Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Mark Twain’s notebooks reveal the development of his ideology.

  There are in Conn, at this moment & in all countries, children & disagreeable relatives chained in cellars, all sores, welts, worms & vermin…This is to suggest that the thing in man which makes him cruel to a slave is in him permanently & will not be rooted out for a million years. To admit that slavery exists in any country is to admit that you may describe any form of brutal treatment which you can imagine & go there & find it had been imagined & applied before you.16

  He brooded on the droit du seigneur, the overlord’s ancient right to possess a bride on her wedding night, and its relation to absolute power, and also to “loyalty,” which to him was almost categorically undemocratic: “The stupid loyalty of to-day is the same sentiment, unaltered, that made le Droit possible, & the degradation is the same in quality & quantity…17 This new mental energy did not find its way immediately into his literature. In March 1888, Mark Twain gave two effective readings in Washington in support of international copyright reform; but writing copy seemed mostly beyond him. He could not even manage a coherent response to a new attack on American culture from Matthew Arnold, whose screed, “Civilisation in the United States,” appeared in the London journal Nineteenth Century in April, and was quickly reprinted by the New York Post. In effect, the piece argued that its own title was an oxy-moron. Expanding on the thesis introduced in “A Word about America,” and drawing on observations made during his lecture tours of 1883 and 1886, Arnold fleshed out his excoriation of America as a benighted, vulgar wasteland, noisily braying its greatness while awash in mindless pursuit of the dollar, and uninterested in ideas. Though probably not conceived as such, the essay was in many ways a withering retort to the red-white-and-blue iconoclasm of The Innocents Abroad, which Arnold by then had had nearly two decades to chew on.

  In truth everything is against distinction in America…The glorification of the “average man,” who is quite a religion with statesmen and publicists there, is against it. The addiction to “the funny man,” who is a national misfortune there, is against it. Above all, the newspapers are against it.18

  Arnold did not name “the funny man,” but he hardly needed to.

  Invited to rebut Arnold by the editor of the Forum, a New York journal of the arts and opinion, Mark Twain worked for nearly two weeks on drafts, but saw that none of it added up to a comprehensible essay. He pleaded the need to attend to his wife, who was suffering from a new attack of diphtheria, and gave it up. He wrote a speech attacking Arnold, but never delivered it. He considered a book-length rebuttal to Arnold, but never wrote it. “Matthew Arnold’s civilization is superficial polish,”19 he scribbled in his notebook—rather banal mots, for the American master of invective.

  In fact, the only thing Mark Twain accomplished as a result of Arnold’s provocation was the completion, with a vengeance, of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. “I had a sort of half-way notion that I might possibly finish [the novel] this summer,” Clemens wrote to his British publisher in September, “but I…don’t suppose I shall finish it till next summer.”20 By that time, though, he was tearing along again. The failed Forum essay became the seedbed for the manuscript’s final blossoming, just as the Briton’s earlier condescensions had infused its conception. Did Arnold worry about the vulgar spread of American culture? Mark Twain’s time-traveling alter ego Hank Morgan redecorates Camelot with it. As 6th-century England is transformed by guns, telegraphs, advertising, dynamite, railways, the printing press, the telephone, soap, “prophylactic” toothbrushes, and cutting-edge weaponry, Twain/Grant/Morgan asserts himself as King Arthur’s right-hand man, leading him on an incognito tour of his own realm. He is now “the Boss,” an ancestor of the Vandal with sidearms and a marketing plan. He starts a newspaper and turns a priest into a sportswriter, assigned to cover jousting tournaments. He de-chivalrizes five hundred knights by putting them on bicycles, and then scatters them with a pair of revolvers.

  But cartoonish fun was far from the only theme. A teletype printout of Mark Twain’s concerns and obsessions at the time he wrote it, Connecticut Yankee has as much regard for realist logic as the Book of Revelation. As the novel moves toward its consummation—Armageddon—Mark Twain abandons satire and farce with hardly a backward glance. His predictive intuition for the America to come is at full force: he conjures a grand finale that is the template for pop-cultural novelists and filmmakers a century in the future. (Connecticut Yankee is the first American science-fiction novel, among other things.) The Church of England—a proto–Evil Empire here, lacking only its Ming—has at last organized its vast resources to crush the lone hero Morgan and the liberating apostasy he represents. The final reckoning begins. King Arthur (the classic hero’s sidekick now) dies heroically in single combat, as classic heroes’ sidekicks must. Now it is only Morgan and fifty-two “clean-minded” teenaged sidekicks untainted by churchly superstition who stand between England and—well, Matthew Arnold. The Church gathers its minions, twenty-five thousand mounted mailed knights, and begins its ponderous exterminating slouch. But the Church hasn’t reckoned with the righteous power of…The Machine! Furthering the cinematic template, Morgan and his crew lovingly assemble their ordnance (“I’ve grouped a battery of thirteen gatling guns…” “Well, and the glass-cylinder dynamite torpedoes?”21) and turn Merlin’s Cave into a storehouse for weapons of mass destruction. When the regulation-clueless knights come charging forth into the Sand Belt, Morgan touches a button and blows the first wave to smithereens (“Of course we could not count the dead, because they did not exist as individuals, but merely as homogeneous protoplasm, with alloys of iron” and buttons…22). Another button touch activates a maze of electric fences and takes care of several ensuing waves (“There was a groan you could hear!”23). The remaining ten thousand are dispatched the old-fashioned way: thirteen gatling guns “vomit death” into them; the escapees drown in a ditch. Game Over.

  Mark Twain finished A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in April 1889, and revised it slightly on page proofs for the Century, which published excerpts in November. A month later, the book was issued by Charles Webster & Company, with illustrations by Daniel Beard, later a founder of the Boy Scouts of America, whose ornately filigreed drawings Mark Twain hoped would offset some of the crudeness and mayhem inside. (Beard was a little too ornate in designing the cover, crowding it so much that he decided to leave the word “Connecticut” out of the title. Mark Twain loved his drawings anyway, and said they were better than the book itself.) Chatto & Windus published the English edition under the more morning-coated title, A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. Consistent with the novel’s futuristic instincts, the first Yankee movie was released only thirty-two years later. The first sound version, in 1931, starred Will Rogers, a figure often compared to Mark Twain as a cultural satirist. Other movie and TV adaptations featured Bing Crosby, Boris Karloff, Tennessee Ernie Ford, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, Bugs Bunny, and the imagineers of Walt Disney, who in 1979 released an adaptation originally titled Unidentified Flying Oddball.24 The novel also provided a future president with the 20th century’s most memorable campaign slogan, when, in Chapter 13, Hank Morgan muses that what the subjugated “freemen” of Camelot need is “a new deal.”25

  Matthew Arnold was spared the danger of being struck dead of a seizure while reading this entrée into emerging American aesthetics. He expired on April 15, 1888, at age sixty-six, while running to catch a tram in Liverpool.

  Mark Twain finished the manuscript amid a whirlwind of distractions, some old, some new. The rudderless Charles Webster & Company had managed to publish only seven titles in 1888, none of them blockbusters: the Beecher biography prepared by the late minister’s son; the Twain-Howells Library of Humor; a how-to book on the buying, cooking, and serving of food; a minister’s collection of his Yale lectures about preaching; a book about Hawaii by Rollin Daggett of Washoe days; and something called Yanks and Johnnies; or, Laugh and
Grow Fat.

  The seventh title offered some hope—but it eventually delivered financial calamity, and typified Webster & Company’s self-destructive futility. The first few volumes of A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time began issuing early in 1888. The Library was conceived in 1885 by a New York literary critic and stockbroker named Edmund Clarence Stedman, who sought permission to include some of Mark Twain’s works. His query attracted the interest of Charles Webster, who invested $8,000 in the plates for the volumes in late 1887 when the original publisher (W. E. Dibble of Cincinnati) bailed out of it. Mark Twain approved the deal, but remained dubious: “I think well of the Stedman book, but I can’t somehow bring myself to think very well of it.”26 This time, both Webster and Clemens were right: by May 1889, Fred Hall was able to tell Clemens that the books were selling well. The series eventually numbered ten volumes, containing 1,740 selections by 573 authors, and became a popular success and an enduring archival treasure.

  The problem was that its expenses gobbled up its sturdy profits. Salesmen allowed customers to buy the series “on installment,” meaning deferred payments. This meant printing and storing ten volumes per customer, instead of just one, a quantum jump in unreimbursed production and storage costs. The company had to establish $30,000 in credit with the hard-nosed Mount Morris Bank, an outfit that would show no mercy when the time of reckoning came. By 1893 the Library had run up more than $62,000 in uncollected installment payments from customers. And that was not all: it turned out that in buying up the printing plates, Webster had neglected to secure copyright on the first five volumes. To make good, the company had to provide Dibble with sets of the series equal to $6,000 in manufacturing costs. (Dibble resold these, and kept the profits.) This meant an extra press run of 3,000 sets, or 33,000 individual books. The absence of revenue necessitated another loan, of $15,000, from Mount Morris Bank. Fred Hall realized belatedly that the company should have established a $200,000 fund for manufacture and sale. More belatedly still, Clemens tried to organize a stock company for the purpose.

  Small wonder, then, that cash on hand at the company often dipped below $2,000. Mark Twain’s dreams of using the profits of his publishing house to finance the Paige were shattered. There were no profits—at least none that he could make use of. Extinction loomed. In the early months of 1889, Clemens and Fred Hall tried to reorganize the company, which was still tethered to the outmoded “subscription” method of selling its product. (Hall had daydreamed “a corps of lady canvassers” to flog the cookbook.)27 Yet the very means by which Mark Twain fast became a bestselling author had now become a liability. Americans no longer wanted door-to-door book salesmen. From 1888 through 1890, Webster & Company stayed alive—barely—on the strength of profits from a few of its books. Most of these profits, some $50,000 a year, were poured into the maw of the Library of American Literature, the title of which might more aptly have been, The Paige Typesetter of Publishing. At the end of August 1889, Charles Webster & Company had a cash balance of exactly $859.18, and faced a loan repayment of $4,000 to the Mount Morris Bank by September 11.

  AND THEN there was the real Paige Typesetter. In November 1888, Samuel Clemens tried to declare the end of his psychic bondage to Paige and his contraption: “Since the spring of ’86, the thing has gone straight downhill toward sure destruction. It must be brought to an end Feb. 1 at all hazards. This is final.”28 This followed a New York Times story reporting that a working model of a type-justifying and composition machine was on display in the city. Clemens may have communicated his impatience directly to the inventor: something roused Paige from his dreamy reveries; he wrenched his metallic landslide of movable parts into sufficient working order so that at the end of December, a freshly delighted Clemens was able to hand Livy a sheet of paper that bore the typographical message:

  To Mrs. S. L. Clemens.

  Happy New Year!

  The machine is finished, & this is the first work done on it.

  SL Clemens

  Hartford, Dec. 1888.29

  The cruel illusion kept Clemens exhilarated for several more days.

  EUREKA!

  Saturday, January 5, 1889—12:20 p.m. At this moment I have seen a line of movable type spaced & justified BY MACHINERY! This is the first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has ever been done…

  This record is made immediately after the prodigious event.30

  The machine was not quite finished, it turned out. It needed more…tinkering. Clemens received a feeler about demonstrating the typesetter at a February 13 newspaper convention. Nope, the assistant Franklin Whitmore confessed. It needed another week. Several small matters. Let the oil get to running freely, limber up all the parts, that sort of thing. By March, for sure. Ready to show the world. Clemens once again embraced his role as Paige’s useful idiot. He kept the money stream flowing, and invited some newspapermen to the showing. March arrived. Tinkering needed. Show canceled.

  A third distraction for Clemens, which reemerged now and would shadow him throughout his remaining years, was that of the graveyard. Death had struck repeatedly at Samuel Clemens’s family in his early life, but had not claimed a close relative since the loss of his son Langdon in 1872. But after a sixteen-year reprieve, a new season of bereavement arrived. Around September 6, 1888, as the Clemenses were preparing to disembark Quarry Farm after another late-summer hiatus there, Theodore Crane collapsed under a paralytic stroke. Sam, Livy, and the girls stayed in Elmira for another three weeks, helping Livy’s adoptive sister, Susan Crane, attend to her husband. His condition was so grave that Clemens jotted a reminder to himself to have a death notice prepared in New York. He and Livy opened their Hartford house to the Cranes, who stayed through the winter and spring as Theodore sought treatment from doctors in New York. Livy and Susan watched Crane rally several times, only to sink back again. “These two women will get sick if this continues,” Clemens wrote to Mary Fairbanks.31 It continued.

  On March 3, 1889, death visited the household of Sam’s brother-in-spirit, William Dean Howells. William and Elinor’s poet-daughter Winifred died at age twenty-five. Howells never recovered from this loss, a twin of the one that would crush Sam and Livy seven years later. Winifred was a victim as much of Victorian sexual superstition as of the mysterious, debilitating “disease” that had plagued her for a decade. With conventional doctors unable to diagnose her frequent spells of enervation, the Howellses had finally sent her to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, an originator of the catch-all “neurasthenia” theory for debilitation in women, and of the equally scattershot “Rest Cure” designed to get them up and functioning again. (Livy Langdon’s own long bedridden stint after her youthful illness was a form of the “Rest Cure,” from which she never regained her full strength.) Weir believed that “neurasthenia” was caused by the inherent weak will and selfishness of women; his famously strict regimen variously involved forced bed rest, forced walks, forced feeding, and a general aura of control. He chose the force-feeding approach with Winifred, and she died soon afterward. Mitchell conducted his own autopsy, and reported to the Howellses that Winifred’s condition had been organic, and hopeless. This fraudulence compounded the parents’ grief with guilt over an inability to help their daughter find a physical cure.

  THE CLEMENSES’ annual summer at Quarry Farm became a death-watch in 1889, as Crane, transported back to his home on the hillside, deteriorated. His physical pain produced deep depression and a gathering sense of hopelessness.

  At a little after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, July 2, the telephone at the farmhouse rang and Clemens’s thirteen-year-old daughter Clara answered it. She relayed to her father the message that someone had read to her: “The machine is finished; come & see it work. J.W.P.”32

  Sam prepared to depart for Hartford, but the next day Theodore Crane died. He was fifty-eight. Clemens remained in Elmira for another week, arranging for the funeral. Then he set out for Connecticut alone. He inspected the “fini
shed” typesetter at the Pratt & Whitney site, and again built fantasies of wealth without limit. In the solitude of the great Nook Farm house, though, alone except for the servants, he fell prey to mortal thoughts. Theodore Crane’s death, following on the heels of Howells’s bereavement, moved him to reconsider the question of God. In a letter back to Livy, he came as close to an affirmation of belief as he had since his love-intoxicated courtship letters.

  We do see & feel the power of what we call God; we do see it & feel it in such measureless fulness, that we “ought to infer”—not Justice & Goodness from that; but…from another thing, namely: the fact that there is a large element of Justice & Goodness in His creature, man; & we may also infer that He has in Him Injustice & Ungoodness, because he has put those into man, too. Next I am privileged to infer that there is far more goodness than ungoodness in man, for if it were not so man would have exterminated himself before this…I detest Man, but nevertheless this is true of him.

  As for God, Sam assumed that “he is as good & as just as Man is (to place the likelihood at its lowest term). And if that is so…I am plenty safe enough in his hands.” The Deity that did frighten him “is the caricature of him which one finds in the Bible…I have met his superior a hundred times—in fact I amount to that myself.”33 In a similarly reflective mood, he wrote to his sister,