Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  …I can not and I WILL NOT think about your being away from me this way every year, it is not half living—if in order to sustain our present mode of living you are obliged to do that, then we will change our mode of living—…19

  “AM WRITING a new, tip-top lecture about California & Nevada—been at it all night,” Sam reported to Mary Fairbanks from Erie, Pennsylvania. “Have already tried the new lecture in two villages…made a tip-top success in one, but was floored by fatigue & exhaustion of body & mind & made a dismal failure in the other…”20 The tip-top lecture’s content was the same that had been under his nose all the past summer: anecdotes from Roughing It, at last. This new talk saved his lecture tour. Unfortunately, the one village where it flopped was Fredonia, with his mother, sister, niece, and nephew in the audience. He’d arrived there glassy-eyed with fatigue: “so tired out I came near going to sleep on the platform.”21 The local review had been unsparing: a “rather thin diet for an evening’s entertainment,” decreed the aptly named Fredonia Censor, adding that Mark Twain “does injustice both to himself and to the societies employing him.”22 He retooled the talk en route to Toledo; he pronounced it “perfectly bully, now,”23 the best he’d ever delivered.

  A train ride of eleven sleepless hours brought him to the charred remnants of Chicago, in the wake of the Great Fire of October 8. (“There is literally no Chicago here. I recognize nothing here, that ever I saw before.”)24 Warmed against the frigid Lake Michigan winds by the sealskin coat he’d bought in Buffalo three weeks earlier, he lectured at a hall south of the devastated area on December 18 and 19. He worked from the Roughing It stories and scored hits both times. Then a few dates on the outskirts of the city, during which time he composed a Yuletide epistle to his wife, a seasonal set piece of ornamentation, replete with brooding sentiment. He had Christmas weekend off, and spent it back in Chicago, reworking the Roughing It material one more time. Livy’s reply, written on the last two days of the year, was filled with tender assurances that her loneliness was not a burden. Her thoughts focused on Langdon.

  Oh Youth our baby is so sweet and prettie; you will love the little fellow, this morning I would say to him pet, pet-i-pet pet, the motion of my lips seemed to amuse him very much, he laughed until his little shoulders shook—Oh I do love the child so tenderly, if anything happens to me in the Spring*you must never let him go away from you, keep him always with you, read and study and play with him, and I believe we should be reunited in the other world…25

  MARK TWAIN was in Paris, Illinois, while Livy was penning these words. In this farming village of thirty-three hundred people, 200 miles down the tracks from Chicago and only 225 miles due east of Hannibal, on a drizzly year’send weekend, Mark Twain experienced a pair of epiphanies that broke up more fountains of the deep, and further alerted his imaginative memory to the literature waiting to be released. The first of these occurred at a church service he dropped in on. The little sanctuary and the people in it filled up his consciousness as he sat in his pew, and sent him hurtling back through time. His letter describing it to Livy is a miniature masterpiece of radiant consciousness, worthy of Thomas Wolfe, Edgar Lee Masters, Thornton Wilder, or Carson McCullers in the annals of lost and holy American place.

  It was the West & boyhood brought back again, vividly. It was as if twenty-five years had fallen away from me like a garment & I was a lad of eleven again in my Missouri village church of that ancient time.26

  He evoked the high pulpit with the red plush pillow for the Bible, the stiff pews, the black contribution purses attached to long poles, “the wheezy melodeon in the gallery-front” and the “old maid behind it in severe simplicity of dress,” the choir that raved and roared around its “victim” the hymn, “& pulled & hauled & flayed it.” He noticed “the distinguished visiting minister from the great town a hundred miles away—gray hair pushed up & back in the stern, intellectual Jacksonian way,” indulging his “imperfectly hidden consciousness of being the centre of public gaze & interest.”

  He became a boy again, fidgeting in his pew:

  [T]he three or four old white headed men & women bent forward to listen intently; the deaf man put his hand up to his ear; a deacon’s eye-lids drooped; a young girl near me stole a furtive look at a photograph between the leaves of her hymn-book;…one boy got out a peanut & contemplated it, as if he had an idea of cracking it under cover of some consumptive’s cough…another boy began to catch imaginary flies; the boys in the gallery began to edge together, with evil in their eyes; & the engaged couple in front of me began to whisper & laugh behind a hymn-book, & then straighten up & look steadily at the minister & pinch each other clandestinely…

  The radiance turned harsh for an instant, as a shaft of the future shed its withering light.

  She was a bright, pretty girl of nineteen, & he had his first moustache. These two did nothing but skylark all through the sermon…it was such a pity to think that trouble must come to that poor child, & her face wither, & her back bend, & the gladness go out of her eyes. I harbored not a critical thought against her for her un-churchlike behavior. Lord! It was worship! It was the tribute of overflowing life, & youth, health, ignorance of care—it was the tribute of free, unscarred, unsmitten nature to the good God that gave it!

  The missionary appeal concluded, the sexton & the deacon went around, while the choir wailed, & collected seventy cents for the carrying of glad tidings of great joy to the lost souls of Further India.27

  SAM’S SENSORY absorption in the church built on an encounter of equal suggestiveness the previous evening. His accounting of this one was published, but not for another three years, in the New York Times. It received little notice and he did not collect or reprint it in his lifetime. It wasn’t republished until 1943, in the Twainian, a journal for Mark Twain enthusiasts. It received no scholarly commentary until 1978.28 In 1992, Shelley Fisher Fishkin proposed it, controversially, as a seminal moment in Mark Twain’s construction of Huckleberry Finn’s narrative voice.*

  As he sat in his room at the Paris House Hotel awaiting his dinner, the door opened and a six- or seven-year-old Negro boy entered, bearing the entrée, a prairie chicken. Sam learned his name, William Evans—in the sketch, it became “Jimmy”—and invited him to sit down. The ensuing conversation soon had Sam taking notes (in a nice irony) on the flyleaf of über–white guy Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s New England Tragedies. He worked the notes up into a 1,824-word sketch, of which all but 328 words were dialogue, nearly all of it the small boy’s. Mark Twain titled the piece, “Sociable Jimmy.”

  “Did you have a pleasant Christmas, Jimmy?”

  “No, sah—not zackly. I was kind o’ sick den. But de res’ o’ de people dey had a good time…Dey all got drunk…”

  “…I should think that if you had asked the doctor he might have let you get—get—a little drunk—and—”

  “Oh, no, Sah—I don’ never git drunk—it’s de white folks—dem’s de ones I means…”29

  If first appears that Mark Twain is re-creating the old-fashioned Southwestern “frame” story here, with the educated point-of-view Gentleman eliciting low humor from the comic-stereotype foil. But the cruel conventions of the frame story never play themselves out in “Sociable Jimmy.” (It’s the white folks who abuse liquor and the black child who abstains, but that is an almost incidental point here.) Instead, the young boy, lounging opposite Sam with his legs draped unobsequiously over the arm of his chair, chats on about commonplace things: stray cats and how to get rid of them; the size of the town; the town’s big church with its high steeple and how the steeple blew off in the wind one day and killed a cow; the landlord’s large family and all their nicknames.

  Bill he’s de oldest. And he’s de bes’, too. Dey’s fo’teen in dis fam’ly—all boys an’ gals. Bill he suppo’ts ’em all—an’ he don’ never complain—he’s real good, Bill is. All dem brothers an’ sisters o’ his’n ain’t no ’count—all ceptin’ dat little teeny one dat fetched in dat milk. Dat�
�s Kit, Sah. She ain’t only nine year ole. But she’s de mos’ ladylike one in de whole bilin’. You don’t never see Kit a-rairin’ an’ a chargin’ around’ an’ kickin’ up her heels like de res’ o’ de gals in dis fam’ly does gen’ally. Dat was Nan dat you ahearn a-cuttin’ dem shines on de pi-anah while ago. An’ sometimes ef she don’t rastle dat pi-anah when she gits started!…Dey’s fo’-teen in dis fam’ly ’sides de ole man an’ de ole ’ooman—all brothers an’ sisters. But some of ’em don’t live heah—do’ Bill he suppo’ts ’em—lends ’em money, an’ pays dey debts an’ he’ps ’em along. I tell you Bill he’s real good. Dey all gits drunk—all ’cep Bill. De ole man he gits drunk, too, same as de res’ uv ’em…Dey’s all married—all de fam’ly’s married—cep’ some of de gals. Dare’s fo’teen.30

  “Jimmy” is not the butt of any “frame story” joke. There is no joke. There is only language. It may or may not have been language that directly animated the voice of Huck Finn—the dialects of Negroes and Caucasians had long since cross-pollinated in much of the American interior—but it was indisputably the voice of a child, conveying the sensibilities of a child: a child speaking contentedly of his town and the people in it: his world and its values, to the limits of his understanding. “I think I could swing my legs over the arms of a chair & that boy’s spirit would descend upon me & enter into me,”31 Sam wrote to Livy no more than ten days after sending her the manuscript of “Sociable Jimmy.”

  HE SLOGGED on eastward and homeward: Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, then Baltimore and New York City before arriving at Hartford, exhausted and out of sorts, in January. He wasn’t finished yet: four days later he dragged himself to Scranton, then Jersey City and Paterson, New Jersey, and Troy, New York. A respite of three weeks, and then the final two stops—Danbury, Connecticut, and Amherst, Massachusetts—in what he called “the most detestable lecture campaign that ever was.”32 It certainly must have ranked high among them. Since leaving Paris, he had picked a fight with a Pittsburgh paper that had printed a transcript of his talk, which retaliated by calling him an overestimated clown, a gross fraud, and a mountebank. He had often spoken six nights a week; he’d boarded trains at 3 a.m.; endured constant rainstorms; seethed at the incomprehension of various “woodenheads” and “leatherheads” in the remoter villages. He had begun the tour with a lecture that didn’t work, replaced it with one only a little better, and hacked together a third which he revised at least twice and rememorized each time, working by dim candlelight in railroad cars, yet he still had no reliable success. At Danbury, his penultimate stop, the reviewer remarked not only the failure of the talk, but also the lecturer’s “saddening drawl” that contributed to the tedium; he added that “Mr. Twain is not a beautiful man,” with his “carroty” hair, shambling gait, and only one (apparently) functioning eye.33 Mark Twain’s final appearance, at Amherst College, drew a sneer from the Amherst Record: two hours of nonsense; the audience “had heard enough of him when he was done.”34

  On the other hand, the crowds were generally large to overflowing, and people loved him in the homeward stretch: audiences were reported forced into convulsion, dissolved in almost continuous laughter and applause, held in rapt admiration. The journalists tried to solve the mystery of his mesmeric stage manner by dissecting it as precisely as if he were a creature who had just stepped from a crate packed by Charles Darwin.

  Whenever he paused, placed his left arm akimbo and his right elbow in his left hand and began to gesticulate slowly with his right hand, the next word or words he uttered was the funny point toward which all that he had been saying just before tended…It is impossible to imitate on paper his gestures and manner of speaking.35

  [Mark Twain] very much resembles the pictures that are meant to represent him in his great book, “Innocents Abroad,” except that he don’t wear the check trowsers on the lecture stand that he wore in the holy land [i.e., in the illustrations]…He appears to labor under some embarrassment in not knowing just how to dispose of his arms and hands, but this only heightens the drollery of his manner, and may be merely a “stage trick.”36

  The tour was a financial success. Sam estimated that he had earned between ten and twelve thousand dollars; he used most of it to pay off debts, including the $7,500 that he still owed on the Express deal. He paid the rent on the Hooker house, settled a debt with James Redpath, sent his mother three hundred dollars and supplied several hundred dollars’ worth of household expenses to Livy. Toward the end of his tour, he complained that he scarcely had enough money to return home on.

  THERE WERE other, more intimate satisfactions in the tour’s closing days. The heavily pregnant Livy, who in December had subjected Sam to some pent-up anger over their long separation, turned tender and subtly erotic as she anticipated his homecoming.

  My Youth

  You have seemed so near and dear to me…[Last evening] I could not help going to the tin box when I went to my room it is never very safe for me to go there, however I did not read any of the oldest love letters, only some that were written since we were married…how sweet the memory of all our love life is—often when I get to thinking of you I would like to have a good cry, a happy, thankful cry it would be—but at such times it is hard not to be able to put out my hand and touch you—Last night I had a vivid dream of your return…in my sleep I did all the things that I should have done waking if you had returned to me, put my hand in yours, stroked your hair, did every thing that should make me really conscious of your presence—Youth don’t you think it is very sweet to love as we love?37

  He arrived at what he and Livy had nicknamed “The Nook Barn” a few days before their second wedding anniversary, Friday, February 2. There is no record of what Livy thought of his departure the next day by train for an overnight visit to New York, for a private birthday reception for Horace Greeley. The great Abolitionist and founder of the New York Tribune had turned sixty-one, and was preparing to oppose Ulysses S. Grant in the 1872 presidential election.* Mark Twain found himself in the midst of several hundred influential people milling through the host’s parlors on West 57th Street. They included P. T. Barnum, Bret Harte, Richard Henry Stoddard, and John Hay, with whom he was already on good terms.

  Hay, with his high cheekbones and tight little mustache, was among the most accomplished young men in America. He had served, along with John Nicolay, as one of President Lincoln’s two private secretaries. He was presently an editorial writer for the New York Tribune, but would go on to an outstanding career in diplomacy, helping to create America’s “Open Door” policy toward China, and in letters—authoring, along with Nicolay, a ten-volume biography of Lincoln that has stood as a cornerstone of Lincoln scholarship. Hay was already one of Mark Twain’s most enthusiastic and perceptive reviewers, and would remain so for the rest of the author’s career. A native of the Mississippi river town of Warsaw, Illinois, just north of Hannibal, Hay was a connoisseur of the “Pike County” speech of the region, recognized by writers as the prototypical “Western” dialect. He’d called Mark Twain “the finest living delineator of the true Pike accent” in a January 25 review of the writer’s lecture at Steinway Hall.38

  The Greeley reception was a prototype of the literary soirees that remain among New York’s cultural bequests to the world: apartment rooms abuzz with celebrity-intellectuals and with guests craning their necks to spot them. “One of the most remarkable companies of men and women of letters” ever seen in New York, the World told its readers.39 Charles Wingate wrote a pamphlet commemorating the event and said that Mark Twain, along with Harte and Hay, “formed a trinity of wit such as has rarely been found under one roof.”40 This undoubtedly made happy reading for Mark Twain, who was still far from certain about his status in the East.

  It may have been on this New York visit, or possibly later in February, in the opinion of editors Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith, that Sam visited a famous medium named James Vincent Mansfield and ran a pragmatic experiment by trying to se
e if Mansfield could correctly report how his brother Henry died. He couldn’t.41

  IN ALL, the new year seemed radiant with happy prospects—a new book and a new child foremost among them. The first copies of Roughing It arrived at Nook Barn from the binders at about the same time Sam came home for his three-week hiatus. Distribution was to commence around February 19, and Livy expected to give birth within a month after that. Langdon at sixteen months seemed robust, for a change—“very fat & chubby, & always cheerful & happy-hearted,” Sam reported to Mary Fairbanks.42 Sam awaited his new book’s publication free from the anxieties that had preceded The Innocents Abroad. If any Clemens was afflicted with anxiety this time around, it was Orion in Hartford, who believed that Elisha Bliss had fraudulently cut corners in the production of Roughing It, and was thereby cheating Sam out of his fair share of royalties (what Clemens had tried to define as “half profits”). Orion confronted Bliss and was fired. This set the stage for the first in a long series of showdowns for Mark Twain and Elisha Bliss.

  On March 18, writing from Elmira, Sam Clemens sent William Dean Howells a most jaunty letter, a note of thanks for the gift of Howells’s new novel, Their Wedding Journey, and a mock-explanation for why he could not return the favor: “I would like to send you a copy of my book, but I can’t get a copy myself, yet, because 30,000 people who bought & paid for it have to have preference over the author.”43