Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  Langdon’s ligitation never passed the planning stage, however, and even the Clemens family’s Tennessee land seemed for a brief period closer to cash actuality than the disputed $500,000. Commingling business interests, Clemens had got Langdon involved with the land, and, with the prospect of eventual success, he renounced his share in favor of Jane and Orion. But by November 1869, Langdon’s interest began to wane, or at least grew vague. He was old and tired of business, he claimed, and even Livy could not learn whether her father intended to work the land for its supposed coal and iron deposits, act as intermediary in selling it, or just give advice. The following year Orion, once again in sole charge of the negotiations, characteristically balked at an offer of fifteen thousand dollars from a Chicago group, and the Clemenses were back in their customary state of aggravated hopes, their prospects near enough to appear glorious but still, as always, too far away to collect on. “I cannot help thinking that maybe our Heavenly Father has put obstacles in the way of our selling the land heretofore,” Pamela was soon telling Orion’s wife, Mollie, “that we may realize a great deal more of it hereafter, and that at no distant day.” Sam himself, who abominated the Tennessee land and the wild hopes it never failed to raise, could not have written a more sardonic, if premature, epitaph.

  To a certain extent the multiple distractions of courtship and the multiple prospects Clemens saw before him in 1869 foreshadowed the fever crisis as a writer, the sense of creative failure, that he was to experience during the first year of his marriage. He had worked all through the spring of 1869 on the proofs of his book, but apart from that he was writing nothing new. In June he estimated that during the past year he had written only “two little magazine squibs and one newspaper letter”; they earned him eighty dollars. He had no new project either on paper or in his mind to follow The Innocents Abroad; he was, in fact, not at all certain that he would ever write another book. During the year between his engagement and his marriage in February 1870, a year during which he felt he was entering an enchanted land, he was a writer only reluctantly; his materials were still lodged below the surface of his awareness. In his engagement to Livy he had pledged himself to a life of steady and respectable earning power, and though he had high hopes for Bliss’s success with The Innocents Abroad he turned to lecturing and newspaper publishing for money and stability.

  In June he found he had less than $3,600 in the bank of the eight or nine thousand dollars he had taken in during the lecture season. This was better than the two thousand he had predicted he would clear; still, he felt, it was not much of a stake with which to buy into a newspaper and marry a girl from a family whose yearly expenses were about forty thousand. “I most cordially hate the lecture field,” he wrote to his mother in June; he was in a passing mood of despondency, he was afraid of being wedded to the profession, trapped in it for life like Nasby and “the other old stagers,” and he hoped that a newspaper post would save him from having to go on tour again. Yet he had already promised to talk ten nights in New York State for a thousand dollars; in May he signed up with Redpath for the following season at a hundred dollars a night; and all through the first seven months of 1869 he wrestled with a plan to go West during the summer and repeat his California and Nevada circuit of the previous year. His decision to go was soon undermined by his unwillingness to be separated from Livy, but his plans and alternatives proliferated: he was going by sea, he was going the overland route with Riley, he wanted Nasby to go on a joint tour with him (and Nasby confused the issue by proposing instead that Clemens join him on the Toledo Blade), he dreaded the idea of having to pass through St. Louis on his way West and visit his family, he was afraid of being idle during the summer but he would not go if Livy preferred him not to. By July, when the scheme collapsed, it was too late to go anyhow, and it was clear to him that he was more interested in locating himself on a newspaper than in seeing California again.

  Soon after his provisional engagement to Livy in November Clemens decided that if he could buy a share of Abel Fairbanks’ Herald he and Livy would live in Cleveland after their marriage, thus combining the two feminine ambiences that had most favored him. Fairbanks’ hesitations, together with the hesitations, illness, and market-place subtleties of his partner, extended Clemens’ negotiations through the spring. By then he had rival possibilities to consider—the New York Tribune, should shares come on the market, Nasby’s Blade, and most importantly the Hartford Courant. Cleveland itself quickly lost its attractiveness. “Both of us,” he told Livy in February, “would prefer the quiet, moral atmosphere of Hartford to the driving, ambitious ways of Cleveland.” Livy’s preferences, her friendships in Hartford (and, quite possibly, her reluctance to share her husband with the meddlesome Mother Fairbanks) fitted in with his own plans for reform. “I can buy into plenty of paying newspapers,” he explained to Twichell, “but my future wife wants me to be surrounded by a good moral and religious atmosphere (for I shall unite with the church as soon as I am located) and so she likes the idea of living in Hartford. We could make more money elsewhere, but neither of us are much fired with a mania for money-getting.”

  He tried to convince General Joseph Hawley and Charles Dudley Warner to admit him to partnership on the Courant. He was not yet the celebrity of The Innocents Abroad, and these two shared Isabella Hooker’s skepticism of the newcomer if not her contempt. What Clemens received from them was an aloof and tentative interest, an evasiveness and general tepidness which amounted in the end (on the advice, he later learned, of their friend Sam Bowles of the Springfield Republican) to a rejection. (“Nasby,” he said a few months later, before he learned of the part Bowles had played in turning him down, “I have never heard anybody say a word against Sam Bowles, and he always treats me politely, but I cannot get rid of the conviction that he is a dog.”) The Hartford Post, scarcely more interested in him than the Courant, was of no interest to him at all. In July, on Langdon’s advice, he demanded a firm proposal from the costive Abel Fairbanks, and he got it: Fairbanks was willing to sell one quarter of the Herald for fifty thousand dollars. Clemens was furious, claiming that the price had been raised on him and that in any case he would not think of being political editor, the job Fairbanks had in mind for him. A few days after the negotiations collapsed Langdon proposed a new possibility: he offered to lend Clemens twenty-five thousand dollars to buy a one-third interest in the Express in Buffalo, a city that was well within the sphere of the family coal interests and where Langdon could be expected to be as useful to Clemens as Clemens could be to him. On August 12, 1869, Clemens made a down payment of fifteen thousand dollars, and on August 14 the former roving correspondent, police-court reporter, and puffer of mining claims took formal possession of his own newspaper.

  During the first half of that year he was sending home thirty-five dollars a month as his contribution to Jane Clemens’ support, and he found it was all too easy to fall behind even with this contribution. He told his family he was determined to support Livy without any help from her father. “I have paddled my own canoe so long that I could not be satisfied now to let anybody help me,” he wrote in February. He was trying to save money, he explained. Citing the plain gold engagement ring he had given Livy (“when fashion imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one”), he begged for their patience if at times he seemed stingy with them. Pamela wagged her finger at the contrast between her brother’s announced thrift and the rich society and the high life he seemed to be enjoying. She, a widow with two children, was the main support of her aged mother; wasn’t Sam engaged to an heiress, and wasn’t he constantly talking about buying into a newspaper (and a metropolitan one, not the crudely printed provincial weekly and by-product of a job-printing shop that Orion was accustomed to)? Sam had every reason to dread a visit to St. Louis. With the exception of his work reading proof, he had spent the spring with Livy in the comforts of Elmira. “I feel ashamed of my idleness,” he wrote to his mother, “and yet I have had really no inclination to do anyt
hing but court Livy.” He had been in and out of New York, visiting friends, attending with Charley Langdon Edwin Booth’s performance as Iago in Shakespeare’s play about “the great Micegenationist.” He spent part of May and June in Elmira. Then he accompanied the Langdons to Hartford for the marriage of Isabella Hooker’s daughter, Alice, to John Calvin Day; Livy was one of Alice’s bridesmaids, Henry Ward Beecher performed the ceremony. Afterward Clemens joined Livy in New York on a trousseau-shopping expedition and went back to Elmira with her for another long visit.

  “You seem to think that I spend money foolishly—but I don’t,” he wrote to Pamela from New York on June 25. “My absolute expenses are $50 a week, just for food, lodging, and washing, and it is not possible to live for less. I have not run behind with Ma. She only asked $35 a month ($400 a year) and I have paid her as much as $500 in the last thirteen months. I ought to have done better, I know, but you must give me the little credit that is due me.” And he explained that if he were not living in expensive hotels he would be able to keep up with his monthly pledges and eventually repay Pamela all the money she laid out for their mother. Pamela could not have found this a reassuring line of argument. Writing the next day from Elmira, he made the tactical error of telling her that his visit to Hartford with the Langdons to attend Alice Day’s fashionable wedding had been “villainously expensive.” “My expenses were ten to twelve dollars a day, and Mr. Langdon’s over fifty. We were gone fifteen days.”

  Sam Clemens’ transition from marginal journalist to newspaper proprietor, from poor man to rich man in his outlook, from bohemian to family man, was not and never would be complete; but it had been made so far with a speed that bewildered him. His reforms were still tentative. Anger warred with the Christian equanimity he was told he should strive for. He had been accepted (after much difficulty) in Elmira but rejected in Hartford, where he was still an unknown; in July the publication of The Innocents Abroad would begin to bring him fame and money to a degree he could never have predicted. His ironical bemusement found a certain expression in the second of the “two little magazine squibs” of that spring. Staying in Bliss’s house in Hartford, he spent the night of May 13 writing a sketch called “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins.” It was a burlesque account of how the real and celebrated Chang and Eng (who had been forced by financial reverses to come out of retirement and go on exhibition once again) managed to coexist.

  Twinship was one of Mark Twain’s favorite subjects, often one of his fatal temptations. He could manipulate it into melodrama and farce by exploiting its possibilities for surprises and discoveries: Pudd’nhead Wilson became viable only after the débridement of a “comedy” called Those Extraordinary Twins. But twinship, along with the cognate subject of claimants of all sorts, also offered Clemens an enormously suggestive if misleadingly simple way of objectifying the steadily deepening sense of internal conflict and doubleness which is suggested by two sets of near-homonyms: Twain/twins and Clemens/claimants. And soon he would begin to explore the doubleness of Samuel L. Clemens and Mark Twain through concepts of “dual personality,” “conscience,” and, toward the end of his life, a “dream self” that seemed to lead a separate life.

  Clemens elaborated certain facts about the real Siamese twins—they had been slave-owners in North Carolina, their wives were sisters, and, aggravated by Chang’s alcoholism, the twins quarreled and fought violently—into a sketch which employed implicit parallels to his own life. Clemens was a Southerner turned Northerner, the son of slave-owners but now about to marry into an abolitionist family. In the same pattern of reconciliation, Chang and Eng, he wrote, fought on opposite sides in the Civil War and captured each other; a military court declared them both prisoners and exchanged them for each other. They were both in love with the same girl, but Chang won her; she abominated tobacco, and so Eng, a ceaseless smoker, had to sit by tobaccoless and listen to his twin’s “fond foolishness, and to the concussion of hundreds of squandered kisses.” At about the time that Livy began to pour out her “prodigal affections” in kisses, caresses, and terms of endearment, she was urging Clemens to give up smoking altogether. The twins hold different positions on most matters, for; as Clemens explained, though they are joined in body “their reasoning faculties are unfettered; their thoughts are free.” Chang was an ardent temperance man and (like Sam and Orion on various occasions) he marched in temperance parades, but Eng would get drunk, and after a while Chang would be drunk, too. (Orion, Sam’s troublesome psychological twin, once disgraced himself at a temperance parade after adopting an empiric approach to the forbidden jug; later, changeable as water, he lost the nomination for Nevada secretary of state because he suddenly announced himself unswervingly opposed to liquor, and still later he is supposed to have turned down an offer for the Tennessee land because the purchasers intended the land for a vineyard.) Finally, according to Clemens, an elaborate experiment was conducted on the twins by the suffering temperance workers. The blameless Chang was filled full of warm water and sugar, and Eng was filled full of whiskey, and within twenty-five minutes both “were as drunk as loons—and on hot whiskey punches.” The moral of this, as Clemens might have been tempted to tell his fiancée’s family, is that it is quite possible for a man to be physically drunk but morally sober.

  II

  In Hartford on May 12 Clemens looked through the manuscript and corrected galley proofs of The Innocents Abroad for the last time. On and off during the spring he had done his work of reading and revision in Elmira with Livy, testing out on her his sense of literary propriety and Eastern mass taste. Now the book was about to go to press, and as he handed it over to Elisha Bliss he made some emotionally charged connections between the work he had done and the life he saw before him. “Nearly every purple ink correction brought my Livy before me,” he wrote to her from Bliss’s house on Asylum Street the next day. “I would give much to own those rusty old bundles of paper,” bundles which tokened his deepest personal and literary commitment and the shared editorial judgment which, however fictive or nominal, was one of the love rites of his thirty-four years with Livy. “I want to get located in life,” he went on. “I want to be married.” In Elmira on June 5 he read the last pages of press proof, and he told Mary Fairbanks that he was “done with the tiresome book forever. I am ever so glad of it, and I do not want another task like it shortly.—I lost very nearly all my interest in it, long ago.” He had cast his book from him as the creation of his own hand, but he was becoming jealously, anxiously, even truculently involved with its career as a publishing venture and vendable commodity. He was about to enact the legend of Mark Twain: the rocket rise, by way of the best seller and its nettling web of values, to celebrity, money, the grandest house in town, the gaudiest style of living. It was in his deliberateness, his promotional sagacity and sheer doggedness, that he departed from the dazzling pattern he set for American writers after him. Unlike the archetypal writer who leaves his creative solitude to find himself famous, Clemens was in part the father as well as the child of the circumstances that made him.

  By the terms of the formal contract he signed with Bliss in October 1868, canvassing for The Innocents Abroad was to begin “very early” the following spring. In anticipation Clemens zealously promoted his book from the platform all through the hard winter of his lecture tour. At the beginning of January he was urging Bliss to advertise the book and issue prospectuses while interest in his subject was still high and “while I am stirring the bowels of these communities.” But Bliss, despite his initial daring in publishing a humorous book for the subscription trade, moved cautiously. He put off until March even the preliminary step of assigning territories to book agents, and the prospectus itself, without which the agent was useless, did not come from the bindery until July 12. By this time Clemens’ impatience and outrage were near the limits of control. “About thirty times a day, on an average,” he recalled in 1906, “I was trying to answer this conundrum: ‘When is your book coming out?’ I got tired o
f inventing new answers to that question, and by and by I got horribly tired of the question itself. Whoever asked it became my enemy at once.”

  Bliss had postponed the book, in favor of others on his list, from early spring to late spring, and from late spring to summer. By May 14 the delays appeared to Clemens to be at an end: twenty thousand copies were to be printed right away, he announced to Livy from Hartford, and in a second jubilant letter the same day he added that the paper for the first printing would weigh “over thirty tons.” But eight days before the first finished copies arrived at Bliss’s office from the bindery on July 20, the publisher sprang another surprise on his author. “Unfortunately we have been delayed too long to make a summer book of it”—Bliss’s technique of aggressive apology kept Clemens off balance for years—“but unavoidably we propose to make a fall book of it with every advantage of full preparation and an early start.”

  By 1906 Clemens’ memory had tricked him into believing that he had cut through the tangle in a decisive telegram to Bliss threatening him with a suit for damages if the book was not put on sale in twenty-four hours. What he actually sent from Elmira on July 22 was an aggrieved letter in which he voiced hurt and confusion even more than anger. “All I desire is to be informed from time to time what future season of the year the publication is postponed to and why—so that I can go on informing my friends intelligently—I mean that infatuated baker’s dozen of them, who, faithful unto death, still believe that I am going to publish a book.” But while he went on to claim that he would hold Bliss responsible in case the postponement caused the sales of the book to fall below expectations, it was on a plaintive and deferential note that this master of invective ended his protest: “I cannot think I have been treated just right.” Even so Bliss had finally been forced to the wall, and with a reluctance and an air of hardship calculated to sour Clemens’ victory by turning it into guilt he agreed to put the book on sale immediately. On August I Clemens apologized for what he now felt had been a “wicked letter” and, an easy victim of Bliss’s self-justifying and hectoring tactics, admitted that “perhaps you had very good reasons for delaying the book till fall which I did not know anything about.” On August 12 he was still apologetic: he attributed his “ill nature” to the collapse of his negotiations with Abel Fairbanks. “Now we will smoke the pipe of peace and bury the hatchet,” he offered. Bliss had saved a final cuff in the teeth for his rebellious but curiously tractable author. “You will hereafter, if you want to say such things to me again,” he scolded Clemens, “just come out plain and call me a d—d cheat and scoundrel—which will really it seems to me cover the whole ground and be a great deal more brief. Now let’s let the thing drop and sell the Book.”