Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  Clemens arrived in San Francisco on April 2, moved into the Occidental Hotel—more than ever, after a winter in boardinghouses, his idea of “heaven on the half shell”—and presented his arguments to Frederick MacCrellish, the owner of the Alta California. MacCrellish at first compromised only to the extent of offering him a ten per cent royalty on the Alta’s book, and in the month of deadlock that followed Clemens set off on his lecture tour. On April 14 he filled Platt’s Hall in San Francisco with a talk about the Quaker City. It drew “a little over sixteen hundred dollars in the house—gold and silver,” he wrote to Mary Fairbanks, but “it was a miserably poor lecture.” Despite his promise to Pamela, not to scoff at “sacred things,” his lecture offended many and revived their indignation at his reports from the Holy Land. But he was pleased to hear that he had been denounced from one pulpit as “this son of the devil, Mark Twain,” and he was even friendly though only politely apologetic to a young Baptist minister who scolded him as “this person who visits the Holy Land and ridicules sacred scenes and things.” Some of the newspapers took up the cry and attacked the lecture as “sickening,” “foul with sacrilegious allusions, impotent humor, and malignant distortion” and the lecturer himself as a “miserable scribbler,” a man “lost to every sense of decency and shame.” Such notoriety had its value, he recognized, and he was so little ruffled by these attacks that he explained to Mary Fairbanks that the basic fault was “the rudeness and coarseness of those Holy Land letters which you did not revise.” Besides, it was only the “small-fry ministers” who attacked him. With “all those of high rank and real influence,” he assured her, he was on friendlier terms than ever.

  He was soon off on a two-week tour that took him to Sacramento, through the towns of the Mother Lode, and to the cities of his first celebrity, Virginia and Carson. He returned on May 5, exuberant and exhausted, having traveled two and a half hours by sleigh in a snowstorm and stayed up all night talking on the boat from Sacramento to San Francisco (he had been given the bridal suite, “a ghastly sarcasm on my lonely state”). He carried with him a gift from an assayer in Carson City, a silver bar inscribed with a Biblical citation that would dog him all his days: “And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” Friends among the Alta California editors had persuaded MacCrellish to give up his publication plans and settle for a face-saving acknowledgment. Having won his battle, Clemens reported to Elisha Bliss on May 5, “I am steadily at work.”

  IV

  During May and June, working from before midnight until seven or eight the next morning, Clemens wrote over 200,000 words of The Innocents Abroad—thirty manuscript pages, or three thousand words, at a sitting. He bettered this staggering output only once, three years later when he was in the grip of a “red-hot interest” in Roughing It, and he never again equaled it for any length of time. Each book after Roughing It, he said, tired in the middle, its “stock of raw materials” was exhausted, but he was confident that “when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time,” metaphors which reflected both his mechanistic turn of mind and his frontier assumption of endless forests and numberless buffaloes. In San Francisco all the conditions seemed favorable. He was liberated from money worries and competing obligations. He had the double incentive of a short deadline and a large reward—he had turned down Bliss’s offer of ten thousand dollars outright in favor of a royalty. And for once in his writing career he had no plot problems to wrestle with; the shape of the book was the shape of the voyage, and, with his Alta California letters, guidebooks, and other materials that he borrowed and collected, he had little fear that his tank would run dry. But he knew that his book had certain imperatives distinguishing it from a collection of newspaper pieces which needed, in the first place, to have “the wind and water squeezed out of them.” It was by changing the “I” of the book—the narrator, “Mark Twain”—that Clemens not only fulfilled these imperatives but also underwent a kind of psychological integration that liberated his mature powers.

  In the correspondence he wrote for the Alta California from New York and abroad, “Mark Twain” was accompanied by a fictitious character named Brown, a comic Doppelgänger. “Mark Twain” was high-minded, something of a gentleman, bookish, eager to learn, refined. “Brown” was the savage American: he was in turn gullible and outraged, he drank a lot and he washed a little, he was impatient with what he could not understand, he was raucous and derisive, his idiom was the slang that Mary Fairbanks abhorred, and he was no gentleman. “Brown” was a mouthpiece for low vulgarisms, for comments on dirt and smells, for chauvinisms and solecisms that would have been out of character for the original Mark Twain. He was in part the embarrassing dream self, the rebellious and perverse demon, that fascinated Clemens years later. In the writing of The Innocents Abroad “Brown” disappeared. “Mark Twain” took over some of his prerogatives, acquired a new range of mood, stance, and confidence, and became a fully created literary persona. “The irascible pilgrim, ‘Mark Twain,’ is a very eccentric creation of Mr. Clemens’,” Bret Harte pointed out in his review of The Innocents Abroad; an eccentric creation of such demanding vitality that it: towered over Samuel Clemens and all his books.

  “Any lecture of mine,” Clemens was to write to Livy a few years later, “ought to be a running narrative-plank, with square holes in it, six inches apart, all the length of it, and then in my mental shop I ought to have plugs (half marked ‘serious’ and the others marked ‘humorous’) to select from and jam into these holes according to the temper of the audiences.” In The Innocents Abroad “Mark Twain” is comparably responsive to the demands of his readers. He can be instructive and “serious,” pious, rhetorical, generous with straight guidebook information. He also wriggles in discomfort when the emotions of respect and awe, said to be especially painful for Americans, threaten him, and then he turns to burlesque and parody and he gibes at history, the Old Masters, anything new or strange or foreign. As an American democrat and announced materialist, he jeers at the European past and its foundations in superstition, cruelty, and economic exploitation; still he falls into a purple trance in front of the Sphinx, no less a loaded symbol of an alien past than the Czar’s summer palace, which he also admires. His characteristic mood is indignation, but when he is not even able to simulate indignation, as Bret Harte said, “he is really sentimental.” He can be all things to all men, a barbarian as well as a sensitive observer, for basically he is a pragmatist of audience psychology, a manipulator of the passing opportunity; and certainly the old Clemens, crying out against the aimlessness and meaninglessness of his life, must have recognized some corroborating qualities in the plasticity of the young “Mark Twain.” Nevertheless, Mark Twain is not only the “I” of The Innocents Abroad but its single structural principle which binds together its erratic episodes and vindicates its inconsistencies, its radical shifts of attitude and allegiance, and its contrasts of the past and the present in personal as well as in historical terms. Through Mark Twain Samuel Clemens begins to rediscover his youth and translate it into literature.

  In Milan, for example, the narrator of The Innocents Abroad is shown a stone sculpture of a flayed man. “It was a hideous thing,” he says, and it calls to his mind an image of terror from his boyhood, a reminder of the frontier violence that was part of Hannibal. Hiding for the night in his father’s law office, Sam had discovered on the floor, picked out by moonlight, the body of a stabbed man who had been brought in off the street to die and been left there until the next morning. “I have slept in the same room with him often, since then—in my dreams.” By a train of associations that lead him further and further back in time, the Pyramid of Cheops reminds him of the Capitol in Washington, then of a high bluff on the Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans, and finally of “Holliday’s Hill, in our town, to me the noblest work of God,” where one Saturday afternoon he had sent an immense boulder crashing down the hillside and through a cooper’s shack. The ter
ror and the idyl were part of the same transformed past, just as Tom Sawyer plays on Holliday’s Hill and also cowers in the graveyard hiding from Injun Joe. Even Jerusalem, a depressing experience for the Alta California correspondent, takes on another possibility for the narrator of The Innocents Abroad. Perhaps time will soften it, he reasons:

  School-boy days are no happier than the days of after life, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school, and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed—because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of that canonized epoch and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden sword pageants and its fishing holydays.

  Intermittently through the writing of the book, insistently toward the end of it, he measures not his distance from the past but his closeness. “That canonized epoch”—Hannibal and the river, not purified of terror but shaped to embrace it—is to become not only his prime subject but also the reality that was home base, that gave him life, where he could make the Antaean connection of sole and soil. As he described it toward the end of The Innocents Abroad, the Sphinx itself had come to stand for this discovery: “It was the type of an attribute of man—of a faculty of heart and brain. It was MEMORY—RETROSPECTION.”

  On June 17, nearing the end of his book, he broke off work to chaffer with Mary Fairbanks in a long stock-taking letter. He was not going back to Europe yet, he told her; he was not going to China either. His next stops after he left San Francisco were going to be New York and Hartford (he said nothing about his invitation to go to Elmira), and then? “I am going to settle down some day, even if I have to do it in a cemetery.” He was up to pages 2343 of his manuscript, he told her, and was homeward bound, “voyaging drearily over accumulating reams of paper.” “I wish you could revise this mountain of MSS. for me,” cut it down to size, for he was tired of the book, bored, impatient now as throughout his career to submit his work to someone else’s judgment, follow recommendations, be confirmed and approved. “If you wanted a thing changed, very good, you changed it,” Howells recalled years later. “His proof sheets came back each a veritable ‘mush of concession.’”

  In San Francisco his Howells was Bret Harte. Supported by an undemanding job as private secretary to the superintendent of the Mint, Harte was able to follow a literary career without having to do hack work for the newspapers. In an office on Montgomery Street he was preparing the first issue of the Overland Monthly, which during the two years of his brilliant editorship became the Atlantic of the Pacific Coast. Clemens watched in admiration as Harte, with a few strokes of his pencil, drew in some rails and transformed the proposed cover emblem of the magazine from an aimless grizzly bear into a totem of frontier California snarling defiance at the approaching transcontinental locomotive; the raw West was dying out, and Harte was creating the literary and picturesque West which took its place. Early in 1866 Harte had proposed that he and Clemens publish a joint collection of their sketches. The project had fallen through, but Clemens had been pleased and flattered at the time; he had gladly conceded that Harte belonged “at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country.” He had been awed by this transplanted Easterner who was a year younger but had found his vocation so much earlier that he seemed almost of another generation. In 1868 Clemens was still dazzled, deferential, apologetic at times. He was made to feel coarse and a little clumsy by Harte’s elegant manners and fashionable clothes, his graceful, even mincing movements, his neckties which flashed like butterfly wings beneath his pock-marked but handsome face. (Five years later Harte complained that his lecture audiences were hostile to him because he looked like a gentleman and not like their idea of a miner; by then Clemens saw him as an insufferable fop.) His handwriting was tiny, precise, dandiacal. He was fastidious, and as both editor and writer he had a special taste in the choice of titles and insisted on literary finish. When they first met in San Francisco in 1864 Harte had noticed Clemens’ careless outfits and apparent indifference to his surroundings, and he recognized in him, he said much later, an “unusual and dominant nature” symbolized by Clemens’ “aquiline eye—an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me.” Against this dominant nature Harte managed to maintain, for the protection of his own edgy ego, a condescending air, a mocking tone, and the authority of the master over the pupil. Harte “trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently,” Clemens told Thomas Bailey Aldrich in 1871, “until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.” Until their friendship finally exploded Harte had the psychological edge, could make him feel off balance and defensive.

  The Frog, as Clemens said, was vulnerable; he had sent it on to Harte apologetically. Now he brought him the mountainous manuscript of his new book. “Harte read all the MS. of the ‘Innocents’ and told me what passages, paragraphs, and chapters to leave out—and I followed orders strictly,” Clemens wrote in 1870. “It was a kind thing for Harte to do, and I think I appreciated it.” Two of the chapters Harte told him to leave out appeared in the Overland Monthly: “By Rail through France” in the first issue, in July 1868, and “A Californian Abroad” in the second issue, in August, when Clemens was in Hartford delivering the book to Bliss and later in Elmira beginning his courtship of Olivia Langdon. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (“Bret’s very best sketch and most finished—is nearly blemishless,” Clemens later noted) also appeared in the August number. It was bold and original, it violated all the literary taboos against prostitutes, obstetrics, and blasphemy, above all it seemed the authentic West, and it put Bret Harte’s star in the Eastern sky. Three years later, having followed this success with “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and a humorous poem, “The Heathen Chinee,” he was to start for the East in a blaze of fame and excitement. When Clemens and Bret Harte said goodbye to each other in July 1868, both were about to begin their ordeals by success.

  On July 2 Clemens gave a farewell lecture, “Venice, Past and Present,” at the New Mercantile Library on Bush Street. Four days later he sailed for New York. “I sit here at home in San Francisco,” he had written at the end of The Innocents Abroad; home was the Occidental Hotel, breakfast cocktails at the Cliff House, champagne dinners at the Lick House. He never in all his life came back to San Francisco or to California, and not until twenty-seven years later, when he was lecturing his way out of bankruptcy, did he even see the Pacific again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I do not live backwards”

  I

  IN 1863, SHORTLY before her eighteenth birthday, Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, began keeping a commonplace book. “Next to possessing genius one’s self is the power of appreciating it in others.—Carlyle”: she copied this down, and, appropriately for the wife-to-be of a writer whose feeling for the adjective was “when in doubt, strike it out,” she also copied “A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.—Tuckerman.” These and similar precepts from Henry Ward Beecher, Daniel Webster, Horace Greeley, and Oliver Wendell Holmes answered to her high-mindedness, her conventional Christianity, and her strong, if untested, sense of right and wrong, but (a distinction which Samuel Clemens would urge on her with some heat) she had got them from books and not from such experience as was open to a girl of her age and background.

  Olivia was sheltered and adored by her parents, sister, and brother, and between her sixteenth and eighteenth years, when the juices of curiosity were flowing fast, she was an invalid and lived in a darkened room. She was tutored by Professor Darius R. Ford, the Socrates of Elmira Female College, of which her father was a founder and trustee, and she was also visited frequently by a family friend and beneficiary, Thomas K. Beecher, pastor of the First Congregational Church. Her education was at best random, but it was not a great deal worse than that of other daughters of well-to-do and respec
table provincial families. Spelling remained a mystery to her, her grammar was uncertain, and her love letters, as her fiancé delighted in telling, were “darling eight-page commercial miracles,” “gotten up on the square, flat-footed, cast-iron, inexorable plan of the most approved commercial correspondence, and signed, with stately and exasperating decorum, ‘Lovingly, Livy L. Langdon’—in full, by the ghost of Caesar!” Her notepaper might as well have borne her father’s letterhead, “J. Langdon and Co., Coal.”

  Jervis Langdon made some false starts as a storekeeper in Ithaca, Salina, and other upstate towns, and he ran into even worse luck in the lumber business. It was only at the beginning of the Civil War, after thirty-five years of struggle punctuated by failures and panics, that his coal and iron monopoly around Buffalo and Elmira (convenient to the Pennsylvania anthracite fields) began to pour out money enough to make him an unequivocally rich man. Jervis Langdon was born under a happier conjunction than John Marshall Clemens, also a storekeeper and a seeker after coal and iron wealth, and he lived in an age of more ruthless enterprise. Joined in a cartel with the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railway, his company administered prices upward and wages downward and managed to keep competition to a minimum and profits at a maximum. Like Henry H. Rogers, the Standard Oil mogul who in the 1890s helped Clemens work himself back from bankruptcy to affluence, Langdon was able to combine rectitude and benevolence in his personal affairs with a certain laissez-faire rapacity in business. Neither Langdon nor Rogers felt fettered by the conflict between private and business morality.