Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Mark Twain’s own response to the tale’s career-establishing success was always edgy. He seems to have feared being imprisoned in the kind of reputation that was the lot of mere “humorists” in the genteel East, where his scrutinizing in-laws, the Langdons of Elmira, New York, practically defined gentility. He revealed as much in a now-famous letter to Orion and Mollie, written on October 19 and 20, 1865, probably just after he finished the breakthrough draft. Orion was floundering badly, casting about for some new way to make a living; his thoughts had turned toward the pulpit. He had written to Sam, enclosing a sermon of his, and Sam’s reply was unusually tender and encouraging. “Orion there was genius—true, unmistakeable genius—in that sermon of yours,” he declared. “…You are honest, pious, virtuous—what would you have more? Go forth & preach.”

  In the same letter, Sam mulled his ambivalence over his own career choices. He acknowledged to his brother that he too had once considered the ministry as a vocation. In the next few lines, he wrote the manifesto for his immortal calling:

  I never had but two powerful ambitions in my life. One was to be a pilot, & the other a preacher of the gospel. I accomplished the one & failed in the other, because I could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade—i. e., religion…But I have had a “call” to literature, of a low order—i. e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit, & if I were to listen to that maxim of stern duty which says that to do right you must multiply the…talents which the Almighty entrusts to your keeping, I would long ago have ceased to meddle with things for which I was by nature unfitted & turned my attention to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures. Poor, pitiful business!…46

  * The source of this legend is Mark Twain in his autobiography. Buyer beware.

  15

  “…And I Began to Talk”

  (1865–66)

  I am taxed on my income! This is perfectly gorgeous! I never felt so important in my life before. To be treated in this splendid way, just like another William B. Astor! Gentlemen, we must drink!”1 Thus Mark Twain’s first encounter with the three-year-old U.S. Revenue Office, as he described it in the Enterprise in late November 1865. His effervescent irony is typical of the strong comic voice he deployed in his daily letters back to Joe Goodman’s paper, which were earning him one hundred dollars a month. (He wrote more than a hundred of these between October 1865 and March 1866.) Some theater reviews for the Dramatic Chronicle brought in another forty. Clemens’s private mood may not have matched his professional jauntiness—throughout his life, he was usually able to work through periods of anxiety or depression. Destitution, or the fear of it, haunted him. “I am also in debt,” he’d written, commiseratingly, to Orion. “But I have gone to work in dead earnest to get out.”2

  When Sam got more sermons on October 20, he added a thought about them on the back of the letter he’d written but not yet sent the day before. He’d read them, but “as unsympathetically as a man of stone. I have a religion—but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.” He added: “If I do not get out of debt in 3 months,—pistols or poison for one—exit me.” Continuing with brutal irony, in brackets: “There’s a text for a sermon on Self-Murder—Proceed.”3 It was probably this period he referred to when he wrote in 1909, “I put the pistol to my head but wasn’t man enough to pull the trigger. Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed, but I was never ashamed of having tried.”4

  DESPITE THESE dark thoughts, Sam seems to have been just then on his way out of a gloomy period—a period that his old friends at the Call took cruel delight in publicizing.

  There is now, and has been for a long time past, camping about through town, a melancholy-looking Arab, known as Marque Twein…His favorite measure is a pint measure. He is said to be a person of prodigious capacity, and addicted to a great flow of spirits. He moves often…These periods occur at the end of his credit…He may feel all right, but he don’t look affectionate. His hat…comes too far down over his eyes, and his clothes don’t fit as if they were made for him…Beware of him.5

  As he foraged for income, that ancient chimera of Clemens wealth, the Tennessee land, whispered to Sam once more. “I have just made a proposition to an old friend of mine…an energetic, untiring business man & a man of capital & large New York business associations & facilities,” he wrote to Orion with near-pathetic optimism on December 13.6 Sam wanted the businessman, Herman Camp, to swing a land deal, after which Sam would give him half the proceeds. The take could be large. Oil had been added to the list of the land’s suspected resources. Sam had reason to believe in Camp’s business acumen: two years earlier Camp had offered him a 50 percent mining-claim partnership; Sam refused, and saw the assets sell for $270,000 two months later.

  Sam urged Orion to send “all necessary memoranda” to acquaint Camp with the land’s location and resources: “Now I don’t want that Tenn land to go for taxes, & I don’t want any ‘slouch’ to take charge of the sale of it. I am tired being a beggar…”7 He envisioned returning east to help with the land sale, and then perhaps staying on to parlay his “Jumping Frog” fame into steady work as a writer. Orion mailed the materials. Camp traveled east. From New York, he wired Sam with a stunning, revised scheme: he would buy the thirty thousand acres outright from the Clemens family. His offer was $200,000. Camp had learned about a wild grape that grew well on Tennessee soil; his plan was to encourage European immigrants to buy or rent tracts of the land, which they would then cultivate as vineyards. The appropriate contracts were mailed to Orion, who was then thrashing around for any kind of new livelihood. His signature would put everything in motion; the land would at long last pay off; life for the Clemenses would be pie…

  Orion said no.

  No, as long as the land would be used to debauch the country with wine. Having recently wrecked his chances for a rewarding public career by trumpeting abstinence in the wettest part of the world since Atlantis, Orion now invoked the same piety to quarantine the entire Clemens clan from windfall prosperity. John Marshall Clemens himself might have marveled at his eldest son’s resourcefulness at sustaining the family’s ancient immunity to wealth—especially given that John Marshall Clemens had been the original promoter of the promising wild grapes. “And so,” wrote Mark Twain in 1906, “he quashed the whole trade, and there it fell, never to be brought to life again. The land, from being suddenly worth two hundred thousand dollars, became as suddenly worth what it was before—nothing, and taxes to pay.”8

  Nearly giddy with rage, Sam threw himself back into the ball-and-chain routine of newspaper writing. And newspaper drinking. He boozed his way along the violent streets of the Barbary Coast, and when the police jailed him overnight for drunkenness, his nemesis Albert Evans snidely insinuated his misfortune in the Gold Hill News. Sam, stung and embarrassed, lashed out recklessly in the Enterprise at police brutality and corruption, an invitation for further harassment, and the police obliged.

  Even his family members now felt his petulance in print. A sketch of his, published in the New York Weekly Review, excoriated the letter-writing styles of “relatives” in general (“How do you…write us such…poor, bald, uninteresting trash?…Why, you drivel and drivel, and drivel along, in your wooden-headed way…”). He targeted his mother in particular, stipulating that she was an above-average correspondent. The charge was overinitializing, as in “J. B. is dead,” and “W. L. is going to marry T. D…”9

  Forgivable horseplay, perhaps, but it had an edge. The edge was where Sam lived now. But a new project promised to restore his good spirits. He and Bret Harte were going to cobble a book together, he announced to Jane and Pamela in late January: a compilation of their sketches (later abandoned). “My labor will not occupy more than 24 hours, because I will only have to take the scissors & slash my old sketches out of the Enterprise & the Californian—I burned up a small cart-load of them lately—so they are forever ruled out of any
book—but they were not worth republishing.”10 Harte had resigned from the Californian in December, in contemplation of his return east, and Sam had followed suit, in favor of an arrangement with the New York Weekly Review.

  And Sam had another, far more ambitious book project in mind, the secret contours of which were being gossiped about in the local papers. The January 12 Examiner hinted that the book “will treat on an entirely new subject, one that has not been written about heretofore. We predict that it will be a very popular book, and make fame and fortune for its gifted author.”11

  “The book referred to in that paragraph is a pet notion of mine,” Sam told the homefolks, “—nobody knows what it is going to be about but just myself.”12 He expected it to run some three hundred pages; the last hundred would have to be written in St. Louis, “because the materials for them can only be got there.”13 Already he was anticipating a long, difficult siege: “If I do not write it to suit me at first I will write it all over again, & so, who knows?—I may be an old man before I finish it.”14 The “new subject” was the Mississippi, as Sam had hinted in this same letter: “I wish I was back there piloting up & down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting.”15

  EVEN AS he composed this letter another form of watery adventure had caught Sam’s attention. On January 13, the California Steam Navigation Company had inaugurated a schedule between San Francisco and Honolulu in the Sandwich Islands, 2,500 miles across the Pacific Ocean. Its flagship, the Ajax, was capable of cutting two-thirds off the normal three-month round trip. Sam’s cachet as a journalist had gotten him invited on the Ajax’s maiden voyage, along with fifty-two others, “the cream of the town,” he told his mother and sister. Plus a brass band. But he declined, unable to find a stand-in as San Francisco correspondent to the Enterprise. He immediately regretted this decision. Sizing up the glittering passenger list with the same satirical eye that he would train on the Quaker City pilgrims to the Holy Land nearly two years later, he fairly smacked his lips: “Where could a man catch such another crowd together?”16

  When the Ajax returned to San Francisco on February 22, Mark Twain was at the docks to greet the passengers with a new journalistic form: the interview. Horace Greeley had conducted the first newspaper interview only seven years earlier, recording the verbatim remarks of the Mormon leader Brigham Young in Salt Lake City. Now Mark Twain, who himself would later become one of the most-interviewed figures of his century, was trying his hand at it for the Enterprise.

  When the Ajax sailed again in March 1866, Mark Twain was on board. His long career as a seafaring writer of travel literature had begun. “I only decided to-day to go,” he wrote home on March 5. “I am to remain there a month & ransack the islands,…& write twenty or thirty letters to the Sacramento Union—for which they pay me as much money as I would get if I staid at home.”17 He spent four months in the unvexed isles, met every local political and religious person of any significance, and wrote twenty-five letters for the Union. These became the backbone of Chapters 62–78 of Roughing It. (Mark Twain had previously organized the newspaper letters into an “islands book” manuscript that he hoped to sell to a New York publisher.)

  The letters reveal a seamless extension of the boy who had left Hannibal at seventeen, a man who could even then make himself at home in St. Louis, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York—and later New Orleans, Virginia City, and San Francisco. Here, as in every other lifetime port of call, Mark Twain found his way to the epicenter of an unfamiliar place. He interacted with the influential locals; he sampled their food, liquor, diversions, and culture with aplomb. Yet he maintained a saving distance that allowed him to write about his sojourns with the detached irony of the self-possessed artist.

  He soaked up character, incident, anecdote, language, physical terrain, and local myth with the glorious disregard for conventional order or plot that would flavor his greatest works. Disembarking at the islands, he luxuriated in a world-that-is-not-San-

  Francisco—a world of cream-cut coral, of trees that cast a shadow like a thundercloud; of people in white coats, vests, pantaloons; a world of centipedes, scorpions, porpoises, and dusky maidens; many, many dusky maidens, who bathed nude and rode horseback trailing their long scarves of tavern-tablecloth brilliance; and cats—“multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep.”18

  He took a horseback tour through the jungle valleys and mountains of Oahu, the big island of Hawaii, and several other islands. “Brown” made his debut in these rambles, to furnish Union readers with coarse commentary on the sojourn, and to lend “Mark Twain” a little class by contrast. Sometimes he called Brown “Billings.” Paddling around in a canoe with Billings, he happened upon a 19th-century surfin’ safari: “a large company of naked natives…amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing,” in which

  [e]ach heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along…and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell!19

  Sam tried his luck at hanging ten. His board caught a wave, but it arrived ashore without him.

  At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen. I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied that they were running some risk. But they were not afraid…20

  He wrote more than a third of his letters in the early weeks of his visit, concentrating on the islands’ warrior past, their religious practices, and their current politics and economy. He witnessed a nighttime eruption of the massive Kilauea volcano, and compared its red-glowing shaft of flame to the pillar of fire witnessed by the children of Israel during their biblical march through the desert. The following night he took a dangerous gambol into the volcano’s bubbling crater, writing later that he and a stranger named Marlette negotiated the treacherous paths of navigable lava by themselves after the local guides begged out. (His narrative of the Kilauea adventure ranks among the descriptive masterpieces in Roughing It.) He dryly noted the restrictions, encouraged by missionaries, on the storied “hula-hula” dance, “save at night, with closed doors,” and for an admission fee of “ten dollars.”21 He visited the temples of gods, and “cabbaged” a bulky history book of the islands (James Jarves’s 1849 History of the Hawaiian Islands)22 from a Honolulu chaplain, from which he cribbed large factual sections for his Union readers and, later, his lecture audiences.

  Sam returned to Honolulu from his horseback tour suffering from a severe case of saddle boils. On June 15, as he lay on his back, a stunning and grotesque—and career-enhancing—phenomenon

  washed into his life out of the Pacific. A lifeboat filled with half-dead seamen had landed on the sands of Laupahoehoe, a village nearly two hundred miles south of Honolulu. They were the sole survivors of the Hornet, a clipper gutted by fire en route from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn. The ship burnt up off the coast of South America. Three longboats carrying all thirty-one passengers and crew put to sea, but two boats were lost. The occupants of the third boat, the captain and fourteen others, survived a forty-three-day odyssey during which they meandered for four thousand miles on ten days’ rations, eventually arriving at Laupahoehoe.

  A week later, Sam sent a quick summary of their story to the Union. The following day, eleven of the men arrived at a Honolulu hospital. Despite his saddle-boil pain, Sam got himself there and once again assumed the interviewer’s role, this time to thunderous effect. He stayed up all night transforming his notes into a long account, and the next morning threw it onto the deck of a departing fast schooner.23 The Union printed the full story on July 19. It was reprinted throughout a nation conditioned by Civil War reportage to expect personal accounts of peril and high drama from the daily papers. Mark Twain had a worldwide scoop.

  Sam’s pain would have prevented him from reaching
the Hornet crewmen but for his encounter with a visiting American diplomat, Anson Burlingame, the United States’ minister to China. He and Sam met at a state social event on the island. Burlingame supervised Sam’s transportation by stretcher to the hospital.

  Sam departed the islands in July on the Smyrniote, a schooner that also carried three of the Hornet survivors. Toward the end of the voyage, he was copying down Hawaiian phrases and their English translations in an obvious effort to learn the language. More productively, he became acquainted with the ship’s captain, Josiah A. Mitchell, and two of its passengers—nineteen-year-old Henry Ferguson and his fatally consumptive brother Samuel, who was about twenty-eight. The Fergusons, scholarly and devout young Connecticut men, allowed Sam to copy the contents of their lifeboat journals. It was a courtesy that Henry Ferguson would later regret, but one that led to a pivotal nonfiction narrative of privation and endurance.

  BACK HOME, Sam worked at expanding the survivors’ saga into a magazine-length essay. He journeyed the ninety miles northeast to Sacramento, where he handed the editors a bill for his Sandwich Island pieces (at twenty dollars per letter), and then audaciously hit them up for a hundred dollars for the shipwreck saga—per column, or three hundred dollars total. They agreed. He sold his long narrative to the influential Harper’s Monthly, which ran it in December under the title, “Forty-Three Days in an Open Boat,” slightly dampening the author’s triumph by misidentifying him in its annual index as “Mark Swain.” Years later he rewrote the story and sold it to the Century. Its title, which survives in his collected essays, is “My Début as a Literary Person.” The essay’s documentary precision (for once, Mark Twain was adhering closely to the facts) wounded the sensibilities of Henry Ferguson, by then an Episcopal clergyman and history professor at Trinity College in Hartford. Ferguson was shocked that Mark Twain had used the real names of some survivors, particularly those who had plotted briefly to mutiny against the captain. In later editions, Mark Twain made editorial alterations that satisfied Ferguson.