Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  On Friday, August 23, the bandaged-up Warramoo carried the Clemens entourage, along with several hundred rats and uncounted cockroaches, out from Vancouver into the Pacific, bound southwest for Australia. Sam watched the great brown gulls scrape the tips of their wings along the ocean surface, and dreamed at night about appearing before a lecture audience without his pants. Clara remembered shuffleboard tournaments and evenings spent studying the stars by telescope, and dancing. Papa remembered the shuffleboard, too: it “is rather violent exercise for me,” he moaned to Rogers. (He let it slip that he’d persevered enough to reign as sole “Champion of the South Seas.”)29 He took his card playing equally seriously, Clara recalled: “Continuous bad luck would start those little twitching muscles under his eyes that signified a growing storm, and then suddenly followed an avalanche of cards on the table and Father would sing out: ‘By the humping jumping—who can play with a hand like that?’ ”30 Then Livy would begin her cooing noises to calm him down.

  At Honolulu, which Clemens had not seen since his Ajax adventures twenty-nine years earlier, he missed a lecture when the ship was quarantined outside port: a cholera scare on shore. A young woman on board told him that her mother had made that Ajax voyage with him. He glumly stared at Oahu, thinking that if he did go ashore he might never leave. He contemplated “[t]wo sharks playing around, laying for a Christian.”31

  Southward again toward Australia. They crossed the equator at 4 p.m. on September 6. “Clara kodaked it.”32

  By now, Susy Clemens’s quest for serenity had led her to the foothills of the paranormal, and a curing system called Mental Science, developed in the 1840s by a former “mesmerist” named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, of Portland, Maine. Like several parallel theories of self-transcendence then in vogue, Mental Science assumed that certain “hidden powers of the mind,” once brought into active use, were capable of curing disease, which was nothing more than “error of mind.” Medicine was thus irrelevant. (Quimby seems to have believed that he cured himself of consumption by driving his carriage horse as fast as it would go one day, but remained elusive about the details.)33 Quimby was visited in 1862 by a sickly forty-one-year-old New Hampshire woman named Mary Baker, who later harnessed his teachings to the assumption that such healing was a manifestation of God; and, as Mary Baker Eddy, developed Christian Science, a system of belief that, among other things, rejected the doctrines of Christianity in favor of an amorphous consciousness that could be thought of as the Divine Mind.

  Mental Science was right up the alley of Samuel Clemens, who remained fascinated with “mental telegraphy” and had been intrigued with mesmerism since his Hannibal days. He’d taken Susy to a mesmerist while the family was in France to help her out of her funk. The chronically ailing Livy believed in it as well. “I have no language to say how glad & grateful I am that you are a convert to that rational & noble philosophy,” Sam wrote to his daughter, hardly dreaming how inadequate it would soon prove. “Stick to it; don’t let anybody talk you out of it.”34

  THE CLEMENSES arrived at Sydney to a tumultuous welcome: “Newspaper reporters, photographers, callers from all circles; and beggars of every description, slovenly and distinguished.”35 Carlyle Smythe was on hand to begin his management duties—hotels, transportation, lecture arrangements, and general safekeeping. He would prove a jolly companion and ardent billiards rival the rest of the way. Heaps of flowers arrived at their hotel, in such volume that to Clara, “they appeared to be symbols of condolence.”36 Newspapermen scribbled down Mark Twain’s every utterance. When he vented a little spleen at Bret Harte’s expense, calling the man heartless and his work shoddy, it created an uproar that quickly became international, and he later retracted it, sort of.37 Even Clemens’s festering carbuncle made the news: a reporter from the Adelaide South Australian Register asked him how he’d managed to smuggle it past customs, a setup for a witticism that Mark Twain pretty much flubbed. “It sits on me like the nation,” was about as good as he could manage.38 Australia was the Clemenses’ port of entry into the global supernation that was the British Empire. For Sam, the Empire’s salient features were human bondage and subjugation. The northern province of Queensland interested him as the epicenter of “Labor Traffic,” the quasi-legal system of raiding the nearby Timor and Coral Sea islands for “recruits” for working the great sugar plantations. Recent laws forbade coercive tactics, but Clemens lost no time locating a ship captain in the trade who railed, in timeless style, against the “cast-iron regulations”39 that put a crimp in his harvesting. (“They and the missionaries have poisoned his life…See him weep; hear him cuss between the lines.”)40

  Mark Twain kept politics out of his public talks. Chapter 13 of Following the Equator even recounts an appealing anecdote about the young Cecil Rhodes, just then a diamond mogul and colonial satrap in South Africa. His four readings over nine days in Sydney were a big hit here—as were his spiffy patent-leather shoes and black formal dress. The Australians treated the family like royalty: they were guests at horse races, polo games, dinner parties, and a ball at the Government House; fawned over by elegant hosts and hostesses whose grandparents were criminal convicts dumped onto the prison-island. Clara encountered a “maniac” who told her that three men were planning to assassinate her father on the lecture platform.41 Sam had another vivid dream; it seemed that the visible universe was “the physical person of God; that the vast world that we see twinkling millions of miles apart in the fields of space are the blood corpuscles in His veins; and that we and the other creatures are the microbes that charge with multitudinous life the corpuscles.”42 In Melbourne, Mark Twain’s lecture one night caused a man in a box seat to laugh until his face turned scarlet and he banged his walking stick on the floor. The Melbourne Argus kindly identified him as a local archdeacon. Even the Presbyterians were laughing hard, the story noted.43 He barnstormed through several other Australian cities and towns—Horsham, Stawell, Ballarat, Geelong, among others—and then headed for Tasmania. New Zealand for six weeks after that, sweeping through large towns and small, telling reporters which of his books he liked best, competing for attention with dogfights at Oamaru, and succumbing to another carbuncle at Napier, which forced him to cancel a talk and ruined his sixtieth birthday. He devised a nickname for towns and regions heavily influenced by transplanted British culture: “Junior Englands.”

  His renderings of this itinerary in Following the Equator are mostly genial, diaristic, but punctuated here and there with observations of the country as a speculator’s paradise; of tremendous wealth extracted and exported from the silver mines; the displacement of the aboriginals by British settlers amused by their primitive survival skills and oblivious to their intelligence. At Adelaide, he beheld the native Australian dog, the dingo—an ancient species, and a beautiful one. “He has been sentenced to extermination, and the sentence will be carried out. This is all right, and not objectionable. The world was made for man—the white man.”44 The scars of the great gold strike of 1851, on terrain and humanity, were everywhere obvious to him, and freighted. Ruminating on the reduction of native human beings in Australia by 80 percent in the first twenty years of British colonization, sometimes by means that amounted to mass murder (food laced with arsenic, for instance), he summed it up with the ironic contempt that would season much of his anti-imperialist writing.

  You observe the combination? It is robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man’s whisky…

  There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.45

  In mid-December the Clemenses looped back to Sydney, visited at Melbourne and Adelaide again; and on New Year’s Day, 1896, they and Smythe boarded the Oceana for the long haul through the Indian Ocean for Ceylon, three thousand miles to the northwest. They passed among the offshore islands, prison colonies not many decades earlier, “whence the poor exiled Tasmanian savages used to gaze at their lost homeland and
cry; and die of broken hearts.”46 On this voyage Clemens relaxed a little, despite having to put up with some irritating children and a score or so of “Salvationists” who sang hymns in the rain and then begged for contributions. He worked and reworked his reading/lectures, keeping two or three versions alive, committing to memory every line of each one, including the revisions. He memorized his work so thoroughly that on the platform, he was able to switch from one lecture text to another at whim, sometimes virtually in mid-thought, without betraying a trace of discontinuity.

  The vastness of the ocean, he commented in his notebook, lessened his belief in Noah’s Ark. He read a stack of novels, a genre that rarely interested him; he noted that he’d recently bailed out of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and some Jane Austen. He promised Livy one morning that he would swear off profanity, shortly before breaking two tumblers while trying to take some medicine—“then I released my voice. Mrs. C. behind me in the door: ‘Don’t reform any more, it isn’t any improvement.’ ”47

  Susy was visiting in New York now, stronger and happier than she had felt in years. Mental Science seemed to be working: a “healer” had visited her several times in Elmira during the summer and fall; Katy Leary skeptically peeked in as the woman would pass her hands over Susy’s throat, to strengthen it for singing. When Leary overheard the woman talking about being at a concert the previous night with her husband, it gave her the heebie-jeebies; the husband had been dead a quarter-century. In the city, Susy moved easily among artists and the avant-garde (as had her father in San Francisco). She paid calls on William Dean Howells and on Dr. Clarence Rice, and looked up Louise Brownell in Orange, New Jersey, a visit that seems to have been friendly rather than passionate and fraught. Brownell repaid the visit at Elmira in January. Life felt good again, and hopeful.

  Arriving at Colombo, in Ceylon, on January 13, Sam (still coughing), Livy, and Clara learned of a minor eruption from the world of the about-to-happen: the failed Jamestown Raid in the diamond-rich Transvaal, which was on their itinerary. A band sponsored by the extractive British South Africa Company had tried to overthrow the strong nationalist government of “Oom” Paul Kruger, and failed, with many of the insurgents thrown into prison. Cecil Rhodes was forced to resign as prime minister of the British-run Cape Colony; a greater war loomed.

  Mark Twain mounted an elephant near Colombo, and called Clara a “sassmill” when she giggled.48

  Seven days after that, steaming up the Arabian Sea, they arrived at a city that had no “Junior England” about it, and swept away Clemens’s jaded irony for a while.

  Bombay! A bewitching place, a bewildering place, an enchanting place—the Arabian Nights come again!…In the great bazar the pack and jam of natives was marvelous, the sea of rich-colored turbans and draperies an inspiring sight, and the quaint and showy Indian architecture was just the right setting for it.49

  He could not stop exclaiming over this “land of dreams and romance,” with its Aladdin lamps, tigers, elephants, cobras, its thousand religions and two million gods.50 India was the cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech; yet as the family was being shown to its hotel rooms by a “burly German” and his seventeen native servants, the German, for no obvious reason, belted one of them across the jaw, then chewed him out for some misstep. The white man’s imprint on a dark-skinned land, again. Some of the enchantment returned in the person of a new servant, a “frisky little forked black thing,” a “shiney-eyed little devil,” on whom Clemens hung the name “Satan.”51 “Satan,” answering a knock on the hotel room door, informed Clemens that God wanted to see him. This presence turned out to be a local holy man, and the purpose of his visit turned out to be a discussion of the philosophy contained in Huckleberry Finn.

  His many lectures were dazzling events there, as the elite of the great city turned out, the women in flashing jewelry, the British men in black evening dress, the Indians in white turbans. Mark Twain thanked the heat for giving him an excuse to wear white clothes whenever he wanted. He lectured one night in “a snow-white fulldress, swallow-tail and all,” as he later described it, and dubbed this “delightful impudence” his “dontcaradam suit.”52 Livy wrote letters to Susy describing entertainments at the homes of princes and maharajahs. “Father gathered the impression from his royal host that his country was dissatisfied with the English powers and would never be completely happy until it was completely liberated from English influence,” Clara recalled.53 Livy visited a museum and found herself surrounded by beautifully dressed and bejeweled women who inspected her closely and chased her behind exhibits and into other rooms. The heat eventually threw Clemens into a mild depression, and he told Livy one sweltering night that because of their debt, they could probably never return to America again.

  The Indians’ seemingly passive subjugation to the British Empire troubled him. Walking at dawn one morning, he encountered a “Hindoo” servant squatting in front of his master’s bungalow. The motionless man looked as though he were freezing. He was still in that position an hour later. “He will always remain with me, I suppose,” Mark Twain wrote. “…Whenever I read of Indian resignation, Indian patience under wrongs, hardships, and misfortunes, he comes before me. He becomes a personification, and stands for India in trouble.”54

  Susy Clemens turned twenty-four in March.

  Sam, Livy, Clara, and Smythe remained more than two months in India, ascending the Himalayas, traveling by rail across its continental vastness to Calcutta, then Darjeeling where, Sam reported, after a lecture, the family “came down the mountain (40 miles) at a dizzy toboggan gait on a six-seated hand-car and never enjoyed ourselves so much in all our lives.”55 Backtracking to Ceylon in early April, they then headed for Mauritius, there to change for the last phase of the itinerary—South Africa. They arrived at Durban, Natal, on May 6, intending to stay three months. Sam allowed Livy and Clara to recuperate in the coastal town while he barnstormed through Johannesburg, Pretoria, Queenstown, and several smaller cities. Letters from home awaited them, but none was from Susy. Livy found herself uneasy about this. She needn’t have—not exactly, not yet. Susy had relocated from Elmira, where Jean stayed on in school, to Hartford. She lived for a while with John and Alice Day at the Gothic-spired family house on Farmington Avenue. In midsummer the Days moved elsewhere, and the house fell vacant. Susy boarded with Charles and Susan Warner next door, but she could not resist crossing the lawn most days to spend long stretches by herself as the lone inhabitant of the Clemens mansion. She sang there, accompanying herself on the piano, as Sam used to do, and her voice floated through the open windows, diverting the Nook Farm neighbors, who sometimes sat outdoors to listen to it. Her life was quiescent, on the surface. But in June she wrote Louise Brownell a series of letters that darkly rehashed the turbulence of their former relationship.

  Mark Twain found his audiences of Dutch-descended farmers—the Boers—a little unresponsive at first, but quick to laugh once they warmed up. He added a glass of water to his platform props, carrying it onstage with him with an air of casualness that presaged generations of nightclub comics holding drinks in their hands. He made a strange detour in Pretoria: he visited the jail that held sixty-four of the Jamestown raiders and conspirators. He was approaching mental and physical exhaustion after nearly a year of constant sailing, overland travel, and readjustment to local food and customs, and the adrenal rush of performance—most of the time nursing one ailment or another. By his own admission, he was bewildered by the gnarly roots of South African politics. Perhaps for these reasons, and the irresistible glamour of the nearby gold and diamond mines, Clemens sympathized with these would-be usurpers of the Transvaal. (It didn’t help that he found the typical Boer “a white savage,”56 grubby and indolent.) Thinking to amuse the imprisoned men with a little gallows humor, he stood before them and launched into an off-the-cuff riff about the bright side of incarceration. “This jail is as good as any other,” he assured them,

  and, besides, being in
jail has its advantages. A lot of great men have been in jail. If Bunyan had not been in jail, he never would have written “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Then the jail is responsible for “Don Quixote.”57

  Apparently there weren’t too many aspiring novelists behind the bars; the prisoners gaped at him, and the joke fell flat. Worse: the Transvaal president, Kruger, was offended enough that he tightened restrictions on visitors to the jail. To Mark Twain’s credit, he visited the president, a heavy-faced man with chin whiskers who sat in an armchair smoking a pungent pipe as the author explained that it was all a joke, and the anticolonialist relented. All but four of the sixty-four prisoners were eventually released. But this was only the beginning. Mark Twain could not have comprehended the scope of the conflict that proceeded from the skirmish that drew him to Pretoria. The Kruger government’s resistance to British hegemony increased for three years until it erupted into the second Boer War in 1899. The invading British armies shocked even their fellow citizens with their brutal victory, which included extermination of resisting guerrilla bands and blockhouses and concentration camps for civilian Boers. The Empire’s legitimacy was fatally tarnished as the 20th century began. Mark Twain never quite pierced through to the anticolonial heart of this conflict; in Following the Equator, he described the jailed raiders as “Reformers”58 and showed more disapproval for their tactics than for their ideas. His ultimate sympathies in this conflict, though, were clear, and they lay with neither the Boers nor the British, but with the indigenous people that each side dispossessed.