by Ron Powers
The warning signs issuing from Kaolatype would have been apparent to any genuine businessman. The fact that it couldn’t do what it was designed to do, for starters. Another involved Dan Slote’s shadowy young German metallurgist, a fellow named Sneider, who was in charge of adapting the contraption to the brass-plate cover-stamping idea. Clemens was eager to witness a demonstration of Sneider’s progress. But as he later wrote Howells, “the self-styled ‘inventor’ had a very ingenious way of keeping me see him apply his invention”:
[T]he first appointment was spoiled by his burning down the man’s shop in which it was to be done, the night before; the second was spoiled by his burning down his own shop the night before. He unquestionably did both of these things.3
(Fire was a motif for Clemens in those days. Flames erupted three times in the Clemens household in early 1881, each combination threatening a different Clemens daughter. A gust from a window sent the flame from an alcohol lamp spreading across the canopy of Clara’s bed one morning; she was saved by Rosina, who entered the room at a lucky moment. A spark escaping through the screen of a fireplace set fire to the lace on the baby Jean’s crib the next day; her nursemaid and Rosina came to her rescue. On the third successive day, a fireplace log broke in half and showered sparks onto the mantel in the “schoolroom” where Susy was practicing piano. Clemens’s personal barber spotted the danger this time and doused the wood with water from a pitcher.)
The apparent arsons forced Sam to confront the possibility that not only Sneider, but Dan Slote himself might be trying to fleece him, and indeed that proved the case. (It turned out that Slote really was a “sinner.”) But instead of walking away from these characters, he moved to enmesh himself deeper in their tentacles. A “handsome” sheaf of sample impressions sent to him by Slote in mid-March spiked his enthusiasm to reckless heights: He’d noticed that a next-door neighbor was beginning an extension to his house, threatening the Clemenses’ view to the east. On the strength of Slote’s blandishment, Clemens strolled over to the work site and bought the land under development, instantly meeting the man’s outlandish price of twelve thousand dollars. Then he and Livy plunged into lavish renovation plans for their own house: library walls and ceiling to be covered with metal leaf designed by Louis C. Tiffany & Co. (for $5,000, replacing Sam’s original notion to cover the area in Kaolatype brass plates); a rebuilding and twenty-foot extension of the kitchen ($4,000); an extension of their driveway one hundred feet eastward; black walnut paneling for other rooms; new pipes; new fireplace tiles; one “Irish setter (red).”4 Sam ordered a new carriage built to his specifications by a New Haven company.
Twelve thousand dollars here, ten thousand there—it was beginning to add up. Clemens’s domestic, business, and investment outlays were in fact exceeding $100,000 for the year—or slightly less than $2 million in early 21st-century dollars. But why should he care? A Tramp Abroad was selling well and pulling Tom Sawyer along in its wake; his earlier books remained in demand; Colonel Sellers still generated good box-office revenue;* his occasional lectures paid well. His income for 1880 totaled $250,000, allowing him to laugh at any notion of restraint. For the time being.
On February 2 Howells ended his twelve-year association with the Atlantic. Thomas Bailey Aldrich succeeded him as editor. Under terms of the ownership breakup, control of the Atlantic went to Houghton, but Howells’s loyalties lay with Osgood, and so he signed a contract with Mark Twain’s new publisher for an annual sum ($7,500) to produce a novel a year as well as shorter pieces. This was a time of personal crisis and artistic richness for the forty-three-year-old literary man. Howells had written several successful plays, most of them light farces or comedies of manners. He was at work on one of his signature pieces of fiction, A Modern Instance, which brought the themes of Euripides’ Medea under his modernist-realist lens. The Lady of the Aroostook, due out soon, would solidify his reputation as a novelist on a par with Henry James. (James published Portrait of a Lady that year, starting the trajectory that left Howells behind.) But in the fall of 1880 Winifred Howells, a promising young writer at seventeen, suffered a “nervous breakdown” that resisted treatment. Distraught, Howells sank into his own malaise. “I have grown terribly, miserably tired of editing,” he told a friend.5 “I think my nerves have given way…[T]he MSS., the proofs, the books, the letters became insupportable.”6
Mr. Clemens sympathized, in his fashion. “The news about Winny is too bad, too bad,” he remarked—at the tag end of a letter mostly concerned with the problematic Philadelphia publisher Gebbie.7 His eulogy to Howells’s tenure at the Atlantic, a career that meant everything to Mark Twain’s ascendancy, was contained in a postscript to the same letter: “Mighty glad you are out of that cussed mill, that gilded slavery.”8
The stream of company continued at the Nook Farm house. Clemens presided over dinners of pheasant, and mutton, and baked oysters, regaling the table with his stories. When Howells visited Nook Farm, he was Clara’s favorite guest. “He always brought sunshine and cheer into the house as no one else could…To see him and Father enjoy a funny story or joke together was a complete show in itself. Both of them red in the face from laughing, with abundant gray hair straggling over their foreheads and restless feet that carried them away from their chairs and back again!”9 Imperious Elinor was a different proposition. Annie Moffett, who encountered her at the Hartford house, later told her son Samuel that “for some reason Mrs. Howells was treated formally…[There were] all kinds of special preparations being made because Mrs. Howells was coming.”10
As for the hostess, she stage-managed the ongoing pageant without drawing any attention to herself; but she confided to her mother:
The house has been full of company and I have been “whirled around.”…Oh, I cannot help sighing for the peace and quiet of the farm. This is my work, and I know that I do very wrong when I feel chafed by it, but how can I be right about it? Sometimes it seems as if the simple sight of people would drive me mad…I want so much to do other things, to study and do things with the children, and I cannot.11
In the evenings when no parties were scheduled, the master of the house would take his favorite chair in the library. As flames blazed in the fireplace under the mantel, firing up the brass fixtures and the porcelain figurines and the walnut arms of the chairs, the womenfolk would arrange themselves around him (with excellent posture) and listen as he read aloud from The Prince and the Pauper, in progress. Little Susy and Clara, their laps filled with ambient cats, were charmed by Papa’s chaste fable. “I like this tale better than ‘Tom Sawyer,’ ” Mark Twain remarked to a friend that winter, adding, ambiguously, “—because I haven’t put any fun in it. I think that is why I like it better.”12
BY THE end of March, Clemens’s spending spree may have begun to feel a little premature. Kaolatype still had not generated the “mighty fortune” that he’d predicted to Pamela. He found himself still awaiting “palpable & demonstrable…reasons for going on,” he warned Slote; “but my hopes are not high.”13 He decided to hire a middleman to monitor the venture. His choice was Charles Webster. Annie Moffett’s husband was twenty-nine, a civil engineer turned real estate man in Fredonia. As his son Samuel Charles Webster noted, his father had been born in Connecticut and “was connected with the usual New England families and directly descended from three governors—Winthrop, Bradford, and Endicott.” Samuel added, with what may have been a lingering trace of familial bitterness, “The women of his family were advanced for their time, even more advanced than the women of the Clemens family.”14
Webster had stepped into Mark Twain’s world on another matter. He’d called at Farmington Avenue in March as the delegate of the Independent Watch Company of Fredonia, which was rounding up stock investors. (Sam’s reputation as a soft touch was by now detectable by main-chance bloodhounds for hundreds of miles.) Sam went in for five thousand dollars and then signed his nephew on as his own representative. Within a week of coming aboard, Webster uncovered evidence
of fraud by Slote and Sneider. Clemens, wounded and enraged by this latest betrayal of his faith, directed his attorney Perkins to go after Sneider first, lulling Slote by making him a co-litigant. As Sneider began wailing about suicide, Sam turned his vengeful eye on Slote. He kicked his conniving old friend out of the company and made noises about “tackling” him and “forcing him to terms.” After less than a year of Sam’s unrelenting harassment, the joyful youth of the Holy Land hijinks disintegrated in health; and, in February 1882, he died. Sam stayed away from the funeral, he informed Mary Fairbanks, and saved his tears. Kaolatype died a few years afterward, along with fifty thousand dollars of Samuel Clemens’s money.
The big winner, in the short term at least, was Webster. Sam gave him “complete authority over Kaolatype & its concerns already vested in you. You will take entire control of the property & employes of the Company; you will hire whom you please, discharge whom you please…15
Some flashes of his old exuberance surfaced during these hard-edged days. Riding on the same train with the uniformed General Sherman to West Point, where both were scheduled to speak, the author of Tom Sawyer persuaded the author of the March to the Sea to swap clothing at alternating whistle stops, delighting crowds.
Reunion with a higher-ranking general awaited him. On July 2, President Garfield was shot and fatally wounded by a deranged lawyer named Charles J. Guiteau in a Washington railway station. Garfield lingered for weeks as doctors tried to locate and remove the bullet embedded in his back. Alexander Graham Bell invented a metal detector to help them out. Garfield died on September 19, from infection caused by the doctors’ unsterilized probing fingers. Not long afterward Clemens visited the New York business office of Ulysses Grant, with an awed Howells in tow. Sam was lobbying: Howells’s father, W. C. Howells, the consul at Toronto, feared that the new president, Chester Alan Arthur, would replace him, and Clemens wanted a letter from Grant to Arthur telling him not to. Howells, who years earlier had stood paralyzed at the sight of Lincoln, practically swooned at “the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest used,” and could not get over taking a carry-in luncheon of beans and coffee with the great man: it was like “sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander, or some other great Plutarchan captain.”16 It was at this meeting that Mark Twain first suggested that Grant write his personal memoirs.
THAT NOTION would take a few years to bear fruit. Sam was full of lesser ideas for himself and others in the meantime. He wondered whether a book about mental telegraphy would make a go. He offered Howells five thousand dollars to assume editorial responsibilities for the Cyclopedia of Humor project (so named now). He mulled a new invention. He brainstormed about adding a character to Shakespeare’s Hamlet: a subscription book agent, actually, named Basil Stockmar, who carries an umbrella and—well, tries to sell subscription books to the other characters, when he’s not being scared silly by Hamlet’s father’s ghost. Howells, remarkably, could see nothing remiss in such a correction of the Bard’s oversight. “That is a famous idea,” he responded.17 Encouraged, Mark Twain began talking up a playwriting collaboration with Howells, one that would take Colonel Mulberry Sellers into old age and make him an eccentric scientist.
As the publication date for The Prince and the Pauper neared, Clemens directed Osgood to send the proof sheets to Howells for one last vetting. As usual, his busy Boston patron accepted the simultaneous (and ethically questionable) roles of editor and reviewer. Editor, reviewer, and press agent, to be completely accurate: the booster of the new realism still had enough of the old Brahmin piety in his soul to be swept away by the novel’s high-Victorian pretensions. Howells decided to place his review in a journal that would alert the broadest possible audience that the old Quaker City sinner was finally in recovery. The New York Tribune would do nicely (luckily, Whitelaw Reid was on a honeymoon vacation in Europe, and the Mark Twain fan John Hay was running things). Howells volunteered a review, unsigned, to Hay, arguing the need to broadcast “that unappreciated serious side of Clemens’ curious genius.”18 Hay agreed, and relayed the proposal to Reid—who fulminated against the idea but ultimately decided not to block it.
The press agent having done his work, the editor then scolded Clemens for some passages guaranteed to shock the reviewer. Most offensive was the appearance of the same bawdy “There-was-a-woman-in-our-town” doggerel that Sam had brayed out during his post-wedding train trip to Buffalo. “[S]uch a thing as that…I can’t cope with.”19 Neither could he cope with such words as “devil,” and “hick” (for “person”) and “basting” for “beating.” A day later, Howells was still rooting out offenses to clean-minded fellows: “I send some passages marked, which I don’t think are fit to go into a book for boys.”20 Sam could not have cared less: “Slash away…[T]he more you slash, the better I shall like it…Alter any and everything you choose—don’t hesitate.”21 He kept the bawdy ditty, slightly revised, in the book anyway.
Osgood issued The Prince and the Pauper in mid-December—sanitized, plump and glossy as a sofa pillow, and garlanded with Mark Twain’s inscription to “those good-mannered and agreeable children, Susie and Clara Clemens.” Reviewers were flummoxed, as they had been by The Innocents Abroad twelve years earlier. Here, in fact, was the mirror image of Innocents: a book without recognizable lineage, but startling for its propriety this time. Into a tale set in an England of yore, Mark Twain had pretty much emptied his vast accumulated grab bag of “period” color, language, and documentary Tudor research (operating, perhaps, on the proverbial theory that we cannot have “archaic,” and edit, too). The diction and dialogue were relentlessly retro-genteel. (“Thou are right; say no more; thou shalt see that whatsoever the king of England requires a subject to suffer under the law, he will himself suffer while he holdeth the station of a subject,” and so on.)
And yet the book stipulated itself for children. Its title characters were not manly knights and knaves, but a pair of fourteen-year-olds who, in one doff-thy-rags-and-don-these-splendors moment, become trapped in each other’s identity and must experience, for a while, each other’s fate. The children’s fates are governed, as Mark Twain made starkly clear, by the inflexible laws and etiquette of the adult class system. Even Howells’s eighteen-year-old daughter, the sensitive Winifred, was taken aback. “I never knew or realized before how in old times the Laws hindered instead of helping justice,” she remarked in a letter of thanks for her inscribed copy; “and now they seem to me much worse than if there had been none.”22
Nothing quite like it had ever appeared before. Certainly nothing from the now-familiar “humorist” Mark Twain. The reviewers cogitated, decided that they liked it—most of them—and struggled to explain why. Nearly everyone pounced on one handy reason: the book was polite; and that fact became the consensus launching pad for commentary. H. H. Boyesen, Howells’s replacement reviewer in the Atlantic, remarked that Mark Twain “has written a book which no reader, not even a critical expert, would think of attributing to him”23—that is, a book whose humor departs from the “boisterous and rollicking” and depends on the plot for its impact.
Howells alone, it seemed, possessed the insight necessary to explain the book—he had, after all, noted its “bottom of fury” in his private letter to Clemens—but here he was ensnared by his nonliterary agenda of seeing Clemens consecrated. His unsigned review had run in October, two months ahead of publication, and it set the tone of all that followed. True, he probed deeper than most in pointing out the strong subtext of satire aimed at the British monarchy, and remarking that “this is the sort of manual of republicanism which might fitly be introduced in the schools.” There he veered off, into the vapors of conventional sentiment. The book “breathes throughout the spirit of humanity and the reason of democracy.” Its “romance” “is imagined with poetic delicacy,” and was “touched with the tenderest, sweetest feeling.”24
Not entirely. The Prince and the Pauper contained scenes that hardly se
emed aimed at the kiddies. Two Baptist women considered heretical are burned at the stake as their daughters wail for their lives; the victims issue “a volley of heart-piercing shrieks of mortal agony.”25 Decaying heads impaled on iron spikes along London Bridge furnish “ ‘object lessons’ in English history for its children.”26 Farmers are sold into slavery; prison life and its horrors are omnipresent dangers. Royal “etiquette” is continually revealed as absurd, constricting, hollow.
If such scenes do in fact hint at controlled “fury,” it appears once again to be the fury of the frustrated believer: Mark Twain, who had grown skeptical of voting rights for the uneducated, had traveled to England and lost his heart to the very sort of grim dowager he’d roasted in Innocents Abroad: an old European country hidebound by sovereign rule. But the very process of absorbing British history—the better to know his inamorata—proved fatal to the flame. The “exceeding severity of the laws of that day” shocked him and spurred his desire to make that severity clear to his readers, he told Howells.
The reviews, to him, were devastating—it was as though a vast, polite-wing conspiracy had formed, insisting on depicting a refined Connecticut Yankee businessman, ensconced in his refined Connecticut estate, tossing off refined Connecticut literature for his refined Connecticut readers. Bret Harte himself could not have plotted a more effective assassination of the Vandal. Yet The Prince and the Pauper contained some trace elements of Mark Twain’s developing vision as an artist. These traces would not have been apparent even to Howells; they become visible only against the relief of his later work. One of them was the elaboration of the twinned- and switched-identity motif, which had first surfaced in the narrator/dwarf of “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.” Mark Twain never offered a specific referent for this shifting, recurring metaphor—if indeed he understood it himself—but it would float through his fiction as persistently as Laura Wright floated through his dreams.
