Whether or not Sam’s account so long after the fact is accurate in all details, he was certainly offended by the encounter when it happened. He wrote Charley Stoddard that Bret Harte, whose Condensed Novels was one of the books in manuscript on Carleton’s shelves, was “publishing with a Son of a Bitch who will swindle him, & he may print that opinion if he chooses, with my name signed to it.” Sam resented the “idiot publisher” for years, and Carleton not only lived to regret his decision but to apologize for it. “I am substantially an obscure person,” he supposedly told Sam in 1888, “but I have a couple of such colossal distinctions to my credit that I am entitled to immortality—to wit: I refused a book of yours, and for this I stand without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century.” He admitted to a friend that he had declined the manuscript of the frog book “because the author looked so disreputable.” Sam submitted it to other New York presses to no avail. The journalist and poet Charles Graham Halpine, aka Miles O’Reilly, reported that the manuscript, “in the form in which he had prepared it, was refused on all sides.” Webb too remembered that all the “publishers to whom it was offered” declined it, so he decided to issue it under his own imprint and offered to pay Sam a 10 percent royalty. Sam later asserted that his “experiences as an author” began when he cut a deal with Webb for his first book. Webb arranged for it to be printed by the John A. Gray and Green Company, the same firm for which Sam had set type in 1853.20
While the book was in production, Sam traveled to St. Louis to visit his family, whom he had not seen in over five years. He caught a New Jersey Central train the evening of March 3 during a snowstorm. During the fifty-two-hour trip, he passed through Pittsburgh, then Alliance, Ohio, and Indianapolis, and then transferred trains in Terre Haute, Indiana. He arrived in the Mound City at midnight on March 5 and went directly to his family’s home on Chestnut Street and “sat up till breakfast time” chatting with his relatives. He carried with him the scrapbooks filled with his Nevada and California writings to leave with his family for safekeeping as well as gifts for his mother, sister, and niece Annie. For the next three weeks he did little but “gad around among old friends,” especially old sweethearts. “I am generally allowed a kiss for old acquaintance sake,” he wrote in his next letter to the Alta California, “and I am sorry now that I didn’t know all the female babies in the country when I left.” Back in his home state, he soon discovered “that the political bitternesses engendered during the war are still about as strong as they ever were. Individual friends and whole families of old tried friends are widely separated yet—don’t visit and don’t hold any intercourse with each other.” In company with his sister Pamela, he viewed an exhibition of paintings by the German landscape artist Carl Wilhelm Gropius at the St. Louis Museum and Theatre on Fifth Street. Afterward he was quoted in a local paper to the effect that “these beautiful pictures bring Europe back again with the vividness of reality”—as if he was a genuine connoisseur of art who had already toured the Old World.21
The women of Missouri were agitating for the vote and, back on native ground, Sam took the opportunity to express his opposition to the suffrage movement in a couple of half-facetious (but half-serious) letters to the editor of the St. Louis Missouri Democrat. He betrayed the orthodox misogyny of the era. “It will never do to allow women to vote,” he declared. “It will never do to allow them to hold office. You know, and I know, that if they were granted these privileges there would be no more peace on earth.” In the second letter, he addressed the suffragists directly, albeit tongue in cheek:
Women, go your ways! Seek not to beguile us of our imperial privileges. Content yourself with your little feminine trifles—your babies, your benevolent societies and your knitting—and let your natural bosses do the voting. Stand back—you will be wanting to go to war next. We will let you teach school as much as you want to, and we will pay you half wages for it, too, but beware! we don’t want you to crowd us too much.22
However ironic the tone of these letters, Sam shared the popular prejudice that women’s place was in the home, that they should exercise moral suasion as “angels in the house,” and that politicking and the franchise would corrupt them.
He had not planned to lecture in St. Louis but he “got a call to do something of that kind” for the benefit of the South St. Louis Mission Sunday school so he “preached” on the Sandwich Islands at the Mercantile Library Hall the nights of March 25 and 26. As usual, he promoted his appearance with a comic classified ad:
In order to illustrate the customs of the ancient Cannibals of the Sandwich Islands, the lecturer will
DEVOUR A CHILD,
in presence of the audience, if some lady will kindly volunteer an infant for the occasion.
The lecturer declines to specify any more of his miraculous feats at present, for fear of getting the police too much interested in his circus.
The hall where he spoke was “something like a barn that had gone to seed,” he reminisced in 1895. It seated “something like 1,500 people,” but he claimed that on account of stormy weather only about twenty or thirty people attended one of the performances, though it was “the most enthusiastic audience I have ever had the pleasure of holding conversation with.” Sam’s assertions do not square with reviews of the lectures in the local newspapers, however. According to the St. Louis Missouri Republican, he succeeded the first night “in doing what we have seen Emerson and other literary magnates fail at attempting—he interested and amused a large and promiscuous audience.” Sam was so pleased by this review that he quoted it at length in his next letter to the Alta. The following evening, Sam closed his lecture by apologizing for failing to inform his audience that the popular Unitarian minister and orator Robert Collyer was speaking at the Philharmonic Hall across town at the same hour and so he had “swindled the reverend gentleman out of a crowd.” The reporter for the St. Louis Missouri Democrat—much to Sam’s dismay—transcribed the talk in shorthand and published a column-long version of it two days later in his paper, effectively reducing its appeal in cities where it was copied by the exchanges. The reporter was Henry M. Stanley, later famous for leading the expedition that located the missionary David Livingstone in Africa. These synopses of his lectures were long the bane of Sam’s speaking tours. As he explained later, each of his lectures “was my property, & no man had a right to take it from me & print it, any more than he would have a right to take away any other property of mine.”23
The remainder of his ramble through the Midwest was uneventful, hardly the triumphant homecoming he might have expected. Sam lectured on the Sandwich Islands in Hannibal, Missouri (April 2), Keokuk, Iowa (April 8), and Quincy, Illinois (April 9), a speaking tour comparable to a tryout in the provinces of a play bound for Broadway. During these two weeks he seems to have refined the pregnant pause in his delivery. “The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too,” he later explained. “It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length—no more and no less—or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble.” “I used to play with the pause as other children play with a toy.” As late as 1907, long after retiring from the platform, he told an interviewer that a successful lecturer “must know exactly how long to hold” his audience “before coming to the point of the joke. After some experience I could tell how long the pause should be to the moment. The length of such a pause differs from time to time and with difference audiences. . . . Even such a little thing as a person coughing in an audience will hurry the point.”24
In Hannibal, according to a contemporary report, he lectured before “the largest and most delighted crowd ever gathered in a public hall” there. The Keokuk Constitution commended him—“it has been many a day since our ribs were tickled so much as at listening to Sam Clemens’ lecture”—but conceded that “a little more voice and a little more nerve in his general delivery would not be objectionable.”
The Keokuk Gate City was even more blunt: “his style of speaking and his manner generally is [sic] too quiet . . . to please a popular audience.” Nor was the lecture in Keokuk well attended: the box office totaled less than thirty-five dollars at fifty cents a head. Still, Sam drew a larger audience there than had Ralph Waldo Emerson a few weeks earlier, and he visited his old friends Ella Creel, Ella Patterson, and Mollie Stotts. To puff his lecture at National Hall in Quincy the next evening, he directed a letter to the editor of the Quincy Whig in which he joked about finding one “John Smith” residing in the city. “I am astonished,” he added, “because I thought you were in San Francisco. I am almost certain I left you there.” Sam had also found “John Smith” in New York, New Orleans, and St. Louis—and jokingly dismissed the possibility that there was more than one “John Smith.” F. A. Dallam of the Quincy Whig, who had known Sam in Nevada, also reminisced about him in the paper and assured the “lovers of genial humor” that they would “find nothing coarse or vulgar” in his lecture. The Quincy Herald concurred: it was “refined enough for the most fastidious, pointed enough for the most obtuse.” As a result, the box office receipts in Quincy totaled $80, over twice the amount in Keokuk—but much less than the $346 Wendell Phillips’s auditors in Quincy had paid to hear him earlier in the season. Still, Sam was pleased. “Quincy is a wonderful place,” he declared in the Alta. “It has always thrived—sometimes slowly and steadily, sometimes with a rush—but always making an unquestionable progress.” He was hosted by James W. Singleton, a former brigadier general of the Illinois Militia and, as Sam put it, “one of the farmer princes” of the region, who lived “two miles from Quincy, in a very large and elegantly furnished house, and does an immense farming business and is very wealthy.”25
From Quincy, Sam hurried east by express train through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to New York. He arrived by April 15, the date he was required to pay the balance of his fare for the Quaker City voyage or lose his deposit. He was unaware that the owners of the Alta had already telegraphed their New York office to authorize payment. Flush with cash upon his return, he took a room at the tony Westminster Hotel on Irving Place.26
Though advertised for sale on April 24, 1867, the first 1,000 copies of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches were bound on April 30, a week before the publication of Emerson’s May-Day and Other Pieces. The next day Sam inscribed a copy to his mother. Webb ordered a second impression of 552 copies three weeks later, and during its first eight months in print about 2,200 copies were sold in the United States. Sam was disappointed. He had expected the book to sell 50,000 copies but it sold only about 14,000 during the first two years. The authorized British edition had sold some 10,000 copies by April 1870 and the pirated Hotten edition over 40,000 copies in England between 1867 and 1873. Shortly after its first publication Sam admitted to his mother and sister with remarkable prescience that he did not “believe that [the book] will ever pay [me] anything worth a cent. I published it simply to advertise myself & not with the hope of making anything out of it.” Sam dedicated the book to “John Smith” whom—as in his letter to the editor of the Quincy Whig—“I have known in divers and sundry places about the world.” Most of the sketches were culled from the Californian, with a few others reprinted from the Territorial Enterprise, the Golden Era, the Dramatic Chronicle, the Sacramento Union, the New York Weekly Review, and of course the titular piece from the Saturday Press. While he publicly declared that the 198-page book was “gotten up” in “excellent” and “elegant style,” Sam privately griped to Harte that it was “full of damnable errors of grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling,” especially “in the Frog sketch,” because he had been “away and did not read the proofs.” Though he publicly promoted its sale, he admitted a year and a half later to the gentle and genteel Olivia Langdon that he hated “to hear that infamous volume mentioned. I would be glad to know that every copy of it was burned & gone forever.” In 1870, the first year of his marriage, he bought the copyright from Webb so that he could “melt up the plates” and ensure it would never be reissued. He not only forgave the six hundred dollars Webb owed him in royalties but paid him eight hundred additional dollars for the privilege: “Think of purchasing one’s own property after never having received one cent from the publication!” Elisha Bliss, who published Sam’s second book, approved his buyout of Webb, though he concurred that “he got the big end of a loaf. He ought to have sold you the plates for what he owed you.” Sam fumed in 1875 that Webb had “swindled me on a verbal publishing contract on my first book” and remarked in 1905 that he hated “both the name and memory of Charles Henry Webb.” The next year, Sam added in his autobiographical dictation that Webb’s “prose was enchantingly puerile; his poetry was not any better; yet he kept on grinding out his commonplaces at intervals until he died, two years ago, of over-cerebration. He was a poor sort of a creature, and by nature and training a fraud.”27
Still, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches served to broadcast Sam’s literary reputation. Its appearance spurred a fresh round of reprintings of some of its contents in papers across the country, such as “Chambermaids” in the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph for May 18, “The Story of the Bad Little Boy” in the Philadelphia Public Ledger for May 25, “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier” in the Sacramento Union for June 6, and “Jim Wolf and the Tom Cats” in the Albany Argus for August 6 and Ohio Farmer for August 24.28
Despite its disappointing sales, the book was a middling critical success, hailed for its “amusing sketches” (New York Round Table), “healthy good humor” (New York Evening Express), “quaint humor” and “pithy wisdom” (New York Times), “hard good sense” and “genial and inexhaustible” humor (New York Herald), and “sagacity of observation” and “keen perception of character” (Boston Transcript). Both the Alta California and Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times favorably compared the volume to George Horatio Derby’s Phoenixiana, and the Sacramento Union likened Sam to Orpheus C. Kerr and Artemus Ward. According to the St. Louis Missouri Republican, the book was “very neatly presented” and “humorously entertaining” and would “be particularly acceptable” to Sam’s “many personal friends” in that city. It was also hailed by Halpine in the New York Citizen and by reviewers in the American Literary Gazette, the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Dispatch, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Providence Press, and the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican. Such London papers as the London Review (“a genuine collection of harmless drollery and mirth”) and Saturday Review (“heartily recommended”) and Tom Hood in Fun (“one of the funniest books that we have met with for a long time”) were no less complimentary of the pirated English edition.29
To be sure, a few critics struck sour notes. The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, for example, thought Sam’s wit was “forced and strained,” and the New York Evening Post sniffed that his brand of western humor was “not suited to this longitude.” Sam had not yet sufficiently restrained his style to appeal to all eastern readers or, as Howells conceded, Sam’s “Western sketches were too strong for Eastern tastes.” Incredibly, the Albion asserted that only half of Sam’s sketches were worth preserving and expressed grave doubt that “posterity will hear of Mark Twain.” Surprisingly, even Sam’s friends at the San Francisco Bulletin criticized the “cheap look” of the book and damned its author with faint praise: “We regard him as by far the best of our second-rate humorists.”30
Like a modern marketeer who practices brand extension, Sam immediately followed the publication of the book with a plan to deliver his Sandwich Island lecture in New York. That is, his fame was fueled by both his published writing and his public performances, and he promoted his books and stage appearances as purposefully as a guest on a late-night talk show. As soon as he returned from the Midwest, he wrote his mother that during his absence “the boys have gotten up a ‘call’ on me,” a petition signed by dozens of transplanted Californians who had settled
in the city, including Robert Howland, Tom Maguire, Clement Rice, and Charley Webb. His friends “suggested it, engineered it, & carried it through successfully,” he wrote Olivia Langdon a year later. He accepted their invitation and soon hired a manager: Frank Fuller, a former secretary of Utah Territory, who had become a vice president of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company with headquarters in New York. Sam had met Fuller in Virginia City in 1862 after he went to work for the Territorial Enterprise, and the two men crossed paths again in San Francisco a year or so later. Sometime in mid-April 1867, according to Sam’s autobiography, Fuller decided that
I must take the biggest hall in New York and deliver that lecture of mine on the Sandwich Islands—said that people would be wild to hear me. There was something catching about that man’s prodigious energy. For a moment he almost convinced me that New York was wild to hear me. I knew better. I was well aware that New York had never heard of me, was not expecting to hear of me, and didn’t want to hear of me—yet that man almost persuaded me. I protested, as soon as the fire which he had kindled in me had cooled a little, and went on protesting. It did no good. Fuller was sure that I should make fame and fortune right away without any trouble. He said leave it to him—just leave everything to him—go to the hotel and sit down and be comfortable—he would lay fame and fortune at my feet in ten days.
As Fuller told the story in 1911, however, Sam walked into his office on Broadway and announced that he wanted to “preach” in “the biggest hall to be found” in the city, Cooper Union, which cost seventy dollars to hire for one evening and Sam only had seven dollars in his pocket. That is, Sam wanted to perform on the same stage where Abraham Lincoln had addressed an eastern audience for the first time in February 1860, prior to his nomination and election as president. Fuller agreed to front Sam the money and to rent the hall and handle the business end of his lecture, including the publicity. (Reminiscing with Sam a quarter century later, Fuller asked “if he remembered the time when he only had $7” and wanted to speak at Cooper Union. Sam confessed that in fact “he had $700 in gold in old man Leland’s safe” at the Metropolitan Hotel and “maybe I didn’t bring out the second syllable quite plainly.”)31 Sam also invited James W. Nye, the former governor and now a U.S. senator from Nevada, to introduce him onstage the evening of his lecture. When he received no reply he asked Fuller to rail to Washington and reiterate the request in person. According to Fuller, he took a night train on April 21 “and saw Gov. Nye in his rooms” at the Willard Hotel near the White House. “I made known my errand and he assented and invited me to sit right down” while he penned “a polite affirmative assent to an invitation which I could write after I returned to New York. I got his signature and rushed back to New York.” By April 23 the lecture plans were falling into place. On that day the New York World announced that Sam would deliver his address at Cooper Union on May 6. Fuller sent him to a tailor to be attired for the occasion. Sam was not yet “a very fine dresser, and thought his ordinary sack suit was good enough. I told him he must wear evening dress, and he said he never had had a claw-hammer coat in his life.” Fuller even “made him procure a suitable collar and necktie.” The evening of April 29, a group of men convened in one of the meeting rooms at the Metropolitan, ostensibly to welcome Sam to the city (though he had arrived nearly two months earlier) but in fact to rally public interest in his lecture the next week. Sam addressed the gathering, Fuller offered a resolution “highly eulogistic” of Sam’s “powers and fame as a humorist” that the attendees endorsed, and then he read to the assembly the testimonial on Sam’s behalf he had ghostwritten for Nye. In advertising Sam’s lecture, Fuller reproduced this letter, which commended the “array of facts” and “descriptions of life, manners, and customs among the natives of the Islands of the Pacific” embellished with “sparkling wit and genial humor.” Over ninety men, including Howland, William Stewart, and Webb, signed a petition urging Sam to appear at the earliest opportunity, cultivating the illusion that Sam had acquiesced to a clamor of interest among his compatriots. The Stage, an entertainment circular, puffed the lecture, though it misstated his name and misrepresented his wealth: “Seth Twain is young, handsome, single and rich, and his future is altogether fair and promising.”32
The Life of Mark Twain Page 57