Howells’ enthusiastic review came out too long before publication to do the American edition much good and, as Clemens hoped, to set the pattern for other reviews; Howells’ was, in fact, about the only review of any critical importance that the book received at the time. But his review did serve a certain purpose: it was picked up by Canadian pirates, who used it to advertise their edition, reprinted from the Chatto and Windus edition, and they skimmed off a large part of the American market, without paying a penny to the author, before Bliss finally had books to sell in December. The Gilded Age sold 50,000 copies during its first full year of publication, Sketches, New and Old about 27,000. Tom Sawyer, far from being an early best seller, sold only about 24,000 copies. Its relative failure, which hastened Clemens’ eventual break with Bliss and his fatal involvements as publisher of his own books, made unmistakable a pattern of declining popularity for Mark Twain. During 1877 his most popular and profitable book was the blank adhesive scrapbook. “It seems funny that an invention which cost me five-minutes’ thought in a railway car one day,” he said to Mary Fairbanks, “should in this little while be paying me an income as large as any salary I ever received on a newspaper.”
IV
As the year drew to an end, the calm surface of life at Nook Farm, already broken by feuding among the Beechers, was further disturbed by a series of curious schemes and squabbles. Bret Harte, in deep with his creditors in New York, was a more or less constant guest at Farmington Avenue. His borrowings from Clemens were approaching the three-thousand-dollar mark, and in other respects he showed himself equally capable of exploiting his literary seniority over Clemens, his confident wit, and his dazzling facility. One Friday night in December he came to dinner with a double deadline to meet: he was scheduled the following morning to read a story to the Saturday Morning Club, a select circle of Hartford young ladies, and Dana of the New York Sun was counting on this story and had promised a bonus of one hundred dollars if Harte delivered it on time. Harte had until morning to write it. Instead of rushing to his room after dinner, he sat up in the library talking and drinking whiskey. By one o’clock Clemens was ready for bed. Harte was ready for work and for more whiskey. He went up to his room and worked and drank steadily through the night, although Clemens’ estimate that Harte consumed two quarts of whiskey between one and nine in the morning is clearly a heroic embellishment of the facts. Harte came down to breakfast alert, sober, and with a finished story called “Thankful Blossom.” The young ladies were delighted, Dana got his story, Harte got his bonus, and thirty years later Clemens was still awed by Harte’s ability to work under pressure and by the story itself: “It is my conviction that it belongs at the very top of Harte’s literature.”
Clemens was still deferential, defensive, a little off balance with Harte, still, in many ways, the obedient disciple as well as anxious collaborator, and there were those at Nook Farm who saw in Harte’s hold over him something altogether undesirable. Recently, at a lunch of chicken and oysters with Susan Warner, Livy, and a number of other ladies, Isabella Hooker had been readmitted to probationary standing in the community. Now, prowling through the house on Farmington Avenue—Nook Farm was noted for its open-door policy—she looked into the billiard room and saw the two men together; in plain sight were some bottles of whiskey. “I felt a new distrust of such companionship,” she wrote in her diary, “and ever since the thought has haunted me that perhaps I have something to do there by way of warning—yet I dread to lose the friendship of that house which is but a slender thread already.” Despite her circumspection, however, that slender thread had very nearly been severed a few minutes earlier by Clemens himself. The tireless gossip of the neighborhood had supplied Isabella with a trivial anecdote, with which she taunted him: Clemens, it seemed, had outspokenly admired a lampshade in his house, but had stopped admiring it when he learned how little Livy had paid for it. Now, hounded by Isabella, he admitted with considerable exasperation that in all probability he had no knowledge or taste, and she set him down in her diary as “Mark Twain, the parvenu.” He resented her nosiness and her condescension, and he checked his anger only because Livy interceded. Isabella departed with a sense of moral and intellectual superiority, leaving Bret Harte to work his influence on “the parvenu.”
The fruit of “such companionship,” it developed, was a quick-money scheme. Mark Twain, who only a month or so earlier was writing Huckleberry Finn, had since the beginning of October been collaborating with Bret Harte on a comedy set in the Mother Lode country. It was called Ah Sin after its main character, the shrewd Chinese laundryman who was the original “Heathen Chinee” of Harte’s celebrated poem. They were to work together on the main character; Clemens was to bring in Scotty Briggs, the virtuoso of Western vernacular who made the arrangements for Buck Fanshaw’s funeral in Roughing It; and each of them, independently, was to construct a plot and then synthesize the best parts of each plot into a third. Whatever lesson Clemens may have learned from collaborating with Warner on The Gilded Age was forgotten in the excitement of the scheme and the prospect of dividing huge profits. Both of them were in the grip of that theater mania which possessed so many of their contemporaries; singlehandedly, Harte was later to try at least two more plays, one of them a dramatization of “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” For Ah Sin they expected eager producers and actors, and large audiences who would flock to the theater to see the novelty of a comedy written by two leading Western humorists and built around a world-famous character. As the play progressed, Clemens’ admiration for Harte continued to rise. “He worked rapidly and seemed to be troubled by no hesitations,” he dictated in his autobiography in 1907. “What he accomplished in an hour or so would have cost me several weeks of painful and difficult labor and would have been valueless when I got through. But Harte’s work was good and usable; to me it was a wonderful performance.”
Ah Sin was finished by the middle of December, and Harte went back to New York to make arrangements with the actor Charles T. Parsloe. He left behind him, however, some injury—a remark about Livy’s faith or furniture or style of living—which was localized enough at the time but which eventually poisoned the entire relationship. “My dear Mark,” he apologized from New York on December 16, “tell Mrs. Clemens that she must forgive me for my heterodoxy—that until she does I shall wear sackcloth (fashionably cut), and that I would put ashes on my forehead but that Nature has anticipated me. … I feel her gentle protests to my awful opinions all the more remorsefully that I am away.” And along with the friendly hope that “Nature has let up generally on your bowels,” he added some news, suggestive of trouble to come, about the revisions he was making: “Writing myself up and you down, that is, trying to make myself more easily intelligible, and you not quite so prononcé.”
“Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it,” Mark Twain was saying prophetically on December 22, in one of the best speeches he ever gave. “There is only one thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of it.” The permanent revival of the feud between him and Bret Harte was more certain, though, than some of the other episodes of the winter. Isabella Hooker’s interest in the spirit world had grown to the extent that she now believed that on New Year’s Eve, in her house on Forest Street, a sign would come from beyond the veil that she had been elected president of a universal matriarchy which, like a giant corporation, would later effect a merger on a share-for-share basis with the kingdom of heaven. A celebration was in order, especially in this community where there was a generalized interest in spiritism (Clemens, for example, would make an attempt in 1879 to talk to his brother Henry through a medium named Mansfield, would visit other mediums after Susy died, and was throughout his later life fascinated by mind science and faith healers). Isabella invited two sets of guests: the secular neighbors—including the Clemenses, the Charles Dudley Warners, and General Hawley—who were there primarily to celebrate the arrival of 1877, and a covey of
local mediums, spiritualists, and clairvoyants who were there to witness her elevation and whom she hid upstairs in a bedroom. At midnight the bells rang, but nothing else happened. The raisins and the walnuts were all eaten. Awkwardly and indignantly the believers came out of hiding—“There is the queerest-looking lot up there,” Isabella’s daughter Alice said a little too loudly—and one medium, Dr. Williams, was mistaken by Clemens for somebody’s coachman. The long-suffering John Hooker, destined by his wife to be secretary of foreign affairs under the new order, was attacked by a muscular lady medium, and they scuffled in the hallway. In the early hours of the new year Hooker confronted Isabella in the study and said she was suffering from monomania.
The entire Beecher hegemony was collapsing, in fact. Henry had said that Isabella was crazy and ought to be locked up. John Hooker was afraid that he himself was about to become the victim of hereditary insanity from one of his grandfathers. Harriet Beecher Stowe was only about tea years away from a state of schizoid anility in which (Clemens recalled) she “would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes.” Harriet’s husband, Calvin, was constantly visited by apparitions, and their son Fred was an alcoholic.
During February 1877 Clemens, who had maintained a discreet public silence about Henry Ward Beecher, launched an attack on an old Beecher protégé which was so venomous and out of scale to its target that it is probable that at the back of his mind was lurking the black-clad figure of Beecher himself. Charles C. Duncan, captain (or, as Clemens chose to call him, “head-waiter”) of the Quaker City, was now back in the public eye lecturing about the cruise and also being investigated for alleged embezzlement and nepotism while serving as shipping commissioner of the port of New York. There were obvious parallels between Duncan and Beecher—neither lived up to his moral pretensions—and Clemens may have been hiding his true intentions from himself when he said, privately, that the vilest thing Duncan ever did was to turn against Beecher when Beecher was in trouble. The pretext for his public statements, which were printed in the New York World, was the charge made by Duncan in his lecture that Clemens had been drunk when he first applied for passage. “I have known and observed Mr. Duncan for ten years,” Clemens wrote, working himself into a blind rage, “and I think I have good reason for believing him to be wholly without principle, without moral sense, without honor of any kind. … I know him to be a canting hypocrite, filled to the chin with sham godliness, and forever oozing and dripping false piety and pharisaical prayers.” A week later he resumed the attack: “A man whose stock in trade is sham temperance, sham benevolence, religious hypocrisy, and a ceaseless, unctuous drip of buttery prayers.”
If Livy’s powers of restraint were actually as considerable as her husband pretended they were, Duncan should have been spared. When Bret Harte’s turn came, her counsels of moderation were no more effective. “Don’t say harsh things about Mr. Harte, don’t talk about Mr. Harte to people,” she pleaded. “We are so desperately happy, our paths lie in such places, and he is so miserable, we can easily afford to be magnanimous to him.” Harte’s original insult had been aggravated by a battle over revisions, but, contrary to Clemens’ recollection of the feud in his autobiography, it was Harte who rejected Clemens. Clemens, in fact, even offered him a salary of twenty-five dollars a week plus room and board to come back to Hartford and collaborate on another play. Harte flung the offer back at him, charging that Clemens was merely speculating on his poverty and making him, in effect, an indentured playwright, and he added a welter of recriminations: Clemens and Bliss were responsible for the failure of Gabriel Conroy; Clemens’ idea of sending Parsloe to San Francisco to study his Chinese part was outrageous; Clemens’ revisions were only marring the play and demonstrated a total misunderstanding of Harte’s characters. All in all, Harte concluded, it would not be “advisable” for them to write another play together. This was in March 1877; by the beginning of April, a month before Ah Sin opened in Washington, Harte was writing to him only about business matters—“My dear Mr. Clemens.”
“Is the name of your play ‘Arse in’?—sounds like a sitz bath,” Frank Fuller teased him a week or so before it opened at Augustin Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre on July 31. Clemens was in New York supervising the rehearsals, seething with anger at Harte for not putting in an appearance, planning, he told Livy, to extract from his collaborator “$50 a day for my work here, or I will know the reason why—that is, if the play succeeds.” The Washington tryout had been a backward affair; the New York run was a failure, and after five weeks of dwindling attendance it closed, leaving Daly with a considerable loss.
On opening night Clemens saw Parsloe act the part and speak the lines miscreated by two celebrated humorists and artists of the vernacular: “Walkee bottom side hillee—stage bloke down—plenty smashee uppee. Plunkee plenty helpee, plenty makee allee rightee—Plunkee vellee good man.” At the end of the third act that evening, Clemens stood before the curtain in a summer white suit and spoke what might just as well have been the play’s epitaph. The more Daly had cut, he explained, “the better the play got. I never saw a play that was so much improved by being cut down; and I believe it would have been one of the very best plays in the world if his strength had held out so that he could cut out the whole of it.”
V
The first months of the Hayes administration raised Clemens’ spirits. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had anybody to feel proud of and have confidence in,” he told Howells. “I mean to take my fill now while the meat’s hot and the appetite ravenous.” But in July and August the anthracite miners and the railroad workers went out on strike; the walkouts were followed by pitched battles between militia and labor; there was rioting, pillage, and arson in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. All this fanned once again his hatred for republican government, and he returned to his habitual tirades against democracy, the vote, the jury system, and the modern world in general. When he visited Bermuda with Twichell in May—“First actual pleasure trip I ever took”—he was dazzled by the whiteness of the houses (he always remembered the Hannibal of his lost childhood as a “white town”), but he was certain that in only a year or so this Eden too would be ruined by civilization’s “triple curse” of railroad, telegraph, and newspapers.
Livy was often on the edge of nervous collapse from the fatigue of entertaining and of tutoring her children; the Hartford house was getting more and more expensive and complicated to run, and the Clemenses were feeling the need to cut back on little things here and there. Livy’s income had dwindled—the coal business, after making only a slow recovery from the panic, was hard hit by the strikes. As usual, when the storm signals went up, Clemens could turn to lecturing. But he declined the usual invitations, because he dreaded traveling alone and carrying the entire show by himself. Instead, still in a collaborative mood even after combat with Bret Harte, he tried to talk Thomas Nast into making the same joint tour—one of them to draw pictures while the other talked—that Nast had proposed to him in 1867. But Nast was no longer interested, and the scheme died. As a humorist, Clemens felt himself more than ever at a disadvantage. “When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life,” he explained when Howells asked him to take public part in the Hayes campaign, “he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause.” Ah Sin had been his second failure within a year. At the end of November 1877 he began The Prince and the Pauper, a tale set in Tudor England; as a further defensive withdrawal from his life and times and profession, he intended to publish it anonymously, “such grave and stately work being considered by the world to be above my proper level.”
He voiced his sense of both independence and alienation in several public gestures whose hostile content, as it seems now, was too painful for him to acknowledge consciously. On one occasion, the Whittier birthday dinner in December 1877, he implicitly rejected and mocked the official culture of New England as represented
by its septuagenary eminences, some of them entering their dotage and all of them products of another taste and another time, when that culture reigned without rival. On another occasion, two months earlier in Hartford, he attacked the sacred values of patriotism, the martial spirit, and New England solidarity.
On October 1, 1877, two hundred and thirty-five members of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts, the oldest military organization in the country—Governor John Winthrop signed their charter in 1638—arrived in Hartford after a four-hour train trip fom Boston. They had come to celebrate their annual fall field day as guests of the city. They were greeted at the depot with a thirteen-gun salute. Led by the Putnam Phalanx, Hartford’s elite marching group, and by a drum corps and two bands, the Ancient and Honorable paraded through the city and passed in review before the old State House. Like the rest of America, Hartford was in the grip of a passion for pageantry and display, for marching groups and drilling societies and fraternal orders; this was the beginning of the golden age of Masons, Elks, and Knights of Pythias. Hartford was also a parade-loving city—Mark Twain later moved the kitchen of his house closer to Farmington Avenue “so the servants can see the circus go by without running into the street”—and its citizens turned out by the thousand. Flags and banners and bunting, evergreens and inscriptions and patriotic devices were everywhere—on private houses, on the buildings of the great insurance companies, on the Wadsworth Athenaeum and on the statue of Israel Putnam in the west park. Near the main entrance of the City Hall was a huge pillow of red, white, and blue flowers enclosing the word “Welcome,” and over Asylum Street an arch of banners, shields, flags, and coats of arms stretched from sidewalk to sidewalk. That night there was a reception, a ball, and a supper. The next morning the Ancients were taken by carriage on a tour of the city, including Colt’s armory, where Dr. Gatling demonstrated his remarkable repeating gun; and shortly before noon there was a band concert attended by four or five thousand people in the park.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 29
