by Ben Tarnoff
Predictably, her answer was no. But he wouldn’t give up: he wrote her some 184 letters over the next seventeen months in which he tried to sound like the man she might want to marry. He quoted Scripture. He scrubbed his language of anything western. He presented himself as a sinner, sorely in need of her civilizing influence, and disowned the parts of his past she might find unpalatable. “Don’t read a word in that Jumping Frog book, Livy—don’t,” he wrote. “I would be glad to know that every copy of it was burned, & gone forever.”
All these saintly noises sounded a bit strange coming from Twain’s pen, but it wasn’t as uncharacteristic as it looked. He loved Livy sincerely, with a passion that cut past his usual irony and tapped an emotional current of true intensity. She also belonged to a world he desperately wanted to join: the upper stratum of American society. Over the last several years, he had inched his way up, from Virginia City to the more sophisticated precincts of San Francisco. Now he was in the East, about to publish a book he hoped would be taken seriously by members of Livy’s social class. He wanted the acceptance of America’s elites, despite his tendency to ridicule and bewilder them. Livy offered access to this aristocracy, and he set about grooming himself for the role of her suitor.
Fortunately, it never quite fit. He would never be a proper gentleman, or a credible Christian, or speak sentences uninflected by the drawl that gave his voice its remarkable melody. He couldn’t get rid of the West if he tried: it was in his blood, inoculating him against bad, boring writing, inspiring the rhythms that would realign American literature. But he cleaned up enough for Livy, who finally said yes to him in late 1868. “I am so happy I want to scalp someone,” he roared to a friend. He hadn’t gained just a fiancée but a partner in crime, a highly educated companion who could edit his work. As page proofs of The Innocents Abroad began arriving in the spring of 1869, she took it upon herself to revise them—to “scratch out all that don’t suit her,” in Twain’s words. Like Harte, she helped trim the manuscript’s rougher bits to create a product that would be agreeable to the reading public of postwar America.
It worked. The Innocents Abroad sold 82,524 copies in its first eighteen months, earning Twain $16,504 in royalties—or more than $217,000 in today’s dollars. It would be his biggest best seller by far, the book that gave him a permanent place in the culture. Reviewers loved it. Even the Atlantic Monthly approved. “There is an amount of pure human nature in the book that rarely gets into literature,” wrote the magazine’s assistant editor, William Dean Howells. “[E]ven in its impudence it is charming.”
The Atlantic’s support was a bit surprising, considering the book was an attack on everything it stood for. Livy had helped Twain temper his irreverence—but all the Livys in the world couldn’t change the fact that The Innocents Abroad was a bullet in the heart of America’s literary establishment. It began with how the book was sold. It was published by subscription, which meant that traveling salesmen went door-to-door peddling it to consumers. This was a popular way to sell cookbooks and Bibles, but no self-respecting literary writer would ever dream of distributing his work this way. The polite thing to do was to put your book on the shelf and wait for it to sell, not run into people’s houses demanding they buy it.
Subscription publishing had ancient roots—Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington had both worked as book canvassers—but it flourished after the Civil War. The rapid growth of railroads enabled salesmen to travel farther and faster. Elisha Bliss’s American Publishing Company belonged to this new generation of subscription houses, enlisting agents to trawl for customers throughout the country.
Twain loved the model. It let someone of his unorthodox talents bypass the gatekeepers of traditional publishing, and gave him a more direct route to his core audience: the middle class. His readers were doctors, lawyers, businessmen—the rising bourgeoisie of the new industrializing nation. They didn’t care if subscription publishing lacked high-culture cachet. They wanted to satisfy their growing curiosity about the rest of the country and the world. The Quaker City sightseers came mostly from their ranks. The Innocents Abroad was their story.
Upscale Americans had been going to Europe for decades. But in the years after the Civil War, as transatlantic travel became cheaper, a new kind of creature began crossing the ocean en masse: the Middle American. He didn’t have the polish of his predecessors. He spoke atrocious French and mangled the pronunciation of foreign names. Faced with the glories of Europe, he wavered between head-scratching incomprehension and enraptured reverence for things he didn’t understand—“old connoisseurs from the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a fresco and a fire-plug,” as Twain put it. Worst of all, he had an insatiable need for souvenirs. In Egypt, Twain spotted a relic hunter crawling up the Sphinx, hammering a memento off its face. “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.”
The familiar spectacle of watching one’s fellow Americans make fools of themselves in a foreign country—Twain captured it perfectly. But parody wasn’t his only point. There was pride too. Like him, these bourgeois barbarians were emissaries of a newly confident nation that had just passed through the bloodiest war in its history. America was coming of age—and the moment was ripe for an Oedipal reckoning with its Old World roots. Twain didn’t go abroad to swoon over a superior civilization. On the whole he found Europe and the Holy Land dirty, dilapidated places, trapped in the past. Even their most cherished treasures often failed to impress. Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper was a “mournful wreck,” he wrote; like much else he saw on his journey, it had grown decrepit with age. The lesson of The Innocents Abroad was that Americans should stop venerating the corpses of dead cultures. Their barbarianism was infinitely preferable to the decadence of a region well past its prime. They belonged to the country of the future: an innovative, economically ascendant nation with a style all its own.
This declaration of independence struck deeply at the Eurocentric sympathies of America’s ruling intellectual class. It came from the same insurrectionary vein as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” The roots of this revolt lay in the West, and The Innocents Abroad was unmistakably a work of western humor. Most of the slang had disappeared in the revisions, but the frontier could still be heard in the book’s rich irony and rambling flow—what Howells, in his Atlantic review, called its “continuous incoherence.” Like any good backwoods storyteller, Twain never told a tale straight, but zigzagged his way downstream via all possible digressions. If The Innocents Abroad proclaimed America’s liberation from the Old World, its prose suggested the form that freedom might take.
It made for a great book. But a great book isn’t guaranteed to sell. The other half relies on hustle, and happily Twain had this quality in large supply. By November 1869, he was back on the lecture trail, playing more than fifty towns over the course of the next few months. He also wrote to various newspaper editors personally, angling for good reviews. His publisher promised to send out as many as two thousand advance copies to ensure widespread press coverage.
One would of course go to Harte, who had played such a key role in the Innocents’ creation. “He praised the book so highly that I wanted him to review it early for the Overland,” Twain explained. But then something went wrong: the book’s western distributor inexplicably refused to provide a review copy. An earlier Harte might’ve shrugged it off and politely waited for the issue to be resolved—but the new Harte, the exalted author of “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” courted by the Atlantic, revered far and wide, threw a fit. He “wrote me the most daintily contemptuous & insulting letter you ever read,” Twain said, “—& what I want to know, is, where was I to blame?” Suddenly the old friends were no longer on speaking terms.
Yet Harte still wrote an admiring review of Innocents for the Overland in January 1870, calling it “six hundred and fifty pages of open and declared fun.” And when Harte’s book
of short stories appeared in April under the title The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches, the newspaper that Twain now co-owned and edited, the Buffalo Express, joined virtually every other periodical in the country in praising it. If their friendship had fallen off, at least it hadn’t deteriorated into open warfare—yet.
A worse collision was coming, and Harte’s bad attitude wasn’t entirely to blame. The two men had always been competitive. But now they were competing for something more than fame: the power to define the Far Western frontier in the American imagination. As the pioneer era of the Pacific coast faded, swept away by the railroad and the Civil War, it would pass into myth—mined for cheap thrills by dime novels and other pop pleasures, adapted for more literary ends by writers like Harte and Twain. What Twain would come to hate most about Harte, apart from the insufferable superciliousness of a writer swollen with his own success, was the picture he drew of the Far West.
Sometime in the early 1870s, Twain marked up his copy of The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches. His margin notes included much praise: the title story, for instance, he found “nearly blemishless.” But he also noticed several false notes: misused gambling slang, inauthentic snatches of dialect. One passage he felt was too indebted to “Dickens & an English atmosphere.” Over time, as his hostility for Harte grew, these criticisms became more severe. He would vilify Harte as a literary swindler: “showy, meretricious, insincere,” a master of “artificial reproduction,” the originator of “a dialect which no man in heaven or earth had ever used.” It no doubt angered him how easily Harte had seduced the eastern critics. The New York Times applauded Harte’s “truthful pictures of early Californian life”—but what did a New York newspaperman know about early California life? In the summer of 1870, Twain signed the contract for his next book. This would be Roughing It, a memoir of the Far West—and an implicit rebuke of what he saw as the phoniness of Harte’s fiction.
Of course, Roughing It would hardly be an objective portrait of the Pacific coast. No such thing existed, thank God: a region so thoroughly steeped in fable couldn’t possibly be described without a fair amount of fictionalizing. Twain’s account would be as artificial as Harte’s. But Harte had an easier time selling his version of the West to the mandarins of eastern culture, owing to his greater polish. Despite the Atlantic’s favorable notice of The Innocents Abroad, Twain remained a lowbrow author: published by subscription, packaged for a popular audience. The heady air of frontier humor that made his work irresistible to the masses didn’t endear him to the guardians of “serious” literature.
Sometimes this bothered him; sometimes it seemed to give him satisfaction. Yet there was one member of the eastern elite whose opinion would always matter to him: Livy. His long courtship hadn’t just involved convincing her to be his wife, but persuading her parents to accept him as their son-in-law: an undertaking that, in Twain’s recollection, included providing the names of “six prominent men” from San Francisco as character references. To his horror, these didn’t exactly further his case. “The friends I had referred to in California said with one accord that I got drunk oftener than was necessary, & that I was wild, & godless, idle, lecherous & a discontented & unsettled rover & they could not recommend any girl of high character & social position to marry me,” he lamented in a letter to his old friend Charlie Stoddard. Fortunately, Livy “did not believe it, & would not believe it if an archangel had spoken it.” Their nuptials would proceed as planned.
On February 2, 1870, they were married in the parlor of her parents’ house. Twain sent the wedding announcement to Stoddard, the text tastefully engraved on pink-tinted card stock. He had finally won the girl he loved and ended his long vagabondage. He had written a best seller and made his name in the East. Yet he couldn’t shake the taste of a bitter thought lingering in the back of his mind. “Tell me,” he scribbled on the inside of the envelope, “what is the matter with Bret Harte?—why all these airs?”
• • •
STODDARD WOULD STAY OUT OF IT. His nonconfrontational nature precluded him from taking sides in any standoff; his loyalty to both men made it inconceivable. He loved Twain, but felt forever grateful to Harte, who “did more for me and my work than any other man.” For years, the elder Bohemian had steered him through his long literary apprenticeship. Now he would help him achieve his breakthrough as a writer.
By 1869, San Francisco’s Bohemian scene had become a victim of its own success. Twain had gone on to greater things in the East; Harte was contemplating his own exit from California. Both had found their national niche by embracing their regional roots. But Stoddard had no special talent for writing about the West. He would need to find a different route to an eastern readership.
In the summer of 1869, he returned to San Francisco after eight months in the Hawaiian Islands. He had roamed the countryside, visiting villages, spending nights with native boys. “You will easily imagine, my dear sir, how delightful I find this life,” he wrote Walt Whitman. Two years earlier he had sent his idol a copy of his Poems and heard nothing back. “Now my voice is stronger,” he declared in his new letter, and Whitman agreed. “Those tender & primitive personal relations away off there in the Pacific Islands, as described by you, touched me deeply,” the great poet replied, recognizing a kindred spirit.
Stoddard, in his own way, was coming out. Not that he would’ve understood it in those terms. But rather than feeling anxious and ashamed about his failure to fulfill certain expectations—to succeed in school, hold down a job, get married—he had begun to embrace what made him different. In 1867, critics had slammed his Poems for being unoriginal. In 1869, he found a more distinctive literary voice by writing about an aspect of his life that had long remained hidden—not in verse, but in playful, intimate prose that conveyed much of the sweetness that people loved about him in person.
“A South-Sea Idyl” appeared in the September 1869 issue of the Overland Monthly. Those who knew Stoddard only for his poems might be surprised to see him transformed into the gloriously indolent sun worshipper who narrated this tropical tale. For a week or two he lived with a Hawaiian boy. They played in the ocean, frolicked naked along the beach. They spent hours watching wild poppies in the wind. They shared a bed—and somehow, Stoddard managed to make the eroticism obvious without crossing the line. When he described being “petted in every possible way,” Whitman surely knew what he meant. But the coyness of Stoddard’s tone kept him safely within the bounds of propriety. He could play at “barbarianism” without his readers realizing how serious he was. He could talk about “hating civilization” and pretend he was kidding.
Harte loved the piece. “Now you have struck it,” he told Stoddard. “Keep on in this vein and presently you will have enough to fill a volume and you can call it South Sea Bubbles!” In prose, Stoddard found the original sound that had eluded him in poetry. It was laced with a distinctly western irreverence for the pieties of proper society—what William Dean Howells later called his “mustang humor,” born of a frontier even farther off the map than the California mining camps. At times Stoddard sounded positively Twain-like: “If you want to do any thing particularly, I should advise you to do it, and then be sufficiently sorry to make it all square.” He also owed a debt to Adah Isaacs Menken, whose example had exhilarated him back in 1863. In her poetry and her performances, Menken had been someone “who dared to live up to her nature,” he wrote admiringly. But his approach remained closest to Whitman, whose coded celebrations of gay love in verse had inspired Stoddard to do something similar in prose. When he sent Whitman a copy of “A South-Sea Idyl,” the poet replied warmly, praising the piece as “beautiful & soothing.”
Harte wanted the Overland to publish more in the same vein. Stoddard obliged. Other sketches followed, with titles like “Barbarian Days” and “How I Converted My Cannibal.” These might add up to a book with real national potential, if only Stoddard could summon the discipline to stay the course.
“It’s time . . . you began to work with a long aim,” Harte advised.
Of course, the long aim never came easily to Stoddard. He had barely landed in California before he wanted to get back on a boat for the tropics. Writing about the Pacific paled in comparison to the pleasures of actually being there. He might follow this new literary path to glory in the East. Or he might abandon all ambition and enjoy a more fulfilled life in a faraway place. In the islands he could be himself, but never famous; in America, he might be famous, but never himself. This was a difficult dilemma for an already indecisive mind, and it accounted for the stormy emotional weather that spun him like a top.
He anchored himself anywhere he could: in the companionship of the Overland Trinity, the pleasant air of Coolbrith’s parlor, the solemn ceremonies of Catholicism. By 1870, he had found another mooring: a twenty-eight-year-old Union war veteran named Ambrose Bierce. Bierce had come West as a member of a military fact-finding and surveying tour. In California he resigned his post, found a job at the San Francisco Mint, and began writing. Stoddard had a weakness for pretty, unusual men. “Biercy” fit the bill in every particular. Infernally handsome, he stood nearly six feet tall, with curly blond hair and bright blue eyes. His animal magnetism earned him admirers wherever he went. Coolbrith liked him. So did Harte—high praise from a man usually reluctant to accept newcomers.
In print he was less lovable. Bierce wrote a weekly column for the San Francisco News Letter and Commercial Advertiser that vandalized virtually everything San Franciscans held sacred. It recalled Bohemia’s bomb-throwing days, back when the Californian loved to antagonize the local establishment. Bierce could do social satire as brilliantly as Harte and Twain. But he also went after babies, baseball, and Yosemite—whose idyllic scenery so revolted him that he called for its destruction with gunpowder. He wielded his pen like one of those modern weapons that mowed down whole columns of his comrades in the Civil War. If he occasionally hit a genuine villain, he also injured many innocents.