Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  39 Europe on Only Dollars a Day

  Twain went abroad with his family in June 1891 to save money, because with his dwindling income he could no longer afford the high cost of maintaining the Hartford house. Yet he ended up taking nothing less than the grand tour of the best Swiss, French, and German hotels, spas, and operas—paying couriers, waiters, porters, private teachers for his daughters, and other agents, according to the ritual of the now wealthy Americans (his “tribe” as he called them in a series of travel letters reminiscent of A Tramp Abroad) traveling abroad in Europe. Passengers on the Quaker City back in 1867 had been charged twelve hundred dollars apiece and were advised to carry an extra five hundred in gold. Now it was 1891. Twain, of course, was paying only for one-way tickets to Europe, not the luxury rates of the Quaker City, but the comparison gives us some idea of what he was spending; indeed, getting to Europe was probably the largest part of the whole expense. The United States had returned to the gold standard thirteen years earlier. As a result, its currency exchanges with western Europe remained stable throughout the time the Clemens family lived abroad. Yet the exchange rate, which was one dollar to five French or Swiss francs in the 1890s, wasn’t the reason Europe was cheap for Mark Twain.

  Europe was not cheap for the average American, who in the nineteenth century rarely went abroad anyway, but only for rich Americans who could afford to purchase nontradable goods and services, those that couldn’t be sold in the United States, such as spas with medicinal waters and tickets to Wagnerian operas in Bayreuth, just outside Nuremberg. The cost of staying for weeks in a luxurious European hotel was significantly less than maintaining the Hartford house. Moreover, considering the heavy flow of European immigrants to the United States in the 1890s, it is not surprising that the people who performed all the menial tasks for guests of the hotels the Clemens family frequented worked for considerably less than their American counterparts. It is no wonder that Aix-le-Bains was the first place Sam and Livy went, leaving their three daughters, the recently widowed Sue Crane, and their Hartford maid, Katy Leary, in Geneva. In the 1890s Swiss and nearby French spas were a particularly good deal for the wealthy American.

  After an initial three days in Paris, they arrived in Geneva on June 18, and by the 29th were immersed in the medicinal baths at Aix-le-Bains. They remained there almost to the end of July. “What I came here for . . . ,” he wrote in the New York Sun, in the first of six widely syndicated letters that paid him a thousand dollars each, “was the baths.” He spoke of his right arm, disabled with rheumatism. “There are a great many curative baths on the continent, and some are good for one disease but bad for another.” Such medical quackery—or myth—proffered every kind of bath: for the nose, the ears, the throat. The typical course of medicinal treatments consisted of fifteen showers and five tub baths in gothic bathhouses made of white marble masonry, all at around ten dollars per course with occasional tips of ten cents. “Two half-naked men seated me on a pine stool,” he wrote, “and kept a couple of warm-water jets as thick as one’s wrist playing upon me while they kneaded me, stroked me, twisted me, and applied all the other details of the scientific massage to me for seven or eight minutes.”

  Staying in Bavaria during the first two weeks of August to attend a series of Wagnerian operas, Twain reported in his second letter to the Sun that he was both pleased and overwhelmed by the operatic performances and the scene in general. “If your seat is near the center of a row,” he wrote of this “Wagner temple,” “and you enter late you must work your way along a rank of about twenty-five ladies and gentlemen to get it.” The opening performance he and his family witnessed was Parsifal, whose first act (of three) lasted two hours, something he enjoyed, he wrote, “in spite of the singing.” Parsifal is loosely based on the epic poem about an Arthurian knight of the same name, and such a drama no doubt perversely appealed to the recent author of A Connecticut Yankee. The next day, Clemens was outside the opera house as the second intermission for Tannhäuser was coming to an end, when the beautiful daughter-in-law of the German emperor appeared on the balcony, stopping the returning audience “dead in its tracks.” The princess quickly hid herself. Twain observed that she had a kind face and was “without airs; she is known to be full of common human sympathies.” Yet in the anti-royal voice of Hank Morgan he added, “This kind is the most harmful of all, for wherever they go they reconcile people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress.”1

  In late September, leaving his family in Lausanne, he embarked alone on a ten-day boat trip that began on Lake Bourget. He went by canal to the Rhone River, which took him ultimately down to Arles, where he took a train back to Lausanne. While still on the boat trip, he wrote to Livy of “the early dawn on the water—nothing can be finer, as I know by old Mississippi experience.” He witnessed “the most superb sunrise! the most marvelous sunrise! & I saw it all—from the very faintest suspicion of the coming dawn all the way through to the final explosion of glory.”2 The Clemenses spent the winter in Berlin, and by the beginning of 1892 Sam was figuring they would remain in Europe for two or three more years. In March he and Livy went to Menton, France, another spa town on the sea just north of Monte Carlo. They traveled in Italy in April and May and settled in Bad Nauheim, Germany, the following month.

  In June he made the first of almost a dozen trips across the Atlantic while the family remained in Europe. He had left home to save money, but he could see from Europe that he was also losing it through his publishing company, especially from the financial strain put on it by the Library of American Literature volumes. So he traveled back to America to deal with that situation, and he also wanted to check on the typesetter, in which he still owned significant stock, although he decided not to meet with Paige, who had relocated his operation to Chicago. Clemens did go to Chicago, briefly, and wrote Orion from his hotel that the family was “in the clouds” because the physicians in Bad Nauheim had informed them, somewhat paradoxically, that Livy did not have heart disease, “only weakness of the heart-muscles.” That alone, he told his brother, “was worth going to Europe to find out.”3 Not only Livy but Jean and especially Susy as well would suffer medical problems during their stay in Europe. Subject to “many savage moods,” as her sister Clara would later remember, Susy could not eat or sleep regularly and lost weight, while taking singing lessons that would ultimately send her to another health spa to rest her strained voice.4

  Twain rejoined his family in Bad Nauheim, and it was in this town just north of Frankfurt that he conceived and first began work on The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson. From there on August 7 in a letter updating his brother-in-law on Livy’s health, he spoke of opposing her wish to spend the winter in Florence. After finally losing that argument and agreeing to find a villa there, he told Charlie Langdon, using an image from Pudd’nhead Wilson, that he was humbled, like his fictional creation Chambers, “& have gone up in the gallery with the niggers.”5 He also began “Tom Sawyer Abroad,” a novelette that even his family thought a product of an imagination straining to succeed at any cost. “My family (tough people to please),” he told Fred Hall, who was now running Webster & Company and also acting as Twain’s literary agent, “like it first-rate, but they say it is for boys and girls. They won’t allow it to go into a grown-folks’ magazine.” But he had a number of irons in the fire, including the planned dramatization of The American Claimant with the celebrated producer Augustin Daly. He continued to make progress on Pudd’nhead Wilson, thinking he was writing a story called “Those Extraordinary Twins,” which, for a time, he was. He called it “the howling farce,” which he had laid aside “to ferment while I wrote ‘Tom Sawyer Abroad.’ ” By now he could sense that the story about the twins was something new with him: “It is clear out of the common order—it is a fresh idea—I don’t think it resembles anything in literature.”6

  In September 1892 the Clemens tribe moved to the villa Twain had rented in Florence for around three hundred dollars a month. Yet the journey the
re took longer than expected. They had to stop over in Lucerne for ten days because of Livy’s illness. They had stayed in Bad Nauheim “a little too long,” he told Susan Crane, who had by then returned to the United States. They feared erysipelas, but one wonders whether Mrs. Clemens wasn’t a typically unhealthy middle-aged woman in the nineteenth century who was in need of exercise and a better diet. Her doctors in Lucerne didn’t think she was seriously ill.7 Once in Florence her health seemed to return, and Twain very much enjoyed the isolation of the Villa Viviani, located in the village of Settignano, three miles outside of Florence.

  “We have been in the house several days,” he told Sue Crane on September 30, “& certainly it is a beautiful place,—particularly at this moment, when the skies are a deep leaden color, the domes of Florence dim in the drizzling rain, & occasional perpendicular coils of lightning quivering intensely in the black sky about Galileo’s Tower.” Those conspicuous towers and domes down in the city, he thought, looked the same as in the time of Boccaccio or Dante. Yet the Italian language was an obstacle, but one that Jean, now twelve, was quickly overcoming. The house, built only two centuries before (not at all old in the Old World), had a gigantic hall that dwarfed everything in it, including Clara’s piano. But it made “an eloquent theatre” in which the Clemens girls performed operas and plays. Clara was anxious to move—and did soon move—to Berlin by herself to continue her music lessons, but could not just yet because of a recent outbreak of cholera in that city. (“She watches the [cholera] reports anxiously,” Susy told Louise Brownell, “and hates to be lingering away from that indispensable Mr. Moritz Moszkowski!” her piano teacher. Later, she would marry a musician, though not this one, today known for his encore piano pieces at the end of concerts; he would die in poverty in Paris in 1925.) So the family was all together for a time, huddling around the mother hen who was ordered by a new doctor to “be in bed by 10 at the latest, & take her breakfast in bed & lie there an hour afterward. . . . She is to drink sparingly . . . & keep an account of it for the doctor to cipher on. She is to eat nothing, & very little of that.” “She will prosper, now,” Twain told his sister-in-law, almost prayerfully. All they lacked, he concluded, was a cat. And they soon found one of those, too.8

  “Some day,” the distracted author told Hall, “I hope to get to work on the Extraordinary Twins again, but I can’t guess how much of a book it will make.” On November 10, he thanked Chatto and Windus for a book on the new science of fingerprinting he had asked them to send (“I shall devour it”), signing his letter with two thumbprints. But as usual, he was working on more than one book at once and had earlier asked his English publishers to send him an encyclopedia article on Joan of Arc. This subject would for a time be dearest to his heart, at least partly because he identified the young martyr with his daughter Susy. By the beginning of December, he had sold “Tom Sawyer Abroad” to Mary Elizabeth Mapes, longtime editor of St. Nicholas Magazine, where it would be butchered by her editors as it was serialized in 1893–94. He had needed the money somewhat desperately and hadn’t asked many questions about its possible censorship, especially since it took him only three weeks to write and netted four thousand dollars. And by the end of 1892 Twain had made the shift from the “Extraordinary Twins” to “Pudd’nhead.” “I begin, to-day,” he told Hall, “to entirely re-cast and re-write the first two-thirds—new plan, with two minor characters made very prominent, one major character dropped out, and the Twins subordinated to a minor but not insignificant place.” He added: “The minor character will now become the chiefest, and I will name the story after him—‘Pudd’nhead Wilson.’ ”9

  This was the first of two major turning points in the composition of Pudd’nhead Wilson because Twain’s reading of Francis Galton’s Finger Prints (1892) gave him a fresh and scientific way of tying the plot together. A year after Pudd’nhead’s triumphant book publication in 1894 (“the best work you’ve ever done,” one admirer told him, “except the Prince & the Pauper”), he had already forgotten the source’s name but not the book itself, “which interested me too much & which I used with so much freedom. . . . Mr. Chatto sent it to me when I was writing Pudd’nhead Wilson; & that accident changed the whole plot & plan of my book.”10 Actually, it took more than the fingerprinting book to solve Twain’s plot problems. The manuscript, which he ultimately reduced to around fifty-eight thousand words, still contained more than eighty thousand words. It probably retained too much of the original farce of “The Extraordinary Twins.” For although he sent Hall a “finished” manuscript, or typescript, in February 1893, he later retrieved it to continue work on it that spring when he returned to America. The second turning point would occur that summer when he was in the throes of his first real panic over his financial condition since going abroad.11

  “Get me out of business!” he pleaded with Hall on June 2, fearing that the Mount Morris Bank would foreclose any day on its thirty-thousanddollar loan. Yet almost two months later, on July 30, he declared, “This time ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’ is a success!” Indeed, the work had diverted him from his misery over finances. “I am almost sorry it is finished,” he told Hall six weeks later when he was ready to ship back the scissorsand-paste typescript. “It was good entertainment to work at it, and kept my mind away from things.” It was during this revision that he separated the conjoined twins. His wife may have objected to his writing facetiously about the physically handicapped. (One wonders how he got the harelip past her in Huckleberry Finn.) Twain had most recently gotten the idea of using “Siamese twins” after seeing an exhibit of the Tocci brothers, Giovanni and Giacomo. He had long been fascinated with such “twinship” ever since seeing the team of Chang and Eng in Barnum’s circus. In 1869 he had written “The Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins,” in which he speculated on the dilemma of two different personalities, one a drinker and the other a teetotaler, in the same body.12

  As was the case with so many of Mark Twain’s plots, this one evolved out of aesthetic doodling in which Siamese twins were finally separated and Wilson found a way to shed his title of “pudd’nhead” long after he had admitted that he would have killed his half of a barking dog. Yet Sam Clemens would continue to try to shake off, or at least diminish, the humorist’s side of his literary reputation. He was soon hoping his book on Joan of Arc would help, but ironically Pudd’nhead had not only reinforced his reputation as a humorist but also planted the seeds of his ultimate reputation as one of the world’s great humanists. As late as 1934 J. Henry Harper, however, one of the founders of Harper’s, which would publish Twain’s complete works along with such important secondary works as Paine’s 1912 biography and Clara’s My Father, Mark Twain (1931), included Joan of Arc as one of the works that shot the humorist out from under the humanist. Huckleberry Finn was included in Harper’s list of the best, but not Pudd’nhead Wilson. It would soon be forgotten until the South of so many Dawson’s Landings woke up to the Civil Rights Movement in the middle of the twentieth century.13

  40 A Dream Sold Down the River

  The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson has given modern critics extensive grounds for consternation and disagreement (even the use of the word “tragedy” in the title is challenged on both textual and thematic grounds). In the wake of the civil rights movement and affirmative action, its plot is inevitably troubling to today’s reader. It is clearly informed by Twain’s own state of conflicted feelings about blacks and race in the 1890s, a point of view that was absorbed into his pessimism about the so-called “damned human race.” In its final evolution out of a farce later labeled a “comedy” in the American Publishing Company’s book publication of the novel in 1894, it is the story not of Pudd’nhead Wilson but of the slave Roxana, or Roxy, and her son Valet de Chambre, known as Chambers—whom she switches with the master’s son, born Thomas à Becket Driscoll, causing each to be called by the other’s name for most of the novel. “To all intents and purposes,” Twain writes in chapter 2 of his book, “Roxy was as white as any
body, but the one-sixteenth of her which was black out-voted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro”—and a slave. Her son, conceived with a white man, was accordingly thirty-one thirty-seconds white—and a “nigger.” This term—what is today referred to in most college classrooms and throughout the media as the “N-word”—was then synonymous with “slave.” Either word signified an unchangeable state of inferiority that underscored and encapsulated the tragedy of race relations, one that in Twain’s view was nearly as bad for whites as it was for blacks. Both are the helpless products of “training,” a concept he had broached in A Connecticut Yankee. Yet Roxy and her son are doubly bound by this deterministic law, for they are “black” by birth and shaped by an environment controlled by whites.

  Twain may have been initially inspired to write his tale about the bogus distinctions of the color line as early as 1890, when Louisiana passed a law requiring separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads. Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black, challenged the law in court and lost. He appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued its notorious “separate but equal” ruling in 1896.1 In this era, because of his mixed race, Plessy was designated as an “octoroon” in the idiosyncratic terminology of hypodescent, a classification system then practiced in Latin America and in the southern United States, particularly in Louisiana. A mixed-race person with predominantly “white” ancestry was called, depending on how many black grandparents he or she had, a quadroon, octoroon, quintroon, or hexadecaroon. Mark Twain did not invoke that terminology for Roxy, or anyone else, but as a quintroon, she would be assigned by “fiction of law and custom” to the race of her one black ancestor—that is, her socially inferior one. The decade of the 1890s was a time in which whites, increasingly anxious about the behavior of blacks brought up outside the institution of slavery, often turned to racial violence. Between 1889 and 1923 nearly twenty-five hundred “blacks,” no matter how many parts white or black they may have been, were lynched. At the turn of the century, as previously noted, Twain himself thought to publish an article, even a book, documenting and denouncing the shameful practice.