1876

by Gore Vidal

  I boarded a horsecar. Although the fare is five cents, I did not have any small change in my pocket—only fragments of remarkably filthy paper, some worth ten cents, twenty-five cents, or even a dollar. In my purse I carry a few half eagles: gold coins worth ten dollars apiece (to be used sparingly!). I have not yet obtained a twenty-dollar double eagle, my beautifully apt simile for this morning’s sun. But then, if the New York sun does not resemble United States currency, this whole great country is not El Dorado but a fraud.

  The horsecar swayed and rattled down Fifth Avenue. At the car’s center a small potbellied stove gave off insufficient heat, and mephitic fumes. On the floor was straw as insulation. My fellow passengers were mostly men, mostly bearded, mostly potbellied like the stove. In fact, saving the desperate poor, everyone in New York is overweight: it seems to be the style. Yet when I was young (I must stop this sort of Nestorizing to myself and save it for the lecture platform and the press), the American was lean, lanky, often a bit stooped with leathery skin—and, of course, beardless. Some new race has obviously replaced the Yankees: a plump, voluptuous people, expanding gorgeously beneath their golden sun.

  On the omnibus everyone was reading a newspaper. That means that the newspaper business, my business, is good. The headline reported the escape from prison of Boss Tweed.

  I got off at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, cursing my age, for I move awkwardly. Like my countrymen, I, too, am fat, but at least have the excuse of advanced age and French cuisine.

  I walked down Sixteenth Street between rows of identical brownstone houses. Irish maids swept stairs; menservants (some Negro) took in garbage pails; the knife-and-scissors-sharpener man moved jingling from house to house. Wisps of white smoke began to appear from the chimneys as this most respectable street slowly awakened.

  I found William Cullen Bryant in his study, wearing a faded dressing gown and exercising with dumbbells. He did not stop, nor, I fear, did he recognize me until the maid announced my name.

  “Schuyler! How good of you to come. Sit right down. I shan’t be a moment.”

  So I sat in the dark study (the only light from two small coals burning in the grate) and watched Bryant do his exercises. He is as tall and spare as I remember, but his appearance has been entirely transformed by a vast beard that now circles his face like a mandala or a magical bush ready at a moment’s notice to ignite, to emit the voice of God, but then I have always thought Bryant’s voice must sound not unlike that of the Deity on one of the Creator’s rare unagitated days.

  “You must exercise each morning, Schuyler…”

  “I think about exercise almost every day.”

  “The blood must flow—flow!” Then dumbbells were put away, and Bryant excused himself. Through several shut doors, I heard the sound of him splashing about in water and knew the water was arctic cold.

  In no time at all, Bryant returned, fully clothed and the picture of, as the British say, rude health. Together we descended to the drafty downstairs dining room furnished with depressingly “sincere” Eastlake furniture.

  We breakfasted alone. Bryant’s wife died ten years ago and “my daughter Julia is out of the city. So I am a bachelor.”

  The maid served us hominy with milk, brown bread and butter. I waited for tea, for coffee—in vain.

  Bryant was greatly affected by Tweed’s escape from prison. “Of course he paid his gaolers. They’re all alike, you know.” Who “they” were he did not specify, but I assume that he meant the lower orders, the Democrats, the Irish, the enemies of the Republican Evening Post, which supports the Grant Administration regardless of scandal. The radical crusading spirit is now entirely dead at the Post. But Bryant is old.

  Glumly I chewed brown bread whilst Bryant expressed himself at length on the hopeless corruption of New York City until, bored, I diverted him with an inquiry about his forthcoming history of the United States.

  I was favoured with a rare smile. “Unfortunately, I have done very little of the work. My collaborator is the one who toils. But I do have a book of poetry ready for publication.”

  Bryant tried out a number of titles on me. We decided that The Flood of Years was the best. Apparently this octogenarian work is “an answer to that poem of my youth Thanatopsis. It’s hard to believe that at seventeen I actually entertained certain doubts about the immortality of the Soul. But now, Schuyler, I have come to accept our immortality!”

  At that instant, Bryant looked like Moses, despite a trace of hominy grit in his beard. I nodded respectfully; felt young again, callow, tongue-tied in the presence of America’s premier poet, of the city’s most distinguished newspaper editor, of the oldest man ever to exercise with dumbbells on an icy winter morning.

  “But your own work has given us all much pleasure.” The deep-set eyes appeared to look at me for the first time. If the blood in my congealing veins were capable of a sudden rush to any part of the body, I might have blushed with pleasure at praise from the only man alive who still looks upon me as young.

  “I particularly admire Paris Under the Commune. What a time! What issues were joined!” To my surprise Bryant is not made panicky by the Communards—or communists—and he asked me intelligent questions. He also got the title of the book right; usually it is referred to as Paris Under the Communists.

  Then we spoke of our dear mutual dead friend the editor William Leggett. I write “mutual” knowing that it is a word Bryant deplores. In fact, he has written a small book of words and phrases that are never to appear in the Post. Not “mutual” but “common.” Not “inaugurate” but “begin.” He has no liking for Latin- or Greek-derived words (yet called his most famous poem Thanatopsis).

  It is curious that despite Bryant’s great good sense about language, his own prose is so perfectly ordinary that even the liveliest topic drops dead at a single prod of his (the last in all of New York) feather quill pen.

  Opening the Herald, Bryant found me on page three. With an amused inflection he read aloud the reporter’s account of the arrival in New York of the celebrated author Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler and his daughter, the Princess Day Regent. “A Turkish title from the sound of it.”

  “No. Bosnian.”

  Bryant’s humour still lurks behind that awesome face he sees fit to petrify the world with. As practising journalists, we enjoyed the confident incoherence of the interviewer; and deplored the low standards of today’s journalism.

  “And yet—” The maid interrupted us not with coffee or tea, as I had prayed, but with Bryant’s topcoat and beaver hat.

  “—the newspaper press can take a great deal of credit for having destroyed Mr. Tweed in ’73.”

  I noticed sourly that the maid did not even attempt to help me on with my topcoat; and due to a rheumatic shoulder, I have more difficulty than does Bryant getting in and out of clothes.

  “With some aid from Governor Tilden.”

  “Of course, a capital fellow. Do you know him?”

  “Yes. Slightly.”

  We were now in the street. School-bound children carried their books in that never-out-of-date shoulder sling whilst a ragged man pulled a sort of barrow after him on which had been placed a large tin bucket of boiling water fired from beneath by a kerosene burner.

  The man’s hoarse cry still sounds in my head: “Here’s your nice hot corn, smoking hot, smoking hot, just from the pot.” I used to collect such “songs” of the street.

  “What sort of corn does he find in December?” I asked as we turned into Fifth Avenue.

  “From Florida. The railroads, Schuyler, the railroads! They have changed everything. For the good, for the bad.” He took my arm. “Do come and see our new quarters. We moved last summer to the corner of Fulton and the Broadway—a ten-storey building—a terrible expense, frankly, but convenient. Also, the presses are hidden away at the bottom, and we even have a perpendicular railway whi
ch I refuse to set foot in. One must always walk! Walk, climb, walk, climb.”

  Touching his hat to those who recognized him, Bryant walked briskly south toward Washington Square Park. As best I could, I kept up with him. Each morning Bryant walks the three miles from his house to the Evening Post. Like a fool, I agreed to accompany him.

  Now, several hours later, as I sit in the parlour of this hotel suite, waiting to take tea with John Bigelow, there is a thunderstorm in my ears whilst my fingernails have exchanged their usual healthy pink for a most disagreeable mauve tint.

  I am drinking rum and tea, and hope not to die before teatime.

  Assuming that I survive my gallop down Broadway with Bryant, I did do the right thing, for not only is he an editor to whom I am beholden but he knows more about the politics of the city than anyone outside prison, saving Mr. Tweed.

  On every corner newspaper posters proclaim the true story of Tweed’s escape from the Ludlow Street jail. Apparently, the Boss was allowed each day to go for a drive with two keepers. Yesterday, after a tour of the northern end of the island, he was allowed to pay a call on his wife in their mansion at Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue.

  Just now my hack driver pointed out to me this sinister palace—brownstone again!—built with stolen money. In the course of yesterday’s visit, Tweed went upstairs, and vanished. Obviously, he is a great rogue, but popular—at least amongst the lower orders, whom he gave, from time to time, small commissions, as it were, on the vast sums of money that he and his ring were stealing from the public at large.

  During our walk Bryant showed me the new Court House. “I calculate that the money Tweed and his people stole while building that temple to Mammon could have paid off the national debt.”

  “But how did it happen?” I was genuinely curious. Most of the city’s officials have always been moderately corrupt, as the younger Gallatin assured Governor Tilden; but it is not usual for the same group to remain in power year after year stealing millions in full view of the public.

  But I was not to be instructed, for just then we were ambushed in City Hall Park by what at first looked to be an enormous green umbrella with no one attached to it. But then the umbrella was raised and its attachment became visible, to my astonishment and to Bryant’s dismay.

  The man introduced himself to us, in a piercing voice: “Citizen Train, Mr. Bryant! Your nemesis! Yours, too, sir.” He gave me a courtly bow; and I noted that he was wearing a sort of French military greatcoat crossed with a broad scarlet sash.

  Citizen Train indeed! The story of George Francis Train is well known to us at Paris. A New Englander, he became a millionaire in his youth from shipping. Later he helped to found the Union Pacific railroad; to finance that project, he created the infamous holding company known as Crédit Mobilier which set about in the most systematic way to bribe most of the Congress, including General Grant’s first vice president, Schuyler Colefax.

  Happily for Mr. Train, he had gone mad before all these bribes were given seven—eight?—years ago. Forced out of the Union Pacific, he went to Ireland and tried to expel the English, who put him in jail for a time. Train then moved on to France in 1870, and became a Communard; he helped organize those horrors that took so many lives—as I have described at length elsewhere.

  Why am I writing journalism? In a moment I shall be explaining and explaining all sorts of things to you, dear reader, when none of this is meant for any eyes but mine. These notes are to be the quarry from which I hope to hack out a monument or two to decorate the republic’s centennial, as well as to mark my own American year—a year that is beginning in a most helter-skelter, breathless way: literally breathless, for I am still breathing with some difficulty despite the rum and tea.

  Anyway, there in the midst of the cold windy park was mad wealthy Train with his red sash and green umbrella and all-consuming passion to be the president! Yes, after the slaughter of the Paris Communards, Train came back to the United States and ran for president in ’72 as an independent—that is to say, a communist. His campaign was unusually eccentric and gave much pleasure to almost everyone. The workies were particularly amused at the spectacle of a millionaire communist whilst the press will always write at length of anyone so entirely mad as to want the vote for women, the right for labouring men to strike, and the price for a postage stamp never to exceed a penny.

  “Dear Mr. Train,” Bryant was uncha­racte­risti­cally nervous as he backed away from that menacing green umbrella.

  Train suddenly turned to me, and with an unexpected smile, said, “Forgive me, citizen, for not offering you my hand but I make it a general rule never to shake hands with anyone over the age of twelve. Intimate physical contact of that sort causes one to lose psychic energy. And vital energy, citizen, must be hoarded in these terrible times. Now, Mr. Bryant, explain yourself.”

  The Moseslike Bryant suddenly resembled that patriarch confronted by a bush more than usually ablaze and angry. “Explain myself?” There was a trace of stammer in his usually deliberate voice. “In what way, sir?”

  “Tweed!” Train was becoming agitated. Nurses pushing perambulators fled our corner of the park. “I said he should be hanged! I wrote you that at the Post. But was my letter ever published, was it?”

  “So many letters, sir…I mean, Citizen Train.” Bryant regained a degree of composure as with a swift sidestep that would have done credit to a youthful gallant of the ballroom, he got himself round the wealthy communist, who stared at him fiercely from beneath the green umbrella (to protect him, I have been told, from malignant star rays).

  “Now you can see what happens when my letters are not printed, and sensible advice is not followed…”

  But by then Bryant had pranced—no other word—to the edge of the park with me in tow, and soon we were safely in Broadway, now filled with morning traffic.

  “That man…!” Bryant was, comparatively, speechless. “A perfect nuisance. Normally, he sits in the park at Madison Square, and I can avoid him. Fate obviously instructed him to come and wait for me here at, ah, Trivium.” The classical reference did Bryant good, and gave me the occasion to congratulate him with some insincerity on his recent translations from Homer. Actually I could not get through them, but they are much admired by those who have no Greek and the wrong English.

  Note: Must do something with George Francis Train. The French papers would certainly be interested. But they pay too little. The English press? Possibly. Must inquire.

  Two large new hotels dominate Broadway just below City Hall, the St. Nicolas and the Metropolitan. Then, at Barclay Street, I insisted that we pause a moment to look at the façade of the Astor House. “I left when it was half-built.”

  “Most showy.” Like me, Bryant disdains New York’s attempts at grandeur: he under the impression that they succeed and I because they fail—at least what I have seen so far. But I do rather like Mr. Tweed’s Court House, which would not be out of place in Paris.

  Then I looked for the Park Theatre; could not find it. “What happened?”

  “Dear Schuyler, it burned to the ground! Everything here burns up sooner or later. You know that.”

  I felt real anguish. “I used to review the plays there…”

  “For me, yes. I know. What did we call you?”

  “Gallery Mouse.”

  “Well, Gallery Mouse has a wide range of new theatres to attend if he so chooses.” A sidelong glance at me. “But surely you don’t want to write about our theatre.”

  “No. No.”

  “Because I do admire your reports from Europe. You deeply understand that wicked old world.”

  I cannot think why I deeply resented Bryant’s smug puritan tone. After all, our wicked old Paris has never come up with a thief on the scale of Boss Tweed.

  “I had thought I might perhaps do some American pieces. You know: what it is like to come back after so many years.”<
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  “A latter-day Rip Van Winkle?”

  The phrase that I have myself been using for two days became on his lips indescribably boring and obvious. “Well, yes. I suppose that such a comparison is unavoidable.”

  “And our newspapers do not avoid much…”

  “Except the truth of the matter.” To my horror, this savagery escaped my lips; but Bryant took it well enough.

  “Half-truths are the best we can manage, I fear. For a moment you sounded like our late friend Leggett.”

  “That is indeed a compliment.” The passionate Leggett burned out his mind and lungs for the truth—or at least for something not unlike that elusive absolute.

  Finally, we stood in front of the Evening Post’s new building.

  “Schuyler, you have endured nobly the three miles.”

  Although my face was stiff from the cold, my body was leaking sweat from every pore.

  “Now you must come in and meet the staff.”

  I entrusted myself to the compartment of the perpendicular railway whilst Bryant climbed the stairs.

  The Negro operator was admiring. “There’s no one like old Mr. Bryant in all New York. He’ll be up there before we are.”

  And so he was. As I stepped onto the landing, I saw Bryant hanging from the lintel to his office door. Very slowly he chinned himself, and dropped to the floor.

  “You will give me a heart attack.” I was firm. “Just watching you is bad for my system.”

  This flattered him, and in the best of humours he took me into his new office which was simply a larger version of the old one—the same desk, chairs, open bookcases crowded with his own works; my sharp author’s eye noted two books by me.

  The literary editor was summoned. George Cary Eggleton is pleasant, young: “Admire Paris and [sic!] the Commune more than I can say, Mr. Schuyler.”

  “Would that you had said it, Mr. Eggleton.” I seldom resist so obvious an opening. “I looked in vain for a notice of it in the Post.”

  “Is that true?” Enthroned at his desk, Bryant was Jehovah on the mountaintop.