Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  He writes the letter designed to seal Jim’s fate, and feels washed clean of sin, until he thinks some more,

  And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing…somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him…and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world…and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.45

  He takes up the letter and studies it a minute—and delivers the purification lyric worthy of Brunhilde’s immolation in the Gotterdammerung:

  “ ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’—and tore it up.”46

  From the mid-20th century on, the moral majesty of this moment has been almost universally assumed. It forms the novel’s abiding claim as an oracle of the American soul. Norman Podhoretz’s 1959 declaration that the scene “is one of the supreme moments in all of literature”47 remains representative. What bedevils the proponents of this view—including those who posit Huckleberry Finn as a deliberately antiracist work—is nearly everything that follows.

  Mark Twain himself sounded the first warning. Toward the end of his 1880 stint, he thought to write the novel’s famous “Notice”: “Persons attempting to find a Motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a Moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a Plot in it will be shot.” And sure enough: within a dozen pages of Huck’s stirring declaration, Tom Sawyer makes his flagrantly improbable reentry into the story; realism vanishes; measured satire gives way to borderline slapstick, and the shackled Jim endures a prolonged ordeal of pointless tormenting at the hands of his avowed liberators, with Huck a submissive agent of Tom’s wild-eyed scenarios. The meaning of Huck’s response to his friend’s high-spirited depravity, and, indeed, of his complicity in it, has been endlessly debated and never resolved.

  Huck favors a quick and simple rescue plan: steal the key to the lock on the cabin, free Jim, and make a run for the raft. Tom, ever book-addled, is dismissive: “I should hope we can find a way that’s a little more complicated than that, Huck Finn.”48 He has been marinating in stories of history’s famous escapes, and wants to try some of the methods out on Jim. “When a prisoner of style escapes, it’s called an evasion,” he later explains,49 using the word that now embraces the ten chapters explicating his tortuous scheme. Opera now becomes opera buffa, with a discomfiting sadistic edge. Tom wants Jim to free his chain from the bed leg, not by simply lifting it off the floor, but by sawing it through. He proposes digging a hole to the cabin floor—with case knives, not spades. He wants to leave “clews.” Rope ladders are contemplated for the ground-level caper. Days pass. Absurdity reaches its height when the boys actually free Jim from the cabin so that he can help them lug a huge grindstone into his room, so that he can write inscriptions on it while awaiting his freedom. Then morbidity reaches its depth: for historical accuracy, Tom wants to fill the cabin with spiders, rats, and snakes. (Jim spoils the fun by rejecting Tom’s pleas to include a rattlesnake.) Three weeks have now passed, with Jim now in bondage as much to the two boys as to the Phelpses. Tom fakes a letter warning that a gang of abolitionists is in the area, drawing a posse of fifteen armed farmers to the Phelps farm—as he’d hoped. The breakout ensues amid a riot of staged and stagey farce: Huck masking as Tom, Tom masking as his brother Sid, Jim and Tom-Sid in women’s clothes, the farmhouse crawling with serpents, melted butter streaming down Huck-Tom’s face, bloodhounds baying, bullets flying, a slug of lead in Tom-Sid’s calf.

  Later—Jim having been recaptured while watching over the wounded Tom, and brought back to the farm—Tom delivers the final pie-in-the-face: Jim is a free man, he announces. The Widow, who died two months earlier, liberated him in her will. Tom knew this all along, but played out the “evasion” charade because “I wanted the adventure of it.”50 In case anyone doubts him, Aunt Polly materializes in the doorway, all the way from St. Petersburg, to confirm the facts. The book ends with Tom proposing that the trio head out west for adventure among the Indians, and Huck allowing that he would “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”51

  Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters. Its greatness rests on its lapidary portraiture of America as encapsulated in a time and place; on its revelatory use of vernacular American dialect as the vehicle for its story; and for the authentic passion, metaphor, self-expression, and moral reasoning released via this dialect. This departure from high diction is what Ernest Hemingway had in mind in his 1935 pronouncement that “all modern American literature comes from” this novel. As for the “evasion” chapters, early commentators have tended to excuse (or damn) them as a failed attempt to conclude an otherwise great tale whose perpetual-motion narrative defies conclusion. More recent analysis has been more respectful, perceiving a grand design: the chapters are, for instance, an allegory of the torments visited on former slaves during the post-Reconstruction era in which Mark Twain wrote. But nearly everybody agrees that it is one hell of a book.

  ITS GREATNESS owes nearly as much to Mark Twain’s technical dedication as to his conceptual genius. Mark Twain always revised as he worked, scrawling his emendations in the margins and between the lines of his pages. This was especially true of Huckleberry Finn. After announcing from Elmira that he was “finished” with it in September 1883, the author took the great stack of pages home to Hartford and worried over it for six more months, refusing to surrender it until mid-April 1884. His improvements were pointillist: an accretion of small, sharp edits that greatly enhanced the diction and imagery of the novel entire.

  In the summer of 1882, Clemens hired a pair of typists from Elmira—among the first professionals in that new skill—to copy his Life on the Mississippi manuscript. He liked the results so well that he directed the typists to start in on the first 663 manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn. Typescripts absorbed and eliminated the clutter of an annotated draft manuscript. For the first time, Mark Twain could make a second round of revisions on clean pages, and he used that opportunity to full advantage. The typescripts are presumed lost, but in 1990 the first 665 manuscript pages reemerged in a Hollywood attic.* Now a sentence as Mark Twain first wrote it could be compared to its final version in the book, and the differences between them identified as changes on the typescript or proofs (including changes made inadvertently by the typist).

  Certain myths immediately evaporated. Foremost among them was the accepted view that Huckleberry Finn’s voice flowed unaltered from Mark Twain’s raw imagination onto the book page. Far from it: the author constantly rummaged through Huck’s (and Jim’s) dialect, weeding out words and phrases that bore any taint of a mature well-read man’s syntax. “Always” became “awluz”; “never heard anything” became “didn’t hear nothing.” In draft, Huck might have remarked that “I had about made up my mind to stay there all night, when I heard horses,” but by the time the presses rolled, he’d corrected himself to “…when I hear a plunkety-plunk, plunkety-plunk, and says to myself, horses coming.”52

  Mark Twain also fine-tuned Huck’s capacity for reasoning, especially moral reasoning. In Chapter 16, Huck suffers a guilty conscience after he fast-talks some slave hunters in a boat out of searching the raft where Jim is hiding, by leading them to think there is smallpox on board. The first draft reads

  They went off & I hopped aboard the raft, saying to myself, I’ve done wrong again, & was trying as hard as I could to do right, too; but when it come right down to telling them it was a nigger on the raft, & I opened my mouth a-purpose to do it, I couldn’t. I am a mean, low coward, & it’s the fault of them that brung me up. If I had been raised right, I wouldn’t said anything about anybody
being sick, but the more I try to do it right, the more I can’t.53

  Many novelists would be willing to ransom their agents for a passage of that caliber, but Mark Twain wasn’t satisfied. It became:

  They went off, and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little, ain’t got no show—when the pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat.54

  Mark Twain himself expressed the value of this system—and offered a glimpse into the near-tactile relationship between a writer and his words on the page—in a letter of recommendation for one of the typists, Harry M. Clarke. “THE EXPERIENCE WITH THE TYPEWRITER HAS BEEN OF SO HIGH A VALUE TO ME,” he wrote,

  THAT NOT EVEN THE TYPE-WRITER ITSELF CAN DESCRIBE IT…THE PAGES OF THE [typewritten] SHEETS BEGIN TO LOOK AS NATURAL, AND RATIONAL, AND AS VOID OF OFFENSE TO HIS EYE AS DO HIS OWN WRITTEN PAGES, AND THEREFORE HE CAN ALTER AND AMEND THEM WITH COMFORT…[Books copied by pen] HAVE A FOREIGN AND UNSYMPATHETIC LOOK…ONE CANNOT RECOGNIZE HIMSELF IN THEM…MY COPYING IS ALWAYS DONE ON THE TYPE-WRITER, NOW, AND I SHALL NOT BE LIKELY TO EVER USE ANY OTHER SYSTEM.55

  WILLIAM AND Elinor Howells and their three children returned from Europe in mid-July of 1883, just as Mark Twain was tearing through the homestretch of Huckleberry Finn. They took up residence in a rented house on Beacon Hill in Boston. The year abroad had restored Howells from his near-nervous collapse and the rigors of finishing A Modern Instance, the rather daring update of Medea, with its themes of marital betrayal and jealousy, to contemporary Boston (“daring” partly because the obsessive female protagonist bore unmistakable resemblances to Elinor). The novel had brought him to a new level of popular recognition and literary esteem. Henry James liked it, as did many Europeans. Mark Twain himself, who knew a thing or two about the subject, assured Howells that one particular passage was “the best drunk scene that I ever read…How very drunk, & how recently drunk, & how altogether admirably drunk you must have been to…contrive that masterpiece.”56

  Back home, Howells lost no time resuming his prodigious literary output. Despite his health failures, family tensions, economic crises, personal correspondence, a writing wrist chronically in pain, and attention to Clemens’s frequent whims, Howells had generated nearly a novel in each of the last dozen years—in addition to a stream of plays, poetry, travel essays, and criticism. Now he plunged back to work on three other novels, A Woman of Reason, The Minister’s Charge, and his most enduring work, The Rise of Silas Lapham.

  And then he plunged out again, because a boy called him away from these grown-up chores. He found himself once again roped into playing Joe Harper to Clemens’s Tom. Looking beyond the completion of his own novel, and back on the prowl for a money-making project, Sam revived the idea of co-writing a new Colonel Sellers play, with Howells as his partner. He wanted to build on the theme of Sellers as a mad scientist: why not also make the old blowhard a claimant to a British title—the Earl of Durham? (Sam had daydreamed several possibilities in church one Sunday, as his attention wandered from Joe Twichell’s sermon.) The lion of letters in Boston was more than game. Howells swept aside his unfinished manuscripts and prepared to play hooky: “As soon as I mentioned our plan for a play,” he gleefully told Clemens, “Mrs. Howells nobly declared that she would do anything for money, and that I might go to you when I liked.”57 Sam signaled his gratitude by mentioning that two-thirds of the royalties should go to himself, given that he was Sellers’s creator. No problem! “The terms are good and just,” Howells wrote back, “two thirds for you and one for me…I’ve read every bit about Sellers in [ The Gilded Age ]. There’s a great play in him yet.”58

  Howells arrived at the Nook Farm house in November to find that Mark Twain had not really developed the play’s plot much beyond the vague-idea stage. Again, no matter! The two old friends spent the next several days brainstorming hilariously. Mad scientist? Peerage claimant? Why not give Sellers some eccentric traits as well! Make him a spiritualist! A temperance reformer! A drunken temperance reformer! Get him involved in recording profanity, to be pawned off to ships’ officers so they wouldn’t run out during emergencies! Strap a fire extinguisher on his back! Give him wings! They seem to have laughed themselves silly. “We had loads and loads of fun about it,” Howells later told Paine. “We cracked our sides laughing over it as we went along. We thought it was mighty good…”59

  After a few days of this, Clemens and Howells had worked themselves into such a pitch of hysteria that they half-convinced themselves they’d written a comic masterpiece. In the middle of it all, the living monument to British high culture, Matthew Arnold, arrived in Hartford to lecture, and Howells dragged Clemens off to a reception for the poet. In Boston a few days earlier, upon hearing that Howells had gone to visit Mark Twain, Arnold had murmured, “Oh, but he doesn’t like that sort of thing, does he?”60 Now, chatting with Howells at the Hartford soiree, Arnold’s gaze fell upon a small man with graying red hair across the room. “Who—who in the world is that?” he asked.61 Introduced, he spent the remainder of the evening in Mark Twain’s thrall, and the next night, “as if still under the glamour of that potent presence,”62 Arnold presented himself at the Clemens house. Clemens never spoke to Howells of what they talked about.

  Colonel Sellers as a Scientist was published in 1887, but never performed in New York. Clemens eventually acquired Howells’s share of the rights to it and financed a brief tour of one-night stands; and then it was over. Howells believed until his dying day that it could have been a success. What seems more significant, in view of the difficult years bearing down on them but yet unseen, is that in their brief stolen holiday of writing the play, Sam Clemens and William Dean Howells probably laughed as hard and as long together as either man would laugh for the rest of his life.

  * Most of these survive in archival files, and some have been printed as appendices in later editions.

  * James M. Cox has famously identified one of these in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Life on the Mississippi: Twain’s deadpan claim in the book’s first paragraph that the river “drains” the far-off state of Delaware.

  † On August 7, the Gold Dust had exploded, killing the pilot Lem Gray, a fact that Twain folded into Life on the Mississippi.

  * The discovery was made by Barbara Gluck Testa, a granddaughter of James Fraser Gluck, a curator of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Buffalo, who in 1885 had asked Clemens to donate the manuscript to the library. Clemens consented, but found that he could send only the second half; he’d misplaced the first half and did not find it for some nineteen months. When James Gluck finally received this second bundle, in 1887, he neglected to put it on display alongside the concluding holograph, and died ten years later with it still stored in his personal possessions. It remained unrecovered for 103 years.

  38

  The American Novel

  (1884–85)

  Even as he raced through final revisions of his unsuspected masterpiece in early 1884, Mark Twain foraged for the next big thing. He finished a stage version of Tom Sawyer that he’d somehow found time to begin drafting the previous fall. He searched for a producer to buy Colonel Sellers as a Scientist. He brainstormed a comic almanac. He dreamed up new inventions: a glass “hand grenade” filled with extinguishing liquid that could be thrown into the midst of a fire; a bed clamp to keep babies from kicking off their covers. He considered promoting a musical game invented by Susy. He mulled the minutiae of contracts, incentives for sales agents, the comparative cost/benefits of printing paper. He roughed out a discount strategy for selling Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer as a matched set (which he later abandoned). And he nurtured an idea that had gripped him at least since he and Howells had had their luncheon with Ulysses S. Grant in New York: to encourage Grant to write and publish his memoirs.

  He ne
eded professional autonomy and a tireless (and compliant) right-hand man. In May 1884, a new publishing firm announced itself to the world: Charles L. Webster & Company, of New York. The former Fredonia real estate salesman found himself, at thirty-two, in charge of Mark Twain’s publishing fortunes. At least that’s what the letterhead implied. “Webster & Company” was in fact Mark Twain himself (as he allowed to the New York Herald in 1885). From now on he would publish his own books and plays, avoiding the blunders of Bliss and Osgood and keeping their share of the swag. His titular publisher, husband of his niece, would function as his eyes and ears, his business enforcer, his legal researcher, his surrogate in the theater world—as the consummator of every Mark Twain scheme, plan, or whim.

  Don Quixote had found his Sancho Panza. Webster was bright, and almost painfully serious-minded. He was willing to immerse himself in every sort of detail—he assimilated the many-layered requirements of the book trade with remarkable speed—and he seemed infinitely obedient. “[Y]our smallest wish shall be gratified no matter how much it discommodes me,” he assured his boss.1 Webster was soon to learn how stressful it could be to lose one’s commode.

  Clemens started him at a salary of $2,500, a little more than that earned by a St. Louis schoolteacher, plus a share of the company’s net profits (a third of the first $20,000, but only a tenth thereafter). Clemens retained the right to approve any business expenses over $1,000, and to complain about the rest (postage, for example). Clemens never quite figured out why Webster needed a starting salary at all; he was, after all, an apprentice in spite of what the letterhead said, and apprentices never received salaries—Sam Clemens certainly hadn’t, as an apprentice pilot.