“The birds, and the flowers, and the Chinamen, and the wines, and the sunshine, and all things that go to make life happy, are present in San Francisco today, just as they are all days in the year,” Mark Twain wrote shortly after moving to the city in May 1864. For a man with an ear for language, the streets were a daily feast. Passersby spoke brogued, drawled, broken English, and a variety of different tongues. Signs cluttered the sidewalks, giving the names of stores and what they sold. Newspapers broadcast the price of money and mining stock, the latest troop movements by telegraph. It was a city in love with the sound of its own voice, and Twain made a noisy addition to the ensemble.
He benefited from good timing. A couple of days before he came to town, a new paper launched its inaugural issue. This wasn’t uncommon: in publishing-mad San Francisco, newspapers rose and fell about as frequently as mining companies on the Comstock Lode. But on May 28, 1864, a different sort of print product appeared on the booksellers’ shelves. If many journals were migraine-inducing rags, the paper as murky as a miner’s sluice, the type densely set and crooked—these pages were gloriously clean and crisp. They measured twenty-two inches across and thirty inches high, a size known in the industry as “imperial”—a word that aptly summarized the periodical’s stately visual style. The letters ran level across three broad columns, easy to read without squinting. Along the top came the title, in full typographical flourish: The Californian.
For months, two men had been staining their fingers with newspaper ink at 728 Montgomery Street, racing to fill all sixteen pages of their maiden issue. Half a year had passed since Charles Henry Webb first revealed in the Golden Era that he and Bret Harte were planning to start a paper. They traded a few cracks on the subject but, by the spring of 1864, what began as a joke had grown dreadfully serious. The city’s Bohemia had scaled upward rapidly over the past year, invigorated by eminent visitors like Artemus Ward, America’s first stand-up comedian. The Californian aspired to embody this new spirit, to rally the Bohemians around a single standard. Webb served as its founding editor; Harte collaborated closely. They wanted to give urban readers something worthy of the city’s growing stature, and promised to enlist California’s finest writers in the effort.
But creating a literary magazine from scratch, and doing it every week, turned out to be a grueling ordeal. Webb confessed the despair he felt at filling “forty-eight yawning empty columns” that swallowed everything he threw at them and “seemed no fuller than before.” Harte did a pair of pieces for the front page; Webb contributed a lengthy column. In his frantic rush to get the paper to press, however, Webb failed to recruit nearly enough writers to produce original work. As a result, he loaded up on “selected” material—excerpts lifted from other newspapers, books, even encyclopedias. Fortunately, the paper didn’t take long to find its footing. Over time, he and Harte honed the paper’s editorial voice to an exquisitely sharp point. The Californian belonged firmly to the Bohemian school of satire and suspicion pioneered by Harte in the pages of the Golden Era. Readers expecting tales of honest miners, or lyrical tributes to California’s landscape, would be disappointed.
Once, in a vainer moment, Twain had told his mother he could work for a San Francisco paper whenever he wanted. He was right. Within a week of arriving, he had joined the Morning Call as a local reporter. He already knew the editors from his stint as the Call’s Nevada correspondent. In San Francisco he lived with Steve Gillis, the Territorial Enterprise typesetter who came with him from Virginia City. In their first four months, they moved seven times. Gillis was a short, sinewy Southerner with a feared reputation as a barroom brawler, and he shared Twain’s prankish bent. For fun they played billiards, or lobbed empty beer bottles onto the tin roofs of their Chinese neighbors and got cursed out in Cantonese.
These diversions aside, life in San Francisco proved harder than Twain expected. The Call made him miserable. His days began at the courthouse at nine in the morning, collecting material for the local column. After enduring hours of testimony—an old man claimed a woman whacked him with a basket, but he only spoke German and was too deaf to hear anything the lawyers said—he visited the city’s six theaters, lingering just long enough to scribble a few notes on the half-dozen performances. Around eleven at night, he returned to the Call’s office to sift through his notebook’s dreary, doodled expanses for a kernel of presentable copy.
It’s hard to imagine a profession less suited to Twain’s personality than daily journalism. Four decades later he still shuddered at the memory of its “soulless drudgery.” Satisfying his nightly quota caused him endless suffering: it was “awful slavery for a lazy man,” he recalled. Worse, the Call wanted him to report facts. At the Enterprise he had enjoyed wide latitude with the truth, roaming freely. At the Call he strained against a much shorter leash. He was no longer “Mark Twain,” but an anonymous hack, churning out unsigned items for each morning’s edition. To console himself, he employed a few tricks from his Enterprise days. He managed some mild hoaxing, and sparked a feud with a rival reporter at the Alta California named Albert S. Evans, who christened Twain the “sage-brush Bohemian.” But Twain couldn’t antagonize everyone equally. Certain targets were off limits. After seeing a pack of thugs throwing stones at a Chinese laundryman, he wrote an angry account of the incident—only to have it killed by his editor. “He said that the Call was like the New York Sun of that day,” Twain remembered. “It gathered its livelihood from the poor and must respect their prejudices or perish.” The Irish read the Call, and despised the Chinese. The paper couldn’t afford to offend them.
Discouraged, Twain almost abandoned writing altogether. A friend who recalled running into him during his Call days said he planned to leave California and resume his career as a steamboat pilot. The Mississippi meant freedom: an “unfettered and entirely independent” existence, plus a generous salary. His friend begged him to reconsider. “You have a style of writing that is fresh and original and is bound to be popular,” he said. “If you don’t like the treadmill work of a newspaper man, strike up higher.”
Twain took the advice to heart. If he had put down his pen in 1864, he would have been rapidly forgotten. He might be vilified for his hoaxes or admired for his cleverness, but sooner or later his name would fade, along with the other minor-league wits who enlivened the era’s newspapers. Instead, he stayed in San Francisco and struck up higher. It would be a rocky ascent. The city humbled him often. It pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy and suicide, and inspired moments of difficult soul-searching. But in the process he grew more profound, more perceptive. His satire became more socially astute. His humor developed a lacerating moral edge.
San Francisco broadened him. The city was considerably more complex than the one he had left behind in Nevada. In the courtroom where Twain spent his mornings for the Call, so many different languages were spoken that the official interpreter knew “fifty-six Chinese dialects,” he later quipped in his autobiography. Daily journalism gave him a swift education in this cosmopolitan social world, and plenty to stir his moral outrage. He met crooked officials and lazy, brutal cops, and watched society reward the strong and the shameless.
But San Francisco’s greatest gift to Twain was its Bohemia. He had been a visiting member for the past year, and returned in 1864 just as The Californian made its celebrated debut. The stylish new paper impressed him. He cheered the “sterling literary weekly” in the Call and singled out Harte for special praise. “Some of the most exquisite productions which have appeared in its pages emanated from his pen,” Twain wrote, “and are worthy to take rank among even Dickens’ best sketches.” This was an unusually generous judgment from a writer who never missed a chance to draw blood. The Californian marked a new stage in the evolution of the literary West, and Twain desperately wanted to evolve along with it.
He soon had his chance. The Call shared a building with the branch office of the U.S. Mint, where Harte worked. As Harte remembered, the Call’s editor brought Twain downstairs one day to introduce him. The scruffy stranger made an impression. “His head was striking,” Harte recalled. “He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and even the aquiline eye—an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me—of an unusual and dominant nature.” His eyebrows were “bushy,” his dress “careless.” He exuded “supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances.”
To Twain, Harte presented a different picture. He had a “distinctly pretty” face, despite his smallpox scars. If Twain dressed like a tramp, Harte was at the other end of the sartorial spectrum: always “more intensely fashionable than the fashionablest of the rest of the community,” Twain noted. He often wore a brightly colored necktie—“a flash of flame under his chin ... [or] indigo blue and as hot and vivid as if one of those splendid and luminous Brazilian butterflies had lighted there.” However hard Twain tried to feign indifference, Harte had the upper hand. He was not only California’s most important writer, but had recently become editor of its most important literary paper, The Californian, while Webb was away. He held the keys to the kingdom, and his first encounter with Twain probably had the air of a job interview.
It was a miracle they were able to communicate at all. Twain “spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl,” Harte recalled. He himself had a smooth, silvery voice, perfect for a lady’s parlor. In their writing they sounded even less alike. Since childhood, Twain had been listening to people tell stories, from the slaves of the antebellum South to the boatmen of the Mississippi. The mongrel infinities of American English played in his ear, inspiriting his writing with the spontaneity of living speech. Harte took a more bookish approach. His references were literary, the result of many lonely hours spent reading, and he composed his prose with as much prickly care as his clothing. Later, after the relationship between the two men soured, Twain would see Harte’s fastidiousness as evidence of his insincerity: both his dress and his writing belonged to the same cynical stagecraft, Twain fumed, the affectations of a hollow man. At the time, however, the Call’s local reporter admired The Californian’s editor and star contributor.
The meeting went well: Twain got the job. “I have engaged to write for the new literary paper,” he told his mother and sister on September 25, 1864, burying any anxiety he felt under a barrage of smugness. “I quit the Era long ago,” he wrote. “It wasn’t high-toned enough.” His new gig promised a less provincial readership. “The Californian circulates among the highest class of the community, and is the best weekly literary paper in the United States.”
He would soon have more time for his literary labors, after the Call fired him in mid-October. “It was true that we had long desired to dispense with Mark’s services,”‘ recalled one of his superiors, “but had a delicacy about bluntly telling him so.” They tried dropping “broad hints to that effect,” without any result. Finally, the Call’s editor, George Barnes, took Twain aside and suggested he resign. Barnes liked Twain, and he went about it in the friendliest way possible. “It was like a father advising a son for his good,” Twain remembered, “and I obeyed.” Even so, it hurt. Forty-two years later, when the Call building burned during the earthquake and fire of 1906, the former reporter couldn’t conceal his pleasure at his long-delayed revenge.
Losing his job at the Call did more than wound his pride. It also did serious damage to his pocketbook. He had recently reduced his hours, earning $25 a week. By contrast, The Californian paid him $50 a month—half his former salary. Thus began a long period of barely keeping his head above water. “It was a terrible uphill business,” observed his old boss Barnes, “and a less determined man than him would have abandoned the struggle and remained at the base.” But when Twain committed to a task, he brought a terrifying amount of energy to it. “Mark was the laziest man I ever knew in my life, physically,” said his roommate Steve Gillis. “Mentally, he was the hardest worker I ever knew.”
For the next two months, Twain undertook his most ambitious writing to date. From October 1 to December 3, 1864, he published nine pieces in The Californian. They reflected a writer who, though still frisky with liquor and frontier humor, had begun to make a deeper investment in literary craft. He did a series of finely chiseled parodies of popular newspaper genres, spoofing advice columnists, theater critics, and local reporters. The moral dimension of his work began to mature. He still told lies, but for better reasons: small, funny lies meant to illuminate large, unfunny ones. These were fictions in pursuit of the truth, and they enabled Twain to probe the distance between what people said and what they did, between how America saw itself and what it actually looked like.
He took aim at the sentimental romance story with “Whereas,” a tale about a woman whose fiancé loses all four limbs to gruesome accidents, an eye to disease, and his scalp to an Indian. Despite being “deeply grieved to see her lover passing from her by piecemeal,” she wonders whether she should still marry him. It was a viciously funny assault on the idea that love conquers all, with the specter of the Civil War lurking between the lines. The fiancé’s slow dismemberment echoed the mutilating violence of the battlefields back East. In both cases, a delusion—the glory of war, the invincibility of love—had been deflated by a bitter reality.
Before Twain could dig deeper, extraliterary considerations put his writing on hold. In late November 1864, Steve Gillis beat a bartender within an inch of his life. He was arrested, and then released on bail after Twain signed a $500 bond. Gillis decided to flee before facing charges, and Twain, who would now be required to pay hundreds of dollars he didn’t have, followed suit. Gillis returned to Virginia City, while Twain traveled to Tuolumne County, where Gillis’ brother Jim owned a cabin in the heart of California mining country. There, among the gulches of the old Mother Lode, Twain would make an astonishing find: in a region already stripped of its resources, a wealth of literary material existed. For the next twelve weeks, his notebook swallowed it whole.
Excerpted from The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature by Ben Tarnoff. Copyright © 2014 by Ben Tarnoff. Published by Penguin Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.