Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  A MONTH after that—on May 26—Sam Clemens made a journal entry: “This date, 1858, parted from L, who said ‘We shall meet again 30 years from now.’ ”82 He could not bring himself, even in the privacy of his journal, to write out the name that “L” stood for—“Laura.” Perhaps he wished to protect Livy’s feelings.

  SUSY’S WRITTEN note about her meeting with Grant was not a random jotting. Earlier that month, she had begun a biography of her father, “—solely of her own motion,” Sam noted in his own journal, “—a thing about which I feel proud & gratified.”83 “Joyous” may have been more like it. She wrote it on lined paper, secretly at first until her mother discovered it, in a spiky but legible hand, adding to it for about a year until losing interest, virtually in mid-sentence (“We have arrived in Keokuk after a very pleasant”84) on July 4, 1886. The manuscript, comprising a little over nineteen thousand words,* became a kind of Holy Grail to Clemens after her death; even its “desperate” spelling part of a sacred text—” [I]t was Susy’s and it shall stand. I love it and cannot profane it.”85

  He cherished her “unimprovable phrases” as well, such as her account of watching him recite “The Golden Arm” in public for the first time, at Vassar: “He startled the whole room full of people and they jumped as one man.”86

  Clemens doted on each of his daughters, but Susy elicited a kind of reverence from him. She had been a child apart from her earliest years, a whimsical, sometimes meltingly reflective aphorist. She mirrored her mother’s dark-eyed beauty, with much of the Clemens strain in her thick hair and brow and wide, shapely mouth. Her fits of passionate temper derived exclusively from Papa. She had caught on, perhaps as early as the European hegira of 1878, that people paid a special kind of attention to her father, and that it had to do with his profession, which was writing. Along with Clara and Jean, she hung on his family readings; unlike them, she hungrily (and critically) explored his books as soon as she was able. She joined the Clemens women consensus in favoring The Prince and the Pauper, and considered it her father’s best book. After a man wrote to congratulate him on returning to his old style in Huckleberry Finn, Susy recorded, “That enoyed me greatly, because it trobles me to have so few people know papa, I mean realy know him…I have wanted papa to write a book that would reveal something of his kind sympathetic nature, and the ‘Prince and the Pauper’ partly does it.”87 Mark Twain incorporated nearly a tenth of Susy’s biography into the work that coalesced from his own dictations, conferring a certain refracted timelessness on many of its passages, such as its beginning:

  We are a very happy family! we consist of papa, mamma, Jean Clara and me. It is papa I am writing about…He is a very good man, and a very funny one; he has got a temper but we all of us have in this family. He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent minded!88

  He loved it that she was “frank” and used no “sandpaper” on him.

  He smokes a great deal almost incessantly. He has the mind of an author exactly, some of the simplest things he can’t understand.89

  Papa uses very strong language, but I have an idea not nearly so strong as when he first married mamma.90

  She inventoried endless household details, and captured his mannerisms during the celebrated Clemens dinner parties.

  [The cats] are namely “Stray Kit,” “Abner,” “Motly,” “Freulein,” “Lazy,” Bufalo Bill” and “Soapy Sal” “Cleveland,” “Sour Mash” and “famine.”91

  He has a peculiar gait we like, it seems just to suit him, but most people do not; he always walks up and down the room while thinking and between each coarse at meals.92

  While Susy was writing, her younger sister was storing up impressions as well. Clara Clemens waited until adulthood to record hers, but the best of them are indelible.

  Once, in the middle of a careful description of a very devout clergyman that Mother was reading aloud, Father sprang to his feet and danced a kind of horn-pipe while he sang, “By the humping, jumping Jesus, what the hell is that to you?”

  Never shall I forget the strange sound that burst forth from Mother’s lips. It could hardly be called a laugh and yet it certainly was not a sob. It contained mirth and horror…93

  GRANT DETERIORATED through the early summer, but he worked on. Clemens frequently called at the house on 66th Street, talking “cheerful nonsense” to the dying hero. One of the riffs he developed was a comic mythification of their proximity in Missouri at the Civil War’s outset; he noted the contours of it in his journal: “I did not know that this was the future General Grant, or I would have turned & attacked him. I supposed it was just some ordinary Colonel…& so I let him go.” Privately, he found this banter “curious and dreadful.”94 It must have amused Grant, though, for Mark Twain began to refine it: “To-day talked with General Grant about his & my first Missouri campaign in 1861…He surprised an empty camp near Florida, Mo., on Salt River, which I had been occupying a day or two before. How near he came to playing the devil with his future publisher!”95 The murky memory from Sam’s Ranger days thus made its inevitable journey from fact to fiction. Mark Twain contemplated inserting Tom, Huck, and Jim into the account—“Union officer accosts Tom & says his name is US Grant,” read a notebook entry96—but decided against it. By late May, he had completed a draft of “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” and showed it to Grant, who was its first reader. The finished version ran in the December issue of the Century.

  By mid-June Grant had effectively completed the two volumes, and hardly a day too soon. He had wasted away to less than 125 pounds now; his distended neck limited his voice to a faint whisper. His family moved him to a summer cottage of a friend at Mount McGregor, New York, a few miles north of Saratoga Springs. The railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt provided a private coach for the journey, perhaps by way of atoning for bankrolling Victoria Woodhull in her 1872 presidential run against Grant. Mark Twain composed a eulogy to the general and sent it to the Hartford Courant. (An assistant editor notified him that he could probably use about half of it.) Days passed, and Grant refused to succumb. Once settled inside the wooden cottage, he demanded page proofs and found the strength to revise them, even to insert important new material. Clemens called on the general toward the end of June. While he was there, Grant composed his Preface: “…I present these volumes to the public, asking no favor but hoping they will meet the approval of the reader…”97 Clemens said his farewell to Grant on July 2.

  Grant delivered the second volume of his Memoirs to Charles Webster at Mount McGregor on Saturday, July 18. Five days later he was dead, of starvation: his cancer had left him unable to swallow.98 Bells tolled around the world. Clemens traveled to New York, where on August 6 he watched from the Lotos Club as the catafalque, drawn by a line of black horses, passed by, en route from the train station to City Hall. He was not among the hundreds of thousands who lined the route uptown to Riverside Park two days later when the body was interred in its temporary mausoleum, although a letter of his in the New York Sun had helped settle a controversy over whether New York or Washington was the appropriate “place of sepulcher” for the general. “We should select a grave which will not merely be in the right place now, but will still be in the right place 500 years from now,” Mark Twain maintained. “How does Washington promise as to that? You have only to hit it in one place to kill it…But as long as American civilisation lasts New York will last.”99 To the strenuous popular objection that New York was not “national ground,” Mark Twain offered a magisterial rejoinder: “Wherever General Grant’s body lies, that is national ground.”

  MARK TWAIN’S fiftieth birthday was celebrated in the Critic with affectionate essays by many of his literary peers, including Oliver Wendell Holmes and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner. In My Mark Twain, Howells composed a striking word-portrait of his friend at this stage of his life.

  [H]e had kept, as he did to the end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes of the burnt-out years were beg
inning to gray the fires of that splendid shock of red hair which…tilted to one side in his undulating walk. He glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes, under branching brows, which with age grew more and more like a sort of plumage, and he was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for him, but he was not all there for you.100

  Ten days later, Volume 1 of Grant’s Memoirs was published, consummating the most successful business enterprise of Mark Twain’s life, as well as the greatest bequest to American culture outside his own works. Three months later, Webster & Company presented Julia Grant with the largest single royalty payment in the history of publishing to that time: $200,000. Eventually, payments to Grant’s widow approached $450,000. Mark Twain netted $200,000, by his own estimate. The memoir became a treasure of American letters, and is recognized as one of the enduring masterpieces of military literature.

  Mark Twain’s future now belonged to the Paige typesetting machine.

  * In the estimate of the scholar and editor Charles Neider.

  39

  Roll Over, Lord Byron

  (1886–87)

  On February 12, 1886, Susy Clemens recorded some apprehension about her father:

  Mamma and I have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he has been publishing Gen. Grant’s book, has seemed to forget his own books and work entirely, and the other evening as papa and I were promenading up and down the library he told me that he didn’t expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die or do anything, he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published.1

  The (unfinished) book in the downstairs safe was the long-contemplated “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” A second work-in-process may have slipped his mind altogether, given that progress on it was so slow. Howells, sensing creative stasis, had tried to cheer Clemens on in January, applauding the rather thin plot-driving idea—time-travel—that his friend had recently shared with him: “That notion of yours about the Hartford man waking up in King Arthur’s time is capital. There is a great chance in it.”2 He’d added, his worry palpable beneath the jovial tone, “I wish I had a magazine, to prod you with, and keep you up to all those good literary intentions.”3

  Mark Twain made a brave effort to meet the challenge. He notified Webster that he’d “begun a book, whose scene is laid far back in the twilight of tradition.”4 This was the snail’s-pace second project. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, inspired partly by the Malory romance that Cable had handed him in the Rochester bookstore. On February 22 he calmed Livy’s and Susy’s apprehension a little by reading them some draft pages from it. But soon afterward he put the manuscript aside again. Susy’s entry had got it right: Papa’s literary career was grinding to a halt, and Papa didn’t seem to care. As the last half of the 1880s began, Samuel Clemens’s addiction to speculation (and its discontents) had all but overtaken him. For sheer flamboyance, writing wasn’t shucks to a business-world circus. On February 6, 1886, he took another long step into the Paige typesetter quicksand. He signed an agreement to pay the inventor an annual salary of seven thousand dollars that would continue until net yearly profits from Paige’s typesetter equaled that salary.5 The machine was close to perfection, Paige assured his benefactor—but he needed to hire another man, a justifier. (“Justifying” would seem to have been a natural job for Paige.) Clemens also obliged himself to promote the machine when it was finished and raise the capital for manufacture. His business agent, Franklin G. Whitmore, an old Hartford billiards-playing pal, was appalled, and warned Clemens that he was courting bankruptcy. Clemens assured Whitmore that he knew what he was doing. Paige tinkered happily on, with the serenity of one who has secured a lifetime research grant.

  On April 22, Vatican officials in Rome signed a contract with Webster & Company to publish a biography of Pope Leo XIII, which Clemens confidently believed would surpass the Grant book in worldwide sales.

  His wife and daughters now provided his only source of unalloyed pleasure. When eleven-year-old Clara, recovering from a sprained ankle, took up solitaire, Papa began playing the game, too. Soon Jean and Livy were drawn in, and as Susy described it, “before dinner is at an end, papa has gotten a separate pack of cards…mamma and Clara next are made subject to the contagious solatair, and there are four solatairians at the table; while you hear nothing but ‘Fill up the place’ etc. It is dreadful!”6

  On April 28, stenographer Fred J. Hall was promoted to a junior partner at Webster & Company. Hall’s elevation was clearly at the expense of Charles Webster, but to some extent, Webster had asked for it. Docile, put-upon, and self-sacrificing at the outset of his windfall publishing career, Mark Twain’s nephew was growing a little cocky upon the successes of Huckleberry Finn and Grant’s memoirs. An officious tone crept into his letters from New York; he bombarded Clemens with facts and figures; and he grew ever more independent in his acquisitions of books for the company. He had some reason to strut. The company was flourishing. Clemens himself estimated its sale value at half a million dollars in early 1886. But Webster could not overcome his penchant for ticking off his uncle. In January of that year he asked Clemens to amend his contract (for a second time), raising his salary to three thousand dollars, and giving Webster easier access to his share of the profits, among other things. Clemens complied, but seethed; from then on, he doubted or privately derided virtually every decision his nephew made. Almost immediately afterward, Sam began looking toward Fred Hall.

  “SUSIE IS fourteen to-day!” Clemens exclaimed to Howells on March 19. “Land, but I do feel old!”7

  Perhaps it was the burdensome awareness of his slippage away from the literary life that moved him to tears when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe on the sidewalk near Nook Farm and she declared, taking both his hands in hers, “I am reading your ‘Prince & Pauper’ for the fourth time, & I know it’s the best book for young folk that was ever written.”8

  His eldest daughter monitored his moods closely—as closely as young Sammy Clemens had monitored the moods of Marshall. “Papa can make exceedingly bright jokes, and he enjoys funny things, and when he is with people he jokes and laughs a great deal,” she wrote,

  but still he is more interested in earnest…subjects to talk upon, than in humorous ones. When we are all alone at home nine times out of ten, he talks about some very earnest subject or not very often about funny things; he doesn’t joke as much, tell many more funny stories than most men, when we are all alone.9

  “IF I come up there, let’s be private & let nobody know, till the work is finished,” he wrote Howells early in May. “Interruptions would be fatal.”10 The “work” was the malingering Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, which the two men were trying once again to resuscitate enough to drag onto a stage somewhere in New York. They had been negotiating in Hartford with an “elocutionist” named A. P. Burbank, who’d sought them out to promote himself for the Sellers role. Burbank would fill the hole left by the great John T. Raymond, who’d long since backed out of the role he created, recognizing this latest vehicle as hopeless. Clemens leapt at Burbank’s feeler. He was foraging for any new revenue source to offset his tidal flow of investment and expense payouts. He proposed now to join Howells at Auburndale and repair the problematic third act (as distinct from the problematic first and second acts). The two old friends clearly hoped that one more session together would reignite the madcap buoyancy they’d enjoyed two and a half years earlier at Nook Farm: the collaborative hilarity that had inspired the fire extinguisher on the Colonel’s back, the angel wings, the claimant-to-peerage idea; and channel it into the semicoherent script.

  The prognosis was not hopeful. Clemens, in the throes of his dry period, lacked the inclination to seriously reexamine his popular character—providing this
Falstaff with his Prince Hal, for instance. As for Howells, he was a little beaten down from some vitriolic reaction to his first three “Editor’s Study” columns in Harper’s, mostly from newspaper reviewers shocked by his enthusiasm for the Russian realist Tolstoy and his unvarnished contempt for romanticism. Clemens had scissored friendlier reviews out of other papers to salve his friend’s bruised feelings, but lost them while searching for Howells’s new Auburndale address—an omen for the tragicomedy of errors that ensued.

  Howells pronounced what should have been the play’s eulogy on May 5. “I’ve just read over the 3d Act, and reviewed the whole play in my mind,” he informed Clemens, “and I must say that I think it will fail. It is a lunatic whom we’ve pictured and while a lunatic in one act might amuse, I’m afraid that in three he would simply be a bore…and there is nothing in the play but Sellers’s character, and a lot of comic situations.”11 He was in no mood for absurdities. News of the previous day’s labor rioting (to achieve an eight-hour workday) in Haymarket Square in Chicago, in which a bomb killed seven policemen, and, later, the execution of several labor leaders in response, inflamed Howells’s social radicalism. Clemens made the visit anyway; he and Howells tore into the play for a couple of days. As Clemens headed for New York with the revised script, Howells wrote him on May 11 to “[w]ithdraw the play absolutely,”12 pending further revisions. The letter failed to reach Sam before he had signed a contract with Burbank in the offices of Webster & Company. Burbank immediately reserved the Lyceum Theater for two weeks. Howells repeated his withdrawal wish in a telegram—sent in care of the “elocutionist.” Embarrassed at finding himself undercut by his partner in such an open way, Clemens called on Burbank to give up his production plans, and arranged compensation for the theater owner. The debacle left Clemens frothing with rage—a rage sharpened by his dismay at a lost chance for revenue. Upon receiving an anguished letter from Howells (“I don’t know how I’ve kept alive since you left…Every time the bell has rung today my heart has tried to jump out of my mouth…Now I want to know the damage, so that I may send you my share, for the folly was mine as much as yours…”13), Clemens rounded on his faithful sponsor, editor, and friend.