Cable read from his works, including Dr. Sevier, a novel that had been serialized in the Century for the past year and published by Osgood that September. It was set in New Orleans between 1856 and the end of the war. As Arlin Turner, Cable’s ablest biographer, observes, this novel departed from the pattern of Cable’s earlier and more picturesque works by focusing on contemporary problems in the South such as the need for prison reform, better sanitation, and poverty relief for ex-slaves and poor whites. It was not primarily a Creole story; nor did it touch more than lightly on the problem of the civil rights of freedmen, which would soon become Cable’s main political focus. Yet it did contain a passage that enraged the South and effectively kept the Cable-Twain team from ever thinking of taking their lecture tour below the Mason-Dixon line: the admission by one of his characters that the cause of the North in the war had been right. The controversy that ensued came from the Century serialization of the book. That October, the magazine printed a letter from a Southerner saying that while Cable had the right to say what he did, the sentiment was not shared by most of his compatriots. In the November issue, however, Cable, who had considered for many years the consequences of speaking out against his homeland, threw more oil on the fire. He said that regardless of whether the war had been fought over either the right to secede or slavery, the first would have clearly allowed the continued existence of the second and the ultimate ruination of Southern life.15
This publicity got the tour off to a rough start, but it soon became insignificant because they spoke only to northern audiences. And while Cable was reflecting the political turn his fiction was taking, Twain was gradually departing from his role as a humorist (“a position entirely his own,” one of the announcements said) as he drew the essence of his performances from his literary masterpiece. Huckleberry Finn, what Justin Kaplan has rightly called “a fresh-water” Moby-Dick, was not publicly recognized as a masterpiece until Andrew Lang’s essay “The Art of Mark Twain,” published in the Illustrated London News of February 14, 1891 (coincidentally, in the year of Melville’s death and years after MobyDick itself had already been forgotten for more than a generation).16 Yet the moral seriousness of Dr. Sevier and Huckleberry Finn is, historically speaking, more evident in the new direction in which each work would take its author in a general assault on the human (and social) condition.
Overall, though, their lecture programs were short on moral seriousness; they were primarily entertainment that depended in large part on the interaction of these two public personalities, both accomplished veterans of the platform. Together they made more than a hundred appearances in eighty cities, beginning in New England and Canada, moving west to Pittsburgh and through the Midwest, and revisiting several more cities in Canada before concluding in New York. They used no formal introducers. Usually, Cable would appear on stage and announce, “I’m not Mark Twain,” before singing a couple of slave and Creole songs and doing his first reading. Twain would subsequently amble out on stage, looking as if he didn’t know where he was or what he was expected to do. He would then proceed as he had in the old days, only now giving “readings” instead of pretending to lecture. Sometimes the two would come onstage together with Twain in the lead and Cable, noticeably shorter, following like a son behind his father. According to one report, Twain would turn and say, “Lays sun gen’l’men, I intorduce to you, Mr. Caaa-ble.”17
They both had an easy sense of humor that came through not only in their performances but also in newspaper interviews they did together in most towns and cities just prior to or following their performance. These in themselves were a form of ongoing advertising for their readings. On one occasion, when a reporter in St. Louis lamented the poor quality of their images in woodcuts in the magazines, Twain answered that he thought that Cable’s picture flattered him, while his own depiction did not begin to do him justice.18 He did grumble privately to his wife from time to time because Cable neither drank nor smoked and attended church services at least twice a week. He also thought at times that Cable took up more than his half of their two-hour program, but these strains did not extinguish their friendship or mutual respect. More than once he told Livy that Cable was a great man. In a letter of February 3, 1885, from Chicago, he expressed his admiration for Cable’s championship of the freed slaves: “He is a great man; & I believe that if he continues his fight for the negro (& he will,) his greatness will come to be recognized.” Since it was Twain who made the lecture arrangements with Pond, he realized, after paying Pond and Cable, around $17,000 for the entire tour. Cable earned a salary of $450 a week and expenses, whether he lectured or not, as well as an additional $60 when more than two matinees were held a week.19 In all, Cable probably made more than $7,000.
33 Mark Twain and the Phunny Phellows
One of the reasons Mark Twain grumbled during the tour with Cable is that it effectively returned him to his role as a literary comedian and underscored his fame as a “phunny phellow.” He had just written an American masterpiece, but here he was doing theatrical high jinks on stage with a southern novelist and a local colorist. (Although he did not at first quite realize its full literary and historical power, Twain did ultimately consider Huckleberry Finn his best work more often than not.) His performances consisted of readings from his more humorous pieces over the years, but they also included the passage in which Huck decides to “go to hell” for a runaway slave. The novel’s publication coincided with the end of his tour with Cable in February 1885. It may have seemed to him that he was somehow reverting to the status of an Artemus Ward. We remember his second lecture tour in the winter of 1871–72, when he scrambled around for a topic, beginning with “Reminiscences of Some un-Commonplace Characters I Have Chanced to Meet” but quickly turning it into “Artemus Ward, Humorist.” After that failed to entertain his audience, he resorted to selections from Roughing It and finished out the lecture season triumphantly (see chapter 21). Yet even at that time, he was succeeding mainly as a phunny phellow, the author of a work that, when published in 1872, was considered by most reviewers as a “funny book of the journalistic sort.” “You will remember, maybe, how I felt about ‘Roughing It,’ ” he wrote his Buffalo friend David Gray in 1880, “that it would be considered pretty poor stuff, & that therefore I had better not let the press get a chance at it.”1
During the postwar period and into the early twentieth century, the humor of the Old Southwest on which Mark Twain was raised divided into two complementary streams—one a shallow rough-and-tumble brook, the other a deeper and more sedate stream, but both leading to the great sea change in American literature, Realism. The first consisted of the phunny phellows who manipulated language with misspellings and malapropisms to satirize political events of the day (several wrote imaginary interviews with Lincoln, and one even remembered the assassination with little regret). It was mainly newspaper humor later collected into books sold by subscription presses of the same kind that would issue most of Mark Twain’s books. Like Clemens himself, many of these literary comedians began as tramp printers before the war. Their work was first made popular in the newspapers through exchanges of material with other papers and ultimately through syndication.
Twain’s contemporaries in this line shared the same literary godfather: Artemus Ward, whose real name was Charles Farrar Browne. Browne employed a cordon sanitaire required of all humorists because the “better people,” as Walter Blair writes, in both North and South did not as a rule go for native humor.2 Such better people included Sam Clemens’s own wife and children. By the 1890s Mark Twain had emerged as the best of a group of forty or fifty such writers. Perhaps the Oxford honorary degree in 1907 finally freed him from the pack, or allowed him to believe he had established himself as more than a humorist. It is therefore not surprising that he overvalued the honor by subsequently wearing his scarlet gown on inappropriate occasions, such as his second daughter’s wedding.
Curiously, Artemus Ward was, like Twain, also lionized in England before h
is death in 1867. And because of his success many other humorists flourished in the United States right along with Mark Twain in the postwar years. Most assumed fictional names to tell their stories on the lecturer’s stage, in the newspapers, and through collections of their materials in books. There was David Ross Locke, whose “Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby” reminds us of Sam Clemens’s hyperinflated very first nom de guerre: “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins.” Other representative funny men were Charles Henry Smith (“Bill Arp”), Henry Wheeler Shaw (“Josh Billings”), Edgar W. Nye (“Bill Nye”), James M. Bailey (“The Danbury News Man”), and Melville D. Landon (“Eli Perkins”). As time went on, a few dropped the mask and wrote under their own names, including Finley Peter Dunne, Eugene Field, and Walt Whitman’s friend and disciple John Townsend Trowbridge.
The other stream of development led to the rise of the local colorists. Indeed, it was their movement that accounts at least in part for the deepening of Mark Twain’s fiction in which the extravagance and exaggeration of the humorists (e.g., in either The Innocents Abroad or Roughing It) take on the regional and local identity of place (e.g., “Old Times on the Mississippi,” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). After the war, readers were curious about different regions and their cultures, having themselves traveled about the country as soldiers, or having relatives and friends who had. Moreover, many were nostalgic for the seemingly pastoral America before the war—even in the Old South, then defeated and struggling under its devastation, both during and after Reconstruction. The demand for a new American regional literature was met by a number of monthly magazines founded in the decades leading up to or immediately following the war—Harper’s Monthly, Putnam’s Monthly, Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Monthly, and others.
Two writers who were famous before the war—indeed whose writings even helped precipitate it—evolved into local colorists after the war was over. John Greenleaf Whittier, whose anti-slavery poems had fueled the abolitionist movement, published in 1866 “a winter idyll” called Snow-Bound that evoked the harsh New England winters he had witnessed as a child. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mark Twain’s neighbor in Nook Farm, reminisced about growing up in Massachusetts and Connecticut in a series of books culminating in Old Town Folks in 1869.3 A third successful writer, Bret Harte, whose career sprang almost solely from his publication of “The Luck of Roaring Camp” when it appeared in the Overland Monthly in 1868, looked back a couple of decades as he depicted life in the California mines following the Gold Rush of 1849. Similarly, Joel Chandler Harris took his readers back to the slave quarters before the war. Cable, of course, sketched out the lives of the Creoles of Louisiana, and somewhat later, Edward Eggleston wrote about the Hoosiers in Indiana. In a real sense, most of them were defining their regions the way the writers of Down East and the Old Southwest had, but now the pictures were about more than mere eccentricities or oddities of character and language. Exaggeration was replaced by Realism, of which this local color movement was the beginning. It set the stage not only for the nuanced descriptions of life in the works of William Dean Howells and Henry James but also the vernacular narratives of Mark Twain.
Twain must have felt the pull of both currents as he struggled with his public image. He knew well what he owed to the humorist tradition. Without it, he would never have become Mark Twain. Yet he sensed that if he remained a humorist only, or was merely remembered as one, he might be forgotten with the other phunny phellows. He had long realized his difference from the most prominent of them, starting at least as early as his lecture on Artemus Ward. What he himself said, he told Livy back then, “fetched” his audience, while what he quoted from Ward did not. Twain’s humor at its best was not topical; rather, it was full of pathos and profoundly engaged in the horrible or hilarious joke of the human condition. He was in fact saved from the fate of the humorist by the local color movement, which introduced him to literary realism. Yet there would likely never have been either a Mark Twain or the American literary realism movement without the irreverence of the phunny phellows. This fact is nowhere better illustrated than in the very story that helped launch Twain’s national career as a humorist, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” Its irreverence evokes the very heart of comedy, when the compulsive gambler Jim Smiley bets that the clergyman’s wife will die. It ultimately takes a stranger—a mysterious stranger in the larger context of the human condition—to bring down such a fanatically selfish human being, a gambler with a vicious streak that Twain ultimately attributed to the entire human race.
A century after his death, we can see Mark Twain more clearly not only in relation to the humor and realist movements but also in the context of literary naturalism, or determinism. As he wrote book after book, always thinking that he was simply making a living, his era was steadily giving way to the malaise of the end of the century. The American West as the land of freedom and second chances had dissolved into myth by the time of the White City at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the same year when Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the frontier had closed. “The translation of land into capital,” in the words of historian Alan Trachtenberg, “of what once seemed ‘free’ into private wealth,” undercut the agrarian dream and set Americans upon the uncharted waters of the twentieth century.4 It was in this fin de siècle tradition that Twain’s humor took on its seriousness. For even though so many of his novels are set in the antebellum past, he was in fact reflecting the problems of postwar America. Beginning with The Gilded Age, which directly addresses the rampant materialism of many Americans after the war, the greed in his characters grows stronger and stronger until it becomes literally funny. He takes this human folly to Europe in A Tramp Abroad and extends it to our English forebears in The Prince and the Pauper. As we shall see, Mark Twain’s vision from here on out becomes darker and darker until it culminates in “No.44, The Mysterious Stranger,” an account of a journey so deep into the heart of darkness that Mark Twain chose not to publish it.
34 Webster and Paige
During the 1880s two quite different individuals emerged in the life of Mark Twain, and their involvement with him would have dire consequences. It was the decade in which he triumphed with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and failed (critically, at least) with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Indeed, his literary highs and lows during this period are almost perfectly reflected in his fortunes and misfortunes as a businessman and an investor. First, there was Charles Luther Webster, who had married Annie Moffett, Sam’s niece by his sister Pamela, in 1875. He hailed from Dunkirk, New York, thirty miles from Fredonia, where Annie had moved with her mother at the age of eighteen. In the census for 1870, Webster is listed as the son of a retired farmer and his wife, and as a draftsman (he later became a self-taught civil engineer). Then there was James W. Paige, a man made for this American era of rampant advances in technology that turned the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., into one of the government’s busiest agencies. He was a machinist and inventor who lived in Rochester, New York, in the 1870s and moved to Hartford in 1877 at the invitation of the Farnham Type-Setting Company, which had agreed to sponsor the development of his typesetting machine.
Webster, according to his mother-in-law, Pamela Moffett, had a “very nervous temperament” and eventually suffered from a debilitating case of neuralgia. When he was nine years old, he accidentally killed a young girl with a gun.1 He died before the age of forty, in 1891, leaving behind a widow and three children. The inventor Paige designed, built, and tinkered endlessly with what Twain ultimately considered his infernal machine, the Paige Compositor. He also fancied himself as something of a playboy. In 1892, having enjoyed Twain’s lavish financial support for years, Paige was sued by a stage actress for breach of promise for the grand sum of $950,000. The newspapers that carried the story reported his net worth at between $2 and $3 million. His accuser never collected a dime, and Paige, whose personal wealth—like his invention—was mo
stly a chimera, died a pauper in Chicago in 1917, precise age unknown.2 Twain immortalized both men in his letters and autobiography. “I have never hated any creature with a hundred thousandth fraction of the hatred which I bear that human louse, Webster,” he told Orion. He said of Paige in his autobiography that if he had the inventor “in a steel trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.”3
After his marriage to Annie, Webster went into business selling real estate in Fredonia. He also got involved with the Fredonia Watch Company, which turned out to be a fraud. Webster discovered the truth about the company, but not before he personally sold his Uncle Sam some four thousand dollars’ worth of shares. Together they frightened the company into returning most of the money, and Twain then put his nephew in charge of the Kaolatype stock being managed by Slote, Woodman, and Company. Gradually, he became Twain’s full-time business manager, and then junior partner in 1884 with the creation of Charles L. Webster & Company. Twain initially set up this publishing house to issue Huckleberry Finn, thinking he could do a much better job himself than what Osgood had done to sell Life on the Mississippi by subscription. (Osgood, as noted earlier, simply had no experience in the field of subscription publishing, as opposed to the traditional way of selling books through his publisher-owned bookshop.) Following the great commercial success of Huckleberry Finn, the firm published Grant’s Memoirs, another triumph but also the last big strike before a series of eighty-six more books with mediocre to poor sales that were published between 1885 and 1894. (See appendix B.) Failures included the life of Pope Leo XIII in 1887, as well as a number of Civil War memoirs whose sales potential had been overestimated after the Grant volumes, which had earned the general’s widow almost $400,000 in royalties and Twain personally almost $100,000.
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