There may be another and better explanation for Sam’s retreat to a health resort on the shores of Lake Tahoe than that he was suffering from a common cold, however.
Of his attitudes toward sexuality, especially during his years on the Comstock and in San Francisco, little is known. Maxwell Geismar has framed the problem best: “despite all of Clemens’ self-descriptions, and his obvious affinity for women, his pagan sense of pleasure and the flesh, and despite massive Twain scholarship, there is, as regards his sexual experiences or lack of them, a complete silence, and blank.” Some scholars have considered Sam “more prudish than Howells.” Dixon Wecter asserted that “a certain fear of sex . . . seems to lie at the root of Mark Twain’s nature” and speculated that he was a virgin when he married in 1870 at the age of thirty-four. That he remained a virgin on the river and in the West, however, is as fanciful as the myth of the whore with a heart of gold. The most that can fairly be said is that there is no hard evidence he ever paid for sex. Louis J. Budd long ago challenged the notion that Sam was sexually repressed: he described him as one of the “bully boys” and a “virile bachelor.” The best circumstantial evidence tends to support Budd’s view, even if it also betrays Sam’s mid-Victorian double standard. He was certainly acquainted with Julia or Juliette Bulette, the most famous courtesan in Virginia City, who lived in a modest house near the corner of D and Union. As he wrote his sister-in-law Mollie in late January 1862, moreover, “I don’t mind sleeping with female servants as long as I am a bachelor—by no means—but after I marry, that sort of thing will be ‘played out.’” He admonished Mollie not to “hint this depravity” to his mother and sister. He also assured her that he would not marry “until I can afford to have servants enough to leave my wife in the position for which I designed her, viz:—as a companion. Don’t want to sleep with a three-fold Being who is cook, chambermaid and washerwoman all in one.”61 He was determined to marry well or not at all. He would sleep with servants, but he would not marry one.
Another clue to his thoughts about sex appears in a ribald ballad, originally titled “My Hog Ranch” and published under the slightly more recondite title “My Ranch,” that he composed at this time. As Arthur L. Scott correctly notes, the poem is a parody of Paul Duoir’s “My Kingdom.” But Scott misses the larger point: a “hog ranch” was a vulgar western euphemism for a brothel, and though Sam omitted the word “hog” from the title of his comic-erotic poem when he finally published it, his meaning seems obvious enough in context:
I have a ranch of quite unknown extent,
Its turnips great, its oats without compare;
And all the ranches other men may rent
Are not like mine—so not a dern I care.
’Tis all my own—no turnstile power may rise
To keep me outward from its rich domain;
It hath a fence that time itself defies,
And all invaders must climb out again.
’Tis true sometimes with stones ’tis overcast,
And troublous clods offend the sens’tive sight;
Yet from the furrows I these so quickly blast,
Their radiant seams do show more clear and bright.
It hath a sow—my sow—whose love for grain
No swearing subject will dispute;
Her swill is mine, and all my slops her gain,
And when she squeals my heart with love is mute.62
To judge from his use of the gender-specific porcine term “sow,” her “squeal” of pleasure, and his allusions to “furrows” and “seams” ripe for plowing, Sam seems to have been thoroughly familiar with western bordellos.
Moreover, the evidence that he contracted a venereal disease while living in the West is entirely circumstantial but substantial. He was obviously sexually active, a habitué of the demimonde, and he sometimes went slumming in Chinatown, where many of the brothels in Virginia City were located. The Bulletin chided him in July 1863, for example, for “coming from the Chinatown district” with “a feather in his cap.” There was no good reason for a white male to frequent Chinatown except to patronize a bar or brothel. At about this time, too, Sam filed a report in the Enterprise about Chinatown, later reprinted in Roughing It:
In every little cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning Josh-lights and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow, long-tailed vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short truckle-bed, smoking opium, motionless and with their lusterless eyes turned inward from excess of satisfaction—or rather the recent smoker looks thus, immediately after having passed the pipe to his neighbor—for opium-smoking is a comfortless operation, and requires constant attention.
Sam earned a local reputation for his forays to the shops and restaurants in the Chinese quarter of Virginia City. The Bulletin soon advised him publicly to “drop that sin of—well, we won’t name it” (apparently fornication) and “leave off going to Chinatown, stop drinking whisky, pay [your] washerwoman, and get up early in the morning by going to bed earlier, and not make night hideous by howling his sorrows in the winds.” If he would do so, Sam might “yet become a partially decent member of society.” In a couple of sentences, the Bulletin seemingly charged him with five of the seven deadly sins—specifically, lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, and wrath. Like his father in his final years, moreover, Sam began around this time to consume blue mass pills laced with mercury, one of the few available treatments for venereal disease, and in the summer of 1863 he retired for a second week to the Steamboat Springs Hotel on account of “ill-health.” In fact, as he admitted, the fame of the resort “rests chiefly upon the miracles performed” upon patients suffering from venereal diseases, and more than two-thirds of the guests “who come here are afflicted with venereal diseases—fellows who know that if ‘Steamboat’ fails with them they may as well go to trading feet with the undertaker for a box.” A few months later, Artemus Ward punningly told Sam that he would “make a good artillery man” because “you are familiar with Gonorrhea”—or gunnery.63
The feuds, both real and imaginary, among the reporters for the Virginia City dailies continued to percolate, with an occasional bubble rising to the surface. The same week the Bulletin reported that Sam had been seen skulking back from Chinatown, some kind of fraternal organization met in town. The members wore red sashes on their right arms, and the Bulletin wondered whether they belonged to a “secret society whose aims are bloody, or what else does the thing mean?” The editor wondered whether “Mark Twain can enlighten us.” The mysterious men may have been compositors: the Washoe Typographical Union met in the basement of a saloon on C Street on August 2. Or they may have belonged to the local chapters of the Sons of Temperance or the Fenian Brotherhood; both organizations were active in Virginia City in the summer of 1863. For whatever reason, Sam blasted the Bulletin in reply the next morning and the Bulletin responded in kind in an open letter:
We have always given you the credit of being the best-tempered and most amiable man under the sun, but we find we have been mistaken, for you come out this morning “boiling with rage.” We knew you had a splendid item written on those blood-red stains of which we made mention yesterday; but, then, we had a duty to perform, and for the sake of sparing you we could not allow a good opportunity to go by ourselves. Besides, if you did lose one good item, did we not furnish you with a dozen better ones?
The next week Sam was embroiled in another fake controversy with Rice. He was still fighting his “cold” and took a day off. Rice substituted for him and under the “Mark Twain” pseudonym he apologized for Sam’s recent transgressions. “We have been on the stool of repentance for a long time,” Rice wrote over Sam’s signature, “but have not before had the moral courage to acknowledge our manifold sins and recklessness. We confess to this weakness.” He begged the forgiveness of all those “whom we have ridiculed from behind the shelter of our reportorial position,” including the mayor, Marshal Jack Perry, William
Stewart, and Theodore Winters, though he also allowed “that no apology we can make begins to atone for the many insults we have given them.” As soon as he returned to work, of course, Sam annulled “all apologies [Rice] coined as coming from us” and held him up “to public commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive jackass rabbit of the Sierras.”64
Local rivalries in Nevada Territory were not unique only to competing newspapers. Even the two volunteer fire companies in Virginia City, which were in fact hostile political machines “largely composed of dive keepers, gamblers, toughs, and bums,” occasionally resorted to violence like warring gangs, most notably on August 28, 1863. A catastrophic fire that day charred four square blocks of downtown between B and Howard Streets and Taylor and Sutton Avenues, with a loss estimated at $300,000, as Sam observed. The entire city might have been incinerated except for a sudden change in the wind, according to Jared Graham of the Union, whose memoirs include the most detailed account of the conflagration. Maneuvering for position and competing for water to pump from the underground tunnels in a narrow street, the hellfighters turned their attention from the inferno to each other. Some fifteen men were slightly injured, another half dozen badly hurt; a miner was murdered by a fireman; two men were arrested for arson; and, as if the carnage was not bad enough, all shops and liquor stores in town were temporarily closed. Dan De Quille and Sam “had our hands full” reporting on the blaze, according to De Quille, because there “was a constant rush of startling events; they came tumbling over one another as though playing at leap-frog.” Sam re-created the chaos thirty years later, while moderating its violence, in chapter 11 of Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which volunteer fireboys flood a building “with water enough to annihilate forty times as much fire as there was there,” prompting local residents to insure their homes not against fires but “against the fire company.”65
The banter between Sam and Clement Rice underscored the rivalries between the Enterprise and the Union and enlivened the news to attract readers to both papers. Often one editor accused another, whether in mock or real rage, of wholesale theft from its columns. Sometimes the allegations were serious, and occasionally they were even true. Before Sam joined the staff of the Enterprise, before the Silver Age moved from Carson City and became the Union, the papers squabbled over the character and integrity of George Turner, the chief justice of the territory. The Enterprise charged the judge with corruption while the Union rallied to his defense. While both papers were loyal to the Union, the Enterprise was less partisan. It supported the corporation bill in 1861–62 and the Union opposed it, and by the summer of 1863 the long-simmering dispute between the respective editors, Goodman and Thomas Fitch, had reached a boiling point, unlike the feigned feud between Sam and Rice. Ironically, at the Fourth of July celebration that year in Virginia City, Fitch delivered the oration and Goodman composed the poem of the day, which was received with “tremendous applause.” On July 30, at almost the same moment Rice was apologizing for Sam’s insults and Sam was repudiating the apology, Goodman publicly pronounced Fitch “a swindler.” Fitch replied in the Union with a demand for satisfaction and Goodman accepted the challenge. Their seconds—Tom Peasley for Goodman and John Church, another co-owner of the Union, for Fitch—arranged the terms: a duel at Six-Mile Cañon due east of Virginia City early in the morning of August 1 with “Navy revolvers, at fifteen paces for the first fire—then advance and fire as they chose.” Some forty or fifty people were present, including seconds, surgeons, spectators, and Sam, who reported the affair for both the Enterprise and the Morning Call. “Yesterday morning, I followed the parties to the foot of the canon below the Gould & Curry Mill, to see them destroy each other,” he wrote. Duels had long been outlawed in Nevada, though the prohibition was usually enforced in the breach. Prizefighting was banned, too, not that it mattered. On this occasion, however, Marshal Perry intervened, arrested the principals, and hauled them before a judge, who placed each of them under bond of five thousand dollars to keep the peace.66
This duel was not so easily prevented, however. On September 17, Goodman renewed the dispute in the Enterprise and Fitch replied in the Union, calling Goodman a coward and a liar. They soon agreed through their seconds to meet across the Nevada boundary in California. At sunrise on the morning of September 28, they fought at Stampede Valley, seven miles west of the state line. Fitch fired first and missed, then Goodman shot and shattered Fitch’s right kneecap, which crippled him for life. Sam again probably covered the gunfight for the Enterprise. In any event, the shootout did not quell the feud between the newspapers, though the two principals in the duel eventually reconciled. Still, their personal rapprochement did not extend to editorial policy. The Enterprise endorsed the proposed state constitution in late 1863 while the Union fought it so aggressively that Goodman asserted that the rival paper had been bought. The Union replied that the Enterprise was a “treasonable” paper “sometimes seen in the saloons about town.” It justified its existence “solely upon fret, fume, and falsehood” and “slanders in refutation of fact and arguments,” and it “habitually assumes the tone of the bully who keeps his hand upon a weapon.”67 Nor did the violence between Goodman and Fitch curtail the blood thirst for public dueling in the region. The last formal gunfight was staged in Nevada a dozen years later.
CHAPTER 9
From Virginia City to San Francisco
San Francisco is a city of startling events. Happy is the man whose destiny it is to gather them up and record them in a daily newspaper!
—“San Francisco Letter,” December 26, 1865
SAM CLEMENS LEAPT at the first opportunity to return to San Francisco, his new favorite city, only 240 miles and thirty hours distant from Virginia City, Nevada Territory, by stage via Carson City. Dan De Quille returned to Virginia City on September 5, 1863, after his sabbatical in the States, and Sam left the same day to hurry back, as he said, to “the most cordial and sociable city in the Union.” He chose from three daily departures via the Pioneer line to Sacramento, including one that left Virginia City at 5:00 p.m. and arrived before noon the next day. In his absence, Joe Goodman chortled, “The moral tone of this column will be much improved. It could not be otherwise.” Sam was only gone a month this time. He again registered at the Lick House and, while in the city, arranged to become a regular contributor to the Golden Era, a literary weekly founded in 1852. He soon became quite a social lion, according to his friends at the Era, and an “immense favorite” at the hotel.1 The evening of September 9 he attended the annual ball of the Society of California Pioneers in the dining room of the Lick House, built to resemble the plush banquet hall at Versailles. In truth, he was not a booster of the organization, and his scorn was comparable to his bias against Native Americans: he thought both groups had been romanticized beyond recognition. Bret Harte also satirized the Pioneers mercilessly. “The character and motives of our founders will not bear close scrutiny,” Harte noted. “The less said about the motives of some of our pioneers the better; very many were more concerned in getting away from where they were than in going to any particular place.” Some had abandoned families in the East and remarried in the West. There were no character references required for membership in the society. It merely required an applicant to prove that he had resided in the state prior to 1850. Harte dismissed it as “a club devoted to mutual admiration and self-perpetuation, whose duties began and ended with the enrollment of new members.” Of course, it was also doomed to disappear through death and attrition. Sam similarly lampooned the Forty-Niners’ pretensions and, as in San Francisco in the spring of 1863, the conspicuous display of trophy wives. One woman was “attired in an elegant pate de foi gras,” he noted, while another “was attractively attired in her new and beautiful false teeth.” The evening of October 1, shortly before his return to Virginia City, he was also the guest of honor at a ball hosted by the ladies of the Lick House. “T
he pleasantest parties in the world” were given there, he reported, adding that only the guests of the hotel were usually invited.2 As it happened, he harbored some of the same pretensions as the Pioneers.
During this second trip to San Francisco, Sam also made a point of attending two performances of Adah Isaacs Menken at Maguire’s Opera House on Washington Street. The lascivious “shape actress” had been a regular customer at Pfaff’s Tavern in New York, where she socialized with such fellow bohemians as Henry Clapp, Ada Clare, and the good g(r)ay poet Walt Whitman. While on tour in the West, she contributed vers libre in Whitmaniac style to the Golden Era, much of it collected in Infelicia (1868), published two weeks after she died in Paris at the age of thirty-three. Junius Brutus Booth Jr., the younger brother of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, performed in her troupe. Joaquin Miller remembered “that graceful, yellow figure in the streets of San Francisco.” No other woman in the world, he asserted, could have worn a yellow silk dress in the windy city without looking ridiculous. Sam thought she was a “finely formed woman down to her knees,” and her bedroom eyes were perhaps her most salient feature. The California poet Charles Warren Stoddard was “transfixed” by them “for they were not wholly human.” The novelist Charles Reade remembered her “beautiful eyes—very dark blue.” Fitz Hugh Ludlow lauded her “tender, earnest eyes” and her “lovely pleading mouth.”3
The Life of Mark Twain Page 32