by Ben Tarnoff
Harte sailed on June 27, 1878. Twain had a fit when he found out. “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward,” he wrote Howells. Moreover, Twain felt “snubbed.” President Hayes “should not have silently ignored my testimony,” he groused, unaware of Howells’s behind-the-scenes role in helping Harte get the job. “If he had only been made a home official, I think I could stand it; but to send this nasty creature to puke upon the American name in a foreign land is too much.” At least there was one consolation: Twain wouldn’t have to see Harte again. He never returned to America, and never brought his family to Europe. When he left in 1878, he left forever.
AFTERLIFE
There was a certain irony in sending Bret Harte abroad to represent the United States. He was a contrarian, a critic, a Bohemian. His best work was about outcasts and underdogs, people on the fringe. He resembled them, despite his refined facade. In San Francisco, he had found a community of fellow misfits, and when he left, he wouldn’t find anything like it again. As Mark Twain became a ubiquitous presence in postwar America, Harte grew ever more estranged from it. He withdrew into himself, and severed his friendships one by one. He was “a man without a country,” Twain said, and by the time Harte departed for Europe, he had already been living in internal exile for years.
Charles Warren Stoddard suffered a similar fate. In 1878, he returned to San Francisco after five years away. He looked different: balder, heavier, with a thick brown beard obscuring what remained of his boyish face. That summer, he would turn thirty-five. His literary career was largely finished and, like Harte, he had himself to blame. Back in 1873, he had published South-Sea Idyls, his comic chronicle of the Pacific Islands. It was the best thing he ever wrote, and it brought him his first national fame. Then he disappeared. He drifted through Europe and the Middle East for half a decade, squandering his talent on lackluster letters for the San Francisco Chronicle that earned him barely enough to live.
Aside from his stint in London as Twain’s secretary, Stoddard traveled aimlessly. He grew his beard, drank cheap wine. He met young artists in Rome and Paris and Munich. He kept in touch with Twain, and found reminders of his friend everywhere he went. “I find no English speaking people who have not heard of you and know something about you,” he wrote from Venice. “Surely your success has been astonishing.” In 1875, he read the first of Twain’s “Old Times on the Mississippi” articles in the Atlantic Monthly, and remembered their late nights at the Langham Hotel together—“the old times when we used to sit up over the fire in the corner room and you drew such graphic off hand pictures of the Mississipp’.”
He felt happy for Twain, but couldn’t help feeling forlorn about his own situation. Abroad, he could escape the burden of being a good son, a good student, even a good writer. But he was still lonely and anxious, and permanently poor. His Chronicle correspondence paid little. He hoped to boost his income by collecting his travel writings into a book, and asked for Twain’s help. Twain tried to get Elisha Bliss on board, but “he shook his head—says he has got more books than customers, & doesn’t want any more of the former.” Times were tough. The depression brought on by the Panic of 1873 had hurt the publishing business. Ever loyal, Twain came up with another idea: a consulship. “Stoddard’s got no worldly sense,” Twain wrote Howells. “He is just the stuff for a consul.” For his part, Howells promised to “leg like a centipede” on behalf of their mutual friend. But nothing ever came of it, and by the summer of 1877, Stoddard was on his way home. He scrounged up enough money to buy his steamer ticket to Philadelphia, and spent seven months in the East before taking an overland train to San Francisco.
“You will find me changed, I fear, and most likely not for the better,” Stoddard warned a friend. All those years of wandering had hardened him. He was less meek, more self-assured. “My enthusiasm has boiled down,” he said; “there is more grit in me than of old.” Those qualities that made his South-Sea Idyls so charming—the childish sense of wonder, the easy pleasure in pretty things—had mellowed with age. But there were certain things he hadn’t outgrown, like his inability to settle down. He still felt adrift. “I have torn up my roots so often that they do not strike into any soil with much vigor,” he wrote.
San Francisco had changed almost as much as he had. The city had been a refuge in the 1860s, but now it looked more like a dumping ground. People from other parts of the country washed up on its shores looking for work, swelling the ranks of the poor. By 1877, San Francisco’s unemployment rate was as high as 25 percent. Stoddard’s parents lived south of Market Street, a sprawling neighborhood that bore the brunt of the bad economy. Among its flophouses and slums, jobs were scarce and crime was commonplace. “Bankruptcy, suicide and murder and robberies were the order of the day,” recalled one workingman.
The city’s literary fortunes had undergone an equally steep decline. The last remnants of the Bohemian scene had vanished. The Overland Monthly finally closed its doors in 1875. A group called the Bohemian Club, started in 1872, had briefly offered hope of keeping San Francisco’s creative energies alive. It grew out of a Sunday salon hosted by James F. Bowman, a friend of Harte and the rest of the old set, and became a society for writers and journalists. Soon artists, actors, and musicians joined. Businessmen were strictly barred from admission. “Weaving spiders come not here,” declared the club motto.
Stoddard joined before he left town in 1873. By the time he returned in 1878, the club had moved into roomier, more respectable quarters, and its membership had grown to include many of the mercantile types it had once excluded. The reason for this reversal was simple. As one early member recalled, they had bills to pay: “It was soon apparent that the possession of talent, without money, would not support the club.” Bankers and industrialists and entrepreneurs trickled in. By the time Oscar Wilde stopped by in 1882, the transformation was complete. “I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life,” he remarked.
San Francisco’s Bohemia had never existed in an economic vacuum. No matter how loudly Harte abused California’s capitalists, the literary flowering he led wouldn’t have been possible without the prosperity of the 1860s. At the Bohemian Club, however, hypocrisy reached new heights. By becoming “Bohemians,” California’s postwar parvenus could playact at glamorous poverty. They could pretend that art, not money, was what united them. They could indulge their creative impulses within a safely circumscribed setting, in members-only performances known as High Jinks, and later at their annual encampments at the Bohemian Grove, their retreat on the Russian River. In the twentieth century, the club would welcome William Randolph Hearst and Richard Nixon. It became an enclave of elite men, the ultimate insider institution—and a grotesque parody of the original Bohemia that inspired its name.
Stoddard visited the club regularly after his return to San Francisco. He was broke, and often had to skip breakfast and lunch. But at the club he could drink for free, and usually find someone willing to take him to dinner. His friend Ina Coolbrith was another beneficiary. The all-male Bohemians elected her as an honorary member—although as a woman, she still needed an invitation to enter. More helpfully, they also arranged fund-raisers on her behalf.
She was grateful. Like Stoddard, she needed all the help she could get. They saw each other in 1878 for the first time in five years. While Stoddard couldn’t stand still, Coolbrith had the opposite problem: she couldn’t move. The restraints keeping her in place had recently grown stronger. In 1874, her older sister Agnes died, leaving two children behind. Coolbrith took them in. She now supported a household of five. Selling poems to magazines wouldn’t be enough to make ends meet. So she took a job as a librarian in Oakland, and found a house nearby for her family. She worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, for a salary of $80 a month—less than half of what Harte earned in Germany doing considerably lighter work for the State Department. A “living tomb,” she called it, and she woul
d remain there for eighteen years.
It wasn’t all misery, however. Schoolchildren filled the library, and she loved to recommend reading for them. One of her young patrons was Jack London. He first came into the library as a ten-year-old, and pulled a book on Pizarro’s conquest of Peru off the shelf. Coolbrith praised his choice, and London never forgot it. “[Y]ou were the first one who ever complimented me on my choice of reading matter,” he told her twenty years later. “Nobody at home bothered their heads over what I read.” He held her in awe: “You were a goddess to me . . . No woman has so affected me to the extent you did.”
Coolbrith created a little world. “Why, we used to come to the library just to look at her—she was so beautiful!” remembered a visitor. “She sat in her chair as though on a throne,” said another. Between cataloguing and cleaning, and cultivating new generations of readers, she also found time to write. She finally published her first book in 1881, A Perfect Day, and Other Poems. “Miss Coolbrith’s admirers would have preferred to see her work come from one of the great publishing houses of the East,” remarked Ambrose Bierce, but the book nevertheless found its way into the hands of eastern critics. Their response was favorable, if restrained. “Without having a large vocabulary or a great range of expression, this poetess makes pleasant music on a few strings,” judged the New York Times. She mailed a signed copy to Stoddard, who gave a warmer verdict. “I know of no living poetess in either England or America who is your superior,” he replied. That year, Stoddard would leave San Francisco, return to Hawaii, and later live in Indiana, Kentucky, Washington, DC, and Massachusetts—teaching English literature, writing articles and books, and never quite finding a permanent home.
But at least he had his freedom. He and Coolbrith stayed in touch, and her letters often raged at the unfairness of how her life had turned out:
My relatives? O, how infinitely better off I would be had I none! What have any of them ever done but hurt me? Look at the long years I gave . . . while you . . . and Harte, were out in the world, and lived, I knew only the four walls in which I worked and the house where I ate and slept, and the path which lay between these two!
California became loathsome to her. It became a cage, the monotonous backdrop for her “convict-life.” “How I hate Californians! Maybe human nature is the same elsewhere, but I doubt it,” she wrote Stoddard. Still, she kept writing. Eventually, California would claim her as one of its greatest writers, and the last remaining link to its literary golden age. In 1915, at a ceremony held at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, she became the state’s first poet laureate. Now seventy-four and severely arthritic, she walked slowly to the stage, and turned to face the crowded auditorium:
I feel that the honor extended me today is meant not so much because of any special merit of my own, as in memory of that wonderful group of early California writers with which it was my fortune to be affiliated, and of which I am the sole survivor.
Harte died in 1902, Stoddard in 1909, Twain in 1910. She had written a manuscript of reminiscences, but it burned in the earthquake and fire that incinerated San Francisco in 1906. By then she had returned to Russian Hill. “I took frequent ‘notes,’” she said, “I had . . . volumes of them.” Later, when a publisher asked her to reproduce them, she declined: “Were I to write what I know the book would be too sensational for you to publish; but were I to write what I think proper, it would be too dull to sell.”
After the blaze died down, she walked to what remained of Anton Roman’s old bookstore. There, on the second floor, the Overland Monthly had been born. That night, Harte came to her in a dream. He took her back to the shop, and they stood in the rubble. “There is nothing left for us now,” he said. “We’ll have to go away and leave it to those who are coming after us.” She died in 1928, and was buried in an unmarked grave.
• • •
WHAT MADE THE BOHEMIAN EXPERIMENT So extraordinary was that it happened where it did. On a distant frontier barely removed from its days of gold digging and gunfighting, a literary scene emerged that invigorated the region, fascinated the country, and, through Harte and Twain, gave America two of its most popular writers. The Bohemians showed that great writing could grow anywhere: that its origins could be remote, its subjects crude, so long as it told stories worth telling. They helped awaken America to the fact of its bigness, to its infinite canvas of incident and character and slang.
Their methods inspired future generations. The use of the vernacular led later writers to take a deeper interest in dialect, in how English evolved in different corners of the country. The use of frontier humor disrupted the distinction between high and low, and unleashed the imaginative possibilities of popular art. These innovations helped pry American literature away from its provincial origins in New England and push it into a broader current—toward the discovery of a vast, varied continent composed of countless local cultures.
What distinguished Twain from the others wasn’t simply raw talent. It was his relentlessness. For Harte, Stoddard, and Coolbrith, Bohemia had meant the best years of their lives. For Twain, it meant the years that made him a writer and put him on the path to greatness. Harte never figured out how to be a westerner in the East. Stoddard and Coolbrith never overcame the loss of a circle that soothed their solitude and fired their creativity. But Twain transplanted himself to eastern soil, and took root. He married into a rich and respectable family. He settled in Hartford and joined the lofty society of Nook Farm. He befriended Howells and clawed his way into the cultural elite. And throughout, he remained recognizably himself. His clothes grew more elegant, but his language still crackled with yarns and jokes and hoaxes, and delicious drawling slang. He experimented constantly, speculating in everything from science fiction to historical novels to detective stories. Not all of his risks paid off, but they kept him in constant motion. He never stopped looking for new lines of attack, and never relinquished the westernness that gave his writing its original force. The Bohemian moment in San Francisco had been brief. Through Twain, it achieved a lasting legacy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Franklin Walker’s pioneering San Francisco’s Literary Frontier (1939) was the starting point for this book. I’m grateful to Charles Fracchia, founder of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, for introducing it to me. Charles made other helpful suggestions, and gave me the courage to head into the archives, where my research began. I’m indebted to Hoke Perkins and the staff of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia; to David Kessler, Susan Snyder, and the staff of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; to Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, also at the Bancroft; to Natalie Russell and the staff of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; to Dorothy Lazard of the Oakland History Room at the Oakland Public Library; to Liz Phillips in the Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Davis; to Patricia Keats at the Society of California Pioneers; to Kathleen Correia at the California History Room of the California State Library in Sacramento; to Amy McDonald at the Duke University Archives; and to the staff of the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library.
The many authors whose work I relied on are detailed in the notes. But several deserve special mention. Gary Scharnhorst’s work on Bret Harte was an essential resource and an inspiration throughout. The late Carl Stroven and Roger Austen provided a wealth of material on Charles Warren Stoddard. Josephine DeWitt Rhodehamel and Raymund Francis Wood introduced me to Ina Coolbrith. And Ron Powers, whose writing on Mark Twain is a national treasure, helped teach me how to think about history.
I wrote this book in the New York Public Library’s Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room. Thanks to Jay Barksdale for making my time there possible. I’m also indebted to the Archives Research Fellowship, which enabled me to explore aspects of Twain’s life that I didn’t have the chance to discuss in the book. The li
brary’s Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History, and Genealogy was indispensable, along with the Microforms Reading Room, the Rare Book Division, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. Thomas Lannon of the Manuscripts and Archives Division provided research help throughout.
My agent, Joy Harris, inspired me to pursue this project, and kept me afloat with regular infusions of enthusiasm and expert counsel. I’m forever grateful to her. My editor, Lindsay Whalen, steered me masterfully through the writing of the manuscript, and always pushed me to improve. I feel fortunate to have had her at my side.
Meg Flaherty contributed to this book in every way possible. She helped with the research, the writing, the thinking, the structure. She helped track down obscure dates, went digging through reels of microfilm, and made big-picture recommendations that improved the manuscript immeasurably. Thanks to Cris Beam and the Hertog Research Assistantship Program in the Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University for putting us together.
T. J. Stiles, Patty O’Toole, and Mark Danner lent crucial moral support. This book owes much to their advice and example, as role models for my life and writing. Carol Field and Susan McGovern offered insights drawn from their deep knowledge of San Francisco. Adam and Noah Pritzker helped keep me human when long days in the library threatened to turn me into a robot. Rachel Nolan and Will Payne were perceptive readers, and their revisions made this book much better. Moira Weigel was an invaluable editor, interlocutor—and more. My parents were a constant source of edits, suggestions, wisdom, love, and encouragement. They also had the foresight to fall in love and move to San Francisco in time for me to be born there, the first in a long list of debts I can never hope to repay.