Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [79]
Born in a small town in Virginia, Tunstall was the daughter of a wealthy attorney who had been a state legislator and a railroad executive. The last of six children, all born on a plantation that had been in the family since the 1790s and was farmed by slaves, Tunstall was, like Pulitzer, a child of loss. Four of her siblings and her father had died when she was young, and she had been raised by her mother.
William Corcoran, one of the city’s wealthiest men, was a friend of Tunstall’s mother, and he invited Nannie to stay with him in Washington. Widowed since he was young, he liked to have company with him at all times. “No one,” noted the Washington Post, “was more delighted with the society of intelligent and agreeable women than Mr. Corcoran.” Tunstall accepted his invitation and soon became a fixture in what she called his “enchanted castle of indolence.”
Tunstall certainly filled the bill. Men were drawn to her. “She excites admiration from all,” said Corcoran’s arts curator, who was among those smitten by Tunstall. She had melancholy eyes, set in a soft, roundish face; a slightly Roman nose; and thick, long, wavy hair. The sculptor Moses Ezekiel was so taken with her that he used her profile for a bas-relief, a bronze copy of which Corcoran purchased.
Tunstall was well-educated, though, like Pulitzer, she had spent little time in school. She read widely and was sufficiently fluent in German to translate poetry; she could also quote French aphorisms in her correspondence, and write poetry and fiction, eventually publishing a novel. She displayed a dramatic excitement over life, literature, and art that seemed daring among the more demure members of Washington’s high society. “I have lived fast—emotionally, I have burned the candle at both ends,” she confessed late in life.
In February, while he was courting Davis, Pulitzer also pursued Tunstall. “Of course, I have thought of you and would like to see you,” he wrote to her when she was visiting relatives in Baltimore. “Of course, you want me to come over to Baltimore. Of course, you are consumed by that tender passion which I return with such powerful profundity and earnestness.”
Tunstall demurely left his notes unanswered. An anxious Pulitzer wrote again. “What day, pray? Whenever I receive the signal, Baltimore shall be invaded.” Like a nervous suitor, he felt compelled to say more. “Here I should stop. But I cannot,” he continued. “Brevity may be the soul of wit and it cannot be the wit of sympathetic souls. So I must go on and at least fill this sheet. And say—what? Well, I scarcely know myself. That I have thought of you much? I see the shake of your classic head? That I have, in cold blood, determined to admire you? I see another shake of incredulity that I hope there will be a due appreciation of that admiration by your ladyship? I hope you now change your gentle shake from the skeptical to the assenting.”
As if at the edge of a precipice, Pulitzer showed tentativeness, almost like second thoughts, referring to previous loves. “Is it well that we should fan the embers of congeniality into lurid flames of attachment?” he asked in one letter. “I really do not like the glare, fear the fire. I have been burned and too often before both actually and metaphorically speaking, both internally and externally.” Another closed with similar reluctance. “What! This is going a little too fast, is it not?”
In May, Tunstall put an end to Pulitzer’s pursuit. Pulitzer called her letter cruel. “It has not only unnerved my soul but blasted my hopes,” he wrote. “Your terrible revelation has put an awful chasm between us.
“Is there no hope? Will you not mend? Will you not begin to appreciate the rare qualities of the humble subscriber—in admiring you? Cold beauty,