The After-Season in Rome

Henry James (1843–1916)
From Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: The Continent

Interesting Links

“Italian Hours, Tuscan Notes: A Taste of Henry James’ ‘Luxury of Loving Italy’” (Simone Sannio, L’Italo-Americano)

Video and images: “Henry James and American Painting,” co-curated by Colm Tóibín and Declan Kiely (Morgan Library)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie,” Henry James
• “Autres Temps . . . ,” Edith Wharton
• “The Namesake,” Willa Cather
• “A Traveler at Forty: Paris!” Theodore Dreiser

Buy the book
Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: The Continent
A Little Tour in France | Italian Hours | other travels | 845 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $20.00

“The Colonnade of St. Peter, Rome,” illustration by American artist Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) for Henry James’s Italian Hours (1909).

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“The other day, I became THIRTY!—solemn fact—which I have been taking to heart,” Henry James wrote from Rome to his parents in May 1873. Although he had not yet published a book, his first novel, the melodramatic Watch and Ward, had been serialized two years earlier in The Atlantic Monthly and he was steadily placing short stories, reviews, essays, and travel pieces in such prominent American magazines as The Nation, Scribner’s, and The Century. He was still financially dependent on his parents, who doubled in Boston as his bankers; all his earnings went directly to his father to help offset the funds sent to Henry in Europe. The letter home served two purposes: to reassure his mother that her parsimonious THIRTY!-year-old son did not (in her words) live “as the lilies, and feed like the sparrows” and to point out that the income he was due to receive from various publications that spring would, for the first time, put him “abreast with my drafts.” After a ten-year apprenticeship, Henry James was finally making ends meet as a full-time writer.

His letter also celebrated the change in atmosphere in Roman society that month: “The Barbarians are thinning out here very blessedly; I shall devote a portion of this last fortnight to going to various places where I have been waiting all winter for them to clear out.” The “Barbarians” were forestieri (foreigners) like himself—the seasonal tourists who invaded southern Italy each winter. He noted the city’s transformation in a letter to his new friend Sarah Butler Wister (daughter of the actress Fanny Kemble): “The weather is deliciously cool and brilliant and I have been pitying the good people who left religiously a month ago because it was the tenth of April. For the most part, though, I don’t want to recall them.”

James’s first visit to the Eternal City was three years earlier—two exciting months at the end of 1869. “At last—for the first time—I live!” he wrote exuberantly to his brother William after his arrival. “I went reeling and moaning thro' the streets, in a fever of enjoyment. In the course of four or five hours I traversed almost the whole of Rome and got a glimpse of everything—the Forum, the Coliseum (stupendissimo!), the Pantheon, the Capitol, St. Peter's, the Column of Trajan, the Castle of St. Angelo—all the Piazzas and ruins and monuments.” To his sister Alice he described Rome as “so vast, so heavy, so multitudinous that you seem to require all your energy simply to bear up against it.” For the first trip, however, he was mostly alone: “I see no people, to speak of, or for that matter to speak to,” he told William.

To read his letters and travel essays from both journeys is to witness his metamorphosis from a wide-eyed sightseer to a citified bohemian trying to blend with the natives. During his second stay in Rome, he abandoned his hotel room and rented a two-room alcove on the fourth floor of a building in the Corso, with the landlord’s family living just down the hall. (“A hotel gives one a disagreeable tourist feeling,” he had told his father earlier in the season.) His enthusiasm for sightseeing had been somewhat dampened, but his social circle had greatly expanded. He became fast friends with Kemble and her daughter and visited with the young historian Henry Adams and the sculptor William Wetmore Story. He played tour guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson when the “enviable man, fresh from the East,” passed through town at the end of his Mediterranean tour. At several dinner parties, James ran into one of his idols, Matthew Arnold, who was “decidedly a disappointment, in a superficial sense”; their conversation “remained small-talk and he did nothing to make it big.” Even as James became more firmly ensconced in the community of American and British expatriates, he convinced himself that each day left him “a little more Roman than before.”

It was during James’s second residence in Rome that he formulated the idea for his first book. As he wrote to his mother, “What I desire is this, to make a volume, a short time hence, of tales on the theme of American adventurers in Europe.” That collection, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales, would appear in January 1875. Three decades later, when James revised his essay “The After-Season in Rome” for the 1909 collection Italian Hours (which is the version reprinted below), he recycled the expression passionate pilgrim to describe the “quiet observer” who wants nothing more than to enjoy the delights of Rome in May, when all the other tourists are gone and “when Rome becomes Rome again and you may have her all to yourself.”

Note: James’s French “informant” was Ernest Hébert, a painter and the director of the Académie de France in Rome. The French phrase renaît à elle-même translates “returns to herself.” James’s reference to “the most morbid blue” is a pun; the Italian azurrro morbide translates correctly as “soft blue.”

The Pope during this period was Pius IX, who was also the sovereign ruler of the Papal States until Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia captured all the papal territories in 1860, became King of Italy in 1861, and cemented his victory over the Vatican by capturing Rome in 1870. In 1869 Victor Emmanuel married Rosa (“Rosina”) Vercellana Guerrieri, his second wife, whom James describes as living in the Villa Ludovisi at the time of his second visit. In June 1873 (after James left the city), the Italian government passed the Law of the Convents, abolishing the corporate status of religious orders in the former Papal States and placing hundreds of hospitals and schools managed by the orders under civil administration. The Palazzo del Quirinale, the destination of the protesters shouting Abbasso il ministero! (“Down with the government!”), was the official residence of Victor Emmanuel.

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One may at the blest end of May say without injustice to anybody that the state of mind of many a forestiero in Rome is one of intense impatience for the moment when all other forestieri shall have taken themselves off. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

A Traveler at Forty: Paris!

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
From Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

Interesting Links

“Dreiser’s Critical Reputation” (Donald Pizer, Dreiser Web Source)

“Theodore Dreiser’s New York” (Mike Wallace, The Paris Review)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “W. L. S.,” Theodore Dreiser
• “Mon Amie,” Randolph Bourne
• “Playing Courier,” Mark Twain

Buy the book
Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology
Hardcover | 613 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $28.00

“One of the thousands upon thousands of cafés on the boulevards of Paris.” Pen and ink illustration by American artist William James Glackens (1870–1938) for Dreiser’s essay on Paris in the October 1913 issue of Century Magazine; reproduced in Dreiser’s book A Traveler at Forty, published later that same year.

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“I have been very fortunate in having about me . . . a group of friends who believe in me and who have been interested in my writing,” Theodore Dreiser told an interviewer in 1913. “Without my friends probably I should never have written at all.” One such friend was English publisher Grant Richards, to whom Dreiser sent, in 1908, chapters from his novel-in-progress, Jennie Gerhardt. Richards replied favorably and suggested that the author visit England. Although Richards would be disappointed when Harper & Brothers opted to distribute the novel on both sides of the Atlantic, he repeated his invitation to Dreiser over breakfast in New York in November 1911 (shortly after the book was published):

You will come to my house in England; you will stay there a few days; then I shall take you to London and put you up at a very good hotel. You will stay there until January first and then we shall go to the south of France: Nice, the Riviera, Monte Carlo; from there you will go to Rome, to Paris, where I shall join you, and then sometime in the spring or summer, when you have all your notes, you will return to London or New York and write your impressions and I will see that they are published!

In fact, Dreiser had been hoping to go to Europe—for research as well as pleasure. He needed to continue his investigations into the life of streetcar tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, the basis for the protagonist Frank Cowperwood in a trilogy of novels: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (published posthumously in 1947). He had also been mulling over the idea of moving to London, since he felt that American critics and readers had not given him the attention he deserved. “It seems almost impossible to make my fellow Americans understand that I am alive,” he wrote Richards. “Once there I will get at least an equal run with [British novelists] Robert Hichens and Arnold Bennett over here.”

Dreiser seemed doubtful, however, about Richards’s promise to help him pay for the trip—yet the Englishman came through. First, he convinced Frank Scott, the president of the Century publishing company, to pay Dreiser a $1,000 advance for three travel articles for its eponymous magazine and hinted that the author was not entirely satisfied with Harper & Brothers. A few days later Dreiser found himself having dinner with Scott to discuss future books. Richards then convinced Dreiser to send to his editors at Harper a brazen letter intimating that other publishers had expressed interest in his books and demanding an advance of $4,000—$2,500 of it to be paid immediately—for both the just-published Jennie Gerhardt and for The Financier, which Dreiser had yet to finish and which Harper already had under contract. Not willing to lose an author whose books were getting attention in the press and whose sales were on the rise, his publisher agreed to the $2,500 portion—bringing the total to $3,500, more than enough to travel in style through Europe. He and Richards set sail on November 22, not even three weeks after their breakfast, and Dreiser didn’t return until April.

Disguised as “Barfleur” in Dreiser’s published accounts of his tour, Richards proved to be as adept a European tour guide as he was an impromptu literary agent. “I am quite sure that Barfleur, when he originally made his authoritative command that I come to England with him, was in no way satisfied that I would,” Dreiser wrote. “It was a somewhat light venture on his part, but here I was. And now, having ‘let himself in’ for this, as he would have phrased it, I could see that he was intensely interested in what Europe would do to me and possibly in what I would do to Europe.” More than even the narrator, Barfleur is the central figure of the travel articles Dreiser submitted to The Century Magazine. (When the manuscript arrived, the editors—and Richards—were appalled by the “women stuff,” and passages detailing the two men’s dalliances with various women, including prostitutes, had to be excised or drastically toned down.) The magazine pieces were incorporated into the book A Traveler at Forty, published in 1913 by Century in the U.S. and by Richards himself in England.

“Toward gambling, show, romance, a delicious scene, Barfleur carries a special mood.” And it is Barfleur who leads Dreiser through Paris, which (almost) lives up to the expectations the Englishman has conjured in the author’s mind. In the chapter of A Traveler at Forty titled “Paris!” Dreiser describes their arrival in the City of Light and their vivacious first night on the town—starting with the chic Café de Paris popular with American tourists, moving to the cabaret musical hall Folies-Bergère, and ending up for a midnight meal at the upscale restaurant Abbaye Thélème.

Notes: At the time of Dreiser’s visit, a restaurateur named M. Mouriez owned both the Café de Paris and the Abbaye Thélème. Over the previous half decade he had increased prices and improved service and décor with an eye to attracting American tourists, many of whom expected that fine dining should be expensive and anything that wasn’t must be déclassé. As The New York Times reported in August 1908, this business strategy upset both Mouriez’s competitors and local diners, who proposed a boycott of his establishments: “Parisians themselves are loudly complaining of the effect which the lavish expenditure of American dollars is having in raising the general standard of prices in the hotels and restaurants.”

George Moore was an Irish author who studied in Paris to be a painter and instead became a writer influenced by the naturalism of the French realists. Among his many books is the 1886 memoir Confessions of a Young Man, about life in bohemian Paris and London. The English-French phrase “on the qui vive” means “on the lookout.” Jean-Baptiste Greuze was an eighteenth-century French portrait painter.

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As we neared Paris he had built this city up so thoroughly in my mood that I am satisfied that I could not have seen it with a realistic eye if I had tried. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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A Walk to Wachusett

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
From Thoreau: Collected Essays & Poems

Interesting Links

Photos: “A short tour of Walden Pond” (Library of America)

“Mt. Wachusett” (Mapping Thoreau County)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Winter Walk,” Henry David Thoreau
• “The Art of Seeing Things,” John Burroughs

Buy the book
Thoreau: Collected Essays & Poems

View of Wachusett from Harvard, undated, oil on canvas by American painter George Frank Higgins (1850–1885).

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Twenty-five-year-old Henry David Thoreau had been writing essays and poems for half a decade and had published a few pieces in The Dial, the small journal edited by Margaret Fuller. Yet, at the start of 1843, he had not yet earned a penny from his writing. One might expect, then, that “A Walk to Wachusett” was “a triumph of sorts for Thoreau,” as historian Robert Kuhn McGregor suggests. It was to be “the first sustained essay for which he received monetary payment—except that the Boston Miscellany never paid him.” Alas, the short-lived Boston magazine “of Literature and Fashion” folded after the very next issue.

“A Walk to Wachusett” details a four-day trek (some fifty miles round trip) that Thoreau undertook in July 1842 with Richard Fuller, Margaret’s younger brother. The essay had its genesis at least a year earlier, however. In a May 1841 journal entry Thoreau addressed an ode to the various hills he could see from Concord, where he had just begun living in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home as a handyman and gardener. The poem opens with these lines:

Especial I remember thee,
Wachusett, who like me
Standest alone without society. . . .

Margaret Fuller rejected a subsequent version of this poem when Thoreau submitted it to The Dial. She leveled overall criticisms (“Thought lies too detached, truth is seen too much in detail”) and made suggestions for revision, although she did offer several encouraging comments. “Its merits to me are, a noble recognition of nature, two or three manly thoughts, and, in one place, a plaintive music.” A later version of the poem takes up most of the first three pages of his Mount Wachusett travel essay, and Thoreau would again revise and expand the poem for inclusion in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).

The young writer was already gaining a reputation for his eccentricities. A few weeks after the hike to Wachusett, on August 31, he met and befriended Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had just married Sophia Peabody. The older writer recorded the event in his journal:

Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday. He is a singular character—a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty. . . . [For] two or three years back, he has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men—an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood. . . . Mr. Thoreau is a keen and delicate observer of nature—a genuine observer—which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness.

By the time he dined with the Hawthornes, Thoreau had begun a draft of his travel essay—and, in fact, it was almost certainly Hawthorne who suggested he submit the piece to Boston Miscellany, which boasted a much larger audience than The Dial. Even though he never was paid for it, the essay marked a turning point for Thoreau. “What is new in ‘A Walk to Wachusett,’” writes biographer Robert D. Richardson, “is the clear trip narrative and the gentle, sociable one of the familiar essay, combining to make a miniature version of the travel book. . . . [The essay] is only a beginning, but it is the first fully characteristic Thoreauvian excursion.”

Notes: The epigraph is Thoreau’s own composition, a two-line poem originally titled “Westward, Ho!” in his journal. On page 44, Rasselas refers to the hero of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), whose home is the Happy Valley. A rifle (page 45) is a piece of wood used by mowers to sharpen their scythes. On page 46, Thoreau jokes that he and Fuller “could get no further” than “atque altæ moenia Romæ,” which is only the seventh line of Virgil’s Aeneid. The lines of verse later in the page are from Virgil’s Georgics. The wars of the neighboring Lancaster refers to King Philip’s War (1675–76). The Latin phrase gelidæ valles (page 47) means “cold valleys.”

The lines of poetry on page 47 are all from William Collins’s poem, “Hassan; or the Camel-Driver” (1742), while the excerpt in the middle of page 50 is from Wordsworth’s Peter Bell (1798). Helvellyn is a mountain in the Lake District in England. The poem at the bottom of page 50 is Thoreau’s own composition. On page 51, Thoreau quotes the last two lines of Virgil’s first eclogue.

On page 54, Thoreau and Fuller travel to the scene of Mrs. Rowlandson’s capture. On February 10, 1676, during King Philip’s War, Mary Rowlandson was captured during a Narrangansett raid on Lancaster and held prisoner for 82 days. She later wrote of her captivity in The Sovereignty & Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed. On the next page, he refers to several participants in the war: Paugus, a Pequawket war-chief, as well as Captain Benjamin Church, and John Lovewell (Lovell), prominent soldiers fighting for the Puritans. Myles Standish was a military leader in Plymouth Colony earlier in the century

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Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travelers. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Great Eaters of Georgia

Carson McCullers (1917–1967)
From Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays, & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“Carson McCullers’s birthday centennial kicks off” (Tim Chitwood, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer)

“Suzanne Vega talks about Carson McCullers” (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selection by Carson McCullers
• “Wunderkind”

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Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays, & Other Writings
Complete stories • The Member of the Wedding: A Play • The Sojourner • The Square Root of Wonderful • Essays, poems, autobiography • 667 pages
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Available in a boxed set
The Collected Works of Carson McCullers

Barbecue stand near Fort Benning, Columbus, Georgia, 1940. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott (1910–1990) for the Farm Security Administration (Library of Congress). “It is in Columbus that I feel most strongly the continuity of the past,” McCullers later wrote. “It was at Fort Benning that I spent the happiest years of my childhood.”

By 1953 Carson McCullers’s long-troubled marriage was at a breaking point: both she and her husband were in Paris, drinking heavily, and Carson found out that Reeves had (once again) forged her name on checks. That summer he attempted to kill himself and tried to talk Carson into committing suicide with him. She fled Paris and returned alone to her home in Nyack, New York.

A few months earlier, Holiday magazine had offered Carson McCullers fifteen hundred dollars to write a piece on Georgia and so she planned a return to the state in November to gather materials and memories. She wrote to a friend, the novelist and social critic Lillian Smith, and announced her intention to visit the town of Clayton and stay at the home Smith shared with Paula Snelling. But Smith was exhausted and frail; she had just finished her latest novel and had recently undergone surgery for breast cancer. “It was not easy to change Carson’s plans once her mind was made up,” Snelling later told McCullers biographer Virginia Spencer Carr. Yet when the unwanted guest arrived, they all stayed up late drinking bourbon and caught up on their lives and gossip, and McCullers complained at length about her rocky marriage.

During her stay with Smith and Snelling, McCullers learned that her husband had committed suicide in the Hôtel Chateau Frontenac on November 18. Although her hosts initially urged her to remain at their home to recover from the shock, McCullers insisted on going to visit Hervey Cleckley, a friend who was also a psychiatrist. Cleckley, who was busy at work (with coauthor Corbett H. Thigpen) on his book The Three Faces of Eve, later told Carr that he and McCullers discussed his research in psychopathology and talked at length about Reeves’s suicide. Their conversations helped McCullers understand both her husband and their relationship, as she later described in her unfinished memoir:

Hervey Cleckley has written a masterful book called The Mask of Sanity, and in that book I could see Reeves mirrored. Psychopathic people are very often charming. They live on their charm, their good looks and the weaknesses of wives or mothers.

McCullers finally returned to Nyack at the end of November—and the next day The New York Times published her husband’s obituary, which suggested as a possible cause of death injuries suffered from a car accident several weeks before. Yet the actual cause was hardly a secret to the couple’s acquaintances and, amidst the deluge of calls and condolences, there seemed to be a palpable sense of relief among some of McCullers’s friends. Carr reports that the actress Helen Hayes, who also lived in Nyack, dropped by and told Carson’s mother, “I’m not going to say I’m sorry, Bebe, because I don’t think I am.”

McCullers soon returned to the task of writing the article for Holiday, and she completed a version in early 1954. The events of the previous year surely explain the wistful and somewhat melancholy tone, and the essay was rejected because (according to biographer Josyane Savigneau) the magazine was “looking for a lighter, more descriptive, less personal piece.” McCullers’s various drafts were eventually stored at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, Austin, and in 2004 Carlos L. Dews and James G. Mayo collated the drafts to prepare “The Great Eaters of Georgia” for publication in Oxford American. It has been reprinted in the Library of America’s new collection Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays, & Other Writings and we present it here as our Story of the Week selection.

Notes: Une petite combine is French for “a little scheme.” Annie Dennis' Cookbook: A Compendium of Popular Household Recipes for the Busy Housewife was originally published in 1893; the volume familiar to McCullers was probably the later publication The New Annie Dennis Cook Book, which appeared in various editions between 1901 and 1921.

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After many years in Europe I visited my home state, Georgia. Until that time I did not realize that I was homesick, homesick for Georgia countryside, Georgia voices, Georgia ways. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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“There is no end to the amusements of Paris”

George Catlin (1796–1872)
From Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

Interesting Links
George Catlin and His Indian Gallery: an online exhibition (Smithsonian)

James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse in Paris in the 1830s (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Americans in Paris
“In France,” P. T. Barnum
“Mon Amie,” Randolph Bourne
“The Flying Fool,” Waverly Root

Buy the book
Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology
Hardcover | 613 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $28.00

Two years ago Story of the Week featured a report written by showman P. T. Barnum, describing how in 1845 he and Tom Thumb took Paris by storm, finagled an audience with the royal family, and jumped through the bureaucratic hoops required for public exhibitions. Almost immediately following Barnum and Thumb’s premiere came George Catlin, who brought five hundred paintings of American Indians, along with a regiment of real-life “Ioways” dressed in full regalia. The back-to-back visits were just two of a first wave of nineteenth-century American “curiosities or exotics—les sensations américaines” that David McCullough describes in his book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.

Six year earlier, unable to sell his paintings in the United States, George Catlin left for Europe and first tried his luck in London, giving lectures and pitching his artwork to potential patrons. It was there he ran into delegations of Ojibwas and Iowas who were already in England on their own dime, putting on shows dressed in feathers and paint. “Catlin invited them to join him,” writes McCullough, “and strongly resented—then and later—those who denounced him for exploiting the Indians.” Eventually, the Ojibwas returned to America, and off to Paris went Catlin and the Iowas, including their translator Jeffrey Doraway (an African American who had been raised among the Indians), the medicine man known as the Doctor, the warrior Jim, and their promoter George H. C. Melody. Like Barnum and Thumb, Catlin arranged an audience with the royal family and experienced his own problems with French bureaucracy—and ended up creating a sensation unlike any other impression by an American painter in Paris, before or since.

On the morning of the day for their reception the long stem of a beautiful pipe had been painted a bright blue and ornamented with blue ribbons, emblematical of peace, to be presented by the chief to the King. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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An English New Year

Henry James (1843–1916)
Illustrated by Joseph Pennell
From Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America

Interesting Link
Henry James Walked Here (The New York Times)

Joseph Pennell, 1857–1926 (The Victorian Web)

Previously from
Story of the Week:
“Paste,” Henry James
“Horsefeathers Swathed in Mink,” A. J. Liebling

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Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America
English Hours • The American Scene • other travels • 846 pages
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On both sides of the Atlantic, the 1870s were a time of economic collapse, beginning with a series of bank failures in 1873 and lasting until the end of the decade. Now referred to as the Long Depression, the downturn was known as the “Great Depression” before the Great Depression.

At the tail end of period, thirty-five-year-old American author Henry James, living in England, wrote a dispatch for the New Year that was published in The Nation on January 12, 1879. (He would republish the piece twice: once in his 1883 collection, Portraits of Place, and later in revised form in his 1905 travel book, English Hours, with illustrations by Joseph Pennell.) In spite of the societal gloom and the very thick London fog, the previous year had been an exciting, prosperous one for James, who had published “Daisy Miller” to international acclaim, soon followed by his novel The Europeans. He suddenly found himself a celebrity of sorts, the toast of English society; he met the poet Tennyson, the novelists George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the painter James McNeill Whistler. He kept a tally of engagements and exclaimed in a letter about “my having dined out during the past winter 107 times!”

But, as his writing shows, the devastation of the economic malaise was never far away and during the holidays he accompanied a friend to “visit the children of a workhouse.” There, somewhat stodgy in bearing and not a little romantic in outlook, he finds a modicum of seasonal joy in surroundings that evoke Oliver Twist.

Note: The reference to Lady Bountiful in the last sentence is to a character in George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) who gives away half her income as charity.

It will hardly be pretended this year that the English Christmas has been a merry one, or that the New Year has the promise of being particularly happy. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Twelve Strangers in the Night

Elizabeth M. Bisgood (1905–1988)
From Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight

Interesting Links

Lindberghs on Tour, 1933:
a newsreel (YouTube)

Charles Lindbergh: An American Aviator (The Spirit of St. Louis Project)

Previous Story of the Week selection
• “The Flying Fool,” Waverly Root

Buy the eBook
Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight
Sixty selections, ranging from the era of balloon flight to the Space Age

Passengers in a Ford Tri-Motor in 1932. Photograph by Russell Froelich (1890–1958). Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collections (30283). Courtesy Missouri History Museum.

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Anne Spencer Morrow and Elizabeth Mitchell Bacon were classmates at Smith College in the late 1920s. In a letter to her father dated 1926, Morrow identifies “that little Bacon girl” as one of her new friends away from home: “It is very nice to be with them and know them on the basis of reading instead of on a basis of just New York, if that makes sense at all.” During the spring of the following year, Bacon was in bed with the measles when Morrow shouted through the window of Elizabeth’s room in the infirmary, “Bacon, Bacon, a man has flown the Atlantic. His name is Charles Lindbergh. He flew all alone. He has landed in Paris.”*

Anne Morrow would meet Lindbergh just seven months later, during the Christmas holidays, when he stayed with her parents in Mexico City (her father was the American ambassador). Two years later they were married, and during their courtship Lindbergh taught Anne to fly; she would fly solo for the first time the year of her marriage and in 1930 she became the first woman to receive a glider pilot license. During the early years of their marriage, the couple would fly all over the world, pivotally charting possible air routes for commercial flights over the North Pole. After their first son was kidnapped and murdered in one of the most infamous crimes of the twentieth century, the couple moved to England to escape the intense American media attention, and Anne began fulfilling her earlier, collegiate ambition of becoming a writer, publishing thirteen books between 1935 and 1980.

“That little Bacon girl” also dreamed of becoming a writer—and it’s tempting to wonder if Anne’s career influenced the choice of topic for one of Elizabeth’s earliest articles, published under her married name Bisgood. Her perspective is different from that of her pilot-friend, however; she is one of twelve passengers, whose attitudes range from awestruck to petrified, on a commercial flight in 1933. And like her friend Anne, Elizabeth would go on to publish a number of other works (including, as Elizabeth Rodewald, the novel At the Edge of the Shadow, about a wife who falls victim to alcoholism). Most of her works are long out of print, but “Twelve Strangers in the Night” is a gem of travel writing rescued from oblivion and included, alongside selections by both Charles and Anne Lindbergh, in the LOA anthology Into the Blue: American Writing on Aviation and Spaceflight.

* As related in Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg

Do you remember how we stared at those people in the airport who were waiting around with us? We tried to make out which were the ones who were leaving and which were being left behind. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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All Parrots Speak

Paul Bowles (1910–1999)
From Paul Bowles: Collected Stories & Later Writings

Interesting Links

The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site

Paul Bowles centennial year: A tribute sparks a memory (Reader's Almanac)

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Paul Bowles: Collected Stories & Later Writings
The Delicate Prey | A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard | The Time of Friendship | Things Gone and Things Still Here | Midnight Mass | The Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue | Up Above the World | selected later stories
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Paul Bowles with parrot. Photograph by Roy Round for the back jacket cover of the US edition of Up Against the World (1966)

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During the early 1960s the New York poet and photographer Ira Cohen lived in Morocco for four years and, while there, he became friends with Paul Bowles (who was born 100 years ago this month). Cohen interviewed Bowles in 1965* and mentioned the author’s famous predilection for pet animals, resulting in a lengthy exchange about parrots, including the following bits:

Cohen: I somehow always think of you as a scorpion, with a cat somewhere in the background, a parrot maybe on its shoulder.

Bowles: I used to carry the green parrot around on my shoulder. I carried him all over the Sahara. They’re good to travel with. They’re happy, they’re not miserable traveling. You try to travel with a cat, and it’s miserable. . . .

My gray parrot lives in the kitchen in [Bowles’s wife] Jane’s apartment downstairs. It’s better for her to be with people and they worship the bird, talk to it, give it things. . . . It won’t let anyone touch it at all except Cherifa and me.

Cohen: I know it pecked a real piece out of my finger one day.

Bowles: Well, it bites everybody.

Bowles’s fondness for parrots (and his guests’ terror of them) dated back nearly three decades, when he first encountered the birds during his and his wife’s honeymoon in Costa Rica in 1938; afterward he was rarely without one or more of them. Although his household could sometimes be filled with exotic animals (the story below mentions an armadillo, an ocelot, and a tejon), he was particularly proud of his parrots, complaining in a letter to a friend about a “libelous” article that painted him “as distant, chilly, and eccentric, and, even worse, describing my parrot as skinny and featherless, which is certainly not the case.”

In 1956 he gathered some of the more memorable of his adventures as an avian aficionado in “Parrots I Have Known,” which was published in the popular travel magazine Holiday; he later retitled the piece when he included it in the 1963 travel writing collection Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue.

* Some of the interview was lost, and part of the extant portion was published in Conversations with Paul Bowles (1993).

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Parrots are amusing, decorative, long-lived, and faithful in their affections, but the quality which distinguishes them from most of God’s other inventions is their ability to imitate the sounds of human speech. A parrot that cannot talk or sing is, we feel, an incomplete parrot. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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In France

P. T. Barnum (1810–1891)
From Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

Interesting Links
The Barnum Museum (Bridgeport, CT)

“There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute:
P.T. Barnum? Hungry Joe Lewis? Artemus Ward? Mike McDonald? Apocryphal? Anonymous?” (Quote Investigator)

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Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology
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In the mid-1840s P. T. Barnum embarked on his first European tour. After scouting Paris for prospective venues and visiting the French Industrial Exposition of 1844, he returned the next year with “General” Tom Thumb. In a June 1845 dispatch for the New York Atlas, he wrote, “We have now been in Paris for nearly two months, and Gen. Tom Thumb’s harvest is still increasing! The excitable Parisians talk of nothing but ‘General Tom Pouce, les tres jollie [sic] charmant enfant!’” Two months later, he wrote to his stateside associate Moses Kimball, exclaiming that France “is the most charming country” but complaining about the onerous tax assessments, which he had handled with “a touch of Yankee.” The following selection from his 1869 memoir Struggles and Triumphs describes in greater detail the story of Barnum’s tour de France: the mobs that greeted Tom Thumb, the audience before the royal family, and the “Yankee trick” he pulled on the French tax collectors.

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I stopped at the Hotel Bedford, and securing an interpreter, began to make my arrangements. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Queen Victoria’s Jubilee

Mark Twain (1835–1910)
From Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, Other Travels

Interesting Links
The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum (Hannibal, MO)

The Mark Twain House & Museum (Hartford, CT)

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Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, Other Travels

While in London in 1897, Mark Twain was commissioned by William Randolph Hearst to report for the San Francisco Examiner on the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne. Evoking historical detail reminiscent of passages in The Prince and the Pauper and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Twain compares the jubilee to his own original and imaginative account of the 1415 celebration following the English victory at Agincourt, and he also reflects on the rapid changes in the British Empire during the Victorian age.

The two-part coverage of the Diamond Jubilee appeared in the newspaper on June 20 and 23 and was reprinted in other Hearst papers shortly afterward. In 1910—the year of Mark Twain’s death—the article was privately printed in a limited edition of 195 numbered books, and although it is not known whether this book version had the author’s sanction, a copy today can sell for several thousand dollars. The essay had not been readily available until it was included in the newly published Library of America volume of Mark Twain’s travel writings, and both parts are offered here for our readers’ enjoyment.

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LONDON, JUNE 19.—So far as I can see, a procession has value in but two ways—as a show and as a symbol; its minor function being to delight the eye, its major one to compel thought, exalt the spirit, stir the heart and inflame the imagination. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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