Unfortunately, such schemes did not sell many tickets. The same evening Sam was scheduled to speak at Cooper Union, Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, delivered his “Across the Continent” talk at Irving Hall; the popular actress Adelaide Ristori performed at the French Theatre; and a troupe of Japanese acrobats, magicians, and jugglers appeared at the new Academy of Music. In addition, The Flying Scud was playing at Wallack’s, The Black Crook at Niblo’s, and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon at Barnum’s Museum. Sam worried, given the competition for entertainment dollars, that he would be embarrassed by a virtually empty Cooper Union on the night of his lecture. One other problem: Henry Stanley’s transcription of Sam’s talk in St. Louis had been copied by the New York Commercial Advertiser in mid-April, potentially depressing interest in Sam’s performance. But as he wrote his mother and sister on May 1, “I have taken the largest house in New York and cannot back water”—a nautical metaphor for reversing course. “Let her slide! If nobody else cares I don’t.” In the end, Sam convinced Fuller to paper the house, a trick analogous to salting a mine with spurious ore. Fuller sent “whole basketfuls of complimentary tickets” for the lecture to “every public-school teacher within a radius of thirty miles” but without a guarantee the gifts would be used. On the evening of May 6, as Sam approached the hall, “I saw that all the streets were blocked with people, and that traffic had stopped. I couldn’t believe that these people were trying to get into Cooper Institute; but they were, and when I got to the stage at last the house was jammed full-packed; there wasn’t room enough left for a child.” The hall was filled with a capacity audience variously estimated at between two thousand and twenty-five hundred—including William M. Tweed, the infamous Tammany Hall boss—but earned Sam no money. “The expense of the lecture was a little over $600,” Fuller reported, and the actual box office receipts “were not quite $300.”33 Nor had Nye appeared as promised to escort Sam to the platform and introduce him.
While the lecture was a financial failure, it was, like the jumping frog book, a smashing critical success. If necessity is the mother of invention, Nye’s failure to honor his commitment inspired Sam to introduce himself, a comic feature of hundreds of his future appearances. After a “yell of welcome” from the audience, according to Fuller, Sam “walked to the edge of the platform, looked carefully down in the pit, round the edges as if he were hunting for something. Then he said, ‘There was to have been a piano here, and a senator to introduce me. I don’t seem to discover them anywhere. The piano was a good one, but we will have to get along with such music as I can make with your help. As for the senator—.’” Sam then referred to Nye with the rhetorical equivalent of a Bronx cheer. “He said things that made men from the Pacific coast, who had known Nye, scream with delight,” Fuller remembered. Only then did Sam begin his talk. “I was happy and I was excited beyond expression,” he recalled. “I poured the Sandwich Islands lecture out onto those people with a free hand, and they laughed and shouted to my entire content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise.” Fuller, too, reported that “the shouts of laughter and the bursts of applause were far beyond anything I have ever witnessed.” Ever adept at self-promotion, Sam plugged the jumping frog book at the close before walking from the limelight into the shadows. He wrote his Alta California readers that he had had “a first-rate success” but he did not elaborate further “because you can get it out of the newspapers.”34
They could. The reviewers were almost unanimous in their praise, from the New York Sun (“a complete success”), New York Weekly (“a steady fire of wit and drollery”), New York World (“Clemens has a future before him”), and New York Leader (“a man of originality in matter, manner, and face”) to Leslie’s Weekly (“the most laughable of lecturers since the decease of the lamented Artemus Ward”) and the New York Times (“seldom has so large an audience been so uniformly pleased”). No less effusive were the New York correspondents of the Sacramento Union (“a success”), Philadelphia Telegraph (“a successful lecture actor”), and Portland Oregonian (“quaint similes, ludicrous expressions, and intensely funny jokes”). The New York Herald asserted that the “mantle of the lamented Artemus Ward seems to have fallen on the shoulders of Mark Twain, and worthily does he wear it.” This claim clearly annoyed a columnist for the New York Clipper, who criticized Sam without mentioning him by name: “Lecturers, humorists, etc., some of whom were never heard of before, now impudently come forward, and endeavor to imitate the quaint manner and method of delivery of the dead and gone ‘showman,’ and claim to be his legitimate successor.”35
Perhaps the most important critic to extol the performance was Sam’s friend Ned House in the New York Tribune. Unfortunately, while House’s review was written the night of May 7 for publication the next morning, the courier sent to retrieve his copy went to the wrong hotel, so the notice was not printed in the paper until May 11. “No other lecturer” except Ward “has so thoroughly succeeded in exciting the mirthful curiosity, and compelling the laughter of his hearers,” House opined. He especially delighted in Sam’s unique style of delivery: “The frequent incongruities of the narration—evidently intentional—made it all the more diverting, and the artifice of its partial incoherence was so cleverly contrived as to intensify the amusement of the audience, while leaving them for the most part in ignorance of the means employed.” Sam, he noted, “lounges comfortably around his platform, seldom referring to notes,” and instead of “manifesting indifference to his own good jokes” in the manner of Ward “he appears to relish them as heartily as anybody.” In all, reviews of Sam’s lecture at Cooper Union were splashed across the country in newspapers as far west as San Francisco and Honolulu and spread his fame. Over a century before Frank Sinatra recorded “New York, New York,” Sam expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to the Alta California: “Make your mark in New York and you are a made man. With a New York endorsement you may travel the country over . . . but without it you are speculating on a dangerous issue.”36
Striking while the iron was hot, Sam repeated his address at the Brooklyn Athenaeum on May 10. In his comic advertising he claimed that it was “the best lecture he ever wrote” and added that it was also the only one he ever wrote. It was, he declared, “an infallible cure for all bronchial afflictions, sore eyes, fever and ague, and warts.” John Stanton (aka Corry O’Lanus) declared in the Brooklyn Eagle that Sam was “a man who will wear” and draw audiences “like a poultice.” Only a couple of critics expressed reservations. The Brooklyn Union compared him to “one of the staid old missionaries” he pilloried and complained that he depended too much on repetition. The critic no doubt referred to the tiresome Hank Monk–Horace Greeley anecdote with which Sam opened the lecture. Similarly, the Alta California complained that Sam “commenced with a story he had heard about the Overland Mail service, and didn’t want to hear any more, for he had read it in the Tribune, in Bayard Taylor’s letters, in the letters of Ross Browne, and in the letters of every other person who had ever crossed the mountains and knew that there were such persons as Horace Greeley and Hank Monk.” Sam’s decision to begin the lecture with the story was one of the few miscalculations he ever made on the platform. Fred W. Lorch dismissed the Hank Monk legend as recently as 1968 as “a silly and pointless yarn” that had long since “become boring and mouldy.” Nevertheless, Sam reprised his talk at Irving Hall in New York on May 15 in part to accommodate the people who had been denied seats at Cooper Union, and the New York Herald reiterated its kudos: the lecture contains “some interesting information concerning the islands, and the habits, manner of living, traits, &c., of the islanders, abounds in comic references, quaint, sotto voce conclusions and ludicrous asides.”37
By late May, Sam began to decline offers to tour in order to fulfill his writing commitments. “I have got a flattering lot of invitations to lecture before various and sundry literary societies,” he reported to his Alta readers, “but I have to forego the pleas
ure, and what is more, the profit, of complying, because literary contracts have got to be fulfilled.” He worked overtime to meet his obligations. He contributed a total of nineteen columns to the Alta California during the five months between his arrival in New York aboard the San Francisco and his departure on the Quaker City, twelve of them written between April 16 and June 6, four of them in the span of four days. In search of copy he frolicked to what Edith Wharton once called the “wild centrifugal dance” of New York. “There is something about this ceaseless buzz, and hurry, and bustle, that keeps a stranger in a state of unwholesome excitement all the time,” he acknowledged,
and makes him restless and uneasy, and saps from him all capacity to enjoy anything or take a strong interest in any matter whatever—a something which impels him to try to do everything, and yet permits him to do nothing. He is a boy in a candy-shop—could choose quickly if there were but one kind of candy, but is hopelessly undetermined in the midst of a hundred kinds. . . . He starts to a library; changes, and moves toward a theatre; changes again and thinks he will visit a friend; goes within a biscuit-toss of a picture-gallery, a billiard-room, a beer cellar and a circus, in succession, and finally drifts home and to bed, without having really done anything or gone anywhere. He don’t go anywhere because he can’t go everywhere, I suppose. This fidgety, feverish restlessness will drive a man crazy, after a while, or kill him. It kills a good many dozens now—by suicide. I have got to get out of it.
He toured the Bible House, the headquarters of the American Bible Society on Astor Place, in mid-May. It was “one of the chief among the fountain-heads of civilization in this great city” and “a wonderful institution, truly.”38
The building also housed the headquarters of the American Church Missionary Society and the Children’s American Church Missionary Society, where Sam’s friend Franklin S. Rising was employed. Sam called on the Reverend Dr. Heman Dyer, the secretary of the American Bible Society, specifically to tell him, Dyer recalled, “what an influence Mr. Rising had gained among the miners and other settlers in Nevada, and what an important work he was accomplishing.” Unfortunately, Rising was killed in a riverboat collision on the Ohio River the next year. Sam struck a somber note in a letter when he learned the sad news:
Here at dead of night I seem to hear the murmur of the far Pacific—& mingled with the music of the surf the melody of an old familiar hymn is sounding in my ear. It comes like a remembered voice—like the phantom of a form that is gone, a face that is no more. You know the hymn—it is “Oh refresh us.” It haunts me now because I am thinking of a steadfast friend whose death I have just learned through the papers—a friend whose face must always appear before me when I think of that hymn—the Rev. Franklin S. Rising.39
The minister had been only thirty-five, virtually the same age as Sam.
For nearly two months before embarking on the Quaker City, Sam enjoyed the opportunity to cruise the streets of New York. At midnight on May 15, he caught a glimpse of Jefferson Davis, recently released from federal prison in Virginia, as he registered at the New York Hotel. He was struck that, only two years after the end of the Civil War, the ex-president of the Confederate States of America was “as unheralded and unobserved as any country merchant”—an object lesson in fleeting fame. In consequence of his carousing, Sam also spent a night in jail in mid-May, probably during the interval between his talks in Brooklyn and Irving Hall. He had tried to break up a street fight and been swept up in the arrests when the police arrived on the scene. He rubbed elbows in the lockup with a black man “with his head badly battered and bleeding profusely,” a “bloated old hag” who had smuggled a flask of gin into the jail, “two flash girls of sixteen and seventeen,” and an “old seedy, scarred, bloated and bleeding bummer.” He was released after paying a fine the next morning. In late May, escorted by a police detective, he went slumming through the tenement district, a hive of “vice and rascality” that presages Offal Court in The Prince and the Pauper (1881). “I have been through the dens of poverty, crime and degradation that hide from the light of day in the Five Points and infinitely worse localities,” he reported, “but I, even I, can blush, and must decline to describe them.” If the Bible House was the epitome of modern civilization, the slums of lower Manhattan represented its sordid underbelly. Half the population of the city lived in fifteen thousand tenement buildings, he explained, “packed away” in “holes and dens and cellars” where “unimaginable dirt is the rule and cleanliness is a miracle.” The houses were breeding grounds for cholera, which he expected would soon “sweep those sinks of corruption like a conflagration.” He dawdled one day at Harry Hill’s Club House, “a little sawdusted den of a tenth rate rum-hole” on Houston Street near South Broadway famous for its women in décolleté. In describing his visit, he pretended the cheap saloon was an exclusive social club. In addition, he planned an excursion to “Mrs. Mills’ Mammarial Balm and Bust Elevator establishment” because “I might as well go there and get busted as anywhere else.” He also inspected some of the institutions that were designed to ameliorate the suffering of the poor and underprivileged, including the Midnight Mission for prostitutes, the New York Asylum for the Blind, and the Newsboys’ Lodging House or, as he called it, the “Boot-Black Brigade Chapel.”40
He also visited Henry Bergh’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Old Bowery Theater; walked past the old-money mansions on Fifth Avenue and the warship USS Dunderberg in New York Harbor; crossed by ferry to Brooklyn and Staten Island; lounged in Central Park and Greenwood Cemetery; and compared “the noble architecture of Old Trinity church” on lower Broadway with the more fashionable but less appealing St. George’s Episcopal Church uptown on Stuyvesant Square, which reminded him of a “cluster of painted shower baths.” He became a nascent art critic. He enjoyed roaming the Academy of Design “because there were but a few hundred paintings in it, and it did not surfeit me to go through the list.” He was not enamored of the Old Masters. On the contrary, he was glad they were “all dead, and I only wish they had died sooner,” a line he would recycle in The Innocents Abroad (1869). Still, he admired a pair of contemporary paintings he saw on his rambles through the galleries: Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, owned by the department store magnate A. T. Stewart, and Albert Bierstadt’s The Domes of the Yosemite, on display at the Studio Buildings on West Tenth Street. Sam saw Bierstadt’s landscape on June 1, the last day it was exhibited, and his comments about it suggest his increasing aversion to romanticism and sentimentality and his growing appreciation for realistic detail. The local critics had “abused it without stint when its exhibition began, a month ago,” Sam averred. “They ridiculed it so mercilessly that I thought it surely could not be worth going to see, and so I staid [sic] away. I went today, however, and I think it is very well worth going to see. It is very beautiful.” Eventually, however, Sam disparaged the hack writing he sent the Alta during these weeks: “I have just written myself clear out in letters to the Alta, & I think they are the stupidest letters that were ever written from New York,” he admitted to his mother and sister. In retrospect, he also regretted that he had failed to lobby in Washington, D.C., on behalf of Orion. “I could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him,” he explained. “But I am so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion & toward you all, & an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement & restless moving from place to place.”41
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