The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Much as Sam sometimes destabilized gender norms in stories about transvestism, he was fond of the racial satire inherent in minstrelsy. As a reporter for the Morning Call whose beat included the theater district, he might have attended blackface entertainments virtually every night. He was particularly enamored of the San Francisco Minstrels, who performed at the Eureka Minstrel Hall on Montgomery Street near Pine. The troupe featured the comedians Charley Backus, Billy Birch, and Dave Wambold, who with “a delightful dozen of their brethren” made “life a pleasure to me,” Sam noted in 1906. He also wrote up the funeral of Samuel Adams Wells, another member of the troupe, in September 1864 during his stint on the staff of the Call. When the Minstrels relocated in 1865 to a theater at Broadway and Twenty-Ninth Street in New York, near the swanky Metropolitan Hotel, according to Sam, “their very first performance gave them a hold upon the popular favor which has never loosened its grip.” They played “to packed houses—every single seat full and dozens of people standing up,” including Sam on occasion. He also relished the performances of the burned-cork comedian William H. Pearl, aka Billy Rice or “Daddy” Rice, who was, Sam remembered, “a joy to me.” Unfortunately, after “a prosperous career for about thirty-five years” the minstrel show “degenerated into a variety show” with “a negro act or two.” The “real negro show has been stone dead for thirty years,” Sam lamented in 1906. “To my mind, it was a thoroughly delightful live thing, and a most competent laughter-compeller, and I am sorry it is gone.”17

  But traditional minstrelsy left its mark on Sam. The little slave Jim sings “Buffalo Gals,” a standard minstrel tune, when he first appears in chapter 2 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Eric Lott asserts unequivocally that “without the minstrel show” there “would have been no Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and Henry Wonham contends that the novel “can be read as a kind of literary minstrel show.” Huck and Jim’s dialogues about King Sollermun and the French language in chapter 14 of Huck Finn are structured like minstrelsy routines, with Huck in the role of the comic stooge or end man. Ditto the “aimless jabber” between Roxy and Jasper in chapter 2 of The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). In the unfinished “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” set temporally fourteen months after the close of Tom Sawyer, Tom searches in his Aunt Polly’s garret for “our old nigger-show things” and plans a “nigger” disguise. In No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1902–8) the character of Little Satan impersonates a minstrel type who sings “Buffalo Gals,” plays the banjo, and breaks into a cakewalk, a form of African American performance that had recently been incorporated into minstrelsy.18

  Much as he had been galled by the deadly routine of the schoolroom and the print shop, Sam was aghast at the compromises countenanced in the competitive newspaper market of San Francisco. “Finally there was an event,” a blatant act of censorship by Barnes of one of his articles, or so Sam recalled in 1906:

  One Sunday afternoon I saw some hoodlums chasing and stoning a Chinaman who was heavily laden with the weekly wash of his Christian customers, and I noticed that a policeman was observing this performance with an amused interest—nothing more. He did not interfere. I wrote up the incident with considerable warmth and holy indignation. Usually I didn’t want to read, in the morning, what I had written the night before; it had come from a torpid heart. But this item had come from a live one. There was fire in it, and I believed it was literature—and so I sought for it in the paper next morning with eagerness. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there the next morning, nor the next. I went up to the composing-room and found it tucked away among condemned matter on the standing galley. I asked about it. The foreman said Mr. Barnes had found it in a galley-proof and ordered its extinction.

  Barnes’s explanation was “commercially sound” but, of course, quite unacceptable. The article would have angered Irish readers, who hated the Chinese and competed with them for day jobs. In a letter to W. D. Howells in 1880, Sam referred derisively to “that degraded ‘Morning Call,’ whose mission in hell & politics was to lick the boots of the Irish & throw bold brave mud at the Chinamen.” The newspaper pandered to the prejudices of the poor and “the Irish were the poor. They were the stay and support of the Morning Call; without them the Morning Call could not survive a month.” Sam’s article would have stirred “the whole Irish hive” and “seriously damage[d] the paper. The Call could not afford to publish articles criticizing the hoodlums for stoning Chinamen.”19 As Sam recounted the story in his autobiography, the editorial offices of the Call were beholden to the counting room.

  The Chinese in San Francisco at the time were certainly the targets of discrimination and the victims of persecution. In 1868, Sam alleged, he had “seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature, but I never saw a policeman interfere in the matter and I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done him.” In 1870 Sam recounted the satirical tale of a boy who was punished for stoning “a Chinaman,” even though he had been taught from the cradle that “it was a high and holy thing” to do. He remembered a particular incident when

  the Brannan street butchers set their dogs on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket of clothes on his head; and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the hilarity of the occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman’s teeth down his throat with half a brick. This incident sticks in my memory with a more malevolent tenacity, perhaps, on account of the fact that I was in the employ of a San Francisco journal at the time, and was not allowed to publish it because it might offend some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the paper.

  But this occurrence seems to be an entirely different affair from the stoning of a Chinese man by boys and the failure of police to intervene. In fact, Sam reported in the Morning Call in August 1864 the story of a group of boys who “were locked up in a cell in the city prison” to “give them a modified conception of what they may expect if they continue to throw stones at Chinamen and engage in other evil pursuits.” He described the next month the case of a pair of thugs “charged with having pounded a Chinaman to pieces in a slaughter house.” He noted a year later that the Call had reprinted “an account of an unoffending Chinese rag-picker being set upon by a gang of boys and nearly stoned to death.” In other words, there seems to have been no absolute proscription on covering anti-Chinese violence in the newspaper, and Sam joined the chorus of protestors against anti-Chinese prejudice. But his defense of the Chinese may easily be overstated. Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence Berkove, for example, declare that Sam was among “a distinguished and brave minority of writers who openly defended the Chinese against an overwhelming white majority that was overtly hostile toward them.”20

  Not really. Sam was hardly as immune from anti-Chinese prejudice or as progressive in denouncing it as his advocates claim. The Chinese were “not conscience-bound in planning and perfecting ingenious contrivances for avoiding the tariff on opium,” he editorialized in the Call a month after he joined the paper. “I am not fond of Chinamen,” Sam once acknowledged, “but I am still less fond of seeing them wronged and abused.” The beliefs that pass as his racial progressivism in fact emit the strong odor of racial condescension. “The Chinaman is the most frugal, industrious and thrifty of all creatures,” he assured his readers in January 1870. “The Chinaman makes a good cook, a good washerwoman, a good chambermaid, a good gardener, a good banker’s clerk, a good miner, a good railroad laborer, a good anything you choose to put him at.” Or as he declared in Roughing It, the Chinese “are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist.”21 Such mild-mannered creatures he deemed a credit to their race.

  After three months of the grind on the staff of the Call, Sam asked Barnes for an assistant and a reduction in hours, agreeing to a corresponding reduction in salary to twenty-five dollars a week. Sam finished h
is shift under this new schedule at “5 or 6 in the afternoon,” he wrote his mother and sister in September. To cover the night beat, Barnes promoted a “patient, cheerful lad” from the counting room, a “great hulking creature” named William McGrew “whom the printers nicknamed Smiggy McGlural,” the name of a popular comic character in minstrelsy. “I used to tell Smiggy to do the police court, and then a fire or two, and it was Smiggy this and Smiggy that, until it became noticeable that Smiggy was doing all the work,” Sam admitted in his autobiography. “I never was so lazy in my life and never enjoyed it so.” Smiggy “went at his work with ten times the energy that was left in me. He was not intellectual, but mentality was not required or needed in a Morning Call reporter, and so he conducted his office to perfection.”22

  Smiggy discharged his duties with such aplomb that after a month Sam became expendable. James J. Ayers, the founder of the Call, recalled that he “had long desired to dispense with Mark’s services, but had a delicacy about bluntly telling him so.” Ayers advised Sam “that he was doing injustice to himself by staying on the coast, as an obscure reporter, instead of going East and exercising the play of his undoubted literary talents in a broad field where they would be appreciated.” Sam replied “that for the time being he was happy where he was.” John McComb, another co-owner and coeditor of the Call, remembered that Sam “detested police reporting,” “was out of his sphere,” and in consequence “used to be dissatisfied with the world in general and newspaper work in particular.” Barnes considered Sam so “tortuously slow” in writing for the paper that he was “the most useless of local reporters.” He allegedly harbored “an inexplicable aversion to walking,” a decided handicap in his occupation, a claim that reinforced Sam’s guess that the editors only “wanted him for his legs.” Although Sam was “at the time a good general writer and correspondent,” Barnes declared that he “only played at itemizing.” Barnes told Sam that he was out of his element in the newsroom and, like Ayers, urged him to pursue a career in literature. As Sam explained in chapter 58 of Roughing It, “I neglected my duties and became about worthless as a reporter for a brisk newspaper. And at last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity I still remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal.”23 Some of the old-timers on the staff of the Call shared “many legends” about Sam’s apprenticeship on the paper with Rudyard Kipling when he passed through San Francisco a quarter century later. According to company lore, Sam had been “delightfully incapable of reporting according to the needs of the day. He preferred, so they said, to coil himself into a heap and meditate till the last minute. Then he would produce copy bearing no sort of relationship to his legitimate work—copy that made the editor swear horribly.” By the end of his tenure on the Call he had been “reduced to such a pitiable condition of mental destitution,” Sam insisted, and “was so completely worn out and impoverished in mind and body by the responsibilities of my position, that the editor invited me to resign. I didn’t want to be ungrateful to a man who had allowed me to learn so much of different kinds of newspaper work in so short a time,” so he agreed. His enemy Evans crowed in the Gold Hill News in mid-October that Sam had ended his

  brief and not very eventful career as a local in San Francisco, and has taken to the grave of genius sundry literature for a livelihood. He says he left the Call because “They wanted me to w-o-r-k a-t n-i-g-h-t-s, and d-a-m-n m-e if I’ll work n-i-g-h-t-s for any man a l-i-v-i-n-g!” It is considered rather necessary for a local on a morning paper in San Francisco to “work nights,” and so he goes out.

  Years later, asked by an interviewer “to what one thing, most of all, do you owe your marvelous success,” Sam replied decisively: “To the fact that when I was young and very ambitious, I lost my job.” Pressed to elaborate, Sam added, “I was a reporter.” Still later Sam allowed,

  It was the only time in my life that I have ever been discharged, and it hurts yet. . . . [Barnes] did not discharge me rudely. It was not in his nature to do that. He was a large, handsome man, with a kindly face and courteous ways, and was faultless in his dress. He could not have said a rude, ungentle thing to anybody. He took me privately aside and advised me to resign. It was like a father advising a son for his good, and I obeyed.24

  Sam left the Call amicably and remained on cordial terms with Barnes.

  But the next several months were harsh ones financially for him. For the first time in his life he was forced to earn his living entirely by freelancing. Barnes remembered that he did “all sorts of literary work whereby he could turn a cent. It was a terrible uphill business, and a less determined man than himself would have abandoned the struggle.” By the end of October, only two or three weeks after Sam’s resignation, one of the reporters for the Call observed that “his hat is an old one, and comes too far down over his eyes, and his clothes don’t fit as if they were made for him.” Fortunately, Barnes had introduced Sam to Harte, the rising star of California letters, who also held a sinecure in the offices of the U.S. Mint, located one floor below the editorial offices of the Call on Commercial Street. Harte, who was secretary to Robert B. Swain, the superintendent of the mint, reminisced later that Barnes

  walked into my office one morning with a young man whose appearance was unmistakably interesting. 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 introduced him as Mr. Sam Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very original talent in a number of newspaper contributions over the signature of “Mark Twain.” We talked on different topics, and about a month afterwards Clemens dropped in on me again.

  Sam remembered, too, that after Smiggy McGlural was hired he “spent a good deal of time with Bret Harte in his office.” Harte in turn introduced “the eagle-eyed young man of tousled hair and slow speech” to Noah Brooks, Ina Coolbrith, Ralph Keeler, Joaquin Miller, Prentice Mulford, Charles Warren Stoddard, C. H. Webb, and others in his literary circle, and the group “had very good times together—very social and pleasant times.”25 In addition, Sam may have enjoyed a brief fling with the poet Coolbrith during his first months in San Francisco. At least Coolbrith claimed as much sixty-three years later. She remembered that Harte “tried to break up our little affair” and that once “when [Sam] met [Harte] in the editorial offices . . . he called him a bad name,” early evidence of their volatile and ultimately failed friendship.26

  Harte was the on-again, off-again editor of the Californian, a West Coast imitation of the New York Round Table launched in San Francisco by Webb, aka Inigo and John Paul, another refugee from the New York bohemian enclave. Shortly before Sam left the employ of the Call, he began to contribute to the weekly, for which he was paid twelve dollars per column. This stipend enabled him to stave off starvation. He published nine articles in the Californian between October 1 and December 3, 1864, and earned about a hundred dollars, and he contributed a total of about two dozen original “literary screeds” to it over the course of a year, most of them accepted while Harte was editor. Among them was a burlesque review of Daniel François Auber’s The Crown Diamonds—Sam attended a performance of it by Richings’ Opera Troupe at Maguire’s Academy of Music on October 10, 1864—and the comic sketch “How I Went to the Great Race between Lodi and Norfolk,” about his apparent failure to attend a famous race between a pair of Kentucky-bred horses north of the city in May 1865. As it happened, both animals were owned by Nevada friends of Sam—Lodi by Judge Charles H. Bryan and the victor Norfolk by Theodore Winters.27

  Though he was a year younger than Sam, Harte succeeded Dan De Quille as his mentor and championed his genius. As Sam wrote in January 1871, Harte “trimmed & trained & schooled me patiently until he changed me from an
awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs & chapters that have found a certain favor.” Ironically, much as Sam was considered inferior to De Quille among the writers of the sagebrush school, he played second fiddle to Harte in San Francisco, at least from his own perspective. “Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to Bret Harte, I think,” as Sam wrote his family. “Some of the most exquisite productions” that appeared in the Californian “emanated from his pen” and “are worthy to take rank among even Dickens’ best sketches.” The Californian under Harte’s editorship “circulates among the highest class of the community, and is the best weekly literary paper in the United States—and I suppose I ought to know.” Sam had stopped writing for the San Francisco Golden Era months earlier—it “wasn’t high-toned enough,” he quipped—but he had never contributed much original material to it. Webb anticipated that the two star contributors to the Californian would eventually abandon the West entirely for the “warm welcome and open field” they would enjoy in the East. The Dramatic Chronicle agreed that both Sam and Bret “could find a sphere in Gotham in which they could be useful and happy,” though the editors added “we should regret to part with them.”28

  Sam formed a fast friendship in the spring and summer of 1864 with the Reverend Henry W. Bellows, who served as Thomas Starr King’s temporary replacement at the First Unitarian Church from May until September. The longtime minister of All Souls’ Unitarian Church in New York, where his parishioners included Herman Melville, Bellows came to California in part to fill the void left by King’s death, in part to raise money for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. A graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, he fit the profile of clergymen like Franklin Rising and later Joseph Twichell whom Sam admired. “Bellows is an able, upright & eloquent man,” he wrote his family, and “a man of imperial intellect & matchless power—he is Christian in the truest sense of the term & is unquestionably a brick.” Bellows’s sermons, he declared in the Morning Call, “are always vigorous, pertinent and interesting, when he talks, as he always does, in the interests of humanity” and on behalf of “the succor of the wounded and the sick among those who have gone out into the field to throttle treason and restore the peace of old.” Jane Clemens was so impressed that her son had met so famous a clergyman that she admonished him to solicit “good advice” from Bellows and follow it. On his part, Bellows claimed he “never fail[ed] to read” Sam’s articles in the press—he “said he went into ‘convulsions of laughter’” over “What a Sky-Rocket Did,” a comic account in the Call of a falling missile that punctures a hole in a tenement roof. Bellows urged Sam to publish a collection of such sketches. When Bellows at length left San Francisco to return to New York, Sam saluted the “animation of thought and fluency of expression” with which the “great and good man” bid the city adieu.29