by Ron Powers
The next moment Livy said, “Ida’s driving too fast down hill!” She followed it with a sort of scream: “Her horse is running away!”38
The lawn people looked on helplessly as the buggy gathered speed down the two hundred-yard descent, bouncing high in the air when it struck a rock or a tree stump. Sam and Theodore Crane ran after the runaway, but it was hopeless. Sam braced himself for another encounter with the death of loved ones.
I ran on & on…saying to myself “I shall see it at the turn of the road; they never can pass that turn alive.” When I came in sight of that turn I saw two wagons there bunched together…I said, “Just so—they are staring petrified at the remains.”39
He was wrong. The carriage had been stopped, the party rescued by a tenant farmer employed by the Cranes, John T. Lewis. Guiding his own two-horse wagon uphill with a load of manure, Lewis had found himself in the path of the onrushing buggy. He’d turned his horses into the path, forming a V-shaped chute with a roadside fence.
Then Lewis sprang to the ground & stood in this V. He gathered his vast strength, &…seized the gray horse’s bit as he plunged by, & fetched him up standing!40
Lewis was about forty-five. Hardworking and honest, a veteran of Gettysburg, a strong Dunkard Baptist, he had indebted himself to the Cranes to the tune of about $700, and his net earnings each year scarcely covered his meals and board. Now, he stood a hero in everyone’s eyes. The Cranes forgave him $400 of his debt, and quietly decided never to collect the balance. Everyone showered him with grateful letters, with banknotes attached. Ida gave him a gold Swiss watch. No one was more transported by the rescue than Sam Clemens. Lewis had performed an act appropriate to the pages of an adventure book that Sammy Clemens had read—or that Mark Twain might write. In fact, Mark Twain did write it, in versions that appeared in Pudd’nhead Wilson and Life on the Mississippi. He formed a friendship with Lewis that lasted until the farmer’s death in 1906.
The incident proved another marker in Samuel Clemens’s “de-Southernization.” A trace of categorical thought toward blacks showed in his letters to Howells and Brown describing the rescue and its aftermath. He reported that when someone asked him whether a watch would be “a wise gift” for the black man, “I said, ‘Yes, the very wisest of all; I know the colored race, & I know that in Lewis’s eyes this fine toy will throw the other more valuable testimonials far away into the shade.’ ”41 But he added, “[&] if any scoffer shall say, ‘Behold this thing is out of character,’ there is an inscription within, which will silence him; for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not the watch the wearer.”
AT MID-OCTOBER, after a failed tour in the West, and more rewrites, Mark Twain admitted that Ah Sin was a lost cause.
Mark Twain and Bret Harte never saw each other again. Harte struggled on against destitution for a while in Washington, writing popular journalism for a pittance and sending money, when he could, to his wife and children back home. Clemens remained actively and permanently vengeful to his former mentor, writing to President Hayes in a futile attempt to block a consular appointment for Harte. When Clemens read about the appointment in a paper, he threw a fit.
“Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler,” he raged to Howells,
a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler,*he is brim full of treachery, & he conceals his Jewish birth†as carefully as if he considered it a disgrace…If he had only been made a home official, I think I could stand it; but to send this nasty creature to puke upon the American name in a foreign land is too much.42
Clemens’s abhorrence had not cooled when Harte died of throat cancer in 1902.
What fueled Samuel Clemens’s out-of-scale hatred of former friends such as Harte, Whitelaw Reid, occasionally Will Bowen, and several figures in the years to come? The answer, of course, died with Clemens—if in fact it was ever available even to him. Yet it may be similar to the loathing that Clemens, the fallen boyhood believer, directed toward the Christian faith: the entrenched bitterness and despair of the jilted lover. Howells saw this. “If he thought you had in any way played him false,” he later remembered, “you were anathema and maranatha forever.” Howells added,
Clemens did not [even] forgive his dead enemies; their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion…he pursued them to the grave; he would like to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay.43
IN THE fall of 1877, Samuel Clemens grandly installed Hartford’s first private telephone in his house, with a line running directly to the Courant. At about this time, a letter from his own closest jilted suitor, Orion, arrived, continuing some correspondence about Orion’s attempts to write fiction.
Sam, I’ve been seized with an idea. Can’t you take my “Kingdom of Sir John Franklin,” use it as a skeleton or as memoranda, expand it (with stories told by the imprisoned crew? &c) into a book, send it out in your name and mine (with some nom de plume if that’s best) (or else in your own name, if you prefer that), give me such part of the profits as you please, and enable me to pay you and the government and my other creditors, and leave me something over?44
Sam of course brushed aside this unworkable idea. “If I write all the books that lie planned in my head, I shall see the middle of the next century,” he told his brother. “But go ahead & write it yourself,” he went on, unable to resist adding the little dig: “—that is, if you can drop other things.”45 He didn’t stop there. Unbeknownst to Orion, Sam had begun a manuscript (never finished) that exploited his brother far beyond Orion’s own innocent imaginings of riding Sam’s coattails: he was writing Orion’s biography. In late March, he confided to Howells, “I have started him at 18, printer’s apprentice, soft & sappy, full of fine intentions & shifting religions & not aware that he is a shining ass…am driving along without plot, plan, or purpose—& enjoying it.”46
ON THE Tuesday evening of December 17, 1877, in a banquet room of the swank Hotel Brunswick in Boston, under the gaze of New England’s most distinguished writers and some founding gods of American literature, Samuel Langhorne Clemens made as shining an ass of himself as at any time over the long course of his life. At least that was how it seemed to him, and Howells, too. This thunderbolt of shame and remorse, traumatic enough to drive him to Europe with his family a few months later, settled into his consciousness, where it joined the incumbent ghosts: Benjamin, Marshall, Henry, Langdon, the burning tramp, the drowned boys of Hannibal.
The occasion was a seventieth-birthday dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier, a silver-bearded Brahmin to the core: protégé of the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison; stalwart patron of the Atlantic; essayist; a founder of the Republican Party; sturdy versifier in rhyming tetrameter, his stanzas marching forward through the parlors and the firesides of the new republic like so many fifers and drummers. Crowning the roster of sixty-odd distinguished celebrants at the U-shaped arrangement of tables were some of Whittier’s fellow archangels: Ralph Waldo Emerson (himself seventy-four now, and slipping toward senility), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes. These great “sweet singers” must have seemed, to Mark Twain, a kind of living frieze: the creators of the American literary tradition that he himself was now revising beyond recognition. What to say, given this suffocating augustness, that would rock the joint?
The evening groaned under its self-importance. The Boston Advertiser later proclaimed the company the most distinguished ever assembled in America in one room. The celebrants dined for hours as course piled upon course: Oysters, a Puree of Tomato Soup, Smelts Panne, Saddles of English Mutton, Squabs en Compote à la Française, Stewed Terrapin, Broiled Partridges on Toast, Canvasback Ducks, Dressed Lettuce, and Desserts of Charlotte Russe, Gelée au Champagne, Gâteaux Variés and Confections, the successive courses washed down with a succession of wines: a Sauterne, a Sherry, a Chablis; then Mumm’s Dry Verzenay or Roederer Imperial champagne with the “removes”; then a claret with the beef; then a Burgundy with the partridges. As the plates were cleared, th
e literary gentlemen scooted their chairs back to give their full literary bellies some room, and the toasts began. Speaker after mustachioed speaker arose, glass lifted high, to deliver unction upon unction. Sometime in the early mists of Wednesday morning, William Dean Howells called on the speaker most eagerly anticipated. His introduction proved a kind of chilling Greek omen. Mark Twain, Howells assured the assemblage, was “a humorist who never makes you blush to have enjoyed his joke; whose generous wit has no meanness in it, whose fun is never at the cost of anything honestly high or good…”47 It was at this moment, perhaps, that Mark Twain began to feel a certain dryness in the throat.
The small, auburn-haired humorist stood up from his chair halfway down one of the long table rows, acknowledged his fellow guests, and drawled out the first sentences of what had seemed, in conception, an inspired counterpoint to all the flowery flattery he’d known would rule the evening’s toasts. His remarks took the form of a “frame” tale as impolite, as Western, as a spur in the flank of a mule. In the tomblike hush that quickly descended on the room (at least he remembered it that way), Mark Twain realized that he had made a horrible miscalculation.
The tale begins with a younger Mark Twain knocking at a miner’s cabin one snowy night in the mining foothills of California. He is received by a barefoot man of fifty, who looks dejected upon hearing the visitor’s “nom de guerre” (Mark Twain). “You’re the fourth—I’m going to move,” the host complains. To Mark Twain’s query, “The fourth what?”, the miner responds, “The fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours.” He names as the others “Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes—consound the lot!”48 In the host’s telling—here the assembled dignitaries may have ceased toying with their after-dinner mints—Emerson was seedy, Holmes a three hundred-pound blubberball, Longfellow built like a prizefighter with cropped hair and a pulverized nose. Once inside the cabin, each man gave out with a few lines of his signature poetry. The miner tried to stop the onslaught—“…says I, ‘Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you’ll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get this grub ready, you’ll do me proud’ ”—but to no avail. The three “littery people” got to drinking, and “swelling” around the cabin, striking attitudes and before long produced a greasy deck of cards and played euchre “at ten cents a corner—on trust.”49 When they spoke, it was always a quotation from each of their more famous poems—Mark Twain’s genuflection to their greatness that perhaps escaped the notice it deserved.
When “Mark Twain” suggests to his host that “these were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were imposters,” the old miner springs the story’s “snapper”: “Ah! impostors, were they? Are you?”50 This was intended as the moment of “reversal” into self-satire: the shift of suspicion from the immortal poets to Mark Twain himself. But by the time he reached it, he sensed horror in the room, and he was speaking (as he recalled it) in a hollow croak. The memory still seared him twenty-eight years later, when he resurrected it for his autobiographical dictations. His reconstruction of the event is fascinating: not for its accuracy, which was almost certainly flawed, but for its employment of his most typical writerly impulse. Here, Mark Twain does what he did with so many of his memories: he improves it, by making a story out it. One can almost sense him being struck by idea after idea for embellishment as he goes, much as in his Christmas Eve letter to Susy in 1875. Self-flagellating as the result may be, his memory is also hilarious—one of the most perfect passages of set-piece comedy he ever wrote. He begins by portraying the faces of the deities seated expectantly at the grand table: Emerson, “supernaturally grave, unsmiling”; Whittier, “his beautiful spirit shining out of his face”; Longfellow, with his “silken white hair and his benignant face”; Dr. Holmes, “flashing smiles and affection” for everyone: “I can see those figures with entire distinctness across this abyss of time.” He describes his arising and launching into his speech. He describes how, some two hundred words in, he realizes that he is committing an act of secular blasphemy. “The expression of interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost…I went on, but with difficulty…always hoping—but with gradually perishing hope—that somebody would laugh, or…at least smile, but nobody did.”51
It gets worse. (And better.) When he pursues the albatross of a joke to its conclusion, the audience and the presiding saints have turned to stone replicas of themselves. He sits down “with a heart which had long ceased to beat,” confronted by “an awful silence, a desolating silence.” Howells tries to whisper out a comforting word, “but couldn’t get beyond a gasp.”52 The next speaker (as he recalls it) is a promising young Wisconsin novelist about to make his first public speech. This fellow arises with “a sort of national expectancy in the air…”53 but in the desolating chill of the moment, the youth can only croak out a few sentences, and then “began to hesitate, and break, and lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile.”54
There exists no newspaper record of a Wisconsin novelist’s meltdown. The Boston Advertiser reported the palpable enjoyment of the three subjects of the burlesque. As for the awful, desolating silence, the city’s Daily Globe remarked on “the most violent bursts of hilarity” that the speech elicited, and the Evening Transcript declared, “there was no mistaking the hearty fun elicited by the droll attitude in which these literary lights were represented.”55 Henry Nash Smith, who assembled these records, stipulates that despite this evidence of a noncrisis, there were clearly “misgivings” about the speech: the Chicago Tribune reported Whittier with an “odd, quizzical pucker to his lips.”56 And by the third or fourth day after the affair, after newspaper transcripts of Mark Twain’s remarks had spread westward from Boston, a backlash in fact set in. Scoldings of “bad taste,” opinions that “he ought to have known better,” and intimations of “high-flavored Nevada delirium tremens” emanated from such publications as the Cincinnati Commercial, the Chicago Tribune, and the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican.
Howells of course was devastated. Despite his championing of the realism and psychological acuity that opened the East to the likes of Mark Twain—or maybe because of it—Howells retained his strong reverence for the old masters. As a fellow Westerner and a chief sponsor of Mark Twain, he also retained a kind of phobia about being unveiled as an “imposter” himself, and booted back to Ohio. He, too, recalled a terrible silence—“weighing many tons to the square inch”57—a silence broken, in his memory, “only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.”58 (Which is just as well, given that this guest probably did not exist.) Howells was afflicted, measleslike, with Mark Twain’s “embellishment” contagion.
SOMEWHAT LESS familiar to followers of Mark Twain than his “awful mistake” is the letter of apology he sent to each of his victims, and the sages’ responses. He pleaded a purity of intent—“I did it as innocently as I ever did anything…But when I perceived what it was that I had done, I…suffered as sharp a mortification as if I had done it with a guilty intent.”59 He admitted that “as to my wife’s distress, it is not to be measured; for she is of finer stuff than I; and yours were sacred names to her. We do not talk about this misfortune—it scorches; so we only think—and think.”60 Holmes and Longfellow wrote gently understanding replies, examples of the civility and forbearance that were natural to the founders of American “polite” literature; qualities that shine all the more brightly against the darker landscape of later times. The letter from Holmes began:
My Dear Mr. Clemens,
I have just read your letter and it grieves me to see that you are seriously troubled about what seems to me a trifling matter. It never occurred to me for a moment to take offence, or to feel wounded by your playful use of my name…
The world owes you too large a debt for the infinite pleasure and amusement you have furnished to
both hemispheres to quarrel with you because your invention has for once led you a little farther than what some would consider the proper limit of its excursions.61
Several days later, Longfellow sent his own gentling message.
Dear Mr. Clemens,
I am a little troubled that you should be so much troubled, about a matter of such slight importance. The newspapers have made all the mischief. A bit of humor at a dinner table is one thing; a report of it in the morning papers is another. One needs the lamp-light, and the scenery. These failing, what was meant in jest, assumes a serious aspect.62
Ellen Emerson, writing chastely not to Sam but to Olivia Clemens on behalf of her father, offered the most cryptic of the responses. Her phrasing suggests the Jamesean ambiguity by which polite Boston could eviscerate with a smile.
Dear Mrs. Clemens,
Today my Father came…and brought with him Mr. Clemens’s letter, so that I read it to the assembled family, and I have come right up stairs to write to you about it. My sister said “Oh let Father write!” but my Mother said “No, don’t wait for him. Go now…”
First let me say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of our minds…But what you will want is to know without any softening [is] how we did feel. We were disappointed. We have liked almost everything we have seen over Mark Twain’s signature…Therefore when we read this speech it was a real disappointment. I said to my brother that it didn’t seem good or funny, and he said, “No it was unfortunate. Still some of those quotations were very good,” and he gave them with relish and my Father laughed, though never having seen a [playing] card in his life, he couldn’t understand [the reference] like his children.63
