Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  “No, no, sir—I’m not going to let you shoulder a solitary ounce of the “folly” onto me! Observe:”14 What followed was a blistering, minutely assembled recapitulation of the weeklong spiral into dissolution, laying all the responsibility on Howells.

  …You let me sit there in Webster’s office [with Webster and a number of others present] & go through the profound unwisdom of tying myself to an actor with a gold thread, & tying the actor to a Hebrew manager with a log-chain, by CONTRACTS which you had already, two days before, privately, decided against. That was the real mistake…15

  At the end of it, Sam seemed prepared to acknowledge the excessiveness of his tirade:

  There—what I’m jumping on top of, & taking by the neck, hair & ears in this schadenfreudig way, is your gentle, & even almost Christlike concession that “the folly was mine as much as yours.”

  Well, but not exactly:

  No, my boy, I pile it all onto you; every ounce of it.16

  If Clemens’s opening blast was intended as a rough sort of joshing with Howells, the humor in it escaped at least one interested party. In a postscript added a couple of days later, Sam confessed,

  Mrs. Clemens has condemned this letter to the stove—“because it might make Mr. Howells feel bad.” Might make him feel bad! Have I in sweat & travail wrought 12 carefully-contrived pages to make him feel bad, & now there’s bloody doubt flung about it? Let me accept the truth: I am grown old, my literary cunning has departed from me.17

  SAM CLEMENS enjoyed a hiatus from his troubles beginning on June 21, when he ushered his wife and daughters and a governess aboard a train for the first leg of a long journey west. They boarded a Great Lakes steamer at Erie, Pennsylvania, and, later, a downriver packet from St. Paul—the first Mississippi steamboat ride, and the first glimpse of Sam’s home territory, for Livy and the girls. Their destination was Keokuk, Iowa, and the Orion and Mollie Clemens household, where Jane now lived. They did not venture farther south for a look at Hannibal, Missouri. The town had lately depressed Sam, and was still years away from recognition as literary holy ground. Given his wife’s and daughters’ lingering discomfort with Papa’s scruffy origins, the question of “worth a detour” probably never came up. They arrived in Keokuk on July 2. Sam’s notebook is blank as to details of this excursion. (In a letter to a friend, Clemens did comment on the “days & nights of hell-sweltering weather.”)18 The visit had the eerie effect of shutting down Susy’s biography of her father, in mid-sentence: “July 4. We have arrived in Keokuk after a very pleasant”19

  Perhaps it was nothing more than all the excitement: Sam was a star of the town’s Independence Day ceremonies, arriving at Rand Park in a carriage with Orion, and dressed modestly in “an entire suit of white duck,”20 as the local paper reported, and a tall white hat. Orion, sixty-one now, was given the honor of reading the Declaration of Independence to the crowd, but Mark Twain managed to upstage him in his own brief remarks: “When I was here thirty years ago there were 3,000 people here, and they drank 3,000 barrels of whisky a day. They drank it in public then.”21 As Philip Ashley Fanning has noted, this was the first time that Sam and Orion had shared a platform.

  BACK AT work on the hilltop in Elmira, Clemens resumed trolling by mail for prospective book properties for his publishing company—“prospective” apparently meaning “only if not written by another famous author.” The success of Grant’s Personal Memoirs was attracting dozens of authors’ inquiries, but Clemens was keen mainly on signing up Civil War generals, or such famous personal friends as Roscoe Conkling, “Orator, Statesman, Advocate.” An idea for a travel book caught his attention (about Palestine, seen through the perspective of Christ’s journeys) and an offer by the retired head of the New York Police and Detective Force. He answered a query about another proposal from Webster, who was just back from Rome, “[M]ake perfectly conscienceless with him—terms which will absorb all the profits—and take his book.”22 This referred to a feeler from a retired Wall Street capitalist. (In the end, Webster & Company landed only the Conkling book.) Clemens’s refusal to solicit the great literary figures of his day, fueled almost certainly by competitive envy, was to prove a serious drawback.

  The late summer and autumn found Clemens deeply absorbed in the Paige typesetter. While he chased this will-o’-the-wisp, other inventors were getting rich: a housewife from Shelbyville, Illinois, patented the dishwashing machine, and Coca-Cola went on sale in an Atlanta drugstore. His notebook entries reveal his continuing hunger and talent for mastering the minutest details of a new system that he had displayed so often before: fractions of an em; pay per thousand ems to typesetters; the sizes of matrices; and strategies for raising capital; and the populations of cities of the world relative to the number of typesetters that might be sold in them. This is not to say that he was all work and no play. He daydreamed of buying the remains of Christopher Columbus and placing them in the base of the new Statue of Liberty, scheduled for dedication by President Cleveland at the end of October. Still, the demands of entrepreneurship weighed on him. A notebook entry: “profanity given up—on account of fatigue.”23 Another entry: “Buy a gun.”24

  The intensity of all this cramming and scheming and strategizing may have begun to take its toll on Clemens’s always-fragile equilibrium, and to affect his behavior toward those closest to him. In December, he wrote to Howells,

  [Y]esterday a thunder-stroke fell upon me…which for a moment ranged me breast to breast & comraded me as an equal, with all men who have suffered sudden & awful disaster: I found that all their lives my children have been afraid of me! have stood all their days in uneasy dread of my sharp tongue & uncertain temper. The accusing instances stretch back to their babyhood, & are burnt into their memories: & I never suspected…25

  How and why Clemens discovered this—whether it was Susy who broke it to him during one of their library promenades, or perhaps Livy in the privacy of their bedchamber—has never been determined. The evidence of Susy’s diary (“We are a very happy family!…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”) suggests that he was embellishing at least a little. On the other hand, Clemens could be a household dragon. Even Clara, protective of her father to a fault, felt compelled to acknowledge this in her memoir of him, while simultaneously trying to laugh it off. “[T]here was something so overtowering in his personality that my sisters and I often felt positive awe in his presence,” she wrote,

  It was a feeling so strong that sometimes it seemed as if a voice were saying: “Take care. He may appear to be harmless, but without action or words he can smother you dead…”26

  Clara hastens to add that she meant, “smother you with the mere greatness of his intellect.”27 Perhaps. And perhaps Clara Clemens was being entirely whimsical when she described the escaping of her father’s temper “into the open”: “Here was the liberation of the caged wild animals of the earth.”28

  HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY details the consequences of a fit that he threw in his bathroom one morning around 1880, when he discovered that three successive shirts of his were missing buttons. He flung them out the window one after the other, and then “straightened up, gathered my reserves, and let myself go like a cavalry charge.”29 In the midst of his aria, he noticed that the door between the bathroom and the bedroom, where Livy lay, was open. After delaying for as long as he could, he crept sheepishly past his wife, and was frozen by her gaze.

  Against the white pillows…I saw that young and beautiful face; and I saw the gracious eyes with something else in them which I had never seen there before. They were snapping and flashing with indignation. I felt myself…shrinking away to nothing under that accusing gaze…Then my wife’s lips parted and from them issued—my latest bathroom remark. The language perfect, but the expression velvety, unpractical, apprentice-like…comically inadequate, absurdly weak and unsuited to the great language.30

  Clemens recalled that he tried to keep himself from la
ughing, “for I was a guilty person in deep need of charity and mercy.” He succeeded, until his wife followed it up, in her grave voice, with, “There, now you know how it sounds.”31

  Then I exploded; the air was filled with my fragments and you could hear them whiz. I said, “Oh, Livy, if it sounds like that, God forgive me, I will never do it again!”

  Then she had to laugh herself. Both of us broke into convulsions and went on laughing until we were physically exhausted and spiritually reconciled.32

  His children could not have found him quite as dark as he claimed they did to Howells. But then, Samuel Clemens’s prodigious guilt seldom needed much priming.

  BACK IN Keokuk, Orion Clemens was doggedly carrying out Sam’s latest errand for him: running down historical facts and figures for Mark Twain’s “history” game. A month or so earlier, Orion had read a newspaper item to the effect that Mark Twain had read to a military group in New York from a new novel set in the time of King Arthur. Sam had mentioned nothing of this during the summer visit to Keokuk. Orion composed a letter of studied bonhomie to his brother: “I was greatly surprised as well as pleased that you have written another book…When will it be published?…I imagine you have been at work on it a good while.”33 There is no evidence that Sam replied. After dinner with Mollie a few weeks later, Orion excused himself and trudged upstairs to the bedroom. Almost immediately he came crashing back down. Rushing to him, Mollie found her husband ashen-faced, his mouth gaping. “Oh my God, I have taken poison,” he croaked.34 He had swallowed a cleaning liquid with an ammonia base. Mollie hauled Orion upright and helped him out into the snowy night, hailed a horse and buggy, and got him to a pharmacy. A doctor administered a bromide, and the couple returned home. Orion passed through the critical stage, but remained in excruciating pain from the ammonia’s searing effects on his inner mouth, tongue, and palate. Unable to talk or eat, he grew gaunt and susceptible to pneumonia. He suffered through the winter of 1887 and was not fully functional until the following April. Orion told his wife that he had swallowed the ammonia by mistake, thinking that it was cough syrup. “His cough medicin was on our bureau behind the door and he took this bottle off our wash stand,” Mollie informed Sam and Livy. “I don’t know how or why.”35

  AS 1887 began, Mark Twain’s writing consisted mostly of notebook entries: aphorisms and drafts of aphorisms (“Do you know why Balaam’s ass spoke Hebrew? Because he was a he-brayist”;36 “My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water”;37 “What is biography? Unadorned romance. What is romance? Unadorned biography”38); shopping lists; lengthy Paige typesetter minutiae; reworkings of the philosophical theme that continued to grip his imagination:

  Special providence! That phrase nauseates me—with its implied importance of mankind & triviality of God. In my opinion these myriads of globes are merely the blood-corpuscles ebbing & flowing through the arteries of God, & we but animaculae that infest them, disease them, pollute them: & God does not know we are there, & would not care if he did.39

  In February, Webster brought up the “Mark Twain Library of Humor,” now a seven-year-old white elephant of a project, recommending that it be published in a year, or a year and a half. A few days later, Howells offered to buy the project from Webster & Company and sell it to another publisher under his own name. Webster vetoed the idea: “as you are a partner it would look as though we had had a row, or that you doubted the ability of your own house.”40 It had come to this: Mark Twain could not get his own nephew to either publish or release a book of his. Worse news lay ahead. “The Pope’s canvassing-book would sell a Choctaw Bible, it is so handsome,” Clemens had exulted to Webster in March 1887, as he looked forward to a deluge of sales revenues from around the world. By August, reality had replaced fantasy. Published in six languages, promoted energetically, Life of Pope Leo XIII was selling well below the hundred thousand copies Webster had projected. Its tepid sales marked the beginning of the company’s slide into bankruptcy.

  Clemens had had impossibly high hopes for the biography of Pope Leo XIII—“which he came to tell me of,” Howells remembered, “when he had imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation.”41 This pope would gain distinction for bringing the Roman Catholic Church somewhat into synch with the modern, secular world (with reservations, including acceptance of democracy). He would rank among the Papacy’s first product pitchmen, awarding a gold medal to the hot 19th-century drink “Vin Mariani,” with its cocaine base. He would be remembered as the first pope who cut a soundtrack: in 1902, at age ninety, he sat in on a live-at-the-Vatican session headlined by the Italian castrato Alessandro Moreschi; the results are available on CD.*

  The thing was that none of this had happened yet. When Webster first approached him on Twain’s behalf, in 1885, Leo was in only the seventh of his twenty-five years as pope. The biography was already written, by one Father Bernard O’Reilly. Charles A. Dana, the great editor of the New York Sun, had secured rights to it. In December, two days before his fiftieth birthday, Mark Twain dispatched Webster to take over those rights with an offer of $100,000. It was “a book we must have. With the priesthood to help, Dana’s book is immense.”42

  Webster accomplished his mission—amazingly, perhaps, for one who had trouble negotiating a sofa. Clemens sent him to Rome in the summer of 1886 for an audience with the pope. Webster enjoyed a nice chat with the pontiff, who knighted him even though he was not Catholic, and gave him a knightly uniform.

  M ARK TWAIN’S initial reaction to the book’s failure was remarkably controlled, given his usual tendencies in times of crisis. “I have to confess that to me our outlook is disturbing,” he told Webster as the early signs of disaster trickled in. “I suppose the Pope’s book and the McClellan book together will not more than pay the expenses of the last year and a half…”43 As time went on, though, his composure gave way to a kind of shock.

  Years later, Howells sadly recalled the near-narcotic power of the expectations Clemens had conjured for the book: “It would have a currency bounded only by the number of Catholics in Christendom…it would be circulated literally in every country of the globe, and Clemens’s book agents would carry the…bound copies of the work to the ends of the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every Catholic must…as he hoped to be saved.”44 He recollected how the scheme’s “hidden defect” eventually revealed itself: “We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often when they could, they did not wish to read…” He described the effect of this latest betrayal of faith on its victim: “The failure was incredible to Clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so exuberantly jubilant.”45 Mark Twain remained silent on the subject of the pope’s book in his autobiographical dictations and in his correspondence. He refrained from scapegoating Charles Webster, but the target on Webster’s back grew more conspicuous: every decision, every action of his was a fresh disaster, in the Boss’s acutely noticing eye.

  In January 1887, Henry Ward Beecher burned anew to write The Life of Christ—the project that had inspired him to organize the Quaker City expedition twenty years earlier. Webster was keen to sign him up. Beecher offered to write his autobiography (not a tell-all, apparently) for publication in tandem with The Life of Christ. Clemens approved a $5,000 advance, and predicted that the Christ book would bring in $350,000, if the reverend “heaves in just enough piousness.”46 Instead, Beecher collapsed and died on March 8 of a cerebral hemorrhage, at age seventy-three. The Beecher family repaid the money, and began to negotiate a biography of Beecher based on his notes and papers, but the Boss was not pleased with this turn of events. He stopped short of blaming Beecher’s hemorrhage on his nephew, but later claimed that when Webster told him he wanted to resurrect The Life of Christ, “I suggested that he ought to have tried for Lazarus, because that had been tried once and we knew it could be done.”47

  A far juicier opportunity for recrimination occurred in March,
when it was discovered that a company bookkeeper named F. M. Scott had absquatulated with some $25,000. Clemens was doubly outraged: at the act itself, and at its incursion into his bank account, every penny of which he desperately needed for payments toward the Paige machine. Webster suspected Scott almost at the outset, Sam wrote in his notebook, “& told me so.”48 He took to addressing Webster directly in these journal-writings, in lines filled with invective: “When you imagined that Scott had stolen $4,000 from you, albeit you could produce no evidence of it, you handsomely called on me to make up the loss by an advance of wages—which I did; being an ass.”49 After Scott turned himself in and restored some of the money, Clemens castigated his nephew for advocating leniency on the thief out of consideration to Scott’s wife and three children—Sam wanted the family house confiscated and sold out from under them. Webster, with Clemens’s urging, pressed for Scott’s conviction, and expressed approval for the six-year prison sentence that resulted. It wasn’t just the Scott case, though; it was everything. The lavishness of Webster’s New York office rankled Clemens (with luxurious appointments and fourteen clerks, the premises were indeed a little over the top). On April Fool’s Day, Webster committed another blunder of tact: he demanded that Clemens agree to limit his capital investments in the publishing house to $75,000 (“to save it from destruction in case I ruined myself,” Sam explained to Orion50); the contract also raised Webster’s salary to $3,800 a year. Webster’s worries about his boss’s capacity for self-ruin were prescient, but his manner, once again, was abrasive—irrecoverably so, this time. (“He made the mistake of his life last April,” Clemens seethed to Orion.51)