Going West

Twain, Harte, Stoddard, Coolbirth - Ben Tarnoff's The Bohemians (Penguin, 2014)

Excuse the absence - I've been on a long voyage to the West and points thereabouts. With some inevitably, I finally ended up in San Francisco in the 1860s and 1870s, and got stuck there for a while. I've been working on what will be one of the first chapters of my book about Mark Twain and the Mississippi, which means I've finally been getting to grips with his time in California and the rich literary world of which he was a part. At the same time, I've also been chasing the ghost of Ralph Keeler - remember him? - which meant uncovering his early career in the Alta California and other San Francisco publications. And then, with some uncanny timing, I got asked to do some filming about the Gold Rush, which left me westering for a little while longer. How lucky, then, that these occidental travels coincided with the publication of Ben Tarnoff's The Bohemians (Penguin, 2014), one of the most engaging and readable books ever written on this pivotal and underexamined moment in literary and cultural history.

George Catlin's American Indian Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery

No lie - you've got until June 23rd

Last time, I was engaging in a little cultural time-travel with my Walter Scott field-trip - attempting to resurrect, on an individual level at least, an association between a place and a book that had faded away long ago. Yesterday, now I sit and think about it, I was engaged in a similar process of time-slippage when I finally made it, just in time, to the National Portrait Gallery's pretty wonderful George Catlin exhibition.

Our Library Table: Debby Applegate's The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

Henry and Harriet

I've been reading Debby Applegate's The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher in stolen moments (so, slowly). It's a compelling read, all told, and totally illuminating at points. I knew a little bit about Beecher (the adultery bit, mainly, thanks to Twain's satellite relationship to the Beechers in Hartford) and had an inkling that I wanted to know more. This proved to be a great place to start, pointing the way to a number of paths that I'll be following in the months to come.

Mark Twain on Mardi Gras

(Mardi Gras in 1858, London Illustrated News, May 8 1858, via)

On March 8 1859, a 23 year old trainee steamboat pilot named Samuel Clemens, a month away from getting his full pilot’s license, arrived in New Orleans after a week’s voyage down the Mississippi from St. Louis. But when the young man who would soon become Mark Twain stepped off the Aleck Scott, looking forward to some rest and recuperation in the South’s premier city, he was unprepared for the spectacle that met his eyes: he had alighted in the middle of Mardi Gras.

On the New Orleans Times-Picayune

Sad news out of New Orleans: last night, the New York Times reported that the Times-Picayune looks set to face severe cuts, including the loss of a daily edition. Gambit covers the reaction here. This is depressing for a whole hosts of reasons, not least because the paper, in one form or another, has been a vital part of city life (and literature) for 175 years.

Kipling and America

Kipling, at home in Vermont

I've been reading some Kipling recently, for circuitous reasons (mainly Peter Bellamy), and it's highlighted to me just how much of a Kipling-dunce I really am.

Ralph Keeler, Literary Vagabond

(via)

Above: the lost literary vagabond, Ralph Keeler (1840-c.1873). Who? Exactly.

Backlog Studies

In which I find myself surprisingly beguiled by Charles Dudley Warner.

Walter Scott in The Gilded Age

Teaching Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age (1873) this week for the first time in a few years, I was interested to find early evidence of Twain's apparently profound and persistent dislike of Walter Scott (the kind of thing that would find much fuller and franker expression in, say, Life on the Mississippi (1883)).