“Lechery and Rumors of Lechery!” New Light on a Mark Twain Mystery

Albert Bigelow Paine introduced readers to Mark Twain's newspaper letters from San Francisco with a panegyric, a puzzle, and a few choice words. In Mark Twain: A Biography (1912) Paine reported that the author's letters of 1865–1866 to the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise were “no longer obtainable” but were, according to a witness, “the greatest series of daily philippics ever written.”1 As evidence of their vibrancy, he cited a tantalizing line of a lost letter which, he was told, excoriated the corruption and immorality of the city's authorities, especially the police. The remembered phrase was quoted as “the air is full of lechery and rumors of lechery.” So lively were the following contents that Mark Twain warned the compositor to show the letter to the publisher before printing. Paine heard this story, almost certainly, from the horses’ mouths—Enterprise compositor Steve Gillis and publisher Joseph T. Goodman. The two men were among Mark Twain's closest friends from those days and had become Paine's informants when the biographer came calling decades later.Mark Twain: A Biography was the culmination of a project Paine began in 1906. In composing it, he drew upon diverse original sources, including the contemporary written record but also Mark Twain's recollections and those solicited from his associates. Mark Twain actively cooperated, granting Paine enviable personal access. The project stimulated the author's work on his autobiography and he hired Paine's stenographer Josephine Hobby to record his dictated reminiscences. From January 1906, Paine was his frequent companion; in June 1908, Mark Twain moved to Redding, Connecticut, where Paine also lived, offering him an office in his newly built home, the Tuscan-style villa he eventually called Stormfield.When Mark Twain died in 1910, Paine continued his work on the biography, now as literary executor and custodian of Mark Twain's papers. He collaborated with Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch, the author's surviving daughter (to whom the biography is dedicated). He interviewed the few more distant relations as well as many friends and associates. Mark Twain had provided Paine with a letter of introduction to “any friend or acquaintance of mine,” recommending their full cooperation (Paine published the letter on page v of the biography). Responses to Paine's queries were mainly generous. In an acknowledgement (ix) he addressed the author's “old friends,” naming three—W. D. Howells, Joseph Twichell, and Joseph T. Goodman—and thanking all for sharing their “precious letters and memories.”Harper & Brothers issued the 1700-page opus in two formats, of three or four volumes. In either arrangement, the first volume does a disproportionate amount of the work, halting at 1875 in the former design and 1870 in the latter. That is, the narrative covers the first and most complex half of Mark Twain's life in less than one-third the total pages. For the details of the author's professionally formative time in Nevada and California, Paine relied heavily on the testimony of Goodman.Goodman (1838–1917) was the first of a trio of Mark Twain's early literary mentors. As the other two were Bret Harte (1834–1902) and Charles Henry Webb (1834–1905), Goodman was the only one still living when Paine began the project. From 1861 to 1874, Goodman was proprietor and editor of the Territorial Enterprise. In 1862, when local reporter Dan De Quille (William Wright) left Nevada temporarily, Goodman recognized that his growing paper needed another staff writer. He hired Mark Twain in September of that year, having enjoyed and published his unsolicited correspondence, signed “Josh,” written from a remote southern mining district in the spring and summer. The editor was then twenty-four years old; his talented charge was twenty-seven. Their professional relationship lasted six years, while their friendship proved lifelong.Mark Twain shared reporting duties at the Enterprise with Dan until May 1864. On the 29th of that month he moved to San Francisco, as a festering dispute with an editor at the rival Virginia City Union careened toward a duel. Goodman and Enterprise compositor Steve Gillis (1838?–1918) came down for the ride and the adventuresome twenty-somethings enjoyed a brief vacation by the Bay.2 Then, but a week after his apparent escape, Mark Twain was fully employed as local reporter for the San Francisco Morning Call—a sign that the move was not wholly unplanned.The author struggled at the Call, however, barely lasting four months in the position. He found the fourteen-hour workdays of a San Francisco local reporter “fearful . . . soulless drudgery”; he also developed a cross-purpose with the Call's proprietor over his reporting of anti-Chinese violence. He was “discharged,” an admission made decades later with lingering shame.3 His tenure at the Call had provided him with an adequate salary but little time for more creative writing. Jobless in October 1864, he commenced writing regularly for the Californian, a literary journal founded five months earlier by Webb. It was edited alternately by Webb and Harte, both of them, like Goodman, strong partisans of Mark Twain's talents. For two months the author was neither overworked nor securely compensated. His memorable weekly contributions to the Californian brought him but $12 each.4Paine little discussed the author's work for the Californian or for the Golden Era, another journal that printed Mark Twain's sketches in the mid-1860s. Edited by Joseph E. Lawrence (1824–1878), the Golden Era was California's oldest and widest-circulating literary weekly. Paine was aware that Lawrence favored Mark Twain's writing, but did not further explore the matter. As it happened, dozens of the author's sketches appeared in its columns but few were written for the Golden Era. Rather, as revealed by Franklin Walker in the 1930s and confirmed in greater detail by Lawrence Mobley in the 1950s, these pieces were mainly reprinted from the Territorial Enterprise, seemingly by arrangement between Goodman and Lawrence.5Paine possibly intended to examine the important Western publications—the Californian, Golden Era, and Territorial Enterprise—on a trip to California. He did not arrive there, however, until after the San Francisco earthquake and fire of April 1906. The disaster consumed the accessible files of many Western papers. Crucially, it destroyed the last files of the Enterprise that were known to cover the period from early 1862 to April 1866. For Paine, Mark Twain's Nevada reporting and San Francisco correspondence were thereby lost.One important archive survived the inferno, though it was inaccessible at the time of Paine's visit. The large library and manuscript collections of historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft were packed away in storage when the earthquake struck. The ensuing fire stopped five blocks shy of the facility Bancroft used on Valencia Street in San Francisco. The collections included files of many Western papers, including the Golden Era and Californian, as well as Bancroft's extensive collection of newspaper clippings. (Eventually the collections were shipped across the Bay to Berkeley, becoming the core of The Bancroft Library—the rare book and manuscript library of the University of California.)The scarcity of available documentary sources would have prevented Paine from verifying the accuracy of his informants’ recollections, should he have attempted to do this. His narrative account of the San Francisco period is consequently flawed chronologically, transmitting errors that still crop up in the secondary literature from time to time. As Paine has it, Mark Twain commenced his San Francisco letters to the Enterprise shortly after his separation from the Morning Call; his reports of police malfeasance motivated his escape to the mines in December 1864; and he resumed the paused correspondence when he returned from the mines in February 1865. None of this is accurate.In truth, Mark Twain wrote only for the Californian in the autumn of 1864. His sojourn in the mines, which began, as Paine said, on 4 December 1865, was motivated by the troubles of his friend Gillis, who was arrested for assaulting a bartender. Mark Twain freed him by posting a straw bond. The injured bartender (who may have been beating another patron when Gillis intervened) was reputed to be a friend of the chief of police. Gillis decided to skip town and soon returned to the compositor's case at the Enterprise. Mark Twain had to go too, since he had no money to pay the bond and would have been jailed in Gillis’ place. In Gillis’ recollection, his brother Jim brought the author up to his cabin on Jackass Hill, near Angel's Camp in Calaveras County. There he stayed for nearly three months, with Dick Stoker and both of Steve's brothers, Jim and Billy, until his return to town in late February 1865. Then the author resumed his Californian contributions but struggled to find fuller employment and lived in difficult circumstances for some months. In May 1865 he began writing again for the Territorial Enterprise. In October, this assignment finally grew into his daily “San Francisco Letter,” accompanied by a summary of the San Francisco telegraphic news.The misaligned chronology in Paine's reconstruction was likely inherited from Goodman's own account. On Paine's initiative, he and Goodman corresponded and then met in California in the winter and spring of 1907.6 Paine later attested, I shall always remember the still, sunny Sunday drive with Joe Goodman, Mark Twain's first editor, from Sonora through the Bret Harte country skirting the Stanislaus River and Table Mountain, to Tuttletown and up Jackass Hill to the old cabin where Steve Gillis still lived and hunted for gold, just as Mark Twain and the Gillis brothers had hunted for pockets there forty-five years before. Mark Twain did not find a pocket on Jackass Hill, but he found the Jumping Frog not far away at Angel's Camp, and that was a greater nugget than had been found in these regions.7From the tour with Goodman and Steve Gillis of the placer-mining locations in Calaveras and Tuolumne counties, Paine took away tales of Mark Twain's time there forty years before.As for Mark Twain's subsequent tenure as Goodman's San Francisco correspondent, Goodman related what he knew. The retired editor had already fashioned a somewhat compressed chronology of this period years before he met Paine. In a newspaper interview in 1900 Goodman gave a short history of the San Francisco letters and remembered a few of the controversies they provoked.Goodman must also have informed Paine that he knew of no surviving file of the Enterprise from the period when Mark Twain wrote for it.9 Goodman once possessed two sets but these were consumed in the Virginia City fire of 1875. Two further sets survived in San Francisco until the earthquake and fire of 1906.10 In an unlocated letter of 1908, Paine seems to have asked Goodman about Mark Twain's own file of Enterprise clippings. The author told Paine he had burned it but Goodman wrote that he was skeptical: I would accept as final your assertion that those “Enterprise” files were destroyed if it rested on any authority but Mark's. He never had physical energy enough to burn anything—unless perhaps his fingers. The Sibylline books would be in existence yet if this burning had depended on him. He may at some time have thrown a scrap of paper in the fire, and afterwards, not finding the “Enterprise” files when he wanted them, fancied that he had burned them; but I'll bet, he never did.11Though Paine would never know it, Goodman's surmise was partly correct: Mark Twain's own highly selective scrapbook file of his work from the years 1863–1867 did survive. It contained a trove of clippings of San Francisco letters to the Enterprise but did not come to light until the 1950s.12 To describe the San Francisco correspondence, therefore, Paine was left with the intriguing phrase about lechery, memories of stories of police corruption and Mexican oysters, and the highly informed opinion of Goodman that the lost letters “were among the best things” Mark Twain ever wrote.13And Mark Twain wrote a good deal of these “best things”: research suggests that he composed at least an occasional letter in the spring and summer of 1865 and from mid-October of that year five or six per week through early March 1866. The daily letter likely averaged around 2,000 words and he certainly wrote at least one hundred of them. In terms of total length, probably one-quarter (or a little more) of the original text has been recovered.14Riches have been revealed, including some of those legendary stories of corruption. Recently the following letter fragment turned up, reprinted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer of 24 March 1866 (p. 3), under an editorial heading. It answers some of the questions raised by Paine's story of the San Francisco letters, though it poses new ones (as recovered letter fragments often do).No example of the original Territorial Enterprise printing for this fragment is known to survive. The date of first publication has been tentatively estimated as 1–8 February 1866, based on the time lag for stories from California and Nevada newspapers republished in Cleveland. The story Mark Twain tells has not been otherwise documented. “Who Could he be?”—the question posed by a contemporary Cleveland editor in a position to have known—remains unanswered. Neither the grievously harmed “John Smith” nor his outraged assailants have been further identified. Did the bizarre murder Mark Twain describes actually take place? Was the crime and punishment, fictitious or not, connected in the full narrative to an exposé of police malfeasance in San Francisco, as Paine recounts? The possibility cannot be excluded for a fragment of 267 words in a newspaper letter that could have been ten times that in length. Also possible is that Goodman or Steve Gillis confounded the memorable “lechery” phrase with other colorful passages in Mark Twain's San Francisco letters that did scandalize the police.This fragment was reprinted more than once. The Plain Dealer text has been found in six other newspapers of a later date and a paraphrased version of the story appeared in seven more. Two days after the Plain Dealer published the story, it reappeared in the Cleveland Herald, under the heading “Sad Fate of a Clevelander.” The editor of the Herald was having none of Mark Twain's story and appended the following afterword: It appears very strange that “John Smith's” real name could not be ascertained after he had been in the County Hospital fifteen years. If that correspondent is addicted to writing sensation articles of this character, we hope he will select some other site as the home of his fictitious heroes. The reputation of the representatives from the Forest City, at the Golden Gate, so far as our knowledge extends, will compare favorably with any from elsewhere. If Cleveland's sons across the plains, are ever guilty of such outrages as that alleged above, send us their names by all means, and don't spoil a good item by inserting the world-wide name of John Smith.15The perils of divining the meaning of a disembodied textual fragment have been long discussed by editors of classical authors. Ancient works not infrequently survive only in part—even as isolated quotations of a primary author embedded in the works of a secondary one.16 The editor of the Cleveland Herald, proud son of the “Forest City,” seems to have accepted the story at face value. Yet Mark Twain's mysterious tale bears signs of having been part of a wider story. It appears at first glance to be a stand-alone vignette but at least the opening line, “I have no time for comment,” begs a question about what preceded it.The 112-year-old mystery of Paine's reported sample of Mark Twain's San Francisco correspondence is therefore only partly resolved. Mark Twain's “lechery” remark and his sallies against police misconduct were attributes of the same body of work. They could easily have become linked, over time, in the minds of Paine's witnesses. The raising of both topics violated contemporary journalistic decorum. The first story contains an innuendo of sexual violence, a topic falling within a wider sexual taboo of the time—though Mark Twain was not alone in occasionally breaking it. The second story, or rather stories, are another matter. Mark Twain's attacks on police violence and official corruption were without contemporary parallel. Author and editor were partly shielded from retaliation by the Enterprise's remote place of publication. With a two-day delay, however, copies of the Enterprise did circulate in San Francisco and some of his potent reports were also reprinted in town (especially in the Golden Era).As Goodman remarked, his author kept him in “hot water”—under threat of libel action—on more than one occasion. Yet he gave Mark Twain license to write as he pleased and did not tamper with the results. That Mark Twain gave instructions, as Paine reports, to show a particularly sensitive letter to Goodman before it was printed is nonetheless characteristic. It is evidence of the author's early awareness that his artistic and philosophical inclinations lay outside prevailing religious and institutional boundaries. Apparently, in these early social satires and commentaries, no less than in Huckleberry Finn or Connecticut Yankee, he intended to stretch those boundaries but without too far exceeding them. Trusted manuscript readers—here Goodman, later in life Howells and Olivia Langdon Clemens—helped him serve these ends.