Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  Along with these appearances in the public eye came an invitation to lecture for the benefit of a Sunday school. He sized up the opportunity carefully: if you intend to publish The Frog before the end of March, he wrote Webb, telegraph me and I’ll pass up the St. Louis invitation in favor of a New York debut. Webb would be lucky to publish before the end of April, he learned, and, having decided to make his opening move in St. Louis, he went at his publicity with the hand of a master of ballyhoo and self-promotion. Like Artemus Ward, who once publicized a lecture on the Mormons by printing up tickets which read “Admit the Bearer and ONE Wife,” he wooed his audiences through crude nonsense. In San Francisco he had teased his prospects with promises of a splendid orchestra, a menagerie of ferocious animals, a fireworks display, and a grand torchlight procession—“the public are privileged to expect whatever they please”; but failing these attractions, he announced, the doors would open at seven “the trouble to begin at eight o’clock.” For the citizens of St. Louis, in order to illustrate a custom of the Sandwich Islands, he promised “to devour a child in the presence of the audience, if some lady will kindly volunteer an infant for the occasion.” He offered prizes as illusory as the beasts and the fireworks for the best conundrum, for the best poem on summer or summer complaint, and for a plausible essay on female suffrage.

  The audience that came to Mercantile Hall on March 25, lured by the antic promotion and the exotic subject, witnessed a performance quite different from anything else on the lecture platform. He told the citizens of this thriving inland city about a precommercial and pre-Christian paradise where it was possible for the natives to be happy without being either industrious or virtuous. He gibed at the white man’s gifts to the natives of “civilization and several other diseases,” but still he intimated to his audience that he was on their side, the side of good works, proselytizing, progress, and democracy: the missionaries brought literacy and virtue to the natives, he assured them, especially the American missionaries. He gave them statistics and anecdotes, edification and amusement, humorous reflections with a delayed effect, and something that passed for moral philosophy, and, in order to gratify what the ladies thought of as a higher taste, he gave them stretches of word painting of a gaudy kind, “gorgeous” and “sublime.” As he described it, the Kilauea volcano in eruption was “a carnival of destruction”; columns of smoke rose through the “murky pall,” and “sheets of green-blue lambent flame were shot upward and pierced this vast gloom, making all sublimely grand.” The volcano had erupted several years before Mark Twain ever set foot in the Sandwich Islands, but the audience sat silent before this peak of eloquence until he clapped his hands, broke the spell, and led his listeners, whose mood and pace he knew better than they did, from awe to applause and laughter. Further word painting of a more delicate sort, a flower this time; he applauded himself again, offered to repeat the passage, then declined his own offer with a comic gesture.

  The lineaments of the early Mark Twain, the popular lecturer, have begun to emerge: a daring manipulator of audience psychology and values, outrageous enough to hoax, surprise, and disorient, but careful not to offend; a humorist and entertainer with moral and educational zeal to assuage a puritan conscience; a painter of word pictures who makes fun of the effect he creates, thereby both gratifying his audience’s hunger for “literature” and reassuring them that he is no littérateur, that fancy talk and three-dollar words are just as alien to him as to any storekeeper or clerk. Publicly, he is not a bohemian. He is traveled and worldly, but he has an air of surprised innocence, and he manages to be a man and a boy at the same time. The vices he confesses to—laziness, petty dishonesty, lying when tempted, swearing when provoked—are, by the business-success values which most of his audience accepts, capital sins in a man. But he juggles these vices into seeming merely the bad habits of a boy playing hooky and fibbing to his mother. His audience likes him for this; in a boy such rejections of authority are taken for signs of independence and growing manliness.

  On his home grounds he scored a total victory. “He succeeded in doing what we have seen Emerson and other literary magnates fail in attempting,” the Missouri Republican said: “He interested and amused a large and promiscuous audience.” “I think that is pretty complimentary,” Clemens joked with his California readers, “considering that when I delivered that lecture I was not acquainted with a single newspaperman in St. Louis.” His only chagrin came from the fact that a twenty-six-year-old reporter named Henry Morton Stanley printed the lecture nearly verbatim, thus depriving it of most of its future value—the equivalent, Clemens later said of such recurrent experiences, of asking a man for the time and then pulling the hands off his watch. “One never feels comfortable, afterward, repeating a lecture that has been partly printed,” he complained, “and worse than that, people don’t care about what they can buy in a newspaper for less money.”

  A week later he lectured in Hannibal, now fallen on hard times. The railroads had taken away its river traffic, and the town was in danger of becoming once again the drowsing hamlet he had known in his boyhood. Like the cannon fire which was supposed to release the bodies of Tom and Huck from the river bottom, the brief visit sent a few connected images of the past floating up to his consciousness. He recalled, and probably for the first time in print wrote about, “Jimmy Finn,” the town drunkard, who for a while was won over by the temperance people, “but in an evil hour temptation came upon him, and he sold his body to a doctor for a quart of whiskey, and that ended all his earthly troubles. He drank it all at one sitting, and his soul went to its long account and his body went to Dr. Grant.” He remembered that he himself, for the sake of a stunning red scarf, had once joined the Cadets of Temperance and pledged himself not to drink, smoke, or swear; after four months, during which there were no funeral processions he could march in to show off his scarf, he resigned, and within the next three weeks “pretty nearly all the distinguished citizens in the camp died.” Except in these flashes Hannibal was still the dead and arid past from which he was escaping; it would be a while yet before the idea of a return to Hannibal would, as the roughest sort of note for Tom Sawyer, take some sort of imaginative shape, and even then it was not the idyl: “Return and meet grown babies and toothless old drivelers who were the grandees of his boyhood. The Adored Unknown a faded old maid and full of rasping, puritanical vinegar piety.”

  From Hannibal he went north to Keokuk, before the war a gate city to the headlands of the Mississippi and now, like Hannibal, in a trough between waves of expansion and speculation. Ten years before, he had left Orion’s print shop there to become a pilot. Now Sam spent the weekend in the city’s fashionable hotel, a visiting celebrity greeted by posters which announced a lecture to be given by “Sam. Clemens, the greatest humorist in America.” The newspapers welcomed “the most extraordinary delineator of human character in America or upon the continent of Europe.” He was at ease in his lecture to a bigger house than Emerson had drawn, and he was happy and playful. Seeing an old friend in the audience, he qualified his description of a Hawaiian ruler: “One of the greatest liars on the face of the earth, except one, and I am very sorry to locate that one right here in Keokuk, in the person of Ed Brownell.” Another lecture in Quincy, Illinois, and then he started on the return trip to New York. The farther he got from home the more attractive the fields and cities of the republic seemed as he looked at them from the express. What he saw now was not the black pall that had hung over Pittsburgh on the trip west, but, all the way through Ohio and New Jersey, wonderful cities, “so cheerful and handsomely built, and so fiercely busy. It is good to come to the States occasionally, and see what a great country it is.”

  IV

  In New York Clemens found waiting for him a check from the Alta California for his passage on the Quaker City. Frank Fuller had got the sponsorship of two hundred Californians for the lecture Clemens was to give a few days after publication of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other
Sketches. James Russell Lowell, Clemens heard, had declared the title piece to be “the finest piece of humorous writing ever produced in America.” The cards finally appeared to be stacked right, and on the strength of this he moved out of his rooming house and into the elegant Westminster Hotel on Irving Place. “Full of ‘bloated aristocrats,’” he described the hotel for his family, “and I’m just one of them kind myself.” He was pleased with his book when the first copy came from the binder near the end of April; the gorgeous gold frog stamped on the plum-colored cloth cover seemed to him worth the $1.50 all by itself. Webb had done everything—selected the contents, read proof, designed the book. In his preface he introduced Mark Twain as an author “too well known to the public to require a formal introduction.” This author, Webb wrote, had already won for himself the sobriquets of “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope” and “Moralist of the Main,” and unlike others—Webb’s allusion was to Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Josh Billings—Mark Twain did not have to resort to tricks of spelling or “rhetorical buffoonery” for his success.

  “The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain will to-day jump down the popular throat”: With this mouth-watering announcement in the New York Times on April 25 Webb offered Mark Twain’s first book for sale through the American News Company. A few days later the author reported to his California paper that the book was handsome, readable, and selling well, and a shipment was on its way to the Coast. To Bret Harte, still in San Francisco working in the United States Mint, he wrote about the book in quite another vein: “It is full of damnable errors of grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch because I was away and did not read the proofs.” And he added, “I am to lecture in Cooper Institute next Monday night. Pray for me.”

  Flamboyant and openhanded, Fuller aimed higher than Irving Hall or one of the smaller New York theaters and engaged the Great Hall which Peter Cooper had built a decade earlier and which had served as forum for Lincoln and Garrison. It was the largest auditorium in the city and, for a lecturer, the most august. Once the move had been made—Fuller put up five hundred dollars of his own money for hall rent and advertising—they discovered that May 6 was an inauspicious evening for a debut. Clemens was going against formidable competition: at Irving Hall Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House and, until the Crédit Mobilier scandal ended his political career, a contender for the Presidency, was lecturing on his trip across the United States; the Italian tragedienne Adelaide Ristori, whose repertory, although exclusively in her native tongue, still brought her full houses across the country (“It beats me entirely,” Clemens confessed; “I believe the newspapers can do anything now”) was giving a farewell performance; and the Academy of Music offered its stage for the debut of a troupe of Japanese acrobats, tumblers, jugglers, magicians, and contortionists.

  The clusters of handbills advertising Mark Twain’s lectures dangled, unplucked, in the omnibuses. The distinguished people to whom Fuller sent invitations—with Horace Greeley and Peter Cooper constituting what Clemens called the “tone-imparting committee”—all sent their regrets. Despite an elaborate eight-page prospectus and the lure of a celebrity, Senator James W. Nye of Nevada, who would introduce the lecturer, there was no box-office traffic at Chickering and Sons of 632 Broadway and at the principal hotels, where tickets for a serio-humorous lecture on “Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands,” could be had for fifty cents. “Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark,” Sam wrote home five days before the lecture, but it was too late to withdraw. “Let her slide! If nobody else cares I don’t.” He did care; his lecture career in the East was at stake, and the prospect of an empty house in New York was as terrifying as that of an indifferent one had been in San Francisco. A few days in advance Fuller rescued the venture from disaster by papering the house. With bushels of free tickets he drew in the schoolteachers, “the choicest audience,” he told Clemens, “the most intelligent audience, that ever a man stood before in this world.”

  Uncomfortable in the new claw-hammer coat that Fuller had insisted he buy for the occasion, Clemens arrived at the hall early, and worried. There had been no word from Nye, and the Senator never did show up; at a time when the impending release of Jefferson Davis from a Federal prison was stirring up the old hatreds Nye, who thought of Clemens as “nothing but a damned secessionist,” was guided by clear self-interest. But the full house that Clemens found—over two thousand schoolteachers and Californians, representing altogether about thirty-five dollars in paid tickets—made up for the betrayal. He spoke his own introduction, looking for a tiny Nye in the cracks between the floorboards as he might look for a bug or a penny. Then he poured out the Sandwich Islands, and for an hour and a quarter he was in Paradise.

  “The house was crowded, on that occasion, but it was not my popularity that crowded it,” Clemens was to write to his fiancée a year and a half later. “The exertions of my friends did that. They got up the whole thing—suggested it, engineered it, and carried it through successfully. If any man has a right to be proud of his friends it is I, thy servant.” This was after a breakfast with Fuller, who had given him a sheaf of lecture reviews which Clemens proudly enclosed with his letter. Among them was a Tribune review written by Ned House, described by his friend as “the most eminent dramatic critic in the Union.”

  The chance offering of “The Jumping Frog,” carelessly cast, eighteen months ago, upon the Atlantic waters, returned to him in the most agreeable form which a young aspirant for popular fame could desire [House wrote]. No other lecturer, of course excepting Artemus Ward, has so thoroughly succeeded in exciting the mirthful curiosity, and compelling the laughter of his hearers. Mark Twain’s delivery is deliberate and measured to the last degree. He lounges comfortably around his platform, seldom referring to notes, and seeks to establish a sort of button-hole relationship with his audience. He is even willing to exchange confidences of the most literal nature. The only obvious preconcerted “effect” which he employs is a momentary hesitation or break in his narration before touching the climax of an anecdote or witticism. But his style is his own and needs to be seen to be understood.

  The other reviews, too, in the Times and the World, were all he might have wished, and, sifting down through the newspaper exchanges, they were copied in Cleveland and Chicago, in Buffalo and Washington, in railheads and freshwater ports, in cities prosperous with ore and cattle, corn and wheat.

  V

  The aftermath of this debut was a month of depression. He was worn out and miserable, restless, full of self-accusation, worried about his neglected correspondence for the California paper. One midnight, only a few weeks away from the pieties and restraints of the European excursion, he was arrested for brawling on the street, and he spent the night in a New York jail. In the courtroom lockup the next morning he found himself in the company of the city’s derelicts—drunks, a man with a battered and bleeding head, streetwalkers, an old lady who offered him a swig from her gin bottle in return for some tobacco. There he saw scribbled on the wall, in mocking parallel to the blithe advertising he had written for his San Francisco lecture, the line “The Trouble will begin at eight.” He thought briefly of contesting his imprisonment. The judge assured him this would not be worth the bother: he had not been booked, and no one would know he had spent the night in the station house unless he told it himself. He told it himself, to his California readers, and he told them more about the lower depths at Harry Hill’s a “concert saloon” notorious for its low entertainment, flowing liquor, and available waitresses and therefore on the basic itinerary of visiting journalists, preachers, and reformers. He had declined to see one of the young ladies home. In his account of his visit he took a stance that he constantly polished: the genteel naïf, the same bookish dupe who, having once listened to Simon Wheeler telling a story about a man named Smiley and his frog, now claimed to believe that Harry Hill’s rumhole was the meeting place of philosophers and savants, that the wise man with the lady on his lap was Professor Mo
rse and the sage treating the house to a round was Professor Agassiz.

  He resumed his correspondence with the Alta California on May 17, and he wrote four letters in four days, fifteen thousand words or so in all, a pace which he scarcely relaxed during the three weeks before sailing. In search of copy he visited the Blind Asylum, Bible House, Henry Bergh’s A.S.P.C.A., the Academy of Design, Greenwood Cemetery, and Central Park. After a trip through the Five Points and the city’s worst slums, the moralist and realist, who was shortly to become a rich man himself, declared: “Honest poverty is a gem that even a King might feel proud to call his own, but I wish to sell out. I have sported that kind of jewelry long enough. I want some variety. I wish to become rich, so that I can instruct the people and glorify honest poverty a little, like those good, kind-hearted, fat, benevolent people do.”