Nicholson Baker - The Way the World Works

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)

Twelve 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.