Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  * They were organized as the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the Quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

  * These misspellings, or “cacographic” variations, were a little different from the phonetic vernacular used by the Southern “frame” writers and Sam Clemens’s “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass,” in that they seemed aimed less at mimicking the sounds of a distinct regional dialect than the capricious misspellings of an uneducated man. Ward also used the device for clever word coinage, as when he described his wife as an unequaled “flapjackist.”

  * Dan De Quille remembered it a little differently. In an 1893 newspaper article, he recalled that the roof-walking episode had occurred after Sam and he had taken Ward on a tour of “Chinatown sights”; that the watchman had aimed a shotgun at them; that Ward had defused things by handing the man a few tickets to his lecture; that the trio had moved on to the Clemens/De Quille apartment, where they all piled in to bed together like “three saints,” as Ward put it; that their sleep was interrupted by hurdy-gurdy music erupting from a dance hall; that they all tumbled out of bed and went there and danced with “three stalwart and capable girls,” and that from there they met up with a bulky, stovepipe-hatted Sonora miner called “Kettle-belly Browne,” who stared down a bartender who had tried to shortchange them and then joined the trio in a new round of barhopping that ended up at dawn in front of Aaron Hooper’s saloon.

  * The “grand jury” reference gave a little cover to Sam’s dignity. Dueling had killed and maimed so many men in Nevada that the legislature in 1861 mandated two-to-ten-year prison sentences on anyone convicted of even issuing or delivering a challenge.

  14

  A Villainous Backwoods Sketch

  (1864–65)

  Later, Sam would recall a phase of “butterfly idleness” in the bayside city he called “the most cordial and sociable city in the Union.”1 He lived at the best hotel in San Francisco, his beloved Occidental—“Heaven on the half shell”2—with his bantam-rooster buddy Steve Gillis. He wore fancy clothes to private parties, “infested” the opera, played billiards in saloons, “simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polked and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo.”3

  His esteem did not exaggerate the city’s charms. By the mid-1860s, San Francisco had soared to prominence among American cities, a garden of delights on the far end of the continent for those willing to risk drowning, freezing, or dying of Panamanian mosquito bites to get there. (Many were willing, including the thousands of young men eager to escape the Civil War.) The gold-digging ’49ers who had swelled the population now supported a robust building and mercantile boom. Importers were bringing in gowns from Paris. Women were changing their hairstyles from the ringlets and curls of Jacksonian America to “the waterfall,” a bunching of the hair below the neck into an oblong shape, held in place by a net. Mark Twain hated “the waterfall” look, and said so in print: It “reminds you of those nauseating garden spiders…that go around dragging a pulpy, grayish bag-full of young spiders slung to them behind.”4

  San Francisco’s art, design, and architecture had an international flair. The four-story Occidental, with its Italianate pediments and storefronts of plate glass, occupied the entire block of Montgomery Street from Sutter to Bush. Salons abounded, and Sam sampled them, probably including the influential literary circle run by the wealthy North Carolina expatriate Martha Hitchcock, a diarist and rumored Confederate spy, who (when not in Paris) stayed at the Occidental with her flamboyant daughter Lillie.

  The salons drew upon a thriving counterculture, the progenitor of the Beat and hippie enclaves of a latter-day San Francisco: the bohemians who’d abandoned Pfaff’s bar in New York for this even less hidebound cosmopolis. The bohemian aesthetic animated San Francisco theater, music, painting, and literature. The city published more books than any in the country, and rivaled London for the volume of its newspapers and literary journals. The artists themselves tended to be far wilder than their art—running around the city in rough work clothes, firemen’s helmets jammed on their heads, cigars between their teeth, holding marathon poker games, indulging in sex and drugs. The male bohemians were equally colorful. Sam mingled with the forebears of Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, mellowing out in the sauna in odd moments. He placed some sketches in the artsy weekly Golden Era, home away from home to Adah Menken, among others.

  Sam was equally drawn to the seedier sides of the city. He gravitated between salon and saloon. He gambled at cards and even more in the stock market, living on credit as his debts mounted. Earthquakes, a San Francisco specialty, fascinated him. The city rattled with nearly a dozen quakes or tremors between his arrival and the end of the year, and he seems to have relished them all. Later on, in 1865, he compiled an “Earthquake Almanac,” offering such blithe prognostications as

  Oct. 26.—Considerable phenomenal atmospheric foolishness. About this time expect more earthquakes, but do not look out for them, on account of the bricks…

  Nov. 1.—Terrific earthquake. This is the great earthquake month. More stars fall and more worlds are slathered around carelessly and destroyed in November than in any other month of the twelve.

  Nov. 2.—Spasmodic but exhilarating earthquakes, accompanied by occasional showers of rain, and churches and things.5

  Expecting to glide along on the “Washoe Giant” fame that he’d assured Jane he had earned in the city, and to continue developing his comic-bombastic style, he had, within a week of arriving in San Francisco, got himself hired as a “local” reporter, at $35 a week, for the Morning Call, the paper that had earlier bought his freelance letters from Virginia City. Three months later, when he inevitably grew tired of the long hours, he rejiggered the arrangement to $25 a week, with no nighttime duties. He resumed one of his favorite lifetime hobbies, needling his high-strung mother, who he knew liked to read his letters aloud to friends and neighbors. “You have portrayed to me so often & so earnestly the benefit of taking frequent exercise,” he solemnly wrote to her in August, carefully setting her up,

  that I know it will please you to learn that I belong to the San F. Olympic Club, whose gymnasium is one of the largest & best appointed in the United States…I think it nothing but right to give you the whole credit of it…I feel like a new man. I sleep better, I have a healthier appetite, my intellect is clearer, & I have become so strong & hearty that I fully believe twenty years have been added to my life.

  And then the “nub”:

  I feel as if I ought to be very well satisfied with this result, when I reflect that I never was in that gymnasium but once in my life, & that was over three months ago.6

  Jane got back at Sam by retailing several of his letters in the St. Louis press, a practice that predictably ticked him off. The same day, August 12, he resumed his old hoaxing ways, this time in a more genial mode: his “What a Sky-Rocket Did” in the Morning Call pretended to report the crash of a burned-out rocket into a tenement building on Bush Street—a dilapidated piece of property that was owned, as it happened, by a plutocratic public figure.7

  Sam sustained his happy-as-a-clam demeanor to Jane and Pamela some weeks later. He sent them a photograph of his barbered and typically unsmiling self—“like a witness under oath,” is the way Louis Budd sums up his posing style—and bragged that “I am taking life easy, now, & I mean to keep it up for a while.”8 Gossiping to Orion and Mollie about Steve Gillis’s scheduled wedding to a wealthy heiress, he picked up on a conversational thread by writing, “Your head is eminently sound on the subject of marriage. I am resolved on that or suicide—perhaps.”9 It was a jarring word to drop into a light-hearted chat about nuptials and good friends, perhaps an attempt at whistling in the dark.

  He and Steve Gillis changed their lodgings constantly. “I need a change, & must move again,” he explained to his folks on September 25.10 He was restless, bored, and probably lonely. A plaintive query in his upbeat letter to Jane and Pamela revealed a
torch that still burned: “What has become of that girl of mine that got married?” he wondered. “I mean Laura Wright.”11

  His reporter’s job was turning into a bust. The Call was nothing like the Territorial Enterprise. He tried to liven its pages up, Virginia City–style. He managed to stir up a real feud, sometimes jokey and more often not, with local reporter Albert S. Evans of the Alta California. But Sam soon discovered that the editors at the Morning Call weren’t interested in wild-and-woolly writing. They wanted to strengthen the paper’s journalistic stature, and they expected Sam to chase down facts. Sam gave it a try, but found it “fearful drudgery, soulless drudgery, and almost destitute of interest,” as he could still grouse forty-two years later.12 The dreary courthouse with its droning lawyers and pitiful downtrodden litigants was his daytime beat, and he’d taken to amusing himself with a kind of word-doodling—writing up the sordid little trials he covered as scenes in theatrical plays. His enthusiasm for the theater kept him from petrifying: he rushed around to San Francisco’s six legitimate stage houses every evening, pausing at each just long enough to glean what was happening onstage, for a review. For four decades afterward, he insisted, even the sight of a theater gave him the dry gripes.

  Prodded by Orion and others, he began to think about writing on a more literary level. “As soon as this wedding business is over,” he told his brother, “I believe I will send to you for the files, & begin my book.”13 The “files” were the scrapbooks into which Orion had been faithfully pasting Mark Twain’s newspaper columns and letters over the past three years, clearly with a book project in mind. But money worries soon imposed an agenda of their own.

  Sam had intended to stay in the Bay City only a month, to sell off some mining stock in Orion’s name. Then he would head back east, where the Confederacy was disintegrating under Union invasion, and resume his Mississippi River piloting career. His native ground was growing safe for his return. The war could not last much longer: Grant, unaffected by the previous June’s carnage at Cold Harbor, where in one twenty-minute stretch he’d traded seven thousand Union lives for a reduction in Robert E. Lee’s cadaverous remnants, was closing his grip on Richmond. General William Tecumseh Sherman had set Atlanta on fire and was slashing his way toward the sea. But in 1864 and 1865 Sam was never solvent enough to make that return journey. His few remaining mining stocks weren’t moving, and they continued to cost him money simply to hold on to them. He’d taken the Call job to bankroll himself, but in mid-October, Sam and the Call parted ways.

  Mentally, he’d been gone for weeks, trying to deal the mining stock, fiddling with his book idea, and carousing. He’d grown further detached after his editors spiked one of the few pieces he’d cared about: a lacerating eyewitness account of some toughs who’d stoned “a Chinaman who was heavily laden with the weekly wash of his Christian customers.”14 (Like his mother, the youthful Sam could be racially callous in the abstract—as in his miscegenation slur—but he could never stand the sight of racial cruelty.) Finally, the Call’s editor in chief, George E. Barnes, took him aside and suggested he might be happier elsewhere. Sam accepted the face-saving offer without rancor, but it hurt. “It hurts yet,” Mark Twain maintained in 1906.15

  He salvaged an income by selling nine sketches and essays to the Californian over a two-month period late in 1864. They hardly brought in a bonanza—at twelve dollars each, they amounted to about half his reduced Call salary ($108 versus $200)—but they helped him stave off destitution. They also brought him into contact with the journal’s new young co-editors, Charles Henry Webb, whom he had already met, and Bret Harte, whom he had not. This was the beginning of an unbeautiful friendship between Clemens and Harte, who would one day share (and vie for) the highest esteem of the postwar nation.

  Harte, a few months younger than Sam at twenty-eight, was a rising player on the San Francisco literary scene, just three years away from a stunning national debut. His stature in American letters—as a talented portraitist of Western folk, and the author of two or three enduring standards—would outlast De Quille’s and even Artemus Ward’s. But he was fated to experience his own public life largely as Mark Twain’s sponsor, then mentor, then co-star among Western writers returning east, then collaborator, then object of corrosive envy and, finally, as one of Mark Twain’s designated whipping boys.

  The two probably met in late September 1864, perhaps when Sam paid a call on Harte to pitch a sketch for the Californian. Sam didn’t have to travel far: Harte was one floor below the Call’s city room on Commercial Street, in the San Francisco branch office of the U.S. Mint. Harte was private secretary to the mint’s superintendent, R. B. Swain. His duties, as outlined by Swain, were basically to sit around thinking up writing pieces to publish in the Californian and the Golden Era. Bret Harte supported by the mint—this made quite an impression on Sam. Harte, in turn, could not help being impressed by Sam. The Clemens voice worked its usual magic on him: “He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl,” Harte later wrote, “which was in itself irresistible.”16 Yet even his fascination carried a condescending edge. “His head,” Harte recalled in an often-quoted remark, “was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and even the aquiline eye—an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me—of an unusual and dominant nature. His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, and his general manner one of supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances.”17 Sam was not nearly so indifferent as he may have seemed. Sam wanted—needed—to write for the Californian. More urgently, he wanted entry into the literary world, and Harte seemed to have his hand on the doorknob.

  But Sam’s aquiline eye was recording some imperfections of its own. Decades later, he could still disgorge them with merciless clarity. “He was distinctly pretty,” Mark Twain conceded in his autobiography, before adding, “in spite of the fact that his face was badly pitted with smallpox.” As for Harte’s clothes, “He was showy, meretricious, insincere; and he constantly advertised these qualities in his dress.” His neckties tended to be either “crimson—a flash of flame under his chin,” or maybe “indigo blue, and as hot and vivid as if one of those splendid and luminous Brazilian butterflies had lighted there.”18

  Harte was a more complex character than Sam Clemens cared to notice. The man soon to gain fame with “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” was a refugee of Albany by way of Brooklyn. He’d come to California as an aspiring poet at seventeen and wandered around for a few years, tutoring ranchers’ children, riding shotgun on a stagecoach, and catching on as a printer for the Northern Californian in Unionville, where he sneaked his own writing onto the page. He did not blend with the local buckaroos. He could be astoundingly pompous. But he was fearless, and he had a passion for social justice. When he wrote up an infamous massacre of Indians in early 1860, his editor fired him. Harte went down to San Francisco and got a job on Rollin Daggett’s Golden Era. He married an ambitious woman named Anna Griswold. His poetry caught the attention of the San Francisco literati, the Harte household soon became a salon, and Bret was suddenly a broker of bohemian writers in the city.

  Sam strutted like a cakewalker in a letter back to the St. Louis folk, about his influential new connection:

  I have engaged to write for the new literary paper—the “Californian”…one article a week, fifty dollars a month. I quit the “Era,” long ago. It wasn’t high-toned enough. I thought that whether I was a literary “jackleg” or not, I wouldn’t class myself with that style of people, anyhow. The “Californian” circulates among the highest class of the community, & is the best weekly literary paper in the United States—& I suppose I ought to know.19

  His work for the Californian shows a burst of his old Virginia City panache. Perhaps he was showing off for Harte. He had some fun at the expense of the Fourth Industrial Fair of the Mechanic’s Institute, a group of pre–Silicon Valley technological nerds, using notes he had compiled on assignment for the Call.
He pretended that the fair was a steamy trysting place for lovers, writing with wicked glee that

  [w]hen you see a young lady standing by the sanitary scarecrow which mutely appeals to the public for quarters and swallows them, you may know by the expectant look upon her face that a young man is going to happen along there presently…20

  A few lines later he exploded into pure dizziness, claiming to have found a love note scrawled between the printed lines of a business card:

  John Smith, (My Dearest and Sweetest:) Soap Boiler and Candle Factor; (If you love me, if you love) Bar Soap, Castile Soap and Soft Soap, peculiarly suitable for (your Arabella, fly to the) Pacific coast, because of its non-liability to be affected by the climate…21

  In a later Californian sketch, he settled a score with the Morning Call. “The Killing of Julius Caesar ‘Localized’ ” drew on Mark Twain’s lifelong gift for language parody. The piece imagines Caesar’s assassination as written up not by William Shakespeare in the third act of his great tragedy, but by a reporter from the “Roman Daily Evening Fasces,” an imaginary paper with a style strikingly similar to a certain plodding, fact-obsessed San Francisco sheet.

  Our usually quiet city of Rome was thrown into a state of wild excitement, yesterday, by the occurrence of one of those bloody affrays which sicken the heart and fill the soul with fear, while they inspire all thinking men with forebodings for the future of a city where human life is held so cheaply, and the gravest laws are so openly set at defiance…The affair was an election row, of course…22