How Not to Get Rich

by Alan Pell Crawford

  On January 31, Paige came to terms. “Farewell—a long farewell—to business!” Twain told Livy. “I will never touch it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it. I will swim in ink!”

  ALL THIS, OF COURSE, was premature—Twain’s euphoria, the sense that his money troubles were suddenly behind him, the vow that he was done with business, and the idea that he would forevermore content himself with making a living as a writer. There was still much to be done because Webster & Company continued to hemorrhage money. It was more than $100,000 in debt—about $3 million today—and if the creditors tried to force it into bankruptcy, as seemed likely, they could seize everything Twain owned, including his stock in the new Paige Compositor company.

  Here, too, Rogers had a plan, and this one was even more devious than the bluff he sprang on the Paige investors. Initially—and there was nothing remarkable in this—Rogers proposed selling off the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, sales of which had screeched to a halt since the Panic of 1893. People just weren’t buying expensive sets of literary anthologies—or, apparently, paying for the sets they had ordered. There was about $50,000 in uncollected orders on the Webster & Company ledgers, nearly 600 sets sitting at the warehouse, and another 5,000 sets that had been printed but not yet bound. There were the printer’s plates as well. Rogers and a son-in-law who dealt in memorabilia offered $50,000 to buy all of it, on the assumption that, once the depression lifted, sales would rebound. Twain accepted the offer, and Hall threw in some of the office furniture as part of the deal.

  This relieved the company of a considerable burden, but there was little reason to believe it could ever become profitable again. Including the Mount Morris Bank, almost a hundred creditors were clamoring for payment, and their demands would have to be met, even if payment was not in full. Few of them could reasonably expect as much, anyway. Managing to keep the Mount Morris Bank at bay, Rogers turned his attention to problems of less immediate urgency but of greater magnitude.

  With or without the Library of American Literature, Rogers came to realize that the publishing house Charles L. Webster & Company could not be salvaged. Suspecting as much himself, Twain spoke of selling the whole concern. Meanwhile, the Century Publishing Company, which produced Century magazine, was interested in buying Twain’s company, but only on one condition. Part of the deal would be that the new company would become the sole publisher of Mark Twain’s books. Twain considered this unacceptable. But if no other buyer could be found and Webster & Company went under, Twain could lose everything, including his stock in the Paige Compositor and all royalties on all of his books, both those that were already published and those still to come. He had only two sure-fire ways of earning money, and they were connected: writing and lecturing. Twain had grown to hate the lectures, but they were a good way to promote his books and keep his name before the public. They were also lucrative in themselves, but only his writing could be counted on now; he was getting older (he was nearly sixty), his health was declining, and with the passage of years, the rigors of travel took a heavier and heavier toll.

  The plan Rogers cooked up would shelter Twain from the financial consequences of Webster & Company’s looming collapse. But to accomplish this, Twain must, as soon as possible, transfer all his assets—including his stock in the publishing company and the typesetter company, and the book copyrights and royalties—to his wife. Livy, after all, had lent the firm more than $70,000, which made her its chief creditor. On March 4, 1894, just before he once again sailed back to Europe, Twain signed over power of attorney to Rogers, who prepared the proper documents stating that Twain’s assets had been transferred to his wife. Zacks, in Chasing the Last Laugh, calls the move “a classic hedge but also a fraudulent transfer. If Webster & Company went under, creditors would find that Twain had no assets.”

  Then Rogers steered the company into voluntary bankruptcy—filed under New York State law since there was no federal bankruptcy law at this time. Twain’s creditors, who, Rogers said, had gleefully planned on “devouring every pound of flesh in sight and picking the bones afterward,” were in for a surprise. So were the American people who, picking up their newspapers on April 18, read the front-page headlines. “Failure of Mark Twain,” the New York Tribune reported. “Mark Twain Fails,” cried the San Francisco Call. “Mark Twain Loses All,” the New York World announced. “No Humor Here,” the Washington Times snickered. The Brooklyn Eagle drew a tidy lesson from it all: “It is another case of a shrewd and bright observer of things missing a moral which he could readily have taught to other people.”

  Though embarrassed by all the unfavorable publicity, Twain told reporters he was “relieved” by the bankruptcy. This, friends reminded him, was standard business procedure. Livy, back in Europe, was ashamed and saw it all as a moral failure. Twain tried to reassure her there was nothing dishonorable in what he had done and that, in time, their debts would be paid and their creditors made whole. This belief that no one would be stiffed was kept alive, no doubt, because Twain still hoped that in the coming months the Paige Compositor would pay off royally. Livy had wanted to sign over the Hartford house to the other creditors, worried that the preference given to her by the transfer of assets was unfair to them. Twain had taken that action, he told her, because his chief duty was to her and the children, “my second is to those others. I must protect you first,” even if it meant protecting her from the consequences of her own admirable generosity and sense of fair play.

  Twain told Livy that at meetings with the creditors, he struggled to remember how Rogers had instructed him to speak of the family’s assets.

  “It was confoundedly difficult at first for me to be always saying, ‘Mrs. Clemens’s books,’ ‘Mrs. Clemens’s copyrights,’ ‘Mrs. Clemens’s type-setter stock,’ & so on, but it was necessary to do this, & I got the hang of it presently. I was even able to say with gravity, ‘My wife has two unfinished books, but I am not able to say when they will be completed or where she will elect to publish them when they are done.’”

  In August of 1894, with the details of the settlement still to be decided, Twain left to join his family in Europe. In October the Paige Compositor and other typesetting machines, including Mergenthaler’s, were to be pitted against one another at trials by the Chicago Herald.

  Now all Twain had to do was wait for the competition and, once the newspapers had learned the results, watch the money roll in.

  20

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  “Knocked Flat on My Back”

  The Chicago Herald’s sixty-day trial of the Paige Compositor began on September 20, 1894. Back in Paris, Twain eagerly awaited updates. At first, the machine seemed to be performing so magnificently that the Mergenthaler backers “will come and want to hitch teams with us.” Rogers soon reported, however, that the trial was not going as well as hoped after all. Their machine, while undoubtedly speedy, was also error-prone. Also, type tended to break. Paige had to be summoned personally for repairs because the machine proved so complex that no one but its inventor understood how, once there was a glitch, to get it operating properly again. It was too delicate, the Herald owners were coming to realize, for them to rely on. Twain stuck by the machine. When it is “in proper working order,” he insisted, “it cannot make a mistake.” The problem must be the operator, he told Rogers, and urged him not to take this mere hiccup seriously.

  Again Twain waited, and as he did, his health declined. He “got knocked flat on my back with gout,” which he first assumed was “some new kind of super-devilish rheumatism, and imagined it would stop hurting presently. But it didn’t,” he told Rogers. Twain was able to sleep from midnight to 3 a.m., which was followed by “5 or 6 hours wherein the gout was the only presence present.” Gout is “one of the oldest pains known to medical science, and is perhaps the most competent. When we got the doctor at last, he said it was only the gout, and an attack of no importance. He seemed to regard it as a pleasure trip. H
e gave me a hypodermic and appeared to think the business was done—which it wasn’t.” Another injection helped, but Twain was in pain again the next day. As for the doctor’s opinion that the gout was of no consequence, Twain told Rogers, Hell is of no consequence, either, “to a person who doesn’t live there.”

  By late November, Twain’s health was better but reports on the Paige Compositor only got worse. The machine still was not performing as hoped, which made Twain doubt the whole enterprise and its future—and himself. Maybe they had added too many unnecessary features to the machine (did it really need a key that made the sign for pi?). Maybe they had rushed the whole process. But “that would have been fore sight, whereas hindsight is my specialty . . . My hindsight,” he realized, “is getting to be very sharp.” It grieved Twain that, although Rogers had “put so much money and brains, and good hard work into that machine there was nobody to save you from this disappointment. I am to blame.” Rogers would come out of all this fine, Twain realized, but he himself would not. When he heard from Chicago, he braced himself. He would shiver and tell himself to “stand by for a cyclone! for if Mr. Rogers finds it wise and best to remove his supports from under that machine, your fine ten-year-old dream will blow away like a mist and you will land in the poor house sure.”

  Hope in the Paige Compositor was not dead, but it was dying. If the trials failed completely (as seemed increasingly likely), and Rogers pulled out, they should consider making no announcement of Rogers’s decision to withdraw his backing. This delay would give them time to buy Mergenthaler stock “at as low a figure as possible.” Surely the Mergenthaler stock would then boom, “for their machine will then be the cock of the walk, and permanently, without possibility of rivalry.” With the Paige invention out of the way, the Mergenthaler would be “an absolutely sure investment.”

  Twain tried to work—he was finishing up the solemn Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, one of his least successful novels—and to face facts. His fifty-ninth birthday had come and gone. Livy and their children “spent two francs on birthday presents for me, and we have begun life on a new and not altogether unpromising basis.”

  A FEW DAYS before Christmas, Twain received the news he was dreading: The Paige Compositor, Rogers decided, was a bust. He and his money were out of the deal. Deprived of Rogers’s future investment, the company would have to be dissolved.

  As inevitable as it might have been, the news of Rogers’s decision nevertheless “knocked every rag of sense out of my head,” Twain said, “and I went flying here and there and yonder, not knowing what I was doing, and only one clearly defined thought standing up visible and substantial out of the crazy storm-drift—that my dream of ten years was in desperate peril, and out of the 60,000 or 70,000 projects for its rescue that came flocking through my skull, not one would hold still long enough for me to examine it and size it up.”

  Desperate, Twain decided he could scurry back to Chicago, or New York, or Hartford—wherever—and see for himself if the venture might be rescued. “I must be there and see it die. That is, if it must die; and maybe if I were there we might hatch up some next-to-impossible way to make it take up its bed and take a walk.” For four hours, such fantasies tormented him and, “still whirling,” he even checked the schedules for trains and ships, “with just barely head enough left on my shoulders to protect me from being used as a convenience by the dogs.” By bedtime, Livy “had reasoned me into a fairly rational and contented state of mind; but of course it didn’t last long.” Then he dashed off lists of possible alterations to the machine, in hopes of accomplishing what Paige had spent years trying to do: perfect the unwieldy contraption, including dispensing with half the keyboard, with its “diphthongs, fractions, & other rubbish which heavily load us up with machinery and yet are used but very very seldom.” But an argument based on such small details would not persuade an expansive strategic mind like Rogers’s, and it didn’t.

  Rogers, by contrast, took the long view. The Paige Compositor “was a marvelous invention,” he admitted, and his assessment suggests a sense that a machine of its kind would be practical only in a future day, when machines might be more like people, perhaps in the Artificial Intelligence sense. The machine, Rogers said, “was the earliest approach to a human being in the wonderful things it could [do] of any machine I had ever known. But that was just the trouble; it was too much of a human being and not enough of a machine. It has all the complications of the human mechanism, all the liability of getting out of repair, and it could not be replaced with the ease and immediateness of the human being. It was too costly; too difficult of construction; too hard to set up.”

  STILL REELING OVER THE NEWS, Twain also considered alterations to his family’s lives that might relieve them of some of their burdens. He realized they could never again afford to live in the Hartford house—“though it would break the ­family’s hearts”—and would need to find more or less permanent tenants. It was costing them $200 a month just to hold on to the mansion. That’s $5,400 today. “If we can rent, or sell, or burn the house,” it would save a lot of money.

  “The thing for me to do,” he told Rogers shortly after New Year’s, “is to teach myself to endure a way of life which I was familiar with during the first half of my life but whose sordidness and hatefulness and humiliation long ago faded out of my memory and feeling.” This is a remarkable admission, coming so late in life. Twain never spoke of his early years as ones of suffering and deprivation, but it seems that is how the author of the idyllic Tom Sawyer might really have recalled them. “With the help of my wife this will not be very difficult, I think. I think, indeed, that she and I could adjust ourselves to the new conditions quite easily if we were alone,—in fact, I know it—but the reflection that they are going to be hard on the children” would make the adjustment more difficult.

  He then wrote to notify friends in Hartford that the house was for rent. Livy’s family business seemed to have revived somewhat from the Panic of 1893, and they could live on about $4,000 a year—just over $100,000 today—from the Langdon interests in Elmira. Twain figured he could count on another $3,500 from the books that were still in print. “To that,” he told Rogers, “I must add $5,000 a year by work, and that will keep the tribe alive.” They weren’t sure where they would live but were thinking of going home. The difficulty of living in New York was that Livy was not strong enough to walk the distances between the horse-car lines. But neither of them wanted “to live elsewhere in America—certainly not in Hartford, in the circumstances.” They would definitely return in the spring, and he would spend the summer in Elmira writing and revising, with Joan of Arc slated for release by the end of the year.

  At least in New York Twain would be among friends, with whom he would have no reason for embarrassment. He would also be near Rogers, to whom he felt indebted—morally and personally, though not financially. Rogers was afraid that his decision to pull out of the Paige investment would cost him his friendship with Twain. But he need not have worried. Twain said he’d never had a better friend in his life. He would soon turn sixty, and in all those years, he said, “I never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore when he found me in deep waters.”

  Rogers had involved himself with patience and great skill, and if he had not made all Twain’s troubles go away, he had banished a great deal of them. Even if they had settled nothing, their meetings in Rogers’s Wall Street office had been a great blessing. He had seen the man dealing with far graver matters than his own miserable affairs, and Rogers was a model of grace and good humor.

  Every day those consultations supplied . . . plenty of vexations and exasperations for Mr. Rogers—I know this quite well—but if ever they found revealment in his face or manner it could have been for only a moment or two, for the signs were gone when he re-entered his private office, and he was always his brisk and cheerful self again and ready to be chaffed and joked, and reply in kind. His spirit was often heavily burdened, necessarily
, but it cast no shadow, and those about him always sat in the sunshine.

  In coming years, Twain and Rogers would spend days and weeks together, sometimes in Rogers’s private train car, or on his yacht. Twain’s writer friends didn’t understand or accept his fondness for Rogers, but Twain never apologized for it. Once, when Twain suggested Rogers as a guest at one of their luncheons, Finley Peter Dunne, author of the Mr. Dooley newspaper pieces, questioned the choice.

  “I thought you said this was to be a literary lunch.”

  “So it is,” Twain said.

  “Then why ask Rogers?”

  “Why ask Rogers? Why ask Rogers? To pay for the lunch, you idiot.”

  WITHIN WEEKS of the compositor’s collapse, Twain was feeling hopeful again and full of schemes. Rogers shouldn’t worry, Twain said, because he had come up with a plan to escape the “heavy nervous strain” that Twain and Livy had been living with for months now—“another project” that would enable them to pay their debts. Rogers should “take a breath and stand by for a surge.”

  Details of this grand plan would follow soon.

  21

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  “Money for a Monument”

  The grand plan was for Twain to embark on a world tour, ­lecturing to paying crowds for a year, with stops in Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. Twain would take Livy and their daughter Clara with him. He wanted Rogers and his wife and son to accompany them, but Rogers demurred. He would stay home in New York, receiving the checks that Livy would forward to him. Livy, who figured it would take four years to free themselves from their “bondage of debt,” would do all the bookkeeping, filling pages with “acres of figures.” She would send the earnings, less the agent’s percentage, back to Rogers. These he would use for the reimbursement of Webster & Company creditors. Whatever was left, he would save for them or look to invest.