by Ron Powers
13
Code Duello
(1863–64)
Artemus Ward, foppish, merry, tubercular, doomed, hit town on December 18, 1863. He checked in to the International Hotel and immediately sought out the local enclave of maverick writers. In Virginia City, that was the office of the Territorial Enterprise, whose inmates welcomed Ward as one of their own. The former Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist had risen to transcontinental acclaim in print and on the lecture stage. His dreamy, off-center comic ramblings, punctuated with social barbs, had made him at once a regular among the louche artists who gathered in the cavernous Pfaff’s Beer Hall in Greenwich Village, and a favorite of that ultimate square, Lincoln, who read Ward’s comic sketches aloud to his cabinet. Artemus Ward was Sam’s first celebrity acquaintance, and Ward introduced him to the perspective of the urban bohemian artist. This perspective ratified some of the town-born Missourian’s most subversive instincts.
“Bohemians”—creative renegades who flourished at the edges of conventional culture—were a new subset of American society. Such undergrounds had been common in European capitals for centuries. The New World remained innocent of them until New York swelled into a metropolis in the 1830s, and attained the urban mass necessary to camouflage a maverick demimonde. Now, as an even more exotic city blossomed on the other side of the continent, many bohemians left Pfaff’s and made the cross-country pilgrimage to its foggy hills and bayside crannies. From the 1860s on, San Francisco and New York would constitute the poles of the American avant-garde, scandalizing and re-energizing the artistic “establishment.” Among the first writers to rise both in bohemia and the establishment was Mark Twain.
In truth, when it came to inventing American culture, the New York bohemians and the Boston Transcendentalists were working the same side of the street. For all their transgressive display, the bohemians were referencing the same classic European standards as Emerson and Holmes and Lowell—for instance, the Seven Arts that had stood since medieval times as the standard of higher learning.* Bohemians and Transcendentalists first converged in Walt Whitman, a regular at Pfaff’s by way of the Fulton ferry from Brooklyn. It was Whitman’s unrhymed, unmetered Leaves of Grass, in 1855, which first answered Emerson’s call for a new American voice. Whitman worshipped the Sage of Concord—“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil”—and cultivated his approval. Emerson responded with great praise—“I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” No such greetings issued from the Boston Brahmin James Russell Lowell, who once warned a friend: “Whitman is a rowdy, a New York tough, a loafer, a frequenter of low places, a friend of cab drivers!”1
The barnstorming Artemus Ward had arrived in San Francisco on November 8. He’d sashayed through the city like a skeletal Pan, accepting flagons of his trademark brandy-and-water from adoring strangers, dancing jigs in front of cheering crowds, and bowing to brass-band serenades, before convulsing audiences at Platt’s Hall and the Metropolitan Theater. Then he’d lectured his way on to Virginia City. Sam well knew Ward’s work. In November he’d announced the humorist’s visit via a pitch-perfect parody of Ward’s anarchic spelling style, in the Enterprise:
We understand that Artemus Ward contemplates visiting this region to deliver his lectures, and perhaps make some additions to his big “sho.” In his last letter to us he appeared particularly anxious to “sekure a kupple ov horned todes; alsowe, a lizard which it may be persessed of 2 tales, or any komical snaix…I was roomination on gittin a bust of mark Twain, but I’ve kwit kontemplatin the work. They tell me down heer to the Ba that the busts air so kommon it wood ony bee an waist of wax too git un kounterfit presentiment.”2
Sam and the boys painted the town with Ward, “collecting” dance halls, hurdy-gurdy parlors, and the Chinese district. They escorted him into the depths of a silver mine, and Ward had so much fun that he extended his scheduled stopover on the mountainside to eleven days, making side trips to lecture in nearby towns. Like so many others, Ward found himself drawn to the small, drawling Missourian with his whimsical asides and his implicit invitation to throw off adult decorum. He and Sam became riotously good chums, and Ward gave Sam a glimpse of what his future could hold.
In Ward, Sam Clemens saw a figure very like himself, only much richer and more famous. (It didn’t escape him that Ward’s projected earnings from this tour were $30,000.) He seems to have immediately grasped the significance of Ward: here was a fellow of Sam’s age, playing the same skills that Sam was retailing around the Nevada hills, but on a national and even international level, and getting rich doing it. Sam welded himself to Ward’s elbow and scrutinized him intently throughout the visit.
Their similarities were extensive. Only two years older than Sam, Ward had been born in a small town (Waterville, Maine); like Sam, he lost his father in 1847 and had learned typesetting to support himself; like Sam, he gravitated toward newspapering and eventually wrote under an assumed identity that soon supplanted his given name, Charles Farrar Browne. Like Sam, he wrote fondly of his boyhood years, played practical jokes, and loved the circus and the minstrel show. He was youthful in affect, like his new admirer, but genial where Sam was impulsive and combustible; a whimsical wit, yet capable of genuine moral indignation; a drinker subject to unpredictable mood swings. The two may even have discovered that as boys, they had landed sketches in the same humor magazine, the Boston-based Carpet-Bag.
“Artemus Ward” was Browne’s concoction of a rustic sojourner, unschooled but shrewd, whose gentle whimsy and phonetic misspellings* sheathed a morally grounded common sense—racial bigotry excepted. Ward’s humor was similar to Mark Twain’s, but less stinging (except in his contempt for Negroes), and more limited than Mark Twain’s mature work. It mainly exploited the fascination that the young nation felt for the eccentricities of its own speaking voice: its vernacular, quaint idioms, and utility for pun making, as when Ward wrote on the topic of “women’s rites.”
Their main difference, other than talent, lay in notoriety. Mark Twain enjoyed a following around Nevada and California—a visiting bohemian from New York, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, had recently hailed him as “that Irresistible Washoe Giant”3—but Artemus Ward had made it big in the East. After a quick rise at the Plain Dealer, he moved on to edit Vanity Fair in New York; and a year later, in 1861, he launched his lecture career. When he arrived in Washoe he was the premier humorist in America. Whether Ward could have equaled Mark Twain in the American memory will never be known: in March 1867 he died of his tuberculosis while on tour in England. Like Oscar Wilde decades later, he maintained his comic stance until the very end. His biographer reports that as Ward lay dying, his friend the playwright T. W. Robertson chided him for refusing his medicine: “Take it, my dear fellow, just for my sake. You know I would do anything for you.” “Would you?” asked Artemus. “I would indeed.” “Then you take it.”4
Artemus Ward’s two lectures at Maguire’s Opera House in Virginia City (on December 22 and 25) were a great success. The miners and their women erupted in knee-pounding laughter again and again as the thin young man peered out across the footlights at them in a perplexed sort of way, and murmured, between seemingly mind-drifting pauses, such nonsense observations as, “I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn’t a tooth in his head—” (pause) “—and yet that man could beat a drum better than any man I ever saw.”5
Well—it is possible that you had to have been there. But that was pretty much the point. Artemus Ward’s manner of telling was nearly as important as the content. This was cutting-edge stuff in mid-19th-century America. The country teemed with traveling lecturers, several of them working in the “humorous” vein. But nobody before Ward had dared rely so heavily on theatrical devices to explode the merely amusing into the hilarious. Ward’s onstage illusion of continually drifting off the subject or forgetting his train of thought was his performance equivalent of those “quaint” misspellings in his newspaper pieces: in each, he played the lovable, naïve �
��ordinary feller” whose deep wisdom radiated through the surface miscues.
At Maguire’s, Ward performed his reliable “Babes in the Wood” lecture, a subtle lampoon of the lecturing form itself, particularly the “uplifting” or “informative” genre (the babes are never mentioned outside the title). He poked somber-faced fun at such deities as Emerson, whom he’d once slagged in a Plain Dealer review as a “perpendicular coffin.” It was the antilecture: maudlin and sentimental on its surface, but designed to slip a banana peel in the path of the pompous half of that industry. Sam Clemens sat in the audience, roaring at Ward’s every move and pause. He was absorbing what he saw and heard with the same voraciousness that he had trained on Uncle Dan’l in Florida, Missouri.
Ward’s rather tepid audacity must have spoken to Sam’s own, far less restrained instincts for hoaxing, mocking, and baiting. But it was the humorist’s stage devices, in particular that tantalizing, tension-building illusion of a slow drift away from his main point, which activated Sam’s powerful mimetic engines. His admiration for Ward was evident in the review he wrote for the Enterprise: “The man who is capable of listening to the Babes in the Wood from beginning to end without laughing either inwardly or outwardly must have done murder, or at least meditated it, at some time during his life.”6 In his letters over the following weeks, he virtually caressed his new friend’s pen name with each reference. “When Artemus Ward gets to St. Louis, invite him up to the house & treat him well,” he instructed Jane, “for behold, he is a good fellow.” (Ward fell ill and never made it there.) Some lines later, Sam casually dropped the news, “At his suggestion, I mean to write semi-occasionally for the New York Sunday Mercury. Of his own accord he wrote a flattering letter about ‘Mark Twain’ to the editors of this paper; & besides, I have promised to go with him to Europe in May or June…”7
A few paragraphs after that, Sam mentioned Ludlow’s recent praise of him and strutted: “Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority, I ought to appreciate them myself—leave sage-brush obscurity, & journey to New York with him, as he wanted me to do.” Then he admitted, “I preferred not to burst upon the New York public too suddenly & brilliantly, & so I concluded to remain here.”8
The best proof of Sam’s esteem lay in the competition he engaged in with the visiting eminence. In the late-night drinking bouts around Virginia City, when the others seemed a little tongue-tied, Sam tried to match Ward mot for mot. At first, he was overmatched. Ward had his shtick finely honed after more than two years on the road, capped by several performances in New York City. He sandbagged the young Clemens at a dinner given him by leading citizens at the International Hotel, after having alerted the rest of the Enterprise entourage about the setup. When the plates had been cleared away, Ward turned to Sam, who was seated next to him, and loudly commenced a conversation on “genius.” Dan De Quille recorded it.
Mr. Clemens,…genuis appears to me to be a sort of luminous quality of the mind, allied to a warm and inflammable constitution, which is inherent in the man, and supersedes in him whatever constitutional tendency he may possess, to permit himself to be influenced by such things as do not coincide with his preconceived notions and established convictions to the contrary. Does not my definition hit the nail squarely on the head, Mr. Clemens?9
It was classic Artemus Ward doubletalk, and Sam never saw it coming. He stammered that he hadn’t quite grasped Ward’s meaning. The table grew quiet. Ward looked incredulous and repeated the thought, tossing in something about ideas darting like meteors across the intellectual firmament. Again, Sam had to admit confusion. Ward began again. Again Sam pleaded no contest, this time invoking illness: he’d been taken drunk. As laughter arose around the table, it dawned on Sam that he’d been had. He reacted to it as he reacted to all practical jokes played on him: by falling into a snit. “Mark was in no amiable mood the remainder of the evening,” De Quille recorded. “He said such a thing ‘might be thought by some to be smart,’ but he failed to see ‘where the fun came in.’ ”10 By Christmas Eve, Sam was ready for Ward. Joe Goodman and the others witnessed their crowning duel at Chaumond’s, after an oyster dinner; a marathon test of wit and liquor-holding endurance that rolled on through the Yuletide night:
…Then begun a flow and reflow of humor it would be presumptuous in me to attempt to even outline. It was on that occasion that Mark Twain fully demonstrated his right to rank above the world’s acknowledged foremost humorist…Course succeeded course and wine followed wine, until day began to break…The first streaks of dawn were brightening the east when we went into the streets.11
At that point, as Goodman remembered, Ward decided that he wanted to walk in the skies, but settled for walking on the roofs. Sam followed him to the top of a house as the others watched, and the two began a lurching, plastered scramble. A watchman materialized, drew his pistol, and aimed. Before he could fire, someone in Goodman’s group shouted that the figures were Artemus Ward and Mark Twain. The watchman had nearly shot them for burglars.*
When Ward bade farewell to Washoe and headed east on December 29, Sam had good reason to feel that his own future lay in the young humorist’s wake. Ward wrote to him from Austin, Nevada, on January 1, addressing him as “My Dearest Love,” and rehashing some of the wild times in Virginia:
Why did you not go with me and save me that night?—I mean the night I left you drunk at that dinner party. I went and got drunker, beating, I may say, Alexander the Great, in his most drinkinist days…I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence…12
The letter reaffirmed Ward’s pledge to recommend Sam to the editors at the Mercury. It thanked Clemens for his “notice,” which “did me much good here, as it doubtlessly will elsewhere.” It joked about his making advances on Ward’s mother and aunt. And it interestingly asked: “Why would you make a good artillery man? Because you are familiar with Gonorrhea (gun-nery).”13
Sam had already sent off his first submission to the New York weekly. “Doings in Nevada” was an adroit sketch telling Easterners about the ins and outs of constitution writing for a prospective new state. It arrived ahead of Ward’s recommendation, but the Mercury ran it in the February 7 edition. Two weeks later, Sam scored again, with “Those Blasted Children,” which appeared on February 21 above an introduction of the writer as “our unique correspondent, Mark Twain.” The piece skewered the raucous children who had distracted the correspondent at the Lick House, and offered some remedies that foreshadowed Ring Lardner and W. C. Fields: “When you come to fits, take no chances on fits. If the child has them bad, soak it in a barrel of rain-water over night, or a good article of vinegar. If this does not put an end to its troubles, soak it a week.”14
Back in Carson City to cover the Union party convention and the legislative session, Mark Twain got himself reelected governor of the satirical Third House, and gave a humorous speech that struck some listeners as a little too obviously influenced by Artemus Ward. Coming as it did only weeks after little Jennie’s death, Mark Twain’s hilarity might also have struck the grieving Orion and Mollie as inexplicably jaunty. But when he wrote to the folks back in St. Louis about the talk, Sam’s thoughts were focused on how he stacked up with his new friend and rival. “I can’t send you my Message,” he declared to his sister Pamela. “It was written to be spoken—to write it so that it would read well, would be too much trouble.” He added: “I got my satisfaction out of it, though—a larger audience than Artemus had.”15
A SECOND whirlwind blew through Virginia City in February. Adah Isaacs Menken presented Sam with an entirely different prototype of the bohemian subculture: what a later, jazzier age would call the Red-Hot Mama. The “Menken” was a wildly eclectic actress and poet, the spiritual godmother of Marilyn Monroe, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Madonna. She was born in 1835 to a French Creole mother and a free Negro father. She converted to Judaism after her early marriage to a nice musician from Cincinnati named Alexander Isaac Menke
n, whom she soon left far behind. Brilliant and drop-dead gorgeous, the Menken became an international sexual icon, at once ridiculed, feared, and desired by her mostly male followers. She shocked people by smoking cigarettes while standing up; she cultivated painting skills, wrote free verse; married several men; and was associated with dozens of others in America and Europe, including Whitman, Charles Dickens, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Alexandre Dumas, père, until Alexandre fils started muttering about a horsewhip.
Nothing seemed too contemptuous of public decorum for her—probably not even folding her shawl carefully upon entering a room. She made her lasting cultural mark as “Mazeppa,” the hero of the Lord Byron poem, an act that called for her to traverse the stage on a galloping horse while clad in a skintight body stocking. (A circus fat woman known as Big Bertha attempted an homage to Menken by tugging on pink tights and strapping herself to the back of a donkey, but her act foundered when the struggling animal stumbled with his cargo into the orchestra pit.16) By the time of her death at thirty-three, Menken had influenced the nascent concept of celebrityhood in America and Europe, and in Mark Twain’s imagination.
Sam had caught the Menken’s act at Maguire’s theater in San Francisco, the city where she had transplanted herself and her entourage, which included her soon-to-be-discarded latest husband, the humorist Orpheus C. Kerr. Sam saw her perform both in Mazeppa and in The French Spy, by John Thomas Haines, and affected disdain for what he saw. He may have been invested in his own countercultural spree in Washoe, but like most Victorian men, he was unable to grant the same license to a woman. Mark Twain eviscerated the actress in a dismissive, thousand-word Enterprise piece: