The Picaroons
by Gelett Burgess and Will Irwin
Introduction by Richard A. Lupoff
DANCING ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER
The Picaroons is one of Gelett Burgess’s earliest books, and one of two which he wrote in collaboration with Will Irwin. Burgess (1866-1951) and the Irwin brothers, Will (1873-1948) and Wallace (1875-1959) were a madcap trio who bounced around the San Francisco Bay Area in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. The Irwins had both been expelled from Stanford University in Palo Alto for publishing risqué satirical prose concerning faculty members in a campus magazine. Burgess, a former professor at the University of California, Berkeley, had been summarily dismissed as his reward for demolishing a self-glorifying statue erected by a San Francisco dental practitioner, Dr. Henry Cogswell.
The three merry companions collaborated on a series of literary enterprises. Burgess in particular was a talented cartoonist, versifier, and prose practitioner. He illustrated books by Wallace Irwin and collaborated with Will Irwin on The Reign of Queen Isyl and The Picaroons: The San Franciscan Night’s Entertainment.
A compendium of tall tales, wild adventures, and satire, The Picaroons follows the adventures of a band of down-and-outers in San Francisco. Staked by a sympathetic cockney restaurateur named Coffee John to the most meager of working capital — a dime apiece! — each adventurer sets out to make his fortune via a get-rich-quick scheme, each more audacious than the next.
The Harvard Freshman, the Hero of Pago Bridge, and the ex-Medium encounter a series of Barbary Coast characters to set the reader’s head whirling. The narrative structure of the book is reminiscent of the Canterbury Tales, with story after story and story within story, all of them, somehow, interrelated and all converging in a grand and uproarious reunion. If you find comparison with Chaucer too much of a stretch, think of the Justice League of America assembling, diverging upon their separate adventures, then returning to headquarters for a grand reunion.
The modern reader may be shocked by the casual racism manifested in The Picaroons. Burgess and Irwin were obviously not in the least reluctant to use vocabulary that today is taboo in polite conversation. When we refer to these terms at all we euphemise them as “the n-word” and “the c-word.” In the authors’ time they were part of everyday speech. So too, alas, was the use of racial stereotypes, sometimes patronizing, sometimes vicious. It was many years before these images faded from popular literature and drama, nor are they totally extinct to this day. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century they were taken for granted. To point this out is not to excuse Burgess and Irwin’s use of them. They should, however, be seen in the context of the era.
It is intriguing to note Burgess and Irwin’s apparent freedom from the Anti-Semitism which was also prevalent in the early years of the Twentieth Century. Popular fiction in those years frequently conjured hostile images of the grasping, treacherous, aggressive and vulgarly materialistic Jew. The authors’ portrayal of Big Becky, while humorous, is also sympathetic, and their references to San Francisco’s Jewish community are respectful.
The date of publication of The Picaroons is particularly poignant. Aside from its captivating characters and outrageous store of incident, The Picaroons is a loving tour of the colorful and wide-open city that was San Francisco in 1904. Less than two years later, in the spring of 1906, the great Earthquake and Fire destroyed much of the city as it was then known. Some of the landmarks described by Burgess and Irwin survive to this day. Any San Franciscan or visitor to the city can visit Lotta’s Fountain, shop on Market Street, stroll through the magnificent old Palace Hotel, climb Dupont Gai — now renamed Grant Avenue — the main thoroughfare of San Francisco’s noisy, crowded Chinatown , or pause to rest in Portsmouth Square.
The Picaroons is a magical book. It is a time machine made of paper and ink. It will transport you to a glittering, rioting, fabulous gem of a city that flourished briefly, only to perish in rubble and flames.
— Richard A. Lupoff