In “Concerning Notaries,” published in the Enterprise on February 9, Sam satirized the “infernal new law” and the profusion of applications it had spawned. There were already “seventeen hundred and forty-two applications for notaryships” on file in the governor’s office, he alleged, and in the course of the sketch Sam encounters dozens of prominent citizens of Storey County, including the jurists Sandy Baldwin, John North, and William Stewart (“the names all signed in their own handwriting”), the mayor of Virginia City, and Charley Strong, the superintendent of the Gould & Curry Mine, with completed petitions. Sam promised “to use my influence toward procuring notaryships for the whole tribe.” Ironically, in fact, he was also “seized by the fatal distemper” and submitted a petition of his own to the governor. It was endorsed by Orion, Tom Nye, and other territorial officials, and Sam formally received a notary appointment from Governor Nye on March 1, the day the new law took effect. He never filed the necessary bond and apparently never practiced the profession, however, and in early April he submitted his resignation to his brother, the acting governor, who accepted it and appointed a bookkeeper in the Enterprise office in his place.37
The third and final session of the Territorial Legislature was also haunted by a sad event: the death of eight-year-old Jennie Clemens, Orion and Mollie’s only child and Sam’s beloved niece. She died of spotted fever the evening of February 1, at the midpoint of the session, after a brief illness. She had been in frail health most of her short life and suffered from epilepsy. The entire legislature adjourned on February 3 to attend her funeral. In its obituary, the Carson Independent reported that she “was a bright and promising child and but a few days ago full of life.” In his next letter to the San Francisco Bulletin, Orion stoically mentioned the recent outbreak of spotted fever in Carson City, Gold Hill, and Virginia City. Two days after her funeral, Sam lambasted “the system of extortion” practiced by the single Carson City undertaker, who also owned the only respectable cemetery in town. “Consequently, when a man loses his wife or his child or his mother,” he explained, “this undertaker makes him sweat for it” because he knows that “an unjust bill for services rendered” will not be disputed. He insisted that an undertaker’s bill ought to be just. With a monopoly on funerals, the only mortician in town charged “a hundred and fifty dollars for a pine coffin that cost him twenty or thirty, and fifty dollars for a grave that did not cost him ten.” In short, Sam concluded, “What Carson needs is a few more undertakers—there is vacant land enough here for a thousand cemeteries.” Jennie’s death elicited a letter of consolation from Thomas Starr King to which Orion soon replied: “We warmly thank you for remembering us in your prayers. We feel our need of them. We pray also for ourselves. . . . Jennie’s suffering and our utter helplessness to aid her have been indelibly engraved on our memories by the hand of death. . . . Long ago I dreaded this result. . . . [O]ur hearts are sore with the affliction, and we yearn for our child’s sweet face and musical voice.”38 To the end of their lives, wherever they lived, Orion and Mollie kept her chair in their parlor as a reminder of their loss. If Marshall Clemens’s unabridged dictionary had been the talisman Orion carried with him to Nevada, his daughter’s empty chair was the talisman with which he returned east. In both cases, he was haunted by specters of the dead.
Jennie’s death marked a tectonic shift in Orion’s life. The upward trajectory of his career was abruptly reversed and he went into a tailspin from which he never recovered. The conclusion is inescapable that he was broken by the loss of his child. Her death begins to explain his otherwise inexplicable failure to campaign for renomination as the Union Party candidate for secretary of state in January 1865, his virtual resignation from the Nevada House of Representatives in March 1866, and departure from the West that September. Sam remarked in his journal in 1885 that in later years Orion suffered from “heaven-scraping exaltations, followed by to the lowest hell.”39
Sam accepted another out-of-town assignment a month after Jennie’s death: an excursion to Como, in the mountains between Virginia and Carson, to inspect the mines there and report on their prospects. He arrived on March 4 and was greeted by Alf Doten. They promptly scampered for beer. In fact, Sam repeatedly postponed his surveys of the local mines for visits to the brewery. Sam’s pleasure in the local libation was so well known that he afterward was cited as an authority: it was “the best in the Territory, as we can prove by ‘Mark Twain,’ who has sat in the brewery and drank ‘gallons and gallons’ of it without arising from his seat.” On the evening of March 6, Sam, Alf Doten, and J. D. Winters, brother of Theodore and owner of a small quartz mill in Como, drank and dined together. Sam left Como, a ghost town today, on March 7, in time to attend Adah Issacs Menken’s Virginia City debut in Mazeppa that evening.40
On February 27, a week after the close of the legislative session and four weeks after Jennie Clemens’s death, Menken landed in Virginia City and registered at the International Hotel on North C Street, the most luxurious lodge in town. She was accompanied by the third of her four husbands, the humorist George Henry Newell (aka Orpheus C. Kerr, or “office seeker”) and her friend Jane McElhinney (aka Ada Clare), the so-called Queen of Bohemia. The town had been in a tizzy with anticipation since Menken announced in January that she would perform there. Dan De Quille allowed that he was “in ecstasies at the bare mention of the fact” that she was coming to Virginia. The Virginia Evening Bulletin announced in the same breathless tone that “the great bare-backed equestrienne” had scheduled a run at Maguire’s Opera House in the city. Two weeks before she debuted, a parodic version of Mazeppa was staged at Sutliff’s Hall in Virginia City featuring someone called Ata Skeekicks Blenken in the title role and a supporting character named Phelim McTwain.41
Menken opened in Virginia in The French Spy the evening of March 2, 1864—she understood the importance of a marketing tease—and postponed her first performance in Mazeppa until March 7. According to Sam P. Davis, the Enterprise reporting staff met and “as a result of their conference decided to vivisect the Menken, but after seeing her, returned to their office and wrote rapturous things about her. Joseph Goodman wrote most of the commendatory notices of her.”42 A furious debate soon erupted in the Virginia City papers over the propriety of Menken’s performances in Mazeppa. As usual, the Union and the Enterprise were on opposite sides of the question. The Union from the first reviled “the scandalous obscene exhibition” and “filthy melodrama” on the local stage. The Enterprise rallied to Menken’s defense in its review of “the splendid spectacular drama,” saying that the critic who panned the play and Menken’s role in it “should blush that he is made in the image of his God—if, indeed, he is. He should rail against painting and sculpture, and the other arts which have developed their most beautiful and divine conceptions in ideal likenesses of the human form.” The Gold Hill News replied by implicitly accusing “the unblushing Menken” in her “fig-leaf performances” of appealing to the baser human instincts like the businesses on D Street—that is, the brothels in the local red light district. The Union then went for the jugular, alleging that Menken was guilty of “indecent display” and “a wanton display of person.” Her “scandalous obscene exhibition,” lacking both restraint and shame, was “of the most lascivious nature that lewd imaginations can invent.” The review might have been written to advertise the very qualities of the play that its author presumed to protest: “an almost nude woman with ample natural or artificial development bending, smiting, posturing on foot and twisting and wriggling on horseback” while “the gallery of half-grown boys sends down a continual howl of approbation.” In all, the play was “beneath criticism and is entitled simply to condemnation.” It contained “immodest and overdrawn caricatures unfit for the public eye. They are degrading to the drama, whose temples they defile—a libel upon woman, whose sex is defamed, whose chastity is corrupted by them, and she who enacts them.” The Enterprise in turn s
corned the organ that presumed “to enlighten the public taste of Virginia City” and instead indicted “all that is truly good, and purely lovely, and decently beautiful.” Across the mountains in California, the Stockton Independent alleged that in their spirited defense of Menken “the editors of the Enterprise have gone crazy—but they didn’t have far to go.”43
Despite the controversy, Menken enjoyed her month among the miners. Dan De Quille remembered that she “was delighted with the excitement and wild whirl of life” on the Comstock. She “was very impulsive and full of all manner of notions and eccentricities.” She was escorted through the mines and purportedly “had half a notion to settle down” and “stay with the many congenial excitements in which Virginia City abounded.” She also contributed “two or three poems—long ones in blankest of blank verse” to the Territorial Enterprise. According to Effie Mona Mack, Tom Peasley squired Menken around the town, “danced with her at the Melodeon, rode horseback with her, bucked the tiger with her, and met her after each performance for a midnight supper.” Menken was serenaded one night by the Opera House band in the street below her rooms at the International. Because she was “a literary cuss herself,” Sam even solicited her opinion of a piece he had written. De Quille remembered, too, a small dinner party she hosted in the hotel that he attended in company with Sam and Ada Clare while Newell strutted and fretted in the hallway. On March 28, three days before her departure, Menken was elected an honorary member of the Young America Engine Company No. 2 and presented with a silver belt inscribed with its insignia. A former New York City firefighter, Peasley was its founder and chief engineer. A group of miners christened their latest strike with a deliberately risqué name, the Menken Shaft and Tunnel Company, and presented her with a gift of fifty shares. The stock certificates were adorned with the image of a naked woman on horseback, and the joke went around that the first work to be performed in the mine “will be to strip all the ledges.” But Menken enjoyed the last laugh. The stock, worth about a hundred dollars per share when it was given to her, was appraised at about a thousand dollars per share, or a total of about fifty thousand dollars in gold, seventeen months later.44
Her marriage to Newell dissolved soon after their visit to Nevada. Never a delicate flower, Menken soon married a fourth time and, during a theatrical tour through Europe, was involved in liaisons with both Algernon Charles Swinburne and the elder Alexandre Dumas. In 1866, while performing in Paris in Les pirates de la savanne (The pirates of the savannah), she posed for a series of scandalous cartes de visite with Dumas, who in one of them is seated in shirtsleeves while Menken embraces him.
Sam, who saw copies of the salacious pictures early in 1867, was appalled by Menken’s apparent intimacy with an older man of color. “Somehow I begin to regard Menken’s conduct as questionable, occasionally,” he wrote a year later. “She has a passion for connecting herself with distinguished people, and then discarding them. . . . Heaven help us, what desperate chances she takes on her reputation!”45
Even before Menken left Virginia City, Joe Goodman departed for San Francisco and Hawaii for a well-deserved two-month vacation. Denis McCarthy, co-owner of the Enterprise, had moved to the Bay Area and founded the daily American Flag there in April 1864. A rowdy Irishman, he was also a pugnacious figure—he had been tried for murder in Sonora in January 1863, would be charged with assault and libel in Virginia City in July 1864, and was sued successfully for libel by one of the editors and owners of the Virginia Evening Bulletin in January 1865. He was arrested in San Francisco on a bench warrant in the libel case that March and released from jail after posting bail of a thousand dollars. Rather than leave so galvanizing a figure in charge, Goodman asked Sam and Dan to manage the paper in his absence. Sam agreed on the condition “that I should never be expected to write editorials about politics or eastern news. I take no sort of interest in those matters.” That is, he refused to write about the war.46
In one of their first editorials, Sam and Dan proposed a solution to the stray-dog nuisance in Virginia City: to authorize local butchers to make sausages from them. Sam recycled the joke three years later in his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, in which he claimed that the Hawaiians’ diet of dog simply consisted of “our cherished American sausage with the mystery removed.”47 Not surprisingly, he omitted this line from Roughing It.
As usual, moreover, Sam was ready to perpetrate an April Fool’s hoax, albeit in this case a lame one. He inserted in the Enterprise for April 1 a putative statement by his neighbor Tom Fitch alleging that their landlord W. F. Myers was a white supremacist who had used “language derogatory of the character of our fellow-citizens of African descent, and calculated to damnify them and bring them into contempt and ridicule.” Fitch ostensibly requested that Myers “be punished either by hanging, or by being compelled to pack sand-bags at Fort Churchill.” The Evening Bulletin scorned the “goak” (joke): “Mark Twain, who is notorious for constantly lying,” made “another mistake” by printing the fraudulent item. “We can’t for the life of us see where the laugh comes in. . . . We suppose our neighbor thinking because this is April Fools’ Day, he has a greater license than usual. But we don’t see it. He who is a fool all the rest of the year has no special rights on this special day.” Sam responded angrily the next morning to this editorial in the Bulletin, which replied in kind in its evening edition. “Sammy Clemens”—the diminutive first name is condescending at the least—
who scribbles the funny things (Heavens save the mark) for the Enterprise, and is not a little addicted to saying hard things about others, as he pretends, in joke, appears to feel it intensely when others turn the joke on him. . . . Perhaps he imagines because he is Sammy that he has a right to do what others with less pretensions to the character of a wit have not. . . . Merciless himself in perpetrating jokes on others, he winces like a cur with a flea in his ear when others retort; showing conclusively that he has quite misconceived the nature of the character he has assumed—that of being Washoe’s wit! . . . We think the funniest part of poor Sammy’s character is his claiming the possession of wit. Drawling stupidity, when well acted by an educated, intelligent man, is indeed comical; but when those features are the natural characteristics of an illiterate and by no means bright intellect, the mouthings of such a one it were a misapplication of terms to call wit.48
This comment is accurate to this extent: fond as he was of perpetrating a hoax or joke, Sam resented becoming the butt of one. “All who knew him best,” according to Doten, understood “that although he liked practical jokes on others, he did not seem to enjoy one upon himself.” Will Gillis agreed: “Sam did like fun, but not when the fun was at his expense.” Sam told interviewers in 1902 that he considered pranks and practical jokes “the cheapest form of wit”—virtually the same comment he made about puns—and that he hated the people who inflicted them on others. “I never was a practical joker,” he insisted, “except when I was a boy, and a boy has not sense. The practical joker is a boy who never had grown up. His head is full of stewed oysters instead of brains.” He reiterated the point in his autobiography: “During three-fourths of my life I have held the practical joker in limitless contempt and detestation; I have despised him as I have despised no other criminal, and when I am delivering my opinion about him the reflection that I have been a practical joker myself seems to increase my bitterness rather than to modify it.”49
Sam was interested, if only briefly, in the publication of the short-lived Weekly Occidental, a literary paper launched in Virginia City by Tom and Anna Fitch. It was so ephemeral that no copy of it survives, and bibliographers even disagree about the number of issues that appeared. “We expected great things of the Occidental,” Sam reminisced in chapter 51 of Roughing It, and the first issuedated March 4, 1864, contained contributions by both Goodman, Tom Fitch’s former adversary, and Dan De Quille. It had “a very neat appearance,” according to the Reese River Reveille, “but as a ‘literary’ production, the first number does no
t justify its being taken as a model.” Sam remembered that “[o]f course it could not get along without an original novel,” so the editors planned a collaborative serial, a takeoff on Charles Reade’s Love Me Little, Love Me Long, titled “The Silver Fiend, a Tale of Washoe.” The first chapters were written by Rollin Daggett and Tom and Anna Fitch. Anna was, according to Sam, “an able romancist [sic] of the ineffable school”; she eventually published several novels, including Bound Down; or, Life and Its Possibilities (1870), The Loves of Paul Fenly (1893), and, with her husband, Better Days; or, A Millionaire of Tomorrow (1891). Sam noted in his journal that he was assigned the task of advancing “Mrs Fitch’s tragedy” from the point “where the Injun chief siezes [sic] the halfbreed child by the ancles [sic], suddenly substitutes a dummy & dashes its bloody brains out against a white dead-wall rather to the disgust of the audience than otherwise.” But the paper suspended publication before Sam’s installment of the serial appeared. The Occidental “died as peacefully as an infant” in April 1864, perhaps after only two issues and certainly after no more than four.50
One of his literary productions from this period survives, however. Sam’s ballad “The Aged Pilot Man” was slated to appear in the Occidental before it failed. Never one to waste material, he inserted it into Roughing It eight years later. When he composed it, he recalled, “I thought my doggerel was one of the ablest poems of the age.” It recounts an act of ironic heroism by a pilot on the Erie Canal who steers his keelboat through a raging storm. For most of the twenty-eight stanzas and 136 lines of iambic meter, the pilot evades shallows and curves, repeatedly assuring his passengers “Fear not, but trust in Dollinger, / For he will fetch you through.” In the end a local farmer throws a plank to the boat from the bank of the canal, followed by the anti-climactic final stanza:
The Life of Mark Twain Page 36