The Way the World Works: Essays (18 page)

Cohen, Gilfoyle, and a third writer, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz—a historian at Smith College and the author of
Rereading Sex,
a study of erotica—have together produced
The Flash Press,
the first book-length survey of this strange rock-pool of 1840s profligacy. Readers of Kurt Andersen’s recent historical novel
Heyday
—and indeed everyone interested in knowing what New York City was like before the Civil War—will want to have a peek. The authors have managed to unearth and collate a remarkable amount of enriching detail about a curiously fleshy moment in the history of New York publishing.

The primogenitor of the flash press was a brilliant, doomed wretch from Boston named William J. Snelling. Snelling’s mother died when he was six; his father was a war hero and a heavy drinker. After dropping out of West Point,
Snelling spent some time living among the Dakota Indians, later writing about them with affection and sympathy in
Tales of the Northwest.
He returned to Boston, went to prison for public drunkenness, worked up that experience into a book—and then, fired by literary ambition, attempted to create the great American
Dunciad:
a long poem called
Truth,
in heroic couplets, attacking many of the minor poets of the day and praising a few. After fifty pages of sharply turned iambic insults, Snelling exhaustedly wrote:

Now have I thump’d each lout I meant to thump,

And my worn pen exhibits but a stump.

After
Truth,
what? Versifying, Snelling wrote an editor, had gone flat for him. “I can only write in the excitement of strong feeling,” he said. He was living in New York by then, still drinking heavily and spending too much time in the Five Points neighborhood north of City Hall, where members of the frail sisterhood were to be found. Out of this experience he and another editor created
Polyanthos,
in imitation of scandal sheets from Britain.

And then, in the summer of 1841, came Snelling’s great innovation, the
Flash
. It was a normal-size weekly newspaper of four pages, set in the usual (i.e., absurdly, illegibly, rag-paper-conservingly tiny) type of the day, with a fancy masthead depicting a dogfight, a leggy ballet dancer, and other racy tropes. (In the back of Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz’s book, you can see a foldout reproduction in miniature of the front page of one issue.) The paper was edited by Snelling, under the pen name Scorpion, along with two other men, Startle and Sly. Startle was George
Wilkes, a snappy dresser and man-about-town who had been arrested for bawdy-house rowdiness in 1836. Sly was George Wooldridge, who ran the Elssler Saloon at 300 Broadway, which sold pickled meats and other delicacies—these could be had in private rooms, “where visitors can sit without observation.” Startle and Sly supplied the gossip and tips on brothel life, and Scorpion worked his caustic belletristic magic to produce a paper that was devoted, as it proclaimed, to “Awful Developments, Dreadful Accidents and Unexpected Exposures.”

The weekly—sold for six cents by vocal newsboys and carrying advertisements for the Grotto and the Climax eating houses, cheap dress coats, midwifery, and antisyphilitic nostrums like Hunter’s Red Drop—was an immediate success, and almost immediately it got into trouble. In the issue of October 17, 1841, appeared one in a series of articles called “Lives of the Nymphs.” The article told the story of a rich, successful courtesan, Amanda Green—the tall, full-formed daughter of a dressmaker, who was abducted by a man in a coach and plied with champagne. “At the crowing of the cock she was no more a maid,” said the article. Abandoned by her gentleman abuser, she took up with a German piano tuner—after which there was no recourse but a life of open shame. “May those who have not yet sinned, take warning by her example,” the
Flash
reporter piously wrote. “She is very handsome. She resides at Mrs. Shannon’s, No. 74 West Broadway.”

In the same issue as Amanda Green’s memoir—the details of which were furnished by “Sly” Wooldridge—was an attack written by Snelling on a Wall Street merchant named Myer Levy. Levy had an enemy, a stockbroker named Emanuel Hart, who fed Wooldridge some specifics of Levy’s
past, which Wooldridge passed on to Snelling, who dashed off a long, calumnious piece alleging that Levy had worked as a “fancy man” for a prostitute and asserting that he was, among other things, lascivious, sordid, and crapulous.

Levy complained to the New York district attorney, who promptly charged the three proprietors of the
Flash
with criminal libel and, in a separate charge, with obscenity. Wooldridge turned state’s evidence and got off. He soon founded a new paper called the
True Flash,
which attacked Snelling: “His best effusions now are the mumblings of a sot,” said the article. “What has he left but to crawl his way through the world, leaving his slime behind him.” Snelling went to jail briefly on the obscenity charge (the ramifications of which are nicely elucidated in
The Flash Press
), and then, remarkably, when he emerged a few months later, he and Wooldridge made up and joined forces again in a new paper, the
Whip
—which was like the
Flash
but slightly racier and a little more careful about libel.

The burst of published indecorum reached its peak in the summer of 1842—indeed, as the authors of
The Flash Press
show, the use of the very words “licentious” and “licentiousness” in American periodicals rose from about 1,500 instances in 1830 to 3,000 in 1842, plummeting again thereafter. By that summer, there were two more flash rags, the
Rake
and the
Libertine,
and a printer and cartoonist named Robinson was busy selling dirty drawings with titles like “Do You Like This Sort of Thing?” It was all too much for James Whiting, the district attorney, who began issuing indictments right and left. The
Flash
and the
Whip
managed to continue in the face of legal troubles and editorial turnover until 1843, threatening malefactors with exposure, interviewing half-naked women in the park, excoriating
sodomites, and writing up the beauties and the dress designs to be found in the richest bordellos. (One personality, Mary Walker, wore crimson embroidered silk: “Praxiteles never chiseled a more exquisite form, and Canova would have died in the vain endeavour to mould a bust like her own,” the
Whip
reported.)

Then it was all over. Snelling left for Boston, where he rejoined his third wife and became editor of the
Boston
Herald
. He was “the father of the smutty papers,” said a writer in the
Rake
. “What would any of us have been without him?” Snelling died broke but legitimate in 1848, mourned as a pillar of the Boston scene.

Recently I drove to Worcester to see these papers in the original. There they were: large, light-brown scholarly objects, protected by acid-free folders, stored on cool shelves with brass rollers—full of strange lost scandal. In some fragile issues—those saved by the Queens College professor Leo Hershkowitz from masses of historical documents discarded by the City of New York in the 1970s—there are notations and cartoonish pointing fingers drawn by District Attorney Whiting himself, as he contemplated possible grounds for indictment. In one issue I read an editorial: “The Flash is known all over the Union,” it said; “at the South it goes like wildfire.” Like Al Goldstein’s weekly
Screw,
which flourished more than a century later, the flash papers told a nervous young reader what was out there—where to go, how to act, and what to expect. “The Sunday
Flash
and its successors gave male readers paths to navigate the city without being conned or embarrassed as a greenhorn,” Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz write. “Even a shy fellow who stayed in his boardinghouse could imagine himself as a blade making a sophisticated entry into a brothel parlor.”

Thanks to the preservation efforts of the American Antiquarian Society and the meticulous research of these three scholars, we once again have a way of looking through a tiny, smudged window into New York’s long-past illicit life. Oh, and the drawing of the chambermaid and her warming pan is on
page 101
.

(2008)

A review of
The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York,
by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in association with the American Antiquarian Society (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

T
welve years ago, I stood on the steps of the church of the Gesuati with a ceremonial handkerchief in my suit pocket, and watched my soon-to-be wife set out with her father from the far side of Venice’s widest and deepest-dredged waterway, the Giudecca Canal. The sky was the color of Istrian stone—i.e., white—and the water looked choppy. Their boat leaned to one side (all gondolas lean, but I didn’t know that then): sunk low among the silk-tufted cushions of their Byzantine conveyance, the passengers seemed to have their heads almost at water level. I worried that a large swell might slosh in unexpectedly from the side and capsize them.

The oarsman at the stern, Bruno Palmarin, had been endorsed by the local grocer. His grandfathers, his father, his older brother, and various uncles and cousins were gondoliers before him; members of the Palmarin family have rowed continuously since at least 1740. Nowadays, when Bruno does weddings, his nineteen-year-old son, Giacomo, is usually the second rower. Their boat is black, of course, in compliance with ancient decree (there is in fact a paint color called nero gondola), the oar blades are red-and-white-striped, matching the rowers’ wedding shirts, and over the sleeves of their white
jackets they wear red armbands bearing the Palmarin family emblem (lion and palm tree) in four-inch lozenges of brass. Embellishing the gunwales are gilded cherubs that tug at bridles of black spiraling silk—these replicate the fittings of the state gondola owned by King Victor Emmanuel III. Most gondolas have a proverb cast in a decorative ribbon of brass just in front of the passenger well. Bruno’s was written for his grandfather, Ambrogio Palmarin, by Gabriele d’Annunzio, the poet:
Ogni alba ha il suo tramonto
(“Every dawn has its dusk”).

Bruno doesn’t row out onto the Giudecca Canal anymore unless a job like our wedding specifically requires it. When he was a boy, traffic on the canal was light enough that he could swim all the way across, returning on the
traghetto,
or two-oared gondola shuttle, that operated into the 1960s; but in recent years it has become a major thoroughfare, a sort of truck route, and its water is abob with the cross-purposed wakes of a vast range of boats: mid-sized motor-launches, ramp-prowed car ferries, crane barges, tugboats, tiny fiberglass speed-wedges banging from one swell to the next with a sound of lawn mowers, eight-story Greek cruise vessels thrumming past like insurance companies that have come laterally adrift, and oval, flat-roofed
vaporetti
swerving in loose S-shapes from shore to shore. Each spreading wave-system is reflected from the quaysides back into the central confusion. You may see ten boats, but you know that the water is mumblingly remembering the previous twenty-five. Only very late at night does the surface revert to its pre-propellerine calm.

This abundance of manufactured chop—known to Venetians by the ominous name of
moto ondoso
—accelerates the decay of the city’s foundational stonework. And it makes
life difficult for the venturesome gondolier, who stands upright on a bit of carpet high on the upcurving tailpiece of a half-ton craft without a keel, trying, as he and his counterweighted, steel-pronged prow seesaw unrestrainedly, to propel it forward with one oar levered against a gnarl of polished walnut. His boat, with its sinuous, side-rocking way of proceeding by self-correctingly veering off course, is a curiosity, maybe even a marvel, of evolved hydrodynamics, but its peculiar nautical graces and efficiencies only assert themselves when it moves over relatively smooth water. A number of gondoliers say that the Giudecca Canal is dangerous. Bruno Palmarin avoids it not because it frightens him but because he thinks he looks out of place there. “In the choppy water, when you are struggling, when you are
distrait,
you feel ridiculous,” he said to me. “You feel like a clown.”

But on our wedding day, my veiled
fidanzata
—a gutsier import-word perhaps than the prissy-sounding
fiancée
—had a good time going across. “Out in the middle of the canal it was perfect,” she says now. “Everything looked silver, or lead-colored, and misty. I don’t remember its being choppy at all.” We got married, walked out the front door through a spray of rice, and stepped into life’s long boat together. It was dark by then; the red carpet in the passenger well glowed. The backboard behind our two seats was carved with some gold-leaf mermaids; its peaked shape, and the tapering form of the bow reaching ahead of us into the shadows, made me think of the Batmobile. There were two small gilded chairs for the best man (my father) and the maid of honor, Minette, with her beautiful smile. We began to move. We surged in the dark up a narrow canal, the San Vio, going surprisingly fast. At the Grand Canal, my father said, “If you’re going to go, this is definitely the way to go.” As a partial wedding
present he gave us a plastic model of a gondola with a little red lightbulb in its gold cabin. We proudly displayed it on a side table in our first apartment, and then, when we moved, it got packed away in a box marked “Toys,” and I didn’t give gondolas another thought for a long time.

—

A year ago, we returned to Venice for the summer, to stay in my wife’s parents’ apartment on the island of the Giudecca. The first week, we did a lot of walking in the crowded trinket-lanes near the Rialto and San Marco, which are difficult to maneuver in with a three-year-old. A man walked into me, holding me momentarily by both arms, and immediately afterward my wife discovered that her wallet had been stolen; later I scolded a teenager on the piazza for luring a pigeon close to him with a handful of corn and then kicking it like a soccer ball. (The pigeon seemed all right afterward.) The second week, my wife had a dream in which her tongue was a large black dog that she had to take out for a walk. It was a sign. We were doing too much walking. The next day, we went on our first family gondola ride. The experience was startlingly pleasant—like sinking down in a warm bathtub, except drier, and with more interesting scenery. In aquatic shade, we turned tight corners in our long manual limousine, clearing edges of powdery brick by a quarter of an inch, admiring an occasional commemorative plaque (Byron is still big), with sunlight and strangely inverted conical chimneys and life-evincing laundry high overhead. There was no bad smell. My three-year-old son put his head in my lap and went to sleep; my nine-year-old daughter pointed out that the disintegrating doorways and passing tableaux were like Disney’s
Pirates of the Caribbean
. Some French women
on a bridge flirtatiously chided the gondolier, who had a fluffy ponytail and wraparound sunglasses, about his lack of a hat. Occasionally a thirties-looking wood-paneled water taxi disturbed our Edwardian trance as it dieseled by with the ruminative sound of toilets flushing. The people on it detached their faces from the rubber flanges of their video cameras for an instant and looked at us wistfully. They had thought they were being very clever by hiring a water taxi, since you can go so much farther in one; but now, seeing our silent, artful, blissful progress, our movement at the ideal speed of architectural self-disclosure, they were less sure: maybe they, too, should have gone for the gondola.