CHAPTER 78 | The Writings of Mark Twain (beta)

Explanatory Notes Ⓔ
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Apparatus Notes Ⓐ
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CHAPTER 78

[begin page 532]

CHAPTER 78Ⓐ

After half a year’s luxurious vagrancy in the IslandsⒶemendation, I took shipping in a sailing vessel, and regretfully returned to San FranciscoⒺexplanatory note—a voyage in every way delightful, but without an incident: unless lying two long weeks in a dead calm, eighteen hundred miles from the nearest land, may rank as an incident. Schools of whales grew so tame that day after day they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles for lack of better sport. Twenty-four hours afterward these bottles would be still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing that the ship had not moved out of her place in all that time. The calm was absolutely breathless, and the surface of the sea absolutely without a wrinkle. For a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another shipⒺexplanatory note that had drifted to our vicinity, that we carried on conversations with her passengers,

our amusements.

introduced each other by name, and became pretty intimately acquainted with people we had never heard of before, and have never heard of since. This was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely voyage. We had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed they were at last for occupation and amusement, I will mention that the gentlemen gave a good part of their time every day, during the calm, to trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on its side), and thread a needleⒺ without touching their [begin page 533] heels to the deck, or falling over; and the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the enterprise with absorbing interest. We were at sea five Sundays; and yet, but for the almanac, we never would have known but that all the other days were Sundays too.

I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without employmentⒺexplanatory note. I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a public lecture occurred to meⒺexplanatory note! I sat down and wrote one, in a fever of hopeful anticipation. I showed it to several friends, but they all shook their heads. They said nobody would come to hear me, and I would make a humiliating failure of itⒺexplanatory note. They said that as I had never spoken in public, I would break down in the delivery, anyhow. I was disconsolate now. But at last an editor slapped me on the back and told me to “go ahead.”Ⓔexplanatory note He said, “Take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket.” The audacity of the proposition was charming; it seemed fraught with practical worldly wisdom, however. The proprietor of the several theatres endorsed the advice, and said I might have his handsome new opera-houseⒺexplanatory note at half price—fifty dollars. In sheer desperation I took it—on credit, for sufficient reasons. In three days I did a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of printing and advertising, and was the most distressed and frightened creature on the Pacific coast. I could not sleep—who could, under such circumstances? For other people there was facetiousness in the last line of my posters, but to me it was plaintive with a pang when I wrote it:

Doors open at 7½. The trouble will begin at 8.Ⓐemendation

That line has done good service since. Showmen have borrowed it frequentlyⒺexplanatory note. I have even seen it appended to a newspaper advertisement reminding school pupils in vacation what time next term would begin. As those three days of suspense dragged by, I grew more and more unhappy. I had sold two hundred tickets among my personal friends, but I feared they might not come. My lecture, which had seemed “humorous” to me, at first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun seemed left, and I grieved that I could not bring a coffin on the stage and turn the thing into a funeral. I was so panic-stricken, at last, that I went to three old friends, giants in stature, cordial by nature, and stormyvoiced, and said:

[begin page 534] “This thing is going to be a failure; the jokes in it are so dim that nobody will ever see them; I would like to have you sit in the parquette, and help me throughⒺexplanatory note.”

They said they would. Then I went to the wife of a popular citizen, and said that if she was willing to do me a very great kindness, I would be glad if she and her husband would sit prominently in the left-hand stage-boxⒺexplanatory note, where the whole house could see them. I explained that I should need help, and would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, when I had been delivered of an obscure joke—“and then,” I added, “don’t wait to investigate, but respond!”

She promised. Down the street I met a man I never had seen before. He had been drinking, and was beaming with smiles and good nature. He said:

“My name’s Sawyer. You don’t know me, but that don’t matter. I haven’t got a cent, but if you knew how bad I wanted to laugh, you’d give me a ticketⒺexplanatory note. Come, now, what do you say?”

“Is your laugh hung on a hair-trigger?—that is, is it critical, or can you get it off easy?”

My drawling infirmity of speech so affected him that he laughed a specimen or two that struck me as being about the article I wanted, and I gave him a ticket, and appointed him to sit in the second circle, in the centre, and be responsible for that division of the house. I gave him minute instructions about how to detect indistinct jokes, and then went away, and left him chuckling placidly over the novelty of the idea.

I ate nothing on the last of the three eventful days—I only suffered. I had advertised that on this third day the box-office would be opened for the sale of reserved seats. I crept down to the theatre at four in the afternoon to see if any sales had been made. The ticket seller was gone, the box-office was locked up. I had to swallow suddenly, or my heart would have got out. “No sales,” I said to myselfⒺexplanatory note; “I might have known it.” I thought of suicide, pretended illness, flight. I thought of these things in earnest, for I was very miserable and scared. But of course I had to drive them away, and prepare to meet my fate. I could not wait for half pastⒶemendation seven—I wanted to face the horror, and end it—the feeling of many a man doomed to hang, no doubt. I went down back streets at six o’clock, and entered the theatre by the back door. I stumbled my way in the dark among the ranks of canvas scenery, and stood on the stage. [begin page 535] The house was gloomy and silent, and its emptiness depressing. I went into the dark among the scenes again, and for an hour and a half gave myself up to the horrors, wholly unconscious

severe case of stage-fright.

of everything else. Then I heard a murmur; it rose higher and higher, and ended in a crash, mingled with cheers. It made my hair riseⒶ, it was so close to me, and so loud. There was a pause, and then another; presently came a third, and before I well knew what I was about, I was in the middle of the stage, staring at a sea of faces, bewildered by the fierce glare of the lights, and quaking in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away. The house was full, aisles and all!

my three parquette allies.

The tumult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before I could gain any command over myself. Then I recognized the charity and the friendliness in the faces before me, and little by little my fright melted away, and I began to talk.Ⓐemendation Within three or four minutes I was comfortable, and even content. My three chief allies, with three auxiliaries, were on hand, in the parquette, all sitting together, [begin page 536] all armed with bludgeons, and all ready to make an onslaught upon the feeblest joke that might show its head. And whenever a joke did fall, their bludgeons came down and their faces seemed to split from ear to ear; Sawyer, whose hearty countenance was seen looming redly in the centre of the second circle, took it up, and the house was carried handsomely. Inferior jokes never fared so royally before. Presently I delivered a bit of serious matter with impressive unction (it was my pet), and the audience listened with an absorbed hush that gratified me more than any applause; and as I dropped the last word of the clause, I happened to turn and catch Mrs.——’s intent and waiting eye; my conversation with her flashed upon me, and in spite of all I could do I smiled. She took it for the signal, and promptly delivered a mellow laugh that touched off the whole audience; and the explosion that followed was the triumph of the evening. I thought that that honest man Sawyer would choke himself; and as for the bludgeons, they performed like pile-driversⒺexplanatory note. But my poor little morsel of pathos was ruined. It was taken in good faith as an intentional joke, and the prize one of the entertainment, and I wisely let it go at that.

sawyer in the circle.

All the papers were kind in the morning; my appetite returned; I had abundance of moneyⒺexplanatory note. All’s well that ends well.

Editorial Emendations CHAPTER 78

Ⓐ 78 (C) • LXXVIII. (A) LXXV. (Pr)

Ⓐ Islands (C) • islands (A)

Ⓐ Doors . . . 8. (C) • “Doors . . . 8.” (A)

Ⓐ half past (C) • half-past (A)

Ⓐ rise (C) • raise (A)

Ⓐ talk. (C) • talk (A)

Explanatory Notes CHAPTER 78

Ⓔ After half a year’s luxurious vagrancy in the Islands, I . . . returned to San Francisco] Clemens left Honolulu aboard the Smyrniote on 19 July and arrived in San Francisco on 13 August. His Sandwich Islands trip, including the voyages there and back, lasted a little more than five months (“Passengers,” Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 21 July 66, 2).

Ⓔ lying two long weeks in a dead calm . . . trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle . . . and thread a needle] Between 24 July and 8 August the Smyrniote was becalmed, and so made negligible progress. Clemens’s shipboard notebook entries and a letter written to his mother and sister describe certain games devised by the passengers, although not the one mentioned here ( N&J1 , 134–62; L1 , 350–54).

Ⓔ For a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another ship] The nearby ship was the Comet, which departed Honolulu for San Francisco just two and a half hours before the Smyrniote. Its passengers included some of Clemens’s Sandwich Islands acquaintances: Mrs. Thomas Spencer and her two daughters, as well as Charles Marlette and Edward Howard (see the notes at 513.14 and 518.1–3; N&J1 , 133; L1 , 352; “Passengers,” Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 21 July 66, 2; “Passengers,” San Francisco Alta California, 14 Aug 66, 4).

Ⓔ I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without employment] Clemens was not in fact idle upon his return, as this remark suggests. During the seven weeks before his first public lecture in early October, he was busy with a variety of literary projects and journalistic assignments. He completed his Sandwich Islands letters to the Sacramento Union and, for the same newspaper, reported the horse races at the thirteenth annual fair of the California State Agricultural Society in Sacramento between 10 and 15 September (see Branch 1969). He contributed the sketch “How, for Instance?” to the New York Weekly Review and “Origin of Illustrious Men” to the Californian, and probably drafted “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat,” which Harper’s Monthly published in December. He may also have worked on a book- [begin page 741] length manuscript based on his Sandwich Island letters, which he submitted for publication in 1867 without success. It is also unlikely that he was financially pressed during this period. According to his later recollection, the Union proprietors cheerfully agreed to pay him twenty dollars a week for “general correspondence” (presumably about three hundred and fifty dollars for seventeen and a half weeks), plus an extra $300 for his “grand ‘scoop’ ” of the Hornet disaster (SLC 1899, 76–77; SLC 1866ii–jj, 1866qq; L2 , 3–4, 58 n. 1).

Ⓔ at last a public lecture occurred to me] Clemens delivered his first lecture on 2 October 1866. He gave his first public account of the experience at a banquet held in his honor on 30 October 1869 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was scheduled to lecture two days later. The Pittsburgh account, widely quoted in the press, accords with the version that follows here except in a few particulars, which are identified in the notes below ( L3 , 382 n. 2; “A Feast of Humor,” Buffalo Express, 3 Nov 69, 2, and “Mark Twain’s First Lecture,” San Francisco Alta California, 24 Nov 69, 2, both reprinting the Pittsburgh Leader of 31 October).

Ⓔ I showed it to several friends, but they . . . said . . . I would make a humiliating failure of it] In 1887 George E. Barnes, a proprietor of the San Francisco Morning Call, recalled that Clemens appeared at his office shortly after returning from the Sandwich Islands and solicited an opinion of his lecture idea, admitting that he had already been advised against it by Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, James F. Bowman, and “the rest of the fellows,” who believed it would damage his “literary reputation” (Barnes, 1).

Ⓔ at last an editor . . . told me to “go ahead.”] Barnes claimed that a Call editor (possibly meaning himself) read the manuscript of the lecture, found it “a well-constructed piece of work,” and advised Clemens to go ahead with his plan (Barnes, 1). In writing this passage, however, Mark Twain probably had in mind (as Albert Bigelow Paine suggests) his friend and enthusiastic supporter John McComb (1829–96), a foreman on the San Francisco Alta California who would soon become its supervising editor and one of its owners ( MTB , 1:292; L1 , 361; L2 , 12–13 n. 1).

Ⓔ The proprietor of the several theatres . . . said I might have his handsome new opera-house] Thomas Maguire (1820–96), originally from Ireland, was at this time San Francisco’s most noted theatrical impresario. He owned the Opera House, built in the early 1850s, and the larger and more splendid Academy of Music, completed in May 1864. It was at this latter hall that Clemens delivered his first lecture. Many years later Clemens recalled Maguire’s advice to “make my fortune—strike while the iron was hot—break into the lecture field!” (AD, Apr 1904, CU-MARK, in MTA , 1:242; Hart, 300; Lloyd, 153–54).

Ⓔ [begin page 742] the last line of my posters . . . Doors open at 7½. The trouble will begin at 8 . . . Showmen have borrowed it frequently] Mark Twain explained in an 1867 letter to the Alta that he wrote his lecture announcement in the offices of the Call. The last line of the original text read: “Doors open at 7 o’clock. The trouble to begin at 8 o’clock” (SLC 1866ll ). The announcement appeared in the San Francisco papers beginning on 27 September, and was distributed throughout the city as a poster. By the following year, the “trouble” phrase had been copied by performers as far away as New York City (SLC 1867g; Fatout 1960, 36–37; MTTB , 292 n. 2, Letter XVIII).

Ⓔ I went to three old friends . . . and said: . . . I would like to have you . . . help me through] One of these friends was certainly John McComb, whom Joseph Goodman described in 1881 as “the same wholesome, considerate fellow that befriended us all in early days and clacqued so conscientiously at your first lecture” (Goodman to SLC, 9 Mar 81, CU-MARK). Goodman’s remark suggests that he was present as well. And according to Bailey Millard, one of Clemens’s successors as local reporter on the San Francisco Morning Call, “Bret Harte and some of his friends” decided to “form a big claque that would insure the success of the affair” (Millard, 371; CofC , 10).

Ⓔ the wife of a popular citizen . . . and her husband would sit prominently in the left-hand stage-box] Amelia Ransome Neville, who attended the lecture, identified this cooperative acquaintance as Mrs. Frederick F. Low, whose husband—a former gold miner and banker—was governor of California from 1863 to 1867 (Neville, 162–63; L1 , 373 n. 1).

Ⓔ My name’s Sawyer . . . if you knew how bad I wanted to laugh, you’d give me a ticket] In April 1872 the San Francisco Chronicle identified Sawyer as long-time San Francisco resident William M. Slason (1831?–72), “a member of old Knickerbocker Engine Company, of a jolly, rollicking, boisterous nature, whose love for a joke was only exceeded by a fondness for rye” (“Bill Slason,” 11 Apr 72, 3). At the time of Mark Twain’s lecture, Slason was a driver for Wells, Fargo and Company (Langley 1865, 404; “Died,” San Francisco Call, 9 Apr 72, 4).

Ⓔ “No sales,” I said to myself] Clemens’s 1869 version was probably more accurate, if less dramatic: “I went down to the theater about four o’clock in the afternoon. . . . Every seat in the house had been sold” (“Mark Twain’s First Lecture,” San Francisco Alta California, 24 Nov 69, 2).

Ⓔ as for the bludgeons, they performed like pile-drivers] Bailey Millard claimed that “although Harte tried to steer the claquers, they [begin page 743] insisted upon applauding and laughing in the wrong places, which may or may not have been intended as a joke on Twain” (Millard, 371).

Ⓔ

All the papers were kind . . . I had abundance of money] The press reviews of the lecture were uniformly favorable. The San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle called it “one of the greatest successes of the season” (“Academy of Music,” 3 Oct 66, 3), while the Evening Bulletin went so far as to praise it as “one of the most interesting and amusing lectures ever given in this city” (“Local Matters,” 3 Oct 66, 5). The Call noted that the lecture “evinced a good deal of shrewd observation on the part of the speaker, and was replete with valuable information and eloquent description, judiciously varied at intervals by telling bits of humor, which were given in the lecturer’s happiest manner” (“ ‘Mark Twain’s’ Lecture on the Sandwich Islands,” 3 Oct 66, 3, clipping in Scrapbook 1:61, CU-MARK). The reviewer for the Alta California concluded, “Mark Twain has thoroughly established himself as the most piquant and humorous writer and lecturer on this coast” (“City Items,” 3 Oct 66, 1, clipping in Scrapbook 1:61, CU-MARK). According to Albert Bigelow Paine, Clemens’s gross returns from ticket sales were about twelve hundred dollars, of which he kept about one-third after paying his expenses and his agent (probably Denis McCarthy: see the next note; MTB , 1:294). On the morning after the lecture the Dramatic Chronicle printed the following anecdote:

Meeting “Mark” this morning on Montgomery street, the following dialogue ensued:

“Mark”—Well, what do they say about my lecture?

We—Why, the envious and jealous say it was “a bilk” and a “sell.”

“Mark”—All right. It’s a free country. Everybody has a right to his opinion, if he is an ass. Upon the whole, it’s a pretty even thing. They have the consolation of abusing me, and I have the consolation of slapping my pocket and hearing their money jingle. They have their opinions, and I have their dollars. I’m satisfied. (“ ‘Mark Twain’s’ Consolation,” 4)

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