If Sam could have had his choice of federal offices but refused because of his aversion to government work, Orion would have leapt at an appointment but was denied all opportunities. Sam initially blamed the bloated Washington bureaucracy. “Things necessarily move slowly where there is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended to,” he explained to his family in late November 1867. Two weeks later, he conceded that while he had “friends in high places who offer me such things . . . it is hard to get them interested in one’s relatives.” But in fact there was a more implacable problem: President Andrew Johnson was at loggerheads with the Radical Republicans in Congress, an impasse that led to his impeachment early in 1868. Whereas Sam considered the move an attempted legislative coup d’état—“Congress has said it is going to boss this Government, in spite of everything and everybody, and it is keeping its word”—his older brother was sympathetic to impeachment. As was his wont, Orion was simultaneously on both the right and wrong sides of history. As a result, Sam was repeatedly frustrated in his effort to win for him a berth in the U.S. Patent Office. He had hoped to broker a position for Orion, if he or the president would “modify their [sic] politics,” but as he wrote his family in late January 1868, “I expect that thing is going to take me months to accomplish” because of political infighting. A month later, still checkmated, Sam was relieved when Orion decided he no longer hankered for a patronage job. “I am glad you do not want the clerkship,” Sam wrote his brother, “for that Patent Office is in such a muddle” with Johnson’s pending impeachment trial in the Senate “that there would be no security for the permanency of a place in it. The same remark will apply to all offices here, now, & no doubt will, till the close of the present administration. Any man who holds a place here, now, stands prepared at all times to vacate it.” But, Sam added, “surely government pap” or breast milk “must be nauseating food for a man—a man whom God has enabled to saw wood & be independent.” In a recent Alta letter, he had similarly (if ironically) disparaged office seekers. They were “wonderfully seedy” and “fasten themselves to influential friends like barnacles to whales and never let go until they are carried into the pleasant waters of office or scraped off against a protruding hotel bill.” Resigned to his fate, Orion eventually rejoined Mollie in Keokuk.29
Sam became a welcome and coveted guest in the parlors and dining rooms of the capital during these months. While he claimed that he did “not enjoy receptions” because so many people attended them, he readily allowed that “I go to them, and inflict all manner of crowding, suffocation, and general discomfort upon myself.” He hobnobbed “with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs for no good purpose.” In mid-December he crossed paths with his old nemesis Charles C. Harris, who had been appointed His Royal Hawaiian Majesty’s Envoy to the United States. “I never saw Harris so pleasant and companionable before,” he reported in the Alta California before showering him with faint praise. “He is really very passable company, until he tries to be funny, and then Harris is ghastly. He smiles as if he had his foot in a steel trap and did not want anybody to know it.” On January 15 Sam attended a reception hosted by Commanding General Ulysses S. Grant, not yet elected president, where he also mixed with Philip Sheridan and William Seward. At the time, Sam “merely saw and shook hands” with Grant “but had no conversation.” He elaborated on the brief encounter in his next letter to the Alta:
Poor, modest, bored, unhappy Grant stood smileless, anxious, alert, with every faculty of his mind intensely bent upon the business before him, and nervously seized each hand as it came, and while he gave it a single shake, looked not upon its owner, but threw a quick look-out for the next. He is not a large man; he is a particularly plain-looking man; his hair is straight and lustreless, his head is large, square of front and perpendicular in the rear.
On January 30 Sam also attended a reception hosted by Speaker Schuyler Colfax. In February he partied at the “coming out” of the debutante daughter of Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan and at a reception hosted by the Illinois State Association. He responded to a toast at a banquet of the Society of Good Fellows on February 14 and, he hastened to assure Mother Fairbanks, he was “funny without being vulgar.” At events on February 24 and 28 hosted by Senator Henry W. Corbett of Oregon and Speaker Colfax, Sam also mingled with Senators Cornelius Cole of California, Charles D. Drake of Missouri, William Stewart of Nevada, Thomas Tipton of Nebraska, and George H. Williams of Oregon; Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller; the California pioneer John Sutter; the travel writer Ross Browne; and John C. Frémont, aka the Pathfinder, the son-in-law of Thomas Hart Benton. Emily Edson Briggs, a columnist for the Washington Morning Chronicle, reported that Sam had become
quite a lion, as he deserves to be. [He] is a bachelor, faultless in taste, whose snowy vest is suggestive of endless quarrels with Washington washerwomen; but the heroism of Mark is settled for all time, for such purity and smoothness were never seen before. His lavender gloves might have been stolen from some Turkish harem, so delicate were they in size; but more likely—anything else were more likely than that. In form and feature he bears some resemblance to the immortal Nasby; but whilst Petroleum is brunette to the core, Twain is a golden, amber-hued, melting blonde.
On March 2 Sam also attended a public reception at the White House, where he met the besieged president Andrew Johnson. “I did not enjoy the visit,” he allowed, because Johnson “looked so like a plain, simple, good natured old farmer that it was hard to conceive that this was the imperious ‘tyrant’ whose deeds had been stirring the sluggish blood of thirty millions of people. . . . I never saw a man who seemed as friendless and forsaken, and I never felt for any man so much.” He exchanged a few words with Johnson, or so he claimed in his next column for the Enterprise: “I said: ‘How is your health, Mr. President?’ And he said: ‘It cannot be of any particular consequence to you, young man. I keep a doctor.’”30
During one of his trips to New York over the winter, moreover, Sam crossed paths with Walt Whitman. Years later, the poet remembered that they met before Sam “was rich and famous. Like all humorists he was very sober: inclined to talk of the latest things in politics, men, books, a man after old-fashioned models, slow to move, liking to stop and chat—the sort of fellow one is quietly drawn to.”31
By early December 1867, alerted perhaps by Joe Goodman, Sam had learned that the Alta California had copyrighted his Quaker City letters, but he was unruffled by the news. He believed he was still entitled to revise them for publication in his book. But when the proprietors of the Alta, including John McComb, got wind of his plans in mid-January they “were wroth,” according to Noah Brooks. “They regarded the letters as their private property. Had they not bought and paid for them? Could they have been written if they had not furnished the money to pay the expenses of the writer?” The Alta soon fired a shot across the bow, a notice that Sam’s letters were its “exclusive property” and no publisher had “the legal or moral right” to reprint them. McComb and the others also sent Sam what amounted to a cease-and-desist order, to which he replied defiantly. “I expect I have made the Alta people mad, but I don’t care,” he wrote his family on January 24. “They did not telegraph me soon enough.” A few days later, he retreated slightly, telegraphing San Francisco to request formal permission to reuse his letters—and his request was denied. “That thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, & now shows no disposition to let me use them,” he whined to Mollie Clemens. In late February, the Alta people raised the ante, announcing plans to reprint all of his Quaker City letters to the paper in a cheap paperback edition, preempting his revision of them. Sam was predictably outraged. “A day or two ago I found out that the Alta people meant to publish my letters in book form in San Francisco,” he complained to Mother Fairbanks on March 10. Bliss had suggested that he simply “write the book all over new, & not mind what the Alta does—but that won’t do.” If the Alta reprinted “those wretched, slangy letters
unrevised, I should be utterly ruined.” So he decided to take decisive measures: to hurry to California and negotiate face-to-face with John McComb and Frederick MacCrellish for the rights to his work. Besides, three months of winter weather in New York and Washington “had begun to make me restive, and I almost wished for a good excuse to try a change of scene,” he wrote. “It came about the eighth of March—a business call to California.” Sam touched Bliss for a thousand-dollar advance on royalties to cover his expenses and left Washington immediately.32
CHAPTER 16
The West Revisited
It was good to get back to San Francisco again, with its generous climate, and its clouded skies—and better than all its cordial people, who always shake you by the hand as if they were in solid earnest.
—“Letter from Mark Twain,” May 19, 1868
SAM CLEMENS SAILED on March 11, 1868, from New York aboard the Henry Chauncey (“I am so glad of an excuse to go to sea again”), paused in Cuba (“such a vision!—a perfect garden!”), and landed in Aspinwall, Nicaragua (aka Colón, Panama) on March 19. The Chauncey was “a magnificent ship,” he wrote his mother and sister, and it carried twelve hundred passengers who were “not so stupid” as the pilgrims aboard the Quaker City, plus he was assigned two staterooms so he was “not crowded.” He traveled forty-five miles across the isthmus by rail in only two or three hours, then sailed north to California via the Sacramento.
On April 2 he arrived in San Francisco and again registered at the Occidental Hotel. Though at first glance Sam seemed at a disadvantage in his discussions with Frederick MacCrellish of the Alta California, in fact he leveraged his case by arguing that by copyrighting his letters and preventing them from republication throughout the West, the newspaper had limited his name recognition and damaged his ability to earn money by lecturing—a claim that contradicted his argument elsewhere that the publication of his lectures diminished the value of his books. If the editors “had acted fairly and honorably, and had allowed the country press to use the letters or portions of them,” he contended, “my lecture-skirmish on the coast would have paid me ten thousand dollars, whereas the Alta had lost me that amount.” MacCrellish offered to settle: “he would publish the book [that is, the compilation of unrevised dispatches] and allow me ten per cent royalty on it.” But, as Sam noted, “The compromise did not appeal to me”—because it would have curbed the sale of the travelogue Sam had contracted to write for the American Publishing Company—“and I said so.” It was only the latest in a long series of Sam’s disputes with publishers. But this time he won. MacCrellish surrendered. He “agreed to suppress his book, on certain conditions: in my preface I must thank the Alta for waiving its ‘rights’ and granting me permission. I objected to the thanks. I could not with any large degree of sincerity thank the Alta for bankrupting my lecture-raid. After considerable debate my point was conceded and the thanks left out.” As Sam wrote his friend Mary Mason Fairbanks on May 5, a month after his return to the Bay City, “Alta has given me permission to use the printed letters. It is all right, now.”1
He also jumped back into the social swim in San Francisco. He likely met the Civil War veteran and journalist Ambrose Bierce, a recent émigré to the city, who a few months later ambiguously reported that “whenever he has been long enough sober to permit an estimate, [Sam] has been uniformly found to bear a spotless character.” He certainly met the young actor Lawrence Barrett, whose repertory company was in the midst of a long run at Maguire’s Opera House featuring plays by Dion Boucicault, William Shakespeare, and Lester Wallack. On April 6 Sam spoke extemporaneously at the meeting of a literary society at Charles Wadsworth’s church and his speech “was received with the liveliest applause.”2
His appearance was a prelude to the more formal lectures he delivered over the next month. On April 9 he spoke at a benefit for the Methodist Episcopal Church in Oakland, and on April 14 he packed Platt’s Hall, much as he had in November 1866. Sam delivered a revised version of his lecture “The Frozen Truth,” retitled “Pilgrim Life,” before a standing-room-only audience of sixteen hundred who each paid a dollar in gold for a reserved seat. According to one reporter, some people were “suspended from hooks, clung tenaciously to the walls, grouped upon window sills, grappled at gas fixtures, mounted the plug hats and well covered shoulders of strangers.” Sam reprised the talk the following evening “in order to accommodate the thousands of besiegers who were repulsed at the door.”
But both performances were coolly reviewed. Sam’s friends at the Alta California grumbled that the lecture the first night “was not so well prepared” as his Sandwich Islands lecture eighteen months earlier. The dramatic editor of the San Francisco Bulletin also strained to praise the lecture. Sam “appeared in a singular disguise before an immense audience in Platt’s Hall last evening,” he reported, “but his voice and humor betrayed him.” To be sure, “there were many telling points in it” but “on the whole, the lecture was not as completely prepared or warmly received as his first one on the Hawaiian Islands.” Even Sam’s former colleagues at the Morning Call were tepid in their praise. He was merely “a kind of free lance, working himself into a grotesque rage over dulness, carving the sconces of proper folk.” A pair of local weeklies were even more hostile. The San Francisco Weekly Mercury panned the lecture, dismissing it as “a most palpable failure . . . foul with sacrilegious allusions, impotent humor, and malignant distortions of history and truth” delivered by an “illustrious letter-monger” who appealed to “a certain class of readers,” a “man so lost to every sense of decency and shame” that he “should better be allowed to expire in obscurity”; and the Marin County Journal reviled the “miserable scribbler, whose letters in the Alta sickened everyone who read them.” His address the next night, according to the Alta, was better because he spoke “with more nonchalance, assuming that confidential conversational tone that breaks down all barriers between the man on the stage and the people occupying the seats.” The San Francisco correspondent of the Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser was even more forgiving, noting that both lectures “were very satisfactory.” But even Sam was disappointed by his performances. “It was a miserably poor lecture,” he wrote Mother Fairbanks, though he hoped to “write a better one the next time I come to San Francisco.” Moreover, he was attacked from pulpits across the region for his Alta letters, still appearing periodically in the paper, or so he asserted to Mary Fairbanks:
The most straight-laced of the preachers here cannot well get through a sermon without turning aside to give me a blast. The last remark reported to me from the pulpit is “this son of the Devil, Mark Twain!” It is a fine flight of fancy, anyway, isn’t it? If I only get time to write the article I have in my head, I will make that parson climb a tree. Don’t you distress yourself. It is only the small-fry ministers who assail me. All those of high rank & real influence I visit, dine & swap lies with, just the same as ever. They have complained of nothing save the rudeness & coarseness of those Holy Land letters which you did not revise.
“What did I ever write about the Holy Land that was so peculiarly lacerating?” he plaintively asked Fairbanks.3
Despite his generally mediocre reviews in San Francisco, Sam launched another lecture tour through the major cities of northern California and Nevada. At the Bradley and Rulofson gallery at the corner of Sacramento and Montgomery Streets, he sat for a photograph by William Rulofson suitable for advertising purposes.4
Normally dubious about the accuracy of snapshots—“No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody”—Sam refused to smile for the camera. He was nevertheless impressed by Rulofson’s picture: “It is better looking than I am, & so I ordered two hundred.” He began his speech at the Metropolitan Theater in Sacramento on April 17 by trying to disarm the critics who had accused him of sacrilege. He had purged virtually all references to Palestine from his address because, he explained, he “had been abused enough for writing” about the Holy Land, and so he “would not attempt
to lecture on it.” He largely ignored his experiences there to focus on the foibles of the Quaker City passengers, and the strategy worked. He concluded by pandering to patriots in the audience. While criticizing the venality and office seeking in Washington, D.C., he announced that he was pleased to have returned to a part of the country “where politicians were incorruptible.” Ironically, Sam’s friend Schuyler Colfax would be implicated in the Crédit Mobilier scandal in 1873 and forced to resign the vice presidency. The Sacramento Union complained that Sam’s “address is not very good and his voice is low and sometimes aggravating to listeners,” grousing that his incidental comments about the Holy Land were “greatly at variance with the customary sentimentalities and grandiloquent musings of the popular travelers.” Nevertheless, the critic allowed that he was partial to “this California humorist” because at “the bottom of his intellectual character there seems to us to lie a vast deal of good sense, which his humor is only used to dress up in such presentable style as will hardly fail to please any audience.” The San Francisco correspondent for the Reese River Reveille invited Sam to repeat the lecture in Austin, Nevada, and promised him a full house, but he declined “on account of the time necessarily consumed in traveling” there.5
Instead Sam took his circus through northern California—to Marysville on April 18, Nevada City on April 20, and Grass Valley on April 21 before traveling to Nevada on April 23. He received a rousing welcome from Joe Goodman at the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise building and from Philip Lynch and Alf Doten in Gold Hill, and his friend Conrad Wiegand presented him with a silver bar worth about forty dollars and embossed with the slogan “Mark Twain—Matthew, V: 41” (“Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain”). The Enterprise added that Sam would never object to going the extra mile “if sure of getting a fellow to the bar.” Coincidentally, Sam arrived in Virginia City the day before Jean Marie A. Villain, alias John Melanie or Milleain or Millen or Millian, was hanged. Villain had confessed to the murder in January 1867 of Sam’s friend Jule Bulette, a British-born courtesan and the most popular prostitute in town, who was well known as a public benefactor. As Sam explained, Villain had “secreted himself under the house of a woman of the town who lived alone, and in the dead watches of the night, he entered her room, knocked her senseless with a billet of wood as she slept, and then strangled her with his fingers.” He stole “her diamond pin, coral earbobs, gold charms, sables,” and other items. When some of these valuables were discovered in his home, according to the Enterprise, he asked “to be hung as soon as possible; that he did not wish to live any longer,” and the authorities readily obliged. He was executed near the Geiger Grade north of the city as four thousand people, including Sam, watched from the adjacent hills. “I never had witnessed an execution before,” Sam observed,6
The Life of Mark Twain Page 67
