Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  As it turned out, he did not return to Tom Sawyer and finish it until the following summer, and even then his definitions were largely tentative ones. He had decided not to take his hero past boyhood; if he had continued with him, he told Howells, Tom “would be just like all the one-horse men in literature.” He said he planned to deal in a future book (which would eventually take the form and title of Huckleberry Finn) with “the Battle of Life” and to “take a boy of twelve and run him on through life (in the first person) but not Tom Sawyer—he would not be a good character for it.” Despite this awareness of the problem of point of view, he never did run Huck on past early adolescence. Sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph Mark Twain was an entirely deliberate and conscious craftsman; he insisted that the difference between the nearly right word and the right word was the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning; his ear for the rhythms of speech was unsurpassed, and he demanded in dialect and social notation nothing short of perfection. But his larger, structural methods were inspirational and intuitive. Chronically incapable of self-criticism, he relied on others to make the basic judgments of his work just as much as he relied on the tank to fill up. The Holy Ghost seemed to sit with him as he wrote. “Since there is no plot to the thing,” he told Howells on June 21, 1875, “it is likely to follow its own drift, and so is as likely to drift into manhood as anywhere—I won’t interpose.” This was only two weeks before he finished writing Tom Sawyer, and he was still drifting. “I have finished the story and didn’t take the chap beyond boyhood,” he wrote to Howells on July 5, and he added, “It is not a boy’s book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults.” Late that November, after some earnest reasoning from Howells, he changed his mind altogether: “Mrs. Clemens decides with you that the book should issue as a book for boys, pure and ample—and so do I. It is surely the correct idea.”

  Clemens showed the same range of certainty and uncertainty about two other literary productions of the summer of 1874 at Quarry Farm. He paid the offending Densmore a total of four hundred dollars for his unauthorized script about Colonel Sellers, worked it over himself, brought it to New York in September when he was on his way back to Hartford, and spent several days rehearsing the actors. With the comedian John T. Raymond as Sellers, The Gilded Age opened at the Park Theatre on September 16 and was an immediate success. James T. Fields found it “simply delicious”; President Grant went backstage to compliment Raymond; and the Atlantic, as well as the daily papers, was full of praise. The play was a continuing success when Raymond took it on tour, earning Clemens about nine hundred dollars a week when it played in the larger cities. The daily reports of the profits arrived in Hartford around dinnertime, and Howells recalled that Clemens would spring to his feet, fling his napkin on his chair, and in “wild triumph” read aloud the “gay figures.” Clemens actually had little talent as a writer for the stage, but he had approached this venture with absolute confidence, and his confidence was vindicated—unfortunately for him, as it worked out. For the success of the play, which was almost entirely due to the near-perfect match of Sellers and Raymond, led Clemens to pursue the phantom of a career as a dramatist.

  The same month The Gilded Age opened in New York Clemens reticently and apologetically submitted to Howells a short piece called “A True Story.” The narrator, an old Negress, tells how she and her favorite child were separated at a slave auction and how twenty-two years later, after her master ran away from the advancing Union armies, they were reunited. It is a moving story, one of Mark Twain’s best, and in a number of ways it foreshadows Huckleberry Finn—in its explicit sympathy for the Negro, its level vision of the brutalities of a slaveholding society, and the enormous skill he displays in telling a first-person story in impeccably nuanced but never obscure dialect. “I’ve kept the True Story,” Howells answered, “which I think extremely good and touching and with the best and reallest kind of black talk in it.” The story was published in the November 1874 Atlantic. It was Mark Twain’s first contribution to the magazine—six years after James Parton had suggested that “a writer named Mark Twain be engaged”—and he was paid at the highest rate the Atlantic had ever offered. This was only twenty dollars a page (or about two cents a word) and not really satisfactory, as he complained to Charles Warren Stoddard. “However, the awful respectability of the magazine makes up.” A year later, in a review of Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, in the December 1875 Atlantic, Howells said that some readers had been puzzled by the seriousness of “A True Story” and had feared “a lurking joke in it.” His own seasoned judgment was: “The rugged truth of the sketch leaves all other stories of slave life infinitely far behind, and reveals a gift in the author for the simple, dramatic report of reality which we have seen equalled in no other American writer.”

  When he submitted the piece to Howells, Clemens had written: “I enclose also a ‘True Story’ which has no humor in it. You can pay as lightly as you choose for that, for it is rather out of my line.”

  IV

  Number 351 Farmington Avenue, still unfinished and swarming with workmen when the Clemens family moved into its second floor in September, impressed a reporter from the Hartford Daily Times, as it impressed practically everyone who ever saw it, as being “one of the oddest looking buildings in the State ever designed for a dwelling, if not in the whole country.” Outside and inside it defied all categories. It presented to the dazzled eye three turrets, the tallest of which was octagonal and about fifty feet high, five balconies, innumerable embrasures, a huge shaded veranda that turned a corner, an elaborate porte-cochère, a forest of chimneys. Its dark brick walls were trimmed with brownstone and decorated with inlaid designs in scarlet-painted brick and black; the roof was patterned in colored tile. The house was permanent polychrome and gingerbread Gothic; it was part steamboat, part medieval stronghold, and part cuckoo clock.

  Inside, on three stories, were nineteen large rooms, five baths (with indoor plumbing, which was still a novelty, and washbasins decorated to harmonize with the rugs), and a wealth of idiosyncratic delights which its owner worked out with Edward Tuckerman Potter, his fashionable and eclectic New York architect. The furnishings were heavy, ornate, and, like the mantelpieces, opulently inlaid and carved with cherubs, gargoyles, sphinxes, and griffins. In the dining room, where soon claret and champagne, fillet of beef and canvasback ducks, Nesselrode pudding and icecream angels would be dispensed with a liberal hand, a window had been cut directly above the mantelpiece and the flue diverted to the sides of it—Clemens enjoyed watching snowflakes and flames at the same time; later on he installed some tin roofing over a part of the house because he also liked to hear the rain drumming. On the west the house looked out over a small valley and the Riveret, a stream which in Nook Farm’s earlier days used to be known as Meandering Swine Creek. The library opened onto a large semicircular glass conservatory, a device for moving nature indoors that Harriet Beecher Stowe developed and popularized among her neighbors; in the dark of winter a fountain played, surrounded by calla lilies and flowering vines. On the second floor, directly above the library, a luxurious study had been built for Clemens. Soon this was taken over as a schoolroom for the children, and he moved to the third-floor billiard room, which although connected to the kitchen and the servants’ hall by an elaborate system of speaking tubes, had only an exiguous relationship to the furnace: the room stayed well above freezing, Howells said, when all the gas jets were on and there was a fire in the fireplace. The billiard room was the closest Clemens came to having a permanent study; even with this sprawling establishment he sometimes went to a room above the stable or in Twichell’s house to find quiet enough to work in.

  “We had a really charming visit, not marred by anything,” Howells wrote to his father in March 1875. “The Clemenses are whole-souled hosts, with inextinguishable money, and a palace of a house.” Howells later passed on his wonderment to his six-year-old son as well. “They’ve even got their
soap painted,” the boy exclaimed when he found a pink cake in the bathroom, and when he saw Clemens’ Negro butler, George Griffin, in the dining room, he had a more exotic vision of life on Farmington Avenue. “Come quick!” he said to his father. “The slave is setting the table!” By 1877, in order to maintain this palace Clemens employed six servants—a German nursemaid, an Irish housemaid, an Irish laundress, a Negro cook, a Negro butler, and an Irish coachman. From time to time this slightly eccentric staff—the butler, for example, was a gambler and a moneylender to the Hartford Negro community—was supplemented by waitresses and nurses. In 1875 the Clemenses hired for Clara a wet nurse who got monumentally drunk when she was left alone. Even when she was supervised, Clemens recalled with admiration, she devoured, drank, and smoked everything in sight; then she would go upstairs and “perfectly delight the baby with a banquet which ought to have killed it at thirty yards, but which only made it happy and fat and boozy.” Allowing for heroic exaggeration here, life on Farmington Avenue apparently had its robust aspects.

  “Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession,” Livy said soon after they bought the land but even before the house had gone up. The stately mansion was a classic American success story, a reminder that it was possible to be born in a two-room clapboard house in Florida, Missouri, a village of one hundred inhabitants, and to become world-famous, marry a rich and beautiful woman, and live a life of domestic bliss in a house that was the marvel of Hartford. On Susy’s third birthday, in March 1875, a rousing wood fire shed warmth and light in the main hall, the colored glass lamps on the newel posts were lighted, and in front of the fireplace, on a bright rug and surrounded by a circle of pink and dove-colored chairs, was a low table full of presents: a pink azalea, a Russia-leather Bible stamped in gold, a gold ring and a silver thimble, a nurseryful of dolls in Sunday dress, and—her father’s gift—a Noah’s Ark containing two hundred wooden animals “such as only a human being could create and only God call by name without referring to the passenger list.” Here, surely, was the fulfillment of dream. For in amplitude, luxury, and freely expressed affection the house on Farmington Avenue was the opposite of Clemens’ cramped birthplace and of his childhood in what he remembered as a loveless household. It was the conspicuous symbol of his success as writer, lecturer, and dramatist: the Word was made bricks and mortar, and Mark Twain dwelt among them.

  “One may make the house a gaudy and unrestful Palace of Sham,” Clemens explained to Mary Fairbanks’ daughter, “or he can make it a Home.” He was concerned with taste and correctness, but he was scarcely reticent about displaying his wealth—to give pleasure to others by displaying it was one of the social obligations of wealth—and he drew the line between Home and Palace of Sham in curious ways. For example, to celebrate the visit of Grant and his family to Hartford in October, 1880, the Clemens house, like others in the city, was decorated from top to bottom with flags of all nations, shields and coats of arms, glittering arches, mottoes and heraldic devices on gold and silver paper. Near the gate stood two figures in complete armor. But, as Clemens told Livy, he “persistently and inflexibly” forbade “the biggest and gorgeousest of the arches—it had on it, in all the fires of the rainbow, ‘The Home of Mark Twain,’ in letters as big as your head.” Actually it would have been just as superfluous to name the owner of Iranistan or Waldemere, the unique but flammable splendors Barnum put up at nearby Bridgeport. But to own this house, Clemens soon discovered, was like being chained to a tiger. By his own choice he committed himself to an earning power more like a tycoon’s than an author’s, and a few years later the expense of running this establishment on the scale it demanded helped drive him to Europe. At various times Livy would be prostrated with hostess fatigue. And in this rambling palace, so antithetic to the rural simplicities and isolation of his study at Quarry Farm, he found he could get little work done. Soon after they moved in he complained he was being pestered and exasperated to death by the builder, the foreman, the architect, the upholsterer, the carpet man, the billiard-table man, the man sodding the grounds. “Just think of this going on all day long, and I a man who loathes details with all his heart.” He made Livy lie down “most of the time.” He described himself as “a headless man.”

  The Atlantic wanted more from him, Livy wanted him to get back to work. “It’s no use,” he wrote to Howells on October 24, “I find I can’t. We are in such a state of weary and endless confusion that my head won’t ‘go.’ So I give it up.” The creature was turning on Frankenstein. It was a long walk in the woods, away from the house, that changed his mood. Later that day he wrote a second letter to Howells. He had been talking to Twichell about “old Mississippi days of steamboating glory and grandeur as I saw them (during 5 years) from the plot house. He said ‘What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!’ I hadn’t thought of that before.” What was new was only the magazine idea. For years he had been planning a book on the subject, and in 1871 he had told Livy he intended to spend two months on the river taking notes and then “I bet you I will make a standard work.” Now, with the pages of the Atlantic open to him, he planned to write a series that would run just as long as his material held out. As it had during the summer, the past came rushing in on him, and despite the distractions of the house he managed to put himself to work. The first of the seven installments of “Old Times on the Mississippi” was in proof by the end of November and appeared in the Atlantic for January 1875. “Cut it, scarify it, reject it—handle it with entire freedom,” he wrote to Howells about the first installment, and Howells responded not only with specific suggestions, which Clemens gratefully accepted, but with the kind of generous praise that was reward and incentive in itself. “The piece about the Mississippi is capital,” Howells wrote; “it almost made the water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it.” And from John Hay, who had been born and raised in Warsaw, Illinois, fifty miles up the river from Hannibal, he received a tribute of the same order which he proudly passed on to Howells:

  I have just read with delight your article in the Atlantic. It is perfect—no more nor less. I don’t see how you do it. I knew all that, every word of it—passed as much time on the levee as you ever did, knew the same crowd and saw the same scenes,—but I could not have remembered one word of it all. You have the two greatest gifts of the writer, memory and imagination.

  “Now, isn’t that outspoken and hearty, and just like that splendid John Hay?” Clemens exclaimed, unaware, of course, that Hay held the private opinion that The Innocents Abroad was a work of “buffoonery.” Spurred on by these encouragements, by January Clemens believed that he had already uncovered enough material to make a book, and, with the optimism he tended to show at the beginning and the middle of any new project, he expected the book to be published at the end of 1875. He was off by eight years.

  Mark Twain’s princely establishment in Hartford was visible proof that it was possible to bypass literary Boston and achieve success in America and in England as well. Now literary Boston, as represented by the Atlantic, welcomed him, and he responded with a troubled mingling of gratitude, residual veneration, mockery, and barely disguised hostility, all contained within a mild hoax. “Dear Redpath,” he telegraphed from Hartford on November 9, 1874, “Rev. J. H. Twichell and I expect to start at 8 o’clock Thursday morning, to walk to Boston in 24 hours—or more. We shall telegraph Young’s Hotel for rooms for Saturday night, in order to allow for a low average of pedestrianism.” Redpath released the text to the newspapers. By Thursday morning, when Clemens and Twichell, carrying their lunch and a change of clothes, started out along the stage road from East Hartford, the Associated Press was reporting the trip to subscribers across the country. Like Barnum, whom he admired and exchanged invitations and curiosities with, Clemens believed that a man without publicity was a tinkling cymbal.

  Howells thought of his own first trip to Boston as a pilgrimage; Mark Twain’s subtitle for The Innocents Abroad was “The New Pilgrim’s Progress.” Now, as a whim, t
he celebrated humorist was setting out on foot for the Holy Sepulcher accompanied, as a princely pilgrim should be, by his confessor and almoner. They walked twenty-eight miles the first day, spent the night in a tavern at Westford, Connecticut, walked six miles more the next morning to North Ashford. There they gave up the pilgrimage and decided to go the rest of the way to Boston by train. “We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days,” Clemens said in a telegram which Redpath read to a lecture audience in Boston. “This demonstrates the thing can be done. Shall now finish by rail. Did you have any bets on us?” Friday night Howells gave them a welcoming party in his new house at 37 Concord Avenue in Cambridge. “I never saw a more used-up, hungrier man than Clemens,” Howells told his father. “It was something fearful to see him eat escalloped oysters.” The oysters restored him, and, standing with his head thrown back, his gray-blue eyes glimmering, he told about the pilgrimage and about their encounter in the tavern at Westford with a young ostler who, as Clemens described him years later, had “oozed eloquent profanity and incredible smut from every pore.” Twichell had become more and more embarrassed as the young man went on, for even on neutral subjects the ostler had been superb: “went into the crops with as fresh a zeal as ever and drove his dialectic night cart through it at as rattling a gait and with as fragrant effect as in the beginning.” On Monday Clemens met Lowell, who was then in the grip of his obsession to demonstrate that everyone was in some way descended from the Jews. He seemed to be interested in Clemens’ apparently Semitic nose and in little else about him; their only common ground was the Beecher affair.