Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  He roused himself in late November on behalf of the “stone blind and deaf, and formerly dumb”14 young woman whom he, Howells, and Henry Rogers had met two years earlier in New York. In a letter to Rogers’s second wife, Emilie Hart Rogers, he noted that Helen Keller* had recently passed the Harvard examination for admission to Radcliffe College, scoring a 90 as compared with the average of 78. Noting the young woman’s limited finances, Clemens wrote, “It won’t do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from her studies because of poverty—If she can go on with them she will make a fame that will endure in history for centuries.”15 He implored Mrs. Rogers to “lay siege to your husband”16 and encourage him to interest John D. and William Rockefeller to fund Helen’s education. Rogers complied; Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe College cum laude in 1904, en route to a career as one of the 20th century’s most inspirational women. She died in 1964. Clemens’s gesture was a bright moment in a dark season. He filled his notebook with lingering grief, and with notes for the great dark themes to come.

  We are nothing but echoes. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own, we are but a compost heap made up of the decayed heredities, moral and physical.17

  She was a poet—a poet whose song died unsung.18

  Sometimes…her speech was rocket-like; I seem to see it go up and up and up, a soaring, streaming, climbing, stem of fire, and finally burst in the zenith and rain colored sparks all around.19

  Of the demonstrably wise there are but two; those who commit suicide, and those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.20

  On April 13, he was able to enter a happier thought: “I finished my book today.”21 A month later—May 18—he entered a happier thought still: “Finished the book again. Addition of 30,000 words.”22 He’d worked almost robotically for six months on it (it was the first book he’d written without putting the manuscript aside for a period), and the finished product reflected his benumbed state—even after he deleted several passages directly commenting on his grief. His flat options for a title further betray his depression: he toyed with “Imitating the Equator,” “Another Innocent Abroad,” “The Latest,” and “The Surviving Innocent Abroad”; not until July did he decide on Following the Equator and its faintly redundant subtitle, A Journey Around the World. The book was largely a series of transpositions from his notebooks (even sometimes literally including pages torn from the notebook itself), laced with helpings of regional history taken from other authors, about thirty in all. Its narrative spine was a straightforward record of his lecture itinerary, mixing political observation and travelogue tidbits with roughly equal emphasis. He sent it to Frank Bliss at the American Publishing Company as soon as he’d finished the May revisions. Bliss cut the conclusions of several chapters, excising passages that bored him—audacities his late father never would have dared. If Mark Twain noticed, he let it go. Bliss packaged the book handsomely, with a colorful African elephant on the cover and several photographs among its nearly two hundred illustrations, a first for a book by Mark Twain. He published it in mid-November, with Chatto & Windus (using a separately revised text) issuing it as More Tramps Abroad at around the same time. The reviews were respectful, and the sales went far toward restoring the balance of Mark Twain’s bankruptcy debt. At about the same time, Harper & Brothers brought out the collection of short stories and sketches, Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective and Other Stories.

  THROUGH THE early months of 1897, Samuel Clemens tried his best to preserve his obscurity in London, but it was a losing battle. Mark Twain may no longer have been interested in the world, but the world was interested in Mark Twain. Rumors about him floated, including the lurid one that he and his family were destitute. The New York Herald took this one seriously enough to launch a charity fund in his name; publisher James Gordon Bennett and the capitalist Andrew Carnegie each chipped in a thousand dollars. On the advice of Rogers, who continued as his financial manager and de facto literary agent, Clemens wrote to the newspaper asking it to close the fund, although the idea had its appeal for him. The rumor drew the attention of a cousin of his, a doctor named James Ross Clemens, who was living in London. Dr. Clemens visited his famous relative, whom he’d not met. The two hit it off famously, but when the doctor fell seriously ill while at Tedworth Square, the London papers noted the address and mistook the name for that of Sam. A new rumor arose: Mark Twain was near death. In early June, a young reporter from the New York Journal, named Frank Marshall White, knocked on Clemens’s door and guilelessly showed Sam a pair of cablegrammed instructions from his editor. The first read:

  If Mark Twain dying in poverty, in London, send 500 words.23

  The second:

  If Mark Twain has died in poverty send 1000 words.24

  Clemens explained the misidentification and assured White, as he recalled it, that his cousin had recovered. “The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.”25 The literal-minded young man handed in the quote exactly as his source had instructed, and within a day or so people around the world were repeating the key line—“the report of my death was an exaggeration”—to one another, and realizing how long it had been since they’d had a jolt of Mark Twain’s humor (if “humor” it was). The remark, which in its variations remains one of the two or three most universally associated with him, restored him to international attention.

  Not that he was much interested in international attention. He did agree to supply an American newspaper syndicate with coverage of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee on June 22, the great processional ceremony celebrating her sixtieth year on the throne, and attracted as much attention from his special seat in the Strand as the parade. But a few weeks later, in mid-July, after minor eye surgery for Livy, the Clemens family fled London, bound for Vienna after a summer stay in Switzerland. Not even an offer of fifty thousand dollars from Pond to lecture in America that autumn could dissuade them from continuing their exile. A further incentive, besides seclusion, was the renowned tutor Theodor Leschetizky, a central figure in the Viennese piano world, student of a protégé of Beethoven at ten, mentor to Paderewski; Clara longed to study with him.

  Joined by Susan Crane, Charley Langdon’s daughter Julie, and Ernst Koppe, a former Berlin waiter who had become Mrs. Crane’s caretaker, they settled in at Villa Buhlegg, Weggis, on Lake Lucerne—terms, six franks ($1.20) per day per person, “rent and food included, also candles and two lamps.”26 On August 18, the anniversary of Susy’s death, “Livy went away to be alone. She took the steamer and spent the day solitary in an inn in an unknown town up the lake.”27 There she reread Susy’s letters to her. It is the first known time that Livy chose seclusion in an emotional time over her husband’s company. Sam found a spot under some trees on the side of a mountain and composed an allegorical lament for his daughter. Humidly ornate, painfully earnest in the old Thomas Moore–Robert Burns tradition, “In Memoriam” unwittingly echoes the callow “Love Concealed” and “Separation” published by the young “Rambler” forty-four years earlier in the pages of the Hannibal Daily Journal.

  In a fair valley—oh, how long ago, how long ago!

  Where all the broad expanse was clothed in vines

  And fruitful fields and meadows starred with flowers…

  Hard by, apart, a temple stood…

  [And] in the temple’s inmost place a spirit dwelt,

  Made all of light!…28

  THIS GLOOMY interlude aside, the two months at Weggis marked a return of his writing energies. Working nine hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, he produced notes and drafts for the later manuscripts on the theme of Satan’s intervention in the world. “Letters to Satan” is a brief, fairly primitive dress rehearsal of the organizing idea: a deputy of Satan’s visits Earth and reports back to the boss on a variety of topical phenomena, such as the telephone and organized tours. It was not published until after Sam’s death. He quickly moved to the more focused cluster of
drafts that, over several years, reworked the device of Satan’s return—first as “The Chronicles of Young Satan,” written in 1899 and revised (eventually with Paine’s meddlesome posthumous help) into what Paine published as The Mysterious Stranger, a Romance in 1916.

  Satan had fascinated Clemens since his Presbyterian boyhood, when he’d tricked the pious Jane into defending him as a victim of bad luck. Now he reentered the forefront of the author’s imagination, as a plausible critic of humanity. “He had but one term for…‘the little stinking human race, with its little stinking kings and popes and bishops and prostitutes and peddlers,’ ” he wrote, sketching out the viewpoint that his newly favorite character would later express. And: “A person (Satan) who for untold centuries has maintained the imposing position of spiritual head of 4/5 of the human race, and political head of the whole of it, must be granted the possession of executive abilities of the highest order.”29 Satan as antihero (or perhaps suprahero), as Christ’s dark twin, made an ideal symbol for his favorite metaphysical themes of the divided self and the blurred boundaries between Good and Evil.

  The books he was reading now and in the next few years renewed his confidence in exploring these themes. Reconsidering Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886, he recognized an extension of his own dwarf-surrogate as alternate conscience from “Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.” His twenty-one-year-old work “was an attempt to account for our seeming duality—the presence in us of another person; not a slave of ours, but…with a character distinctly its own,” he remarked, before conceding that Stevenson’s novel got nearer the heart of it: “J. and H. were the dual persons in one body, quite distinct in nature and character and presumably each with a conscience of his own.”30 Recent inquiries conducted in Baltimore and France, he now believed, proved both Stevenson’s and his ideas insufficient, in that the cases “show that the two persons in a man have no command over each other…[They] do not even know each other and…have never even suspected one another’s existence…”31

  In January 1897 he proposed a further extension, leavened by his reading of William James’s massive Principles of Psychology, which drew on both philosophical and scientific precepts in its pre-Freudian effort to construct a theory of consciousness. James strengthened Mark Twain’s confidence in the idea of mind cure as a science; he also took from the book a new conviction in the substantiality of “realities” embodied in hypnosis and dreams. (James’s work was “pre-Freudian” only in that Freud had not yet published in that area. In 1897, in Vienna, he was just then immersed in his own dream analysis, excited by the “intellectual beauty” of probing the unconscious and its power.)

  Clemens went on:

  To this arrangement I wish to add this detail—that we have a spiritualized self which can detach itself and go wandering off upon affairs of its own…I am not acquainted with my double, my partner in duality…but I am acquainted (dimly) with my spiritualized self and I know that it and I are one, because we have common memory…32

  This other “self” was Samuel Clemens’s “dream self,” the self that gamboled with his Platonic Sweetheart—his ordinary body and mind “freed from clogging flesh and become a spiritualized body and mind,” with the powers of both enlarged.

  Waking I move slowly; but in my dreams my unhampered spiritualized body flies to the ends of the earth in a millionth of a second. Seems to—and I believe, does…

  I do actually make immense excursions in my spiritualized person. I go into awful dangers…I go to unnamable places, I do unprincipled things; and every vision is vivid, every sensation—physical as well as moral—is real.33

  It is impossible not to sense the ecstasy that radiates through these sentences. Science notwithstanding, they signal a regathering in Samuel Clemens. (Justin Kaplan has conjectured, arrestingly, that “by turning his dream life into a literary problem—into work—he saved himself from madness.”34) His mind had always been voracious to absorb process, whether it involved the skills of typesetting; the contours of the Mississippi River; women’s fashions and household design; the arcana of mining; the technology and financial structure of book publishing; the workings of Kaolatype or the Paige machine; the class system of medieval Europe; the awful German language; a hundred other areas of specialized expertise. Now that voracity began to extricate itself from the suffocating compost of grief that had formed upon the death of Susy. Clemens would never put that grief to rest, but in allowing his curiosity to be drawn toward that ultimate sphere, the human mind and its mysteries, he forestalled creative death. Reinforced by his interest in the new political currents roiling the world, the nation-sized tests of the weak against the strong, the ethnic scapegoat against the ethnic oppressor, this passion fueled his return to purposeful work through the remainder of his life.

  MARK TWAIN began three other significant manuscripts in his fertile weeks at Weggis. None of these was published for decades following his death; two were abandoned, and the third remained in the form of extended notes. Yet each represents an important act of memory and imagination. All are rooted in his boyhood hometown. The most striking of these is the stupendous work of tabulated early memory that he called “Villagers 1840–3.” “Villagers” is a kind of city directory of Hannibal in those years, culled from forty-four-year-old information stored in the mind of Samuel Clemens. Faintly presaging Spoon River Anthology in its survey of characters in a community, but even darker in its preoccupations—the “heavenly” town now seen as a little slice of Hell—it comprises thumbnail sketches of more than a hundred Hannibal people. These include the Clemens family itself, which in a transparent and useless gesture toward privacy (Sam had no intention of publishing the list) he renamed as “Carpenter.” The often squalid lives and grim fates of these townsfolk are sometimes rendered in only a few words (“Jim Wolf. The practical jokes. Died.”35 “Clint Levering drowned. His less fortunate brother lived to have a family and be rich and respected.”36). Other lives (and calamities) are more fully fleshed. Physical characteristics were noted, and temperaments, and occupations, and styles (Sam Raymond “[a]lways affected fine city language, and said ‘Toosday.’ ”37), and destinies (a sleigh overturned and Mary Moss’s “thigh was broken; it was badly set. She got well with a terrible limp, and forever after stayed in the house and produced children”38).

  The longest single sketch in “Villagers” is the last one, covering “Oscar Carpenter” (Orion). Adding credence to the theory that the notes were intended as references to future fiction projects, Mark Twain shifted immediately after this entry (on August 4) to the second related work: the beginning of “Hellfire Hotchkiss.” This novel fragment features “Oscar” as a feminized boy of Dawson’s Landing, who is saved from certain death on an ice floe in the river by the hard-charging title character, a beautiful Menkenesque tomboy given to riding around on a black horse with a life preserver at her side, and breaking up lethal assaults perpetrated by the “Stover” brothers (Ed and Dick Hyde) with her trusty baseball bat. “Pudd’nhead Wilson says Hellfire Hotchkiss is the only genuwyne male man in this town and [Oscar] Carpenter’s the only genuwyne female girl,”39 Mark Twain has an onlooker remark helpfully. Given this sex-role reversal, and given that the author shifts some of his own boyhood experiences to “Oscar” (the Cadets of Temperance episode, for instance), and given the shadow of Susy at the edges of Hellfire’s world-conquering prowess, it seems a pity that Clemens was not able to show this manuscript to Freud when he reached Vienna.

  The third and longest fragment is “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.” Abandoned after ten chapters and nearly thirty thousand words, it is a promising but overheated effort to reanimate Mark Twain’s most replenishing trio of characters. Promising, because settling back into Huck’s rich narrative vernacular once again released all sorts of instincts in Mark Twain for layered storytelling unavailable in the stiff, self-conscious exposition that permeated “Hellfire.” Here is an older, post–Civil
War Huck looking back. Huck (to his author’s credit) has not transcended his narrowness of time and place and become a mouthpiece for racial enlightenment—he slings the word “nigger” with far more abandon than in the novel under his name. Exactly through his limited prism, the reader is able to see Jim’s own stunted sense of self and his unending victimization with heightened clarity and moral force. (Once again, Jim is at the mercy of an outraged mob, his fate in the hands of his young white friends.) And “overheated,” in that Mark Twain once again made Tom Sawyer the emissary of pulp-fiction plot devices that smother the deeper explorations in a riot of detective intrigue, murder solving, and shenanigans. The novel-that-might-have-been, had Mark Twain enjoyed the luxury of another eight-year cycle of pause, revision, and reconsideration, is likely a loss to American literature.

  “I WOULD as soon spend my life in Weggis as anywhere in the geography,” Clemens jotted in September 1897,40 but he stuck to the family plan, and by the end of the month the party was ensconced in the Viennese Hotel Metropole, where seclusion proved out of the question. Hapsburg royalty glittered around them. In the hotel dining room on October 3, they observed, at the next table, an entourage that included Princess Charlotte, gossipy daughter of Victoria (the Dowager Empress Frederick) and granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and a few assorted princes. “Good-looking people,” Mark Twain noted. “They all smoke.”41

  Clara arranged to meet the tutor Leschetizky even before her bags were unpacked. Papa drove his daughter to the appointment across the city in a two-horse victoria; Clara wanted to hide her acute nervousness from him, “so I started him on the human race,”42 and the miles melted away. At the master’s house, Leschetizky, a tiny, bland-looking old man, asked Clara to play a short piece on the piano, and then showered Sam in German with a long list of Clara’s technical shortcomings, but agreed to take her on anyway. Clara soon met another of Leschetizky’s pupils, the handsome young Russian-Jewish pianist and orchestral conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Ossip was nineteen, four years younger than Clara, but dazzlingly talented and deeply connected to the musical world: among his close friends was the thirty-seven-year-old Gustav Mahler. Clara and Ossip soon commenced a tempestuous romance; ten years later, they would marry.