Ward remained in and around Virginia for ten days. Joe Goodman wondered later “how many nails were prematurely driven into his coffin” by his spree there. “By some law of mental affinity, I suppose,” Ward was attracted to Sam and Dan and the Enterprise office became his headquarters. According to Dan, “Comstockers received Artemus as a brother, and he seemed as much at home as if he had all his life been a resident of Virginia City.” He and Sam “had the pleasure of showing him the town, and a real pleasure it was—a sort of circus, in fact—as he constantly overflowed with fun.” Not only did Sam and Dan carouse with Ward by night, they feigned a public spat to amuse him by day. Ward planned to deliver his comic lecture “Babes in the Woods” in Virginia City and its suburbs, and Dan announced in the Enterprise that he and Sam would “personate the babies” before a backdrop of “the ‘great pine forest at Dutch Nick’s’ to represent the woods.” Sam replied to the private joke the next day, resurrecting his old Josh pseudonym in the Gold Hill News. “Not since the narrative by the veracious Mark Twain of the massacre at Dutch Nick’s have we read a more sorrowful or pathetic tale than we read in yesterday’s Enterprise,” he wrote, presumably in the same vernacular voice he employed in the lost Josh letters the year before. Dan in turn questioned in the pages of the next Enterprise whether Josh was “a myth” or a real person, whereupon Philip Lynch of the News assured him that he was a genuine correspondent from Virginia City who neither frequented Gold Hill “nor takes his nightly slumbers in the armchairs of this hole in the ground.”25
Ward was in Nevada to exploit his mercurial fame by lecturing. He delivered “Babes in the Woods” at the Melodeon in Virginia City on December 22, in Silver City on December 23, in Gold Hill on Christmas Eve, again in Virginia City on Christmas Night, and finally in Dayton, with ticket prices between fifty cents (for parquet seating) and a dollar (for the dress circle). Sam attended his opening-night performance and was greatly amused. Graham of the Union remembered that Sam was seated near the stage and responded to the speech with guffaws. “There are perhaps fifty subjects treated in it,” Sam reported the next day in the Enterprise,
and there is a passable point in every one of them, and a healthy laugh, also, for any of God’s creatures who hath committed no crime, the ghastly memory of which debars him from smiling again while he lives. The man who is capable of listening to the “Babes in the Woods” from beginning to end without laughing either inwardly or outwardly must have done murder, or at least meditated it, at some time during his life.
Sam remembered a generation later that “Artemus was one of the kindest and gentlest men in the world” and “his lecture on the ‘Babes in the Woods’ was the funniest thing I ever listened to.” But Ward was clearly burning the proverbial candle at both ends. He died young, Sam remembered, as the result of “overwork and carelessness.”26
Sam’s encounter with Ward, however brief, was a formative experience. More to the point, Ward’s deadpan style of delivery influenced Sam’s own platform performances. In both cases, their speeches were parodies of lyceum lectures. Ward’s stage persona, as Paul Fatout has explained, “was an object lesson in the humorous technique of incoherence, exaggeration, non sequitur, and anti-climax” and Sam’s speaking style, as James Austin adds, was “noticeably modeled” on Ward’s, with “the rambling digression, the calculated pause, the premeditated afterthought, the sober expression, and the pose of worried innocence.” W. D. Howells later acknowledged, too, that “in some of his beginnings” Sam copied Artemus Ward, though the “imitation could not last long.” The “first virtue of a comedian,” Sam explained in one of his few comments on his brand of wit, “is to do humorous things with grave decorum and without seeming to know that they are funny.” He told his lecture agent James Redpath years later that, like Ward, he relied for his comic effect “on a simulated unconsciousness and intense absurdity.”27
Though they spent less than two weeks together, Ward quickly recognized Sam’s genius and urged him to “leave sage-brush obscurity & journey to New York with him.” Sam tentatively agreed—he wrote his mother in early January 1864 that he had promised to accompany Ward “to Europe in May or June,” though he soon changed his mind. Whereas Sam’s career was in ascent, Ward’s career—as Ward well understood—was already in decline. “Artemus once said to me gravely, almost sadly, ‘Clemens, I have done too much fooling, too much trifling; I am going to write something that will live,’” Sam reminisced. “‘Well, what, for instance?’ In the same grave way, he said: ‘A lie.’” The Christmas Eve dinner Ward hosted for his colleagues at Chaumond’s Oyster Bar—with Sam, Dan De Quille, Denis McCarthy, Ed Hingston, and Joe Goodman around the table—lasted into the wee hours and cost $237. Seven years later, Sam remembered the occasion with the “remnants of the feast thin & scattering, but such tautology & repetition of empty bottles everywhere visible as to be offensive to the sensitive eye.” Because the Enterprise was not issued on the holiday, Sam, Dan, Joe, and Ward spent the rest of the night in a drunken debauch around town. They went slumming in Chinatown, where they drank sake, and ventured to a hurdy-gurdy house to dance and drink beer, as both Dan and Goodman remembered. At sunrise on Christmas Day 1863 they were outside a saloon—Goodman remembered Fred Getzler’s, De Quille thought Aaron Hooper’s—as Ward “with a spoon was gently doping” Sam “with mustard while he inquired of the bystanders if they had ever seen a more perfect presentiment of a subjugated idiot.”28 Not surprisingly, Sam failed to mention Ward’s visit to Virginia City in Roughing It. It was as if it either did not occur or happened during a blackout binge.
That night at the Melodeon, Ward was still (or again) drunk when he took the stage. He stood on a table in blackface like a minstrel show end man and recited the ballad “Baby Bell” by his fellow New York bohemian Thomas Bailey Aldrich. “I blackened my face,” he shamefully admitted, “and made a gibbering, idiotic speech.” Still, Ward wrote Bret Harte in San Francisco that his “march through Nevada Territory was in the main a triumphant one.” According to Alf Doten of the Union, however, his act soon wore thin. Despite “his funny writings, and his fame which came here before him,” his western audiences “were much disappointed, and were rather inclined to vote him a humbug, although they paid well to see him and his ‘babes in the wood.’ He couldn’t make it pay a second time. He is ‘played out’ with us.” Ward also understood that the popularity of his brand of dialect humor was waning. He told Dan that his “peculiar style would soon surfeit the public if he wrote too much. For this reason he said he was going to give the people a rest.” His reticence to overexploit his fame helps to explain Sam’s own unwillingness to “burst upon the New York public” until he was better positioned to succeed there.29
Before Ward left Virginia by stagecoach on the morning of December 29, he promised Sam he would recommend his work to the editors of the New York Sunday Mercury. They never saw each other again. As going-away gifts, Sam presented Ward with a copy of the Enterprise and Dan handed him a sack of hard-boiled eggs, his cure for a hangover. Ward wrote Sam from Austin, Nevada, on New Year’s Day that he would always remember his visit to Virginia City “as a bright spot in my existence.” Sam wrote his mother in St. Louis that when Ward arrived there she should “invite him up to the house & treat him well, for behold, he is a good fellow. But don’t ask him too many questions about me & Christmas Eve, because he might tell tales out of school.” There is no evidence that Ward and Jane Lampton Clemens met when he passed through St. Louis the following March, however, and he died of tuberculosis in England two years later.30
But, as good as his word, Ward wrote the Sunday Mercury on Sam’s behalf, and within two weeks of Ward’s departure Sam had mailed a pair of manuscripts to the New York paper. His sketches “Doings in Nevada” and “Those Blasted Children,” published on February 7 and 21, respectively, were his first two original publications under the Mark Twain pseudonym to appear in the East, but they were not, as James C. Austin asserts, his first
pieces “in an Eastern paper except for his early Carpet-Bag contribution” nor, as Albert E. Stone Jr., maintains, the first of his work “to reach an Eastern—and, hence, a national audience.” Still, Sam’s articles in the Sunday Mercury served to enhance his reputation. The first of these items featured a facetious classified ad that satirized a pair of local politicians, including his brother Orion:
FOR SALE OR RENT.
One Governor, entirely new. Attended Sunday-school in his youth, and still remembers it. Never drinks. In other respects, however, his habits are good. As Commander-in-Chief of the Militia, he would be an ornament. Most Governors are. . . .
One Secretary of State. An old, experienced hand at the business. Has edited a newspaper, and been Secretary and Governor of Nevada Territory—consequently, is capable; and also consequently, will bear watching, is not bigoted—has no particular set of religious principles—or any other kind.
In “Those Blasted Children,” Sam ridiculed the Calvinist doctrine of innate depravity, suggesting that if “young savages” stammer, they might be cured by the surgical removal of their jawbones. If they suffer from worms, “Administer a catfish three times a week. Keep the room very quiet; the fish won’t bite if there is the least noise.” Oblivious to his satire, Ada Clare accused him of “misunderstanding God’s little people.” More likely he understood them all too well, especially the neglected and abused ones. Sam thought “Those Blasted Children” a “pearl” and expected it to be widely circulated. Little wonder he soon earned a national reputation as “the Artemus Ward of the California press.”31
The Third Nevada Territorial Legislature convened on January 12, a week before the proposed state constitution was scheduled for a vote. In light of the uncertainty about the future, the legislature debated nothing more than routine business, some of it nevertheless controversial. As usual, Sam covered the forty-day session for the Enterprise. His friend Billy Clagett of Humboldt introduced a bill to consolidate the jurisdictions of Virginia City and Gold Hill. It failed. The traction companies sought legislation that would enable them to build a rail system through the crowded streets of Virginia—what Sam called “gridiron railroads” in his letters to the Enterprise—and this proposal also failed. However, the legislature agreed to purchase the stone building where it had assembled since 1861 from Abe Curry for eighty thousand dollars to establish a territorial prison and appointed Curry the first warden. It also granted twenty-nine additional toll road franchises. Most acrimoniously, several legislators from Storey County pushed to transfer the Nevada capital from Carson to Virginia City. It failed, too, to Sam’s disappointment. “My first and best reason for thinking the Capital ought to be removed,” he opined in the Enterprise, “is that while it remains in Carson, the Legislative Assembly is beyond the pale of newspaper criticism—beyond its restraining influence.” Certainly, to judge from the gratuitous insults he leveled at the editor of the new Carson Independent, he was unimpressed by the caliber of the local press: “It is my unsolicited opinion that he knows very little about anything. And anybody who will read his paper calmly and dispassionately for a week will endorse that opinion. And more especially his knowing nothing about Carson is not surprising; he seldom mentions that town in his paper. If the Second advent were to occur here, you would hear of it first in some other newspaper.”32
Two weeks after the start of the official legislative session, the Third House met in the Ormsby County courthouse and reelected Sam its presiding officer. Two trustees of the First Presbyterian Church in Carson, one of them Carrie Pixley’s father, suggested that he charge admission to his inaugural address the evening of January 27 to raise money for the church building fund and Sam agreed. “If the public can find anything in a grave state paper worth paying a dollar for,” he replied to the invitation, “I am willing they should pay that amount or any other. And although I am not a very dusty christian myself, I take an absorbing interest in religious affairs, and would willingly inflict my annual message upon the church itself if it might derive benefit thereby. You can charge what you please; I promise the public no amusement, but I do promise a reasonable amount of instruction.”33
He spoke before a paying audience for the first time in his career and the church collected two hundred dollars toward repairs on its roof. “When I was elected to the Chief Magistry of the Burlesque Government of the territory of Nevada,” Sam reminisced three years later, “I delivered my annual message to the Legislature for the benefit of a church, and charged double admission. The proceeds enabled them to put a new roof on that church, and everybody said that the roof would cave in, sometime or other, and mash the congregation, because I was one of those sinful newspaper men, but it never did.” A “large and fashionable audience” attended his address, according to Clement Rice. Sam parodied James Nye’s annual State of the Territory speech and, as he wrote his sister Pamela, “it was terribly severe” on the governor. At eight o’clock, he “ascended the steps into the pulpit,” bowed politely, and then, according to one of his auditors,
unfolded a gigantic roll of brown paper. People thought at first it was a map, but it turned out to be his lecture written on great sheets of grocers’ brown paper, with an ordinary grocer’s marking brush. After his bow he turned his back around to the audience and craned his head up to the lamp and thus read from the big sheets as though it would be impossible for him to see any other way. The lecture was on “The Future of Nevada,” and was the funniest thing I ever heard. He prophesied the great era of prosperity that was before us and sought to encourage us residents of the sagebrush region by foretelling what appeared to be Golconda-like tales of impossible mineral discoveries.
Response to the lighthearted speech was mixed: a critic in the Virginia Evening Bulletin thought it was “by far the best message [Sam] ever delivered,” while the Union groused about his “clownishness.” The Carson Independent similarly complained that Sam “has a shocking bad delivery. He hasn’t got voice enough” to fill a hall. On his part, Sam was delighted by his presentation. “I got my satisfaction out of it, a larger audience than Artemus had,” as he crowed to Pamela. At its conclusion, his friends Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters presented him with a gold watch that cost $225 (more than the sum raised for the church), inscribed to “Governor Mark Twain.” Two weeks later, Sam reciprocated the favor by praising the three-story mansion Winters had built in the Washoe Valley north of Carson City; and in late April, he wrote a similar piece about the nearby granite mansion of Sandy Bowers, the first Comstock millionaire.34
Unfortunately, no text of Sam’s address survives ostensibly because, as he explained to Pamela, “It was written to be spoken—to write it so that it would read well, would be too much trouble, & I shall probably never publish it.” He made much the same point years later to Edward Bok, the longtime editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, in detailing the reasons he detested interviews.
The moment “talk” is put into print you recognize that it is not what it was when you heard it; you perceive that an immense something has disappeared from it. That is its soul. You have nothing but a dead carcass left on your hands. Color, play of feature, the varying modulations of the voice, the laugh, the smile, the informing inflections, everything that gave the body warmth, grace, friendliness and charm and commended it to your affections—or, at least, to your tolerance—is gone and nothing is left but a pallid, stiff and repulsive cadaver.
In truth, according to his friends at the Territorial Enterprise, however, Sam was “induced to withhold” his speech from publication because “it alluded somewhat too pungently in places to certain disagreeable facts in connection with the administration of the Territorial Government.”35
The Third Territorial Legislature also revised the laws by which notaries public were licensed. Because all mining documents had to be notarized, as Guy Louis Rocha and Roger Smith explain, “the smooth legal workings of the mining industry” demanded a critical mass of certifying officials. The opposite w
as also true: dishonest or incompetent notaries could cripple the industry. Over the years the number of notaries across the territory had proliferated, so the legislature rescinded all notary commissions and provided for the appointment by the governor of a specific number of them for each county. Whereas Storey County had almost a hundred notaries when the session opened, San Francisco—with ten times the population—had only twenty-two. Though nearly two hundred Storey County residents applied for the lucrative positions, by the close of the legislative session only eighteen notaries had been appointed, the number stipulated by law.36
The Life of Mark Twain Page 35