Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Instead, it was Theodore Dreiser, another writer of the American vernacular, who spoke out in “Nigger Jeff” (originally named, interestingly, “Nigger Jim”), his finest short story, published in 1901, the year in which Twain wrote “The United States of Lyncherdom.” As a newspaper reporter in 1893, Dreiser had witnessed a lynching outside St. Louis and never forgotten it. Earlier, his best friend, Arthur Henry, had published Nicholas Blood, Candidate (1890), a story that anticipated the genre of novels sympathizing with the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, the most popular of which would be Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman in 1905. In Henry’s story, a physically imposing black man alarms the city of Memphis when he runs unsuccessfully for mayor. Henry, progressive on most political questions of his day, was probably taking commercial advantage of the Negrophobia in America with a racist novel that he later tried to forget, perhaps was even ashamed of, since he never told Dreiser of its existence. “Does anybody doubt that America has among her possibilities a Reign of Terror?” Henry asked rhetorically in his epigraph. “We have 8,000,000 children of the night among us, and, like the shadows of a dark and stormy night, they spread swiftly. . . . Let us look at them.”2

  Such was the racial climate in the United States when Twain took one of his last looks back at the town that had once hosted the relatively harmless boyhood adventures of Tom Sawyer. When Pudd’nhead Wilson first appeared as a serial in Century between December 1893 and June 1894, the word “tragedy” did not appear in the title. The story was taken generally by the white audience of that day as a humorous parable about the ways not only of southern blacks and whites in the antebellum era (the action of the novel begins in 1830) but also, by implication, of blacks in the 1890s, who were generally considered harmless but also potentially dangerous to a society that had once enslaved their antecedents. “Tragedy” was added to the title only when the American Publishing Company issued it. Frank Bliss paid extra to include the revised text of “The Extraordinary Twins,” which was called a “comedy” to set it off from the “tragedy” of Pudd’nhead Wilson. To include it, Twain apparently had to remove whatever Livy found offensive, though at that point, given his impending financial disaster, she may have compromised her principles. The novel was copyrighted in her name to protect his royalties in case of bankruptcy. When this strategy was first broached, he told Hall, his literary agent and still head of the struggling Webster & Company: “What I am mainly hoping for, is to save my royalties . . . for if they go I am a beggar.”3

  Yet Pudd’nhead Wilson is indeed a tragedy in the sense that the fragile possibility of racial equality is destroyed by the “fiction of law and custom.”4 In Huckleberry Finn, Twain had tricked the typical (white) post-Emancipation reader into freely cheering for the successful escape of a fugitive slave, whom he otherwise would have cared little about. Neither the reading audience of the 1880s nor its successors in the twentieth century any longer had an emotional investment in “the nigger Jim” as property. Hence, they were enabled, after the fact, to do the “right thing.” In Pudd’nhead Wilson Twain also turns the tables by making the victims of American racism almost entirely white. It was only in the illustrations for the 1899 “deluxe” edition of the novel, when America’s Negrophobia reached its zenith, that Roxy was absurdly depicted as having black skin. The 1894 illustrations were faithful to Twain’s descriptions of a woman (with brown hair) only one-sixteenth black. Roxy is Twain’s most feminine literary character and one of his few memorable women after Aunt Rachel in “A True Story.” In that 1874 story, there is no question of the color of Aunt Rachel’s skin; she is clearly a black victim of white injustice.

  Roxy is doubly a victim because she is mostly white, though not white enough. The “one-drop” theory about black or Indian blood would continue well into the twentieth century (in fact, it still operates in some legal ways, such as tribal decisions about who is or is not a genuine member, and in several extralegal ways, having only disappeared legally in 1967), and it helped to reintroduce Twain’s classic to the reading public in the 1960s, when the word “miscegenation” was still a pejorative. In the interim, the novel was nearly forgotten or dismissed as a farce, not only about foreigners who happened to be twins (even conjoined ones in “The Extraordinary Twins”) but also about blacks ignorant enough to name a son after a bathroom attendant (“Valet de Chambre”). “It’s de nigger in you” is the refrain heard from the lips of not only Roxy but Twain as well, who explores the curse of American inferiority based on race. “Why were niggers and whites made?” Tom asks himself once he has been told that he is a black and potentially a slave. Twain is sympathetic and even empathetic toward his black characters, just as he was toward blacks he knew both as a boy and as an adult. He describes Roxy as “the heir of two centuries of unatoned insult and outrage” and the peals of black laughter as available only to angels “and the bruised and broken black slave.” At the same time, however, he is paternalistic and even condescending, evincing the prejudice of a reformed southerner, or “Yankee” who generally thought that all the slave ever needed was emancipation.5

  Briefly, the story is putatively about another Yankee, David Wilson, who makes the mistake of facetiously calling for the death of his half of an invisible barking dog and is thus branded a “pudd’nhead” by the clueless and smug little town of Dawson’s Landing, another stand-in for Hannibal. In revisiting Hannibal in his fiction this time, Twain sold it down the river to below St. Louis, where the slave’s burden was harsher. As the result of Wilson’s “blunder,” this Orion-like protagonist is prevented from succeeding as a lawyer and spends the next twenty or so years as a surveyor.

  He also takes up as a hobby the new science of fingerprinting, and in the course of this activity over the years collects the prints of everyone in Dawson’s Landing. This includes those of Thomas à Beckett Driscoll and Valet de Chambre, born on the same day. The first is the wholly white child of Percy Driscoll and his wife, while the second is the slightly black offspring of Roxy and one of the leading white residents of the town, Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, who soon dies. Both children are placed in the care of the Driscolls’ slave Roxy, who, after the birth of Valet de Chambre, “was up and around the same day,” while Mrs. Percy Driscoll dies within a week of giving birth. One day before his own untimely death, Percy Driscoll explodes over the petty thievery of his household slaves and threatens to sell the guilty ones down the river. Fearful that her own son will suffer such a fate someday, Roxanna, as already noted, switches her baby son with the master’s fully white child. The result is that her son grows up “white” and is known as “Tom,” while the real heir grows up as “black” and a slave, and is known as “Chambers.” Both become the ward and property, respectively, of Percy’s brother, Judge York Driscoll, another leading citizen of the town who lives by the Code Duello of a Virginia gentleman. Roxy, who was freed on the death of her master, Percy Driscoll, remains in the Driscoll household to rear both children.

  Reminiscent of the title character in “The Story of the Bad Little Boy,” the nominal “Tom,” we learn in chapter 4, was, following the switch, “a bad baby, from the very beginning of his usurpation.” It would have been easy in the 1890s to read this plot as the parable of the freed slave who squanders his freedom, causing mayhem in the white community—much in the way Nicholas Blood does in Arthur Henry’s racist potboiler. Yet the false Tom, it becomes clear in Twain’s narrative, does not fail because he is “black” but because of the master-slave culture that brings him to condemn if not despise all blacks, including his own mother, Roxy. The false heir grows up and goes to Yale for two years, long enough to learn to tipple and gamble. Twain was perhaps subconsciously extending a possible slight to Yale, which had in 1888 awarded the “humorist” an honorary masters degree. It also reflects the consensus among artists of that era who lacked university training that such academic privilege made fops of the American breed. “Tom’s eastern polish,” we read in chapter 5, “was not popular among the y
oung people [of Dawson’s Landing]. They could have endured it, perhaps, if Tom had stopped there; but he wore gloves, and that they couldn’t stand, and wouldn’t; so he was mainly without society.”

  “Tom’s” gambling indebtedness eventually drives him to become a thief who loots the houses of Dawson’s Landing. Roxy, who, after Tom and Chambers reach adulthood, goes “chambermaiding” on the Mississippi, returns to ask “Tom” for financial support. When he contemptuously refuses her, she pulls out her hidden ace and informs him that he is not “white” but in fact her son, and she can prove it. In fact, she can’t, but he is successfully bluffed and allows her to share the profits of his thefts. She becomes an accomplice in crime merely out of economic desperation; otherwise, Roxy believes wholly in the proud heritage of her white blood.

  Indeed, in switching her baby to avoid his being sold down the river, she is fortified by the example of whites. “ ‘Tain’t no sin—white folks has done it,” she exclaims in chapter 3, recalling fragments of the biblical tale of King Solomon. She emulates whites by celebrating the false heritage of the F.F.V., the same way that Twain’s own father had. Even though she tells her son that slaves “ain’t got no fambly name,” she goes on to tell him in chapter 9: “You ain’t got no ’casion to be shame’ o yo’ father, I kin tell you. He was de highest quality in dis whole town—Ole Virginny stock, Fust Famblies, he was.” It wasn’t only the Old World of Europe, where Twain was writing this novel, that reminded him of the pomposity of fancy names and titles. He had expressed his ridicule for aristocratic airs in A Connecticut Yankee and before that in his parody of the Duke and King’s claims of nobility in Huck Finn. Yet in The American Claimant and Pudd’nhead Wilson he shows how these claims tempt even the democratically minded American, who was otherwise brought up to disapprove of unearned privilege and the pomp that accompanied it.

  The town’s reception of the Twins, especially in the farce, is Twain’s burlesque of the American fascination with nobility. The Twins are the issue of old Florentine families. The fact that they are also physically joined may underscore Twain’s ridicule of unearned social rank. In what Twain called in 1894 “The Suppressed Farce,” the Twins become the houseguests of Aunt Patsy Cooper and her daughter Rowena. Mother and daughter agree that the names of Luigi and Angelo Capello are “perfectly beautiful! Not like Jones and Robinson and those horrible names.” When the “double-headed human creature with four arms, one body, and a single pair of legs” arrives, the town is overwhelmed with pride.6 Eventually “Tom,” jealous of the attention the visitors are receiving, insults the Twins and is kicked by one of them. In the court case that follows, it is impossible to determine which twin committed the assault, and the case is dismissed.

  Here we have the nexus between the two stories that allowed Twain to perform his literary Caesarean and complete Pudd’nhead Wilson. It is clear in this story that the kicking is done by Luigi, who is subsequently forced into a duel with Judge Driscoll, after “Tom” attempts to substitute legal retribution for the Code Duello. As a result, the judge disinherits him (not for the first time) and, to save his family honor, challenges Luigi to a duel that is inconclusive. Driscoll is just as proud of his “first fambly” status as Roxy is of her (secret) connection to it. When he discovers after the unsuccessful duel that Luigi had killed a man (however justly), he refuses to duel with someone who is not a “gentleman” and plans to shoot him in the back. But before he can act, the judge is killed by “Tom,” who is ultimately apprehended and convicted of murder. Instead of being hanged, however, he reverts to slave status and is sold down the river.

  At the time Twain was writing his book, he was increasingly worried about his financial future and bracing himself for the probable bankruptcy of his publishing company. These fears washed over into his story. When Percy Driscoll dies, his estate has gone into bankruptcy and is able to pay only sixty cents on the dollar of its debts. (Twain initially planned in his company’s bankruptcy to pay only fifty cents on the dollar before Livy insisted on full payment.) Now with the addition of a slave who has not been included as property in the original bankruptcy proceedings, the creditors return. Technically, the guilt for the murder, as the governor determines when he pardons “Tom” and allows the creditors to sell him down the river, lies not with the murderer but with the “erroneous inventory.” “Everybody saw,” Twain concludes his novel, “that there was reason in this. . . . If ‘Tom’ were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him . . . but to shut up a valuable slave for life—that was quite another matter.”

  Mark Twain ends his story by returning to his title character. By winning the Twins’ case, Pudd’nhead Wilson reinvents himself and becomes the mayor of Dawson’s Landing. Yet the true protagonist of the story, Roxy, who also had been sold down the river temporarily by her own son, is left out in the cold. David Wilson’s “long fight against hard luck and prejudice was ended,” but Roxy’s battle against a much more virulent and insidious prejudice is allowed to continue. Twain abandons his heroine the way Nathaniel Hawthorne had abandoned Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, after allowing that the sin of adultery with Arthur Dimmesdale had “had a consecration of its own.” Twain had begun his story the way Hawthorne had—intending to celebrate his heroine. At the outset he describes Roxana as a white woman whose one-sixteenth of black blood “did not show. She was of majestic form and stature, her attitudes were imposing and statuesque, and her gestures and movements distinguished by a noble and stately grace. Her complexion was very fair, with the rosy glow of vigorous health in the cheeks, her face was full of character and expression, her eyes were brown and liquid.” If Hawthorne, in the forest reunion of Hester and Arthur, wrote the most erotic scene in nineteenth-century American literature, Twain is a close second in this most sexual description. While he stresses his heroine’s nobility and stateliness, we still get a clear impression of Roxy’s potential sensuality.7

  Yet everything for Roxy goes downhill from this ecstatic picture in chapter 2. Even before the description, her black dialect threatens to bring her down to size. Her strong sense of survival, certainly as noble as that of any white person in the novel she might emulate, is treated condescendingly. “Was she bad?” the narrator asks. “Was she worse than the general run of her race? No.” Twain blames her behavior on the “unfair show” of their environment. Yet even her son “Tom” fails, and he—unlike Huck’s Jim—is white on the “outside.” Roxy’s “whiteness” doesn’t save her, either. It can’t, of course, in the world out of which comes Plessy vs. Ferguson. The only “black” it can’t enslave is the “white” one called Chambers; training does that. (“The poor fellow could not endure the terrors of the white man’s parlor, and felt at home and at peace nowhere but in the kitchen.”)8 Just as Hawthorne couldn’t let his heroine go unpunished in antebellum America (Dreiser did do that fifty years later in Sister Carrie, with the result that his own publisher condemned the book), Twain couldn’t leave Roxy be. At the close of Pudd’nhead Wilson she is a scorned woman. He could no more save her than he could dare to publish “The United States of Lyncherdom” in 1901. His novel would have been condemned—if not for its sympathy for blacks, then certainly for its unrealistic conclusion in the emerging Jim Crow society of the South—and the influence of that policy in the North, where his novel had far more readers.

  41 Family Matters

  On January 18, 1893, from Florence, Clemens wrote his old friend Mary Fairbanks, whose husband had recently gone through the bankruptcy he increasingly feared for himself, that he had ground out “mighty stacks of manuscript in these 3½ months, & some day I mean to publish some of it.” These stacks probably included “Tom Sawyer Abroad” and “The £1,000,000 Bank-note,” but the book he was working on at the moment was neither of these. “That is private,” he told her, “& not for print, it’s written for love & not for lucre, & to entertain the family with, around the lamp by the fire.” The work he sought to cloak in mystery and would publ
ish anonymously was Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), which he intended as a companion piece to The Prince and the Pauper and which Howells imagined would be as popular as Ben Hur (1880). The use of the word “personal” in the title was a double entendre since Susy, almost twenty-one, was something of a martyr herself, having been taken away from her friends at Bryn Mawr. She experienced “sudden sieges of complete homesickness,” she admitted to her former Bryn Mawr classmate Louise Brownell. Telling Mrs. Fairbanks that Clara was thriving in Berlin at the Willard School for American young women, Twain added, “I’m afraid Susy isn’t, for she is with us away out here on the hills overlooking Florence.” Though only two or three actual miles from the Tuscan jewel on the Arno, where Dante was first dazzled by his Beatrice, it seemed like “forty in fact, as I realize when I have to drive down there twice a month.” Susy usually accompanied him to Florence, and their slow return, an uphill journey, usually concluded after dark.1

  Over the previous twenty-one months, Susy had discovered that her darling Louise was conventionally religious, something Mark Twain’s eldest daughter was not, and that Louise had mixed her religious idealism with Victorian notions of romance. (They both adored Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh.) Susy also learned that her friend had acquired other emotionally close girlfriends; this provoked slight fits of jealousy. When Louise finally revealed her attraction for a Bryn Mawr classmate named Elizabeth, Susy fired back that she had understood “that side of you from the first, the very first. What has surprised me is that having it you could feel any love for, or drawing toward me, . . . I have wondered all along if you have seen me as I am.” Then she went on to make what was tantamount to an admission of lesbianism. “Your love for Elizabeth is largely based upon spiritual reverence. . . . I love you first and last because—I love you, and the honoring and reverencing are quite secondary and subordinate; so much so that if I neither revered nor honored you, I should still love you.”