Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  He arranged what he hoped would be his farewell lecture, a reprise of his Sandwich Island triumph, on November 16. This talk, though judged a “decided success” in the papers, didn’t compare to his debut in October. Worse, the San Francisco courts attached his receipts to settle the long-standing matter of the bond he’d posted for Steve Gillis’s bail in the bartender-bashing incident. He cobbled together a short tour to San Jose, Petaluma, and Oakland. The reception was only fair—perhaps his money anxieties had caught up with him onstage.

  His appearances before large audiences must have reconjured his boyish “powerful ambition” to preach. In November he’d encouraged Pamela’s six-year-old son, also named Sammy, to “[k]eep up your lick & you will become a great minister of the gospel some day, & then I shall be satisfied.” He added, “I wanted to be a minister myself—it was the only genuine ambition I ever had—but somehow I never had any qualification for it but the ambition.”13 “I am running on preachers, now, altogether,” he informed Jane. “I find them gay…Whenever anybody offers me a letter to a preacher now, I snaffle it on the spot. I shall make Rev. Dr Bellows trot out the fast nags of the cloth [the more liberal clergy] for me when I get to New York.”14

  Bellows and perhaps others must have commended Sam Clemens to a “fast nag” clergyman whose oratory and essays and sermons had established him as a national personage on a par with Emerson: the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn.

  IN MID-DECEMBER, Sam figured out a way to leave California on his own terms. He negotiated a deal with the Alta California in San Francisco as a “Travelling Correspondent.” The paper announced this in its December 15 edition.

  “Mark Twain” goes off on his journey over the world…not stinted as to time, place or direction—writing his weekly letters on such subjects as will best suit him…

  His itinerary, the paper indicated, would be the stuff of dreams:

  …crossing the ocean to visit the “Universal Expedition” at Paris, through Italy, the Mediterranean, India, China, Japan, and back to San Francisco by the China Mail Steamship line…[w]e feel confident his letters to the ALTA…will give him a worldwide reputation.15

  On that same day, the thirty-one-year-old Sam Clemens sailed out of the Golden Gate into the Pacific Ocean toward Nicaragua aboard the steamship America. He strolled the first-class deck in high spirits, despite a lingering illness. He was satisfied that he had ended his Western years on a plane of accomplishment and prestige. The Civil War fugitive, the failed silver miner, the hard-drinking journalist and provocateur, had risen: he’d won the esteem of nationally famous personalities, moved in the highest literary echelons of America’s most sophisticated city, and was now advancing toward a global adventure on commission to a premier newspaper.

  In a sentimental mood the night before his debarkation, he’d written to his mother of the friends he was leaving behind—more, he boasted, than any other newspaperman who’d departed the Pacific slope: most of them just made enemies. At a church fair earlier in the evening, he’d encountered several men and women “of Sandwich Island nativity,” who “came forward, without the formality of introductions, & bade me good bye & God speed. Somehow these people touch me mighty close to home with their eloquent eyes & their cordial words & the fervent clasp of their hands.”16 Already, it seemed, the Wild Humorist was beginning to grow tame.

  The first portent of what was to be a hellish voyage struck on the first night. A fast-gathering storm lashed the ship with seas that broke high over the prow, carrying away bulwarks and washing cargo up and down the decks. Many among the four hundred passengers prayed on their knees. Lifeboats were readied, though deemed useless against the towering waves. Sam surveyed the roiling scene down below him, the flooding in steerage, and noted the captain’s steadfast command of his crew. Then he rode out the night in the relative stability of his upper-deck berth.

  A day or two later, the crisis surmounted, the captain invited Sam to view, through a marine glass, a pair of whaling ships at anchor, as their crews hoisted blubber aboard. The sight reminded the captain of a story, and Sam was captivated by the old salt’s manner of telling, and the outlines of an iconic character began to form in his imagination, one that would bestride Mark Twain’s literature across many decades.

  “I had rather travel with that old portly, hearty, jolly, boisterous, good-natured old sailor, Capt Ned Wakeman than with any other man I ever came across,” Sam wrote in his notebook a few days afterward.17 Edgar Wakeman was a dazzling sea god, a bearded, tattooed, barrel-bellied, pious, profane ripsnorter swathed in diamond stickpins and gold chains. He was born on a Connecticut farm in 1818, ran off to sea at age fourteen, sailed the world, memorized much of the Bible, and had plied the Pacific off California. His past rivaled that of any old Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. He once swiped a steamboat and took it on a joyride around Cape Horn. In San Francisco, he’d hanged at least two men. He even intimated that he’d visited Heaven, and met a fellow up there who sneered at it all; nothing suited him. Hell of a place, the chap declared.

  Sam Clemens drank in this apparition, and somewhere within him, Sammy did, too. Wakeman cast a spell vastly more powerful than the one cast by Horace Bixby. The spell floated on a kind of holiness. Jilted as he felt himself to be by his Christian God, chilled by his father, Sam was receptive to the figure who gave off a whiff of brimstone. And who could speak a good sentence.

  “The rats,” Sam records Wakeman as bloviating about some remembered voyage,

  were as big as greyhounds & as lean sir! & they bit the buttons off our coats & chawed our toe-nails off while we slept & there was so many of them that in a gale once they all scampered to the starboard side when we were going about & put her down the wrong way so that she missed stays & come monstrous near foundering! But she went through safe, I tell you—becus she had rats aboard.18

  Sam transferred Wakefield’s surging lingo and fantastical stories, seemingly unaltered, into his notebooks. From there, they infused Mark Twain’s stories: Wakeman appears variously as himself (and later as “Captain Waxman”) in Mark Twain’s Alta California letters; as Captain Ned Blakely in Roughing It; as Captain Hurricane Jones in the 1877 sketch, “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion”; as characters in four other works;* and, most memorably, as the title character in “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” By the time Mark Twain was through with him, Wakeman/Stormfield was racing comets to heaven, in a surreal, disjointed work of fantasy that Mark Twain dabbled at intermittently for three decades.

  ON DECEMBER 21, Sam idly speculated on “Genius” in his notebook, while the passengers sang and played leapfrog: “Geniuses are people who dash off wierd, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, & then go & get booming drunk & sleep in the gutter…people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing.”19 On Christmas Eve the first death, a child, occurred—a commonplace shipboard tragedy. Sam recorded the conversation of the ship’s officers regarding the sea burial. The incident quieted the passengers. They had no inkling what was coming.

  The cholera was waiting for them when they reached Nicaragua. The America put into port at San Juan del Sur, and the passengers learned of an outbreak among six hundred westbound passengers awaiting the ship. Sam’s notebook mentioned reports of thirty-five deaths among these travelers and forty more among the natives. The passengers disembarked Wakeman’s ship, climbed into carriages and onto horses, and began the beautiful, perilous twelve-mile isthmus crossing. They gaped at wild monkeys and calabash trees, and bought oranges and bananas and coffee in carved cups from pretty native women, while the disease selected its victims. They boarded a steamer for a short lake voyage and then headed down the San Juan River toward the Atlantic Coast aboard another stern-wheel boat. “Paradise itself,” Sam jotted, “—the imperial realm of beauty—nothing to wish for to make it perfect.”20 He began to notice an eccentric young barber named Andrew Nolan, whom he nicknamed “Shape,�
�� and also a Jew who he felt had grown overfamiliar with the “white” passengers (himself included) to the point where he’d brazenly lounged on the same stateroom sofa with them.

  On New Year’s Day, 1867, the passengers boarded the steamboat San Francisco at Greytown for the voyage to New York. On January 2, Sam recorded: “Two cases of cholera reported in the steerage to-day.”21 The ship experienced its first mechanical breakdown later that night, and the first of the sick passengers died. And then, after midnight, the second.

  The next day Sam listed the ingredients for a tropical drink. Then his notes grow allusive, dreamlike.

  Folded his hands after his stormy life & slept in serenest repose under the peaceful sighing of the summer wind among the grasses over his grave.

  Brown—yes, you’re very sea-sick, ain’t you?—you better take a little balsam co—

  What!

  He said “Oh, nothing,—don’t mind me,”—but I half believed I heard him mutter something about Mrs Winslows Soothing Syrup for sick infants, as he went out.

  Still on January 3, Sam recorded the third cholera death—the fourth fatality since the ship left San Francisco.

  January 5: “Seven cases sickness yesterday—didn’t amount to anything.” A few lines later: “ ‘Shape’ is said to be dying of cholera this morning.”

  Later: “ ‘Shape’ has been walking the deck in stocking feet—getting wet—exposing himself—is going to die.”

  The disease has got into the second cabin at last—& one case in the first cabin…

  Jan. 5—Continued—10 AM—The Episcopal clergyman, Rev. Mr. Fackler, is taken—bad diarrhea and griping…

  12—“Shape” dead—5th death.—

  Rev. Fackler has made himself sick with sorrow for the poor fellows that died.

  There is no use in disguising it—I really believe the ship is out of medicines—we have a good surgeon but nothing to work with.

  Jan 5…Verily, the ship is fast becoming a floating hospital herself…

  When I think of poor “Shape” & the preacher, both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I myself may be dead to-morrow.

  …all levity has ceased…22

  Later on January 5 he listed the dead—six thus far, including the infant. The latest casualty was the Reverend St. Michael Fackler. The next day the ship docked at Key West, Florida, and twenty-one passengers, many of them stricken, fled the ship. (“I am glad they are gone, d—n them.”)23 Sam went ashore in a disoriented and fractious mood. The cholera aside, he had felt snubbed and even mocked as the voyage had progressed. Captain Wakeman was a man’s man of the sort he felt comfortable with; but Wakeman was behind him now, and he was estranged from the more refined passengers and even by the pursers, who looked at his careless clothing and questioned his first-class status (“None but 1st cabin allowed up here—you first cabin?”).24 A “double-chinned old hag” had scolded him for his drinking.

  Finally, on Saturday, January 12, after twenty-seven and one-half days, two more mechanical breakdowns, and another bout of frigid weather and rough seas, the San Francisco steamed past snowy Staten Island and docked at New York Harbor. Sam had survived a seagoing ordeal in which a pestilence of deadly microbes had claimed eight lives, in which two violent oceans had raged up and pitched his vessels about as if they were microscopic droplets. It had all been like a hideous dream. He scribbled a few last sarcasms in his notebook, packed his trunks, and strode down the gangplank into the hard daylight of the gathering Gilded Age.

  * Panurge is the atavistic rogue-companion of Pantagruel, in François Rabelais’s comic novel Gargantua and Pantagruel of 1532–34, who speaks and acts from his most primal impulses. Although Harte was suggesting that Mark Twain himself had his Panurge-like moments onstage, the comparison is even more apt for “The Unreliable,” “Brown,” and other of Twain’s fictional doubles in his (relatively) nonfictional works.

  * Mark Twain attributed this line, in Roughing It, to the newspaper editor Thomas Fitch (p. 360).

  * They are Captain Saltmarsh in The American Claimant, Captain Davis in The Great Dark, Admiral Abner Stormfield in The Refuge of the Derelicts, and Judge Sim Robinson in Those Extraordinary Twins.

  17

  Back East

  (1867)

  He walked into a clotted low-slung mecca of immigration, trade, street anarchy, slums, and political bossism. San Francisco had been about art; New York was about buying and selling, and the main chance. This had grown even more true in the nearly fourteen years since Sam had been here last. The city’s largely postwar immigrant population was surging past a million and a half, a concentrated pool of greenhorn pockets ripe for the picking by Democratic Party boss William Marcy Tweed and his corrupt minions. What green-backs the pols missed, the merchants were scooping up. The Northeastern factories that had churned out munitions, textiles, shoes, wagons, and utensils for the Union troops now needed this burgeoning civilian market for their survival. The skyline did not yet reflect this ascendancy of commerce. Church spires—notably Trinity’s at Broadway and Wall Street, and St. Paul’s at Broadway and Fulton—still towered above all else; the first wave of skyscrapers was still eight years away. But a new phenomenon, the department store, replicated itself along the great numbered avenues of Manhattan, drawing a huge consumer wave of women in its wake, and adding to the near gridlock in the streets; within a year, the tunneling for the first subways would commence.

  All of this hustler energy meant a couple of hopeful things for an ambitious young writer-entertainer fresh in from the Wild West. The retooled factories, new stores, and proliferating railroads of the East were forming a template of mass citizenship in the postwar nation. Along with it came a widening hunger for ideas, for public personalities, for news of the consolidating “national character.” The same generation that had learned to read from the mass-distributed McGuffey’s Reader had come of age, endured a war, and was now hungry to participate in the collective America that was emerging. Much of their access was through the printed word.

  The late 1860s and 1870s saw an enormous surge of books and periodicals, concentrated among the “gentlemen publishers” of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. These years also saw a redefinition of the published product. Alongside the familiar leather-bound volumes of European literature and the sparser American canon produced in small numbers for an upper-class clientele were gaudy and exotic new genres: paperback “dime” adventure novels of the “pluck-and-luck” formula; Western tales, and humor; women’s romance. (Not to mention women’s writing in general. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s success with Uncle Tom’s Cabin—three hundred thousand copies sold in 1852 alone—did not go unnoticed.) Book production was not yet industrialized; publishing still tended to be a small-scale enterprise, often an adjunct of a printing-bookselling family firm. But now, with the decreasing price of paper and printing, with railroads rushing the inventory to every corner of the country and into the hands of local door-to-door “subscription” salesmen, and with public libraries serving immigrants and the strapped working classes, books were suddenly an important and democratizing mass commodity. This trend fed heavily into the second hopeful prospect for an aspirant like Sam Clemens: it signaled that a new writer could break through on talent and powerful publicity, not just via pedigree or conformity to traditional standards of belles lettres and culture. The sting of Eastern snobbery remained a hazard for any outsider; but in Sam Clemens’s short career as a writer—a “writer of a low order,” but still by God, a writer—no one had dismissed his work.

  Bracing himself against the January wind, Sam checked in at the commodious Metropolitan Hotel on Broadway and Prince, in what is now SoHo, just below Greenwich Village. The rates were three times what he’d remembered from 1853. But he was back on Broadway, the street he had strutted at seventeen. He knew this town and what it could do for a fellow with moxie. “Make your mark in New York, and you are a made man,”1 he instructed his Alta California readers a fe
w weeks later. Frank Sinatra himself could hardly have put it better.

  He had come a long way from being a completely unknown entity in this market. The “Jumping Frog” story in Saturday Press had lit the way east for him, along with the sobriquets “Washoe Giant” and “Moralist of the Main.” There was the entrée forged by Ward with the Sunday Mercury, which had published a couple of Mark Twain’s California sketches. The Weekly Review had run several of his pieces. Harper’s Monthly could have had the city welcoming him as a star based on his Hornet survivor interview, but for that d—d misprint “Mark Swain.” There were also the introductory letters he carried from the San Francisco clergymen, addressed to Henry Ward Beecher. These connections held out the hope of steady work. But within a couple of days of his arrival, Sam found himself encouraged to pursue the most tantalizing goal on his agenda: getting a book published. He had brought along clippings of his Sandwich Islands letters to the Sacramento Union, arranged in the sequence of a book manuscript, expecting to find a book publisher without much trouble. The hazily defined “river book” was still in the back of his mind. To his surprise, it was the “villainous backwoods sketch” and some other pieces from the Californian and the Enterprise that comprised his book pitch.

  The instigator of this turn of events was Charles Henry Webb, founder of, and Harte’s partner at, the Californian. Webb, who had led the bohemian exodus from New York to the West Coast several years earlier, was now back home. His apartment was just a couple of blocks from the Metropolitan—another lucky thing for Sam, given that getting around this congested city was like trying to swim upstream against a firehose. You couldn’t “accomplish anything in the way of business, you cannot even pay a friendly call, without devoting a whole day to it,” Sam railed, sounding like generations of out-of-towners.