not appear, however, because, as the editor explained to Clemens, the Call had to respect the prejudices of its readers. But he did manage to criticize, though briefly, the Call policy in the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle.5
When work for the Call became tedious, Clemens hired an assistant. But in October he “retired” “by solicitation. Solicitation of the proprietor,” as he put it in his autobiography.6 Some of his energies at this time were going into the preparation of a book, apparently about his Nevada experiences, since in a letter written to Orion and his wife (dated September 28, 1864) he noted that he expected to ask Orion to send the “files” that he kept of his writings.
Bret Harte had just begun to edit the Californian, a rival to the Golden Era—Harte being an established California writer who had been there since 1854. In the fall, Clemens began to contribute regularly, and he and Harte began a long association, including, much later, the coauthorship of a play. Later still, Harte provided his biographer with a vivid description of what Clemens looked like when they first met. Harte’s account suggests that when Clemens moved to the East, he would want to change his appearance considerably.
His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and even the aquiline eye—an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me—of an unusual and dominant nature. His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, and his general manner one of supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances. Barnes [editor of the Morning Call] introduced him as Mr. Sam. Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number of newspapers contributed over the signature “Mark Twain.”… He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was itself irresistible.7
For a time Clemens enjoyed the relationship, but eventually he came to despise Harte for his insincerity, callousness, and dishonesty, as we shall see.8
At the Call, Clemens had been paid twenty-five dollars a week. For a weekly article for the Californian, which Clemens in a September letter to his mother called “the best weekly literary paper in the United States,” he was paid just fifty dollars a month. Although little of what he wrote at this time has lasting interest, it was a crucial period in Clemens’s life. At last he could write at length and at leisure, and from October I through December 3, each issue of the Californian contained a piece by him. In the spring and summer of 1865, he was again writing for the Californian. He chose to write accounts of adventures, real and imaginary: visits to the Industrial Fair, to the Cliff House to see a whale on the beach, and to the opera. Several pieces deserve attention. In the Californian, one is called “Whereas”; later versions, such as the much-abridged one in Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, are entitled “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man.” Here Mark Twain looks askance at the subject of romantic love. Alleging that his advice has been sought by one Aurelia Marie, of San Jose, he recounts her sad story. She is “almost heart-broken by the misfortunes she has undergone.” Her fiancé lost first his good looks through smallpox, then a leg by walking into a well, then one arm by “premature discharge of a Fourth-of-July cannon,” then the other to a carding machine. Her heart was “almost crushed by these latter calamities.” Then her lover lost his eyesight to erysipelas, next his other leg, then his scalp to Indians. What SHOULD she do? Aurelia asks. Mark Twain’s advice is that she should furnish “her mutilated lover with wooden arms and wooden legs, and a glass eye and a wig, and give him another show.” If he survives ninety days, she should marry him. Her risk will be slight, he notes, since the man will not live long—he is accident-prone.
The amusing account is black comedy. Mark Twain’s interest, however, is not in the man but in Aurelia’s responses, as is shown by the author’s matter-of-factness in describing the young man’s experiences. The focus is on Aurelia: “It was a sad day for the poor girl when she saw the surgeons reverently bearing away the sack whose use she had learned by previous experience, and her heart told her the bitter truth that some more of her lover was gone.” It is not her lover’s suffering that interests Aurelia but her own inner life. The sketch is one of young Mark Twain’s freshest and most original.
In “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier,” Mark Twain aims at a somewhat similar target. It is a burlesque of a popular type of literature of the day, the Civil War romance, in the form of a “condensed novel,” a genre then cultivated among San Francisco’s literary bohemians. Bret Harte published a volume of such parodies in 1867, and this was Mark Twain’s second “novel.” (The first is the very brief “Original Novelette,” published in the Call on July 4, 1864.) The satirist was soon to write several more, such as “The Story of the Bad Little Boy” (1865) and “The Story of the Good Little Boy” (1870). Lucretia’s story is by “M. T.,” who identifies himself as “an ardent admirer of those nice, sickly war stories in Harper’s Weekly.” He has now soared “happily into the realms of sentiment and soft emotion,” inspired by “the excellent beer manufactured at the New York Brewery.” The story tells of how Lucretia Smith, seeking to make up for her earlier rejection of her lover, devotedly tends for a long time in the hospital a wounded soldier she takes to be her man, only to discover the truth when the bandages are removed. “O confound my cats,” Lucretia exclaims, “if I haven’t gone and fooled away three mortal weeks here, snuffling and slobbering over the wrong soldier!” The sketch was widely reprinted in the East, where it hit its target resoundingly. Toned down, it was included in Mark Twain’s first book. Although the piece now seems slight and rather silly, it is another useful indication of the antiromanticism and skeptical frame of mind Clemens had developed.
Now Mark Twain was once again writing for the Enterprise, as San Francisco correspondent, and again nearly all of what he wrote is lost. Some of the pieces, it is known, criticized the San Francisco police for corruption, ineptitude, and abuse of Chinese immigrants. These made him unpopular with their chief. When Steve Gillis, for whom Clemens had stood bond after a barroom brawl, fled to Virginia City, Clemens chose to leave town, too, rather than contend with the police. On December 4, 1864, he went to the Sierra foothills, to the Mother Lode country of Calaveras County, California, where he stayed with Steve Gillis’s brother Jim at Jackass Hill and Angel’s Camp. As he put it in 1872–73, “Got too lazy to live, & too restless & enterprising. Went up to Calaveras County & worked in the surface gold diggings 3 months without result.”9 But there were in fact important results, for there he heard several tales that he was to make much of later. In his autobiography he recalled:
Every now and then Jim would have an inspiration, and he would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and his hands crossed behind him, and deliver himself of an elaborate impromptu lie—a fairy tale, an extravagant romance—with Dick Stoker as the hero of it as a general thing. Jim always soberly pretended that what he was relating was strictly history, veracious history, not romance. Dick Stoker, gray-headed and good-natured, would sit smoking his pipe and listen with a gentle serenity to these monstrous fabrications and never utter a protest.10
In the notebook he began to keep on New Year’s Day 1865, he recorded several items that were to serve as reminders. Among them are these: “The ‘Tragedian’ & the Burning Shame. No women admitted.” “Mountaineers in habit telling same old experiences over & over again in these little back Settlements. Like Dan’s old Ram, wh[i]ch he always drivels about when drunk.” “Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot & he couldn’t jump—the stranger’s frog won.”11 The first of these would serve as the basis of one of the Duke and the King’s performances in Huckleberry Finn, and the story of the old ram would be attributed to Jim Blaine in Roughing It. The frog item would see use shortly. The notes also mention Ben Coon, a former steamboat pilot who appeared in his writings almost immediately.
Clemens left the mountains on February 25, 1865, and was back in San Francisco the next day, when in his notebook
