The Life of Mark Twain
Page 42
He was nearly as enamored of Horatio Stebbins, Bellows’s successor and King’s permanent replacement in the Unitarian pulpit on Geary Street. According to Samuel Bowles, Stebbins was widely regarded “as the first man in intellect” on the West Coast, and Sam cultivated his friendship. He bragged to his family that he was “thick as thieves” with Stebbins, whom—like Bellows—he considered “a regular brick.” In fact, Sam sought the company of clergymen during these months—“I am running on preachers, now, altogether,” he wrote, because “I find them gay”—including a pair of Bostonians, Henry M. Scudder of the Howard Presbyterian Church and A. L. Stone of the First Congregational Church. “Whenever anybody offers me a letter [of introduction] to a preacher now, I snaffle it on the spot,” he announced. Among the ministers he also befriended was Charles Wadsworth, pastor of the Calvary Presbyterian Church, best known today as Emily Dickinson’s “dearest earthly friend” and the recipient of letters the famously private poet addressed to her “master.” That is, just as Sam was two degrees of separation from Melville through Bellows, he was two degrees from Dickinson through Wadsworth, who never failed “to preach an able sermon” and occasionally told “a first rate joke.” Sam bragged in the Californian that he exercised “a great deal of influence with the clergy here,” especially Stebbins and Wadsworth, because “I write their sermons for them.”30
Sam contributed to the Californian during these months some of the earliest pieces he would subsequently collect in his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). Among them were “The Killing of Julius Caesar ‘Localized,’” a report of Caesar’s murder that burlesqued the brand of crime reporting he had contributed to the Call, and “Answers to Correspondents,” a faux advice column. In the familiar essay “Whereas,” he developed a conceit of lovers as pastries handmade in Love’s Bakery. As he observed, “they take a couple of hopeful hearts in the rough, and work them up, with spices and shortening and sweetening enough to last for a lifetime, and turn them out well kneaded together, baked to a turn, and ready for matrimony.” Sam borrowed the name of the bakery from an establishment at the corner of Third and Minna Streets in San Francisco owned by William Love. He may also have gleaned it from the name of a bakery owned by another Love, founded in 1864 on Nuuanu Street in Honolulu and still operating today. In the second half of the sketch, Sam recounted the pathetic love story of an ill-fated couple. The young man suffers scarring from smallpox (“his face was pitted like a waffle-mould”), breaks both of his legs, loses both arms, is blinded in one eye, and finally is scalped by Indians. Writing in the style of a columnist for the lovelorn, Sam urges the young woman, Aurelia, to “furnish her mutilated lover with wooden arms and wooden legs, and a glass eye and a wig, and give him another show.” Despite its pathos, the sketch convulsed some readers with laughter, to Sam’s dismay. “If there is anything really funny in the piece,” he admitted to Howells, he was “not aware of it.” If on the one hand the story recalls Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up” (1850), it anticipates on the other Nathanael West’s novel A Cool Million; or The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934). It may allude ironically to Sam’s friend Harte, whose face was deeply pitted with smallpox scars, or even Orion Clemens, who, Sam once wrote Howells, was incessantly if figuratively “losing a limb by a new kind of explosion.”31
Similarly, “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier” in the Californian for December 3, 1864, travesties the “nice, sickly” stories in Harper’s Weekly about love among the ruins of the Civil War. Set in the Massachusetts village of “Bluemass”—the name evokes the mercury-laden pills both Sam and Marshall Clemens consumed—the tale is predicated on the same premise as Howells’s “Editha” (1905): a flighty, romantic, and manipulative young woman, here tellingly named Lucretia Borgia Smith, persuades her suitor to enlist in the army to prove his love for her. He is killed in battle, of course, though she inadvertently helps to nurse to health another soldier whose face is swathed in bandages and whom she mistakes for him. According to the editors of Sam’s early writings, “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier” was “immediately popular on both coasts.” But there are only two known appearances of the story in the East: in the New York Atlas and the New York Sunday Mercury. That is, it was apparently neither “immediately” popular nor widely circulated until after it was reprinted in the Jumping Frog book.32
Sam and Steve Gillis seem to have been rowdy roommates during their months together in San Francisco. They changed hotels twice and rooming houses five times, sometimes at the behest of the landladies. One woman from whom they rented apparently thought they were “desperate characters from Washoe—gamblers & murder[er]s of the very worst description” because they carried bottles of beer to their room late at night and threw “their empty bottles out of the window.” They also “kept a nasty foreign sword”—Dan remembered it was Japanese—“& any number of revolvers & bowie knives” at hand. They “always had women” visiting them, “sometimes in broad daylight—bless you, they didn’t care.” As Sam asked Dan De Quille rhetorically, “what in the hell is the use of . . . building up a good name, if it is to be blown away at a breath” by someone “who is ignorant of the pleasant little customs that adorn & beautify a state of high civilization?” They lived for a time in a house on a bluff on California Street and later in the private home of a well-to-do family on Minna Street, in a neighborhood just south of the Embarcadero between First and Second “full of gardens and shrubbery.” When Sam lost his job with the Call, they moved a few doors away to a rooming house owned by Steve’s father Angus, where Sam could charge his room and board. He was so desperate for money that he contributed three squibs to the Napa Valley Reporter in November and December 1865. Meanwhile, Gillis was involved in a brawl than landed him in trouble with the police. As combative as a bantam rooster and weighing less than a hundred pounds, he intervened in a bar fight on the side of a customer and smashed the bartender over the head with an empty beer pitcher. Unfortunately, the bartender was a friend of the notoriously corrupt San Francisco police chief Martin J. Burke. Sam somehow posted the hundred dollars required to cover Gillis’s five-hundred-dollar straw bond, in effect cosigning a loan for him. His good deed earned its own reward: Gillis failed to appear at his trial a few weeks later; instead, he returned to Virginia City and his old job in the print shop of the Enterprise, and Sam was on the hook for the balance of the bond.33
In early December 1865, to save money and preempt Gillis’s prosecution on assault charges, the roommates abandoned the city to spend the winter in a pair of decayed mining camps in the Sierra foothills. “I took $300 with me,” Sam later recalled, probably from the sale of his last mining stock. The Hale & Norcross Mine had been listed for sale at $1,000 a share in early November but dropped to $310 on December 1, and Sam apparently liquidated his remaining interest in the mine during the bear market to finance his trip. On December 4 he and Steve Gillis arrived at the one-room cabin on Jackass Hill, a mile from Tuttletown in Tuolomne County, where Steve’s brothers Jim and William lived with their partner Dick Stoker. According to Dan De Quille, the cabin was “a friendly place of retreat in the mountain wilds for writers desirous of respite from the vanities and vexations of spirit incident to a life of literary labor in San Francisco.” Dan once called it “the headquarters of all Bohemians visiting the mountains.” Harte had tarried there for a few days a decade earlier when, at the age of nineteen, he traveled afoot from Sonora to Tuolumne. The cabin was well stocked with books—“Byron, Shakespeare, Bacon, Dickens, & every kind of first-class literature”—and Jim Gillis was a gifted storyteller. He “had a bright and smart imagination and it was of the kind that turns out impromptu work and does it well, does it with easy facility and without previous preparation, just builds a story as it goes along, careless of whither it is proceeding,” Sam recalled. Occasionally he “would have an inspiration and he would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and his hands crossed behind
him, and deliver himself of an elaborate impromptu lie. In one of my books—Huckleberry Finn, I think—I have used one of Jim’s impromptu tales, which he called ‘The Tragedy of the Burning Shame’” or “the King’s Camelopard or the Royal Nonesuch,” the ribald story of an actor who prances onstage stark naked on all fours with a lit candle in his rectum. It appealed to Sam’s bawdy sense of humor and he transcribed it in phonetic shorthand as he heard it in Gillis’s cabin under the title “The ‘Tragedians’ and the Burning Shame. No women admitted.” However, he “had to modify it considerably to make it proper for print and this was a great damage. . . . How mild it is in the book and how pale; how extravagant and how gorgeous in its unprintable form!”34 In the novel, the king, painted in stripes, merely prances onstage in the nude.
Tuttletown had long since become a backwater in the ebb tide of the Gold Rush, moreover. During the 1850s, as Sam told Rudyard Kipling in 1890, the mining camp had boasted “a population of three thousand—banks, fire-brigade, brick buildings, and all the modern improvements. It lived, it flourished, and it disappeared.” If Virginia City in its heyday was the “livest” town in the West, Tuttletown by the winter of 1865–66 was tumbledown. Its decline was epitomized by the fate of a local resident, a “poor fellow” who once entertained Sam
on a long walk with enthusiastic talk about his wife, whom he was on his way to the next village to see, & who had been absent a week, that I had the strongest desire to look upon a woman who could inspire such worship. And to my deep pain and astonishment I found that he was always making this weary journey & returning from it disappointed & marveling. His wife had been dead 23 years. On her return from a week’s absence, young & beautiful, the stage went over a precipice—& when he arrived, uninformed, expecting to take her in his arms, they lifted a sheet & showed him her corpse.35
Like the Bowen brothers’ sister Elizabeth, who never recuperated from a similar fright, the local man had lost his mind and never recovered.
As usual, however, Sam discovered a few pleasant diversions in the neighborhood. He met a pair of sisters, eighteen-year-old Phenila (Nellie) and fifteen-year-old Mary (Mollie) Daniels, who lived on Chaparral Hill two miles away. “Sam was a favorite with the girls,” Steve Gillis remembered, and the boys often called on them.” They were nicknamed the Chaparral Quails and they boasted “the slimmest waists, the largest bustles, and the stiffest starched petticoats” in the region. They were “beautiful creatures, clean-minded, good-hearted, well meaning, favorites with old & young,” Sam remembered, “yet they could outswear Satan. It was the common speech of that remote & thinly settled region, they had come by it naturally, & if there was any harm in it they were not aware of it.”36
After a weeklong excursion to nearby Vallecito immediately after Christmas, Sam returned to Jackass Hill, where he camped until January 22. He traveled that day with Jim Gillis to Angel’s Camp in Calaveras County, where Gillis had filed a mining claim, though they were soon confined to their room by the winter rains. “I had a very comfortable time in Calaveras county, in spite of the rain, and if I had my way I would go back there,” Sam declared a month later.
Calaveras possesses some of the grandest natural features that have ever fallen under the contemplation of the human mind—such as the Big Trees, the famous Morgan gold mine which is the richest in the world at the present time, perhaps, and “straight” whisky that will throw a man a double somerset and limber him up like boiled macaroni before he can set his glass down. Marvelous and incomprehensible is the straight whisky of Angel’s Camp!
In his notebook at the time, however, he was not so complimentary of the local cuisine. “Beans and coffee only for breakfast and dinner every day at the French Restaurant at Angels—bad, weak coffee,” he noted soon after his arrival. “J[im Gillis] told waiter he must made mistake—he asked for café—this was day-before-yesterday’s dishwater.” The litany continued without interruption for the next week:
Jan. 23, 1865—Angels—Rainy, stormy—Beans & dishwater for breakfast at the Frenchman’s; dishwater & beans for dinner, & both articles warmed over for supper.
24th—Rained all day—meals as before.
25—Same as above.
26th—Rain, beans & dishwater—tapidero beefsteak for a change—no use, could not bite it.
27th—Same old diet—same old weather—went out to the “pocket” claim—had to rush back.
28th—Rain & wind all day & all night.
29th—The old, old thing.
30th—Jan.—Moved to the new hotel, just opened—good fare, & coffee that a Christian may drink without jeopardizing his eternal soul. . . . Dick Stoker came over today from Tuttletown, Tuolumne Co. . . .
Feb 3—Dined at the Frenchman’s, in order to let Dick see how he does things. Had Hellfire soup & the old regular beans & dishwater. The Frenchman has <3> 4 kinds of soup which he furnishes to customers only on great occasions. They are popularly known among the Boarders as Hellfire, General Debility, Insanity & Sudden Death, but it is not possible to
As long as the deluge continued, the men “did nothing all day but sit around the bar-room stove, spit, and ‘swop lies.’”37 Finally, the rains stopped on February 6 and his comrades were able to pocket mine on the Gillis claim.
Sometime between Stoker’s arrival at Angel’s Camp on January 30 and February 6, however, in the tavern at Tryon’s Hotel where Sam and Jim Gillis played pool, they heard the bartender Ben Coon, a balding former riverboat pilot, relate the tale of a leaping frog contest, unconsciously imitating the deadpan speaking style of Artemus Ward. “I heard the story told by a man who was not telling it to his hearers as a thing new to them, but as a thing which they had witnessed and would remember,” Sam explained.
He was a dull person, and ignorant; he had no gift as a story-teller, and no invention; in his mouth this episode was merely history—history and statistics; and the gravest sort of history, too; he was entirely serious, for he was dealing with what to him were austere facts, and they interested him solely because they were facts; he was drawing on his memory, not his mind; he saw no humor in his tale, neither did his listeners; neither he nor they ever smiled or laughed; in my time I have not attended a more solemn conference. . . . [N]one of the party was aware that a first-rate story had been told in a first-rate way, and that it was brimful of a quality whose presence they never suspected—humor.
At the time Sam simply scribbled these notes in his journal: “Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot & he couldn’t jump—the stranger’s frog won.” Five years later, Sam reminisced about “the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain & mud of Angel’s Camp,” the night
we sat around the tavern stove & heard that chap tell about the frog & how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it there on the hillside while you and dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my notebook that day and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it—I was that blind. But then we were so hard up.
The reputation the anecdote earned for Sam “has paid me thousands of dollars since,” he admitted.38 By the time he left the California goldfields he had taken notes on two other stories told by Dick Stoker that he would publish in the years to come: “Dick Baker’s Cat” in Roughing It and “Jim Baker’s Bluejay Yarn” in A Tramp Abroad (1880).
But he did not strike pay dirt as a pocket miner. In Roughing It, Sam asserted that he, Stoker, and the Gillis brothers “panned up and down the hillsides” around Jackass Hill “till they looked plowed like a field” and then “prospected around Angel’s Camp”
without success. Similarly, he claimed in his autobiography that during his months with the Gillis brothers in northern California “they found nothing, but we had a fascinating and delightful good time trying”—as if he had reunited his old Hannibal gang to dig for gold at the mouth of McDowell’s Cave. In fact, there is no evidence Sam performed any more physical labor prospecting for gold in California than he had working his claims in Aurora three years earlier. Will Gillis remembered this period differently: “The nearest approach to any work” that Sam “ever did at mining was when he became my partner at one time for about two weeks.” In his own account, moreover, Gillis located a pocket and extracted about seven hundred dollars in gold over ten days, “I doing the work and Sam superintending.” According to Steve Gillis, “Mark was the laziest man I ever knew in my life, physically. Mentally, he was the hardest worker I ever knew.”39