Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  They said she was dressed from head to foot in flesh-colored “tights,” but I had no opera-glass, and I couldn’t see it, to use the language of the inelegant rabble. She appeared to me to have but one garment on—a thin tight white linen one, of unimportant dimensions; I forget the name of the article, but it is indispensable to infants of tender age…In the first act, she rushes on the stage, and goes cavorting around after “Olinska”; she bends herself back like a bow; she pitches headforemost at the atmosphere like a battering-ram…she carries on like a lunatic from the beginning of the act to the end of it.17

  As to Menken’s signature horseback ride as Mazeppa, Mark Twain wrote:

  They strap Mazeppa on [the horse’s] back, fore and aft, and face uppermost, and the horse goes cantering up-stairs over the painted mountains…with the wretched victim he bears unconsciously digging her heels into his hams…to make him go faster…The fierce old circus horse carries his prisoner around through the back part of the theatre, behind the scenery…he makes his way at last to his dear old home in Tartary down by the footlights, and beholds once more, O, gods! the familiar faces of the fiddlers in the orchestra.18

  Yet when Menken brought her act to Virginia City on February 27, she sought out Sam for a social get-together. (She apparently sought out a local horse trainer for more intimate purposes, which scarcely could have humored the now-humorless humorist Kerr.) She invited Sam and Dan De Quille to dine with her and a woman friend (Ada Clare) in her hotel room. The evening was less soirée than sorry. De Quille recalled that a certain tension prevailed after Menken barred Orpheus Kerr from the room. Kerr’s visit really was not going well. Sam recoiled from the nineteen-odd dogs that the Menken kept in her room, his distaste increasing as the beasts got hammered on the brandy-laced sugar cubes that the diva kept tossing them. The nadir was reached when Sam, intending to kick one of the howling dogs into silence, instead nailed the hostess’s “pet corn,” causing her, in De Quille’s telling, “to bound from her seat, throw herself on a lounge and roll and roar in agony.”19 Sam excused himself shortly afterward, claiming a previous engagement. The friendship did not flourish, although Menken later recalled that she’d had a great time in Virginia City.

  MARK TWAIN was a newly anointed “Washoe Giant,” praised by Ward and Fitz Hugh Ludlow, sought out by the Menken. His work graced the pages of the Eastern papers. He was unrestrained and restless—a dangerous combination for him. He would find his mischief soon enough, and the consequences would threaten his life, mortify his brother and sister-in-law, and lead to self-exile from Nevada Territory itself. So far, Sam had downplayed his Southernness in the pro-Union territory. In fact, he’d done his best to blot out the cataclysm back east. But war passion surrounded him now. In the early months of 1864, the war washed up at his feet, bringing old guilts and terrors on its tide.

  One of the most respected and effective charity resources for Union soldiers during the war was the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Started in April 1861 as a volunteer movement of churchwomen and ladies’ aid societies throughout New York, the commission soon obtained sanction from the federal government. Frederick Law Olmsted was a board member, and Walt Whitman was among its volunteer nurses. The Sanitary Commission funneled canned food, blankets, clothing, medical supplies, and books from cities and towns to the front lines, and strove to provide surgeons and nurses for battlefield casualties. In 1881, the commission evolved into the American Red Cross.

  The aid effort required lots of money—the commission ended up taking more than $7 million into its treasury, in addition to goods valued at more than $15 million—but by 1862 it was in danger of collapse. It was saved by a nationwide series of Sanitary Fairs that generated enough money and goods to sustain its work through the end of the war. Much of that new support came from the Pacific Coast.

  In February 1864, some Union sympathizers in the divided city of St. Louis planned a money-raising Sanitary Fair in the spring. Among its backers was the soon-to-be general of Abraham Lincoln’s army, Ulysses S. Grant. Pamela Moffett sent fund-raising circulars for the event to Sam in Virginia City, and he wrote some pieces in the Enterprise and the San Francisco Morning Call boosting the efforts. A circle of prominent women in Carson City, among them Mollie Clemens, organized a charity dress ball for May 5, intending to send the proceeds to the St. Louis fair. At the same time, an Austin, Nevada, grocer named Reuel Colt Gridley—a Hannibal school chum of Sam’s—had been lugging a sack of flour to nearby towns, which he “auctioned,” at each stop, to benefit the Sanitary cause. Mark Twain followed Gridley for a day in mid-May, and wrote about it in the Enterprise. At which time, unfathomably, Sam Clemens’s demons broke loose.

  On Monday, May 16, with Joe Goodman out of town again, Sam, by his own admission deracinated by liquor, scribbled a fake “news item” and passed it to De Quille, who agreed that it should never see print. Somehow, though, the squib got picked up by the “foreman, prospecting for copy,” Sam later supposed.

  On Tuesday, Enterprise readers were dumbfounded to read that the proceeds from the Carson City Ball were in danger of being diverted from the commission headquarters in St. Louis. Instead, they were to be sent to “aid a Miscegenation Society somewhere in the East”—a society, in other words, dedicated to the intermarriage of the Negro and Caucasian races. The item cryptically added that the report was “a hoax, but not all a hoax, for an effort is being made to divert those funds from their proper course.”20 The future author of Huckleberry Finn could scarcely have thought up a more explosive bit of mischief.

  The Emancipation Proclamation was less than two years old in the spring of 1864; the war that produced it still drained lives and wealth from the continent. Sentiment toward Negroes, even on the “emancipating” side, was saturated with animosity, superstition, sexual fears, and resentment: the liberators would soon have to compete with former slaves for work. Union-“secesh” tensions rippled through Washoe; fights erupted, shootings occurred over the question. Even though Union sympathy prevailed, few people accepted the notion that Negroes were equal to whites. Many pro-Union whites still resented black slaves for having made the war inevitable.

  Carson City erupted over the Enterprise’s fake report. On Wednesday, May 18, four women drafted a denunciatory letter to the Enterprise—the president, vice president, treasurer, and secretary of the Sanitary Ball committee. Joe Goodman, back at work, tried to defuse the uproar by ignoring it. Bad judgment: it ran a week later, for three days (May 25, 26, and 27), as a paid, public notice in the rival Virginia Daily Union under the heading “The ‘Enterprise’ Libel of the Ladies of Carson.”21

  The damage would be extensive. Mollie Clemens, still grieving for Jennie, found herself ostracized from Carson City society. Sam wrote an anguished letter to her on May 20, five days before the ladies’ letter was published, but not to apologize for the mortification he’d caused, nor to promise that he would assume public responsibility. He was preoccupied with the damage that the committee women’s letter could do to him.

  My Dear Mollie:

  I have had nothing but trouble & vexation since the Sanitary trip, & now this letter comes to aggravate me a thousand times worse. If it were from a man, I would answer it with a challenge…22

  He went on to confess that, yes, it was he who had written “the squib,” in the midst of a “drunken jest” with several other parties whom he refused to name. He had laid the item before Dan De Quille “when I was not sober (I shall not get drunk again, Mollie,)—and said he, ‘Is this a joke?’ I told him ‘Yes.’ He said he would not like such a joke as that to be perpetrated upon him, & that it would wound the feelings of the ladies of Carson. He asked me if I wanted to do that, & I said ‘No, of course not.’ ” Sam’s concern for his honor grew from the women’s labeling the item as “a tissue of falsehoods, made for malicious purposes” 23—in short, a dirty lie, hence the reference to answering their letter “with a challenge.” He saw no other options.

  Since it has made th
e ladies angry, I am sorry the thing occurred, & that is all I can do, for you will see yourself that their communication is altogether unanswerable. I cannot publish that, & explain it by saying the affair was a silly joke, & that I & all concerned were drunk. No—I’ll die first.24

  He indulged further self-pity: “Mollie, the Sanitary [affair] has been very disastrous to me. Aside from this trouble, (which I feel deepest,) I have two other quarrels on my hands, engendered on that day, & as yet I cannot tell how either of them is to end.”25

  Mark Twain felt he could not publicly apologize because he was involved with those “other two quarrels,” one still unidentified, the other a gratuitous fight he had picked with the Virginia City Union over a related event, the Reuel Colt Gridley flour-sack auctioning campaign. On May 18, the day after his miscegenation hoax had appeared, Mark Twain published an item—“How Is It?”—chiding the Union for reneging on its hundred-dollar “bid” for Gridley’s flour sack. This charge, too, was bogus. The Union fired back the next day, with an angry statement about what “Is” is. “ ‘How Is It?’—How It Is,” repudiated Mark Twain’s allegation and included a slur virtually begging for violence: “Such an item could only emanate from a person whose employer can find in his services a machine very suitable to his own manliness.”26

  This was apparently what Sam was looking for: an excuse to unleash the defining ritual of southern manhood, the code duello.

  The protocols of dueling were published in 1595, by an Italian sword-fighter living in London named Vincentio Saviolo. Saviolo’s ten rules of etiquette and procedure—intended, paradoxically, to limit violence by restricting deadly action to the challenger and the accused, as opposed to acres of their broadsword-wielding friends on each side—were further elaborated in Ireland in 1777. By Mark Twain’s time, the Code had twenty-five rules, set forth with detached formality suggestive of a deranged etiquette guide: “…[T]he parties engage until one is well blooded, disabled, or disarmed; or until, after receiving a wound, and blood being drawn, the aggressor begs pardon.” The Code found a new home in the antebellum South, whose planter aristocrats deluded themselves (as Mark Twain himself never tired of pointing out) that they were the knightly inheritors of Sir Walter Scott’s chivalric never-land.

  On Saturday, May 21, Sam—who had taken to carrying a pistol once again—sent a note over to James Laird, a publisher of the Union, that haughtily identified himself as the author of the original offending “editorial,” and demanded a public retraction of the Union’s “insulting” response. Laird was furious. It wasn’t enough that Joe Goodman had already crippled one of his editors (Thomas Fitch); now came the reigning loudmouth of Washoe, still infamous from the Carson massacre hoax, to assail his newspaper again. On Saturday afternoon and into the evening, the two papers exchanged private missives of aggrieved manly dignity, and the grim politesse of the challenge. A Union printer named J. W. Wilmington sent Sam a note asserting that it was he, not Laird, who’d authored the “manhood” slur. Sam ignored Wilmington and wrote back directly to Laird, his note filled with high-toned duello lingo if not perfect grammar: “…any farther attempt to make a catspaw of any other individual and thus shirk a responsibility that you had previously assumed will show that you are a cowardly sneak. I now peremptorily demand of you the satisfaction due to a gentleman—without alternative.”27

  As the day faded into evening, Laird once again goaded Sam to face Wilmington, taking care to mention Sam’s groveling disrespect for truth, decency, and courtesy. Sam wrote to Laird a third time: “…[I]f you do not wish yourself posted as a coward, you will at once accept my peremptory challenge, which I now reiterate.”28

  This was nothing like the jaunty fake feuding between Mark Twain and the Unreliable. This was dark, deadly stuff. There seemed something despairing—if not downright suicidal—about Sam’s recklessness. Sam seems to have viewed dueling as a kind of hovering fate, onerous but inevitable, an obligation that must sooner or later be met to confirm his manhood. He was twenty-eight in 1864, a man now, but a man with a “soft” calling in a violent, obsessively masculine society. Restless, unsure of his future or his legitimacy in that society, a serious drinker, and a provocateur who had already made enemies, he may have decided, in his delirium, that it was time to toe the mark.

  BUT HIS heart was never really in it, and the more apparent his lack of resolve became to him, the more he tried to mask it with belligerent posturing.

  As his Tom Sawyerish challenge to gunplay edged toward reality, Sam finally reached out to the women of the Sanitary Ball committee in Carson; and, indirectly, to Mollie Clemens. On May 23 he sent a somewhat self-exculpatory letter to the president of the committee, Mrs. William K. Cutler (“Madam—I address a lady in every sense of the term…”). He offered a somewhat circular explanation of why he had not quickly apologized: he’d been distracted by this feud with the Union. He thanked Mrs. Cutler for her continued friendship with Mollie “while others are disposed to withdraw theirs on account of a fault for which I alone am responsible.”29 Mr. Cutler issued Sam a challenge anyway.

  Sam headed off that particular distraction by sending the ninety-five-pound Steve Gillis over to reason with Cutler, who had come up from Carson and was waiting at a hotel. Whatever Gillis’s reasoning, Cutler found it persuasive, and hurried home. The following day—Tuesday, May 24—Sam made a similar halfway-gesture in the Enterprise: yes, “we” published a rumor, and yes, it was a hoax, but “we” stated as much, “And it was—we were perfectly right.”30 “We” were sorry for the “misfortune,” and “we venture to apologize for it,” and so on.

  Yet in the same edition, Mark Twain preempted all hope of a peaceful resolution: he published every one of his letters and Laird’s replies, and, in an afterword, denounced Laird as an “unmitigated liar,” accused him of backing down from a fight, and added that Laird was a fool. The Carson City ladies’ unforgiving letter was published over the next three days. Soon newspapers around the territory were reprinting the letters; some mocked the author of the Carson massacre hoax for being about to experience real-life bloodshed. Then, on the following Sunday, May 29, it ended: not with a bang, but with an absquatulation. Along with Steve Gillis, Sam Clemens climbed aboard a stagecoach and lit out from the territory—from Virginia City to San Francisco. The duel never happened.

  How close to the brink of gunfire he and Laird actually came is uncertain. In a letter to Orion dashed off the day before departure, Sam struck a macho pose: “Steve & I are going to the States…Say nothing about it, of course. We are not afraid of the grand jury, but Washoe has long since grown irksome to us, & we want to leave it anyhow.”31 The letter asked for two hundred dollars, to be sent to San Francisco.*

  The affair continued to vex him long afterward, and he treated it with careful levity in his writings. He can barely bring himself to touch on it in Roughing It, published only eight years later. He left Nevada, he says in that book, because “I began to get tired of staying in one place so long.” He wrote a funny sketch about it for Tom Hood’s Comic Annual for 1873, called “How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel.” In his autobiography, he treats the whole matter facetiously, as a kind of boys-will-be-boys romp in the Wild West. Dueling was a “fashion,” and “by 1864, everybody was anxious to have a chance in the new sport.” He personally “had had no desire to fight a duel,” but one day, more or less out of boredom, he “woke up Mr. Laird with some courtesies…and he came back at me the next day in a most vitriolic way.”32 It was Rollin Daggett, in this telling, who wrote up the acerbic challenges for him, and it was Laird who backed out on the duel after Steve Gillis shot the head off a sparrow and showed it to Laird’s seconds, claiming that Mark Twain had made the shot at thirty yards.

  The local Gold Hill Evening News administered a farewell kick in the Twainian posterior on the day following his leave-taking.

  Among the few immortal names of the departed—that is, those who departed yesterday morning per California stage—we n
otice that of Mark Twain. We don’t wonder. Giving way to the…eccentricities of an erratic mind, Mark has indulged in the game infernal—in short, “played hell.” [In mounting the miscegenation hoax and embarrassing the ladies of the Sanitary Ball]—he slopped. The indignation aroused by his enormities has been too crushing to be borne by living man, though sheathed with the brass and triple cheek of Mark Twain…He has vamosed, cut stick, absquatulated; and among the pine forests of the Sierras, or amid the purlieus of the city of earthquakes, he will tarry awhile, and the office of the Enterprise will become purified…33

  Sam’s absquatulation drew the curtain of charity over the wildest, most irresponsible, and dangerous period of his life. As he ascended into literary stardom and elite society over the next three decades, he would struggle to hold in check the version of himself that exploded into being on the slopes of Mount Davidson: the coarse, dissipated, exhibitionistic jokester and provocateur. (He was at his best, at least on paper, to the extent that these efforts at suppression failed.) But this dangerous interval was also the most important gestative period of his writing life. Sam discovered the true essence of his craft amidst the self-invented poets and prose writers who surged through Virginia City and the Territorial Enterprise during the Civil War years. This extraordinary cadre of countercultural exiles and wandering bohemians—Goodman, De Quille, Daggett, the Unreliable, Ward, even Menken—awoke him to the ecstasies of an expressive style unthinkable to the saints of literature back east. It was a style unapologetic to traditional aesthetics, but alive to the needs and impulses of the moment: pared-down and vernacular in diction, unterrified of authority or manners, wisecracking, brutally frank (except when it was hoaxing), joyously attuned to terrain, and above all, attuned to the fate and the legitimate viewpoint of the common man. Soon that voice would come bursting back east and sweep everything before it, riding hell-for-leather on the back of a jumping frog.