In San Francisco and still in debt, Sam didn’t kill himself. He put down the pistol and picked up the pen. As he would do throughout his life, in good times and bad, Mark Twain wrote. Old and new outlets suggested themselves. The Call shared a building at 612 Commercial Street with the Golden Era, Rollin Daggett’s former magazine, to which Twain had contributed earlier pieces about unruly children and matronly fashion shows. Drawing on his experience in police court, he published a new piece, “The Evidence in the Case of Smith vs. Jones,” lampooning gaseous lawyers, impenetrable legal jargon, and unreliable witnesses. The Call building also housed the local annex of the U.S. Mint, where a bright young writer-editor was emerging on the literary scene while marking time at his government post. Francis Bret Harte, nine months younger than Mark Twain, was yet another easterner (born in Albany, New York) who had come west in the wake of the 1849 gold rush. He had spent time in the raucous mining camps at Jackass Hill and Angel’s Camp, collecting experiences that would pay huge dividends a few years later in such stories as “The Outcasts of Poker Flats” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” before becoming a typesetter and assistant editor on the Uniontown Northern Californian.
Relocating to San Francisco, the handsome, cultivated Harte found work on the Golden Era, to which he began contributing poetry and stories while tirelessly cultivating influential sponsors such as Jessie Benton Frémont, the wife of pathfinding General John C. Frémont, and the Reverend Thomas Starr King, pastor of the city’s largest Unitarian church. Harte’s enthusiastic support for the Union cause, to which he contributed specially prepared poems and songs, together with his socially advantageous marriage to the lead contralto in King’s choir, helped win him a privileged sinecure at the San Francisco branch of the U.S. Mint. There, his duties as secretary to the superintendent consisted mainly of writing more poems and stories and editing a new literary magazine, the Californian, on office time. Somehow Harte managed to do both tasks simultaneously.
Twain and Harte first met in the summer of 1864, while Twain was working upstairs at the Call. Despite their radically different Civil War experiences and their inherently opposite personalities, the two men shared a love of writing. Years later, each still remembered vividly his first sight of the other. “His head was striking,” wrote Harte of Twain. “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 very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, and his general manner one of supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances.” As for Twain, he found his counterpart “distinctly pretty, in spite of the fact that his face was badly pitted with smallpox. He was showy, meretricious, insincere, and he constantly advertised these qualities in his dress. His neckties tended to be either crimson—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.”
Personally and professionally, Twain and Harte would always have a complicated relationship. As the first two western writers to achieve national prominence, they would naturally feel a certain amount of competition—Twain perhaps more than Harte. Many years later, in his autobiography, Twain would say memorably: “Bret Harte was one of the pleasantest men I have ever known. He was also one of the unpleasantest men I have ever known.” Recalling Harte’s much-publicized journey east in 1871 after being hired by the Atlantic Monthly to produce a story a month for one year, Twain grumbled that Harte had received “such a prodigious blaze of national interest and excitement that one might have supposed he was the Viceroy of India on a progress, or Halley’s comet come again after seventy-five years of lamented absence.” Given that Twain felt a proprietary claim on the comet that had heralded his birth in 1835, Harte’s celestial linkage would have been considered by Twain to be presumptuous, if not bogus. Even the heavens were not big enough for both of them.
The final break between the two, occasioned mainly by the failure of their collaborative play, Ah Sin, a dramatization of Harte’s career-making poem, “The Heathen Chinee,” was still several years in the future. For the present, Harte generously encouraged Twain’s contributions, offering to pay him twelve dollars per article or a flat fifty dollars per month. Twain quickly bragged of his new job to his family. “I have engaged to write for the new literary paper—the ‘Californian,’” he informed his mother and sister. “I quit the ‘Era,’ long ago. It wasn’t high-toned enough. I thought that whether I was a literary ‘jackleg’ or not, I wouldn’t class myself with that style of people, anyhow. The ‘Californian’ circulates among the highest class of the community, & is the best weekly literary paper in the United States—& I suppose I ought to know.”
Twain was moving into more rarefied literary territory at the Californian, a career change that his inveterate enemy Albert Evans characterized condescendingly as “sundry literature” and “the grave of genius.” Twain didn’t see it that way. The Californian attracted the best and brightest of San Francisco’s bohemian culture, including homosexual travel writer Charles Warren Stoddard, a personal friend of Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. Stoddard, who sometimes styled himself “Pip Pepperpod,” had just returned from the Sandwich Islands and Tahiti, where he had tried unsuccessfully to cure himself of his attraction to men by taking long bracing walks on the beach and meditating moistly under the palms. Apparently, it didn’t work, since Stoddard was soon writing to his gay New York friend Walt Whitman: “For the first time I act as my nature prompts me. It would not answer in America, as a general principle—not even in California, where men are tolerably bold.”
Also tolerably bold was Stoddard’s platonic friend and lifelong soul mate, the beautiful bisexual poet Ina Coolbrith. Born Josephine Donna Smith (Coolbrith was her mother’s maiden name), Ina was the niece of Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Running full-tilt from her fundamentalist roots, Coolbrith married young, betrothing herself to a wastrel Los Angeles musician named Robert Carsley. Her husband was a mean drunk who threatened his tall, darkly beautiful wife with scissors and knives and once shot off her stepfather’s hand when he attempted to intervene. Coolbrith, understandably, sued for divorce and escaped suburban Southern California for the more pacific environs of San Francisco. There under the pen name “Meg Merrilies,” she began publishing her breathily apostrophizing poetry—“San Francisco, city of mists and dreams!”—and commenced a half-century-long career as a full-time poet and part-time lesbian. Stoddard, Harte, and Twain were all enamored of her at one time or another, but for various reasons of sexual orientation, marital status, or simple good sense, all declined to press their case. Twain, being neither married nor gay, might have been the most logical suitor, but Ina’s Mormon background and her rather prosaic day job as a public librarian across the bay in Oakland may have put him off the chase. He never said—revealingly, perhaps, he never mentioned her at all.
Another of Twain’s exotic female acquaintances, poet-actress Ada Clare, reappeared just long enough to provoke from him an angry response. Clare, last seen in the company of Adah Isaacs Menken at their disastrous dinner with Twain and Dan De Quille in Virginia City in February 1864, had read Twain’s Jonathan Swift-like piece, “Those Blasted Children,” in the Californian, in which he recommended drastic cures for childhood diseases—removing the patient’s jaw in the case of stuttering, or parboiling the sufferer in the case of cramps. “I don’t quite like Mark Twain’s last article on children,” Clare ventured to say in the Golden Era. “He is funny, of course; but he is guilty of misunderstanding God’s little people.”
Annoyed and hurt, Twain responded with one of his first recognizably Twainian performances, “The Story of the Bad Little Boy That Bore a Charmed Life.” In a spoof of morally uplifting tales, “Grandfather Twain” recounted the tale of Jim, who did not have a sick mother, did not pray for her recovery, did not feel remorse for stealing jam, did not fall out of an apple tree for stealing fruit, did not get expelled for swiping his teacher’s penknife, did not drown in the creek for going swimming on Sunday, did not shoot off three or four of his fingers with his father’s stolen gun, and did not disappear after running away to sea. Instead, “he grew up, and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality, and now . . . is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature.”
Twain also got revenge on Clare indirectly by reviewing a concert by her former lover, pianist Louis M. Gottschalk, the father of the out-of-wedlock child with whom she defiantly registered at hotels, “Miss Clare and Son.” In a signed review in the Californian, Twain unfavorably compared Gottschalk’s piano stylings to those of minstrel banjo players Sam Pride and Charley Rhoades, noting that “the piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickle, and slate pencils”—a direct gibe at the ever-corseted Clare. “Give me the banjo,” he said, adding that it produced the same happy physiological effect as hot whiskey punch, strychnine, and the measles. Gottschalk, true to form, was forced to flee from San Francisco a few months later after a couple of schoolgirls from the local female college were caught sneaking back into their dormitory one night following an unauthorized visit to the pianist’s hotel room.