The Bohemians by Ben Tarnoff

Author:Ben Tarnoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

III

EXILE

Portrait of Harte published on the cover of Every Saturday , January 14, 1871.

SEVEN

America greeted the news of Bret Harte’s departure from California in 1871 with an enthusiasm verging on the hysterical. The nation had an endless appetite for novelty. The roaring capitalism of the postwar era was demolishing the old and making a religion of the new, and now a writer from the younger half of the Union arrived to give fresh life to American letters.

Mark Twain felt his mercury rising. The spotlight properly belonged to him, and he knew it. He was the true westerner, not this foppish city slicker who looked like he just stepped off Savile Row—a dandy with little direct knowledge of the mining camps, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a flannel shirt and a slouch hat. Twain had plenty to be pleased about—The Innocents Abroad was selling well—but his star shone nowhere near as brightly as Harte’s. Harte didn’t capture just the middle-class demographic that loved Twain, but also those vicarish high-culture types who tended to be stingier with their praise. “Do you know who is the most celebrated man in America to-day?” Twain fumed to a friend, “—the man whose name is on every single tongue from one end of the continent to the other? It is Bret Harte . . . All the cities are fussing about which shall secure him for a citizen.”

He was right: every city wanted Harte. From the moment the former Overland Monthly editor boarded the train in San Francisco in February 1871, the country breathlessly beheld his transit. The telegraph tracked his every move. Newspapers from Idaho to Ohio chattered about where he might choose to live.

Chicago felt good about its chances. The city was America’s railroad hub, a gateway between the urban East and the rural interior. Its merchants and manufacturers had followed the transcontinental track to the Pacific, poaching markets once loyal to San Francisco, and now Chicagoans hoped to lure Harte to the shores of Lake Michigan to take the editorship of their Lakeside Monthly. Soon after he and his family arrived on February 7, several prominent citizens invited him to dinner to discuss the offer.

Inexplicably, he failed to show. This rudeness outraged his hosts, and their indignation grew when they learned the reason for it: apparently Harte had expected a carriage to be sent. This embarrassing revelation unleashed the scorn of the local press, and wormed its way through papers around the country—the first hiccup in Harte’s princely progress. Yet Harte may have concocted the carriage excuse to cover up a domestic squabble, according to a story told years later by a friend. In Chicago the family stayed with Mrs. Harte’s sister. When Mrs. Harte discovered the Lakeside dons hadn’t invited her sister to dinner, she angrily announced that none of them would go.

Whether Bret’s ego or Anna’s temper or some other symptom of their toxic marriage produced the Chicago fiasco, it suggested a darker margin to the storybook romance between America and the author of “The Heathen Chinee.

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