by Ron Powers
Mollie and seven-year old Jennie soon joined Orion in Carson City. Mollie, with her drab Iowa roots, now entered the brief zenith of her married life. As the wife of the territorial Secretary, she took on civic stature, organizing parties and entertainments in the two-story frame house that Orion had built at Spear and Division streets.
The star of her gatherings was generally the Secretary’s younger brother. In November 1862, Sam talked Joe Goodman into letting him travel to Carson City to cover the second assembly of the legislature, to be held over a six-week period at the town’s new Great Basin Hotel. He boarded at his brother’s house and sparkled at Mollie’s social events, dancing a deft quadrille, drawing laughter with his long-drawled stories, warbling songs from his Missouri days. The Mule named Jerusalem or perhaps Methusalem (and possibly it was a Horse), made its Western debut. He cut a figure in a starched shirt and black boots, a wardrobe he sometimes augmented with a dramatic broadcloth cloak. “Great excitement exists,” Sam had written as he and other reporters spent a night raising hell on the street with bonfires, speeches, and brass bands. “Half the population is drunk—the balance will be before midnight.”11
He had lobbied Goodman for the legislature beat even though he didn’t know much about parliamentary procedure (which put him on more or less equal footing with the legislature). Winning the assignment brought him into contact with a young rival reporter from the Virginia City Union named Clement T. Rice. Sam recruited Rice as a foil in a zany running newspaper joke that made the two of them close friends, not to mention the talk of Washoe.
At first glance, Rice reeked of rectitude. Solemn, heavy-lidded, with shadows under his eyes and a goatee that hung below a downturned mouth, he belied the rampaging comic primate that he was made to appear in Sam’s Enterprise columns. In addition to his reporting job, Rice served as registrar of the U.S. Land Office in Carson City. He would go on to become secretary of a consolidated gold and silver mining company and later a wealthy businessman in New York City.
But not before he gyred and gimbled for a while in the wake of Sam Clemens. As he had with stolid Will Bowen back in Hannibal, and as he would with a few other fellows of dignity and stature in future years, Sam drew Clement Rice into a charmed sphere of lost, larking boyhood. The sway that Sam held over these otherwise dull men seems to have held a little of the mesmerist’s power, or Pan’s. His chosen cohorts thrived inside Sam’s imagination, transported and enlarged.
Rice and Sam competed head-to-head for scoops. Rice was the more experienced reporter. Sam sought a crash course in legislative procedure from his friend William Gillespie, chief clerk of the Nevada Territory House of Representatives. Billy Clagett, now a territorial representative, also lent him advice. Still, nothing in this legislative period was anything like the coverage of it.
Rice started things off by gleefully pouncing, in print, on some detail that Sam had jumbled up. Sam retaliated by announcing to his readers that Rice was “unreliable.” In subsequent dispatches, Rice became “The Unreliable,” a hopelessly dissipated liar, glutton, and borderline criminal. Rice happily fired back, branding Sam “The Reliable.” The “feud” went on, readers of both papers loved it, and the two print antagonists became close drinking friends, holidaying together in Carson City and San Francisco. As for Sam’s reportage, it quickly stabilized to a level that earned him, along with Rice, a resolution of thanks from the lawmakers at the session’s conclusion on December 20. Back in Virginia City, Sam found that newspapers all over Washoe were reprinting his more colorful work. By late December 1862, though, he was back to doodling in his notepad as he slouched in courtrooms and meeting rooms, sketching caricatures of the speakers he was supposed to be covering. Joe Goodman had assigned him to report stock quotations, earnings from some of the five hundred mines on the mountain, and public meetings in the town—the kind of rote work that drove Sam up the wall with boredom.
Sam indulged his ennui by turning the column into a spoof of the genre. Announcing that “our stock reporter” had attended a wedding the previous evening (and, by implication, gotten knee-walking drunk), Sam offered the fictitious reporter’s “notes”: “Stocks brisk, and Ophir has taken this woman for your wedded wife. Some few transactions have occurred in rings and lace veils, and at figures tall, graceful and charming…”12 Then he reported seeing a fearful “blue and yellow phantom” on New Year’s Eve. It turned out to be a familiar mannequin advertising a shooting gallery.13 A week later, after his hat was filched at an Odd Fellows ball in Gold Hill, he announced menacingly in the column that he suffered from the seven years’ itch, “probably the most aggravating disease in the world. It is contagious.”14
His relations with Goodman, despite Sam’s volatility, remained warm—Sam was by now, in effect, the paper’s city editor—and so when he asked his boss for a day’s vacation to Carson City in late January 1863, and that day turned into a week, with Clement Rice in tow, Goodman did not object. He did not object partly because the letters Sam sent back to the Enterprise were very good. Sprung from the humdrum, Sam was alive again, and poured his reawakened zest into his writing. Goodman could see that instead of the flashes of brilliance, interrupted by periods of lazy indifference and forced effects, Sam was perfecting a consistent, arresting voice supple enough to embrace the essentials of the classic 19th-century newspaper “letter”: personal intimacy, comic flair, and sharply observed journalism. He wrote three on this trip, each displaying a skillful mixture of first-person narrative (his social adventures in Carson), long comic riffs starring “The Unreliable,” and enough factual tidbits from the political sphere to satisfy his editor’s standards.
The seeds of his literature were germinating in this compost. Mark Twain scholar Edgar Marquess Branch has pointed out how these and other letters of the early 1860s “exhibit[ed] with marvelous nonchalance his native gift of phrase, his talent for assimilating and appreciating slang, and of course his…humor.”15 Sam’s letters also demonstrated his capacity for exaggeration. His indifference to the boundary between fact and fantasy became a hallmark of his literature, and later, of his consciousness.
The figure of the Unreliable represents the first successful appearance of an elementary Twainian device: the half- or fully fictionalized “Other,” through which the narrator can write in a counterpointing voice, conveying temperaments, points of view, even self-criticism, that are not available to the narrator himself. With his roots in the Southwestern frame story, this Other completes a dialectic that deepens the story and allows the reader to collaborate, constantly deciding which voice is the more persuasive. As the years went on, the Unreliable was replaced by such similar figures as “Brown,” “Blucher,” “Harris,” and even, in a somewhat different way, by Huckleberry Finn.
In the first of his letters, Sam had the audacity to include a fictional version of the reticent Goodman, “that incessant talker.” Sam then turned the stage over to the Unreliable, through whose antics he gave an id’s-eye-view of a party hosted by former California governor J. Neely Johnson.
About nine o’clock the Unreliable came and asked Gov. Johnson to let him stand on the porch. That creature has got more impudence than any person I ever saw in my life. Well, he stood and flattened his nose against the parlor window, and looked hungry and vicious—he always looks that way—until Col. Musser arrived with some ladies, when he actually fell in their wake and came swaggering in…He had on my fine kid boots, and my plug hat and my white kid gloves…and my heavy gold repeater, which I had been offered thousands and thousands of dollars for, many and many a time…After all the modern dances had been danced several times, the people adjourned to the supper-room. I found my wardrobe there, as usual, with the Unreliable in it…he was desperately hungry…First, he ate a platter of sandwiches; then he ate a handsomely iced poundcake; then he gobbled a dish of chicken salad; after which he ate a roast pig…Dishes of brandy-grapes, and jellies, and such things, and pyramids of fruits, melted away before him as shadows fly
at the sun’s approach…16
This first Carson City letter, which ran in the Enterprise on February 3, 1863, included two other notable features. One was its arresting lead sentence: “I feel very much as if I had just awakened out of a long sleep.”17
The other was the signature at the bottom of the letter, a signature Sam had never used before, but one that gave especial resonance to the opening sentence: “Mark Twain.”18
12
“Mark Twain—More of Him”
(1863)
How he came to select his pen name may never be known. Clemens’s own explanation and abiding myth have it that he took it from the language of the river. “Mark twain” (literally “mark two”), a depth of twelve feet—a depth readily navigable and safe. In Life on the Mississippi, he wrote that he had “confiscated” the handle from Captain Isaiah Sellers, the legendary steamboatman and occasional river correspondent whose reminiscences Sam had lampooned with wicked accuracy in 1859, and then regretted. Archived New Orleans papers of the period have not yet yielded a single use of the signature “Mark Twain.”1
Whatever its origins, “Mark Twain” is the most recognized alias in world literature, if not the history of aliases, and the most analyzed. It plays beautifully against the ear: short, resonant; that tight knock of hard consonants trailing off into a subtle chime. “Mark Twain” carries the unforced persuasiveness of an actual, everyday name (as opposed to “Trismegistus,” or “Peregrine,” or “Ensign Stebbings,” or “Uncle Remus,” or “Panurge,” or “Gipsey Girl,” or “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass”). For the hermeneutically inclined, there is the Comstock lode of possible meanings embedded in “Twain”—that undiscovered signifier from whose bourn no post-structuralist Ph.D. candidate returns.
Something about “Mark Twain” has also attracted psychobiographical analysis the way deep water attracts a dowsing rod. Justin Kaplan has pointed out that twinship was one of Twain’s favorite subjects, and proposed that Sam took refuge in the “Mark Twain” persona as a conduit to literary independence—it helped free him from his temptations toward bourgeois respectability and blandness—and, as bereavements piled up in his life, as a means of protecting his sanity.
Some 19th-century reviewers recognized a crucial distance between Samuel Clemens and his literary alter ego. We cannot “fairly hold Mr. Clemens responsible for ‘Mark Twain’s’ irreverence,” wrote Bret Harte in a famous review of The Innocents Abroad.2 In 1868, Clemens himself wrote jocularly of an “independent Double” who had gone around the country impersonating him and doing things that the respectable Clemens could not get away with.3 Late in his life, Clemens had his alias registered as a trademark. But then, the author/narrator distinction was a given for all “frame” writers and those who used pen names. Nor is it uncommon for celebrities, politicians, and other notables to talk about their public image in the third person. Somehow, Samuel Clemens has been held to closer account than most figures for behaving differently toward the world, or within his artistic medium, than in private. When T. S. Eliot later wrote of preparing “a face to meet the faces that you meet,” he surely had a wider referent in mind than Clemens/Twain.
IN TRUTH, Sam probably took a pen name (with Joe Goodman’s permission) because pen names were fashionable and also because it gave him a thin veil of anonymity (as had “Josh,” which he signed to his Enterprise letters in mid-1862). His barbed writing had started to draw blood here and there; not everyone was disarmed by his antics. Virginia City was a small world, and Sam’s more edgy items, usually short and shockingly personal under a pretense of joking, lent him an aspect of meanness in some people’s eyes, and caused others to storm the Enterprise editorial offices, looking for a fight.
In mid-February he dashed off a prototype of what would become a favorite exercise: the parody of a genre. In “Ye Sentimental Law Student” Sam imagined a valentine composed for a sweetheart by a pedantic law student (who turns out to be the shape-shifting Unreliable): “Such sights and scenes as this ever remind me, the party of the second part, of you, my Mary, the peerless party of the first part. The view from the lonely and segregated mountain peak, of this portion of what is called and known as the Creation, with all and singular the hereditaments and appurtenances thereunto appertaining and belonging…”4
Days later, his mercurial mood had turned dark again. He brooded to Jane and Pamela that his escapade in Carson City had been tolerated only because nobody at the Enterprise missed him: “they haven’t much confidence in me now.”5 He turned protective of his privacy: “What do you show my letters for? Can’t you let me tell a lie occasionally to keep my hand in for the public, without exposing me?”6
He kept a wary eye on Orion, who was acting as territorial governor during James Nye’s frequent getaways to California and the East. In December 1862, Nye had skipped out, not to return until the following July. This meant that Orion, who’d once had trouble managing his father’s dry-goods business, was now in charge of 110,000 square miles of wasteland, silver mines, immigrants, desperadoes, and increasingly resentful Indians. It was starting to look as though he had inherited a responsibility unimaginable from behind the counter in Hannibal: armed conflict with California.
A certain ambiguity prevailed at the California-Nevada line, especially along a stretch of northern land in the ore-rich Honey Lake region of the Sierra Madres (including the Esmeralda region). After Nevada aggressively organized a chunk of that disputed land into a county called Roop, a few dozen men from each side took up firing positions against one another in the village of Susanville. The shooting started on February 15, 1863. A few men were winged, nobody was killed, and after three hours, a truce was called and several of the fellows on both sides got together for dinner and war stories at a local hotel. Still, real tensions were mounting, carrying undertones of the war back east: Nevada was controlled by Unionists, but in California, “secesh” sentiment prevailed. Prickly negotiations went on for weeks, with Orion handling things on the Nevada side. “I suppose we are on the verge of war now,” Sam idly remarked in an April 11 letter home.7 It never happened, thanks mainly to Orion’s diplomatic maneuverings, which resulted in a surveying of the disputed land by crews from both California and Nevada. The valuable Esmeralda fields stayed on the Nevada side.
By early May, as the Union army licked its wounds after the battle of Chancellorsville and Ulysses S. Grant began to organize his Vicksburg campaign, Sam was in San Francisco, the Unreliable in tow. He had taken a two-month leave from the Enterprise. Money was in the air. The whole western slope, it seemed, was awash in it. Sam and Rice bought sixty days of extravagance with their saved-up salaries and hoarded stock cash-ins. They stayed at the posh Occidental Hotel at Montgomery and Bush streets, and then moved down the street to the even pricier Lick House. They dined on beefsteaks and oysters at the fanciest restaurants; drank their way up and down Montgomery Street, hit the opera and concerts at the Bella Union Melodeon, ordered some handmade suits, and sailed on yachts on the sparkling bay.
San Francisco attracted Sam, and with good reason. In 1863 it was a cosmopolitan city with traditions and luxuries that the raw wealth of Virginia City could not match. The site was settled in 1776 by Spanish missionaries, who built a mission overlooking the bay. The city that grew there was called Yerba Buena, “the Good Herb,” but was renamed San Francisco in 1847, a hundred twenty years short of the Summer of Love. At that time it had about five hundred inhabitants. After gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, thirty miles away, in December of that year, the population jumped to two thousand in February 1848; then fifteen thousand several months later. A local historian writing in 1853 remembered them as the motliest people in the world: the men wore everything from slouch hats, to short-waisted frocks, to swallowtailed dress coats, to double-breasted jackets, to surtouts, to bang-ups, to Spanish wrappers, to serapes, to bear skins (when women started arriving in number, the men began to tone it up a little). “In those days the humor of the people inclined the
m not in the slightest degree toward intellectual pursuits…one might infer without sinning violently against the truth, that drinking was a universal habit.”8
By the time of Sam and Rice’s arrival, most of the men had thrown away their slouch hats and were wearing “trim and formal models from Broadway or Chestnut Street.”9 The city would eventually replace Virginia as Sam’s Western gravitational center. He seems to have anticipated this on his initial visit. Trading on his rising celebrityhood in Washoe, he visited the offices of the San Francisco Morning Call, and struck a deal to send it letters from Virginia City.
In letters back to the Enterprise, Mark Twain kept his readers regaled with tales about the Unreliable’s usual simian behavior, “jumping” hotel rooms better than his own as one would jump a mining claim, and shouldering his way into private boxes at the theater: “[He] has conducted himself in such a reckless and unprincipled manner that he has brought the whole Territory into disrepute and made its name a reproach…”10
In a letter to his mother and sister, he practically strutted between the lines: “I suppose I know at least a thousand people here—a great many of them citizens of San Francisco, but the majority belonging in Washoe—& when I go down Montgomery street, shaking hands with Tom, Dick & Harry, it is just like being in Main street in Hannibal & meeting the old familiar faces.”11 He gassed on, “We dine out, & we lunch out, and we eat, drink and are happy—as it were. After breakfast, I don’t often see the hotel again until midnight—or after.”12 Perhaps anticipating that this sort of news would appall the good Presbyterian Jane Clemens, he twisted the knife: “I am going to the Dickens mighty fast.”13
Whichever of his chest-thumping assertions ignited his mother’s famous temper first—the social preening, the big-spending allusions, the reference to drink, the general tone of wild and crazy dissipation—she fired off a reply that pinned his ears back a little. He wrote:
