Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  He was discreet publicly, but in private he continued to rage at the familiar corruptions and abuses. “Noble system, truly,” he grumbled, where a man who should be in jail or practicing shyster law in the Tombs goes to the Senate instead. He wanted to write a biography of Whitelaw (or “Outlaw”) Reid and also a biography, The Genial Thief, of Mayor Oakley Hall, puppet and patron of the Tweed Ring. But there were new forces, too, which troubled Clemens and which, though he barely understood them, were changing the nation he thought he knew so well: the rise of organized labor, the wave of immigration which in the years 1880-89 added five and a quarter million newcomers to a population of fifty million. Sixty thousand “communists,” someone told him, were drilling in the streets of Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis; anxious cities were putting up armories to put down rebellion. The radicals, foreigners many of them, the hearsay went on, were inflamed by socialist revolutionary theory, and Clemens believed they might very well overthrow “the asinine government” of this “leatherheaded Republic,” which he would not mind, except that his money and property and Livy’s were hostages to the status quo. As the Holsatia headed for the open sea, where it would pass ships carrying some of those five million immigrants waiting for the first sight of the New World, Mark Twain sniffed the Old World in the breeze. It was good, he reflected, “to go and breathe the free air of Europe.”

  II

  “Oh, I have such a deep, grateful, unutterable sense of being ‘out of it,’” Clemens wrote to Howells from Frankfurt. “I think I foretaste some of the advantages of being dead. Some of the joy of it.” After the Beecher scandal he was all the more eager to drink in the bürgerlich virtues he saw all about him. “What a paradise this land is,” he exclaimed. “What clean clothes, what good faces, what tranquil contentment, what prosperity, what genuine freedom, what superb government!” The German trains ran on time, the brass was polished every morning and the sidewalks swept and washed down, the Empress dressed like anybody else and went to Church of England services. For Clemens, as for many Americans of his generation and a few after it, Germany stood for Protestant rectitude and industriousness, orderliness and thrift. The contrast was with the disordered America of the Gilded Age, its urban squalor and meager municipal services. The contrast was also with England, still condescending to most of American culture, and above all with France and Italy, Catholic countries and, as Clemens saw them, sensual, torn by radicalism or reaction. The German revolutionaries of 1848-49 had emigrated to America, seeking an ideal of popular government; now, thirty years later, the German-American cultural entente was never stronger. American universities looked to Germany for models of academic freedom and scholarship; Germany took the lead in music, in philosophy and science, medicine and jurisprudence. Carl Schurz, a German revolutionary in 1849 and, during the Civil War, American minister to Spain and a divisional commander, was now President Hayes’s Secretary of the Interior; and, in a sense reciprocally, Mark Twain’s fellow passenger on the Holsatia was Bayard Taylor, translator of Goethe’s Faust and professor of German literature at Cornell, on his way to Berlin to take up his new post as American minister.

  The Prince and the Pauper, which Clemens began in November 1877, was the sign of his growing disenchantment with England, now replaced in his enthusiasms by Germany. Before leaving America he began to study German, and he kept on with it even though its intricacies of sentence structure exasperated him as much as they amused him. “Yes, sir,” he wrote in his notebook, “once the German language gets hold of a cat, it’s goodbye cat,” and he decided he would rather decline two drinks than one verb. He admitted to Bayard Taylor that he was fighting a losing battle, and this was obvious to others. “Speak in German, Mark,” Twichell whispered to him as Clemens was discussing some private matter within earshot of some Germans, “some of these people may understand English.”

  His enthusiasm for the Germans was matched by their enthusiasm for him. Roughing It had come out in a German translation in 1874, a year after Bret Harte’s Die Argonauten-Geschichten; four other Mark Twain books were translated between 1875 and 1877 (between 1890 and 1913 a hundred German translations of his work were published); and Baron von Tauchnitz’s paperback Continental reprints in English brought him additional popularity among the Germans (as well as modest but entirely voluntary royalties). “They all quote him before they have spoken with you fifteen minutes, and always give him a place so much higher than we do,” the Bostonian Thomas Wentworth Higginson, visiting Coblenz in August 1878, said in amazement. “I don’t think any English prose writer is so universally read.” It was in the flush of this requited love affair with Germany and the Germans that Mark Twain, discovering that he needed a passport, sent an application to Bayard Taylor in Berlin with an exuberant self-description:

  Geborn 1835; 5 Fuss 8½ inches hoch; weight doch aber about 145 pfund, sometimes ein wenig unter, sometimes ein wenig oben; dunkel braun Haar und rhotes Moustache, full Gesicht, mit sehr hohe Oren und leicht grau practvolles strahlenden Augen und ein Verdammtes gut moral character. Handlungkeit, Author von Bücher.

  Yet into Clemens’ paradise at the Hotel Schloss in Heidelberg came an unescapable demon in the form of news that Bret Harte, another hero to the Germans, had been given a consular appointment in Germany—in the textile center of Krefeld, it developed, only about two hundred miles north of Heidelberg. “Tell me what German town he is to filthify with his presence.” Clemens wrote to Howells in June 1878; “then I will write the authorities there that he is a persistent borrower who never pays.” Fully in the grip of a monomania that only grew more violent with age, he intended to protect the Germans from the new American consul. “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth as if he considered it a disgrace.” For Bret Harte, a diplomatic appointment was one way of solving his money problems, and he had had an anxious time in Washington politicking for a position, aware all the time that he had enemies working against him, among them his former collaborator. Clemens had taken the trouble to write to President Hayes and denounce Harte as unfit for any public office. Now, as he admitted to Howells, he felt “personally snubbed,” because the President “silently ignored my testimony.” Certainly Clemens did not know—and neither did Harte, probably—that in an attempt to cut through all the wheedling and backbiting Hayes had written directly to Howells, who was his cousin by marriage and author of his campaign biography, asking for an opinion, and that Howells, after admitting that Harte had “the worst reputation as regards punctuality, solvency, and sobriety,” concluded cautiously that he was making an effort to reform and therefore deserved help. “Personally, I should be glad of his appointment, and I should have great hopes of him—and fears.”

  “Billiardly-speaking,” Clemens wrote, when Hayes appointed Harte “he simply pocketed his own ball,” and he asked Howells: “Have you heard any literary men express an opinion about the appointment? Who were they—and what said they?” Howells maintained an embarrassed silence which after three months had Clemens wondering, “Have I offended you in some way? The Lord knows it is my disposition, my infirmity to do such things …” Among those offended was Frank Harris, former bartender and cowboy, now, at the age of twenty-two, a student at Heidelberg, who called on Clemens to ask him to address the local Anglo-American literary society. Like Kipling, Harris idolized Bret Harte, and he was treated to a venomous account of how his idol was a cheat and fraud who had bilked the American Publishing Company. “I told the publishers that they ought to have put him in prison,” Clemens went on, ignoring the effect he was having on Harris. “A man should be honest above everything.” At that moment Harris lost his last bit of respect for Clemens. “I never want to see that man again; never again do I want to talk to him,” he said to a friend. “Fancy his running down Bret Harte on such paltry grounds.” And more than forty years later, after Clemens’ death, Harris wrote him off as a small man who
wanted success and popularity in his day and was willing to pay any price for it.

  Behind the litany of Clemens’ grievances against Bret Harte during the summer of 1878 was an infuriating parallel. Harte was coming to Germany as consul at Krefeld (at a salary of two thousand dollars a year) because he could no longer make a go of it as a literary man in America. Gabriel Conroy was a failure, Ah Sin was a failure, he was in debt, and his achievement and fame were already behind him. Mark Twain was in Germany partly to save money, partly because of the declining American sales of his books, partly because he was unable to work at home and finish any one of the six or so books (among them Huckleberry Finn) he had begun, partly because he wanted to return to proven ground and write another travel book. In Heidelberg he spent weeks waiting for “a ‘call’ to go to work”; when the call came it was not a strong one, and he ended by tearing up most of what he wrote there. Europe, for all his first enthusiasm, did not excite him in any deep sense; soon, in fact, he realized that he hated travel, hated the food, hated hotels and opera and Old Masters, hated them so much (as he told Howells) that he was afraid he was too angry to write “successful satire.” As Clemens struggled with his book in Heidelberg, and then in Munich, Paris, Elmira, and Hartford, he had reason to be afraid that he was going the way of Bret Harte.

  Clemens paid for Twichell’s trip to Europe because he needed the stimulus of Twichell’s company for A Tramp Abroad, and he freely acknowledged Twichell’s importance. When he heard that a Hartford paper said it was improper for a clergyman to accept patronage from a humorist, he commented that it was Twichell who was doing the favor; in eventual terms if the book turned out to be a success, that money was “a trivial share of the money which he has lavished upon me.” When Clemens finished the book in 1879 he made a significant calculation: he had spent fourteen months in Europe collecting material; Twichell had been with him only one and a half months of the fourteen; yet Twichell, thinly disguised as “Mr. Harris,” a hired “agent,” figures in about two thirds of the book. One way of describing the inadequacies of A Tramp Abroad is to say that it reflects the personality and viewpoint of the boyish and fundamentally conventional Twichell altogether too much.

  Yet even along the barren ground of A Tramp Abroad Mark Twain stumbled on outcroppings of his native vein. Two brilliant chapters near the very beginning of the book deal not with dueling, the Alps, or the pleasures of bourgeois tourism but with the California hermit Jim Baker, who understands the language of animals and birds and tells a yarn about a gullible bluejay. There is a story about Riley and a Washington office seeker. Toward the end of a digressive chapter there is a story about Nicodemus Dodge, a printer’s apprentice in Hannibal, who had a skeleton put in his bed as a practical joke; the skeleton was that of Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, who auctioned off first claim on it for fifty dollars, spent the fifty dollars on a long binge, and after two weeks was dead. And in other ways, even in the unlikely context of a European travel book, Mark Twain was rehearsing Huckleberry Finn, put aside in 1876 when the tank ran dry. Weaving together Chapters Fourteen through Nineteen of A Tramp Abroad is a curious raft episode, almost wholly invented, which Mark Twain wrote in Munich during January and February 1879. The raft episode suggests both the waywardness and the persistence of his creative process: he came back to his block and stopping point in Huckleberry Finn, the destruction of the raft, in the same way that the tongue comes back to the site of the missing tooth.

  Adjoining his rooms at the Hotel Schloss in Heidelberg, Mark Twain writes at the beginning of this fictional episode, was a glassed-in balcony looking out over a swift stretch of the winding Neckar, the arched stone bridge, and the thick traffic of rafts. “I used to sit for hours in my glass cage, watching the long, narrow rafts slip through the central channel,” he recalls. “I watched them in this way, and lost all this time hoping to see one of them hit the bridge-pier and wreck itself sometime or other, but was always disappointed.” To begin with, this is a curious preoccupation for the man Twichell was describing in his journals as timid, shy, delicate, absorbed in flowers, petting a lamb—“can’t bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull too hard.”

  Visiting Heilbronn, thirty-five or so miles up the river from Heidelberg, the narrator is suddenly possessed by “the daredevil spirit of adventure.” He tells his companions, “I am going to Heidelberg on a raft. Will you venture with me?” He charters a raft, and they push out into the current and into the repose and freedom Huck and Jim knew. “The motion of a raft is the needful motion,” the narrator says, “it is gentle and gliding, and smooth, and noiseless; it calms down all feverish activities …” The idyl has begun again, but as a parody of the raft episode in Huckleberry Finn. The hazards of the journey—a storm, dynamite blasts, the river steamers—are burlesques of travel adventure. The narrative is padded out with German “legends” about knights, lords, and Crusaders and with the words, variant translations, and even the music of “Die Lorelei.” In place of Huck and Jim, fugitives from justice, we have Mark Twain and his thinly disguised pastor, Mr. Twichell. Huck is certain he will go to hell, Mark Twain is certain he will get to Heidelberg.* He gets there at sunset …

  … perceiving, presently, that I really was going to shoot the bridge itself instead of the archway under it, I judiciously stepped ashore. The next moment I had my long-coveted desire: I saw a raft wrecked. It hit the pier in the center and went all to smash and scatteration like a box of matches struck by lightning.

  Clemens’ anxiety about Huckleberry Finn is in a subtle way exorcized by substituting for it an old anxiety about the river. (“My nightmares, to this day,” he noted in 1882, “take the form of running into an overshadowing bluff, with a steamboat—showing that my earliest dread made the strongest impress on me.”) The narrator of this story is now back where he started, back in Heidelberg—one derivation of which is from a telescoping of Heidelbeereberg, meaning Huckleberry Mountain. The writer Mark Twain, whose creative unconscious lies closer to the surface than it does with most men, and whose life, consequently, is full of psychologically loaded accidents and coincidences, is now back at the end of Chapter Sixteen of his greatest book.

  III

  In 1909, reading over a letter he had written Howells from Munich in November 1878, Clemens thought back over his life as a traveler. Up to the time of the Quaker City trip, he said, he had a normal appetite for travel. Every voyage since then—he counted over forty of them, including a trip around the world—he made only out of necessity, “with rebellion in my heart, and bitterness.” For all his initial relief at being out of America, for all his delight in Bavarian Gemütlichkeit and Lebkuchen and Christmas trees hung heavy with sugared dates and candy sticks, the winter of 1878-79, in Munich and Paris, was long and troubled. The cold weather lasted late into the spring; it snowed in May, and even in July and August he shivered by the fire. Someone was always sick: the baby, Clara, came near dying in January, Clemens thought; he himself was laid up with rheumatism and dysentery. “I broke the back of life yesterday and started downhill toward old age,” he wrote to his mother on his forty-third birthday, jokingly enough. “This fact has not produced any effect upon me that I can detect.” Yet the sudden death only a few weeks later of Bayard Taylor in Berlin, worn out at fifty-three, came as a somber reminder. “It is too sad to talk about.” Throughout the winter Clemens had such trouble with A Tramp Abroad that he hoped he could find a pretext for abandoning it altogether.

  Somewhere in Florence or Rome, or on the way to Munich, Clemens lost, or so he thought, one of the two notebooks of his tour with Twichell. Considering the disproportionately important role that Twichell plays in A Tramp Abroad, the loss of one of these notebooks would have been staggering; the book would have become “simply impossible.” For Clemens, a man who in his professional and personal life hardly ever lost anything and generally preserved everything, this “accident” had a meaning which he grasped. “If it remains lost,” he wrote to Twichell from Munich
in November, “I can’t write any volume of travels, and shan’t attempt it, but shall tackle some other subject.” He was, he admitted, relieved, glad—“I was getting an idea that I had lost my faculty of writing sketches of travel.” And a month or so later, when the “lost” notebook was finally found, “down went my heart into my boots,” and he set to work grimly on the “dismal” task of writing this “confounded book.” He finished A Tramp Abroad more than a year after he “found” the notebook, a year during which he seemed to be groping for some way to escape the sterile obligation of writing “sketches of travel” and to regain the freedom he was to find in fiction and in imaginative uses of the past. “My Long Crawl in the Dark” was the title he eventually gave to one of the chapters in the book, an account, extravagantly adapted from an incident with Livy in Munich, of how he crawled forty-seven miles on his hands and knees in a dark bedroom looking for one of his socks. In the same vein was a remark he made in Paris to Moncure Conway, the clergyman, reformer, and literary man to whom he had entrusted arrangements for the English publication of Tom Sawyer. On a cold March morning in 1879 Clemens was on his way to call on General Noyes, the American ambassador, when Conway overtook him on the Champs Élysées and asked him what he was writing these days. “Well,” Clemens answered, “it’s about this: A man sets out from home on a long journey to do some particular thing. But he does everything except what he set out to do.”