GLR January-February 2025

down his original description of the bawdy performance: he had initially written that the king was “stark” naked but then crossed that out. He first described his outfit as “scandalous,” then changed it to “outrageous,” and then finally settled on “just wild.” In a sentence he later deleted, he wrote that the naked actor “judged he could caper [ sic ] to their base instincts.” The men in the audience, their base instincts appealed to, at first enjoy the ribald show—they “most killed themselves laugh ing”—but when they learn that a single nude man is all they’re going to see, they become angry and protest that they’ve been “sold.” They’re about to attack the duke and the king when a member of the audience halts the incipient riot, pointing out that if word gets around that they all paid good money to see a naked man, they will be “the laughing-stock of this whole town.” No, instead they should convince all the other men in town to come to

One evening, Gillis was passing by “Big Jim” Casey’s bar on Howard Street when he saw Casey mercilessly beating up one of his customers. Gillis rushed in to intervene, and when Casey piv oted to attack him in turn, Gillis grabbed the nearest weapon—a pitcher of beer—and whacked the bar owner on the side of the head, knocking him out. When the police came, Casey was taken to the hospital and Gillis was taken to jail. That night, Sam Clemens was rousted out of bed to post bond for his roommate— $500 he didn’t have, and for which he needed to sign a promissory note instead. The next morning, the men got word that Casey was in critical condition and that Gillis would certainly be charged with assault, and perhaps manslaughter. He chose to skip bail and hightail it back to Virginia City. That would mean Sam would be on the hook for $500 that he couldn’t possibly pay, so it was de cided that he too would leave town, and that he would hide out for

the second performance, so they all will have been equally duped, and then everyone will be too humili ated ever to speak of it. The second performance goes off much like the first, but on the third and final evening, seeing that the audience this time has brought “sickly eggs by the barrel, and rotten cabbages, and such things,” the duke and the king make a strategic exit from the town, pocketing the proceeds. The incident in the novel that has come to be referred to as “The Royal Nonesuch” is ultimately un satisfying. It is uneven and trun cated, starting out in one direction, then veering off and ending abruptly. The reason for the chop piness became clear when Twain’s manuscript was available for study. We now know that until the very last moment, until the galleys were being prepared for printing, the play presented by the king and the duke was not “The Royal None

a while in a mining cabin on Jack ass Hill in Tuolumne County that was owned by Gillis’ brother Jim. During his three months in hid ing in Tuolumne and in adjacent Calaveras County, Mark Twain listened to the tall tales told by the miners, and he began to write them down. When one of the sto ries—about a frog jumping con test—was published in an Eastern newspaper, the critics and the pub lic alike hailed the arrival of a uniquely American literary voice. The dead hand of European litera ture had at last been cast off. In his memoir Roughing It (1872), Twain writes about the sparsely populated enclaves he found nestled among the forested hills of Tuolumne County, locales that had once been raucous, roar ing mining camps but were now home to a handful of men who had seen the region flourish and then decline as the gold petered

out. “With it their hopes had died, and their zest of life. They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes to ward their early homes. They had accepted banishment, for gotten the world and been forgotten by the world ... outcast from brotherhood with their kind.” When the wave of pros perity washed over the region and then receded, these out casts chose to remain behind, forming a brotherhood of their own built around mining, whiskey, and oral entertainment. “I spent three months in the log-cabin home of Jim Gillis and his ‘pard,’ Dick Stoker,” Twain later wrote, describing Jack ass Hill as “that serene and reposeful and dreamy and delicious sylvan paradise.” But his recollections of the place were no doubt gilded by his memories of long evenings spent drinking and talking in Gillis and Stoker’s home: Every now and then Jim would have an inspiration and he would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and

such” but instead “The Burning Shame”—a burlesque too raunchy even for men eager for low comedy. In his autobiogra phy, Twain wrote of the king’s nude performance: “I had to mod ify it considerably to make it proper for print, and this was a great damage. ... How mild it is in the book, and how pale; how ex travagant and how gorgeous in its unprintable form!” § T HE STORY OF M ARK T WAIN ’ S ENCOUNTER with the ultimately unprintable story of “The Burning Shame” goes back nearly two decades before Huckleberry Finn was published, to a pitcher of beer that changed the course of American literature. It all began (as interesting things in San Francisco so often do) in a bar South of Market. In 1864, Twain (still known to his friends as Sam Clemens) was living in San Francisco, sharing a room with Steve Gillis, a man who had worked as a compositor for the Vir giniaCity Territorial Enterprise when Clemens was a reporter for the Nevada paper.

TheG & LR

16