rat was ashore out of that brannew beautiful brig.27
Wakeman and his friend wisely followed the rats’ example and thereby saved their lives; the ship was never seen again. In the Alta letters he is alternately Wakeman and Waxman, though Mark Twain insisted that all the names he used were fictitious.
The trip to New York was by way of Nicaragua, which took two days to cross on “horseback, muleback, and four-mules ambulances,” with Clemens traveling by ambulance or “mud wagons.”28 On board the ship that then took them from Nicaragua, cholera broke out among the steerage passengers and soon spread. There were several deaths. Many passengers left the ship when it landed at Key West. On January 12, 1867, the ship reached New York.
What he would do next was not clear to the journalist. Three days after he arrived in New York, Clemens wrote to E. P. Hingston, who had been Artemus Ward’s manager, to report that he was planning a lecture tour but needed Hingston to manage him. He wrote to Orion’s wife from New York in February that he had been made good offers by newspapermen, and he arranged for the New York Weekly Review to publish five of his Sandwich Island letters. By early March he had discovered that “Prominent Brooklynites are getting up a great European pleasure excursion for the coming summer” (p. 111), as he explained to his California readers. His account describes at length how he and a fellow journalist had visited the chief officer of the excursion, with his friend entertaining himself by introducing the Rev. Mark Twain of San Francisco. Playing along, Clemens explained, “I have latterly been in the missionary business.” Clemens’s friend elaborated on the joke and arranged for him to preach on the vessel while at sea. The next day Clemens went back to book passage for himself and reveal his true identity. The cruise was intended to have a strong religious orientation, with a visit to the Holy Land as a feature. When the letter describing all this appeared in the Alta, readers were notified by the editor that Mark Twain’s plans had been authorized by his employers. He would leave for Europe in June.
In the interim, in March, Clemens went on to Missouri, where he lectured in St. Louis on the Sandwich Islands and published a series of funny pieces on “Female Suffrage”29 and then went on to Hannibal, where he also lectured.30 His visit to his hometown caused him to recall Jimmy Finn and the excitement he brought to Hannibal. Finn was to be portrayed as Huck’s “pap.” How close to fact the portrait of the town drunkard is in the novel may be suggested by this 1867 account of Finn’s reformation and its aftermath.
Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, reformed, and that broke up the only saloon in the village. But the temperance people liked it; they were willing enough to sacrifice public prosperity to public morality. And so they made much of Jimmy Finn—dressed him up in new clothes, and had him out to breakfast and to dinner, and so forth, and showed him off as a great living curiosity—a shining example of the power of temperance doctrines when earnestly and eloquently set forth. Which was all very well, you know, and sounded well, and looked well in print but Jimmy Finn couldn’t stand it. He got remorseful about the loss of his liberty; and then he got melancholy from thinking about it so much; and after that, he got drunk. He got awfully drunk in the chief citizen’s house, and the next morning that house was as if the swine had tarried in it. (p. 214)
Perhaps because of this Hannibal visit Mark Twain soon wrote up another anecdote from his boyhood memories. A request for a contribution to the New York Sunday Mercury resulted in “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats.” While he had some references to boyhood memories in the Alta and elsewhere, notably his experience as a “Cadet of Temperance,” this is the first extended piece on the subject. The hero, or victim, is Sam’s bashful friend Jim, some sixteen years of age, whose efforts one winter night to chase away noisy cats that had awakened him from his sleep leads him on to an icy roof in nothing but his short shirt. He slips and ends up in the midst of a group of girls having a candy pull. The story purports to be, however, not what the author remembers but a story he heard from Simon Wheeler, who had once again caught his visitor and made him listen. In this comic story, the theme is humiliation, but pain and pleasure are artfully mixed. While Wheeler takes pleasure in Jim’s acute embarrassment, his humor also helps him to preserve his sense of proportion—and the reader’s, too.31 The story was widely reprinted. Mark Twain liked the story so much that he retold it twice, each time with modifications, in an 1872 speech and in his autobiography.32
In the Alta letters, the writer reports the limited success of his ambitions to publish a book. When the publishers of Artemus Ward’s collection (in which the “Jumping Frog” was to have appeared) rejected his manuscript, Charles Henry Webb, former editor of the Californian and now in New York City, arranged to publish The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches in late April. Described as “Edited by John Paul,” Webb’s pen name, it contains twenty-seven pieces. The author and Webb revised the sketches and stories selected for publication by removing slang, local references, and allusions to gambling, alcohol, sex, and damnation. This first censorship was largely self-inflicted.33 The prefatory advertisement in the volume explains playfully that “the somewhat fragmentary character of many of the sketches” resulted from “detaching them from serious and moral essays with which they were woven and entangled” in the writings of the man known as “the Moralist of the Main.” In his Alta letter, Mark Twain praises the “truly gorgeous frog” on the cover, so beautiful that maybe it will be well to “publish the frog and leave the book out” (p. 158).
The writer made nothing from the sales of his first book, to his considerable disappointment. In December 1870, he wrote to F. S. Drake that he had “fully expected the ‘Jumping Frog’ to sell 50,000 copies & it only sold 4,000.” But unbeknownst to him, the publication benefited him considerably. It was pirated by the English publishers George Routledge and Sons and John Camden Hotten, who sold more than 40,000 copies. Moreover, the volume received favorable reviews in England.34
Neither from the Frog collection nor from the Alta letters of the period does one get a strong sense of Mark Twain’s identity as a writer. He appears particularly divided on the question of his social standing. Did he want to climb, as Burlingame had urged? He had discreetly cleaned up his earlier pieces for book publication. He was sensitive to the differences between East and West, as his comments in an Alta letter show: Sut Lovingood’s collection of humorous sketches “will sell well in the West, but the Eastern people will call it coarse and possibly taboo it” (p. 221). Was he to be of the West or of the East? His fortunes seemed to be carrying him east, and his comments in his letters about his New York experience seem to show an increasing liking for it. And New York was where he must succeed. “Make your mark in New York,” he wrote to the Alta, “and you are a made man. With a New York endorsement you may travel the country over … but without it you are speculating on a dangerous issue” (p. 176). On the other hand, he was willing to describe the night he spent in jail as a result of trying to stop a fight: he seems to have enjoyed meeting the prisoners there. He delighted in the conversation of bootblacks; their speech and sentiments are reported appreciatively. He is gladdened that his “old Washoe instincts that have lain asleep in my bosom so long are waking up here in the midst of this late and unaccountable freshet of blood-letting that has broken out in the East.” The newspapers are full of violence—murders, suicides, assassinations, fights. “It is a wonderful state of things,” he reports (p. 232). The coarseness that he had identified with, even cultivated, in the West—what part was it to have in the continuing development of the literary personality of Mark Twain? Samuel Clemens obviously did not know.
Mr. Brown was disappearing from his Alta letters. He appears frequently in the earlier ones, but later he makes appearances only when Mark Twain seems at a loss for something to write about. He is absent from the non-humorous letters written in May, one about a visit to the Bible House of the American Bible Society, one about an asylum for the blind. These institutions could scarcely be treated comically, and the writer had decided to report on more serious subjects. When Mark Twain visits an exhibition at the Academy of Design, he does feel free to make jokes and profess pride in his ignorance: he is “glad the old masters are dead, and I only wish they had died sooner” (p. 239). But his comments are not vulgar or outspoken, as they would be later, when he saw the old