Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and the San Francisco Circle

THE YEAR WAS 1866. The Civil War concluded, America (save the South) had settled into an era of prosperity, and San Francisco proved to be at the vanguard of this national trend. In almost all phases of economic expansion, San Francisco by 1866 had been booming for more than a decade. No longer a supply station and recreation center for the motley gold miners, but an emerging major urban center, San Francisco enjoyed a population explosion and building boom that had been going strong for years. Brick and stone business establishments several stories high, opera and theater houses, picturesque dwellings perched on steep slopes, government and financial centers (including a branch of the U.S. Mint), and even paved streets were features of the "new" San Francisco. People of every description poured into the Bay Area, but what made this relocation and settling unusual was the extraordinary number of artists, artistes, and writers who arrived during this era. Far from the wounds of war, the humiliating poverty of Reconstruction, and the riots of eastern industrialization, San Francisco, with its early lead on postwar prosperity, enjoyed flush times with a unique emphasis on culture.

Poetic in its spectacular vistas and misty weather, in the late 1860s "The City" became the birthplace for what would come to be called the local color movement in American literature. Practically every writer associated with early western local color at least made an appearance in San Francisco; many of these writers, who by the early 1870s would be scattered all over the East Coast, England, and Europe, called the place home. 1 While in San Francisco, most of these writers knew each other, and came to regard themselves as the circle or group that formed the cutting edge of a new kind of American writing. Surely the dominant figure of this emerging literary movement was young Francis Bret Harte. In the local color decade of 1865 to 1875, he would rise from local fame (and sometimes infamy) as a satirist, poet, editor, and short story writer to become the most celebrated figure of current American literature, before slipping away into a sad obscurity. Mark Twain, now recognized as unquestionably the group's greatest writer, was on the way to fulfilling his potential, and should be regarded as the second key figure in the San Francisco circle. These, men were the leading lights of local color, but what an amazing parade of writers as characters passed through The City. The most familiar names include Ambrose Bierce, Ina Coolbrith, Joaquin Miller, and Prentice Mulford. All of these emerging authors penned some form of what could at least loosely be called local color. Just what, then, is local color?

Hamlin Garland wrote the standard definition of local color in the 1890s, explaining that this type of writing "has such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native." 2 This definition sounds so simple, reasonable, and convincing that somehow it ought to be true–but it is not. Harte, for example, left his native New York as a teenager; he later left California for the East Coast, after proving that there was more gold to be found in writing about the locals than in panning streams with them. It is now generally accepted that Harte spent less time in the Mother Lode country than many enthusiastic tourists of recent years. Although he wrote about California's gold rush period for almost forty years, Harte lived only eighteen of his sixty-six-year lifespan in California, and he spent most of those eighteen years not in mining camps, but residing in the San Francisco Bay area. In fact, most of the local color writers migrated to Nevada, Oregon, and California, the scenes of their most famous local color works. Garland's definition holds true, however, as a commentary on the spirit of this literary "innovation" called local color. His emphasis on "texture"–presumably meaning dialect speech, folkways, and local lore– and his emphasis on "background"–presumably meaning distinctive landscapes and picturesque character types–does suggest that in this definition, Garland had Harte much more in mind than, say, the politically active and social-issue-oriented Kate Chopin. But critics have always placed some strange ideological bedfellows together in the local color movement. Harte, Chopin, and writers as diverse as Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Mary Ellen Wilkins Freeman, and John Muir are commonly regarded as local color writers. Considered historically instead of stylistically or ideologically, the local colorists can be viewed with some consistency; they form that diverse and diffuse group of American authors from several distinctly different areas who became prominent in the last half of the nineteenth century for their stories about particular geographical regions and characters.' In order to understand historically the beginning of local color as a movement of San Franciscobased writers, we need to examine the origins and sources of these authors.

The origins of California local color writing were mainly oral, journalistic, and southern. A maverick from the beginning, local color came from no established genre or body of traditional literature. Antecedents for local color were typically humorous, anecdotal collections, such as A. B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835), J. J. Hooper's Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845), and the later Sut Lovingood (1867) by George W. Harris. Harte liked to credit Judge Thomas Haliburton, author of the Sam Slick stories, with founding local color shortly before James Russell Lowell in The Biglow Papers (1848) legitimatized the concept by giving it Brahmin sanction. But Lowell, and to an extent Haliburton, wrote sanitized and stylized versions of local color. The frontier yarn spinners, proud of their subliterary raciness and satiric bite, were the true originators of local color. These dealers in horse-swapping yarns, confidence games, peculiar local creatures and customs–tall tales in general–were in tune with the newspaper realities of Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Company, journalists all, and without a college degree to their names.

Even the dapper, frequently pompous Bret Harte began his local color career as a humorist. A survey of Harte's writings for northern California newspapers during the mid-and late 1860s reveals that much of his writing about the Golden State was in the vein of humorous local color. 4 In 1860, for a San Francisco newspaper called the Golden Era, Harte wrote an uproarious sketch about the drunken doings of a group of miners on Saturday night entitled "A Night at Wingdam." For The Californian, a literary newspaper of the mid-1860s, Harte wrote a number of pieces about San Francisco that were pointed satire, often mixed with humor. Several of these examples were actually folklore, a reporting of local customs and beliefs, such as "The Legend of Devil's Point" (1864), or "A Legend of the Cliff House" (1865), or "Early California Superstitions" (1865). Harte also realized the power of California to "customize," to modify material from other eras, locations, and cultures and imprint this material with a Golden State stamp. Harte took particular delight in adapting nursery rhymes, limericks, and fables from Aesop for California children. 5 In his late twenties, he did write an occasional serious, sentimental, and picturesque local color sketch or story, "The Work on Red Mountain" (1863) probably being his most famous example. This novella tells the story of spunky and bucolic M'liss, who fashions a life for herself in the rough mining world of the Sierra Nevada mountains. But until the late 1860s, local color was generally intended to be humorous.

Interestingly enough, in early California local color writing, sometimes the serious could not be distinguished from the humorous. In 1865, Bret Harte, backed by a successful if speculation-prone publisher named Anton Roman, agreed to edit a collection of local poetry to be called Outcroppings. For all the advertising and promotion of this anthology, editor Harte nonetheless found the vast number of submissions far from ideal. After eliminating obvious plagiarisms and rhymed acrostics for patent medicines, Harte had to sort through an avalanche of essentially two types of poetry: talentless imitations of late Augustan picturesque verse in a California setting, or high-sounding Victorian verse of general truths, general sentiments, and predictable rhymes. As editor, Harte was too close to the situation and his deadline to realize that these poems were not material for an anthology, but rather convincing evidence that traditional, literary statements of high purpose and seriousness would mutate into comedy when confronted with California as subject matter. Reluctantly, Harte decided to publish the Victorian group.

By the mid-1860s, local color was by no means yet the fashionable vogue for aspiring California writers it would become by the end of the decade. Popular lyric poetry, and ballads of an heroic, sentimental, and conventionally rhymed nature could be found in virtually every issue of every West Coast newspaper. Poetry readings were frequent, and such figures as "Blue Bird,' and "The California Canary" had surprisingly large, loyal followings. The more serious poets were literary establishment adherents to a well-known scribe, writers who relied on their self-proclaimed potential and on an ability to imitate such recent "great" and popular poets as Longfellow and Tennyson. San Francisco attorney Edward Pollock was the most famous of the establishment imitators, a poet with considerable ambition who unfortunately died young before fulfilling his much-heralded promise. In Outcroppings, Harte reprinted Pollock's then-celebrated "The Chandos Picture," an embarrassing and febrile rewriting of Poe's "The Raven," which substituted a talking bust of Shakespeare for the bird. Blatantly sentimental verse also had its followers, as the popularity of Mrs. A. M. Schulz, Clara Dolliver (her "No Baby in the House" was a melodramatic local sensation), and May Wentworth could attest. 6 Read today, all of this jejune and overblown verse sounds quite comical, of course. Harte may indeed have suspected that something was radically amiss with Outcroppings. Finding almost no California poems that might be either admired or respected, he found himself in an editorial box canyon, as his limp and apologetic "Preface" to Outcroppings revealed he understood. Reader sympathy for Harte's questionable anthology was not forthcoming; trouble, however, was–immediately and in large doses.

Judging from the violent disapproval of the volume by virtually every northern California and Nevada newspaper, what the public wanted was an all-inclusive anthology that would print every local versifier's work regardless of merit, making the volume a showcase for every California town's "cultural" products."As a collection of California poetry it [Outcroppings] is beneath contempt," noted the American Flag. 7 Other regional papers were more explicit, calling the volume "hogwash and purp stuff ladled out from the slop bucket," or "a flap-doodle mixture," or "a quantity of slumgullion," or "tailings . . . which would average about 33 1/3 cents per ton," or referring to editor Harte as a "serene ass" or an "editorial jackass."' Too late Harte realized that he had played the fool by attempting to instruct and portray California with the best local poetry he could find that tried to demonstrate traditional, serious, eastern, and Victorian values.

Attempting to save at least his reputation if not his pride, Harte joined the fray with indignant enthusiasm by writing a series of anonymous pleading reviews and counterblasts. His "A Sheaf of Criticism" (The Californian, Dec. 23, 1865) attempted to survey and understand this situation from the editor's viewpoint, and the article is filled with humility mixed with a genuine puzzlement and appeal for understanding. But venom had continued to spew from rival newspapers, so in the same issue of The Californian, Harte turned from an accommodating prose to ripping apart the opposition with satire, thereby ignoring his own culpability in this fiasco. The fault rested with California and the idiotic bards he had published, not with Bret Harte! His critical parody in verse, "Sunrise on Mt. Davidson," written with all the righteous indignation of an outraged sophomore, unmistakably showed the comic absurdity of writing on trivial local subjects in the language of great art. The mock-heroic metaphors and conventions, plus a dreadfully inappropriate imagery of seduction, birth, and parentage, made this a devastatingly effective satire on the literary pretensions of inferior California and Nevada would-be writers. His description of the brazen mining camp of Virginia City (at the foot of Mt. Davidson) in glowing, golden terms mocked the blind pride of such low-grade and presumptuous versifiers. Here is the poem's first stanza:


Lo! where the orient hills are tipped with snow,
The pregnant morn slow waddles o'er the plain,
Big with the coming day; the shameless child
Of Erebus and Nox, wrought in the slow
And sure gestation of the rolling hours.
How great is the fecundity of Time!
Methinks I see the swaddling clothes of mist
Roll down the bosky glens, and standing here
Notebook in hand, I really seem to be
Accoucher of the Universe!

To his antagonists, Harte wrote some further ripe lines in demeaning, falsely picturesque couplets that described the flatulent morning in a typical miner's camp.


And through the valleys rose between
The pleasant hiss of the esculent bean.
And the jay bird's thrilling song was stopped
When the luscious flapjack softly flopped.'

Harte was the leader, but not the only California writer who at first believed that local color was primarily humor. An entire group of "phunny men" arrived in San Francisco and began western local color as comedy, often a mockery of the very area that tolerated and sustained them. In the 1850s, an outrageous prankster and irrepressible perpetrator of hoaxes arrived on the California scene. George Horatio Derby, better known as Squibob or John Phoenix, entertained many, including the influential Jessie Benton Frémont, with his barbs and parodies, eventually collected in Phoenixiana (1855). A few years later, Prentice Mulford (Dogberry) appeared and quickly went to work on the Golden Era, writing humorous if crude sketches about gold miners' destructive appetites and moral habits. During the 1860s he also wrote a series of very funny burlesques on mining life, "Compressed Novels."

Also joining the Golden Era staff during these years was Robert Henry Newell (Orpheus C. Kerr). He became the master of dialectal misspelling and preposterous exaggeration in his political satires, which scornfully attacked self-serving office seekers. Newell, third husband of Adah Isaacs Menken, first came to San Francisco when his wife arrived to play the equestrian lead in Byron's melodramatic tragedy, Mazeppa. Tied prone to a stallion's back, her Goyaesque curves contained by a virtually invisible body stocking, Menken was the cultural sensation of the Opera House for almost a year (1863–4). During her year in The City, Menken wrote poetry for the Golden Era good enough to be praised by Whitman and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 10 Other writers of some import who arrived in San Francisco during this time included Fitz Hugh Ludlow (author of the remarkable The Hasheesh Eater), known as the American de Quincey, and the black poet James Madison Bell.

Another "one of the boys" who appeared in San Francisco during this era was Samuel L. Clemens, who would emerge from the West as Mark Twain, and go on to become an international celebrity and indisputably major American writer. During the 1850s and '60s) Clemens never lighted in any one place for long. These were apprentice years for this future master of comedy and invective. In 1862, Clemens began writing local interest columns for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, columns which quickly turned into some of the most picturesquely humorous and incisive prose in the entire West. Clemens was challenged by a number of young journalistic rowdies, including the cynical Joe Daggett; fantasist William Wright (Dan de Quille), author of such humorous comic horrors as "Petrified, or the Stewed Chicken Monster"; and Steve Gillis, the small but lively renegade fighter from Mississippi.

It is only poetic justice that Sam Clemens garnered his famous nom de plume not in the service of captaining a river boat, but in the world of western local color. Scholar Paul Fatout learned from old timer George W. Cassidy and other sources that "Mark Twain" (allow two free drinks) was a reference to the "on credit" drinking contests Clemens held with a number of opponents in Virginia City's Old Corner saloon. 11 After a time Mark Twain hurled one pointed barb, one dare too many, and he left Virginia City under a certain amount of pressure from his journalistic peers and other victims of his waggish prose and drinking prowess.

Clemens moved to San Francisco in May of 1864, having recognized The City's literary potential on a visit the previous year. The Call employed his services as a reporter for a time, but, as in most literary work Clemens would attempt, his own brand of satire, humor, and invective would soon triumph, and triumph especially quickly over so dull an assignment as the daily reporting of routine events. Clemens found more of a home with The Californian. For this imaginative literary newspaper, he developed his eye for local color by writing ten articles every week throughout the fall of 1864. With these pieces for The Californian, Clemens came directly under Bret Harte's tutelage, and much later paid tribute to the mentor of local color. "He [Harte] trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor." 12 Beginning to develop as a writer and gaining some local reputation and a following, Mark Twain had no intention of settling down just yet.

He traveled back to the wild and wide-open Virginia City, happily discovering that his reputation as a troublemaker had largely been forgotten. But Clemens found the literary life of this isolated place dull and limited compared to the cosmopolitan San Francisco. So he wandered back to California, stopping in the Mother Lode to spend three months with prankster Steve Gillis at Jackass Hill and Angel's Camp. It was during this period that Clemens heard the jumping frog story and a number of other tales from Jim Gillis, Steve's brother, a celebrated yarn spinner.

Clemens's "Jumping Frog" story, of course, is a parody of the tall tale and its conventions. For example, the story has a double narrative perspective–once removed. Deadpan Clemens calls the whole proceedings "monotonous,"and Simon Wheeler–amazingly digressive and longwinded even for a cracker-barrel folksy philosopher–does not disappoint us with this elongated yarn about poetic justice. Bit by bit, we perceive that the story is putting us on, as a nameless confidence man (the first of Mark Twain's many Mysterious Stranger figures) out-cons con man Jim Smiley. A mere anecdote, the "Jumping Frog" story is as garishly decked out and ornately tacky as a Virginia City saloon. What gives the story more depth than simply that of a comic tour de force is Clemens's unerring depiction of the picturesque as the grotesque. The story has its basis in Jim Smiley's ob- session with gambling, typically involving some kind of animal contest. What begins as a funny character quirk ripens into the truly disturbing account of Andrew Jackson, the dog who meets his mutilated match, a digression which sets up the reader to fall for Daniel Webster, who literally and figuratively gets shot down. Typical of Mark Twain at his best, this short early tale reveals a comedy increasingly dark and disturbing as one ponders its meaning.

Publishing "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in 1865 did give Clemens a taste of national recognition. He received even more plaudits with his collection of the same year, somewhat edited from the originals for an eastern audience, The Celebrated jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. During the next several years, Clemens would continue this pattern of travel, arrive, write, depart, and publish. His two most famous literary projects of the late 1860s were his letters about local customs in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) for the Sacramento Union, and his letters about traveling in the Middle East for the Alta California. Called "The Quaker City Letters," a much edited version of this collection eventually became Mark Twain's uproarious bestseller about traveling in the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad (1869). From Harte and others, Clemens had learned a great deal about how to transform satiric journalism into local color, as well as how to use local color materials to develop his own genius. Yet to reach his vast potential, or even write a lengthy local color work about the West, by 1869 Mark Twain nonetheless had passed beyond his apprentice days. 13

Until the late 1860s, local color writing in the Bay Area was a young man's sport. As renegade writers, these journalists naturally turned to debunking and criticizing the terrain at hand–western customs, myths, and values. All were new to San Francisco; all published much under the protection of anonymity; all developed essentially adolescent literary personas, thus their reliance to a man on pseudonyms. They shed this assumed identity when it became too silly or limited. There were "serious" local color works before the late 1860s, such as Harte's "The Work on Red Mountain," but they were rare. As California's early local color authors matured, they sought broader horizons, frequently leaving San Francisco in the process. With flush times, the transcontinental railroad soon to be a reality, and area writers growing older and more serious, publisher Anton Roman believed that the California literary scene was ready to make a bid for national recognition, and, with luck, even profitable fame. A major publication based in San Francisco was the logical vehicle, and Bret Harte the logical pilot. Recognizing his achievements as writer and critic, in 1868 Roman named Harte editor of the Overland Monthly. This would be California's most ambitious literary adventure, a new magazine to rival Boston's Atlantic. Roman and Harte agreed at once that the Overland should be produced primarily for an audience that would be literate, civilized, and eastern. However, this agreement posed a serious problem for both experienced publisher and maturing writer.

In the spring of 1868, Roman took Harte and his family for a retreat in the charming valleys and picturesque hills of Santa Clara, near the crisp surf of Santa Cruz. Publisher Roman had a mission to perform. Of course he wanted the Overland to publish great writing, but at least equally he wanted his magazine to sing the praises of California's idyllic life loudly, thereby luring to the Golden State numerous East Coast and Midwest families and their money. To accomplish this goal, Roman knew that he must convince Harte of California's worth as a serious literary setting, a goal tantamount to reversing the direction of the debunking and humorous local color movement. Harte, after all, was the area's leading satirist; Roman could hardly have forgotten the triumph of invective over beauty and serious purpose in the Outcroppings debacle. The majority of Harte's previous references to miners, the Gold Rush, California in general, and even the sainted San Francisco in particular, had been satirically abusive. He had frequently lambasted the area for its earthquakes and foggy climate, the people for their barbaric cultural depravity, and local authors for not even approaching the lofty literary standards of Tennyson and Browning, or Longfellow, Lowell, and the other Boston Brahmins.

Yet Roman's appeal to Harte worked; not because of the publisher's self-confessed capitalistic boosterism, but because of the successful appeal to Harte's conscience. With this conversion, local color took a giant step forward. Influenced by Charles Dickens, Harte became convinced that his prejudice against California's colorful inhabitants was in direct contradiction to his broadly optimistic philosophy that however cursed by their follies, all men were ultimately good. Viewed in this light, Harte's romantic and liberal notions about mankind were quite compatible with Roman's happy credo that free enterprise means a free society.

Harte simply shifted his view of California local color from a satirical perspective to the more fashionably respectable sentimental perspective. Consider this passage of Harte invective from the Outcroppings literary war: The [Sacramento] Union believes that the "grand gold hunting crusade" would make a fine theme for an epic. We are inclined to think it would. Something in the style of the episode of the Argonautae, with Sam Brannan for "Jason," Michael Reese for "Theseus,"and the editor of the Union as the "Orpheus" who sings the romantic chronicle. 14

The absurdity in this 1866 situation was more apparent than real. In his Overland stories, Harte would replace the above-named real colorful local figures with Jack Hamlin, Brown of Calaveras, John Oakhurst, or Colonel Culpepper Starbottle, and begin to create the volumes of nostalgic California Gold Rush tales which he called episodes of "The Argonauts of '49." Not only would Harte follow this mocking "advice," but he would become famous and, for a time, rich doing it.

Almost all of Harte's well-known local color stories were written during his three-year tenure as editor of the Overland Monthly. One may argue that these stories of the California Gold Rush, permeated with nostalgia for a simpler time past, were never meant to be complex pieces of realistic fiction. They can probably be read most accurately as topical parables which reinforced the values of the Overland's market, the idealistic eastern audience. 15 For example, seeing "The Luck of Roaring Camp" as a topical "parable" instead of a "short story" explains the lack of realism (except for those local color surfaces of setting and character types), psychological motivation, and organization around a central conflict. Parables are designed to illustrate truths, i.e., support an audience's values and expectations; they typically are not well-wrought individualistic statements from a gifted, articulate consciousness. "The Luck," then, is a Mysterious Stranger story, a parable where Christlike Tommy Luck converts several picturesque miners to a facsimile of Victorian civilization–before a raw, savage, anarchistic wilderness wipes them all out.

Numerous other Bret Harte stories for the Overland follow this parable formula. 16 "Tennessee'sPartner" is a parable about the power of brotherly love. "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" shows that ultimately there is good in even the worst of people. (This story introduced "Mother Shipton," a character who would become famous as the "whore with a heart of gold.") "Brown of Calaveras" is a parable that demonstrates the nobility of duty over desire. "How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar" is a parable with the message of "never give up." As he gained more experience in writing this type of story, Harte learned how to use the parable formula for making serious social criticism. Stories such as "The Right Eye of the Commander" and "The Crusade of the Excelsior" demonstrate this development. But sometimes nothing fails like success. In establishing the triumph of local color, Harte's parables moved this subject from thematic issue to a background concern. For Harte, local color became not thematic substance in itself as much as the picturesque setting for parables about a lost or threatened order restored. But Harte and the Overland Monthly did lead the San Francisco-based western local color movement to a position of legitimacy in American literature.

The most obvious feature of any Overland issue was that it looked very much like an issue of the well-established Atlantic Monthly, but here the resemblance largely ceased. Unlike the Atlantic, Harte's contents revealed a strong emphasis on local color. For this purpose he selected a wide variety of travel articles, feature stories, and imaginative tales. Some were devoted to California and its inhabitants, but the journal also carried travel articles and fiction about Europe, Asia, Mexico, South America, and numerous parts of the United States besides California. This material was chosen to suggest an ultimate linking of local characteristics and issues with universal human concerns. Harte clearly wished to pull local color into the "mainstream" of serious literature. His journalistic emphasis on pointed brevity greatly enhanced the quality of Overland writing. And, despite protests from publisher Roman, Harte did include articles critical of California and the West. Under Harte's editorial leadership, the Overland quickly became nationally respected as an impartial and highly creative magazine.

In moving local color from satire to seriousness, Harte relied on the help of two protégés, Charles Warren Stoddard and Ina Coolbrith. The three became known as "the Golden Gate Trinity," and while quite interested in writing and publishing social criticism, all came to believe refined feeling far superior to parody, protest, and invective. Stoddard was persuaded to drop his ridiculous pen name of Pip Pepperpod, and received encouragement to concentrate on writing substantial travel literature and philosophical poetry. 17 As Stoddard's early mentor, Harte directed his effusive charge away from momentary enthusiasms to matters of more enduring substance. Stoddard, always intrigued with travel and foreign cultures, eventually authored South Sea Idyls (1873), becoming, after Melville, the most famous nineteenth-century American writer about the Pacific. A mentor himself to younger writers as the century wore on, Stoddard was for years a leading figure on the San Francisco literary scene. In the 1880s, Stoddard informed and directed the visiting Robert Louis Stevenson towards his "paradise" in Samoa, and in the 1890s, Stoddard coached and inspired the promising Japanese-American poet and essayist, Yone Noguchi.

Ina Coolbrith was often Harte's inspiration and always his trusted and reliable editorial supervisor on the Overland. Harte thought of her as shy, sheltered, young, and talented, almost certainly having no knowledge of the mysterious and violent events that brought her to the Bay Area. The niece of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, Coolbrith (who disguised her given name in a number of ways) rode over the Sierra Nevada mountains as a ten-year-old, perched on the saddle of famed Indian scout James Beckwourth. Settling with her family in the small pueblo of Los Angeles, young Coolbrith wrote poems that were published in several California newspapers. Her verse was widely read and widely admired. But by 1861, at twenty years of age, she had been married, had given birth to a daughter (who very quickly died), and was divorced from her insanely jealous husband (who was later killed in a duel), in addition to achieving a growing literary reputation. Coolbrith and her remaining family relocated in San Francisco. As a poet, she wrote carefully crafted, inspirational Victorian verse, chiefly, as would be expected, about love and the picturesque. Probably her best-known volume is Songs from the Golden Gate (1895), and in honor of this and numerous other volumes of her poetry, in 1915 she was named the first state poet laureate in America.

Even more than with Stoddard, Coolbrith's real accomplishment was in her generous support of other writers. Certainly during the Overland heydays, editor Bret Harte relied heavily on Coolbrith's judgment and assistance. For many years she was a librarian at the Oakland Free Library, where she supervised the reading development of numerous patrons who sought her advice. She received considerable praise for the inspiration and literary guidance she gave to Isadora Duncan and young Jack London. In the case of Ina Coolbrith, one cannot help but wonder what such a talented person would have accomplished if fate and her era had been more responsive and kind to her. Among her other tragedies, Coolbrith lost all her possessions in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. 18

With the help of Stoddard and Coolbrith, Harte produced in the Overland an important literary journal of very high quality. Harte's own fiction for the Overland, plus his verse satire "Plain Language from Truthful James" (better known as "The Heathen Chinee," and often mistakenly read as blatant racism, rather than as a serious ironic indictment), took the eastern reading public by storm. But the Overland as a journal was first rate for several reasons. The Overland book reviews, mostly written by Harte with occasional assistance from journalists Noah Brooks and W. C. Bartlett, were the most complete and reliable estimations and standards for literary taste in the entire country. Nonfiction articles in the Overland frequently pointed to problems being experienced in these flush times. Young Henry George wrote of economic hardships the transcontinental railroad would bring to many people; T. H. Reardon stated that those with professional skills (especially lawyers and educators) were too plentiful on the Western Slope; A. W. Loomis wrote about anti-Chinese sentiment in California; and several authors touched on the seriousness of the earthquake issue. The Overland accomplished a good deal more than making Bret Harte famous for local color writing. l9

While Harte led local color fiction in the direction of literary respectability, Mark Twain in 1872 published the greatest work of satiric local color, Roughing It. By this time Mark Twain had gained even more respectability, although not yet fame, than Bret Harte. Safely seated behind a massive desk at his hilltop farm near Elmira, New York, and married to a very wealthy industrial heiress with his bachelor days only a lingering memory, Clemens decided to write his comic memoirs of the West. Roughing It is more than autobiography and less than a conventional novel; it is gullible young Sam Clemens, the wondering, wandering tenderfoot, in the role of narrator unable to tell fact from hoax. The book is an extended tall tale of Clemens's never-completed expedition from St. Joseph, Missouri to the South Seas. With deadpan understatement and grotesque exaggeration, Clemens reveals through many episodes that in the West, assumed knowledge is likely to be wrong, perhaps dangerous; fiction may be fact; the absurd and the unexpected hold much more validity than serious and "reasonable" moral purpose.

As the journey in Roughing It continues into Virginia City, more a loosely organized melee of violence and practical jokes than a town, the narrative increasingly reads like a contemporary black humor novel. 20 Indeed, of all the San Francisco circle writers, Clemens clearly has had the most impact on contemporary novelists. Characters vanish in the Nevada silver fields, while representative western types, such as the vagrant Mormon, suddenly appear then disappear. At one point, the narrator and his party find themselves stranded at Lake Mono (in eastern California), which looks like nothing so much as the surface of the moon. Earlier, Jim Blaine recounts the hilarious tale of his grandfather's bargaining ram, which includes a digression about old Miss Wagner. She [Miss Jefferson] was a good soul–had a glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner, that hadn't any, to receive company in; it warn't big enough and when Miss Wagner warn't noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while t'other one was looking as straight ahead as a spyglass. Grown people didn't mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it was so sort of scary. 21 This episode, indebted to southwestern local color and certainly not Bret Harte, is black humor by the following definition: black humor is tragedy masquerading as humor, a comedy grim (and often satiric) in its message, but also black in the sense of obscure or opaque. With what emotion should we react to Miss Wagner–disgust, laughter, pity? This is complex comedy spilling into grotesque tragedy, quite appropriate to the western experience as later writers would see it, and quite beyond the other western local color writers of this era.

In Roughing It, the tall tale is reality. Mark Twain seeks not merely to amuse, but to create a serious, often irreverent world, paradoxically out of comedy. His tale of Bemis's affair with the buffalo bull is a masterpiece of the comedy of despair, as is the story of Dick Hyde's movable ranch, or Buck Fanshawe's self-destructive anger. The book's notorious and lengthy attack on Mormonism considers with tongue-in-cheek sympathy the debilitating administrative problems of Brigham Young's married life. With all its wild tales, bizarre contradictions, and fragmented, incomplete form, Roughing It also gives great insights into the crass values of those who go out West to "strike it rich." Here, as in his greatest fiction, Mark Twain showed his inimitable style, and his penetration beyond masks to a shrewd analysis of the real self-serving motivation behind his characters' actions. Through local color Clemens learned a fundamental and paradoxical truth he would carry to his grave: ironic comedy can be the most effective tragedy.

By the end of 1871, most of the newly famous San Francisco writers had scattered. Harte left California, never to return, although he continued to write local color stories about the '49ers for another thirty years. Growing more remote in time and space as the years went by, Harte's fiction also declined in popularity and critical respect. Mark Twain used the techniques he learned in writing western local color fiction to help create his great masterpieces, Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), as well as his other celebrated novels and stories. Two other younger San Francisco writers–both very colorful and at opposite ends of the literary spectrum–used their experiences in The City to gain fame in England. These two colorful figures were Joaquin Miller and Ambrose Bierce.

Cincinnatus Hiner Miller received his name "Joaquin," in addition to some very valuable help on performing public readings, from Ina Coolbrith. While she admired the bearded, unwashed bard, and even rather liked his poetry, editor Harte took a dim view of Miller's theatrical enthusiasm rendered in a rhymed, bombastic verse. Understanding Miller's considerable potential for establishing himself as a public personage, Harte nevertheless refused to accept for the Overland any poems submitted by Joaquin. Coolbrith urged what had become her creation to seek fame in England, where "American literary primitives" were much in favor as performers. Having led a tangled and peripatetic personal existence in the United States, Miller was easily convinced to try life as an export.

Miller proved to be a sensation in London. Tom Hood got Miller's lush Pacific Poems and prolix Songs of the Sierras into print, but it was on the stage that Miller really achieved popularity. Dressed in the outlandish garb Coolbrith had suggested–a ten gallon hat, riding boots, spurs, and a sealskin coat with real gold nuggets for buttons–Joaquin fascinated the English with marvelous, magniloquent tales of his adventures. Although he gained a certain measure of fame as a popular poet, his poetry never received much but scorn from serious literary critics.

As an older man, Joaquin moved to the hills of Oakland, and became something of a professional "character," and indeed, there was always an aura of the innocent flower child about him. In his final years, Joaquin abandoned writing poetry in favor of entertaining lady admirers at his cottage ("The Hights"), and planting eucalyptus trees around San Francisco Bay. 22

Ambrose Bierce cut quite a different figure. Ever sneering at Victorian poetry and all lofty sentiments, Bierce was a journalist who could wield a bitter, abusive prose that maintained the rhetorical stance of vituperative, frontal attack. In 1868, he took over the "Town Crier" column of the News Letter, a San Francisco newspaper which welcomed his relentless attacks and satiric jests. Odd as it may seem, Bierce got along famously with Bret Harte. Harte accepted for the Overland portions of what would become Bierce's Grizzly Papers, and it was Bierce, for better or for worse, who persuaded Harte to retrieve "The Heathen Chinee" from the wastebasket and print this satirical poem in the Overland.

Bierce was part of the literary contingent that left San Francisco in the early 1870s. His satires, increasing in their skill and bite, were very well received in England, where three books of his satiric sketches on California were published. Like Miller, but unlike Harte and Clemens, a now famous Bierce returned to San Francisco, the area which he so often claimed treated him with alienation and estrangement. As a satiric journalist in the corrupt "Gilded Age" of the 1880s and '90s, Bierce was not wanting for material. During these years, he attacked virtually everything, from Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party to the local Humane Society. Having offended with his Thersites-like wit practically everyone by the turn of the century, Bierce, despite his brilliance, came to be regarded by many as a crank. He disappeared in 1914, trying, at age seventy-one, to join up with Pancho Villa. Fortunately, he departed for Mexico after completing his classic collection of bitter definitions, The Devil's Dictionary. Bierce had come a long way from his salad days of writing satiric columns for the News Letter. 23

As the century progressed, the San Francisco-based brand of local color not only moved from theme to background, but it was indeed more popular as a novelty, more popular the farther away from California's shores it was read, studied, and performed. By the early 1880s, Harte's uplifting stories seemed sentimental and dated. As other parts of the West became more settled, a new generation of local color writers emerged, a generation that pushed local color in a decidedly realistic direction. This group included Mary Hallock Foote (Colorado and Idaho), Bill Nye (Wyoming), Alfred Henry Lewis (the Southwest), and, of course, Hamlin Garland (the northern Plains). But the shaping influences of Bret Harte and Mark Twain can be perceived in all of them.

Although the San Francisco circle broke apart in the early 1870s, the circle quickly regrouped and then expanded. In the early 1870s, the Bohemian Club, dedicated to good fellowship, support of the arts, and literary pursuits, was founded in downtown San Francisco. The Club's spectacular Bohemian Grove festivals and "happenings" continue to this day. The Bohemian Club, the revived Overland of the 1880s, and the establishment of The Wave in the early 1890s were literary events that marked the continuation and expansion of the circle.

Perhaps the most significant and far-reaching examples in the 1870s and '80s of this expanding circle were the works of nature writers Clarence King and John Muir. A rather bizarre nonstop talker and mountain climber, King in 1872 published Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, a collection of short pieces in several genres. What makes this uneven volume important is its subject matter; King wrote not of people dealing with a frontier culture, but about the relationship between wilderness and humanity. John Muir, who in the early 1890s founded the Sierra Club and became known as the "Father of our National Parks," was the first widely read western writer with a mystical, ecological vision. Far more than even King, Muir explored Sierra Nevada wilderness areas, coming to the deep belief that wild country must be preserved for its intrinsic value. Muir's statements about this "new philosophy" first appeared in 1873 Overland issues, and his influence on modern serious western writers and thinkers has been considerable and important.

For generations, the San Francisco area has maintained its position as one of the two or three leading literary centers in the country. A list of twentieth-century writers associated with the San Francisco area reads almost like a Who's Who of modern American literature, including Gertrude Atherton, Kay Boyle, Dashiell Hammett, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Irving Stone, among others. In the 1950s and '60s San Francisco was the center for the Beat Movement, a group of writers (chiefly poets) who were loosely aligned as radical, anti-establishment anarchists. This group included poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and sometimes Kenneth Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth, plus novelists Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. Inheritors of this tradition continue into the 1980s, expanding in terms of ethnic base and feminist orientation. The most promising of these San Francisco-based writers include Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, and Ntozake Shange. In our age of jet travel and creative writing teaching positions and scholarships, numerous writers, such as South African Dan Jacobson, Nicaraguan Catholic priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal, Filipino Nestor Gonzales, and British-born Thorn Gunn, to name only a few, have spent at least some time as members of the lively San Francisco area literary scene. 24

Also in this century, strong satellite literary communities have formed near the mother city of San Francisco. One thinks immediately of the Monterey-Carmel area with Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, Mary Hunter Austin, Robinson Jeffers, and Richard Farina; the Berkeley connection with George Stewart, Josephine Miles, and Thomas Parkinson; or Big Sur and Henry Miller; or Lincoln Steffens in Sacramento, Gerald Haslam in So-noma, and William Saroyan in Fresno; and recently, William Saroyan's son, Aram, based in Bolinas, Wallace Stegner in Palo Alto, and the numerous artists who have moved to Mill Valley. Whether acerbic in social protest, radically chic, daringly innovative, or fashionably parodic, a local color flavor can still be found in San Francisco area writing. Bret Harte would be horrified but not surprised at the directions his northern California bohemian successors would choose to take in their writing. Mark Twain, however, would be downright gleeful about the way literary developments in The City and environs have evolved as we move towards another appearance of Halley's Comet, and the final decade of our twentieth century.

PATRICK D. MORROW, Auburn University

Notes

1. The best book-length account of the local color era in California continues to be Franklin Walker's San Francisco's Literary Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1939). More recently, Kevin Starr in Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) has written perceptively of this era.

2. Crumbling Idols (Chicago and Cambridge: Stone and Kimball, 1894), p. 64.

3. For a broad sampling of local color stories and an excellent introduction to this topic, see Claude M. Simpson, ed., The Local Colorists (New York: Harper, 1960).

4. See George R. Stewart, Jr., ed., A Bibliography of the Writings of Bret Harte in the Magazines and Newspapers of California, 1857–1871 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933), pp. 133–156.

5. See John B. Howell, ed., Sketches of the Sixties by Bret Harte and Mark Twain (San Francisco, 1927), second edition.

6. See Nancy J. Peters and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Literary San Francisco (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), pp. 46–48.

7. George R. Stewart, Jr. gives an excellent account of the Outcroppings fiasco in his definitive biography, Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), pp. 129–154.

8. A very mellow account of this incident, a version rendered from the healing perspective of time, appears in Harte's contribution to My First Book, ed. Jerome K. Jerome (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894), pp. 476–486. Apparently Harte kept a clippings file of these local journalistic outbursts, and then "improved" them to heighten their scorn. Several accounts Harte mentions appeared in publications whose copies have disappeared; thus every student is to a large extent at the mercy of Harte's scholarship here.

9. Harte placed the disclaimer "By the Editor of the Enterprise" (Joe Goodman) in brackets above the poem.

10. See Paul Lewis, Queen of the Plaza: A Biography of Ada Isaacs Menken (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1964).

11. See Paul Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), pp. 34–39.

12. Albert B. Paine, ed., Mark Twain's Letters, vol. I (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917), p. 182.

13. See Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), which gives the fullest account of the complex relationship between these two writers.

14. The Californian, Dec. 23, 1865, p. 2. Brannan and Reese were powerful, flamboyant businessmen regarded as pirates by many.

15. See Patrick D. Morrow, "Bret Harte, Popular Fiction, and the Local Color Movement," Western American Literature 8 (Fall 1973): 123–131.

16. For further amplification of the formula issue in western fiction, see John G. Cawelti, The SixGun Mystique (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1971); Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Patrick D. Morrow, Bret Harte, Literary Critic (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1979); and William T. Pilkington, ed., Critical Essays on the Western American Novel (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).

17. See Stoddard's autobiography, Exits and Entrances (Boston: Lothrop, 1903).

18. A recent biography of this remarkable individual is Ina Coolbrith: Librarian and Laureate of California by Josephine D. Rhodehamel and Raymund F. Wood (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1973). 19. For a reliable on-the-scene account of Harte as editor of the Overland, see J. C. McCrackin, "A Letter from a Friend," Overland 40 (1902): 221–223.

20. See Max F. Shulz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973). Schulz writes a series of intense, perceptive essays on such figures as Barth, Pynchon, and Vonnegut, and includes a fine chapter on Thomas Berger, author of Little Big Man. This novel, very influenced by Mark Twain, is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of western fiction published since World War II.

21. Mark Twain, Roughing It (rpt. New York: Rinehart, 1953), p. 286.

22. See Benjamin F. Lawson, Joaquin Miller, Western Writers Series, No. 43 (Boise: Boise State University, 1980).

23. See Joseph Gaer, ed., Ambrose Gwinett Bierce: A Bibliography and Biographical Data (rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978).

24. See Part Two of Literary San Francisco, pp. 121–233.

Selected Bibliography

Beasley, Thomas Dykes. A Tramp Through Bret Harte Country. San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1914. Beasley's nostalgic guidebook through the Sierra Nevada gold mine country remains insightful and accurate even today.

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Cawelti's thorough, insightful, and intense study is the place where contemporary explications of American popular fiction begin.

Cummins (Mighels), Ella Sterling. The Story of the Files. San Francisco: Cooperative Printing, 1893. This is an almost complete account of primary source information about journal, magazine, and newspaper publishing in early San Francisco.

De Voto, Bernard, ed. Mark Twain in Eruption. New York: Harper, 1940. De Voto presents a selection of nasty and insightful Mark Twain writings that had previously been suppressed.

Duckett, Margaret. Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. This remains the definitive account of the stormy literary and personal relationship between these two men.

Hart, James D. A Companion to California. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Hart, author of the well-respected The Popular Book in America, has also written this useful source book about numerous aspects of California culture.

May, Ernest R. "Bret Harte and the Overland Monthly." American Literature 22 (Nov. 1950): 260–271. In this article, historian May provides a detailed and accurate account of Harte's career on the Overland.

Morrow, Patrick D. Bret Harte, Literary Critic. Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1979. This is a study of the evolution and development of Harte as an important literary critic.

Paine, Albert B., ed. Mark Twain's Letters. New York: Harper and Bros., 1935. Paine in this volume has assembled a judicious and revealing selection of Mark Twain's candid letters.

Peters, Nancy J., and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Literary San Francisco. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980. This is the best general survey of how the San Francisco literary scene has developed over the last 150 years.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. New York: Vintage, 1957. A venerable study, this classic and provocative interdisciplinary work has inspired many other critical volumes in the last few decades.

Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. A recent study, well-documented and quite convincing, of the promise that California has held for so many, including its writers.

Stewart, George R., Jr. Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931; rpt. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1968. A definitive work, this biography is one of the finest ever written about an American writer.

Walker, Franklin. San Francisco's Literary Frontier. New York: Knopf, 1939; rpt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969. This is a beautifully written and well-researched account of Harte, Clemens, and company.

[Contents]    [Index]

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