“Indeed,” she further revealed, “I have loved once, twice where I did not even respect. You see darling, here is where we differ vitally.” By this time, Susy felt that she had waited long enough for letters that finally satisfied her completely. “The point of all this discourse,” she told Louise, who would marry, bear four children, and earn a Ph.D. in Greek and English from Bryn Mawr in 1897, “is that I am confirmed in my fear that perhaps it would not be safe for me to tell you as much about myself as I should like to. How do I know you mightn’t break off our relations on the spot?” She closed by suggesting that Louise was “rather implacable inflexible puritanic.” Their correspondence continued for another year or more but with an acknowledged difference. “What you say,” Susy told Louise in her next letter, “is true to a certain extent about my leaning more on my love for you than on yours for me.”2
If the idea of his daughter’s homoerotic tendencies ever occurred to him, Sam probably left no record of it. Three days after writing Mrs. Fairbanks, he was consumed by eighteen-year-old Clara’s affliction with Daisy Millerism. Ever since Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1878) had been the reading rage for those wealthy enough to go abroad, these Americans had been especially self-conscious about their European image. And Mark Twain, who had made so much fun of European manners in The Innocents Abroad, now sounded more like Winterbourne’s aunt in James’s novella, who finds the Miller family’s social intimacy with their courier appalling. “From the outspoken frankness with which you tell about excluding yourself with forty officers,” he told Clara, “one is compelled to believe that you did not know any better. . . . The average intelligent American girl who had never crossed the ocean would know better than to do that in America. It would be an offence against propriety there—then what name shall it be called by when done in Berlin?” Speaking for her mother as well, he concluded, “An American girl in Europe cannot offend in the least degree . . . and not get herself talked about.”
Within the year, he would extend this dissertation on the moral purity of Victorian women to his “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” published in the North American Review in 1894 and collected in How to Tell a Story and Other Essays in 1897. It was an attack on Edward Dowden’s 1886 life of Shelley, which had blamed Harriet Shelley, the poet’s first wife, who committed suicide in 1816, for his infidelities. About the same time that Sam Clemens was writing his defense of Harriet, all the time respecting the genius of Shelley as a poet, Susy Clemens was reading Dowden’s biography. While sympathetic toward Harriet’s ordeal with Shelley, who left her—with two children—for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1814, Susy couldn’t help telling Louise: “Shelley I am sure wasn’t quite sane but he is adorable!” Clearly, Susy was losing her desire to return to puritanical America and was becoming acclimatized to the ethereal life of Florence and upper-crust Europe in general. Her father may have sensed this development in his daughter, whom he always sought to protect from the world. As with Joan of Arc, Susy was doubtless in his mind when he wrote his witty defense of Harriet Shelley. One of his reasons for devoting so much time and effort to the twenty-thousand-word essay was that he feared that the biographer’s “version is accepted in the girls’ colleges of America”—colleges like Bryn Mawr, presumably.3
For Twain, the isolation from that or any society at the Villa Viviani otherwise set his imagination free, for it was about this time that he began to write the kind of philosophical fiction that culminated in works like “Which Was the Dream?” and, later, “3,000 Years among the Microbes.” On Susy’s twenty-first birthday, he told his other “Susy,” his sister-in-law Susan Crane: “I dreamed I was born, & grew up, & was a pilot on the Mississippi, & a miner & journalist in Nevada, & a pilgrim on the Quaker City, & had a wife & children & went to live in a Villa in Florence—& this dream goes on & on & on, & sometimes seems so real that I almost believe it is real.”4 It was almost as if he had died and gone to heaven, or at least some extraterrestrial place, after writing Pudd’nhead Wilson. His moorings were somehow loosed after that last fictional return to the river. David Wilson, the latest version of the mysterious stranger who had moved in and out of his fiction ever since “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” had solved a crime using science, a subject Twain would become more intensely interested in, especially evolutionary biology. Fingerprints proved that we could never truly change. By the end of the decade, Wilson would rematerialize in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.”
Twain sailed for America on the Kaiser Wilhelm II on March 22, 1893, his second trip back home since going abroad in the spring of 1891. He got caught up with his old friend Howells, who “was really the same Howells that we used to know,” he told Livy. At the home of Mary Mapes Dodge, he had dinner with Rudyard Kipling and his wife, who were then living in Vermont. Twain first met the author of The Light That Failed in 1889 when Kipling sought him out for an interview in Elmira. The future anti-imperialist had no problem with the imperialistically minded fiction of this up-and-coming literary star. Indeed, Huckleberry Finn may have influenced Kipling’s Kim (1901), a novel Twain read every year, so he wrote in 1906, for the “deep and subtle and fascinating charm of India [that] pervades no other book as it pervades Kim.”5
On his trip he managed to get to Chicago again, this time in the company of Hall, to learn what progress Paige had made in the production of the first fifty typesetting machines and to try (in vain) to modify their financial arrangement. Paige had a knack for always embedding deep in any contract something that worked to his advantage. Only a day or two after his arrival, Twain came down with a severe case of bronchitis that kept him in bed for the next two weeks. Not only did he fail to see Paige, but he also missed the World’s Fair of 1893. The White City, as it was called, was located in Jackson Park on Lake Michigan. It spawned both Chicago’s renaissance in art and architecture and the nation’s first serial killer, who used the Columbian Exposition to attract and snare his twenty-seven or more young female victims.6
Back in New York City by April 26, Twain took to his bed again. “I’ve a mind to stay right here,” he told Orion, meaning until he was scheduled to sail back to Europe May 6. He told his sister Pamela that he had been “very close to pneumonia for a week in Chicago” and that he had suffered it for thirty-five days a year earlier in Berlin. Though he feared he had damaged his right lung, he continued to smoke his pipe and cigars. Twain returned to Europe with a profound sense that because of his illness, he had accomplished nothing. He was struggling to protect his family from impending poverty but feeling helpless to stop its steady march toward them. The family was already leaning on Livy’s letter of credit. “We are at a heavy expense, now,” he told Hall. “We are skimming along like paupers, and a day can embarrass us.” He fretted over “the Mount Morris volcano,” an increasingly impatient New Jersey bank that was Webster & Company’s biggest creditor.7
In June the Clemenses broke up housekeeping in Florence. Susy went to Paris with a chaperone to study singing under the well-known vocal teacher Blanche Marchesi. The rest of the family moved to Munich briefly, Clara joining them upon her graduation from the Willard School. From Munich in July, the family visited the baths at Krankenheil-Tolz in Bavaria, mainly for Livy’s sake, since she wasn’t feeling that well when they departed from their Italian villa. The following month they were back in Munich and headed for other baths in Franzenbad—this time for Susy. Her voice teacher had sent her home, finding her physically unfit for the rigor of singing lessons and in need of rest and strengthening. Marchesi recommended the cure at Franzenbad. “Here in Franzenbad,” Susy told Louise in September, “there seems to be more room than usual for that faithful friend of mine, the ennui.” Unlike Clara, who was up to that time steadfast in her desire to become a pianist, Susy was more reserved or hesitant about her artistic aspirations. “Oh how I hate the tastelessness of things!” she told her Bryn Mawr love. “And how I would rather live in this life and let the half dead condition wait till later!” Life in this ca
se meant Louise. “Oh my beloved I cannot tell you how precious you are to me,” Susy wrote. “I wish that when I see you I could just slip into your room and take you in my arms.”8
In October the family would establish its winter quarters in Paris, presumably so that Susy could resume her voice lessons there. Clara was finished with any lessons or schooling for a while and decided to return to the United States. She and her father sailed on the Spree on August 29, 1893. Upon their arrival in New York, Clara accompanied him on a trip to Hartford and then went to stay with her Aunt Sue in Elmira. Twain spent the winter season in New York City, staying initially at the Lotos Club “for economy’s sake.” But he soon moved in with his old friend and family physician Dr. Clarence C. Rice on 19th Street. Soon thereafter, he established longer-term quarters at the Players, in another “cheap room.” He was back in America, his third visit since leaving it in 1891, to face a looming double crisis, and fortunately for him, he came upon a dark angel, perhaps ultimately suggesting in the deep reaches of his literary imagination the satanic figure of “The Mysterious Stranger” texts. His name was Henry Huttleston Rogers, known to many as the Mephistopheles of high finance.9
42 A Friend at Standard Oil
Henry Rogers was a couple of years younger than Twain, whose writings he had admired for years. Twain’s depictions of small-town life, especially in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, reminded Rogers of his own humble beginnings, from which he had risen to become John D. Rockefeller’s leading financier and vice president at the Standard Oil Company. Worth today’s equivalent of thirty-nine billion dollars, Rogers could have modeled for Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood in The Financier (1912). He was ruthless but human, financially cold-blooded yet artistically sensitive. That combination blended well with the strengths and weaknesses of Mark Twain, the artist and businessman, who was now desperately in trouble. Rogers understood the writer’s reckless nature when it came to making money, especially his madness about the Paige typesetter, in which even Rogers had obligingly invested.
Twain’s return to the United States in the fall of 1893 marked the first of two New York phases in which he hobnobbed with the rich and famous, regularly attending grand dinners and yachting with America’s version of European nobility, robber barons such as Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Twain was famous, and it was in the interests of Rogers and Rockefeller to associate themselves with his popular image in order to balance the monstrous one that Ida Tarbell would soon be constructing in her 1902 series of articles that led to The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904). That book was the harbinger of the kind of muckraking that would be published in the first decade of the twentieth century and would open the way for well-researched fictional attacks not only by Dreiser but also by Upton Sinclair, David Graham Phillips, and other writers, now forgotten. Mark Twain has been accused of both joining the plutocracy that these younger writers opposed and helping to improve the public image of Standard Oil in the press. Some of the biggest threats to American industry in the last part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth were the trusts that Theodore Roosevelt is today remembered for destroying (possibly one of the sources of Twain’s later antagonism for that president). Rogers was a director of thirteen of these trusts and, along with Rockefeller associates John D. Archbold and William Rockefeller, controlled the many companies that made up the monopolistic Standard Oil Company. “We are not in business for our health,” Rogers proudly admitted to a government commission investigating his organization, “but are out for the dollars.”1
This was the man who told Twain when they first truly met in October 1893 (they had briefly been introduced two years earlier on a yacht) to “stop walking the floor” over his financial troubles. “You may have to go to walking again, but don’t begin till I tell you my scheme has failed.” Twain was almost childlike in his relief. “I have got the best & wisest man in the whole Standard Oil group—a multi-millionaire—a good deal interested in looking into the typesetter,” he told his wife. He had also told Rogers about a near-miss debacle at Webster & Company. Only a month earlier, the company had almost gone under but had been saved for the time being. “The billows of hell have been rolling over me,” he told his wife. “It looked for days as if we must go under, for lack of $8,000 to meet notes coming due to-morrow, Monday. I raced up to Hartford & back again. At Hartford I wrote Sue [his sister-in-law Susan Crane, some of whose money was also invested in the machine] telling her I had no shame, for the boat was sinking—send me $5,000 if she possibly could.” But Sue didn’t have the money, and neither did the banks on Wall Street in the first wave of the Panic of 1893. Already, millions were out of work across the country. Moreover, his Hartford acquaintances of many years didn’t seem sympathetic enough either. On his return from Hartford, he went to bed physically and emotionally exhausted. It was at this point that Rogers fully intervened not only with shrewd financial advice but also with money of his own.2
To give the company breathing room, Rogers arranged for his son-in-law, William Evarts Benjamin, to purchase the burdensome Library of American Literature. Then he turned to Paige and the typesetter and eventually whittled down the agreements between the Chicago and Hartford interests to a manageable level for all concerned. “A singularly clear-headed man is Mr. Rogers,” Twain told his wife on December 4. “This appears at every meeting.” If nothing came of Rogers’ managerial wizardry, he thought, only Paige would be to blame. Rogers pursued the inventor like a rat in a cage. “Paige will never sign [the proposed amended contract] unless hunger compels him,” Twain continued. And hunger—or desperation—did bring him around. Indeed, Rogers’ persistent pursuit of the wily inventor began the steady slide to his ultimate demise in 1917 in that potter’s field in Chicago.3 His decline and utter disappearance are emblematized in the fact that not a singe photograph of him has ever been found.
Rogers was not only Twain’s financial savior; he was his frequent companion in society and the sporting playgrounds around New York. It was even remarked that the two men resembled one another. Twain’s letter to his wife of January 4, 1894, throws a sidelight on history now forgotten. Rogers had purchased tickets to watch the “Coffee Cooler”—a Harlem native who became the “Colored Middleweight Champion of the World” that evening—“dress off another prize fighter in great style.” Twain used the term “prize fighter,” but he actually witnessed one of the early “glove contests” in America, what we know today as boxing, with six-ounce gloves and a stated number of rounds of fixed length. This was different from actual prizefighting, which was illegal and which permitted bare knuckles and endless rounds stopped only by a fighter’s being knocked down. John L. Sullivan, the first American recognized as a heavyweight champion of boxing, had participated in the last bare-knuckle championship against Jake Kilrain in 1889 in Mississippi, where the fight lasted seventy-five rounds. “A round consists of only 3 minutes,” he told Livy, describing these glove contests with set rounds as opposed to interludes between knockdowns. “Then the men retire to their corners & sit down & lean their heads back against a post & gasp & pant like fishes. . . . Only one minute is allowed for this; then time is called & they jump up & go fighting again. It is absorbingly interesting.”4
Later that month, Twain went to an exhibition bout involving Gentleman Jim Corbett at Madison Square Garden. Corbett had become the heavyweight champion in Florida three days earlier, defeating Charlie Mitchell. Twain met the champion in his dressing room after the fight, later telling Livy that the architect Stanford White, one of the occupants of the ringside box Rogers had rented, escorted him there. (At a later time, the publisher J. Henry Harper claimed to have introduced Twain to the champion.) Corbett himself did not remember it. Since Twain’s report was written right after the alleged meeting, however, the following interchange with the champ may be reliable. “You have whipped Mitchell, & maybe you will whip [Peter “Black Prince”] Jackson in June—but you are not done, then,” the five-foot, eight-and-a-ha
lf-inch, 150-pound writer teased the six-foot, one-inch, 200-pound boxer, fantasizing over a bout between America’s best writer and America’s best boxer. “He answered so gravely,” Sam told Livy, “that one might easily have thought him to be in earnest—‘No—I am not going to meet you in the ring. It is not fair or right to require it. You might chance to knock me out, by no merit of your own, . . . & then my reputation would be gone & you would have a double one.’ ”5
Following the boxing, Twain danced until four in the morning to a Hungarian band at the Players Club. “I had danced all those people down,” he told his wife, “& was not tired. I was in bed at 5, & asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9.” That afternoon he walked three miles to Rogers’ house and returned at 5:30. This wiry chain-smoker of nearly sixty manifested remarkable stamina. On another evening in the subfreezing January weather, he told Livy, “I did errands in Boston till 11 a.m.; reached N.Y. [by train] at 5:30 pm; left my satchel at the station & walked 17 blocks in the snowstorm to Mr. Rogers.’ ” Following dinner, the two men played billiards until 10:30, “talking typesetter now and then,” after which Twain walked back in the storm to the station to retrieve his satchel and take a cab back to the Players. Rogers more than once observed that his friend never seemed to show physical fatigue.6 It may have been that he was simply walking on air in his anticipation that Rogers would eventually release him from his financial worry. Actually, during this American visit, he suffered frequently from bronchitis and a nagging cough, which Dr. Rice tried to relieve with various remedies.
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 39
