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 hoodlums chasing and stoning a China-man who was heavily laden with the weekly wash of his Christian customers” were observed by a policeman “with an amused interest—nothing more.” His story did 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