he “spent four hours arranging the notes in their proper order, then wrote all night and beyond it.” By nine o’clock the next morning, he was able to get his story on a departing ship; his “scoop” was given space on the front page of the Sacramento Union.
Burlingame advised him, “Avoid inferiors. Seek your comradeships among your superiors in intellect and character; always climb.”16 The advice was to be heeded, and Samuel Clemens would climb, sometimes leaving Mark Twain far behind, often with unfortunate results for the writer—and perhaps also for the person.
Mark Twain was still a humorist, but the invention of a companion for the traveling writer, Mr. Brown, permitted him to appear much less vulgar himself. To Brown he assigned anything crude or earthy he wished to say. This technique he may have picked up from the English humorist William Combe, who created a sentimental traveler who was accompanied by a servant with a quite different point of view, or, more likely, from Charles Dickens, whose Mr. Pickwick and his servant, Sam Weller, are of the same pattern. (Clemens had read Pickwick Papers while in Nevada.)17 Reporting the adventures of two travelers gave Mark Twain two levels of action: what the travelers saw, and the byplay between Brown and himself. Mark Twain calls Brown “this bitter enemy of sentiment.” When Brown is nauseated but unable to find relief, Mark Twain reads him sentimental poetry. “‘It is enough,’ said Brown, and threw up everything he had eaten for three days.” When Mark Twain reports how much he likes the islands, Brown reads the account and proposes that he go on to describe the “cockroaches, and fleas, and lizards, and red ants, and scorpions, and spiders, and mosquitoes, and missionaries.”18
The best passages are those in which Mark Twain is neither the admiring visitor nor his vulgar companion, but the witty, skeptical, ironic commentator—the writer created by his Western experience. For example, on the subject of the old pagan religion, he observes that there is
a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old by-gone days, when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it to him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice—in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how impossibly beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance, he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose, showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal Summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell! And it inclines a right thinking man to weep rather than to laugh when he reflects how surprised they must have been when they got there.19
Experience in the Pacific islands fed Mark Twain’s religious skepticism as it had for Herman Melville before him.
Despite their humor, the Hawaiian letters are now chiefly interesting as historical accounts. They treat geography, the character of the native Hawaiians, politics, industry, and religion. The visitor makes a strong case for San Francisco becoming a whaling center to replace Honolulu. He makes other proposals, such as the use of “coolie” labor in the production of sugar.
While in Hawaii, Mark Twain began a little-known connection with the short-lived Daily Hawaiian Herald; from September 5 till December 13 he provided seven contributions, mostly short.20
On his way back to California in July 1866, Clemens had the good fortune of finding the surviving captain and two passengers of the Hornet and was able to copy their diaries. These, with his account in the Union, were the basis of “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat.” Clemens was especially proud of this account of the burning of the ship and the survivors’ story, as he explained much later in “My Début as a Literary Person,” for to qualify for this exalted term, “he must appear in a magazine.” His article appeared in what he considered “the most important one in New York,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. He proudly called the publication of this article (not the “Jumping Frog”) his literary debut, and he expected thereby to spread his name “all over the world, now, in this one jump.” The article appeared in the December 1866 issue but without a signature; in the index the author was identified as “Mark Swain.” The author was indeed a “Literary Person,” but “a buried one, buried alive.”
In California, Sam Clemens found that he had some money for once: he collected eight hundred dollars from the Union. He also had an improved and widened reputation. But he was not sure what to do with himself. In his notebook for August 13 he recorded: “San Francisco—Home again. No—not home again—in prison again—and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped, & so dreary with toil & care & business anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!”21 The passage suggests that Clemens had much in common with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn: a love of freedom and a hatred of routine. He needed excitement and found it where he could. He took advantage of his reputation as an authority on Hawaii to lecture on the subject, and on October 2 he drew a crowd of perhaps eighteen hundred to Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. This was not Clemens’s first public lecture, for he had contributed his services to a fund-raising effort for a Carson City church in 1864, but it was the first intended to be profitable to the lecturer. His handbill ominously warned, “The Trouble Begins at 8 O’Clock.” Many years later, in 1904, he remembered,
A true prophecy. The trouble certainly did begin at eight, when I found myself in front of the only audience I had ever faced, for the fright which pervaded me from head to foot was paralyzing. It lasted two minutes and was as bitter as death; the memory of it is indestructible, but it had its compensations, for it made me immune from timidity before audiences for all time to come.22
This lecture was such a success that soon he was speaking on the same topic, with variations, in Sacramento, Marysville, Grass Valley, and eventually in Virginia City, Carson City, and other Nevada towns. Although it contained information, the lecture was full of comic digressions and asides. “It is not safe to come to any important matter in an entirely direct way. When a young gentleman is about to talk to a young woman about matrimony he don’t go straight at it. He begins by talking about the weather. I have done that many a time.”23
Making direct contact with his audience, standing before them not so much as the conveyor of information but as the public personality “Mark Twain,” now one of the best known writers in the West, Clemens was rapidly discovering, by trial and error, what it was he could do best. For a good while, lecturing was stimulating, exciting. On December 10 he had the honor of making a special appearance in San Francisco at the request of the governors of California and Nevada, among others. The lecturer was nearly always able to avoid pomposity; it was not difficult for this drawling humorist, for he could control an audience.
The discovery of his talent as a lecturer was to have an important effect on Clemens’s life. It focused the writer’s attention on how he presented himself but diverted his energies from writing at several points in his career. He became very much in demand as a lecturer, and lecturing was lucrative, a ready source of funds. Eventually he was to switch to reading selections from his writings, as Dickens had done. But in time Clemens’s laziness, the enormous success of his 1869 book, and his dislike of routine would keep him from an extended career on the platform.
His Hawaiian experience gave Mark Twain a new role as a lecturer and as a writer, that of mock-serious moralist. In a short piece in the Californian,
