The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  His delusions grew. He pretended to be rich, even as evidence of his ruin mounted. He continued to insist on special treatment, even as the quality of his writing plummeted. His biggest liability was his pride. When a Chicago magazine wanted to make him its editor, he killed the deal by demanding an exorbitant salary. When John H. Carmany at the Overland Monthly asked him to return to San Francisco to resume control of the magazine, he used it as an excuse to whine about California’s recent treatment of him. “I do not see how I could make the Overland’s ‘Sanctum’ the literary Mecca of the West, after the Prophet had been so decidedly renounced by his disciples,” he wrote.

  Even the Atlantic tried to give him a second chance. In 1874, the magazine considered bringing Harte back on an exclusive basis. Unfortunately, his ego got in the way. The crisis came when he insisted on being paid $500 for a story. Maybe in 1871, Harte could’ve commanded such prices—but no longer. Still, Howells promised to read the piece and consult his publishers. A week later, the editor returned with a counteroffer: $150. Harte bristled at the insult. “[S]ince my arrival East, I have never received so small an offer for any story,” he huffed. “I don’t blame you, my dear Howells . . .” he added condescendingly, “but I do wish you lived out of a literary atmosphere which seems to exclude any vision of a broader literary world beyond.”

  This exchange permanently terminated Harte’s relationship with the Atlantic. It also paved the way for another westerner to join the magazine’s distinguished ranks. The same month Harte threw his tantrum, Twain submitted “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.” The piece was based on a conversation with Livy’s sister’s cook, a former slave, about seeing her husband and children sold at auction. Twain put her heartbreaking tale on paper in its original dialect. As in “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” he enclosed the story in a frame. The white narrator sits on the porch with his black servant, Aunt Rachel, whom he describes as a “cheerful, hearty soul.” She laughs easily, and with such genuine joy, that the narrator can’t help wondering at her happiness. “Aunt Rachel, how is it that you’ve lived sixty years and never had any trouble?” he asks. Her smile disappears, and she begins the tragic yarn that puts the narrator’s question to shame.

  Howells judged the result “extremely good.” He was especially impressed by Twain’s ear for “black talk”—a talent drawn from his memories of listening to slaves in antebellum Missouri. It lent the text a rugged verisimilitude of the kind the editor was keen to promote in his pages. It also treated a subject of great contemporary significance. By 1874, Reconstruction was in retreat. The brief postwar experiment in redeeming the sins of the South had begun to lose steam. A federally imposed regime in the states of the former Confederacy had enabled ex-slaves to vote, travel, hold office, and own property, but a confluence of factors conspired against it—including a violent insurgency by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups. Southerners would succeed in scuttling Reconstruction and re-establishing white supremacy. Northerners, eager to heal the wounds of the war, would find it easy to forget the evils of slavery.

  “A True Story” would remind them. It appeared in the Atlantic in November 1874, and Howells liked it so much that he immediately gave Twain another commission. “Our Bret Harte negotiation did fall through,” the editor explained to one of his publishers, “but I’ve more than made good the loss by securing Mark Twain for a series of sketches next year.” This would be “Old Times on the Mississippi,” a seven-part serial about Twain’s experiences as a steamboat pilot. Like “A True Story,” it belonged to Twain’s ongoing transmutation of his personal past into literary gold.

  Meanwhile, Harte entered the last leg of his downward spiral. His writing had deteriorated to the point of self-parody; his life had become an unsustainable mix of poverty and pride. His lies, to himself and others, were unraveling. When a Boston paper reported that he might have to take a job at the US Custom House in New York to support his family, he felt the need to deny it publicly. “I have always found my profession sufficiently lucrative,” Harte declared, even as his creditors took him to court. Yet Twain stood by his friend. He tried to help. He lent him money. He persuaded Elisha Bliss to give him a contract for a novel that took years to produce and fared catastrophically poorly when published. He even collaborated with him on a play.

  This wasn’t purely charity on Twain’s part. Writing for the stage could be very lucrative, and the standards weren’t especially high. Twain had dramatized The Gilded Age without much trouble, and earned a small fortune from it. Harte had also tried breaking into the theater world, with less success. He wrote a baggy, bewildering gold rush melodrama called Two Men of Sandy Bar that got devastating reviews. The New York Times pronounced it “the most dismal mass of trash that was ever put into dramatic shape before a New-York audience.”

  But Twain liked it. One character in particular grabbed him: a Chinese laundryman played in yellowface by an actor named Charles Thomas Parsloe Jr., who, despite being onstage for only five minutes, made audiences howl with laughter by saying things like “Me no likee” and bobbing across the boards in clogs and a coolie hat. When Harte proposed joining forces, Twain recommended they write a new play with this “delightful Chinaman” as the protagonist, and enlist Parsloe for the part. “Harte came up here the other day & asked me to help him write a play & divide the swag, & I agreed,” Twain wrote Howells on October 11, 1876.

  Over the following months, Harte made multiple trips to Hartford. By this point he and his family were living in New York, only three or four hours away by train. The co-writers camped out in the study on the top floor of Twain’s house, happily isolated from the domestic bustle below. They built the plot, fleshed out the scenes. They wouldn’t be doing their best work. They were slumming, trying to cash in on the national fascination with the Far Western frontier they had helped create. The result was a convoluted bit of dime-novel drama, set in a California mining camp. They called it Ah Sin, after the Chinese hero of Harte’s famous poem “The Heathen Chinee.”

  Harte’s days as a slow, fastidious writer were over. He couldn’t spare those extra hours searching for le mot juste. He was in survival mode. “He worked rapidly and seemed to be troubled by no hesitations or indecisions,” Twain recalled. Alcohol helped. A neighbor who stopped by in November found Harte and Twain hard at work in the study, with “bottles of spirits” nearby. Twain was no teetotaler, but Harte had become a drunk. One night in early December, Harte took a break from the play to finish a story for the New York Sun. It was due the next day, but he didn’t seem especially stressed. He enjoyed a leisurely dinner with his hosts, shared a couple of postprandial cocktails with Twain, and then retired to his room to write. He took a bottle of whiskey with him and, around five in the morning, rang for the butler to bring him another. At nine he came down for breakfast, the story finished, two quarts of booze in his bloodstream and “not even tipsy,” Twain remembered.

  Liquor didn’t magically restore Harte’s literary powers. But it did ease his writer’s block. It reconciled him to the tedium of turning out mediocre work on deadline for money—to “working over old material into new shape,” as the Alta California put it. Fortunately, the success of his venture with Twain depended less on the quality of the script than it did on the presence of a bankable star, and in mid-December, Harte went to New York to get Parsloe on board. The actor didn’t make it easy. He failed to show at their first meeting, and then acted insufferably superior at their next. Once, Harte had been the highest-paid writer in the country. Now he sat patiently while an entertainer whose chief distinction was a talent for irredeemably racist caricature treated him like a serf. Harte’s clothes were ragged. His pants were coming apart at the hem. Still, he prevailed with Parsloe. “I read him those portions of the 1st & 2d acts that indicated his role, and he expressed himself satisfied with it,” Harte wrote Twain on December 16. “As nearly as I could judge he was pleased.”

  Ha
rte’s tone suggested a man humbled by circumstances. He almost certainly knew that Ah Sin offered his last best hope of salvation, and this inspired a new kind of resolve. “He was a man who could never persuade himself to do a stroke of work until his credit was gone,” Twain observed. Then he could “work harder . . . than any man I have ever seen.” Harte’s letter to Twain displayed his diligence. He provided the details of the Parsloe meeting, and described his continued tinkering with the manuscript. He asked after Twain’s health and gave his love to Livy.

  But this closeness wouldn’t last. In Twain’s recollection, Harte made an insufferable houseguest. He wouldn’t stop making snide remarks. He ridiculed everything, all day. At some point, he turned his satirical sights from the furniture and the flatware to a more precious feature of the household: Livy. Whatever he said was “slight and vague and veiled,” Twain recalled, but sufficiently insulting to provoke. Twain had no patience for uncharitable words about his wife. Moved to anger, he became implacably malevolent.

  He was nothing if not thorough. First he called Harte “a shabby husband.” Then “a born bummer,” a “tramp,” a “loafer,” an “idler,” a “sponge,” a wearer of rags, a delinquent debtor, and, above all, an ingrate. “[Y]ou are not charged anything here for the bed you sleep in, yet you have been very smartly and wittily sarcastic about it,” he seethed. “[Y]ou sneer at everything in this house, but you ought to be more tender, remembering that everything in it was honestly come by and has been paid for.”

  Possibly Twain said all this in person. Possibly he put it in a letter, or said none of it at all. The above account, given thirty years later in his autobiography, might be a composite, or pure fantasy. But the final split definitely took place in late February 1877. Twain wrote Harte a note, now lost, that said some unkind things. Harte took a few days to cool off before answering. Then, on March 1, he composed a long reply. “I’m not anxious to write this,” he began. “But there are a few things I must say to you.”

  The ensuing pages had the strained, quivery quality of someone trying to keep his cool. Harte didn’t want to go completely berserk. He had signed a contract dividing the profits from Ah Sin three ways with Twain and Parsloe, and still hoped to see some money from it. But he couldn’t resist airing his grievances. He started by accusing Twain of sabotaging his novel. He blamed its poor sales on Twain’s monopolizing the publisher’s resources. “Either Bliss must confess that he runs his concerns solely in your interest, and that he uses the names of other authors to keep that fact from the public, or else he is a fool.” Next, he attacked Twain for refusing to lend him more money. Twain had offered Harte a weekly stipend of $25, plus room and board in Hartford, to write another play together. Harte found the idea insulting. It struck him as a scheme to exploit his poverty by making him Twain’s indentured servant. Harte concluded with stern words about Ah Sin. He demanded that Twain stop “marring it” with unauthorized revisions, and insisted he be consulted on all future decisions.

  The letter enraged Twain. He couldn’t even finish it. “I have read two pages of this ineffable idiotcy [sic]—it is all I can stand of it,” he scrawled on the back in pencil. Harte had made another major miscalculation. He had wanted to put his partnership with Twain on a fairer footing, and ended up destroying it instead. In the coming months, Twain took Ah Sin wholly into his own hands. He rewrote the play until he “left hardly a foot-print of Harte in it,” he told Howells. He infested rehearsals, bombarding the actors with notes. He kept Harte in the dark, and abused him so loudly that even Livy grew concerned. “[D]on’t say harsh things about Mr. Harte,” she told him. “We are so desperately happy . . . and he is so miserable, we can easily afford to be magnanimous toward him.” It was no use. Twain’s wrath was immune to reason. In his early forties, he still had the temper of a ten-year-old.

  He was regressing in more ways than one. Ah Sin would show him not only at his meanest but also at his most mercenary. Seizing the production from Harte, Twain pushed it in the direction he hoped would be most profitable. When a journalist visited a rehearsal, he saw Parsloe in costume as Ah Sin. “Look at him,” Twain said, “ain’t he a lost and wandering Chinee by nature? See those two front teeth . . . just separated far enough to give him the true Mongol look.” This was a far cry from 1864, when Twain had watched a gang of hooligans assault a Chinese laundryman and courageously tried to publicize the incident in the San Francisco Call. Thirteen years later, Twain was putting on a play those same thugs would love. Ah Sin premiered in Washington on May 7, 1877, and opened on Broadway on July 31. Its title character wasn’t just gap-toothed but a liar, a thief, and an imbecile. He yapped in pidgin, got mocked and beaten, and frequently humiliated himself. “The Chinaman is killingly funny,” Twain bragged, hopeful about its box-office success. Adding to the insult, he insisted his portrait was accurate. The first night in New York, Twain came onstage after the conclusion of the performance to announce that what the viewer had just seen was “as good and as natural and consistent a Chinaman as he could see in San Francisco.”

  Whether he actually believed this, or simply said it to conceal the cynicism of trying to profit from pandering to people’s bigotry, didn’t make Ah Sin any less of a moral failure. The “Chinese question” was becoming a national issue, and Twain couldn’t have chosen a worse time to weigh in. Only a week before, a race riot had broken out in San Francisco. It started on the night of July 23, 1877, when eight thousand workers gathered outside City Hall to show support for the railroad strikes that had flared throughout the country that summer. The Panic of 1873 had produced a long depression, sharpening the class antagonisms of the Gilded Age. California was in especially bad shape. The decade following the arrival of the transcontinental railroad had been a never-ending nightmare of crisis, stagnation, and unemployment. Closer integration with the East had made the region more vulnerable to financial tremors elsewhere in the country. Immigrants flocked to California in record numbers, hoping to escape the depression, only to find equally bleak conditions when they arrived. Local shocks, like the failure of San Francisco’s all-powerful Bank of California in the summer of 1875, made matters worse. The golden days of the 1860s were gone—and, as always, some people blamed the Chinese for their suffering.

  This element made itself felt at the rally. Hecklers cried anti-Chinese slogans. Hoodlums pummeled a Chinese passerby. “On to Chinatown!” someone shouted, and a mob of hundreds spun off from the crowd and went on a rampage. They sang and swore and screamed, “indulging in the wildest species of Indian yells,” a journalist wrote. They set fire to Chinese homes and cut the hoses of the firemen who came to extinguish them. They pried cobblestones from the street and broke the windows of Chinese laundries. They killed four Chinese people, and inflicted $20,000 in damage before a combined force of city police, state militia, and vigilantes pushed them back.

  Not far from where the mayhem took place, Harte had written the poem that became “The Heathen Chinee.” In 1870, he had tried to satirize anti-Chinese prejudice. By 1877, Chinatown was burning, and the hero of that poem—Ah Sin—was onstage three thousand miles away, reincarnated as a cretinous coolie played for cheap laughs. For both Harte and Twain, Ah Sin represented a betrayal not just of their principles but of their Bohemianism—of the outsider ethos that imbued San Francisco’s literary boom. The play foundered. It hung on through the fall before closing permanently. A “most abject & incurable failure,” Twain reported to Howells on October 15, 1877. “I’m sorry for poor Parsloe, but for nobody else concerned.”

  Poor Parsloe would be fine. He had found his niche as a “stage Chinaman,” and it would keep him steadily employed for years to come. Harte wouldn’t be so lucky. By late 1877, he was nearly sunk—“floating on the raft made of the shipwreck of his former reputation,” in the words of one Boston paper—and he knew it. He felt “run over in flesh and spirit,” he said: racked by a hacking cough, consumed with anxiety about how to support his wif
e and children. Yet he hadn’t entirely lost his instinct for survival. Even before Ah Sin fell through, he had been trying to get a job at an American consulate overseas. In June 1877, he almost succeeded in landing one—in China.

  Twain did everything he could to block it. He even enlisted Howells in the effort. Howells’s wife, Elinor, was President Rutherford B. Hayes’s cousin, and Howells himself had been a prominent Hayes supporter during the campaign. Twain wanted Howells to urge the president not to hire Harte. “I think your citizenship lays the duty upon you of doing what you can to prevent the disgrace of literature & the country which would be the infallible result of the appointment of Bret Harte to any responsible post,” Twain wrote. Elinor passed Twain’s denunciation on to Hayes’s son. An answer from Washington followed soon after: “Father has read the letters and directs me to tell you there is no danger of [Harte’s] appointment.”

  Harte kept pushing, however. He rallied his few remaining friends, and pleaded his case to powerful Republicans who had pull with the president. By the spring of 1878, he had succeeded in putting himself back in the running. President Hayes wrote Howells directly, asking his opinion, saying he had “heard sinister things” from Twain. Howells responded with a carefully worded reply. He didn’t sugarcoat Harte’s reputation regarding “solvency and sobriety.” But he still felt “great affection for the man,” and sympathized with his plight. “It would be a godsend to him, if he could get such a place; for he is poor, and he writes with difficulty and very little.”

  Nine days later, on April 18, 1878, the assistant secretary of state summoned Harte for a meeting in Washington, DC. The official produced a map of Germany and pointed to a town on the Rhine called Crefeld, a major exporter of silks and velvets. The State Department needed a commercial agent there to supervise the shipment of goods to the United States. The position paid an annual salary of $2,500, plus a portion of the export duties collected. “[W]ith all my disappointments, this seemed like a glimpse of Paradise,” Harte told his wife. A month later, he officially accepted. He would go alone, sending money home until he could move the whole family to Europe.