by Ron Powers
IN VIENNA, where he and the family stayed for twenty prolific months, Mark Twain had gravitated yet again to a vortex of historic transformation. The Austrian capital in the late 1890s was at once a world center of art, thought, and café-society elegance—and a post-Dreyfus central battlefield on which the “Jewish question” smoldered toward conflagration. Dvoák was in the city; and the teenaged Schoenberg, not yet dreaming his twelve-tone dreams; and Mahler, directing the Vienna Court Opera; and Freud; and such blinding new artists of the Vienna Secession as Gustav Klimt and Maximilian Kurzweil. Also present was the reactionary genius and radical orchestral composer Anton Bruckner, heir to Wagner’s anti-Jewish nativism. The anti-Semite Karl Lueger was elected mayor in the year the Clemenses arrived; Christian socialism was noisily ascendant, threatening the 175,000 Jews who lived in the city and supplied much of its cultural elite. Stirring times lay ahead.
None of the turmoil was immediately apparent, as Vienna showed its creamy surface to the world-famous literary artist Mark Twain. The city’s elite flowed toward him. Dukes, barons, princes, and newspaperwomen visited the Clemenses’ corner suite in the Metropole, politely adhering to the post–5 p.m. schedule the family had set. Clara recalled that the drawing room came to be known as “the second U.S. Embassy.”43 Sam conducted one interview (the reporter was male) while lounging in bed, to Livy’s shock. Sam liked it, and the bed soon became his second office. He was photographed and pointed out and banqueted and invited to speak at opulent charity events. His love of attention resurfaced; he preened and hobnobbed and smiled to those who recognized him on the Ringstrasse. He sat at a concert in the box of Johann Strauss at the Waltz King’s invitation. Clara was fascinated by “the life-giving quality of ginger” of the glamorous Viennese women, recalling that when one of them entered a room the air seemed full of little broken dishes.44 Sam was more interested in the fact that these titled ladies smoked pipes. Some of them—Freud may also have noticed this—even puffed on large cigars.
AS PARLIAMENTARY capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire with its nineteen fractious ethnic states, political Vienna trembled with the same pre-revolutionary currents as the trouble spots of the global British Empire, but with the added shock wave of anti-Semitism. Mark Twain found himself attacked by the ultra-right-wing press, which detected something a little fishy in that Old Testament first name of his, “Samuel.” He was far from intimidated—he’d cut his teeth on newspaper feuds in Virginia City. In the autumn of 1897, Sam visited the marbled Lower House of the legislature several times. What he saw there, and what he failed to see, echoed his visit to the Senate chamber in Washington in 1854. Back then, the teenaged Sam had sketched vivid word-pictures of the lawmakers as they debated and declaimed, without grasping the full implications of the subject before them: a legislative act that would hasten the onset of the Civil War. Now, forty-three years later, he again composed a brilliantly detailed tragicomic chronicle of legislators in an uproar, again without grasping—as who could?—that he was witness to the chrysalis of a great war. On October 28 and 29, from his perch in the gallery, he watched an astonishing twelve-hour filibuster by the Moravian socialist Otto Lecher, delivered over a stream of wild shouted insults and bangings of desk boards from right-wing German nationalists. Lecher was stumping for a seemingly marginal rule change, to allow Czech civil service workers the right to speak their own language on the job. In fact, as everyone understood, the issue was whether ethnic minorities (read: Jews) deserved tolerance. Lecher’s effort temporarily forestalled defeat of the language proposal; but a month later the factions tore into one another again over the same issue, and this time things ended in mass fisticuffs on the floor, a swarming of the chamber by sixty policemen, rioting in the streets, and a collapse of the parliamentary government.
“Stirring Times in Austria” was published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in March 1898, and remains one of Mark Twain’s virtuoso feats of eyewitness reportage, despite its understandable absence of prophetic insight. “They are…earnest, sincere, devoted [men],” he wrote of the battling ideologues of the House, “and they hate the Jews.”45 Later, describing the violence that spread outward from the chamber into cities and towns, he observed that “in some cases the Germans [were] the rioters, in others the Czechs—and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on.”46 Mark Twain was virtually alone among journalists in his reportage of Jewish Europeans as caught in the pincers of rising nationalist antagonisms. The larger import of those antagonisms—as paranoia took hold among heads of state and armed mobilization spread through Europe—would not fully reveal itself for another sixteen years.
ON THE morning of December 11, far away from the turmoil and the glitter, Orion Clemens arose at six, his usual time, and descended the stairs of his small Keokuk house to build a fire. Mollie stirred awake upstairs. Orion sat down at the kitchen table and wrote out some notes for a court case. Molly waited for his rap on the ceiling, their signal that the fire had warmed the room enough for her to come down. The rap did not come. She gave the floor a rap of her own. No response. She hurried downstairs and found her husband upright, but with his head slumped forward and his arms dangling. He was seventy-two.
“We all grieve for you; our sympathy goes out to you from experienced hearts; & with it our love,” Sam wrote to Mollie, “…& for Orion I rejoice. He has received life’s best gift.”47 Orion’s remains were taken to Hannibal, and he was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery alongside Marshall, Jane, and Henry Clemens.
AS THE March issue of Harper’s circulated among its readers—on February 11, 1898—Henry Rogers’s secretary Katharine Harrison mailed a letter to Samuel Clemens with some spectacular news. “I wish I could shout it across the water to you,” the Sphinx gushed, “so that you would get it ten days ahead of this letter, but I’m afraid my lungs are not strong enough.”48 (A few businessmen in New York no doubt would have been astounded to learn she could speak at all.) The news was that Clemens’s bankruptcy debt was all but paid in full. Henry Rogers had managed the Clemens finances masterfully. In addition to facing down the hard-line creditors and rejecting their demands for immediate payments, Rogers had advised Sam well in his dealings with his publishers; his investments of Clemens’s money, infrequent but always prudent, had paid well, with one of them netting a $16,000 profit. Most of the old Webster & Company debts had been settled by early in the year, and in February even the Scroogish Mount Morris Bank had agreed to a compromise settlement. Sam and Livy had seen the good news coming since January, as Rogers and Miss Harrison kept them apprised of the creditor payoffs. “I have abundant peace of mind again,” Clemens wrote his benefactor on January 20, “—no sense of burden. Work is become a pleasure again…”49 The continued sale of his collected works had been assured in 1896, when Harper’s began issuing volumes for what would become the Uniform Edition. (The bulk of these volumes would be stalled until 1904, when Henry Rogers finally retrieved Mark Twain’s remaining copyrights on the books published between 1869 and 1879 from the American Publishing Company.)
In March, Clemens reported that “Mrs. Clemens has been reading the creditors’ letters over and over again…and says this is the only really happy day she has had since Susy died.”50 At the end of that year, Livy calculated that the family was not only solvent again, but flush: the house and furniture in Hartford had not been sacrificed; Mark Twain’s British and American copyrights were good for $200,000, and the Clemens bank account stood at $107,000. Mark Twain’s achievement was world news. The press compared him to his old bête noire Sir Walter Scott, who had similarly refused to accept bankruptcy after a depression wiped out his printing firm in 1825, and wrote to pay off his debts until his death in 1832.
Clemens had learned a thing or two about investments. He would never again take leave of his senses on a harebrained scheme like a machine that supposedly set type like a human being. No: the next harebrained scheme involved a machine that would design patterns in textiles aut
omatically. “I’ve landed a big fish to-day,” he exulted to Rogers, once again channeling Colonel Sellers, in a facts-and-figures-laden letter in mid-March that consumed him for three days in the writing.51 For a mere $1,500,000 investment…It took a few weeks, but Rogers eventually managed to talk Clemens down from this particular ledge.
(In this case, though, the inventor, a young Pole named Jan Szczepanik, was no ineffectual dreamer. Szczepanik’s companion invention—a machine that stored and disgorged the patterns to be followed by textile looms—contained paradigm elements of the computer. A few years earlier he’d patented a device that had Clemens salivating, but the Paris exhibition had already cornered it. This was the “telelectroscope,” the evolutionary ancestor of television.)
Vienna’s warm embrace of Mark Twain chilled and slackened in the spring of 1898, when some stirring times in Havana Harbor ignited a recklessly conceived war between America and Spain. The mysterious explosion on February 15 of the battleship Maine, symbol of U.S. solidarity with the Cuban rebels, fanned war fever in the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers and others of the “yellow” press to levels beyond the control of President McKinley. A “Peace Appeal to Labor,” signed by William Dean Howells and others, ran in the New York Post on April 17; while generally laughed at, it was the genesis of a movement. The Spanish government monitored the hysteria, figured that it might as well get the first lick in, and declared hostilities. Soon Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt was a world media star for his exploits at the head of the Rough Riders (he wrote a best-seller about it the following year); the Spanish army withered under U.S. shock and awe, and Europe had a reason to fear a huge new player in the empire game. The Clemenses found themselves coolly interrogated by Viennese friends who wondered how long it would be before America annexed Cuba and then went shopping for Spain’s remaining territories in the far Pacific.
Clemens did not believe anything like that could happen. He saw the war initially as a righteous American mission to liberate the Cuban people from a distant tyrant that had sought to quell dissent by breaking up the population into a latticework of camps, where death estimates ran as high as four hundred thousand. Empire? That was an Old World value, preposterous as a knight on a bicycle. “I have never enjoyed a war…as I am enjoying this one,” he wrote in June to Joe Twichell, whose son David had enlisted in the army in defense of Cuba. “For this is the worthiest one that was ever fought, so far as my knowledge goes. It is a worthy thing to fight for one’s own freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man’s. And I think this is the first time it has been done.”52
The war was over in four months, Spain’s infantry shot to pieces, her fleet decimated by Commodore Dewey’s warships. Under the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, Spain agreed to evacuate Cuba and leave the island an American protectorate en route to independence. But America’s victory went beyond liberation. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine archipelago now belonged to the United States. (Hawaii had been quietly annexed during the war.) America was a fledgling empire. Clemens was shocked. “When the United States sent word to Spain that the Cuban atrocities must end she occupied the highest moral position ever taken by a nation since the Almighty made the earth,” he told Paine years later. “But when she snatched the Philippines she stained the flag.”53
IF HOWELLS was right—that Mark Twain “wrote as he thought”54—then Mark Twain was thinking very fast these days, and balefully. In April 1898, he commenced “What Is Man?” a Socratic dialogue for expressing the view of Man as a machine, and a self-interested one at that. He revised the manuscript until 1904, adding in an argument for training Man against these impulses. The slim manuscript was not printed until 1906, after Livy’s death, and only in a limited private edition without his name, which Paine was kind enough to add in a profitable essay collection seven years after Mark Twain’s own demise. He also began “The Great Dark” (the title is Bernard DeVoto’s), a self-referencing and truly bleak piece of work never finished but published after his death, which concerns the fate of a man named Jessie Edwards. Edwards playfully shows his wife and two daughters the tiny life in a drop of water through a microscope one day, then falls asleep and finds himself on a ship in a nighttime storm-tossed sea—that very same water drop. He begs the “Superintendent of Dreams” to let him awaken from this nightmare and learns that he is awake; this unending voyage is his life, and the pleasant household of his memory is but a dream. Sam’s metaphor was doubtless reinforced by the essay he was drafting at the same time: “My Debut as a Literary Person,” recounting his meeting in Hawaii with the sea-ridden survivors of the Hornet.
In late July he composed “Concerning the Jews,” a well-intentioned attempt to clarify his attitudes on that subject that succeeded mainly in revealing his naïveté about Jewish culture and history. The essay includes one of his more famous aphorisms—“I am quite sure that (bar one)* I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.”55 Yet in his very attempt to extol the race in question, he ratified the most inflammatory pretext for resentment of it: the Jew as money-getter.
I am persuaded that…nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew comes from the average Christian’s inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business—in either straight business or the questionable sort.56
Given that the “average Jew” in these times was a desperate refugee from economic hard times, foraging the world for a place to earn sustenance, his point unintentionally reinforced a key pretext for Semitic hatred.
Philosophy, politics, and dreams: these formed the borders of his imaginative consciousness. It was in August 1898 that he wrote “My Platonic Sweetheart,” the phantasmic tone poem concerning his unnamed dream angel Laura Wright. A notebook entry, atypical in its erotic frankness, explores the only overtly sexual dream that he ever recorded. Its subject was a “negress,” and perhaps represented fantasies that originated in the Quarles farm days.
…I was suddenly in the presence of a negro wench who was sitting in grassy open country…She was very vivid to me—round black face, shiny black eyes, thick lips…She was about 22, and plump…and good-natured and not at all bad-looking. She had but one garment on—a coarse tow-linen shirt…She made a disgusting proposition to me. Although it was disgusting…it seemed quite natural that it should come from her…I merely made a chaffing remark, brushing aside the matter…
“It was not a dream—it all happened,” he insisted in his notebook. “I was actually there in person—in my spiritualized condition…dead or alive she is a reality; she exists and she was there.”57
In his dreams.
IN SEPTEMBER 1898, Empress Elizabeth of Austria was assassinated in Geneva by an Italian anarchist. “I am living in the midst of world-history again,” Clemens observed to Twichell.58 Mark Twain wrote on.
“I have no special regard for Satan,” Mark Twain had written in “Concerning the Jews,” “but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him…we never hear his side.”59 Mark Twain seemed bent on rectifying that imbalance. As the year passed into autumn, he turned from “The Great Dark” to two more variations on the theme of Satanic visitation. The first of these was “Schoolhouse Hill,” a tale of the appearance in “Petersburg” of a “miraculous boy” who turns out to be the son of the Devil. Far from evil, “Forty-four,” as he is known, announces that he has come to cleanse the world of sin, his father’s legacy. Mark Twain’s extensive notes show that he intended to have “Forty-four” establish a new church with the goal of eradicating hypocrisy and the corrupted Moral Sense, and then fall in love, evidently with Hellfire Hotchkiss. But after six chapters, the author thought of a better way to tell his tale and abandoned that one.
“The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” is Mark Twain’s late-life masterpiece. He wrote it rapidly and compactly in December 1898, and
Harper’s published it a year later, as a novella of 17,500 words. Ingeniously plotted beyond any of his previous fiction, it efficiently unifies the field of his concerns for corrupt, prideful, deceitful, avaricious, deterministic Man. Its narrative is among the most familiar under his name: through the tidy, self-satisfied village of Hadleyburg, “the most honest and upright town in all the region,”60 passes a stranger—not Satan, in this case; not overtly, at least—whom the town somehow manages to offend. The stranger devises a revenge plan: he will humiliate Hadleyburg by exposing the town’s susceptibility to corruption. He returns there with a sack supposedly filled with gold to be given to the man (nonexistent) who, the stranger tells the bank cashier’s wife, saved his life by giving him twenty dollars on his last trip through. The test of the claimant’s authenticity, the stranger explains to the woman, will be his ability to repeat a remark he made to the stranger while giving him the handout. The stranger sees to it that the “remark” reaches each of the town’s nineteen leading citizens in a sealed envelope. The resulting chain of duplicity, opportunism, self-corruption, and dashed hopes (the “gold” in the sack turns out to be lead slugs) consummates a formally perfect fable and a withering summation of mankind.
ONE BY one, the supporting actors in the epic drama of Samuel Clemens’s life continued to withdraw from the stage—as they had been withdrawing since his early childhood. In March, word reached him that his old Washoe friend and rival Dan De Quille (William Wright) had died at sixty-eight in West Liberty, Iowa. He’d returned to Virginia City after publication of The Big Bonanza, survived a fire that leveled most of the mountainside boomtown and the folding of the Territorial Enterprise in 1893, but never fulfilled his early promise or his dreams. A literary collection of his, The Fighting Horse of the Stanislaus, finally got published in 1990.
