Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  It was a great lark for Mark Twain, and he passed the time as a man about town—the Belle of New York, as Mary Mapes Dodge dubbed him. He could be seen on the lecture stage along with James Whitcomb Riley, and in Delmonico’s, dining with the great actor Sir Henry Irving. Henry Rogers introduced Clemens to Hellen Keller, and took him to the fights; they saw Gentleman Jim Corbett box an exhibition at Madison Square Garden. Afterward, the great architect Stanford White, who happened along, took Sam into Corbett’s dressing room. Clemens told the champ that he wanted a match in June. Corbett “ducked out” of it: if Mark Twain hit him with a lucky punch, “then my reputation would be gone & you would have a double one.”13 He was also writing again: ten thousand words on Tom Sawyer’s Mystery (later Tom Sawyer, Detective), he reported to Livy.14 To Susy, he wrote, “My new book I am writing makes me jolly. I live in it,” quickly adding, “But when I think of Joan of Arc, how I long to get at that again!”15

  The most hopeful symptom of all, perhaps, was that Mark Twain was raising hell. His “fine fury” ignited as he sat reading his Pudd’nhead Wilson proofs in the office of the Century one afternoon, and discovered that somebody had been mucking with his punctuation—“my punctuation, which I had deeply thought out, & laboriously perfected! Then my volcano turned itself loose, & the exhibition was not suited to any Sunday school.”16 The culprit, he learned, was a “peerless imported proof-reader, from Oxford University,” whose word around the magazine was considered “sacred, final, immutable.”

  I said I didn’t care if he was an Archangel imported from Heaven, he couldn’t puke his ignorant impudence over my punctuation, I wouldn’t allow it for a moment. I said I couldn’t…sit in the presence a proof-sheet where that blatherskite had left his tracks…this stuff must be set up again & my punctuation restored…I’m to return there tomorrow & read the deodorized proof.17

  As a general rule, it was not a great idea to mess with Mark Twain’s punctution.

  Paige cracked on January 15, 1894. A telegram from Chicago announced that he would accept Rogers’s terms, given certain cash stipulations. Sam dashed off a letter of exultation to Livy.

  I came up to my room and began to undress, and then, suddenly and without warning the realization burst upon me and overwhelmed me: I and mine, who were paupers an hour ago, are rich now and our troubles are over!

  I walked the floor for half an hour in a storm of excitement. Once or twice I wanted to sit down and cry…18

  His public resurgence continued. Cosmopolitan, with Howells in the editor’s chair, published sketches of his in three of its fall 1893 issues. Tom Sawyer Abroad was being featured in St. Nicholas, and Pudd’nhead Wilson was running in the Century in the months leading up to its April 1894 publication, and was already generating buzz: a professor lecturing on “Politics from 1781 to 1815” managed to work in his opinion that Mark Twain had “serious deeps,” and that “ ‘Pudd’nhead’ was clearly & powerfully drawn & would…take his place as one of the great creations of American fiction.”19 His take on the professor’s comment reflected the growing primacy of the machine in his reveries. The idea was “unexpected,” he told Livy,

  For I have never thought of Pudd’nhead as a character, but only as a piece of machinery—a button or a crank or a lever, with a useful function to perform in a machine, but with no dignity above that.20

  Webster & Company remained anemic, and so Henry Rogers, despite the distraction of a fire that gutted his summer house in his hometown of Fairhaven, took on the role of book agent for Pudd’nhead Wilson and scored a dual-publisher deal for an April 1894 launch: Frank Bliss’s American Publishing Company would swallow its old resentments and issue the novel by subscription, while Harper would publish for the bookstore trade. At the end of January, the man who only a little more than four years earlier had declared his “retirement from literature permanently” wrote to his wife,

  When the anchor is down, then I shall say:

  “Farewell—a long farewell—to business! I will never touch it again!”

  I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it, I will swim in ink! Joan of Arc—but all this is premature; the anchor is not down yet.21

  On February 1, James Paige signed Rogers’s contract. A cable from Sam to Olivia arrived in Paris the following morning, their twenty-fourth anniversary: “Wedding news: Our ship is safe in port. I sail the moment Rogers can spare me.”22 That moment came on March 7, when Clemens, having given Rogers the power of attorney, embarked for France. His stay lasted three weeks. Then Webster & Company received its death wound, and Samuel Clemens crossed the Atlantic once again. Clemens had let himself believe that Rogers could prevent this. Given the Century Company’s wish to buy all of Mark Twain’s books, the financier had suggested turning the screws and obliging Century to buy out the entire Webster inventory, which would entail a loss, but at least would get Clemens out of his heavy bank debt. But in early April, the Mount Morris Bank installed a new president and board of directors, and these men called in the publishing house’s loans. Only an inspired ploy by Rogers saved Clemens from losing control of his own literary properties.

  The bank insisted on taking ownership of every asset under Sam’s name until the $100,000 debt was paid off. These would include the Hartford house, and the copyrights to everything he’d published. In what must have been a tumultuous confrontation, Henry Rogers preserved the copyrights by declaring that Olivia Clemens, who was owed $60,000 by Webster & Company, had first claim on this property as a preferred creditor. As for the house—she owned it, not her husband. Rogers also pushed through a settlement that would require Clemens to pay just fifty cents on each dollar owed. On April 18, 1894, Charles Webster & Company was liquefied. Fred Hall nearly wept when he signed—and drew Clemens’s steely contempt: “…I half thought he would go off & drown himself…In all my days I have never seen so dull a fool.”23 As the newspapers played the story prominently, Sam himself kept up a defiant façade. He was insouciance itself on a train to Hartford a couple of days later: “As I hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of, I wasn’t ashamed; so I didn’t avoid anybody, but talked with everybody I knew on the train.”24 Livy felt differently. In a letter to Susan Crane, she poured out the humiliation and despair of a worn-out woman whose own family traditions would never permit such a capitulation—and whose father would never have shown the recklessness and ineptitude that brought catastrophe about.

  The hideous news of Webster & Co.’s failure reached me by cable on Thursday…Of course I knew it was likely to come, but I had great hope that it would be in some way averted…I have a perfect horror and heart-sickness over it. I cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace…

  Sue, if you were to see me you would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year. I have wrinkled.

  Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems to me so impossible…I feel that my life is an absolute and irretrievable failure. Perhaps I am thankless, but I so often feel that I should like to give it up and die…25

  She never directed any such bitterness at her husband; she tried to soothe him and protect him from self-recrimination. She closed her letters with endearments like, “Good night yours in the deepest love of my heart, Livy L.C.”26 Her ruse worked better than she perhaps knew. “Nothing daunts Mrs. Clemens or makes the world look black to her,” Sam wrote to Rogers later that year, “—which is the reason I haven’t drowned myself.”27 By the time he wrote this letter, in December 1894, it had grown clear to Sam that the Clemenses could never again afford to live in the Hartford house, “though it would break the family’s hearts if they could believe it.”28

  Livy recoiled from Henry Rogers’s combative stance against the bank, a stance that her husband had gleefully adopted as his own.

  Oh my darling we want those debts paid and we want to treat them all not only honestly but we want to help them in every possible way…You say Mr Rogers has said some caustic and telling thin
gs to the creditors. I should think it was the creditors place to say caustic things to us.29

  She went on, drawing upon a sense of civility and fair play that she had learned in the Langdon household, and at the Elmira Ladies Seminary:

  My darling I cannot have any thing done in my name that I should not approve. I feel that we owe those creditors not only the money but our most sincere apologies that we are not able to pay their bills when they fall due.30

  And turning the emphasis back to her husband’s interests, “You know my darling, now is the time for you to add to or mar the good name that you have made. Do not for one moment let your sense of our need of money get advantage of your sense of justice & generosity.”31 Livy’s pacific moral clarity led her to insist on a goal that Rogers supported and Sam Clemens readily, and publicly, embraced: he would pay back not just a fraction of the debt as required, but all of it—one hundred cents on every dollar. He was fifty-eight, sick, rheumatic. His body, including the muscles in his writing arm, was rebelling against him. His wife was hardly more than an invalid; his eldest daughter was depressive and possibly anemic; his youngest daughter was now prey to serious epileptic attacks. His ability to write at a sustained level of high coherence, inventiveness, and purpose had atrophied. Repaying this bankruptcy debt in full would require a hellish effort of some sort—one that almost certainly would call forth every bit of physical and psychic strength that he had left. But Livy wanted it, and so, in fact, did he. All right then. He would go to hell.

  There was worse to come.

  Even in the uproar of negotiating the terms of his bankruptcy, Clemens had found time in New York to renew his dragnet for investors in Paige machine royalties and stocks. Rogers continued to act as his advocate and informal partner, even though he had now suffered a loss infinitely more devastating than that of his Fairhaven home. His wife, Abbie Palmer Gifford Rogers, died on the operating table on May 21, as surgeons tried to remove a tumor that had gone undiagnosed for weeks. (“Let us be spared this, my darling,” Clemens wrote to Livy in reference to Rogers’s grief. “May we die together.”)32 With reports from the Paige factory that the machine was finally near perfection (but no Paige signature on the necessary patents as yet) he sailed to France on May 9. “I am glad Paige has signed,” he dryly wrote to Rogers in June, when that gesture was finally accomplished. “I wish it was his death-warrant. Well, maybe it is.”33 The Chicago Herald agreed to install the typesetter for a series of tests that to all appearances were but a formality, a prelude to its long-anticipated debut in the market. Aboard ship, he moved the “Joan” manuscript ahead. He composed his second piece of literary criticism for the North American Review, which was just out with an installment of his Harriet Shelley essay. Far from the severity of that screed, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” is a masterpiece of playful demolition: it indicts the sonorous author of The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder for his utter misconceptions of the forest, the ways of Indians, the art of tracking quarry, and the behavior of rifle bullets—and then moves on to a merciless review of Cooper’s rhetorical style. “There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction,” Mark Twain intones near the outset, “—some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them.”34 The normally humorless Review published it word for word.

  Life within the family was not exactly trouble-free. Susy remained depressive and feverish; on a family hiatus for her sake to the baths at La Bourboule-les-Bains, in the south of France, she lay in bed for two days. A few weeks earlier, an unsuspecting Livy had approved her request to cross the English Channel for a reunion with Louise Brownell, who was studying at Oxford. There, Susy found that Louise’s romantic affection for her had cooled—a traumatic discovery, given that thoughts of Louise were all that had sustained Susy during her European exile. A long undated letter of Susy’s, probably written at the end of July 1894, expresses her anguish in prose as heartrending as any her father ever used to portray his own or his characters’ suffering.

  I don’t know how to write you. There seems to be nothing to say…Your dear letter has come…saying you are likely to go to America this year. I was all unforewarned and it made my heart stand still. I would not, could not dream this would happen and that I should lose you now at the moment of having you again, after all these years of waiting. It is impossible. I cannot believe it. It cannot be true. Oh no. Dear dear Louise, my darling it is too dreadful!…

  …Please come in to me and let me lie down in your arms, and forget everything but the joy of being near you—Write me that you will let me see you once, one little once before you go…Forgive whatever there is wrong in this letter. It’s my love that’s so violent and demanding my poor terrified love that cannot give you up.35

  Susy’s broken spirit did not stop her father from writing rapidly, on the book he was now calling The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, By the Sieur Louis de Conte—the epic-sized paean to Susy’s soaring and immaculate heart that he deemed too pure even to risk contamination by the taint of “Mark Twain.”

  Sam sailed back to America for a brief visit in mid-July, mostly to comfort Rogers in his bereavement. He briefly examined some samples of Paige’s test production at the Chicago Herald, where it was on display for sixty days in competition with rival typesetters. He liked what he saw, and he liked even better some pages that Rogers sent him after his return to France: “The Herald has just arrived, and that column is healing for sore eyes. It affects me like Columbus sighting land.”36 This Columbus, unfortunately, was about to drop off the edge of the world.

  As he furiously ploughed on through the “Joan” manuscript at the cliffside coastal village of Etretat, back in Chicago the Paige sputtered again. Something in its eighteen thousand moving parts just wasn’t…quite…right. It began to jam again. In mid-November, the consecutive breakdowns began. Rogers hurried to Chicago, and Clemens waited helplessly in Paris for further news. It arrived at 8 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day, a letter with Henry Rogers’s return address. Clemens told himself to stand by for a cyclone as he opened it. The cyclone gusted out: Rogers now doubted that the machine would ever work. Panic-stricken, Clemens could only wait some more. Two days later, on his fifty-ninth birthday, Livy handed Sam his birthday presents, which cost two francs, total. “[A]nd we have begun life on a new and not altogether unpromising basis.”37

  The Herald suspended the tests, as expected, and passed on the Paige. On December 22, Clemens learned that Rogers had dissolved the Paige Compositor Manufacturing Company. It was over. So was his fortune. Only partial financial records survive, so it is impossible to know how great his total losses were. Estimates range between $170,000 and $300,000, in late 19th-century dollars, or between $3,300,000 and $4,900,000 in today’s money.

  In the end, the author-businessman who saw Man as a kind of imperfect machine was done in by a machine that was too manlike.

  JAMES PAIGE never reestablished his career. He became caught in a scandal involving a tall, blonde, married former actress who claimed he had once breached a promise to marry her. He died in 1917 and was buried in a potter’s field in what is now Oak Park, Illinois, probably by an undertaker named Funk.38 Samuel Clemens and Henry Rogers remained close friends until Rogers’s death in 1909, a year before Clemens’s own. Much has been written about the moral contradictions inherent in Clemens’s warm regard for the ruthless capitalist, given his own tendencies toward populism and reform. Certainly Rogers’s reputation was no secret to the author. Clemens, who at times seemed able to spot a business shenanigan from around the curve of the earth, had watched close up as Rogers employed some of his “Hell-Hound” tactics. He’d chortled with Rogers when one of their prearranged ruses worked on some clueless adversary. He had personally turned down a book manuscript submitted to Webster & Company that attacked the ethics of Standard Oil and its executives. Yet as far as Clemens was concerned, Rogers’s dark side did not exist. This opinion stood the test of time. As early as Februa
ry 1894, he was assuring Livy that Rogers was “the only man I would give a damn for.”39 Eight years later, at a tribute to the industrialist, he told the guests, “He is not only the best friend I have ever had, but is the best man I have known.”40 If William Dean Howells was listening somewhere, he kept his reaction to himself.

  The elements of Samuel Clemens’s regard for Rogers are self-evident. Less clear, perhaps, is the question of why Rogers should feel drawn to Sam Clemens. He was probably drawn to Clemens for the same reasons that moved Howells, and Bret Harte, and Jervis Langdon, and Grant, and Matthew Arnold (in person, anyway), and all the other powerful, irrevocably grown-up eminences whose paths crossed Sam’s. They recognized in him their boyhood selves—or the selves they wished they could have been. The most ingenious theory for Rogers’s “pirate” persona stipulated that he was simply caught up in a fantasy of the sort that boys play on river islands in summertime. It was offered by a fellow player, the Boston stockbroker and writer Thomas W. Lawson, whose own fortune approached $50 million.

  Above all things Henry H. Rogers is a great actor. Had his lot been cast upon the stage, he might easily have eclipsed the fame of Booth or Salvini. He knows the human animal from the soles of his feet to the part in his hair and from his shoulder-blade to his breastbone, and like all great actors is not above getting down to every part he plays. He is likely also so to lose himself in a role that he gives it his own force and identity, and then things happen quite at variance with the lines.41