Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (4 page)

But some outlaws seemed to maraud merely for the pleasure it gave them, the homicidal maniacs the Harpe
brothers being the most infamous example. “Big Harpe” (Micajah) and “Little Harpe” (Wiley) were technically robbers, but it might be that they really robbed so that they could have the greater satisfaction of murdering their victims. A shot in the back or a tomahawk to the head were their preferred methods, after which they would slit open the dead man’s belly, fill it with rocks, and dump it into the river. When Big Harpe was mortally wounded by a pursuing posse in western Kentucky in 1799, one of the posse sawed off the dying outlaw’s head while Big Harpe cursed him. “You are a God Damned rough butcher,” he panted, “but cut on and be damned!”

Colonel Fluger, in some contrast, was interested in profits, though his method of making them was murder-by-the-boatload. Colonel Plug, as he was known, would slip aboard a boat, get down into its hold, and bore a hole in it. When the boat began to sink, Plug’s companions, watching from shore, would row out to the rescue—but rescue only the goods, leaving the crew to drown. Eventually Plug was trapped belowdecks when a boat filled too quickly, and he went to the bottom with his victims.

The end of the outlaw chieftain Mason wasn’t as neat as that of Plug or as savage as that of Big Harpe. Nevertheless, it has its characteristic frontier flavor. When a posse caught up with him west of Natchez, the pursuers tomahawked and decapitated him. Then, in order to claim
the reward money, they covered the head in a ball of blue clay to prevent putrefaction and carried it to Natchez where it was duly identified.

Brawlers, outlaws, gamblers, filibusterers, land sharks, whores, runaway slaves—all these drifted on the Mississippi River’s mighty sweep down to New Orleans. And there on its waterfront, in its cafes and coffeehouses, its high-roller casinos and splintered gambling dens, in its garishly appointed whorehouses and stinking one-room cribs there grew up a rich gumbo of oral traditions that persisted and multiplied long after print and the stage had pretty well choked off authentic folklore in regions where it once had flourished.

In New Orleans they told of the rough hordes of boatmen who would arrive there starved for women, whiskey, and fresh opponents to fight. And the town had everything they wanted, including the far-famed brawler Bill Sedley, who for years was more than a match for any upriver newcomer—but not for Annie Christmas, a six-foot-eight woman who could carry a flour barrel under each arm and a third one atop her head when she worked down on the docks. When she got bored with stevedoring, she would turn tricks down there until she’d worn her line of customers down to the last man. At other times she would transform herself into a one-woman towing
machine capable of pulling a fully-loaded keelboat from New Orleans to Natchez on the dead run. Bill Sedley steered clear of Annie, and it was said she was also the reason Mike Fink stayed away from New Orleans. So one group’s lore imaginatively overthrows another’s.

The city’s huge black population claimed Annie as its own and said she had twelve sons, each of them a seven-footer and coal black. But black and white, all New Orleans residents claimed the pirate king Jean Lafitte, who over the course of his career amassed a fortune by taking tall treasure ships in the Caribbean and running slaves up to the city from his base on Grand Terre. It was Lafitte and his pirates—Dominique You and Nez Coupe Chighizola, among others—who heroically came to General Andrew Jackson’s aid at the battle of New Orleans that ended the War of 1812, and had it not been for them, the outcome, they say, would have been different.
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Treated shabbily by the government he’d helped to save, the pirate king and his crew left America behind, sailing south. A few years later—off Mexico some said—he died in battle, leaving his treasure buried somewhere on Grand Terre where it lies undiscovered to this day.

Maybe only Macao was as given to gambling as New Orleans in the nineteenth century. Men would bet on anything and would bet everything, including all they owned—wives, slaves, plantations. The names of heroic
gamblers like Star Davis, Jimmy Fitzgerald, Napoleon Bonaparte White, and Colonel Charles Starr were rolled off like a litany anywhere a form of chance took place—around a card table, out at one of the city’s racetracks, in a cockpit, or at a dog fight. Jim McLane was among the most famous and a disgrace to his highly placed family: his mother sent him ten thousand dollars a year to stay away from home.

In 1938 the pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax chanced upon Jelly Roll Morton playing piano in a third-rate nightclub in Washington, D.C. By that point Morton was a prematurely aged and forgotten figure, but in the early years of jazz he was famous as a pianist, composer, and bandleader. And just as he could recall for Lomax the names and styles of men who played piano in the tonks of turn-of-the-century New Orleans—Sammy Davis, Alfred Wilson, Kid Ross, the incomparable Tony Jackson—so he could recall also the city’s legendary gamblers, pimps, and outlaws of that time and place: Aaron Harris, Black Benny, Sheep Eye, Chicken Dick, and Ed Mochez who left behind a hundred and ten suits when he died. “Aaron Harris,” Jelly told Lomax, “was no doubt the most heartless man I’ve ever heard of. He could chew up pig iron—the same thing that would cut a hog’s entrails to pieces—and spit it out razor blades.”

There were heartless outlaws on the streets and waterfronts of New York, too, but in the nineteenth century they generally formed gangs, particularly after 1820, and there were times when they actually seemed to rule the entire city, as they did during the Draft Riots of July 1863. Slums like Five Points, the Bowery, and the Fourth Ward spawned gangs of such fearsome reputation as the Five Pointers, the Bowery Boys, the Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits, and the Hudson Dusters. They fought each other for turf and for control of certain forms of commerce and roughneck entertainment, sometimes in pitched battles that would go on for days. Figures like Mose, the “Bowery B’hoy,” whatever their historical origins may have been, transcended the grim and doubtless pathetic facts of their lives to become legends and at last the sanitized figures of popular culture. At the level of oral lore Mose was an eight-foot figure of terror, carrying into battle a ponderous paving stone in one hand and a wagon tongue in the other. If an opponent was lucky enough to avoid these, Mose might stomp him to death with his copper-soled shoes studded with inch-long nails. His Herculean habits recall in an urban vein those of young Mike Fink: in the dog days of summer Mose was to be seen striding the mean streets of his kingdom with a fifty-gallon keg of ale swinging from his belt. By the 1840s and thereafter
Mose became a comic figure of the stage, a swaggering, flag-waving tall-talker in a red flannel undershirt.

Equally fiercesome if not gigantic was George Leese, better known as Snatchum, a member of the Slaughter House gang, who prowled the waterfront dripping with his weaponry. His singular claim to fame, though, was his work at bare-knuckle boxing matches where Snatchum acted as a kind of precursor of modern-day boxing’s expert “cut men.” But Snatchum, instead of cauterizing and swabbing the boxers’ cuts, as the modern men do, would suck the blood from their wounds. Others in the pantheon with him included Hop Along Peter, Patsy Conroy, Kid Shanahan, Kid Twist, and the original Billy the Kid, a thief who was arrested one hundred times before his twenty-sixth birthday. Big Nose Bunker belongs here as well. Big Nose was a celebrated rough-and-tumble fighter whose final opponent chopped off four of his fingers and stabbed him six times in the stomach. Somehow Big Nose was able to carry his fingers in a paper sack to the nearest police station where he asked for a doctor to sew them back on. He died before the ambulance arrived.

The Deerslayer, American fiction’s first major character, is an oblique and somewhat sanitized reference to America’s dark and violent past. But very little else of this folk-based material entered the national literature’s mainstream until the career of Mark Twain, and none of it in all its hairy violence, its cruel humor, its profanity, sexuality, casual bigotry, and xenophobic contempt for anything foreign or smacking of culture (often enough regarded as synonymous). As for language, the American vernacular was confined to levels far beneath polite letters. It appeared in minstrel shows, in newspaper sketches, and in almanacs that mingled jokes and regional speech oddities with crop forecasts and reports of three-headed calves. It appeared also in burlesque, which achieved enormous
popularity after the Civil War, especially in New York City. But even in burlesque, with its bawdiness and disdain for just about everything, the full dimensions of the vernacular were hardly more than hinted at, as if in the broad innuendo, the double entendre, the smutty stage whisper audiences were being invited to understand and participate in an otherwise forbidden code. Beyond this there was nothing to indicate the liberal profanity, the crude sexuality that must certainly have been there in the stories swapped about Mike Fink, Annie Christmas, Big Harpe, even Crockett, whose comic antics and speech would originally have been strong stuff indeed at the oral level.

In his famous Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1837, “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson had boldly called for a literature that would reach down to the real roots of the American experiment and speak in a radically native way. “Give me,” he said,

the insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat… .

But what could the Concord sage have known of the news of the boat when that boat was a keelboat or a broadhorn docking at the noisome slum of Natchez-under-the-Hill
or New Orleans where some eighty years later a precocious Jelly Roll Morton was learning the street songs that would ultimately scorch the stately decor of the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Chamber Music Auditorium when he recorded them for Alan Lomax? Henry Miller would have loved this stuff. Emerson would have been appalled. Nor could he have imagined the existence of unlettered artists of profanity who could reduce their audiences to stunned silence with their long, rolling braids of oaths and epithets—rude oral-formulaics such as those that made possible the Homeric epics. Emerson was perhaps our most original thinker, and at great effort he had struggled out of the heavy cloak of his ancestral Puritanism to encourage American writers and artists to create art out of the experiences of a new world instead of pining for those of an old one. He had, however, a thin opinion of fiction (including that of his neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne) and thought that eventually “these novels” would give way to truer and more serious stuff. And he actually never learned much about the life of the street or the waterfront and even less about what went on where the ragged edges of civilization met the great woods—certainly far less than Crèvecoeur. Lecturing in Beloit, Wisconsin, in the winter of 1856 where it was twenty below, he confided to his journal that he knew well enough that his rough audience in their thawing coats and boots could accept his wisdom
only if it came in comic dress. But he couldn’t give them that. Wit he had, though he employed it sparingly. But not that comic spirit that kept company with violence to make up the American Grotesque.

Emerson saw more of the country than Henry Tho-reau did, though almost always surrounded by Bostonian acolytes who did their best to shield him from certain incivilities. But on the wild shores of Cape Cod and in those great woods Crèvecoeur had written of, Thoreau learned things about America that his mentor had at best but intuited. It wasn’t only the remaining wilds of the east, as in Maine, that inspired his observation that there was still a lot of America that remained undiscovered. It was as well that unconquerable wildness beating in America’s heart. It made the nation coarse, uncouth, and at times even disgusting to him. How it would ever get into literature as he understood that term was a question. What would the literature be like if someone like his Indian guide in Maine, Joe Polis, learned to read and write? As for his own work, when he chose, Thoreau could write close to the vernacular, employing here and there certain of its pithy and colorful terms, but for him that was more than enough flavoring. His themes were after all relentlessly lofty and required an appropriate diction.

When he went down to New York to meet Whitman in
1856, he seemed almost to shrink from too close a contact with this self-styled “rough” who appeared positively to glory in phenomena so decidedly anti-poetic: the sounds of boot soles on the city’s pavements, the talk of boatmen and clam diggers around a chowder pot. Who wrote as well of

Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made,
acceptances, rejections with convex lips …

And then there were passages like this one that could not but have horrified a man who was always striving to overcome the inconvenience of having been born with a body that had its own needs:

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer
morning;

You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned
over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged
your tongue to my barestript heart,

And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you
held my feet.

To his great credit, Thoreau fought past his squeamish-ness to recognize the poet’s singular power and authenticity, that what Whitman was writing pointed the way the
literature of a democracy would have to go, even if he couldn’t go there himself. He was profoundly in the American grain—but always somehow a little bit above it: he would not write of the city’s wharves and docks and crowds, nor yet of tipsy prostitutes with pimpled necks or of bloody suicides sprawled in some tenement room with the pistol beside the body. He did want to see the Great West and write about it, but he didn’t live long enough.

It took American writers about sixty years to begin to appreciate what Whitman had done in the first three editions of
Leaves of Grass,
and even well after that Henry Miller could with real justice refer to Whitman as that “rude hieroglyphic,” so astonishingly modern was his work. But the literary impact of Mark Twain was immediately apparent. Here in ink and on paper and available at polite levels of the culture was America
talking
—not writing—in the outsized, colorful monologue mode that had been a century and more in the making. After Twain’s long career had come to an end, his old friend the novelist and editor William Dean Howells called him the “Lincoln of our literature.” The tribute stuck, though it is not clear just what Howells meant by it. Many things maybe. Clearly he meant that his friend was unlike any writer who’d come before him—“sole, incomparable.” Maybe he also meant to draw comparisons between the two men
from the heartland who had known the great rivers, their life and lore. And just as Lincoln had drawn on the jokes and stories of that region for his own jokes, illustrative comparisons, and metaphors, so for everything that was best in his writing Twain drew from frontier, folk-based materials. It is also possible that Howells may have been thinking that as Lincoln had freed the slaves, so Twain had freed American literature from its slavish devotion to Anglo-European models and taught it to admire the sound of its own voice, endlessly gabbing and tale-spinning.