Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Ma, you are slinging insinuations at me again. Such as “where did I get the money?” and “the company I kept” in San Francisco. Why I sold “wildcat” mining ground that was given me, & my credit was always good at the bank…I never gamble, in any shape or manner, and never drink anything stronger than claret or lager beer, which conduct is regarded as miraculously temperate in this country…14

  Still, even in this hat-in-hand posture, the prodigal son could not restrain himself from bragging in his last paragraph that “it costs me $100 a month to live.”15

  ANOTHER ASPECT of Sam’s deportment in San Francisco with Clement Rice, and indeed, of his subsequent intense friendships with other men, has raised questions undreamed of in Jane Clemens’s philosophy. This is the question of whether Sam experimented in homosexual behavior.

  The question wasn’t raised for nearly a century and a half, until it appeared in (and virtually consumed all critical reaction to) a Mark Twain biography published in 1997. This work, which was otherwise graced with praiseworthy research and interpretation, essentially “outed” Sam on the basis of evidence that, while provocative in parts, remains speculative and circumstantial.16 The author catalogued every suggestive kernel he could uncover to make his case, which he never framed more explicitly than the boundaries of innuendo permitted. He drew on the fact that Sam and Rice lived together in Virginia City, and that Sam later shared a room, perhaps even a bed, with Dan De Quille; he mused over the “romantic” salutation (“My dearest Love,”) in a letter from the unabashedly homosexual humorist Artemus Ward; he ruminated on the long history of San Francisco’s attraction for homosexual men. He pounced upon a remark by Sam in a letter to Jane from San Francisco: “We fag ourselves out completely every day…”17

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, “faggot,” as an allusion to the lighted brand used to torture heretics and homosexuals in the Middle Ages, does not enter American usage as a homosexual slur until 1914, and the shortened form “fag” doesn’t show up until 1923. Before then, “fagged” was slang for “fatigued,” and “faggot,” interestingly, was a term of contempt for women.

  European and American men in the 1800s (well, maybe not the British) hugged, linked arms with, leaned against, expressed endearments to, and paired off platonically with one another far more frequently than they did with women, whom they could scarcely touch without inviting a collective nervous breakdown in the vicinity. Surviving letters, photographs,18 etiquette books, and descriptive narratives make this unimpeachably clear. Unmarried men, especially when away from home, often shared beds. Homosexual attraction was undoubtedly a component in some of these activities, but it could hardly be said to define all of them. Sam Clemens, who from early boyhood went into head-standing paroxysms over pretty girls, who sustained a lifelong dream-affair with Laura Wright, who returned from the West to marry and preside over a close-knit family, and who carried on at least two lifelong, intense male friendships without a hint of erotic complication, was simply a creature of his century. As perhaps, even, was Abraham Lincoln.

  Of course, the question remains: as a virile bachelor in his mid-twenties, how and where was Sam attending to his libidinous drives?

  Here, too, the trail leads virtually nowhere. Sam Clemens was a joyous connoisseur of bawdy jokes and the originator of at least one comic-pornographic masterpiece (“1601”), and his letters to a few trusted friends sometimes revealed his zest for off-color punning. But apart from the passage in a letter to Mollie Clemens that confessed to bedding the household help (unfortunately, not a betrayal of one’s honor in Victorian America), and a few references to young women who had turned his head, Sam kept mum about his actual sex life, a custom he shared with nearly every other writer of his century, and one that has since sadly slipped into desuetude.

  SAM AND Rice returned from their San Francisco holiday on July 2, 1863. In Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, it was the day of the Round Tops, Devil’s Den, and Cemetery Hill. In Mississippi, Major General Grant was two days from seizing the shattered city of Vicksburg, restoring Sam’s “national banner” to federal control, splitting the Confederacy, and leading to Grant’s promotion to general-in-chief of the Union armies. In Virginia City, the only explosions were from mine-shaft dynamite: the boomtown was booming as never before. A silver vein below A Street had been struck, and the mine’s stock had rocketed to $6,000 a foot. The company, Gould & Curry, started work on a mill two miles outside town that cost $750,000. The Ophir hit a vein worth $2,500 per ton. More prospectors and mining men converged on the mountainside, followed by more fortune seekers. New hotels, rooming houses, and stores sprung up. Strangers gunned down strangers on drunken impulse. General hysteria reigned.

  Mark Twain’s first dispatch to the Morning Call described Virginia’s new “turmoil and confusion,”19 its brass-band parades in preparation for the Fourth of July celebration, and the midnight shooting of a saloon proprietor. He wound it up with characteristic whimsy: “There was a report about town, last night, that Charles Strong, Esq., Superintendent of the Gould & Curry, had been shot and very effectually killed. I asked him about it at church this morning. He said there was no truth to the rumor…”20

  Town life took on a new intensity. In July the Enterprise moved into a three-story building and began printing its expanded editions on a steam press. On July 25, a fire raced through the western sections of the tinderbox town. Among the buildings it consumed were the White House and the boardinghouse on B street, where Sam lived with Rice and William Gillespie. Sam was inside when the house went up in flames. Blocked from the doorway by smoke, he dived through a window. He lost most of his belongings, including his San Francisco suits. As elsewhere in the country in those days, rival fire companies battled one another as well as the blaze. Afterward, two companies negotiated the territorial issue at Taylor and C streets; one man was killed and fifteen were injured.

  Sam moved into the new Collins House, at whose grand opening two weeks earlier he had given what the rival Evening Bulletin had described as “[p]erhaps the speech of the evening…Those not familiar with this young man, do not know the depths of grave tenderness in his nature. He almost brought the house to tears by his touching simple pathos.”21

  Violence hit new levels. Men hit, stabbed, slashed, shot one another daily, and nightly. The more refined classes, repelled by this collapse of decorum, revived the Southern tradition of dueling. On August 2, Mark Twain wrote about a thwarted duel that would have pitted Joseph Goodman against Thomas Fitch, the editor of the rival Union. The two had been sparring in print about factional Union party politics. Policemen broke up the confrontation before any shooting, but two months later the editors snuck out and met again. Goodman drilled Fitch below the right knee, crippling him.

  On August 4, laid up in bed with a cold, Sam was torpedoed in print by his “nemesis” the Unreliable. Clement Rice had offered to take over Sam’s “Local” column while he recovered. Appropriating Mark Twain’s byline, Rice wrote a fake “Apologetic” to several town citizens whom Sam had maligned. Sam furiously annulled the apologies the next day, noting that the Unreliable was “a reptile endowed with no more intellect,…no more Christian principle” than a “jackass rabbit of the Sierras.” As if this were not sufficient conflict, Sam received a letter from Orion lecturing him about his “dissipation,” and another from Jane, admonishing him that if he worked hard, he might get a real job someday. This hurt. “Ma, you have given my vanity a deadly thrust,” he raged in reply.

  Behold, I am prone to boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor, of any man on the Pacific coast, & you gravely come forward & tell me “if I work hard & attend closely to my business, I may aspire to a place on a big San Francisco daily, some day.”…Why, blast it, I was under the impression that I could get such a situation as that any time I asked for it. But I don’t want it. No paper in the United States can afford to pay me what my place on the “Enterprise” is worth…Everybody knows me
, & I feel like a prince wherever I go…And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory.22

  “Conceited” was hardly the word for it. He was flying now; writing and behaving as though accountability were a joke; he was invulnerable; the objective world was just an extension of the dreamworld within. He blurted into print whatever was on his mind, heedless of its effect on others, his reputation, his safety. His mind played dizzying tricks with words; his antic humor brightened some of them, and his spleen coated others with poison. It was as if he’d been gripped by a kind of typographical Tourette’s syndrome. Perhaps he was caught up in the surreality that had enveloped Virginia City, the sense that anything could happen, that limits had been abolished, that the sloping ground underfoot was the Big Rock Candy Mountain. It was a dangerous assumption, and real consequences were on their way. In the meantime, he was granted a “furlough” to cure his cold: two weeks at Lake Bigler. Without Goodman’s permission, he lounged for another week at a Washoe County hotel with the interesting name, the Steamboat Springs, and wrote a puff piece about it that probably covered his room and board. Bigler was coming to be known by the Indian name of “Tahoe,” given that its namesake John Bigler was a pro-Southern man in Union country. No one had asked Mark Twain’s leave to make this change. He handed down his judgment in the Enterprise: “I yearn for the scalp of the soft-shell crab—be he injun or white man—who conceived of that spoony, slobbering, summer-complaint of a name. Why, if I had a grudge against a half-price nigger, I wouldn’t be mean enough to call him by such an epithet as that…”23

  Dan De Quille returned from his Iowa hegira on September 5, and resumed his “Local” column. Sam, who’d been back at his post for less than two weeks, seized the opportunity to hightail it back to San Francisco for yet another month at the Lick House. “During his absence the moral tone of this column will be much improved,” De Quille kindly remarked in his column.24 While he was in town, the Golden Era reprinted another of his madcap genre-burlesques, a form of mimicry tailored for his extraordinary ear. He’d written this one, titled “All About the Fashions,” from the Lick House during his spring visit, and probably first published it in the Enterprise. The headline above the title proclaimed, “Mark Twain—More of Him.” The send-up of overwrought fashion-writing prose anticipates such 20th-century parodists as S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, and Steve Martin, with perhaps a touch of Lewis Carroll.

  Mrs. B. was arrayed in a superb speckled foulard, with the stripes running fore and aft, and with collets and camails to match; also, a rotonde of Chantilly lace, embroidered with blue and yellow dogs, and birds and things, done in cruel…

  Mrs. J. B. W. wore a heavy rat-colored brocade silk, studded with large silver stars…a bournous of black Honiton lace, scalloped, and embroidered in violent colors with a battle piece representing the taking of Holland by the Dutch…upon her bosom reposed a gorgeous bouquet of real sage brush, imported from Washoe…

  Miss A. H. wore a splendid Lucia de Lammermoon…also, a cream-colored mantilla-shaped pardessus, with a deep gore in the neck…garnished with ruches, and radishes and things. Her coiffure was a simple wreath of sardines on a string. She was lovely to a fault.25

  In that same September 27 issue, the editors of Golden Era—in keeping with the too-much-

  ain’t-enough temper of the times—ran a similar sketch by Mark Twain titled “The Lick House Ball.” This second send-up of an actual social event at the hotel’s famous grand ballroom, attended by the new California governor-elect among others, took the parody even further. “[T]he ball was a grand success,” Mark Twain reported. “The army was present and also the navy.” As for the fashions, “Mrs. Wm. M. S. wore a gorgeous dress of silk bias…set off with bagnettes, bayonets, clarinets, and one thing or other—beautiful.” As for Miss B., she showed up in “an elegant goffered flounce…with a frontispiece formed of a single magnificent cauliflower imbedded in mashed potatoes. Thus attired Miss B. looked good enough to eat.”26 Even the chambermaid inspired imagery; she reminded Mark Twain of U.S. Grant, marching to the center of the room with her broom and slop bucket.

  But after just one month in town, Sam’s hubris took a terrible jolt. The high-flying prankster finally reached too far. The offending piece was titled, “A Bloody Massacre near Carson.” It ranks as one of the most graphically repellent notions ever to flow from Mark Twain’s pen. It described in blood-soaked, photorealistic detail the murderous rampage of one Philip Hopkins, of Ormsby County, against his family that took the lives of seven of his nine children, his wife, and, ultimately, himself. The piece—reprinted in newspapers from Sacramento to San Francisco—opened with an account, taken from “Abram Curry,” of Hopkins’s late-night dash into Carson on horseback, “with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping.” Hopkins died on the spot. The scalp he carried was that of his wife. The sheriff and a group of citizens hurried to the Hopkins house,

  where a ghastly scene met their gaze. The scalpless corpse of Mrs. Hopkins lay across the threshold, with her head split open and her right hand almost severed from the wrist…In one of the bedrooms six of the children were found, one in bed and the others scattered about the floor. They were all dead. Their brains had evidently been dashed out with a club…The children must have struggled hard for their lives…27

  Two of Hopkins’s daughters lay in the kitchen, “bruised and insensible, but it is thought their recovery is possible.” The eldest daughter was found in the garret, “frightfully mutilated, and the knife with which her wounds had been inflicted still sticking in her side.”28 The Hopkins family did not exist, and the piece was a hoax. The public’s horrified revulsion soon turned to anger.

  Mark Twain had written it (unsigned) with the aim of exposing what he called the “dividend-cooking system” of certain incorporated companies in Nevada and California—a practice of overvaluing a stock and selling it before the buyers realized they had been tricked. In the piece, “Hopkins” was revealed to have been an affable and polite man until he started to lose his life savings in various crooked schemes: “It is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad and resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family.”29

  Most readers seem never to have made it that far down in the story. The details of the “murders” were too much to stomach. Some of the public’s anguish must have reached the Enterprise offices the day the piece appeared, October 28, because the next day’s editions carried a brief notice over Mark Twain’s byline, titled,

  I TAKE IT ALL BACK

  He tried to laugh off the furor. Didn’t people notice the giveaway clues?—who did not know that the “great pine forest” mentioned in the piece was nonexistent? Or that Empire City and Dutch Nicks (also alluded to) were one and the same town? Anyway, this wasn’t just about kidding around. “It was necessary to publish the story,” Mark Twain insisted, “in order to get the fact into the San Francisco papers that the Spring Valley Water company was ‘cooking’ dividends by borrowing money to declare them on for its stockholders. The only way you can get a fact into a San Francisco journal is to smuggle it in through some great tragedy.”30 That made matters worse. When people found out that their sensibilities had been violated on false premises, outrage spread. Several papers denounced Mark Twain. It didn’t help that in naming the Spring Valley Water Company, he had exaggerated its financial plight, or that his accusations against the San Francisco press were not wholly accurate.

  Mark Twain had tapped real-life events for his grisly lead, as he would so often in his fiction. There had been an ax-murder spree in the region about five months earlier, and Twain borrowed details from it for his piece. But the image of the killer brandishing a scalp was his invention, and it may have been drawn from deep personal wells. Indian-fighting frontiersmen ran through the maternal side of Sam Clemens’s ancestry; massacres by marauding Indians in old Kentucky formed much of the Lampton family f
olklore; and Jane, with her storytelling flair, passed several of these bloody tales along to Sammy.

  POLITICS BEGAN to absorb both Sam’s and Orion’s lives. In October 1863, Nevada called a convention in Carson City to draw up a constitution, as a move toward statehood. Mark Twain was the reigning reportorial star despite his recent “Massacre” misstep. Once again he also starred in the newsmens’ off-hours cavorting, getting himself elected governor of the mock legislative body, the Third House (a play on “third estate”). He returned to Carson in January to report on the Union party’s political convention that produced a slate of candidates for the territory’s anticipated first election as a state.

  Orion was nominated by acclamation for secretary of state—his reward for skillfully negotiating a settlement to the California-Nevada border crisis. It seemed to be the harbinger of a career in public service. In the January 19 election, he was victorious. Once again Mollie Clemens presided over fabulous parties, Sam delighting the guests with his dance steps and wit. Jennie, nearly eight now, a bright and religious child, marveled at it all from the sidelines. A golden future seemed at hand. In fact, Orion’s and Mollie’s days of power, prominence, and joy had reached an end. The constitution that had been drafted before the election was ruled null and void because of technical irregularities. Voided along with it was the January 19 election. Then, on February 1, Jennie Clemens died of a disease believed to be meningitis. The loss put out whatever fire remained in Orion. He and Mollie struggled along in Nevada for two more years, and then headed back east, effectively into oblivion.

  Sam’s fortunes were accelerating in the opposite direction. In November 1863, between the two conventions at Carson City, a literary eminence from the East visited Virginia City, and struck up a riotous friendship with Mark Twain. The encounter between Sam and Charles Farrar Browne, known to the world as Artemus Ward, pointed Mark Twain toward national recognition, while at the same time nearly destroying him in the flames of his inner furies and despair.