II
According to the account Clemens and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, were soon circulating, The Gilded Age had its origin in one of those long evenings of food and talk with which the Nook Farm residents waited out the New England winter. The talk at dinner ran to contemporary novels; Clemens and Warner voiced their discontent; Livy and Susan Warner suggested that writing was better than criticizing; and so the two men accepted the challenge of writing a topical novel together.
There were certain parallels which, more than any deep personal afinity, accounted for their willingness to work together. Six years older than Clemens, Warner too had been a long time finding his vocation. He published a book when he was a little over twenty, spent two years in Missouri as a railroad surveyor, had a fling in business in Philadelphia, took a law degree and practiced in Chicago, and came to Hartford in 1860 as a newspaper editor. Like Clemens he was a civilian during the war, and, like Clemens again, he was making the transition from a career as editor to that of full-time man of letters. His reputation as an urbane and gentle if unexciting writer of essays and travel sketches was based on two books, My Summer in a Garden (1871), which had an introduction by Henry Ward Beecher, and Saunterings (1872), a travel book about Europe. Like Clemens, he was also to write about his boyhood. Neither Clemens nor Warner had written a novel before, both were tentative about risking their reputations in a new form, and the most important thing they had in common, beyond their knowledge of Missouri and their skeptical outlook on American democracy, was their faith that by pooling their inexperience and anxieties they would accomplish something of greater literary value than anything either of them could do on his own. As it turned out, this faith survived the collaboration by only a few years. “This is going to be no slouch of a novel,” Clemens said in April, when they were barely finished. But later he woke up to the fact that he and Warner worked together “in the superstition” that “we were writing one coherent yarn, when, I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were writing two incoherent ones.” In his old age he tended to grumble that it was Warner who had pressured him into the collaboration.
When the manuscript was finished they called on J. Hammond Trumbull, LL.D., L.H.D., reputedly the most learned man in Hartford, to supply them with chapter-head quotations in a vast number of tongues, including Sanskrit, Chinese, and Sioux Indian. This sort of ostentatious mystification (the appendix of translations was added in 1899 in order to prolong the copyright life of the book) corresponds to the whatnot gimcrackery and exotic junk freighting many a mantelpiece shelf; it was as if P. T. Barnum, the genius of nearby Bridgeport, had decided to exhibit a philologist in a cage. And it hardly requires a Henry James to see in more important aspects of the collaboration a certain commercial vulgarity amounting to a state of total anesthesia to the inner life of fiction.
Clemens had some elements of the story to begin with: the bitter-comic history of the Tennessee land, his knowledge of politics in Washington, the incurably hopeful and believing Orion (in the novel Washington Hawkins), and, above all, his mother’s cousin, James Lampton, who became Colonel Sellers. Warner was to write a love story largely set in the twin worlds of Philadelphia Quakerism and Philadelphia commerce, and to follow the fortunes of two young men who go to Missouri and work as railroad surveyors. The story of Laura Hawkins, the femme fatale whose career as lobbyist in Washington is the framework for much of the political exposé, was worked out in collaboration.
With their main plots staked out, Clemens and Warner began working like tunnel crews boring from opposite sides of the mountain. Clemens wrote the first eleven chapters at white heat, coming to a temporary stop on page 399 of his manuscript with the note, “Now comes in Warner’s first chapter.” Through the rest of the book he contributed other blocks of chapters or single ones, paragraphs and sentences here and there, interpolated passages about corruption, the level of civic responsibility, and (from his own experience in Nevada and California) the intricacies of prospecting and mining. In general, as he liked to say, he contributed the fact and Warner the fiction.
Considering the differences in method and temperament, the collaboration was surprisingly flexible. “There is scarcely a chapter that does not bear the marks of the two writers of the book,” the authors declared in their preface. Despite this united front Clemens in his copy of the first edition carefully identified his own work, even to the paragraph and sentence, and he was later to claim and receive from Warner all dramatic rights in the characters that were wholly his creation, chief among them being Colonel Sellers. Nor was he at all reluctant to supply his friends with a simplified version of the collaboration. “I think you don’t like The Gilded Age,” he wrote to Mary Fairbanks a few months after publication, “but that’s because you’ve been reading Warner’s chapters,” and he listed the thirty-five of the book’s sixty-three chapters that he claimed as his own either whole or in part. “You read those!”
Nearly every evening during the early months of 1873 Clemens and Warner met, read the day’s work aloud to each other and their wives, and exchanged reactions. The ending of the story was settled by a kind of referendum in which Livy and Susie Warner, after some indecision, cast the determining votes. At first they were all for letting Laura Hawkins off easy, and they urged Warner to work out a chapter in which this acquitted murderer and schemer would somehow settle down to a peaceful marriage and simply disappear. Clemens’ version of what he called “the ‘boss’ chapter” showed her trying a career as a lecturer. After a humiliating failure—she is hissed from the platform and followed down the street by an angry mob cursing and stoning her—she retreats to her hotel room and dies of a heart attack (Clemens may have been exorcising his own violently opposing feelings about lecturing).
This is the version that the authors and their wives settled upon. “My climax chapter is the one accepted by Livy and Susie,” Clemens told Mary Fairbanks later that evening, “and so my heroine, Laura, remains dead.” Livy and Susie were instrumental in setting their husbands to writing a novel in collaboration; they were involved with its composition throughout; they were clearly the final arbiters. All this puts into a different light the familiar claim that Livy and her circle exerted an influence on Mark Twain that was genteel to the point of emasculation. The Gilded Age, the first full-scale product of Mark Twain’s Hartford years, is not hushed and polite literature, nor does it deal with any of the smiling aspects of American life.
The Gilded Age echoes the sounds of its times—the rustle of greenbacks and the hiss of steam, pigs grunting in the village mud, the clang of railroad iron and the boom of blasting charges, the quiet talk of men in committee rooms and bankers’ offices. Its raw materials are disaster, poverty, blighted hopes, bribery, hypocrisy, seduction, betrayal, blackmail, murder, and mob violence. Written at a time when each day brought news of some revelation in the Beecher affair or the Crédit Mobilier investigation, its subject is democracy gone off the tracks.
In January 1873 a new scandal broke on an already hard-pressed Grant Administration. It supplied Clemens and Warner with their basic situation, and it set them to working six days a week to rush the book to completion. In the wisdom of his fifty-sixth year Clemens’ Washington dinner companion, Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy, Radical Republican who had represented Kansas since 1861, had decided to seek a third term. Before a joint session of the state legislature in Topeka this tireless worker in the cause of temperance and the Sunday School was charged with having offered another politician eight thousand dollars for his nominating vote, and the charge was supported with evidence that was altogether damning. In two previous campaigns Pomeroy had been suspected of vote-buying. This time the convention refused to believe his story that the money was not a bribe but a loan to help a friend start a bank—Pomeroy even insisted that there was nothing unusual in making large and unreceipted loans in greenbacks from hotel rooms at midnight—and unanimously declined to support him for the nomination. To compound the scandal, Pomeroy
, despite the weight of evidence against him, was later cleared by a select committee of the United States Senate who turned the hearings into an attack on his accusers. (“All being corrupt together,” E. L. Godkin wrote in the Nation in May, “what is the use of investigating each other?”) Pomeroy’s Congressional biography notes merely that he was “an unsuccessful candidate for re-election.” He subsided into private life, emerging briefly eleven years later as the Presidential nominee of the Prohibition party.
“Oh, I have gathered enough material for a whole book!” Clemens had written to Livy during his brief visit to Washington in 1870. “This is a perfect gold mine.” With Pomeroy’s downfall, he began to work the mine. Senator Abner Dilworthy of The Gilded Age was Pomeroy undisguised, unmistakable to contemporary readers; as Mark Twain informed them, there was “no law against making offensive remarks about U. S. Senators.” The change of name was the merest bow to the conventions of fiction; Elisha Bliss’s illustrators worked directly from pictures of the bearded and fatherly-looking Senator. Pomeroy-Dilworthy became a comic-corrupt archetype which Mark Twain jeered at all his life and which survives. “I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.” (The late Earl K. Long of Louisiana once explained, “Huey used to buy the Legislature like a sack of potatoes. Hell, I never bought one in my life. I just rent ’em. It’s cheaper that way.”)
With equal directness the authors of The Gilded Age drew other characters from life and intended them to be recognizable. In Virginia City or San Francisco, Clemens may have known another Laura—Laura D. Fair, a widow-adventuress with a dazzling smile who in November 1870 boarded the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco, confronted her lover, a lawyer and politician named Crittenden, accused him of deserting her, and shot him to death in plain sight of his wife. Her trial for murder brought her national notoriety. She was acquitted and freed on the grounds that she had murdered Crittenden in a moment of “emotional insanity,” a legal novelty that aroused Clemens’ indignation (he very nearly dedicated Roughing It to Cain: “It was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent insanity plea”) and fed his considerable skepticism about the jury system.
Throughout the book there are other clear references, to Jim Fisk and Josie Mansfield, to Boss Tweed, to Representative Oakes Ames (“Mr. Fairoaks”) and the Crédit Mobilier. Ironically, the authors ran into trouble from a totally unexpected quarter. Colonel Sellers was Clemens’ distant cousin, James Lampton. “I merely put him on paper as he was,” Clemens said in his autobiography. “He was not a person who could be exaggerated.” Twenty years later George Washington Cable was introduced to Lampton at the Southern Hotel in St. Louis and was so fascinated by the precise correspondence of reality to fiction that he transcribed some of Lampton’s conversation. It is pure Sellers: “I’ll take you down to the edge of my pond surrounded by willows and—gold fish in it that long, Cousin Sam. And I’ve got—you know—I’ve got a brewery! Pipes leading to the house. Just turn on the fasset. Ah, ha, ha, ha!”
Lampton never minded his public existence as Colonel Eschol (later Beriah) Sellers. The trouble came from one George Escol Sellers of Bowlesville, Illinois, an inventor, speculator, and promoter whom Warner had heard about from a mutual friend and whose name he carelessly passed on to his collaborator. The real Sellers, warned by the mutual friend that his name appeared in the advertising prospectus for the book, made the long trip to seek redress in Hartford. He was placated by Warner’s offer to have the name changed on the printing plates from Eschol to Beriah Sellers. Even so, a number of copies of the first edition carried the offending name, and several newspapers claimed that the Bowlesville Sellers was the model for the Colonel. For four or five years Clemens, Warner, and their publisher, Elisha Bliss of Hartford, lived with the threat of a lawsuit hanging over them.
The Clemens-Warner method of building a satirical story around real people and fresh social and political history showed not only a casual attitude toward the libel laws but also a casual attitude toward the power of fiction to digest an immense amount of raw topical material and still have the wholeness of fiction. The topical novel can collapse under the weight of its topics, and even the crudest inventory of The Gilded Age shows the high (or at least unexamined) expectations the authors had for their vehicle: frontier life before the war; the strategy and techniques of lobbying and bribery in Washington; the workings of Congress; universal suffrage; the jury system and the insanity plea; the politics of promoting a railroad; surveying; coal mining; land improvement schemes; the social structure of Washington, with particular attention to the parvenus; business, banking, and swindling in Philadelphia; the conflict of Quaker and marketplace morality; the emancipation of women; the Negro as a tool of the carpetbaggers; the credit foundation of society—“I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars” (or, as Billy Sol Estes was to explain, “If you get into anybody far enough you’ve got yourself a partner”).
All of this was to be supported by two parallel plots—one group of characters goes East in search of wealth, the other West—embellished with romantic conventions, a trite and sentimental love story, and such melodramatic clichés as adopted foundlings, mysterious parentage, and fever crisis followed by an avowal of love. The book is awkwardly structured; there are any number of loose ends, inconsistencies, and improbabilities. Characters are mislaid. The chronology is shaky. Situations potentially rich in drama and symbol—Ruth Bolton, the Quaker medical student, uncovers on the dissecting table the corpse of a Negro—dissolve in sentimental rhetoric. Comedy and satire undermine each other. Beyond the plotting, there was the major difficulty of an incompatibility of style and scope. As a novelist Warner worked within the conventions, even if as a social critic he stood outside them and continued to write reform novels dealing with the abuse and misuse of wealth. These novels, Howells said, failed to use “experience imaginatively, structurally.” Mark Twain, on the other hand, had barely tapped the springs of his endowment, but even in this first, faltering attempt at extended fiction he threatened established molds, carried realism farther than any other novel of his day, and began to discover the imaginative and structural use of what he had known, seen, and been.
“Up to the time old Hawkins dies your novel is of the greatest promise—I read it with joy,” Howells wrote to Warner, “but after that it fails to assimilate the crude material with which it is fed, and becomes a confirmed dyspeptic at last.” Howells’ joy had ceased even before Warner’s part of the story began, and he considerately offered not to comment on the book in print. Yet Howells, who was not alone in feeling that the book was a failure, was fascinated by the one character who transcends and in part redeems it, and he collaborated with Clemens on a play called Colonel Sellers as a Scientist. Ten years after The Gilded Age was published, he was encouraging Clemens in the notion that Colonel Sellers was “the American character,” a type so representative that like the stock figures of the commedia dell’arte he could support any number of plots. This was not so extravagant a notion; then, as now, Sellers—“a living and distinctive type of real American and peculiarly American character,” a New York Tribune editorial said—epitomized the aspiration, energy, optimism, and bombast of his country and his time.
Sellers is Southern gentry fallen on hard times after the war and willing to come to terms with the new men of power. He is courtly, hospitable, generous, and broke. He stands drinks in the best saloon in town, but his money is always in his other coat at home, where his family dines on turnips, cold water, and expectations. He is the mystic of the cash nexus, a visionary and spellbinder who can elevate traffic in mules, hogs, corn, and bottled eyewash to the level of Eldorado and Golconda. He is, above all, the Promoter, that distinctive profession of the Gilded Age. “I’ve got the biggest scheme on earth—and I’ll take you in; I’ll take in every friend I’ve got that’s ever stood by me, for there’s enough for all, and to sp
are”: he spoke for his contemporaries, including Samuel L. Clemens, the promoter (and victim) of the Paige typesetter and a hundred other, less expensive chimeras. In 1897, when Clemens tried to answer the familiar European charge of American materialism, he was still so much in the grip of the Sellers passion that the best he could offer was only a half-truth: “I think that the reason we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience.”
In his autobiography Mark Twain looked back with love and almost in tears on James Lampton, the real Sellers, who dreamed magnificent dreams all his life and never saw any one of them come true. “A pathetic and beautiful spirit,” he mourned, “a manly man, a straight and honorable man, a man with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man born to be loved.” And yet what gives The Gilded Age a degree of imaginative wholeness is the fact that this “straight and honorable man” is nonetheless completely at home with the corruptions of his time. “The Salt Lick Branch of the Pacific Railroad” that he exuberantly maps out on his tablecloth begins in St. Louis and advances by way of Slouchburg, Doodleville, and Hallelujah to its eastern terminus in Corruptionville (“after Congress itself,” he explains). Soon he learns the price of pork-barrel delicacies like his railroad, the Columbus River Slack-Water Navigation Company, and the Eastern Knobs University for the Education of Negro Freedmen. In the House and the Senate it is ten thousand dollars apiece for the votes of a four-man committee majority plus another ten thousand for each of the chairmen; an ordinary Senator or representative with a high moral tone fetches three thousand dollars; and a small-fry country member goes for about five hundred dollars. Sellers goes to Washington and becomes something of an expert in the field of what is politely called lobbying.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 23
