Jungle of Stone Page 9

  He wrote home every Sunday after attending Episcopal Church services, signing each letter to his father as he would throughout his life with his full name: “Your affectionate son, John L. Stephens.” Yet his letters were intimate and personal, and in all the volumes of his later writings and correspondence, nothing captured him so directly and left such a clear and unassuming self-portrait. His affection for his sisters is obvious as he discusses their schooling, their health, and the recent departure of Mrs. Madden, the family’s housekeeper, who apparently had become a mother figure after the death of Clemence six years earlier. It saddened him deeply when he learned his father was not coming to visit and he said he felt terrible when his brother Benjamin paid an unexpected visit. “I had to keep up notes and lessons and he felt I was not paying enough attention to him.” And he struggled mightily with his handwriting, which everyone had complained was virtually illegible. He tried out a variety of writing styles on the family, including a nearly horizontal script that was as bad if not worse than the one he was trying to replace. “A person can hardly imagine the difficulty of such an apparently trifling an operation as that of altering his writing,” he explained. “I have said to my fingers make it so and they make it not so.”

  The most telling aspect of the letters is his mastery of language at seventeen, an indication of what was to come, and his already strong ambivalence about becoming a lawyer, a feeling that would continue to plague him through his relatively short legal career. The law was not only supposed to provide him with a respectable profession, he said, but provide for him financially as well. But he was skeptical when his father mentioned a sum that Daniel Lord said he would pay him on his return to Lord’s law office in New York. “If I am not mistaken his own business after a practice of six or seven years yields him very little if more than the sum he named,” he wrote. He added that he heard there were now many more entering law practice than there were clients. In the end, however, he admitted that he could probably make a living at it, if in the profession “many dull, stupid ignoramuses do thrive and soon are able to live upon the fat of the land . . . though [it’s] a mortifying idea to hope to succeed because other blockheads do. . . .”

  Homesickness, his young age, and the hard labor of his studies undoubtedly contributed to his doubts about continuing at the school. But there was also a lingering sense of youthful literary dreams he felt he was giving up. “This profession is no fairyland in which a person can indulge his heart, content to build castles in the air,” he told his father. “Fact, stubborn fact, stares him too broadly in the face to suffer that he should long rove in this world of his own creation, including himself with hopes which can never be realized . . . and show him the slender foundations on which his visionary fabric is erected.”

  But the matter was out of his hands. While he was several months at the law school, long enough, he thought, to make a case for his misgivings, the final decision about whether he should continue was up to his father. “I have promised to abide by your opinion,” he wrote. And when the decision came back that his father wanted him to finish and resume his apprenticeship with Lord, Stephens dutifully accepted it. Doubts and restlessness now banished, he concluded in a letter dated November 30, 1823, “I am now two days past eighteen. Three years yet before the law will allow me to think of living by it.”

  Never again does Stephens reveal himself so personally. There are flashes of such a Stephens in his scattered future letters, but his books reveal little of his inner life. In all the thousand pages of his writings and letters, for example, there is not a single hint of a significant romantic relationship. Mysterious, unknown Shakespeare with all his cryptic poetry revealed more. And while a reader of Stephens’s books would come away with a full and distinct impression of him, often disarming and formal in the same moment, it is the batch of Connecticut letters that most captures his essential character and heart. His father kept most of the letters together; he too must have felt their poignancy.

  The correspondence also reveals Stephens struggling in his prose between the charming easygoing style for which he would become famous and the unwieldy constructions of too much learned Latin and Greek. Already he senses it. Responding to a letter from his youngest sister, Clemence, he compliments her on her writing, her use of the words “supremely” “roaring fire,” and “bombazet frock,” and her pure, unpretentious style. “It all seems so natural,” he wrote. “She has put on paper just what she would have said in person.”

  Stephens’s legal career would be one of fits and starts. He concluded his studies in Litchfield at the end of the summer of 1824 and eventually would spend only seven years earning his living at the law, although his training sharpened his mind and served him well in his later work. Yet even before he resumed his clerkship in New York, he fled—a sign of what was to come. Homesickness now abated, he and a cousin, Charles Hendrickson, with their families’ reluctant blessing, went on a long “jaunt” out to the Illinois territory. Officially it was a visit to Aunt Helena Ridgway, one of Judge Lloyd’s five daughters. Like so many Americans at the time, she had migrated west, with her husband, Caleb Ridgway, to make a new life, and landed in the tiny Illinois prairie town of Carmi. For the two young men in their late teens, driven by wanderlust, it was an adventure too enticing to pass up.

  The trip took them first to Pittsburgh and then by keelboat down the Ohio River to Cincinnati, where they visited a Lloyd cousin living in a one-room log cabin. From there they traveled on to Carmi, a place on the very brink of the “wild west.” They passed primitive farms and Conestoga wagons, and encountered Indians along the way. The Ridgways were living a hard frontier existence, according to Hendrickson, who described the trip in a series of letters to his mother. Correspondence from Stephens, if there was any, has vanished. Uncle Caleb was reduced to making the family’s shoes, Hendrickson reported after their arrival, and for the coming winter he planned to start up a school with twenty pupils. “You know it must be pretty hard times to drive Uncle Caleb to that,” Hendrickson wrote.27

  After more than two months of travel, Hendrickson admitted that they had had enough and couldn’t wait to get home. The easiest way was down the Mississippi River by flatboat, then by ship around to New York. His mother wrote and begged them to avoid New Orleans, where yellow fever was then rampant. But Hendrickson assured her it would abate with the cooler weather. Leaving Carmi, the cousins traveled though sparsely populated Shawnee Indian country, one night camping in the woods with pistols drawn and ready. They journeyed down the Mississippi in early December and reached New York sometime in early 1825.

  Stephens next took up a clerkship in the law office of George W. Strong. After two years’ apprenticeship with Strong, he traveled to Albany, where in 1827 he was finally admitted to the bar. There is little in the record about the next seven years of Stephens’s life, during which he practiced in New York. He mentions that he served briefly in the local militia, as was common for young men at that time. And he became seriously involved in local party politics. But his law career remains a mystery, as there are no documents to indicate even what kind of law he practiced—criminal or civil, or both. The only account of this period of his life comes from the Reverend Francis Lister Hawks, who published Stephens’s obituary in a New York magazine shortly after his death. According to Hawks, Stephens “never felt or exhibited much ardor or zeal in the pursuit of his profession.” His primary interests were political and he was a frequent speaker at Tammany Hall, Hawks wrote. There he undoubtedly displayed the debating skills he had carefully honed at Columbia and Litchfield.

  Tammany was a powerful political organization that had used its muscle to help put Andrew Jackson into the presidency. What part Stephens played is not known but he was a committed Jacksonian Democrat and must have spoken in his support. Hawks noted that Stephens delivered impassioned speeches opposing monopolies and in support of free trade. “He spoke from the heart,” wrote Hawks. “His manner was earnest and everyone who
heard him could see that he felt what he spoke.”28

  Then, in 1834, Stephens’s life took an abrupt turn. In an odd twist, the very instrument on which he depended for his political and professional life failed him. He had contracted a serious throat infection that was to change the course of his life.

  II.

  Stephens was twenty-nine years old when he arrived later that year in Le Havre, France, on the packet ship Charlemagne. He had left behind his law practice and a particularly brutal political year in New York. President Andrew Jackson had made good the year before on his promise to, in effect, shut down the Second Bank of the United States, which touched off a vicious mayoral campaign in the spring of 1834. During the election, riots broke out between pro-Jackson and pro-bank partisans. Then riots against abolitionists followed during the summer with ugly attacks on New York’s recently emancipated African-Americans. There are no records of Stephens’s role in these events but he likely had been drawn into the frays through his connection with Tammany Hall.

  By late summer, his throat infection had become so serious he was forced to consult a doctor. He was told to leave New York, where the city’s notoriously bad air would worsen with the fires and smoke of winter. The doctor apparently suggested the balmy air of the Mediterranean, a typical antidote prescribed for throat and lung problems—for those who could afford it—and Stephens readily complied.

  From Le Havre he went to Paris, then traveled to Rome, and by February 1835 he had crossed the Adriatic Sea to Greece. There he soaked up site after site of the classical world. What had been mere words and images at Columbia under the tutelage of Charles Anthon now lay in stone before him. Far from nursing himself with the prescribed rest and recuperation, Stephens climbed the acropolis above Corinth to view snowy Mount Parnassus, visited the Lion’s Gate and Agamemnon’s tomb at Mycenae, and with a copy of Herodotus clambered up the burial mound covering the Greeks who had fallen on the Plain of Marathon. There, sitting alone, he read the account of the epic battle in 490 B.C. between the Persians and the greatly outnumbered Athenians.29

  In Athens, a city still in ruins from the Greek revolt against the Turks a decade earlier, Stephens made several trips up to its famous Acropolis. “Solitude, silence, and sunset, are the nursery of sentiment,” he wrote of his final visit. “I sat down on a broken capital of the Parthenon: the owl was already flitting among the ruins.” Looking down on the shattered city, however, sentiment gave way to the pure New Yorker within him:

  I said to myself, “Lots must rise in Athens!” The country is beautiful, climate fine, government fixed, steam boats are running, all the world is coming, and lots must rise. I bought (in imagination) a tract of good tillable land, laid it out in streets, had my Plato, and Homer, and Washington Places, and Jackson Avenue, built a row of houses to improve the neighborhood where nobody lived, got maps lithographed, and sold off at auctions. I was in the right condition to “go in,” for I had nothing to lose; but, unfortunately, the Greeks were very far behind in the spirit of the age, know nothing of the beauties of the credit system, and could not be brought to dispose of their consecrated soil “on the usual terms,” ten percent down, balance on bond and mortgage; so giving up the idea, at dark I bade farewell to the ruins of the Acropolis, and went to my hotel to dinner.30

  Acropolis at Athens. Illustration from Stephens’s book Incident of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, 1838.

  However serious his throat ailment, Stephens was reenergized by his travels. Italy and Greece had been his goal but now the Aegean Sea beckoned, and he found an old brig headed for the Turkish coast. On a whim he took it. He traveled first to Smyrna, today named Izmir, and then on horseback rode south to the ancient ruins of Ephesus. Everything he saw went into his notebook and his description of his journeys ended up in a long letter sent home to friends. Without his knowledge, this correspondence came to the attention of Charles Fenno Hoffman, editor of American Monthly Magazine in New York, who published the letter serially in four separate issues of his periodical. Later Stephens acknowledged the impact those publications had on his life. “Favorable notice taken of it,” he wrote, “had some influence in inducing me to write a book.”31 The letter would create an author but, in consequence, also end Stephens’s career in the law.

  He would gradually gain better control of his writing, but the style in the letter shows the flamboyance of his school days and probably his speeches at Tammany Hall, which were no doubt filled with the rhetorical flourishes common in orations of the time. Earlier, for example, as he prepared to leave Greece, he visited the tomb of Themistocles, one of Athens’s greatest heroes. “For more than 2000 years,” Stephens wrote, “the waves have almost washed over his grave—the sun has shone and the winds have howled over him; while, perhaps, his spirit has mingled with the sighing of the winds and murmur of the waters, in mourning over the long captivity of his countrymen; perhaps, too, his spirit has been with them in their late struggle for liberty—had hovered over them in battle and breeze, and is now standing sentinel over his beloved and liberated country.”32 This was the writing style of the time, which Stephens was about to transform. The poetics would melt away, not overnight, but Stephens’s language would become spare, stripped down, and eventually acquire the fresh, conversational tone for which he would become well known.

  He traveled by steamboat to Constantinople, today’s Istanbul. “Join me, now in this race,” he told his unknown eventual readers, “and if your heart does not break at going at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour, I will whip you over a piece of the most classic ground. . . .”33 Although the ruins of Troy had yet to be unearthed, Stephens knew they lay somewhere on the plain along the Turkish coast south of ancient Hellespont and the Dardanelles. As his ship steamed along the coast, the poetry of Homer rang through his head with the tales of Helen and Paris, Ajax and Achilles. In the distance he was thrilled to see the island of Tenedos, behind which the Greeks had withdrawn their fleet pretending they had given up the siege of Troy while leaving behind a giant wooden horse as a gift.

  Approaching Constantinople from the Sea of Marmara, Stephens was dazzled by the “glittering crescents and golden points” on the mosques and minarets. His ship swung around the Seven Towers and walls of the seraglio into the Golden Horn, whose banks were covered with tiered gardens and Oriental palaces. His writing captures much of the city’s mystery, its filth and pestilence, the beauty of the dome of St. Sophia and mosque of Sultan Achmet, the walls and gates of ancient Byzantium. He visited a slave market and witnessed the launch of a huge ship commissioned by Sultan Mahmud II, the supreme potentate of the Ottoman Empire, who attended the ceremony. “I could not divest myself of the lingering idea of the power and splendor of the sultan,” he wrote, “the shadow of God upon the earth. I had wished to see him as a wholesale murderer, who had more blood on his hands than any man living.” Instead, Stephens said he found “the plainest, mildest, kindest” man dressed in a “military frock-coat and red tarbouch, with his long black beard the only mark of a Turk about him.”34

  Mosque of Sultan Suleyman in Istanbul.

  Stephens fell ill in the city, probably from a return of his throat infection which continued to plague him in the months to come. Throughout his journey, however, he managed to escape the horror of a far more serious illness, the plague, which was infecting several of the ports he visited, including Constantinople. His trip to regain his health was, in fact, putting him in even greater peril. Yet he showed some prudence. He desperately wanted to sail to Egypt, but on learning the plague had been ravaging that country for months, he held back. Indeed, at that moment more than a thousand people a day were dying in Alexandria and Cairo. By the time the epidemic burned itself out late that summer, it would claim the lives of up to two hundred thousand Egyptians.35 There was no way to ignore the disease. Yellow flags at many ports around the Mediterranean indicated they were disease-free but also warned arriving travelers they would be detained for weeks in quaran
tine stations called lazarettos. A red flag, as was then flying in Alexandria, signaled that the plague had gotten there first.

  Stephens’s ailment did not keep him down for long. Within days he was on his feet arranging to travel by horseback through the Balkans and by boat up the Danube River to Paris. On impulse he instead took a steamer leaving from Constantinople up through the narrow Bosphorus Strait and across the Black Sea for Russia. Three days later he was anchored off Odessa. Yellow flags flew in the harbor and a Russian health officer came alongside. Stephens and his fellow passengers got their first clue of what was to come when the officer climbed aboard and offered to take letters to the town, then purify and deliver them. “According to his directions,” wrote Stephens, “we laid them down on the deck, where he took them up with a pair of long iron tongs, and putting them into an iron box, shut it up and rowed off.”

  Stephens and the other passengers were soon quarantined together in the lazaretto, a complex of cottages, offices, and inspection and purification buildings—for fourteen days. He was physically examined, his clothes and personal effects fumigated with sulfuric gas, and he and the other passengers were assigned guards who stationed themselves outside their quarters. It was not as unpleasant as he expected. Friendly as ever, he took tea daily with the other passengers, ate at the single restaurant on the grounds (“not first-rate perhaps, but good enough”), and enjoyed an unobstructed view of the sea. But he was ill again and was inundated with advice and prescriptions from the others. They were all apprehensive that his sickness might delay their release, but on June 7, 1835, they were freed from their confinement on schedule.