Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  The Innocents Abroad continued to sell. He felt prosperous enough to plan to move his mother, Pamela, and Pamela’s two children to Fredonia, a town about forty miles from Buffalo, and give them one thousand dollars toward building a house there. Orion’s inventions—in June he was showing a prospective backer a “modest little drilling machine”—promised a moneyed success for him finally, Clemens believed, and proved that he had “the partrician blood of intellect.” Even the Tennessee land, because of an offer of fifteen thousand dollars from a group in Chicago, seemed for once to be not altogether chimerical. Favored by all circumstances, Clemens made some loose and confident plans. He thought of going abroad during the summer to write “a telling book” about England. Then he gave up Europe and planned to spend August and half of September with the Twichells in the Adirondacks, all his newspaper and magazine work having been done in advance. He planned to go to California during the spring of 1871. He turned down Redpath’s offer of five thousand dollars a month to lecture that fall. “Have got a lovely wife,” he told Redpath, “a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished; a lovely carriage, and a coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-inspiring—nothing less—and I am making more money than necessary—by considerable, and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform?” In a paragraph to lyceums announcing that Mark Twain probably would not lecture during the season of 1870-71, Redpath explained that his client had made money from lecturing, from editing a newspaper, from writing a book, even from having his father-in-law perpetrate a swindle on him—“The fate of Midas has overtaken this brilliant but unfortunate lecturer.” Years later, after such recitals of good fortune, Clemens would have added, “Unberufen!”—Let the Devil stay unsummoned.

  The new life made its own demands on him. He no longer kept his hands in his pockets or lolled in his chair. He was even willing, for Livy’s sake, to wear a flower in his buttonhole, indoors if not on the street. “There is no argument that can have even a feather’s weight with me against smoking,” he had once written to Livy, however. In flat rejection of all her family’s reasoning on medical grounds, he cited the fact that he was in perfect health although he had smoked since he was eight, and he also passed on the information that his own mother, now a hardy sixty-seven, had been smoking for thirty years. The whole matter of giving up cigars he found ludicrous and hateful. “I am sure it has caused us both more real suffering than would accrue from smoking a million cigars,” he wrote to Livy in apology for his anger. By this time he had fallen back on his last line of resistance—he would give up smoking if she desired him to, but not for any other reason. Not long after the marriage Jervis Langdon offered him ten thousand dollars and a trip to Europe if, having already given up spirits, he would now give up drinking ale and smoking. Clemens rejected the bribe—“I can’t sell myself,” he told Langdon—but he did cut down his smoking drastically, to Sunday afternoons only, and thus he made a sacrifice which is emblematic of the confused terms on which he lived his first year of marriage. He came almost to a full stop as a writer that year, but by the spring of 1871, when he decided to reject all the conditions of his life in Buffalo and commit himself full time to writing Roughing It, he had resumed his normal pace of constant smoking through the day and some drinking at night, a bottle or two of ale for a sedative. “If I had sold myself,” he said to James T. Fields in 1876, after telling him about Langdon’s offer, “I couldn’t have written my book, or I couldn’t have gone to sleep, but now everything works perfectly well.”

  During his thirteen months in the house on Delaware Avenue Clemens maintained the outward semblance of a religious believer. The days were punctuated at regular intervals by prayers, Bible readings, and grace before meals. “After all, what does tobacco matter?” he joked. “Let’s have another chapter of Deuteronomy.” But he was planning to write a book about life on Noah’s Ark as seen through the diaries of Shem and Ham, was terrified that someone would steal the idea from him, and regretted ever having mentioned it to Abel Fairbanks, a compulsive publicist like his wife. “Maybe it will be several years before it is all written,” Clemens wrote to Bliss a month before his marriage, “but it will be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.” The “Noah’s Ark Book,” begun just as he was marrying into Livy’s world of tranquil faith, was the seed of a book which he was still working on when he was seventy and which his surviving daughter suppressed for fifty-two years after his death because of its hilarious unbelief.

  “So Mark got hooked at last,” Dan De Quille had written in the Territorial Enterprise. And in San Francisco Ambrose Bierce, who hardly knew Clemens but knew a newsworthy transformation when he saw one, had written in somewhat the same vein of frog’s chorus: “Mark Twain, who, whenever he has been long enough sober to permit an estimate, has got married,” and Bierce regretted that the groom’s “long bright smile will no more greet the early barkeeper.” Inevitably, despite Clemens’ new happiness, he also suffered something like rootburn from his transplanting. From the sandy, sometimes alkaline soil of his Western independence, he moved, by his own choice, to a richer soil of money, status, and social imperatives, and although these conditions were to favor him as a writer they did not favor him right away. The past had suddenly welled up in all its old glory again, he had told Will Bowen, but the aftermath of this discovery of his literary materials was a period of restlessness and unproductivity. For the Express he wrote weekly sketches and only occasional squibs and editorials. Yet even with these he had difficulty, took his pen, arranged his paper, and paced back and forth, finally confessing to himself that he had no heart in what he was doing, that “my time is not come.” “I am utterly empty,” he said; he was determined to “force it” the next day. Professor Ford’s meager correspondence from abroad obliged Clemens to abandon the series of travel letters, even though, in keeping the letters going singlehandedly, he had dug into his Nevada material and made a start on what would be Roughing It. In answer to rumors which he said had been started in Hartford, he published on the editorial page of the Express during five days in March 1870, a denial that he planned to leave Buffalo. “I am a permanency here,” he announced. “I am prospering well enough to please my friends and distress my enemies, and consequently am in a state of tranquil satisfaction.” Yet he already knew that the Express could never hold his interest, for he wanted more and more to write “for enjoyment as well as profit” (two years earlier he had told Orion that as soon as he married he would stop chasing “phantoms” and would “write to please myself”), and the paper seemed not only a chore and a waste of time but a hazard. He was afraid he might write himself out in the weekly grind and tire his public. He felt confined, he complained, for he had no outlet for “fine-spun stuff,” and often he had to put aside an idea because it might not be “worth while” to write it for a newspaper. His notion of the literary status scale was simple: at the bottom were newspapers, at the top were books, and in the range between, with the Atlantic leading, were the magazines.

  In March he accepted an offer from the Galaxy, a New York monthly founded just after the war in emulation of the Atlantic, to write a regular ten-page department called “Memoranda.” The publishers were willing to pay him $2,400 a year—in page terms more than they had ever paid a contributor—but it was not money that was his major incentive. “I give you my word that I can start out tomorrow or any day I choose and make that money in two weeks, lecturing,” he wrote Colonel William Conant Church, the Galaxy’s publisher, but he accepted nonetheless; remembering his difficulties with the Alta California proprietors, he insisted on retaining his rights in his material. In Hartford Elisha Bliss had unpleasant forebodings that his most valuable author was being seduced away from him. “I consider the magazine because it will give me an opening for higher class writing,” Clemens explained to him in March, “stuff which I hate to shovel into a daily newspaper,” and at the end of April, just as concerned as Bliss with maintaining the market value of his nom de plume, he assured
him that if there were ever any signs of “letting down” in the Galaxy material he would “withdraw from literature and recuperate.” He calculated that his work for the Express and the Galaxy would together take up only six days a month (often he made the same piece do double duty), leaving him time enough, he told Jervis Langdon, “to admire the house in.” And, with Roughing It at the back of his mind as “the Calif. and Plains book,” he added casually, “Need it, too, to write a book in.”

  Jervis Langdon once teased Livy into believing that if she ever married he would have nothing left to live for. Early in 1870 he fell ill, and that spring, as she was adjusting to her new life in Buffalo, he went South to recuperate. By the end of June it was apparent that what had started as chronic indigestion was, in fact, cancer of the stomach, and Clemens and Livy went back to the brownstone mansion in Elmira to help nurse him. For three hours in the middle of the day and from midnight to four in the morning Clemens stood his watches in the sickroom, fighting off sleep in order to wave a palm-leaf fan over Langdon’s drawn, white face. Characteristically, what he remembered years later with agonizing clarity was the guilt of “my noddings, my fleeting unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand and I would wake up with a start and a hideous shock.”

  In July Langdon seemed to be recovering, and Clemens left on a quick trip to Washington to lobby for a judicial redistricting bill for Tennessee which had a bearing on his father-in-law’s Memphis involvements. He sat for his portrait at Mathew Brady’s studio, talked to his friends among the politicians and reporters, and revisited the Congressional press galleries. A literary celebrity now, he was taken to the White House by Senator Stewart to be introduced to the notoriously taciturn Grant, who was considerably less at ease than Clemens and more at a loss for words once the first courtesies had been exchanged. “Mr. President,” Clemens volunteered, “I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?” Grant’s response was a grim smile. The fact was, Clemens told Livy, “the General was fearfully embarrassed himself.” The redistricting bill did not pass, but Clemens came back from Washington with a sense of achievement all the same. He was convinced he had found “a perfect gold mine” for a book. Samuel Pomeroy, the corrupt Kansas Senator, with whom he had dined on the evening of July 8, was to be the model for Senator Abner Dilworthy in The Gilded Age.

  Soon after he returned to Elmira, and still in high spirits, Clemens signed a contract with Bliss for a new book. He was going to “do up Nevada and Cal.,” he wrote to Orion, and he was proud that his seven-and-a-half per cent royalty was the largest ever paid on a subscription book. At the end of March he had paid $9.50 to have the “coffin” containing his files of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise shipped to him from his mother’s house in St. Louis; now he asked for the loan of Orion’s memorandum book to fill out his recollections of the route, station names, scenes and incidents of the overland trip to Carson City they had made together nine years earlier—“I remember next to nothing about the matter”—and he was to pay Orion a thousand dollars out of the first royalties for his help. “The book I am writing will sell,” he predicted at the end of July. With equal confidence in his chances of living an orderly and productive life, he planned to deliver a manuscript to Bliss by January 1, 1871.

  “Beecher, I’m going home … and I’m almost there”: this had been Jervis Langdon’s valedictory, his preacher told a memorial audience in the Elmira Opera House. The coal dealer’s death on August 6 was only the first of a series of overwhelming interruptions to the six months of intensive writing Clemens had planned. Worn down by grief and by the weeks of nursing her father and sitting up nights, Livy had a nervous collapse and needed her husband’s constant care; she slept only when drugged. At best Buffalo had been a city of only mild social diversions for Clemens; now, back at Delaware Avenue soon after the funeral, he was bound by the conventions of mourning to live in near-isolation with an increasingly distressed household. Jervis Langdon’s widow came to stay with her daughter, and at the end of the month another visitor arrived, Miss Emma Nye, a friend of Livy’s who was on her way from South Carolina to teach school in Detroit. Within a week she was sick with typhoid fever and Clemens and Livy were deathbed watchers once again. Emma Nye died on September 29 in Clemens’ own bed and bedroom, a displacement that symbolizes the extent to which his life and his literary goals were to be victimized by malign and domestic harassments.

  Throughout the fall he managed to work on Roughing It, although his pace steadily slackened. “Am up to page 180,” he told Bliss ten days before Emma Nye died; “only about 1500 more to write.” By the middle of October he was writing twelve to twenty pages of manuscript a day, but his usual facility had gone. It was “very slow work,” he complained; it went along at best “fairly tolerably” and most often “ever so slowly.” He refused to admit that his difficulty was an index of his growing despair and discouragement. Instead he convinced himself that by writing so slowly he would not have to change a sentence later. But even this dogged demonstration of the stability and basic hardiness of his genius had to end. On November 11 came a cry of utter defeat. “I am sitting still with idle hands” he wrote to Orion. He was too distracted, too busy with doctors and with bills, even to read Orion’s Nevada notes. In October Livy had a near-miscarriage brought on, he said, by a trip over Buffalo’s cobblestone streets, and she was confined to the library downstairs. On November 7 she gave birth to a son, Langdon Clemens, four and a half pounds in weight and, like his father at birth, frail, sickly, and at least a month premature. “I am sitting still with idle hands—for Livy is very sick and I do not believe the baby will live five days.” The baby survived the winter, but Livy continued in a dangerous condition, an invalid once again, slowly recovering from childbirth complications only to get typhoid in February and come close to dying. In March 1871 she was still an invalid, and when Clemens, by this time half crazy with fatigue and despair, decided to leave Buffalo for Elmira, she had to be moved on a mattress.

  At intervals Clemens’ gloom lifted a little. “Mrs. Fairbanks (my best critic) likes my new book well, as far as I have got,” he told Bliss. He kept busy during December. He finally settled the issue of the Celebrated Jumping Frog royalties that he claimed Webb had withheld. After suing in the New York courts Clemens agreed to waive the six hundred dollars Webb was supposed to owe him and pay an additional eight hundred for all the rights in the book and the plates besides. “Think of purchasing one’s own property after never having received one cent from its publication!” he wrote to Mary Fairbanks. But he was relieved. He planned to melt the plates down and reissue the Frog story and some of the other pieces in the book, and he signed a contract with Bliss for a collection of sketches.

  The day after Christmas 1870 Clemens wrote to the historian Francis S. Drake, who was compiling A Dictionary of American Biography. Clemens’ entry in Drake’s book, published in 1872, gave his occupation as “humorist”: “Entered journalism in Virginia [City], Nevada, in 1862; continued in it three years there, three years in San Francisco, and one in Buffalo. Author of The Jumping Frog, & Other Sketches,’ 12mo, 1867; ‘The Innocents Abroad,’ 8vo, 1869, of which 100,000 copies have been sold in two years.” The sales of The Innocents Abroad had set a record, Clemens wrote to Drake, and, with the air of a man who feels that his victories are all behind him, he added: “That is the only thing in my life that seems to me remarkable enough to merit public attention.” As the hard winter months of 1871 closed in on him and he watched the star of another California writer, Bret Harte, rise and blaze in the sky, his work on Roughing It came at last to a full stop, and, utterly overwhelmed, Mark Twain no longer functioned as a writer.

  II

  In an autobiographical dictation in 1906 Clemens said that the two or three days before Emma Nye’s death were “among the blackest, the gloomiest, the most wretched of my long life.” He made a significant connection between this crisis, which in one form or another continued through the spring,
and the way he functioned as a humorist, and, in effect, he described the hypomania which often accompanies deep depressions: “The resulting periodical and sudden changes of mood in me, from deep melancholy to half-insane tempests and cyclones of humor, are among the curiosities of my life.” With his jackknife one day he carved into a wooden printing block a map which the Express published on September 17 as “Fortifications of Paris”—a travesty of news from the Franco-Prussian War and also of the maps in big-city papers, which, he said, were generally more artistic than reliable. He executed this joke with the unflagging enthusiasm of near-hysteria or, as he recalled his mood, in a “spasm of humorous possession.” His “map” of Paris was consistently and deliberately childish: crude block letters which would come out in reverse, impossible meanderings of misplaced rivers, the mockery of Europe and of military strategy through the designations “Fence,” “Erie Canal,” and “Podunk,” and, finally, a series of appended testimonials from Grant, Bismarck, and Napoleon III. Republished in the November Galaxy, the map eventually found its way to Berlin, Clemens said, where American students roared with laughter over it. He himself was so entranced that he sent a copy to Ainsworth Spofford, the Librarian of Congress, with the suggestion that it be preserved “among the geographical treasures of the Congressional Library.”

  Later that fall, in another “spasm,” he wrote a sketch called “Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography.” He built it on the unwearying device of claiming his descent from a long line of highwaymen, forgers, thieves, pirates, and the like. It was as single-minded a performance as his map of Paris, but hostility and self-hatred are so nakedly displayed that what was meant to be a joke ends up being genuinely unpleasant. Along with a dull burlesque called “Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance”—indicative of his sense of failure at the time, the point of this story is that the author doesn’t know how to end it—he allowed the “(Burlesque) Autobiography” to be brought out by the Galaxy publishers in February 1871. In content and aspiration this little book marks the lowest point in a bad year. Later on he regretted that he had ever written and published it, and the fact that he felt he had to destroy the plates of this book as well as those of Webb’s edition of The Celebrated Jumping Frog—two out of his three books to date—is evidence as poignant as one could find of his fumbling grasp of his literary identity. In the fall of 1870, however, his “(Burlesque) Autobiography” seemed appropriate enough, one of those “half-insane tempests and cyclones of humor” that were his response to despair. “The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” he said many years later. “There is no humor in heaven.”