1876

by Gore Vidal

  2

  “POLO,” SAID JAMIE, mopping his sweaty face with a towel, “is perhaps the oldest game in the world. And thanks to me, as you can see, it’s on its way to being the most popular American sport.”

  “Popular?” I indicated the thirty or forty bewildered spectators, most if not all of them related to the players on the green meadow at the edge of the Central Park.

  “Don’t worry. The Herald will make it popular.” Jamie was his usual airy self. We were seated beneath a shady tree. Today the weather has been formidably hot, and both horses and riders looked exhausted. For the last two years polo has been the rage in England. Not to be outdone by our—by his—British cousins, Jamie has now formed his own club, and a number of young men have taken to the game. Mounted on horses, the players try to hit a small wooden ball with a long mallet. Like so many games, polo is more amusing to play than to watch.

  Between matches, we were able to do a little business.

  “You are missed at the Herald.” Jamie looked at me accusingly. I looked at him most innocently, rather struck by the trimness of his figure considering the amount of absinthe he daily pours into it. “Nothing from Schuyler in July. Nothing in August. Next week it’s September. A new season.”

  “But what is there new to write about? I mean politically. No one seems very interested in either candidate.” This is true, and I find it astonishing, considering the issues involved. Yet all summer long the country has been entirely preoccupied with the Centennial Exhibition, with sewing machines, Japanese vases, popped corn, typewriters and telephones, not to mention incessant praise for those paladins who created this perfect nation, this envied Eden, exactly one century ago.

  “Things will heat up, Charlie, and you’re the man to do the heating.”

  “No, Jamie. Nordhoff heats the pot, which I simply stir from time to time.”

  “That’s all right, too.” He gave me a passing grade for this conceit. “Zach. Chandler has ordered the Interior Department to investigate Tilden’s taxes. Back in ’62, during the worst of the war, Tilden said that his income for the year was only seven thousand dollars. Actually, it was more than a hundred thousand.”

  “I should think that by not paying the infamous tax on income, Tilden would be something of a hero.”

  “Boys in blue,” said Jamie, combing his moustache with his fingers. “Union in peril. Slaves to be freed. Every dollar needed. Patriotic duty. Down with Copperhead Democrats. Oh, The New York Times is getting ready to pour it on. There is no crime their editors would not commit to help the Republican party.”

  “I don’t think that I can be lyric on the subject of taxes not paid.”

  “There’s good stuff assembled. And something very sweet about Hayes.” Jamie looked suddenly happy. “Some years ago he shot his mother with a pistol, in a sudden fit of insanity.”

  “This need not make him unpopular.” I thought Jamie was joking. But apparently he was repeating the latest rumour to make the rounds.

  All in all, I do not think that democracy, as practised in these states, is a success. While Tilden grimly, laboriously presents to the people his plans to reform what is, probably, the most corrupt society in the Western world, the press is busy with idiotic irrelevancies about Tilden’s alleged drunkenness, syphilis, closeness to Tweed—all set to music in a pretty song called “Sly Sam, the Railroad Thief.”

  Hayes’s taxes are also under review, since he, too, is a rich lawyer who did not pay, it is rumoured, any tax at all in ’68 and ’69. Lately he has been accused of stealing the money entrusted him by one of his soldiers killed in the war.

  “Charlie, go South. Please. I beg you. Get that pony out of the sun, you stupid Irish bastard!” shouted Jamie to his groom.

  “Even the heat at Newport is too much for me. I would perish at the South. Besides, Nordhoff’s already done you proud.” Nordhoff’s pieces for the Herald on the so-called cotton states have been most sympathetic and vivid; he appears to want some sort of re-alignment to the present political balance.

  “Always a breeze at New Orleans, and Florida is a paradise this time of year. That’s where the trouble’s going to be.”

  “How do you know?” Although I have no high opinion of Jamie’s general intelligence (certainly he has managed to keep well outside Western civilization and all its works), I am constantly impressed by his sense of this country. He is a sort of human barometer, able to anticipate before anyone else a political scandal, an Indian massacre.

  “South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana are all under Federal control. Grant’s got the troops down there.”

  “Less than three thousand in the whole South.” I am, after all, An Authority.

  Jamie ignored my Authoritativeness. “So what’s going to happen if they vote Democratic?”

  “But they will vote Democratic, and Tilden will be the president.”

  “That’s only a part of it.” Jamie looked about him vaguely. “I’ll give you half again as much as I’ve been overpaying you if you just go to New Orleans, talk to the leaders there…”

  I was firm. I refused to go South. But I did agree to resume my weekly pieces in September, since the last eight weeks of a presidential election are the crucial ones. At least from the point of view of learning who stole what from whom.

  “Did Hayes really shoot his mother?” I was curious about that detail.

  Jamie was donning his helmet, pony at hand. “Certainly.”

  “Shot her dead?”

  “No. Just winged the old cow. But then he never could shoot straight. Missed his own fat mother from six foot away. That’s no president, now, is it?”

  As Jamie mounted his pony and I prepared to go back to the hotel, I asked him if Madame Restell was in the city. “Oh, Charlie! You’ve no need of her for a friend, have you? Some lady you have wronged?”

  “No, dear boy. I want to chat with her about a common friend.”

  “Well, she’s away. Nobody’s in town in August, except the first American polo team!” He returned to his game; I returned to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

  Denise has been in excellent spirits, faithfully taking her powders twice a day, and there have been no more recurrences of panic. Emma is constantly with her, while Sanford is constantly at sea in his yacht. I would be critical of his behaviour if it did not so absolutely suit the three of us to have him at a distance.

  I had hoped my first evening in town to pay a call on Madame Restell and report on her patient’s progress, but instead of an evening at Madame Restell’s amusing atelier, I had an unexpectedly fascinating time with John Apgar, who had got us tickets for a new play called Two Men of Sandy Bar by Bret Harte, one of the numerous imitators of Mark Twain.

  “They say the play isn’t very good.” John was apologetic. “But there is supposed to be a most comical Chinese character in it.”

  I started to tell John about the Chinese club at Paris where a number of us go from time to time to smoke opium but then thought better of it: lately there have been a good number of attacks in the press on the Chinese, whose supposed addiction to opium is always mentioned as proof of their undesirability as citizens. I have always found it strange that a nation whose prosperity is based entirely upon cheap immigrant labour should be so unrelentingly xenophobic.

  Since the notices for Mr. Harte’s play had been unenthusiastic, the audience was small; also, late August is not the best time to open a play. The Union Square Theatre was so hot that it would have been difficult to enjoy any play, much less this one, on such a night. John tells me that Mr. Harte is best known for a poem about the “Heathen Chinee,” and regards himself as a friend to that beleaguered race; he writes, however, like an enemy.

  John apologized for the play, as if he’d written it. But I pretended to be amused, and in due course was very much amused when during the entr’acte, John pointed out to me Samuel L.
Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, in whose wiry small frame is concentrated everything that I most dislike in American life—or thought I disliked.

  “Would you like to meet him, sir?” asked John.

  “No.” And I meant “no.” I have never particularly liked the company of professional writers, and certainly this music-hall comedian and newspaper-writing Yahoo is quintessentially the professional. But my “no” coincided with the approach of Twain and the phrase “no go” on his lips seemed to echo me. He was talking to the play’s author, who looked every bit as distracted as playwrights are supposed to look on such occasions.

  “Good evening, Mr. Clemens,” said John as Twain suddenly veered in our direction, as if eager for a distraction.

  “Why, good evening. Uh…”

  “Apgar, and this is Mr. Charles Schuyler—”

  “Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler?” I was surprised to note that Twain’s normal voice is not much different from that of any other resident of Hartford, Connecticut. But when he is “in character,” as it were, the voice becomes very Western and yokel-ish; he also has the careful, artful delivery of a professional actor.

  “Well, I confess now that this is very like to being an honour, sir, meeting you.” Twain slipped into character as, warmly, he shook my hand. For the record, Twain’s hair is wiry and still fox-red. He is not tall, not stout. The face’s expression is very much sly-Yankee, in the pre-Civil War sense.

  “Your confession delights me, Mr. Clemens.” Does one address him as Clemens or Twain? I wondered. Following the usually impeccable Apgar lead, I called him Clemens.

  “Always hoped we might get a glimpse of you and your beautiful daughter in Paris but we never did, though we heard tell of you, naturally.” I could see that Twain was idling, hoping to strike the right note.

  I was benign as befits a sixty-three-year-old writer of only modest fame in the presence of a world-famous celebrity of thirty-nine.

  The playwright muttered something in Twain’s ear and moved away. “Let’s have us a drink at Delmonico’s,” said Twain, plainly relieved at Harte’s departure, “as soon as this—well, accident is over. Old Bret won’t be joining us right away. Says they’re going to rehearse the company right after the show. Sort of like giving a haircut to a corpse. Does no good, but the family feels better for the effort.”

  When the play eventually ended, we walked the short distance to Delmonico’s. John and I were not allowed to forget just how privileged we were, for everyone knows Mark Twain; even the hack men would shout, “Hey, Mark!” as they rattled down Fourteenth Street. Meanwhile, the great man talked what is known as a “blue streak.”

  We were greeted by Charles Delmonico, who told us that we were to be amongst the very last to dine at this branch of Delmonico’s “because we’re shutting down for good. Next month we open the place on Madison Square.”

  “You hear that?” Twain shook his head theatrically. “Now I ask you, how can you have any kind of tradition in a country where as soon as you get used to a place like this where the food is passable in spite of the Frenchified trimmings, they go and tear it down?”

  But Charles Delmonico sang the praises of the family’s new restaurant and invited us all to the grand opening. He then assigned us a table close to the main entrance where, according to Twain, “we can keep an eye on the comings and goings because, let me tell you, it’s a lot more entertaining in here than it is at any of the theatres in this town. Oh, that play!”

  Then Twain proceeded to drink the first of several Scotch Old Fashioneds whilst John and I shared a bottle of claret. I listened to him very carefully, in order to be able to record here everything America’s—no, the world’s—idol said.

  “And to think that my old friend wrote that thing, or, I reckon, just let it happen to him, like measles. Well, it’s plain no go, that play. And I’m sorry. Old Bret’s had a terrible time, poor man. First he comes East. Which is a fatal mistake—for some people. Then he gets himself this nice contract to write for the Atlantic Monthly. Then promptly forgets how to write like he used to, which is just plain peculiar. Then he goes out lecturing.

  “Now, there’s not a word to be said against lecturing, at least not by me, because there’s a whole heap of money to be made at it if you’ve got the knack. But old Bret, why, he can’t get up and talk worth a hill of beans. Which is again most peculiar, come to think of it, since he’s a natural-born liar. Anyway, now he’s trying the theatre, which is the gold mine in our trade.

  “Not yours, of course, Mr. Schuyler. Oh, I’ve got the greatest respect for your—uh, history-writing. But for us journalists, it’s the lecture hall or trying to please the ladies in the magazines, which is a Christ-awful labour, if you’ll forgive my language. But I have to say that the most or certainly the easiest money that I ever did make—and am still making—is from that play they made out of The Gilded Age—”

  “I saw it, Mr. Clemens.” John is an eager theatregoer. “I thought it most enjoyable, sir. Colonel Sellers is a wonderful character.”

  “Glad you did, because if you and a lot of others didn’t enjoy it, why, I wouldn’t be getting those weekly royalties that so delight my soul. Particularly after the bad time I had with the press when the book first came out and the Chicago Tribune, may it burn to the ground all over again, said I had written a hoax, which, as it developed, as attacks go, was nothing compared to what that bastard Whitelaw Reid did to me in the Tribune. I guess you saw that. But I made him back down just the way I made the Evening Post haul water. I reckon you know what the Post did to me. Well, maybe you missed that, living in Europe. They said I had paid out of my own pocket for a testimonial dinner to myself! Well, I sued and I won. Oh, I tell you that old Bryant is as sanctimonious an old weasel as ever got loose in a hen house.”

  This went on for some time. Mark Twain takes very seriously what the press says about him. Obviously this is the price one must pay for his kind of popularity; yet there is not a popular newspaper in the United States which an intelligent man need take seriously on any subject.

  But Twain was only beginning to warm up. He reverted again to play-writing and all the money that could be made in the theatre. “Fact, I’ve told Harte I’ll collaborate with him on his next play. We’re going to use that character of his, the Heathen Chinee. Which is what the public is going for in a big way right now, you know, comical Chinese characters. Then there’s some talk they may be doing that new book of mine for the stage.”

  “Tom Sawyer?” To my astonishment, the proper John Apgar was bedazzled by the splendid figure at our table, and knows his career in great detail.

  “Yes. I can’t say that the sales have been anything like what I had hoped for. We’ve sold just under twenty-five thousand copies since December—a fraction of what Innocents Abroad did in its first year. But if we can get a play out of the book…”

  Twain began a second Old Fashioned and I ordered my usual lobster salad. “Anyway, I told the managers that I see the two boys, Tom and Huck, being played by two really good-looking girls. That’s always popular, you know.” Tom and Huck are, I gather, two characters in the new book.

  “But would young women be convincing in the parts?” Yes, John has actually read the book, which I only glanced at. “Surely they are—well, real boys in your story.”

  “But that’s just a story. The stage is something else again. A gold mine for those who have the gift—not that I personally seem to have it on my own, so far, but you never can tell.”

  Until now, Twain the professional writer was living up to my grimmest expectation. But then he shifted to unexpected ground. “I must say I’d like to give up this whole damned thing here and light out with the Madam for Europe. The way you did, Mr. Schuyler. Not Paris, mind you. There’s nothing on this earth anywhere near as absurd as a Frenchman. But England—now, that’s a place where you can really use the past they got there…awf
ul as it is. But if you stay on here, you find you’re obliged to wear yourself out just trying to keep up to the minute.”

  “But your last book, sir, was very fine. And that was about the old days, wasn’t it? Your own boyhood.” John was reverent.

  “Yes, but it’s not the same thing as all that history they’ve got in Europe. And then, like I said, the sales have been very, very disappointing. No, I’m now interested in the truly historical sort of tale.”

  I made the mistake of asking him if he’d read Flaubert’s Salammbô. “An immoral sort of writer, I believe.” Twain looked stern.

  “But a most distinguished style—”

  “Mr. Schuyler, if I am forced to read a distinguished writer and suffer in consequences the torments of the damned, I will apply myself to the interminable distinction of our very own Mr. Charles Francis Adams.”

  “But I should think that with your great satiric gift”—I laid it on—“you would want to stay here where there is so much absurdity.”

  The answer to that was prompt. “Mr. Schuyler, no man can write good satire unless he’s in a good mood. Well, sir, I am in a terrible mood. Which means I can’t satirize anything at the moment.” The blue-grey eyes were as cold and as bright as the ice in the third Old Fashioned, which he held tight in his hand, as though fearful it might escape his clutch. “I want to take a stick, an axe, a club, and smash it all to bits.”

  “Smash what?” I had never suspected that at the heart of this beloved popular entertainer there would be so much rage.

  “Anything, everything! Look at those congressmen you’ve been writing about! Every last one a thief. You know their motto, don’t you? Addition and division and silence. They are all crooks—and why? Because of universal suffrage. Wicked, ungodly universal suffrage!

  “Now, you watch me real close because I am about to foam at the mouth! I always do at this point. How, I ask you, can you have any kind of a country when every idiot male of twenty-one or more can vote? And how, I ask you, can anyone with half a mind want to make equal what God has made unequal? I tell you to do that is a wrong and a shame.”