Attacking or satirizing a writer of a previous generation was scarcely unprecedented, of course. Swift had assailed Dryden in “A Tale of a Tub” and “The Battle of the Books.” Byron had ridiculed Southey on several occasions. Wordsworth had criticized Pope. And Shelley had found fault with Wordsworth in “Peter Bell The Third” for abandoning the principles of the French Revolution and becoming conservative in his old age as poet laureate. Twain would have read about this last authorial assault in Dowden’s biography of Shelley. Twain’s approval of the French Revolution, as evidenced in A Connecticut Yankee and in his correspondence, would have landed him on Shelley’s side in the pseudonymous “Peter Bell,” in which the preface declares that Peter (i.e., Wordsworth) “changes colors like a chameleon and his coat like a snake.”4
On the American side of the Atlantic, Twain’s old friend and now enemy Bret Harte had once parodied Whittier, something Twain himself had come close to doing in his Whittier birthday dinner speech of 1877. In 1871 Osgood and Company had published a volume of Harte’s poems that contained “Mrs. Judge Jenkins,” billed as “the only genuine sequel” to Whittier’s “Maud Muller,” a sentimental poem about the restrictions on marriage between members of different social classes. Whittier’s theme was actually about the lost dreams of youth, but his plot line set him up for easy ridicule, especially of his conclusion that “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, / the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’ ” Whittier’s poem told of a judge who becomes infatuated with an illiterate milkmaid, Maud Muller, but comes to his senses and marries “a wife of richest dower, / Who lived for fashion, as he for power.” In Harte’s clever rejoinder, the judge comes back down the lane to Maud instead of getting on with those of his class “whose verbs and nouns do more agree.” After sketching the judge’s subsequent life with Maud’s family, in which her father borrows money, her brother gets intoxicated, and his twin children look too much “like the men who raked the hay,” Harte concludes:
If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, “It might have been,”
More sad are these we daily see:
“It is, but hadn’t ought to be.”
Whittier had been known for his anti-slavery poems before the war, when Sam Clemens still mistrusted such northern ideas. So he may well have subconsciously agreed with Harte, even though he consciously despised him, the way he doubtless agreed with Shelley about Wordsworth.
Cooper’s “offense,” other than writing for his own contemporary audience instead of Twain’s, was that the American Scott had been championed by the academic, literary arbiters of the day, such as Professor Lounsbury (who later edited Whittier). From the mid-1880s onward, efforts to create an American academy of distinguished writers of all kinds led various American journals to poll their readers on who should belong. The Critic in 1884 asked its readers to send in “a list of the names of the forty American authors of the sterner sex whom they deem most worthy of a place in a possible American Academy.” In the early balloting the top places went to the writers of the previous generation, usually northern, such as Holmes, Lowell, and Whittier (but curiously not Cooper). Howells (fifth) and Bret Harte (eighth), no doubt to Twain’s displeasure, ranked considerably higher up than he did at fourteenth. As such polls proliferated, Twain—the humorist—was usually not even among the top ten. Thomas Bailey Aldrich (seventh), George Washington Cable (twelfth), and Henry James (thirteenth) likewise outranked Twain. The other vernacular writer who is today ranked as a major American artist, Walt Whitman, came in twentieth out of a field of forty.5
Twain had made yet another round-trip crossing of the Atlantic, between July and August, when he joined his family, now located at Étretat, a spa on the coast of Normandy. He had placed Joan with Harper’s, though it was first to be serialized in Harper’s Monthly (anonymously so that readers wouldn’t expect humor), but he was still working on Cooper. “I have been sitting here all day,” he told his wife from New York shortly before he sailed back to Europe, “grinding away at those old Cooper articles. I was far from satisfied with them; but now I have cut them down to a single article . . . & I think I am quite well satisfied with it; well enough, in fact, to offer it for publication.”6
Cooper could now fend for himself while Twain turned his attention to Joan of Arc, who was at this point becoming another of his literary personages—indeed, a kind of historical/fictional daughter whose courage nearly obsessed him. Yet his real daughter Susy, the one whose blood connections and emotional neediness had given him an almost tactile connection with the Maid of Orléans, was at the same time in utter distress. After waiting three years for her first reunion with Louise Brownell, who that summer came to Oxford to pursue postgraduate studies, Susy was dreadfully disappointed, even beside herself, after Louise evidently made it clear that she did not want to continue their relationship on the same emotional terms. Livy had given Susy permission to travel to England despite her fragile emotional state, but Louise chose not to repay the visit by coming to France. “I don’t know how to write you,” Susy told her lost friend. “There seems to be nothing to say, nothing in all the world.”
Evidently Louise was about to return to America without seeing Susy again. “I would not, could not dream this would happen and that I should lose you now now at the moment of having you again, after all these years of waiting. It is impossible. I cannot believe it. It cannot be true.” “Why didn’t you, why couldn’t you come to Étretat?” Susy pleaded. “Oh I have lost you and can do nothing.” In September her father tried to console his friend Howells on the death of his father. “Sympathy is for the living,” he told him, “& sincerely you have mine.”7 He closed with his usual refrain about the dead being better off than the living. Although he couldn’t know it, he was soon to suffer his own death in the family, for, in her brooding condition and fragile physical state, Susy had less than two years to live.
44 Back Home and Overland
In the fall of 1894 the Clemens family sublet a house from a friend in Paris on the Right Bank for $250 a month—in what is today the seventh arrondissement. Clemens later described the place at 169 rue de l’Université as “large, rambling, quaint, charmingly furnished and decorated, built upon no particular plan, delightfully uncertain and full of surprises.” It reminded Livy of their Hartford house, which she now longed to reoccupy after more than three years of living abroad. On their way from the Normandy coast, however, they had to stop a week in Rouen because Susy, perhaps in a delicate state over her frustration with Louise, came down with a serious case of bronchitis. Rouen was also the place of St. Joan’s trial and execution in 1431. In the same letter to Rogers in which he reported that Susy’s fever had risen to 104 degrees, he spoke of the ancient city as having little of note remaining about his Joan. “Even the spot where she was burned is not as definitely located as one would expect it to be,” he wrote, adding, “But there is a new statue of her—and the worthiest one that has been made yet.”1 He would now get back to his book.
Yet he was distracted again that December when the Paige Compositor went down for the last time. It had failed a crucial test at the Chicago Times-Herald. As Rogers later told Albert Bigelow Paine, it was too much like a human being and not enough like a machine. There was nothing left but to break the calamitous news to Twain in Paris. “I seemed to be entirely expecting your letter,” he told Rogers, “and also prepared and resigned; but Lord, it shows how little we know ourselves and how easily we can deceive ourselves. It hit me like a thunderclap.”2 The long night of hoping was over, and Twain now knew that he would not get any help from the typesetter in repaying his company’s debts. There was some financial compensation when the Mergenthaler people bought up the rights to Paige’s invention for $20,000, but Twain no doubt got very little of that. The irrepressible Paige was last seen applying for a patent on a pneumatic tube.
Instead of returning to the Hartford house, Clemens and his family would have to rent it. “I ha
ve got to pay the creditors of CL Webster & Co a heavy sum before the year closes,” he told Frank Whitmore, the Hartford businessman who had been handling Twain’s affairs in Hartford while he had been abroad. “I want repairs on the house reduced at once to $15 a month, even if the roof fall in. . . . We’ve got to rent that house, or sell it or burn it.” He wisely crossed out the last clause, but he was feeling desperate. Empty, it cost $200 a month to maintain, not counting taxes and insurance. One of the very few expenses he couldn’t cut was Orion’s stipend. “My brother will have to have his $50 a month again [it had been briefly cut in half]—that can’t be helped. He has nothing else to live on.” He even asked Whitmore to take a 50 percent cut in pay, now that there was no typesetter interest in Hartford to worry about. He calculated that he could live on $13,000 a year if he remained in Paris or moved to Vienna. Four thousand of that, he told Rogers, came out of the “rags” of Livy’s estate. He was still realizing $1,500 a year from the American Publishing Company royalties, and Chatto and Windus provided another $2,000. That meant he would have to earn another $5,000 or $6,000 just to “keep the tribe alive.”3 Where would the money for the Webster debts come from?
Twain returned to the States again for a month in March 1895 to arrange for the Harpers’ publication of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (which began its anonymous serialization the next month) and to discuss a plan for a uniform edition of his works—every writer’s dream in the nineteenth century (such editions of Emerson and the Schoolroom poets were already available). It was an emotion-filled trip for him, for he was finally letting go of his Joan and also making preparations for plans to ease himself out of personal debt that now amounted to around $100,000. Since digging himself out entailed the rent of the Hartford house, he went there to inspect it. Katy Leary had supervised the undraping of the furniture and its general preparation for leasing.
When he got off the train at Hartford, he told Livy, he didn’t even want to go near the house. “But as soon as I entered, . . . I was seized with a furious desire to have us all in this house again & right away, & never go outside the grounds any more forever—certainly never again to Europe.” It almost took his breath away, he continued. “Katy had every rug & picture and ornament & chair exactly where they had always belonged, the place was bewitchingly bright & splendid & homelike & natural, & it seemed as if I had burst awake out of a hellish dream, & had never been away, & that you would come drifting down out of those dainty upper regions with the little children tagging after you.” The painful truth was still not clear to him: they could never go home again to Hartford.
The house was in every way a monument to the woman he loved. “You did it all,” he told her,“& it speaks of you & praises you eloquently & unceasingly.”4 Although he thought that with Pudd’nhead Wilson he had abandoned the practice of dedications in his books, he decided nonetheless to dedicate Joan of Arc to Livy, “tendered on our wedding anniversary [in 1896] in grateful recognition of her twenty-five years of valued service as my literary adviser and editor / 1870–1895.” It was the last novel he would publish during his lifetime. He thought at times it was his best, but posterity has not agreed. Twain followed the life of this saint (canonized in 1920) as accurately as he knew how, given the fact that he had been reared within an anti-Catholic ideology.
What he conceived as a labor of love turned out to be one of infatuation, for he had temporarily found somebody outside of his immediate family who had no equal and “no blemish,” as he made clear at the close of the essay he appended to his French chronicle. Otherwise, the chronicle of Joan in Twain’s hands is lacking in nuance and genuine drama, apart from the actual history of his subject during France’s war with England. Only on the brutality and senselessness of war did the future author of “The War Prayer” appear to hesitate. After a battle in which everyone pays homage to this military leader who had the directness of Grant, Joan, in Twain’s version, is seen to weep for the mothers of the slain enemies. Later on in the story, Joan is asked whether God is on the side of the French and hates the English. Her answer evades the question by suggesting that God had allowed the English to dominate the French during the Hundred Years’ War in order to chastise France for its sins. Mark Twain’s unconditional love for Joan comes through most dramatically when he describes the torture of her existence during her trial and execution.
It seems as if Twain was otherwise afraid to tamper much with the facts of this future saint, whose existence he had supposedly first learned about as a boy in Hannibal, when a leaf from a book describing Joan’s mistreatment in Rouen supposedly, by his later account, flew in front of him.5 Moreover, the entire exercise must have struck him as almost sacrosanct, for this book, though publicly dedicated to Livy, was secretly inspired by his own daughter’s suffering—her continued unhappiness and depression, which she barely concealed behind the blank countenance we see in her pictures taken about this time.
By the time he was back in Paris in April, Twain had decided that he would embark on an international lecture tour in order to pay off his debts. His friend Sir Henry Stanley, whom he had known since 1867 and who had since made a great success as a public lecturer, encouraged and advised him. He hated lecturing and had sworn after the Cable tour that he would never do it again. He did not enjoy, as he would tell his nephew Sam Moffett in a newspaper interview that summer, “the hard travel and broken rest inseparable from lecturing,” and he certainly would not have embarked on such a scheme at this late turn in his life if he could have avoided it. “I could have supported myself comfortably by writing,” he said, “but writing is too slow for the demands that I have to meet; therefore I have begun to lecture my way around the world.”6
When Sam Clemens finally returned to the United States with his family in May 1895, he had crossed the Atlantic fifteen times in the previous four years—on average, nearly once every four months. Yet in spite of his age and current health problems (he suffered from both gout and a severe case of carbuncles that kept him bedridden for forty days in June and July), he came home only to immediately leave it again for a lecture tour that would take him even farther away from home than before. The family spent almost all its time in Elmira before the tour kicked off in Cleveland on July 15. Before that, he was forced to get up from a sickbed to make an appearance in court in New York City when one of his creditors, a printing concern that had made a great deal of money from Webster & Company, heard that he was back in the United States. Twain blamed his own lawyers for allowing him to be so humiliated, but the scare put him in constant fear that his lecture receipts would be seized. Rogers eventually calmed these financial waters sufficiently so that Twain could concentrate on developing lectures, or readings, for his tour.
There were actually two tours, the domestic and the international. Before sailing for Australia to begin his international circuit, arranged through Robert S. Smythe of that country, he decided to lecture his way across North America. As the thermometer was already hitting triple digits that summer, he followed a northern route across the Great Lakes and into Minnesota and Montana on his way to the state of Washington and finally into British Columbia, where he would deliver his final overland lectures in Vancouver and Victoria. These lectures were arranged through Major James B. Pond, who had handled the Cable tour ten years earlier. For his services, Pond received a quarter of the lecture receipts. Twain also hoped to give a series of lectures in San Francisco, which he hadn’t visited for twenty-seven years, but he was disappointed to learn that the city would be largely empty of potential audiences in August, and so he did not go there. Pond’s wife went along. Twain was accompanied by his wife and daughter Clara. The other two daughters did not want to go, Susy claiming that she preferred to continue her singing lessons and Jean not wanting to miss enrolling in her mother’s alma mater, Elmira College. The girls—even though Susy was now legally an adult at twenty-three, she was regarded as a dependent just like Jean, who was almost fifteen—stayed with their Aunt Sue
in Elmira, planning to rejoin their parents and sister in London one year later at the end of the tour. Whatever their reasons, Twain could not have afforded at this point to pay travel expenses around the world for his entire family. He had initially decided to take only Livy, because he thought the sea voyage would be good for her health. Clara, who actually did want to go on the tour, was included on the excuse that Livy would not be taking a maid.7
The Cleveland lecture was a disaster. Seated behind him on stage at the Stillman Music Hall were five hundred unsupervised boys. “I got started magnificently,” he told Rogers, “but inside of half an hour the scuffling boys had the audience’s maddened attention . . . so I skipped a third of my program and quit.” To make matters worse, he was preceded by “a concert of amateurs” whose family and friends “kept encoring them.” Never again, he told Rogers: “There ain’t going to be any more concerts at my lectures.” Pond thought the lecturer looked “badly fatigued,” and indeed he was barely out of his sickbed.8 He had at least twenty more performances to look forward to before he sailed from Victoria in August. His course zigzagged along the Canadian border, going as far north as Winnipeg and as far south as Portland, Oregon. From Ohio they crossed Lake Erie to the Detroit River, which took them out on Lake St. Clair and up the St. Clair River to Lake Huron. From here they went from Michigan on Lake Superior to Duluth, Minnesota, where Twain went directly from the ship to the lecture hall on July 22. Immediately after the lecture, he and Pond boarded a train for Minneapolis to give another lecture. By the beginning of August, the party crossed the Rockies by a train that took nearly the entire day to climb eight thousand feet.
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