“After that,” Twain continues, evoking and eliding a scene in the Heptameron of Margaret, Queen of Navarre in which a girl is ravished in front of her mother, “Whitman is delicate enough, isn’t he?” He concludes with “The Venial Sin” in Balzac’s Droll Stories. In a final parodic spin on the mores of the day, Twain writes that he has mislaid his English copy of it and so quotes from the French translation, certainly a more appropriate conduit in light of his recent, if private, trashing of that culture. Translated to English, it would have read: “The hermit undressed himself immediately, and the small angel did so as quickly. When each was naked, Rustique dropped to his knees, and put the poor innocent in the same position. There with hands joined, he cast his eyes on_____.” He concludes this mock letter to the editor by saying that he would not complain if the editor censored his quotations from the classics: “Yes, you know that indecent literature is indecent literature; & that the effects produced by it are exactly the same, whether the writing was done yesterday or a thousand centuries ago; & that these effects are the same, whether the writer’s intent was evil or innocent.” This fascinating tribute by one major writer of the nineteenth century to another breaks off with the phrase “Whitman’s noble work,” obviously the beginning of another paragraph. This hanging fragment may be evidence of Mark Twain’s acknowledgment of a literary equal, but, like all those other honest but risky statements about art and morality left behind in unpublished nineteenth-century manuscripts, it would be lost to Twain’s world and only published posthumously in ours.5
The following month, Twain paid final homage to the man who had greeted Whitman “at the beginning of a great career” back in 1855. Emerson was fading rapidly in the spring of 1882. He had already been failing mentally by the time of the 1877 Whittier dinner. Twain, Whitman, and Emerson, coincidentally, had all been “banned in Boston,” more or less, at junctures during their careers. Emerson had become persona non grata at Harvard for a generation following his “Divinity School Address” there in 1838; Twain had been denounced by proper Bostonians after the Whittier debacle; Whitman’s sixth edition of Leaves of Grass had been censored there. Boston, the literary cradle of America’s rebellion against what Emerson called “the courtly muses of Europe,” was losing its place in the transcendentalist hunt for the ultimate “end” or purpose of nature (even Whitman’s raw nature) as an emblem of God, as Emerson had put it in Nature. It favored the past over the present in literature. Even humor, as the late Bayard Taylor had perceived it, still found its literary apex in James Russell Lowell instead of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain.
In early April, Twain went out to Concord with Howells, who he was still hoping would accompany him on his trip down the Mississippi. There is an indirect reference to this visit in his 1882 notebook, one that puzzled Twain scholars for many years. He wrote, “Emerson & Artemus Ward”—strange bedfellows until we discover in a later notebook entry of late 1906 or early 1907 that it is a reference to Emerson’s befuddlement during one or more of his lectures as he became increasingly plagued with aphasia. Apparently, Twain heard a story about it on the day of his visit to Concord from Emerson’s son Edward, whom he had known since 1872 when the two were passengers on the Batavia sailing home from Liverpool. The two had been brought together as familiar acquaintances after having witnessed a harrowing spectacle at sea in which their ship’s captain rescued of a number of people from a sinking vessel despite a raging storm. In the later notebook he wrote of an incident in which Emerson lost “his scraps & his place” during a late lecture and was allegedly confused by some members of the audience with the literary comedian who had launched Mark Twain’s career.6 Emerson died on April 27, a day before Twain returned to New Orleans for the first time in twenty years.
32 Return to the River and the Lecture Circuit
On April 17, 1882, Mark Twain attended a dinner at the Union League Club in New York City. The next morning, in the company of Osgood and Phelps, he took a train for St. Louis. By April 28 they were in New Orleans, having journeyed down the Mississippi first on the Gold Dust and then on the Charles Morgan. During the trip south, Twain tried to go under a pseudonym so that his fame wouldn’t hamper his ability to draw out the pilots, but he was recognized almost immediately. One of the sailors in the pilothouse quipped to Sam that he had heard a shaggy visitor “use your voice. He is sometimes called Mark Twain.” At Cairo, the Gold Dust nearly ran over a raft. Twain recorded in his diary that he felt “an old-time hunger to be at the wheel and cut [the raft] in two,” but the incident no doubt reminded him of what he had already written about Jim and Huck’s raft almost getting sliced in half by a steamboat in chapter 16 of the novel he had left half finished in Hartford. The trip also strengthened his sense of the landscape when he returned to finish Huckleberry Finn. Going down the river, he noted the changes in its course and other details that would make their way into the later chapters of Life on the Mississippi.1
While on the Charles Morgan, which he had boarded in Vicksburg, he overheard and recorded the conversation of two black laundresses. One of the ex-slaves got nostalgic for the old days as they passed a beautiful plantation near Baton Rouge. The other strongly disagreed, saying “it was mighty rough times on the niggers.” “That’s so,” admitted the first. “I come mighty near being sold down here once; & if I had been I wouldn’t been here now; been the last of me.” The other said that she had actually been sold down the river as far as Mississippi, and that if she had gone “furder down,” she too wouldn’t be there today to remember it. “Occasionally,” Twain concluded, “the big laundress would drop into song & sang all sorts of strange plantation melodies which nobody but one of her race would ever be able to learn.”2 In returning to the South and the Mississippi River, it appears, Twain was also revisiting the questions of race and slavery—indeed, perhaps confronting these issues directly for the first time since writing “A True Story” in 1874.
His old mentor Horace Bixby was in New Orleans to greet him. By this time, the fifty-five-year-old pilot was commander of the Anchor Line steamer City of Baton Rouge.3 Before leaving Hartford, Twain had also made arrangements to meet both George Washington Cable, who still resided in New Orleans, and Joel Chandler Harris, who was coming there from Atlanta, where he wrote for the Constitution. Twain had met Cable in Hartford in 1881, when the author of Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880) vacationed in New England. Before that, Cable had written for the New Orleans Picayune. He had also been a Confederate cavalryman in the Civil War, but he was well on his way to becoming a champion for the civil rights of freed slaves. His books were popular in the North and initially so in the South (except with Creoles), but his political opinions were ultimately denounced in his homeland. In 1884 he would reluctantly decide to relocate to Massachusetts. Harris, on the other hand, was warmly regarded in the South for his Uncle Remus tales. Twain, too, admired the way he captured the black dialect. As Eric Sundquist notes, Harris’s tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox “do not entirely whitewash the Old South but maintain a taut balance between minstrel humor and a subversive critique of slavery and racism.” They encoded, another critic points out, slave themes of the trickster figure.4 Mark Twain would ultimately go beyond both these writers in treating the whole matter of black slavery and the troubled white conscience.
Along with Osgood and Phelps, Twain stayed at New Orleans’s commodious St. Charles Hotel, with its barrooms, restaurants, and Grand Salon—a circular hall with white walls and red carpets, endless mirrors and crystal chandeliers. Cable came right over from his home on Eighth Street, in what is known today as the Garden District, to take the visitors for a daylong tour of the city. Twain kept referring to Cable personally as “Life on the Mississippi,” and later in his book of the same name he called the author of The Grandissimes “the South’s finest literary genius,” in whom it had “found a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history.” On their first afternoon together, the party lunched on d
elicious pompano in the West End on Lake Pontchartrain. Cable took them to a mule race held to raise money for the Southern Art Union. The next day, Saturday, they were guests at Cable’s home. And on the following, Harris arrived from Atlanta. On Monday the trio of authors read from their works in Cable’s study. That is, Twain and Cable read from their works. “Uncle Remus was there,” Twain told Livy, “but was too bashful to read; so the children of the neighborhood flocked in to look at him (& were grievously disappointed to find he was white & young) & I read Remus’ stories & my own stuff to them, & Cable read from the Grandissimes & sketches.”5 The day was topped off with a dinner at the home of Cable’s friend James B. Guthrie, a lawyer and local Shakespearean. The evening was filled with music, song, and story until after midnight. Cable sang some of the dialect songs that he would use during his tour with Sam in 1884–85.6
Twain spent a total of nine days in New Orleans, the city he had haunted as a young pilot and the last place he had seen his brother Henry before his death on the Pennsylvania in 1858. At sunset on Saturday, May 6, Twain and his traveling companions boarded the City of Baton Rouge, captained by his old teacher Bixby. When it reached St. Louis six days later, Osgood temporarily left their river sojourn to attend to business in Chicago. Two days later, May 17, Twain boarded the Gem City and found himself back home in Hannibal. It was a sad homecoming in one sense, and this may be why he recorded none of the particulars of his visit in his letters home about the town that had molded him. “The romance of boating is gone, now,” he confided to his journal. “In Hannibal the steamboatman is no longer a god. The youth don’t talk river slang any more. Their pride is apparently railways.” He also found the South there “sophomoric”—the speech “flowery & gushy.” For some reason, perhaps because of the return to his poor beginnings there, he counted up his current investments. They included more than twenty concerns and totaled $68,950.7 The Paige typesetter accounted for $5,000 of the total.
In visiting the river and in particular Hannibal, he probably realized for the first time how fully his past had vanished. The “Old Times” pieces had come from that vanished past. As a result they are much more romantic and engaging than the later chapters in his Mississippi memories, which are weighted down with postwar realism. Railroad tracks ran rudely along the river in front of Hannibal now, and the village shuddered slightly as trains rumbled by almost every hour or so. The era of the steamboat was almost dead. He had come back to the river not only to turn his Atlantic pieces into a book but also to stimulate memories that had been initially stirred up by writing about the region in both the “Old Times” pieces and Tom Sawyer. Possibly some of the pessimism that invades Huckleberry Finn resulted from that eye-opening return. At New Madrid, on the party’s way north ultimately to Minnesota, he made an entry in his journal about the infamous Darnell-Watson feud, which had already become the basis of the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud in chapter 19 of Huckleberry Finn.8 He noted the way two of the young Darnells were shot in the back. In the novel, Buck Grangerford and his cousin are similarly gunned down. He even recorded how the two feuding families attended the same church services together. He left Hannibal on the Minneapolis after a three-day visit.
Before concluding his tour up the river at St. Paul on May 21 and going home by train two days later, he visited a number of upper-river towns, including Keokuk, where he had lived in 1857. The next day, his boat stopped in Muscatine, Iowa, another family landmark since Orion had edited the Muscatine Journal there between 1853 and 1855 and had printed nine of his younger brother’s earliest travel letters from New York and Philadelphia. He was returning to write a book, Life on the Mississippi, that more than likely he really did not want to write. Like A Tramp Abroad, it would be another tedious exercise of pushing a travel book beyond its natural life in order to satisfy the bulk expected by buyers of subscription books. Back in Hartford, he asked his publisher Osgood to “set a cheap expert to work to collect local histories of Mississippi towns & a lot of other books relating to the river for me.” By the next year, when Life on the Mississippi was issued, he was referring to it as “this wretched God-damned book.”9
In the spring of 1882 Osgood published The Stolen White Elephant, Etc., which features a story originally written in 1878, another of the pieces omitted from A Tramp Abroad, and recycled pieces from Punch, Brothers, Punch! “The Stolen White Elephant” was a rather tedious burlesque of a notorious body-snatching case in New York City that Twain had written while in Munich. It was another way to keep his name before the public, and in this case attention to the book was enhanced by P. T. Barnum’s importing from England an elephant to whom he gave the same name that Twain had used for the pachyderm in his story—“Jumbo.” That summer or fall, Twain invented a complicated history board game (not produced until 1891) that never made him any money.10 He was, however, revisiting the Huckleberry Finn manuscript that he had put away in 1876 after completing some fifteen chapters. Since 1880 he had written four more chapters, the ones that introduce the river frauds known as the Duke and the King and carry the story through Sherburn’s killing of Boggs (chapter 21). He had also written the “Notice,” which would help make up the preliminaries to his greatest work:
Persons attempting to find a Motive in this narrative will be prosecuted;
persons attempting to find a Moral in it will be banished; persons
attempting to find a Plot in it will be shot.
By Order of the Author
Per G. G., Chief of Ordnance
This farcical announcement perfectly reflected his mood during the writing of the other books and stories he managed to produce as he rummaged through his imagination for the true story of Huck and Jim. It was applied to the book in almost a note of exhaustion over the sheer impossibility of finding true humanity or higher meaning in a Darwinian universe. Speculation has it that “G. G.” stands for “General Grant,” whose praises he had recently sung in Chicago in 1879. Grant was a soldier whose earliest of “superstitions,” as he wrote in the memoir Twain would publish in the same year as Huckleberry Finn, “had always been . . . not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished.”11 It was an unrealistic credo that worked only in war, not in the deeper complexities of life. Huck might “go to hell” for Jim, but he could never get him to heaven.
About as close to the saints that Twain ever got was spending the winter of 1884–85 lecturing and entertaining with George Washington Cable, a devout Christian who never traveled on Sundays. On their lecture tour they were publicized as “twins of genius.” Cable, whose literary imagination came right out of the French Quarter of New Orleans and its surrounding plantations and hamlets, was as soaked in the South as Mark Twain. Essentially, both men had been members of or sympathizers with the Confederate army. By the time of their pairing, each had become a “Yankee.” Both now felt keenly a certain irony in their alienation from their southern roots. In a photograph taken at the outset of their lecture tour, the two men stand together in a casual pose that exudes absolute confidence in themselves as writers and performers. Twain stands with his coat open and his right hand in his hip pocket. A watch chain trails off across his vest to his left side. Cable, almost a head shorter than Clemens, is seen leaning slightly into his friend. He is dressed in a long coat fully buttoned with his left hand in his hip pocket. He is bearded, with a moustache trailing down to his collarbone. His neatly combed black hair contrasts with Twain’s ruffled, slightly graying look. There is a slight smile on Cable’s face, but it seems to come from his eyes. Twain, beardless with full moustache, looks as though he has a great deal on his mind.
Their lecture manager was Major James B. Pond, a colorful entrepreneur who in 1875 had purchased Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau in Boston and afterward opened a lecture bureau of his own in New York City. It is not absolutely clear just why Mark Twain returned to the lecture platform. It may have been mainly for the money, for he was feeding a number of investments that now included increasingly f
requent cash infusions to the Paige typesetter. Moreover, he generally wasn’t very fortunate with other investments. In January 1883, for example, he bought more than two hundred shares in a railroad company in Oregon at seventy-five dollars a share. Six months later he sold his two hundred shares—plus another hundred purchased later for four thousand dollars—for a pitiful twelve dollars a share, or a loss of more than fifteen thousand dollars.12
Twain and Cable’s joint program, which opened in New Haven on November 5, 1884, consisted of readings in which (as it was advertised) “the pathos of one will alternate with the humor of the other.”13 At first it was hoped that the tour would include not only Cable but also Howells, Aldrich, and even the shy Harris, but it eventually came down to these two writers, performing at the height of their careers, Clemens approaching his apex while Cable had already crested. Clemens’s primary selections naturally consisted of memorized readings from his forthcoming Huckleberry Finn, which would officially be published in February 1885 at the close of the lecture tour. His material also included excerpts from A Tramp Abroad; his coauthored (with Howells) failure of a play, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist (advertised in at least one program as “Colonel Sellers in a new role”); and older items such as the Jumping Frog story, the Blue-Jay yarn, and occasionally “A True Story.”14 This work would have been in general harmony with the anti-slavery subtheme of Huckleberry Finn since he included in his performance the scene in which Huck decides to “go to hell” and help Jim escape from slavery. Significantly, he presented nothing from his recently published Life on the Mississippi, which had not sold well.
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