Fitz Hugh Ludlow
The front-parlor was full of paving-stones; the carpets were cut to pieces; the pictures, the furniture, and the chandelier lay in one common wreck; and the walls were covered with inscriptions of mingled insult and glory.
[3] The pages of The Hasheesh Eater introduce a bookish and near-sighted young Ludlow: "into books, ill health, and musing I settled down when I should have been playing cricket, hunting, or riding.
The younger thirst for adventure was quenched by rapid degrees as I found it possible to ascend Chimborazo with Humboldt lying on a sofa, or chase harte-beests with Cumming over muffins and coffee.
"[6] Henry himself, in one of his few preserved sermons, attacked Great Britain for "her cruel oppression of her East India subjects, often starving… and forced to cultivate opium on land they need to supply themselves with bread…" and defended China "for resisting a traffick which was sapping, by its terrible effects upon her citizens, the very foundation of her empire…"[7] Fitz Hugh's father had obvious and enormous influence on him, with his mother playing a more marginal role in his life.
College legend holds that Ludlow was so unhappy with the late night lyrics he composed to the tune of the drinking song Sparkling and Bright he threw away the manuscript.
"[15] A few months before, Bayard Taylor's Putnam's Magazine article The Vision of Hasheesh[16] had been devoured by Ludlow, and so when the cannabis-based tetanus remedy called Tilden's extract came out he had to try some.
"[L]ife became with me one prolonged state of hasheesh exaltation…"[20] he wrote, and noted that "the effect of every successive indulgence grows more perduring until the hitherto isolated experiences become tangent to each other; then the links of the delirium intersect, and at last so blend that the chain has become a continuous band… The final months… are passed in one unbroken yet checkered dream.
"[21] He concluded: Hasheesh is indeed an accursed drug, and the soul at last pays a most bitter price for all its ecstasies; moreover, the use of it is not the proper means of gaining any insight, yet who shall say that at that season of exaltation I did not know things as they are more truly than ever in the ordinary state?… In the jubilance of hashish, we have only arrived by an improper pathway at the secret of that infinity of beauty which shall be beheld in heaven and earth when the veil of the corporeal drops off, and we know as we are known.
[21]Ludlow was earnest in his description of the horrors of withdrawal, adding that "[i]f, from a human distaste of dwelling too long upon the horrible, I have been led to speak so lightly of the facts of this part of my experience that any man may think the returning way of ascent an easy one, and dare the downward road of ingress, I would repair the fault with whatever of painfully-elaborated prophecy of wretchedness may be in my power, for through all this time I was indeed a greater sufferer than any bodily pain could possibly make me.
[25]He says in The Hasheesh Eater that through the drug, "I had caught a glimpse through the chinks of my earthly prison of the immeasurable sky which should one day overarch me with unconceived sublimity of view, and resound in my ear with unutterable music.
Ludlow had difficulty in finding words to describe his experiences: "In the hasheesh-eater a virtual change of worlds has taken place… Truth has not become expanded, but his vision has grown telescopic; that which others see only as the dim nebula, or do not see at all, he looks into with a penetrating scrutiny which distance, to a great extent, can not evade… To his neighbor in the natural state he turns to give expression to his visions, but finds that to him the symbols which convey the apocalypse to his own mind are meaningless, because, in our ordinary life, the thoughts which they convey have no existence; their two planes are utterly different.
"[27] Still, he made the attempt, trying on the one hand to make a moral or practical point that "the soul withers and sinks from its growth toward the true end of its being beneath the dominance of any sensual indulgence"[28] and on the other to map out the hashish high like an explorer of a new continent: "If I shall seem to have fixed the comparative positions of even a few outposts of a strange and rarely-visited realm, I shall think myself happy.
It was probably through the Vanity Fair staff that Ludlow was introduced to the New York City bohemian and literary culture, centered around Pfaff's beer cellar on Broadway and Saturday night gatherings at Richard Henry Stoddard's home.
[30] This scene attracted the likes of Walt Whitman, Fitz James O'Brien, Bayard Taylor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Artemus Ward.
George William Curtis, the editor of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, remembered Ludlow as "a slight, bright-eyed, alert young man, who seemed scarcely more than a boy," when he came in for a visit.
One can suppose that the childlike eighteen-year-old with brown hair and eyes and "a complexion, marble struck through with rose flush" who falls for the narrator of Our Queer Papa, a young magazine sub-editor described as a "good-looking gentleman with brains, who had published," is the fictionalized Rosalie Osborne, who follows that description, and whom he would marry the year after the story's publication.
"[35] The couple spent the first half of 1859 in Florida, where Ludlow wrote a series of articles, "Due South Sketches," describing what he later recalled as "the climate of Utopia, the scenery of Paradise, and the social system of Hell.
"[2]: 507–08 He noted that while apologists for slavery condemned abolitionists for condoning miscegenation, "[t]he most open relations of concubinage existed between white chevaliers and black servants in the town of Jacksonville.
[37]: 309 He couldn't believe that a pair of co-wives "could sit there so demurely looking at their own and each other's babies without jumping up to tear each other's hair and scratch each other's eyes out… It would have relieved my mind… to have seen that happy family clawing each other like tigers.
"[38] Ludlow spent considerable time with Orrin Porter Rockwell, who had been dubbed the "Destroying Angel" for his supposed role as Brigham Young's assassin of choice.
Contrary to his progressive nature, inquiring mind, and abolitionist politics, he describes a "motherly mulatto woman" as possessing "the passive obedience of her race"[42]: 493 ; Mexicans in California as originating from "a nation of beggars-on-horseback," a melting pot of "Spaniards, Greasers, and Mixed-Breeds…;"[43] and Chinese immigrants in "a kennel of straggling houses"[44] which he envisions "finally… swept away from San Francisco, and that strange Semitic race… either exiled or swallowed up in our civilization…;"[45] and deplores "the natural, ingrained laziness of the Indians.
Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority, I ought to appreciate them myself…"[50] Ludlow also observed the ravages of opium addiction among the Chinese immigrant population in San Francisco: I shall never forget till my dying day that awful Chinese face which actually made me rein my horse at the door of the opium hong where it appeared, after a night's debauch, at six o'clock one morning… It spoke of such a nameless horror in its owner's soul that I made the sign for a pipe and proposed, in "pigeon English," to furnish the necessary coin.
The Chinaman sank down on the steps of the hong, like a man hearing medicine proposed to him when he was gangrened from head to foot, and made a gesture, palms downward, toward the ground, as one who said, "It has done its last for me — I am paying the matured bills of penalty.
Most of his stories were light-hearted romances, sprinkled with characters like "Mr. W. Dubbleyew," or "Major Highjinks," and generally concerning some semi-ridiculous obstacle that comes between the narrator and a beautiful young woman he's fallen in love with.
When she got to the lab, she immediately sought out some chemical with which she could kill herself: We were alone together among the strange poisons, each one of whom, with a quicker or a slower death-devil in his eye, sat in his glass or porcelain sentry-box, a living force of bale.
The author of the journal, Edgar Sands, panics, fearing that he will be blamed for the death, and attempts to destroy the body, …he went calmly to work, with an awful despair in his eyes, and cut the shell of me — the husk I had left — to pieces; as a surgeon would, on a table in the laboratory.
This story was certainly inspired by the synesthesia Ludlow experienced during his hashish experiences, of which he wrote that: The soul is sometimes plainly perceived to be but one in its own sensorium, while the body is understood to be all that so variously modifies impressions as to make them in the one instance smell, in another taste, another sight, and thus on, ad finem.
The Household Angel[42] was published over a series of thirteen issues of Harper's Bazaar in 1868, and is a soap opera of betrayal, deceit, and the descent of a likable protagonist into alcoholism and despair.
The play was performed by children, under the direction of Jessie Benton Frémont, the wife of General John C. Fremont, (and starring their son), and included two shetland ponies.
It is occasionally anachronistic, as when Ludlow reviews failed attempts to explain the enormous energy radiated from the sun using classical physics, eventually settling on the heat given off by incoming meteor collisions as the most likely explanation.
