Death and Football

My dad died the day after my last post. Perfectly, for him—sadly, funnily, beautifully—he died during a 49er game. He would have appreciated the D. H. Lawrence poem I posted the day before; he was a literate enough guy. He would have appreciated the words I spoke to his unresponsive form late that night; he had his sensitivities, even if he didn't like to show them much. But he would have found much more meaning and poetry in the fact that he breathed his last as the Niners took a 9-6 lead into the locker room, flanked by both his sons. Most of all, I think he would have enjoyed the fact that because we were yelling at Jimmy Johnson's halftime inanities, we both missed his final breath.

      Russell Jones was a sweet man and a genial man, but not an easy man to reach. His father died when he was young, leaving him in the care of a cold, mean mother during the cold, mean Depression. (As my Aunt Betty likes to say of their childhood, "The wrong parent died.") The best years of his life were his first two in the Marines, 1940 and 1941; he had a place in the world, an ordered life, a community, and enough to eat for the first time in his life. Then the war tore that ordered world apart and sent his community of shipmates to the bottom of the Savo Sea. That, I think, was the betrayal that sent him into his shell for the rest of his life. He married a woman who seemed nothing like his mother but turned out to be too much like her in some painful ways. He endured an often cruel marriage by keeping his head down and his eyes turned away from his heart, and he sought comfort in the pleasures he'd learned to trust in childhood: old movies, hiking, big band jazz, fixing cars, and football.

      He wasn't one to stretch out and embrace his sons' interests; I suspect he was afraid to stretch too far beyond the places that felt safe to him. My brother and I learned, years apart and on our separate paths, that the way to connect with our father was by learning to care about his interests. Ray was the more physical one, the better hiker and the better repairman. I was the one who in his teens knew who directed The Public Enemy and who played lead trumpet for the Benny Goodman band. Both of us, though, knew the 49ers.

      When my brother was young, in the early 1950s, the family lived in San Francisco, at one point in an apartment across the street from Kezar Stadium. My dad would take him up to the roof to watch games for free, hoping nothing too exciting happened near the west end zone, where the curve of the stadium cut off their view. When Ray names players from those years, they echo with the depth and weight of a liturgy: Tittle, Perry, Nomellini, St. Clair. A decade later, when we were living in the suburbs and watching the games on TV, I learned to recite magic names of my own: Brodie, Washington, Wilcox, and the real Jimmy Johnson.

      The family kind of flew apart in the '70s. My brother wasn't getting along with our mom, who had developed an inexplicable distaste for his wife; I'd pretty much turned my back on my dad and his interests as I pursued the young-writer role that my mom liked to see me in. Then came that autumn day in 1981. I was living in San Francisco and couldn't help overhearing that the long-hopeless 49ers had just beaten the Dallas Cowboys 45-14. Not quite able to bring myself to be a football fan again, I nonetheless checked the sports section the next week to see that they'd beaten the Packers in Green Bay, then actually listened to the radio for a while as they held off the hated Rams to take control of the division. So when I visited my parents the next weekend, I suggested to my father that we watch the 49ers play the Steelers to see if these guys were for real.

      For years he had been following the 49ers on his transistor radio in the garage, if he managed to follow them at all, driven underground by my mother's loathing of sports. But she could raise no objection when her favored son (hell, I'd just landed a literary agent and had an editor interested in my first book) wanted to watch the game. San Francisco won. My dad, his heart wounded by decades of 49er disappointments, focused mainly on the fact that their offense hadn't been very productive, but I was excited, more excited than I'd ever have expected to be. I think that afternoon was the first time in years that I'd picked up the phone to call my brother. Had he been following these guys? Was this really happening? He'd also been burned by the Niners too many times, but I remember a cautious note of optimism in his voice when he said, "It looks like Montana might actually turn out to be a pretty good quarterback."

      Over the next two decades, the 49ers were the linchpin of my family's socializing. Watching them with either my brother or my father had a special sweetness; when Ray and I both managed to watch a game with the old man I felt as though I were part of a sort of triangular perfection. Gradually even our mom got excited by playoffs. The last time Ray and I took my dad on a major outing, when the hydrocephaly was beginning to rob him of his mobility, it was to see SF beat Detroit at Candlestick Park. The day, months after our mother died, when we moved our father into an assisted living facility, the 49ers were playing the Eagles; we plunked him down in the common room to watch the game, taking turns checking on him and the score. We forgot about the furniture moving for a while as our boys sealed the game with a magnificent goal-line stand, the last football we three watched together until the day our father died.

      His mental decline paralleled the team's decline. I watched a few games with him in the bad years of 2004 and '05, but he couldn't quite follow what was happening. The seasons after that were entirely lost to him, as was life itself except for a narrowing circle of emotions and half-memories. We got the call on a Sunday night that he'd gone into the hospital with pneumonia and might not come out. For a few days we lived at the hospital, watching him fight for life, until he settled into a morphine sleep. Then we took turns with the vigil, agreeing that it was too much to hope that we could both be there for his death, hoping that one of us could be.

      Late Sunday morning I came in to relieve Ray. He was watching the morning NFC game on the TV mounted to the hospital room wall. He would have left right away, so he could watch the 49er-Giants game at home, except that the Falcons put on a fourth-quarter rally to tie the Saints and he couldn't tear himself away. The Niners game started, and he decided to watch a little of it before he left. It turned out to be one of those gut-clenching defensive match-ups, and a little became the entire first half. We talked about how fitting it was that we got to watch one more game with Dad. When a doctor came in to check Dad's uneven breathing and stopped to look at the TV, Ray told him about watching games from the roof of that apartment building across from Kezar. In the closing minutes of the half I noticed that Dad's breathing had gotten more ragged, but how could I think about that with the Niners botching a chance to score right before going into the locker room?

      Finally, at halftime, Ray stood up and gathered up his book and his sweatshirt in order to go. He paused just long enough to watch Terry Bradshaw and Jimmy Johnson trading inane remarks. I looked at Dad to tell him, as a matter of ritual, that Ray was leaving. Then I said, "I don't think he's breathing."

      We watched the rest of the game together, with our late father between us. We talked about the immensity of what had just happened, the loss of our last parent. We talked about our memories of him and our gratitude that his decline hadn't dragged on any longer than it had. But we also talked about Justin Smith's perfectly timed leap to knock down Eli Manning's fourth-down pass and win the game for San Francisco. Russell Jones raised his sons to know what really matters.

To bid farewell to one's own self

My father is dying, and this is what I'm reading:

The Ship of Death

D. H. Lawrence

I

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew

to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell

to one's own self, and find an exit

from the fallen self.

II

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?

O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall

thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.

And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!

Ah! can't you smell it?

And in the bruised body, the frightened soul

finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold

that blows upon it through the orifices.

III

And can a man his own quietus make

with a bare bodkin?

With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make

a bruise or break of exit for his life;

but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?

Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder

ever a quietus make?

IV

O let us talk of quiet that we know,

that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet

of a strong heart at peace!

How can we this, our own quietus, make?

V

Build then the ship of death, for you must take

the longest journey, to oblivion.

And die the death, the long and painful death

that lies between the old self and the new.

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised,

already our souls are oozing through the exit

of the cruel bruise.

Already the dark and endless ocean of the end

is washing in through the breaches of our wounds,

Already the flood is upon us.

Oh build your ship of death, your little ark

and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine

for the dark flight down oblivion.

VI

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul

has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying

and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us

and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying

and our strength leaves us,

and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood,

cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

VII

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do

is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship

of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food

and little dishes, and all accoutrements

fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies

and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul

in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith

with its store of food and little cooking pans

and change of clothes,

upon the flood's black waste

upon the waters of the end

upon the sea of death, where still we sail

darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

There is no port, there is nowhere to go

only the deepening blackness darkening still

blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood

darkness at one with darkness, up and down

and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more

and the little ship is there; yet she is gone.

She is not seen, for there is nothing to see her by.

She is gone! gone! and yet

somewhere she is there.

Nowhere!

VIII

And everything is gone, the body is gone

completely under, gone, entirely gone.

The upper darkness is heavy as the lower,

between them the little ship

is gone

It is the end, it is oblivion.

IX

And yet out of eternity a thread

separates itself on the blackness,

a horizontal thread

that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.

Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume

A little higher?

Ah wait, wait, for there's the dawn

the cruel dawn of coming back to life

out of oblivion

Wait, wait, the little ship

drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey

of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow

and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

X

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell

emerges strange and lovely.

And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing

on the pink flood,

and the frail soul steps out, into the house again

filling the heart with peace.

Swings the heart renewed with peace

even of oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!

for you will need it.

For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

(1929)

Election Predictions

Just so I can say, "Hey, look how smart I am!" a year from now...or say nothing at all...

It will be Mitt for the GOP. It was always going to be Mitt for the GOP, and so it will be. But I see Obama being reelected, by about one Ohio's worth of electoral votes. The Democrats will hold onto the Senate, narrowly. But they won't even get close to taking back the House. Which means the next five years will be just about the same as the last three...

The Enemy Silenced!

Continuing The Undressing of America: Anthony Comstock and the YMCA battle to convict the radical free-love, free-speech proponents Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin for indecency when they expose the sexual shenanigans of a prominent minister in the press:

Comstock was not content to be merely a player in the protracted Claflin case. That would always be a mark of his character: he was indefatigable and unwilling to stop. Although his sponsors at the YMCA distanced themselves from this case, they saw great value in his new fame and confidence. The Association was sending representatives to Washington to lobby for a stricter law on the mailing of obscene material, asking sympathetic lawmakers to help them prepare a strong case for the new Congress that would convene the following March. Even though the previous Congress had just passed a law covering the same ground, the YMCA argued that the fact that the prosecution had such a hard time constructing a case against Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly was evidence in itself that the current statute was inadequate. Comstock began to accompany the association’s expeditions to the capital. At first he was baffled by the labyrinths of Washington, but his sheer passion, certainty, and knowledge of the extent of the evil of obscenity made a deep impression on many legislators.

      The Claflin case dragged on into 1873. Free on bail, the sisters traveled the Northeast giving speeches and continued to bring out issues of the Weekly. They regularly attacked Comstock as a hypocrite and a coward, and described the YMCA as “our new Protestant Jesuits” and said they would call its crusade a new Spanish Inquisition except that no one involved had the stature of a Torquemada. Many newspapers joined in the attack, if not quite so colorfully, complaining that such prosecutions were a dangerous threat to freedom of speech, declaring that the federal government’s involvement in what should have been a local issue was gross overstepping of its authority and an attack on American liberties, and that the prominence of a private citizen like Comstock in a federal case was a travesty.

      The federal prosecutors involved seemed less than enthusiastic about this case that looked weaker with each passing week. The entire aspect of the case involving Henry Ward Beecher was dropped, and by the spring the only charge still being pressed concerned the sisters’ far less interesting exposé of Challis the stockbroker. The sisters, their supporters, and many other observers denounced the whole procedure as simple persecution by Anthony Comstock and the YMCA.

      Comstock did not back down. Even as he grew less sanguine about the prospects of the case, he still saw it as a moral necessity to keep fighting. He stood in the middle of the courtroom one morning, looking at the seats filled with Claflin supporters, listened to their jeers, and knew he was up against “the hardest kind of free-lovers.” He knew that he must not surrender, even if the case went wrong, even if he became the target of national opprobrium: “What happens to me matters not at all,” he write in his diary. “The Master’s plan is everything.”

      His efforts were not without reward. Even as most newspaper stories on the Woodhull case did not go far beyond amusement and titillation, an increasing number of editorials denounced their values and philosophies as genuine threats to American life. More and more news stories rolled off the presses about free love, utopian communists, wealthy radicals, and dangerous publications. Many leaders of the feminist movement of which the sisters had been so vital a part condemned them for their insouciant dismissal of Christian morals and American traditions. Even as he was losing the case, Comstock stirred and focused public anxiety about indecency and the effects of mass publishing on the minds of young people and the future of the country.

      Nor was he idle. While the sisters were out on bail, he pushed the authorities to prosecute another newspaper publisher, a man named Frank Leslie whose weekly paper flirted more openly with erotic fiction. This was a speedier trial, and before Woodhull and Claflin appeared in court again he’d already won a conviction. This was a major case for Comstock: for one thing because Leslie published a newspaper that appeared on most newsstands and would have been thought reasonably respectable, not dirty books that had to be pulled from the back room; for another because it brought him national publicity. The fame and notoriety he’d earned from the Claflin case had made Comstock himself worth reporting on. He was becoming recognized as the leader of a new reform movement, the cleaning up of publishing.

      Comstock’s greatest work in the first months of 1873, however, were not in the courts of New York but in the congressional offices of Washington. He had become the lead proponent, and to some extent the lead author, of a sweeping bill to give the Post Office vast and unchallengeable authority not only to refuse to carry any material it judged obscene but to prosecute violators, with penalties including years of imprisonment. It also created the office of an official Post Office Inspector whose job it would be to catch filth passing through the system, to arrest perpetrators, and—unilaterally, even before they were judged guilty—ban their products from the mail. That would be a powerful post, because hardly any publication could survive without the mails. There were no networks of distributors then, no trucks to move material around, and most of the country’s population still lived in small towns or rural areas. The inspector’s findings could be overturned in court and the accused could return to the mails, but being banned from them even for a few months could be a commercial death sentence to many a publisher, and so the rage and whims of the nation’s postal inspector would be terrible indeed. Not surprisingly, Comstock hinted that he would available for the post, should the government see fit.

      Congress at that moment was reeling from revelations of scandal: many leading members of the legislature had been taking bribes from the construction company called Credit Mobilier, which was actually an arm of the Union Pacific Railroad and was revealed to have defrauded the nation of over a hundred million dollars through inflated, extortionary invoices. The newly reelected President Grant had been implicated as well, and suddenly any opportunity to stand up for decency and reform was seized upon in Congress, especially by the dominant Republican Party. The “Comstock Bill,” as it was already becoming known, sailed through both houses easily and became law on March 7, 1873. Surely no one was surprised when the Postmaster General chose Comstock as his Chief Inspector.

      Before Comstock could begin to take on his new duties, another opportunity arrived. In June, as most expected, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin were found not guilty of sending obscene materials by mail. The case was done, and many member of the YMCA board expressed embarrassment at having been associated for so many months with such a dubious crusade. Comstock argued that the sisters would have been found guilty under the new law that he and the Association had just seen passed, but still the directors began to aver when he suggested they turn their energies to hunting new quarry, this time armed with their stricter law.

      Frustrated, Comstock spoke to some of his allies on the board and suggested that what the cause needed was a new organization, unattached to the YMCA or any other institution that might have reason to feel conflicted about the pursuit of smut. Within weeks, those men and several other prominent New York Protestants had come together to form the Society for the Suppression of Vice. It would have an ample budget and a full staff for the purpose of seeking out filth and the men behind it, then publicizing their findings, pushing New York’s city and state authorities to take action, and helping them build their case. As its first secretary and chief warrior, the new group chose Anthony Comstock.

      By the end of summer, Comstock was beginning his wave of arrests as special postal inspector and chief suppressor of vice. By the end of the year, he was already scoring convictions. The state of New York proved as eager to support him as had the national Congress, for it too had been thrown into upheaval by scandals—Boss Tweed was tried and convicted in the same summer that the Society was formed, laying bare years of blatant graft and corruption in New York city’s politics—and there too the reformers were taking charge, and few dared oppose them. The prosecutors and most judges of the city proved more than eager to win Comstock’s favor and hand him victories. They wanted to show the tide of sin being turned, especially by the Republican Party, and in one realm, the realm of publications, Comstock was a valuable ally. Almost immediately, newspaper and magazine editors began to clean up their product, and the dealers of more open smut drew deeper underground. Soon enough Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin had shut down their weekly and moved on to less risky pursuits.

      By the end of 1873, Anthony Comstock had made himself the chief censor of America, the embodiment of the dam that the old Protestant elite erected against the flood of words and pictures and ideas pouring from the new mongrel nation, a man of tremendous cultural power. He was not yet thirty years old. His reign promised to be a long one.

Next: enter Bernarr Macfadden...

Finding Your Story

This is a post I wrote for my friend Meghan Ward's terrifically informative Writerland blog. It's mainly about a class I teach at the San Francisco Writers Grotto called "Finding Your Story," but it also touches on a lot of the struggles and discoveries of writing the current book.

You know the line: “Those who can’t do, teach.” Never the favorite homily of those of us who write for a living and teach on the side. But I’ve developed my own version, and this one I’ll stand by: “Those who can’t do learn how to do...and then they’ve got something to teach.”

Some aspects of writing have always come easily for me: dialogue, pace, a generally smooth style. I entered this business with a kind of natural glibness, which in the early going I thought could carry me all the way. It took me years to realize—and even more years to admit to myself—that what didn’t come naturally for me was telling a story.

Oh, I was clever enough with structure and the mechanics of plot. I could outline with the best of them. But somehow my narratives, in both fiction and nonfiction, rarely had the forward drive they needed or came together with the symphonic inevitability I wanted. When it did happen, I never quite understood why; I could only step back and marvel at how a story had miraculously emerged from the sludge and found its own way to a satisfying ending. More often I had to dig my way to a reasonably satisfying ending through countless wrong turns and massive rewrites.

The books I read about story didn’t help much. I was getting screenwriting jobs for a while, so I became especially familiar with the geometric approach of how-to-write-a-movie books, all those three-act structures and juxtaposed A-plots and B-plots. The more I tried to use those, the more my stories came to feel like those wooden frames they use to build sidewalks, inert boxes waiting to be filled with concrete. (A lot of what they say isn’t even accurate; any savvy screenwriter can tell you that Hollywood runs on a four-act template, and why people insist on calling it three acts with a turning point in the middle of the extra-long second act I have no idea.)

The more I looked at the usual ways of breaking down a story, the less sense most of them made. What’s this “beginning, middle, and end” business? Isn’t the end implicit in the beginning and the beginning still continuing to the end? How do you separate the “middle” from either? Once separated, how do you keep it from becoming just a receptacle for narrative miscellany? And what’s all this about the “character arc”? Why does a character have an “arc”? Does it go up in the middle and then back down? In a story of midlife fullness and senile decay it might, but that’s hardly every story. I don’t see my life as an arc. A line, a road, a river, or a tree, fine. But not a parabola.

So I started looking hard at how other writers made their stories work, “reading like a writer” and feeling for the sandbags and steel girders under the fascinating details and pretty prose. I started summarizing the most compelling and satisfying stories, and I found that with the best of them I could keep boiling them down, making them simpler and simpler, and they never lost their essence.

“A bunch of sheltered aristocrats are lost in assorted self-preoccupations and existential riddles until their nation is nearly destroyed by an invader, tossing them back on the basics of life, death, and love, enabling them to see the hand of God in human events.” A lot more happens along the way in War and Peace, but I never did catch Tolstoy losing touch with that core story.

That’s when I really understood (and it’s not like I’d never heard this, but I finally started to get it in a concrete, applicable way), that a story is not a plot, and it’s not a structure, and it’s not a series of concrete events. At its heart, every coherent story is a single event. A single transformation or revelation. It isn’t made up like a brick building of its component parts; its parts are manifestations and demonstrations of its essence. I discovered I could get pretty metaphysical about it, especially late at night after working too hard. But I also discovered I could find the heart of my own story through a series of exercises.

     The most important step always turned out to be understanding just what my story is. Who’s it about, what’s it about, what one big thing is happening, what I’m saying about people or the world. That turned out to be a lot harder than it sounds. The details of writing can be awfully distracting, not only for the reader but for the writer; I learned that I could write thousands of words of dramatic events about interesting people without ever fully understanding what I was trying to say—and without understanding that, I could never know just which events mattered or just how to tell them.

My work got better. It felt stronger, it got easier, and the world started telling me I was onto something. When your editor—a publishing veteran so tough she’s known in the business as “the Dragon Lady”—tells you that your final chapter brought tears to her eyes, and when you get Michael Chabon and Art Spiegelman calling your book “relentless” and “a constant delight,” you know you've found your story. Which meant a lot more to me than the praise I was accustomed to for my breezy dialogue and catchy voice; because for that I had to go at my own weak spots and make myself better. Like the difference between being six feet tall and being able to run eight miles.

That also gave me something to teach: exercises, tools, and tricks I could give to other writers wrestling with the same issues. Working with them has been teaching me far more than I ever learned on my own, because you can also turn that annoying comment on doing and teaching a different way: “Those who teach learn how to do.” But that, trust me, is another story.

The Magnetic Girl

Continuing The Undressing of America, in which a young dry-goods salesman and amateur porn-buster named Anthony Comstock has improbably, with the support of the YMCA, risen to become America's first professional censor:

Comstock wasted no time in wielding the YMCA’s resources against the smut mongers of New York. He quit his job and gave his full days to collecting evidence against them, spreading the Association’s money among informants in the demimonde, then pushing the police to arrest them and the state's attorneys to prosecuting them. He built his cases so thoroughly that prosecutors began to follow his lead, sometimes using him as an expert witness, often bringing him into their conferences and adding him as a consultant to their legal team in the courtroom. Judges became familiar with him and often praised him, and he in turn publicly supported those judges who were mostly likely to sympathize with his cause.

     As his potency increased, so did Comstock’s certainty not only of his righteousness but of his importance. He was known to brag about having brought on William Haynes’s fatal heart attack. When a second pornographer fled New York soon after and was rumored to have died, Comstock said he hoped the man had ended his own life. Then came a third death, another pornographer who may have killed himself. Comstock began to speak with relish—not only to confidants but to the press and civic reform groups—of helping deliver sinners to “their final judge.” With each new victory, he would inform the newspapers of the number of criminals he had now had convicted, the number of shops he had shut down, the number of books he had had destroyed, and the number of deaths he had inspired.

     Then, in October 1872, he met an adversary worthy of him: a pair of adversaries, really, who forced him to draw upon his full resources of spirit and anger and to become the man God wanted him to be. The Claflin sisters were not pornographers, but they were exponents and personifications of everything about the age of mass print and the intellectual and social instability of the post-war years that alarmed men like Anthony Comstock.

     They were born of a marriage of two forces on the rise in mid-nineteenth century America: hucksterism and crackpot religion. Their father was a confidence man and patent medicine salesman and their mother an illiterate member of a spiritualist sect that followed Franz Mesmer’s beliefs in the healing and mind-controlling powers of magnetism. During the many stretches when their father was unable to make enough money, the children were hired out as menial laborers; Victoria, the seventh of the ten siblings, was pulled from school at the age of eight and sent to clean houses. Soon after she turned eleven, however, her fortunes changed. The family was run out of their small Ohio town when her father burned down his own mill and tried to collect the insurance, and in casting about for a way to make a living he settled on Victoria and her “spirit powers.” For Victoria was a clever and imaginative child who embraced her mother’s ideas about magnetism and invisible forces. She believed she could levitate objects with her will, walk without touching the ground, and see places from a great distance. Soon enough, “Dr. R. B. Claflin” and his family were touring the backwater towns of America, conducting séances and offering “magnetic healing,” with Victoria as their star attraction.

     At fifteen Victoria escaped the family act by marrying an unlicensed doctor named Canning Woodhull. They moved to the boom town of San Francisco, where she promptly had two children by him, but he contributed little to their upkeep, preferring to drink, chase other women, and disappear for weeks at a time. When she could not earn money as a clairvoyant and healer, Victoria worked as a music-hall actress and cigar girl, a pair of occupations that in those days commonly included some selling of sexual favors. Finally, in 1860, at the age of twenty-two, she left her husband and returned to her family, who had taken their spiritualistic road show to New York City, their primary selling point now being her beautiful sixteen-year-old sister Tennessee.

     Victoria was little interested, however, in returning to her old place in her father's fiefdom, and within a few months had persuaded Tennessee to leave the family and hit the road as a sister act. They quickly discovered eager audiences among the more cultured and affluent urbanites of New York and New England, among whom spiritualism was catching fire as a peculiar new blend of godless religion and novelty entertainment.

     In most times and most places, a Victoria Woodhull would have lived her life at the periphery of American society, flickering briefly through the consciousness of curiosity seekers and uncritical spiritualists and then vanishing forever. But when the waves of cultural change are tossing high, the most unlikely figures can rise to the crest. She found her company sought after by some of the brightest men in New York, not only for her charm and eccentricity and prowess as a medium but for her caustic wit and increasingly daring ideas. Her belief in the transmigration of souls led her to believe in the spiritual equality of all people and the relativity of human institutions, while her own experiences had taught her to resent the traps of marriage and the legal and economic power of men.

      She married James Harvey Blood, a sensitive and cultured infantry colonel who had returned from the war believing not only in spiritualism but in free love.  He, Victoria, and Tennessee turned their home into a salon where they soon found themselves hosting the boldest of New York’s intellectuals and politicians. Victoria embraced the most radical social and political ideas of the time: women’s suffrage, absolute racial equality, sexual freedom, the abolition of marriage, the legalization of prostitution, and the new styles of anarchism and communism being propounded by the First International in Europe. She was a quick study and, despite a third-grade education, became known as a witty and challenging conversationalist.

      Victoria was the quicker and more knowledgeable, but Tennessee’s beauty and charm soon proved useful to their social rise as well: at the age of twenty-three she won the affections of the seventy-three year old Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in America.

       Vanderbilt quietly bankrolled and advised the sisters in the forming of Woodhull, Claflin and Company, a stock brokerage. They made $700,000 in their first year, and immediately became favorites of New York social circles and the popular press. They epitomized everything most glamorous and startling about the city and the era, those beautiful, extravagantly-dressed, attention-loving, free-loving radicals who had mastered American capitalism.

       The sisters understood the power of the popular press. Newspapers drove some of the great reform movements of the day: the Times’s attack on Boss Tweed, Horace Greeley’s on corruption in the White House. And it was Greeley, of course, who publicized Anthony Comstock’s battle against pornography. So it was that, in the spring of 1870, as soon as they had money to invest, they brought out a newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, to promote their ideas and bring their own provocative interpretations to events of the day. Victoria immediately caught the eye of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other leaders of the feminist movement, and within two years had become such a popular writer and speaker on the rights of women that the nascent Equal Rights Party nominated her for President of the United States, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate.

       Until that autumn of 1872, the sisters had inspired only admiration, gossip, amusement, and argument. There seemed room in New York, on the newsstands, and in the hodgepodge community of reformers and radicals for a vast moral and intellectual range, and Victoria seemed not unjustified in her assertions that hers were the ideas that would shape the future and liberate the world. But then they took the step that put them on a collision course with the other rising force of American reform, the purity movement as embodied in Anthony Comstock. They reported that the most respected of American clergymen was cheating on his wife.

      Rumors had been swirling around the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and his relationship with the wife of one of his parishioners for at least two years, but so great was his prestige as an abolitionist leader, moral reformer, lecturer, and brother of the nation’s most admired novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, that no one had dared to print a whiff of them. Certainly no one who valued Beecher’s support in the battles for racial justice or women’s suffrage would have thought to besmirch him.

The bedroom eyes of Rev. Beecher

      Victoria Woodhull had no patience with such hypocrisy. Although she and Beecher worked for many of the same ends, she disliked his sanctimoniousness and the distress he brought to his wife, and she disliked the dishonesty of those who kept his secrets while denouncing immorality. In her mind, the fault was less with Beecher as a man than with the false idols of marriage and monogamy. She wrote of Beecher’s “amative nature,” the sexual magnetism that made him such a compelling speaker and leader, and lamented that the false morality left to us from an oppressive past did not allow him to express his nature openly, nor allow the rest of us to discuss it freely. For Woodhull, the improvement of humankind would come through the exposure of the truth of human nature.

       That issue of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly sold out instantly.  Many readers lauded their courage and honesty. Others simply enjoyed the scandal, as well as Victoria’s voluptuous descriptions of Beecher’s “immense physical potency,” “zest,” and “magnetic power.” But many of their allies and supporters were appalled. Feminists who saw the suffrage movement as aligned with Christian rectitude, who had been loyal to Beecher and appreciated his support, denounced them or distanced themselves.

       Among those most outraged was Anthony Comstock. He was unshakably certain of the Reverend Beecher’s innocence and just as certain that the sisters were proponents of corruption engaged in an assault upon decency. In his mind, Woodhull and Claflin were of the same stuff as all the indecent publishers, just two more purveyors of smut and innuendo. But now they were not simply corrupting the young for profit, they were using their obscenity against a leader of the church, they were attempting to tear down the pillars of the nation’s morals. Where everyone else seemed to content to cluck their tongues and vow to the deny the sisters social entrée, Comstock took action.

Comstock: eyes for anywhere but.

       He went first to the state courts, suing for action on the grounds that the weekly violated the obscene publications law of 1868, but the District Attorney refused to pursue the case. Comstock called his attention to another obscene article in the same issue of the newspaper, this one about a stockbroker named Challis who went around boasting about his female conquest. Still the DA would take no action. But Comstock would not stop. He knew another law on the books, another law that the YMCA had supported, this one a federal statute, enacted just four months before, a tightening of the laws against using the US mail to send obscene publications. There he found a more sympathetic audience. A pair of deputy US marshals were dispatched to arrest Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.

       At first no one, not the arrested women nor their supporters, took the matter seriously. A crowd gathered at the Weekly’s offices where, according to the New York Telegram, “puns, jokes and witticisms were freely indulged in at the expense of each other, the police, the prisoners and the United States government, and many a hearty laugh indulged in as a fresh sally was heard.” The Dispatch described Claflin at her arraignment as “flushed like a rose, and her blue eyes sparkled nervously. As she glanced round the room, a smile of contempt seemed to gather about her ruby lips.” The case against them seemed thin indeed, but the feeling against them ran high enough that a grand jury brought indictments against them, the judge set a high bail, and they spent most of November in jail.

       The trial was delayed once, and then again, as the prosecution kept shifting its charges, seeking something that might stick. And at the forefront, publicly denouncing the sisters and demanding that the government stay true to its prosecution, stood Comstock. Many in the press began to protest, seeing a misuse of government power that would threaten the basic freedom of the press. The Brooklyn Eagle criticized “the irresponsible action of the more zealous and sensible Comstock,” and soon after noted, “As to Mr. Anthony Comstock, we never heard of him till he ‘ranged himself’ in legal company with the Claflin Sisters as their prosecutor and world-wide advertiser.”

       More and more the battle was seen as being between the sisters as representatives of a titillating but dangerous new morality and Anthony Comstock, so recently unknown, so suddenly prominent, as the embodiment of militant rectitude.

To be continued...

The Metaphor of Dead Young Men

Continuing The Undressing of America with some thoughts on the cultural forces and metaphors driving our evolving ideas about "purity" and "filth."

It is difficult, from our distance, to realize that the perception of indecent literature as a source of social and psychological harm was once a new one.

      There had been attacks on obscenity for centuries, including mass burnings of it and the persecution of people who made it, often led by Calvinists like Comstock. But in the middle 19th Century, Calvinism was fading as a dominant force in American life, eclipsed especially by heterogeneous, secular cultures of New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The mores of New York, in particular, had grown steadily more lax in the decades before the Civil War: risqué entertainment and scandal had become accepted topics of polite discourse, and the prostitute had become a common subject of literature and journalism, a symbol both of what was most tragic and most romantic about modern city life. Religious attacks on immorality generated little interest. But a new conception of forbidden stories and images began coming into focus in mid-century: pornography as a negative social force, a force that a generation needed to be protected against; a force, almost like a disease, worthy of being dealt with through public policy.

       Much of this was simply the worried response of the affluent and established classes to what the common man was seeing. Educated opinion was ambivalent about this still-young medium of mass print: clearly it made the masses more literate and aware, but who knew what sorts of bad ideas or dangerous stimulation it would bring to the uneducated and the impressionable young? When pornography had been consumed only by men of a certain level of wealth and therefore, implicitly, of sophistication, it had been easily dismissed as a matter of personal moral failing. But when one considered the young men who every day arrived in the city fresh from small towns or their parents’ farms, already feeling the heady freedom and countless distractions of the city, one could easily imagine them being aroused and made curious by those magazines and books they could find at any newsstand. And since those same newsstands also sold guides to local brothels and newspapers advertising condoms and questionable medicines for the prevention of social diseases, they might be led to act on that new curiosity; a curiosity that led not only to moral decline but likely to syphilis, that incurable gate to madness, shame, and family devastation.

       Pornography led young men even more certainly often to other deeds, deeds rarely spoken of in public but ever more frequently worried about in private. During those very years a growing mass of medical authorities and educators warned of the physical and psychological danger of masturbation, once a vice that troubled some clergymen but was otherwise of little general interest, now recast as an incipient destroyer of young men’s energies and mental capacities.

       The intensity of concern inspired by pornography, however—intense enough that it apparently came to worry Morris Jesup and other officers of the New York YMCA more than the brothels and diseases themselves—show that we are entering the realm of cultural metaphor, of common patterns of thought and perception shaped by the larger fears, hopes, and daily preoccupations of the time.

       This was a moment of tremendous change. Industrialization was still young in America, its transformation of life, work, physical environment, and common thought still in its fluid days, still bringing soaring dreams, deep terrors, and vast mystery. The cities especially were changing rapidly, and none more quickly or dramatically than New York. The centralization of capital and industry, and the accompanying federalization of power in the wake of the Civil War had raised new questions of national identity and new expectations of government. Ideas of progress and reform, the conviction that change was not only here and inevitable but noble and desirable, dominated nearly every field. Young men made up the new workforce that would drive American industry and commerce during the post-war years, but they became more than that in popular thought: they became symbols of change itself, omens of the future. In the behavior of a generation, older people looked then as they do now for signs of coming prosperity or ruin, indications that the future would be as bright as they hoped or as dark as they feared.

       The Civil War gave new poignancy to that metaphor. The slaughter of so many thousands of young men had made that generation seem not only precious but fragile. The horror of those young bodies scattered over the battlefields, maimed and diseased and blown apart, haunted the national imagination, evoking horror at what we might do to our young, inspiring an overarching protectiveness, a desperation to identify and prevent future harm.

       In the popular imagination grew up a sentimentalization of young men that nearly amounted to a new national myth. Even as Anthony Comstock was beginning his pursuit of indecency in the mass press, another New England Congregationalist, Horatio Alger, was using that same medium to tell stories about plucky, hardworking adolescent boys in New York finding their ways to riches and respectability through courage and moral virtue. Alger himself had a romantic, even erotic, vision of young men, and it struck a loud chord, immediately making him the most popular American writer in the cheap press. Thus mass print became the great promoter of the potential of young men, which tightened the popular association of cheap publications with the moral and intellectual formation of the new generation. If Alger’s stories were to be embraced as good for boys, then Alger’s opposite numbers must be denounced as bad for them.

       There was, however, a bigger metaphor than this at work. The industrial revolution was changing the social and political worlds, creating new models of business and new ways of working, forming a new kind of city, and requiring new forms of regulation and coordination. It was also bringing a profound change to common views of the world. People were seeing that vast changes could be wrought by human design and effort that no one had ever imagined could be made before. Industry, driven by science, was transforming the physical world and taking control of powers that had been assumed to lay beyond human mastery. The ages-long acceptance of the great forces and inevitabilities of life was, in the span of just a few generations, giving way to dreams of a world in which anything might be changed, of existence shaped not by what God had made but by what men wanted it to be.

      And so came the idea that mankind itself might be reshaped by design and will. The “social sciences” came to prominence, promising to bring a rational mastery of human society equivalent to what chemistry and physics brought to the material world. Against the pessimism about man’s fallen nature that informed Christianity, especially Calvinism, there arose the idea that human behavior and human society might be, if not perfected, then at least reformed beyond what anyone had dreamed possible. Through superior knowledge, rigorous design, and coordinated effort, a new human reality might be made in the same way that new transportation, materials, and energy sources were made.

      The driving metaphor, then, was of the rational mind subduing and marshaling the organic. This was not, though, a monastic punishing of the organic or a gnostic attempt to leave it behind. Following the industrial metaphor, in which science and design are the controlling elements but sheer physical might is the maker of change and the force on which everything depends, the body and its energy were seen as essential to the perfect whole. The body in this new model of human perfection would be healthy, strong, and well-trained, but entirely subject to the requirements of the mind; and not only the individual mind, but the plan set by the leaders of society.

      This was such a powerful idea, and so well fueled by the technological and economic currents of the day, that devout Christians began to form their world views around it. A self-described “Purity Movement” began in England in mid-century and spread to America. It was a Protestant Evangelical movement, stressing purity of soul foremost, preaching against alcohol and sexual stimulation; but it also advocated elements of diet, physical fitness, and purity from chemical contaminants, drawing many of its ideas from medical sources. The founders of the YMCA drew heavily on the Purity Movement in their emphasis on physical fitness; and although that emphasis was mainly on fitness through diet, sobriety, and adequate sleep during the Association’s first years in England, as soon as the New York branch opened it began to emphasize exercises and physical games. The body was to be made fit, its energies were to be first stirred and then marshaled. In some ways this Christian focus on health was an answer to threats raised by industrialism and urbanization, but in other ways it grew straight from the underlying suppositions and dominant metaphors of the new world of industry and science. So we are always shaped by our opposites.

      The energy that most needed to be marshaled, from both the Protestant and industrial viewpoints, was sexuality. Industrial logic demanded that resources not be expended on the unproductive, and that no one’s energies should turn inward. Where children would be produced, sexuality was encouraged. Where they would not be, it would be discouraged in a way it had not been before: because the issue at hand was not simply unwanted pregnancy, the threat of disease, or the saving of the soul, but a use of precious resources. Metaphors of waste and depletion, as well as of energy and production, run through 19th Century discussions of sex. In that regard, the anxiety over masturbation was a fundamental one. If the marshaling of sexual energy to the growing vigor of the young man was essential not only to his health but to his value to the world, then the squandering of that energy was a cost the world could not approve.

       The concept of purity drew Christian and scientific beliefs together into a new metaphor: impurity as disease. People’s relationships with illness then was very much marked by that same combination of hope and fear that filled their visions of the future and the young generation. Science made rapid advances in understanding and fighting disease, raising hopes that illnesses could be conquered that mankind had always accepted with tragic resignation. As the roles that sewers and stagnant water played in cultivating cholera, malaria, and other diseases became clearer, vast public works, driven both by the new technology and the new systems of organizing labor, made the cities cleaner and safer. But at the same time, industry introduced new contaminants into the atmosphere, causing physical problems that mankind had never to contend with before, providing no relief from fears of deadly impurity.

      The more bodily health became linked to mental, spiritual, and social health, the more mental and spiritual influences were viewed as bearers of disease. The young mind was perceived as pure in the way the body free of disease and contamination was pure, and the elements that might corrupt it were seen not as ideas but as poisons and disease agents. Comstock’s association of pornographers with mad dogs, simple and reflexive as it was, contained in it some of the most potent metaphors and assumptions of his moment.

      Calvinists like Comstock and Jesup, in fact, found themselves strangely relevant to the larger concerns of society in the years after the Civil War. No one was better suited to funnel the anxieties of the time into a course of action, a mission of public cultural reform; and no one had a comparable zeal to fight the battles that such a mission required. They shared the industrialists’ belief in group control of the individual and the authority of expertise, but their area of expertise was morality, and the source of it they believed to be the word of God. Further, as Comstock quickly demonstrated, cultural reform might require far more than battles against the publishers of naughty stories and dirty pictures. For there were voices out there calling for a different sort of cultural reform, envisioning a different America to come.

To be continued...