Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  Eventually, in the private hell of his autobiography, Clemens consigned Bliss to the lower circle of scoundrels, imbeciles, and publishers. “I feel only compassion for him,” he reflected, after reviewing what he long before decided had been “ten years of swindlings” from Bliss, “and if I could send him a fan I would.” But during 1869 and 1870, when Bliss’s agents were rapping on front doors to “sell the Book,” Clemens was willing to back him against any publisher in the world. “It will sell. Between us we will make it sell,” he told Bliss in August. “I like the book. I like you, and your style and your business vim, and I believe the shebang will be a success.”

  From his headquarters in Hartford Bliss sent out a flood of ballyhoo and promotional literature. His pamphlets blurbed the book as “the Most Unique and Spicy Volume in Existence.” His memoranda for provincial newspaper editors supplied them with extravagantly favorable reviews of The Innocents Abroad extravagantly adapted from “leading journals.” And, following the sturdy principle that success makes news and vice versa, neither Clemens nor Bliss hesitated to issue gross exaggerations of the book’s sales. Early in May 1870 Clemens was proposing that when the sales reached 100,000 copies Bliss should celebrate by inviting him to an oyster supper in Hartford, the invitation, the supper, and Mr. Clemens’ speech to be duly covered in the newspapers. On May 30 he was still refining the idea, and he added yet another dimension of unreality to this non-event: he did not plan to come to the dinner, he said, but if Bliss would write him an invitation he would send back a speech that the papers could have. The book would get its free publicity, Bliss would save the price of the oysters, and Clemens would be saved a trip from upstate New York. What canceled this delectable scheme was the fact that it was to be another two years before 100,000 copies were sold, progress too slow to be real news.

  By the end of 1869, five months after publication, a little over thirty thousand copies had been sold. “Nothing like it since Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I guess,” Clemens said hopefully to Livy that December. (Except perhaps in dollar volume, The Innocents Abroad did not come anywhere near Mrs. Stowe’s staggering record of 300,000 the first year.) During January, February, and March the pace decreased from December’s twelve thousand to about nine thousand copies a month, and by July, a year after publication, the total was nearly seventy thousand copies. “I only expected the Innocents to sell 3,000 copies,” Clemens wrote that December, making a good story out of it, “but it astounded me by selling 85,000 copies within 16 months.” This time his total reflected the facts. The Innocents Abroad was not the besom of destruction its author and its publisher made it out to be, but it was a substantial and continuing success nonetheless. With royalties of about nineteen cents a copy coming in from Bliss, Clemens was feeling confident enough at the beginning of 1870 to pay off some debts, send a thousand dollars to his mother and Pamela, buy a ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy on his life for his mother’s benefit, and still have some money in the bank—all this a few weeks before his marriage.

  Bliss’s army of book agents, marching out in greater numbers and generally better equipped than those of his competitors, invested every town and hamlet. The “line of battle stretches from end to end of a great continent,” Clemens said in euphoric tribute to Bliss’s “genuine generalship.” Bliss believed in saturation, repetition, and persistency, techniques that Clemens applied when he himself published Grant’s Personal Memoirs in 1885. The subscription agent, with a prepared talk in his head and a canvassing book in his coat, was faceless, ubiquitous, tireless, a schoolteacher, retired clergyman, or demobilized veteran, as familiar a feature of the American social order as the circuit rider and the touring lecturer. He opened his canvassing book on the parlor center table and, talking all the while, showed his prospect, who might never have seen the outside of a bookstore, the ornate title page, the voluminous table of contents, the text, the 234 illustrations, and sample bindings (which ranged from cloth at three-fifty to half morocco at five dollars). With the customer’s signature on the dotted line, a down payment, and the satisfaction of having earned about a dollar for himself (more than five times the author’s royalty), the agent set off on another of the fifteen or twenty calls he might be able to make on a lucky day.

  Clemens missed few opportunities to promote his book in the Buffalo Express, where he had begun work in August, and the Galaxy, a magazine to which he began to contribute a regular humorous department in March 1870. He claimed in the Express on October 9, 1869, that there had been so far twelve hundred press notices of his book, proof (even with a generous discount for exaggeration) that Bliss’s technique of saturation was as effective with editors as it was with agents and customers. Bliss concentrated on towns instead of cities, on popular papers instead of literary journals, and Clemens used his personal connections. Through their combined efforts The Innocents Abroad, which had started as a loosely conceived assignment from a California newspaper, was given a measure of Eastern critical attention almost unique for a book which was sold by subscription and which was consequently, and by its own novel character, outside the established literary tradition.

  “Today my new book will be sent to the Tribune,” Clemens wrote to Whitelaw Reid in August 1869, “and this is to ask you if you won’t get your reviewer to praise the bad passages and feeble places in it. Those are the only ones I am worrying about, you know—the meritorious parts can get along themselves, of course.” And Reid, who had already done his part for Jervis Langdon, now responded with a review that left Clemens both obliged and relieved. “I was afraid from the start that I might ‘catch it’ disagreeably and caustically in the Tribune,” Clemens wrote to him in September. “Certainly and surely it isn’t every adventurer’s maiden experiment that fares so kindly at the hands of the press as mine has.” The Cleveland Herald was soon to come through with a column-and-a-half front-page review which hailed Mark Twain as a “laughing philosopher” and which was followed up ten days later by an editorial blurb identifying The Innocents Abroad as “the literary sensation of the day—at least in this locality.” His friends on Packard’s Monthly, indebted to him for his contributions that year, could be counted on to give him the title of “first among American humorists.”

  But it was not from the daily press or the cheap magazine that Clemens sought and received the attention he really desired. The subscription book was the front door to prosperity, but it was, at best, the back door to literary status. Bliss was claiming in his broadsides, “Twain is entitled to the title of The People’s Author.” What was surprising, consequently, was that the Nation, on September 2, reviewed the book at all, not that it reviewed it primarily as a phenomenon of popular culture. Casting on this latest manifestation of native humor an eye more tolerant than that which saw in most aspects of the Gilded Age only evidence of a “chromo civilization,” E. L. Godkin’s influential weekly concluded that “if some of the book is needless, none of it is really poor, and much of it very good,” acclaim somewhat better than silence.

  In San Francisco, while the book was in manuscript, Bret Harte had praised it so generously that Clemens had high expectations for his review in the Overland Monthly. Clemens was a native son, a contributor to the magazine. He had been present at its birth, and, writing to the Alta California from Hartford in July, he had cast, he hoped, some bread upon the waters. The magazine was well known and handsomely praised in high literary circles in the East, he reported, and as for Bret Harte (poised, like him, a few steps away from a great popular triumph), “The Luck of Roaring Camp” was the “best prose magazine article that has seen the light for many months on either side of the ocean.” Clemens was sincere in his admiration, and in terms of expediency it was a good time to be so outspokenly partisan. But whatever good work had been done was undone by some ludicrous difficulty Harte experienced in getting a copy of the book for review. Clemens told Webb a year later that he found himself on the receiving end of “the most daintily contemptuous and insulting letter you e
ver read,” and his friendship with Harte entered one of its cyclical periods of absolute zero. Harte’s review in the Overland appeared in the January 1870 issue, five months after the book’s publication; Clemens’ hope for an early review that would trigger Western sales was already disappointed, and Harte’s comments, although sympathetic and even generous in many respects, were framed in peculiarly grudging terms and narrow categories. The book was not for the “fastidious reader,” Harte said, nor was it for the reader who “prefers to find books rather than let them find him.” The humor had “very little moral or aesthetic limitation”; the indignation was closely related to sentimentalism. As a travel book, Harte said (and he had never been to Europe or the Near East), it was too conventional: the author had followed a guidebook itinerary and a treadmill round of sights. Yet in its own class, that of subscription literature, the book was a “joyous revelation,” and among “Western humorists” Mark Twain was “foremost.”

  A Westerner writing for a Western magazine, Harte had laced his review with the literary condescension and cosmopolitan fastidiousness that Clemens feared he would find in the East. Actually, to a surprising extent and from surprising sources, he met with the opposite reaction. The copy of The Innocents Abroad that he sent to Oliver Wendell Holmes brought back a delighted letter paying tribute to the “sharp, twinkling Yankee (in the broader sense) eyes in his head.” In that tolerant use of “Yankee” Holmes was mitigating his Hubbish pride, which sometimes made him an uncomfortable host to an outlander. (Howells had squirmed a little to hear him dismiss a stranger with the brusque statement, “If you don’t know where Washington Street is, you don’t know anything.”) Now in praising a book which extended beyond the geography of Boston he expressed the hope that “your booksellers will sell a hundred thousand copies of your travels.” But, exasperating as the weather that rattled past his study window over the Charles, Holmes beat a cautious retreat from his praise. “Don’t let them get hold of this letter,” he wrote, referring ostensibly to publishers in general and implicitly to what passed through Clemens’ mind as he savored this superbly useful testimonial, “for the rascals always print everything to puff their books—private or not—which is odious.”

  “The first great man who ever wrote me a letter,” Clemens said ten years later in a birthday tribute to Holmes. His pleasure at the doctor’s praise and from the tacit conferral of the status of a fellow author outweighed his disappointment. From his desk at the Buffalo Express, where on the opposite side the political editor was scratching out the day’s editorial, he wrote an effusive letter of thanks. What excuse, Holmes had asked, did Mr. Clemens have for sending so large a book? “I hadn’t any real ‘excuse,’” Clemens answered, “but I sent the book as a sort of unobtrusive ‘thank-you’ for having given me so much pleasure often and over again.”

  From Boston came another literary credential, and an entirely public one. The Atlantic Monthly, making an exception to its practice of ignoring subscription books, printed in its December issue an unsigned review of The Innocents Abroad by its thirty-two-year-old assistant editor, William Dean Howells. Parton’s recommendation of Mark Twain as a contributor to the magazine probably had its effect in bringing the book to Howells’ attention, but with the book once before him Howells was quick to recognize and declare that here was no mere comedian but a decided original who had both genius and aspiration. “There is an amount of pure human nature in the book,” he said, “that rarely gets into literature.” My Mark Twain, the biographical tribute Howells wrote in memory of his friend over forty years later, was hardly more grounded in admiration than his review of a book by a man whom he had never met and whose name he consistently misrendered as “Clements.” “This book ought to secure him something better than the uncertain standing of a popular favorite,” Howells concluded. “It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of the best.”

  III

  In January 1870, his marriage to Livy only a month away, Clemens celebrated his economic stability. “My book is waltzing me out of debt so fast that I shan’t owe any man a cent by this time next year,” he wrote to Mary Fairbanks. And he added casually, “I mean to write another book during the summer. This one has proved such a surprising success that I feel encouraged. We keep six steam presses and a paper mill going night and day, and still we can’t catch up on the orders.” The other book would be Roughing It; it would be two years before he finished it, and he would have experienced a time of crisis and depression that nearly destroyed him as a writer. But now, in the full pride of his year of marvels, all things seemed easy and possible, even the sequel to a popular triumph, and he was, in fact, just as occupied with other effects of The Innocents Abroad: lecture invitations, so many that he eventually changed his plan not to lecture at all that winter, invitations to write for magazines and newspapers, bids from book publishers. Impressed with Clemens’ sweeping popularity in New England, Charles Dudley Warner was now trying to talk him into leaving the Express for the Hartford Courant. Even the haughty Isabella Hooker leaned from her buggy one day to tell Clemens that public demand made it absolutely imperative for him to join the Hartford paper and that she had asked Jervis Langdon to help persuade him to sell out in Buffalo. He was tempted by Hartford, but he felt that the money he would lose in selling out so early was more than he could afford. And besides, he recalled “the insultingly contemptuous indifference with which the very same matter was treated last June (by every one of them)”—to Livy he was now able to voice his anger at the Hartford establishment. “Revenge is wicked, and unchristian and in every way unbecoming,” he gloated to her. “But it is powerful sweet anyway.” He said no, even though his first enthusiasm for living in Buffalo and running the Express had cooled some months earlier.

  He had his plans for the Express; it was that solid, remunerative newspaper post which he had made a condition of his marriage, it was something to settle down to. “I shall always confine myself to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience,” the new associate editor declared in his “Salutatory” on August 21, 1869, and he promised, with a certain murky irony which infuriated critics of Jervis Langdon’s coal monopoly, that he would not introduce “any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make trouble.” His main program was a professional one: he was going to train his reporters, he told Livy, to “doing things my way,” and he wanted adjectives, slang, and philosophic reflections curtailed and thunder-and-lightning headlines saved for real news. He was, at the start, ambitious for his paper, energetic, willing to work late hours, the veteran newspaperman settling down once again to the routine of articles and editorials, skimming through the exchanges, reading proof, receiving visitors. In a display of nonchalance meant both to impress and to shock Livy, he confided that often when he and J. L. Larned, the Express’s political editor and a co-owner, found themselves stuck in what they were writing and tired of biting their nails and scratching their heads, they swapped manuscripts in the middle and, sitting at opposite ends of the same table, each finished the other’s piece. “Some of our patchwork editorials of this kind are all the better for the new life they get by crossing the breed.”

  Clemens’ own singlehanded contributions to the paper reflected some of the same casualness and detachment. He was soon turning out a Saturday series of sketches, satirical commentary, burlesques, most of which reflected the strain of the regular grind, and in search of copy he turned to one of those schemes of collaboration that sum up the partialness of his commitment as a writer. Young Charley Langdon was being sent abroad by his parents once again, this time around the world, and Clemens made a loose agreement with Charley’s traveling companion and tutor, the local savant Darius R. Ford, to supply travel letters which would be rewritten in Buffalo in the manner of The Innocents Abroad. “These letters are written jointly by Prof. D. R. Ford and Mark Twain,” the
Express announced on October 16. “The former does the actual travelling, and such facts as escape his notice are supplied by the latter who remains at home.” As a collaboration the scheme was a failure. Of the twelve “travel” letters that Clemens published in the paper between October and the following March, only two were based on material from Ford. The other ten were all Clemens, accounts of his experiences in California, Nevada, and the Sandwich Islands, and, as such, in an accidental, inadvertent way they were the unacknowledged beginning of Roughing It, the book he was able to write only after he renounced a compromise career as newspaper publisher and decided he would be a full-time man of letters.

  During his first months in Buffalo Clemens boarded at the house of an Express clerk named McWilliams on Oak Street. Summer evenings after work he went rowing on Lake Erie, and then he would come back to his room and write to Livy: “Little dearie, little darling, in a few minutes, after I shall have read a Testament lesson and prayed for us both, as usual, I shall be in bed.” Weekends, while Larned filled in for him on the paper, he traveled the one hundred miles by train to Elmira to spend Saturday and Sunday with her. Yet by early September the old restlessness, this time aggravated by his loneliness for her during the week and by the success of his book, was on him again. “I feel a sort of itching in my feet, mother,” he told Mary Fairbanks in open envy of Charley’s trip around the world, “and if my life were as aimless as of old, my trunk would be packed, now.” Redpath had not been able to free him from his lecture engagements for the coming winter. There was no point to learning a lecture and then giving it only a few times, he rationalized for Livy. He might as well commit himself for a full season of lecturing. Piling reason on reason, he reminded himself that he needed a cash stake to begin married life, and, besides, the tour might have some publicity value for the Express—Nasby, after all, was taking a leave from the Toledo Blade to go on the New England circuit. In a squib in his paper Clemens answered his own question, “What is your favorite season of the year?” “The lecture season.” After less than two months on the Express he took a leave of absence and moved to Elmira to spend a few weeks with Livy while he worked up “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” his old Cooper Union lecture revised. Late in October he set off on a tour which began in Pittsburgh with an oyster supper and ended, after nearly sixty engagements, in Jamestown, New York, on January 21.