by Ben Tarnoff
“Wait a m-moment,” he said. “Ina, this is Fr-Frank: Frank, th-this is I-na. N-now you b-be g-good to her.”
Francis Brett Harte—“Frank” to his friends—was a name that she knew. It was Harte’s full name, which he still used to sign his pieces. By the end of the decade his byline would shrink to Bret Harte, and it was by this name that he became most famous. The first time Coolbrith saw Thomas Starr King speak, he had read Harte’s poetry aloud. He led a charmed life, earning a comfortable income from his sinecure at the mint that gave him time to refine his work through a stern regimen of rewriting. No one could possibly be harder on Harte than he was on himself. The countless drafts that filled his wastebasket revealed a writer for whom one false note would be a humiliating defeat. He seemed to embody California’s hopes for itself as its fortunes rose with the Civil War. With his distinguished dress and quiet courtesy, he suggested a future beyond the frontier, a metropolitan maturity to follow the Far West’s gunsmoke-and-whiskey adolescence.
Coolbrith found him attractive. He was “manly,” she later said, though not in the traditional sense. His masculinity was of a mellower sort. After their introduction, they corresponded about her poems for the Californian. For a man with a caustic literary edge and relentlessly high standards, he treated her with exceptional kindness. He once replied to a selection of her verses with the flattering remark that they were all so good he had trouble choosing which to publish. And when he didn’t like one, he provided gentle criticisms to help her improve. “Every man has sometime in his life said something good,” he told her. “[I]t is the habit of being smart that makes the good writer or poet, and the power of carrying a thought or fancy to completeness that makes the article or poem.” Art was hard work: it demanded consistency. Guided by Harte, Coolbrith grew. The Californian meant the beginning of something better, when she found a path out of her imprisoning past and into a brighter future.
• • •
BY THE SUMMER OF 1864, San Francisco no longer needed visitors from the East to feed its creativity: it now generated heat of its own. Since appearing in May, the Californian had become, in the words of its editor, an “established fact.” The press embraced it. The Morning Call praised the paper’s “charming repose, easy address, and delicacy of perception.” The Alta California called it a “welcome visitor in every house.” The Sacramento Daily Bee named it the “best looking paper ever printed in the State.” “It is not of the wishy-washy, sentimental, sickly order of publications,” wrote the Marysville Express, “but one which we hope Californians will be proud to recognize as one of our coast.”
The Californian made people feel proud to be Californian. It was a triumph: gorgeously printed, ambitiously edited, a periodical for an ascendant Pacific coast. Webb encouraged this impression, advertising the Californian as a paper devoted to “the best interests of California.” Yet on closer inspection, its pages carried little to inspire local pride. On the contrary: the picture of California that emerged from the Californian was largely harsh and unflattering. An undertow of contempt touched topics trivial and profound: California’s climate was too mild, its people too ignorant, its culture too crude. This was the paradox at the heart of the paper. It benefited from California boosterism even as it skewered California. It serialized “sensation novels” by best-selling genre hacks like Mary Elizabeth Braddon while mocking them for being poorly written. It criticized pulpy melodrama while using it to lift sales. When Webb republished the report of a child sacrifice in Haiti, he insisted it was only for educational purposes: not “to pander to the popular appetite for horror” but to shed light on a dangerous superstition. The real reason, of course, was economic. The Californian cost money to run, and needed to cater to popular taste to survive.
Charles Warren Stoddard published his first poem in the Californian in July 1864. It described, in tender language, the process of death by drowning. If these suicidal verses offered any indication, the young poet had hit a breaking point. That summer, he had finished his first year at Brayton Academy in Oakland. School had become a daily nightmare of fear and humiliation. Academic success eluded him. As soon as he stopped reading a book, its contents drained from his memory like water. Nothing he did could make his brain a better container.
By the end of the semester he was a “nervous wreck,” he wrote. Brayton Academy had broken him. His family brought in a doctor, who suggested a change of scenery. Long trips to faraway places were thought to be therapeutic. So in August 1864, Stoddard set sail for the Sandwich Islands, as Hawaii was then known. His parents had friends in Honolulu, and Stoddard felt deliriously grateful to be going. Ever since seeing Nicaragua as an eleven-year-old boy, crossing the isthmus on his way to California, he had longed to return to the tropics. His daydreams were populated by monkeys and parrots, mango trees and coconut palms. The journey to Hawaii would do more than just reunite him with this landscape; it would alter “the whole current” of his life, he later said. In the farther frontier of the Pacific Islands, he found a way to live without wanting to die.
• • •
BY THE TIME Stoddard left San Francisco, Twain had settled in. He had begun the typical way after arriving in May 1864, blowing his money on assorted extravagances and rooming at the luxurious Occidental Hotel—“Heaven on the half shell,” he called it. Within days, however, the honeymoon ended and a sobering reality set in. Twain had expected to earn a fortune by selling the mining stocks he acquired in Nevada. But as their value plummeted, and his prospective riches shrank to a more modest sum, he realized he wouldn’t survive as a speculator. He needed a job.
Once, in a vainer moment, Twain had told his mother he could work for a San Francisco paper whenever he wanted. He was right. Within a week of arriving, he had joined the Morning Call as a local reporter. He already knew the editors from his stint as the Call’s Nevada correspondent. And, despite the recent uproar in Nevada over the miscegenation hoax, he still enjoyed broad popularity in the California press. On June 12, 1864, when a group of prominent citizens gathered at Maguire’s Opera House to honor an army engineer who had salvaged a sunken warship, they asked Twain to deliver the opening address. He nailed it, delivering a mock-pompous monologue that would’ve made Artemus Ward proud.
In San Francisco he lived with Steve Gillis, the Territorial Enterprise typesetter who came with him from Virginia City. In their first four months, they moved seven times. Gillis was a short, sinewy southerner with a feared reputation as a barroom brawler, and he shared Twain’s prankish bent. For fun they played billiards, or lobbed empty beer bottles onto the tin roofs of their Chinese neighbors and got cursed out in Cantonese.
These diversions aside, life in San Francisco proved harder than Twain expected. The Call made him miserable. His days began at the courthouse at nine in the morning, collecting material for the local column. After enduring hours of testimony—an old man claimed a woman whacked him with a basket, but he only spoke German and was too deaf to hear anything the lawyers said—he visited the city’s six theaters, lingering just long enough to scribble a few notes on the half-dozen performances. Around eleven at night, he returned to the Call’s office to sift through his notebook’s dreary, doodled expanses for a kernel of presentable copy.
It’s hard to imagine a profession less suited to Twain’s personality than daily journalism. Four decades later he still shuddered at the memory of its “soulless drudgery.” Satisfying his nightly quota caused him endless suffering: it was “awful slavery for a lazy man,” he recalled. Worse, the Call wanted him to report facts. At the Enterprise he had enjoyed wide latitude with the truth, roaming freely. At the Call he strained against a much shorter leash. He was no longer “Mark Twain,” but an anonymous hack, churning out unsigned items for each morning’s edition.
To console himself he employed a few tricks from his Enterprise days. He managed some mild hoaxing, and sparked a feud with a rival reporter at the Alta California named
Albert S. Evans, who christened Twain the “sage-brush Bohemian.” But Twain couldn’t antagonize everyone equally. Certain targets were off limits. After seeing a pack of thugs throwing stones at a Chinese laundryman, he wrote an angry account of the incident—only to have it killed by his editor. “He said that the Call was like the New York Sun of that day,” Twain remembered. “It gathered its livelihood from the poor and must respect their prejudices or perish.” The Irish read the Call, and despised the Chinese. The paper couldn’t afford to offend them.
Discouraged, Twain almost abandoned writing altogether. A friend who recalled running into him during his Call days said he planned to leave California and resume his career as a steamboat pilot. The Mississippi meant freedom: an “unfettered and entirely independent” existence, plus a generous salary. His friend begged him to reconsider. “You have a style of writing that is fresh and original and is bound to be popular,” he said. “If you don’t like the treadmill work of a newspaper man, strike up higher.”
Twain took the advice to heart. If he had put down his pen in 1864, he would’ve been rapidly forgotten. He might be vilified for his hoaxes or admired for his cleverness, but sooner or later his name would fade, along with the other minor-league wits who enlivened the era’s newspapers. Instead, he stayed in San Francisco and struck up higher. It would be a rocky ascent. The city humbled him often. It pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy and suicide, and inspired moments of difficult soul-searching. But in the process he grew more profound, more perceptive. His satire became more socially astute. His humor developed a lacerating moral edge.
San Francisco broadened him. The city was considerably more complex than the one he had left behind in Nevada. In the courtroom where Twain spent his mornings for the Call, so many different languages were spoken that the official interpreter knew “fifty-six Chinese dialects,” he later quipped in his autobiography. Daily journalism gave him a swift education in this cosmopolitan social world, and plenty to stir his moral outrage. He met crooked officials and lazy, brutal cops, and watched society reward the strong and the shameless.
But San Francisco’s greatest gift to Twain was its Bohemia. He had been a visiting member for the past year, and returned in 1864 just as the Californian made its celebrated debut. The stylish new paper impressed him. He cheered the “sterling literary weekly” in the Call and singled out Harte for special praise. “Some of the most exquisite productions which have appeared in its pages emanated from his pen,” Twain wrote, “and are worthy to take rank among even Dickens’ best sketches.” This was an unusually generous judgment from a writer who never missed a chance to draw blood. The Californian marked a new stage in the evolution of the literary West, and Twain desperately wanted to evolve along with it.
He soon had his chance. The Call shared a building with the branch office of the US Mint where Harte worked. As Harte remembered, the Call’s editor brought Twain downstairs one day to introduce him. The scruffy stranger made an impression. “His head was striking,” Harte recalled. “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 “bushy,” his dress “careless.” He exuded “supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances.”
To Twain, Harte presented a different picture. He had a “distinctly pretty” face, despite his smallpox scars. If Twain dressed like a tramp, Harte was at the other end of the sartorial spectrum: always “more intensely fashionable than the fashionablest of the rest of the community,” Twain noted. He often wore a brightly colored necktie—“a flash of flame under his chin . . . [or] indigo blue and as hot and vivid as if one of those splendid and luminous Brazilian butterflies had lighted there.” However hard Twain tried to feign indifference, Harte had the upper hand. He was not only California’s most important writer, but had recently become editor of its most important literary paper, the Californian, while Webb was away. He held the keys to the kingdom, and his first encounter with Twain probably had the air of a job interview.
It was a miracle they were able to communicate at all. Twain “spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl,” Harte recalled. He himself had a smooth, silvery voice, perfect for a lady’s parlor. In their writing they sounded even less alike. Since childhood, Twain had been listening to people tell stories, from the slaves of the antebellum South to the boatmen of the Mississippi. The mongrel infinities of American English played in his ear, inspiriting his writing with the spontaneity of living speech. Harte took a more bookish approach. His references were literary, the result of many lonely hours spent reading, and he composed his prose with as much prickly care as his clothing. Later, after the relationship between the two men soured, Twain would see Harte’s fastidiousness as evidence of his insincerity: both his dress and his writing belonged to the same cynical stagecraft, Twain fumed, the affectations of a hollow man. At the time, however, the Call’s local reporter admired the Californian’s editor and star contributor. The dapper young writer behind the desk at the US Mint had polish, discipline, and prestige, precisely the qualities Twain lacked.
The meeting went well: Twain got the job. “I have engaged to write for the new literary paper,” he told his mother and sister on September 25, 1864, burying any anxiety he felt under a barrage of smugness. “I quit the ‘Era,’ long ago,” he wrote. “It wasn’t high-toned enough.” His new gig promised a less provincial readership. “The ‘Californian’ circulates among the highest class of the community, and is the best weekly literary paper in the United States.”
He would soon have more time for his literary labors, after the Call fired him in mid-October. “It was true that we had long desired to dispense with Mark’s services,” recalled one of his superiors, “but had a delicacy about bluntly telling him so.” They tried dropping “broad hints to that effect,” without any result. Finally, the Call’s editor, George Barnes, took Twain aside and suggested he resign. Barnes liked Twain, and he went about it in the friendliest possible way. “It was like a father advising a son for his good,” Twain remembered, “and I obeyed.” Even so, it hurt. Forty-two years later, when the Call building burned during the earthquake and fire of 1906, the former reporter couldn’t conceal his pleasure at his long-delayed revenge.
Losing his job at the Call did more than wound his pride. It also did serious damage to his pocketbook. He had recently reduced his hours, earning $25 a week. By contrast, the Californian paid him $50 a month—half his former salary. Thus began a long period of barely keeping his head above water. “It was a terrible uphill business,” observed his old boss Barnes, “and a less determined man than him would have abandoned the struggle and remained at the base.” But when Twain committed to a task, he brought a terrifying amount of energy to it. “Mark was the laziest man I ever knew in my life, physically,” said his roommate Steve Gillis. “Mentally he was the hardest worker I ever knew.”
For the next two months, Twain undertook his most ambitious writing to date. From October 1 to December 3, 1864, he published nine pieces in the Californian. They reflected a writer who, though still frisky with liquor and frontier humor, had begun to make a deeper investment in literary craft. He did a series of finely chiseled parodies of popular newspaper genres, spoofing advice columnists, theater critics, and local reporters. The moral dimension of his work began to mature. He still told lies, but for better reasons: small, funny lies meant to illuminate large, unfunny ones. These were fictions in pursuit of the truth, and they enabled Twain to probe the distance between what people said and what they did, between how America saw itself and what it actually looked like. He took aim at the sentimental romance story with “Whereas,” a tale about a woman whose fiancé loses all four limbs to gruesome accidents, an eye to disease, and his scalp to an Indian. Despite being “deeply grieved to see her lover passing from her by piecemeal,” she wonders whether she should still marry him. It was a viciousl
y funny assault on the idea that love conquers all, with the specter of the Civil War lurking between the lines. The fiancé’s slow dismemberment echoed the mutilating violence of the battlefields back East. In both cases, a delusion—the glory of war, the invincibility of love—had been deflated by a bitter reality.
Before Twain could dig deeper, extraliterary considerations put his writing on hold. In late November 1864, Steve Gillis beat a bartender within an inch of his life. He was arrested, and then released on bail after Twain signed a $500 bond. Gillis decided to flee before facing charges, and Twain, who would now be required to pay hundreds of dollars he didn’t have, followed suit. Gillis returned to Virginia City, while Twain traveled to Tuolumne County, where Gillis’s brother Jim owned a cabin in the heart of California mining country. There, among the gulches of the old Mother Lode, Twain would make an astonishing find: in a region already stripped of its resources, a wealth of literary material existed. For the next twelve weeks, his notebook swallowed it whole.
• • •
IF GILLIS HADN’T smashed a beer pitcher across a bartender’s head, Twain might never have spent nearly three months in the Sierras. Such were the “queer vicissitudes” of life in the Far West, as he called them. A man might lose his fortune on the stock market and make it back at the faro table. An earthquake might periodically rearrange people’s houses. At any point one’s circumstances might change, radically.
In December 1864, soon after Twain hightailed it out of San Francisco, Stoddard returned home after four months away. The trip to Hawaii had transformed him. He had stayed with a family friend outside Honolulu, and spent many blissful hours lying in a hammock and browsing the shelves of the local bookstore. The thick, slumberous air soothed the grim memory of his failed year at Brayton Academy. He met fellow expatriates like Enoch Wood Perry Jr., a San Francisco painter. Together they took a trip to the Big Island, where Perry wanted to sketch the scenery.
