Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Now about the book,—we would like to have you get us up one. We can handle it we think, to the advantage of both of us…We think we see clearly that the book would sell; a humorous work—that is to say, a work humorously inclined we believe in…The first thing, then, is will you make a book?”3

  For material, Bliss suggested Mark Twain’s “Cal. letters, revamped & worked over, & all other matter you can command, connected with your Quaker City trip, including all letters written &c., on that trip—or their contents.”4 As for terms, Bliss cited his arrangement with the current star of the American Publishing Company’s list, A. D. Richardson, whose Beyond the Mississippi had appeared that year: a royalty of 4 percent of his book’s sale price, instead of the publisher’s alternative deal, an outright purchase.

  Clemens was elated, but still in suspense about the terms Bliss would offer. He asked his family to send him any clippings of his newspaper articles that reached them. He’d not made copies of his shipboard letters, and many of these were stacked in the offices of the Alta California in San Francisco, awaiting publication. On January 9 he wrote Bliss again, a letter now lost but accessible in part through Bliss’s reply to it:

  In regard to what you write about your book, &c., I would say to you that we will make liberal terms with you for it, in some shape most satisfactory to you…[Y]ou get your letters & overhaul them & be getting the matter in shape. We will manage to get together soon…Are you coming to N.Y. again soon? If so perhaps I can meet you there. I think we can make a success of your work & make it pay you well. Please reply to this & let me know that…I can in some manner rely upon a book from you in the future.5

  While he waited for this reply, Clemens wrote late at night in the rooms he shared with Stewart, smoking and singing and whistling as he worked, torturing up memory. He had plenty else to keep him busy and bankrolled: his newspaper commitments, and whatever speaking engagements he could round up. On January 11, at the annual banquet of the Washington Newspaper Correspondents’ Club, a quick-fingered reporter recorded his toast and—in brackets—the audience’s riotous response to it, as well as Mark Twain’s mannerisms as he delivered it: a rare verbal snapshot of him working a crowd. The toast was “Woman: The Pride of the Professions, and the Jewel of Ours.”

  Human intelligence cannot estimate what we owe to woman, sir. She sews on our buttons, [laughter,] she mends our clothes, [laughter,]…she bears our children—ours as a general thing….

  Wheresoever you place woman, sir—in whatsoever position or estate—she is an ornament to that place she occupies, and a treasure to the world. [Here Mr. Twain paused, looked inquiringly at his hearers and remarked that the applause should come in at this point. It came in. Mr. Twain resumed his eulogy.] Look at the noble names of history! Look at Cleopatra!—look at Desdemona!—look at Florence Nightingale!—look at Joan of Arc!—look at Lucretia Borgia! [Disapprobation expressed. “Well,” said Mr. Twain, scratching his head doubtfully, “suppose we let Lucretia slide.”]…look at Mother Eve! [Cries of “Oh!” “Oh!”] You need not look at her unless you want to, but, (said Mr. Twain reflectively, after a pause,) Eve was ornamental, sir—particularly before the fashions changed!…look at the Mother of Washington! she raised a boy that could not lie—could not lie—[Applause.] But he never had any chance. [Oh! Oh!] It might have been different with him if he had belonged to a newspaper correspondent’s club. [Laughter, groans, hisses, cries of “put him out.” Mark looked around placidly upon his excited audience and resumed.]

  …Then let us cherish her—let us protect her—let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy—ourselves, if we get a chance. [Laughter.]6

  Among those present was Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the House and a future vice president of the United States. According to Sam, Colfax considered it the best dinner-table speech he had ever heard.

  Among those not present was Senator William Stewart. The friction that would separate them had begun to be discernable—Stewart had threatened Sam with a thrashing—and by January 15, Sam was writing from a new address, “356 C [Street] bet. 4½ & 6th.” The rift had its poignant aspects. Stewart spoke with pride about the fact that Sam began to rough out The Innocents Abroad while sharing quarters with him. “He would work during the day,” Stewart recalled, “and in the evening he would read me what he had written, after which he would stroll out about the city for recreation.”7 Unfortunately, it was usually after midnight when Sam returned, and then the cigar smoking would begin. Not to mention the whistling and singing.

  IMPATIENT FOR a resolution with the American Publishing Company, Sam replied by telegram to Bliss’s last letter, and probably on the same day, January 20, took a train from Washington to New York, where he stayed two days before going on to Hartford. In New York, he sought out Henry Ward Beecher for some negotiating advice, which the worldly preacher was only too happy to give—“Now here—you are one of the talented men of the age—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters of business, I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains; I’ll tell you what to do, & how to do it.”8 Sam arrived in Hartford on January 22, accepting the hospitality of John and Isabella Hooker for three days. (Boarding in that household had its drawbacks—“I hear no swearing here, I see no one chewing tobacco, I have found nobody drunk,” he told his Alta readers.)9 Beecher’s advice apparently had been good: Sam proved a tough and prescient bargainer. He declined Bliss’s offer of a $10,000 purchase, and held out for 5 percent royalty on each book sold—one percentage point higher than the house was paying the established Richardson. In July 1868, he was supposed to deliver a manuscript sufficient for a book of 500 to 600 pages, based on the newspaper letters. The deal made him boastful. “I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, & a good deal of it. I told them so,” he told his mother and sister. As for his promise to find an appointment for Orion, why, “I want just one private talk with Andrew Johnson when I get back to Washington, & then I’ll know what course to pursue.”10

  As happened so often during transformative moments in his life, he thought to get in touch with Will Bowen.

  I have just come down from Hartford, Conn., where I have made a tip-top contract for a 600-page book, & I feel perfectly jolly. It is with the heaviest publishing house in America, & I get the best terms they have ever offered any man save one…It would take a good deal of money to buy out the undersigned now, old boy.11

  In the fourth paragraph, Sam got around to commiserating with his childhood friend on the death of his eldest child, seven-year-old daughter Mattie. A few lines later, his thoughts edged a little closer to the deep dream-trove that as yet eluded his capacity to reopen it: “I have been thinking of schooldays at Dawson’s, & trying to recall the old faces of that ancient time—but I cannot place them very well—they have faded out from my treacherous memory, for the most part, & passed away.”12 Back in Washington, he worked days and nights, shifting from newspaper dispatches to the book manuscript after dark. The pace sapped his stamina, but it may have improved the quality of his prose. Without a handy mountain of published letters in front of him, in all their slangy and vitriolic rawness, he was obliged to compose, rather than simply paraphrase; in the process, he took his writing to another level. Metaphor, clever phrasemaking, and universality replaced the earlier sarcasm and angry invective, and the controlled satirical vision began to emerge that gave The Innocents Abroad the power to resonate far beyond its own time. Yet he knew that memory alone would not sustain him through the thousand-odd manuscript pages required to make a 600-page book. He would need the Alta letters.

  IN STAKING everything on royalty profits from a book that would depend on door-to-door subscription sales to a largely non-“literary” clientele, Samuel Clemens revealed a strong intuitive grasp of his natural readership. The American Publishing Company’s products did not darken the doorways of the Eastern bookstores, whose exalted authors towered over mere “journalists” and “humorists” l
ike Mark Twain. In this fact lay the unique potential of such books to reinvent American literature. Door-to-door subscription sales, after all, were the same method that a quarter-century earlier had broadcast the McGuffey’s Reader around America and created mass literacy among rural children like Sammy Clemens. These children had grown up just in time for the postwar spread of railroads and industry to group them into new urban and suburban centers west of the Alleghenies. This new, literate, middle class viewed reading as a hallmark of gentility, even though it was not altogether certain what “gentility” entailed. In a way similar to Sam Clemens as he cultivated his circle of wised-up pilgrims aboard the Quaker City, these arriviste Americans hungered to learn the rules of the lodge.

  They wanted to know about how to behave and how to speak well. They wanted to know about science and how to cook and how to make money. They wanted to learn about family life and how to deal with the suddenly exalted concept of “childhood.” (Advice books about children, and storybooks, enjoyed a huge renaissance during these years.) They wanted to learn the songs other Americans were singing and what kind of medicine they were taking. They hungered to know about Great Men. (As for Great Women, Queen Victoria pretty much preempted the transatlantic field.) They wanted to know about American adventurers, and how exotic places seemed to American eyes. They wanted to be entertained, inspired, transported, confirmed in their goodness and the goodness of the country. They did not necessarily want to be challenged, or confronted with complexity or erudition. The people who opened their doors to subscription booksellers burdened down with “sample books” for show-and-tell, and order forms, and illustrations and pastedowns and binding samples—these were the Great Emerging American Middlebrow. These were, in effect, the rest of the Quaker City pilgrims.

  IN EARLY February, still in Washington, Sam fell into bed with exhaustion and remained there four or five days. He had moved again, briefly to 356 C Street and then to 76 Indiana Avenue. When he was stronger, he placed himself on a more routinized work schedule, writing in the daytime and sleeping at night. A visiting fellow journalist was fascinated by the wildness of his working scene: the floor littered with torn-up newspapers from which Sam had slashed out his letters, the “chaotic hovel foul with tobacco smoke,”13 Sam himself stripped down to suspenders and pants, swearing and smoking and ripping up newsprint as he paced the floor. By February 21, he had produced drafts of the first ten chapters.

  He could still find time to make mischief for his enemies, and brag about it, especially if he could do it through his influence with the high and mighty. The postmastership in San Francisco retained some appeal for him, and when he found out that another candidate “turned up on the inside track,” he prevailed on Justice Field on the Supreme Court to leave a sickbed and pay a visit to President Johnson: “In just no time at all I knocked that complacent idiot’s kite so high that it never will come down.”14 He canvassed his family for more of his published letters. He groveled a little for Mary Fairbanks about his use of slang in return for clippings of her newspaper correspondence with her husband’s Cleveland Herald. “I see a good many ideas in your letters that I can steal.”15 He pressed Emma Beach for the names of consuls at Gibraltar and Marseilles. “And please tell me the names of the Murillo pictures that delighted you most—& say all you can about them, too. Remember…it is hard to have to write about pictures when I don’t know anything about them.”16 He hit up Mary Fairbanks again for more of her work: “Now please hurry them up—there’s a good mother.”17 The flop-sweat was starting to flow. Accountable for a 600-page book, he had estimated that his own letters would probably make only about 250 pages. That was probably a bit low.

  He had reason to be worried. The temperature out west at the Alta had turned arctic. Its editors had picked up on press reports out of New York that Mark Twain was working on a book on the Holy Land expedition. They telegraphed Sam reminding him that his newspaper letters were their property. Sam’s reply is lost, but the possibility exists that it might have been cross. (“I expect I have made the Alta people mad,” he wrote to Jane and Pamela, “but I don’t care.”)18 On January 21, the Alta published an explicit claim of copyright ownership, using as pretext the uncredited reprinting of a Mark Twain missive by the Sacramento Union.19

  Anxiety consumed him, and not just about copyright. His newspaper deadlines were an insufferable distraction; yet he needed the money. He hinted that he wouldn’t mind an embassy job in a note to Anson Burlingame, the China-America liaison who’d befriended Sam in the Sandwich Islands. He leaned on his family, including Orion, who was still boarding with his mother and sister in St. Louis while Mollie remained stranded in Keokuk, to track down some of his missing letters. (The culprit turned out to be—surprise—Orion, who had wonderfully sent them to his wife instead of to Sam.) He pleaded with Bliss: “If you ever do such a thing as give an author an advance, I wish you would advance me a thousand dollars.”20 Bliss came across with some money.

  THE ALTA standoff escalated. In late February, word trickled back east that the paper had decided to issue its own book of Mark Twain’s letters—clearly a move to preempt Clemens’s reprinting them. Appalled, Sam broke his aloof stance. For the first time, he asked permission of the editors that they let him use the letters himself. The reply arrived two weeks later—an infuriating mishmash of legalistic jargon—in any case, not a “yes.” One option remained. Sam packed a trunk, and on March 11, the cash from Bliss in his pocket, he boarded the side-wheel steamer Henry Chauncey for Panama. He crossed the isthmus and caught the Sacramento for the northbound ocean voyage, arriving in San Francisco on April 2. He checked in to his beloved Occidental Hotel and got down to bargaining with the Alta editors that same day.

  Sam arrived to find his Pacific Slope celebrity still intact—enhanced, even, thanks to his published Quaker City adventures. His movements about town were news-item fodder. Perhaps swelled by the attention, he stopped in at the soignée photographic studio of Bradley & Rulofson at Montgomery and Sacramento and had his portrait made. Even the embattled Alta editors lightened up enough to report that “the genial and jolly humorist” was back in town and planning a series of lectures on the Quaker City tour. He launched his performance, a reheated version of “The Frozen Truth,” before a packed house of 1,600, at a dollar a head, at Platt’s Hall on April 14. To accommodate those who were “repulsed at the door,” he repeated it the following night, and then retailed it around the Bay Area over the next several days, having prevailed on several editors to refrain from printing synopses of the talk and ruining his gate.

  The crowds were good, but the press, which had doted on his Sandwich Islands lectures, ranged from cool to vicious. The Bulletin wished he had said more about Palestine and “less about the bald-headed, spectacled and sedate old pilgrims.”21 The Alta opined that it was not terribly well prepared, save for two bursts of eloquence, one of which was about the ruins of Palestine. The San Rafael Marin County Journal scorched him as “this miserable scribbler, whose letters in the Alta, sickened everyone who read them”; the California Weekly Mercury deplored his “sacrilegious allusions, impotent humor, and malignant distortions of history and the truth.”22 He fared a little better when he returned to Virginia City. Joe Goodman trumpeted him into town with a jolly notice of his speaking dates at the Opera House. Mark Twain revisited Carson City for a pair of talks and then returned to the mountainside town for a few days of renewing old friendships among the Washoe crowd.

  For all the savaging his lectures received from the Western newspapers, it was the tongue-lashings from the Western pulpits that stung Clemens the most. Here was a nice irony: the Wild Humorist had departed the Pacific Slope in 1866 fearful that his wild-and-woolly views and language would prove unacceptable in the genteel East. Yet no Yankee minister—not even Henry Ward Beecher, whose brainchild the Holy Land cruise had been—came close to the excoriations unleashed on him by California clergymen. To some of them, he was “this son of the Devil, Mark Twain!
” as he reported in a bewildered way to Mary Fairbanks—“What did I ever write about the Holy Land that was so peculiarly lacerating?”23 Seated up near the pulpit at a Baptist service one Sunday evening, he was nonplussed to hear the pastor, who did not recognize him, hold up his writings as an example of the sin of ridicule, “the weapon of cowards.” As worshippers who did recognize Mark Twain shot him embarrassed glances, the preacher excoriated “the letters of this person, Mark Twain, who visits the Holy Land and ridicules sacred scenes and things.” The letters were popular “because of his puerile attempts at wit, and miserable puns upon subjects that are dear to every Christian heart.”24 Puns, no less! Was there no bottom to his perfidy?! After the service Clemens introduced himself to the mortified clergyman: “I feel that I deserve everything which you have said about me, and I wish to heartily thank you.”25

  He was delivering a subtly sarcastic message. The hostile reviews, the offended clergy—there were portents here for the prospects of his book, and Clemens, like a politician shoring up his base, was willing to ponder them. The preacher had given him a sense of the limits. A mass reading public was not going to tolerate a book built on self-indulgent retaliations against the pilgrims, certainly not against individually named pilgrims, no matter how cleverly phrased. Nor would it accept a wholesale ridiculing of the sacred. The California reviewers and preachers were carrying out the necessary work of Mary Fairbanks and others to whom Mark Twain turned: the work of alerting him when it was time to turn from nihilism to art.

  ON MAY 5, Sam wrote triumphally to Mary Fairbanks: “The Alta has given me permission to use the printed letters. It is all right, now.”26 He had stood his ground with the editors and, despite their strong copyright claims, he had prevailed on every point of contention: no, to a compromise that would give him a percentage of the Alta’s royalties; and no, to a preface in which he thanked the newspaper for waiving its rights. (He did agree to grant the Alta an acknowledgment.) He notified Elisha Bliss of the good news, and predicted he would return east in mid-June with a completed manuscript. Dug in with his manuscript and newspaper letters at the Occidental, breaking for champagne dinners at the Lick House, he launched into another of the marathon writing binges that would propel him through many of his books.