Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [76]
The 800-word article, filled with praise for Bowles’s journalism, revealed Pulitzer’s own literary growth. It was not that Pulitzer had become a polished writer. In fact, many of his allusions seemed forced, his sentences wordy even for an era of breath-challenging sentences, and his choice of vocabulary highly self-conscious. But the piece was the work of a well-read thirty-year-old immigrant comfortable in his new tongue.
He began by introducing his readers to Bowles’s hometown. “Trees remarkable for size and beauty; streets picturesquely winding over promontories; every house a garden; the silver stream of the shallow Connecticut obsequiously washing the feet of precipitous bluffs; steeped in the softest green; streets well made and rarely tidy; school houses and churches numerous and of good architecture; Swiss cottages for dwellings; wherever you look, green and air and room—this is the town of Springfield, Mass.”
With a flourish, typical of the slow-paced style of the set pieces of the era, Pulitzer laboriously—as if confessing—revealed that the purpose of his journey was to see Samuel Bowles. “I am glad it is out,” he wrote. “With all regard for delicacy, one might as well see ‘Hamlet’ without the part of the Prince of Denmark as write about Springfield with Sam Bowles omitted.”
In August, Charles Johnson came east to spend time with Pulitzer, but when he reached the Fifth Avenue Hotel he found that Pulitzer had gone to take the baths at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Johnson wrote and persuaded Pulitzer to meet him at Long Branch, New Jersey, a coastal resort that had become glamorous when President Grant chose to summer there. Other friends, including Alfred Townsend, joined them. They spent their days bathing in the ocean and riding horseback. “In the evening,” Johnson said, “we discussed almost everything.”
Pulitzer sprained his ankle and was confined to his room. Albert, who had returned from Europe, came down to stay with him. A few days later, the group left Long Branch for New York, where they took in shows, including one in an old railroad depot that had been converted by P. T. Barnum into a hippodrome named Gilmore’s Garden in honor of Patrick S. Gilmore, a bandmaster whose best-known composition was “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” (Two years later, the hippodrome was renamed Madison Square Garden.) Pulitzer and Hutchins tried to talk Johnson into accompanying them to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, but he declined.
In early October, Pulitzer returned to St. Louis. He saw a performance of Hamlet by Edwin Booth, the nineteenth century’s most famous American Shakespearean actor (and brother of the assassin). Just as Hamlet is concerned with his famous question of being, Pulitzer still had no answer for the one that confronted him. At the end of 1877 he was no closer than four years prior, when he had left the Westliche Post, to finding a place for himself in his adopted land. Politics had let him down. After experiencing New York, St. Louis confined him. And, aside from a brief attraction to a neighbor’s daughter and to one of Schurz’s daughters, Pulitzer had thus far remained free of love. By the end of the month, he was on the move again, this time back to Washington.
Chapter Eleven
NANNIE AND KATE
As 1877 ended and 1878 began, Pulitzer was caught between two places, two professions, and two women. The confluence of all three problems pressed the thirty-year-old Pulitzer for decisions. “I am almost tired of this life—aimless, homeless, loveless,” he wrote.
St. Louis grew less attractive and Pulitzer spent more time in Washington, which he had come to know while covering the 1876 election debacle for the New York Sun. His friend Hutchins had also moved to