Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  At the beginning of “The Carnival of Crime,” the author-narrator is in his study, at peace with himself, “thoroughly happy and content.” Without knocking, “a shriveled, shabby dwarf” enters the room. He is about forty years old. He is a walking deformity, a “vile bit of human rubbish,” covered with “a fuzzy, greenish mold.” Even so, Mark Twain recognizes that he and this mysterious stranger resemble each other in appearance, and in manner as well: the dwarf talks to him with the kind of brusqueness he himself uses only with his closest friends and in the same exasperating drawl. The dwarf proceeds to cite a series of shameful episodes that Mark Twain believed no one else knew about. He allowed his best friends to be ridiculed behind their backs. Years earlier he tricked his trusting younger brother into walking blindfolded on thin ice; and the brother fell into the water and nearly froze to death. (Clemens held himself responsible for his brother Henry’s presence on the steamboat Pennsylvania when it exploded and burned him fatally.) The dwarf goes on with these shameful secrets. “Every sentence was an accusation,” the narrator says, “and every accusation a truth.”

  “I am your conscience.” the dwarf says. Earlier he had accused the narrator of turning away a hungry tramp; now the narrator argues that if he had fed the tramp instead of turning him away he would still feel guilty, for he would have been condoning vagrancy and thus would have offended the conscience of the community. Then he realizes that it is the function of “conscience” to whip a man into guilt regardless of right or wrong or any absolute value; all his life he has been the slave of the tyrant “conscience.” In a fit of anger he kills the dwarf, tears him to pieces, burns him. He is now liberated, having passed all the way from atonement to carnival: he is a man without a conscience, living a life of “unalloyed bliss” and free to commit every imaginable crime.

  “The Carnival of Crime” lapses at the end into extravaganza: the “I” murders all his enemies, sets fire to a house obstructing his view, swindles a widow and orphans out of their last cow, and offers for sale to medical colleges dead tramps by the gross or by the ton. Still, it is a remarkably direct expression of Mark Twain’s concern with multiplicity and remorse, with inner conflicts as well as conflicts with the community. He was, in certain aspects, doubly an outsider. He rejected the aberrant democracy of the Gilded Age, but while he shared certain attitudes with the intellectual reformers—their worry about unrestricted immigration and unrestricted suffrage, for example—he was also skeptical of this self-appointed elite. His sense of alienation from himself as well as from the community often forces him to hide like a hunted man. (“We are so much in the habit of wearing disguises,” said La Rochefoucauld, “that we end by failing to recognize ourselves.”) He has more aliases than he can remember, and he feels the need to explore the troubled twainness of Mark (or dark) Twain and his creator and Siamese twin, Samuel L. Clemens, and all the other identities clustering about a nucleus of personality called, for the sake of brevity, “S.L.C.”: Sam, Mark, Youth, Samuel Langhorne, C. L. Samuel of New York, J. B. Smith, and other incognitos.

  At about the same time Clemens was writing “The Carnival of Crime,” his perennial interest in claimants—a sinisterly apt phonym as well as a metaphor for a riven personality—was being fed by a distant cousin named Jesse Madison Leathers of Louisville. Leathers was fixed on the belief that he was the rightful Earl of Durham, but he needed money to establish his claim. “Can we recover the estate or is it a myth?” he asked Sam in a rare moment of tentativeness. If Cousin Sam would underwrite the legal expenses, Cousin Sam would get half the estate. “You might as well tackle Gibraltar with blank cartridges,” Cousin Sam advised him in October 1875. All the same, Leathers, fueled by the wild hope that ran in the family bloodstream (along with such quantities of alcohol in his own that at one time he landed in the Louisville Inebriate Asylum), believed until his death in 1887 that he was “an American Earl,” the title he gave to an autobiography Clemens persuaded him to write. Clemens thought of him as an “ass,” a foghorn fighting against the fog, and in An American Claimant, published in 1892 and one of the worst things he ever wrote, he merged Colonel Sellers with Jesse Leathers. The fantasy went deeper than that. “Suppose I should live to be ninety-two,” he once said to Livy, “and just as I was dying, a messenger should enter and say—” “‘You are become Earl of Durham’!” she broke in, thus providing him with one more instance of what he called “mental telegraphy.”

  For Mark Twain the spirit of ’76 was troubled and divided. At times he felt he had only two or three years of acceptable work left in him. We all cry when a baby dies, he told Mary Fairbanks that June, “but some are conscious of a deeper feeling of content—I am, at any rate.” Thinking of his dead son, he was blinded by gloom and pessimism to her pride and pleasure in her own son, who had just turned twenty-one: “Never mind about that grisly future season when he shall have made a dazzling success and shall sit with folded hands in well-earned ease and look around upon his corpses and mine, and contemplate his daughters and mine in the madhouse, and his sons and mine gone to the devil.” After some minor misunderstanding about the family carriage, Clemens told Annie Fields that he spent the greater part of his life, which was “one long apology,” on his knees begging forgiveness. Instead of evoking the past for Will Bowen, he now scolded him brutally for mooning over it. “Every day that is added to the past is but an old boot added to a pile of rubbish,” he said. “Man, do you know that this is simply mental and moral masturbation? … You need a dose of salts.” At times he hated everything about his past. “Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckleheadedness—and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at 19 and 20,” he wrote to a friend from his St. Louis days, “and that is what the average Southerner is at 60 today.” Howells, who thought of him as “the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew,” recalled a conversation they had one night in Hartford. “I wonder why we hate the past so,” Howells said. Clemens answered, “It’s so damned humiliating.”

  Even the dead seemed to be returning. In 1876 the bodies of John Marshall Clemens and Henry Clemens were dug up and moved to a new cemetery. “As for a monument,” Clemens wrote to John RoBards in Hannibal, “if you remember my father, you are aware he would rise up and demolish it the first night. He was a modest man and would not be able to sleep under a monument.” (Nor would he have been able to sleep under the roof of 351 Farmington Avenue, the son may have felt.) As for Henry: “My darling, my pride, my glory, my all,” he had mourned in 1858, praying to be struck dead if this would bring Henry back to life. Now Henry’s death was part of the dreadful and humiliating past: “Henry Clemens. Born June 13, 1838—Died June 19, 1858—the above is sufficient for Henry’s grave.”

  In “The Carnival of Crime” he was trying to explore the roots of his black depressions. He believed that “conscience” was the source of guilt and remorse, and of that Presbyterian sureness of damnation that he tried to joke away in his “(Burlesque) Autobiography” and in all his other public pseudo confessions that he was a liar, a thief, and a wastrel. (These pseudo confessions become an integral part of his humor: by taking the initiative in accusing and, symbolically, punishing himself, the humorist achieves a kind of immunity from the disapproval of society.) Years later, when he drew into himself after Susy’s death, he no longer felt that such simple dualities as man and conscience, or Jekyll and Hyde, were adequate solutions to his own enigma, and he turned to psychology, to notions of a “dream self” and the demonic urgings of the unconscious.

  During the summer of 1876, back in the solitude of his study at Quarry Farm, Clemens worked on two projects which, though they were grotesquely contrasting in quality, were related in important respects. Both were implicit rejections of the taboos and codes of polite society, and both were experiments in using the vernacular as a literary medium. The first, written for private circulation, was a harmless but soon notorious piece of bawdry calle
d 1601; or Conversation as It Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors. This excursion into what Clemens imagined plain-spoken Elizabethan English to have been was, in a sense, an escape from the restraints of juvenile literature, a covert way of scribbling dirty words on Tom Sawyer’s fence. The manuscript or surreptitiously printed copies passed from hand to hand among a circle of critical mediocrities (it is a wonder Mark Twain survived their adulation): Twichell; Twichell’s friend Dean Sage, a Booklyn lumber dealer and authority on hunting and fishing; David Gray, Buffalo newspaper editor and pious minor poet; someone Clemens recalled as “a Jewish Rabbi in Albany, a very learned man and an able critic and lover of old-time literature.” They declared 1601 to be a great and fine piece of literature; it seems now only a minor sort of curiosity.

  “I am tearing along on a new book,” he told Mary Fairbanks on August 4 about his second project of the summer. He could not afford any interruptions, he said, because he was afraid that his mill might get cold. Five days later he was writing to Howells in a more casual spirit. “Began another boy’s book—more to be at work than anything else. I have written 400 pages on it—therefore it is very nearly half done. It is Huck Finn’s Autobiography. I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done.” The tank ran dry, as he feared, and though he did not burn the manuscript he did pigeonhole it for two years; he worked on it again in 1879 or 1880, pigeonholed it again, and finally finished it in 1884, eight years and seven books after he first began it, a wandering process of creation that is a book-length story in itself. In the first sixteen or so chapters that Clemens wrote that first summer and liked “only tolerably well,” he set Huck and Jim afloat on their raft, their fragile island of freedom between the two shores of society. When they passed Cairo, Illinois, in the night, the last free-soil outpost, Mark Twain found himself faced with an enormously difficult problem of plot and structure. He solved that problem with a persistence which reveals his deep involvement with the book both as a literary artist and as a man desperately needing to resolve his own bewilderments about conscience and the restraints and freedoms of the community.

  Tom Sawyer, which Clemens once described as “simply a hymn” to boyhood, ended with the establishment of a trust fund for Tom and Huck; to have money out at six per cent meant to be part of the fabric of organized, acquisitive society. Huck’s first step toward winning his freedom from the town and his father and toward beginning his education of heart and eye is to renounce his share of the trust—it has brought him nothing but trouble and confinement. He helps Jim to escape, thus symbolically destroying the institution on which the economic life of the community is built and, in actuality, committing a capital crime against the community. And at the end of the book, still rejecting civilization, Huck intends to “light out for the Territory.” Throughout the book the price of these and other freedoms is remorse. Huck feels agonies of conscience not only because he is breaking the law by freeing Jim but also because he has betrayed Miss Watson by helping steal her property. In a battle with conscience, Huck finally rejects the idea of turning Jim in: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” He plays a practical joke on Jim, but then he realizes he has betrayed Jim’s love, and he feels like “trash”: “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger—but I done it.” Like Huck, Jim has memories which shrivel his soul. Once, he says, he struck his little daughter because she ignored what he said to her; then he learned she was deaf and dumb. “Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her up in my arms, en say, ‘Oh, de po’ little thing! de Lord God Almighty forgive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to forgive hisself as long’s he live!’” In the manuscript Mark Twain emphatically underlined “de Lord God Almighty fogive po’ ole Jim.” “This expression shall not be changed,” he wrote in the margin. He too would cry to heaven for forgiveness.

  Nearly twenty years after he began Huckleberry Finn Clemens described it in his notebook as “a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.” Ignoring for the moment the fact that he himself, despite his Hannibal background, had grown up to become the most desouthernized of Southerners, he went on to describe how unquestioned the institution of slavery had been in his boyhood: “The conscience—that unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early and stick to it.”

  The dwarf conscience was not necessarily the voice of God, he had discovered; it might be only the voice of the people. If he, like Huck, could reject the community, or at least maintain a critical distance from it, he could win his freedom from the tyranny of conscience. When Clemens broke off his story at the end of the summer of 1876, Huck and Jim are only halfway to freedom. They have passed Cairo, crossed the invisible frontier, and entered enemy territory. A steamboat, the image of avenging society, pounds down on the raft, her wide-open furnaces blazing in the night. Huck dives deep, deep down to escape the thirty-foot paddle wheel, holds his breath until he thinks his lungs are bursting. Mark Twain was also diving deep down into sensibility and memory and preparing himself for a searing examination of the society—part of “the damned human race”—which nurtured him. As man and artist he was to find his first, only, brief liberation.

  III

  That Mark Twain wrote even as much of Huckleberry Finn as he did during the summer of 1876 is proof, if any were needed, that the book sprang from a deep inner necessity. Chronically subject to rages and depressions which at other times might have stopped him altogether, he managed to work on it at the same time that he looked on helplessly while Tom Sawyer, the augur of a decline in his fortunes, headed for disaster. Bliss had had the manuscript since the end of November 1875 and had put his best illustrator, the alcoholic and eccentric True Williams, to work. In England Chatto and Windus were rushing toward a June publication. With his expectations high, Clemens sent Howells a set of untitled proofs; Howells finished his review at the end of March and scheduled it for the May number of the Atlantic. “It is a splendid notice, and will embolden weak-kneed journalistic admirers to speak out, and will modify or shut up the unfriendly,” Clemens wrote on April 3, and he unfolded his plan: “About two days after the Atlantic issues I mean to begin to send books to principal journals and magazines.”

  All of this was, of course, based on the assumption that Bliss was doing his part, but a visit downtown to 284 Asylum Street in mid-April shocked Clemens out of his confident strategy. Bliss mumbled some excuse about the engravers falling behind schedule; not a single advertisement had been issued, not a single canvasser had gone out to take an order. “A subscription harvest is before publication (not after, when people have discovered how bad one’s book is),” Clemens explained to Howells—in considerable embarrassment, for the book could not possibly issue before the autumn. “Howells, you must forgive me if I seem to have made the Atlantic any wrong. I—but I’ll talk to you about it and show you that it was one of those cases where ‘the best laid schemes of mice and men, etc.’”

  He wanted Howells to believe that it was his own idea to postpone Tom Sawyer to autumn, when it would sell as a holiday gift book, but the truth of the matter was quite different, humiliating and infuriating. Made prosperous by Clemens’ past successes, Bliss had expanded his list and taken on too many other books to be able to handle Tom Sawyer on schedule. Many of these books were by authors brought into the house by Clemens himself, by now a director as well as a stockholder; among them were Dan De Quille, Charles Dudley Warner, and Bret Harte. He had pleaded with Bret Harte to give his novel, Gabriel Conroy, to Bliss, in the expectation that it would make money for the publishing house. The author was acting as businessman, a double role that was to become more and more tempting for Clemens, and he was caught between conflicting interests. The previous December Harte, who was broke, had begged Clemens “in the common interests of our trade” to get him another tho
usand dollars from Bliss. But in September 1876 Harte complained to him about Bliss’s delays with Gabriel Conroy. Use your influence, Harte demanded. “You are a stockholder in the Concern.” The following spring he was at Clemens again. Gabriel Conroy had been a failure. “Either Bliss must confess that he runs his concern solely in your interest, and that he uses the names of other authors to keep that fact from the public, or else he is a fool.” For Clemens, who was all the while watching the failure of his own book and whose feelings for Harte were by now permanently poisoned, this was too much. “I have read two pages of this ineffable idiotcy,” he scrawled on the back of Harte’s letter. “It is all I can stand. S. L. C.”

  During the summer Clemens was in a rage against Bliss. Ignoring his conflict of interest as stockholder and as author, he went about in Hartford and New York denouncing Bliss’s incompetence and double-dealing. Even the mild Williams, whose sole interests were illustrations and the rum bottle—Orion had once seen him climbing up a lamppost in front of Tim Dooley’s saloon—was so fired up by one of these diatribes that he started taunting Bliss, his employer. Bliss made a frantic appeal to Clemens to stop the campaign. “For myself I care nothing,” he said, with a touch of sanctimonious injury, “but it seems poor policy to injure the stock this way, and our stock is too valuable to be made to suffer.” Put in these frank profit terms, his appeal was irresistible, and Clemens the investor apologized at the same time that Clemens the author remained absolutely certain that Bliss had botched Tom Sawyer.