As Sam wrote in his cover letter to Reid, “The last paragraph of the article is bully. Silly as it is, nobody can read it without a startle, or without having to stop & think, before deciding whether the thing is possible or not.” Based on his experience in the West, Sam doubted the ability of juries, courts, and governments to execute either justice or criminals. “Cut, slosh around with pistols and dirk knives as you will,” as he had once complained during his tenure on the Morning Call, “and the worst that comes of it is a petty charge of carrying concealed weapons; and murder is but an aggravated assault and battery.” Two weeks after his letter appeared in the Tribune, however, Rulloff was put to death, the last public hanging in the state of New York. His freakishly oversized brain, still preserved at Cornell University, is one of the largest on record.22
Sam’s apparent defense of capital punishment in his second letter is echoed by his sardonic indictment of delays in the execution of justice in his third. That is, the two letters should be read as companion pieces that, while similarly sarcastic, nevertheless endorse the death penalty for capital crimes. After killing New York merchant Avery D. Putnam in April 1871, William Foster was convicted of first-degree murder. Foster’s lawyers were able to postpone their client’s hanging for several months, however, by insisting that, because he had been drunk when the crime occurred, he had lacked the will to kill. A judge granted Foster’s petition for a stay of execution on July 6, 1871, but Sam was unconvinced by the argument. “The lawyers’ opinions do not disturb me,” he allowed, “because I know that those same gentlemen could make as able an argument in favor of Judas Iscariot, which is a great deal for me to say, for I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.” In a drunken rage Foster had “beat [Putnam’s] brains out with a car-hook” and then cheated the gallows. “The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal, practical joke upon the world,” Sam concluded. The next day, the New York Tribune printed a letter to the editor that protested “the ghastly flippancy of Mark Twain’s letter.”23 In any case, Foster was summarily hanged two weeks later.
During the winter of his discontent in Buffalo, Sam was nevertheless able to hatch several new literary schemes, including a plan for a collection of sketches to be published by Bliss and a collaboration with John Henry Riley of the San Francisco Alta California on a book about diamond mining in South Africa along the lines of the aborted “Around the World” series with Darius Ford. “I have put my greedy hands on the best man in America for my purpose & shall start him to the diamond fields of South Africa within a fortnight, at my expense,” Sam explained to Bliss on November 28. Riley claimed to be “an expert in precious stones” after befriending a diamond hunter in California, and Sam planned to outsource the research, then write a book about Riley’s travels based on his journal notes and their daily conversations after his return “just as if I had been through it all myself, but will explain in the preface that this is done merely to give it life & reality.” In his November 1870 column for the Galaxy, which was in print by mid-October and probably written no later than mid-September, Sam had commended Riley to his readers even before broaching the subject of the book to him: “Riley has a ready wit, a quickness and aptness at selecting and applying quotations, and a countenance that is as solemn and as blank as the back side of a tombstone when he is delivering a particularly exasperating joke.” In the end Sam could not have cared less “whether there is a diamond in all Africa or not—the adventurous narrative & its wild, new fascination is what I want.” For weeks he expressed enthusiasm for the project, a type of sequel to The Innocents Abroad that did not require him to leave his wife and infant son. In finally pitching the plan to Riley, Sam described it in enticing terms:
I to pay your passage both to & from the South African diamond fields. . . . You to skirmish, prospect, work, travel, & take pretty minute notes, with hand & brain, for 3 months, I paying you a hundred dollars a month, for you to live on. . . . You to come to my house at the end of your labors, & live with me, at $50 a month & board, (I to furnish the cigars,) from 4 to 12 months, till I have pumped you dry—for, the purpose of your diary is to keep you (as well as me,) bright & inspire your tongue every morning when you take a seat in my study. You are to talk one or two hours to me every day, & tell your story—& the rest of the day & night you can do what you please with—& at 3 P. M., I shall always quit work too. With your diary by me I shall be able to write without mistakes after you are gone out walking or driving.
Sam assured Riley he would easily earn an annual income of ten thousand dollars for life in the lecture field “& all the idle time you want, to loaf & travel in or raise a family” and offered “to “coach” him, to “drill you completely (for it took me 3 or 4 years to learn the dead sure tricks of the platform, but I could teach them to you in 3 or 4 weeks).” Riley rose to the bait. Before the end of December, Sam predicted to Bliss that he would “get two 600-page books out of [Riley’s] experiences” and “if you make the first one go, we won’t have any trouble about who shall publish the second one. I mean to keep Riley traveling for me till I wear him out!” He arranged for Bliss to advance Riley fifteen hundred dollars to cover his expenses and pay a royalty of 8½ percent on the project. Bliss issued a contract for the volume(s)—that is, Sam was under obligation at the end of 1870 to supply the American Publishing Company with three manuscripts: a narrative about western travel, a collection of miscellaneous sketches, and the diamond mine book. Sam and Bliss agreed that “the big California & Plains book” would appear first, “then the Diamond book” in spring 1872, “& then the Sketch book the following fall.” Riley left for England on January 7, 1871, then from London on February 1 for South Africa. He returned from the diamond fields to Port Elizabeth in mid-June and to the United States in August, meanwhile submitting his notes to Sam. The project would die aborning, however, after Riley fell ill and died of blood poisoning in Philadelphia in September 1872.24 The third proposed work, Sketches New and Old, was postponed indefinitely.
In early December 1870 Sam also contracted to write a holiday pamphlet for Isaac E. Sheldon and Company, the publisher of the Galaxy, to jolt his cash flow. He traveled to New York the second week of the month to finalize the deal, registered at the Albemarle Hotel, and visited Dan Slote and Whitelaw Reid. He may also have met John Hay, Reid’s colleague on the staff of the New York Tribune, during this trip. Hay and Reid “were salaried members of the New York Tribune staff when I first knew them,” he recalled. In addition, he may have met Horace Greeley when he accidentally stumbled into the editor’s office, as he remembered in his autobiographical dictation. Sam was prevented by his contract with Bliss from writing a competing volume, but he evaded this stipulation by arranging for a cheap, short collection of sketches in paper and muslin covers that did not technically qualify as a book. The pamphlet, titled Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, was not issued until the following March, however. Written when Sam was in bad humor, this forty-six-page hack job earned little money for either author or publisher and reviewers almost unanimously panned it—for example, the Cincinnati Eclectic (“the material has frequently a funereal character”), the Boston Literary World (“feeble and characterless”), Godey’s Lady’s Book (“does not do justice to Mark Twain’s reputation”), the San Francisco Bulletin (“the jokes are stale, the puns bad, the conceits forced, the ‘points’ pointless”), the Chicago Tribune (“if capital punishment were the penalty of a poor burlesque, he would soon [suffer] it”), New York Herald (“an awful, terrible strain at burlesque, than which nothing can be more pathetic”), and the Philadelphia Telegraph (“the fun is rather far-fetched”). Even the newspapers that praised it paid it short shrift—for example, the Cincinnati Gazette (“very laughable”), the Galveston Tri-Weekly News (“very ludicrous and very funny”), and the Cleveland Herald (“several hearty laughs on each page”).25
To mol
lify Bliss, who was incensed by his crude dodge of the noncompete clause of his contract, Sam offered to redouble his efforts to complete “the big book on California, Nevada & the Plains.” On January 27 he declared his unrealistic (and unrealized) intention to “write night & day & send you 200 pages of MS. every week.” As the result of the premature birth and fragile health of his son, Sam had already missed the initial deadline for the book by a month. He hoped that if he finished the manuscript by April 15, however, Bliss might still issue the book by May 15 because “my popularity is booming, now, & we ought to take the very biggest advantage of it.”26 Within a week, however, another twist of fate again interrupted his work.
Sam left Buffalo on January 31 to consult with Bliss, Francis P. Church, and others about future projects. He registered for two nights at the Grand Hotel in New York before continuing to Washington, D.C., where he stayed at the Ebbitt House near the White House. On February 7 he was photographed with fellow journalists David Gray and George Alfred Townsend at Mathew Brady’s studio on Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House.
That evening he attended a dinner in his honor hosted by Congressman Samuel S. (Sunset) Cox of New York at Welcker’s Restaurant on Fifteenth Street adjacent to the Treasury building. According to Townsend, Welcker’s was at the time the most prestigious eatery in the nation’s capital and “all the expensive and remarkable dinners” in the city had been held there “for several years.” One of the guests, Donn Piatt, a crusading journalist, mugwump politician, and coeditor of the progressive weekly paper Capital, remembered that he first met Sam at this dinner. He remarked on his “bushy hair,” “keen gray eyes,” “hooked nose,” and “solemn countenance,” adding that he had been “told by those who know him well that he is a very kind hearted fellow.” During the dinner Sam was handed a telegram from Sue Crane notifying him that Livy was ill, whereupon he hurriedly left the restaurant for Union Station and a train back to Buffalo.27
Like Emma Nye, Livy had contracted typhoid fever. She nearly died in mid-February and was bedfast until the end of March. “Sometimes I have hope for my wife,—so I have at this moment,” he wrote Bliss in the midst of the ordeal, “but most of the time it seems to me impossible that she can get well. I cannot go into particulars—the subject is too dreadful.” She suffered from delirium and required opiates to sleep. “She is in her right mind this morning,” he hopefully reported to his mother and sister on February 17, “& has made hardly a single flighty remark.” She was attended around the clock and Sam was loath to predict “what the result will be. . . . We have had doctors & watchers & nurses in the house all the time for 8 months, & I am disgusted.” Even before Livy recovered, Sam decided that wholesale revisions of what he had completed of his manuscript were required. Beginning with “the first chapter I have got to alter the whole style of one of my characters”—no doubt the tenderfoot narrator—“& re-write him clear through to where I am now. It is no fool of a job I can tell you, but the book will be greatly bettered by it.” In fact, he admitted two weeks later, he had scarcely touched the manuscript since the start of the year. “In three whole months I have hardly written a page of MS,” he admitted to Bliss on March 17. “You do not know what it is to be in a state of absolute frenzy—desperation. I had rather die twice over than repeat the last six months of my life.”28
Yet another factor complicated Sam’s life at the time: an unfriendly competition with his former friend and mentor Bret Harte. Hubert H. Bancroft, Bliss’s West Coast distributor, had refused to supply Harte with a review copy of The Innocents Abroad and Harte refused to buy a copy of the book he had helped to edit “for the rare pleasure of reviewing it in the Overland.” He protested to Sam that “friendship even of a more romantic kind than ours could not ask more” from him. Sam considered this missive “the most daintily contemptuous & insulting letter you ever read.” Though Harte eventually lauded the book in the magazine, Sam expressed regret two months later that “Bret broke our long friendship . . . without any cause or provocation that I am aware of” and he blamed Bancroft for the rift: “Think of an agent refusing to give copies to the chief papers! He is an infernal fool.” Harte allegorized their estrangement in his story “The Iliad of Sandy Bar,” in the Overland for November 1870, by dramatizing the quarrel of two former mining partners, Matthew Scott (Harte) and Henry York (Clemens) in the Amity Claim. Their feud escalates until York finally leaves the goldfields, much as Sam had departed for New York in December 1866 and for Europe and the Holy Land in June 1867, “and for the first time in many years, distance and a new atmosphere isolated the old antagonists.” The two men are eventually reconciled—much as Harte hoped eventually to patch up his friendship with Sam.29
Unfortunately, Harte’s recent literary triumphs threatened to eclipse Sam’s reputation—to Sam’s consternation. Harte’s story “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” first published in the Overland for August 1868, was hailed by the Nation as “one of the best magazine articles that we have read in many months.” After Harte collected the tale in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1869), Sam glossed in his copy over a decade later that the title story was Harte’s “most finished work” and “nearly blemishless.” The Buffalo Express received exchange copies of the Overland and occasionally copied articles from it during Sam’s tenure with the paper. After the poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” (best known later under the title “The Heathen Chinee”) appeared in the Overland for September 1870, however, Harte leapfrogged over Sam as the most popular humorist in America. Within days of its publication the satirical tour de force was reprinted in dozens of newspapers and magazines across the country. Sam conceded that his rival was “the most celebrated man in America to-day,” with his name “on every single tongue from one end of the continent to the other,” and that the poem “did it for him.” In his autobiography, Sam remembered that the jingle “created an explosion of delight whose reverberation reached the last confines of Christendom.” Harte’s popularity was only enhanced by the publication of a volume of his collected poems in late 1870 in time for the Christmas season. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic began to compare the two writers, often to Sam’s disadvantage. The London Graphic, for example, averred that Sam lacked Harte’s comedic genius.30
Worse still, in December 1870, soon after the publication of “Plain Language from Truthful James” and at the height of Harte’s popularity, the Express printed a dramatic monologue titled “Three Aces: Jim Todd’s Episode in Social Euchre,” signed “Carl Byng,” in patent imitation of Harte’s poem. Not only was “Three Aces” widely copied, its authorship was often attributed to Sam and it was sometimes even reprinted with the signature “Mark Twain.” Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of Every Saturday, an influential Boston weekly, opined that “Mark Twain’s versified story of ‘Three Aces’ seems to be a feeble echo of Bret Harte.” Sam was understandably troubled by the allegation: “Every Saturday accuses me of writing a ‘feeble imitation’ of Bret Harte in the shape of a euchre rhyme about threes & a flush. A pretty grave charge.” He admitted that “it is hard to be accused of plagiarism,” especially to have been accused of plagiarizing Harte and doubly so because the allegation was demonstrably untrue. “Three Aces” was in fact written by an obscure humorist named Frank Manly Thorn who masqueraded under the pseudonyms Carl Byng and Hy Slocum. Sam wrote Aldrich to demand a public apology and a retraction of the accusation: “I did not write the rhymes referred to, nor have anything whatever to do with suggesting, inspiring, or producing them. . . . I am not in the imitation business.”31 But even after its publication in Every Saturday this letter failed to dampen the widespread speculation—which endured among scholars for nearly a century and a half—that Sam was the author of “Three Aces.”
Then there was the trouble that the publishing pirates, especially John Camden Hotten, were brewing for Sam in England. In the absence of international copyright, Hotten issued five slapdash editions of Sam’s writings i
n 1870–71: The Innocents Abroad (1870); The Jumping Frog and Other Humourous Sketches (1870); Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography (1871); and a pair of scissors-and-paste jobs, Screamers: A Gathering of Scraps of Humour, Delicious Bits, and Short Stories (1871) and Eye Openers: Good Things, Immensely Funny Sayings and Stories (1871). The latter two compilations were assembled from Sam’s columns in the Buffalo Express and Galaxy, supplemented by other unsigned material, and of course he received no payment for any of the books. While technically not illegal in the absence of international copyright, such pirating threatened Sam’s reputation even as it failed to put money in his purse. “In a future edition,” the London Spectator observed in its review of Screamers, “we trust Mark Twain will carefully weed out the vulgar papers, and the extravaganzas, and the no-sense as distinguished from the nonsense.” Hotten also perpetuated the myth that Sam was the author of the Carl Byng items in the Express by reprinting some of them in the collections. Sam replied in a letter to the editor of the Spectator:
The Life of Mark Twain Page 80