Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  “How could you have brought a man in that condition to your home,” she scolded afterward, “to sit at your table and meet your wife?” Her mortification when Aldrich told her that the departed guest was Mark Twain, and cold sober, was never equal to her deep-grained disapproval. And as for Clemens, years later, in a ferociously funny account of the dedication of a memorial to Aldrich in Portsmouth in 1908, he was still chewing over the meats she failed to offer him that evening. “I conceived an aversion for her the first time I ever saw her,” he said. “A strange and vanity-devoured detestable woman! I do not believe I could ever learn to like her except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.” She had invited sixty authors, many of them old and poor, to come to the “mortuary festival” by special train from Boston; they had to pay their own fares all the same. This incident alone, Clemens rejoiced, “restored my Mrs. Aldrich to me undamaged and just the same old thing she had always been, undeodorized and not a whiff of her missing.”

  The mannerisms, the eccentric costume, the sealskin coat and the unruly flow of reddish hair under the sealskin hat—these were in part the trappings of the professional humorist. What Mrs. Aldrich disapproved of was also bringing him triumph after triumph on the lecture platform. He was bound to be tormented by the distinction and the split, always invidious, between performing humorist and man of letters, and he had no way as yet of reconciling the two. S. L. Clemens of Hartford dreaded to meet the obligations of Mark Twain, the traveling lecturer—to preserve a double incognito he had registered at a Bethlehem hotel as “Samuel Langhorne, New York.” The epithet “buffoon” took on a kind of terror for him. What he liked about the Atlantic audience, he was to tell Howells, was that it “don’t require a ‘humorist’ to paint himself stripèd and stand on his head every fifteen minutes.” When the Duke in Huckleberry Finn decides that what the Arkansas lunkheads want is low comedy, the King comes prancing out on stage on all fours, naked, painted with streaks and stripes; the image corresponds to the way Clemens thought of himself during one of his sudden alternations from the buccaneering high spirits of the successful performer to depression, self-hatred, and hatred of his audience. “I am demeaning myself,” he complained years later, when he and George Washington Cable were returning to their hotel after an evening on stage. “I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It’s ghastly. I can’t endure it any longer.” By then he had proved himself as a man of letters and was indulging in some self-dramatization. But in the early 1870s he was vulnerable, hypersensitive, and, with considerable justice, suspicious of some of the people around him. The private opinion of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson of Boston, who visited Clemens in Hartford and then dined out in England on the strength of it, was that he was “something of a buffoon,” and that grace at his table “was like asking a blessing over Ethiopian minstrels.”

  Soon after moving to Hartford Clemens was elected to membership in an elite twenty-man discussion group called the Monday Evening Club. Governor Hawley and the Reverend Edwin Parker, Calvin Stowe and the eminent philologist James Hammond Trumbull listened to him with respectful interest when he read papers on the license of the press, universal suffrage, conscience, organized labor. Outside Nook Farm, however, the response was quite different. When, in a letter to the New York Tribune, he ventured a serious criticism of the jury system, a correspondent who signed himself “H.K.” sprang to the attack. No thinking man would attach any value to the view of a humorist, a class of persons who with “actors and clowns, make it a business to cater to our amusement in jest and burlesque,” H.K. raged, and he concluded that in the circumstances Mark Twain’s letter was a piece of “ghastly flippancy,” misleading, and in the worst possible taste. But this was the merest echo of an attack on the profession of humorist during 1871 and 1872 while Mark Twain was off on his “detestable lecture campaign.”

  In Scribner’s Monthly, of which he was editor and one of the founders, Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland published his own four-part analysis of what was wrong with the lyceum system. Holland was an eminence in his day. Under the pseudonym Timothy Titcomb, he first became famous as the author of a series of moralistic letters to the young—he was an expert, as Mark Twain was to say, at arguing in support of self-evident propositions. Holland was a popular lyceum lecturer of the old stamp, dedicated to uplift and instruction, and his popularity survived the Civil War, though he was now more in demand in villages than in cities, and in the West rather than the East. The lyceums were having increasing trouble staying out of bankruptcy, Holland observed in his magazine, and he said that the prime source of their troubles was the fact that serious lecturers of his sort were being driven out of the field by “jesters and mountebanks,” “triflers,” and “literary buffoons.” “Professional jesters and triflers are professional nuisances,” Dr. Holland thundered, “who ought not to be tolerated by any man of common sense interested in the elevation and purification of the public taste.” With a naïveté that was almost appealing, he demanded that the lecture bureaus purge themselves.

  As a prominent “literary buffoon” and the heir of Artemus Ward, Mark Twain might just as well have been named by name. He answered Holland with a counterblast titled deceptively “An Appeal from One That Is Persecuted,” and written with an irony that threatened to turn into physical violence. After some mild ad-hominem teasing, including extended references to Holland’s soporific poetry and unsuccessful career as a doctor of medicine, he settled down to the main attack. The truth of it all, he said, was that the old-line moral instructors like Holland were the people who were bankrupting the lyceums; only the “literary buffoons” were bailing the lyceums out. Dr. Holland “has hung crepe on more lyceum door-knobs than any other man in America,” he went on. “He moves through the lecture field a remorseless intellectual cholera,” a “perambulating sack of chloroform,” and “the very incarnation of the Commonplace.” Finally Clemens cited two offers that he himself had just received for the coming season, one for ten thousand dollars to lecture a month and one for five thousand to lecture twelve nights. The supreme law, he might as well have said, is the law of demand; money talked louder than Holland could. Significantly, in the entire piece there are only glancing references to what was after all the heart of the argument: the function and dignity of the humorist. “Ours is a useful trade, a worthy calling,” he was to say in 1888 when he accepted an honorary M.A. from Yale:

  … with all its lightness, and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it—the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and … whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties.

  Still later, in The Mysterious Stranger, he was to write that the only really effective weapon owned by the human race is laughter. “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand,” not even the most colossal humbug. But in the early 1870s he was still unable to define and justify himself except by the sort of angry, pragmatic, and superficial arguments he used against Holland. And he never published his “Appeal from One That Is Persecuted.” He realized that its basic position, determined by his misgivings and indecisions about his literary status, was no more sound or coherent than Holland’s.

  III

  By July 1872, when Clemens wrote his answer to Holland, Roughing It had been out a full six months and had sold about sixty thousand copies. Publicly he tended to inflate his sales. Privately he confessed he was disappointed. He said that Bliss could have sold twice as many copies if he had not been so stingy about sending review copies to the newspapers. By May the book had earned him $10,500, less than half of what he had got from The Innocents Abroad over an equivalent period. “So you will see,” he told his niece Annie Moffett, “we are not nearly so rich as the papers think we are.”

  Even so, the new book proved to
him that he could support himself by writing; he had recovered from his fears that his days as a popular author were over; and he had other books in mind—an account of piloting on the Mississippi, which he would not begin for a few years, and a satirical travel book about England which would take him abroad that fall but which he would never write. He believed Roughing It was a distinct advance over The Innocents Abroad—“much better written,” he told Livy—and his friends reported that the “general verdict” bore him out. “They like a book about America because they understand it better,” he explained to Bliss. “It is pleasant to believe this because it isn’t a great deal of trouble to write books about one’s own country”—a claim supported by the fact that after he abandoned his book about England he wrote his share of The Gilded Age in less than three months.

  Howells’ review of Roughing It in the June Atlantic went along with the “general verdict.” The grotesque exaggerations and broad ironies—which had offended some readers of The Innocents Abroad— struck Howells as possibly the ideal colors with which to paint life in the West, “for all existence there must have looked like an extravagant joke, the humor of which was only deepened by its nether-side of tragedy.” And the unpredictable shifts from humor to pathos, from burlesque to word painting, which had seemed inconsistency in the other book now impressed Howells as creating a “complex,” “a sort of ‘harmony of colors’ which is not less than triumphant.” Although he conceded in a guarded way that the book did not always have all the literary virtues, he hardly more than hinted that the second half clearly showed haste, galloping ennui, and a tendency on the part of the author to consult his scrapbooks instead of his imagination. All in all, the review put a Boston stamp of approval on Western humor, and Clemens reacted with both gratitude and relief. “I am as uplifted and reassured by it as a mother who has given birth to a white baby when she was awfully afraid it was going to be a mulatto,” he wrote, a comment which even forty years later Howells thought was too indelicate to repeat in print.

  Soon after his lecture tour came to an end the Clemenses left Hartford for Elmira, where on March 19 their second child, Olivia Susan, known as Susy, was born. Among the felicitations was a characteristic message from Bret Harte. “If she behaves herself she shall marry my Franky,” he wrote, “provided her father does the right thing in the way of dowry and relinquishes humor as a profession.” The relationship was mended enough, though only temporarily, to support such teasing. In May, Clemens and Livy left their two children in Elmira in the care of nurses and went off to Cleveland to visit Mrs. Fairbanks. When they returned they found Langdon—the fat, alabaster-white baby who was still not able to walk—seriously ill once again. Several times before, they had given him up for dead; Clemens blamed these alarms on nurses who overfed the child by day and overdosed him with laudanum at night. This time Langdon had “a heavy cough,” but he seemed to be recovering; he was well enough, in this era of guarded convalescences, for his father to take him out for an airing one morning. During the long drive in an open carriage Clemens fell into “a reverie,” he said many years later, and let the fur blankets slip off Langdon, and by the time the coachman noticed this “the child was almost frozen.” When they reached home he was sick again. They rushed back to Hartford, where on June 2 Langdon died, not of pneumonia but of diphtheria. Diagnostically this fails to jibe with Clemens’ statement that he was responsible for the boy’s death. Clemens, a lifelong guilt seeker, remembered or misremembered mainly what he wanted to; even so casual an acquaintance as Mrs. James T. Fields noted that “his whole life was one long apology.” Looking back on that carriage ride with Langdon, Clemens wrote in 1906: “I have always felt shame for that treacherous morning’s work and have not allowed myself to think of it when I could help it.” Only once during his four-decade friendship with Howells did Clemens mention his son, and that was to say, “Yes, I killed him.”

  When the Nook Farm neighbors paid their condolence calls at the hushed house on Forest Street Clemens was in a mood of pity for the living, envy of the dead, that was to become a ground note of his celebrated despair. “Mr. Clemens was all tenderness but full of rejoicing for the baby,” Lilly Warner wrote to her husband, George, “said he kept thinking it wasn’t death for him but the beginning of life.” Livy, who had held Langdon in her arms when he died, was “heartbroken.”

  Yet they quickly began to translate their grief over Langdon into a devotion to Susy that would later prove catastrophic in its excessiveness; when she died of meningitis, in 1896, they never recovered from the blow. And far from observing a period of mourning for his dead son, Clemens was soon full of hilarity and confidence, busy with all sorts of plans. “I want you to send a copy to the man that shot my dog,” he wrote to Howells not two weeks after, to tease him about a published portrait. “I want to see if he is dead to every human instinct.” And he boasted about the sales of Roughing It. He was seeing a good deal of Bret Harte. When the canvasser for the Hartford city directory called one day Clemens solemnly listed for him as a “boarder” at Forest Street “F. Bret Harte, Poet and Author.” In July the heat drove them from Hartford to a hotel on Long Island Sound at New Saybrook, and Clemens kept up his high mood even when dealing with the kind of trivia that at other times put him into a towering rage. He was asking Orion’s wife, left in charge of the Hartford house, to take care of his dirty laundry, to find a decent washerwoman for his shirts, to buy him a dozen pairs of cotton socks (“Not lisle thread, but cotton. All my present socks appear to have darns on them. I infinitely prefer holes”), and he was doing this with astonishing patience.

  To Orion he sent tidings of a “great humanizing and civilizing invention” to be called “Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook.” “My idea is this: Make a scrap book with leaves veneered or coated with gum stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag, or tongue, and dab on your scraps like postage stamps.” He patented the scrapbook the following year and arranged with Dan Slote for its manufacture and distribution, and it actually earned him some money, making it unique among the bewildering variety of devices that Sam and Orion, each fueling the other with high hopes, were constantly thinking up. Sam already owned one patent, “Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments,” and he eventually acquired a number of others, including one on a board game played with pegs and pins. During this period he encouraged Orion to push on with new inventions. (Even as late as 1893, by which time Sam was thoroughly disillusioned by his own failures as well as his brother’s, he was assuring Orion there was a one thousand per cent profit to be made marketing a private and infallible concoction of plain kerosene and cheap perfume under the trademark “Swift Death to Chilblains.”) He proposed a railroad steam brake, only to be told by Orion that someone—named George Westinghouse—had already discarded it. He proposed a steamboat paddle wheel suitable for icy waters; he proposed some novel kind of knife. Orion, who pursued these phantoms on Bliss’s time and who was already working on the grand scheme of his lifetime, a flying machine, was most of all interested in a device that had come out of his own brain: a perforated wooden block of mountain ash to serve as a guide for gimlets and drills. Orion was also working on a considerably more complicated project. “My machine is creeping along,” he had written to Mollie in October 1871. She was in Elmira getting hydrotherapy for an “inflamed womb,” and she was probably glad to be that far away from the nightmare Orion described for her:

  The clockmaker has made about 3,000 links for my chains, and has about 2,000 more to make. About 800 connecting parts have to be turned; and I suppose they have not been commenced. They were ordered at Bristol. I have to get them before the cogwheels intended for the chain can be made. While waiting on these things I am fixing over the pulleys, putting them on brass plates, temporarily, instead of wood, experimentally.

  Nothing more was heard about this machine, a project of the sort that Sam would later deride—but not before its blood brother, James W. Paige’s mech
anical typesetter, had driven him into bankruptcy. During the summer of 1872, however, having more than a touch of the same fever Orion had, Sam was full of hope and encouragement.

  As for his next book, his planning was casual enough. “Shall spend the fall and winter in England or in Florida or Cuba,” he told Redpath in mid-July. A few weeks later he decided to write the book about England, to go there alone at the end of the summer and spend a few months taking notes. Livy was so certain that England would inspire him that she easily resigned herself to the separation. “I am contented to have him away,” she told Mary Fairbanks, “because I think it is just the work that he should be at now.” (It would also be for the better, she might have added, if Sam and Orion had three thousand miles of ocean between them for a while.) On August 21 Clemens sailed from New York for Liverpool on the Scotia. Eight days later, off the coast of Ireland and nearing his destination, he sent her an exuberant greeting: “I am standing high on the stern of the ship, looking westward, with my hands to my mouth, trumpet fashion, yelling across the tossing waste of waves, ‘I LOVE YOU, LIVY DARLING!!!’”