Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  Dilworthy is a Unionist who prospered because of the war; Sellers fought on the Confederate side and is now a poor man. But is that any reason, the authors ask, for Sellers to give Dilworthy the cold shoulder? Ultimately Dilworthy and Sellers need each other: they are two essential forces behind the horrors of Reconstruction. With varying degrees of cynicism, self-interest, and sanctimony, they are willing to work together on a grand plan which will simultaneously enrich them, tap the Federal treasury, and rehabilitate the Negro. “I’d elevate his soul, that’s just it; you can’t make his soul too immortal, but I wouldn’t touch him, himself,” Sellers tells Dilworthy. “Yes, sir! make his soul immortal, but don’t disturb the niggro as he is.” Abolitionist and slaveowner join in the common cause.

  As much as Dilworthy, Sellers represents a social and political system that Mark Twain during the 1870 saw as rotten through and through, all the way from the witless citizens of Cattleville, who elect Dilworthy, to the marble halls of Congress which are adorned with the “delirium tremens” of art and where “addition, division, and silence” are daily practiced. In Mark Twain’s vision of Gilded Age democracy there is no place for the romantic myth of the frontier. The villages are as corrupt and debased as the cities. In rude and tumbledown villages like Obedstown the shiftless inhabitants—“animals” and “cattle,” Squire Hawkins calls them in Chapter One—live in ignorance, squalor, and somnolence; their occupations are whittling, spitting, and gossip. The citizens of New York picked to serve on the jury in Laura’s trial are scarcely of a higher order: “Low foreheads and heavy faces they all had; some had a look of animal cunning, while the most were only stupid.” Whatever their differences, Mark Twain and Warner shared the same acute skepticism (if not the same degree of misanthropy) over American democracy, and they derided and rejected its basic institutions—representative government, the vote, the jury system. In a much more disturbing way than Henry Adams’ Democracy, a fastidious view of politics and society, or John Hay’s The BreadWinners, a conservative’s fantasy about anarchism and organized labor, The Gilded Age, for all of Sellers’ caperings and charades, is a novel of reaction and despair. Even the naïvest of its characters, Washington Hawkins, finally experiences the shock of futility: “The country is a fool.”

  Early in March 1873, more than a month before the manuscript was completed, Clemens assured Elisha Bliss that if Thomas Nast illustrated the book they would have free advertising “from Maine to the Marquesas.” In the same blue-sky spirit he cautioned Bliss to remain absolutely silent; Clemens wanted to buy more stock in the publishing house before, as he was certain, the news would drive the shares up. No more was heard of the Nast scheme. Bliss employed a conventional stable of illustrators, and among other disappointments the book brought was Clemens’ feeling that it was “rubbishy looking.” As for keeping the book a secret, when the time for publicity came, the right kind of publicity was hard enough to find. At the end of March, counting on their friendships with both Whitelaw Reid and John Hay, Clemens and Warner began a strenuous campaign to get an advance review in the Tribune. Clemens was willing to forget his anger at the paper for having got an incompetent and humorless “old stick” to review Roughing It as “one of the most racy specimens of Mark Twain’s savory pleasantries.” At first they were jocular and bluff, strong in the faith that out of friendship Reid would ask Hay to puff the book. “I have a nice putrid anecdote that Hay will like,” Clemens wrote to Reid. “Am preserving it in alcohol—in my person.” Then the tone became reproachful: “You could have given us a splendid sendoff and not stepped outside the proprieties in any way.” And finally Clemens wrote an epitaph over his relationship with Whitelaw Reid, after the paper had run what was at best a grudging bit of advance publicity. “He is a contemptible cur, and I want nothing more to do with him,” Clemens told Warner in May. “I don’t want the Tribune to have the book at all.” By this time Clemens was in mid-Atlantic, on his way to England to arrange with the Routledges to publish the book in December 1873, simultaneously with the American edition.

  Beyond a reference in his prospectus to “prominent persons and things,” Bliss scarcely mentioned the topical content or the drift of the book. He emphasized instead the novelty of two prominent authors working together. As a vendor of entertaining and edifying books he was bound to fear that The Gilded Age carried satire too far, and many reviewers thought so, too, found the book more uncomfortable than a literary curiosity ought to be, and attacked it for presenting the country in an unfavorable light. “We should blush to see the book republished in Europe,” the Independent said. Bliss’s emphasis on the novelty of the collaboration also exposed the book to a number of damaging charges: that it was “a gigantic practical joke,” that it was all Warner’s work and the name Mark Twain on the title page was a cheap merchandising trick, and, worse, that all the writing had been done by a hack journalist hired by the supposed authors. Even so the book started off like a best seller: about thirty-five thousand copies were sold in the first two months. In March, however, the rate of sale fell off abruptly; during the remaining ten months of its first year in print only about fifteen thousand more were sold; and during the next five years only about six thousand. By Clemens’ standards The Gilded Age—“the best-written and best-abused book of the age,” he said to Orion—was a commercial failure.

  “But for the Panic our sale would have doubled, I verily believe,” he said in February 1874. He spoke out of the bitter knowledge of one of the panic’s victims, for when the banking house of Jay Cooke and Company collapsed in September 1873 some of his own money, and Livy’s, went down with it; the Langdon coal interests were hit hard, and Livy’s income dwindled. One night in London after he heard the news of Cooke’s failure, he sat up late smoking, hating himself for his stupidity in having banked with Cooke, and now facing the prospect of having to borrow from the Routledges in order to get his family home. If, as the Nation said, the panic was brought on partly because English investors had been frightened and disillusioned by “repeated cases of American rascality,” then, in an ironically prophetic way, The Gilded Age was the cause of its own failure and Clemens’ financial embarrassments. Eventually he recouped some of his losses. His loose dramatization of the book as a stage vehicle for the comic actor John T. Raymond as Colonel Sellers became one of the more profitable plays of the 18705. Just this once the Tennessee land paid off. Clemens figured that in three years his combined royalties from the book and the play came to $100,000—“just about a dollar an acre.”

  The Gilded Age fed Clemens’ anger at American democracy instead of exorcising it, and obsessively he continued his invective against universal suffrage and the jury system. He read a paper about universal suffrage to the Monday Evening Club in February 1875, and in an unsigned article, “The Curious Republic of Gondour,” published in the Atlantic that October he proposed his solution to the problem of democracy: turn it into an aristocracy; instead of constricting the vote, which would be unconstitutional, why not expand it by rewarding men of education, property, and achievement with five or even ten votes each? Annie Fields, who with her husband paid the Clemenses a visit in April 1876, enjoyed the songs of the blackbirds in the trees surrounding his new house, but she was also exposed to a monologue that began at lunch and was resumed at dinner. Drinking beer to soothe his nerves—it seemed to her that this was about the only nourishment he took—he told her he had lost all faith in the government and wanted to see it overthrown. He inveighed against “this wicked, ungodly suffrage,” she reported, “where the vote of a man who knew nothing was as good as the vote of a man of education and industry; this endeavor to equalize what God has made unequal was a wrong and a shame.” At dinner he summed it up: “He is overwhelmed with shame and confusion and wishes he were not an American,” Annie Fields noted. She hoped that if he did carry out his announced plan to move to England for a while, perhaps he might “discover away from home a love of his country which is still waiting to be unfolded.”
And if Annie Fields was dismayed by his bitterness, what must twenty-one-year-old Mollie Fairbanks have thought when her mother’s old friend, that charming, amusing, and famous man, declared to her his hatred for “all shades and forms of republican government”? He explained his reason for his tirade: “Tell your mother I am trying to do what every good citizen ought to do—trying my best to win you and the rest of the rising generation over to an honest and saving loathing for universal suffrage.”

  Slowly his monomania subsided. In September 1879 he was to return to America homesick after a year and a half abroad. He was also to return to the hurly-burly of politics: he became one of the favorite orators of the Republican party, campaigned for Garfield and later, as a prominent mugwump, he supported Grover Cleveland. He rejoiced that the labor movement would give the oppressed of the earth a power greater than that of any monarchy or aristocracy. In A Connecticut Yankee, his Anglomania now far behind him, he declared that there was “plenty good enough material for a republic in the most degraded people that ever existed,” even though, at the end of the book, it has become impossible for the Yankee to impose a “new deal” on “human muck.” By 1889 he was explaining to the English critic Andrew Lang that as a writer he identified himself not with “the thin top crust of humanity” but with “the mighty mass of the uncultivated,” and in terms of his enduring reputation he became symbol and spokesman of the free society he once detested.

  However short-lived, this fever crisis of political and social reaction still shaped the course of Mark Twain’s work. “What could have sent you groping among the driftwood of the Deluge for a topic,” Joe Goodman asked, astonished by the remoteness of The Prince and the Pauper, “when you could have been so much more at home in the wash of today?” The answer is that The Gilded Age had presented to him the truth that he could treat “the wash of today” only as a satirist. As his anger and disgust grew more intense satire itself became impossible. He had to find another medium flexible enough to accommodate indignation and entertainment. “A man can’t write successful satire unless he be in a calm judicial good humor,” he remarked to Howells in 1879 apropos of Old Masters and Wagnerian opera. “I don’t ever seem to be in a good enough humor with ANYthing to satirize it; no, I want to stand up before it and curse it, and foam at the mouth—or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp.” His recognition that he could not write sustained imaginative literature about the American—or European—present turned him to the past.

  The Gilded Age was subtitled “A Tale of To-Day.” Writing sustained fiction for the first time, Mark Twain found a matrix for the materials of his past: the Tennessee land, steamboating on the Mississippi, his father and Orion, village life. All of his major books were to be tales of yesterday. The next project he undertook after The Gilded Age was a series of articles about piloting, called “Old Times on the Mississippi,” and through the rest of his career as a writer he turned further and further back into yesterdays: to the South before the war and to the South of his boyhood and adolescence, to the England of the Plantagenets and of Merlin the Wizard, to the France of Joan of Arc, to Germany in the Middle Ages, to fantasy stories in which the distinctions between past and present are blurred in nightmare. To a certain extent he became an expatriate from his own country: between August 1872, when he made his first trip to England, and July 1907, when he made his last, he spent more than eleven years abroad. To a much greater extent, however, he became an expatriate from his own times.

  And in other ways The Gilded Age was the antecedent of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Mysterious Stranger—a beginning, not a dead end. Obedstown and Hawkeye represent the scenes of Mark Twain’s recollection that were to be the stage and setting for his imagination. These raw settlements, depicted with a precise and savage realism, are Jamestown, Tennessee, where John Marshall Clemens thrived for a while and bought the land that pressed so heavily on his heirs; Florida, Missouri, where the bankrupt Clemens moved in the hope of brighter fortune and where his famous son was born; Hannibal. In Mark Twain’s fiction, and in the first part of Life on the Mississippi, these towns mirror the possibilities of the human condition. They are St. Petersburg, the “drowsing” setting for an idyl of boyhood; but on the streets of such towns Boggs is shot down in cold anger and the lynch mob gathers; in the surrounding forests the boys play at Robin Hood, and the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords carry on their blood feud. As Mark Twain grew older the archetypal town enclosed his darkest vision of the race—Dawson’s Landing in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Eseldorf in The Mysterious Stranger. But in the long run the upright and honest citizens of Hadleyburg are not so very different from the “animals” of Obedstown and Cattleville. Mark Twain’s pessimism was a generalizing of his despair about democracy. This pessimism, as it became a powerful leveling principle which obliterated the difference between high and low, educated and ignorant, honest and corrupt, became also, by the way of paradox, a somber and cautious affirmation of democracy itself.

  III

  A month before Clemens went back to England in May 1873, he received from the editor of the New York Daily Graphic a request “for a farewell letter in the name of the American people.” In his answer, which included a substantial plug for The Gilded Age, he explained that what was driving him abroad was merely a hunger for excitement. His morning paper brought him only news of such torpid events as riots, feuds, patricides, lynchings, massacres, and disasters. “Well, I said to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; there don’t appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this progressive nation gone to sleep?” And as for a farewell: “Bless you, the joy of the American people is just a little premature; I haven’t gone yet. And what is more, I am not going to stay, when I do go.”

  His return to England was pure triumph. This time he could share it with Livy. In London he was sought out by Browning and Turgenev, Herbert Spencer, Anthony Trollope, Willkie Collins. Lewis Carroll—“the shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met”—sat in nearly complete silence while Clemens talked; Alfred Tennyson longed to hear him lecture. “In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation,” Howells wrote years later, adding significantly, “But in his own country it was different.” The last tatters of his plan to write a book about England were blown away in the immense ovation. He and Livy were so caught up in English social life, he told Mary Fairbanks, that they had hardly any time to see the sights of London. Eventually the pace turned out to be too intense. They went to Scotland, where Livy fell ill, and then to Ireland.

  In October Clemens was lecturing in London and Liverpool to enormous and fashionable audiences; his subject was the Sandwich Islands. The English could not have enough of him, it seemed; Americans too, like P. T. Barnum, were flocking to his lectures. But Livy was homesick and tired, pregnant once again. He resolved the conflict by taking her and Susy back home late in October and then returning alone to England for a three-month lecture season. At the Langham Hotel in London, he began to feel the first pangs of separation; he had only the Times, a breakfast of bacon, toast, and poached eggs, and the distant sight of the Horse Guards on Portland Place to distract him. Soon enough, as a dreadful fog continued evening after evening, so thick that it trailed into the lecture hall, dimmed the gaslights, and muffled hilarity, his loneliness became intense. “If I’m not homesick to see you, no other lover ever was homesick,” he wrote to Livy early in December, and he added a private idiom of impatience: “And when I get there, remember, Expedition’s the word!” Publicly he tolerated no latitude about her. “In Salisbury,” he told her, “when a gentleman remarked upon my taking the trouble to telegraph a Merry Christmas to my wife, saying it was the sort of thing to do with a sweetheart, I dosed him up very promptly, and said I did not allow any man to refer to my wife jestingly.”
At the beginning of January 1874, a little over a week before he sailed for home, he sketched for her a domestic scene which was a far cry from the ideals of Elmira, New York. “I want you to be sure and remember to have in the bathroom, when I arrive, a bottle of Scotch whisky, a lemon, some crushed sugar, and a bottle of Angostura bitters.” In London, he told her, he had formed the habit of drinking these medicine-cabinet Old Fashioneds before breakfast, dinner, and bed, and he attributed to them the fact that his digestion was “wonderful—simply perfect … regular as a clock.” “I love to picture myself ringing the bell at midnight—then a pause of a second or two—then the turning of the bolt, and ‘Who is it?’—then ever so many kisses—then you and I in the bathroom, I drinking my cocktail and undressing, and you standing by—then to bed—and everything happy and jolly as it should be.”