of the appeal of Tom Sawyer; in fact, he is thoroughly wicked. “And he grew up, and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality, and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature.” Here Mark Twain presents himself as the satirical outsider.
Such sketches required a fertile imagination; finding something to write about was a constant strain, and he was barely making a living. He was frustrated. In Roughing It, he explains that “my interest in my work was gone; for my [Enterprise] correspondence being a daily one, without rest or respite, I got unspeakably tired of it. I wanted another change” (chap. 62).15 Clemens still had in mind the idea of a book, which he mentioned in a letter to his mother and sister on January 20, 1866, but “nobody knows what it is going to be about but just myself.” His boredom is reflected in his surviving Enterprise letters. After complaining in his January letter that his life was uneventful and that he wished he had accepted an invitation to take a round trip on the Ajax to the Sandwich Islands (the Hawaiian Islands), he visited Sacramento, and there the Daily Union commissioned him to write twenty or thirty letters from Hawaii. He was to go on the next sailing. This experience was pivotal, for it gave him an opportunity for sustained writing. The experience and observations were a combination that would prove fruitful in his travel books and novels.
Clemens left San Francisco on March 7, 1866, and returned August 13. Concerning this visit he wrote one letter for the New York Saturday Press, one for the New York Weekly Review, and twenty-five letters to the Sacramento Union. He stayed much longer than he expected, as he explained to Will Bowen, an old friend from Hannibal days, in a May 7 letter from Maui.
I contracted with the Sacramento Union to go wherever they chose & correspond for a few months, & I had a sneaking notion they would start me east—but behold how fallible is human judgment!—they sent me to the Sandwich Islands. I look for a recall by the next mail, though, because I have written them that I cannot go all over the eight inhabited islands of the group in less than five months & do credit to myself & them, & I don’t want to spend so much time. I have been here two months, & yet have only “done” the island of Oahu & part of this island of Maui, & it is going to take me two more weeks to finish this one & at least a month to “do” the island of Hawaii & the great volcanoes—& by that time, surely, I can hear from them. But I have had a gorgeous time of it so far.
He visited only those three islands.
Later Clemens edited his Hawaiian letters into a book manuscript, but he was not able to find a publisher. (Subsequently, he revised them for inclusion as chapters 63–77 of Roughing It.) While readers of that book usually find the Hawaii chapters weaker than the earlier ones on Nevada and California, the explanation is simply that he was a rapidly maturing writer and that the earlier chapters were written after Clemens’s trip to Europe and Middle East and the publication of The Innocents Abroad.
Mark Twain’s growth from a writer of sketches and news stories, humorous and otherwise, created a change that would lead to severe tensions in his career. Hitherto, in Nevada and California, he had been a critic of the dominant culture. He had chided the clergy, the courts, and the police. He had ridiculed women’s fashions. He had even criticized children and romantic young women. He had presented himself as an associate of the disgusting “Unreliable.” He was an outsider, a bohemian. In the increasingly sophisticated San Francisco, he was identified as being from Washoe, and he constantly reminded his readers of his origins. He was lazy, a loafer. As a writer he was a hoaxer and a humorist, a man of limited education and uncertain ambition. All this was to change, at least on the surface.
In Hawaii, he discovered, he was a man of importance, on an assignment that gave him prestige. As a result he associated with people of a sort that he would not have known on the mainland. He visited the king; he met the American minister, and he was befriended by Anson Burlingame, who was on his way to an important position in China. When Burlingame asked to see his writings, Clemens provided, as he told his mother in June, “pretty much everything I ever wrote.” Soon Burlingame was helping him with a news story about a fire on board the clipper ship Hornet; his account was to spread his reputation. Because Clemens was in bed with aggravated boils, Burlingame arranged to have him taken to the hospital on a stretcher to interview the survivors. Then, as he explained many years later in “My Début as a Literary Person,” 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;