Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  One of the mementos of this well-publicized pilgrimage is a letter Clemens nominally addressed to Livy but really, as he explained a week or so later, intended for Howells. He dated it November 16, 1935, the centennial year of his birth, and he sent it, he said, from a city which used to be called Boston but which was now (a jab at the anxieties and the possibly waning vitalities of the Yankee community) called Limerick—“It is enough to make a body sick.” Twentieth-century Limerick-Boston is populated by “idiots” and “fools” who communicate with each other in “dreary conversational funerals” that make Clemens want to “curse till my asthma brings me the blessed relief of suffocation.” Along with Protestant hegemony, democracy and universal suffrage have withered away by the year 1935. Instead of a President the country has an emperor and a large titled nobility; Clemens is the Duke of Hartford, Howells the Duke of Cambridge, and Twichell the Archbishop of Dublin. But in this cozy reactionary fantasy, which Howells and others loved for its “deliciousness,” there are hard glints not only of misanthropy but also of hostility toward the Boston peerage. Osgood, the Duke of Hartford now reports, was hanged many years ago for conspiracy. Aldrich, now Marquis of Ponkapog, was nearly hanged on the same charge; he is drunk, as usual, and spends his time telling lies. “I wish you could see old Cambridge and Ponkapog,” the letter concludes. “I love them dearly as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on idiots.”

  Faithful subscribers to the Atlantic could not have been surprised to find in the January 1875 issue two poems by Professor Longfellow and an essay by Dr. Holmes, nor would the excerpt from Henry James, Jr.’s Roderick Hudson have seemed much of a departure from normal editorial policies. But, beginning on page 69 of that issue, with the first pages of the first installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi,” they heard a new voice and should have been electrified by it, just as, in what is surely one of the great passages in American literature, Hannibal, “the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning,” is electrified into life by the cry of “S-t-e-a-mboat a-comin’!” The gaudy packet, flying a flag from its jackstaff and tumbling clouds of black smoke from its fancy chimneys, its paddle wheel churning the water to foam, pent steam screaming through its valves, was Mark Twain announcing his arrival and declaring once and for all that his surge of power and spectacle derived not from such streams as the meandering Charles or sweet Thames but from “the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.”

  Back in Boston on December 15 to attend an Atlantic dinner for its contributors, Clemens could see advance copies of the January issue at each of the twenty-eight places at the table. Afterward, instead of a formal speech, he remarked only that the dinner had been “nice,” “really good,” “admirable,” and, summing up in symbolic terms his own edged, only partially revealed attitudes, he declared that the dinner had been “quite as go as I would have had if I had stayed at home.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Spirits of ’76

  I

  BY THE SORT OF COINCIDENCE that delighted Mark Twain, the adultery trial of Henry Ward Beecher was at a crisis point on April 19, 1875, the one-hundredth anniversary of the first shots fired in the cause of American independence. On the sixty-seventh day of a soggy legal drama that had begun in January and was to end in the July doldrums with a hung jury, Beecher, wearing black broadcloth and holding in his left hand a small bouquet of flowers, entered the crowded Brooklyn courtroom, bowed low to the judge, and took the stand. That same morning Clemens and Howells were together in Cambridge struggling through crowds and traffic on Massachusetts Avenue to find some way of getting to the centennial ceremonies in Lexington and Concord.

  A few days earlier, with Twichell, Clemens had attended the trial in Brooklyn and heard Beecher under cross-examination. Later, when Howells pressed him to talk about the trial, he became strangely reticent. “The man has suffered enough,” he said wearily. His own disgust transcended the issue of guilt or innocence. As he said years later, “Mr. Beecher made the stupendous and irremediable mistake of remaining silent until all sane people”—Clemens included—“believed him guilty.” Clemens’ interest in the trial was not so much in its outcome as in the simple fact of its existence, evidence of what a pamphlet of the day called Wickedness in High Places. It would have been better for religion, he told Pamela, if Beecher had died in infancy. He saw the Beecher trial as a companion piece to the perjury trial of the Tichborne Claimant which he had followed with such intense interest in England in 1873. He meant to have Beecher scrapbooked, too, he told Charles Warren Stoddard, whom he had paid to paste up the six volumes of clippings about the Claimant. “At present,” he told Stoddard early in 1875, “I believe I would rather go down in history as the Claimant than as Mr. Beecher.” The claimant to the Tichborne title and estate had turned out to be just Arthur Orton, fat son of a ship’s butcher of Wapping, and now he was convict number 10539 at Dartmoor. Beecher was a false leader who in his private behavior had betrayed the faith of his followers, as much a symptom as Boss Tweed of the ills of democracy.

  All the “accidents” of Mark Twain’s life had some kind of purposive meaning—so it seemed to him in his old age, when he tried to map out the turning points by which he had become a writer. His intermittent but deepening sense of alienation during the 1870s can be summed up in three “accidents”: he managed to be present at the Tichborne trial in London and the Beecher trial in Brooklyn, but, despite elaborate planning and high expectations, he managed to miss the centennial celebrations. Clemens arrived in Cambridge alone on April 18—Livy was reluctant to leave her infant in the care of their alcoholic wet nurse—and spent the night with Howells. They were among the honored guests who the next day were to go by special train to Concord, where the dedication of Daniel Chester French’s “Minute Man” was to be followed by an address by Emerson, an ode by Lowell, the appearance of President Grant and his cabinet, an enormous military parade led by General Burnside, and dinner in a tent for four thousand. Clemens and Howells decided to shorten the trip by skipping the train from Boston and starting out from Cambridge instead. After a leisurely breakfast they walked to the Porter Square station in North Cambridge, only to discover that there was not a place to be had on any train going to Concord; every car was full, and the roofs were covered with patriots. Every kind of vehicle from miles around was on the road and full. Not even a cat was for hire, Howells recalled. The day was cold and windy, North Cambridge was deep in mud, even Clemens’ sealskin coat could not keep out the chill, and along with his anger and impatience came an attack of acute indigestion. In a final act of futility, Clemens ran after a carriage that seemed to have some empty seats; all he got for his troubles was more mud. They gave up. Through their scheme of bypassing Boston they were to miss one of the gaudiest spectacles the young republic had ever staged to celebrate itself. They also missed, as they would learn from the papers, some elements of farce: the speakers’ platform collapsed twice under the combined weight of the distinguished guests; the dinner tent was blasted by wet snow and wind, and only the ice cream was warm; a town of twenty-four hundred thrifty souls was overrun by fifty thousand tourists, all cold and hungry and many of them drunk, looking for food, drink, shelter, and a way to get home. “There is no difficulty now in understanding the hurried retreat of the British from Concord and Lexington,” the Boston Daily News said about the chaos.

  Disappointed and humiliated and angry with each other, Mark Twain and Howells made their way as slowly as possible back to Concord Avenue and tried to convince Elinor Howells they had made a quick round trip to and from the ceremonies. She saw through the story right away, and as they stood by the library fire they began to see the morning’s episode in a different light. They had, in fact, acted out the part of one of Mark Twain’s favorite comic personae: the innocent, the tenderfoot, who is sure that he can outsmart the natives. The comic non-visit to Concord was, for Clemens
, as loaded with psychic tensions as the comic non-walk to Boston. “I think the humor of this situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord would have been,” Howells wrote in 1910. “Only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt detection.”

  “You left your fur cap, which I propose to keep as a hostage,” Howells wrote on April 22. And in a letter the next day Clemens commemorated what was one of the many peaks in the range of their friendship of nearly forty years: “When I think over what a splendid good sociable time I had in your house I feel ever so thankful to the wise providence that thwarted our several ably planned and ingenious attempts.” It was one of many such visits, to Boston or Hartford, during which they talked late into the night, Clemens in his long nightshirt, smoking constantly, telling the story of his life—“the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told again,” Howells called it, acknowledging a mythic dimension that set his Mark Twain apart from “all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists.” After the hot whiskeys, the beer, the champagne—whichever he happened to favor as a soporific at the time—Clemens finally went to bed, and after a while, when he had fallen asleep, Howells looked in on him and put out the last, still-lighted cigar of the night. Even after the house was aired that next morning and Clemens had gone, the smell of his tobacco remained. Worn out by smoke, drink, and late hours, completely talked out and listened out, after such a visit Howells felt like “one of those locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer.” In personal terms, Clemens’ friendship with Howells had something in it of Sherlock Holmes and Watson: a nervous, impatient, unpredictable, intuitive, dominating personality finding vital satisfactions with someone who seems to present the complementary qualities of solidity, reliability, perseverance, and established values. Yet in professional terms the roles were all reversed. Clemens played pupil to Howells as master, acknowledged to him a debt as deep as the country job printer owes to the city shop foreman who teaches him the right way to do things, obediently followed Howells’ editorial suggestions, valued praise from Howells above all others’. Howells, often hard pressed for money while Clemens lived in affluence, gave freely of his work and time. With the exception of Kipling much later on, Howells was about the only writer of fiction Clemens consistently read with pleasure and admiration. “You are really my only author; I am restricted to you,” he was to tell Howells in 1885. “I wouldn’t give a damn for the rest.” Their common ground was a basically elitist bias along with a deep loyalty to democratic roots, a refusal to sentimentalize boyhood or to cleanse it of terrors and anguish, and above all an unswerving respect and affection for each other. Through all of Clemens’ vagaries and contradictions, his rages and violent rejections of old friends, his friendship with Howells was untouched by rancor or rivalry and was illuminated by a tenderness which shines through the nearly seven hundred letters they exchanged and through Howells’ My Mark Twain, the memoir he wrote the year Clemens died. In his review of Sketches, New and Old Howells praised him as a dramatic reporter of reality, a friend of mankind, and a humorist of growing subtlety and seriousness. “Yours is the recognized Court of Last Resort in this country,” Clemens wrote gratefully, “from its decision there is no appeal; and so, to have gained this decree of yours before I am forty years old, I regard as a thing to be right down proud of.” Livy especially was grateful for the comment on his “growing seriousness of meaning,” he said. “You see, the thing that gravels her is that I am persistently glorified as a mere buffoon, as if that entirely covered my case—which she denies with venom.” He signed his letter with the emblem of his being as public man and professional writer, “Mark.” To Livy on her thirtieth birthday, November 27, 1875—three days before he turned forty—he wrote from the depths of a different identity. She called him “Youth”; now he greeted her as daughter as well as wife. “You are dearer to me, my child, than you were upon the last anniversary of this birthday.” In terms that indicate his still-bewildered response to his rapid translation from buffoon into moralist and Victorian pater familias, he concluded: “With abounding affection for you and our babies, I hail this day that brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades.” He signed himself, magisterially, “Always Yours, S.L.C.”

  Clemens spent the spring and summer of 1875 in Hartford. “I work at work,” he complained, “but I don’t accomplish anything worth speaking of.” He was chained to his way of living. To move his household to Quarry Farm “would be like moving a menagerie,” he said, “and to leave it behind would be like leaving a menagerie behind without a keeper.” There were other distractions as well. Dan De Quille, an old friend from the Territorial Enterprise, was in Hartford working, at his suggestion and with his help, on a history of the Comstock Lode, The Big Bonanza. Bliss was to publish it the following year, in conflict, as it turned out, with Tom Sawyer. “There ain’t any risk,” Clemens had assured De Quille, who yielded to pressure from him to take a leave of absence from the paper and come East to write the book; “I am a large stockholder and director in our publishing house, and have some influence.” In part it was the Riley affair all over again, a red-hot idea which seemed as spectacular as the Big Bonanza itself, the biggest silver strike in America, and was projected in a twenty-page letter fringed with telegrams. “Here you shall stop at the best hotel, and every morning I will walk down, meet you half way, bring you to my house and we will grind literature all day long in the same room,” Clemens promised. “Sundays we will smoke and lie.” And, like Riley, De Quille was offered not only enthusiasm but also some dead-sure secrets. “I can show you a trick or two which I don’t teach to everybody, I can tell you! … Bring along lots of dry statistics—it is the very best sauce a humorous book can have. Ingeniously used, they just make a reader smack his chops in gratitude.”

  In June they began their work in Clemens’ study, now moved away from the domestic noises of the house to a room above the stable. Inevitably Clemens’ interest in the red-hot idea cooled; the “Introductory” he wrote for The Big Bonanza was reserved in its enthusiasm, and the old friendship, for all the time they spent together in Hartford and during part of the summer in Newport, was never restored to its old basis. Even De Quille was troubled by the distractions Clemens seemed to look for instead of avoid. While Thomas Beecher was visiting at Farmington Avenue Clemens would do nothing but play billiards. Then Clemens went to New York on a business trip; Raymond was reviving The Gilded Age. Joaquin Miller was in Hartford, shorn of his shoulder-length locks and also, as De Quille saw it, of “much of his silly affectation.” And Bret Harte was in town from time to time to see Bliss and talk over his novel, Gabriel Conroy. He was even thinking of renting a house in Hartford, a plan which must have given some uneasiness to Clemens, who seems to have made an effort to keep him and the Nook Farm group apart. On their way to a baseball game in May 1875 Clemens and Twichell encountered Harte on the street; it was the first time Twichell (who said he was “a little disappointed” in Harte’s looks) had ever seen him up close.

  Nonetheless, by July Clemens finished Tom Sawyer. He could not afford to offer it to the Atlantic for serial publication, he explained to Howells. “You see I take a vile, mercenary view of things—but then my household expenses are something almost ghastly.” But he wanted Howells to read the manuscript anyway “and point out the most glaring defects for me.” “It is altogether the best boy’s story I ever read. It will be an immense success,” Howells said, adding that he had made some penciled suggestions and corrections. “The adventures are enchanting. I wish I had been on that island.” When Clemens came to “the dreary and hateful task” of revising the manuscript, he hit upon a method which sums up the extent of his almost unquestioning reliance on Howells: “Instead of reading the MS, I simply hunted out the pencil marks and made the emendations which they suggeste
d.” But, on occasions more exacting than all his “censors” working together, he added, “There was one expression which perhaps you overlooked,” and he cited Huck’s complaint about the rigors of life with Widow Douglas: “They comb me all to hell.” Howells had, in fact, let it pass; so had Livy; so had Livy’s mother and Livy’s aunt, all “sensitive and loyal subjects of the kingdom of heaven, so to speak.” Now that Tom Sawyer was to be “a boy’s and girl’s book,” it was Clemens who boggled at the cornerstone vernacularism and changed “hell” to “thunder,” a minor but celebrated emendation. He had an excessively fine if sometimes erratic sense of what was fitting for a juvenile audience. In general, with an adult masculine audience, he used what Howells described as “the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance which I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish,” which, unfortunately, was one word for Howells.*

  II

  On January 24, 1876, in the library of his house on Farmington Avenue, Mark Twain read to the members of the Monday Evening Club a paper called “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.” He had written and polished it with more than his usual care, for, as he told Howells, “I think it will bring out considerable discussion among the gentlemen of the Club.” Later that night Twichell wrote in his journal that the paper was “serious in its intent though vastly funny and splendidly, brilliantly read.” A clergyman present asked Clemens to read it again as a homily from the pulpit the Sunday after. And Howells, who had been among the first to recognize his friend’s “growing seriousness of meaning,” published it in the June Atlantic. “It was an impassioned study of the human conscience,” Howells wrote a few years later. “Hawthorne or Bunyan might have been proud to imagine that powerful allegory, which had a grotesque force far beyond either of them.” But the public, including the Atlantic public, still expected Mark Twain to be a funny man only and were puzzled and dissatisfied when, as he did in this piece, he turned moralist, examined community values, and, exploring the dark side of his moon, touched on his growing sense of divisiveness.