Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  “You are one of the talented men of the age,” Clemens quoted Henry Ward Beecher as saying to him, “but in matters of business I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.” At the end of January 1868, primed with publishing advice from Beecher and with an invitation to be the guest of Beecher’s sister Isabella Hooker, Clemens paid his first visit to Hartford and discussed terms with Bliss face to face. They reached a formal agreement by which Clemens was to get a five per cent royalty on the subscription price, and this, he told his family proudly, “is a fifth more than they have ever paid any author, except Horace Greeley. Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this” (and so would Greeley, who was never one of Bliss’s authors). He was to deliver the manuscript Of his untitled book by the middle of July; he was giving himself six months to write or rewrite about 240,000 words, and he would soon discover that he had to put aside nearly everything else in order to do this. But for the moment, before the realities of work were on him, and before his dealings with Bliss were put to the inevitable tests of impatience, suspicion and recrimination, he was, quite simply, euphoric, a man with a new-found vocation standing in the city of plenty. Near Bliss’s office on Asylum Street were the other thriving subscription houses, the printers, the binders, and a paper mill, that made Hartford a major publishing center. All about him, as he explored this city which less than four years later would be his home, he sensed solid security, a marriage of prosperity and regularity which was new to him. Hartford was steady habits and regular income, he told his California readers. The sources of its wealth were rock-firm. The god of this celestial city was capital, invested and protected capital, and to him the people had raised altars: the insurance companies and the banks, the revolver works and the rifle factory. The streets were broad, the houses ample, shapely, and surrounded by “most capacious ornamental grounds.” He saw hardly any smoking, no chewing, and no saloons, although there were saloons on Asylum Street. Poverty was not known, nor was swearing to be heard in the land. Isabella Hooker and her husband were crushingly upright, unshakably superior. “I don’t dare to smoke after I go to bed, and in fact I don’t dare to do anything that’s comfortable and natural,” he wrote to Mary Fairbanks on January 24, after he had spent a few nights with the Hookers on Forest Street. But he had seen the promised land, and he submitted willingly enough: “I tell you I have to walk mighty straight. I desire to have the respect of this sterling old Puritan community, for their respect is well worth having.”

  “I have just come down from Hartford,” he wrote to Will Bowen from New York the next day, “where I have made a tip-top contract for a 600 page book, and I feel perfectly jolly. It is with the heaviest publishing house in America, and I get the best terms they have ever offered any man save one…. It would take a good deal of money to buy out the undersigned now, old boy.” He had got a firm offer from Bennett of the Herald of double his usual rates for Washington correspondence, and he proposed to raise his rates to the other papers he wrote for; still, “the book is going to crowd me some—I shall have to cut off all outside work, and it is growing pretty lucrative.” But he is not altogether occupied with rates and contracts, and in this letter to Will Bowen there begins to emerge the crucial web of motives and conditions by which Clemens would flourish as a writer: prosperity and status; Hartford, symbol of his eager acceptance, after years of drift and marginality, of a place in the social order; and marriage.

  A month and a half earlier Mary Fairbanks had recommended a good wife as an incentive to steady habits, and he had countered, “I want a good wife—I want a couple of them if they are particularly good—but where is the wherewithal?” It took two newspaper letters to support him; how could he support a wife too? “I am as good an economist as anybody,” he had told her, “but I can’t turn an inkstand into Aladdin’s lamp.” Writing to Will Bowen, however, Clemens has become slightly mawkish on this subject. He envies Will for having “a most excellent wife,” he says. “I wish I had been as fortunate. To labor to secure the world’s praise, or its blame either, seems stale, flat, and unprofitable compared with the happiness of achieving the praise or abuse of so dear a friend as a wife.” In this mood he has also begun to grope toward his materials as a writer and to begin his reconstruction of the idyl of Hannibal: “I have been thinking of schooldays at Dawson’s, and trying to recall the old faces of that ancient time—but I cannot place them very well—they have faded out from my treacherous memory, for the most part, and passed away.” The following July, when he returned to Hartford to deliver his manuscript to Bliss, he made a vital connection of his new life in the East to “that ancient time.” “I never saw any place where morality and huckleberries flourished as they do here,” he noted. He had heard of huckleberries, but he had never seen them before, and he joked that he always thought they were something like turnips. Now he saw children gathering buckets of them on the hillsides, and by the slow process of unconscious creation the huckleberry, a Hartford fact, was to become talisman for recapturing the Hannibal past. What had happened was that, in Hartford, the sight of a promised land, and, in New York, his first meetings with Olivia Langdon caressed and quickened memory and aspiration.

  Clemens met her around Christinas time 1867. He was in New York on a two-week visit with Slote, and was invited by Charley Langdon to meet his sister and his parents at the St. Nicholas Hotel, once the city’s grandest palace of gold leaf and mirrors but now subsided into ultra-respectability. Clemens called on the Langdons on December 27 and was introduced to Livy. On New Year’s Eve he accompanied her to Charles Dickens’ reading at Steinway Hall. Among but above the other attractions of New York, Dickens had drawn the Langdons down from Elmira as he had drawn enormous crowds, five thousand at a time, who lined up in front of ticket offices before dawn on winter mornings. Speculators were riding high; Dickens’ novels were selling by the tens of thousands; and the day after he arrived all but two of the nineteen hundred copies of his work in the Mercantile Library were out on loan. For all his criticism of America and his careful avoidance during the Civil War of any expression of support for the Union side, Dickens was still a Northern hero, a demigod even for abolitionists like the Langdons. The circumstances of the evening Sam Clemens spent with his future wife were appropriate. This was the valedictory reading tour of a towering literary personality, a hero of the mass audience which would soon elevate the newcomer, Mark Twain, also a great public reader as well as an actor manqué, to an analogous height. Despite his awe of Dickens, “this puissant god,” Clemens confessed that he was disappointed: the readings from David Copperfield struck him as monotonous, the pathos as purely verbal, “glittering frost-work, with no heart.” Dickens mumbled, and the audience, though eager and intelligent, managed to remain unexcited. So Clemens reported to his California paper. He also reported, “I am proud to observe that there was a beautiful young lady with me—a highly respectable young white woman.” In an account which he dictated nearly forty years later he fitted that evening with Livy into a characteristic nexus of motives, for, at the height of his Hartford years with her, love, happiness, literary fame, and money had become convertible currency. Charles Dickens made $200,000 from his readings that season, Clemens recalled, but that one evening with Livy “made the fortune of my life—not in dollars, I am not thinking of dollars; it made the real fortune of my life in that it made the happiness of my life.”

  The next day Clemens paid Livy a New Year’s call at the house of her friend Mrs. Berry. There, amidst the Moorish décor which marked his hostess as a lady of wealth and discrimination, he remained the entire day and part of the evening. With Livy was another friend, Alice Hooker, daughter of the disapproving Hookers of Hartford and niece of the two Beecher clergymen. Despite the gaiety of the occasion, there was little or no alcohol and a great deal of propriety, and although Clemens spent thirteen hours at this marathon reception, he probably got to know the beautiful Miss Hooker at least as well as he could have known the
“sweet and timid and lovely” twenty-two-year-old Livy. For, as he wholly idealized her, she was angelic, disembodied. The distance between them was too great for him to dare think of love; reverent worship, at best the grave affection of brother for sister, alone was possible. “You seemed to my bewildered vision a visiting Spirit from the upper air,” he recalled a year later, “not a creature of common human clay, to be profaned by the love of such as I.” After three meetings with Livy he had not progressed far enough to dare to write to her, and the one overt carry-over was an invitation from the Langdons to visit them in Elmira. He had seen her ivory miniature in September 1867; he met her at the turn of the year; he did not pay his visit to Elmira until August 1868; and before then, in February, he considered a diplomatic post in China which would keep him out of the country for a long time. Wooing her had not yet become even a possibility for him, and beyond a mention in one of his letters home—“Charlie Langdon’s sister was there (beautiful girl)”—Livy vanishes from his record for over half a year.

  III

  On short notice and with a doorkeeper recruited at the last moment, Clemens gave a lecture in Washington on January 9 called “The Frozen Truth,” a fabric of Quaker City impressions and anecdotes which he stitched together between ten o’clock one evening and breakfast the next morning. “I hardly knew what I was going to talk about,” he told his mother, “but it went off in splendid style.” Two nights later he had an unflawed success as an after-dinner speaker at a Washington Correspondents’ Club banquet. Every speaker came prepared, he said: the arrangements were masterly and went as by clockwork. When midnight came, and along with it the Sabbath and the threat of adjournment, the guests voted to adopt San Francisco time, and they would have needed more than three hours of grace if the champagne had held out. Clemens was twelfth in a mammoth program of fifteen speakers, but even toward the drowsy, vinous tail of the evening his response to the toast “Women—the pride of any profession, and the jewel of ours” had the power to awaken and delight. With a sure sense of shock and transition he moved from the slightly indelicate (“She bears our children—ours as a general thing”) to the colloquial (“She is a brick”), from burlesque eulogy to topical satire and back to the indelicate once again (“As a wet nurse, she has no equal among men”), and finally he put jesting aside and paid homage to what, along with the flag, was certain to bring a male banquet audience lurching to its feet: Mother. It was an extraordinarily varied performance within a span of about seven hundred and fifty words: graceful, bold, entirely original, and with a distinctive admixture of the orthodox and the outrageous. The public personality of Mark Twain, the eccentric demon born of the needs, aggressions, and reticences of Sam Clemens, was still in flux, no longer simply the bookish observer and the teller of tall stories but becoming a man of the world now, ironic, polished, and confident.

  “Dear Folks,” he wrote, with the triumph still fresh, “I thought you would like to read my speech, which Speaker Colfax said was the best dinner-table speech he ever heard at a banquet.” Two weeks later, when he wrote to Mary Fairbanks, he had second thoughts. He was afraid she would see his speech reported in the papers and, in accordance with her standards, take him to task for using “slang,” that catch-all word he and she used for indecorums, colloquialisms, indelicacies, and vulgarities of all sorts and degrees. The star performer for a toughened audience of journalists and politicians was still willing to bend his head for a scolding from a middle-aged bluestocking, proof that when he paid homage to “Mother” he had been dead serious. There was slang in the speech, he apologized, but the newspapers “had no business to report it so verbatimly. They ought to have left out the slang—you know that. It was all their fault. I am not going to make any more slang speeches in public.”

  The bolt fell nonetheless. Her letter, he said, was “a scorcher.” He made his vows again—“I will rigidly eschew slang and vulgarity in future”—and he stuck by them reasonably well. In February he again spoke at a Washington banquet, and he reported to her that his speech had been “frigidly proper” and that by following her advice he had learned a lesson: “I acknowledge—I acknowledge—that I can be most laceratingly ‘funny without being vulgar.’” A literary comedian at the start of his career, he soon discovered that many of the people whose approval he most wanted thought there was something vulgar merely about being funny; much later he discovered that there was also something confining. He assured her that he was now going to apply this hard-earned knowledge to The Innocents Abroad (it was to be more than a year later, after considerable agonizing over what were felt to be the blasphemous overtones of “The New Pilgrim’s Progress,” that he settled on the title). There was going to be no slang in the book, he told he, except “in a mild form in dialogues,” as crucial a reservation as his insistence on the right of personal satire. To allay her fears that he might cause pain to his victims, he copied out for her a passage about the imposing vacuity who bore the title “Commissioner of the United States of America to Europe, Asia, and Africa.” “It just touches Dr. Gibson on a raw place,” he told her. (He had already touched Gibson on a raw place by arranging for him to be surrounded by a band of Arab beggars while posing for a photograph in front of the Pyramids.) Anticipating an objection from her on compassionate grounds, he added, a little disingenuously, “That complacent imbecile will take it for a compliment.” For all his apparent submissiveness, he was baiting her and beginning to rebel against promises exacted by those to whom, almost mimetically, he offered himself as reconstructible sinner. For fear of exposing his “want of cultivation,” he had promised Emma Beach not to joke about “those dilapidated, antedeluvian humbugs” the Old Masters; he promised Pamela there would be “no scoffing at sacred things in my book or lectures.” He kept few such promises. With these women, as later with Livy, he conformed only as far as his evolving goals and standards told him to conform, and he generally had his own way.

  He went through the file of his Alta California correspondence and discovered that there were not quite so many letters as he seemed to recall having written and that many of these letters did not measure up to Eastern taste. Even padded out with illustrations, all his letters would fill only two hundred and fifty of the six hundred pages he had to deliver. He would have to rewrite these letters and write three hundred and fifty new pages by the middle of the summer, and he needed all the help he could get. In search of ideas and raw material he borrowed Mary Fairbanks’ letters to the Cleveland Herald, and he asked two other passenger-correspondents to collect their letters for him. Four days of illness in February, brought on by his day-and-night lobbying for the postmastership, proved to him he would have to change the way he lived. With the exception of a lecture in Georgetown later in the month, he managed to curtail other obligations, to save the nights for sleeping and the days for working, and he hoped to turn out ten pages of book manuscript a day, fifteen if things went well. But only a day after he reorganized his life in this way he found himself spending all his time in press galleries and hotel lobbies, covering the major event of his winter in Washington and observing the turmoil which for a while seemed to threaten bloodshed all over the country. On February 21 Andrew Johnson tried once again to dislodge his Secretary of War. Stanton locked himself in his office, the Radical Republicans took to the warpath, and impeachment was in the air. Johnson did not look at all like a “tyrant,” Clemens wrote after watching him at a reception on the twenty-fourth, but instead like a “plain, simple, good-natured old farmer” who was uneasy, exhausted, and restless and looked in every eye for reassurance: “I never saw any man who looked as friendless and forsaken, and I never felt for any man so much.”

  The impeachment crisis lasted until May, by which time Clemens had been gone for over two months. His experience as a Washington reporter soured into a lifelong contempt for politicians in general and Congressmen (the only “distinctly native American criminal class”) in particular, and his moment of sympathy with Johnson also passe
d. A year later he wrote for the New York Tribune a burlesque account of Johnson’s last hour in office. The President lists his services to his country—he protected assassins, perjurers, and the Ku Klux Klan, and he encouraged corruption and incompetence in the government—and then he and his cabinet officers play cards for the furniture. Music is heard announcing the arrival of “the usurper Grant and his minions,” and Johnson leaves wet with tears and loaded down with public property.

  One other development prevented Clemens from putting his new work scheme to the test in Washington. The owners of the Alta California had put a high value on his services. They paid his passage in the Quaker City, they paid him twenty dollars for each letter from abroad, and, in a printed notice that Clemens preferred to ignore or forget, they reserved to themselves all rights in his correspondence. Now, hearing that without consulting them he had contracted with Bliss for a book based on their property, the owners decided to collect the letters as originally printed, publish them in a book to be sold on the Coast, and perhaps recover some of their investment. It was a double threat to his vision of prosperity and popular success. Not only did the Alta California’s owners deny him the right to use his original material in his book for Bliss, but, as Clemens explained to Mary Fairbanks, “if the Alta’s book were to come out with those wretched, slangy letters unrevised, I should be utterly ruined.” He tried to argue his case by telegram, but quickly gave up. On March 8, two days after the disaster was sprung on him, he decided that his only chance was to leave for California immediately, confront the proprietors and claim his rights. When he sailed from New York on March 11, with the aid of an advance from Bliss, he was in high spirits, happy to have left Washington, happy to go to sea again, and with the prospect of earning money by the Western lecture tour he had told Fuller about in December. The ship was “magnificent,” he told his mother, the passengers were pleasant and friendly, “not so stupid as on the Quaker City” he added. On the voyage up from the Isthmus (this time crossed by rail in three hours), in the same high mood, he once again encountered his archangel, Captain Wakeman, who told him his dream about racing comets to heaven.