The second in a series of posts in which we ask writers about the cultural influences on their work.
I often draw on fact to spin my fiction. But in the case of “Frog Music,” which is based on an 1876 murder in San Francisco of a woman who dressed like a man, and features dozens of real people, my sources were an embarrassment of riches—meaning that I’m embarrassed by the possibility that readers may think I’m like some lazy hostess who arranges and serves up a platter of yummy things from a deli. So may I just say that I had to make a lot of this novel up? The sources were gappy, mutually contradictory, and fantastically suggestive rather than full.
With the help of librarians and Clare Sears, the one scholar who’s published an essay on the murder of the frog-catching, cross-dressing Jenny Bonnet, I tracked down—often in online newspaper databases—about sixty newspaper reports about her and Blanche Beunon, who was with Bonnet in the saloon when the bullets came through the window. It was a slog: excitingly forensic, but in a slow-motion way. Searching for “Jenny/Jeanne/Jeanne Bonnet/Bonnet” threw up more illustrated advertisements for bonnets than you could imagine. Optical Character Recognition added a whole other complication. Given that these newspapers were often sprinkled with misspellings and smearily printed, their digitized versions can read like gobbledegook. (“Suspicon fixed Iteelf on him and on, one of bit fritndi, Ernest Gerard, as It wat tap. posed tbey bore Jeanne Ill-will for tbe part she had taken In peraaadlag Blanche to leave ber paramaar.”)
I also subscribed to genealogical databases, hunting down birth, baptism, census, immigration, marriage, and death records for my many characters—sources I would have had to do without if I’d been writing even a few years ago, before they were online. Of course, San Francisco lost a lot of its records in the earthquake and fire of 1906. But I found fascinating tidbits in such apparently dull places as the annually published municipal reports; for instance, the fact that Jenny’s sole item of property at the time of her death—her Colt pistol, which she was always flashing around in bars—actually belonged to a pawnbroker.
When I began “Frog Music,” I thought I’d throw a few songs in, because everybody sang back then, whether in public or private, without a blush. What I didn’t expect was that I’d end up including almost thirty, mostly mid-Victorian popular hits, but some ballads, which originate in eighteenth-century France or Scotland. (You can hear my whole playlist here.)
Nor did I realize that my search for out-of-copyright texts of their lyrics and tunes—to insure I wouldn’t get sued—would prove so interesting. (Shout out to all the folk enthusiasts at mudcat.org!) I learned that no music tradition is pure; they hop fences and rub up against each other, just like people do. Also, that satirical parody can be impossible to distinguish from the authentically earnest; I’m still shocked that the poignant “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye,” which I grew up singing as a protest against war, began as an English music-hall sendup of the Irish.
Several of the songs quoted in “Frog Music” are by the gloriously versatile Stephen Foster. “Some Folks” helped inspired my main characters’ feckless individualism: “Some folks get gray hairs, / Some folks do, some folks do, / Brooding o’er their cares, / But that’s not me nor you.” Frogs pop up, not just in “The Love Sick Frog,” which has been around since the early seventeenth century, but in the minstrel song “Old Aunt Jemima,” which jests about a forbidden love between a bullfrog and a tadpole’s sister. In folklore, the frog is an audacious trickster who slips across boundaries and gets punished for it, so I thought my character, a frogcatcher for the restaurant trade as well as a Paris-born Frog, should borrow some of those amphibious qualities.
I drew on so many visual sources: maps, oil paintings, fashion plates, newspaper cartoons, jewelry, and children’s toys. But it was photography—the thrilling new art of the nineteenth century—that I found most inspiring, not just for the information it captured but for the mood of the times. From a ship’s passenger list I knew that Blanche’s man, Arthur, had been an acrobat, but it was an anonymous, sexy photo of “Jules Léotard with Trapeze” that convinced me to make Arthur a trapeze artist. Léotard’s famous quip, before he died young, of smallpox, was that if you want the crowd to love you the trapeze is optional, but the fleshings—the costume that would later be named after him—are obligatory.
One newspaper published a sketch of Jenny after her death, but the woman it shows is so glum and dowdy in her baggy suit that I’m sure some hack worked it up from a description, not from life. To get a sense of what a stir she caused, strutting around San Francisco and getting arrested for “wearing the attire of the other sex,” on average once a month, I stared instead at a photograph from the eighteen-forties, “Anita Garibaldi,” which shows the revolutionary in pants and a pose of cool nonconformity.
According to one source, Blanche wasn’t just a “soiled dove” but a dancer in a bordello. To figure out what, exactly, erotic dancers did back in the eighteen-seventies—long before pole dancing, and even before striptease—I turned to promotional postcards of burlesque performers. Clearly, it was all about the leg (in translucent tights) rather than what’s now called “T. & A.,” and there had to be some laughs involved: look at this costume from a Broadway show called “The Devil’s Auction” (1867).
Much of my sense of what life might have felt like in America in 1876 came from Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Jenny quotes Twain like ancestral wisdom, prefacing each borrowed smart remark with “As the fellow says.” I didn’t think any of my characters would be poetry readers, but I tried to make the novel Whitmanesque in its pan-sensual celebration of the urban throng. Some historical novels helped me: two standouts are Charles Portis’s “True Grit,” for its laconic tough-girl child narrator; and E. L. Doctorow’s “The March,” for the way it squeezes vaudeville tragicomedy out of the dregs of the Civil War. I aspired to both the breakneck narrative drive of Gil Adamson’s “The Outlander” and the understated jokes of Patrick DeWitt’s “The Sisters Brothers.” Not that all my required reading was set pre-twentieth-century. I’m addicted to the Jack Reacher series—action thrillers about an iconic American, by a Brit—and I modelled Jenny’s casual vagrancy on that of Jack, who fears that owning anything more than a toothbrush will tie him down.
Films and television drama fed into “Frog Music,” too. Some of them were depictions of nineteenth-century American life: “Unforgiven,” a remarkable Western that hinges on the disfigurement of a prostitute; “The Ballad of Little Jo,” which makes common cause between a downtrodden Chinese man and a woman passing as a man in the Old West; “Gangs of New York,” for the glamour of urban feuding; and, of course, the brilliantly revisionist and profane “Deadwood.” But it was “West Side Story” I thought of when I wanted to show a casual summer meeting that sparks a murderous feud. And it was “The Wire” that I took as a model for its compassionate insistence on making us care about every lowlife on its mean streets.
Photographs: Colt revolver, by David E. Scherman/Time Life Pictures/Getty; Jules Léotard in Kleidung; Anita Garibaldi in Rome, 1849, by Leemage/UIG/Getty; A 1870 whiskey advertisement, photograph by Buyenlarge/Getty; Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday dinner, photograph by Culture Club/Getty.
