The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  bred a species of infamous pictorial literature that will spread the same effect over a far wider field. Papers and pictures that would have been regarded as obscene, and shunned like a pestilence a few years ago, are displayed on every bookstand now and sell by tens and hundreds of thousands. Boys and girls can buy them when they please, and they do buy them, and so prepare to go as straight to the devil as they possibly can. . . . The best thing New York can do, now, and the other cities and towns of America as well, will be to go to building—not warehouses and dwellings, but houses of ill-fame—let them build thousands and tens of thousands of them, and the Black Crook, the White Fawn and the infernal literature they have bred will stock them all.11

  Stimulating or simulated nudity had become faddish at Broadway theaters. The Worrell Sisters, Irene and Sophie, who had performed in San Francisco when Sam lived there in 1865, staged a burlesque piece in New York in spring 1867 in which they stripped but, Sam added, they did not remove enough clothing “to achieve supreme success.” He also saw Sallie Hinckley, formerly of San Francisco, play “a nude fairy piece” in Bird of Paradise at the New York Theatre on Broadway. In the last act

  she makes a lovely statue of herself and stands aloft before the audience, and dressed about like the Menken. She looks very beautiful—but heaven help her assistants! She has got about thirty padded, painted, slab-sided, lantern-jawed old hags with her who are so mortal homely that nothing tastes good to them. And to see those lank, blear-eyed leathery old scalawags come out and hop around in melancholy dance, with their cheap, ragged, nine-inch dress-tails flapping in the air—oh, it is worth going miles to see! And when one of them finishes her poor little shindig and makes her wind up stamp in the orthodox way, sticking out a slipper like a horse trough, with a criminal attempt at grace, I want to snatch a double-barrelled shot-gun and go after the whole tribe.

  As usual, Sam frequented the legitimate theater, too. He attended performances of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at Zion Protestant Episcopal Church, The Christian Martyr at Barnum’s Museum, and Macbeth starring Joseph Proctor at the Old Bowery Theater. He was convinced, however, that Edwin Booth, headlining at the Winter Garden, would eventually need to “peel some women” to attract an audience because “nothing else can claim the popular taste, the way things are going now.”12

  Sam attended something other than pernicious entertainment when he ferried across the East River to Brooklyn Heights on Sunday, February 3, to attend the most famous house of worship in America, Henry Ward Beecher’s capacious Plymouth Church. The local blue laws required virtually all city businesses and “all possible places of amusement and public resort” to close on Sunday, so Sam paradoxically observed both the local custom and Beecher as he paced the stage. “I have been in a pious frenzy myself for a while,” Sam admitted, and he had been promised a place in the pew of Moses Sperry Beach, the owner and editor of the New York Sun, though he arrived too late to be seated there. It was a common problem at the church: thirty-five hundred people were often squeezed into a space designed to accommodate twenty-seven hundred. Instead, Sam was jammed into a seat in the gallery “about large enough to accommodate a spittoon.” But he heard Beecher preach “one of the liveliest and most sensible sermons I ever listened to.” The source of his satisfaction is not difficult to discover: Beecher was a literary artist in the pulpit and on the platform. According to the popular historian James Parton, author of biographies of Aaron Burr, Ben Franklin, Horace Greeley, and Andrew Jackson and husband of the humorist Fanny Fern (aka Sarah Willis Parton), Beecher’s sermons contained “not a word too much, nor a word misused, nor a word waited for, nor an inharmonious movement.” Or as Sam put it, Beecher

  has a rich, resonant voice, and a distinct enunciation, and makes himself heard all over the church without very apparent effort. His discourse sparkled with felicitous similes and metaphors (it is his strong suit to use the language of the worldly,) and might be called a striking mosaic work, wherein poetry, pathos, humor, satire and eloquent declamation were happily blended upon a ground work of earnest exposition of the great truths involved in his text. Whenever he forsook his notes and went marching up and down his stage, sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point, I could have started the audience with a single clap of the hands and brought down the house. I had a suffocating desire to do it.

  Beecher was “a remarkably handsome man when he is in the full tide of sermonizing,” Sam concluded, “but he is as homely as a singed cat when he isn’t doing anything.”13

  He was almost as impressed by the High Church Episcopal service he attended at St. Alban’s Church on February 17 and by Anna Dickinson’s lecture “Something to Do” at Cooper Union two days later. He was usually critical of rival lecturers but not on this occasion; instead, he “was mightily pleased.” Dickinson was escorted to the stage by the philanthropist Peter Cooper and introduced to an audience of twenty-five hundred by Horace Greeley. Though Sam guessed she was not older than twenty-three, she was in fact thirty-four. She spoke rapidly without notes, “never hesitate[d] for a word,” and “always [got] the right word in the right place.” Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman a generation later, Dickinson argued for greater economic opportunities for women. “She keeps close to her subject, reasons well, and makes every point without fail,” Sam noted. She had only a single defect as a lecturer, one common to her sex: “frequently, after she has got her audience wrought up ready to explode with enthusiasm, she does not spring her grand climax upon them at the precious instant, but drags toward it so slowly that by the time she reaches it they are nearly cooled down to a dignified self-possession again.” With the gender prejudices common to his time, he predicted that Dickinson would “make a right venomous old maid someday.”14 Sam was eventually acquainted with her more personally than he would have preferred.

  Sam was as prolific as ever during these months as a contributor to the Alta California, the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and other papers. Presumably at the invitation of Whitelaw Reid of the Cincinnati Gazette, whom he likely met in Washington early in 1867, Sam blurbed Mrs. C. V. Waite’s exposé of the Latter-Day Saints, The Mormon Prophet and His Harem (1867): “If that book don’t sell, it will be foolish for anybody to try to get up one that will. I only wish I were the publisher of it.” Sam would cite the book three times in Roughing It. During this time he contributed seven mostly unremarkable sketches, including “Jim Wolf and the Tom Cats,” in which he reintroduced the raconteur Simon Wheeler, to the New York Sunday Mercury, which boasted a circulation of about sixty-five thousand. He later recalled that he had been “offered a large sum to write something for the Sunday Mercury” and probably received twenty-five dollars for each of the seven items, which “seemed over-pay.” He dined at the Century Club, perhaps “the most unspeakably respectable Club in the United States,” whose founding members included his friend Henry W. Bellows, and he attended the grand Bal d’Opera, a masquerade ball at the New York Academy of Music, along with a thousand other people. He also paid court to a mysterious sweetheart known only as Pauline. According to one of his friends, Sam “was smitten with her good looks and qualities,” though he declined to elaborate. Sam remained in touch with Pauline until at least February 1868, when he complained to Mollie that he had “received no letter from my sweetheart in New York for three days. This won’t do. I shall have to run up there & see what the mischief is the matter. I will break that girl’s heart. I am getting too venerable now to put up with nonsense from children.”15 Pauline then disappears forever from the record.

  In February, probably on the same Sunday he attended Plymouth Church, Sam learned about an excursion to Europe and the Holy Land planned for the summer—the first organized tour of its kind. Many of those signed up were members of Beecher’s congregation and the minister was rumored to be among them. Forty-six
-year-old Charles C. Duncan, organizer of the trip and owner of a shipping company, had leased the Quaker City, a 1,428-ton side-wheeler with a normal speed of ten knots with gusts up to twelve, consuming 30 tons of coal daily, for the voyage.

  A former Union supply transport built in 1854, it had been refurbished for passengers and was to be outfitted with a library, a printing press, a Chickering piano, and a Mason and Hamlin parlor organ. The spacious saloon featured six large tables, a chandelier, and curtained windows. Duncan announced that several celebrities in addition to Beecher had joined the band of 110 travelers, among them the orator Henry Gwinn; Robert Hendershoot (aka the Drummer Boy of the Rappahannock, whom Sam confused with Henry D. Davenport, the Drummer Boy of the Potomac); the actress Maggie Mitchell; and General William Tecumseh Sherman. All applicants for the journey were to be vetted by a selection committee and required to provide character references. A few reprobates with enough money to pay for the voyage might even be admitted to the company. Duncan explained in his advertising circular that the “limited amount of room we have” was open to any person with “good moral character, good health, and a fair share of good humor.” The ship would dock in Marseilles for ten days to allow passengers to attend the Exposition Universelle in Paris before sailing to several cities in Italy, including Civitavecchia “to land any [passengers] who may prefer to go to Rome.” It would “tarry awhile” in Piran Piraeus, the port of Athens, then progress to Constantinople “through the beautiful Bosphorus” and “across the Black Sea to Sebastopol and Balaklava.” The excursion then would continue to the Holy Land, touching at Beirut, where wayfarers might leave the ship and journey overland to biblical sites, including those in Jerusalem, before rejoining the ship at Joppa. Then homeward through Egypt, Sardinia, Majorca, and Valencia, “the finest city in Spain.” From Gibraltar the Quaker City would sail to Madeira and then ten days across the Atlantic to Bermuda before returning to New York. The fare was $1,250 per person in greenbacks or about $550 in gold, plus incidentals—an expensive excursion, compared to the $200 price of a round-trip first-class ticket to Europe on the Cunard Line.16 Though the tour was advertised as a nonprofit pleasure trip, Duncan in fact was near bankruptcy and he fully expected to make money on the expedition.

  Sam was immediately intrigued by this promise of “five months of utter freedom from care and anxiety of every kind.” He was eager to end the monotony that had befallen him. “All I do know or feel,” he soon wrote his family, is “that I am wild with impatience to move—move—Move! Half a dozen times I have wished I had sailed long ago in some ship that wasn’t going to keep me chained here to chafe for lagging ages while she got ready to go. Curse the endless delays! They always kill me—they make me neglect every duty & then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.” Accompanied by Ned House, he called on Duncan at his office on Wall Street near the harbor in late February. “I was without conscience in those old days,” Sam remembered. He had planned to claim “that I was a son of the captain’s whom he had never met, and consequently hadn’t classified, and by this means I hoped to get a free passage; but I was saved from this great villainy by the happy accident of Mr. House’s getting in his milder rascality ahead of me.” House introduced him as “the Reverend Mark Twain,” a Baptist minister recently arrived from San Francisco traveling for his health, which he had ruined while evangelizing among the natives of the Sandwich Islands. House even expressed concern that, as a Baptist, Sam might be denied the opportunity to travel with so liberal and broad-minded a clergyman as Beecher. Duncan claimed a decade later that he had recognized Sam immediately and knew he was no minister by the smell of cheap whiskey on his breath. A “tall, lanky, unkempt, unwashed individual,” he recalled, “filled my office with the fumes of bad liquor. . . . I knew him at once, it was Mark Twain, and I said, ‘You don’t look like a Baptist minister or smell like one either.’” On his part, Sam retorted that “for a ceaseless, tireless, forty-year public advocate of total abstinence the ‘captain’ is a mighty good judge of whiskey at second-hand.” In his defense, he added that at the time he had been too poor to “afford good whiskey. How could I know that the ‘captain’ was so particular about the quality of a man’s liquor? I didn’t know he was a purist in that matter, and that the difference between a five-cent and forty-cent toddy would remain a rankling memory with him for ten years.” Still, Sam handed Duncan a 10 percent deposit to hold his place on the Quaker City and “left references as to my high moral character,” the Reverend Samuel Damon of Honolulu among them. “It was scarcely wise” for Duncan to admit “so strange a genius” as Sam “into the sacred circle”—like a fox into a henhouse—though “it was well for the public,” the New York Herald later editorialized.17 Sam’s decision to join the excursion required a change in his itinerary. He had planned to travel to France and from there to continue around the world. Instead, he committed to a round-trip from New York to Europe and the Holy Land and back to New York. He would never travel either to Japan or China.

  Much as the Sacramento Union had bankrolled Sam’s trip to Hawaii, he hoped that the Alta California would finance his voyage aboard the Quaker City. He proposed to the proprietors of the paper that he would contribute a total of fifty travel letters during the trip if they advanced the money to pay his fare—a stiff investment for a two-penny dreadful. Noah Brooks, managing editor of the Alta, doubted that the scheme was worth the expense, but John McComb persuaded Frederick MacCrellish and the other owners to approve it. They telegraphed Sam to “go ahead.” Whereas he had received about four dollars a letter as the San Francisco correspondent of the Territorial Enterprise and had been paid seven dollars per Sandwich Islands letter by the Sacramento Union, he was raised to twenty dollars per letter by the Alta California. He was sent a remarkably open-ended contract: “Your only instructions are that you will continue to write at such times and from such places as you deem proper and in the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers of the Alta California.”18 That is, Sam was to remain a roving reporter for the paper with unspecified duties and deadlines. Unfortunately, the brief negotiation failed to clarify the issue of copyright. Who would own the articles—the paper that paid for them or the author? Who had the right to reprint them?

  While in New York, Sam also began to shop around the manuscripts of two books, the first the illustrated travelogue about Hawaii based on his articles in the Sacramento Union, the other a potpourri of his humor writings. Webb had editorialized in the Californian the year before that Sam’s Sandwich Islands letters “possess sufficient intrinsic interest and value to justify” republication and “we are satisfied that the book would prove both a literary and a pecuniary success.” Sam submitted printers’ copy to Dick & Fitzgerald but eventually withdrew it because, he explained, “it would be useless to publish it in these dull publishing times.” Instead, he sold five of the letters to the New York Weekly Review, a short-lived, middlebrow literary paper, which reprinted them between mid-March and late June.19

  He was even more sternly rebuffed in his attempt to publish his humor book. Webb suggested that he compile a volume of comic sketches and, although Sam realized he had but a “slender” or “very attenuated” reputation on which to base its appeal, he “was charmed and excited by the suggestion and quite willing to venture it.” With Webb’s help, he selected twenty-seven pieces from his scrapbooks. He chastened the humor in some of them, including the jumping frog sketch, by revising them slightly and toning down the slang to suit polite eastern sensibilities. In a brief notice of Sut Lovingood’s Yarns in one of his Alta letters at the time, he speculated that George Washington Harris’s book “will sell well in the West, but the Eastern people will call it coarse and possibly taboo it.” That is, Sam was sensitive to the differences in regional canons of taste. Webb wrote an introduction to The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches to grease its reception. He noted that Sam was alr
eady well known in the East and described him as more moralist than humorist. Webb also arranged an appointment for Sam with G. W. Carleton, his own publisher, at Carleton’s office on Broadway. The meeting was a disaster and proved the truth of Isaac Newton’s third law of motion. Sam wrote W. D. Howells a decade later that Carleton insulted him and “when the day arrives that sees me doing him a civility, I shall feel that I am ready for Paradise.” Sam was still bitter forty years later. As he recalled in his autobiography, he was compelled to remind Carleton that he was there to offer a “book for publication.” The publisher

  began to swell, and went on swelling and swelling and swelling until he had reached the dimensions of a god of about the second or third degree. Then the fountains of his great deep were broken up, and for two or three minutes I couldn’t see him for the rain. It was words, only words, but they fell so densely that they darkened the atmosphere. Finally he made an imposing sweep with his right hand which comprehended the whole room and said, “Books—look at those shelves. Every one of them is loaded with books that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I don’t. Good morning.”