Excerpt: A Sneak Peek at Thom Nickels’ Literary Philadelphia
Since Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin put type to printing press, Philadelphia has been a haven and an inspiration for writers. Local essayist Agnes Repplier once shared a glass of whiskey with Walt Whitman who frequently strolled Market Street. Gothic writers like Edgar Allen Poe and George Lippard plumbed the city’s dark streets for material. In the twentieth century, Northern Liberties native John McIntyre found a backdrop for his gritty noir in the working class neighborhoods while novelist Pearl S. Buck discovered a creative sanctuary in Center City. From Quaker novelist Charles Brockden Brown to 1973 U.S. Poet Laureate Daniel Hoffman, author Thom Nickels explores Philadelphia’s literary landscape.
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When balloonist Jean-Paul Blanchard flew over northern Philadelphia and the Delaware River into New Jersey during his historic 1793 flight, the crowd of dignitaries at the liftoff included President George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Tickets for the best seats were five dollars. The spectacle, known as America’s first flight, attracted the attention of New Yorkers, who hoped that wayward winds would blow Blanchard over their city.
If we were to review Philadelphia’s literary terrain in the same way that Blanchard flew over the city, we’d see a patchwork of styles and visions.
Owen Wister, for instance, was the only child of a physician father and an actress mother who happened to be the daughter of English actress Fanny Kemble. The Wister family had strong Philadelphia patrician roots; as an only child, young Wister was sent to exclusive boarding schools in New England and Switzerland.
From this tableau of breeding, in 1878 Wister entered Harvard, where he achieved top honors in musical composition and dramatic writing. Perhaps it was his success in writing the libretto for Hasty Pudding’s comic opera Dido and Aeneas that made him want to become a composer.
Despite his mother’s artistic leanings (she was a magazine writer), Wister’s father was not keen on his son’s ambition to study musical composition in Paris. The prospect, no doubt, appeared naïve to the grounded family physician, but in the end he gave his consent and even provided the young student with financial support.
Now there was nothing standing in the way of Owen’s becoming a great composer. He had only to build from scratch and start a legacy as great as Chopin’s — provided, of course, that he could turn his dream into reality. For most artists, such an achievement is rarely a straight, unencumbered road but a crooked one filled with unexpected pitfalls.
But Wister’s Parisian musical ambitions must have hit rock bottom because in 1883 he opted to return to the Quaker City after resigning himself to a utilitarian goal: a junior position in a Philadelphia law firm, something that for many young men would have been a fine thing, indeed, although in Wister’s case it led to dissatisfaction and restlessness.
He tried his hand at another artistic endeavor, coauthoring a novel with a Harvard friend, before entering Harvard Law School. Yet as the enrollment date for law school drew near, Wister was on the verge of a collapse. Psychoanalytical experts term this a nervous breakdown — complete, of course, with a breakdown’s unattractive antecedents like vertigo, blinding headaches and hallucinations. His father urged him to leave Paris at once, and the much-weakened Wister complied, although he had now developed Bell’s palsy and would have to wait a few weeks for its eventual remission.
Nervous breakdowns, when they happen to artists, can sometimes be a ticket to literary and intellectual insight. The number of poets and novelists who have sought refuge in sanatoriums or in warmer climates after a breakdown are legion. In Philadelphia, Wister consulted Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a Franklin Inn member and also a friend of essayist Agnes Repplier. Wister was diagnosed with a severe case of neurasthenia and suggested a trip to a Wyoming ranch. Mitchell had developed a system for treating nervous men, and that was to send them to the West, where they could rope cattle, hunt game, rough ride horses and engage in various forms of male bonding. In his 1871 book, Wear and Tear, Mitchell encouraged nervous men to go west in order to reinforce their masculinity and to test their willpower. ’Under great nervous stress,’ Mitchell wrote, ’the strong man becomes like the average woman.’ Had Wister been born today, his attending physician no doubt would never have suggested that he travel west for his health, as was the custom of the day, but instead be put on a regime of psychotropic meds that could have deadened both his energy and creative talents ‘like a patient etherized upon a table.’
The ‘go west’ cure for men was a staple of nineteenth-century life. For Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins, who was fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts for removing the loincloth of a male model in front of female students and who was then ostracized by Philadelphia society, going west was more than rehabilitative. It saved his life.
‘For some days I have been quite cast down being cut deliberately on the street by those who have every occasion to know me,’ Eakins wrote in a letter to his sister.
Eakins sought his western cure in the Dakotas, and when he returned, he was ‘built up miraculously,’ according to Walt Whitman. Whitman himself sought his own western cure in 1879 and documented that journey in Specimen Days (1882).
Even Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt returned from his western cure without what his detractors called his ‘former effeminate looks’ and ‘high voice that often provided comparison to Oscar Wilde.
After three weeks in Wyoming, Wister — who had slept in a tent, bathed in an icy creek, hunted, fished and spent hours on horseback — felt like a new man. Dr. Mitchell also prescribed ‘rest cures’ for women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote about Mitchell in The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), was once a patient of his, but the treatment was quite different. Instead of open skies, campfires at night and swims in the local creek, for nervous women, Mitchell advocated seclusion, overfeeding, electrotherapy and massage. Although competent historians have come to categorize Mitchell’s rest cure therapy as nothing more than nineteenth-century misogyny, Wister was so entranced by the beauty he experienced in Wyoming that he came to idolize the cowboy, which in turn would form the basis for his classic novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, about a Wyoming cattleman who would go on to become one of the country’s first mass-market bestsellers. ‘To Wister,’ Kimmel writes, ‘the west was manly, egalitarian, self reliant, and Aryan — it was the true America, far from the feminizing, immigrant infected cities, where voracious blacks and masculine women devoured white men’s chances to demonstrate manhood.’
Wister would spend the next fifteen years traveling to Wyoming during the summer months, visiting ranches, cow camps and remote cavalry outposts while getting to know gamblers and ranch hands. These sojourns provided him with stories that he began publishing in Harper’s Weekly. The publication of The Virginian in 1902 changed his life forever. The book sold 200,000 copies in one year and was adapted for Broadway; it went on to be the basis for five movies and a television series.
The Virginian has never been out of print, despite the story’s stock character stereotypes, namely the eastern ’naïve’ narrator, the savage Indian, the puritanical schoolmarm and the devil-may-care, tobaccochewing cattle rustler.
The book caused Wister to become more famous than his friend novelist Henry James, whom Wister revered and thought of as ‘a real novelist.’ In a curious twist of fate, the recognition that he sought for his musical compositions in Paris was now his but in triplicate, yet this made him decidedly unhappy because he looked on his fans as ‘the semi-literate public.’ He wanted Henry James’s fan base, not ‘the repugnant masses.’ After writing and publishing The Virginian, Wister returned to Philadelphia after realizing that his western ideal wasn’t what it used to be. He complained of ‘the rabble of excessive democracy, populist politicians, unassimilated immigrants and tourists.’ In Philadelphia, he dabbled in many things, including politics and writing nonfiction, including the story of his friendship with Teddy Roosevelt, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship. Wister died on July 21, 1938, in Rhode Island. His journals and letters, edited by Frances Kimble Wister, were published in 1958.
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Certainly, Philadelphia novelist John T. McIntyre, whose first novel, Steps Going Down, published in 1936 by Farrar & Rinehart (New York), was familiar with the Curtis Building and the Dream Garden mural. McIntyre has always been known as a noir writer, meaning a writer who describes the gritty side of life, as exemplified in the city’s underworld. Noir might also be described as the gritty truth underneath a mainstream sugar coating: the life of petty criminals, drug dealers, streetwalkers under the El, small-time mobsters or the unstable drama inside dingy bars filled with cigarette smoke, suspicious characters and, of course, lurking danger.
McIntyre was born in Northern Liberties and left school at age eleven to work full time. For a period, he was a freelance journalist with the Philadelphia Press. He wrote over twenty books, most of them noir or crime novels, but some had a conventional slant. A noir novel might also be called ‘B fiction,’ as in B movie. One B movie that comes to mind is the 1965 exploitation film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! directed by Russ Meyer and starring Tura Satana. It is about three strippers who wreak havoc and violence on a young couple they encounter in the desert and then kidnap an old, wheelchair-bound man as they attempt to seduce the man’s sons for the family money. Although there’s some redemption in the fact that all three bad girls come to a bad end, it takes a long time for this to happen.
McIntyre, who was Irish Catholic, manages to weave elements of his Catholicism into the most sordid of his stories. While one chapter may describe how the main character falls in love with a streetwalker, another chapter will present the reader with a small paragraph about the Virgin Mary.
Consider this passage in his novel Steps Going Down in which characters Gill and Hogarty are having drinks in a sleazy bar, where ‘there was noise, and smoke, and the smell of drink in the place … the floor sloppy with spilled beer … the walls grimy with the rubbing of many a loafer’s back [as the] cash register rang and rang.’
In this section, Gill tells Hogarty that sometimes when he sees what he sees (as in pretty awful stuff), he says a prayer to the Blessed Virgin. ‘She has a far-reaching voice in Heaven,’ Gill tells Hogarty. ‘And God Himself is always hearkening to her. More poor souls have been saved from despair through her than you can put to the credit of all the saints and martyrs in all the far depths of the heavens.’ As if this nod to religiosity wasn’t enough, Gil and Hogarty begin to talk about the Annunciation and the biblical city of Nazareth. But after that, it’s a jump to a house of ill repute on Sixteenth Street in Center City.
Curious to know a lot more about McIntyre’s life, I headed over to Temple University Archives to examine McIntyre’s documents and manuscripts. Oftentimes, when a famous writer dies, his or her papers are turned over to a university. There they are archived and labeled for researchers and biographers. In McIntyre’s case, I was able to go through quite a number of boxes. Some of these boxes contained business papers, such as rent receipts, bank correspondence and statements, while others contained personal effects, like personal telephone books, correspondence and rejection letters from publishers.
Although McIntyre published a lot in his lifetime, when he shopped his work around, he got his fair share of bad news. Most of the rejection letters came from the Macmillan Company, a New York publisher. On March 15, 1943, his novel Gun Smoke Along the Nueces was turned down. In May of the same year, Murder in the Mist was rejected, the letter signed by a Lisa Dwight Cole, an associate editor there. Then, in November, he received a rejection letter for his book O Land of Milk and Honey. In 1948, a Macmillan editor sent back his novel Some Days in the World and apologized for keeping it so long with the words, ‘We are very much chagrined at the length of time we have had your manuscript.’ McIntyre probably rejected the phrase ‘we are very much chagrined’ as a spine-tingling language abomination.
In 1944, McIntyre sent a letter to his friend Alfred Lunt asking for money. McIntyre had just been laid off from a job because business wasn’t doing well. He wrote that ‘just two minutes ago I was told that I was through at Street & Smith’s, business conditions being what they are, etc.’ The letter was painful for me to read because I knew what was coming. ‘I hate to ask in times like these,’ McIntyre continues, ‘but could you possibly send me some money’ Every cent I have will be the money I’ll get this Friday. We’re in damned desperate straits here as it is and this thing will make it just so much worse.’ McIntyre ends the letter by requesting ‘some letters of introduction to men who rate in the publishing business.’
One archival box contained an interesting exchange of letters from a Cooperstown, New York banker replying to the novelist’s request to purchase back records of a newspaper called the Saturday Star Journal. Apparently, McIntyre wanted to know how much the bundle would cost, and the banker put the fee at $300, far too much money for the cash-strapped author, who then offered the banker a counter of $175. The banker replied, ‘I am not inclined to accept the offer for them of $175 but would be willing to lower my price somewhat. If you wish to make an offer of $225 for the lot, let me know and I will consider it.’ The exchange was very bureaucratic and unfeeling, the banker obviously looking down at McIntyre from his high financial perch. Then, one month later (March 11, 1941), everything changed. The banker sent a handwritten note to McIntyre refusing the writer’s latest offer, but you could feel that something wasn’t quite right. Why a handwritten letter? The letters picked up again in August, when the banker sent McIntyre another handwritten note, although it was not on the bank’s letterhead. The writing was very disconnected looking and sloppy, as if the writer had a broken hand.
‘I went to the hospital April 10th for a severe operation,’ the banker said.
‘I am writing to ask you if you are still interested in my Saturday Star Journals and if your previous offer for them still holds good. Your offer was $175.00 for the Star Journals and $50 for the Dime Libraries.’ We don’t get McIntyre’s response, though I imagine he felt some sympathy for the Second National Bank official, who was no longer sounding high and grand. Two weeks later, the two men concluded the deal, and McIntyre got his bundle.
A sad discovery in another box was a 1951 document detailing the writer’s funeral expenses from the Oliver Blair Company: ‘Gray cloth covered casket; silk lining; pillow; old silver extension bar handles; crucifix and services, pine case’$410.00.’
Literary Philadelphia, published this month by The History Press, is available everywhere that books and ebooks are sold, like right here on Amazon.
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