The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Characteristically, Sam took umbrage at the suggestion that he had acted unethically. In his reply to Ferguson, he claimed that he had contributed his payment for the Harper’s article to an Episcopal church in Stamford, Connecticut, though there is no record of such a donation. Apparently forgetting that he had ignored the brothers’ request to “doctor” their journals and their insistence that he omit all mention of the conspiracy, moreover, he blamed them for any damage his articles may have caused. They had had an “abundance of time” to edit their diaries during the voyage from Honolulu to San Francisco, and

  that you did not offer to edit them, and did not put upon me any restrictions or limitations of any kind, was your fault, not mine. If you were surprised, afterward, that you neglected to edit them, that was your affair—and remains so. The whole first page of your letter is made up of pure imaginings, with not a supporting fact behind them. They make against me, by innuendo, a charge of discreditable conduct, and I will ask you to withdraw it. Your second page begins with the remark that the publication did harm to one man of the party and caused great distress to another—a suggestion that I am to blame for that, too. I am in no way responsible for it—you should have edited those things out if you didn’t want them left in. I had no interest in imposing [upon] anyone, and nothing to gain by it.6

  Still, Sam deleted all the names of the potential mutineers from the version of “My Debut as a Literary Person” he reprinted in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories (1900), just as Ferguson wished.

  When Sam returned from Honolulu, George Barnes remembered, “he was no better off than when he left, except in prestige, and quite in the dark as to his future course.” Or as Sam recalled in Roughing It, “I was home again in San Francisco, without means and without employment.” He accepted occasional reporting assignments for the Sacramento Union, such as covering the California State Fair and reviewing a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore at Maguire’s Opera House in San Francisco. On August 20 he facetiously applied to be editor of the Californian, the same job Harte once held, in a letter printed in the weekly paper and written from the Farallon Islands, thirty miles off the northern California coast, where he was recovering from his Hawaiian vacation. “You had better hire me,” he advised the owner of the paper, because he knew exactly what it needed: “a good Moral tone.” He had recently returned from a stint as “missionary to the Sandwich Islands,” he explained, “and I have got the hang of all that sort of thing to a fraction.” In his opinion, the paper was failing because it had recently published “too much poetry,” “too many frivolous sentimental tales,” “too much wicked wit and too much demoralizing humor,” and “too much harmful elevating literature.”7 He was not given the job, nor would he really have wanted it. The Californian suspended publication eighteen months later.

  In the end Sam struck on a more lucrative alternative. “I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a public lecture occurred to me! I sat down and wrote one, in a fever of hopeful anticipation.” As he reflected in 1896, “It seemed an easier way of making a living than by journalism; it paid better, and there was less work connected with it.” By the close of the Civil War, in fact, lecturing was an increasingly popular vocation. Virtually every city and town in the country had a local organization, usually a lyceum or literary society, that sponsored a series of six to eight lectures during late fall and winter. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted, “a lecture is a new literature, which leaves aside all tradition, time, place, circumstance, & addresses an assembly as mere human beings, no more.” The lyceum circuit during the postwar years gradually (d)evolved from an educational or didactic medium into a form of performance or entertainment. In 1872 the editor and novelist J. G. Holland protested this shift in focus. Once upon a time, Holland complained, such lecturers as Emerson and Wendell Phillips discussed important topics, but now “a lecture may be a string of nonsense that any literary mountebank can find an opportunity to utter.” Holland contended that such “triflers and buffoons” as Artemus Ward were “a constant disgrace to the lecturing guild, and a constantly degrading influence upon the public taste.” In a scathing but unpublished reply to Holland, “An Appeal from One That Is Persecuted,” Sam turned the argument around. With his commonplace “instructional” lectures, Holland had “hung crape on more lyceum door-knobs than any other man in America,” he alleged. “It is not I & my craft that bankrupt & destroy the lecture societies,” Sam insisted, “but it is Dr. Holland himself & the other ‘first-class old fashioned’ disseminators of ‘instruction’ that do it. . . . The real truth is that the doctor & his people go about the country massacring lecture associations, & the buffoons follow after and resurrect them. It sounds strangely enough to hear Dr. Holland accusing us of killing the lecture business. . . . He moves through the lecture field a remorseless intellectual cholera.” A successful lyceum appearance served either to entertain and/or instruct—and the overriding purpose of Sam’s lectures, like his sketches and novels, was to entertain. He had “seldom deliberately tried to instruct” his auditors, “but have done my best to entertain them,” he once acknowledged to Andrew Lang. James Redpath, who later managed a pair of Sam’s speaking tours, similarly insisted that the “lyceum lecture is a failure if it succeeds in imparting instruction only. It should afford pleasure as well.”8

  Though he subscribed to few of Holland’s objections, Sam embarked upon his own professional speaking career with some trepidation. He insisted from the outset that his brand of humor was an antidote to the didacticism of lecturers like Holland. “What the societies ask of me,” he explained to his friend Mary Mason Fairbanks, was to leaven the “heaviness” of their normal fare “& in accepting the contract I am just the same as giving my word that I will do as they ask.” But he was motivated by his empty pockets. “A sensible man lectures only when butter & bread are scarce,” he admitted. He always excoriated those “devils incarnate” who, in the guise of newspaper critics, picked the pockets of public speakers by printing “infernal synopses” of their lectures, thus discouraging people from paying to hear them. But in San Francisco in the fall of 1866, when he launched out as a lecturer with “great boldness,” he was not yet calloused to the risks: “I had the field all to myself, for public lectures were almost an unknown commodity in the Pacific market.”9

  Predictably, Sam decided to speak about the Sandwich Islands—not only to reminisce about his recent tour there but to tap into the interest in Hawaii sparked by the visit of Dowager Queen Emma to San Francisco between late September and mid-October. He showed his lecture manuscript to several friends, including James Bowman, Bret Harte, and Charley Stoddard, who “all shook their heads. They said nobody would come to hear me, and I would make a humiliating failure of it.” Sam was disconsolate until his friend John McComb of the Alta California encouraged him to push ahead and rent the largest theater in town and “charge a dollar a ticket.” Sam later recalled, “The audacity of the proposition was charming; it seemed fraught with practical worldly wisdom.” Tom Maguire offered his Academy of Music on Pine Street, with a seating capacity of several hundred, for $50 and half the profits of one night and Sam in “sheer desperation” agreed. He soon spent $150 on promoting his appearance “and was the most distressed and frightened creature on the Pacific coast” lest he waste his investment.

  But in a page he might have torn from the self-marketing of Whitman or the audacious classified ads he once set in type for the Hannibal Journal, he wrote a humorous advertisement that stirred local interest in his first public address on the coast:

  MAGUIRE’S ACADEMY OF MUSIC

  The Sandwich Islands!

  MARK TWAIN,

  (Honolulu Correspondent of the Sacramento Union)

  will deliver a

  Lecture on the Sandwich Islands,

  AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC,

  ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 2,

  In which passing mention will be made of Har
ris, Bishop Staley, the American missionaries, etc., and the absurd Customs and Characteristics of the Natives duly discussed and described. The great VOLCANO OF KILAUEA will also receive proper attention.

  A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA

  Is in town, but has not been engaged.

  ALSO,

  A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS

  Will be on Exhibition in the next Block.

  MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS

  Were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned.

  A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION

  May be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please.

  Dress Circle $1 Family Circle 50 cts.

  Doors open at 7 o’clock The Trouble to begin at 8 o’clock.

  He brazenly stole the final line from Artemus Ward, who had promoted his lecture in Boston in October 1863 by announcing that the theater doors would “open at 7. The struggle will commence at ¼ to 8 o’clock.” Sam adapted the proclamation in a variety of ways to boom his subsequent lectures. The next month in San Francisco his ads read that “The wisdom will begin to flow at 8” and a month later “The inspiration will begin to gush at 8.” In New York in May 1867, his ads proclaimed that “The sublime utterances begin at 8.” The next year Sam continued to adapt the line in advertising his talks in San Francisco (“The Orgies will commence at 8”) and Nevada City (“The Insurrection will start at 8”).10

  The rumor soon circulated that Sam’s lecture scheduled for October 2 was another hoax, that he planned to bilk the public and abscond with the ticket sales or that he was so stricken with stage fright that he would fail to appear at all. The day before the lecture, the Dramatic Chronicle reported that he “was so overcome” by the “prospect of having to make a first appearance before a metropolitan audience that his courage broke down, and he secreted himself in the baggage room of the Occidental, with the intention of taking the 4 o’clock boat” for Sacramento. He later allowed that when he learned that every seat in the academy had been sold, he “half resolved to leave town,” but he admitted in Roughing It that he “pretended illness” and threatened flight as a publicity stunt. The Dramatic Chronicle claimed the day of the lecture that some ticket holders had hired security guards “to apprehend the fugacious lecturer” should he attempt to flee and thus prevent his “contemplated swindle. Owing to these precautionary measures,” his “attempt at evasion will probably be frustrated, and the lecture will, we hope, come off according to announcement.” At last report, Sam drank a “dozen bottles of Mrs. Winslow’s soothing syrup,” became “reconciled to the situation,” and would “positively appear” that night onstage. Sadly, the day before Sam Clemens’s first Sandwich Islands lecture Sam Ferguson died at Congress Springs near San Jose as the result of his six-week ordeal in the longboat.11

  In Roughing It Sam offered an alternative account of his public appearance in San Francisco even more at variance with the facts. “I had sold two hundred tickets among my personal friends,” he remembered, “but I feared they might not come. My lecture, which had seemed ‘humorous’ to me, at first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun seemed left, and I grieved that I could not bring a coffin on the stage and turn the thing into a funeral.” As a precaution, the lecturer arranged for several friends in the audience to laugh on cue. At 4:00 p.m. on the day he was scheduled to appear, or so he claimed, he “crept down to the theater” and “the box-office was locked up. I had to swallow suddenly, or my heart would have got out. ‘No sales,’ I said to myself; ‘I might have known it.’” Expecting an empty theater, he entered by the back door that evening and “stumbled my way in the dark among the ranks of canvas scenery, and stood on the stage. The house was gloomy and silent, and its emptiness depressing.” Then Sam “heard a murmur,” he wrote, and “it rose higher and higher, and ended in a crash, mingled with cheers. It made my hair raise, it was so close to me, and so loud. . . . [B]efore I well knew what I was about, I was in the middle of the stage, staring at a sea of faces, bewildered by the fierce glare of the lights, and quaking in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away. The house was full, aisles and all!”12

  A pretty tale, but demonstrably stretched. For days in advance all of the San Francisco newspapers had puffed his appearance and reported that the lecture was a sellout. Many attendees, “unable to obtain seats, ranged themselves in a standing posture against the walls.” The next day the Morning Call, in fact, urged Sam to repeat the lecture at the earliest possible date because so “many ladies and gentlemen . . . failed to obtain admission” and others who might have attended had been discouraged by the muddy streets. The box office receipts amounted to over twelve hundred dollars. After sharing the box with Maguire and paying advertising costs, Sam cleared about four hundred dollars. His detractors—who claimed that he had failed to speak loudly enough to be heard throughout the hall or that his earthly humor was too coarse to be enjoyed by respectable women—intimated that the flattering reviews were written by critics intimidated by Sam’s reputation into praising his performance lest he retaliate. Sam responded by bragging he had “the consolation of slapping my pocket and hearing their money jingle. They have their opinions, and I have their dollars.”13

  However anxious he may have been before the lecture, he quickly calmed his nerves and, by his own testimony, never again suffered from stage fright. He was greeted with “shouts of applause” as he walked onto the stage—at five foot eight, 165 pounds, his “body lithe and muscular,” his dark eyes “deep set,” his reddish hair already beginning to gray. “In the space of about five minutes,” one of his auditors observed, Sam “made himself quite at home with his audience.” The San Francisco Bulletin reported that it was “one of the most interesting and amusing lectures ever given in this city” and “a brilliant success.” The reviewer for the Marysville Appeal had feared that Sam “could not talk as he can write” but he was “very much mistaken.” For the entire ninety minutes “the crowd had no more effect” upon him “than if he had been addressing a few boys in a cellar. I felt assured the moment that he made his bow that he was all right, and when he commenced the lecture, I commenced to laugh, and continued to do so until the end. He made a hit, a great hit, and he has established a reputation for himself as a humorist that nothing can shake.” Sam was “a character; he is one in a thousand; he is gifted by nature, and to attempt to imitate him would only render a person supremely ridiculous.” The San Francisco Examiner reiterated both points: “in five minutes all doubt as to his ability as a lecturer was dispelled. The most delightful discovery made was, we think, this: that he speaks as he writes.” Sam remembered that as soon as he began to speak his friends in the audience “made such outrageous applause that I half recovered, and I was actually surprised myself at the number of jokes I related.” “The tumult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before I could gain any command over myself,” he related in Roughing It, but “within three or four minutes I was comfortable, and even content.” The jackleg journalist Noah Brooks, who was in the audience and perhaps one of the conspirators with instructions to cheer on cue, recalled that “shrieks of laughter and thunders of applause had been contrived to be launched at appropriate intervals. Some of these kindly meant demonstrations were ill-timed. No matter; the unpurchased suffrages of the people soon overwhelmed the less discriminating volleys of the claque.” Sam’s “method as a lecturer,” Brooks added, “was distinctly unique and novel. His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences, and above all, the surprise that spread over his face when the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word-painting”—especially his set piece about his visit to Kilauea—“were unlike anything of the kind they had ever known. . . . All this was original; it was Mark Twain.” The audience demanded an encore, during which Sam announced that he planned
to publish a book about his trip to the Sandwich Islands with illustrations by Edward Jump.14

  The next day, as he noted in Roughing It, all of the critics were kind, his “appetite returned,” and “I had an abundance of money.” His friends at the Dramatic Chronicle declared that his performance was “one of the greatest successes of the season.” His friends at the Morning Call pronounced the lecture “most successful,” his audience among the “largest and most fashionable” ones “ever seen within the walls of the Academy of Music,” and ranked him above Artemus Ward among humorists. The Bulletin (“one of the most interesting and amusing lectures ever given in this city”) was no less enthusiastic. The Californian commended its “constant undercurrent of humor—so characteristic of the speaker.” Prentice Mulford in the Golden Era praised his droll humor and also contrasted him with Ward, who was “as a penn’orth of tallow to a mammoth circus chandelier. . . . Nature must have been in one of her funniest moods when she fashioned this mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous.” Harte reported that Sam made “a brilliant success” and “at once established his reputation as an eccentric lecturer whose humor surpassed Artemus Ward’s with the advantage of being of a more legitimate quality. He had already acquired, here and abroad, considerable fame as an original and broadly humorous writer, but he took his audience by storm.” According to Harte, Sam’s brand of humor was “of the western character of ludicrous exaggeration and audacious statement, which perhaps is more thoroughly national and American than even the Yankee delineations of [James Russell] Lowell.” His satire is “not always subtle or refined,” he added, but his abhorrence of sham “will make his faculty serviceable to mankind. His talent is so well based that he can write seriously and well when he chooses, which is perhaps the best test of true humor.” With genuine prescience, Harte hailed “a new star rising in this western horizon.”15 After this stage appearance, Sam was well-nigh launched on his public speaking career.