Under the name of Mark Twain the wild-haired Southwesterner began to contribute to the press yarns swapped about the legislative halls of Carso, the bars and billiard parlors of San Francisco, and the hot stoves of miners on Jackass Hill. From these last, about February, 1865, he first heard the old folk tale of the Jumping Frog. To the anecdote he added the salt of human values which the genre usually Sacked, in garrulous Simon Wheeler and simple Jim Smiley the Frog's owner. Published in the Saturday Press of Kew York, November 18,1865, it was swiftly broadcast. The author grumbled in a letter home about the irony of riding high on "a villanous backwoods sketch," but already he was tastingjhat sense of popularity_which soon came to be his elixir of life. In October, 1866, back from Honolulu and planted on a San Francisco lecture platform, he first encountered another powerful stimulant, the instant response. Early in 1867, at Cooper Union in New York, he won his eastern spurs, and began to be hailed as rightful heir to Artemus Ward, lately dead of tuberculosis in England. Soon, as his friend William Dean Howells phrased it, Twain learned "all the stops of that simple instrument, man." The lecturer's effect upon the writer was great. Increasingly Twain came to write by ear, testing his books by reading aloud, while making the expanded anecdote or incident the unit of his literary composition. Sometimes, of course, without benefit of his infectious personal charm, that mane of fiery red hair and hawklike nose, the gestures of an artist's hands, and the inflections of that irresistible drawl, a reader of cold print missed qualities which on the platform redeemed humor of a perishable sort.
"When I began to lecture, and in my earlier writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw and heard," he told the biographer Archibald Henderson. After his first volume, of chiefly Western sketches, named The Celebrated Jumping Frog (1867), he reinforced this reputation by distilling a humorous travelogue out of the letters sent back to the Alta California from his cruise to the Mediterranean and Holy Land on the Quaker City in 1867. Comic capital was readily furnished by the flood of tourists, affluent merchants and their wives, war profiteers, former army officers on holiday, and clergymen for whom Jerusalem justified the junket, which swept over the Old World after Appomattox. Knowing themselves to be innocents, they faced down their provincialism by brag and cockalorum, and haggling over prices. Mark Twain gladly joined them, joking his way among the shrines and taboos of antiquity, comparing Como unfavorably with Tahoe, bathing in the Jordan, finding any foreign tongue incredibly tunny, and pitying ignorance, superstition, and lack of modern conveniences. 1 he Innocents Abroad (1869) helped to belittle our romantic allegiance to turope, feeding our emergent nationalism. Instantly a best seller, it delighted ^nose Americans in whom "the sense of Newport" (as Henry James later Called it) had never been deeply engrafted. A slender minority like James himself felt that Mark Twain amused only primitive persons, was the Phji-tines' laureate. Years later, in 1889, in a letter to Andrew Lang, Twain WouU glory in this charge:
Indeed I have been misjudged, from the first. I have never tried in even single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for ' either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that directin ' but always hunted for bigger game—the masses. I have seldom deliberately trf H to instruct them, but have done my best to entertain them. Yes, you see I have always catered for the Belly and the Members.
Yet this is not the whole story. From an early date, Mark Twain, the playboy of the Western world, had begun to feel the aspirations of an artist, to crave deeper approval than had come to the cracker-box humorist like Sam Slick and Jack Downing. In Honolulu in 1866 the diplomat Anson Burlin-game gave him advice by which the aged Twain avowed he had lived "for forty years": "Seek your comradeships among your superiors in intellect and character; always climb." On the Quaker City voyage the Missourian fell under the refining spell of "Mother" Fairbanks, wife of a prosperous Ohio publisher, and tore up those travel letters which she thought crude. Always enjoying petticoat dominion, he eagerly sought her approval of the revised Innocents and was enchanted when she pronounced it
"authentic." "A name 1 have coveted so long—and secured at last!" be exclaimed. "/ don't care anything about being humorous, or poetical, or eloquent, or anything of that kind—the end and aim of my ambition is to he authentic—is to be considered authentic." In a similar thirst for higher recognition he told Howells, reviewer of Innocents in the Atlantic: "When I read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had corne white." Nevertheless, as Twain found to his intermittent chagrin, his reputation throughout life kept returning to that of a "phunny phellow," turning cartwheels to captivate the groundlings—until at length he built up the defensive attitude expressed to Lang. At Atlantic dinners, the author of "Old Times on the Mississippi" and Tom Sawyer found himself seated below the salt, ranked by Longfellow and Lowell and Whittier, as well as by such adopted sons of Boston as Howells and Aldrich. Despite the new decorum of his life and the growing richness of his art, the wild man from the West was expected, some time, somehow, to disgrace himself. And, by the meridian of Boston, he eventually did so, when at the celebrated Whittier birthday dinner on December 17, 1877, he made his speech of innocent gaiety about three drunks in the high Sierras who personated Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes. The diners were shocked, refusing their laughter while he stood solitary (as Howells said) "with his joke dead on his hands." The next day or so, when Twain's haunting distrust of himself and his own taste had induced a penitential hangover, he sent apologies; writing characteristically: "Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. gut then I am God's fool, and all his works must be contemplated with respect." He then begged Howells to exclude him from the Atlantic for a while, in the interest of readers' good will. The gravity with which both the saints and the sinner regarded this incident reveals the massiveness of the genteel tradition in New England and the probationary status upon which Mark was kept for so many years.
Between the publication of the Innocents and this indiscretion, Clemens had taken a wife whose remolding influence has been the subject o£ much debate. The story of their courtship is familiar: his first sight of her delicate face in a miniature carried by betrothal while her father, the richest businessman in Elmira, and her kin were slowly won over; and their wedding early in 1870, with Clemens the bridegroom trying unsuccessfully to establish himself as a solid newspaper editor in Buffalo, but moving to Hartford in 1871 to resume a free-lance life. His veneration of women and their purity was almost fanatical. "I wouldn't have a girl that / was worthy of," he wrote "Mother" Fairbanks before his engagement. "She wouldn't do."
About the sexual make-up of Mark Twain speculation has been indulged since the Freudian era. In that famous sophomoric sketch 1601, written in mid-career to amuse his clerical friend Joe Twichell, he had Sir Walter Raleigh describe "a people in ye uttermost parts of America, y* copulate not until they be five-St-thirty years of age." This, it happens, was the age when Clemens married a semi-invalid wife, as if some inadequacy in himself, some low sexual vitality, made such a woman his fitting mate. And yet respecting their physical love for each other and the fruitfulness of their union, with its four children, no doubt can be raised. What illicit experience might have come to a boy growing up in the accessible world of slavery, and passing his green manhood upon river boats and in bonanza towns, can only be guessed at. In later years, respecting the idealized Hannibal of his boyhood, he went so far as to deny the existence of sexual irregularities; and by confine-mg his two great novels about Hannibal to adolescence he was able in a banner to carry his point. Obviously certain taboos about sex, personal as well as conventional, appear in his writings from beginning to end. Unlike friend Howells, he attempted no probing of desire, no analysis of the affinity between man and woman beyond the calf love of Tom and Becky and [he implausible treatment of Laura the siren of The Gilded A Only under the protective shield of miscegenation, in the person of warm-blooded Negress Roxana Wilson, does he venture approach passion which overleaps". Joan of virgin of exquisite purity plainly is the heroine after his inmost heart fear of sex, like the shrinking of primitive races and some adolescent from carnality as if it meant degradation of the body, seems to lie at the roar of Mark Twain's nature. The exceptions of his occasional bawdry—in and a few unprinted works like his speech before the Stomach Club in Paris and his manuscript "Letters from the Earth"—but prove the rule, in ridiculing the body and its ways sufficiently to suit the most fanatic Puritan.
Yet Twain was in no sense a misogynist. He loved the company of women, of the refined women whose tastes and restraints fitted his own presuppositions about them. His understanding of the feminine mind has left no more delightful evidence than "Eve's Diary," written in 1905 shortly after Olivia's death, so that Adam's final bereavement becomes the epitaph of his own loss: "Wherever she was, there was Eden."[1] In summary, Mark Twain's personal make-up and the conventions of gentility surrounding the kind of success he aspired to, joined to suppress the recognition of sex as a key motive in human actions—leaving woman not an object of desire but of reverential chivalry.