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, dated August 20, he applied for the editorship of that journal as “The Moral Phenomenon,” a title he says he was given by the Sandwich Island missionaries. He had himself served, he declares, as “a missionary to the Sandwich Islands, and I have got the hang of that sort of thing to a fraction.” As editor, he would replace sentimental tales, wit, humor, and elevated literature with morality, just what he believes is really called for.24 If Clemens was now ambitious, ready to undertake the social climbing Burlingame had urged, he was not yet willing to stifle his irreverence. He now added to the cluster of Mark Twain’s attributes the pretense of being, sometimes, a moralist.
For five and a half eventful years, Clemens had not been home to Missouri. Tired of the West, he contracted with the San Francisco Alta California to supply a weekly letter “on such subjects and from such places as will best suit him,” during a trip that would, according to the expectations of the Alta proprietors, take Clemens to Europe, India, China, Japan, and back to San Francisco.24 He left for New York on December 15, 1866. The Alta published his farewell the day before his departure. He declared that he was leaving San Francisco “for a season… to go back to that common home we all tenderly remember in our waking hours and fondly visit in dreams of the night—a home that is familiar to my recollections but will be an unknown land to my unaccustomed eyes.”25 He wrote to his family that he was “leaving more friends behind … than any newspaperman that ever sailed out of the Golden Gate.”
In the next eight months, twenty-six letters signed “Mark Twain” appeared in the Alta. Although he did nothing more with them, they were collected in 1940 into a book aptly titled Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown, since the traveler is accompanied, at least in the early pages, by his vulgar companion. Not as well known as the Hawaiian letters and probably not taken as seriously by their author (who was not now traveling in order to write for a newspaper), these letters are nonetheless attractive and significant in the growth of the writer. Through them one follows Clemens on his trip from San Francisco to Nicaragua, across the isthmus, then up to Key West and on to New York. On the first leg of the journey he met Captain Edgar Wakeman, who was to appear again and again in Mark Twain’s works, including Roughing It, where he is Captain Ned Blakely, and in “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” which the writer began in 1868 but did not publish until the end of his life. In his Alta letters he had a good deal to say about Wakeman, but the more hearty comment, though incomplete, is in his notebook: “I had rather travel with that portly, hearty, jolly, boisterous, good-natured old sailor, Capt Ned Wakeman than with any other man I ever came across. He never drinks, & never plays cards; he never swears, except in the privacy of his own quarters, with a friend or so, & then his feats of blasphemy are calculated to fill the hearer with awe & admiration. His yarns—” Here he broke off.26
Later, long after he found it difficult, if not impossible, to call up his early literary personality, Mark Twain was able to return to the spirit of his earlier self by the use of a vernacular narrator, and a favorite was Captain Wakeman. In one of his Alta letters, Mark Twain lets Wakeman tell tall tales of rats. Here Wakeman tells how rats saved his life by indicating that a ship was not safe.
We were going home passengers from the Sandwich Islands in a brannew brig, on her third voyage, and our trunks were below—he [his friend Josephus] went with me—laid over one vessel to do it—because he warn’t no sailor, and he liked to be conveyed by a man that was—felt safer, you understand—and the brig was sliding out between the buoys, and her headline was paying out ashore—there was a woodpile right where it was made fast on the pier—when up come the biggest rat—as big as an ordinary cat, he was, and darted out on that line and cantered for the shore! and up come another! and another! and another! and away they galloped over the hawser, each one treading on t’other’s tail, till they were so thick you couldn’t see a thread of cable, and there was a procession of ’em three hundred yards long over the levee like a streak of pismires, and the Kanakas [Hawaiians], some throwing sticks from that woodpile and chunks of lava and coral at ’em and knocking ’em endways every shot—but do you suppose it made any difference to them rats?—not a particle—not a particle on earth, bless you!—they’d