1876 by Gore Vidal Page A

There are a number of practical methods ...”
    “Balloons ...?” That was my sole contribution, for Stedman did not stop in his discussion of air travel until those about us started to rise. He hoped that I would soon join him for lunch or supper at any one of those clubs that encourage Bohemian membership.
    “Literary New York is eager to meet you.”
    “Surely they hardly know that Rip Van ...” But I stopped myself as that dread name once again climbed out onto the end of my tongue. Fortunately Stedman was not listening.
    “You will like Bayard Taylor, I’m sure. He’s teaching German literature up at Cornell. But now he’s in the city. Or have you already met each other in Europe?”
    “No, I think not.” I have been very much aware over the years of those of my literary countrymen who keep coming in what seem hordes to old Europe, where they usually stay longer than planned. Yet I have, as much as possible, avoided them. Somehow they never seem to fit our way of life at Paris: this includes Bryant, though he and I have met in Europe off and on over the years, usually in Italy. I once debated (and the negative won) taking him to Princess Mathilde’s, where he might meet her circle, particularly my especial friend Taine, as well as such amusing novelists as Gautier, the Goncourt brothers and the Russian Turgenev. But somehow I could not imagine William Cullen Bryant in that circle (where even I, after forty years, am still known as the “blond wild Indian”). I fear that that brilliant circle would sooner roast a waterfowl than apostrophize it.
    Lately the young journalist-writers have been descending on Europe like termites on an ancient frame house, and London has taken them very much to heart. The English can never get enough of the grotesque; they particularly delight in those Americans who seem to them truly American, preferably the ones with long hair and Western twangs, who chew tobacco and tell tall tales—ah, those tall tales of wild Indians and of drunken bears and of jumping frogs. N.P. Willis, Joaquin Miller, Mark Twain and, most interesting of all, I am told, a Californian called (I think) Pierce whose work I have not read, but whose brilliant mordant conversation has been reported to me by the Princess Mathilde who hears of him from the Empress at Chislehurst. Our Empress may be bored by literary men and explorers, but apparently a son of the American West has discovered how to make her exile amusing. Needless to say, nothing west of Seine-et-Oise interests Paris, including, alas, their former Empress.
    Stedman mentioned any number of literary men I must meet and I pretended interest, although I have never found congenial the company of professional writers. Also, I do not read novels any more whilst today’s poetry makes me quite angry, since, at best, it is no more than carefully ruined prose.
    History and politics are my field, and New York seems not to be rich in either historians or true political writers despite the often interesting efforts of the Adams descendant who edits Boston’s North American Review .But I am unfair to my countrymen. I have been here too short a time to judge. Also, I tend to compare the home product with Paris at a time when I think that city is, for once, what in its eternal arrogance Paris thinks itself always to be, a city of true light with Taine and Renan ablaze, and a thousand ideas stirring.
    I found it amusing (the ironist’s word for “discouraging”) that when I spoke to Stedman of French writers, he seemed not even to know their names. He has heard of Flaubert of course; knows that Madame Bovary was an immoral novel that even the French tried to ban; insists that better than “all that lot, and far more daring” is an American poet much disliked by the prudish American reviewers. I promise to read this poet, who is called Whitman and lives at Camden in New Jersey; apparently, he enjoys good sales in America and good notices in England. Lucky man!