by Ron Powers
Sam further leveraged his fame by turning his Sandwich Islands writings into a lecture. If the talk was a hit in San Francisco, he would take it on the road. By now, Sam had stood up before a few audiences, but these were mostly friends—the printers in Keokuk, the reporter/politico crowd at the Third House shenanigans in Carson City, a couple of after-dinner turns in Virginia City. A public lecture—an attempt to play on Artemus Ward’s level—was a voyage into uncharted waters. Luckily for posterity, Sam was desperate. He wrote a presentation in large, easy-to-read block letters on manila paper that was by turns comic, descriptive, and airily unctuous—something, he clearly hoped, for every customer. He rented the biggest house in town, Thomas Maguire’s new Academy of Music, which seated between 1,500 and 2,000 people, for the night of October 2. Maguire let Clemens have the hall at half-price for fifty dollars, on credit, plus half the receipts. He showed his lecture to some trusted friends, asking their opinion of it. He spent $750 dollars on handbills and an ad that ran in every San Francisco newspaper. Its highlights, written by Sam himself, have become a part of Mark Twain folklore:
A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA
Is in town, but has not been engaged.
ALSO,
A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS
Will be on exhibition in the next Block.
MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS
Were in contemplation for this occasion,
but the idea has been abandoned.
A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION
May be expected; in fact, the public are privileged
to expect whatever they please.
Dress Circle……. . $1 Family Circle…………. 50 cts.
Doors open at 7 o’clock. The Trouble to begin at 8 o’clock.24
The stakes were high. In Roughing It and elsewhere, Mark Twain milked the drama for all it is worth—perhaps a little more than it is worth. Writer Charles Warren Stoddard and Bret Harte tried to talk him out of going through with the lecture, insisting that it would hurt his literary reputation.25 An editor at the Call (probably George Barnes) bucked him up, and even suggested that Sam charge the stiff price of a dollar a person. As the evening drew near and he compulsively reread the manuscript, it became less and less funny to him, until on the day of the event he was drenched in flop-sweat.
Half-starved—he hadn’t eaten in three days—he recruited three “stormy-voiced” friends to sit in the audience and laugh like hell at his dim jokes. And then a quintessentially Twainish thing occurred: on the street, Sam ran into a conveniently drunken character—named William Slason. As if anticipating the opening lines of Huckleberry Finn, Slason blurts (in Roughing It), “You don’t know me, but that don’t matter. I haven’t got a cent, but if you knew how bad I wanted to laugh, you’d give me a ticket. Come, now, what do you say?”26 Mark Twain asks the man for a sample laugh. “My drawling infirmity of speech so affected him that he laughed a specimen or two that struck me as being about the article I wanted, and I gave him a ticket…”27
ON TUESDAY night, October 2, 1866, Sam Clemens took the Academy of Music stage in San Francisco. Facing his public for the first time as Mark Twain, nearly blinded by the footlights, trembling with terror, frozen in place for a full minute, he finally gained control of himself,
“…and I began to talk.”28
That night, a new kind of personage materialized in America. This figure clearly owed a debt to Artemus Ward and others with Ward’s mannerisms, but Ward and the others would fade; this figure would endure. Mark Twain would move quickly to a national and then to a world stage, and his words would yield unimaginable global fame and wealth. The nation would share his ecstasies and his heartbreaks. People would point him out on the street, his rocking, rolling gait, and women in his lecture halls would whisper their dismay when his wife gave him children. The world would be there for him, but he would never quite be there for it. He began to talk, peering at the faces before him, and the enraptured audience inside Thomas Maguire’s Academy of Music peered back at the nation’s first rock star.
16
On the Road
(1866–67)
Side-splitting,” the San Francisco papers reported. “A hit, a great hit.” They described the “continued applause” over his “grotesque imagery, and fearfully ludicrous stories.”1 In a measured and thoughtful review, Bret Harte wrote that Mark Twain’s “humor surpassed Artemus Ward’s,” and was perhaps “more thoroughly national and American than even the Yankee delineations of [James Russell] Lowell.”2 But he had his faults, Harte added, among them “crudeness, coarseness, and an occasional Panurge-like* plainness of statement.”3 Mark Twain had a great act, but bad management. He grossed $1,200 at the Academy of Music, but after paying off the shrewd Maguire and other expenses, pocketed only $400. He needed a partner who could help him with the details of this new dodge. A ready volunteer was at hand: young Denis E. McCarthy, former Enterprise co-owner, who had sold out to Goodman in September 1865, and who may have acted and been paid as Clemens’s agent for this initial lecture. McCarthy was a savvy businessman who loved the world of artists and show business, but who was struggling financially. In no time, the two of them had plotted out an itinerary.
He performed in Sacramento a week later. Then Marysville, by steamer up the Sacramento River. Then Grass Valley, by stagecoach, a lecture fueled by gin and capped off with hot whiskey punches at a local oyster parlor. Nevada City. By horseback to the mining burgs of Red Dog and You Bet. These outposts were so starved for variety that, as a Washoe joke had it, the local preachers altered the Lord’s Prayer to, “Give us this day our daily stranger.”* Sam and his new manager papered the burgs with variations on the San Francisco handbills—“THE CELEBRATED BEARDED WOMAN! Is not with this Circus”4—and caroused through the local bars at every stop, owning each joint.
Then a triumphant return to Virginia City, for a Halloween night lecture at Maguire’s Opera House. The newspapers trumpeted him home. “The enthusiasm with which his lecture was everywhere greeted is still ringing throughout California, and now, that his foot is on his native heath, we may expect to see the very mountains shake with a tempest of applause,” cried the Territorial Enterprise,5 making sure to add that the Enterprise was where Sam Clemens had christened the name Mark Twain “and developed that rich and inexhaustible vein of humor which has made the title famous.” Joe Goodman contributed an idea of his own: when the curtain opened, Mark would be sitting at a piano, playing and singing the song that had become his “signature” out west, “The Horse (Mule) Whose Name Was Jerusalem (Methusalem).” He would look up, appear startled to see the audience, and then start talking.
Nursing a cold, Mark Twain electrified his old friends in the hillside boomtown. The Opera House crowd was standing room only, eight hundred strong. They wore their fanciest clothes, and cheered, stamped, and hooted before and after he performed. Steve Gillis remembered that “when he appeared on the platform he was greeted with a hurricane of applause.” The newspapers bear-hugged him: “immense success,” “drollest humor.”6 Mark Twain considered, but eventually turned down, a request for a second performance. His showman’s instinct was coalescing: always leave ’em wanting more.
His new celebrityhood swept away a host of the old antagonisms. A letter from Carson City awaited Mark Twain after he left the Opera House stage: an invitation to bring his lecture there, signed by more than a hundred citizens who said they had “none other than the most kindly remembrances of you.”7 (W. K. Cutler was not one of the signers, but H. F. Rice and Samuel D. King, husbands of two of the Sanitary Ball committee ladies, were.) He telegraphed his acceptance on November 1, and on November 3, he rolled into the capital, McCarthy in tow, for a sold-out performance at the Carson Theater. Then, after a few days, back to the one-horse towns: Washoe City on November 7, the next day at Dayton, eleven miles to the northeast of Carson; back west through Silver City and Gold Hill on November 9 and 10. (McCarthy returned to Virginia City at this point.) Mark Twain in Washoe Ci
ty stayed at the home of Thomas Fitch, the former Union editor and bitter rival whom Joe Goodman had crippled in their duel in 1863. Fitch, minus a kneecap, was now the district attorney of Washoe County. No hard feelings: he brought Mark Twain onto the platform at the courthouse with a rousing introduction (“He needs no introduction…”8) after acting as doorkeeper. His status as the famous humorist’s personal friend had Fitch hobbling on air.
En route home with Fitch, Sam was engulfed in another dark mood, which often happened after a triumph. Told by Fitch that he had taken in over $200, Sam replied, “Yes, and I have taken in over 200 people.” He added that as a lecturer, he was “a fraud.”9 The darkness still gripped him when, on November 10, his old drinking pals from Virginia City honored him in the rough-and-tumble Washoe way, with an extravagant practical joke. McCarthy, Gillis, and some others decked themselves out like bandits and held up the stagecoach that was carrying Sam along the lonely “Divide” from Gold Hill to Virginia. After leveling pistols, they absconded with more than a hundred dollars in cash, some jackknives and pencils, and a gold watch worth $300—Mark Twain said he valued it for sentimental reasons “above everything else I own.”10 Forty years later, Steve Gillis plaintively insisted that the objective of the good-humored caper was to supply Mark Twain with fresh material for a second lecture for which the local folks were clamoring. But Sam took it as he always took jokes at his expense: he pouted and nursed a grudge. When his goods were returned and he discovered that the incident was a prank, he stormed out of Virginia City on November 12, arriving in San Francisco the next day. Writing Roughing It several years later, he was still sore: “The joke of these highwaymen friends of ours was mainly a joke upon themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full hours before I came, and there was very little fun in that.” Moreover, he wasn’t nearly afraid enough “to make their enjoyment worth the trouble they had taken.”11
He certainly had the temperament of a rock star.
BUT IN what sense, really, can that label have meaning when applied to an aspiring Victorian gent and semiapostate ex-Presbyterian journalist/humorist who fashioned his craft on clapboard gaslit stages ninety-odd years before the advent of, say, Metallica? Most of the parallels are merely facile: his adoring press, his tours, his promo schemes, his manager, his eruptions of childish petulance, his worship of money.
His proto-rocker mojo kicked in once he took the stage, and was fueled by something nascent in the American air, something only half-anticipated by Emerson, but grasped by Adah Menken, Ward, and some others. It caught a new-blooming audacity of the Self, a Self set loose from old pietistic constraints. Emerson had got that much of it right, with his God-intoxicated Yankee poet launching out into Old Night, and provoking cries of wild creative delight. Emerson’s poet remained faithful to his obligation to speak representative truth, in high and sonorous diction. But this was a new night now, a postwar night lit by cities and industry, and the American Self had caught its reflection in the lorgnette of a fashionable woman in the front row.
As the California tour rolled on, Mark Twain grew more acquainted with what worked, what stirred his audiences, made them abandon their reticence in a wash of laughter; what made them abandon themselves, made them one with him, made them his. He noticed the people in the seats, and he noticed how they noticed him. It was an intimate and extra-verbal communion, and Mark Twain was among the first, and surely the most gifted, of those who played with it on the lecture stage. In some ways it was erotic: a process of creating tension and release. He toyed with the libido.
The eroticism was hardly overt—and certainly unstipulated. (There is no record of his female fans heaving their pantaloons onstage.) Yet a current existed; women responded to him in a sensual way. Years later, at an 1871 gig in Brooklyn, he had several ladies alternately cooing and pouting: “My, what a handsome young man to be a lecturer!”; “He isn’t a bit funny now he’s married”; “He’s got a baby and that takes all the humor out of him.”12
He faced colorful competition. The lucrative post–Civil War American lecture circuit was filling up. Authors, preachers, feminists, temperance shouters, war heroes, divas, phrenologists, paleontologists, out-and-out buffoons—everybody wanted to get in on the act. They declaimed, they hectored, they trilled, they wept, they testified, they did somersaults, they showed off their fancy clothes, they paced and strutted and gulped water from their pitchers. At times, they even lectured. They achieved varying degrees of renown, even star-quality, in the public mind. Yet even the most accomplished performed at a certain remove from the spectators in front of them; a remove as much psychic as physical. An irreducible taboo remained in place, the taboo of sensual intimacy. Droll, righteous, and passionately reformist the lecturers might be, but only from the far side of an unbreachable gulf between the platform and the people.
Mark Twain broke the taboo by breaking the proscenium and making contact with each individual in the hall. (“He…seeks to establish a sort of button-hole connection,” wrote one reviewer.) His electric intimacy manifested itself from the moment of his debut on the Academy of Music stage. The swank San Franciscans had begun tittering before he’d uttered a word. He’d had a reputation as a funny man, but in print. He seduced his live audience largely through the tension of his mannerisms: his lingering, silent gaze from face to face across the footlights (an effect of stage fright, in that first appearance, but soon quite expertly mediated); his fingers caressing his wild sprawl of auburn hair and tugging at his mustache; his hands wringing each other; the long, hypnotic drawl as he began to speak, lazily and dreamlike—and then the sudden release: the dazzling “snapper” that came from the caged furies inside, electrifying the crowd, making them “jump out of their skins” and erupt into applause and what he called “artillery laughter,” complete with “Congreve rockets and bomb-shell explosions.”
Mark Twain broke a lot of rules and traditions in these early Western gigs—words like “coarseness” tended to show up in some of the more conservative reviews, including Bret Harte’s. He continued to dress flamboyantly sloppily, slouching onstage in the same lumpy suits, retro string ties, and “heavy arctics” on his feet that he wore around town. (He eventually switched to the regulation claw-hammer coat; by the end of his career he was looking almost Beatle-like in his red Oxford gown, or his white suits and red socks. He once expressed the wish that he could wear a multicolored garment that fit the description of a dashiki.)
His drawling voice could take on a raw, distinctly non-“oratorical” rasp; one reporter compared it to a little buzz saw slowly grinding inside a corpse. He understood shock value: he frequently promised to demonstrate what he meant by “cannibalism” by eating a baby onstage, if someone would hand him one. No one ever did.
He had the impulses of a rock star, which is to say, the impulses of a child. An audience member who kept his hat on during a performance got him crazy, and he railed about it to the local press. He screamed at hotel help, slammed his door repeatedly in the middle of the night to get an innkeeper’s attention, berated local hosts and chairmen who did not introduce him properly; he sometimes shooed them away and introduced himself. Once he tossed all his silk shirts out of an upstairs window. He occasionally canceled dates at the last minute. He barnstormed the country on a “Twins of Genius” tour with a fellow performer; he feuded with his co-star; smashed a window shutter with his fists over a scheduling problem. At the end of the tour, the other performer referred to him as a bad dream.
As for what Mark Twain had to say on the platform, it wasn’t exclusively humorous. Mood shifting was essential to his aura. He came to understand that much of his onstage power derived from his ability to keep the audience on its toes, play with its emotions. He could bring the crowd to a hush with a lyrical aria—for example, his stunning description of the volcanic eruption at Kilauea. In other moments, he would begin what seemed to be a solemn train of thought, then pause, and turn it to the absurd with a quick “snapper
,” à la Ward. Then he would unleash a succession of comic mots and descriptions that ratcheted the hilarity in the house to the point of hysteria. He revised his material constantly, building on experience. He would tweak and experiment for the rest of his lecturing days. He experimented with a kind of pre-electronic reverb: somewhere in the Comstock, he trotted out an old familiar anecdote concerning the famous editor Horace Greeley and a local stagecoach driver, the punch line of which was: “ ‘Keep your seat, Horace, and I’ll get you there on time’—and you bet he did, too, what was left of him.” The story’s best laugh-getting days were behind it, which was exactly the point. Mark Twain told it straight-faced at the outset of one lecture, and the crowd sat on its hands. He began it again. And then again. And yet again, until the audience grasped that “unfunny” was the heart of the tension, and laughed at that.
UPON HIS return to San Francisco, Sam began to plan his long-desired exit from the West. The showman in him wanted to make a grand departure that would buoy his reputation back on the Atlantic seaboard, from where he imagined that he would travel to Europe and then into India and China (where Anson Burlingame would be his host and guide), writing letters to American papers along the way. A more familiar incentive drove him as well: cash. The box office from his California-Washoe tour had mostly been sponged up by his creditors. Financially, he was running in place.