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Mark Twain, A Biography Vol I, Part 2: 1866 - 1875
LXVI. Back to San Francisco
by Paine, Albert Bigelow
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Reply came from the Alta, but it was not promising. It spoke rather
vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities. Clemens gathered
that under certain conditions he might share in the profits of the
venture. There was but one thing to do; he knew those people--some of
them--Colonel McComb and a Mr. McCrellish intimately. He must confer
with them in person.
He was weary of Washington, anyway. The whole pitiful machinery of
politics disgusted him. In his notebook he wrote:
Whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried
out in demagogues.
And in a letter:
This is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in. There are
some pitiful intellects in this Congress! There isn't one man in
Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame,
and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great talents to
the world this government would have discarded him when his time was
up.--[Anson Burlingame had by this time become China's special
ambassador to the nations.]
Furthermore, he was down on the climate of Washington. He decided to go
to San Francisco and see "those Alta thieves face to face." Then, if a
book resulted, he could prepare it there among friends. Also, he could
lecture.
He had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but matters were
too urgent to permit delay. He obtained from Bliss an advance of royalty
and took passage, by way of Aspinwall, on the sidewheel steamer Henry
Chauncey, a fine vessel for those days. The name of Mark Twain was
already known on the isthmus, and when it was learned he had arrived on
the Chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him
with refreshments and entertainment. Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long a
resident of that southern land, was one of the group. Beyond the isthmus
Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned Wakeman, who during the
trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become Captain
Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. He made the first draft of this story soon
after his arrival in San Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps's Gates Ajar, then very popular. Clemens, then and later,
had a high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman's dream, but his story of it
would pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of
publication.--[Mr. John P. Vollmer, now of Lewiston, Idaho, a
companion of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond
the isthmus. The notorious crippled gambler, "Smithy," figured in it,
and it would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the exciting
story in Chapter XXXVI of the Mississippi book.]
In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped. Colonel McComb was
his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the proprietors, presently
conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid.
The author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the Alta in his
preface, and the matter was settled with friendliness all around.
The way was now clear, the book assured. First, however, he must provide
himself with funds. He delivered a lecture, with the Quaker City
excursion as his subject. On the 5th of May he wrote to Bliss:
I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold in the
house; every seat taken and paid for before night.
He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East with
the completed manuscript about the middle of June.
But this was a miscalculation. Clemens found that the letters needed
more preparation than he had thought. His literary vision and equipment
had vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence. Some of
the chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely. It required two
months of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together.
Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland Monthly,
then recently established. Harte himself was becoming a celebrity about
this time. His "Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat,"
published in early numbers of the Overland, were making a great stir in
the East, arousing there a good deal more enthusiasm than in the magazine
office or the city of their publication. That these two friends, each
supreme in his own field, should have entered into their heritage so
nearly at the same moment, is one of the many seemingly curious
coincidences of literary history.
Clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years before.
He was assured that it would be throwing away a precious opportunity not
to give his new lecture to his old friends. The result justified that
opinion. At Virginia, at Carson, and elsewhere he was received like a
returned conqueror. He might have been accorded a Roman triumph had
there been time and paraphernalia. Even the robbers had reformed, and
entire safety was guaranteed him on the Divide between Virginia and Gold
Hill. At Carson he called on Mrs. Curry, as in the old days, and among
other things told her how snow from the Lebanon Mountains is brought to
Damascus on the backs of camels.
"Sam," she said, "that's just one of your yarns, and if you tell it in
your lecture to-night I'll get right up and say so."
But he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though Mrs. Curry did not rise
to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew.
He returned to San Francisco and gave one more lecture, the last he would
ever give in California. His preparatory advertising for that occasion
was wholly unique, characteristic of him to the last degree. It assumed
the form of a handbill of protest, supposed to have been issued by the
foremost citizens of San Francisco, urging him to return to the States
without inflicting himself further upon them. As signatures he made free
with the names of prominent individuals, followed by those of
organizations, institutions, "Various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on
Foot and Horseback, and fifteen hundred in the Steerage."
Following this (on the same bill) was his reply, "To the fifteen hundred
and others," in which he insisted on another hearing:
I will torment the people if I want to.... It only costs the people
$1 apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for?...
My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have
submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have
pronounced it good. Now, therefore, why should I withhold it?
He promised positively to sail on the 6th of July if they would let him
talk just this once. Continuing, the handbill presented a second
protest, signed by the various clubs and business firms; also others
bearing variously the signatures of the newspapers, and the clergy,
ending with the brief word:
You had better go.
Yours,
CHIEF OF POLICE.
All of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date
of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end. Nothing short of a
seismic cataclysm--an earthquake, in fact--could deter a San Francisco
audience after that. Mark Twain's farewell address, given at the
Mercantile Library July 2 (1868), doubtless remains today the leading
literary event in San Francisco's history.--[Copy of the lecture
announcement, complete, will be found in Appendix H, at the end of last
volume.]
He sailed July 6th by the Pacific mail steamer Montana to Acapulco,
caught the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New York on the 28th, and
a day or two later had delivered his manuscript at Hartford.
But a further difficulty had arisen. Bliss was having troubles himself,
this time, with his directors. Many reports of Mark Twain's new book had
been traveling the rounds of the press, some of which declared it was to
be irreverent, even blasphemous, in tone. The title selected, The New
Pilgrim's Progress, was in itself a sacrilege. Hartford was a
conservative place; the American Publishing Company directors were of
orthodox persuasion. They urged Bliss to relieve the company of this
impending disaster of heresy. When the author arrived one or more of
them labored with him in person, without avail. As for Bliss, he was
stanch; he believed in the book thoroughly, from every standpoint. He
declared if the company refused to print it he would resign the
management and publish the book himself. This was an alarming suggestion
to the stockholders. Bliss had returned dividends--a boon altogether too
rare in the company's former history. The objectors retired and were
heard of no more. The manuscript was placed in the hands of Fay and Cox,
illustrators, with an order for about two hundred and fifty pictures.
Fay and Cox turned it over to True Williams, one of the well-known
illustrators of that day. Williams was a man of great talent--of fine
imagination and sweetness of spirit--but it was necessary to lock him in
a room when industry was required, with nothing more exciting than cold
water as a beverage. Clemens himself aided in the illustrating by
obtaining of Moses S. Beach photographs from the large collection he had
brought home.
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