Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Mark Twain would never write a book about the French that contained the indictment suggested in his private journal attacks; his French book would have to wait until the 1890s and then focus on French virtue in the character of Joan of Arc. Of course, he had already tried once to write one about the English. Now he was about to try again—or to continue—picking up the incomplete manuscript of The Prince and the Pauper once he returned to the United States, even as he finished A Tramp Abroad. Both books were penultimate to completing Huckleberry Finn, but The Prince and the Pauper contains the initial elements of not only his masterpiece but also Pudd’nhead Wilson, as well as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It is rather telling that the only book of Mark Twain’s to be almost unanimously classified as a children’s book should contain the major seeds of his most ambitious work. But then, Huckleberry Finn began as a boy’s book. The Prince and the Pauper lives today mainly as a drama for children, which is also rather curious considering that Mark Twain could never write a successful play (it wasn’t he who would successfully dramatize The Prince and the Pauper.) Furthermore, it was supposed to be his attempt to write “serious” or upscale Victorian fiction on a par with Howells and the others of his era. It was not a frivolous gesture when he prefaced Huckleberry Finn with the caveat that anyone looking for the usual ingredients of high literature—a moral or even plot—would be prosecuted, banished, or shot. For The Prince and the Pauper is one of the most moralistic and carefully plotted books that Mark Twain ever wrote. Here he worked extra hard to write “literature.” In Huckleberry Finn he was—he initially thought—simply writing a sequel to Tom Sawyer. And indeed when he finished his masterpiece, he hardly realized what he had accomplished.

  The Prince and the Pauper features yet another Tom, the impoverished Tom Canty, along with Edward VI, look-alikes who inadvertently exchange roles. That allows Twain to show in contrasting depictions both the poverty of the masses in sixteenth-century England and the astonishment of a young prince who is exposed to it for the first time and eventually resolves to strive for reforms in his kingdom, much in the way that Huck will ultimately resolve to “go to hell” for Jim. Twain took his epigraph for the novel from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, about the “quality of mercy” lacking in English life. The idea of switched boys anticipates the theme of switched babies in Pudd’nhead Wilson, where the difference between them is not only economic but also racial. Tom as “king” even rejects his mother, foreshadowing Chambers’s essential rejection of his mother. This Tom is also like Tom Sawyer in that “the little Prince of Poverty” loves stories of chivalry and romance, thereby making it easier for him to adapt to the routines of royalty once he has been switched into the court of Henry VIII. The prince’s sister, Lady Jane, in her questioning of the “mock prince,” anticipates the harelip Joanna Wilks, who interrogates Huck.

  Once the real prince is exposed to the miseries and dangers of his kingdom, he meets up with Miles Hendon, another wandering claimant deprived of his true rightful identity. Like Huck and Jim, Edward and Miles go on an epic journey that exposes the different levels and kinds of social injustice and human folly. There is even a scene in chapter 13 in which Hendon, like Huck in the scene with Judith Loftus, demonstrates his male ignorance of the women’s art of sewing, or how to thread a needle. When Henry VIII dies, Canty, still as the false prince, asks a question similar to the “Is he dead?” query at the sight of an ancient mummy in The Innocents Abroad: “Will he keep?” Twain looks backward as well as forward, then, as he moves inexorably toward his magnum opus. When the king is forced to beg for his “poor afflicted brother,” he forecasts Huck on the raft with the slave catchers pleading for his sick father. But again Twain pulls in details and incidents from everywhere. In chapter 18, Edward Tudor wakes up thinking he is lying next to a corpse, “newly dead and still warm.” It turns out to be a living calf, but as Twain earlier recalled, coincidentally in chapter 18 of The Innocents Abroad, the body he woke up to as a boy in his father’s Hannibal JP office was both human and dead. And like Huck and Jim on being reunited after the Grangerford episode, the prince and Hendon jog “lazily along” in chapter 25, “talking over the adventures they had met since their separation.” Finally, the switching of the two boys in The Prince and the Pauper resembles the identity exchange between Huck and Tom at Aunt Sally’s. Like Tom Canty’s exchanging his rags for royalty, Huck Finn the river rat becomes “respectable” as Tom Sawyer.

  All of this was no doubt percolating in Mark Twain’s subconscious as he grumbled about the French and began to change his mind about the English. In fact, he had already written “The Great Revolution in Pitcairn,” a sketch anticipating his anti-imperialistic and anti-British theme in his second “book about the English,” A Connecticut Yankee. In “The Great Revolution” a “mysterious stranger” tries unsuccessfully to reshape an island culture of ninety people, who before his arrival enjoyed nearly idyllic conditions. The sketch was initially intended for A Tramp Abroad, but ended up in the March 1879 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. While visiting Great Britain, he met as he had in Paris other writers and artists of note. There was a dinner with Henry James, whom Livy liked very much, and James Whistler, whom she didn’t. They visited the grave of Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon, and Twain met the “great Darwin” on another side trip, this time to the Lake Country. He said little about the meeting at the time in his journal, but three years later upon the death of Charles Darwin, he recalled the two had been embarrassed at being introduced to each other as great men. He also recalled that Charles Eliot Norton told him Darwin said he “always read himself to sleep with my books.”7 There is no evidence that Twain read himself to sleep with Origin of Species (1859), but he had perused Descent of Man (1871) and later joked that Adam now stood to be exchanged for a monkey and forgotten.8 Earlier, of course, in The Innocents Abroad, his narrator weeps at the grave of Adam as though he were a close relative.

  After fifteen months abroad, the Clemens party sailed for home on the Gallia out of Liverpool on August 23, 1879. They had stayed away too long, and this may have been a factor in the shift in Twain’s mood toward France and England, if not Germany and the other places they had visited on the continent. When their ship reached New York harbor on September 2, a New York Sun reporter said that Twain looked older and grayer than when he had gone abroad, while a Times correspondent described “the nearest surviving kin of the jumping frog” as ageless in that his hair was “no whiter than when he last sailed for Europe.” The Times did note, however, that he came back with even more luggage than he had left with—a total now of twelve trunks and twenty-two freight packages. It took six hours for him to get everything through customs. He was the last passenger to leave the ship, partly because one of his trunks was temporarily lost. Twain told Dan Slote, “I was lucky to get through at all, because the ship was loaded mainly with my freight.” Much of it was intended for the Hartford house, enough new things to prompt an expensive redecorating by Louis Comfort Tiffany. But for now the Clemenses were headed for their summer home in Elmira, which they would occupy through October before returning to Hartford. By the end of the year he had given the speech for Grant in Chicago (see chapter 8) and another Atlantic birthday speech in Boston, this time for Oliver Wendell Holmes, at a breakfast in honor of the author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Given the staleness of the humor of that book today, perhaps even then to Twain, much of whose humor still lives, he did well and did not “embarrass himself” as many thought he had done two years earlier at the Whittier dinner. In fact, he no doubt endeared himself to Holmes and others in the audience by publicly confessing that he had unconsciously stolen the epigraph to The Innocents Abroad from Holmes’s Songs in So Many Keys (“To My Most Patient Reader and Most Charitable Critic, My Aged Mother . . .”). He spoke of his earlier apology to Holmes and the response (from “the first great man who ever wrote me a letter”).9 This time, after so many months abroad, the “fit” with American l
iterary royalty felt a little less alien.

  Yet Twain was entering deep and treacherous waters as the decade of the 1880s opened before him. He would accomplish his greatest invention with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but there would also be other inventions that would eventually threaten him with financial ruin. The artist who allegedly hated art would ultimately become the businessman who hated business.

  PART III

  The Artist and the Businessman

  31 Associations New and Old

  A Tramp Abroad would be Mark Twain’s last book with the American Publishing Company for years to come. It had been a difficult work to finish, what with all the cuts and revisions. Yet, probably because of its advance publicity by way of early reviews and published excerpts, the book, released in March 1880, sold well—in its first year more than sixty thousand copies in the United States. Elisha Bliss died the following fall. Twain had been less and less satisfied with the man who had sold so many of his books by subscription. Paradoxically, it was the success of A Tramp Abroad that brought about the rupture in his eleven-year streak with the Hartford publisher. He broke with Bliss when he realized that the de facto “half profit,” or fifty-fifty split between author and publisher that Bliss had agreed to since Roughing It (amounting to 7.5 percent of the list price), was a lie. When for the first time the term “half profit” actually appeared in the contract for A Tramp, Twain found that he made significantly more money than he had on all the previous books.1

  He had also been courted for some time by James R. Osgood, who had come up through the ranks at Ticknor and Fields of Boston. By the late 1870s, Osgood had bought out the original owners and eventually joined forces with Henry Houghton. But that arrangement had soon foundered, and by 1881 he was in effect starting over as James R. Osgood and Company without Houghton’s old list of established authors.2 Now dispossessed of Emerson as well as the Schoolroom poets of Boston, Osgood needed to expand his range of authors—indeed, extend it to the widening class of readers that improved transportation and the rapid postwar advancement of print technology had created by bringing down the price of the average book. His new acquisition of authors who wrote in the vernacular and appealed to this broader readership included not only the humorist Mark Twain but also the controversial poet Walt Whitman.

  Not that the first major book Osgood published—or copublished—with Twain was written in the vernacular. The Prince and the Pauper was nonetheless published as a subscription book. This method of book sales, which probably inspired the Sears Roebuck catalog as a way to reach potential customers beyond the urban bookshops, turned out not to be Osgood’s strong suit, but the general arrangement between the publisher and Twain evidently worked out well enough for their association to carry over to Life on the Mississippi. In effect, with Osgood, Twain reversed the unfair ratio between publisher and author that he had resented in his dealings with Bliss, agreeing to pay Osgood exactly the 7.5 percent royalty Bliss had paid him on Roughing It. Moreover, Twain, after Bliss, still needed somebody to manage his literary affairs. In fact, the need was even more acute because his business interests had begun to expand beyond simple nonliterary inventions of his own.

  He now owned the majority interest in a patent for Kaolatype, a new and still untested engraving process he had purchased from Dan Slote, whose company retained the rest of the stock. Slote, Woodman, and Company was supposed to market the product, but when that investment failed to live up to its promise even after Twain contributed additional funds, Twain got Charles L. Webster, his niece’s husband in Fredonia, to investigate. Webster reported in the spring of 1881 that Slote, in siphoning off so much of Twain’s money, was either “a knave or a fool.” Webster’s conclusion, along with suspicions that Slote and his company had also cheated Twain on the profits from his self-pasting scrapbook, ended their close friendship of fifteen years, which had started on the Quaker City cruise. When Slote died suddenly a year later, Twain told Mary Fairbanks: “If Dan had died thirteen months earlier, I should have been at the funeral, and squandered many tears; but as it is, I did not go and saved my tears.” His “mother” Fairbanks, who had also known Slote on the same cruise, tried to remind her “son” that at least before his ex-friend found himself in a financial corner he had offered “a notable friendship—made so by your book it is true, but consistently sustained by after years of mutual service and sympathy.”3 But iron had already entered Sam’s soul.

  One would think that after such a disappointing foray into business, Clemens might stick to writing, even in the heyday of American inventors. But Mark Twain’s arrangement with Osgood led him to become not only his own publisher but also by the mid-1880s a heavy investor in yet another invention in the rapidly expanding printing and publishing field. He had already met, in 1880, a machinist and inventor named James W. Paige. Only a few years earlier, another self-taught engineer, Thomas Edison, now hailed as the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” had invented the phonograph and the first commercially practical incandescent lightbulb. As an investor and part owner of the Farnham Type-Setting Company, which rented space in the Colt Firearms Factory in Hartford, Paige—no doubt encouraged by Edison’s example—worked away at perfecting his automatic compositor, or typesetter.

  That year Sam Clemens had also welcomed into the world his third daughter, Jean, born in Elmira on July 26, another event that proved ominous in his life. Indeed, 1880 would be a major turning point. It ushered in both prosperity and eventually also the pessimism now attributed to him during the last years of his life.

  The Prince and the Pauper was published to favorable reviews in the United States and not-so-favorable ones in Britain, where some critics resented Twain’s emphasis on the brutality of the English throne in the sixteenth century and snidely suggested he restrict himself to American humor. He now turned to the Mississippi River to complete a book prompted by the success of his “Old Times on the Mississippi” articles in the Atlantic in 1875. He intended to revisit St. Louis and the Mississippi in preparation for it. He asked his friend Howells to accompany him, but Howells was too busy, so he made the journey instead with Osgood and a stenographer from Hartford named Roswell Phelps. But before their trip that April, Twain became interested in another matter at the James R. Osgood Company.

  Osgood had taken a chance and published the sixth edition of Leaves of Grass in the fall of 1881, becoming Whitman’s only commercial publisher since the war. Whitman, now practically worshipped in some quarters as the “Good Gray Poet,” had given one of his popular lectures, “The Death of Abraham Lincoln,” in Boston that fall, and this appearance led to his signing on with Osgood, who had previously known Whitman in the 1860s as a fellow drinker at Pfaff’s. In turning over his latest manuscript, what became the final and definitive edition of Leaves of Grass, the poet had cautioned his old acquaintance: “Fair warning on one point—the old pieces, the sexuality ones, about which the original row was started & kept up so long, are all retained, & must go in the same as ever.” The bard was referring to the recurring attacks on his book since its initial publication in 1855. He now considered Leaves of Grass his life’s work, a “cathedral” in which the early sexual poems were no longer at the center of its altar but still held their rightful place in the overall structure. But that’s not the way Boston district attorney Oliver Stevens saw the matter. On March 1, 1882, he informed Osgood, just as he was preparing to journey down the Mississippi River with Twain, that Whitman’s book violated “the provisions of the Public Statutes respecting obscene literature” and ordered its withdrawal from sale immediately.4 Leaves of Grass thus became the first book to be “banned in Boston,” setting off a blizzard of letters to the editor in both the New York and Boston papers.

  Mark Twain wrote one of those letters to the Boston Evening Post. “The Walt Whitman Controversy” was left unfinished and, perhaps like 1601, never really intended for publication. His argument in support of Leaves of Grass pointed to the hypocrisy of allowing all kinds of pornograp
hy from antiquity to stay in print (and on the bookshelves of respected homes) while living authors like Whitman were censored and even prosecuted criminally for far less offensive material. Such “classic” writers as Rabelais, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Chaucer, and Shakespeare were in every gentleman’s library, but not the “new bad books” such as “Swinburne’s and Oscar Wilde’s poems, & Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass.’ ” “Are they handy for the average young man or Miss to get at? Perhaps not. Are those others? Yes, many of them.”

  At this point, the humorist fully unmasked himself: “Now I think I can show, by a few extracts, that in matters of coarseness, obscenity, & power to excite salacious passions, Walt Whitman’s book is refined & colorless & impotent, contrasted with that other & more widely read batch of literature.” “In ‘Leaves of Grass,’ ” he went on, “the following passage has horrified Mr. Oliver Stevens by its coarseness.” Among the lines that the district attorney had singled out as obscene, Twain must have been thinking of the following two, given the scatological Rabelais passage he contrasts them with: “I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart, / Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.” What followed instead in his letter were two lines of ellipses and a bracketed statement supposedly from the Evening Post editor saying, “We are obliged to omit it.—ED. Post.” “How pale and delicate it is,” Twain continued, perhaps echoing Whitman’s use of “delicate,” “when you put it alongside this passage from Rabelais.” Throughout, he makes it clear which passages from these classical works he is citing, and his next example, from The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, is also ostensibly censored by the Post editor, but it is ranker than anything found in Whitman. The letter goes from example to example drawn from a variety of classics, introducing salacious passages, but always pretending to have the prim editor bleep them out, to conclude that there is not “an educated young fellow of nineteen, in the United States,” who has not read them.