Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  Finally there was an event. One Sunday afternoon I saw some hoodlums chasing and stoning a Chinaman who was heavily laden with the weekly wash of his Christian customers, and I noticed that a policeman was observing this performance with an amused interest—nothing more. He did not interfere. I wrote up the incident with considerable warmth and holy indignation. Usually I didn’t want to read, in the morning, what I had written the night before; it had come from a torpid heart. But this item had come from a live one. There was fire in it, and I believed it was literature—and so I sought for it in the paper next morning with eagerness. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there the next morning, nor the next. I went up to the composing-room and found it tucked away among condemned matter on the standing galley. I asked about it. The foreman said Mr. Barnes had found it in a galley-proof and ordered its extinction. And Mr. Barnes furnished his reasons—either to me or to the foreman, I don’t remember which; but they were commercially sound. He said that the Call was like the New York Sun of that day: it was the washerwoman’s paper—that is, it was the paper of the poor; it was the only cheap paper. It gathered its livelihood from the poor, and must respect their prejudices, or perish. The Irish were the poor. They were the stay and support of the Morning Call; without them the Morning Call could not survive a month—and they hated the Chinamen. Such an assault as I had attempted could rouse the whole Irish hive, and seriously damage the paper. The Call could not afford to publish articles criticising the hoodlums for stoning Chinamen.

  I was lofty in those days. I have survived it. I was unwise, then. I am up-to-date now. Day before yesterday’s New York Sun has a paragraph or two from its London correspondent which enables me to locate myself. The correspondent mentions a few of our American events of the past twelvemonth, such as the limitless rottenness of our great insurance companies, where theft has been carried on by our most distinguished commercial men as a profession; the exposures of conscienceless graft—colossal graft—in great municipalities like Philadelphia, St. Louis, and other large cities; the recent exposure of million-fold graft in the great Pennsylvania Railway system—with minor uncoverings of commercial swindles from one end of the United States to the other; and finally to-day’s lurid exposure, by Upton Sinclair, of the most titanic and death-dealing swindle of them all, the Beef Trust, an exposure which has moved the President to demand of a reluctant Congress a law which shall protect America and Europe from falling, in a mass, into the hands of the doctor and the undertaker. According to that correspondent, Europe is beginning to wonder if there is really an honest male human creature left in the United States. A year ago, I was satisfied that there was no such person existing upon American soil—except myself. That exception has since been rubbed out, and now it is my belief that there isn’t a single male human being in America who is honest. I held the belt all along, until last January. Then I went down, with Rockefeller and Carnegie and a group of Goulds and Vanderbilts and other professional grafters, and swore off my taxes like the most conscienceless of the lot. I was a great loss to America, because I was irreplaceable. It is my belief that it will take fifty years to produce my successor. I believe the entire population of the United States—exclusive of the women—to be rotten, as far as the dollar is concerned. Understand, I am saying these things as a dead person. I should consider it indiscreet in any live one to make these remarks publicly.

  But, as I was saying, I was loftier forty years ago than I am now, and I felt a deep shame in being situated as I was—slave of such a journal as the Morning Call. If I had been still loftier I would have thrown up my berth and gone out and starved, like any other hero. But I had never had any experience. I had dreamed heroism, like everybody, but I had had no practice, and I didn’t know how to begin. I couldn’t bear to begin with starving. I had already come near to that once or twice in my life, and got no real enjoyment out of remembering about it. I knew I couldn’t get another berth if I resigned. I knew it perfectly well. Therefore I swallowed my humiliation and stayed where I was. But whereas there had been little enough interest attaching to my industries, before, there was none at all now. I continued my work, but I took not the least interest in it, and naturally there were results. I got to neglecting it. As I have said, there was too much of it for one man. The way I was conducting it now, there was apparently work enough in it for two or three. Even Barnes noticed that, and told me to get an assistant, on half wages. There was a great hulking creature down in the counting-room—good-natured, obliging, unintellectual—and he was getting little or nothing a week and boarding himself. A graceless boy of the counting-room force who had no reverence for anybody or anything, was always making fun of this beachcomber, and he had a name for him which somehow seemed intensely apt and descriptive—I don’t know why. He called him Smiggy McGlural. I offered the berth of assistant to Smiggy, and he accepted it with alacrity and gratitude. He went at his work with ten times the energy that was left in me. He was not intellectual, but mentality was not required or needed in a Morning Call reporter, and so he conducted his office to perfection. I gradually got to leaving more and more of the work to McGlural. I grew lazier and lazier, and within thirty days he was doing almost the whole of it. It was also plain that he could accomplish the whole of it, and more, all by himself, and therefore had no real need of me.

  It was at this crucial moment that that event happened which I mentioned a while ago. Mr. Barnes discharged me. It was the only time in my life that I have ever been discharged, and it hurts yet—although I am in my grave. He did not discharge me rudely. It was not in his nature to do that. He was a large, handsome man, with a kindly face and courteous ways, and was faultless in his dress. He could not have said a rude, ungentle thing to anybody. He took me privately aside and advised me to resign. It was like a father advising a son for his good, and I obeyed.

  I was on the world, now, with nowhere to go. By my Presbyterian training, I knew that the Morning Call had brought disaster upon itself. I knew the ways of Providence, and I knew that this offence would have to be answered for. I could not foresee when the penalty would fall nor what shape it would take, but I was as certain that it would come, sooner or later, as I was of my own existence. I could not tell whether it would fall upon Barnes or upon his newspaper. But Barnes was the guilty one, and I knew, by my training, that the punishment always falls upon the innocent one, consequently I felt sure that it was the newspaper that at some future day would suffer for Barnes’s crime.

  Sure enough! Among the very first pictures that arrived, in the fourth week of April—there stood the Morning Call building towering out of the wrecked city, like a Washington Monument; and the body of it was all gone, and nothing was left but the iron bones! It was then that I said “How wonderful are the ways of Providence!” I had known it would happen. I had known it for forty years. I had never lost my confidence in Providence during all that time. It was put off longer than I was expecting, but it was now comprehensive and satisfactory enough to make up for that. Some people would think it curious that Providence should destroy an entire city of four hundred thousand inhabitants to settle an account of forty years’ standing, between a mere discharged reporter and a newspaper, but to me there was nothing strange about that, because I was educated, I was trained, I was a Presbyterian, and I knew how these things are done. I knew that in Biblical times, if a man committed a sin, the extermination of the whole surrounding nation—cattle and all—was likely to happen. I knew that Providence was not particular about the rest, so that He got somebody connected with the one He was after. I remembered that in the Magnalia a man who went home swearing, from prayer-meeting one night, got his reminder within the next nine months. He had a wife and seven children, and all at once they were attacked by a terrible disease, and one by one they died in agony, till at the end of a week there was nothing left but the man himself. I knew that the idea was to punish the man, and I knew that if he had any intelligence he recognized that that intention had been carried out, altho
ugh mainly at the expense of other people.

  In those ancient times the counting-room of the Morning Call was on the ground floor; the office of the Superintendent of the United States Mint was on the next floor above, with Bret Harte as private secretary of the Superintendent. The quarters of the editorial staff and the reporter were on the third floor, and the composing-room on the fourth and final floor. I spent a good deal of time with Bret Harte in his office after Smiggy McGlural came, but not before that. Harte was doing a good deal of writing for The Californian—contributing “Condensed Novels” and sketches to it, and also acting as editor, I think. I was a contributor. So was Charles H. Webb; also Prentice Mulford; also a young lawyer named Hastings, who gave promise of distinguishing himself in literature some day. Charles Warren Stoddard was a contributor. Ambrose Bierce, who is still writing acceptably for the magazines to-day, was then employed on some paper in San Francisco—The Golden Era, perhaps. We had very good times together—very social and pleasant times. But that was after Smiggy McGlural came to my assistance; there was no leisure before that. Smiggy was a great advantage to me—during thirty days. Then he turned into a disaster.

  It was Mr. Swain, Superintendent of the Mint, who discovered Bret Harte. Harte had arrived in California in the ’50s, twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and had wandered up into the surface diggings of the camp at Yreka, a place which had acquired its curious name—when in its first days it much needed a name—through an accident. There was a bakeshop with a canvas sign which had not yet been put up but had been painted and stretched to dry in such a way that the word bakery showed through and was reversed. A stranger read it wrong end first, Yreka, and supposed that that was the name of the camp. The campers were satisfied with it and adopted it.

  Harte taught school in that camp several months. He also edited the weekly rag which was doing duty as a newspaper. He spent a little time also in the pocket-mining camp of Jackass Gulch (where I tarried, some years later, during three months). It was at Yreka and Jackass Gulch that Harte learned to accurately observe and put with photographic exactness on paper the woodland scenery of California and the general country aspects—the stage-coach, its driver and its passengers, and the clothing and general style of the surface-miner, the gambler, and their women; and it was also in these places that he learned, without the trouble of observing, all that he didn’t know about mining, and how to make it read as if an expert were behind the pen. It was in those places that he also learned how to fascinate Europe and America with the quaint dialect of the miner—a dialect which no man in heaven or earth had ever used until Harte invented it. With Harte it died, but it was no loss. By and by he came to San Francisco. He was a compositor, by trade, and got work in the Golden Era office at ten dollars a week.

  Thursday, June 14, 1906

  Entirely about Bret Harte—his appearance, dress, writings, etc.

  Harte was paid for setting type only, but he lightened his labors and entertained himself by contributing literature to the paper, uninvited. The editor and proprietor, Joe Lawrence, never saw Harte’s manuscripts, because there weren’t any. Harte spun his literature out of his head while at work at the case, and set it up as he spun. The Golden Era was ostensibly and ostentatiously a literary paper, but its literature was pretty feeble and sloppy, and only exhibited the literary forms, without really being literature. Mr. Swain, the Superintendent of the Mint, noticed a new note in that Golden Era orchestra—a new and fresh and spirited note that rose above that orchestra’s mumbling confusion and was recognizable as music. He asked Joe Lawrence who the performer was, and Lawrence told him. It seemed to Mr. Swain a shame that Harte should be wasting himself in such a place and on such a pittance, so he took him away, made him his private secretary, on a good salary, with little or nothing to do, and told him to follow his own bent and develop his talent. Harte was willing, and the development began.

  Bret Harte was one of the pleasantest men I have ever known. He was also one of the unpleasantest men I have ever known. He was showy, meretricious, insincere; and he constantly advertised these qualities in his dress. He was distinctly pretty, in spite of the fact that his face was badly pitted with smallpox. In the days when he could afford it—and in the days when he couldn’t—his clothes always exceeded the fashion by a shade or two. He was always conspicuously a little more intensely fashionable than the fashionablest of the rest of the community. He had good taste in clothes. With all his conspicuousness there was never anything really loud nor offensive about them. They always had a single smart little accent, effectively located, and that accent would have distinguished Harte from any other of the ultra-fashionables. Oftenest it was his necktie. Always it was of a single color, and intense. Most frequently, perhaps, it was crimson—a flash of flame under his chin; or it was indigo blue, and as hot and vivid as if one of those splendid and luminous Brazilian butterflies had lighted there. Harte’s dainty self-complacencies extended to his carriage, and gait. His carriage was graceful and easy, his gait was of the mincing sort, but was the right gait for him, for an unaffected one would not have harmonized with the rest of the man and the clothes.

  He hadn’t a sincere fibre in him. I think he was incapable of emotion, for I think he had nothing to feel with. I think his heart was merely a pump, and had no other function. I am almost moved to say I know it had no other function. I knew him intimately in the days when he was private secretary on the second floor and I a fading and perishing reporter on the third, with Smiggy McGlural looming doomfully in the near distance. I knew him intimately when he came East five years later, in 1870, to take the editorship of the proposed Lakeside Magazine, in Chicago, and crossed the continent through such a prodigious blaze of national interest and excitement that one might have supposed he was the Viceroy of India on a progress, or Halley’s comet come again after seventy-five years of lamented absence.

  I knew him pretty intimately thenceforth until he crossed the ocean to be Consul, first at Crefeld, in Germany, and afterwards in Glasgow. He never returned to America. When he died, in London, he had been absent from America and from his wife and daughters twenty-six years.

  This is the very Bret Harte whose pathetics, imitated from Dickens, used to be a godsend to the farmers of two hemispheres on account of the freshets of tears they compelled. He said to me once, with a cynical chuckle, that he thought he had mastered the art of pumping up the tear of sensibility. The idea conveyed was that the tear of sensibility was oil, and that by luck he had struck it.

  Harte told me once, when he was spending a business-fortnight in my house in Hartford, that his fame was an accident—an accident that he much regretted for a while. He said he had written “The Heathen Chinee” for amusement; then had thrown it into the waste-basket; that presently there was a call for copy to finish out the Overland Monthly and let it get to press. He had nothing else, so he fished the “Chinee” out of the basket and sent that. As we all remember, it created an explosion of delight whose reverberations reached the last confines of Christendom, and Harte’s name, from being obscure to invisibility in the one week, was as notorious and as visible, in the next, as if it had been painted on the sky in letters of astronomical magnitude. He regarded this fame as a disaster, because he was already at work on such things as “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” a loftier grade of literature, a grade which he had been hoping to presently occupy with distinction in the sight of the world. “The Heathen Chinee” did obstruct that dream, but not for long. It was presently replaced by the finer glory of “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” “Tennessee’s Partner,” and those other felicitous imitations of Dickens. In the San Franciscan days Bret Harte was by no means ashamed when he was praised as being a successful imitator of Dickens; he was proud of it. I heard him say, myself, that he thought he was the best imitator of Dickens in America, a remark which indicates a fact, to wit: that there were a great many people in America, at that time, who were ambitiously and undisguisedly imitating Dickens. His long nove
l, “Gabriel Conroy,” is as much like Dickens as if Dickens had written it himself.

  It is a pity that we cannot escape from life when we are young. When Bret Harte started East in his new-born glory, thirty-six years ago, with the eyes of the world upon him, he had lived all of his life that was worth the living. He had lived all of his life that was to be respectworthy. He had lived all of his life that was to be worthy of his own respect. He was entering upon a miserable career of poverty, debt, humiliation, shame, disgrace, bitterness, and a world-wide fame which must have often been odious to him, since it made his poverty and the shabbiness of his character conspicuous beyond the power of any art to mercifully hide them. There was a happy Bret Harte, a contented Bret Harte, an ambitious Bret Harte, a hopeful Bret Harte, a bright, cheerful, easy-laughing Bret Harte, a Bret Harte to whom it was a bubbling and effervescent joy to be alive. That Bret Harte died in San Francisco. It was the corpse of that Bret Harte that swept in splendor across the continent; that refused to go to the Chicago banquet given in its honor because there had been a breach of etiquette—a carriage had not been sent for it; that resumed its eastward journey leaving behind the grand scheme of the Lakeside Monthly in sorrowful collapse; that undertook to give all the product of its brain for one year to the Atlantic Monthly for ten thousand dollars—a stupendous sum in those days—furnished nothing worth speaking of for the great pay, but collected and spent the money before the year was out, and then began a dismal and harassing death-in-life of borrowing from men and living on women which was to cease only at the grave.

  Monday, June 18, 1906

  The five letters written by three women, twenty-seven years ago, and Mr. Clemens’s comments upon them—Bret Harte again.