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CHAPTER TWO

Journalist and Lecturer

Samuel Clemens was now to make California his home for two and a half years. Welcomed by the Golden Era as “The Sage-Brush Humorist from Silver Land,”¹ he shortly made his presence felt by speaking at a ceremony at Maguire’s Opera House. The occasion was less than extraordinary: the presentation of a cane to a marine engineer who had visited San Francisco in order to resurrect a steamship that had sunk in the bay. The speech, published the next day on the front page of the San Francisco Alta California (June 13, 1864), was intended to be amusing; “Mark Twain” was clearly a humorist. He chose to speak on behalf of “your countless friends, the noble sons of the forest,” such as the Diggers, the Pi-Utes, the Washoes, and the Shoshones, whom he described as “visibly black from the wear and tear of out door life, from contact with the impurities of the earth, and from absence of soap and their natural indifference to water.”

Clemens liked California; he wrote to his mother and sister, “This superb climate agrees with me. And it ought, after living where I was never out of sight of snow-banks 24 hours during 3 years.” Later, when he had experienced New England, he was less enthusiastic. In Roughing It he complained, “No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful” (chap. 56). But while he was there, he expressed great satisfaction with the place. In “‘Mark Twain’ in the Metropolis,” written sometime in June for the Territorial Enterprise, he described “the birds, and the flowers, and the Chinamen, and the sunshine, and all things that go to make life happy” in San Francisco. For a longtime resident of Washoe, he explained, life at San Francisco’s Occidental Hotel is “Heaven on the half shell.”

In Roughing It, Mark Twain remembered this time fondly:

I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the vulgar honesty to confess it.… I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polked and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo. (chap. 58)

He also wrote two striking pieces for the Golden Era, published in June and July, “The Evidence in the Case of Smith vs. Jones” and “Early Rising, as Regards Excursions to the Cliff House.” The first of these anticipates “Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral” in Roughing It; here Mark Twain recounts the absurdly contradictory testimony by witnesses to a fight in language designed to entertain the speaker and outrage the judge, who objects to such expressions as “Busted him in the snoot” and “D—n you old tripe.” He insists that they “refrain from the embellishments of metaphor and allegory as far as possible.” The effect is to make the judge’s formality ridiculous. This sketch seems to have been Mark Twain’s longest to date, some seventeen thousand words. It makes heavy use of dialogue, with colorful characters adding to the humor.

“Early Rising, As Regards Excursions to the Cliff House” attacks romanticism. Mark Twain repudiates the maxim “Early to bed, and early to rise, / Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” by contrasting the anticipated pleasures of an early-morning trip to the beach with the actuality of the experience. He joins George Washington, who he finds also stood in disagreement with Benjamin Franklin’s maxim. The “gorgeous spectacle of the sun in the dawn of his glory; the fresh perfume of flowers still damp with dew”—Mark Twain is having none of it. The misadventures of his trip were “only just and natural consequences of the absurd experiment of getting up at an hour in the morning when all God-fearing Christians ought to be in bed.” The sketch epitomizes the identity that Mark Twain presented in 1864: lazy, skeptical, self-indulgent, open, outspoken, humorous without trying to be funny. If he at this time wished to appear authentic, he was successful; his lack of pretense is charming.

Fortunately, when Clemens arrived in San Francisco after his hasty departure from Nevada, he had a convenient place to head for regular work, the Daily Morning Call, a newspaper with a circulation of about ten thousand, largest of the five local newspapers. Employed as a reporter from June to October 1864, he was responsible for reporting on local events, and a file of the paper survives. Because he was not often writing as “Mark Twain,” it is not always easy to distinguish his anonymous writings from those of other reporters: Edgar Branch has published a collection of over two hundred pieces.² Although Clemens’s work on the Call did not allow the kind of freedom he had enjoyed in Nevada, he produced many amusing pieces. A particularly playful one explains how the earthquakes of June 23 affected the city. Entertainment was to be welcomed, in his view, even from a near catastrophe.

There were three distinct shocks, two of which were very heavy, and appeared to have been done on purpose, but the third did not amount to much. Heretofore our earthquakes—as all old citizens experienced in this sort of thing will recollect—have been distinguished by a soothing kind of undulating motion, like the roll of waves on the sea, but we are happy to state that they are shaking her up from below now. The shocks last night came straight up from that direction; and it is sad to reflect, in these spiritual times, that they might possibly have been freighted with urgent messages from some of our departed friends.³

Another piece may amuse those who remember Huck Finn’s analysis of the loot picked up on the steamboat Walter Scott. Here Mark Twain catalogs the contents of a drunkard’s pockets:

Two slabs of old cheese; a double handful of various kinds of crackers; seven peaches; a box of lip-salve, bearing marks of great age; an onion; two dollars and sixty-five cents, in two purses, (the odd money being considered as circumstantial evidence that the defendant had been drinking beer at five-cent houses); a soiled handkerchief; a fine-tooth comb; also one of coarser pattern; a cucumber pickle, in an imperfect state of preservation; a leather string; an eye-glass, such as prospectors use; one buckskin glove; a printed ballad, “Call me pet names”; an apple; part of a dried herring; a copy of the Boston Weekly Journal, and copies of several San Francisco newspapers; and in each and every pocket he had two or three chunks of tobacco, and also one in his mouth of such remarkable size as to render his articulation confused and uncertain.⁴

Among other still-readable items are reports on horse races, theatrical performances, political meetings, and sensational crimes. There are no sketches. The one distinctive development to be noted is that at this time the writer was becoming sensitive to political corruption and the incompetence of public officials. The account of his work on the Call in his autobiography tells how he prepared a fiery report on how “some hoodlums chasing and stoning a China-man who was heavily laden with the weekly wash of his Christian customers” were observed by a policeman “with an amused interest—nothing more.” His story did not appear, however, because, as the editor explained to Clemens, the Call had to respect the prejudices of its readers. But he did manage to criticize, though briefly, the Call policy in the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle.⁵

When work for the Call became tedious, Clemens hired an assistant. But in October he “retired” “by solicitation. Solicitation of the proprietor,” as he put it in his autobiography.⁶ Some of his energies at this time were going into the preparation of a book, apparently about his Nevada experiences, since in a letter written to Orion and his wife (dated September 28, 1864) he noted that he expected to ask Orion to send the “files” that he kept of his writings.

Bret Harte had just begun to edit the Californian, a rival to the Golden Era—Harte being an established California writer who had been there since 1854. In the fall, Clemens began to contribute regularly, and he and Harte began a long association, including, much later, the coauthorship of a play. Later still, Harte provided his biographer with a vivid description of what Clemens looked like when they first met. Harte’s account suggests that when Clemens moved to the East, he would want to change his appearance considerably.

His head 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. Barnes [editor of the Morning Call] introduced him as Mr. Sam. Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number of newspapers contributed over the signature “Mark Twain.”… He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was itself irresistible.⁷

For a time Clemens enjoyed the relationship, but eventually he came to despise Harte for his insincerity, callousness, and dishonesty, as we shall see.⁸

At the Call, Clemens had been paid twenty-five dollars a week. For a weekly article for the Californian, which Clemens in a September letter to his mother called “the best weekly literary paper in the United States,” he was paid just fifty dollars a month. Although little of what he wrote at this time has lasting interest, it was a crucial period in Clemens’s life. At last he could write at length and at leisure, and from October I through December 3, each issue of the Californian contained a piece by him. In the spring and summer of 1865, he was again writing for the Californian. He chose to write accounts of adventures, real and imaginary: visits to the Industrial Fair, to the Cliff House to see a whale on the beach, and to the opera. Several pieces deserve attention. In the Californian, one is called “Whereas”; later versions, such as the much-abridged one in Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, are entitled “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man.” Here Mark Twain looks askance at the subject of romantic love. Alleging that his advice has been sought by one Aurelia Marie, of San Jose, he recounts her sad story. She is “almost heart-broken by the misfortunes she has undergone.” Her fiancé lost first his good looks through smallpox, then a leg by walking into a well, then one arm by “premature discharge of a Fourth-of-July cannon,” then the other to a carding machine. Her heart was “almost crushed by these latter calamities.” Then her lover lost his eyesight to erysipelas, next his other leg, then his scalp to Indians. What SHOULD she do? Aurelia asks. Mark Twain’s advice is that she should furnish “her mutilated lover with wooden arms and wooden legs, and a glass eye and a wig, and give him another show.” If he survives ninety days, she should marry him. Her risk will be slight, he notes, since the man will not live long—he is accident-prone.

The amusing account is black comedy. Mark Twain’s interest, however, is not in the man but in Aurelia’s responses, as is shown by the author’s matter-of-factness in describing the young man’s experiences. The focus is on Aurelia: “It was a sad day for the poor girl when she saw the surgeons reverently bearing away the sack whose use she had learned by previous experience, and her heart told her the bitter truth that some more of her lover was gone.” It is not her lover’s suffering that interests Aurelia but her own inner life. The sketch is one of young Mark Twain’s freshest and most original.

In “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier,” Mark Twain aims at a somewhat similar target. It is a burlesque of a popular type of literature of the day, the Civil War romance, in the form of a “condensed novel,” a genre then cultivated among San Francisco’s literary bohemians. Bret Harte published a volume of such parodies in 1867, and this was Mark Twain’s second “novel.” (The first is the very brief “Original Novelette,” published in the Call on July 4, 1864.) The satirist was soon to write several more, such as “The Story of the Bad Little Boy” (1865) and “The Story of the Good Little Boy” (1870). Lucretia’s story is by “M. T.,” who identifies himself as “an ardent admirer of those nice, sickly war stories in Harper’s Weekly.” He has now soared “happily into the realms of sentiment and soft emotion,” inspired by “the excellent beer manufactured at the New York Brewery.” The story tells of how Lucretia Smith, seeking to make up for her earlier rejection of her lover, devotedly tends for a long time in the hospital a wounded soldier she takes to be her man, only to discover the truth when the bandages are removed. “O confound my cats,” Lucretia exclaims, “if I haven’t gone and fooled away three mortal weeks here, snuffling and slobbering over the wrong soldier!” The sketch was widely reprinted in the East, where it hit its target resoundingly. Toned down, it was included in Mark Twain’s first book. Although the piece now seems slight and rather silly, it is another useful indication of the antiromanticism and skeptical frame of mind Clemens had developed.

Now Mark Twain was once again writing for the Enterprise, as San Francisco correspondent, and again nearly all of what he wrote is lost. Some of the pieces, it is known, criticized the San Francisco police for corruption, ineptitude, and abuse of Chinese immigrants. These made him unpopular with their chief. When Steve Gillis, for whom Clemens had stood bond after a barroom brawl, fled to Virginia City, Clemens chose to leave town, too, rather than contend with the police. On December 4, 1864, he went to the Sierra foothills, to the Mother Lode country of Calaveras County, California, where he stayed with Steve Gillis’s brother Jim at Jackass Hill and Angel’s Camp. As he put it in 1872–73, “Got too lazy to live, & too restless & enterprising. Went up to Calaveras County & worked in the surface gold diggings 3 months without result.”⁹ But there were in fact important results, for there he heard several tales that he was to make much of later. In his autobiography he recalled:

Every now and then Jim would have an inspiration, and he would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and his hands crossed behind him, and deliver himself of an elaborate impromptu lie—a fairy tale, an extravagant romance—with Dick Stoker as the hero of it as a general thing. Jim always soberly pretended that what he was relating was strictly history, veracious history, not romance. Dick Stoker, gray-headed and good-natured, would sit smoking his pipe and listen with a gentle serenity to these monstrous fabrications and never utter a protest.¹⁰

In the notebook he began to keep on New Year’s Day 1865, he recorded several items that were to serve as reminders. Among them are these: “The ‘Tragedian’ & the Burning Shame. No women admitted.” “Mountaineers in habit telling same old experiences over & over again in these little back Settlements. Like Dan’s old Ram, wh[i]ch he always drivels about when drunk.” “Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot & he couldn’t jump—the stranger’s frog won.”¹¹ The first of these would serve as the basis of one of the Duke and the King’s performances in Huckleberry Finn, and the story of the old ram would be attributed to Jim Blaine in Roughing It. The frog item would see use shortly. The notes also mention Ben Coon, a former steamboat pilot who appeared in his writings almost immediately.

Clemens left the mountains on February 25, 1865, and was back in San Francisco the next day, when in his notebook he recorded: “Home again—home again at the Occidental Hotel—find letters from ‘Artemus Ward’ asking me to write a sketch for his new book of Nevada Territory travels which is soon to come out. Too late—ought to have got the letters 3 months ago. They are dated early in November.”¹² Now Mark Twain wrote fourteen more pieces for the Californian, published between March and December. In the first of these, “An Unbiased Criticism,” he referred to his experiences in the Big Tree region of Calaveras County, where he had “a very comfortable time.” Pretending to be a review of the paintings at the new California Art Union, this sketch is a parody of art criticism, or rather what passed for criticism, for like the targets of his satire, “An Unbiased Criticism” is full of irrelevancies. By far the most engaging is a long comment from Ben Coon, who becomes one of Mark Twain’s vernacular narrators. He tells the history of his Webster’s Unabridged, which has made the rounds of the mining camps: “But what makes me mad, is that for all they are so handy about keeping her sashaying around from shanty to shanty and from camp to camp, none of’em’s ever got a good word for her.”

Soon Mark Twain renewed his attack on the genteel in a comic, imaginary “Important Correspondence” concerning the vacancy in the pulpit of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. The position was in fact open at the time, and each of Mark Twain’s “correspondents” had indeed been invited to fill it, as the San Francisco Evening Bulletin reported.¹³ Mark Twain’s letter to Bishop Hawks, D.D., of New York encourages him to take it, despite the terms, for the author argues that he has “a great deal of influence with the clergy here” and “can get them to strike for higher wages any time.” The reply concocted for the bishop is full of gratitude. Both writers suggest that they understand the game, with its formalities, pretenses, and hypocrisies. “Hawks” writes:

I threw up my parish in Baltimore, although it was paying me very handsomely, and came to New York to see how things were going in our line. I have prospered beyond my highest expectations. I selected a lot of my best sermons—old ones that had been forgotten by everybody—and once a week I let one of them off in the Church of the Annunciation here. The spirit of the ancient sermons bubbled forth with a bead on it and permeated the hearts of the congregation with a new life, such as the worn body feels when it is refreshed with rare old wine. It was a great hit. The timely arrival of the “call” from San Francisco insured success to me. The people appreciated my merits at once. A number of gentlemen immediately clubbed together and offered me $10,000 a year and agreed to purchase for me the Church of St. George the Martyr, up town, or to build a new house of worship for me if I preferred it.

Mark Twain manages to create just the right tone for the bishop, with biblical echoes and pious sentiments mixed skillfully with frank expressions of opportunism. Moreover, the satirist had his facts straight about the New York reaction to his “call.”

Following a long and witty commentary on the bishop’s letter, he promises to publish in the next issue the replies of the Rev. Phillips Brooks of Philadelphia and the Rev. Dr. Cummings of Chicago. But instead he published their telegrams, urging him not to do so and each offering five hundred dollars to discourage him. But now, he reports, he has become overwhelmed by other ambitious clergymen, each seeking his support, some even turning up to be his guests, with good appetites. The combination of affected charity and actual vulgarity makes this whole “correspondence” funny, fresh, and on target, one of the high points of Mark Twain’s writing career in California.

In these pieces he was expressing sentiments quite consistent with the values of his other pieces. He had developed a skeptical attitude and a vernacular style to go with it. Making fun of clerical ambition and the associated hypocrisy was part of the same attitude that dismissed romantic love and sentimental views of nature.

In June 1865, the Californian announced a new department, “Answers to Correspondents,” a parody of the columns featured in many periodicals then as now, though at that time literary advice was sometimes sought as well as more personal kinds of advice. Mark Twain wrote six columns and included parts of them in his 1867 Jumping Frog collection. One item is a poem, prefaced by a letter from the poet “Simon Wheeler” of Sonora, California. These demonstrate Mark Twain’s continuing interest in vernacular characters, especially narrators, and his increasing skill in rendering their language and their values. Soon Simon Wheeler would achieve wide and lasting fame.

Although some of the pieces written at this time indicate a lack of development, there are two important exceptions, a letter and a story. The letter is Clemens’s first real indication of a commitment to writing, to literature. On October 19, 1865, he shared with Orion what he called his life’s ambitions. He relates that in his early years he had been interested in becoming a pilot and a preacher; he had achieved the first goal but not the second because he had never had a call. “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.” The tone of resignation in this letter presumably comes partly because he had now reconciled himself to the fact that the stocks he owned were never going to be worth much, as he had strongly believed, and partly from the fact that humorists did not enjoy a good reputation on the West Coast or elsewhere. If he accepted the role of humorist, he would have to produce a new and distinctive kind of humor—literary burlesque was commonplace—in order to obtain much-needed self-respect. He did recognize that he had talent. As he told Orion, God “did His part by me—for the talent is a mighty engine when supplied with the steam of education—which I have not got.”

About the time that he wrote this letter, Mark Twain produced the first solid evidence that he had been called, nearly a year after he had heard the frog story. Two surviving false starts show that he was being very deliberate in composing this piece; he must have known that he had good materials to care for. One of these early versions, less than one thousand words, is entitled “Angel’s Camp Constable.” It deals with one of the vernacular narrator Simon Wheeler’s pet heroes. The other, too, is only a fragment; it never gets around to its announced topic. Like the version that was at last completed and published, it is a letter addressed to Artemus Ward, who—it will be recalled—had written to Clemens in the fall of 1864 asking for a sketch for his Nevada book. This second fragment, first published in 1981, is entitled “The Only Reliable Account of the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, together with some reference to the decaying city of Boomerang, and a few general remarks concerning Mr. Simon Wheeler, a resident of the said city in the day of its Grandeur.” The fact that the story was nine months in gestation suggests that the writer was just beginning to realize what he was to emphasize often in his later years in his comments about literature, notably in “How to Tell a Story,” that the “humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of telling.”

The version of Mark Twain’s story that was published in the New York Saturday Press of November 18, 1865, is entitled “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” (It had arrived too late for publication in Artemus Ward, His Travels.) Told with infinite care, the story is narrated by two tellers, Mark Twain, who introduces his account somewhat pompously, and Simon Wheeler, the garrulous vernacular storyteller, who sets forth his story for Mark Twain’s ears. Simon Wheeler, the erstwhile poet, was kin to Ben Coon of Angel’s Camp, who (according to Mark Twain’s 1897 account) had told him the story.¹⁴ The addition of a second narrator, carefully characterized, enriches the sketch greatly. There is irony in both tellings. The writer pretends that he has had to put up with a preposterous bore as the result of Artemus Ward’s request that he look up the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley; and Simon Wheeler, whom he meets on his search, pretends that there is nothing funny about the story he tells in response. Wheeler possessed “the first virtue of a comedian,” the term used in “‘Mark Twain’ in the Metropolis” (1864), “which is to do humorous things with grave decorum and without seeming to know that they are funny.” Moreover, Wheeler’s artfully told story seems endless and pointless. A double irony allows readers to feel superior to the narrator, although an alert one sees the writer is making sport of portraying himself as well.

The story focuses on the narrator as victim, since victimization is also a theme of the story. Jim Smiley, the optimistic and compulsive gambler, always looking for a little excitement, can be fooled by a stranger because he lacks the caution of the experienced Westerner. But before Simon Wheeler reveals Smiley’s gullibility in the climax of the yarn, he creates interest in the gambler, as well as in his animals, exaggerated to heroic proportions. The story moves from a catalog of Jim’s interests, including chicken fights and straddle-bug races, to a discussion of his horse’s surprising abilities and the distinct personality of his dog, the well-named Andrew Jackson. Now Wheeler is ready to tell about Smiley’s frog, Dan’l Webster. Wheeler comments, admiringly, “You never see a frog so modest and straightfor’ard as he was, for all he was so gifted.”

As the story moves to its climax, the narration moves to drama, and we hear conversations between Jim and the stranger, whose coolness more than matches Jim’s studied indifference. Jim thinks he has entrapped the stranger when the latter observes, “I don’t see no points about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.” Jim’s search for a frog for the stranger, to compete with Dan’l, provides the stranger with time to fill what was to become known as the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County “pretty near up to his chin” with quail-shot. Thus the stranger’s frog is permitted to win, whereupon the winner repeats, again coolly, “I don’t see no points about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog,” and leaves.

It is Mark Twain’s control of point of view that makes the story so rich. We see the narrator’s view of Simon Wheeler, and Wheeler’s view of Jim Smiley; each is consistent, and subtle. The story gave the writer a new sense of his capabilities. Even before it was published, the New York Round Table in an article on “American Humor and Humorists” had called him “foremost” of the “merry gentlemen of the California press.” Clemens saw the article, for it was quoted in at least two San Francisco publications. In January, he sent his mother a clipping from the New York correspondent of the San Francisco Alta California: “Mark Twain’s story in the Saturday Press of November 18, called ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,’ has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark. I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near. It is voted the best thing of the day. Cannot the Californian afford to keep Mark all to itself? It should not let him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the California Press.” The Californian of December 16 reprinted the piece.

Mark Twain’s Eastern reputation was spread through a series of eight pieces appearing in the New York Weekly Review in 1865 and 1866, the first being an account of the October 7 San Francisco earthquake. But there was no sudden change in the author’s fortunes. He continued to write for the Enterprise, many of his letters being reprinted in the Golden Era. In the letter to Orion about his call to humorous literature, he announced that he was beginning work as a reviewer for the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle. Although it was the earliest version of San Francisco’s current leading newspaper, it was a poor thing, a four-page advertising handout, in which Mark Twain’s work consisted of squibs and fillers in addition to reviews—all anonymous. Only one short sketch appeared there, “Earthquake Almanac.” The pages of the Chronicle mention Mark Twain frequently during his two months of employment, but usually he is identified as the Enterprise correspondent. He also contributed two pieces to the Examiner and one piece, ridiculing women’s fashions, to the Evening Bulletin.

Six new pieces appeared in the Californian in late 1865 and early 1866. One deserves mention. “The Christmas Fireside for Good Little Boys and Girls. By Grandfather Twain,” subtitled “The Story of the Bad Little Boy That Bore a Charmed Life,” appeared on December 23. The story takes all the conventions of the moralistic children’s fable and naughtily turns them upside down. This bad little boy has none of the appeal of Tom Sawyer; in fact, he is thoroughly wicked. “And he grew up, and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality, and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature.” Here Mark Twain presents himself as the satirical outsider.

Such sketches required a fertile imagination; finding something to write about was a constant strain, and he was barely making a living. He was frustrated. In Roughing It, he explains that “my interest in my work was gone; for my [Enterprise] correspondence being a daily one, without rest or respite, I got unspeakably tired of it. I wanted another change” (chap. 62).¹⁵ Clemens still had in mind the idea of a book, which he mentioned in a letter to his mother and sister on January 20, 1866, but “nobody knows what it is going to be about but just myself.” His boredom is reflected in his surviving Enterprise letters. After complaining in his January letter that his life was uneventful and that he wished he had accepted an invitation to take a round trip on the Ajax to the Sandwich Islands (the Hawaiian Islands), he visited Sacramento, and there the Daily Union commissioned him to write twenty or thirty letters from Hawaii. He was to go on the next sailing. This experience was pivotal, for it gave him an opportunity for sustained writing. The experience and observations were a combination that would prove fruitful in his travel books and novels.

Clemens left San Francisco on March 7, 1866, and returned August 13. Concerning this visit he wrote one letter for the New York Saturday Press, one for the New York Weekly Review, and twenty-five letters to the Sacramento Union. He stayed much longer than he expected, as he explained to Will Bowen, an old friend from Hannibal days, in a May 7 letter from Maui.

I contracted with the Sacramento Union to go wherever they chose & correspond for a few months, & I had a sneaking notion they would start me east—but behold how fallible is human judgment!—they sent me to the Sandwich Islands. I look for a recall by the next mail, though, because I have written them that I cannot go all over the eight inhabited islands of the group in less than five months & do credit to myself & them, & I don’t want to spend so much time. I have been here two months, & yet have only “done” the island of Oahu & part of this island of Maui, & it is going to take me two more weeks to finish this one & at least a month to “do” the island of Hawaii & the great volcanoes—& by that time, surely, I can hear from them. But I have had a gorgeous time of it so far.

He visited only those three islands.

Later Clemens edited his Hawaiian letters into a book manuscript, but he was not able to find a publisher. (Subsequently, he revised them for inclusion as chapters 63–77 of Roughing It.) While readers of that book usually find the Hawaii chapters weaker than the earlier ones on Nevada and California, the explanation is simply that he was a rapidly maturing writer and that the earlier chapters were written after Clemens’s trip to Europe and Middle East and the publication of The Innocents Abroad.

Mark Twain’s growth from a writer of sketches and news stories, humorous and otherwise, created a change that would lead to severe tensions in his career. Hitherto, in Nevada and California, he had been a critic of the dominant culture. He had chided the clergy, the courts, and the police. He had ridiculed women’s fashions. He had even criticized children and romantic young women. He had presented himself as an associate of the disgusting “Unreliable.” He was an outsider, a bohemian. In the increasingly sophisticated San Francisco, he was identified as being from Washoe, and he constantly reminded his readers of his origins. He was lazy, a loafer. As a writer he was a hoaxer and a humorist, a man of limited education and uncertain ambition. All this was to change, at least on the surface.

In Hawaii, he discovered, he was a man of importance, on an assignment that gave him prestige. As a result he associated with people of a sort that he would not have known on the mainland. He visited the king; he met the American minister, and he was befriended by Anson Burlingame, who was on his way to an important position in China. When Burlingame asked to see his writings, Clemens provided, as he told his mother in June, “pretty much everything I ever wrote.” Soon Burlingame was helping him with a news story about a fire on board the clipper ship Hornet; his account was to spread his reputation. Because Clemens was in bed with aggravated boils, Burlingame arranged to have him taken to the hospital on a stretcher to interview the survivors. Then, as he explained many years later in “My Début as a Literary Person,” he “spent four hours arranging the notes in their proper order, then wrote all night and beyond it.” By nine o’clock the next morning, he was able to get his story on a departing ship; his “scoop” was given space on the front page of the Sacramento Union.

Burlingame advised him, “Avoid inferiors. Seek your comradeships among your superiors in intellect and character; always climb.”¹⁶ The advice was to be heeded, and Samuel Clemens would climb, sometimes leaving Mark Twain far behind, often with unfortunate results for the writer—and perhaps also for the person.

Mark Twain was still a humorist, but the invention of a companion for the traveling writer, Mr. Brown, permitted him to appear much less vulgar himself. To Brown he assigned anything crude or earthy he wished to say. This technique he may have picked up from the English humorist William Combe, who created a sentimental traveler who was accompanied by a servant with a quite different point of view, or, more likely, from Charles Dickens, whose Mr. Pickwick and his servant, Sam Weller, are of the same pattern. (Clemens had read Pickwick Papers while in Nevada.)¹⁷ Reporting the adventures of two travelers gave Mark Twain two levels of action: what the travelers saw, and the byplay between Brown and himself. Mark Twain calls Brown “this bitter enemy of sentiment.” When Brown is nauseated but unable to find relief, Mark Twain reads him sentimental poetry. “‘It is enough,’ said Brown, and threw up everything he had eaten for three days.” When Mark Twain reports how much he likes the islands, Brown reads the account and proposes that he go on to describe the “cockroaches, and fleas, and lizards, and red ants, and scorpions, and spiders, and mosquitoes, and missionaries.”¹⁸

The best passages are those in which Mark Twain is neither the admiring visitor nor his vulgar companion, but the witty, skeptical, ironic commentator—the writer created by his Western experience. For example, on the subject of the old pagan religion, he observes that there is

a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old by-gone days, when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it to him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice—in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how impossibly beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance, he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose, showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal Summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell! And it inclines a right thinking man to weep rather than to laugh when he reflects how surprised they must have been when they got there.¹⁹

Experience in the Pacific islands fed Mark Twain’s religious skepticism as it had for Herman Melville before him.

Despite their humor, the Hawaiian letters are now chiefly interesting as historical accounts. They treat geography, the character of the native Hawaiians, politics, industry, and religion. The visitor makes a strong case for San Francisco becoming a whaling center to replace Honolulu. He makes other proposals, such as the use of “coolie” labor in the production of sugar.

While in Hawaii, Mark Twain began a little-known connection with the short-lived Daily Hawaiian Herald; from September 5 till December 13 he provided seven contributions, mostly short.²⁰

On his way back to California in July 1866, Clemens had the good fortune of finding the surviving captain and two passengers of the Hornet and was able to copy their diaries. These, with his account in the Union, were the basis of “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat.” Clemens was especially proud of this account of the burning of the ship and the survivors’ story, as he explained much later in “My Début as a Literary Person,” for to qualify for this exalted term, “he must appear in a magazine.” His article appeared in what he considered “the most important one in New York,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. He proudly called the publication of this article (not the “Jumping Frog”) his literary debut, and he expected thereby to spread his name “all over the world, now, in this one jump.” The article appeared in the December 1866 issue but without a signature; in the index the author was identified as “Mark Swain.” The author was indeed a “Literary Person,” but “a buried one, buried alive.”

In California, Sam Clemens found that he had some money for once: he collected eight hundred dollars from the Union. He also had an improved and widened reputation. But he was not sure what to do with himself. In his notebook for August 13 he recorded: “San Francisco—Home again. No—not home again—in prison again—and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped, & so dreary with toil & care & business anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!”²¹ The passage suggests that Clemens had much in common with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn: a love of freedom and a hatred of routine. He needed excitement and found it where he could. He took advantage of his reputation as an authority on Hawaii to lecture on the subject, and on October 2 he drew a crowd of perhaps eighteen hundred to Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. This was not Clemens’s first public lecture, for he had contributed his services to a fund-raising effort for a Carson City church in 1864, but it was the first intended to be profitable to the lecturer. His handbill ominously warned, “The Trouble Begins at 8 O’Clock.” Many years later, in 1904, he remembered,

A true prophecy. The trouble certainly did begin at eight, when I found myself in front of the only audience I had ever faced, for the fright which pervaded me from head to foot was paralyzing. It lasted two minutes and was as bitter as death; the memory of it is indestructible, but it had its compensations, for it made me immune from timidity before audiences for all time to come.²²

This lecture was such a success that soon he was speaking on the same topic, with variations, in Sacramento, Marysville, Grass Valley, and eventually in Virginia City, Carson City, and other Nevada towns. Although it contained information, the lecture was full of comic digressions and asides. “It is not safe to come to any important matter in an entirely direct way. When a young gentleman is about to talk to a young woman about matrimony he don’t go straight at it. He begins by talking about the weather. I have done that many a time.”²³

Making direct contact with his audience, standing before them not so much as the conveyor of information but as the public personality “Mark Twain,” now one of the best known writers in the West, Clemens was rapidly discovering, by trial and error, what it was he could do best. For a good while, lecturing was stimulating, exciting. On December 10 he had the honor of making a special appearance in San Francisco at the request of the governors of California and Nevada, among others. The lecturer was nearly always able to avoid pomposity; it was not difficult for this drawling humorist, for he could control an audience.

The discovery of his talent as a lecturer was to have an important effect on Clemens’s life. It focused the writer’s attention on how he presented himself but diverted his energies from writing at several points in his career. He became very much in demand as a lecturer, and lecturing was lucrative, a ready source of funds. Eventually he was to switch to reading selections from his writings, as Dickens had done. But in time Clemens’s laziness, the enormous success of his 1869 book, and his dislike of routine would keep him from an extended career on the platform.

His Hawaiian experience gave Mark Twain a new role as a lecturer and as a writer, that of mock-serious moralist. In a short piece in the Californian, dated August 20, he applied for the editorship of that journal as “The Moral Phenomenon,” a title he says he was given by the Sandwich Island missionaries. He had himself served, he declares, as “a missionary to the Sandwich Islands, and I have got the hang of that sort of thing to a fraction.” As editor, he would replace sentimental tales, wit, humor, and elevated literature with morality, just what he believes is really called for.²⁴ If Clemens was now ambitious, ready to undertake the social climbing Burlingame had urged, he was not yet willing to stifle his irreverence. He now added to the cluster of Mark Twain’s attributes the pretense of being, sometimes, a moralist.

For five and a half eventful years, Clemens had not been home to Missouri. Tired of the West, he contracted with the San Francisco Alta California to supply a weekly letter “on such subjects and from such places as will best suit him,” during a trip that would, according to the expectations of the Alta proprietors, take Clemens to Europe, India, China, Japan, and back to San Francisco.²⁴ He left for New York on December 15, 1866. The Alta published his farewell the day before his departure. He declared that he was leaving San Francisco “for a season… to go back to that common home we all tenderly remember in our waking hours and fondly visit in dreams of the night—a home that is familiar to my recollections but will be an unknown land to my unaccustomed eyes.”²⁵ He wrote to his family that he was “leaving more friends behind … than any newspaperman that ever sailed out of the Golden Gate.”

In the next eight months, twenty-six letters signed “Mark Twain” appeared in the Alta. Although he did nothing more with them, they were collected in 1940 into a book aptly titled Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown, since the traveler is accompanied, at least in the early pages, by his vulgar companion. Not as well known as the Hawaiian letters and probably not taken as seriously by their author (who was not now traveling in order to write for a newspaper), these letters are nonetheless attractive and significant in the growth of the writer. Through them one follows Clemens on his trip from San Francisco to Nicaragua, across the isthmus, then up to Key West and on to New York. On the first leg of the journey he met Captain Edgar Wakeman, who was to appear again and again in Mark Twain’s works, including Roughing It, where he is Captain Ned Blakely, and in “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” which the writer began in 1868 but did not publish until the end of his life. In his Alta letters he had a good deal to say about Wakeman, but the more hearty comment, though incomplete, is in his notebook: “I had rather travel with that portly, hearty, jolly, boisterous, good-natured old sailor, Capt Ned Wakeman than with any other man I ever came across. He never drinks, & never plays cards; he never swears, except in the privacy of his own quarters, with a friend or so, & then his feats of blasphemy are calculated to fill the hearer with awe & admiration. His yarns—” Here he broke off.²⁶

Later, long after he found it difficult, if not impossible, to call up his early literary personality, Mark Twain was able to return to the spirit of his earlier self by the use of a vernacular narrator, and a favorite was Captain Wakeman. In one of his Alta letters, Mark Twain lets Wakeman tell tall tales of rats. Here Wakeman tells how rats saved his life by indicating that a ship was not safe.

We were going home passengers from the Sandwich Islands in a brannew brig, on her third voyage, and our trunks were below—he [his friend Josephus] went with me—laid over one vessel to do it—because he warn’t no sailor, and he liked to be conveyed by a man that was—felt safer, you understand—and the brig was sliding out between the buoys, and her headline was paying out ashore—there was a woodpile right where it was made fast on the pier—when up come the biggest rat—as big as an ordinary cat, he was, and darted out on that line and cantered for the shore! and up come another! and another! and another! and away they galloped over the hawser, each one treading on t’other’s tail, till they were so thick you couldn’t see a thread of cable, and there was a procession of ’em three hundred yards long over the levee like a streak of pismires, and the Kanakas [Hawaiians], some throwing sticks from that woodpile and chunks of lava and coral at ’em and knocking ’em endways every shot—but do you suppose it made any difference to them rats?—not a particle—not a particle on earth, bless you!—they’d smelt trouble!—they’d smelt it by their unearthly, supernatural instinct!—they wanted to go, and they never let up till the last rat was ashore out of that brannew beautiful brig.²⁷

Wakeman and his friend wisely followed the rats’ example and thereby saved their lives; the ship was never seen again. In the Alta letters he is alternately Wakeman and Waxman, though Mark Twain insisted that all the names he used were fictitious.

The trip to New York was by way of Nicaragua, which took two days to cross on “horseback, muleback, and four-mules ambulances,” with Clemens traveling by ambulance or “mud wagons.”²⁸ On board the ship that then took them from Nicaragua, cholera broke out among the steerage passengers and soon spread. There were several deaths. Many passengers left the ship when it landed at Key West. On January 12, 1867, the ship reached New York.

What he would do next was not clear to the journalist. Three days after he arrived in New York, Clemens wrote to E. P. Hingston, who had been Artemus Ward’s manager, to report that he was planning a lecture tour but needed Hingston to manage him. He wrote to Orion’s wife from New York in February that he had been made good offers by newspapermen, and he arranged for the New York Weekly Review to publish five of his Sandwich Island letters. By early March he had discovered that “Prominent Brooklynites are getting up a great European pleasure excursion for the coming summer” (p. 111), as he explained to his California readers. His account describes at length how he and a fellow journalist had visited the chief officer of the excursion, with his friend entertaining himself by introducing the Rev. Mark Twain of San Francisco. Playing along, Clemens explained, “I have latterly been in the missionary business.” Clemens’s friend elaborated on the joke and arranged for him to preach on the vessel while at sea. The next day Clemens went back to book passage for himself and reveal his true identity. The cruise was intended to have a strong religious orientation, with a visit to the Holy Land as a feature. When the letter describing all this appeared in the Alta, readers were notified by the editor that Mark Twain’s plans had been authorized by his employers. He would leave for Europe in June.

In the interim, in March, Clemens went on to Missouri, where he lectured in St. Louis on the Sandwich Islands and published a series of funny pieces on “Female Suffrage”²⁹ and then went on to Hannibal, where he also lectured.³⁰ His visit to his hometown caused him to recall Jimmy Finn and the excitement he brought to Hannibal. Finn was to be portrayed as Huck’s “pap.” How close to fact the portrait of the town drunkard is in the novel may be suggested by this 1867 account of Finn’s reformation and its aftermath.

Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, reformed, and that broke up the only saloon in the village. But the temperance people liked it; they were willing enough to sacrifice public prosperity to public morality. And so they made much of Jimmy Finn—dressed him up in new clothes, and had him out to breakfast and to dinner, and so forth, and showed him off as a great living curiosity—a shining example of the power of temperance doctrines when earnestly and eloquently set forth. Which was all very well, you know, and sounded well, and looked well in print but Jimmy Finn couldn’t stand it. He got remorseful about the loss of his liberty; and then he got melancholy from thinking about it so much; and after that, he got drunk. He got awfully drunk in the chief citizen’s house, and the next morning that house was as if the swine had tarried in it. (p. 214)

Perhaps because of this Hannibal visit Mark Twain soon wrote up another anecdote from his boyhood memories. A request for a contribution to the New York Sunday Mercury resulted in “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats.” While he had some references to boyhood memories in the Alta and elsewhere, notably his experience as a “Cadet of Temperance,” this is the first extended piece on the subject. The hero, or victim, is Sam’s bashful friend Jim, some sixteen years of age, whose efforts one winter night to chase away noisy cats that had awakened him from his sleep leads him on to an icy roof in nothing but his short shirt. He slips and ends up in the midst of a group of girls having a candy pull. The story purports to be, however, not what the author remembers but a story he heard from Simon Wheeler, who had once again caught his visitor and made him listen. In this comic story, the theme is humiliation, but pain and pleasure are artfully mixed. While Wheeler takes pleasure in Jim’s acute embarrassment, his humor also helps him to preserve his sense of proportion—and the reader’s, too.³¹ The story was widely reprinted. Mark Twain liked the story so much that he retold it twice, each time with modifications, in an 1872 speech and in his autobiography.³²

In the Alta letters, the writer reports the limited success of his ambitions to publish a book. When the publishers of Artemus Ward’s collection (in which the “Jumping Frog” was to have appeared) rejected his manuscript, Charles Henry Webb, former editor of the Californian and now in New York City, arranged to publish The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches in late April. Described as “Edited by John Paul,” Webb’s pen name, it contains twenty-seven pieces. The author and Webb revised the sketches and stories selected for publication by removing slang, local references, and allusions to gambling, alcohol, sex, and damnation. This first censorship was largely self-inflicted.³³ The prefatory advertisement in the volume explains playfully that “the somewhat fragmentary character of many of the sketches” resulted from “detaching them from serious and moral essays with which they were woven and entangled” in the writings of the man known as “the Moralist of the Main.” In his Alta letter, Mark Twain praises the “truly gorgeous frog” on the cover, so beautiful that maybe it will be well to “publish the frog and leave the book out” (p. 158).

The writer made nothing from the sales of his first book, to his considerable disappointment. In December 1870, he wrote to F. S. Drake that he had “fully expected the ‘Jumping Frog’ to sell 50,000 copies & it only sold 4,000.” But unbeknownst to him, the publication benefited him considerably. It was pirated by the English publishers George Routledge and Sons and John Camden Hotten, who sold more than 40,000 copies. Moreover, the volume received favorable reviews in England.³⁴

Neither from the Frog collection nor from the Alta letters of the period does one get a strong sense of Mark Twain’s identity as a writer. He appears particularly divided on the question of his social standing. Did he want to climb, as Burlingame had urged? He had discreetly cleaned up his earlier pieces for book publication. He was sensitive to the differences between East and West, as his comments in an Alta letter show: Sut Lovingood’s collection of humorous sketches “will sell well in the West, but the Eastern people will call it coarse and possibly taboo it” (p. 221). Was he to be of the West or of the East? His fortunes seemed to be carrying him east, and his comments in his letters about his New York experience seem to show an increasing liking for it. And New York was where he must succeed. “Make your mark in New York,” he wrote to the Alta, “and you are a made man. With a New York endorsement you may travel the country over … but without it you are speculating on a dangerous issue” (p. 176). On the other hand, he was willing to describe the night he spent in jail as a result of trying to stop a fight: he seems to have enjoyed meeting the prisoners there. He delighted in the conversation of bootblacks; their speech and sentiments are reported appreciatively. He is gladdened that his “old Washoe instincts that have lain asleep in my bosom so long are waking up here in the midst of this late and unaccountable freshet of blood-letting that has broken out in the East.” The newspapers are full of violence—murders, suicides, assassinations, fights. “It is a wonderful state of things,” he reports (p. 232). The coarseness that he had identified with, even cultivated, in the West—what part was it to have in the continuing development of the literary personality of Mark Twain? Samuel Clemens obviously did not know.

Mr. Brown was disappearing from his Alta letters. He appears frequently in the earlier ones, but later he makes appearances only when Mark Twain seems at a loss for something to write about. He is absent from the non-humorous letters written in May, one about a visit to the Bible House of the American Bible Society, one about an asylum for the blind. These institutions could scarcely be treated comically, and the writer had decided to report on more serious subjects. When Mark Twain visits an exhibition at the Academy of Design, he does feel free to make jokes and profess pride in his ignorance: he is “glad the old masters are dead, and I only wish they had died sooner” (p. 239). But his comments are not vulgar or outspoken, as they would be later, when he saw the old masters’ paintings in Europe. He was even now working his way to a position that he was to set forth more fully eight years later in “Old Times on the Mississippi.” Here he writes:

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art, and ignorant also of surgery. Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes, and surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghasdy stack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease. The very point in a picture that fascinates me with its beauty, is to the cultured artist a monstrous crime against the laws of coloring; and the very flush that charms me in a lovely face, is, to the critical surgeon, nothing but a sign hung out to advertise a decaying lung. Accursed be all such knowledge. I want none of it. (p. 238)

Later he would compare the unromantic outlook of the physician and that of the steamboat pilot, who can no longer appreciate the beauty of the river.

This appreciation of the blessings of innocence and ignorance contrasts sharply with another observation, one that shows he had not forgotten that his Western experiences had led him to shed some of his illusions. He writes, “I am waiting patiently to hear that they have ordered General Connor out to polish off those Indians, but the news never comes. He has shown that he knows how to fight the kind of Indians that God made, but I suppose the humanitarians want somebody to fight the Indians that J. Fenimore Cooper made. There is just where the mistake is. The Cooper Indians are dead—died with their creator. The kind that are left are of altogether a different breed, and cannot be successfully fought with poetry, and sentiment, and soft soap, and magnanimity” (p. 266).

Despite uncertainties about his literary identity, Mark Twain tried out a version of his Sandwich Islands lecture. He badly needed the money for the trip he was about to take.³⁵ In May he appeared at the Cooper Institute, the Athenaeum in Brooklyn, and at Irving Hall in New York, with his friend from the west Frank Fuller as manager. His topic was the Sandwich Islands; the lectures were well received, to the lecturer’s great relief. He considered these lectures “a first-rate success”; he “came out handsomely” (pp. 178–79). He had been painfully aware that there were many competing attractions.

Later he would build effectively on this success; now his real interest was the trip he was about to undertake. He wrote to his mother on June 1 of being “wild with impatience to move—move—move!” A week later he complained that he had written himself “clear out” in his letters to the Alta, “the stupidest letters that were ever written from New York.” He had written ten letters in less than three weeks, letters vastly better written than the bulk of his western journalism. He was also writing for the New York Sunday Mercury, where five pieces appeared, in addition to “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats,” and he had written for the Tribune and the Saturday Evening Express.³⁶

Presumably his impatience was chiefly over his dissatisfaction with his career as a writer and his failure to achieve any sense of fulfillment. He was thirty-one years old and had not yet discovered fully his métier. He was growing, intellectually, very fast, even though he considered himself, he wrote his mother, “so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory.” Meanwhile, his European trip was in his mind not a great opportunity but—as he wrote to his friend Will Bowen—simply an occasion for fun.