4 of Roughing It as “the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains.” His natural style derived from the ways of the old-timers, who had found, before him, that genteel Eastern ways fit badly in the West. Rejecting artificiality, superficiality, and the hypocritical cult of polite conformity, Mark Twain emerged as an irreverent skeptic in religion. In San Francisco, he would soon give proof of his anti-establishment views. But he was by no means an alienated loner, for he had enjoyed and valued his membership in the Territorial Enterprise group. More humorous than funny, he grew increasingly fond of burlesquing genteel attitudes. He was not able now or later to create a fully consistent literary personality, but he made his hallmark a self-assured, confidential, unhurried tone. This Mark Twain developed from an appreciation of “characters”—honest, natural, straightforward, manly people—whom he esteemed as “simple-hearted” or characterized by their “simplicity.” Although their conversational style and manners are by implication anti-genteel, any words such as low, common, vulgar, or even folk connote condescension that Mark Twain did not express. Samuel Clemens’s signal contribution to the achievement of American literature in the twentieth century lies in his respectful discovery of these vernacular values.48
CHAPTER TWO
Journalist and Lecturer
Samuel Clemens was now to make California his home for two and a half years. Welcomed by the Golden Era as “The Sage-Brush Humorist from Silver Land,”1 he shortly made his presence felt by speaking at a ceremony at Maguire’s Opera House. The occasion was less than extraordinary: the presentation of a cane to a marine engineer who had visited San Francisco in order to resurrect a steamship that had sunk in the bay. The speech, published the next day on the front page of the San Francisco Alta California (June 13, 1864), was intended to be amusing; “Mark Twain” was clearly a humorist. He chose to speak on behalf of “your countless friends, the noble sons of the forest,” such as the Diggers, the Pi-Utes, the Washoes, and the Shoshones, whom he described as “visibly black from the wear and tear of out door life, from contact with the impurities of the earth, and from absence of soap and their natural indifference to water.”
Clemens liked California; he wrote to his mother and sister, “This superb climate agrees with me. And it ought, after living where I was never out of sight of snow-banks 24 hours during 3 years.” Later, when he had experienced New England, he was less enthusiastic. In Roughing It he complained, “No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful” (chap. 56). But while he was there, he expressed great satisfaction with the place. In “‘Mark Twain’ in the Metropolis,” written sometime in June for the Territorial Enterprise, he described “the birds, and the flowers, and the Chinamen, and the sunshine, and all things that go to make life happy” in San Francisco. For a longtime resident of Washoe, he explained, life at San Francisco’s Occidental Hotel is “Heaven on the half shell.”
In Roughing It, Mark Twain remembered this time fondly:
I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the vulgar honesty to confess it.… I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polked and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo. (chap. 58)
He also wrote two striking pieces for the Golden Era, published in June and July, “The Evidence in the Case of Smith vs. Jones” and “Early Rising, as Regards Excursions to the Cliff House.” The first of these anticipates “Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral” in Roughing It; here Mark Twain recounts the absurdly contradictory testimony by witnesses to a fight in language designed to entertain the speaker and outrage the judge, who objects to such expressions as “Busted him in the snoot” and “D—n you old tripe.” He insists that they “refrain from the embellishments of metaphor and allegory as far as possible.” The effect is to make the judge’s formality ridiculous. This sketch seems to have been Mark Twain’s longest to date, some seventeen thousand words. It makes heavy use of dialogue, with colorful characters adding to the humor.
“Early Rising, As Regards Excursions to the Cliff House” attacks romanticism. Mark Twain repudiates the maxim “Early to bed, and early to rise, / Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” by contrasting the anticipated pleasures of an early-morning trip to the beach with the actuality of the experience. He joins George Washington, who he finds also stood in disagreement with Benjamin Franklin’s maxim. The “gorgeous spectacle of the sun in the dawn of his glory; the fresh perfume of flowers still damp with dew”—Mark Twain is having none of it. The misadventures of his trip were “only just and natural consequences of the absurd experiment of getting up at an hour in the morning when all God-fearing Christians ought to be in bed.” The sketch epitomizes the identity that Mark Twain presented in 1864: lazy, skeptical, self-indulgent, open, outspoken, humorous without trying to be funny. If he at this time wished to appear authentic, he was successful; his lack of pretense is charming.
Fortunately, when Clemens arrived in San Francisco after his hasty departure from Nevada, he had a convenient place to head for regular work, the Daily Morning Call, a newspaper with a circulation of about ten thousand, largest of the five local newspapers. Employed as a reporter from June to October 1864, he was responsible for reporting on local events, and a file of the paper survives. Because he was not often writing as “Mark Twain,” it is not always easy to distinguish his anonymous writings from those of other reporters: Edgar Branch has published a collection of over two hundred pieces.2 Although Clemens’s work on the Call did not allow the kind of freedom he had enjoyed in Nevada, he produced many amusing pieces. A particularly playful one explains how the earthquakes of June 23 affected the city. Entertainment was to be welcomed, in his view, even from a near catastrophe.
There were three distinct shocks, two of which were very heavy, and appeared to have been done on purpose, but the third did not amount to much. Heretofore our earthquakes—as all old citizens experienced in this sort of thing will recollect—have been distinguished by a soothing kind of undulating motion, like the roll of waves on the sea, but we are happy to state that they are shaking her up from below now. The shocks last night came straight up from that direction; and it is sad to reflect, in these spiritual times, that they might possibly have been freighted with urgent messages from some of our departed friends.3
Another piece may amuse those who remember Huck Finn’s analysis of the loot picked up on the steamboat Walter Scott. Here Mark Twain catalogs the contents of a drunkard’s pockets:
Two slabs of old cheese; a double handful of various kinds of crackers; seven peaches; a box of lip-salve, bearing marks of great age; an onion; two dollars and sixty-five cents, in two purses, (the odd money being considered as circumstantial evidence that the defendant had been drinking beer at five-cent houses); a soiled handkerchief; a fine-tooth comb; also one of coarser pattern; a cucumber pickle, in an imperfect state of preservation; a leather string; an eye-glass, such as prospectors use; one buckskin glove; a printed ballad, “Call me pet names”; an apple; part of a dried herring; a copy of the Boston Weekly Journal, and copies of several San Francisco newspapers; and in each and every pocket he had two or three chunks of tobacco, and also one in his mouth of such remarkable size as to render his articulation confused and uncertain.4
Among other still-readable items are reports on horse races, theatrical performances, political meetings, and sensational crimes. There are no sketches. The one distinctive development to be noted is that at this time the writer was becoming sensitive to political corruption and the incompetence of public officials. The account of his work on the Call in his autobiography tells how he prepared a fiery report on how “some
