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Had it not been for the ghost of tobacco smoke given up by his clothes, he might not have been there at all. When he finally did speak, it was of a woman he’d been with in New York City. “Amy Leslie— she also went by other names—lived in a flat house on West Twentyseventh, a street jammed with opium palaces and brothels. The janitor at Amy’s place enjoyed a flash of celebrity when he declared, with a smirk and a swagger, that I had stayed with her during the summer of 1896. On that rancid crumb of intelligence the public choked and, having done so, spat me out. What was the word of a fornicator
against that of New York detective Becker and the entire Nineteenth Precinct? The dope layout the police found when they tumbled my room completed the picture of Dorian Gray and made me an object of spite and an outcast from polite society, whose morals were safeguarded by police commissioner Roosevelt and Hamlin Garland. I had nailed the tin tray to a wall in my room to memorialize an excursion into the Tenderloin, taken so that readers could be titillated by ‘Opium’s Varied Dreams.’ With the exception of Hearst’s Journal and Walt Whitman’s old paper, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the gentlemen of the press
bludgeoned me. I was afraid the cops might do likewise with their truncheons. I didn’t go into the Dora Clark business, thinking of martyrdom. I don’t care for martyrs. They stink of the match that sets light to the pyre.”
ABOUT THE BOOK The Caricaturist, the eleventh, stand-alone book in Norman Lock’s The American Novels series, is a tragicomic portrait of America struggling to honor its most-cherished ideals at the dawn of the twentieth century. In its pages, you’ll meet Oliver Fischer, a self-styled bohemian, boardwalk caricaturist, and student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, who becomes ensnarled, along with Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, in a clash between the Anti-Imperialist League and their expansionist foes. Sent to Key West to sketch the 1898 American invasion of Cuba, in company with war correspondent Stephen Crane, he realizes––in the flash of a naval bombardment––that our lives are suspended by a thread between radiance and annihilation. 35