by Ben Tarnoff
But these blunders weren’t his only reason for moving to San Francisco in the spring of 1864. The big city represented more than just a refuge from his mistakes; it also promised a larger canvas for his talents. Over the last year, he had cultivated his newspaper contacts there with nearly as much enthusiasm as he had indulged his appetite for shellfish and champagne. On his first visit, the Morning Call had hired him as its Washoe correspondent; on his second, he began writing for the Golden Era. Then, in late 1863, an esteemed visitor had given Twain’s literary ambitions another crucial lift.
On November 8, 1863, the country’s most famous comedian came to San Francisco. He called himself Artemus Ward, and counted Abraham Lincoln among his many fans. When the president presented the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet in 1862, he prefaced it by reading one of Ward’s sketches aloud, presumably to lighten the mood before changing the course of American history forever. Artemus Ward was the pseudonym of Charles Farrar Browne, a typesetter from Maine who became America’s first stand-up comic. A best-selling author, he built a booming career on the lecture circuit, wringing loud laughter from a nation that sorely needed comic relief. He was also a New York Bohemian, a regular at the beer-soaked gatherings at Pfaff’s. Like his colleague Adah Isaacs Menken, whose salacious Mazeppa had premiered in San Francisco only three months before he came to town, Ward had a flair for publicity, and knew how to fill a theater to bursting. By the time he arrived in San Francisco, his manager had already been there for weeks, securing favorable notices in local papers and canvassing prominent citizens for their endorsements. Ward’s promotions paid off. On November 13, the night of his debut, an overfull crowd packed into Platt’s Music Hall. At eight o’clock, the show began.
A tall, thin man took the stage. He had a face ideally proportioned for the caricaturist’s pen. His nose bulged; his hair flopped. He wore an elegant suit with white kid gloves, and spoke so softly that people in the back had trouble hearing. In his writings Ward played the part of the illiterate rube: misspelling words, mangling syntax. “Perhaps” became “praps”; “facetious,” “faseshus.” But under all the clowning ran a bracing current of Yankee common sense, and sharply observant insights into the foibles of his fellow Americans. Ward reprised this personality at the lectern, to tremendous effect. He often seemed to forget where he was, losing the thread of his argument. He remained solemn even when saying the silliest things. He rambled through murmured digressions that never seemed to conclude, made ample use of non sequiturs and awkward pauses. The weirder things got, the harder the audience laughed.
“The point of his lecture of course consists in having no point at all,” observed the Daily Evening Bulletin the next day. It was a parody of traditional oratory, with none of the preachy moral pronouncements typical of the genre. Sitting in the darkened theater, Harte watched Ward closely. The secret to the showman’s power, Harte intuited, lay in an unusual sensitivity to everyday American speech. Ward captured the “humor that belongs to the country of boundless prairies, limitless rivers, and stupendous cataracts,” Harte wrote in the Golden Era—“that fun which overlies the surface of our national life, which is met in the stage, rail-car, canal and flat-boat, which bursts out over camp-fires and around bar-room stoves.”
• • •
HARTE HAD HIT ON SOMETHING. Those “camp-fires” and “bar-room stoves” were the forums of the frontier. The “fun” that suffused them had a long history in American life. It dated back to the colonial era, when the West had meant the land beyond the Allegheny Mountains, and the crude, combative men who settled it liked to taunt each other with wildly imaginative boasts. A backwoodsman might declare he had bear’s claws and alligator’s teeth and the devil’s tail. His rival might respond in kind, with some equally bizarre bit of braggadocio, and so on, until they either started brawling or broke down laughing.
On the frontier, laughter was the great unifier. In a society of strangers, it created a sense of community. This wasn’t the polite tee-heeing of eastern parlors but the knowing cackle, the cleansing guffaw of people engaged in the same daily struggle. They lived hard lives, in strange and often terrifying surroundings. Humor helped ease their gloom and isolation. They spun the unfunny facts of frontier existence into surreal comic fictions—“tall tales”—that let them laugh at themselves and bond over what they had in common.
Twain absorbed their stories. As a boy in Missouri, he had immersed himself in a particular strain of frontier humor that emerged in the Old Southwest—a loosely defined region including western Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. When Twain went to Nevada in 1861, he found plenty of Southwestern influences on the Pacific coast. The gold rush had drawn hordes of emigrants from the Mississippi River valley across the plains to the Far West—“Pikes,” they were called, after the Pike County region of Missouri and Illinois. The Pikes brought their tall talk with them, and grafted the humor of past frontiers onto a new one. Their legacy could be felt everywhere, from the slangy chatter of the mining camps to the pages of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
Artemus Ward also owed something to his Southwestern predecessors. But he managed to craft a brand of comedy with even broader appeal, becoming rich and famous on a scale unthinkable for an earlier generation of humorists. After his success in San Francisco in November 1863, he continued his western tour, working his way through California and Nevada. When he landed in Virginia City on December 18, 1863, for a pair of sold-out shows at the local branch of Maguire’s Opera House, the enfants terribles of the Enterprise gave him a hero’s welcome. Over the next ten days, they treated him to a tour of the local sights. The bawdy, histrionic boomtown looked like something straight out of one of Ward’s sketches. He loved it.
Twain and Ward liked each other instantly. They spent evenings drinking brandy and beer, cavorting with dance-hall girls, sampling Chinese liquors. Their friendship bloomed so fast that, by the end of their Washoe jaunt, Ward had taken to calling Twain “My Dearest Love” in their correspondence. Both had lost their fathers at a young age and found work as newspaper typesetters soon after. Both drew their inspiration from the inky populism of the printing room, and from frontier humor. Only one year older, Ward had pursued a parallel path, and his example gave Twain higher hopes for his own future. The famous comedian lent his new friend every encouragement. He recommended him to the editors of the New York Sunday Mercury, which published two of Twain’s pieces in February 1864—his first appearance in the New York press. He even urged him to “leave sage-brush obscurity, & journey to New York,” as Twain reported in a letter to his mother in January. When Twain fled Virginia City four months later, he didn’t choose another mining town. He chose a metropolis, the kind where he could outgrow “sage-brush obscurity” and begin to build a national reputation. He soon discovered that San Francisco didn’t lack for young writers with similar hopes, and that a giant in Washoe looked somewhat smaller among creatures his own size.
Montgomery Street in the 1860s.
THREE
The birds, and the flowers, and the Chinamen, and the winds, and the sunshine, and all things that go to make life happy, are present in San Francisco to-day, just as they are all days in the year,” Mark Twain wrote shortly after moving to the city in May 1864. For a man with an ear for language, the streets were a daily feast. Passersby spoke brogued, drawled, broken English, and a variety of different tongues. Signs cluttered the sidewalks, giving the names of stores and what they sold. Newspapers broadcast the price of money and mining stock, the latest troop movements by telegraph. It was a city in love with the sound of its own voice, and Twain made a noisy addition to the ensemble.
He benefited from good timing. A couple of days before he came to town, a new paper launched its inaugural issue. This wasn’t uncommon: in publishing-mad San Francisco, newspapers rose and fell about as frequently as mining companies on the Comstock.
But on May 28, 1864, a different sort of print product appeared on the booksellers’ shelves. If many journals were migraine-inducing rags—the paper as murky as a miner’s sluice, the type densely set and crooked—these pages were gloriously clean and crisp. They measured twenty-two inches across and thirty inches high, a size known in the industry as “imperial”—a word that aptly summarized the periodical’s stately visual style. The letters ran level across three broad columns, easy to read without squinting. Along the top came the title, in full typographical flourish: The Californian.
For months, two men had been staining their fingers with newsprint at 728 Montgomery Street, racing to fill all sixteen pages of their maiden issue. Half a year had passed since Charles Henry Webb first revealed in the Golden Era that he and Bret Harte were planning to start a paper. They traded a few cracks on the subject but, by the spring of 1864, what began as a joke had grown dreadfully serious. The city’s Bohemia had scaled upward rapidly over the past year, invigorated by eminent visitors like Artemus Ward. The Californian aspired to embody this new spirit, to rally the Bohemians around a single standard. Webb served as its founding editor; Harte collaborated closely. They wanted to give urban readers something worthy of the city’s growing stature, and promised to enlist California’s finest writers in the effort.
But creating a literary magazine from scratch, and doing it every week, turned out to be a grueling ordeal. Webb confessed the despair he felt at filling “forty-eight yawning empty columns” that swallowed everything he threw at them and “seemed no fuller than before.” Harte did a pair of pieces for the front page; Webb contributed a lengthy column. In his frantic rush to get the paper to press, however, Webb failed to recruit nearly enough writers to produce original work. As a result, he loaded up on “selected” material—excerpts lifted from other newspapers, books, even encyclopedias. Padding columns with plagiarized material was a common practice in those days. Yet it also made the Californian a blander, less bracing read. Fortunately, the paper didn’t take long to find its footing. Webb continued to rely heavily on pirated content, but the original writing improved. Over time, he and Harte honed the paper’s editorial voice to an exquisitely sharp point.
The Californian belonged firmly to the Bohemian school of satire and suspicion pioneered by Harte in the pages of the Golden Era. Readers expecting tales of honest miners, or lyrical tributes to California’s landscape, would be disappointed. Like Harte himself, the Californian took pleasure in puncturing clichés. It could be populist or aristocratic, radical or conservative—but always contrarian. Its tone was sharper than anything in the Era, tinged with condescension and a dandyish self-regard. This greater fearlessness came from several sources. The rising self-confidence of Bohemian San Francisco was one. The darkening mood of the Civil War was another.
• • •
PROGRESS HAD ALWAYS Been an article of faith among Americans, but the barbarism of the Civil War made it look like a cruel joke. The gap between the rhetoric of combat—the stirring hymns, the lofty speeches—and its putrid, soul-killing reality inspired no small amount of cynicism. As the Californian observed in 1864, human civilization had ascended to such magnificent heights as to be able to guide a “bullet to a man’s heart, at a distance of half a mile,” and land an artillery shell on his house three miles away. Americans might well wonder whether they were becoming more civilized or more savage. Harte often asked this question on the Far Western frontier, where settlers swindled each other, massacred Indians, and despoiled the countryside—all in the name of progress.
Reading the reports from the front, Ina Coolbrith had two reactions. The first was simple: she felt grateful for her family’s safety. However hard they worked to stay afloat, however tedious her job as a teacher, none of her loved ones would ever go to war. But this happy thought came burdened with a sadder one: that other people’s loved ones were dying in large numbers. She had no illusions about the heroism of violence. She knew that a death didn’t end with a person dying, but rippled outward in waves. Every corpse meant grief for “some desolate house-hold,” she wrote in a poem, and a lifetime of mourning for the mother—a pain she understood intimately. Against this bloody backdrop, patriotic songs about “the splendor of battle” rang hollow. “Could those battle fields open,” she wrote, “[a]nd show what their trophies are.”
Life in San Francisco presented more mundane challenges. The most urgent was always money. When one of her half brothers needed a job, she tried to find him work. She knew that Charles Henry Webb, formerly of the Golden Era, had started a new paper: she had even published verses anonymously in its pages. Perhaps he needed another printer. But when she visited the Californian’s office to inquire, Webb wasn’t in—“a great relief to me,” she later recalled, “for only necessity could have urged me on such an errand.” She left a note, and something else: a poem. Days passed without a word. Then one afternoon Webb appeared at her house unannounced. Coolbrith, whose shyness had only recently begun to recede, was scared “almost to death.” Webb, too, likely felt a bit tense, with a lovely young woman staring at him anxiously through the doorway. He had a face neither handsome nor homely but “on the whole rather pleasing,” she decided, framed by bright blond hair. He spoke with a stutter, and said very strange things. Nearly fifty years later, she recalled their conversation:
“About your brother,” he began. “Has he ever set type? I need some help in the office . . . but is he a rat?”
“A rat?”
“Yes,” he said, “a r-r-at! Y-you know the-the pr-printers have a-a un-union, and all ou-outsiders are ca-called r-rats.”
As it happened, Coolbrith’s half brother wasn’t a rat: he was too young, which meant Webb could hire him as an apprentice. The conversation turned to another topic.
“A-and now a-about your p-p-poem,” Webb said. “I have seen your n-name and know s-s-something of you, b-but you are r-rather y-young, and this v-v-verse of yours, is . . . ac-ccepted, of course, but h-have you a-any others?”
What Webb feared, he later confessed, was that Coolbrith had stolen the poem. He didn’t mind poaching from other papers, so long as he attributed his “selections” properly; ripping off other writers, however, was unforgivable. Because of her youth and beauty, or simply because she was a woman, people always doubted her talent. As a schoolgirl in Los Angeles, she had written a poem for her composition class that the teacher refused to believe was her own. The little poet burst into tears. Her mother brought other specimens from home to persuade the school’s principal that the lines were genuine, and the ordeal had a happy ending: the principal sent the verses to the editor of the Marysville Express, who published them.
The meeting with Webb went well. Coolbrith began writing regularly for the Californian and, despite the awkwardness of their first encounter, warmed to its editor. “He had a mother at home whom he devotedly loved,” she remembered, “and I had a mother whom I devotedly loved.” Family was sacred to Coolbrith, and she valued it in others. Webb began spending more time at her house, writing in her parlor. With his irrepressible good humor and stammering wit, his captaincy of the Californian and his stature in the city’s Bohemian scene, he helped undo the defensive shielding that had insulated her for years. The kinder, funnier woman within began to filter through the cracks.
Coolbrith would bring a distinct sensibility to the Bohemians of the Pacific coast. Her style had evolved since her Los Angeles days. Her language had acquired a certain compacted precision, as in her portrait of a pouty girl:
Cheeks of an ominous crimson,
Eyebrows arched to a frown
Pretty red lips a-quiver
With holding their sweetness down.
She had tamed the breathlessness of her early verse, and replaced it with a more measured rhythm. Still, her poetry was stuck in a single gear, dogged by an unrelentingly mournful tone that made it feel monotonous. Her writing contained little of the keen
irony that defined her personality, and made her such a valued addition to the Bohemian circle. She would never indulge her comic impulses as freely as her Californian colleagues. In fact, she despised puns and parodies. To her, Artemus Ward represented rock bottom for American culture: his ungrammatical “buffoonery” pandered to a “tawdry and vitiated” public taste. But while she hated humor writing, she could muster withering blasts of wit—as when, in her first prose piece for the Californian, she ridiculed those “model wives” who passed their lives in meek devotion to their “lord and master.” She would never know the supreme bliss of darning her husband’s socks. She would never accept the idea that “puddings rather than poetry” were “the proper sphere of woman.”
By remarrying, she might have escaped the drudgery of earning a living at the schoolhouse and the hours spent helping her mother at home. But singledom had its rewards. For one, it freed her to pursue intense friendships with men without facing scrutiny from a jealous spouse. And San Francisco was full of interesting men. She met many through Webb. She almost certainly encountered Twain around this time, although they never became close. He left no record of her, and evidence for their friendship is scant. Her relationships with the rest of the Bohemians would be far more memorable.
One day while out walking, Webb and Ina paused outside the stout brick building that housed the Californian. As they stood talking, the door opened and a young man stepped across the threshold. In Coolbrith’s memory he appeared “slightly built,” with “large brownish gray eyes, slightly drooping at the corners,” and skin pitted with smallpox. They moved aside to let him pass, but then Webb thought better of it.
