Ben Tarnoff - The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

T he 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 pasteminences like John Crittenden and General Winfield Scott, both born in the previous centurywent into forced retirement, while younger, more modern minds like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant 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, bewilderingand, 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 postadolescent excess, they also offered opportunities unlike any that might be found in the colleges and countinghouses of the East. These new Americans were the tan-faced children of Walt Whitmans poem Pioneers! O Pioneers, the vanguard of democracy:

All the past we leave behind;

We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world,

Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

When Whitman looked West, he didnt just 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 inevitably toward the Pacific, and that the continents limitless supply of virgin land would be settled by yeoman farmers who embodied the nations egalitarian spirit. 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 forwardpast the Alleghenies, then the Mississippi, then the Rockiesthe Jeffersonian dream of a westward empire of liberty began to look like prophecy. Even Henry David Thoreau, when departing for his daily walk in Concord, felt drawn in a westerly direction. The future 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 frontierand 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 menthey hadnt come to stay, but to get rich and get out. They erected tents and wooden hovels, makeshift structures that made easy kindling for the citys frequent fires. They built gambling dens and saloons and brothels. They lived among the cultures of five continents, often condensed into the space of a single street: Cantonese stir-fry competing with German wurst, Chilean whores with Australian. On the far margin of the continent, they created a complex urban society virtually overnight.

By the time Twain got there, San Francisco still roared. It was densely urban, yet unmistakably western; isolated yet cosmopolitan; crude yet cultured. The city craved spectacle, whether on the gaslit stages of its many theaters or in the ornately costumed pageantry of its streets. Its wide-open atmosphere endeared it to the young and the odd, to anyone seeking refuge from the overcivilized East. It had an acute sense of its own history, and a paganish appetite for mythmaking and ritual. Even as the gold rush waned, and the miners shanties became banks and restaurants and boutiques, the city didnt slow to a more settled rhythm. Rather, it financed the opening of new frontiersin Nevada, Idaho, and elsewhereand leaped from one bonanza to the next. Its citizens spent lavishly: on feasts of oysters and terrapin, on imported fashions and furnishings. They drank seven bottles of champagne for every one drunk in Boston. Long after the gold rush, they kept the frontier spirit of the city alive.