Two Tales & Ah Sin
BRET HARTE by Richard O'Connor. 331 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.
Bret Harte had many admirers and almost no friends. Mark Twain, who respected Harte's work, called the author a coward, a liar, a swindler, a thief, a snob, a sot, a born loafer and a son of a bitch. When autograph hounds enclosed return postage in their letters, it is said that Harte used the stamps to pay his overdue butcher's bill. He was an instant success at 32, and at his prime was the most popular author the U.S. had ever known. Yet, though he sold everything he wrote and his collected writing fills 20 volumes, his reputation was built on two short stories and 60 lines of doggerel, which Harte himself despised as "possibly the worst poem that anyone ever wrote."
Not quite enough to warrant a strictly literary biography. Biographer O'Connor, whose previous books have shown a taste for the minor figures in America's past--Bat Masterson, James Gordon Bennett Jr., Jack London--sensibly confines himself to the life and the figure of the man. Both make handsome contributions to the kind of story that O'Connor enjoys telling and consequently tells very well.
Drifting Dude. At one time or another, Harte partially earned many of the opprobrious epithets that Mark Twain hurled his way. He was quite capable of snubbing friends on the street --and equally capable of showing up just at dinnertime to borrow two quarts of whisky and a room to finish them in while knocking out a short story. "If he ever repaid a loan," grumbled Twain, who was himself touched for several thousand dollars, "the incident failed to pass into history."
A young dude in a silken mustache and patent-leather shoes adrift through the California gold mine country, Harte discovered the literary lode he was to tap for the rest of his life. The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat, two short stories published in the Overland Monthly magazine, gave readers so honest and vigorous a draft of frontier life that Harte became an overnight celebrity. It is fair to say, as O'Connor does, that the literature of the West began with Bret Harte.
Overland Hole. The two stories and his poem Plain Language from Truthful James, in which Ah Sin the Chinaman beats a table of U.S. poker players at their own game, have found permanent lodging in all the anthologies. Harte himself was astonished at the success of the poem, which was republished in papers and magazines all over the country. He had stuffed it into one issue of Overland merely to fill a hole, and ever after wished that he hadn't.
After these early triumphs, Harte went on writing for another 30 years, mostly abroad, where he had gone after wangling a post in the U.S. consular service. He formed a menage a trois with a Belgian couple in London, dictating his diary to his host's wife and patting the heads of her nine children. Finally discharged from the consular service for "inattention to duty," he lived on with the Belgian widow, under sentence of death from cancer of the throat. In 1902, he died at 65 in the best Western tradition, with his boots on and almost broke: leaving an estate of $1,800 and a story in progress on his table.
Yet I state but the facts; And we found on his nails, which were taper, What is frequent in tapers--that's wax.
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