Early in his college years, probably during the spring of 1854, Fitz Hugh’s medical curiosity drew him to visit his “friend Anderson the apothecary” regularly. During these visits, Ludlow “made upon myself the trial of the effects of every strange drug and chemical which the laboratory could produce.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “The Night Entrance” The Hasheesh Eater 1857 A few months before, Bayard Taylor’s Putnam’s Magazine article The Vision of HasheeshTaylor, Bayard “The Vision of Hasheesh” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, April 1854. had been devoured by Ludlow, and so when the cannabis-based tetanus remedy called Tilden’s extract came out he had to try some.

Ludlow became a “hasheesh eater,” taking heroic doses of this cannabis extract regularly throughout his college years. Just as in his youth he found to his delight that he could from the comfort of his couch adventure along with the words of authors, he found that with hasheesh “^*he whole East, from Greece to farthest China, lay within the compass of a township; no outlay was necessary for the journey. For the humble sum of six cents I might purchase an excursion ticket over all the earth; ships and dromedaries, tents and hospices were all contained in a box of Tilden’s extract.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “The Hour and the Power of Darkness” The Hasheesh Eater (1857)

He found the drug to be a boon to his creativity: “pen glanced presently like lightning in the effort to keep neck and neck with my ideas,” he writes at one point, although, “[at last, thought ran with such terrific speed that I could no longer write at all.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Nimium — the Amreeta Cup of Unveiling” The Hasheesh Eater 1857

Although he later grew to think of cannabis as “the very witch-plant of hell, the weed of madness”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Vos non vobis — wherein the Pythagorean is a By-stander” The Hasheesh Eater 1857 and his involvement with it as unwise, “^*herein I was wrong I was invited by a mother’s voice.… The motives for the hasheesh-indulgence were of the most exalted ideal nature, for of this nature are all its ecstasies and its revelations — yes, and a thousand-fold more terrible, for this very reason, its unutterable pangs.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Cashmere and Cathay by Twilight” The Hasheesh Eater (1857)

For a time he seemed never to be out from under the influence of hashish. “^*ife became with me one prolonged state of hasheesh exaltation…”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Then Seeva opened on the Accursed One his Eye of Anger” The Hasheesh Eater 1857 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.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “The Night of Apotheosis” The Hasheesh Eater 1857 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.

Ludlow’s endeavor to end his “addiction” to cannabis is puzzling. The intoxicating chemicals in marijuana and hashish are not considered addictive in the strict sense of the word, and are only thought to be habit-forming in the same way as tennis, ice cream, or soap operas. Yet Ludlow was earnest in his description of the horrors of withdrawal, adding that “^*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.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “The Hell of Waters and the Hell of Treachery” The Hasheesh Eater 1857

Ludlow’s account was probably flavored by the tale of opium addiction which formed the model for his book: Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. But Ludlow’s “addiction” is curiously missing signs of physical withdrawal symptoms — terrible nightmares are about the worst symptom he specifies. He takes up tobacco smoking to help him through his “suffering,”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “My Stony Guardian” The Hasheesh Eater 1857 but this suffering seems mostly to be from disappointment at the dreary colors and unfantastic drudgery of sober life, rather than from any physical pain (ironically, his incipient nicotine addiction may have been the real source of any physical suffering he experienced; he writes at one point that “to defer for an hour the nicotine indulgence was to bring on a longing for the cannabine which was actual pain.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Grand Divertissement” The Hasheesh Eater 1857):

The very existence of the outer world seemed a base mockery, a cruel sham of some remembered possibility which had been glorious with a speechless beauty. I hated flowers, for I had seen the enameled meads of Paradise; I cursed the rocks because they were mute stone, the sky because it rang with no music; and the earth and sky seemed to throw back my curse.…

It was not the ecstasy of the drug which so much attracted me, as its power of disenthrallment from an apathy which no human aid could utterly take away.Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Leaving the Schoolmaster, the Pythagorean Sets Up For Himself” The Hasheesh Eater 1857

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.” This glimpse would haunt him for the rest of his days. A poem, preserved in his sister’s notebook, reads in part: “I stand as one who from a dungeon dream / Of open air and the free arch of stars / Waking to things that be from things that seem / Beats madly on the bars. // I am not yet quite used to be aware / That all my labor & my hope had birth / Only to freeze me with the coffined share / Of void & soulless earth.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “I Did Not Ask That I Might Have a Name” (unpublished)

The Hasheesh Eater was written on the advice of his physician during his withdrawal. 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.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “The Book of Symbols” The Hasheesh Eater 1857

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”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Introduction” The Hasheesh Eater (1857) 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.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Notes on the Way Upward” The Hasheesh Eater (1857)

Entering the New York literary scene

For a time he studied law under William Curtis Noyes (himself a lawyer who had begun his legal studies at the age of fourteen in the offices of Fitz Hugh’s uncle Samuel). Ludlow passed the bar exam in New York in 1859, but never practiced law, instead deciding to pursue a literary career.

The late 1850s marked a changing of the guard in New York City literature. Old guard literary magazines like The Knickerbocker and Putnam’s Monthly were fading away, and upstarts like the Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Press, and Vanity Fair were starting up. Ludlow took on a position as an associate editor at Vanity Fair, a magazine which at the time resembled Punch in tone. 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.Smyth, Albert H. Bayard Taylor Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1970, pp. 137-8. See also: Howells, William Dean Literary Friends and Acquaintences… New York & London 1911, pp. 70-1. This scene attracted the likes of Walt Whitman, Fitz James O’Brien, Bayard Taylor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Artemus Ward.

New York City’s vibrant literary scene and cosmopolitan attitudes were a boon to Ludlow. “It is a bath of other souls,” he wrote. “It will not let a man harden inside his own epidermis. He must affect and be affected by multitudinous varieties of temperament, race, character.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “The American Metropolis” The Atlantic Monthly January 1865, p. 87

New York was tolerant of iconoclasts and of people with just the sort of notoriety Ludlow had cultivated. “No amount of eccentricity surprises a New-Yorker, or makes him uncourteous. It is difficult to attract even a crowd of boys on Broadway by an odd figure, face, manner, or costume. This has the result of making New York an asylum for all who love their neighbor as themselves, but would a little rather not have him looking through the key-hole.”

The late 1850s and early 1860s found Ludlow in just about every literary quarter of New York. He wrote for, among many others, the Harper’s publications (Weekly, Monthly and Bazar), the New York World, Commercial Advertiser, Evening Post, and Home Journal, and for Appleton’s, Vanity Fair, Knickerbocker, Northern Lights, The Saturday Press, and the Atlantic Monthly.

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 visitCurtis, George William “Editor’s Easy Chair” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine December 1870. Curtis introduced Ludlow to the princes of the Harper publishing family as an upcoming literary talent who, before his twenty-fifth birthday, would have his first book go through several printings and would place more than ten stories in Harper’s publications, some of which were printed serially and spanned several issues.

Rosalie

Rosalie was eighteen when she married, not particularly young by the standards of the day, but young enough in character that it would later be remembered that “she was… but a little girl when she was married.”Letter from Carrie to her mother, 30 Dec. 1864 Memoirs written by members of the New York literary circle in which the Ludlows were an active part universally paint Rosalie as both very beautiful and very flirtatious. The wife of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, for instance, remembered Mrs. Ludlow as “the Dulcinea who had entangled ^* in the meshes of her brown hair.”Aldrich, Mrs. Thomas Bailey Crowding Memories Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company 1920, p. 22.

The couple spent the first half of 1859 in Florida, where Fitz Hugh 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.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “If Massa Put Guns Into Our Han’s” The Atlantic Monthly April 1865, pp. 507-8 He noted that while apologists for slavery condemned abolitionists for condoning miscegenation, “^*he most open relations of concubinage existed between white chevaliers and black servants in the town of Jacksonville. I was not surprised at the fact, but was surprised at its openness.… not even the pious shrugged their shoulders or seemed to care.”

From Florida, the couple moved to New York City, staying in a boarding house and diving rapidly back into the literary social life.

The heart of the continent

Bierstadt wanted to return West, where in 1859 he had found scenes for some of his recently successful paintings. He asked Ludlow to accompany him. Ludlow’s writings about the trip, published in the New York Evening Post, the San Francisco Golden Era, the Atlantic Monthly and then later compiled into book form, according to one biographer of Bierstadt, “proved to be among the most effective vehicles in firmly establishing Bierstadt as the preeminent artist-interpreter of the western landscape in the 1860s.”Anderson, Nancy K. & Ferber, Linda S. Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise New York: Hudson Hills Press.

During the overland journey, they stopped at Salt Lake City, where Ludlow found an industrious and sincere group of settlers. He brought to the city prejudice and misgiving about the Mormons, and a squeamishness about polygamy which embarrassed him almost as much as his first view of a household of multiple wives. “I, a cosmopolitan, a man of the world, liberal to other people’s habits and opinions to a degree which had often subjected me to censure among strictarians in the Eastern States, blushed to my very temples,” he writes.Ludlow, Fitz Hugh The Heart of the Continent 1870, p. 309

He couldn’t believe that a pair of co-wives “could sit there so demurely looking at their own and each others’ babies without jumping up to tear each others’ hair and scratch each others’ eyes out… It would have relieved my mind… to have seen that happy family clawing each other like tigers.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “First Impressions of Mormondom” The Golden Era 20 Mar. 1864

His impressions of the Mormons came when Utah was seen by many of his readers back home as rebellious and dangerous as those states in the Confederacy. Ludlow encountered frequent snide comments about the disintegration of the Union, with some Mormons under the impression that with the flood of immigrants to Utah fleeing the draft, and with the decimation of the male population in war time making polygamy seem more practical, the Mormon state would come out of the American Civil War stronger than either the Union or the Confederacy. Ludlow’s opinions were read with interest back East, and would constitute an appendix to the book he would later write about his travels.

“The Mormon system,” wrote Ludlow, “owns its believers — they are for it, not it for them. I could not help regarding this ‘Church’ as a colossal steam engine which had suddenly realized its superiority over its engineers and… had declared once for all not only its independence but its despotism.” Furthermore, “^*t is very well known in Salt Lake City that no man lives there who would not be dead tomorrow if Brigham willed it so.” 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. Ludlow wrote a sketch of the man which Rockwell’s biographer, Harold Schindler, called “the best of those left behind by writers who observed the Mormon first-hand.” Ludlow said, in part, that he “found him one of the pleasantest murderers I ever met.”

Ludlow wrote that “their insane error, Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “First Impressions of Mormondom” part II The Golden Era 27 Mar. 1864 For instance, “Brigham Young is the farthest remove on earth from a hypocrite; he is that grand, yet awful sight in human nature, a man who has brought the loftiest Christian self-devotion to the altar of the Devil…”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Among the Mormons” Atlantic Apr. 1864, p. 485, col. 2 A warning that must have seemed especially poignant was this: “[T" target="_blank" >^*he Mormon enemies of our American Idea should be plainly understood as far more dangerous antagonists than hypocrites or idiots can ever hope to be. Let us not twice commit the blunder of underrating our foes.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Among the Mormons” Atlantic Apr. 1864, p. 488, col. 1-2

Racist opinions

Native Americans were a particular target of his bigotry. “The copper-faced devils” he called them, and he looked with scorn on “the pretty, sentimental, philanthropic prayers” that constituted much of the contemporary literature about the “noble savage.” Ludlow believed the “Indian” was subhuman — an “inconceivable devil, whom statesmen and fools treat with, but whom brave and practical men shoot and scalp.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “Salt Lake City to San Francisco” The Golden Era 17 Apr. 1864

San Francisco

There, Ludlow again found himself in a vibrant literary community, this time centered around the Golden Era, which published Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller and Bret Harte. Twain was at the time still a virtual unknown (he had first used the pen name “Mark Twain” in a published piece a few months before). Ludlow wrote that “funny literature, that Irresistable [sic Washoe Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position.… He imitates nobody. He is a school by himself.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “A Good-bye Article” The Golden Era 22 November 1863, col. 5 Twain reciprocated by asking Ludlow to preview some of his workBishop, Morris “Fitz Hugh Ludlow” Union Worthies 8, Union College, 1953, p. 16, and wrote to his mother, “if Fitz Hugh Ludlow, (author of ‘The Hasheesh Eater’) comes your way, treat him well.… He published a high encomium upon Mark Twain, (the same being eminently just & truthful, I beseech you to believe) in a San Francisco paper. Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority, I ought to appreciate them myself…”Clemens, Samuel, letter to Jane Lampton Clemens, 2? January 1864, in Mark Twain’s Letters Berkeley: University of California Press 1988, p. 268

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.”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “What Shall They Do To Be Saved?” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine August 1867, pp. 377-387

From San Francisco, Bierstadt and Ludlow ventured to Yosemite, then to Mount Shasta, and then into Oregon, where Ludlow was struck “by a violent attack of pneumonia, which came near terminating my earthly with my Oregon pilgrimage”Ludlow, Fitz Hugh “The Prisoners of Portland: An Historical Novel of the Present, Past and Future: In two short (may its readers echo ‘too short!’) books — and no chapters whatsoever: Doleful, Damp, and Dramatic” The Golden Era 12 June & 19 June 1864 and which stopped their wandering for the better part of a week.

By late in 1864, after Ludlow’s return to New York, his marriage was in trouble. The reasons for the strife are unknown, but surviving letters suggest a mutual and scandal-provoking flood of infidelity. Rosalie obtained a divorce in May of 1866. She would, a few months later, marry Albert Bierstadt.

Fitz Hugh meanwhile was again trying to kick a drug addiction, but he quickly started up a relationship with Maria O. Milliken, of whom little is known except that she was ten years his senior. They were married shortly after Rosalie’s marriage to Bierstadt.

New York stories

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. Occasional stories break from this pattern:

The Phial of Dread

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. Should it be Hemp? No, that was too slow, uncertain, painful. Morphine? Too many antidotes — too much commonness, ostentation in that. Daturin? I did not like to ask how much of that was certain…

She finally stabs herself in the heart with a knife she finds in the lab. 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. These fragments he screwed down into a large retort, and placed in the fiercest of flames, fed with pure oxygen.… I knew that all of me that had been seen on earth was reducing there to its ultimates — I was distilled there by degrees.

Her soul becomes trapped in the vial in which he pours the last drops of this substance, and he in turn is tormented by the presence he sees as a small, tortured woman within the vial. She is, however, able to take over his body with her soul long enough to write the confession from which the above excerpts come. This saves Mr. Sands from capital punishment, but he notes that the last pages of his journal were “written… after I was discharged from Bloomingdale Insane Asylum.”

The Music Essence

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. Thus the hasheesh-eater knows what it is to be burned by salt fire, to smell colors, to see sounds, and, much more frequently, to see feelings.

John Heathburn's Title

The Household Angel

Cinderella

“E Pluribus Unum”

And it is occasionally visionary, as when Ludlow, decades before Albert Einstein would do the same, abandons the idea of the æther and muses that “^*e might be allowed to… assert that because our only cognitions of matter are cognitions of force, matter in the scientific sense is force.” He does not elaborate, and evidently the article was altered and cut for publication substantially, so we are left to wonder how far he pursued this idea of the equivalency of matter and energy.

Homes for the Friendless