1876

by Gore Vidal

  “If you do, I do.” That was mischievous.

  “Well, it’s only for a short time.”

  “Until I am married?” From her voice I could not guess her mood. I suspect that this is because we now speak only English to each other and in English she is someone else, as I am. Languages do bend one morally to their grammatical requirements.

  “Until I get my post as minister to France if I get it.” I then shifted to French and that made for our old intimacy. “Do you want to marry John?”

  “If you want me to.”

  “No. Never like that, my girl. You make your own choice.”

  “But you would like it?”

  “He is suitable.”

  “Suitable!” This caused a change of colour—good! She is a Latin woman in French, and I am at home with her: her father, in fact.

  “The Apgars are…”

  “Magnificent! I know. They tell me that every day. And Sister Faith! She thinks she is the equal of a Daughter of France!”

  “There is money.” I was to the point.

  She was, too. “But how much?”

  “I should think, in time, a lot.”

  “Can you see me living here?”

  Tears came to my eyes most unexpectedly. “I should not want you ever to be at any distance from me now.” I did not need to say the rest. Of all living creatures, only the man of letters knows that he must die.

  “John wants to announce the engagement at the New Year’s.” As Emma pulled on mauve gloves, she looked at herself in the pier-glass mirror whose scrollwork walnut magnificence mars the parlour of our suite rather than furnishes one of the bedrooms. I must remember to have the valet move it.

  “An engagement can always be broken…” I began, not certain of how the sentence was to run either on my tongue or in my head. Since I am truly undecided, I did not finish. Instead I picked up the envelope from Sanford and from habit felt its surface. The type was expensively raised.

  “Not easily. Not here. Not in the land of the Apgars.” Emma knows the country already, better than I. She should be the one recording this world, for she really sees it whilst I see only the two of us, struggling to survive.

  “He did mention the possibility of one day living in France.” But this was weak and I knew it.

  “They’ll never let him go. Well”—Emma picked up her mother’s still-splendid sable coat—“we shall be engaged at the New Year. I think that’s best.”

  “And married in June?”

  “At Grace Church. Where else?” Emma smiled, and the dark hazel eyes reminded me poignantly of Aaron Burr’s most beautiful luminous all-seeing eyes. “From the New Year to June is a long time.”

  “Thank heaven. What do you think of him?” I was still holding in my hand William Sanford’s envelope.

  “I think he is singularly brutal and wild”—she used the word sauvage—“and overconfident.”

  I did not understand. “John is none of these things.”

  Emma watched herself look startled in the mirror. “I thought you meant the unspeakable Mr. Sanford.”

  “No. No. Even for an American millionaire his manners are not supportable. I meant John.”

  “Oh, John…” She spoke on exhalation. “Well, he’ll be what he seems. That is something. Certainly, after Henri…”

  “John is not half bad?”

  “No. Not half bad.”

  “But not half good?”

  “Papa, I am thirty-five years old, and there is very little choice and very little time left for me.” And that was that. I have always admired the hard French practicality even when it chills me to the bone. Emma kissed my cheek and left me; her violet scent still fills the room.

  3

  THE DAYS RUSHED BY in a constant and tiring round of encounters, mostly social. According to the popular press—of which there is altogether too much—the glamourous Princess d’Agrigente is the sensation of the New York season; and it is coyly hinted that she may soon make a marriage here in “Old Gotham” to a member of the “Knickerbockracy.” The style is hideously imitable.

  Not so coyly, the Apgars were told that Emma’s mission on this planet would be fulfilled in June. Thanks to their kind encouragement, she told them that she is now willing to surrender the eminence of her tinselly old-world highness for the dim but oh so pregnant with distinction and true worth title of Mrs. John Day Apgar.

  Sister Faith looked as if she might faint with the joy of having such a sister-in-law, whilst the Third Brother Apgar was quietly pleased and assured me, man to man, over one of his stale Park and Tilford cigars that the marriage has, as of this moment, the blessing of a two-thirds majority of the Nine Brothers. The dissenters were troubled by Emma’s religion, and by Paris. “But they’ll come round, on New Year’s Day, when we make our announcement.” Meanwhile, for the next week or two, the secret is known to all but not to be discussed in front of any of the principals.

  Since receiving the money from Mr. Bonner of the Ledger I no longer wake up in the middle of the night, unable to get my breath as I wonder desperately how I am to support us. Yet even with the Ledger’s money, dollars do seem to melt as rapidly in this city as last night’s snow.

  It is now decided that we shall go to Washington City on February 15, when I begin for the Herald my “observations” (a good word for what I shall be doing and one that Jamie says he likes).

  Mrs. Paran Stevens has given us letters to twenty intimates we must know. We are still undecided whether or not to let a house for the two or three months we shall be in the city, or simply stay at a hotel. I incline toward hotel life, as it gives one an excuse not to reciprocate the many kind invitations we mean to accept.

  Today has been as full as all my other days. I lose Emma to the Apgars at noon. Then I lunch, usually at an oyster bar. These charming places are to be found in cellars; from the street, they are identified by a striped red and white pole with a large globe on top.

  But today I had to forgo the oyster bars and have lunch with Richard Watson Gilder—at a restaurant. I firmly refused to dine with him at his house for fear of his sister. A manly girl, Jeanette is devoted to literature and has views on everything; no sooner does she ask you a question than she answers it. Gilder’s wife is charming, but she is usually painting in her studio at the lunch hour. I also refused to be taken yet again to either the Century Club or the Lotos Club. One meets altogether too many writers at those places, and not enough publishers.

  I did give my promised talk at the Lotos Club last Saturday. Everyone seemed most pleased by my comments on France since the fall of the Empire, but there was no interest at all in the French writers.

  I met Gilder at a French restaurant reputed to be good, on Fourteenth Street just across from the imposing Steinway Hall, where orchestras play and lecturers bray. I believe that Charles Dickens inaugurated the Hall on one of his visits.

  Mother Linau’s is a most congenial restaurant, and though perhaps too self-consciously Bohemian (the clientele, not the waiters and cooks), I quite enjoyed our lunch. I even enjoyed the company of Gilder who is most likeable, despite a relentless desire to get ahead in the literary world that makes me uneasy. I see him because he is the editor of Scribner’s Monthly and likes to publish me. He sees me because he has developed some sort of a passion for my—exotic-ness?

  “You are so much an American writer always and yet so foreign!” The face opposite me looked pleased through the rising mist from the excellent hot bean soup.

  Happily, at Madame Linau’s, there are small tables as well as the institutional-type long tables that Americans are devoted to. Even at the Fifth Avenue Hotel one must dine at a table set for thirty and, worse, often occupied with as many strangers. Democracy.

  I have told the munificent Mr. Bonner that I might do him a piece on New York’s restaurants. “Make it Paris restaur
ants, and I’ll buy!” Someone at the Lotos Club told me that Bonner paid Bryant five thousand dollars for some limp verses on the death of Lincoln. For that amount even I would turn poet, and on any subject.

  “I don’t feel in the least foreign,” I lied to Gilder, enjoying the bean soup, which I liberally seasoned with vinegar. “In fact, this is like old times. We could be in the Shakespeare Tavern.” Gilder looked puzzled. I told him how literary and theatrical New Yorkers of the thirties used to gather in that pleasant place, long since torn down and forgotten. He hungers for memories of Irving, Halleck, Cooper. I do my best to amuse him.

  “I suppose in those days there was more fraternity amongst our literary men than now.” Gilder is younger than Emma, it suddenly occurs to me.

  “We did not really think of ourselves as ‘literary.’ Writing was something any educated man might try his hand at for the amusement of himself, of his friends. If one was poor—like me or Mr. Bryant—why, we wrote for newspapers, often under pseudonyms because we didn’t want to embarrass our friends.”

  “Our literature is a battlefield now, Mr. Schuyler.” Gilder looked stricken. “It is a war to the very knife between the realists, as they like to call themselves, and the writers of good taste—like you, like Mr. Bryant.”

  I did not enjoy the joint wreath so sweetly offered, but left it unremarked. After all, my interest in these urgent literary matters is slight. As long as I don’t have to read all these great new writers, I am willing to praise or condemn them as the occasion demands.

  The citadel of realism is the Atlantic Monthly, published at Boston by a Middle-Westerner named Howells, an engaging if somewhat too literary man whom I met years ago in Venice, where he was the very young American consul—his reward for having written an exultant campaign biography of President Lincoln.

  Note: remind Mr. Dutton that I am in a position to write a similar biography of Governor Tilden. Bigelow and I have corresponded on the matter and though he is the logical choice for such a work, he will be too busy with the campaign “and think you the best of all people to present the Governor to that small part of the electorate able to read.”

  Howells publishes realistic stories in the French manner as well as lively stories of the Far West, currently the most popular genre. In fact, if one is not a Westerner (or cannot write like one), the door of true success hereabouts is at best only half ajar. At the other end of the literary spectrum are the polite journals for which I write, including the one edited by Gilder.

  “We must never forget,” said Gilder loudly, perhaps suspecting that I was already beginning to forget what he was about to say even as it was being said, “that our audience is made up almost entirely of the ladies. Bless them!”

  I blessed them through a chunk of decent French bread.

  “That’s why Howells and the Atlantic are losing circulation,” he continued. “Because they insist on shocking or, worse, boring the ladies.”

  “Then our reading ladies must be as easily shocked as they are boring.” Alas, I had said exactly what I meant instead of what I had only meant to say.

  But like most people, Gilder heard what he expected to hear. “I don’t always agree with Stedman, say, or some of our other friends at where the line should be drawn. As rough and—well, shocking—as Mark Twain can be, I think him a very moral man and a good influence.”

  “I think him the most contemptible music-hall performer that ever pandered to an audience of ignorant yahoos.” I do detest Mark Twain, and several weeks of having to hold my peace on the subject caused me uncha­racte­ristic­ally to explode.

  Gilder was not as astonished as I would have thought. “Of course, Twain is a sort of god in these parts,” he observed mildly.

  “Particularly amongst those who do not read.” The fit was upon me. “He is what he is, isn’t he?” For some years Twain has been lecturing around the world, telling interminable jokes and tall tales like another Davy Crockett. Unhappily, I doubt that I shall live long enough to see him duly installed at his Alamo.

  “But surely, Mr. Schuyler, you admire the vigour of his short stories…”

  “He is a nice comedian and I would pay to see him on a stage. But if I could burn every copy of The Innocents Abroad I would.”

  My dislike for Twain is inevitable. The professional vulgarian wandering amongst the ruins and splendours of Europe, making his jokes, displaying his contempt for civilization, in order to reassure the people back home that in their ignorance, bigotry and meanness they are like gods and if they ever should (Heaven forbid) look about them and notice the hideousness of their cities and towns and the meagreness of their lives, why, there’s good old Mark to tell them that they are the best people that ever lived in the best country in the world, so let’s go out and buy his book! I will say one thing for him: he is read almost entirely by people who ordinarily read no books at all. This helps us all. As everyone knows, the President’s favourite (only?) book in all the world is The Innocents Abroad.

  Gilder did his successful best to soothe me; remarked that Twain’s sole attempt at writing a novel in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner had been a failure, though a play based on one of the characters in The Gilded Age is still being performed.

  “Now he seems to have failed again.” Despite Gilder’s liking for Twain, he is too much the man of letters not to take joy in the failure of another writer. “He has just this month published what appears to be a boys’ book. At Brentano’s they say hardly anyone has asked for it.”

  After lunch I proposed that we stroll about the Five Points.

  My companion was shocked. “You’re not serious, Mr. Schuyler?”

  “But we must make some concession to the realists. In France the writers haunt such places.”

  Gilder was grim. “I’ve read those writers and they are—unclean.”

  But finally he agreed to go with me as protection. In Broadway we boarded a bright Yellow Bird horsecar bound for City Square Park.

  The day was not cold and it was most agreeable to take the air, bad though the air was downtown; and see the sights, grim as they proved to be.

  At first glance, the Five Points have not changed much. As many streets converge on a dismal acre or two of bare earth. Since the melting of the snow, all is now mud and human excrement in that triangle known with some bitterness to the inhabitants as Paradise Square. A broken fence encloses the area, as if to protect the two spindly trees that are its only decoration. Chestnut vendors ply their trade in a desultory manner whilst old women of foreign stock sit on the front stoops of tenements, grating horseradish with filthy hands. Two young ragged tramps sit in a doorway, swigging from a long black gin bottle. Here and there gamblers have set up tables on the sidewalk, and despite the cold a number of customers play three-card monte.

  When I was young I used to enjoy the sense of danger, of seduction, even of violence in this quarter. But all that is changed. Not gone but changed, swelled by the immigrants who live jammed in the cellars, the attics, the tiny rooms of those ramshackle tenements that make up the sides of the triangle. Largest of the buildings is a one-time brewery recently turned by good church ladies into a Mission House. On either side of this lopsided building are narrow lanes: one is known as Murderers’ Alley.

  “Dickens was horrified when he saw this.” Gilder indicated the alley in which dark figures could be seen hurrying on terrible missions.

  Numerous beggars approached us. Fortunately, there are police on hand; at sundown, however, they sensibly vanish, and there is no law in the Five Points but that of the fist, the knife, the gun.

  At the corner of Worth Street a black figure—literally black in clothes, face, hands (but not a Negro)—blocked our passage. “We’ve got the dogs for you, sirs. They’re just startin’ in the pit now. Down there, sirs. In the alleyway.”

  Gilder said we were not interested, although I must say that
I’d like very much to see this new, dreadful, illegal sport. A specially trained terrier is placed in a small zinc-lined enclosure filled with rats. The terrier invariably kills each rat but also suffers horribly in the process. Meanwhile bets are placed: how many rats will the dog kill and how long will it take? Sometimes as many as a hundred rats are dispatched in a single contest.

  “Most popular sport.” Gilder was disapproving.

  “With the poor?”

  “With the rich, too. Shameful.”

  A number of prostitutes tried to entice us but they would not have interested anyone other than a blind-drunk sailor, for not only were they plain to look at and filthy in person but disease seemed to emanate from their every rag. I who have liked prostitutes all my life fled almost as precipitately as did the refined Gilder; it was as if even a glance from one of those poor creatures would be sufficient to make one burn and drip for a year despite the good god Mercury’s best offices.

  As we started down Thomas Street (discussing the sales of books—the usual subject of the New York scribbler), I noted the whorehouse where once I used to regularly spend myself in every sense of that verb. The house is unchanged. But now it is packed from cellar to dormer windows with Italian immigrants.

  As we passed, children flowed like lava from the house (the image is appropriate, since all are Neapolitan), and clustered round, begging for money. I scattered pennies; spoke to them in their own language, to their astonishment. Incidentally, I speak more French, German, and Italian in New York’s streets and restaurants than I do English. The entire working class save the Irish speak no English, and what the Irish speak is at best near-English.

  Yet my taste for low life has now returned after two months of trying to make my way in the world of scribblers. Tonight, in fact, I was absolutely indulged.

  Late though it is, I feel marvellous, despite exertions that at my age are more apt than not to end with the spirit’s swift departure from the voluptuously overburdened flesh.

  Jamie came to take us first to the theatre and then to supper at Delmonico’s. I thought that he would bring his fiancée, a Baltimore belle, but he came alone, and was not entirely sober. Fortunately, after so many years, Emma is as indulgent as a sister (twenty years ago when Jamie would pull her hair she would kick his shins). So we were very much en famille, as he installed us in his grand victoria.