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 he recorded: “Home again—home again at the Occidental Hotel—find letters from ‘Artemus Ward’ asking me to write a sketch for his new book of Nevada Territory travels which is soon to come out. Too late—ought to have got the letters 3 months ago. They are dated early in November.”12 Now Mark Twain wrote fourteen more pieces for the Californian, published between March and December. In the first of these, “An Unbiased Criticism,” he referred to his experiences in the Big Tree region of Calaveras County, where he had “a very comfortable time.” Pretending to be a review of the paintings at the new California Art Union, this sketch is a parody of art criticism, or rather what passed for criticism, for like the targets of his satire, “An Unbiased Criticism” is full of irrelevancies. By far the most engaging is a long comment from Ben Coon, who becomes one of Mark Twain’s vernacular narrators. He tells the history of his Webster’s Unabridged, which has made the rounds of the mining camps: “But what makes me mad, is that for all they are so handy about keeping her sashaying around from shanty to shanty and from camp to camp, none of’em’s ever got a good word for her.”
Soon Mark Twain renewed his attack on the genteel in a comic, imaginary “Important Correspondence” concerning the vacancy in the pulpit of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. The position was in fact open at the time, and each of Mark Twain’s “correspondents” had indeed been invited to fill it, as the San Francisco Evening Bulletin reported.13 Mark Twain’s letter to Bishop Hawks, D.D., of New York encourages him to take it, despite the terms, for the author argues that he has “a great deal of influence with the clergy here” and “can get them to strike for higher wages any time.” The reply concocted for the bishop is full of gratitude. Both writers suggest that they understand the game, with its formalities, pretenses, and hypocrisies. “Hawks” writes:
I threw up my parish in Baltimore, although it was paying me very handsomely, and came to New York to see how things were going in our line. I have prospered beyond my highest expectations. I selected a lot of my best sermons—old ones that had been forgotten by everybody—and once a week I let one of them off in the Church of the Annunciation here. The spirit of the ancient sermons bubbled forth with a bead on it and permeated the hearts of the congregation with a new life, such as the worn body feels when it is refreshed with rare old wine. It was a great hit. The timely arrival of the “call” from San Francisco insured success to me. The people appreciated my merits at once. A number of gentlemen immediately clubbed together and offered me $10,000 a year and agreed to purchase for me the Church of St. George the Martyr, up town, or to build a new house of worship for me if I preferred it.
Mark Twain manages to create just the right tone for the bishop, with biblical echoes and pious sentiments mixed skillfully with frank expressions of opportunism. Moreover, the satirist had his facts straight about the New York reaction to his “call.”
Following a long and witty commentary on the bishop’s letter, he promises to publish in the next issue the replies of the Rev. Phillips Brooks of Philadelphia and the Rev. Dr. Cummings of Chicago. But instead he published their telegrams, urging him not to do so and each offering five hundred dollars to discourage him. But now, he reports, he has become overwhelmed by other ambitious clergymen, each seeking his support, some even turning up to be his guests, with good appetites. The combination of affected charity and actual vulgarity makes this whole “correspondence” funny, fresh, and on target, one of the high points of Mark Twain’s writing career in California.
In