Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  The voyage to Hawaii would mark the first of many seagoing adventures in Mark Twain’s life. Later he crossed the Atlantic almost as regularly as one might today by air. And then such voyages were rigorous and often dangerous. In his first letter to the Union, he described the journey as “very rough for several days and nights, and the vessel rolled and pitched heavily. All but six or eight of us took their meals in bed constantly, and remained shut up in the staterooms day and night. The saloons and decks looked deserted and lonesome.” Clemens probably thrived on such travel because he seldom became seasick. The Hawaii letters mark the first time that the writer engaged in the beautiful descriptive prose that so distinguishes The Innocents Abroad and other works. These passages, however, didn’t always escape the criticism of his imaginary traveling companion, Mr. Brown, who at one point (in letter four) exploded: “You can go on writing that slop about balmy breezes and fragrant flowers, and all that sort of truck, but you’re not going to leave out them centipedes and things for want of being reminded of it, you know.”4

  During his four months in the islands, he visited three of them, Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii. He had intended to visit Kauai, but this plan was abandoned when in Oahu he met Anson Burlingame, who was returning to China as the U.S. ambassador. A month after Sam’s arrival in Honolulu, he sailed on an interisland schooner to Maui, passing by the newly established leper colony on Molokai (lying “like a homely sway-backed whale on the water”), which operated into the next century. Descriptions of its horrors would have to await the pens of Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson, and later James A. Michener and W. S. Merwin. Clemens remained on Maui for five weeks, returning to Oahu on May 22. Four days later he sailed for Hawaii, where he visited the volcano Kilauea. He returned to Oahu on June 16 and remained on Waikiki until sailing for San Francisco.

  Although he later remembered going to the islands mainly to write about the sugar industry, he didn’t get to that subject until his twenty-third letter, in which he dutifully quoted facts about the production from the various islands. In comparing it with the sugar industry in Louisiana, however, he appears to have been ahead of his time in suggesting the benefits of today’s outsourcing. “The hire of each laborer [in Hawaii] is $100 a year,” he wrote when the ink was hardly dry on the United States’ decision to end slavery, if not on the Emancipation Proclamation itself—“just about what it used to cost to board and clothe and doctor a Negro—but there is no original outlay of $500 to $1,000 for the purchase of the laborer, or $50 to $100 annual interest to be paid on the sum so laid out.”5 After five years in the West, he still remained something of a southerner in terms of his sensitivity to the recent crime of slavery.

  There was also a need to satisfy his Sacramento readers, whose numbers no doubt included a healthy minority of copperheads. Otherwise, Mark Twain, whose nom de guerre was about to become permanently famous, provided a colorful overview of the islands, now in their last years of the Kamehameha dynasty. Hawaii was still the center of whaling, a central focus in the letters, which argued for that industry’s relocation to San Francisco. He criticized the “Kanakas” (not then a pejorative for Hawaiians) for their general dishonesty as vendors and their poor treatment of horses, much as he would Arabs during his visit to the Holy Land a year later. He spoke mirthfully of the history of the Hawaiians and their human sacrifices of grandmothers in honor of their kings and queens. Even the semisecular legislature did not escape unscathed, although he saw no difference between that one and any other. He recalled the case of the Wisconsin legislature that had debated a penalty for the crime of arson. A clueless legislator had risen to suggest “that when a man committed the damning crime of arson they ought either to hang him or make him marry the girl!”6

  The letters contain a reasonably strong hint (at least to the modern reader) that Twain was enjoying casual sexual relations with native women. In fact, the recent biographer who argues for Clemens’s homosexual tryst with Rice also thinks that he may have contracted a case of venereal disease there, or more likely earlier in either Virginia City or San Francisco. This suggestion is based on a diary entry written during the visit to Hawaii in which the writer complains of having the “mumps,” adding, “I suppose I am to take a new disease to the Islands & depopulate them, as all white men have done heretofore.” Twain also notes that it is “a damned disease that children have,” but adults can and still do contract it. The allusion to depopulating the islands may simply be a reference to the fact that whites did indeed bring venereal disease to the South Sea islands (Melville’s relatively poorer Marquesas, for example), and nothing more. Practically the only marriageable women in Nevada when he was there were already married, like Orion’s Mollie and the other ladies of Carson City. In 1862, as we have seen, Sam confessed to his sister-in-law that he didn’t “mind sleeping with female servants” as long as he remained a bachelor.7 Apparently, there was nothing wrong with somebody of his social background and standing engaging in such conduct as long as he was not married. Nothing in the rough-and-tumble environment of the mining towns of Nevada and California occasioned the indirect mention of casual sex, and certainly not with prostitutes, but the still largely unknown Sandwich Islands, where visitors considered the hula dance obscene, did invite such allusions. The women there were not lily-white Victorian women but lightly clad olive-skinned teenagers who could be described in a suggestive context.

  In his Union letters he speaks of these pretty young women with their “splendid black eyes and heavy masses of long black hair.” Mention of a female’s abundant thick black hair was shorthand in the nineteenth century for a sexually liberated woman. These “long-haired, saddle-colored Sandwich Island maidens” caught his eye time and again during his travels there. While on the big island, he described “these creatures” as “bathing about half their time. If a man were to see a nude woman bathing at noonday in the States, he would be apt to think she was very little better than she ought to be. . . . [Such women] are only particular about getting undressed safely, and in this science they all follow the same fashion. They stoop down, snatch the single garment over the head, and spring in. They will do this with great confidence within thirty steps of a man.” Apparently, these women were available to foreigners who might somehow enrich their husbands or fathers. He describes the Hawaiians as a “strange race,” “amazingly unselfish and hospitable. To the wayfarer who visits them they freely offer their houses, food, beds, and often their wives and daughters.”8

  No wonder he stayed longer than a month and almost went broke doing it. He doubtless enjoyed more freedom to satisfy himself in this way on the less populated islands. It was on his return to Oahu from Hawaii on June 16 that he met Ambassador Burlingame. A highly cultured man who had served three terms in Congress, he took an interest in Mark Twain and may have been the first cultivating force in his life, preceding the influences of Mary Fairbanks, his wife, and Howells. Burlingame encouraged Sam to turn his writing talent to more serious subjects. When the survivors of the Hornet sinking arrived in Honolulu, the ambassador and his son (who later became the first editor of Scribner’s Magazine) got Clemens out of a sickbed to interview them and subsequently break the horrifying story to the world. The account first appeared as letter fifteen to the Union, which otherwise made little fanfare over Twain’s letters. This in turn led to an adaptation that appeared in the national press.9

  When Burlingame arrived in the islands, he sent word to Twain, who was recovering from saddle boils caused by riding mules on the big island, that he and his son would like to call on him. During their first meeting, Clemens told his mother, Edward Burlingame “said he could tell that frog story as well as anybody.” Both were highly interested in the writer. “At his request,” he remembered, “I have loaned Mr Burlingame pretty much everything I ever wrote.”10 As a diplomat, Burlingame was an idealist and a democrat who opposed privileges for foreigners in China; earlier, as Lincoln’s minister to Austria, he had been in favor of the Hungarian R
evolution. His policies of noninterference in foreign affairs probably influenced Twain’s later anti-imperialist politics. In Roughing It where Twain criticizes the American treatment of Chinese immigrants in Nevada and California, he cites Burlingame’s support for China’s “bitter opposition to railroads [since] a road could not be built anywhere in the empire without disturbing the graves of their ancestors or friends.”11

  Twain remembered that he had “made Honolulu howl” in the company of this diplomat, as well as the ambassador to Japan, who was traveling with the Burlingame party on returning to his own post. They all attended a ball on the Fourth of July and stayed up talking until three the next morning. “I only got tight once, though,” he told Will Bowen in a letter the next month. “I know better than to get tight oftener than once in 3 months. It sets a man back in the esteem of people whose good opinions are worth having.”12 He left Hawaii something of a changed man, one who was clearly struggling to put the experience of at least the last eight years into clearer perspective. This new vision surveyed the river, the West, the coast, and now the Sandwich Islands, where some of his rough edges were starting to be smoothed away. He sailed on the Smyrniote on July 19 and arrived in San Francisco on August 13. He went to Sacramento to collect his pay, which amounted to twenty dollars a week plus one hundred for the Hornet letter. “They paid me a great deal more than they promised me,” he told his mother and Pamela. “I suppose that means that I gave satisfaction, but they did not say so.”13

  15 Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope

  Evidently, it was Ambassador Burlingame who gave Twain the idea of lecturing by suggesting that he do it in the Far East. He had talked publicly before, of course, long ago in Keokuk at that printer apprentices’ dinner and more recently as the burlesque Governor of the Third House in Carson City. Yet it would take some seed money and a newspaper sponsor to get such a project off the ground. Thanks to Emerson’s success in what was still considered the West (mainly Ohio and adjacent states), the public lecture was becoming popular. As Paul Fatout remarks, by the end of the Civil War, “almost every town of any size had a young men’s literary society, which arranged a course of six or eight lectures by visiting speakers.”1 This tradition had grown out of the lyceum movement in New England, where Emerson had first tried to apply the ideas of the European romantic movement to the United States and its Puritan origins.

  Transcendentalism, as it was called, was pretty much exhausted by the end of the war, and the American public was hungry for something lighter and perhaps exotic. What better than an informative lecture about some lovely islands more than two thousand miles southwest of San Francisco (“why they were put away out there in the middle of the Pacific . . . is no business of ours”) that was also funny? In chapter 78 of Roughing It, Twain described himself as returning to San Francisco “without means and without employment. I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a public lecture occurred to me!”2 He suggests that he was rather isolated from the rest of the city, discouraged by friends to whom he showed a draft of his lecture, and not encouraged by the newspapers. But the facts from stories in the papers suggest that Mark Twain’s first great success on the lecturer’s platform originated in a conspiracy.

  The first clue is that the Sandwich Islands lecture of October 2, 1866, wasn’t that funny. Actually, it is difficult to tell whether it was funny, because, Paine’s assertion aside, we do not have a verbatim account of the initial delivery of a talk that Twain gave more than forty times with variations as to audience and place. Certainly, aspects of it are still amusing, but the speech itself is rather long on information and short on humor. In a few subsequent performances of it—for example, in Petaluma—the local paper thought that Mark Twain as a lecturer had fallen “below mediocrity.” Yet this criticism may have been provoked by the lecturer’s failure to provide complimentary tickets to the press.3

  It may have been Twain’s delivery or the way he conducted himself onstage that made funny what today seems rather drab. Many testified that he could tell a story better than he could write one. Incredibly for someone who died as late as 1910 and made several recordings with Edison, apparently no recordings of his voice have survived. The closest we have is a 2.45-minute imitation of Twain reading from his Jumping Frog tale done by his former friend and neighbor William H. Gillette before a Harvard English literature class in 1934. It suggests that the tale told with his Missouri drawl was funnier than it is today in cold print. It was not only his accent that worked in his favor but also the informal way he lounged about the stage with his hands in his pockets, acting as if the audience wasn’t even present. One auditor recalled that he had sat “simmering in laughter” through what he misperceived as merely Twain’s introductory remarks, only to discover that he had been so amused for almost the entire lecture.4

  Twain’s humor was readily suggested by a handbill advertising the lecture at Maguire’s Academy of Music, where potential auditors were told that the doors opened at seven and the “Trouble” was to begin at eight. The advertisement referred first to the informational part of the lecture on American missionaries, “the absurd Customs and Characteristics of the natives,” and the volcano Kilauea. Beneath this announcement, partially in capital letters, were the following inducements:

  A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA

  Is in town, but has not been engaged

  ALSO

  A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS

  Will be on Exhibition in the next Block.

  And so on.

  The ad clearly assumed the success of the lecture, perhaps because Twain had the newspapers almost unanimously on his side. John McComb, one of the managers of the Alta, had come forward in full support of the lecturing idea. Probably encouraged by Twain’s letters from Hawaii, he got Twain to approach Tom Maguire, whom the humorist had known in Virginia City, for the use of the hall at half price.5 McComb’s support put the Alta on Twain’s side, and it and other like-minded newspapers published predictions for a large audience and a successful lecture. Hence, the fear of failure Twain described in Roughing It was probably an exaggeration to dramatize his initial struggles as a lecturer, an activity he was once again engaged in as that book came on the market in 1872. As the Call observed on September 30, “the various city papers have been busy congratulating their readers during the past week, that this keen observer and facile writer has consented to gratify the public with a viva voce description of the life and manners of the Hawaiian Islanders.”

  The same newspapers followed the lecture with high praise for the performance. It is true that the house was sold out in advance, leaving a few latecomers to the event out in the cold. But its success was probably not in its humor, if any of the texts that still exist are reliable, but in its entertaining way of conveying information about an exotic place. Although the typical California audience had largely emigrated from “the States,” most Americans before the Civil War never traveled far from the place of their birth. Indeed, it was the war that got people, as soldiers, moving around the country and created an interest in other parts of the nation and the world. This national predisposal to the travel lecture helped, but his friends in the press guaranteed success. Only the Golden Era failed to join the effort of celebrating one of their own. “Mark made a number of very good hits, and then he made some passes which were not hits at all,” the paper commented on October 7. It also suggested that the uniformity of praise was due more to fear than honesty: “They are all afraid of you, Mark; afraid of your pen.”

  Twain’s reputation for retaliation in the press certainly followed him from Virginia City, but by 1866 he had many more friends than enemies in the Fourth Estate. Whatever the case, he netted four hundred dollars from this initial lecture and quickly made plans to take his show on the road. Between October 2 and December 15, 1866, when he left for the East Coast, he gave his Sandwich Islands lecture seventeen times.6 His next stop was the Metropolitan Theater in Sacramento, where he was known for his
Hawaii letters, which were in fact still coming out in the Union. Following appearances in a number of mining towns in California, he crossed over to Nevada and stood on October 31 before a full house in Virginia City. But he hesitated to give the lecture in Carson City on November 3 because of the miscegenation hoax he had played on its first ladies back in 1864. These fears were quickly allayed by a public invitation in the Enterprise. In his response, also published in the Enterprise, he thanked Carson City for its toleration “of one who has shamefully deserted the high office of Governor of the Third House of Nevada and gone into the Missionary business.”7

  Sam Clemens’s return to Nevada as Mark Twain was marred only by a fake holdup played on him and Denis McCarthy, a one-time coproprietor of the Enterprise and Twain’s lecture agent, who was in fact in on the hoax. Everybody thought that Twain, known in Virginia City as a practical joker, got what he deserved, but the hoaxee in this case was in fact somewhat angry—as the pranksters had brandished actual guns, causing the rising star to fear for his life. The two men were returning after dark from Gold Hill, where Twain had lectured on November 10, to Virginia City, a distance of around five miles. It marked Sam Clemens’s final departure from that vast silver land of Nevada—to which he would return only vicariously to exploit his experiences in Roughing It.

  Twain finished his tour of the Pacific slope where he had begun it—in San Francisco, this time in Congress Hall on December 10. Although the hall wasn’t filled to capacity, the lecture was well attended. This time he added an impromptu address to the audience, which no doubt contained many of his journalistic friends. By now he had made an agreement with the Alta to write letters about his trip back east. The idea, as earlier suggested, may have come from Burlingame, who thought he ought to travel to Asia. His plans were to return home to his family, then in St. Louis, via New York and then, after a well-earned reunion, to find a way to begin his new travels. Standing on the stage that night, he didn’t quite know where he was headed ultimately or how. He just knew he had launched himself as both a lecturer and a travel writer and thought he would never again have to worry about a steady income. Little did he know what riches awaited him.