Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Acknowledging his kind treatment by the city (leading to the fame of the Jumping Frog), he thanked his “ancient comrades” and “brethren of the Press.” He told them he was going home but added that he dreaded the changes he was bound to find there. As he would early demonstrate in the cave scene in Tom Sawyer in which Injun Joe dies and in the opening chapter of Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain was ever fascinated with time and its ravages. “I shall share the fate of many another longing exile,” he told his audience, “who wanders back to his early home to find gray hairs where he expected youth, graves where he looked for firesides, grief where he had pictured joy—everywhere change!”8 The theme of death curiously hovered in the consciousness of this rising American humorist as he embarked on a voyage that would nearly kill him.

  Travel across the Great Plains was not easy in 1866, though it would become far less arduous after the completion of the transcontinental railroad just three years later. An easier and not much longer way in terms of time to cross the continent was to take a ship down to either Panama or the Nicaragua Isthmus and cross by land and inland water to the Atlantic and take another ship north to New York. Having made the overland journey from Missouri to Nevada in 1861, Sam was not eager to revisit those hardships and dangers. He sailed on the steamship America, captained by the fifty-year-old Ned Wakeman, a most colorful character who would make a strong impression on Sam and appear in a number of his later fictions, including “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” The America sailed in “opposition” to the more established Pacific Steamship Company’s Panama route. It may have attracted Sam because it was cheaper, though his pockets were presumably heavy with lecture receipts. Yet he might have had to stretch what he had. Thrift may also have been the reason a blushing unmarried couple took the same passage, to the shock of the other passengers. They planned to marry in New Jersey, they said, but Wakeman married them onboard five days out of San Francisco in a ceremony full of nautical metaphors. (“The world’s got little enough fair weather in it as it is,” Twain quoted the old salt in his second letter to the Alta. “Splice and make the most of it. Sail in company and help one another.”)9

  Yet the ceremony was one of the last delights on a journey that involved many deaths. On December 24 a young child died aboard the ship. Brought together in artificial ways as a ship’s passengers often are, especially in times of danger, the America’s passengers and crew acted as if “they were related by blood to the child.” On Christmas night, Twain told the Alta, the first officer and the boatswain’s mate “held the canvassed corpse with its head resting on their shoulders and its feet upon the taffrail—at the conclusion [of the ceremony] there was a breathless pause; . . . a sharp plunge of the weighted body into the sea, a shudder from the startled passengers, a wild shriek from the young mother (a mere girl), and all was over.”10 Mark Twain was already traveling well beyond his now established reputation as a humorist.

  When the America reached the port of San Juan del Sur on the Pacific on December 28, the passengers got their first hint that cholera awaited them on the other ocean. They heard a report that the deadly disease had broken out among six hundred passengers, many of them soldiers, coming from the East Coast. In fact, the sick had sailed on the very ship that Twain’s group was to take up to New York. To get to Greytown on the east coast of Nicaragua, however, Twain’s party had to travel by carriage and boat. During the first twelve-mile leg of a nearly four-hour journey through the Nicaraguan jungles, Twain, as he had in Hawaii, showed an interest in the native girls—“raven-haired, splendid-eyed Nicaragua damsels standing in attitudes of careless grace.” “They are virtuous according to their lights,” he told his Alta readers, “but I guess their lights are a little dim.”11

  Once reaching Virgin Bay and the shores of Lake Nicaragua, they boarded a steamer to Fort San Carlos on the San Juan River. After a nearly all-day and overnight passage, they had to go ashore at Castillo to get around the rapids and change to another stern-wheeler, which brought them to Greytown on New Year’s Eve. The following day the traveling party, enduring heavy surfs and drenching rain, boarded the San Francisco for New York. The first two cases of cholera on board became evident the very next day, and the death toll throughout this leg of Twain’s trip from San Francisco would climb to seven. He himself feared for his life on January 5, after three had died, including a minister who had conducted two burials at sea. By now the ship was a floating hospital without medicine, and the dead were being thrown overboard within an hour of their last moments to ward off the spread of infection.12 To make matters even worse, the ship’s engine kept breaking down as it steamed around Cuba.

  Its immediate destination was Key West, but the captain feared the ship would be quarantined, thereby trapping the healthy with the sick. This fear was not realized, as the port of Key West was more interested in making money than halting the disease. The port doctor called the sickness “malignant diarrhea” and, Twain told his readers back in San Francisco, “cheerfully let us land and spend $3,000 or $4,000” there. The sick quickly departed, as did others fearful of continuing the journey to New York. The cholera victims were also quickly forgotten by the Alta reporter, who was consumed with disgust at the greedy Key Westers who lived off the government by selling whiskey to the soldiers at Fort Taylor and running an expensive customhouse. On the other hand, he was pleased to be back in “the States” again after almost six years. Two more passengers died on the way up to New York, but as the ship moved out of the warm climate of the Gulf Stream, the January temperatures began to drop rapidly along with “all the fright about the disease.”13

  By the morning of January 12, 1867, the San Francisco was passing the snow-covered houses on Staten Island and returning Sam Clemens to the East to expand upon his new career as Mark Twain. He immediately recognized the Castle Garden, which he had visited thirteen years earlier as a teenage journeyman printer. Naturally, the vast city with its palisades and “its hundred steeples” had changed since his first visit. It now ran far beyond Union Square and past what would become known in the twentieth century as Times Square. He lodged on East 16th Street, but even from here it was difficult to get around the city except by walking. The omnibuses were so packed with passengers that a belated rider had to stand perilously on the open platforms. Sam was back in the States, if not yet home again in St. Louis.

  PART II

  Writer in the East

  16 Westerner in the East

  The “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope” had finally come to Manhattan, by then beginning to rival Boston as the publishing center of the American universe. With hardly more than a year since his Jumping Frog story had appeared in the New York Saturday Press, there was a buzz about its author, this new funny man on the horizon called Mark Twain, perhaps because of the news of Charles Henry Webb’s imminent publication of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. In recycling the story for the Californian in the July 16, 1865, issue, the word “Celebrated” had been added to the title of Jim Smiley’s story. Now with the tale’s publication as a lead story in a book, that change seemed to underscore Sam’s national literary debut. For at least the month of January 1867, he stayed at the Metropolitan Hotel at the corner of Broadway just below Houston Street, one of the “great caravan hotels” popular among Californians, with a capacity for six hundred guests. Because of postwar inflation, prices for a hotel room in New York City had more than doubled since his visit in 1853. He soon moved to cheaper accommodations above Union Square. “I room in East Sixteenth street, and I walk,” he told his Alta readers in a letter dated February 2. “It is a mighty honest walk from there to anywhere else, and very destructive to legs, but then the omnibuses are too slow during this mixed rainy, snowy, slushy and hard-frozen weather, and the [street]cars too full.” He added that the city “is all changed since I was here thirteen years ago, when I was a pure and sinless sprout.”1

  Twain had changed, too. His clean-shaven, sti
ll-boyish look at eighteen, in dress slightly rumpled, had transformed into that of a rather polished gentleman of thirty-one, still with a thick head of red hair but now sporting a heavy moustache, the face slightly leaner, but the eyes just as piercing. Only when he spoke in the same drawl of the Mississippi Valley did he betray his origins, speaking so slowly that easterners occasionally suspected that he was drunk. In fact, having long given up his promise made back in 1853 to his mother about not drinking, he spent some leisure hours at Pfaff’s celebrated subterranean tavern on Broadway near Bleecker. For one thing, it was the hangout for Henry Clapp, the editor of the now defunct Saturday Press. Pfaff’s was a well-known watering hole for New York literati of a bohemian persuasion.2 Earlier in the decade, Twain’s future best literary friend, William Dean Howells, was rumored to have shaken hands there with Walt Whitman, another regular in times past.

  Symbolically, the meeting of Howells and Whitman, if indeed it truly occurred, was the age of Social Darwinism, with its hedges on the full meaning of evolution, coming up against the kind of gritty realism that would lead almost directly to determinism. Twain would walk the line between them throughout his literary career. For now, he was just a humorist with a book in press. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County would appear on April 30, 1867. Despite its dedication to John Smith (“It is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated, always buys a copy”), he never personally made a dime on the book, though his publisher did. Twain also had another manuscript in hand at this time, a version of his Sandwich Island letters, parts of which eventually appeared in chapters 62 through 77 of Roughing It. He even submitted the manuscript to a New York publisher but eventually withdrew it, probably because the publishing house wasn’t showing much interest.3 Even the Jumping Frog book had been turned down by another publisher before Webb took it on, and Twain wasn’t yet sure that he had a true book in him.

  In the meantime he would make his living by writing for the newspapers and, soon thereafter, with a resumption of his lectures. He was still planning to travel around the world, but how to do it didn’t become clear until sometime in February when he heard that members of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn congregation were going on one of the country’s first tourist cruises to Europe and the Holy Land. Tourism before the war had been restricted mainly to the North American landscape, a testament to the impact of the work of Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran, whose paintings, respectively, of Niagara Falls (shown at the Paris Exposition of 1867, when Twain would visit the city), the Catskills, and Yosemite, among other scenic wonders, helped focus Americans on the beauty of their own country. Now that interest expanded to the Old World, resulting in an invasion that Europeans would forever condescend to parody (though perhaps not so easily after the publication of The Innocents Abroad). In a letter dated only a day before his departure for St. Louis and a long-awaited reunion with his family, Twain wrote to his Alta readers that the passenger list of the Quaker City was filling up fast: “The ship is to have ample accommodations for 150 cabin passengers, but in order that there may be no crowding, she will only carry 110. The steamer fare is fixed at $1,250,” but passengers were advised to bring an additional $500 in gold for extra expenses away from the ship.4

  Beecher himself, the country’s most famous clergyman and then minister of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church, was the main draw, but it was also rumored that General Sherman would join the cruise. Mark Twain soon got the Alta to pay his own fare in partial return for his travel letters chronicling the trip. Subsequently, both Beecher and Sherman failed to book passage on the steamer, prompting a number of the minister’s congregation to withdraw from the passenger list, but at this point the ship’s captain and organizer, Charles C. Duncan, could still be picky about the clientele. Potential passengers had to satisfy a committee as to their social standing. Duncan and Twain would clash in the newspapers in the next decade, but the seeds of their mutual dislike probably began to germinate even before the ship departed. Clemens, in the company of Edward H. House, a drama critic for the New York Tribune whom he had met for the first time in January at Webb’s office, went down to the ship’s offices to see Duncan about arranging his passage.

  Perhaps after the two had made a visit to Pfaff’s, House introduced Clemens to Duncan as the “Rev. Mark Twain,” who had been a missionary to the Sandwich Islands. Moreover, he was further introduced as a Baptist minister who wished to take part in the religious services on board. Beecher was a religious liberal, a Congregationalist who would have been uncomfortable with the fundamentalism of the Reverend Twain’s faith. No matter, said Duncan, however reluctantly, and soon discovered that he had been the victim of a hoax. This story went to the Alta readers. The bad blood was initially on Duncan’s side as the object of House and Clemens’s trick, but ultimately it was Clemens who seethed over the captain’s behavior, especially after he endured what he considered Duncan’s phony religiosity during the cruise. When Twain attacked him in the newspapers in 1877 for another perceived offense, Duncan claimed that Mark Twain had been drunk the day they met (and in reply Twain admitted as much).5 Prior to all that acrimony, however, Twain was securely on the passenger list of the Quaker City, and—as it turned out, following the loss of Beecher and Sherman—its most famous passenger.

  But first he would have that reunion with his family in St. Louis. Mark Twain told his Alta readers in a letter dated March 15 that he left New York on the New Jersey Central on March 3 in the middle of a snowstorm. The sleeping car was full the first night, and this Civil War dropout sat up all night listening to the war stories of a young beardless veteran who had fought some of the bloodiest battles, including Second Bull Run and Antietam. Interestingly, Twain doesn’t spell out for his western audience (which contained many former copperheads) which side the “handsome, modest, honest, good-hearted boy of twenty-three” fought for. Traveling twenty-five miles per hour, the train reached smoky Pittsburgh the next afternoon and St. Louis at midnight on March 5. “I went straight home,” he wrote, “and sat up till breakfast time, talking and telling other lies.”6

  Like New York, St. Louis had changed, though not as much. It had added 50,000 more residents, bringing the 1867 count up to 250,000. During his visit, perhaps as a way of publicizing his forthcoming Jumping Frog collection, he told the title tale to a local Sunday school gathering, and its success led to a series of five Sandwich Islands lectures in the area, two in St. Louis and one each in Hannibal, Keokuk, and Quincy, Illinois. Following the first one, to an overflow audience at the Mercantile Library Hall on March 25, the St. Louis Republican noted that Twain had “succeeded in doing what we have seen Emerson and other literary magnates fail in attempting. He interested and amused a large and promiscuous audience.” Ralph Waldo Emerson had been speaking in the area as late as February, giving a lecture entitled “The Man of the World” in Keokuk and Quincy.7 Twain quoted the Republican ’s review in his Alta letter of March 25, perhaps firing the first shot of a volley that would eventually be heard around the world of literary Boston exactly ten years later, in the form of his Whittier birthday dinner speech.

  By this time Emerson had been invited back to Harvard. A year earlier, in 1866, the college (and its Brahmin literary community) had forgiven him for his heretical “Divinity School” lecture of 1838 and awarded him an honorary doctorate. (By then, New England Congregationalism had absorbed most of the nuances of Unitarianism, which undercut or compromised the distinction between Christ and the first self-reliant man, or transcendentalist.) Emerson was now an institution to be cherished, not feared by the establishment. He had even published the poem “Terminus,” in which he announced, “It is time to be old.” In the West, they would have agreed. On February 28, two days after Emerson lectured in Quincy, the editors of the Quincy Herald entitled their review “Another Bore.” “The Man of the World” (not to be confused with his “Napoleon: The Man of the World,” which had appeared in Representative Men in
1850) taught the Emersonian doctrine that the individual of action is also he who “knows the joys of the imagination.”8 But this was postwar America, in which action and the social animal ruled; it was the beginning of what Twain and Charles Dudley Warner would in the next decade christen “The Gilded Age.”

  While in St. Louis, Sam stayed with his sister Pamela and her two children, Annie and Sammy, at 1312 Chestnut Street. Clemens’s mother, Jane, was living there as well. Pamela’s husband, William Moffett, had died in 1865. Twain returned to New York in the middle of April. With the prospect of future employment on the Quaker City cruise, he registered first at the Metropolitan and then a few days later at the Westminster, which he described as “a hundred times better hotel.” He was feeling on top of things after his successful lectures.9

  As his ship wouldn’t sail until June 8, he needed to make some more money lecturing. The exposure would also help to advertise the forthcoming Jumping Frog collection. He recalled in his autobiography that Frank Fuller, his old friend and the former governor of Utah Territory, had instigated his very first lecture in New York at Cooper Union on May 6. Now in business in New York, Fuller, Twain later remembered, was a “magnified and ennobled Col. Sellers,” the garrulous illusionist of The Gilded Age (1874). Fuller “had one enthusiasm per day, and it was always a storm. He said I must take the biggest hall in New York and deliver that lecture of mine on the Sandwich Islands—said that people would be wild to hear me.” Paine confirmed this version, but a year after Twain’s death Fuller remembered it differently. “Frank,” he said Twain told him, “I want to preach right here in New York, and it must be in the biggest hall to be found. I find it is the Cooper union.” Twain, however, had the last word in a document written in 1895. There he wrote, “There are two private versions of the matter. . . . One of them is not true. I have always had more confidence in mine, because although he was older than I, he had not had as much practice in telling the truth.”10