Relationships between the writers and offers a valuable look at postcivil war west coast and provides the kind of perfect medium for the development of bohemia. It is a rich feast of history that really unwinds many different threads. Both of the writers and the city that helped host their exploits. Ben is the author of another book, the counterfeiters paradise, which is published by penguin press, and his writing has also appeared in the San Francisco chronicle, and hes worked at lathams quarterly. It is a delight and a pleasure to have him with us. Welcome, ben tarnoff. [applause] thank you for that introduction. And thank you all for coming out tonight. I should tell you, i have a little bit of a flu, so if i get a little warm or if my voice gets a little froggy, youll have to forgive me. Mark twain, when he was here in the 1860s in San Francisco wrote a very funny sketch called how to cure a cold, and one of the cures was to rub mustard all over your chest. So if things get to that point, i might send someone out for mustard. [laughter] this is my book, the bohemians, and it tells the story of four young writers in San Francisco in the 60s 1860s, mark twain, brett hart, Charles William stoddard and edith galbraith. One of the things i really looed about this project is that it gave me access to an underknown part of twains life. I think when we think of twain, we think of the man in the white suit chomping on the cigar with the white hair, the kind of grandfatherly facade. Thats really the twain of his last decade with his kind of best work behind him. Hes in his 60s and 70s. The twain of my story is the twain of his 20s and 30s when he hasnt really learned to conceal his extreme emotions under that grandfatherly facade. Hes extremely ambitious, hes vindictive, hes angry, hes vengeful, hes competitive, hes filled with anxiety about money and fear for the future, hes convinced that hes going to end up in the poorhouse, and hes surrounded by these other young writers in San Francisco who really form him and mold him to literary maturity. San francisco was a great place to be a writer in the 1860s, and there are a few reasons why. Its very peaceful, so the civil war is tearing apart the rest of the country. San francisco, this is no fighting reaches the coast. And the draft is never applied west of iowa and kansas. So its a great place to sit out the war. Its also a very rich city. Its the industrial, financial and commercial center of the far west. And that prosperity finances a range of print publications that sustains a class of professional writers including twain. Its also a very urban city. Its got more than 100,000 people when twain is there, which makes it by far the biggest city west of st. Louis. And that population is very cosmopolitan which is a legacy of the gold rush. Youve got chinese, europeans from all different countries, south americans, mexicans, australians, you name it. The last reason that San Francisco so conducive to the literary scene is its isolation. Its pretty hard to reach San Francisco from the eastern united states. And that gives a kind of buffer to the culture, lets the city incubate its own idiosyncratic, cultural spirit that really guides twain and the rest of the bohemians. So i thought i would begin just at the beginning, read a little bit of the introduction and then introduce you to these four characters. The civil war began with an outburst of patriotic feeling on both sides and the belief that a few battles would result in a swift victory. It ended with the death of 750,000 soldiers and a nation shaken to its core. The wise men of an earlier era found themselves entirely unequal to the crisis. The great political and military leaders of the past, em em anyoneses both born in the priest century went into previous century went into forced retirement while younger, more modern minds rose to the challenge. The civil war destroyed old assumptions and rewarded radically new thinking. It triggered a cultural upheaval comparable to the one wrought a century later by the vietnam war, a National Trauma that made an older generation suddenly obsolete and demanded novelty, innovation, experimentation. The 1860s was bloody, bewildering and, if you managed to survive, a magnificent time to be a young american. If america belonged to the young, then its future lay in the youngest place in america, the far west. The pioneers who settled it were overwhelmingly young and untethered from traditional society, they built a new World Without the benefit of their parents counsel. If their encampments often reeled with excess, they also offered opportunities unlike any that might be found in the colleges and counting houses of the east. These new americans with the tanfaced children of Walt Whitmans poem pioneers, o pioneers, the vanguard of democracy. When whitman looked west, he didnt see a place, he saw an idea rooted in a mystical tradition as old as the country itself. Thomas jefferson had been its founding prophet. He and his disciples believed that American Civilization would march unevident my toward the pacific, and that the continents limbless supply limitless supply of land [inaudible] of course, the reality was often more complicated. The region contained land that resisted cultivation and indians who resisted extermination. But as the line of settlement inched steadily forward past the alleghenies, then the mississippi, hen the rockies, the jeffersonian dream of a west ward empire of liberty began to look like prof my. Even henry prophesy. Even henry david thorough felt drawn in a western direction. The future that lies that way to me, he wrote, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. Mark twain was born in 1835 and reached young adulthood at the best possible time, just as the country embarked on the most extraordinary period of change in its history. He was a westerner by birth, raised on the missouri frontier. The outbreak of the civil war forced him farther west as he fled the fighting in his native state for the region beyond the rockies. There he found another frontier, and a social experiment unlike any in the country. In 1848 the discovery of gold in california had triggered a swift influx of people from all corners of the world. As the gateway to the gold rush, San Francisco went from a drowsy backwater to a booming global seaport. Mostly the newcomers were young, single men. They hadnt come to stay, but to get rich and get out. They erected tents and wooden hovels, makeshift structures that made easily kindling for the citys frequent fires. They lived among the cultures of five continents, often condensed into the space of a single street. By the time twain got there, San Francisco still roared. It was densely urban, yet unmistakably western, isolated yet cosmo pollan, crude yet cultured. The city craved spectacle, whether on the gaslit stages of its many theaters or in the package genre of its streets. Its wide open atmosphere endeared it to the young and to the odd, to anyone seeking refuge from the overcivilized east. It had an acute sense of its own history and a pagannish appetite for myth making and ritual. Even as the gold rush waned and the miner shanties became banks and restaurants and boutiques, the city didnt slow to a more settled rhythm. Rather, it financed the opening of new frontiers in nevada, idaho and elsewhere and leaped from one bonanza to the next. Its citizens spent lavishly on feasts, on imported fashions and furnishings. They drank seven bottles of champagne for every one drunken boston. They kept the frontier spirit of the city alive. They also sustained a thriving publishing culture. California was always crawling with scribblers. The first generation wrote the story of the gold rush themselves in letters and diaries and the pages of the newspapers they started as soon as they arrived. San franciscos Printing Presses cranked out pamphlets, periodicals and books, relieving the loneliness and boredom of the frontier. By the 1860s the city had spawned an extraordinary literary scene, a band of outsiders called the bohemians. Twain joined their ranks, and the encounter would shape the entire current of his life. So the first time twain comes to San Francisco is the spring of 1863, and hes been living in Virginia City, nevada, at the time working as a journalist for a local paper called the territorial enterprise. The reason twain comes west originally is to avoid the civil war, because when the civil war breaks out in 1861, he is working on the mississippi as a steam boat pilot, and the war shuts down traffic. So hes out of a job. And the other problem is that in missouri at the time you have draft agents from both the confederate and union sides going door to door, pressing young men into service. So he has to get out of missouri. And he has an opportunity when his brother is appointed secretary to the territorial governor of nevada. So the two of them, sam, sam clemens as he was known before he took on the pseudonym, and orion, his brother, got on the stagecoach and went west. And then in the spring of 1863, twain visits San Francisco for the first time. San francisco is the place to spend money in the west if you have it. So hes coming to the big city from the mining boomtown, and hes looking for a good time. What people remembered best about him, aside from his red brows and rambling gait, was his strange way of speaking, a drawl that spun syllables slowly like fallen branches op the surface of a stream. Printers transcribed it with hyphens and dashes, trying to render rhythms so complex they could have been scored as sheet music. He rasped and droned, lapsed into long silences, soared in the swinging, the enor tenor inherited from the slave songs of his childhood. He remained dreadfully imperially serious. He mixed the factual and fictitious in proportions too obscure for even his closest friends to decipher. He was prickly, vindictive, a personality as impenetrably vast as the west and as prone to seismic outburst. He was Samuel Clemens before he became mark twain n. The spring of 1863, he made a decision that brought him one step closer to the fame he craved. On may 2, 1863, mark twain boarded a stagecoach bound for San Francisco. The trip from Virginia City, nevada; to the california coast promised more than 200 miles of jolting terrain, sleepless nights spent corkscrewing through the sear rahs and alkali dust so thick it caked the skin. Twain, at 27, already had more interesting memories than most men twice his age. He had piloted steam boats on the mississippi, roamed his native missouri with band of confederate guerrillas, and taken the Overland Route to the territory of nevada that was named after a local indian tribe. Now he fell in love with the first and only metropolis of the far west. After the deserts, he later wrote San Francisco was paradise to me. Its grandeur and festivity exhilarated him, and he gorged himself with abandon. He drank champagne in the dining room of the lick house, a palatial haunt of high society. He toured the pleasure gardens on the outskirts of town. He met a pretty girl named jeannie who snubbed him when he said hello. He rode to the beach and listened to the roaring surf and put his toes in the pacific. On the far side of the continent, he felt the countrys vastness. He hadnt planned to stay long, but a nonstop itinerary of eating, drinking, sailing and socializing kept him too busy to bear the thought of leaving. In mid may he wrote his mother and sister to say he would remain for another ten days, two weeks at the most. By early june, he was still in San Francisco, had switched lodgings and showed no signs of slowing his pace. I am going to the dickens mighty fast, he wrote, a taunt aimed squarely at his devoutly calvinist mother. The city offered many afterdark amusements, gambling dens and girly shows, and twain rarely returned home before midnight. He was never at a loss for companionship. He reckoned he knew at least a thousand of the citys 115,000 residents, mostly friends from nevada. The citys main thoroughfare, montgomery street, where crowds and carriages swarmed under gleaming facades, reminded him of his hometown. Spring turned to summer, and still twain hadnt left. Dreading the inevitable, he clung on as long as he could. It seems like going back to prison to go back to the snows and deserts, he complained. In july he finally said farewell. He had been away from nevada for two months. Even after he settled back into the sagebrush on the dry side of the sierras, the city lingered in his mind. Over the course of the next year, he would find many reasons to return; first to visit, then to live. Wnc5hj xini he would chronicle its quirks and hurt the feelings of not a few of its citizens. In exchange, San Francisco would mold him to literary maturity. It would inspire his evolution from a provincial scribbler into a Great American writer, from3 hannibals Samuel Clemens into americas mark twain. So twain continues to visit San Francisco, and then he decides to move there permanently in the spring of 1864. When he does, he comes into contact with brett hart who is the citys leading literary figure. And two of them are going the two of them are going to form a very complicated love hate relationship that will continue beyond San Francisco. Brett hart liked to be looked at. That season, as summer fog cooled the city, he might be seen in a stylish overcoat sporting a lamb collar brightened by a solicitous flash of color, a crimson necktie, perhaps, that set him apart from the rabble. Every fold, every fabric of the young mans outfit would be carefully arranged. On montgomery street, he footed through the human foliage. If your eyes happened to meet his, he would smile. If he spoke a few words in greeting, his voice would be agreeable. But there would be nothing to remind one of mark twain. He preferred to be admired from afar. And there was much to admire. At 26 hart had become the leading literary light of the pacific coast. No small feat in a state where even the shaggiest miner aspired to barthood, and poets were pop stars, declaring verses to crowds at public gatherings. Hart had powerful friends, a wife and an infant son. His evenings didnt involve drunken romps of the Virginia City variety, they centered on more domestic concerns like how to keep baby griswold from disturbing his study or his wife from dragooning him into household chores so he might have a couple of quiet hours to write. This shy, softspoken dandy must have seemed like an odd choice. He didnt wield an axe or a revolver. He ridiculed the regions most cherished myths, especially the cult of the pioneer. He hates philistines, sentimentalists and hypocrites and felt that california had all three in abundance. Where others saw progress, he saw decline. Few things escaped the corrosive touch of his subtler reverence as his friend, William Dean Howells, later observed. But hart wasnt just a destroyer. If he often felt disillusioned with california, or this was because he saw its True Potential as an infinitely original civilization with its own unique history and habits, a singular fraternity of spaniards, mexicans, chinese, europeans, australians, indians and americans living free from the trammells of precedent on the far edge of the world. Here was the real, genuine america trumpeted by walt whitman, a world of raw literary possibility beyond the wildest imaginings of the countrys reigning custodians of high culture and just possibly the seeds of a new national literature. The next character im going to introduce is Charles Warren stoddard whos a very, a very shy young man. In 1862 he publishes his first poems in the golden era which is the citys most prestigious literary paper of the time. If youd been standing on clay street where the golden eras offices were at the time, you would have seen him pacing back and forth in front of the office with an envelope with his poem in his hand in a cold sweat waiting until everyone had cleared off, and then he finally would push the envelope through the slot and run away after having spent hours building up the courage. And sure enough, the poem appears in the next edition of the golden era, and he starts writing moreclsx poems and becos connected to this bohemian scene centered on hart and twain and others. So heres stoddard. The shop on montgomery street sold mostly religious books and bibles. Inside its clerk was constantly dusting not because he cared much more cleanliness, but because the monotony of the motion made it easier for his mind to wander. As he sank deeper into his day dream, the feather duster in his hands became a palm tree. He longed for the tropics. He had fallen in love with them eight years earlier on his way to california. E remembered the syrupy taste of the oranges and the mist that sprayed when he broke their skin. He remembered the bright plumage of the birds, flickering against the relentless green of the jungle. Most of all, he remembered the natives who adorned their nearlynaked bodies with necklaces and wreaths. One day californiasi most fas preacher appeared in the doorway, cutting stoddards reverie short. Celebrities had been in the shop before, but never one who would stoddard held in such high esteem. In my youth i was a hero worshiper, and thomas stark king seemed the most heroic of them all. After a probing glance at the trembling clerk, king drew a scrap of newspaper from his pocket. Did you write these lines, he asked, pointing to his poems . Stoddard said he did. The minister responded by reading them aloud. He added words of encouragement to his favorite lines and invited stoddard to visit him with more work. He also presented tickets to his upcoming lecture series on american poetry where he would be discussing those distinguished new england poets whom stoddard had read as a schoolboy. Then he vanished. I was left speechless with wonder and delight, stoddard recalled. At first glance the young poet might have reminded king of hart. Both were slender and delicately built.