up his surroundings and stored them in the marrow of his developing mind. In his thirties, these memories began to
resurface. He described the process in a letter to Will Bowen, his best boyhood friend from Hannibal, Missouri. “The fountains of my great deep are broken up,” he wrote, borrowing a line from the book of Genesis to convey the scale of the flood carrying him back in time. His past wasn’t a museum of musty relics but a living tissue of “faces,” “footsteps,” “hands,” “voices,” “songs.” It was a place he experienced in the present tense; a place he heard, touched, tasted.

  These remembrances didn’t just set him off on drunken rambles. They also opened a new field for literary creation. This possibility first came into view when The Gilded Age finally appeared in late December. The book flopped: sales were disappointing, and the critical response was mixed. William Dean Howells chose not to review it for the Atlantic Monthly. Privately he called the novel “dyspeptic,” blaming it for failing to digest “the crude material with which it is fed”—a fair criticism, given the baffling array of characters and plotlines that glutted its six-hundred-plus pages. Yet for all its faults, The Gilded Age represented a major step forward for Twain. It was his first novel, and his first published attempt to put his boyhood memories into a full-length work of fiction. Flashes of his biography—Mississippi steamboats, small-town life in the Old Southwest—give the book its best scenes. His uncle’s slave makes a cameo as Uncle Dan’l. His mother’s cousin shows up as Colonel Sellers, a frontier hustler forever on the verge of getting rich. “I merely put him on paper as he was,” Twain explained.

  He didn’t have to look very far to find suitable fuel for his fiction: the universe of his youth furnished everything he needed. In the 1860s, he had found the building blocks of his art in the Far West. He had used a tall tale about a jumping frog to open a new path for American literature, inspired by the raw, tuneful voices of the frontier. But these voices had been with him his whole life. In the 1870s, emboldened by his success, he turned inward to recover them. He remembered Hannibal, Missouri, and this remembering would enrich his writing immeasurably. It would lead to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and give him a deeper perception of what made America distinctive. In Hannibal, he would discover a microcosm for the nation as a whole, a place where the particular weave of American society could be made visible.

  In London, Stoddard saw this development in its early stages. Twain’s all-night reminiscences revealed the makings of his future masterpieces. “I trust I am betraying no confidence when I state that a good deal of the real boy is blended with the ‘Story of Tom Sawyer,’” Stoddard later said.

  By January 1874, however, Twain was getting tired of these marathon talks. “Stoddard & I have been talking & keeping a lonely vigil for hours,” he scribbled to Livy one morning. “It is so unsatisfying.” He loved his friend, but needed his wife: “I want you—& nobody else.” He wrote her constantly, counting down the days until they saw each other again. He told her to have a bottle of Scotch ready when he arrived. He pictured himself ringing the bell of their home in Hartford—“then the turning of the bolt, & ‘Who is it?’—then ever so many kisses—then you & I in the bath-room, I drinking my cock-tail & undressing, & you standing by—then to bed.” It was time to go home. His business was done: he had copyrighted the English edition of The Gilded Age; his lectures had been a hit. Before he left for America on January 13, 1874, he would perform a pair of farewell shows in Liverpool. Hundreds of Britons packed into the hall to give their beloved American a hearty send-off. Twain presented Stoddard with a page of his “prompt notes” as a gift—an aide-mémoire he used at the lectern, scrawled with mnemonic symbols—and inscribed it, “We’re done with this, Charles, forever!”

  It made a fitting memento for his faithful secretary, who had seen the lectures so many times he nearly knew them by heart. They spent their final night together in the usual way, drinking and talking well past midnight. Whatever happiness Twain felt at going home gradually faded as the hour advanced, and his usual melancholy returned. “He sank into a sea of forebodings,” wrote Stoddard, who watched helplessly as Twain slid into a nightmare trance, revisiting his terror of the poorhouse, envisioning his future as “friendless, forsaken, despised”—until a comforting thought came to him. He knew what he would do if he failed as a writer. “I’ll become a teacher of elocution!” he declared, and rang a clerk for a copy of the Bible. What followed was perhaps the most surreal of the many odd moments that occurred that winter. Twain read the book of Ruth while Stoddard listened, astonished. The man he had seen drawling onstage for more than a month now spoke with the oratorical fluency of an Episcopal minister. The western twang was gone. The words flowed beautifully, “in a style that would have melted the hardest heart.” “He seemed to forget my presence and lose himself in the simple beauty of the story,” Stoddard remarked.

  Twain’s “prompt notes” for his lecture “Roughing It on the Silver Frontier.” The icons helped him remember his talking points, starting from the top left with Lake Tahoe. On the right is Twain’s message to Stoddard: “We’re done with this, Charles, forever!”

  It was a story about loyalty, the virtue Twain most valued in others. Perhaps this explained his “soul-deep” feeling in reading it; perhaps the verses recalled some incident of his Presbyterian upbringing. Mostly, it gave his ravening mind something more sustaining to chew on. In the morning, he sailed home. He would be returning to a life entirely unlike the one he had imagined. The next few years would be happy, successful, and hugely productive. He wouldn’t spend them in a poorhouse but in the eccentric, extravagant home he and Livy had just built in Hartford. He would publish The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and begin writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He would become a regular contributor to the Atlantic and a favorite of Howells. He would take his seat at the table of the eastern aristocracy, and expand his mass appeal. And he would see an old friend become a bitter enemy.

  • • •

  BRET HARTE LOOKED EXHAUSTED. An “old-young man,” a journalist called him, his face prematurely wrinkled, his eyes heavy. By 1874, he was no longer the Next Big Thing, the literary heartthrob who fascinated the nation with tales of gunslingers and gold seekers. He was a pale echo of his past self, doing anything he could to survive. His cratering finances had forced him onto the lecture circuit. He hated public speaking, but he had no choice. He needed money to survive. So while Twain put down roots in Hartford and embarked on the most creative period of his life, Harte wandered the continent like a traveling salesman, surviving blizzards and broken-down trains, sleeping in hotels and Pullman cars, playing to crowds from Toronto to Topeka.

  People came out to see a real live westerner. He could sense their disappointment the moment he took the stage. He wore fancy suits, not the coarse garb of his characters. “[I]f I had been more herculean in proportions, with a red shirt and top boots, many of the audience would have felt a deeper thrill,” he recalled. They felt even fewer thrills in the hour or so that followed, as Harte planted himself on the podium and proceeded to read a prepared text. If Twain liked to break down the wall between him and his listeners, Harte did the opposite. He put up as many barriers as he could. He spoke in a languid monotone, rarely looking up. He hadn’t learned any lessons from his disastrous performance at Harvard in the summer of 1871—and these days he didn’t have the luxury of shrugging it off. He had to keep touring, even in the face of withering criticism. From late 1872 through early 1875, he performed. An “exceedingly dull affair,” groaned a journalist in St. Louis. “Harte as a lecturer is a dead failure,” judged another in Des Moines.

  Twain had a more nuanced view. “He has an excellent lecture . . . & reads it execrably,” he said after seeing Harte perform in Hartford. The talk was called “The Argonauts of ’49,” and in it, Harte narrated the saga of the world-historical event that had inspired his best writing: the gold rush. Yet this wasn’t the same gold rush as the one described in “The Luck of Roaring Camp”—it was more heroic than ironic, more triumphant than absurd. Harte had lost his s
ense of early California as a cosmic joke. He now eulogized the pioneers with the same rhetoric he once ridiculed. In fact, his description of the miners of 1849—an “Argonautic brotherhood” of “jauntily insolent” young Americans—sounded curiously like another frontier fraternity: the Bohemians of the Pacific coast.

  The lost literary scene of San Francisco had been the only place Harte ever belonged. When he left, burning his bridges, he achieved a degree of glory unknown for a western writer, followed by an exceptionally brutal decline. He limped on in a kind of literary afterlife, lingering in the periphery of the public eye. He became the living fulfillment of Twain’s worst fears: not just bankrupt, but “friendless, forsaken, despised.” People used to hang on his every word; now they hammered at all his failures and flaws. The most hurtful attacks came from California, where, in late 1872, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page article by a former friend of Harte’s that accused him of embezzling money from the Overland Monthly during his tenure as editor.

  Harte was furious. “I have been lately pretty well abused from unexpected sources but I think the enclosed caps the climax,” he wrote Twain, who had remained loyal since their reconciliation. “I don’t mind his slander; that I can refute—but how am I to make this dog know that he is a dog and not a man?” Not everything the dog said was easy to refute, however. Perhaps Harte didn’t steal from the Overland—but the Chronicle piece also charged him with being a “borrower of considerable sums,” and “a cool ignorer of the gracious loaners,” facts no one could deny. Indeed, his endless debts and lackadaisical approach to repaying them did incalculable harm to his reputation. He made it worse by lashing out at his creditors, complaining of their “hoggishness.”