SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 35 (of 78)
Trodding the Boards (1866, 1867)
Chapter 35
Trodding the Boards (1866, 1867)
As a title for the lecture, I chose “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.” My debut performance of it, in October of 1866, took place at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco.
However, as the day set for the lecture approached, I began to worry whether anybody would show up. I grew more and more unhappy. I had sold two hundred tickets among my personal friends, but I feared even they might not come. My lecture, which had seemed “humorous” to me, at first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun seemed left, and I grieved that I could not bring a coffin on the stage and turn the thing into a funeral.
I ate nothing on the last day before the dreaded lecture—I only suffered. I crept down to the theater at four in the afternoon to see if any sales had been made. The ticket seller was gone, the box-office was locked up. I had to swallow suddenly, or my heart would have got out. “No sales,” I said to myself; “I might have known it.” I thought of suicide, pretended illness, flight. I thought of these things in earnest, for I was very miserable and scared. But of course I had to drive them away, and prepare to meet my fate. I could not wait for half-past seven—I wanted to face the horror, and end it—the feeling of many a man doomed to hang, no doubt. I went down back streets at six o’clock, and entered the theater by the back door. I stumbled my way in the dark among the ranks of canvas scenery, and stood on the stage. The house was gloomy and silent, and its emptiness depressing. I went into the dark among the scenes again, and for an hour and a half gave myself up to the horrors, wholly unconscious of everything else. Then I heard a murmur; it rose higher and higher, and ended in a crash, mingled with cheers. It made my hair raise, it was so close to me, and so loud.
There was a pause, and then another; presently came a third, and before I well knew what I was about, I was in the middle of the stage, staring at a sea of faces, bewildered by the fierce glare of the lights, and quaking in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away. The house was full, aisles and all!
The tumult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before I could gain any command over myself. Then I recognized the charity and the friendliness in the faces before me, and little by little my fright melted away, and I began to talk. Within three or four minutes I was comfortable, and even content.
To make a long story short, the lecture went very well. So much so, in fact, that I ended up extending my lecture tour throughout northern California and western Nevada. But a mean and rotten practical joke played on me soured me on continuing my western residence, and I soon severed ties with my tour manager and returned east.
EDITOR’S NOTES: In his autobiography, Twain recorded the following about his leap into lecturing following his sojourn in Hawaii:
After about four or five months I returned to California to find myself about the best-known honest man on the Pacific coast. Thomas McGuire, proprietor of several theaters, said that now was the time to make my fortune—strike while the iron was hot—break into the lecture field! I did it. I announced a lecture on the Sandwich Islands, closing the advertisement with the remark: “Admission one dollar; doors open at half past seven, the trouble begins at eight.”
A true prophecy. The trouble certainly did begin at eight, when I found myself in front of the only audience I had ever faced, for the fright which pervaded me from head to foot was paralyzing. It lasted two minutes and was as bitter as death; the memory of it is indestructible but it had its compensations, for it made me immune from timidity before audiences for all time to come.
The Governor of California was among the crowd (and the Governor of Nevada attended Twain’s later lecture in that State). Some would-be audience members in San Francisco had to be turned away, and Twain netted $400 from the lecture there (the equivalent of well over $6,000 in 2020).
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.